The Severed Streets

by Paul Cornell

  Quill crossed on the lights, a wave of tourists around him, passing Toffs coming in the other direction. He was looking forward to the relative cool of the Opera Rooms, which was an upstairs bar with big leather sofas in a pub called the Chandos near the Strand. They kept the windows open in summer. ‘Give me a call if any of them flare up. Okay, see you…’

  Quill was looking dully ahead at one of the many Toff figures coming in his direction, but something inside him was yelling an alarm at him. At first he thought he’d crossed on a red, that he was hearing some oncoming car that was about to run them all over. He wasn’t hearing anything, he realized; it was his new senses shouting a warning. Huge meaning was approaching, coming straight for him.

  He looked into the face of the figure marching across the road towards him. It was masked and caped like all of the others. But in the moment he’d turned his attention to it, it … started to blaze with the potential of the Sight.

  From the eyes of its mask were falling tears of silver.

  In that second Quill knew what he was looking at …

  The figure ran at him.

  ‘Kev,’ yelled Quill, ‘he’s here! He’s—’

  The razor sliced the air beside him. Quill ducked aside and ran. He shoved his way back through the crowd of tourists coming in the other direction. They shouted happily at him in Dutch or something. They couldn’t see what was behind him. Or some of them half could and recoiled, doubting themselves, dreaming.

  He burst out of the other side of them, onto the concourse in front of Charing Cross again, and ran straight into the mass of protestors, looking round and round as their masks surrounded him and parted in front of him, every hand holding the possibility of a blade, every mask blank with no tears. He picked a direction and heaved his way through them. He still had his phone in his hand. He could hear Kev yelling from it.

  He broke through them and found a gap ahead. He ran down the shallow hill that led around the corner of Charing Cross, down towards the Embankment. He grabbed the phone to his ear again, looking desperately behind him. ‘What can you do for me, Kev?’

  ‘I’ve called for backup. Where are you?’

  ‘Embankment tube.’ He heard Sefton yell that to someone on another line. ‘I’m not going to get into a cab, not here. With the traffic, I’d be a sitting duck like Spatley—’

  ‘Marked cars converging on you.’

  ‘You’ll just get uniforms killed.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  Quill saw light blaze at the top of the hill. A brilliant figure, like something out of William Blake, had shot up onto the heads of the crowd, and now took one huge leaping step towards him.

  He turned and ran. Down the hill. Not looking back. He didn’t panic. He ran with purpose. He was totally unarmed against this thing. He had to use his environment. There was a crowd flooding into the space ahead—

  Dear God, no. It was more of them!

  The masks and capes were rushing out of Embankment station and down from the bridge across the river. They weren’t looking at him, but past him, aiming to link up with the ones at Charing Cross. He ran through them, heaving them out of the way, aware they were slowing him down, that light behind him getting brighter, closer.

  Quill elbowed his way through the crowd, then, on impulse, turned right and ran at the ticket gates. He vaulted them, making the ticket inspectors yell, and pounded for the escalators. ‘Going underground!’ he yelled into the phone and pocketed it.

  He ran down the escalator, pushing his way past people. He was going to take the first train that appeared. It was a Bakerloo line train, going north. There was no light behind him. He slammed his way through people, ran up the platform, and then hopped into a carriage just as the doors were closing.

  ‘Stand clear of the closing doors,’ said the recorded announcement. There was an endless moment as he waited for the light to shine down the length of the platform. Maybe he just saw the shadows out there start to lengthen. He wondered what he could do, trapped in here. He thought desperately of Sarah and Jessica. He’d left no message for them. He had to get home for them.

  The doors slid closed. The train started pulling out. It accelerated. Nothing came for him. The other passengers, locked in around him, tight as sardines in a can, weren’t looking at him, sweating and panting, didn’t care. Normality crashed back into him, sheer relief. He looked to his phone, hoping to tell Sefton what had happened. That he’d given the Ripper the slip. No reception.

