Our Lady of the Streets

by Tom Pollock

  The Mistress purred contentedly in her mind.

  She coiled and flexed the wire until she had all of it, then to her astonished delight, she felt her awareness jump to another strand close to that one, then another followed, then another. Her proprioception raced along fence-top coils and bales of razor-wire and tendrils buried under hillsides. She was almost screaming with the electric sensation of it, just on the border of pain.

  Dark shapes formed in her mind: streets and cellars and empty courtyards, like the half-images she got in her head when she listened to the radio. The wire could feel the form of the city that surrounded it, and the echoes vibrated in its barbs. Pen’s awareness raced up over rooftops and along railway tracks. She sensed the electromagnetic thrum of neon and steered towards it. A hulking square black building emerged out of the night – a warehouse or a supermarket, lights were blazing against it. A figure slouched towards those lights across an empty car park, a figure, a man, who looked familiar somehow. Curious, she moved the wire closer towards him—

  ‘Oh.’ Pen uttered a little shocked breath. Ice crept into her gut and up into her throat. The wire mewled around her, wanting to know what was wrong, why she’d stopped.

  ‘It can’t be,’ she whispered. ‘I mean, it can’t—’

  Tentatively, almost unwillingly, she reached back out to the supermarket car park and the barbed-wire tendrils that guarded its high brick wall from alighting pigeons. She unwound one tendril and sent it snaking silently after the figure. The closer it got, the more of a sense Pen got of him. He lurched like a man exhausted, and he was thin – far thinner than she’d ever seen him. His beard was a mat of darkness on his hollow cheeks, but Pen knew him. She could never not have known him, no matter how badly she wanted to forget him.

  Dr Julian Salt stumbled towards the building where he’d made his makeshift home, and behind him, Pen coiled the wire to strike.

  She held it there for an unbearable time. Her mind was full of his voice, the grate of his stubble on her cheek, his callused fingers sliding up under her clothes, stroking her spine. She felt a snarl build in the back of her throat.

  ‘It’ll be our secret,’ she spat, and the wire barbs around her mouth clenched like a second jaw. A metal voice sang in her mind.

  He stole, he stole

  End it now, take your toll.

  Fear and doubt, fear and doubt,

  End it now. Snuff him out.

  But still she hesitated. The wire remained curled, a scorpion’s sting, but her eagerness faltered. Was this her, she wondered, or was it the wire? Could it really be her, deciding to kill a man? A nervous thrill ran through her at the thought, at the freedom it hinted at. She could choose, and take all his choices away.

  She’d waited almost too long. Salt had pressed forward and now he was just a wavering charcoal shape on the edge of her perception. Steel tendrils lashed the air around her in frustration.

  Now! Before he gets away.

  Don’t lose this chance, don’t let him stray.

  ‘Stop pushing me!’ Pen snapped, and the wires recoiled from her face but then crowded back in, metal hissing over metal. Her eyes darted back and forth, trying to track them all, but they were as tangled and impossible to follow as her own thoughts.

  The Mistress made another suggestion in her sing-song voice, and this one stopped Pen cold.

  Perhaps you’re right, we should not kill,

  For that won’t let us take our fill.

  If a human spy is what we lack,

  Perhaps then we should take him back.

  Suddenly Paul Bradley was staring out at her from her memory with his earnest, short-sighted eyes, saying, ‘It has to be me. There’s no one else. Maybe I don’t have to come back.’

  Mr B, Beth’s dad, who was willing to walk eyes-open into the trap that had claimed half a city. Who she’d all but cornered into volunteering, and who now, maybe, didn’t have to.

  Pen felt her resistance wavering. Out across the night, her wire fingers stretched out towards Salt to claim him. For Paul’s sake. For Beth’s sake. Salt shivered as a barb brushed a hair on the back of his neck.

  The wire hummed inside Pen’s mind. ‘And maybe, he won’t have to come back.’

  No.

