Never Was, Never Will

December 24th, 1870 – Bloomsbury, London

It was a quarter to six on Christmas Eve when the children were called to bed. Liza settled her lamp down onto the dressing table at the foot of the children's bed, its meagre flame filling the ordinarily airy attic bedroom with light and warmth, or at least the illusion of it. The children wriggled into bed, pulling the heavy woollen blanket up to their chins to keep out the chill of the frost that spread in glittering patterns across the bedroom window.

“Now remember,” Liza said, tucking the blanket more firmly over the smallest of the three children, whose nose only just peeped over the blanket's edge. “You must sleep all night if father Christmas is to come and see you. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Liza,” they said almost as one, the youngest of the three forgetting himself and answering a second out of time. Liza smiled to herself, smoothing rumples from the blanket with the palm of her hand. She stood up from of the edge of the bed and was about to turn away, when a small hand grabbed her by the wrist.

“I don't want father Christmas to come!”

With a faint frown pressing into her brow, she sank back onto the edge of the bed. She swiped at an errant strand of hair that had fallen from her cap, tucking it behind her ear. “Michael..? Why ever would you say that?”

The youngest of the children, now doggedly avoiding meeting his maid's eyes, Michael pouted and wriggled further down beneath the blanket. When Liza looked to the elder of the two boys, John, he too lowered his eyes – and if there was one occurrence that surely gave Liza cause for concern, it was when the children overcame the natural instinct to bicker and came to a consensus with one another. In the quiet that followed, Liza could hear the muffled sounds of talking downstairs. She waited without a word, fixing each one in turn with the kind of meaningful look that told them she wasn't leaving until she'd had an answer.

“I want the shadow to come, not him!” said John at last.

“Yes, Liza! Can't the shadow come and see us instead?” Michael added, quite suddenly on the verge of tears.

The frown of confusion that Liza wore deepened, marked now with concern. Though she'd not long come into the employ of the Darling family, Liza was already familiar with the story of the shadow. She had been warned about it, in particular warned her not to indulge the children's already wildly active imaginations where that particular flight of fancy was concerned. She brushed a hand over Michael's tousled hair, smoothing a wayward curl back into place.

“Now, children. Your father has spoken to you about stuffing your head full of silly stories like that. The shadow isn't-”

“He is!” Michael's head popped out from beneath the blanket, his pout fiercer than before as he interrupted. “He is real! I saw him! We have to leave the window open for him so he can come in and play!”

John nodded quickly, “It's true.”

Michael swiped at his running nose with the sleeve of his freshly cleaned pyjamas. Liza sighed, shaking her head. She looked to the last of the children, the eldest, who had earned the coveted middle spot in the bed. “And I suppose you saw him too?”

Of all the children that Liza expected to hear a tall tale from, it was Wendy Darling, but the girl simply shook her head, though her eyes wandered to the window as she spoke.

“N-no,” she said. “The shadow isn't real,” she added, as the wind rattled the windows and the lamplight shuddered as though caught in a breeze, the shivering flame causing the shadows cast onto the bedroom walls to twitch and dance for the briefest moment.

“He never was real - and he never will be.”

July 28th, 2012 – Bloomsbury, London – University College London, Institute of Archaeology

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn't shoot you, Mr. Crowley.”

It was, on reflection, the first time that he had been threatened by a librarian wielding a blunderbuss.

There had been altercations with librarians in the past – the quiet ones, as the saying went, were always the most troublesome – but never before had he stared down the sizable barrel of a blunderbuss. He'd scarcely fluttered in the window of the library before the musket had appeared, followed and carried by a young woman in a tweed jacket. They were alone in the library of the UCL institute of archaeology, whose low lights, warmth and shelves of ancient curiosities would have been overwhelmingly inviting to Crowley, in less tense circumstances.

He licked his thin lips and tried to keep his hands from trembling, as he held them up in the universally acknowledged gesture for surrender. Behind his dark glasses, his black eyes twitched from the gun to the woman in tweed and back again, over and over. “I'd prefer that you didn't.”

The librarian scowled, though the expression was nothing new. From what little Crowley had observed of Rosamund Darling, there was every chance that she had been born with the scowl etched into her flesh. “I'm not sure that I care what you prefer, Mr. Crowley,” she said.

“Consider the consequences, then. Imagine the mess I'd leave behind. However slight of build I may be, I suspect I'd leave a rather unsightly, bloody stain on your carpet. I couldn't live with myself if I thought I'd be the ruin of such a.. charming piece,” he added, glancing back quickly at the somewhat ragged-edged but hopefully priceless rug hanging on the wall behind him.

“How very selfless of you,” Rosamund said, all but rolling her eyes. She shifted the musket in her arms, the stock resting heavily against her shoulder.

Crowley cocked his head to one side and a nervous little smile wriggled onto his pale lips. “My dear, I understand that you are.. upset after my last visit. We didn't part on the best of terms.”

“Upset? I should be upset if my aunt's cat died, Mr. Crowley. Upset does not cover how one feels upon discovering that one of the four treasures of the Tuatha Dé Danann has been stolen-”

“Borrowed,” Crowley interjected. “With good cause - and really, what good is a magical sword of light if you can't slay a demon with it every so often? Besides, that's why I'm here. To return it to you – to the institute.”

Rosamund looked Crowley up and down. Every scrap of clothing he wore was jet black and clung to his bony frame like a second-skin. If he was hiding anything on his person, it wasn't much larger than a book of matches. Following Rosamund's train of thought to its logical final destination, Crowley's brow wrinkled. “I don't have it with me, but I do know where it is – and as a matter of fact... there is a very good chance that we may need that blunderbuss of yours to retrieve it.”

Less than half an hour later, they stood in the shadow of the Church of Christ the King. Crowley lifted his sunglasses to peer up at the illuminated rose window.

Rosamund was on the pavement to his left. “You can't be serious,” she said.

The sunglasses slipped back into place. Crowley smiled, “I can. It's just not in my nature.”

She sighed and though she said nothing at first, the slight shift of the blunderbuss's weight in her arms said everything that needed to be said. “You left a priceless antique sword inside an Angelican church.”

“I left it in the hands of an angel. Couldn't be safer.” Hopping over the low wall that circled the church, Crowley was at the front door in two long strides. One slim hand dipped into the inner-pocket of his jacket and produced two thin metal picks. Crowley sank into a crouch and carefully wedged both picks into the church's old lock.

“And now you are breaking into the church. We shall add sacrilege to your litany of delinquencies,” Rosamund observed, as she shuffled further into the shadow of the church, the blunderbuss cradled against her chest.

“If God didn't want me inside his house, Rosamund, he would have bought a better security system,” Crowley said, not looking away from the task at hand. “Instead of having his servants spend all of their money on giant, jewel-encrusted gold crosses and... marble statues of flying babies,” he added, as the lock gave a satisfying click.