Wolf in Shadow-eARC (41 page)

An invitation to visit, even one framed as a summons, from The Black Museum to Commission enforcers was as likely as finding the Staffordshire Hoard of Saxon treasure with a twenty-pound metal detector. It was theoretically possible but one didn’t expect it to happen in one’s lifetime.

Jameson parked the Jag in Bart Street, just south of Bloomsbury Way, taking care to display his Special Branch Parking Permit.

They walked the short distance into Bury Place, to a round concrete windowless shell a couple of meters in both diameter and height. Structures like this served a variety of boring but essential utilities all over central London. They were so commonplace that the populace no longer noticed them. This one was covered in illegal posters announcing pub concerts, street sales, and the services of ladies sporting exotic underwear and whips. The only free area was where a brass plate greened with age was sunk into the door. At various times posterers had tried to utilise this attractive freehold, but their posters had mysteriously caught fire.

Jameson put his hand on the plate, which shone silver at his touch.

“Major Jameson, The Commission. I believe I am expected.”

“And your companion,” said a disembodied voice.

“Karla. I’m with him,” she said, putting her hand on the brass plate in turn.

This time it turned dull rust red, the color of dried blood.

“Come in,” said the voice.

A solid metallic click sounded from the lock and the door slipped outwards by a few inches. Jameson pulled it open for Karla to step over the concrete sill. Following her, he pulled the heavy door to, shutting them into a steel cage. The floor dropped and a high-speed lift carried them down under London. Lights showed the walls sliding by faster and faster as the lift accelerated.

Abrupt heavy braking pushed Jameson down when the lift stopped. He found himself face to face with a slim man in a dark business suit set off by a salmon-pink tie.

“Director Bellevue,” Jameson said, inclining his head. “I had not expected to be welcomed by you personally.

The man examined Jameson with an expression of faint distaste.

“Welcome is not quite the word I’d employ, but no doubt it will suffice.”

Jameson slid back the cage door and followed Karla out.

“My associate, Karla . . .”

“Is a daemon, I know,” Bellevue said coldly. “We have taken the appropriate measures, or she would not have got this far without being destroyed.”

Bellevue turned on the heel of his black leather shoes and stalked up the corridor, which had an arched roof of red brick. The walls were plastered and painted in the insipid pale green that Jameson associated with government buildings. The Civil Service must have bought a job lot of several hundred thousand gallons back in the early twentieth century.

“Follow me,” Bellevue said over his shoulder.

The corridor curved gently, dropping downwards until they came upon a black cat sitting licking its paws. It ignored Jameson but arched its back and spat at Karla.

“We discussed this, Mike. I don’t like it any better than you,” Bellevue said.

The cat spat again, then stalked up the corridor with its tail straight up in the air.

“You will have to excuse Mike. Deep down he is convinced he’s the Museum Director, and he has an aversion to daemons. He doesn’t much like Commission officers either.”

“And Mike is?” Jameson asked.

“A cat, what does he look like? He’s Mike, The Museum Cat,” Bellevue pronounced each word with a capital letter. “You must have heard of Mike?”

Bellevue looked at Jameson.

“You never read Mike’s biography, written by Budge? Good grief, what do they teach you people in The Commission?”

“E. A. Budge, the Egyptologist?” Jameson asked.

Bellevue nodded.

“But that would make the cat a hundred years old.”

“At least the rest,” Bellevue said. “Mike has patrolled the Museum catching and killing vermin since its earliest days.”

He looked speculatively at Karla. “Rats, pigeons, daemons, it’s all the same to Mike.”

Karla grinned at him. “I am pleased that you have such a dangerous beast under control.”

They entered a much larger tunnel with a gravel floor that was used as a storage area for wooden crates and steel containers. A three-rail line ran along one side, disappearing around a curve into blackness.

“Does that link up with the tube system?” Jameson asked, pointing.

“Useful for moving larger artifacts,” Bellevue replied.

“How on earth did the Museum afford all this? How did you excavate your own tube line without anyone noticing?”

Bellevue smiled, obviously pleased that Jameson was suitably impressed. “It was not as difficult as you might think. Haven’t you guessed where you are? For God’s sake, man, this is the British Museum tube station.”

