Moon Over Soho

by Ben Aaronovitch

  I didn’t like the idea of Simone and her sisters just disappearing at the hands of Caffrey and his lads. I believe in the rule of law and this was, however weird, a police matter and I was a sworn constable who was about to exercise his discretion to resolve a breach of the Queen’s Peace.

  Or as Leslie would have it—I was out of my fucking mind.

  I pressed random buttons on the intercom until someone answered.

  “Come to read the meter, love,” I said and they buzzed me in. I made a mental note to pass the number of the building to West End Central’s crime prevention team for a stern lecture and started up the stairs.

  They hadn’t gotten any less steep. No wonder Simone and her sisters had to suck the life force out of people.

  I was just catching a breather in front of their door when somebody grabbed me from behind and held a knife to my throat.

  “It’s him,” she hissed. “Open the door.”

  Because of the height difference she had to reach up under my armpit to get her blade, an old kitchen knife I thought, against my neck. She would really have been better off threatening my back or stomach. If I’d been desperate I could have chopped down with my arm and forced her hand away. It would have depended on how fast she was and how willing to kill.

  The door opened and Simone looked out.

  “Hello, Simone,” I said. “We need to have a chat.”

  She looked stricken to see me.

  The woman with the knife pushed me and I edged carefully into the room. Peggy was in there too, still dressed in dungarees, hair still spiky, face pale and scared. That meant Cherie was the one with the knife. Simone closed the door behind us.

  “Get his handcuffs,” said Cherie.

  Peggy groped me around the waist. “He hasn’t got any.”

  “Why haven’t you brought your handcuffs?” said Simone. “I told them you’d have handcuffs.”

  “I’m not here to arrest anyone,” I said.

  “We know,” hissed Cherie. “You’re here to kill us.”

  “What, just me on my own?” I asked, but I was thinking of Caffrey and his posse drinking tea back at the Folly. Only by now they’d have finished their tea and were probably in a van, a nondescript Ford Transit most likely, doing last-minute checks on their weapons and night-vision equipment.

  “I’m not here to kill anyone,” I said.

  “Liar,” said Cherie. “He said you’d disappear us.”

  “Perhaps we should let them,” said Peggy.

  “We haven’t done anything wrong,” said Cherie and her knife nicked my throat by accident—thank God it wasn’t sharp.

  “Yes, we have,” said Simone. There were tears on her face, and when she saw me looking at her she turned away.

  “Who said we would kill you?” I asked.

  “This man,” said Cherie.

  “Did you meet him in a pub?” I asked. “What man? Can you remember what he looked like?”

  Cherie hesitated and that’s when I knew.

  “I can’t remember,” she said. “It’s not important what he looks like. He said that you worked for the government and all the government was interested in was eliminating anybody who isn’t normal.”

  What could I say? I was pretty much here to tell them the same thing.

  “What color were his eyes?” I asked. “Was he white, black, something else?”

  “Why do you care?” shouted Cherie.

  “Why can’t you remember?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Cherie and relaxed her grip.

  I didn’t wait for her to remember she was supposed to be holding me hostage. I grabbed her wrist and twisted her knife hand up and away. The rule for fighting a person with a knife is to start off by making it point away from you and then ensure that it hurts too much to hold on to. I felt something crack under my grip, Cherie screamed and dropped the knife. Peggy tried to hit me but I was already twisting away and she ended up smacking Cherie in the face.

  “Stop it,” yelled Simone.

  I shoved Cherie over toward her sisters. She stumbled into Peggy and they both tripped on the edge of the mattress and went down. Peggy came up spitting like a cat.

  “Wait up,” I said. “I’m trying to do you a favor here. There’s a real evil man out there that you don’t want to be messing with.”

  “You should know,” spat Peggy. “You work for him.”

  “It’s not our fault,” said Cherie dejectedly. Simone sat down beside her and put her arm around her sister.

