A Life Less Ordinary (18 page)

“It’s busy,” I said, slowly. I had no idea what I was looking for, unless it was traces of magic. I opened my mind carefully and sensed...nothing. The Kirk wasn’t glowing with magic, not like the Castle and a hundred other buildings along the Royal Mile. It was an ordinary mundane building. “Why are we even here?”

Master Revels said nothing. I followed him into the building and through the tourist’s section, into a vast room that showed us the remains of the archaeological exploration program. I found myself studying information plaques in puzzlement. The Kirk had been linked to Edinburgh’s famous underground city – the Town below the Ground – yet the research had been halted a year ago, for no apparent reason. Master Revels was still distracted, so I wandered over to one of the staff members and gave him my best smile.

“This is a fascinating place,” I said, seriously. As I had guessed, he began to launch into a long history of the building and how it related to Edinburgh’s history. Some of it was quite fascinating, all the more so because I knew about the magical world and could guess at links that he, for all of his knowledge, couldn’t even imagine. The magical world and the mundane world had interacted more than anyone could have guessed. “Why did they stop the research here?”

The staff member looked left, then right, and then back up at me. “They were talking about ghosts,” he said, quite seriously. “They said that they encountered ghosts.”

A year ago, I would have laughed in his face. Now, having seen ghosts myself – both real ghosts and the afterimages of particularly traumatic events – I believed him. He didn’t believe himself, however, and was giving me the dressed up version he saved for the tourists. I couldn’t believe his cheek; I might not have much of a Scottish accent, but I didn’t sound as if I came from England, let alone overseas. Still, I listened carefully, and a picture started to form in my mind.

The workers had started to feel chills soon after they began work, followed by strange accidents that seemed to have no real cause. They’d suffered a couple of injuries when power surged unexpectedly, followed by several more who’d been hit by flying objects...objects that had been thrown by an unknown and unseen hand. At first, they’d believed that students from the nearby University of Edinburgh were playing jokes on them, but as the incidents continued to mount, it seemed impossible that students could have organised them. The site security had been doubled, to no effect.

And then the sightings had started. The workers had seen ghosts – small children, older boys and girls – in the building. At first, they had only been glimpsed out of the corner of their eyes – not unlike the magical world itself – but as the days and weeks had passed on, the ghosts had gotten stronger and more visible. The workers had eventually convinced their superiors to halt the work. Unwilling to miss a chance to boost their funding, their superiors had leaked the news to the local papers and charged for access to the site.

“So as you can see, the place is haunted,” my helpful tour guide concluded. “Fair sends a shiver down your spine, doesn’t it?”

I shrugged. Try as I might, using all the tricks I had been taught, I could sense no sign of magic within the building. All ghosts, even the afterimages, left behind some traces of their presence, even if they were unwilling or unable to manifest fully. The only trace of magic I could sense was the faint blur surrounding Master Revels, something that was clearly not part of the building. It was strange...

“Ah, you’re not a believer,” the guide said. I smiled to myself. Does it count as having faith if someone actually
knows
that ghosts exist? “You should come to the tour this night. We’ve been allowing people to actually spend the night in the Kirk, where they actually see ghosts and all manner of strange things.”

“I’ll think about it,” I promised him. It was an impressive story, although I had no idea how much of it was actually true. The absence of magic suggested that none of it was true, yet...
something
had clearly happened in the Kirk. Edinburgh’s magical field should have infested the building, even if none of the mundane tourists could sense anything. “I just have to work late tonight.”

I wandered over to Master Revels and filled him in, quickly. I’d never seen him looking disturbed before, even when we had discovered Mr Pygmalion’s handiwork in the museum. He looked as if he’d seen a ghost, which was ironic seeing that ghosts were the last thing we could see here.

“Interesting,” he said, when I had finished. “I wonder what it all means.”

I looked up, sharply. “Didn’t your masters tell you anything, or did they just send you to see what you could sniff out?”

Master Revels smiled. “They never tell me everything,” he said, dryly. He looked up sharply before I could say anything. “I know you are there, by the way. Why don’t you come out and join the party?”