  It was instinctive rebellion. She recoiled, her consciousness rushing back down the wires to where she stood. She blinked, suddenly seeing once more the tumbled brick beneath her, the stars burning coldly above. A breeze cut into her sweat-soaked skin and she shivered. She flexed her hand. These were her fingers, these flesh and blood digits; the metal ones belonged to the Mistress.

  We’re not the same, she told herself desperately. We’re not the same.

  ‘I will decide.’ She was shaking, and she spoke aloud to the creature that encased her. ‘I will decide what I want from him – for me. Not for you, not even for B or her dad, for me.’

  He voice was full of resolve she didn’t feel. She didn’t know what to do. Her head was a mess of half-made decisions and shreds of purpose. Bloodlust was sharp in her veins: her own, or the wire’s or a mix of both. She didn’t know how to tell the difference any more.

  She steadied herself on the bricks and cast around, but she barely saw anything until she looked back up at the sky.

  Clouds were racing in, obscuring the stars, promising storms, and she thought, Espel.

  She hesitated, her anger still smoking inside her, but then she pictured Espel, pushing her blonde hair out of her eyes and sitting anxiously on the cold bathroom tiles, waiting for her.

  What if she leaves? What if she thinks I’m not coming?

  Now, she urged herself, echoing the Mistress’ words, before she gets away.

  Don’t lose this chance, don’t let her stray.

  The thought was like a door opening in her mind: a clear direction away from the poisonous turmoil surrounding Salt, and she fled towards it. The wire bridled as Pen’s urgency trickled through to her, but the link between them went both ways and she could feel it becoming the Mistress’ urgency too. A gust of wind picked up and she swayed for a moment. Then the spindly steel legs uncoiled and bore her onwards.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The bathroom was like a cave, cool and dank. The barbs on Pen’s feet scratched the lino as she walked in.

  ‘Espel? Es?’ She groped for a switch and the neon tubes on the ceiling hummed to life. Pen stared into the long, frameless sheet of mirror-glass screwed to the wall above the sinks. Her face blinked back at her from its nest of wire. Other than her reflection, the room was empty.

  For one sick moment she thought she was too late, but then she remembered that half-faces like Espel didn’t cast reflections – the steeplejill could be an inch from the glass on the other side and shouting her head off and Pen would neither see nor hear her.

  ‘Es?’ she called again. She could feel her pulse, beating at the base of her throat like a trapped bird. ‘If you’re there, slam a door or something – find a way to show me.’

  She stared at the row of cubicles in the reflection, but none of the doors moved.

  Disappointment filled her stomach like concrete. Her gaze roved over the reflection’s empty lino floor. Stupid, she thought, of course she’s not there – she never was. Even if that Mirrorstocrat was telling the truth, she’s leading the Faceless now, why would she make time for you?

  Her head weighed heavy. Her eyes ached. She turned reluctantly towards the door.

  Only then did she notice the patch of mirror – just to the right of the middle sink – that had steamed up.

  She stared at it. A rough oval of fog was growing on the glass, as though someone was breathing on it. Pen felt her own breath catch in the back of her throat as a clear space appeared in the middle of the condensation: the perfect print of a right hand.

  She ran to the mirror and pressed her own hand against it. The glass felt almost cold enough to blister, but Pen tried to imagine that a little of the warmth from Espel’s hand was bleeding through from t
he reflected world to hers.

  Questions bubbled up in her: how had Espel escaped the Masonry Man? Had she found a way to put her id back to sleep? What must she think of her, standing here all wrapped up in wire? But when she opened her mouth, Pen didn’t have the heart to speak. She didn’t want to hear her lonely voice echoing off the tiles. And what did the answers matter anyway? Es was here. Es was here. That was what counted.

  She let her forehead fall against the glass and watched tears she couldn’t feel run down her nose and trickle down the mirror.

  She didn’t know how long she stood like that, overcome with relief, only that it was blissful and she hated the sounds and images that, black and insistent as oil in water, drifted back to the surface of her mind: a vagrant shadow crossing a car park; a voice in her ear …

  Something must have shown on her face because the glass above her hand fogged again and a question mark cut itself into the condensation, the line of it as thick as a finger.

