Christopher Fowler - Personal Demons

'Oh, Christ – '

'What's the matter?'

'They walled up something precious to bring themselves luck – '

Several things happened at once just then. An enormous roll of thunder made itself heard all the way to the basement, there was a sudden renewed rush of water through the sewer duct, and Jonathan started in surprise, moving his shoulder from the trapdoor. The spring tightened, the lid swung unstoppably up and slammed shut with a deafening bang. For a moment both men were shocked into silence. Then Marrick began shouting and thumping about in his tiny cell, but the sound of his rage was not enough to carry clearly through the heavy sealed door.

Marrick stood up sharply and cracked his head on the ceiling. His heart was pounding in the darkness. The walls pressed forward. He was unable to catch his breath. Claustrophobia hemmed him in. The dead air in his throat stifled him. He gasped and bellowed at Jonathan, every filthy insult he could conjure, and threw himself to the floor in an attempt to dislodge the trapdoor. But it was somehow arranged so that it could only be opened from the iron ring outside – and only he had had the strength to pull it down. Jonathan would never be able to manage it alone. He forced himself to calm down for a moment. Barney. Jonathan would have to go and get Barney. He might still be at the office. He wished he had not left his mobile phone in his briefcase on the ground floor.

'Jon,' he shouted at the floor, 'go and get Barney to help you! Call him! Get Barney!' He held his breath and listened, but all he could hear was the rain outside and the distant rushing water below. 'Jon, for fuck's sake what are you doing?' His voice rose in fright as the beam from the torch grew yellow and died. He dropped to his knees and scrabbled at the seams of the unmoving door until he could no longer feel his fingers.

Jonathan made his way back along the passageway in total darkness. He soaked his legs crossing the sewer duct, which was now overflowing the sides of the brick channel. A faint light showed from the distant cellar entrance. When he reached the top of the stairs, he collected Marrick's briefcase. Then he went back to the rumbling river.

Positioning himself by the water that boiled and rushed through the iron grating, he emptied the contents of the case, Marrick's pens, his mobile phone, his cocaine, his lunch receipts, and all the contracts he had drawn up for the purchase and eventual demolition of the building. Jonathan watched as they passed through the wide iron mesh on their underground journey to the city's dark heart.

'There are no kind gods,' he said aloud. 'The price of true belief will always be terrible.'

Back on the ground floor he studied the huge plate Marrick had passed to him, the lauded ceremonial plate commemorating the death of Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV, sister to the murdered princes in the Tower, beloved mother of Henry VIII. On the back was engraved an elegy, written for her by Sir Thomas More. He was holding a cornerstone of history, long thought lost, finally restored to safe hands. He would never know what else the oubliette contained apart from the large useless article that would now serve the birth of a new urban deity.

Several days later, Jonathan returned to the stairwell window and looked out into the centre of the building. It was a still, sunny day, and a sparrow perched on one of the sturdy weed-stems that sprouted from the wall of the hidden room. Jonathan stared at the tiny window with the thick iron bar across it, and occasionally – as if it could sense that someone was watching – a pale face, despairing and nightmarish, passed before the gap like the moon fleetingly glimpsed through clouds. It was a sight that he would never forget, an eternal penance. His skin prickling, he hastily returned to the warm city streets and the choking traffic beyond.

There is a brief respite in the sobbing, crying maelstrom. The city's agonies are temporarily assuaged. A sacrifice accepted; a building restored. For the most fleeting of moments, the tough old woman raises her crumpled face to the sun and smiles.

A century and a half ago, within the thick Wren walls of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, a body was discovered with a dagger in its ribs. Somebody was murdered in the theatre and quietly bricked in. Nobody knows why, or whether the victim was still alive when the last brick was cemented into place.

The Sultan Omar Mehmet Shay-Tarrazin was a ruler much given to statistics, not particularly through his own choice. It was simply that he had so much of everything, there was a fascination in quantifying it. He had seventy-three concubines and four hundred and twenty-six children. His great summer palace of white and ochre wood, Mehmet Shay Tarrazin yali , built between two streams known as the 'Sweet Waters of Asia' on the banks of the Bosphorus, stood on the threshold of two continents. It had nearly six hundred rooms, passages, portals, halls and courtyards. The Sultan trained fifty imported Arabian stallions, each an undefeated champion in its class. The land he owned stretched so far and wide that one could ride from dawn to sunset for six days on the fleetest of his horses and still cross no more than one fifth of his property. His political allies could be found as far afield as Britain, China and the Cape of Good Hope. He sailed fleets of gold-crested vessels laden with cinnamon, cumin, hashish and nutmeg, and fought holy wars for the reliquaries of gods, and issued stern unpopular edicts, and cremated his chancellor for dropping tangerine peel on the steps of the royal harem, which was unfortunate for the innocent chancellor, who was allergic to tangerines and still alive to protest his innocence when the execution pyre was lit. The Sultan's slightest whim became the harshest law.

How did one man ever become so powerful? Omar Mehmet Shay-Tarrazin was the last thin trickle in a long dark bloodline winding down through the centuries from the offspring of Suleyman the Magnificent himself. His family had ruled in every shy corner of the East, and though depleted still planned to continue its rule far into the future, until fate intervened.

Shay-Tarrazin's wife, Melek (the woman chosen by Allah, his grandfather, and his father in that order) had been raised solely for the purpose of betrothal to the Sultan, and was so finely bred that she could walk no more than five paces without requiring assistance. But one hot morning she died in childbirth, and her sickly son only survived the ordeal until sunset. Now there was no-one pure enough to continue the line without polluting it, so Shay-Tarrazin made do with his plump young concubines and his ivory stallions, and watched his power slowly settle until he relied entirely on the news of couriers for his dealings with the outside world, and hardly ever left the grounds of his palace. His wealth and status allowed him a life beyond all restriction, and yet it was filled with so many rules, laws, arrangements and appointments that he became a prisoner of his own making.

It happened that the Sultan was newly fascinated by the concept of time. Like many royal rulers he was seized by fads, and longed to make sense of a world he mostly witnessed through the tortoiseshell latticework of the throne-room. Having grown bored with the wonders of astrology, biology and alchemy (and having cremated the practitioners of all three sciences whom he had invited to the palace to instruct him) he turned to more ethereal concepts, and discovered time. He liked the idea very much. It was tantalisingly intangible, unlike biology, which had required the dissection of living animals, or alchemy, which had blackened the walls of his temples and filled the orange-orchards with the stench of smouldering sulphur.