Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (19 page)

“No, of course I’m not bloody delivering the bloody coffee, do I look like I’m bloody delivering the coffee? I’m here to save the city, ain’t I?”

The words, once said out loud, seemed silly. But, concluding attack to be the best form of defence, she stabbed one finger, quivering with urgency, towards Rhys’s inflamed nose, producing quite a satisfying cringe. “What do you know about missing spirits?”

“Um… only what Mrs Rafaat said at the meeting. And obviously what you see as a druid, see, but I’m not really meant to see that sort of thing, not without my certificate. That there are… are things going missing from the city?”

“What sort of druid things do you know?”

Rhys cringed again. It seemed to be his default setting. “Well, I’m not really supposed to talk about the sacred secrets of the druids, see, owing to how I never actually qualified—”

“This: ladies’ lav,” pointed out Sharon. “Me: angry shaman.”

The argument, succinct as it was, had some effect. “They say,” responded Rhys, “that the ley lines have been weakening, their power growing thin. The city wall is crumbling, and all the creatures that live just outside the… the…
atchoo!
–the veil of perception, they’re fleeing the stones for fairer climes. Like Birmingham,” he added, surprised to note that, by his own logic, this city fitted such a description. “The selkies have fled the Bermondsey sewer, and wishes made on the waters of the Fleet are no longer granted. The wyvern nest at Battersea Power Station withered, and they say the statues are crying blood, but I think that sounds a bit far-fetched, in fact quite Roman Catholic. But whatever’s going on, it’s got everyone very worried, even the druids, and
they tend to think long term.” Then, in a more conspiratorial tone, “You won’t tell anyone I said so, will you?”

Sharon drummed her fingers against the wall beside Rhys’s head. “Okay, what do you know about this place?”

“Uh… the ladies’ loo?”

“Burns and bloody Stoke!”

“Well, I, uh… I know they run Windows 7, which keeps on crashing, and they use Internet Explorer not Mozilla, which I think is maybe a little… and that there’s a script running in their main email server which routes all correspondence straight to the manager’s—”

“Magic stuff!” snapped Sharon. “I need to know about the bloody magic stuff here that goes down!”

“Oh, I, um. I didn’t know they did any magic or… stuff, either, actually. I just look after the machines.”

Sharon pointed an angry finger at him once more and loomed. This was none too easy for a woman of only five foot five, but Rhys shrank back nonetheless and tried to become one with the nearest wall.

“You just told me that the city is withering up, and all you do is the computers?”

“Um… yes. I mean, it’s like when the prime minister says it’s a broken society and I think, ‘Well, that doesn’t sound very good but I feel all right.’ What I think I want to say, is I’m not sure what I can do about it personally, myself.”

Sharon opened her mouth to say something pithy and found nothing leapt to mind. “Okay,” she admitted. “So maybe you’ve got a point. But this place–this place–Burns and Stoke…” She told him of abandoned shops, broken houses, empty factories. “If there’s an unnatural hollowness there, they own it, yeah? Like there’s nothing, the soul of the place ripped out? Are you gonna tell me it’s a coincidence that wherever there’s emptiness, there’s them?”

“Um… no?”

Sharon relaxed a little. “Glad you said that. I mean, just to make sure my logic wasn’t flawed or nothing.”

“Oh, no!” he exclaimed. “It all makes sense now! Burns and Stoke–evil bankers–empty buildings–property rights–absolutely! Was this, uh… why you were being invisible?”

“I was being invisible because the receptionist was bloody rude!”
Punctuating each word with a finger jabbed into his chest, Sharon added, “What. The. Hell. With. The. Bloody. Door?”

“Which door, Ms Li?”

“The one I didn’t walk through!”

“Could you narrow it down?” he asked, and at once regretted it. “What I meant is that you, and doors, and… and… aaaahh…” His face crinkled up ready to sneeze again. Sharon reached out and pinched Rhys’s nose shut. His face turned purple as if he was going to explode from internal pressure. Then his eyebrows crumpled and he took on a look of sheer disbelief at the surprise of a strange woman pinching his nose. The sneeze died down. Sharon carefully let go.

“This happen to you a lot?”

“Yes, Ms Li. Sorry, Ms Li. This door you were… uh… not going through. Did you try knocking?”

She fixed him with a look that could have frozen a polar bear.

He gestured incoherently. “Well, okay, not knocking because of your, uh… secret mission to, um, save the city, yes, so um… was it warded?”

