The Severed Streets

by Paul Cornell

  An alarm came from her phone. She looked at it to find a note from Forensics. ‘Your fingerprint search was one of the few tasks I was able to complete successfully in the current circumstances,’ it began, ‘so it went to the top of the queue, but I find the implications extraordinary…’ Ross scrolled quickly through the message and got to what those implications were.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘One of those photographs of fingerprints inside a prehistoric long barrow, fingerprints put there four thousand years ago, matched the prints found at the Ripper murders.’

  Sefton stared at her in shock. Then he grabbed the phone. ‘Where,’ he said, ‘is this long barrow?’

  * * *

  After a few minutes’ driving, Costain pulled the van to a halt, breathing hard. He’d been going far too fast. Only the emptiness of the streets had saved him. He’d switched off his phone as soon as he’d turned the corner. He was sure Ross would leave him messages. He didn’t want to hear them. He reached into his jacket. He found the secret inner pocket, closed his hand on the object. He wanted to see it, to make sure no secret power had taken it from him.

  The Bridge of Spikes was a plain gold sphere, small enough to fit into his hand.

  He’d stolen it from Anna Lassiter’s house two days ago, before he and Ross had gone there together, when Quill had sent him back to the Soviet bar to talk about prostitutes. He had used several of Sefton’s protective items, taken from the man’s holdall, to get into Lassiter’s flat. He doubted he’d have been able to do it without what he was now sure had been Vincent’s men making their own attempt hours before.

  He had done it because he couldn’t handle the idea of someone looking into his dreams. Because of how vulnerable that made him feel. He hadn’t previously decided what to do with it, although keeping it on him was some sort of decision. He’d had fantasies about staging a fake raid and triumphantly giving it to Ross.

  Now he had made his mind up. He had sacrificed so much for this. He hoped it was worth it.

  Costain replaced it in his pocket, took a deep breath, and drove off once more.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Ross and Sefton looked up at the building above them, dark in the summer night, framed in the ruddy light of the fires from the riots in White City. Only a few windows were illuminated. The former BBC TV Centre looked like the corpse of the building from Ross’ childhood memories. What once had been a broadcasting headquarters was now home to independent production companies, other businesses, apartments. The circular building with the courtyard and the fountain and the statue familiar from so many magazine programmes was now a listed building, a sort of monument to the idea that broadcasting should belong to the nation, to the people. The Sight revealed so much more, it made the building actually hard to look at. Its sheer gravity made Ross feel she had to stand straight, with her feet balanced, or she’d be drawn forward into it. They stepped forward slowly, both of them trying not to stagger, the weight of exhaustion and drugs making what was in front of them feel like a swaying dream. The round building was like an enormous recording device, a swirling whirlpool of visual and audible information, caught here to be replayed forever, like ancient video, fluttering and distorted, the light of childhood, the memories of the great national occasions, the hope for unity, the hope of meaning. The density of the information moving in front of her made it hard for Ross to pick out individual moments, but every voice she heard, every image that swept past her pupils meant something to her, tugged at emotions right down to the core of her, from scenes she’d seen on screen before she was aware of having memory. This place had imprinted itself into the consciousnesses of Londoners for decades. Even now, with this temple turned over to profit, the memory remained; the memory fought the building’s new purpose. This was a place of a billion ghosts.

  Across the country now, the Ripper killings were continuing, and here they were, pursuing a tiny hope.

  ‘They’re sure it’s here?’ asked Sefton.

  Ross stopped herself from looking again at the email. ‘The long barrow in the grounds was partially excavated in the fifties, before TV Centre was built. That’s when the fingerprints on the inner wall were photographed. Then it was reburied.’

  They stumbled inside. Sefton showed his warrant card to the security guards on duty, who were surprised, and, in the end, relieved to have coppers around tonight. No, they didn’t want an escort. No, they insisted on not being accompanied. They talked fast and harshly and scared the receptionists simply by how they looked on this terrible night. They were allowed through the inner revolving doors, into curving corridors. Ross tried to understand what the Sight was telling her about this place. She put a hand to the wall and felt and saw the gold thread, layered and deep, fine like the grooves on a vinyl record. You could play TV Centre, she thought, if you had the right enormous and precise needle. The information that rushed down these circular corridors, around and around, all sang the same sad song, about a future that had not come to pass, a dream of modernity, of a world evolving into unity through communication. What this building had stood for was an attempt within London to solve everything, to tell the truth about everything. No wonder so many things had conspired to stamp it out, to break this recording and broadcasting device.

  Sefton was looking at Google Maps on his phone. ‘I think I can feel where the barrow is,’ he said. He set off at a run which became a stagger which righted itself into a run again, and, making sure that where he was going corresponded to the map, Ross followed.

  * * *

  They made their way, falling sometimes into the walls or into each other, through the high, empty space of an unused studio, ancient flats standing under covers, lights still hanging from dusty rafters, enormous doors and props which were now without context, waiting to be moved to other facilities. They saw the sad faded ghosts of every meaning, beloved and lost like old school plays. They nearly fell down circular stairwells. They passed a bar on several levels, where a couple of people stood apart, looking out of the long curving windows at the fires which were now consuming the skyline, washing the ancient carpets with crimson. Sefton could taste dark beer and old drama and the tales of actors, worn into the surface of those tables and that bar. He was following, as well as his map, a feeling underneath all this, buried deep underneath the earth, something he was now experienced enough to isolate and pursue, but Ross wasn’t.

