by Paul Cornell
He grabbed at his face and pulled from himself the ridiculously excellent mask he could inhabit so well in this protean form. Underneath, he was cycling still between all those different selves that demanded him to be them. He would triumph over them, he yelled silently at all the images. He would become himself once more, no matter how much death and duplicity it took. No matter how many men he had to kill.
He was, and would always be, Sherlock Holmes.
The great detective tried fruitlessly to calm himself and, with a cry of desperation, raced off into the streets that now so perplexed him.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Lofthouse no longer knew how long she’d been stumbling through the dark. It must now surely be Monday. She had no idea how long Sally Rutherford’s interest in duplicity would keep her own lies going. Perhaps Peter was already suffering; perhaps he was already dead. She put that thought out of her head as she inched along, unseeing. She couldn’t go back, so she had to keep going. She thought she could see the faintest change in light ahead, but maybe that was her eyes playing tricks. Her body kept telling her she needed medical attention, but she was past the point where she felt her life mattered. She had managed, despite the pain in her chest, to squat to shit against the wall, yelling as she slid down, yelling as she stood again. She’d had to lie against the angle of the rock for several minutes afterwards, controlling her breathing, before she could continue. The only thing that led her was the tug of the key. It didn’t care what her physical condition was.
She realized the path she was on had started to head downwards, and she felt the shape of a step. Then another, a clean one, cut in the rock. The key grew more insistent. She managed to make good, slow progress down them. She could hear something moving, smell a new freshness, feel a new cold on her face. Was she nearing a large body of water? It would be stagnant down here, wouldn’t it? No, it might be an underground river. There was definitely light ahead, far below, and as her eyes adjusted, she realized just how far the steps descended. She kept herself flat against the wall, one foot down, then the other, shuffling like a crab, in pain with each step. If she fell now, that’d be it. The stairwell felt enclosed: she couldn’t fall off, but if she fell down, she’d be a useless heap at the bottom. The light was round the corner at the bottom, a clear light, illuminating the last few steps. She got to the bottom and slid round the wall.
It was an ancient, dusty light bulb, fixed to the rock ceiling in a white mount, with no sign of any cable. She found she was laughing. She felt like the laugh might become a sob and stopped herself. Round the corner at the bottom of the steps, the cave opened out. Keeping against the wall, she hobbled to see more. Inside this cathedral of a space, the roof of which rose out of sight, there was an enormous lake, which again extended back further than she could see. There was a rocky beach on this side of it, which swept round out of sight. The steps opened up at the edge of the beach, water lapping at their base. Further along, she could see other cave entrances.
Closer to her, formed out of the beach, was a sort of barrow, a rounded shape that looked like it rose out of the rock. The presence of human artefacts in this space that had been formed by nature spoke to Lofthouse of ritual, like the deep caves where archaeologists found drawings and remains.
Before she investigated anything, she needed water. The key was tugging urgently at her wrist, agreeing with her. She should get to the lake. She swung the bag on her shoulder to balance her and set off from the wall, hobbling on legs like stilts across the shale. This body of water might flow down further into the earth, or it might be a reservoir.
These deductions appeared in her mind uselessly. How many small humans had found themselves in places like this and had meaningless thoughts? She was as alone as someone on the moon, with less hope of getting home.
No, don’t let your big thoughts flatten you, human. Body first. Water first.
She thought about how to sit, and did so, hissing between her teeth as she lowered herself to the cold stones at the very shore. She was already cold through to her core. She put her hands into the water, lifted it to her mouth and drank, slowly, then blissfully. The water tasted strange, like it was full of exotic minerals, but that didn’t matter. Was it making her feel a little . . . drunk? That must be the dehydration. It was still the best thing she’d ever—
She turned at a sudden sound.
The rocks had moved. She could see nothing along the silent, illuminated beach. Then more sounds; she could hear them but couldn’t see them. She’d expected to encounter something she couldn’t see, that she would have needed the Sight to see, but shit, not here, now, when she was so vulnerable. She rolled from the water, scrabbled to get the gun out of her bag, fumbled to get the cartridges into it, made herself concentrate on doing that, rather than on the sound of something . . . a number of things . . . running at her now.
She’d readied the gun. She stood, bracing it, looking around helplessly for a target. The sounds were almost on her. Her training and experience made it extremely difficult for her to fire randomly. Unconsciously, she took a step back, preparing to do just that, her finger pulling on the trigger.
Her foot found a sudden absence of support.
She toppled towards the water. Her other foot missed the edge and she plunged down into the lake.
The sudden deep cold hit her. She felt like she was going to die.
She desperately held on to the gun. She hadn’t taken a breath. The pitch-dark water was going up her nose. It was deep, so close to shore. A reservoir, not a lake, thought her monkey brain. Pain yelling through her she saw light above. She had nearly lost sight of which direction life was in. She pushed up towards it. She wasn’t going to make it. She was too weak. She had to take a breath. Her muscles screamed.
