Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (34 page)

“You can’t…”

Was there a whisper from another mouth, on Farringdon Road?

A murmured reply from Wilmington Square?

A half-hushed response from the edge of Spa Fields, where even now a banshee was turning her head to the sky and opening her mouth to howl the impossible howl of her kin?

The builder listened and heard nothing.

“Babes,” he tried.

Nothing.

“Arseholes.”

Sharon stepped closer, picking her way past overturned chairs and fallen pigeon feathers. She fixed her eyes on the builder.

“Call that driving?” he spluttered. “I didn’t… more than my… Wanker!”

She stopped an arm’s-reach in front of him. He didn’t seem to notice. Though his head didn’t turn, his eyes wandered, and his lips were working, albeit in response to sounds he couldn’t hear.

“You must be what they call a composite personality,” murmured Sharon. “I saw that when I was in the shadows back there in Tooting, where you killed that Friendly. I looked at you, and you were all the same. You’re all the same thing, at the end, but in four bodies. I wondered what you’d be like if you were ever pulled apart. I guess now we know.”

For a moment the builder’s eyes locked on hers. “Bacon sarnie!” he exclaimed, then flinched as if surprised by his own words. “Cuppa tea,” he blurted and shook his head as if to release true meaning from his addled mind. “Tits!”

And where Farringdon Road met Clerkenwell Road, it seemed to Gretel the troll that the struggling of the builder on her back had grown weaker. She hesitated beneath the red glow of the traffic lights and examined her burden. Anyone who bothered to look may have briefly seen…

… but then no, because what they saw was not something they cared to perceive.

And in Wilmington Square, beneath the hanging branches of the willow tree where for a hundred years young lovers had felt classically romantic, Rhys the druid sat back on his haunches and panted and sweated and wondered why the builder, his bones nearly healed, didn’t leap up and try to kill them all. Or why Sammy the Elbow, usually so vocal in his opinions, was silent. Why was everything about them so silent?

A breath is released. In the shattered hall on Exmouth Market a man in a fluorescent jacket sways, sweat standing out on his forehead, and whispers:

“I…”

In Spa Fields, a voice picks up the cry: “… can’t…”

On Farringdon Road, a whisper beneath the traffic lights: “… be…”

In Wilmington Square, on the leaf-strewn grass: “… alone.”

And they die.

Not a death of blood or bone.

Not even a death of falling and decay.

It is an exhalation.

Four builders breathe out at last, and with their breath go their lives, their strengths, their shapes, their weights, their colour, their mass, their solidity, and their everything, until, for each of them, only a yellow fluorescent jacket and a pair of steel-capped safety boots remain.

Four bodies, but only one breath.

Kevin was saying, “You can’t have too much antiseptic…”

He stood in the wrecked remains of the hall surrounded by a largely curious gathering of Magicals Anonymous. The crowbar was still lodged firmly in his chest but, from the fact he was still on his feet, this didn’t seem cause him nearly as much physical distress as hygenic.

Two witches, their hands covered by latex gloves, their faces by white masks, were tentatively slathering the crowbar with bright pink antiseptic fluid from a bottle found in the copious depths of Kevin’s bag. Sharon approached gingerly, and at the sight of her Kevin shrieked, “Face mask, face mask! Oh my God, haven’t you people heard of germs?”

A face mask was proffered, by Chris the exorcist, whose eyes were locked on the crowbar protruding from the vampire’s chest.

Holding the mask over her nose and mouth, Sharon mumbled, “You okay, Kevin?”

“God no!” he replied. “They completely missed my heart, but have you seen this?” He gestured at the crowbar, all the while dripping a mixture of blood and medication onto the floor. “It just screams tetanus!”

“It’s a
magical
crowbar through your chest, stupid!” corrected Sammy.

“That’s worse!” wailed Kevin. “What if it carries magical tetanus?”

Nearby, Rhys sat, a cup of tea pressed into his hands by the concerned Mrs Rafaat. Every aspect of his body language suggested that here was a druid who had been pushed to the edge and whose survival could only be attributed to luck.

“Is that it?” he murmured as Sharon came over and sat next to him. “Have we won?”

“Uh… yeah. But kind of no.”

“Oh,” he said. “But at least it’s progress?”

