Archangel (A Ghosts of London Novel) Read online

  “I was right, wasn't I?” Milhouse said. “Calling you, I mean. It's definitely one of those cases, yeah?”

  “Definitely,” Robinson replied, taking a flashlight from his pocket and switching it on, using it to light the way ahead.

  “I wish Quix was here,” Katie said after a moment.

  “Why?”

  “She always seems... ready for things.” She paused. “Where is Quix, anyway? I haven't seen her all morning.”

  “She's busy,” Robinson replied, starting to make his way down the steps. “I asked her to go and fetch something for me.”

  ***

  “Alright, love! Give us a flash!”

  Rolling her eyes, Quix ignored the workmen as she made her way along the narrow street, finally stopping at an unmarked wooden door. She looked both ways, to make sure that no-one important was paying any attention to her, only to see a young boy loitering in a nearby doorway, sucking on a lollipop while staring at her with an expression of boredom.

  Fixing the boy with a determined stare, Quix slowly began to narrow her eyes.

  The boy immediately ran, racing along the street as if the fear of hell had been put into his soul. Smiling, Quix turned back to the door and knocked twice. Taking a deep breath, she waited, trying to ignore the sound of the jackhammer as the workmen continued to dig up the street, and finally the door clicked open and she stepped into the building.

  “You're late,” said the small, hunched man in the dark hallway, as he pushed the door shut after her. “I told Robinson I'm busy today. People usually need to make an appointment two months in advance to use my portal, and I told him, I did, I said the only way I could fit you in would be if you came on time.”

  Quix stared at him dourly, waiting for him to lead the way.

  “Is that...” The man leaned closer, sniffing her coat. “Chanel?”

  She waited for him to get on with things.

  “Right,” he muttered, leaning heavily on his cane as he began to limp along the corridor, with Quix following. “I hope you know what you're doing,” he continued, “because, right, there are certain dangers associated with this kind of journey. You'll be arriving and departing during night hours, 'cause the library isn't synchronized to daylight savings and all that jazz, but the good news is that I'll be able to place you more or less exactly next to the correct spot, 'cause this particular shelf portal happens to be located right by where you wanna be. As long as you know the exact title you're after, I don't foresee any problems and you can be back by lunch.”

  Reaching another door, he took a key from his pocket and strained to reach up so he could slip it into the lock. Once the door was open, he pushed it open and then stood back, revealing the darkness within. After a moment, a cold breeze passed through the doorway.

  “Ladies first.”

  He waited, but Quix merely stared at him.

  “What's wrong with you?” the old man asked with a faint smile. “Cat got your tongue?”

  With a sigh, Quix opened her mouth to reveal her stump.

  “Oh,” the man replied, his eyes widening with horror. “That must have been one hell of a cat.”

  ***

  “So how does a man get barbecued in the middle of a church?” Katie asked, as she followed Robinson down the stone steps. “I mean, maybe... a flamethrower?”

  “What would someone be doing with a flamethrower in a church?”

  “I suppose they'd have brought it specially.”

  “Seems a little over-the-top. Plus, I can assure you that carrying a flamethrower around in broad daylight will earn you some very concerned glances from your fellow pedestrians.”

  “Petrol, then?”

  “Did you see any petrol residue on the stone floor?”

  “No, but -”

  “So then it wasn't petrol. Petrol's messy, it spills everywhere and it leaves a terrible smell. Decent suggestions, though. You're finally starting to show some promise at this apprentice business. I think you'll do very well on the first exam.”

  “What exam?”

  “Something burned Colin Morecombe,” he continued, “and only Colin Morecombe. How's that for targeting?”

  “What exam?” she asked again.

  “Focus.”

  “But -” She paused. “Fine. Do you have any theories?”

  “Hundreds,” he replied, as they reached the bottom of the steps and he opened the door to reveal the dark crypt. “The problem is, I have to narrow them down a little, because most of them are rather ridiculous.” He paused for a moment. “What do you make of this place?”

  “It looks empty,” Katie said, peering past him and watching as the flashlight picked out several thick stone pillars.

  “Let's hope it is,” he replied, taking a step forward. “Come on, I thought you wanted to impress me during your apprenticeship, so let's see what you can come up with. Does anything strike you as odd about the crypt? Anything at all? Look around and say the first thing that comes into your head.”

  “Well...” She looked around, desperately hoping to spot something she could mention. Robinson often asked innocuous-sounding questions in an attempt to test her, and she was certain that he'd already noticed something useful, but all she could see were stone walls, stone pillars, a stone wall and vast amounts of empty space. “I mean... There's...”

  “What do you see?” he asked. “Just say it. One word.”

  “Stones?”

  “And?”

  She paused. “Nothing.” Another pause. “That's... going to turn out to be the right answer, isn't it?”

