Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (17 page)

At the eleventh she paused, hauled in a breath and glanced down the staircase. Below–not very far–a triad of men and one woman were jogging up and down the stairs. She managed to stop her mouth drooping open. Bloody bankers taking their physical fitness so bloody seriously they were running up and down the stairs…
because they could.
Some things, she decided, couldn’t be learned from self-help books.

She tried the door. It was locked, so she walked straight on through.

The office was beautiful and wrong.

It was long and narrow, butted up against a great glass window overlooking a foyer full of more glass and polished tiles, and a bank of lifts with panels that lit up to let you know you’d arrived. Someone had conducted a study and decided that the best way to ensure integration between staff and senior management was to arrange long ranks of desks at which, in posture-fixing chairs, bosses and staff could sit pressed forward against their screens, each cut off by nothing from nobody, accessible, observable, their every deed remarked on by passers-by. No space was given over on these pristine desks for the usual distracting detritus of office life–gone were pictures of loved ones, vanished were panels on which to stick magnetic images of Dr Who or the Pink Panther. Post-it notes were for remembering vital thoughts, not sticking on the backs of workmates; computers were for emailing, not playing pinball; and if you felt the need to get up and move, there were designated areas furnished with lime-green sofas for you to perch on, each sofa no wider than a woman’s shin and constructed to ensure maximum discomfort within a minimum time. Meetings happened while walking; coffee was served only in the community area, from the sleek espresso machine behind the bowls of fruit.
The fruit was provided by the staff of each department, and while it wasn’t obligatory to meet a quota, nor was it playing ball if you didn’t achieve your weekly delivery of nectarines for the good of the company. The infrastructure of the office operated discreetly behind unmarked doors, and the single message board maintained for this purpose carried only two notices: an invitation to attend team Pilates at 7 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and a request to all staff to please observe the new recycling policy.

Sharon gave up counting the people when she got to sixty. It was hard to do anyway, given the near-uniform of tie and suit. Even the women wore the same shades of black and grey, the same shoes, the same sheer tights; and all sat hunched at their desks with the same expression of determination. Numbers rolled down the screens, coded in red or green. The youngest employees toiled across the office pulling trolleys loaded with paper; the eldest leaned back in their chairs, hands behind their heads and phones tucked beneath their chins, and talked.

It was hard to tell what the company did, much less why it should own so many properties across the city from which the very soul had been plucked. Worse, as Sharon moved through the office, whenever she slowed down to examine someone closely, the world began to shift back out of the shadows in which she lurked. If she stood still she could feel the veil that hid her from sight begin to tear. Lingering to peer past one man at his flat-screen computer, she almost grew visible again, and a woman nearby looked up with a cry of “Oh, are you…” before Sharon darted back into the refuge of invisibility. As she made her way through the shadows that had to serve her for privacy, she looked in vain for anything out of the ordinary, the shimmers of illusion which had shrouded members of Magicals Anonymous or the smell of magic trailing after them.

Not only did she have to keep moving; it was harder here. The walk of the city streets no longer protected her, so that she had to adjust her pace, perfectly pitched between urgent stride and easy shuffle, at the exact speed that matched with invisibility within these walls. Sammy hadn’t warned her about this, hadn’t mentioned the changing nature of invisibility as her environment changed, and she cursed under her breath as she struggled to stay unperceived.

“And, back from our commercial break, we ask–what tips are there on staying invisible?”

“Shut up,” she growled as the half-shadow of Dez the spirit guide shimmered into existence beside her.

“If only I wasn’t a manifestation of your subconscious mind, I would be deeply insulted. As it is, this documentary programme only knows as much as you do, so however you look at it, you’re in trouble!” sang out Dez before vanishing once more.

Sharon looked around as a shaman looked and saw…

… nothing of much interest to anyone.

She drifted on through a meeting, where one man slammed his fist onto the table and proclaimed, “I’m not talking about the fucking Italians, screw the fucking Italians, I’m talking about the Hungarian bonds!”

