Fear was a glass knife in Rachel’s gut.
A smiling, round-bodied woman with cherubic curls and a dour-faced man in a black coat entered.
‘Please keep it down, ladies and gentlemen,’ the woman said with a faint foreign accent. ‘This is a hospital, after all.’
Rachel sought her eyes—this had to be Nora. She raised her voice.
‘We have reinforcements on the way! Put down your weapons now.’
Her words echoed from the cathedral-like ceiling.
‘Really? I think we will be gone before they arrive. If you put down your weapons, they may find you still alive.’
‘We both have Tickets,’ Rachel said. ‘We are not afraid.’
She clicked off the gun’s safety. One of the gunmen to her left reacted to the sound and immediately aimed a revolver at her, both hands around the grip, feet spread, clearly a marksman.
Joe swung his rifle towards the gunman in response. Clicks followed as five more safeties came off nearly in unison.
‘This room is a Faraday cage,’ the dour-faced man—Otto, presumably—said in a thin voice. ‘Your spirits will be trapped here, and the only way out is through the bodies we provide. But there is no need for unpleasantness. We are on the same side, Mrs White. And I believe that is Captain White with you?’
Joe grunted. A bead of sweat shimmered on his forehead.
‘Yes, this is Captain White of the One Hundred and Eighty-Seventh Aetheric Armoured Cavalry, and he is aiming between your eyes, sir,’ he said. ‘And gentleman though I am, I have no compunctions against taking out your lady friend as well.’
‘Whoever you are, you have an interesting definition of sides,’ Rachel said, trying to keep her voice steady. ‘If you surrender and cooperate, you will be treated well and compensated for any information you provide. That is the best offer you are going to get.’
‘Mrs White, your government is days away from starting a war in Spain. Iosif Dzhugashvili is the only man who can stop it,’ Otto said. ‘Our comrades have been hunted down all over Europe like animals by the NKVD. We desire nothing more than peace and an end to the abomination called the Presence that has swallowed millions of souls for nothing.
‘We are very grateful to you for providing us with our first weapon against it. You can change the world, Mrs White: just take Bloom in and keep him quiet.
‘Imagine if death meant something again, Mrs White. Imagine a world where war was something to be feared once more, where human well-being and health were cherished, where each citizen had to make the most of their allotted time. Where generational change and learning could be reinstated, instead of eternal rule by ossified queens and tyrants. Where everyone would understand what it is to feel true loss, as you once did.’
Rachel took a deep breath. Blood pounded in her temples.
‘We can make that world together, Mrs White, and all you have to do is nothing.’
Bloom spoke in a barely audible whisper.
‘They are lying,’ he said. ‘They will do anything to stop the Presence from learning about the Cullers. You can’t give up now. Imagine your Edmund Angelo. What kind of world would you have wanted him to grow up in?’
Joe threw a sidelong glance at Rachel. There was a question in his eyes.
Rachel’s heartbeat slowed until each thump in her chest was like a church bell tolling. A world with death, or without?
It was not her decision. She’d had enough of empires and dreams, and of the small men behind them. Bloom was right. She and Joe would end up in the crime hospital’s beds.
She looked at Joe. There might be a mad, terrible way out, she suddenly knew. Could she ask such a thing of him? He held her gaze, then closed his eyes in assent, briefly, like a tiny bird’s wingbeat.
She knew he had already made his decision.
‘You make some interesting points,’ Rachel shouted. ‘We are considering them. Why don’t you put your weapons down first, as a demonstration of good faith?’
Without looking towards the bed, she hissed between her teeth, ‘How much do you care about your mission, Peter? What are you willing to sacrifice to deliver your message?’
‘Anything. My soul.’ He paused. ‘Even to your husband.’
‘You had us worried there for a moment, Mrs White,’ Nora shouted. ‘But I am glad we can resolve this without violence—’
‘Goodbye, Peter. And thank you,’ Rachel said.
Then she shot Peter Bloom in the head.