“Warded?”

“Yes. Like, with magic?”

“What does that look like?”

“Look like? I dunno. It doesn’t look like anything. You don’t see a ward, unless it’s a really big one, I suppose, in which case there might be like, bits of wire sticking out or mystic runes or that kinda thing. Don’t you know what a ward looks like, being a shaman?”

She scowled. “People keep saying ‘being a shaman’ like it comes with a job manual.”

“Course you don’t need a manual, Ms Li! Being a shaman, you just know!” His eyes met hers, and the start of a grin began to fade. “Unless, uh… I mean, I say you just ‘know’, but then I’m not a shaman, am I?”

“What
are
you exactly?”

“Well, I was trying to be a druid, see,” he replied. “But I get these allergies and sometimes there’s all this lavender, and after I had a really bad attack they said they didn’t think I was right for advancement.”

“Could you get through a ward? I mean, if I wanted to get through a warded door, could you open it for me?”

“Me? Do magic?” Snot began to bubble at the end of Rhys’s nose, his eyes pushed against their lids, his body shook. “Oh, no, I don’t think that’d be a good idea. Because I’d love to of course–I was actually meant to be the chosen one–but…”

Sharon pinched his nose shut again, hard enough to silence him, and they stood there, in the ladies’ toilet, while around them office life progressed in busy apathy. At length Sharon eased her fingers away from his nose and murmured, “Now, Rhys, this is important. Possibly it’s the most important thing you’ll do in your life, so don’t balls it up. Who do you know who can beat wards?”

Necromancy is such a misunderstood art.

Personally I blame the media. They’re obsessed with reporting bad news; they never give people the right idea about all the things we have achieved. Turn on any of these crap TV channels nowadays and all you get are zombies, virgin sacrifices, vampiric killing sprees and the walking undead. It genuinely makes me angry whenever I see necromancers portrayed in popular culture as cowardly, bloodthirsty or with a funny limp, as if ligature failure is something to be mocked! In point of fact the training is
extremely
long and taxing, and most necromancers I personally know–and I like to keep my finger on the pulse–are very hard-working individuals with an advanced understanding of organic chemistry. Decay is important. Death is important! Society needs undertakers and butchers and men who pull the guts out from fish, and in the same way I believe society needs its necromancers, to study the mystical aspects of decay and death. Because, frankly, this is a shockingly underfunded area of research, and someone needs to take responsibility for it.

Naturally, in such a poorly regulated area, accidents do happen, and I’m not pretending they don’t. But consider the sacrifices we have to make in order to achieve results! I’ve been practising necromancy for a hundred and ten years and I’m not even eligible for a pension. Benefit
fraud, they said down the local office. Benefit fraud! I had to get the birth certificate of a younger man to avoid the authorities, and keep his head in my freezer so that when they asked awkward questions I could just whip it out and pop a fifty-pence piece under the tongue and peel off the masking tape from the eyes and get it to…

Well, never mind what I got it to do, but you have to remember! With a severed head in the freezer, that’s no frozen peas in your diet. You’re not keeping ice cream, there’s no handy loaf of bread to come back to after a long holiday in hot weather. And of course there’s the odours. I have such trouble keeping up appearances. Dinner parties have become impossible. Ever since I used the bile of the basilisk to slow my metabolic rates I’ve had fantastic bone density but a terrible problem with these pustules underneath the crook of my…

What I’m saying is, it’s hard to be a necromancer.

People never think these things through.

He looks and he sees and he says, “Oh.”

The members of the board shift in their seats. They wear matching suits, matching ties, matching shoes and matching faces. It’s not that they’ve been told to, it’s not a conscious decision; it’s simply that for the senior management of Burns and Stoke this is who they are. Or possibly just who they feel they have to be.

At the head of the table sits a man. Though the chairs run the length of the table, nevertheless without anyone shuffling their chairs or leaning away, there is a distance between him and the assembled board. And though he is dressed as they are, and sits as they do, and though some are sure they have seen him take a sip from his still, volcanic water in its perfect crystal glass, there is no denying that he who sits at the head of the table is different. Other. Apart.

“Oh,” he repeats, his voice a breeze that wafts down the table as gently as floating silk. “This is disappointing.”

