A Madness of Angels: Or the Resurrection of Matthew Swift (37 page)

 

Behind him, Blackjack said, “I don’t think they’re really looking for love.”

 

“Hello, Dave,” I murmured at Blackjack.

 

“Hello, sorcerer. Hello, bastard pig priest and your bitch consort slut of a minion,” said Blackjack, nodding at Chaigneau and Oda. He sank himself onto a chair next to me with an expression of polite goodwill on his face. Then to me, “Hear you got into trouble.”

 

“It’s fine.”

 

“Yeah? How fine?”

 

“Chocolate pancake with cream fine,” I answered. “It’s not going to be civil; but there are people here, aren’t there?”

 

“Oh, it’s going to be another massive fuck-up,” murmured the third arrival. I looked again, and recognised him.

 

“Survived, then?” I asked.

 

The warlock was still dressed to the nines in what I could only politely call “ethnic dress”, although by English standards he looked as ethnic as mushy peas. He grunted. “Got the old gang back together? A little talk, a little chat, a little sniper fire through the window at night?” he asked. He helped himself to a fingerful of hot chocolate sauce still in its pot, licking his digit clean with a loud slurping noise. “You know, I really hoped it was you who fucking got done at Sinclair’s place.”

 

“How did you survive?” asked Oda incredulously. Then, only a little quieter, “Why
you
?”

 

“Psycho-bitch,” sneered the warlock, “there are gods watching over me older than the furry fucking mammoths.”

 

“This is going to be hilarious,” sighed Blackjack.

 

“Is this it?” asked Vera incredulously through a slurp of thick pink milkshake. “The best that Sinclair and Swift could muster – a bickering pack of badly dressed drones?”

 

“I’m a fucking warlock!” he retorted. “Master of mystic fucking arts!”

 

“
He
’s a sorcerer,” she replied, indicating me, “and I’m told that means he could like, totally pop your eyes out of your skull with a thought. Doesn’t stop him looking like a starving pigeon, does it?”

 

“Thank you,” I muttered, snatching the hot chocolate sauce away from the warlock’s dabbling fingers. “I’m glad we’re all getting on so well. Sit down, warlock, no one’s going to get shot here.”

 

“You sure of that?” he replied.

 

“This is a public space. Besides, too many people have brought far too many reinforcements. It’d be a bloodbath and if anyone here is planning on shooting us” – my gaze moved round the table – “they sure as hell wouldn’t get out of it alive.”

 

“There are always car bombs,” said Chaigneau with a bright, white smile. “Guy Lee is renowned for his flexibility in these matters.”

 

The big biker said, “You think you can park anything round here without it getting done? Traffic wardens would have it in thirty seconds.’Sides, Guy Lee isn’t going to kill us in the pancake house, because, talking straight, us being here is one big fucking joke. Are we going to do any introductions?”

 

“I’m Matthew,” I replied.

 

“Halfburn,” said the biker, neck bulging in what might have been a nod. “Although if we’re going to be real friendly about this, you can call me Leslie.”

 

“Leslie?”

 

He met my eyes full on, and his gaze was the colour of burnt tar on a night-time road. “Yeah,” he said. “You got something to add?”

 

“No.”

 

“Good. This is Blackjack,” jerking his chin at Blackjack, “and the guy in the skirt,” indicating the warlock, “goes by the online chatroom

 

name of Mighty Magician 1572, and his real name’s Martin.”

 

“Hello, Martin,” I said, nodding at the warlock, who grunted.

 

Halfburn grinned, leant forward so his saucepan-sized fists rested heavily on the table, looked round until he had every gaze fixed on his face, and said, “So – is there anything other than fucking pancakes to eat in this dive?”

 

 

There have been alliances before, within the magical community. Magicians and all their subspecies come in every shape and size, faith, creed, sex, colour and political inclining. This naturally leads to affiliations, groupings, clans of like-minded individuals with similar buttons to be pressed. Sometimes, even these pig-headed bickering clans can agree on a common cause. Back in the Dark Ages they agreed to fight a couple of faerie hordes, although myths and records for those times are blended. In the Renaissance, rumours leaked of epic battles with demon spawn crawling out from their caves, and alliances of alchemists in the cities swapping intelligence with the last hiding druids cowering in the countryside on where the necromancers were hunting for their dead. In the 1800s there were stories that one of the very earliest urban magicians, among the first to taste power in the machines and smoke and bricks of the city, rather than the older sources of magic, created an alliance of beggars and aristocrats, to further the study of this new wonder together. Stories also tell that the magician in question died impaled on the end of an enchanted rapier thrust through his chest by one of his erstwhile allies; but, again, records and myth tend to blur into each other.

