Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (26 page)

    
the umbrella I found abandoned at the bus stop when the rain began to fall

the receipt for the £1.90 Underground fare bought with the exact change that was

the last money I had in my hand to get me home

         
packet of salted peanuts what was the only food I could find in the night

before Mr Ruislip picked her up by the back of the neck and turned her to face the room. “I will count to ten,” he intoned. “Or perhaps I
shall count backwards from ten; which would you find more appropriate? Let’s see. Ten.”

Rhys stared at Sharon. His mouth shaped a soundless “What now?” of terror.

Sharon looked past him at Edna, whose fingers clutched at Mr Ruislip’s arm. She couldn’t see the way the flesh billowed off him like sails in a gale or she might not even have tried to fight free.

“Nine.”

Sharon’s fists were bunched tight, the strap of her bag curled around her wrist, but she stood frozen in doubt.

“Eight.”

Kevin suddenly dropped the weight of his body, slipping free from the hammer across his throat. As the builder threatening him tried to slam his weapon into Kevin’s skull the vampire leapt back, curling animal-like onto all fours, and snarled. His fangs were now clearly visible, and as the four builders surged towards him he hissed, “I warn you! You get really nasty infections from puncture wounds!”

Mr Ruislip looked exasperated, and tugged hard enough on the back of Edna’s head for the old woman to cry out in pain.

“Seven!”

Kevin leapt at the nearest builder, who threw up his arm. There was a burst of blood, brilliant and scarlet in that grey place, and the builder seemed to shimmer. He shook Kevin, just once, gently, from side to side, and this little gesture seemed enough, more than enough, to dislodge Kevin, to toss him up in the air and away, slamming him shoulder first into the wall. The vampire collapsed to the floor, eyes wide with astonishment, his mouth stained with blood.

“Six,” sighed Mr Ruislip. “You know, you’d really better come out now.”

The builder Kevin had bitten was staring at his arm with mild surprise. “You tosser,” he exclaimed. To Rhys, the words sounded far off.

“Wanker!” announced another. Rhys saw a hint of red on this man’s arm, a faint puncture mark to match his colleague’s injury, though Kevin’s teeth had come nowhere near him. Yet even while Rhys watched, the mark began to heal, the blood drying and turning black before his eyes, flaking off as a remnant of decaying scab.

Kevin spat crimson onto the floor and whimpered, pawing blood
from his mouth with the back of his hand, “Oh God, that’s so disgusting…”

Another cry of pain sounded from Edna as Mr Ruislip jerked her head further back, his fingers pressing against her eyes.

“Five!” he declared. “Goodness, but these friendly people are antisocial, aren’t they? Is that the antithesis here? Friendly and anti-social? Or does one merely say ‘unfriendly’ as in ‘willing to let a friend suffer and die’–is that a more appropriate usage?”

Rhys turned back to Sharon, whose shoulders were shaking, but not, he realised, from tears or even dread, but with an anger that stood out on her face so hard and bright, she seemed almost to glow in the darkness. She took a step towards Mr Ruislip and for a moment Rhys wondered if this was it, if she was going to try and fight, to rip the skin off the already skinless monster stood before them.

“Four.”

For a moment the world hung in the balance. Kevin tried to pick himself up, but a foot slammed into the back of his neck, pinning him to the floor. Edna tried to close her eyes, but the pressure of Mr Ruislip’s fingers against her lids pulled them back to stare madly at their impending end. The four builders in their invisible cloaks tutted and waited, tools in hand–and was it just Rhys’s imagination that caked the end of every tool with a crust of aged blood?

“Three!”

Rhys looked at Sharon, and saw her deflate.

Her shoulders sagged, her head bowed, a sigh passed her lips; the bag dropped to her side, no longer a weapon. Rhys swallowed hard against a rising nausea and a hideous itching that made his eyes and nose stream as Mr Ruislip announced:

“Two!”

And Sharon began to slip out of the shadows, taking Rhys with her, sliding back into the world where to be seen was also to be perceived. At the sight of her, Mr Ruislip beamed, though his fingers didn’t move from Edna’s inflamed face. “How nice of you to join us again!” he chortled. “But we were so close to one.”

