Better the Devil

by Mike Wild

  "Seems like thanks to you, loverboy and little and large are as bollocksed as the bell tower," Jenny Simmons observed coolly. The fact was, she didn't give a toss whether Brand and the others were bollocksed or not, but she was curious as to how the Scotsman would react. She paused as Ness stayed momentarily silent, a small smile on her lips, playing him. "So you wanna help them, my psychopathic friend?"

  Ness watched a second longer, drew in a deep breath, then turned, snarling. He was fully aware of how pivotal the decision he'd just made - like smashing in the head of the bastard who'd put him away - had been, but everything ended, everything changed. "Take a look around yer, darlin'," he growled. "We're two down wi' two more ta foller, our base o' operations is likely gonna burn ta the ground, n' the pair o' us have got an infernal fatwah on our nappers. Far as ah can see, that puts Caballistics, Inc well and truly outta business. So waddaya think?"

  Jenny Simmons's smile broadened. "You tell me."

  Ness began to shimmy down a drainpipe, fully intent on using the rippers' current distraction to make a run for the woods. He glanced once towards the others, and then away. "Chapter and Brand ain't soldiers and trainin' was a long, long time ago," he said. "Fook 'em."

  "Welcome to hell, Michael Ness."

  Chapter Eight

  Ravne awoke in a small pool of light that he could sense was the centre of attention of a much more expansive blackness. His immediate instinct was to flee - as always, to remove himself from the spotlight - but that proved to be somewhat difficult on the practicalities front.

  He could not move a millimetre. He appeared to have been tightly lashed to some giant metal wheel, wrists and ankles secured so that he formed a human X. He was also naked, a state of affairs that was disturbing, but allowed him to observe how bruised and lacerated his body was. Whether this was as a result of someone applying the rod or his enforced journey through the sewers he did not know. But there was one interesting thing... his leg had been splinted and bound.

  Obviously he was not in the hands of rippers. Not only did he suspect that the assassins were severely lacking in medical skills, but also that he would have been stripped down far more than to the skin - to the bone, in fact - and right now he would not have been able to feel anything.

  So... his current predicament was either going to be quite awkward or quite fun, depending on who had taken him. But he somewhat doubted it was Gustav or Gretchen, or indeed any other of his basqued and suspendered playthings, or that tank, his safety word, was going to make much difference to the proceedings here.

  Ravne squinted into the light, which he saw was generated by bright storm lamps held by his captors. They were indistinct shapes, only vague smudges of a shoulder here, the outline of a head there, their figures shadowed by the lamps they held. But there appeared to be two of them. He gained the impression that they were staring at him, though there was no movement from them whatsoever. He could also sense a great deal of hostility, at least from one of them, and realised he would have to play his cards very carefully, be guarded in what he said.

  "Hello?" he said into the light, his voice cracking, his mouth as dry as sand. "My name is..."

  One of the figures loomed close to his ear and a voice spoke to him. Male. Educated, by the sound of it. Utterly unfamiliar.

  "Solomon Ravne," it said, as if greeting an old but dubious acquaintance. "I trust that you are enjoying yourself?" He slapped a hand on the metal wheel, which reverberated slightly. "After all, I hear that this is quite your thing."

  They know my name, Ravne thought. "You hear?"

  "Oh yes, we hear all right. Tales of the great Solomon Ravne, whispered to us in our minds while you writhe or sleep, deep into the night."

  "I don't understand. Who...?"

  The speaker slid into view before him and Ravne frowned. A young man, perhaps mid-thirties, once handsome, but now drawn, and with a mane of hair flowing wildly from what some time ago might have appeared to be a stylish and expensive cut. The man's expression was probing as he stared at him, deeply curious and yet at the same time set in a prejudged mask of contempt. This man did not like him at all, Ravne sensed, and it made his hackles rise. But that was not the only thing that did so. There was also the matter of the black suit and tie in which he was garbed. His captor appeared to be wearing his clothes.

