Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (25 page)

“And why friendly?” continued the man in the same easy-going tone. “Why are you friendly and not, for example, nice or charitable or generous, or whatever else fits into the ‘morally white’–” his fingers mimed a pair of quote marks “–aspirations that you so clearly strive for? What is the quality of ‘friend’ that is so appealing to you?”

Edna coughed, cleared her throat and rasped, “Would you like a cup of tea?”

All eyes turned to her. Kevin demanded, “You what?”

“I’m just wondering if the gentleman would like some tea.”

“Uh, darling, he’s like, walked into here and done this whole creepy rant thing and is like, so not human it’s amazing, and I’ve got like this headache coming on and there’s a corpse, I mean a
corpse,
which is just so
uch,
beneath you, and you want to have tea?”

“Maybe she’s avoiding escalating the situation?” suggested Rhys.

“Escalating?” queried the man in the suit. “Is that what this is–is this an escalation of the situation? That’s very interesting, isn’t it? This
implies all sorts of curious sensations yet to come. Tell me,” stepping towards Rhys, who retreated fast, “when things are ‘escalating’, do you know where they will go? Will we escalate to new levels of friendliness–is that the word?–or did you have in mind an alternative emotional journey?”

A meek “Um” was all that made it out of Rhys’s mouth, but that seemed at last to stir Sharon to action. She stepped sharply forward, putting herself between the man in the suit and the cowering druid.

“Hey,” she snapped. “I don’t know who you are but you are giving off these seriously negative vibes. And my friend Rhys here, he can’t be having negative vibes because he’s got a very weak… most things… and I’m a shaman, which means good vibes are really important to me too, maybe with some chanting and nasal breathing and that.”

A rather bewildered silence followed. “Is nasal breathing important to the creation of these… ‘good vibes’?” queried the man in the suit.

“It’s a technique,” she retorted. “Who are you and what do you want?”

The man’s face split into a well-practised grin. “How delightful!” he exclaimed. “Well, I am Mr Ruislip–hello–” a hand was thrust towards Sharon for inspection “–and I have the honour and the privilege of being the CEO of Burns and Stoke Enterprises. Is it Enterprises or is it Limited? Is there a difference? I really don’t know, but isn’t this friendly?”

Sharon stared at the offered hand, grey skin threaded with blue. She reached out, fighting down a sense of revulsion, and as her fingers closed around the boney offering there was a taste of

blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD

and she snatched her hand away before the world could turn crimson and the taste of it in her mouth could make her puke across the bare concrete floor. Mr Ruislip was staring at her, smile locked in place, head on one side. “Is that… fear?” he asked as Sharon tried to swallow down the taste of blood. “Or is there a better word, a more refined concept we should work towards? How about revulsion, was that revulsion? Revulsion, fear, revulsion, fear… maybe it was both? Oh, how complicated. Well!” The hands briskly clapped together. “I leave these questions for you to work on, perhaps to deliver a focus group report in the next fiscal quarter. In the meantime I’m afraid I’m here for two special reasons. Firstly…”

His hand moved too fast for Sharon to see. Its fingers were round her throat before she could know that was what they were. As she gagged and tugged at his arm, his smile stretched. “Trespass is naughty, little girl,” he breathed. “You come back to Burns and Stoke, I’ll tear you to pieces.”

“Hey! You don’t talk to Ms Li like that!” To everyone’s surprise, especially his own, Rhys leapt forward. He tried to grab the hand that circled Sharon’s throat but another hand fell on his shoulder. It was large and pink, with oversized fingers stained white by mortar dust, and it lifted him up with a snap of distressed bones colliding beneath his skin. He saw a smiling ruddy face, hair shaved along the side of the scalp and grown across the top to a small lawn. There was a suggestion of fluorescent yellow jacket, sensible steel boots, blue jeans, bad breath and a voice that said:

“Do you want us to bury ’em, Mr Ruislip sir?”

“Foundations,” agreed another voice, male, full of gravel and mugs of cold tea; and while it was different, it was also the same.

“Scrawny git,” added a third.

“Carrot-top!” concluded the fourth. And for a moment Rhys could see them all, four builders in yellow fluorescent jackets. If he strained with every gram of will he had, he could make their forms solidify, just briefly, into actual shapes, and force his mind to remember that they were real, and they were there.

