The Wolves of London (42 page)

It was Lyn.

As on the previous occasions I had seen her beyond the confines of Darby Hall, this was the Lyn of yesteryear, before the ‘dark man’ had entered her life. And as before, she was pregnant and radiant, dressed in the white nightshirt with the cherry design, her feet bare, her fingernails and toenails painted a bright cheerful pink, her slim wrists bedecked with bangles.

Those bangles jangled now as she beckoned me. ‘Come on, Alex,’ she said. ‘Hurry.’

She turned and began to stride away, heading deeper into the building. With a twinge of regret I glanced at the fire door and then hurried after her.

She was maybe ten metres ahead of me, moving quickly despite her bulging belly. As she reached the end of the corridor, I was striding past the long, busy office on my left, inside which I could see dark shapes moving through a row of frosted windows. Whoever might happen to look up at the windows from the other side would no doubt see the blur of my head passing from one to the next, but thankfully nobody emerged to check who I was or what I was doing. As Lyn turned right into the next corridor, I put on a spurt of speed, knowing that her presence was so ephemeral that to lose sight of her momentarily might mean losing her completely. My heart was thumping with anxiety as I rounded the corner – but there she still was, half a dozen metres ahead of me. Her blond hair swished as she shifted her weight from one side to the other, and her bare feet even made slight indentations in the carpet.

She stopped at a door two-thirds of the way down the corridor on her right. Although she glanced back as if to check I was still with her, she didn’t say anything and she didn’t wait for me; she pushed open the door and entered.

Or at least, I
thought
she had pushed open the door, but when I reached it I discovered it was still closed. Screwed to the door was a brushed-steel nameplate, the name itself indented in black: Detective Inspector F. Jensen.

I didn’t knock and I didn’t hesitate. I turned the handle and pushed the door open. Beyond was a small office, no more than half a dozen metres square. Directly in front of me was a neatly arranged desk, behind which a large window offered a view which was two-thirds sky and one-third birdshit-smeared rooftops. There was no sign of Lyn, but standing behind the desk, pulling open one of the desk drawers, was DI Jensen – the same DI Jensen whose throat I had seen slashed from ear to ear. Glancing at me with something like irritation, he reached into the drawer and withdrew the obsidian heart, which he brandished like a rock he intended to whack me across the head with. Immediately the air shimmered around him and his outline started to blur.

Without thinking what I was doing, and in defiance of my stiff and aching body, I leaped up on to the desk and hurled myself at him. I hit him like a rugby player making a tackle, my full weight causing him to hurtle backwards. With me still clinging to him, he hit the window at such a speed that the glass simply gave way, shattering outwards. I had the fleeting impression that we were surrounded by jagged chunks of glittering sky.

Then we were falling.

T
here was a smell.

Something chemical.

Chloroform?

Was I in hospital?

My eyes seemed to be glued closed and I couldn’t summon up the energy to open them. I felt as if I was somehow
below
the surface of my body, as if my consciousness was wallowing in thick, black darkness, unable to influence my physical self, which was somewhere above me, out of reach. For the time being I could only think, remember. I recalled the uncontrollable, stomach-lurching sensation of falling from a great height. I remembered tumbling over and over, broken glass like shards of lethal-edged light cascading around me, the wind screaming, my hands gripping the lapels of Jensen’s jacket and refusing to let go. And then…

Nothing. A blank. An absence. No sense of time passing, no dreams, not even darkness. I was gone and then I was… here. Aware but detached. Able to think, to smell…

To hear?

Yes. All it took was a slight shift in perception, and I became aware of sounds. Echoing clangs and clanks. A slight, persistent hiss. A wordless shout of pain or fear that seemed to come from far away.

And touch? Could I feel anything? I tried to connect with my muscles and bones, to imagine my fingers and toes twitching, even to tap into the memory of pain from my bruised and battered body. But I couldn’t. There was nothing. Was I dead? Was my consciousness, my soul, somehow trapped inside my mortally injured corpse? Panic surged, but it was slow and inexorable, like a vast, black wave of something more cloying, more terrible than water. I felt it rising above me, closing over my head. My thoughts broke apart and I let it fill me.

I slept.

