Yesterday's Hero (8 page)

Back in the conference room

In the absence of other targets, Tabitha is staring daggers at me now.

“Look,” I say, “I know being hideously insensitive to everybody is kind of your ‘thing’,” I even give her the air quotes, “but if you could lay off the woman whose boyfriend you stole that’d be just lovely, all right?” It’s not the
most diplomatic way to handle it, but I’m really not in the mood.

To my shock it’s not Tabitha who responds.

“Hey,” Clyde says. Then, uncharacteristically, he seems to run out of things to add.

Tabitha rolls her eyes at him too.

I close my eyes. I don’t want fights. I want to be happy and in a new relationship and my only concern to be a Russian that wants to blow me into very small pieces.

“If we could all just… act like we’re adults, and not stare venomously at Devon, and not avoid her eye with our heads on the table, then maybe this might be easier, that’s all I’m saying.”

The daggers continue from Tabitha. Whether it’s in spite of or because of what I’ve said, I’m not sure.

I’m about to try a new tack when the door opens and Felicity pops her head back in. My heart does a little leap. Hopefully this is to announce Coleman has been sent back to whatever circle of hell he had the temerity to crawl out from.

But instead she says, “Clyde. Arthur. If you could pop down to London and pull papers on the Chernobyl incident that would be very convenient.”

She sounds like she’s asking. It’s very unlike her.

“Are you sure?” I say. Something else feels wrong now.

“Please.” She nods.

OK, something else is definitely wrong.

“Do you need us to—” I start.

“Just go to London,” she says. “It’ll be fine.”

But as Clyde and I stand, I know she’s lying. Something is shifting. And it’s not some towering monster, not something from outer space or out of our reality, it’s something small and mundane. And I know for certain, all of a sudden, that when we put the world back together, we did it wrong.

C
lyde and I manage to maintain silence for at least two corridors. Then he turns and looks at me.

“Did you know?” he asks me.

Here we go again.

“About Devon?” I ask, just to confirm this is going to be as uncomfortable as possible.

“Shaw told you?” He’s working his long piano-player fingers against and between each other.

“I…” I start, then fail to think of a way to change the subject mid-question. “She told me last night.”

“You could have called me.”

He’s right, of course. I should have. It was cruel to let him walk into that this morning. But I was… otherwise engaged last night.

“It was late,” I say rather than get into the sticky details of it all.

Clyde taps the mask that is not his face with a finger that is not his. “I don’t seem to really sleep any more. Little bit shy on the old zees. With this.” He doesn’t sound overjoyed about it.

“You OK?” I ask.

“Me?” He cocks his head again. Shrugs. “Been better, yes. But I’ve been worse. Been dead actually. Albeit briefly. So, you know, on the scale of things, pretty much always going to be able to say things have been worse. But you know, reincarnation and all that, so things can pick up. Sleeping in the bed I made. And it’s Tabitha’s bed, so…” He trails off, hangs his head. “I feel like a bit of a shit, Arthur.”

And he should. But that’s not the sort of thing you say to a friend. “You followed your heart,” I say instead. I try and make it sound like an excuse.

Clyde nods. “Not the smartest organ out there is it?”

“Not the stupidest organ I’ve ever been accused of thinking with.” I twist my mouth into a smile for Clyde.

Clyde chuckles, then he laughs. And he shrugs, and a little of the morning tension sloughs away.

“What do you reckon’s going to happen about this Coleman bloke?” I ask. Not that either of us really know. But a problem shared… well, it’s not halved, but maybe it’s… well it’s someone to talk to about it.

“I’m sure Shaw will sort it out,” Clyde says.

In Shaw we trust. And I have to trust her. Except I already have misgivings about how she’s handling it.

“Come on,” Clyde says. “Let’s get off to London. See the sights. Revel in the sense of history. Maybe buy a T-shirt. Or look for hoodies without skulls on them. One of the two. Whatever takes your fancy.”

“Sounds like a plan.” I nod.

“There’s just one thing we need to pick up along the way.”

Outside the Bodleian Library

Clyde’s Mini is parked, engine running, in an empty back street near the massive copyright library. I watch Clyde staggering under the weight of an enormous cardboard box as he exits. He sets it down by the car with a grunt. A large and rather eclectic collection of books. I look at Clyde confused. His mask is—obviously, I suppose—unreadable.

