‘This,’ interjected Ross, ‘is what Losley meant by remembered.’
‘Exactly. . and so are the tourist ghosts. But this is the extreme case, the one I was leading you to to show you, the one case that tests the rule. ’Cos it’s not true.’
‘Stop believing it’s real, then,’ said Quill. ‘Wish it away.’
For a moment, Costain was sure he could. He visualized the darkness as not being there. When he went undercover, he always felt he was absolutely in charge of what he believed about himself, could project that persona to other people, acting a part and making them believe it. But. . now it felt that he wasn’t in charge of every part of himself, because part of him — the part that he knew had done bad shit in the past — had been judged and found wanting. He kept scrambling to make up for that flaw. And that flaw put a hole in everything he tried to do through exuding confidence alone. Every time he said something funny, there was now that thought undercutting it: am I hurting anybody? It felt as if he couldn’t take a single step without hurting someone. Or, at least, the person he was right now couldn’t. And he didn’t yet know how to be anyone else. That flaw meant that. . he found he couldn’t project anything of himself, couldn’t make the world around him believe anything. So he couldn’t make this darkness go.
None of them could.
‘We didn’t believe it when we came in here,’ he said. ‘Or we thought it’d be easy. If it was as easy as that, we’d be fine.’
They heard a noise in the darkness, and they all fell silent. And there it was again. A footstep on the stairs.
‘Sometime in the 1870s,’ said Sefton, ‘and this is just what a short story from the 1930s says, there were these. . these two penniless sailors who’d heard all the previous stories, only they were too poor to care, and they-’
The footstep again, closer now. That door they couldn’t see would soon open.
‘-they broke in here, ’cos it was empty, and they stayed the night. They lit a fire. They fell asleep. And one of them woke up and he heard-’
Another step.
‘That’s what he heard: something on the stairs. But, of us, it was just me that knew that. So you don’t need to know about this to experience it, so apparitions aren’t about what the people who see them believe-’
‘You should have told us all this,’ said Quill, ‘before we entered.’
‘Would that have made a difference?’ whispered Ross.
The sound of the door opening. Something stepped slowly towards them. It felt huge, but not focused in one place. Instead, it seemed to be all around them. Costain could sense it trying the air around the circle, pushing at it, trying his eyes too at the same time, testing his skin, trying to find any way in. Costain’s eyes strained to discern it in the absolute darkness. But it felt like it was all darkness at once, unknown and unknowable. Was this the smiling man? How would he react if it was him? Was the man coming for him now?
‘As long as the circle isn’t broken,’ said Sefton, ‘we’re fine. Believe that, ’cos it’s true. We can stand here all night if we have-’
Their phone text alerts all went off.
They all jumped simultaneously at the sudden noise. Costain let out a relieved breath. The tension was broken. Whoever that was was from their world, from the world of forms to fill out and warrant cards and cups of tea. It was probably the news about the DNA searches they’d been waiting for. It was like a torch they could hold up against the dark. Something modern. He took out his phone and defiantly hit the text from an unfamiliar number. He expected to see a proud announcement of success, of hope he could use to hold off this dark, even to hold up the screen and yell at whatever it was that they were closing in on it.
He stared at what the text actually said:
Any communication breaks the circle.
Costain looked down on hearing a sudden noise, and the others looked too. The circle had roared into a sudden, consuming flame.
‘Oh fuck,’ said Sefton.
The circle evaporated. The darkness rushed in.
Costain ran.
Behind him, he could hear shouting. He didn’t make it to the door.
As the darkness swept over him, Sefton bellowed in despair and threw himself flat. And then there was silence. .
He waited. He raised his head slightly. He saw that his hand had landed across what remained of the circle. An ache in his palm told him that he’d snuffed out the fire on a small section of the ink line. And so he was still connected to it. Careful to keep his hand where it was, he looked around. Beside him, still as statues, caught in the act of shouting, stood Ross and Quill. Halfway across the room was Costain, frozen in mid-sprint. That was what had happened to the two sailors. One had run, the other had stayed, and been driven out of his mind to the point where he’d thrown himself out of the window.
As Sefton watched, he saw a tiny movement of Costain’s arm. Time was still going, then. Sefton was just experiencing it a lot more quickly than the others. Nothing special about me. Must be because I’m still touching the circle. They’ve been caught by whatever this is. He moved his hand a little, and saw the edge of it. He slid his knee up, until it was touching the line too. Then he lifted his hand quickly, ready to slam it down again. Still fine. He put one foot down on the ink by his knee, and managed to stand. Okay. He looked out into the darkness that had infested every inch of the space, like a darkened theatre around a bare stage set. The most haunted house in London. And he himself had led them here. Costain had been right about that: Arrogance. You start to take a bit of charge of your life, and you go mad with it. You’re not used to it. The Sight was now worked up to a pitch inside his head, pulsing out of everything around him. The darkness had bloody texted them! Had that been his fault, had him saying it made it happen? No, otherwise they could have believed their way out of it. It was the mass of opinion that mattered, he was sure of that now, unless you were one of those people who could surf that with words and gestures — or something like Losley’s lord, whose opinion seemed to matter more than other people’s. Oh, very British.
But not many people in London right now would know about the details concerning this place. . Oh. It must be the memories of the dead, too. Somehow. That would suggest they were somehow still around, lingering in an. . afterlife. But he didn’t want to credit that, because it went against everything he believed in, and what he believed was even more important now. Perhaps the dead also existed only as some sort of reservoir of memory held around London. He remembered the rising fear among his team as he’d told his story. It was as if they’d summoned something here, by using the Sight, in a chain reaction between what they expected and what collective opinion said about this place, and what they could see, which had then reached a moment when it went off the scale and kind of. . shorted them out. If he hadn’t been touching the last bit of the circle, what would have happened to all of them? People vanish in London all the time. With his fumbling ‘experiment’, he’d brought them to the edge of that. So he had to get them out of it. How?
He stared out into the dark, let himself get a flavour of it.
The roar of the engine underneath. . a school bus. His school bus. Children, pressed all around, holding him down, his face against the floor, singing taunts round and round, batty boy posh boy homo, all in that accent he hated that was also him that time they’d made him eat fag ends, the walls of the bus locked around him, and the doors will never open-!
He stumbled, nearly fell off balance from where he was standing on the line, so had to take a mental leap back. He found his feet again, breathing hard. Okay, so when he looked into it, it was about himself. That was probably what the others were experiencing too. Costain would be getting another taste of what he’d decided was Hell. One way to muller a copper: take them off the grid. This was just fear pushed to the maximum. It was like being trapped under the surface of a frozen lake. It was what he’d felt inside Jack, but far worse. This was the perfection of the weight and terror of the crowd. Just as well I’ve got freedom of thought, it’d really be hell if I couldn’t step out of it. The kind of stress that’d give you a heart attack. The others haven’t got long. I can’t walk into that, so what can I do? At least it could only kill him. He didn’t think there was anything beyond death to be threatened with, and he felt that conviction was a strength here.