Dead Letters Anthology (38 page)

‘Easy, geezer!’ He laughs at the sight of my face. ‘It’s jokes, mate. I’ll buy you another.’ And then I see him taste it.

And then I see the first of its effects.

Adam’s eyes bulge. His nostrils flare. His face lurches sideways and then lengthwise into yawning maw, which becomes a pinched moue. I leap at him, feeling my own spells swirling out of the bone and straining to return to my body, and some of them even make it through his pores to me. I can feel myself opening like a bud, I can, but too much, too much is in him. I’ll swallow down his spitty cud – I’m not proud – if I can make him retch it up. But he’s already swallowed.

I pound his back but oh, I am too late, and he transforms into a stoat. He’s eaten my precious magic.

* * *

Witch. She always was. I think of the first time I saw her, and as I watch a portion of my soul wrench the body of my colleague down into a little furred, fanged mouse-eater, I still can’t regret our love affair. There was something about her, the apprentice who took over the business. Even now, I find her irritatingly enticing. Enticingly irritating. You know.

‘Adam,’ I tell the stoat, sadly. ‘Cough up that skull, or I’ll have to cut it out of you.’

The stoat blinks. ‘What’s the difference between a stoat and a weasel?’ it says in a whispery stoat voice. I’m not surprised that Adam can speak.

‘One eats another person’s magical skull!’ I shout. ‘One steals another person’s ancient magic, smashed into a wee skull by that person’s ex-girlfriend, a long, long time ago, that same ex-girlfriend who banished him behind the mist, who dwelled in a lake with Excalibur clenched in her fist!’

There’s a silence. Adam blinks again, this time more rapidly, his eyes pinkish and watery.

‘One is weaselly recognised, the other is stoatally different,’ whimpers Adam. ‘That’s all I’ve got. Something’s the matter with me. I’ve a tail.’

Witch.

I crouch on my heels and regard the ermine that is Adam. That the transformative power of my bones is in his, not my, bones, is a grave annoyance.

‘Just a little reminder of what you come from…’

Certainly, I’ve been a mouse. Fuck’s sake, I’ve even been a stoat, but never for very long. I tested the world’s possibilities. I’ve been a blue whale and an eagle as well. What’s her point?

‘Hahaha a ahah G.’

Why G? There was a rumour once that she had a son called Guivret, but I doubt he’s still knocking around, if he ever was. And what has he to do with anything? ‘A ahah’ sounds like someone having a stroke. What is with this absurd cod-chilling message? Hahaha? Why not just write mwah-hah-hah and have at it? I begrudge no one a taste for theatre. Let’s not go into the costumes in which a certain wizard has been seen in his earlier, shall we call them Proto-New Romantic Days (very Proto – 14th century) but this is just camp. It’s as though the world’s most powerful witch, cousin to selkies, embodied woman-water-spirit of the lake’s fury, is taking lessons in Gothic from a children’s television programme. A not-great one.

Adam forages for snacks. Actual snacks. I have a bit more of my magic back. Not enough. And something very important is still missing. Something that I’ve reason to believe is still in this room. What am I supposed to do now. Eat Adam? Is that the great plan?

I look at his stoat self, his pale fur, his tipped tail. I don’t want to eat him. Over the years I’ve become increasingly vegetarian. This is what happens when you’ve been a variety of earth’s creatures and you don’t know what’s coming for you.

Beneath London, the drill named Elizabeth still propels itself relentlessly across the city, west to east. I can always feel it, and now I feel it more vividly than ever. It’s approaching the apocalypse.

‘There’s more in here,’ says Adam, nose trembling. ‘I smell it, me. Magic in a packet. Smells like crisps.’

He sniffs about and, miserable, in a non-new normal way, I watch him. His magic stoat nose twitches.

And as he goes foraging ferociously, I realise, with a slow burgeoning I think for a moment is more indigestion of some unusual kind, then identify as the thing called hope, that what’s twitching in that nose is both the stoatness and the magic.

‘Go forth, Adam!’ I bellow. ‘Sniff! Hunt! Find!’

Adam ransacks the office of dead letters. He roams with tooth and claw, slavering, growling. He shreds dull correspondence, tears into circulars, slashes postcards. He pisses upon a stack of the 1970s. I can’t say as I blame him. I’ve been in that shelf myself. Once I ate some blotter acid and I thought I’d gotten all my magic back, before coming down a day later and realising my powers were imaginary.

