In which allies are made, enemies revealed, trains taken at late hours of the night, and an unusual use suggested for paint.
In the morning I managed, through much sweet persuasion and a hefty amount of money, to get myself into a small hotel in Merton – a place that I had always regarded as something of a fiction spread by the enemies of London and was surprised to find so real and large.
I had another shower, and scrubbed until my skin was raw and not a trace of ink or dye remained, I rubbed at my scalp until the shampoo sluicing down across my face was no longer tinted blue.
Then, at least, I felt less dirty. I went out and bought new clothes; the old ones I abandoned in a recycling bin. Even wearing my old clothes to the charity shop made me feel unclean again, their smell of rat so strong that the scrupulously polite girl behind the counter cringed at it.
I took my coat to the dry-cleaner, who offered to scrap it for free, but in the end accepted twelve pounds fifty to do a rush job on a repair. When it came back, the colour was faded and still splotched across the shoulders and cuffs – irredeemably so, the manager told me – but when I put it on again the fabric was warm and smelled clean, and for the first time that morning I felt just a bit human.
The day’s headlines blamed the Amiltech stalker for the brutal murder of San Khay, but the papers made no mention of how he’d died, nor of the inks that covered his skin. I didn’t know if that was the police being careful, or the Tower covering its tracks. Perhaps it was arrogant not to care, but at that moment we didn’t want to think about it.
We decided to take the rest of the day off.
We had croissants, hot chocolate, coffee, jam, bread rolls and fruit salad for breakfast, and went to the cinema. We had never been to the cinema before. The plot was something about a genius arms dealer who discovered redemption, cardiac conditions and an interesting and potentially lethal use for spare missile components in a cave. It wasn’t my thing. We were enthralled, and staggered out blinking from the cinema two and a half hours later with our mind full of pounding noise and our eyes aching from the overwhelming brightness, resolved to see more films as often as possible. During school hours we sneaked into an empty playground and rode the swings, so high we thought we’d fall off, then spinning on the roundabout until the world was a blur; sliding down the silver slide while trying not to whoop with glee; letting the sand in the pit trail through our fingers and, finally, resting to catch our breath at the very top of a roped climbing frame, from which we could see across a wide common of mown grass, great trees and dog walkers, all the way to the big old houses beyond the railway line. I hoped no one would see me.
We went to a bookshop, and sat reading graphic novels, fascinated by the style, the strange inhuman faces that were nevertheless so readable, the worlds in those pages made up of strange, twisted things, the buildings all out of proportion, the bright colours too bright, the dark sweeps of shade too deep – and yet, for all their fantastical properties, the pictures that we saw were somehow recognisable, and provoked in us feelings that matched the creatures in those pages.
When we were asked to move on, we took a train into the centre of the city, found a ticket booth and joined the queue. We bought a ticket for the first thing that was available, which turned out to be a musical. Still not really my thing, but we were determined to give it, anything, everything a try – and while we waited for the hour of its performance, we wandered into Chinatown and ate crispy duck with pancakes, and drank green tea and listened to the waiters chattering in Cantonese. We found that, without consciously translating, we could understand what they were saying: an unexpected side effect of our resurrection.
We saw the musical, and even though the lyrics were absurd, we came out burning with the energy of the place. We had not become lost to a spell, but with so many minds around us enthralled by what they saw, we too let our thoughts sink into that illusion. It thrilled us, the intensity of that buzzin the blood, and the light in the eyes of every face that came out from it. For a brief while, we forgot that we were wearing mortal flesh, mortal skin, mortal hurts, and were gods again, watching a world full of stories. As a treat to end our first proper day of life, we bought fish and chips, and ate it, with ketchup, on the bus back to the hotel. For the moment, we could ignore revenge, anger, pain, desire, hunger, want, fright, fear and hope; all we could hear was the gentle heartbeat of the city, and when we walked, we walked in time to its rhythm.
Next day, I went back to work. I checked out of the small hotel in Merton, and wandered up to the nearest supermarket, from one of whose dumpsters I removed a large sheet of cardboard. I also bought a tatty blue jumper, a pair of fingerless black gloves, a woolly hat, soup in a white polystyrene cup and a small packet of child’s coloured chalks. Feeling pretty much equipped, I caught the bus, heading north.
My dilemma was simple. I didn’t know where Bakker was. And even if I did, the knowledge wouldn’t do me much good, since, if Sinclair’s files were right, Amiltech was just one of the many organisations run by the Tower which protected him. While I felt perfectly comfortable tackling the lesser thugs of the institution, it was pure arrogance to assume I could handle more than one thing at a time. San Khay had died before he could tell me what I needed to know about the Tower and Bakker; that meant I would have to ask someone else. I had chosen Amiltech as my initial target because owing to its relatively high profile, I felt it would be an easier target to focus on without too many risks of reprisal than some of the other Tower-affiliated organisations. Now, my attention had been forced to move to an altogether different source of information, and danger: Guy Lee. Master of an underground network of … pick a name and it would be there, accountant through to zealot who worshipped at the altar of Lady Neon and other spirits of the city. San Khay had been arrogant enough to assume that he could handle us alone. It would be unlikely Guy Lee would make the same mistake, now that San was dead. He would be on guard; that meant I would have to change my tactics. I would need help.
I had a vague idea where to start.
The patch I’d chosen for the day’s work was near Paddington station. A medley of worlds joined here – the Arab community from the Edgware Road merging into the giant white terraces and quiet mews of the wealthy, bordered in turn by the council estates and student digs overlooking the railway lines crawling in and out of the station itself, in a deep cutting, as if embarrassed to be taking up so much space and hoping no one would notice their progress.
Like all terminus stations, Paddington attracted a roving population of tourists, travellers, squatters, prostitutes, muggers, racketeers, smugglers and beggars. It was this last that interested me, because, after the pigeons and the rats, it’s the beggars who tend to see the most.
So it was that on a cold, clean morning as winter was beginning to make itself known to autumn, and autumn was looking bashfully towards the door and explaining it had to go and wash its hair, I put my sheet of cardboard down in the service doorway round the side of a restaurant near St Mary’s Hospital, unfolding it as protection against the hard coldness of the pavement. I pulled on my hat and gloves, dragged my coat up tight around my chin and patted my pockets for the coloured chalk. Sitting still on the pavement for hours, if you aren’t properly dressed, lets the cold crawl all the way into the bones, twining itself around the spine with the grip of rooted ivy. I knew this from experience – begging for a day had been one of the things Robert James Bakker had instructed me to do; and back then, without question, I had obeyed; and back then, he’d been right.
In a small fountain outside Paddington station I had rinsed the empty polystyrene cup that had contained my soup and now put it on the ground in front of me. On the pavement I scratched in careful capital letters, HUNGRY PLEASE HELP, and with my coloured chalks, pale smears on the stones, I started to draw. I took my time, ignoring the footsteps of passers-by as they ignored me, using the rectangular shape of one particular paving stone as my frame, and putting in every detail of what I drew: not just in the face and clothes, but in the background, fading it from red to blue, smudging the strong colours where they met into a waving line of purple. I drew a face in profile with a curved yellow beard like some sort of inverted horn, a sharp triangular nose, a beady blue eye, and a smile – a distinctly smug smile. I filled in the tiny black diamonds on the figure’s blue collar, and shaded its shoulders with red sweeps of colour to suggest the richness of its clothes; finally, I gave it a pointy crown. The drawing eventually resembled a king in a pack of playing cards, all odd angles and confusing shapes and colours. I don’t know how many hours it took; but by the time I finished I’d got 57p in my polystyrene cup, and cramp in my arms from too much leaning on my elbows.
With the cup by my side, I curled up on the doorstep behind my chalk picture and my message on the floor, and waited.
There are several kinds of beggars in London. There are the lone aggressive ones, usually with thick beards and big duffle coats, who approach passing strangers with “Please, I just need 80p, please” – and sometimes that works. Perhaps it is a more honest approach; but for the ordinary passer-by, these open appeals can be as frightening as they are direct, and too often the answer no is followed by cursing that only confirms the stranger in their opinion of the beggar as frightening and dangerous.
A subcategory of this class of beggar, who perhaps inspires the greatest fear, is the stranger who comes up to you and asks for money while behind him or her, two friends lurk right in your path. It is not begging as such – there is no appeal to charity or understanding. Instead, it is a psychological mugging.
The majority of beggars are the silent huddled ones sitting alone near an ATM, or in shop doors when the shutters are drawn, or outside an expensive jewellery store until the police are called to move them on, or near the railway stations, or outside a café in the hope that enough money may become a sandwich, or a cup of coffee, or that the stranger will be more inclined to believe the cardboard sign with the words “not on drugs, hungry, poor, please help”, or that the staff, at closing-up time, might give them a packet of something about to pass its best-before date, or let them use the bathroom. Passers-by don’t just not see these people; they go out of their way both to ignore them, and then to forget that they ignored them, to drive away from their shamed recollection the shape of the huddled girl with her pet dog and tatty boots, or the image of the old man with the tangled beard who they didn’t even smile at, not wanting to admit that they failed to take pity. If asked why they did not give charity, the standard reply is “They would only have spent it on drugs”. Unkind as this is, the bastard’s reply is even worse: “It’s their fault they’re here; why should I waste my money on someone who can’t be saved?”
Thus, with a single swoop, the entire population of old, young, black, white, frightened, bold, subdued, cowering, cold, ill, hungry, thirsty, dirty or addicted are classified as self-destructive, and every ignored face, every shadow blotted out of the memory of the stranger on the street, can be classed by a single word – failed.
Perhaps they are worth saving, as people are always worth saving, sigh the compassionate.
But perhaps, whispers the voice of cynicism, lurking just below, just perhaps the beggars cannot or worse, do not want to be saved.
Pity and compassion walk a fine line hand in hand, but one will always be a more welcome guest than the other.
At the time, I didn’t understand why Robert James Bakker made me spend a day of my education begging. By the evening of that lesson, I understood entirely.
I watched the faces of those few people who glanced at me and then quickly walked on. A beggar must be humble; must keep his eyes to the ground so as not to frighten the easily afraid. As so many people went by in shiny shoes and comfortable clothes, with big bags and big coats, concerned with how many hundreds of pounds must go out this month to pay the mortgage, rather than with how many pennies will combine to the next cup of tea, my emotions progressed slowly from chilled self-pity to anger at the faces that from four hundred yards away braced themselves to avoid meeting my eye.
It took a kindly woman wearing a dog collar to stop, squat down opposite me, look at my chalk drawing on the pavement and say, “I haven’t seen you before,” to prevent us from grabbing the nearest passing stranger by the ankle and tripping him nose-first to the floor. She gave me two pound fifty and asked if I’d found God. I told her no, but she still gave me a leaflet informing me that Strength is Faith, and directions to a Tuesday evening soup stand. The leaflet fascinated us – why was Strength Faith, and did it matter what you had faith in? The whole concept seemed bizarre to an unusual extreme, but we folded the paper up and put it in our coat pocket, in order to mull over its implications another time.
From that lady onwards, the anger faded, and a numb gratitude settled in at the flick of even a five-pence coin in my direction. It was no longer a burning desire to hate the majority who ignored me; it was a necessary comfort to be grateful to that minority who bothered to demonstrate kindness.
Boredom was the ignoble theme of the day.
Utter, bone-breaking, cold-biting, toe-tingling boredom.
A guy can only mull on self-pity for so long. Too quickly the needs of the body – discomfort, aches, pains, thirst, hunger – kick in so that any pretence at achieving a higher state of spiritual awareness through a day of sitting quickly succumbs to the overwhelming desire to have a pillow to sit on.
Five minutes took fifteen.
An hour was three.
Horrific, unwatched, uncared for, inescapable boredom.
By sunset, I had thirteen pounds forty-eight pence in various pieces of small change. I abandoned my post for a few minutes to buy myself a bread roll, a packet of wafer-thin turkey, an apple and a very large cup of steaming hot coffee, and when I returned my picture in chalk had been smudged over by someone’s thoughtless boot. I managed to bite down the curse on the tip of our tongue before it could harm them for their carelessness. By the time I’d finished repairing the damage, the street lights were flickering on and the cold was starting to spread out with the shadows. We felt exposed on our piece of card as the darkness settled around the neon splotches on the street, unsure without four walls to protect us that the next pair of footsteps wouldn’t steal our hard-won cup of coins, or scuff our picture, or prove to be a monster looking for our blood.
We had no intention of sleeping, and my bones ached too much to let instinct pull me under. Every twitch was an uncomfortable one, every surface not just hard concrete, but deliberately, overengineered, hard concrete whose sole purpose was to push tighter and tighter against the bones in my body, as if the door space I inhabited was closing in against me, trying to squeeze me into a cramped splotch on the floor.
The streets became quieter, my hands became colder. A man staggered down from the pub on the corner, on the other side of the street, saw me, shouted, “Ey-oi mate!” and threw up in the gutter. In a friendly way. He grinned when he was done and proclaimed to the closed windows of the street that he felt much better.
A small child being dragged to bed peered curiously at me as it passed, then waved. We waved back, not being entirely sure how else to respond to small creatures like that. A black taxi pulled up, disgorged a group of women dressed for commercial combat, in suits so tight you could see the seams warping under pressure, and drove off again while they giggled their way down the street.
I let my mind drift. We listened to the brains of the seagulls as they swept towards the river, drawn by the smell of rubbish and salt; we briefly balanced on a wall between two small gardens with terracottapotted plants, in the mind of a stray cat with one beady yellow eye; and we lounged in the senses of a bored fox watching the bins behind the halal burger bar. But it was through our own ears that we heard the regular, unhurried footsteps approaching us up the street.
I half-opened my eyes, straining with my mundane human ears for the sound of someone nearing. The footsteps, when I eventually picked them up again, had a sharp, nail-in-sole click to them, and a steady, inevitable beat, as if the walker was in no great hurry, but would somehow get somewhere regardless of anything. It sounded a good kind of stride.
The owner of the footsteps stopped by my chalk drawing of the stylised king in his crown, rocking back and forward on the balls of his tattily shod feet. The feet wore a pair of once-comfortable soft loafers, now held together with so much hammering and thread, I felt my toes curl at the sight of them. The owner of the shoes said in a nasal voice, “Could be worse.”
I raised my eyebrows and waited for an explanation.
“Could have rained. You wanting something?”
