RELICS

“I know where you can buy a dragon’s cock.”

I tried to hide my surprise. Not because I believed him, but because he’d never before shown any inclination to speak. I’d been aware of Fat Frederick for over six years, and I thought it might have been the first time he’d even looked at me. Until now, I’d been less than a shadow.

“What would I want with a dragon’s cock?” I asked. I remained cool, taking deep swigs of the harsh chemical they passed off as single malt in the Slaughterhouse Bar. Nice name. Hide in pure sight. I’d heard rumours of four people who’d been carried from here in bags. The fifth I’d seen with my own eyes.

He seated himself next to me. I heard the stool creak and groan above the music, the chatter of patrons, the clink of bottles and smash of dropped glasses. In the far corner, two men were planning something criminal over a table awash with spilled beer. One had a patch over his left eye, the other sported a long, pointed beard coiled with razor blades. A scruffy man sat on his own at another table, rolling a flick-knife between his knuckles like a drummer with a stick. Three women tended a fourth, blood speckling her shoulder and face. Courtesy of the flick-knife, perhaps. In the darkest corner, a man squatted beneath a table with his face buried between a woman’s thighs, neck muscles straining. She smoked a crack pipe and stared at the ceiling as if completely unaware.

Classy joint.

“Well, there’s the obvious use, first of all,” Fat Freddie said. “It’s only a shard, a splinter, but a dragon has the biggest cock in the animal kingdom.”

“Dragons aren’t real.”

“And then there are more...arcane uses,” he continued as if he hadn’t heard me. “Soaked in gin, it makes for an effective food spice. Meaty and hot. Dried and ground up, dropped in a lover’s drink, it aids libido. Keep the dose low, though. Dangerous.” He tapped his greasy nose with a chubby finger, a gesture I found quite sickening. “Toxic cum.”

I took another swig of drain cleaner. Slammed the glass down. The bartender glanced my way and I nodded once. I’d been nurturing an image down here for a long time, and couldn’t afford to let it slip. It was hard enough being a woman in a world like this. Image was everything.

“You like our Scotch?” Freddie asked, surprised. “No. Why are you talking to me?”

He feigned offence, and then something about him changed. It was chilling. All pretence at civility and good humour melted away, and I was suddenly sitting beside one of the most dangerous crime lords in London.

“Angelica Golden,” he said. “You know why I’m talking to you. You did it so I’d talk to you.”

“Did what?” I asked, but then I saw his expression—that slack, heavy face, eyes dead as if they reflected his many victims’ final moments—and I wished I hadn’t. Lying to Fat Freddie was stupid.

“You’ve been coming to the Slaughterhouse for a long time. You never cause trouble. You ask questions sometimes, but I allow that. It’s a bar, and questions are why people like you come to places like this. But certain questions draw my attention. I wouldn’t be who I am if they didn’t.”

He signalled the barman. The gesture was so subtle that I wasn’t sure I’d seen it at all. Next moment there was a bottle of Laphroaig and two glasses on the bar before us. Fat Frederick scooped up the bottle and both glasses in one huge hand and slid from his stool with surprising grace.

A flush of fear washed through me. Have I gone too far? I wondered. I watched for different signals he might give others in the Slaughterhouse—a blink to kill me, a nod to drag me out back and cut off my hands.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go and talk about the relics.”

––––––––

Walking away from the Slaughterhouse, the world suddenly seemed so much larger.

I’d always known that there was more to the world than meets the eye. Even more so since losing Vince. When he vanished the streets grew darker and my mind opened to things that caused most people to glance away. The average person has a filter that they don’t even know about. Especially here in London, where a thousand sights can hide one uncomfortable truth. It’s easy to walk the streets and ignore the things that should not be, because the human mind is designed that way.

Dipping myself beneath the general ebb and flow of city life, I’d heard many rumours of stranger things. The pub basement in Holborn where a vampire from the twelfth century was buried beneath a foot of concrete and ten feet of compacted soil. Sometimes there was a heaviness to the air in that place, so it was said, a texture during those short, irregular moments when the entombed vampire’s mind approached consciousness.

The unfinished tunnel in the Underground, where construction had been halted because no one would work that route. The sense of threat and terror was far too great.

And not only buried things. There were places in London hidden from common view, folds in the city negotiable only by those ready and willing to open their minds a little wider. Some of these places I had visited myself. They were usually curious, perhaps troubling, with their sense of otherness and their colourful and strange people.

Sometimes they were frightening.

