There was a hospital intensive-care ward.
Then there was a less intensive ward.
Then there was outpatients.
Then there was the street with a discharge notice, a single change of clothes, my old coat, my bag and a new pair of shoes; everything, in short, that I owned in the world.
I had no way to prove that I was alive, no home address and no money of my own. Sinclair gave me ten grand in a brown paper bag and said that the concerned citizens were grateful for my assistance.
In a way, the absence of these things seemed liberating.
I stayed with the Whites for a few weeks, in order to get my bearings. Then I stayed with a couple of friends in the countryside, who were close enough to put me up but not so close as to have realised that I was ever dead to begin with. I went walking in the hills, sploshing through mud and after a few weeks of it, despite the unfamiliarity of the place, I was beginning to understand how the countryside too could produce sorcerers, who summoned ivy instead of barbed wire.
But my heart was still in the city, and eventually I drifted back.
I took casual work in odd places here or there. My skills weren’t necessarily that useful, but I supervised a few exorcisms and blessed the odd business about to set up shop, scratching very carefully into the walls of one or two abodes, Domine dirige nos, just for good luck.
I was leaving the swimming pool when she found me. I’d taken to making regular visits, partially because we enjoyed the act of swimming so much, but mostly because there was the promise of a hot shower afterwards, to keep me clean. It was in Highbury Fields, at that cool time of the evening on an overcast day when the sun is already below the horizon but its reflection is still bright enough to see without the street lamps’ sodium glow. I walked away from the swimming pool, turned towards my regular bus stop, and she was there, emerging without a sound from the shadows of a shrubbery, pressing the gun to the back of my head and grabbing me by the shoulder to stop me flinching from its metal.
“Bang,” she said.
“Oda,” I replied breathlessly. “We wondered.”
“Bang,” she repeated. “Two in the head, and then three to the chest. Bang bang bang. No coming back from that; no phone boxes to hand either, just to make sure. Lights out, game over, good night the sunny time and so on.”
“I didn’t think you’d be the kind of person to go on about it,” I said reproachfully. “If you’re really going to do it, then just do it.”
“You don’t seem too freaked?”
“I’m not.”
“What about them?”
“What is life, if it doesn’t end?” we said.
“That’s a really unhealthy attitude you’ve got there,” she pointed out.
“And I thought the Order was all about the spiritual things?”
Oda grunted, gently lifted her hand from my shoulder, and removed the gun from my head. She stepped back. I turned to look at her, curious. She met my gaze easily and said, “I wanted you to know. Any time, at any moment, wherever you are, whatever you do, I can do it. I can. I’m really that good.”
“I believe you.”
“Good. Think about it if you should be feeling Satanic.”
She turned, swept her bag up off the pavement, and started to walk away. “Wait!” we called out.
She stopped, turned, looked back, eyebrows raised.
“We were informed that you’d kill us anyway,” we said.
“I’m sure I will, some day. When you lose control or start sacrificing kiddies or eating rabbits’ skulls for kicks, I’ll be there. But as it is, right now…” She hesitated, half-turning her head up to the street lamp as if looking for it to click on in a moment of inspiration. Then she shook her head. “Right now, you’re still on the side of the angels.”
“Oh, the irony.”
“Isn’t it just?”
“Did you think of that now, or was it a pre-planned kinda thing?”
“See you around, Matthew Swift,” she said in reply.
“You too, Oda. I’ll see you around.”
And she walked away.
Using Sinclair’s money, I bought a PO Box at Mount Pleasant Post Office, and kept the rest in a small metal box buried in Abney Park Cemetery, since I didn’t really know what else to do with it. A few days later, leafing through a copy of the Yellow Pages left on top of a bus shelter, I found under S the following entry:
“Swift, M. (sorcerer): PO Box 134B, Mount Pleasant, Rosebery Avenue, London, EC1R 2JA.”
Since I hadn’t put it there, I dismissed it as being down to damn mystical forces again, and tossed the fat yellow document back up on top of the shelter. I slung my bag over my shoulder, stretched my legs, patted down my pockets to make sure I hadn’t dropped anything and, not knowing where I was going, or how I was going to get there, started walking. In the distance, we could hear the rumble of buses, the honking of cars, the shriek of a scooter’s brakes, the tinging of the bicycle bells, the flapping of the pigeons, the scuttling of the rats, the shouting of the children, the mumbling of the old bag ladies, the cursing of the young men, the flirting of the pretty women, the slamming of windows, the venting of pipes, the dripping of taps, the hissing of televisions, the pinging of ovens and the ringing of the telephones, all around on every side, at every hour of every day, every day of every week, for ever, unending, an infinity of sound, sight, smell, life, light, wonder, a quiet endless mundane magical clamour that filled every corner of every street with the promise of adventure; a world too big for mortals, immortals and all the creatures in between.
We kept on walking.
Whatever happened next, good or bad, it would be wonderful finding out.