I looked him up and down. He wore badly patched corduroy trousers, a big puffed jacket with stuffing coming out of a clumsily sewn-up gash in the side, which gave him an inflamed, swollen appearance, a shirt that smelt of sweat and old hamburger, together with a pair of knitted gloves, a big blue scarf, and a large woollen hat with the words Arsenal FC in red and white across the front. His face was long and angular, not merely stretching down top to chin, but out in odd directions too, so that the tip of his grizzled jaw protruded nearly as far as the end of his nose, and his ears stuck out, even inside the hat, like he had half a lemon on either side of his head. He scratched his chin with long, dirty brown nails the texture of old wood, and surveyed me through a pair of intelligent grey eyes.
I found that after a day of silence, the words didn’t come.
“New to this?” he asked.
I managed to stumble an “In a way.”
“You’re not one of us, then?”
“No. Not really.”
“But you know about things, I’m guessing.”
“Things? Yes.”
“And I’m just guessing,” he said, rolling his eyes with melodramatic emphasis, “that you’ve got an agenda.” He spat the word between his wonky front teeth. “Everyone’s got a fucking agenda these days, too easy just to give money on the street, oh no, we’ve got social assets to consider and fucking community spirit. All right. You’ve sat the sitting, drawn the fucking picture, whatever. What do you want, sorcerer?”
He didn’t like the word sorcerer. That was just fine. I was beginning to understand why it might not be popular.
“Well,” I said, pulling myself up one stiff joint at a time and rubbing some of the numbness out of my arms, “ideally I want to destroy the Tower and all its works for the evil it has committed, for its own selfish acts against the magical community of the city among others, and to see the shadows of its making burnt so even the walls can no longer remember their stains. But right now, I’d settle for a cup of tea, a comfy chair and an audience with the Beggar King.”
He led me to a scrapyard underneath the Westway, a great big sprawling bypass that in five minutes of motorway trundling takes the traveller from Paddington to Shepherd’s Bush, above and parallel to the railway line out of the station. In the grey, smelly shadows underneath the motorway some of his flock were clustered: men in torn jackets, clumped round fires burning in old metal canisters, women with pale, lifeless skin, and thick veins standing out on the tops of their hands, eating chips and sharing a single, depressing cigarette.
He lived in an abandoned London Transport maintenance van, whose walls were insulated with more variations on a theme of flearidden blanket than I had ever seen. It boasted at one end a large metal safe, into which he deposited from his pockets two packs of hotel matches, presumably lifted from some expensive side table before he was thrown out, a rusted tin-opener, and some loose change amounting to roughly £27. He said, not really paying me much attention, “I accept donations.”
I gave him all my day’s takings. There are always rules, always prices to be paid. A day sitting in the cold; an offering of pennies and shiny five-pence pieces. These are rules so obvious, they never needed to be written down. Nothing about the Beggar King is ever written down.
He grunted and said, “Seen worse,” turned on a tiny paraffin heater, put a tin of tomato soup onto it, and as it started to bubble in the can he sat down, cross-legged on top of a pile of thick, itchy tartan blankets and old stained trousers, scratched his chin and said, “So … I’m guessing you’ve got issues if you’re looking for a chat with the old miser. That’s the word, isn’t it? We aren’t allowed to say problem these days.”
“‘Issues’ is fine,” I said. “I think the king might even have a few in common with me.”
“Such as?”
“The Tower.”
“Shit, what the hell’s he got to do with it? They don’t bother us much.”
“How little is ‘much’?”
“He can’t protect everyone,” said the man, eyes flashing.
“From what I hear, have read, the Tower takes beggars off the street. San Khay offered me a trip in the senses of an addict on the edge of death. I can think of no better way to get that than from a beggar, alone, unnoticed, dying in the dark.”
“We have … the occasional clash. These things happen.”
“I saw a warehouse,” I replied carefully. “It was run, maintained, by Amiltech, probably on behalf of Guy Lee. In the basement, I found the body of a beggar. Things had been done to it. Everyone knows Guy Lee has an interest in necromancy. It needs tools. Are you going to sit and wait for Guy Lee to catch an unfortunate disease off one of his badly washed bodies until you say, No more?”
“You see what happens to the enemies of the Tower?” he asked, casually scraping a thick nailful of dirt out from under his thumb.
“Yes.”
“And you’re still looking for a fight. Well, shit.”
“I think the Beggar King would understand.”
“Why?”
He wasn’t looking at me, this man with his huge beard. He gave off the air of a man who just didn’t care, who, above all these things, was lost in fascinated study of the dirt under his nails. Perhaps it wasn’t an act. Perhaps these things really were as tiny to him as dust in the street.
I shifted uneasily, licked my lips. “Because, like the Bag Lady and the Boatman, it’s not just a title, is it?” I stared at him, daring him to speak. “Sure, there’s been a lot of beggar kings, a lot of dead bodies left in unmarked graves or thrown into the river. But the Beggar King, the real Beggar King, who comes when you draw the image of his crown on the pavement and sacrifice a day of takings to his throne, lives on, generation after generation. The Beggar King is there when the druggie dies alone in the puke and shit of his last shot, holding a bloodless hand until the last breath is gone. The Beggar King is the shadow across the street who smiles up at the window of the refuge when the homeless girl gets given her own room, and tells her it’s all right, you don’t have to fear the walls. The Beggar King … the real Beggar King … is the one you offer your prayers to when your jacket is too thin and the stones are too hard, and every penny you have has just been taken away by the spite of people who don’t understand. Not just flesh and blood, yes?”
“You should know,” he replied quietly. “They told me, when you went from the telephone lines.”
We went cold, and my jaw felt like it was locked.
He smiled at us.
“Bright blue eyes,” he murmured. “They don’t suit you.”
“We are … we … as … we are …”
“Tongue-tied?”
I stuttered, “Will you help me?”
“Just you? Just the little mortal wearing a dead man’s flesh? Or do you want something more? What, you have to ask yourself, but what do the angels want?”
“We are … we … we want revenge.”
He chuckled. “Join the queue. You get used to that too, on the streets. Gotta be polite. Gotta keep to the rules. Gotta cause no trouble,’cause the second you’re trouble” – he snapped his fingers – “no one will even try to save you.” Then, “What exactly do you intend?”
“I need to find the Whites.”
“Why?”
“Bakker is at the heart of the Tower, but he’s protected. Guy Lee, Harris Simmons, Dana Mikeda …”
“San Khay?” It was an accusation as well as a question.
“I didn’t kill him.”
“I would have.”
“I didn’t.”
“Nasty way to go, from what I hear; suggests a slightly loopy brain at work and frankly I …”
“We didn’t kill him!”
He smiled, an expression of unamused interest. “Well,” he said, “at least part of you is honest. Which part, though?”
“Guy Lee is master of an underworld army,” we said. “His creatures prey on the ignorant, the innocent; he keeps the clans down under an iron fist, his enemies …”
“All enemies of the Tower disappear, little sorcerer!” he snapped. “You know this, I think? But perhaps such people should be fucking controlled, yes? By concerned citizens, maybe, making sure that those who know the secrets of these things don’t go spilling them too easily to the masses? To the piss-stupid fucking people?”
“Bakker does it for his own ends, not for others.”
“And what ends are those? Does anyone know?”
“I can make a good guess,” I muttered.
“Can you?” He leant forward eagerly. “I’m all ears.”
We met his eyes squarely. “He wants to be like you, your majesty. He wants to be an idea. He wants to outlive his own flesh.”
He drew back, face darkening. “Impossible,” he said. “So shit.”
“You know it’s not. There wasn’t always a Beggar King, there wasn’t always a Bag Lady. These things have to grow out of something, they have to have a vessel, a beginning, and eventually, a conclusion. He will be like you.”
“You know this?”
“I know this.”
“But do you know this?” There was an urgency to his voice, a hungry intensity. “Not you, little sorcerer, but you, do you know this?”
We recoiled, surprised at the force of his gaze, and stammered, “We are not … this world is still strange.”
“You’re just a fucking child, aren’t you?” he laughed.
“I’m not.”
“Sure, sure, whatever,” he said, waving a casual curled, dirty fist in the air. “You’ve lived long enough to die. But them, the other ones with the bright blue eyes – fucking kids! Never seen nothing! Never felt nothing! Christ, and you want my help?”
“Yes,” we replied. “We do.”
He leant back slowly, a look of dissatisfaction on his face. Finally he said, “If I do anything for you, all my people are put at risk. I have a responsibility.”
“The Tower is dangerous,” I repeated.
“And you can stop it?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Because Bakker’s shadow slit your throat and with your dying breath you managed to slip into the blueness that he dreams of achieving?”
I felt the pain of a dozen old aches, weeks old to my mind, a life ago to the world, the burning in my skin. Taste of blood in my mouth. I thought that, with enough fish and chips, hot tea, crispy bacon, with enough new memories to wipe over the old, it would go. But there it was again, still again, the iron bite of it on my lips.
I still needed help.
So, I got down on one knee in front of him, and bowed my head in respect to the Beggar King.
“If you help me,” I said, “if you would honour us,” we added, “we will stop the shadow.”
His eyes flashed up brightly, alert, interested. “The shadow?” he asked quickly.
“It grows out of nothing. It has yellow teeth, dead skin, watery eyes,” I replied, trying not to see too clearly the images in my head. “You’ll have heard of it. It says, ‘Give me life.’ Help us. Join us against the Tower.”
He thought about it, then put his hand on my shoulder, the skin warm through my clothes. “I offer you a thought to consider, little sorcerer. If Bakker thinks he can beat his own death, have you not considered that, now you are out of the wire, it might be your very blue blood that can help him do this?”
We looked up slowly, uncertainly, and were met with an almost fatherly sigh. He patted us on the head, as if we were a young child making innocent remarks that, to a wiser audience, were laced with hidden meaning. “I suggest this, in case you’re wondering who might have brought you back.”
We opened our mouth to speak, but he said abruptly, “Right, can’t have you lolling around here, bugger off!”
The moment passed, our mind still revolving this interesting, frightening idea. Who brought us back? Why? I stood up uncertainly, to occupy the space of my own silence, and said, “Will you …”
“Maybe. I’ll think about it.”
“But if …”
“You’re going to ask the Whites, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“They will help you.”
“I don’t know where they are.”
“Well, shit!” he laughed. “All you gotta do is follow the writing on the wall!”
We left him there, the Beggar King in his court of rags and fleas.
We navigated while my mind drifted, picking our way through the night with our eyes wandering through every flowerpot, lamp-post, fence and street sign, marvelling that however well we thought we knew these streets, when we looked again we could still find something new in them. I thought about Elizabeth Bakker, sitting with just the pigeons for company in her care home. I thought about the Beggar King, the Bag Lady, and my gran, who liked the songs that the rats sung in the night through the hole in the corner of her floor, and always fed the squirrels. Somehow, thinking about it all made me feel tired, cold, the anger of my certainty fading down to just a flat recognition of things that needed to be done, rather than things that I desired.
However, before anything more could be done, there was somewhere we had to go first.
If I was going to get help, I wasn’t going to be picky about where it came from.
Subways at roundabouts and beneath busy streets are, in general, frightening places. It’s not simply the basic London subway with its friendly sign in big blue letters “POLICE PATROLS HERE” to comfort the uneasy traveller; it’s not the strange, translucent stalactites drooping down from the ceiling like warm salt icicles; it’s not even the odd patch of pondlike green mould on the floor to trip the unwary passer-by. It’s the enclosed, hidden nature of the place, which makes human instinct flex its fingertips in uncertainty and distress at the thought of imminent destruction, the utter confidence that whatever happens, in the subways there’s no place you can run.
I arrived early, around 2 a.m. in the maze of tunnels underneath the roundabouts, one-way systems and sprawling circular roads on the edge of Aldgate, where the City becomes simply the city, and the signs point to The North as well as to Bow and Whitechapel. In London, places beyond its boundaries are always called The North or The West, too big, too vague and too Not London to merit any more detailed descriptions.
I huddled down by the specified exit, pulling my coat around me for warmth, and let the hum of the intermittent traffic – lorries full of the next day’s shopping, bras, socks, shoes and a dozen different kinds of apple – travel with a buzz up my fingertips.
I was half-asleep by the time the biker sat down next to me with a loud “Oof!”, stretching out his legs into the narrow concrete width of the passage and dumping a big black sports bag down at his side. “You look shitty,” he said. “Not a morning person?”
“I didn’t notice you,” I said.
“You surprised?”
“Not entirely. No great reprisals got to you, since I saw you last?”
He gave a grunting half-laugh. “You really surprised?” he repeated. “I move too fast for any whacked-out fucker to catch.”
“Not at all,” we sighed.
“I hear you’ve been busy.”
“Really?”
“San Khay.”
“I didn’t kill him; please let’s not go down that line of enquiry.”
“It wasn’t you?”
“No.”
“Jesus. Although – you didn’t seem like the blood-drinking, heart-ripper type.”
“Touching. I don’t suppose you’re up for lending me a hand?”
“That’s why I’m sat in this shit-hole talking to you,” he replied with a shrug. “Anything in particular?”
“I’m looking for help to go up against Guy Lee; are you interested?”
“Why Lee?”
“He might know things about Bakker. And even if he doesn’t, he has a small army at his command. It’d be nice to know that it’s not at his command, before going after the top of the Tower.”
“Why do you need help? You seemed just fine with Amiltech. Swanned off all mysterious for your solo day of judgment, like something out of a fucking Clint Eastwood movie.”
“That’s just it,” I replied, thinking of the shadow rising up from the darkness of Paternoster Square. “This time, they’ll know I’m coming. Guy Lee isn’t going to make the mistake San did.”
“How much help?” he asked carefully. “I ain’t gonna speak for the others.”
“It’s still all in the planning, but I thought the Whites, the beggars, the bikers, the painters, the drifters, the …”
“Dregs of fucking society, right?”
“Guy Lee isn’t renowned for his selectivity, either, when it comes to membership.”
“You think you can beat Lee?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not going to be like pissing around with San Khay. If Lee knows you’re coming, he’s not just going to sit by while you torch the office and curse the staff.”
“Yes,” we said. “We were thinking that.”
“You must have one hell of a beef.”
“It’s the entire bull and the horns, since you ask.”
“What makes you think you can pull this lot together? Shit, no wonder sorcerers have short life expectancies – that’s some cock-arsed arrogance you must have, wobbling around inside the pink stuff in your head.”
“I think they’ll want to help.”
“Why?”
“Because the Tower will probably make the decision for them.”
“You like being a mysterious bastard, don’t you?” he asked with a grin. “Sweet.”
“I learnt a few nasty lessons.”
