The Severed Streets (39 page)

Lassiter had come home yesterday, having gone out to get some items to replenish her flat’s defences following the break-in attempt, to find the Bridge of Spikes missing, with only small signs of a burglary having taken place.
This must have been done, she thought, by someone with the Sight.
Ross was surprised to hear that these were the first such attempts.
It had been secrecy, rather than anything particularly useful in terms of defences, that had stopped Lassiter being raided before now.

‘It would make sense,’ said Costain, when she had taken him aside, ‘that it’s the same person who made both attempts.’

Lassiter had bought the Bridge at one of the underworld auctions over the phone, through a proxy.
She’d used what she called ‘craft’ to conceal her identity on the other end of the phone from what she called ‘checking’, or as Sefton had it, ‘reading your bar code’.
She’d trusted the auctioneers with her address, she said bitterly, because nobody had ever successfully paid to see the register before, but she didn’t want anyone else to know she’d got the Bridge.
Ross had started to ask if the individual who’d been her proxy was trustworthy, but the woman had laughed bitterly at that, saying he was long dead.
Yes, she had been planning to use the Bridge to save herself from death.
Why else would she have held onto it?

They took all the details.
It wasn’t much to go on.
The burglar had left no trace of his or her passing.
The raiders hardly much more.
Costain and Ross took prints from likely surfaces, and Lassiter angrily let them have hers for comparison.

Before they left, Costain did something Ross admired him for.
He called up a locksmith, talked and talked at him about what a good thing locksmiths were, and paid over the phone for him to come and repair the door.

They left Anna Lassiter glaring at them furiously, like the jackals they were.

*   *   *

Costain and Ross went back to their cars in the bright afternoon sunlight, and Ross felt as if she wanted to die.
‘We’re not going to be able to find whoever stole it,’ she said, aware of how tiny her voice sounded now.
‘We don’t have enough evidence.
We don’t have enough contacts in that world.’

‘There are the fingerprints.
You never know.’

She had to lean on her car.
She didn’t feel like going anywhere or doing anything.
She was starting to see the edges of grief, doubled for her, unfolding infinitely around her.
‘Why are you so hopeful?’

‘I’m … not.
I suppose…’ He rested on the car beside her.
‘I suppose I just have to keep going.
For Jimmy.’

‘Right.
Keep going.’
She made herself say it, but she didn’t feel it.

They went back to Costain’s place, took some more meth, fucked.
Ross took what pleasure she could from it.
She found no happiness.
She was thinking about her father and Jimmy in Hell.

Then the phone rang.

TWENTY-TWO

Kev Sefton had stood at the door of the Portakabin watching Costain’s car roar off down the road.
He felt, in that moment, too angry to breathe.

What was he supposed to do?
Carry on on his own?
What could he do?

Nothing.
He was meaningless and had now been utterly deserted.
Was all this happening to him because he’d taken a life?
He’d felt wrong ever since.
Was that why Brutus was still rejecting him, why his source and … patron, he supposed, wasn’t allowing him access?
He had no idea how Brutus felt about death.
Or about anything, really.

He sat down on the floor.
He let his head drop back against the wall.
He felt desperately that he wanted to fall asleep, but he couldn’t let that happen.
He felt a dream welling up in his head, making strange sense of his thoughts, and fought it off.
He wouldn’t close his eyes.

He closed his eyes.
He was on the verge of sleep.
He was on the verge of giving in.
‘Help,’ he said, with no power in his voice.

Something moved over the Portakabin.
The light against his eyes changed.
He heard a distant sound.
Distant music.
Dance music.
It was like a hand on his face.
It was an echo of the joy that he and Brutus had shared in a kiss.
Dance music that took him back to happier times.

The music offered him a way forward.
A terrible way.

He opened his eyes again.
Everything around him was normal.
There was a moment when he didn’t believe anything strange had just happened.
He was stressed out and grieving and exhausted.
But what was he if not someone who did mad things because of something that might be a dream?
That was a definition of what he had to be if he was going to go any further into knowing the power of London.

