Marshall skipped lightly over an industrial cable running through 
sawdust and dark brown, flaking stains Edward hoped were 
creosote. Nearer the door the objects on either side had been 
relatively mundane; stacks of yellowed papers, covered canvases 
stacked in rows; a metal shelf with a row of antique fountain pens 
under a jeweller's light. Now they grew progressively stranger—a 
1960s Dust Devil vacuum cleaner, a locked fishtank containing a 
Pez dispenser with a blackface minstrel's head and sealed with 
hazard warning tape, a firehose packed in flame-retardant foam. 
None of it looked valuable, unless it was supposed to be modern art. 
Marshall's face was turned away as he navigated a teetering mass 
of bulging cardboard boxes containing something pink that was 
slowly leaking out onto the floor. Edward held his breath and took a 
left at a shattered Exidy Sorceror home computer from the 1970s, 
which for reasons known to themselves someone had hooked up to 
an HD monitor. A moment, then: 


"Mr Gradley?" 


Edward ran, his only purpose to create as much distance between 
himself and Marshall as possible. He tripped over a wind-up monkey 
that had been left in the middle of an aisle—labelled '7H' on a 
disintegrating tag around its neck. He flung it disgustedly away and 
was about to rise to his feet again when he realised it had been a 
blessing in disguise. A guard was slowly patrolling the walkway 
above the next aisle; if he had remained upright for another moment 
he would have been seen running through the warehouse and 
alarms would have been raised. Instead he crawled on hands and 
knees in his suit, engine oil and packing dust staining his cuffs and 
trousers. 


Now what? He couldn't even try to get his bearing among the stacks 
—he moved, bereft of direction, and the cacaphony grew ever 
louder around him. Inanimate objects had given way to a parade of 
living horrors—fleshy, snakelike things with chimpanzee faces 
hammering themselves against perspex, a squirrel with blood- 
crusted eyes screaming at him from inside a cage inches away from 
his face, something like an owl constantly everting itself and turning 
right-side out again with a sickening pop. He fixed his eyes on the 
next corner and continued crawling. When the worst of it seemed to 
be over he stopped, breathing heavily. Where he was now was dark 
—overshadowed by a portion of the catwalk and a great glass 
container filled with sand which seemed to be a giant antfarm, 
except the tunnels nearest the glass were five times wider than any 
ant had a right to be. He would sit here for a minute, take stock. 
Face it, Edward, he thought, this was not your brightest idea. You're 
trapped in a warehouse of things that came out of a nightmare and 
you have absolutely no idea how to go about finding the codex, if it's 
even here. 


"Sunny in Mogadishu," said a voice close behind him. He flinched, 
spinning around to face the cage he had been resting against. His 
eyes couldn't make anything out in the enclosure, eclipsed by the 
towering pile of bric-a-brac dumped on top of it. 


"Hello?" he said. "Is there someone in there?" 


"Drizzle in Los Angeles"—the voice was mournful, the words 
mumbled as though by someone who had learned the sound of the 
phrases but not their meaning. Edward felt the hairs on the backs of 
his hands pricking. 


"| mean, are you a prisoner here? I'm sorry ... I'm not sure if | can 
help you. Get you out, | mean." The cage had been secured by a 
hefty combination padlock. In the nearest corner he could see a 
bowl of water. "I don't know how to get out myself." 


"Tornado in Rio de Janeiro," it said. "A mild depression moving 
eastwards towards Astrakhan." 


"Please," said Edward, hoping against hope that whoever it was in 
the cage could even understand him. "| need to find a book. It looks 


like an iron box. It would be where they keep the latest acquisitions. 


"Rainy in London," said the voice, a note of utter despair entering its 
voice. "Rainy in London." 


Edward tugged at the lock but it was solid. He considered trying to 
pry it open, but he couldn't see anything long or solid enough. 


"I'm sorry," he said, and began to move away. 
"Storm coming in over Gradley,” it said. "Bring your umbrellas." 


Edward paused. "Did you say my name?" Squinting, he made out a 
shadow at the far side of the cage—a couple of glints which could 
be eyes. It was the wrong shape to be human. 


"Snow right around the corner," it said, miserably. "Then for the next 
four days straight. Wrap up warm." 


Edward thought about it for a moment. Well, it wasn't the most 
insane thing he'd done today. 


"Thank you," he said. 
"Always rainy in London,” he heard the voice say from behind him. 


He turned right on the mummified alligator pinned to a board with 
copper wire. He counted as he ducked between each stack, 
counting them off as he passed gravity wheels and Archimedes 
screws, rotating slowly and quietly. One. 


Rows of surgical equipment, some gleaming, some corroded and 
damp. As he passed they vibrated, chattering in their constraints. 
Two. 


Television monitors, seemingly fused together into a spreading tree. 
Three. 


A human fetus in a jar. The jar was taller than Edward. So was the 
fetus. Four. 