He goes to the trunk, pulls out two jump leads and passes them to me.

Ah, the regalia of the supernatural. Screw cauldrons and smoking test-tubes.

“If it’s not too much of an imposition,” Clyde starts, proving he’s the only man who can use those words and not make it sound like it’s the beginning of an insult, “would you pop the hood, and then on the word ‘Arcum’ slam these down on the car battery?” He takes a firm hold of the metal clamps on his end.

How exactly
I
managed to kill Clyde before he did it to himself, I’ll never know.

“Any chance of you telling me what’s going to happen when you say that?” I get nervous whenever Clyde
works magic. It always seems far too closely associated with someone trying to tear off parts of my body.

“He’s good with books,” is all Clyde says, and then he’s off muttering to himself. “Entok um jessun. Lom niem mor cal anum. Eltoth mok morinum.”

And because I’ve seen what happens when magic isn’t powered by electricity, I pop the hood and jump out of the car.

Violently exothermic, Clyde called it. Magicians getting turned into bloody smears on the ground seems a little closer to the mark.

“Cathmartum mal ellum. Etok mol asok.” Clyde intones nonsense syllables, a voice that is not quite his own issuing from behind a mask that… that is him.

What if I took it off the body? What would be left? Some mindless fellow? A vegetable? So much human meat?

“Melkor al malkor. Mor tior. Arcum—”

And then there’s no time to think. At the requisite word I slam the contacts on the battery.

“—locium met morum um satum Winston.”

Wait. Winston?

Sparks fly. The world darkens, blue light spitting from the battery, crawling up the wires towards Clyde. He keeps chanting as it racks him, working its hissing, burning way over his body.

Clyde convulses. His gut heaves. I worry about him dropping the clamps. About violently exothermic results that blow me halfway to China.

Then Clyde hawks out a great white gob of lightning. His throat bulges with it. His face behind the mask distorts, distends. I can see his cheeks bulging. Then it flies out and under the mask as he gags. It smashes into the box. Books explode out, scatter. They fly through the air, slap into the walls. But they don’t fall. They just spin. Faster. Faster.

Clyde chokes up another lightning ball. He spits and gags. His body doubles over. Another. Faster.

The books slam round the corridor. All in the air. All caught in the maelstrom of detonations.

The lightning batters at the books. Balls of the stuff smash into them, force them together. Tighter, tighter. A ragged cylinder of crackling paper.

Clyde chokes again. More lightning balls. Faster.

The mass of books changes shape. Is refined. Gains defined edges. Then the realization hits me. This isn’t just Clyde blowing off steam in a fit of adolescent arcanum. The lightning is molding the books. This is magical sculpture.

Hardbacks stack into legs. Papers and encyclopedias jostle to form a chest. Paperbacks and dictionaries become two roughly hewn arms. At their ends, books clack open and shut like lobster claws. A head starts to appear. A book on its side for a mouth. Children’s books with finger puppets for eyes.

A jagged silhouette of a man, limned in crackling white.

Clyde collapses, the spell done. I pull the clamps off the battery, blinking away the shapes that have bleached my retinas.

The book man lets out a racking cough. “Oh fuck me sideways,” he says. “That stings like a bitch.”

Oh God. I wonder if becoming incorporeal might have seriously damaged Clyde’s judgment.

“Seconded,” Clyde coughs.

The book-man takes a stumbling step forward, catches himself, takes a second, more confident stride. “Arthur?” he says. He has a thick cockney accent. “Is that you, mate?”

Winston. Clyde’s book golem. His inside man at the Bodleian library. Scanning for thaum… thaw… thaumer… spell books. Living in the stacks. Owner of a filthy mouth.

“Hello, Winston,” I say.

Pages ripple in Winston’s face. I think he’s smiling. “Well bugger me,” he says. “Looks like we’re getting the band back together.”

C
lyde pilots his Mini out of Oxford. Winston sits in the back seat. “So,” he says to Clyde, “the kiddie murderer look is big right now, I take it?”

“Sensitive,” I say.

“Honesty, mate,” Winston says in very serious tones, “is a valuable commodity in this day and age.”

