Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (9 page)

“Too right.”

A silence stretched like the screech of chalk across a blackboard.

Then, “She’s founded this thing, this society. It’s called Magicals Anonymous.”

“Shit name.”

“Dog’s killings aren’t random.”

“Course they ain’t.”

“He’s targeting a very specific group of people, all connected to a very specific operation.”

“Course he is! But you’re too tied up with the cash thing to do nothin’ ’bout it!”

“The four greatest killers the world has ever seen are in town.”

“What’s new?”

The man addressed as the Midnight Mayor said, “I think they were hired by a wendigo.”

Silence again.

Then, “You pillock.”

The man called the Midnight Mayor grinned. “Thought you might say that.”

There were a lot of messages waiting for Sharon when she got home. Her shift had been long, occasionally stressful and frequently dull, all beneath the shadow of her boss, judging his employees without raising a finger to contribute. Three months she’d worked in the coffee shop, and that was two and a half months too long. But where else was she to go?

She sat down in front of a tiny laptop, her leaving-school present to herself, and flicked through the logs. Most of the messages were via Facebook, and nearly all were from members of Weird Shit Keeps Happening to Me And I Don’t Know Why But Figure I Need Help. Some were nice. Sally the banshee wished to thank Sharon for her initiative and enthusiasm in chairing last night’s meeting; Gretel the troll had attempted to express her delight at Thai food and wondered if maybe next week they could try Mexican, but unfortunately the size of her fingers had crunched the keys and most of what emerged was an unintelligible medley of letters. Chris the exorcist had attempted to post an ad on Facebook for
Exorminator–Exorcism With Love
–which Sharon removed with a firm little note requesting that all promotional material be kept off the group page.

One was from a stranger, requesting permission to join the group. There was a message attached, which read:

Sorry to run off last night, but there was a bloodthirsty hound prowling through the spreading shadows. Asked a friend to pop by and see you at work. He’s cranky but okay. Bring toothpaste.

It wasn’t signed. The name of the sender was one MS. She clicked through to his profile page. It was almost entirely empty. In the “About me” section someone had written:
Protector of the City, Defender of the Night, Guardian of the Mystic Walls. Like you believe a word of it.

Only one other person seemed to have ever looked at the site of MS.

KS
: This is not what I meant when I suggested we raised your public profile.

MS
: Bite me.

KS
: How do you feel about Twitter?

MS made no reply, but two days later KS was back again.

KS
: Did you have to hex the backup servers too?

After that the conversation lagged.

Sharon sat back, drumming her fingers along the edge of the desk. It wasn’t every day, she concluded, that a goblin demanded you met for purposes unknown at 11 p.m. in the middle of town. But then it wasn’t every day you had curry with a troll or got patronised by a guy with invisible burning wings at his back. So perhaps she should just write off the entire week as being a bit odd and go with it.

The man in the empty factory had said she was a shaman.

He’d said a lot of other things too, most of them in haste and with an infuriating lack of detail, but that had been the part that stuck. That had been the bit she knew was right, as she had spent so much of her life
knowing
without knowing how.

She googled shaman.

Her laptop chugged through the search, chewing every byte like an old cat on dry biscuits.

Pictures populated her screen, one pixel at a time. Shamanism didn’t look like a profession with great fashion sense. Feathers she could handle, though less so through her nose. Pages of ravaged faces, men and women with lives etched canyon deep into their features, stared out of the screen with the reproachful gaze of the too wise wishing for ignorance. She tried reading a few articles, and the words blurred before
her. Vegetarianism seemed in, especially mushroom dishes. Drumming seemed likely. Leadership was an absolute must, but nowhere did it say exactly
how,
or give any useful pointers like whether to bring a clean pair of trousers. The implication was that if you were a shaman, then you probably knew already what you were doing.

She looked at the clock on the wall: 9.45 p.m.