One of the shadows in the room took on shape and form, disgorging a human magician. None of the mundane humans noticed anything amiss. He was tall, with dark skin, a neatly trimmed goatee and a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. He wore white Islamic robes and a skullcap on his head. Under his arm, instead of a cane, he carried a book.

“I wanted to know what you found,” he said, in a lightly-accented voice that suggested that English was not his first language. “I found nothing, you see.”

He chuckled and I found myself liking him at once. “It’s the ghosts,” he said. “The ghosts are all gone.”

Chapter Sixteen

“I fear that I have neglected to perform introductions,” Master Revels said, dryly. He’d noticed my puzzlement. “This is Dervish of the Unseen Words of Allah.”

Dervish bowed to me, politely. “I always liked your master,” he said, seriously. His brown eyes twinkled as he spoke. “Very little gets past him.”

I smiled back, thinking hard. Was Dervish his
real
name, or merely an assumed name like Dizzy? “It’s good to meet you,” I said, sincerely. “You may call me Dizzy.”

“A good choice for a name,” Dervish assured me. “There are few links to the higher powers or to Allah Himself; the name is nothing, but what you make of it. You have chosen well.”

Master Revels smiled, rather dryly. “Returning to the subject at hand,” he said, “what do you know about the ghosts disappearing?”

Dervish winked at me. “He hates it when someone else is ahead of him,” he said. “I know that this place was so infested with ghosts that even mundane people – those poor innocent mundane people – could sense their presence.” He looked over at me for a moment. “Even mundane people can sense ghosts, if the ghosts are powerful and persistent. Ghosts really hate being disturbed, so if they were pulled from their slumber they would have started to try to push the mundane intruders away. Unluckily for them, the mundane people have thick skulls and it takes a lot to get a message into their heads.”

“Such as
go away and leave us to sleep
,” Master Revels injected, dryly.

“Quite,” Dervish agreed. “So there were a vast number of ghosts here, despite all the mundane world could do, until two days ago. And now they are all gone.”

I blinked. “Gone onwards to their great reward?”

“Ghosts do sometimes fade away,” Master Revels said. “We don’t really know what happens to them. Some believe that they finally complete their mission on Earth and go onwards, others believe that God finally gets tired of them hiding on Earth and removes them...and some believe that they just fade away and disappear completely.”

“Allah may be harsh, but he is never unjust,” Dervish said, firmly. “We believe that sometimes he grants the ghosts mercy, or allows them to reincarnate in another body and try again. To suggest that a soul can be destroyed is...unpleasant.”

“And yet they have all gone,” Master Revels said. “The reports on this place warned of the presence of hundreds of ghosts, enough for even the mundane world to notice...and now they are all gone and all of the magic that should have been in this building has gone with them. Do you know anything that can do that?”

“There was an incident in Mecca a few years ago...but that was at Allah’s command,” Dervish said. He sounded uncomfortable, as if he didn’t want to talk about it or even
think
about it. “The ghosts were allowed to reincarnate as a group after condemning themselves to wander the Earth after their deaths. The Merciful One granted it as a special case.”

I frowned. “Could that have happened here?”

“I don’t know,” Dervish admitted. “The circumstances are very different, but this
is
a place of worship and Allah would have been watching over it. It wasn’t as if this place was built to show off the wealth and power of men who choose to squander what Allah gave them.”

Master Revels shrugged. “If the Higher Powers or even the All-Highest had intervened here, so close to so much of our population, we would have sensed it all across the country,” he said. “If an angel had come to carry the souls to Heaven or Hell, we would have sensed it and all of us would have been hiding under our beds until it had departed. A devil could not have taken their souls without their permission, freely given.”

“Unless their life choices condemned them to Hell,” Dervish said. I realised, suddenly, that they were old friends and would cheerfully argue for days if they were allowed to do so. “If the devil got impatient and sent one of his servants to collect them...”

“A few hundred years is nothing to those who walk in eternity,” Master Revels countered. “He could wait until doomsday for them if necessary.”

