The Severed Streets

by Paul Cornell

  There were children in Hell? He looked up and saw a mother carrying a baby. There were babies here? He shouldn’t be shocked. This wasn’t about good and evil. He knew that now. But it meant that the terrible words written on the sign over the gate might actually be true.

  There came the sound of a scream. Behind the window he was looking in, there were … children, naked children, and they were being … oh, God! He went to the door, tried to get in, shouted he was police, and knew in that second that he’d done that out of habit but in doing so had submitted to the label this world had given him. The door was locked, so he tried to smash the window, but nothing would break it. The gentlemen inside looked out at him with smiling bemusement as they continued their abuse. Quill looked back to the street. He saw a uniformed policeman and ran to him. He started yelling, pointing out what was going on. The man was extremely deferential. ‘I see that, sir. There’s nothing we can do, I’m afraid, sir. Would you like to take it out on me instead, sir?’

  Quill stopped at the look of genuine fear on the face of the officer. He backed away. He went back to the window. He kicked at it a few times. ‘I’ll be back for you,’ he said, impotently. Those inside hardly registered his presence.

  He looked away. He walked off. He stumbled across the street.

  He’d been shown that because he was a parent. Hell now made him acutely aware that he was walking away and leaving those children to their fate. He tried to find some mental posture that allowed him to feel more comfortable about that. He could not. He thought about Jessica. Hell laughed at him doing that.

  The throngs with their top hats and waistcoats and gloves and pith helmets and spats passed, and he started to see it everywhere now, such horror. Child prostitutes in lewd costumes pulled at the trousers of the men and were kicked away or had their hands grabbed and were led away. Beggars with horrifying ailments were lying in the horse shit, some of them just a head and an arm sticking helplessly up out of it, a hopeful expression on their gnawed-away faces.

  Quill tried to haul one up out of it, dodging as carts rushed to and fro, but the beggar was screaming and complaining, urging him not to do it. Quill finally managed to heave him out onto the road surface, such as it was, both of them covered in mud, and found he’d rescued just the smallest part of a chest, with arm and head still attached. ‘What did you go and do that for?’ the beggar asked, tears streaming down his cheeks.

  Quill pulled him to the side of the road, with the beggar all the while screaming, ‘Put me back!’

  He sat the man up against a lamp post. ‘I’ll find you something to eat,’ he said.

  ‘Fucking newcomers, trying to make themselves feel better! Fuck you!’ The end of the sentence was cut off as a boot from a passerby sent the beggar tumbling into the street once more.

  Quill watched as the beggar was run over by the wheels of a cart and, still alive and screaming, was ground back into the muddy centre of the road. He wondered how deep it was there, if there were layers of them down there, some sort of peace to be found.

  You couldn’t die here, he realized.

  He moved on. What else could he do? He had to see. Hell noted that he had to see. It would therefore enjoy showing him.

  He saw the body of a child being thrown out of a house, covered in soot. Other children ran to the door, pounding on it, demanding to be given the work that had … killed … the boy. The boy’s chest started to heave, and he began to cough, black tar bursting from his mouth and nostrils.

  Quill moved on.

  What could money mean here? Why did people need it? Quill started to realize that there was a pecking order here and, oh, the pecks were precise and they went deep.

  In every window, in every building, at the end of every alley, there was something else that made him sick. By the time he’d fought his way to the end of just this street it felt as if he’d been here for days; he was tired to the core, moving through so many people. That would continue forever, said Hell, with interludes where things would get horrifyingly worse. When would one of those happen? Unexpectedly. By surprise.

  He heard what sounded like a distant barking, coming from overhead, and looked up. There was something odd in the sky. It was hard to see, past the smog, but there it was, a band of something, as if he was standing on a planet that had rings. Now he was listening for it, he could hear all sorts of animal noises from up there, and Hell, whispering in his mind, told him that was nothing but animals, that that was where most of them were kept. Quill remembered all the times they’d heard about animals being sacrificed, that those who’d done that thought they were making sacrifice to London itself. But what they killed ended up here. He wondered if the foundations of this place were made of all the teeth and fingers and blood that people had cut from themselves in return for power on earth.

  He realized that Hell was telling him things in the place in his head where he normally had the Sight, that the Sight had gone from him now. He had no greater feeling for anything. He found he missed it as if it was armour he no longer wore. The lack of it was another thing that added to his complete vulnerability. He moved on. Ahead, there was a building with red curtains at its windows, looking a bit like somewhere official, a post office or something. People with no expression on their faces, looking as if they’d been here a long time, were trudging tiredly into it. Here came someone who was fighting, being dragged into the building by his fellow citizens, shouting and bellowing, and ripping at their clothing. Quill felt a surge of pride and fellow feeling to see someone putting up a fight, but already he knew that the emotion was only there to be pulled away from him, already he was flinching from the blow that was about to come, and he had been here minutes, and would be here forever.

