Hi, I’m Eddie…
(Hello, Eddie)
… please don’t let the monster hurt me.
I got into magic at uni when I puked up in my hall of residence’s cabal. They were well secret, but I was well pissed and I thought it was my door I was opening, but it was theirs and they were in the middle of this ritual thing and I’d had a few, and I guess you could say…
Anyway, they said they could curse me, or I could join, and I figured yeah, looks cool, I’ll do it! I’m not very good at magic–I get the words muddled and forget if I’m moving the sigil from left to right or right to left, but I do okay, you know? But it doesn’t really pay, and I’ve always wanted money. I mean, not just for the sake of having money, but because it’s there, someone’s gotta have it, and if I have a choice between being the guy who’s happy and the guy who’s not, I’ll take happy any day. And so thank you, yes, very much, for a Christmas bonus, you know? People talk about greed like it’s a bad thing, but it’s not–there’s always gonna be rich people and there’s always gonna be poor, and all greed is a conscious decision of which end of the ladder you’re gonna fall. I think that’s admirable, actually; I think that’s something to make you proud.
I joined Burns and Stoke seven years back. They were good times on the market, and I’d forgotten most of the magic stuff anyway because it wasn’t worth shit next to knowing where the derivatives market was gonna go. I knew there were a few others in the department who dabbled, you know, but it was all regulated and we had this deal with Harlun and Phelps, who everyone knew was seriously into the magic shit–no major financial gain through mystical means unless it was run by the Bank of England first. And getting anything by those tossers is practically impossible, so we just ignored it. Didn’t need it, you know?
Then it all kicked off–Lehmans, Northern Rock, the Eurozone debt crisis, Greece, Spain, Italy–and we hadn’t been too stupid, you know, we’d spread our bets and taken our positions carefully. But in that climate it didn’t matter where you were at because everything, all of it, stank. And it’s fucking stupid, yeah, because the government will bail out the banks when it’s like, little people’s money and that, but they won’t raise a finger when the real fat cats, the guys who drive everything, when they’re gonna burn. And so there we were, and we were all eyeing up our favourite pencils and the knick-knacks on our desks and wondering how much stationery we could sneak out of the cupboard before the entire thing went down, when he turned up.
Mr Ruislip.
I don’t know where he came from, but one day I was called into a meeting and he was just there, sat at the head of the table. And he said:
“Good afternoon, Mr Parks. I hear you have some mild skills with magic. Kindly remain in the office after work today. I will see you at 8.45 p.m. precisely.”
And that was it.
I turned up at 8.45 like the guy said, and there were like, a dozen other guys there including my boss, Gavin McGafferty, who even I thought was an arse, and I work in finance. And Mr Ruislip walked in just as the second hand hit the button and said:
“Gentlemen, you have been requested to remain behind as you have some moderate skill with summoning magics. I am not expecting wonders from you, yet, but from now on please consider your Tuesday and Thursday evenings to be within office working hours. And if you could each see to purchasing a box of latex gloves, that would be appreciated.”
Spells I’d never heard of.
Big spells too, like… proper bindings, and compelling. We’d go to buildings all across the city, every Tuesday and Thursday night, and we’d make the summoning circle and we’d pull these… creatures out of the walls and floors. I guess you had to call them spirits, but they were all twisted shapes on the air, or odd bends of light, or shrieks with no bodies.
I was kind of freaked out at first. We were pulling out the souls of a place, but we always bought the building we were gonna perform the spell in, because that made it easier, because Mr Ruislip said if you held the deed of ownership in your hands then the binding would sit better on the stones. And he was right.
I got really good at it, in fact; though I didn’t see why we were bothering until, one day, McGafferty said,
“You’re a fucking stupid little arse, Parks, and I’m only gonna fucking show you this once so you can piss off and shut up, okay?”
