He turned over every stone in the alley, physical and metaphorical, but she simply wasn’t there and there was nowhere she could have gone.
Part of Josh began to doubt she’d ever been there, that he’d caught whatever sickness had driven the rest of the men in his family—all save for his dad, Barclay Raines, who’d died well before his time and in that case probably before the obsession could take hold—mad.
With no real idea what else to do, Josh followed the only clue he had left and embarked upon a pilgrimage of the dead. It was that or give up and go home for the night, and going home meant facing Lexy and his mum, and work in the morning, which felt too much like the real world for today. Today was the kind of day meant for creating his own Josh Stories his friends could trade with smiles at his memorial. He knew roughly where the old Ravenshill burial grounds were supposed to be, if not where they actually were thanks to the ever-shifting landscape of the city. One thing he’d already learned was that a lot could change in ninety years. Not least the contents of a cemetery in London, which wasn’t something he would have ever imagined before the bookseller’s explanation, and then of course it had made absolute sense. The Blitz had rewritten the landscape, and it stood to reason that the bombs wouldn’t discriminate between the living and the dead.
He had no idea what, if anything, he’d find waiting for him at the end of his pilgrimage.
Graffiti on the walls offered the wisdom of a generation’s worth of prophets. They didn’t have very much to say, or maybe it was just a case of being too old to understand what they were saying? Wasn’t that how it worked? Each generation had its own idols and martyrs, and where once it had been Timothy Leary now it was the Steve Jobs of the world—or whichever faceless suit had replaced his vision after cancer had claimed him—the youth bowed down to as they offered every sort of iGenius for download by the kilobyte if you had the right data package.
The city moved to the drumbeat of his heart, an insistent percussion that had Josh looking back over his shoulder on every street corner, not just looking left and right before crossing the road. She had been there, almost close enough to reach out and touch. He thought about Isaiah’s confession to Boone, that he’d seen her, unchanged, in 1994, and realized that as crazy as it was, it was true. That was a game changer. It was one thing to keep it all at a distance and think of it almost academically, but it was quite another when it was the evidence of your own eyes. Eleanor Raines might have disappeared ninety years ago, but she had been here less than an hour ago as though she’d stepped out of one timeline and into another.
Josh sank down onto a bench seat, head in hands, ignoring the rain, and tried to think it through but there was nothing about it that made sense. The whole impossible scenario defied logical explanation. But there was no getting away from the fact that he’d seen what he’d seen.
She’d been running. From him? From Lockwood’s goons? There were so many places someone could lurk unseen. The streets were nothing more than an elaborate rattrap. Unwelcome Boomtown Rats lyrics ran through Josh’s mind as he doubled back on himself determined not to be caught. He glimpsed his reflection in a shop window: he looked harried, tired, and stretched thin. He couldn’t be sure that was entirely an illusion of the glass. He checked the street signs against the basic map of the city he’d used to mark out the strange scorch marks on the wooden floor of Boones’s secret flat, following its landmarks to be sure he was walking the right way.
Up ahead, he saw the gates of the burial ground as the bookseller had promised, and for a moment thought the pitted iron was all that remained of the cemetery because behind them rose gleaming towers of concrete and steel reflecting dozens of incarnations of London back through their blind windows.
He saw a little old man huddled up on a bench oblivious to the rain. The man, with the wisps of his white hair plastered flat to his scalp, looked up at him as he approached the wrought-iron gates. The iron formed the black wings of a raven, reinforcing the dilapidated cemetery’s name. One side of the gates hung lopsided, only held in place by the rust. As he got closer he realized that the old man was actually a tramp, swaddled in layer upon layer of dirty old coats and torn trousers. He wore a pair of hobnail boots that had been resoled so many times you could tell the age of them by looking at the rings around the bottom of them. The smell was the worst of it; weeks-old piss fused into his coats was being released by the rain.
The old man nodded as he passed. He had the red vines of alcohol abuse across his cheeks and the tell-tale open bottle peaking out of one of his pockets as he leaned forward, watching Josh every step of the way.
The guy was creepy, but said nothing and made no move to stop Josh or beg for spare change to waste on the demon drink.
Josh ignored his audience and walked through the gates, passing into a lost part of London.
It wasn’t miraculous.
Crossing the threshold didn’t suddenly transport him to Oz or Narnia.
