A Madness of Angels: Or the Resurrection of Matthew Swift (41 page)

 

“Matthew, I don’t know what you’ve been doing…”

 

“Necromancy – the magic of the dead. I want to know… what you did to him.”

 

“What
I
did to him?”

 

“You fear dying, Mr Bakker,” I said to the voice in the phone, “you are so afraid. If his non-life, his frozen existence could offer you the solution to your problem, wouldn’t you have taken it? I have racked my imagination, all the things you taught me, and I can’t think of a single power, magician or enchanted tome which could do the things to Lee that I think must have been done – only you. You’d do it, I think, and not look back.”

 

A sigh, tired and old, down the phone. I watched the sunlight thicken on the pavement and crawl over the tops of the grand old houses surrounding Lincoln’s Inn. “He told me you attacked him, you went to a pit?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“I thought I had taught you better.”

 

I shrugged, then realised the absurdity of the gesture. “I will undo whatever it is you’ve done, Mr Bakker.”

 

“Matthew?” His voice had a darker, lilting edge of polite, poison-edged enquiry.

 

“Mr Bakker?”

 

“Lee tells me that when you fought, you burnt blue. Your skin was on fire with flames the colour of your new eyes, and the rumour goes…”

 

“Yes?”

 

“… the rumour goes that the voices in the telephone stopped talking, when you came back, that the angels suddenly stopped singing their blue songs.”

 

I said nothing.

 

“Matthew?”

 

Nothing.

 

“What have you done, Matthew?” he whispered. “What did you think you could do?”

 

“Mr Bakker?”

 

“Yes?”

 

“Did you bring us back?”

 

Now he was silent on the other end of the line. A breath, a slow exhalation transmitted in zeros and ones to our ears. “My God,” he murmured.

 

“Did you bring us back?” we repeated.

 

“It’s true!” Not a confession: surprise, horror, perhaps a hint of delight in his voice.

 

“Mr Bakker?” we said.

 

“Matthew Swift, what deal did you make? What did you think you could
do
?!”

 

“We are coming for you,” we said. “We will not stop.”

 

We slammed the phone down onto the hook, and walked until we were me again, breathing furious, angry, frightened breaths, and the dawn light was starting to bring some warmth to the streets of the city.

 

 

In the Kingsway Exchange, for the whole of a non-day and a non-night, they prepared. The Whites painted every wall, sprayed every inch of glass, every door and every frame with their winding images, and when there was no more space left in the tunnels, they climbed up onto the streets and drew their creatures and their words onto the walls of the university library, and the Starbucks, and the closed shutters of the newsagents, and the pillars of the stations.

 

Below ground, the delegation of a dozen or so warlocks moved from room to room and blessed them in the names of the spirits from whom they drew their special powers: Harrow, Lord of the Alleyways; the Seven Sisters, Ladies of the Boundaries; Ravenscourt, Master of Scuttling Creatures; and of course, our personal favourite spirit to invoke – Upney, Grey Lord of Tar. Theirs was a borrowed magic of other powers; high priests in the service of skulking city shadows.

 

The Order kept themselves to themselves, but the street kids under the Whites’ protection, scampering from room to room with wide, marvelling eyes, whispered of enough weaponry to fight a war, and I believed them. I didn’t like to ask what the shapeshifters did, and they didn’t offer to tell. We all knew Lee would come. He would find us. Nothing would stop him now.

 

 

Blackjack found me, eventually, sitting with my back against an old, abandoned stack of telephone connectors, standing like an overgrown tombstone of dead wires and slots and metal frames and broken bulbs. Its presence comforted us, reminded us, in a strange small way, of our life before now, when we’d been on the other side of those wires, looking out.

 

He sat down next to me, considered his words, then said what I think he’d been intent on saying all along. “You look like a piece of rotting road kill.”

 

“Thanks.”

 

“Why the long face?”

 

“We don’t like waiting. Sitting around waiting for them to attack; we want to be outside, looking, exploring.”

 

“You’re talking in plurals again.”

 

“What?”

 

“‘We’,” he explained with an embarrassed expression.

 

“Sorry.”

