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Overture
Chapter 13
Labyrinth
The siren scream of a fox ripped Finch from his slumber with such force that he drew in a frantic, gasping breath before realising where he was.
He struggled up out of the car seat, coming to several important revelations in the process. One was that his awkward position had put a difficult knot in his spine as he’d dozed, and he twisted his neck in an attempt to unscrew the concentrated point of pain.
The other was that a billowing, translucent fog had curdled around the car while he’d been asleep. Finch blinked, trying to clear his eyes, and could swear that the mist was oozing through the window and coiling in his lap. Sighing harshly, he reached out for the remainder of the coffee and downed it in one, reaching the grit and dregs at the bottom of the cup and spitting faintly and bitterly as he did so.
He caught a movement from the corner of his eye as he lowered the empty cup, and for perhaps half a second, caution fought reflex for control of his muscles. Gaining the upper hand, Finch ducked his head and studied the scene outside through half-closed eyes, breathing as lightly and slowly as he could.
The fog was...odd. It was washed through with pink from the sodium streetlights overhead, but that alone couldn’t have accounted for its almost nacreous shimmer. Finch’s breathing slowed further, and he waited for sight of another shift in the muted shadows.
His breath halted entirely just as a diaphanous shape coalesced from the eddying curtains of mist, drifted between two parked cars on the far side of the street and stopped. Finch saw a half-turn, and then the figure slipped back the hem of a cloak for a second to adjust something at its waist. Even through the fog, Finch saw the low light dart along the edges of three wicked blades.
This vision stabbed through him, and once again he endured the image of those mortal wounds, of alabaster skin and glazed grey eyes on the post mortem table, of deep and constricted wounds made by a knife so sharp that it could slice through taut flesh as if it were soft cheese. Even as the heavy cloak dropped back into place, shielding the daggers from Finch’s dull, horrified line of sight once more, he suffered a lurch in his guts and felt his treacherous muscles shrinking.
Swilling the fear back down his throat with a conscious effort of will, Finch nevertheless remained frozen as the figure crossed the road, passing within yards of Finch’s car, and with that acuity of hearing lent by profound unease, he heard the soft, measured pad of footsteps in the sepulchral silence.
The small part of Finch’s mind that was still under the command of his police training was collecting details, although detail itself was scarce. The long cloak created a line as smooth and featureless as that of an origami figurine, even where it shifted in motion, although he couldn’t help but notice the man’s size; he was easily six feet tall, and probably more.
Finch’s gaze at last came to rest upon what little he could see of the mask between the obstruction of both the fog and the clean crescent shadow of the hat brim, which amounted to a lascivious Cheshire cat smile and a glistening, sallow cheek. As he watched, the mask tilted, and one deep-set eye flashed for a split second, a facsimile of a conspiratorial wink. Then, turning on his heel, the figure paced out the remaining distance and drifted around the corner.
Finch groaned softly as he released a breath he’d been holding, quite unconsciously, for several minutes, and considered his next move. He knew that he’d set out without a plan of action, compelled only by a desire to uncover the truth, a desire so powerful that it was nauseating. Now, with the reek of prey in his nostrils, he was caught at bay in the midst of a vicious battle between instinct and self-preservation.
The only problem, he knew, was that instinct – that age old instinct of both dogs and coppers to chase what ran – would triumph. Deciding to pre-empt it, Finch wrapped his coat around him, still feeling the pressure of the bulky pistol against his side, and climbed out of the car.
Pressing his shoulder to the brickwork, he leant forward and peered
cautiously around the corner. This side
street was even narrower, hemmed in with
The fog was thickening even as he moved forward and, as he edged through it, Finch realised that he’d lost sight of his quarry. He was surrounded by very low, breathless sounds; the squeak and shift of saplings, weighted down with condensation, a faint jingle that might have been the bell on the collar of a passing cat and, some distance away, a muted, repetitive click, as if someone had left a door or window unlatched.
Some prompting of a sixth sense had him heading for this last sound, although he was unfamiliar with the area and had no idea what his steps might be carrying him toward. He halted along the way, grasping a lamp-post for support, feeling the mist coagulating on his throat and in his twitching lungs.
As he straightened up, Finch pulled his hand up to his face, conscious of the water prickling there, and it was then that his laboured breathing ground to a halt. His palm was scattered with pinpoint droplets of water, each rounded and perfect, but within each speck there was a rainbow. Not a rainbow as he’d always understood it, but a rainbow composed of the colours of fire; scarlet, vermilion, orange and umber, shifting and scintillating without let.
