Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (28 page)

“Oh,” he whimpered. Then added “Sorry,” and fell, slowly and gently, to the ground.

Sharon caught his shoulders before his head could slam into the pavement. “Oh, my God!” wailed Kevin. “There’s dirt everywhere and he’s bleeding!”

“I’ll call an ambulance,” stammered Edna. But Sharon interrupted before the older woman could move.

“How are we going to explain this to anyone?”

“But what if there’s digestive fluids in the blood?” demanded Kevin. “That’s so gross.”

Sharon looked into Rhys’ face. His eyes were half-open, staring at a distant nothing; his lips tried to move but produced no words. She peeled away the shirt around his side and there were two marks gouged in his skin, the marks of animal claws, the blood too thick and black for her to see anything clearly.

Edna didn’t move; Kevin wavered, eyes transfixed by the blood seeping through Sharon’s hands. “Rhys?” she whispered. His eyes flickered. “Oi! Rhys!” Louder, more urgent. “Hey, hay-fever-nut druid!” she shouted, loud enough to send his eyelids quivering back up, whites rolling beneath. “Oi, you!” she repeated, shaking him by the shoulder. “You don’t bloody go nowhere, you hear? You stay with me.”

She turned to the others. “There’s a number on my phone,” she said, pressing down gingerly against the wound in Rhys’s side. “Sammy the Elbow. Call him.”

Hi there. So yeah, I’m Dr Seah. You’d think I’d get bored saying that but, actually, it took like, seven years to get the Doctor part, so really I’m kinda cool with it. Thankfully I don’t want to be a surgeon, because then I’d be a Mister, only obviously I’m a Miss; but you don’t really hear about Miss Surgeon Seah, do you, so I’d probably still be a Mister anyway, which would cause a lot of confusion and just not be groovy. But yeah, I guess the point is I’m a doctor and that’s pretty fucking awesome.

I don’t have any problems, really. I mean, not so you’d notice. I do a lot of baking. I mean, some people say that’s because of the rage–like I get pretty annoyed when you’re like, “Could you do this, please?” and the nurse is all like, “It’s a rabid banshee, no way am I taking swabs” and I’m like, “It’s a nice rabid banshee” and then nothing gets done. So yeah, I guess you could say that gets me a bit frustrated. Or when I go out for an evening with my mates and then they’re all “So, I’ve got this curse on me” and I’m like, “Have you tried aqueous cream” and they’re like, “Can I show you?” and I’m like, “Guys, this is my only night off, and I get that your curse is like, a problem and that, but, seriously, I’m trying to enjoy a mojito and there are other people here, and then there are these guys and…”

Anyway. Like I said. Sometimes I get annoyed. It’s not easy working for the NHS, and I guess you could say that baking just helps keep things in perspective.

I’m going to get a piping bag for Christmas.

I really think it’ll help with the cupcakes.

Sammy came in a van.

The quickness with which he arrived suggested he hadn’t been far away to begin with.

The van was driven by a familiar face.

Sharon said, “Ms… Somchit?”

Five foot two, black hair, black jacket, black trousers, black shoes, Ms Somchit exuded friendly unstoppability as she clambered out of the blue Transit van and inspected Rhys. They’d dragged him up onto a park bench, where he lay, head in Edna’s lap, Kevin keeping a hygienic distance.

Ms Somchit, who had attended the first meeting of Magicals Anonymous and offered advice on Council Tax, beamed.

“Hello, dear,” she exclaimed, easing back the sodden mess of shirt pressed to Rhys’s side. “Sammy said you might need a lift.”

Sammy the Elbow hopped down from the passenger side of the van, unimpressed by the distance he had to go from vehicle to earth comparative with the length of his knobbly grey legs. He waddled over to Rhys, peered at the bloody mess, sniffed and exclaimed, “Wendigos. Amateurs.”

“He needs a hospital,” whispered Edna.

“He needs a sterile controlled environment staffed by qualified professionals!” added Kevin, his voice a fraught almost-shriek.

“We
need help,” corrected Sharon, “and you,” a finger stabbed towards Sammy’s face, “are gonna give it right bloody now.”

The back of the Transit van smelt of rubber and wet dog.

Kevin exclaimed “Oh, God, that is so—”

“Can it, vampy,” snapped Sammy, “or I’ll go garlic on you.”

