Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (10 page)

there was something on her hand.

Something red and bright and hot, a pair of crosses that vanished the second she stared, agape. “There’s a bloody—”

“I know!”

“But I didn’t—”

“I know, I know!”

“How did—”

“I know!”

Sharon hesitated, eyes swinging back to the goblin. “Hold on!” she said. “That one was a question.”

“I know!”

“And that isn’t an answer.”

“I know, I know, I’m getting there,” fumed the goblin. “Midnight Mayor’s watching out for you. There’s them that say one guy’s watching out is another guy’s manipulating like a pot of play-dough, but with this one it’s kind of hard to call, like, is he really that pig stupid or is he playing like some fucking long game? Most punters are too
thick to tell but I know where I’m gonna stand at the apocalypse, just saying.”

Sharon stared at the goblin, and the goblin had, perhaps, the good grace to look embarrassed. She felt in her pocket and handed over the tube of toothpaste. The goblin snatched it merrily, leaping with surprising vigour into the air and spinning away. The lid was off in a single twist and his head tilted right back as, with every sign of satisfaction, he squirted a fat stream of blue-white goo into his mouth, rolled it around inside and swallowed.

Sharon’s face was a picture of distaste, the goblin’s of delight. “Not too fucking bad,” he concluded, wiping his foaming lips with the back of his hand. “Next time get whitening.”

“Who’s the Midnight Mayor?” demanded Sharon.

“Protector of the city, guardian of the night and all that crap,” sang out Sammy, slipping the toothpaste inside his hoodie for later. “I’m all like ‘You can’t say you’re the protector of the city and not have a big hat’ and he’s like ‘Screw your big hat’ and I’m like ‘It’s your fucking style sense, whatever.’ ”

“But that doesn’t mean anything! ‘Protector of the city’ is the world’s stupidest job description ever! And besides who are you?” demanded Sharon, her hands slamming onto her hips as if by force of gesture alone the conversation could judder to a halt.

“Sammy!” replied the goblin, giving her a look which implied that if she hadn’t worked this out already or, more, been somehow attuned to the very nature of this mystery, she wasn’t worth his time. “I’m Sammy the Elbow, second greatest–
second
greatest, wankers!–” he shouted at some unknown academic audience “–shaman to ever fucking live. I’ve seen the path and walked the walk, I know the secrets of the sodium night and when I say jump toot sweet you jump toot sweet yeah?”

“What do you mean ‘the Elbow’?”

“You really are ignorant as a cheeseburger, ain’t you? Didn’t you learn nothing at school about goblin tribes?”

“No,” she replied, a glare of defiance seeping into her face. “I know this is like, way out there, but at school we learned about chemistry and geography and how to put a condom on a banana. We did not learn about goblin tribes, because until, like, two minutes ago I didn’t fucking know there were goblin tribes, so cut me a break, okay?”

To her surprise Sammy grinned, revealing a small collection of very large brown teeth. “There’d have been this thing,” he explained. “You’d have been walking along, probably by yourself, only you weren’t by yourself because you weren’t never by yourself but you were probably too dense to know that, and there would have been this thing, this sort of ‘Oh what the fuck’ thing.”

“ ‘Oh what the fuck thing’?”

“Yeah. And you’d have been like ‘Something is happening’ only like I said, you’d be too dense to know what it was and then there’d be this second, and in that second you’d know everything. Everything that is and was and will be in the city, every brick and stone and piece of squished chewing gum, every secret and every dirty party, you’d know it all and then,” his grin widened, “you forgot.”

Sharon stared down at her feet and remembered the feeling of rain on her face, the taste of kebab in her mouth. And something else, something bigger, that she hadn’t been able to bring back.

“Okay,” she said at last. “So what do you want?”

Sammy the Elbow, second (?) greatest shaman to walk the earth, spread his arms wide in delight. “What do you think, carrot-brains? I’m your new teacher!”

Howl!

         
Howl!!

                     
Howl!!!

He hears and he runs.

His name is Scott, his mum raised him Catholic, his dad raised him wizard, and now he’s beginning to wonder if maybe his mum wasn’t on to a better thing. Usually he combs his hair back over his scalp to hide the premature bald spot that was another unwelcome genetic inheritance. Now his hair stands up like the quills of a hedgehog facing down a cement truck, and if he has any time to interact with it, it’s to pull it out, strand by strand.

