“What about Alaizabel?” Cathaline asked, pushing her plate of food aside. “Did you find her?”
The Devil-boy turned towards her. “She matters nothing now.”
“She matters to me!”Thaniel cried, jumping up.
Cathaline laid a hand on his arm, not taking her eyes from Jack. “Do you know where the Distillation was performed?” she asked.
“I could not locate it,” the boy rasped. “It does not matter. Alaizabel was taken by the Fraternity, and the Fraternity have their spirit. Leanna Butcher’s death will bring their plan to fruition. We must prepare.”
Armand laughed his mindless laugh. Hur-hur-hur.
Crott looked distractedly around the feasting hall. It was the same as any other night in the high-vaulted stone hall. Laughter, food, carousing; the high life of the beggars. He was their guardian, and he took his post seriously. The rest of the world could slide into the abyss for all he cared, but not his people. Their faces might be scarred and deformed, their limbs twisted or missing, but their hearts were the same as any. He felt himself failing them. The omens, the Rat King, the Crimson Fever... all symptoms of the evil that was to come. He was not a man who believed in God, but he believed in the Fraternity, and he believed in wych-kin. And he knew what they could do.
The word went out at dawn. Messengers were sent to the three other Beggar Lords, telling them what was occurring, warning them to be prepared. Crott’s gang were informed, ordered to forsake their begging duties for the coming day and prepare for a war. Traps were checked, fortifications were built, doors were bolted. Guards were sent to the sewers, lookouts to the high-ground, spies out on the streets. Crott had not wanted to give the order until the very last, because he knew that panic and disorder were never far away when people were scared, especially when they did not know what to be scared of.
The evil is coming, was the whisper around the Lanes. The evil is coming. But what the nature of the evil was, no-one knew.
It was enough for the people of the Crooked Lanes that their Lord had given them an order; and being superstitious folk, having witnessed for themselves the foul portents that had spread across the city, they believed in the evil. The Crimson Fever was spreading fast outside the Lanes, and several had already fallen within, though mercifully they had not infected any others as far as anyone could tell. They knew dark times were upon them, and many of them were relieved to be doing something about it.
The warrens that ran beneath the streets had always been ready for a war. The beggars lived in a state of permanent alertness, for their enemies were many. There were the Peelers, who had always wanted to clear the Crooked Lanes of her festering inhabitants; there were the other Beggar Lords, whose constant struggle for territory and advantage meant that conflict was never far away; and of course there were the wych-kin. In less than twenty-four hours, the Lanes would be as fully prepared as they could be, and their deeper recesses would be as impenetrable as the Tower of London.
Cathaline returned to the cold, sterile room like a moth to a flame. She had stolen short hours of sleep here and there, but the tiredness that had draped itself across her shoulders would not be shifted by such half-hearted remedies. Here, time seemed to slow, measured by breaths rather than seconds. Leanna Butchers breaths, becoming progressively more erratic as she neared the end. She had the smell of death on her.
Leanna Butcher: utterly insignificant in every way. Unhappily married to a callous and uncaring husband, a worker in a tin-packing factory, she was a pale and frail thing. All that Cathaline knew about her was that she had embarked on an affair, a forbidden love somewhere in London. She had divined that much from the letter in her pocket, a tender and heartfelt confession of one mans feelings. It was the one shining light in Leanna’s dreary life, and it had been snuffed out when she became the final mark in a demonic join-the-dots puzzle.
She had been kidnapped and taken in secret to the Crooked Lanes. Nobody knew where she was. She had disappeared. That was the way it had to be. No hospital could protect her from the wych-kin.
So she lay; alone, dying. There were guards outside the door, and the occasional visit from the doctor, but beyond that... nothing. Only Cathaline, for hour after hour, sitting with her. Something about the woman provoked a terrible sadness in Cathaline, the woman and the letter. Why didn’t you leave your husband? Why didn’t you try to be happy? Why did you stay crushed and downtrodden? She felt as if she knew this woman, knew her by her pinched features, her mousy shape, her drab clothes and bonnet. She had read the letter many times, drawn many details from it. It pricked her heart, for reasons she could not explain. Insignificant Leanna Butcher was now the most important person on Earth to them. She was dying for them, and only one person cared enough to be with her when she did.
