It’s an old house, not too far from what’s left of Finchby’s old premises.
It rises above me: a gable-end property of a block of maybe a dozen tall, terraced townhouses; four forlorn storeys plus attic of brown-brick memorial to a lifestyle that’s passed on. No-one wants them now, certainly not here, in this area.
God knows there’s enough of these old places, here around the tired end of the City. Some are converted into cheap apartments, but most stand empty, long unloved, often derelict, sometimes downright dangerous.
And if I’m not mistaken, these are marked by James and Haswell for demolition in plans they brought forward after the debacle with Finchby.
Many in the block, this one included, are bricked up, I assume against squatters. Their windows blind, concrete blocks are cemented into the stone mullions. The front door too is blocked up, now just a canvas for spray paint and graffiti. I didn’t pop a sledgehammer or angle grinder in my pocket as I left, so I’ll not be entering this way.
I hover, considering. Even given my recent poor relations with Baxter, this seems an unlikely choice for a get-together of old chums.
Tapping into my mobile, I check the address in Baxter’s message.
Yes, I’m in the right place.
A narrow street passes along the gable-end and I follow it around to find a rear access lane and a line of walled back yards. Once perhaps, these would have been the tradesman’s entrances. Now, there’s just me. Rank upon rank of windows, blind with brickwork or sealed with steel shutters, lie before me.
Putrid cardboard boxes and old mattresses piled against the outer wall of ‘my’ house add to the air of decay. An ancient gate swings from a single hinge. Even the graffiti is peeling. But there’s room to step through and I notice, prints in the mud, quite a mix; boots, trainers, some large, some daintier.
Entering, I recoil. The yard is packed with the muck of years. Whichever low-lives have been staying here have simply tipped the trash out into the yard until it piles almost to my eye level. Black plastic bags compete with takeaway cartons, drinks bottles and filled nappies for space…
How the fuck does anyone live like this?
Thank Christ the weather’s cold…
It’s anyone’s guess what this compacted refuse of humanity will be like when it warms up. The only gap through the foul mess is a one-man wide path, although what look like burrow entrances gape in a couple of places.
Wary for rats, I pick my way through, pulling in my arms close, my jacket tight.
The door and rear windows too, have been bricked up. But at some point, the door has been smashed through and a hole large enough to admit a man yawns between the blocks. Leery of the gloom beyond, I stand back, aiming inward with the flashlight from my phone.
It was probably a scullery once, or a kitchen: an antiquated butler’s sink squats against one wall, the brass faucet dripping. I can’t see much else, but all seems quiet, so still watching for company, human or animal, I swing a leg over two layers of blocks to step through the gap.
Darkness and a deep, in-ground, all-pervading reek…
Urine. Shit. Vomit. Decay. Unwashed bodies. Meths. Vinegar.
A handkerchief over my nose and mouth, I swing the slim beam of light…
On the drainer of the sink, empty bottles, foil, the cut-out bases of drinks cans, a soiled plastic container, the label peeling away and faded… Citric Ac…
Nothing else remains of the original kitchen. Not so much as a table or a broken chair. And while there is an internal doorway, it consists only of the casing that frames the gap. The door itself and any architrave have long vanished; burned for firewood maybe.
I aim my flashlight forward through the gap.
Half a dozen bodies lie on the floor of a central hallway, stretched out on filthy mattresses or blankets. Most look to be sleeping. One tosses and moans…
Bad trip?
Idiot…
Wonder where they’ll go when Haswell demolishes the place?
These are the dregs left over when the barrel’s already been scraped and there’s nowhere else left. They’re beyond doing any harm, unless they’re wanting cash for the next hit. In which case, watch your back.
Taking the Glock from its holster, it’s a comfort to hold, but means that I have to choose between the phone or the handkerchief for the other hand, and I’ll not get far without some light. Both weapon and torch aimed forward, I walk on.
Holding my breath against the rank air, I pick my way through the bodies, watching all the while for any of the lost and the lonely that is more than he appears. But the living dead remain prone on their stinking pallets. I pass through unmolested and without incident.
Flashing up and around: the remains of elegant cornicing hugs the joint of wall and ceiling, a central rose where a chandelier once hung is cracked and split. Black mould arcs out from one corner, a dark and spreading stain on swollen plasterwork. Bracket fungi protrude from another. A staircase, wide and once handsome, yawns upwards. Doors lead off.
