The Severed Streets (14 page)

Costain wished he knew more about the nature of the defences in this place, in case he had to make a sudden exit.

*   *   *

‘See you later, then,’ said Ross to the bloke at the bar, and she made to get up.
She’d started a conversation about safety on the streets, in light of the riots, and had hoped the man might say something about the Ripper murders.
But he hadn’t.

He stopped her now.
‘I didn’t realize you were … one of them.’

She tried to look non-committal.

‘We were told we were going to get to go down there too, sometime soon.
You know, under the new proprietors.’

‘Oh.’

‘Obviously that message hasn’t got through.
I mean, I don’t even know how we’d do that now, since it turns out to be true that we’re not even able to see the bally stairs, but … could you remind those in charge?
When you get down there?’

‘Of course,’ she said, and headed over.
So, there was a whole other level to this place, and only people with the Sight were allowed down there.
That was where juice for the operation might be found.
Maybe juice that would help with her own plans too.
She had to find some sources of information about occult objects, about one object in particular.
She had to get down there.
She wanted just to march over, but down there – given that it didn’t exist as far as a lot of these people knew – surely counted, in the terms Quill had set out for the evening, as a private space.
So to go down there would be to go against orders.
She noted Quill nearby and walked past him, raising her eyebrows in a question.

Quill seemed to consider for a moment, then, just before he was gone out of her eyeline he nodded, which was a relief.

She headed for the stairs, and the man beside them met her gaze.
He made a gesture so quick she couldn’t follow it, a grab of nothing, and she felt the air flatten against her face … as she mentally recited the couple of lines of nonsense syllables that Sefton had taught them from the scroll he’d found in the Docklands ruins.
She’d been repeating them to herself ever since so it was second nature.

He nodded her through.

Without looking back, she was aware of Quill doing the same and being allowed to follow.

She walked quickly down the stairs.
At the bottom was another set of doors exactly like the ones that led into the bar on the floor above.
Ross marched right in as if she belonged.

*   *   *

In the milling group waiting beside the stairs, Sefton had managed to strike up conversations with a few people, by just rudely butting in.
It seemed to be the sort of interaction they were used to.
He was being the classic undercover – not asking questions, but instead, annoyingly, moving the conversation away from the subject, making people focus on it again, while listening to what was said in the background.
It turned out that what was most on the minds of these people was what was going to change about this venue.
They mentioned a number of other pubs they might try, and Sefton made a mental note of them.
Then there was the issue of whether or not the Ripper murders were going to be pinned on ‘their lot’.
These people were unsure if there was anyone aware enough of ‘their lot’ to be doing any such pinning.
There was a little bit of a paranoid streak to them; they seemed pretty certain that soon enough bad things would happen.
He caught whispers from people who’d look in his direction, and when he noticed and returned the gaze, look away: too many outsiders, too many changes.
He heard someone refer to the Ripper as ‘proper London’, but there were urgent denunciations of that until the person who’d said it had to admit that they didn’t know anything about what was going on now, that they’d been talking about the Ripper as part of London history.

The people who were doing the talking here, all in all, seemed to need to gossip about everything surrounding the Ripper murders but appeared not to have any idea how or why they were being committed.
They were as scared and puzzled as any other slice of the general public.
Like the general public, they were in general much more concerned about their own patch.
But there were also those here who weren’t talking.
Sefton saw a couple of sighing expressions, a couple of looks that suggested that what might be the Sighted members of this community had seen what Quill’s team had seen when they’d watched the news on television.
Those were the ones who didn’t gossip so easily.

He found himself making surprised eye contact with Costain when both the non-undercover members of his team suddenly took it upon themselves to do what they themselves had decided was beyond their operational parameters and move on down to the next level, without even consulting them.
He lost the expression swiftly as he looked back to beardy waistcoat, who was beside him, now looking nervous.

‘I can’t see anything there,’ he said, nodding towards the stairwell.
‘Can you?’