What cruel foul things people are, Cathaline thought. With their ambitions and their greed and their ignorance. This whole city will go about its affairs this morning and not one hundredth of them even know that their lives may be preserved one more day be-cause of this woman. And those who do know don’t care. They only care that her heart keeps working. If she never awoke, if she kept on breathing but never awoke; why, that’d be just perfect for them.
Sometimes she hated the city. The factories spewing filth, the endless new inventions, the strict manners, the criminals... this was the face of the Age of Reason, the new world of science. Muck and soot and horrible, horrible greed. Murder and spite and hatred. The factories brought the money, and where there was money there were the businessmen, and who gave a shilling about the life of a poor woman like Leanna Butcher when there were a million like her to pack the boxes, work the looms, stir the lye? Cathaline longed for days she had read about, days of country folk, days of villages and honest work and a warm hearth. Days where people cared about each other, and it was only the aristocracy who spent their days debating how to kill each other while the common man got on with his business.
Such days probably never existed, she told herself, but she could dream. Dream of a place that was not like this, this soulless, polluted, seething mass of humanity’s worst. Dream of a world without wych-kin.
She held Leanna Butcher’s cool, dry hand, and read the letter to her for the hundredth time. She hoped that somewhere, Leanna could hear and be glad that there was someone who loved her. Somehow, she knew Leanna was going, going soon. She finished the letter, and looked up at the ceiling of the dim room, as if she could see through it to the dawning sky. Tears sprang to her eyes. What would become of them now, now the darkness was poised to swallow them? What would become of them all?
She was still holding Leanna’s hand when she died.
PART FOUR:
THE DARKENING
PORTENTS
THE NIGHT MARE
THE FIRST DARK DAY 20
The catastrophe came slowly on to London.
Morning had broken, sheeting rain down on to the dirty streets, turning everything dark and glistening. People got up as usual; the tram drivers, the muffin-men, the cobblers and solicitors. The night-folk took their rest, the prostitutes and the gamblers and those who ran the opium dens in the Docklands. One shift off, one shift on, the city went on as normal, unaware of the horror bearing down upon it. Only the innocent and the sensitive felt what was happening. All across London, babies cried incessantly. Palm-readers and fortune-tellers—those who were genuine, anyway—shut up their shops and huddled fearfully in their homes. Dogs howled, cats wailed, and people commented that it was most odd, how, even in the centre of the city, the cacophony of animals was to be heard in the distance.
It was in Margate that people noticed it first. There was a stiff west-to-east breeze blowing, curving the rain as it fell. Why, then, was the high, bobbled blanket of cloud moving west, against the wind—towards London? Similar observations were made in the north and south, where the clouds were rolling perpendicular to the bluster, crawling steadily inward in the direction of the capital.
The storm began at mid
-afternoon, doubling the fury of the rain and jabbing forked sparks of lightning down on the city, the sky flashing and booming with terrible rage. So heavy was the downpour that it masked the clouds above, and consequently few were aware that the thick grey mass looming over them had begun to slowly circle.
So immense was the scale of the phenomenon that it would only have been possible to fully appreciate it from high above. If a person could have ridden a hot-air balloon high into the stratosphere, higher than anyone had ever gone, they might have looked down and seen a sight never seen before. The British Isles were covered in cloud, as was usual for this time of year, but never had it behaved in such a way. It appeared that London was sucking in the cloud in a great spiral. The vast, louring bulk was circling massively, like water down a plughole. London was the centre of a huge, rotating monstrosity of cloud. The eye of the hurricane.
