Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (7 page)

“Have I—”

“You seem like you’re big on self-improvement, and anyway…” He stopped, his head turning with pigeon speed towards some unseen shadow. Sharon shifted, listening for something more, and thought she heard… maybe just a train passing below?

“The question you have to ask is this.” His voice sounded far-off, distracted, his blue eyes were turned elsewhere. “Where did they go? I’ve done all I can but I’m no shaman. I don’t know how to walk down the hidden paths. The spirits of the city are missing and it’s not natural and it’s not evolution and it’s not right and—”

And she heard it and so did he, somewhere outside in the settled gloom, a sound which you hoped would be an engine starting, the slow winding-up of oversized gears and which, as you listened, the more you listened, truth intruded on hope and it became…

“Don’t look back,” he said. “It wants you to look.”

It became…

“Time to go now,” he added. “Time to run.”

Starting at the very bottom of the register, almost too low to almost too high, it grew and grew and it became from the floor to the sky:
hhhhhoooowwwwwillll!!!!

She looked up at the man in the window and there was light in his hands, light on his skin, a brilliant electric blue and he wasn’t human–nothing human looked like that–he was a thing wearing human flesh, he was a face pretending, a body bursting from something else inside, and as he looked round at her his eyes burned and in them were a million million voices all shouting all as one and she…

… ran.

Sharon ran.

She didn’t know why and she didn’t know what from, but the man in the darkness had said run, and from his back had grown a pair of burning angel wings and she knew they weren’t real, of course they weren’t real, but they were real to her eyes, which was all the reality she felt she could cope with right now and

and she’d had supper with a troll

       and shaken hands with a banshee

                 and heard a creature howl

So now she ran.

She ran straight through the shaman’s walk, that place where she became invisible and all the invisible things began to crawl out for her to see. She ran straight through it and out the other side, unseen footsteps running through the night, a gasp of breath heard where there was nothing to be seen; and as she ran, the shadows dragged behind her and the whispers of the things buried just beneath began to creep and clutch their way out from beneath the paving stones, tangle their memories around her legs and tell of

             
Drip drip drip on the cobble stone

Spring-heeled Jack jumping over the rafters

                       
Ten for a pound, ten for a pound, get ’em ’ere!

Howl!

         
Howl!!

                    
Howl!!!

And as she ran she felt lighter, thinner, as if she wasn’t merely becoming invisible to the eye that saw, but growing invisible in herself, her very matter melting about her, and on the streets there were creatures clinging to the walls, there were finger bones scratching their way out from between the lines of mortar, and a smell of… wet dog?

Something was sticking to her feet. She glanced down and there was a viscous goo on the pavement, coming up from below the pavement, thick and black and not black

thick and red and seeping through her shoes, and it wasn’t real, of course it wasn’t real, she knew it wasn’t real, but the streets were bleeding, seeping blood upwards, and the stench! She gagged and nearly fell, briefly flickering into visibility before picking up the pace again and forcing herself on, running, and she thought she could hear

something running with her.

In the darkness behind.

A great heaving of lungs.

A great falling of paws.

A great gasping of breath.

A great running monster whose breath stank and whose bellow-lungs pushed out air like

She wanted to look but then

“Don’t look back,” he’d said. “It wants you to look.”

Traffic surged past Old Street roundabout, but it was far, far away, horses pulling against the reins of the man in the Ford Mondeo who drove them, scuttling thief-boys spilling their Starbucks coffee, time mixing as past and present clashed in silent explosions around her, and she could taste blood in her mouth and knew it wasn’t her blood, and see the howling of the thing, of the whatever-it-was behind her, as movement in the air, like heat haze disturbing the sky, but this haze was all around, rippling against the street light and sucking the colour from it and

Don’t look back. It wants you to look.

Her heart was racing and her mouth was parched and crusted around the lips where blood was drying, and she wanted to laugh and
throw her hands up to the sky and scream at the moon–which was not there–and tear at the silent traffic that stop-started against the lights and could not see her, nor even perceive itself, the drivers oblivious as the black fog of their engines melted with the black fog that had hung over London for a hundred, two hundred years and

She ran across the street and felt something move beneath her.

It was a jolt, a shock, an almost physical force that threatened to trip her, knocked the breath from her and sent her staggering, hands out to support herself against the nearest wall.

Her hands passed straight through and so did she, tumbling head first, through the wall of a private dental clinic and its posters of patients who reported their immaculate smiles to be the most important thing in their life, onto a scrubbed tile floor. She lay there gasping as the blood thundered in her ears and the world outside seeped back into place, reasserting the sodium colours of the night, the busy crawl of the buses and the weary honking of horns by irritated drivers.

Some lingering tracery of that shadow vision, the shaman’s vision that came with the shaman’s walk, was still settled over her eyes. She crawled to her hands and knees, then got up, keeping her back turned to the wall through which she had stumbled.

She listened but heard no howl.

There was, however, a breathing, a slow rise-fall, a steady drawing in and pushing out of breath, like a huge motorbike engine made of muscle, waiting to start.

She tightened her fingers around the strap of her bag, closed her eyes and prayed to who-cared-what-for-anything-good and slowly, stomach spinning faster than her step, turned.

No one there.

Just the slow thump-thump of breath that wasn’t her own. Her lungs were heaving, grabbing down air, but this sound, this breathing, this steady roar–it could circle the globe and still have oxygen left for resuscitating an elephant.

She told herself she was being ridiculous and knew she wasn’t.

She told herself that this was absurd, that she was standing inside a dental surgery on City Road and she’d get in trouble with the police if they found her and soon an alarm would go and she should really move.

And did not move.

She thought about Gretel the troll and Sally the banshee, about Kevin the vampire and the man with electric-blue wings, and wondered what they would do.

