Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (47 page)

Rhys yawned, then put his hands over his mouth. “Sorry, Ms Li,” he exclaimed, “That was really inappropriate.”

“It’s okay,” croaked Sharon, against the pressure of the wendigo’s arm. “ ‘These drugs may cause drowsiness.’ ”

“Yes, but I wouldn’t want you to think I was yawning–
yawning
–while you’re in danger, Ms Li.”

“Rhys, can we concentrate on the wendigo?”

In the darkness beyond the door, where footsteps had run and stopped abruptly, Rhys heard it again–the swish of tyres on stone, moving fast, far too fast for the narrow gloom outside.

“Now,” Mr Ruislip said, shuffling closer to the edge of the pit, “the situation is very simple. You are mortals of no significance, whereas
I
—”

“What’s in the pit?” Sharon cut in, wheezing with the effort of breathing.

The question caught Mr Ruislip off guard. “What?”

“I can hear… voices. All the spirits you stole, right? You locked them up down there?”

“You really expect me to ans—”

“Well, the way I reason it is this. You’re gonna use me as a human shield, right, against Rhys here until he like, gets mega-drowsy from all the anti-histamines and that. But that’s kinda dumb. Because if you do hurt me, then Rhys is so gonna blast you into tiny bits. And, actually, you may have summoned the nether hordes of darkness or whatever shit it is you’ve got going out in that corridor there. But
me…”
Her hands tightened suddenly around Mr Ruislip’s arm and it occurred to the wendigo, a second too late, that a vice-like grip went both ways. “… I’ve got this serious shaman shit going down.”

Sharon vanished.

So, for that matter, did Mr Ruislip.

There was a second of confusion.

Mr Ruislip looked round at the shadow world where the shamans walked, and for a second saw all that the shaman could see: walls
encrusted with a hundred years of river salt that sparkled like diamonds; the ice that had once been buried here, still visible between the stones; metal crawling with rust mites that burrowed in and out of the iron of the walkway; Rhys burning, blazing with anti-histamine-fuelled magic that spluttered and spat around him like oil in a frying pan.

And, down–a long way down–the pit, a spinning, roaring mass, a great writhing mess of voices and shadows: there the red-brick soul of a warehouse plucked from the cracks in the mortar; there the silvery-glass back of an abandoned church hall, still rippling with the music that had once played within its embrace; there the soapy guardian of an old spa house where Victorian gentlemen had perfected their beards; here the sharp clattering voice of the factory floor, stolen at night from the hollow quietness of the waiting machines–dozens of them,
hundreds
of them, the stolen souls of the city whirled beneath him, screaming, hammering at their prison bars.

And, as Mr Ruislip looked up, he saw for a brief second his own hands, his own arms, his own skin, the billowing flayed flesh rippling around him like sails in a storm, and he grinned, and in this place his grin had fangs, and for a glorious moment he remembered how he had enjoyed the taste of blood and the thrill of the hunt until…

“Yo, saggy-skin!”

Sharon caught him by the waist, charging head first into his middle and knocking him back against the iron railing of the walkway…

… or, to put more fine a point on it,
through
the iron railing of the walkway.

For a second Mr Ruislip clawed at empty air, but there was nothing, only time and voices, to cling to; and he opened his mouth to scream as he, and Sharon, fell together into the whirling pit below.

Several floors above the pit where Sharon and Mr Ruislip had just fallen into endless dark, things were not going well.

They were not going well for a number of reasons.

Firstly, the office Kevin, Edna and Gretel were exploring had suddenly, and unhelpfully, filled with plastic bags. And while this was not, in and of itself, a major problem, the sudden animation of the plastic bags and the seemingly unified decision these items of garbage had taken all at once to come to life and attack the inhabitants of that space was definitely creating a difficult working environment.

“Get it off!” screamed Edna, as a shopping bag proclaiming
EVERY DAY IS DISCOUNT DAY!
wrapped itself around her arm, pulling her towards the ground.

