A Madness of Angels: Or the Resurrection of Matthew Swift (19 page)

 

Bakker?”

 

The question came so suddenly, I almost didn’t hear it. “What?”

 

“Will you kill him? I read that Amiltech is suffering – that is, San Khay; he is loyal to Bakker. You wish harm to the Tower, but you haven’t said if you’ll kill him. I want you to. Kill him and destroy everything he’s made. Can you?”

 

“We can kill Bakker,” we said thoughtfully, “but it is not him who we fear.”

 

“Then who? Who if not Bakker?”

 

I didn’t answer.

 

“Kill him.”

 

“Why?”

 

“He is a monster.”

 

“Is he? I haven’t seen any claws.”

 

He flinched, but said, “If you want to know what Bakker has done, visit Carlisle.”

 

“The city?”

 

“No. The care centre.”

 

“Why? What’s there?”

 

“If you go, you’ll want to kill him.”

 

I stood up, and that was an achievement. “If I need you, you’ll be…”

 

“With Sinclair,” he said firmly. “I’ll see you. Although,” he grinned, and the teeth were yellow and ratty, “you may not see me. Goodbye, sorcerer. Bring me some of his blood on your hands, when you make up your mind.”

 

“You’re a funny guy,” I replied, and walked away.

 

 

I don’t know why I let myself in for these things.

 

I went to Carlisle.

 

The care home was on the southern edge of Croydon, in a converted red-brick house with a big driveway, near a park rolling down towards the green belt and its countryside. Even here the taste of the air was different, not as sharp and strong as in the city, but hinting at that other magic, the strange magic that so few people understood these days – that of places beyond the city, the slower, sluggish, calm magic of the trees and the fields, that had, once upon a time, burnt as brightly as the neon power through which I now wandered. There were still some left who could harness it as it had once been used – druids and the odd magician out in the countryside who summoned vines instead of barbed wire from the earth – but they were few in number and generally didn’t talk to their urban counterparts, whose magic they regarded as a corruption rather than an evolution of the natural order of things. It was a debate I kept well out of.

 

I didn’t exactly know who I was there to see when I arrived at the Carlisle care home. But the question was quickly answered when I got a glimpse of the residents’ book in reception. One name leapt out at me – Elizabeth Jane Bakker.

 

I signed myself in as Robert James Bakker, and went to meet her. They didn’t question who I was, but the nurse informed me that she was delighted I had finally come to the home and that Elizabeth was showing good signs of improvement, though she still screamed at the sight of mirrors.

 

Elizabeth Jane Bakker sat in a wheelchair at one end of a living room full of beige furniture. She wore a white veil over her face and a bandage of white around what was left of her hands, as well as the obligatory, shameful blue pyjamas of the other residents. On her lap was a tray of untouched food – mashed potato, carrot and some kind of sausage meat in suspiciously fluorescent gravy. I sat down on a stool opposite her and said, “Hello, Elizabeth.”

 

The veil twitched. Between its hem and the top of the pyjamas, I could see the scrambled, scarlet remnants of the burnt skin on her neck. When she spoke, her voice was distorted by the effort of shaping words with the twisted remains of her mouth, and came out almost inaudible at first, so I had to lean right in to catch it.

 

“I see… to be free… they say… be me…” she whispered.

 

“How are you?” I asked, and immediately felt stupid.

 

“The rats keep singing when I try to sleep. All the time, singing singing singing. But the voice in the phone went away.”

 

“Aren’t you hungry?” I tried.

 

Her glance moved down to the plate. With a deep grunt from the back of her throat, she seized the tray with the remnants of her hands, throwing it across the room. Mash flew out from the little plastic indents as it smashed against the far wall. The nurse hurried in from the corridor, saw the mess, and merely rolled her eyes, as if this was something regular and understandable, before cleaning it up.

 

Elizabeth lapsed into sullen silence. Unsure what else I could say that wouldn’t be either dangerous or mad, so did I.

 

We stayed sitting in silence for almost ten minutes before she looked up slowly and said, “Is it free, where you are?”

 

I hesitated. “It’s all right,” I said, hoping this was a safe answer.

