Instead of looking sorry about the accident, the people Gert worked with laughed. Sure. That’s funny, Allie thought. Make the people from the pub clear all that out of the carpet, a dozen glasses broken. That’s hilarious.
The mess and broken glass were cleared away, and Allie was pulled around the room to stand there while Gertie talked about things and people Allie knew nothing about. She had to do something. She had to stand up for herself. If she went right now, she could catch the bus, she could still be home by seven, she could still get the curry and get a full night’s telly in. All she had to do was make a move.
“Gert,” she said, “I think I’m going to—”
Gert turned toward her and grinned, like she’d just remembered Allie was there.
“I need a ciggie,” Gert said, pulling on Allie’s arm. “Come on, come on.”
Another thing Allie hated was smoking, and standing outside in the drizzle so people could smoke. Again, no. If she could only say no. What was wrong with her? They went outside, where London traffic pulsed around them. The pavements were crowded with people pushing their way to and from Oxford Street. This was the worst possible place to be—the middle of the shopping district right before Christmas. Getting home would be a nightmare. And it was cold. They moved around to the side of the pub. There was a white van parked there. Two doors set into the pavement were flapped open. These kinds of doors—the ones actually set in the ground where people walked—always made her nervous. But this was not a delivery. She watched as a bit of paving stone was pulled out of the doors on a rope.
Gertie was drunk and kept fumbling with her lighter in the rain.
“Gert,” Allie said, “I’m just going to . . .”
There was something a bit odd about the young men in the coveralls. She wasn’t sure what. Maybe it was that they looked so young. Maybe it was the extreme blondness of the hair on the tall lad, and how he wore his hair slicked over to the side with a flat-top cap.
“Oh!” Gert yelped. “I need to show you the most hilarious text . . .”
Allie moved just in time as Gertie flailed around with her lit cigarette while she dug around in her bag. That would have been her hair on fire or a hole burned in her new jacket. Stupid Gertie and her stupid cigarettes. Why did she agree to come outside with smokers?
Also, these people with the van, they were definitely strange. The girl she’d seen slip under the bar popped out of the opening and got in the back of the van. The blond boy shut the delivery bay doors. He looked up and saw Allie watching and smiled in a way that made Allie very uneasy, then he doffed the cap before hopping into the van. It almost hit Gert as they pulled out.
“Did you see that?” Gert said, wheeling around. “Did you see . . . I should get the registration number . . .”
Allie watched in some amusement as Gert tried to type the numbers into her phone, but the van was already gone, slipping into the mad traffic.
“Forget it,” Gertie said. “I don’t even want to smoke now. Let’s go back.”
“Actually? I’m just going to—”
“Oh, you can’t leave.”
This was her moment. This was the test. Say you are going home.
“Actually, Gert, I really need to . . .”
“Did you feel that?”
Allie had felt it—a rumble under the pavement. It lasted for about twenty seconds.
“Probably the Tube,” Allie said, pointing at the Tube sign across the road.
“I come here all the time. I’ve never felt that. That wasn’t the Tube.”
Truth be told, it was a pretty strong vibration. Then it hit again—another pulse. Then a distant, muffled sound of people yelling. Allie and Gert both watched as people began spilling out of the Tube at the entrance of the park. And as they did so, something began to change in the air itself. The rainy night air felt like it was thickening. A fog began to take over, developing around them. Within a minute, it was so thick that Allie didn’t see the cracks that were beginning to form in the pavement under their feet.
London fog is like fish and chips, salt and vinegar, crown and jewels, tea and biscuits. Jack the Ripper hid in it. Sherlock Holmes hurried through it. Every character in Dickens stood in a clump of it. Poets rhapsodized about it. Painters tried to snare it and stick it to a canvas. It mostly vanished fifty or sixty years ago, when the coal fires stopped and people got more serious about the environment. You couldn’t burn just anything anymore and send orphans up the chimney to deal with the mess. Modern London is a responsible place, and its air is relatively clean and clear.
So people forgot that the fog wasn’t always such a nice thing. It was the city’s dark shadow, echoing between the rivers and the chimneys and the sky. It came in various colors—not just gray, but brown, black, yellow, or green. It didn’t always stay outside. It crept into homes. It lingered in corners. Occasionally, the fog would kill. People wandered in front of carriages and into rivers; some simply choked from the sheer weight of it. The fog could turn day to night and breathable air into poison. Water could combine with pollutants and turn into hydrochloric acid and burn out your eyes. In four days in December of 1952, the London fog killed twelve thousand people.
Still, the fog returned from time to time, squatting over the city like a long-absent dragon guarding the precious things below. This fog was greater than all those fogs together. It poured out of the Tube entrance like milk, and the voices of the people in it were silenced instantly. It took the Tube entrance and it took the pub and it took Allie and Gert too. It stopped spreading at that point and stayed precisely where it was, a formation of white, made of quiet.
Around that end of Hyde Park, the people outside the fog looked on. They pulled out phones and took pictures. Then, very quietly, like a frost, the windows of the buildings and every car window along the street began to show spider cracks. The cracking started from the ground-floor windows in single cracks that grew up and up like the branches of a tree. The cracks inexplicably skipped from pane to pane, not minding the frames. Then they spread to the next story, oblivious to the bricks and mortar, then the next story, until each reached the top story of its respective house. There, the branches grew so dense that every pane went white with breaking.
