Graveyard Shift (11 page)

F
or our afternoon rounds, Mr. October wore the old man's body in the rumpled white suit as he always did for delicate occasions. We visited the hospital first.

By the time we arrived, the bus driver was in the intensive care unit and his ghost was pacing the waiting area like an expectant father. Mr. October whispered briefly with the receptionist, an elfin woman with white streaks running through her jet-black hair, then he took me aside.

“It's all clear. The Lords of Sundown have agents in every hospital — there's always a wealth of strandeds and newly-departeds in places like this — but we have our own here too. The receptionist is one of ours. She says none of Cadaverus's crew have shown up yet. Keep a lookout while I deal with the driver. He knows what's happened, but he doesn't know where to go from here.”

While Mr. October spoke to the man in a consultation
room across the corridor, I watched the comings and goings of hospital staff, patients, and visitors. If the enemy were as good at disguise as Mr. October said, they could be anywhere. A porter went by, pushing a gurney. A team of nurses followed. A man in a wheelchair with one leg in a cast rolled himself out of an elevator.

A blinding white light flashed behind the consultation room door. The receptionist winked at me and touched a finger to her lips, and I knew then that the driver was gone.

The rest of the afternoon was a whistle-stop tour. After the hospital we had a natural causes at a Putney Vale shopping center, then another at a nursing home in Richmond. Both were elderly and well mannered and knew it had been coming for some time.

The man at the nursing home was sitting in a chair by his bedside, staring thoughtfully at his lifeless body under the sheets. Hearing us enter the room, he took to his feet and looked at us calmly.

“Ah, it's you,” he said.

“Samuel Garner?” Mr. October said.

“Yes. I've been expecting you. I've been tired for so long.”

“That's fine,” I said, hoping I wasn't speaking out of turn. “You can rest now.”

He gave a sigh of relief. “At last.”

Later, we headed north for a 3618 in Wood Green. A forty-four-year-old man named Howard Burke had taken a tumble while performing a bit of DIY tile repair on his roof. The fall hadn't killed him, but the inflatable children's wading
pool in the garden where he landed had — 3618 meant drowning.

Then another natural causes at a tapas restaurant opposite Tufnell Park Tube station. After that, close to Highgate Cemetery, we found the ambulance victim, the 10176.

Bob Fletcher, 38, had been struck while crossing the street by an ambulance racing to answer an emergency call. Death had been instantaneous. Fletcher was livid. The scene had already been cleared, his body driven away, and now he sat by the roadside with a girl in a stylish black suit who was doing her best to console him.

“It's not fair,” Fletcher was saying. “My appointment with the specialist was such great news, everything I wanted to hear, and then that idiot came out of nowhere — I didn't have a chance. Look at me now — cuts and bruises, dislocated shoulder, and bloody invisible too! I'll sue, that's what. But who'll pick up my kids from school? Who'll tell my wife? She's expecting me home. I just called to say put the kettle on, we've got something to celebrate. . . .”

He hung his head. The girl at his side stroked his hand. Her tan face was fixed and serious, her black hair short-cropped and spiky.

“I know,” she said. “I know.”

“Who is she?” I asked Mr. October. “And how can she see him?”

“This is how they operate,” he said. “This is how subtle they are. It's why we have to keep up this pace. She's one of them, one of Cadaverus's cronies.”

He marched straight to them, addressing the girl in a voice that snapped like a whip.

“You. Hey, you. Scat!”

She looked up in alarm, let go of Fletcher's hand, and scrambled to her feet, facing Mr. October with an expression somewhere between fear and contempt.

“No,
you
scat,” she hissed. “We were here first.”

Mr. October drew a breath, as deep a breath as his body would allow, and as he leveled his walking stick, a strange animal sound crept from his throat.

“Shallaleiken fsood man-pareth,”
he said.
“Ark fnaark manpareth malakayenisti!”

