Paul Cornell - London Falling

‘Have you got anything else to tell me?’ Lofthouse asked, at the end of the final briefing. ‘Anything you haven’t put on the record?’ She seemed genuinely interested, eager to hear, even. ‘Anything you. . couldn’t?’

Ross had thought about it for a moment. ‘No, ma’am,’ she said.

‘You are Alfred Toshack’s daughter,’ said Mora Losley. She pointed to Ross’ nose. ‘I made that. It could have been any accident, across the course of your life, but it was me. I am the mother of your face.’

The fear gripped Ross now. That smell! It had taken her back to when she’d been terribly hurt. It made her feel very small. This was what she had always imagined she would sometime see again.

As she studied Ross, Losley inclined her head sideways, like a predatory bird, moving her hands in a strangely elegant gesture as she did so. ‘The disobedient child, a policeman and two blackamoors, one of them a sodomite.’

Ross couldn’t begin to process that.

‘And yet somehow they have a “protocol” on them. What is it?’ The woman took a step towards her. It took an effort, but Ross made herself stay where she was. ‘Did you make sacrifice and then touch my mistress’ blessed soil deliberately, so as to gain the Sight? You? Or is this an accident?’

Ross could feel the power of her. Even the force of her shadow on the floor was making the air between them ripple with heat. The fact she had questions was the only thing now saving them. There were so many people downstairs: all she had to do was yell and they’d come running. But they wouldn’t see the old woman. They’d be blind to the danger.

‘Are you privileged ?’ Losley barked. ‘Do you make sacrifice , or are you remembered ?’ Her accent had slid suddenly upwards, into something resonating with privilege. Even as Ross distantly wondered what any of those words meant, her mind obeying her training even as it reeled in shock, she was ridiculously reminded of Keith Richards. ‘Answer me!’

‘How. . how did my uncle employ you?’

Losley stopped. She looked suspicious again, as if this question had revealed some hint of worrying knowledge. ‘I am not employed . He merely knew of me from the football club.’ She put a hand to her heart and then to her brow, a kind of benediction. She had said ‘football club’ very precisely, as if she’d learned those words once and kept them carefully enunciated like that. ‘He made a good sacrifice. My lord of the pleasant face assigned me to his service.’

Ross felt very small again. Toshack hadn’t even bothered to send this thing after her when she’d run. She couldn’t quite believe that. But she’d discovered it now, out of some horrible accident or of some destiny that was going to destroy her. She managed to make herself speak again. ‘So why did you kill Toshack?’ She was aware of Quill looking towards her, still in shock but urging her on.

‘When my service ended, my lord of the pleasant face would not hear his pleas, so he offered me sacrifice to continue!’ She shook her head, looking at Ross with a terrible aloofness, as if all this were her fault by association. ‘Modern rubbish. The rules are not written down ! When I ignored that fucking cunt of a criminal, he tried to tell this watchman’ — she pointed at Quill — ‘my name !’

Quill stepped forward until he was alongside Ross, breathing heavily. She realized he was going to do it, this absurd, futile thing. She felt admiration and fear for him. ‘Mora Losley,’ he said, and he clearly had to pause and gather himself together before he continued quickly, ‘you are under arrest for the murder of Robert Toshack and several others. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence-’

She raised a hand and screamed.

The sound made them stagger. They fell to the ground. And still it continued, battering them from every angle of the attic. Ross put her hands over her ears, and she was properly back there now, sobbing in the dark, with the hugeness looming over her and blow after blow. . But no. No. She would not go back there. She would not .

She hauled herself to her feet. The room swayed in front of her, all in red. Blood in her eyes. Blows still reflecting off the walls. But there was the witch, her mouth slowly closing around the mere sound that had beaten them all to their knees, looking so hugely affronted, so vastly above any of their lives that for them to try to bring her down to their level had made her bellow thus in horror at the insult.

Ross would not go through this again. She had to fight. It was more important than staying alive. She ran at Losley, her hands reaching in front of her face. She got further than her feet expected to, swinging her balance at the last second to throw a punch straight at-

Losley made another gesture.

Ross felt something precious drop out of her head. And then she was looking upwards as her body flew away from her, like some aircraft she was falling from, and was soaring up towards the ceiling, impossibly. She twisted frantically, to see what was below her. Hot black entwined darkness was hurtling up at her from out of the floor.

Quill had seen what Ross was about to do and had staggered to his feet, a second ahead of the other two. He was having trouble controlling his bladder, which made him feel like a child in the face of this thing. He had been about to shout something. To yell that they should get out. . that they had walked into a situation they weren’t expecting. .

He had no idea what he had been about to shout.

But then his brain had fallen through his shoes, and his body was blasted up out of him like a rocket, and he was a falling ghost with no visible self, nothing to him but his own awareness of himself.

He remembered, as he fell and fell an impossible distance, beyond the height of the room, that look on Toshack’s face in the interview room. He remembered how his own eyes had hurt at what had been happening, how his brain had failed to understand it. And he realized that Toshack hadn’t been slammed up against the wall, as he’d thought at the time. It had been the ceiling he’d been staring down from. And he imagined Losley standing there, invisible, doing to Toshack then what she was doing to them now. With that terrible ancient nurse’s face, revealing her sad certainty of pain.

Sefton saw his body flying away from him, and was rigid with fury in the nothingness that was now himself. It had all been taken from him with such ease, like something stolen and thrown over his head. She had all power over him. The word she’d used: ‘sodomite’ indeed! The distaste in her voice as she looked at him and judged him. There was power all around him, and he couldn’t get his hands on it. He couldn’t speak. Just as always, he couldn’t change anything. Just as always, he needed to understand it in order to use it, but for now he had to hide from it, and there wasn’t time, because it had him in its grasp.

Costain turned as he fell, and saw what he was falling towards, and he started scrabbling to grab purchase on air and, when he couldn’t, he started to scream.

Quill looked down, too, when he heard the screaming, and saw the nothingness below him. It was a void that seemed to stretch in impossible directions, beyond the ability of his eyes to encompass it. The floor warped into it at its outer fringes. Something that felt hot and dangerous, like an invisible fire, streamed up from this void, and he was aware of a terrible gravity to it, as if he was in a nightmare and this was the mouth that would finally eat him, no matter what he did.

He looked up again, and was startled to realize that he was seeing his own body now as it bumped up against the ceiling; that he really was outside that body; that there was somehow more to him than had been contained in that same body.