A Madness of Angels: Or the Resurrection of Matthew Swift (54 page)

 

I felt the movement in the air and turned instinctively, knowing what it would be; I had felt the air change like that once before, and I had dismissed it and died – the same mistake would not happen twice.

 

Hunger was still only halfway out of the paving stones and rising, emerging out of the shadow of a lamp-post in a thin, pale line, his shape only half there, coat billowing in and out of shadowy existence around him. His claws, however, were real and solid and black enough as I raised my arms and caught him by the wrists even as he slashed down towards my face with his curved fingertips. His arms were ghostlike; I could see the traffic barrier behind them, and through his chest a rickshaw man pedalling his latest fare towards Soho, as Hunger rose into the air and I turned to face him.

 

I hissed, “Do you really want to fight here? In this place, with so many lights and people and so much
power
? Do you really think this is wise?”

 

“You forget,” he replied, and his breath was like the cold blast of air when a train is about to arrive at an underground platform. “They will never see me, nor know who I was, when I drink your fire!”

 

He twisted his arms in my grip; my hands had no difficulty encircling his wrists, they were so thin. But as he twisted, his fingers stretched down to brush my skin, and his black claws gouged through my clothes and into my arms. There was no sudden shock of pain; he dug the tips of his black fingers into my skin with the slow inexorability of a knife cutting into cold butter: a laborious work of strength but one that he would do, breaking the skin, the capillaries, the muscle, the tips of his fingers brushing bone and…

 

I think I must have called out as my blood rose under his hands, seeping out and staining my jacket an odd dark purple in that reflective, changing neon light, because he smiled and whispered, “I do not care for the rules of your kind; that is what it means to be free, yes? You drove me back too many times, little sorcerer and his blue flames!”

 

But even though his strength was unstoppable, and I could feel the dull pain starting to throb up my elbows and into my chest as his grip tightened and tightened and I struggled to hold on to his wrists in turn, he still wasn’t all there. He didn’t have feet, merely a trailing-off of coat into the shadow of the lamp-post, as if he was a seal halfway out of water; and his chest was still an incoherent grey smear across the air, not real or solid at all.

 

I said through gritted teeth, “Make a wish?”

 

“To feast richly,” he replied. “Always, to feast!”

 

“Probably have to invest more than a ten pence, then.”

 

For a moment, he didn’t understand. Then a glint of comprehension entered the sunken, half-there, half-gone eyes. His glance darted up to the horses rearing behind me in their fountain, then to my face, then to the wet sleeve beneath his grasp, turning pinkish red with my blood. His hand was too thin, I realised, too insubstantial even to notice that the thing it held was damp. We grinned triumphantly and exclaimed, “We know now that you are weak!” and with every ounce of strength we had, with every flux of power and magic we could find, digging our toes so hard into the soles of our shoes that the pavement hummed beneath us, we clenched our fingers around the ghosts of his wrists, and turned. We heaved him to one side and threw him straight towards the fountain, twisting ourself head first towards the water line and dragging him along with us. As he was pulled towards it, he stretched. His legs melted into a grey blur within the shadow of the lamp-post, then elongated like elastic pulled taut. We plunged his head into the water, which burst into steam as he touched it, boiled and bubbled around us while he thrashed, his fingers instantly coming free from my arms and lashing up towards my face. But he was blind while his head was driven down as far as I could push it, towards the floodlight lamp that burnt towards the horses rearing overhead. I snarled, “Make a wish, and let there be light!”

 

And the stretching shadows of the lamp-post thinned, paled, fled. The floodlights scorching upwards at the horses took on the colour of an angry equatorial sun; the neon lights above Piccadilly Circus spat sparks and grew brighter and brighter, until I had to close my eyes against them; and still the intensity of it grew through my eyelids as every car lamp, brake light, street light, shop light and reflective surface lit like a newly born sun, burning away every shadow and hint of darkness so that for a second, in the middle of the night, it was daytime.