His fingers slipped up and pressed, very lightly, against the whites of Edna’s eyes. She opened her mouth to scream, feet scrabbling at the floor, hands scratching in vain against Mr Ruislip’s face and

Sharon’s phone rang.

The cheery, chipper rhythm of the ringtone filled the room like the buzz of a bumble bee in an ice palace. Mr Ruislip hesitated. The four builders shifted uneasily.

Ring ring,
went the phone.

Ring ring.

They stood there, ten seconds becoming twenty, twenty becoming thirty, and still the call did not pass, and still no one moved.

“Aren’t you going to pick it up?” demanded Mr Ruislip at last.

Moving slowly despite herself, Sharon reached into her pocket and pulled out her mobile. The number was “Unknown”. She thumbed it on and held it to her ear.

“Yeah?” she asked.

“Hi there!” The voice was cheerful, male and familiar. It was the voice that had spoken to her from the shadows in Clerkenwell, and whispered “Run” at the howling of a distant dog in the night. It brought to mind a couple of words she’d heard uttered by so many people as something that should have mattered–Midnight Mayor.

“Would you mind putting me on speakerphone?”

“What?”

“Speakerphone–your phone
does
have a speaker, doesn’t it? I know that phones these days aren’t really about talking to people any more, it’s all apps and that, but come on.”

Sharon looked at Mr Ruislip and saw nothing but curiosity in that strange, animal face. “Okay,” she said. She held the phone away from her ear and turned on the speaker.

“Brilliant!” The voice was tiny and far off, but still somehow carried and filled the room through sheer force of enthusiasm.

“Hello, there!” it sang out. “My name’s Matthew. How are you all doing? And may I take this opportunity to say that you all suck. I mean really, you’re useless, the lot of you. I give you my blessing, I get you free classes in shamaning, I send you clues, I give you pointers, I give you all sorts of really useful advice and what do you do? You just faff around in Tooting. Bloody hell!”

“Who is this?” demanded Mr Ruislip.

There was an audible huff of breath on the other end, which might have been irritation. “You must be the wendigo. Has anyone
told you that’s a really bad suit? Everyone assume the brace position, please.”

So saying, the voice on the other end of the line hung up.

Sharon looked at Rhys; Rhys looked at Sharon.

There was a honking of angry horns on the street outside.

Mr Ruislip’s face was a mass of confusion. The four builders shrugged, and it was all the same shrug.

There was a squeal of tyres and the bump of dodgy suspension doing unwise things.

Behind Sharon a flash of headlights through the window.

A scream of tyres, a screech of brakes as cars swerved in the street outside.

Sharon threw herself onto the ground and assumed the brace position.

There’s a lot of bad driving around Tooting Broadway.

It’s not that the local drivers are inherently bad; it’s just that all the laws of geography conspire against them. Inhabiting that strange zone where London Transport hands the baton to mainline trains, it is neither a suburban place of quiet tree-lined streets for the casual driver, nor a clearly planned well-thought-through inner-city zone where every traffic light is scrupulously regulated and every driver knows, to the second, how long it takes to get past the bus lane at rush hour. Busy enough to have a continual flow of shoppers, yet residential enough that no one has considered how best to make deliveries to the shops, Tooting Broadway features a continual parp of angry horns, the red lights of stuck trucks pulled onto a narrow pavement, the smell of petrol and thwarted drivers in search of the South Circular Road, who can’t believe they’re still not there. Averaging a hundred yards every four minutes at the main crossroads, even the most phlegmatic drivers find themselves getting frustrated.

So, when a single-decker red bus to St Andrew’s Church, Streatham decided spontaneously to lurch out of the bus lane, shove its way through the opposing traffic with the crunch of wing mirrors and a screech of torn metal, before ploughing nose first through the glass front of Edna’s Tanning and Beauty Salon and into the backs of the
builders standing inside, the initial reaction of Tooting Broadway was one of rage and disbelief at the selfishness of the bastard who’d gone so wildly out of his way to make a difficult journey that much worse. Just how the bus got itself through the window of Edna’s when its driver was standing arguing on the kerbside with a black-clad auburn-haired woman about acceptable levels of hygiene within his vehicle was a question to be asked only some considerable time later.

