Vicious Circle

We stepped through the doorway into a concrete stairwell. Father Gwillam closed the door, which was a fire door, and pushed the bar back into place with a small grunt of effort. Then he turned to me.

“Good to see you again, Castor,” he murmured. “On the side of the angels at last.”

“Color me undecided,” I suggested.

He smiled—a brief flicker of expression that couldn’t take root in the affectless terrain of his face—and nodded. “Everything’s set up upstairs,” he said, to the company in general. It wasn’t a comment I liked very much, but my personal honor guard closed in on me as Gwillam led the way up the stairs, so I didn’t have much choice about whether or not I followed.

I was looking for clues as to where we were. Close to the Thames, I knew, but where had we crossed? Not as far east as Rotherhithe, surely? In any case, I was pretty sure I’d have heard the engine noise change if we’d come through the tunnel. But maybe we’d gone west. There was no way to be sure: at a rough guess, we could be anywhere between Wapping and Kew.

But as we came out of the stairwell onto a wide blue-carpeted corridor with a gentle incline, bells began to chime. I’d been here before, some time in the long-ago. I experienced a flash of déjŕ vu that included the insanely staring eyes of Nosferatu, and I almost had it. A cinema? Had the Anathemata found one of London’s decommissioned dream houses and moved in, as Nicky had done over in Walthamstow? That would be a pretty sick irony.

But no. As it turned out, they’d gone one better than that. Gwillam threw a door open and flicked a light switch. Striplights flickered in sequence along a wall as long as a football field. A black wall, black floor, too, scarred with the scuff marks of innumerable feet. Up ahead of me, something that looked a little like a Tyrannosaurus rex made of glass and black steel reared itself up to about twice my height. But it wasn’t a T. rex: it was a Zeiss projector.

“Son of a bitch!” I said, impressed in spite of myself as the penny dropped.

“That’s the sort of language Po doesn’t appreciate all that much,” Gwillam murmured, raising the disturbing possibility that he might actually have a sense of humor.

He walked around the Zeiss projector, and I followed: or rather, I was herded. The vast expanse of floor on the far side was mostly empty, except for a ghost pattern of unbleached areas on the carpet where other objects had once stood: display stands, partition walls, ancient cine cameras, life-size dioramas from great movies. The Anathemata had colonized one small area; there were a couple of guys working on laptop terminals at desks that were surrounded by thick, overlaid loops of electric cable like barbed wire entanglements. Another couple of guys were talking on cellphones, one of them tracing a line with his finger on an ops board—a huge map of London pinned to the wall, like I’d only ever seen in seventies cop shows. That was pretty much it: that, and a whole lot of empty space stretching away into the middle distance.

“You should move somewhere smaller, now that the kids have grown up,” I commented, trying for a nonchalant tone that I think I missed by a mile or so. “You’re probably paying more rent than you need to.”

Gwillam smiled thinly. He was watching my face, taking a clinical interest in my reaction. “Who mentioned rent? They left the key under the mat, and we let ourselves in. I’m assuming you know what this used to be, before it died?”

“Sure,” I said. “I know.”

But Gwillam wanted to give me the punch line, and he wasn’t going to be deterred. “It was the Museum of the Moving Image.”

Just the words conjured up a little squall of memories. The museum was part of the South Bank complex, like the National Theatre and the Festival Hall—but it was added on after all the rest were built, because film was the scruffy little Johnny-come-lately of the art world and had to make space for itself at the table with its elbows. I’d only been here once before in my life—on a school outing when I was thirteen. All the way up from Liverpool on the train, with four stuffed pork roll sandwiches and a can of Vimto to see me through the day. I’d pretended to think it was shit, because that was what all my mates were saying, but secretly I reckoned the low-tech horror of the magic lantern shows was the dog’s bollocks, and I sneaked back to watch the X-wings versus TIE fighters battle sequence from Star Wars twice over.

Now it was just an empty warehouse.

“They closed the place down some time in the late nineties,” said Gwillam, absently. “Took the exhibition on the road. It’s meant to be opening again in three years or so. In the meantime . . . it’s really handy for the West End. Sit down, Castor.”