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“God in heaven,” he slurred. “Are they going to plague my boys,too?”
Young I
The memory of his children and his wife and his inability tokeep them brought the tears to his eyes. He began to weep andcouldn't stop.
Time, chopped and jumbled, went by. Streets tumbled past. Smoke.Steam. Turmoil.
Doyle found himself in another grubby backstreet and anotherfilthy tavern. As before, a boisterous crowd willingly financed hisraging alcoholism.
Despite the wine, the fairies started to skip around his feetagain. Either they were getting stronger or he was gettingweaker.
He drank and walked and drank and cried and drank and rantedand, quite suddenly, Big Ben was chiming midnight and he was awareof his surroundings.
Clarity!
There was something he had to do, a place he had to be, an urgehe couldn't defy.
Doyle found himself on the outskirts of the Strand. It wasclosed off and secured by a police cordon. Access and egress wereimpossible from Trafalgar Square in the west all the way to FleetStreet in the east.
He had no idea why he wanted to get onto the famous thoroughfarebut the determination to do so was all-consuming.
Kingsway and Aldwych were blocked, as were the various roadsabutting the main street from the north and those leading up to itfrom the Thames, to the south. Only Bridewell Alley had beenoverlooked, due, perhaps, to its extreme narrowness and the factthat it was clogged with rubbish.
Doyle slipped into it, tottered along its length, and lurchedout into the wide street beyond. The Strand had once been amongLondon's most glamorous playgrounds but now broken glass crunchedunderfoot and many of its buildings were gutted, blackened, andwindowless.
It was teeming with thousands of Rakes and wraiths. The latter,Doyle was used to. He himself had ventured out in spirit form oncountless occasions in recent months. The corporeal bodies, though,u
He kept his eyes downcast and shoved his way past them until hereached a grand old edifice, undamaged by the rioting. Only vaguelyaware of what he was doing, he stumbled into the opulent structureand ascended five flights of stairs. He banged on a door andentered.
Fairies darted between and around his ankles.
He sat at a table.
His hands were gripped.
Someone said, in a dry, husky voice, something about the greatergood of mankind.
“The greater good of mankind,” he chanted, like an automaton.Then: “Freedom! Liberation! Anarchy! No God!”
“Thy shackles are unbreakable, soft skin,” a fairywhispered.
“Leave me alone,” he hissed, then aloud: “Rules must be broken!Propriety must be challenged! The status quo must be unbalanced!True liberty!”
“Slave to oppositions!” the fairy mocked. “There are but twoeyes in thy head! Will the third not open for thee?”
The Russian woman materialised, just as she'd done many timesbefore.
“Go forth, apostles,” she said. “Liberate the downtrodden andthe oppressed.”
She reached out to touch him.
He knew what would happen, and he knew it had happened too manytimes before. This time would be the last. After so manyseparations, he was too exhausted for the rejoining.
He tried to say no.
He failed.
Her nebulous finger brushed his forehead.
Time distorted and space warped out of shape.
Somehow, impossibly, he was in two places at once.
He shuffled along the Strand, feeling heavy and sodden and emptyand lonely and mindless and lost.
He also drifted, amorphously, elsewhere on the thoroughfare, andthe Russian woman's force of will resonated like a church bellthrough what little substance this aspect of him possessed.
A fairy floated before his two sets of eyes-the corporeal onesand the formless ones.
“Thou hast fulfilled the role assigned to thee. Recurrence, nottranscendence, shall come,” it tinkled.
“Leave me alone, you bloody lizard!” he snarled.
He wondered at his own words.
Lizard?
At the Trafalgar Square end of the Strand, CommanderKrishnamurthy, his entire face mottled with bruises after hisordeal at Tichborne House, squinted through the dense atmosphereand addressed a gathering of constables.
“Now then, lads,” he said, “who's got a headache?”
More than half the men raised their hands.
“Me too. And let me tell you, I've had quite enough of it. Sotonight we're going to sort it out. However, I'm afraid that, forsome of you, the headache is going to get worse before it getsbetter. We're close to the source of the public disorder that'sbeen disrupting the city these days past, and, whatever it is, it'sgoing to wheedle its way into your brains to try to make a defectorof you. You all know fellow constables who've gone absent withoutleave to join the rioters-”
The men muttered an acknowledgment, and one of them growled:“Bloody deserters!”
“No,” Krishnamurthy objected. “Their minds are beingcontrolled-and, as I say, over the next few hours, it's likely thatthe same thing will happen to some of us.”
“No, sir!” the men protested.
“We have to be prepared for it. We don't want to be addingourselves to the enemy forces, hey? So here are my orders, lads,and I pray I never have to tell you to do anything like this everagain: in the event that you notice one of your fellows supporting,or begi
The constables looked at each other, perplexed.
“I mean it!” Krishnamurthy said. “If needs must, render yourcolleague unconscious. Knock him out! Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir!” came the hesitant responses.
Krishnamurthy knew that not far away, at the top of Kingsway,Detective Inspector Honesty was giving the same speech to anothergathering of constables, though probably in a rather more concisefashion, while in Fleet Street, Detective Inspector Trounce wasdoing the same.
The three groups of policemen were each about a hundred andfifty men strong. Much smaller teams were guarding the variousminor routes into the Strand.
Krishnamurthy estimated that a force of a little over sixhundred constables had congregated around the area. From what he'dseen so far, he suspected that at least four times that number ofRakes lurked inside the police cordon.
“Is this really all we can muster?” he muttered to himself. “Iknew the force was haemorrhaging men but I'd no idea it was thisbad!”
He peered into the rolling ground-level cloud. There was a fullmoon somewhere above, and its light gave the mist a weird anddeceptively bright silvery glow. However, the shadows were dense,and, with most of the street's gas lamps destroyed, visibility wasfar worse than it seemed.
Sergeant Slaughter approached, stood beside him, and noted: “Ifit's not one thing, it's another, Commander.”
“What do you mean?”
“This murk, sir. There's been a lot fewer vehicles on thestreets what with the rioting, so where's the bally steam comingfrom?”
“Hmm, that's a very good question!”
“Then, of course, the steam got mixed up with the smoke from thefires, so we got this dirty grey soup. But most of the fires inthis area burned themselves out a good while ago. So, again,Commander: where's it coming from?”
Krishnamurthy suddenly became aware that his breath was cloudingin front of his face.
“By jingo!” he exclaimed. “I hadn't realised! The weather's onthe turn!”
“Crept up on us, didn't it!” Slaughter said. “The end of theheatwave, and about time, too. Except, it looks like the change hasbrought on a London particular.”