When I next woke things were different. I knew immediately that I was closer to the surface. My eyes behind their closed lids felt hot and itchy and swollen. The pain that I could feel throbbing in my limbs was almost welcoming. The smells and sounds were sharper, more varied. The chemical odour was mingled with that of wood or pipe smoke, of hot oil or candle wax, of something dank and slightly musty. I heard footsteps, voices, the rattle of wheels, the clatter of hooves on stone, the general bustle of activity, all of which were muffled, distant, almost soothing. I was aware of something supporting my head, of my body from the chest down smothered by a covering that was prickly, and that smelled a little stale.

I tried to move my fingers, but again I couldn’t manage it. Was I paralysed? Had I broken my spine in the fall from the police station window? Had I been in a coma, and if so for how long?

I struggled to communicate – to speak, to open my eyes. I felt the blood rushing to my brain. I felt trapped inside myself. I pushed and pushed, my eyes beneath the closed lids smarting, bulging, filling with heat as if about to burst. I wanted to scream, to thrash, but I couldn’t move. I had an explosion building inside me, an uprush of energy with nowhere to go.

And then… light! Suddenly, unexpectedly. It was only a sliver, a chink, a tear, but it was searing, liberating, wonderful.

Once the breakthrough had been made it was easier. It was like cracking a carapace that had been encasing my body, like breaking out of an egg. I felt – imagined – the thin shell falling away. I struggled into the light, floundering, gasping, clawing at the air. I forced my eyelids apart, the tiny muscles around my eyes straining, aching, working like pulleys to prise open grit-encrusted window shutters. As the light seeped in, it flooded my brain, acting like a balm, soothing and reviving.

The first thing I saw was a row of windows to my left. Beyond them I glimpsed movement – birds? Pigeons, maybe? It was hard to tell, not only because daylight was filtering through and making my smarting eyes water, but because the windows were small and high up and coated with a thick layer of grime. I blinked, tried to lift my hand to wipe my eyes, but it was unresponsive. Perhaps I
was
paralysed, though at that moment the thought didn’t distress me as much as it ought to have done. I was just glad to have broken out of the darkness, to feel the daylight on my face. One thing at a time. Softly, softly, catchee monkey, as my dad used to say.

I blinked the tears away. Blinked and blinked until my vision was clear. I moved my head, looked around. I was in a small room, lying on my back on an iron-framed bed. The room had mustard-yellow walls, a bare wooden floor, wooden fixtures and fittings. To my left, below the row of windows, was a workbench stretching the length of the room, which was cluttered with equipment, all of it archaic. There were glass phials; test tubes in wooden stands; a bell jar containing a contraption that was all brass handles and curly wires and hand-blown light bulbs. There was a chunky box-like affair studded with brass dials beneath a half-moon display of hand-written numbers and a metal indicator needle, from the back of which rubber tubing trailed like an array of severed tentacles.

The right-hand wall was composed of a wooden frame divided into a grid of smaller frames, each no larger than a metre or so square. Each of these frames contained a mosaic of darkly coloured stained glass – no elaborate designs, simply rectangles of orange, brown and green glass fused together in haphazard patterns. The glass was thick, almost opaque, the effect of the design – though crude – autumnal, forest-like. It made me think of a screen of foliage through which seeped murky, dappled light.

The centrepiece of the wall of glass was a sturdy wooden door with a brass handle. There was no electric light in the room. Instead four gas lamps at head height provided what would presumably be the only illumination once the daylight faded.

Where was I? And more to the point,
when
was I? I could only surmise that the heart had done its thing, and that as Jensen (or the thing that
looked
like Jensen) and I had fallen, it had zapped us somewhere else.

So what year was this? Unless this place was some kind of museum, the evidence seemed to suggest I’d travelled back a century, maybe more. From my surroundings, and from the chemical smell, I would guess I was in a hospital, maybe a laboratory. The room reminded me of a set from a Hammer horror movie – not a pleasant thought. As I shook off the last muzzy threads of unconsciousness, I realised that the movement I could see beyond the grime-furred windows was people – or at least their legs and feet – moving to and fro.