  “Exactly. This is a large space, very large, with lots of potential and absolutely no damp problem. And did you see upstairs? The back rooms were filled to the brim with items, including old packing cases, and they'd even resorted to stacking things in an alcove behind the altar, which I'm pretty sure is supposed to be reserved solely for religious relics. All that stuff crammed into such a small space... So why don't they just store it down here, where there's lots of room?”

  “Because...” She paused, drawing a blank.

  “Because they're scared to come down?”

  She opened her mouth to reply, before realizing that he was probably right.

  “Because they're scared to come down,” she whispered, looking around.

  “But what is there to be scared of?” Robinson continued, making his way through the darkness as he shone the flashlight in all directions. “There seems to be nothing down here except stone and air, and who's scared of stone and air? No-one, that's who, so there must be something else down here, or at least they think there's something else down here. Milhouse said he spoke to the custodians of the building, but apparently none of them mentioned the crypt at all.”

  “But they would have mentioned it, wouldn't they?” Katie pointed out. “If there was something to mention, at least.”

  “Not if it was just a vague feeling,” he replied. “A hunch. Maybe they didn't ever see anything, but they could sense it. People get embarrassed about their superstitions, you know. They don't want to seem stupid, so they keep them to themselves and only share them with like-minded individuals.” He shone his torch up at the curved ceiling for a moment. “And then poor Colin Morecombe decided to ignore the superstitious nonsense and come down to the cursed crypt. Maybe he was the first person to come down here for a while, or maybe he just picked the wrong place at the wrong time. Either way, it was a fatal mistake.”

  “How do you know he was down here?”

  “The key was still in the lock. So what does that tell us?”

  “Um...”

  “It tells us that the people who work at this church have been going to great lengths to avoid coming down to the crypt unless it's absolutely necessary,” he continued, “and finally one poor gentleman had to break that unwritten rule. The question is, why did he come down?”

  “I don't -”

  “To bring something? To fetch something? No, not to fetch something, it can
't have been that because there was nothing here to fetch. So to bring something. Maybe he was sick of stacking things upstairs and he finally decided, sod it, why not use the crypt? He'd probably heard the stories that the other people whispered about, but he figured they were nonsense so he came anyway, maybe just to check it out at first.”

  “You think someone was down here? Like... waiting for him?”

  Pausing, Robinson studied the darkness, watching the shadows as if he expected something to make its presence known. “Have you heard of this church before, Katie? St. Barnabus the Divine... Does that ring any bells? No pun intended, obviously.”

  “Not... really...”

  “So you don't know its history?”

  “I can look it up online,” she told him, eager to make herself useful. Taking out her phone, she began to bring up a web browser. “Maybe there's something about the crypt.”

  “Oh, there is,” he replied, “but I doubt you'll find it mentioned online, since they went to great lengths to cover the whole thing up.”

  “I'll have to check later,” she muttered. “No signal. Did something really happen here before?”

  “Not just something,” he continued, turning to her. “This exact same thing. Someone died here more than a century ago in almost exactly the same circumstances. A man running from the crypt, perhaps being chased by something, ending up burned to death in the chancel, quite possibly on the exact same spot, with the exact same injuries, but was he killed by the exact same thing?”

  “Unlikely if it was so long ago.”

  “Really?” he asked, turning to her. “You don't think it's possible?”

  “Are you saying it is?”

  “Are you saying it's not?”

  “So you don't think it could just be a copycat?” she asked. “Couldn't someone have found out about what happened a century ago and decided to repeat it?”

  “It's not a copycat,” he replied. “The problem is, the previous death was kept quiet and never fully investigated. Well, not by anyone except one particular, rather dashing and extremely intelligent hero who tried his best but wasn't able to get to the bottom of things. Power of the church, and all that. Either way, information about the original death isn't in the public domain, since there were some rather lurid theories about the incident.”

  “Such as?”

  “I told you, people can be very superstitious. Some of them thought they saw an...”

  She waited for him to finish the sentence.

  “Saw a what?” she asked finally.

  “I almost feel silly saying it,” he continued, “since it's so utterly ridiculous, but...” He shone the torch across toward the opposite wall for a moment, before turning to her. “Some of the people back then swore blind that they'd seen an angel down here in this very crypt.”

  ***

  Under a cloudless, starry night sky, several million rows of shelves stood bathed in moonlight. In the distance, screams could be heard rising up from different parts of the Great Library, loud enough and close enough to terrify an unprepared traveler, but there were other sounds too:

  Wolves howling.

  Drunks singing.

  Merchants arguing.

  Things killing other things.

  It had long been known that the Great Library was not a place for the timid. Anyone traveling to the library in search of a book would most certainly find what they were looking for, but while some parts of the land had become civilized, others were wastelands filled with danger. Of the millions of shelves, around half were in what were generally considered to be 'safe' zones, while the rest lay in darker, riskier areas. The silence in this particular library was the silence of the dead.