By now it was only the most ignorant or those best versed in denial of the unknown that could not feel the unease and faint dread which settled upon them like ash. Something primal in their souls spoke to them, telling them that something unnatural was happening, made their spines prickle and their hands jitter. Only the women discussed their fears; the men kept it to themselves. That was the way of things.
The gas lamps were lit at four o’clock, so dark had it become. They glowed pallidly, reflecting in waving lines on the rippling rivers that chased each other down the streets. By six o’clock, people had begun noticing the reddish glow from the sky, strongest in the south, across the Thames; but the rain was still too strong to see through.
Just shy of eight o’clock, the rain thinned and stopped; and finally, the people of London realized that their unease had not been mere fancy, but terribly real. For there, hanging above the Old Quarter, was the centre of the spiral of cloud that stretched across the land, and at its core the sky glowed afoul arterial red. Like a slow whirlpool of blood it stirred around and around, rumbling and growling, flickers of dry lightning lashing from the maelstrom and darting down to the ruined, bomb-torn streets below.
Behind the clouds, night fell, deepening the already dark day to black. The fog gathered in the alleys and roiled out on to the streets. And with the fog came the wych-kin in their hordes.
They came from the Underground, pawing their way through the locked doors of the stations. They came across the Thames. The bridges across the river were guardless all of a sudden, and the gates hung open. They walked like ghosts through barriers, slipped from the shadows, slid beneath doors. They stalked and shifted, half-seen things, and the wolves stalked with them. Unhurried, they passed into north London, quietly, stealthily, and there they spread like a plague, finding new hollows to dwell in, new streets to roam. New lives to take.
It took time. First to suffer were those areas which nestled close to the Thames. Wych-kin moved subtly, each with their own urges and intentions. Perhaps two hundred were afflicted in that first night, but nobody had any idea of the insidious tide that was washing foetidly beneath their window sills until it was far, far too late.
In her bed in Chelsea, the copywriters wife Claris Banbury woke with a shriek to see her husband rising from beneath the sheets of his own bed, lifting silently into the air. As the white shroud fell free, she saw in terror that his eyes were closed, that he was lying perfectly straight in sleep. Still shrieking, she saw the thing lurking in the shadows of the corner of the room, visible only in the murk of sleep-fogged eyes. Naked, twisted, an old, old crone with her long straggly hair cloaking her bent body, she crouched on all fours with hooves for feet and a long tail twitching behind her. Claris’s heart had always been weak; it stopped altogether at the sight of the Night Mare taking her husband, and she sighed and lay back in her bed as if returning to slumber. She did not see her husband continue his smooth rise to the ceiling, dreaming of flying, until he was swallowed by the shadows up there. She was spared the slow, steady droplets of blood that began to spatter the beds, drip, drip, drip, painting the white sheets in shocked flowers of red.
Stepney Cemetery, a sprawling patch of walled-in grass scattered with tombs and markers for the victims of the Vernichtung. The fog that gripped the city was only a wispy mist here, due to some trick of geography. Corbis Tallow, grave-robber of no mean reputation, was in the process of procuring a fresh corpse for the experiments of one particularly ambitious doctor when he walked between the moon and the grave of Kitamina Forrest, a young aristocrat’s daughter who had fallen to polio, aged eight. It was a little-known fact even to scholars of wychcraft: that ghasts preferred the tombs of children to hide in, but Corbis had never even heard of a ghast, and so he walked on, leaving his moonshadow behind him in the clutches of the wych-kin, not realizing that he had already died.
Barrow Smith, real name Boris Dunkel, an immigrant from the Teutonic states, had not found life in London easy. Experience had taught him to curb his accent, for Londoners were not fond of his people after the Vernichtung, and he lived under another identity to prevent the random beatings that he had suffered in the years following the bombing of the city. Bitterly now he hated the city to which he had come fifteen years ago. It had steadily worn him down, taking first his dignity, then his job as a secretary to a Bond Street lawyer, then his home. Fifteen years, and what was he left with? Only himself, a tattered rag of a man, tramping dismally over a heath in the undeveloped areas of Poplar, unable to sleep because the awful cold sent arthritic needles through his joints. So he walked, not knowing where, fog swilling around his ankles, hoping that somewhere on this wet, desolate patch of land was the long-awaited upturn in his fortunes that would make him feel a little bit human again.
