Black London 05 - Soul Trade

way to her skin. She could feel the gentle pulse of the Black, the other side that people like Wolcott chose not to see, like the vibration of a subterranean train under her feet. She was mostly used to it by now, but on nights like tonight, when it was silent and the hum of the city seemed miles away, it seeped in and knocked around her skull, almost as palpableas the fog.
    Wolcott’s blonde head appeared, bobbing between the monuments. The churchyard was only a hundred meters from end to end, but it was crammed full of headstones and obelisks, with far more bodies than there were stones below Pete’s boots. London suffered from too many dead and too little space, and before great swaths of green were cordoned off for burying by the later Victorians, thedead resided wherever there was room—in churchyards, under the church floorboards, in shallow pits that fouled the air and drew in the Black like a magnetic field.
    “Christ, this weather,” Wolcott said. Her bronze skin, painted on rather than earned under the sun, was as brassy as her hair. In her off-hours, Wolcott favored skintight satin pants, loud prints, earrings large enough to use as handcuffs,and makeup by the pound. But she was bright and had nerves of steel, and Pete was glad she’d agreed to come.
    “It’s going to piss down rain any moment,” Pete agreed. She gestured toward a large winged angel, the biggest monument in the churchyard. “Can you take me through it again? What happened the other night?”
    “Sure.” Wolcott shrugged. “Station got a call from the vicar about half-twelve andI came around. Said there were lights out in the churchyard. Figured it was some hoodies pissing about, thought nothing of it.” She walked a few paces, staring up at the angel. Its stone eyes were blacked over with moss, and the ghostly marks of old graffiti wrapped like white vines around its base.
    “I got about halfway into the yard when I heard this sound,” Wolcott said softly. “This low sound,like a moaning. Still thought it were kids, so I pulled out my light and gave the order to show their smart little faces.”
    The wind picked up, pushing leaves against Pete’s feet, and the fog flowed and rippled across the uneven ground as if it were alive and making a mad dash for the safety of the church. “But it wasn’t,” Pete encouraged the other woman. Wolcott flinched, as if she expected Peteto accuse her of making it all up, or simply laugh in her face.
    “Brandi,” Pete said. She laid a hand on Wolcott’s nylon-clad arm. “I believe you. The more I know, the easier it’ll be for us to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
    The PC hunched inside her navy blue windcheater, and Pete saw then, up close under the sodium lights, that what she’d taken for reluctance was actually fear. Wolcott’sentire body was strung with it, as if she were a puppet on wires. Pete sucked in a deep lungful of damp, cold air. Whatever had happened here, it had been a lot worse than a ghost popping out of a mirror or a poltergeist flinging crockery.
    Not for the first time that night, she cursed Jack and his stubborn refusal to do anything that wasn’t exactly in line with what he wanted.
    Wolcott spokeagain in a rush, voice rattling like the dead leaves all around. “I seen this shape hunched on the ground, and he were mumbling, over and over. It were Bible talk, I don’t know. I never did pay attention in church.”
    “‘Behold, I am coming soon. I have my reward with me and I shall give to everyone according to what he has done,’” Pete said. That had been Mickey Martin’s favorite passage to quotein his letters to the various tabloids and one-sheets of the day.
    Wolcott’s nose wrinkled. “Yeah, that. Street-corner nutter ramblings, I thought.”
    “It’s Revelation,” Pete said. “The handbook of all street-corner nutters.”
    “You some kind of brain, then?” Wolcott asked, clearly glad to have the subject diverted from what she’d seen.
    “No,” Pete said. “Just a very poor sort of Catholic.”
    “Wasabout to ask,” said Wolcott. “Don’t see many Catholics mucking about with the dark arts.”
    “You saw the man and then what?” Pete prompted, deciding that the lecture on black magic versus exorcism could wait for another day.
    “I told him the churchyard was closed and he’d have to move along,” said Wolcott, “and then he just … he looked at me, and I can’t describe it. Had dead black eyes, bleedingonto his