Glass flew.

The glass was of two kinds. The first was in deadly little pieces, a razored snowfall as the plate glass of the shopfront embedded itself in floor, ceiling, walls–anything, hard or soft, that got in its way. The second comprised the finely coated sheets that exploded out from the windscreen and side windows of the vehicle as it ploughed through the front of the building, the top of the red bus collapsing in on itself and forcing the metal struts that supported it to bulge and shear outwards. Sharon was on the floor, her hands wrapped over her head, knees up to her chin; and it was probably this, she reflected later, that prevented the railings from the pavement outside, torn up by the bus as it swung into its final charge, from ripping her head off as they flew into the room.

As the glass stopped falling, black smoke poured from the grille of the crippled bus and a little engine noise went

whumph

whumph

whumph

inside the remnants of the bus, something trying to turn against cogs that were no longer there.

Sharon raised her head, very slowly, feeling glass tumble from her back like gravel, clattering where it fell.

whumph

whumph

whumph

She looked up a little further and a pair of eyes stared back at her. They were pale blue, set in a great round face topped with pale blond hair: one of the four builders, in his torn fluorescent jacket, had been hit directly by the bus. His back had been snapped in two, his legs bent into triangles, his neck twisted so that now his face was turned fully
backwards at her. Splinters of glass were embedded in the skin of his face like the vengeance of a roadkill hedgehog. His lips moved, trying to form a word.

“Ah… ahh… arses,” he whispered.

For a second nothing happened. Then the builder half-closed his eyes, gave a little grunt and turned his head, snapping his own neck back into alignment. There was the sharp snicker-snack of vertebrae scraping against each other, the click of cartilage. Then the glass that had embedded itself in his face began to slip out, pushed away by the flesh knitting back together, thin lines of blood running down his skin as fibres joined and muscle thickened, reconnecting together without even the white trace of a scar.

Sharon felt a sound pass up from her throat that might, under different circumstances, have been a curse. Then a flash of white moved on the edge of her vision. Glancing round, she thought she saw Dez standing by the door, microphone in hand, making furious gestures that might, perhaps, be an exhortation to run.

She groaned, and crawled onto her hands and knees even as the builder in front of her gave another grunt and swung his left leg up and round, the joint snapping loudly back into place beneath his thigh. Two others were on the floor, healing from their injuries at the same speed as their companion; a fourth had been flung through the windscreen of the bus, and was folded round a bent rail inside it like a towel on a drying rack. Edna lay across the broken altar, largely untouched by the debris of the impact. She had frozen in panic like a rabbit, one foot no more than three inches from the nose of the bus itself. Sharon scrambled to where Edna lay, grabbed her by the shoulder and hissed, “Time to go!”

Edna responded with the empty stare of a woman whose mind no longer wanted anything to do with her own senses.

Sharon shook her. “Oi! Time to bloody go!” She hauled Edna to her feet and shoved her towards the door. Edna staggered a few paces, looked down, saw the builders, looked up and ran. Sharon turned and saw Kevin struggling to his feet, shaking glass from his hair, then staring at his hands with a gaping look of horror.

“Oh, my God!” he wailed, observing a neat tear through the palm of his left hand. “I need a sterile wipe!”

“Not now,” hissed Sharon, shoving him towards the shattered wall behind the bus.

“But
injectionl”
he moaned.

“Or death?” Sharon gestured back at the room. One of the four builders was halfway onto his feet, rolling his shoulder back into place and turning to focus, for the first time, on Sharon. His face twisted with hatred and contempt; and even Kevin, holding his bloody hand aloft like a rescued puppy in a flood, gave a whimper and scrambled for the broken wall.

Sharon paused. Fumbling in the debris, she found her bag, half-buried beneath the remnants of a porcelain sink ripped from the wall. Water gushed from the pipe into the dust-filled petrol-stinking gloom. She wrapped the strap round her fist and even as the first builder reached out at her, she swung the bag with all her might, hitting him in the face. He staggered back, surprised.

“N-not…” he stammered.

“… how…” whimpered another from the floor.