Authors: Kate Griffin
Carefully, Sharon twisted the lid off, and sniffed the clear contents. “Smells… soapy.”
“That’s probably just a little leftover shampoo…”
“You sure this stuff ain’t gonna blow up in my face? Because I’m already dealing with a wet-sock disaster, and getting bad hair now would just piss me off.”
“N-no explosions, Ms Li. I never really got into exploding things,” he added. “At least, never on purpose.”
Sharon held out the bottle as far away from her as she could. With her face scrunched up in a preemptive grimace of pain, she emptied it into the water. The potion was swallowed up at once, rushing away into the surging mass.
A moment, a silence.
Sharon said, “Uh…”
… and the water burst into light. It was a golden-yellow, flecked with foam, a great rush of sunset warmth in the tunnel, itself lined with glass, amid which little bubbles of shampoo rose and popped like mud above a volcano. It rushed away, following the flow of the stream, eddying out into stray currents, and there was a smell, an overwhelming, irrefutable smell of…
“Fresh towels and babies?” suggested Sharon.
“Eucalyptus and fabric softener?” offered Rhys.
“What the hell do you put into this stuff?”
Rhys shrugged. “Um… a bit of this, a bit of that. I’m glad it works, see, because last time I tried I just burnt the saucepan.” In the warm light now filling the tunnel, Sharon’s expression was either one of absolute admiration or limitless horror. Rhys shifted in the cold flowing water, and added, “Do you think the T-Tribe have warm socks?”
The shaman turned away, her eye following the direction of the water. “Dunno.” She sloshed through the tunnel, golden light breaking and parting around her ankles. “So far they haven’t given off that kinda vibe.”
Chapter 24
The tunnel, as they walked, grew colder, narrower, darker and, undeniably, smelly. The smooth glass walls grew patched with worn, slime-covered brick. At first these reminders of the old Victorian watercourses were merely intrusions into the otherwise perfect curve of the passage, but after a few minutes the tunnel became entirely brick-lined.
The potion that lit their path began to fade, not so much from a lack of ingredients as an addition of others. The clear water grew muddy, fed from the ceiling by pipes that spat orange goo into the dimness, so that the golden foaming light became brownish, and the initial brightness was broken into sallow patches of illumination which floated on the surface like oil. Walking ahead of Rhys, Sharon briefly vanished and, for a moment, terror gripped the druid’s stomach, before the shaman reappeared with a cry of “Well, it’s not pretty, but at least it doesn’t stink so much in the spirit walk!”
So saying, and before he could protest, she grabbed him by the arm and pulled him after her, into the silver-grey walk of the shamans.
Still the same tunnel, still the same place. The spirit walk of the shamans was, Rhys knew, not so much about a change in geography as an altered perception. He looked, sharing Sharon’s perceptions. The tunnel now had its own light, great splotches of illumination from ancient fungus fed on unnameable sources, and tendrils of slime that writhed like the tentacles of living creatures. He looked down and saw that the water which ran around his ankles was full of faces, sinking and bobbing up from the depths, a thousand thousand faces with empty black eyes, bubbles bursting from their mouths as they opened their lips to scream, before they drowned. The shadows of rats ran in his wake, great fat bodies and dark red eyes, one or two more enterprising creatures passing straight through him before they, too, dissolved into the shadow of what had been, or might be, or might yet come to be. He looked up at Sharon, and even here, even in the spirit walk, it seemed that she wasn’t there, a bare outline in the dark, a tiny scratched shadow moving through the gloom, and it occurred to him that if she let go of his wrist he might not believe she was there at all.
As they moved further, scratches on the wall, almost invisible to the normal seeing eye, burst into light around them. Here, the image of a child holding a gun; there, a policeman scratched crudely into stone, a bag of swag over his shoulder. There, a beautiful lady cleaning her nails with the razored end of a stiletto heel; there, an eye embedded in a CCTV camera, which wept silvery tears down the brick walls as they passed. The tags of the Tribe, their symbols, brilliant to the shaman’s eye, glimmered as they passed them, until, with a great squelch of ooze beneath their feet, they ducked out beneath a metal rim and emerged onto a plain of mud.