Stand here paralysed, she concluded. Frozen with fear at an unknown something waiting in the night.

She told herself she was a shaman.

She thought she heard a voice, tiny and far off. “Tonight, on who wants to be a shaman, will Sharon take the challenge or will she give up her dreams?”

It seemed an unlikely voice to hear in the dead of night, and she concluded she must be going mad.

Having proposed madness, she considered it further and decided yes, all things considered, that probably made the most sense.

And that being mad, there was probably no escape from madness so, hell, she might as well go outside and dance the dance.

She took a deep breath and stepped back through the wall.

A woman at a bus stop with a violin case on her back glanced up and furrowed her brow as she tried to work out if she really had just seen a girl appear out of nowhere, or if she was joining in some universal process and going insane.

Then she shrugged and chose not to think about it.

Sharon looked around her: red brake lights heading in one direction, and white headlights streaming in the other. Old Street roundabout wasn’t big on sleep.

No trolls lurched, no monsters stirred, no men with blazing eyes and burning wings appeared to offer cryptic messages.

As an experiment, she walked back towards the Angel, until she hit that perfect stride where invisibility began to seep over her skin, where she was so much a part of the city that no one bothered to notice her any more, and she heard it again.

The slow rumbling of breath.

Further off now.

Perhaps an illusion.

Perhaps a plane passing overhead.

Don’t look. It wants you to look.

She walked away and then, in a single swift moment, moving too fast to have second thoughts, she turned and looked.

There was a wall across the street. It towered above the houses, it blocked out the sky, it was black and ancient and its stones were sea-smoothed-round and the mortar dripped blood and whispers, and fingers beckoned from the shadows of every indentation, and in the centre of this wall, this giant, impossible wall that spanned City Road like an urban overpass, this wall that traffic drove through like it was nothing at all when it was clearly everything that ever mattered, there was a gate. Black wood soaked through with blood and corseted with bone and, above the gate, a shield of white from which red blood flowed, running down from a giant cross, while another bleeding sword set in the top left segment of the shield dribbled its liquor down to the ground, the whole thing encased in silver-black claws.

Claws which rippled.

Sharon looked up and there it was, metal skin and twisting lizard-tongue, wings folded back and knees bent, eyes spinning and wild, a dragon holding its bloody shield above the gate, just like all the little dragons around the city carved from stone: the symbol of the City of London. But unlike those stone dragons, this one was alive. And it was staring straight at her, and it wasn’t pleased.

She backed away as the dragon flexed its wings, droplets of blood shimmering on their spiked tips. It opened its mouth to hiss and its throat was a yawning pit and its eyes were spinning red flame.

Then something moved beneath it, and its head snapped round towards the gate. And it occurred to Sharon that, in this giant black wall that no one else seemed able to see, that traffic passed through like it wasn’t even there, it didn’t seem natural for someone to have left the gate open.

The dragon screeched its indignation and snarled at the gate, and its voice was the sound of untuned brakes and its breath stank of the hot dust of the Underground.

Sharon peered at what it could see, and thought she made out something beyond the open crack of the gate; and she knew,
knew
that it stood where the old city wall of London had run. Through the gate that shouldn’t be open something was looking at her that ought not to be there. Its eyes were yellow, its jaw was wide, its fangs dripped black venom and, as its shoulders rose and fell, it made a
whumph whumph
whumph
sound like a steam engine beginning to move. It looked at her, then raised its head and howled.

The dragon screamed and launched itself from its perch above the gate, throwing itself down at the thing in the gap. Fang met claw and Sharon put her hands over her ears as the two forces met and tumbled, gashing each other until their blood began to flow and burn the tarmac beneath their feet and she…

… turned and ran.

It was called Coffee Unlimited and its tag line was
SIMPLY AMAZING COFFEE!!

Its best price was £1.80 for a cardboard cup of thin brown slime which the blackboard behind the counter declared to be
Classic Americano–made from finest hand-picked coffee beans and crafted to perfection by our trained staff, this is the classic beverage on which
COFFEE UNLIMITED
forged its reputation.

People came and people went, and weren’t particularly happy about either action, yet somehow, impossibly, Coffee Unlimited had found a tiny part of Pentonville Road where there wasn’t something better on offer.

Pentonville Road was not a glamorous place to spend a lunch break. Traffic roared east from King’s Cross to the Angel with the recklessness of bored drivers who’ve spent too much time at a red light and are determined to make it into fourth gear if it kills them–or anyone who gets in their way. In the opposite direction, traffic slouched round a one-way system where oversized lorries drove through undersized streets in search of that elusive sign that pointed, in all its cryptic glory, to
THE WEST.

Shielded from these geographical misdemeanours by a grubby sheet of glass, worked the staff of Coffee Unlimited–
Happy to Help!
–creating
alchemical concoctions on whose mysteries they were sworn to secrecy and, frankly, did anyone really want to know? Greg, twenty-seven, Polish, studied stage management and worked towards his visa with relentless good humour and a wry resignation at the impossibility of anyone pronouncing his surname correctly. Gina, half Indian, half Greek, entirely stunning, apologised for other people’s mistakes until the day Robin, American, brash and utterly unimaginative, finally went too far and blamed her workmates for the incident with the exploding pot of pressurised cream, when a new aspect of Gina struck down all before it in hitherto pent-up rage. And Sharon, who kept her head down and did her very best not to turn invisible before the customers’ eyes or forget to open the storeroom door when fetching another litre of on-the-turn milk.

Above them all, ruling from afar, was—

“Were you late this morning, Sharon?”

Mike Pentlace, five foot five of carrot-crowned lechery, iPhone fused to the palm of his hand, perpetually trying to make its voice activation recognise his drawling tones, forever failing.