Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (27 page)

“… babes…” croaked the one still struggling to snap his spine back into alignment from where he’d wrapped it round a rail inside the bus.

“… fight,” offered the last, this one right by Sharon’s feet.

“Screw that!” she retorted and drove her heel as hard as she could into the belly of the builder at her feet. “Rhys! Where the bloody hell are you?”

A feeble groan, a suggestion of dusty ginger hair. Rhys had ended up submerged in an ocean of debris. Torn cushions, shattered furniture and broken glass had fallen around him and over him, so now, as he tried to free himself, his legs slipped and his arms flailed in vain. Sharon hissed with frustration, stumbled towards him, grabbed Rhys by his wrist and hauled, and shifted.

The grey shimmer of invisibility fell over them, sounds deforming, shadows stretching. The change was fast, much faster than Sharon had done it before. A cold weight settled in her belly, and bile rose at the back of her throat. This time she didn’t even know what she was doing, nor how she was doing it, only that it had to be done. Rhys’s mouth was quivering, but he struggled up obediently as she pulled.

She shoved him towards the smashed remains of the exit, glanced back and saw the claws.

Sharon hadn’t known anyone could move so fast. But there he was, Mr Ruislip, skin billowing off him like a warrior’s banner, eyes burning and bloody, fingers turned to claws, claws turned to black. He rose up from the shattered remains of the Friendlies’ altar like a vortex from a raging sea and lashed out, his face twisted in rage and hate. Sharon recoiled and heard a sharp tearing, then a little, bewildered “Oh.”

Blood spangled the grey world like fireworks in a darkened night. She looked down at herself in panic, saw Mr Ruislip’s face leer with satisfaction as he examined his crimson-stained claws, and then realised she wasn’t actually bleeding.

Rhys swayed.

“I…” he began, and Mr Ruislip lashed out again. Sharon grabbed Rhys by the shoulders and dragged him away even as she fell back, the claws tearing the air overhead. Mr Ruislip’s mouth parted in a wide O of laughter; but the sound in that shadow place was a hunting cry, a piercing animal call that deformed the air and made the ghosts of things unseen crawl away. Sharon could hear her phone ringing again somewhere in the concrete dust and torn-up metal. She dragged Rhys with one hand and scooped up the phone with the other, dropping deep and fast into the spirit walk, so that the walls bled the whispers of old memories, and the ghosts of the Friendlies gathered round the flickering lights that hovered above the shattered altar. The bus was sticky with dirt and oil, faces moving impossibly under its internal light, two-dimensional shadows pressing against the scarred glass. Beneath her feet the floor was sticky; she could feel things move in the wet concrete, heard a
pop-pop-pop
that might, just might, have been the sound of air leaving Derek’s lungs as the floor swallowed him up.

She reached the street door, and Dez was there, gesticulating and shrieking, “Oh my God oh my God oh my God!”

When, she wondered, but when did spirit guides get so useless?

The floor shuddered, sudden and hard. It wasn’t the ghost-shudder of things unseen, but real, a jerk in reality. Sharon reached towards the nearest solid object–as it happened, the side of the still-ticking bus–for support. She felt the ground crack beneath her, heard Rhys cry out in alarm, and leapt aside as a spike of metal, rusted and shedding dust, stabbed upwards where she’d just been.

She looked back; three of the builders were on their feet and the
fourth was staggering up. Their faces were furious–the same furious expression on four furious faces. They raised their hands as one and, as they did, the floor cracked and split open. Foundation spikes of metal and twists of torn black piping lashed up into the air around them. In the street outside, car alarms wailed as the road began to crack, mains water fountained up, sparks snapped from cables overhead, and dark fault lines opened between gaps in the paving stones. Kevin, trying to support Edna without unnecessary physical contact, ducked instinctively as security alarms began wailing in response to cracks surging through the walls of nearby buildings.

Another lurch: the concrete beneath Sharon’s feet was beginning to liquefy, acquiring the texture now of a mattress, now of a swamp, sucking at her and pulling her in. Rhys was pale and shaking and too frightened to scream, and as she looked over her shoulder through the grey half-light of the spirit walk, she saw the four builders wearing their cloaks of nothingness, and Mr Ruislip the wendigo whose laugh was a hunting cry and whose face was split in a fanged grin of ecstasy.

