by Peter McLean
His faith in me was touching, and entirely misplaced.
“I suppose I could–”
“Yes?” He looked up hopefully, the tears glistening on the seamed cheeks behind his glasses.
I supposed I could what, exactly? What the fuck was I thinking?
I was thinking that maybe I could try not to be such a shit all the time, if I’m perfectly honest about it. Besides, helping someone for once might cheer Trixie up a bit. I had enough money to be going on with for now so perhaps a bit of pro bono wouldn’t kill me just this once.
“All right,” I said. “I mean, this isn’t the sort of thing I usually do so I can’t make any promises, you understand?”
“Of course,” he said. “No promises.”
“All right,” I said again. “Let me have your address and I’ll come over tonight.”
“Thank you Mr Drake. Thank you so much!”
He gave me his details and left. He looked overjoyed.
Trixie very much didn’t, when I told her about it.
“You said you’d do what?” she snapped at me. “What on earth for?”
Angels, huh? They’re the very souls of sympathy sometimes.
“He cried,” I admitted.
“Oh that’s just pathetic,” Trixie said, and turned back to the window.
Remember that real live angel I mentioned? Yeah, that was Trixie. She was sitting at my kitchen table, smoking a long black cigarette and staring listlessly out into the yard behind Mr Chowdhury’s grocery shop downstairs. She hadn’t really done a great deal of anything else for several months now, not since her glorious performance at Wormwood’s club. On the whole I think being my guardian angel was boring her shitless.
Of course, she wasn’t really my guardian angel at all. Trixie, or Meselandrarasatrixiel to give her the full honours she was due, was the guardian of the Burned Man on the direct order of her Dominion. That was something like a royal decree from what I could work out, certainly not something a simple soldier like her could argue with, however much she’d rather have just gone home. The Dominion was her boss, her commanding officer in the Heavenly Host, but it was much more than that too. She had tried to explain it to me once, but we had hit problems with the language barrier and I still wasn’t too clear how it worked. What it said went, I had got that much. All the same, I could tell she wasn’t happy about it.
Of course, that wasn’t the only problem. She wasn’t over Adam and that’s all there was to it.
She looked as gorgeous as ever, sitting there in a pair of tight jeans and a plain white blouse, her long blonde hair hanging loose over one shoulder as she smoked her awful Russian cigarette. There were three dead ones crushed out in the ashtray already, their crumpled gold butts and mashed black stems making them look like so many dead scarab beetles. At least she’d finally got the hang of opening the window when she was smoking. That was something, I supposed. I coughed anyway as I put the kettle on.
“Want one?”
She shrugged and blew smoke out of the window into the gloom of South London on a damp spring afternoon. “Not particularly,” she said.
I shook my head and poured water onto cheap instant coffee. I had to admit she was starting to do my head in for all that I loved her, she really was. She was still sleeping in my bed for one thing, and I still wasn’t sleeping in it with her. Look, I’ll be honest, I really wanted to shag her. She was so gorgeous she almost took your breath away, you know what I mean? I suppose it stood to reason that she would be, being an angel and all that.
It wasn’t like that though, with her. I mean, it was for me, but sexy as she might be, she somehow managed to be weirdly sexless as well. I really couldn’t see her going for it. Not just with me I mean – there are more than enough human women who don’t want to sleep with me, ta very much. I haven’t got any illusions on that score. No, I mean in general. I just didn’t think sex was something she went in for.
Ah, but then there was Adam. I knew she was more than a little bit in love with the fallen angel who called himself Adam. Oh yeah, we were old mates, Adam and me, if “old mates” was some sort of euphemism for “bitter enemies”. I had a nasty feeling she could go in for it with him all right. Unrequited love is a bitch, I tell you. Not that she had the faintest idea how I felt about her, I knew. I’d never got up the nerve to tell her and I couldn’t see that changing any time soon, to be perfectly honest.
“Damn!” I yelped as hot brown water slopped over the edge of my cup and onto my hand.