I’d never actually seen anything. Not really. Much as I’d searched—because the collection of arcana had been Vince’s domain, and the gathering of strange tales had obsessed him for those last couple of years before he vanished—all I’d ever found were hints and reflections. Like fading dreams, those deeper truths I sought kept themselves hidden one degree past the corner of my eye.

But then there were those places and things that Fat Frederick had just told me about. And there was the box he had opened for me.

I sat on the Tube carriage, rocking slowly back and forth, good whiskey swilling in my stomach and warming my bones, and I never once came close to nodding off. Perhaps I would never sleep again. “It’s how I make my way in life,” he’d said. “Everything else is just . . .”He’d waved at the air, dismissing everything I knew about him with one wave of his hand. The bars and brothels, the drugs and murders, the payments to police and local councils disguised as charity.

“Why are you showing me this?” I’d asked.

And then the bombshell. “Because I want to find Vince as much as you do.”

The thing in the wooden crate.

“It’s the one relic I’ll never sell. How can I?” He’d sounded almost dreamy then, and for a few moments I regarded Fat Frederick as an equal. A man capable of innocent fascination and joy, rather than the brutal, cynical killer I knew him to be.

I closed my eyes and remembered the angel, curled up in that box as if waiting to be born. But it was long-dead. Childlike body petrified, wings curled around its papery torso, feathers still whole but greyed with dust. Its face . . .

I could not remember whether I had even seen its face. Maybe I had shut it from my mind. Or perhaps I had been too terrified to look.

When I opened my eyes again, the two men sitting opposite were looking at me. One of them half-smiled and glanced away, the other stared over my shoulder through the window into the fleeting darkness. I wondered what they saw.

I got off at the next stop even though it was not mine. The platform was busy at this time of night, and I was pleased at that. The bustling people kept shadows on the move. I went with the flow and stood on the escalator taking us towards the surface, and all the way up I felt someone watching me.

It’s only natural, I thought. Now that I know, I can feel the weight of the unknown city around me.

Out from the Underground, away from the warm, spicy stench of fuel and dust and hidden depths, I stood on London’s rainy streets and let the crowds pass me by. For a moment I had the impression that they parted around me and I stood there like a rock in a stream, and I wondered whether knowing more of the hidden world had made me a part of it. But then a teenager nudged my arm and apologised, a man stepped on my foot, and I negotiated my way across the pavement to lean on the railing beside the road.

I looked up into the sky and watched the illuminated rain falling down towards me. It held me in its damp embrace.

Vince knew, Fat Frederick had said. Sometimes I think he knew more than me. Still looking down at that dead, ancient angel he kept in an old oaken box, he gave me the name of someone I should see.

––––––––

Everyone leaves part of themselves behind.

That evening I sat in my apartment and looked at what I had of Vince. Photographs, scribbled notes, concert ticket stubs, memories in image and print that formed the ephemera of six years together. I spread everything around me on the floor while I drank a bottle of Merlot, but there was no sense of Vince being there with me. I tried putting on some Radiohead, his favourite band, but though the words and music edged some way towards making those memories richer, there was still something lacking. A pair of his shoes smelled only of old shoes. I ran my hands across the inside of one of his favourite jackets, but felt nothing but cotton and leather.

All the while, the woman’s name sang to me from earlier that day. Mary Rock will answer your questions, Fat Frederick had said, and I could only wonder why he had never been to her himself.

Head fuzzy from the wine, still unsettled by what I had seen earlier that day, I decided to venture back out into the night. My search for Vince had been ongoing since the day he vanished three years before, but only now did I feel one step closer. Perhaps speaking to Mary Rock would take me closer still.

It was raining even heavier than before. I shrugged myself deep into my coat and clasped the phone in my pocket. It was almost two in the morning, and though London never slept, it did give way to a dark community that rarely saw daylight. I had never questioned why a phone could give me a sense of safety, but it did. Perhaps because it was a route to the outside world.

Taxis buzzed the streets, looking for trade. Other cars kerb-crawled, occupants shrouded by night. The rain enclosed me, but I kept my head up and my eyes open, searching for any shadows that moved the wrong way. I knew how to protect myself, but that didn’t mean that I relished the chance to use that knowledge.

It was a two mile walk to the address that Fat Frederick had given me, and I decided to do it all on foot. A taxi seemed too impersonal. I would use the time to clear my head, and to think through what had happened and how things had settled where they were now. I had always felt like a piece of flotsam bobbing on the whims of London’s tides, and after tonight that sensation was even stronger.

The city watched my progress with calm, satisfied eyes.