He runs until he can’t breathe, and pauses on a street corner to fumble with his phone.

“Help me!” he shouts into it. “Help me!”

“The secret,” replies the voice on the other end of the line, “is not to look back.”

“It’s coming for me!”

“It wants you to be afraid.”

“You said you’d protect me!”

“I also told you to run, and here we are.”

“Help me!”

“I’m coming. Keep your phone on.
Run.”

He runs, shaking with fear; his body become his new worst enemy. At times like this, he feels, his legs should grow wings, his back should become light, his stomach full of helium and he should fly along, every muscle feeding off the urgency of his mind and making it easier for him, blocking out the pain. That doesn’t seem to be how it works. He’s never been so tired, nor so far from home. He runs, not knowing or caring about the direction any more, just straight, in a straight line until he reaches the edge, and he hears behind him–so much worse than the howling in the night–he hears a silence. The thick impenetrable silence that comes when the traffic stops, the deafening roar of a silent fan, the impossible nothing of a non-dripping pipe. His is the only noise in these sleeping streets, his the only movement, a firework at a funeral. Don’t look back.

He realises that he repents.

Fear can do that when guilt fails. And he has plenty of fear.

Lights ahead, a main road–no one dies on the main road, the idea is ridiculous–he runs towards it, a night bus swoops by at the end of the street fulfilling its role of perpetually never being quite where you want it. He staggers onto Fleet Street, a road too narrow for the daytime traffic that clogs it, too wide for this night-time emptiness. The tall shops and offices are clustered in recognition of their sometime medieval ground plan, inconsistent grandeur mixing with modern slabs of concrete, old porticos bearing stone faces that guard the way to the latest sushi bar. Not 400 yards away he can see the back of a black dragon on a stone plinth, its head turned outwards towards the place where the City of London meets the City of Westminster, its spiked wings as tall and sheer as the Gothic ornamentation on the Royal Courts sat right by it. He gasps down a shuddering breath and staggers towards it down the middle of the street, feet flapping on the tarmac, head tilting forward, ready to fall. He can see a figure waiting just the other side of the dragon, a man dressed in a tatty coat, a flash of blue from his eyes–impossible at this distance, a thing imagined–and from the phone in his hand he hears a faint voice proclaim, “You’re nearly there. Don’t look back.”

His mouth opens in an unstoppable grimace, he wants to laugh even though the dragon is still so far, and hears behind him, so close:

hhhhhoooooooooowwwwwwwwwwillllll!!!!

hunting cry

a snuffling, a shuffling, a thing that becomes the bounding rhythm of a gallop, soft paws on the ground that wouldn’t make any noise but that the thing above them is so heavy, a thump of unstoppable force beating against the street and a bellowing of breath through tight black nostrils and it’s here, it’s here so close now and must be this second, must be now and

“Don’t look!” shouts the man at the end of the street. “Don’t look!”

he can feel its heat, smell the blood and dog stench in its fur and

“Don’t!”

he knows this is how the others died but they couldn’t stop it either and

he looks.

He didn’t realise jaws could be so wide.

Sharon thought she heard…

… but it was nothing.

She trailed behind Sammy the Elbow, falling into step automatically, and half-listened as he explained.

“In the good old days we got treated with proper respect, it was all like ‘You know shit, wow!’ and we were all like ‘Yeah so give us your virgins’ only virgin has always been this really dodgy term, especially, I gotta tell you, especially in north London. Then there was this thing with the Tower and everyone was a bit like ‘Wow, we should’ve done something’ and that kind of didn’t do the rep any favours, which is crap because I was in Derby so didn’t have nothing to do with all that shit but by the time I come back to London you’ve got amateur magicians, you’ve got shit mystics talking like they know shit, you’ve got untidied hexes everywhere and the Midnight Mayor is some bloke who isn’t even totally dead yet. I mean amateurs! Shoddy spellcraft everywhere and when people come running ‘Oh, Sammy, there’s unbound shades on the loose in Kennington’ I’m like ‘You’ve only got yourself to blame’ but do they listen do they?”

“I don’t know, do they?”

“No!”

“And uh… is that… for any particular reason?”

“What’s that meaning?”