Biting into his lip, struggling not to whimper from fear and confusion, he rubbed his palm on his coat, drying the dampness. When he raised his hand once more, the firelight was gone, and with it half the knowledge that it had ever been there to begin with – although Finch had, though not a visual memory, a remembrance of the senseless glitter of it.
He propped himself against the lamp-post until his heart stopped fluttering against his sternum, and then took several careful breaths of sticky air. He studied his palm once more, but the bewildering aurorae hadn’t returned.
The staccato click of the open door reached his ears once more, and Finch headed towards it, still feeling a faint tremor in his legs. After a few more steps, he reached out and encountered a smooth, glazed red brick façade. His mind grabbed for a conclusion and he stepped back, craning his neck up, but the familiar symbol of the London Underground wasn’t there. He had nothing but a blind steel door, buffeted by a faint breeze, creeping to and fro and bouncing every now and again on its latch.
Finch turned his head very slowly, staring away from the slice of darkness behind that door, seeking any halfway plausible distraction from the idea of walking through it. At the end of the street he could see the occasional passing car beneath the comforting glow of Piccadilly, but even as he watched, the lights flickered and faded, dimming to a ghoulish green glow that reached down his throat and twisted his guts one-handed. Finch staggered back, feeling his shoulders make contact with the door behind him, which swung open. Robbed of any further excuse, he turned and blundered through it.
A distant, stentorian roar assaulted him at the same moment as a violent updraught whipped at his coat. He jerked, profoundly disoriented in the eldritch gloom and this racketing, buffeting noise, and grabbed for the gun out of sheer reflex.
Only when he caught his finger tightening around the trigger did Finch force himself to back down, finally understanding that this was nothing more than a passing train, somewhere far below his feet.
Achieving a sense of relative calm in the wake of this realisation, he cast a glance around him for the first time, seeing that he’d stepped into a cramped ante-chamber which served as nothing more than the landing for a narrow, musty set of stone steps, passing through curls of dust and clogged, haunted cobwebs to a feeble wedge of light.
Finch descended these, trying to avoid the webs and whatever muck and grime had accumulated in them over the years, and still keeping the gun in one loosely curled fist. Reaching the bottom of the steps, he turned and found himself at the top of a deep, cold well, lined with a rattling spiral staircase.
Eric...
Finch jerked back from the railing as if it had sprouted claws, feeling his breath whining through a throat that appeared to have constricted spasmodically. That oiled whisper still echoed in his head, but he had no idea if it had ever been the product of anything but his imagination.
Creeping back to the staircase on feet muffled by a thick layer of dust, he peered over the edge, trying to outstare the gulf below. Each curve of the staircase was lit by a mildewed emergency lamp, but this still left several uncompromising pockets of shadow, any one of which could have sheltered the phantom he’d pursued this far. Hefting the gun for what little comfort it was still providing, Finch started down the stairs.
He was two turns from the bottom when another capricious spiral of wind came shrieking out of the depths, ripping at his hair and clothes. He backed away from the edge of the stairwell, but it was then that the paltry wall lamps winked out; not one by one, but in perfect unison, replacing the weak, sick glow with a darkness so absolute that Finch could all but feeling it sucking at his eyes, even as he delved into his pocket for the torch he’d brought with him.
He was about to switch it on when he heard another serpentine whisper. Just as before, it crawled out of the deep and seemed to etch itself upon his cortex without passing through his ears.
Yesterday upon the stair...I met a man who wasn’t there...
Taking one more step down, fighting every craven instinct that told him that he should be running, Finch swallowed ferociously and tried to breathe slowly, not wanting to drown out external sounds with his own harsh panting. Once again, he thought about switching on the torch, but ten years of training, backed up by reserves of basic common sense, told him that in exquisite darkness, this would do nothing but advertise his position. He pocketed it once more and reached out, unseeing, for the handrail.
He wasn’t there again today...
Without warning, the cold rail twisted under Finch’s palm, and in the frozen fraction of a second before he flung himself from the bottom step with a thin and tepid yelp, he felt fur beneath his curled fingers. Thick, warm, oily fur, rough and wiry to the touch. Staggering back, ramming his clenched fist up against his chest as if he’d been gripping white-hot steel, he backed up against the grimy wall and shuddered there like a palsied racehorse.
I wish that man would go away...
