Wolf in Shadow-eARC (21 page)

Jameson nodded. Karla could be so very literal.

They went down the stairs and out into the courtyard. Karla wandered around, sniffing the air like a hound dog. She selected a place and dug into the ground with her claws, cocking her head and listening before digging slightly to one side. Carefully she extracted a skull stained brown with dirt and minerals. She held it up and gazed intently into its eye sockets.

Jameson wondered what the hell she was up to. He did not recall her getting a bang on the head. Of course, he had taken a few, so maybe it was him not her that was ga-ga.

She shook the skull until something with multiple legs fell out and scuttled away. Her boot squashed the wriggler before it got more than a few centimeters. She gazed at the skull again, nodding as if she was in a conversation.

“Getting somewhere?” Jameson asked, tentatively.

“Sure,” Karla replied.

She crushed the skull between her hands and dropped the splintered bone fragments.

“This way,” she said, walking back across the cloister.

Jameson followed her into the tunnel. It turned out to be longer than he remembered. He touched the roof and discovered that it was concrete rather than stone corbelling. They were on their way through the Otherworld to a different place, maybe a different universe. They emerged into daylight from between two shattered concrete blocks. He had to duck under rusted iron strands hanging from ruined ferro-concrete.

The sky was still grey and cloud covered. They climbed through twisted rubble that resembled a bunker complex that had been comprehensively smart bombed. Shattered remains of modern buildings hemmed them in. Bushes sprang up wherever enough earth lodged in hollows to sustain their roots. Creepers climbed the shattered concrete columns. Whatever happened here was years old judging by the plant growth, maybe decades old.

Water trickled from under a fallen wall, running down to join a brook that flowed in a straight line alongside a zone that was largely clear. Wreckage lined each side like—like a shattered street, except that the surface consisted of grass. Jameson scraped some away with his foot to reveal the remains of tarmac.

They walked along what was left of the road. Gradually the damage lessened until the buildings were substantially intact. Most had lost their roofs, but the deterioration seemed to be from decades of neglect rather than violent destruction. Ivy climbed the walls, turning structures into romantic ruins like the follies Victorian gentlemen built on their estates. A sycamore grew out of what had once been a showroom window.

They arrived at a crossroads and Karla stopped.

“Where now?” Jameson asked.

Karla did not answer, occupied by gazing thoughtfully down one of the side streets.

“What the hell is this place?” Jameson said. “The Otherworld shadows the real world, right?”

“The parts we can access do,” Karla replied.

“So where are we?” Jameson asked again.

“London, or an echo of a London,” Karla replied. “It may never have existed. You people are so confused in your thoughts, but you have such powerful ideas, such vivid imaginations. You project images of your dreams and nightmares into the Otherworld, shaping its form and substance.”

“Hmm,” Jameson said. He had heard that explanation before, but this place spooked him.

Karla turned left at the crossroads, leaving the stream that tumbled on along the middle of the main road. Jameson followed but found he missed the comfort of the stream, the only friendly, living feature of the landscape. The clouds were thinning, allowing sunlight to illuminate the ruins. This did not improve Jameson’s mood because it made the city look more abandoned and sad.

A clink of stone in a ruined building jolted him out of his ennui. He whirled, gun in hand. A scruffy mongrel with mottled yellow ochre-and-brown fur emerged from behind a wall. It was not particularly large or heavily built, and showed no sign of aggression, so Jameson relaxed.

He pursed his lips and whistled. “Here, boy.”

He was pleased to see the dog. It was the first animal they had come across in the dead, silent city.

The dog watched him, sniffing the air. More crept out of the rubble, spreading out to encircle him and Karla. They were near identical in size and color so they could not be mongrels, but equally they were no breed he recognized. They made no sound, no canine whines of welcome or even threatening barks. Jameson felt cold. They behaved like a pack of African hunting dogs. They might be descended from family pets but they were now completely feral.

Karla laughed delightedly.

“Here, little hunters,” she said mockingly, stepping towards them and beckoning with her hand.

