London Falling (25 page)

There was a low noise from the ink circle, a static hiss that was slowly rising in pitch.

‘I think the circle’s melting,’ said Ross. ‘Do you think it’s melting?’

‘Experiment over,’ said Quill. ‘Can you get us out of here?’

Sefton seemed to panic for a second, then he bent back to the floor. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I’m going to draw a circle intersecting this one, and then another, and we’ll
slowly head towards the door—’ And then he shouted in surprise and jumped back – as the pen rolled away into the dark and was lost. He held up his hands and Costain could see the
burns on the tips of his fingers. ‘Oh fuck. Oh fuck, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t expect this.’

‘What was the plan?’ asked Quill, whose voice had become very precise. All pretence had left him. That realization chilled Costain too.

‘I thought it’d be hard to take, a lot more so than the tourist ghosts. Because that’s what all the books say about it, that there’s a terrible sense of fear. But the
most important thing about this place is . . . it’s not true.’

‘What?’

‘It’s like that bus that had never crashed, like one of Ross’ ships that actually sank in the bloody Mediterranean! I followed everything back. I looked up all the details.
This place is just a chain of people making up stories, all of them based on what the last one said. And some of them are actually, you know, just stories! Fiction set in other places, then retold
about here, made up by writers! From 1871, there was one about a maid having suffered a fit here, and so a bloke stayed in the room and saw the same stuff, only that was the plot of a story in a
magazine three years earlier. This is where a new bride was going to live, but she left her husband at the altar, and he was left mad and wandering. Or a rich man kept this place empty only so that
he could visit it, lock up the caretakers, and do something evil. Or this was where a lunatic brother was kept, and fed just through a hole. And none of it –
none
of this shit –
is true! The “most haunted house in London” doesn’t present a single item of evidence.’ He sounded to be arguing with the darkness itself. ‘And, absolutely,
there’s no proof that anyone ever conducted a sacrifice here. So, if it’s one thing or another—’

‘This,’ interjected Ross, ‘is what Losley meant by
remembered
.’

‘Exactly . . . and so are the tourist ghosts. But this is the extreme case, the one I was leading you to to show you, the one case that tests the rule. ’Cos it’s
not
true
.’

‘Stop believing it’s real, then,’ said Quill. ‘Wish it away.’

For a moment, Costain was sure he could. He visualized the darkness as not being there. When he went undercover, he always felt he was absolutely in charge of what he believed about himself,
could project that persona to other people, acting a part and making them believe it. But . . . now it felt that he wasn’t in charge of every part of himself, because part of him – the
part that he knew had done bad shit in the past – had been judged and found wanting. He kept scrambling to make up for that flaw. And that flaw put a hole in everything he tried to do through
exuding confidence alone. Every time he said something funny, there was now that thought undercutting it: am I hurting anybody? It felt as if he couldn’t take a single step without hurting
someone. Or, at least, the person he was right now couldn’t. And he didn’t yet know how to be anyone else. That flaw meant that . . . he found he couldn’t project anything of
himself
, couldn’t make the world around him believe anything. So he couldn’t make this darkness go.

None of them could.

‘We didn’t believe it when we came in here,’ he said. ‘Or we thought it’d be easy. If it was as easy as that, we’d be fine.’

They heard a noise in the darkness, and they all fell silent. And there it was again. A footstep on the stairs.

‘Sometime in the 1870s,’ said Sefton, ‘and this is just what a short story from the 1930s says, there were these . . . these two penniless sailors who’d heard all the
previous stories, only they were too poor to care, and they—’

The footstep again, closer now. That door they couldn’t see would soon open.

‘—they broke in here, ’cos it was empty, and they stayed the night. They lit a fire. They fell asleep. And one of them woke up and he heard—’

Another step.

‘That’s what he heard: something on the stairs. But, of us, it was just me that knew that. So you don’t need to know about this to experience it, so apparitions aren’t
about what the people who see them believe—’

‘You should have told us all this,’ said Quill, ‘before we entered.’