“Sweetheart, I’m kind of busy!” hissed Kevin, swatting a bag with his sports holdall as it flew directly for his face. Gretel was already half swamped. Plastic bags were clinging to her legs, her belly, her arms, her shoulders, and even as Kevin glanced her way, the troll’s great form spun sideways, pushed down by the thickening mass plastering itself to her flesh. A bright orange Sainsbury’s bag drifted down and tried to spread itself over the troll’s nose and mouth, only for Gretel to roll like a carpet out of its way, crunching and rasping in the swathes of plastic already clinging to her. Even the troll’s immense strength didn’t seem enough, and Kevin groaned with a foreboding of defeat as
something cold and crumpled managed to stick itself across his back, rippling and writhing against his touch as he tried to peel it off.

“There’s a trigger spell somewhere in here!” he screamed. “Destroy the trigger!”

Edna was cowering under a desk, a doodle-strewn notebook held up in front of her to bat away the incoming clouds of plastic, which swarmed and circled the room. Gretel roared feebly as a bag wrapped itself around her throat and began to twist and tighten. Kevin tried to get to her, but a bag had got around his foot and didn’t want to move, pulling him back down. He flailed at the empty air, then fell, blood running freely from his nose.

He’d taken the wrong blood type, that much was obvious. And now, as Kevin lay on the floor reflecting on all the untoward things that might be happening to his internal organs, he felt the cold pressure of another bag wrap itself around his hand. Another settled across his body, embracing him like a taxidermist’s blanket. He saw a white bag settle, so slowly, over Gretel’s features. It morphed itself to the troll’s nose and mouth, then flared up and down as the troll groaned, choking for breath under the plastic seal.

“Edna,” croaked the vampire. “Find the trigger!”

Under the desk, Edna whimpered, swatting away a bag that had attempted to ram itself into her mouth like a sponge. “I can’t,” she cried.

Gretel’s struggles were growing less, her lungs slowing in their battle against the death mask stuck over her face, and even as Edna looked around her in panic, more plastic was encasing the vampire too, pinning him to the floor.

There was…

… not so much a sound as a
pressure,
a sense of particles moving with a sound just beyond human hearing. The floor-to-ceiling windows hummed; mugs bounced along the surface of the desks; cables buzzed inside their shielding. Something grey, fast and winged was spinning through the air outside the office. Banking tightly, it snapped its wings in close and barrelled towards the building’s vibrating glass exterior, which now began to pop, began to splinter, began to crack; and an instant before Sally the banshee burst through into the office, mouth agape and vocal cords singing beyond human powers to hear, the glass walls of Burns and Stoke exploded.

“What was that?”

“Did anyone else hear…?”

“Oh my God. Look at that!”

“Dear me, is that something to do with us, Mr Swift?”

“You know, Mrs Rafaat, I think it might be.”

“But all that glass! That’s going to cost a fortune to replace.”

“That’s what makes me think it might be something to do with us.”

“Do you think everyone is all right?”

“Well, personally I find massive symptoms of architectural destruction a rather positive indication.”

“That’s because you’re incompetent, sorcerer.”

“Thank you, Sammy. The next time I’m fighting off unstoppable evils, I’ll remember that key piece of feedback and advice.”

“Should we do something?”

“You took the words out of my mouth, Mrs Rafaat. Let’s… do something bloody mythic.”

In the flickering gloomy pit beneath Burns and Stoke, Rhys gasped and slid to the floor.

He’d just seen Sharon and Mr Ruislip vanish, only to reappear a second later as two shapes tumbling into the black pit. He’d rushed to the edge, and seen…

… darkness.

He hadn’t realised how quickly the dark could swallow light, how easily living things could become small.

Now he sat, dizzy and bewildered, eyes heavy and throat clear, mind fuzzy and thoughts racing.

She’d fallen.

She’d fallen.

She’d fallen.

And he hadn’t stopped it.

“Aaa… aaa…
atchoo!
”

A child giggled out in the darkness of the corridor.

A bicycle tyre slid on stone.

It occurred to Rhys that these were not the normal sounds of an industrial-era storage pit beneath a financial building in Canary Wharf. Also, that if there was nothing left for him, no purpose, no meaning, no future, there was no further point in fearing things unseen and unknown.

He staggered to his feet, cradling his broken hand against his chest, and pushed back the door to the corridor.

