Not how it should have been.
Too long, this awakening, floor warm beneath my fingers, itchy carpet, thick, a prickling across my skin, turning rapidly into the red-hot feeling of burrowing ants; too long without sensation, everything weak, like the legs of a baby. I said twitch, and my toes twitched, and the rest of my body shuddered at the effort. I said blink, and my eyes were two half-sucked toffees, uneven, sticky, heavy, pushing back against the passage of my eyelids like I was trying to lift weights before a marathon.
All this, I felt, would pass. As the static blue shock of my wakening, if that is the word, passed, little worms of it digging away into the floor or crawling along the ceiling back into the telephone lines, the hot blanket of their protection faded from my body. The cold intruded like a great hungry worm into every joint and inch of skin, my bones suddenly too long for my flesh, my muscles suddenly too tense in their relaxed form to tense ever again, every part starting to quiver as the full shock of sensation returned.
I lay on the floor naked as a shedding snake, and we contemplated our situation.
runrunrunrunrunRUNRUNRUNRUN! hissed the panicked voice inside me, the one that saw the bed legs an inch from my nose as the feet of an ogre, heard the odd swish of traffic through the rain outside as the spitting of venom down a forked tongue, felt the thin neon light drifting through the familiar dirty window pane as hot as noonday glare through a hole in the ozone layer.
I tried moving my leg and found the action oddly giddying, as if this was the ultimate achievement for which my life so far had been spent in training, the fulfilment of all ambition. Or perhaps it was simply that we had pins and needles and, not entirely knowing how to deal with pain, we laughed through it, turning my head to stick my nose into the dust of the carpet to muffle my own inane giggling as I brought my knee up towards my chin, and tears dribbled around the edge of my mouth. We tasted them, curious, and found the saltiness pleasurable, like the first, tongue-clenching, moisture-eating bite of hot, crispy bacon. At that moment finding a plate of crispy bacon became my one guiding motivation in life, the thing that overwhelmed all others, and so, with a mighty heave and this light to guide me, I pulled myself up, crawling across the end of the bed and leaning against the chest of drawers while waiting for the world to decide which way down would be for the duration.
It wasn’t quite my room, this place I found myself in. The inaccuracies were gentle, superficial. It was still my paint on the wall, a pale, inoffensive yellow; it was still my window with its view out onto the little parade of shops on the other side of the road, unmistakable: the newsagent, the off-licence, the cobbler and all-round domestic supplier, the launderette, and, red lantern still burning cheerfully in the window, Mrs Lee Po’s famous Chinese takeaway. My window, my view; not my room. The bed was new, an ugly, polished thing trying to pretend to be part of a medieval bridal chamber for a princess in a pointy hat. The mattress, when I sat on it, was so hard I ached within a minute from being in contact with it; on the wall hung a huge, gold-framed mirror in which I could picture Marie Antoinette having her curls perfected; in the corner there were two wardrobes, not one. I waddled across to them, and leant against the nearest to recover my breath from the epic distance covered. Seeing by the light seeping under the door, and the neon glow from outside, I opened the first one and surveyed jackets of rough tweed, long dresses in silk, white and cream-coloured shirts distinctively tailored, pointed black leather shoes, high-heeled sandals composed almost entirely of straps and no real protective substance, and a handbag the size of a feather pillow, suspended with a heavy, thick gold chain. I opened the handbag and rifled through the contents. A purse, containing £50, which I took, a couple of credit cards, a library membership to the local Dulwich Portakabin, and a small but orderly handful of thick white business cards. I pulled one out and in the dull light read the name – “Laura Linbard, Business Associate, KSP”. I put it on the bed and opened the other wardrobe.
This one contained trousers, shirts, jackets and, to my surprise, a large pair of thick yellow fisherman’s oils and sailing boots. There was a small, important-looking box at the bottom of the wardrobe. I opened it and found a stethoscope, a small first-aid kit, a thermometer and several special and painful-looking metal tools whose nature I dared not speculate on. I pulled a white cotton shirt off its hanger and a pair of grey trousers. In a drawer I found underpants which didn’t quite fit comfortably, and a pair of thick black socks. Dressing, I felt cautiously around my left shoulder and ribcage, probing for damage, and finding that every bone was properly set, every inch of skin correctly healed, not even a scar, not a trace of dry blood.
The shirt cuff reached roughly to the point where my thumb joint aligned with the rest of my hand; the trousers dangled around the balls of my feet. The socks fitted perfectly, as always seems the way. The shoes were several sizes too small; that perplexed me. How is it possible for someone to have such long arms and legs, and yet wear shoes for feet that you’d think would have to have been bound? Feeling I might regret it later, I left the shoes.
I put the business card and the £50 in my trouser pockets and headed for the door. On the way out, we caught sight of our reflection in the big mirror and stopped, stared, fascinated. Was this now us? Dark brown hair heading for the disreputable side of uncared for – not long enough to be a bohemian statement, not short enough to be stylish. Pale face that freckled in the sun, slightly over-large nose for the compact features that surrounded it, head plonked as if by accident on top of a body made all the more sticklike by the ridiculous oversized clothes it wore. It was not the flesh we would have chosen, but I had long since given up dreams of resembling anyone from the movies and, with the pragmatism of the perfectly average, come to realise that this was me and that was fine.
And this was me, looking back out of the mirror.
Not quite me.
I leant in, turning my head this way and that, running my fingers through my hair – greasy and unwashed – in search of blood, bumps, splits. Turning my face this way and that, searching for bruises and scars. An almost perfect wakening, but there was still something wrong with this picture.
I leant right in close until my breath condensed in a little grey puff on the glass, and stared deep into my own eyes. As a teenager it had bothered me how round my eyes had been, somehow always imagining that small eyes = great intelligence, until one day at school the thirteen-year-old Max Borton had pointed out that round dark eyes were a great way to get the girls. I blinked and the reflection in the mirror blinked back, the bright irises reflecting cat-like the orange glow of the washed-out street lamps. My eyes, which, when I had last had cause to look at them, had been brown. Now they were the pale, brilliant albino blue of the cloudless winter sky, and I was no longer the only creature that watched from behind their lens.
runrunrunrunrunrunRUNRUNRUNRUNRUNRUNRUNRUN!
I put my head against the cold glass of the mirror, fighting the sudden terror that threatened to knock us back to the floor. The trick was to keep breathing, to keep moving. Nothing else mattered. Run long and hard enough, and perhaps while you’re running you might actually come up with a plan. But nothing mattered if you were already dead.
My legs thought better than my brain, walked me out of the room. My fingers eased back the door and I blinked in the shocking light of the hundred-watt bulb in the corridor outside. The carpet here was thick and new, the banisters polished, but it was a painting on the wall, a print of a Picasso I’d picked up for a fiver – too many years ago – all colour and strange, scattered proportions – which stole our attention. It still hung exactly where I’d left it. I felt almost offended. We were fascinated: an explosion of visual wonder right there for the same price as a cheap Thai meal, in full glory. Was everything like this? I found it hard to remember. I licked my lips and tasted blood, dry and old. Thoughts and memories were still too tangled to make clear sense of them. All that mattered was moving, staying alive long enough to get a plan together, find some answers.
From downstairs I heard laughter, voices, the chink of glasses, and a door being opened. Footsteps on the tiles that led from living room to kitchen, a clink where they still hadn’t cemented in the loose white one in the centre of the diamond pattern; the sound of plates; the roar of the oven fan as it pumped out hot air.
I started walking down. The voices grew louder, a sound of polite gossipy chit-chat, dominated by one woman with a penetrating voice and a laugh that started at the back of her nose before travelling down to the lungs and back up again, and who I instinctively disliked. I glanced down the corridor to the kitchen and saw a man’s back turned to me, bent over something that steamed and smelt of pie. The urge to eat anything, everything, briefly drowned out the taste of blood in my mouth. Like a bewildered ghost who can’t understand that it has died, I walked past the kitchen and pushed at the half-open door to the living room.
There were three of them, with a fourth place set for the absent cook, drinking wine over the remnants of a salad, around a table whose top was made of frosted glass. As I came in, nobody seemed to notice me, all attention on the one woman there with the tone and look of someone in the middle of a witty address. But when she turned in my direction with “George, the pie!” already half-escaped from her lips, the sound of her dropped wineglass shattering on the table quickly redirected the others’ attention.
They stared at me, I stared at them. There was an embarrassed silence that only the English can do so well, and that probably lasted less than a second, but felt like a dozen ticks of the clock. Then, as she had to, as things probably must be, one of the women screamed.
The sound sent a shudder down my spine, smashed through the horror and incomprehension in my brain, and at last let me understand, let me finally realise that this was no longer my house, that I had been gone too long, and that to these people I was the intruder, they the rightful owners. The scream slammed into my brain like a train hitting the buffers and tore a path through my consciousness that let everything else begin to flood in: the true realisation that if my house was not mine, my job, my friends, my old life would not be mine, nor my possessions, my money, my debts, my clothes, my shoes, my films, my music; all gone in a second, things I had owned since a scrawny teenager, the electric toothbrush my father had given me in a fit of concern for my health, the photos of my friends and the places I’d been, the copy of Calvin and Hobbes my first girlfriend had given me as a sign of enduring friendship the Christmas after we’d split up, my favourite pair of slippers, the holiday I was planning to the mountains of northern Spain, all, everything I had worked for, everything I had owned and wanted to achieve, vanished in that scream.
I ran. We didn’t run from the sound, that wasn’t what frightened us. I ran to become lost, and wished I had never woken in the first place, but stayed drifting in the blue.
Once upon a time, a not-so-long time ago, I had sat with my mad old gran on a bench beside a patch of cigarette-butt grass that the local council had designated “community green area”, watching the distant flashes of the planes overhead, and the turning of the orange-stained clouds across a sullen yellow moon. She’d worn a duffel coat, a faded blue nightdress and big pink slippers. I’d worn my school uniform and my dad’s big blue jacket, that Mum had unearthed one day from a cardboard box and had been about to burn. I’d cried, an eleven-year-old kid not sure why I cared, until she’d saved it for me.
We’d sat together, my gran and me, and the pigeons had clustered in the gutters and on the walls, hopped around my gran’s slippered feet, wobbled on half a torn-off leg, flapped with broken, torn-feathered wings, peered with round orange unblinking eyes, like glass sockets in their tiny heads, unafraid. I had maths homework which I had no intention of doing, and a belly full of frozen peas and tomato ketchup. Winter was coming, but tonight the air was a clean, dry cold, sharp, not heavy, and the lights were on in all the houses of the estate. I was a secret spy, a boy sitting in the darkness of the bench, watching Mr Paswalah in number 27 ironing his shirts, Jessica and Al in number 32 rowing over the cleaning, old Mrs Gregory in 21 flicking through 300 TV channels in search of something loud and violent that when her husband had been alive she had felt too ashamed to watch, it not being correct for a lady raised in the 1940s to enjoy the Die Hard films.
So I sat, my gran by my side, as we sat many nights on this bench; just her, me, the pigeons and our stolen world of secret windows.
My gran was silent a long while. Sitting here on this bench, with the pigeons, was almost the only time she seemed content. Then she turned to me, looked me straight in the eye and said, “Boy?”
“Yes, Gran?” I mumbled.
Her lips were folded in over her bright pink gums, her false teeth inside the house beside her little single bed. She chewed on the inward turn of them a long while, head turning to the sky, then back to the ground, and then slowly round to me. “You sing beautiful in the choir, boy?”
“Yes, Gran,” I lied. I may have cried to save my father’s coat, but I had enough teenage self-respect to not be caught dead singing in the school choir.
“Boy?”
“Yes, Gran?”
“You cheat at tests?”
“Yes, Gran.”
“I told’em, I told’em, but the old ladies all said… Angelina has a problem with her left ear, you know? You cheat at tests, boy?”
“No, Gran.”
“Always gotta keep your pencils sharp before the ink runs dry!”
“Yes, Gran.”
Silence a long, long while. I remember staring at my gran’s legs, where they stuck out beneath the nightdress. They were grey, riddled with bright blue veins, large and splayed, like some sort of squashed rotting cheese grown from the mould inside a pair of slippers.
“Boy?” she said at last.
“Yes, Gran?”
“The shadow’s coming, boy,” she sighed, fumbling at her jacket pockets for a tissue to wipe her running nose. “The shadow’s coming. Not here yet. Not for a while. But it’s coming. It’s going to eat you up, boy.”
“Yes, Gran.”
She hit me around the ear then, a quick slap like being hit with a thin slice of uncooked meat. “You listen!” she snapped. “The pigeons seen it! They seen it all! The shadow’s coming. Young people never listen. He’s coming for you, boy. Not yet, not yet… you’ll have to sing like the angels to keep him away.”
“Yes, Gran.”
I looked into her fading, thick-covered eyes then, and saw, to my surprise, that tears were building up in them. I took her hand in sudden, real concern, and said, “Gran? You all right?”
“I ain’t mad,” she mumbled, wiping her nose and eyes on a great length of snot-stained sleeve. “I ain’t crazy. They seen it coming. The pigeons know best. They seen it coming.” Then she grinned, all gum spiked with the tiny remains of hanging flesh where teeth had once been. She stood up, wobbling on her feet a moment, the pigeons scattering from around her. She pulled me up, my hands in hers, and started to dance, pushing me ungainly back and forth as, with the grace and ease of a drunken camel, we waltzed beneath the sodium light of the city. All the time she sang in a little tuneless, weedy voice, “We be light, we be life, we be fire, te-dum, te-dum! We sing electric flame tedum, we rumble underground wind te-dum, we dance heaven! Come be we and be free…”
Then she stopped, so suddenly that I bounced into her, sinking into the great roll of her curved shoulders. “Too early to sing,” she sighed, staring into my eyes. “You ain’t ready yet, boy. Not yet. A while. Then you’ll sing like an angel. The pigeons don’t have the brains to lie.”
And then she kept right on dancing, a hunched singing sprite in the night, until Mum called us in for bed.
Looking back, I realise now that the problem wasn’t that my gran knew more than she was saying. The truth of the matter was, she said exactly and honestly what it was she knew, and I just didn’t have the brains to see it.
I stopped running when my feet began to bleed. I didn’t know where I was, nor what route I’d taken to get there. I knew only what I saw: the edge of a common or a small public park, a dark night in what felt like early spring or late autumn. Leaves falling from the giant plane trees round the edge of the green – autumn, then. It was drizzling, that strange London drizzle that is at once cold and wet, yet somehow imperceptible against the background of the pink-orange street lights, more of a heavy fog drifting through the air than an actual rain. I couldn’t think in coherent words; it was too early for that. Instead, as my brain registered all my losses, panic immersed it like the splashing of a hot shower, preventing any reasoning of where I might go next or what I might do.
I found a dim, neon-lit passage leading under a railway line, that no beggar or homeless wanderer had colonised for that night, and sank down against the cold, dry paving with my knees against my chin. For a long while I did no more, but shivered and cowered and tried to seize control of my own thoughts. The taste of blood in my mouth was maddening, like the lingering dryness of cough medicine that couldn’t be washed away. I played again the bright blue eyes of a stranger reflected in my reflection, tried to put those eyes in my face. The memories didn’t bring physical pain; the mind is good at forgetting what it doesn’t want to recall. But each thought brought with it the fear of pain, a recollection of things that had been and which I would move to some uninhabited rock away from all sodium lamps and men to escape again.
For a brief moment, I contemplated this idea, telling myself that the loss of everything was in fact a liberation in disguise. What would the Buddha do? Walk barefoot through the mud of an unploughed field and rejoice at rebirth, probably. I thought of worms between my toes, fat wriggling pink-grey bodies, cold as the rain that fed them, and we changed our mind. We would run; but not so far.
Instinctively, as it had always been when afraid, I let my senses drift. It was an automatic reflex, imparted as almost the first lesson of my training, the first time my teacher had…
… my teacher had…
Give me life!
… a shadow is coming…
runrunrunrunrunRUNRUNRUNRUNRUNRUNRUNRUNRUN
Breathing was strength, the wall was safety. I pressed my spine into it, my head against it. Fingers would not grow out of the wall, claws would not sprout from the shadows. The more of me was in contact with something solid, the fewer places there were for the darkness to crawl, the better it would be. I imagined a great barking dog, all teeth and slobber, squatting by my side to keep me safe, a loyal pet to stand guard when I grew too tired. There were things which could be done, almost as good as a guard dog; but I didn’t know if they would attract too much attention.
And so, again, as my breathing slowed, my senses wandered, gathering information. Smell of electricity from the railway overhead, of urine being washed away by the rain, of spilt beer and dry mortar dust. Sound of the distant clatter of a late-night commuter train, carrying sleepy one-a-row passengers to the suburbs and beyond. A bus splashing through a puddle swollen around a blocked drain, somewhere in the distance. A door slamming in the night. The distant wail of a police siren. As a child, the sound of sirens had comforted me. I had thought of them as proof that we were being protected, by guardians all in blue out to keep us safe from the night. I had never made the connection between protection and something we had to be protected from. Now the sirens sang again, and I wondered if they sang for me.
My clothes were too thin for the night. The drizzle made them soggy, clinging, itchy and cold to my skin. I could feel damp goose bumps up the length of my arms. We were fascinated by them, rolling up our sleeve to stare at the distortion of our flesh, and the little hairs standing to attention as if they were stiff with static. Even the cold interested us, how disproportionate it made our senses, our freezing feet too large for the space they inhabited, our numbed fingers huge pumpkin splatters across our thoughts; and it occurred to us that the human body was a very unreliable tool indeed.
Crispy bacon.
The smell of pie.
Taste of blood.
Memories of…
… of…
Half-close your eyes and it’ll be there, all yellow teeth and blue eyes, looking down at you; press your eyes shut all the way and the blood will roll once again over your skin, pool and crackle across your back and sides, tickle against the sole of your foot, thicken in the lining of your socks.