‘Dig, Adam, dig!’

He digs. I don’t much like using Adam this way but he might even be enjoying himself a bit, I suppose. He is rampaging through a land of packaging.

When I met her, I was all over smitten – and, too, I thought I’d found someone to do my dull bits, the piecemeal fill-in tidying spells. An assistant. A stunning spell-maker who’d deal with the bits of the court I found tedious: the love philtres and the yammer-stoppers, the powdered items requested by various knights for use in week-long orgies, the herbal birth control fizzies requested by ladies for use after same. I’d grown weary of mushroom foraging and unicorn coaxing. I’d had a couple of run-ins with an aggressive manatee, and one with a white rhino that saw through my charms. I had a vision of a more alchemical period in my magic, and perhaps even a small beach vacation, leaving Nimue capably in charge of the court. Instead? She blasted me.

The first time she and I travelled together, it was by fish. We were at the bottom of the river, and she was nothing grey and mottled. She was a parrotfish in freshwater, not proper, not correct. That was when I noticed she’d taken some lessons from me. Lady of the Lake indeed! My love was a lady of the sky, the sea, the wilderness. The all of it.

She was right: she didn’t steal my magic. I gave it to her, willingly, and now I’m here, in a postal office, my mouth tasting of lost objects, following a co-worker I might have to eat.

Adam flies up at last from a heap of ravaged packages. He has a small envelope in his teeth. He shakes his head ferociously, and presents me with his find.

‘Will I be a stole?’ he asks, forlorn.

I give him a pat on the head. It’s the sort of pat that guarantees nothing.

Still – something about this envelope attracted his magic stoat attention. It has a dragon sticker on it. Really? I slash open the packet with my trusted opener, my fingers trembling.

What’s inside is a mermaid made of bone.

Could she really be so on the nose? Though of course it wasn’t her choice.

There’s no slogan here, no silly statement of her victory-that-was-and-wasn’t. I haven’t seen her in hundreds of years. I feel my heart beginning to pound. Nimue was like nothing anyone had ever seen. She had no qualms.

‘Merlin,’ she said. ‘Don’t be a fool. You’re an old man, and you’ll die one day. Do you not think you should teach someone the things you know?’

‘I’ll live forever,’ I said, and though I could clearly see this miserable century of post office in my future, I didn’t know what it meant then.

‘Forever alone,’ she said, and started to walk away, at which point I decided in lovesick desperation to teach her everything I knew.

I bring the cheap-looking mermaid to my lips. In her is the rest of my magic, all the secrets I gave to Nimue, all the transformation spells, all the subtleties, the things I learned of my mother the mortal, and my father the devil. Inside her is the history of Arthur and his reign, the knowledge of his future kingdom.

* * *

I’ve entertained myself imagining the words of the hex.

Scatter all you spells like seed,
You powers to hold the world in thrall.
I shatter that we do not need
Soul of the mightiest mage of all.

I don’t know.

Magus Prime spreads o’er the map,
Turned into tons of stupid crap.

Whatever the doggerel, both parts of the spell worked perfectly. And it was aimed at the greatest magician in the world.

It took me a long time to guess what had happened. A lot of leads. A certain trail of insinuation.

I taught her well. It turned out there was no way to choose between us anymore.

Magic is good for many things, but fuzzy logic is not one of them. Faced with two exactly equal greater powers, maybe the spell could’ve shrugged and dissipated. But it didn’t. It worked on both of us. I was scattered, and she was scattered too.

I bite into the mermaid’s tail and taste the apples of Avalon. I taste the pitch of the tree I lived atop just after Nimue and I were parted. She dove, and I rose, her hand full of the sword, and my hands full of air. I lived in a crystal cage, and my love lived at the bottom of a lake until she took Arthur to his hiding place.

My teeth part the mermaid’s flesh, and I taste my memory, my magic, and the divine bitterness of foolish love.

And then, wrenching free of my teeth, hauling backwards in a storm of spirit, Nimue stands before me.

I stare. She shines. Her gown shimmers like a beetle’s wing. A sword glows in her girdle. Oh, I know that sword.

She looks at me with sea-green eyes, holds Adam in her arms, and pets his face. The stoat nuzzles traitorously into her bosom.

‘That took forever,’ she says. ‘My neck’s all cramped.’

‘It took less than a thousand years,’ I say, offended. ‘That’s nothing when it comes to forever, as you should know.’

I soften. I can’t help it.