A pile of books stood on the wobbly fake-wood table by the bed. They were much thumbed and well annotated, and featured such helpful titles as
Believe in Yourself
and
You Are the Best.
They offered a variety of guidelines on how to live your life in this uncertain age, ranging from five minutes of meditation every two hours–which Sharon had calculated to mean at least five hours a week of sitting on her behind trying to breathe through her nose–through to a healthy diet of celery and beetroot juice. She felt rather guilty about her collection of self-help books, not least because she couldn’t shake the feeling that much of their wisdom was the stuff her grandmother would have spouted when tipsy on too much rice wine. None of the books advised on what to do when you accidentally turned invisible, or walked through walls; nor, above all else, whether either of these had dangerous medical implications. Having no real information on such conditions and being largely unable to control them, Sharon had tried instead to manage her concern at the situation through helpful mantras, extensive lists and, during particularly difficult times, multicolour highlighted charts entitled “My Aims” pinned to the inside of her cupboard door. These proclaimed things such as
I will get a proper job and I will learn how to use the self-assessment tax service
and of course, above all else,
I will take control of my own magical nature.
This last point she’d highlighted in both blue and pink, creating a smudged, rather unintelligible note of good intent.

10.10 p.m.

Downstairs Trish was watching TV, loudly, with the living-room door open. It wasn’t much of a living room, mostly dominated by one grubby sofa and a coffee table supported on books, yet for all its lack of space somehow they could never find the remote. She loitered in the bedroom doorway, listening to a merry male voice proclaiming, “What a stunning performance! She really gave it everything she’s got, and here’s her mother, looking so proud…”

Ayesha was out for the night. When they’d moved in together, Ayesha had told them she liked to study late in her university library. Trish had laughed and made a joke about a line of boys; Sharon had laughed too, until she’d seen how deeply Ayesha had blushed and caught the smell of old paper clinging to her hands. Sharon didn’t like touching old books; it annoyed her to hear the scratching of the pen and the rippling of the thousand microscopic bugs that lived in the spine. Certain things, it seemed, wanted her attention whether she was invisible or not; books and blood being right up there.

She put her satchel over her shoulder, pulled on a pair of thick socks and her purple boots, and went downstairs to the living room.

“Hey, Trish,” mumbled Sharon.

“Hey, babe!” replied Trish, eyes not turning from the screen. “Good day?”

“No,” admitted Sharon. “I got told off by my boss, and a goblin came into the shop and ordered tea, and last night a guy with these wings told me that I had to find a dog and then there was a howling and I ran away.”

“Sounds good, babe, sounds good!”

“I think I’m meant to do something, something important, and I don’t know what it is.”

“I get that all the time, babes,” sighed Trish. “It’s like, I’m looking at myself in the mirror and I can’t work out what’s wrong and it takes like, for ever to realise I forgot my earrings!”

Sharon smiled meekly, the only response she could find, while Trish suddenly leapt forward on the sofa and screamed at the TV, “What the fuck? You can’t vote for him–he was fucking shit! Jesus!”

On the screen a boy, barely seventeen or eighteen, was hugging a woman in a white dress and crying with joy while around him bright lights flashed and portly ladies of an age to know better screamed like chemically maladjusted schoolgirls.

“Trish?” asked Sharon.

“Yeah, babes?”

“If I’m not… If you don’t hear from me tomorrow, will you tell someone?”

“Yeah, yeah, babes, of course, whatever.”

“I’ll text you.”

“Cool, babes. Fucking hell, what is she wearing? Slag!” screamed Sharon’s flatmate at the TV.

Sharon drifted back down the hall, feet barely touching the thin carpet, head bowed and mind scarcely there, took her coat off the hook by the door and let herself out.

You wanna know about Sharon? Uh, like, why? I mean, she’s my friend of course, you know, like my sister and that, but she’s like… I mean, okay, so, I’ll just say what I think here, yeah? She’s like, really nice and that, and I really respect her and everything, but I’m just like… She’s weird, you know? And I’m like, Jesus, can’t you just stop being weird already? Like, you’ve only got yourself to blame. She doesn’t even watch
X-Factor,
what the fuck?