You really want to remember all that?
Didn’t think so.
Don’t close your eyes.
I rolled my sleeve back down, tucked my chin deeper into my knees, wrapped my hands around myself, folded my feet one on top of the other.
There were other senses waiting to report in.
A little look, a quick gander, where was the harm? No one would ever know; breathe it in and maybe it will be all right, despite the shadows?
I inhaled, let the air of the place wash deep into my lungs, play its revelations through my blood and brain. Here it comes …
The feel of that place where I huddled like a child had a sharp, biting quality, thin on the ground, not so heavy as in other places where life moves more often and more densely, but carrying traces of other areas drifting in the air, snatched across the city in tendrils that clung to the commuter trains rattling overhead. What power and texture I could feel had a strong smell, but a slippery touch, retreating from too firm a command like a frightened bird. It gave me comfort, and a little warmth.
I pulled myself up and looked at the white-painted walls, examining the graffiti on them. Most of it was the usual stuff – “J IS GAY!” or “P & N FOR EVER” – but there was across one wall an orange swish of paint, all loops and sudden turns, that I recognised. It felt warm when I pressed my fingers to it, and tingled to the touch like slow-moving sand. A beggar’s mark, delineating the edge of a clan’s territory. It was good to find my senses still sensitive to such things – or even, I had to wonder, more sensitive than they’d been before? Though we could see the advantages, the thought did not comfort me.
I staggered down the tunnel, examining now in careful detail each splash of paint and scratch across the whitewashed walls. Messages like:
DON’T LET THE SYSTEM GET YOU DOWN
or:
××ULTRAS××
or:
Don’t lick the brushes
melted into each other over the cemented, painted surface of the bricks.
One splash of paint at the far end of the tunnel caught my attention, and held it. It had none of the usual trappings of protection that most who understood such things used to defend their territory, but was written in crude capital letters across the wall in simple black spray-paint. It said: “MAK ME SHADOW ON DA WAL”.
It made me uneasy, but other things that evening were taking priority on my list of concerns, so I ignored it. I had no paint, but dribbled my fingers in the sharp sense of that place and, in the middle of the tunnel, started to draw my own mark on the wall, feeling even that slight movement give me comfort as I made the long shape of the protection symbol, my own ward against evil and harm. Not quite a guard dog; but close enough.
When I had finished, my head ached, and my fingers shook. Even something so small took too much out of me, the last vestige of strength left in my limbs. A warmth inside me suggested a hollowness that time, perhaps, might repair, and the weakness was not so much one of exhaustion, but of inexperience, as if every finger was freshly grown, the muscle untested, not yet conditioned to its former use. I slumped against the opposite wall and waited.
It took only a few seconds before the shape I’d drawn started to burn and hiss on the wall, its lines emerging in thin black swirls. I slid back onto the paving stones, tucked my knees up to my chin and shivered. The white strip lights overhead buzzed quietly; I could taste the electricity in them. Lesson one for anyone in my profession was always about electricity.
I took a risk, and with the tips of my fingers snatched a little warmth and light out of one of them, which died into darkness as I drew its energy to myself. The pea-sized ball of light and heat I managed to drag from it was like a match held between two fingers – shockingly hot when I brought my skin close to it, but not enough on which to sustain life. Uncertain which was likely to cause more pain, the cold or the failure of my own strength, I risked pulling down more light, and a few degrees more heat, caressing it into the sphere between my fingers, until almost all the lights overhead were extinguished, leaving just one at either end of the tunnel. The effort left me in a cold sweat, breathless and with a nasty case of tinnitus, but it also left me clutching a fat bubble of white light the size of a small, immaterial football. I lay down and curled myself around it like it was a bag of pure gold, feeling it warm me through and drive some of the wetness out of my clothes, and closed my eyes.
We did not want to sleep – our thoughts raced, our senses strayed out as far as we could reach, into the scuttling of a rat’s claws under the street, the snuffling nose of a ragged-tailed urban fox, while we tried to pick out every shape and sense of life around us. But I was tired – too tired – and regardless of what we wanted, I had to sleep. I felt my eyes sink like an executioner’s blade.
Taste of blood.
Yellow teeth and watery, weak blue eyes.
Give me life give me life give me life give me life GIVE ME…
Not quite sleep.
Distant siren, distant cars. Someone was out tonight looking for someone else; crawling through the gutters, talking to the pigeons, stealing the nose of the orange fox seeking its hamburger supper.
We did not enjoy sleep. Our dreams were mixed in with our reality, the world seen through a haze of blue. I had always loved nights like this, when the rain bubbled in the gutter. It gave everything a clean, clear quality, and allowed the mind to roam far and easily without becoming obstructed by the haze of crowded life and busy sense that too often obscures the wandering vision. Thoughts without words.
I couldn’t have slept for more than a few hours. When I woke, the warmth in my hands had slipped away back into the lights, which glowed with their earlier harsh whiteness. On the edge of my senses I was distracted by a faint drip drip drip drip.
At one end of the tunnel, the beggars’ orange-painted mark was running down the wall in trickles, like blood from a nosebleed. It caught on a chip in the wall, pooled, then overflowed, dripping with a tiny, regular rhythm into a sad stain on the ground. I looked over at my own protective mark, the swirl of burnt paint at the other end of the tunnel, and saw that it too was starting to wobble round the edges, the lines of its power shimmering as if caught in a heat haze, the very bottom of the sign starting to liquefy.
I pulled myself up onto my feet, which immediately reported that they wanted nothing to do with the rest of me, and throbbed with a dull ache to prove the point. Blood and dirt had mixed into a dull brownstain. Hobbling to the end of the tunnel, I looked out into the dark. It was still night, or at least that dead time of morning before the dwindling gloom can muster any outline on the horizon. The rain was giving its all, pocking the ground with tiny silver craters, and turning the pavement into a reflective sheen of ebony blackness, pink-orange neon and flashing puddles.
I let my senses wander, and felt uneasy, a shuddering across my skin more than just the cold. There was a smell cutting through the rain, a blunt assault on the senses, a taste as much as a stench, that forced itself to the back of the nose and activated every receptor at once so that the brain was overwhelmed with so much information it couldn’t even begin to decipher the component parts of the smell to say that this is orange peel and that wet cardboard. It was the smell of warm, wet rubbish, left to rot and moulder in interesting ways in a tight, dark, compressed area, before being let out into the air. And it was getting stronger.
I listened for dustbin trucks, scavengers and thieves.
Nothing.
Just the slow hiss of melting paint and the pattering of the rain.
I am not given to paranoia, but recent experience had altered my perspective. It seemed unlikely that paint could melt and the air smell of litter – no, of something more than litter, a bite sharper than disgust – without there being some direct and unpleasant connection. I turned away from the stench and started walking as quickly as my battered feet would allow me, down the tunnel and out into the rain, letting it wash over me and enjoying the shock as it ran into my eyes and washed out the sleep; even as the rest of my senses came up to scratch and reported… . .
… the smell of rubbish…
… taste of mould…
… touch of rain…
… empty street of strange shadows…
… sound of footsteps…
… edge of dry, hot ozone, getting closer, getting stronger…
I started jogging, uncomfortably, each landing on the soles of my feet a reminder that the human form actually weighed a lot, and that this burden was supported by a very small area relative to the mass. What a ridiculous form our flesh took, we decided. What a ridiculous species to have conquered the world.
There was a sound in the road behind me like newspaper blowing across sand. I broke into a run, suddenly not caring about the pain, but overwhelmed by a desire to be somewhere else, fast. The noise behind me grew louder, and so did the smell, and with it came a strange, low rumble, like the engine of a very old diesel car just before it explodes in a cloud of steam.
I saw an alley between two houses, full of dirty rubbish bags and oily puddles, and turned into it, racing for the wall at the end. Somehow being hemmed in comforted me – I had no way out, but whatever was behind me had only one way in, and I could face it properly, my back safe from claws and yellow teeth. I reached the wall at the far end and turned, pressing against a high wooden gate that presumably led into someone’s back garden. I stretched my fingers out on either side of me, braced myself against the reassurance of a solid surface behind and started dragging power to me. It was slow, too slow, too long since I had last tried this – I hadn’t had need for so many years! Still I pulled, thickening the air with it until the walls either side seemed to ripple with the pressure I was building up, cocooning myself inside a wall of force, ready to throw it at anyone or anything that might be looking for me. No such thing as coincidence. Not tonight.
At the end of the alley, nothing. I strained and heard a faint cling cling, and then a noise like the slurping of thick cake mixture being slopped up from the bottom of the bowl. Then that too stopped, and there was only my breathing, and the madman’s certain feeling of being watched.
I didn’t move. If it was going to come down to a battle of wills between me and whatever was out there, I was more than prepared to stay exactly like this, at the end of the alley until dawn or dusk, rather than expose myself to an unknown danger.
My head snapped up as a pair of pigeons exploded up from a nearby roof gutter. For a moment I considered borrowing their eyes and looking down on the world, but decided against it. Staying upright was demanding enough; multitasking was out of the question.
I waited.
It could have been a minute, it could have been ten; I didn’t know, didn’t care, and the adrenalin in my system wasn’t about to let me judge.
I heard a can rattling on the alley floor. I looked across at the bin bags thrown against a wall. One of them was split, and its contents had poured out, into the stagnant puddle I’d waded through to reach the safety of the rear wall. Lank, torn crisp packets and broken banana skins floated in it; dead tissues, toilet-roll tubes, cardboard boxes for ready-cook meals, stained kitchen cloths, the broken handle of a cup, ripped foil, scrunched cling film, compressed orange-juice cartons and bent pints of semi-skimmed milk, all had spilt out of the bag, and all were, very gently, and without any explanation, starting to shake like popcorn in the pan.
The small, pale finger of dread levelled its tip in my direction and offered a suggestion. I knew what this was. It had been too easy.
Old plastic bags, torn-up junk mail, broken CD cases, they bounced through the tear in the bag, ripping it further, to let more rubbish spill out. They shook on the floor of the alley, and then, the lightest first, shopping bags caught in the breeze, remnants of ham packages, the sleeve that had held some piece of cheese, started to rise, straight upwards as if gravity were just some passing fad. Then the heavier pieces of rubbish – the cardboard box that had held a new portable radio, the remnants of a half-gutted lemon, a pile of orange peel that unwound upwards like a stretching snake in one unbroken piece. I watched them drift up from the torn rubbish bag in a slow, leisurely fashion, sheets of cling film each unscrunching and spreading as they ascended, bread sacks inflating like hot-air balloons and rising, bottom down, nothing rushed, nothing dramatic, all to a gentle hissing and rustling of old litter.
They rose towards a single spot, a shadow on the edge of one of the houses, clinging to the corner where wall met drainpipe, and as it all rose, it seemed to mingle with the shadow’s form, a crisp packet reflecting with silver foil off what might have been an arm, a sliver of cardboard coating what could perhaps be described as a belly. It looked like some sort of organic gargoyle, dripping strange thick liquid waste from one of its clinging limbs, still, patient, lumpen.
Then it turned its head, and its eyes glowed with the dying embers of two cigarette stubs. When it exhaled, its nose, the broken end of a car exhaust pipe, gouted smoke; when it raised one arm off the wall it clung to, its paw came away with the suction sound of well-chewed gum sticking, and its claws gleamed with the shattered razor-edges of old Coke cans and soup tins. Its thighs were composed of old hosepipe left in the street by some builders after a water-main repair job, its middle was covered over with old pieces of tin and card, bent traffic signs and abandoned boxes, to create an armoured underbelly beneath its hulked form, under which I could smell, and through cracks between its surface skin, see, a squelching heart of dead fruit, apple cores, chips, half-eaten hamburgers and abandoned Chinese takeaway, all crunched together into a brown mass beneath its surface armour, like a belly without the skin. Its teeth, when it opened its mouth, were reflective green glass from a broken bottle, its face was covered over with old newsprint and abandoned magazines, its arms shone with the reflective coat of foil, its wings were two translucent thin spreads of cling film that rose up behind it with a thin, sharp snap across the air, the joins woven together with fuse wire spun like tendons throughout its body. As it clung with its gummed paws to the wall of the house above me, the rubbish from the split bag settled into its flesh, spread itself across its arched back, wrapped itself around the backward-jointed bend of its knee. If it had been a living creature, I would have said it resembled a giant hyena, larger than a man, but hunched and feral, the shape its body made was arched and ready for a strike. But since it was not living, and its very breath was hot with the power that sustained it, I took it for what it was: a litterbug.
It had all been too easy.
I should have guessed that something like this would have to happen sooner or later. I’d just been counting a little too optimistically on later.
It stretched its jaw of green glass and rotting sandpaper tongue wide and hissed a tumbling gout of black exhaust into the air. The last broken plastic straw and burnt-out light bulb drifted up from the alley floor, settling into the litterbug’s flesh, making it bigger, stronger. I saw its back arch, cling-film wings shimmering with the rainwater running across their surface, as with the hiss of a dying carburettor it stretched its razor-tin claws for my face, opened its mouth to emit a gout of fumes, kicked off with its back legs and tried to take my head off.
Instinct rather than conscious decision saved my life.
I let go the wall of force I had been building. It slammed into the litterbug mid-leap, propelled it backwards, threw it up against the wall, sending an explosion of dirty newspaper and mouldy organic spatter out from its flesh, and dropped it into the alley in a pile of torn foil and cling film. I had no interest in seeing whether this was going to stop it, I was pretty sure that it wouldn’t, so without further ado I turned, slammed my shoulder into the high wooden gate until the lock tore away from the door, and ran into the garden beyond. Behind me, the litterbug pulled itself onto its hind legs, the torn remnants of its skin flowing back into its flesh, and advanced after me, snorting loudly through its rusting nose.
I ran across the soggy garden lawn, climbed over the back wall without looking back and slipped down the long drop to the railway line below on my backside, which, compared to my feet, had had an easy time so far. Bracken and broken shopping trolleys, which always seemed to find their way into railway cuttings, tore at my skin and clothes; nettles stung me, and a family of rats scuttled for cover in the destructive wake of my passage. I hit the hard ballast of the railway line with a bang and sprawled across it, catching myself on one of the railway tracks, smooth and silver on the top surface, rusted thick brown on the sides. Getting back on my feet was perhaps worse than the descent down the embankment: every muscle screamed indignation, every inch of skin featured a cut or a bruise or a stung bubble of inflamed flesh. I hobbled along the side of the railway track in that dry muddy space where ballast met slope, not caring where I was going, so long as it was somewhere else. Litterbugs did not just randomly stalk the streets of Dulwich; they had purpose, direction, intent, and it didn’t take any thought to know that tonight, it wanted us. Behind me, I could hear the low wailing hunting-cry of the creature, a sound like the shriek of ancient bus brakes. I didn’t have the courage to look back, but kept on hobbling along the railway line.
It was hard to say how far I went. I stopped only when I reached a station: North Dulwich. It was locked, the lights on its high yellow-brick walls casting odd shadows. I crawled onto the platform close by the safety of its heavy doors, and didn’t care that the CCTV camera was watching. I lay down on my back and shook and felt in pain and generally sorry for myself.
When I had my breathing under control and some of the fire in my skin had died down to just a dull ache, we cast our awareness into every inch of ourself, feeling the shape and pressure of every cut and bruise. We were oddly fascinated by it, by the reality of it, even though we were surprised and appalled at the indignity of pain. We lay, and felt the cold rough surface of the concrete beneath us, and the cold rain drying on our face in the breeze that drifted along the railway track. For a moment, the overwhelming torrent of sense from every inch of our body, from every nerve in our skin, the coldness of the rain, the hotness of our muscles, the dryness of our tongue, the wetness of our hair, the gentle bleeding of our scratches and the tightness in our bruising, was fascinating, real, alive. For a moment, we wanted to laugh, although I wasn’t sure if it mightn’t be wiser to cry.
Then I smelt the rubbish.
Getting up on my feet was a triumphant act of will – staggering to the closed exit a shocking realisation of weakness, leaning against it a second of reprieve. I whispered imploring words to the lock and caressed it with my fingertips until it gave up and clicked; pulled back the heavy door even as, beyond the circle of neon light on the platform, I saw the glowing reddish embers of the litterbug’s eyes. It slunk out of the dark, taller than ever, its skin now glowing with pieces of broken glass snatched up from the railway embankment, mosaicked across its flesh like royal jewellery.
I staggered out of the station, and it followed. The moment of reprieve had given me time to think, remember; I knew what I needed. It didn’t take me long to find it as I ran through the tight uphill streets. The first was the lid of a black dustbin, painted with “Flat 5” in yellow letters. The second was a bank of green wheelie bins, left by the local council outside a chemist on a small shopping parade, and thank all the powers in the heavens, they weren’t too full. The litterbug was not far behind me, but it was too big to run as fast as the fear could carry us; not that it would give up for such a simple reason.
I opened all the lids on the wheelie bins, checking that there weren’t any containing split rubbish bags – and tonight my luck held: every bin looked clean. I held the black dustbin lid I had taken from Flat 5 like a shield, pushing my right hand as far as I could through its handle, until it rested just above my wrist, wedged onto my arm. But by the time I was ready the creature was in sight, padding up the middle of the road and wading through the rainwater that poured downhill, with the slow, laborious and inevitable purpose of a sidewinder crossing the desert.
Here, the rain pouring off my face and seeping into my clothes, and, I hoped, washing some of the stench away, I turned and faced the monster.
We regarded its approach curiously, watching the care with which it advanced towards us, and with what single-minded purpose. It seemed almost a pity to destroy it, since we could probably have learned a lot from its structure, its form of life, but the preservation of ourself took priority.
