Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (41 page)

“No worries, my lovely,” she said as he thanked her. He began to walk, then a thought struck him.

“Where’s… Dog?” He tried to frame the question, shoulders back, as if it concerned a small family pet.

“Walked off at the dawn light,” replied Ms Somchit, turning another page. “Looked east and walked away, and where he had been before, there he suddenly was not. I wouldn’t worry about it; mystical manifestations are like that. Light of day and the incorporeal nature of their beings, all that kind of thing. I’m sure he’ll be found when we need him.”

“Oh… good.”

Le Café Delight stood on a nearby street between a laundrette and a newsagent whose window advertised lessons in Arabic, massages, tango classes (beginner-intermediate) and finest Polish delicacies. The sound of sizzling and the smell of bacon dragged Rhys, zombie-like, through the door, past the early-afternoon clientele of steel-capped construction crew and retired gentlemen reading the naughty pages of the tabloids.

“Can I have… everything?” he said at the counter, reaching into his pocket.

“Full English?” asked the woman.

“With extra tomatoes?” he hazarded and froze. His pockets were empty. Somehow, in all the excitement of the night before, he’d put his wallet down, and he wasn’t quite sure where. “Uh…”

The woman behind the counter put on the universal expression of kindly matrons everywhere who’ve had their kindliness taken for a ride. “You okay, luv?”

“How much is it?” asked a voice behind Rhys.

He couldn’t turn. Relief and shame fought for control of his features and settled for an all-purpose blush.

Sharon leaned past him and pushed a banknote over the counter. “It’s okay,” she added as change was handed back. “He’s had a bad couple of days.”

Rhys swayed with gratitude as Sharon guided him to a plastic bench by a red plastic table shimmering with rubbed-in grease. He realised he’d never been so hungry in his life. As a fresh set of slightly grubby cutlery was placed before him in a crumpled paper napkin, he recalled what must have happened.

“I, uh, think I lost my wallet back in Exmouth Market while dragging a murderer far enough away from his friends so that they all dissolved… you know, into the nether mist. Oh,” he added with a
flush of relief, “but I left my credit card in Frances’s flat. Only, seeing as how I’d already been stabbed and it had blood on it, I took it out with my library cards and cycling club card and left them all behind in case something bad happened…”

“It’s the shock,” said Sharon, settling opposite him to resume her breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon and toast. “Apparently scented candles are very good for this sort of situation.”

His almost-teatime breakfast was put in front of him, and he attacked like it was personal. Some time passed before he felt free to pause and look up. Sharon was wearing a frown of concentration. She said, “You know, there’s no point denying it. Things are crappy, I mean like, generally. And we may as well say so, because that is the only way in which we shall Overcome Our Issues.” She intoned the words carefully, as one making sure she had them right and hoping others would share in her appreciation.

“Acutally,” she went on, “I’ve been thinking this through… I’ve got no job, no degree, no experience, and I’m what the accountants call financially fucked,
and
I’m registered to vote in a safe seat, so when the elections come round it’s not even like I can help get these wankers out of government… and I’ve got to save the city and that. And I feel… okay.” The word slipped out, slow and considered.

She tried it again, just to make sure it was right. “O-kay. Yeah! I actually feel… all right about it all. I mean, I can kiss goodbye to new shoes or anything like that, but for the first time since… well, for ever… I feel like I’ve got… something that’s for me. Something I’m meant to do.”

There was a clatter as her fork hit the plate.

She jerked upright, eyes wide. “Oh shit,” she muttered.
“That’s
what I am. I’m a bum. I’m a self-help shaman and a spirit-walking bum.
Jesus.”

Rhys felt he should say something significant. Before he could utter a word, Sharon cut him off anyway.

“We gotta go back to Burns and Stoke. We gotta free the spirits they’ve been pulling from the city. We gotta find these sacrifices they talked about. Undo the spell. Get Greydawn back. Problem is–” her face twisted into a scowl “–it’s the only thing we
can
do and the wendigo is gonna know it. And it could go really, really bad.”

Her eyes widened at a further thought.

“This must be how heroic stuff happens!” she exclaimed. “I always wondered why people would go running towards the fire, but I guess I get it now–because there’s a bigger fire somewhere else! Wow.” She sank back against her chair. “This has been a learning experience, hasn’t it?”

