by Mike Carey
Nobody had ever come round to question me in connection with the mayhem at the MOU, or the physical and psychological dismantling of two security guards last seen in my company down in Surrey, but that just made me more uneasy. Sooner or later, somehow, the axe was going to fall.
It had been impossible even for Nicky to find out how things had turned out after I slammed the door on Jenna-Jane and her staff and walked away. The embargo on that information went both very high and very deep, which left me with the unnerving conviction that she must somehow have survived. If she’d died, then what was left of her operation would surely have been in more disarray.
I came dressed in overalls and carrying a plastic bucket. That was enough to stop anyone from challenging me as I slipped into the pediatric ward in the wake of a visiting family.
Once in Lisa Probert’s room, I locked the door and took out my whistle. Closing my eyes, I started to move my fingers on the stops, imagining the tune, low and fast; letting it play in my head, because it would take another three months for the bone graft to be stable enough to allow the steel pins to be removed from my jaw.
It was a tune I knew really well, easy enough to visualise in its entirety. I held one end of it in my mind, cast the other end like a hook out into the dark. It seemed like no time at all before a telltale prickle of pressure on the skin of my face and hands told me I was being watched.
The four little girls stood in a ragged horseshoe formation, staring at me impatiently. They never liked to have their city-wide games of hide-and-seek interrupted.
‘Abbie,’ I said, sounding like a bad ventriloquist because my mouth wouldn’t open wider than half an inch. ‘Good to see you. Good to see you all.’ I could never remember the names of Charles Stanger’s three victims, and I never wanted to go back to the records to refresh my memory. ‘I hate to bug you, but I was hoping you could do me a favour.’
I pointed to the still, barely breathing figure in the bed.
‘Find her,’ I said. ‘Find where her spirit is hiding. Bring her home, if you can, back to this body. And if you can’t . . . then maybe she can hang out with you, for a while, until she decides what she wants to do.’
‘All right, Mr Castor,’ Abbie whispered, her voice not stirring the air. ‘We’ll see what we can do.’
I left as quietly as I’d arrived, and nobody even knew I’d been there.
Come to think of it, that’s pretty much how I felt when I dropped in on Juliet and Sue later that same night. The two of them were so wrapped up in each other, they scarcely knew the world existed.
Somehow the power dynamic in the relationship had shifted, and it was a strange thing to see. Juliet had come back to her full strength, but to look at them together you’d think that it was Sue who had the whip hand and the ineluctable magnetism. Juliet was as attentive to her, as solicitous for her, as quietly, ubiquitously there for her, as a Victorian butler. She kept touching Sue’s hand, or her cheek, or her shoulder, as though she had to reassure herself constantly that she was still there.
It was because she’d been back to Hell, or at least that was my best guess. Because Asmodeus’ wards had dragged her back against her will into her own past, and she’d seen with sudden, terrible clarity what it had been like: what she’d gained and what she’d lost, and what she might be again if she let herself slip. She held onto Sue because Sue was the embodiment and the anchor of her new life. Sue was the mnemonic that let her remember who she was.
I excused myself as soon as I found a decent opening, using some mumbled bullshit about Nicky inviting me over for a screening. He hadn’t, but I dropped in on him anyway. As it turned out, he was busy pricing up stock for his new enterprise down the market and had no time to spare for socialising, but he had one quick question for me before he shut the door in my face.
‘One of the original prints of A Matter of Life and Death,’ he said, hefting the heavy silver canister, like a thick discus, so I could see it. ‘Shit-awful condition. Breaks. Burns. Splices. Not really playable, but still . . . an original print. How much?’
‘A tenner?’
‘I was thinking a couple of thousand.’
‘Hoe Street Market? You want to attract the casual impulse buyer, Nicky, not the cruising millionaires.’
‘It’s a piece of fucking history.’
‘Cut it into three-inch pieces. Sell them for a tenner each.’
He tried the idea on for size and decided that - besides increasing his profit margin substantially - it made a lot of sense. ‘I guess people only want as much history as they can easily carry around, right?’
‘That’s always been my personal preference.’