“Bakker teach you any in-between classes?” he asked in an overly casual voice, and when I looked up, “Oh, yeah, I can do fucking research too, you know.”
I steepled my fingers, took in a long breath of the piss-stained air of the subway tunnels, half-closed my eyes. “And you are called Blackjack, Christ knows why; you’re a member of the biker clan, the men and women who specialise in living off speed, being nowhere and everywhere, who revel in their own freedom; and when they travel, the road is shorter for them than for anyone else. Your leader, if you guys can really be said to have one, was murdered, and your clan attacked. You like being unpredictable, unexpected, everywhere and nowhere, standing up for being a difficult bastard just to see the looks on people’s faces, you think being normal is being shameful … shall we carry on, and see who runs out of trivia first?”
To our surprise, he grinned. “You want to know a secret?”
“Always.”
“My real name is Dave.”
“I see.”
“This doesn’t seem to amuse you.”
“I met Jeremy the troll a few nights ago.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. Also known as the Mighty Raaaarrggh! Although … I can sorta see why you changed the name. ‘Dave’ isn’t known for its mysterious, mystic sexiness.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“‘Matthew the sorcerer’? You weren’t tempted to go for something … well … with more vowel sounds?”
“To tell the truth, the idea didn’t occur to me.”
A footstep at the end of the subway, loud on the wet stairs leading down. Blackjack added casually, fingering his bag, “Like I say, I got a lot of research done on you while I was wandering.”
“Hum?” I asked absently. We eyed the stairwell at the end of the tunnel.
“Uh-huh. But the bird – Oda? … she’s a slippery fish to pin down.”
We tried in vain to decipher the layers of imagery. We opened our mouth to ask a question, and Oda was at the end of the tunnel, and Oda wasn’t alone.
Sometimes, dignity is sacrificed under the weight of sheer, adrenalinrush instinct. Instinct said fight or flight, but there wasn’t anywhere to fly to in that long tiled gloom under the ring road. We stood up hastily, keeping the rumbling of the traffic still in our fingertips to be unleashed at any given moment, and said, very carefully, “We were to meet alone.”
Blackjack was also on his feet, eyeing up the two men who stood flanking Oda. He had a tight, cold look on his face; at his side his fingers gently flexed.
Oda said, “Someone wants to talk to you.”
The men on either side of her reached into their pockets. Their hands weren’t even out before Blackjack was taking something from his bag and his fist was wrapped in a length of chain that seemed to grow at his touch into a writhing, living snake of metal links, lashing into the air and stretching as it moved. I saw guns being pulled out from the bulging jackets of the two men with Oda, and instinctively snuffed out the light, crudely swiping at the strip lights overhead with the rumbling heat still in my fingertips, bursting the bulbs with a loud static pop and a sprinkling of falling glass. I put my hands round my head to protect it from the crystal tinkling as the shards rained down, and turned and ran.
Somewhere in the dark I heard a loud snap, a rattling sound as of a chain scraped along a tiled wall and the crunch of tiles being pulled free from their mortar with the passage of the metal links; I heard running feet, shouting, the click of catches and gears. Perhaps in different circumstances we would have stayed and fought, we would have burnt them all for daring to challenge us – but I feared guns, I didn’t like to try and stop bullets in the dark, it was too unpredictable. I stuck my hands out to feel along the wall and stumbled towards the yellow glow at the other end of the tunnel, away from Oda, Blackjack and the men in black. I heard a gunshot – it wasn’t as I had expected, not a ringing blast in the dark, but a snap, more like the bursting of an air rifle than an explosion of chemicals – but whatever it was, I heard a shout in the gloom that could well have been Blackjack’s voice, and for a moment thought about going back for him, pulling up all the glass pieces on the floor and throwing them down the tunnel in a wave, like a swarm of angry flies; but by now I was at the staircase at the other end and clawing my way up into the open where I could see, stand my ground, fight with more effective tools and …
“Hey, sorcerer?”
The voice came from the pavement above the mouth of the subway stairwell, out of my line of sight. That too was probably the source of the dart that impaled my back like the nose of an angry swordfish, and with it, the quick shrinking down of my world to a pinprick of yellow light that tightened, tightened and, with a sigh, went out, taking me with it.
We woke, didn’t know where we were, and panicked. In our confusion we lashed out at the nearest thing we could find and shattered the front passenger seat window into a hail of safety glass with our fear, before a hot electric snap across our neck sent us lurching back into a painful blackness, from which no amount of violent dreaming could wake us.
When we next woke, we felt a tightness in our chest, an aching in our arms, a terrible pain in our shoulders, and a hot patch of blood in the small of our back, where the dart that had first knocked us into darkness had been pulled out by someone who didn’t care how much it bit into our skin. We jerked on waking, the fear sweeping us; but this time awareness and control were quicker to come and with all my strength I kept my eyes shut, my breathing level, and my face empty.
That first start of surprise when we woke, though, had betrayed us, and over the sound of rushing traffic, through the flashing regular pulse of neon light racing by and the cold breath of wind through the shattered passenger window, we heard Oda’s voice say, disinterestedly, “He’s awake again,” and that was cue enough for someone to send us back to darkness.
The last waking of that outward journey was the slowest of them all. There was no more traffic hum around me, but the pain in my joints was amplified tenfold. I came back to awareness with the slow understanding that the greyness on the edge of my vision was the beginning of sunrise, that the wetness on my face was from dew on the grass, that the cold dampness seeping through my clothes was rising up from the mud I’d been dropped on, that the pain in my shoulders came from the position of my arms, pinned behind my body, which had then fallen back, cutting off any remaining circulation to my fingertips. I felt frazzled and sick, but not entirely afraid. Perhaps the repetition of my wakings and sleepings had inured me to fear; perhaps it was simple relief at being alive, I didn’t know and didn’t care – the stillness of my own mind was a comfortin itself.
The world fascinated us, that I now saw at right-angles from where our head had fallen on the grass. As the pale sunlight started to sneak over the top of a chalky hill, we became aware of the smell of mud, animals, dead leaves, mould, rain, dew, cattle manure and fresh water, mixed with just a hint of burnt tyre. We heard the calls of wrens, sparrows, starlings, magpies, blackbirds, blue tits, and woodpeckers, and saw, crawling an inch from our nose through the mud, tiny flies and other insects, some no more substantial than the lightest drizzle glimpsed falling at night in front of a street lamp. We had never seen so much open nothingness, nor imagined that nothingness could be so busy in the pallid light. We searched for power to drag to our hands, to pick at the tight plastic cuffs that were rapidly causing our fingers to go numb, and though it was there, though we could sense some sort of magic, some lingering essence on the cold air, it was strange to us, like an echo of song, heard far off.
Countryside.
Bloody crappy pollen-drenched, grass-covered, dew-soaked bloody countryside.
Not a neon bulb, not a power line, not a water or gas main within half a mile all around. Nothing to arm myself with, except what little warmth was left inside our blood.
A voice said, “I take it you’re not a country man.”
I croaked, tasting bile in my mouth, “It’s got its charms.”
“But you are an urban magician, Mr Swift. Your disposition lies elsewhere, you find your magic in the cities, not the fields, correct?”
“Just a point of view,” I whispered. “That’s all.”
Hands pulled me up by the elbows and shoulders, and as the world swung back into place I forced down the taste of acid in my throat, and half-closed my eyes against the sensation of spinning. I saw a pair of black leather shoes, topped by smart black trousers, a black jacket and – here was the bad news – a dog collar and a purple scarf. Never underestimate the ridiculous things that have been done in the name of religious-semantic obscurity.
The face that topped these defining features was round and smiling, friendly in the manner of all inviting alligators who only want to talk; it was the colour of rich, dark chocolate, and topped by silvery-grey curly hair, plaited at the back of the neck into dreadlocks of such solidity that I suspected they’d never be undone. The owner of this ensemble appearance spoke in a soft voice, lyrical with a gentle tone, and said, “May I put a suggestion to you, Mr Swift?”
“Where’s the biker?” I asked. “What about Blackjack?”
“He’s fine.”
“Fine what? Finely chopped, with a stick of celery?”
“I think, considering your position, you’ll have to take my word on it, Mr Swift.”
I looked round cautiously. The field in which I’d been dumped was bordered by tall trees on two sides; elsewhere it stretched away into more rolling muddy shapes: a landscape devoid of any kind of help. Around me, in various poses of threatening or sceptical looming intent, were more men and women, of every colour and age; some held guns, and one or two, we noticed with something resembling disgust, were holding swords, or fireman’s axes, with the look of people who not only knew how to use them, but enjoyed doing so. Oda was among them; in one hand she had a curved blade that resembled a samurai’s katana, still in its ornate sheath, while over her shoulder and more to the point, I felt, was slung an automatic rifle with a sturdy wooden butt and the well-oiled look of a weapon properly cared for.
She stared at me, and there was no pity in her gaze.
I stammered, trying to keep our eyes on the silver-haired man, “You want something.”
“I have a question I’d like to ask you. Or at least, I’ve got a question I’ve been asked to ask you. Personally, I find it unlikely you will survive the judgment, but these tests must still be administered, even now and to someone as shrunken as you.”
“You’ve got my attention.”
“Can you control them?”
“What?”
“It’s very simple, Mr Swift. Can you keep control?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Please, let’s not play coy with this. It is the matter on which your whole life currently depends. Should I decide that you are incapable of keeping the creatures currently inside you at bay, should I judge that you are a threat equal or even superior to that which you are attempting to destroy, I will have your head removed from your shoulders, your face shot off, your fingerprints burnt away and the remnants dumped in a variety of rivers feeding a number of fish-infested seas. So please, take me seriously when I say, I will have an answer. Can you keep control?”
I licked my lips and felt the shaking in my bones. “I’m a sorcerer. I’ve been taught how to …”
“This isn’t about your sorcery!” he snapped. “Tell me about them.”
“About who?”
He hit us with the back of his hand, across the face, and his knuckles slammed into our jaw and the pain filled us with shock and astonishment, anger flashing inside us. Hands pulled me back up and he said again,
“Can you keep control?”
“Who are you?”
He hit us on the other side of our head, and when we tried to crawl back up of our own accord he hit us again, knocking us once more to the earth. I bit down the anger turning the silver streaks of sunlight electric blue in my eyes and waited for the people there to pull me up. When they did, he said again, “You must be angry by now, Mr Swift, you must be afraid. You’ve died once before, and your kind can only see the flames of hell when your heart stops, when your soul leaves, so you must be afraid. Can you control them, when they think about dying, when they wonder about losing their newfound existence, can you stop them from lashing out, can you keep them under the calm waters of reason, can you persuade them not to fight, kick, scream defiance, can you stay human? Can you keep control?”
I took too long to think of an answer, tasting blood on my lips, and he hit us again and pressed his foot down across our neck, forcing our face into the mud, and leant close and hissed, “Is your blood on fire yet, can you stop it blazing?”
We snarled at him, twisting under his weight, but he just smiled and kicked us, knocking us flat to one side; and now we were angry, we were ready to take his heart and crush it until it burst, we were ready to boil the blood in its vessels, we were prepared to …
I squeezed my eyes shut against the blueness and pressed my face deeper into the earth, feeling the coldness of it against my skin and breathing rapidly, trying to purge the pain from my muscles, chill the heat away from my blood. Hands pulled me up again, and the silver-haired man came close, pulling my face up so that blood trickled down from my nose into my mouth, and leaning in until his breath tasted of coffee and too many hours without brushing his teeth. He hissed, “What are they saying now, sorcerer? Are they cowering like the children that they are, or do they have a darker purpose, a more aggressive intent? Which is it, Mr Swift?”
“You,” I hissed through the blood on my tongue, “will have to work it out for yourself.”
He tugged my head up until it hurt, staring into our blue eyes, then, with a grunt, pushed me back and stepped away.
I tried calming our anger a little at a time with nice, rational placations, soothing over the fear with the thought that if killing was all he had in mind, we wouldn’t have had a chance to notice. As I did, I carefully rubbed my fingers together in the palm of my hand, feeling the dirt between them, the heavy dark soil, with just a hint, delicate, and so hard to pin down with my city-attuned senses, of rich, active magic. I was no druid, I had no understanding of the lore of natural things; but perhaps, just possibly, there was a little strength to be drawn from here, if you could only look at it from the right point of view. Even in this place, strange and alien to us, there was the beauty that, to our eyes, made magic.
The silver-haired man said sharply, “I want to talk to them.”
“To who?” I mumbled, probing my teeth with my tongue for any new looseness.
“Let’s not waste time with definitions. I want to speak to them.”
“You’re an idiot,” I said. “There’s only me here. Do you think I’ve got an alien in my belly, do you think there’s a Siamese twin attached to my shoulder that never had the chance to grow? You talk to me.”
I half-expected him to hit me again. We almost relished the idea, ready for the fury that explodes with pain; enough, perhaps, just enough to give us the strength and passion to grasp the tiny fragment of elusive power in this place and use it to pop his chest open. To my surprise, though, he didn’t hit me, but squatted down on his haunches in front of me, and said, “Let me tell you what I think.”
I nodded, hypnotised by his gaze, taste of blood in my mouth.
“I’m a man of words, you see? I read, I study, I think, I train myself to think only in words, neat, linear structures, passages with correct punctuation that can define a train of reasoning, understanding – nothing left to chance. I am also a man of faith. At the end of the logical chain, when all knowledge that I have acquired – and the knowledge is significant – when the end of the chain runs out into an infinity of uncertain questions and doubts, I know that there is still an answer. You may object to calling it God, you probably find the term too vague – I understand that, it’s fine. You think of a big man with a beard. I think of force. God is force. God is strength, certainty, movement, motion, direction, power, and he sits at the end of all things, and he will, sorcerer, condemn you. Not because you are a heretic – which, by the way, you are – not because your soul is necessarily so black or so tainted, not because you have killed or fought or stolen; all these sins can be purged in fire. He will condemn you, because you aspire to be like him, and have the arrogance not even to think of the consequences.”
He seemed to expect some kind of response to this statement, so I said, nearly choking on the words, “You’re going to burn me?” We added, “You can try,” and I immediately bit my tongue so hard I could feel the pain in my ears.
He didn’t show any sign of noticing our slip, just gave a dry, humourless chuckle. “Times have moved on. The good must be merciful, even if that mercy to the damned is merely in a quick dispatch.”
“That’s not much of a comfort.”
