The Wolves of London (17 page)

Although the thought of getting close to the thing disgusted and terrified me, I couldn’t just stand there and watch Mary die. I stepped forward, but as soon as I reached out the creature’s ‘neck’ flexed and its head shot forward like a striking snake. I snatched my hand back, horrified as a double row of jagged metallic teeth concertinaed out on an extendable jaw made of fused bone and metal, and clacked together on empty air that a split second earlier had been occupied by my fingers.

‘Fuck!’ I shouted. ‘I need a weapon!’

Clover was pressed against me, fingers digging into my arm tightly enough to leave bruises. Her voice was a thin shriek. ‘Use the heart!’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know! Just try it!’

I dug into my jacket pocket and pulled out the heart. Despite what had happened earlier the idea of using it as a weapon seemed ludicrous. I held it up, pointing it at the creature. But as I waited for something to happen, I heard a horrible crack, and the life went out of Mary’s swollen face, her eyes rolling back in her head. Clover screamed, ‘No!’ as Mary’s body spasmed and went limp. The heart continued to sit there in my palm like a lump of useless black stone as the eel-creature slackened its grip on poor Mary’s throat and her body hit the floor like a spud-filled sack.

Uncoiling itself from her neck, the eel-creature reared up like a cobra, its grotesque baby-face weaving from side to side. I backed up, almost treading on Clover’s toes, ushering her towards the partly open door from which we had emerged. As we retreated, Clover’s breaths rapid with the distress of what she had seen, something moved over by the stage. Keeping the eel-thing in my peripheral vision, I glanced in that direction.

Clover whimpered as something unfolded from the stage. Bathed in spotlights, which blazed from above and below, it gave the impression it was rising from an effulgent sea. Squinting, I initially thought that it was some kind of vast bird. And then, as it extended to its full height and stepped forward to stand at the front of the stage, like a diver perched on the edge of a diving board, I realised it was a man.

It was not a normal man, though. He was impossibly tall and thin, a ragged overcoat hanging from his bony shoulders like the wings of a gigantic bat. His head was long and white and narrow and completely bald, and he was wearing rimless round spectacles – either that or his eyes were nothing but pale, reflective discs.

At first I thought his mouth was tiny and thin-lipped, but then he smiled, and the smile split his face like a widening vertical wound. It stretched and stretched, and grew redder and redder, and as it did so he slowly raised his arms, like a conductor poised to begin a concert performance.

Immediately the arms began to grow, to elongate, to stretch towards us. I heard a clicking and a whirring as they did so, and then I saw the tips of his long, pale fingers peel back like the opening petals of a flower. I watched with horror and astonishment as syringes, each one tipped with a hypodermic needle, emerged from the holes of the fingers of his left hand, a succession of scalpels and drills from the fingers of his right. The syringes were transparent, and filled with a cloudy fluid. I even saw a bead of liquid at the tip of one of the needles catch the light and glitter like a tiny jewel.

Then Clover was screaming my name and wrenching my arm, pointing upwards. I looked up and was appalled to see that I had been so distracted by the man on the stage that I had failed to register his army of freaks, which were now slithering and buzzing and clacking towards us. It was a nightmare conglomeration of flesh and machinery, the heads and limbs and viscera of children and animals intermingled with components that appeared to have been gleaned from Victorian engines and time-pieces and weaponry.

There was something that looked like a large mechanical beetle, albeit with the dangling limbs of a small child, chugging through the air towards us, leaking a trail of oily vapour; there was a stubby, brass-coloured cannon-like device that swooped and darted through the air, propelled by the white, outstretched wings of an owl; there was a clicking, spider-like contraption with the face of a mewling cat that scuttled sideways along the wall, defying gravity; there was a limbless girl in a glass bell jar who rolled and lurched towards us on a complex lash-up of pipes and pulleys and caterpillar tracks.

So fascinating and hideous was this advancing parade of horrors that I might have stood, gaping, and allowed them to overwhelm us if Clover had not grabbed me by the collar and wrenched me backwards. A split second later a dozen or so metallic needles buried themselves in the wall beside my head. Startled, I realised that all of the advancing creatures were armed in some way. Even now weaponry of one sort or another – nozzles and tubes and whirling blades – was shunting into place, powering up, swivelling in our direction.

