by Paul Cornell
Saunders tried a defensive protocol, one not used in centuries. But what she was trying to say failed . . . or she got it wrong.
Chartres couldn’t think of a single word to say. He had been told all of this in his dream, he realized, and yet had still come here.
The shape solidified for him, against his will. It was a smart, well-off-looking young man. Of course it was. He was smiling all over his face. Of course he was. He raised his hands into the position that caused the model on the table top to spring into life.
They were suddenly amid London again, and zooming in, zooming in, to Rotherhithe. To the De Souza and Raymonde skyscraper.
‘No,’ said Chartres. ‘This is one of those things tradition tells us we must never do. We must not look at ourselves. We must not ever be part of what we observe. There isn’t anything, when you look too closely, don’t you understand? There isn’t anything!’
But the model kept expanding. They flew towards the meeting chamber. Straight down at it, faster and faster.
‘It’s not about the map,’ said Saunders, and with a start Chartres realized that she was saying words their enemy wanted to be said, with something like the same voice he’d heard in his dream. ‘It’s about what’s underneath it. The time of abstractions is past. Time itself is nearly over. What’s inside the people you looked down upon from a great height is enormous, and it’s terrifying, and you missed it. All things now tend towards me.’ She raised a hand to point towards the smiling man.
The man started to laugh. It turned out his laugh was the same high laugh as that of the youths outside.
Chartres felt that he was participating in a dream again, someone else’s dream. All the history and information and power and tradition that his team had represented was about to vanish.
Their vision of London sped them into the wall of the meeting chamber . . . and through it, and there they all were. They were now standing among themselves. They couldn’t help it; they looked. Chartres looked at himself, who was looking at himself, who was looking at himself. Those selves vanished to a terrifying collapsed point in the distance, a hole that he realized could look right back into him and—
He had a thought, just before the moment when all thought would be dragged out of his body and sent somewhere terrifying. That thought was about his duty. He had no hope. So it was time to activate the final protocol, the one that had been drummed into him by the last chair of the CPT, from his deathbed.
He put his hand into his satchel and found his key. He remembered the syllables he repeated every Thursday teatime and spoke them aloud, while making the gestures with his fingers. Suddenly, he was spinning gold thread from the air. He wrapped it swiftly round the key, a bundle of it, containing everything of the team, the pattern and the shape of them, a description of what the five of them did, how they fitted together, the news about what had happened tonight. It was a crude, desperate attempt to preserve their legacy.
He threw his hand open, and to his amazement, he made a solid thing vanish. The most he had ever done, right at the end. The key was gone.
Then he was overwhelmed, and made to see the entirety of himself, and was put in his place and made to halt. The nothing that he was now swallowed him.
Judgement passed over the building.
The Smiling Man stood at the centre of London. He spread his hands wide and drew his people and his monsters in from the darkness in which they had been exiled. The real London was coming back, alongside poverty and tuberculosis and history. The civilized consensus was over. The future was not going to happen. Tonight was just the start. He would have to do this many times, to keep the wheel turning backward and backward, widdershins. He opened his hands again, and for the first time in centuries, they were free.
The next morning, when the shadows were still short, people arrived for work in the courtyard between the high buildings. The cleaners arrived first, then the new shift of security people, who heard of nothing to report from the old shift, and then the workers themselves, and the visitors, some of whom looked across to the garden annexe and saw . . .
Nothing. Just bare pavement. Where there now actually stood a ruin. People were already walking among it like there was nothing there. It, and the people who once worked in it, had been forgotten.
THIRTY
Lofthouse couldn’t move with the shock of the huge mass of new information that was suddenly inside her head. She had remembered everything, so much, so fast. She felt like she wanted to write it all down, but no, she didn’t need to, she knew it. The whole history of her time advising the Continuing Projects Team . . . those were proper memories, those had happened to her. She remembered being charmed by his culture, and worried by how amateur the organization he ran seemed to be.
