Chapter 225 Mr. Banks's House
POV: Edmund Banks | Flat above St. Thomas site, Southwark
I have lived above the old St. Thomas building for six years and in those six years I have developed the specific relationship with my neighbourhood that marked humans develop with places where the supernatural world is active beneath the surface, which is a relationship of careful not-looking combined with thorough peripheral awareness, the specific skill of someone who can see through the Veil and who has learned that seeing through the Veil and acting on what you see are two entirely different categories of decision with two entirely different sets of consequences.
The Veil, for people who cannot see it, is the perceptual barrier that the supernatural world maintains over its activities, the mechanism by which two hundred years of vampires and werewolves and fae have moved through a human city without producing the specific crisis that full visibility would produce. I can see through it. I have been able to see through it since I was nineteen, when something happened in a pub in Bermondsey that I have spent fifteen years not thinking about in detail, and the ability has been producing the specific quality of life that abilities you did not ask for and cannot remove tend to produce, which is a life organized around managing something you did not choose.
Managing it means not talking about it. Not reporting it. Not investigating the sounds that come from beneath the building I live in, which have been coming for three weeks in the specific pattern of sounds that mean habitation and activity and occasionally distress, children's voices at the lower registers that carry through floor and foundation, and which I have been cataloguing the way I catalogue all of it, which is in a journal I keep under my bed and which I will burn before I die because the journal is not a record I want anyone else to have.
Tonight the pattern changes.
At eleven forty-five the street below my window, which is a street that is routinely empty at this hour because it is a service street for a building that has been officially decommissioned, fills with people moving with the specific quality of people who are not here to be seen. I count them from behind the curtain edge, which is the correct position for counting people in the street below you when you do not want them to know you are counting, and I get to twenty-six before they have all cleared the street's visible section and moved toward the building's service entrance.
Werewolves. I know the quality of werewolves in human form from six years of this neighbourhood and these are werewolves, the specific density of presence, the way they move relative to each other, the awareness of the group operating as a unit. Some of them are something else, something that moves differently, vampires, the specific quality of something very old and very fast operating at the reduced speed of deliberate concealment.
I watch them go in.
The building absorbs them the way old buildings absorb things, which is completely, the surface unchanged, the street empty again as if nothing passed through it.
I stand at the curtain for a long time in the specific state that marked humans live in when the thing they have been carefully not investigating for three weeks is being investigated by twenty-six people with considerably more capacity to investigate it than I have, and I do the thing you do in that state, which is stand very still and wait.
At twelve fourteen my phone connects to the emergency services line, which I have dialled with the specific automatic response of someone whose body decided to call before the rest of them agreed on the decision, and I am describing unusual activity at the St. Thomas site in the careful language of someone who knows they are going to be told there is nothing to worry about and who is calling anyway because calling is the only available action.
The operator takes my name and my address and tells me a unit will respond when available and I know and she knows and everyone involved in this exchange knows that a unit will arrive, find a decommissioned building with a locked service entrance, and file a report that goes nowhere, because the Veil works on responding officers the same way it works on everyone else who cannot see through it, which is completely.
I hang up and go back to the curtain.
The building is still and dark and quiet in the specific way it has not been quiet for three weeks, the sounds from beneath it absent for the first time since they began, and I am standing at my curtain at quarter past midnight in the specific state of someone who is witnessing something and who cannot do anything about the witnessing, which is the state I have lived in for six years, and I am thinking about the children's voices and the three weeks of journal entries and the twenty-six people who just went into a building that officially contains nothing.
The floor shakes.
Not the building, the floor, which means the sublevel, which means whatever is happening is happening below where I am standing, and the shaking has the quality of something large releasing rather than something large arriving, an explosion or a structural failure or the specific quality of a containment being broken.
The ceiling above my kitchen table cracks along the plaster in a line that runs north to south and dust comes down from it in the thin steady way that means something significant is moving below.
I look at the crack and I look at the floor and I look at the street, which is still empty.
"What's happening down there?" I say, to the room, to nobody, to the six years of careful not-looking that has just become impossible to maintain.