Slowly he got to his feet.
He contemplated what was being asked of him.
It would be a sacrifice.
It seemed to hold the potential to wash him clean of Barry Keel’s blood.
It seemed to hold the possibility of doing due honour to Quill.
It was something right for him and how he lived.
Finally, he had a way forward in his hands.
He looked up, then down, because he wasn’t sure where Brutus’ ‘outer borough’ could be said to be.
He said thank you, silently.

He went to his holdall, intending to see what defences he could take with him on his journey.
As he looked through it, he realized there was something missing – several things.
He emptied the bag out onto the floor, and found that a bunch of items he’d kept because of their potential as protective devices: a box of London-made matches with what seemed to be occult symbols in the trademark, some salt from an ancient source actually within the metropolis, a horseshoe used in the Trooping the Colour … they were all gone.

He looked around the Portakabin, wondering what could get in and do that.
The same thing, presumably, that had entered their dreams.

He put down the holdall and understood that he should do this without help.
He headed for the door.
He knew where he was going.
He wanted to call Joe, but, no, he decided, he didn’t want to frighten him.

*   *   *

Sefton had known there were dance clubs in London that kept going twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, but he’d never been to one before.
He found it in Vauxhall, a small dark dance floor in the basement of a club, the ethos of which was all concrete warehouse and the smell of poppers.
Even at this hour, on a weekday, it was packed with men, dancing and occasionally snogging, when, for fuck’s sake, London was falling apart.
He himself hadn’t come here to escape, but to find something.
He couldn’t really look down on this lot, though, could he?
There’d been a time when he’d have been up for this.
The flavour of music was trance, shading into pounding industrial – the kind of music that had sounded distantly in his head back in the Portakabin.
Not that he knew one style of dance music from another.
He and Joe had once laughed their arses off at a club flier offering ‘intelligent handbag’.
There was nothing of the Sight about this place.
Nobody here had any strange weight about them.

He’d turned down a covert offer of ‘speed, trips or e’ near the door, but now he wondered if he should have taken them up on that.
His reading had told him about mystics who’d made risky attempts to connect with something beyond themselves by pushing their minds into an altered state of consciousness.
Doing that by drugs, or at least by street drugs, seemed too easy and would involve someone else’s designs for one’s brain.
This had to be his sacrifice.
It had occurred to him that he could have gone to a gym and worked his way into the state he wanted to achieve, but there there’d be someone to stop him.

He walked into the middle of the floor, closed his eyes and started to dance.

*   *   *

He danced for what he was sure was hours.
He had his phone switched off; there was no clock visible from the dance floor.
His body didn’t know what time it was.
There were no clues from the light.
He stopped only for visits to the water station, which he’d do at speed, throw it down, throw it over himself, go back.

At first he tried to concentrate on several repetitive phrases that he ran around his head, trying to switch off his thoughts, but found he couldn’t.
He let his mind wander.
He found all the different muscle groups in his legs, in his arms, his stomach, all starting to ache, so he’d shift a little when they did, and work something else.
He let the euphoric breaks lift him, keep him going, then knuckled down to work hard again as the bass slammed back in.
Every now and then he’d become aware of a man deliberately dancing near him, and he’d turn away.

He got exhausted and pushed through it, found new energy from somewhere, then burned that away too.
He started to feel the aches from where he’d been thrown from the bus.
He started to feel that he had to be absolutely weak and helpless to get where he wanted to go.
That wasn’t going to be hard.
He kept thinking of Jimmy, of how Sarah would be feeling now, of how he’d given Jimmy such useless things with which to protect himself, of how it didn’t feel like an investigation now, but as if they were all just children stumbling towards something terrible and huge that could pick them off when it liked.
He thought of Barry Keel, that the man must have had friends, relatives, people who thought he was decent and kind and who loved him.

