The Shadow Cabinet (7 page)

7

C
ONVENIENTLY
,
THERE
WAS
VERY
LI
TTLE
WAY
OF
MISSING
Highgate Cemetery. All I had to do, according to the map, was walk up a street called Swain's Lane, and I would be in the middle of it. This street was very quiet, and the tree count went up considerably. On my right, there was a low wall with a fence of black spikes, and tombstones were clearly visible. The road eventually led to a gatehouse that looked like the entry to a Gothic church. It cost a few pounds to get in, and I paid a little bit more for a map. There was a warning at the bottom explaining that the cemetery was huge and in some places unstable, so there were areas no one was supposed to enter. This was quickly explained when I saw what the place was like inside. It was wild, so broken. There were so many gravestones, rarely two of them alike. There were the standard slab ones you expected to find if someone was drawing a cartoon of a graveyard. Along with those, there were Celtic crosses, plain crosses, pillars, columns, urns, human figures. They were pressed together, with barely any space between. Many had been pushed up or had sunk over time, and most were at least a bit crooked. Many of the shorter ones had ivy clumped on top of them like mad, ill-fitting toupees. There were trees everywhere, shooting up from clusters of graves, all bare of leaves. Some of the roots had snaked out of the ground and clutched at the monuments, hugging them with long, thick tendrils. It reminded me of a show I once watched about what the world would look like if humans stopped taking care of things, and electricity turned off, and water was shut off, and no one maintained anything. Apparently, it wouldn't take long at all for the plants to come and run the place, knocking everything to the side and generally getting some long-awaited horticultural revenge.

This was going to make finding “tree” difficult.

The paths varied between paved and well maintained to places in the undergrowth that had been sufficiently tramped down by human feet to become bald. A few of the hardier London birds screamed in the trees, and the wind ripped through them. Highgate, I soon realized, got the name from being really high up. From some points, you could look down over London.

I passed a few other people—cold, faintly miserable tourists clutching guidebooks in a smattering of different languages. All seemed to be wondering why they had come to a cemetery in England in December, when even the best day was a bit gloomy and spitting rain. They dutifully took pictures of the more interesting stones, and I pulled up my hood and walked past with my head turned the other way. Not that these people would have any idea who I was. It was Thorpe's instruction, and I was feeling twitchy. The sky above looked like it planned to let loose at any moment. As it was, invisible rain was spitting in my face, and my gloveless hands were going numb in my pockets.

The one thing I didn't see was ghosts.

Tree.
Really, Stephen. For a guy who loved precision and details, this is all the information he gave.
Tree.

I reached what the map called the Egyptian Avenue, which began with a wide, sculpted archway that wouldn't have looked out of place in a Las Vegas reconstruction of ancient Egypt. It didn't look ancient, it didn't look Egyptian, but it did look like set dressing. Vines climbed all over the walls on either side of the arch, and these ended in a matching pair of obelisks that reminded me of the bookends that my cousin Diane used to prop up her books on auras. The archway led into an open-air corridor with a series of stone doorways on either side, tightly packed. A nice, cozy neighborhood for the dead in what amounted to a tourist attraction.

And then, as I came out of the Egyptian Avenue, I saw what Stephen might have been talking about. There was a tree—but not just a tree—a massive honking tree, considerably larger than anything else around. It was the center of a circle of tombs that had clearly been built around it, marked on the map as the “Circle of Lebanon.” Here, the stone doorways were only a few feet apart—a collection of elegant portals to rooms that contained the dead. There was writing carved into the lintel and in the thick doorways—sometimes a line or two, sometimes long screeds. It was all snug, and extremely quiet, maybe the quietest place I'd been outdoors in London. I made my way around the circle once, then again. No one was around.

“Hello?” I called.

Nothing. I tried again.

“I'm looking for the Resurrection Man,” I called.

The stones had no reply. The tree was silent.

I walked on, to a row of tombs in a long, covered, curved passage called the Terrace on the map. All of these tombs—the Terrace, the Egyptian Avenue, the circle—these were the expensive ones. All these tiny, private cells for the richest dead people Victorian London had to offer. (So said the commentary on the side of the map.) I trailed around, making what I could of the already declining day. I wandered down path after path, past a statue of a sleeping angel on a tomb and a monument with a sculpture of a loyal dog sleeping by his master. That one made me pause and even tear up a little.

“That's ol' Tom Sayers,” said a voice behind me. I turned to find a man leaning against a tree. “Hero of the people. Great fighter he was. I saw him fight once. Beautiful thing to see. That there's his dog, Lion. Lion was the chief mourner when he died. 'Alf of East London turned out for that funeral.”

I could see what he was in a moment: that grayness of aspect, the general look of being out of time. People of a certain period—and by that, I mean almost any time but the present—they didn't age like we're used to. They had lots of stuff wrong with them. Every capillary in his face looked like it had burst. His neck had something purple swelling out the side of it. Something had grown on his face that could have been a beard or a kind of mushroom. His clothes were all brown—loose pants with rips in the knee held up by a thick belt, and a shirt that may not have started off brown, with cloudlike sweat formations under the armpits. He had on a heavy, floppy brown hat. He was friendly enough and smiled nicely, showing off a mouth of decaying teeth.

“You called me the Resurrection Man?” he said. “Why's that, now?”

“That's you?” I asked.

“Aye, but it's a old name,” he said. “I'm Ol' Jim. Everyone calls me Jim. Why's a young lass like you looking for Ol' Jim?”

Old Jim, as he called himself, was of an indeterminate age.

