Pariah

by Donald Hounam

  Ferdia turns the lights back on. ‘Where’s Marvell?’

  ‘She wasn’t feeling well.’

  That was just outside. I’d stuck the shark back in my robing room – I was beginning to get a bit bored with lugging it up and down staircases – and I was heading for the autopsy room when I realised I’d lost Marvo again.

  I found her sitting on a bench with her head in her hands. ‘I’m fine,’ she grunted. ‘I’ll be along in a minute.’

  ‘Is she all right?’ says Ferdia.

  ‘Dunno. I’ve got this cloaking spell on my studio—’

  Ferdia groans and puts his hands to the sides of his head. ‘I wish you hadn’t told me that.’

  A cloaking spell is on a specific location, but it can spill over onto anybody closely bound to that location.

  ‘Anyway,’ I say, ‘I think it’s hit her a bit hard. Like, she’s all over the place.’

  ‘Everyone knows she fancies you.’ He pulls a face. ‘God knows why!’

  It’s true: the more someone’s emotionally bound up with the focus of a cloaking spell, the more it knocks them about. But I’d rather not think about that right now. And anyway, I’m colder than ever and there’s something definitely not right. I lay my hand on the boy’s forehead. It’s like ice – so cold that it hurts.

  ‘Ferdia, what’s going on?’ I turn. My foot slides out from under me and I find myself sitting on the floor.

  ‘Stupid idiot!’ Ferdia’s glaring down at me.

  And you know what? He’s right. I am an idiot. It’s not just cold in the autopsy room – it’s demonically cold.

  There’s two ways a demon can come for you: in fire or in ice. And given that they spend most of their existence in a place where the stoves are turned up and the windows are shut tight, they usually prefer to come in ice . . .

  The autopsy room isn’t just freezing any more. It’s arctic. The floor has frozen over. Ice crystals are spreading across the surface of the door like a coat of white fur that gets thicker and thicker until, with a sound like glass shattering, the wood splits and collapses into a pile of splinters—

  And the birds come flocking in. Thousands of them – more than the room can logically contain. About the size of sparrows, but black and white with silver beaks. I’ve got my hands clasped over my face, but I can see them between my fingers, swirling around like a whirlwind and flying clean through Mr Memory, who’s wandering around the room with a confused smile on his face.

  Ferdia’s curled up in the corner with his arms wrapped around his head. I’m sliding about on the icy floor, trying to get to my feet; but the birds keep punching into me.

  I’m screaming, ‘Adonai, Tetragrammaton!’ – the usual names of God because I can’t think of anything else. Maybe it’s helping. But I don’t think the birds are that interested in me.

  Or in Mr Memory, who’s starting to fade away now.

  Right in front of my eyes, one of them opens its beak, wide and black as a mineshaft . . .

  And swallows another bird whole. It’s happening all over the room. As they gulp each other up, the birds get bigger, fewer – and louder. They’re the size of magpies now, squabbling and screaming and scrabbling and swallowing, until they form a thick, twitching mass of black and white feathers that covers the boy on the slab.

  And suddenly, with a deafening squawk, there’s just a single stupid-looking thing, like a giant grey chicken about five feet tall, sitting on the Crypt Boy’s chest, crowing triumphantly and thumping its wings on its own chest.

  It lets off a gigantic fart and dumps a huge dollop of grey shit across the boy’s face.

  The room smells . . . unutterable. Furniture and equipment are flying everywhere.

  I stagger to my feet, but a flailing wing sends me spinning backwards across the room. My shoes skid on the ice and I make a grab for the handle of one of the drawers below the bench. It comes flying out. My head cracks on the floor and I’m happy for a while, watching flickers of light explode everywhere.

  I can hear flapping and scuffling, and Ferdia moaning. The flashing lights clear and, like the curtains opening at the Vaudeville, the room’s back again.

  I can see clean through Mr Memory to the demon, perched on the slab. The Crypt Boy’s head has fallen back over the edge, exposing his throat. The beak is poised to strike—

  No time to do magic. I’m rolling around in a sea of scalpels, probes and clamps—

  And a small bottle. The glass has shattered, but there are still a few drops of clear liquid at the bottom.

