‘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.
It was so far away from him now. He didn’t know how he could get back to it. He desperately needed to.
He remembered Toshack heating up in that interview room, and he felt himself heating up now — saw his body up there starting to glow with it. What had happened to Toshack then, what he hadn’t been able to comprehend properly back then: that was what was happening to him now.
But that was weird, wasn’t it? He was still feeling the heat, though it was his body way up there that was being heated up. The same thing was happening to both entities, and he now doubted that some sort of hole in the floor had really opened up underneath him, whatever ‘really’ meant in these circumstances. No, this was all inside his brain: this was him sort of seeing what was going on, him being pulled out of his body. And that extraction wasn’t over yet, because there was the heat thing going on for both of them, so there must still be some sort of connection between the two.
He did it without thinking: shifted mentally from one foot to the other, a copper trying to quickly find his balance-
And he was back inside his body, with a sickening feeling of his heart or his guts now stretching away below him, and an immediate horrifyingly painful sensation that he really was about to explode. And that nearly made him step out again, but-
He could see with his real eyes now, the real room below him, and he remembered what she’d said about having to clean the soil, and he wasn’t going to be able to hold it in much longer, anyway, and he knew nothing about how any of this worked, but-
He reached down, his fingers feeling huge, inflamed. He could hear the screams of the members of his unit around him. There were only seconds left before they hit whatever it was way down there, and then their blood would erupt from them volcanically, as it had erupted out of Toshack. That thing that was Losley had turned its back on them, was walking back towards her red door, the cat following at her feet, as if they didn’t matter any more, not even the exultation in killing them. He managed to grab his zip and pull. He managed to tug his dick out of his trousers. ‘Here, Mora!’ he bellowed, with every ounce of London in him. ‘I piss on your West Ham!’