The Grey makes a noise composed of the murmuring of ghosts and the vibration of power. Each city sounds different: Seattle mutters and rattles; Mexico City hums like feedback. London raised a mighty chorus over the bass drone of the river Thames. The power lines of the Grey were not laid in a neat grid, like Seattle’s wire-frame world, but in wild-hare directions and labyrinthine meanders that came together in knots of brilliant colored light. I couldn’t see them all, but I knew there were layers of history as thick and striated as sandstone beneath my feet, just as they were at the street level. The ghosts of buildings glistened over the surfaces of present structures, and phantom traffic choked the streets with oxcarts, horses, trams, and pedestrians. Most of the visions were from the eighteenth century onward, after the city had recovered from its own Great Fire, but promontories of older times and buildings long gone thrust up from below or floated slightly displaced by the actions of history and nature. Glimpses of fire caught my eye again and again. I shied the first time I heard the whistle of a falling bomb from the city’s memory of World War II.
I did not, in fact, dawdle through Hatton Garden, but took the more direct and higher-traffic way along Charterhouse to St. John, passing Smithfield Market’s painted iron arcades where meat and poultry were still sold fresh in huge loads. From the outside it reminded me a bit of the cliffside buildings at Pike Place Market, though Seattle’s famous produce markets didn’t hold a candle to the meat markets of Smithfield’s imposing quarter mile of whitewashed iron, brick, and glass, gleaming in the early summer sunshine. I turned up St. John, dodging cars, trucks, pedestrians apparently bent on suicide, and phantom herds of cattle swarming toward their historical demise. As I diverged from the hectic intersection into the upper part of St. John’s Lane, the noise and traffic dropped to a distant babble.
Looking around as I walked, I thought Clerkenwell must have been a much quieter town before it was eaten by London. It was tall and narrow and had the feeling of age, layered as it was with phantom monks and people in rich, ancient clothes, struggling against a tide of newer ghosts from the rise of the Victorian middle class and the bombings during the Second World War, all threading through the busy spectral streets. If I’d thought the area I’d walked through earlier had a lot of pubs, lower Clerkenwell had it beat hollow, and the ghostly crowds of muscular men that gathered around the present pub doors were thick and well-worn into the neighborhood’s history. As I walked up the road, getting closer to the dark squares on my map marked ST. JOHN’S PRIORY, the shades of history grew more pastoral and the dominance of the church felt like the chill of an open crypt.
The old priory gate at the top of St. John’s Lane was a yellow brick and stone structure of arches and squat, square towers that cut across the road as if it might have once held massive turnstiles to control the traffic of people and beasts coming down from the fields to the north. The uprights and plaza stones of the gate glowed with a soft, red energy that rose from the ground like fog—vampires must have been in the neighborhood for a long time but without raising much notice, judging by the unusual form of the magical residue. That was interesting.
I passed a tall, narrow arch neatly wedged between two tall, thin buildings nearby. The words PASSING ALLEY were carved into the white plaster, and from the corner of my eye I caught the same colorless glitter I’d spotted near Temple Underground Station. I turned my head away, as if checking the address on the nearest building. Then I looked back, peering down the alley as my gaze passed over it. A bit of white floated back into the distant murk of the covered alleyway, but the shadows were persistent and the Grey remained a smear of silvery mist curiously impenetrable. Not a vampire, but there was something there—or more to the point, something pretending not to be there.
I turned and went on as if I’d noticed nothing. Whatever it was would have to come out into the sun and follow me through the open squares on each side of the priory gate if it wanted to keep up.
As I went through the arch of the old church, I pulled out my cell phone and held down the button that activated the camera in video mode. Keeping my hand down, I pointed the tiny lens behind me and kept walking through the narrowest part of the gate and across the square. I crossed Clerkenwell Road and stopped in a sunny plaza paved in bright white stone—some kind of marble maybe—with a dark circle laid around the edge as if there used to be some small building there that had long since vanished and left only its footprint in the road. A tall, dim hole in the old brick wall on the north of the open area was identified as JERUSALEM PASSAGE by a neat, tin sign. I brought the phone up to my face and took a quick look at the video capture.
The figure was difficult to see, not because of the low quality of the video but because it wasn’t entirely present in the normal realm. It was also black and white where everything else was color and very vague around the edges. But there wasn’t any doubt that the eerie thing was following me. I wasn’t sure if anyone aside from myself could see it and I wondered what it would do once I entered the narrow confines of the walkway ahead. I didn’t want to turn and confront it just yet. This was far too open and public a place for that to be wise if the thing wasn’t corporeal.
Tense with anticipation, I entered Jerusalem Passage. But even turning back when I came to an unlighted corner, I saw and felt nothing behind me. I walked on, uphill through the twisted route. Occasional slashes of light came down through breaks between the overhanging roofs, spotlighting the low-ceilinged shops and tiny cafés tucked into the buildings along the narrow route.
Just at the bottom of a flight of stone steps, I found the address I was looking for. A bronze bellpull on a chain hung from a bracket beside the small, dark green door, which was adorned with a complementary knocker in the shape of a swan. The light was dim enough that looking round for trouble wouldn’t seem strange, so I did. Still no sign of the glittering thing.
I used the knocker on the tarnished bronze plate attached to the door. Something rustled on the other side and the upper part of a phantom face pushed through the surface. It was unthreatening to me, just taking a look, and I took it for some kind of ghost-powered alarm or majordomo. Then it sank back, leaving a tiny ripple on the door’s lingering Grey surface.
Clanking and scraping sounds came from inside, and in a moment, the door creaked open. I had to stoop to see into the low, dark opening. An odor like old gym socks and unwashed dishes wafted out. I clamped my teeth over an urge to gag and tried to smile.
A thin man with his back and shoulders permanently bent into a crouch peered out at me. His face was unlined, yet he seemed old, and the energy colors around him were scarlet and muddy blue-green.
“Whatcher want?” he demanded, his voice like the shrieking of unoiled iron hinges.
“I’m looking for John Purcell.”
“Master Purcell’s gone out.” He pronounced the name “PURSE-el.”
“When will he be back?”
“Don’t know.”
“Then, when did he leave?”
“What business is it of yourn?” he snapped, narrowing his eyes and showing sharp, yellow teeth.
“I have some business with Mr. Purcell on behalf of a friend in the US.”
“We’re not in trade with colonials,” he declared, and moved to slam the door.
I ducked and put my shoulder into the opening, levering my weight against the carved planks and feeling the alarm-ghost imprisoned in the wood writhe away from the contact. The crooked man on the other side pushed back with considerable strength, but I dug in and shoved, forcing my body through the gap and bulling my way inside. The thin man plunged against my absence, unable to correct his drive to close the door, and ended up slamming it shut behind me. The bolts and latches clanked into place, locking me in the room with him.