Jesus Christ, can a man not take his time over an absurdly long 3,000 word update any more? Anyway...yeah. Here it is.
Chapter 22 - The Water Rises
Night falls over London.
In amongst the canals and waterways of Little Venice, sluicing down into the earth and the forgotten, subterranean rivers, the boatmen and gypsies chatter and bicker, poking their poles down into the murky depths of Browning's Pool and comparing the depth. The water, they agree, is higher than it should be.
"It's the fahking Grand Union, innit," one of them grumbles. "Lock's been coming apart since forever. Must be, ‘cos it ain’t like there’s been a lot of rain."
"Right," snaps one of his companions, "I'm gonna call my MP. This ain't right."
Far to the south, in his study, tucked away high over Victoria, Esteban du Marchais paces, flinching as a sudden, sharp knock comes at the door below.
He remains very still, unable to move, as Schiller begins to yell at him to open the fucking door.
In his chamber, Roger Kirkbeck wakes from torpor, unsettled and shaken, as if he's suffered a terrible dream but the details of it have somehow slipped from his mind.
*
You wake to darkness.
You're in your own bed. Dusk has fallen over the city; there is no trace of even the faintest grey light from behind your thick curtains. The clock on your bedside table reads 9.17pm. The nights are getting shorter, you think, easing yourself upright onto your elbows.
Antonia greeted you home with a yelp of utter joy, wrapping her arms around you in a manner that was slightly uncomfortable and extremely unprofessional. You suffered it, nevertheless, and smiled and nodded as she told you how happy she was that this whole mess had been dealt with, that she'd always known you couldn't really be dead. She moaned with hunger, too desperate even to hold it in, and you let her feed.
Something is wrong, and it takes you a second to figure out what. Certainly, nothing's out of place in your room. Aside from the low, constant chatter of celebrities, hangers-on and drunken students in the pubs further down the hill, towards the high street, you can't hear anything strange at all.
But there's a gentle draught, a whisper of breath, against your face. There's a window open, somewhere in the house below.
You consider for a moment, entirely calm. After all, it's not as if you weren't expecting that he would come. But now that it's actually happened, what exactly are you planning to do?
*
In the end, you don your dressing gown, and slip in silence down the stairs and into the kitchen. You keep expecting something to come at you out of the shadows, but every corner and darkened corridor is empty.
You pour yourself a glass of bishop's blood from the fridge, take a seat at the sofa, and wait.
The clock above the mantlepiece jerks forward, a tiny measure at a time. You can hear the constant, droning breath of Antonia, as she sleeps undisturbed in the next room. An ambulance howls through the night, in the road below.
"I have no intention," you say, after a moment, "of running backwards and forwards through my own house searching for you in cupboards and jumping at every noise, so I'd very much appreciate it if you stopped lurking around trying to spook me like some bloody ghost. Kindly come over here and sit the fuck down."
Silence.
And then Terence Rannigan says, from behind you,
"Scared, Sommers?"
You don't reply.
A quiet, weary laugh. And then he limps around into the living room area and flops down onto the easy-chair opposite you.
He looks visibly worse-for-wear than the last time you saw him, on Oscar's security footage. He's wrapped up in the same coat, which is now torn and coated in mud. His hair is dishevelled, and his face set with a permanently off-kilter, absent-minded grin. You can smell him from here. And yet he sits, comfortable and relaxed, one leg swung over the other, entirely at ease.
His eyes lock on to yours. His gaze is intense, and lingering.
"I don't think we've ever been formally introduced," he says. "But a friend of mine told me you'd been trying to find out what'd happened to me, so I thought I’d better…well, you know who I am. Terence Rannigan."
"Does this friend have a name?" you ask. You take a long, slow, entirely unintimidated sip from your glass. "Or are we speaking of 'Hob'?"
Rannigan raises an eyebrow.
"So you know about Hob?" he says, and for a second you can see a glint of excitement in his eyes. "Oh, my – I’m glad to hear it. Did the Prince tell you, I wonder?"
"In a manner of speaking, yes," you reply.