  "My name is Marcus Farrow," the young man said, "and we have a mutual acquaintance. His name is William McKenzie."

  McKenzie? Ravne thought with some surprise. He pictured the thin and sallow half-man he had left in his usual room back at Exham Priory. How the hell did this bastard know McKen-

  "You do recognise the name?" Farrow pushed. "Or do you only ever refer to him as slave?"

  Ravne frowned at the question. Was that what this was about? His arrangement with McKenzie? Despite his circumstances, he gave a grim smile. He might have thought of McKenzie as a slave, but he had never called him so to his face. Apart from anything else it was just so... theatrical. Besides, he and William went back a long way, and after all that time in his thrall the little shit deserved more respect than that. Oh yes, he knew William. He knew Billy well.

  It had been 1737. Edinburgh. And the woman in the second floor window had shouted, "Gardy-loo!"

  Ravne - although his name had been different back then - had not faltered as her night's waste had landed with a splot on the cobbles directly in front of him, and he had proceeded on his early morning mission through the middle of the brown and golden puddle, his expensive buckled leather shoes impervious to any lasting soiling by the splosh, splosh, splish. There were few people out on the streets where he walked - with good reason not to be, other than the unsociable hour - and he had continued on, past the church and then the Rumour Inn, nose wrinkling as its steps were swept of the stomach contents of the previous night's customers in readiness for the cyclic excesses of the day. Shadows deepened as the streets narrowed, closing in around him. His fine gentleman's attire - breeches, ruffed shirt, cape and walking cane - seemed out of place in that part of the town, but no one seemed stirred by his presence. The people hereabouts were used to gentlemen into whose business they knew it was best not to pry. For those gentlemen were almost invariably heading for the appropriately named Fleshmarket Close.

  And it was flesh that Ravne had come in search of that morning, though not the warm, greedily welcoming and doubtless rank variety. For though he was far from averse to the dubious pleasures that he knew could sometimes only be found on the streets, his business was not that of any normal gentleman, as he indeed was no normal gentleman. Even then he had already chosen a path that had removed him as far from normality as could be.

  The wooden pushcart trundled towards him, thudding dully and creaking as it was manhandled over the uneven cobblestones by its two aproned attendants. The air immediately above it was smudged a thick grey by a buzzing cloud of fat, sated flies. These were halcyon times for the insects, finding their own heaven in what was rapidly becoming a hell on Earth.

  "God save you, sir. There's nothing for you here," one of the attendants cautioned. "There's plague in the close and the council has decreed that the place is to be sealed up. With those still not taken by the plague sealed up with it."

  Yes, the plague, Ravne had thought. The blight that had darkened this particular period of the town's history had taken hold some weeks before and it had suited his needs perfectly.

  "Then I have come to the right place," he had answered measuredly, "for my business is with the dead, not the living."

  "A medical man, are you? These ones here are too plague-ridden to be of any use for the gentlemen at the university. If it's anatomy specimens you're wanting, then you'd be better seeking out the resurrection men-"

  The glint in Ravne's eye had silenced him. "No. It's fresh flesh I want. Not days-old and worm-riddled dead meat dug up from Martha's kirkyard."

  Ravne stared down into the cart, entirely unaffected by the sight meeting his eyes. It was laden to the bri
m with the naked and mottled corpses of the previous night's plague victims - men and women of various ages - tossed without care or any concession to dignity atop each other in this, their final transport. The plague had made no distinctions between who they had been and had no interest in whatever petty squabbles had divided them in life... it simply united them in death. Ravne's attention was drawn to one of the bodies in particular, a male, whose lean body lay splayed in the centre of the cart, sightless eyes staring in bewilderment at the heavens from a head that rested in the cup of the breasts of the woman twisted beneath him. "What about this one?"

  "William McKenzie, sir. A thief and a drunkard and a sinner from Leith, where such as those seem to naturally congregate. Died this very hour and still warm to the touch. If the plague hadn't taken him, then the drink or the gallows surely would have."

