Pariah

by Donald Hounam

  Marvo and her kid brother.

  ‘You’ve no business!’ And here’s the punch on the arm: hard and sharp.

  I’ve spotted something else. There’s a table beside the bed. On top of it, a black cloth, folded to make a bandage. And leaning against the wall, a white stick.

  I grab it. ‘Practising?’

  ‘What do you think?’ Marvo pulls the stick out of my hand.

  A tatty can see crystal-clear well past the age when everybody else is going Blurry. The downside? You hit about thirty and go crash-bang stone blind. Just like that. Overnight, in some cases.

  I put my hand behind my back. ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’

  ‘Don’t muck me about, Frank. I can’t see round corners. I’ve got ten years—’

  ‘More’n that—’

  ‘Not much more. I’ll be totally blind.’ She leans the stick back against the wall. ‘I figure maybe I should be ready for it.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s not like you won’t be able to afford a guide elemental,’ I say.

  ‘And spend the rest of my life relying on something?’ Marvo mutters. ‘Not much future in that. Let’s get on with it!’ She pushes me out along the landing and into a narrow room at the back of the house. She pulls the curtains open. I see a desk under the window and a bed at the end.

  ‘Nice view,’ I say. The sky is completely blocked off by a massive horse chestnut. Withered brown leaves have collected in soggy piles on the flat roof just below. ‘Was he depressed, your brother?’

  At some point the room has been painted an oppressive mustard yellow. Maybe Sean was trying to cover it over, because he pasted stuff up everywhere, from just above the chipped skirting boards almost to the ceiling – as far as a small boy could reach standing on a chair, I guess.

  It’s mostly faded pictures torn out of newspapers and magazines. Marvo is gazing at a crumpled, spidery drawing of a sort of black splodge perched over a couple of vaguely circular shapes that are probably supposed to be wheels. It reads, ‘Hapy birthday Mad’ in tottering letters before it runs out of paper.

  ‘I chucked it out,’ Marvo whispers. Her voice is shaking. ‘I mean, I didn’t see any point in keeping it. He found it in the bin and he was dead pissed off with me.’

  ‘Did you do drawings as a kid?’ I ask.

  ‘Course. My mum’s still got them somewhere.’ It takes her a couple of seconds to ask the question she’s supposed to ask: ‘You?’

  ‘Not that I remember.’

  ‘Yeah, Frank. You an’ your deprived childhood.’

  ‘It wasn’t much fun.’ Didn’t last long either. I was six – a year younger than the other novices – when they hauled me off to Saint Cyprian’s and started shoving demons in my face.

  All Marvo’s interested in is her brother. ‘Can we get on with this before my mum wakes up?’

  I can see one obvious thing about the pictures on the walls: they’re all of Ghosts. The Lord Mayor getting out of one, wearing a funny hat and a robe with bits of dead animals hung round it. Some self-important fool in military uniform staring out of the window of one.

  I look round at Preston.

  ‘Sorry, boss. Nothing yet.’

  I unfold a huge blueprint: the side view of a Ghost, labelled with magic symbols.

  ‘Daddy brought that home for him,’ says Marvo. ‘I told you he worked at the Ghost works in Cowley.’ She smiles sadly. ‘That’s what killed him – the fumes in the paint shop . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry. Don’t you think it’s funny, though? That you say Sean was killed by a Ghost and here’s all this stuff.’

  She blinks and sits down hard on the side of the bed. ‘Oh,’ she says, like it’s the first time this has occurred to her.

  I open the wardrobe. ‘Didn’t your mum throw anything out?’ There’s a school blazer and pairs of trousers on hangers. Neatly folded shirts, socks and underwear. It smells of lavender.

  ‘For a long time she wouldn’t admit he was dead,’ says Marvo softly.

  ‘She must’ve seen his body.’ I close the wardrobe. ‘Marvo?’

  She looks up at me and nods. She’s started crying again.

  I don’t know if this is fair, but anyway: ‘What about you?’ I ask. ‘Did you see him?’

  She nods.

  ‘So was he . . .?’

  ‘All smashed up?’ She smiles. ‘No.’ The tears are pouring down her face.

  I find that hard to believe. Doctor Death’s reconstruction of the accident . . . let’s just say that it looked like a mortician would have his work cut out. And looking around the Marvell household, I don’t see any sign that they could afford the magic involved.

  Marvo whispers, ‘He looked like a little angel.’

  I’ve met a few angels in my time. None of them looked even remotely like the plump kid grinning out of the school photo on the desk.

  I’m going through drawers. I find a camera – and boxes and boxes of photographs. I haul them out and stack them on top of the desk. I open the first . . .

  Marvo’s bro, he didn’t just like Ghosts – he was obsessed by them. That’s all there is in the boxes: picture after picture after picture. There’s Ghosts in city streets and Ghosts in open country. Ghosts on straight roads and Ghosts going round corners. Ghosts moving and Ghosts parked.