She hauled water into her lungs. No, not water, not all of it. There was something else too, something even more terrifying. It was rushing into her head.
She burst out onto the surface, but she wondered giddily for a moment if she was in a different place. She’d surfaced in a new world. Standing on the shore, bellowing at her were . . . What were they?
Three enormous pigs. Giant albino hogs with combs of wire hair along their backs, blazing pink eyes and sharp tusks. She felt them, somehow, as much as she saw them. She felt their strength, how much this was their home. She hacked hard, water bursting from her lungs. She stumbled forwards, in great pain.
The ceiling above her was illuminated by garlands of golden braid, leading upwards into infinity. The water she was in, full of gold and silver, streamed impossibly upward too, a river that defied her sense of perspective. She was immersed in it. It was inside her. Yelling, she made herself get to her feet. She was covered in silver. She could feel it running from her eyes and nose and mouth. The sense of weight, of presence, of where she was, was suddenly huge.
She realized what had happened, what this had all been about. She had been immersed in the river and gained the Sight.
The pigs bellowed again and her attention snapped back to them. They didn’t seem to want to get close to the water. Lucky her. One of them made a swift foray forwards. OK, they were hungry enough to risk it. In a moment, they’d decide it was worth coming at her. She shook the tension out of her hand from where she’d been gripping the gun so hard. She was shivering so fiercely, the cold as far inside her as the Sight was now. She raised the gun, made sure to aim. She found the trigger. She would squeeze lightly. She wanted to keep one shot. She only hoped that the water hadn’t ruined the gun or the cartridges. Were such things designed to be waterproof? It certainly felt dependable to her now, its invincibility and potency flaring golden in her hands.
The pigs ran at her. She squeezed.
One of the pigs flew backwards, blown apart. The other two creatures screamed and fled, afraid of another shot, down the beach, down one of the other tunnels and away, their shrieks fading. Thank God. Thank God they had been animals.
Lofthouse stumbled up the beach. The key was
still tugging at her wrist, she realized. It wanted her to head towards the barrow. Shelter would be good.
The barrow was made of rock, but there was a metal door to it. On it was a bronzed lock that looked to her now to be momentous and historic and secure against anything. This was a lock and she had a key. She found it on her wrist, and it was willing. She put the key in the lock and turned. She felt the key die, spent, its mission accomplished. The door swung open.
Inside, the barrow was illuminated by another impossible light bulb. There was a rough table, upon which sat a book, a row of pegs on the wall and two stools. That was all there was. It was, however, much warmer in here, as if the bulb could provide that much heat.
Lofthouse went to the book and opened it. It was an ancient volume, a binding of older documents, medieval manuscripts that showed people being immersed in the water, of it flooding specifically into their mouths and their noses, to the point where the figures panicked and cried out. Latin tags explained what was going on. Lofthouse didn’t need much in the way of explanations. She’d just lived through it. She’d breathed in the water. Drowning in it was the only way one got the Sight.
She picked up the book and put it in her bag.
She sighed to herself, picked up one of the stools, took it to the door of the barrow and sat down. Here she had the warmth, but also the view of that magnificent cave and the impossible river that ran through it in many surreal directions.
So this was all the key had wanted. It was something enormous, to be sure, but, as far as she could see, it wasn’t a way to help Peter. She was sure she had done something that whatever had possessed her husband would not want her to, but that was a double-edged sword. If she managed to get back home, how could she conceal this?
She realized that against the dripping silence of the cave, she could hear something. Sounds were coming from the stairwell. Sounds of movement. Someone was stepping calmly, confidently, down it. Someone whose mere presence suddenly, like a great shadow falling over her, felt more enormous and frightening than anything she’d seen in these caverns.
She stood up to see more clearly. A real shadow now stretched from the stairwell. The darkness of the shadow seemed to change the beach where it fell, infesting it, polluting it. What was coming had never been here before. She felt a strange sense of connection to what was coming and realized that the Sight was telling her of things she couldn’t naturally know.
It was telling her that what was coming had followed her down here.
He stepped into the light. A nondescript man in a suit. He was smiling at her. Something about his face reminded her of the expression of her possessed husband.
He brought up his hands and began to clap.
She understood now. She had thought she had found the map despite him, but it was because he had wanted her to. He couldn’t have got to it, hidden as it had been. He had motivated her to come on this quest in order to follow her and find what was down here.
As she watched, he took from his jacket a bottle. It reeked of decay. Its foulness was indicated by colours that leaped from it into her eyes, and a hiss like a firework about to go off. The Sight illuminated so much extra meaning. He turned from her and headed calmly towards the reservoir. He was going to put that into the water, she realized. He was here to poison it.