  ‘Te exorcizo,’ I yell. ‘Spiritus immunde—’

  OK, not very original, but at least it’s Latin. I chuck the contents of the bottle across the room.

  ‘In nomine et virtute Domini nostri—’

  Even in flight, I see the exorcised water freeze into tiny pellets of ice that hit the demon—

  And explode.

  The chicken throws back its head and screams. Feathers fall like snow, only to burn up as they hit the floor. Mangy patches of bare flesh writhe through the colours of the rainbow—

  And it transforms. The head is still a chicken – and an ugly one at that, with a white comb and beady, bright-blue eyes. It has the body of an overweight man wearing a baggy pair of blue and white striped pyjamas, with grey feathers protruding at the neck, wrists and ankles. One leg is withered, and a good six inches shorter than the other.

  It seems to have just one arm, ending in a pincer like a lobster’s. Unwieldy, but enough to hoist the boy over one shoulder. It squawks deafeningly again, and shambles out of the room with the kid’s arms flapping behind like a pair of trousers on a washing line.

  I’m trying to get to my feet. But the ice is thicker than ever and the whole room’s rocking . . .

  I’m up. I’m down again. Now my arse hurts too. I bang off Ferdia and out through the door. I can hear the dragging, irregular sound of the demon’s feet and a sort of wheezing, clucking noise. I go after it, along the corridor. The door of the children’s ice room dissolves ahead of the demon—

  I’m close behind. ‘Look out!’ I yell.

  The diener is wheeling a trolley across the space. He looks round and goes pop-eyed. He throws himself out of the way.

  But here’s Marvo! Stumbling in through the door at the other end, looking like she’s about to fall over . . .

  Despite its malformed leg, the demon is picking up speed, lumbering straight at her. I can’t see very clearly because the kid is bouncing up and down, and snowflakes are swirling around the room; but a split second before the demon crashes into her, it looks to me like Marvo just tips over – bang! Flat on her back.

  The demon tries to jump over her, but with the boy over one shoulder, it hasn’t a hope. One foot catches in Marvo’s coat and it crash-lands the other side of her.

  The entire building judders. The Crypt Boy’s on his own now, tumbling through the air, arms and legs flailing like a rag doll. He lands bang on top of the trolley, which starts to roll . . .

  The demon’s picking itself up off the floor. The trolley hits the wall and the Crypt Boy rolls off onto the floor. The diener has scuttled behind the desk and is gibbering into his scryer, with his wide-eyed child assistant beside him.

  The demon is heading for the Crypt Boy.

  ‘Halt!’ It’s Caxton to the rescue, standing behind Marvo, pulling a pistol out of her coat pocket. ‘Or I’ll shoot.’

  We did all this at Saint Cyprian’s. You can’t destroy a demon by shooting at it. Not even with a silver bullet. Not even with a silver bullet made from melted-down crucifixes. Not even with a silver bullet made from melted-down crucifixes that have been personally blessed by the pope.

  Have we got that straight?

  Clearly, however, this particular demon didn’t attend the same lectures I did. It squeals like a pig and starts blowing clouds of black smoke from every available orifice. A violent explosion knocks everybody flat on their backs.

  By the time we’ve all picked
ourselves up, the smoke has cleared and the demon has vanished without a trace.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Feather

  ‘WHAT THE HELL was that thing?’

  Caxton glares around the ice room. We all stand there, still shaking and staring back at her.

  ‘Sampson?’

  I know exactly what it was. It was the demon that I caught Kazia summoning. The one I thought I’d prevented from manifesting.

  ‘No idea,’ I say.

  It somehow survived the collapse of the invocation, hopelessly malformed but dead set on fulfilling Kazia’s intention. Until it finally ran out of steam.

  ‘Someone must have sent it,’ says Ferdia. ‘Demons don’t just show up of their own accord.’

  Caxton nods. ‘So whoever it was . . .’

  ‘It mattered a lot to them.’

  I’m struggling to make sense of all this. If Kazia sent the demon to nail the Crypt Boy, she must have known he wasn’t dead. So it must have been her who did the original body magic on him.