* * *
For the second time in as many days, Peter Bloom tore through the disintegrating electric net of a brain, ejected into the Second Aether’s chill. This time, he struck something solid: the wall of the ward’s Faraday cage. He fluttered around madly in the enclosed hypercube until the momentum of his death died away and his hypersight started working again.
He saw the spiky thought-forms of Otto and Nora’s men, full of fear and rage. His deceitful Stalinist handlers, Otto cold and calculating, Nora a flower of malicious joy.
A swirling vortex where Captain White stood, pulling Peter in. An ectotank was an anti-medium, not a soul to be fought and subdued but a hole in the aether that was impossible to resist.
And then there was Rachel. As always, her soul was the most difficult to read. He thought he could see forgiveness in its angled, jewel-like petals, but he could not be sure.
Close enough, he thought, and threw himself into the mouth of the raging storm that was Captain Joe White.
* * *
Rachel dived to the floor as the Stalinists opened fire. The volley of shots boomed through the ward, stray bullets hitting unconscious bodies with meaty thunks. Feathers erupted from pierced pillows. She rolled under the metal-framed bed. It shook and rang in the rain of lead.
Rachel kept rolling and emerged on the other side. A silhouette to her right, two beds away, took cover behind a shelf. She fired from a sitting position. The man slumped to the ground, clutching his throat.
More shots. She moved into a crouch and dared a glance at Joe. He stood still, eyes closed. A bullet hole bloomed in his arm. Rachel screamed wordlessly.
It didn’t work, she thought. He is too weak. Two gunmen loomed low behind the cover of beds while another two advanced with shotguns.
Rachel braced her pistol on the bed frame and fired furiously at the oncoming men. The recoil tore at her wrists and lifted the muzzle. She took out a ceiling light in a shower of sparks.
Shotgun thunder. The bed next to Joe exploded in a fountain of crimson and torn sheets. An IV bag turned into rain.
Rachel struggled to bring her weapon to bear. The revolvers were taking aim. The next volley would go right through her.
‘Fockin’ cunts!’ Joan screamed, leaping forward. Something flashed in her hand, a knife. She sank it into one felt-capped man’s neck. Rachel fired at the other, missed. The sheets smoked from the muzzle flash.
Nora shot her zapper’s spikes at Joan. The Scotswoman went down, twitching.
The men with shotguns reloaded their weapons in unison. Spent shells clattered to the floor.
Then Joe changed.
Ectoplasmic whiteness erupted from his eyes and mouth, almost invisible in the harsh glare at first. It flowed over his skin in a thin film like milk, turned him into an eyeless, faceless marble statue.
The Stalinists fired. Rachel screamed. The buckshot stuck to the white membrane covering Joe’s face like metallic acne. He did not fall.
Instead, he rose.
Thick, fuzzy tendrils poured out of him like threads of candyfloss pulled from a child’s stick at a country fair. His body a white cocoon, he stood up on three spindly legs, a giant ungainly insect, brushing the ceiling.
For the first time, Rachel realised the ectoplasm was not white, but interwoven threads of all colours, the rainbow and hues she could not name.
The Stalinists stared up at Joe. For a moment, the guns were silent and the ward was deathly still. Then a bundle of hair-thin tentacles whipped forward fr
om Joe’s central mass. Rachel looked away. Wet noises followed, the sound of falling meat, and one scream. Breathing hard, she crawled forward. The ectoplasm shell made a high-pitched, keening sound.
Nora looked up at Joe’s new form with an expression of utter wonder, like a little girl seeing a butterfly for the first time, and shoved Otto forward, hard. Then she turned and ran.
Otto stumbled and fell. He let out a cry of anger and fumbled for his pistol. Joe descended upon him like a stinging spider.
Rachel wrenched herself up and ran after Nora. The floor was slick and something warm fell on her face, like hot rain. The Dutchwoman was about to slam the door shut behind her. Rachel fired one wild shot in her direction. It glanced off the metal door and Nora fled.
Rachel followed the clatter of her progress up the stairs. She wondered if her gun was empty, and if Nora was armed.
Behind her, the scream of the ectotank creature continued.
