by Tuson, Mark
‘Good luck.’ Eddie shook everyone firmly by the hand, and then Peter found himself stood on the pavement outside a place he had visited a few times before. It was crowded with people: far less likely to be noticed.
It was Manchester Piccadilly train station. It was a clear day, with a slight chill on the air. He looked around, noticing a group of stereotypical Japanese schoolgirls walking out from the station, and thought how amusing a cliché that was. There was a man a few years younger than him talking on a mobile phone. From how he was dressed and the slightly nervous manner in which he was acting, it looked like he had just been to a job interview. Peter found that amusing too; the man looked a little like he had a few years before, though Peter was slightly taller.
A young woman who looked twenty or so approached Peter, holding a cigarette, and asked for a light. Without thinking, Peter took out his wand from his satchel and tapped the end of the cigarette, and it was lit. He realized his mistake immediately, but before he had a chance to say or do anything to redeem himself, she had gone. Maybe she hadn’t noticed, or else there were some fancy lighters around now.
Lugging his suitcase behind him, he went into the station. The overhead display said his train was due to set off in ten minutes, so he took himself to the platform and waited. Nothing happened while he waited for the train, other than people getting on with their lives.
The train arrived. He boarded, taking a moment to find a seat, and then he was gone.
The journey was uneventful, though the train was rather more full than Peter was really comfortable with. The ride was a straight journey; Blackpool North being a terminus meant that all he needed to do was sit on the train until it stopped completely. That was the kind of journey he preferred, because he knew he’d be safe from missing his stop or getting off too early.
When he did land at Blackpool, it had become slightly warmer, though he still was grateful for having a jacket that could be buttoned up. Nobody noticed him – or at least nobody openly looked at him – walking in a plain black suit and shirt from the platform, through the large hall-like train station, and outside. Once outside, he stopped for a moment. Straight ahead he saw something different. A large structure had been built in his absence. Needless to say, he didn’t like it.
There were taxis queued up along the slightly curved pavement in front of the station entrance and adjacent café, and he considered getting into the one at the head of the queue for a moment, though what he really wanted was to visit the café and see if the coffee was as good as he remembered. So he went in and ordered one, and sat down at one of the tables near an open fridge containing cold drinks.
He had been away for five years, and now he was back, one thing was abundantly clear to him: life had gone on without him. There was, doubtless, a lot that would have changed since he had gone away, and he would have to take it as though, either, he wasn’t a local and hence wouldn’t know the difference; or else as though he was a local who had been away. The truth seemed more… well, honest, but he had nothing like a credible reason for having so suddenly left and then come back.
Another thing was pressing him, as well: should he try and make contact with his parents while he was in the area? He felt awful, like he must be truly evil to have simply left without saying anything, and now it had been this long since he had left, he didn’t know what he might say to them that wouldn’t just sound like a feeble excuse. He supposed he could explain exactly what had happened to them, but again, he didn’t for a moment think they would believe him.
All in good time, he supposed. Maybe the opportunity to make contact would present itself while he was here. He hoped it would, in a way that would make it easy to explain openly what had happened. He didn’t like lying or promulgating lies.
The coffee wasn’t fantastic. The closest thing to a normal black coffee that the café served was something called “Americano,” which, as he understood it, was watered-down espresso. To say it wasn’t fantastic would, in fact, have been putting it mildly: it was disgusting. It was like drinking dilute stale bitterness. He braved it, though, on the basic principle that he didn’t like waste.
He went outside, dropping his empty paper cup into the bin on the way, and tapped on the window of the taxi at the front of the queue. The driver helped him put his suitcase in the boot, and then Peter told him the address from the card Eddie had given him, and they were on their way.
Peter didn’t speak to the driver along the way. He gritted his teeth and bore it, however, on this occasion, since he wasn’t familiar with any of the public transport around here any more. That was something he was going to have to look into for when he started work, at the beginning of the following week.
He read through the card with the address and job details on it. The job was only something simple, though it was one of the avenues that he’d considered when he first finished his degree: working as a technician at a local college. He stared at the address of the college. It was the place where he had studied for his degree.
The taxi arrived at the address he had given. It was a little north of the train station, so the ride wasn’t any more than five minutes, and it turned out that the place he was to be living in was an upstairs flat in what looked like a slightly underprivileged area: the entire road was terraces, one long architectural construct on either side of a narrow street, with such things as empty condom wrappers, crisp-packets, and cigarette butts lining the gutters.
He wondered, as he left the taxi and collected his luggage, exactly how he was going to be performing the task which the Guild had assigned to him. There was a key taped to the back of the card he had been given, which he used to open the door into his new… domicile.
Inside, there was nothing particularly exciting to speak of. A couch and a table and a couple of dining chairs in the living room, a bedroom with a badly-made single bed crammed into one corner, a bathroom that looked like its cleaning had been merely cursory, and a kitchen which was much the same. All throughout, the decoration was decidedly sparse, with the walls all painted a pale, off creamy-come-blue colour, and fairly generic brown carpets which looked at least thirty years old.