Sefton didn’t know how to answer him.
Here was a surprise: beardy waistcoat was someone Privileged, who knew how to at least make a start at using the occult power of London, or so he’d indicated, but who wasn’t himself one of the Sighted.
Seeing that look on Sefton’s face, he looked suddenly crestfallen.
‘I know you’re able to – I can tell when someone can; I mean, I pick up on the body language—’

‘Mate, I’m just learning about this stuff too—’

‘But there’s nothing to stop me trying to go down there, is there?
To support you, if nothing else.
Whether or not change is coming to the Goat tonight, we ought to be allowed access to … whatever that man is guarding.
Come on, we succeed or fail together.’
Suddenly he was off, taking his place in the actual queue which was now forming out of the vague one, and Sefton could only feel he should go with him.
The abusive woman had just gone down the stairs, and in front of them now was one of the angrier-looking young men of the hipster crowd.
The man with the book invited him to step forward, making that checking gesture again with one hand.
The youth did so, and walked straight over the top of the stairwell, his feet walking on what looked to Sefton like empty air, keeping going until he’d covered the space to the far wall.
Then, furious, he whirled, looking back at the gatekeeper.

Who stared calmly back at him.

The bouncer took a concerned step from his corner.

After a moment of considering his options, the young man turned on his heel and marched for the door.
The gatekeeper looked back to Sefton and beardy waistcoat, and visibly sighed when he saw Sefton.
Here came more trouble.

Sefton’s instinct as an undercover was to avoid confrontation.
He really should just walk forward, deal with the man’s gesture, get down the stairs, if being able to block the gesture and see the stairs was enough, if there wasn’t actually full-on apartheid in place.
But in character – maybe in reality too – he didn’t feel like being
allowed
to go anywhere.

‘What are you reading?’
he asked the man.
His first question of the night.
Actually it was more of a challenge.

The gatekeeper looked surprised.
He held up his book, which had a blank cover.
Blue, tatty, like an ancient library book.
Sefton had wondered if there was a list of people inside it, to go with the gesture and the ability to see what you were walking down.
To get a look at that list might be valuable.
He plucked the book out of the man’s hands and opened it.
He could feel beardy waistcoat behind him, going with it, craning to look at what was revealed inside these pages.
Sefton realized, in that second, that he’d already handled books that could have done him considerable harm, that he’d just been unprofessionally reckless.
That was where playing this character had led him.
No, there was nothing inside this book to harm him.
Indeed, there was nothing.
The fine dusty pages were blank.
Genuinely blank.
It was just a prop, something to shore up this man’s authority.
If there were rules, they weren’t written down.
Sefton flicked all the way through to make sure, then he gave it back to the man, who was now smiling patronizingly at him.
‘Thanks,’ said Sefton, ‘didn’t like the ending.’
The look on the man’s face said that Sefton had really pushed it, that now it would be touch and go whether to let him in.
Finally, the man made the gesture and Sefton bounced his silent question away and he was allowed to proceed.

He was about to go down the stairs, but from behind him came an odd, awkward laugh.
‘A book of rules?’
It was beardy waistcoat, looking baffled at Sefton.
‘I could see they’re written in a very tight hand, but I didn’t get a good look at a single one of them.
What was that you said about the ending?
Come on, did you see how to do this?’

The gatekeeper looked despairingly at the young man.
He didn’t even bother to make the gesture.
He just slowly shook his head.

‘Oh, come on, this isn’t fair.
Tonight we were told we were going to be allowed…’ Beardy waistcoat looked pleadingly to Sefton, who could only look steadily back in return.
Anger made the young man’s face suddenly flush.
The oppressed minority he’d thought he was doing a favour to had progressed further than he had.
‘I’ve worked so hard…’

The gatekeeper looked towards the diffuse, impatient queue that was standing all around, and by implication to the bouncer, who was even now sauntering over.