The phone in her hand stopped ringing. She groaned and tried to pull herself up as the floor became grey quicksand, tried to spread her weight without letting go of Rhys, tried to heave herself up by the twisted remains of the single-decker bus; but it too was shrinking, its tyres popping loudly as the growing pressure of the wet concrete caused them to burst. The phone rang again in merry insistence as the pavement outside spat sudden blue flame at the rupturing of a gas pipe and drivers stalled in the middle of the street began to abandon their vehicles, racing for safety, wherever that might be.

Somehow her thumb found the answer button. And there it was again, the bright brisk voice of the man called Matthew, the Midnight Mayor. “Hi there!” it exclaimed. “I have a question for you. When you walk through walls, are
you
the ethereal one, or is it the architecture? Something to consider.”

So saying, he hung up, perhaps sensing the torrent of abuse about to head his way.

Sharon was up to her knees in concrete now and gasped as something soft brushed against her ankle inside the liquid floor. How long, she wondered, did it take human flesh to decay in such conditions? Was Derek still down there, or had he become just a bone-filled hole? She
bit back on an exclamation as another shudder of the building pulled her lower, submerged to her thighs. Next to her, Rhys was clutching at his side, already up to his hips in cement, blood seeping through his fingers from a tear in his flesh. The four builders were laughing now, four killers in invisible fluorescent jackets and one wendigo, laughing at the remains of the Friendlies’ temple, at the shattered altar and broken glass, at the place where Derek the Friendly had been sucked down to die, at where Sharon and Rhys would be sucked down to die; and they were enjoying it, the bastards were
enjoying
it and…

“Actually, it is something to think about, isn’t it?” mused Dez.

Sharon looked up, and Dez, her panicking spirit guide in his immaculate white suit, was standing exactly in the place where the wall had been, one foot in the street, one in the self-collapsing, imploding remains of the Friendlies’ temple. Half in this world, half in the next. The concrete slipped up to her waist, and she looked and saw Rhys struggling to breathe against the weight of it pressing on his ribs, his features rigid with the effort of staying brave, and her face tightened. Her fingers grasped harder around his arm, and she looked back at Dez and the world beyond and this… place—

This temple.

It wasn’t like the dead places where the spirits had gone. Sure, Edna’s Tanning and Beauty Salon hadn’t been much to write home about, but the Friendlies had come here and made it their own, and now the walls were watching, the air hummed with voices and memories, the floor was pressed flat with a thousand footsteps, and though the altar had been smashed, the echoes of everything it had been remained, were still real and bright and defiant.

When you walk through walls, are
you
the ethereal one, or is it the architecture?

She could hear them, even now, the prayers of the Friendlies, sent up from this shattered room.
Let me find… Grant me strength… Give me peace… Be not alone…

She bent forward over the collapsing wet floor, turned her face towards Rhys and smiled. He tried to smile back, shaking with the effort. Her fingers tightened on his arm until she could feel the bone beneath the skin, and, half-closing her eyes, she found the voices were louder, tumbling like dust from the walls.

She pulled and barely moved an inch, but it was enough–it was motion–and she pulled again and the world moved with her, darkening as the shadows grew deeper, as the memories thickened and reality seemed thin and far away. Beyond the shattered window of the shop, the past flickered over the street, mingling with the present. Trees sprouted and grew and were felled; cobbles were laid and tarmacked over; shop signs melted in and out of each other as old owners moved on and heralded new; and it was real, it was all real, all here, just waiting to be seen, half-hidden. Somewhere, somewhen, the floor beneath her feet was solid, and she pushed against it and it was real, pushing right back. She heaved herself up as around her the shop was destroyed and rebuilt and destroyed again a dozen times, and reality was far, far away. Her breath fizzled on the air and there was Derek of the Friendlies laying candles on the altar and Edna trimming hair, a long time ago and far, far away. Her arms seemed vast, hands belonging to someone else, skin icy; and as she dragged Rhys onto his feet she saw Dez again, beckoning from somewhere far, far away; and she tried to move towards him, and the world bloomed and shrunk, opened and closed around her, past and present competing for attention all at once. She tried to draw down breath and the air was thin, as if the entire atmosphere was composed of someone else’s exhalations. Rhys’s lips were turning blue, and as she tugged him she could feel the itching in his throat, the burning in his eyes, the pain in his nose, the sickness in his belly, the shame in his mind, and the blood seeping down his side and staining the top of his trousers sticky-black.

