Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (45 page)

Edna crawled out from beneath the mess of files and papers. The rune-wearer was not three paces away, pulling his hands apart for another spell. Dizzy and bewildered, she sat with ears ringing and hair still smoking, a lemming on the cliff top, as his hands moved with inexorable, ritual slowness, drawing up power.

Something moved behind him.

It was dark, fast and very nearly silent.

It said, “Oh God, I am
so
going to regret this,” and an instant later seemed to fold itself round the man.

His face changed.

A look of surprise flashed briefly into pain, before his features crumpled, along with the rest of him. His head rolled back, his jaw dropped. A line of blood dribbled down his neck and began to seep into his clothes. His eyes drifted shut. A second later the darkness unfolded from around him, and he slid silently to the floor.

Kevin wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then stared in horror at the streak of blood across his bone-white skin.

“Oh. My. God,” he whispered. “Oh my
God!”

He fumbled in his sports bag, throwing out handfuls of latex gloves, sterile wipes and plasters. Finally he hoisted aloft a great bottle of blue mouthwash, with which he set to rinsing his mouth like he’d swallowed cyanide.

“Where’s my dental floss?” he wailed. “I don’t feel well.”

“Kevin, dear? Are you… quite all right?” Edna asked, as she picked her way past the bloodied body of the guard.

“I didn’t do a medical history! Pass me that!”

A finger gestured imperiously at a syringe in a clean plastic package which had fallen from Kevin’s bag. Edna handed it over, and with practised professionalism Kevin ripped it from its package, bent down over the unconscious guard, rolled up his sleeve, slapped the soft skin in the crook of the man’s arm and pushed in the needle.

“I need a sample,” he explained. “For testing!”

“Testing for what?”

“Typhus!”

“Typhus?” echoed Edna. “I’m not sure that’s very common any more, dear.”

“Chlamydia!”

“Well, yes, I do hear that rates are on the rise.”

Kevin withdrew the needle and held it up to the feeble light. “Do you think he’s got the right antigens?” he asked. “Or if there’s any ice in this office?”

“May I have one of your bandages, please?” asked Gretel quietly.

“Oh no, you poor dear!” cried Edna at the brown blood seeping from a dozen cuts across Gretel’s great surface. “Kevin!”

“Help yourself,” mumbled the vampire, drawing back hastily as the troll bent down to rifle the bag. A fat wad of cotton was pulled out and Gretel wrapped it round her bloody fist.

To Edna’s offer of a safety pin she politely replied, “Thank you, but I think I will be all right.”

Kevin was swaying, his face even greyer than usual. “Yeah,” he muttered. “I’m not sure I will be.”

He removed the last of the blood from his hand and mouth with a sterile wipe, then dropped all his medical detritus into a yellow plastic bag marked
BIOHAZARD.

Looking up, he added, “Someone said something about a plan?”

There were only two buttons in the small lift.

One was “Up”, the other was “Down”.

“Up” didn’t seem to go anywhere, so Sharon and Rhys rode the lift down.

The lift played more tinkly muzak at them as it descended.

It descended a very, very long way.

When the door opened, it did so with a little
ping.

The air beyond was noticeably colder, damper.

The corridor was noticeably darker, lit only by bare bulbs hung on the wall.

It was also older.

Brick walls, turned black-grey with a hundred years of lichen and moss. The floor was smooth flagstones, worn down by centuries of footsteps. Water dripped in the distance. The smell of the river was close, the lift a brilliant sparkle of modern brightness in the dark. Its door slid shut behind Sharon and Rhys as they stepped out into the cold wet air, cutting off the muzak.

Dirt had settled on a sign nailed onto the corridor wall. Sharon brushed it off, leaving an orange-brown slime on the palm of her hand. Its ancient scratched letters read,
NO FIRE PAST THIS POINT.

“Where are we?” Rhys whispered. His voice bounced down and
down the corridor, into thick darkness. He was staying close to Sharon, so he told himself, in his guise as a manly protector, and not at all a guy who had this problem with the dark. It wasn’t a big deal, just… dark, see?