“Well, I’m just saying–I mean, it’s nothing to do with you as a person, I’m sure you’re really cool and that–but I’m just saying…” She hesitated. “You’re not really giving off positive vibes and I’m guessing people do like that, especially when, and I know this is going to sound really bad and I don’t mean it in a discriminating way, yeah, but especially when you’re three foot tall and a goblin.”

Contemplative silence.

Then, “Is you saying it’s cos I’m short?”

“The height… may be a thing, yeah.”

“Is it you’re saying it’s because of my…
ethnicity?”
Sammy savoured the word as a food taster might enjoy the professional satisfaction of that first tinge of cyanide.

“My sociology tutor told me how ethnicity was only a social construct,” she announced. “It’s like as how, it’s not just about your race and that, it’s about your culture and your social identity.”

“What social identity?”

“I guess what I’m saying is that it’s not because you’re a goblin, it’s because you’re… kind of negative about everyone else. Sir.” The “sir” was thrown in as an afterthought, as Sharon’s brain offered up the view that, sure, even though Sammy barely came up to her waist, that didn’t mean he couldn’t bite.

“You ain’t met many goblins, squishy-brains.” It was a statement delivered with the certainty of someone who not only knows the answer to his own question, but can see the wretched consequences of it right before his eyes.
“I’m
fucking civil.”

“Why are you teaching me?” demanded Sharon, the words dropping before she could stop them.

Sammy shot a glare at her. Even at this hour St Martin’s Lane was busy with people wondering how they were going to get home, as clubs and bars began disgorging the tipsy, the sozzled and the truly smashed into an ear-wringing night. Sharon and the goblin scurried past a tapas bar where the bouncers wore badges on their sleeves, and on a wall by the door a motley collection of mojito-fuelled revellers sat enjoying a quick fag. No one seemed to notice Sammy and, as Sharon realised with a faint jolt, nor did anyone seem to see her. It was the
walk, that very special walk where all eyes fell straight through them, an invisibility by default usually known only to security guards and cleaners. Sammy was doing it on automatic.

“I am trying to tell you about the way things are,” he shrilled, “and you just keep asking stupid questions!”

“It’s not a stupid question,” she insisted, moderating her voice to keep it level as they turned up Long Acre. Mannequins stared out from behind sheet glass; the local council were again drilling in the middle of the street just in case they’d missed a deposit of famed Soho crude. “A lot of shit has been happening the last few days and I thought it was because of Magicals Anonymous and how people might get interested in that, but now I don’t think it’s about that, I mean, not just about that, because sure it’s weird but this is a whole different level of weird.”

“First you called me short, and now call me weird?” demanded Sammy.

“No! I’m saying that weird, like ethnicity, is like… in the eye of the beholder, you know? So there’s probably guys out there who are like ‘Wow, I’m talking with a goblin’ and that’s completely cool but, like I’ve been trying to say, this is my first time and so yeah, I’m allowed to say it’s a bit weird and in fact–” she puffed up with sudden, revelatory pride “–in fact, yeah! This is something difficult I’m going through and I think you should be fucking supportive about it and not give all me this grief, which isn’t to say I’m not grateful for the teaching thing if it happens because I am yeah, but this is exactly why I used to get into trouble because people weren’t understanding when things were weird and exactly why we need Magicals Anonymous, so yeah!”

She stopped so suddenly that the air seemed to bend around her as reality tried to work out what the game was. Sammy paused, looking back at her with his oversized, over-round eyes, and for a moment Sharon wondered how he did that, how he stayed unseen and stationary at the same time and if he’d ever got it wrong; then the rising tide of her indignation brought another burst of defiance.

“I’ve got a job to do, you know!”

“What job?”

“I’m… I’m a barista!”

Sammy snickered.

Sharon felt small and rather alone.

There was a flicker of something in Sammy’s face that might almost have been him relenting. If perhaps he’d spent a happier youth among the garbage heaps of whichever big city, he might have held out a trembling hand in support. If he hadn’t learned at a tender age that emotional intelligence had nothing on good athletic skills over a 400-yard sprint, he might even have ventured a word of consolation. As it was, he had, so he didn’t, but kept on striding invisibly through the night, tutting under his breath. Sharon hesitated, then moved to catch up, swinging back into that rhythm where all things became a little bit thin, and a little bit soft around the edges, and the world went out of its way not to perceive.