A Madness of Angels: Or the Resurrection of Matthew Swift (61 page)

 

“You’ll feel embarrassed about those words when you’re finished with them.” We walked on into the port.

 

 

Tucked behind the maze of ramps and causeways and car parks that made up most of Dover’s ferry port was a small and mostly makeshift customs area, full of little offices, confiscated goods and demolished cars that suspicious customs officers had literally taken apart piece by piece. Beyond that, a small red-brick building was almost built into the cliff itself, with a black metal door and a single buzzing light that sounded like a fly was trapped inside the bulb. I dug into my bag for my set of blank keys and fitted one into the lock.

 

The magic was slow coming here, even though we could hear the splashing of the sea and smell petrol fumes. We knew there was potential in this place for all sorts of wonders; but it was so unfamiliar to us that we struggled to access it, as if we were caged in walls of perfect glass.

 

“You OK?” asked Blackjack as I tried to make the key work.

 

“Fine,” I muttered through gritted teeth. “Give me a moment. It’s just…”

 

The key sprung in the lock, the door slipped open.

 

Inside was a long white corridor that smelt of disinfectant. The tiles were chipped and the lino-covered floor, despite regular cleaning, was so ingrained with dirt that its former blue colour had been reduced to speckled brown. Suddenly we were sure that of all the places we didn’t want to be, all the parts of life we didn’t want to explore, this topped the list. I made us step forward carefully, as calmly as I could, in my new shoes. Blackjack hadn’t noticed them. That could be useful.

 

Off the corridor on either side were small offices, the walls covered by pin-boards dotted with pictures, notes and departmental memos, the chairs small, grey swivel jobs for rocking in when bored after lunch; the whole place lifeless, cold, and hard. It cast a sickly, overwhelming muddy stench across our senses that blotted out our usual perceptions, reduced what we felt, and dared to feel, down to a mini mum, swamped us with nothing. Horrid, magicless nothing.

 

“Hey – you sure you’re all right?”

 

“Let’s get it over with,” I muttered.

 

“Get what over with?”

 

I pushed back the door at the end of the corridor and walked down a metal staircase. In the basement were stainless-steel beds, trays, tables and knives, and on one wall a bank of steel doors, like a baker’s oven, but too small and too cold.

 

“Sorcerer?” There was a note of caution in Blackjack’s voice. “What the hell are we doing here?”

 

“Things must end,” we replied. “And we are all about now.”

 

I scanned the labels on the steel doors until I found the one I was looking for, swung the handle back and opened it up, pulled the steel handle inside and dragged it out, pulled the sheet back from the face of the corpse and saw…

 

Once Harris Simmons.

 

There was still enough of the face left to tell that much.

 

It had once been Harris Simmons. But they’d probably need to use fingerprinting, just to make sure.

 

“Oh, God,” muttered Blackjack.

 

“Things must end,” we repeated quietly, pulling the sheet back over the remnants of Harris Simmons’s face and leaning against the cold steel wall. “So why not now?”

 

“What the hell happened to him?”

 

“He ran. He was afraid of… us. The shadow killed him. When I spoke to the lord of the lonely travellers, he said a shadow was hunting Simmons. It was always going to find him before I could, and it only really has one solution to any problem.”

 

“You knew Simmons was dead?”

 

“Yep.”

 

“Then what the fuck are we doing here? Séance?”

 

“No,” I sighed. “Something much worse.”

 

The lights dimmed in the ceiling. Blackjack backed towards the wall. “Sorcerer!” His voice was a warning growl, his hand already going into his big sports bag. “What is this?”

 

A laugh started somewhere at the back of my throat and spread uncontrollably, we held in our sides with the force and pain of it. I rubbed my eyes as they ran with tears, wiped my nose on my sleeve. All around I could hear the slow snap of the lights going out, see my shadow stretching thin. “Bakker knows I’m looking for Simmons. So why shouldn’t his shadow know too?” Blackjack had a hand out of his bag holding a fistful of chain. I looked straight into his eyes, and there was something more than fear on his pale – unusually pale – face. “Simmons is going to lead me to Bakker,” I said gently. “He was always going to be a trap. But I wanted to know if you’d be the one to spring it.”

 

For a moment, he hesitated.

