He’s tall.
“Skinny” doesn’t handle it. “Skinny” could imply anything, from vegetarian who hasn’t quite got hold of the protein situation, through to well-exercised young gentleman with a penchant for soup. “Skeletal” might be closer, but that implies bones protruding under flesh, and he has not much flesh for anything to protrude from; and the skin that would do the bulging were there any bulging to be done is so thin you can see the indigo blood pulse through the capillaries beneath it.
He wears a suit.
His hair is thin and pale, his eyes have a fish-like quality suggesting that even in death their gaze would settle on you, personally, through the mortal mists.
He smiles, perfect baby-teeth in a pencil-thin mouth. The smile is the smile of a man who wishes you to know that he has practised the expression long and hard in an attempt to put you at your ease, and if you cannot appreciate it, well then that’s your own damn fault.
And he’s not alone.
This is something of a problem, because the four gentlemen who he is not alone with are…
… difficult to focus on.
Rhys tries and feels something prickly on his forehead, and stops trying. Then he wonders what he’s stopped trying to do and why it seemed so important at the time. He tries again and thinks for a moment he can see four men in yellow fluorescent jackets; but why do the yellow fluorescent jackets make it so hard to see them? And they are smiling, four different faces…
… but all the same smile.
Then the man in the suit steps forward. As if his body has decided to make the decisions his mind is too rational to manage, Rhys feels a deadly itching at the back of his throat and a chill in the pit of his stomach.
“You must be the Friendlies!” exclaims the man in the suit. “Tell me, is it one of those concepts you people have? Irony, is that the one, or is it sarcasm? I never can keep track. Are you friendly in an ironic manner, or do you genuinely take it upon yourselves to emit this one quality above all others?”
Rhys looked to Edna for an answer. Edna looked to Kevin. Kevin shrugged and, inevitably, all eyes turned to Sharon.
Sharon’s face was crimped in concentration. Her eyes ran from the man in the suit to the four–was it four?–who stood behind him. Or possibly around him. Or who maybe weren’t there at all; it was hard to tell.
“And why friendly?” continued the man in the same easy-going tone. “Why are you friendly and not, for example, nice or charitable or generous, or whatever else fits into the ‘morally white’–” his fingers mimed a pair of quote marks “–aspirations that you so clearly strive for? What is the quality of ‘friend’ that is so appealing to you?”
Edna coughed, cleared her throat and rasped, “Would you like a cup of tea?”
All eyes turned to her. Kevin demanded, “You what?”
“I’m just wondering if the gentleman would like some tea.”
“Uh, darling, he’s like, walked into here and done this whole creepy rant thing and is like, so not human it’s amazing, and I’ve got like this headache coming on and there’s a corpse, I mean a corpse, which is just so uch, beneath you, and you want to have tea?”
“Maybe she’s avoiding escalating the situation?” suggested Rhys.
“Escalating?” queried the man in the suit. “Is that what this is–is this an escalation of the situation? That’s very interesting, isn’t it? This implies all sorts of curious sensations yet to come. Tell me,” stepping towards Rhys, who retreated fast, “when things are ‘escalating’, do you know where they will go? Will we escalate to new levels of friendliness–is that the word?–or did you have in mind an alternative emotional journey?”
A meek “Um” was all that made it out of Rhys’s mouth, but that seemed at last to stir Sharon to action. She stepped sharply forward, putting herself between the man in the suit and the cowering druid.
“Hey,” she snapped. “I don’t know who you are but you are giving off these seriously negative vibes. And my friend Rhys here, he can’t be having negative vibes because he’s got a very weak… most things… and I’m a shaman, which means good vibes are really important to me too, maybe with some chanting and nasal breathing and that.”
A rather bewildered silence followed. “Is nasal breathing important to the creation of these… ‘good vibes’?” queried the man in the suit.
“It’s a technique,” she retorted. “Who are you and what do you want?”
The man’s face split into a well-practised grin. “How delightful!” he exclaimed. “Well, I am Mr Ruislip–hello–” a hand was thrust towards Sharon for inspection “–and I have the honour and the privilege of being the CEO of Burns and Stoke Enterprises. Is it Enterprises or is it Limited? Is there a difference? I really don’t know, but isn’t this friendly?”