He sighed. For now, he was home. He dumped his suitcase on the bed: unpacking wasn’t urgent.
In the living room, on the table, was a small cardboard box with his name inscribed on it in marker: P I RUTHERFORD. Inside it was a loose bundle of papers and leaflets describing things like bus routes, with what was relevant to him marked off in red ballpoint ink, some written instructions describing exactly what he needed to do, and a cheap mobile phone – apparently everyone else had been issued one – with everyone else’s numbers stored in it.
He sat down with the instructions. They were written in Eddie’s slightly blocky hand, in blue ink which had issued forth from a fountain pen.
As we will have discussed earlier today, it has been arranged that you will be living in this area for the foreseeable future, in a capacity of something like espionage, though it may become necessary for you to intervene with whatever is going on.
From what we’ve found out from other recon operations, there may be a significant Werosaian base nearby, either in Blackpool or at least within a few miles. You and the others who have been detailed to pose as pathetes are each involved through your assigned day-jobs with someone who may be connected to the Fraud or his army.
Peter laughed openly at reading the word referring to non-magical people: it wasn’t exactly derogatory, though it wasn’t something he had ever expected to read in serious correspondence from the Steward of the Guild of Magicians.
We aren’t sure what the purpose is of this base, if it exists, other than having our suspicions. One of these suspicions is that the Fraud might be attempting to plan a large-scale invasion of the Guild, and then the country and maybe the world. Things like this have been attempted before, and we’ve managed to stop them for the most part, but it never gets any easier.
What we need you to do is find out mo
re about the person you are working for, rather than the company. The companies are all legitimate, that’s a lot easier to find out about than the people. The actual person you’re going to soon be starting to work for is one of the people we think might be involved in whatever the Werosaians are cooking up.
For you, this is pretty straightforward, but it’ll be pretty boring most of the time. You’re to go to work, do your work well, and try to become friends with your boss.
So that was all he had to do, become friends with his boss. Shouldn’t be too hard, he didn’t think.
He spent the next couple of days, bringing him into the weekend, wandering about the town and getting his bearings. If he was honest, he just wanted to relish the simple fact of being where he had come from, just one more time. It was quite surreal, seeing these things and these places again. Probably nowhere near as surreal, though, as it was going to be, being back at the college, working. He wondered if there would be anyone there who might recognize him. Of course, it would be a bad thing if there was. Still, he couldn’t help being curious.
As the end of the week and then the weekend wore on, Peter found himself visiting some of the places he had known before becoming a magician. The market on Abingdon Street, where he stopped off to buy some normal clothes, was one place he had liked walking around in his former years – and also where there were some stalls that sold nice food. That said, there were places nearby that sold some disgustingly greasy food, of the kind he had eaten almost exclusively when he was a student. Pizza shops, Indian take-aways: all of the foodstuffs that made him grateful for not knowing any dieticians. In fact, harkening back directly to his days as a student, he spent Saturday evening buried deep in a sixteen-inch meat feast pizza. It was beautiful.
When Monday came, he awoke early and made his way, via bus, to the college – it wasn’t only the same college he had studied at, it was the same campus. For a moment he wondered if that had been arranged with some sort of purposeful irony. If it had, he would have an advantage, knowing the place and maybe still knowing a few members of staff.
His first week at work passed easily enough, and he wasn’t finding it all that difficult to become friends with some of the people there, his boss included. The one thing he was finding difficult, though he wasn’t about to broadcast it to any of his colleagues, was that he wasn’t as familiar with the technology that they were using as he perhaps should have been. In fact, for five years he hadn’t been exposed to any technology at all – not electronic technology, at any rate. It was strange, once again being suddenly subjected to glowing panels of glass and the noises that they made. He saw no purpose in them at all now.
He was stood in an open-air area, between buildings at the college. This whole situation was most decidedly surreal and strange to Peter, and even now, two months following the start of this operation, everything around him seemed to carry some alien sort of weight. Each leaf on each tree, each blade of grass. Even the sky looked super-saturated in colour: super-saturated in reality. This was where he had started this whole journey.
It was lunch time. He had had his food, which he noted was nowhere near as good as he had remembered, and now he was stood outside, as he always had when he had been a student, with a paper cup of muddy coffee. There were students walking around, either going to get their own lunch or just coming out to smoke – a habit Peter hadn’t even thought about since he himself had stopped, six years ago. He had a momentary urge to smoke, which extinguished itself after only a few seconds.
Carl, the person Peter was working for, wasn’t giving anything away to do with the Fraud. This wasn’t down to a lack of subtle probing on Peter’s part; all his probing had been subtle. It had also been deep and comprehensive. There was nothing to find.