“Stop pouring when it’s full, Don,” she said, without turning away from the window.
I sighed and looked at her, my trained magician’s gaze able to see her aura clearly outlined against the window. She had never gone back to hiding it, that was something, I supposed. It made it a lot easier to keep an eye on her. In all honesty, sometimes I felt like I was looking after her and not the other way around.
Angelic auras are a beautiful golden colour, in case you didn’t know, or they should be anyway. Trixie’s, well, wasn’t exactly like that. When I’d first met her she had been masking it with a dazzling white light and back then I hadn’t known any better. By the time I’d found out she was faking, she wasn’t in good shape. Trixie wasn’t a fallen angel, she was very clear on that point, but by her own admission she had certainly slipped a bit. She had slipped more than a bit last year, if you asked me. Last year she had still been fighting the Furies, and she had gone to some rather extreme measures in the end that had involved her trying to steal the Burned Man from me.
Of course, that had been exactly what the Burned Man wanted her to do and it hadn’t ended well, and Trixie had very nearly fallen for good. She would have done, in fact, if it hadn’t been for the intervention of her Dominion. Even now there were greenish rotten patches in her golden aura, and a few remaining black traces of corruption. Oh yes, she still had Adam on her mind all right.
Still, all that aside, things were looking up on the whole. Trixie had well and truly put Wormwood in his place, and the Burned Man had never been so well behaved since its foiled escape attempt and a close encounter with the Dominion that could quite possibly have smashed it to atoms. Well maybe, anyway.
I still wasn’t too clear on who would have won that fight if it had come right down to it, but my money was on the Dominion. The Burned Man was an archdemon, sure, but a Dominion is something like a general in the Heavenly Host. If you know anything at all about angels, you’ll understand that makes it a double hard bastard by anyone’s standards.
I mopped up the spilled coffee and went to stand beside Trixie at the window. There was a mangy old ginger tom walking along the top of the wall at the back of the yard downstairs where Mrs Chowdhury was busy hanging her washing out. The old lady clapped her hands at it and the cat startled, turning enough for me to see that half its face was scar tissue and it was missing an eye. It jumped down off the wall and out of sight.
“Horrible-looking cat,” I said, for want of anything else to say.
Trixie ignored me. Down in the yard Mr Chowdhury came out of the back of the shop, leading one of his grandsons by the hand. The boy was about four or five years old, and he came to visit them every weekend. Every time I saw him I felt a vicious stab of guilt.
Vincent and Danny McRoth had had a grandson about that age and I had killed him. Not on purpose of course, but my screamers had torn him to bloody rags all the same. I must admit I had killed Vincent and Danny on purpose, to pay off a debt to Wormwood. The boy had just been there when he shouldn’t have been, that was all.
I knew that made no difference whatsoever.
They say time heals all wounds, but then they talk a lot of shit in general. It had been nearly five months now and that wound wasn’t showing any signs of healing, forgiveness or not. When I least expected it, the memory of his face would suddenly swim up behind my eyes and I’d have to remember it all over again. The only thing worse than remembering would have been forgetting. Forgetting is denial, and
a denial of that magnitude would send anyone round the bend. Well it would me, anyway. I’m no gangster like Gold Steevie, to take that sort of thing in my stride and just move on. I may have been forgiven, but I knew I would never forget him.
Looking back on it I was probably nursing a nice little case of undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder, but there you go. Whatever, I didn’t want to watch that little boy outside playing with his grandparents.
“I’m going to see what the Burned Man has to say about this little bit of business,” I said. “Coming?”
“No I’m not,” Trixie said. “I may have to be that horrible thing’s guardian but that doesn’t mean I want to have to look at it.”
