Michael Spatley bellowed with pain. Instead of sound, what burst from his throat was a deluge of blood.
* * *
Brian Tunstall looked round at the sudden sound from behind him. In the back seat, Spatley was thrashing around. It was just him in there. It took the driver a moment to take in what he was seeing, to be sure there was nobody else in the car. ‘Medical emergency,’ he shouted into his headset. ‘Ambulance required on scene.’ He was unclipping his seatbelt as he said it, turning to — to do what, exactly?
Now he could see how much blood there was. In an instant there was more of it, out of the man’s abdomen and groin. Tunstall could see the fabric ripping apart. Suddenly the man’s trousers burst open, and there was a great gout of blood as-
Just like that, the screams stopped.
Tunstall stared at the flesh that spiralled up into a sort of swaying pillar, a snake of … oh, God … what was this? How could this be happening? He’d never imagined-
With a slap like meat hitting a slab, everything he was looking at suddenly blurred sideways and, with a concussive splatter of blood, something sped through the side of the car.
Across the rear seats lay the remains of Michael Spatley, his neck and abdomen and groin split open and empty, his mouth lolling. The thumping and swaying against the car continued. For a moment, Tunstall could only stare. Then he made himself clamber into the back seats and did what he had to do.
ONE
Detective Inspector James Quill liked his sleep. He liked it especially on these short summer nights when he was woken by the dawn and had had to leave the window open to get cool, and then it rained on the carpet. He would only willingly give up his sleep for his daughter, Jessica, who would on occasion wander into his and Sarah’s bedroom at 3 a.m. with something very important to tell them. These days Quill, having once been made to forget Jessica through occult means, would listen to that important thing with a bit more patience. Now once again there was an unusual noise in his bedroom, and he found a smile coming to his face, sure it was her.
He blinked awake, realizing that this time the noise wasn’t the voice of his child, but of his phone on the bedside table, ringing.
He lay there for a moment. There was a lovely pre-dawn light through the curtains.
‘Would you please answer that,’ said Sarah, ‘and tell them to fuck off?’
Quill saw who was calling and answered the phone. ‘Lisa Ross,’ he said, ‘my wife sends you her fondest regards.’
‘If it’s her, I actually do,’ amended Sarah.
‘It’s the Michael Spatley murder, Jimmy.’ The intelligence analyst’s voice on the other end of the line sounded excited.
‘Please don’t tell me-?’
‘Yeah. It looks like this is one of ours.’
* * *
Quill took a deep breath as he always did before quietly opening the door of his semi-detached in Enfield and stepping out into the world. He looked around cautiously as he approached his car in the driveway. This morning there didn’t seem to be anything horrifying-
‘Morning,’ said a voice from nearby.
Quill jumped. He looked round, his heart racing.
It was the newspaper delivery guy, with a bag over his shoulder. He’d parked his van at the end of the close. Quill tried to make himself give the bloke a smile, but he’d already seen what was with him. The delivery guy was followed by a trail of small figures, giggling and nudging each other. They looked like tiny monks and wore robes that hid their faces. As Quill watched, one of them, seemingly unnoticed by the man, leaped up like a monkey onto his shoulder and whispered something in his ear. The man’s expression remained unchanged. But now Quill thought he could see a burden in the eyes, something being gnawed at. ‘Don’t like the look of the news this morning,’ said the man, his voice a monotone.
Quill nodded and went swiftly to unlock his car.
* * *
He headed for the A10, but, as always, couldn’t help but look up into the sky ahead of him as he did so. Towards the reservoir, something horrifying loomed in the air. It was there every day. It had taken him a while to notice it, as was the way with the Sight — the ability to see and feel the hidden things of London that he and his team of police officers had acquired by accident less than six months ago. Once he had seen the thing, it had become more and more obvious, to the point where he now wished he could ignore it.
But, being a copper, every time he had to look.
It was a vortex of smashed crockery, broken furniture, all the cared-for items of a home, whirling and breaking above a particular house somewhere over there, over and over again, each beloved thing impossibly fixing itself only to be smashed again. He could never see such detail from the car, obviously, but as he’d become aware of it, he’d gained the emotional context, the feeling of rage and betrayal, the horrible intimacy of it. Those feelings were also part of what the Sight did. The detail of what he was seeing had come when he’d looked into the matter and found out about a poltergeist case that dated back to the seventies. Once he knew what he was looking at, the Sight had filled in the gaps, and now every time he drove this way he was therefore burdened by something that looked like a distant weather phenomenon but also shouted pain into his face.
The worst thing of all was that there was nothing he could do about it. The participants no longer lived around here. No crime that he was aware of had been committed. It might not even have really happened. But in some way, via some mechanism that he and his team had not yet got to grips with, London remembered it. Being remembered was one of the two ways one could gain power from some intrinsic property of the metropolis itself; the other being to make an awful sacrifice to … well, they didn’t know what the sacrifice was made to, really, though they had made some worrying guesses. Quill sometimes thought that living here with the Sight was like continually wearing those Google glasses he’d read about — always seeing notations about the world. Except in this case the notes were all about ancient pain and horror.
Those little buggers in the hoods were another example. As far as he and the others could tell, they were some sort of … well, they were either a metaphorical representation of various psychiatric disorders — of human misery, basically — or they actually were that misery, and psychiatry was the metaphor. They were as common as rats, and Quill’s team had quickly stopped trying to deal with every instance of them they saw in the street. They could be chased away, or the person they were tormenting could be taken away from them, but they always came back. Quill could swear that, as the summer came on, he was seeing more and more of them. At least he didn’t have any following him. Yet.
He turned the car onto the A10, thankful not to have the weight of that poltergeist thing in the sky right in front of him any more. The familiar lit-up suburban bulk of the lightbulb factory loomed ahead; a few early cars were on the road. He took comfort in the ordinary these days. He switched on the radio, found some music on Radio 2. He felt guilty every time he thought about it, but he often found himself wondering if life would have been so bad had he and his team actually accepted the offer that had been made to them. That terrifying bastard whom they called the ‘Smiling Man’, who was almost certainly not a man at all, had used a proxy to tell them that he was willing to take away the Sight. They, being coppers, being aware that if they did that they’d spend the rest of their lives wondering what they were missing when they came across a crime scene with some hidden dimension, being aware that that smiling bastard who had been behind their first case had something enormous planned … like mugs they had all, for their differing reasons, said no.