Authors: Guy Adams
They cut through the train station, emerging onto Tooley Street and then moving up towards the river.
‘To be honest,’ Toby continued, ‘I think I was just panicking a little. I couldn’t see what my place was in the section. It was all weirdness, a world outside that which I’d trained for. I couldn’t see what use I would be. I could think of nothing worse than spending the rest of my days watching on in confusion while you explained some new and unbelievable bit of nonsense.’
Shining laughed. ‘So what changed your mind?’
‘I met a woman who tried to convince me I was right, that it was all beyond me. I reasoned she’d hardly be saying it if it were true.’
‘A woman?’ Shining stopped walking. ‘What woman?’
Toby told him everything that had happened the night before.
‘How interesting,’ said Shining, as they continued on their way.
‘I assume it was something to do with that enemy of yours in Whitehall, Sir Robin?’
‘I doubt it, it’s not his style at all. He’d just have threatened to cut your pension.’
‘Great.’
‘Stick with me and you won’t live long enough to claim one.’
‘That’s a relief. So who do you think she was?’
‘No idea – isn’t that lovely? You can’t beat a bit of intrigue. I dare say you’ll hear from her again.’
‘I look forward to it.’
They emerged onto the riverside, went past HMS
Belfast
and towards the lopsided glass onion of City Hall.
‘For now,’ Shining continued, ‘let’s keep our eyes on the road. I took a gamble yesterday as to the location of the numbers broadcast and Oman has confirmed my suspicions.’
‘Well, that makes things easier.’
‘Actually, probably not; it opens up a whole new can of worms.’
‘Oh good.’
Shining patted him on the shoulder. ‘You’re a new man this morning! Where’s the sullen cynic of yesterday?’
Toby shrugged. ‘He’ll be back soon enough. For now I’m taking the path of least resistance. No doubt I’ll be up to my neck in something utterly impossible before the morning’s out. Until then I may as well just enjoy the walk.’
It was a pleasant day for a walk. The sun was bright, and had brought the tourists out to stare at the water and photograph one another’s fixed smiles.
The two men worked their way along the waterside, past Tower Bridge and on towards the scrubbed, false world of Shad Thames.
‘We love our history with all the soot removed,’ said Shining, ‘Industry as a charming ghost rather than a grunting, sweating, creaking beast.’
The older man moved away from the river and into the tight network of streets.
He stopped in front of an apartment block and stared up at its stone and glass body. ‘How interesting.’
‘If you like Terence Conran,’ said Toby, noting the shop beneath the building. ‘Personally I find it all a bit Emperor’s New Clothes: spindly nothings, the only heft is the price tag.’
‘Hmm …’ said Shining, glancing at a clear Perspex chair in the window. ‘I stumbled upon a real ghost chair once – cost more than a couple of hundred quid to sit in it. I wasn’t looking at the shop, though.’ He stepped as far back as he could, resting his back against the external wall of the building opposite. ‘Look between the buildings. What do you see?’
Toby stood next to him. ‘A bit of industrialist grey with a door in it, staff entrance to the shop maybe? I don’t know – just looks like a join between the two buildings.’
‘Keep looking.’ Shining walked across the road, marched up to the divide between the shop on the right and the clean walls of Cinnamon Wharf on the left. He reached his hands out towards the plain, grey concrete. Then he continued to walk and Toby was faced with exactly what he had predicted only a few minutes earlier: the utterly impossible.
From the young man’s perspective, the narrow stretch of concrete – no more than six feet wide – shimmered and ballooned
outwards, changing its appearance entirely. It was a warehouse. Not the spruced-up, rebuilt apartment blocks that now filled the area but an ageing, crumbling, dirty stretch of wood and brick. Once the illusion had been broken, Toby could see it clearly, unable to believe he hadn’t noticed it in the first place. There was an entire warehouse between the shop and the apartment block. Shining reappeared, framed in the large, tatty doorway, having pushed open the double doors.
‘You see it?’
‘I see it.’
‘Come on then, if you’re going to accept the impossible you may as well explore it thoroughly.’
Toby walked across the road, narrowly avoiding a bicycle courier.
‘Open your eyes, mate!’ the cyclist shouted. Toby thought he could tell him the same.