It took every drop of courage he possessed for Finch to step out into the unfettered darkness once more and reach out for the handrail. Biting his lip, he placed his cold, sweat-glossed palm to the metal. Feeling nothing but bare iron and rough speckles of rust under his touch, he groaned softly and then removed his hand. As he did so, he heard laughter.
It would have been better, somehow, if it had sounded crazed, or unhinged, or even shrill, but it was none of these things. The tunnel before him reverberated to the tune of a faint but warm and good-humoured chuckle, which was already dwindling before he’d stopped to analyse it to any degree, and he was then left alone but for the steady drip and spatter of water somewhere up ahead.
Even as Finch advanced on the gaping maw of the passageway, tightening his grip on the gun until it left white, bloodless spots on his knuckles, the lamps on the staircase throbbed back into life. It was pure, unbound instinct that turned his head towards the sudden resurgence of light, and the same instinct that urged him to follow that light back up, to return to the overworld and give up a chase that was rapidly descending into madness in the dark – but he overruled it.
“No,” he muttered to himself, setting foot beneath the arch. “No. I know you’re down here, you bastard.”
He hadn’t gone five steps when a repugnant smell curved out of the shadows ahead and gripped him around the throat as if it had a physical presence all its own. The splash of falling water was louder now, the sound an immanent force. Finch coughed reflexively and brought his free hand up to shield his mouth and nose from the foul reek, and with his next footfall he realised that the floor of the tunnel was a sticky delta of stagnant streams.
Hopping over the vile mess in his path, he paced to the end of the tunnel and reached a junction. The passage narrowed here, and with what remained of the light he’d left behind him, Finch could see the outline of stark white tiles, cracked in many places and all blotched with murky stains. There were various posters and signs affixed to the wall in front of him, but he couldn’t read them in the velvet gloom and, in any event, most were scoured in age old filth.
While he was trying to decide which way to turn, and realising that both turnings led into a quagmire of shadows and stench, another blast of cold air buffeted him from the passage to his left and, this time, it was accompanied by an otherworldly scream that scratched across his nerves like broken glass.
Through half-closed eyes he saw the stroboscopic flash of the thundering train, but though the lights dwindled and died, the screech persisted, and in the end, Finch slammed his hands over his ears in an attempt to shut out what sounded like the hectoring shrieks of a murder of crows. This achieved nothing; if anything, the cacophony seemed to leap toward a crescendo, and he dropped to his knees in the dust, head bowed, eyes screwed tight, so much so that fireworks darted across his retinas.
As he shivered on the floor, blinking to try to adjust his eyes to darkness so near to absolute that he knew it would give his vision no quarter at all, Finch felt another breath of air. It wasn’t the wash of an approaching train, but a warm puff across his brow, as if something had moved past him. He’d barely time to register this when something stroked his clammy cheek, something like the wing of a bird, and then was gone. In time with its passing he heard several light footsteps, and his stomach lurched.
Reflex reached down his arm and into his pocket, and he dragged the torch out and flicked it on. Swinging the beam up and out, he stared at the narrow section of platform that he could see, hemmed in by the archway at the end of the passage.
The ring of light picked out very little. There was some sort of poster on the far wall, beyond the tracks, but it had been shredded by decades of backwash and left pulpy and stringy in places where the roof of the tunnel had wept upon it during the rains far above.
Realising that the raucous chattering in his ears had ceased, Finch hauled himself up, one hand braced against the wall in spite of its gritty, filthy coating. He took three steps towards the arch, testing his recalcitrant legs for signs of incipient collapse, and then edged around the corner and onto the platform.
As he did so, the noisome, foetid cavern erupted into life around him as if it had been charged. Finch sucked in a horrified, whistling breath as the walls of the tunnel flared and pulsed, ran with quicksilver streamers of electricity so fierce that it passed through white into viridian and then into crackling, furious violet. He backed away, surrendering to an inborn instinct in the face of such violent disarray around him, but as his shoulders struck an unyielding barrier, he understood that the way back was lost.
The light behind the wild lightning cascade was so brilliant that it was verging on painful. Finch dropped the torch and the gun, hearing both clatter to the floor, but with only half an ear. He ducked his chin into his chest and turned to the cold wall behind him, only to find it possessed by the same savage firestorm.
He was perched on the precipice between the plateau of bewilderment and the canyon of abject terror, and as he heard the scrape of boots from behind him, he penetrated the defences of his last reserves of courage and, tapping it straight to the bottom, swung around to face the creature he’d pursued into the abyss. When he did, he bit into his tongue hard enough to fill his mouth with sour blood.