Sharon didn’t answer. As she moved down the tunnel, her fingers brushed the ancient brickwork, taking away a stain of mould, dust and time. Her head was tilted and, listening, she could hear…

       
creaking of masts swaying above still water

smell of sewage

              
oi oi ready to sail!

out of the way boy

help us

             
where’s the master?

lapping of water on stone

     
rat claw scurry scuttle scurry fleas in flesh bite of plague and leap!

     
Help Us!

black lumps under the arms

     
salt in the skin

tide turning at midnight

HELP US!!

“This was part of the old quayside,” she heard herself say in a distant voice. “Back when this place was a dockyard, they’d keep things down here so they wouldn’t spoil. Meats and fish and that. Then when the docks went, they knocked everything down, but this survived. It goes deep.”

“What do Burns and Stoke want with it?”

“They use it to trap their stolen souls in. Places that are old, and cold, and dark, and deep–they make good cages.”

“Um, that’s slightly scary, Miss Li. Not that I’m scared, see, but you know, if I wasn’t so not scared, that’d probably freak me out.”

“This way,” she replied, walking faster.

The corridor curved gently down and, as it did, water began to appear, silt-stained brownish water from the river that had crept in, forming salt crystals on the brick walls, little trickles that flowed up through imperfections in the floor, eating at its stones, grinding them down. Occasionally passages would lead off to the side. Glancing down one, Rhys thought he glimpsed a hall, vast brick surfaces and
darkness, pools of black water, fouled walls and the scuttle of rats. Sharon didn’t stop, didn’t look, but strode forward now with a greyhound determination. Rhys scampered to keep up.

He thought he heard…

… but no, nothing else was moving down there, nothing living…

… not that that meant anything dead was moving either, what Rhys meant by
nothing living
was nothing was moving which they needed to be afraid of, nothing but shadows, only shadows, and only little boys were afraid of shadows whereas he was a druid–a very good druid, if only the exam board had realised it and—

“Atchoo!
”

The sneezed echoed away down the corridor, vivid and loud.

Atchoo!
the walls whispered back.

Rhys froze.

Could he hear…

… was that…

… a bicycle?

“Help me here!”

Sharon had reached the end of the corridor, where a great iron door with a wheel for a lock stood shut, almost rusted into the brickwork. Rhys scurried up and, straining against the weight of the wheel, muttered, “Don’t you think there should be, maybe, more guards and that?”

“One problem at a time,” grunted the shaman. With a lurch, the wheel spun, and the door swung open.

They stepped through into a round chamber, lined with smooth grey stone, a metal walkway stretching across the middle of the room. Beneath the walkway, going down into darkness, was a great black pit. The air stirred in it, twisting and turning. Rhys, through the haze of his fear, thought he could hear…

Help us…

Sharon was clinging to the rail of the walkway, her face ashen, body swaying.

“They’re here,” she whispered. “I can hear them–all the souls the wendigo stole, ripped out of their place.”

“What is this?” breathed Rhys.

She didn’t answer.

“It used to be an ice store!”

The voice had come from behind them, bright and crisp and deafening in the stillness of that place. Rhys felt the pit stir beneath him, shadows twisting more violently in the darkness, writhing like creatures in pain.

And there he was, Mr Ruislip, immaculately dressed as always. He was flanked by three men and one woman, wearing suits. The humans wore the bright ties and shiny shoes of office workers, but signs including grey hairs and ostentatious cufflinks suggested that here were no ordinary servants of money. These were senior management, gathered to witness the triumph of their CEO. Mr Ruislip drifted towards the cold hollow of the pit, savouring the darkness like a connoisseur studying a piece of art. The four members of management, and here was a word that rose unbidden to Rhys’s mind–the four
surviving
members of management–followed at a distance, heads bowed, none daring to interrupt their boss’s triumph.

“Ice was considered a privilege for the wealthy,” explained Mr Ruislip, looking down into the depths of the pit. “A sign of prestige. Prestige makes men feel good. Prestige can only be achieved if other people believe the owner of the prestige to be good. In some way, that is. After all, good is a moral statement as well as a feeling. Can one do bad and feel good? I suppose one can.”

