She didn’t know what he was. He tried to reach out to her. She was too big. He smelt male and new. His every gesture bounced off the roaring whirlwind that was her, a terrified animal rushing around and around.
The stones started to be placed against the end of the small enclosure. They wanted to keep using the rest of the kennet, Quill realized. They wanted to move their animals into it to shelter them from the cold, to make profit from it. By sealing her up in this part they would cleanse it and make it into just an ordinary place. Perhaps they could use the terror of her too: pray to the sun and the moon, or the wight will get you.
As the darkness was built across the entrance to the chamber, and the woman in here with him became more and more afraid, as she always did in this part of the dream, Quill heard a sudden high sound from outside.
A priest was singing a single note: a chant that was being repeated all down the hill, a straight track of sound that reached all the way back to the new wooden circle in the village. He sustained the note and made it resonate back to him from the end of the kennet. It was a last stab.
Quill felt it like a needle lancing through him.
It was to provoke her. It was to make her feel her imprisonment.
Then the workers slammed the last great stone against the chamber they were in and sealed it, and the note was cut off. The moonlight vanished. The great note of horror rebounded down the length of what was now absolute darkness, echoing and echoing, building and building into a great cry of rage.
Quill groped around him, overcome with sadness, trying to find her with his hands to comfort her. He reached out and felt bones. He had a hand inside her ribs, into her heart; he stretched out quickly with his other hand, intending only to steady what he’d found, and caught her skull, and she was falling apart in his grasp.
That was only her body. Her real self roared into his head. She was going to … to … she was trying to get inside him! She thought he might be an escape, a way to claw her way out. She needed a body, any body! She could form one if she was given the power, but if not she would take what was within reach. She was going to take his body and use it to get out of here, back to the world she needed to be part of!
Quill held up his hands and screamed.
EIGHTEEN
Quill looked around him and saw that people right down the length of the train carriage were glaring at him for screaming.
He lowered his hands. He made eye contact with the woman sitting opposite him, whose frown had turned into a laugh. He let out a long, relieved breath. Then he realized that he should record what he’d seen, that it had all felt important. He jotted down some quick headings in his notebook. Then he texted the other three to let them know that, at least with portable defences, their terrifying problem was still a problem. He’d give them all the details tomorrow.
The train pulled in at Victoria. He got to his feet and smoothed down his suit. There was something odd here, he thought. What was it? A strange sound in the distance, from the station concourse. The commuters around him were noticing it too as they all got off the train, looking in that direction, not hesitating to walk swiftly together towards it, but worried now, looking at each other. The sound grew louder as he went through the ticket barrier. There was noise echoing from the archway that led from the station. Slogans and chants and yells and drums. Those bloody protestors again. Near the tube entrance, the image of a Toff mask, now almost a logo, had been painted over a poster for Les Misérables, the paint still dripping.
He went into the underground, got out at Embankment, and walked the short distance up the hill to Charing Cross. He was startled now to hear the same noises echoing across this concourse too, coming from the road outside. He went out there and took a look. Near the Charing Cross itself, disrupting the taxi ranks, with drivers hooting at them, a small party of protestors in masks and capes had assembled. ‘Burn it down,’ the leader was yelling into a megaphone, ‘and start again!’
Yeah, he could understand the appeal of that. Sensible policies for a happier Britain. He turned to head towards his destination, but a sudden thought struck him. He took out his mobile and called Sefton. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘what you said about … “ostentation” was it? Is anyone still keeping tabs on where Twitter says the next protest is?’
‘Wait a sec, I’ll check out my saved searches.’
‘Only they seem to have split into different groups…’
‘Are you around Charing Cross?’
‘Yeah.’
‘They were starting to say it’s kicking off outside the station there about ten minutes ago.’
Quill looked behind him, and saw more and more protestors, many of them in the Toff outfit and mask, arriving from all directions. ‘You can see how that works, practically,’ he said, ‘but in London, what you found out was that saying something’s going to happen is also sort of encouraging it to happen, right?’
‘Yeah, Gaiman thought that was how it worked.’
Quill turned, staying on the phone as he waited to head across the road, looking all over, hoping to see a uniform, but not finding any. ‘We ought to get Lofthouse to get the Met in general on to this: watch Twitter, find out where there are rumours of protests and anticipate them-’
‘I don’t know how much that’d help; there are loads of small potential trouble spots tonight, by the looks of this. And, you know, with the strike coming up, every department’s trying to get stuff completed before it starts.’
Quill crossed on the lights, a wave of tourists around him, passing Toffs coming in the other direction. He was looking forward to the relative cool of the Opera Rooms, which was an upstairs bar with big leather sofas in a pub called the Chandos near the Strand. They kept the windows open in summer. ‘Give me a call if any of them flare up. Okay, see you…’
Quill was looking dully ahead at one of the many Toff figures coming in his direction, but something inside him was yelling an alarm at him. At first he thought he’d crossed on a red, that he was hearing some oncoming car that was about to run them all over. He wasn’t hearing anything, he realized; it was his new senses shouting a warning. Huge meaning was approaching, coming straight for him.
He looked into the face of the figure marching across the road towards him. It was masked and caped like all of the others. But in the moment he’d turned his attention to it, it … started to blaze with the potential of the Sight.
From the eyes of its mask were falling tears of silver.
In that second Quill knew what he was looking at …
The figure ran at him.
‘Kev,’ yelled Quill, ‘he’s here! He’s-’
The razor sliced the air beside him. Quill ducked aside and ran. He shoved his way back through the crowd of tourists coming in the other direction. They shouted happily at him in Dutch or something. They couldn’t see what was behind him. Or some of them half could and recoiled, doubting themselves, dreaming.
He burst out of the other side of them, onto the concourse in front of Charing Cross again, and ran straight into the mass of protestors, looking round and round as their masks surrounded him and parted in front of him, every hand holding the possibility of a blade, every mask blank with no tears. He picked a direction and heaved his way through them. He still had his phone in his hand. He could hear Kev yelling from it.