‘So,’ I say. ‘You’re looking well.’

‘You have gum in your beard,’ Nimue says.

Liar! I’m about to shout, but she snaps her fingers and shears my chin. Six feet of white braids fall to the floor. She grins. ‘Old goat.’

As ever, I am quite lost. ‘Is that all of my magic back?’ I ask her, after some panting and uncertainty. I can feel the answer. I’m surging. She had the last of it in with her, packed tight like it was provisions for a trip through the underworld. I’ve got it all back in me now. Except for the stuff in that bloody animal.

‘I have my own,’ she says, and gives me a dose of her wicked eyes, her silken skin, her curling upper lip, the one that has never caused me anything but problems. ‘Your spells are out of date. I was only keeping them safe for you. And then I got into a little trouble and had to make myself scarce.’

‘Right,’ I say.

Adam burrows into her cloak. He looks to be making himself a nest.

‘That,’ I say, with dignity, ‘is my mate you’re holding.’

‘Your tastes have changed,’ she says, eyebrow up.

I can feel myself turning colors. ‘My colleague. Kindly return him to his own form.’

‘Do it yourself,’ says Nimue. She passes him to me. ‘You have your spells. I have more important things to do. Surely you’ve seen the news. They’re getting close to you-know-where.’

I’m left holding the stoat, like a magician’s assistant.

‘So you’ve been keeping up, then,’ I say to her back. ‘Despite…’

‘I was keeping my head down,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t ignoring what was happening.’

‘Right,’ I say. She’s so annoying. What I want to say is, you were just about to ride to the rescue of the world, as soon as you’d decided to stop being a gimcrack mermaid, right?

‘So. We’re agreed?’ she says.

‘Yep,’ I say stiffly.

‘Well come on then,’ she says. She glances me up and down. ‘You’re not going to get far, fast, like that. Take shape.’

Adam looks up at me with a particular blankness, one I recognise from my own arsenal of expressions. There is no option. I’m allowing myself one snip, however, before the inevitable.

‘Do you wonder,’ I say to her, hating my whiny voice, ‘why my powers were scattered in parts and you were scattered into one part? One of those parts, even, you might say. I mean, I did teach you everything you know… so it’s almost as if all your powers combined are just one single aspect of mine, isn’t it?’

And with that I chant a single powerful word, and my body shrinks. I wriggle up from a heap of jacket and trousers, flipping myself through the cloth. I rather can’t breathe, and my skin hurts, and my eyes are bulging, to my alarm. I look out from my man clothes, and discover Adam staring at me, his stoat teeth bared.

‘Fishie?’ croons Adam, with savage longing.

I can feel my scales. Errors! I shout another word, before he leaps. Panic subsides: I’m ermined.

Nimue bends and points at us, one hand to each mustelid. She whispers to me.

‘That did occur to me, yes,’ she says. ‘As did what I considered significantly more likely: that my defences are stronger than yours, my reflexes quicker, my soul more coherent.’

Damn it. I’m still thinking of a blistering retort when she turns and rushes away. Frankly, that sounds more likely to me too.

I whip out of the door behind her, and Adam chases after me.

‘She’s your wife?’ he shouts.

‘My witch,’ I tell him over my stoat shoulder. ‘The only witch for me, the worst and best of them all.’

When we reach the street – how long since I have smelt the night with animal nose and nerves! – Nimue is striking a manhole cover with the hilt of Excalibur, drawing green sparks. We leap into the void after her, and land heavily beside her in London’s sewers. I hear Adam cough something up—

—and with a rush, as he vomits, a jolt of my newly returned powers are gone. I can’t bear it. The chewed-up-and-swallowed skull containing grots of my magic has dropped into the darkness and washed away, and Adam is back, in confused human form.

I rush off with the sewage after it, but it’s dissipated, in a new, even more humiliating way. I rage impotently. Adam is pale and disheveled. I see Nimue pat him, with the same sort of no-guarantees pat I used earlier. She bends down and does the same to me. I’m still a stoat.

‘Carry me, knave,’ I shout from ankle level. To Adam. She’s already gone.

Adam dazedly obeys. I direct him into the dark.

There must still be some uncanny calories in him, the way he follows her glowing self, passes through tunnels and sewers, past the scent of bones buried in Roman times, skeletons of saints, skeletons of paupers. I yearn for a gnaw, of anything in tooth-reach, but restrain myself. From inside his pocket, I can feel Adam’s quick breathing and his clammy skin.