“I think it’s all terribly sad,” put in Mrs Rafaat. “I mean, those poor psychopathic builders probably had no choice about being a composite destructive murderous personality. I blame their upbringing.”

Sharon turned to stare at the older woman. There was something about this lady, a certain… normality that, in this place, made no sense. Mrs Rafaat smiled, fidgeting with the long embroidered scarf around her neck. “Well, that’s just what I think,” she offered.

Sharon thought she saw the white-suited shape of Dez flit across the wall behind Mrs Rafaat. “You… get weird dreams, right?” she asked carefully. “I mean, you’re not like… magical or unstable or explosive or anything like that; it’s just that you get, you know, weird stuff happening, yeah?”

“I wouldn’t want to exaggerate things,” ventured Mrs Rafaat. “There are so many people in this world who are far worse off than me.”

“Out of interest,” Sharon heard her own voice, as if from a long way off, “when did these weird dreams start happening?”

“A few years ago, but really shouldn’t we be focusing on this nice vampire with the impaling problem?”

Turning on the spot, a full 360 degrees, Sharon looked slowly round the room. As she did she saw, with a shaman’s eye, all the truths behind the shapes–of Kevin

so gross so gross so gross

of Chris the exorcist, who wondered:

will the builders haunt this place I don’t know it looked like a peaceful way to go, in a violent sense, but then with mystic forces such as these there are always deeper issues at work…

Her gaze wandered up to the rafters, where in the clouds of pigeons still flapping around she could see another shape, drawn out of the falling feathers, which swirled and drifted round each other and
which formed, for a very brief moment, the shape of a human arm curling round the verminous flock, or a hint of a human face twisting up. Look a little deeper, and there were the shadows of the things which had taken place in this hall–kids in judo uniforms tumbling on old stuffed mats; actors prancing round the room doing whatever exercises actors did as preparation for emoting; the Sunday prayer seminar for singles concerned about their love lives. Can’t find a boyfriend? Can’t sustain a relationship? Monstrous sounds or manifestations while having sex? Come to our singles prayer seminar, and all shall be explained.

And there was Dez, white suit and fake tan, big red microphone held up as he exclaimed, “And now a message from our sponsor! Do you have problems seeing the truth of things? Is the journey down the hidden path just a little too hard-going? Not convinced you’ve got the right aura of shamanly wisdom? Try doing it better, the ultimate solution for a difficult situation!”

Sharon glared at him, and her spirit guide had the good grace to fade unobtrusively into the grey realms of psychological discord from which he had sprung. Finally Sharon turned back to Mrs Rafaat: there she stood, a nice old lady with curling grey hair, one of Wembley’s finest saris modestly sparing her ankles from the gaze of lewd observers, and she was… normal. Utterly and entirely 100 per cent Mrs Rafaat, not a hint of power, not a shadow of a doubt, not a glimmer of magic, not a—

What had Edna said?

“Derek did hire a couple of very nice wizards to try and scry for Greydawn, but they didn’t find anything. Which was odd, as you’d have expected some sort of mystical residue or glow, but it’s really as if she’s just vanished into the city.”

And being a shaman wasn’t, Sharon recalled, about being invisible. It was about being so much a part of your environment that no one even bothered to look.

“Excuse me?” Mrs Rafaat was staring politely at Sharon’s left shoulder. “Um… Ms Li? Are you still there? Only you do appear to have vanished into thin air.”

For a second the two of them stood there, shaman and smiling old lady, trying to puzzle each other out. Then Sharon turned around,
snapping back into the world of perceived reality, her mouth already opening to shout, “Sammy! Get your arse here now!”

The goblin shimmered out of nowhere to appear where he’d always been, just behind Sharon. “No need to shout,” he grumbled. “Drama drama drama, that’s all humans ever–
ow!
” Sharon’s fingers had closed round one of his ears and she dragged him towards the troll-sized remains of the door. “You can’t! It’s my… This is not dignified!” shrilled the goblin as he was pulled out into the night.

She dragged him into the alley down the side of the hall, let go of his ear and hissed, “At one with the bloody city!”

Sammy paused, just in case he’d missed a deeper meaning to this sentiment. “I know you’ve got potato brains,” he concluded, “and you’re gonna have to talk me down to your intellectual level.”