  The train stopped at Charing Cross. Quill tensed again as a masked figure made its way along the carriage … no, it was just another protestor. He pushed past Quill and got off. Quill let himself start to relax. Where should he get off? Baker Street, call Sefton from the open Metropolitan line platform there, get a taxi either back to the Portakabin, or home…? No, the Portakabin: he was only going to tell Sarah about this when it was ancient history.

  Why had he suddenly been targeted? What had changed?

  * * *

  He got out at Baker Street, ran up the stairs to the Metropolitan line platform, found phone reception after a couple of steps and noticed the flashing of a couple of voicemails – that would be Sefton, desperately trying to contact him. Before he could hit them, his phone rang. He answered it.

  ‘Where are you?’ said a voice on the other end that he didn’t recognize.

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘It’s Neil.’

  ‘Neil who?’

  ‘Neil Gaiman.’

  ‘What? How did you get this number?’ Quill wondered if this famous person had picked the mother of all wrong moments to ask him about some detail of police work.

  ‘Listen, there’s something about what’s going on right now that you need to understand—’

  ‘Ostentation, yeah, we got that.’

  ‘Never mind that now. There’s more to it.’ Quill suddenly realized that Gaiman sounded almost as tense as he was. ‘I know what’s going on, and only I can help you. I’m in a car, coming in from the north. I can get you away. Where are you?’

  ‘Baker Street tube.’

  ‘Right, I’ll be outside in a few minutes. Call me back if you have to move.’

  He hung up before Quill could ask him anything further. Quill was about to head for the exit, but stopped as he understood what he was looking at. From here he could see across several platforms. From trains at all of them were spilling, among other passengers, a number of Toffs.

  He called Sefton. ‘Where am I?’ he asked.

  ‘Baker Street?’ said Sefton. ‘If what Twitter is saying—’

  ‘Right,’ said Quill. ‘They must have been prepared to form flash mobs in this general area—’

  Again he stopped. Just slightly, the quality of light on the platform had changed. The weight of the Sight shifted within him, gravity turning his head like that of a prey animal smelling the predator, nausea and panic making him stare.

  At the far end of the platform, light was leaping into the air above the crowd again. He turned, but the doors of the train had closed a moment before and now it was accelerating off. ‘He’s here again, Kev!’ he shouted.

  He ran down the platform, shouldering through people coming the other way, the Victorian vastness of the station vault above him; shafts of sunlight illuminated him as if he was a small animal running through the forest. He ran past the snack bar. He raced along beside a train that was just pulling in, that nauseous light throwing his shadow against the side of it, shining into the windows, making one old lady look up at him and glimpse something terrible and then lose it again and look away.

  He shoved his way along through another group of people clustered at one of the doors, waited to make his move until the doors were closing, then he dived in as they did. He was between the doors, heaving against them as they closed on him like vices, and then he was through them, into the train, as if he’d fought to be born, to stay alive. They slammed behind him.

  Quill staggered to the other side o
f the train as it rattled off.

  He felt something wet hit him. He looked at the far door and saw his shadow cast there by sudden light. He looked down and saw silver.

  He leaped forward up the centre aisle and felt the blow miss him.

  He looked over his shoulder as the train threw him left and right. Passengers looked up from their seats, wondering what he was heaving himself away from, if it could possibly hurt them. Deciding that it couldn’t, that he was mad, they looked back to their papers and books.

  It came bouncing after him, leaping down the length of the train. It left dripping silver in its wake. The silver was pouring from it, not just from the mask, but from under the cape, from its limbs. Quill felt for an animal moment that he might survive this, because it looked wounded, because that looked like blood.

  But it was flying at him now with all its strength.

  He knew exactly what it was going to do to him.

  He reached the end of the carriage, where cooler air was blasting through the window down the middle of the cars. He was damned if he was going to let this thing get him without every ounce of fight. He dragged open the connecting door, then the one after it, and threw himself through them and slammed the doors shut.