‘I’m trying to remember walking past it,’ he said to Shining as he entered. ‘Surely you must notice it’s taking you too long to get from one place to the other? Your eyes say it’s only a few feet and yet you spend too long walking next to it.’
‘Did you notice?’
‘No.’
‘Then you have your answer.’
Toby looked around. The ground floor was open, some signs of a few crumbled partition walls, a rotting staircase heading up to a second level that could be glimpsed through the occasional hole in the ceiling.
‘Some form of perception field, I imagine,’ said Shining, continuing to explain the trick that had hidden the building from sight. ‘You can only see it if you know it’s there.’
‘A spy’s dream.’
‘Hardly one hundred percent reliable though. It didn’t take much encouragement for you to see it, did it? If I were them, I’d have put up more protection than that.’
There was a crashing sound from upstairs.
‘What the hell was that?’ asked Toby.
‘More protection?’ wondered Shining.
‘I’m really beginning to hate this job,’ said Toby. ‘What’s it going to be now? A dragon? A yeti?’
‘Nothing so subtle I expect,’ muttered Shining, dropping to the floor and beginning to trace in the dust with his fingers.
Toby shook his head in exasperation and began backing towards the door. ‘And this would be why she was right, telling me that I wasn’t cut out for this section …Years of training and it’s still like sending a plumber to fix your computer. I don’t suppose you thought to sign out a firearm?’
‘I haven’t carried a gun for ten years,’ Shining admitted, busily drawing a large circle in the dirt. ‘I think there may be an old revolver in the office kitchen if you want to bring it with you in future. I’m pretty sure it still fires. They built things to last in the ’40s.’
‘You’re not making me feel any better.’
‘In truth, neither would the gun. It would be no more use to you in a situation like this than a roughly sharpened pencil. In fact, the pencil would be better … Easier to draw with than your finger.’
The clattering noise increased. A cacophony of splintered brick and snapped wood.
‘And drawing helps?’ asked Toby.
‘It might. Stand inside the circle and keep your feet within the line.’
‘You’re asking me to just stand still and wait for whatever that is?’
‘I am, and because you’re clever enough to realise that while
you
may not be trained to face whatever it is, I
am
, you’ll do it.
Now
.’
Toby stepped inside the rough circle Shining had drawn. ‘I still think I’d have preferred the gun.’
Shining was moving around on his hands and knees, adding embellishments to the circle, swirls and symbols.
‘That Egyptian?’ Toby asked.
‘Sumerian.’
‘Great. I work in British Intelligence and my section head is writing in Iraqi.’
‘Very ancient Iraqi.’
There was one more crashing noise and then it was replaced with the sound of hooves. Dust poured in torrents from the ceiling.
‘A horse,’ said Toby. ‘Somebody’s riding a horse up there.’
‘No, that would be ridiculous.’
‘I’m glad to hear you say that.’
‘Not some
body
, some
thing
. You’d never get a real horse and rider up those stairs.’
Toby shook his head and stared at his feet. ‘I am imagining this, aren’t I? Like the story you told me yesterday. This is a hallucination, a trick.’
‘Possibly, but I don’t think so.’
‘You said it wasn’t a
real
horse and rider …’
‘That doesn’t mean they’re a figment of your imagination. Now shush a minute, I need to concentrate.’
‘Shush a minute?’
The sound of horse’s hooves increased in volume as whatever it was galloped across the length of the floor above, heading towards the stairs.
‘It’s coming.’
‘I know, and you need to
not
look.’
‘What?’
The hooves began to descend the stairs, Toby saw a glimpse of old bone in the pale light that cut through the shadows.
‘It’s important, Toby. You mustn’t look at it. Close your eyes, stare at your feet – whatever you find easier, but
do not look directly at it
.’
‘Why?’ The hooves descended even further, a thin band of the horse’s chest now visible, a ragged thing of butchered meat.
‘Because it doesn’t need to touch you to kill you.’ Shining stood in front of Toby and grasped the young man’s head in his hands. ‘Look at the floor.’ He forced Toby’s head forward. ‘Describe your shoes.’
‘What do you mean “describe my shoes”? What earthly fucking point is there in my describing my shoes?’
‘Please, Toby, trust me and do it.’
Toby gave a slight nod but Shining continued to hold his head.