It wasn't like any language I knew and I had no idea what it meant, but it obviously meant something to her. The girl tottered back several steps, rocking on her feet as if she'd been punched. Her eyes rolled back, showing only the whites. A tremor ran through her, causing her arms to shake violently. She began to shrink into herself, sagging inside her suit.

There was an explosion of dark light, the air turning black where she'd been standing, and then she vanished completely. In her place was a feral gray and black cat, teeth bared and back arched. It took one poisonous look at Mr. October before shooting off down the hill.

Mr. October took a step forward, flipped his stick neatly from right hand to left, then flashed out his free arm as if hurling a stone.

A ball of orange-yellow flame leapt from his fingertips
and trundled down the street, gathering speed after the cat. At the end of the block, the cat scaled a high trellis fence and dropped wailing to the other side. The fireball burst against the stone wall below it, scattering smaller balls of flame every which way. A smell of burning cinders crept up the street.

Mr. October leaned on his walking stick, watching the smoke clear.

“What the heck did I just see?” Bob Fletcher demanded. “I mean, what was that and who are you people?”

“Friends,” Mr. October said, helping Fletcher's ghost to his feet. The effort of doing that took something out of him, and he took a moment to catch his breath. “Yes, friends. Unlike the rapscallion you were just talking to.”

“You're lucky we got here,” I said.

“Lucky? You must be joking. How lucky is it to get run over by an ambulance? What did you do to that girl?”

Mr. October wiped his brow. “That was no girl. That was a shape-shifting agent of darkness.”

“Nonsense.” Fletcher paced the sidewalk, fuming, seemingly unaware of his oddly jutting dislocated shoulder. “Stuff and nonsense. She tried to help, couldn't you see? An agent of what? Get away. You're insane.”

“This will be tricky,” Mr. October told me. “He's angry and confused and convinced a great injustice has been done, the very qualities — or rather, weaknesses — the enemy look for in a target. They'll be back with reinforcements if we tarry too long.”

“What can we do?”

“Let me think.”

He stroked his white-whiskered chin, his face inscrutable. I shivered, sensing a change in the air. It was cooler now. The shadows of privet hedges and garden shrubs were stretching across the street.

Were these the reinforcements he meant? If the Lords of Sundown could take any shape, suppose they were inside these shadows, hiding and ready to spring?

“Look there.” I gave Mr. October a nudge.

“Shush, I'm still thinking.”

“Think faster, then. It looks like they're here.”

The black shapes crossing the ground suddenly looked more like spindly fingers than tree branches. One reached for my feet and I jumped across the curb with a yelp. Another twitched toward Mr. October, though he didn't acknowledge it. At the intersection where the fireball had detonated, a host of new shapes squirmed out from the shade beneath the stone wall.

“What will I do?” Bob Fletcher said. “What's the wife gonna do when she finds out she'll never see me again? And the kids . . . oh God, what a mess. What'll I do?”

A light came on in Mr. October's eyes.

“Listen,” he said. “Bob, will you trust me?”

“Why should I? I trusted that girl and you blew her to bits.”

“Only because I had to. She would've chewed you up and spat you out if you'd gone with her. You'd be a darn sight worse off than you are now.”

“You're mad. I'm not listening to you.”

“I'm all you've got,” Mr. October said. “What happened to you was tragic, but also inevitable. If it hadn't been an ambulance, it would've been something else, a truck or a taxi or falling masonry. Your time is up, and the sooner you let go, the easier it will be.”

The shadows were snapping at our heels. I hopped around the pavement, dodging them. All along the street they were tearing themselves from walls and fences, creeping out from under parked cars.

“Mr. October,” I said, close to panicking.

But he ignored me, resting a hand on Fletcher's busted shoulder and speaking to him in low, soothing tones.

“Trust me and I'll take the pain away, and the anger too. I'll make sure you see your wife one more time, give you a chance to say what you need to.”

Fletcher's anguished face softened. “You can really do that?”

“I really can.”

The shadows stopped in their tracks. Very slowly they began to withdraw, snaking back from the pavement where we stood. I watched them shrinking across the street until they were only shadows again, stirring gently over the asphalt in the breeze.

