The Severed Streets

by Paul Cornell

  So Quill entered the Portakabin with some slight hopes. ‘Today is when it all comes together,’ he said, ‘when the elephant in the Portakabin reveals itself.’

  ‘And shits on us all,’ said Costain, laughing a tad shrilly, Quill thought.

  The team spent the day concentrating on Mary Arthur, exploring possible further links, from geographical to financial, between her and the other victims, not excepting Rudlin, on Ross’ insistence. Quill sent Costain back over to the Soviet bar to ask around about prostitutes using the place. This was not, Costain reported back, having been gone a bloody long time, something the bar staff were aware of, even on the sly. So Quill’s prediction for the day failed to come true. But he knew this was the right line, that this was how they’d crack it. He had some hopes that they might have freed themselves from the problem of being got at when they slept as well, though Sefton looked incredulous at the idea that his defences had worked.

  At six that evening, thinking that a bit of bonding with a superior officer might well take him over the limit, Quill headed for the railway station. He fell asleep, as he always did on trains. He realized with a start that he was doing so, but he had some of Sefton’s protective objects on him. Finding them with his hand, he let it happen, and he started to dream.

  * * *

  He was backstage at a Rolling Stones concert, and he was talking to Mick Jagger, who turned out just to want to talk about money, while Quill was all about the music. ‘Nowadays,’ said Mick, ‘the world is just as bad as it was in the seventies, but we’ve had all our illusions scraped off, and it seems people are willing to put up with that without, you know, revolution.’

  Quill said something, he wasn’t sure what. This is a normal dream, a wary part of him kept saying.

  A nondescript figure was standing behind him. He had a hand on Quill’s shoulders. Quill ignored him for a moment, then realized, with a start, that he was looking into the back of Quill’s head. ‘No, don’t move,’ said the figure calmly, like a doctor. Quill stayed put, with his back to him, but suddenly he had a gun in his hand, because a part of him was yelling that he really needed to have a gun right now.

  Quill knew what this was. He spun round and tried to grab the figure, but he couldn’t register any details of it. His hands went straight through it. Quill stumbled forwards into the figure, which was trying desperately to get out of his way, but now Quill had found that the figure was actually a hole, and in trying to grab it he was falling.

  Quill lost his footing completely and fell into the void.

  SEVENTEEN

  FOUR THOUSAND YEARS AGO

  Quill fell into the dreams of a mind much older and much bigger than his own. He screamed as he fell, but made himself stop when he saw how huge what he was falling into was. He wasn’t sure he wanted this mind to notice him. The woman who was dreaming dreamed the same things, over and over. Quill had no idea of time, but he was inside her dreams long enough to understand everything. The sadness of it fell over him like a shadow.

  * * *

  The word ‘kennet’ meant three things to the people of the hawthorn bushes: a long low mound of soil with rock slabs cut by the ancients in a grove at its door; the entrance of a woman, from which came children; and something that was evil. That was why it was a swear word, something shouted by soldiers over beer in the round house.

  In the woman’s dreams, which were now his own, Quill found himself standing inside a kennet that she thought of as her home. He no longer had the gun he’d imagined into his hand to protect himself. He was here on the night when everything had changed, a terrible night. She kept dreaming about this night, over and over. Quill could feel that something dreadful was going to happen.

  The air was dry as if he was in a library. The floor was impacted mud. The only illumination was moonlight, entering at one end of the kennet. The walls were made of piled rock slabs, covered in painted patterns, swirls and grids. Quill looked closely at them and saw handprints and fingerprints, thousands of years old, and wondered at them. This is what that terrible night had been like, the memories of the dream said to him, grabbing him and shouting it desperately in his ear like a needy drunk. The swirls had been drawn by those who’d brought her body here, many decades ago, when her flesh had died. They had drunk the rotten beer, and the swirls and grids were what they had seen. The fingerprints were her own, pressed to the wall when her flesh was dead, to mark her passing, before they carried her into the chamber where she slept.

  Quill tensed at the news that the woman whose dreams he was swimming in was dead. He felt for a moment that he was dead too. He watched and felt a reiteration of what he’d seen already, and realized that, though she was dead, the woman kept dreaming because of the shape of the kennet. It was shaped like this so that her information was kept intact, so living people could talk to her. But not for much longer after this terrible night that was being remembered. This was the night when it had all changed.

  The kennet, he saw in his mind’s eye, as the woman’s dreams remembered it, ran along a low ridge near where the people of the hawthorn bushes kept their sheep. It was many paces from the road. It took an effort for the hawthorn people to bring offerings here. They brought their questions with them. They asked the wise woman what they should do.

  So what this lot called a kennet, Quill found his own word for: a barrow. He was inside a barrow, a real place, somewhere. His detective mind kept grabbing onto the concepts swirling around him and pinning them down: he was in a barrow somewhere near where there were hawthorn bushes.

