“The hall stands on the site where Boudicca killed herself and our two daughters,” he said. “This,” now his foot tapped at the kitchen floor, “is where they died. I am tied to it by sorrow and by power. And now, by you. I am not surprised you picked this place, above all others, to make your home.”
There was something else lurking behind his words, but Jack could not see it. Why was he back? What had Prasutagus and Boudicca to do with the Troy Game? Jack knew he could stand here all day and ask Malcolm questions and get little but more puzzlement back in response. So he studied Malcolm one moment longer, stretching out the silence until it was slightly uncomfortable, then gave a nod, as if dismissing Malcolm, and left the room.
Malcolm stared after him. Then, when he was quite sure Jack was gone, he bared his teeth in a silent snarl.
“That wasn’t very nice,” said a voice.
Malcolm snapped about.
A young woman with long curling black hair and a cold face was leaning against the outside door.
“When they discover you there’ll be hell to pay,” Malcolm said, recovering his composure.
“Ah, but isn’t that what you and I and Boudicca have planned for, all along?” said the woman. Her eyes wandered over to where Jack had been standing but a minute previously.
“You can’t wait to meet him, can you?” Malcolm said softly.
If it was possible, the woman’s face became even colder. “I care nothing for him,” she said.
“Of course not,” said Malcolm. “Did you know the imps are murdering—” he went on, but got no further, for suddenly he found himself alone in the kitchen.
THREE
Maze Pond, Southwark
Friday, 8th September 1939
Vera Clements finished her shift as a nurse’s aide at Guy’s Hospital far later than usual. That damned Ward Sister had been unhappy with the dressing trays, and had required Vera to do them all again—cleaning, laying out, wrapping, sterilising. The entire bloody lot. No matter that Sister had known it would make Vera late. No matter that Sister must have known that it would be fully dark by the time Vera left and Vera would need to walk to the train station along unlit streets.
Nothing mattered but the cursed dressing trays.
Vera had finished, but night had closed in, and Vera knew her parents would be worried. They hated her walking the streets at night and, once they realised she’d missed her usual train home, would be sitting at the kitchen table, a cold pot of tea between them, worried eyes flickering towards the little clock sitting on the dresser.
Well, at least London Station wasn’t far. All Vera had to do was duck up Maze Pond, then nip across St Thomas Street and she was there. Five minutes, six at the most, and she’d be inside the station and heading for her home.
She hunched down into her coat—Lord, but it was cold for this time of the year!—and walked so fast up Maze Pond it was almost a jog. Her heels clattered along the pavement, enough to wake the dead, but Vera didn’t care. Just another few minutes and she’d be out of this dark, lonely street and inside the train—
A shadow moved, catching Vera’s eye, and she jerked to a halt.
A man stood in the dark rectangle of a doorway across the street. Vera could make nothing out but the glow of his cigarette as he drew on it, and the outline of the hat pulled down low over his brow.
He wasn’t looking at her—his head was bent low, as if studying the pavement—but Vera knew his attention was all on her.
She forced her feet to move. Silly man, she told herself. Lonely, no doubt. Thinking to chat up a nurse on her way home. Well, he’d not get a word out of—
She gasped in shock. She couldn’t see it, but somehow she knew that another man was following her up Maze Pond. His footsteps were slow and stealthy, his movements slippery, his eyes fixed on her back.
Vera spun about.
A shape (the man) slipped into a passageway between buildings and was gone.
Trying to control her breathing, Vera glanced at the man across the street—still in his doorway, still drawing on his cigarette—then around at the now-empty street behind her.
Slowly, her every move a nightmarish effort now, Vera turned again and began to walk as fast as she could up the street.
From the corner of her eye she saw the man in the doorway toss aside his smoke and step after her.
Vera broke into a run. St Thomas Street was just ahead! She could reach it in less than a minute!
The second man stepped out of an alleyway directly in front of her and grabbed at her elbow.
Vera shrieked, the sound a harsh whistle in her throat, and jerked her arm away, heard the man laugh softly.
“Got you worried, have we, sweet?” he whispered.
She tried to step around him, tried to run, tried to drag her eyes away from his, but she stumbled in the gutter, sprawling painfully across the surface of the street.
A hand traced lightly down her back. Vera could feel its fingers burning through her coat.
Sobbing, terrified, Vera scrambled forward, trying repeatedly to get to her feet but stumbling back to her hands and knees every time.
Her hands and knees were bleeding, and the base of her chin throbbed from where it had slammed into the road.
One of the men stepped up behind her—Vera thought her heart would burst from fright—and buried his hand in her coat between her shoulder blades.
The next instant he had hauled her to her feet.
Run, he whispered in her mind. Run!
Vera ran.
Her feet slipped wildly on the road, but somehow she managed to stay upright. Her handbag had long gone, and her jaunty red woollen cap lay on the roadway where she’d fallen. Her hair escaped from its bun and wrapped itself about her eyes, blinding her, and her coat flapped madly as she ran towards the junction of Maze Pond with St Thomas Street.
She could see cars passing along St Thomas Street, could see the dim lights of London Station, could see the shapes of people moving about inside.
Vera knew she would never make it out of Maze Pond.
“Are we scared yet?” came a whisper in her ear. “Truly terrified?”
Vera spun around, hitting out madly, blindly, with her fists.
Something sharp, something nasty, sliced along her left ribs.
Can you feel her terror?
She heard that, although she knew her assailants weren’t addressing her.
Rather, they addressed something large, something shadowy, something huge, something seething down from the night sky!
Vera screamed, her mind refusing to accept what she was seeing, or what was about to happen to her.
One of the men, laughing softly, grabbed at the collar of her coat, pulling her against him.
A knife, very long, very cold, very sharp, slid into her belly, then jerked to one side.
Much later, the imps, moving under the cloak of power, left Vera Clements’ ruined corpse under the porch of St Magnus the Martyr on the northern bank of the Thames.
One of them, Jim, held a scrap of flesh in his hand—still warm, bloody, and soft.
He sighed, as if regretful, then walked the short distance to the embankment and tossed what remained of Vera’s womb into the cold, grey waters.
Then both he and Bill looked upwards, their teeth glinting.
It had been a good night.
FOUR
Faerie Hill Manor
Saturday, 9th September 1939
Jack drove through Epping Forest the night after Vera had taken her ill-fated walk along Maze Pond. Despite the cool weather, he had the hood of the Austin convertible folded back, and the wind rippled through the short curls on his head. He drove with one hand on the wheel, the other resting on the top of the door, occasionally lifting it to his mouth to draw on the cigarette he held in his hand.
The car zipped along the narrow roadways. There was a speed limit of only twenty mph in force to try to save petrol, but Jack ignored it. No one would see or hear him, for Jack drove that strange borderland between the Faerie and the mortal world, where distances expanded and contracted according to need, and where time passed only as requested. Trees crowded the verges of the roadway, dark and impenetrable, their branches meeting overhead so that Jack drove through a dark tunnel. Occasionally the headlamps of the Austin would catch something strange drifting between the trees or scampering across the road just in front of the car.
Jack had been driving for hours. In the usual world it would have taken but a few short minutes to drive from Copt Hall to Faerie Hill Manor, but Jack wanted the time and space to think. Tonight was a cliff edge: a night of beginnings and endings. Never again would he be the same once he stepped over that edge.