Moving carefully, I try the first door, pushing it open with the muzzle of the Glock.
A female hunches over the grate, in the middle of cooking-up. She looks my way, then hastily back again. The fireplace might once have been graceful. What is left of the hearth is marble, but the surround and mantle have gone, leaving only black lines and cobwebs clinging to the wall.
The next room is much the same, this time with a man and a woman sprawled unconscious in a corner. She twitches occasionally. A cardboard box next to the woman contains something bundled in a rag, but I don’t want to look any closer. It whimpers quietly then falls quiet.
…
Mommeee… Stop it! You’re hurting Mommee…
…
James, eyes closed… stretched out from his armchair in front of the fire… Cara lying on his chest, his palm resting close and steadying her…
…
Breathe…
…
I move to the next room, and the next. They’re all the same. The entire ground floor is the haunt of the kind of addicts and alcoholics who have reached the end of the line. The fix is all that’s left. And, very soon, there won’t even be that much.
Whatever is happening, why ever I have been brought to this place, the answer does not appear to be here.
From above, a sound…
… the creak of floorboards…
My head tilts and eyes roll to follow the noise. Without thought, my hand swings too, aiming the Glock upward.
The creaking repeats: the rhythmic groan of timber under slowly pacing feet
Making my way back past the ranks of the soulless, I stand at the base of the stairs, looking up.
What’s waiting?
Or who?
Baxter?
My mouth tastes sour. Is that the foul air? Or is it from within? It barely matters. I’m here now.
My mobile vibes again, the screen flashing in my hand and making the pencil-thin torchlight blink out momentarily while I read the message.
Time to play…
I don’t bother to reply.
Above and ahead of me, bare wooden steps. More or less. Some are partly rotted or missing entirely. But others, thick with dust at the edges are polished smooth in the centres, the grain of pine streaking around whorls and knots. A pervasive mushroom smell sets my nerves jangling.
At the top of the first flight, bright lines demark the edges of one of the steel-shuttered windows. Tall and narrow, it spears light down the stairs to slant bright lines over my legs.
Making careful, precise moves, I place my feet, one step at a time, on the staircase, only moving upwards slowly as I test my weight on the timbers. The temptation is to grab at the handrail, but missing spindles warn me off.
At the top of the flight, I pause. Two more of the light-rimmed windows rise tall over the landing. One even still has the glass, albeit shuttered by the steel. The windows would have been expensive in their day. Mackintosh would have approved. Now, they merely cast light over a view that might be more comforting with less illumination.
And I listen to…
… to nothing…
The footsteps I heard…
From this floor?
Would it carry more than a single floor? The sound of footsteps on bare boards?
Perhaps. In a house naked of carpet, curtains or furnishings, such a sound could travel. But strain as I might, I don’t hear it again. No sound comes from below either. The silence is deafening, with that odd sensation you get in complete quiet, of hearing the rush of blood inside your ears.
Doors lead off the landing, set into once fine, timber-panelled walls. Now the panelling curls and peels: food for mushrooms.
At the first door, weapon at the ready, my finger hovering at the trigger, I pause. There is no handle. Perhaps it was made of brass originally. Certainly, it’s gone, along with the mounting plate and anything else remotely of value. A dark rectangular outline on the woodwork marks a missing fingerplate.
But the drilled hole in the wood remains, where the cylinder once passed through, now more or less blocked by a mass of cobweb. A small tunnel curving into the mass of silk suggests that its owner lurks inside, presumably waiting for lunch to arrive. Strands of silk pass across the doorframe, some anchored to the door itself, and as I gently push, they stretch, then snap, rebounding to lay ghostly fingers over my face and lips.
Swiping at my mouth, tentatively, I ease inside, but…
Nothing…
Nothing but darkness and more cobwebs and the musty damp. There’s enough light to see by, but not much to see. In the corner by the window, the swollen plaster is streaked black. An entire section has simply fallen from the wall, lying in a heap of white dust and fragments. The naked brickwork underneath is threaded with black bootlaces.
I try the next room with a similar result. And the next. The entire floor is vacant. It seems even the zombies down below have more sense than to try to live up in this mess of fug and fungus.
How many more floors?