“The problem is, times are not so simple as in the days of the Book. Utilitarianism, I think; we must choose the lesser of two evils. I take comfort, when I contemplate your evil enduring, in the thought that when the day of judgment comes, when we are all standing naked in front of the Lord, you will be damned and I will not. And in the mean time, I may, perhaps, do some good to the innocent of this life in setting you against another who is more foul even than your taint.”
“Bakker.” I didn’t need to ask.
“Robert James Bakker,” he agreed. He slapped his thighs and straightened with a sudden jovial expression. “Of course, if you were not in your current condition I would just let the two of you tear each other apart – sorcerer against sorcerer. But he is more powerful, I think, than you ever were, even though he chose you, Matthew Swift, to be his apprentice. I could take comfortin the fact that perhaps you could, for a time, weaken him with your attack, and that he, in killing you, had rid the world of one more sorcerer – but it doesn’t solve the initial problem, does it? How do you defeat a man like Robert Bakker? A man surrounded by every kind of protection and ally, a man with powerful friends and powers of his own, a man whose enemies die, and they seem great until they fall. I find that under such circumstances, I am forced to deal with the better kind of devils, to defeat a worse. Am I making sense?”
I nodded.
“Which brings me to my only serious problem. I am more than prepared to let you live, for the moment, Mr Swift, so that you and Bakker can, I hope, destroy each other. But before I let you live, I need to know that you are not a greater threat, that the things which sustain you have not yet consumed all rational restraint. So, Matthew Swift” – he brushed invisible dirt off the black fold of his trousers – “let us talk about the blue electric angels.”
We looked up into his eyes, and held his gaze, and I was happy to see an instant of doubt on his face. We said, “We are hard to kill, if you are thinking of trying. We persist, even if it will not be in this place.”
He let out a satisfied breath, and murmured, “Well, it is nice to finally meet you.”
“It’s not like I went anywhere,” I declared. “Even if you kill us, we will endure, we will find a way back; it is our nature, although I won’t be too happy about it.”
“That’s remarkable!”
“What is?”
“The way you switch without even blinking. One second, monster from beyond the plane of flesh and blood; next second, angry little man, suddenly cut off from all that power he’s used to throwing around. A seamless switch, not even dribbling on the way. Not normal for possession; something more subtle, yes?”
“We are the same,” we said.
“The same what? Same flesh? Doesn’t mean anything, haven’t you seen any 1970s horror films?”
“We are Matthew Swift.”
“However pretentious the man may have been in life, I’m sure he didn’t use the plural pronoun.”
“I am the blue electric angels,” I explained, licking away the taste of salt and iron around the edges of my mouth. “It’s really very simple. We are me and I am us.”
“That doesn’t sound simple at all.”
“You have a limited imagination. I guessed as much.”
His jaw tightened, but he didn’t move. “I am curious, Mr Blue-Eyed Swift, how exactly you found yourself in this predicament.”
“I’m assuming one of your men shot me,” I replied. “It’s all a bit blurred.”
“I was thinking more of how you found yourself bonded to and controlled by …”
“There is nothing to control,” we snapped.
“… controlled by,” he repeated firmly, “creatures as strange as the blue electric angels.”
I said, “I doubt you’d understand.”
“I’m not here to understand, I’m here to assess.”
“That’s not much of a comfort.”
“Don’t you want to buy some time, to see if you can get your senses round the magic of this place, see if you can coax your brain to the magic of leaves and sunlight rather than concrete and neon? I’m sure you must. Tell me.”
I let out a long, shuddering breath that I hadn’t realised was inside me. That seemed to take all the fight out of me, leave my chest empty, so I shook my head and muttered, “All right. All right; it goes something like this:”
***
In which certain memories best left forgotten are duly remembered.
“When I was fourteen years old, the phones started talking to me. I dialled the wrong number one day – I was trying to get the local library, but instead I got a bank helpline. It said:
“‘Welcome to telephone banking! To change your credit card details, please press one. To check your current account balance, press two. To dance in fire until the end of your days, please press three. Hi, this is Mara speaking; sorry, I’m out at the moment, but if you could leave your message after the beep, I’ll be sure to get back to you when the shadows have swept down the wall. Thanks! Which service do you require, police, fire, ambulance or exorcist? To cancel a direct debit, please press the star key. To send your soul across the infinite void faster than the blink of the mind dreaming in the moonlight, please press hash now.’ And so on.
“I would wait at the bus stop and the rats would come and look at me; I would run through the streets at night and the freedom of it, the exhilaration of it, nearly killed me. I forgot to eat, to drink, to sleep, grew drunk on the feeling in my bones, on the beauty of the lights around me, on the sounds of the city, on the senses of other creatures.
“When he found me, I weighed eight stone two, had just failed GCSEs, was on tranquillisers and on the verge of being consigned to a care home. He showed me kindness, took me away from my home, where my mother was trying to care for me – and my gran. She didn’t say no when this wealthy, kindly man offered to take me under his wing; but only later did I realise it wasn’t just his smile that had talked her into it. My gran told me always to trust the pigeons, and when I told him I didn’t know what she meant, he just smiled, patted me on the shoulder and said it would be all right, I’d work it out one day. Magic isn’t genetic, it’s not something programmed in your DNA. But it does run in families – in the same way that you can say, these people are morose or these are funny or these have their own, unique turns of phrase. For example, my mum didn’t like the city; but when we went outside to the country she became like I was when I first tasted that magic, glowing, alive with the feel of it, revelling in all its forms in her blood, strengthening her by mere presence. It wasn’t a spell, it was something more than that, a link, a consciousness that here is something special, indescribable, infinitely rich. I learnt from her a relish for life; but for me, it was something to be found in the city; and that, nothing more, is what makes me a sorcerer.
“He said his name was Robert James Bakker, but I was to call him Bobby. I called him Mr Bakker though, like my mum said. He paid for me to retake my GCSEs and hired me a tutor, and I passed – not well, but well enough. He said that you had to understand the minds of others, their learning and their ideas, before you could excel them; that to be a good sorcerer, you had to be a good man first. The day I got my A-levels he took me out into the city and taught me my very first lesson. We walked through the empty arcade of Leadenhall Market, late at night, when the wind was cold off the river, and he taught me to feel the light on my skin, as if it was silk, how to tighten my fingers around it and pull it along like a cloak, drag it down to me away from the walls and ceilings until I was on fire with its brightness and everything else around me was smothered in dark, taught me to wear it inside me, as well as over me, a furious burning in the heart. I learnt how to summon the Beggar King, about the legends of the city – the Midnight Mayor, Fat Rat, the Seven Sisters, the dragon that guards the old London Wall, Domine dirige nos, the old rules and the new magics. He taught me everything I know, was teacher, sponsor, father, friend for nearly ten years. Rich, kind and powerful; things I had never seen or imagined in my childhood.
“Sorcerers don’t have any textbooks, formal lessons, ritual incantations or spells like the magicians do. Magicians use the wisdom of others, gestures of power, words of binding to do their bidding – theirs is a precise, focused magic. Sorcerers bind a different kind of magic: ours is the power of seeing the power in the most ordinary thing, and binding it to our will; it is wild, free, beautiful and dangerous. Teaching control is the most vital lesson, one that is learned at various speeds. Some sorcerers submerge their natures entirely to the rhythms of the city, forget that they do not have wings or that their feet are in Knightsbridge, because their mind is too busy following the route of the number-nine bus up Piccadilly at the same time that their eyes are lost in the senses of a rat somewhere in Enfield. Others establish control ruthlessly, minimise all that they do, everything tight, precise; they revel in what they can do only for themselves, everything for a neat, exacting purpose, rather than the richer enchantments known to some.
“Bakker said I could be whatever I wanted, that every sorcerer was unique to their own nature. I studied under him until I was twenty-four, but I could never have the control he had. He was, then, a middle-aged man, who didn’t show a day of it: his personality – vibrant, powerful, passionate – was stamped all over his magic, in extravagant shows of force that you felt he could never contain, and yet which were always, in the most delicate manner possible, well within his control. I have never seen a more powerful, nor a more talented sorcerer; he could breathe the air off the river and, on its smell alone, run a mile. Perhaps that should have warned me. He was so full of the stuff of life, one day it had to burst.
“When I was twenty-four, he said I was fine, ready; that my life was my own and I could do what I wished. So I did. I travelled – to Bangkok, Beijing, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Madrid, New York; in every place I earned money by teaching English or serving as a cleaner or a kitchen dishwasher for a few months, just so I could experience the different magics of those places. In New York the air is so full of static you almost spark when you move; in Madrid the shadows are waiting at every corner to whisper their histories in your ear when you walk at night. In Berlin the power is clean, silken, like walking through an invisible, body-temperature waterfall in a dark cave; in Beijing the sense of it was a prickling heat on the skin, like the wind had been broken down into a thousand pieces, and each part carried some warmth from another place, and brushed against your skin, like a furry cat calling for your attention.
“It may not sound much of a life to you – travelling, with no real home, no constant friends as such. But for me it was a day-to-day revelation, which Bakker had taught me a sorcerer’s life should be, even if it stood still. A sorcerer, he said, can walk down the same street, twice a day for the rest of his life, and should be able to spot something new about it every time. Relish what you see, what you have: sounds, sight, touch, smell, that’s what keeps you a sorcerer, that’s what lets you understand what magic really is. It took me some time to realise what he meant, but he was right. Whatever has happened to him now, I will always remember then – he was right.
“I will spare you the details of my doings. I was, as you have pointed out, not one of the most interesting sorcerers, I did not seek to change the world, and had no great crusade to fire me. I will jump ahead a little.
“I came back to London. Worked a little, lived a little; nothing extraordinary. Then, about two years ago, I got a phone call from Robert Bakker’s office. He had had a stroke and was in hospital; he wanted to see me. I didn’t understand, at first, how this strong, vibrant man could be a mortal. But everyone gets older, even if it’s only in the flesh. I visited him, of course I did – anyone would have done the same. I was relieved to find his mind was still in one piece – he recognised me, spoke to me reasonably, lucidly, didn’t seem to have any difficulty with the mundane, automatic skills that strokes sometimes kill, as simple as lifting a fork, or putting on a pair of trousers – all that, he remembered well enough. But there had been complications, the doctors weren’t sure how serious, and all the best consultants were called in to offer placating sounds.
“Over the weeks, however, it grew evident how serious it was. He was paralysed from the waist down, and would not walk again.
“At first he laughed and said it was an excuse for the lazy lifestyle he’d always wanted. But the reality of paralysis is more than just being unable to move – it is a loss of dignity. He could not put on his own trousers any more without help, or go to the toilet, or stand in the shower, or climb stairs, or get out of the bath, or reach a book on the shelf, or reach a pot to cook a meal. I think it was the indignity that first started to turn him. I noticed it, in my visits to him, over the weeks at the hospital as he went into physiotherapy, a growing anger at the indignity of it all, the unfairness – he, who had never smoked, drunk to excess, travelled to dangerous places or even had any particularly reckless sexual adventures – still he was stuck in a wheelchair. He said he was getting old, that life was going to pass him by, and for the first time, he sounded angry.
“One evening, his office called me and said I needed to go to the hospital, urgently. I thought something terrible had happened to him; but when I arrived, he was sitting up in bed, quite composed, the phone in his hand. He said,
“‘Matthew, I want to summon the angels.’
“I remember, because he said it so flatly, so calmly, that I could hardly believe my ears. I spluttered confused noises and eventually said something along the lines of ‘Why?’ and ‘It’s dangerous!’ and other empty sounds.
“He said, ‘The doctors tell me that I am dying. I have not had just one stroke, I am at risk of several, they said. They tell me that over the next few days, weeks, months, years, they can’t be sure, I will have more minor strokes, one on the other, perhaps so small I don’t even notice, perhaps large enough to leave me without feeling in my fingers, and that they will eventually eat away my brain, my mind, my memory, and my feelings until I am just a gibbering shell. I want to summon the angels.’
“‘What good will they do?’ I asked.
“‘You’ve heard them, think about it,’ he replied – he was never one for a straight answer, always liked you to work it out for yourself, said if you could understand by yourself why a thing was true, you would believe it more than just having it told to you by a teacher.
“‘Why do you need me? Surely they’re still there, in the dialling tone …’
“‘I can’t hear them.’ He held up the receiver towards me and, for the first time, looked me straight in the eye. ‘I want you to listen, tell me if they’re there.’
“I took the receiver – I was trained not to disobey him; such things when you are a learning sorcerer are dangerous. I listened.
“He hadn’t dialled any particular number, but with the angels you don’t need to; an open line is what they always enjoyed. And eventually, through the dialling tone, I heard them.
“They started with just the beeeeeep of the tone. Then, when you listened, it was more than a beeeeep it was a voice, saying beeeeee at exactly the same pitch and tone as the dialling tone, but still a voice.
“It said, beeeeee meeeeeee …
“And then, when you realised that those were the words it was saying, it said more.
“Beeee meeeee beeeee freeeeee …
“And by increments, aware that they had an audience, the angels came, and they said at the tone of the telephones, We be …
… to see …
set free …
We be light, we be life, we be fire!
We sing electric flame, we rumble underground wind, we dance heaven!
Come be me … …
and be free …
… we be blue electric angels …
“Bakker said, ‘Can you hear them?’
“I said yes.
“‘What do they say?’
“‘What they always do.’
“‘Tell me!’
“I told him; I confess, I was hypnotised by their sound. When the angels spoke, it was more than voices, it was with a presence that wormed its way into the mind and filled the senses with burning, fiery blueness. They whispered that they were the creatures of the wire, that their playground was the world, that they danced at the speed of light and rippled faster than sound, spread their wings across every wire, voice, mind, sense, sight in the world and when they had bounced from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back again through every telephone and computer and radio transmitter on earth, they would bounce into the radio waves in the sky, and spin away into space, circle the moon and then fly on, to see what sights they could see. They asked you to come be me, to be free – to let go of life and join them for ever, playing in the wires.
“It was a dangerous song – all sorcerers knew of the angels. They had a reputation, that of a young, reckless power that travelled as interference in the system, unexplained spots of static, moved too fast to catch, stop, or begin to understand. They had grown out from the wires only in recent years, but that shouldn’t really surprise us. Where life is, there is always magic, and over the years we pour so much of ourselves, of our lives, into the phone lines – our hearts, dreams, desires, hopes, friends, enemies, hates and loves, tipped into the wire. The angels started off as just a rogue piece of static but, over the years, fed on all that life being thrown at them – telephone conversations, radio broadcasts, internet, email – that unique magic altered them, made them growinto the form that you currently understand as blue electric angels.