Rachel stopped. Nora’s footsteps receded into the distance. She lowered her weapon and then let it fall to the ground. I am not going to let a Soviet spy get between me and my husband a second time, she thought.
She turned around and returned to the ward.
The ward resembled an abattoir. The white ectoplasm thing hunched in the middle, stained pink, a swollen mosquito, its legs folded in sharp angles.
Rachel covered her nose and mouth and walked towards it. The terror would return to her in dreams, later, but for now she closed it out. The creature twitched and keened.
‘I can see you, Joe,’ she said. ‘I know who you are. I am not afraid.’
A tentacle lashed towards her. She closed her eyes. It skimmed her face: it felt like a rough paintbrush. She kept walking. More tentacles came, wound gently around her body. She spread her arms and allowed the thing to embrace her.
As she walked, the tentacles started melting away like candyfloss in rain, and by the time she reached the centre of the ward, only Joe sat there, on the floor, hugging his knees. He cried soundlessly, shaking all over.
Rachel sat down next to him and gathered him into her arms. He pressed his face against her shoulder as she caressed his back.
‘Ssh,’ she whispered. ‘It’s all over now. It’s all over. It’s gone. It’s just the two of us.’
She rocked him gently in the remains of the crime hospital, amongst the dead and the dying and the spirits, until Special Branch finally came.
* * *
So this is what Fading is like, Peter thought.
He was falling, falling faster than he had imagined possible. He had pushed all his vim through Joe White until there was nothing left. The living world receded away from him, all the soul-sparks a starry sky above.
He felt cold. Suddenly, it was difficult to remember what had happened just moments before. Rachel. Nora. The firefight.
He smiled as he fell, and forgot why he was smiling.
He fell through all the layers of the Summer City, lacking the strength to stop his descent, leaving parts of his self behind on the way.
Then all was dark and quiet. He liked it. It was easier to concentrate and think. He was still moving, still falling, faster and faster. Movement equalled thought, he remembered. In Summerland, you could think yourself anywhere. He had read that in a book, but did not remember its title.
If you strip away everything that is not needed, he thought, there will be some axioms left. Some axioms that you cannot prove. And statements like the Liar’s Paradox that can never be true or false. He held it in his mind, from a lecture he had attended, a liar saying they are lying, remembered the infinity of mathematics hiding within, a snake eating its own tail.
The point of consciousness that had been Peter Bloom kept falling towards infinity. After an eternity, he saw an ocean below him, an ocean of light, and on the other side, a starry sky—
24
THE LAST DANCE, 3RD JANUARY 1939
Rachel White spent almost two weeks sitting on a chair in a cell in Wormwood Scrubs while a procession of interrogators went through the events of the last month in ever-greater detail—and with varying degrees of competence, she thought.
She had not kept up with the news very much, but Joe told her that the fact that a Stalinist group was operating in Britain had made the headlines, and the government had used it as leverage in the negotiations in Spain. However, the existence of the crime hospital had been kept out of the press.
No one was quite sure what to do with her. Harker, in a fit of apoplexy, was initially going to fire Rachel outright. Surprisingly, Miss Scaplehorn stepped up, calmly stated that Rachel was in her Section now, and while Mrs White had clearly engaged in extracurricular activities of a questionable nature, the brigadier should pause to consider the outcomes. After a while, Harker appeared to realise that Rachel exposing Roger and the latter’s connections to the Summer Court gave him a big stick to beat the Spooks with. Finally, Noel Symonds called her and offered her the opportunity to pass over to the Summer Court and take the position in Counter-intelligence originally intended for Roger. She declined.
No one talked about CAMLANN.
* * *
Sometime during the endless series of debriefings, Prime Minister West came to visit her.
She was nursing a cup of cold tea when he entered: a small, round man with a tired face and thin white remnants of a moustache, yet strikingly clear silvery eyes. It took Rachel a moment to recognise him, but when she did, she stood up.
‘Sir.’
West waved a hand. ‘Don’t get up for my sake, Mrs White. Officially, I am not even here.’