“There isn’t one.”

“There was. Part of the deep Central Line opened in 1900. The nearby High Holborn station was built by a competing train company It was only a few yards away overground, but unconnected underground. When the system was rationalized into a single network, it made sense to add a deep Central Line station under High Holborn. That left this station superfluous, and it was acquired for the Black Museum. The collection was originally in the basement of the British Museum building off Great Russell Street. Space became increasingly problematic as the National Collection expanded. The Natural History Collection decamped to South Kensington, and we came here. The Museum was glad to get shot of us after the infamous plague of newts during the 1911 great tea trolley disaster.”

Bellevue’s lecture was drowned out by the deep rumble and roar of a train passing through a nearby tunnel. Everything in the decommissioned station shook. Bellevue made a lunge to stop a cardboard box sliding off the end of a crate. Karla got there first and secured it until the vibration stopped.

“Of course, there are disadvantages,” Bellevue said.

Jameson noticed an old sepia-faded poster on the wall indicating the direction to First Aid.

“The public sheltered down here during the Blitz,” Bellevue said, observing his interest.

“You let the public into the Black Museum?”

“Of course not, we moved in after the war. Oh, I see what you mean. I was referring to the first Blitz, in World War One.”

They passed through an arch, where the platform had been, and climbed a spiral staircase. At the top, a door took them into a room with chairs along one side and a desk at the other. Behind a computer on the desk sat a slim woman of indeterminate age. Jameson was vaguely disappointed not to see a vintage Civil Service black typewriter. The computer rather ruined the ambience.

“Miss, ah, Trenchfoot, my secretary,” Bellavue said.

She lifted her glasses from where they hung around her neck on a chain, and, placing them on her nose, examined the visitors carefully.

“I have their passes, Director,” she said.

Jameson smiled broadly at her as he took the plastic card from her hand and clipped it on his lapel, but she was immune to his manly charms. She did recoil when Karla took her ID.

“I am beginning to feel unloved,” Karla said to Jameson, laughing.

“You are the first daemon allowed access to the Black Museum,” Bellevue said. “I must say, you are not quite what we expected.”

“I could snarl and drool a bit if that would help,” Karla said.

“No interruptions, Miss Trenchfoot?” Bellevue asked, ushering his guests into his office. Like Jameson, he automatically stood aside to let the lady go first. It was easy to forget that this lady was a blood-sucking monster. Bellevue’s room was a clone of every corporate management office that Jameson had ever seen, apart from the lack of a picture window. Hidden lighting filled the room in a comfortable glow. Even the air smeled fresh, or what passed for fresh in London. Presumably there was a circulation system somewhere. The man was a bureaucrat, not a museum curator, a product of the new style public sector management. The gentlemen were out and the players were in. Trouble was, it was often not quite clear what game were they trained to play.

They all sat down.

“So where did you get this?” Bellevue placed the crumpled, torn sheet of hieroglyphs on his desk and smoothed it out.

“In a Masonic temple,” Jameson replied. “In Essex.”

“Essex?” Bellevue looked shocked.

“Badford to be precise.”

“It just gets better and better.” Bellevue scratched his chin. “Tell me the context, please.”

“Not relevant, if you’ll just tell me what it is and why it concerns the Black Museum,” Jameson countered.

“That is confidential,” Bellevue said stiffly.

“It seems we have an impasse,” Jameson said, unwilling to blink first in a bureaucratic showdown with one of The Commission’s mortal enemies.

“What fools you people are,” Karla said, looking up as if for information. “Your complete destruction is possible and all you do is play chimp games, beating your chests and waggling your willies at each other. How do human women put up with it?”

Bellevue turned beetroot red and huffed. Jameson only smiled, being used to Karla’s directness.

“Now listen,” Karla said. She ran through an abridged and admirably succinct version of events to date. Bellevue listened intently, turning pale when she mentioned elves. “So,” Karla asked, “are you going to stop pissing around and tell us what we need to know?”

Bellevue pressed a button on his phone.

“Sir,” Miss Trenchfoot’s voice was tinny on the little speaker.