He spoke, Rhys realised, as one perpetually trying to solve a puzzle, a child reasoning out loud, faced with concepts whose importance he couldn’t quite believe in. Meanwhile there it was, that flicker of something inhuman in his eye, that flash of something ancient, dressed up in someone else’s skin.

“Nowadays we use this place to store souls, rather than ice. But the purpose is, I believe, the same. Prestige,” he mused. “In the past the idea of prestige was honest, visceral. Power was through blood and the exercise of might; it was a truth embodied in the very acts of life and death. Then it was a thing founded on wealth, the ownership of other men, and symbolised by things including the possession of ice in summer.

“I did struggle at first with this concept, but now I comprehend–the ownership of wealth is, in fact, precisely the same as ownership of blood and death, which was so much simpler in the old days–except,
through wealth I may buy the souls of men, as well as their lives. Humans do so complicate things, don’t you think?” The wendigo’s eyes flashed up to Rhys, who gulped and staggered back a pace. The druid turned to look for Sharon, who’d have something to say–of course she would.

But Sharon was not there.

“Are we there yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Are we nearly near there yet?”

“Not yet, Sammy.”

“My puppy doesn’t like cabs.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that, Mrs Rafaat. But as it is, your puppy is sitting on my left foot, which may yet get gangrene. So really I think we’re all suffering here.”

“My puppy doesn’t like leaving the centre of London. He gets all pensive, don’t you? Yes, you do! Yes, you dooooo!”

“Think of this as an exciting adventure.”

“Are we there yet?!”

“No, Sammy, shut up!”

“You can’t talk to me like that, I’m the second greatest shaman who’s ever lived!”

“And we’re the blue electric angels, and we’re getting really, really annoyed.”

“Are you the blue electric angels, Mr Swift?”

“So it would appear.”

“That must be very uncomfortable.”

“We manage, Mrs Rafaat.”

In Burns and Stoke’s department of Magical Affairs, something architecturally unsound is about to happen.

Wait for it…

Wait for it…

KABOOM!

The ceiling thunders, then shakes; dirt drifts down and ceiling panels collapse.

Silence.

KABOOM!

Silence again.

KABOOM!

If a sound engineer had been asked for a precise description of this noise, he might well have described it as that of a large, unathletic troll jumping from the top of a broken, sagging desk onto the floor as hard as she could.

KABOOM!!

On this last great roar of noise, the sound engineer might have been pleased to find his hypothesis, if not confirmed, then heading in the right direction by said troll crashing bum first through the ceiling of the office below in a shower of torn cables, twisted pipes and billowing
white dust. Sitting on a debris-strewn floor, she batted ineffectually at the pulverised architecture drifting in the air around her.

Peering down through the troll-sized hole Gretel had made, there appeared the faces of Kevin and Edna.

“Well,” said Edna. “That’s certainly one way to get past the wards.”

“I don’t feel well,” moaned Kevin. “I think I swallowed the wrong kind of blood.”

“How can you swallow the wrong kind of blood? You’re a vampire!”

“Antigens!” he wailed. “When you have Seah’s syndrome, it’s very important to get the right antigens!”

“Are you going to jump?” asked Gretel from the floor below.

By now Kevin was swaying, eyes out of focus. He smiled absently, muttered, “Some damn drinking spree,” and stepped forward blindly into the hole.

Gretel scrambled out of the way as the vampire crashed to the floor beside her. Kevin picked himself up slowly, one limb at a time.

“Aren’t vampires supposed to be graceful and agile?” enquired Edna.

Kevin’s grin was still locked in place. Gretel carefully poked him in the shoulder, and he rocked one way, then the other, like a punchbag.

“I don’t think Kevin is quite himself,” admitted the troll. Then, “If you jump, ma’am, I’ll try to catch you.”

“I’m far too old for this, you know,” muttered Edna, easing herself feet first to the edge of the sagging hole. “You promise not to peek?” she added with sudden alarm as her skirt began to hang over the edge.