The Mini was parked along the curb of Middle Lane, not far from the gate leading into the adjoining Priory Park. In the mud by the gate itself, a couple of footprints and a twist of some sort of brown fiber caught in the ironwork bore witness to the fact that someone had passed that way since it began to rain.
Nobody was there when a dark, indistinct figure stumbled out of the trees; nobody but a couple of sparrows were disturbed when it slipped on the wet grass and fell into some bushes, or staggered to its feet again, leaving tufts of coarse-spun wool snagged on the branches. No one was there to register its labored, painful breathing, or the words it was muttering in little runs as it made its way across the park. It was, or up until fairly recently had been, a man.
The shiny, lumpy pink scars of recent burns stood out against hairless white skin, piebald and blotchy; his eyebrows and eyelashes had vanished, his teeth showed an odd dark stain at the gum line, and his mouth was twisted up on one side with scar tissue. What had happened to his eyes was perhaps the worst. They were the white of poached eggs, a blank mass of pale, formless, membranous tissue. They were eyes that had, quite literally, been cooked.
And they were also glowing faintly blue. At the moment it was almost impossible to tell, as the remains of his face were scarlet and puffy with the effects of capsaicin spray, the eyes almost swollen shut, a trickle of blood here and there where he had clawed at his skin in a helpless attempt to stop the burning—but little slits of light still showed between the lids. It had been several hours since the attack, and his frantic coughing had subsided, but the pain of the spray on the burn-scar tissue was slower to fade.
He knew very little at the moment other than that the monster-doctor woman had escaped him, and that this had displeased God, with the consequent punishment of physical agony. Words of prayers he had only just committed to memory came back to him, and he was muttering them as he crossed the park, following a distant yet undeniable call in his head. He knew which direction he needed to go in to reach the holy light. As soon as he found the right kind of way down into the tunnels, he would leave the surface and make his way there.
By the time the abandoned Mini’s dome light guttered out completely, he had, in fact, gone underground.
CHAPTER 6
Tuesday morning came grey and bleak, the sourceless light of a winter dawn throwing no shadows over the vast arching teeth of the Thames Barrier, rendering Cleopatra’s Needle a dull white spike, flattening the baroque shadow-play on St. Paul’s dome. Even without venturing into the streets, people could feel the bone-coldness of the city, feel the year’s end creeping upward from the soles of their feet.
It was August Cranswell who got up and made the day’s first pot of tea, wearing a borrowed dressing gown over his boxers and a T-shirt advertising the fact that Guinness was Good for You. Both Ruthven and Varney were still sleeping the sleep of the undead, and Greta had made Fastitocalon swallow a fairly powerful antihistamine before the lot of them trooped severally off to bed. Cranswell had the house to himself.
He went to fetch the newspaper, pausing for a moment on Ruthven’s front steps to watch the early traffic crawl along the Embankment and the poor bastards who had no choice but to be not only up and about but working at this hour toil along the pavement, breathing out great clouds of white in the frigid air. Winter had definitely shoved autumn out of the way and settled in for a good long stretch of bitter chill to wind up the year. Cranswell wondered how the mad monks planned to celebrate Christmas, and decided he didn’t want to know.
In the kitchen he put the kettle on and unfolded the newspaper. The headline screamed RIPPER DEATH TOLL RISES TO 11: NEW VICTIM DISCOVERED AFTER YESTERDAY’S TWO KILLINGS.
Cranswell hadn’t caught the news of the latest murder on the radio the evening before—he’d been too busy perpetrating theft of antiquities—and now he read with a dull kind of horror about the tenth and eleventh victims. It was somehow worse to realize he had almost become used to reading about murders, that there was very little shock in his reaction, just intensifying fear.
The article made particular mention of the plastic rosaries found at all the scenes so far:
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Westminster has released a statement condemning the activity of this serial murderer and in no uncertain terms vilifying his or her blasphemous tactic of using rosaries as an accessory to his or her crimes. Some commentators have questioned the actual sanctity of the rosaries involved, given that they are apparently mass-produced in Taiwan and retail for 50p apiece, but so far this point has not been directly addressed by the diocese.
The kettle boiled, and Cranswell made the tea, glad for the brief distraction.
He’d been frightened—badly frightened—by the previous night’s experience; in fact he thought he had never been quite so scared in his entire life, which sparked exactly no desire to go home at the moment. The fact that he didn’t know what he’d seen, or thought he had seen, was no comfort whatsoever; he didn’t want to go out there right now. The Embankment house was much nicer than Cranswell’s flat; also he rather strongly wanted to remain under the immediate protection of someone physically capable of tying lampposts in knots.
Ruthven wouldn’t mind putting him up for a few more days. He was always encouraging people to come and stay with him; it was not out of any noticeable desire to bite their necks—unless they were into that, maybe—but Cranswell thought partly just because he was lonely. It must be inescapably lonely, being that old, having watched so many people come and go, quite separate from the ordinary lives all around him. Having to pretend he was one of them, for the most part.
Ruthven was good at pretending. He didn’t, in fact, tie lampposts in knots; that was precisely the sort of objectionable and dangerous showing off that he condemned roundly in the supernatural community. Cranswell could remember a story Ruthven had told him two or three years ago, in which a group of very young and very stylish vampires had been given the choice of leaving the city in a hurry or having their pretty necks wrung, after a series of unacceptably high-profile incidents. “But you’re one of the Kindred,” their leader had said, according to Ruthven. “You’re above the humans.”