The Wolves of London (24 page)

I watched, my skin creeping, as he walked up to the glass. When he reached it, he simply stood there, looking in, smoking his little cigarette, his face expressionless. From upstairs, above the muted cacophony of battle, I could hear the thud of movement and raised voices, but it seemed like it was coming from another world, another time.

I knew it was a bad idea, a
terrible
idea, but I felt myself taking a couple of steps back into the room. Above me the glass ceiling creaked again, as if the darkness sensed my proximity. But I felt, for Kate’s sake, that I had to take a closer look at this man, perhaps even make an effort to communicate with him.

‘Who are you?’ I asked, my voice as fragile as the glass above my head.

I was almost shocked when the man’s eyes swivelled to regard me. He seemed so other-worldly that I’d assumed he would be unaware of my presence, or at least would consider me unworthy of his attention. Yet although his dark eyes met mine, the expression on his face didn’t alter. He looked as though he had seen so much that nothing would surprise him, or scare him, or shock him, or make him happy, ever again.

Instead of answering my question, he slowly raised his right hand. It wasn’t a gesture of greeting, and neither was he reaching out in supplication. His palm was facing inward, as though he was about to cover his face, or perhaps even peel it off like something from a horror movie. For a moment he simply stood in silence, the two of us staring at each other – and then his fingernails started turning black.

It happened slowly, beginning with the half-moon cuticles. First they went a smoky grey, then they darkened as the colour began to creep upwards. I watched, fascinated, as the blackness filled the fingernails completely, right to their tips. It was like watching five tiny containers filling with dark liquid.

As the darkness reached the tips of the man’s fingernails it began to seep into the air, curling and twisting like treacly black smoke. The man’s lips parted and more of the blackness crept out of his mouth. It drifted lazily in all directions, a few wispy tendrils rising to explore and partly smother his face.

Another pane of glass above my head cracked – which was enough to break the spell. My head jerked up, and I backpedalled rapidly to the door leading into the house – just as several panes burst in unison. As glittering shards of glass hit the floor with a jagged tinkle and exploded into splinters, I turned and ran back into the house, slamming the conservatory door behind me.

Running through the kitchen and along the corridor to the front of the house, I heard more glass breaking in my wake. I reached the hallway just as Clover, Benny and Lesley were coming downstairs. Benny looked grim, Lesley as frightened as the little dog that was shivering in her arms, and Clover, now dressed, looked hassled. I guessed she had had a hard time persuading them of the danger they were in. Benny glared at me as more glass shattered at the back of the house.

‘What the fuck’s going on?’

‘We’re under attack,’ I said.

‘Under attack?’ He looked outraged. ‘Who the fuck by?’

‘It’s more of a what than a who.’

His jaw tightened, his eyes narrowing into razor slits, and all at once I found it easy to believe the stories I’d heard about him.

‘What are you talking about? Speak fucking English.’

I held up my hands as if to hold back his anger. ‘There’s something out there. A kind of…’ I struggled to put it into words. ‘…a kind of living darkness.’

‘A
what
?’

‘It’s true, Benny,’ said Clover quickly. ‘I’ve seen it. It’s like an oil slick.’

‘There’s a man too,’ I said, looking at Benny but aware of Clover’s eyes widening in fear. I glanced at her. ‘Not the one we saw at Incognito. Someone else.’

Benny stepped towards me, lithe as a dancer, dipping a hand into the pocket of the blue suit he was wearing. When the hand reappeared there was a gun in it, a pit bull of a weapon, compact and powerful.

‘What are you doing?’ I said. ‘You can’t go in there, Benny.’

He halted abruptly, stared at me, as if I was something new and strange. He was perfectly still, but it was a stillness brimming with menace.

‘Who says I can’t?’ he asked quietly, almost reasonably.

‘You don’t know what you’re up against,’ I said.

A thin smile appeared on Benny’s face. It was the coldest expression I had ever seen. ‘Neither does he, whoever he fucking is. Now get out of the way, Alex, or I’ll put a fucking bullet through you.’