  “I get that,” I said. “I really do. But whatever you think about my governor there’s another total evil bastard out there and by the way—why the fuck are you still here? Everyone knows where you live.”

  I figured I might just have another ten minutes before Nightingale and Caffrey turned up to demonstrate the military version of the hard target entry, followed by a unique close-up view of their search-and-destroy procedures.

  “He’s right,” said Peggy. “We can’t stay here.”

  “Where can we go?” asked Cherie.

  “I’ll get you into a hotel,” I said. “We can talk about what to do next then.” I concentrated on Simone, who was looking at me with a kind of sick longing. “Simone, we don’t have much time.”

  She nodded. “I think we should leave immediately and never return.”

  “But what about my things?” wailed Cherie.

  “We’ll get you more things,” said Peggy, hauling Cherie to her feet.

  “I’ll check the coast is clear,” I said. I stepped out onto the landing and pressed the pop-in switch thingy that turned on the miserly forty-watt bulb.

  There was a crash downstairs, the distinctive double bang of a heavy door being smashed open and the rebound off a side wall. It’s no joke, that rebound. There have been plenty of instances where the first bastard through the door has been knocked right back out on his arse.

  I was too late. I didn’t know if it was Nightingale with Caffrey in support or a CO19 armed response team sent in by Stephanopoulis. Either way I had to de-escalate the situation before they reached the top of the house. I told Simone and the others to stay in the room.

  “Officer on the scene,” I shouted. “No weapons, no hostages. I repeat, no weapons, no hostages.”

  I paused to listen. From down below I thought I heard someone sniggering and then a deep voice with a lisp said—“Excellent.” Then I definitely heard feet running up the lower staircases. I held up my hands at chest level, palm out to show I was unarmed. It wasn’t an easy thing to do—one of the reasons why the Met has to train its officers in conflict resolution is to overcome our natural London urge to get our retaliation in first.

  The push-in light switch popped out and it suddenly went dark. I frantically slapped at the switch to get it on again—anything that can go wrong with armed men in the light can go twice as wrong in the dark.

  The footsteps reached the landing below me and a figure came bounding around the corner and up the stairs.

  And that’s when my brain let me down. Whatever you’ve been told, seeing is not believing. Your brain does a great deal of interpretation before it deigns to let your consciousness know what the hell is going on. If we’re suddenly exposed to something unfamiliar, a damaged human face, a car flying through the air toward us, something that looks almost but not quite human, it can take time, sometimes even seconds, for our minds to react. And those seconds can be crucial.

  As when a chimera is racing up the staircase to reach you.

  He was male, muscular, stripped to the waist to reveal that he was covered in short russet fur. His hair was black and cut long and shaggy. His nose was all wrong, as black and glossy as a healthy cat’s. As he bounded up the stairs toward me his mouth opened too wide to reveal sharp white teeth and a lolling pink tongue. None of this registered until he was almost on top of me and I didn’t have time to do anything but scramble back and lash out with my foot.

  Doc Martens, patented acid-resis
tant-soled, reinforced leather shoes, as recommended by police officers and skinheads everywhere—when you absolutely, positively have to kick someone down the stairs.

  Predictably Tiger-Boy landed like a cat, twisting his spine as he dropped to fall into a crouch on the landing below.

  “Get up on the roof,” I shouted through the door.

  Tiger-Boy took a moment to shake his head and give me a big feline grin. His eyes were quite beautiful, amber-colored, slotted like a cat’s, and obviously adapted for hunting at night.

  I heard the door open and Peggy and Simone dragging a still-whimpering Cherie out of the room and onto the stairs up to the roof. I didn’t dare take my eyes off Tiger-Boy; he was just waiting for me to lose concentration.

  “Who the hell is that?” asked Simone.

  “Nobody you want to know,” I said.

  Tiger-Boy hissed. I saw his tail twitch and found myself wondering whether he’d cut a hole in the back of his Y-fronts to let it out.

  “Little mousy,” lisped the Tiger-Boy. “Why don’t you jump about? It’s more fun when you jump about.”

