London Under Midnight Page 12

  'Ah,' he murmured as he approached an old suit of armor that instead of a helmet sported a plastic human skull. 'How are you, Horatio?' He patted the top of the skull. 'Now, sir, did you hear what I heard?' By now the current of cool, damp air became a torrent. His breath misted white. 'Now… what on earth do we have here?'

  He peered at the concrete floor. Set there was a massive steel hatchway. The hatch itself had been opened - so it was this that had crashed to the floor. This thing must have weighed three hundred pounds at least. Its pitted underside was streaked with rust stains, and blobs of fungus had formed on it in the damp air of whatever vault or dungeon lay beneath his feet. Irving went to the edge of the hatchway and looked down.

  'All is blackness,' he declaimed. 'All is stygian night, but hark…' He couldn't resist the theatrical response as he cupped his hand to his ear. From the hole came the sound of rushing water; its echoing nature suggested that it ran through a tunnel. 'A sewer?' He sniffed. 'Or a lost river of old London town?'

  Years ago, as a novice actor, when parts were few he'd supplemented his income by acting as a tour guide on the open-topped double-decker buses that plied the capital's streets. As well as reciting the landmarks - Big Ben, Houses of Parliament, Downing Street, Buckingham Palace, and so on - he'd dramatically reveal the hidden aspects of London. 'Beneath the streets,' he would tell the tourists as the bus rumbled along, 'is a mysterious, secret London you never see. There are thousands of miles of tunnels and passageways.

  Once there were rivers that ran along its surface, but as demand for building land grew these were buried underground. Beneath Fleet Street lies the River Fleet where boats once sailed. The rivers of Westbourne and Tyburn have been buried, too.' Even back then as a tourist guide he'd made a pantomime gesture of listening. 'They say that in the dead of night you can put your ear down to the pavement and hear the rush of those subterranean waters. And some will claim they even hear the ghostly creak of oars as the phantom boatmen search for a way back home.' If there'd been girls sitting nearby when he made his commentary he'd finish with a ghoulish laugh to try and elicit screams.

  Now this conundrum. Here he stood in a clown costume in the theatre basement. The iron hatch yawned open. Below him was complete darkness. A cold breeze blew up into his face. He heard the gush of invisible water. So this really might be one of the hidden rivers of London that rushed through its tunnel toward the Thames.

  'But who opened the hatch to yonder cavern?' Irving bent down, expecting to find workmen down there. He guessed checking the 'integrity of the structure' would be the engineer's explanation.

  As his eyes adjusted to the darkness he gave a start. Half a dozen faces looked up into his. But he saw, too late, there were no workmen's hard hats. Those faces were strangely bloodless, their lips were blue, dark lines were etched beneath their eyes. He tried to move back but he felt hands grip his ankles. He still moved, but only to topple on to his back. The hands gripped his ankles so ferociously that he yelled in pain. A moment later they hauled him in. He fell through darkness to splash down into a foot of ice-cold water. Gasping, he struggled to his knees. Above him, the opening of the hatch to the warmly lit room beneath the stage could have been his saving, his entrance to heaven. He would be denied admittance to both. The pale shapes flitted with sinuous speed. A second later they pinned him against the tunnel wall. His costume was torn open.

  'For God's sake, what are you doing?' he screamed as he felt mouths clamp against his bare wrists, then his stomach, then finally his face. Those half dozen mouths began to chew while their owners grunted in gluttonous ecstasy. Irving Browning managed to project his scream far away down the tunnel to exit on the banks of the river; there the sound dissipated across the face of the water where it died away without being heard by human ears.

  ***

  'Okay, Ben, where do we start?' Trajan emerged from the bathroom. He rubbed his face with a towel before dabbing it on the back of his head with a grimace. 'Still leaking,' he grunted as he studied the spot of crimson on the fabric.

  'I always do too much research on my articles; it's the curse of living alone.' Outside dusk had fallen. 'Missing person stories are one of the evergreens of journalism. If news is quiet there'll always be a story about someone going out to buy a newspaper and never coming back.'

