Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (12 page)

Sammy scowled. It was an impressive scowl, making unnatural-looking folds in his face as his lips curled back to reveal his oversized yellow teeth. “You gotta think about all the stuff people don’t usually see,” he chided. “Look proper like!”

Sharon sighed and looked again.

The shop was silent.

Posters of snowcapped peaks lined a wall of ski boots; folded tents were laid out beneath one larger construct of fabric and poles with a sign proclaiming
DELUXE
7000–
TAKE YOUR HOME ON AN ADVENTURE!!
There was a faint smell of cleaning fluids and the slow red glare of a security alarm confused by the absence of broken glass or splintered doors in the wake of the two shamans.

She looked, and for no evident reason a shudder ran through to her bones at the sight of a thermal jacket padded almost as thick as the human frame it was designed to protect; as her eyes wandered over the balaclavas something silky brushed her cheek. Turning, she heard a till slam shut, coins jingling in its plastic drawers, and she spun round again, staring towards the checkout counter with its discount offer on dripping water bottles and keyring compasses whose points couldn’t find north.

She hesitated.

Something wrong with this picture.

Stepped towards the counter, reached out for the plastic bottles lined up by the till. They were nipple-lidded, garishly bright, their price reduced from ridiculously high to merely silly for a one-time-only twice-monthly sale. She could hear the rubbing of the fat red felt-tip pen as it struck off the old price hanging round their necks; and from the top of each bottle water tumbled, silent and clean, a slow fountain that barely rose up before it tumbled back down, pooling on the counter, then a rippling down onto the floor. The compasses in their boxes were spinning, the needles racing round and round. As the water spread across the tile floor towards Sharon’s feet she thought she heard the whisper of the sea, tasted salt, felt icy air press against her cheek. Hesitantly, she picked up a bottle, and heard the crash of crates as they were loaded into an iron container, smelt oil on deck and voices crying out in a foreign tongue, turned and saw

a man in a top hat and walking cane, papers rolled up before him, sat at the table where knitted hats and scarves were sold, waiting for his meeting,

and she dropped the bottle, which rolled away across the floor.

The flow of water stopped, had never been there, but the man remained.

“Sammy?” she hissed. “There’s a dead Victorian dude sat by winter headgear.”

The goblin tutted. “So?”

Sharon edged closer to the figure, its head bowed, face lost in shadow. She could feel… a contracting around her, the walls not so much closing in as bending, craning to watch; and when she glanced up she saw the snow billowing off the posters of mountainsides in far-flung places, ice crystallising on the plastic soles of the ski boots, and knew that though it wasn’t real, it was nonetheless true. A thin mist filled the air, blue-grey; the stink of it made her nose itch and tightened her throat. As she neared the man in his black top hat, she felt something sticky beneath her foot and saw a piece of yellow gum on the floor, carrying the imprint of her boot. A few paces from the man; now only one. She stood before him, trying to inspect him, but his features were lost beneath the top hat. She glanced at Sammy for advice, and saw for an instant in the goblin

Blistered feet

     
Endless road

         
Never come back

before he said, “Go on, look!”

She turned back to the man on the headgear table, reached out gingerly and prised the hat from his head. His eyes flashed up at her, two ochre-stained balls swivelling in a hollow skull; a tongue rattled between his lips of rotted grey-black leather, and his nose was hollowed down to two great holes and a thin piece of bone. She dropped the hat and scrambled away–away from him and away from the stinking mist, staggering back into the cool darkness elsewhere in the store.

Sammy grabbed her by the sleeve as she leaned against a wall and gasped for breath, coughing out the taste of smoke. “What’d you see?” he demanded.

“Dead dude,” she replied, trying not to shrill the answer. “Very
much… dead dude. Am I going to start projectile vomiting? Only seeing dead people isn’t something I’m really big on and really not something I signed up for.”

“You gotta learn how to see the things what are there! All the stuff underneath, all the things just outta sight–even the dead things! It’s all part of the shaman thing!”

“Really? Only I was hoping it’d be… nicer than that.”

“Nice?
Nice?
Magic ain’t supposed to be
nice.
You want nice, go look after baby penguins at the zoo!”