I knew she was going to say that, of course. Trixie hadn’t set foot in my workroom since last year, not since her horribly ill-advised attempt to steal the Burned Man from me. We were over that now of course, or at least I sincerely hoped we were, so I kept trying. Trixie and the Burned Man were the two most important people in my life since I lost Debbie and it would have been nice if they had been able to at least tolerate each other, especially as we all lived under the same very small roof together. Well, I say “people” but you know what I mean. They might have been a half-fallen angel and an imprisoned archdemon, but they were still the closest thing I had to a family. That pretty much summed up my life at the time.
I shrugged and left her to it, and went to speak to the Burned Man.
“Afternoon,” I said, as I pushed the workroom door open.
“Blondie stood me up again then has she?” it sneered.
The Burned Man was a nine-inch tall fetish that stood on the ancient oak altar at the far end of the room, and it contained the imprisoned soul of one of the most powerful archdemons in all of Hell. It was chained to the surface by tiny iron manacles around its wrists and ankles, and its whole ugly naked little body was blackened and blistered, the skin cracked open in places to show the livid, weeping red burns beneath. It was a bloody horrible little thing, and it was always hungry.
“You know she has,” I said. “Peckish?”
“Is a bear Catholic?”
I sighed and crossed the room, stepping over the grand summoning circle that was carefully inscribed into the hardwood floor. This was where the work got done. The real work that is, summoning and sending demons, not helping little old men with batty wives. For free, at that. What the hell had I been thinking?
I knelt down in front of the altar and unbuttoned my shirt. The Burned Man lunged forwards and sank its nasty needle-like teeth into the meat beside my nipple, gurgling contentedly to itself as it started to slurp on my blood. I sighed and looked down at myself. My chest was more scar than not these days. You’d think I’d be used to it by now but it still hurt like a fucking bastard.
“So what’s up?” it asked when it had finally had enough.
I winced and dabbed the smear of blood off my chest with a tissue.
“We’ve got a little job,” I said. “Don’t get excited, it’s not exactly the usual this time.”
“Why are we doing it then?” it asked me. “Shitloads of cash, I trust.”
“Why don’t you let me worry about the business side of things?”
“Because we’d go broke in a month,” it said. “Even the bank of Blondie can’t be fucking bottomless.”
I shrugged. Trixie always seemed to have money when I wanted some, and if it stopped me working she was happy to give it to me. Trixie really didn’t approve of my line of work, to put it mildly. All the same, the Burned Man was right, of course. I couldn’t count on that forever. Besides, a man has to have some pride. Which made doing a job for free seem even stupider, now that I thought about it. I cleared my throat.
“Look,” I said. “There was this little old man, and he’s got a problem.”
“And shitloads of cash?” the Burned Man asked hopefully.
“I doubt it,” I admitted.
“Pillock,” it said. “Sometimes I wonder about you Drake, I really do.”
“Whatever, we’re doing it,” I said.
I was still holding out a thin hope that Trixie might come around to the idea and cheer up a bit, maybe even join in, although I had to admit that was starting to look a tad unlikely.
“So what’s this ancient pauper’s problem then, apart from being old and poor?”
I sighed and told it what the old chap had told me. The Burned Man frowned up at me.
“She’s some sort of witch then, is she, this batty old dear?”
“Yeah, it sounds like it,” I said. “I’ll have to go and see I suppose.”
“I suppose you will,” it said. “I’m not a sodding oracle, I don’t know what we need to do until you can properly tell me what’s what.”
“Right,” I said.
I got up and left it to whatever it did when I wasn’t there.
I shudder to think, to be honest.
Chapter 3
I went down to Big Dave’s café next door for dinner first. Trixie hadn’t wanted to join me there either, although as I looked at the greasy plate of lukewarm bacon pie and soggy chips in front of me, I had to admit I didn’t really blame her. Big Dave ran a proper old-fashioned café, not one of those poncey places that were starting to take over the neighbourhood. None of that artisanal coffee and your food served on a roofing tile bollocks here, thanks very much. That said, the place was a bit crap if I’m honest about it.
