Authors: Kat Richardson
A tourist is one among thousands, but a first-class traveler is one of a hundred and, like any other undercover job, I’d had to look the part. Now I had to act it as well until I could shift into the next physical and mental disguise. I suspected that most of my investigations in London would require a less-affluent wardrobe and an attitude that wasn’t as hard as my usual street armor. I already missed the convenience of my old, wrecked Rover with its cache of clothes and tools. The hotel would have to be my base of operations, so, first thing, I’d need to find an unobtrusive way in and out, or risk attracting attention. Vampires are a paranoid lot and if some local faction had moved against Edward as he seemed to suspect, they’d be on the alert for anything that indicated his eye was on them. Eventually, they’d connect me to Edward, but the longer I could keep that from happening, the better.
The car had just passed some kind of light industrial or office complex and the wide, multilane road descended from its protected cement embankments to run at street level as a highway when the preternatural world flooded over me. I hadn’t noticed the Grey much before that; the area west of London along the M4 was a little more rural than the suburban mix between Seattle and our own airport at Sea-Tac and not quite as haunted—which isn’t much to begin with. But leaving the motorway and entering the streetscape of western London was like stepping into a deep and turbulent sea of the Grey, even inside the damping barrier of the car’s steel and chrome. I don’t know why I hadn’t given much thought to the weight and chaos of the unseen that would grow up along with a city over the course of two millennia, but it was as thick and opaque as a one of London’s famous Victorian fogs and I shuddered with cold, although the sunny afternoon was pleasantly warm—hot by native standards.
“Would you like the air turned off?” the driver asked.
“Huh?” I coughed, the centuries choking and slamming through me.
“The air-conditioning. Would you like it turned down? You seem cold.” His speech wasn’t strict BBC bland but it was carefully correct. I suspected he spoke with a broader accent at home but was supposed to present a bit more polish on the job.
“Yes. Please.” If it would help me warm back up after the shock of sudden immersion in the icy sea of the past, I was in favor of it. I would have to gain some control and equilibrium before we reached the hotel or I might be completely useless—or at the least as sick and punch-drunk as I’d been the first few times I’d stepped into the Grey.
“Where are we?” I asked, groping for something to orient myself by.
“Just coming into Hammersmith. Not much farther.”
“How much longer to London, then?”
He laughed. “Sorry, miss. We’ve been in Greater London since we left Heathrow. It’s all London.”
“But you said Hammersmith. . . .”
“It’s one of the outer boroughs. London’s like . . . a lot of little cities that grew together. I’ve a cousin in Queens, New York, says it’s the same sort of thing there. One vast city made of a lot of bits. What you probably think of as London, that’s really just a couple of the old cities—the City of London, and the City of Westminster—and the inner boroughs.”
“Like most people think New York is just Manhattan,” I suggested.
“That’s what my cousin said!”
“So . . . how big is London?” I asked, realizing I’d bitten off a lot more than I’d imagined in agreeing to come with no idea which part to look in for Edward’s answers or my own.
“Huge! But not to worry. Your hotel’s central. You’re almost in the Square Mile.”
“What’s that—the Square Mile?”
“Used to be the old City of London. Now it’s business offices, banks, stock exchange, the Old Bailey, the Inns of Court, and the like. When your business associates say ‘the City,’ that’s what they mean. Westminster is right next door. That’s where the cathedral and the abbey and parliament are. You know: Big Ben and that sort of thing. Lots of sightseers round about, lots of one-way roads, narrow bits, alleys . . . Traffic’ll be a bit thick. Far more agreeable to walk in than drive.”
“So don’t rent a car.”
“Absolutely not. Stick to your feet when you can, cabs when you have to—even the Tube, buses, and so on, though they can be nasty—and you’ll get round much quicker and slicker. A bicycle is useful if you have one, but walking’s generally the thing.”
I nodded, making vague noises of agreement as the car wormed its way deeper into the thick of London and its ghosts. I tightened my focus to the deepest levels of the Grey, where the magical energy grid of London blazed in polychrome lines and labyrinthine whorls that darted in and out of the earth we passed over. I hadn’t been a good student of history, but I had heard that modern London was built on the wrack and ruin of earlier settlements and prior incarnations that had burned, or sunk, or been knocked down, and been built over again and again, rising higher on the delta of mud and memory. I concentrated on the hard power lines until I had a solid feel for the magical bones of the city and its layers of history before I let myself swim back up to a more normal level of vision.