And there it was—a clearing in the wilderness, a square area 


surrounded with shelving and dominated by a thick wooden table, 
which might have been lacquered once but had been stripped down 
to the raw by scrapes, scratches, and what looked like acid burns. In 
the middle, a sign had been scrawled in permanent marker on a 
piece of corrugated card and propped against a tin filled with 
stationery. 'NEW ARRIVALS". The shelves were littered with debris 
—a metal slinky toy, an astronaut's helmet with a crack running the 
full length of the visor, a pair of high heels. No codex. He clawed at 
the items, threw them to the floor, angry with himself for having 
made such a stupid gambit. Then, tucked between a table clamp 
stained with blood and other matter and a curiously elderly and 
overweight Action Man still in its packaging and dressed in the outfit 
of a four-star general, his eye picked out the shape of the metal box 
with 'Gervais' scratched on its spine. He grabbed it, held it close to 
his chest. 


"Hey!" he heard from somewhere above him. He dropped to his 
knees, crawled back into the shadow of the stacks. He maybe had a 
few minutes before the guard came looking for him; or maybe he 
goes and finds Marshall first. Yes, that would fit. He'll go and ask 
Marshall what to do. He guessed he might have a little longer. 


There was something glittering by his shoe, half-hidden under the 
box of a mouldering board game protruding from the shelving—a 
shard of glass, he realised, though the light caught it oddly. For a 
second he thought that his MC&D member's pass might have 
slipped out of his pocket and shattered, and something about that 
chilled him even though he knew he never intended to return to the 
chapterhouse. Had he dreamed something about it? But no, it was 
intact in his pocket. 


He slid his hand under the shelves and retrieved the shard, cold and 
sharp between his fingers, no more than five centimetres across. Up 
close he could see what had puzzled him—it wasn't transparent at 
all but opaque; he couldn't see his fingers through it at all. Instead— 
he looked closer at the small reflection. He jolted out of his reverie 
and jerked around—nothing but a burlap sack, filled with coal, upon 
which someone had written 'D-5067'. He looked back and saw it 
again—the glass shard reflected not his own face but the head of an 
English bulldog, mottled brown and black with a white stripe on its 


forehead, occasionally blinking or turning this way or that. It looked 
out at him, slightly cock-eyed, and licked its nose. Edward waved his 
hand in front of the glass. Unsurprisingly the animal showed no 
indication that it could see him, instead opting to pursue the exciting 
taste of its own nostrils. 


This wasn't possible was it?, he thought, turning the shard over—the 
exact same canine reflection. No power source, no apparent means 
of projecting the image. It seemed to be part of a larger whole, but 
looking about he could see nowhere it might have come from. At the 
very least, he thought, this represented a good century's 
advancement in materials science. Just my luck, the stock-trader 
thought, | get the piece without the manufacturer's name. He tucked 
it into his pocket and continued moving, this time away from the 
screaming. 


"Hold on," said the square-jawed guard at the entrance, stubbing out 
his cigarette on the arm of the traffic barrier and swaggering over, 
ball of his palm over the holster of his weapon. "Nothing and no-one 
comes in or out without Mr Marshall's say-so." He eyed the metal 
case under Edward's arm. 


"He's said so," Edward replied, as haughtily as he could. "I've 
chosen my reward and now I'm on the clock. | need to be on the 
road asap." 


"What you need don't come into it," the security officer said. "You're 
gonna wait until Mr Marshall gets here to let you out." 


Edward tried not to sweat. Right now, he thought, Marshall was 
being disabused of any notions he might have that Edward had just 
got turned around amidst the debris of MC&D's empire. He eyed the 
walkie-talkie at the man's chest. Soon a call would come in on that 
and he'd be dead. 


"By that time it'll be a little late. I've been dispatched on Mr 
Marshall's orders. Any delays will be severely punished." He saw the 
guard swallow, look around shiftily as if hoping the blond man might 
appear to resolve his dilemma. Edward mused—Marshall considers 
his underlings a less competent substitute for himself; he can't be 


everywhere, so they're here to fill in. They aren't trusted to think for 
themselves, which means eventually they don't think at all, they just 
follow orders. And that means in the end they do and say whatever 
they think you want, whether you like it or not; the idea of you being 
angry with them is more powerful than what you actually want. And 
you're trapped in a universe of reflections. 


"| don't know," said the guard. Edward heard the buzz of a radio 
from within the office. Soon, one of the other guards—perhaps the 
big one with the stubble tossing a coin over his knuckles by the 
freight entrance—would go over to see what was happening. 


"Listen," said Edward, trying to perfect the Marshall sneer. "if I'm not 
in that limousine -" he nodded at the vehicle outside "- and headed 
back to Whitehall in the next fifteen seconds..." 