I often daydreamed about feeling Vince’s gaze upon me. I was convinced that he was still alive, though there was no evidence at all to support that. His friends, his sister Mel, his mother living in Australia, had all long-since given up hope. That said more about them than Vince, although there was no doubting his troubled history and the terrible way he’d treated his family in the past. But I loved him now as much as I did that night he vanished, and I wanted him back.

Just popping down Asbo’s for a bottle of wine, he’d called. Asbo was what we called the local Asda’s supermarket on account of its general clientele. I was in the bath and had heard him opening the front door, and I’d shouted, Get some Jelly Babies. Those were the last words I said to him.

The bath was cold by the time I’d started to worry.

I moved along a street that bustled during the day but which was now all but silent. Restaurants and bars were closed up, some of them glowing faintly from low-level lighting. A few still sported neon signs in their windows. Some had doors protected by grilles or heavy metal rollers, others chanced their luck. Rain splashed on the pavement and made the reflections of streetlights come alive. It swilled along the gutters, pooling around drains blocked with litter and dog shit. A car sat on flattened tyres. A homeless man huddled in a doorway beneath torn cardboard boxes. I could just see his shoes, and for a shocking instant I imagined them attached to something horned, scaled, inhuman.

I slowed my pace and a growl came from beneath the boxes. I hoped it was his dog.

I hurried on, taking the phone from my pocket and glancing at the locked screen. It had become habit, almost a nervous twitch. I still expected to see a message from Vince waiting for me one day.

Three shadows moved towards me along the pavement. They were talking, animated, at ease with the dark. I moved to the edge of the pavement, my coat brushing against parked vehicles. The men’s voices lowered only a little as we passed, and one of them said, “Evening.”

I nodded and moved on, glancing back several times to make sure they had not stopped and were staring back at me, ready to give chase.

Damn it, Angie! I thought. I was never usually this nervous. And I hated the fact that the more I found out, the more scared I became. This was my city. I’d lived here my whole life, and I’d always suspected it had strange depths and hidden secrets. Knowing that for sure should not change the way I was.

But the angel, its papery skin, dusty feathers . . .

“It’s all just old dead things!” I said, my voice startling me. I hadn’t realised how quiet it was.

I entered a residential area. The streets were darker and even more deserted. I saw a couple of city foxes trotting across the road ahead of me, and the sight of them gave me comfort. They were jittery creatures, and if there was anything at all wrong with the night they would be in hiding.

There were a few lights on in houses. Some were upstairs, some down. I passed one window where the curtains were wide open and a man sat watching TV with the lights on. He held a can of beer in one hand and ate from a takeaway carton with the other. I watched for a moment, then turned away. He was in his own world, as was I.

I paused a little longer outside another bay window, looking across the small front garden at the gap between curtains. The lighting inside was more subdued, but I could still see the couple fucking. The man sat on the sofa and the woman rode him with her back to me, leaning forward so they could kiss, offering me a frank look at that glimmering, wet place where they joined. She pounded onto him as if angry. His hands grasped her buttocks.

I had not made love to anyone since Vince had disappeared. I suddenly felt like an intruder, spying on this couple as they indulged in something so private and intimate. Perhaps the city was watching me like this all the time.

It took an hour to reach Mary Rock’s address. I was surprised when I arrived, and I had to check a couple of times that I’d come to the right place. I programmed the postcode into my phone and it confirmed that I was on the correct street.

The houses were large, probably a million pounds-plus, but there was a uniformity to them that surprised me. Detached, the eight houses along the street differed only in the designs of their gardens and the choices of window dressings. I’d expected a supplier of relics, someone who dealt with Fat Frederick, to live somewhere more distinct, and at the same time hidden away. An old warehouse in the docklands, perhaps, converted to open-plan apartments and with hidden basements. Or a deconsecrated church, converted into living accommodation.

Now that I was here, I wasn’t sure what to do. It was four in the morning. The rain had lessened, and soon dawn would sheen the east. There were already more vehicles on the roads than there had been before. The city was stirring.

My uncertainty was settled when the front door of the house opened and a tall, thin woman walked along the path that curved across the front garden. She was black, graceful, perhaps fifty years old, and she walked with her hands in her pockets. So casual. Reaching the low front gate, she pulled it open without a sound.

“Angelica,” she said. “Frederick told me to expect you. You look cold. Please, come in, I’ve already put some coffee on.”

Mary Rock seemed so normal.

That should have made me turn and run.

––––––––

Inside, the house was warm and pleasant, well-appointed and with a homely feel. Its ground floor was taken up with an open hallway from which a wide staircase curved upwards, a comfortable living room smelling of scented candles, and a couple of other rooms I did not see.