And then, like an orchestra moving in unison to one great, final note, every window on the street exploded at once.
From Golgonooza the spiritual Four-fold London eternal
In immense labours & sorrows, ever building, ever falling,
Thro’ Albion’s four Forests which overspread all the Earth
From London Stone to Blackheath east: to Hounslow west:
To Finchley north: to Norwood south. . . .
All things begin & end in Albion’s ancient Druid rocky shore. . . .
William Blake,
from Milton: A Poem
20
THERE WAS A HOME N’ DECK NEAR MY TOWN (WE DON’T get a Home Depot; we’re not that fancy). One night, a few years ago, it burned down. It was a huge fire—you could see it for miles. Everyone was pretty interested in this fire, so a few friends of mine and I drove over to look at it, because this is what you do for fun in Bénouville—you look at the burned-down remains of a building supply store and then you get some soft serve. When we arrived, there was a ring of cars around the place. The building had collapsed upon itself. There were charred riding lawn mowers out front and burned-out and half-melted racks where plants had been. The place was sunken and stinking. And in the middle, as if nothing had happened at all, a big pile of paving stones. They were the only thing still standing that looked totally unaffected. There was something about them that seemed to be saying, “What? Is that all you got?”
By this I mean: stones, they’re tough. I guess this is an understood concept. Also, stones are stones, and maybe something in my mind was saying, “It’s okay, you only told them about a stone. Who cares abo
ut a stone?”
Stephen would care. Of that, I was sure. And if this stone was what we’d been told it was, then moving it would be bad. Very bad. The kind of bad that Stephen would be extremely agitated by, if he hadn’t been completely motionless and unable to do anything about it.
I sat on the bed, cradling his head on my lap, my hand over the injury on his brow. He had his glasses on this time, obviously the ones he’d been wearing at the time of the accident, because they were crooked and one of the lenses had a bit of a crack in the corner. The light shadow of hair that had grown around his chin on the morning he had slipped away was still there. I liked this slightly disheveled, morning-after look. It softened him.
Everything would be all right now. I would stay with him. Nothing would move me. Somehow, this would all work out.
I’m not sure how much time went by. Stephen and I were alone in the relative quiet. I could hear people coming and going below. There was music coming through the floor, but I didn’t know the songs. Story of my life.
The afternoon ebbed away, bleeding out its light and falling into dark. Someone was in the room with me at all times—various weirdos I’d never seen before. Later in the day, I was watched over by Jack. It was easy to recognize Jack with his anachronistic clothes and his hair that looked like plastic. Given his size and the nature of our previous encounter, I knew he would take me down in a second if I tried to go anywhere or do anything. Not that I could. Jane understood completely—as long as Stephen was there, I was there. They might as well have set me in concrete.
I tried to work out how this scene had come to pass. Marigold was a doctor, and someone who worked with Thorpe. Thorpe had mentioned that someone had taken Stephen’s body. Clearly, she’d been keeping him here for a reason—she’d realized that something was going on. She’d kept him in bed. There was some medical stuff in the room. She’d been trying to do something.
So Charlotte had come here. Charlotte, who was now playing for Team Jane. I would work out how that happened later. Charlotte told Jane where to come, what was going on. Then they’d set the trap and waited for us to spring it.
These people were crazy—of this, I was reasonably certain. Still, they had managed to give Charlotte the sight. They obviously knew some tricks we didn’t, or at least that I didn’t. And I was sitting here holding Stephen, who somehow had not exactly died, and now we were all waiting around for a magic stone. This would have seemed more stupid, was I not also a magic stone myself.
There was no road map for where I was. I realized something about that moment, now an hour or two past, when I had told Jane where the stone was. I did it because I was afraid for these three people who were now depending on me. But what was more disturbing was that in that moment, something in my brain—some tiny, tiny version of me made a tiny, tiny leap because she wanted to believe. Get the magic stone, wake the sleeping Stephen. Of course, these same people who wanted to help me out with this were also talking about defeating death and kept friends of mine under floorboards.
On some level I’d been expecting Boo or Callum or even Freddie to come sailing through the window. They had to realize we’d been gone too long. Except that “too long” was impossible to judge with Thorpe. Thorpe came and Thorpe went, and no one questioned the ways of Thorpe. It was unlikely they’d come here if no one got in touch with them. I was going to have to get a message out. That was going to be very hard. I couldn’t leave. I had no phone. I was locked in a room.
There was one person who would notice if I didn’t get in touch. Jerome.
If I could let him know something was wrong, then . . . well, I wasn’t sure what happened then. It wasn’t like I could tell him where I was, or that he should call the police. But Jerome was smart. Maybe he could work something out. As to how I would text him, well, that would require telling Jane the truth. Just tell her what happened. She knew enough about my life. She knew about Jerome.
“I need to speak to Jane,” I said.
Jack rolled his eyes and leaned against the door.
“I mean it,” I said.