 

The last alliance of its sort that I knew of came in 1973, when a sorcerer by the name of Terry Woods went out of control and started hurling his magic across the city streets with all the delicacy of an angry gorilla throwing coconuts at startled monkeys. It took the lives of seven wizards and a sorceress called Lucinda to stop him, and the alliance afterwards remained until the last of its members died in the late 1990s, again the victim of unpleasant circumstances. Become too involved in these kinds of battle, and sooner or later, circumstances will become unpleasant.

 

Our own alliance, made in the pancake house on High Holborn, was very simple, and in many ways carried on the traditions of the past. For a start, none of us liked each other. No one trusted anyone else either. But that was fine. I was perfectly happy to let them bicker; the more they argued, the more the chances were Guy Lee would hear of all that was happening. And with the subtlety of a hand grenade in an oil refinery, he would try and stop it. And that, like all good stories where fear is the theme, should be enough to make an alliance real.

 

Necessary things.

 

It helped that we didn’t like them either.

 

At 7.30 p.m., I looked up from my examination of the bottom of my third milkshake and said over the bickering, “Have you heard of the shadow?”

 

Silence settled over the table.

 

“I call it Hunger,” I explained. “It describes what it is: pure hunger, lust, without control or restraint. It resembles a man. His teeth are yellow, his eyes watery blue. His skin is the colour of wet tofu, and on his back he wears a coat stained with blood. My blood, but let’s not split hairs on this. His hair is a thin straggle of nothing; when he leaps, the darkness bends with him. When he stalks you in the night, you can see nothing, touch nothing, but you will know he is coming for you by the bending of your shadows. He kills Bakker’s enemies. His fingers are claws that tear through flesh and bone like they were parting a silk curtain. He runs his tongue over hands soaked in blood, smells the sweat on your skin as you die, looks into your eyes, so close that all you can taste is the rotten stench of his breath. He says, ‘Give me life.’ He is not Bakker. He destroys all that Bakker wishes destroyed, but would not kill Bakker’s sister. Would burn her, send her mad, curse her for not giving Bakker the thing that he desired. Sorcerers are dead. Seers are dead. A prophet who saw his own end ran and could not run far enough. He is not Bakker. He is not human. How long until he comes for you?”

 

At 7.45 p.m., Vera proposed the final agreement, and all agreed.

 

She proposed a blood oath.

 

Some magics never change.

 

I was quietly opposed to it, but my position wasn’t one where I could say so. Any show of dissent after so long arguing would destroy a day of work. So it was done.

 

The warlock, the bikers, the Order, the Whites, the weremen and I: over pancakes, milkshakes and beer we swore to help each other until we had destroyed the Tower; and because somethings never change, I pulled my penknife from my bag, a napkin from the pile underneath the ketchup bottles, very carefully cut the top of my thumb, and swore on my blood.

 

So did everyone else, letting a few drops fall onto the napkin, where it spread into the whiteness and merged with everyone else’s blood in a thickening scarlet stain. When we were done, I burnt the napkin in the flame from a cigarette lighter, spilling the ashes into the empty bottom of a coffee cup. Then, when no one was looking, I tipped the ashes of our blood oath, along with several cigarette stubs, into my jacket pocket, just to be on the safe side.

 

 

I did not go to the tunnels that night. Nor did Oda insist on following me when I started walking. Perhaps she’d been warned off, perhaps learnt tact; I didn’t care which, so long as I could be alone.