“Please, take a seat,” Mary said, pointing at a wide leather sofa. “I’ll pop through to get coffee. How do you take it?”

“White, no sugar. Did Vince sit here?” I was looking at the sofa. I could imagine him there, and in my mind’s eye he was grinning up at me with that I’ve-done-something-stupid lopsided smile of his that I hated to love.

“Oh yes, many times,” she said. I watched her pass through a set of double doors. She wore jeans and a heavy jumper, walked barefoot, and carried herself with an alluring grace. She almost seemed to float.

I followed, deciding not to sit.

The doors opened into a big kitchen with a dining area attached. Half of the kitchen was given over to a comfortable corner sofa, the rest was all chrome and shine, modern and expensive. I saw machines whose function I didn’t even know. Mary had a proper coffee machine, and she worked it as I watched.

“Oh, okay,” she said, noticing me. “We’ll be going downstairs, anyway.”

“Downstairs?”

“You came to see, didn’t you?”

She didn’t ask what I had come to see, nor did she give a clue. But I nodded mutely, watching as she made coffee and steamed milk. Our fingers brushed as I took the mug from her, and she was staring into my eyes.

“Vince was such a nice young man,” she said. “So proper and...old-fashioned.”

I snorted. “Really?”

“That’s who I saw,” she said, smiling and shrugging. “Everyone is different away from home. Come on. Are you ready?”

I don’t know, I thought, suddenly panicked. Am I ready? For what? What is she going to show me? Fat Frederick took me to see a dead angel, but she . . .

She was royalty to Fat Frederick’s butler. It wasn’t the house or the obvious wealth, because that could be feigned. It was in her manner and the way she bore herself. There was a weight to her gaze that had nothing to do with money, and everything to do with knowledge.

I was suddenly more afraid of this woman than I had been of anyone in my life.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m ready.”

I followed her through the kitchen, past the sofa and into a lobby area. A door led into the garden, and another seemed to be a closet. She opened the third, smaller door, flicked a switch on the wall, and beyond her I saw a stone staircase leading down.

“Vince was one of my best hunters,” she said, holding the door open. A waft of secret smells breathed up from the basements.

“Is,” I said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Is one of your best. He’s not dead.”

“Oh.” She tilted her head. “It’s sweet that you believe that.” She started down the staircase, and I followed.

A sense of time immediately enfolded me—the must of ages in my nose, dense shadows that seemed heavy and ancient. If the house above us was relatively new and pristine, this basement area was altogether older. The past hid down here, and I was an intruder.

“So he hunted for relics for you?” I asked. “The things that Fat Frederick deals in?”

“Oh, did he show you his angel?”

“Yes,” I breathed.

“Bless him.” She spoke like a mother talking about her child.

“It was...amazing.”

“It’s dead.”

I was watching my footing on the stone steps. They were worn concave by centuries of use, and the idea of who had walked here before filled the air with ghosts.

“Dead?”

“Through here.” The lighting was poor, spread weakly from a couple of bare bulbs swathed in dust and spider webbing. She walked ahead of me and I had to hurry to keep up. I had the sudden sense that I could get lost down there, and the thought of wandering in the darkness, hands held out before me, sent a chill down my back.

“Aren’t all the relics from dead things? That’s what they are, surely. Fossils. All that’s left of . . .”I trailed off.

“Do you really think that?”

“I . . .”I wasn’t sure what I thought.

“It’s dark in here,” she said. “It prefers it like that. Follow me, I’ll give you something to help you see.”

Mary Rock took my hand. It was unexpected and intimate, and I squeezed without even thinking about it. She squeezed back, this woman who might have been the most dangerous person I’d ever met, giving me comfort.

Darkness breathed us in as she closed a door. And there was something in there with us.

Mary held something against my face. “Put them on,” she whispered. “Keep your eyes closed, and only open them when I say.”

Glasses. Goggles of some sort. She let go and I used both hands to secure the strap around the back of my head, keeping my eyes closed as instructed. My heart thumped. I could smell something strange, a living scent that was unlike anything I had ever smelled before.

I wanted to turn and run, flee that place and keep running all day and night, out of London and into the countryside where perhaps I might find somewhere to hide, shed everything I was discovering, and live out my days in blissful ignorance.

“Open your eyes,” Mary Rock whispered. She had a voice demanding to be obeyed.

I looked, and saw, and my whole world grew wider and darker than I had ever believed possible.

“My retirement,” Mary Rock said beside me. “My future. One day I’ll figure out how to kill it, and then...I’ll start to harvest.”

Thin limbs, as if from malnutrition, but I thought not.