As career advice went, Sharon had heard worse. “Okay,” she grumbled, forcing her breathing to slow down. “Tell me about the dead dude.”

“This place was a merchant’s office,” explained Sammy. “Company what sold opium out to China and that. Now course they buy all their stuff from China, which I guess is kind of funny, ’cept the stuff they get from China’s all like, plastic drinking bottles and that and not so many drugs, not here anyways.”

“So dead dude was a drug dealer?”

“Nah, he was a merchant!”

“Who sold drugs?”

“Yep.”

“Kind of then,” said Sharon in the tone of someone puzzling out a great problem, “like a drug dealer. Why’d I see him?”

“Time,” Sammy replied. “Time and secrets–people try an’ bury ’em both, stick ’em down beneath bigger roads and brighter lights, pretend that they aren’t there. You get it sometimes when you touch people, or things–that feeling when you know all the things that are true about them, all the things they don’t want you to know. You taste it, the bitterness in their mouths, the worries in their heads, hidden away. But it’s always there, stuck just beneath the surface, making this world what it is, and you, bein’ a shaman an’ all, you see it. An’ sometimes it sees you.”

Sharon blanched. “No way am I talking to dead dudes,” she insisted. “I mean, I’m sure it’s groovy in its way, but there’s some serious God questions raised there and I can’t be having it right now, thank you.”

Sammy mimed exasperation. “You’re at one with the city now,” he explained. “You don’t really get no more havin’ it than that. Come on.”

He marched out into the street through a wall of T-shirts carrying such life-affirming messages as
TO THE END AND BEYOND!
and
CONQUEST IS VICTORY,
designed to inspire bold camping adventurers to look to their navels in search of inspiration.

Outside was chilly, damp, the traffic a sullen stop-start of odd cars and buses by the lights of Holborn Circus infuriated at how few pedestrians were crossing. They passed Hatton Garden, a street of goldsmiths selling rings and other jewellery to the naive, and pawnbrokers buying them back. East lay Smithfield Market, whose long aisles, beneath its Victorian wrought-iron roof, were built to take deliveries of meat by the cow and blood by the bucket. Sharon shivered and thrust her hands deeper into her pockets as Sammy strode past shuttered shops with warning signs informing would-be thieves that they’d be prosecuted to the limits of the law if they so much as considered breaking into these properties, within which no money was kept overnight, so there.

“Every building’s got its history,” explained Sammy as they marched up the office-shadowed street of Snow Hill. “Even the new ones, cos they’ve been built on something. They’ve got secrets and stories–it’s like the sorcerers say! Where there’s life, there’s magic and that, and all a shaman does is notice. Every street, every stone, they’ve all got something inside ’em, scratching to be heard. Trick is knowing which bits to listen to and which to ignore, cos let’s face it, if you listened to all of it, your brain would go dribbling out of your ears.” Sammy seemed to relish this idea. Then with a stamp of his foot he declared, “Only some silly bugger’s gone and buggered about with it and muggins ’ere has to bloody fix it!”

A seed of suspicion stirred in Sharon’s mind.

“What do you mean, buggering about?”

“Buggerin’ about!” he retorted, as if that should be explanation enough. “Playing silly buggers, tampering with the forces of nature and that! ’Ere!”

He led the way to a little side road and stabbed a finger towards a squat round building that sat on the corner. The street was barely wide enough for its one-way traffic, with iron bollards unevenly spaced down its length as if, one at a time, a century of accidents and disasters had been removing them.

“Like that ’un there.”

Sharon followed where he was pointing to the darkened windows of the building. A white banner over the door proclaimed,
COMING SOON!!!
It didn’t say what was coming soon, but that hadn’t stopped the maker getting very excited. Plywood covered its shopfront windows, and above, on the smaller windows in the building’s rounded corners, someone had written in the dust,
Expect no mercy.

“Was this one owned by a slave trader?” asked Sharon.

In reply Sammy just waggled his eyebrows, which were of the same magnificent thickness and colour as the black hair that quivered beneath his broad grey nostrils. He waited until, with a puff of exasperation, she marched towards the locked door and straight through to the other side. She sensed a moment of pressure, a flash of darkness, then she stood in a wide empty room with a central pillar supporting the ceiling and heaped dust sheets kicked against a chipped plasterboard wall. Thin street light drifted through cracks in the plywood window covering; even so, it took a while before her eyes adjusted to the settled gloom. The last occupants had left few signs of their purpose: a bright green fire exit sign, some leaflets spilled on the floor and a blackboard still chalked with the words,
EVERYTHING MUST GO.