As it came on, I stood my ground, hefting my dustbin lid in front of me, waiting. It advanced more cautiously than I expected, and before reaching me it stopped, raised its snout and emitted a strange shriek, like the scrape of old tyres skidding on a wet road. It did this three times and then sunk onto all fours, eyeing me up with its unblinking red embers. I felt that if I blinked it would pounce, and was immediately aware of my own eyes and the need to blink, as if, by thinking about it, the unconscious part of me that controlled this action could no longer function, and every blink and every breath had to be a deliberate, demanding thought-process. Still the monster didn’t attack, and it took me too long – embarrassingly so – to work out why. The shrill call wasn’t a challenge or an expression of pain – it was a call for reinforcements.
So much for this.
I looked around the street for a source of heat and found a fragment clinging to the wet surface of the chemist’s bright green and white shop sign. Raising my left hand, I dragged it into my fingertips, crunching it down into a small penny shape between my fingers. The light, sucked dry of its energy, flickered and whined in indignation. I turned to the litterbug. It sensed my intentions, shifted uneasily, rose up a little, flexing the metal shards of one of its paws and emitting puffs of smoke. I pinched the penny of heat between my thumb and forefinger, and it winked out. For a second, nothing happened. Then the cigarette embers in the creature’s eyes glowed brighter, burnt yellow, and exploded into flame. The spitting fire caught the newspaper of its head and burrowed into the soggy mass, sparks digging down through its skull to the dry ash and paper that formed the bulk of its long, snoutish head.
It screamed with the sound of a thousand screeching brakes as flames burst up through the mesh of wire and old laundry line that had spun a frame around its head, gouts leaping out through its nose, mouth, eyes and ears, spreading down the dry rope of its spine and melting the thin fuse wire of its wings, turning their cling-film sheen black and liquid, dripping hot plastic onto the ground. The flames burst out between the metal plates of its belly, glowed red-hot in the joints at its knees and elbows, spat out angry sparks between its clawlike fingers, made the chewing-gum pads of its paws dribble and smoke with a sickly smell, sent gouts of steam exploding off its surface–
But didn’t kill it.
Instead, with a furious roar, it drew itself back on its hind legs, tensed its blazing back, and sprang.
I dropped onto one knee as it leapt, raising the dustbin lid up over my head to protect myself, and braced for the impact. Its bulk blocked out the light; its smell made my eyes run, twisted a knot in my stomach and sent a shudder through my belly. When it hit, it was like bricks falling in an earthquake. I tucked my chin into my chest, hunched my shoulders towards my stomach and put my arms, with the bin lid across them, over my head. Around me, rubbish showered down, and a thin gout of smoke stretched into the darkness. I heard a low moaning sound and peeked up from under my makeshift shield. The litterbug lay on one side, half an arm missing and a small hole gouged in the side of its chest. Around it litter drifted, displaced by the impact with my shield. I staggered upright, head spinning from the shock, and raised the dustbin lid against it. It rolled over and stood, moving awkwardly, its mass now off balance, belched smoke and ash, and threw itself at me. This time I raised the shield high over my head and willed what was left of my strength into it, until the plastic burnt against my skin. As the litterbug drew up to its full height, towering overhead, almost as high as the upper windows of the houses around us, I shoved the bin lid up towards it.
It roared with the blare of a hundred car horns, and smashed one claw down towards the bin lid with the weight of a wrecking ball. The force of the collision nearly knocked me off my feet. Around my shield a shower of bright orange sparks flew out in an umbrella shape, and litter rained down. The monster reared back in agony, clinging to the remnants of its shattered paw. As it did, distracted by whatever it was that counted for pain in such a creature, I threw my shield aside and leapt at it. I punched through a piece of cardboard that made up its loose underbelly, into the sticky, hot, rotten mass of its chest, while it flailed at me with shattered, stumpy arms. Fire snapped at my sleeve as I drove my arm into its middle, up to the shoulder; jagged metal parts, that seemed to float inside the foul core of mouldering food and other remains, slashed at my skin. My fingers closed over something small, that felt frozen, at the exact same moment that the litterbug, swaying precariously, wobbled onto one foot and with the other delivered a clawed kick that threw me backwards across the pavement, spraying organic spattered remains and soggy cardboard as I went.
The litterbug stood, its insides dripping, its head steaming as the rainwater competed with the smouldering flames of its eyes, and looked confused. Its gaze settled on my hands, where, with the creature’s slime dripping off it in a thick black sludge, I held a single scrunched-up ball of paper, ice-cold to the touch. I unfolded it. Underneath the scrawl of symbols, summonings and incantations drawn in black felt-tip pen, I saw the words:
… local borough initiative…
…recycling boxes provided…
…collection Monday, Thursday…
…glass, tin, paper and all organic…
…making a BETTER environment…
…for the people of…
The ink started to run in the rain. The litterbug screeched, with its strange, mechanical, metal voice. I crawled onto my feet. My eyes fell on the open, waiting wheelie bins. So did the monster’s. It started to run, ready to throw itself into my path. I began to run too, slipping onto the pavement and reaching out for the bins, the icy piece of paper growing soggy in my fingers. Just as I reached the nearest bin, the litterbug reached out to slam its lid, and I was suddenly trapped between the bin and the monster’s on-coming burning bulk. I closed my eyes instinctively, ready for the life to be crushed out of me, and dropped the piece of paper into the bin.
There was a bang, and I felt a sudden warm, enveloping sensation. I heard the sound of the rain, and a rustle of falling paper, felt the gentle passage of sticky rotting goo run down the back of my legs and the tickling brush of old newsprint and bits of plastic floating down around me as, without a sound, the litterbug collapsed. Its cardboard skin slid off its rotting flesh with a great wet splat, its wings drifted like angels’ feathers to the floor, bits of hosepipe slid out of its mass like the splattering of intestines falling from a gutted fish. The embers in its eyes went out, the cigarette butts falling with sad little plop plops onto the soaking ground.
I pressed myself against the wheelie bins, forgetting to breathe as the drifts of rubbish settled around me. A few loose plastic bags caught in the wind and floated down the street. A ball of compressed newspaper rolled into the gutter and got stuck between the bars of a drain. A few embers were burning out in a puddle, a crunched Coke can bounced loudly against the wall. I opened the wheelie bin’s lid an inch and peered inside. The inscribings on the piece of paper, the symbols of invocation and command that were the core of any construct and the heart of the creature, were gently burning themselves into ash inside the bin, powerless and contained.
I dropped the lid and turned, rubbish shifting at knee height all around me. Back down the hill, a few hundred yards away, a car was parked directly across the middle of the street. It hadn’t been there before. A man got out of the passenger door. Then two more climbed out of the back, and a fourth, probably a woman, it was hard to tell in the light, got out of the driver’s door. They started walking towards me. Reinforcements, I guessed. They’d heard the litterbug’s wail.
I leant against the wheelie bin and half-closed my eyes, struggling to retain control. We were tired, in pain, and angry. We had not come here for this; this was not how things were meant to be, the wrong kind of living. Everything, we realised, but everything, was wrong.
I was too tired to care.
We opened our eyes. The world was bright blue in our vision; electric fire.
We stepped forward through the swirling remnants of dirt and monster. We opened our arms and let the blue fire spread between our fingers. It was so good, so easy! We thrilled in it.
“Do you wish to fight us?” we yelled towards the advancing men. “Do you think you will live so long?”
They stopped, hesitated, drew back in the middle of the road, and I could have just sat down in the filth of the street, stopped, could have, but that the fire was now burning behind my eyes. Beautiful, brilliant blue fire. “Do you not relish what life you have?” we called, letting the flames burn across our skin. “Do you not live for every breath, dance every moment to the rhythm of your own heartbeat, have you not seen the fire that burns in every sight?”
We tightened our fingers, ever so slightly, pulling them into the shape of a fist. Above us, the neon lights of the street lamps exploded, the burglar alarms on the sides of the shops popped, spraying metal, the water in the gutter bubbled, twisted, turned, like it was being sucked down into a vortex. “If all you see in life is its end,” we called, “then join us!”
It was so easy, now we were willing to try, the power felt so good, that brilliant, sacred word we hadn’t dared to whisper since I had first reopened my eyes, the magic of the streets, my streets, our magic…
Lights started turning on; there were voices in the houses; car alarms started to wail in the street. I didn’t want to be caught, I so badly didn’t want that to deal with on top of everything else now, please not now. I wanted to sleep. We wanted them gone.
Neither, it seemed, were they prepared to stay. They started backing away; then turned and ran, scuttling into their car, and firing the engine. We let the power slip from our fingers, although I knew, so easily, I knew that just a thought could burst their brakes or shatter their windows or twist their pipes or burn their fuel, we knew we still had that strength inside us, so simple, so easy to just…
I let the power go, let the built-up magic between my fingers slip away; and it hurt. There was so much of it, just letting it go without bursting into flame made my head ache and my heart pound. Inside, I knew that we loved it. We loved that fire in our fingers, we loved that victory against the monster, we loved the rain and the rubbish and the night and the noise, and we would never, entirely, let it go.
As the first person started shouting from their window, “What the fuck is…”
… I turned, and walked away, into the night.
That was the first night.
By the end of everything, I missed the calm of those hours in Dulwich.
I had fifty stolen pounds in my pocket. I sat on a bench until dawn, a slippery grey turning from monochrome to colour crawling up from the east. I didn’t have to wait long. Sleeping was out of the question; we wouldn’t let our mind stop, wouldn’t shut our eyes, although I so wanted to sleep.
At sunrise, I took the first bus that came along, to the first tube station I could find. The man behind the counter couldn’t see my bare feet, so didn’t ask; but I knew I still smelled and looked wild because even through the plastic glass that separated us, he recoiled when I approached.
He was, I now realise, the first person I had spoken to in nearly two and a half years. The daily Metro, newly delivered to the newspaper rack inside the station, gave me the date; the man behind the window gave me conversation.
The date should have appalled me.
But I suppose the night had brought me time to think, to reconcile myself to the worst of all possibilities, and when I read it, I was almost relieved to find it hadn’t been longer since I had last held a newspaper.
The man selling tickets said, “What d’you want?”
“An Oyster card.”
“You OK?”
“OK?”
“Um… yeah. OK?”
“I had a rough night.”
“Oyster card, right?”
“With a travelcard. Monthly, zones one to six.”
He named a price. I was duly appalled – two years had not been kind to inflation. But we weren’t about to care about the cost of travel-cards, not yet, so let it go.
“What can I get with what I’ve got?” I asked, pushing the fifty pounds through the copper-plated hollow between us.
He gave me a weekly travelcard, and not much change. I hoped a week would be long enough.
It would be two more hours before the shops would open. I waddled down to the platform. The escalator felt warm, the slats an unusual sensation between my toes. I curled my feet over their edge as I rode down; and then, since the feeling had seemed so strange, we rode up again, and down one more time, trailing our fingers along the polished metal surface in the middle of the escalator shaft, or leaning against the black rubber handrail as it moved at a slightly different speed from the stair itself, dragging our body faster than the stairway could carry us.
I caught the first train of the morning, almost empty, travelling north beneath the river. I went to Great Portland Street station, and walked along Marylebone Road. Even at this early hour, with the sun reflecting grey-silver-gold across the wet pavement, the road was busy, cars stopping every hundred yards to wait for that elusive green light to ripple from one end of the system to the other. On Marylebone High Street the houses were big, pale stone or red brick, with high windows and large glass doors or shopfronts on their lower floors. The street woke slowly, lorries crawling away from offloading their goods into the small supermarkets just as the one-way system started to feed its first cars of the day south, towards the West End. People avoided me as I walked by. I was a mess; but not threatening enough to justify calling the police. I radiated humility and harmlessness, a good-natured insanity, and they let me be.
I camped out on the pavement like a beggar in front of the shop I’d had in mind until it opened, and was looked at strangely by the young shop assistant – new since I’d last been here – as I wandered in.
It was a charity shop, one of the biggest of its kind. I drifted past second-hand books, old alarm clocks and newly laundered dresses in all the oddest sizes on the scale, to the shoe section. More battered and flattened creatures I had not seen; they were exactly what I wanted.
I tried on a pair of trainers, that had once been bright blue and white and were now faded blue and muddy grey. The padding still fitted snugly, but it was thin enough underfoot for me to feel the texture of whatever surface I walked on. The laces didn’t match, and the trim at the back of one shoe was torn; they were perfect. Buying them, and breakfast, took the last of my change.
Breakfast was crispy bacon, egg swimming in grease, potato waffles containing mostly cardboard-tasting white powder, suspicious sausage, baked beans overboiled, and tea. It was ambrosia on our tongue, an explosion of sense and memory, a delight unlike any we had experienced before. It made me, for a moment, feel as if nothing had changed, and that all could, perhaps, be well.
Fed and finally shod, the question arose of what I should do next. We desperately wanted to go walking, to explore the city and find what two years had done to it, see how it was different in daylight, eat the food, drink the drink, revel in every street and sight like a tourist, seeing it all for the first time outside the hazy mess of my memories.
But our feet were in pain and our safety was uncertain, our clothes stank of litter and urban rain, stained a thin beige-brown. Besides, I had a long list of questions that needed to be asked, and until I knew the answers, I felt that I would not be safe.
For the sake of decency and security, I needed new clothes. I would attract too much attention in my current garb, and if the litterbug had demonstrated anything, it was that there would be people looking for me.
I needed money.
Begging was an option, but I wasn’t sure if I had the time. We certainly did not have the patience, not when there were more … exciting solutions to our problem.
I wandered up Marylebone High Street in my new, blissful shoes, until I found a phone box, bright red, a hangover from a bygone pre-mobile-phone era, preserved by the local council in the name of heritage and tourism. The interior of the phone box stank of piss and beer, also in keeping with London tradition, and, as the ultimate in old-timey heritage, the back wall of the box was covered with a selection of little cards.
“LOOKING FOR A GOOD TIME?” was the least imaginative and least biologically explicit of the cards on offer, but in keeping with its neighbours it had a picture of a woman with what I could only assume still medically qualified as breasts protruding monumentally from beneath the tag line.
“!!!HOT HOT HOT!!!” proclaimed its neighbour while, below, a number of cards offered services ranging from exotic through to mind-blowing, all with attached telephone numbers for ease of booking your special encounter. At random I picked one that had been stuck up with bits of old chewing gum, all the while with my eyes half-closed. Anything close to taste or discernment in these circumstances made me feel dirtier than I already was. “**SEXY ASIAN BABE**” was its motto, and even as I put it in my pocket we were glancing this way and that in case someone, anyone, was watching us in our moment of shame. I walked with this card to the nearest bank, just opening up for the morning. The security guard watched me from the door to the counter and kept on watching, face dark and eyes narrow, waiting for me to make a move. I picked up one of the counter pens on its little beaded chain, and started to write on the back of the card. I wrote four sets of four numbers, relieved that I could remember them after so long. It was possible that someone in the credit card industry would be watching, studying their computer screens for the sacred numbers that could charm any ATM in any corner of the world to flash across the transaction board, ready to trace their user; but then, that was exactly the point. These digits, which so neatly resembled an account number, could be used anywhere, at any time and, like any black ant on a dark night, their use would get lost in the volume of data, too dense even for the sharpest magician to see.
That at least was my hope, though even as I finished inscribing the card I knew what a risk I was taking.
I left the bank before the security guard could try to arrest me on whatever premise he felt necessary, and kept on walking. Three streets away there was another bank, with an ATM planted firmly in the concrete wall outside. I walked up to it, checked over my shoulder for any passing watchers, pulled my SEXY ASIAN BABE card out of my pocket, and pushed it, careful not to bend the cardboard, into the debit card slot of the machine.
The screen went black. I waited. A single 1 appeared in the top right-hand corner, then quickly expanded into a mad marathon of numbers and figures tumbling over the screen. A warning sign appeared and for a brief moment my fears were realised – someone was watching the banks, looking for the sacred numbers that could access an account – then it was gone again, and the message appeared, PLEASE SELECT THE SERVICE YOU REQUIRE.
I chose cash withdrawal.
The machine said:
£10 £shadowrun 100
£30 burnburnburnburn £damnedsouldealdealdeal?
£50 £200
£80 £ Any Other Amount
I chose any other amount, and took out £500.
The notes rolled out reluctantly, my cardboard card was returned.
With a sad little squelch, the machine rolled out a receipt. It was black all over, soggy with ink, and tore itself apart in my fingers with the weight of liquid spilt across the thin paper.
I took my money and ran.
By 10 a.m., Chapel Street Market already smelt of cheese, fish, Chinese fast food and McDonald’s. It was a market defined by contrast. At the Angel end of the street, punk rock music pounded out from the stall selling pirate DVDs; from the French food stall, more of a van with a rumbling engine at its back, there sounded a recording of a man singing a nasal dirge about love, and Paris when it rained; at the cannabis stall (for no other name could do justice to the array of pipes, T-shirts, posters, burners and facial expressions that defined it, everything on display except the weed itself), Bob Marley declared himself deeply in love to the passing hooded youngsters from the estate down at Kings Cross. Outside the chippy, where the man with inch-wide holes in his ears served up cod to the security guards from the local shopping mall, a gaggle of schoolgirls from the local secondary bopped badly in high-heeled shoes to a beat through their headphones of shuung-shuung-shuung-shuung and shouted nicknames at their passing school friends in high voices that didn’t slow down for the eardrum. Fishmongers chatted with the purveyors of suspicious rotting fruit, sellers of ripped-off designer gear gossiped with the man who sold nothing but size-seven shoes, while all around shoppers drifted from the tinned shelves of Iceland to the rich smell of the bakery, wedged in between the TV shop and the tattooist’s parlour.
I wandered down the middle of the market, sidestepping the wind-blown papers, dead plastic bags, vegetables and fruit splattered on the road, chubby young mothers with prams, and impatient vendors flapping over their wares, between stalls selling wrapping paper, cheese, mushrooms, batteries, pirate films, pirate CDs, second-hand books (including numberless Mills and Boon titles for 50p a shot), cakes, bread, personal fans, portable radios, miniature TVs, scarves, dresses, boots, jeans, shirts and odd pieces of spider-web-thin fashion that looked like they were too light even to billow in the wind. My clothes here were no problem; there were too many sights and smells for people to care a damn about me.