‘Would that have made a difference?’ whispered Ross.

The sound of the door opening. Something stepped slowly towards them. It felt huge, but not focused in one place. Instead, it seemed to be all around them. Costain could sense it trying the air
around the circle, pushing at it, trying his eyes too at the same time, testing his skin, trying to find any way in. Costain’s eyes strained to discern it in the absolute darkness. But it
felt like it was all darkness at once, unknown and unknowable. Was this the smiling man? How would he react if it was him? Was the man coming for him now?

‘As long as the circle isn’t broken,’ said Sefton, ‘we’re fine. Believe that, ’cos it’s true. We can stand here all night if we have—’

Their phone text alerts all went off.

They all jumped simultaneously at the sudden noise. Costain let out a relieved breath. The tension was broken. Whoever that was was from
their
world, from the world of forms to fill out
and warrant cards and cups of tea. It was probably the news about the DNA searches they’d been waiting for. It was like a torch they could hold up against the dark. Something
modern
.
He took out his phone and defiantly hit the text from an unfamiliar number. He expected to see a proud announcement of success, of hope he could use to hold off this dark, even to hold up the
screen and yell at whatever it was that they were closing in on it.

He stared at what the text actually said:

Any communication breaks the circle.

Costain looked down on hearing a sudden noise, and the others looked too. The circle had roared into a sudden, consuming flame.

‘Oh fuck,’ said Sefton.

The circle evaporated. The darkness rushed in.

Costain ran.

Behind him, he could hear shouting. He didn’t make it to the door.

As the darkness swept over him, Sefton bellowed in despair and threw himself flat. And then there was silence . . .

He waited. He raised his head slightly. He saw that his hand had landed across what remained of the circle. An ache in his palm told him that he’d snuffed out the fire on a small section
of the ink line. And so he was still connected to it. Careful to keep his hand where it was, he looked around. Beside him, still as statues, caught in the act of shouting, stood Ross and Quill.
Halfway across the room was Costain, frozen in mid-sprint. That was what had happened to the two sailors. One had run, the other had stayed, and been driven out of his mind to the point where
he’d thrown himself out of the window.

As Sefton watched, he saw a tiny movement of Costain’s arm. Time was still going, then. Sefton was just experiencing it a lot more quickly than the others.
Nothing special about me.
Must be because I’m still touching the circle. They’ve been caught by whatever this is.
He moved his hand a little, and saw the edge of it. He slid his knee up, until it was
touching the line too. Then he lifted his hand quickly, ready to slam it down again.
Still fine.
He put one foot down on the ink by his knee, and managed to stand.
Okay.
He looked out
into the darkness that had infested every inch of the space, like a darkened theatre around a bare stage set. The most haunted house in London. And he himself had led them here. Costain had been
right about that:
Arrogance. You start to take a bit of charge of your life, and you go mad with it. You’re not used to it.
The Sight was now worked up to a pitch inside his head,
pulsing out of everything around him. The darkness had bloody texted them! Had that been his fault, had him saying it made it happen? No, otherwise they could have
believed
their way out of
it. It was the mass of opinion that mattered, he was sure of that now, unless you were one of those people who could surf that with words and gestures – or something like Losley’s lord,
whose opinion seemed to matter more than other people’s. Oh, very British.

But not many people in London right now would know about the details concerning this place . . .
Oh. It must be the memories of the dead, too.
Somehow. That would suggest they were
somehow still around, lingering in an . . . afterlife. But he didn’t want to credit that, because it went against everything he believed in, and what he believed was even more important now.
Perhaps the dead also existed only as some sort of reservoir of memory held around London. He remembered the rising fear among his team as he’d told his story. It was as if they’d
summoned something here, by using the Sight, in a chain reaction between what they expected and what collective opinion said about this place, and what they could see, which had then reached a
moment when it went off the scale and kind of . . . shorted them out. If he hadn’t been touching the last bit of the circle, what would have happened to all of them?
People vanish in
London all the time.
With his fumbling ‘experiment’, he’d brought them to the edge of that. So he had to get them out of it.
How?