  The darkness outside the train and the nature of the roar around it changed in that second, and he looked back again.

  The Ripper was slowly pushing through the first of those two double doors.

  This had been a long train, hadn’t it? A bloody long train. He’d got on somewhere near the back. Thank God.

  Quill ran up the train, going through every connecting door and making sure they closed behind him. Door handles were too prosaic for the Ripper, he thought for a moment. After three sets of doors he looked back, though, and there it was, two carriages behind him, now flinging open a door, obviously having started to use them. Of course it had. It had probably written that message in blood. It could use its fingers if it wanted to.

  Quill sprinted, put another two carriages between them. He saw the train was pulling in to Finchley Road. He was in a nightmare. He looked to his phone. He found slight reception. He texted the number Gaiman had left. He stepped out onto the platform with a bunch of other people and stayed wary of falling under the Ripper’s eyeline as he raced up the stairs from the platform.

  * * *

  He left the tube station, looking in every direction, half expecting to see the busy shopping street once more filled with Toffs. To his sheer relief, it was not. Nothing followed him out of the entrance. He waited half hidden in the doorway of a newsagent. He hit reply to one of Sefton’s panicked voicemail messages. ‘I’m at Finchley Road,’ he said. ‘I’m going to see what … oh fuck—’

  That glow and the weight that came with it was somewhere above him. He looked up, above the level of the shops, and saw a new star appearing in the sky. It was like Tinkerbell dancing its way up out of the metropolis, heading round and round, on a circular course, a corkscrew that was heading right towards him. It took a moment for him to resolve that shape, once again, into the Ripper.

  The figure was running in the air. It was jerking the razor in front of it, miming the action of what it still wanted to do to him. It would never give up, he knew. ‘Over here!’ A voice was shouting to him.

  A big black car had pulled up at the kerb. From the driver’s seat, Gaiman was urgently beckoning him. ‘Get in! Quick!’

  Quill ran for the car.

  NINETEEN

  Sarah Quill was waiting. She’d woken up that morning to find that Quill hadn’t come home. This was unusual, but hardly unique. She’d called his phone, expecting to find him having a bacon sandwich at some crime scene or in that Portakabin, which he’d described to her so many times that she could almost see it. She’d left a message on his voicemail, that surprised-sounding identification of himself, with a little hesitation which said, ‘Is this thing on?’ She’d asked him to call and got Jessica to say good morning to Daddy as she got her ready for nursery.

  Then she’d gone to work, where there were new computers, and Geoff was showing everyone three choices of new Enfield Leader logos. There’d been a series of phone interviews about the promises made by central government concerning wheelie-bin collections. So many parts of London were burning now that they might as well announce which ones weren’t on fire. At lunch, eating a sandwich at her desk, Sarah called Quill once more, heard the start of the voicemail again, didn’t leave a message. She called the home phone and was relieved to find an answerphone message there but then frowned to hear that it was from the undercover Quill often talked about, Costain. He was asking her to call him back. He sounded worried.

  Her fingers fumbling, she called the number he gave, and, with a feeling like a stone in her stomach, asked what had happened. He said he couldn’t tell her much, but it felt more as if he didn’t want to, as if he was sparing her from something. Quill hadn’t checked in. They regarded him as missing. They were pulling in resources from everywhere to try and find him. They’d call as soon as anyone knew anything.

  After she ended the call, she immediately wanted to call him back and demand to know what he hadn’t been telling her. But she didn’t.

  At 3 p.m. she collected Jessica from nursery and said nothing about Daddy. She hoped that this would just be a day without him that Jessica wouldn’t even notice.

  At 7 p.m., when it was time for bed, Jessica asked where Daddy was. ‘He’s at work, sweetheart; they sometimes have very long days. He might be here when you wake up.’ Jessica had nodded and, five minutes later, repeated it to Sarah: that Daddy might be here when she woke up.