  The pop-in light switch popped out, it went dark, and Tiger-Boy leapt toward me.

  I put a werelight in his face.

  I’d been practicing and had managed to produce one that burned as brightly as a magnesium flare. I’d closed my eyes and it still lit up the inside of my eyelids, so it must have hit Tiger-Boy right in his specially low-light-adapted eyes.

  He howled, I jumped and this time managed to get both size elevens in contact with his body. He probably outweighed me but Isaac Newton was on my side and we went down the stairs together, only he was hitting all the steps and I was surfing down on him. At least that was the theory.

  We hit the landing harder and faster than I expected. I heard a snap under my feet and there was stabbing pain in my left knee. I yelled and he yowled.

  “You’re right,” I said. “It is more fun when you jump about.”

  I didn’t have any cuffs or rope to secure him, so I settled for scrambling back up the stairs, ignoring the shooting pain in my knee as I went. Behind me Tiger-Boy wailed pathetically and, more important, stayed where he was. I ran through the roof door, ducked under a clumsy swing by Peggy, and slammed it shut behind me.

  “I beg your pardon,” said Peggy. “I thought you were him.”

  I looked at the three women. They were clutching one another for support and had the dazed unfocused look that people get after bombing incidents and motorway pileups.

  I pointed to the north. “Climb over the railing, go that way across the roof,” I said. “Go to the right. There’s a fire escape down to Duck Lane.” I’d spotted it during my night of passion with Simone as a possible access point for burglars. Which proves, if nothing else, that a police constable is never off duty even when he’s not wearing his underpants.

  They didn’t move—it was strange they were acting so slow and dull. As if they were drugged or distracted.

  “Come on,” I said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Will you be quiet,” said Peggy. “We’re talking to someone.”

  I turned around to find that an evil magician had been standing behind me.

  HE WAS standing at the far end of the roof garden leaning nonchalantly against the railing. He was dressed in a beautifully tailored dark suit and a pale silk cravat; he was carrying a cane topped with a mother-of-pearl handle. The witnesses had been right about his face. Even as I concentrated on his features, I found myself noticing the gleam of his gold cuff links, the scarlet triangle of his pocket handkerchief, anything except his face. This was him—the Faceless One.

  “Oy,” I shouted. “Just what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Do you mind?” said Faceless. “I’m trying to talk to the ladies here.” His accent was generic posh, public school, Oxbridge—which fit the profile and endeared him to my proletarian soul not at all.

  “Well, you can talk to me first,” I said. “Or you can go to the hospital.”

  “On the other hand,” said Faceless. “You could just take a quick jump off the parapet.”

  His tone was so reasonable that I actually took three steps toward the railing before I could stop myself. It was seducere, of course, the glamour, and it might have worked on me if I hadn’t spent the year having various demigods and nature spirits trying to mess with my mind. Nothing gives you mental toughness like having Lady Tyburn trying to make you her house slave. I kept heading for the railing, though, because there’s no point giving away an advantage and I was curious to know what he wanted from Simone and her sisters.

  “Ladies,” he said, “I realize your true nature may have come as a shock and right now you’re a little confused.” He was speaking softly but I heard his words with unnatural clarity. Part of the seducere? I wondered. Nightingale and I were going to have to have a long chat about this sometime soon.

  I’d reached the edge of the roof, so I turned and put my foot up on the railing as if I were about to climb over sideways before plunging to a horrible death. It also gave me an opportunity to see what Faceless was up to.

  He was still chatting up the girls. “I know you believe that you are cursed,” he said. “Forced to satiate your unnatural appetites by draining the life force of others. But I want you to think outside the box.”

  I still couldn’t see his features, but I’d done a bit of reading since Alexander Smith had given us a description of his face or, more accurately, hadn’t. Victor Bartholomew, possibly the most boring magician who ever lived, named it vultus occulto—which even I knew was pig Latin—and had devoted an entire chapter to the subject of countermeasures, which, typically for Bartholomew, I could boil down to one sentence—“Keep looking really hard and sooner or later you’ll see through it.” So that’s what I did.

