Hospitals. Life suspended. Not our favourite place.
Oda told no one where we went, and I did not, in honesty, even know that the place existed – a private ward somewhere south of the river, where the nurses were all old, loud, and, by implication, far too experienced to tolerate any sort of strop or independent thinking from their patients. They fed us boiled vegetables and slices of overcooked meat, until Oda, to my surprise, brought us ice cream, which we ate by the tub.
The attending doctor, a small, infinitely cheerful woman who introduced herself with “Hi, I’m Dr Seah – hey, who beat you up? Jesus,” and who wore a long stethoscope that went almost down to her waist, informed me that I had a nasty cut to the back of my head but no need for stitches, several cracked ribs that necessitated my staying still while the world moved around me, a twisted ankle and various lacerations, burns and bruises, some on the inside, that only time and a good diet could heal. We were furious at the vulnerability of our own body, but we scattered wards as best we could around the bed, threatening to walk out, healed or otherwise unless they were left untouched by the cleaners, and, despite ourself, we obeyed the doctor’s orders, and stayed in bed. From our room we could see the sun rise, and watch the shadows bend to long, luminous angles as it set in the west, and the regular cycle of days and nights had never seemed more reassuring than it did then. Of Hunger, we saw and felt nothing. Perhaps we had frightened him more than we thought; we didn’t know and didn’t want to.
The only person I saw in that time confined was Oda. She would arrive every day at 11 a.m. precisely with a new pile of books and some new secret food smuggled in past the wary eye of the nurse and the cheerfully unfussed eye of the doctor (“You know, I figure… fuck it!”), and sit by my bed saying not a word unless I spoke first, until exactly 6.30 p.m., at which point she’d stand up and say, “There’s a guard downstairs who’ll watch you,” and pull on her coat.
“Shouldn’t it be ‘look after me’?”
“What?”
“Shouldn’t the guard be looking after me, rather than just watching me? Watching makes it sound like I’m a prisoner, instead of the valiant injured.”
“In that case, he’ll do both,” she said, and without further comment, swept out of the room, leaving me alone with the radio headphones and the latest three-for-two book offers from the bookshop down by the riverside market.
Days passed and they were, I realised, little better than the passing of days when I had been underground. Down in the Exchange, though time had been a sunless, timeless series of patiently ticking events, at least underground the non-today and non-tomorrow had kept me occupied. In the hospital, the day was well enough defined by the rising and setting of the sun outside my window, but there were no events to make yesterday any different from today, or tomorrow any better than the day after.
To keep ourself busy we read books, tuning down our worries and fears into the strange, artificial reaction of feelings in the face of ink and paper, until we forgot that we were doing anything so mechanical as reading; the things we saw simply were, rather than being a conglomeration of syllables. Thus, drifting through the best of the three-for-two offers, we managed for a while to forget the passing of time.
I don’t know what day it was when Oda came in, her bag of books slung under one arm and a paper bag of bread rolls and salami hidden in her jacket pocket, and I asked, “Who knows I’m here?”
“Me, Chaigneau, the men guarding you.”
“Just the Order? What about Vera?”
“What about her?”
“Shouldn’t she know?”
“The Whites are alive. Guy is dead. Half the people he employed have expired with bits of paper in their throats; everyone’s up in arms against what’s left of his men. They had to hire a lorry to get the bodies out to Essex for a burial.” She saw my face and her eyes narrowed. “You look like a wet tissue. Isn’t that what you wanted? Lee dead, his army broken?”
“A lorry of bodies?”
“Get used to the idea. Sacrifices have to be made. Besides, they were mostly the other side.”
“I didn’t mean for… I didn’t think that…”
“No, you didn’t think that, did you?” she said, slicing open a bread roll with a penknife and loading it with folded salami. “But it’s fine. You didn’t think about it and it happened and it’s a good thing it happened and frankly we should all be pleased that it did. So go on and pretend you’re guilty that people died if you must, but do it somewhere else, please? It was necessary.”
She handed me a roll with an imperious tilt of an eyebrow. I took it automatically and rubbed the thin white flour on its top between my fingers for a moment, then licked my fingers clean again before taking a careful bite. Oda watched all this and, for almost the first time since she’d sat vigil by my side, spoke without being spoken to.
“Tell me about the paper.”
I mumbled incoherent throwaway noises through a mouthful of salami and chewed more slowly.
“How does paper keep someone alive?”
There was a neediness to her voice; so, resignedly, I swallowed, put the rest of the roll to one side, folded my arms and said, “What do you want to know?”
“Paper. Explain to me about the paper.”
“It’s nothing too special.”
“Then it won’t tax you too much to tell me about it.”
“There is a history of… people trying to stay alive under unusual circumstances. In the good, old-fashioned days, magicians would pluck out their own heart and encase it in a lead chest dropped at the bottom of a well where no one could ever find it, thus gaining a degree of invulnerability – hard to kill someone when you can’t stop their heart beating. Problem with that, of course, is that if you become too hard to kill, too invulnerable, then all the other bugger need do is cut off your arms, head and legs, scatter them in twenty different places, chained to a rock, and there you are, still alive, head on a spike in Newcastle, scrabbling arms chained to a wall in Cardiff, and heart still beating, senses still functioning, still alive, still not dead; just in pain. You can be too safe, you see – and what’s the point of being alive unless there is a progress, a journey, and somewhere, at some point, an end? What else other than that motivation makes us really live, the sense that this is a chance we must use, and now? Think of the laziness of immortality – so easy to say ‘tomorrow’ for ever.”
“I was hoping for a technical explanation; thank you anyway.”
“I’m telling it to you as…”
“As what?”
“As it was told to me.”
She grunted, but said nothing more.
I wiped my mouth with my sleeve and tried again. “Necromancers go other ways – traditional magics that will never lose their validity, I fear – blood of the newborn babe, or even better, placentas, transplants from blessed vessels of Godly might, vampirism, reanimation, possession and so on and so forth. The modern medical era has made it easier; you’d be amazed how useful the MRI scanner has been to necromancers. But it is a messy business, unhygienic, usually defined by bad complexions, spots and rapid hair loss; and besides, it causes a lot of attention and provides little gain. Dead is dead is dead; even if it’s walking and talking, the flesh decays – nothing yet, that I know of, can stop time.”
“You know a lot about this.”
“I was well taught.”
“Bakker?”
“Yes. Why do you think he hasn’t tried any of these things? He is desperate to stay alive, determined to survive at any cost – but he understands that life, real life, is much more than just survival in dead bones. He wants to live in every way. He wouldn’t try necromancy.”
“But Lee did?”
“Sort of. A different kind of ripping out of the heart, you might say. The magician writes on a piece of paper certain incantations, a few spells of a kind that usually are old enough and vague enough, that have been through endless mistranslations, to carry consequences, and to that adds a few compulsions. To the servants of the magician, usually there’s a clause in there to obey and serve, to never wither until he commands, to feel no pain unless in failure. But when a magician does it to himself, swallows that paper with those enchantments, the words are usually… aspirations.”
“Aspirations?”
“Things like, ‘I am a good man’, or ‘I will never age’ or ‘My favourite colour is blue’ or ‘I will be for ever powerful’ or ‘I will not sleep’ or…”
“Why?”
“Because you die when you eat the paper,” I explained, surprised at the sharpness of her voice. “You choke on it, you have to swallow it whole and it kills you, invariably; it’s part of the deal. That’s why it’s magic – at that instant, the paper absorbs your death, your… well, I suppose, life – it absorbs your dying breath and that gives it life, the words on the paper define who you are from that instant onwards; define everything about you. You’re not technically dead, because there’s still your life inside your body. But unlike a heart in a box you can die if the paper is removed; the spell is broken, it is a guarantee against extreme eternal agony, and at the same time…”
“A form of invulnerability?”
“Close.”
“But… when you fought Guy Lee, you hurt him?”
“No. I hurt his flesh – he felt nothing. There was no pain in him until I actually pulled the paper out of his throat; the spell probably went with an ‘I will feel no pain’ clause – it’s fairly standard.”
“What happened when you pulled it out?”
“Imagine having a metre and a half of rolled-up paper stuffed down your throat and suddenly becoming aware of it,” I answered. “Then guess.”
She nodded slowly, eyes elsewhere. Finally she said, “What about… the others. The dead with the paper…”
“A basic command. I’m guessing that the warlock I met wasn’t dead when Lee found him, merely dying, and that Lee pushed a simple spell of obedience down his throat when he died, catching his last breath in its snare, trapping it in his lungs. Not alive, not dead, just… bound. The magic of a dying breath is a powerful thing.”
“Even today?”
“Even today. Christ,” I muttered, “what do you think? Life is magic! Where there is life there is magic! Sure, the magic is in the city, in the street, in the neon lamp and the coughing pigeon and the stray cat and the sewers and the cars and the smell of dirt; that’s something new – but life really hasn’t changed so much. Certain things – blood, skin, breath, words, paper, ink – will always have their own very special power, one which I don’t think will ever really change.”
She thought about it, then nodded again. In a voice that wasn’t entirely there, her eyes fixed on some distant, other place, she said, “Is that why Bakker wants you alive?”
“What makes you think…”
“I found one of Lee’s men. I asked him things.”
“You…”
“I asked him things,” she repeated firmly, eyes flashing bright and angry towards me. “That’s all. He said they were under orders not to harm the sorcerer.”
I shrugged.
“You don’t seem surprised.”
“Not really.”
“Why?”
“Oda, you know why Bakker and I argued.”
“He wanted you to help him summon the blue electric angels and you said no.”
“He wanted me to summon us, so that he could feed off our power, off our life, use it to sustain him. He wanted to force us from the telephone, get us into the world of flesh where we would be vulnerable so he could steal our essence – we are creatures of left-over life, creations of surplus feeling whispered into electric energy – to his eyes, we are the answer to his problem. He desires life and we are all that he desires. And here we are, trapped in this skin, vulnerable, just like he always wanted.”
“I see.”
“Would you betray us?”
“Me?”
“It is always a fear.”
She made no answer.
“We… do not know who we should trust. When we were in the blue, there was no need for ‘friend’. We were all the same, our thoughts burnt off each other with static fire, we were one, never alone. Here, things are different.”
“My breaking heart,” retorted Oda with a scowl.
I glared and snatched up the rest of my salami roll, biting into it to hide my anger. Not hiding it very well, clearly, since Oda sat up straighter and said, “I didn’t mean that…” She hesitated, then made a grunting sound, relaxing. “Chaigneau hates you,” she said finally.
“It’s mutual.”
“You embarrassed him.”
“It’s something I’m good at.”
“It’s more than that – you tainted him. He’s now been touched by magic.”
“So? He’s a killer of magicians, a paladin of narrow-minded insanity; surely it’s good to know his enemy?”
“He doesn’t believe you’ve really lifted the curse you put on him.”
“Why not?”
“He won’t say.”
“Is this another of his paranoid irrationalities coming through?”
“Did you undo what you did to him?” she asked sharply.
I met her eyes, unafraid of her cold glare. “Yes.”
Another hesitation – perhaps something more too? “If you live,” she said finally, “if you meet Bakker and have your revenge, if you kill him – what will you do then?”
“I don’t know.” I thought about it. “Clearly Chaigneau will try to kill me, the instant all this is over. So either you and I become implacable enemies, or I run away to another city and learn French or something.”
“He’ll find you.”
“Then you and I become enemies,” I answered. “And if I survive that…” There was nothing on her face to answer the hopeful enquiry in my voice, so I just said, “If I survive your Order, then… I don’t know. My CV isn’t great; and, besides, there’s this two-year gap where I vanished, which employers will assume was spent in prison. I don’t have any money that isn’t obtained by the use of a spell; I don’t have a home; I don’t even know what’s happened to my friends. I just… I don’t know. Maybe I’ll pack up and go. Head out to some other place and start again. Go back to being eighteen with just my qualifications and a week’s work experience, wipe everything else clean, say I had cancer or something. Maybe be someone else, get a false name, try discretion and tact for a change. It could be an adventure.”
“What about them?”
“Them?”
She tapped the side of her head conspiratorially and said, “Them with the blue eyes.”
We thought about it, and grinned. “We will find joy in all life, anywhere. To be whoever we want to be… nothing but joy.”
“Doesn’t sound joyous to me,” said Oda.
“That’s because you don’t like living without certainties,” I replied. “You’re just afraid.”
“I am not!”
“It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. Fear is the art of being alive – without fear there’s no bravery, no heroism, no…”
“Shut up,” she exclaimed.
I raised my hands defensively. “Sorry – I’m sorry. Is there anything else to eat?”
We lost patience before I was due to be discharged; in the middle of the night I got up, wrote Oda a brief and reasonably polite note, gathered up what few clothes we could find, and slipped out of the hospital, into the empty streets. Cold air on our face and hard pavement under our feet was a bliss we could not describe.
I spent the next day replenishing my stock – I found a new cardboard ad offering the services of “***PLAYFUL SEXY CHICK!!!!***” and scribbled my symbols of magic onto its back with a biro, sliding it into the ATM to withdraw enough money for my day of shopping. I bought new clothes and replenished my supply of tools for the trade – then went to the dry-cleaners and sat and waited while they struggled to remove the endless swirls of paint, dust, smoke, dirt and blood from the fabric of my coat and the surface of my bag. The result looked like a faded clown’s costume that had once been dyed beige, but the fabric felt warm and dense, a weight without which I would have felt naked. For lunch I had a curry at the local tandoori house, dipping poppadoms into every chutney and spice. We were determined to find out what even the fiery red one was like, having avoided it in my previous life, and found that there were indeed flavours that could make our teeth burn. In the afternoon I booked myself into a hotel, and that evening, I went out for a drink.
I met her by the bar of a small jazz café near Hyde Park. She said her name was Felicity, and that it was nice of me to try, but she wasn’t really interested. I told her I just wanted to have a conversation and she answered that that was what everyone said, that men were all the same. But she didn’t say no when I bought her a drink; and we talked about the weather, the price of tickets on the underground, the embarrassment of our current politicians and all their useless prancing for the media, and what was on television, until at last I felt human again, and when it was time to say goodbye, we kissed and promised never to see each other again.
When I dreamt that night, I didn’t wake up with the taste of paper in my mouth, and that, I concluded, could only be a good sign.
The next day I bought a mobile phone – the first I’d ever bought in my life – and rang the hospital where I’d been staying until they put me through to Dr Seah, who after a lot of umming and aaahing and “Have you been in a fight yet?” agreed to ring Oda and give her my number.
Oda rang me no more than ten minutes later. She was not a happy person.
“You bastard! I’ll kill you if you ever do that again!”
“Hello to you too.”
“Where the hell did you think you were going, what did you think you were doing, you can’t just…”
“I needed some air.”
“You needed two days of air without telling me? Just walking off into the dark like you were… what if something had happened?!”
“Please don’t try concern; you’re much better at indignation.”
“If you ever pull something like that again…”
“Oh please, like the sniper rifle isn’t gleaming through the window already,” I said. “I’m calling now, aren’t I?”
“You’re a selfish pig, sorcerer. A lying, selfish pig.”
“I just thought I’d let you know I’m OK.”
A calmer edge entered her voice. “I’ve got something to tell you.”
“Is it abusive?”
“Sinclair woke up.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know – they moved him the second he gained consciousness.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“His assistant.”
“Charlie?”
“If that’s his name.”
“You know where?”
“I just said I didn’t.”
“Right – got any way to contact him?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know he woke up?”
“Because he’s not in the morgue and he’s not in the hospital, what do you think?”
“All right, thanks. I’ll try and find him.” I hung up quickly, before she could shout any more.
I spent the day with the pigeons, on a bench in Trafalgar Square, my bag of belongings huddled to my chest in case someone thought of taking them, and a pile of breadcrumbs at my feet. I let the pigeons congregate around me, listening to their thoughts, too brief and insubstantial to be anything other than a glimpse of yellow sound or sight. Eventually a local warden came up to me and said, “Sir, we ask people not to feed the pigeons,” with such an expression of civic determination that I pretended not to understand English. Instead, I lisped my way through various “eh?” sounds until, having exhausted his two words of French and three of Spanish, he concluded that, since I was neither nationality, I wasn’t worth the bother.
Though the pigeons’ thoughts were too fleeting to give me anything really coherent, I lingered in their minds, drifting with them over the rooftops, until a tingling on the edge of my senses warned me that my own body was starting to get pins and needles. London from above only emphasised how dense, furious and busy it was; with the height of the houses obscuring the streets, all you could see was building on building, stretching as far as the pigeon’s sight could perceive, way beyond Alexandra Palace on its hilltop to the north, and then beyond that by quite a way, and south as far as the Downs, whose slopes were obscured by sprawling suburbs. At ground level, it was harder to remember that only a few metres away was another street running parallel, and another and another, each filled with as many people as those you could see. Doubtless they had the same sense of significance as I felt when I went about my day, all of them walking at the Londoner’s brisk speed to their own Very Important Meeting Thank You. It was only the pigeons overhead who understood the scale of the city.
The rats were more useful. Their brains were sharper, and as I sat by the dumpsters behind a restaurant in Chinatown, letting them flock around me and nibble at the chocolate I’d bought for their delight, their noses picked out scents that the pigeon brain was simply too harried to consider. A flash of strong, unusual scent – creatures that were sometimes rats and sometimes foxes and sometimes neither. I dabbled my senses in the rats’ memories, felt the claws flex at my fingers and a pelt of dark, greasy fur on my back, remembered how it was to sense the width of the tunnel with the twitching of my whiskers and to smell the tantalising poison of the rat-catcher being laid down three floors above me.
In the evening, I sat by the Regent’s Canal, near Caledonian Road, with a hamburger in a box and waited in the drizzle for the foxes. They came along the towpath, limping in the twilight from badly healed injuries or scampering with uncertain fearfulness out of their holes, and nuzzled at the hamburger with their curious black noses, sniffing through the stench of their own matted fur for a scent of something interesting.
I stroked them behind the ears, and through that contact borrowed their senses, searching their brief memories for a recollection of something out of place. A flash of an unfamilar smell, the sound of unusual movements, the image of a creature that resembled a fox but wasn’t quite of the right mould. Weremen left all sorts of interesting scents across the city, to which the animals were perhaps more sensitive than even the average alert magician. I took the sensations gleaned from the rats, the foxes and the pigeons, who along with the beggars and the dustbin men probably see and know more than anyone else in the city, and followed the wavering smells they’d detected, to where the strongest sense of something out of place seemed to combine; the smell led north, to the wide, tree-shaded streets of Muswell Hill.
To most of the population of London, Muswell Hill is simply a name. An interesting name – unlike many, there is no easy guess at how it arose. Certainly there’s a hill, but was there a Mr Muswell who named it, or was it simply well mussed? It has none of the easy recognition of Bishopsgate or Aldersgate – the gates for bishops and aldermen, in their times – nor of Westminster nor Kings Cross – each with a physical feature to give it a name. More, it was hemmed in by places that had tube stations, whose very presence on the underground map made recognition a hundred times easier – Wood Green, Finsbury Park, Crouch End – so that Muswell Hill tended to exist in relation to somewhere else.
The scents and memories I had gleaned from the animals weren’t enough to pin down the wereman’s location to one particular house, not least since the red-bricked, heavy doorways of every street seemed identical, and the long, curved avenues made it hard to judge which way was north or south.
From the overall impression got from the pigeons, foxes and rats, I focused on a block of four streets. These encased a series of terraced Edwardian houses, whose windows featured rectangles of stained glass set above the larger panes, to give an impression of traditional gentility rendered on a reasonable budget.
The glances of the foxes and the swoops of the pigeons gave me no clue as to street number, and there were too many houses for me to start knocking on doors. But after wandering for a while I found a flat green telephone switchbox tucked into a corner of one road; and with much banging, and levering with the end of my penknife, I finally coaxed the cover off it, to reveal the circuits inside. I pulled out my newly purchased mobile phone and, from my paint-splatted satchel, a thread. I tied the thread round the phone at one end, and round a single wire in the telephone box at the other, turned on my phone, spread out my coat under me and sat down to wait.
In a while, my phone started to talk.
“Hello, love, uni treating you OK? Hum. Hum. Yes, Dad’s here too…”
“I just want you to talk to me! Is that so much to ask? Just talk and…”
“Three pizzas with the mushroom topping and the… no, the mushroom… yes and the… no, crispy crust…”
“Look, I was really sorry to hear about…”
“Tomorrow evening? Yeah, great, what shall I wear?”
As my phone caught the signals travelling through the wire, the sound of it was strangely therapeutic, like a medley of lullabies being sung just for me. I sat on the pavement and waited for something to happen; in the mean time it calmed us down, made us feel stronger for it. This was, after all, where we had come from – bits of life transformed into electrical signals and sent round the planet, all those sighs and laughs and shouts and thoughts and feelings transmitted in electrical bursts until eventually, as these things must, they had become too much for just one signal to contain and had, in their own way, come alive, become us. Perhaps, now we were no longer in the telephone wires, it would all happen again. Maybe even now, a new blue electric angel was starting to grow, fed by all that surplus life in the system, and would eventually become like us, and start to feel alive.
We felt somehow happy at the thought. It seemed like an appropriate development, the right thing. Circle of life doing its revolving thing, all over again, just like it probably should. It made sense.
“Sweet and sour pork, special fried rice… yeah… yeah… black bean sauce…”
“I was in! I was in all bloody day and you people couldn’t just wait for the bell to stop ringing to see if I’d answer the door… you try without hot water!”
“OK, can you see the button in the left-hand corner? Now I want you to click on it just once… look, you rang me, do you want this document to print or not?”
“Please press one to top up. Please press two for customer services. Please press three if you wish for payplan details. Please press the hash key for the flight of angels. Please press the star key to hear the options again…”
I shifted my weight, and wished I’d brought a coffee.
“Yeah, hi. No, we don’t know. Yeah. No, we’re going to keep him here a bit. No. I heard. Yeah.”
I sat up.
“Don’t, for Christ’s sake. Not even the sorcerer, he might…”
Clutching my phone, I pressed the call key. “Hi, Charlie?”
There was a grunt on the other end of the line and a tinkling of something falling. Then, a voice trying not to shout but not quite making it: “Who the hell is this?”
“The sorcerer, remember me? Swift?”
“Swift? How the hell did you…”
“Magic.” I managed to bite off the “duh” sound before it could escape my lips, but only just.
“Right. Yeah. Of course.”
“We need to talk.”
“I’m… I’m on the phone.”
“Yes, I noticed that. And hello whoever’s at the other end of the line, sorry for interrupting.”
A woman’s voice, confused but otherwise friendly enough: “It’s fine.”
“Is there going to be a problem?”
Charlie’s voice: “Where are you?”
“Muswell Hill.”
“What are you doing there?”
“Looking for you and doing, I think, a very good job of it too. We really should talk.”
They’d put him on a bed too small for him in a room too small for anyone, dominated by a large wardrobe and with a stool by the bed. The curtains were closed and, as I entered the room, Charlie warned, “No light.” I fumbled my way to the stool in the orange glow seeping past Charlie’s outline in the doorway, and sat down next to Sinclair’s bed.
Charlie said from the door, “I heard Lee is dead.”
“Yes. Was all along, really.”
“I heard the Whites killed many of their enemies.”
“Yes. Although some of them were dead already too.”
“My friends helped you.”
“Yes.”
“Some of them died.” It wasn’t a question, but still surprised me.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“They knew what they were doing. Everyone who went to the Exchange knew what they were doing – even Lee.”
I looked up at the tone of his voice. Charlie added, “Do or die. That’s how sorcerers are – there’s no middle ground. You fight or you die.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
A voice wheezed from the bed next to me, audible only because of its strangeness, “Yes it is.”
I looked down at Sinclair. His eyes reflected dark puddles in the orange glow from the doorway, and his breathing was slow and laboured. His skin looked a strange, sickly yellow, his eyes protruded, and his chin had been badly shaved. He raised a hand towards Charlie, but I couldn’t read the gesture – dismissal, warning, greeting, hard to tell. Whatever it was, Charlie didn’t move, although his jaw grew tight.
Sinclair smiled a grim smile at me and added, “Sorcerers… burn too brightly. Their magic is life: their life and the lives around them. When you fight with the purest powers of blazing life, all you can do is fight… or die.” He coughed and feebly gestured again at Charlie, who reached past me to the top of the wardrobe and took down a bottle of water, tenderly lifting the old man’s head to help him drink.
When Sinclair was done he flopped back, eyes staring up at the ceiling as if turning his head was too much effort, and said, “I think I am meant to thank you, sorcerer.”
I didn’t answer.
“Candid as ever,” he said. “Good, of course. Khay is dead, Lee is dead…”
“Was dead, all along.”
“He dabbled in necromancy.”
“He wrote the essence of his life on a sheet of paper and swallowed it whole,” I answered. “That’s how dead he was.”
“Really?” Sinclair let out a disappointed breath that rattled through his throat like it was made of loose marbles. “An absence in the files. And now…”
“I want to find Harris Simmons.”
“He’ll run.”
“Why?”
“He’s a poor magician. He depends on other people’s enchantments – Lee was always the toughest, and you made an alliance that … crudely, I suppose… ‘killed him good’.” There was a tone of harsh mockery in his voice. “Simmons knows he can’t stand up against that. He’s always been a coward.”
“Where will he go?”
A half-shrug, followed by another burst of wheezing.
“The Tower won’t be destroyed until the money stops; Simmons provides the money.”
“The Tower is already crippled; why waste the time? You’ve killed the security, the soldiers…”
“I want Bakker to know,” I said. “I want him to know that I’m coming. I want him to know that there’ll be nothing left. All of it, gone.”
“Revenge,” rasped Sinclair. “Of course, of course… revenge is perhaps a mundane motive, but when it leads us to excel, perhaps … perhaps useful. Listen to me. Come close. Listen.”
I leant closer. “The woman – Oda – there is something about her you must know.”
“I know she’s part of the Order.”
A glint of surprise, then a smile. “Good, good. Yes, I am glad. Good. She hates with such fire, she despises you all. All magicians. She is their killer. Do you understand me? Their killer, their assassin, the lady of the knives, that’s what they call her. They think I don’t know, but in the Order… there are also concerned citizens.”
“Charlie was telling me about concerned citizens.”
“Good; it is good you know. They will send her after you, she will try to kill you.”
“I know.”
“Do not trust her. She hates with such fire…”
“I know. I won’t. You have… contacts… in the Order?”
“Contacts? Yes, yes, I suppose I do. It is a tool, sorcerer, a useful entity: gather up the hate, the anger, put them in one place, use them…”
“A tool?”
“Use them to… to eliminate creatures as dangerous as they are; and they have such hatred, such passion…”
“Chaigneau wouldn’t tell me who was in charge of the Order.”
For a moment his eyes turned to me with an effort; his hands trembled. “Anton Chaigneau? He doesn’t even tell people his name.”
“I cursed him.”
“You cursed Chaigneau? How?”
“He had my blood on his hands. There are some magics that don’t ever change.”
Sinclair’s eyes went to Charlie. “Charlie, dear boy… Charlie… leave us.”
“Mr Sinclair…” began Charlie, starting forward.
“Leave us, Charlie. I’ll call when I need you.”
Charlie reluctantly moved away from the door; I listened as he plodded downstairs. Sinclair gestured me closer still, until my ear was only a little way from his mouth and I could feel the strained tickle of his breath. “I mis-spoke when I said, before, that you were a poor sorcerer.”
“I don’t remember…”
“I said you were not powerful, before you became what you are, Mr Swift. I said you were merely average.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“I mis-spoke. You are… were… perhaps… afraid of what you could be, what you could do. That is why you argued with Bakker. You were afraid. He wanted you to give power, so much power, the blood of angels in his veins – you said, Mr Swift, you said – some magics don’t ever change. You were afraid of that power. That isn’t weakness, it is intelligence. To feel so alive, have the heartbeat of a city under your shoes – fear it. Fear what you may do. It is human. For misjudging you, I apologise. And perhaps for misjudging you, I apologise.”
“You know about us?”
“Dear boy, it is my business.”
“I accept your apology. We accept your apology.”
“You are… smart…” he said hesitantly. “Yes, smart. You hide it well, perhaps; but you know when a power shouldn’t be used.” His eyes gleamed in the dull light. “You said some magic didn’t change. Charlie told me what you did, told me about your blood burning blue, told me that… and I know. Should not have lived, they said, fire in the blood. Isn’t that your story? We be light, we be life, we be fire? Such creatures that revel in such living, should not be afraid… Ask me.”
“Why does Oda hate magicians?”
“Her brother was one. She killed him.”
“Why?”
“No one knows. They say he turned bad, went mad with his power. I do not entirely believe it. I think they lie, and so does she. It is a question that you do not ask.”
“Why did you ask the Order to come to the house in Marylebone, the night we were attacked? Knowing what they are – it was a risk.”
“A risk? To expose so many magicians to such hate, yes, well, I suppose… a risk.”
“Why?”
“I think you may guess.”
“Chaigneau didn’t know who was in charge of the Order – he said he followed orders, and so does Oda.”
Sinclair’s smile widened.
“Mr Sinclair,” I said, struggling to keep some patience in my voice, “are you the head of the Order?”
“No, dear boy, no! Just a head. One of many. Best not to know how many there are, or who they are, or where they are; dangerous, dangerous indeed. No. A head, Mr Swift, a head.”
“You use them?”
“A tool. If you know who those are who hate magic with such fire that they would burn the world to be rid of it, you can tame them, use them, direct them, yes? Yes, and when you need them, perhaps you can give them that magic that they long to destroy, point them at a target and say, ‘There is the sorcerer’ or ‘There is the shadow’ or ‘There is the demon’ or ‘There is the angel’, yes? And they will strike, and it will not go back to me.”
“They have decided to kill me,” I pointed out reasonably. “That has me a little concerned.”
“Chaigneau will follow orders.”
“How ironic.”
“Oda won’t,” he whispered. “Once she has her target, she will not stop. I can tell them to stop – difficult, perhaps, but then you can always say, ‘He is a lesser evil. Let him be damned in his own time.’ There are ways to spin these things. Oda will not stop.”
“If you knew that, why did you introduce me to her in the first place?”
Sinclair grinned, then flinched at the pain even of that, and gave a grunting sound. “Because you are Robert Bakker’s apprentice,” he wheezed, pressing his fat fingers into his chest like he was trying to massage the pain from his bones. “Because you are the blue electric angels. And if he were to take your power, to catch you and work out how to steal that life that keeps your eyes blue… well… well… imagine.”
“So you’d have me killed?” I said, forcing my voice to stay low. “Like that?”
“I would have anyone killed whom I deemed a risk,” he replied, voice rising in stern reproach. “And you always will be a risk. But, I think, you will always be smart, and smart enough to be afraid. And perhaps that will be enough.”
“We have something else we need to ask.”
“Go on?”
“Did you summon us? Did you bring me back?”
“No, Mr Swift. I would like to see Bakker gone, but to bring the blue electric angels into this world? No. A risk – indeed, a terrible risk. Such a deed would have required a sorcerer’s skills. I would suggest, in fact, that if anyone did summon you, it would have been Bakker trying to bring the angels into being, or, perhaps, his more sensitive apprentice, Dana Mikeda.” He let out a long, easier breath. “You will have to fight her, sorcerer. That’s how it is in these things. Neither of you, I think, can just walk away.”
“Dana Mikeda is my problem.”
“No,” he murmured. “Not any more. She serves Bakker now. He took her hand when they held your funeral with the empty coffin, and he said he was her friend, her new teacher; now she serves him utterly. He helped her when you were gone; she’s his apprentice now, not yours. And I would not like to think what he may have taught her; no, indeed. You may, in fact, save some time by directing Oda her way. You could eliminate two threats in a single stroke – the woman who…”
“No.”
“The Order hopes you will destroy each other; Bakker and Swift. Why should these two not do the same?”
“No,” I repeated.
“I can send the Order word, command them to…”
“Our blood is in your veins,” we insisted. “Some magics never change. Leave Dana Mikeda to me.”
His voice didn’t alter, nor did his light smile; but there was that edge there, that danger. “Kindly don’t threaten me, blue electric angels. You are so far lost in this world that the lightest push could send you toppling over the edge into madness. Save your anger for someone else.”
I swallowed. “There is one last thing I need to know.”
“Go on.”
“The night we were attacked, the first night I met you…”
“Yes?”
“Who attacked us?”
“At a guess, San Khay’s men.”
“And who sent the litterbug to attack me on my first night?”
“Those kinds of magic… Guy Lee.”
“How did Guy Lee know where I was?”