She felt, rather than heard, Sammy step through behind her, his yellow eyes glinting a little too bright in the darkness.

“Whatcha see?” he asked.

“Nothing. I mean… you know, some stuff, but nothing.”

“Whatcha hear?”

She listened.

The nothing she heard was almost deeper than the nothing she saw, a great dead heartbeat that had forgotten how to pulse.

“Nothing.”

“There’s signs you can look for,” he explained. “The shop that opens and six months later shuts again–might just be the economy or shit, might be a shop trying to sell smelly candles by a football stadium or whatever–but then the shop after that shuts in six months, and the one after that in three and you gotta start asking yourself, is it cursed? And the answer is of course it’s fucking cursed–I mean how dense are you?” He kicked at a can of solidified paint. “You’re a shaman,” he
explained. “You’re at one with the city–which ain’t great for the city, I gotta tell you, cos if you’re the best it can do then it’s so stuffed–but anyway you’re meant to see the things that ain’t there. Hear the things no one else can hear. Whatcha hear?”

“I said, nothing.”

“Whatcha see?”

“Nothing. Is this some new teaching method or what, because I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Channel Four make documentaries about this kind of abuse.”

Sammy clapped his hands in busy command. “Nothing!” he repeated. “You’re dense as lead in a treacle pie but you ain’t that dense. You ain’t seeing nothing, you ain’t hearing nothing cos in this place there ain’t nothing left to be seen.” His voice was suddenly soft and loud all at once, the clearest she had ever heard him speak. “Someone’s been stealing the souls of things. Been plucking them right out, a building here, a building there, sucking them dry. The spirits in the statues, the dryads hiding in the traffic lights, the ghosts in the graveyards, the shadows that walk beside you in the night–they’re what you hear, they’re what you see, even the stupid bloody people what haven’t got two brain cells to rub together, they don’t know it’s them they’re looking at but they
feel
it, they feel the things just the other side of the dark. There was something here, there
should
be something here, and it’s gone. Someone took it. Someone’s been taking them all, all the shadows of the city. It ain’t a good death; it ain’t fire or flood or any of that Midnight Mayor shit. It’s a slow, declining death that don’t bother to say hello or bye bye and you don’t even notice you’re dying until you’re already dead. That’s what this nothing is. Only a shaman knows to fix that.”

Sharon found herself turning, staring right at him, the little angular shape of grey goblin in the dark. “Okay, then,” she said. “How’d you fix it?”

“You gotta find them, the lost ones. All the spirits and all the shadows that got stolen away. You gotta bring them back–you gotta bring…” He hesitated. Then, “You gotta bring
her
back. The oldest of them all, her what keeps the city walls shut, what keeps out the dark. The Lady Who Walks Beside, our Keeper of the Lamp, the Silent Friend, the Lady of 4 a.m. She’s not just some building spirit or some
imp at the end of a lane, she’s… she’s the one who keeps you safe from the thing you don’t dare look at in the night. Greydawn, they call her, and like everything else in this city, she’s… missing.”

“ ‘Missing’,” echoed Sharon, then, with a surge of realisation, “Oh, bloody hell, is this what all this cryptic crap has been about? The guy yesterday who didn’t buy me lunch, you turning up demanding toothpaste, ‘missing spirits’ and all that? You know, Sammy, it could’ve been great. I was open to it, I really was, I thought, yeah, sure, he’s a goblin, but I’ll be open-minded and try and learn from him, but really,
really
all this is about, at the end of the day, is some missing… person… with a lot of daft names.” She quivered with an outrage worthy almost of her master.

“Course it is, stupid!” he exclaimed. “But you think I’d be bloody wasting my time on some cabbage-for-sense baby shaman if the fate of the whole fucking city weren’t at stake? You think the Midnight bloody Mayor would give two farts about you if he wasn’t shit scared that this time he can’t find a big enough shovel! Course you gotta do something about it and course you should be pleased!”