Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (20 page)

This street was no exception. A mixture of shops and houses jostling each other as if the designer had dropped his plans on the way to work and not got them back in order before building began. An Albanian restaurant shared kitchens with a curry house; an off-licence sold Polish beer by the six-pack and French wine by the litre; notices in the
window of the newsagent offered hatha yoga for women and cheap calls to Ghana for everyone. Amidst it all, small, quaint and defiant, was Mr Roding’s house.

A path of chipped beige tiles led past a rubbish dump disguised as a front garden to a small red-brick porch. A ceramic family of ducks took flight across the bricks surrounding the front door; the flat plastic image of a teddy bear hugged a sign proclaiming this lone two-storey home, between the wine warehouse and the tyre yard, to be
SUNSHINE COTTAGE
. The curtains were drawn across every window of the house. The sun was setting on the world outside, the sky turning green-grey, the traffic faint and far off.

Sharon knocked.

Behind her Rhys fidgeted. He didn’t quite know how he’d ended up in Walthamstow, though he had this memory of Sharon grabbing him by the sleeve and pulling him out of the toilet. He had this sense that she’d walked at a speed which didn’t really have anything to do with distance covered or time taken, this special speed at which all things had begun to blur. And then.
Then
he couldn’t shake the feeling, imagined or not, that as she dragged him out of Burns and Stoke with a cry of, “Come on, druid, make yourself useful!” she hadn’t bothered to open any doors. Which was unfortunate, because he hadn’t logged out of the servers at Burns and Stoke before shutting down, and if refusing to obey the laws of matter was disconcerting, failure to observe proper security procedures was just bad IT.

The door opened a cautious inch on a brass chain. A single pale eye regarded Sharon. “Yeah?”

“Mr Roding?”

The eye narrowed. “I know you,” grumbled the voice. “You’re that shaman.”

Sharon beamed. “That’s me, Mr Roding sir! I’m Sharon and this is Rhys.”

“Hello,” quavered Rhys.

The door stayed on the chain. “What you doing here?” demanded Mr Roding. “What you want?”

“Well now, Mr Roding,” trilled Sharon, her voice rising like the call of an alarmed blackbird, “I was wondering if you knew anything about wards.”

Mr Roding responded with the deep silence of a man running through, in his mind, the myriad ways in which he is not going to enjoy this conversation.

“Wards,” he repeated. “As in hospitals or mystic?”

“The magical kind?”

“I do know about wards,” came his voice through the door. “But then I did my own research, didn’t I?”

Sharon hesitated. “I’m sensing a slightly negative attitude from you, Mr Roding…”

A grunt was the only answer.

“If I told you, Mr Roding sir, that the fate of the city was in the balance, would you be more positive?”

Mr Roding considered. “Nah,” he said and began to close the door. Sharon stuck her foot in the gap.

There was a moment of silence as shaman and necromancer wondered where things could go from here. Then Rhys leaned forward, raising one hand like a schoolboy at the back of the class and said, “Um, excuse me? I don’t know much about this sort of thing, but have you thought about lavender oil?”

After a pause there came a cautious “What?” from Mr Roding.

“Well,” gabbled Rhys, “I couldn’t help but notice that, what with you being into the whole metabolic thing, which is fine, by the way, I’m not to judge, but I couldn’t help but notice how you’ve got some, um, some dermatological issues, see? And I didn’t get very far in the potions training because I get these allergies, but I am a druid and actually I think I could be really good and I was wondering have you thought about lavender oil? I know this amazing recipe for acne, you know. You don’t even have to ceremonially strangle a cat.”

Silence again.

Sharon removed her foot from the door. The door drifted shut; there was the sound of the chain being pulled off its track, and the door opened all the way. “You can come in,” grumbled Mr Roding. “But I only got Earl Grey.”

A picture of the house of Mr Roding.

He lives alone and has done for some time. Japanese prints–flowers, wading birds, the fall of water between the trees–line a corridor painted a dubious lime green. Pale cracks line the ceiling where the pipes have begun to weigh a little too heavily. And everywhere there is the smell of air freshener. It’s an almost visible cloud, overwhelming but still not enough to cut through the unmistakable odour of rot.

No, not just rot.

Something worse.

Meat.

Rotting meat.