 

The cold slippery head beneath my hands vanished. It disappeared so suddenly that I staggered and nearly fell forward into the icy bubbling water of the fountain. I heard a sharp electric pop nearby, then quickly dragged my hands out of the water as beneath its surface the floodlights brightened so that the horses’ eyes above me seemed mad, and then snuffed out, the burning wires of the lamps withering into scorched black worms. I heard a snap and a crack like lightning on a hot, rainless summer’s day, and the skid of traffic as the headlamps of vehicles all around, heated to bursting by the intensity of light pouring out of them, burst. Above the junction of Regent Street and Shaftesbury Avenue the neon lights grew too bright to look at and exploded, showering the street below with hot sparks and light, hurling out fragments of glass. As a final, apologetic encore, the street lamps snuffed out, plunging the Circus into panic-struck darkness.

 

 

I sat on the rim of the fountain’s basin as Piccadilly Circus exploded into chaos. As the lights around them popped out into nothing, the pedestrians went quickly from yelping with surprise, to getting on their mobiles and telling their friends and family in rushed, excited voices, that they’d just seen the most amazing thing. The more enterprising of them rushed to take photos with maximum exposure, or film the still-glowing lamps of Piccadilly in contrast to the dead lights of Haymarket, hoping to flog their images to the London
Evening Standard
. The traffic came to a standstill, after one 38 bus driver, seeing his lights explode, had swerved across Shaftesbury Avenue so that his front wheels had skidded up onto the pavement. With his bus being eighteen metres long, all other traffic had been stopped in both directions. Some drivers trapped by the bus blared their horns; others, seeing that order wasn’t about to be restored, got out to buy coffee and a doughnut from the nearby twenty-four-hour store, paying by torchlight. As with the best curiosities in London, the crowd gathered in half the time it took the police to arrive, congregating to see the strange thing of the lights
not
being on, and to speculate on what it was that could have blown so many bulbs at once. The police cars eventually managed to crawl their way through via the back streets of Soho, the sirens being audible several minutes before the cars became visible, preceded by several officers in yellow fluorescent jackets, who’d despaired and climbed out to try and make sense of the situation on foot.

 

As all this went on, I sat and rolled up my shirtsleeves. Four perfect crescent moons had been incised on the underside of each forearm, and all were bleeding copiously. I was tempted to wash the injuries with water from the fountain, but it seemed inappropriate to the magic of that place to use wishing water for cleaning wounds. Instead, I drew out a penny from my pocket, offered up a thought of thanks to whatever spirit of urban magic had blessed the waters of that place with the wish-maker’s mark, and dropped the coin into the water, watching it sink. In the darkness of the Circus I couldn’t see my gold coin, and half suspected there wouldn’t be anything left to see.

 

I crossed over the road and went to the all-night pharmacy. There I bought a roll of bandages and some disinfectant liquid that stung so badly we almost ran outside again in search of water. Sitting in a passport photo booth for privacy, we wrapped up our bleeding arms in rolls of bandage too thick to be covered by the remnants of our shirtsleeves. With just our coat protecting the bandages from the queries of the police as they struggled to organise the traffic, we went home.

 

 

When we woke in the morning, our arms were still bleeding; in fact the bandages were soaked through. It was a bad start to what, we thought, should have been a day of relative triumph.

 

By mid-morning, with no sign of clotting, we checked out of our hotel and went in search of a doctor.

 

At the hospital south of the river, Dr Seah studied our bloody arms and said, “Uh-huh. OK. You know, they train us to be like, you know, all sympathetic and comforting and shit? But looking at this… you’re kinda totally fucked.”

 

“What’s wrong?”

 

“Haemophilia?” she suggested in a pained voice.

 

“It’s not very likely.”

 

“It didn’t seem very likely, seeing as how you were here last week and didn’t bleed out. Know what, just for kicks, shall I call an ambulance?”

 

We raised our bloody arms to the light and studied the blood still trickling into the crooks of our elbows. “It may not be enough,” we replied. “Perhaps a taxi would be better.”

 

 

Weakness. Human weakness, frail, pale, failing. How could we be ourself, trapped in dying flesh?