“No,” murmured Mr Ruislip. “Keep them alive. You could shake him a little, though.”

Obediently, the hand that held Rhys almost off the ground shook him. His teeth crashed together, biting his tongue; his legs flapped. He tried to mumble words, tried to find magic and fight back, but the shock, like the shame of it, overwhelmed his senses.

And here it came, the tingling at the back of his throat, the overwhelming urge to…

“Aaatchoa!
”

The shaking paused. Rhys was aware of the four builders in their yellow jackets staring in surprise. Momentarily he realised that their faces all wore the same–the exact same–expression.

Sharon was gagging, her face turning blue. Mr Ruislip’s hand was still around her throat, as if he’d forgotten about it.

“Does that… happen?” marvelled Mr Ruislip, looking at Rhys. “Is that a fear response, something biological? Do people sneeze under stress?”

“Never seen that before,” admitted one builder.

“Load of wet panties!” concurred another.

“Tits,” offered the third.

“Wanker,” concluded the fourth. A moment of mutual appreciation passed, each of them satisfied that the argument had been pushed to its limit.

“Oh my God, you guys are so uncivilised!” exclaimed Kevin. Five pairs of eyes turned towards him. He backed off.

Mr Ruislip let go of Sharon. She flopped to the floor, heaving in breath with the sound of a defective steam engine. Rhys dangled from the hand of one of the builders. Edna was trying not to cower with too much indignity, and Kevin was doing his best not to get involved.

“What were we discussing before this little exploration of sentiment?” asked Mr Ruislip. A snap of his fingers, bone on bone. “Of course! If you come back to Burns and Stoke again you will be killed. Of course, you,” indicating Rhys, “are sacked. And the company that hired you has been liquidated, because in successful corporate enterprises,” swelling with rehearsed wisdom, “Commitment Is Everything.”

Rhys was shaken again until the hand that shook lost interest and he was deposited on the floor with the grace of a splattered ice cream.

“Now…” Mr Ruislip’s gaze slid to where Edna was clutching at the altar of knick-knacks like a sailor to the side of a capsized lifeboat. “What was the other thing?” He stepped neatly past Sharon, who was trying without much success to get to her feet, until, without seeming to move much at all, he filled Edna’s world. A face of blue-grey, hands of bone, eyes with the sheen of a gutted fish. His breath was heavy with peppermint, but that didn’t disguise the stench of rotting meat at its core.

“Where is Greydawn?”

“Greydawn?” stammered Edna. “She’s uh… She’s in the… the air, isn’t she? I mean she’s a, she’s…”

Gently, Mr Ruislip reached out and ran the back of two long fingers down the curve of Edna’s cheek, pausing to tilt her head up so that her eyes were forced to meet his as he repeated, “Where. Is. Greydawn?”

“Gone!” squeaked Edna. “She vanished!”

“But you are the Friendlies,” murmured Mr Ruislip. “You are friendly with her, isn’t that the point? You must know where to find her, otherwise what is the point of you?”

“You’d think that, wouldn’t you, dear?” Edna stammered. “But actually it’s a big mystery we’re all terribly worked up about–aren’t we terribly worked up? In fact the man you should probably ask is Derek but he’s… he’s gone. He’s gone and you…” Her eyes swerved to the four men in fluorescent jackets and steel-capped boots. A tiny “Oh” escaped her even as she put her hands over her mouth as if to hold back the sound. She looked from Mr Ruislip to the four builders and back again, and she
knew.

Mr Ruislip smiled. In a dreamy tone he remarked, “I think I’ve heard of this ‘Derek’ character. He was your high priest, yes? I asked my colleagues here–one must say colleagues even when one is innately superior, to encourage teamwork in the workplace–to talk to this Derek concerning the question I now put to you. Apparently, he was most uncooperative, and negotiations grew hostile. Is that the word, hostile? Hostile, aggressive, offensive, terminal–frankly, they all sound apt to me. But now…” he ran a nail down a line in Edna’s skin, fascinated by it as a kitten might be enthralled by a pigeon’s severed foot “… a shaman breaks into my office, and a druid works on my servers, and the Midnight Mayor vanishes–indeed, vanishes!–and unprofessionally neglects meanwhile to set up an email auto-reply. So I conclude that the personal touch might be the way to expedite matters. You see, I won’t hurt her. Greydawn will be my friend. That’s good, isn’t it? You like it when people are friendly.”