“Um… Ms Li?”

Sharon’s eyes drifted towards Rhys’s gaze, and he managed to hold her look without flinch, dribble or snot getting in the way.

“I know I’m not very good at the magic thing,” he confessed. “And I know I haven’t been very helpful so far, except in bringing biscuits to meetings. But I
was
nearly the chosen leader of the sacred circle and I
did
almost pass my exams. And if I can help, I’d like to.”

Sharon smiled at him.

“Actually,” she said, “I’ve been wondering… What is it that druids do?”

Matthew Swift, Midnight Mayor, sorcerer extraordinaire, guardian of the night, etcetera, etcetera, sat on the highest part of Sally the banshee’s home gasometer and ate a cheese and pickle sandwich.

“Wotcha,” he said to a particular place in the empty air.

Sammy grudgingly shimmered into existence beside him.

“I always meant to ask,” the sorcerer said, through a mouthful of grated cheese and heavily spiced onion, “why I can’t see you when you’re invisible, but I can smell you. Surely invisibility should affect all the senses?”

“It does,” grumbled the goblin. “You can’t smell Sharon, yeah? It’s just I’ve got a more magnificent odour than the mind can ignore. Lifetime’s work, smelling like me.”

Swift swung his legs out over the drop and went on eating. In the distance a long freight train snaked into a tunnel; its engine, just audible, throbbed deeper as it picked up speed. The Golden Mile was a stubble of silver-grey towers, Canada Water a more distant clump of spikes in the flatlands of inner London, far out to the east.

Below, Rhys and Sharon wandered back through the overgrown wasteland. They were, Swift realised, picking flowers: fistfuls of bud-dleia, rubbery webs of crawling ivy, the white fluff from seeding thistles; all of it being shoved into a large cloth bag. And more–flakes
of rusty iron scraped from old foundations, crumbling shards of mortar, great armfuls of green algae from the nearby canal and finally dirty old water from foul settled puddles.

Swift half-thought he could also hear voices, rising up from far, far below.

“This is very kind of you–
atchoo!
–Ms Li.”

“Not a problem.”

“I’m sure once we’ve got it in the summoning circle it’ll be–
atchoo!
–it’ll be all right.”

“Got every confidence, Rhys.”

“Looks like dribbly-nose is making potions,” commented Sammy, who’d also been watching them. “You wouldn’t know about that shit because you’re all about the elemental power and stuff. But some people,
some
people have to actually study, and work, and pay attention to their craft.”

“Is that what urban druids do? Make potions?”

“Nah, it’s what baby druids do,” replied Sammy. “It’s what druids do what fail their exams because they get sneezing fits during the sacred intonations.”

“An embassy from the Sacred Circle of Muswell Hill tried to explain it to me once. But they’d just accidentally awakened a slumbering ent in Highgate Cemetery who managed to damage Karl Marx’s grave before tripping over a telephone line. So we got a bit disrupted.”

“Lotta amateur pillocks doing crappy magic,” agreed Sammy.

The two sat in silence a while longer, watching the city bustle beneath them.

Swift sighed, his chin sinking deeper into the shapeless stained mass of his coat. “I can’t–and this is a novel experience for me–I can’t fix this alone. We are not used to these ways, to the hidden things. Our strength is only potent against tangible evils, whereas this… this world of spirits and shadows and things unseen, is beyond our… beyond my usual remit. Ever since the business with the Tower, with Bakker, I’ve tried to cut myself off from much of the world. The lessons I learned were that friends leave you, or they die, or they are damaged by the life you lead. I lie to the ones I love to keep them away when, to be honest, I probably need them the most. And now this… It is not our world.”

Sammy considered this for a long while. Then he reached out and
patted Swift on the knee. “Can I give you some advice?” he asked, “as a shaman and spiritual guide, and that?”

“Sure.”

The goblin sucked in air through his mighty teeth, considering his next few words.

“Live with it,” he announced at last. “Lump it,” he added. “And deal with it.”

The sorcerer reflected on this advice.

Beneath him he half-thought he heard the druid mumble:

“Now, the secret to being a good druid, Miss Li, is always to have a fresh pack of facial wipes.”