Sharon stared at the offered hand, grey skin threaded with blue. She reached out, fighting down a sense of revulsion, and as her fingers closed around the boney offering there was a taste of
blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD
and she snatched her hand away before the world could turn crimson and the taste of it in her mouth could make her puke across the bare concrete floor. Mr Ruislip was staring at her, smile locked in place, head on one side. “Is that… fear?” he asked as Sharon tried to swallow down the taste of blood. “Or is there a better word, a more refined concept we should work towards? How about revulsion, was that revulsion? Revulsion, fear, revulsion, fear… maybe it was both? Oh, how complicated. Well!” The hands briskly clapped together. “I leave these questions for you to work on, perhaps to deliver a focus group report in the next fiscal quarter. In the meantime I’m afraid I’m here for two special reasons. Firstly…”
His hand moved too fast for Sharon to see. Its fingers were round her throat before she could know that was what they were. As she gagged and tugged at his arm, his smile stretched. “Trespass is naughty, little girl,” he breathed. “You come back to Burns and Stoke, I’ll tear you to pieces.”
“Hey! You don’t talk to Ms Li like that!” To everyone’s surprise, especially his own, Rhys leapt forward. He tried to grab the hand that circled Sharon’s throat but another hand fell on his shoulder. It was large and pink, with oversized fingers stained white by mortar dust, and it lifted him up with a snap of distressed bones colliding beneath his skin. He saw a smiling ruddy face, hair shaved along the side of the scalp and grown across the top to a small lawn. There was a suggestion of fluorescent yellow jacket, sensible steel boots, blue jeans, bad breath and a voice that said:
“Do you want us to bury ’em, Mr Ruislip sir?”
“Foundations,” agreed another voice, male, full of gravel and mugs of cold tea; and while it was different, it was also the same.
“Scrawny git,” added a third.
“Carrot-top!” concluded the fourth. And for a moment Rhys could see them all, four builders in yellow fluorescent jackets. If he strained with every gram of will he had, he could make their forms solidify, just briefly, into actual shapes, and force his mind to remember that they were real, and they were there.
“No,” murmured Mr Ruislip. “Keep them alive. You could shake him a little, though.”
Obediently, the hand that held Rhys almost off the ground shook him. His teeth crashed together, biting his tongue; his legs flapped. He tried to mumble words, tried to find magic and fight back, but the shock, like the shame of it, overwhelmed his senses.
And here it came, the tingling at the back of his throat, the overwhelming urge to…
“Aaatchoa!”
The shaking paused. Rhys was aware of the four builders in their yellow jackets staring in surprise. Momentarily he realised that their faces all wore the same–the exact same–expression.
Sharon was gagging, her face turning blue. Mr Ruislip’s hand was still around her throat, as if he’d forgotten about it.
“Does that… happen?” marvelled Mr Ruislip, looking at Rhys. “Is that a fear response, something biological? Do people sneeze under stress?”
“Never seen that before,” admitted one builder.
“Load of wet panties!” concurred another.
“Tits,” offered the third.
“Wanker,” concluded the fourth. A moment of mutual appreciation passed, each of them satisfied that the argument had been pushed to its limit.
“Oh my God, you guys are so uncivilised!” exclaimed Kevin. Five pairs of eyes turned towards him. He backed off.
Mr Ruislip let go of Sharon. She flopped to the floor, heaving in breath with the sound of a defective steam engine. Rhys dangled from the hand of one of the builders. Edna was trying not to cower with too much indignity, and Kevin was doing his best not to get involved.
“What were we discussing before this little exploration of sentiment?” asked Mr Ruislip. A snap of his fingers, bone on bone. “Of course! If you come back to Burns and Stoke again you will be killed. Of course, you,” indicating Rhys, “are sacked. And the company that hired you has been liquidated, because in successful corporate enterprises,” swelling with rehearsed wisdom, “Commitment Is Everything.”
Rhys was shaken again until the hand that shook lost interest and he was deposited on the floor with the grace of a splattered ice cream.
“Now…” Mr Ruislip’s gaze slid to where Edna was clutching at the altar of knick-knacks like a sailor to the side of a capsized lifeboat. “What was the other thing?” He stepped neatly past Sharon, who was trying without much success to get to her feet, until, without seeming to move much at all, he filled Edna’s world. A face of blue-grey, hands of bone, eyes with the sheen of a gutted fish. His breath was heavy with peppermint, but that didn’t disguise the stench of rotting meat at its core.