The assembled table cringed from their boss’s wrath. Papers were shuffled–another reason, Sharon noted, for the documents lying all around–it just wasn’t as easy to doodle on a laptop as it was with pen and paper. Even here, it seemed, where productivity was king, the employees found a few small ways to rebel against their working life. She passed through into another meeting room.

“Uh, yeah, so the exposure is seventeen for now, but there’s another two on the table once we get the figures through…”

These people talked, Sharon realised, almost entirely in numbers and acronyms. Fifteen–it took her a while to mentally add the million to the number in question–was being transferred via API through to the PCLL account while the HKL report was going to be converted into a LLI for application to another thirty-two on the move to MNB. She stared hard at the purveyors of this mystical information, and there it was, the truth of the thing, the shadow that lay at their backs and whispered of

bastard’s bonus was fucking bigger than mine fucking arsehole how dare he look at me like that, like he’s laughing fucking bastard

        
they mustn’t know what I did

will this day never end?

                
waiting for me she’s waiting for me so sweet…

Jesus, did he just ask me something? Was that something he asked me was that a question I wasn’t listening I was…

“Uh, yeah, I can do that, Tim.”

just play ball, play ball and in four years you’ll have enough to get out four years at full pay then into the account interest 12.1 per cent no tax that’s enough that’s enough don’t need more really do I? Do I need more no of course I don’t… unless I do…

Sharon’s nose wrinkled in displeasure as the magical shadows each danced behind their master’s back. She turned and looked directly at a wizard.

Of course he was a wizard.

She knew this, even though she’d never actually met any wizards, unless you counted Mr Roding the necromancer, but then, who did? No, this man was a wizard, she concluded, because no one walked around with two faces. There was his real face, a perfectly well made thing with a round, curving chin that showed no sign of bone, and slightly deep-set eyes; and there was the artificial face, crafted from whispers and power, stitched into his skin with little tendrils of power. The artificial face, the one the world could see, was beautiful. Unearthly, intimidating, unnaturally beautiful.

There was a word Mr Roding had used for that too–glamour. The wizard wore a glamour, and for a moment Sharon’s fear was subdued beneath the question of what the self-help books would have to say about that. Was it proactive (good) or self-deceiving (bad)? Was it a tool for surviving the hurly-burly of modern life (respectable) or an exercise in shaping yourself to society’s prejudices (unforgivable, the books exclaimed–be yourself)? Perhaps it was all of them at once. Perhaps that was the problem.

She stared at the wizard, and he stared straight back, or rather through her, slamming his fists on the table and proclaiming, “When you lads have finished playing with your dicks, come and do some real work with the big boys, yeah?”

Sharon’s dismay deepened. The others laughed, as if something funny had been said, and she watched his artificial face flicker with the sound of the laughter, as if feeding on its environment, taking strength. His real face, beneath the glamour, was set hard, contemptuous of those who admired his so-called wit. It occurred to her that she need only reach out and tug, and the true him would be revealed.

Then he turned and marched into the main office, barely acknowledging the others behind him, like a departing royal personage. He
waved his hand at a lock on an electric door, which clicked open, and stepped through. Sharon slipped through after him, feeling something tug at her as she moved through the door, a weight and a pressure that she hadn’t sensed elsewhere in the building. The office beyond was more of the same–uncomfortable furniture, beautifully displayed; desks with no privacy; people staring at screens; but this time there was a smell on the air, and it smelt of magic. She looked and…

There, in that woman’s tattoo just visible above the line of her shirt, a vein had been drawn above her own; and as the blood flowed beneath her skin, so the tattoo itself pulsed with life and…

There a man stretched his fingers, and as they clicked like castanets thin grey fur tried to push its way out through the wrinkles in the joints, before he frowned and wrung his hands and the greyness retreated.