So this must be a basement then, or at least a room slightly below ground level. From the echoing and often distant quality of the sounds beyond the door to my right, I’d guess that there was a corridor out there, or a series of corridors. I might have been wrong, but I had the impression of size, of a large building filled with many rooms.

I looked down at myself. I was wearing what appeared to be a white gown or nightshirt and was mostly covered by a coarsely woven grey blanket that made me think of the army. I tried to sit up, but realised that although I could now move my fingers and toes freely, I couldn’t lift my arms or legs. I wondered again whether I was paralysed – and then suddenly it struck me. There was nothing physically wrong with me. I’d been restrained, strapped to the bed.

A wriggle of fear went through me and I looked again at the workbench on my left. I was only partly relieved to see there were no surgical implements on there, nothing that might be construed as a torture device. Presumably I was a prisoner here, but who were my captors? The Wolves of London? Hulse and his cronies? I was desperate to know, but at the same time reluctant to find out.

Clenching my fists, I flexed my muscles and pulled. The restraints held firm. Whoever my captor or captors were, he, she or they would be able to do whatever they liked to me. What did they want? The heart? Information? I guessed the latter, because otherwise why was I still alive? Which I supposed must mean that when I had arrived here, I hadn’t had the heart with me.

Before I could think about it further, I heard footsteps in the corridor outside. They weren’t the first footsteps I’d heard since waking up, but they were the first ones that were close, and getting closer. They were measured, casual, and – to my ears – ominous. I tensed, tugged again at the restraints, but they were immovable. I twisted my head to look at the door, a pulse jumping wildly in my throat. The knob turned and the door opened.

A man in a sombre tweed suit, albeit with black velvet lapels, stepped into the room. He was tall and bald with a pale, narrow face, his eyes encircled by small round spectacles. His lips were thin, but so red you might have thought he’d been eating strawberries. He was spindly, and he smelled strongly of the chloroform odour that I had detected when I’d woken up. Although he was just a man, and nothing like the monstrous creature I had encountered previously, I recognised him at once.

It was the Surgeon.

‘Ah, the sleeper wakes,’ he said, and smiled, displaying large yellow teeth, many of which were threaded darkly with decay. As he approached I began to squirm and thrash, to struggle frantically against my bonds.

‘Get away from me!’ I yelled. ‘Don’t fucking touch me!’

The smile slipped and he looked momentarily taken aback, but then his lips curled upwards and he unsheathed his teeth once more.

‘Don’t take on so, my friend,’ he said soothingly. ‘No one here means you harm.’

‘Keep back!’ I warned, and then as he took a step closer I began to shout as loudly as I could. ‘Help me! Someone! Help!’

The Surgeon raised his right hand. In it was an old-fashioned hypodermic syringe with brass finger loops either side of the plunger.

‘There really is no need to concern yourself,’ he purred. ‘You are entirely safe, I assure you. I have a suppressant here which will ease your agitation and enable you to relax.’

I continued to struggle, to scream for help, but no one came. The Surgeon placed his left hand on my shoulder and held me down with surprising strength. Then, yellow teeth gritted, he plunged the needle into my arm.

I
was sitting in Benny’s conservatory, sunlight streaming through the window. Basking in warmth, I felt relaxed, content. Suddenly aware that someone had entered the room, I looked round and smiled.

‘Hello, Daddy,’ said Kate. Her eyes, magnified by the lenses of her pink-framed spectacles, were the blue of the sky that was visible through the glass around us. When she smiled back at me her nose crinkled, reminding me of her mother.

‘Hello, sweetheart,’ I said, and noticed she was holding something in her hand. ‘What have you got there?’

Kate raised her arm. Squatting on her palm, like a gnarled black bullfrog, was the obsidian heart. It was pulsating, throbbing.

‘Where did you get that?’ I asked.

‘From here,’ she said, using her free hand to pull open the white doctor’s coat, which I only now realised she was wearing. She showed me the dark, ragged hole in her chest.

I lurched with shock – and awoke.

For a moment the mustard-yellow walls throbbed like the heart in my dream. I heard an animal-like panting, which it took me a few seconds to realise I was making myself. My eyes flickered about the room, snagging details – the gas lamps, the row of windows, the equipment on the workbench, the stained-glass wall.