“I would suggest,” he said carefully, picking every word out like a piece of stuck apple from between his teeth, “that the house you were living in was sold on after your death to a woman who works for a company called KSP. KSP stands for Kenrick, Simmons and Powell and is the company run by Harris Simmons. I suggest that, since you clearly returned to a place of comfort in your old home, she phoned Simmons on the night of your resurrection and warned him that a naked, confused-looking man had just crawled out of the telephone lines and that perhaps someone should investigate. Lee would have been the one to send the litterbug; Khay would have been the man following on foot. You see – the Tower doesn’t like loose ends.”
I thought about the business card stolen from a wallet in my old home that I’d seen on the first night of my new life; Laura Linbard, Business Associate, KSP. I said, “I… I had friends, before this. I haven’t dared… it seemed risky to…”
“Until the Tower is gone,” replied Sinclair flatly, “everyone you knew or valued is being watched. Bakker will know by now that you are… perhaps shall we say… more than you once appeared. He’ll have worked out why the phones went silent the night you returned; he isn’t a fool. He will do anything he can to find you and if that means killing the people you once knew, he will. That’s the Tower, Mr Swift, that’s why you should really be fighting rather than from any motive of revenge; and when this is over that’s what I will tell people you died for – a good, heroic cause, rather than your loosely defined sense of injured personal pride. My advice, if you’ll take it – and please, consider it well intended – is to forget everything you were and everything you think you can continue to be; to stop imagining that things can go back to normal when Bakker is dead, and accept. You are not Matthew Swift any more.”
I nodded. “Mr Sinclair,” I murmured, “I feel I must tell you something.”
“Of course, of course.”
“There are times when I can believe that you are right.” I met his eyes, and he didn’t look away. “There are times when there isn’t us in our skin, when there isn’t the fusion of miscellaneous life and thought that is what we have become, Swift and angel mixed up into one great roiling cauldron. There’s just me, just fire in the blood, just vengeance and anger and pure blazing blue life. I let the angels be all that I am, let them do what they want and… do you know why, in the telephone lines, we would tell those who wished to listen, ‘come be we, and be free’?”
“Enlighten me.”
“When we are the angels, we do not care about the thoughts of men, or their laws, or their ideas, or their conceptions of morality. We are beyond that, above that, free from these petty fictions by which you live your days – laws, rules, duties, responsibilities. We are pure fire and light and life, and nothing can contain us or bind us, and nothing can make us die. That is what it is to be free. That’s why I let them be me.” I straightened up, shook my head. “That’s it. That’s all that I wanted to tell you.”
“A curious choice of conversational matter,” he said with a half-laugh. “Are you telling me in the hope that I will… maybe reconsider my orders; perhaps, even, permit your demise? A strange hope, for a creature who blazes without thought for lesser species in its path. Perhaps you’re just telling me for the sake of telling someone. It must be lonely, yes indeed, of course it must, inside your life. Not quite anything at all. Not quite human, not quite angel. Come be we and be free – and you’re stuck as both, and neither. Indeed, difficulties, naturally. I am tired.”
“Tired? Is that it?”
“For now,” he replied, waving absently towards the door. “Charlie!” He hardly raised his voice and Charlie was there. I stood up, acknowledging my dismissal, and noted his slow, shuddering breaths.
“Mr Sinclair?”
“Yes?”
“Who do you think betrayed us the night you were shot? How did they know we were there?”
“A pertinent question, indeed, yes. I would say Oda – but no, it isn’t her style. Perhaps the warlock…”
“He’s dead. He died fighting Lee. Lee stuffed paper down his throat to catch his dying breath.”
“Indeed.” Sinclair showed not a tremor. “I trust the fortune-teller, she has too much history to be a convincing suspect; and the wizard died. The Bag Lady, well, she is…”
“I know about the Bag Lady.”
“Well, then,” said Sinclair mildly, “you are starting to run short of suspects, aren’t you, Mr Swift?”
I nodded and forced a smile. “Thank you, Mr Sinclair. I hope you recover soon.”
“I will, Mr Swift, I assure you, I will. It’s all in the blood.”
I glanced at his face, but his eyes were shut and his expression that of a sleeping child, innocently relaxed as if it had always been that way. I let Charlie show me out, and wandered off in search of a bus.
This is the history of Harris Simmons.
He was born Harry Simon in a small town just outside Colchester, a fact that he didn’t like other people knowing – to the tune of one dead teacher, a mysteriously vanished family member with a Swiss bank account, and an arson attack at the local County Records Office. At the age of twenty-two, Harry Simon disappeared from his job at the local estate agency and Harris Simmons materialised in London with a degree in Econometrics from the London School of Economics, a perfect new pinstriped suit, a big briefcase, an accent that could have been polished on velvet and three months’ work experience with HSBC in Boston. Perhaps it was simply a bad year for PricewaterhouseCoopers in terms of intake – or perhaps they respected the kind of man capable of forging such credentials, as a useful asset to the team on his own basic merits. Whatever the reason, potential employers found it hard to say no to such a confident and self-possessed young gentleman, and Harris Simmons was soon earning more per bonus than his entire family had earned in twenty years of taxi-driving and bar service down at the pub. Sinclair ascribed no great moral evil to the fact that Simmons no longer supported his family – once he was so much more than just Harry Simon, he didn’t look back; and that, it was grudgingly admitted, was probably the only way to survive, with such an ambitious agenda.
At twenty-five, Harris Simmons became the youngest, best-paid executive inside the Golden Mile, that area of EC postcodes in the centre of London where between Monday and Friday you cannot move for sharp suits, and which on Saturday and Sunday lies as still as the morgue. Somewhere around this point, he was also introduced to the supernatural, and on the realisation that it was possible to manipulate markets by something as easy as cursing a German steel company on the Wednesday, having invested in their competitors on the Tuesday, he took to it with the slick ease of a man bred to such devices. At the age of twenty-six, a few months before I abruptly found myself dead beside the river, Harris Simmons was approached by Mr San Khay on behalf of a budding new finance and investment company largely owned by Mr Robert Bakker, and asked if he would like to be a partner. When he demanded what this company had going for it that made it worth his highly expensive time, the answer was simple. Market manipulation was a profitable business and at this company they knew the value of a good goblin in the files. Thus, Kenrick, Simmons and Powell was born, and quickly swept into the FTSE 100 and onto the markets with Simmons’s hand at the rudder. Indeed, its success was so astounding and its predictions so true and accurate, as it followed market fluctuations, that several discreet investigations were launched within its first year, in an attempt to determine whether it might be influencing events to its own advantage. But no conclusive evidence was found, and even the concerned citizens, of whom Sinclair was one, had difficulty understanding how such a new company could have such astounding success.
The profits from KSP did as profits do – fed more profits, and more, cycling back forever into the system that created them, largely for the sake of yet more profit. When that profit was simply too absurdly large to invest, and after the taxman had been sent away with the sneaky suspicion that he hadn’t taken his fill, the rest – millions a month – was siphoned off into the organisation loosely known as the Tower. Some went on simple personal pleasures – the wine, girls and general luxury of a particular lifestyle. Some went to Lee, to fund his bribery and blackmail throughout the lower magicial communities in the city; some was sent to other cities to establish more links for the Tower. And a large part went on what was simply known in the records as “Operations”.
It took Sinclair eighteen months to get an inventory of the needs of Operations, and the result explained to a large extent why so much was sucked into it each year. The silver teeth of dead prophets, the finger bones of ancient sorcerers, the blood of mythic beasts filtered through a sieve of frozen mercury, the jade-encrusted skull of a deceased necromancer, the still-beating heart of a newborn child whose mother’s womb was cursed by the hand of a voodoo witch – these things all cost money, particularly in the quantities in which Bakker, Khay, Simmons and Lee were acquiring them. For Lee, a regular supply of corpses and high-quality paper seemed a priority; for Khay, his tattoos were hardly cheap; for Simmons, endless trinkets of magical enchantment were wanted, to compensate for what was by nature a weak magical inclination.
To Bakker went all the rest. I recognised some of the ingredients and could guess at their purpose. There were only so many reasons why tens of thousands of pounds could have been spent on phone lines, modems, servers and intercept technology, only so many excuses to purchase shards of stone dug up from the first Roman ruin found underneath the city’s streets; only certain spells that could possibly require blue laser light reflected off a fairy’s aluminium wing – it was easy enough to recognise the ingredients of summonings and enchantments in Bakker’s wish-list, and to guess at their purpose. And it was all paid for by KSP, and Harris Simmons.
Did we need to find him?
Perhaps.
What would we do if we found him?
A problem for another time. Best not to think about it now.
I started by making a few phone calls.
“Good morning, KSP reception, how may I help you?”
“Hi, I’m calling on behalf of Amiltech Securities, I’m hoping I could make an appointment to see Mr Simmons.”
“Mr…”
“Harris Simmons, yes, sorry, you must have a lot in the business.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but Mr Simmons’ schedule is entirely full…”
“I’m willing to be very, very persistent.”
“Amiltech, was it?”
“Yes.”
“Can I take your name?”
“Adam Rieley.”
“Just a moment.”
The moment lasted five minutes of what sounded like the nose-pipe rendition of “Greensleeves”; it felt like five years. When she came back, I was so close to falling off the end of my hotel bed in dismay and irritation that I nearly did just that from surprise.
“Mr Rieley?”
“Still here.”
“I’m very sorry, but Mr Simmons is out of the country right now on business and won’t be back for several weeks. If you’d like to contact him, I suggest you send an email to his secretary – would you like the address?”
“Any idea where he’s gone?”
“No, Mr Rieley, sorry.”
She didn’t sound very sorry, but I couldn’t really blame her. “Thank you very much, ma’am, you’ve been most helpful.”
“Sorry I couldn’t be of…”
“It’s fine. Thank you.” I hung up and went in search of my satchel.
Harris Simmons lived in that elusive part of London to the north of Marylebone station that doesn’t quite know what it’s trying to be, and ends up being a bit of everything – old, new, rich, poor, sprawled and compressed all at once, so that the most expensive fish and chip shops in the world can find themselves between a council estate, with its police witness-appeal signs, and a walled-off, high-gated mansion. In the midnight-dimmed shops between the area’s quiet mews and its wide thoroughfares, parmesan cheeses the size of chubby babies were displayed, and Italian and Greek flags drooped from windows here and there. From the pubs a polite buzz of thick-carpeted gentility rolled out from half-open doors and warmly lit interiors.
The house I was looking for, directed by Sinclair’s immaculate notes, sat behind a high wall fronting onto a broad avenue that rose up from the end of the Westway towards the long bank of hills that encased north London, whose names – Gospel Oak, Hampstead Heath, Primrose Hill – promised leafy parks, and steep streets furnished with coffee shops.
There was an electric intercom on the gate; I buzzed it and waited. There was no answer. There was nothing so crude as a keyhole, and shards of broken bottles were cemented onto the top of the brick wall. I walked round the block until I found a cul-de-sac that led to the rear wall of the house. Here there was a smaller gate, also with an electronic buzzer, and a CCTV camera peering down at it. When I approached, a single bright light flicked on automatically next to the gate. I dragged the light and warmth out of it and curled them into the palm of my hand, immersing the gateway area in darkness again, except for the trapped glow between my fingers. Once again, I tried the electric buzzer, and got no answer. I ran my finger over the wood of the gateway, feeling the polished sheen on the black paint, until a faint, cool buzz beneath my fingers murmured tantalising hints of electricity not too far away. In place of a keyhole, Simmons had substituted an electromagnetic lock. I pressed my hand against the door and pulled gently at the electricity in the lock. It sparked into my fingers with an angry pop, burning a small hole through the wood of the gate; then wriggled its way into the earth at my feet as I chucked it aside. The gate swung open.
Inside the high walls, there was no light; so I let some of the trapped white glow from the outside lamp slip from my fingers. It rolled across heavy flagstones, over shallow curving walls planted out with blooming purple and yellow bulbs; it swept round the trunk, and tangled in the leaves of a weeping willow; and displaced the shadows around a hulking concrete-pretending-to-be-stone griffin which crouched outside the back patio doors, its black eyes staring angrily at the garden gate, its tongue licking the air in front of its-nose. A dry yellow and brown crust had settled over part of it, like skeletal moss, and on either side of it was a low wooden bench looking onto a scorched area of brick that had the dismal semblance of somewhere you held barbecues. I found the whole tableau – the well-maintained garden, the bright flowering bulbs, the civilised layout of the place – slightly unsettling. It would be all too easy to imagine Simmons, the illustrious middle-class wealthy host, serving sausages to the congregation at the local Anglican church on a Sunday, while a wife (who he didn’t have) chatted nicely to the vicar. As a semblance of what normality was meant to be, we found it disturbing. Uninspiring.
I scurried past the frozen griffin as quickly as possible and went to the back patio door. The lights were all out in the house, and a burglar alarm clung to the second-floor wall above the sloping roof of what looked like a dining room, glassed round on three sides with windows onto the garden. Throwing the last of my light ahead of me in a buzzing sphere of white neon, I felt the surface of the back door until I found the keyhole – at last, a keyhole! I rummaged in my bag for the set of blank keys I’d bought almost on my first day of new life, fumbling through them until one fell into my fingers that looked of the right make. Having put it into the lock, I was pleased at how quickly it assumed the appropriate shape – far easier to unlock things using tools, I was reminded, than when it was just you, murmuring gentle placations by yourself. I twisted, and opened the door.
The alarm immediately sounded – but not in the angry, distressed manner of a security system faced with an intruder; merely the low warning bell of a timer counting down to an emergency. I hurried down the corridor until I found the controller for the alarm – a keypad set into the wall. A numeric keypad was the last thing I really wanted, since the kind of magics that can predict the numbers embedded in a circuit tend to require preparation, consideration and a lot of time in execution, being of a subtler nature than the usual fistfuls of power magicians like to throw around. I found myself wishing I had the kind of equipment that all spies seemed to be assigned in prime-time BBC drama – number-breakers, silenced pistols, safe-cracking devices, fingerprint scanners or even a plastic sonic bloody screwdriver. In the event, I fell back on guesswork. Hoping for the best, I rubbed my hands together, feeling the friction build up between them. When the resulting warmth began to buzz, I caught it in the palm of my hand, feeling the hairs stand up all the way along my arm from the static around my fingers, and slammed my palm as hard as I could into the keypad. The static jumped from my fingers into the piece of machinery, which gave a loud electric pop, and fell silent.
A wisp of embarrassed black smoke curled out from under the panel. The alarm stopped wailing. Feeling pleased with myself, I felt my way down the corridor until I found a light switch. Turning it on, I saw that the corridor was bare, apart from the alarm keypad and a small wooden table below it. Not a painting, not a book, not a mouldy tax demand; not a thing. I walked into what I guessed, by the empty brick fireplace, was the living room; and there, too, was nothing. The shelves were bare, the walls bare, and only the faintest indent in the cream-coloured carpet remained to suggest that a scrap of furniture had ever sat on it. The bedroom showed the same rough outline of a bed that had once been present, and the odd faded patch on the wall where a picture had hung; but other than those hints, there was nothing to suggest that the house was anything other than a hollow frame. The cupboards in the kitchen were bare and spotlessly white; the bathroom smelt of bleach. Only when I went upstairs did I find anything – the one object left in the house.
It sat on the floor of what had probably been the master bedroom, a spacious, irregularly shaped area with a window onto a west-facing balcony. It was propped up on the floor by its own open shape, by the sturdiness of its expensive, thick paper. On the side facing the door someone had written in familiar handwriting: For Matthew.
I sat down with it on the floor of an alcove away from the windows, wary of deceit. It read:
My dear Matthew,
If you truly wish to continue with this course of events, I cannot prevent you. But I hope you will at least give me the opportunity to speak with you and talk about why you have returned so full of the determination to be my enemy, when I have never meant anything but the best towards you. If you would be interested, I am attending this event and hope you receive this note in time to join me.
With ever the best regards,
Robert
P.S. Out of concern for his safety, I have removed Mr Simmons from the country and hope you will respect his innocence in anything that may lie between us enough to not endanger him as you did Mr Lee and Mr Khay by your actions.
Between the pages of the note was a small piece of yellow paper. I read it, folded it back up, put it in my pocket and, leaving the note behind, went downstairs.
What did I feel? A mixture of anger and disappointment, certainly; nothing else could explain the tension in my back and the sudden ache in my eyes. Curious, maybe? And perhaps, somewhere at the back of my mind, perhaps just a moment of uncertainty, perhaps if you stopped and thought, perhaps just…
Keep moving, that was the rule. Stop and think too long and you might never move again.
Simmons’s house had clearly been emptied out by someone who understood that it wasn’t enough for you to vanish – your life had to disappear too. Not just physical absence was needed, but an absence of any property or other evidence that might give your tracker a sense of how you thought, what you thought and where it might have led you. More to the point, someone had taken immense trouble to remove all personal traces that might be turned to a more magical form of pursuit.
On the other hand, not for nothing had I spent nine months as a cleaner for Lambeth Borough Council.
I tried the bathroom. The shower was immaculate, the bath glowed with polished white pristine hygiene. If it was possible for a toilet to smell of lemons, his managed it – even the ventilation shaft had been dusted to shining silver perfection.
Some things, however, never change. I squatted underneath the sink and, grunting at the stiffness of the stainless steel bit, unscrewed the bottom of the waste pipe. As I pulled the part free, a splash of turgid, smelly water spilled out. A pool of water lay at the bottom of the pipe-end, but it too smelt of bleach, and the edges were largely free of the thick, muddy dirt you might usually find. I ran a finger round the rubber seal at the top, and came away with a layer of slime. I slid my nail under the seal and pulled it away from the metal of the pipe and, as I did, something so thin it was almost imperceptible moved, catching the light for a moment. I peered closer, the smell of the pipe enough to make my eyes water, and turned the pipe until the thing flashed again with a dull, dark gleam. Pinching it between thumb and forefinger, I lifted it away. It was short, might once have been almost blond, was stained with dirt and withered from the bleach, but was, despite it all, still very much a single human hair.
That was all I needed.
Back at my hotel, I washed the hair under the hot water tap until it glowed a dull browny-yellow; and, with the tweezers from my penknife, I put it carefully by itself in the middle of the soap bowl. I then put the soap bowl down in the middle of the bedroom floor and went in search of the ingredients for the spell that I needed. I pulled the telephone out of the wall and the telephone wire out of the telephone, and wrapped the wire a few times round the soap bowl to create my protective circle. I bought a packet of ten blank CDs from the local general store and took the top one for my mirror, idly spinning it round on my finger as I considered what power might be most useful.
I settled on a minor spirit, who I felt might be equipped to my purpose and, sitting cross-legged in front of my little bowl with its single human hair, smashed the topmost CD on the table end, took the largest piece from the remnants and with the sharpened point drew a doorway in the air in front of me. Then, in my most commanding voice, I invoked the demon of the lonely night, of the travellers on the midnight train, the lord of the lost parking space, by all the names I could think of, including the shrieking noise of brakes, made at the back of the throat, to call him forth, and by the red light of the “STOP” traffic light that I twined between my fingers and poured into the shard of broken CD until it glowed the colour of newly spilled blood.
The doorway I’d drawn in the air shimmered, wobbled like a mirage. I felt a breath of warmth from it on my face, heard a sound like the swish of tyres through a puddle in an empty road, and the distant rattle of a train heard far off, when the wind is in the right direction. I looked up to the doorway as it started to leach from the colour of the red traffic signal down to an emerald green and just as I thought I saw a figure take shape inside it, there was a knock on my bedroom door.
The bubble of colour winked out in front of me. I swore, the noise snapping out of earshot in an instant, scrambled up and hurried to the door. I left the chain on, and opened it an inch. There was no one outside.
Realisation struck. I turned, raising the shard of broken CD in front of me, but he was already there, emerging out of the darkness in the centre of the room and right in front of me, the fingers of one hand twining round my throat while the other smacked my head back against the door hard enough to knock it shut behind me with a loud bang. His eyes were the amber of traffic lights, his breath the swish of traffic passing on a wet night; his skin had the colour of old chewing gum. A dry warmth rolled off it as he tilted my head back, pressed his fingers into my throat and hissed, over a tongue the shade of uncooked chicken, “A devotee of the lonely traveller, or a fool?”
“Shouldn’t you have come through the other doorway?” I croaked.
His eyes glowed. His clothes were shifting black shadows that, as he adjusted his weight, parted for a moment to reveal nothing but dull orange neon glow underneath, as if his whole body was little more than a collection of trapped lights compressed behind the darkness of his coat. “I am the lord of the lonely traveller, I am the last passenger on the train, I am the shadow when you close the garden gate, the stranger in the dark, the…”
“As far as I’m aware,” I said sharply, “I summoned you knowing all this, spirit. So, please” – I closed one hand around his wrist and with the other I levelled the gleaming shard of broken CD against his throat – “give it a break.”
A smile. His teeth weren’t even solid, but lumps of pale, half-chewed bubble gum that formed sticky fibres between his thin blue lips. A wisp of breath that rattled like train wheels across shining new rails, a creak in his bones as he shifted his weight like the sound of a rusted gate banging in the wind. “You threaten me?”
“Ah, well, this isn’t any ordinary bit of broken plastic,” I said quickly. “This is a piece of broken reflective plastic.” I held it up quickly before he could shy away, pressing it in front of his eyes. There was a flash of orange-pink neon so bright and so sharp it hurt as it went into my head, and burst the light bulb in the middle of the room with its force. From the creature’s lips came a wail like the horn of a lorry just before it’s about to crash. He curled back, instantly cowed, crouching animal-like and raising his hands to shield himself from the sight in the broken shard. His whimpers were the nagging sound of a distant car alarm in the night. If there was one thing this spirit could not abide, it was his own reflection, showing him for what he was – nothing at all. You cannot be the lord of the lonely travellers and be in the company of your own reflection.
He whispered in a voice like a pigeon’s feather on the wind, “What do you wish, master?” He squatted by the end of the bed. Through the loose shadowy folds of his huge coat, the dull glow of orange-pink neon poured out of any opening like the shimmer of lamplight under a doorway – bright enough in the dark to see everything in black and white, except for the light itself, which shone with chemical colours.
I crouched down in front of him. As spirits went, I could feel a certain sympathy for this one, a reluctant affinity for the magics that had spawned it. They were much the same powers that had created the Bag Lady, the Beggar King and, perhaps to an extent, the angels of the wire, the forgotten lives left in the telephone. Where there was life, there was magic, and even in the lonely tread of the commuter, and the fearful breath of the traveller by himself in an unknown place, there was a very special kind of life; and from that life, there was the spirit.
“I’m looking for someone.”
“Does he travel alone?”
“Who doesn’t?” I answered with a smile.
His eyes glanced up to me, and in the dark they glowed with the dull red illumination of a traffic light. “You know me,” he whispered. “I hear your footstep in my belly; you have offered me your prayers.”
“Everyone has offered you a prayer at some point or another. When they’re alone, in the dark, even the SAS probably jump at the sound of a stranger, or the unexplained door slamming in the empty house, or the tinkling of glass somewhere near by; and when they do, their thoughts are with you.”
His lips curled in what might have been a smile, but came out a sticky, gummy sneer. “Who do you wish to find?”
“The man who owns that hair,” I said, pointing at the soap dish in the middle of the floor.
The lord of the lonely traveller – whose name could only be pronounced properly in the shriek of brakes or the last rumble of the train engine before it’s turned off at the final stop, but who was known to everyone through the swish of distant traffic in the rain, or the sigh of a breath condensing in a lonely night – leant forward, eyes narrowing as he studied the hair. He pinched it between two fingertips, then licked it slowly, and carefully, his saliva hanging off it in a thick yellowish goo. His eyes half closed, and he whispered, “A traveller, so many travellers…”
“Where is he?”
“He runs, his footstep is sweet, a tumtetumtetumtetumte… he is chased! So afraid of the dark, and a man who used not to fear; but now he runs, he runs from the monster in the night.”
“Where does he run to?”
“He is praying.”
“To you?”
“They all pray to me, when they are alone and afraid,” he whispered, eyes flashing. “Even those who think they are brave.”
“What does he say?”
His tongue rippled across the thin blue edge of his lips, and he let out a sigh of contentment, shoulders relaxing to let more neon light spill through his clothes. “The monster is close, his feet on the tarmac and it sings to the time of his rhythm … he prays for life; so sorry, so sorry, he says, so sorry that it went like this, forgive me in the night, forgive me the past, forgive me time and forgive me… forgive me… oh, his fear is so bright! He fears the blue-eyes!”
“None of this is helping me,” I declared. “I’d be happier with points on a compass or GPS coordinates, please.”
“He fears you,” whispered the creature, curious as he studied me. “He fears the blue-eyes, and prays… so sorry… so sorry …”
“Where?!” I shouted.
“On the sea. He is at sea.”
“A boat?”
“Salt and endless dark falling, and the smell of petrol from the engine towers pumping out heat into the cold wind.”
“A ferry?”
“Would you like to hear his prayer, blue-eyes?”
“Why, what does he say?”
“He says… we be light, we be life, we be fire! We sing electric flame, we rumble underground wind, we dance heaven! Come be we and be free! Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me and have mercy in the night, make me a shadow on the wall but do not let him eat my heart, forgive me…”
“He prays to the blue electric angels?” we said, incredulous.
“And to me,” he murmured.
“And he’s on a boat?”
“Crossing the seas. Oh” – a look of sadness moved across the creature’s face – “but he’s not alone. How sad, how sad not to be alone on a night of such cold winds and hidden thoughts…”
“Who is with him?”
“It runs silently across the water’s edge…”
“Enough of this crap!” I raised the reflective edge of the plastic in warning. “Here’s me, sorcerer, pissed off and blue-eyed and not in the mood; so you tell me who is with him like you had a grasp of concise necessity; otherwise I’ll bind you to a bloody hall of bloody mirrors!”
“He doesn’t have a name that I can hear.”
“Give me your best shot at a description.”
The creature thought about it, tilting its head up towards the roof to find inspiration, while cracks of pinkish light crawled up round the edge of its neck, running through its skin. “The one who travels with him… he is hungry,” he said. “He is so very, very hungry.” A quizzical tone entered his voice. “He knows I’m here. He wonders why I watch, since he does not travel alone. He reaches out and says, what are you? Why have you come? He smiles. He says, I see blue fire in your strings, and stretches a wing and…”
“Leave!” I shouted.
“So hungry…”
“Leave right now! Piss off, be dismissed, get your arse banished out of here, get out!”
A tightening of shadows around the edge of the creature’s face? A sunken quality to the eyes, a twisting of the pinkish light around its limbs? I wasn’t about to take the risk. I picked up my stack of blank CDs, and threw them at the spirit. The orange-neon glow split and reflected off the spinning disks as they fell around it, and the lord of the lonely travellers screamed with the sound of a plane crashing from the sky, of brakes snapping on a speeding bike, of the emergency cord being pulled on the train. It raised its arms above its face while cracks of burning light spread through its skin and blazed the colour of sodium street lamps, so bright I couldn’t look, so loud the windows shook, and, its face a mask of surprise and light, it shattered into drifting pinkish shadows that skittered across the wall, oozed out under the door, and were gone.
I grabbed up my belongings, and left that hotel without looking back; and didn’t sleep until the comfort of daybreak.
In the afternoon I phoned Charlie. He said Sinclair was sleeping and wasn’t about to be woken. I said I thought Simmons had left the country and was on a ferry. He said he’d look into it. I didn’t mention the shadow. Nor did I mention the folded piece of yellow paper and the note For Matthew that I’d found at Simmons’s house. I didn’t see any need to let him know.
The yellow piece of paper advertised a play; and at this play, I assumed, would be Bakker. I took only one precaution before going: I went to Bond Street to find a jeweller.
His name was Mr Izor, he was American, but, he assured me, despite this he still had perfect taste. We wondered whether something as subjective as taste could be “perfect”, but decided not to ask further and let our eyes drift over the sparkling mass of diamonds, gold and silver watches, necklaces, rings, earrings and miscellaneous pins that were on display in a dozen cases around the plush, red-carpeted room. Even the door handles looked like they were gold, but Mr Izor assured us when he saw our stare, “Oh, Jesus, no; manager’s way too cheap.”
I told him what I wanted. He said, “OK, different, who’s the lucky girl? Or is it a lucky guy?”
I said, “I want it to sacrifice to the spirits of the wishing-water in the direst of emergencies; but should I ever meet the lucky girl or the lucky guy, I’ll be sure to come back to your shop for advice.”
“Don’t go with the diamonds; tasteless, totally common.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
“Guys like silver.”
“Thanks. What about my current needs?”
He found it for me, eventually. It was about the size of a two-pound coin and cost a figure that made me shudder. Sums that large, I decided, shouldn’t be paid using a credit card, let alone one that wasn’t real. For the first time since my resurrection, I felt a pang of guilt at my lifestyle, and the credit card/prostitute ad that I was using to steal the things I now loosely called my belongings. The attraction of a home to call my own was suddenly a hunger, like the need for fish and chips when hungry and having just smelt vinegar. It stuck in my mind and in my belly, a sense of emptiness.
I bought the thing anyway. We told ourself that our need out-weighed the damage, if any, to the jeweller’s business. We told ourself that all the way to the theatre.
The show was by Waterloo Bridge.
I bought a ticket for £10 from the returns queue and was assigned a seat in a box-like black theatre, two floors up beside a large red button with the alluring notice “THIS BUTTON DOES NOTHING” stuck up next to it, a label that troubled and confused us throughout almost the entire performance. I was wedged into a seat between a polite couple from Cambridge wearing a business suit and pearls respectively, and a pair of old ladies in huge padded jackets who didn’t once meet my eye and looked disapproving at every irreligious reference in the play, of which there were plenty. The play was full of torture and swearing and stories, in roughly even measures, creating a strange mixture as it floated from physical violence to battles of grammatical wit to renditions of things that should have been for children, if you took out some of the decapitation; so that by the interval we were thoroughly befuddled, and strangely entranced. We bought a chocolate ice cream then, despite the pain it caused me to pay so much for it, because it seemed to be the thing that was done, and because our stay in hospital had taught us that ice cream was a thing never to be refused, in any weather. Then we stood out on the balcony and watched the reflection of the tourist cruisers’ lights on the river, the buses on the bridge, the tracery of little blue lamps in the trees along the bank, and listened to the comments of other people with their ice creams on the terrace below.
“Well…”
“… yes…”
“I think he’s awfully good, don’t you?”
“Well…”
An audience of disconcerted people, I decided – they didn’t know if what they were seeing was good, bad, clever, inane, witty or crude, and this was, I decided, probably a good thing. They could walk away after the second half and not know what to think, and for that, they would probably think about it all the more.
The bell rang for the second half. I filed back in and resisted the temptation to press the big red button, until my fingers itched with desire. There was a buzz on the air, a tingling all of its own quality, a thick swish of bronze potential, elusive, edgy, aware, as the play resumed and all those minds concentrated on a small space with three shouting men in it, a focus and a magic so absorbing that we almost didn’t notice ourself being sucked in, becoming part of that state of crackling hot thought that filled the theatre.
Just an edge, just a moment, a blink of green awareness, a flash of a thought not entirely directed on the play?
Hard to tell.
The play’s hero, although it wasn’t a term that could really be applied, murdered his brother for killing by stories, and was eventually shot for his pains. A nicer outcome didn’t seem… right, although we couldn’t say why. The bad cop turned out to be not such a bad cop; though, again, “bad” left no space for the imagination. We decided that the best thing was not to try to guess, and to be unsettled. It was, strangely, a sensation we enjoyed, although we could not understand why we should be elated by such unease and uncertainty about the last three hours’ experience, as if it was the adrenalinrush of fear.
When the lights went up and the applause faded down, the lady to my left said, “Well!”
The man to my right said, “Interesting.”
The tubby woman in the row in front of me said, “Oh, he was really very good!”
I picked up my coat and bag and joined the long shuffle of a large audience trying to get through a small door to fresher air. As we walked past the big red button, our hand reached out instinctively and, as fast as only the spark can fly, we pressed it.
Nothing happened.
My face turned red and, head bowed, we sidled away, feeling all the more bemused.
I felt no desire to wait and see if anyone might approach me in that place – after such a sleepless night, I wasn’t in the mood for games or deceits. Besides, there was a safety in the crowd; I doubted Bakker would be interested in harming me in front of so many people, assuming he could spot me at all.
A flash of awareness, a bright spark of familiarity among the buzz of voices.
“Yes, obviously a use of religious imagery…”
“… very interesting…”
“… what have we seen him in?”