Big Dave was his usual jolly self though, and he must have told me at least five times that if I’d fallen out with Trixie he’d gladly take her off my hands for a small fee. I forced myself to banter along with him whilst trying not to think about how many pieces Trixie would have cut him into if she’d heard that. And me as well, probably. The highlight of the meal was seeing the ugly ginger cat from Mrs Chowdhury’s yard almost get hit by a bus as it ran across the busy road outside.
Big Dave’s wasn’t exactly the sort of place where you linger after eating so I was back outside by half six and in a taxi ten minutes later. We crawled through the stagnant ooze of the London traffic until it eventually pulled up outside the address the old chap had given me.
I looked out at the place with a sinking feeling in my guts that wasn’t just down to Big Dave’s cooking. The house was in a grotty row of shabby old terraces, but predictably enough his was the grottiest one in the street. The tiny front garden was overgrown with dead weeds, and the windows were so filthy it was a wonder there weren’t more weeds growing on them as well. The grim tower blocks of a sink estate loomed over the rooftops a couple of streets away. I sighed and paid the cabbie.
“Cheers mate,” I said as I got out, trying to muster an enthusiasm I didn’t feel.
It was nearly dark but I couldn’t see any lights on in the house. If this turned out to have been some sort of elaborate windup I wasn’t going to be best pleased. I walked past the overflowing wheelie bin and looked for a doorbell, almost falling over a mangy ginger cat as it dashed between my legs. I frowned after it. Nah, it couldn’t have been the same one. There didn’t seem to be a bell, so I rapped on the front door with my knuckles, and rattled the letterbox for good measure. A moment later the front room light came on and I heard footsteps shuffling towards me behind the door.
“Who is it?” the old boy called out.
“Mr Page? It’s Don Drake,” I said. “You came to see me this afternoon.”
The door opened and he peered out at me through his plastic-framed glasses.
“Oh yes, yes, hello Mr Drake,” he said.
“Call me Don,” I said.
“Oh, oh all right. I’m Charlie, then.”
He ushered me inside and closed the door behind me. The house was chilly and quiet, and smelled of damp and boiled cabbage. I could hear a clock ticking somewhere in the back but that was all. The front room looked like one of those formal sitting rooms people used to have in the 1930s, a dusty sofa no one ever sat on and a fireplace that was always cold. Kept for a “best” that
never came. And for funerals, of course. For laying out the dead. What a cheerful thought that wasn’t.
“Come through, come through,” Charlie said.
I followed him through the door at the bottom of the stairs and into the back room, the parlour or whatever you’d have called it. Honestly, I don’t think this place had been done out since it was built. There was a three-bar electric fire with one miserable bar glowing like a half-dead salamander, and a big ugly wooden clock on the mantle above it. Above that hung a faded print of the Queen in a cheap frame. The print looked like it was from maybe forty years ago, perhaps a souvenir from the Silver Jubilee.
Two shabby armchairs were pulled up next to the fire and a couple of dining chairs stood against one wall, and that was it. The too-small rug was threadbare and surrounded by splintery looking floorboards.
I could tell that this was going to be about as pro fucking bono as work got.
Charlie lowered himself into one armchair and waved vaguely at the other one. He wasn’t wearing his nylon coat any more, but other than that he still looked the same as he had that morning. He didn’t offer me a cup of tea or anything, I noticed. Still, I hate tea anyway and I couldn’t imagine he had anything approaching drinkable coffee in the grotty little kitchen that led off the parlour. I sat down. The clock was ticking loud enough to give me a headache.
“So,” I said. “Um, Mrs Page?”
“Oh yes, yes, bless her,” Charlie said. “Ever so sad, Mr Drake, but it’s got to be done.”
“It’s Don,” I said again. “I was hoping I could see her. I need to get some idea of what I’m dealing with, you see.”
“Oh, yes, well,” he said.
He looked me up and down, peering oddly at my suit. I might not be a fashion icon exactly but I was a damn sight better dressed than him so I wasn’t quite sure exactly what his problem was.
“What?” I had to ask eventually.