The new memories in her head, though, what she’d just seen, events she had not been present at, those were what had halted her. She found herself stumbling towards the barrow as the weight of it hit her. Where had this knowledge come from? From the key. She’d seen Chartres send it to her at the end, with that final gesture. It was that key on her charm bracelet, the one that had appeared that very same night under her pillow. It had been supposed to tell her all she needed to know, but then that attack on the Continuing Projects Team had erased them from everyone’s memory. She’d been left only with the feelings the key gave her, a subconscious urge to create a new team to take their place.
There was a noise from behind her. She turned to see that the Smiling Man, the creature who, she now knew, had slaughtered her old friends, was rising slowly from the water. His smile remained fixed. She made eye contact with the thing. She wanted to say she and Quill’s team would find a way to stop whatever its plans were. She wanted to say she was going to do whatever it took to bring justice to its victims.
Before she could say anything, the Smiling Man raised his hand in mocking salute and then vanished.
Lofthouse sagged with relief. She put the gun back into her bag. What had been in those cartridges? She might never know. She had to get back to the surface, to find out about Peter. She now remembered Chartres telling her of an easier route back up, of a flight of many steps. The ordeal, slight as it had been for his initiates, was meant to be over at this point.
Slowly, she hauled her pain-wracked body off across the beach towards one of those other entrances.
Tony Costain looked slowly around the Portakabin. The others had first taken him to see the doctor at Gipsy Hill, then, at his insistence, back here. He didn’t want to go home and be alone and recover. He wanted to hear what had happened, to be with his colleagues again. They’d been putting food and drink in his hands since he’d emerged, blinking, into the light of Brook Street.
The man who’d kept Costain prisoner, who looked exactly like him, hadn’t let slip any information about who he was or why he was doing this, although he had asked him a load of questions about Quill’s team. Costain had refused to answer. He’d spent his time in captivity feeling weak, unable to summon the strength to fight back when his captor had taken him from his makeshift cage, put a pad of what must have been an anaesthetic over his face and dragged him to a waiting vehicle. The next thing he knew, his neck had been in a noose, and, miraculously, his friends had come bursting in. He couldn’t offer any clues as to where he’d been kept. His captor had been meticulous.
‘Yeah,’ said Ross now, ‘you’d kind of expect that.’
‘Holmes can drive?’ said Sefton.
‘He can learn new skills very rapidly,’ said Ross, ‘and now there’s the Internet.’
‘If only we could put out a description,’ said Sefton, ‘for a bloke with a changing appearance who can do perfect disguises.’
‘I’ll tell them to throw uniforms into the area around Brook Street,’ said Quill, ‘and go house to house, get everyone aware of empty properties, who’s doing what and where. It might slow Holmes down, at least.’
Costain still couldn’t get his head round it. ‘So I was held prisoner . .
. by Sherlock Holmes?’
‘Yeah,’ said Ross, going to the ops board. ‘So what is up here is a fuck ton of lies.’ She started unpicking images and erasing lines. ‘He gave himself away not by any specific clue, but by . . . how he behaved. Specifically towards me.’
‘What?’ Oh God, had he hurt her?
‘Later for that. That was enough to bring a whole lot of odd little details colliding together in my head, after Flamstead hinted to me that I already had all I needed.’
‘What, Gilbert Flamstead, the actor?’
Ross gave him a sad smile. Which was the greatest thing. ‘You’ve missed a lot.’
‘Yeah.’ Costain turned to find Quill had sat down, calming himself by muttering something under his breath, Moriarty beside him. He looked across the way to see Sefton had gone to the kettle to make tea for them all. ‘Thank you,’ he said, loudly, ‘all of you.’
‘Biscuits,’ said Sefton, and threw the packet over.
Costain caught it. ‘What did he do when he was pretending to be me?’
‘He played us,’ said Ross.