Another step, and in some place, some time, there was a broken bus between her and the way out, but not
this
here, not
this
now. Another step and Rhys tried to cry out and couldn’t. The sound was snatched away before it could even form, sucked into the whirlwind. A flash of white, Dez calling from beyond the glass; a howling somewhere far off as Mr Ruislip stretched his claws; the slow bubbling of Derek’s breath as it was squeezed from his lungs; a burning in Sharon’s palm where somehow the Midnight Mayor had left his mark without bothering to ask her permission, and her face deepened into a scowl and she pulled Rhys harder, dragging him through the shattered place where once there had been a window and now there was broken glass, and into the street beyond.

It was a step too far. The roaring of the shadows and the weight of air slammed into her and knocked her nearly to her knees, smacking the pair of them back into the wailing, cracking, spinning real world. Dropping Rhys as she fell, she landed on paving stones where dust danced like oil in a pan, sand in an earthquake. She looked back and heard the hunting cry of Mr Ruislip, saw the ceiling of Edna’s salon begin to sag as its walls gave out, saw the flash of a yellow fluorescent jacket as the builders tore a passage through the walls. Groaning with the effort, she caught Rhys by the scruff of the neck, pulled him up and ran.

So I think I might be dead.

That’s not the problem though. I mean, okay, it’s not great but actually we’re dealing with it, you know? We’re dealing with it and it could have been much, much worse. There could have been hair loss, there could have been skin disease, biological decay, bad breath–I know how lucky I got.

The thing is, the issue–I think we’re supposed to say it’s an issue these days–the issue is, I’m not sure I’m human any more. I’m not sure I can remember what being human means. If it’s two arms, two legs, a head and all sorts of bits in between, then that’s okay: so far so good. Is it a feeling? Is there an easy formula for humanity–is it loss, or hope, or guilt, or grief, or joy, or pain? Is it hunger or thirst? Is it a longing, a desiring, an imagining of things which could be desired, a wondering of what is to come? Is that it? There was a time before, when these things seemed simple. And now… we are become so much more. We are sorcerer, we are Midnight Mayor, we are electric angel, we are greater than the world around us and for all this we are…

Unique.

Special.

Alone.

Is that what it means to be human?

Sharon ran.

She ran until the ground stopped splitting, the wires stopped spitting, the water stopped flowing up from beneath her feet, the car alarms stopped wailing, the windows stopped cracking and the world was at last a solid thing of neat little houses, empty bus stops and the distant wailing of sirens.

Somehow Rhys had managed to run with her, stumbling through the night-time streets of Tooting, all tidy little rows of tidy little houses largely inhabited by people with an appreciation of patios. She hadn’t attempted the spirit walk, much less a spirit run, but a stagger through the solid reality of London, no shadows in the walls nor whisperings in the street, just the racing of her own heart as she and Rhys fled the wrecked remnants of the Friendlies’ temple. Kevin had scampered after them with a cry of “Don’t forget me!” pausing on each street corner to hop up and down with urgency as Edna, wheezing and holding her sides, brought up the rear.

The four of them had united, too breathless to speak, on the edge of a crooked green park with inexplicable apparatus for children to have fun on, if they could solve the intellectual challenge of how.

Kevin, though the least winded, swayed with incredulity and indignation for a good three minutes while the others gasped their way
towards normality, before he threw up his hands and wailed, “What the fuck?!” He sagged against the iron railings of the park, his face as morose as his body language.

Edna managed to say, “Are… Are they… Are they going to… follow?”

“I guess we’d know by now,” panted Sharon. “Bloody hell, I need to do a sport or something.”

Rhys didn’t speak. His face was ash-grey and, as Sharon turned to look at him, his gaze drifted down to where his hand was still pressed against his side, fingers red with blood.