I could see he meant it. I raised my hands and stepped aside. Benny slipped past me, pushing open the door into the corridor that led to the conservatory. I looked at Clover. Should I go after him or wait here? Or should the three of us flee the house while we had the chance? For twenty seconds we stood in silence, bracing ourselves for shouts or screams or gunshots.

Finally I said, ‘What do—’ and then I spun round as I sensed movement behind me.

It was Benny. He was still holding the gun.

‘The place is a wreck,’ he said. ‘But there’s no one there.’

‘What about the darkness?’ I asked.

He gave me a long, silent look, then strode purposefully across the hall towards the front door.

‘Be careful,’ I said, but he ignored me. Without hesitation, he opened the front door and stepped outside. He stood in the porch, staring out into the darkness, gun held in front of him. The night framed his sinewy physique. It was deathly quiet and almost preternaturally still out there. The wind from earlier had died down.

‘Where’s—’ Clover whispered, and then all hell broke loose. The darkness suddenly erupted towards us, black tendrils flying out of the night. Before Benny could react they swarmed over him and invaded the house. Like thousands of snakes released from a box, they spread in all directions, coiling around the door frame, slithering across the walls, stretching along the ceiling. They moved with incredible speed, obliterating the light as they came. They swept over us like a huge shadow blotting out the sun.

There was no substance to the darkness, so there was nothing to touch, nothing to grab hold of or fight. All the same I felt it engulfing me, crushing all that was good and hopeful and optimistic. I felt as if I was being torn from my body, as if my soul, my essence, had been swept away into a cold, endless void, a suffocating world of shadow. It wasn’t like death, but like the
fear
of death, because at least with death would have come the bliss of oblivion.

I have no idea how long the experience lasted. Physically it may only have been seconds, but mentally it felt as if time was no longer relevant, as if a micro-second and a billion years were one and the same. I know that sounds hard to grasp, but that was how it was. Sometimes experiences go beyond words; sometimes words are too restrictive to convey the true depth and scope of what we think and feel.

For what seemed an age I was adrift in a limbo of fear, hopelessness and desperation. I thought I’d never get out, that I was trapped for ever, but what pulled me back into the real world was excruciating physical pain. It ripped through me like a hot blade; it was more agonising than anything I’d ever experienced. And yet there was a part of me that welcomed it, that latched on to it and clung to it for all it was worth, purely because it was physical, because it was mine, and because it reminded me that I was alive.

It was the pain which brought my body and soul back together. I snapped into awareness, as though waking from a trance, to find myself still on my feet and scrabbling at my chest. I thought for a second I was having a heart attack, and yet at the same time I felt as though the blazing white shell of agony which encased me was protecting me even as it was making me suffer – or rather, that it was protecting me
because
it was making me suffer. I felt my senses sizzling back into life as my hand clawed at my chest. And then it hit me where the pain was coming from, and my hand dipped into the pocket of my hoodie and closed around the heart.

Immediately I knew that it was this which had found me and yanked me out of the darkness. I knew it as surely as if a pulse of information had passed through the cold stone and into my brain. I took the heart out of my pocket, and suddenly it was as if some connection had been made, and the heart was part of me, or
I
was part of
it
. The pain faded, and as it did so I became aware that I was thinking differently, that all at once I knew what the heart was and how it worked. It didn’t seem strange to be thinking this way, it didn’t seem as though my mind was being manipulated or influenced; on the contrary, it seemed logical and natural. I held the heart in my palm and watched it change, and
as
it changed I got the impression that
I
was changing
it
as much as
it
was changing
itself
.

It wasn’t merely the consistency of the stone which changed, becoming soft like putty; it was the nature of the thing itself. It transformed from a cold, hard inanimate object into something organic, alive. It spread out across my hand and extended into what I can only describe as some sort of tail or limb, which coiled around my wrist and slithered up my arm to the elbow. I felt tiny spines or suckers connecting with the pores in my skin, locking themselves into place. It should have been an alarming sensation, but it wasn’t. Instead I felt complete, and also partly as though I was doing this to myself. It was as though my body and the heart were different components of the same machine, which needed to mesh together in order to work properly.