“Come be and be…”
I turned on the stairs and nearly walked into a lady with curly white hair wearing more padded silk than it seemed plausible that her small, bony frame could support without tottering or getting a rash. I apologised and kept moving with the flow of the crowd down the stairs. At the bar in the halfway foyer I paused while waiters swept away used plastic cups and champagne glasses, and scanned the crowd; but the density of people I had counted on to protect me also obscured anything that might be familiar. I kept walking. On the ground floor, a sign said, “If your bag is bigger than this” – a square the size of a small suitcase – “you MUST leave it at the cloakroom.” I patted my satchel, roughly twice the size indicated, which had stayed next to me all the time, and felt a thrill of guilty, criminal pleasure.
I let out a long breath and tried to clear my head. The difficulty I had in focusing on anything other than stories and images and happy green pigs – another theme of the play – hinted at a further reason why Bakker’s note had suggested the theatre; it was hard to sense any power in that place, that didn’t flash in the crowd itself with a transient glow. A trick, perhaps, to lure us to a place where we, more than ever I would have been before, risked becoming lost in a stranger spell?
“Mr Swift?”
The voice came from behind me, and our immediate instinct was to throw our bag at it and worry afterwards about what spell could follow. However, the owner of the voice looked too bemused and unarmed to merit the black eye that our jerking elbow desired to give, being a young woman wearing the heavy, slightly embarrassing T-shirt of a theatre stewardess. She said again, “Mr Swift?”
“Yes?” I stuttered, surprised to find I hadn’t answered already.
“Your uncle asked if you could help him.”
“My…?”
“With the wheelchair.”
“Right. Yes. Of course. Where is he?”
“He’s attending the sponsors’ drinks.”
“Sponsors…”
“Mr Swift?”
“Yes?”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes. Fine. I didn’t realise he was such a patron of the arts.”
“He said to tell you not to mind the crowd. He was very insistent I said so.”
“I’m sure he was. Could you show me the way?”
The sponsors’ drinks were in a bar with almost no windows, and a lurid decor of mirrors, uncomfortable furniture and odd angles. Men in black and white served champagne, and nibbly things made from tiny slices of fish and puffs of pastry. The theatre clearly needed a lot of sponsors to fund its plays, and some of the rich and the cultured had spilled out onto the landing. There, they sipped their drinks and indulged in banter about how he had actually slept with her back when they were running the theatre, and the only reason they put on such old-fashioned plays was because of the influence of them.
In the face of so many people’s importance, we felt small – and so, rebellious. We were pleased that our coat was scruffy, stained with faded paint, that our satchel was soaked through with ink marks and that our hair was badly combed; we were grateful for the looks of uncertainty and unease in the face of our charity-shop trousers and thrown-away trainers; and I was glad, just a bit, to see how one or two of the more discerning theatregoers flinched away from the blueness of our eyes.
In one corner a cluster of champagne-quaffing men and women were gathered round a shape. I went towards it, knowing instinctively what was behind that wall of silk and linen. As I approached, I heard the voice, still rich and wry like it had been when I was a boy, with that humorous air of putting on a performance and loving it, the attention and the buzz of being admired, that showmanship he’d always relished, back before he was in the wheelchair: “Tell me if you spot an anonymous, we can ask if they’re in it for the drinks as well.”
I leaned past the nearest member of the crowd, and looked down.
It was a new wheelchair; odd, perhaps, that this should be the first thing I spotted. Perhaps other realisations were also there in my unconscious, but too afraid to come out and make themselves known – whatever the explanation, that’s what I saw first. It was a stylish thing, all light titanium and smooth edges, tailor-made to his shape, unlike the crude hospital wheelchair I’d last seen him in; he wore it like a model might wear a pair of glasses, as if at any moment he might leap out of it to a cry of “Why, Mr Bakker, you’re beautiful!”, and amaze the audience with his agility and strength. It didn’t look like a tool for dealing with his paralysis, nor the thing in which he would almost certainly die, but just a piece of metal clothing, or some family-inherited piece of furniture that he’d sat in as a lively child.
We were surprised at how relaxed and friendly he looked: a rich old gentleman who loved the theatre and wanted to spread that love. Despite my memories of how he once was, throughout years and years of acquaintance, the sense we’d had of him when he’d called to us in the telephone and begged us to come and give him some of our strength had been of a withered, hulking thing, a black spot of consciousness just beyond our reach, who we had shied away from as he extended his thoughts into our domain. But here, we were astonished to see his smile, even brighter than the sense of his magic that we had tasted in the past.
He noticed me the moment I saw him. He kept on talking, eyes darting to my face, and then away, smile still in place, chatting to a lady in gold earrings and a shimmering dress to match, about the tragic trend towards revivals rather than original art in the West End, and whether the dumplings in Chinatown were to be trusted. To our surprise, we found ourself getting interested, curious to hear his opinions as he talked on about theatre and music and food – things that I’d always meant to learn about, but had never had the time.
It was only at a natural pause in the conversation – and it was quite clearly a full stop imposed politely at the end of a theme – that he looked us straight in the eye and said, “Hello, Matthew. I’m glad you could make it.”
“Hello, Mr Bakker.”
“I don’t think you know anyone here, yes?” The smile, still bright, a little laugh as he looked round at the people gathered around his chair and, God help us, they laughed too, feeding off his presence and character as if he was weaving an enchantment even then – and perhaps he was. There was a gentle tracery of power about him, subtle and hard to distinguish – but they laughed when he laughed, even though they did not know who I was or why I looked afraid.
“No. I don’t think we’ve met.” We sounded empty. We didn’t know what we were meant to put into the words.
“I may be rude, then, and skip the introductions; good manners are important but when there’s this many people the names tend to just blend into one unless you know who you’re talking to. Everyone, this is Matthew – my nephew, in a way.”
“‘In a way’?” said one lady in a voice that could have resonated glass, and now I noticed the little tape recorders in odd pockets, hints and clues that this night was about more than the drinks and that everyone was on display. Another reason, perhaps, to feel safe in the crowd? I couldn’t imagine Bakker doing anything in front of the press – however, I still didn’t feel inclined to sample the champagne.
“A sort of godson, nephew, surrogate cousin relationship,” explained Bakker airily. “I knew Matthew when he was just a spotty kid, didn’t I?”
“Yes. You did.”
“Do you like the theatre?” asked the same woman, favouring me with a glance like two hot needles in the eye.
“What we’ve seen, very much, although it is a little frightening. I never really got into it in the old days.”
“Frightening?”
“You let yourself fall into a spell, willingly,” we explained. “You know that it is there and you allow yourself to be deceived. It is a powerful magic that can enchant someone who is knowingly aware of the illusion.”
“The magic of theatre!” chuckled a man through a monstrous fly-trap of a moustache.
“Even bad plays?” asked the woman.
“We don’t really know how to judge.”
“Matthew,” said Bakker quickly, “would you like something to drink?”
We met his eyes squarely. “No. Thank you.”
“To eat? I think there’re vol-au-vents of some kind.”
“No.”
“Well, please yourself,” he said with a shrug. “Forgive me, all – Matthew, could you wheel me in the direction of the bathroom, please?”
I did wheel him in the direction of a bathroom, but took him no further than the foyer outside. We were still in comfortable proximity to the buzzing noise of sociability, but far enough away so that the conversation was merely a pitch and yaw of polite sound, rather than distracting words and sentiments to be understood. He put on the brakes of his chair and smiled at me, gesturing at a staircase with an inviting hand. I sat down on one of the steps so that my face was level with his, leaning my elbows on my knees and bending in towards them to create a small target, huddling like a child, like I’d sat in front of him all those years before.
He didn’t speak, just sat in the chair and studied me head to foot, the smile not fading as he raised and lowered his head, quite clearly observing my clothes, my face, my eyes, my expression, reading everything about me and taking it all in, without a glimpse of feeling either way. We let him look and waited, patiently.
Finally he said, “You look well.”
I grunted, unimpressed.
“You probably need a haircut,” he added.
I resisted the temptation to run my fingers through my hair at his glance, but only just.
“Your coat – it’s not quite the old one, is it?”
I shook my head.
“But still enchanted. A delicate, subtle whiff, yes? Anonymity, the beige jacket of anyone in the crowd. Not quite invisibility – but close enough.”
“It’s been to the cleaners a bit.”
“It’s a good coat. A sorcerer should always have a good coat, with deep pockets and proper waterproofing. Only an idiot wastes their time trying magically to ward against the rain – getting soggy socks is important.”
“Why?” I said, knowing the answer from the olden days but still wanting to ask.
“So that when you get home you can take them off and put them up in front of the fire and let your clothes steam, while drinking a hot cup of tea and feeling your skin dry out of all its wrinkles.”
“That’s important?”
“Of course it is,” he said with a tight smile. “It is a reminder that we are part of our own flesh, not a blazing magical fire in the sky. Or a signal in a wire.”
We smiled and looked down, studying our hands, stretching them to feel the tension in our skin. We said, “How long have you known?”
“Known what?”
“About us.”
“I don’t know that I do know, yet. I hear rumours, of course. From the seers who I have in the basement listening all the time for the voices of the powers whose blood is formed of surplus strands of life, I hear it reported that at such a time, on such a night, the voices of the blue electric angels buzzing in the telephones winked out, vanished like they’d never been there. I hear that San Khay’s body was found among the corpses of rats, and that on a none-too-special evening at McGrangham’s pit, a stranger with bright blue eyes, whom no one recognised, fought against Guy Lee and won, and that when he did, his skin burnt with blue fire. This, I think, is what computer nerds call data, rather than information. Trickles of digital fact, just waiting to be interpreted into the bigger picture.”
“What do you want to know?”
“You’re asking me?”
“Yes,” we said, surprised to find how calm we sounded.
“I want to know… if there’s anything of my apprentice left alive.”
“What?”
“I would like to know if you’ve hurt Matthew.”
“You want what?” I squeaked. “To know if I’m hurt?”
“He was my apprentice,” replied Bakker calmly. “I wish to be assured of his well-being.”
“It’s me! It’s bloody me! Short of having been fucking murdered two years back, do I look like I’ve been hurt?”
A hesitation on Bakker’s face, a twitch of doubt; then a polite smile. “For all I know you are nothing but a demonic parasite infecting his skin, using his memories to pretend to be human. Since what I know of the angels is an entity hungry for life, experience and sense, blazing its presence across the world with a bright fury, such an occurrence is not impossible. Matthew could be dead, and you could be nothing but a replica of him, a crude imitation that doesn’t know what it means to be alive, really alive.”
“You patronising, hypocritical, miserable bastard.”
For a moment, the smile widened. “That sounds, at least, like the apprentice I knew.”
“Whatever I say, you’re going to see nothing but the angels, aren’t you?”
“Why?”
“Perhaps because we are what you want to see.”
“Why should that be? You think I’m pleased at what’s happened to my apprentice? Glad to discover the kid I taught is now possessed by the spirit of telephone interference?”
“We think that you are dying, Mr Bakker,” we said simply. “We think that you’ve been dying all these years, and you’re terrified of it; and we think that when you tried to coax us out of the wire all those years ago, you wanted us for more than just a dance in the fire. Why don’t you swallow a piece of paper, like Lee did?”
“Necromancy is such a clumsy way to survive – I told you that, almost the first week.”
“I take it then that drinking the blood of the black-mass-baptised babe is out of the question too?”
“My God, what do you make of me?”
“Hungry,” I said, rubbing my eyes to wipe away the fatigue. “So hungry.”
“What does that mean?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Matthew!” He raised his arms in an expansive, open gesture. “I’m the one trying to understand! Am I next? Is that what all this is leading up to?”
“My God, haven’t you seen it? Look at the Tower!”
“This is about the Tower?”
“Haven’t you noticed the bodies, the threats, the extortion, the death, the battles, the…”
“This is about the organisation that I created which, for the very first time, brought together under one roof all magicians, witches, warlocks, voodoo practitioners and… and bloody enchantresses of ancient and mystic lore, united at last, regardless of race, faith, creed, colour, gender, social status or wealth, to protect all magic-users in the city from the bias and bigotry of…”
“It’s a monster! It gobbles up the best of the magicians and spits out the bones in a voodoo way! You really think employing a man whose guards carry guns under their armpits, or a dead necromancer with a sheet of paper down his throat, was going to create a friendly public image? You think it was nice of Lee to wage war against the Whites, or charming of Khay to guard a warehouse full of human organs that were most definitely not for the transplant business? The Tower is a unified organisation – a massive one – and the thing that unites it is fear! Of you! Of your servants and your power and your ambition and your …”
“How dare you judge me? I’d like to say that you were my apprentice and thus should have learnt some respect; but you’re not even that! A blue-eyed demon crawled out of the telephone lines into the skin of someone I used to know – and you speak like this to me?”
Our voices had grown too loud. People were looking towards us, their conversation turning to a low buzz, while curious hearers tried not to be seen snooping. Bakker scowled and put his fingertips together in front of his nose; took in a long breath. Quieter, struggling to control his anger, he said, “You are correct; I have wanted to meet the angels for some time now; but I do not know what purpose you think I had in mind. I wished to study them, to learn about them, to understand what kind of a creature the angels are, nothing more.”
“Hungry,” we muttered, feeling tired and drained. “Hungry.”
“Should have had a vol-au-vent then.”
“The last time we met,” I said, “you said you wanted to summon the angels; you wanted to bring them out of the phone lines into this world. You said you couldn’t hear them any more, that you needed the help of another sorcerer to make the spell work. I asked why you wanted them out of their natural realm, and you said, ‘Because they are alive; because they will not die.’ I asked what you wanted. You said, ‘Life. Just life.’ Did it ever occur to you that there was a reason we didn’t want you to hear us when we played in the wire? Did the thought cross your mind that perhaps the reason you couldn’t hear us any more was because we didn’t want you to? Did you think we were unaware of your attempts to summon us, to pull us out of the wires even before you approached me and asked for my help? What made you think you could just snatch us from our home and bind us to your desires? And Mr Bakker, give me credit for a little imagination. You don’t want to study us; it was quite clear what your aims were. When you taught me you said that the angels were too dangerous to be listened to; that they preached freedom from all restraint, all laws, that they had no conception of responsibility, duty, need or even basic moral principles; that they were free in the purest, most unbound sense. You don’t summon creatures like that to study them. You summon them if you’ve got their song in your head, if you think that perhaps, the freedom that they enjoyed could be yours. Power and fire and light and movement in a simple, cure-all spell.”
“Well,” he replied softly, fingers tight around the arms of his chair, knuckles sticking up through the skin like at any moment they might pop out, “that part at least sounds like my mistaken apprentice.”
“We kept away from you,” we said, “because even then we could sense that there was something about you that did not conform to our sense of what we should be, and what we are. It poured off you then and you stink of it now.”
“And what, tell me,” he half-growled, fighting to keep his voice civil and his face fixed in the polite smile of good company, “is that?”
“Hunger,” we replied. “You do not simply want to study us, you were hungry for it, a starving creature desperately scrabbling for life – but not your life. Ours. You had passed the point where you made a distinction between what others had and what you desired for yourself. We sensed your intent, and I know it.”
He half-lowered his head, tucking in his chin and nodding to himself in silence for a moment. Then he looked up sharply and said, perfectly level, “I’m sorry.”
“You are?”
“I’m sorry for the bad opinion you have of me. I do not know how you have reached this, but I am sorry for your…”
“How I’ve reached it?! I reached it at roughly the same point the first set of claws severed a long list of my arteries! I reached it about the time my blood pressure dropped so low I started to go blind. I reached it at approximately the same moment that the shadow – your bloody shadow – pressed its fingers into my face, stared into my eyes and whispered through my blood on its teeth, ‘Give me life!’ Try that and see how it alters your long-held opinions in a very short time!”
A tremor of confusion on his face. “What?”
“When I walk out of here, do you know the first thing I’m going to do?”
“No.”
“I’m going to find an underground station and sleep in it behind the biggest protective ward I can raise with a travelcard and a good spell until sunrise, so that the creature that you sent after me last time we met has a hard time killing me this time round too!”
“Matthew, what creature? What happened?!”
His voice was pained, shrill, tense. But I didn’t know whether it was from the effort of lying – something I felt sure he could do perfectly well – or a genuine sound of need and upset. And just then, for an instant, we felt a hint of uncertainty, and almost pitied him. But this was what we were here for, what we wanted to know.
“It’s a shadow,” we said. “He has your face.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He comes up out of the paving stones, wherever there’s a thick enough patch of darkness. He killed Patel, Awan, Khan, Akute …”
“A creature? A summoned creature?”
“He has your face, this shadow,” I repeated gently, studying his eyes for any hint of a reaction that wasn’t a trembling uncertainty, tainted with fear. “The night we argued, he attacked me when I was alone, by the river. I’d never seen anything move so fast. He just appeared, bang, right behind me, and he had won before I even had a chance to raise a spell. Now that we are here, he is less certain in what he does. It seems he doesn’t just want to kill; rather, he is interested in what makes us alive. ‘Hello, Matthew’s fire,’ he says; and we are sure that if he wished to kill us he could have done so. But instead he toys, watches, studies, tries to work out what makes us what we are. We can hold him off for a while. But in the end, we doubt there is a way to kill just him, and for what he did to me, and what he wants with us, we will kill him.”
“You… think this creature is connected to me. That’s why you’ve done all this?”
“Yes.”
“Why, because… because it looks a bit like me?” His voice was rising again, I could hear the tight edge in it as he struggled to keep it under control.
“Yes. And because it kills your enemies…”
“My enemies? I have no enemies!”
“The sorcerers who said ‘No’ to the Tower?”
“Do you really think I’d kill someone just because they couldn’t see a good thing when it happened to them? Do you really think I’d hurt you?”
I hesitated and for the first time that evening, reluctantly let myself think about it, the certainty draining away like blood from a corpse.
“I don’t know,” I answered finally. “I really don’t.”
“So on a hunch you’re attacking my friends?”
“I have… seen evidence.”
“Evidence? What kind of evidence?”
“Concerned citizens…”
“You’re being used.”
“Dead was dead was dead,” I replied. “No getting round that very personal fact.”
“And you blame me?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Because we argued?!”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe that my Matthew would be so stupid. But perhaps with the consciousness of an entity that is incapable of grasping more than its own flightiness…”
“This is my battle.”
“You’re just using the angels?”
“No.”
“Then how does it work?”
“We are also angry.”
“Why?”
“We… we…”
He looked at me and drummed his fingers impatiently on the armrest of his chair as we struggled to find the answer. “Well?” he spat finally. “You… things of little surplus electricity, you odd remnants of feeling, confused signals, what’s your anger about? You’ve been given a gift beyond the wildest comprehension – you are alive! You’ve been called out of the wires where you were nothing more than a conglomeration of sense, and been given your very own, pre-packaged body, memories, experiences and learning that is probably the only thing that stopped you going mad at the first realisation of sight, sound and senses all for yourself. You have all your power and you have the pleasure of being really alive with it, in perfect, three-dimensional, physically stable sorcerer form! Why should you be angry at such a thing?”
“We… are not… we are glad to have seen this world, to understand at last what it is that the thoughts in our signal meant when they described ‘yellow’ or ‘pink’, to hear sounds as more than a flash of mathematics across our wings when we were travelling in the telephones. But we are not ourself any more. We were free. This world leaves you no capacity for what we were, and … in coming here, we have gained perceptions and… instincts… that we could never before conceive of. But we have lost everything. Everything. We were the blue electric angels, we could be in a thousand places at once and still be whole, we could bounce off the moon for sport and skim the sum total of the world’s knowledge in an instant, ride the signal from America to Zimbabwe without even travelling, the world moving around us, we flew on radio waves three times round the earth and knew every inch of atmosphere that we touched as we went by. We were gods. Now we are just… mortal.”
He nodded slowly. “I see. You really are just a child in this place, aren’t you?”
We didn’t answer.
“A child with a lot of power,” he added, in a reproving voice. “There’s an irony there.”
“How so?”
“When I asked Matthew to help me summon you, he refused. Now that he is you and you are him – a complicated relationship, I’ll grant you – surely he can see the irony.”
“The thought had crossed my mind.”
“Well? Now you know what the angels are like, do you still begrudge me my desire to know them better?”
I thought about it. “Yes,” I said.
“Why?!” He nearly laughed on the word.
“I think… it boils down to intent.”
“That isn’t an argument the judge would respect.”
“You’re going to sue me?”
“Don’t be so shallow.”
“I don’t have a permanent address to send the order to.”
“You vanished for two years!”
“And now you know where I was.”
“No, not entirely.”
“I think you can guess.”
“Guess at what? You say you were killed – now that is something I find hard to get my head round, not least since I taught you so well never to dabble with necromancy; and you don’t look like a man suffering from the skin complaints of the average animated corpse.”
“I’m not particularly inclined to tell you the details, to be honest.”
“Then you’re not really giving me a chance, are you?”
“A chance?”
“Are you here for any better reason?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know why you’re here at all?”
“You invited me.”
“Yes – because you were my apprentice. What’s your reason?”
“I think… I wanted to be absolutely sure.”
“About what?”
“Whether you were as I remembered.”
“And am I?”
“I don’t know.”
“You seem confused.”
“It’s very complicated. Can I… I just want to ask something. I think it might be why I came, in fact.”
“Ask away.”
“Do you really not know that the shadow has your face?”
He met our eyes squarely. “Matthew – or whatever you’d like to be called now – I have no idea what you are talking about.”
We tried to read some sort of truth in him and, for a second, I desperately, desperately wanted to believe it, to say I was sorry and that I’d never do it again and I hoped he could understand and forgive me and we could explain everything and it would all go back to how it was and…
… never going to be how it was…
wouldn’t that mean Lee and Khay were dead for nothing?
… a lorry of bodies…
we simply didn’t know.
I stood up quickly. “Sorry,” I said, not knowing why. “I’m sorry.” I stepped round him quickly and headed for the stairs.
“Matthew, wait!” He struggled to turn the chair in that small space. “Matthew!”
“Matthew?”
The voice came from the doorway of the bar. Its owner held a champagne glass in one hand, and a handbag in the other, its small chain hooked in at her elbow. The bag was the same silvery colour as her dress, and her shoes gave her an extra few inches of height that she didn’t really need. The dress clung to every inch of her like a libidinous friend, revealing that, along with a haircut that had removed all but a short skullcap of red-tinted dark brown hair, she’d lost a lot of weight since I’d seen her last, rounding down in some areas and out in others. She held herself with the same good posture, and had the same relaxed dignity in the curve of her arms and openness of her eyes. But when she looked at me in that moment, as well as weight loss, there was something about Dana Mikeda that meant I hardly recognised her.
I looked from her, to Bakker, to her again, and then, drawn by a nervous tic when I had looked at Bakker, again to him. He stared at me with pain, uncertainty, even a touch of fear on his face, sitting at the top of the stairs on the very edge of his chair, leaning towards me as if at any second he’d leap up and run after me, but unable to do so. It took a moment to realise what was so wrong with that picture – nothing in how he looked or the way he sat, but in the environment around him as, opening one arm out towards me as if trying to call me home, he cast no shadow.
I turned and ran.
I had run once before two years ago, on a cold night quite like this, along the same river, after speaking to the same man. I tried in vain to remember if there’d been a dark reflection around him then, or if the light had just tripped off him like it forgot to notice how he blocked it. My memories were too easily movable – if I wanted, I could paint that image of him in the wheelchair on the night I’d died with no shadow at all, or with a big black shape of himself looming halfway up the back wall. There was simply no way to tell, as my imagination worked overtime, desperately trying to find gaps and plug them, in everything I thought and believed.
I walked as quickly as I could without being called “Thief!” or knocking into the pedestrians still turning out of the theatres, restaurants and concerts along the bank by the river, just like I had two years ago – but this time, I knew what was coming, and watched the image of my own shadow moving under my feet, waiting for it to turn. I was halfway to Hungerford Bridge, the pedestrian walkways bolted onto the original railway bridge lit up like snowy knives, my shadow splintered into a dozen pale blue fractures in front of me from the lights in the trees by the riverside, when a bit at a time, like the hands coming together on a clock face, my shattered shadow started to come together into one pool of me-shaped blackness, and bend towards the light.
That was when I started to run for real. I slung my satchel as securely as I could across my shoulder and turned into the crowd, keeping close to the silvery rail at the edge of the bridge, snatching up some of the cold from it into my fingertips as I ran, breathing the river air as deep as I could; there was power by the river, an intense, old magic that the druids had been drawing on back in the days when wizards had burnt the colour of forest fires and summoned ivy from the paving stones, instead of barbed wire. I breathed it in as deep as I could as I ran, felt its cold seep down into my lungs and into my blood, pushing away some of the heat and pain from my underexercised legs and filling me with a sense of giddy lightness and strength, so that for a moment I knew, knew that I could run the length of the marathon, and if I did my skin would be cold and my mouth wouldn’t be dry. My feet slapped with a dull, metallic shudder as I ran, and we savoured our own confidence as we dodged round late-night tourists on their way from eating deep-fried oysters in Chinatown or heading to a grand hotel on the Strand. We were moving with the satisfaction of a mathematician on the edge of solving some mysterious problem, knowing that it can be done, and done that night.
At the end of the bridge I took the steps down onto the Embankment. I was fearful of how empty the greeny-yellow brick tunnel looked towards Charing Cross station, how easily we might be ambushed in that space, and drawn by the crowd moving towards the station entrance. In the street, with its sandwich bars, cobblers’ shops and dirty news-stands, the sense of the power was different, that we swept up in our fingertips like seaside breeze tickling the palm of our hand. It gave off none of the sense-numbing, consuming balm of the river, but had a lower, hotter sensation to it, through which we could feel the rumbling of trains beneath us and sense, as our legs hit their stride, the pulse of the city. We ran with the rhythm of that road, the commuter’s rhythm, the pace of life you only get around railway stations; that puts the step of every mother, father and child into a regular tum tum tum tum leaving no room to pause and consider which way to go or how to get there, but pushes you on towards your destination with no messing or hesitation, thank you. For a moment, I understood a bit more of the bikers’ magic, that fed off these rhythms embedded in the city’s life and was most potent between 5 p.m. and 7.30 p.m. when the entire population seemed to be travelling, like the changing of the tide; even now, at this hour of the night, I could taste some of its potency lingering on the air.
I ran up the street, catching the smell of the last sandwich in the bar, spilt beer, the whiff of curry powder from the open door of the tandoori, urine from the door of some lawyer’s firm, rubbish being thrown out from behind the back of an Italian restaurant, and sweat mixed with disco music from the basement window of a gym beneath the station, and still my shadow refused to move with the bending of the light.
At Charing Cross station I dodged past the waiting taxis and paused for a moment at the central spike of sludgy-brown stone that, so legend had it, marked the traditionally central point of the city. Legend or not, the thing burnt in my senses in all its spiky, multilayered tastelessness. I stood in front of it and half-closed my eyes, and for a moment, in that place, I could feel every pigeon like they were hairs on my head, blowing in the wind, and taste every rat like their claws were the serrated edges of my own teeth. It was the same sensation I’d felt at the very top of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, or at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, or standing in Temple Bar in Dublin; whether or not the place really was the geographical centre, it was still a hub, magical north on the compass. As such, its power sent a tingle through my skin; and for a moment I knew exactly what it was to be the woman remembering the first kiss of her ex-boyfriend on the number 9 bus, or the train driver leaning on his handle underground, or the child eating chips and watching the departures board in the station, or the sleepy passenger in the plane overhead, looking down at the city beneath him as they circled in to land.
For a moment, I considered diving into that sense, just like so many sorcerers had before me, letting go of their own skins and their own feelings and immersing themselves in the city. Wherever I’d gone, I had been told that it was the most dangerous thing of all for two sorcerers to fight in the very centre of a city, at its heart, where it was so easy to forget why you were there, and just sink yourself into the endless magic available in that place. You’d think you were using the magic to your own ends, until you were found days, sometimes months, later, wandering through the city’s streets with the absolute certainty that you were the 91 bus to Crouch End. There was nowhere better in the city to become lost.
Come be we and be free!
We jerked our eyes open but didn’t move; our thoughts were still tangled in the swirling of dirty newspapers caught in the wake of a passing lorry; in the almost inaudible ticking of the traffic lights; in the slamming of shutters over the supermarket windows of the…
Come be me!
So easy to become lost…
… just sink into the city…
Hello, Matthew’s fire!
We snatched at our satchel to make sure it was still securely there and ran, no longer bothering to see where we were going or whether the cars would stop when we crossed the road; no need to ask or look – we felt the brakes pressing into our flesh, although when we had last checked our arms weren’t made of tyre rubber. We heard the echo of our footsteps from the drains underneath where we were nibbling on dropped chow mein in a cardboard box; we saw ourself running past the side of St Martin in-the-Fields, looking down from our nest in the high gutter of the tall white houses with the big shuttered windows and the poor insulation in the roof that helped keep us warm when it rained – we knew we were running, by all these signs.
We ran towards Trafalgar Square, through the traffic and down the steps into the wide, pedestrianised area around Nelson’s Column and the big stone lions crouched on their pedestals. Pigeons scattered towards the Arab Emirates Bank, and Admiralty Arch, embedded with figures of imperial triumph and heaving bosom, and framing a vista of the Mall and Buckingham Palace. Distances changed perspective in the centre of London: only close to did Nelson’s Column seem to tower up for ever, whereas from a few hundred yards away it seemed scarcely higher than the rooftops around it. From its broad, stepped base, in equal measure I could feel the buzzing, gaudy excitement of Leicester Square, and taste the sedate, patient, weighty magic of St James’s Park, even though in my imagination they had always seemed far apart.
Perhaps because our senses were fired up with fear, again, at Nelson’s Column, we felt that focus of magical energy waiting for our attention, sitting at our feet with a big friendly expression and an open maw full of sense, inviting us to forget that we ran or what it was we fled, but to be instead the beggar sitting by the ATM and the actor taking his final bow in the theatre, or even just the hotness in the theatre lights shining down on the stage; whatever we wanted to be, a part of the city.
I ran my fingers across the smooth side of one of the lions and down the rougher edge of the pollution-crunched stone, centring myself with the reality of those textures beneath my hand.
I am…
we are
Or perhaps…
we am me
Already free, already me. Don’t need to fall tonight.
Catching my breath, I turned and ran on, up towards the imposing pillared entrance of the National Gallery and its modern, glassy extension, ducking into the small passage between the two and bounding up the steps while in the other direction, skater kids rattled down the ramps and leapt over the shallow steps the other way, spinning their boards and making grunting sounds whether or not their manoeuvre had worked.
Leicester Square, even at this time of the night, hadn’t stopped; the doors to the cinemas were still opened wide, though the park with its guardian Charlie Chaplin statue was chained up tight, with the lights of a funfair extinguished. I slowed to a walk and struggled to get my breath; then headed past the Swiss Centre with its terrible clock of musical bells and automated figures, whose tastelessness was, nevertheless, an attraction in itself, being tacky enough to embody the spirit of the whole area. I hurried past ticket touts and music shops, and vendors of woolly hats, umbrellas and plaster models of the Houses of Parliament, until I reached Piccadilly Circus. Traffic whooshed up Shaftesbury Avenue, or slogged resentfully the other way. I slowed to an amble, and paused by the sculpted horses exploding out of their fountain on one side of Piccadilly Circus. Running my fingers through the water, I watched the reflection on a hundred pennies at the bottom, as they caught the lights from the flashing billboards over head, reflecting from red to blue to gold to green to burning white as the messages rolled in their metres-high illuminated font. I dug in my bag until I found the jeweller’s little purple box from Bond Street, then took out the single gold coin, heavy and cool in my palm. If you didn’t know it was gold you might have thought it was just a tacky plastic badge painted a certain colour; but there was no doubting the weight, or the texture of the metal. I closed my eyes, gripped it until my fingers hurt, and made a wish. Then, still holding it in my clenched fist, I stuck my arm into the water up to the elbow joint, and let the coin go.
I felt the movement in the air and turned instinctively, knowing what it would be; I had felt the air change like that once before, and I had dismissed it and died – the same mistake would not happen twice.
Hunger was still only halfway out of the paving stones and rising, emerging out of the shadow of a lamp-post in a thin, pale line, his shape only half there, coat billowing in and out of shadowy existence around him. His claws, however, were real and solid and black enough as I raised my arms and caught him by the wrists even as he slashed down towards my face with his curved fingertips. His arms were ghostlike; I could see the traffic barrier behind them, and through his chest a rickshaw man pedalling his latest fare towards Soho, as Hunger rose into the air and I turned to face him.
I hissed, “Do you really want to fight here? In this place, with so many lights and people and so much power? Do you really think this is wise?”