 

“Come be me,” she sang, in a faint, distant voice of one remembering a nursery rhyme. “Come be me and be free!”

 

We felt a shudder run all the way down from the hairs on our skull to the tips of our toes. “Where did you hear that?” we asked.

 

“They used to burn in the telephones. I danced with them before they went away. Did you lie?”

 

“Did your brother hear them sing too?” we asked.

 

She shook her head, slowly, uncertainly, then added in a more cheerful voice, “Have your pudding and eat it, that’s what they said, save the best for last, meat and two veg, do you see?”

 

“Did he hurt you?” I asked, as gently as possible.

 

“Said to dance, said to burn and we’ve always loved the city…”

 

“Did he do this to you?”

 

“He just sits in the chair that’s all, nothing bad, just sits and likes to eat, watches, gets on with things, although the water doesn’t taste so good any more, vodka, vodka and lick the lamp post…” Her shoulders were starting to shake – with a shock, we realised that she was starting to cry.

 

Uncertainly, I leant forward, and put my arms round her shoulders, although she was so limp that it was hard to tell what good it did. We put our mouth near her ear, and so close now we could see through the veil, the burnt, sunk flesh, the remnants of a nose, the unevenness of burnt-off lips, and murmured as quietly as we could, like a mother singing her lullaby, “We be fire, we be light, we be life, we sing electric flame, we slither underground wind, we dance heaven – come be we and be free. Come be me.”

 

Her shaking slowly stopped. She pulled away from our hold and looked through the veil straight into our eyes. The bandaged stub of a hand brushed our cheek, sending a shudder through our skin. “So blue,” she whispered. “No wonder you went away.”

 

“Why did Bakker do this to you?” I asked quietly. “Why would he do this thing?”

 

“He wanted to hear the angels,” she whispered. “He wanted to find them, to see the blue, but he couldn’t, he couldn’t, he tried and they wouldn’t answer, he was too far, too quiet, they didn’t come for him, he couldn’t understand and he said… he said…” The bandage pressed against my cheek. “
He asked you
,” she hissed. “To find them, he asked
you
. And you said no – why did you have to say no? I would have kissed you and you said no, and he needed another sorcerer, he needed someone to give their senses and their blood and you said no so he asked me. He tried to bring them back and when I couldn’t do it, when I couldn’t do it, he said it was all right, he was sorry, he said he loved me, he forgave me and… and …”

 

And Elizabeth Jane Bakker, just like her brother, was a sorcerer, and her skin burnt my cheek to the touch, even through the bandage, and the lights spat and fizzed around her and the floor hummed like a train was passing beneath us. I grabbed her arm and whispered, “Listen to me, listen to me… what did Bakker want you to do?”

 

“He is so hungry!” she whispered. “So hungry…”

 

“Did he bring us back?” we demanded. “Does he still want the angels, did he bring us back?”

 

“Make me a shadow on the wall.” She nearly wailed it, clung to my face like she wanted to press it into some new, better shape. “I said I was sorry, so sorry, that I wouldn’t say no again and it just kept on, kept on burning, kept saying that I didn’t understand, so sorry, so sorry, make me a shadow on the wall…”

 

“Bakker did this to you, because you wouldn’t help him?”

 

“So sorry…”

 

She was shaking again. I ran my hand over the top of her head, across the white fabric of her veil and felt the odd stubble of patchy hair underneath it, and whispered soothing noises as she pressed her face into my shoulder and the humming in the floor gently started to die down and the rats scuttling in the walls began to breathe again. “It’s all right,” I whispered. “It’s all right. We’re here now.”

 

“He wouldn’t kill me, he wouldn’t. He said I should feel what it’s like, know how it felt, understand…”

 

“It’s all right,” we repeated, not sure what else we could say. “Shush, it’ll be all right.”

 

“So hungry,” she whispered. “I’m so hungry.” We leant away slowly, staring into the vague shadow of her eyes. She stared straight back, lips twitching under the veil. “He said I should live and that I would always be hungry, always be thirsty, always be ugly, always be in pain, because I didn’t help. Matthew?”

 

“I’m here,” I murmured.

 

“Why didn’t you do what he asked you to? Why didn’t you help him?”