 

Time to take charge of myself. Be practical, businesslike; keep a level head in a situation of growing tension, keep the voice steady, the eyes locked, the chin down and the shoulders back. If you start to sound afraid, start to look afraid, you’ll be scared before you know it.

 

Dr Seah ordered a taxi. We climbed in the back, our hands starting to shake, and I gave an address. The driver said, “You sure you don’t need a doctor? You don’t look…”

 

“There’s a doctor friend at this address.”

 

“OK, if you’re sure.”

 

He took me to where I wanted to go: Chalfont Street Market, flanked on one side by the reflective grey glass of Euston station, and on the other by the red bricks of the British Library as it tried to blend in with the fairy tale castle towers and arched windows of St Pancras station. I got out, thanked him, paid with what little money I had left, and staggered enough up the road to make him think that I was serious about continuing on it. When the taxi was gone, I turned back the way I’d come and, feeling the tremble in our knees as we walked

 

to fear is not to be free

 

we are…

 

… I am…

 

come be me
…

 

I walked, I
made us
walk, because I knew what it was like to be this weak and we had no conception of it, round the corner to the boarded-up, broken windows of the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital for Women. Its tea-coloured walls were cut off from the public street by high chipboard hoardings, plastered over with ads for concerts, magazines and, in the odd place here or there, the scrawling graffiti of the Whites, the snouts of their crawling black-and-white crocodiles pointing towards the Kingsway Exchange. Round the corner, towards the main doors overhung by a drooping green entrance sign welcoming you to the hospital, were notices warning “danger” and “keep out” and “no children”. The doors themselves were covered over with corrugated iron, and padlocked; on them someone had painted the face of a white-skinned nurse, with eyes shut, and over that someone else had added in big black letters, “WERE HAV WE VOICES??”. I knocked, but the corrugated iron just banged loudly against the empty door frames behind, while broken glass crunched under my feet like thick snow.

 

I kicked at the iron barrier, and shouted, “Hey!” up at the hospital’s broken windows, but my voice was snatched away by the passing of a bus, crawling round the traffic lights away from Euston station.

 

Losing our patience, we reached into the satchel for our skeleton keys, and fumbled at the padlock with slippery, bloodstained fingers. At length we found the right key, coaxed it into shape, turned, and opened the lock. We pulled the chain off the door, and dragged it back, the heavy metal squeaking and scratching painfully across the pavement, before ducking through one of the broken glass door panels.

 

Inside, traceries of overcast daylight seeped in around plywood panels boarding up the window panes. Though the corridors were bare, they were full of broken glass, water dripping from shattered pipes, and rotting pieces of splintered wood, all suggesting nonetheless what this place had once been. The tiled floor was discoloured from years of floods and droughts and more floods, staining it with moulds and interesting tufts of vivid green moss that gave the place a cold, sharp smell of decay. At a crack in the wall I pulled a few purple buddleia flowers off their stem, and crunched them in my palm to a handful, before slipping it into the frontmost pocket of my satchel. Buddleia grew in London wherever buildings were left neglected; they sprouted through every wall by every railway cutting and out of every derelict site, spreading roots into the stone itself. As such, buddleia flowers had their own special properties within any urban magician’s inventory; wherever they were found, they weren’t to be ignored.

 

With the last fragment of purple in my bag, I chose a left turning at whim, and splashed my way through puddles of stagnant water stained with clouds of chemical whiteness. I found a flight of stairs, with half the tiles missing from their treads, and the scarred concrete showing underneath. It led past a wall supported by scaffolding; on the first floor was another empty, airless corridor.

 

I called out, “Hello?”

 

My voice was eaten up so quickly by the dead silence of that place, I half-wondered if I’d called at all.

 

At random I turned right, then left. I was about to climb the next flight, when behind me in the corridor I heard a click. I turned. A woman stood there in a nurse’s uniform. Her face was the same near-perfect white of the graffiti image on the iron door downstairs, her hat the same old-fashioned, almost theatrical blue of the painted nurse’s cap. Her expression was one of immense seriousness.

 

“And who are you?” she asked in a prim voice.