“You met a friend of mine,” I said. “Tall, probably dressed like a policeman. I need . . . information?” It sounded ridiculous when I said it out loud. In fact, Jim laughed out loud and slapped the monument wall in amusement.

“What can a poor ol' man like me tell you?”

“I need to know, when someone becomes a ghost, where do they appear? How do I find someone?”

“That”—he pushed himself forward and rubbed his lips together before finishing the sentence—“depends on who yer looking for.”

He stepped toward me, and I backed up.

“Ol' Jim won't hurt ya,” he said.

“It's not that. I don't want to hurt
you.
”

“How's that, then?” he asked.

“I have . . . I can do something.”

There was no easy way of explaining this. I toed a pile of dead, slimy leaves at my feet.

“There's a thing called a terminus,” I said.

“A light,” he replied.

“You know about it?”

“Aye. There was a lad here once. He had one.”

“That was my friend,” I said eagerly. “He's the one I'm trying to find.”

“He's dead. Oh, that's sad. So sad. An' you think he's . . .”

He pointed to himself.

“Like you,” I said. “He is. But I can't find him. I was there with him when he died, and I know he came back, but I don't know where.”

“Aye,” Jim said, nodding his head. “I see the problem. And yer looking for 'im.”

“Right.”

“And this thing he had—the ter . . .”

“Terminus,” I said.

“You 'ave one?”

“I am one,” I said.

He whistled between his teeth.

“Cor . . . Now,
that's
something.” He looked me up and down—a full top-to-toe scan. If a living person had done that to me, I would have reached for my pepper spray. I decided this situation got a pass. Neither one of us was really that normal.

“Well, then! Let Ol' Jim show you around. Ol' Jim's the man. Not many of my sort here, but a lovely spot. Best in London. Maybe the best in the world. That's what they used to say. Noplace like this since the 'Gyptians. I'll show you.”

“I don't—”

“Come, now, you can't come to a place like this an' not let Ol' Jim show you around.”

“I don't have a lot of time,” I said.

Old Jim ignored this protest.

“Plenty o' time,” he said. “Ol' Jim can explain it all for you. Ol' Jim knows how it works. You can count on Ol' Jim. Not much Ol' Jim hasn't seen. You want to find your frien', Ol' Jim's yer man.”

This was a guy who made sure you knew his name, that was for certain.

“Okay,” I said. “Sure. I can look around. And you can tell me . . .”

“Oh, lass, you've come to Ol' Jim, and Ol' Jim never let a lass down. An' I knew yer lad. Good lad. Good lad.”

“He was,” I said.

“And how did you know about me? Did he talk about Ol' Jim?”

“He wrote some notes,” I said.

He nodded again, as if this was exactly what he was expecting to hear.

“Well, now. Let Ol' Jim show you the place. Things to see, things to see.”

It looked like if I was going to get any information at all, it would only happen if I followed Old Jim around the cemetery. So that's what I did for about an hour. He didn't take me to any of the big monuments or the things on the map. Instead, he told me stories of things he'd seen at funerals—fights, people falling into open gravesites. He told me about the Great Vampire Hunt of 1970, when some people thought they saw a vampire running around the grounds and searched for it with stakes. He seemed to like that one a lot, and told me about all the things he put out for them to find. He led me far back, where there were no paths at all. I remembered the warning from the bottom of the map, about how some parts weren't safe, but Jim assured me he knew where the safe parts were. I decided it was worth risking and I would have to do my best to feel out the ground and not fall into a hole. I was pretty sure I could manage that. I mean, I grew up in a swamp. There's quicksand all around my neighborhood. This was one thing I had covered. I tried to get him back on the topic at every possible opportunity, but Jim was taking his time. He clearly liked having company, and he wasn't going to answer my questions until he'd shown me around for a while.

He was showing me a stone that had grown a bit of tree root that bore a resemblance to a certain part of the male anatomy when I caught some movement out of the corner of my eye, around the back of a tomb that was about the size of a large shed.

“Did you see something just then?” I asked.

Jim looked up and frowned.

“Aye. The beast lives around here.”

“The
beast
?”

“Aye.”

Given Old Jim's seemingly relentless instinct to point out every single thing of interest, you'd have thought that something called “the beast” might have come up before.

“It won't hurt you if I'm here,” he said. “It's scared of Ol' Jim. But it does 'orrible things.”

“Like what?”

He shook his head to indicate that such things were not to be described.

“There it is,” he said, pointing. “Poking out the back there.”

Sure enough, a thing was behind the tomb.

“Come outter there!” Old Jim said. “Show yerself!”

The thing poked out some more.

The first thing I noticed was the filth. That was what confused me for a minute. There was so much dirt that it was hard to make out features. But when I did make out features, there were far, far too many of them. Too many eyes, mostly bloodshot. There were some more shoulders above. And legs—I could count five, but there could have been more on the other side. And arms—seven. There were no heads, just a fusion of skulls into a lumpy dome, with bits of hair here, bits of hair there. Bits of hair all over the place. There was something brown and clothlike weaving in and out of the mess.

Sickeningly, it reminded me of something we make at home at Christmas that we call “very rocky road.” You toss handfuls of things into a bowl—marshmallows and nuts, bits of pretzels and smashed M&M's. There is no science to very rocky road. You beat all this crap into a bigger bowl of melted chocolate and drop lumps of it on a tray. I get very absorbed in this process, watching little M&M pieces land side by side, or trying to get lumps with marshmallows on either side. That was what this thing was like. An eye here and there. An arm up high, another down low. It was without human shape—just a glob of people pieces mixed together and permitted to stick together however they were thrown down.