Beardy gave Sefton a look that could kill.
A look like a mask falling that Sefton felt he would remember for a long time.
Then he was pushing his way back through the crowd, heading for the door.

Sefton turned and calmly walked down the stairs.

*   *   *

Costain had noted the reaction to the bouncer from the guy who hadn’t been allowed down the stairwell.
So the bouncer could be seen by everyone, not just the Sighted.
He wandered over and found himself casually standing next to the man.
If this
was
a man, a real person.
He looked real enough.

‘Excuse me, kind sir,’ he said, ‘I was thinking I might head downstairs.
May I?’
Asking questions in this circumstance was something his character, the newbie, would certainly do.

The bouncer barely reacted.
‘Depends,’ he said.
He sounded like a clichéd comedy bouncer too, brutal vowels and hardly opening his mouth.
‘Are you on the list?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Then you’re not on the list.’

‘Where is this list?’

‘You can’t see the list.’

‘Who else is on the list?’

‘Are you on the list?’

‘Possibly.’

‘Then you can find out.’

‘But not from you?’

‘Depends.’

‘On what?’

‘Are you on the list?’

It was as if he was a character in a video game.
Costain was pretty sure now that the bouncer wasn’t a human being, but something made by someone.
A sort of deliberately placed ‘ghost’.
But one that the non-Sighted were very much aware of.
‘Is the list real?
Or is it just some sort of metaphor?
Does whether or not you’re on the list change from moment to moment?
Is it down to how confident you are or how you dress or who your parents were?
Please, dear sir, enlighten me.’

The bouncer paused for a second.
Processing.
But no, there was nothing robotic about those quivering jowls.
Whatever he was had been made of emotion and flesh.
‘Depends,’ he finally decided.

Costain sighed.
His way out of this place, should he need it, was what it was.
No advantage to be found here.
It was time to share the risk his unit was taking.
That was the right thing to do, and these days he always did the right thing.

Besides, Ross was down there.
Among the powerful shit.

He headed for the stairs and patiently waited until it was his turn with the gatekeeper, who looked at him as if it was incredible that
two
black men had come his way this evening.
He made the gesture and sighed at the result, letting him through as if the sky had fallen.
Rules were rules, he seemed to be thinking, but he didn’t have to like what the rules allowed.

Costain was about to walk past him with confidence, the star of this picture.
Then he remembered the character he was playing.
He stopped and made his body language submissive and dropped his gaze to the floor.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said.

The gatekeeper inclined his head, and Costain went down the stairs.

SIX

Quill noted Costain’s arrival.
Now all his unit were two floors below street level.
Exactly what they had gone down into was another question.
At first sight, this bar looked like the one immediately above it, but many of the details were different, and, with the Sight suddenly putting a queasy feeling of gravity in his gut, those details seemed drastically important.
He felt as if he was already deep under the earth, as if rescue was a long way off, far above.
When he first got down here he’d had to stop himself from going over to Ross and indicating they should both pull out immediately.
But there was no operational reason for him to feel like that.
Ross had walked straight over to a barwoman who looked a degree more specialized again than the one in the bar above, with a distinctly old-fashioned touch to her uniform, curls to her hair that looked to be from some era he couldn’t pin down, and, startlingly, white pancake make-up that made her look like a mime artist.
The dress code for those who’d got down here was clearly older, poorer, often specifically London in nature.
There were remnants of uniform: London transport; real cavalry jackets; what Quill realized was a zookeeper, even.
The look was distinctive, but hardly impressive in the way of a fashion show.
They also showed signs of harm: the odd missing finger; bruises and cuts displayed proudly.
There was something else about them now: their voices were hushed, they kept glancing towards the door.
This lot were in their familiar place, obviously used to being here … but tonight they were afraid of what remained above.
To get out of what had started to feel like a footie boozer with a bunch of away fans in it hadn’t eased the pressure very much.