  Caxton’s bored of waiting for more suggestions, and she’s gone into her thinking pose. It’s strikingly like her world-famous detecting pose – one foot resting on a step, elbow on knee, forefinger to her mouth – but there’s more lip-pursing involved. ‘So who is he, the boy?’ She looks around and whispers: ‘Royalty?’

  ‘None left,’ Ferdia whispers back. The royal family were all rounded up and executed in 1918. But there have always been rumours of survivors . . .

  We stand around, getting older, until Caxton announces that since the Crypt Boy isn’t quite as dead as everybody thought he was, and since he’s clearly in danger, she’s moving him somewhere safe: one of Ferdia’s amphitheatres.

  To be fair, it’s a good choice. The three amphitheatres in the mortuary were set up for forensic rituals like establishing time of death, so there’s a lot of . . . OK, not exactly magic, but supports for magic, built into the fabric. If she wants to create some sort of line of protection around the boy, it’s as good a place as any.

  The dieners unfold the kid, lay him on a trolley and wheel him out to the lift. Then the rest of us troop up the stairs, into a circular space about twenty yards across, where the dieners have parked the kid bang in the centre of two concentric copper rings, about twelve feet in diameter, set into the cedarwood floor. We start arguing about what to do next.

  Caxton wants Ferdia to get kitted up, grab a stick of chalk and mark up the circles so the kid’s safe if there’s another attack. Ferdia says he’s up for it, but I can see him hesitating.

  ‘No offence,’ I say. ‘But maybe I should do it.’

  Caxton looks down her nose at me. ‘Are you still here?’

  ‘Nobody told me to go away.’

  ‘They are now. Get lost, Sampson.’ She turns to Ferdia. ‘Is there a problem?’

  Ferdia glances at me, and it’s like I can see the little wheels turning: we both know he’s not absolutely sure he can do it any more.

  Peak Gift is around eighteen. It’s not like you wake up on your nineteenth birthday and wave your wand and nothing happens; but it’s getting more and more like hard work, and by the time you’re Ferdia’s age – like I said, twenty-one – every time you step into a magic circle you have to sweat your socks off. By twenty-five or so, all you’re good for is elemental work, like Charlie.

  I asked him about it once, and Charlie said it was like you’re doing everything right, but it just isn’t happening and you’re afraid because you know you can’t trust yourself any more.

  He said he thought about doing himself in.

  Ferdia hasn’t quite got there yet. He looks Caxton right in the eye. ‘No problem.’

  But I can tell he’s not happy. And he’s standing far enough away from Caxton that she ought to be able to read his face. Maybe she doesn’t realise what’s bothering him. Maybe she just doesn’t care.

  ‘So get on with it.’ She looks around the amphitheatre. Mr Memory is sitting in the gallery, looking only slightly transparent.

  ‘Where the hell did Marvell get to?’ Caxton asks.

  It’s a fair question. I thought Marvo followed us from the ice room, but there’s no sign of her now. This ‘now you see me, now you don’t’ lark is starting to annoy me.

  I’m standing beside the trolley, leaning over the Crypt Boy. He just lies there, eyes wide open, staring blankly up at the patterns of diamonds set into the domed ceiling in the shape of the major constellations.

  ‘Now what are you up to, Sampson?’

  ‘Just wondering what he’s thinking.’

  Actually, I’m more interested in the small, dark object clenched in the boy’s left fist . . . and how I can get hold of it without Caxton noticing.

  ‘Maybe you’d like to do something useful.’

  ‘Like get lost?’ I keep my body between her and Crypt Boy as I sneak the object out of his hand.

  She sighs. ‘Like find Marvell for me.’

  The amphitheatre doors drift shut behind me. I look along the corridor: nobody watching. I examine the object.

  A single grey feather.

  I duck into Ferdia’s robing room and steal a small black silk square. I fold it carefully around the feather and stick it in my pocket with Kazia’s pentacle.

  I find Marvo, still down in the children’s ice room. She’s got one of the compartment doors open and she’s pulled out the tray so she can examine the body lying on it: a boy with half his head blown away by a gunshot. She’s got this strange look on her face, like she’s not really seeing him . . .

  ‘Marvo?’

  She ignores me. Just slides the tray back and closes the door.