Edna, Kevin and Rhys rode in the back, with Rhys held steady by Edna at his head and Kevin, after two pairs of latex gloves and a sterile scrub, at his feet. Ms Somchit drove the van with the grace of a runaway train, cheerfully unaware of lesser beings that might get in the way.

Sammy and Sharon sat beside her, and Sharon seethed.

She seethed through the backstreets of Tooting and onto the main road to Balham.

She seethed past Wandsworth Common and beneath the railway lines that congregated round Clapham Junction. She seethed towards Battersea, until at last Sammy exploded:

“Bloody hell, can you sulk or what?”

Sharon’s fist slammed into the dashboard, hard enough to make its dials jump. “I,” she declared, each word falling hard and slow, “have been used.”

An embarrassed silence.

“All this… all this teaching me to be a shaman, Midnight Mayor, fate of the city crap–you’re just using me. The Midnight Mayor potters around in the background and I get to deal with the shit. And you know what? All that’d be okay–I mean crap but okay–because it’s not like I had much of a clue what to do with a homework assignment which was ‘Save the city’, but!” Her fist slammed into the dashboard again, making even Ms Somchit wince. “But now Rhys is bloody bleeding back there and there’s a guy who’s been buried alive and we could’ve bloody died so you–” Sammy had the good grace to shy away from Sharon “–you are gonna tell me what the hell is going on, right bloody now! And no cryptic shit, because I’ve had it up to here with cryptic shit. And no calling me soggy-brains, because you’re basically five parts nasal hair to one part mug, and I won’t be having it any more!”

Sammy looked at Ms Somchit. Ms Somchit found herself very interested in the middle of the road. Sammy rolled his eyes–an impressive deed considering the eye-to-skull ratio the little goblin could achieve.

“Okay,” he grumbled. “So maybe we’ve been a little… you know… thin on some stuff, okay? But that’s only because we thought you’d be bright enough to work it out.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” demanded Sharon.

“The Midnight Mayor, course!” exclaimed Sammy. “The protector of the city and all that. Ms Somchit here is an Alderman what works for him.”

“Hello there,” sang out Ms Somchit from behind the wheel.

“So you what… you came to Magicals Anonymous to spy on us, is that it?”

“No!” Ms Somchit insisted. “I mean of course I did,
naturally
I did, because no one in the office could believe anyone would do something quite as… remarkable as organise a society for the magically confused. And you know, I really do think it’s an excellent thing you’re doing, Ms Li, and if the entire welfare of the city wasn’t under direct and immediate threat, I would be applauding your efforts and possibly providing fragrant herbal tea.”

“What about you?” said Sharon, glowering at Sammy. “Why’d you come to the coffee shop? Why’d you decide to teach me?”

Sammy suppressed a groan with the infinite patience of the learned dealing with the naive. “Because,” he said, “you’re a shaman and they’re bloody hard to find. And I’m bored with there being so many amateurs out there who think they can do it ‘in their spare time’, because that is shit and it leads to shoddy work and I can’t be having that, no thank you. Also,” he added, “because the Midnight Mayor asked me and I’m just a sucker for toothpaste.”

A moment to consider the fate of Constable Hurst.

A fairly affable policeman by the standards of the area, he was one of the few local bobbies who believed, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that good policing really did begin with the community. He gave directions to lost visitors, helped old ladies struggling with their shopping, was always firm but polite to the young vandals loitering outside Burger King and, whenever pursing a criminal in the execution of nefarious deeds, always attempted to maintain a calm composure and polite language when nicking the arsehole.

It was therefore unfortunate that he, that day, happened to be the first policeman to arrive at the scene of what had been Edna’s Tanning and Beauty Salon in Tooting, in time to find the pavements thronging with a mixture of horrified and gleefully fascinated onlookers, traffic piled up, cars swerved and, to cap it all off, a bus rammed through the front windows of the now shattered temple. Quite how the bus had achieved this was a mystery, since no one remembered seeing a driver either behind the wheel or leaving the vehicle after the event. But this was surely a question that CID would answer, whereas a junior officer like himself was merely there to keep things under control.

“Is anyone in there?” he demanded of the assembled crowd. “Is anyone left inside the building?”