“You forget,” he replied, and his breath was like the cold blast of air when a train is about to arrive at an underground platform. “They will never see me, nor know who I was, when I drink your fire!”
He twisted his arms in my grip; my hands had no difficulty encircling his wrists, they were so thin. But as he twisted, his fingers stretched down to brush my skin, and his black claws gouged through my clothes and into my arms. There was no sudden shock of pain; he dug the tips of his black fingers into my skin with the slow inexorability of a knife cutting into cold butter: a laborious work of strength but one that he would do, breaking the skin, the capillaries, the muscle, the tips of his fingers brushing bone and…
I think I must have called out as my blood rose under his hands, seeping out and staining my jacket an odd dark purple in that reflective, changing neon light, because he smiled and whispered, “I do not care for the rules of your kind; that is what it means to be free, yes? You drove me back too many times, little sorcerer and his blue flames!”
But even though his strength was unstoppable, and I could feel the dull pain starting to throb up my elbows and into my chest as his grip tightened and tightened and I struggled to hold on to his wrists in turn, he still wasn’t all there. He didn’t have feet, merely a trailing-off of coat into the shadow of the lamp-post, as if he was a seal halfway out of water; and his chest was still an incoherent grey smear across the air, not real or solid at all.
I said through gritted teeth, “Make a wish?”
“To feast richly,” he replied. “Always, to feast!”
“Probably have to invest more than a ten pence, then.”
For a moment, he didn’t understand. Then a glint of comprehension entered the sunken, half-there, half-gone eyes. His glance darted up to the horses rearing behind me in their fountain, then to my face, then to the wet sleeve beneath his grasp, turning pinkish red with my blood. His hand was too thin, I realised, too insubstantial even to notice that the thing it held was damp. We grinned triumphantly and exclaimed, “We know now that you are weak!” and with every ounce of strength we had, with every flux of power and magic we could find, digging our toes so hard into the soles of our shoes that the pavement hummed beneath us, we clenched our fingers around the ghosts of his wrists, and turned. We heaved him to one side and threw him straight towards the fountain, twisting ourself head first towards the water line and dragging him along with us. As he was pulled towards it, he stretched. His legs melted into a grey blur within the shadow of the lamp-post, then elongated like elastic pulled taut. We plunged his head into the water, which burst into steam as he touched it, boiled and bubbled around us while he thrashed, his fingers instantly coming free from my arms and lashing up towards my face. But he was blind while his head was driven down as far as I could push it, towards the floodlight lamp that burnt towards the horses rearing overhead. I snarled, “Make a wish, and let there be light!”
And the stretching shadows of the lamp-post thinned, paled, fled. The floodlights scorching upwards at the horses took on the colour of an angry equatorial sun; the neon lights above Piccadilly Circus spat sparks and grew brighter and brighter, until I had to close my eyes against them; and still the intensity of it grew through my eyelids as every car lamp, brake light, street light, shop light and reflective surface lit like a newly born sun, burning away every shadow and hint of darkness so that for a second, in the middle of the night, it was daytime.
The cold slippery head beneath my hands vanished. It disappeared so suddenly that I staggered and nearly fell forward into the icy bubbling water of the fountain. I heard a sharp electric pop nearby, then quickly dragged my hands out of the water as beneath its surface the floodlights brightened so that the horses’ eyes above me seemed mad, and then snuffed out, the burning wires of the lamps withering into scorched black worms. I heard a snap and a crack like lightning on a hot, rainless summer’s day, and the skid of traffic as the headlamps of vehicles all around, heated to bursting by the intensity of light pouring out of them, burst. Above the junction of Regent Street and Shaftesbury Avenue the neon lights grew too bright to look at and exploded, showering the street below with hot sparks and light, hurling out fragments of glass. As a final, apologetic encore, the street lamps snuffed out, plunging the Circus into panic-struck darkness.
I sat on the rim of the fountain’s basin as Piccadilly Circus exploded into chaos. As the lights around them popped out into nothing, the pedestrians went quickly from yelping with surprise, to getting on their mobiles and telling their friends and family in rushed, excited voices, that they’d just seen the most amazing thing. The more enterprising of them rushed to take photos with maximum exposure, or film the still-glowing lamps of Piccadilly in contrast to the dead lights of Haymarket, hoping to flog their images to the London Evening Standard. The traffic came to a standstill, after one 38 bus driver, seeing his lights explode, had swerved across Shaftesbury Avenue so that his front wheels had skidded up onto the pavement. With his bus being eighteen metres long, all other traffic had been stopped in both directions. Some drivers trapped by the bus blared their horns; others, seeing that order wasn’t about to be restored, got out to buy coffee and a doughnut from the nearby twenty-four-hour store, paying by torchlight. As with the best curiosities in London, the crowd gathered in half the time it took the police to arrive, congregating to see the strange thing of the lights not being on, and to speculate on what it was that could have blown so many bulbs at once. The police cars eventually managed to crawl their way through via the back streets of Soho, the sirens being audible several minutes before the cars became visible, preceded by several officers in yellow fluorescent jackets, who’d despaired and climbed out to try and make sense of the situation on foot.
As all this went on, I sat and rolled up my shirtsleeves. Four perfect crescent moons had been incised on the underside of each forearm, and all were bleeding copiously. I was tempted to wash the injuries with water from the fountain, but it seemed inappropriate to the magic of that place to use wishing water for cleaning wounds. Instead, I drew out a penny from my pocket, offered up a thought of thanks to whatever spirit of urban magic had blessed the waters of that place with the wish-maker’s mark, and dropped the coin into the water, watching it sink. In the darkness of the Circus I couldn’t see my gold coin, and half suspected there wouldn’t be anything left to see.
I crossed over the road and went to the all-night pharmacy. There I bought a roll of bandages and some disinfectant liquid that stung so badly we almost ran outside again in search of water. Sitting in a passport photo booth for privacy, we wrapped up our bleeding arms in rolls of bandage too thick to be covered by the remnants of our shirtsleeves. With just our coat protecting the bandages from the queries of the police as they struggled to organise the traffic, we went home.
When we woke in the morning, our arms were still bleeding; in fact the bandages were soaked through. It was a bad start to what, we thought, should have been a day of relative triumph.
By mid-morning, with no sign of clotting, we checked out of our hotel and went in search of a doctor.
At the hospital south of the river, Dr Seah studied our bloody arms and said, “Uh-huh. OK. You know, they train us to be like, you know, all sympathetic and comforting and shit? But looking at this… you’re kinda totally fucked.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Haemophilia?” she suggested in a pained voice.
“It’s not very likely.”
“It didn’t seem very likely, seeing as how you were here last week and didn’t bleed out. Know what, just for kicks, shall I call an ambulance?”
We raised our bloody arms to the light and studied the blood still trickling into the crooks of our elbows. “It may not be enough,” we replied. “Perhaps a taxi would be better.”
Weakness. Human weakness, frail, pale, failing. How could we be ourself, trapped in dying flesh?
Time to take charge of myself. Be practical, businesslike; keep a level head in a situation of growing tension, keep the voice steady, the eyes locked, the chin down and the shoulders back. If you start to sound afraid, start to look afraid, you’ll be scared before you know it.
Dr Seah ordered a taxi. We climbed in the back, our hands starting to shake, and I gave an address. The driver said, “You sure you don’t need a doctor? You don’t look…”
“There’s a doctor friend at this address.”
“OK, if you’re sure.”
He took me to where I wanted to go: Chalfont Street Market, flanked on one side by the reflective grey glass of Euston station, and on the other by the red bricks of the British Library as it tried to blend in with the fairy tale castle towers and arched windows of St Pancras station. I got out, thanked him, paid with what little money I had left, and staggered enough up the road to make him think that I was serious about continuing on it. When the taxi was gone, I turned back the way I’d come and, feeling the tremble in our knees as we walked
to fear is not to be free
we are…
… I am…
come be me…
I walked, I made us walk, because I knew what it was like to be this weak and we had no conception of it, round the corner to the boarded-up, broken windows of the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital for Women. Its tea-coloured walls were cut off from the public street by high chipboard hoardings, plastered over with ads for concerts, magazines and, in the odd place here or there, the scrawling graffiti of the Whites, the snouts of their crawling black-and-white crocodiles pointing towards the Kingsway Exchange. Round the corner, towards the main doors overhung by a drooping green entrance sign welcoming you to the hospital, were notices warning “danger” and “keep out” and “no children”. The doors themselves were covered over with corrugated iron, and padlocked; on them someone had painted the face of a white-skinned nurse, with eyes shut, and over that someone else had added in big black letters, “WERE HAV WE VOICES??”. I knocked, but the corrugated iron just banged loudly against the empty door frames behind, while broken glass crunched under my feet like thick snow.
I kicked at the iron barrier, and shouted, “Hey!” up at the hospital’s broken windows, but my voice was snatched away by the passing of a bus, crawling round the traffic lights away from Euston station.
Losing our patience, we reached into the satchel for our skeleton keys, and fumbled at the padlock with slippery, bloodstained fingers. At length we found the right key, coaxed it into shape, turned, and opened the lock. We pulled the chain off the door, and dragged it back, the heavy metal squeaking and scratching painfully across the pavement, before ducking through one of the broken glass door panels.
Inside, traceries of overcast daylight seeped in around plywood panels boarding up the window panes. Though the corridors were bare, they were full of broken glass, water dripping from shattered pipes, and rotting pieces of splintered wood, all suggesting nonetheless what this place had once been. The tiled floor was discoloured from years of floods and droughts and more floods, staining it with moulds and interesting tufts of vivid green moss that gave the place a cold, sharp smell of decay. At a crack in the wall I pulled a few purple buddleia flowers off their stem, and crunched them in my palm to a handful, before slipping it into the frontmost pocket of my satchel. Buddleia grew in London wherever buildings were left neglected; they sprouted through every wall by every railway cutting and out of every derelict site, spreading roots into the stone itself. As such, buddleia flowers had their own special properties within any urban magician’s inventory; wherever they were found, they weren’t to be ignored.
With the last fragment of purple in my bag, I chose a left turning at whim, and splashed my way through puddles of stagnant water stained with clouds of chemical whiteness. I found a flight of stairs, with half the tiles missing from their treads, and the scarred concrete showing underneath. It led past a wall supported by scaffolding; on the first floor was another empty, airless corridor.
I called out, “Hello?”
My voice was eaten up so quickly by the dead silence of that place, I half-wondered if I’d called at all.
At random I turned right, then left. I was about to climb the next flight, when behind me in the corridor I heard a click. I turned. A woman stood there in a nurse’s uniform. Her face was the same near-perfect white of the graffiti image on the iron door downstairs, her hat the same old-fashioned, almost theatrical blue of the painted nurse’s cap. Her expression was one of immense seriousness.
“And who are you?” she asked in a prim voice.
Her hair was silvery-grey. A nurse’s watch hung from her apron; she wore black tights and black sensible shoes, had skinny legs, and old hands, folded neatly in front of her.
When we didn’t answer, she repeated, “Well, come, come now, I haven’t got all day.”
“Swift,” I stuttered. “My name’s Swift.”
“Well, Mr Swift, can I help you?”
“I’m looking for the hospital.”
“As you can judge for yourself,” she said, voice not changing, expression not wavering, arms not moving, eyes looking down at me across the length of her nose even though she had to be half a foot shorter than I was, “this is a hospital.”
“Yes. Sorry, yes. I can see.”
“If you can see, why did you ask?”
“I… need help.”
“That is why most people come to a hospital. What exactly appears to be the problem?”
I rolled up a coat sleeve to reveal one of the blood-bandages. Her lips thinned. She made a little ummm noise, tutted, then barked, “Very well, come this way, chop chop.” Turning on one heel, she set off down the corridor. I struggled to keep up, striding as fast as I could without breaking into a run. “I suppose you have tried the regular services; there is a waiting list, yes?”
“Yes.”
“And? Please don’t waste my time with the usual inadequate excuses, Mr Swift. ‘I just happened to be playing with the bones of the dead’ or ‘It just so fell out that I accidentally summoned the spirit of a thousand shards of falling glass’ or other feeble tales. I really don’t care how the injury was inflicted, I simply need the full information to make a good diagnosis.”
She turned into a room as mouldy and dark as the others; but unlike them, it was possessed of a large wooden cupboard with another padlock across its doors, and a dentist’s chair set in the middle, with a bright lamp lit up above it. Although the lamp had no electrical lead, it grew brighter as the nurse approached it. She waved me to the chair, and as I sat down she added another “Well?! What happened?”
“Honestly – I was attacked by the living shadow of a sorcerer, a creature of darkness and hunger that longs to drink my blood and which I managed to defeat by the use of a wish-spell and a lot of burning light. It dug its nails into my arms; and now they won’t stop bleeding.”
“Interesting,” she said in a voice of a woman who couldn’t care less. She reached into her apron and pulled out a pair of glasses that she rested at the end of her nose, and a pair of very sharp-looking scissors. “But nothing special. I don’t suppose you killed this living essence of darkness?”
“I doubt it.”
“Wouldn’t that have been the most sensible reaction?” she said, peering at me over the tops of her glasses straight down the sharp tip of her nose as I lay on the chair.
“It’s a shadow,” I replied. “It dies when the man that casts it dies.”
“How terribly tedious,” she intoned. “You know, sometimes, I don’t know why I bother – they all come back here eventually.”
She started snipping neatly at the bandages around my arms, and when they came away, tutted at the bloody half-moon indents in my skin. “Yes, well…”
“I… do not know what it is I should offer you for your help,” I said as we turned our head away and half-closed our eyes against the sight of our own blood.
“Offer me?” A shrill note of indignation entered her voice. “Young man, there are three things that make Britain great. The first is our inability at playing sports.”
“How does that make Britain great?”
“Despite the certainty of loss, we try anyway with the absolute conviction that this year will be the one, regardless of all evidence to the contrary!”
I raised my eyebrows, but that simply meant I could see my own blood more clearly, so looked away and said nothing.
“The second,” she went on, “is the BBC. It may be erratic, tabloid, under-funded and unreliable, but without the World Service, obscure Dickens adaptations, the Today programme and Doctor Who, I honestly believe that the cultural and communal capacity of this country would have declined to the level of the apeman, largely owing to the advent of the mobile phone!”
“Oh,” I said, feeling that something was expected. “Oh” was enough.
“And lastly, we have the NHS!”
“This is an NHS service?” I asked incredulously.
“I didn’t say that; I merely pointed out that the NHS makes Britain great. Now lie still.” I lay still and tried not to flinch as her fingers probed the tender flesh on both my arms. She tutted again.
On a whim I asked, “What about the Beatles?”
“What about them?”
“Do they make Britain great?”
“Don’t play silly buggers in my hospital, thank you.”
“Sorry.”
After a while she said, “Did you collect some buddleia?”
“Yes. Was that OK?”
“There’s plenty around, why should I care?”
“But… you asked.”
“A nurse is supposed to put the patient at ease during unpleasant procedures, in order to facilitate a calm and quick medical process.”
“You haven’t done anything too unpleasant…” I began, then hesitated.
“The word you caught your tongue up on was ‘yet’,” she said with a small-toothed grin. “I’m glad you thought it through before making a rash utterance.”
“This is a reassuring medical procedure?”
“You survived – badly – being attacked by a living shadow, essence of darkness,” she said. “A little honesty isn’t going to hurt. Not as much as the medicine.”
“Do you enjoy what you do?”
“It’s a living.”
“How?”
She pulled a key out of her pocket and undid the heavy padlock on the cupboard. Inside, the shelves were in shadow. “You’re scared of doctors,” she said briskly to the clinking of jars. “You’re frightened by medicine. It’s fine. You’ve also had a couple of splintered ribs, a twisted ankle, a lot of bruising and been clinically dead sometime in the last two years. So I can understand your point of view.”
“How do you know all that?”
“I read your palm, do you really want to know?” she retorted in an uninterested voice. Turning, she revealed a large glass kitchen jar containing some sort of dark, sludgy goo. “Crushed rat’s skull, desalinated Thames water, ground dried moss scraped from the base of a leaking pipe in Kings Cross station, a pinch of mortar dust and a vestige of unleaded petrol drawn from the top of a puddle of torrential August rain; ground together, microwaved for ten minutes and filtered with the light from a photographer’s lamp for three days and three nights – sound all right to you?”
“For what?”
She tutted again at my impertinence. “Mr – Swift, wasn’t it? Mr Swift, did you bother to consider some of the medical implications of being injured by a creature of pure darkness before you rashly engaged it in mortal combat? I doubt it. Young people never do. You all think you’re immortal. Lie still.” She popped the top off with the hiss-snap of escaping pressure, and from one of her pockets, which I was beginning to suspect were not nearly big enough for all the things that she seemed to fit in them with perfect ease, pulled out a small wooden spatula. She scooped a large dollop of the slippery, shining dark gunk from the jar, took a grip of my right wrist, pulling my arm straight with a hand like an iron clamp, and started smearing the stuff across my wounds with the casual air of a grandmother icing a birthday cake.
The effect was like eating hot Vietnamese curry: for the first few strokes of the spatula, there was no sensation beyond that of thick soap bubbles moving on the skin, or of sticky flour being washed off the fingertips. Only when the mind had been fooled into thinking that it wouldn’t be so bad did the burning hit. It started as a dull itch, quickly rising to an intense, fiery pulse that went right down to the bone and shot up past the elbow joint and into the shoulder blade; my fingers burnt and my neck cramped. We jerked at the shock of it, but her grip was unrelenting, and her face showed no sign of humour as she muttered, “Don’t be a baby.”
“It hurts!” we whimpered, mostly for the relief of having breath in our mouth and sound in our ears; any sort of sense to distract us.
“And it’ll be over soon,” she said. “If it was really that bad I’d have thought about giving you an anaesthetic; but you know how it is with budget cutbacks these days.” On our skin the dark substance started to mix with our blood, in brownish-black whorls the colour of treacle. “You’ll get a little dizziness,” she added, “but please try and control any latent sorcerous urges you might have to incinerate my hospital. Despite its infinite patience, the NHS isn’t that understanding, and we have to serve everyone equally.”
We squeezed our eyes shut and bit our lip until we could taste blood. It wasn’t dizziness; not quite. It was… more of a loosening of thoughts, a disintegration of the straight, neat lines of thoughts-with words, of structured reasonings and human sounds, splitting down, as our mind inflated like a hot-air balloon, into its component parts, like the dream-state just before sleeping or wakening when it seems perfectly logical for the goldfish not to like to peel its own potatoes on the bus. I thought of my thoughts, those conscious processes and pains, as thoughts-with-words, as understandings and rationales within the constraints of language; but in that state, our thoughts were nothing of the sort, they were…
hello hello? yeah hi i’m looking for jeff yeah jeff the guy with the no I can’t hang up will you just listen he’s
mum died on thursday. yeah next week its
three poppadoms no three. three. well if they said that
look move the thing to tuesday, i’ve gotta go and
help me! he’s in the house and he’s coming for me and oh god oh god if you
yeah miss you too
hello?
hello?
HELLO?
We opened our eyes. We grabbed the nurse’s arm as she reached across with another dollop of gunge, and hissed, “When did you last make a phone call?”
“Mr Swift, is this entirely…”
“Your name was Jean but then your father died. He was a doctor. You cried down the phone and said help me, help me, please, but she was in Paris, she couldn’t come in time, there weren’t any tickets, it was Christmas she said baby, it’ll be OK, it’ll be OK, and you found the costume and you knew about magic you knew what made it tick, you told your friend on the phone that you were going to make it work and he said, what are you doing, what do you think you’re talking about and you said goodbye. Sorry I have to leave you goodbye. I’ll always think of you and then you hung up. You haven’t picked up a phone since. You fell silent, you don’t want to know, nothing that isn’t in front of you, no one that isn’t there, no voices, no distance, no responsibilities, just this, just goodbye Alex, I’ll sometimes think of you, but don’t think of me, goodbye.”
Jean pulled her wrist carefully free of our fingers and met our eyes without flinching. “Fascinating,” she murmured at last. “You know, you really should have informed me that you were sharing your consciousness with the stranded memory of the telephone wires, it qualifies as relevant medical history.” Her voice was level, her hand was shaking.
“We know you,” we whispered.
“Do you?”
“We know what you said.”
“How?”
“It’s…”
somewhere in flying thoughts
blue memories of what we are of
hello!
you there?
anyone there?
hello?
gotta go, darling, gotta go now
don’t hang up
bye
good night, sweet dreams!
hello? i’m looking for this number it’s for this guy
hello?
“We are the thoughts you left behind,” we murmured. “We-are… the feelings in your voice, even if he didn’t hear. We are…”
“Responding interestingly to what should really just be dizziness,” she said briskly. “Does your blood usually turn blue and wriggle like maggots in the presence of oxygen?”
We glanced at the trickling blue sparks crawling across our skin where the medicine had met our blood, and I felt suddenly sick, the world a spinning vague thing seen through a heat haze, tinnitus in my ears and my head aching, no longer a hot-air balloon but stuffed with lead, dragging me down with the sound of
hello!
anyone there?
never had a chance to say…
look i know this shouldn’t be done by phone but i want
you to know that
looking for someone is there operator?
hello? Hello? HELLO?
“Help me!” I blurted through gritted teeth. “Please, help me!”
“Well now, that all depends on the problem,” said the nurse in a voice of infinite patience.
“I can’t remember! I can’t remember what… what I was before! I can’t remember being me!”
“You’d be wanting a shrink more than a nurse,” she explained, and she had got her composure back, in an instant switched back into professional, businesslike mode. “I can give you a referral.” Then, quieter, sharp little words to be spoken and forgotten again, “You still want the bleeding to stop?”
“Don’t know, don’t know…”
“I don’t want to cast a shadow on your evening, but it’s that or a slow and anaemic death, which, may I add, will do nothing for your complexion…” The smile gleamed, not exactly cruel, but neither bursting with compassion. She leant in close and murmured, “… unless that’s a tempting thing?”
I hesitated.
We said, “No.”
And we were surprised that we had spoken, surprised to hear ourself sound so confident, so sure of it, surprised that I hadn’t spoken sooner or more certainly.
“You sure? I mean, if you want the shrink…”
“No. We want… no. Please. Help us.”
“Help us, or help me?”
“We are the same.”
“You sure?” she asked nicely. “Only it seems to me that one of you has blue blood, and one of you has red, and one of you knows about the things that were in the phone line and one of you, probably the clinically dead one, has a better grounding in the personal ego – not that I want to speculate beyond my training, you understand. You may share the same skin and the same voice, but I’m really not entirely sure that you’re working on the same track.”
We thought…
But then I thought…
“I… am sorry,” I said.
“We’re sorry,” we added.
“I… please, forgive me, I… spoke…” I mumbled.
“We did not think that… we are…” we explained.
“Other arm,” she said, switching the iron grip from one wrist to the other. “This time, try not to drip electric blue sparks everywhere, please? It’s really not my place to judge my patients.”
“Why not?” we asked. “Would you treat a murderer?” I added.
“Yes,” she said flatly. “If he was ill.”
“Why?”
“Medical oath, vows of service, duty, legal reasons, NHS policy, all that.”
“But why?”
“You should know. One of you.”
“Which one?” I asked, smiling despite myself and the pain in my head or on my skin. “It’s not how it is,” we grunted with a wince.
She paused, staring down at us, black splotch running down the edge of the wooden spatula in her hand. “Life is magic,” she replied. “That’s all there is to it. You’re losing it, aren’t you, sorcerer? You can’t keep control.”
“Yes,” I said. “I mean… no.”
“Which one?”
“That depends on whether the question was rhetorical.”
“Oh, a wisecracker as well as magically confused.” She shrugged. “Oh, well.”
“That’s it, ‘Oh, well’?”
“Not my place to…”
“… to judge, I know.”
“I’m going to finish up here, and bandage it.” She beamed. “Change them every twelve hours for the next three days, then you might consider going with plasters. Men in bandages feel so righteous it’s almost unbearable. Not having period pains every month gives them a whole superiority complex, but when they’re in bandages they just want to be loved.”
“Are you talking about me, or is this a general piece of medical observation?”
“I suspect you wouldn’t complain to my supervisor, if you didn’t like my attitude,” she replied.
“Who is your supervisor?”
“Oh…” She waved the wooden stick with airy abandon, splattering gobbets of sticky black goo around the room. “Higher powers would give them too much ego, demigods brings in this whole religious aspect, spirits seems a bit Peter Pan-esque, so we’ll just go with…”
“Mystical forces?”
“Smart button.”
“Thank you.”
“Feel better now? Less gyrating black spots, fewer screaming voices and uncontrollable magical memories?”
“A bit, yes, thank you.”
“All part of the service,” she said. “Now – I’m going to get bandages. Please don’t evaporate into your constituent parts before I get back.”
“I’ll do my best,” I replied, and, to our surprise, we meant it.
She got bandages. She let the black slime settle on our arms, and set into a thin crust, before brushing it off briskly with a rough cloth that tugged and strained against the cuts on our skin until we thought they’d bleed all over again just from the sheer vigour with which she cleaned. However, as we looked again at ourself, we saw in the half-moon marks left by Hunger’s attack no sign of more bleeding, and the beginning of thick, dark scars instead. Such a sight had never seemed more of a relief, or more natural to us.
She bandaged up our arms with prompt efficiency, then patted us on the shoulder and said, “All right, show up the next patient.”
“There’s another patient?” we asked.
“Cursed with severe acne,” she replied.
“Is that a threat or the patient’s condition?”
“Would you like to find out? Bugger off, will you; I’m working to a tight schedule, and haven’t you heard that there’s not enough doctors per patient in this country?”
And that was it. She didn’t seem inclined to talk to us any more. With a shrug we picked up the satchel, and walked to the doorway.
In it, we turned, saw her putting the jar of medicine back in the cupboard and said without thinking, “Can I ask something?”
She didn’t answer, didn’t move, didn’t flinch.
“If we become… all that this body is, if we become…”
“Me?” she said, not glancing up. “I mean in the metaphorical sense – if you plural become you singular, rather than actually growing breasts, should you accidentally find yourself thinking like a human, feeling like a human, instead of like a medically unsound mess of crossed wires…”
“… will we be so bad?”
She hesitated, then turned, looked straight at us and said, “Life is magic. Magic is not life. You’ll be fine. Now bugger off before I call security.”
“Thank you,” we said.
“Thank you too,” she replied, but she didn’t sound like she meant it.
I sat on the bus heading south from the derelict hospital, my bandaged arms hidden inside my coat, and resisted the temptation to roll up my sleeves so that everyone could see, and I could feel righteously injured, like a wounded soldier walking with pride.
I resisted.
Or possibly we resisted.
The distinction was becoming harder to make. Or rather, it had always been hard to make – we had always been me – but lately we were not so sure if we were any more than a useful set of memories, magics and ideas that I accessed at whim. Or was I nothing more than a strange recollection of Matthew Swift that we thought was ourself, but who had in fact died some two years before? We knew that Matthew Swift had died, his dying breath entering the phones and spinning into our domain. We knew that we had decades of memory and experience and thoughts and feeling and that, more and more, these guided us, shaped who we were in the world and what we did and how we behaved. Or so it seemed, as we came to understand why the strange, singular sorcerer that had been Swift had done what he did; but we did not know if this signified more than just memory.
We are me, we are Matthew Swift.
And I am the blue electric angels.
Did the distinction really matter?
It’s very simple, Mr Swift. Can you keep control?
I don’t understand.
And in the end, so what if I was, technically, dead? I felt pretty damned alive: I felt the breaths I drew tickle the inside of my lungs, I felt the beating of my heart in my veins, I felt fear and sorrow and happiness and pain and uncertainty and dread and hope and all the other good and bad tick boxes of humanity that, no matter how bad bad might be, at least proved that the depth of feeling and emotion I could experience now were as I remembered experiencing them. Was that not enough? If we were me and we could experience such pangs, did that not make us alive, or human? The technicalities of whether we were genuinely human seemed increasingly irrelevant, since we felt, more and more, that we were the oh-so-human I. The blip that perhaps Matthew Swift had died with no way of coming back and that possibly the blue electric angels were nothing but the gods of lost voices in the wire increasingly did not concern us.
Did not concern me.
We will not bother with such distinctions.
I sat on the bus and looked at the world through my blue eyes and felt the ache in my burning arms and knew that I could understand every language spoken on the top deck of that vehicle as we rattled down Gower Street; knew also that inside me was the capacity to blaze burning blue fire so fast and so bright and so far that it could, for an instant, eclipse the sun, and this felt … natural.
Life is magic.
I knew, without having to ask, what she meant. Life was not the magic of spells or enchantments or sorcery; or, it was, but that was not the point. Life created magic as an accidental by-product, it wasn’t, definite article, absolute statement, A = B, magic. Life was magic in a more mundane sense of the word; the act of living being magic all of its own.
This was something we instinctively understood – it simply hadn’t occurred to us that it might need explaining.
I went south, towards Holborn.
Vera and Charlie met me in a small sandwich shop made of linoleum; it was round the back of Drury Lane and advertised itself as Tasty Cafe in big blue letters above a squeaking door with a bell on it that clunked more than it rang. We sat at a small orange plastic table, while around us large men in fluorescent jackets from a local building site drank tea and ate dried-out ham sandwiches.
Vera looked tired but alert; Charlie was his usual implacable self.
She said to me, not unpleasantly, “You buggered off something royal in the Exchange, bastard.”
“I’m sorry. I was hurt.”
“They told me.”
“Who they?”
“The bloody fucking Order, thanks a million for getting them involved, by the way.”
“Is there a problem?” demanded Charlie.
She glared at him. “No sooner have we smashed the massed undead army of Lee to a thousand itty pieces, wereman, than we’ve got a group of religious nutters sitting on our doorstep who know exactly where we live and what our tricks are.”
“They’re causing trouble?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
“Then is there a problem?” I hazarded, uncertain of where her anger was coming from or what she wanted.
Her hand tightened round her cup of coffee until the knuckles were white. “When there is, are you going to come and make it all better, sorcerer?” Her voice dripped acid. We felt oddly ashamed.
“Oda didn’t tell me how many died.”
“Plenty.”
“But are… did it…”
“Did it make a difference?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps. With Lee dead, with his men beat… there’s only so much power that you can have at the end of a gun. First you’ve gotta fear it, and perhaps… that’s changing.” Her grip relaxed, her shoulders rolled forward. She looked drained; we wondered if she’d slept. “What’s next?” she asked.
“Harris Simmons.”
“Do you know something new?” said Charlie.
“Perhaps. I think he’s on the run.”
“How does that help?” asked Vera.
“He’s being followed. Bakker knows that I’m looking for him, cleared out the house and left a message for me.”
“You didn’t mention a message.” Charlie looked reproachful, edgy.
“It was personal.”
“I thought we’d gone past that.”
“Oh, get real,” snapped Vera. “You blind?”
“If they know you’re looking for him, things will not be so simple,” pointed out Charlie reasonably.
“Thank you for the profound insight,” groaned Vera. “What do you want, sorcerer?”
“Your help.”
“Again?”
“I think we can bring down the Tower.”
“What, exploding concrete, or in a more organisational sense?”
“Harris Simmons can lead us to Bakker.”
“Doesn’t seem very likely,” murmured Vera.
“Bakker is hard to find; he keeps moving all the time,” added Charlie. “Especially now that Khay and Lee are dead – he’ll be alerted to the danger, won’t stay more than one night in one place until you’re…”
“Deader than a decapitated zombie!” shrilled Vera. “Deader than old Marley’s ghost, deader than a tombstone on Mars, deader than…”
“Thank you, we understand the image,” we said. “Besides, ‘dead’ isn’t quite the full story, as far as Bakker is most likely concerned.”
“Is he a zombie too?” hazarded Vera.
“He is not,” said Charlie firmly, as if Vera’s question was a foolish thing asked by a child to annoy. “But he is dying.”
“And he was very interested in talking to us before,” we added. “So I think that, given this information, a few risks might be worth taking.”
“What kind of risks?” Vera’s eyes were instantly narrow.
“I think Harris Simmons is going to be a trap,” I replied. “It makes sense; he knows I’m coming, on the run, being tracked by a shadow…”
“… a shadow?” Charlie’s voice was hard.
“Are you an important person?” Vera asked Charlie quizzically. “Sorcerer, why is the wereman here?”
“He’s an important person,” I sighed. “Please be nice to each other, I still need your help.”
“Just our help? Not the biker, the Order, the warlocks, the…”
“You’re the two I trust.”
“Thanks,” said Vera with a grunt. “Touched, but a little surprised, since we hardly know each other.”
