But no. As it turned out, they’d gone one better than that. Gwillam threw a door open and flicked a light switch. Strip lights flickered in sequence along a wall as long as a football field. A black walclass="underline" black floor, too, scarred with the scuff marks of innumerable feet. Up ahead of me, something that looked a little like a tyrannosaurus rex made of glass and black steel reared itself up to about twice my height. But it wasn’t a T-rex: it was a Zeiss projector.
‘Son of a bitch!’ I said, impressed in spite of myself as the penny dropped.
‘That’s the sort of language Po doesn’t appreciate all that much,’ Gwillam murmured, raising the disturbing possibility that he might actually have a sense of humour.
He walked around the Zeiss projector, and I followed: or, rather, I was herded. The vast expanse of floor on the far side was mostly empty, except for a ghost-pattern of unbleached areas on the carpet where other objects had once stood: display stands, partition walls, ancient cine-cameras, life-sized dioramas from great movies. The Anathemata had colonised one small area: there were a couple of guys working on laptop terminals at desks that were surrounded by thick, overlaid loops of electric cable like barbed-wire entanglements. Another couple of guys were talking on mobile phones, one of them tracing a line with his finger on an ops board – a huge map of London pinned to the wall, like I’d only ever seen in 1970s cop shows. That was pretty much it: that, and a whole lot of empty space stretching away into the middle distance.
‘You should move somewhere smaller, now that the kids have grown up,’ I commented, trying for a nonchalant tone that I think I missed by a mile or so. ‘You’re probably paying more rent than you need to.’
Gwillam smiled thinly. He was watching my face, taking a clinical interest in my reaction. ‘Who mentioned rent? They left the key under the mat, and we let ourselves in. I’m assuming you know what this used to be, before it died?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I know.’
But Gwillam wanted to give me the punchline, and he wasn’t going to be deterred. ‘It was the Museum of the Moving Image.’
Just the words conjured up a little squall of memories. The Museum had been part of the South Bank complex, like the National Theatre and the Festival Hall – but it had been added on after all the rest were built, because film was the scruffy little johnny-come-lately of the art world and had to make space for itself at the table with its elbows. I’d only been here once before in my life – on a school outing when I’d been thirteen. All the way from Liverpool on the train, with four stuffed-pork-roll sandwiches and a can of Vimto to see me through the day. I’d pretended to think it was shit, because that was what all my mates were saying, but secretly I reckoned the low-tech horror of the magic-lantern shows was the dog’s bollocks, and I sneaked back to watch the X-wings-versus-tie-fighters battle sequence from Star Wars twice over.
Now it was just an empty warehouse.
‘They closed the place down some time in the late 1990s,’ said Gwillam absently. ‘Took the exhibition on the road. It’s meant to be opening again in three years or so. In the meantime . . . it’s really handy for the West End. Sit down, Castor.’
I hadn’t even seen the chair. It was sitting in a patch of shadow just on the further side of the ops board where two of the strip lights had failed to come on. A coil of rope and a doctor’s little black bag lay on the floor beside it. There was a table, too: a small, round coffee table with a stained formica top which looked as though it had wandered in here from somewhere else. Gwillam swivelled the chair around to face me.
‘Please,’ he said, in the same deadpan tone.
‘I’d rather stand.’
Gwillam sighed, and pursed his lips in a way that suggested he got a lot of this selfish and hurtful behaviour but never quite got used to it.
‘If you’re standing,’ he pointed out patiently, ‘Zucker and Sallis can’t tie you to the chair.’
‘My point exactly,’ I agreed.
‘And I want you to be tied to the chair because it makes some of the things I’m about to do to you that much easier.’
‘Look,’ I began, ‘as a concerned citizen, I’m really happy to cooperate with any–’ But Gwillam must have given some kind of signal to his team that I didn’t catch. Po’s massive clawed hand closed around my throat and he hauled me unceremoniously over to the chair, slammed me down and held me in position. Zucker and Sallis made busy with the ropes. They were enthusiastic amateurs where knots were concerned, but they made up in quantity what they lacked in real finesse.
While they worked, Gwillam brought up another chair and placed it opposite me. Then, when they stood back respectfully from the finished job, he nodded a curt acknowledgement to them. ‘Sallis,’ he said, ‘you’re with me. Mister Zucker, after your recent exertions you and Mister Po might wish to avail yourselves of the chapel.’
‘Thank you, father,’ Zucker said, and the two of them turned on their heels and walked away into the darkness. Po looked over his shoulder at me: he bared way, way too many teeth. Sallis went over to the wall and sat down with his back to it, the gun not exactly pointed at me but still ready in his hand.
‘Is that a euphemism of some kind?’ I asked Gwillam.
He shot me a look of genuine surprise.
‘No,’ he said. ‘We have a field chapel wherever we set up, Castor. Our faith is very important to us.’
‘Your former faith.’
Gwillam quirked one eyebrow. He didn’t look upset, though: the barb didn’t have quite as much sting as I’d expected it to.
‘Do you know how many Catholics there are in the world, Castor?’ he asked me.
‘Before you and your pals got their marching orders, or afterwards?’
‘There are more than a billion. Seventeen per cent of the world’s population. Five hundred million in the Americas alone.
‘So the Holy Father must of necessity be a statesman as well as a religious leader. He has to play the games of men, and of nations. And sometimes that means he has to balance small injustices against larger gains.’
‘Meaning?’
‘The Anathemata Curialis was given a massive appropriation of funds just before the death of John Paul II. Then his successor, Benedict XVI, ordered us to disband or face excommunication. The two actions are best seen as the diastolic and systolic beats of a heart. The Church has disowned us, but it has not ceased to wish us well.’
‘Even though you use werewolves as field agents? How broad is your brief, Gwillam? I’m just curious.’
He knelt down, picked up the black bag and put it up on the coffee table. He snapped it open and rummaged inside. I hadn’t forgotten the bag: in fact, it was fair to say that it was preying on my mind a little.
‘Our brief,’ Gwillam said, ‘is narrow and exact. We fight the last war. We’re Heaven’s skirmishers, sent into the enemy’s heartlands to gauge his strength and harry his forces as he attempts to deploy them.’
‘The enemy being . . . ?’
‘Hell, of course.’
He took from the bag, one by one, a disposable hypodermic, a bubble-pack with a small snap-in vial of some straw-yellow substance, a larger bottle of clear liquid and an unopened pack of surgical swabs. ‘The rising of the dead,’ he said, looking me full in the eyes with the deadly calm of the fanatic, ‘was the opening of hostilities. Hell is on the move against Heaven, in every sphere, in every nation of Earth. It was forseen, and it was foretold. We were not taken by surprise. But there were those in the Church who wouldn’t accept the evidence of their own eyes.’