  'It's no laughing matter.'

  'I agree, but the hard, uncompromising truth is people vanish. It happens all the time. I wrote up a magazine article a couple of years ago about the body of a woman found in the Serpentine. She lay in the morgue for six months and nobody could identify the body. All the evidence the authorities had was her appearance, her clothes and what was in the pocket of her jacket. That was a key attached to a teddy bear fob and a piece of paper inside a plastic bag. On the paper were the words "My name is Susan Pierman. I have no relatives." '

  'So the police had a name.' Trajan was impatient to begin the search. 'They could trace her through that.'

  'And so you'd think, but nobody by that name had gone missing in the UK. She may have been from overseas, or it was an assumed name. This Susan Pierman is only one of thousands of people that go missing every year in this country.'

  'Come on, there can't be that many?'

  'No? Like I say, I'm a writer who lives alone. I do too much research for my own good. Listen, Trajan, we need more information before we start hunting April.'

  'We must do something. The police treated me like I was reporting a lost hamster, not a human being.'

  Ben sighed. 'That's another brutal fact. Unless it's a child that's missing or there's evidence of forced abduction, missing person cases are low priority. Just last year the Lambeth police division - that covers just a single borough - investigated more than two thousand cases where people had vanished. There are websites that specialize in identifying the remains of bodies found in England. Believe it or not, there are hundreds of cases - people found dead in rivers, canals, supermarkets, city streets, hotels, you name it. Some have been murdered, some killed themselves, others died of natural causes, but the single factor that unifies them is that the police haven't a clue who they were. And day after day the morgues collect more and more corpses from the Thames, or municipal parks or bus stations and nobody can put a name to them.'

  Trajan's anger evaporated. He sat on the sofa digesting what Ben had told him. The expression of misery on the man's face touched Ben, and he began asking himself what was his motive for helping to find April. Was it for April's sake? Trajan's? Or did Ben cherish a secret hope that if he found her he could also steal her away from that blond-haired man who sat there grieving for his lost fiancee?

  The bottom line was that Ben must do what he could. Whatever April decided after that was up to her; providing they could trace her, that is.

  'OK,' Ben said. 'First things first. Nothing unusual happened in the days or weeks running up to the night April went missing and you were attacked?'

  'Absolutely nothing.'

  'No peculiar phone calls, or letters, or strangers hanging round the apartment block or where she worked?'

  'No. And no ransom note made from diced newspaper. Don't you think I've gone through all that with the police?'

  'At the moment, Trajan, we've nothing to go on. All we know is what you've told me. You walked beside the Thames. Someone attacked you. When you came round April was gone. There are no witnesses to confirm or deny what-'

  'You think I'm lying?'

  That sense of violence pervading London crackled in the air of the lounge. It was as if some unseen power tested London's population, trying to goad them into acts of random savagery.

  Ben took a deep breath. 'I don't believe you're lying, but you know more than you're telling me.'

  'Like what, for God's sake?' Trajan's face flushed.

  'You can't remember what happened to you yet, but…' Ben tapped his own temple with his finger. 'It's locked in here. When you were sleeping you started shouting. I checked on you and I distinctly he
ard you say: "Why did you bite her?" '

  'Bite her?' Confusion clouded his eyes.

  'Did the individual who attacked you, Trajan, bite April?'

  'I don't-' There was a searching quality to his eyes as if he looked into his own mind. 'I wanted to say, "Yes" but I don't know why. I still can't remember what happened.' He gave one of those painful shakes of his head. 'Sorry. All I can recall is something about a figure that was wrong in some way. A peculiarity I can't define.'

  'How's your head now?' Ben asked.

  'Good enough.'

  'Then it's time we return to the scene of the crime.'

  'Wait. Do you really believe I saw someone bite April?'

  'I believe you know something. It's just a case of triggering your memory.'

  'I hope to God you're right.'