“All right, put it another way. You,” nodding at Vera, “have too much to lose, and have lost too much already; and you,” nodding at Charlie, “come with good credentials and an honest face, when it hasn’t got whiskers. Therefore, I’m talking to you both.”
“What about Oda?” asked Vera. “You seem quite pally with the psycho-bitch.”
“I trust her utterly,” I replied, surprised to find that it was true, “but only up to the point where she no longer needs me. Which, if what I suggest can be made to work, could be quite soon.”
Soon was three days.
I spent each night at a different hotel, not least because in every case my relentless casting of wards around the bed, and the mess this left, didn’t please the management.
In those three days, Charlie called by twice. The first time he provided £100 and a note from Sinclair that read simply, “Try legality, and best wishes,” as well as a change of clothes and a first-aid kit for the scabbing nail marks on my arms. The second time, he came by with a pair of shoes.
After I’d looked at them, I said, “You’re joking.” We added, “Are you sure it’ll work?”
“These things don’t just grow on trees,” he replied.
“The image is ridiculous enough already,” I retorted. “Besides, what if someone takes the shoes?”
“There is another option.”
“Which is?”
“Surgery.” We turned pale. “They can slice your skin open, implant the chip just below your…”
“You’re not as humourless as you look,” I said.
“In point of fact, I am.”
I took the shoes. They fitted perfectly, and when I walked on them, there wasn’t a bump or a lump to suggest the thing hidden inside. Charlie beamed. “Magicians,” he said brightly. “Always so busy doing the magical thing they never bother to think about technology.”
On the third day, I got a phone call from Oda.
It went, “Where are you hiding?”
“If I told you that, it wouldn’t be hiding.”
“Never mind, I’ll trace the call.”
“You called me.”
“Doesn’t mean these things can’t be traced.”
“I’m fine.”
“That wasn’t really my problem.”
“No. I suppose that about sums it up.”
“What are you doing?”
“Waiting.”
“For what?”
“To find Bakker.”
“You just think sitting around on your arse is going to help you find Bakker?”
“Simmons will tell me where Bakker is.”
“So you’re waiting to find Simmons?”
“Yes.”
“What if he doesn’t? Or won’t that matter?”
“It’s complicated.”
“You are a one-note-answer kinda guy, aren’t you?”
“At the moment.”
“Fair enough.”
“Is that it? Fair enough?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Oh, please. I’m going to find you, remember?”
“You’ve made the point explicitly clear. Although, to tell the truth, it may not be such a bad thing.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m sure you’ll work it out,” I said. “When things get sticky, talk to Vera.”
“You trust her?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“She’s not actually sworn an oath to the deity to decapitate me at the earliest available opportunity,” I replied, “which is a good thing.” And hung up, before she could say something offensive.
About an hour later, Charlie rang.
“Found Simmons yet?” I asked.
“Yes – you were right, about the thing following him. It’s not pretty.”
“Where?”
“You’ll need a lift. Looks like this thing is going down in the middle of bloody nowhere.”
“Let me worry about transport.”
“I knew you would,” he said, and gave me the address.
Just one more thing that needed to be done, before it finished. Just one.
I found a copy of the Yellow Pages on top of a bus shelter, and leafed through it until I found the number under C for Catering. I wandered back to my hotel, picked up the phone and dialled.
The voice that answered said, “Palmero Paradise, yeah?”
“I’m looking for Mrs Mikeda.”
“Who’s calling, like?”
“Matthew Swift.”
“Right, give’s a mo.”
I waited. The owner of the sawing voice and grating accent could be heard in the distance beyond the receiver saying, “Hey, where’s the bag gone?”
We had a feeling…
… voices in the receiver…
… we knew we could know this voice, if we wanted to. Everyone leaves something behind, in the phones.
“Hey, Swift, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“She’s just coming.”
“Thank you.”
… so easily…
I pinched the palm of my hand until the skin was red and lumpy. A voice came onto the phone, with a different accent that drooled across every syllable like a pot of honey. “Yes? Who’s this?”
“Mrs Mikeda? It’s Matthew Swift here.”
“If you want money I’m not your woman, you know?”
“Money? No.”
“Then piss off.”
She slammed the phone down on the hook. I was surprised; but, thinking about it, I wondered how I had ever expected a better reception.
I packed up my belongings and decided to do things the old-fashioned way.
Palmero Paradise was a small, greasy sandwich shop off Smithfield meat market, where the butchers went in their lunch hour for salami sandwiches and a slosh of tea in a cardboard cup. When I arrived, it was early evening: too soon for the area’s fashionable wine bars and soon-to-be-heaving clubs to have opened their doors, but late enough for the market’s gates to be shuttered over the racks of mechanised hooks and the floors smelling of diluted blood and sawdust. The streets had a quiet, Sunday-afternoon feel, drained of excitement in a thin drizzle.
The lights were still on in Palmero Paradise, but they were clearly shutting up shop, moving the few wobbly metal tables back into the small shop and pulling down the covers on the fridges. I picked up the last sandwich on the shelves – Cheddar cheese and suspicious-looking pickles wrapped in cling film – and ordered a cup of coffee.
Behind the counter, the young man in the big red apron had the same nasal accent that I’d heard on the phone. He said, “We’re closing, like.”
“I just want a coffee.”
“Sure, right, yeah, but…”
“We think you call telephone pornography lines,” we said suddenly, feeling inspired both by his apron and the familiar drone of his voice, and irritated by his reluctance to give us something to drink. And then, because I was surprised to find both that we believed this and that his face showed it was true, I added, “You need to get yourself a girl.”
He said, “Are you…”
“Is Mrs Mikeda around?”
“You’re not the nut who phoned, are you?”
“That’s me.”
“Look, uh, I don’t want…”
“Maybe you should see if she’s still here.”
“Right. Yeah. Whatever.”
With that, he disappeared through the jangling plastic bead netting at the back of the café.
I waited. A moment later, to the sound of much stomping, Mrs Mikeda appeared. She had a mobile phone in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other and the words “Leave now, police soon or scissors immediately, which would you…” on her lips before she looked at me, I looked at her, and the words died.
“Mrs Mikeda,” I said politely, because Mum had always taught me to be courteous to older women.
“Mr Swift!” The words were as much twisted sounds on an uncontrolled rush of air, as showing any intent to speak. “You’re … not… I mean… you’re…”
“How are you, Mrs Mikeda?” I asked, in an attempt to break the ice.
“I’m well, yes, fine, fine. What are you doing here?”
“Is this ‘Surely you aren’t after a coffee’ what are you doing here or ‘Why aren’t you six feet under and decomposing?’ what are you doing here?”
“I don’t want to… but you were…”
“I wanted to talk to you about Dana.”
Her face tightened. She lowered the scissors and the phone with a conscious effort that shook her little frame. “Maybe somewhere more private.”
Mrs Mikeda was the daughter of a Russian émigré who, she’d always claimed, had fled the Russian Revolution in 1917 with the secrets of the Tsar’s court in his head, a loyal, steadfast and cultured aristocrat who’d died of a broken heart. However, that story had always seemed a bit remote from any likelihood, and since her father had only recently died, in a council flat in Bermondsey, the chronology didn’t quite make sense either.
She was of average height, and unusual width – being not so much fat as all-present, so that even in the largest of rooms there was never quite enough space for the crowd and Mrs Mikeda to coexist peacefully. Her skin had been dropped onto her frame like a curtain over a piece of treasured furniture; it was full of endless folds and hidden depths, suggested even beneath her voluminous puffed flowery shirt, and a giant navy-blue skirt from beneath which poked a pair of legs that were all kneecap. Sitting in her kitchen, she poured vodka into two plastic cups and said, “I know it’s a cliché, but the English don’t know how to drink.”
I steeled myself and as she did, so I too downed mine in one. We were horrified by the initial shock of it, then strangely fascinated as it burnt its way into the stomach and sent a punch up through our arteries straight to the brain, as if the whole thing had instantly combusted on touching our flesh and filled our veins with vapour. We didn’t know whether it would be safe to try any more; but to our relief, Mrs Mikeda didn’t make the offer. Instead, the vodka out of the way, she poured coffee and said, “So… I suppose you must get asked this all the time?”
“Asked…”
“About how you were dead.”
She passed a mug over to me and stood up to rummage in the back of a cupboard above a shining stainless steel sink with industrial shower attachments for cleaning purposes, until she found a packet of digestive biscuits.
“Oh. Yes. Dead,” I repeated vaguely, watching as she slit the plastic open with a single titanium-razored red nail. “It’s complicated.”
“Sure,” she said. “Always complicated. Knew it would be when I first met you.”
I took the coffee and felt grateful for the distraction of it: the nice social ceremony and the hot mug into which I could peer as if it held all my troubles. She sat down again with the groan of an ageing lady who spent too much time on her feet. “So? You want to talk about my daughter.”
“How is she?”
“You don’t know?”
“I… haven’t seen her recently.”
“Why not?… Oh… yes. Dead.”
“That’s the one.”
“She’s all right.”
“Is that it?”
“What, you were hoping for bad news?”
“No, no, not at all… I just… didn’t expect it to be so brief.”
“I don’t see much of her these days.”
“Why not?”
“Shouldn’t you be asking her? Or is there something you want to tell me?”
She looked at me with her head on one side and, even though she wore an innocent, almost childish expression behind her ruddy cheeks and big, curly, metallic-red hair, her eyes still had that gleam of sharp intelligence from when I’d first met her.
I found that I couldn’t answer.
“Biscuit?”
“What?… No, thanks.”
She took a biscuit from the package, bit off a corner, dipped the rest in the coffee, waited a few seconds, then ate it in a single bite. I watched her chew and she watched the floor. When she’d finished she let out a long sigh and said, “All right, let’s get through the list first. Is my daughter dead, possessed, demonically influenced or cursed in any way?”
“What? No! At least, not as far as I’m aware.”
“You don’t seem very far aware,” she pointed out reasonably.
“I don’t think she’s any of the above.”
“Well, that’s the essentials covered. Is there anything else you need to talk to me about?” She saw my expression. “I’m a good Christian mother, you know. I like to make sure that my daughter, while clearly a vessel for some mystical forces, isn’t breaking too many articles of the faith?”
“To the best of my knowledge, she’s not.”
“Good. Then what do you want?”
“Have you ever met Robert James Bakker?”
“Yes,” she said, in the weary voice of someone who knows where this conversation is going and can’t believe she has to wait at the traffic lights to get there.
“What do you think of him?”
“Nice man. Held her hand at your funeral; very nice man.”
“Yes,” I murmured. “I think he is.”
“But you have the look of a man with something to say on that count,” she added. “Come on, out with it. That’s what I liked about you, Mr Swift – always very straightforward.”
“Really?”
She grinned, and took another biscuit. “First thing you ever said to me: ‘Excuse me, ma’am, may I have a black coffee, strong, no sugar, and is a member of your family or your household acting peculiar bordering on mystical by any chance?’”
“I said that?” I asked, surprised at myself.
“Yes.”
“Just out of the blue?”
“Yes. You looked like you’d had a long day.”
“It was a while back,” I admitted.
“And you’ve probably been busy since then…”
“Yes…”
“Funerals, decomposition and so on.”
I smiled patiently. “As a good Christian mother…” I began.
“You sure you don’t want a biscuit?”
“Maybe one,” we said quickly, taking it from the package offered. “Thank you. As a good Christian mother,” I continued, “are you wondering about what the Bible has to say on the sanctity of resurrection when it’s not our lord and saviour?”
“You know, the Old Testament…” she began.
“I’m really, really not dead,” I said. “In fact, it’s starting to get a bit of a pain having to explain it all.”
“Dana thinks you’re dead. Explain it to her – leave me out of it. As far as I’m concerned what happens in your world stays in your world.”
“I’m sorry to come here like this…”
“Get on with it, Mr Swift. Bad news should at least be honest about what it wants.”
“Where’s Dana?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t know or won’t tell?”
“She went with Mr Bakker.”
“Why?”
“I said. He was kind. You… shall we skip ‘died’ and go to ‘disappeared’?”
“Where’s Dana?”
“He’s like you. He said he was your teacher.”
“He was.”
“Well, is it bad?” she asked sharply. “He taught you, you taught Dana, she didn’t seem to become anything that I feared, any sort of…” She caught herself, then smiled, a pained twitch of the mouth. “She’s fine.”
“But you don’t know where?”
“He gives her money for travel, her own things. She moves around a lot. You never provided money, Mr Swift. I know that’s not what it’s about but you have to understand… why’s he successful?”
“What?”
“Mr Bakker? He came up to me at the funeral and offered me a lift, said he knew that my daughter was… well… gave me a lift home to talk about what happened next. Said she was half-trained, still needed help, but spoke highly of you. Big black car, seats made of leather.”
“He’s a good businessman.”
“Good sorcerer?” she asked, so sharp it was almost angry.
“Yes,” I said, taken aback. “Very… capable.”
She snorted. “Good man?”
I didn’t answer.
“Why’d you want to see Dana?”
“She was my apprentice!”
“So?”
“It’s important.”
“But you’re not saying why.”
“It’s just… it is important.”
“Come on, come on,” she said, waving a hand impatiently in a circle through the air. “Get on with it!”
I took a deep breath. “She might be in danger.”
“Good!”
“Good?”
“Good that you’ve told me; not good that it is. Why is she in danger?”
“I said might be.”
“You said might be because you think I am a stupid old woman who can’t cope or understand. Come on! Why is she in danger?”
“It’s… to do with Mr Bakker.”
“Ah. I thought it might be.”
“Why?”
“She doesn’t come home any more. She calls sometimes, but then won’t talk; she says that the phones listen. She’s lost a lot of weight – how can a girl who eats that much lose so much weight? Is he a good man, your Mr Bakker?”
“He was.”
“But isn’t any more?”
“It’s…”
“… complicated? Always was, Mr Swift. What do you want?”
“I… think I wanted to apologise.”
“OK. You’ve apologised. Anything else?”
I shook my head, then hesitated. Mrs Mikeda waited. I said, “If you can contact her, if you can find her, tell her I’m sorry. And tell her to get out while she can.”
“Why?”
“Shit and fans.”
“Have you put her in danger?”
“No!”
“Will you?”
I said nothing. She smiled and asked, politely, “Vodka?”
“No thanks. Not really our thing.”
“Trust me, Mr Swift?”
“Yes.”
“Then tell me everything.”
To my surprise, I did.
This is how I met Dana Mikeda.
Late spring in central London; it is almost impossible to feel depressed. The trees are sprouting green leaves on every street, the sky is blue, dotted with thin white clouds, the sunlight reflects watery colours off the windows of offices and divides the street between cold shadows and burning bright rooftops. The air smells clean in the morning after it rains, and the people, who make a city what it is, start sporting bare shoulders and sunglasses almost as soon as the temperature hits double figures. It is pleasantly warm in the sun, with a breeze that isn’t quite cool enough for goose bumps.
On the morning I met Dana, I was walking along the Holborn Viaduct above the busy Farringdon Road, not paying much attention to where I was going, enjoying the stroll. It was that time of the mid-afternoon when the streets in the centre of town weren’t too busy, and the usual buzz of magic and urgency on the air that to a large degree dictated my daily routine was at a gentle, soft ebb.
In Smithfield I bought a sausage roll from a shop by the meat market, and sat on a bench outside the faded classical façade of Barts hospital, eating and watching people go by: young businessmen in smart suits, butchers in huge aprons and fat rubber gloves, builders in hard hats, and trendy people looking like they were designers, in fashionably torn jeans.
It was while sitting there that I became aware of being watched. I looked round; and eventually I saw the source of my unease. The rat stood on its hind legs, in a patch of shadow obscuring a narrow street that led towards the church of St Bartholomew the Great. He was quite unconcerned at the passers-by, and just staring. I was used to unusual behaviour, but even the unusual things in my life tended to have an explanation, and I couldn’t muster a valid one for this, so I finished my sausage roll, brushed the crumbs off my jeans, stood up, and wandered towards the rat.
I got about halfway, when its nose twitched, its tail wiggled and it turned and scuttled away, something so normal and boringly predictable that I was startled by the fact it had happened at all. Faced with a choice between accepting normal behaviour for what it seemed to be or looking for a reason why things weren’t normal at all, I did as I had been taught, and accepted the latter. Normal is unusual in this line of work, my teacher had always said. If you expect something to happen and it does, it’s usually time to start looking out for the higher powers creeping your way, or the man with the knife. Sooner or later, something dangerous will happen to you, and you can never be too sure – particularly when it comes to the little things.
So I stood in the middle of the square outside the hospital, and looked for something unusual. What I found sat in a neat silent line above the row of stone urns, and the brightly coloured heraldic dragons, that ornamented the roof of the meat market. They weren’t moving: not twitching, nor even hopping from one withered orange foot to the other. I shouted, “Boo!” at the top of my voice and they didn’t even flap. I guessed there were over a hundred pigeons sitting there, and when I crossed through the market by the covered road, past the war memorial and the plaques detailing the history of the area, I wasn’t entirely surprised to see that the birds had sat only on one side of the roof.
I crossed back the way I’d come and looked in the direction that everyone of the pigeons was gazing: towards a group of shops including a pub whose sign showed a lecherous bishop, a day nursery, a launderette and a couple of sandwich bars. I picked one of the sandwich shops at random and wandered in. There weren’t any customers, and neither was there any staff, but the fridge showed enough gaps in its display to suggest that this was just a mid-afternoon lull, rather than a symptom of terminal decline. I leant on the glass counter above the bowls of chicken, and tuna, and sweetcorn salad and waited.
There was a buzzing from the glass-fronted fridge, a nasty, unhealthy electric sound like a wasp trapped in a bottle, or the crack of flies hitting an electric lamp. I watched as sparks snapped out of the cabling at its back and the lights faltered along the displays of neatly packed sandwiches. Then, with a hiss, the fridge died. The bulb above my head flickered on and off a few times, and the power points in the corners of the walls spat angry electric sparks from behind the switches. After a few minutes, this too died. During this time I heard a raised voice from somewhere behind a bead curtain: the incoherent sound of a woman shouting at someone whose response was too quiet for me to hear.
My curiosity now completely engaged, I stepped round the counter, and through the bead curtain. Beyond it was a stainless-steel kitchen, and it was a mess. Pots and pans were strewn across the floor, remnants of viscous liquids were splashed up the walls, glass from shattered bulbs crunched underfoot. On the knife rack, the blades were all twisted out of shape.
I moved carefully through the wreckage towards a door at the back; as I did, the voices became louder. The woman’s, shrill and frightened, babbled in a language I didn’t understand but which, by its thick quality and the richness of the sound, I guessed to be eastern European. Another voice answered in the same language: male, quieter, but no less scared. I pushed open the door, onto a crooked flight of stairs. Climbing them, I emerged into a narrow corridor of scuffed paint on cracked plaster. At the far end, outside a closed door with a poster of some anonymous boy band and a sign saying “KEEP OUT!!!” in big red pen, were the owners of the voices: a short woman who seemed far too large for the space she stood in, and a man in the dark shapeless clothes of a priest, with a big black beard. In one limp hand, the priest held a crucifix; and by his gestures he was trying to pacify the woman, and failing. The place buzzed with a sparking, yellow-golden sheen that hissed like fizzy drink on my tongue as I drew it in; wild, rich, and dangerous power, emanating, I guessed, from behind the closed door.
I said, “Excuse me?”
The woman paused, looked at me, said, “We’re shut,” and in an instant was back to shouting at the man.
I waited a few moments; then, since she didn’t seem to have any further interest in talking to me, I raised my voice and bellowed, “Sorcery!”
They both fell silent, more caught by surprise, I suspected, than ready to listen. “Thank you,” I said quickly. “Now, may I have a black coffee, strong, no sugar, and is a member of your family or your household acting peculiar bordering on mystical?”
In the kitchen, with trembling hands the woman gave me a plastic cup of vodka. She watched me down it while she clung to her own drink and said, “You police?”
“This isn’t your business…” began the man in priest’s clothes.
“Stuff you,” I replied, and for her benefit I added, “No, I’m not. My name’s Matthew Swift.”
Mrs Mikeda introduced herself.
“A pleasure to meet you,” I responded. “And this gentleman with the beard is…?”
“What do you want here?” he snapped.
“A priest,” replied Mrs Mikeda in a cowed voice.
“More than a priest, I’m guessing,” I said, looking him over and finding myself unimpressed. “Exorcist, yes? Demonic possession, Satanic vibes, all that kind of thing?”
“Who are you?” asked Mrs Mikeda.
“You can just call me Matthew. Now, let’s throw out the beardy, and why don’t you tell me about your daughter?”
“How do you know about my daughter?” she demanded, her knuckles turning white around the plastic cup.
“It’s the choice of boy band poster on her bedroom door,” I replied. “That tells me that she’s a girl. The presence of the exorcist guy tells me you haven’t got a clue what’s going on, and the sense of uncontrolled and raging magic tells me it’s more than just hormones that gives your daughter bad period pains. So why don’t you tell me what’s happening here?”
Mrs Mikeda downed the vodka, scrunched up the plastic cup without thinking and dropped it in the sink. She looked from me to the priest and back again and said, “Mr Swift, I don’t know why I should trust you.”
“My honest face, my charming, open expression, and the fact that in the end, I’m just so damn right, aren’t I? Nothing like a grasp of the situation to give a guy some cred.”
“Can you help her?”
I thought about it. “Yes,” I replied, feeling as I said it that this was absolutely the correct answer. “I think I can.”
When I knocked on her door there was no answer. I called out, “Dana? You all right in there?”
No reply.
I tried the handle. The door was locked.
“Key?” I said to Mrs Mikeda.
She gave me a small brass key. I turned it in the lock and opened the door. Filthy didn’t begin to cover the room beyond. It had served as bedroom, living room, kitchen and bathroom for what smelt like weeks; the heat and intensity of it slammed into my face and left no room for compromise or forgiveness. The curtains were half drawn, and at the base of the window were pigeon feathers strewn in dirty heaps. Dana Mikeda lay on the bed, her back turned to me, breathing slowly and steadily. I went over and reached out to touch her. But before I did, the hairs on the back of my hands stood up, at the same time that Mrs Mikeda gave a warning gasp.
I pulled a plug from the wall with a popping of sparks, and cut it at the top and the bottom with my penknife, exposing the metal strands beneath. Holding it by the rubber insulation I touched one end of the wire to the floor, and let the other drop onto the girl’s shoulder. A white spark crawled into the carpet. When I moved my hand again over Dana, there was no longer that feel of buzzing static in the air.
I took hold of her shoulder, and rolled her over. Her eyes were shut, but when I lifted the lids they glowed underneath with the bright orange of a pigeon’s iris; and as she exhaled, every breath carried with it a snort of thick black smoke and the smell of car exhaust, rattling over her lungs like a loose engine on the back of an old truck. Her skin burnt to the touch, and when I lifted up her fingers, they trailed neon scars through the air, like her nails were about to dig a hole in space itself.
“Can you do something?” whispered Mrs Mikeda.
“Maybe,” I replied. “How long has she been like this?”
“A few days. But it’s never been this bad before!”
“Do you own a car?”
“No.”
“Have you got a friend who’ll lend you one?”
Mrs Mikeda drove. I sat in the back, Dana’s head in my lap. Her hair when I touched it felt like fuse wire. To escape the feelings that must have been attacking her every day and night, she’d sunk herself deep into some form of magical trance or stupor. So lost in it was she that when the pistons of the hydraulic brakes exhaled, she did too, in the same breath and tone as the car itself.
We drove west, inching past Marylebone, speeding down the Westway, and jinking about through grungy Shepherd’s Bush and the genteel streets of Chiswick in the cheerful spring sun. In Chiswick High Street, the schools were emptying, and the cafés had put seats out on the pavement under the big old plane trees to serve coffee and cakes to the locals. By the time we reached Kew Bridge, the rush hour had started; Dana’s heart rate was up, so fast and strong I could see the veins moving in her neck as she responded, her blood moving at the speed of the city as its people switched direction from work to pleasure. We parked the car just beyond Kew Bridge and carried her down, each supporting her by an arm, onto the tidal mud of the Thames. Water seeped out around our feet like we were walking on a sponge, saturated so that water ran off it like oil. I pulled off my shoes, socks and jacket, and Mrs Mikeda did the same for Dana.
“This isn’t… pagan, is it?” she asked.
“It’s all relative,” I replied after a moment of hesitation, reasoning that this would be the least offensive but most honest answer. Mrs Mikeda didn’t look satisfied; but neither did she complain. I struggled to lift Dana up, supporting her by one arm across my shoulders and half-carrying, half-dragging her out into the biting cold river.
I walked out until the water came up to above my waist, and the mass of it had taken up most of Dana’s weight. From a muddy islet in the middle of the river, a heron regarded me with something resembling bird-brained displeasure that another creature was on its patch. Beyond the little tangle of trees and birds’ nests that made up the heron’s home, a large white boat chugging back from Hampton Court Palace had drifted to a gentle cruise, the tourists leaning over to photograph the odd spectacle of Dana and me in the river, while the driver called out, “Hey, you OK?”
“Baptism!” I replied cheerfully; on the bank Mrs Mikeda flinched even at this much profanity.
The boat moved on by, a handful of the tourists waving and whooping cheerfully as it did. Behind the trees on the opposite bank, the sunlight was dimming to a pinkish burn across the sky, stretching out the shadow of each trunk across the water.
I risked wading a few more yards out into the river, the sediment at the bottom swirling in a gritty cloud around my toes.
“What happens now?” called out Mrs Mikeda from the bank.
“Turn of the tide!” I answered in my best optimist’s voice. “Gotta have some magic in that, right?”
“Don’t you know?”
“I’m trying to save your daughter’s life within the tenets of the Orthodox faith. I haven’t a clue!”
“If you don’t know what you’re doing then…”
“Do you have the time?”
“What?”
“The time? It’s freezing out here!”
She looked at her watch. “Six forty-three.”
“Near as dammit,” I muttered, more for my reassurance than hers. I brushed Dana’s wiry hair from her face. Her skin had a pale greyish tint, and around her chin and across the hairline were patches of dry scratchy flesh which were increasingly starting to resemble tar. I leant down so my lips were a few inches from her ear and whispered, “If you can hear me, don’t be afraid. The tide’ll carry it all away.”
“What are you doing?” Mrs Mikeda could make her voice carry like it was a boulder tossed by a giant.
“Don’t be alarmed!” I called back. “Any second…”
… a tugging around my ankles…
“… any second…”
The heron, which had been watching the entire affair with a disinterested look on its unimaginative face, flapped into the sky…
“Oh, stuff it,” I said, pinched Dana’s nose shut with my fingers, took a deep breath and dropped both her and me under the water.
Thames water was once, so I had been told, toxic. Not just slightly unpleasant to drink, but actually lethal to fall into, a straight-to-hospital case. And although news reports still complained about disgusting messes in the water, nowadays these were more about the trash people threw in and the occasional suicide’s body dragged to the surface, rather than the raw sewage defining much of the river’s previous four hundred years.
So it was with a good degree of confidence that I pushed Dana down head first into the water, then let my knees bend and ducked my shoulders down after her. I let the water rush over her head and mine, let it shock my ears into an icy humming, let it tug at my hair and inflate my clothes around me to the size of a hippo as giant air bubbles crawled from under my shirt to pop and burst above my head. Dana didn’t struggle, didn’t squirm; all I had to do was hold her down against the bed of the river against the pressure of her natural buoyancy, and watch the bubbles roll out between her lips. As I held her down for five, ten, fifteen seconds, through the water I could hear Mrs Mikeda screaming, a strange, deep overhead rumble; also the distant thrum thrum thrum of some water bikes scudding past us, and a high splishsplishsplish of oars striking the surface somewhere downstream. Then, just as I was beginning to think I’d got the timing wrong, I heard a sound like a whale burping in the deepest part of the ocean, felt a relaxation all around, followed by a tightening, as, right on cue, the tide changed direction.
Dana exhaled. Her breath was a thick black stain in the water, slipping out to get tangled in the tide and sucked slowly past her towards the estuary, dozens of miles away. A thin metallic shimmer drifted out of her hair, whose strands started to drift loosely around her head. Grey, tarlike flakes spun away from her face, revealing clear, human skin beneath; the colour rose in her cheeks, her fingers twitched and, at the last, a moment before my lungs were going to burst, her eyes opened; and they were distinctly, irrefutably human, and just a bit beautiful.
I pitched her up out of the water just as she started to kick like a drowning person, and held her upright as the water ran off her face and out of her nose and she coughed and hacked and spat liquid, her hair tangled across her face like seaweed caught in a rudder. Mrs Mikeda was already halfway to us, up to her hips in the river, shouting incoherent curses in Russian; but at the sight of her daughter she stopped dead, hands going to her mouth and shoulders shaking. In the water around us, the clouds of trapped magic that Dana had accumulated drifted and faded into the river, and for the first time since I’d met her, she looked up at me with her own senses.
She said, “Uh…”
I said, “Hi.”
Mrs Mikeda said something obscene.
She said, “Have we met?”
“I don’t think so. Have we?”
“Did you just try to drown me?”
“Do I look like I just tried to drown you?” I asked as water dripped off the end of my nose.
“Where is this?”
“Twickenham.”
“What the hell am I doing in Twickenham?”
“Do you think this is really the place to discuss it?”
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“I’m Matthew. Nice to meet you.”
“Yeah,” she muttered, looking round at the water flowing around us. “I guess it must be.”
Mrs Mikeda’s friend had left blankets in the back of her car that smelt of wet dog, but we weren’t about to complain. We sat on the edge of the open car boot and ate fish and chips while Mrs Mikeda went in search of a Woolworths that might sell something warmer and fluffier to wrap around her shivering daughter. It took a while for the conversation to get going, but when it did, Dana Mikeda was pretty much to the point.
“So. Twickenham.”
“Yes.”
“I hate Twickenham,” she said, spearing a chip with a savage thrust of her little wooden fork. “I get lost. Always end up in Isleworth, and that’s like Wales.”
“How is it like Wales?”
“One guy gets on a train to Swansea, one guy gets on a train to Isleworth, and you can bet the guy going to Swansea gets there first.”
“I see.”
We watched the sky fade to a pale cobalt blue, and the lights along the riverside start to come on.
“Some shit, huh?” she said finally.
“Does your mother know you swear?”
“Would you like to hear it in Russian?” she asked sharply.
“I’ll live.”
“You’re… what? Like an exorcist?”
“Me? Hell, no. Sorcerer.”
“Oh.”
“You don’t sound surprised.”
She gave me a long sideways look. “I spent three years on antipsychotic drugs and being told by an NHS shrink that my dad had clearly abused me as a kid, and this shit still didn’t stop. So I’m either mad and the medicine doesn’t work, or I’m sane and there’s magic out there, because I don’t know what the middle ground is on this one.”
“You’re sane,” I said quickly. “Or as sane as a hormonal teenager can be.”
“I’m twenty-two,” she rejoined. “Just because I live at home doesn’t mean…”
“Sorry. My mistake.”
She was eating cod, I had plaice. She had opened the tip of her ketchup and dipped each chip delicately in the end of the foil wrapping. I sprayed all of my ketchup loosely into the paper bundle of fish and chips and shook vigorously before eating. “How old are you?” she asked.
“Twenty-eight,” I replied honestly.
“You look, like, older. Sorcery do that for a guy?”
“No, this is just my lived-in face,” I retorted. “Besides, sorry to hit you with the bad news, but you’ve got the sorcerous vibe bouncing off you like you could play pinball with it.”
“I figured,” she said.
“You did?”
“Somewhere between me being a pigeon, and reading the future in the way the litter blew outside my mum’s café, I guessed something had to be up. Sorcery sounds… about right. Is it fatal?”
“What?”
“Like a medical condition?”
“No, not at all! There’s nothing medical about it.”
“What about my mum? Is she…”
“Doubt it.”
“But if she’s…”
“It’s not a genetic thing. Forget X-men, The X-Files or anything else really at the latter end of the alphabet. It’s just… a point of view.”
She nearly dropped her fork. “A point of view? Is that what made me spend three weeks listening to the rats complaining about the butchers in the meat market and the nurse on ward three? Fuck that!”
“You’re not exactly trained,” I pointed out.
“Harry Potter? Three-week courses at Hogwarts, how to be a sorcerer?”
“Not like Harry Potter, no. Besides, magicians do the spells thing. Sorcery is more about… seeing magic where most people don’t, and using it. Does that make sense?”
“No. Bugger it,” she added, and took a large slurp from the carton of Ribena at her side. “Bugger it. Am I going to start hearing voices again?”
“Sure.”
“Shit.”