“They relish life, rejoice in it; their whole lives are learning, understanding, a composite of other people’s existences, an idea plucked from Jane merged into a word from Bob and a sigh from Joe; an entire personality can be formed from the throwaway bits of conversation we leave trapped in the wire. They are so proud! So bright and brilliant, the world’s knowledge at their fingertips, the whole of humanity pouring itself into their soul. So beautiful, so bright, they delight in all that is new, feast and feed on it, for it was what made them. They are a child, and a god. All sorcerers love and fear them, for they are very much like the sorcerers are – feasting on all things that they see. Life is magic. And as I have said, too much life … too much of too much … mortals cannot sustain it.
“They are everywhere at once, thinly spread across the world like flurries of snow; but they can, sometimes, coalesce into one place for a special purpose. In that hospital, that strange night that had been like any other night, Bakker wanted to provoke such an event; he wanted to bring the angels together, and force them out of the phone.
“I asked why.
“He didn’t smile, or sigh, or show any sign of emotion when he answered. He simply said, ‘Because they are alive; because they will not die.’
“I wanted to know how he thought he could get them out of the phone lines that had spawned them.
“He just laughed and said he was sure that they, if he had judged their character right, would be all too willing to come, for the right incentive. He knew how I had first fallen into sorcery. He knew that as a child, I had loved to listen to the phones, and they had loved to talk to me.
“What then, I asked? When you have somehow dragged the angels out of the phone line, their natural place, what do you do then?
“‘Life,’ he said. ‘Just life.’
“I only understood slowly. Even when he had explained it, I did not wish to comprehend. His plan was to draw the angels out of their natural territory, force them to take a human, physical form with his spells and, once they had achieved such a state, to steal that which made them alive.
“You must understand – the angels are created from the life that others leave behind in the phones: words thrown out into darkness, ideas left half unsaid. Their whole existence is speed and freedom and wild electric power and magic and life; they feed off humanity’s forgotten thoughts. He said, ‘Their blood is life, Matthew. Their souls are fire.’
“I finally – too slowly – understood. Bakker didn’t just want to summon the angels. He wanted to become the angels, to be like them, no longer physical, restrained by the bonds of his own crippled body. He wanted to feast on their bright burning blood, become pure electricity and fire in human form, burning his way across the planet – a human consciousness in the form of the angels themselves. But he needed my help.
“I asked why.
“He said, ‘I can’t hear them. Things are different, I can’t hear them. I need a sorcerer who can make them come out of the phone lines. I need your help.’
“I said no. I didn’t even know why I said it; I was so appalled, I just spoke on instinct. I said that his plan would make him inhuman, a deity of blue light rather than a sorcerer, that I knew he must be frightened and in pain, but that what he proposed was nothing short of a bond with an electric devil.
“He wanted to know why I said no.
“I couldn’t think of an answer. I couldn’t say what I really thought – that the angels’ whole nature was wild and reckless, and that in his flesh they would only be more so; that I did not trust him with that kind of power.
“We quarrelled. I think that part was well established after my death. I left there too angry to speak. I felt betrayed. As a child, I had put nothing but faith in Mr Bakker, who had come to my mum’s front door and saved me from the nuthouse. I guess these childish things were suddenly going away.
“I walked. When I am angry, I often walk to calm myself, look at the river and let it flow through my mind, washing away the fury and dirt in my head. I walked along the river, but I don’t really remember the route I took and had no clear objective.
“When it came, it was so fast, so sudden that I didn’t even feel its attack. It came out of the pavement at my feet, arms first, claws that lacerated my ankles on their way up as it grew from the darkness around me. It was thinner then, paler, barely more than a shadow itself. I guess it has learnt as the years go by. I didn’t have time to fight: its claws were in my chest, across my back, on my face. It hissed and spat, a breath of rotting teeth, its spit burning my skin where it touched, its movement cloaked in blackness.
“I will not describe particularly what happened there. I do not think I know much myself, the pain and fear of it was so great. The mind can’t remember pain – the flesh won’t bear it. But it remembers the fear. It remembers remembering agony.
“I knew that I was going to die, that with every pump of my heart, rapidly failing, blood was pouring out of me in regular, surging gouts. I call ‘it’ – the thing that attacked me – a ‘he’, since, though a creature of magic should not have a gender in the traditional boring human sense of which organ goes where, the face he wore was nonetheless an imitation of warped humanity, recognisable despite its contortions. He walked around me and whispered, ‘So hungry, so hungry,’ in a wheedling voice like a starved snake might have, and dipped his fingers in my blood and sighed in contentment at the taste, cupping his hand in the pools around me and lapping it up like a cat after milk. I crawled away from him as best I could, crying with the fear and pain of it, utterly helpless. He held my face and stared into my eyes, and said, ‘Give me life!’ I didn’t understand then what he wanted; only later did I realise that he was trying to see what was in me as I died, trying to reach into my mind to follow my senses, see my thoughts and memories.
“But death wasn’t so cooperative in coming quickly. He let me go with an angry hiss, knowing that I couldn’t crawl far and that death was inevitable, and stalked the small concrete perimeter of the killing ground, looking around at it like a confused child in an art gallery, trying to work out what makes the paintings on the wall worth its attention. While he did this I had crawled to a telephone box. I didn’t know who I thought I’d call – strangely, Bakker was the first number that had leapt to mind, although I didn’t dial.
“I lifted the receiver. He saw, but only smiled with a mouth full of my blood, and didn’t even bother to try and stop me.
“I heard the dialling tone and, as I lay there, the phone held to my ear, they came.
“And we said, come be me …
“So easy to die …
“And we said, We be fire, we be light, we be life! We dance electric flame, we skim sense, we be the ocean and the burning and the sunrise and the sunset on the edge of the world, we chase moonlight and sunlight and we do not stop, we cannot be tamed, we be free!
“And we said, We be the singing in the wire, the whisper of the friend, the static on the line, our dance never begins and never ends, our voices be always heard, invisible silk in the ear, never feared, never alone, we be in every mind and every soul and every mind and every soul be we! Come be we and be free …
“And I closed my eyes, held the phone to my lips, and with the angels in my ears, allowed myself to die.
“We caught my dying breath as it entered the phone and held on to it with all our strength. From the tip of the breath we pulled the warmth in the lungs, then the electricity in the nerves, the buzzin the muscles, the movement in the blood, the water in the skin, the colour in the hair, the strength in the bones; we pulled the dying embers of my thoughts, the expiring rhythm of my heart and, dragging me in by my last breath, we dissolved the sorcerer, and made me electric, melting away my original form to nothing more than blue sparks wriggling into the earth. We have always loved life.
“We have no need for time, in the wire. We were everywhere, everyone, everything; we knew all that we could want to know, and at every instant learnt something new, forgetting nothing. You spray out your ideas and your thoughts and your feelings and your knowledge so fast, every infinity there was something new to explore, an eternally growing world of first-time callers and last-call goodbyes, new papers on new subjects posted on new pages, new feelings towards a new lover whispered down an old line, new links from New York to London, Paris to Berlin, new paths to explore, new sights to see, new worlds to bathe in. There is never an instant in the wire that is not changing, alive; and together we danced in that world, in the richness of the life that others leave behind. You will call it two years that we danced together in the wire, splitting our thoughts to spread out across the face of the earth, pure energy, pure fire. We will not bother with such distinctions. Petty human tongues cannot describe our glory.
“When the spell came, we were entirely unprepared. At one moment we were riding a billion dollars through Switzerland, and sweeping through the radios of a NASA shuttle about to launch. The next, we were coming into one place, our thoughts becoming one, our senses becoming one; and I was there too, the scattered, formless substance of my nature dragged, with the angels, back into one collective piece. I realised this wasn’t just some nightmare, some horrible reassertion of reality – it was a summoning. Someone was summoning us, and I was being dragged along with it.
“My presence disrupted the spell. Whoever called us back called only the angels, not me. My influence meant we did not appear where we should have; my mind took us to the place that I regard as home, and piece by piece, as we fell out of the phone like water off a leaf, the blue sparks of our existence formed a shape, a consciousness, a human form, and that form was me. Not how it should have been. We should have been summoned as gods. I should have died. Instead, you see us now as we are. Half-flesh. Human and angel for ever tangled into one soul, inextricable, mortal, eternal, us and I.
“And your world is terrible as well as beautiful. We are grateful to be me, to have my memories and thoughts and heart and mind; it keeps us from madness. How can you live in this place? How can humans endure it? It is so bright and loud; with each moment, every sense is overwhelmed: colours and noise and the feel of the air in our fingers, the smell of people, and the street and cars and vents and fans and animals and water and weather? How does it not overwhelm you, such endless existence all around you, always changing? We thought we understood life, we thought that we had seen everything that could be known, that our dance across the face of the earth had encompassed all of human being. But sight,and sound; or the simple act of feeling your own heart, knowing that somewhere inside you there’s this fat red organ of lumpy muscle going gu-dunk, gu-dunk, gu-dunk; or tasting food, feeling it burn in the mouth or tingle on the teeth. This world of yours, a world of flesh, is the most amazing, frightening thing we have ever known. We delight in it! The joy of everything, of sense … had we but time or means, we would eat for ever for the wonder of the taste, play for ever in the child’s playground, spend our lives listening to the stories on the stage or screen, devour every book in the library, smell every flower and bin. I have seen this world once before … now we see it again.
“How can you bear to understand that you will get old and lose this feeling, will die and wither and encounter nothing but dark? How can you bear it? Since we came here, we have been entirely fearful, snatched from our safe, comforting bliss of scattered feeling. But we would not die and leave this amazing place for any price. It is the closest thing to sacred we have ever seen.
“So, here I am. We were resurrected as one individual, brought back into life fused into a single form. There’s no untangling that knot. True, you can shoot me – I die. But my consciousness is now tied up with ours; and if you have a phone, or a passing radio wave should happen to be overhead, we will crawl back into the wire, and still be me, and still be the blue electric angels. We would have it no other way.”
***
I had finished speaking.
The man scratched at his chin, his nails making a harsh Velcro sound against his skin. He said, “Not entirely what I expected to hear.”
“And you’re a man of learning.”
“I don’t know whether it changes my opinion of you. Or, indeed, if it should.”
“What did you think had happened?”
“Oh,” he waved his hands. “You quarrelled with Bakker, doubtless over one of his Satanic schemes, walked away, faked your own death, went travelling, discovered some evil mystic art, bonded your soul to a devil for power, glory, et cetera; returned to wreak havoc and revenge … you get the idea?”
“You don’t have much of an imagination, do you?”
He smiled tightly. “I don’t know that your story is better than anything I imagined.”
“Doesn’t innocence help salve my soul?”
“Technically, you don’t have a soul. You’re a creature of other creatures, a compound of other people’s lives.”
“And in what way are you more than the flesh you are in and the memories that rule you?” we asked sharply. “Are you not who you are because experience makes you this way? Are we not the same?”
“I don’t bleed blue blood.”
“It’s all about oxygen bonding,” I retorted, glancing at Oda, who tilted her chin defiantly back at me, “and we saved Sinclair’s life.”
“You needed him,” replied the man. “Besides, he is useful but obscene.”
“He’s long-winded. I don’t see why that makes him obscene. We had his documents, his information. So do you really think that need is what made us do it? I don’t go around killing random people, and I’m sure as hell not a fan of letting others die.”
He sucked in a breath between his teeth. “Tell me,” he said, “just this, honestly. If you thought a thing looked prettier in flames, would you really not set it alight?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“I wasn’t asking you.”
“Oh, get a bloody sense of perspective.”
He hit me, again. I thought we’d been doing quite well, so the shock and surprise of it, more than the pain, injured me, sent me recoiling back inside my shell. After a moment lying curled around our own unhappiness, we picked ourself up and glared at him.
He said, “You … blue electric angels … you are children with the power to kill, destroy and burn. You know nothing about life, its rules, norms, laws and understandings, and probably care less. Why should you not set the field on fire for the prettiness of its burning; why should you not kill wherever you go, simply because you can; why should you understand anything that the rest of humanity can?”
“Because I’m here,” I growled.
“You are just one man,” he retorted. “The angels are the sum of millions, billions, more than that; although before you start, I do appreciate that your relationship is complicated.”
“We do not need to … to change anything. This life of yours is wonder enough without us setting it on fire.”
He smiled, shoulders jerking as if a laugh was brewing, hijacked halfway up his throat. “You really are just a child, aren’t you? A poor little bumbling power, crawling out of the nice safe confines of its telephone line. Utterly ignorant and totally confused. You must be going mad inside that good disguise of yours. But perhaps all you’ll do is drool and gibber, when reality finally takes you down.”
He paused and sucked in his breath. Overdramatically, I thought. Enjoying his power, perhaps, a bit too much. I felt the dirt between my fingers, the tiny heat of it. Not enough to do anything spectacular. But enough, maybe, to burn out something vital under his skin, before we died.
“I’ll have to think about it,” he said, with an unsympathetic face, and nodded at one of his henchmen. “Good night, angels, good night!”
We pinched that fragment of magic between our fingers, ready to slip it into the blood of anyone who dared to touch us. “You will be a shadow on the wall,” we snarled. “A remnant of the night. You will fade, and your darkness will blend into the memories of the city and be forgotten, lost inside all the better things that happen around you.”
Oda stepped towards me. Her hand went into a jacket pocket, her eyes meeting ours; and I hesitated. The grey-haired man leant down until his face was almost level with mine and whispered, “You have no idea who you’re dealing with.”
I grinned, and leant forward sharply, banging my head against his. Not hard, but it was contact I needed; just that moment of touching was enough. I let that morsel of power slide into his skin, a maggot of blue, burrowing down in an instant, seen out of the corner of the eye, and gone. Where our heads had banged, blood from my battered skin slid a thin red slide over his own. Some magics never change. Blood is one of them.
He blinked and recoiled, then slapped me, open-palmed. This time I didn’t even bother to get up, but lay curled on the ground and said nothing. My blood on his hands; even better.
“We are the Order!” he snapped. “We watch you people all the time, we are everywhere! Can you begin to imagine our power?”
I laughed despite myself. “So powerful,” I exclaimed through hysterical bursts of breath, “you can’t even kill Bakker by yourself. You need to get us to do your work for you. We know you. We heard your voice inside our mind, when you whispered into the phone. You are an infestation in our skin, a worm in our flesh. You’re part of us. Think about that next time you shoot us!”