The crowd responded with shrugs and grunts. Then the owner of the jewellery shop across the street stepped forward with a cry of, “I think I saw a man go inside and…” But he hesitated. His mouth had wanted to say, “and some builders.” However, as he thought it over and tried to pin down the memory of four figures clad in fluorescent jackets, he drew a blank. It wasn’t that he lacked some kind of recollection, but rather as if his thoughts slid over the memory like spilt liquid over marble. His eyes had seen, but his brain had failed to perceive.

“… I think I saw some people come out,” he concluded.

“All of them?”

“I don’t know.”

Constable Hurst puffed in frustration, gestured at the crowd to stay back and, with a cry of “I’m going in!”, plunged through the torn-up window. He hopped over twisted metal and a shattered sink, and edged along the side of the bus, rapping against the still-hot metal and calling out, “Anyone here? Anyone alive?” He felt a mixture of foolishness and immense professional pride as he went, before the sheered edge of a wheel of the bus caught his trouser leg and tore a great ragged slice out of his best uniform from the ankle to the knee. He swore, reaching down to inspect the damage, and as he did felt something move by his ear. His head snapped up, breath drawn in sharply, torn trousers forgotten and for a moment thought he’d seen…

… but no.

The idea was absurd.

What would a builder, bum hanging out of his trousers, fluorescent jacket torn and grubby, face like a flattened breeze block, be doing here? Why had the idea even occurred to him?

“Arses,” whispered a voice, and he jumped, and felt a fool for jumping at nothing.

“Tits,” concurred another, and Constable Hurst half-closed his eyes and reflected that this was not how he had imagined he’d behave when tested, not at all, not by imagining things or by seeing…

“Is this rage?”

His eyes flew open. The voice was real, it had to be real, and there was the speaker: a man, thin hair, pale skin, unnaturally pale, a clean suit–how could clothes be so clean in this place of shattered concrete and dust? Constable Hurst opened his dry mouth to stammer, “Are you
okay, sir?” but the words didn’t come; a mumble of not-noises passed his lips and he realised he was afraid, and didn’t know why.

“I am experiencing,” explained the man in the perfect suit, brushing the thinnest veil of powder from his sleeve, and there was something wrong with his hands, Constable Hurst noticed, something wrong with the man’s hands–fingers too long, too bent, too…

… clawed?

“I am experiencing,” repeated the man, as one examining his own feelings with extreme caution, “a peculiar physiological heat which I must assume to be a reaction to some external trigger. How novel. Is it correct to say that one emotion may lead to another? May frustration, for example, be a trigger for anger, and anger of itself then escalate, as though feeding on its own situation, to fury? What an evo-lutionarily unsound feedback system, and yet I,” he smiled and his teeth were too small, shark points in his thin mouth, “appear to have–why yes, I would say it is so!–appear to have all the features that one might classify as rage. To whit, the urge to tear. The urge to fight. The urge to drink blood and gouge the bodies of my enemies in two–or shall I say twain? Twain has an old-fashioned ring about it, though whether that implies a linguistic superiority I cannot say.”

His eyes drifted up from his sleeve and met those of Constable Hurst, and for a moment the unfortunate policeman saw not merely what was there to be seen, but also what was beneath, and his mouth opened to shout a warning, and his fingers fumbled at the pouches on his belt for a weapon, his baton, his radio, anything, anything at all to stop the gaze of this man in a suit, the not-man in his disguise of a suit.

Too late.

Teeth parted.

Fingers stretched.

There was a moment of uncertainty as what was seen to be and what was actually the case met and clashed. For just a moment fingers were claws, and teeth were fangs, and Mr Ruislip’s suit was no more and no less than the thin illusionary disguise that covered his flayed form as he leapt, tongue flicking at the air, straight for the hot pulsing veins of Constable Hurst’s throat.

Some few minutes later someone said:

“Nasty cut, that.”

“PC Plod.”

“Pigs!”

“Cozzer.”

A hand wipes away blood.

A tie is straightened.

A handkerchief mops away the remnant of flesh clinging to a pair of thin grey lips.

“Gentlemen,” murmurs Mr Ruislip, “I do apologise for my deviation into emotionally-led behaviour. It will not happen again. In the meantime…” the handkerchief, stained scarlet, is folded away “… find the shaman and her friends, and kill them for me, if you would be so kind? If you would also dispatch the Midnight Mayor, preferably tearing him limb from limb, and possibly torching any remaining temples of the Friendlies, ideally with their members inside, it would be of great benefit to my composure.”