‘Yours feeling any lighter?’
‘Yeah,’ I admitted. ‘A little. But I’m benching three and a half decades, Nicky. A month here, a year there . . . it makes less difference than you’d think.’
He nodded philosophically. ‘Sure, sure. Well, I’m up to my neck here, and tomorrow is the grand opening. Stop by if you’re in the neighbourhood.’
I headed back out into the night, the heavy steel doors echoing behind me.
I could have taken in a late-night movie, or caught the last couple of rounds at a bar where the music and the beer were more or less bearable. I could even have gone back home and slept. But Pen and Rafi were renovating both the house and their relationship right then. I never knew which room they were going to turn up in, so the less time I spent at home, the less chance I had of accidentally walking in on some of the wilder stretches of the Kama Sutra.
I caught the last Tube out of Walthamstow Central back into town, and walking on autopilot I found my steps taking me through Somers Town again. To my amazement, I bumped into a familiar group of zombies sitting around a familiar fire, although they had it banked a little higher now that the nights had started to turn.
There was a Londis open nearby, with a small but not too shabby selection of booze behind the counter. I bought a couple of bottles this time, one of whisky and one of rum, and a packet of plastic cups. Then I went and sat with the dead men for a while, fulfilling a promise I’d all but forgotten I’d made.
They were surprisingly good company, once you stopped registering the smell. They’d been through everything the world had to throw at them and earned their philosophical detachment the hard way. It made for a sort of fatalistic good humour: life’s a bitch, and then you die, and then . . .
The levels in the bottles sank inch by inch, the sky started to lighten around the horizon, and I was about to call it a night when a newcomer joined the circle around the fire, crowding me a little close. She brought her own warmth with her, noticeable in this company because most of the regular crowd were at the ambient temperature.
I turned round to see who it was.
‘Private party?’ Trudie Pax asked.
‘Limited to the living, the dead and the pending file,’ I told her.
‘Good enough. Any of that booze left?’
I poured her a generous measure of Scotch. ‘How did you track me down?’ I asked.
She held up her hands, both of which were wound around with many loops of multicoloured string. ‘A little stiff,’ she said, ‘but I’m right back in the game. You wouldn’t believe what I can do with these babies now.’
‘I’d love to find out.’
It was the kind of mildly off-colour remark I throw out by reflex, and I expected an equally perfunctory put-down. Instead, Trudie slipped her hand into mine.
When the dawn filled half the sky, the zombies headed off to pastures new - an ownerless shed round the back of Camden Lock where they could lie low until the unruly sun stopped poking at them. Hand in hand with Trudie, I walked through Euston Square and watched the morning get its kit on.
‘I heard that Imelda Probert’s daughter made a full recovery,’ Trudie said, her tone guardedly neutral.
‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘I heard that, too.’
‘Any idea where she’ll go now?’
; ‘She got a job,’ I said. ‘At a market stall in Walthamstow. It’ll pay the rent.’ My tone was even more off-hand than Trudie’s, but that was because the subject was one that still hurt too much to dwell on for long. I’d given Lisa back her life: I didn’t believe for a moment that in doing that I’d settled the debt between us.
‘You ever wish you were part of this?’ Trudie asked, indicating with a toss of her head the scuttling commuters, the street cleaners, the shopkeepers taking down their shutters on the station concourse.
‘Of life, you mean?’ I asked, surprised by the question. ‘No. Not much. I’d rather be an ironic commentator. ’ But it was a flip answer, and from the tone of her voice she’d meant the question seriously. ‘I suppose when I think of it at all, I feel like Janis Joplin in the Chelsea Hotel song. “We may be ugly, but at least we’ve got the music.” I wouldn’t want to give up what I’ve got for what they’ve got.’
‘No,’ Trudie agreed. ‘Me neither.’
We walked along together in silence for a while.
‘So how religious are you feeling today, Ms Pax?’ I asked at last.
‘Very. Very devout. How about you, Mr Castor?’
‘Atheistic. Blasphemous. Practically satanic.’
She leaned her head on my shoulder.