I checked out the army surplus store, full of hunky boots, camouflage netting and men who loved to own both, the discount fashion store, the cobbler’s, the baker’s, the art shop and finally the costumiers, guarded by a fat black-and-white cat that sat on a wicker chair outside its door, the ceiling heavy with clothes drooping down from the roof so you had to duck to get through the doorway and heave your path clear between the shelves; walls lined with socks and shoes and antlers and old board games and prints of 1930s sporting events and wizard’s hats and all the wonders of the world, in miniature, discount form, hiding somewhere in the dust.
At the army surplus store I bought two pairs of socks, a warm-looking navy-blue jumper with only a few holes in it, a Swiss Army knife replete with more gadgets than there could be use for, including such classics as the fish descaler, impossible-to-use tin-opener, and a strange spike with a hole through the top whose use I had never been able to fathom. At the fashion discount store I bought a plain satchel, which I suspected would earn me the scorn of the shrieking schoolgirls outside the chippy but had the feel of a thing that would never die. At the cobbler’s, with a lot of persuading, I bought a set of ten blank keys for the most common locks in the city and a keyring to hang them on, as well as a small digital watch that could also dangle from the ring; in the art shop, I bought three cans of overpriced spray paint. At the costumiers, I bought my coat.
It was an excellent coat. It was long, grey, suspiciously blotched, smelt faintly of dust and old curries, went all the way down to my knees and overhung my wrists even when I stretched out my arms. It had big, smelly pockets, crunchy with crumbs, it boasted the remnants of a waterproof sheen, was missing a few buttons, and had once been beige. It was the coat that detectives down the ages had worn while trailing a beautiful, dangerous, presumably blond suspect in the rain, the coat that no one noticed, shapeless, bland and grey – it suited my purpose perfectly.
I paid, and tried it out. Back on Chapel Market, I turned up the collar, slung my satchel laden with its goodies over my shoulder, and walked through the crowds. No one paid me the slightest attention. I walked up to the cannabis stall, where I picked up a large plastic pipe with a picture on it of the Pope and three pot leaves against the flag of Jamaica. Slowly and deliberately, I opened my satchel and put it inside. As I walked away, no one even looked. Feeling on the edge of elation, I went over to the discount shampoo store, and put the pipe down on the counter. I leant across towards the tired-looking Chinese man who ran the store and said very loudly, “Boo!”
He jumped, hands flying up instinctively. “Uh?” he squeaked, staring at me with frightened eyes.
I nearly danced on the spot. We wanted to play with electricity, we wanted to throw fire and whoop with joy, delighted to find that the power still worked, that the instinctive use of that magic was still there, binding itself into my clothes, my skin, completing me just as it had in the old days, making me, if not invisible, then utterly anonymous at will: simply not worth noticing. I pointed at the pot pipe on his table and said, “Present.”
Before he had time to ask embarrassing questions, I turned, and sauntered away. We could have whistled.
Eleven a.m. brought us to the Cally Road swimming baths.
What Islington Council had thought would come of putting a swimming pool inside a corrugated-iron shed halfway between a railway terminal and a prison, I could not fathom. What mattered was that within these dark brown iron walls, besides the swimming pool inhabited by complaining children being forced through their weekly lesson by the bald, hook-nosed swimming master, there was a hot shower to be had for no more than £4.99 a throw.
We had thought heaven was some superficial construct of an ignorant humanity.
Standing in the shower, the stench of the litterbug being washed out of our skin, our hair, our bones, we realised this was not so. Heaven was on the Caledonian Road, smelt faintly of chlorine and was blasted out of a slightly grimy tap at 44 degrees Celsius under high pressure. We could have stayed there all day and all night, head turned into the water, but as always the driving fear of staying in one place too long, the memory of what might await me if I was found before I was ready, kept me moving.
By lunchtime, hair clinging damply to our face and new clothes pressed like the cloth of gold to our skin, I was ready. I went in search of some old friends.
My old friends could not be found.
I tried calling from phone boxes, picking numbers out of the haze of memory. I tried Awan first, a good, solid old man who’d always been kind to me in his dryly tolerant way. The number was disconnected. I moved on to Akute, with whom I had once shared a not very serious and rather drunken kiss on Waterloo Bridge, before discovering that she preferred blonds. An old lady answered the phone and informed me, no, sorry, never heard of her. A man shouted abuse at me from the number that should have been Patel’s; and because Pensley’s office was only a few minutes’ walk from the Caledonian Road, set back behind York Way, I went to find him in person, and found the place had been converted into a bathroom warehouse.
Uncertain, and getting desperate, I tried dialling Dana Mikeda’s house.
A man answered; not a good start.
“Yes?”
“I’m looking for Dana Mikeda.”
“Who’s calling?”
“I’m… an old friend.”
“What’s your name, please?”
“I need to speak to Dana Mikeda.”
“Who shall I tell her is calling?”
“I’m…” I bit back on the edge of saying my name, not safe, not yet, not until we knew for certain. “Please. It’s really important.”
“Where are you?” asked the man firmly, a posh, determined voice used to barrelling its way through all objection by shock and stubbornness. “Who is this?”
I slammed the phone down. My hand was shaking. The fear was back again, the terrible, biting certainty of eyes in the street, barely diminished by the bright merriness of the sun. There was one other number I could try, but the thought of it made my stomach turn and twist, threaded terror like a doctor’s wire through every vein and blocked the flow of hot blood.
There was only one place left to go.
In the heart of London, in the area defined by Wigmore Street to the north and Oxford Street to the south, there is a network of little weaving, half-hearted roads and tiny, crabbed alleyways, the remnants of a time when almost every street in the city snuggled up to its neighbours like fleas to skin, compressing the people between its walls into ever tighter and darker corners. Some of these streets had become gentrified over the years, offering a posher flavour of tea or a higher-cut boot than the discount bargain shops and the giant department chains that squatted on Oxford Street itself, like sullen hulking mounds looming over a river of wealth. Others had retained that darker edge of cut-price squalor that defined much of Oxford Street’s commercial goods – strange recycled computers, odd-tasting pizza with the fur left on, unusual lingerie shops for the woman who understands both work and play; suspicious acupuncture clinics and uncredited “Schools of English”, clustered in the shadows between the streets.
Amongst them, and I was pleased to see it hadn’t gone, was the “Cave of Wonders, Mysteries and Miracles”, advertised by a small wooden sign swinging above an open door through which the overwhelming smell of cheap incense and musty carpets hit the nose like it wanted a pillow fight. It lurked between a small bookshop and a pub with frosted windows and dark paintwork, looking embarrassed to be there. I felt embarrassed going into it. But I told myself it was for the best, took a deep breath of fresh air before entering, and began my descent.
What began as a bright stairwell with white walls was suddenly transformed. Beyond a hanging covered with mystic-esque symbols it became a dull stairwell of dark maroon walls and polished wooden floors, tormented by an eerie, nasal background droning from tiny speakers high up on the walls. The feel of the place changed too. The buzz of magic was stiller, quieter, an elusive black-silk touch across the senses rather than the shock of sensation I always used to associate with the Cave. Immediately, that made me suspicious.
The reception area had always been a makeshift affair, with plastic benches and tatty editions of last year’s Magic and Miracles – “THE GUIDE TO TRUTH!!!! – Featuring an exclusive interview with ***Endless Might *** on the rewards of proper summoning technique!!!”
These quaintly unpleasant items had been replaced with black leather sofas and a silver cigarette tray containing stress balls. I walked up to the receptionist, a sour-faced man wearing tight leather trousers and not much besides, and said, “I’m here to see Khan.”
“Uh?” His attention was fixed on a magazine which seemed to be all about What Brad Did Next, and breasts.
I tried again. “I’m here to see Khan – what are the stress balls for?”
He had a tattoo across his bare, bronzed back of a Pegasus spreading its wings. Down one arm someone had inscribed in black and red ink: “WIZARD”.
“Excuse me?” I repeated patiently. “Why do you have stress balls?”
His eyes didn’t leave an article dedicated to “How I Pulled Cheryl!!” as he replied, “Clear your aura for the reading.”
“Clear my what?”
“Your aura. You got an appointment?”
“No.”
“You’ll need to make an appointment.”
“I just want to see Khan – what do you mean ‘clear my aura’?”
“You gotta be in the zen to do a reading. Gotta have a clear head for the truth that’ll unfold, see?” he mumbled through his disdain.
I thought about it, and reached the only conclusion to be had from a lifetime of magical experience and several years of extracurricular mystic activity. “But… that’s bollocks,” I said, hoping he might be inclined to agree.
“Not my problem. Wanna make an appointment?”
“No, I want to see Khan.”
“No one here called Khan.”
“He owns this place.”
“Uh-uh. Sorry, mate, you’ll be wanting somewhere else. No Khan here.”
He still wasn’t paying us attention. We were not prepared to tolerate disrespect. We leant across the counter, grabbed him by the throat with one hand, pulled his face an inch from ours and hissed, “We want to see whoever is in charge now!”
He made a wheezing noise and pawed at my wrist. We wanted to see his eyes bulge a little further from his face, but I relaxed my grip and pushed him back. I smiled, in a manner that I hoped was apologetic but firm. “Perhaps I should just go through,” I offered.
He pawed at his neck and made gagging sounds. I nodded politely, and swept past reception and through the curtains leading to the gloom beyond.
The irritating nasal droning was even louder in the shadows beyond the curtains, and the smell of cheap incense almost giddying; its thick smoke spilled out of every corner and tickled the eyeballs. There was only one source of light: on a table in the centre of the room a crystal ball was glowing white. It didn’t really emit light, so much as hug the shadows, defining a tight area of space against which the darkness pressed. I didn’t bother with it, since its colour and texture felt entirely mains-powered, rather than anything worth the name of magical. From beyond the next curtain, of a thick black velvet, a voice like snow swishing across a mountainside said, “Since you’ve come so far, you are welcome.”
I pushed the curtain back.
Half lost in a cloud of incense, the woman sat at the back of the room on a chair upholstered in red silk. Her hands were folded neatly in her lap, and a deck of cards lay on the table in front of her. She was wearing more gold medallions and fake gold chain than I had ever seen on a single living creature. The jewellery hung from a headpiece resting precariously on her dyed-black hair, dangled over her heavily made-up face, swept across her shoulders and down her arms, tinkled along her fingertips, drooped down her front and spread out in waves around her ankles and across her bare feet and polished toenails. When she moved, each motion a delicate twitch, she jingled, she glinted, she glowed.
She said, not raising her eyes from the cards, “Will you not sit, since you are so eager to hear your fortune told?”
I said, spreading my arms wide in disbelief, “What the bloody hell is this?!”
“The mystical often takes us by surprise…”
“No, but seriously, what the bloody hell is going on? Where’s Khan? What’s all the shiny stuff for, why do you have a glow-in-the-dark crystal ball, who’s the man in the tight trousers, what’s up with all the incense, I mean really and right now? What kind of establishment is this meant to be?”
For a moment, just a moment, she looked surprised. Then her expression reset itself into one of semi-divine entrancement, her hands drifting up around her face in the swirling patterns of the smoke she disturbed, a beatific smile settling over her bright scarlet lips. “I am the seer of the future,” she intoned, “I am here to grant to you…”
“Where’s Khan?”
“I am here to grant you a vision into…”
“Bugger a vision into the unknown mists of fucking whatever, I want to see Khan, and I want to see him right bloody now!”
She hesitated, a flicker of something real passing over her serene features for a moment, and in a slightly more sensible voice, tinged with a hint of Peckham, she enquired, “Why would you seek this man?”
“Do you know who Khan is?”
“A king, an emperor, a lord…”
“We are not here to play games!”
She froze, and this time made no effort to recover, the surprise clear on her face. I glared at her, daring her to mumble a single line more of inane waffle, itching to throw something. Finally, with a little breath, half a laugh, half a start of surprise, she said in a much clearer, sharper voice, “Why are you here? What do you know about Khan?”
“Alfred bloody Khan,” I snapped. “Seer of the bloody future. Something, may I add, which you are not.”
There was a flash of anger behind her eyes. She stood up, gathering her skirts in a single sweeping, practised gesture, and exclaimed, “Be careful. You were not invited here.”
Then, to our surprise, she stepped right up close to us, and stared at our eyes. She drew in a long breath between her teeth and whispered, “Well then…”
She reached up to touch my face, and instinctively I caught her wrist, the metal across it cold and uncomfortable. “Tell me” – I struggled to keep our voice tame – “where Khan is.”
She hesitated, then smiled a thin, humourless smile. “Alfred Khan died two years ago,” she said flatly. “You are behind with the news. Anything else I can do for you, sir – aura cleansing, mystic divination, unfolding of the sacred secrets? No?”
I let go of her wrist, before I could forget that I held it. We were not entirely surprised; nevertheless I didn’t know what to do, what to say, how, exactly, I should behave. So we did nothing, but waited to see if an emotion would strike, curious to know how we responded to such news, whether we cried or shouted or became angry or felt nothing at all. We hoped we would cry; it was the most human response. My eyes remained firmly dry, my mouth empty of any words.
The woman was staring at us, waiting to see how we reacted. We sat down on a padded stool covered in silk. In that close space, she towered over us, a proud tilt to her chin. I guessed she was in her mid-thirties, that the yellowish colour of her eyes came from a pair of tinted contact lenses, and that somewhere underneath that headdress the roots of her hair were blond. She waited for the news to settle, and the flat waters of incomprehension to start bubbling into a sea of embarrassing self-pity, before she said, “You knew Khan well?”
“Sort of.”
“Former client?”
“He once read me my future in the flight of a plastic bag,” I replied with a shrug. “He derived the secrets of time in the patterns of vapour trails in the sky, or the drifting of scum on the surface of the canal. Sounded like a load of pretentious balls at the time, but I guess, in retrospect…”
“What did he tell you?” she asked.
I smiled despite myself, ran my hands nervously through my drying hair. “He said, ‘Hey man, you’re like, totally going to die.’”
“That sounds like him,” she conceded. “Tact is not part of the service.”
“He was right,” I scowled. “He was bloody right.”
Silence a while.
Then she said, “You really didn’t know? That’s he’s dead?”
“No. I’ve been away.”
“It was two years ago,” she repeated. “I run this place now.”
“You’re not a seer,” I snapped. “How can you even breathe in all this bloody incense?”
She shrugged. “I understand what people want to hear, I have a good enough brain to see things, an excellent manner and a husky, sensual voice.”
“Is that the qualification, these days?” I asked.
“And I know things,” she added, firmer.
“Any useful things?”
“I know how to spot a magician.”
I looked up sharply, found her staring straight back down at me. “Yeah,” I said at last. “I bet you can. But you’re still not quite hitting the money, are you?”
“You come here to have your fortune read, magician, or is it something else you’re looking for?”
I found myself forcing a smile. “I was never a believer in having your fortune read, even by Khan. It was all too fatalistic.”
“Even the best-told fortunes can be evaded,” she said with a shrug and a jangling of metal. “I don’t take kindly to anyone barging in, by the way, magician or not. It’s rude, and it’s unprofessional.”
“It’s not been a good day.”
“A poor excuse. Stand up, I want to look at you.”
“Why?”
“You have interesting eyes.”
“I do?”
“Very blue.”
We were surprised she had noticed; not a total fool, then. Perhaps she could see in our eyes a signal, to all who dared look, of our true nature. “That interests you?” I asked, for want of anything more intelligent to say, and to buy time.
“I am interested in all unusual things.”
Then, and I was too numb by now to resist, she grabbed my wrists with the same forceful gesture by which I’d grabbed hers, and turned my hands over. She studied my palms, my fingers, my knuckles, my nails, the veins in my wrists. Having turned my hands this way and that, she then tossed them aside like rotten potatoes. She took hold of my face, with the same unsympathetic grip the doctor uses when examining a swelling, and turned it this way and that, scrutinised the colour of my eyes, the shape of my ears, even the condition of my teeth, smelt my breath.
Suddenly her fingers were at my throat, digging in, pushing my chin up as the tips of her nails drew half-moon rims of blood. We half-choked, reached instinctively to find the electric fires that always burnt inside. But her fingers went no deeper, and I held back, uncertain.
She hissed, her face an inch from mine, “Sorcerer.”
“How’d you tell?” I asked through the pressure of her fingers on my neck.
“I told you – I know things. I know the smell of magics; and you don’t just dabble, you swim in it, you breathe it. An urban sorcerer, in my shop? Who are you?” When I didn’t answer, her grip tightened, sending a wave of heat into my head as the blood strained in its arteries. “I am not defenceless,” she added. “As I’m sure you can imagine.”
“Very much so,” I croaked. “Are you like this with everyone you meet?”
“Your name!”
“Swift,” I said, and was pleased at how easily the remembrance of it came to me. “My name is Matthew Swift.”
Her grip relaxed for a moment; surprise, not intent. “Matthew Swift?” she echoed flatly.
“That’s me. Ta-da!”
“You want to tell me that you’re Matthew Swift.”
“Is this a bad thing?”
“You are a dead man, Matthew Swift.”
“You must have customers flocking to hear your predictions.”
“It was a statement of fact, of history.”
“It pays for prophets to be cryptic, particularly in this litigious age,” I wheezed.
“You misunderstand,” she said gently, her breath tickling my skin. “Now, right now, as we are talking, your corpse is rotting in the earth.”
I shrugged weakly. “Clearly, it isn’t.”
“Matthew Swift,” she said, slowly, “the sorcerer called Matthew Swift, died two years ago.”
“Question!” I said, raising one meek hand. “Did you actually see the body?”
She hesitated.
“Well, there you go.”
“Nothing bleeds that much and lives.”
