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.
EIGHT
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.
The stairs, right in front of her, were particularly challenging. It was as if you could see underneath the stairwell and yet up it at the same time. The up-and-down pattern of the stairs seemed to be overlaid on the surface of your eyes. But it was still contained within a discrete space. It was like a Picasso painting of a stairway.
It took her a moment to see what was now perched on top of the newel post at the far end of the banister. Not a skull any more, but an entire child’s head. Its neck was like an automaton’s, skin hanging around a spinal column which looked to have been screwed into the wood. It had golden curls like a cherub, and bright blue eyes looking straight at them. It blinked, as if it was surprised.
‘Oh,’ it said, ‘you can see me.’ And then it started to yell, louder and louder. ‘Strangers! Strangers!’
Ross didn’t want to acknowledge it. She didn’t want it to be real. She looked back at the others. They didn’t seem to want it to be real either. It was as if they were still in a dream. The forensics team had already started looking at them questioningly. They obviously couldn’t hear the child shouting. Ross took the lead again, and headed up the stairs. She had to do it through sheer physical memory because, if she looked, she couldn’t see where her feet were going. It occurred to her that getting down again would be even harder.
Sefton was looking all around him as they went, letting it soak in. This felt different to what he’d encountered in the street, and had been aware of ever since. The green thing. . Jack. . just. . was. . grown out of something naturally. And that way had felt the same for just about everything he’d felt the distant presence of. This was more like that old bloke who’d stepped out of Jack’s way. This was. . deliberate, something that someone had made. It was like his mum had always said, that there was another world underneath ours. Someone — the suspect Mora Losley — seemed to have been taking advantage of it.
They carefully made it onto the upper landing, and stared around them at what was now a polluted palace, medievally regal, adorned with deep furs and tapestries. There was nobody up here, or in the loft either, from the sound of it. The ladder that led up was now glowing in a low light coming from above. Ross made to go up it, but Quill stopped her, and he went up first.