 

We walked, without direction, through Covent Garden, feeding off the tingling sparks of magic in the air, feeling it dance across our skin like physical illumination. We wandered through Leicester Square, past Piccadilly Circus, stared up at the endless moving lights and sat on the steps of the statue of Eros, until we felt that any more saturation would make our skin start to glow. We wandered down to St James’s Park, and through the palatial back streets near by: grand offices, old red-brick mansions, high-walled royal palaces, densely hidden mews and the occasional sly, cobbled lane. Shop windows selling bespoke leather spats and cigars. We watched the late-night tourists baiting the guards outside Buckingham Palace while the traffic roared around it, lingered in the maze of fumes and subways and lights and grand hotels of Victoria, wandered through the station and listened to the last trains of the evening chug away towards obscure destinations with improbable names – Tattenham Corner, St Martin’s Heron, Epsom, Sutton, Carshalton Beeches.

 

When we were finally calm, our mind soothed by drifting down the silver flashing rails of the lines along with the dozing commuters and sleepy lights of the trains, and lulled by their regular rhythm, we left Victoria station, and wandered back onto the streets. Outside a domed Catholic cathedral that could have been transported from the streets of Rome, hiding in a plaza that burst out between the local launderette

 

and a cobbler’s shop, we found a telephone box.

 

I dialled the number from memory, and waited.

 

The number was disconnected.

 

I swore and tried some others. Two more were disconnected, and one was a XXX video store in Soho whose assistant introduced herself with a silky voice and the words, “Hey hon, looking for something special?”

 

In desperation, I tried one last number. The phone rang. A voice said, “You’re through to KSP reception, how may I help you?”

 

“I’d like to speak to Robert Bakker.”

 

“I’m sorry, we have no one of that name…”

 

“But you know where to find him. Please. It’s very important.”

 

“I’m sorry, but…”

 

“My name is Matthew Swift.”

 

After a while, a voice said, “Please hold.”

 

The phone started playing the remnants of Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony on a xylophone. I endured the pain and waited.

 

Fifty pence later, a new, bored, woman’s voice said, “Hi, you’re through to reception, how may I help?”

 

My heart rattled at the speed of a train, my mind scuddered along endless silver tracks; but my voice, strengthened by all that buzzing life in one place, was steady. Just like he’d taught me. Forget you are afraid, he’d said. In a place like this, when you step out into the road you could be run down, when you turn a corner you could be knifed, when you come home you could die from a short circuit in the mains, or eat a curry poisoned with badly cooked cat meat and in somewhere this big, and this busy, you will never know what hit you. Forget you are afraid – there is too much worth living to just hide behind your own uncertainties.

 

I said, “Hi, I’d like to put in a call to Mr Robert Bakker.”

 

“Mr Bakker is busy at the moment…”

 

“He’ll want to talk to me; please, it’s very important.”

 

“May I ask who’s calling?”

 

“My name is Matthew Swift. Please – tell him.”

 

“If you will hold the line…”

 

“I’ll hold.”

 

I held for another 70p and almost half a movement of xylophone Beethoven. I began to understand the power of tinned telephone music – it gave me something else to get angry about, to marvel at, instead of letting my thoughts dwell on what I was doing.

 

The woman’s voice came back. “Mr Swift?”

 

“Yes?”

 

“Mr Bakker would like to know if there’s a number he can call you back on.”

 

“Miss?” I answered in my sweetest, gentlest voice.

 

“Mr Swift?”

 

“I want you to call Mr Bakker back and tell him that, as well he knows, my body was never found and that this should tell him something about the urgency of my call. Please tell him those exact words.”

 

“Uh, Mr Swift…”

 

“Please, miss,” I said nicely. “If that doesn’t get him to the phone, I’ll go away; I promise.”

 

“I’ll be right back, Mr Swift.”

 

Vivaldi was the next composer, murdered by someone on a harmonica. Thirty pence later the woman’s voice was back.

 

“Mr Swift?”

 

“Still here.”

 

“I’m transferring you now.”

 

“Thank you.”

 

A beep. A long silence. A sigh of distant breath. I found I couldn’t speak. After ten trips of my shuddering heart he said, in that familiar, rich voice, “Matthew?”

 

“Mr Bakker, sir,” I stumbled, tongue tangling over the automatic, familiar words, feeling like a fifteen-year-old boy again, about to be prescribed tranquillisers.

 

“Matthew! My God!” Nothing but surprise; no anger, fear, just marvelling wonder, tinged with an odd flavour of almost laughter – perhaps delight. “I heard you were… there was a funeral!”