 

He leant back nonchalantly against the bank of forgotten equipment, its edges flecked with rust, and pulled a small whisky flask out of his pocket. He downed a slurp and offered it to me. I took it and we risked a cautious gulp of the stuff; an acquired taste, we decided, although it grew in charm as it sunk deeper into our stomach. “So,” he said finally, in a strained voice that was leading to something more.

 

I waited.

 

“I got told I owe you for getting me away from the nutters with the guns.”

 

“The…”

 

“The Order.”

 

“Right. Yes.”

 

“Nice stunt; how’d you pull it?”

 

“I cursed the leader of the Order – Chaigneau – with a long and withering death,” I said. “He saw my point of view.”

 

“Bastard’s going to kill you, Matthew Swift,” he said brightly. “Just in case you hadn’t figured it out.”

 

“I know.”

 

“Although, if you need help when push comes to shove…”

 

“Thanks. I appreciate the offer.”

 

He gave me a long, sideways glance. “That means ‘no’, doesn’t it?”

 

“What?”

 

“You like working alone.”

 

“I… have nothing here,” I said, struggling to find the right words, caught off guard. “The people I trusted or thought I could trust either can’t be, or are gone. Vanished, dead. Or those who may live I put at risk by my presence – people will get hurt around us. Given those circumstances, wouldn’t you rather work alone?”

 

“Don’t get me wrong; I get the whole lone rider vibe,” he said, raising his hands in defence. “But I’m just saying: it’ll put you in the scrapyard twenty years earlier than might’ve been.”

 

“We think… that we are grateful for your concern,” we stumbled. “Thank you.”

 

“That’s a fucking weird thing you’ve got going there,” he grunted, turning away and half shaking his head, hand going towards the whisky flask again.

 

“What is?”

 

“For Christ’s sake, Matthew, this is a fucking telephone exchange! Do you think no one noticed when suddenly
poof
, the voices in the wire went missing? Do you know how many nerds in basements were watching those rogue pieces of frequency, the bursts of inexplicable interference in the system? One second there’s a semi-demonic power whispering out of the telephone to anyone with half the senses to hear it, and the next second it’s just gone! And there you are, walking around with bright blue eyes and a bewildered crap expression and, you know, it doesn’t take a million brain cells to work it out. That’s what’s so fucking weird, the way you can’t work out if you’re even bloody human any more.”

 

I looked away, ashamed. We mumbled, “We… meant no harm.”

 

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered.

 

We looked up sharply, trying to read his voice, his words. His eyes were fixed on an opposite bank of dead machinery as, with shaky fingers, he unscrewed the top of his whisky flask. “We also have nothing here, except what I remember, and that’s largely gone. We did not mean for any of this to happen; we hope you will understand.”

 

“This is a new one,” he groaned.

 

“What is?”

 

“Me talking to a bloody mystic power no less, disguised as a guy with a face like a soggy sandbag.” Clumsily he touched his forehead with a couple of fingers and smiled. “Nice to meet you, blue bloody electric bloody angels. How you doing?”

 

We looked him straight in the eye and said, “Things have been better.”

 

“I bet they bloody have.” He waved the whisky flask at us again; we shook our head.

 

“Was that Matthew or the angels saying no?” he asked. “Just in case one of you’s teetotal.”

 

“We are the same,” we said. “The distinction is merely one of presentation and form. To us… all things are new. Humans and the things they do. We were made by them… but had never
experienced
them before. As for me… I just want to get on with it. When we blaze, when we fight, when we rejoice, then I am all us, for that is all we are. When I am… afraid… we do not understand, do not like these things. We are me. It is… frightening, having to be me.” I caught his expression, somewhere trapped between genuinely bemused and hopefully open. I shrugged. “And I’m not teetotal. Thank you. I’d just like to keep a clear head.”

 

“Things are very weird,” said Blackjack.

 

“There,” we said, “we also agree.”

 

 

We waited in those tunnels for another two days before it happened. By the time it did, I almost believed that it wasn’t going to, that Lee had got his head screwed back on right, that Bakker wouldn’t order it, that they wouldn’t come. No one said it; but we had begun to think it even after the first night. It was hard to tell whether I felt disappointment or hope when Vera woke me up with a shake in the dark and murmured, “Come. Now.”