He stared out into the dark, let himself get a flavour of it.

The roar of the engine underneath . . . a school bus. His school bus. Children, pressed all around, holding him down, his face against the floor, singing taunts round and round, batty boy
posh boy homo, all in that accent he hated that was also him that time they’d made him eat fag ends, the walls of the bus locked around him, and the doors will never open—!

He stumbled, nearly fell off balance from where he was standing on the line, so had to take a mental leap back. He found his feet again, breathing hard. Okay, so when he looked into it, it was
about himself. That was probably what the others were experiencing too. Costain would be getting another taste of what he’d decided was Hell. One way to muller a copper: take them off the
grid. This was just fear pushed to the maximum. It was like being trapped under the surface of a frozen lake. It was what he’d felt inside Jack, but far worse. This was the perfection of the
weight and terror of the crowd.
Just as well I’ve got freedom of thought, it’d really be hell if I couldn’t step out of it. The kind of stress that’d give you a heart
attack. The others haven’t got long. I can’t walk into that, so what can I do?
At least it could only kill him. He didn’t think there was anything beyond death to be
threatened with, and he felt that conviction was a strength here.

So this was
remembering.
The force of it was huge, like continents. It was older than everything. It flowed through everything. He wanted to utter something brave at it, to make a joke at
it. He couldn’t, not just now.
What would it take to make it forget instead of remember?
He felt the answer emerge: to make something
forgotten
would take an enormous effort, a
continuous effort during every moment. To do that was way beyond him. But instead of forgetting . . . what about trying to create a different version of what was remembered here, to remember not
this horror but some of the other things this place had been or was meant to have been? Those memories wouldn’t be as powerful as the fear, for fear was always so strong, but . . . his
research had also said this house was a den of criminals, counterfeiters, who used that fear as a cover. Okay, so they wouldn’t still be here as ‘ghosts’, because there was no
legend, no memory of that; besides, he had to get rid of even the idea that there were ghosts here. He imagined instead the remains of coins discovered in the gaps in the floorboards, an exhibit
commemorating it, maybe, a plaque on the wall outside, this place as a historical building, the infamous counterfeiter gang, with modern actors playing the roles, that manager downstairs laughing
about how they get the crime tours coming through here . . . He made himself see the details—

And, for the first time, he felt the Sight pushing back against this world he’d found himself in. He could see these fragile things in his eyes now. Light had expanded from where he was,
making a vulnerable space on the stage set. Knowledge was power, literally, in this city. He stopped himself from celebrating, because he knew this would last only seconds. He dared to step off the
marker line. He grabbed Quill and Ross by one hand each. He started to drag them towards the door, pushing against the nightmares that confined them. Their faces were looking at things beyond him,
their feet dragging along like reluctant toddlers. He pushed them into Costain, sent him, also, stumbling towards the door.

Four of them? They could have made their own circle, he realized, with a part of his mind he associated with deduction – with UC thoughts about what OCN shape was like. Only five would be
better than four, the shape of the organization of five would be strong. Thoughts like these were being formed inside him by the sheer pressure around him, he suddenly understood: natural defences
in operation, his persona finding a way.

But the fear was strong. The fear had more force. The fear had been thrown back and now was . . . going to come crashing in on them again!

He gathered them all with him, and
shoved
them at the door. They rushed through it together. They got over onto the other side. They fell in a heap. The door swung shut with a bang.

And suddenly the light in the corridor was again provided by a bulb. The four of them were just lying there, staring up at the bulb in its dusty lampshade. Sefton thought they must look like
something from an old painting, with their clothes and their hands flung out in glorious abandon. He started to laugh, but then he bit down on it. He didn’t like the feel of where that
reaction might take him. He was panting too hard, so he put a hand over his mouth and took smaller breaths. He felt aware of his own failure that had led him to this knowledge.