  Ravne had studied the man. "Excellent. Exactly the kind of fellow I was looking for." He had placed a purse into one of the attendants' hands. "I'm lodging at rooms by the surgeon's hall. See that the corpse is delivered there by this afternoon and there'll be a weightier twin of this purse for both of you."

  The attendant couldn't keep the smile off his face, despite the inherent dangers of the task he had been hired to fulfil. He was not to know that the gentleman would be not only cleansing McKenzie of the plague but of death itself, and that his recent sale would be walking the earth for a long time after his own grasping little body had gone. "Very good, sir. And what name shall we ask for you by?"

  "Raven," Ravne had said, identifying himself. "Mister Raven."

  That was approaching three hundred years earlier. What did the people who held him now know of his business then? How and what could they possibly know of William McKenzie? Who were they?

  His eyes growing more accustomed to the light, Ravne began to make out more details of Farrow himself, and also of his companion - a woman. He knew the answer to his question immediately, and the realisation made his heart boom. There was no mistaking the grey complexion, the sunken and shadowed eyes, the subdued inspiration and expiration of the lungs - they were each of them reanimated dead, of McKenzie's own unnatural ilk. He knew, of course, that others besides himself had been and were capable of the rituals needed to restore and perpetuate half-life in this way, but he hadn't encountered them or their thralls in all of his years. To encounter not just one but two of them together wasn't only unprecedented, it was nigh on impossible.

  It became all the more impossible when the two were joined from behind by the remainder of their assembly.

  They loomed slowly forward just into the edge of the pool of light - a bedraggled lot in old-fashioned and half-rotted clothing - just enough to be seen by him and no more, their simple shift of balance tipping their angular features through the terminator as they presented themselves in a mute, semi-circular audience before slipping back into the dark. It was more than curiosity that drove them to do this, Ravne sensed. The single, unified movement seemed to be a deliberate ploy to unnerve him, and though he refused to acknowledge so in their presence, unnerve him it did. From what he had seen of the deeply shadowed faces in that fleeting moment, Ravne estimated that there were another six or seven of them - men and women, and a child. Impossible, he thought again.

  Now, at least, he understood how they knew McKenzie. Though they were not always brought back for such reasons, all reanimated dead had a unique capacity to see things, to scry, to communicate even, with not only the future but the past and the present, too, unearthing hidden knowledge wherever or whenever it might be. In that respect they were similar to the demi-humans at the Abraxas facility - the difference being that they were much more easily controlled, which was precisely why he kept McKenzie and not a demi-human as a pet.

  Still, on the subject of control, he would have to have a word with Billy when he got home. Teach the little stiff to keep his thoughts to himself.

  "What is this place?" he asked.

  Farrow ignored the question and regarded him evenly. "I see from your reaction that you have realised what we are but not who we are. But you wouldn't, would you? Such a question would not occur to you for a single moment. Who we are, then, are the last of those who have succeeded down the years in gaining liberty from those who brought us back. In other words, our so-called mistresses and masters. Bastards like you."

  Runaways, Ravne thought? He'd once heard that there were such things, even that one of them had tried to help its kin by creating some kind of a sanctuary for them years ago, but he'd dismissed the rumours as myth, comforting tales for the reanimated dead.

  "You do me an injustice," he said with a thin smile. "I have been called much worse names than bastard in my time."

  "Your time, yes," Farrow responded. "How long is it now? How many hundreds of years have you leeched your life of luxury off the sweat and the sacrifices of people like us? Tell me, Mister Ravne, do you realise how much the things you make us see cause us pain?"

  "Of course. If it was painless, I would do it myself. But I asked what this place was, not for a polemic on your status in the food chain."

  Farrow gestured to the others and together they turned and held their lamps high. They lit a large subterranean chamber. It was manmade, possibly some kind of old pump room for the sewers, and furnished with ragged, makeshift cots and crates that passed for tables and chairs. Open tins of food and takeaways no doubt scavenged from the world above littered the floor. "This?" Marcus Farrow said. "This is our home."

