by Paul Cornell
They negotiated their way to the twenty-eighth floor, the building’s management thankfully deciding they didn’t need a warrant for a ‘routine follow-up’ about a deceased resident, and probably wondering just how many more police officers were going to come barging through here. Ballard’s apartment was how Sefton had described it. Ballard’s will was still being worked out.
Lofthouse watched as Quill went to sit down in one of the enormous armchairs, looking uncomfortable as he sank into it. Moriarty appeared in front of him, looking around as if trapped. Here, she thought, was an example of what they called the Uncanny Valley. He had all the soul of a cartoon, creepily trying to be a person, but clearly not alive. ‘OK,’ said Quill, ‘I’ve been doing what Sefton here told me to, reinforcing the idea of who I am, letting London do some of the heavy lifting by remembering me. Doing that has let me hold on. Just about. It’s allowed me to stop seeing Hell all around me. Now, I don’t think that was a hallucination. I think I was being allowed to see something underlying everything, a real connection between this world and the other. So what if I stopped trying to hold that back? Don’t try to talk me out of it. I’m ordering you not to. I’m going to try it now.’
He closed his eyes.
Lofthouse saw the others all wanting not to allow him to do this, but at the same time wanting him to keep his dignity, to let him have this moment of leadership. She could have stopped it, but hadn’t Quill said it was only just about working? Could whatever Quill was planning be anything that might truly harm him?
Then the walls of the apartment began to change.
Quill knew he’d been fighting off this illness that was also part of him by repeating comforting lies. He’d been bigging himself up. He’d been OK with that, because surely it was what just about everyone did. Most people in London thought death was the end, and yet they still found reasons to do things while they waited for the inevitable. Others expected pleasant afterlifes of their own. These were the colours they added to the black and white of life and death.
But come on. He knew better.
He made himself consider the futility of everything. He would die and go to Hell. Sarah would die and go to Hell. Little Jessica would die and go to Hell.
He imagined what would become of her there. He remembered what he had seen being done to children.
That made him angry, made him want to fight, but there was no fighting something as big as this; he let himself realize that. It was like fighting the weather.
The anger got inside him, into all the places it had been getting into lately. He hated having senses. He hated having a real body in the real world. He hated being conscious. He hated that useless cunt at home with her meaningless gestures of support. He hated his child, the burden always round his neck. When they went to Hell, it would be even more painful than when he did. He hated everything and everyone and himself in the face of that. He hated the fear that was everything he was. The fear and the hate were the same thing.
He let all these bad thoughts flood back into him and have their way. Because it was all still there. He’d just been holding it back.
He wasn’t in control of any of it. Objects were just objects. People were just objects that knew. There was no extra meaning colouring any of it. There was no hope.
He was aware that he was sobbing, bawling like a baby, for the same reason a baby bawls when it enters the world.
He opened his eyes and there was Hell.
‘Oh my God,’ whispered Lofthouse, ‘I can see it too.’
‘We all can,’ said Ross. She, Costain and Sefton were staring in horror at what James was doing to himself. They were experiencing once again, Lofthouse realized, what she was understanding for the first time. She could feel the ghostly tensions wracking Jimmy. She could also see . . . what?
The ultra-modern interior of the apartment had become something like a Victorian gentleman’s club, all statues and brown surfaces and plants and trophies. Quill sat in one of its decadent armchairs, his face contorted, his mouth working soundlessly. Moriarty had become a vague ghost, Quill’s paranoia, Lofthouse realized, having returned to its owner. The surroundings, relatively normal as they were, shook Lofthouse to the core. They came with a smell that was like something on the edge of childhood memory, of the moment when the idea of fear had first come to her, in a nightmare. The smell said that under everything real was horror. It was the decay at the bottom of the world. She could see the others reacting to it also, Costain especially. He was looking around, waiting for some threat to leap out.
Into the room staggered Mark Ballard.