 

I thought about it. “Because it was obscene,” I said finally. “What he wanted was obscene.”

 

“Missed you,” she whispered. “Just like the song said. They always said the world was bigger than the current could flow, and when you’d touched every corner, you could drift away into the stars… did it hurt, your death? He said you were dead. I screamed at him and called him names. I screamed and screamed until they burnt my tongue, make me a shadow on the wall, I said, make me a shadow… I would have helped if you weren’t dead. I called him murderer. He said I couldn’t understand, that it wasn’t… that you weren’t… but they kept on and he said… they were always there and then it just stopped!”

 

“Shush, shush,” I whispered, stroking the odd, coarse tufts of her hair. “I’m here now. We’ll see you safe.”

 

She leant up and with the rough, uneven edges of her mouth, through the veil, kissed my lips, once, gently, and put her head into my shoulder. “My angels,” she whispered. “My electric angels.”

 

I stayed with her for the rest of the day, and she didn’t say anything more, and neither did I. And that, too, was sorcery.

 

Shortly after dusk, we left her sleeping, kissing the whisper of our voice into her tiny, lobeless ear, and went to finish San Khay.

 

 

The newspapers reported pretty much what I knew. The Amiltech office was in ruins, the staff had been sent home. It wasn’t safe any more, they said, and those who stayed too long thought they saw the glimmering of aluminium wings in the fan vents, and heard the chittering of the fairies.

 

Clients, while sympathising greatly with the clear campaign of hate that had been taken up against Amiltech, were making tactful enquiries about switching security firms for the simple reason that Amiltech was plainly unable, in its current state, to fulfil obligations.

 

There was more I could do, and I knew it. A little arson, a bit of trashing – this was not enough to bring down a company permanently, this was something insurance could still cover. I could be methodical, thorough, find every blood bank and illicit financial record, burn them all, expose them all, tear Amiltech apart.

 

But now, we were not in the mood to wait. We wanted San Khay, we wanted to pull down the king at the top of this particular house of cards, and with him gone, we knew that even the Tower would feel the blow.

 

What we didn’t know was whether we wanted to kill him, or if he was simply a pawn on the way to the ace in the sky – Bakker.

 

We knew now that we wanted to kill Bakker.

 

I thought about the blue drawing of a burning angel I’d found under San Khay’s desk.

 

I remembered the taste of blood.

 

I remembered…

 

         …
give me life
… .

 

             …
be free
…

 

                        …
my electric angels
…

 

Bakker had to die. And if that meant going through San Khay, so be it.

 

I needed equipment.

 

 

I spent a night and a morning in bed recovering from my encounter with Charlie. I spent the afternoon purchasing from every general store, haberdasher and art shop I could find, as much dye of every kind as I could find. Bottles of ink, capsules of fabric dye, in every conceivable colour; I purchased everything I could get my hands on and which could fit into my bag. I also went round the junk stores until I found the shattered remains of a large grandfather clock, from whose face I stole the minute and hour hands, and acquired a small bell, a set of six six-sided dice, a blanket and a very large, heavy-duty permanent marker. From the supermarket I bought a week’s supply of egg and cress sandwiches, a bunch of bananas, a pair of buckets and six litres of bottled mineral water. Lastly, I went to the second-hand bookshops on Charing Cross Road and trawled up and down through their shelves until I found a copy of
The Train Journey’s Companion
, published in 1934, its dusty cover red and heavy, smelling of crushed insects and dry leaves.

 

Then, I hired a van. The man who let it to me was willing, for Ł400, to ignore my lack of valid driver’s licence and ID. The van stank of cabbage and cornered like a drunken elephant. It would do.

 

 

The next day I spent looking for just the right kind of place. In the newspapers, San Khay vowed to take revenge on the enemy of his company and his employees, and bring them to justice for their crimes. His share price fell by sixteen pence on the London market, and everyone expressed immense sympathy. The vice-president of the company moved his family to Cornwall, after all the walls of his house were scratched by dozens of very, very tiny aluminium fingernails. San’s personal secretary complained that she couldn’t sleep because the shadows kept moving on her walls, and there were voices in her head, and as a result, she’d have to take a holiday in Corfu as soon as possible while the company repaired itself.