  Ravne almost laughed out loud. This place was the fabled sanctuary of their kind? This was all they could manage after, by the look of some of them, years on the run? It was pathetic.

  "It hardly seems worthy of protection by such an elaborate trap," he observed. "It was your trap, I take it, that finished the ripper?"

  "If you mean that thing, yes. But the trap and others like are not designed to protect our home, they are designed to protect us."

  "And this home," the woman said, speaking for the first time, "is not the sanctuary I see you thinking of with such contempt, but where we have been driven by those who hunt us down."

  "Hunt you down?" Ravne repeated. "I think that you flatter yourselves. It may be that you are the Dead of London, but that is all you are. All of you unwanted, unremembered and unmourned. Deadtritus. Why should your masters go to the trouble of hunting you down when there is so much more meat in the morgues?"

  "I did not say that it was our masters who have organised the hunt."

  Ravne had to admit, that threw him. "You think that I-?"

  "I think that you now flatter yourself, Mister Ravne," the woman said. "No, we know that your presence here is only coincidence, but we know also that it is not unconnected to the hunters."

  "I have no idea what you are talking about."

  "Of course you haven't," Marcus Farrow growled. He pulled an angry face and pointed to his head. "But that is because you have not been reborn with the gift."

  "So why have I been brought here, Marcus? Are you going to kill me, is that it? Vengeance for your kind?"

  "That all depends on your answer to our next proposition."

  "Which is?"

  "We want you to help us. We, in turn, may be able to help you."

  This time, Ravne did laugh out loud. "Why should I do that?"

  Farrow pulled a sharp-looking blade from where it had been tucked in the waistband of his trousers, in the crook of his back. He held it up to one of Ravne's wrists and rocked it first against the ropes and then against his flesh, drawing a fine line of blood. He was obviously out of patience. "Because the alternative is that I slice off your hands right now. And those I will follow with your feet. And then I will keep you alive, writhing on the floor, as a pet."

  "Ah, I see," Ravne said. "Irony." His answer might have been glib, but the fact was he believed Farrow might actually do it.

  His mind whirled. There was every chance he would fully recover from such mutilation if he could then escape and reach a regenera
tion tank - any regeneration tank, even Thatcher's on Wardour Street - in time. But it was a big if - and the reality of the situation was that for the moment he had no idea where under London he was, or how deeply underground he had been dragged while unconscious.

  He couldn't take the risk.

  For the first time in his life he was in thrall to a dead man.

  "What do you want me to do?"

  Chapter Nine

  Hannah Chapter wasn't sure whether the blackness that had swamped her soul was grief or the darkest fury. If it was grief then she was effectively screwed as a field operative, probably unable to work closely with anyone again. If, on the other hand, it was fury, then she was screwed as a human being, because the purging of such emotion could only be achieved one way. She had come close to it once, with Warren in that Soho S&M joint, booting out the whores who'd handily cuffed the ex Man-in-Black to the bed, and then, fuelled by drink, ramming her piece into his pleading, pathetic mouth, ready to blow his head off for the deaths of their fellow agents back in Red Hook, US of A. But even though Warren had abandoned Charteris, Niland and herself to face the tentacled thing that had been lurking in that brownstone's basement, she couldn't pull the trigger on him, and in the end had simply advised the bastard to find another country.

  As she'd left it had occurred to her that when it came down to it, she'd turned out to be as gutless as he was.

  This time she knew it would be different.

  This time it was Lawrence Verse who was dead.

  Already almost oblivious to the van in which she rode, Hannah closed her eyes, allowing herself to be swallowed by the blackness in the hope that she could find some reconciliation between the two emotions, but instead two faces swirled unavoidably in the maelstrom, and she found herself remembering. It was true that the Scotsman hadn't been directly responsible for her partner becoming a casualty, but by God he could at least have tried to help him after he'd gone down, the bastard.