Quill noted Costain’s arrival. Now all his unit were two floors below street level. Exactly what they had gone down into was another question. At first sight, this bar looked like the one immediately above it, but many of the details were different, and, with the Sight suddenly putting a queasy feeling of gravity in his gut, those details seemed drastically important. He felt as if he was already deep under the earth, as if rescue was a long way off, far above. When he first got down here he’d had to stop himself from going over to Ross and indicating they should both pull out immediately. But there was no operational reason for him to feel like that. Ross had walked straight over to a barwoman who looked a degree more specialized again than the one in the bar above, with a distinctly old-fashioned touch to her uniform, curls to her hair that looked to be from some era he couldn’t pin down, and, startlingly, white pancake make-up that made her look like a mime artist. The dress code for those who’d got down here was clearly older, poorer, often specifically London in nature. There were remnants of uniform: London transport; real cavalry jackets; what Quill realized was a zookeeper, even. The look was distinctive, but hardly impressive in the way of a fashion show. They also showed signs of harm: the odd missing finger; bruises and cuts displayed proudly. There was something else about them now: their voices were hushed, they kept glancing towards the door. This lot were in their familiar place, obviously used to being here … but tonight they were afraid of what remained above. To get out of what had started to feel like a footie boozer with a bunch of away fans in it hadn’t eased the pressure very much.

In the far corner, in the same place as on the floor above, was a different tweedy bloke with a beard, sitting guarding yet another downward stairwell. As above, so below. So there was another level beneath this. Of course.

Quill went over to the juke box, in exactly the same place as in the bar above. This one was an old-fashioned job with vinyl singles, and the selections were all songs about London: the Kinks; Blur; the Small Faces. To play one cost only twenty pence. But he didn’t feel like being the first to select a track. He went to a table and picked up a menu. These cocktails had names like the Lambeth Walk, the Ally Sloper, the Black Shock. That last name made something echo in his head. Like déjà vu for something that hadn’t yet happened. Quill didn’t know one bottle of champers from another, but the top of the range down here was considerably cheaper than upstairs. He went to check out the paintings on the walls. These were all portraits of individuals, their names underneath, nothing spooky about them. Though, wait a sec, Aleister Crowley – there was a name he recognized: fat bloke, a sort of coked-up mania about him, half performance, half something a bit more worrying. Beside him: Dion Fortune; Austin Osman Spare; Gerald Gardner … There were many more – a complete circuit of them on the walls – and in between the portraits were what seemed to be action scenes, or at least metaphorical versions of such. Here were a group of figures under the searchlights and blimps of wartime London, their arms arranged in stark stick-figure angles, protesting against or attacking what was surely the threatening shape of a falling V2 rocket. Here was a parting of the ways, a splitting, as many figures walked many different paths, some falling off into nothingness, into a sunlit map of London.