In the distance, tiny and pale, the lift stood waiting to carry any who dared approach back into the light. Rhys fingered the packet of antihistamines in his pocket and wondered what would happen if he combined the pills with coffee. Was that medically allowed?

He raised his head and called out, “There’s nothing you can do to me that hasn’t been done, so don’t even think about trying.”

So saying, he stepped into the dark of the corridor.

Swish of a wheel in the dark, splash as it rippled through a puddle on the stone floor, then nothing again.

It occurred to Rhys that these corridors were too narrow for a cyclist, even a lithe and dextrous one, but frankly he no longer cared about such practicalities. He took another step forward and heard a child giggle. Then another step, and another. As he walked down the corridor it seemed that no matter how far he went, the lift door still seemed a very long way off, too far off in fact, but when he looked back, so did the door to the pit.

Something dark and fast moved in the corner of his eye; he turned quickly, raising his hands to strike, but it was gone, as if swallowed by the walls themselves.

Something else blurred behind him: a rattle of chain on gears. He spun again, but it was out of sight, swallowed up by the darkness.

“Atchoo!
”

The sound of his sneeze echoed down the corridor. He whispered the words of the druid’s guide light, opening his palms to release a sodium-stained creature the size of a small blackbird, its skin glowing with a pervasive pinkish glow. It rose up to circle above his head, spilling its light across the stones around him–and there!

He saw it just for a second, a shadow all in black on a bicycle all in black, as if rider and transport were made of the same stuff, an insubstantial absence of light which wheeled across his vision before vanishing into the wall itself. He heard the laugh again, and there was another figure, a child, a boy in a black hood with black fingers moulded to the handles of his black bicycle. He too rode through the wall, and no sooner was he gone than another appeared, pedalling out of the brickwork itself and circling Rhys; then another, and another,
appearing and vanishing into darkness, forming a shoal of childish riders who giggled at their prank. Rhys turned uselessly on the spot as he tried to think of a spell…

“Atchoo!
”

Suddenly one rider swerved and pedalled straight for him. Rhys turned to run, but he had nowhere to go, cut off in the circle of riders. He felt something cold and liquid slam into the small of his back and then pass through him–it passed
through
him and took with it all the warmth in his belly, all the solidity in his bones, knocking him to the ground. As the shadow cyclist giggled and rejoined the circling mass of riders, Rhys thought he could hear them whisper in the dark,
Ride with us, ride with us, ride with us…

He crawled onto his hands and knees, gasping for air, and another cyclist pedalled out of the wall and slammed into him, knocking him back to the floor. He gave a faltering gasp of pain as his fingers, now turning blue, scrabbled at the wet stone beneath him. The little circling guide light went out.

Ride with us, ride with us, ride with us…

He saw one of the riders turn and swerve his bike to a stop down the corridor, lining up the front wheel with the end of Rhys’s nose for one last, great charge.

Something glassy rolled in Rhys’s pocket. He felt it: a small bottle containing a spray distilled from canal water and slime. He didn’t need to see the masking-tape label to know what the label said: “Peaceful”.

The shadow cyclist gave a bright “ting-a-ling” on his bell, swung upright into his saddle and charged, standing up on his pedals and leaning forward into his handlebars like a champion jockey as he sped through the darkness towards Rhys. Rhys raised himself onto one arm, pulling the bottle of Peaceful out of his pocket and thrusting it aloft in his shaking, swollen, disfigured hand.

Ride with us, ride with us,
roared the bicycle swarm.

“Grow up,” grunted the druid, and as the rider burst through the circling darkness and upon him, Rhys smashed the bottle as hard as he could into the ground.

Sally the banshee burst into the shattered remains of Burns and Stoke through the window, talons outstretched through a billowing cloud of plastic bags and pigeon feathers. Her wings beat at the mass of detritus that spun around her, caught in the turmoil of her passage as she descended on the bags smothering Gretel and began to rip away at them with her claws. The banshee had torn a great gash through the bags covering Gretel’s face and scraped off a large swatch from the troll’s side before a cloud of plastic, turning in the air as tightly as a flock of starlings, slammed into her, knocking her to the floor with a great
ploomph.