“Still the ruffian, I see,” I said contemptuously.
Barris laughed easily. “Oh, yes,” he said. “More than you could imagine, Mr Collins.”
He scrambled up the ladder and I could see the glow of a match flare in the darkness above. For a second I considered throwing down the ladder and then running for the hall and stairway. But I could feel Barris’s terrible grip firm on the top of the ladder and I remembered the strength with which he had propelled me across that plank bridge and then up the stairs.
Awkwardly—for I had continued to put on weight through the preceding year—I made my way up the ladder and then onto my knees in the musty-smelling dark above and then, shaking off the detective’s helping hands, to my feet. He lit the lantern.
Immediately in front of me loomed the ebony jackal-face of the god Anubis. I wheeled. Less than six feet away, a seven-foot-tall statue of Osiris stared down at me. The god was properly dressed in white with his tall white hat and carried his requisite crook and flail.
“This way,” said Barris.
We made our way down the centre of what had once been a long attic. There were more tall statues set under the eaves on either side. To my left was Horus with the head of a hawk; to my right was Seth with his animal head and long, curved snout. We walked between ibis-headed Thoth and Bastet with her cat’s face and ears. I could see where the sagging floor here had been reinforced by recent carpentry. Even the ceilings in the niches where the gods resided had been altered, built up like dormers so that the statues of the gods could stand upright.
“They’re plaster of paris,” said Barris, his lantern beam flashing back and forth as he led me farther down the length of the attic. “Even with the rebuilt floors here, stone effigies would crash through.”
“Where are we going?” I asked. “What is all this?”
At the end of the attic there was a square door where Barris pulled aside a piece of canvas that kept the weather and pigeons out. The frame around this relatively new doorway was made of fresh wood. Lightning illuminated the opening and the thick night air flowed in and around us like some foul syrup. From the sill of this door, a single plank—not more than ten inches wide—ran a dozen feet or more to a dark opening on the opposite side of an alley fifty or sixty feet below. The wind had come up ahead of the approaching storm, and the door canvas flapped with the sound of a raptor’s heavy wing.
“I’m not crossing that,” I said.
“You have to,” said Barris. He seized me under the arm and lifted me onto the sill and then shoved me out onto the board. With his other hand, he aimed the lantern to illuminate the impossibly narrow wooden plank. The wind threatened to topple me off before I took a single step.
“Go!” he ordered and shoved me out over the fatal drop. The beam disappeared for a moment and I realised that Barris was half-crouching on the plank and securing the canvas on nails behind us.
Holding my arms straight to either side, my heart racing, I set one foot in front of the other and shuffled forward like some circus clown preceding the real acrobats. Lightning flashed somewhere nearby and the following roll of thunder struck me like a giant open palm. The rising wind flipped my cape over my face when I was halfway across the impossible plank bridge.
Then somehow I found myself at the opposite window, but the canvas here was as taut as a drum’s skin—I couldn’t get in. I crouched fearfully and clung to the half-inch of wood frame around the opening, feeling the plank beneath us spring up and down and begin to slide—and slip off the sill—as Barris came up behind me.
His broad arm reached over my shoulder (if I had moved a muscle then, we would have both fallen to our deaths), his free hand fumbled with some opening in the canvas, and then the pitching lantern beam showed an opening. I threw myself forward into this second, larger attic.
Here waited Geb, the green-coloured god of Earth; Nut, with his crown of blue sky and golden stars; and Sekhmet, the god of destruction, his lion’s jaws open wide in a roar. Holy Ra was nearby with his falcon’s head, Hathor with the cow horns, Isis with a throne on her head, Amun crowned with feathers… they were all there.
I realised that my legs were so weak I could no longer stand. I sat on the path of fresh planks that ran down the centre of this larger attic. A new window, round, at least twelve feet in diameter, had been set into what I guessed was the Thames-facing southern rooftop, the circle of glass and wood placed directly above a wooden altar. The window was well constructed with thick, quality leaded glass not yet warped by gravity and there were metal circles within circles set into the glass much as I had always imagined some exotic gun sight on a naval ship.
“That points at the Dog Star, Sirius,” said Barris, who had secured the canvas and turned off his lantern. The nearly constant lightning display was enough to illuminate this large attic space now empty except for us, the Gods of the Black Lands, and the black-linen-draped altar. “I don’t know why Sirius is so important to their rituals—I dare say you may, Mr Collins—but one finds such a window aligned properly with that star in all their London attic nests.”
“Nests?” My voice sounded as stunned as I felt. The scarab was so excited that it was tunnelling ragged circles through the riddled grey matter that passed for my brain in those days. The pain was excruciating. My eyeballs felt as if they were slowly filling with blood.
“Drood’s followers have attic nests like this all over London,” said Barris. “Dozens of them. And some of them connect half a dozen or more attics.”
“So London has an Overtown as well as an Undertown,” I said.
Barris ignored that. “This nest has been abandoned for some weeks,” he said. “But they’ll be back.”
“Why have you brought me here? What do you want?”
Barris lit his lantern again and shined the bullseye beam on part of the wall and steep ceiling. I saw birds, eyeballs, wavy lines, more birds… what my clark friend at the British Museum called “hieroglyphics.”
“Can you read this?” asked Barris.
I started to answer and then realised, to my deep shock, that I could read the picture-words and phrases. “And Djewhty came forth! Djewhty, whose words became Ma’at…”
It was part of a ritual for naming and blessing a newborn child. And the words had been carved into the rotting wood of the ceiling, not painted on, just above a statue of Ma’at—the goddess of Justice—who stood there with a feather in her hair.
I said, “Of course I cannot read this gibberish. I am no museum docent. What are you asking?”
To this day, I believe this lie saved my life that night.
Barris expelled a breath and seemed to relax. “I thought not, but there are so many who have become slaves and servants of Drood.…”
“What are you talking about?”
“Do you remember the last night we saw each other, Mr Collins?”
“How could I forget? You murdered an innocent child. When I turned to remonstrate, you brutally clubbed me on the head—you might have killed me! I was unconscious for days. For all I know, you were trying to kill me.”
Barris was shaking his dirty, bearded head. His expression, what I could see of it through the grime and wild hair, seemed sad. “That was no innocent child, Mr Collins. That Wild Boy was an agent of Drood. He was no longer human. If he had escaped to tell of our presence there, Drood’s hordes would have fallen on us there in that sewer within minutes.”