Sharon slowed, the world reasserting itself around them as she paused, and Rhys looked down to discover thick, green-grey mud had embraced his feet halfway up the length of his shins. Looking up, he saw a flat stretch of reeds and long grass, heading to a sudden stop that might have been a riverbank. The yellow lights of the Isle of Dogs glowed in the distance, and the white summits of the Thames Barrier, like clothes irons sticking up from the river’s surface. A thin green laser, its beam caught in low cloud, stabbed upwards from the black mound of Greenwich Hill, marking the meridian. On the waters of the Thames itself, a tug grumbled by, hauling yellow containers freighted with landfill.
Rhys looked back and saw a narrow brick portal gushing grey slime into the muddy mess where he stood, the last glow of his potion now the merest shimmer in the blacker-than-black tunnel from which they’d come. Sharon was looking down at her feet with disgust. “Magic,” she repeated, “totally and utterly
sucks
.”
She tried lifting a foot, and the mud slurped and clung to it. She sighed and, bending down, scraped off enough mud to reveal the laces of her boots, then untied them and took off her sodden, grimy socks. Pulling her boots out of the mud, she knotted their laces together; then hesitated.
“Jesus,” she said. “Do you think there’s something mystical about tying your shoes together? Am I about to be smitten by the wrath of God or something?”
Rhys’s instinctive shuffle back from this proposed calamity was only prevented by the sticking of his own shoes in the mud. They both waited. A smiting from the Almighty did not occur. Sharon relaxed and, holding her boots by their laces, looked about her, across the muddy plain. “Maybe it’s okay,” she muttered. “Mustn’t let the death and danger stuff get to you. Or compromise your personal values and that.”
By that count, Rhys couldn’t help but wonder what you
could
let get to you. “Um… do you think the Tribe are… here?” he asked.
Sharon looked again. A small brick stump, little more than an architectural accident in the mess of mud, stood some few hundred yards away, its back turned to the light of the city. Around it were clustered poles and wireless pylons, their cables long since stripped away, metal corpses in a dead forest. “Well,” she muttered, “let’s go find out.”
There were the remnants of a chain fence around the brick hut.
The fence had been torn up in so many places that it hardly counted any more.
A sign on what was left of the rusted links proclaimed:
WA NING – NO U AUTHO ISE ACCE S
The sign swung freely from its one remaining bond, as the wind brushed it by.
The brick hut was silent, dark, locked.
A single metal door was the only way in. One tiny window was covered over with chipboard on the inside. The paint on the door had popped and burst in little rusted flakes. There was no one in sight, no sign of life. Sharon went up to the door and knocked.
The long shoreline grass rippled in the breeze.
Sharon knocked again.
It occurred to Rhys that he had no idea how they were going to get back, assuming there was anything left of them afterwards to go back. He could see no obvious roads, or nearby means of transport, and tried in vain to imagine that a kindly bargee would give them a lift on his tug to the nearest bridge or quay.
Sharon knocked one more time, then called out, “Look, it’s not like we’re from the Inland Revenue or nothing!”
No response.
“It’s cold,” she went on, face turned to the closed door. “It’s late, or maybe it’s early. I’m muddy and my socks are soggy and there’s nothing worse than wet feet, they get all wrinkled and blue, and then they stink for days and it’s just disgusting, so, look, could you just let us in? We’d seriously appreciate it, wouldn’t we, Rhys?”
He nodded, pretending fervour.
Still silence.
“Okay,” she sighed. “We’re gonna come through the door, but, and I feel you oughtta know this, it’s in a strictly need-to-get-on way.”
Once again, she grabbed Rhys by the hand, and, before he could explain that, actually, he wasn’t really a fan of walking through the translucent boundaries between reality, the world went silver-grey, and she dragged him wrist-first through the locked metal door.
A moment as the world closed and parted around him, and they were on the other side of the still-shut door. He had a second to appreciate a sense of tight brick walls, low ceiling, and silent metal banks of equipment, before someone came up behind him and hit him very hard on the head.
Chapter 25
Someone said, “… Really quite unnecessary!”
Rhys opened his eyes.