He was dressed in Victorian finery, almost too much of it: a coat so heavy it seemed to be weighing him down, a collar so big his neck was lost in it. Attached to him, leading out of the door behind him from under his clothes, ran many tiny chains. He was staring in shock at Lofthouse and the others. ‘Don’t trust him!’ he suddenly yelled, pointing at Costain. ‘He . . . he killed me!’
‘We know,’ said Sefton, quickly.
It took a few moments of persuasion for Ballard to calm down, but his anger was swiftly replaced by a desperate hope. ‘So . . . have you come to rescue me?’ He ran up to them, wincing as the chains held him back. ‘Please, do it now. I have my examination soon. There’s some sort of lease system. I haven’t enough money. It’s not about justice here.’ His voice was suddenly that of a child. ‘I want to see my mum and dad. My proper ones. Not the ones who are in here.’
‘We don’t know how to free anyone yet,’ said Sefton. ‘Tell us how to find Holmes and we’ll keep working on it.’
Ballard looked horrified that he wasn’t going to get immediate help. ‘No, no, please, you don’t understand. You don’t know what it’s like here. Are you real? Listen, I can’t get up the inverted tower; I can’t see the world; they won’t let us see London. I don’t know how . . .’
‘The person you thought was this guy here.’ Sefton pointed to Costain. ‘Tell us what the deal you made with him was, give us some reason to help you. What about that knife we showed you, for a start?’
Ballard looked confused for a moment, like he was wondering if this was some new trick of Hell. ‘It was a fetch kettle, like I told you. I was holding back on what spiel it held, hoping for a deal, but Tony there . . . I thought it was Tony . . . when he was alone with me, he told me what to say, offered me cash . . .’
He proceeded to confirm what they’d already suspected about the weapon.
‘You said he offered cash. What did he pay you with?’
‘Gold.’
Lofthouse realized that Holmes’s money would now be just as real as his clothes. That power of agency was part of the concept of Sherlock Holmes. ‘For anything else,’ she said, ‘how easy would it be for someone in a perfect disguise to get credit?’
‘Once I’d got my deal, he came to visit me. He said he was interested in buying some items from me. I thought I was dealing with a corrupt copper who’d got himself into the best possible place to prosper. He said we could scratch each other’s backs. I showed him the Bastard Scourge. He pretended that he didn’t know much about this stuff, then grabbed the Scourge and used it on me. He made me dance like a puppet, saying lines like I was Sherlock Holmes. I . . . I got what he was doing then. I have never been so . . . not until now, all the time now . . . He made me walk downstairs and get into a car. Then he made me sleep. When I woke up, I was in another room. It might have been quite a long time later – I don’t know. God, I don’t like to think about . . . He used the Scourge to make me stand absolutely still, though every muscle was . . . and he picked up this . . . spanner, and . . .’ Ballard started to sob, looking at Costain, shivering.
‘Fuck,’ said Costain.
‘It was after the second blow that I . . . went.’
They told him what they thought had happened afterwards, that their suspect had raided Ballard’s apartment.
‘He only got the list under the bed?’ said Ballard, his despair for a momen
t turning into surprise. ‘Then he hasn’t got everything.’
‘That is what we were hoping you would say,’ said Sefton. ‘Where’s the item that can locate a particular individual?’
‘You promise you’ll get me out?’
Lofthouse took a deep breath. She was about to negotiate with the dead. Not the sort of thing she normally found on her day planner. ‘We’ll do our best. You have my word as a senior officer: if we ever discover we can save anyone, we’ll save you.’
Ballard wrote down the details and then, horribly, tried to keep talking, to say anything that could delay him going back to Hell. Lofthouse looked to Quill, not wanting to let this continue, but then something started to haul Ballard backwards on his chains, which skittered across the floor, and he squealed like a pig. Lofthouse and the others ran to Quill. ‘James,’ she cried, ‘come back to us, please. We’re all here for you.’