  ***

  They infiltrated the city as the darkness took hold. April Connor and her kind had emerged from the waters after their transformation into New-Life, driven by a hunger that overwhelmed all rational thought. They craved food. That need became nothing less than a burning madness. It must be satisfied at all costs.

  Beside a railway track that ran through wasteland north of King's Cross, a man who was shooting vermin with a rifle found rats fleeing toward him from a derelict warehouse. There were dozens of them. He couldn't believe his luck as he burst their furry bodies with his gunshots. His luck changed when whatever had scared the rats sped from the doorway and seized him. As he saw the surviving rats flee into the shadows he thought to himself in surprise, Biting! The jaws of something no longer human ripped at his skin to release his hot blood.

  In Chelsea, an architect dropped his car keys on the pavement just outside his mews home. When he picked them up he happened to glance down a drainage grate set at the edge of the road.

  'Hello, how did you get down there?' He looked down into a child's wide eyes that gazed up trustingly into his. 'Did someone put you down there?' asked the architect. He glanced round but there was nobody in sight to offer a hand, so he bent down to see the child better. What a world! Who 'd think of pushing a child down through a manhole into a sewer? The child could have been wandering lost for hours.

  The moment the man's face was close enough to the iron grille two things happened. Firstly, he saw several grey-faced figures below lit by the radiance of a street lamp. Two, the child's arms, that were slender enough to pass through the bars of the grate, reached out; its hands grabbed him by the hair and dragged his face downward to slam against the bars. 'Hey!' Their mouths couldn't reach the architect. Instead, one of the figures below drove a steel spike up between the bars and into his eye. Once they'd yanked it out the man's blood rained down on to the figures below who danced in the ruby cascade; as they danced they licked that liquid nourishment from each other's bodies.

  The janitor responsible for locking up the swimming pool in the basement of the hotel yelled into the phone, 'Listen to me. Someone's caught beneath the grid at the bottom of the pool… no, I don't know how. All I can see is a pair of arms. They must be drowning down there. Get someone down here now!' He threw aside the phone then ran back to the pool. At this time of night it was deserted so this was the first time in the man's life he would be hailed a hero. He dived in fully clothed and swam down to where a pair of bare arms extended from the dislodged grille. Beneath that was the drainage conduit that would dump the pool's water into the sewers under the hotel. When the manager and the desk clerk made it down to the pool side, they would find the normally crystal-clear waters of the pool turned the colour of rust. Of the janitor there would be no sign.

  On a houseboat moored to the riverbank a man searched for his wife who'd stepped out on deck just minutes ago to enjoy the cool night air. He scanned the dark waters. 'Sonia, where are you?' The only answer was the sucking noise the waves made as they lapped against the wharf.

  Downriver, towards Tilbury Docks, a stream discharged water into the Thames. On the wall directly above the confluence of waters stood Jez Martine. Zipped into the pocket of his leather coat was the endeavor of his adult life; a home-recorded CD of his songs. Now at fifty years of age he was exhausted. The title song of his album said it all: 'This Man Is Used Up'. Nobody had heard his compositions. The record companies weren't interested. Radio stations didn't even return his complimentary disks, never mind play them. Remember Vincent Van Gogh's self-sacrifice, he told himself, this is the route to immortality. Tonight he would throw himself into the river. When his body was pulled from the water in a day or two, the CD would be found, then the world would mourn the genius that it had lost. Jez Martine heard that death by drowning wasn't only painless, it was a euphoric experience. Oxygen deprivation engenders a sensation of sublime bliss.

  Jez stared down into the river. Pale shapes swam there beneath the surface with all the predatory menace of sharks. Yet when something broke the surface it wasn't a shark's fin but a human face with blazing eyes. Those eyes fixed on him, waiting for him to take that lethal step forward. Jez fingered the hard shape of the compact disk in his pocket. Perhaps it might be worth trying the record companies one more time, he told himself, before hurrying away from the river in the direction of home.