  The people going into the building had something in common: the tags on their arms were flashing like Belisha beacons. Their time, Quill realized, was up. What did that mean? What happened in there? Hell felt his animal fear, the way his new body – which was somehow more compromised and pathetic than his old body, as if all the worrying signs of age that Quill had ever felt were packed into it at once – reacted to the smell of the slaughterhouse. Quill felt something inside him start begging and squealing, and he had to clench his teeth to stop terrible pathetic sounds coming from his mouth. This was in the first few minutes, and he had forever ahead of him. Since the end of the Losley case, he had been blissfully without the depression that had occasionally beset him. He’d fooled himself into thinking that his new awareness of a greater purpose to his work had rid him of his ‘black dog’, but here he knew he still had that darkness in him, here he knew it would be forced back into him.

  He turned the corner at the end of the street, at a point where many roads met, where the volume of sound actually increased, and he saw the other side of the red-curtained building, the back door, where people stumbled out again, their tags no longer flashing. They had on their faces expressions of new hope, of shattered emptiness, of howling, sobbing pain, sobbing like laughter. He stopped one of them and started asking questions. ‘Ticking down to the next time,’ the woman said, ‘going to get a drink.’ She shouldered past him.

  Quill tried to look at his own tag, but he couldn’t now quite bend his shoulder and neck to see how long he’d got. He’d been able to see it before. Things changed arbitrarily, said Hell. He needed to know the clock was there so he’d be afraid of time running out. But he couldn’t see how much time he had left. He could ask others to look, of course, but that would take a negotiation. He would never know if they were telling the truth. That might be why there was money here, because of that horrifying force underneath this … he didn’t want to think of it as a civilization; it was a continuing parody of one.

  He walked on. He had nothing else to do. He couldn’t quite believe he still existed. Why was all this here, instead of just simple death? Why cruelty instead of nothingness? He remembered Sefton speculating that the memories of the dead contributed to London ‘remembering’ a powerful being
or location. Maybe that was why so many people had been shoved together in such a small space, to increase that effect. He’d got used to the idea of death as part of nature, or he’d got used to it more than he ever could this. He walked and he walked. He needed to see everything. As if, said Hell, seeing it all would make it better. He covered a lot of ground. Day became night, which meant the sky had just become a little darker.

  He found that there were versions of buildings he recognized. The dome of Saint Paul’s was now a basin, filled with steaming water. The Houses of Parliament were like a leaning row of dominoes against the tidal bashing of the Thames, over which bridges covered in shops – shops that were actually falling off – swung dangerously, everyone nevertheless swarming over them, having to get to wherever they had to go.

  He’d noticed it earlier, and now he saw it in every detail: the people were fighting over every scrap because they needed to pay others to increase the time on their clocks, or even to see the clocks. It was an economy of fear.

  His ‘job’ allowed him to explore, he realized. His ‘job’ let him see everything. Was he going to perform his ‘job’? To do so would be another submission. How could it do any good? He decided to go along with it for now, to wait and see if it could. Hell was pleased at his acceptance and indicated that it was sure he was keeping some part of himself apart from it. It could wait. In an eternity of time, he would become the thing it had labelled him.

  A street trader was standing outside a grand circular building, a comedy theatre, it seemed, judging by the mocking masks hanging from its over-decorated pillars. In a battered carpet bag behind him were a pile of the tags, and the crowd all around him were jostling for them, fighting for them, showing him how much money they had. ‘Now then, lads and lasses. Everything’s for sale here, and we’ve got all the time in the world! I don’t want your money, little lady, it’s a question, is it not, of what else you have for me?’

  Quill moved on, wanting to make an arrest, but already wondering what use that would be, wanting to smash heads, but already seeing how meaningless that would be, wanting to keep a part of himself separate from all this still, undemeaned.

  People talked about ‘them’ a lot. How ‘they’ would come, about what ‘they’ would do to them. It was ‘they’, he soon realized, who you saw when your time ran out. He was aware he’d been here for some time now and kept thinking that it had to be any moment now, kept feeling that fear, suppressing it, wondering if there was any attitude, anything he could do that would give him any control over this process, apart from participating in this terrifying market of time. He knew that everything about this place told him there was nothing he could do. His time would come. He would eventually have to go into one of the buildings with the red curtains. He couldn’t think about that. He had to be strong. Didn’t he? What did that even mean here? What would that be for?

  He used his authority – hating to do it, because Hell underlined how it compromised him – to stop people and talk to them. He asked them what year they were from. Some of them said the year had been twenty-something when they died, some said fifteen-something. The earliest was twelve-something. Not all of them wanted to admit they had died. Some of them had strange explanations, weird cosmologies of their own. Some, particularly the children it took all his courage to question, expected to wake up. The sheer completeness of it was a new horror to Quill: it meant that the sign above the gate that he’d seen when he came in, that he kept trying not to think about, this also meant that it might be true. There were more people from later times, of course, because more people had been alive then. To some of these people, this was a futuristic city they were suffering in. For most, it was a vision of the past. It didn’t change, he heard. Or he found nobody who remembered it being different.