He opened his red, sore eyes and glared at her with an anger that was only tempered by how lost the rest of his expression was. Sefton went to him and started to whisper urgently to him, to make him say his name, over and over, to recall past adventures. Gradually, the trappings of Hell started to fade. The screams of Ballard as he was dragged down the hall outside vanished into the distance. They were back in the apartment, even though now, to Lofthouse, it felt more like a stage set. Quill wouldn’t speak when prompted. He just kept shaking his head. Moriarty seemed to have revived a little. As Sefton kept talking to Quill, he gained in structure and presence.
Finally, when they thought he was able to move, they supported Quill between them and got him to the elevator and out to the car.
Costain drove them to Marylebone station, and Ross and Sefton went to lost property. They had been rehearsing what Ballard had written for them to say. Costain and Lofthouse stayed in the car with Quill. Costain hated seeing that look on Quill’s face, that damage that Hell had left in him. ‘After we’ve got him,’ he said, ‘Jimmy, will you do me a favour and get some help?’
Quill looked up at him and couldn’t seem to settle on any gesture or expression. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘You have nothing to be sorry about.’ Costain took his hand.
The car doors opened, and Ross and Sefton got back in, Sefton carrying a bow and a single arrow. The wood of the bow looked extraordinarily old, the sort of thing a museum would have to keep in controlled conditions. The arrow had a flint head, and there were just the sticks of faded feathers as flights.
‘I don’t know what this is,’ said Sefton, ‘and what Ballard wrote down is very basic.’ As he nocked the arrow, and with no skill at all aimed it up and out of the passenger window, Ross started the engine and pulled on her seat belt.
Sefton let fly. The arrow shot into the air, higher and higher, out of sight. It stayed, however, in Costain’s mind, in his Sighted idea of where things in London were.
‘I’ve got it,’ said Ross, and turned the car to speed away from Marylebone, and then southwards.
‘Faster!’ cried Moriarty, gesturing dramatically towards the windscreen. ‘We may already be too late!’
THIRTY-FOUR
Ross had no specialist driving experience and couldn’t help but wish that it was Costain behind the wheel as they raced down Bromley Road, into the heart of Beckenham, a proper high street in what looked to be a nice commuter town. Mind you, Costain had no specialist training either, just years of experience driving for gangs. She had had to adjust to having in her head a sense of direction being provided by something else, the arrow that she kept imagining plunging towards the earth somewhere in front of her. Several times on the way here, particularly as they’d got closer, she’d had to change course away from it, unable to follow it as the crow flew, and had felt it pricking at the edge of her eye, insisting she pay attention to it, which had nearly made them run into the back of a lorry.
She kept trying to find a left turn, and finally took the corner beside a pub called the Oakhill, going way too fast, only to have to pull up almost immediately in front of a row of bollards. ‘It’s right there,’ she yelled. She could actually see it in the sky now, forever descending, heading down onto the roof of a house ahead and to the left.
She pulled the key from the ignition and leaped out. The others followed. Sefton, still weak from loss of blood, was managing to stumble along. Quill came too, a grim, furious expression on his face. They ran past a barber’s shop, and the arrow suddenly speared down and went through the upper-floor window of a little house with a neat garden, seeming to do no damage as it went. Had they found Holmes this time before he’d found a victim? There was a front door and a window. Next door, someone had left an old chair out to be collected. Before Sefton could take the stick of chalk from his pocket, Quill grabbed the chair, barely held on to it, ran at the window and rammed it through, smashing the glass and setting off a blaring alarm. Then he clambered up and leaped through the frame, sending more glass flying.
Ross made herself follow, her shoes slipping on the sill, forcing herself to ignore the shards biting into her hand. Then she was through, and following Quill, the others right beside her, as he pelted up the stairs. Quill wasn’t shouting anything about being a police officer, so she was glad when Sefton did.
The arrow was on fire, sticking at an angle out of the carpet on the landing. It burned to dust in the second she set eyes on it. Where was Holmes?