  Pen imagined Espel mouthing on the other side of the glass: What’s wrong, Countess?

  ‘I …’ Pen’s mouth was startlingly dry. ‘Nothing. I just …’ But she tailed off.

  The question mark remained, unimpressed by her denial.

  ‘I have a friend,’ she said at last. ‘He’s going to do something awful to himself, something that will almost certainly kill him, and it was me who gave him the means.’

  The invisible finger inscribed a capital Y next to the question mark.

  ‘Because it’s necessary – because somebody has to, and there wasn’t anyone else.’

  An unseen palm obliterated the writing. Fresh fog clouded the glass and ghostly letters inscribed and underlined themselves.

  Wasn’t?

  Pen laughed humourlessly. ‘Yeah, well: that’s the point.’ She looked at her reflection and the strands of barbed shadow that obscured her eyes. She tried to imagine she looked predatory, dangerous, but she didn’t really; she just looked like her.

  ‘Now there’s someone else – someone I want to hurt’ – the words came up out of her, vicious and true – ‘and I’m pretty sure that I have the power to make him do it instead.’

  For the first time, she let the idea fully crystallise in her mind. She imagined snatching Salt in his sleep with her steel tendrils, sending the barbs burrowing under his skin before she shoved him out of some doorway to wait for the claylings to come through the floor.

  She tested herself, like prodding a mouth ulcer with her tongue to see when the pain would come. She waited for the revulsion, the pity and the horror at what she was thinking of doing to him. None came. There was no satisfaction either, no eagerness, just a dreadful anger, rolling through her like a forest fire, and the vague sense that this might feed it, if only for a moment.

  She met her own brown eyes and imagined Espel’s blue ones looking back.

  ‘You’d tell me I shouldn’t, right?’ she said. ‘That it’s not my choice to make?’

  Pen felt a ripple of surprise as she read the message that came back to her.

  Sounds like you’re the only one who can make it.

  And underneath,

  Whatever you choose, Countess, I’m here.

  Without hesitating, Pen leaned forward and put her lips gently to the glass, then rested her forehead against it and closed her eyes. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered, then straightened and, reluctantly, she took her hand from the mirror.

  ‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘Knowing Beth, she’ll send out a search party if I’m not back by daybreak, and I have a detour to make. Could you … could you be back here in three days?’

  If I’m breathing, I’m here.

  The mist faded slowly from the mirror until all that was left inscribed was If.

  Pen nodded ruefully, lifted her chin and walked away.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  It probably shouldn’t have surprised Pen that Salt snored.

  He lay wedged at the end of the cereal aisle, curled into a heap of T-shirts and jumpers he must have salvaged from the clothing section. Even hanging right over him, Pen could barely see him. A pair of hollow-eyed women were tending a campfire in the stripped-bare crisps and snacks aisle next door, but the weak light it threw out didn’t reach Salt’s face. If it hadn’t been for his breath, rasping in and out of his throat like a struggling lawn mower, it would have been easy to pretend he wasn’t there at all, that his shape was just a trick of the light, another Salt-shadow, thrown across the floor by her mind.

  Another snore ripped out of him; he scratched himself and shifted onto his back and his face rolled into the light. Pen thought she saw his eyelids flicker and her heart almost stopped. She imagined his eyes snapping open, fixing on her; she imagined him smiling that old, coldly certain smile.

  She was shivering, she realised. Barbs scraped lightly over the backs of her hands as they trembled. She was breathing fast, but whether from fear or eagerness, she couldn’t tell. Everything about her body felt very distant to her; the wire was more real than her own arms or legs. A detached calm flooded her mind.

  In the next aisle, the two women chattered low over their crackling fire. One of them laughed softly.