“The river was just a temporary thing. You go in at the changing of the tide and it just… washes it all away. But like all good launderettes, it’s up to you not to spill the tomato sauce on the whites after washing, right?”
“I think I get it.”
“Anyway, the whole sorcery thing, it’s not that bad.”
“I couldn’t remember my name.” There wasn’t any feeling in her voice, just a flat statement of fact. When I looked at her, her eyes were lost on the river. “I was everywhere. My fingers were the streets, my toes were the wires dug into the earth, my breath was the exhaust of the cars, my…”
“You were in a trance,” I said. “It’s always a risk. Sorcerers draw their magic from the city around them. So much magic in one place – it’s easy to get lost – to forget that you’re you, and just… sort of drift off. That’s what was happening to you. Your body was breaking down, your mind was just becoming absorbed. Eventually your consciousness would have become spread so thin across the city you’d probably have just popped out of existence. Something you might want to keep an eye out for, by the way.”
“Oh, crap. And this happens to all sorcerers?”
“Just badly trained ones.”
She gave me a thoughtful look. “So how come you’re doing the sane bit?”
“I’m well trained.”
“Who trained you?”
“A very good sorcerer. Very kind, very powerful.”
“He dunk you in a river too?”
“No, he found me a bit earlier than that. I was about fifteen, I’d run off into the night and just run and run because I could; loved it, became lost in the streets but always found my way home. Blisters, memory loss, daydreaming, the roof practically bleached white with the pigeon shit by the time he found me. He saved my life.”
“And you mine?” she asked quietly.
“Best not to think about it like that.”
“How should I think about it, then?”
“Good luck and the eternal interlinked cycle of life crap.”
“Cycle of life crap?”
“Ever watched The Lion King?”
“Sure.”
“Well, think that kind of vibe, but with a fifteen certificate.”
“I see.” Her eyebrows were drawn together in concern. “So… I’m a sorcerer.”
“Right now you’re just a teen… a young woman… who happens to have tendencies.”
“OK. Can I make it stop?”
“You could move to the countryside,” I suggested.
“Is that it?”
“Probably not. Sorcerers tend to pick up on the magical thing wherever they are. It’s very different outside the cities, the tone of it, the quality of the magic. But even the most stubborn sorcerers tend to adapt.”
“So I’m stuck.”
“Pretty much.”
“How’d this happen?”
“There was probably a moment.”
“A ‘moment’?” she echoed. “What does that mean?”
I put my fish and chips to one side. “It goes something like this. You’re walking along minding your own business, or you’re on the underground or you’re on a bus or something, but generally you’re not paying much attention. And suddenly you look around and see all these other people and think, ‘Hey, they can look at me and see me and I can see in my mind what I think they see, and when I’m gone they’re going to keep on walking and they’re going to go and live their lives, and their thoughts are going to be just like mine, but different, but real and solid and alive and full of feeling and confusion and colour just like life, and, hey, isn’t that cool!’ And it is.
“And roughly around this time you’re going to notice that you can feel trains under your feet or pipes bubbling, and you can hear the sound of traffic and voices and stuff; and then you’ll probably look up at the things around you and think, ‘Those buildings with the lights on look almost alive, like giant trees lit up with their own constellation of stars in every window,’ or maybe not if you’re underground; and you’ll realise that you can see the city all around, and it’s so full of lives and life, and they’re all buzzing around you, and every single individual is real and alive and passionate and full of mystery, and it’s not just Joe Bloggs walking by who’s like this, but that every part of the city is crawling with life. And you’ll think, ‘Hey, that’s pretty damn sweet, everywhere I look there’s life,’ and roughly around that point you’ll realise you can hear rats and pigeons and thoughts and spells and colours and electricity, and that’s probably when you started going a bit mad. Am I close?”
She thought about it. Then, “They said you were coming.”
“Who said?”
“Them. In the phones.”
“I’m still curious about who ‘them’ is.”
“They said life wasn’t worth living unless you lived it to the full, that it was all right to catch fire and burn for ever, and that all I had to do to be free was to light up the sky. Forget the laws, forget what people tell you you should or should not be able to achieve. They said, ‘We be light, we be life, we be fire – come be me and be free.’ You still think I’m not mad?”
“Oh. Them. They’re not worth paying much attention.”
“What are they?”
“They live in the telephone lines. Bits of life that got left behind. They’re just after kicks.”
“They said you were coming.”
“They’re good at spooking people. Don’t pay any attention.”
“What did they mean?”
“They want to know what it’s like to be human. Some people say that they’ll eat up your dying breath, your soul, gobble you up in order to find out what it is that makes you tick. Theory also goes the other way, though. If they breathed, that is. I used to… but it’s not safe.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“Best not to think about it.”
“I should just ignore it?”
“Yup.”
“Why?”
“They’re dangerous.”
“Is this a sorcery thing?”
“What do you think?”
She grunted. We sat in silence for a while longer, the grease from the fish-and-chip paper congealing on my fingers. Finally she added, “They said they were angels.”
“They lied.”
“You’ve heard them?”
“Yes. All sorcery is, is about spotting life in unusual places. Not to wax metaphysical about things, but it’s not just the sky, sea, mountains and so on; it’s the light from the street lamps and the buzz in the telephone. You can spot these things where others don’t. The blue electric angels sing a very seductive song. ‘Forget the confines of your own world, forget your flesh, your feelings, your friends, your laws. You are a sorcerer – you could blaze so brightly if only you thought you could.’ They want that, freedom and fire and bright lives; it’s all they’re about. Keep away from them.”
“Are there more things like that?”
“Sure. Demons and monsters and all that palaver. Easy enough to avoid though, if you’re careful.”
“Right.” She let out a long, shuddering breath. “My mum’s going to do her nut over this.”
“I think she’s so chuffed that you’re not currently exhaling lead, she won’t really care.”
“But it’ll happen again, right?” I looked up to find her eyes fixed on me. “You said – all this stuff, it’ll happen again.”
I shrugged.
“Why’d you get involved?” she asked sharply.
“Happened to be passing.”
“Coincidence?”
“Dodgy word, but short of a discussion on the merits of higher powers and the uncomfortable prospect of fate, destiny and so forth, yes. Coincidence.”
“Don’t suppose the guy who taught you wants another student?”
“Maybe.”
“You got his number?”
“Sure.”
She waited. When I didn’t move she said, “Well, can I have it?”
I hesitated. “There is…”
“Yes?”
“… the way it usually works is…”
“You teach me?”
“Pretty much.”
She nodded slowly then said, “There’s no nudity or blood, right?”
“What? No!”
“Good. How about living sacrifices and ceremonial dancing?”
“I don’t know if you’re really taking this seriously enough…”
“I am,” she said quickly. “Believe me, I just want to know what it is I’m getting into.”
“You’re already there,” I pointed out.
“Yeah. I guess so.” She looked up at the sky then back down at the river. “Are you a psychopathic murdering bastard?” she asked casually, no tone of offence in her voice or on her face.
“No,” I answered with a sigh.
“Well then,” she said. “Maybe we should talk.”
I left Mrs Mikeda in Smithfield around the time that the local clubs were starting to build up their queues of barely clad trendy young things ready to dance until the buzz in their heads had worn itself away. I didn’t know what the lady made of me or my story – her face had shut down to an impassive wall almost before I’d begun. But it was something that I felt had needed to be done.
I packed my bag, paid my hotel bill and, feeling there wasn’t much else left to do, caught the first bus I could find to Willesden.
Blackjack was at home, but only at the third time of knocking on the door to his shed. He was jumpy. No lights went on, no sounds were made from inside the wobbly, lopsided stack of iron that he called home, but he opened the door with a single tug and, the instant the door was wide enough, swung a double-barrelled shotgun up into my face that would have made the Metropolitan Police swoon on the spot.
On seeing my expression, he hesitated a moment too long before swinging it down to his hip and muttering, “You any idea what time it is?”
“Witching hour of night?” I suggested.
“You alone?” he asked, peering past me into the darkened scrapyard. Even though it was late, he still wore his leather jacket and big black boots, with a red spotty scarf tied around his neck; he’d pulled a thick pair of gloves up over his hands, so that his finger barely fitted into the trigger guard of the gun.
“Can I come in?” I asked.
He indicated that I should, and turned up a paraffin lamp as I stepped into the gloom of the shed. “You want coffee?” he asked, turning towards the low stove and slotting the shotgun down by a shelf full of spray-paint.
“Thanks, that’d be good.”
He put the kettle onto the stove, turned the nozzle on a cylinder of camping gas and struck a match to the hob, which belched its way into low blue life.
“Haven’t seen you for a while, what’ve you been doing, sorcerer?” he asked in a single breath as I settled down on a pile of least suspiciously stained blankets.
“Not a great deal,” I admitted.
“Heard you got hurt at the Exchange.”
“I’m fine.”
“Shit, like you’re ever really fine.” At the humourless chuckle in his voice, we looked up. He flapped a hand. “Never mind. Times are changing, you know, like the bard said?”
“The bard?”
“Jesus Christ, you need to get a life.”
“That’s the whole point of the exercise,” we replied. “You doing anything in the next few hours?”
“You want my guide to healthy living?”
“I want a lift.”
“Take the fucking train!”
“The lord of the lonely travellers probably isn’t my friend right now.”
“The what?”
“You should probably rethink your place in the grand picture sometime soon,” I said. “Can I have that lift, please?”
Blackjack grinned. “You’ve gotta get somewhere in a hurry?”
This is the biker’s magic. It is the melding of places into one. In every city, on every road, there is always a loose spot where things seem transient, where for a moment north doesn’t seem to make sense to be in the north, where in the instant before recognition that pub on the corner seems to be exactly like another which you visited some years back, in a different place. There are streets where you wake after sleeping in the back of a car and for a second, no matter how many years you’ve lived here or worked here or travelled this way, you have no idea where you are. In those places, if you know what you’re doing, it’s sometimes possible to slip through the gaps and cover, in a very short time, very large distances.
We were curious to see the biker’s magic at work, and found the thrill of the ride on the back of his bike an excitement that made our heart race as he spun through the empty streets. Nevertheless, inside the confines of the biker’s spare helmet, passing from light to shadow in an endless dazzle under the street lights, the whole thing made us feel rather motion-sick.
A flickering of anonymous streets. He didn’t take us south, despite the fact that this was where we needed to go, but drove north, until the streets faded into one long blur of semi-detached mock-Tudor houses that in my imagination defined so much of outer London suburbia. The roar of his bike’s engine was the loudest thing on the streets, startling the foxes as they rummaged in the bins, and echoing off the sleeping houses. I watched the names run by: Harlesden, Dollis Hill, Neasden, Queensbury, Stanmore; and then, out of nowhere, we turned left and roared into a housing estate, swinging round into an area of locked garages graffitoed over by a mixture of kids and the odd magician, one of whom had covered a whole wall with the image of flowing white horses. Blackjack took us off the road, over a patch of grass that spattered soggy mud and limp grass up around our ankles, and through an alleyway surrounded by dumpsters.
There was a moment of sickness, a tightening in our stomach, and all we could see was an endless dark alley, illuminated by the succession of white, stuttering long-life lamps.
Then we emerged at the other end, and swung into a street that looked exactly like all the others we’d passed through so far on our journey north. But now, when we reached the end of it and Blackjack passed straight through the red traffic light onto the empty curving road beyond, the signs were no longer for the M1, the Midlands and the North, but offered to show the way to Dover, Folkestone and the south-east. In a single cut through a council estate we’d covered over twenty miles of urban sprawl, and were on the other side of the river.
More cuts. Blackheath turned into the green belt with a sickening twist between a pair of trees; a service station’s endless winding internal roundabouts just before Rochester led out into the endless winding roundabouts of an equally depressing service station near Faversham; the monotonous street lights overhead seemed to dissolve into each other faster than a mere failure of eyesight to keep track would have suggested. When we reached the ring road above Dover’s white cliffs, I guessed that no more than forty-five minutes had passed between us leaving Willesden and arriving at the English Channel.
Blackjack took things easily down the long, steep road cut into the cliff’s edge below the castle. Dover sat below all that chalk like a stubborn stain on a perfect white tablecloth, caught between cliff and sea, a thin beady line of orange glow that mixed a history longer than the sea wall around the ferry port with 1950s lumps pretending to be architecture, from when much of the town had been levelled during the war.
Blackjack parked the bike in the ferry terminal’s car park. I staggered off the rear seat, back aching, knees wobbling, and legs hot from being so close to the engine, and sniffed the air. I smelled oil, diesel, seagull and the salt of the sea, whose cleansing rhythm washed against the buzz and flow of magic in the air. We tasted strange, thin magic that hinted at layers beneath it, but which were too unfamiliar to touch. I imagined that a druid would feel as uneasy as I did in that place, where so many different kinds of magic – traditional sea sorcery, the natural magic of the countryside around, the weighty history of the place and lastly the imposed bustle of life and business around the port – collided.
Blackjack said, “You been here before?”
“No,” we answered.
“And what about you?”
“Give it a rest,” I replied. “Come on.”
“Where now? France?” he asked, swinging a heavy sports bag over his shoulder and shoving my helmet into a plastic compartment on the back of the bike. “Holiday time?”
“You’ll feel embarrassed about those words when you’re finished with them.” We walked on into the port.
Tucked behind the maze of ramps and causeways and car parks that made up most of Dover’s ferry port was a small and mostly makeshift customs area, full of little offices, confiscated goods and demolished cars that suspicious customs officers had literally taken apart piece by piece. Beyond that, a small red-brick building was almost built into the cliff itself, with a black metal door and a single buzzing light that sounded like a fly was trapped inside the bulb. I dug into my bag for my set of blank keys and fitted one into the lock.
The magic was slow coming here, even though we could hear the splashing of the sea and smell petrol fumes. We knew there was potential in this place for all sorts of wonders; but it was so unfamiliar to us that we struggled to access it, as if we were caged in walls of perfect glass.
“You OK?” asked Blackjack as I tried to make the key work.
“Fine,” I muttered through gritted teeth. “Give me a moment. It’s just…”
The key sprung in the lock, the door slipped open.
Inside was a long white corridor that smelt of disinfectant. The tiles were chipped and the lino-covered floor, despite regular cleaning, was so ingrained with dirt that its former blue colour had been reduced to speckled brown. Suddenly we were sure that of all the places we didn’t want to be, all the parts of life we didn’t want to explore, this topped the list. I made us step forward carefully, as calmly as I could, in my new shoes. Blackjack hadn’t noticed them. That could be useful.
Off the corridor on either side were small offices, the walls covered by pin-boards dotted with pictures, notes and departmental memos, the chairs small, grey swivel jobs for rocking in when bored after lunch; the whole place lifeless, cold, and hard. It cast a sickly, overwhelming muddy stench across our senses that blotted out our usual perceptions, reduced what we felt, and dared to feel, down to a mini mum, swamped us with nothing. Horrid, magicless nothing.
“Hey – you sure you’re all right?”
“Let’s get it over with,” I muttered.
“Get what over with?”
I pushed back the door at the end of the corridor and walked down a metal staircase. In the basement were stainless-steel beds, trays, tables and knives, and on one wall a bank of steel doors, like a baker’s oven, but too small and too cold.
“Sorcerer?” There was a note of caution in Blackjack’s voice. “What the hell are we doing here?”
“Things must end,” we replied. “And we are all about now.”
I scanned the labels on the steel doors until I found the one I was looking for, swung the handle back and opened it up, pulled the steel handle inside and dragged it out, pulled the sheet back from the face of the corpse and saw…
Once Harris Simmons.
There was still enough of the face left to tell that much.
It had once been Harris Simmons. But they’d probably need to use fingerprinting, just to make sure.
“Oh, God,” muttered Blackjack.
“Things must end,” we repeated quietly, pulling the sheet back over the remnants of Harris Simmons’s face and leaning against the cold steel wall. “So why not now?”
“What the hell happened to him?”
“He ran. He was afraid of… us. The shadow killed him. When I spoke to the lord of the lonely travellers, he said a shadow was hunting Simmons. It was always going to find him before I could, and it only really has one solution to any problem.”
“You knew Simmons was dead?”
“Yep.”
“Then what the fuck are we doing here? Séance?”
“No,” I sighed. “Something much worse.”
The lights dimmed in the ceiling. Blackjack backed towards the wall. “Sorcerer!” His voice was a warning growl, his hand already going into his big sports bag. “What is this?”
A laugh started somewhere at the back of my throat and spread uncontrollably, we held in our sides with the force and pain of it. I rubbed my eyes as they ran with tears, wiped my nose on my sleeve. All around I could hear the slow snap of the lights going out, see my shadow stretching thin. “Bakker knows I’m looking for Simmons. So why shouldn’t his shadow know too?” Blackjack had a hand out of his bag holding a fistful of chain. I looked straight into his eyes, and there was something more than fear on his pale – unusually pale – face. “Simmons is going to lead me to Bakker,” I said gently. “He was always going to be a trap. But I wanted to know if you’d be the one to spring it.”
For a moment, he hesitated.
Then the shadow at his feet reached up, stretched one long, clawed hand out of the floor, clung onto the edge of a steel bed, and pulled. It pulled out a shoulder, pulled out the top of a head, tilted backwards towards the dying light of the bulb, and as its eyes started to form out of the darkness it turned to me and hissed, “There you are!”
“Charmed,” I said, and threw ourself nails first at Blackjack, stepping straight through the half-formed shadowy shape of Hunger as he pulled himself up from the darkness on the floor. Blackjack was fast, but, off-guard and big, he lumbered to one side as we hurled ourself at him, reaching up for his eyes. The lights above us popped, and sprinkled burnt glass, and Hunger lashed out at our passing ankle with still only half-formed claws that passed straight through us like ice-crystal fog. Our fingers scraped the side of Blackjack’s face, and our teeth sunk into the corner of his ear, drawing blood which tasted of nothing but burnt ash and salt.
Then something landed across our back, heavy and fast, and through his own grunting Blackjack caught us by the scruff of the neck like we were a dog and threw us back, snarling, anger in his eyes, and the chain in his hand didn’t so much move through the air as suddenly go from being in his hand to being round our throat with nothing in the middle to justify the journey. We gagged and clawed at our neck even as he tugged on the other end of the chain and dragged us down to our knees, his eyes burning, blood rolling down the side of his face and staining his necktie purple red.
“Bastard!” he screamed; “Bastard!” but that didn’t really seem enough, just empty sound with no meaning in the noise.
Then Hunger rose up in front of me and smiled a mouth full of rotten gum. “Hello, fire!”
That seemed to put an end to Blackjack’s swearing. His face turned grey.
Hunger leant down in front of me, grabbed my hair with one now solid, snow-white hand, and tilted my chin up with his other, its black nails digging deep. Turning my head so that all I could see were his dead eyes, he whispered, “Where is Matthew’s fire now?”
“It’s a better question than you know,” I replied.
A glimpse of doubt behind Hunger’s empty eyes?
Possibly. I looked at him and saw Bakker, and perhaps I only thought I saw feeling, in the replication of my old teacher’s body language on Hunger’s empty form. Hunger’s nails under my chin dug in deeper, drawing blood.
“Matthew…” and for a moment it was Bakker’s voice from Hunger’s lips, just for a moment, then gone, snatched away back into the depths of the creature’s belly. “Will you sing for me?” he asked. “Your old, favourite song?”
“‘Ten Green Bottles’?” I wheezed, feeling my blood start to run freely across my skin.
“The one that the angels sing. We be light, we be life, we be fire…”
“Shouldn’t trust what you hear on the telephone,” I replied. “You never know whether they’re laughing as they lie.”
He snarled, and then his hands became shadow across my head, and reached into me, curled around my heart and in that place, that dead place with the biker’s chain around my throat ready to strangle, I didn’t have anything to fight back with, and we were too afraid to try.
We were aware of…
… weaknesses…
… that we would not describe.
When the lights went out in the waking parts of our mind, we were secretly glad.
Journey with spaces and motion sickness.
Jumping from A to C without bothering to ask B if it wanted a look-in.
Incoherent vagaries. Flickering lights, burning around our neck, darkness in our blood, and always his voice. Give me life, he said, give me life.
We know that they drugged us.
We know that they tapped our blood. It wasn’t anything too unhygienic; they wanted us alive. They took a pint that Hunger licked at with his fingertips as if it were hot curry sauce. Then they took another because he could not understand why it tasted human. Then he shook us where we lay, and screamed, “I don’t want the sorcerer’s blood; I’ve tasted it before and it isn’t enough: boring, human, boring and grey! Where are the angels?”
It would have been easy for us to ignite my red blood in its plastic packages to our burning blue fire. It would have been so easy it would have made dying look complicated.
We stayed in darkness, and tried to stay that way, for as long as we could manage.
We had a dream. I’ve never been a big fan of the mystical interpretation of dreams, but say what you will for the implausibility of prophecy, as well as its uncomfortable metaphysical curiosity, this dream had something going for it. In it, we found ourselves drifting in a bright blue wire, while around us danced the distant humdrum sound of voices saying,
hello?
hello?!
HELLO?
Hi, your call has been forwarded to…
press one for damnation
two for enlightenment
three to alter your account details
or press the star key to listen to the menu again…
HELLO!
and to our surprise, we weren’t alone. We turned in the dancing space of the telephone line and looked at the stranger who’d surprised us. I was crouching on a drifting Microsoft Windows sign, face covered in blood, trailing my fingertips casually in the wake of a passing computer virus, watching the tendrils of flaky white malignancy tumble into nothing around my fingers, and we realised that I knew, even in this place, especially in this place, even the computers were alive.
We said, “Who are you?”
I looked up at the sound of our voice, a strange sparkling thing that, I realised, wasn’t just one voice but thousands, a burst of interference clubbed together from the myriad of human voices passing through the system at that instance to form a sound, where we had no mouth to do so, of speech. We stood in front of me, the blue electric fire of the wires passing straight through us like it was fog, or perhaps we were fog, it was hard to tell the difference, coalescing in and out of existence, staring at me through a face covered in flame.
“Matthew Swift,” I replied. “What the bloody hell is going on?”
“We remember you,” we said. “You gave us life!”
“I did? That’s nice.”
Round about this point, as is so often the case with dreams, I became confused, nagged by the sense that something about this whole picture wasn’t quite right.
“Have we met?” I asked, as we grew a hedgehog on our head and a small bendy bus drove across the Eiffel Tower beneath us.
“We are…” we began.
“… I’m sure there’s something…” I suggested, surprised to discover that my hands were purple and had three fingers each.
“Is this…?” we tried.
“Definitely something up,” I agreed. “Perhaps if…”
Then we heard a sound, a deep dark rumble sound that shouldn’t have been there, that rose up into a hacking boom, that became, filling the wire with its presence, laughter. We cowered behind me, instinctively feeling that I offered better protection against this very human sound in our domain, although surprised at ourself for feeling so immediately drawn to shelter behind a creature that was as clearly weak and alien as myself. In a turn in which our toes trailed across the mobile phones of Africa and our nose bumped the firewalls of Washington, we spun in the blueness until we saw the source of the laugh.
The source was, predictably enough, a mouth, full of pointed, rotting teeth, and that was all it was. The mouth filled our world, rose up over and above the scattering voices and dancing fire of our home, revealing a deep black gullet behind, and from between its lips came the stench of rotting flesh and the sound of giggling ball-bearings as it spread, swallowing our world whole in a single bite, blocking out all light around us, as we felt the fire on which we stood, the electricity in which we swam sink into the black hole of its throat, sliding down like its tongue was greased with thin oils, until all we could see was mouth and teeth and tongue and dead once-pink tissue that with a single gulp swallowed us whole.
As we fell into darkness, we looked back.
I watched the fire of the blue angels die out in the encroaching shadow, dislodging the cheetah that had decided to attach itself to my shoulders in order to keep warm, and said, “Don’t look at me. I was dead to begin with.”
Then even I was swallowed up into darkness.
Whiteness, whiteness, everywhere.
I looked to my left; I looked to my right. This was about as much physical movement as I could manage.
My eyes fell on the needles plugged into my left arm. If I hadn’t already seen most of my own internal organs up close and personal the last time something bad happened, we would probably have fainted. I held us to consciousness, and tried to think calmly.
The whiteness was from the walls, and the ceiling, and the buzzing strip light overhead, so bright that it hurt. Our eyes were gummy and dry, our lips were chafed, our tongue felt like leather in our mouth. Lifting my head was the extent of what I could manage; everything else seemed firmly strapped to the bed I lay on. I squinted at the bags suspended above where someone had rolled up my shirt sleeve to put in the needles. One held blood, type O, flowing at a steady rate; I noticed that my veins stood out thin and blue like an addict’s. Another plastic bag, dripping its contents into me, looked like it held glucose and minerals. Further up my arm, there was a pink plaster over the bulging veins in the crook of my elbow; clearly the relationship I was now in was one of give, as well as take. Someone had taken our blood.
We bit back on anger and nausea.
I wondered why I was still alive, and looked down further. My feet were bare. I wiggled my toes in an attempt to distract myself from the sudden grip of fear in my stomach. Where had they taken my shoes? More importantly, perhaps, when had they taken my shoes? I had no way of telling and for a moment we almost considered lashing out with what strength we could feel inside ourself and incinerating everything that came within the radius of our limited perceptions, so that at least if all things had to end, they could end with a bit of glory.
I resisted, forcing us to breathe in and out with a slow, steady rhythm and consider our situation. By rubbing my chin against my shoulder I got the impression of a few days’ growth of beard. By my light-headed state after even that small excursion, I guessed that they’d taken several pints of blood from me during this time; the administration now of type-O blood was for no better purpose than to keep us alive a bit longer, for their own benefit, rather than ours. By the fact that all our internal organs were where they should have been and our heart rate steady, we guessed that they still needed us, and felt for a moment a thrill of optimistic heat in our skin.
There was no hurry.
I could wait.
I lay back and closed my eyes, and let the blood fill my veins again.
“Matthew?”
I said nothing.
“Oh, Matthew. How did things ever come to this?”
“You know,” I replied, “I’m only two restraints, a cramp and a cocktail of drugs away from shrugging contemptuously in answer to that one.”
The squeak of a wheelchair on rubber flooring; a sigh. “Matthew,” chided the voice, “this is for the best.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I still don’t understand how you ended up like this! How it became so… rooted… in you. I know they drove you to do the things you did, and I promise you, I will free you from their curse.”
We opened our eyes. “Our what?”
Bakker leant forward in his chair, hands clasped together in front of him, face concerned. “I understand that… despite the terrible things you’ve done… it was for them. The angels hunger for life; of course they do; what wouldn’t? They feed on it, long for it, for experience, sense, freedom – it only makes sense that they would… well. Enough of what they would. It’s too late now for San and Guy and Harris and all those other poor souls who I’m sure they’ve dragged down, while wearing your body. I am sorry for it, and for the things that you will feel, if I should ever manage to free you from the angels’ snare.”
I stared at him, his pale, ageing face made more so by the gaunt contrasts of the room. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but can I just clarify this? You think I killed San Khay and Harris Simmons? You think that Guy Lee was even capable of dying? You think the angels have possessed me? Are you really that lost?”
He shook his head in dismay; began to turn the chair.
“Mr Bakker!” I called out after him. “I do not believe you can’t in your heart of hearts sense the things that have been done, guess at the crimes committed in your name! Look in the mirror and tell me where your shadow goes when you are so happily dreaming of good deeds; look at your own reflection and tell me why, in a bright light, the darkness we all cast isn’t lying at your feet!” He gave no response. I screamed after him, “You can’t be so blind as to not know! A part of you must know!”
He didn’t answer, and wheeled his way out of the room without once looking back.
No more dreams.
We wanted no more dreams.
Make me a shadow on the wall…
can you keep control?
a few pearls of wisdom
… you’re kinda stuffed, sorcerer!
come be me
we be light, we be life, we be fire
make me a shadow on the wall
burn for ever
… not worth paying much attention to
You’re a nit when not them, aren’t you?
we sing electric flame, we rumble underground wind, we dance heaven!
come be me and be free
we be…
I be…
be free
I’m sorry there’s no one to take your call right now, please leave your message after the dialling tone!
Beeeeeeeeee…
… me…
And be free.
.-.-.
No more dreams.
We couldn’t stand them any more.
A tickle in our nose?
A rumble somewhere far off, like the hot sigh of underground wind coming up from the tube.
I opened my eyes, since we were too afraid to, and looked around. Somewhere in the distance, there was a deep, polite whumph.
A tickle in my nose.
A trickle of mortar dust drifted down from the ceiling. We licked it off our lips, curious. It made our dry tongue, if possible, drier, and tasted of nothing much, with a hint of salt.
I croaked, “Dana?”
From the corner behind my head, out of my line of sight, she said, “That’s a spooky thing you’ve got going there.”
“What is?”
“The way you knew I was here.”
“I was faking being asleep.”
“Then the blue eyes are spooky instead.”
“We can’t really do anything about that.”
“Another spooky thing.”
“What is?”
“The way you sound human when you speak.”
“That’s got a better explanation, all things considered. What’s going on?”
She shrugged. “There’s an underground line beneath us.”
“Which one?”
“Northern.”
“Oh. That’s what the rumbling is.”
“Perhaps.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“I’m not buying into any new faith systems.”
“I wasn’t asking for you to…”
“I think we’re going to die,” she said quietly.
We thought about this, then smiled. “All things must end,” we said. “So, in the long-term perspective, you may be right. But what’s the point of living, unless you have an end to live for?”
She grunted. I heard the sound of her shoes plodding flatly on the carpet, of something moving on a table beyond my vision. The needles in my arm were gone, the pinpricks covered with small plasters, but I didn’t feel any better for it. Her hand brushed the back of our head, tilted it up carefully. She put a plastic cup next to our lips and said, “Go on. Have some.”
We hesitated, and looked up into her face. She looked pale, thin, but her eyes were still alert, if no longer bright. I sipped. The touch of the water was absolute balm; it rolled across our tongue as if the muscles in our mouth had cracked and dried like a desert, so solidly baked it was almost incapable of absorbing the moisture. When I’d drunk, she said, “I read somewhere that it just goes straight through you, if you’re too dehydrated, like a brick.”
“Cheering,” I said.
“Would you like some more?”
I licked my lips and nodded. She disappeared somewhere behind me. Water ran. She reappeared and helped me drink. Then she said, “You haven’t asked me to help you yet.”
“I didn’t want to rush things.”
“They say you’re possessed.”
“Who ‘they’?”
“Mr Bakker.” The same tone of respect was in her voice that still, even now, instinctively filled mine.
“I’m not.”
“But you’re not quite yourself, are you?”
“No. Not entirely.”
“He said you killed Khay, Lee, Simmons.”
“I didn’t.”
“But you did see my mother.”
I looked up and she was right there, staring down at me, face impassive, voice so cold and empty I half-imagined she hadn’t spoken at all. I licked the last drops of water off my lips, and she didn’t offer to get any more. “I saw Mrs Mikeda. She’s worried about you.”
“Did you do anything to her?”
“You know I didn’t.”
She nodded slowly. Then, “If I help you, promise me you’ll leave. Just get up and go, run. Just run and don’t stop running and move east faster than the night-time and keep going. I know you can do that. I know you know how. Just…” She stopped. I waited. She took a deep breath, steadied herself. “He watches me, all the time,” she murmured. “He’ll find out.”
“Bakker?” I asked.
She shook her head. “He is kind. He tried to help me.”
“Hunger?” I said.
Her eyes turned to me, uncertainty giving them a certain light, for a moment. “You…” she began, a question trailing off in her voice.
“Tall, dark, wears Mr Bakker’s face?” I asked. “He who watches you?”
She nodded.
“Wears my old coat?”
Slowly, nodding.
“What does he want?”
“He said he’d let me live if I helped him.”
“Help him do…?”
“Summon the angels. He said…”
Realisation dawned slowly. “You called us back,” we murmured. “You brought us here!”
There it was, a spasm of fear on her face. “Yes,” she said.
“You brought us back!” we repeated, louder. “It was you, you dragged us out of the lines because we’ve always spoken to you, always known you, always been there for you and you knew where we would hide and you brought us back! We have loved you your whole life, we have whispered to you of freedom and the brightness of life and you, you brought us back! You summoned us!”
“Yes,” emotion now in her voice, trembling on the edges.
“Why?” we asked.
“So many dead,” she replied. “He killed them – Akute, Pensley, Foster, all the sorcerers who you told me to run to if things got bad – he killed them all! Not just because they were his enemies, but because they were your friends! To have his revenge on you even once you were dead because you wouldn’t help him; wherever I went he killed! And you left me!”