The shade was standing less than a yard away, still smiling his perfect and perfectly inscrutable smile. The cloak shifted and curved at the hem in some errant breeze that Finch couldn’t feel, but as he cast his gaze around the man’s outline, seemingly sliced from the stone of the vaulted cave, he saw the aura, and watched it flower.
The stranger’s halo was dead. Not black, like his clothing, but dead nonetheless. In sickening contrast to the sparkle and shine of everything around, this aura was a turbulent pyroclastic curtain of smoke shot with veins of sullen crimson light, though which he was reaching out one shining glove which crawled with skeins of the same frightening dark ectoplasm. With eyes that now felt as though they were about to burn out of his skull, Finch saw that the limb left a delicate procession of after-images in the fractured air behind it.
Cold fingers closed around Finch’s neck before he could react, before he could even think to react. He twisted his head, or at least tried to, but the grip on his throat was both gentle and authoritarian at once. With an effort of will that left his head spinning, he grabbed for the gloved wrist, trying to break its hold, but beneath the soft black brocade his fingers encountered curved lines of firm muscle, as smooth and implacable as marble.
“This isn’t real...” he said. He meant to speak clearly and decisively, but heard his own voice emerge as a weak, tired sigh. The ivory features shifted without seeming to move, and the face was suffused with something that he could only read as being amused pity.
“You do yet taste some subtilties o' the isle that will not let you believe things certain,” was the response, cut into the air in a welter of coloured curves. Finch struggled feebly once more and then, finding that the hand around his throat had eased its grasp a little, he wrenched his head around and stared into the one sphere of darkness in the whole of that searing, actinic cave.
From out of the void surged a whispering, tumbling grey tide, pouring over the edge of the platform and struggling with itself as it approached.
“Welcome, my friends all,” whispered the mask.
Gordon rounded the corner into
He reached the exterior of the old station and stopped dead, head tipped back, throat working furiously. If there had been anyone to see, they would have remarked, if only to themselves, on the peculiarity of the tableau: Gordon, as still as a sculpture in the middle of a sinuous midnight mist, eyes half closed and showing nothing but glazed whites; and Nelson, collar socked tight up against his throat, whining through wet lips, every muscle vibrating and transmitting that vibration down to a ramrod stiff tail.
Gordon blinked twice and then, stepping past the dog, placed a palm on the freezing cold door and pushed. It shivered back on its hinges, squealing plaintively, and he stepped through into the dusty shadows beyond.
As Gordon reached the top of the spiral staircase, he was almost jerked off his feet as Nelson lunged for the stairs, whiskers pricking and hackles furiously erect. There was no growl, no snarl, no canine noise whatsoever save for a stertorous rumble in the dog’s chest as he fought to escape the lead and race down the steps. Alarmed by this metamorphosis, Gordon tugged back on the lead a little, although this put no more than the tiniest dent of restraint in Nelson’s savagery, and then they both set off, down and down.
Gordon was upon the bottom step of the spiral staircase when he heard a thin, piercing wail echo from the murky tunnel up ahead. He froze, hearing several shades and harmonics of naked terror in that cry, but Nelson, not given to such introspection, dived forward once more until he stood at the end of the lead, almost dragging Gordon off his feet. This time, the dog launched a spittle-clogged snarl from between his teeth.
Stumbling down the last step, Gordon wrapped the lead around his fist in a desperate attempt at keeping the dog in check, and then plunged into the curved shadows in the mouth of the passageway.
The stench of the rancid water hit him hard, but he inhaled no more than half a mouthful before he coughed it back out and held his breath, plunging through the slime on the floor and through the miasma, taking a small taste of the air before starting to breathe once more. Glancing around, ears straining for any further sound at all, he heard the echo of a train bulleting down a tunnel far away, its subtle growl lost in the reverberation from the walls and ceiling.
With the sound of the wheels already fading, Gordon picked another sound out of the air, another noise just as plaintive and as organic as the first, although this was more of a muffled whimper, granted several conflicting echoes by the curve of the walls. In spite of the crawling at the back of his neck, he rounded the corner and stepped out onto the platform ahead.
The shadows were thicker here, in spite of the dim, lurking lights around the curve of the tunnel, and there was a vicious, malodorous taste to the air, filled as it was with coarse dust whipped up by the endlessly shifting air currents. At last, his hearing volunteered a final detail: somewhere close by, there was a rustling and a chattering.