He so wanted to talk to her. Just the two of them. Now wasn’t the time. He went over to the board, where she was now writing frantically, and the others joined him there.
‘He faked his own death,’ she said, ‘to remove himself from suspicion. He created that orgy of evidence to distract us, not only from Watson, but from the idea that he might not be dead. He also planted clues so that if we saw beyond that, we might get diverted into the blind alley of thinking our prime suspect was Moriarty.’
Moriarty made an impatient noise and flounced away.
‘You know,’ said Costain, ‘that’s going to get on my nerves.’
‘At that point, he’d already committed two murders, in disguise as a friend of Christopher Lassiter, and then as Albie Bates, having been Dean Michael when setting Bates up as first a patsy, then a victim.’ She went round the walls, angrily ripping down the notes from the extra boards. ‘He killed the latter in the guise of the short killer from the novel, showing just how perfect his supernatural power of disguise is.’
‘In the books,’ said Sefton, ‘he fools his best mate, who’s looking right at him. The memory of London thinks of this ghost as being able to impersonate anyone, so he can. The knowledge of character isn’t perfect like the disguise is, though. Holmes didn’t realize Costain had read the stories, for instance, and covered that up by saying he’d got bored.’
‘Then he set us up with the Lone Star – the organization of which took immense planning – had Erik Gullister killed, kidnapped Costain and planted himself among us as him. He’d obviously aimed this . . . exquisite, amazing, brilliant plan . . . at us from the start, anticipating what we’d do and using us to do things like get Albie Bates out of jail. I suspect the idea to use us might have come from Holmes realizing during his preparations that we were based at Gipsy Hill and thus could bring Bates to where he needed him to be. Holmes knew once he’d messed with us, we’d get after him, that we might surprise him, so part of the plan was for him to hide among us, to allow him to keep an eye on us, to react to what we did and change the details of what he was doing should he have to.’ She looked to Costain. ‘I should have realized it wasn’t the real you so much sooner.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I mean because he treated those supposed wounds of his on the deck of the Lone Star, away from us. He joined in when we got the idea about the victims all playing Holmes because he knew we’d have got it anyway. In his Tony Costain guise, he arranged the handling of the contents of the ship, and I guess still had some goons handy to take the crate with you in it away a couple of hours later.’
‘Oh, I thought you meant because he didn’t share my charm.’
She brushed straight past that. ‘The first thing he did was to try to distract me, big time, to get me interested in going after my happiness again, to get me lost in irrelevant detail outside of my speciality on the eve of his big score. I suppose I ought to be flattered.’
‘That Sherlock Holmes doesn’t want you in the game?’ said Costain. ‘Damn right.’
This time there was an awkward smile. Which then vanished. He was so pleased that she could do that again now. ‘I think he tried to distract the rest of us too,’ she said.
‘Didn’t need to in my case,’ whispered Quill.
Costain was amazed and horrified by the change in him. They needed to talk one-to-one too.
‘He got me to talk about my work,’ said Sefton. ‘On the train. Everything I’d learned about the London occult shit. Maybe he picks things up fast, like you said, the king of Google, but he didn’t know anything about that.’
‘Then,’ Ross continued down the new board she was swiftly sketching, ‘he tried to kill you, having set you up in another typically showy Holmes disguise as that old lady. He killed Danny Mills . . .’
‘He said he’d stayed at my bedside,’ said Sefton, ‘but if we asked the hospital staff, I bet we’d find out he was away for hours.’
‘. . . and when he and I went to talk to Ballard, I reckon he must have said something to him when I wasn’t there, made a private deal . . .’
‘Probably didn’t have to break character to do it,’ said Costain, before anyone else did.
‘. . . because Ballard then went out of his way to tell me that the blade that we thought killed Holmes had a spiel on it that could kill a ghost. So I doubt that was true. It was just to keep us certain in our belief that Holmes was dead.’