Two attacked without warning, no growls, no threat displays, just naked aggression. They split like a well-trained combat team to hit her simultaneously from both flanks. Compared to Karla they were as slow as engine oil flowing down a dipstick. She ran at the one on the left and kicked it like Beckham faced with an open German goal. The dog bounced over the ground, head flopping on a neck bent at an impossible angle.

Momentum swung Karla round and the second dog took the opportunity to leap for her throat. Jameson started forward but he moved in slow motion, even slower than the dog. Karla was quicksilver in comparison. She caught the dog by the neck, talons sinking through the fur. It wriggled and snarled, the first sound it made—and the last. She squeezed and crushed its windpipe until its tongue lolled and its eyes streamed blood.

The rest of the pack watched silently. One dog advanced a few steps and looked around at its pack-mates, as if seeking support. Karla hurled the corpse at the animal. It turned and fled back into cover, breaking the spell. The rest of the dogs followed. The only sign that the pack had ever been there were the two bodies.

Karla laughed delightedly.

“I do wish you would not provoke trouble,” Jameson said. “One day you are going to give me a heart attack.”

“They would have followed us and attacked sooner or later,” Karla said. “Better it be on our terms rather than theirs. Now the little hunters know.”

“Know what?” Jameson asked.

“That we are death, not food,” she said with her usual succinctness.

“We need to get on,” Jameson said. “The Sun is going down and I don’t fancy being here after dark.”

They walked on until they came to a strange structure in the road. It was a skeleton of thin strips of wood. Two large box shapes were connected by a central spar on which was attached a plywood egg. Thin strips of tattered canvas hung from the frame, presumably the remains of a cloth skin.

Jameson walked around the, whatever-it-was. A trail of wreckage suggested that there had been more canvas-covered boxes behind.

“What on Earth have we here, some sort of water storage?” Jameson asked, not expecting an answer.

Karla had little curiosity about such matters, but he should not complain. Her monofocus had advantages, as, unlike him, she was unlikely to be distracted from what mattered.

He stood on tiptoe to peer into the egg. It was open at the top and had a thin seat inside surrounded by levers. Pulleys suggested that they had once operated cables long since rusted away. His imagination conjured up some sort of signaling device, but communicating what to whom? And what was it doing lying there in the middle of a London street? It had no wheels or any sign that it had been attached to anything that might have lifted it up. It just seemed to have dropped from the sky.

“Of course,” Jameson said. “The light build is a clue. It’s a primitive airplane—as it has no engine, a glider.”

He grinned in delight at Karla, pleased with his own cleverness. She smiled back, happy that he was pleased.

“It must have looked like two box kites with some sort of tail,” Jameson said. “What a strange contraption. Hell to fly in something so unstable in anything but perfect conditions.”

His smile faded as a thought occurred. “I know where we are.”

Karla looked at him gravely, picking up on his swift change of mood.

“This is a
drachenflieger
, kite-like gliders carried by German airships in Wells’
War in the Air
. They attacked enemy airships, like planes operating off carriers. I suppose this is what the German airships did to London.”

He spread his arms out to indicate the city.

“That’s why there are no cars,” he said. “It was 1900 or something. But there should be human and horse bones from the purple plague that depopulated the city before its destruction.”

He frowned, recalling the feral packs of dogs. Chewed bones would be scattered in amongst the ruins.

“Wells predicted the destructiveness of air warfare. He saw the airships as unstoppable, so the war went on until civilization collapsed. Of course, the German airships turned out to be easy meat for the new fighter planes when real Zeppelins attacked London.”

No wonder this city looked so sad. It was a cenotaph to a lost empire, a dead civilization. The Otherworld was full of the relics of human disasters, both real and fictional.

“What a bloody depressing place,” Jameson said.

“Do you think so?” Karla asked in surprise. “I rather like it.”

That didn’t surprise him. Karla’s concept of pleasant surroundings bore as little relation to human preferences as her other likes and dislikes.

“Is the gate near?” he asked.

“Yes,” Karla replied.

She hesitated and Jameson raised an eyebrow.

“This air war story?” Karla asked.

“Yes.”

“Is it very popular?”