  He reached out, instinctively starting to ask questions, and recoiled in horror from what he found. She was right here, just a few feet away, at the darker end of the kennet, this enormous, hugely powerful mind! She roared forwards at him again, trying to grab him, needing to know what he was, this ghost from the future. He retreated, cowered, hid.

  As her memory raced around him, searching for him, he saw that she lay on a bed of charcoal. Around her was a scattering of star shells, round lumps of rock that had been cracked open to reveal a five-pointed symbol, which seemed to be made of rock too, but also looked as if it had once lived. The fish traders sometimes still brought star shells to the hawthorn people, saying the rocks came from the sea, and calling them ‘nuts’ or ‘knots’. There was a counting rhyme sung to babies:

  One is you, if you’re lucky,

  Two is the mother, you on her breast,

  Three is the father, the words,

  Four is the chair, the world,

  Five is the knot, the knot that catches things,

  Six is the flies, the infected wound,

  Seven is the secret, the heart of the sky.

  Quill felt the power of the song getting stronger and stronger, reflecting from one end of the kennet to the other. The sound shapes of such old songs were made to be sung in the kennet. He hid from the power of the song, hid from her, as the song gradually faded in intensity and her memories drifted into those of happier times.

  She had been happy here after her death. For a very long time. She had become a small god because of where she had been placed. She would share wisdom with her people who entered having made the right signs and sung the right songs and filled themselves with the rotten beer.

  Quill wondered what had gone wrong, and instantly regretted it, as she shrieked the answer, the screams reverberating, trying to find him, to grab him so she could tell him and take some tiny comfort in the telling. She was so alone now, driven out of her dead mind by loneliness, in an afterlife of one.

  The people of the hawthorn bushes had changed, her scream said. The men had stopped visiting her. The few women who still had, before this terrible night that was about to happen again, as it happened time after time in her dreams, did so secretly, and said awful things like, yes, she was still a small god to them, but they were being told that the sun and the moon were much bigger gods. The men had told their wives not to come here any more. The priesthood of the sky had said te
rrible things about her and had started to point out the kennet as it cast a shadow on the hillside, saying it scared the children, that it soiled the cloaks of the sun and moon whenever they rolled over it. They had a new name for her now: they called her a ‘wight’.

  Quill felt the slow second death she’d experienced. She’d gone from being the mother of her people to being more and more excluded, her existence becoming more sour every day as love was slowly drained from it. She couldn’t move from here to plead her case. She couldn’t leave the kennet because that was how the land was shaped. The shape of the land that had been chosen to give her a continuing presence also kept her here, because if she left it she would be powerless and would roll back here like a leaf being blown back into a hollow by the wind.

  Men were now in control of the hawthorn people, the last few women who had visited had told her. Those women had laughed bitterly that at least it cost them nothing to come to the kennet, except the usual boughs and flowers and roots to burn. The sun and the moon demanded expensive sacrifice, of livestock and grain. The priesthood had started to make their own currency, of unpolished axe heads that could never be used. What was the point of hoarding something and exchanging it and never using it?

  Quill felt the terrible night coming to its climax. Something bad was approaching from the direction of the village of the hawthorn people.

  The new wooden circle had been made. He could see it in the dreams: a better sort of grove than the stone grove around the opening of the kennet, the only place now from which to adore the only gods. The people, as instructed by the priesthood, whose actions they encouraged with every acceptance, had built ditches around the new circle, banks for the audience to sit on, a ceremonial way to progress into it, wooden trackways off in several directions for the spirits of the dead to leave it and join their fellows with the sun and moon in the sky.

  The kennet was in the way of one of those tracks. They felt it might infect the path, that the terrifying wight in the kennet might snare the beloved dead and drag them in here with her. Why would she do that? How little they knew her!

  He could feel the seething fear and hatred of those who were approaching. He could feel only tiny protests among them, concealed in the minds of a handful, not to be spoken aloud.

  The existence of the kennet had become too much for the hawthorn people to bear. They had spent too much, gone hungry too often. They had made a final effort, staged a great collection. They had paid farmers and fishers and soldiers to suspend their duties and come to the kennet over several days with the longest light. Tonight was to be the last night of that process. Tonight was the last time a great column of people with torches had come up from the village. Tonight was the last time the woman in the kennet would have visitors at all, be talked to at all, be loved at all.

  Quill looked back to the memory of moonlight at the end of the kennet and saw it as precious now, as some fondly kept remembrance, but now gone. Tonight, the terrible night that went round and round in memory, was when the light at the end of this tunnel had been cut off. The sleeping place of this dead woman was about to be turned into a tomb.

  Over the last three long days the men had used levers and gestures to lift the stones of the grove at the kennet and brought them inside the opening, intending to seal up the wound in the ground that so alarmed them.