These were the words Sharon whispered as she stood hugging herself by the central pillar at Seven Dials, alone and impatient:

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

The theatres were emptied and shut, the lights still burning above their padlocked doors, and the traffic was thin, with a distant bubble of sound towards Cambridge Circus and St Martin’s Lane. But the pubs were still open and nearby restaurants were serving their finest dessert wine, one thumb-sized glass at £12.80 a sip, excluding service.

Seven Dials was, as the name suggests, a place where seven roads met. There they made a small circle around a pillar, from which blue clock faces dressed in gold looked down at the neighbourhood’s narrow lanes like a warning to mind your seconds and watch your step. According to some local businesses, this geographical anomaly in the larger street plan of London was a
village,
a corner of Covent Garden that featured not mere purveyors of goods but boutiques offering the ultimate in handbags, shoes and hair for the truly tasteful and shockingly rich.

Sharon knew she was neither of these. Her purple boots clomped on the smoothed stone below the pillar as she walked round and round, murmuring, “I am beautiful, I am wonderful, I have a secret…”

A cab crawled round one corner, driven with the caution of
somebody who suspects he’s made a mistake but hopes no one will notice.

“I am floating calmly beneath the surface of the river…”

A paramedics’ car paused at the bottom of Monmouth Street, its blue lights silently flashing. It did a circuit of the pillar, then another. On the third attempt the driver made a wrong decision, leaving him with not enough room to turn. The passenger door opened and a medic got out, green bag slung over his shoulder, and began jogging back the way the car had came, while the driver circled again in search of a way through.

Sharon paced, circling the pillar like the second hand on a lethargic clock. In summer tourists sat huddled here while scanning their maps for Trafalgar Square, where they could huddle beneath a larger pillar in greater numbers. By day shoppers not only went in search of high fashion, but sought quirks, strange hold-outs in a sea of universal trend. A shop selling nothing but beads for the enthusiastic craftsman; a theatrical bookshop with a love of musicals and high tragedy; the model shop featuring stormtroopers in all sizes from keyring to lifelike with added comics for the true enthusiast.

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

“You got toothpaste?”

The voice was loud, belligerent and unmistakable. Sharon turned, just in case the universe was about to pull another, unwelcome surprise and, sure enough, there was the goblin in his oversized green hoodie which drooped down to his knees,
SKATE OR DIE!
blazoned across his back and the image of what looked like a cool penguin in shades performing a trick on his front.

The recollection that this was real and this was happening–or at the very least that this was something she was perceiving to be real and if she was mad she might as well go with it–held her back for a moment, and a default answer of “What?” issued from her like notes from a run-down stereo.

“Toothpaste, toothpaste!” shrilled the goblin, hopping from one foot to the other. “You got the mark of the Midnight Mayor on you so he must’ve talked to you so he must’ve told you to bring toothpaste!”

Sharon looked down at herself, saw no mark, craned to see over her shoulder, and felt down her spine for what she could only assume was
the mystic equivalent of a
KICK ME
sign. The goblin rolled his eyes. “You are as sharp as a bag of boiled potatoes, ain’t you?” Gleefully he bounded forward and before she could object grabbed Sharon’s right hand in his. His skin was leathery, dry, thick, given a rougher edge by a thin coating of black bristles almost invisible against the skin.

“Here!” he snapped, waving Sharon’s hand up and down in front of her face. “Look here!”

She looked.

There was nothing.

“You gotta stop trying,” the goblin exclaimed. “It’s about seeing a thing in the corner of your eye when you is walking down the street and thinking, ‘Fuck me I didn’t see that’ and then when you think you should go back to check you’re running late for a meeting so you don’t and you never know–it’s that, that’s what you gotta see, them things that don’t want you to see them at all!”

Sharon swallowed, thought about Gretel the troll, her face lost behind an ever-changing mask of don’t-quite-want-to-look. She looked away from her hand, then swept it quickly in front of her vision in a single dismissive gesture, pulling free of the goblin’s grip, and, for a moment,