He had not been witness to the strange and evil-looking phenomena over the Old Quarter, having spent the late evening huddled in an alley, screened in from the sky. Only after the fog had fallen did he decide to wander.
The yelp of the dog echoed eerily across the ghostly heath, making Boris start. He listened, and once again it came, a pitiful whine as of a mangy creature pleading for something. Boris looked, and he could faintly see a place where the earth folded over itself, leaving a small earthen cave with the roots of a nearby tree holding it up. A third sound, and he realized that the dog was inside the hollow.
There might have been a time when he would have imagined finding a hurt dog, nursing it back to health, having a companion to brighten his days on the streets. But his imagination had long since withered, and so he could think of no clear reason why he headed to the hollow, except that he felt a strange yearning for whatever was within.
“Here, boy,” he said, in perfect Cockney. “Lets ’ave you. Where are you, then?”
He crouched down in front of the hollow. Eyes glittered back at him. The yelp deepened to a growl, and Boris realized that whatever had been making that noise, it was most certainly not a dog, and that mistake was to cost him his entirely pointless life.
Jimley Potter, master pickpocket at the age of twelve, street-urchin in the employ of Pete the Knife. He slept, twitching, in his cot in an empty warehouse, along with six other boys his age who formed the rest of Pete’s gang. It wasn’t a bad life, stealing other people’s purses, keeping a bit and giving the rest to old Pete. Apart from the occupational hazard of being hung, it was really quite rewarding.
It was of the hangman’s noose that he dreamed now, a gallows standing alone on the Yorkshire Moors, the rope swinging steadily. He often dreamed of the noose, but he never remembered, just as he would not remember this one, which was remarkable because of a new element in it. There was a small child standing by the gallows, a little girl wearing a black funeral dress, and a black cloak with a hood set halfway back on her head. He could see she was entirely bald. Her eyes were downturned at first, but when they looked up at him he could see that her irises were red as blood, and her face was as cold as the grave.
He awoke as normal that morning, stretched, and got up to have breakfast. It was only later that day that the Crimson Fever began to make itself f
elt.
Frannie Best, prostitute and mother, lived on the top floor of a two-storey house. It stood alone, a little island in the centre of a particularly tight muddle of back streets. The property was the result of a helping hand from an appreciative client, who was also a landlord and who lived on the bottom floor with his wife. He had made a fortune from unscrupulous dealings in the developing areas of London, fiddling property boundaries to make a profit. Downstairs, he was sleeping soundly. Upstairs, Frannie did not know what to do. For twenty minutes now she had been watching the wych-kin circling her house, listening to the soft scrape of its feet, watching it lumber slowly and awkwardly along with the great, glowing round stone held in its big hands. Three times now it had stooped to put the stone down, each time at one of the corners of the house; three times it had walked away and returned with a new stone. It was a tall, mournful, dreadful thing, known in wychlore as a deildegast. It took the shape of a narrow, lanky man in rags, his head bowed, his shoulders drawn as he carried his burden. Shuffling like a sleepwalker through the fog, it made a slow circuit of the house, and if Frannie had counted, she would have noticed that it always made three circuits before dropping its stone.
Now, as it approached the fourth corner on its third trip around, Frannie panicked. She rushed into her two-year-old daughter’s room, swept her up, and ran. Down the stairs she went, her infant starting to squeal in her arms. Out of the door, her fear of the wych-kin overwhelmed by her fear of staying in that house when the final stone was placed.
The deildegast placed its last stone on the final corner, and vanished. A moment later, the house gave a groan and collapsed, burying the landlord and his wife, leaving only the stones, their glow dimming until they had faded to grey rock once more.