“Unless he thought they could redeem themselves and escape his grasp,” Dervish said. “Or perhaps they were the victims of a spell used to trap their souls here, which finally snapped.”

I cleared my throat and both men glanced at me. “You’ve actually seen angels?”

“Very few people have seen angels and lived to tell the tale,” Master Revels said, darkly. “Angels have always given me the creeps.”

“An angel makes the most fanatical fanatic look uncertain,” Dervish added. “They have nothing but conviction that they are doing the right thing, whatever it is. They are great shining beings of light, Allah’s messengers and his soldiers in the war against evil, powerful beyond measure or hope of reason. To look upon an angel in its natural form is to be transmuted to salt, as happened to Lot’s wife after the fall of Sodom. It was an angel that destroyed the city and everyone who lived within its walls.”

“And another angel that saved Lot and his family from the fires,” Master Revels said. “They would have all been saved if she hadn’t looked back and seen the angel standing over the city, bathing it in holy cleansing fire. It is not in the nature of an angel to accept excuses. One is either a saint or a sinner, with no room in-between for the vast majority of the human race. To encounter an angel is to risk certain death at its hands.”

I closed my eyes. I hadn’t been raised in a very religious family and I had never been to Sunday School, but from what little I recalled, angels were benevolent servants of God. The story they were telling me was different, of angels that were so powerful and dangerous, if only because they
knew
that they were right. I wondered, suddenly, if angels had free will. Did fanatics have free will?

“That’s a matter of opinion,” Dervish said, when I asked. “Some believe that an angel that learns to think for itself will slide towards evil and fall into Hell. Others believe that the angels know the truth of the universe and serve Allah willingly. Some long time ago, before the Final Messenger of Allah, a man summoned an angel to ask it that very question.”

I blinked. “And what happened?”

Dervish gave me a toothy grin. “Did you ever wonder where the Sahara Desert came from?”

Master Revels chuckled. “We’re getting off track here,” he said. “I found no trace of the ghosts and I assume you found nothing likewise. What does that tell us?”

“That the tourists who are coming here this evening are going to be disappointed,” Dervish said. He winked at me when he saw his friend’s expression. I wouldn’t have teased Master Revels, not with my bottom still aching from last night. Still, it was good to know that Master Revels had outside friends. “They won’t see a single ghost here.”

I shrugged. I had never been on one of the famous Midnight Tours, but I had heard about them and I suspected that most of the ghosts they saw were actually created by mundane science and trickery. Given time, the tourist company would probably create a whole new legend for the Kirk, even if the real ghosts were all gone. It might even be safer than toying with the first set of ghosts.

“Apart from that, it tells us that someone has managed to destroy the ghosts or to capture them,” Master Revels said, firmly. He didn’t look as if he was prepared to be distracted any longer. “And, whoever it was, it has nothing to do with Heaven or Hell.”

“It seems that way,” Dervish agreed. “Fascinating, isn’t it?”

I couldn’t help myself. “Are you telling me that we’re looking for kidnapped ghosts?”

Master Revels grinned. “It looks like it,” he agreed. “So, my old friend, what happened at Mecca?”

“It wasn’t the same,” Dervish said. He stopped, as if he was listening to a voice far away. “If you wish to know, I would feel more comfortable discussing it behind a set of wards. Please will you allow me to share the comforts of my home with you?”

Master Revels glanced at me and then nodded. “We would be honoured,” he said. “Besides, Dizzy needs to expand her mind a bit.”

Dervish shrugged and led us out of the Kirk, pausing only to pick up a tourist brochure from one of the stalls. Once we were outside, he led us down the street, down towards Edinburgh Central Mosque. It was a strange building, a glimpse of Arabia in the midst of Edinburgh that clearly didn’t fit in with the rest of the city. Dervish pressed his lips together and walked towards a bare stone wall. A moment later, as we followed him, the stone parted and allowed us through, revealing a flight of stairs leading down into the mosque’s basement. It was no surprise to me that the stairs just kept going down, well below the official levels. We had stepped into another part of the magical world.