And he took me downstairs, I mean right downstairs, lower than the lift went, to the basement of the building, past locks and doors and men with fucking guns–I mean, guns, can you believe it?–and into this giant vault thing. And at the bottom of this vault there was this great black hole, this spinning, whirling black pit. And I’m not much good at magic, but I could taste it, hear it on the air, and I looked into this thing and thought, shit, that’s it, they’ve opened up a portal into hell. But it wasn’t like that, it was a… a prison. They’d made a prison in a pit under the building and in it they trapped all the spirits we’d been summoning from the buildings, hurled them all together. And McGafferty said:
“These fucking ghouly-ghosts are old, old as the fucking streets. And they’ve changed with the times and they’ve become powerful with the times, and even the smallest little shit-rag spirit sucked from a fucking stupid laundrette has power. And we’ve got them now; we’ve got ’em and we can make ’em work for us, the way nature should be.”
He told me that they had spells to suck the power out of the spirits, and spells to make them dance and obey, spells of summoning and control; that he himself had sent the soul of an Internet café flying round the world to steal data from a Hong Kong computer and made two point three million that day. Or the spirit of an abandoned fire station which he’d dispatched to burn the warehouse of a company he’d bet against. Or the soul of a nursery school which he’d sent to sing lullabies into a trader’s brain so he bid up, up, up, when he should have just sold.
“Usually these beasties just sit around in the city and do shit,” he explained, “like the ‘soul’ isn’t a fucking commodity! Fuck that, I say to you, fuck that! This is the twenty-first century! Time for the fucking soul to earn its way.”
That’s what we did.
We made magic a commodity. That’s kind of what we do, I guess.
And I was okay with it. Jesus, I know you’re gonna hate me now, but I was okay with it because I was selling high and buying low, and it didn’t matter what the real value of the product was because if it went too high I could just wave my fingers and tweak it back, and if it went too low, no worries! Click my heels and problem solved. It was great, I mean really, really great–it was what magic should’ve been, no sweat, no consequences. So when Mr Ruislip called us into his office I was on top of the world. I was like, “Yeah, screw you!” and “Rock on, universe!”–only not to his face, of course–but that’s how it felt, you know?
“Gentlemen,” he said, “I am moderately satisfied with your efforts so far. Stocks are recovering and there shall be Christmas bonuses for us all.”
He liked to talk about bonuses a lot, even when it was only spring, did Mr Ruislip.
“I now feel confident enough in your endeavours to propose a far more ambitious project. There is a spirit known to the sentimental as Our Lady of 4 a.m. To date we have only attempted to bind petty souls, little dabbling shadows, but Our Lady is a different creature entirely. She can command life and death itself and grant the wish of any standing before her willing to pay the price. I have produced a mission statement and business strategy for our next steps in capturing, binding and compelling her; you will all find your tasks inside.”
We did it–I mean, of course we did. Our heads were spinning with money, with the taste of it, especially since so many other firms were struggling, but we–we were the smart ones, we were frickin’ gods! I was tasked with finding appropriate sacrifices to compel this spirit–which took fucking weeks I may add–and then we all assembled at 11 p.m. sharp–Mr Ruislip always meant sharp when he said sharp–nine of us, to perform the summoning. McGafferty was leading it, and as it got under way Mr Ruislip came in with a woman.
She was a cleaner.
She was shaking.
Crying.
Scared.
And you know how you know something, you know it but you can’t quite believe it? I didn’t believe it, I didn’t think we could, but then they put her in the middle of the circle and she was sobbing, this Indian woman with greying hair in a blue cleaner’s overall, and she was begging and McGafferty had a knife and I thought no, he’s not gonna, it’s a trick, he’s not really gonna, but I knew he was, he had to, but I couldn’t say anything because no one else was saying anything and fuck knows I wasn’t gonna be the prat who asked a stupid bloody question or blew everything now, and besides she’d seen my face! I didn’t know… I mean, I couldn’t…
… so I guess I didn’t. Because no one else did. And looking back now, I suppose everyone else there was kind of thinking the same thing. But fuck me, why did I have to be the guy to speak? Why did I have to do it; why couldn’t someone else?