We wound our fingers carefully around hers, started unpicking them from our throat. “Then consider this. If, hypothetically, I am the same Matthew Swift who was attacked two years ago and who lay expiring in his own blood while his killer walked away, happy with the thought that no doctor nor hospital in the world could repair such a hole in the heart, such a tear in the lung, such a rip in the chest – if, say, I happen to be the kind of man who can survive that to stand here now, shouldn’t you be more concerned about threatening me?”
We detached her last finger from our neck, pushed her hand carefully back to her side. She stood in front of us, jingling faintly with the weight of breath she drew. Finally: “How would Swift survive?”
“Precariously.”
“It’s not possible to…”
“No,” I said firmly. “It isn’t. Now will you tell me what happened to Khan?”
Silence.
I smiled my most beatific smile. A kind of serenity was settled over me. I knew now, standing in that stench of incense and beneath that endless nasal drone, that things had got just about as bad as they could conceivably get. Therefore it stood to reason that things could get no worse; therefore I was finally almost calm.
“His throat was cut,” she said flatly, after a pause. “He saw it coming, and couldn’t stop it. That’s power – to kill a man even when he knows every detail of his own demise – that’s truly a cruel death. If you are Swift, where have you been for two years?”
“Around.”
“I deal in cryptic answers every day, Mr Swift; don’t try and distract me with my own devices.”
“Fair enough. I will not play with you and invent some story; I will simply not tell you where I went or how I got there. Is that satisfactory?”
“No.”
“Well, shucks.”
“Can you prove you’re who you say?”
I thought about this. “No.”
“No,” she repeated with a nasty twist to her lip. “Of course you can’t.”
“I can’t prove it,” I growled through my teeth, “because I own nothing that was my own. Everything that I thought I had, everyone I knew… no, I can’t prove anything.” I added, “You are a terrible prophet.”
“My opinion of you is hardly in the stratosphere,” she retorted. “Why did you want to see Khan?”
“That’s my business.”
“You… wanted his help?”
“That’s not important.”
“Then what do you want?”
When we answered, we spoke without my noticing, with a word that slipped out as naturally as breath.
“Revenge.” Once spoken, it seemed so right, so honest and comforting, that I was amazed I hadn’t said it before. “I want revenge.”
“Against…?”
“The one who attacked me. Who left me to die. And… And against the one who brought us back.”
She hesitated, her narrow eyes flicking to and fro, her fingers dancing a tiny rhythm at her side, their jewellery jangling like wind chimes. “Where have you been?” she murmured. I had the feeling it wasn’t a question intended for me. Then, clearer, “Do you have a plan?”
“Not yet.”
“Does anyone know that you’re… that you claim to be Swift?”
“No. And if you tell anyone…”
“If I tell?” she snapped, defiant.
“We will kill you,” we said gently. “You are nothing before us. We can stamp you out like a whisper of static in the wire. We will kill you. I’m sorry about it, but that’s just how it is.”
She didn’t seem frightened by this, more curious. She put her head on one side and breathed, “Interesting.”
“Really?”
“You keep on saying ‘we’.”
I shrugged.
“I may be able to help you, possibly – Matthew Swift.”
“How?”
“I have… friends. People who share a common interest.”
“Why would you help me?”
She smiled. “Even if you aren’t Matthew Swift, you could be of use.”
“I thought you were helping me.”
“There could be mutual benefits.”
“I’m not really interested.” I turned to go, seizing the curtain. She reached out and grabbed my arm, her fingers digging into my skin. Instinctively we shied back, flexing our fingers for the feel of the power, ready to strike; but, sensing our fear, she snatched her hand back. “Matthew Swift and Alfred Khan are not the only ones who died these last years. Do you know that? Have you asked? If you want to know who else is dead, and why, go to the Eye tonight, at nine. Things have changed; perhaps you do not know. There are new rules, new… dangers.”
“I’ll work it out.”
“Do you know Robert James Bakker?” I was halfway out of the door and her words stopped me dead. “I think you do.”
“What is your interest in Bakker?”
“If you want to know more about Bakker, what he has done, what he has become, we are the ones to talk to. We can be of great use to you.”
I forced a smile. “And I to you, yes?” Her cold expression was answer enough. I said, “I’ll think about it. Good afternoon, miss. Remember what we said.”
And walked away.
Whether or not I had any interest in the fortune-teller’s proposition, a few things she said had got my thoughts moving.
Without really knowing why, I found myself going towards the river. I walked through Middle Temple Inn, a place of old trees, high brick buildings, sash windows, cobbled streets, enclosed courtyards, lawyers, and film actors, in costumes from roughly 1580 to the present day, at work on some new historical drama (usually Dickens). I made my way towards Blackfriars Bridge, and into the gloomy concrete zone of wiggling, covered alleys, traffic-filled streets, tunnels and pedestrian walkways that link Blackfriars and London Bridges on the north side of the river. I wandered under dull yellow neon lights, watching my shadow stretch across the walls as I walked, listening to the distant rumble of cars passing through the maze of one-way systems and underpasses that had sprung up after the Blitz between what was left of the area’s history and the new, ugly, squared-off buildings compressing the winding byways of the city into ever more unlikely shapes. The Circle line sent up a hum through the pavement as it rattled towards Monument and, overhead, the train to Farringdon wheezed its way through a tunnel of nail-tight buildings pressed up against the railway.
I came to the tiny yard of flagstones and half-hearted container shrubs that jutted out between a giant converted warehouse and an office with walls of black-green glass, and sat down on a bench looking out past a row of iron railings to the river. At low tide, the water lapped against a wide beach of pebbles and brown sand embedded with plastic bags and dropped bottles. Within a few hours, the tide could rise up the tall stone wall on which my courtyard sat, where a green line of weed defined the high-tide mark, a metre or so below my feet.
A part of me was disappointed at how unchanged the place seemed, now that I sat and contemplated my situation while I watched the tide rise. There wasn’t a plaque of remembrance, nor a bunch of wilting flowers tied to the railing, nor even a lurid stain on the flagstones where so much of my blood had been spilled. Even the telephone box hiding in a corner, as if embarrassed to be seen in the mobile phone age, didn’t have a sign inside saying in childish script, “i was ere”. Instead it had the usual cards, advertising sex and, this being the City with a definite article and its own coat of arms, yoga stress support groups for the harried banker, probably at a slightly higher rate than the cruder alternative.
Out of curiosity I picked up the receiver. There wasn’t even a dialling tone, let alone the sounds I’d heard last time I was here. The booth smelled of pee and neglect. I was disappointed that my fingers, scrabbling up its side in desperation as I had tried to dial, hadn’t left scratch marks for posterity. I kicked the telephone with the heel of my foot until it reluctantly gave up £2.40 worth of change into the returned-coins slot. Returning to my bench I contemplated what this could buy me. In this city, I decided, not much.
The tide rose, and the shadows changed direction. I only got up and left when it started drizzling again, the cold raising goosebumps across my skin. I didn’t know if visiting the place of my previous demise had been a good idea; probably it had to be done sooner or later, if only to experience the full reality of my own absence. Here, all unremembered, was where Matthew Swift crawled across the wet paving stones to the telephone booth, dragging most of his exposed organs with him, and where in the morning they found only bloody clothes and pieces of skin.
There could, we decided, be advantages to my former self having been forgotten, even though it seemed that the sorcerer I used to be still had a name worth remembering. Certainly, seeing the place where I had died made what we wanted to do that bit easier.
I spent the rest of the day in the local library, reading newspapers. The world had changed in some ways that I found almost impossible to grasp: regimes different, governments fallen, icons dead, new stars, new soaps, new orders, new ideas. Phones were smaller, computers faster, lives more packed, worlds more messed in together. In other ways it remained constant. The temperature was still rising, and the complaints – tax, the NHS, transport, scandal – were still the same.
And at 9 p.m. I found myself at the London Eye.
At no point had I decided that this was where I wanted to be. Perhaps I simply had nowhere better to go.
I paid for a ride and queued with all the tourists curious to see the city at night. The crowd was dense – the day’s drizzle had cleaned the air so that tonight, at the summit of the giant, white-and-silver ferris wheel, you could see all the way to the North Downs in one direction, and to Alexandra Palace in the other.
I didn’t bother looking for whoever might want to speak to me. If they were worth any conversation, they’d find me. Meanwhile, I would not have been there were it not for the crowds. There is a protection of sorts in numbers – so long as the other bugger is playing by the rules.
I found myself in a capsule with a small flock of Japanese tourists who exclaimed as the floodlit Houses of Parliament dropped away beneath us, marvelled at the watery reflection of the lights on Victoria Embankment, photographed the pools of light sprawling out northwards to the dark splotch of Primrose Hill, ogled the purple and green lit-up walls of the National Theatre, pointed at Tower Bridge and pushed past each other to see the BT Tower sticking up from the West End; there was also a family from, judging by the accent, somewhere in south-east England, whose youngest child was only now discovering her fear of heights.
As for us, we sat on the bench in the middle of the capsule and watched our city expand beneath us, and felt like God. We had never seen anything so beautiful, and could not conceive of more magic in the world.
By the time the ride had started its descent, the staff below were already closing up the capsules ahead of us and turning away the public for the night. On our arrival at the embarkation platform, while the tourists shuffled out through the door, I didn’t move; nor did anyone ask me to.
I heard footsteps on the capsule floor and the swish of the door closing behind me. The river began to drop away again, the capsule making another trip skywards.
Behind me a voice said, “Lovely night, isn’t it? Enough to move a sentimental man to verse, I find.”
I shrugged, wrapping my coat tighter around myself and watching the patterns of neon spread out underneath me once more. By the sound of their steps, there were two of them. The one who spoke had a heavy, breathless voice like the deep snorts of a walrus. It was a cultured voice, well-educated to the point of being overly so. Knowledge so intense it drowns out all common sense. The man also brought with him a smell. It tingled on the edge of my senses: a deep, subtle shade of magic that tasted of cream crackers and the colour of shining oil. However, it wasn’t coming from him, I realised, but from his companion, whose reflection I saw in the glass of the capsule against the night outside – a young Asian man in a smart suit, hands folded in front of him, who stood by the shut door like it was the gateway to a treasury, eyeing me up in my own reflection even as I watched him.
The man who’d spoken sat down on the bench beside me; so I figured that, whatever strange aromas the younger man gave off, he was merely the sidekick to this man’s central act.
He said, “I hope you haven’t minded the delay.”
“No.”
“It is intolerably rude to make someone wait for an appointment. But I fear these are not such civilised times, Mr Swift. I blame the mobile phone, naturally.”
I turned to look at him properly. He was fat – there was no other way to describe it – a belly contained by a shiny waistcoat like a straining bulkhead, any second about to explode a shrapnel of buttons. His suit was a subtle pinstripe, finely cut to disguise the sheer scale of his form. His face, emerging out of the rolling slope of his neck, was friendly, with bright eyes peering from under gigantic eyebrows, the only hair on an otherwise polished pale head. He had a ring on his wedding finger and a pair of black leather shoes, but otherwise no possessions with him worth the name. He studied me as I studied him, and at roughly the same instant I was reaching my conclusions about him, he said, “My, yes, but the resemblance is extraordinary, isn’t it?”
“Resemblance?”
“To our sadly departed dead sorcerer, Matthew Swift.”
“Ah.”
“Although as far as I know, he had no brothers.”
“I don’t.”
“Of course, of course,” he said. “You don’t. In fact, if I recall correctly, you have no living relatives?”
“I have a grandmother in a nursing home.” A sudden pang of guilt that I hadn’t even thought of her until now; alive, dead?
“Do you?”
“I did when I last checked.”
“See her often?”
“She only likes talking to the pigeons,” I replied, honestly enough.
“I see. Such a shame.”
“The pigeons let her fly with them. They bring her all the news. It is not sad.”
He smiled again, but this time the smile was tighter: less friendly but somehow more honest for it. “Indeed, indeed,” he mumbled. “But forgive me; I’m going about this terribly rudely. We should introduce ourselves before digressing to personal matters.”
“You know who I am.”
“I know who you say you are. And I know what you appear to be, which is quite different. But for the now let me say that I am Dudley Sinclair, and that it is my honour to make your acquaintance.”
He held out his hand. I shook it, after only a moment’s doubt. The cold clamminess of his grip clenched hard around my fingers and lingered a second longer than politeness required. We pulled our fingers away.
“You know the fortune-teller?”
“Dear boy, I know everybody. It’s my business, you see?”
I didn’t have anything to say to that, so resumed my quiet study of the two men’s reflection against the glory of the city.
“Yes, yes,” he muttered, not particularly for my attention. “Of course.” The smile reasserted itself, broad, but somehow not revealing any teeth as it ran from ear to ear. “Well, yes, this is a remarkably fortuitous encounter. Indeed. Shall we dispense with the boring questions for now and say that yes, indeed, you are Matthew Swift, a sorcerer in every form, way, and guise. Yes, I think this is best, don’t you?”
I shrugged.
“A man of few words; I can respect that, although personally I find you can discover a lot about a fellow even in the meaningless detritus with which he may litter his speech, an unconscious, perhaps, symptom of who he really may be, beneath his conscious mind. But you, sir, seem to play a close game – well, good. Yes, very good.”
“There was talk of mutual benefit,” I said. “The fortune-teller said… there were people who can help me.”
“And, I believe, there was talk of revenge, yes?”
“I can manage my own affairs.”
“Of course you can, yes! A very capable gentleman, certainly – indeed, to be Matthew Swift and to have survived when so many others have died would suggest quite how capable you may indeed be!”
“Who died?”
A flicker in the eyes, a tiny movement around the corners of his mouth. “I take it you are unfamiliar with current events.”
“I’ve read some newspapers.”
“I was thinking of events within that… special area in which you and I both happen to dabble.”
“You dabble, but he” – I nodded at the silent young man by the door – “does a bit more than that, I think.”
A moment’s hesitation; hard to tell whether the tightening around his eyes was surprise, or pleasure, or both. The young man showed no feeling – we could have been talking about a dead stranger as far as he seemed to care. “A man of insight, sir,” murmured Dudley Sinclair finally, his voice quieter and deeper than before. “I can see why she thought you curious.”
“Who died?” I repeated. “I tried calling some… who died?”“A list? Crude, certainly crude, but perhaps necessary. Very well – as far as I’m aware, you – I mean Matthew Swift – were the first, although we do not entirely know whether your death fits the pattern since, as of course you know, no body was ever found. Alfred Khan died shortly after – the theory goes he had visions of your death, and of his, and knew what was coming for him, but could not stop it. Imagine that, if you will; imagine that.”
I said nothing.
“Patel went missing, but they assumed he was dead when they identified his thumb and part of his left hand by its fingerprint. Awan was found partially flayed – thankfully, I believe, the shock killed him first; Koshdel had been strangled with his own intestines; Akute’s head was discovered on her bedroom floor, we’re not entirely sure where the rest of the body went; Pensley was set on fire. Ah, now Dhawan managed to put up a bit of a fight, which unfortunately collapsed the entire building he was in, making identification a tricky process – dental records, eventually. Did you know Foster? A young sorceress, perhaps not really in your circle, but her death was by…”
“Did the same person kill them all?” I asked breathlessly, the words running like sand between my fingers.
“We assume so.”
“Why?”
“Oh, the violence of the crime, the focus on practitioners of the art, the ritualistic nature of the death, the prolonged …”
“I meant why kill them?”
“We don’t know. We have theories.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
His eyes shifted away to the city, his right hand twitched. “We are… concerned citizens.”
“Urban magicians?”
“Some of us, yes.”
“Why do you think they were all killed?”
“Now that’s really very tricky to say.”
“Try.”
His eyes flashed for a moment, glancing at me and away. If he’d felt anger, though, he hid it well. “You must have views yourself. You were one of them – until today.”
“I have an idea of who may have had motive.”
“Then you must have an idea who sent the litterbug after you this morning.”
That surprised me – that he could have known, and so soon. I tried to hide it, but I’m sure he saw through my half-hearted grunt and tight expression to my unease.
“We found the burnt core,” he explained, almost nicely, “and the local council was inundated with complaints about rubbish on the streets near one of its stations. I’m sure you understand why we made the leap of judgement – there are only so many practitioners of our unique profession who understand the summoning of such a creature, or indeed know the best way to break such a powerful spell.”
When I didn’t say anything he shifted his weight slightly and said, “May I suggest something to you? I don’t wish to influence your own personal views in any way, or even imply a course of action. I merely wish to throw an idea out, sir, and see if you find it in any way conducive.”
“Well?”
He leant in close until his breath almost tickled my ear and whispered, “Robert James Bakker,” and leant back with a smile to see how I reacted.
I rocked the sole of my left shoe idly across the floor of the capsule. I ran the index finger of my right hand in and out of the dips between the knuckles of my left. I watched the city. I said not a word.
Not a word seemed ample, for Mr Sinclair. “Very good,” he said, “very good. You are a man who does not wish to be too forward with his own views – I respect that, it is an admirable quality; you wish to gather all information first, yes, of course, naturally. Perhaps, then, it would be of interest to you to know that Patel was one of Khan’s closest confidants, and that if Khan revealed anything about his impending death, it would have been to that young gentleman? Awan, of course, was linked to Mr Guy Lee, who I’m sure you know of, a close associate of Mr Bakker’s. Koshdel was a gentleman who had very strong, perhaps too strong, views about the appropriate use of power, and liked to get involved. Pensley, one of my closest associates, yes, indeed, a tragedy for Pensley considering he was only doing as asked – Dhawan, a sorcerer like you, I’m sure you must have met him on occasion, and of course, he too knew Bakker. Akute… remains something of a mystery, but I suspect once we’ve had more time to research the nature of her demise, a link of sorts will transpire. Nothing provable, of course, nothing solid, there were never any witnesses, naturally, naturally! – and you always need more than motive. Theory, you understand, conjecture, nothing more, and Bakker is, after all, such an outstanding citizen.”