She hissed with frustration, turning on the spot like a caged animal. “At one with the city! That’s how you vanish, that’s what being invisible means–being at one with the bloody city!”

“Yeah, and—”

“And why would anyone care about us lot anyway, really? I mean, I know that like, Chris is looking to get more business and Rhys has these allergy issues, but no one cares about Magicals Anonymous.”

“I’m with you there.”

“But Mrs Rafaat isn’t magical, isn’t special, isn’t powerful, isn’t dangerous, isn’t angry, isn’t anything really that you’d think would make seeking help important; but you know what? She’s so much not all of these things it’s like she’s nothing else, do you see?”

“No. What are you talking about?”

“That’s all she is! Mrs Rafaat is too human!”

“Too—”

“Too human,” insisted Sharon, “to be bloody true.”

“Oh.” Then silence. “Oh!” repeated Sammy, struggling with this syllable as being something not present in regular vocabulary. Then, raising his voice a little, “You may look thick as a brick wall, but maybe you’re not so dumb after all.”

“Thanks.”

“Which isn’t to say you’re right, cos you probably ain’t…”

“That’s fine.”

“… but if you are, then well… yeah. That’s something, innit?” mused Sammy. Then, as if the desire to say it had been welling up until it became unstoppable, he exclaimed, “If it was so bloody obvious all this bloody time, why the bloody hell couldn’t the Midnight Mayor arsehole figure it out for himself? Incompetent wanker!”

There was a polite cough from the end of the alley.

Sharon turned with the shuffle of one who has seen a lot of disaster but can’t believe she’s seen the last of it.

A man stood at the end of the alley, a disruption of the dark.

“Excuse me?” he said. “Would you be talking about me?”

I really feel very embarrassed bothering you like this.

I have this… dream.

Again and again, it comes to me in the night.

I am…

… air. Or not air; I am a cloud within the air. No, that’s not right. Not a cloud; that’s far too like the weather.

I am breath.

That’s what I am. My body is breath, my thoughts are wind, my fingers are the warm curling whispers from air vents, my toes are the rattling of old papers along the ground, my hair is the swaying of leaves and the singing of glass in the high towers.

I dream of the night, of the city at night, when everything is sleeping, that beautiful hour before the sun comes up when the roads are empty of all traffic except for the street cleaner and the late-night painter of lines; when the lights burn in empty offices where only the woman in rubber gloves moves between silent stations.

I sweep above the goods train creaking along empty railway lines; I dance through the tunnels where the engineers walk with grubby faces; I spin round the TV set of the lonely security guard in the too-quiet car park. I am everywhere they are, these people lost in the dark; and sometimes, to delight them, I tangle a plastic bag in my arms and
a newspaper round my ankle and let it spin round me so that they may look up and see, in the detritus of the day, that I am there, walking beside them. That they are not alone.

And when the moon is hidden and the street lamps are flickering, I walk along the city wall, and it is as real to me as any paving stone in London. And outside the demons of the night howl and hammer and scream for admittance, all the nightmares that mankind has tried to lock away–the spectres and the ghouls, the ghasts and the ghosts, the devils with pointed faces and the wendigos clad in the skins of the fallen–and my dog is beside me, and he howls and growls, and they cower and are afraid, and I feel pity for them, and my dog does not.

That’s my dream.

Every night it comes to me, and sometimes even when I am not sleeping I think I hear him, my dog, howling, calling to me, trying to find me.

Then I wake and remember what I really am.

I am a cleaning woman from Wembley, widow of a loving husband, and I cook an excellent prawn madras.

All the rest is just… longing, I suppose. Longing, and wishing for something more.

Nothing I can’t live without.

He stood at the end of the alley, bright blue eyes beneath dark brown hair, fingerless black gloves at the end of a dirty beige coat, secondhand jeans and second-hand T-shirt. The T-shirt proclaimed:

SAVE OUR NHS

Sharon walked up to him, staring into his too-blue eyes, and said, very quietly and fast, “I think I should slap you but I’m not going to slap you because that would give off a negative energy and we’re working really hard on doing positive stuff here but if it wasn’t deeply immature and not at all socially responsible, I wouldn’t just slap you now, I’d put a knee through your testicles, just so you know.”