“No doubt at one time but almost forgotten now, I should think,” Jameson replied. “Wells may have been prescient, but the novel wasn’t very good. It had too much political preaching, too little story, and was overtaken by real events. People didn’t need air attack on London fantasies after the World Wars. They had a bellyful of the real thing.”

“So if the book is forgotten, what fixes this reality?” Karla asked.

That, Jameson thought, was a good question. The imaginations of masses of people created the shadow realms of The Otherworld, so this city should have faded away when people forgot Wells’ story. Someone must have a contemporary use for this place, and the fact that it appealed to Karla rather than Jameson suggested that the someone was not human.

“The way here was too easy,” Karla said. “Like we were invited in.”

“Come into my parlor said the spider to the fly,” Jameson said.

Karla nodded.

He checked his pistol again as you never knew in the Otherworld. The bolts might have been breeding. Unfortunately, he still only had one round. When he looked up, Karla was disappearing between two ruined buildings. He hurried after her, and they pressed on to a forest of tangled bushes and trees. A rhododendron bush was in full flower, covered in hemispherical purple flowers like the decorations on a Christmas tree. It looked cheerfully out of place in the abandoned city.

It was the sound that he first noticed, a rhythmic squeak like the slow turn of a rusting wheel. They found the children’s playground in amongst the bushes. The top of a slide projected out of a bramble patch and a wooden play-wheel rotated slowly, making a grating noise as it spun. It had once been brightly painted in blue and yellow, but the colors had faded. It slowed, stopping completely after three or four more revolutions. Jameson wondered who or what had started it spinning in the first place. He could still hear the squeak.

“I’m over here,” a woman’s voice said.

Jameson moved sideways to see around a holly bush without getting too close. He did not want to come face to face with the owner of the voice unexpectedly.

A tall woman in a long yellow-and-white floaty summer dress sat on a child’s swing, her blond hair permed into waves in a style that reminded him of the 1930s. She rocked backwards and forwards, and the swing’s chains squeaked where they passed through metal hoops on the supporting frame. Jameson kept his gun trained on her. She looked harmless, which proved exactly nothing.

“Go on, give me a push,” the blond said.

“Sefrina!” Karla said from behind Jameson.

Jameson kept his pistol centerd on the woman. If Karla recognized her, there was no doubt in Jameson’s mind of what she was, how bloody dangerous she was.

“Spoilsport,” Sefrina said, pouting. “I heard your latest pet was quite hunky, but the gossip didn’t do him justice, Karla. I don’t know how you pull them at your age and with your dress sense.”

She looked Karla up and down with a sneer. Karla’s leather jacket and trousers had seen better days.

“I think you look damn sexy,” Jameson said loyally to his partner.

Karla shot him a smile.

“What do you want, Sefrina?” Karla asked, moving in front of Jameson but careful not to block his line of fire.

“It’s not what she wants but what I want,” said a male voice.

A man in precisely pressed fawn chinos topped by a navy blue polo shirt emerged from the shadows under the trees. He looked like a politician dressed in smart casual for a photo-op on his holiday. Of course, politicians didn’t usually hold an automatic pistol.

“Still playing with guns, Max,” Karla said. “You surely don’t imagine that toy would stop me.”

“Not you, Karla, I wouldn’t use anything less than a cannon to stop you,” Max said. “But it will make a nasty mess of your little pet there. I am willing to bet you aren’t ready to lose him.”

“And my bolt pistol will make a nasty mess of your girlfriend,” Jameson said, getting a little fed up with being treated as a passive part of the background.

“I doubt Max cares,” Karla said to Jameson.

“Not quite true,” Max said. “Sefrina has her uses. It would be annoying to have to find a replacement.”

If Sefrina was upset by his callousness then she bravely managed to conceal the fact.

He put the gun in his pocket and walked slowly towards them. Karla tensed.

“But there is no need for any unpleasantness. I only want to talk.”

“So talk,” Karla said, folding her arms.

Max bowed mockingly.

“This little pet of yours is a Commission enforcer, is he not?” Max said. “Karla and Jameson, the invincible kill team, the toast of Old London Town.”