It was the most ludicrous, stupid thing he'd ever said, a piece of 
nonsense that he cursed even as it came out of his mouth. What 
kind of a threat is that, he thought, that's pathetic. He had just 
plucked an image out of the air, paired it with the most senior person 
he could think of in MC&D's hierarchy, that terrible old man, and it 
had become mixed up in his mind with that horrible, moving thing 
under the cloth... 


"...I'll feed you to Carter's chair." 


The guard went grey, all at once. His eyes started watering. He was 
trying to speak, but nothing was coming out. Shaking like a newborn 
foal he thumbed the controls to disengage the pedestrian door and 
Edward strode forcefully past as behind him he heard the first faint 
yells. No point trying to bluff the limousine driver—as soon as his 
feet met pavement he started running. That had worked better than 
expected, he thought. 


Edward had feared that when he got out he would find himself in the 
middle of nowhere, nothing but fields for miles around. Instead, he 
found to his amazement that after only a few paces he emerged on 
the thoroughfare of Pall Mall, city traffic buzzing around, deafening 
yet reassuring in its mundanity. They must have driven the limo 
around in circles to try and disorientate him, he reasoned, until he 
remembered the way the sounds of the city had fallen behind to be 


replaced by silence and the occasional note of birdsong. He pushed 
onto the pavement and mingled with the crush of pedestrians, 
becoming invisible under their umbrellas. 


"You let him out." It was not a question. Matt Berkeley, four O-levels, 
army dropout, felt like a rotten oak in a storm. Every day for the last 
three years he had prayed—"Don't let him see me. The pay's good, 
it's easy money, if he just doesn't see me. Let me go another day 
without him noticing anything | do. Let him take it out on someone 
else today, please, just not me." He had perfected the art of 
seeming engaged in reviewing security logs or approving access 
papers whenever anyone more senior happened by, then joined in 
wholeheartedly with the poker and the prank calls to Paki 
shopkeepers and the furtively exchanged dirty mags. Inside he was 
hollow—he knew he deserved no praise and had spent every day 
hoping he would never be found out. 


"He said you'd approved it," said Berkeley, in barely more than a 
whisper. 


"And you believed him?" 


"Yes sir," Berkeley's head dropped onto his chest, waiting. He had 
seen what happened to men who screwed up in the employ of 
Marshall, Carter & Dark. And afterwards he had put the bits into 
bags and dropped them in front of trains. He looked around. Would 
Mikkelsen be the one lugging Berkeley's bin liner down in front of 
the five-o-five to Reading? Maybe 'Hammers' Rogan. Or perhaps 
there wouldn't be enough left of him to bother. 


Marshall's long fingers dipped into his breast pocket and withdrew 
something in a silky white handkerchief, unwrapping it delicately. 
Some sort of comb, he saw—intricately carved but warped and 
yellowed. 


"Hold still, idiot." He took Berkeley's head with one hand and 
delicately inserted the comb into the still-thick clump of hair behind 
his ear. Sweat dripped from the man's forehead as he waited to turn 
inside out or his teeth to come alive or his soft tissues to melt. The 
other guards looked on with morbid fascination. 


After an excruciating minute Berkeley looked up and said "Is 
something supposed to happen, or..." 


The guards turned their attention to Marshall, who stood back 
bowed, leaning against a concrete pillar. He was taking great 
sucking gasps of air, his teeth bared. They exchanged brief glances, 
faces pale. They had never, ever seen Mr Marshall like this. 


"Wake him up," he said, voice like polished bone. 
"Sir?" asked Berkeley, but he already knew what was coming. 


"You heard me. Wake up the Bagman." 


Chapter Seven: "Codex" 


"Look at you," she had said. "Every time you come to me these days 
it is in such a state." 


Maria had accepted the codex silently, looking at him with an 
unreadable expression in those brown eyes. She had sat him down, 
his clothes stained and rent, on a chair in the kitchen, and brought 
him a hot cocoa. Later, she found him one of her father's dressing 
gowns and put him up in the house's master bedroom. 


"Marshall will be looking for me," he croaked. "If he guesses I've 
brought the codex back to you..." 


"Sssh," she said. She looked at the tired dark rings under his blue 
eyes and ruffled his hair with her fingers. "You'll stay here tonight," 
she said. 


They sat up together in bed, reading the codex. The Viage to the 
Contree of the Cimmerians was written in densely packed cursive; 
designed for economy of parchment, not ease of reading. But 
Edward had read the extracts that had once been published in a 
1754 chapbook as A Journey to the End of the World, and was able 
to fill in the blanks where the manuscript became illegible. 


"It starts like one of the Arthurian legends," he explained. "A 


Subject 574-A: Well, not a camp... y'see nobody wanted 
to live there. There was... noises, sometimes, at night. 
Spooked th'hell outta me when | went there coupl'a 
times. 


Dr. Jankovic: Why did you go on the eighteenth?