 

Then the shadow at his feet reached up, stretched one long, clawed hand out of the floor, clung onto the edge of a steel bed, and pulled. It pulled out a shoulder, pulled out the top of a head, tilted backwards towards the dying light of the bulb, and as its eyes started to form out of the darkness it turned to me and hissed, “There you are!”

 

“Charmed,” I said, and threw ourself nails first at Blackjack, stepping straight through the half-formed shadowy shape of Hunger as he pulled himself up from the darkness on the floor. Blackjack was fast, but, off-guard and big, he lumbered to one side as we hurled ourself at him, reaching up for his eyes. The lights above us popped, and sprinkled burnt glass, and Hunger lashed out at our passing ankle with still only half-formed claws that passed straight through us like ice-crystal fog. Our fingers scraped the side of Blackjack’s face, and our teeth sunk into the corner of his ear, drawing blood which tasted of nothing but burnt ash and salt.

 

Then something landed across our back, heavy and fast, and through his own grunting Blackjack caught us by the scruff of the neck like we were a dog and threw us back, snarling, anger in his eyes, and the chain in his hand didn’t so much move through the air as suddenly go from being in his hand to being round our throat with nothing in the middle to justify the journey. We gagged and clawed at our neck even as he tugged on the other end of the chain and dragged us down to our knees, his eyes burning, blood rolling down the side of his face and staining his necktie purple red.

 

“Bastard!” he screamed; “Bastard!” but that didn’t really seem enough, just empty sound with no meaning in the noise.

 

Then Hunger rose up in front of me and smiled a mouth full of rotten gum. “Hello, fire!”

 

That seemed to put an end to Blackjack’s swearing. His face turned grey.

 

Hunger leant down in front of me, grabbed my hair with one now solid, snow-white hand, and tilted my chin up with his other, its black nails digging deep. Turning my head so that all I could see were his dead eyes, he whispered, “Where is Matthew’s fire now?”

 

“It’s a better question than you know,” I replied.

 

A glimpse of doubt behind Hunger’s empty eyes?

 

Possibly. I looked at him and saw Bakker, and perhaps I only thought I saw feeling, in the replication of my old teacher’s body language on Hunger’s empty form. Hunger’s nails under my chin dug in deeper, drawing blood.

 

“Matthew…” and for a moment it was Bakker’s voice from Hunger’s lips, just for a moment, then gone, snatched away back into the depths of the creature’s belly. “Will you sing for me?” he asked. “Your old, favourite song?”

 

“‘Ten Green Bottles’?” I wheezed, feeling my blood start to run freely across my skin.

 

“The one that the angels sing. We be light, we be life, we be fire…”

 

“Shouldn’t trust what you hear on the telephone,” I replied. “You never know whether they’re laughing as they lie.”

 

He snarled, and then his hands became shadow across my head, and reached into me, curled around my heart and in that place, that dead place with the biker’s chain around my throat ready to strangle, I didn’t have anything to fight back with, and we were too afraid to try.

 

We were aware of…

 

           … weaknesses…

 

… that we would not describe.

 

When the lights went out in the waking parts of our mind, we were secretly glad.

 

 

Journey with spaces and motion sickness.

 

Jumping from A to C without bothering to ask B if it wanted a look-in.

 

Incoherent vagaries. Flickering lights, burning around our neck, darkness in our blood, and always his voice. Give me life, he said, give me life.

 

We know that they drugged us.

 

We know that they tapped our blood. It wasn’t anything too unhygienic; they wanted us alive. They took a pint that Hunger licked at with his fingertips as if it were hot curry sauce. Then they took another because he could not understand why it tasted human. Then he shook us where we lay, and screamed, “I don’t want the sorcerer’s blood; I’ve tasted it before and it isn’t enough: boring, human, boring and grey! Where are the angels?”

 

It would have been easy for us to ignite my red blood in its plastic packages to our burning blue fire. It would have been so easy it would have made dying look complicated.

 

We stayed in darkness, and tried to stay that way, for as long as we could manage.

 

 

We had a dream. I’ve never been a big fan of the mystical interpretation of dreams, but say what you will for the implausibility of prophecy, as well as its uncomfortable metaphysical curiosity, this dream had something going for it. In it, we found ourselves drifting in a bright blue wire, while around us danced the distant humdrum sound of voices saying,

 

hello?