“Vince was one of those who helped bring it in.”

An elongated head, large eyes, elfin ears.

“In fact, he tracked it down. Ealing. Down beneath the city.

” The worn stubs of broken wings.

“There’s a whole world down there. Sometimes I fear that’s where he’s gone.”

A fairy, I thought. She has a fairy down here, alive, breathing, giving off warmth and a stench like.... like . . .

“I have to leave,” I said, and that was when the manacled, chained, wretched thing lifted its head and looked right at me.

––––––––

I was surprised she let me go. Walking toward the front door, Mary Rock now at my back, I expected the impact at any moment. A heavy object against my skull, a blade between my shoulder blades.

“I want Vince back,” she said as I reached the front door.

“So do I.” My voice shook. Everything I knew had been shaken. The world beyond the door was a wider, stranger place. “If anyone can find him, it’s you.”

I turned, she smiled, but it did not touch her eyes. Coolness came off her in waves. I thought back to when she had squeezed my hand, but could not recall feeling any warmth at all.

I opened the front door and stepped out of her house backwards, still looking at her, trying to find something else to say. But what else could I say?

You have a fairy prisoner in your basement.

By the time I reached the street I was running.

––––––––

Something followed me home.

The streets were busier now, and it was almost seven in the morning. Residential streets hummed with passing cars, early morning deliveries, and children hustling towards their pre-school clubs. With so many people on the streets, I did not feel any safer.

As I walked, I tried to connect Vince with the amazing things I had found out, tried to imagine him hunting things like that creature in Mary Rock’s basement through the shadowy places and forgotten buildings of this great, mysterious city. And as I remembered his warmth, his love, the look in his eye as he came in from one of his supposed late-night rehearsal sessions with his band—

Something brushed past me, just out of sight. I span around, ready to face anything, and instead there was only empty pavement. I was in front of a café filled with people having an early morning fry-up and tea, and several of them sitting at a window table stared at me. No one smiled.

I hurried on. I could feel attention upon me, a prickling on my neck, a cool tingle down my back. Traffic growled and tooted, people shouted, motorcycles grumbled, and in all that noise I still heard one whispered word:

Angie.

Only Vince called me Angie, and only when he wanted to piss me off. My name was Angelica, and that was what I liked.

I turned a full circle again, scanning the street and looking up to the rooftops. A shape shivered behind a window, shaking rapidly just out of sight. A shadow flitted from one roof to another, leaping along a ridge with the sun behind it. Looking into the rising sun, shielding my eyes, I could not quite make out what it was.

Maybe because of what I knew, I could sense so much more.

Or perhaps whatever was out there knew that I knew, and that was why it followed me. Stalking. Hunting. Letting me know that with the knowledge I now carried I might never be alone again.

I raised my hand for a taxi. It slowed, then sped up again as if the driver didn’t like the look of me.

I glanced in a shop window to see if I was crying or bloodied, and standing behind me I saw the reflection of a face I knew.

I turned quickly, gasping, “Vince!” and ready to embrace the man I loved. He’d lied to me for the six years of our relationship, but I was more than ready to forgive him. He had deceived me, perhaps believing that I was nowhere near ready to know what he knew. I’d prove him wrong. I’d tell him about Fat Frederick’s dead angel and Mary Rock’s barely-living fairy, and Vince would see my manic, ecstatic acceptance of this greater new world.

But the man standing behind me was not Vince. I didn’t know who he was, or what, but he stood so close that I would have smelled his breath, if he had any.

He examined me. I have never been so thoroughly analysed. He tilted his head to one side and looked me up and down, and I could feel his gaze brushing my heart.

“Don’t hurt me,” I whispered. All awareness of my surroundings was gone. I had no thought of help. Somewhere very far away I could hear traffic and see the vague, ghostly shapes of passing pedestrians, but in reality there was only him and me. His face was...forgettable. Even as I blinked I lost track, and saw him anew each time my eyes reopened. “Please don’t hurt me.”

He grinned. I was certain I would not forget that, even as his face faded from memory. I would never forget so many teeth.

Then the man leaned forward and smelled me, filling himself with my scent, before turning and losing himself in the crowd.

I did not even see him go.

I ran, like a scared little girl in a fairytale, all the way home.

––––––––

The thing that sniffed me is still out there, and it knows me. I cannot let it scare me off.

I’m going to find Vince. My determination grows, and a desperate, deep part of me wishes he’d shared this part of his life so that we could have lived it together. That’s a big part of the reason I want to be with him once more. Because I love him, yes.

But also because I want us to share the adventure.