He rubbed his head, a nervous gesture. Could he sense our magic, the tiniest curse, working through his body? Probably not. It was out of our hands. “Maybe I will,” he said.
He nodded at Oda, who stepped up to me, pulled my head back with a quick gesture, and stuck something into my neck that filled my throat with oil and my head with the sickly blanket of darkness.
I woke and had never been more grateful to find myself uncomfortable. Everything ached, throbbed or stung; and it was bliss, simply because there was too much of it to be a dream. Nor, I suspected, was it anything resembling an afterlife. I was on a small, bare wooden floorin a small, bare room with rough plastered walls that had once been painted blue and were now a theme of faded and chipped. The room sported a plastic panel of flashing green lights that circled the head of Jesus Christ like fairy lights on a Christmas tree, while he looked on benevolently. There was one door, one window, and a smell of dust. It was also, very much, in the city. The smell of fumes hit immediately, and I heard the rumble of traffic, the screech of brakes on a bus; I was back in my home, alive.
I risked getting up on all fours, and looked round the room. By the door, fiddling with her rifle in the casual manner of someone accustomed to bullets, Oda said, “Hi.”
“Hi,” I replied, pulling myself into a sitting position and feeling around the inside of my mouth for any more loose teeth. There was blood on my shirt and face; I hadn’t considered how quickly a vendetta, and prolonged magical confrontation, could eat through my wardrobe. We said, as reasonably as we could, “Why are you here?”
“Got to keep an eye on you,” she said. “I’m not happy about it either, if you’re wondering.”
“You are – not afraid?”
“Afraid?” she echoed, raising one surprised eyebrow.
“Pissed off doesn’t really cover it,” I said. “We would kill you for what you did. And I want you to be impressed, by the way, at the fact that I’m not spontaneously combusting, because I promise, it’s just two nerve endings and a snappy word away.”
“The blue electric angels are much quicker to go around killing than the little sorcerer, aren’t they? Or at least, much quicker to talk about it,” she said, not bothering to look at me. “If you’re going to throw up, there’s a toilet next door.”
“Why would I throw up?”
“It’s a standard reaction to the drugs.”
“What have you done?” we barked.
Perhaps the anger in our voice jerked her from her complacency. “Just to make you sleep for the trip,” she said in a defensive tone. “We want you alive – for now.”
“I’m not happy about this arrangement.”
“And I am under orders to shoot you at the first sign of overly Satanic inclinations.”
“What are those?” I asked, my genuine curiosity briefly overriding our fury.
“My remit is to use my own judgement to determine when the harm that you might do outweighs the necessary evil of using you against a worse danger. Or in order words, if you look like you’re going to shape up to be a son of a bitch worse than Bakker, I pop two in your skull and three in your chest and make sure the phones are switched off.”
“You’re not making much of a case for my liking you,” I said, flexing my fingers for that familiar crackle of electricity. There was a little, running through the walls only a few feet away, and a plug quite close to her feet from which I could snatch some power, if it became necessary.
“Well, there are a few things you can consider,” she said, patting the barrel of her rifle with a gesture more motherly than threatening. “For a start, I can be immensely useful to you.”
“How?”
“I can kill anyone who gets in your way,” she explained, smiling hopefully, “so long, of course, as I deem them to be worthy of the death. And I know a very good dentist.”
“I’m thinking that perhaps you’re something of a breakaway cult.”
“Cult?”
“References to God, damnation, dentistry, Satan, mixed with a violent tendency and samurai swords.”
“We take all sorts. Those who believe are, naturally, those best equipped for our mission.”
“And what, exactly, is your mission?”
She shrugged. “Ultimately, the complete obliteration of all magic on this earth, although right now we’re dealing with priorities, and will settle for the obliteration of all actively malign and threatening magic on this earth, starting with Bakker.”
“And progressing to me?” I asked, guessing the answer.
Her eyes flashed, stayed for a second on mine; then looked away. “We’ll have to reassess our priorities when the time is right.”
“Religion has got corporate-speak?”
She smiled, just for a moment. “We find it easier to mention ‘issues’ than talk about the advancing horde of the evil masses.”
“And I’m currently not sending two hundred and forty standard mains volts into you for what reason?”
She ticked them off on her fingers. “One: you’re inquisitive. Two: I know you need allies and we” – a grin – “are very good at what we do. Three: any second now you’re going to wonder where your biker friend is and whether he’s all right, and I’m going to give you an answer that’s not entirely satisfactory from your point of view, yet really dead predictable. Four: there is still a part of you, Matthew Swift, that is human enough to give a damn, I think, about the entire killing thing in general. You didn’t kill San Khay.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“You wouldn’t have had the guts,” she replied. “The blue electric angels might have, but at the end of the day, you’re still in there being a coward. Did I miss anything?”
I shook my head, feeling small. “No,” I said. “I guess you didn’t.” With a sigh, “Where is Blackjack?”
“Is that his name?”
“It’s Dave really.”
“I see why he changed it.”
“Really? I don’t.”
“Should you ever get into the world of online fantasy gaming, Mr Swift, you will find, to your surprise, that Bob the Master of Arcane and Mystic Arts is a rare creature, and that Gary the Sacred Warrior of Eternal Might doesn’t buy so many potions of smiting when he goes shopping for his battle gear. You have no sense of style; your friend does.”
“You have him?” I asked. “And he’s not really a friend.”
“Yes.”
“Hurt him?”
“No.”
“Going to?”
“Perhaps. Do you care?”
We thought about it. I knew the answer, though I couldn’t find a reason for it. “Yes,” I sighed. “What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to kill Bakker,” she said with a bright, sucrose smile. “And I’m going to be there at every step, until you do.”
“And if I do?” I asked wearily. “What then?”
She stretched, slinging the rifle casually over her shoulder. “I’m sure we’ll work something out.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why bother? What’s your reason?”
“Did you miss the mission statement?”
“I think I understand what’s going on with the Order. You’re The X-Files meets the Jesuits meets the SAS, yes?”
She shrugged.
“What about you, Oda? Why are you the one standing there with the big sword, the nasty gun and the attitude?”
She thought about it for a moment, then looked me in the eye and said, “My brother is a murderer. He kills with magic. Is that enough, or shall I tell you of the light of God and the Truth of his Word?”
I shook my head. “No thank you. I think I’ve got the picture.”
“Excellent!” she exclaimed. “So! Did you have a plan?”
The bathroom was chipped and brown, the white tiles filled in with old crumbling cement where they’d cracked, the floor warping with thin plastic sounds of distress, the sink too small, the tap too low. I washed as best I could, and in the kitchen found a small tray of ice in a freezer containing nothing else but fish fingers and suspicious tubs of home-made dripping. I wrapped the ice cubes in a tea towel stained with tabasco, sat down on the floor and tried my very best to relax.
Oda was packing a small arsenal of weapons into a sports bag, utterly uninterested in my self-pitying looks as I moved the ice around various ugly, swollen areas of bruising on my face. I hadn’t been this hurt since I was fifteen and got into a fight at school; and that had ended by my accidentally sending fifty volts into the fist of my attacker, back when I hadn’t understood why the squirrels brought me nuts in the winter, or why the local fox didn’t run away when I found it digging through the bins.
I said, “The plan’s simple.”
“Well?”
“I intend to destroy the Tower.”
“We’re with you on that one; any bigger plans?”
“There were four people Sinclair identified as important in sustaining the Tower – San Khay, Guy Lee, Harris Simmons and …”
“Dana Mikeda, yes, I know.”
“Sinclair thought that by targeting those four you could undermine the Tower itself. San Khay is … Amiltech is a wreck. They won’t be able to provide proper security any more. Now I’m on to Guy Lee.”
“One down, three to go. Sure, I get that.”
“Oda?” I bit my lip. “There’s something I need to make clear now. If the Order or you so much as touch Dana Mikeda, I will show you just how Satanically inclined I can be.”
“I thought you might say that.” She shrugged. “No promises, not that vows mean anything to you. We’ll have to see how things play.”
I grimaced and tried not to think about large quantities of electricity. “So,” she said, with a thin smile, “Let’s talk about Guy Lee.”
Sinclair’s files were thorough, but not nearly as useful as they had been for San Khay. For a start, Guy Lee was not a man of nice, predictable habit. He had no fixed address, no family, no real friends and no consistent lovers. Even his driver, shepherding him across town night after night, was changed on a frequent but unpredictable basis. Khay had offered to provide Lee with personal security; rumour went that Lee just laughed and said he was better off dealing with his own affairs. Certainly, he was a man with many minions, and his interests spread from Enfield to Croydon across the whole sweep of the city – brothels in Soho, beggars in Holborn, street cleaners in Moorgate, thugs in Dagenham and racketeers in Acton.
He walked a fine line between reward and punishment – those who openly crossed him tended to be discovered nailed to a tree on Hampstead Heath, or a remnant of their bloated flesh would be picked out of the water at the Thames Barrier; those who served him faithfully might acquire a penthouse suite overlooking the river at Putney, or a town house in Knightsbridge, and were driven in cars with tinted, bulletproof windows, and doors that closed with a thump so heavy they might have been weighted with gold. You did not take the charity of Lee for granted, and more than a few lieutenants had found themselves hung upside down by parts of their own internal anatomy for crossing Lee’s will, his favour taken away as quickly as it had come.
Sinclair was a precise man who clearly disapproved of presenting things as fact when they were merely supposition. But as a best guess a marginal note in his file read: Lee can summon for his needs at least 143 men and women from within his own adherents to any place at any time.
Further down it added: Amiltech can provide support.
And last, scrawled in minute pencilled handwriting: He summons monsters.
I thought about the litterbug I’d run into on my first hour of reliving, and the craft and power that had gone into its creation.
All that Sinclair would say with certainty of Lee’s personal activities was that his day began at sunset and finished around sunrise. All night he would not stop moving for more than an hour, inspecting his investments, making sure that the right enchantments were being cast to ensnare the appropriate MP or CEO, punishing those who did not appreciate his power, and paying visits to those families honoured by his good graces, like a royal prince shaking hands with a foreign dignitary before flying on to the next negotiation. Sinclair loathed the boundary that Lee crossed: he was one of the few in the city cocky enough to use magic to achieve mundane political ends, and his minions could be found lurking around the edges of a dozen government committees and corporate boards. Magic didn’t change the scope of human ambition; just the means it used.
Outside his work, he didn’t seem to pursue any special pleasures – certainly, he might demand a meal of such a quality, or a woman for his bed, or such and such a drug – but the delivery of each thing was given out as a test of abilities, or loyalty. Rumour was that he would deliberately sup at the house of a man he did not trust and, despite the fear of poison, would eat every last morsel, while his host quaked with the dread of failing to satisfy.
One last rumour, unsubstantiated but interesting, related to Lee’s magical interests. In sum, the man was a magician – competent, no doubt, but a man who shaped the forces he controlled through learning, gesture, words – the traditional components of spells and spell-casting, rather than the less traditional arts such as sorcery. His magic was precise, neat, and highly competent. But a question arose over where he’d acquired these skills, since the forms taken by a lot of his magics were decidedly unwholesome. Enemies cursed by him were consumed from the inside out; those foolhardy enough to attack him tended to die choking on their own blood. There were even reports that some of his more unusual servants, as they moved around on their business, were never hotter nor colder than room temperature.
I didn’t like to say necromancy. It’s a messy art, not entirely without its uses but not for those with a weak stomach or who particularly care about personal hygiene. I could imagine Lee doing it.
“So your plan is …”
I foresaw Oda fast becoming even more of a pain.
“Allies. Khay was different, he was in the public eye. Lee is entirely below board; and this time, he’ll know I’m after him. Allies. Help.”
“You’ve got the Order.”
“I wasn’t about to call you an ally, as such.”
“Get used to the idea.”
“Whites.”
“Who are the Whites?”
“The Long White City Clan.”
“What are they?”
I smiled and stretched, getting up to put the remnants of my ice pack in the sink. “Artists.”
When I asked the Beggar King how to find the Whites, his answer had been short and to the point: the writing is on the wall.
“So what does that mean?” snapped Oda.
“Oda, has it ever occurred to you that if in the good old days ladies with bad skin and big hair drew mystic pentagrams and pointed stars on the walls with bits of old chalk, then the invention of spray-paint would only have enhanced this tendency?”
That evening, we found the first one sprayed onto the local launderette’s closed shutters in bold white and black: a frog with a huge snout and long, bulbous fingers. With one hand it stroked its beard, while the other pointed a curling finger towards the bus stop. On its head was a big top hat with the price still in it, $1.41, and in its mouth a fat, smoking cigar.
We followed the curved finger to the bus stop, Oda’s sports bag clanking with its weight of weaponry. When the 141 bus came, we rode it till we came to a rectangular, railed-in area of grass beneath huge plane trees floodlit in bright green, blue and purple. Oda snapped, “There!”, and we hurried to get off.
What she’d seen was a picture of a small girl with angel wings. It was painted on the side of a Unitarian chapel, beneath a dredge of less artful efforts making statements like DaN iS gAy! and C4D 4ever. The girl’s face was turned up, studying a large red balloon drifting upwards towards the shiny aluminium venting funnels of a patisserie next door; one small painted white hand reached up in vain for the trailing string.
Oda said, “Well?”
“Angel,” I replied, trying to sound more confident than I felt.
We took the first bus to the Angel. Outside the underground station we looked around for a few minutes, until I spotted a small black-and-white rat, painted below an ATM by the Bank of Scotland offices. It wore a long scarf, carried a suitcase and a bunch of rosemary wrapped in paper like it was a bouquet of roses; and its long black nose was twitching towards the south.
We followed the nose of the rat down to Rosebery Avenue, where we found a mock ATM painted in a walled-up window; from its money dispenser there emerged a huge mechanical arm, clutching in its claws a child. She was almost the image of the little angel-winged girl who’d lost her balloon, and held her hands to her mouth in a gesture of surprise.
The arm was gesturing towards Farringdon Road, so we walked down that wide, dull artery of traffic, until the yellow brick walls of a railway line grew up on one side and Oda said, “Swift.”
She was pointing at a hoarding covered with posters advertising bands, albums, low-budget films and desperate struggling magazines. In one corner was a small stencilled image of a train, forever looping in on itself, round and round until it swallowed its own tail, the carriages blending into each other.
Oda, who’d said almost nothing all evening, now asked, “Where does it want us to go?”
I groaned. “Circle line.”
“Circle line where?”
“Where isn’t the important part.”
“What does that mean?”