When the process was complete it was as though I was wearing a black, spiny, pulsating glove that extruded slowly waving sensor-like filaments, or tentacles. These filaments made me hyper-sensitive to my environment, made me able to taste the air, or more specifically to analyse the nature of the darkness which filled it. On some instinctive level I recognised that the darkness was something wild and primal, something dredged up from a fiercely burning core of anger and terror and human suffering. It was an emotional weapon made physical, unleashed with the purpose of invading and overwhelming the atoms and molecules of everything around it.

Not only did I perceive and understand this, but I could see a way to remedy it too. All at once the answer seemed simple and obvious, as if it was second nature to me, something I barely had to think about. It seemed as basic as parking my car in an empty space rather than in one that was already occupied, or of opening a door before going through it.

I flexed the muscles in my hand and wrist and suddenly the pulsating black substance which coated my arm was riven with dozens of thin fissures. From the fissures shone a piercing blue-white light, which sliced through the darkness, causing it to retreat, to shrivel back, in the same way that it had done earlier when the man in the demob suit had walked through it. As the darkness shrank away, objects and people began to appear, fading slowly into view like photographic images in a bath of chemicals. First Lesley was revealed, standing at the bottom of the stairs, still clutching the dog, and then Clover, a little way ahead of her. They were motionless, their faces taut, their eyes wide, as if frozen at the instant of some appalling memory or revelation. But as the blackness fell away from them they began to stir and blink, their faces relaxing, as if they were waking from a long and terrible nightmare.

Leaving them to recover, I walked forward, pushing the darkness ahead of me. It was breaking up, separating like curdled milk, folding in on itself as it retreated. It drained away through the door and back out into the night, revealing Benny in the porch, still clutching his gun, shaking his head and groaning like a boxer recovering from a knock-out punch.

As the last clots of darkness shrivelled and died in the light, Benny turned groggily and looked at me. His face went slack with astonishment and his eyes opened wide. It was strange and oddly disconcerting to see him with his guard down, his emotions so exposed.

‘What the fuck?’ he muttered, but I didn’t try to explain. I couldn’t. Its job done, I felt the fissures resealing themselves, the spine-like attachments disconnecting from my skin as the heart shrank back into my palm.

‘We have to go,’ I said, and then I turned as someone behind me made a shrill, inarticulate sound of distress.

It was Lesley. She was swaying on her feet as though about to faint. Her face was deathly pale, but there were feverish flares of red on the tips of her prominent cheekbones, and she was still holding the cringing little dog to her bosom like a talisman.

‘What are you?’ she hissed.

I shrugged. ‘I’m not anything. Just a person.’

She glanced at my arm and her lips curled with fear and revulsion. ‘Then what’s that?’

The heart was little more than a gelid mass in my palm now, but even as I glanced at it, it retracted further, hardening into its familiar shape.

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘It’s not mine.’

‘You should get rid of it.’

I nodded, though I was surprised to find how much the suggestion alarmed me. ‘You’re probably right.’

She gave me a last look – part distaste, part fear – and then she buried her face in her dog’s fur, whispering words of reassurance.

Clover moved across to me. ‘You okay?’

Her face was hard to read. There was concern, confusion. A little bit of fear. Maybe even a hint of awe.

‘I think so.’

Like Lesley, she glanced warily at the heart. ‘What happened?’

‘I’m not sure. Did you see?’

She gave a hesitant nod. ‘Some of it. The heart changed, didn’t it? Came alive.’

‘It saved us,’ I said. ‘I… communicated with it.’

‘It spoke to you?’

‘Not as such, but… we worked together.’ I shook my head. Already my understanding of the heart’s nature and purpose, and my knowledge of how I had naturally and effortlessly achieved symbiosis with it, was slipping away. ‘I can’t explain it. We didn’t exactly have a conversation, but… we shared an understanding. It’s intelligent, I’m sure of that. Whatever it is.’

Clover shuddered, though whether at what I had said or at the memory of the darkness flooding into her I had no idea.