  It was a feeling of terrible, ancient, anger. ‘Angry’ – that was one of the words Jimmy had written in his notebook.

  They fell out of a side door that led to a little dark lane around the corner, where trucks stood with silver boxes. They sped up, Sefton shouting and pointing, sure his goal was in sight.

  They finally found, out by an annex, an undistinguished lawn, with a high wall around it. A children’s mural still smiled from the building beside it. The grass had been allowed to grow tall. They saw weeds and odd rough ditches in the light of the fires and a single blazing lamp at the corner. A small sign on what turned out to be a weather station indicated that this had once been the site of –

  ‘The Blue Peter garden,’ said Ross.

  Sefton recalled the presenters of that children’s magazine programme going out and doing nature items here from time to time. He put down his holdall, and from it took the spades and pickaxes they’d brought along – looted, frankly, from the smashed open window of a hardware store. The fury was now broadcasting from the ground right beneath him. He wouldn’t need a map to pinpoint it. They had no idea what they would find down there, knowing only that – in the absence of Mary Arthur – this was their only remaining hope. So he was going to fucking dig until it gave way or he did. He just hoped nobody wandered past and saw what they were doing. ‘If anyone asks,’ he said, sinking his spade into the ground hard and fast with his boot, ‘we’re looking for the tortoises, the time capsule and the skeleton of Petra.’

  * * *

  It took a lot of diggin
g before the quality of the surface underneath their spades changed. They dug too fast, and their heads started swimming with the effort until what they were doing started to feel like a dream and they kept having to yell at each other to keep going. People did come past, but none of them saw fit to challenge what they were doing on this uncared-for land, not tonight.

  They hit stone. Sefton grabbed a pickaxe and started working away at it, slamming and slamming and slamming the blade into the rock, and eventually there was a block that could be cracked away with a crowbar and lifted out. Muscles crying out, they prised it out to reveal a gap into darkness beneath that was big enough for a person to get through, just. Sefton waited, hanging over the edge, thinking that maybe his goal was complete. He’d half expected this moment to free some howling banshee, but no. The archaeological survey of this thing had reported an inner chamber that had remained sealed. Maybe it was in that. Whatever it was.

  They looked into the dark.

  Sefton felt the great weight of what was down there, the enormous anger, clear now. It still wasn’t free. He looked to Ross. She was obviously feeling it too. One of them had to go down there. Him, because of his greater experience of dealing with supernatural beings? Or her, because if what was down here was connected to the Ripper and did somehow share the same fingerprints, then it had shown itself unwilling to hurt women?

  Ross’ phone rang.

  She answered it, hands fumbling with it, and as she listened to whoever was on the other end of the line, Sefton saw the expression on her face become one of absolute horror.

  * * *

  Russell Vincent stood up from his desk and stretched. He wandered to the window of his upper-floor apartment in a tower block of one of his many subsidiaries in Wapping and looked out to see, in so many directions, London burning. Great palls of smoke were drifting across the summer night. Concentrations of fire. It was like looking at a volcanic landscape. It was all down to him.

  He had worked nearly three-quarters of the way down his little list, cutting every trail that could lead back to him and going on to attack his list of enemies, slicing through employee and celebrity and politician alike. It was fortunate, actually, now he knew what the Ripper wouldn’t do, that he hadn’t used any of his female staffers to act as his proxies in occult London. He had done his research, confident that the night of the strike was coming, finding out where every one of his targets was going to be, checking in on their dreams. No reasonable evidence could point to him. Okay, someone might well say, one day, what a coincidence that all these people had grudges against Russell Vincent. But how could he have been responsible? What had happened was impossible! The social landscape of Britain was about to change, anyway, and would make such speculations in public much harder to make.

  He was genuinely sorry he’d had to kill Challoner. The man hadn’t even considered being disloyal, and it pleased Vincent to kill only when he had to, to show noblesse oblige to his employees. But Challoner was weak and might crack under questioning, and so, ever since Quill had found that business card with his phone number on it, Challoner had been on Vincent’s death list for tonight.

  It wasn’t every man, he thought now, feeling the strength of his fifty-four-year-old body as he paced the room, who got to enjoy this almost Roman sensation of absolute power. The Herald had the best coverage of what had happened tonight – that’s what they’d say tomorrow morning. He’d actually done what so many other newspaper owners had failed to do, and through the use of multiple anonymous accounts and by taking advantage of the nature of London, had actually imposed his own meaning on Twitter.

  He had played the police, even those special ones who knew a bit about this stuff, at their own game, and he had won. If Mary Arthur dared show her face again, next time he’d just get some bloke to hire some other bloke to put a bullet through her head, then use the Ripper to get rid of both blokes.

