Sharon walked into the single, small, women’s toilet, all stainless steel and polished surfaces, turned the lock on the door behind her and breathed.
StupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidSTUPID!
What kind of stupid bloody idiot thought they could just swan into some stranger’s office, what kind of pig-headed fool decided they were going to save the bloody city? It was insane! It was bloody stupid insane, and now she’d missed a whole day at work and why? Because a goblin–a goblin, which wasn’t exactly a great recommendation to begin with–had popped out of nowhere and told her it was her responsibility. Like shit.
She pressed her back against the door and forced herself to breathe, whispering to herself, “I am beautiful, I am wonderful, I have a secret, I am beautiful, I am wonderful, I have a secret, I am beautiful, I am—” She slammed her fist into the door. “I am beautiful and wonderful and have a bloody secret!”
She hit the door again, hard enough to hurt, and felt a bit better.
Closed her eyes.
Breathed.
She was a shaman.
Think shaman.
She half-thought she heard Dez’s voice whispering in the back of her brain and raised a single imperious finger and whispered, “Zip it.”
He–or it–or possibly she, if he really was just another part of herself–zipped it.
She breathed through her nose until she felt confident enough to breathe through her mouth without hyperventilating. She turned to face the door and tried to remember the feeling of being unseen, the cool casualness of it. It wasn’t a conscious will, there was no intoning or furrowing of brow; it was something deeper than that. An invisibility that came from the overfamiliar, a sense that she was a part of something so big that no one could really understand it, and, as no one could understand it, no one really tried to look.
She thought she could hear Sammy, see him gesturing furiously at the vacant air, proclaiming, You can see the city and it can see you…
She opened her eyes, and there it was again, that tinge overlaid on reality, the smell of things that had come before, the whisper of
God I need more coffee
did he see me do that?
#myinsanity tweets what a fucking waste of time
“Shut up,” she whispered under her breath. “Shut up shut up!”
Jesus Christ what does she want now?
if you could just flag the issues here
concerned client, I’ll give you concerned fucking client!
Help us
“Stop it!” she hissed at the twisting shadows hanging off the walls. “Stop it stop it now!”
What will he do if he finds out?
oh God, Prozac
Help us
don’t want to tell don’t wanna don’t wanna
Help us
he’ll kill me Jesus he’ll kill me
howl? howl? I didn’t mean it. Didn’t mean it didn’t mean
HELP US, SHAMAN!!
The words cut through so loud and hard that Sharon yelped, jumping against the door of the toilet and slamming her elbow into the handle. She grabbed at the nearest stable object, which turned out to be a hand dryer that whirred into instant and obedient life, yelped again, and jumped back against the door one more time.
Being a shaman, she was beginning to suspect, was not necessarily a dignified career move.
Help us, whispered the walls. Help us.
She pinched the skin on the back of her hand until it hurt, then rubbed her hand until it didn’t, took a steadying breath and walked out through the shut toilet door.
A second later she walked back in and undid the lock, just in case someone needed to use it later.
Help us, and the voice that whispered it in her head wasn’t male, wasn’t female, wasn’t loud, wasn’t quiet, wasn’t soft, wasn’t hard, wasn’t furious, wasn’t breathy; it was just… a sense without sound, meaning without words, pictures with no colour, a collection of certainties that assembled in her consciousness to proclaim, simply, truly and with no respect for the boundaries of language, Help us, shaman, help us.
Papers billowed gently in the draught from her passage, and deskbound eyes flickered up at the faint thud of her boots on the carpet, only for heads to turn back down as people failed to perceive the source of distraction, this moving unease on the air. Sharon walked without quite knowing where she was bound, confident and brisk, with the office stride of a busy worker, invisible to all. And now that she looked, really looked, there were echoes of other things, of truths unperceived. The taste of pills, dry on her tongue, dissolving to a sticky slime before swallowing; the feel of sweat sticking to the cotton shirt on her back, not that she wore such a thing; and, perhaps, hanging over it all, clinging like cobwebs to the fluorescent lights in the ceiling, the bitter adrenaline taste of fear.
Help us, whispered the walls, help us.
She thought she caught a glimpse of Dez moving beside her, his reflection layered over hers in the great panes of internal glass wall. He seemed to be slightly ahead of her, his face fixed towards a door at the end of the open office on which a yellow sign proclaimed, AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY. DANGER–ELECTRICITY. There was a greyish shimmer to the door, a thickness in the air about it, but Sharon put her best foot forward and her head down and, like a bull faced with a bright red flag, marched straight towards it. She swung her arms from the elbows, took a deep breath, heard, Help us, shaman, help us, strode into the door and, like a bumble bee bouncing off cold glass, slammed straight back and fell on her arse.
The world seemed to freeze. She sat there as Dez faded, along with the whispers of the office walls, the magical tastes and senses of the place, the dirty secrets left scratched into the air, receding all at once as reality reasserted itself. Her bum smarted, her ears rang, and the door remained resolutely (a) a door and (b) in front of her rather than behind, as she sat on the floor, legs splayed out, mouth open. And she was visible.