Talking to me, I guessed, not us; we had never entirely left her.
“You left me half-trained, unprepared, what was I supposed to do when you were dead?” Her voice was rising in anger and fear and, perhaps, something else. “He said he’d kill everyone I knew, everyone I touched, everyone I… but I’d be alive because they’d never found your body, because he saw you the night you died, he saw you breathe your life into the telephone lines, saw your flesh eaten away in a second by a mountain of blue electric maggots that fed on you until there was nothing but blood left, and I hoped, I thought, that perhaps… what was I meant to do?”
We stared at her, and there were the beginnings of tears in her eyes, although she was fighting with all her pride to hold them back, daring me to disagree. We said, “We’re sorry.”
She grunted, half-turned away from us to wipe her eyes with her sleeve, snuffled and turned back, as if somehow we hadn’t noticed the gesture.
I said, “I’m sorry. Dana – I’m sorry.”
She swallowed and nodded. “Run away,” she said. “You can’t stop him. Please. Run away.”
“It may be a bit too late for that,” we answered. “Dana?”
“Yes?”
“What did your mother have to say?”
Dana half-laughed, a choked-off, failed sound. “She said you were an arrogant bastard and probably in league with the Devil.”
“Really?” I asked, not too surprised.
“She said you told her everything. She said you apologised.”
“That’s true.”
“In all the years since you’ve been gone, with all the things that have happened,” murmured Dana, “Bakker has never apologised. He doesn’t know that he needs to.”
A distant thud, another trickle of mortar dust from the ceiling. I said, “That’s not the Northern line.”
A flash of a grin on her face, wry and familiar. “Central line around here too.”
“Really?”
“Sure.”
I thought about it, then started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“I know where we are. Christ, the guy’s got some cheek,” I muttered. “Dana?”
“Yes, Matthew?”
“Will you help me?”
“He’ll kill us.”
“I can handle Bakker.”
“It’s not him I’m talking about.”
“We know. We can handle him.”
“Mum said you were possessed. Mr Bakker said you were possessed too.”
“It’s too short a word for the relationship,” I murmured. “Please, Dana. You wouldn’t be here at all if you weren’t going to help me. So I’m sorry to rush this, but please, please do what you had to, sooner rather than later?”
“Why’d you see my mum?”
“I was worried!”
“About me?”
“Of course about you!”
“But you thought she might call me. Say you came by. You counting on me to help you out? You were dead until a few weeks ago. You’ve got the wrong colour eyes.”
“Please,” I said. “Please, you know that this is still me. Help me.”
She thought about it. “Maybe we should talk,” she said.
We talked.
She told me about being Mr Bakker’s apprentice. That he had shown her the wonders of the city, taught her to find beauty in all the brightest things, taught her that everything was alive, and bright and full of potential and wonder if you just bothered to see, and that this was good, this was how sorcery felt it should be.
Then she told me that he’d told her that magic was life. That there would be no life if there wasn’t magic, that the study of magic, the pursuit of it, the analysis of it, the understanding of it, all these things were key to understanding life.
Then he’d told her to listen to the voices in the wire, the angels that had always talked to her in her childhood, because we’d always sensed that she had a love for life and could live it so fully, we were drawn to that delight in all things that she had in her voice even over the phone. Even when speaking to a faceless machine her words had been full of feelings and thoughts and honest truths, even in the wire we had sensed the expressions on her face, she had given us so much life.
Then he’d told her to talk back to the angels.
Then he’d told her that they were another form of magic, and that as such, they could give life.
Then he’d told her to summon them.
And after the shadow had appeared in her room at night and all the spells she’d thrown at it had been for nothing, she had. After it had told her that it was hungry, so hungry, that it wanted to drink the blue fire of the angels and, if it could not, it would have to feast on the meagre blood of sorcerers – or sorceresses – so, instead, she had.
We were going to say something rude, but I bit it back. Thinking about it, I pointed out a few basic flaws. It wasn’t about talking; all I had to do was listen, and I wasn’t going anywhere until the story was done.
Then she let us go.
We were surprised how weak we were. We did not understand how I could bear it; but then, I wasn’t in the mood to consider what could go wrong for us next.
Dana helped us to the door of the white room, and pushed it open. There was nothing outside but an empty corridor, with strip lights buzzing quietly overhead, and the humid hotness of water pipes running through the ceiling. There was also, however, the familiar smell of…
rich deep blue magic rising up from the underground lines
rumbling reddish-brown tints of the traffic overhead
silvery sparkle from the water pipes
flashing blue fire from the electricity!
… enough magic to grasp hold of and tangle in our fingers, a remembrance of our power, thick and compelling.
We let out a sigh of relief.
“I know where we are,” I repeated, pressing my fingers into the dry, unadorned concrete of the walls. More than just the ordinary hodgepodge of sensation, I knew why Bakker chose this place for his home. It buzzed with something more, a deeper line of power that in the good old days of naked dances and ritual sacrifice would probably have been worshipped at dawn.
“You’ve been here before?” she asked.
“No. But, Central line, Northern line, the Tower; and Mr Bakker always had a sense of the ironic. You didn’t need to tell me anything more.”
“I don’t like this dark,” she muttered. “He keeps on popping out of it.”
“It’s all right,” we answered. “We can protect you.”
“I’d rather Matthew did,” she replied.
“I’ll do my best,” I said. “Tell me: when I was brought here, was I wearing shoes?”
“What?”
“It’s important.”
“Yes. Why?”
I smiled, standing on tiptoe to brush the ceiling, feeling the warmth seep into my fingers from the cables clustered within it. “Friends are coming. We need to get you out.”
“Me? Why?” Then she thought about it some more and added, “Friends? How?”
“Because they’re not very sympathetic,” I replied. “And you’ve been keeping bad company. What were the other questions?”
“Is this about your shoes?”
“Yes.”
“Thought it might be.”
“Good. Which way to out?”
The map of the London underground system was an elegant bit of design by any standard. In other cities, the equivalent looked like a faded imitation, full of implausible destinations highlighted in unsuitable colours, and confusing junctions between overlapping stations, where dotted lines were indistinguishable from coloured blobs meant to inform the viewer that here you could get three escalators, or just walk between stops without violating the terms and conditions of your ticket.
Be that as it may, on the map of the London underground there were only two places where the Central and the Northern lines met, as they ran through the city nearly at right angles to each other. The first was the strange vortex of direction-distorting tunnels, platforms and winding white-tiled stairways that made up Bank station, a place in which even the shrewdest geographers armed with compass and map could get lost while trying to track their way between DLR and Circle line platforms. A place indeed, so some practitioners said, where the borders between spaces were more flexible than usual, and where the bikers swore that, even at the slowest speed, it was possible to find those weak points and slip through to a destination entirely different from any on the map.
But the buzz of magic in the place where I stood, feeling the warm, familiar rumble of the trains under my feet, wasn’t that of Bank. That left one other station: Tottenham Court Road, serving an area of suspicious computer shops, hi-fi warehouses and dodgy second-hand dealers, together with the megastores and brothels of Oxford Street and Soho.
And there was a tower. It amazed me that I hadn’t thought of it before; there was a tower, and it wasn’t just a giant building stretching up into the sky, it wasn’t just an expression of power or, as some feminists would have it, a symbol of masculine insecurity, as so many tower blocks in so many cities seemed to be. It was the Tower; it featured on postcards; and the air inside it buzzed with all the magic that such a position entailed.
If I hadn’t been certain before, I was by the time Dana helped me up a flight of stairs, pushed back a door with the words “Danger!! High Voltage!!” plastered in big yellow letters on it, and led me out into a concourse that smelt of sweat and chlorine. Opposite me was a sign. It read:
Men’s Toilets→
←Women’s Toilets
** Centre Point is a Non-Smoking Zone **
Dana said, “What d’you think?”
I laughed.
“Thought you’d say that,” she grunted.
“Bakker lives here?”
She shook her head. “He moves around.”
“But he’s here, tonight.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes. How’d you know?”
“He wants our blood,” we replied. “He’s trying to make it catch fire, he wants us to give him life. I knew he wouldn’t want to be too far from us, once he found us.”
“You… wanted to be found?”
“I knew Simmons was most likely dead. I knew Bakker wanted us alive. I knew that, with San Khay and Guy Lee both gone, the shadow would have to deal with me myself. I knew I was going to be betrayed, and a process of elimination led me to think it would be by my friend. With such a wonderful array of information at your fingertips, what would you have done?”
“But… you were… there were needles and…”
“I was keeping my fingers crossed that you might let me go.”
“You didn’t know?” she asked sharply.
“Didn’t seem good manners to presume.”
She scowled. Then, sharply, out of nothing asked, “Can you?”
“What?”
“Give him life? Can you cure Bakker?”
We shook our head. “Not as he’d see it.”
“He said that you could save his life. He’s dying,” she added, with reproach in her voice.
“I know, and no one can,” I replied gently. “Least of all us.”
“Then what can you do? Sorry to sound like the naive one, but wouldn’t it have saved a lot of trouble if you’d told him this?”
“We are creatures of the life you leave behind. We feed off the feelings you forget, we were born of the thoughts that faded the moment they were spoken, of the unseen things, of the unspoken things that got trapped in the wire when the phone was cut off or the words lost in interference, or when the mouth that spoke them lied, but on the other end of the line they couldn’t see their faces. We are all this, and he thinks that if he takes it, for himself, takes that which makes us alive, he will live for ever.”
“Forever doesn’t sound so bad; I mean, if you’re not such a bad man. What’s the catch?”
“Apart from the fact that he’s been leeching my blood?” I asked.
“Apart from that.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Oh, please. I think I got way past that lesson on day one.”
“Which way?” I asked.
She nodded round the curve of the dimly lit passageway. I grinned.
“What?” she asked, seeing my expression. “What’s so funny?”
“I’ve always liked this place.”
“You know that it’s a disgraceful example of the greed of the property industry, a crappy piece of planning and, until dead recently, a dive for druggies, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It fits the vibe.”
“Is this the right time to criticise some of your teaching techniques?”
A rumble somewhere not too far off, a ripple of sensation, a shudder of the lights, a moment where we thought we heard
hello Matthew’s fire…
“No,” I said firmly. “Come on.”
The tower’s foundations had been set deep, and there were more than on the official map; tunnels spread around the water mains, and between the passages of the underground station almost immediately beneath it. We seemed to walk, stagger, jog on our irregular progress through the maze of seemingly identical passageways under Centre Point, the smell of the underground gym – all body odour and chemicals – being replaced by the stench of urine that defined the subways passing beneath its concrete struts, which in turn faded down to the distant thrumthrumthrum of pounding club music humming through the walls.
We found a service lift, its panels rusted, its floor uneven, its wall of cardboard stuck on with gaffer tape. Dana pressed the ground-floor button and I didn’t argue, leaning against her and watching my world steady itself as we rose up with a slow cranking sound through the lift shaft. I didn’t know how much blood they’d taken or how much they’d put in me, but by the lightness of my head I was willing to guess that it hadn’t been a proportionate ratio.
We had passed the grid to the basement exit when the lift lurched, the lights went out and everything stopped.
Dana said, her breath coming fast and ragged, “What the hell?”
“Friends are coming,” I replied, straining to hear something through the dull echoes of the shaft. “It’ll be all right.”
“Is this something to do with your bloody shoes?”
“Yes. Magicians are always so hung up on magic, they never bother to check for technology.”
“You… were followed?”
“Pretty much. I’m not the only one capable of tricksy planning and cunning insight, you know.”
She scowled, staring round the tight confines of the lift, uneasy at the small space. “We’re going to sit here?”
“Too many shadows,” I answered.
“You had to say it, just when I was being steely with self-control, you had to say it!”
We took a deep breath and rubbed our hands together, searching for warmth between our fingers. The magic was easy in this place, we didn’t need much to work with. I opened up the palm of my hand and let the bubble of pinkish-orange neon light float up above our heads, illuminating the tight space of the lift. Dana’s face was pale, the fixed smile scared, but refusing to sink into any more honest expression. “He’s going to kill me, isn’t she?” she said, not bothering to raise her voice or let the terror fill it. “He’s going to kill me.”
“He hasn’t yet.”
“So?”
“The shadow… is part of Bakker,” I answered, thinking about my argument a word at a time. “Perhaps there’s a part of him – both the man and his creature – which doesn’t want you dead?”
“You’ve always got a way with the implausible.”
“I’m just theorising.”
“What now?”
The lift jerked, and started moving again, of its own accord, tossing us to the sides to cling on for support.
“Good?” asked Dana breathlessly.
“Buggered if I know.”
“You know, for a man possessed – sorry – in a complicated relationship with mystical entities of bloody magic and forgotten life – you’re pretty useless when it comes to a tight situation, aren’t you?”
“This isn’t a tight situation yet.”
“Tell that to the white room and the operating table,” she retorted sharply. “Looked pretty tight from where I was.”
“Yes,” I replied, “but you did help me, didn’t you?”
She opened her mouth to speak, then hesitated, thought about it, then opened her mouth again. “You are a total…”
The lift jerked to a stop. The door slid open with inexorable slowness. Beyond was a single cream-coloured corridor, lined with tinted glass windows that obscured the light and darkened even the shadows beyond it. Outside it was night; inside it was harsh strip-light day, the floor cold and the air dry, unstirred. I stepped out of the lift cautiously and looked around. Dana said, “This isn’t the ground floor.”
Behind us, the lift door slid shut.
I walked to the window and looked down. Some distance below I saw the shape, tinted brown, of what in real life was a bright blue, floodlit fountain of three treble-pronged stone nozzles that squirted water into the pool around them and, chaotically, over the narrow pavement beyond. I guessed it to be about four floors down. Dana said, “I’m sure I pressed ground.”
“I’m sure you did too,” I answered, looking around the corridor. There was no feature in it except a red fire extinguisher next to a closed door. “But lifts can be subject to other people’s control.”
“I didn’t feel we moved that many floors…” she began again, a note of urgency entering her voice.
“Moving without covering all the distances involved,” I answered cheerfully. “It’s been known. Dana?”
“Yes?”
“If Mr Bakker got round to teaching you any sort of protective magics, now might be the time to practise them.” I could hear a humming, a sound like an angry beehive, or perhaps a very expensive, very badly treated car engine caught in traffic…
“Is this where the lights go out?” she asked.
I wandered over to the fire extinguisher and tugged it out of its rack on the wall. “Deep breaths,” I said, and kicked open the door.
On the other side was another long white corridor. Standing in it were at least half a dozen men and women, armed variously with grenades, handguns, and rifles, and assorted magical baubles that floated and drifted, or had just been slung down casually at the owner’s feet. In front of them a huge motorbike dominated the corridor, black tyre marks skidded all around it. Sitting on it, mirrored visor lowered over his face, was the wide form of the biker. He revved his engines.
Dana said, “Um…”
He put his foot down on the pedal, kicked the bike off the stand and, with a roar of engine that filled the whole corridor with an angry thrum, and a burst of black fumes that darkened the faces of the people around him, charged straight for us.
I pressed down on the fire extinguisher.
From its end came thick white billowing gas. I pressed down harder, caught a fistful of gas between my fingertips, spun it into a tornado of whiteness and threw it down the corridor, straight at Blackjack and his friends as they ran towards us. It spread out as it moved, rattling the windows and splattering the walls with patches of pale foam, thickening in an instant to the consistency of froth on hot cappuccino, blinding the eyes of the men with the guns and the women with the bombs as they ran at us, choking them and filling their noses with the stench of chemical suppressants. But not Blackjack. Behind his empty-faced helmet he just kept coming. I grabbed Dana’s hand, pulled her away from the door and said, as calmly as I could, “Run.”
Bakker had taught her as he had taught me, because she did as I said without question.
We ran.
Corridors, offices. The offices sat behind dull plywood doors. Most of them were empty. Some were missing panels on their ceilings, through which wires drooped and odd foil-covered pipes poked. Some had water coolers, the gossip-corner of any workplace; some had long rows of endless boring desks lined with endless boring computers that were probably capable of making phone calls to innocent bystanders, but had almost certainly had all the games wiped before installation, with no opportunity to install any more.
We ran into another office of neglected desks and the odd revolving chair. Right behind us, the biker burst through the doors, smashing them apart with the front wheel of his bike. Dana dove left, I dove right and the biker tore between us, spinning around a few metres beyond with a screech of burning tyre that tore a gash in the carpeted floor. He revved his engine a few times, like the challenge a knight gives before the joust, and the sound was so loud that the windows tinkled, the loose wires in the roof swayed, and the chairs creaked and rocked; the noise went straight through the eardrum and made the inside of our nose ache, shook into our stomach and blurred the edges of our vision. From the back of the bike, a cloud of noxious black smoke whirled up around him; its instant taste in our throat was like the stench from a garage forecourt, which could penetrate even the thickest glass and suck moisture from our mouth.
The lights faltered around us and, for a panicked moment, I looked down at the floor to see my own shadow; it was not turning. I looked over to Dana and saw that she had one hand raised towards the ceiling, and was dragging crackling jagged arcs of blue electricity out of the wires above us, causing the lights to dim as she spun it between her fingers. The motorbike roared into life, and went straight for her. She threw her bundle of voltage at the biker, but at the last instant he swerved; and for a moment, there were two of him, one swooping straight into the oncoming blast of Dana’s spell, the other spinning away from it, behind her already, the two images flickering for a moment as Blackjack worked his magic and moved from A to C, without calling in at B.
He disappeared from in front of Dana.
Instantly, he reappeared, a few feet behind her, and his front wheel was still headed straight for her. I called out a warning and swatted a wave of pressure through the air that wasn’t nearly enough to dislodge something as heavy and as fast as the motorbike, but knocked Dana aside enough so that the front wheel missed her. It slammed on past, pounding through a plywood desk that didn’t even slow the bike down, but splintered right through the middle without the biker losing an instant of speed. I ran to Dana, grabbed her by the wrist, dragged her up and pulled her through the nearest door. A corridor away there was a flight of stairs, winding round one corner of the building; below I could see a theatre and the bright lights of the crossroads outside it, the evening’s crowd pouring out after a performance, the buses struggling round the tight corners and the taxis lining up for their fares in the narrow bus lanes of New Oxford Street to the indignant tooting of other traffic.
We wanted to go up; up would be where he was – but with Dana I didn’t dare risk it, didn’t want her in the same building as that man and his shadow for a second longer than necessary, so we went down, winding round the narrow confines of the stairwell, third floor, second –
– just after the second floor, we felt a tugging of sickness in our stomach, a moment of dislocation, and looking down, we saw that below us was the third floor. We tried again, reached the second floor, dropped down another flight of stairs and were instantly back at the third floor. We could taste Bakker’s magic in this, we could feel the familiar taste of his spells, the unique craft and skill of them, but under it, too, a faltering of the lights, a pulling in our stomach.
We looked down at the floor and saw our shadow starting to stretch long, even though we weren’t moving. Dana followed our gaze, and her hand tightened around ours.
“He’s coming,” she whispered.
The lights dimmed in the stairwell, and this time it wasn’t our doing. I turned to the window and started kicking at it. Dana, realising what I was doing, joined in, but the glass just went bonk, as if it was a solid plastic sheet. I cursed in frustration, looking around for some sort of inspiration; Dana got there first. She dug the nails of her right hand into the palm of her left, flinching as she did, until the skin tore and a thin line of blood crawled out. She dipped a finger into the blood and drew, on the glass, the image of a keyhole. For a few moments the shape was nothing more than a dark stain on a dark surface; then it began to hiss and smoke. She clenched her right hand into a fist and punched the glass as hard as she could in the heart of the keyhole.
The glass cracked. She punched again. Little fault lines spread out, thickened; the whole thing started to creak. She drew her fist back for one more punch, and a fist emerged out of the darkness of the glass, and caught her by the wrist, black nails digging into her skin. She screamed, a sound of genuine terror that was the product of I couldn’t imagine how many months of fear. I grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her back, and the arm that held hers reached out of the glass, the blackness of its shape growing sickly white flesh, and her blood trickling around his fingertips as he became real.
We snarled, and lashed out at the forming flesh of Hunger, our fingers trailing sparks through the air; and our nails drew three parallel lines of black blood through his flesh. His hand spasmed around Dana’s arm and she whimpered again, cowering away and shaking her head in numb horror, every instinct she had shut down behind the fear. Then out of the dark glass the head appeared, and leaned forward with its mouth already open, teeth sparkling, tongue licking its blue lips as it reached out for Dana’s blood, its eyes, nose, skin gradually becoming solid.
I waited for its ears to become real and, though it was probably only moments, that waiting seemed to take for ever. Then I put my hands over Dana’s ears, drew my foot back and kicked the metal banisters of the stairwell with the sole of my bare heel.
The metal went booooiinnnnggg.
Hunger flinched.
He was scared of us.
We grinned and kicked it again.
The rails responded with a hollow, long, resounding boooooii innnnggggooinnggggoinnnggg…
Bakker had taught me this spell, and knew how it would end. And, because Hunger was, in the end, Bakker’s shadow, so did he; even before I levelled a final kick he was retreating, drawing back into the shadows while the lights around us brightened. But just to make sure, to finish him off, I aimed one final kick, and drove my heel as hard as I could against the metal banister.
The stairwell shook. The sound was the sound of hollow metal vibrating, but rising up through more than just a single long rail. It filled the stairwell, hummed up every banister, and the sound fed off itself, the hum in one setting off a vibration in another which set off resonance in the next, filling the whole stairwell with such a clamour of magically enhanced ringing that the cracks in the windows spread of their own accord, that the light fixtures tingled, that dust shimmered down from the plastic-padded walls, that the edges of the black rubber sheath over the top of the banister started to warp under the strain, that the whole world seemed to quake. In the street outside, car alarms sounded; in the blue pool of the three ugly fountains, water sloshed against its sides and one fountain spurted the half-hearted residue left in its pipes over a passing tourist who clung to a lamp-post as the hum rippled through the street.
Hunger’s fingers uncurled in an instant, his face stretching with pain; and he was gone, retreating into the window. Dana’s bloody hands were pressed over mine, which were covering her ears; her eyes were shut and her face a twisted mass of confusion and distress. I felt my ears pop and my nose start to run with hot blood – something we didn’t feel we could afford to lose right now. I staggered up the stairs, pulling Dana along with me by her head, kicked open the nearest door and, blind to which floor or what spell we were trapped on or in this time, fell onto the carpet beyond, pulling Dana down with me, and shoving the door shut behind us.
The echoes slowly faded. I sat up, my ears ringing. Dana pulled herself up and experimentally lifted her hands over and away from her ears. Then she turned to me, her voice shaking, and said, “You never taught me that.”
“It was luck,” I replied. “Damn things could have been solid, for all I knew.”
“In this building?” Her voice was distant and slightly too low, as if heard through a thin sheet of water. I wiped the blood from my nose and shook my head, as if that would be enough to banish the tinnitus buzzing just behind my eardrums.
“Fair point,” I conceded. “Where are we?”
She staggered onto her feet and pulled me up with her. “It all looks the same to me,” she admitted. “But I’m pretty sure we should have hit the ground floor by now.”
“Good old-fashioned spells to confuse, baffle and bewilder,” I groaned. “We are starting to lose patience with this game.”
“Is that what it is?”
“For him,” we replied, and felt that we didn’t need to specify for who.
“You hear that?” she asked.
We put our head on one side, not sure if the tinnitus was fading or if we were simply getting used to it. Perhaps a hint of …
“Motorbike,” said Dana.
“Now we really are out of patience,” we announced.
The door at the end of the corridor burst open, and this time, the motorbike was trailing fire. Dana threw herself through the nearest door and I followed. A female toilet, somewhere neither I nor we had ever been before, and which disappointed us in its plainness.
Dana slammed the door shut behind us and pressed a large metal bin against it as the bike swept by. The sound of it stopped too suddenly for it to have gone into the stairwell; the engine noise just winked out, leaving us in sudden and uncomfortable silence.
Dana looked at me, I looked at her. She rolled her eyes, marched over to the bank of low, cracked metal taps and started running every single one, putting in the plugs and dipping her hands into every basin as they started to fill. I groaned as I saw what she was doing; but, not having a better idea, I picked up the lid of the bin lodged against the door, and smashed it against the long mirror above the sinks. I carefully picked out a shard of glass from the cracked spider’s web clinging to the wall, curling my fist around it until it bit into my skin, drawing blood. Dana raised her hands from the final basin, water pouring off them, and grinned. “Right,” she said. “Not so useless!”
She started to spin her hands through the air, with a beckoning, gentle gesture. The water pouring out of the taps started to turn, twist up away from the basins it was filling and spin towards her, circling around her like clear silk scarves, winding around her legs and arms without ever actually touching her skin, the taps still running so that she seemed to be almost attached by liquid placentas to the sinks, by lines of still-flowing, thickening water that constantly spun and moved around her as the taps poured more and more into the spell, and kept on pouring. I’d heard of sorcerers who’d sucked whole reservoirs dry doing spells like this; unless someone actually, physically turned off the taps, there was no reason to stop.
And she was good at it. The spell flowed around her, and the way she spun it, the way she let the growing swirls of water dance and mingle into thicker strands of sparkling translucence across her – she knew the effect was beautiful, and in many ways, that sense of the elegance of the thing was what let her craft the spell so well. She’d always said she’d found the sight of still waters to be calming; and watching her then, entirely in control, I felt for a moment that, perhaps, everything would be all right after all.
I raised my fist, the glass clenched inside it, towards the mirror and spun my own version of the same magic. The cracks spread from where I’d smashed it with the lid of the bin, rippling out towards the edges in ever-splitting streams like the passage of water across uneven dry soil, until, with a single heave, the entire thing shattered. The glass fragments, however, did not fall. They drifted at my command; I could feel everyone like the skin on my back, taste them in my mouth, a sharp metallic feel on the tip of my tongue, and when I moved, they moved with me, wrapped themselves around me like a reflective blanket, each one shimmering back the brightness of my eyes
our eyes
bright blue
a moment to remember that our eyes are blue now, a thousand, thousand pieces of blue brightness looking back
beautiful brightness too
before I turned to the door, painfully aware of the silent nothing outside, and said to Dana, “Right. Sorcery.”
I kicked open the door, as much for the drama as anything else.
The corridor outside was empty, except for a trail of burning tyre marks along its length that finished as suddenly as it had begun. Dana gestured, and a slender filament of water still drawing its life from the running taps in the bathroom, and snaking out from the door behind her as she moved, now slithered through the flames, extinguishing them in front of us. I walked ahead, careful, in case I cut her, to keep my distance as the shards of shattered glass and mirror danced and dazzled around me in a standing wave of silver. Moving slowly behind, Dana trailed the umbilical cords of water like the tails of a kite.
We passed through another office. A post room, full of empty sacks and bags; a small kitchen; a canteen, the shutters drawn across the windows. Our shadows stayed obeying the laws of physics, turning and bending with the light. Another office. Another flight of stairs.
Dana said, “Can we break his spell? Can we get out?”
“Sure,” I answered. “But it’d be easier with a motorbike.”
Shouting somewhere below; sounds of battle somewhere above.
“Guns?” asked Dana.
“Yes; my friends don’t have much imagination,” I replied. “Come on.”
“Can’t we find them?”
“Sure,” I said. “Bakker’s ex-apprentice and his current apprentice together at last in front of an angry mob of people come here for the express purpose of destroying the Tower, bloody sorcerers and all their works. What a happy meeting that would be.”
“No need to get sarky.”
“Sorry.”
We started descending, slowly, one step at a time. We turned the corner of the stairwell and I could see the door to the second floor and felt a tight tugging in my belly and we stopped.
Putting our head on one side we leaned gently forward, then back on our heels, feeling the sickness grip us as we did. “It’s here,” we whispered, eyes half shut as we tried to pinpoint the source of our unease. “Right here.”
We looked round. The floor we stood on was uncarpeted, the walls clean. We looked up. The ceiling consisted of plastic panels set into concrete. Dana threw a fistful of tight, high-pressure water at the most central one, which wobbled, came loose, and flopped onto the floor. I bent to pick it up, letting my glass shroud drift above me for a while. On the back, someone had drawn, very carefully in thin black ink, a picture of a stairwell, all odd angles and strange dimensions, that seemed to feed inexorably into itself. I touched it with a fingertip. The hot magic of it burnt; we snatched our hand away and for a moment heard
Matthew’s fire!
We dropped the panel. Then, with a scowl, we directed a handful of shattered glass at it, tearing the thin plastic to shreds in an instant.
“You OK?” asked Dana.
“Children’s games,” we snapped, louder than we’d meant. “We have no patience with these tricks of the light!”
I grabbed back my handful of glass, tossing it into the whirling mêlée around my head, and kept descending. This time, the second floor stayed the second floor, and the first floor was the first. The door to the ground floor was locked, but Dana leant out of her watery cloak for a moment to stroke it, whispering gentle invocations into the bars on the door, which eventually, reluctantly, clicked loose. The doors swung back.
There was a foyer beyond, high-ceilinged, full of odd alcoves and strange shapes, along with the occasional neglected potted plant, a battered reddish carpet and an abandoned reception desk. Beyond that were a pair of large, black glass doors.
In front of them sat the motorbiker, and there too, its long tail curled round the back of him, was a dragon.
There was no mistaking the creature. The tail was the signs of street names that had been changed by the local council; its claws were the bent pipes of signposts that had been smashed into by speeding cars; its spine rippled with the reflective Catseyes of the motorways; its belly was plated with speed warnings; its haunches were tense with the triangular fluorescent warning signs of “DANGER!” or “SLOW – CHILDREN CROSSING”, bent and twisted to fit the curves of its hulk. Unlike the litterbug, this creature was at least fifteen feet end to end, and all metal; no vulnerable cardboard underbelly here, nor beating recyclable heart. It didn’t so much blink as that the reflective coating of its eyes – the battered lenses of smashed speed cameras – glinted with the slightest movement of its head, capturing the shimmer of the white lamps dangling high over head like suspended jellyfish.
If there was an expression on the biker’s face, it was hidden under his shiny helmet, and the impassive curling dragon showed no inclination towards feeling across its twisted metal snout, buckled together by the reflective neon yellow bands of cyclists’ warning straps.
Dana said through the corner of her mouth, wisely keeping perfectly still as we surveyed the creature and the dwarfed shape of the biker beneath it, “You didn’t mention dragons.”
“Oh, come on. I must have.”
“Pretty sure I would have remembered.”
I considered the beast. There was a familiarity in its shape and form. I said, “I don’t suppose you’ve ever lived in the City of London?”
“Not my kind of rent,” she admitted. “Is this going to be relevant?”
“Perhaps.” We looked down at the biker, cleared my throat and raised my voice. “Bakker still needs us,” we said. “The shadow still wants us.”
Blackjack reached up, and slowly pulled off his helmet. Underneath, his face was blistered, red, eruptions of pus around his throat and chin, and thick infected arteries standing out across his forehead. “I know,” he said, staring straight at me, his voice hoarse and weak. “He told me.”
The lights shuddered, dimmed overhead. The dragon stirred. I murmured to Dana, for her ears only, “Legally the City of London is a historical anomaly; it’s been almost unchanged for centuries. They say the Mayor has the power to exclude even the sovereign from entering the city, not that anyone’s tried for a while.”
“If it’s not relevant I will actually chain you back up in that damn room myself,” sung out Dana in a fluty, frightened voice. The shadows stretched, bent at our feet.
“The city’s symbol,” I replied, keeping my voice as low and as calm as I could, “is a dragon, holding the cross of St George. And its motto…”
… darkness thickening in front of the dragon, tightening to a spot, warping, rising…
“… is Domine dirige nos.”
“Nice,” squeaked Dana. “Catchy.”
… rising up from the floor, forming a head, a chest, arms, a face…
“Let me handle the dragon,” I muttered.
Hunger emerged from the shadows. He stood in front of the dragon, which seemed quite content to have him there, and stretched, the darkness swirling around him. I saw Blackjack flinch in his presence, but he didn’t otherwise move. Hunger looked at the biker, like a snake drawn by movement, and grinned, exposing rotten teeth. “Poisons in your blood?” he murmured.
Blackjack looked away, and for a moment it occurred to me that the expression on his face wasn’t anger, but shame.
Hunger turned to me, still grinning; then his attention moved to Dana. “I always knew you’d betray me, to him,” he whispered, voice carrying like the hiss of a serpent. “I hoped that the pain of you betraying him would be enough to kill his heart, and let them take over what was left; but you didn’t. Little child, running back for safety.”
Dana didn’t answer.
Hunger’s empty black eyes settled on my face. “Ever killed a dragon, sorcerer?”
“Not lately,” I replied.