  London before midnight buzzed with life. Only some of it was the wrong kind of life. It was still hungry. The gang of muggers waited in the park for what should be easy victims - a girl with her companion; a slender guy with gold-tipped teeth. When they were close the five men pounced. The first move would be to beat the guy unconscious then rob the pair of them. It all happened in a blur. The robbers fell one by one, their throats torn, or faces ripped from their skulls. As one of the thugs lay dying the word 'ironic' escaped him. But as he lost consciousness the phrase 'a biter bit' drifted through his mind.

  SIXTEEN

  April and Carter gorged on the blood of the would-be robbers. To human eyes the park would be a mass of indistinct shadows but for April the lights of the city beyond the trees illuminated the place in vivid multi-coloured hues. Here in a clearing in the bushes she saw the scene with perfect clarity. Deep inside her, a voice fainter than a whisper of dust falling in a tomb protested that this was a scene of utter horror. Oh no, April told herself, this is a slice of heaven dragged down to earth. For in the clearing lay the source of the most beautiful, nerve-tingling food in creation. The five men who'd made the fatal mistake of pouncing on them lay dead on the ground. Their bodies were a mass of bite marks inflicted during the attack. And now the aftermath of that short battle was a frenzy of feeding.

  April inserted a finger into the torn neck of a muscular guy dressed in army surplus fatigues. With that finger she probed the dripping wound until she found what she needed. Oh… those lovely ruby drips; she yearned to lick them from his skin, but there was something altogether richer and darker -and far more abundant. She craved more than drops, she lusted after a whole reservoir of the man's lifeblood. That probing digit found the carotid artery deep in the neck. April's hunger gave her the strength to hook it with her finger, then draw it out through the wound; a pink tube that once formed the expressway from heart to brain. She moved with such speed the procedure appeared to be borne of years of practice. But this was her first time… her first, glorious, fulfilling, yearned-for time. Through her mind flashed memories of devouring that salty estuary water, but that had only been a substitute for this, the most precious fluid in the world. Her face darted down at the exposed artery; she bit through with an audible snick! As the man's heart had stopped beating there was no arterial spurt. No, this girl's going to have to work hard for her reward. The very molecules of her body blazed with the ferocious hunger. All that mattered in the universe right now was: Feed. Feed long and hard. So this is the beautiful moment of swallowing. She pushed the severed end of the artery into her mouth. Then she sucked hard. The moment of bliss was nothing less than a star exploding in her soul. Those famished molecules all seemed to give a heartfelt 'Ahhh…' A unified sigh that magically spread even beyond the borders of h
er own body. It was as if she nourished a ravenous universe by the act of feeding. She sucked the blood from the man's body with so much power his face began to shrink. As she did so, memories raced through her mind. Of her as a teenager as she sucked on a plastic straw to drain the last of the milkshake out of a cup. This was similar. At first the blood spurted into her mouth from the severed vein in a flood of satisfying salt and flesh flavours. Then as it became depleted in the cadaver's veins she had to draw all the harder until her cheeks ached with the effort. Yet the flood of satisfaction was beyond anything she'd ever experienced before.

  Then, finally, as the reservoir of lifeblood was exhausted, and the man's eyes sank into their sockets, she moved on to the next of her victims. This was a kid with a wide-open mouth that displayed rotted teeth; his eyes were wide glassy orbs in the darkness; the expression suggested his own death had come as an unexpected surprise and he still couldn't come to terms with it. She giggled; the bellyful of man-blood intoxicated her. It left her with a warm sense of well-being. The world had become a lovely place lit by delicious rose tints. As she worked on his throat to tease out the carotid artery she glanced across at Carter.

  Carter luxuriated in gluttony, too. He'd chewed away the hand of a tattooed street bandit. Now he sucked on the open wrist veins with such bliss on his face, while both of his hands stroked the corpse arm from shoulder to forearm as he coaxed the blood along the veins. April giggled again as she watched him. Carter's milking that arm of blood, she told herself, like he's milking a cow. Maybe she should go along and ask for a taste? Tattoo boy's blood might be meatier than the one she worked on now. But then she gasped with surprise. She hadn't expected this. What an unexpected bonus!