It didn’t block out the sounds of the traffic or life on the other side, but it might as well have because Ravenshill was a different country. Josh let his feet take him down the overgrown path between the headstones, looking for Damiola’s name on one of them. A tree to his left was ringed by crooked stones. There must have been two hundred headstones crammed together with only inches between them. None of their engravings were visible; the names of the dead lost. Moss and lichen clung to the weathered stone. There were no bodies beneath the stones—they had been destroyed during the bombings. The stone circle was all that remained of two hundred lost souls.
Time was the cemetery’s worst enemy. It encroached everywhere. Its fingers wormed their way into every nook and cranny, filling them with natural signs of decay. The old stones could stand against anything apart from time.
Josh walked through the lines of graves.
There were no mourners here, and no signs of fresh flowers on any of the plots to suggest that any might come. It was hardly surprising, given the fact that the last interment had happened some sixty years ago. Other than the tramp guarding the gates, there was no one left to mourn these dead. Beneath the weeping willows, he saw an ancient mausoleum fenced off by iron railings. It was overlooked by two stone angels. The skeletal limbs of overhanging trees and the hungry roots of vegetation gone to seed reclaimed the structures on either side of the mausoleum. It wouldn’t be too many years before they claimed it for their own. They were already creeping through the black railings. Crooked gravestones marked more of the nameless dead, their memorials weathered away. The place gave Josh the creeps.
He was just about to give up any hope of finding Damiola’s resting place amid the ranks of anonymous stones, fearing the worst—that it was somewhere amid those ringing the tree—when he saw the mausoleum’s gates properly for the first time, realizing that the filigreed metal looked like a magician’s gloves caught in the moment of transformation from cloth to blackbird ready to fly.
He’d found Cadmus Damiola’s tomb.
A deep crack ran through the wall where clematis vines had clawed it open.
The gate was locked, but judging by the state of the rust-eaten hinges, it wasn’t going to provide any sort of obstacle. Josh looked around to be sure that he wasn’t being watched—the tramp had left his bench and wandered off—and then boosted himself up, scrambling over the railings with their blunted spear-tip points.
He dropped down on the other side and stayed in the crouch, looking around again for prying eyes. He couldn’t have looked more suspicious if he’d been carrying a hand-painted placard that declared he was a tomb robber. Satisfied he was alone, Josh crossed the short distance to the iron-studded crypt door, which like the gate, was locked. He hadn’t thought this far ahead. The lock itself was more decorative than practical, the keyhole as big as his fist. He could see part of the mechanism through the keyhole, but without something to trip it, he wasn’t getting inside. It was ironic, of course, after all the years Boone had worked so hard to keep him from becoming one of the Rothery kids, and here he was contemplating breaking into somewhere far more sacred than any two-up two-down because of the old man’s obsession. It was contagious. His great-grandfather’s madness had been handed down to him like some twisted heirloom. Seeing Eleanor had just cemented it for him. He couldn’t not open the door after that. He owed it to her, to Isaiah, and ultimately to Boone.
He needed something thin enough and strong enough to work into the hole and turn the heavy tumbler without breaking and blocking the mechanism—assuming the tumbler wasn’t jammed up with the rust of age. None of his keys were long enough to do the job. The answer was entwined in the elaborate iron gloves of the rusted gate. It took him a few minutes to worry free one of the thinner pieces of filigreed iron from the design, the rust flaking off in his hands and staining them a dull red as he did so. But he had what he needed: a makeshift lock pick.
A few seconds later Josh heard the satisfying clunk of the tumbler falling into place.
He took a deep breath, then pushed the door open.
The other side was absolutely dark, broken only by the shaft of faint light that encroached around him. Josh stepped inside. He hadn’t thought to bring a torch, and with his phone dead the only light source he had was Boone’s old petrol lighter. He took the battered tin from his coat’s deep pocket, and rescued the lighter from inside.
He slipped the tin back into his pocket and wrapped his hand around the lighter.
A short flight of nine stairs led down to a second set of double doors. Even in the Stygian gloom he could just make out the accoutrements of the stage magician’s craft carved into them. The doors were exquisite. A work of art that like the tomb itself spoke of surprising wealth, which jarred against the expectation of a man who had spent his life treading the boards of British theaters offering penny entertainments for the masses. How could he have accumulated the kind of fortune such an afterlife demanded?
There was only one answer to that, of course: Lockwood.
It was the logical leap as far as joining the dots of what had started out as a very cold missing person’s case and was beginning to look like a grand criminal conspiracy that went back a century. Damiola had been in Lockwood’s pocket, either through greed or fear, both great motivators on their own, but together surely irresistible?
Josh approached the door, resting the flat of his hand against the shape of a huge leafless tree and the curious Celtic knotwork carved into the door.
He opened the door.