“Come on,” I said. “We need to buy a few things.”
I’d bought a book of sudoku, a biro, a packet of chewing gum and a small trashy romantic novel, placing them all with loving care in a single plastic shopping bag. At the local pub, I was now trying to convince the girl behind the bar that she wanted to serve me coffee, not beer, before Oda’s patience snapped.
“What are you doing?” Oda demanded, indicating the bag.
“Sacrifices.” I was secretly pleased that she’d asked before I’d been obliged to tell her, and felt determined to make her suffer for her curiosity.
“Sacrifices for what? Why aren’t we taking the Circle line and finding the Whites?”
“We’ve got to wait,” I replied.
“Why?”
“For the last train.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what the symbol means. It’s not just the Circle line; it’s the train that swallows itself again, travelling round and round forever, no stations, no stops – it’s not just ‘Go take the Circle line.’ It’s much more complicated. Sacrifices.” I waved the bag with the sudoku book.
“You are deliberately being cryptic,” she exclaimed. “Why?”
“Because I don’t like you.”
“On my word your friend’s life hangs. And yours,” she added, eyes narrowing.
“So you tell us,” we said. “It must frighten you, not being entirely sure what we will do next.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” she retorted, her voice cold and level. “You are a dead nothing, whatever forces you’ve made bargains with.”
“That’s not the point,” I said in my gentlest, most placating tone. “You are afraid of not being certain.”
“No.”
“If you say so.”
“You know nothing,” she added vehemently.
“I know that I want a coffee, and that beer would be a bad idea, all things considered.”
“Why? What’s so important about catching the last train?”
“I’d much rather let you work that out for yourself,” I said, and resumed trying to order coffee.
At 11.45 p.m. Oda and I walked down towards Farringdon station. The last train of the evening was written up on the board for six minutes past midnight, in blue marker pen. There weren’t many people waiting on the platform. Some late-night theatregoers lingered, in their pearls and smart suits, at a distance from a group of girls whose feet ached from having got lost hereabouts in the wrong kind of shoes. At the opposite end of the platform, pushed into a brick alcove by their passion, a couple of men soaked in sweat and hormones were engaged in the longest, loudest kiss we’d ever seen. I tried not to stare. We were fascinated.
A Metropolitan line train came, heading towards Baker Street, where, selfishly, it had decided to terminate; the girls got on it anyway, as did the theatregoers in their silk scarves. A Hammersmith and City line train didn’t do much better, giving up the ghost at Edgware Road, but that was clearly far enough for the two men, who, to the surprise of the polite Arab-looking couple sitting in the carriage amid piles of free daily newspapers strewn across the floor, resumed where they’d left off.
The indicator cleared itself of all but one more train – on the westbound Circle line, its destination picked out in bright orange dots. A group of young men and women ran onto the platform, giggling with the adrenalin of their own having-nearly-missed, until one of the girls, dressed almost entirely in cold pink skin and bra strap, was sick behind one of the benches. Oda scowled and looked away. The girl’s friends clustered around her, patting her, soothing, stroking her hair, and dabbing at the remnants of bile around her mouth until with a final heave she was empty, and sat down on the bench and started to cry. We felt a sudden burning in our face at the sight of it, which we could not understand or control, and it was only Oda’s cold expression that stopped us from sharing the girl’s distress.
At 12.09 a.m. precisely, the Circle line train rattled and wheezed into the station. Oda stood up quickly, slinging her bag onto her shoulder; but I caught her arm, pulling her back down. She said, “But the …”
“No. Not this one. The last train.”
“This is the …”
“Trust me.”
She hesitated, then reluctantly sat back down. The girls and boys staggered onto the train, which with a clunk and a beeping of door alarms slammed its carriages shut and, engine whirring with a rising pitch, rattled its way out of the station. It passed the graffiti on the opposite wall: long, incomprehensible names made entirely of angles, and doodles in green paint. By a board showing you where to go for trains to Luton, someone had drawn a pair of closed black-and-white eyes, each eyelash ending in a long Egyptian curve.
After a moment Oda said, “You’ve got a plan, sorcerer?”
I nodded as, above us, the indicator board swept itself clean with a single orange asterisk, and didn’t display any more messages. I stood up, and walked down the platform past signs for
“Sensational!!!”
Bollywood Romance – a Love Story for Our Time!
“The Most Amazing Thing I’ve Ever Seen!!” – News of the World
“Astonishing!” – Time Out
and further down.-.-.
The new voice of now! – Love and Lost – a heart-breaking album to inspire a generation.
When I reached the end of the platform, I pushed back the swinging “Danger! Do not cross!” sign, ducked past the array of mirrors to show the parked train driver the platform’s length, and followed the narrowing, dirty concrete slope of the platform down towards the ballast and electric spice of the line. I could taste the thick, smoky dirt of the tunnel on the end of my tongue, the dryness of it in the air; I could feel the buzz of thousands of volts in the track beside me, feel the cold wind of the last train’s passage still being pumped through the tunnel, fading into the heavy heat of the motionless underground. With my back pressed against the rough, black wall bursting with coils of cabling that hummed even through their once-coloured plastic sheaths, I slipped down onto the narrow remainder of the platform’s edge, into the darkness.
Oda stared at me from the light of the platform itself with undisguised surprise and distaste. “What are you doing?”
“Oda,” I said, “when Hunger came looking for us at Bond Street station, do you really think he would have left you alive? Do you honestly believe he would not have drunk your blood as well, just to see if it tasted the same as the sweat on your skin as you died? Trust me. Please.” I held out a hand to her. Scowling, she pushed past the “Danger!” sign, picking her way down until she squatted next to me. She was straining, I noticed, to avoid the bulky snake of cables locked into the wall, even as her eyes swerved uneasily to the electric rail. In that darkness, we had no space, and we could feel the heat of her proximity on our skin, a strange, living warmth in the stale gloom of the tunnel’s edge. We stared at her, curious and unashamed, until, glancing up, she saw our eyes on her and quickly looked away, muttering, “Jesu preserve us.”
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“I can see them in the dark.”
“What?”
“Your eyes. Like a cat’s – they reflect blue.”
“It was an almost perfect resurrection,” we hazarded.
She spat into the dark. Her spit fizzed off the live rail.
I said, “I can’t help … it’s not … sorry.”
She glanced up again, then away before I could see anything but the question in her face. “What are we doing here, exactly?”
“Waiting for the guard to inspect the platform.”
She only grunted in response, and we felt the heat of her breath tickle our skin again, like the brush of dying sparks.
We didn’t have to wait long. The guard came, muttering into his radio, a few minutes after the last train had left. He walked briskly along the platform’s edge, picking up bits of litter with a prong on the end of a plastic stick, opened up the vending machine, took the day’s coins and filled it with tomorrow’s old, overpriced chocolate and cans of drink. That took us nearly ten minutes of sitting, huddled in the darkness at the edge of the platform, trying to limit the sound of our own breaths.
When he finished, he turned the lights down, so that the entire place was washed with a low pinkish-orange neon glow rising up from behind the benches, reflecting strangely off the glass panels of the advertising boards. I heard the clattering of the iron gate at the front of the station being drawn shut. At my side Oda whispered, “Enough?”
I nodded.
She scrambled back up the platform, hastily moving away from me and self-consciously brushing the dirt off her clothes. I looked up at the dead indicator board and said, “We just have to wait now.”
“Wait for what?” she groaned.
“You wanted to be part of this so badly you had to attack me and kidnap a man,” I said, surprised at how calm I sounded. “Now you just watch and learn.”
I sat down on a bench, wrapping my dirty coat around me against the cold and sudden stillness of the place, and waited. Oda paced, jaw set in a tight, angry line. I tried to judge the minutes by the length of her walk – four progressions back and forth seemed to equal roughly a minute. My eyes felt heavy, my skin hot and tired, my hair dirty and my stomach full of lead. I let my head hang down, although we stayed on edge, ears more alert even as our eyelids fell, and drifted. We heard the drip of a water pipe and the distant rumble of a bus somewhere overhead. Our senses drifted without thinking into those of a mouse scuttling along by the electrified rail, sniffing out discarded food. We enjoyed the sensitivity of its nose, twitching it and feeling our entire face change shape slightly with that movement, and the sensitivity of our whiskers as they picked up on the reverberation of Oda’s walking, like each footstep was the last hum of a ringing bell left in the air.
“Sorcerer!”
Her voice frightened the mouse, so I let its mind go and quickly looked up. Oda’s face was a garish pinky-orange in the light of the platform, and her eyes were turned up towards the indicator board. In large orange letters, it read:
“1) Circle line via KingsX – 2 mins”
And nothing more.
For a moment we both looked at it, then Oda said, “Is this a spell of yours?”
“No.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s the last train,” I explained gently. “The real last train. It’s … like the Beggar King, or the Bag Lady.”
“This means nothing,” she snapped, and the anger meant there was fear too – fear of magic in general, or the train itself; I couldn’t be sure.
I struggled with the words. “Some ideas are more than just random moments of good inspiration. Some ideas become real whether you mean them or not.”
“So what … idea is it that’s due here in two minutes?”
“The train that doesn’t ever stop travelling,” I said. “That goes round and round the Circle line forever.”
A cold wind on my face, from the end of the tunnel, a smell of dirty deep underground. We breathed it in, deeply.
“That’s absurd.”
“For a woman who has dedicated her life to the eradication of mystic forces, you have a very limited comprehension of what you’re dealing with.” A distant growing te-dum, te-dum, te-dum. The hairs on my scalp twitched with the coldness rising up and tickling my skin; the track itself gave a creak of added strain. I got to my feet, picking up my small plastic bag of sudoku, biro and chewing gum.
“And this train …” she said, struggling to keep the fear out of her voice, “this will take us to the Whites?”
“The Whites should already know we’re coming,” I said.
“How?”
I pointed across the other side of the platform. By the board telling you how to get a train to Luton, the pair of painted-on black-and-white Egyptian eyes, with their long curves and deep, stylised quality, were now open. Their black pupils and grey-flecked irises stared right at us.
Oda followed my gaze. She stammered, “It’s not a trick of the mind.”
“No.”
“Is what you do always like this, sorcerer?”
“No. But if it was, life would be perfection,” we said. We walked towards the edge of the platform, toes peeking over the edge of the yellow “Do Not Cross” line. In the tunnel at the other end of the station, a pair of dull white lights appeared, like the eyes of a hunting cat, glowing bigger and bigger out of the darkness. As they emerged, so did the dim light of a driver’s compartment, empty except for a black shadow of no definable features. Growing with the sound of the rattling, hissing, spitting wheels as they threw up fat blue sparks across the ballast of the track and with the shrieking of brakes like the final breath of a dying banshee, the last train pulled up onto the platform of Farringdon station, and opened its doors.
The last train had once been white, but its paintwork was stained off-grey with neglect and age, and its surface scratched and tainted with brown bubbling rust. Its windows were almost impossible to see through, they were so scratched and criss-crossed with messages scoured into them. The doors, when they opened, did so with a scrape like fingernails down a blackboard, as rust edged over rust. Looking into the dim yellow glow of the carriages, I saw no passengers, just a slatted floor stained black by trodden-in chewing gum, and scattered with the remnants of old newspapers that drifted like feathers in a breeze. The seat covers were so thin, you could see the stuffing beneath, where it hadn’t already spilled out; the glass on the emergency alarm was cracked and looked like it might fall out of its holder at any moment; and the fabric straps hanging from the support poles in the ceiling swayed gently by themselves after the train had stopped. At either end of the carriage the windows were open wide, and the place hummed with ventilation rising from behind the battered seats.
Oda said, “This is what I think they meant by Satanic inclination.”
“You haven’t even given it a go,” I said. “Think of how small the human race would be if people didn’t give such inclinings a chance.”
I stepped cautiously up into the carriage, and when nothing happened, I turned and faced her, still standing uncertainly on the platform. “You trusted me at Bond Street,” I said, holding out my hand. “Trust me now.”
“Is it … necessary?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She took my hand; she stepped up into the carriage. Almost immediately, the doors started to wail, a high-pitched, shrilling, too-loud sound that made me wince away, as with a heavy, final bang, they slammed shut. The train jerked sharply, and started to move. I wrapped my hand into one of the fabric loops drooping down from the ceiling and said, “I have a confession.”
“What?” she asked, as the train slowly picked up speed with a low whine.
“I’ve never taken the last train before.”
“Why not?”
“It’s easy to get lost.”
She grunted, then nearly lost her footing as with another jerk, the train accelerated more sharply, the warm glow of the platform vanishing as we hit the tunnel. She dropped her bag and wrapped her hands quickly round a pole in the middle of the carriage, pressing herself against it for support as we picked up speed. The wind from the open window at the far end of the carriage tore past us and away as we ploughed into the darkness, pulling at hair and clothes until my coat snapped like a flag in a gale. I saw the pale red and yellow shades of the dirty cabling outside the window draw apart as tracks joined, split, widened; then saw the cables disappear entirely, the light from inside the carriage falling on, as far as I could tell, nothing at all, no texture outside, not even the curve of a black wall, just blackness itself. The lights flickered in the ceiling and for a moment, in each intermittent flash, the carriage wasn’t empty, but I was standing pressed in shoulder-to-shoulder with a hundred grey faces, featureless, with perhaps the hint of a hat here or the suggestion of a baby’s buggy there, blocking up the doorway, pressed in so tight that for that moment I could barely breathe and the heat of it burnt down to my bones, before the lights shuddered again and the carriage was cold and empty, the wind driving at our faces like each particle held microscopic knives, and a grudge to make it worse.
Oda screamed over the roar, “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”
“Give it a minute!” I shouted back.
A flash of light outside, and for a second I saw the walls of Kings Cross St Pancras underground station – but only a second, and we made no attempt to stop; the entire length of the platform was gone by in the time it took to draw a breath. Newspapers billowed around my knees, old crunched-up drinks cans and hamburger packets rolled down the carriage as we picked up yet more speed, and when I tried to lift my foot, the chewing gum glooped and tugged my ankle back down, so only with a great physical wrench could I get free of its hold.
When the stop came, it came so fast and so hard that it threw me to the floor, and tossed Oda hard against the cracked glass panel dividing a row of seats from the door space. I picked myself up onto my knees, ancient black gum clinging to my palms, and looked round. We were still moving, I realised; I could feel the hum of the engines through the floor and hear the high-pitched whine of the ventilation and the electric belly of the train pushing power into the wheels, but it was no longer the heady drive of our first acceleration. Now, with the lights steady and low, the carriage was no longer empty.