"That’s good,” he says. “That’s good to know. Given his habit of trying to murder me in recent weeks, I’m sure he told you a warped little tale starring himself as the prudent leader who did what he had to do under difficult circumstances. But it doesn’t matter. When the truth comes out, it tends to come in…torrents.”
“I have to ask,” you say, slowly, placing your glass to one side on the table. “Are you the real Rannigan? Or are you simply wearing him? Forgive my discourtesy in being so upfront about it, but it’s been a very long week.”
His lopsided grin spreads further. Raising his hands high, as if in surrender, he says,
“I’m he, I’m he. I buried three shovelheads under the big oak in Ravenscourt Park in 1973. There’s a safe behind the Bosch mural in my study in Wimbledon and the key’s sewn into the inside of my secretary’s mouth. I think I have a passport somewhere. I doubt I’ll be able to convince you, but I am the one they call Terence Rannigan. Cross my heart and hope to…well, we’ve both been too close to death in recent days to joke about that, haven’t we?”
He places a hand over his heart and crosses himself, mock-superstitiously.
“You were in that last great war, weren’t you?” he says. “I know, I know – I’ve done my reading. I was at Crimea – retreated out of Taganrog – as a Kine, and at Gallipoli as a Kindred. Got a lot of night duties then, as you can imagine. Well, my sire told me I was insane and that I ought to just stay well out of it. War wasn’t in a Ventrue’s nature, he said. But I didn’t care. I was bored, and I wanted to spill a lot of blood. Didn’t spill much,” he adds, cocking his head, suddenly thoughtful, “but I saw a lot. Blood trickling down at the hill at Chunuk Bair, finding a hundred paths through the earth and the bodies. And, you know, I felt hungry, overwhelmed by the sight of it all, afraid for my own life…but I was also horrified. As if I was Kine, as if the fallen all around me were my brothers and countrymen…as if I was back in the Gulf, watching the Russian shells tear our ships apart. The body remembers, you see. You think you’ve rid yourself of it, but it remembers. I’d have cried, if I was capable of crying. Anyway, I slipped away before dawn, and that was that.”
You watch him. He gazes down at his sodden shoes for a moment.
“It all comes back,” he says, eventually, “as someone told me not too long ago, to Gehenna. To a war and an end and a purpose to all of this pissing about. You were here at the turn of the millennium, weren’t you? It should have happened then, you know. When the thin-bloods rose and the Sabbat tried to take the city. Something should have broken then; something should have happened. But instead we just kept limping on.”
“There are always Gehenna scares,” you murmur, frowning, “and there always will be. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Rannigan shakes his head vigorously.
“It should have happened then,” he insists. “It was the time. And Hob confirmed it. Something’s gone wrong, Sommers. The whole fabric of...everything. We've missed our stop.”
You ask him, carefully, watching for his reaction,
“Who is Hob, Terence?”
A slightly glazed, dreamy smile slips across Rannigan’s face.
“I’d heard about the beauty of Venus’ Temple,” he says. “So when I heard that what they’d said about Hawksmoor, that the slanders about him were not slanders at all, that the rumours that put him up in front of the Camarilla court were true…I had to see it for myself.”
“Heard from whom?” you ask, a little sharply. Either he’s too enraptured to hear you, or he simply ignores you.
“The golden looking-glass is there, Sommers,” he continues. “In the hall below the halls, beneath the circle squared…and that’s where Hob spoke to me. From across the seas, he spoke to me. He called me a warrior, and he said that he’d once been a warrior as well. That his sword had been shattered, his armour torn from his breast…that his last battle, his last immense purpose, this thing that we called Gehenna, had not come to pass. He told me I carried the weight and the air of a great grey city, riding low over ancient waters down into the delta. Streets upon streets, ways and paths hidden beneath cold stone, buried under fog. He had dreamt of this city, he said, with memories that were his but were not his. And he wanted to find a home here. A new purpose.”
“Hob’s already here,” you say. “He’s in London, isn’t he? You brought him across from China in a cargo crate. You were running from him the night the Prince tried to murder you.”