I raised my head slowly, for fear that if I rushed anything, I’d lose control. I looked him straight in the eye and said, “Are you hoping I’m going to say that Bakker attacked me?”
“No, no, I do not wish to impute any such suppositions to you!”
“He didn’t.”
“Of course not, no, I never thought…”
“I saw no one attack me.”
“But you have an idea who might have…”
“Yes.”
“May I be so bold as to enquire…”
“You can enquire; I don’t think I’ll answer yet. I don’t think I know enough. I don’t know you.”
He let out a little tired-uncle-left-with-the-children sigh. “I take it then, you have no interest in these other deaths.”
“They interest me very much. I knew some of them. And the manner of their deaths is disturbing.”
He let out an impatient sigh. “Do you know, sir, why I mentioned Robert James Bakker?”
“I take it you see some connection between him and these deaths.”
“All who have died are in some way linked to him; indeed, yes, it is most true. Including you, I believe? You and Robert Bakker … were very closely linked indeed, were you not?”
“Where is he now?”
“No one is entirely sure.”
“What does that mean?”
“He moves around. He is very difficult to find. These last few years… he has become more than just a recluse. No one knows where he’s based, or where he will be at any moment. It is suggestive, in itself. Do you know?”
“Me?”
“You knew him.”
“I guess so.”
“Come now, let us not be too coy, sir! I know that on the day you died, you met Robert Bakker at St Thomas’s Hospital. I know you argued with him, I know that you left him and walked along the river; all this is on record, sir, all this the police themselves turned up, quite without help from me, I may add. I know that a few hours after leaving him, you were found missing, but a lot of your blood was found very much present, sir. More, sir, more, I know that the people currently inhabiting your house are employees of a company that indeed, sir, is ultimately owned by Bakker’s own corporation, and that there was a good deal of external pressure from his lawyers to see your property and your assets divided as soon as possible after your presumed demise – such as there was. I’m sure, sir, why you understand my concern, yes indeed.”
“You know so much, why talk to me? I’ve said what I have to. I don’t know your reasons for being interested in Bakker, nor who you are, and I don’t really care. I’m only here to find the person who attacked me, and…” I stopped myself, but too late.
Sinclair’s eyes glowed with the reflected light of the city. “Yes,” he said, taking a long time to get the sound out. “And of course, ‘the one who brought you back’. That was the phrase you were looking for, was it not, Mr Swift? And she was right – you have most unusual eyes.”
“Is that relevant?”
“You must understand, Mr Swift. I have spent a considerable amount of time studying both your demise, and the unfortunate deaths of these people I have named, among others. It is… you may say… an invested interest. In this time I feel I have come to know you, or at least know what part of yourself you chose to leave behind to posterity – which may, in truth, not be much. I know what you look like, every detail of your face; I know your habits, your dispositions. I know that when you walked into that courtyard by the Thames your eyes were brown, and now when I look at you, your eyes are very much blue. And I find myself wondering – is this the same Matthew Swift after all, or is it some fraud? Perhaps… neither? Perhaps you do not experience the kind of death that I am given to believe you did by the state of your clothes when they were found, by the blood and the mess it made – forensic science, you see, marvellous thing. Perhaps you do not experience such things and come away the same. Perhaps you change to survive, yes?”
I looked away.
“There was one thing about the death of Matthew Swift that struck me most,” he explained after a pause.
“What was that?”
“His fingerprints were found, in blood, on the receiver of a telephone booth just a few metres from where we find the first pool of blood. He dragged himself to the booth, lifted the receiver, but did not dial 999. Instead, the body disappears, leaving merely the shredded remains of bloody clothes, a few loose pieces of skin and the odd vital fluid from the occasional organ.”
“So you think Bakker had me attacked?”
“I do sir, indeed yes, I do. I think you may be so inclined as well – at least, your curiosity must have been aroused – unless of course you know something that I don’t, in which case I would implore you to share such knowledge.”
“Didn’t see anyone I knew.”
“But of course you saw something?” He was almost panting, the sweat trickling down his cheek. We could smell the salt in it, feel the heat from his face. “The police think that Swift took a long time to die, yes? You must have seen something!”
I thought about it. We didn’t trust this man; but on the other hand, what he seemed to know already was enough to make him interesting. “It was a shadow,” I said. “That’s all.”
“Come now! Come!” he proclaimed. “I’m sure there must be more!”
Abruptly I stood up. “Mr Sinclair,” I said, “you have a lot of information. Yes, I talked with Bakker, I quarrelled with Bakker. But whether he is behind what happened to me, I will not say. Until I know more, I will not trust you. I have learnt too many lessons to take that chance, and we are still new to this game.”
“We?” his voice cut in, sharp and harsh.
I ignored it. “You want my help with something. What is it?”
He got to his feet, and now there was no friendliness in his face, just a full, sweeping stare, trying to read every part of my mind and heart. “Matthew Swift,” he said, slow and deliberate. “I do not know with what power you must have consorted to stay alive, when so many others died who, I think, had been more knowledgeable, powerful, careful and aware than you ever were. But if what sustains your life now becomes a threat to me, I will eliminate it, do you understand?”
We shook our head. “We are not here for you,” we explained, and for a moment there was fear in his eyes. I folded my arms. “So, Mr Sinclair. Tell me. What exactly do you want?”
He thought about it, stretching up to his full, not-too-impressive height, and folding his hands behind his back in a formal posture. Finally he said, “Let us be blunt with each other. I am interested in finding out more about Mr Bakker’s organisation, his friends, his purpose, his abilities and his history. I, and some other… concerned citizens… suspect that this gentleman may be exploiting his many advantages for a level of personal gain which may endanger others of my persuasion.”
“And what persuasion is that?”
“Living, Mr Swift. Simply living.”
“You believe Bakker is a threat to people?”
“Honestly, sir, I do. I have little proof beyond hearsay and a series of violent deaths within a certain community, but I do, sir, consider Mr Bakker to have an agenda that could be of great concern to us.”
“What ‘agenda’?”
“From what I understand, he is gathering to himself certain items, individuals, objects and abilities which, combined, could render him disproportionately influential, if you understand my implication.”
“I think I may.”
“In this light, I hope you won’t consider it rude if I enquire as to the nature of your dispute with Mr Bakker?”
“I won’t consider it rude; but, again, I’m afraid I will not answer.”
“Will you at least concede as to whether it had any bearing on the hypothesis I have proposed?”
“I believe… I believe that Robert James Bakker long ago became a danger to myself and to others. Is that what you want to hear?”
“Indeed, indeed, it is close. Is it true?”
“I knew Bakker was a danger before I came to meet you.”
He nodded vigorously. “Good, good, yes, of course. And, I take it, you were considering some investigation of his activities yourself?”
“Perhaps.”
“Naturally, yes. The circumstances of your demise led me to assume there must be some link.”
“I take it you wish in some way to limit his threat?”
The question seemed to take him aback. “Let us speak bluntly, Mr Swift. I wish him killed.”
“I see.”
“I take it you do not agree with this course of action?”
“I don’t agree with it, no. But we think it may be necessary.” I let out a breath I hadn’t realised I’d been holding. “Mr Sinclair, I apologise if my behaviour appears unhelpful. I learnt a harsh lesson when… you are correct in thinking that these things change a man. As for the nature of my continued survival, we intend no harm. You wish to kill Bakker. I will not pull the trigger, but I will not condemn it; and, if I can, I will help you in any other way, so long as when we require assistance, you are willing to reciprocate.”
The big words tumbled out of my mouth, matching him pomp for pomp.
This time the smile was real, and it was frightening for it. “Good. Good, Mr Swift. Good. Yes, indeed. I think this will be a most profitable relationship. In fact, if you would be so kind, I’d like you to meet some friends of mine.”
He had a silver Mercedes parked in one of the little, squat-housed streets near Waterloo station. It had mirrored glass thick enough to be bulletproof. The young man with milk-chocolate skin drove, while we sat in the back on white leather upholstery. Dudley Sinclair offered me a Turkish delight from a silver-edged box. We were tempted; I said no. That was the end of any conversation as we drove back across the river.
We made our way north-west, past Hyde Park and Marble Arch, crawling up Edgware Road with its shopfronts in curling Arabic script, bars selling shisha, and windows full of expensive, gaudy lampshades. Five times a day Edgware Road is lined with men kneeling on mats dragged hastily out of car doors or onto the floor of restaurants, praying to Mecca, while all around the traffic edges sulkily past the congestion charge zone. We turned off into the narrower byways towards Marylebone High Street, where the red-brick terraced houses have flower-filled balconies, tall windows, spiked black railings, and wide steps leading up to their giant front doors.
In one such street we stopped, got out; and Sinclair marched, as best his bulk allowed, up a flight of steps to one such door, where a buzzer showed the house to be divided into five flats. He rang three times, twice short and once long, and the door clicked open without question. The hall beyond was wide, with black-and-white marble flooring and a thickly carpeted staircase curving upwards. Sinclair headed for a surprisingly plain lift, with a rattling metal door, and warped mirror walls that made our reflected faces look diseased. All of us – myself, Sinclair and his ever loyal, ever silent companion – piled in, an act of intimacy more than any handshake as we compressed ourselves to accommodate Sinclair’s bulk, and rode the straining contraption to the top floor. It didn’t open up on a shared hallway, as I had expected, but straight into a flat itself, whose walls were papered in white with a swirling reddish floral pattern, and whose pale blue carpets almost caressed our shins with their freshness. Sinclair waved us on towards a light shining beneath a door, from beyond which I could hear voices.
As I pushed open the door, all conversation stopped – a reaction I’d always hoped for in my secret dreams, but which had never happened until now.
Seven people were sitting or standing, round a glass-topped coffee table, on which stood half-eaten bowls of crisps and glasses of wine. I recognised the fortune-teller, now more comfortably attired in a dark, semi-formal dress that clung in a way that suited her. The rest were so mixed, and the odours they gave off, both natural and unnatural, so diverse, that I hardly knew where to begin.
Sinclair started for me. Sweeping into the room with a “Good, good, excellent, glad to see you all, yes…” he had a glass of wine in his hand before he’d finished, “… you all know why we’re here, yes, naturally, and of course you’re eager to get on.”
Looking round the room, I noticed that the curtains were closed and the lights turned down. Next I became aware of the tension in one man, with a long, pale, horselike face, who sat hunched forward, knees locked together, white-knuckled fingers clasped on his lap; also how the fortune-teller glanced nervously around, looking away the instant anyone looked at her.
Only one person seemed relaxed. She was sitting in a corner with a bowl of peanuts in her hand, wearing a faded pink woollen cardigan that had every dire symptom of being hand-knitted, a grey knee-length skirt of somethick material, a woolly hat with a bobble on it and a pair of furry slippers. At her feet were a number of large plastic bags. Even from across the room, they emitted strange smells of curry and grease and, to my consternation, traffic fumes, spilling out from the largely empty space around her. She looked me over with eyes sunk deep into a face like a map of the Pyrénées, and shrilled between the gap in her front teeth, “Raisins in the bottom of the bag!” Then her eyes narrowed and in a smaller voice she added, “I sees you hiding in that skin. Heard in the wire, ain’t it? Heard it go away.”
We shifted uneasily in the force of her gaze.
“Hah!” she shrieked. “Bollocks arseholes!”
“Thank you, Madam Dorie,” intoned Sinclair. “As always, your contribution is scintillating.”
“Up yours, walrus-bottom!”
No one seemed particularly bothered by this statement – clearly Madam Dorie’s contributions were often along these lines.
“Gentlemen, ladies,” Sinclair ploughed on. “You all know why we’re here.”
“I don’t,” I offered.
“Is this a sorcerer?” asked one man, who wore what I assumed was some sort of African tribal costume, despite his being as pale as snow in December, and ginger. His voice was like the last hum of a fading siren. “He looks like nothing.”
“You look like a twat in a dress, but you’re only a warlock despite it,” I retorted. I have never liked warlocks. They lack the intuition of a sorcerer and the academic aptitude or patience of your hard-working wizard. Instead, as a short cut to power, they align themselves with the ancient spirits of the city – Lady Neon, the Seven Sisters, the Beggar King, Fat Rat and so on – doing their will in exchange for a quick-fix magic trip. It’s a lazy, risky profession.
The horse-faced man made a snuffling noise that might have been a laugh, hastily repressed. The fortune-teller’s lips twitched, Dorie ate a handful of peanuts, Sinclair showed no reaction at all. Of the other two in the room, one was a woman in jeans, with skin the colour of roast coffee, and a tight black jacket which bulged in odd places; she looked like she was ready to set something on fire. The other, a large man in the vast trousers and jacket of someone who rode motorbikes and took it seriously, laughed so loud the glasses on the table shook.
The warlock in the tribal costume glared at him, and this just seemed to make the biker laugh even more, and exclaim through it, “Sinclair, have you found something interesting to talk about at last?”
“If you will…” Sinclair cut in, “Mr Swift is willing to help us with our mutual concern. I thought it wise for us all to meet and discuss in more depth exactly how we wish to remedy our collective problem, yes?”
“We’re going to kill the bastard,” offered the biker. “You OK with that, sorcerer?”
“Are we all talking about Robert Bakker?” I asked.
There was a series of grunts and nods around the room which I took to be yeses, along with Dorie’s cry of “Gotta dig the bottom of the bag!”
“And what do you all have against him?”
“What do you?” snapped the warlock.
“My reasons for getting involved,” I replied quickly, “are my own. I’d like to know yours.”
“So we tell you about ourselves, and you tell us nothing?”
I glared at the warlock. “Yep. Pretty much.”
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” crooned Sinclair. “This is a matter we can easily sort out. Mr Swift – you largely know my interest – I am concerned because I suspect Mr Bakker of being involved in a number of deaths, including, I believe, yours. Such things concern me, as a man who may be involved, yes? I’m sure you understand.”
“Are you police?” I asked.
“Good heavens, no, no, no, that wouldn’t do at all. I am, shall we say… affiliated to certain aspects of government, who are keen that, at all costs, order should be maintained. And here, I fear, I must say no more.”
“A spook,” added the biker dryly. “X-Files with cream tea.”
“And you?” I looked round the room. “Are you all enemies of Bakker?”
“You must understand,” soothed Sinclair, “things have changed.”
“How have they changed?”
“The Tower runs things now.”
I rolled my eyes, impatient. “Great. What is the Tower, what has changed, and what is Bakker’s role?”
“The Tower,” the fortune-teller cut in, “is an organisation of magicians, wizards, warlocks, witches and other practitioners of the art, and Bakker is their leader.”
“A union? Sounds like balls to me.”
“Oh, it’s very real,” sighed Mr Sinclair. “I believe they even have AGMs.”
“Why do you sound like you don’t like it?”
“Because what they cannot get, they take,” snapped the fortune-teller, “and they kill when they are not obeyed.”
“The magicians who are dead,” explained Sinclair gently, “all in some way crossed the Tower. As I think you did.”
“I’ve never heard of the Tower.”
“It grew up shortly after your death. They are gathering things – books, knowledge, ability, magicians, items, artefacts – they are accumulating power. I think you knew Bakker had this interest… perhaps was dabbling in certain things that shouldn’t be handled. I think that’s why you quarrelled.”
“You can think what you want,” I replied. “What is he dabbling in specifically?”
“Rumours,” said the warlock.
“Too many rumours for them all to be false,” corrected Sinclair. “Too many, in too close proximity. Experiments, Mr Swift. We believe Bakker is experimenting on magicians, on civilians, searching, that he is looking for something powerful – presumably, something dangerous, since he keeps its nature so secret from his staff, his servants and the community at large.”
“If that’s so, why aren’t you doing something?”
“Because Bakker’s a fucking sorcerer with enough money to buy Mayfair, duh,” intoned the warlock.
“You’re a charmer, aren’t you?”
“Look,” he said, angry now rather than just annoying. “Getting to him is like trying to get into Fort Knox with a fucking tin-opener!”
“There are other sorcerers…”
“No,” said Sinclair sharply. “There aren’t.”
“Don’t give me that.”
“You know that Dhawan is dead, and Akute. I didn’t mention deMaurier, MacKinnon, Samuels, Zheng…”
“I don’t believe this.”
“… and if they’re not dead, they’ve fled. Do you understand this, Matthew Swift? They’ve hidden, run away – people who oppose Bakker die. Do you think the litterbug just happened to turn up in Dulwich this morning? You must have been seen. It takes power to summon a creature like that; it was looking for you. If you are to oppose the Tower, Mr Swift, you need to do it discreetly. As we do now. You cannot simply charge in and hope to come away alive.”
I looked round the room. Embarrassed faces avoided my eyes. Even Dorie sat perfectly still on her chair, studying her bowl of peanuts. Finally I said, “All right. Let’s say, just for the moment, that I believe you. What exactly do you propose to do?”
There was an almost audible relaxation of breath. In her corner Dorie muttered, “Bug bug bug bug bug blue bug…”
The man with a horselike face stumbled, “We had a plan…”
“Fucking idiotic plan!” the warlock contributed.
“Moron,” snapped the fortune-teller.
“Fight!” said the motorbiker with a happy smile. “Go on, fight!”
The woman in the jeans said nothing, but looked more angry than ever before.
“Ladies, gentlemen,” soothed Sinclair. “Charlie, please?”
The one addressed as Charlie turned out to be Sinclair’s loyal shadow, he with his dark eyes and straight black hair. At the mention of his name, he produced from behind a sofa a slim black briefcase. He entered a pair of combination codes on the clasps, snapping them back with a press of a brass button, and carefully put the whole contents of the briefcase onto the table.
Pictures, words, columns, figures, diagrams, maps – all sprawled out at Sinclair’s fingertips as he arranged them across the table. “This,” he said, spreading his hands above it like it was spider’s silk that might drift away on a breeze, “is everything we know about the Tower: who runs it, how it works, how it stays alive.”