Shadows, semi-transparent forms, filled every seat and every corner of the carriage. A grey, faceless woman rocked a silent grey sleeping baby; a grey, faceless man bopped to his silent music, its thin grey wires flapping around his head as he moved. A man in a bowler hat made way for an old woman with a walking stick; a family with big touristlike bags on wheels shuffled deeper into the carriage as a woman struggled to position a’cello against the far wall. They weren’t ghosts – ghosts have faces, expressions, sounds, reasons – these were utterly silent, anonymous, forgettable faces that had been forgotten, their features melted into each other to leave nothing but a blank shadow. I looked out of the window and saw only the glowing straight lines of railway tracks, dozens of them, hundreds, on either side, stretching away in parallel, polished steel glowing on the top, black rusted metal beneath, spread out on either side of us like lanes on a motorway, as far as the eye could see before they faded into the inevitable darkness.
Oda crawled up painfully from where she’d fallen, shaking her head when I offered her a hand, and whispered, “What is this?”
“The train needs passengers,” I replied, turning to let a shadow of a man in a baggy jacket with a prominent beard push by me towards the carriage door, where he grabbed a fabric handle with fingers no thicker than mist, swaying gently with the quiet, steady rhythm of the train, te-dum. Te-dum. Te-dum.
“Are they … alive?”
“In a sense. They go everywhere in the underground, all the time, forever; they’re part of it, like its memory.”
“That doesn’t sound alive to me.”
“They are like us,” we said. “They are what comes when you put so much life into one place. They are everywhere and nowhere, they came into existence when the first people gasped at the wonder of this new way of travelling, and marvelled at it, and they will only die when the last train closes its doors, and no one remembers that there ever was a railway underground. That is to say, not for a very long time. We are the same.”
“Wonderful,” she hissed between her teeth.
I grinned. “Not even slightly afraid?” I asked.
She glared.
I opened up my bag of goodies and pulled out the sudoku book. All heads turned in the carriage; dozens of empty eyes fixed on us. I waited until I was sure I had their attention, then, still kneeling down, I put it on the floor of the carriage. I laid the biro on top of it, the romantic novel next to it, unwrapped the chewing gum package so the top button of white gum was visible, and stepped back. The shadows drifted towards us, the shape of a fat lady in a big dress rising up from her seat, the image of a girl with a heavy rucksack moving down towards us, the ghostlike form of an old bent man. They huddled towards the pile, reaching out for it. As they advanced I pushed Oda gently back, until we were both pressed into the doorway. The shadows grew thicker and thicker around the sacrificed goods on the carriage floor, flooding in; and still more came, until there were at least two dozen figures occupying barely a square foot between them, their forms blending into a dark, opaque mass. The books, biro and gum became obscured by a churning mass of almost-solid-looking shapes, from which the occasional ghostly head or shadow arm would emerge, before sinking back into the mêlée.
When the shadows emerged again, pulling themselves clear, each drifted back to where they’d been without a sound or a backward look. Where they had congregated, there was nothing left on the floor but a scrap of chewing gum wrapper, and a torn page of a sudoku book, all the numbers filled in with neat blue biro.
Oda opened her mouth to speak, and the train jerked, nearly sending us flying again. She clung on to a handle and shouted over the roar of the accelerating engine, “What happened there?”
“It’s a sacrifice,” I yelled back as we began to sway and bounce along the tracks. “You sacrifice what they most desire!”
“A sudoku book?”
“Something anonymous, occupying, something to do so you don’t have to look at the rest of the train – yes, a sudoku book and a trashy novel! That’s what you do on the underground!”
Another wrench as we built up speed. For a moment, as we rounded a corner, I could see the other carriages curving away for ever into the darkness, before the line straightened again and they vanished. Sparks flew up from the wheels and flashed across the windows; the lights in the carriage faltered and one or two burst, with a pop and a puff of smoke. The rising and falling darkness raised and banished the shadow figures, so that one second the carriage was full, the next empty, with each dimming of the lights. Outside, for a second, another train rushed by, with a roar and a scream and the thumpthumpthumpthump of air trapped and pounded by the passage of so much metal – I saw a man reading a newspaper, a woman doing her knitting – before the image of the train was snatched away from us again and there was just the darkness and the reflection of our own faces in the scratched glass. We laughed out loud as the sparks splashing up from the wheels rose up around the windows in a blinding backwards waterfall, filling the darkness with electric pops that made the carriage burn with whiteness and the air hum with electricity, obscuring our view and rising up so high and so bright that we had to turn our eyes away and squeeze them shut against their radiance.
The sparks drifted down with the tone of the engine as we began another sharp deceleration. The shock of it knocked me sideways, banging into Oda as her grip slipped from the handle. I caught her instinctively as she staggered across the carriage with the declining movement of the train, and held her tightly by the arm while the sheet of fire outside our window faded, and the lights became dull and normal, the shadows receded down to nothing and, once again, outside I saw the flash of dirt-covered cabling.
Then came a dimly lit platform: neglected concrete and old beige tiles. We came to a halt and, clunking, the carriage doors opened. I stepped out into the cold air of the platform; Oda picked up her sports bag and, with an unsteady step, followed me. Behind us, the carriage doors slammed shut, and the train rattled away.
I looked around for a sign, and saw one: Aldwych.
I laughed. Oda said, “I’m glad you found that funny.”
“Live a little,” I replied. “Welcome to Aldwych station.”
“I’ve never heard of Aldwych station.”
“It’s a closed station. It used to be on the Piccadilly line.”
“Then how did we get here?”
“Are you really going to ask such inane questions all the time? Mystic bloody forces; just accept them and cope!”
There was a polite cough from the other end of the platform. Oda’s hand flew to her bag. I said, “Hello.”
There were three of them, a man and two women. They stood in the entrance to the platform, underneath an old-fashioned sign of a black metal hand with an outstretched finger, below which was the word “Exit”. They had guns. They weren’t smiling. “Evening,” said one of the women, stepping forward. “Were you wanting to see us?”
They took Oda’s bag. That made her angry but at least she coped without shouting. They took my satchel. I said nothing, and wished I had deeper pockets.
Then they blindfolded us and, with a hand on our arm, took us walking. By the gentle rumbling through my feet and the hot, heavy nature of the air, we didn’t go above ground. Besides, our senses were tingling, picking up a low, familiar buzz, a texture to the air between our fingers that seemed … enticing, and which grew with every passing second.
We walked, I estimated, for nearly ten minutes. At one point the smell of the sewers – congealed fat and diluted waste – hit my senses; at another I walked in the company of the rats, watching through their eyes as they scuttled in the dark ten paces behind us, until one of the people escorting us heard the pattering of their claws, and shooed them away with a violent shout in their case, and a clip across the back of the head in mine – not painful nor particularly threatening, but a warning enough that they guessed why the rats were so interested. Our footsteps echoed, and the air grew thicker. So did the taste of magic in that place, a heavy texture as if the breeze passing through my fingers when I moved were liquid, not gas, and as if the floor were covered with treacle, which clung to my feet when I moved.
As we walked, I heard the opening and shutting of several heavy metal doors or gates, and the clicking of many locks. The overall trend seemed level – what few steps up we took were counteracted by a similar number leading back down, so that I imagined we couldn’t be much higher than the Piccadilly line itself by the time we reached our destination. When we arrived, we knew the place at once, familiar to us even from the outside, and I had to struggle not to laugh.
The place where they took off our blindfolds was close, gloomy, made of concrete – concrete walls, floor, ceiling, once a uniform pale beige, now inclining to grey – and full of giant, silent old pieces of machinery. There were banks and banks of it, cables drooping from the monoliths of their bulk, wires sagging and exposed, bulbs off and rust beginning to creep onto the exposed circuit boards inside their slotted structures. But still you could see these were, undeniably, the remnants of a telephone exchange. We could sense, even now, the humming of the place, the clatter of its underground workings – though, by the look of it, many years had passed since the place had been put to its original use.
What had been put to use, however, were the floors, walls and even parts of the ceiling, which were vividly covered with paint. Swirls of colour, messages in orange, blue, purple, pink, images of watching eyes, scampering rats, elves in fancy clothes, creatures fictional and real and some who walked the fine line in between, caricatures of politicians, images of images done in mock-graffito style – here a Rembrandt, reproduced with all the characters playing poker rather than watching the potatoes boil, there a Monet where all the faces were reproduced as beady-eyed ferrets jostling each other in their frilly dresses – if there was any space at all, someone had filled it with paint. The floors glowed with it, the ceiling dripped it, the walls ran with it. The place looked like a psychedelic nightmare, an LSD trip gone wrong, down in the remnants of the Kingsway Telephone Exchange.
They took us into a room whose walls were variations on a theme of purple – purple tower blocks melting into violet flowers that curled around maroon caterpillars squirming their way around lavender bushes that themselves melted into tower blocks again, whose lights described little faces peering out from the rectangular frames of their windows. A heavy iron door, with the words “Committee Room” in old-fashioned lettering, was slammed behind us, and locked. At the far end of the room, someone had left an old mattress stained a suspicious brown, and a bucket.
Oda said, “Is this part of your plan, sorcerer?”
I sat down – not on the mattress – yawned and said, “It’s fine for now.”
“In what way is this ‘fine’?”
“You’re not dead, I’m not dead, they haven’t killed us, we haven’t killed them, it’s fine,” I replied. “If I was a White being pursued by the Tower for nonconformity and antsiness, I’d be iffy about strangers too. I suggest you get a bit of sleep and try not to worry.”
“I won’t sleep in this place,” she answered, pacing across the room and scowling.
“Why not?”
“It’s horrific.”
I stared at her in surprise. “Why?”
“They’ve painted enchantments into the walls, sorcerer! How can you sleep, knowing that?”
I looked round the room at the swirling landscape. “We think it’s beautiful,” we said. “Tire yourself out if you must; I’m going to sleep.”
With that I pulled my coat up around my shoulders, tucked my knees into my chest, rolled onto my side, closed my eyes, and was quickly asleep. My dreams were all purple.
They woke us – there was no way to tell when: day, night, we had nothing to go on – and took us down the corridors, past a reinforced iron door and into a room with a large round table and a single suspended light. A woman was seated there with her red-booted feet up on the table, examining her nails. Her hair was black, and heavy quantities of make-up made her eyelashes seem to stretch on for ever; the corners of her eyes were painted with the long curving lines I’d seen in the Egyptian eyes at Farringdon station. Her lips were black, her skin was pale, her nails were painted bright blue and her clothes were all leather, studs and chains. She said, not looking up as we entered, “I haven’t got much time, so let’s get it over with.”
Oda’s bag of weapons stood in the corner, opened and rummaged; at the sight of such disdain for her equipment, Oda’s face darkened.
“OK,” I said, sitting down where indicated by one of the people who’d brought us here. “Briefly – I’m a sorcerer, and this lady here represents a truly vile and unimaginative group of idiots who may prove useful. I’ve got a grudge against the Tower; I was responsible for the campaign against Amiltech, although not for Khay’s death; Dudley Sinclair recruited me to an alliance of people cooperating against the Tower, including bikers, warlocks, fortune-tellers and bag ladies; the Beggar King told me how to find you; I’m told that you and Guy Lee are locked in a bitter and losing battle. Would you like my help, and will you help me?”
The woman flicked the end of one of her nails and didn’t look at me. “I’ll think about it,” she said. “Thanks for asking.”
She nodded airily at the wall, and our guards pulled us back up by the elbows and led us from the room, back to our purple prison.
With the door locked again, Oda stared at me in horror. “What was that?” she asked, in a voice too calm to be what it seemed.
I sat back down in my corner. “Personally, I thought it went rather well.”
More meaningless time.
No one had told me that vengeance could be so boring.
They fed us sandwiches – spam and stale bread, with tea in chipped mugs. We ate, curious to see if spam was as bad as I remembered it, and were satisfied to find that it was. Oda ate nothing; so, just to make sure, we ate hers.
Oda started doing push-ups in a corner.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“I have to stay fit,” she replied.
“For what?”
She glared at me. When she’d done fifty push-ups, she switched, and did fifty sit-ups. I felt tired just watching her.
When there had been what I guessed was a whole no-night and a long no-day, Oda said, “You know, if I don’t make regular calls, they start cutting bits off the biker, Blackjack.”
I groaned and stood up from my corner. “Right!” I snapped. “Fine. Everyone’s expecting this so why don’t I just bloody get on with it?”
“Bored?” she asked, raising one cocky eyebrow.
I glared, marched up to the iron door and hammered on it. “You talk to me right now!” I shouted. “Or I swear I will fry everything in bloody sight and lots of stuff besides!”
When there was no answer, I gave them a count of thirty seconds, then stood back. “Right,” I muttered. I pressed my ear against the door, half-closed my eyes, and started murmuring the guiding, meaningless sounds of an opening spell, whispering imploring noises into the iron, coaxing the touch of my breath all the way down to the lock, stroking it with my fingertips like you might caress a frightened kitten, wishing I had my set of blank keys from my satchel to make life easier. Purple paint bubbled and hissed on the walls; the tower blocks swayed, the lavender bushes whispered in the wind, little faces of office lights blinked uneasily at us from the surface of the walls; until, eventually, with a reluctant snap, the lock came open.
I pushed the door back. There was no one in the long, gloomy corridor, but also no rats I could hijack for a little scouting. There was, however, a lot of electricity around. I said to Oda, “If I ask you to keep out of my way, you’ll just make a hollow laughing sound, am I right?”
“You give me more credit for humour than I deserve,” she replied. I wasn’t entirely surprised.
I held up my fingers and started dragging the electricity out of the walls, wrapping it round my hand, my wrists, wreathing it up my arms and around my neck like a scarf, letting it drape down my back in a mass of angry worms of lightning, feeling it wriggle across my chest and make my hair stand on end. When I had enough of it in my grasp that my blood ached with the pressure of it, and my eyes stung from the closeness of its heat to my face, I started marching down the corridor. Oda followed at a tactful distance. As we walked, the paintings very gently turned to watch us.
I chuckled.
“What’s so funny?”
“They’re watching,” I said.
“Who’s watching?”
“The Whites.”
“Why?”
“I’m not entirely sure. Come on. This way.”
“How do you know?”
“We know this place from the inside, from the old days.”
“What do you mean?”
“It used to be a telephone exchange. We would come and play here, when the lines weren’t so busy. Remember – trust me!”
“You try, one day,” she retorted. I grinned and kept walking.