  And in one particular row of those several million, a figure was crawling out from a shelf.

  Getting to her feet and dusting herself down, Quix looked first one way and then the other, seeing nothing but shelves spreading in both directions toward the curved horizon. After a moment, however, she saw something glistening in the moonlight and she realized that a fine spider-web had been constructed between the shelves a little further off, and there was a faint scratching sound coming from atop one of those shelves, as if something was waiting for an unsuspecting passerby.

  In the distance, something exploded.

  Above, a faint hawking sound could be heard, and she looked up just in time to see a winged silhouette passing directly in front of the moon. Realizing that staying still for too long would be a mistake, and that her scent would soon be picked up by predators, Quix reached into her pocket and took out a scrap of paper, upon which a title had been noted down in Robinson's messy, barely-legible scrawl:

  The Calamity of Angels by J.R. Hildebraith.

  Sighing, she saw her own breath in the cold night air. Looking up at the nearest shelf, she saw that she was in the D section of the Religious Archaeology section, which meant that the inter-world shelf portal had indeed been remarkably accurate. Making her way along the aisle, she reached the E section, then F and G, then a few forgotten letters, and finally H. Realizing that the Hildebraith book was most likely to be on the very highest shelf, she stuffed the piece of paper back into her pocket and then began to climb, until she was able to support herself at the top and search for the book, which she finally located between A.A.R. Hilckerman's The Shadow Proxies and another J.R. Hildebraith title, An Account of the Great Plummeting. She pulled out the book she needed, before dropping back down onto the muddy ground.

  “Will you be checking that out?” asked a dour male voice suddenly.

  Turning, she saw a gray-faced man standing just a few feet away, wearing a gray cloak with the hood raised. She was certain he hadn't been there a moment ago, and she had no idea how he'd managed to suddenly sneak up on her. Then again, the attendants of the library were notoriously industrious, and at least this way she wouldn't have to go and find a desk.

  She nodded cautiously, before reaching into her pocket and pulling out a small leather pouch, which she held up for the man to see.

  “Quix, huh?” the man said after a moment, pulling out a scroll and checking a list of names for a moment. “Tell me something, Ms. Quix, don't I know you from somewhere?”

  She shook her head.

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded.

  “I'm very good with names and faces,” he continued. “I could swear that you seem familiar.”

  She shook her head again.

  “Hmm.” He stared at her library card for a moment, his eyes slowly narrowing. “So there's no danger, I trust, that you're actually taking a book out on behalf of someone else, is there? Someone, perhaps, who has been given a life-long ban from taking books away from the Great Library? Someone who has in fact been banned from the library due to his past... misadventures?”

  She shook her head.

  He stared at her.

  She swallowed hard.

  “And I trust that you do understand,” he continued, “that if you take this book out on your card and let someone else take possession of it, you are the one who will be responsible for its safe return?”

  She nodded.

  “Including all fines, levies and other punishments?”

  She nodded again.

  “Hmm. So if you were to borrow a book on behalf of someone else, it would have to be someone you trusted implicitly.”

  Quix raised an eyebrow.

  “The withdrawal will be noted in the official record,” the man continued. “I hope you'll remember, however, that failure to return the book on time will result in harsh penalties. No-one likes having to go to extremes but, well, rules are rules and sometimes we just have to set an example, don't we?”

  Quix nodded.

  “We have an entire department dedicated to the recovery of overdue items,” the man explained. “It's a unit of the military, actually, and they'll go to any lengths in order to get what they're after. Sometimes they even get the Soldiers of Tea involved, which can really escalate matt
ers quite dramatically, so I hope that you and... anyone else who might get their hands on this book, will understand that the loan period is thirty days and not a moment longer. In fact, returning it early would be a tremendous sign of good faith.”

  Quix nodded again.

  “You're not very talkative, are you?”

  She shook her head.

  “I like that in a person,” he replied, taking the book from her and stamping the first page, before handing it back. “Too many people feel the need to chatter all the time. It's rare to meet someone who actually respects the signs.”

  Quix frowned.

  Reaching up with a bony hand, the old man pointed at a sign on one of the nearby shelves.

  Silence in the Library

  Allowing herself a wry smile, Quix nodded.

  “I suppose that concludes our business,” the old man continued, turning and shuffling along the aisle before stopping and looking back at her. “I'm glad to see that people still want to borrow books from this part of the Great Library, it's so rare that we get anyone here since the new section was built. I'm not in favor of such business, but progress is progress and I'm not one to stand in the way. Oh, and...” He glanced over his shoulder for a moment. “Give Robinson my best. And bring that book back on time, or else!”

  Smiling, Quix stepped back and performed a brief curtsy in the moonlight.

  ***