As I drew a long, steadying breath and blinked around at the busy world of London’s reality overlaid with the riotous layers of its ghosts, the driver pulled to a halt in a narrow road.
“Here you are, miss.”
My hotel proved to be a modern, glass-and-steel-fronted tower on a tiny street just across a big road and a wide park from the Thames. I took a look up and down the lane from behind the sedan’s tinted glass, trying to set the scene and location in my mind. There was a low Victorian stone building just across from the hotel with a strip of bright blue signage that identified it as TEMPLE STATION. A pair of other buildings flanked the hotel but faced the roads to each side, like bodyguards. No sign of a service or employees’ entrance from the front of the elegantly stark facade, so I assumed there would be one on the side or a back alley where the public couldn’t see the unglamor ous aspects of hotel service without going out of their way. The small street wasn’t very busy except for the people going in and out of the Underground station, but the wide boulevard running along the riverside was aswarm with all sorts of people from immaculately dressed men and women in business suits to tourists in jeans and T-shirts with sunglasses and hats protecting their eyes from the glitter of light off the waters of the Thames. Surging through it, layer on layer of ghosts. The mix, so close at hand, reassured me that I wouldn’t find it hard to slip away from my glamorous pad and become anonymous.
A dark-coated doorman stood at the curb, wearing a top hat in defiance of the wind off the river. He stepped forward and opened my door as the driver fetched my suitcase from the trunk.
“Welcome to the Howard, miss.”
I barely got out a “thank you,” before I and my bags were whisked into the lobby. As I turned from the car, something near the Underground station gave a fractured glitter through the Grey like light tripping off a broken mirror. I turned around to catch it but saw only a white streak of movement that vanished into the shade of the station’s doorway to roost among the steam-shapes of the Grey.
From my room I had a view of the Thames and the street below. The room was a bit too high for me to see the inside of the Underground station’s doorway, but I could see the sidewalk in front of it. The layers of glass between me and the exterior filtered the Grey to a dim soup of mist and Saint Elmo’s fire, but I could still detect something near the station’s entrance that was more like a faceted void of Grey than the usual lingering energy colors. I observed it for about twenty minutes before it drifted deeper into the Tube station and disappeared. Something that wasn’t quite there was watching my hotel.
It took a bit of looking to find a newsagent. The shops were narrow and varied wildly, from specialists in arcane materials and curious arts that had been in business since William and Mary, to bustling little food stands selling everything from spicy kebabs and curry to bacon sandwiches and cups of steaming tea. There were also lots of pubs with contingents of smokers relegated to the sidewalks with their cigarettes in one hand and their pints in the other, talking nonstop and blocking the pavement, unable to hear my “excuse me” over the roar of traffic and the babble of voices.
I finally found what I was looking for. The small shop sat next to a post office and advertised newspapers, magazines, books, and maps on its sign. Like many of the small, street-level businesses I’d already passed, it was more like a deep stall than anything else and empty of people except me and the cashier. Local maps and other aids for travelers were prominently racked near the front, so I went in and bought several as well as a small bottle of water and an energy bar. I asked the very young woman behind the counter about the address Edward had given me for his missing agent, John Purcell.
She squinted, her brow creasing crookedly where a piercing had been removed, and tilted her mouth to one side as she thought. Her hair was patchwork brown over a previous dye job that had left it a bit brittle. Green and blue glints shot through her aura like tiny shy fish. If someone had asked, I’d have guessed she was coming out of a broken relationship with a bad boy and a bad crowd. Her accent was decidedly less posh than those I’d heard at my hotel and her demeanor a little nervous.
“Jerusalem Passage? Not sure. Here, let’s look.” She flipped open the map book I’d just purchased and riffled through the street index until she found it. Then she flipped back to the appropriate page. “Oh, that’s Clerkenwell. Must be just north of the old priory gate. See,” she added, pointing to a convoluted quirk of streets near Clerkenwell Road and St. John Street, about half a mile northeast of where we stood.
I peered at the page and had difficulty picking out the narrow wiggling line of Jerusalem Passage. “It must be a very narrow street,” I thought aloud.
“It’s not a proper street,” the shopgirl said. “It’s a passage.”
I didn’t know the difference. “Is that like an alley?” I asked.
“Sort of, but not. It’s, umm . . . it’s a walkway. Not a promenade—not wide like that—and not like a regular pavement on the edge of a road. Just a footpath, not very wide, say . . . three people wide—or two fat German tourists.” She looked startled at what she’d said and lowered her head back to the map with a blush.