  Quill needed to be close to her as the horror approached. The men with the stones were inside the kennet now, their shadows in the way of the moonlight. He wanted to comfort the dreaming woman as he comforted his daughter, as he sometimes had to comfort his old dad when he forgot something. He wanted to be the law for her, to do something about this terrible injustice, but he could not be anything but a fragment of her dreams, an observer. He made himself stumble into the darkness, his hands reaching out. He reached a chamber at the end, where a ridge in the mud at his feet marked the edge of the space where the woman was. He felt the fear radiating out of the darkness in front of him. He could sense that immense fury roaring around and around, anguished at the idea of being bottled.

  She didn’t know what he was. He tried to reach out to her. She was too big. He smelt male and new. His every gesture bounced off the roaring whirlwind that was her, a terrified animal rushing around and around.

  The stones started to be placed against the end of the small enclosure. They wanted to keep using the rest of the kennet, Quill realized. They wanted to move their animals into it to shelter them from the cold, to make profit from it. By sealing her up in this part they would cleanse it and make it into just an ordinary place. Perhaps they could use the terror of her too: pray to the sun and the moon, or the wight will get you.

  As the darkness was built across the entrance to the chamber, and the woman in here with him became more and more afraid, as she always did in this part of the dream, Quill heard a sudden high sound from outside.

  A priest was singing a single note: a chant that was being repeated all down the hill, a straight track of sound that reached all the way back to the new wooden circle in the village. He sustained the note and made it resonate back to him from the end of the kennet. It was a last stab.

  Quill felt it like a needle lancing through him.

  It was to provoke her. It was to make her feel her imprisonment.

  Then the workers slammed the last great stone against the chamber they were in and sealed it, and the note was cut off. The moonlight vanished. The great note of horror rebounded down the length of what was now absolute darkness, echoing and echoing, building and building into a great cry of rage.

  Quill groped around him, overcome with sadness, trying to find her with his hands to comfort her. He reached out and felt bones. He had a hand inside her ribs, into her heart; he stretched out quickly with his other hand, intending only to steady what he’d found, and caught her skull, and she was falling apart in his grasp.

  That was only her body. Her real self roared into his head. She was going to … to … she was trying to get inside him! She thought he might be an escape, a way to claw her way out. She needed a body, any body! She could form one if she was given the power, but if not she would take what was within reach. She was going to take his body and use it to get out of here, back to the world she needed to be part of!

  Quill held up his hands and screamed.

  EIGHTEEN

  Quill looked around him and saw that people right down the length of the train carriage were glaring at him for screaming.

  He lowered his hands. He made eye contact with the woman sitting opposite him, whose frown had turned into a laugh. He let out a long, relieved breath. Then he realized that he should record what he’d seen, that it had all felt important. He jotted down some quick headings in his notebook. Then he texted the other three to let them know that, at least with portable defences, their terrifying problem was still a problem. He’d give them all the details tomorrow.

  The train pulled in at Victoria. He got to his feet and smoothed down his suit. There was something odd here, he thought. What was it? A strange sound in the distance, from the station concourse. The commuters around him were noticing it too as they all got off the train, looking in that direction, not hesitating to walk swiftly together towards it, but worried now, looking at each other. The sound grew louder as he went through the ticket barrier. There was noise echoing from the archway that led from the station. Slogans and chants and yells and drums. Those bloody protestors again. Near the tube entrance, the image of a Toff mask, now almost a logo, had been painted over a poster for Les Misérables, the paint still dripping.

  He went into the underground, got out at Embankment, and walked the short distance up the hill to Charing Cross. He was startled now to hear the same noises echoing across this concourse too, coming from the road outside. He went out there and took a look. Near the Charing Cross itself, disrupting the taxi ranks, with drivers hooting at them, a small party of protestors in masks and capes had assembled. ‘Burn it down,’ the leader was yelling into a megap
hone, ‘and start again!’

  Yeah, he could understand the appeal of that. Sensible policies for a happier Britain. He turned to head towards his destination, but a sudden thought struck him. He took out his mobile and called Sefton. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘what you said about … “ostentation” was it? Is anyone still keeping tabs on where Twitter says the next protest is?’

  ‘Wait a sec, I’ll check out my saved searches.’

  ‘Only they seem to have split into different groups…’

  ‘Are you around Charing Cross?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘They were starting to say it’s kicking off outside the station there about ten minutes ago.’

  Quill looked behind him, and saw more and more protestors, many of them in the Toff outfit and mask, arriving from all directions. ‘You can see how that works, practically,’ he said, ‘but in London, what you found out was that saying something’s going to happen is also sort of encouraging it to happen, right?’

  ‘Yeah, Gaiman thought that was how it worked.’

  Quill turned, staying on the phone as he waited to head across the road, looking all over, hoping to see a uniform, but not finding any. ‘We ought to get Lofthouse to get the Met in general on to this: watch Twitter, find out where there are rumours of protests and anticipate them—’

  ‘I don’t know how much that’d help; there are loads of small potential trouble spots tonight, by the looks of this. And, you know, with the strike coming up, every department’s trying to get stuff completed before it starts.’