Nelson had stopped growling, stopped fighting the restraint of the lead, and simply stood foursquare at Gordon’s side, panting harshly. Gordon set one foot out in front of him, and then heard something click and scrape against his toe; something metallic. He stooped and stretched out a hand, sliding it forward gingerly. His fingers closed around what felt like a pocket torch, and he pointed his arm out into the gloom and thumbed the switch.
The beam was weak but wide, and cut a broad circle out of the platform and the mouth of the tunnel. In the paltry light, Gordon saw a pale hand rise over the edge of the platform, grasp at nothing but air, and sink back down once more. In the few seconds of stunned mental quietude that followed this horrifying flash-frame image, he realised that the shuffle and susurrus he could hear was rats - more rats than he dared imagine.
Somewhere in Gordon’s fear-clenched brain, a trip switch dropped into place. Reaching down at his side, he unclipped Nelson’s lead and whispered, “Go”. The dog launched himself into the air as if spring-loaded, and covered the distance to the tracks in one bound. Gordon watched Nelson plunge into the seething mêlée beneath the platform, and even as he started forward, his stomach contracted with loathing as he heard the rats begin to scream.
Gordon gripped the torch between his teeth and dropped over the edge, landing up to his ankles in litter, muck and wriggling rats that were already engaged in a violent battle to escape the furious dog. Nelson stood astride a bulky, huddled shape and was lunging left and right, sinking his teeth into fur and tails, shaking his head and flinging ripped, bloodied bodies aside. His muzzle was plastered with gore and his whiskers decorated with scarlet beads.
Putting out a hand to steady himself as he moved forward another inch, Gordon laid his palm on the nearside rail. Beneath the rough coat, he could feel an insistent buzz, deep in the steel, which grew in frequency as he slid his hand up and away from the rail once more, his mind suddenly a cocoon of urgency, understanding that a train was approaching.
Plucking the torch from his mouth, Gordon hurled it aside. It skittered across the floor, casting wild, deformed glances of light over the scene as it spun and, finally, came to rest against the far wall. He braced himself, then bent and wrapped both arms around the dog’s waist and lifted him up. Nelson was a struggling parcel in Gordon’s arms, and he gasped with the effort as he heaved the dog up and back onto the platform. Nelson skidded on the concrete, claws squealing, and prepared to dive back into the morass of rats.
“Stay!” yelled Gordon, his voice high and cracked with terror, and the dog shuffled back, whining. Gordon turned back, hearing as he did so the mutter of the oncoming train, which was still some way down the tunnel but gaining speed on the incline.
The last of the rats pelted into the tunnel, driven both by madness at the scent of a predator and by their instinctive reaction to the approach of a train. Beneath their flight, Gordon peered into the triangle of shadow beneath the edge of the platform and found the outline of a man, still alive, but mumbling incoherencies to himself. Ahead of him, he heard wheels screeching on a curve, and then the tunnel was glazed with light as the train rounded the last bend and bore down on the station.
Bare reflex galvanised Gordon. He crouched and slipped a hand beneath Finch’s shoulder, pulling him into a sitting position and grabbing him beneath the arms. Straightening up, Gordon dragged the semi-conscious policeman up into an embrace. He felt a vein twitch in his temple as he did so, and wondered how this slightly built man could be so heavy. Gordon hissed the last of his breath between his teeth and heaved, dragging Finch up and onto the platform, shoving him to safety.
It was too much, too much by half. A weak shudder gripped Gordon’s muscles, ran down his spine and into his legs, which folded beneath him. His ears were filled with the savage bellow of the train, and he had no more power than to raise his hand, shielding his eyes from the dazzling dance of the headlights as they assaulted him.
Time now slowed to a sticky, languorous crawl, and Gordon experienced a flicker of a moment in which, sagging against the rail, paralysed with exhaustion and fear, he wondered if his death might just be kind enough to arrive instantaneously as he was dashed onto the front of the train.
A hand descended into the light and clamped around Gordon’s wrist, followed by another, which closed around his forearm, and his shoulder exploded with agony as he was dragged up. Finding one last scrap of strength born of animal instinct, he shoved his free hand down against the edge of the concrete slab and kicked up from the rail, tumbling onto the platform, pulling in a rough breath as the train slammed past him, inches from the tips of his toes. The hands lifted him clear and set him down without ceremony, and he gasped as he hit the unsympathetic floor with a jarring thump.