She studied the book for a moment and flipped it over to the Underground system map on the back before adding, “Not sure about the bus. The closest Tube station would be Farringdon, but you’d have to take the Circle line all the way round past Aldgate. Bloody pain that is.” She winced a little and glanced at me to see if I’d noticed before going on. “Much shorter to walk if you don’t mind it.”
“I don’t mind at all.”
“Good. Weather’s nice for it. Here, now . . . what’s the best way . . . ?” she pondered.
Between us we worked out a route that was easy but not too ugly. “If you’ve a mind to, you could go up Hatton Garden to Clerkenwell Road instead of Charterhouse to St. John’s. It’s not so direct, but the jewelers are worth a glance.”
I looked at the map again. Purcell’s home was within a few minutes’ walk of a lot of “points of interest,” according to the map. Of course that was true for a lot of London addresses, but this one was old and close to a lot of economically important businesses that had been around since the city was young: the jewelers, the meat markets, the old business districts for cloth makers and brewers, and the hospital and medical school at St. Bartholomew’s among others. An ideal place for a vampire who managed the long-term investments of other vampires.
Of course, if Purcell was there, he wasn’t likely to be awake for hours, but he’d have to have some kind of daylight assistant I could track down. And if not, I’d look for records.
“Oh,” I started, “where would I find records of titles and deeds and things like that?”
“For Clerkenwell? Parish records to start, maybe at Clerkenwell Heritage Centre if it’s something old. They’d tell you where to go after that.”
I thanked her and headed out toward Fleet Street and Clerkenwell.
I’d read a lot of British mystery novels in my time, but I didn’t expect to see much that recalled the worlds of Christie or Sayers or Conan Doyle. But between the occasional high-rises, the roads were lined with buildings that hadn’t changed in hundreds of years, and the routes blazed with a millennium of coming and going worn deep into the ground but still shining upward. And the city sang.
The Grey makes a noise composed of the murmuring of ghosts and the vibration of power. Each city sounds different: Seattle mutters and rattles; Mexico City hums like feedback. London raised a mighty chorus over the bass drone of the river Thames. The power lines of the Grey were not laid in a neat grid, like Seattle’s wire-frame world, but in wild-hare directions and labyrinthine meanders that came together in knots of brilliant colored light. I couldn’t see them all, but I knew there were layers of history as thick and striated as sandstone beneath my feet, just as they were at the street level. The ghosts of buildings glistened over the surfaces of present structures, and phantom traffic choked the streets with oxcarts, horses, trams, and pedestrians. Most of the visions were from the eighteenth century onward, after the city had recovered from its own Great Fire, but promontories of older times and buildings long gone thrust up from below or floated slightly displaced by the actions of history and nature. Glimpses of fire caught my eye again and again. I shied the first time I heard the whistle of a falling bomb from the city’s memory of World War II.
I did not, in fact, dawdle through Hatton Garden, but took the more direct and higher-traffic way along Charterhouse to St. John, passing Smithfield Market’s painted iron arcades where meat and poultry were still sold fresh in huge loads. From the outside it reminded me a bit of the cliffside buildings at Pike Place Market, though Seattle’s famous produce markets didn’t hold a candle to the meat markets of Smithfield’s imposing quarter mile of whitewashed iron, brick, and glass, gleaming in the early summer sunshine. I turned up St. John, dodging cars, trucks, pedestrians apparently bent on suicide, and phantom herds of cattle swarming toward their historical demise. As I diverged from the hectic intersection into the upper part of St. John’s Lane, the noise and traffic dropped to a distant babble.
Looking around as I walked, I thought Clerkenwell must have been a much quieter town before it was eaten by London. It was tall and narrow and had the feeling of age, layered as it was with phantom monks and people in rich, ancient clothes, struggling against a tide of newer ghosts from the rise of the Victorian middle class and the bombings during the Second World War, all threading through the busy spectral streets. If I’d thought the area I’d walked through earlier had a lot of pubs, lower Clerkenwell had it beat hollow, and the ghostly crowds of muscular men that gathered around the present pub doors were thick and well-worn into the neighborhood’s history. As I walked up the road, getting closer to the dark squares on my map marked ST. JOHN’S PRIORY, the shades of history grew more pastoral and the dominance of the church felt like the chill of an open crypt.