The kitchen is maintained to almost surgical standards of cleanliness: a box of latex gloves by the sink and a dozen kinds of antiseptic with lemon-fragrance washing-up liquid lined up on white-tiled shelves. Two small windows swing open at the top to let cold air in and the smell of—

best not to think

—out into a back garden which to a four-year-old with a plastic truck would be a full-size jungle and which Mr Roding was evidently developing to the same ambition.

“I got no milk neither,” he barked as the kettle began to boil. He
snapped on a pair of rubber gloves before pulling matching mugs from a pristine cupboard. “It’s barbaric to have milk with Earl Grey. I can do you a slice of lemon.”

Sharon grinned a little too wide. “That’d be cool.”

Rhys had turned a curious grey-green, his eyes watering under the weight of chemicals in the air. “I-I-I-I-I’m fine, thank you, sir,” he gasped between pulses of histamine-laden blood.

The urge to call Mr Roding “sir” had overcome Sharon and Rhys almost as swiftly as the stench-disguising stench of the house he lived in. It wasn’t that Mr Roding looked old–he could have passed for late fifties if he’d wanted to, despite a crook to his back that pushed his neck down and head forward. It wasn’t the clothes he wore–black shirt and black slacks and a pair of brown loafers pinched up around the seams like an apple pie. Or even the way he talked. It was more in self-defence, through offering respect against adversity, though neither Sharon nor Rhys could quite say what that adversity might be.

Perhaps it was the slick sheen to Mr Roding’s skin, the almost plastic quality about his face as if, between each layer of flesh, someone had stretched a sheet of grease-coated cling film. Or maybe it was the way he’d superglued some of his nails back on, with one or two of them crooked; or his mismatching false teeth, which protruded too far from beneath his top lip. Or, just perhaps, it was the unmistakable odour of a body whose internal organs had long since given up trying to understand their neighbours and settled for doing the best job they could under difficult circumstances. Mr Roding wasn’t dead–definitely not. He was simply going through the process, and had been for nearly forty-five years.

None of them spoke while the kettle boiled.

None of them spoke as Mr Roding made three careful cups of tea. He dunked each tea bag individually, each one going in and out precisely twenty-five times. Then a single slice of lemon was carefully added to the mix and a tiny silver teaspoon dropped into the bottom of each cup. He handed them to Rhys and Sharon. Rhys quaked; Sharon’s grin stretched a little thinner. The three eyed each other up, murderers at a poisoners’ ball, and then, at an unspoken signal, sipped all together. A pause to observe effect. No one transformed into a specimen of the living dead, so all three began to sip more freely, in
their own time. When a suitable quantity had been consumed to establish some kind of trust, Mr Roding pulled off his latex gloves, dropped them in an orange bag marked
BIOLOGICAL WASTE–INCINERATE ONLY
and said:

“So you want to commit a crime, is that what this is about?”

“Oh, no!” exclaimed Rhys, only to be silenced by Sharon.

“Why d’you think that?”

He shrugged. “Youth these days, smashing things, breaking up wards…”

Sharon bristled. “Because the youth of the 1950s were all rosemary and sunshine?”

“At least we knew how to respect our elders.”

“Respect your… what about the 1960s? What about the sex, the drugs, the rock and roll?”

Mr Roding sniffed, a dangerous thing for any man whose nasal hair was attached only by inertia.

“Besides!” Sharon felt her indignation rising. “You’re the one who wasn’t motivated by the concept of saving the city!”

“Saving the city–what do you know about that? Why do you even get to say those words?”

She hesitated. Rhys was staring at her too. It seemed he too hadn’t received an answer to this question.

“Because a goblin shaman told me that the city is dying, the soul of the city is being ripped away; and because wherever this happens there’s this firm called Burns and Stoke. And when I went to their office I heard the walls whispering,
Help us, help us,
and they were talking to me. And I couldn’t see anything bad, but there was this locked door, and when I tried to go through it I couldn’t because it was warded. And people there were scared, and Greydawn is missing, whoever that is, but everyone seems kind of worried ’bout that so I figured yeah, it’s like, the fate of the city. You gonna help or what?”

The only sound came from Mr Roding, dinging his silver spoon against the rim of his cup. He laid the spoon down with a tiny clink and sipped his tea.

“What do you know about Greydawn?” he asked.

“Uh… nothing,” confessed Sharon. “Only what this goblin said.”