The movement of his fingers froze, and Edna became aware that the sharp points of his nails were resting just below her eye sockets. They began to push, curving in and down, and her hands seemed frozen to the altar at her back and her tears welled up as Mr Ruislip calmly demanded, “Are you friendly now?”

Rhys tried to get to his feet, but a kick from a steel boot sent him falling forward like a man in prayer. Kevin said, “Hey, now that’s not…” only to find that one of the four other men had produced from a half-concealed tool belt a hammer, which he laid, claw inwards, across Kevin’s throat with a murmur of:

“Fucking vampires, bloodsucking sponges on the fucking state.”

“Get back to Transylvania!” agreed another.

“Come over here…”

“… drinking our blood.”

“Disgraceful.”

“I’m from Liverpool, actually,” Kevin said, and the hammer pressed harder. If there’d been much blood left to rise in Kevin’s body, it would have risen; as it was, his only reaction was a gagging sound.

A tear dribbled from the corner of Edna’s eye. Mr Ruislip scrutinised it, then wiped it away with his fingers and tasted it, flicking his tongue like a lizard. His eyes closed in satisfaction, and a slow contented breath seemed to leave his frame diminished. “Marvellous,” he murmured.

Then a voice said from the empty air, “Oi! Respect the aged!”

Something heavy, fast and quite possibly bag-shaped slammed out of the nothingness at Mr Ruislip’s back and into the place where spine met skull. There was a sharp, satisfying snap and the suited man staggered forward, his weight knocking Edna down into the altar of little trophies and gifts, which collapsed beneath the two of them with a crash of splintering plastic. As the four men in fluorescent jackets reached for their tools, the same unseen force slammed into the jaw of the one who stood over Rhys. The man staggered back, briefly registering surprise, then scowled and pulled a spanner out of his belt. “Let’s get the bitch!” he roared.

Rhys felt something firm close around his arm and before he could so much as sneeze, he was hauled to his feet and into…

… a grey place. It was still the temple of the Friendlies, still the world he knew and generally feared, but the echoes of things that were, and things that weren’t, and things that might have been, swelled and ebbed from the walls around, and as he turned to look he saw…

the truth of things.

There stood Kevin the vampire. In this grey place his teeth were fangs, no denying, and his hair was grey and his skin seemed to suck in the light. And there were the four men in yellow fluorescent jackets, but they weren’t fluorescent now; here they were seen for what they were–great billowing coats of invisibility, a flowing wizard’s cloak that engulfed each wearer so that only eyes and hands and the occasional flash of a foot were visible. The faces of the men who wore them
were all the same, the same featureless nothing: eyes in smoothed-over skin pressed flat by an angry potter in a moment of frustration, ears mere holes cut into the head, bodies made of slabs of flesh tacked together at the joins with no sympathy for skeletal structure or nervous system. Lines of power joined the men together, their fluorescent cloaks billowing in and out of each other, so that briefly it seemed as if the four were one.

Then Rhys turned and a sound caught in the back of his throat.

Mr Ruislip was there, right
there,
staring straight at him, or perhaps through him. His eyes were searching the space where Rhys had been, and in this grey place Mr Ruislip’s eyes were sodium-pink and -yellow, and his teeth were black glass-grinders, and his skin was flaking off him in great white banners that coiled and snapped in the air around him, and he had claws for nails and blood for spit, and he was a being that Rhys had only heard mentioned a couple of times, an idea whispered nervously in the dark, but he knew it as sure as he knew that pollen was no good for a histamine-primed endocrine system. Mr Ruislip was a wendigo.

A hand fell on Rhys’s shoulder and he yelped. Clearly the sound was audible in the real world, whatever that was, for the heads of the four builders snapped round and one of them made a swipe with his spanner that nearly brained Rhys where he stood. Then the hand on his shoulder dragged him back and he half-saw Sharon standing there, the only bright thing in this shadow world, a blaze of purple and orange amid the gloom. She had her bag wrapped around her wrist and was swinging it like a slingshot ready to fire–until Mr Ruislip’s distant voice, full of a bile that Rhys had only imagined in the mortal world, but which was here real, announced:

“I will eat the old one’s eyes.”

Edna was picking herself up from the ruins of the altar, a silent “Oh” of horror forming on her lips as she saw the shattered remains of