I waited for something more.
“Anyone who tries to approach Bakker directly – assuming they can find him – fails.” For a moment, his eyes were on the lady in jeans, whose scowl, if possible, deepened. “You must understand – he is not merely a dangerous practitioner of magic. He has wealth: his lawyers can protect him from the law, and should they fail to do so, he has a plane ready to take him out of the country, and money overseas. His reach is international, his friends are in the highest circles and can operate in the lowest gutter.”
“He’s always had power.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” murmured Sinclair. “But only recently has he exploited it so flagrantly. What we propose, then, is to remove as much as possible of the source of his power before we strike against him. We are not merely talking the odd curse here or there. We are talking about undermining his wealth, his reputation, his influence, removing his friends one at a time until there is nothing left, merely him, alone. Then, perhaps, he will be vulnerable, if such a thing is even possible any more.”
“You have a plan?”
“Everything,” he said, waving his hands over the documents, “everything is here. We will tear the Tower apart piece by piece.”
I studied the papers he’d spread in front of me. The room waited. I said, “Sounds like a shitty plan to me.”
“Sinclair, do we have to have shit-for-brains here?” growled the warlock. We felt flickering sapphire-blue anger.
“Mr Swift, you have an alternative? You think you can find Bakker by yourself, you think you can… undo whatever has happened here… without our help?” Mr Sinclair was still smiling, but his voice was the incantation of the bored priest administering funeral rites.
I shifted uncomfortably, looking down at the tumble of papers. “I will help you. But I will not kill Bakker unless it becomes necessary.”
“You are entitled to your wish.”
“What can I do?”
“Bakker has lieutenants, key people in running the Tower.”
“I know some. Guy Lee, San Khay, are they who you’re thinking of?”
“Also Harris Simmons, and Dana Mikeda.”
“Dana Mikeda?”
“You know her?” asked the warlock sharply.
“I… did. What’s her involvement?”
“I suppose, for the sake of saving time, I shall be crude. Protégée. Lover. One or the other, although perhaps it doesn’t do justice to the relationship.”
“How long has she been this way?”
“What way?”
“Protégée, lover, and all the other things you aren’t describing.”
He smiled, a rare flicker of amusement. “Approximately two years. You know her.” It wasn’t a question, and thus didn’t require an answer.
“You’re planning on killing them also?”
“If necessary.”
“You have an alternative?”
“Perhaps. If they can be useful.”
“I see. If there is…”
“Pustulant warts!” shrilled Dorie from her corner.
“For fuck’s sake,” groaned the warlock.
“Oh, well, bollocks to your brain,” she muttered.
We hesitated, looking up from the documents on the table to where she sat, arms folded, in the corner of the room.
“Swift?” asked Sinclair quietly, seeing our expression.
We looked round the room, suddenly uneasy.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “Nothing.”
“You’re a nit when not them, aren’t you?” Dorie muttered.
I stepped back from the table. I walked a few paces across the room towards her, hesitated just in front of the window, found my right hand shaking. “You know us,” we said, uncertainly.
“Heard you in the wire,” she said with a yellow-toothed grin. “‘Come be we and be free’, that’s your song, ain’t it, blue-eyes?”
“You have met us?”
“I like the dance you play,” she admitted. “But I wouldn’t stand where you do right now.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Fucking shadow on the wall,” she replied. “Duck!”
I ducked. I can respect formidable magical talent when I meet it, and Old Madam Dorie, the grey bag lady who smelt of curry powder and car fumes, had it in spades. She exuded skilful manipulation of primal forces just like her bags gave off the smell of mould, and if she’d said hop, I would have hopped. She, like my gran, had the look of a woman who talked to the pigeons; and in the city no one sees more than the pigeons.
I ducked, which is why the bullet from the sniper’s rifle shattered the skull of the horse-faced man, who’d just been standing, rather than mine.
“Banzai!” shrilled Dorie.
The lights went out in the room – and, more than that, the power went too. I could feel the sharp loss from the walls and ceiling as the fuses were pulled, somewhere below in the rest of the house. The darkness was intense, but only for a moment, as the orange-white glare from the street lamp outside came in through the curtains. I crawled across the floor towards the horse-faced man’s body, even as Dorie stood up and clapped her hands together with a cry of “Ratatatatatatat!”
Somewhere on the other side of the road, someone duly cocked a small mechanism in a big weapon, and opened fire. The bullets tore through the remnants of one window and shattered the other, peppering the rear wall and filling the room with white puffs of mortar dust. From the floor I saw Dorie scuttling out through a door, utterly unconcerned, while the corpse of the horse-faced man bounced and shook with the impact of every bullet. The line of fire puffed out the stuffing from the sofas, shattered wine glasses, sending a fine spray of red wine and crystal shards flying across the room, blasted pictures off the wall, smashed doors into splinters, ripped up curtains and punched through pillows. In the gloom I saw a pair of high-heeled feet belonging to the fortune-teller as she wriggled towards the hallway door, closely followed by the absurd robe of the warlock, while somewhere behind the remnants of the sofa, now almost reduced to a bare frame with rags hanging off it, I guessed were Sinclair, the biker and the sullen lady in jeans.
The ratatatatatat of the gun on the other side of the road stopped. In the sudden ringing silence I heard the wailing of car alarms, burglar alarms from the houses around, the screaming of people, the flapping of terrified pigeons, the running of feet. And the grinding mechanism of the lift, rising up from the ground floor.
I shouted, “They’re coming upstairs for us!”
“Bedroom,” came the shrill sound of the warlock. “There’s a fire escape.”
“If they’ve got any brains, they’ll come up that too,” muttered the fortune-teller.
“You want to take chances?”
“Some help here, please?” came the biker’s voice.
I crawled on my belly round the back of the sofa. My fingers dipped into sticky blood mingling with wine; my elbows crunched on broken glass.
Behind the sofa was indeed the lady in jeans, with the biker, breathless, face spattered with blood but not his own, and what was left of Sinclair, wheezing desperately, the folders clutched to several holes in his chest and belly. Even though he was a large man, the bullets had penetrated well enough; and as he breathed, he sweated, he bled, he stank of salt and urine and death, as if his whole body was unclenching at once, every cell letting out everything within it, chemicals, blood, fluid, life and all.
The motorbiker was struggling to hold him up. “Can you do anything?” he hissed.
“Come on!” shrieked the fortune-teller. “They’re coming!”
The warlock glanced at Sinclair with a brief look of pity, but kept moving.
“Shit,” I muttered. “Shit.”
I pulled back the front of his jacket and there were even more holes. The entire shape of his body was distorted, as if he was sand pocked by tiny meteors, and bent into the odd dips and curves of impact.
“Do something!” demanded the biker.
“I can’t just fix this!” I retorted angrily.
“Fucking sorcerer!” he roared.
I heard the ping of the lift door in the hall. “Move,” we hissed. “Get him to the back escape.”
“It’ll be watched,” said the woman sharply.
“Then fight!” we replied. “Get him out of here now.”
They didn’t bother to ask questions. The woman snatched up the bloody folders and gracelessly stuck them down the back of her trousers, the tops protruding from behind the belt. With an almighty grunt she helped the biker raise up Sinclair’s great bulk, an arm over each of their shoulders, and started dragging him towards the back door.
I crouched behind the sofa and rummaged frantically in my satchel. I heard footsteps in the corridor outside and, as our fingers closed over the first can of spray-paint, a foot kicked open the remnants of the door. White torches swept across the room, dazzling us, if only for a second.
We stood, letting the world move slowly around us. We stretched out our left hand and pinched out the light on those torches, breaking the glass of their bulbs at our will. With our other hand we threw the spray-paint can at the door and, as it bounced off the shoulder of the first man through it, we pinched that too, and turned our back.
The can exploded with the bang of a firecracker, sending out a shower of blood-red paint and twisted metal. The spray tickled the back of my neck as I ran towards the door, and a razor-sharp shard of metal nearly took my ear off as it spun past. In the doorway I heard screaming, and a familiar voice shouting, “Shoot, shoot, dammit!” San Khay, a friend of Bakker’s even when I’d been one too. I’d never met him until now but, even back then, back before all the things for which I couldn’t find a name, his star had been rising.
One of them got enough paint out of their eyes to find a trigger, but not enough to aim well. I dove through the bedroom door and slammed it shut, one hand already in my satchel for another can of paint. As the crowd of attackers in the other room got control of themselves again, I drew a ward across the door, big and exaggerated, stretching it over the walls in long strokes that eventually described a crude key. A foot slammed into the door, which shook, but didn’t open. I murmured gentle words into my ward and backed away. Someone opened fire, the noise at this proximity almost painful, shocking to our senses, but the door didn’t splinter, didn’t move, didn’t open. That wouldn’t last long, but it was good enough. I crawled across the room, past a neatly made double bed to where a window stood open, a metal staircase visible below. I half-fell onto the cold stair, damp from the evening drizzle, and saw below the struggling shapes of the motorbiker and the woman, hauling Sinclair down towards the ground.
I scurried after them, and caught up as they managed to drag the gasping Sinclair into a small passage at ground level.
“The men?” the motorbiker asked me, with a strong grasp of the relevant.
“They’ll get through eventually.”
Sinclair’s face was white and slick. “He needs a hospital,” I muttered.
“You think?” snapped the motorbiker.
“Do you have a vehicle?”
“My bike.”
“Can you get him on it?”
“Shit, you think he’s in a fit state? You’re a fucking sorcerer, do something!”
“It’s not that simple! To repair something like this you need equipment, preparation…”
“Sorcerers can’t heal,” said the woman. It was the first time I’d heard her speak. Her voice was low and cold, almost dispassionate. “It’s not part of their magic.”
“I can fucking heal when I have the fucking equipment!” I retorted. “But no, if you’re asking, we’re not exactly into bringing people back from death or even the bloody edge!”
“Great,” the motorbiker hissed. “You’re just so grand, aren’t you?”
“We can keep him alive,” we snarled. “Our blood can hold him for a little; if you can get him to a place to heal.”
Perhaps even the motorbiker sensed our intent – certainly he was not foolish enough to question us. I pulled out the Swiss Army knife from my satchel, the cool metal slipping in my bloody fingers. My hand was shaking; I didn’t know what I was doing, nor if it would work. And if it didn’t, then…
We steadied our hand, forcing ourselves to be still. We took a long, slow breath, every nerve on edge, and tried to calm our heart from its thundering in our ears. We searched, and levered out the hinged knife we needed from within the casing. Then, careful not to cause ourselves more than a shallow injury, we drew the blade across the palm of our left hand. We could feel the disgust and horror in the woman, even though her expression stayed cold, and see the surprise in the man’s face. For a moment, the pain was a shocking relief, a distraction that removed the ringing in our ears, the burning in our eyes and the shaking in our limbs, and focused us entirely on the blood pooling in our cupped hand.
At first the blood was not appropriate: dark, almost black in the poor light. Just crude human fluids; ugly, temperatureless. We waited. After a few seconds, the change began. A bright worm of blue light rose to the surface of the blood welling between our fingers, then dipped down again, like an animal breaking from the sea for air. A moment later, another shimmer of blue flashed like a static spark between two lightning rods across the surface of our blood; then another. I tried to hold back nausea as, emerging like blue maggots, the colour spread throughout the blood in my hand, a bright glow of sparks that rose up to the surface, shimmering and twisting, so bright it cast shadows across our faces, pushing back the darkness in its electric-blue glow. It wasn’t just in the blood in my hand; as the writhing blueness spread, I could feel it running up inside my veins, saw my skin turning white and blue as the redness drained from it, a pallor running from my wrist up my arms, that seemed to turn my blood to ice, shuddering through my flesh like frozen electricity, rattling off my bones and making my head buzz with…
… come be…
… we be…
I closed my eyes as the blueness rose in front of my vision, burning away the darkness and covering the world with its sapphire glow. But even behind my eyelids the blueness burnt and, God help me, we loved it, revelled in it, raised our fingers and felt the electricity flash between them like every nerve carried a hundred volts, like every organ was bubbling acid feeding a spark plug inside my heart that, with every pump, set our skin on fire. In all my life I had never felt so alive, so inhuman.
We moved automatically through the fear, performing our function. We pulled back the jacket of the injured man, peeled away the remnants of his waistcoat around the worst of his injuries and tipped some of our burning blue blood onto his flesh. Where it touched, the flesh crisped, and at every drop the man jerked and moaned like he was being burnt with pincers. We poured a few drops into each of his wounds and pulled open his shirt over his heart. We waited for his breathing to become steadier, and said, “You will need to hold him.”
“What are you doing?” demanded the woman.
“We will keep him alive, as long as we can without harming ourself,” we said. “Our fire in his flesh.”
We poured the blood over his heart. He screamed, but the man obeyed our command and held him down as we rubbed the blood into his chest, the liquid dividing into worms of blue light, each one brighter than a diamond at noonday, which wriggled across his skin for a moment and then started burrowing, digging down into his flesh, a dozen, more, of our sparks burrowing into his skin, his nervous system. Where they had entered his flesh, they left tiny, pale burn marks, and we were not sure if those would heal. However, he slowly relaxed as the last of our blood dug itself into his skin, and his breathing became more natural. Across his skin and in the palm of our hand, the smears of blood still visible gently faded back to their original dark red; carefully we tore the end off our shirt sleeve to bind around our hand and prevent further bleeding.
“Now,” I said breathlessly, fighting the spinning in my head and sickness in my belly, “he’ll live long enough to reach a hospital. Can you get him there?”
The motorbiker smiled. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I think so.”
His bike was parked in the street outside; and the street outside was deafening. Every car alarm wailed, every light was on in every house, and in those where they weren’t on, burglar alarms were blaring out their distress into the night. I could hear sirens in the streets around, police cars getting closer, and one or two braver souls further from the gunfire, who perhaps hadn’t worked out its context, had even opened their front doors and were peering into the street. The bike was big, with huge silver pipes and gears sprawling out of it like the tubes of some demented church organ, and with a giant leather seat and wide handlebars. We slung Sinclair across the front and the motorbiker climbed up behind him, reaching his huge arms across the other man’s mercifully unconscious form, hands just resting on the handlebars, a grin on his face. “I’ll be at UCH, find me,” he said. “Before they do.”
With that, he kicked the stand out from under the bike, and started the engine with a thick, heavy fart of fumes and a roar of the engine like the mournful wail of a dinosaur.
Left behind in the middle of the road, the woman said, “This is too easy.”
“Oh, you just had to go and say it,” I muttered, slinging my satchel into a better position.
“If they were determined to kill us, I’m sure they could have done it in a more efficient manner,” she replied primly.
“You’re jumping in there with question number two on the list.”
“And question one?”
“How the hell did they find us in the first place?”
Her eyes roamed quickly across the street. “Where’s the warlock? The seer woman?”
“I have no idea; let’s start walking.” With my least bloody hand I turned her briskly away from the house. She flinched from my touch like it burnt.
“We have to move,” I hissed.
She hesitated, then nodded and started walking. I fell into step with her, face forward, breathing steady, hand now on fire, wondering if I needed another tetanus jab any time soon, or if tetanus was even applicable any more.
Our shadows bent around us.
She was right, it was easy, far too easy. I felt cold all over, the fire in my blood simmering down to leave nothing but exhaustion and pain. We felt eyes on us, tasted the same ice-cold shimmer in the air that I had sensed that day two years ago, when I’d picked up the telephone receiver with bloody hands by the river; but this time it was stronger. Was that because I was already half-looking for it, or because it had grown in my absence? The lick of its power in the air was like drinking thin black moonlight. I looked down, knowing what I would see, and felt my stomach tighten. My hands started to shake and – we could not stop it – tears in my eyes, the memory of every single cut, stab, tear, pain, every moment, every trickle of blood from my skin, every instant – it was there, real, enveloping me, drowning out sense; and though we tried to fight it down we could see our vision blurring and feel the strength going out from our bones at the thought, astonished that a mere state of mind could reduce our physical form to the consistency of wet paper, and afraid, so afraid that we were about to experience these things for ourself, about to end sensation with these sensations…
“What’s wrong?”
The woman’s voice was a relief, a knife through the high-pitched buzz in our ears.
We pointed with trembling hands at the pavements where, slowly and surely, our shadows, defined by the orange neon outline around us, were beginning to bend towards the light.
“Run,” I whispered.
“What?”
“Run.”
I grabbed her hand when she didn’t move and though she tried to pull free, we gripped with all the strength in our bones and pulled her down the street.
We ran.
There was no sign of pursuit, no sound of running footsteps, no shouting of “Oi, you!”, no sirens, no yelling, no breath at the back of our necks, no gunshot, no symptom at all of being chased. But as we ran I watched our shadows stretch out thinner and thinner, and they didn’t bend with the light, they didn’t move as we ducked under every lamp, didn’t contract and expand they way they did when you ran through the city, moving from pool of shadow to splotch of neon, they just stretched pole-thin, dragging behind us, until my shadow felt almost like a physical weight, a cloak of lead pulling me back head first. My neck hurt with the effort of keeping my eyes forward, my shoulders creaked, every movement of my legs felt like they had sandbags tied to them. She must have noticed too – I doubt she would have kept running without the realisation that her own shadow was moving around behind her and becoming distorted, warping, the edge shimmering and melting.
That night we ran like we had run all our life, like it was all we knew, all we needed, all that there was.
We ran south, across Wigmore Street and back into the mess of alleyways where I’d first encountered the fortune-teller in Khan’s old Cave of Miracles. We ran out onto Oxford Street, still busy but less so at this hour. Beggars, drunk men and skimpily dressed women paid us little attention as we crossed in front of the oncoming night buses towards the half-shut gate of Bond Street station, pushing past the large sign saying “Station Closed” and the half-asleep guard in dark blue who was writing it, and scampering down the stairs into the station proper.
“Wait a minute!” piped the guard.