“I’ve heard of her,” offered Rhys. Two pairs of eyes turned to stare.
Under their semi-disbelieving gaze, he sensed sneezing soon to come, and babbled as fast as he could. “She’s Our Lady of 4 a.m., the One Who Walks Beside, the Keeper of the Gate, the… the… aaaaahhh…”

“You might wanna stand back,” offered Sharon.

Mr Roding raised his eyebrows and took a step back just as Rhys erupted in a sneeze that sent clouds of air freshener gusting across the room.

“I’m so sorry, it’s just that I… aaahh… aaaahhhh…”

“He does this a lot?” asked Mr Roding.

“Dunno,” replied Sharon. “Don’t really know him. But yeah, so far I’d say it’s like, a serious thing.”

“I don’t mean to, it’s just I… I… I…”

“You tried anti-histamines?” asked Mr Roding.

“They make me dro… drow… sleepy.”

“What’s so special about this Greydawn?” asked Sharon as Rhys turned his back to dab his streaming eyes. “Why’s everyone worked up?”

Mr Roding put his cup down and leaned against the padlocked fridge. “Been a shaman long?”

“I’m learning,” she replied, sharper than she’d meant.

“Then you might want some pointers on the city’s major powers. Seven Sisters, Bag Lady, Fat Rat, Greydawn, Midnight Mayor, Beggar King…”

“I think I’ve met the Midnight Mayor.”

Mr Roding looked surprised. “You met him?”

“Yeah, sure. Dark hair, blue eyes, bit of a twat, that him?”

“I don’t know,” murmured the necromancer, a thoughtful expression spreading over his face. “Very few know him personally. He’s rumoured to be incredibly powerful and extremely dangerous.”

“He looked kind of… scruffy.”

“ ‘Scruffy’?”

“Yeah. You know. A bit… crap.”

“You’re certain it was him?”

“Well… he did grow these blue electric wings, and had blood on his hands and, like, Sammy–he’s my goblin–was all like ‘Yo, Midnight Mayor’ and that. So, yeah, I’m guessing he was the guy. He important?”

Mr Roding scratched thoughtfully at his chin, tracks of white skin
flaking off beneath his nails. “Midnight Mayor only comes out for bad things,” he murmured. “His involvement never bodes well. Did he tell you anything?”

“Um… he told me to find the dog. Which, I gotta admit, even though I’m supposed to be a shaman and know all sorts of crap, I found majorly unhelpful.”

“And you say Greydawn is ‘missing’?”

“Yeah. Like vanished, only in a spooky mystic way that no one is telling me about. And, actually,” Sharon demanded, “what the hell is the point of going ‘You’ve gotta do shit’ and then not telling me what the shit is I’ve gotta do?”

“I can see your problem. But then Greydawn is of the spirit realm, and only the shamans can understand that.”

“D… druids are also… interested… in spirits…” tried Rhys, his shoulders shaking with the effort of suppressing the latest allergic reaction.

“Druids!” groaned Mr Roding. “Preserving the urban lore is all very well, but what do they do with it? Not even bingo nights!”

“Bingo nights!” exclaimed Rhys with a sudden enthusiasm that briefly overcame even his endocrine system. “We should have bingo nights for Magicals Anonymous! Or those social nights with a band?”

“I’m not sure we’re kinda there yet.”

“Or maybe trips to Margate? Although,” Rhys said, deflating at the thought, “I guess it’d have to be night-time trips for Kevin and Sally.” “Have you been to Margate, young man?” demanded Mr Roding.

“No…”

“That must be why you consider this a good idea.”

“Can we just focus on the fate of the city?” said Sharon. “Like, who the hell is this Greydawn and why is everyone so like ‘Whoa’ about her?”

“She divides the day from the night,” sighed Mr Roding, the patient teacher faced with a particularly dense student. “Which, in more practical terms, is to say that she is the gatekeeper between what is, and what is
underneath
”.

“That’s practical terms?” asked Sharon.

Mr Roding’s lips curled in annoyance, revealing a hint of purple gums and yellowing tongue. “There are layers to the city,” he proclaimed. “There’s what people see–cars and buses and windows and
all the rather more superficial aspects of our existence. Then there is what people choose not to perceive–runes in the graffiti, spells woven from telephone wires, wards cut out of pieces of scrap paper, those who walk under glamours and enchantments, or those who have mastered the shaman’s walk–at which all eyes look away and don’t know why. And beggars, of course. Beggars and shamans both know the way to move in the city, and be seen without ever being perceived.