Paul Cornell - London Falling

‘Don’t give him the satisfaction,’ said Dad.

‘What?’ laughed Harry. ‘You’ve done so well ’cos you’re a better copper, Jimmy. I know that. When it comes to getting on, I’m a lazy sod. But I see you putting the work in.’

‘He made you say that! You do all this to hurt yourself! And he loves it when you do, you pathetic little twat!’

Quill steeled himself. ‘To some extent, that’s true, but it’s also just because of how the dice rolled. You’re a fucking amazing DS, Harry. If you went off to do something else, using those same skills, you’d be way ahead of me.’

‘Patronizing bastard.’ That had been Harry himself, with just the tiniest twitch of a smile — which his dad didn’t share.

‘But the dice did roll that way, and you’re my mate. You’re going to be my DS again at some point. I don’t want to think of you gnashing your teeth.’

Dad burst forth with a tirade of insults, but Quill wasn’t listening. He was watching Harry instead. He wanted to see if his laying down the law could make Harry rebel against this thing, if Harry’s disciplined side could make this other bastard vanish.

‘That’s good to hear, Jimmy,’ Harry said. ‘Don’t worry your pretty little head about it.’ But, though he gave Quill his most sardonic grin. . his dad remained.

Quill finally left the pub at closing time, and fended off Harry’s suggestion of finding a cab with him. This encounter was going to be just a weird drunk ghost story, wasn’t it? Something he’d tell people after he’d retired: ‘There was this one odd night when. .’

He staggered a bit as he headed back round the corner, stepping on and off the suburban pavement, going back towards the blaze of lights outside the Losley house. He should call home: Love, it turns out ghosts are real. Don’t have nightmares. It’ll never happen again . But he was still feeling weird and, now he was out in the open, he could still feel the sort of sensation he’d had with Harry’s dad sitting there. That coldness, it was everywhere. As if there was a dead dad lurking in a lot of these houses. And. . above him, and under him. That was too worrying to think about. And that feeling was especially strong, hugely strong. . right ahead of him.

He had to stop as soon as he saw the Losley house.

He stared at it. He had to look away, and then look back. But he knew what he was seeing was real.

Quill was surprised that Costain was the first to arrive at the all-night cafe on Willesden High Road. ‘I hadn’t gone home,’ Quill admitted.

‘Why?’

Quill just shook his head. This was going to be the hardest bit. He had been drinking black coffee ferociously, and now he couldn’t quite tell the difference between drunk, buzzed, and this new weird stuff. But he knew what he was after. He remembered that feeling that had passed among them when he’d touched the soil, and now he needed to find out if the other three were seeing stuff, too, and get them to admit it. They might think they’d been drugged or something, and maybe they had been, but if they were all seeing the same thing. .

‘Listen-’ he began.

‘You can frigging see it too!’ a voice interrupted. They looked up to see Sefton marching in. He dropped into a chair beside them, and stared at them challengingly. ‘Don’t tell me you frigging can’t, because I’ve had my head full of this frigging stuff!’

‘Who are you talking to?’ Quill reprimanded him, quickly and gently.

‘Sorry, guv. . sir.’ Sefton looked so suddenly lost again that Quill almost felt sorry he’d said it. He’d quite liked that sudden show of fierceness from the quiet one.

Costain looked between them, and gave in. ‘All right, I can see it, too. What is it?’

They looked up at the sound of someone else entering, very quietly. Ross walked unsteadily towards them, and sat down beside them. She looked as if she didn’t know what to say.

‘We’re seeing it, too,’ said Costain quickly.

Ross bit her lip and looked away. ‘I went to the psychiatric hospital,’ she confessed. ‘There was. . a lot of. .’

They sat there awkwardly, as she kept a distance between herself and them. They waited for her to finish that sentence. But she didn’t.

‘You’re not going mad,’ said Quill. ‘This is real.’

‘Oh, that makes it so much better,’ said Ross sarcastically.

‘I’ll ignore that remark, but I don’t want to hear anything like that again — from any of you.’

Ross looked up, shocked, as if she’d been slapped. But the others were looking almost relieved. And now so was she. There was a time for informality, which was most of the time, and there was a time for this.

‘Guv,’ they all concurred, grateful to him while resenting it too. He didn’t want to keep handling them like that, but it’d do for right now.

‘I’ve got something to show you,’ he began.

They stood in front of the Losley house, but Sefton couldn’t make himself look at it for too long. His thoughts flicked back to Joe in the pub where he’d quickly led him after the incident in the street.

‘What was that?’ Joe had said. ‘What happened to you there?’

‘Just. . some kind of fit, I suppose. I ought to get myself checked out. .’

‘Is it still going on?’

Sefton had glanced over to where there was something spindly standing at the bottom of the stairs. And then he’d known he had to get away. Away from things like that, and from where there were so many people, all of whom seemed to be contributing to the weirdness. It had been like the way he felt normally about the general public, but pumped up to eleven. They made him want to hide. He had asked for Joe’s number, written it on a beermat, and got out of there. He’d still been able to feel huge things moving about outside that relatively modern bar. So this wasn’t all about ancient stuff. He’d edged his way through the people on the pavement, feeling all their expectations and fears, not individually as in telepathy or something, but as one great terrifying mass; feeling what might be looming in the distance. He hadn’t questioned this feeling, because he wasn’t able to. This wasn’t some medical condition; he was in the middle of a new reality. The phone call from Quill had come as a relief. He’d known from the DI’s tone of voice that he was feeling it too.

The crime scene didn’t look like a normal house any longer. It was a haunted negative of a building, with black windows that were looking into Sefton, challenging him, making him think that, at any second, he’d glimpse something terrible up there. It was entirely different from the buildings on either side of it. ‘The witch’s house,’ he said. And this time he wasn’t making jokes about fairytales.

‘Right,’ said Quill, ‘so let’s-’

But Ross had already set off across the road, heading straight for the front door.

Ross hardly registered showing her pass to the uniform on the doorstep. She had to be first in, had to be in control of this. But, as she walked into the hall of the Losley house, her courage failed her. Rich tapestries hung where the windows should be. The thin carpet was replaced by fur rugs. The writing and the diagrams were still on the walls, but now they shone. There was something chitinous about the colours of the walls, the filthy carapace of a giant insect. As they came in behind her, Ross saw the other three stop and react to it, too. The new forensics shift was making its way through all this, none the wiser, not seeing what was all around them.

Ross felt her comrades draw closer. They had unconsciously formed a square now, their backs to each other, each of them looking in one of the directions trouble might come from, braced like coppers, with legs apart and weight tilted backwards; Ross found that she was doing the same, while the room swirled with horror around them.