Sharon passed through the office, now fearing all the more that someone might look up and see her. She came to a stretch of wall on which a notice proclaimed,
ACQUISITIONS
, and, oh yes but at last, she recognised the pictures stuck to the whiteboard with little magnetic tabs. Here were the properties bought up by Burns and Stoke which, oddly enough, no one else seemed able to buy or sell. The places where even their history had gone quiet.

Then she heard someone say “… because he’s dead!” and things got more interesting.

Hi, I’m Chris (Hello, Chris). I’m an exorcist. I’m from Melbourne. Being from Melbourne isn’t actually a part of my job, but the accent, the tan, the blond hair, the physique, you’re going to be looking at me and going “Damn, he’s no Brit” and so, sure, yeah, I’ll get it out of the way right now and say I’m Australian and proud. And an exorcist. Australian first, then an exorcist, then a green belt in aikido, and I know that’s not like a black belt, but I think that by green you’re kind of getting the hang of things, anyway, what was I talking about?

Yeah, exorcism. I like my job, like I really do get a sense of satisfaction from a job well done, from knowing that the dead are finally at rest and the living can get on with their lives in peaceful, uninterrupted bliss. I also do curses, bedevilments and compulsions, for an extra thirty-five pounds including expenses but excluding VAT, just in case any of you guys have any metamystical baggage.

The problem–cos we’re here to go through our problems, right, that’s the whole point–the problem is this whole twelfth-century attitude you guys have towards the exorcism thing. I mean, it’s not just you guys, it’s everyone in the industry, and personally I blame the Italians more than the Brits, but you know, Brit-bashing, it’s a great hobby. But everyone is all so “book bell candle” and “I banish you!” and there’s shouting and flickering lights and ranting, and while I’ve never
personally actually seen anyone crawl up the walls, projectile-vomit or turn their heads 180 degrees, there’s all these guys out there who swear to it, which I actually think gives the industry a bad name. I mean, we’re professionals, and if at the end of an exorcism for which you’ve paid a decent fee, you know, with your loved ones screaming and writhing and all that, if after forking out all this dosh you’ve still got to get blood out of the carpets, well then I think something’s gone wrong, don’t you? And being dead is traumatic! People never think of it from the other guy’s point of view, but I’m just saying, if you’re haunting somewhere it’s probably because you were brutally murdered or all that so just take a moment to think about that when dealing with the projectile vomiting.

This is my card. I’m Exorminator–like Terminator only kind of without the guns. I believe in a holistic approach to the echoes of the violently departed. I think you should work through your issues, talk it through, reach a sense of harmony where actually both the living and the dead can move on in a groovy, non-pukey way. I mean, just because you’re dead doesn’t mean psychoanalysis can’t help you out.

I don’t get many commissions.

There were two of them.

They were huddled in the “library”. It was called the library because it had two bookshelves containing publications with catchy titles like
Accounting Practice 2009–2011, Vols XXIV–XXVI.
Despite containing all the most recent rulings on advanced accounting practice, whoever printed the books still felt the need to bind them like the Victorians did, and emboss the titles in gold, so they created a rather old-fashioned feel on the Ikea-style shelves.

The two arguing were a man and a woman. The man wore… a suit; the woman wore… a suit, and in that was all that could really be said. Not a pink tie nor a brass cufflink flashed to suggest any mark of individuality. Their voices were tuned down low and urgent except for the occasional flare, which was immediately hushed by the other. The woman was in her mid-thirties, the man in his late twenties, and if they could have huddled any more in the corner they’d chosen, they would have had to develop triangular spines. Had she the chance to inspect their wallets, Sharon might have learned that her name was Camilla; his Eddie. As it was, when she looked, the only thing she could see about them was…

     
… a single slipper soaked with the rain…

… child’s mitten left on the railing…

         
… greasy chicken wrapping in a dirty old box…

Blood on the carpet. It crackles underfoot. You have to lift your shoes clear of it and it sticks like gum, sticky gum and…

Sharon looked away, the taste of greasy chicken suddenly mixing with something far, far worse in her mouth. She swallowed the urge to gag right back down to the pit of her stomach and edged closer.