‘Light brown, scuffed. Mismatched laces. I always snap the laces and end up having to replace them. Should replace the shoes too. I get through them so quickly, always buy chain store cheap. Something about the way I walk wears the heel down at an angle. Before you know it I’m on a tilt every time I stand still. What’s the point in spending real money on them?’
The hooves had reached the bottom of the stairway. Their progress slow now, and steady.
‘Keep talking,’ said Shining. ‘In what way do you walk funny?’
‘I don’t know. Not something I’m aware of. It’s only looking at the shoes that you notice. Forty-five degree angle worn out on each heel. Right in the corner.’
‘Do you get back pain?’
The hooves continued towards them. No urgency, just a gentle, casual trot across the cement floor.
‘Let me guess: you’re a trained chiropractor too?’
‘Not sure I go along with chiropractic medicine, actually.’
‘I used to think that, but I went to a guy once – when I was having real back trouble – and he sorted me out a treat.’
‘I suppose there may be benefits as an art of physical manipulation. It’s the notion of “Innate Intelligence” I struggle with – the idea that manipulating the spine can cure your kidney troubles.’
‘I don’t know about all that. But I went in with back pain and I came out without it.’
‘Fair enough. I can be too much of a cynic sometimes.’
Toby and Shining looked at one another and Toby actually felt himself laugh. ‘You’re a mad old bastard, you know that?’
‘I do.’
The hooves circled them.
‘Ignore it,’ Shining insisted as Toby’s head twitched towards the noise. ‘It’s nothing to us. A passer-by. Beneath our attention.’
Toby nodded.
‘My sister,’ said Shining, ‘now she’s a great believer in alternative medicine. I once had to spend an hour having tea with her in Claridge’s with twenty acupuncture needles dangling from her face. The waiting staff ignored it completely of course, even though she kept getting bits of scone stuck on the tips.’
‘What’s your sister’s name?’
‘Have a guess.’
‘June?’
‘Two months out. She’s April.’
‘Your parents really didn’t like to think too hard about names, did they?’
‘Their minds were on other things. I’m lucky I wasn’t born a week later. September Shining – sounds like a Coldplay album.’
The hooves finished their circuit. The horse whinnied, the sound wet and raw.
‘Thank you for not suggesting I was too old to have heard of Coldplay,’ Shining continued. ‘My ears are still functioning perfectly.’
‘Not if they’re listening to Coldplay, they’re not.’
‘You prefer Beethoven, I suppose?’
‘Piss off.’
‘Sorry … Ludwig.’
‘You’re forgiven … September.’
‘So what music do you like?’
‘I don’t know … all sorts …’
‘Please tell me you’re not the sort of man who just listens to the radio and occasionally digs out his two CDs, one of James Bond themes and the other
Queen’s Greatest Hits
?’
‘No. I like a lot of music. It’s just all a bit—’
The horse whinnied again, this time followed by the sound of something fleshy hitting the floor.
‘—strange. I like atmospheres. Weird sounds. A lot of movie soundtracks. Tom Waits … Love Tom Waits.’
‘“Innocent When You Dream” was always one of my favourites. Rather apt with people running through a graveyard.’
‘You know him then? Don’t suppose he’s one of your agents?’
‘Sadly not … he works out of Langley.’
The hooves began to retreat. Slow, reluctant, heading back towards the stairs.
‘It’s going,’ said Toby.
‘It is.’ The hooves began to ascend the stairs once more. ‘But don’t relax just yet.’
‘As if I would.’
There was a final, terrible cry from the horse and then the hooves galloped across the floor above and there was a loud crash as it departed their world.
Both men sagged against one another in relief.
‘And you think you haven’t got what it takes to survive in Section 37?’ said Shining. ‘I think you’re a natural.’
‘Why am I not finding that a comfort?’
‘The day you get comfortable with any of this would be the day you’d be in the most danger. I’ve been up to my neck in the impossible for fifty years and it still gives me the willies.’
‘What was that thing?’
‘Angel of Death – at least, an exceptionally clichéd manifestation of it.’
‘Angels? I have to believe in
angels
now?’
‘Just a name. Magic is all about personality and preconception. That trap was laid by a traditionalist – it was a pure dose of Dennis Wheatley.’