“Where is Greydawn?”
“Greydawn?” stammered Edna. “She’s uh… She’s in the… the air, isn’t she? I mean she’s a, she’s…”
Gently, Mr Ruislip reached out and ran the back of two long fingers down the curve of Edna’s cheek, pausing to tilt her head up so that her eyes were forced to meet his as he repeated, “Where. Is. Greydawn?”
“Gone!” squeaked Edna. “She vanished!”
“But you are the Friendlies,” murmured Mr Ruislip. “You are friendly with her, isn’t that the point? You must know where to find her, otherwise what is the point of you?”
“You’d think that, wouldn’t you, dear?” Edna stammered. “But actually it’s a big mystery we’re all terribly worked up about–aren’t we terribly worked up? In fact the man you should probably ask is Derek but he’s… he’s gone. He’s gone and you…” Her eyes swerved to the four men in fluorescent jackets and steel-capped boots. A tiny “Oh” escaped her even as she put her hands over her mouth as if to hold back the sound. She looked from Mr Ruislip to the four builders and back again, and she knew.
Mr Ruislip smiled. In a dreamy tone he remarked, “I think I’ve heard of this ‘Derek’ character. He was your high priest, yes? I asked my colleagues here–one must say colleagues even when one is innately superior, to encourage teamwork in the workplace–to talk to this Derek concerning the question I now put to you. Apparently, he was most uncooperative, and negotiations grew hostile. Is that the word, hostile? Hostile, aggressive, offensive, terminal–frankly, they all sound apt to me. But now…” he ran a nail down a line in Edna’s skin, fascinated by it as a kitten might be enthralled by a pigeon’s severed foot “… a shaman breaks into my office, and a druid works on my servers, and the Midnight Mayor vanishes–indeed, vanishes!–and unprofessionally neglects meanwhile to set up an email auto-reply. So I conclude that the personal touch might be the way to expedite matters. You see, I won’t hurt her. Greydawn will be my friend. That’s good, isn’t it? You like it when people are friendly.”
The movement of his fingers froze, and Edna became aware that the sharp points of his nails were resting just below her eye sockets. They began to push, curving in and down, and her hands seemed frozen to the altar at her back and her tears welled up as Mr Ruislip calmly demanded, “Are you friendly now?”
Rhys tried to get to his feet, but a kick from a steel boot sent him falling forward like a man in prayer. Kevin said, “Hey, now that’s not…” only to find that one of the four other men had produced from a half-concealed tool belt a hammer, which he laid, claw inwards, across Kevin’s throat with a murmur of:
“Fucking vampires, bloodsucking sponges on the fucking state.”
“Get back to Transylvania!” agreed another.
“Come over here…”
“… drinking our blood.”
“Disgraceful.”
“I’m from Liverpool, actually,” Kevin said, and the hammer pressed harder. If there’d been much blood left to rise in Kevin’s body, it would have risen; as it was, his only reaction was a gagging sound.
A tear dribbled from the corner of Edna’s eye. Mr Ruislip scrutinised it, then wiped it away with his fingers and tasted it, flicking his tongue like a lizard. His eyes closed in satisfaction, and a slow contented breath seemed to leave his frame diminished. “Marvellous,” he murmured.
Then a voice said from the empty air, “Oi! Respect the aged!”
Something heavy, fast and quite possibly bag-shaped slammed out of the nothingness at Mr Ruislip’s back and into the place where spine met skull. There was a sharp, satisfying snap and the suited man staggered forward, his weight knocking Edna down into the altar of little trophies and gifts, which collapsed beneath the two of them with a crash of splintering plastic. As the four men in fluorescent jackets reached for their tools, the same unseen force slammed into the jaw of the one who stood over Rhys. The man staggered back, briefly registering surprise, then scowled and pulled a spanner out of his belt. “Let’s get the bitch!” he roared.
Rhys felt something firm close around his arm and before he could so much as sneeze, he was hauled to his feet and into…
… a grey place. It was still the temple of the Friendlies, still the world he knew and generally feared, but the echoes of things that were, and things that weren’t, and things that might have been, swelled and ebbed from the walls around, and as he turned to look he saw…
the truth of things.