Pain shot through from his retina to the back of his skull, but that wasn’t his main source of anxiety. A face – or what had once been a face – filled his vision. Certainly, the usual features – eyes, nose, ears, lips – were still there in principle, but this seemed to be despite their owner’s intentions, rather than owing to any great care of them. Scars, great ridges of purple and red, ran criss-cross across the shabby remnants of the man’s cheeks. The flesh had been methodically pulled back from the ends of his nose, so now two great slits opened up directly into black hollows of cartilage and calcified tissue. The tops and bottoms of his lips were shot through with needle points where once thread had bound the whole together, and the lobes of either ear had been hacked off, the edge cut round and spikes of silver and aluminium thrust through what little remained of the protruding spirals of skin. As the head moved, tendons rippled beneath the flayed skin of his neck, standing out and sinking in, white bands no longer hidden by the missing skin, and, though there was a pattern to the cutting, an order to the disfigurement, what Rhys beheld was, nevertheless, the face of a monster.
Instinctively he tried to get away, felt a chair at his back, clawed at it for support, and saw the throat of the man ripple and flex with the faintest of laughs.
“u is weak lil fin, is u,” murmured the man.
Rhys bit his bottom lip hard enough to draw blood, but it was too late. The pressure welled up at the back of his throat, clawed its way across the ridged pallet above his mouth and with a great burst of sound and dampness, exploded into the room. “Aaaatchoo!”
The face recoiled, and in the momentary widening of his vision which this offered Rhys saw more faces, more people, slunk round the brick walls of this windowless cell, men and women, some with still-bleeding wounds glowing red across their skins, some with fingers missing, or bolts of steel pushed through the tenderest pieces of their flesh, to make the skin sag and hang low with the weight of metal. He recoiled, felt another sneeze rise up inside him and, as he turned to look, he heard a voice say,
“I don’t suppose you guys have antihistamines?”
The voice was calm, clear, polite and blessedly familiar.
“… atchoo!”
Through the haze of moisture rimming up in the bottom of his eyes, Rhys saw Sharon, sitting on a metal chair next to him, hands folded politely in her lap, knees crossed. She was staring at the man with the savaged face, with that very special look that Rhys had seen deployed on vampires and wendigos with an attitude problem.
“Failing that,” she went on, “tissues? I did have some in my bag, but I see you’ve taken my bag away, which was unhelpful. Also, I heard rumours of unsterilised knives, and I do hope that someone is going to offer appropriate medical attention to my druid here, seeing as how you took it upon yourselves to attack him without provocation.”
The man with the ruined face slunk across the floor towards Sharon. He moved with an animal-lowness, his weight dropped towards his knees, his back bent forward, his fingers splayed, a hunter waiting to strike. He slunk over to Sharon and the room of disfigured men and woman watched him, lips parted, tongues wet, eager to see a fight. The scarred man leant down until his face was almost close enough for the tatty remnants of skin to brush Sharon’s own, and breathed, “u wnt 2 play, lil girl?”
Sharon’s dark brown eyes locked into the red-rimmed blueness of the man’s. A muscle tightened around Sharon’s jaw. Her fingers clenched into fists. Then she said, “You know, personal issues are no excuse for bad manners.” The scarred face drew back, a ridge where eyebrows might once have been, tightening in confusion at her words.
“Now, I can see that you, Mr… well, I can see that you have clearly got a few issues, a few personal issues, which now may not be the right time to discuss, not least because we barely know each other. But while no self-respecting member of society is entitled to disregard the concerns of another, I do feel that taking your angst out on well-meaning strangers is uncalled for, and, frankly, gives off a bad impression. So if you don’t mind, I’d like my bag back, please, because Rhys has got this thing with nerves and allergies, and if he doesn’t look after himself he’ll get a very raw nose and no one here wants that, and if you’ve got a kettle I’d love a cuppa tea for myself.”
In the silence that followed, the open mouths of the assembled people were, Rhys noticed, now dangling a bit wider. The scarred man stared, trying to work out what he was supposed to do next. Requests for tea were clearly not in his usual understanding of things.
Aware that this mightn’t be getting her anywhere, Sharon cleared her throat and added, “If, on the other hand, you’re enjoying the notion of unsterilised knives in all the wrong ways, I do feel that some might interpret that as indicative of deeper psychological issues. I’m not saying that society has all the answers, but there has to be a less radical means of self-expression than blindly attacking anyone who walks through your front door.”