We got to the height of the spell, and I could feel the power, feel the moving, and it was 4 a.m., bang on 4 a.m., and I thought, here we go, and McGafferty stepped into the circle and raised the knife and just… he just did it. We were all swaying and chanting and there was this power in the air, this incredible pressure, and I was burning hot from it and felt like I was about to be snapped in two and McGafferty stuck the knife in, wham, and I nearly laughed. Jesus, I nearly fucking laughed because when the blood came out of the cleaner’s chest you could feel it, the power of it, the weight of it. I could taste it in my mouth, boom! She fell to the floor and we all waited but…
… nothing happened. McGafferty just stood there, blood dripping off the blade, shaking, this stupid fucking grin on his face, but nothing happened. The spell was fucking working, we knew it was working, but Greydawn wasn’t there. We must have stood there for five minutes, waiting for something to happen, until suddenly McGafferty dropped the knife like he’d only just realised he was holding it, and the stupid grin vanished from his face and he just stood there, still trembling all over, muttering, “Fuck fuck fuck fuck…”
Then someone was sick. Someone else went to the door and puked outside. Other guys just sat down where they stood. I felt dizzy, confused, the blood still spreading across the floor. I went to the window and pressed my head against it, and Mr Ruislip was standing there, silent, hands folded behind his back, and I thought, he’s gonna kill us, he’s actually gonna kill us.
“Gentlemen,” he said when the last of us had found some sort of composure, “shall we adjourn to the boardroom?”
And we would have adjourned to that fucking boardroom, blood still on McGafferty’s hands, but someone said, “Where’s the woman?” and we all looked round and she was gone. There was this trail of blood, not footsteps, just a great wide dragged-along streak of red, heading through the side door to the emergency stairs, and we all followed in a panic, fighting with each other, and I knew then, if she was still alive, I’d kill her, not to finish the spell but because she’d seen my face and had to die. She’d pulled herself all the way to the office below and collapsed on the floor. There was paper everywhere, like a whirlwind had been through the room, like a tornado had torn it apart, and she was already dead, staring up at nothing, and the lights were on and there was no fucking blood in her left to bleed and I felt relief, so much I nearly cried, to know that she was dead. But I thought I heard someone running down the hall, and I was too frightened to follow.
Only after, when Dog started hunting, did we begin to realise what had gone wrong with our spell.
It takes all your blood, every last drop, to summon and compel Greydawn.
But by the time the cleaner died, she wasn’t in our summoning circle any more. The magic was good and true, but it was the dead woman who got her wish, not us. I just hope she wished for something good.
We didn’t try that spell any more. All of us, we were too shaken. I knew Mr Ruislip was angry about it, but when we tried to scry for Greydawn, see where she was at, we got nothing. Like she wasn’t even in the city any more.
Then things started to happen.
Rumours at first, odd warnings of things breaking out into the night which shouldn’t have been there. Then one night Christian said he thought he’d heard howling, and Gavin said that was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard, and Scott said he thought there’d be consequences. And the next day Gavin was dead, torn apart in the dead of night, and there was no sign of his killer, except these footprints that had burned the earth. Then Christian heard the howling again, and he was dead two days after that, and Scott said, “We have to run we have to tell someone,” and Mr Ruislip said, “You are entirely overreacting. Please, consider your bonus,” and Scott, I think, did try to run, and did try to get help, but he didn’t make it in time and the police asked me to identify the body, and I knew, Jesus, I knew it was gonna come for me too. There are nine of us in the summoning circle; now only three are left. I said:
“We gotta go to the Midnight Mayor! We have to get help!”
But Mr Ruislip replied, “Should you be so foolish as to refer to this gentleman for assistance, I shall be forced to refer you to that clause in your contract regarding premature termination.” And by now I wasn’t standing still for shit, I wasn’t gonna do that stupid fucking thing of going “Does he mean it?” Because I fucking knew he meant it, he meant every word.
Then last night I heard the howling.
And I rang this guy at Harlun and Phelps and said, “I know everything. I know about Greydawn. I know why she’s missing. It was us, we did it,” and then the Midnight Mayor got on the line and he said:
“You’re a shifty stupid little shit, but you’re the best I’ve got to work with, so run.”
And I ran.
I ran so hard, and so fast, and so far…
… and it brought me here.