There stood Kevin the vampire. In this grey place his teeth were fangs, no denying, and his hair was grey and his skin seemed to suck in the light. And there were the four men in yellow fluorescent jackets, but they weren’t fluorescent now; here they were seen for what they were–great billowing coats of invisibility, a flowing wizard’s cloak that engulfed each wearer so that only eyes and hands and the occasional flash of a foot were visible. The faces of the men who wore them were all the same, the same featureless nothing: eyes in smoothed-over skin pressed flat by an angry potter in a moment of frustration, ears mere holes cut into the head, bodies made of slabs of flesh tacked together at the joins with no sympathy for skeletal structure or nervous system. Lines of power joined the men together, their fluorescent cloaks billowing in and out of each other, so that briefly it seemed as if the four were one.
Then Rhys turned and a sound caught in the back of his throat.
Mr Ruislip was there, right there, staring straight at him, or perhaps through him. His eyes were searching the space where Rhys had been, and in this grey place Mr Ruislip’s eyes were sodium-pink and -yellow, and his teeth were black glass-grinders, and his skin was flaking off him in great white banners that coiled and snapped in the air around him, and he had claws for nails and blood for spit, and he was a being that Rhys had only heard mentioned a couple of times, an idea whispered nervously in the dark, but he knew it as sure as he knew that pollen was no good for a histamine-primed endocrine system. Mr Ruislip was a wendigo.
A hand fell on Rhys’s shoulder and he yelped. Clearly the sound was audible in the real world, whatever that was, for the heads of the four builders snapped round and one of them made a swipe with his spanner that nearly brained Rhys where he stood. Then the hand on his shoulder dragged him back and he half-saw Sharon standing there, the only bright thing in this shadow world, a blaze of purple and orange amid the gloom. She had her bag wrapped around her wrist and was swinging it like a slingshot ready to fire–until Mr Ruislip’s distant voice, full of a bile that Rhys had only imagined in the mortal world, but which was here real, announced:
“I will eat the old one’s eyes.”
Edna was picking herself up from the ruins of the altar, a silent “Oh” of horror forming on her lips as she saw the shattered remains of
the umbrella I found abandoned at the bus stop when the rain began to fall
the receipt for the £1.90 Underground fare bought with the exact change that was
the last money I had in my hand to get me home
packet of salted peanuts what was the only food I could find in the night
before Mr Ruislip picked her up by the back of the neck and turned her to face the room. “I will count to ten,” he intoned. “Or perhaps I shall count backwards from ten; which would you find more appropriate? Let’s see. Ten.”
Rhys stared at Sharon. His mouth shaped a soundless “What now?” of terror.
Sharon looked past him at Edna, whose fingers clutched at Mr Ruislip’s arm. She couldn’t see the way the flesh billowed off him like sails in a gale or she might not even have tried to fight free.
“Nine.”
Sharon’s fists were bunched tight, the strap of her bag curled around her wrist, but she stood frozen in doubt.
“Eight.”
Kevin suddenly dropped the weight of his body, slipping free from the hammer across his throat. As the builder threatening him tried to slam his weapon into Kevin’s skull the vampire leapt back, curling animal-like onto all fours, and snarled. His fangs were now clearly visible, and as the four builders surged towards him he hissed, “I warn you! You get really nasty infections from puncture wounds!”
Mr Ruislip looked exasperated, and tugged hard enough on the back of Edna’s head for the old woman to cry out in pain.
“Seven!”
Kevin leapt at the nearest builder, who threw up his arm. There was a burst of blood, brilliant and scarlet in that grey place, and the builder seemed to shimmer. He shook Kevin, just once, gently, from side to side, and this little gesture seemed enough, more than enough, to dislodge Kevin, to toss him up in the air and away, slamming him shoulder first into the wall. The vampire collapsed to the floor, eyes wide with astonishment, his mouth stained with blood.
“Six,” sighed Mr Ruislip. “You know, you’d really better come out now.”
The builder Kevin had bitten was staring at his arm with mild surprise. “You tosser,” he exclaimed. To Rhys, the words sounded far off.
“Wanker!” announced another. Rhys saw a hint of red on this man’s arm, a faint puncture mark to match his colleague’s injury, though Kevin’s teeth had come nowhere near him. Yet even while Rhys watched, the mark began to heal, the blood drying and turning black before his eyes, flaking off as a remnant of decaying scab.
Kevin spat crimson onto the floor and whimpered, pawing blood from his mouth with the back of his hand, “Oh God, that’s so disgusting…”
Another cry of pain sounded from Edna as Mr Ruislip jerked her head further back, his fingers pressing against her eyes.