The woman, with a surprising show of pragmatism, pointed to me and shouted, “He’s got a gun, fucker!”
There were only two things for the guard to do in answer to a statement like that – test it or not test it. I had a feeling he wasn’t paid enough to find out if I did have a gun. With an exclamation of “Fuck, shit,” he turned and ran.
Bond Street station was still lit up – indeed, I doubted that the lights ever went off – but the ticket machines had black screens, and the shutters were down on all the booths. In the artificial brightness, our shadows weren’t even visible, blotted out by the white strip lights across the ceiling.
“Is that it?” asked the woman.
“You wish,” I muttered. “Do you have a travelcard?”
“The tube’s not running. We’ve missed the train…” she began.
“This is not the time to argue,” I said in my nicest voice, “just say bloody yes!”
“Yes,” she muttered.
“Good. Through the barrier, now.”
“But the train…”
“Either it will kill you or we will unless you move now!”
I had shouted; this surprised us all. She nodded numbly, fumbled in her pocket with bloody fingers, found the card and, without a word, shoved it into the ticket mouth of the electronic barrier.
“Not working!” she called out even as I fumbled for my Oyster card. “Shall I jump?”
“Don’t bloody jump!” I snapped. “It won’t work if you jump.”
“What won’t work?”
I ran over to the barrier, and slammed my Oyster card as hard as I could onto the card reader. Sparks raced from my hand into the machine – I hadn’t even consciously tried for the spell, everything was running on adrenalin – and with a polite beep, the gate opened. I stepped through. “Try again!” I exclaimed at her.
There was a movement at the top of the stairs. The lights flickered on the ceiling, pushing us in and out of darkness.
“But I…”
“Do it now!”
She pushed her travelcard into the reader and this time it accepted and, with a beep, opened the gate. She scuttled through, and the gate shut behind her.
I turned my attention to the stairs coming down into the station. The lights at the top of the stair died with a tiny whining sound, as if they’d simply given up the ghost. Then the lights in front of those, and in front of those, and in front of those. The darkness spread down from the mouth of the staircase like a tide coming in from the sea. As it crawled across the barrier and snuffed out the illumination over our heads I reached up and snatched a glimmer of white light out of the last lamp before it could expire, clutching it between my fingertips, while the other hand was clenched tight around my Oyster card.
The darkness spread past us, running down the escalators at our back and leaving us in just a tiny spot of white light encased by shadows. An inch from me, the woman murmured, “What is it?”
“Don’t let go of your ticket,” I replied.
In the gloom on the other side of the barrier, a deeper patch of darkness seemed to rise up from the floor, thicken, move, open eyes the colour of star-filled night. It opened a mouth, and it was a he; and though he seemed like the withered corpse of a man, I recognised him nonetheless. In a voice like the swish of silk across polished bone, he whispered, “Hello, Matthew.”
“Hello,” I murmured, unable to muster anything better. “Hungry?”
“Always, always an aching belly. And hello, Matthew’s fire,” he added. “And such fire you are!”
He started walking towards the barrier, dragging shadow as he came. In the dull reflected light of the sphere of whiteness in my fingers, I could see his face, corpse-white, shrunken, bone protruding at every angle, a skull on which skin had been thinly draped, teeth misshapen, eyes a sickly, watery blue, almost as pale as his skin, hair a thin white rag drooping down from the uneven, pocked skin across the rough plates of his skull, just visible beneath the broad black hat he wore to shield his eyes. His neck was barely thicker than his spine, his fingers unnaturally long, and when he moved he didn’t seem to lift his bare feet, with toes like stretched matchsticks and veins protruding like baby snakes between the long tendons of his legs, but glide across the shadows on the floor, pooled around him in thick oily waves. He wore a pair of thin, tattered trousers, half-rags, spattered with whitewashed stains, a loose white shirt that hung off his frame like a deflated air balloon, and a coat. I recognised the coat with a shock – long, beige, and with the faded brownstain of where my blood had seeped into it, dried, and been crudely washed out again.
He saw my expression and murmured almost petulantly between his jutting yellow teeth, “I keep something in honour of all my friends. I was going to take your heart – but when I looked again you had kept it for others!”
He neared the barrier, slowed, looking it over with a scornful air.
The woman’s fingers tightened on my arm.
He hunched down in an almost animal pose, head on one side, and then without any apparent effort, leapt. As he rose, the darkness seemed to stretch around him, and for a second, his coat – my coat, on his body – was nothing more than a raven’s wing, catching at the air, and his form stretched and shimmered like it was made of bent fog. His leap carried him up and forward. He sailed over the barrier, hit the space directly above its middle, and was, with a bang, thrown backwards. He sprawled across the floor in the darkness, and then, not showing any sign of injury or pain, picked himself up again. His eyes glowed with silvery light.
“Will you think to hold me?” he hissed.
I held up my Oyster card like a policeman’s badge in front of me, pointed directly towards him, and said, “These are the terms and conditions of carriage: ‘If you do not have an Oyster card with a valid season ticket and/or balance to pay as you go on it, you must have with you a valid printed ticket(s), available for the whole of the journey you are making. You may use your printed ticket in accordance with these conditions. All printed tickets…’”
The creature threw itself with a roar at the barrier again, his form stretching out around him until he almost filled the station; and again he was thrown back with a sharp electric bang.
“‘… remain our property and we may withdraw or cancel any printed ticket at any time. We will only do this for a good reason, and if we do, we will give you a receipt.’”
He opened his mouth and roared, and from his throat came the smell of rotting flesh and a rolling tide of darkness, physical darkness taking shape like moths that threw themselves at the barriers and the air above them and the spaces below and, whenever they hit the middle of the barrier, shattered into little black pieces of ash that faded as they sank to the floor.
I kept speaking, lost now in the spell, thrilled with it, and as I did, the air around the barrier thickened, growing firmer with every word until the shadow of the creature on the other side of the barrier was distorted by the sheer density of magic between us and it. I yelled, revelling in the feeling of it, “‘You must only buy printed tickets from official ticket outlets. If you buy a printed ticket from anyone else, it is illegal and may result in the ticket being withdrawn and the seller/you being prosecuted…’”
On the other side, the creature grew claws of ebony blackness and raked them across the barriers, but they didn’t even wobble. I screamed, the spell burning around me, filling me from head to toe, “‘The single fare that you must pay at London Underground stations or for journeys on London Underground and for journeys to places served by other operators, is the fare from the station where your journey begins to the station/Tramlink stop where…’”
With one last, almighty hiss of frustration, the creature launched itself at the barrier, scrabbled at the invisible wall of power suspended in its path, tore and snatched and pummelled at it and finally, wailing like an injured animal, fell back.
“‘… where your journey finishes.’”
I realised I was out of breath, my head spinning, my entire body now feeling light to the point where if I moved, I thought I’d float off the ground.
The lights started to come on around us. They spread back up the escalator and curled round the walls, encircling the black shadow, which now looked vaguely human again, standing in the middle of the concourse.
Through the wavering wall of force between us, it said, “I’ll come again, Matthew. For the blue electric fire, for your guardian angels, I’ll come again.”
Then, without a sound, without a sigh, it melted, darkness shimmering off its frame and boiling down to nothing but a shadow on the floor that raced away, up the stairs and into the night, as the lights all came back on.
I slid to the floor. Bewildered, I sat on the dirty tiles of Bond Street station, the slow, sneaky awareness slipping through my bones that I was alive.
The woman squatted down in front of me, keeping her distance. After a while she said, “You all right?”
“Uh?”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes. Fine.”
“Can you walk?”
“What?”
“We need to leave this place.”
“We do?”
“I told the guard you had a gun.”
“Oh, yes, right. Walk. Sure. No problem. Give us a hand?” She hesitated, face crinkling in displeasure at the thought. “Fine,” I muttered, crawling onto my hands and knees and laboriously up. I felt like I hadn’t eaten for a week, or that this was the precursor to an almighty hangover. “Fine.”
I staggered up to the barrier and beeped myself out. She followed suit. The barrier opened and closed like the wings of a butterfly around us, no problems, no questions asked, the miracle of a valid ticket on the London Underground.
“Will it come back?” she asked, as we staggered up the stairs.
“You know,” I said honestly, suddenly very tired, “I have no idea. But I doubt it. Not tonight.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not used to being thwarted. Let alone twice.”
“Twice?”
“Come on,” I sighed and, fixing my eye on the nearest bus stop, went to find a way from that place.
On the night bus as I lay across the front seats of the top deck, she said very quietly, from the row behind me, “Twice?”
“Give it a break.”
“That… abomination… knew you. It called you by your name.”
“Uh-huh. It did too.”
Outside, the shop lights were green, yellow, orange, white, lighting up mannequins in all the latest fashions of the day, staring out contemplatively onto the quiet street below. Even the beggars were calling it a night, opening up their pieces of cardboard in front of the shop doors and stretching out their sleeping bags at the feet of the ATMs while the day’s litter – takeaway boxes and McDonald’s packaging, HMV bags and the plastic wrappings of newly purchased CDs, receipts and cigarette butts – billowed in the wake of the passing night bus.
“You knew what it was. You knew that it was coming.”
“We’ve met before,” I said. “I’m sure you’ll work it out.”
“What was it?”
“A shadow,” I said. “Just a shadow. You can call it Hunger. That’s all. All there is to see.”
“What was the spell that stopped it?”
“Basic warding.”
“With an underground ticket?” She sounded amused, rather than surprised.
I groaned and sat up – explaining the intricacies of magical theory while sprawled across the top deck of a bus wasn’t, I felt, the appropriate way to deliver the lesson. “What exactly is your part in this?” I asked flatly. “You seem to know bugger-all about magic, have sod-all feel for it. You have no… flavour on the air, your movements leave no colour, no smell of spice. What the hell are you doing with Sinclair and that lot?”
She smiled thinly, and looked down at her bloody hands, folded in her lap. “My disposition lies elsewhere.”
“What’s your name?”
“Oda. You can call me Oda.”
“Matthew,” I said. “You can call me pretty much anything you like.”
She smiled again, lips shockingly pink in an otherwise dark, finely formed face. Her black curly hair was braided so close to her skull it had to hurt, and her eyes were wide and alert. “Very well. Explain to me – the underground ticket.”
I scrunched my hands into fists and covered my eyes, trying to press some of the fatigue out of my brain. I gave it my best shot. “Everything, everyone and every place has its own unique magic. The underground’s magic is defined by the rhythms that go through it. It’s like a heartbeat, a pulse, the flow of life like blood through its veins, describing in every detail the shape of power in its tunnels. When you go into the underground, you buy a ticket, you pass through the barrier, you enter its tunnels, you take the train, you use your ticket, you exit through the barrier. This is part of what defines it, this is part of what makes the taste of its magic different, heavy, crowded, full of dirt and noise and life and strength. If you know that this magic is there, if you understand the rhythms that shaped it, it is a very simple matter to harness it to an appropriate spell that utilises to the full its unique signature. In this case –”
“An impassable barrier, to something without a ticket.”
“Pretty much.”
“I suppose that is clever,” she admitted. “In an obscene way.”
“It’s sorcery,” I replied with a shrug. “All that sorcery is, is a point of view.”
Her eyes flashed up to me, and held, and for a second there was a fire in them that scared me. “Sorcery,” she said quietly, “makes men into gods, and men were not meant to be such creatures.”
“You’re… not what people call nice, are you, Oda?”
“There is a distinction between being nice and being righteous,” she replied primly.
I groaned and slumped back into the tattered embrace of the seats as the bus turned onto Tottenham Court Road.
University College Hospital was new, clean, busy, bright and smelt of disinfectant. The floors and walls were so bright and white they almost hurt, the glass in every window an odd, reflective bottle-green, the potted plants were cheerful plastic in full bloom, the seats padded and pale, the uniforms of the night staff bright blue. Outside the Accident and Emergency entrance was parked a very large, black motorbike.
We didn’t look out of place in A and E: two bedraggled figures stained with blood, staggering in from the street. The receptionist took one look and promptly assured me that a doctor would see to me soon. We didn’t ask where Sinclair was – as two bloody people, looking for a gunshot victim didn’t seem the best way to go about matters. Instead we followed signs on the wall up through the hospital, endless identical-looking corridors of gleaming white and strip lighting, tried intensive care, found no one, and eventually made our way towards the operating theatres.
We found the motorbiker sitting on a bench with a can of Red Bull open in one meaty hand, outside Operating Theatre 3. He grunted as we approached and said, “You took your time.”
“Were you followed?” asked Oda sharply.
“You don’t follow me,” he replied in a voice that left no room for argument. Then with a sudden flash of a smile, “But you’d be welcome to try, lady.” Oda rolled her eyes.
There were no windows or other way of seeing into the operating room, so I sat down on the bench opposite him, every muscle exhausted, every nerve throbbing in reproach, and said, “What do they think?”
“Oh, you know. Police must be called, immense internal damage, may not make it through the night, miracle he got so far, don’t understand what’s keeping him alive will do everything they can so on and so forth yadder yadder yadder, you get the drift?” There was an alert gleam in the corner of the motorbiker’s eye. “You get trouble?”
“A little.”
“Come out OK?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Well, shit, now you’re here, I don’t know about you but I think we should consider buggering off.”
“What about Sinclair?” asked Oda quickly.
The biker burped. “He lives, he dies, we can’t change it, OK? But the police are coming. And I don’t want to deal with the police, do you?”
“You’ll leave him to die?”
“Christ, woman, I signed him in under a false name and like I said, the police will be here soon. If the guy pulls through, he’ll be safe enough.”
Oda glanced at me, eyebrows raised. I said, “We’ll only bring him more danger.”
“I don’t believe that,” she replied.
“Then we will only suffer more inconvenience if we stay,” I corrected, “is that better?”
She gave a snort in reply, but didn’t disagree. The biker stood up in a single quick movement, slapping his thighs cheerfully as he did and tossing the empty can of drink with perfect aim into the recycling bin by the vending machine. “Right! Let’s bugger off out of here before the shit really hits the fan.”
The biker lived, for want of a better description, in a garage, in a scrapyard. If that wasn’t bad enough, it was in Willesden.
Willesden, to most of the population of London, is a place that you pass through on your way to somewhere better. It is a composite, an area whose character is defined by the places around it – by the leafy streets of Hampstead to the east, by the broad avenues of Maida Vale to the south, by the squat, semi-detached homes of Wembley to the north, and by that strange, indefinable area sprawling out, along streets with still-young trees that aspire one day to be great oaks, from the boundary on Willesden’s western edge where city becomes suburb, and stays that way for nearly fifteen miles beyond. London, indeed, can be defined as one big suburb spread around a relatively small core, and at Willesden, every aspect of this suburbia seemed to combine into a mishmash of scrapyards, railway junctions, neat terraced homes, semidetached bungalows, tall terraced houses, giant supermarkets, strange ethnic greengrocers, synagogues, mosques and Hindu temples galore, all pressed together like they didn’t quite know how they’d got there in the first place.
The biker’s shed, for there wasn’t a kinder way to describe the cobbled sheets of corrugated iron that enclosed his home, was near an old canal, a remnant of a more industrial past, opposite a field of dead cars and mechanised hands for crushing them. The walls of his home were hung with tools, jackets, salvaged spare parts from bikes and cars, and pictures of bikes, reminding me of a cross between a garage and a teenager’s bedroom. There were no overt symbols of a mystical nature anywhere to be seen. But as he stoked the small iron stove in a corner and kicked a small electricity generator until the lights stopped flaring up and down and settled for a dull consistent glow, I tasted a certain unique spice on the air, like a flash across the senses, seen and instantly gone. I could only guess at its nature since whenever I tried to catch the sensation again, it was as elusive as a bar of wet soap slipping from my fingers.
The biker gestured at a couch covered with old, stained blankets and said, “Want coffee?”
“No,” replied Oda, not bothering to sit.
“Yes,” I said, slumping across the couch with the sudden, absolute certainty that coffee was the thing around which every ambition in my life revolved.
“Want to talk about what happened?”
“Yes,” said Oda.
“No,” I replied.
“Shit, well, I guess I’ll just make the running,” he said, putting an old iron kettle on top of the stove. “Any of you two think we were sold out?”
“Yes,” said Oda.
“Perhaps,” I whimpered, pressing my hands against my temples with the effort of staying awake.
“Want to guess whether they’ll come after us again?” added the biker, cheerfully spooning a large heap of instant caffeine into a chipped brown mug.
“If they are smart,” said Oda calmly.
“Perhaps,” I added.
“The creature – what you call Hunger – said he would come after you, Matthew Swift,” she pointed out, without any sign of concern.
“You had to remind me,” I groaned.
“What creature is this?” asked the biker casually.
“Just a shadow.”
“It knew the sorcerer,” she corrected. “Called him by his name.”
“I’ll handle it,” I said.
“You sure of that?”
“It’s what I’m here for.”
“Fair enough,” muttered the biker, as the kettle started to spout hot steam. “So – what do you want to do about this shit?”
“I am here to destroy Bakker,” said Oda flatly, folding her arms. “This changes nothing.”
“You’ll get no complaints from me on that one. Question is – how do you want to do this? We’re not doing a great job right now.”
Oda produced the bundle of blood-smeared documents and spread them across the rough metal floor of the shed. “We have what we need, here,” she said.
I rolled over on the couch to see more clearly.
“Everything we need to destroy the Tower, to stop Bakker from whatever he plans, to rein in his power, to destroy his evil,” she added, and the way she said it was more frightening than any shadow, it made my nerves itch, “is here. I am not without my friends, or my resources.”
“Me neither,” murmured the biker, passing a mug of coffee in my direction, though his eyes were fixed on the documents.
I picked up a picture from the pile of papers on the floor and studied it. The pale, fine features were familiar to me – indeed, I could give them a name. San Khay, Bakker’s right-hand man.
I took the picture, folded it and, very carefully, slipped it into my bag.