 

              
hello?!

 

                             
HELLO?

 

Hi, your call has been forwarded to…

 

press one for damnation

 

two for enlightenment

 

                      
three to alter your account details

 

                                 
or press the star key to listen to the menu again
…

 

           
HELLO!

 

and to our surprise, we weren’t alone. We turned in the dancing space of the telephone line and looked at the stranger who’d surprised us. I was crouching on a drifting Microsoft Windows sign, face covered in blood, trailing my fingertips casually in the wake of a passing computer virus, watching the tendrils of flaky white malignancy tumble into nothing around my fingers, and we realised that I knew, even in this place,
especially
in this place, even the computers were alive.

 

We said, “Who are you?”

 

I looked up at the sound of our voice, a strange sparkling thing that, I realised, wasn’t just one voice but thousands, a burst of interference clubbed together from the myriad of human voices passing through the system at that instance to form a sound, where we had no mouth to do so, of speech. We stood in front of me, the blue electric fire of the wires passing straight through us like it was fog, or perhaps we were fog, it was hard to tell the difference, coalescing in and out of existence, staring at me through a face covered in flame.

 

“Matthew Swift,” I replied. “What the bloody hell is going on?”

 

“We remember you,” we said. “You gave us life!”

 

“I did? That’s nice.”

 

Round about this point, as is so often the case with dreams, I became confused, nagged by the sense that something about this whole picture wasn’t quite right.

 

“Have we met?” I asked, as we grew a hedgehog on our head and a small bendy bus drove across the Eiffel Tower beneath us.

 

“We are…” we began.

 

“… I’m sure there’s something…” I suggested, surprised to discover that my hands were purple and had three fingers each.

 

“Is this…?” we tried.

 

“Definitely something up,” I agreed. “Perhaps if…”

 

Then we heard a sound, a deep dark rumble sound that shouldn’t have been there, that rose up into a hacking boom, that became, filling the wire with its presence, laughter. We cowered behind me, instinctively feeling that I offered better protection against this very human sound in our domain, although surprised at ourself for feeling so immediately drawn to shelter behind a creature that was as clearly weak and alien as myself. In a turn in which our toes trailed across the mobile phones of Africa and our nose bumped the firewalls of Washington, we spun in the blueness until we saw the source of the laugh.

 

The source was, predictably enough, a mouth, full of pointed, rotting teeth, and that was all it was. The mouth filled our world, rose up over and above the scattering voices and dancing fire of our home, revealing a deep black gullet behind, and from between its lips came the stench of rotting flesh and the sound of giggling ball-bearings as it spread, swallowing our world whole in a single bite, blocking out all light around us, as we felt the fire on which we stood, the electricity in which we swam sink into the black hole of its throat, sliding down like its tongue was greased with thin oils, until all we could see was mouth and teeth and tongue and dead once-pink tissue that with a single gulp swallowed us whole.

 

As we fell into darkness, we looked back.

 

I watched the fire of the blue angels die out in the encroaching shadow, dislodging the cheetah that had decided to attach itself to my shoulders in order to keep warm, and said, “Don’t look at me. I was dead to begin with.”

 

Then even I was swallowed up into darkness.

 

 

Whiteness, whiteness, everywhere.

 

I looked to my left; I looked to my right. This was about as much physical movement as I could manage.

 

My eyes fell on the needles plugged into my left arm. If I hadn’t already seen most of my own internal organs up close and personal the last time something bad happened, we would probably have fainted. I held us to consciousness, and tried to think calmly.

 

The whiteness was from the walls, and the ceiling, and the buzzing strip light overhead, so bright that it hurt. Our eyes were gummy and dry, our lips were chafed, our tongue felt like leather in our mouth. Lifting my head was the extent of what I could manage; everything else seemed firmly strapped to the bed I lay on. I squinted at the bags suspended above where someone had rolled up my shirt sleeve to put in the needles. One held blood, type O, flowing at a steady rate; I noticed that my veins stood out thin and blue like an addict’s. Another plastic bag, dripping its contents into me, looked like it held glucose and minerals. Further up my arm, there was a pink plaster over the bulging veins in the crook of my elbow; clearly the relationship I was now in was one of give, as well as take. Someone had taken our blood.