She burst into a back bedroom a second after Quill did, to recoil, coughing, at the taste of the air. An ancient charcoal burning stove was sitting by the bed, and on that bed lay an emaciated, unconscious figure, his face covered – true to the story – in sticking plasters. Quill went to the window, found it locked and smashed it open. Lofthouse went to grab the body. Costain and Sefton at the door were turning, wondering where in the house—
Holmes burst out of another room, a handkerchief over his nose and mouth, a knife in his hand, very possibly the one that had killed Richard Duleep. His appearance was flickering wildly. He leaped forwards decisively, precisely, trained in the use of the weapon. Costain put his head down, ducked under his swing and ran at him, barging into him at the top of the stairs. The knife went flying. Holmes took up a boxing posture, hands up in front of his face. Costain grabbed both his hands and kneed him in the groin, then kicked the crumpling figure down the stairs.
To their surprise, Holmes bounced neatly down like a tumbler, leaped to the door, flung it open and was out and away. With a bellow of rage, Costain raced down after him, got to the door, ran out into the street.
After a few moments, they caught up with Costain. He’d stopped, looking around. ‘I couldn’t see him,’ he said, panting. ‘I just picked a direction. We lost him.’ Ross, ridiculously, looked around, as if she might see him hiding in one of these perfect gardens.
‘And that arrow’s a one-time deal,’ said Sefton.
Lofthouse ran up to them, her phone in her hand. ‘I hauled the victim out onto the landing and opened all the windows,’ she said. ‘He’s still breathing. I’ve called the paramedics.’
Quill sat down on the street, oblivious to the people now coming out of their houses, looking out of their doors. ‘Lost him,’ he said. ‘No, no, no.’
Moriarty stepped forwards, as if speaking for Quill. ‘Follow him!’ he bellowed. ‘Follow him, for he is fixed on his course now and he will strike! Stand clear or be trodden underfoot!’ He turned and raced off down the street, back towards the car. Quill looked up, as startled as any of them, then scrambled to his feet.
‘Go,’ said Lofthouse. ‘I’ll take care of things here.’
By the time they got back to the car, Moriarty was pointing frantically. ‘Follow!’ he cried again.
‘I think,’ said Ross, as she opened the door for Costain to drive, ‘we may have found an expert in tracking Sherlock Holmes.’
Cara Lavey was a production assistant on the BBC’s ratings-winner Sunday-night Sherlock Holmes series. This was, she wanted her friends to know, not all that gla
morous, and was a lot of hard work, mostly consisting of carrying things and making coffee, for actually not very much money, although there was a London living allowance.
After she’d had a few drinks, though, she would admit she liked getting to know the actors. Today was the midway point of filming on the last block of the last episode in the season. Filming in the Southwark facility was coming to an end, and everyone was a bit thousand-yard-stare and sleepless, with mucking about on set answered not by laughter but by brusque calls to concentrate. She’d been employed counting out properly hallmarked copies of the script, taking a brunch order for the assistant director and finding a floor plan of the consulting rooms set to discover ‘which fucking marks are still here from previous shooting days’, as the director had put it. All of which was exactly what she’d signed up for, the hard yards she was utterly willing to put in to get noticed, to be given more responsibility and work her way up.
‘Cara, you useless fuckwit, how’s it going?’ murmured Gilbert Flamstead as he wandered to the edge of the set, a grin letting her know that she was being complimented. Just for once, she thought, it might be nice if he simply said nice things.
She would never dare insult him back. ‘Excellent.’
‘What terrible news. I don’t suppose anyone has seen my talentless fellow?’ They all suddenly turned at a shout. Onto the set had burst an extraordinary figure. It was Sherlock Holmes. Meaning it must be an actor, or an impersonator, someone in cosplay? He looked bloody good, though. He had the face for it. Such a clean-cut look, like he was someone famous she didn’t recognize. He was running towards them, security guards chasing him. Was this a comedy thing, a DVD extra they hadn’t been told about? Or, shit, was this a fan? A couple of the blokes with tool belts tried to grab him, but he spun, hurling them aside with ease. In his hand now was something that looked like the handle of a whip. He brought it down with a motion like he was miming lashing at something too.