‘Let’s form an inter-faith study group,’ she suggested.
about the author
Mike Carey is the acclaimed writer of Lucifer and Hellblazer (now filmed as Constantine). He has also written extended runs for Marvel’s fan-favourite titles X-Men and Ultimate Fantastic Four, the comic book adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, and a movie screenplay, Frost Flowers, soon to be produced by Hadaly/Bluestar Pictures. He lives in London with his wife, Linda, also a novelist and screenwriter, their three children and a cat named Tasha.
For more information about Mike Carey visit www.mikecarey.co.uk
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if you enjoyed
THE NAMING OF
THE BEASTS
look out for
A MADNESS OF
ANGELS
by
Kate Griffin
Prelude: The Trouble with Telephones
In which a summoning is almost (but not quite) perfect, some new friends are made, and some old enemies remembered.
Not how it should have been.
Too long, this awakening, floor warm beneath my fingers, itchy carpet, thick, a prickling across my skin, turning rapidly into the red-hot feeling of burrowing ants; too long without sensation, everything weak, like the legs of a baby. I said twitch, and my toes twitched, and the rest of my body shuddered at the effort. I said blink, and my eyes were two half-sucked toffees, uneven, sticky, heavy, pushing back against the passage of my eyelids like I was trying to lift weights before a marathon.
All this, I felt, would pass. As the static blue shock of my wakening, if that is the word, passed, little worms of it digging away into the floor or crawling along the ceiling back into the telephone lines, the hot blanket of their protection faded from my body. The cold intruded like a great hungry worm into every joint and inch of skin, my bones suddenly too long for my flesh, my muscles suddenly too tense in their relaxed form to tense ever again, every part starting to quiver as the full shock of sensation returned.
I lay on the floor naked as a shedding snake, and we contemplated our situation. runrunrunrunrunRUNRUNRUNRUN! hissed the panicked voice inside me, the one that saw the bed legs an inch from my nose as the feet of an ogre, heard the odd swish of traffic through the rain outside as the spitting of venom down a forked tongue, felt the thin neon light drifting through the familiar dirty window pane as hot as noonday glare through a hole in the ozone layer.
I tried moving my leg and found the action oddly giddying, as if this was the ultimate achievement for which my life so far had been spent in training, the fulfilment of all ambition. Or perhaps it was simply that we had pins and needles and, not entirely knowing how to deal with pain, we laughed through it, turning my head to stick my nose into the dust of the carpet to muffle my own inane giggling as I brought my knee up towards my chin, and tears dribbled around the edge of my mouth. We tasted them, curious, and found the saltiness pleasurable, like the first, tongue-clenching, moisture-eating bite of hot, crispy bacon. At that moment finding a plate of crispy bacon became my one guiding motivation in life, the thing that overwhelmed all others, and so, with a mighty heave and this light to guide me, I pulled myself up, crawling across the end of the bed and leaning against the chest of drawers while waiting for the world to decide which way down would be for the duration.
It wasn’t quite my room, this place I found myself in. The inaccuracies were gentle, superficial. It was still my paint on the wall, a pale, inoffensive yellow; it was still my window with its view out onto the little parade of shops on the other side of the road, unmistakable: the newsagent, the off-licence, the cobbler and all-round domestic supplier, the launderette, and, red lantern still burning cheerfully in the window, Mrs Lee Po’s famous Chinese takeaway. My window, my view; not my room. The bed was new, an ugly, polished thing trying to pretend to be part of a medieval bridal chamber for a princess in a pointy hat. The mattress, when I sat on it, was so hard I ached within a minute from being in contact with it; on the wall hung a huge, gold-framed mirror in which I could picture Marie Antoinette having her curls perfected; in the corner there were two wardrobes, not one. I waddled across to them, and leant against the nearest to recover my breath from the epic distance covered. Seeing by the light seeping under the door, and the neon glow from outside, I opened the first one and surveyed jackets of rough tweed, long dresses in silk, white and cream-coloured shirts distinctively tailored, pointed black leather shoes, high-heeled sandals composed almost entirely of straps and no real protective substance, and a handbag the size of a feather pillow, suspended with a heavy, thick gold chain. I opened the handbag and rifled through the contents. A purse, containing £50, which I took, a couple of credit cards, a library membership to the local Dulwich Portakabin, and a small but orderly handful of thick white business cards. I pulled one out and in the dull light read the name - ‘Laura Linbard, Business Associate, KSP’. I put it on the bed and opened the other wardrobe.