Two…
Plus attic…
The next floor is very similar. For all that the pulse at my temples pounds an ever-accelerating beat, and the damp, stinking air is making my eyes stream, I’ve seen nothing more dangerous than some dodgy flooring.
On the topmost floor, my hand trembles. My brain shrieks warnings and my eyes are drawn inexorably to the staircase leading into the roof space.
It’s narrow, only wide enough for one person…
… twelve steps that lead to a slatted timber door.
The latch lifts with the slightest of clicks and as I push, again with my gun muzzle, the hinges complain then wheeze open.
My flashlight needles into the gloom, doing nothing but pierce the blackness and leave me blind to anything else. So, knocking it off, instead I raise the glowing screen.
It casts a pale wash over a large open area: like most of these places, a single open attic space taking up most of the footprint of the house.
Timber-planked floors stretch off into the darkness, the lines leading away in a weird perspective effect like one of James’ architectural sketches.
Despite the dust and the emptiness, the scent of furniture polish hangs in the air, mixed with the earthy fungal smell of dry rot. The wooden boards underfoot look unhealthy, feel spongy. The timbers, cracked like crazy paving, span wide spaces and in corners and from ceilings, the curled brown plates of bracket fungi protrude.
I tread carefully, placing my feet where aligned ranks of nail heads suggest the extra support of some beam underneath.
There can’t be anyone here…
Surely?
A wild goose chase?
Is that the game?
To keep me on the run?
My phone held close to my body, I swing my screen in a wide arc, the pallid beam barely lighting the darkness, scanning through almost one-eighty…
… then swing back.
The darkness isn’t quite complete.
Across the floor, over the expanse of dust and silverfish, the light picked out some detail from the gloom.
A sound…
I freeze.
What was it?
It came too quickly. Was too brief. I only barely registered it. Couldn’t identify it.
And it doesn’t repeat.
Warily, I aim my beam outward again, towards the… whatever-it-was… I saw…
I can’t make out the detail, just… shapes, mere shades against the deeper shadow.
As I shift, under my feet, the floor creaks uneasily. Nothing will persuade me to cross that floor. Only the terminally suicidal would trust these decayed boards…
Is that the game, then?
To provoke me into unintentional suicide?
Not a chance…
I don’t have a suicidal bone in my body…
That noise again. It twitches through the air, distorted and twisted by echoes, a nails-on-chalkboard of a sound, setting my nerves on edge.
And, my vision strained to its limit, there’s movement. Something shifting.
How to get there without breaking my neck?
I’d like to turn off my phone screen. silhouetted even by this dim light, I’m a target against the dark. But if I turn it off, beyond doubt, I’ll misstep and if I go through the floor…
Twenty feet? Maybe more?
No, thanks.
I hold the screen below my direct eye line, hanging on to as much of my night-vision as possible. Backing off slowly, I retreat to the stairwell, then quickly back down to the ground level.
The scene is pretty much unchanged, the lost and the lonely and the City undead on their putrid pallets. Stepping smartly between them, the stench of urine and unwashed bodies insults my sinuses, and I pick my way across the floor, trying hard not to touch any of them.
I head past the main staircase to the back of the house. The owners of a property like this would have had servants. And as often as not, a service staircase for them. And it would be…
Here…
With Les Misérables behind me, I face another stairwell, this one faintly lit from somewhere above.
Unlike the first, it appears solid and well-used, the timber boards sound and polished with the smooth patina of many feet. In places, rodent droppings gather into crevices, and the small cones of bird droppings suggest that the local avian population finds the house more to its liking than I do.
Glock aimed ahead of me, I make my way up, craning towards the source of the light.
It’s a miserable grey excuse for illumination, spilling through a barred slot of a window. Not dawn. Just the paling of the sky as the moon rises. Still, it’s an improvement.
The first landing comes out, more or less as I expected, onto the first storey of the house, at the far end of the corridor I first saw. Strictly a servants’ entrance, the door is set into the wall, disguised as panelling, so the Great And The Good didn’t have to acknowledge the little invisibles who served them. As I press it open, laminate breaks away from the plaster backing, dropping as dust and splinters to the floor.
I’ve seen what I need to. I pull the door back again, leaving it only partly closed to give me a little more light.
The next two floors are much the same. I’m not interested. Gun at the ready, I keep moving.