On the wall behind him a film runs in grainy black and white. The camera looks at a door which proclaims
AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY. DANGER–ELECTRICITY
. It runs on a loop of nearly fifteen seconds, its gazed fixed. It films nothing, nothing, nothing; then out of nowhere a woman appears and rebounds off the door. She is young, and her hair is black streaked with blue, and she is surprised.

A moment later she rises to her feet, grabs the hand of someone not quite in shot and pulls the person away.

The man at the head of the table turns off the image with a remote, swings back round in his swivel chair, which is gross and black and bigger than himself, and softly repeats, “Oh.” Then his face twitches. His thin eyebrows contract over almost impossible pale blue eyes.

“Is disappointed the word I am looking for here? Does disappointed, as an adjective, carry enough weight to describe the sentiments I should express?” He turns to his nearest neighbour. “How does one express due concern and rage at the failure of an institution to protect its secrets? What do you think?”

“I think… disappointed is good?” she declares, eyes flickering across the table in search of something, anything to hold her gaze, that isn’t his eyes.

“You don’t feel it’s a little… weak? As in, how one might say–he is disappointed, she is upset, you are angry, and I am going to rip your head off and suck on your spinal fluids? Is that not the definition we are aiming for?”

“Maybe?” she stutters, gripping the edge of the table.

If the man at the head of the meeting notices her response, he doesn’t seem to care. “Disappointed,” he echoes, turning the word over in his mouth. “Frustrated? Concerned. I am concerned that this woman,” gesturing at the screen, “this woman who, from what I can see, has no significance whatsoever in the grand scheme of things, is interesting herself in our affairs. I am concerned that the Midnight Mayor continues to probe us despite the three-month golf membership we offered, which, I was assured, would be more than enough to guide him away from our affairs.”

“He doesn’t…” began one man, then wished he could swallow the words back down.

“He doesn’t…?”

“He… the Midnight Mayor doesn’t like golf.”

Silence. Then, “But everyone likes golf. People smile while they play it. They walk across well trimmed grass with their friends and they say, ‘Isn’t this nice?’ How does the Midnight Mayor not like golf?”

“He said it was… it was… it…” The unfortunate executive was
breathing hard. “He said it was a stupid wanky game for lazy tossers and we could take our golf clubs and stick them.”

“Stick them?” queried the man at the head of the table. “Stick them where?”

“He seemed to think we’d know the answer to that, Mr Ruislip, sir.”

The man addressed as Mr Ruislip sir leaned back in his chair. He wrapped his long fingers around the back of his thin shell-like head and considered the ceiling. Then he said, “The Midnight Mayor is being difficult, but he can be contained. However, this business with Dog is… may one say unfortunate?”

“Unfortunate is good, sir,” stammered the woman nearest him.

“Unfortunate,” he repeated. “It is unfortunate that Gavin was disembowelled–yes, unfortunate is accurate, isn’t it, for it implies a negative attribute of fortune, so yes! And so it is indeed unfortunate that Gavin was disembowelled. Likewise it is regrettable,” he savoured the word, warming to his theme,
“regrettable
that Scott was decapitated, and most… most
concerning
that Christian has started hearing the howling in the night. But, ladies and gentlemen!” He straightened, pleased at his own conclusion. “Ladies and gentlemen, let us remember! The fact that you are all being dismembered, one at a time, only indicates how close we are to success! Indeed, the break-in of this unwelcome visitor, this woman, could also be taken as a sign that we are achieving our aims! Greydawn will be ours, and then we may all get our wishes and live… how is the phrase–happily ever after?” He sat back in his chair, beaming with delight. “And of course nothing shall stand in our way. Should we put that in a memo?”

The house was in Walthamstow.

Sharon had never understood Walthamstow. Was it a posh suburb or a squalid dump at the end of the Victoria Line? She didn’t know if it was big or small, where its centre was or how to measure it, for Walthamstow had this odd way of stretching out in unexpected directions, its lower end brushing the Olympic site, its topmost edge blending into forests, and motorways that suddenly found themselves amid greenery, as if an invisible limit had been thrown around the city, proclaiming
STOP
. On the one hand, she knew Walthamstow had an Underground station–possibly several–but the buses were the rat-route runners of the suburban city, single-deckers or ancient beat-up red monsters with the stuffing falling out of their seats. Bored youth, busy mums and old ladies pulling their shopping behind them on wheels mingled in the shabby little shops of its narrow streets, while over all fell the shadow of the area’s new mega-markets. It was an unknown quantity of a place whose quality changed with every turn of the street.