This one contained trousers, shirts, jackets and, to my surprise, a large pair of thick yellow fisherman’s oils and sailing boots. There was a small, important-looking box at the bottom of the wardrobe. I opened it and found a stethoscope, a small first-aid kit, a thermometer and several special and painful-looking metal tools whose nature I dared not speculate on. I pulled a white cotton shirt off its hanger and a pair of grey trousers. In a drawer I found underpants which didn’t quite fit comfortably, and a pair of thick black socks. Dressing, I felt cautiously around my left shoulder and ribcage, probing for damage, and finding that every bone was properly set, every inch of skin correctly healed, not even a scar, not a trace of dry blood.
The shirt cuff reached roughly to the point where my thumb joint aligned with the rest of my hand; the trousers dangled around the balls of my feet. The socks fitted perfectly, as always seems the way. The shoes were several sizes too small; that perplexed me. How is it possible for someone to have such long arms and legs, and yet wear shoes for feet that you’d think would have to have been bound? Feeling I might regret it later, I left the shoes.
I put the business card and the £50 in my trouser pockets and headed for the door. On the way out, we caught sight of our reflection in the big mirror and stopped, stared, fascinated. Was this now us? Dark brown hair heading for the disreputable side of uncared for - not long enough to be a bohemian statement, not short enough to be stylish. Pale face that freckled in the sun, slightly over-large nose for the compact features that surrounded it, head plonked as if by accident on top of a body made all the more sticklike by the ridiculous oversized clothes it wore. It was not the flesh we would have chosen, b
ut I had long since given up dreams of resembling anyone from the movies and, with the pragmatism of the perfectly average, come to realise that this was me and that was fine.
And this was me, looking back out of the mirror.
Not quite me.
I leant in, turning my head this way and that, running my fingers through my hair - greasy and unwashed - in search of blood, bumps, splits. Turning my face this way and that, searching for bruises and scars. An almost perfect wakening, but there was still something wrong with this picture.
I leant right in close until my breath condensed in a little grey puff on the glass, and stared deep into my own eyes. As a teenager it had bothered me how round my eyes had been, somehow always imagining that small eyes = great intelligence, until one day at school the thirteen-year-old Max Borton had pointed out that round dark eyes were a great way to get the girls. I blinked and the reflection in the mirror blinked back, the bright irises reflecting cat-like the orange glow of the washed-out street lamps. My eyes, which, when I had last had cause to look at them, had been brown. Now they were the pale, brilliant albino blue of the cloudless winter sky, and I was no longer the only creature that watched from behind their lens.
runrunrunrunrunrunRUNRUNRUNRUNRUNRUN RUNRUN!
I put my head against the cold glass of the mirror, fighting the sudden terror that threatened to knock us back to the floor. The trick was to keep breathing, to keep moving. Nothing else mattered. Run long and hard enough, and perhaps while you’re running you might actually come up with a plan. But nothing mattered if you were already dead.
My legs thought better than my brain, walked me out of the room. My fingers eased back the door and I blinked in the shocking light of the hundred-watt bulb in the corridor outside. The carpet here was thick and new, the banisters polished, but it was a painting on the wall, a print of a Picasso I’d picked up for a fiver - too many years ago - all colour and strange, scattered proportions - which stole our attention. It still hung exactly where I’d left it. I felt almost offended. We were fascinated: an explosion of visual wonder right there for the same price as a cheap Thai meal, in full glory. Was everything like this? I found it hard to remember. I licked my lips and tasted blood, dry and old. Thoughts and memories were still too tangled to make clear sense of them. All that mattered was moving, staying alive long enough to get a plan together, find some answers.