Once more, I climb a narrow stairway. And once more, I find myself in an attic space.
Silver moonbeams slit down through a tiny skylight, only the size of a couple of the slates. The light is filtered as it crawls through the moss and slime encrusted glass. A curved crack across the glass has been letting in the rain and directly underneath, more of the fungi sit like roughly stacked plates on what passes for the floor.
But now I can see this space has been used. The wall is roughly daubed with the old-style horsehair and lime plaster. The remains of planking over the floor is still there, but close by me, is now overlaid by rough sheets of chipboard, the large four-by-eight panels that will straddle uncertain joints and perhaps pass as safe flooring.
But the space goes on, and on. At some point, someone has knocked through the roof spaces of… I crane into the darkness… at least two houses beyond…
… and the chipboard flooring stretches out into an uncertain gloom.
Still placing my weight gingerly, I move forward.
The ‘somethings’ I saw… the shapes…
A table. A rusting metal basin. A bedframe, peppered by woodworm…
… and another staircase, descending, presumably into the next house along.
Down I go. And down.
The rot doesn’t seem to have reached here and I move with more confidence. But on the next floor down, I can’t figure what I’ve walked into. Instead of the landing and passageway I expected, a vast space stretches before me, again vanishing into shadows.
Baffled, I pause and hold… thinking…
The scent of machine oil hangs in the air…
And the penny drops. Sometime in the past, someone had bought up the block and knocked through all the houses but the one I entered by. Perhaps the intention was to convert to some kind of industrial complex and live on-site. That would make sense.
Risking a little more light, I turn on my phone screen again, upping the brightness to sweep the dim space…
And yes, old-style industrial sewing machines stretch out in a double row as far as I can see. You’d think they’d have been removed long ago, if only for scrap value. Still, sometimes things are simply forgotten. The only thread these have seen in a long time is the silk and cobweb which sheets over them, catching flies and dust.
Mystery solved, I relax a bit, then common sense reasserts.
Get a grip…
Now deserted, the block has been commandeered by Baxter and his woman. I have nothing to relax about.
Looking forward, beyond where the fragile illumination of my mobile reaches, there’s… something…
I strain to see…
And there… From somewhere ahead of me…
Footsteps…and… another noise… A warbling, quaking rattle of a noise…
My heart makes a single mighty bound, jack-hammering the blood to my head and fingertips, then bangs inside my ribs like some maddened jack-in-the-box.
What the hell was that?
Distorted by echoes, I can’t identify it…
Then the silence again.
Keeping close to the wall, I edge forward, ready to dive for the doubtful cover of the machines I’m passing. As I draw closer, the something eases into view.
It’s an office: a simple partitioned space set off from the main floor. You couldn’t call them walls, simply windowed panels, cheaply constructed to enclose the area, while giving the office occupant a round-the-floor view of whatever the workers were doing: his little empire…
A rusting filing cabinet, missing one of its three drawers, spills rotted paper and mouse nests over the floor. It sits by a desk, leather-topped, made from some hardwood, now almost fossilised with age.
The leather is curled at the corners, cracked like the bottom of a dried-up lake. But it’s more or less clean, wiped of dust, and empty save for a saucer, chipped at the edge and stacked with cigarette butts. An empty packet lies screwed up to one side. Picking it up, I sniff, getting the scent of fresh tobacco and also, that mushroomy smell again.
Underfoot, the boards are painted, dusty save for an area around the desk where a track has been polished smooth by use.
Then, as I see the wall, I forget all else.
Or to be precise, what is on the wall.
A corkboard… Three cork boards in fact… In a sort of abstract triptych, they’re pinned with photos and a spider’s web of connecting threads radiating out from the middle panel.
At the centre of it all, photos of me; many old, others newer, others I didn’t even know about. Some are ancient: copies of torn and stained ‘Wanted’ posters from different parts of the world. A couple come from my younger days in Africa. Several are newspaper cut-outs from the time of the Blessingmoors debacle.
One or two, I struggle to identify until I realise that they’re screen dumps from video footage taken in Finchby’s place. There are images of me in corridors, sometimes alone, sometimes with James, Michael and Jenny. In one, I’m in the cellars, wiring in the detonators to the Semtex I used to let the river into the basement…
Did I see a camera down there?