  “What if,” said Faceless, “—and I throw this out to you as a hypothetical—what if it was all right to feed on people? What is feeding off people anyway but good old exploitation? And we’re perfectly happy to exploit people, aren’t we?”

  I glanced over at Simone. She and her sisters had stopped holding one another and were regarding Faceless with the same polite interest one might give to a visiting dignitary in the hope that he gets on with it and shuts up soon.

  Ha, I thought. Tyburn would have them genuflecting by now.

  “This notion that we’re all equal is so intellectually bankrupt anyway.” As he spoke I blinked a couple of times, and suddenly I could see his face. Or rather I couldn’t, because it was hidden by a plain beige-colored mask that covered his whole head. It made him look like an unusually tasteful Mexican wrestler. I think he may have sensed that I’d pushed through the disguise, because he turned to look at me.

  “Are you still here?” he asked.

  “I wasn’t sure whether I should go headfirst or feetfirst,” I said.

  “Do you think it will make a difference?”

  “Statistically, you’re more likely to survive if you go feetfirst.”

  “Why don’t you jump?” he said. “And then we can see.”

  I felt it then, the seducere, stronger this time and bringing with it the smell of roast pork, freshly mown grass, the stink of unwashed bodies, and a metallic taste, like iron, in my mouth. I turned to the railings, paused, and then turned back.

  “What did you say your name was again?” I asked.

  “Jump,” barked Faceless.

  He gave me his full attention but seducere never seems to work twice, and while he was using it on me he wasn’t using it on Simone.

  “Run,” I yelled.

  I saw Simone snap out of it first and pull at Peggy’s arm. They both shot me scared looks and then, thank God, grabbed Cherie and started climbing the parapet where it separated the roof garden from next door. I glanced back at Faceless just in time to see the swing of his shoulders as he threw out his arm in my direction. I recognized the gesture—I’d been practicing it myself for the last six months. This sa
ved my life because I was already diving to the left when something bright and hot zipped past my shoulder and melted a two-foot hole in the railings. About where my stomach would have been if I hadn’t moved.

  I flipped a couple of skinny grenades at him even as I was flying through the air, which would have been way more impressive if I hadn’t been trying for a straight fireball. As I skidded along the floor another chunk of railing melted behind me and I saw that one of my skinny mines had popped harmlessly in midair; the other fell out of the air and bounced to a stop at Faceless’s feet. He looked down and through pure luck it chose that moment to explode. The blast staggered him backward and twisted him around. I used the time to scramble to my feet and face him.

  “Armed police,” I shouted. “Stand still and put your hands on your head.” This time I knew I had the right spell lined up.

  He turned and stared at me. Despite the mask I could tell he was incredulous.

  “You’re the police?” he asked.

  “Armed police,” I said. “Turn around and put your hands on your head.”

  I risked a glance to check that Simone and her sisters were off the roof.

  “Oh, don’t worry about them,” said the man. “I’ve found something far more interesting than them. After all, I can always make more people like them.”

  “Armed police,” I shouted again. “Turn around and put your hands on your head.” They make this very clear at Hendon: If you’re going to put the boot in, there must be no doubt that you identified yourself and that the suspect heard you.

  “If you’re going to shoot,” he said. “Then shoot.”

  So I shot him. It was worth it just for the obvious outrage it caused him and I enjoyed it right up until the point where he caught the bloody fireball. Just snatched it out of the air and held it, Yorick-like, in front of his face.

  I’d released it as soon as it got near him but it hadn’t exploded. He twisted it this way and that as if examining it like a connoisseur, which perhaps he was—I figured he wanted me to lob another one at him so he could catch it or deflect it or do something else with annoying insouciance. So I didn’t. Besides, the more time he spent taunting me, the farther away Simone could get.