‘You’ll have been watching me,’ she called to the figure, ‘so you must know about this gun I’ve got.’ She pulled it from her bag once more, found the trigger, brought the gun to her shoulder and aimed it at his back. ‘If you weren’t certain it couldn’t hurt you, you wouldn’t have let me keep it.’ She could feel his mockery from here, from the angle of his shoulders as he started to bend. She felt how meaningless he thought her to be, just a pawn he’d duped. All that cruelty to the man she loved, just for this trick. ‘That’s the logical deduction, isn’t it? That this can’t hurt you, so I won’t fire.’
Something in the sound of her voice made him pause and turn to look back at her.
‘I think,’ she said, ‘that if I’ve got this gun, I should bloody well use it.’
She squeezed the trigger. The Smiling Man was blasted off his feet.
He landed out in the water. The bottle landed with him. Something broke as he hit. The bottle, yes – that evil erupted, corrupted the water; there was no stopping that – but something else broke, hard.
She’d broken his concentration. It wasn’t the shot that had done it, but the impact of what he’d fallen into. The Sight had rushed into a being who was so in control, who had everything balanced on a knife edge. What had Sefton told her about erased memories? That it took enormous energy and concentration on someone’s part to keep people from remembering? She could feel the letting go, the tremendous size of what he’d let go. It took a moment to fall from his grasp, to drop back into the world. Here was the shadow of it falling on her; here was the enormity of it, coming at her—
She remembered.
TWENTY-NINE
Five years ago
‘Has it never occurred to you,’ said the smiling politician, ‘how odd a thing the placebo effect is?’
The crowd laughed. Chartres was there among them. He looked around, surprised. But he shouldn’t be surprised.
‘No, seriously! A doctor gives you a pill and, with all his authority, tells you it’s going to cure you. And simply because you believe that, it does. Even if it’s just chalk.’
The crowd was now a little more quiet. Perhaps he was trying to reach for a serious point. They didn’t like that so much. Chartres nodded at the interesting conjecture.
‘That suggests a relationship between the mind and the physical world that should stagger you with its implications. But it doesn’t, because you’re used to it. Imagine that applied to physics. The airliner you’re in is falling out of the sky, but the captain calls from the flight deck and tells you it’s not . . . and so, suddenly, it’s not.’
The crowd looked questioningly at each other and waited for the politician to draw some sort of conclusion. But he just sighed at them, because they didn’t yet understand. ‘Thankfully,’ he said, ‘you’ve all got an appointment with me.’
Then he woke up.
Sir Richard Chartres, RIBA, KCBE, opened his eyes, sat up and started to laugh at the ridiculousness of his dream. He reached for his journal, contained in the old satchel he kept beside the bed. In the old days, whenever the satchel wore out, he would purchase a new one of exactly the same design. But they’d stopped making those, so currently his satchel had holes in it and his books kept falling out. When he’d finished noting down the dream, with some extra annotations concerning his own silliness, he went over to the window of his grace-and-favour apartment in Golders Green. He was allowed to live here rent-free for life because, as with so many things, that was just how the world ticked along. He opened the curtains and looked out at another beautiful sunrise in London. There was nothing at all to worry about.
He had an appointment this evening.
The meeting chamber stood at the end of the garden annexe, a hundred paces to the east of the De Souza and Raymonde skyscraper in Rotherhithe. Everyone commented on how different in style the chamber was to its parent building, but nobody, Chartres was sure, not even all the prize-winning architects who passed it while walking across the courtyard between the tall shadows, could identify exactly what that style was.
It could have been a relic from when Rotherhithe was still proper docklands, when there were warehouses and pulleys and damp brickwork. But it would have stood out as looking old then too. It was low and square, with a dome gleaming so white that it looked like it had never been rained on. That was because it hadn’t.
To get to the door of the meeting chamber, Chartres had to pass through the rest of the ‘Dessandarr’ building – these days, a nightmare of open-plan workspaces – and then go out under the canopy, with its visible cable supports, into the ‘Space for Free Thought’, with its water feature and sundial. The chamber stood awkwardly
at the end of all that, not relating to it, but connected by a gravel path. Chartres, as a young man, had once felt part of the firm, merely seconded to this strange assignment. Nowadays, even as a full partner, this strange assignment took up all his time, and the firm was something through which he was obliged to walk. To get into the meeting chamber, one had to be a member of the De Souza and Raymonde Continuing Projects Team. Each member of the CPT had been given, by Chartres, a key to the meeting chamber, cut from his original, itself made smooth by centuries of handling.
It was Halloween tonight, Chartres thought as he approached the little building, the old key in his hand. What a lovely smell of winter in the air.
Inside the chamber, the illumination came from a cubic lantern/window in the centre of the ceiling dome. When it rained outside, the light cascaded down the four walls like those present were encased in a genie’s lamp.
The chamber smelt of the old books that were stored under the floor. The shelves were made of wood polished only by age, otherwise kept pristine by the precise climate inside the chamber. They were accessed by tugging on a loop of rope to slam open a slab of the stone flooring, then cranking a metal lever fixed on a post. The wooden shelves would rise up out of depths, notch by notch. The crank needed special oil to keep it running smoothly, which was kept in a special oil flask.
