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.