For long seconds, the train filled every sense he possessed; he sprawled on the platform and drew tortured breaths as it blazed past, lighted windows flashing. Then, just as it had arrived, it plunged back into the tunnel on the far side and left the scene in darkness once more.
Gordon turned as best his prone position would allow and found himself facing a pair of glossy black boots. In some way that he couldn’t comprehend, he read an air of satisfaction about them, as if this sensation was so powerful and so primal that it was being directed to every single part of this man’s anatomy.
Pushing himself up from the floor, coercing painfully stretched muscles into some semblance of organised motion, Gordon staggered upright and brought his gaze to bear on V’s dark and unresponsive eyes. In the backwash of light from the fallen torch, he could see nothing but the sallow curves of the mask, and though some old Pavlovian reaction insisted that this should have him backing away, he understood that he was too exhausted to be anything but brutally honest, both with himself and with V.
“It ends here,” said Gordon. He’d expected his voice to emerge as a painful exhalation, but to his surprise he heard himself enunciating perfectly into the space between them. “No more games,” he went on. “I’m tired of it all, V. I’ve done this your way, I followed you the way you knew I would, but I’m finished. Now let me go.”
“Aye, that I will,” said V, “and I'll be wise hereafter, and seek for grace.”
“Caliban,” responded Gordon, automatically, although he found room on his face for a weary, sad smile. He watched the mask nod shortly.
“I’ll trouble you no further,” said V, and bowed low. The gesture was courtly and his voice was steeped in sincerity, and in the midst of such degraded surroundings, Gordon found it all faintly fantastic. He maintained a sober silence until those empty eye sockets met his stare once more, and then drew a lungful of stale air.
“You’ve promised that before,” he said, without irony.
“You are right,” said V, quite evenly, “but this time, the decision is mine. You are correct. It ends here. My business from this moment on is neither your preserve nor your concern.”
“Not quite,” breathed Gordon, and he turned to nod at the crumpled figure of Finch, lying on the platform in what Gordon could only hope was nothing more than a faint. He noticed that Nelson had trotted over to the detective and was sniffing gently at his shoulder. “What did you do to him?”
The question rang like a bronze bell in the claustrophobic air. V’s head dipped to one side, as if he were contemplating a difficult puzzle.
“I laced his coffee with LSD. It should muddy the waters somewhat,” he said, at last. “Even so, he is still a threat...” With this, V dropped a hand to his belt and allowed it to rest on the hilt of a knife. Gordon shifted without making any kind of conscious decision to do so, placing himself between V and Finch.
“No,” he said, firmly. “He doesn’t deserve to die, and I won’t let it happen. Now do what you have to.”
There was no reply. Instead, V looked down at his own hand and lifted it precisely from the hilt, folding his fingers around as he did so and clasping his hands together in front of him. Gordon, understanding that in some silent manner, V had signalled agreement, unwound his rigid muscles.
“You should go, Gordon,” said V, stepping back as he did so until even the mask faded into shadow, leaving nothing but its highlights and points and a serpentine glint in the pit of each eye. “Mr. Finch and I have matters to discuss.”
Gordon remained where he was. His throat surged, and he battled with the urge to avert his eyes, but won out over it, even if only just. He heard a gentle, reproachful sigh.
“You have my word,” V told him. “I will not harm him. Go in peace with that assurance.”
In the temporary silence that followed, Gordon swore that he could hear a subtle peal of guttural laughter from some distant corner; but perhaps, he thought, it was only the warped echo of a slowing train. Finally, feeling as if the right moment had arrived, he turned his head away and snapped his fingers at Nelson. The dog’s head jerked up, and he lumbered over to Gordon’s side, still licking smears of rat blood from his lips.
“Something’s changed,” he said, still staring into the middle distance. “Either the world is different now, or I am, I don’t know which. But does it really matter?”
“Perhaps not,” was the reply. Gordon closed his eyes briefly, nodding, and then turned and left the platform, with Nelson at his heel.
When all trace of their footsteps had faded, V snorted softly and bent to retrieve the torch from the corner. Holding it in his gaze, he hesitated for a second before folding it in the hem of his cloak and wiping it down, careful to smooth over every crease in the aluminium. Then, switching it off, he pocketed it and turned towards Finch.
“The hour's now come,” he whispered, smiling curiously in the dark. “The very minute bids thee ope thine ear;obey and be attentive.” V’s footsteps were drowned beneath the howl of another passing train as he approached the slumbering Finch.
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