If this was to be a spiritual journey I wasn’t going to need anything else, and I’d put off the moment long enough. I went reluctantly downstairs to where Molly was waiting for me in the middle of the atrium. She stood with her head bowed, her hair a black curtain hiding her face, hands locked in front of her.
‘I don’t want to do this either,’ I said.
She raised her head, and for the first time looked me directly in the eye. ‘Do it,’ I said.
She moved so fast I didn’t see it, throwing herself against me. One arm snaked around my shoulders and grabbed the back of my head, the other went around my waist. I could feel her breasts pressing against my chest, her thighs clamping hard around my leg. Her face was buried in the hollow of my neck, and I felt her lips against my throat. Fear rolled over me: I tried to pull myself free but she held me tighter than a lover. I felt her teeth scrape at my neck and then pain, strangely more like a blow rather than a stab, as she bit me hard. I felt the action of her swallowing as she sucked at my blood but I also felt the connection with the tiles beneath me and the bricks in the walls – the yellow London clay – and then I was falling backwards into daylight and the smell of turpentine.
It wasn’t like a VR or a how you imagine a hologram should work; it was like breathing vestigia, like swimming in stone. I found myself in the Folly’s own memory of the atrium.
I’d done it – I was in.
*
The atrium looked largely as it should but the colours were muted, almost sepia in tone and there was a ringing in my ears like the sensation you get when swimming near the bottom of the deep end. Molly was nowhere to be seen, but I thought I caught a glimpse of Nightingale, or at least the imprint of Nightingale on the stone memory, making his way wearily up the stairs. I unclasped my hand and checked that I was still ‘holding’ the skeleton badge. It was still there, and when I closed my fingers back around it I felt it tug, very gently, towards the south. I turned and made my way towards the side door in Bedford Place, but as I crossed the atrium floor I was suddenly aware of a vast darkness beneath my feet. It was as if the solid black and white tiles had been rendered transparent, and through them I could glimpse a terrible abyss – dark, bottomless and cold. I tried to move faster but it was like walking into a violent headwind. I had to lean forward and push hard to make progress. It wasn’t until I’d carefully steered myself through the narrow servants’ quarters under the east stairs that I wondered whether, this being the realm of ghosts, after all, I might just walk through the walls. After knocking my forehead a couple of times I just opened the side door like a normal person.
I stepped out into the 1930s and the stink of horses. I knew it was the 1930s because of the double-breasted suits and gangster hats. The cars were nothing but shadows, but the horses were solid and smelled of sweat and manure. There were people walking on the pavements; they looked perfectly normal but for an abstracted look in their eyes. I stepped in front of one man as an experiment, but he just walked around me as if I were a familiar and inconsequential obstacle. A sharp pain in my neck reminded me that I wasn’t here to sightsee.
I let the skeleton badge tug me onwards down Bedford Place and towards Bloomsbury Square. Above, the sky seemed strangely ill defined, blue at one moment, cloudy the next and then gritty with coal smoke. As I travelled I noticed that the clothes on the passers-by changed, the ghost cars vanished completely and even the skyline began to alter. I realised I was being drawn back in time through the historical record. If I had guessed right, then Nicholas Wallpenny’s badge would not only take me to his Covent Garden haunt but to the point in time when he started haunting it.
The most recent book on the subject I could find had been from 1936, and written by a guy called Lucius Brock. He’d speculated that vestigia were laid down in layers like archaeological deposits, and that different spirits inhabited different layers. I was going to Wallpenny in the late Victorian era and he was going to lead me to Henry Pyke in the late eighteenth century and Pyke, whether he wanted to or not, would reveal his last resting place.
I’d made it as far as the top of Drury Lane when the Victorian era drove me retching to my knees. I’d been getting used to the pervading smell of horseshit but the 1870s was like sticking your head into a cesspit. It may have been vestigia, but it was strong enough to heave my imaginary lunch into the filthy gutter. I tasted blood in my mouth and realised that some of that was my own – no doubt fuelling whatever occult shit Molly was doing to keep me here.