 

I followed her through tunnels lined with sleeping bags below still-damp paint, stepping over the hunched forms of snoozing weremen, the curled-up shapes of slumbering warlocks and around the heavy black, weapon-laden bags of the Order, until we dropped down a narrow flight of grey concrete stairs, illuminated by a single light that sat in the wall like a squid clinging to the side of a sunken ship. The shadows here were almost thick enough to swirl like fog, and at the bottom, by a heavy, shut iron door, there lay a body, almost floating in a puddle of its own accumulated blood.

 

Holding up an electric lamp to see more clearly, Vera said in a hushed voice, “The door leads down to the Post Office tunnels. Trains used to go through there to the sorting offices. It’s not marked on the map.”

 

I said nothing and squatted down on the steps just above the body. Repulsed and fascinated, we reached out without thinking, even as our stomach turned, and carefully prodded the side of the broken man. His skin was still warm through the remnants of his clothes, and as we pushed his body over we saw that something had torn open his belly, dragged out a handful of intestines and wrapped them round the man’s middle a few times, like a badly knitted belt. We tasted bile in our throat and felt a physical convulsion through our body as our heart skipped a beat, and stood up quickly, backing a few steps and suddenly not sure what to do with the blood on our fingers, running them over the wall to try and wipe it off.

 

“Is it Bakker?” hissed Vera. “Are they here? Is it Lee?”

 

“They’re coming,” I answered. “But it’s not Bakker.”

 

I snatched the lantern from out of her hands and held it close to myself, sweeping it from side to side in front of me; as the bright light moved around my feet, my shadow, stretching out behind me, did not move with it, but simply grew longer and thinner, like a rubber band being drawn towards breaking point. We felt a laugh growin our throat, shrill and frightened, and I bit down hard to contain it, so the sound that came out was more like a whimper.

 

“What is it?” Vera could see how the light didn’t bend the shadows at our feet, and was smart enough to be scared.

 

“Something much, much worse,” I declared, handing the lantern back to her. “Wake everyone up. Don’t let anyone go around in groups of less than five, or without a strong light. Tell them that Lee’s coming.”

 

 

To the best of my knowledge, this is what happened in the Kingsway Exchange; but in such chaos, even with the best of intentions, it is hard to tell.

 

Guy Lee had an army at his command. It wasn’t a big army, nor was it well disciplined; but when the individual soldiers of the said army can blend their skin to the colour of concrete or burst bubbles of burning hydrogen in the pipes above your head or scream with the roar of the exploding fuel tank on the back of a bus in billows of black fumes, size doesn’t matter. They’d been paid, bribed, threatened, blackmailed, cajoled, promised, and coaxed into working for Lee, and when the survivors were questioned they all whispered that somewhere, behind it all, they knew what Lee was. Not just a man with a will: a servant of the Tower. And those who disobeyed the Tower did not live to regret their mistake for more than a few days of blood loss and pain.

 

They entered the old, forgotten Post Office train tunnels at the Mount Pleasant sorting office, a truly unpleasant collection of tin roofs and grey walls that sat beside heavy fuming traffic at the junction of Rosebery Avenue and Farringdon Road. They slipped down through the darkness, their way lit up by the witches who coaxed the mould around the leaking pipes to fluoresce into vibrant light and guide the travellers on their way to the Exchange. They didn’t know how Lee had known where to go. They said there was a traitor somewhere within the Whites. It could have been anyone.

 

The watchman on the Post Office tunnel was called Yixiao, a White from Brixton who specialised in inscribing his spells in towering green letters on the brick cuttings of railway lines, and in his youth had been part of a gang who labelled themselves MORTON BOYZ in big black letters across the wheelie bins of their local estates. That was before Yixiao had discovered, to his surprise, that the crows he drew in the daytime flapped their way across the white walls of-the tower blocks at night, squawking the words “
caw caw
” in squiggly small black letters from their beaks across the paint on the walls, before sunrise forced them to land again across the garage doors where they’d first been painted. In the tunnels behind the big iron doors that he guarded, he’d painted on the encrusted walls, their surface finely textured with layers of solid dirt built up over the years, the images of his coal-coloured crows, who patrolled up and down the corridor every night to see who might be coming in the dark, and shrieked with silent letters their warnings across the concrete walls, for Yixiao’s hearing only.