  When Jessica had gone to bed and had had her story, and was asleep, Sarah called Gipsy Hill again and asked to be put through to the Portakabin. She got Lisa Ross, whom for some reason Sarah had always imagined to be very glamorous. She sounded nervous to hear from her.

  Bloody hell. Bloody hell, this was getting worse. She started to ask all the questions and felt as if she had picked at a loose thread and now everything was unravelling.

  ‘We know where he was when he made his last phone call. There’s no indication that he’s come to any harm.’

  ‘I know about what you lot do. Was he doing something like that?’

  ‘Mrs Quill—’

  ‘Don’t you … don’t you tell me it’s an operational matter. You’re the one that … you were willing to … please, would you just tell me everything?!’

  She did, in that halting, washed-out, carefully blank voice of hers. She did her best to make what Quill’s phone messages had said sound positive. She emphasized that nothing had been found at the scene of the last phone call, outside Finchley Road tube station. There was CCTV footage of Quill dashing off, as if certain of where he was going, but the view of the camera didn’t stretch far enough to see what he was heading for. There were no further witnesses so far. Sarah knew what they were thinking might be found. ‘We’re doing everything we can. We’ve been on this since that moment. Mrs Quill…’ Then her voice changed, and Sarah got an inkling of why Quill told her he had such faith in this woman. ‘Sarah. This is all we’re doing now. We’re going to find him. I swear to you, I’ll call you as soon as there’s news. Okay?’

  Sarah gave Lisa all her numbers and said goodbye too quickly and ended the call. Quill would turn up having finally come out from his hiding place, smelling of shit. She would be so happy to see him. She could see his face.

  Was this what it was like when it wasn’t a false alarm? Was this what it was like when the worst possible thing finally happened?

  She could feel the first tug of something that felt impossibly big. If she didn’t think about this yet, she could hold it off. It might go away as things turned out to be okay. Oh, she hated him for doing this to her; she was so angry at him …

  That stone in her stomach again. She felt hungry, but she knew she’d just look at what she might make to eat and not want it, and it would feel bad to start making it. She felt desperately sle
epy too, stupidly so, but she didn’t want to sleep in case the phone rang.

  She went to the door of Jessica’s room, intending to go in and take comfort in looking at her, but then she stopped. She didn’t want to bring the stone in her into Jessica’s presence. She didn’t want it to multiply.

  She went to bed. She actually went to bed and fell straight to sleep, as if this was a normal day.

  The sound of the phone on the bedside table woke her up. She told Quill to please answer that. When he didn’t, she remembered.

  She grabbed the phone and nearly switched it off in her scramble to answer it.

  Her name, spoken by this professional, caring, careful voice of a stranger, as a question, was the most terrifying thing she had ever heard.

  TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AGO

  ‘Thanks for that,’ said Quill, as Gaiman brought the car to a halt. They had stopped in a side street somewhere near Edgware Road.

  ‘Please, don’t thank me,’ said Gaiman, turning to look at him. He had the oddest expression on his face: a deliberate solemnity.

  ‘Well, you saved me, didn’t you?’ said Quill. He went to open the car door. But it was locked. ‘You planning to let me out so we can go and get a drink? Or are you going to tell me what’s going on?’

  The author had refused to answer questions as he’d driven the car at high speed, presumably thinking the Ripper might be after them. He’d only been distracted by sending a text message when they’d stopped at traffic lights. Gaiman just kept looking at him, his mouth a straight line of tension. Then it suddenly dawned on Quill what might be going on here. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘You’re helping him.’

  * * *

  The glowing figure burst through the car door.

  Gaiman made himself watch. Quill screamed as he tried to move, to fight, but the razor flew back and forth supernaturally fast, slashing into the man’s torso. Quill kept screaming. Gaiman desperately wanted him to die quickly, but that was such a terrible, selfish thought. The slashes reached Quill’s neck and the sounds suddenly stopped.

  The Ripper flew from the car. Silver splattered on the window. The remains of Quill’s body fell in a heap across the seats.