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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Walker in the Circle

Beside the steep gothic roof of St. Pancras station and its highly decorated brickwork is another big red-brick building. They are as alike as chalk and Chinese food. Brick color and size is all they have in common. Where St. Pancras sweeps the eye into the curve of its facade and then throws it upward to enjoy the exuberance of its peaks and spires, the other building stops the eye dead with windowless slopes of brick bunkered down in a defensive hunch, as if expecting something nasty from the road in front.

Between it and the wide raceway of Euston Road is an open stone and brick piazza, which feels less like a pleasure spot than a featureless killing ground for the giant brick fortress squatting on two sides of it. Of course, it isn’t really featureless. There is a massive statue of a heavy-browed man crouched over a pair of dividers, as if measuring the world—or at least the few yards in front of his feet. And it isn’t actually a fortress, either. It’s a library. The British Library. You can tell that because there is a tall gate and a metal screen where it announces itself repeatedly in a frozen cascade of thickening fonts.

And there is also a sunken circle.

The sunken circle has stone benches all around its interior. On the top rim, there are roughly round boulders. If you were to look closely at the boulders you’d see there are crudely carved human figures that appear to be starting to emerge from them.

The descending black bird took no notice of the statue or the stones. It did, however, fly through the gates because it was no ordinary black bird. It was a raven, and it chose to fly beneath the arch because it did have, among many things rooks didn’t come equipped with, a sense of style.

It banked right and overflew the sunken circle. The Walker paced back and forth on the curved bench, a thin roll-up cigarette smoldering in the side of his mouth, eye squinted against the smoke.

The Raven sideslipped down to land on his shoulder. The Walker didn’t look at all surprised that a large black bird had alighted by his ear.

The Raven shuffled up closer. Its beak clacked quietly. The Walker listened.

“St. George’s Square, you say? By the river.”

He turned decisively. The Raven pushed off and hung in the air in front of his head, flapping unnaturally slowly, lazily defying all laws of gravity and several of the general advisory guidelines of nature as it did so. The Walker pointed to the rookery of gargoyles on St. Pancras.

“Tell him not to fail this time, rain or no rain—or by the first stone and the chisel that cracked it, I’ll be the one he answers to.” High above them, the cat-gargoyle with the flaked wing and the corroding waterspout watched the Raven rise toward it. It shook itself in anticipation. It stretched its wings, and when it looked around it saw that all the other gargoyles were very busy not looking at it at all.

Back in front of the bunker building, the only sign of the Walker was a pinched-out dog-end of cigarette smoking slightly on the brick floor of the stone circle.

On the other side of the Euston Road, a man walking down Judd Street with earphones on had the sudden sense that he should take them off because he wouldn’t be able to hear someone coming up behind him. But when he turned quickly, there was no one there.