“She’s busy.”
“I need to talk to her,” I said. “Because if I don’t, this whole thing is going to get screwed up, and then she’ll beat you to death with her shoe. Get her.”
I sounded like I meant it. I was using the lawyer voice I copied from my parents, the one they used when they had to put the frighteners on people. I had never done it so well.
Jack cracked the door open and yelled down for Jane. I heard a creak on the stair. He spoke to her by the door in a low voice, and then she came in, pushing past him.
“What is it?” she said. There was a note of impatience in her voice, but she was still doing the “I’m a therapist, I never get annoyed” thing. We were both doing voices.
“Remember, in therapy, I told you about Jerome?”
“I do,” she said.
“And I told you how he’s into conspiracies?”
She nodded.
“He found me yesterday. And Thorpe talked him into not saying anything. Well, Thorpe had me do it. The deal was, I have to text him a few times a day. If I don’t, he’ll go to the police. He knows where I’m staying. They would trace where I’ve gone. Did Thorpe have a phone in his pocket? Check it. Check the text messages. Call the number if you want. The only number in the phone is Jerome.”
“I want to believe you’re telling me this for the right reasons, Rory, but given your situation, I’m not sure it’s what I would do.”
After watching me for a moment, Jane called out for someone to bring Thorpe’s phone up. She examined it.
“See?” I said.
“And how did he find you?”
“A Ripper conspiracy site,” I said. “There was someone watching the school. They saw me. Some Internet freak followed me and mentioned where I was. The Internet, huh?”
Jane read through the messages again.
“Look,” I said. “It’s not going to help Stephen if the cops come here. He’s dead. They’ll take him. They’ll . . . they’ll do an autopsy. They’ll cut him apart. I can’t let that happen.”
My grief had the right ring to it because it was real.
“That’s true,” she said.
“If you think I can wake him up, then I’m going to try it. And if they come here, that gets screwed up. Also, it’s just Jerome.”
Jane gave me the once-over.
“Tell me what you want to say,” she said. “I will type.”
“Tell him: ‘I’m good. Have fun with Freddie. Love you.’”
“‘Love you’?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “This is the boy you broke up with. And at the moment, it’s very clear that your feelings lie elsewhere. There was something in your demeanor that told me you were in love, but obviously not with Jerome. It all made sense once I saw this one. The way you reacted to seeing him only confirmed it. This is the boy you love.”
“That’s true,” I said, wiping my face with the back of my hand. “But I also realized that Jerome was the one who got me through a lot. He found me, even though the government was hiding me. He’s my friend. I don’t have to be weird about it anymore. I do love him, like a friend love, and he gets that. Or don’t type that. I don’t care.”
“And who is Freddie?”
“Friend from school. Jerome’s visiting him over the holiday. Some prefect thing. You can add, ‘even though he’s an asshole.’ That’s better than ‘love you.’”
“That sounds a bit more like you, I think,” she said.
Jane typed. They clearly knew things about the squad, but they didn’t know about Freddie. They didn’t know she was a girl, and not from my school.
All I could do was set the dominoes falling and hope they made a pretty pattern on the floor. I held on to Stephen’s hand, squeezed it. I will get you out of here is what I thought. Maybe he woul
d know. Maybe he knew I was there.
What I felt like was a plastic bag, blowing in the wind.
• • •
More time passed. I was brought soup, which I first refused to eat. But Jane ate a spoonful herself to show me there was nothing wrong with it, and I was told it would be in my best interests to keep my strength up for the journey ahead. They seemed really concerned about this, so eventually I got some of it down. It settled heavily in my stomach, but I probably had needed it. I felt a bit clearer with something in my stomach. I tried to figure out how many people I was hearing downstairs, to tease apart their voices and count them. There were, I thought, maybe eight people in the house. Things were being moved around. Then there was a car out front, the door opened again, and new voices came into the mix. These voices were excited, out of breath. Jack looked out the door a lot, and then he was swapped out with Charlotte. She came in, all smiles.
“It’s almost time,” she said. “Rory, I’m so excited for you. It’s all going to happen now. It’s going to be so amazing.”
I said nothing.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “It’s new. It must seem so odd. But, Rory . . .”
She crossed the room. She still had that prefect walk—erect, head up, alert.
“My mother died,” she said. “Five years ago. I’ve tried since then to be good, to do all the right things. But I always knew, somewhere, in me, that she couldn’t be gone. Those things I was doing, they were for some life I thought she would want me to have. But it’s a life based on fear of something we don’t need to fear. It’s a life based on buying things and collecting things like someone’s keeping score. She’s not gone. My fear is gone. I find it tremendously empowering. I think that . . . despite all that’s happened . . . I feel like I’ve come out of this stronger. I’m not afraid anymore. How can I be, knowing what I know now? No reason to be scared of death. Death, the thing that defines us all. It makes everything I did before feel so unimportant. All that worrying I used to do at school. All the panics I got into over Latin and history and getting into Oxford. I thought all of that mattered. I thought that was the most important thing in the world. Seems silly now. Jane was trying to tell me all along, during therapy, but I needed the sight to understand.”
The Shadow Cabinet Page 19