The old priory gate at the top of St. John’s Lane was a yellow brick and stone structure of arches and squat, square towers that cut across the road as if it might have once held massive turnstiles to control the traffic of people and beasts coming down from the fields to the north. The uprights and plaza stones of the gate glowed with a soft, red energy that rose from the ground like fog—vampires must have been in the neighborhood for a long time but without raising much notice, judging by the unusual form of the magical residue. That was interesting.
I passed a tall, narrow arch neatly wedged between two tall, thin buildings nearby. The words PASSING ALLEY were carved into the white plaster, and from the corner of my eye I caught the same colorless glitter I’d spotted near Temple Underground Station. I turned my head away, as if checking the address on the nearest building. Then I looked back, peering down the alley as my gaze passed over it. A bit of white floated back into the distant murk of the covered alleyway, but the shadows were persistent and the Grey remained a smear of silvery mist curiously impenetrable. Not a vampire, but there was something there—or more to the point, something pretending not to be there.
I turned and went on as if I’d noticed nothing. Whatever it was would have to come out into the sun and follow me through the open squares on each side of the priory gate if it wanted to keep up.
As I went through the arch of the old church, I pulled out my cell phone and held down the button that activated the camera in video mode. Keeping my hand down, I pointed the tiny lens behind me and kept walking through the narrowest part of the gate and across the square. I crossed Clerkenwell Road and stopped in a sunny plaza paved in bright white stone—some kind of marble maybe—with a dark circle laid around the edge as if there used to be some small building there that had long since vanished and left only its footprint in the road. A tall, dim hole in the old brick wall on the north of the open area was identified as JERUSALEM PASSAGE by a neat, tin sign. I brought the phone up to my face and took a quick look at the video capture.
The figure was difficult to see, not because of the low quality of the video but because it wasn’t entirely present in the normal realm. It was also black and white where everything else was color and very vague around the edges. But there wasn’t any doubt that the eerie thing was following me. I wasn’t sure if anyone aside from myself could see it and I wondered what it would do once I entered the narrow confines of the walkway ahead. I didn’t want to turn and confront it just yet. This was far too open and public a place for that to be wise if the thing wasn’t corporeal.
Tense with anticipation, I entered Jerusalem Passage. But even turning back when I came to an unlighted corner, I saw and felt nothing behind me. I walked on, uphill through the twisted route. Occasional slashes of light came down through breaks between the overhanging roofs, spotlighting the low-ceilinged shops and tiny cafés tucked into the buildings along the narrow route.
Just at the bottom of a flight of stone steps, I found the address I was looking for. A bronze bellpull on a chain hung from a bracket beside the small, dark green door, which was adorned with a complementary knocker in the shape of a swan. The light was dim enough that looking round for trouble wouldn’t seem strange, so I did. Still no sign of the glittering thing.
I used the knocker on the tarnished bronze plate attached to the door. Something rustled on the other side and the upper part of a phantom face pushed through the surface. It was unthreatening to me, just taking a look, and I took it for some kind of ghost-powered alarm or majordomo. Then it sank back, leaving a tiny ripple on the door’s lingering Grey surface.
Clanking and scraping sounds came from inside, and in a moment, the door creaked open. I had to stoop to see into the low, dark opening. An odor like old gym socks and unwashed dishes wafted out. I clamped my teeth over an urge to gag and tried to smile.
A thin man with his back and shoulders permanently bent into a crouch peered out at me. His face was unlined, yet he seemed old, and the energy colors around him were scarlet and muddy blue-green.
“Whatcher want?” he demanded, his voice like the shrieking of unoiled iron hinges.
“I’m looking for John Purcell.”
“Master Purcell’s gone out.” He pronounced the name “PURSE-el.”
“When will he be back?”
“Don’t know.”
“Then, when did he leave?”
“What business is it of yourn?” he snapped, narrowing his eyes and showing sharp, yellow teeth.
“I have some business with Mr. Purcell on behalf of a friend in the US.”
“We’re not in trade with colonials,” he declared, and moved to slam the door.
I ducked and put my shoulder into the opening, levering my weight against the carved planks and feeling the alarm-ghost imprisoned in the wood writhe away from the contact. The crooked man on the other side pushed back with considerable strength, but I dug in and shoved, forcing my body through the gap and bulling my way inside. The thin man plunged against my absence, unable to correct his drive to close the door, and ended up slamming it shut behind me. The bolts and latches clanked into place, locking me in the room with him.