  Then the Ripper could take a holiday. For a while. When the Coalition disintegrated tonight, and his friends from a different sort of politics stepped forward with their plan to crack down, the Ripper would vanish in the light of their golden dawn. It could always appear again if some new nightmare was required to scare the plebs.

  Maybe it was time to stop luxuriating and move on to the next name on the list. He slid his finger down the list on his iPad … oh, that comedy actor who’d made a fuss about invasion of privacy and long lenses and got an out-of-court settlement back in the day. Well, he was about to get a lesson in just how much power he’d poked at.

  Vincent sat again in the comfortable chair at his desk and prepared to make the gestures that would activate the scrying glass and connect his mind with the entity he called upon for the power to create the Ripper. He clicked the joints of his fingers and licked his lips, willing himself to do once again what was necessary.

  There came a knock at the door.

  Vincent stopped.

  He’d said he wasn’t to be disturbed. His PA knew that. So something must have happened that was truly extraordinary for her to go against his wishes, for her not even to send an email or call him. He went to the door and opened it.

  He gasped at who was standing there, but before he could call for help or slam the door closed—

  The man had marched into the room, his hands grabbing the lapels of Vincent’s suit, his strength turning him and slamming him against the wall.

  ‘Yeah, you slag,’ said James Quill. ‘I’m back from the dead. And I haven’t had any dinner.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWO NIGHTS AGO

  Quill had felt all the signifiers, all the meanings of the world collapse at the moment of his death. For just an instant, it had been a relief, an end to the terrifying pain. He saw his old life fall away below him with his body, and suddenly it had been like when he was dying in Mora Losley’s attic, except now there was nothing to hold him back from speeding higher and higher towards … what? To somewhere where mind and matter existed together in a different way.

  He felt the heat and closed his eyes. He had hoped for Heaven. Hadn’t he been good? But he already knew that the supernatural in London wasn’t about good and evil.

  Sarah and Jessica – the thought of them made him panic and try helplessly to shove himself back down towards his body. They would hear what had happened to him. The hurt they would suffer. He couldn’t help them. It was too much to bear. He pushed such thoughts away and tried to control his non-existent breathing and concentrated on the now.

  He was looking at a sign. He was passing under it. He was being forced to read it. He hated what it said. Could what it said be true? No, it mustn’t be, it mustn’t be. That lie was surely meant to be the first step towards breaking him.

  Then he woke up. That’s what it felt like. It took him a few moments to process what he was seeing. He was, bizarrely, standing up. He was standing on a muddy, paved street with dung piled in the gutters, between rows of houses that looked Gothic, imperious. He looked around. There were people in all directions, people and horses! Carriages and carts and cabs. He took a step forwards and a man in a cap carrying a tray of apples on his shoulder shoved him out of the way … then looked at him, afraid, doffed his cap and hurried on. He was in London, he realized. He heard the chimes of Big Ben somewhere in the distance. They sounded weird, echoing. It was hard to hear over the clatter of hooves and people, so many people, many more than in the London he knew. This was, what, Victorian? Was he in Victorian times? No, it didn’t feel real, somehow. Certainly, this was nothing like the glimpse of Hell that Costain had reported, but had he really seen anything past what Quill had seen in those first moments? He saw his reflection in a shop window; he was dressed in bowler hat and waistcoat and long coat with tails. He put his hands on his clothes; he could feel. He had a body, but it felt odd, like after a visit to the dentist. There was a small pain in his arm. For some reason it reminded him of being in hospital. Then he noticed: there was something on his arm, where the pain was. He reached to touch i
t and found his fingers went through something that was only sort of there. He pulled his sleeve round to see. It was a kind of tag that hovered in the air. It was attached right through the fabric, to his flesh, by – he winced as he tugged at it – something like an intravenous connection. Gingerly, he pulled on it, then harder, tried to pull it out—

  He reeled and fell against the window, suddenly full of sickening pain.

  He waited until the pain left him. It took its time. The people continued to walk past him, amused by him, some afraid of him.

  He looked again at the tag. On it was a tiny clock face, a segment of it ticking down to something, along with his name, and … it said he had a job. He was ‘a police detective’. What was this game? It was almost comforting, being immediately given a function. He was sure it wasn’t meant to be reassuring. He thought again of Sarah and Jessica and wondered how far away he was from where they were. It felt as if they were a billion miles away, or rather, an impossible distance; you couldn’t get there from here. There was something, he thought, looking around again, about the squalor of here that said, implicitly, that one would never leave. It was one of many messages written into the shape of the buildings, the air he was breathing. This was a different state from being awake or dreaming. Who he was had been squeezed into a space that was too small. The shape of it was made to limit and control him and make him afraid. There was none of the comforting pantomime of a dream, the ever-present knowledge one could escape.

  This was Hell. He knew it. It was telling him what it was.

  Suddenly, he coughed. He’d been tasting the air, and the muck of it had slowly built up in his mouth: it was harder to breathe than it should be. He looked around once more and saw that many of those in the street had cloths or scarves across their faces. He could taste industrial smoke on his tongue, see the fog of it in the distance. The faces of some of the children who passed were spattered, as if they had freckles of tar.