“Not at all,” Rannigan snaps, with sudden annoyance. “Run from Hob? I was running from the Prince’s men. I had no idea he was even following me, I left him in the hiding place…lucky for me that he did,” he added, “because Kirkbeck was out to murder me. Do you know, I think he really believes I mean to use Hob against him – against the city? All I’ve ever done, Sommers, is to serve London and to serve the Camarilla; and Hob can be a great and powerful instrument in that.”
He slips up onto his feet, with surprising grace.
“I want you to pass my message on to the barons at the next council,” he tells you. “Let them know that Hob is no threat to us. I shall get word to them myself, in time, perhaps even…no. The ground has to be prepared first of all.”
“And you seriously think that I can be trusted?” you ask.
Rannigan smiles.
“No,” he says. “But I’m told you’ve seen as much of Kirkbeck’s blunders and lying than anyone else. And – let’s be frank with one another – you lack the means to act against me. Who will you run to? Turcov? Eames? You think they can be trusted either? No; you go to the barons and tell them about Hob, before them all…and if they truly don’t want us here, we’ll leave, for where Hob goes I go too. Go to them, Sommers. At worst, they’ll consider you a dupe. At best, they’ll ask to see me. And I’ll come, and Hob will come…and they’ll understand what he can do for them. For all of us.”
He checks his watch.
“A week until you meet again,” he mutters. “Another week in a sewer. You know, we haven’t spoken to another soul since we went down there. Aside from a few Sabbat, prowling about in the depths.” His eyes gleam bright for a moment. “Hob tears them apart,” he adds, with sudden excitement. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it. They never stand a chance. Their faces are always so…afraid, so very frightened.”
“Anyway,” he says, with a little smile. “Sorry to drop in on you so early, Baron. I’ll be in touch.”
And he goes. The front door slams behind him.
You sit, slouched across the sofa, for some time, staring at nothing.
*
A whisper, in the darkness of the tunnels, far below the howl of the Underground trains, barely audible over the rushing torrent,
“Keep your fucking eyes peeled. That thing could come out at us from anywhere.”
One of the Sabbat members, busy setting the charges perched on the tunnel roof, lets out a snarl of laughter.
“There’s no ‘thing’, shithead. We’re the scariest cunts you’re going to find down here.”
“The Sculptor was afraid of it,” another pack member snaps. “Remember?”
“Sculptor’s dead. And not from any fucking sewer monster neither.”
The new ductus gazes down into the flowing water.
“Dead indeed,” he says aloud, after a moment. “Right, Lars – charges in place? We need to be quick. Let’s make the bastards suffer for what they did to Angelos.”
Across the sewers of North-East London, two of the underground explosions cause the loam to collapse downwards, filling the tunnels. A third explosion, shortly afterwards, fails to bring down the roof entirely, damaging the foundations of the Fleet Street apartment block far above.
Slowly, but unstoppably, the flow of three of the city’s long-forgotten subterranean rivers, the Langbourne, the St. Clement’s and the Walbrook, begins to alter. It goes where it is directed; east, and downwards.
*
You’ve only been to Jack’s Warren once before; a twisting, two-tier hive, centred about a low circular chamber, lit by flickering fairy lights and pilfered bulbs. In the centre, balanced on a plinth fashioned from mud, rock and tyres, stands a crude statue; Old Jack himself, the most infamous of all London Nosferatu, leering and crouched, holding out a kidney – which you note, appears to be real, and therefore changed regularly – as an offering to every visitors. Oscar told you once that this statue was intended as a serious tribute to the kine-killer; when asked again, he insisted that it was a reminder of the Beast within every Kindred.
Wires and cables, a few of them sparking, hang loosely from the ceiling, crawling up every wall. From here, you know, the Nos monitor every corner and alleyway of the city above, wherever there’s a camera that they can hack into.
You’re kept waiting for some time, standing uncertainly at Jack’s feet. A couple of Nos, lounging in the archways above in the higher tier, gaze incuriously down at you.
Finally, a brown door creaks open from somewhere in the sunken earth, and Weep-Not Sorley steps out.
“Thy name is Sommers,” he hisses, stepping forward, and makes a little bow of his head.
