As she got closer, I heard the rush of water and the creak of gigantic wheels and, over it all, the long lonesome cry of a falcon high over the moors.
‘As it happens,’ said Seawoll, ‘not really. Why don’t you stop fucking around and tell us?’
‘Alexander!’ said the girl with mock severity. ‘Do you kiss your mam with that mouth?’
‘Who are you?’ asked Seawoll.
‘She’s the Glossop,’ I said.
‘You can call me Brook,’ she said. ‘Or Glotti – depends on how old-fashioned you want to be.’
‘Do I know you?’ asked Seawoll.
‘No, Alexander,’ said Brook. ‘I was asleep for a long time, but I watched you and your friends playing in my dreams so perhaps I was in the middle of waking up. I loved your games – all those Daleks and Drashigs and other monsters. It reminded me of when the world was young and we still had dragons.’
I must have reacted to the last, because Brook fixed me with her dark eyes.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘We had dragons back then, breathing fire and crawling on their bellies – or were that the wyrms? I couldn’t keep them straight then, either.’
‘You were going to tell us what we’re looking for?’ said Seawoll, who obviously wasn’t going to let meeting the ancient spirit of his home town’s river get in the way of the police work.
‘First you’ve got to introduce me to your friends, Alexander,’ said Brook. ‘It’s only polite.’
‘This is Danni,’ said Seawoll. ‘And this is Peter.’
In a spirit of inquiry, I stuck out my hand for Brook to shake. She took it in her small hand, her grip firm, and for a fleeting moment I was up in a high place under a clear night sky – the stars wheeling over my head.
A wide, disturbing grin spread across her face.
‘That, Peter,’ she said, and let go.
When Danni put out her hand, Brook childishly faked her out and thumbed her nose at her.
‘You’re not ready for awesome yet,’ she said. ‘Shit will get real soon enough.’ She looked at me and winked. ‘Isn’t the internet wonderful,’ she said. ‘Better than dragons any day.’
‘So what is it you think we’re looking for?’ said Seawoll. ‘That’s assuming you actually know what you’re talking about.’
‘The Sons of Wayland,’ said Brook. ‘Those mad romantics in iron and steel – keeping alive the ancient traditions but not above knocking out a decent steam boiler if you asked them nicely.’ She looked from Seawoll to me.
‘You’re looking for the storehouse what was brought here in 1939,’ she said. ‘But they moved it out again in 1946. I wasn’t there, of course. I was asleep and I didn’t awake for another forty years. There were only fitful dreams of bombs and fires in the night.’
‘Do you know where it is now or not?’ asked Seawoll, who doesn’t take lip from a witness – no matter what they say they’re the god of. ‘Because I’m getting that desperate for my tea.’
‘Come with me,’ said Brook.
She led us out the back of the building. As we approached the rear door the sound of the rain faded and daylight lightened, so that when we stepped outside it almost felt like sunshine.
It was still overcast but it felt like a bright spring day. Ahead I could hear children laughing.
‘I remember this,’ said Seawoll. ‘This was our adventure playground back in the day.’
What it was was a health and safety nightmare. A big orthogonal open space bounded on all four sides by the sandy-coloured ruins of the Volcrepe Mill. Small hills of brick rubble mixed with rusting girders and the remains of gantries twisted into gallows shapes by time and neglect. Weeds and scrubs pushed up through broken asphalt and concrete slabs strewn with broken glass and jagged metal shrapnel.
Anyone looking to film a low budget post-apocalyptic movie need look no further. A Young Adult dystopia at that, because a dozen or more kids were playing amongst the ruins.
‘God, I hope they’ve had their tetanus jabs,’ said Danni as we watched a pair of boys sled down a rubble heap on a piece of rusty corrugated iron.
‘Don’t be such a mitherer,’ said Brook. ‘If you don’t bloody your knees when you’re a kiddie, what kind of a childhood would that be?’
‘One without septicaemia?’ said Danni.
‘Nobody’s going to get septicaemia or tetanus or crippled or the like,’ said Brook. ‘Not while I’m here.’
‘Swear,’ I said, and the light faded a bit.
Brook turned on me, her face a stern adult mask.
‘You dare?’ she asked – her voice deceptively pleasant.
‘Swear,’ I said.
I felt her power then, and it went all the way back to a time the Glossop was a mad unchannelled stream that ran free and wild down from the moors. A time when bears and wolves patrolled her banks and bison drank from her pools.
What was I in the face of all that geological time?
And then Brook was eleven again and smiling a mischievous smile. The sky brightened and I took another breath.
‘The Starling,’ she said. ‘Just what the doctor ordered.’
‘And the kids?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ she said. ‘I swear on my power and all that. Satisfied?’
I looked at Seawoll, who was looking impatient, obviously having missed all the mystical stuff.
‘And the archive?’
‘I can help you find it,’ said Brook. ‘But first I need your help with something.’
‘Oh great, a bloody side quest,’ said Seawoll.
But in policing, like in open-world RPGs, you get used to chasing after collectables in the hope they’ll help you move things along.
‘This way,’ said Brook.
We followed her around the remains of a brick shed. In front of us was an area where the rubble had been cleared away. On it, bits of scrap metal had been cemented together with what looked like papier mâché to form the shape of a plane – a big plane, at least fifteen metres long and with a wingspan to match.
Not just any junk either, but what appeared to be actual bits of aircraft fuselage. As we watched, a couple of older kids held a curved section in place while a younger child pushed papier mâché into the crack between it and the next section along. I could see patches of untarnished aluminium and structural spars with the distinctive lightening holes drilled through them to save weight.
I had a friend at school who was mad keen on Airfix models, who probably could have told me the make of plane, but I knew enough to guess it was a Second World War bomber.
It was a patchwork anyway – some fragments were painted khaki, others showed bare metal or scraps of camouflage patterns. I thought I saw at least one white USAF star and part of an RAF roundel.
‘It’s like a cargo cult plane,’ said Danni.
It was just that. As if the children of Glossop were hoping to attract planes to bring them cargo – although given that the town seemed entirely built on a slope, I wondered where they thought they would land.
‘I slept for fifty years,’ said Brook, ‘and woke up to find you lot had made a right mess of things. Now down here in the valley I was used to that, but up on the moors?’ She shook her head. ‘I expected better.’
Seawoll nodded towards the front of the bomber, where a seven-year-old girl was drawing a stick figure reclining under the broken edge of the cockpit windscreen.
‘Are you talking about the crash sites?’ he asked. ‘Most of those were cleaned up.’
‘Not the planes, not the metal,’ said Brook. ‘That’s not what I’m talking about. It’s the poor dead sods left cruelly behind that plague me. Sad shadows condemned to walk the moors like a bad Morrissey song.’