Akha looked from him to Greta to the box and back, and then down at the baby in her arms. “You say lectristy will not burn us,” she said, returning her gaze to Greta. “Not come out of bottle Mewleep is seeing, and … escape.”
“It won’t,” said Greta. “I promise that it won’t. Breaking the glass won’t set it free. Breaking the glass will put it out. I don’t want you near this box when I throw the switch in case anything does happen, but can one of you please open the lock for me.”
Akha sighed, the deepest sigh Greta had ever heard a ghoul fetch, and handed the baby to Mewleep, who at once began the unconscious practiced sway of someone used to the task. She knelt in front of the box and took the lock in her left hand, and belatedly Greta noticed that her claws were much longer than most ghouls’ were, longer and very sharp, their tips black like porcupine quills. One of them was not completely straight, with some zigzag notches filed into its sides, and it was this claw that Akha inserted carefully into the first padlock’s key slot and twisted very slightly.
Greta had been expecting them to simply yank the lock off the door and toss it aside, the way a vampire would, but as she watched Akha work she realized how important—how vital—it must be to the ghouls’ safety and livelihood to be able to open and close locks without leaving a trace. She thought of Gandalf, keep it secret; keep it safe, and almost laughed, jagged with exhaustion.
As she watched there was a faint but decisive click from inside the lock, and the shackle sprang free. Akha dropped it and began to work on the second lock, which lasted even less time. When she had them both open she stood and retreated from the electrical box, and took the half-asleep baby back from Mewleep, cradling him against her shoulder.
Greta was lost for words. “Thank you,” she said, after a moment. “I—Thank you.”
“Do it,” said Akha. “Doctor. Make it stop.”
Greta nodded, and swung the doors open, and despair sank into her stomach at the complexity of the equipment revealed—how the hell could she hope to know which of these switches to throw—and then Mewleep said, “Second from right, top row.”
“Thank you,” she said again. “Can you give me the light, and then go back down the tunnel a safe distance, please, all of you?”
He gave her the piece of rotting wood, which felt as if it should be either hot or cold to the touch, giving off that eerie green light, but which felt like any other splinter: quite ordinary and unremarkable. Their hands touched briefly, and then Greta was alone.
She held the wood up to the electrical switchgear, trying to read the curling, ancient Dymo tape labels, unable to make out more than a string of useless numbers and letters on each one. It doesn’t matter, she thought. Mewleep heard the men say it. Second from the right, top row. She would have to trust his recollection.
The switches were huge, old. She closed her fingers around the Bakelite handle of the one she needed.
Oh God, she thought. If this doesn’t work—
But her hand was already moving, and the switch came free of the ON detent in a crack and fizzle of sparks, and slammed into OFF with a sound that seemed to Greta much, much too loud: loud enough that people on the surface might have heard it, loud enough to crack the concrete tunnel around her and send the earth cascading in.
Cranswell hung in a blue void, unable to move, unable to scream, as the thing inside the light unpeeled his thoughts and memories slice by translucent slice. It was in his head. It saw everything, all of the small and shameful perfidies of childhood, everything he had ever hated, every time he had failed, each flare of lust and envy, each deliberate insult, dissected out in a clean and clear unseaming and set out for his own view, one by one.
This is what you are, August Cranswell. This is all that you are.
No! he thought. I’m not like that! I’ve never—
Never what? said the voice, amused. Never lied? Never cheated, stolen, envied, hurt? One by one it showed him flickers of his own memory, example after example after example.
I’ve never killed!
Oh? said the voice. What about Mrs. Jennings’s dog, when you were nineteen and driving your mate’s car and fiddling with the stereo system instead of looking where you were going?
That was an accident! He could see it in his mind’s eye, very clearly, presented for his approval like a wine bottle in a restaurant: his younger self on his knees in the gutter beside what had recently been a dog, the stupid car’s stupid stereo still belting out the song he had been trying to skip over, dog blood soaking into the knees of his jeans, mouthing, I take it back, oh God, I take it back, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please, I take it back—
I didn’t MEAN to! he howled, inside the light. Tears ran down his cheeks.
Could just as easily have been Mrs. Jennings’s little son, August, couldn’t it? Couldn’t it? You weren’t looking where you were going, and a man who will run over a dog will run over a child.
I didn’t mean to, Cranswell said again, dully now, strengthless, and he could feel the thing drawing itself up for its next attack, feel it relishing the sick misery from that day years ago and searching his head for more—and abruptly, suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, the light cut off.
Total blackness filled the room, a darkness so complete it felt solid, as if the air had gelled into some impenetrable substance. In that dark Cranswell could hear the faint roaring of some huge fan slowing as the blades spun down toward stillness, could hear his own breathing, panting like a man who has run up several flights of stairs. His mind was his own again, a book closed from prying eyes; he was alone in his head once more, and he had time to think, We will never find our way out of here, we are lost under London, lost in the dark, and they have poison knives and we have just one sword I don’t know how to use before the spark in its glass bulb flickered back into existence.
The light grew, and with it the voice, like a volume knob being turned up. Cranswell could feel it beginning to pull at him once more, the tears still drying tacky on his face, but it was weak now. He could see its edges.
He took another step toward it, and another, Ruthven’s sword still in his hand, and even as the voice in his head scaled up and up and up he wrapped both hands around the hilt and drew the sword back over his shoulder.
Mrs. Jennings’s dog was off its lead, he told the voice. It should never have been in the fucking street, that was an ACCIDENT, and YOU are NOT THE VOICE OF GOD—
Cranswell brought the sword around in a baseball swing that had his full weight behind it, and the voice screamed, No, you do not DARE, YOU DO NOT DARE, YOU MUST NOT, but nothing in the world or out of it could have stopped the saber now as it sang through the air to make contact, at last, with the pregnant curve of the rectifier’s bulb.