‘He was telling the truth before then, though,’ said Quill. ‘The bit about the fetch kettle.’
‘Fake Costain realized Ballard hadn’t played that bit well,’ said Ross, ‘so he pointed it out afterwards, used it to build up my sense that Costain was the real thing. He also used the occasion to find one of Ballard’s lock-ups. Plans within plans, the brilliant bastard.’
‘So the spiel on the blade must have been designed to do something else,’ said Sefton, ‘like, for instance, to create an image of Sherlock Holmes for the Sighted and broadcast a message to me about his death.’
‘Then he went with me to the auction,’ said Ross, ‘and felt able to pull out one of his own teeth, which now I think about it might be because that was just a bit of his disguise.’
‘Sometime around then,’ said Sefton, ‘he must have gone to find Ballard again, to set him up for being found in a bank vault. He got Ballard to sign up to be a security guard, maybe by making some sort of offer concerning another bank job. Then, when Ballard shows up at Lombard Street, ready to scope out the target, he’s forced to put on a deerstalker and play Holmes, before being held still to be smashed across the back of the head. Holmes set up the computer worm—’
‘Sherlock Holmes can code?’ asked Costain.
‘We’ve seen,’ said Sefton, seized by a sudden idea, ‘if that image he left of himself at Baker Street was accurate, that this Holmes is all of them, every version, including all the modern ones. He doesn’t have to learn how to drive or code; he just knows!’
Ross pointed at him, correct, and erased a line of her new scribbles.
‘He’ll be up for the supernatural too,’ said Costain, ‘with Conan Doyle in the mix. He believed in fairies.’
‘But,’ said Quill, and him speaking up made them all stop, ‘I reckon that’d be a problem, because everyone knows Holmes didn’t. Put that and Conan Doyle in the same body, put all these different versions of Holmes in the same body and . . . something’s got to give.’
They all took a moment to think about that. Quill sounded like he knew what he was talking about.
‘Holmes had time alone,’ Ross finally continued, ‘to get Ballard out of wherever he was stashed, probably in a vehicle, and into that room beside the bank, where he was killed.’
Sefton nodded. ‘I reckon then Fake Costain raided Ballard’s apartment, maybe had even been given a key, or just got it off him, though they’d have let him in as easily then as they did afterwards
when we both went over. He’d heard Ballard had a device to find anyone, which would be a major threat to him if we got hold of it, but it wasn’t there. Not being Sighted, he didn’t find the list under the bed. He just came away with the “bastard scourge”, whatever that is. When we did find the list under the bed, I think he had a quick look at it and was relieved there was nothing on it that would make us immediately go after the stuff. That night, though, he got there first, more as a box-ticking exercise than anything else, because there was nothing that could help him much either, thank God. Otherwise we’d be playing against Sherlock Holmes armed with tons of exciting devices.’
‘No wonder he looked knackered by the time we went to the conference,’ said Ross. ‘No wonder he couldn’t use the blanket spiel to hide his identity. I wonder why the ones who checked him out didn’t realize who he was.’
‘If they’re looking for a copper, he isn’t one,’ said Quill.
‘And if it goes deeper than that,’ said Sefton, ‘I doubt it comes back with a name. You’d just get a feeling of something like him being a complicated private eye, which wouldn’t have set off the alarm bells like police presence would. Or if there was a flavour of Victorian to what they found out, then from what we’ve seen, that would have reassured them.’
‘At the conference, Flamstead arrived to play against him,’ said Ross. ‘He put the sort of pressure on Holmes that would have got to any Victorian gentleman, pushed him so hard that his perfect disguise started to crack. I’m going to say a few difficult things now, Tony, OK?’
He was pleased she’d asked him. He nodded. She proceeded to fill in the details of how she’d had a fling with this bloke, this God of London. All Costain could think was that it was a pleasure to have been asked if this was OK to talk about, that he liked how she and him were being with each other now. He took care to nod along.