Someone walked past, exhaling a healthy plume of smoke that drifted into and around Peter. It was disgusting and made him want to retch and not breathe. But then he was struck by another momentary desire for a cigarette. He sighed. It was no good.
He was distracted by a beep from his phone: another thing he had had spent a significant amount of time adjusting to again. He retrieved his phone from his shirt pocket and squinted in the outside light to read what was on the small, irritating display. It was a text message from Eric:
P. Nothing happening here, think it may be time to let it go. E.
That wasn’t something to argue with, Peter thought. He clumsily tapped a reply.
Nothing here either. Must be something though or why would we be here?
He replaced his phone in his pocket and drained the last filthy dregs of his coffee, striding over to the bin. As he dropped the empty cup in to join the rest of the trash his phone beeped again.
Even the Guild makes mistakes. E.
Of course it does. But while Peter agreed that maybe their operation might have been a bit of a waste of time so far, he still had a strong feeling it wasn’t going to have been a complete waste of time. He didn’t send another reply, however.
That evening, once he had arrived safely at home, he knew he wasn’t in any danger of being disturbed. The smallest chance remained that one of the other magicians who had been detailed to this operation in Blackpool might either phone him or text him, but in reality that chance was remote enough as to be considered, to all intents and purposes, negligible.
He had a plan for this evening, which would involve the casting of a long, rather complex spell of his own creation. Creating one’s own spells, Peter had learned early on, was simpler than any pathete or beginning magician would have considered. It was very much like creating pieces of computer code: once a person knew the basic elements of what could be used to make spells, that person would be able to create their own spells pretty much on the fly. Canned, pre-created spells were generally only used either where creating the spell afresh would have involved too much effort, or else in the opposite case where the spell was so simple that it would have been a waste of mental energy to invest that energy in reverse-engineering the effects into its component steps.
This particular spell was one Peter hoped would enable him to revisit what he had seen on the stone. He wanted to have a chance to transcribe the markings that had been made on it, with a view to finding out what they were and what they meant. There was a potential advantage in being where he was, as opposed to in his own home at the Guild: he could use the Internet here to research recent discoveries concerning early writing systems and things like that, which went some way toward making up for him not having access to the Guild’s library for all this time.
Everything was ready: all the preparations for the spell had been made, mostly by way of meditations which he had been engaging in during the evenings over the last two weeks. The spell needed an incredibly clear mind to cast; to drag information out of his mind would require a forensic level of clarity concerning the information he was attempting to access.
The light was off, and he sat down cross-legged on the floor, facing the door. On the floor in front of him was a pencil and a ream of blank copier paper. He held his two-stick in his hands; his wand wouldn’t have been able to perform a spell of this nature, or at least not to a satisfactory level of accuracy and fineness.
First, there were small spells which would have been akin to subroutines. Spells he had created to enable him to remain in a calm state of mind. Spells to tune his senses in to his memory instead of the organs they were usually attached to. Failsafe spells to return his senses to his organs after an hour from the start of the main spell, or else at the sound of his phone ringing or beeping – in case another member of this operation needed to call him. Spells to improve his short- and long-term memories, in case there was anything he didn’t manage to get down onto the paper while the spell was in effect: that way he would still be able to recall it without needing to repeat this experience.
It took half an hour to perform the preparatory spells, and now all that was left was the main spell, the crescendo to which he had been building up. He wov
e it slowly and carefully, his fingers brushing against his bare scalp as he circled his head with the weaving two-stick. Images from long ago flashed through his vision: his first Christmas, his first day of school, the day he was caught stealing chewing gum from a corner shop which hadn’t been there in twenty-odd years, his last day of primary school, his first kiss… everything rushed by, just the way people say it does when one is about to die, until he got to the moment he had been aiming for.
It was all there, in ultra-high-definition. The flickering light, the fish-eye lens effect of the tangible, viscous energy in the room. His eyes didn’t need to adjust, because he wasn’t seeing through them. He was reliving the memory.
Frantically, by touch alone, Peter scribbled down everything he could see as his memory-self walked slowly around the stone. He was grateful, now, that he had walked around it.
There was a zen-like state of mingled calmness and frenzy in Peter’s mind as he deposited graphite on paper, and when the spell snapped itself off, it left him sitting there, on the floor. It brought about a non-magical reliving of a memory he carried from many years before: when the BBC had used to turn off their television transmissions, leaving Test Card J and Teletext displaying alternately on the receivers. Bee-bee-bee-bee-BEEP. Those were the days.
He slowly stood up and turned the light back on. Everything was down on paper, slightly smudged by his rapidly-moving hand, but all there. He laughed aloud and punched the air. It had worked.
Just then, his phone beeped. Right on cue. It was Eric again.
P. Everyone wondering what best course of action is. E.
So was Peter, if he was honest. He was sure, though, that there must have been something here if, after six months, the people who had been out on the operations which had built up to this one had had their suspicions. He thought for a moment, bringing himself back into the right mental state, and then tapped his reply.