He brought in a sweet scent with him that somehow reminded Rachel of a childhood summer.
With visible effort, West sat down in the interrogator’s chair and took off his hat. Rachel braced herself to recount yet another version of the story she had been repeating for days. She wanted to get out and visit Joe in hospital. He was improving, but the experience in the crime hospital had left him emotionally and physically drained.
‘I want to ask you about Peter Bloom, Mrs White. I believe you are aware of our … connection. Of course, if you were ever to mention it outside this room, I would categorically deny it.’
‘Of course, sir,’ Rachel said.
‘It would help me greatly to understand Peter’s final moments.’ He paused. ‘Not the details, but … did he find a purpose? Do you think he believed in what he did?’
‘Only Peter Bloom can answer that, sir. But for what it is worth, I do.’
‘Good. He spent so much time looking for that, looking for truth, for lack of a better word. Sometimes I envied him. My own life has mostly passed in the pursuit of imaginary things, politics included.’
Rachel said nothing. What did West want of her?
‘With that in mind, I want you to know that if you were to consider fulfilling Peter’s mission, you should not regard it as unpatriotic, but rather as a service. Or even just as a favour to a dying old man.’
West placed a card on the table in front of Rachel. It had a Hinton address written in a neat cursive hand.
‘I leave the choice up to you, Mrs White. When it comes to bringing a new world into being, I don’t think failed fathers are much good. What the future really needs is a mother.’
With that, he put on his hat and walked out in an old man’s waddle, and closed the door behind him.
* * *
A week later, Rachel sat down at an outdoor table at a French café in Marylebone, under the blasting warmth of a gas heater, next to the man who had been following her for the past hour.
He hid behind his newspaper for a moment. WAR ENDS IN SPAIN, the headlines screamed. LENIN’S GHOST SUGGESTS PEACE TALKS.
Rachel cleared her throat. The man folded the paper neatly and placed it on the table. He had world-weary eyes, a broad forehead and an ever-so-slightly sardonic, confident smile. He was in his mid-forties, well dressed, and had the beginnings of a paunch.
‘Good day, Mrs White,’ he
said. ‘I am Shpiegelglass.’
‘I have a notion of who you are, sir.’
Shpiegelglass was rumoured to be the head of an NKVD unit called the Mobile Group, tasked with purging Stalinists from the Soviets’ European networks. He had been linked to at least six disappearances in France and Austria, as well as the recent events in Spain.
‘I want to thank you,’ he said, taking a sip from his coffee cup. Rachel leaned back and looked at the passers-by. The café was in a corner next to a park, and the air smelled of dead leaves and cigarettes.
‘I am not in the habit of accepting the gratitude of NKVD agents,’ Rachel said.
He pressed the tips of his short, thick fingers together and leaned forward.
‘The situation is unusual, I admit. We had no idea about the Stalinist plot, and I was occupied elsewhere. Not only that, when I reported your actions to the Presence, it led to this outcome.’ He tapped the newspaper. ‘It was not a popular decision amongst my colleagues, nor your Service, I believe.’
‘It is not my Service anymore, sir. I resigned last week.’
‘Ah. In fact, I was aware of that.’ He smiled, still with a hint of mischief in the corners of his mouth. ‘I read Bloom’s reports. We would be very interested in working with you more closely. In a very limited capacity, you understand. Simply an extended interview, if you like.’
‘What, no meticulous asset development? No ideological narrative? No attempt to connect with me personally?’
‘I felt you might take it as a professional insult.’
‘As far as professional courtesy goes,’ Rachel said, ‘I should mention that your name did come up in my debriefing, and the Service is aware of your association with the two Dutch agents.’
‘Of course. I would expect no less.’
‘Respectfully, I am afraid I must decline your generous offer. However, I will make you a trade, Mr Shpiegelglass. You will leave me and my husband alone, and I will give you something.’ She took a fountain pen from her purse and scribbled the Hinton address West had given her on Shpiegelglass’s napkin. He picked it up, smearing the ink with his fingers, and glanced at it with apparent distaste.