Stumbling and almost falling over one another, Clover and I threw ourselves back through the door and slammed it behind us. Clover locked it while I shoved the heart back in my pocket.

‘Where now?’ I yelled, my heart racing with adrenaline, my limbs tingling with shock, my thoughts jagged with sheer disbelief at what I had seen.

She led me back along the corridor, past her office and into a room on the left. It was nothing but a poky storeroom, stacked with boxes across which was laid a thick swag of faded blue curtain. Against the far wall leaned a set of stepladders, an old ironing board and half a dozen fold-up chairs. I looked around for a hidden door but couldn’t see one. I even looked up at the ceiling, searching for a skylight.

‘What—’ I started to say, but Clover, bent almost double, barged me aside. Off-balance, I stumbled, throwing up my hands to stop myself crashing into the wall. I twisted angrily, to see that Clover was dragging aside a rug I’d been standing on. Underneath was a trapdoor with an iron ring set into a circular groove so that it was flush with the floor. She dug her fingers under the ring and heaved and the trapdoor started to open. I rushed forward to help, shoving the trapdoor all the way up until the folding hinge that supported it had snapped into place.

Cold air wafted up from the opening, accompanied by a dank smell like mouldering stone and old farts. I saw a square shaft inset with rusty but solid-looking rungs. After a few metres the shaft was swallowed by darkness.

Kneeling, I peered into the shaft and saw white splinters of light reflecting on black moving water far below. I could hear it too – a rushing sound so faint it was like a gentle breeze through dry grass.

‘What is this?’ I asked.

‘Escape tunnel.’

I blinked at her. ‘Handy.’

‘In the late seventies this place was owned by a friend of Benny’s. George Lancaster?’

She said the name as though I might have heard of him. I shrugged.

‘He had a lot of enemies, so he had this installed for when he needed a quick getaway.’

She had already taken hold of the top rung and was lowering herself into the shaft.

‘Where does it go?’ I asked.

The shadows were swallowing her now, closing over her head like black water. Her voice echoed off the stone walls. ‘Does it matter?’

G
eorge Lancaster’s escape tunnel came out round the back of a Chinese restaurant in the tangle of roads leading off from Leicester Square tube station. It took us ten minutes, maybe less, to get there. As soon as we had reached the bottom of the ladder beneath Incognito – having pulled the rug back across the trapdoor and closed it behind us in an attempt to cover our tracks as best we could – Clover grabbed a torch from a stone shelf, peeled off the plastic bag it was wrapped in and turned it on.

I was not sure what I’d been expecting to see. My sole knowledge of London sewer tunnels came from old Sherlock Holmes movies and the like. I suppose I thought they might have been modernised since the 1890s, but I was wrong. Clearly those Victorians knew what they were doing.

Stretching ahead of us was what looked like a huge brick pipe with a flat floor. There were smaller pipes, thick grey plastic ones, about the width of my thigh, attached to brackets running along the left-hand wall. I half-expected to have to wade through a river of human waste, but there was only a modest flow of rusty-looking water running along the central drain. Even the smell wasn’t so bad, dank and farty but bearable.

Clover led the way, hurrying along despite the high heels she was still wearing, as if she knew exactly where she was going, the torchlight leaping eerily across the greasy walls. My mind still felt like a bag of broken glass, tinkling and sharp-edged with shock. Mostly it was occupied in trying to come to terms with, and make sense of, the incredible things I had seen tonight. Were those creatures
real
? If so, where had they come from? What did they want? But struggling to fight free of the bomb-blast debris in my mind came random, and more practical, thoughts and observations.