  Pen bit down hard on her lip. From the edge of her field of vision, black barbed strands curled down towards Salt’s sleeping form, but when her tendrils reached him, they flinched away. She could feel their tips, hovering a fraction of an inch from his skin, but it was almost more than she could bear to make them touch him.

  Steeling herself, she threaded the wires under him, very gently, so as not to wake him. With the barbs carefully turned outwards she painstakingly laced them around and between his legs and behind his back. His arms were clutching some dream-treasure to his chest and she bound them there, letting her ligatures flex with the movement of his lungs. She wrapped the wire around his neck, and then, finally, with sudden violence, she lashed it around his mouth.

  He woke instantly, eyes bulging in his head, blinking desperately and searching for whoever was doing this to him. A scream was stifled deep in his throat. He looked over Pen without seeing her; the shadows in the ceiling were too deep for his eyes to penetrate. Pen watched him curiously. It was no effort at all to hold him. It was incredibly strange to feel his muscles straining so violently against her wires but unable to stir even a hair’s breadth.

  She marvelled at her own dispassion. She kept expecting her calm to crack, but it held and held, even as her heart beat faster and harder.

  She shortened the slack in the wire between them an inch at a time. Gradually, he rose up off the floor towards her.

  A line of shadow crossed his face as he was hoisted above the level of the shelves that lined the aisles. Suddenly she could see the sweat glimmering under his nose and latticing his forehead. She could see his teary eyes, pale and round; like tiny moons reflected in puddles.

  Feeling only mild curiosity, Pen twisted one of the strands which bound him and buried its barbs into the side of his neck.

  The pain echoed; she could feel it in her own skin, but dully. His panic raced through her veins, but left her untouched. Her calm held. She saw his sight wavering in front of her own and now she could see herself through his eyes – she came slowly into view, pressed flat to the ceiling like a giant insect, clinging onto the ceiling with hundreds of barbs.

  She drew him up until he was six inches below her face, then let him dangle parallel to her. She could feel the muscles in his jaw working frantically. She thought about unbinding his mouth, but she had no real interest in hearing him speak. She breathed in, and the harsh scent of his aftershave scraped her sinuses.

  The smell was like a white-hot knife in her head, shattering her calm around her. She blinked and shuddered. She was back in her body and she was panicking. All the anger and the fright and the maddening, maddening helplessness unravelled violently in her stomach.

  Oh – suddenly, she was frantic – Help! How can it feel like this, she thought furiously, still? After all she�
�d been through, after everything she’d seen and done, even with the wire wrapped around her like armour, even with him hanging helpless as a doll under her?

  How can he possibly still make me feel like this?

  And it did still feel exactly the way it had before, when she was standing alone with him in an empty classroom with no one to see, and no one to tell, with his stubble scraping along her cheek.

  Our secret ….

  The sheer unfairness in those two words still felt like it was ripping her open from the inside out. The wire whispered to her,

  It feels the same, it always will,

  Unless you have the strength to kill.

  She drew in a breath to scream at him, but she hesitated. The fire in the next aisle danced in the corner of her eye. The women there still hadn’t noticed her.

  I am so sick of secrets, she thought.

  ‘FUCK YOU!’

  It was the loudest she’d ever heard her own voice, and Salt flinched violently. The women in the next aisle over looked around, then up, startled, and then bolted, screaming.

  Pen didn’t even watch them go. ‘I’m sick of pretending,’ she snapped at the man dangling beneath her. ‘I’m sick of hiding, sick of sneaking and telling half-truths. I’m sick of my own deepest secrets. All because of you.’

  You, she thought, eyeing him furiously. You, who I had to bury inside myself, bundled up with everything that was most private, everything that was most mine, until all of me felt tainted by it. You, who made me feel like I had no choice, who made me feel like I was nothing. You, who left me nothing in myself to turn to.

  ‘It was you,’ she said again, and now she saw his eyes widen as he recognised her voice.

  And just like that, looking into his tear-streaked, terrified face, she finally knew what she wanted, and it wasn’t this – this scrambling over ceilings like a spider in the night.