A voice behind her said, “Um… Ms Li?”
The words took a few seconds to register. Then she was on her feet in a single movement and already proclaiming, “Yeah, but see I’m here to deliver the coffee yeah, Coffee Unlimited, the best coffee ever and… How do you know who I am?”
She turned and looked at her unlikely accoster. Straight carrot-coloured hair, a face frazzled with freckles, a striped shirt that someone may have told him was smart as a practical joke, and a blue tie covered in big white spots. He stood holding a coffee in one hand and a visitor’s badge in the other. His face was set in a grin of apology and hope; his voice was Welsh, and his tone was the urgent tone of a man who doesn’t understand how he could be in trouble but feels sure he is anyway.
A name surfaced from the marshland of memory.
“Rhys?” she hazarded.
Rhys, the not-quite-qualified druid and sometime IT consultant, grinned with his teeth and cowered with his lips, a strange battle working across his face. Sharon looked left, looked right, saw no one else who might have witnessed the less-than-shaman-like incident with the insufferably solid door and added very carefully, “You’re not here serving forces of darkness and destruction, are you? Only that’d be a mega-problem.”
“Um, I don’t think so,” mumbled Rhys. “I’m serving the servers, in fact.” He almost laughed at his own joke, then thought better of it and hung his head. Across his features hope and shame fought their long-running battle, and the favourite took the prize.
Sharon looked from the druid to the door and back again, then grabbed Rhys by the sleeve. “You! Toilet! Now!”
“Oh, but I…” he began. But he was already being frogmarched away, his grin of unease and confusion stretching almost to his ears. He found himself, to his surprise, pushed bodily into the nearest women’s toilet and the door slammed behind him.
Rhys cowered as Sharon smacked one palm against the wall by his left ear and, with her other hand, snatched the coffee cup from his grasp and deftly threw it in the bin.
“Oh, but see…” he began as the liquid seeped away.
“What the bloody hell are you doing in this bloody place and what the hell is wrong with that bloody door and you’d better tell me because I know bloody kung fu and am the knower of the hidden bloody path!”
A finger capped with a carefully trimmed nail, which had been painted blue until Sharon got bored with the maintenance work, quavered before the tip of Rhys’s nose.
“I um… Well, see, it’s, uh… We’re in the ladies’ loo,” muttered Rhys, “which is fine, because it’s, uh… but I’ve never been in a ladies’ loo, see, and it’s not that it’s not nice to see you, because it is, it’s very nice indeed, but—”
“Rhys!” barked Sharon. “Doors! Walls! Voices! You! Spill!”
“Ah, now, yes, I see, I, uh…” He paused, his chest swelled, his shoulders drew back and, with a sudden dread of what was to come, Sharon found herself leaning away as Rhys spluttered, “I uh… I… I… aaaaahhh…”
He sneezed.
The first sneeze was merely a shriek from the back of the throat, punctuated by an “I’m so sorry, it’s just that…” The second was a great heaving from the shoulders. “When I get nervous, see, it’s this…” By the third sneeze, Sharon was taking cover as far away as she could in the tiny space. Rhys’s eyes dribbled, his nose turned red, and he rummaged frantically in his pocket for a much-used tissue. “Had it all my life, see, and it’s… it’s… it’s…”
“Allergies?”
“Allergies,” he agreed. “Though they say it’s also psycho… psycho… pssyycchho–atchoo!–somatic, a stress thing.”
“I wasn’t judging.”
“That’s very nice of you, it’s very nice, only I… I… aaahhhh…” She waited as Rhys’s body shook and his nose ran and his eyes seemed to swell in their sockets and his ears turned pink. “I don’t want to be any trouble, see?” he managed to whimper.
“What are you doing here?” Her words, in the confined space of the toilet, should have been a furious hiss. Yet somehow Rhys’s look of abject allergy-racked desperation made it dissolve into a gentler, more consoling enquiry.
“I maintain the servers,” he explained. “I’m an IT consultant. I came to consult.” Then, nervously dabbing the sweat and snot off his top lip with the sodden end of his tissue, “Are you… are you really delivering the coffee, Ms Li?”
“No, of course I’m not bloody delivering the bloody coffee, do I look like I’m bloody delivering the coffee? I’m here to save the city, ain’t I?”
The words, once said out loud, seemed silly. But, concluding attack to be the best form of defence, she stabbed one finger, quivering with urgency, towards Rhys’s inflamed nose, producing quite a satisfying cringe. “What do you know about missing spirits?”
“Um… only what Mrs Rafaat said at the meeting. And obviously what you see as a druid, see, but I’m not really meant to see that sort of thing, not without my certificate. That there are… are things going missing from the city?”
“What sort of druid things do you know?”
Rhys cringed again. It seemed to be his default setting. “Well, I’m not really supposed to talk about the sacred secrets of the druids, see, owing to how I never actually qualified—”
“This: ladies’ lav,” pointed out Sharon. “Me: angry shaman.”