  A significant number of them said they felt that things had once been different, even after they’d died. They thought the place they were in had changed but they couldn’t remember how. That made sense, considering what Quill’s team had found out on earth about the point when everything seemed to have changed, the moment when the Docklands headquarters of the Continuing Projects Team had fallen. Perhaps this Hell was not eternal after all, but actually quite new, in terms of its rules and how many people were in here. In all his walking, he still had not found any limits to this generic metropolis. It kept telling him that it did have some, that it was growing every second. However, every street was packed with people, much more so than Quill had ever seen in the real London.

  ‘They always come for us in the end, sir,’ said one of the constables in a police station he entered. The interior of it was like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan: a lot of men, and only men, from different times, judging by their haircuts, all squeezed into Victorian uniforms, performing endless slapstick comedy and making jolly comments. ‘It is how you spend your time before that … I was about to say that it counts. It does not.’ He would be paid, he was told, amid much laughter at the obviousness of the newcomer’s question, with a certain amount of time on his clock, ‘at the end of the week’. Whenever that was. That seemed to be something that could be moved or taken away.

  He stopped on the threshold as he walked out. There was something here that did not seem to be compromised by Hell. It was surely a trap, a device to give him hope, but … ‘What the Hell,’ he said out loud.

  He was still being paid to be a policeman. Those in charge of him were arbitrary and miserly. So no change there.

  A number of persons of interest in the matter of the Ripper murders would almost certainly be in this most outer of outer boroughs.

  He would do his duty and continue his investigation. It would, at least, be something to do until they came for him.

  * * *

  He found Spatley first. He was working as the director of a home for wayward girls. It looked like a factory, with enormous chimneys. He watched as parties of female children were herded out of police vans and through the doors.

  He saw posters and heard that Spatley was going to give a speech. Quill went along and found he couldn’t get through the crowd. He stayed at the back and watched. Spatley stood onstage with banners and complacent matrons and stern sponsoring men who looked proud to be there. Spatley himself was in a high collar so starched that Quill was sure it made him stand straighter. But Spatley was sweating, and his eyes looked desperate. ‘If I was not here to hold the powers that control this world back, to moderate their policies,’ he said, ‘then things would be so much worse. I’m doing a good job here. What I do here is important.’ The rest of it was drowned out by audience laughter.

  Afterwards, Quill went into the dark factory, barged past a pair of stout yeomen at the door and marched into Spatley’s office. The man looked up from his work with an admirable amount of poise. ‘What is the meaning of this affront?’

  ‘Listen to you, already going native.’ Quill sat down opposite him, in what turned out to be a squirmingly uncomfortable chair made of … he stood up and didn’t look at it again. ‘It’s not often I get a chance to ask this: why do you think you were killed?’

  ‘I’m … not certain. I don’t deserve to be here—’

  ‘That’s what they all say. What do you know about a prostitute by the name of Mary Arthur?’

  Spatley looked suddenly, desperately, guilty.

  ‘Mr Spatley,’ said Quill, ‘you’re in Hell. Even if, for some unimaginable reason, you think you can mitigate this place, what further trouble do you think an admission of guilt could get you into?’

  Spatley looked at him for a moment as if his world was crumbling. ‘I … was lured to a hotel room,’ he said. ‘With an offer, an offer that very specifically catered to my … It was like someone had looked inside my head. But it seemed too perfect … I mean, I went because I wanted to spring the trap. Seriously.’

  ‘I believe you, sir.’ He actually did.

  ‘I pretended to be outraged that she was dressed as a schoolgirl. Well, actually, I was outraged. Or
I would have been, had I not been there, you know, deliberately.’

  ‘Could we please get to the meat of this, sir?’

  ‘I sent her into the bathroom to change and took a look in her bag. I found her phone, discovered that that was her real name, Mary Arthur. There was a text message on the phone that described what was supposed to happen as a “honey trap”. She was meant to take photos of me, to compromise me. I wrote down the number of whoever had sent her that text on the back of a card I found in her bag. When she came out of the bathroom, I sat her down and told her I knew everything. I tried to get her to come with me to the police, to tell them all about the man who’d hired her, although I was sure he must be an employee, a deniable freelancer. She listened; I’ll give her that, she was interested. I ended up telling her all about my suspicions concerning who was behind this trap, put the story together for the first time – the first time I’d told it all to anyone.’

  ‘Who did you think was behind the trap?’

  ‘Russell Vincent, of course.’

  Quill frowned. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I was about to start assembling my forces for a major inquiry into how he was attempting to influence government. A certain number of ministers to the right of the Tories adored him, but some of the moderates seemed actually afraid of him. It was as if he had a hold over individual MPs. The attempted honey trap convinced me I was right, that he was blackmailing his way towards some enormous … coup.’

  Quill didn’t know enough to make a guess about how credible that was. ‘I take it Mary Arthur didn’t agree to give evidence?’

  ‘No. She said, sorry, she already felt a bit threatened by how scared the man she’d worked for had seemed of a boss he wouldn’t talk about. If she’d fucked up a job for someone as powerful and dangerous as that, she said, she was going to have to vanish for a while. I wished her well and felt worried about how I’d burdened her with so much of the truth. I decided to stop gathering evidence and move to acting against Vincent as soon as possible. I don’t know how he could have known my intentions, because I’d told nobody, but I think, on reflection, that my plan was what got me killed.’