Behind him, the dragon flexed its claws.
“This is a beast of forgotten and disobeyed things,” said the shadow. “He is summoned from the broken street sign, from the smashed order and the bent commands, vulnerable to being summoned because so much of what he is has simply been ignored.”
A hand stroked the dragon’s metal flank, nails scraping across the rusted remains of a one-way street sign. “Little humans always think they know best. Forget the past, forget the rules, forget humility – that is their natural place, being petty things. It is why he is angry.”
I licked my dry lips and risked staring into the cracked camera lens of the dragon’s eye. It shimmered back at me.
“I hoped that she would free you,” explained Hunger. “Does that surprise you?”
“You wanted what?” Dana’s voice was a bare breath on the air.
“We thought you would let her help us,” we replied coldly.
“And why?” he asked, enjoying his moment.
“To make us fight to escape. To make me fight to protect her.”
“To make your blood burn blue!” He almost laughed it, practically clapped his hands together with childish delight. “When you are the sorcerer your blood is nothing to me. I have drunk my fill of it already and it tastes like the others, like all the other dead old men and frail little women; it barely touches a corner of my belly, it is tepid in my throat! When you are the angels, your blood burns so brightly it… it…” A whine entered in his voice, he seemed to constrict, shrink into himself like a petulant child. “Hungry.” The words rattled out thin across his teeth. “So hungry…”
“We can beat you,” we said easily.
“You’ve never killed a dragon,” explained Hunger, eyes burning bright.
I grinned. “Life is full of… well, a lot more life.”
And, because we had it to hand, we threw a wall of glass towards Hunger and Blackjack; Hunger melted into the shadows in a second, Blackjack threw himself down under the blast and the glass shattered lightly off the dragon’s metal sides. Its nostrils flared with the clanging of tempered metal, and it raised itself up, shaking its bulk with a deafening clamour. I grabbed Dana’s wrist and hissed, “You worry about the biker.”
Dana opened her mouth to complain, looked into our eyes and changed her mind. She nodded, turned and threw a head-sized ball of water at Blackjack, wrapping it around his nose and mouth as he struggled to his feet. I focused my attention on the dragon.
It raised itself up on its back legs, the slashed wreckage of a speed-humps sign warping around its thighs as it did, the bent remnants of a “dog fouling” notice cracking under the strain, and roared. The sound severed the lamps in the ceiling, which smashed down on the floor in front of it and around it; it shattered the glass of the foyer and knocked Dana off her feet. We dropped to a crouch, ready to pounce, and I dug my nails into the palm of my hand without even thinking about it, digging them deep until the blood ran. I dipped two fingers in the pool of red liquid accumulating in my hand and, the blood sloshing thinly, drew a crude cross on the floor in front of me, and another, smaller cross in the left-hand corner of the shape. The dragon lumbered towards me with surprising ease and grace, its form shimmering across the floor. It didn’t even need to claw me to death; a single swipe of its neck would break every bone in my body.
I heard the cracking of metal and saw that Blackjack had crawled away from his bike. He had a chain in his hand, which was lashing out towards Dana’s face; but she ducked, and hurled tall funnels of water at him. They spattered his face, then knocked him off his feet, and bowled him backwards like they were ocean waves breaking from a storm. The tendrils of her spell, winding around her and back through the doorway to the stairwell, led from where the taps were still running, some floors above.
Above me, meanwhile, the dragon raised a paw. Its palm, ready to smash down on my head, was a blackened “STOP” sign, graffitoed over in big green letters by some wag with the comment “Caliper Boy SMELLS”. I dropped instinctively to one knee, raising my hands above my head, and, from under this metallic death, in the second before the lights went out I shouted, “Lord lead us!”
The paw hesitated, hovering a few inches above my head, so wide that I couldn’t see the ceiling above it.
Somewhere on the foyer floor, I heard a hacking and spluttering as Blackjack tried to spit water out of his lungs; and the sloshing of Dana preparing another twist to her spell.
The paw trembled in the air above me.
“Domine dirige nos!” I repeated, shouting the words up at it. “Lord lead us! Lord lead us!”
The paw drifted to one side. A pair of camera-lens eyes stared down at us.
“You are the dragon that guarded the city of London,” we whispered frantically. “We recognise you, we know you; you are the dragon on all the old gates at the city walls, you are the symbol of the old part of the city; Domine dirige nos is your motto: Lord lead us; we know you…”
A rumbling sound from somewhere inside the monster like the passing of a distant train.
“No!” The voice came from the shadows, where Hunger emerged. “No! I summoned you. Obey me!”
“Lord lead us,” I whispered again. “We know you; Lord lead us. ‘The city of London shall have all its ancient liberties and free customs, as well by land as by water; furthermore, we decree…’”
“I summoned you!” shrieked Hunger. “You are mine! I summoned you out of the city; you will…”
“‘…know that I have granted to my citizens of London for themselves and their heirs, the citizens may appoint as sheriff whomever they want from among themselves and as judge whomever they want from among themselves to take charge please of the crown and supervise their conduct; no one else shall be judge over the men of London…’”
“They are the blue electric angels, they do not know these laws!” shrieked Hunger.
“You are the dragon of the city of London,” I whispered. “Listen to me! I’m from this city, I know its laws, I know what makes it alive, I understand it. Domine dirige nos; I know your history, I understand how the shadow summoned you, but you don’t have to listen, I know the history, duty, humility, laws, time…”
“No!”
The scream came from somewhere other than the shadows. I looked round and saw that the shadow had moved; he now stood behind Dana, one black arm across her throat, claws pressed against-her eyelids, his eyes burning. “Stop it, sorcerer,” he muttered, and then, in a voice that wasn’t quite his, not quite, “Stop it, Matthew.”
I stayed absolutely still, while the dragon coiled back in on itself, watching with empty eyes. “You know the Magna Carta, you know the rights of the city; you may even know how to unsummon an urban dragon,” not Hunger’s voice, coming from Hunger’s mouth, “but if you push me, I will kill her!”
Blackjack was on his knees, throwing up water through his nose and mouth. Dana’s trailing spirals of tap water were now flooding pools splashed across the floor, her eyes shut and breath coming in little wheezes as Hunger held her close to his frozen skin. “I kept her alive for this,” he whispered. “Just like my sister. I kept her alive.”
I started forward, but his fingers pressed harder into her face, pushing the blood out of it. Hunger grinned. “Where’s Matthew’s fire now?”
“You didn’t know I’d come back!”
“But I never found a body either,” he replied. “And the angels always loved to talk to you. Come be me, they said, and be free, and you’ve always wanted to be free, Matthew. You’ve always dreamed of turning yourself into dancing blue fire and spinning across the sky, you’ve always wanted to be a rumble on the wind, a dancer in the clouds; what creature of flesh would want less? The chance to fly and be free, to forget the poor, constructed laws of humanity, the pain, the fear, the feeling, the ageing, the dying. The angels have always loved you, because you’ve loved them, you’ve always wanted their message to be real, you’ve always wanted to be fire and light and life and now that you are… you will not share. So I kept her alive, and maybe, just maybe, the sorcerer has enough control over the angels to not let her die?”
“Robert…” I began.
“I am Hunger!” he screamed. “I am not bound by the laws of flesh! I am hungry! You are so alive when you burn – I will have that life!”
The dragon’s tail twitched, scraping along the floor.
“We can’t…” we whimpered. “Please… I…”
“Which one? Which one can’t? Which one can’t bear it if she is dead?”
“We are…” we stuttered.
“… almost…” I began.
“… the same.”
“Please,” we said.
“Please…” I added.
Then Hunger grinned. “I will understand these things when I am alive again,” he said, and raised one fist of black claws towards Dana’s face.
We screamed.
The bloody cross within a cross that we had drawn on the floor at our feet caught fire. The fire was bright blue flashing sparks that wriggled and writhed by themselves.
And because we didn’t know what to do, couldn’t cope
not this
my feelings
such feelings
not this
because we couldn’t understand
this feeling
too much
–because we couldn’t
I couldn’t–
we screamed
“Domine dirige nos! Domine dirige nos!”
And the dragon of broken and disobeyed signs was, in the end, an urban creature, summoned out of the city itself; and the city’s dragon, the lord of the city’s gates, did so very much like to lead, and be obeyed, and have its own rules that could, so rumour went, stop the king or queen entering the city, if it was felt that Londoners didn’t need them inside their walls. Hunger had told me the key himself: time, law, humility, a recognition that in the eyes of the city, we were nothing, and the dragon was the lord.
Without a moment’s hesitation, it swiped its tail in an easy gesture that took the head off Hunger where he stood, slashing it from his shoulders with a single razored edge of broken signpost.
Hunger disintegrated into nothing, black wisps of darkness crawling away into the corners of the room, where they melded into the shadows.
We looked at the dragon, it looked at us, as the blue fire of our blood gently retreated back down to dull redness. Then, without a sound, it started to melt. Scales of reflective plastic drifted off its skin, in flashes of bright white, yellow and red. The traceries of a thirty-mile-an-hour warning sign, the remnants of a school crossing notice, part of a placard welcoming you to a council estate, a shard of post office notice, a chipped blue piece of a notable’s plaque, a warning about temporary lights. They slipped off it like seeds from a dandelion as the spell that had sustained it slowly disintegrated.
Last of all, flopping to the ground with a single dull thunk, was a small rounded piece of stone that rolled towards our feet. We picked it up. Its edges were smooth and surface warm; it felt old in our hands. On one side were the words:
n this day in 167
derman of the city
in honour o
Domine dirig
and that was all.
“Matthew?”
I turned to look at Dana, who, without a sound, slipped to the floor in a rapidly growing circle of her own blood.
We dragged our nails into our hand to draw blood, and put all our strength and heat and warmth into it until it burned so brightly that the walls were blazing blue. We rubbed it into her wounds but she didn’t speak, didn’t stir.
We screamed for help, shook her, shouted her name, pressed the heat of our flesh into her cold skin, pressed our hands as hard as we could into the gashes in her chest and neck but the blood just seeped out around our fingers and mingled with our own until we couldn’t tell what was ours and what was hers and the burning of ours was muted in the medley.
I couldn’t
not Dana
I couldn’t
so we had to. We held her in our arms, and every joint seemed to have just broken, every limb hanging so heavy, we were amazed she had been able to lift them, even her fingers were so heavy when we tangled them in ours, and because I knew and couldn’t cope, we screamed.
We screamed until the glass that had shattered on the floor danced again with our voice, until the wires under the floor grew up like ivy through soil and tangled themselves around every railing and buried themselves in every wall, until the foundations warped and the ceiling shook, until the electricity danced around us in a tornado, until the gas pipes burnt inside their casings and the water pipes burst in geysers around our head, erupting towards the ceiling and boiling away in clouds of billowing steam. We screamed until the fire extinguishers burst, until plastic melted, until the thinnest wires started to melt and drip with their own heat, until our voice wasn’t human, but the roar of the traffic and the screech of brakes and rattle of engines and rumble of an underground wind and
come be we
and until our hair danced with electric flame and our breath was black carbon on the air in front of us, bursting through our nostrils, and our fingers had the metallic gleam of a penknife and our heart raced in time to the dedumdedumdedum of the speeding train racing across old tracks deep in the earth and the rats clustered in the gutters and the pigeons scattered to the sky and, all around us, every telephone started to ring.
If we had known how, that would have been when we crawled back into the telephones.
We would have forgotten that moment, would have said goodbye to being human, if this was what it was like. I’d have done it in an instant, if I’d known how. But we’d burnt out the telephones around us, and the lights in the street, so we sat and rocked the body of Dana Mikeda, and whispered the dead sounds that people make at corpses, like the soothing words of a mother to her baby, telling them it’ll be all right, after all.
We became conscious of Blackjack’s wheezing by slow degrees. We looked up. Part of his leg was open and torn, and one arm hung oddly, but he was still alive, for what it was worth. His jacket had been slashed to ribbons and under it I could see the bare flesh of his infected veins. He had found his bag crushed under the remains of his bike and from it, pulled a gun, which he pointed at us. We felt…
… not quite nothing…
He found it hard to speak, but we weren’t going anywhere.
“You…” he began, then spat blood and a piece of tooth, and tried again. “You… knew I was the traitor.”
We said nothing.
“Used me!” he rasped. “Used me to find Bakker, find her. Knew I’d betray, knew you had to be alive. They followed… you were followed… so that the others could come here, destroy the Tower.”
Still we said nothing. There wasn’t anything that seemed to need saying.
“Used me,” he repeated, nodding a quick, frantic nod. “Respected that, sorcerer. Respected it.” He flicked back the safety on the gun. “I’m dying,” he said.
Nothing.
“Blood curse. I swore and I betrayed. Knew it’d happen. Knew I’d die when I swore. Gotta be done. Gotta… gotta keep moving … gotta… find speed… enough… it’s gotta be real. Life has to be lived on the edge, you have to see how it ends, to know that you’re living it. I was so fast… you gotta be different, you know? To know you’re alive? The whole clan they fucking said… gotta fight the Tower. Gotta work as one. Gotta work with others, say the right fucking thing, walk the right fucking walk, talk the right… you gotta bleed and burn and die and do what is right, because that’s what’s expected. You gotta do right. Because that’s what a normal guy is meant to do. I ain’t never going to be that normal guy. I ain’t never going to be what they told me to be. When the shadow killed the head of my clan… he set us free. Do you understand, Matthew? The chaos? The speed? Do you understand being free? It’s… it’s all about… it’s… no one tells me who I’m going to be. No one.”
We said nothing.
He levelled the gun. “Don’t you want to hear the rest?”
We thought about it. We shook our head.
He closed his finger over the trigger.
There was a single, sharp gunshot. Then another. It echoed across the flooded, shattered debris of the room. Blackjack staggered forward, the curse-ridden, battered remnant of his body barely able to support even that movement, then slid into a puddle on the floor.
From the stairwell, Vera said, “Psycho-bitch can shoot, can’t she?”
We heard the clicking of a rifle, and footsteps coming towards us. We looked up. Oda looked back at us, behind her Vera, and behind that, a dozen or so Whites stinking of various destructive magics.
Oda said, “You look shit. Need a hand?”
We thought about it. Then we nodded, took hold of the hand that she offered us, and let her pull us back onto our feet, carefully laying down the body of Dana Mikeda on the floor behind us as we did.
There were Whites scattered on every floor. Vera said they’d lost the signal from the tracker in my shoe just outside the tower, but it hadn’t taken much guessing to work out where I’d gone. She said there’d been confusion about why they kept on arriving at the same floor over and over again, no matter how many times they went upstairs, but it was nothing a lot of shooting and a dash of magic couldn’t solve.
She agreed that we looked like shit.
It almost sounded like a compliment, coming from her.
We took the lift up to the tenth floor, where it stopped working. At the twelfth we found another dozen Whites and a lot of bodies; on the seventeenth a group of weremen dropped in; on the twenty-third we found a gaggle of warlocks; on the twenty-seventh, Oda greeted stony-faced Order men, laden with more weapons than we had ever seen.
At the thirty-fifth, the very top floor, Oda pressed a gun in our hand.
I said, “I don’t know if I can…”
Vera, standing behind us, said, “Arseholes, we’ve come this bloody far!”
Oda thought about it, looked us straight in the eyes and said, “You came here for revenge. Now you’ve got a real reason for it.”
“I… I was… it…” I couldn’t really explain.
She thought about it, then said, lowering her voice, “Bakker is alone up there. No one is coming for him, not Amiltech, not Lee, not Simmons. You destroyed them all to get to him. Even the shadow is gone…”
“Not yet,” I replied, “not quite.”
“… if you can’t finish this,” she said, firmer, “then maybe you should let them do it for you.”
We stared at her in surprise. “Oda?” we said.
“Well?”
“We don’t know if we can do it either.”
“This is the only thing you have.”
We took the gun, left the Whites in the stairwell, and went alone to meet Mr Bakker.
There is a magazine, published irregularly in the UK, and distributed occasionally in the US, Australia, South Africa and among a specialist English-speaking market, whose imaginative founding editor dubbed it Urban Magic. Students sometimes read it when they’re bored and listless, in case they can get useful hints about sex out of it; fluffy ladies who care about gardening sometimes read it in case it can advise them on how to read their own palms; sinister men with an unhealthy interest in rabbit’s blood sometimes read it, in case they can find clues in its pages to a conspiracy. All of these people tend to be disappointed. If you ignore the occasionally garish covers designed to entice readers of just this sort into paying the £1.60 required per issue, the contents tend to be rather dry – essays on the various applications of ultraviolet light in binding spells; studies on the effect of different kinds of road paint in summoning circles, with excruciatingly detailed footnotes and usually a URL link to online case notes as supporting evidence; an assessment of how the wave–particle theory of light might be connected to the manipulation of pure elemental forces, and so on. It is the magazine of the professional urban magician, and a fairly specialist one at that. I first started reading it when I was in my twenties, a while after the first issue was published, and borrowed the back copies from the local library, because my teacher told me to. When I couldn’t find the more obscure issues, I joined the British Library and went through their archives. There, after much scrutiny, I found an article very well received at the time, entitled “The Changing Concept of Magic”, written for one of the earlier issues by my very own teacher. I read it, took notes and reported back favourably enough; but it took me a long while to work out what it was about the thing that bugged me so much.
It said: magic is life.
And there, quite simply, should have been the warning.
There was a pair of double doors at the end of a hall, and an empty reception desk in front of them. The doors were locked. We kicked them until they opened, no strength left for subtlety, and marched into the room beyond.
The room was gloomy, the lights switched off; but more than enough street light drifted through, reflected down from the orange clouds outside, drawing long shadows within shadows across the carpeted floor. Spread out beyond the windows, on every side except the one I’d come from, was the city. It ran away as far as the eye could see, a chaotic pattern of orange, white and pinkish stars across an uneven black floor, gleaming off the Thames, catching the flashing yellow indicator lights of the cars in the streets below, the glare of headlights where the streets aligned with our point of view, the glint of bedroom lights as they were turned out for the night, or the neon glow of the signs above the restaurants, clubs and bars.
And it was beautiful. No getting round the fact. It was simply and utterly beautiful.
And sitting in front of it, looking south towards the high red lights of Crystal Palace and the distant blackness of the North Downs where they cut off the orange sky, his back turned to the door, was Mr Robert Bakker.
He sat utterly still in his wheelchair, head forward, breathing slow and steady. Tubes were attached to his arms. On one side was a bag of some clear fluid that we couldn’t guess at, leading into a drip. On the other side was a bag of bright red blood. I could guess whose. We felt the weight of the gun in our hand, the sticky hotness of our palm, and noticed in the light of the moon peeking out occasionally between the scudding clouds that he was casting a very respectable black shadow.
“Mr Bakker?” I said.
He stirred slightly in the wheelchair. “Matthew?” he asked, in a distant, confused voice.
We moved forward. “Mr Bakker?” we repeated, louder.
“Matthew, is that you?”
I stepped round so that I was next to him. He looked up, confused, then smiled. “Come to admire the view?”
I nodded and looked out across at it. “It’s a good view,” I said finally.
“One of the best. I had this whole floor cleared out so I could see it better.” His eyebrows tightened. “How’d you get here? Not that I’m not pleased to see you…”
“I was kidnapped, drugged, tied up and left in a basement thirty-something floors beneath this,” I replied cordially. “I then had a large amount of my blood taken out of my body for what I can only assume were experimental purposes, before my friends, having followed me here with foreknowledge of my imminent kidnapping and likely fate, attacked, and I escaped.”
He thought about it, then said, “That’s not what I expected to hear, I’ll admit.”
“Would you like to hear the rest?”
“Yes,” he said. “I would.” And by now, his eyes had clocked the gun in my hand, and the blood on my clothes and skin, and his voice was level and tense.
“Your shadow is alive.”
“What?”
“Your shadow is alive,” we repeated, struggling not to raise our voice. “It’s been alive for several years. It killed Patel, Pensley, Dhawan, Akute, Foster, Awan…”
“Matthew, are you quite all right?”
“… Koshdel, Khay, Dana, and me, to name a few. It is you. No getting round it. And it won’t be killed until you are.”
His fingers tightened on the arms of his chair. “You… believe this to be true?”
“Yes.”
“What did you mean by Dana?”
I met his eyes squarely, and saw him flinch. “It killed her. It held her, and I said, ‘Domine dirige nos’…”
“The blessing of the city?”
“The very same, just like you taught me, the invocation of all its guardians and its spirits. And it killed her. I held her and I couldn’t stand it, so I just… we were… anyway. It killed her. It wants to be alive – really alive. It is hungry. Nothing will ever sate its appetite, it is so hungry for life. It has no pleasure in anything, it cannot understand delight or feeling or pain, but it tries; it feasts on the blood and the fire of others, kills in order to see how people die, is fascinated by death and feasting and life. And it is a he; and he is you. That’s how it is, I’m afraid. How it’s going to go.”
“Matthew…” he began.
“It came alive when you had the stroke. You were a good man – a brilliant sorcerer. You had always delighted in life, seen beauty in it; that’s what sorcery is. The ability to see something wonderful, magical, where other people see just mundane and boring nothing. A point of view. You taught me that. Then you started dying and you couldn’t cope. You couldn’t reconcile the loss of your faculties, your abilities, your strength, your life, to how you’d lived it in the past. You were a healthy and active man and suddenly you’re trapped in this dying carcass. But you’ve still got those scruples. The moral part of your brain says, “Oh, well, such is life, et cetera et cetera, better make the most of it and not cause any fuss.” Then there’s this other part, the part that everyone has anyway, that screams and fights and kicks against the idea of dying, that is terrified of it, can’t cope with it, refuses to accept it and longs, above all other things, to live. That can find nothing in this life that doesn’t lead to death, can see nothing in this life that it doesn’t think is destructible or must have an end. I’m sure you see where this is leading.”
“You’re wrong,” he said simply.
“Because you’re a sorcerer,” I went on, drained, empty. “Because you have a certain view on life, this other part comes alive. Perhaps it’s harmless for a while, but then its thoughts seep into your own, its dreams infect your own, and you start thinking, ‘Hey, let’s see if I can stay alive, I’m sure it wouldn’t cause anyone any trouble, where to start?’ And you think of the blue electric angels and go, ‘They’re just surplus life waiting to be tapped, I wonder if they’d like to give some of their power to me?’ And somehow in this process you forget the rules. You forget that the angels are about freedom from restraint and laws and all the earthly things, and you forget that they are not just life, they are power. And the hungry part of your brain might be thinking, ‘I shall be a burning blue fire across the sky,’ but you sure as hell don’t say it. You could steal the electric angels’ power and be a god, without flesh, form, feeling, substance, without restraint by the laws of man. And you’re already halfway there, as we’ve established, because there’s your shadow doing its thing. So you ask your apprentice round. And I said no. Probably didn’t explain it well at the time – sorry – but no was the answer and it was the right answer. And you’re a bit pissed at that.”
“Matthew, I didn’t…” he tried again.
“Let me finish,” I snapped. “I need to get it right this time. You’re a bit pissed off and, whether you like it or not, there’s a part of you going, ‘Little bastard betrayed me! The angels always talk to him, why not to me, little shit!’ or words to that effect and, Bob’s your uncle, I am surprised to find myself dead at the claws of a creature that wears your face but is distinctly, definitely not alive, merely hungry. So very, very hungry.”
We clicked off the safety on the gun, and turned it this way and that in our grip, wiggling a finger into the trigger guard. “So there’s really two things, as far as we see, which need explaining on our part, us to you. The first thing is why we didn’t talk to you, when you listened for us in the phone lines. And the short answer is this – you are a great sorcerer, a brilliant master of your arts, you see magic wherever you go. But you said, ‘Magic is life,’ and that’s not quite right. You think that the study of magic, the understanding of it, gives you some sort of better grasp of life. Unfortunately, even I worked out that this isn’t quite true; it’s a bit skewed, see? We understand this. Magic is not life. Life is magic. Even the boring, plodding, painful, cold, cruel parts, even the mundane automatic reflexes, heart pumping, lungs breathing, stomach digesting, even the uninteresting dull processes of walking, swinging the knees and seeing with eyes, this is magic. This is what makes magic. Understand that, and you are some way to understanding why we are what we are.
“And I guess that covers point the second – why I didn’t help you summon the angels. It pretty much boils down to this: a man who looks at everything and sees a tool to be used, a force to be manipulated, rather than just good, old-fashioned stuff doing its thing, should not be free of the restraints of humanity. Have we missed anything?”
He thought about it a while, then smiled. “I don’t think so.”
“You don’t seem particularly surprised.”
“I knew you had to believe something like this.”
“You don’t seem particularly surprised that Dana’s dead.” He didn’t answer. “Why did you keep her alive?”
He thought about it a long while, then said, “I doubt you’d really care for the reasoning. And it really is worth staying alive, however you can.”
I saw it coming a second before it happened, a flick of his wrist. I raised the gun, swinging it up instinctively towards his head, but he’d already opened his fingers. The wall of twisted air slammed into me and picked me off my feet, knocking me back and wrenching my wrist as I skidded across the floor. The barrel of the gun smoked and burnt red-hot. I threw it aside and crawled back onto my feet, spinning my fingers through the air to catch a fistful of the magic of that place, dragging the reflected orange light in the clouds around me like a fluffy blanket to ward off the cold, until my skin burnt with its dull gleam. Bakker hadn’t moved from his chair, hadn’t stood; his back was half-turned to me. But as I watched and prepared a spell, he reached over and slipped out from his skin the needles carrying blood and other fluids, put them to one side and, very carefully, stood up. His legs buckled, but he caught himself on the handles of the chair, and rose nonetheless. He steadied himself and turned to look at us, standing on his own two feet, unsupported; and his face was white, his eyes empty, his teeth rotten, he trailed darkness as he moved, and he cast no shadow.
“There you are,” we said.
Hunger/Bakker grinned. “And we are so hungry!”
“No, really?”
He opened his mouth and the darkness poured out like he had swallowed a bellyful of black, breeding locusts. It buzzed on the air and filled the room, expanding into every corner to block out the moonlight Its touch was ice on our skin, but we drew our neon blanket tighter around us and half-closed our eyes, letting the bite of it settle down on us like a winter’s wind after leaving the confines of a warm house. We couldn’t see anything other than our own hands, lit in neon; the windows, the walls and even the floor were obscured by the almost liquid dark that swirled around us as we drew our hands through the air.
We heard, very faintly, an electric crackle. Unwilling to trust to chance, we threw up our hands to catch the bolt of mains-powered lightning that lashed out of the darkness in a burst of blinding white fire, snatching it into our fingers and spinning it towards the floor before it had more than a chance to singe our sleeves. Beneath us, the floor itself started to spout barbed wire that crawled up around our ankles. We ignited a gas pipe overhead and spilled the roiling liquid fire around our feet until the wires melted and withered away, before batting out blobs of smelly flame into the darkness all around where, to one side, briefly, they illuminated a flash of white skin before it was eaten up again by the dark.
He spat a billow of hot ashes at our face; we burst the pipes under our feet to smother it in backwards-falling rain. He shattered a window, letting in a dragging blast of wind that pulled and clawed at us both, then sent the jagged glass flying towards us. We spun the wind from the smashed window into a tornado around us, calm at the centre, that snatched each shard of glass and reduced it in a second to sand; he pulled the steel skeleton of the building up from beneath our feet, jagged rods lashing at us from the floor we stood on; but we simply jumped aside, weaving our way through them as they danced. He pulled the wires down from the ceiling cavity and wound them round our wrists and throat, choking us and dragging us off our feet in their snare; we pumped electricity through them until they melted and burnt through, dropping us back down onto our knees in the whirling darkness.
We felt him prepare another spell, sensed the tug of his magic in the air, and this time we struck instead. We put the warmth of our skin into the sodium-coloured neon light that blanketed us, then the touch of our breath, then the beating of our heart, so that in each second it grew brighter, and brighter. It burnt into the dark like a Mediterranean sun, it boiled off our skin like a corona, it made our hair stand on end, it scalded the floor and blackened the ceiling, and we put more and more and more into it, filled it with ourself until the flames started to turn blue and our feet no longer touched the ground and we opened our arms like the angel, ready to embrace any enemy who came towards them, and opened our mouth to let out the buzzing blue locusts in our belly, the flaring blue sparks that danced like living light, let them roll across our tongue in a glittering icy sea that gnawed into the darkness and congregated in dizzying hordes, like the lights that magicians had once called will-o’-the-wisps, and we blazed
so cold
because we could, we let our skin turn white with the ice of it, let our bones shiver, let our feet drift up off the floor and the eddy of our own breath spin us round, let the blue electric fire shatter every last window, and blast holes in the roof that lashed up towards the moonlight, let it burrow deep black burns in the floor and melt the walls; we let it consume every last vestige of warmth and anger and pain and fear inside me
inside me!
inside us, we let it eat up every feeling inside us
inside me!!
and through the burning we saw the shadow staggering, struggling to stay upright as the fire ate at his flesh, burnt his hair, dissolved the darkness of his coat, ate at his fingers, his nose, until black blood ran across him and until even that blood started to bubble and burn, steam and boil on his skin and he screamed and screamed and
was for a moment
as he screamed
just a frail old
His knees buckled.
His legs gave way.
His blood was bright red, his shadow a tiny pinprick under him.
And we were laughing.
because we were so bright and so powerful and no one could control us because we were
I was
unstoppable, untameable, so alive that we could burn for ever, light and life and fire and
laughing at his screaming
our skin cracking and the blue light blazing through underneath it
through our mouth and eyes and under our nails
because
I was
we were
blue light pouring out under our clothes, bursting out of us with every breath and we couldn’t inhale there was so much of it
because I was…
because
we am
so much power… we were light, we were fire, we were life, we were the slithering underground wind, we were dancing heaven, we were blazing blue fire and
we were the angels!
…
Then he said my name.
And we were surprised to realise that I could still remember it. And we screamed and kicked and struggled as I forced us to breathe in, we screamed and punched and tore at our own skin, trying to pull the light out of us so that we would dissolve our flesh and be nothing but a blazing comet in the sky as I made us close our eyes against the blue blanket across our vision, we punched and bit and tore as I dragged our arms back down and clenched our fingers into fists and we screamed
WE BE LIGHT, WE BE LIFE, WE BE FIRE
COME BE WE AND BE FREE
WE BE
WE BE
WE BE…!
“Matthew?” His voice was weak, old, frail and dying.
WE BE BL… WE BE… WE BEEEEEEE…
And blood started running out of the cracks in my skin instead of our light, started seeping into our clothes and I was so weak, so small inside of us and we said
weeee beeeeeee…
but I am
come be…
Sinking to our knees, pain, so much pain
we can make you free!
from so much pain
come be we… we blaze for ever across the sky…
so weak
we set you free
nothing but ice left inside.
come be we and be free…
I shook my head. “Not today,” I said. “Not yet!”
a fading remnant of fire worming its way beneath our fingers. We whispered, “So bright, so bright…” our fingers scuttling after it as it disappeared into the floor, “so beautiful…”
“Matthew?”
I looked up.
Just me.
He lay in a growing pool of his own blood, awkward, on one side, head towards the window. He coughed, spittle and blood mixing around his lips. I crawled on hands and knees towards him, knelt next to him and murmured, “Sorry, Mr Bakker.”
A glimpse of a smile. “What’s there… to be sorry?” he croaked.
“It’s complicated.”
“Always is. You’re a sloppy sorcerer, Matthew Swift.”
I shrugged, and even that was agony. “Could be worse,” I replied.
His fingers closed around my wrist, and I noticed that, even though the face was Bakker’s, the nails were still long and black. “Dying,” he said. I stared down into his watery eyes. “Dying,” he added, and his nails dug deeper into my skin, long, black nails. “Something we never understood about life,” he explained and in that instant there was a pallor on his skin, more than just blood loss.
We snatched our wrist away, and threw ourself back even as his other hand reached up for our neck, nails gouging a slash just in front of our jugular vein, and his blood was still black as it came out of his skin, and his tongue licked rotten teeth and he screamed, “Want it! Want it now!” and he raised his head up on a shattered old body, ready to bite with yellow teeth, seizing my head by the hair and dragging it towards his with a strength that no one should have had, screaming, “Want it! Want to burn!”
I wound my fingers together, pressed electricity into them, drew them back, and slammed them as hard as I could into his chest. At least, I think I did it. In that moment, it was hard to tell.
The shock knocked him backwards, picking his feet up off the floor as he went, snapping his head back with a loud crack of bone on bone, and thrust him shoulders first out of the remnants of the window. I heard the screaming fade, and then stop abruptly with a splash, thirty-five floors below.