“Ask Professor Fairbold to join us at his earliest convenience.”

“Yes, Director.”

“And bring in some tea please.”

Jameson relaxed; tea indicated a temporary truce in the Civil Service lexicon of interdepartmental infighting.

“What do you know about the Egyptian Book of the Dead?” Bellevue asked.

“It’s the Ancient Egyptian Bible or Koran,” Jameson replied.

“That is the popular view, and, as usual, the popular view is misleading. It isn’t called the Book of the Dead, and it isn’t even a book. The real name is untranslatable into modern English, but would be something like The List of Emerging Forth into the Light. It’s actually a compendium of spells.”

“Like a Wicca’s Book of Shadows,” Jameson interjected.

“Yes, but a rather specialized list used in funeral rites. The spells are to help the dead person’s Ba.”

“Ba?” Jameson asked.

“Their soul, if you will, although the word is untranslatable as we don’t have the cultural references. Ba means something more tangible than a soul, more like a clone, almost a total copy of the deceased. Anyway, the spells allow the Ba to enter the Otherworld and proceed safely through its various regions to the Field of Reeds, the Egyptian Heaven. Each list is different, individually created for the owner.”

He picked up the scrap of paper.

“These hieroglyphs depict a spell from the Book.”

“So what? I can go and buy a copy of the Book of the Dead in the British Museum bookshop. What’s the big secret about that?” Jameson asked, pointing at the scrap of paper with its hieroglyphics, and trying to deflect what was turning into a lecture on Egyptian culture. Maybe Bellevue had gone native and was becoming an academic.

“I am coming to that,” Bellevue said, refusing to be distracted.

There was a knock at the door and Miss Trenchfoot entered with a tray. “Professor Fairbold is on his way, Director.”

Bellevue ignored her and carried on with his explanation as if she wasn’t there.

“You’ve heard of Wallis Budge?”

“The famous British Museum Egyptologist—of course.”

“He smuggled the Papyrus of Ani out of Egypt for the National Collection. The Papyrus is the most complete collection of
The Book of the Dead
ever found. It contains spells unknown in other copies. The Egyptian authorities and the French got wind of the matter and locked him up. Fortunately, Budge got away. Just as well, I shudder to think what might have transpired if the French had got the Papyrus.”

Bellevue tapped the scrap of paper liberated from Essex.

“This is one of the forbidden spells that we have censored from the version of the Papyrus of Ani on general release to academia and the public. That is why we were so concerned to find out that The Commission had a copy, because there are no copies!”

“Until now,” Jameson said. “It seems you have a mole.”

“Impossible,” Bellevue shook his head. “My people are entirely reliable. Someone must have stumbled on another version of the Book in Egypt.”

A knock on the door announced the arrival of the summoned professor before Jameson could tell Bellevue what he thought of that explanation. Maybe Bellevue believed in the tooth fairy as well.

“Ah, Fairbold, take these two down and show them the original of this,” Bellevue handed the professor the paper and rose to his feet to indicate the interview was over. “Answer any questions they might have.”

The black cat sat outside. It regarded The Commission agents with an expression of supercilious disdain, turning its head to watch them leave. It was licking its paws again when Jameson looked back. He noticed one of them had a white flash.

CHAPTER 21
I MEET THEREFORE
I AM

Professor Fairbold reassuringly resembled an archetype Museum curator, from his white-flecked beard to his worn leather shoes. He even wore a lab coat that had once been white. Fairbold led them through a maze of tunnels to a study. Benches loaded with reprints of academic papers, journals, and documents ran along the walls. At one end was a sink with a kettle. He shooed a black cat off the chair against the desk, where it had been sleeping. It jumped down as if it had intended to do so all along and that Fairbold’s hand-waving was a complete coincidence. Jameson noticed that it had one white front paw.

“Tea?” Fairbold asked.

“No, thank you,” Jameson said, wondering if the Civil Service bulk-bought the stuff from the same place they got the paint.

“Sit down.”

Jameson moved a skull of a small mammal from a chair and sat. Karla preferred to stand.A low moan sounded through the door, tonally rich in depressive harmonics to an extent that made Jameson’s teeth clench.