Bob Fletcher never even saw them. He had no idea what he'd done. Now I knew what Mr. October had meant when he'd said they fed on people's grief and rage. The smell of it
had lured them out of the dark, but Fletcher's change of mood had sent them straight back.

“I'd give anything for that chance,” he said, “even if it's only a few minutes. Sorry for carrying on before. I must be in shock.”

“No apology necessary,” Mr. October replied. “But we'd best be off. As you say, she's expecting you.”

 

It was a big art deco house on leafy Brim Hill, a pleasant and peaceful place until they broke the news and Mrs. Fletcher began to scream. I had decided to wait outside.

I stood in the driveway, watching the house, tired and hungry, wondering how Mr. October coped with this all the time, every day. The screaming stopped and a silence drew out, and all I heard then was birdsong, a distant lawn mower, an occasional car rushing by.

Finally the thing I'd been waiting for came: an explosion of light behind a downstairs window, startlingly bright as a camera flash. Seconds later, Mr. October came hobbling down the driveway, looking drained but flushing with pride.

“Sometimes I surprise myself, I'm that good,” he said. “That was hard work, but rewarding. Anyway, it's over now. He's gone to where Cadaverus can't reach him.”

“But Cadaverus nearly did.”

“Yes, he came close. You handled yourself very well, young man.”

We turned off the driveway and onto the street, heading to our next call in Belsize Park.

“How did you do it?” I had to ask. “The ball of fire was incredible.”

“Thought you'd appreciate the fireworks. Actually, it's mostly for show, and the Overseers don't encourage anything that's for show. They frown on pyrotechnics. Still, it does tend to give the enemy a bit of a fright.”

“Could I do that?”

“Not yet. Only at the appointed time, and even then only with practice. And please don't try it at home.” He checked the next card, the last on our list. “Ah. Another difficult case.”

“What language was it that you spoke to the girl?” I asked. It seemed to me the words he'd used had done even more damage than the fire.

“Ministry dialect.” He felt around inside his jacket. “Apocalypti slang, a form of ancientspeak only demons and field agents understand. Here, see for yourself.”

He took out a pocket-size book,
The Pandemonium Guide to Apocalypti Idioms & Phrases
, a slim volume that felt weightier in my hand than it should.

“Hardly a catchy title,” he said, “but its audience is limited because it's a near-impossible language to learn. Look inside and you'll see why.”

Opening the book at random, I could see he wasn't kidding. The print quivered around the page like grubs, the
letters scurrying in all directions to form new words, then breaking apart to form even newer words.

“Like the records office,” Mr. October said. “The book is alive and constantly changing. It takes enormous skill and concentration to master it.”

I turned to another page. More moving, scuttling text. It looked like the book had been colonized by ants.

“Don't strain,” he said. “You'll never be able to read it until you're ready. And when you're ready, be extremely careful how you use it. There's nothing more destructive than a few choice words of ancientspeak used in the wrong way. You could build new worlds with the right words, or just as easily tear worlds apart.”

I closed the phrase book, fascinated but somehow afraid of its power, and offered it back.

“Keep it for that time,” he said. “It's yours.”

“OK.”

I pocketed the book, amazed by the idea that these words could be like guns or bombs in the wrong hands. There was something awesome about that, something scary. Then again, I realized I may never be able to learn it. I couldn't until the words stopped moving, anyway.

 

The last stop on the shift, at Belsize Grove, proved to be the strangest of all.

In order to give Mr. October's legs a rest, we'd taken the
Tube from East Finchley and twenty minutes later came out onto Haverstock Hill. Now we were standing on a quiet sunlit sidewalk beside an herb garden that overlooked the curved steps leading down to a basement apartment. Mr. October rechecked the name and reference on the card — Andy Cale, 43765 — and I remembered the unusual circumstances of the death.

“It's the parcel bloke,” I said. “He mailed himself to his fiancée.”

“The very same.”

He started down the steps, testing each one with his stick as he went.