Was he just hurting himself?
That was a deceitful, seductive thought whispering in his ear.
He was harming himself in order to let himself feel better about Jimmy, in order to feel that he was working, doing something to take his mind off Jimmy’s death.
No, he told himself, these were weasel words, to make him stop dancing.
He needed more water.
This time he ignored the thirst.
He burned the doubt out of himself by keeping going.
He needed to rip up all these signifiers of what he was, all these words, and find what was under them, what was real.
To do that, he needed to break himself.

He kept dancing.

It began as a pain up his back and chest and into his neck, a pain he feared as the start of something serious, a stroke or heart attack.
He’d been told he had to face fear to get to wherever he was going, so he embraced it, pushed at the pain, letting it rack him.
He felt his teeth clench and his breath start to come in gasps, felt the air was entering him in a different way now.

He kept dancing.

The pain came properly; it was all through his body, and there were disturbances in his vision, like the start of a firework display inside his eyes.

He kept dancing.
He felt a shadow fall over him.
He realized he couldn’t see clearly now but he could still see the lights dancing inside his head.

Soon he didn’t know what his body was doing; he was only distantly associated with it.
It would continue being alive or it wouldn’t.
The pain could be ignored now, because it was only happening to that distant body.

Perhaps he was lying on the dance floor having some sort of fit.
An enormous smell rushed into his head.
It reminded him of childhood, but he couldn’t place it.
It felt somehow like death too.

The lights in his eyes turned and resolved into one shape and locked into place.

They formed a tunnel.
A smooth spin of vision showed him that it led straight down.
There was a hole in the world.
Oh.
He was on top of it.

Sefton laughed in joy as he fell down it.

He fell into a wide open space.
He couldn’t see it, he couldn’t see anything, but he could feel it.
His giddy joy turned to fear.
He had to reach out into the darkness with his senses, not with his body.
He had to find a way to do that or he’d keep falling in darkness, forever.
He was aware, distantly, of his real body, still moving, perhaps doing something different to dancing now, not as warm.
In fact it was cold.
He concentrated on the pain and the cold, solidified himself around grief and fear.

He felt his way into London and saw it slowly resolve into vision all around him.
He felt all the people who made it.
The buildings were incidental to the people.
The buildings were like a bouncing line on a mixing desk, flying up and down according to the needs and wishes and secrets of the people who pushed and pushed at the metropolis around them.
The people made the buildings.
He stepped out into what they’d made.
He walked along a thousand balconies, hopped from one to another, ran along a line he was making as he went, association to association, along a tightrope across libraries and post offices and spires, the line springing to the beat that he felt all around him.
He stopped and looked down at the metropolis around him and felt the compass points, from the big to the small, to the infinity of minuscule ones in between them.
He felt how roundabouts and temples of all kinds produced eddies, how big malls created deluges, all to the unconscious will of the people, all manipulated deliberately by those who knew how.

He could feel the orbits of the outer boroughs.
He looked up and decided to see them.
He found he could.
There were lots of them, up and out of the plane of the M25, and down below it, all swinging about Centre Point at their different angles.

The Centre Point building itself wasn’t at the centre, but a little off it, so the wheel of London turned with a continual pulse beat thump around that hub.
It was turning the wrong way.
Anticlockwise.
It was turning as if it had been set in motion with one big push.
It wasn’t going in the direction it was meant to roll.

Sefton tried, just for a moment, to set his strength against it, becoming a chalk hill figure on the South Downs and heaving at it, but only for a terrifying instant before he realized that its accumulated momentum would crush him utterly if he tried.

He came out of that and steadied himself.
He saw a new hopeful direction, walked the back gardens down by the railway, walked beside every train coming into every station.
He felt the flow of people in and out of London.
He heard on his own personal soundtrack a speeded-up version of one of those pieces of Fifties ‘bustling people’ music.

He felt for the pain and the cold and called for the patterns to form inside his eyes again.
He breathed in the right way and found the fireworks starting to go off.
It was like being able to see his own brain working.
The lights wanted to form their pit again, but this time he wouldn’t let them.
He made them form in front of him, made the lights into a tunnel he could walk into.
He felt his real body walking too, distantly, not dancing any more, but outside, somewhere cold.