The argument, succinct as it was, had some effect. “They say,” responded Rhys, “that the ley lines have been weakening, their power growing thin. The city wall is crumbling, and all the creatures that live just outside the… the… atchoo!–the veil of perception, they’re fleeing the stones for fairer climes. Like Birmingham,” he added, surprised to note that, by his own logic, this city fitted such a description. “The selkies have fled the Bermondsey sewer, and wishes made on the waters of the Fleet are no longer granted. The wyvern nest at Battersea Power Station withered, and they say the statues are crying blood, but I think that sounds a bit far-fetched, in fact quite Roman Catholic. But whatever’s going on, it’s got everyone very worried, even the druids, and they tend to think long term.” Then, in a more conspiratorial tone, “You won’t tell anyone I said so, will you?”
Sharon drummed her fingers against the wall beside Rhys’s head. “Okay, what do you know about this place?”
“Uh… the ladies’ loo?”
“Burns and bloody Stoke!”
“Well, I, uh… I know they run Windows 7, which keeps on crashing, and they use Internet Explorer not Mozilla, which I think is maybe a little… and that there’s a script running in their main email server which routes all correspondence straight to the manager’s—”
“Magic stuff!” snapped Sharon. “I need to know about the bloody magic stuff here that goes down!”
“Oh, I, um. I didn’t know they did any magic or… stuff, either, actually. I just look after the machines.”
Sharon pointed an angry finger at him once more and loomed. This was none too easy for a woman of only five foot five, but Rhys shrank back nonetheless and tried to become one with the nearest wall.
“You just told me that the city is withering up, and all you do is the computers?”
“Um… yes. I mean, it’s like when the prime minister says it’s a broken society and I think, ‘Well, that doesn’t sound very good but I feel all right.’ What I think I want to say, is I’m not sure what I can do about it personally, myself.”
Sharon opened her mouth to say something pithy and found nothing leapt to mind. “Okay,” she admitted. “So maybe you’ve got a point. But this place–this place–Burns and Stoke…” She told him of abandoned shops, broken houses, empty factories. “If there’s an unnatural hollowness there, they own it, yeah? Like there’s nothing, the soul of the place ripped out? Are you gonna tell me it’s a coincidence that wherever there’s emptiness, there’s them?”
“Um… no?”
Sharon relaxed a little. “Glad you said that. I mean, just to make sure my logic wasn’t flawed or nothing.”
“Oh, no!” he exclaimed. “It all makes sense now! Burns and Stoke–evil bankers–empty buildings–property rights–absolutely! Was this, uh… why you were being invisible?”
“I was being invisible because the receptionist was bloody rude!” Punctuating each word with a finger jabbed into his chest, Sharon added, “What. The. Hell. With. The. Bloody. Door?”
“Which door, Ms Li?”
“The one I didn’t walk through!”
“Could you narrow it down?” he asked, and at once regretted it. “What I meant is that you, and doors, and… and… aaaahh…” His face crinkled up ready to sneeze again. Sharon reached out and pinched Rhys’s nose shut. His face turned purple as if he was going to explode from internal pressure. Then his eyebrows crumpled and he took on a look of sheer disbelief at the surprise of a strange woman pinching his nose. The sneeze died down. Sharon carefully let go.
“This happen to you a lot?”
“Yes, Ms Li. Sorry, Ms Li. This door you were… uh… not going through. Did you try knocking?”
She fixed him with a look that could have frozen a polar bear.
He gestured incoherently. “Well, okay, not knocking because of your, uh… secret mission to, um, save the city, yes, so um… was it warded?”
“Warded?”
“Yes. Like, with magic?”
“What does that look like?”
“Look like? I dunno. It doesn’t look like anything. You don’t see a ward, unless it’s a really big one, I suppose, in which case there might be like, bits of wire sticking out or mystic runes or that kinda thing. Don’t you know what a ward looks like, being a shaman?”
She scowled. “People keep saying ‘being a shaman’ like it comes with a job manual.”
“Course you don’t need a manual, Ms Li! Being a shaman, you just know!” His eyes met hers, and the start of a grin began to fade. “Unless, uh… I mean, I say you just ‘know’, but then I’m not a shaman, am I?”
“What are you exactly?”
“Well, I was trying to be a druid, see,” he replied. “But I get these allergies and sometimes there’s all this lavender, and after I had a really bad attack they said they didn’t think I was right for advancement.”
“Could you get through a ward? I mean, if I wanted to get through a warded door, could you open it for me?”
“Me? Do magic?” Snot began to bubble at the end of Rhys’s nose, his eyes pushed against their lids, his body shook. “Oh, no, I don’t think that’d be a good idea. Because I’d love to of course–I was actually meant to be the chosen one–but…”
Sharon pinched his nose shut again, hard enough to silence him, and they stood there, in the ladies’ toilet, while around them office life progressed in busy apathy. At length Sharon eased her fingers away from his nose and murmured, “Now, Rhys, this is important. Possibly it’s the most important thing you’ll do in your life, so don’t balls it up. Who do you know who can beat wards?”