“I probably should have thrown in an etiquette manual this time, shouldn’t I?” Clyde says.

Winston, as it has been explained to me, derives some of his personality from the books that constitute his physical form. Too much Dickens and Irving Welsh, I seem to remember Clyde commenting. Why he failed to revise the mix this time, I have no idea.

“Harsh, man,” Winston says. “Fucking harsh.”

I look from Winston’s paperback face to Clyde’s wooden one. I feel like the odd one out. “Why did we summon him again?”

“Charming fucking company this is,” Winston grumps. “Like bloody tea with the Queen it is.”

I shake my head. “Not what I meant.” I suspect it’s all bluster with Winston, but Clyde’s right, he is good with books and I’d rather not piss him off. “Just, weren’t you summoned already?”

“Oh, well.” Clyde shrugs. “There was a small break in the spell binding Winston to this reality. Spell interruptus, so to speak. Breach of magical contract on my part. So old Winston toddled off to his natural plane of existence. Just a blip, really.”

“Nice to see the old country,” Winston assures us.

“What sort of blip?” I ask. Magic and blips seem to be a combination that ought to be avoided.

“Oh.” Clyde shrugs as if wrestling out of an uncomfortable jacket. “The whole dying thing.”

There is a long and very uncomfortable silence in the car.

Winston breaks it by clearing his throat. “Tabitha any good in the sack?” he asks.

Silence, mercifully, returns as Clyde drives on.

London

The British Museum appears around a corner, and I say, “Bollocks.”

“No need to brag about them, mate.” Winston gives me a papery smile.

“No,” I shake my head, “I just… I didn’t know you were coming to the library, so I didn’t… There’s no plan. How do we get you in? Can’t just walk up to the front desk with an animated pile of books, and ask for the way to the reading room.”

“Books?” Winston says. “Is that all I am to you, Arthur? All surface with you isn’t it?”

I flap a shushing hand in his direction. He harrumphs.

“Well, I’ve got a handcart in the trunk,” Clyde says. “Should be fine.”

I puzzle over this one. “Are we going to use the handcart to bash in the brains of anyone who asks us about Winston?” is about as good as I can get.

Winston cackles. “Nah, mate. Same way we got me into the Bodleian. I stand to attention and we use old Tabitha’s bogus paper trail to sneak me in as a donation of books. Subterfuge. Like a bleedin’ ninja.”

“Tabitha’s false paper trail?” This is the first I’ve heard about it.

“Oh,” Clyde says. It’s no longer possible to catch his eye, but he still turns his head so I can only see the edge of his mask. “About that. Yes. Well I was sort of thinking, by which I mean, I
was very precisely thinking that perhaps, I, by which I mean… well, myself. No one else I could mean really. But I was thinking I, me, might be the one to create the paper trail. Perhaps. Maybe. Except, well… sort of connected to their system and doing it
right now.”
He shrugs. “Wireless and all that. Terrible security
if I can break it.”

“Wait,” I say. “You’re connected to the internet right now?”

“Well,” Clyde shrugs, “come back from the dead with computer superpowers, seems a shame not to use them.”

And of course, Clyde violates the laws of the universe on a daily basis. That’s basically his job description. And I work with him. I watch, and I nod, and I smile while he does it. So really, connecting your brain directly to the internet shouldn’t be a big deal. But somehow Clyde has blown my mind again.

“Didn’t accessing the internet almost give you a seizure yesterday?” It’s probably not the most important question to ask, but it’s the one that’s easiest for my mind to form.

“Well, yes.” Clyde nods. “But practice and its correlation to perfection and all that. And, I concede, Tabitha did advise against the practice. Bit of a sticking point. That and my first attempts lost her a lot of her files. Total accident, of course. But, in hindsight, I probably should have waited until the caffeine sank in this morning before mentioning it to her. But she took it pretty well, I think. Could have gone a lot worse, and we also happened, along the way, to learn certain lessons about the durability of the mask. So, you know, in overall terms, a positive experience.” He shrugs. “But yes, sort of stayed up all night working on it.” He taps the mask, and, again, there’s something odd about the way he does it. As if the feel of it makes him uncomfortable. “Might as well make myself useful, I figured. I want to be useful.”