“Five!” he declared. “Goodness, but these friendly people are antisocial, aren’t they? Is that the antithesis here? Friendly and anti-social? Or does one merely say ‘unfriendly’ as in ‘willing to let a friend suffer and die’–is that a more appropriate usage?”
Rhys turned back to Sharon, whose shoulders were shaking, but not, he realised, from tears or even dread, but with an anger that stood out on her face so hard and bright, she seemed almost to glow in the darkness. She took a step towards Mr Ruislip and for a moment Rhys wondered if this was it, if she was going to try and fight, to rip the skin off the already skinless monster stood before them.
“Four.”
For a moment the world hung in the balance. Kevin tried to pick himself up, but a foot slammed into the back of his neck, pinning him to the floor. Edna tried to close her eyes, but the pressure of Mr Ruislip’s fingers against her lids pulled them back to stare madly at their impending end. The four builders in their invisible cloaks tutted and waited, tools in hand–and was it just Rhys’s imagination that caked the end of every tool with a crust of aged blood?
“Three!”
Rhys looked at Sharon, and saw her deflate.
Her shoulders sagged, her head bowed, a sigh passed her lips; the bag dropped to her side, no longer a weapon. Rhys swallowed hard against a rising nausea and a hideous itching that made his eyes and nose stream as Mr Ruislip announced:
“Two!”
And Sharon began to slip out of the shadows, taking Rhys with her, sliding back into the world where to be seen was also to be perceived. At the sight of her, Mr Ruislip beamed, though his fingers didn’t move from Edna’s inflamed face. “How nice of you to join us again!” he chortled. “But we were so close to one.”
His fingers slipped up and pressed, very lightly, against the whites of Edna’s eyes. She opened her mouth to scream, feet scrabbling at the floor, hands scratching in vain against Mr Ruislip’s face and
The cheery, chipper rhythm of the ringtone filled the room like the buzz of a bumble bee in an ice palace. Mr Ruislip hesitated. The four builders shifted uneasily.
Ring ring, went the phone.
Ring ring.
They stood there, ten seconds becoming twenty, twenty becoming thirty, and still the call did not pass, and still no one moved.
“Aren’t you going to pick it up?” demanded Mr Ruislip at last.
Moving slowly despite herself, Sharon reached into her pocket and pulled out her mobile. The number was “Unknown”. She thumbed it on and held it to her ear.
“Yeah?” she asked.
“Hi there!” The voice was cheerful, male and familiar. It was the voice that had spoken to her from the shadows in Clerkenwell, and whispered “Run” at the howling of a distant dog in the night. It brought to mind a couple of words she’d heard uttered by so many people as something that should have mattered–Midnight Mayor.
“Would you mind putting me on speakerphone?”
“What?”
“Speakerphone–your phone does have a speaker, doesn’t it? I know that phones these days aren’t really about talking to people any more, it’s all apps and that, but come on.”
Sharon looked at Mr Ruislip and saw nothing but curiosity in that strange, animal face. “Okay,” she said. She held the phone away from her ear and turned on the speaker.
“Brilliant!” The voice was tiny and far off, but still somehow carried and filled the room through sheer force of enthusiasm.
“Hello, there!” it sang out. “My name’s Matthew. How are you all doing? And may I take this opportunity to say that you all suck. I mean really, you’re useless, the lot of you. I give you my blessing, I get you free classes in shamaning, I send you clues, I give you pointers, I give you all sorts of really useful advice and what do you do? You just faff around in Tooting. Bloody hell!”
“Who is this?” demanded Mr Ruislip.
There was an audible huff of breath on the other end, which might have been irritation. “You must be the wendigo. Has anyone told you that’s a really bad suit? Everyone assume the brace position, please.”
So saying, the voice on the other end of the line hung up.
Sharon looked at Rhys; Rhys looked at Sharon.
There was a honking of angry horns on the street outside.
Mr Ruislip’s face was a mass of confusion. The four builders shrugged, and it was all the same shrug.
There was a squeal of tyres and the bump of dodgy suspension doing unwise things.
Behind Sharon a flash of headlights through the window.
A scream of tyres, a screech of brakes as cars swerved in the street outside.
Sharon threw herself onto the ground and assumed the brace position.