You stare. A large black rat scurries from one side of the Nosferatu’s shoulder to the other. Nuzzling itself into the flesh of his neck, it begins to feed.
Weep-Not smirks at you. His teeth have been filed sharp. A single corroded ring – perhaps a wedding ring, because it carries a dull diamond stud on one side – dangles from his lower lip.
“I won’t keep you long, primogen,” you say, summoning the old confidence. “I…simply wanted to greet you informally. I will, as you will no doubt be aware, soon be made a Baron of this city, and I felt that we should get to, ahm, know one another. Do you have an office, or somewhere we might go to talk?”
“I do have an office,” Weep-Not says. He doesn’t move.
You try again. Leaning in confidentially, you tell him,
“Listen…I’m aware that I might be seen in some circles as an upstart of sorts. I know some of the other Barons don’t appreciate my presence. So I just wanted to make it quite clear to you, because you’ve always struck me as a sensible creature, that I don’t have any untoward ambitions. I just want to do right by London. And I’d like to make a friend out of you, if I can, because I have a feeling I’m going to need them before long.”
You hold out your hand for him to shake.
Weep-Not raises his hand. Slowly, holding your gaze, he plucks the rat from his neck, bites down deep into its flesh, and begins to drain.
“Thank you for your time,” you tell him, sweetly, bow, and go.
He shouts out after you, as you duck your head to lower yourself through the entrance tunnel,
“Twas kindly of you, Ventrue, to stoop so low as to visit our kind!”
From the arches and the holes of the warren, harsh voices howl with laughter.
*
You head back towards the lift, cursing your own arrogance all the way. Did you really think you could just stroll into the warren uninvited and gain the trust of the Nosferatu?
The sewer-water beside the walkway is becoming choppy, you notice; some spittle splashes up onto your shoes. Ahead, it spills over, onto the metal. The water dripping down from the grilles at regular intervals along the tunnel have gone from being trickles to steady streams.
The Nos guard standing beside the lift entrance gives you a bored look.
“Goin’ up?” he mutters, as you approach. “Don’t worry, chief. From down here there ain’t no way but up.”
You snap at him,
“Just get me to the-”
And a sudden wave splashes up against the corner of the walkway, soaking both of you.
You stare at him, foul-smelling water dripping down from your suit. He stares back, in confusion. A sodden condom is hanging from his ear.
“Should…that have happened?” you ask.
And then you hear the sound.
A low, steady rumble, that increases in volume until it becomes a roar-
And the flood begins to down through the passage from the tunnels above and ahead, ten different torrents of white-water crashing down from every direction.
You snatch at the Nosferatu guard, yelling,
“Open the fucking lift doors-”
He scratches wildly at your face, wriggles out of your grasp, and dashes back away from you down the walkway.
You turn, gaping, as he vanishes around the corner of the tunnel.
The networks, you think, with a strange kind of calm. The cameras, and the databases; the Camarilla’s information network. It’s all going to be fucked by this.
The torrent hits you, and carries you onwards, buffeting you against the walls of the tunnel as you fly.
*
In Jack’s Warren, the Nosferatu struggle to close the sluice doors. Some of them, at Sorley’s instruction, gather up their laptops and portable equipment, scurrying up the walls towards the surface.
The torrent strikes; pouring into the central chamber, lifting up struggling Kindred in its wake. Untamed electricity flashes through the water.
And the Sabbat come.
*
You surface.
The lights of the tunnel have been snuffed out; above, some loose wires spark and jitter ominously. Water is pouring, at a slower rate now, in from above.
You’ve cracked your head against the tunnel wall, you think, and pulled your leg against the walkway railing, but you’re otherwise unharmed. A turd bobs merrily past your left shoulder. You splash about, trying to get your bearings.
To the south, you can hear shrieks. The warren is under attack. The lift is back to the north; even if it’s shorted out, you should be able to climb back up the shaft to the surface.
And to the east, you notice, somewhere beyond the continuous flow of water, a light is flickering. A small, faint light, as if from a candle.
What do you do?
A) Head back to the lift.
B) Make for Jack’s Warren.
C) Investigate the candlelight.
troll