  I can’t see the uniformed diener anywhere, but the kid who helps him is standing beside me. He pulls at my jerkin. ‘What’s up with her?’

  Marvo’s got another compartment open. The tray glides out. The body is small. A boy, I think, aged maybe four or five. Hard to tell, though, because the features have been deformed beyond recognition by immersion in water.

  ‘Marvo.’

  She jumps and turns.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  Her eyes fill with tears. ‘I thought maybe Sean would be here . . .’

  CHAPTER TEN

  Baby Brother

  THE LAST I heard, Marvo’s baby brother was dead and buried.

  ‘He was run over by a Ghost,’ she says.

  ‘Yeah, I know. Last year. You told me.’

  It’s mid-morning and we’re sitting on a stone bench in the herb garden in front of the mortuary. I get the smell of horse dung from the street outside the gate. Marvo’s hauled a small tin out of her pocket and she’s rolling a cigarette.

  ‘I didn’t know you smoked . . .’

  ‘I do when I’m stressed. Just for a few days, then I give up again.’

  ‘What’ve you got to be stressed about?’

  ‘Nark off, Frank.’ She pulls a few loose strands of tobacco away from the end of the cigarette. ‘It didn’t even stop,’ she says. ‘The Ghost.’

  I’ve heard all this before. It didn’t make sense then. It doesn’t make sense now.

  When the college wars kicked off and the university started lobbing fire and brimstone back and forth, the big money got the hell out of town. And Ghosts are what they raced off in. They’re big. They’re fast. They’re shiny. And they don’t need horses to pull them.

  They’re propelled by magic, with an elemental sitting in the front compartment, ready to open the passenger doors and haul the jewellery and silverware out of the luggage compartment at the back.

  They cost a fortune, OK? If you can afford one, you’re incredibly rich or incredibly important.

  Or both, of course.

  ‘Shits!’ says Marvo, striking a match.

  ‘Yeah, except it didn’t happen.’ I’ve found a rusty nail and I’m scratching a pentagram on a paving stone. ‘Look, Marvo, I told you: the elemental driving the Ghost – there’s no way it could run over anybody.’

>   I wait while she blows smoke out.

  ‘Not even a member of the Marvell family.’

  She punches me hard in the shoulder.

  ‘I’m sorry, but it just can’t happen.’

  The bloke who invented the Ghost, William Morris . . . he did tests. He got the Society to dig out a couple of dozen cows and sheep, plus a couple of poor idiots who’d been condemned to the stake for unlicensed sorcery, and chain them all up in the middle of the road. Then he told the elemental controlling a Ghost to drive right through them. Every time, no matter how powerful the directive, the elemental would happily plough through the animals, but would always brake or swerve round the humans.

  After a week, there were a lot of squashed cows and sheep and two gibbering idiots. So they cooked and ate the animals. And just cooked the two idiots.

  Marvo’s doing her sulky face. ‘You don’t want to help me.’

  ‘No, I said I can’t help you.’

  ‘There were witnesses,’ she mutters through a cloud of smoke. ‘They said it drove right over him.’

  To cover the smell of tobacco, I get up and pull a sprig from a lavender bush. I rub the leaves between my palms and bury my face in my hands. I inhale one part of the smell of magic that I got when I stepped into the summoning room, two hours ago. I see Kazia’s face . . .

  ‘It’s just like you, Frank: you promise stuff, then you don’t do it. You said—’

  ‘Who investigated?’

  She just looks at me.

  ‘The jacks who handled the case – have you talked to them?’

  ‘Must’ve done.’

  ‘Don’t you remember?’

  If she does, there’s no sign of it. She grinds the end of the cigarette into the bench beside her. Finally she says, in this dead voice: ‘He was run down by a Ghost—’

  ‘These witnesses . . .’

  ‘They said it drove right over him.’ She’s still smearing shreds of tobacco across the stone.

  ‘Who were they?’

  Blank look. It’s like there’s two people in there: one who remembers she used to have a brother called Sean who got run over, and another who knows nothing about it.

  There’s something not quite right here. I mean, obviously it’s the cloaking spell on my studio, but the symptoms . . . they should be more specific – mostly physical, a bit like flu – and specifically tied to me and my studio.