I wondered whether Clover had had need to use this particular exit before; I wondered briefly whether we should call the police in case those…
creatures
swarmed out of the club and began to cause havoc in the London streets (and almost immediately I rejected the notion, thinking, entirely selfishly, of email man’s orders, of Kate’s safety). I wondered too whether the creatures were
associated
with email man – whether, in fact, the figure on the stage with the extendable arms and the too-wide smile was email man himself. My mind shied away from that possibility like a frightened horse. The thought of Kate in the clutches of those
things
…

Eventually we came to another rusty-looking ladder and climbed up it. At the top was a square manhole cover, and it took the two of us, clinging awkwardly to opposite sides of the ladder, to push it up and over to one side. I had visions of climbing out and getting instantly mown down by a truck, but as I say we emerged to find ourselves in a dark alley round the back of a Chinese restaurant. Ironically, having just walked quarter of a mile through a sewer tunnel, it was the stale smell of steamed fish and vegetables drifting out of an air vent at the back of the building that made me double over with a sudden attack of stomach cramps.

‘You okay?’ Clover asked.

I nodded and straightened up. ‘Just got to me for a second. I’ll be fine.’

She switched off the torch and looked around. Her face was white and I could see she was trembling.

‘Back there,’ I said. ‘Those things. What were they?’

She shook her head. Suddenly her face crumpled and she was sobbing.

‘Hey,’ I said softly. ‘Hey.’ I stepped forward and held her in my arms.

Although I was comforting her I felt like a fraud. I felt like sobbing myself. She clung to me until the tears had run their course, and then she broke away, sniffing and wiping at her eyes, bringing herself under control.

When she spoke her voice sounded almost normal. ‘Where to now?’

‘Back to my place?’ I suggested. ‘Cup of tea? Work out what to do next?’

We both knew it was a risk, but our options were limited and we needed somewhere to get over what we’d been through. We trooped out into the street, which was still not deserted even though it was getting on for three in the morning. There were a few late-night revellers around, and one or two places that were just about open, but looked as if they’d be closing soon. We passed through the Chinatown arch on Gerrard Street and headed up to Shaftesbury Avenue looking for a cab. Finding one, I told the driver my address and then the two of us sank back into our seats. For the rest of the journey we sat in stunned and mutual silence, each affected by the night’s events and lost in our own thoughts.

It was only when we turned the corner into my road that I stirred from my slumped position, leaning forward to scan the vehicles parked nose to tail along the length of each kerb. If I had spotted a police car, or even a vehicle with people sitting in it, I would have told the driver to keep going, but all seemed quiet.

After instructing the driver where to stop, I roused Clover, who appeared to have slipped into a light doze. I paid the fare, then we hurried across the forecourt to the door of my building, my eyes darting right and left as my hand rooted in my pockets for keys. It was a relief to get inside and to hear the reassuring clunk of the lock behind us. As we trudged up the stairs it struck me how weary and hollow I felt – the result, I guessed, of adrenaline crash after the traumatic events of the evening. From the way Clover was moving – like someone leaving hospital after an operation – I guessed she felt the same way.

We reached my landing and came to a halt. For a couple of seconds we simply stared at my door hanging off its hinges, a big dent edged with splintered wood visible beneath the handle. It looked as though the lock had been shattered with one almighty kick or perhaps with a whack from a sledgehammer.

Clover and I exchanged glances. She was so exhausted that she looked drawn and disappointed rather than scared. I understood the expression, because I felt exactly the same way. I took a deep breath, gathering what little resources I had left, and said, ‘Wait here.’ I tiptoed across to the broken door and slowly pushed it open, reaching around the frame to switch on the light.

There was nothing to see or hear. Just the small hallway, doors leading off. The doors to the bathroom and both mine and Kate’s bedrooms were open, the rooms beyond small enough for me to tell at a glance that they were unoccupied. The only closed door was that which led into the main room and the adjoining kitchen. Had I closed it earlier as I had left the flat? I couldn’t remember. Bracing myself, I sprang forward and shoved the door hard with both hands.

If there had been someone crouched on the other side the door would have knocked them flying. But it didn’t happen. Instead the door just swung back, showing me a dark but apparently empty room.

I glanced at Clover, standing in the corridor, looking anxious. ‘All clear, I think.’

I was aware of her edging cautiously over the threshold and into the flat as I stepped into the main room. Backlit by the light from the hallway I knew that I made an obvious target, and so reached immediately for the square of plastic to my left. I slapped the switch down, squinting a little at the sudden glare, though my vision didn’t take much adjusting. I felt Clover at my back, trying to see around me.