Swift groaned. “Yup,” he admitted, “fair enough.”

The sun was setting over London.

Sharon sat on the edge of a rusted iron staircase curling up the outside of the gasometer, and watched it. The sun was watery orange-yellow, sinking towards a horizon obscured by rolling grey cloud. A pair of angry blackbirds were shrieking at a cat that was stalking through the bushes on their territory. Somehow the best part of the afternoon had vanished, spent offering Rhys tissues from a box of Man-Sized Economy Deluxe, while he intoned between allergic symptoms and wrapped up various potions and powders in fragments of rag, labelling them with a felt tip pen and a piece of masking tape.

The names used by the druid seemed a little disappointing. But if nothing else they helped the inexperienced user. A small pack of powder was marked “Sleep”; another, “Hysteria”. At one point Gretel, intrigued by the smells, had wandered into their improvised shelter, made of buddleia branches and plastic sheeting, only for Rhys to shoo her out with a cry of “We can’t let Hysteria near a troll!” Thereafter the mere possibility had provoked a great, watery fit of coughing.

Now, Sharon knotted her fingers together between her knees and whispered under her breath:

“I am beautiful, I am wonderful, I have a secret…”

The first time she’d walked through a wall by mistake, it hadn’t been
psychological counselling she’d required, since the fact of her turning invisible and being able to pass through solid surfaces was undeniable. What troubled her was more a question mark over whether any of these truths could be
healthy.
What effect, for example, did invisibility have on blood pressure?

Shamanism, it turned out, didn’t come with a manual.

She’d read a lot of self-help books. Not as a conscious decision; it was just that titles such as
It’s Okay, It’s Not You
and
Working Through Your Problems Without Working Yourself Up
had seemed at that time to chime with her very essence. And in one of them, on page one, there it had been–the mantra to be uttered whenever doubts assailed and confidence fled:

“I am beautiful, I am wonderful, I have a secret, the secret is…”

“Oi oi, scrawny!”

The voice of Sammy the Elbow.

“You got your battle paint ready?” demanded the goblin. “ ’S okay!” he cackled, seeing the look on her face. “Only stupid-git kinds of shaman do the battle-paint shit.”

“Sammy,” Sharon’s voice had the rising edge of someone testing a difficult hypothesis, “I’ve always wondered… do you
enjoy
watching people suffer?”

The goblin thought about it, then clapped his hands with glee. “Love it!” he exclaimed. “Arseholes everywhere, may as well stick…”

“Never mind.”

He hesitated, waiting for Sharon to move. Her face was turned towards the sunset, as if waiting for the last of the light.

“Uh… squelchy brains?”

She didn’t answer.

“It’s your tribe,” he said. “You’re their shaman. You’re the one has gotta lead ’em.”

“I know,” she murmured. “I think I always knew. But that’s… I think it’s gonna be okay.”

For once in his life, Sammy said nothing.

Sharon smiled, turning away from the setting sun.

“Right,” she said. “Let’s go fix this, shall we?”

Later, when the history of Magicals Anonymous was assembled and compiled by one B. Cartiledge, scholar, wizard and sometime player of bagpipes, the rally cry of Sharon Li would be recorded in the following manner:

“Friends! Colleagues! Comrades! We here gathered today are the latest, greatest assembly of magical might ever to walk the stones of the city! I look at you and I see scions of the darkness, masters of the decaying flesh, queens of the sky, guardians of the bridge and the chosen druid of his circle, and I know, as the city’s soul stands in the balance and the very fate of our friends and loved ones resides in our hands, that we, together, can achieve a magnificent victory for truth, for brotherhood, for life!”

In the bibliographical reference for this section a small footnote suggests that, in the author’s humble opinion, the quality of this speech, given to Magicals Anonymous before they went off to do battle with the forces of the dark, may in fact have been exaggerated.

An alternative wording was offered which, while lacking some of the glamour of the standard accepted version, had, it was felt, an indefinable tang of authenticity, and it went like this:

“So, yeah, guys. Basically, we’re in so much shit until we sort this shit out, so I know it’s not really your problem, but it kind of is, which is
cool, because it’s also everyone’s problem, but kind of groovy that we’re the guys standing up to deal with it, so I guess you can all feel proud and that.