  ‘He was a Ghost-spotter,’ says Marvo.

  ‘What, like train-spotters?’ The things normal kids get up to! I was busy dodging demons when I was that age. ‘Wow!’

  The second box contains a small red notebook, with ‘Spotting’ scrawled on the cover in wobbly letters. When I open it, half a dozen photographs fall out onto the desk. One of them is an out-of-focus, underexposed shot of a toad-faced, middle-aged man in a black skullcap, sitting in the back seat of a Ghost.

  ‘Who’s he?’ Marvo asks.

  ‘Dunno.’

  He’s some sort of cleric, with a big sparkly crucifix strung round his neck. He stares up through the open window, startled and angry, from the sheet of paper he’s holding.

  ‘He isn’t wearing glasses.’ Marvo looks me dead in the eye. ‘Another one of the lucky ones?’

  We’ve been here before. Marvo’s noticed that there are some grown-ups who don’t seem to go Blurry. The official story is that a few happy bunnies just found life’s winning lottery ticket in their pockets; but Marvo’s twigged that luck’s got nothing to do with it. The fact is, the Society has a very special procedure – not just any procedure, the Procedure – to fix the Blur. I as much as admitted it to her once, so it’s just a matter of time before she pulls her gun on me and tells me to get to work.

  Meanwhile, here’s the interesting thing about the man reading the document: he isn’t just some ordinary priest from the parish church round the corner. Judging from the complicated black robes and the sheer size of that crucifix, and from the fact that he’s sitting in the back of a Ghost, this is some sort of bishop or cardinal or something. An important bunny.

  And the Procedure isn’t just something you can organise through your friendly local apothecary. You need a demon – a particular demon – and the Church says that’s messing with Satan and, all things taken into consideration, a Bad Thing.

  So if you’ve got a Big Cheese in the Church and he’s reading a document without glasses . . . there’s something funny going on. No wonder he looks pissed off at having his picture taken.

  ‘So what does it mean, Frank?’ Marvo’s grabbed the photo off me and she’s staring at it; and I’m racking my brains for something clever to say—

  When fate comes to my rescue. The door flies open and knocks me across the room onto the bed. Marvo loses her balance and the photographs scatter everywhere. When I look round, her mum is standing in the doorway staring at us, with her hair all over the place and her spectacles swinging on the string around her neck. She’s wearing a nightdress and clutching her usual kit for greeting visitors: a kitchen knife.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing.�
� Marvo starts picking up the pictures.

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Frank. You’ve met him—’

  ‘I think I’d remember.’

  ‘Don’t confuse her,’ I whisper to Marvo. The last time I saw Mrs Marvell I hypnotised her into forgetting me.

  ‘She’s my mum,’ Marvo hisses back. ‘And I’ll confuse her if I want to.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Crossed Keys

  WHY CONFUSE SOMEBODY in a cold bedroom when you can do it in a warm kitchen?

  There’s a fire flickering in the grate. They’ve washed away the magic circles I chalked on the floor last time I was here, to prevent Alastor from ripping all three of us apart and juggling with the pieces. The table that got broken has been fixed, but it rocks dangerously as I drop the notebook on top.

  ‘Burglars,’ says Mrs M. ‘They smashed everything.’ She’s grabbed an unbroken cup from the Welsh dresser and tipped out a small metal disc on a chain. A Saint Benedict amulet, with the man himself clutching a cross and an open book. And an inscription. Vade retro Satana: get thee behind me, Satan. As she drops it around her neck, it rattles against the lenses of her spectacles.

  She may not remember who I am, but somewhere in a corner of her brain there’s a little voice screaming that I’m trouble. She’s not very happy about Preston, either—

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Well?’ Marvo punches me in the shoulder.

  ‘Abyssinian truffle hound,’ I say. ‘And that bloody hurt!’

  ‘Abyssinian truffle hound?’

  ‘What am I supposed to say?’

  ‘I like it,’ Preston murmurs.

  Mrs M is muttering away to herself and kissing the medal. I open Sean’s notebook and spread the six photographs across the table.

  Marvo’s mum’s spectacles go on. ‘What’s all this?’

  ‘He’s helping me find out what happened to Sean,’ Marvo says.

  ‘Why?’

  Marvo looks a bit taken aback. ‘Because I want to know.’

  ‘What’s there to know?’ Mrs M grumbles.

  I can feel Marvo’s breath on my scalp as I shuffle through the photos.

  ‘I said, what’s there to know?’ Mrs M’s voice is sharp now. ‘He was run over.’

  ‘Marvo says—’ I try.

  ‘What’s wrong with her given name?’

  ‘It’s stupid, for a start,’ Marvo mutters.

  ‘Magdalena was your grandmother’s name.’

  ‘And she made everybody call her Rose.’

  I dive in again: ‘Marvo says it was a Ghost.’

  ‘What sort of nonsense is that?’ Mrs M mutters. ‘I don’t believe in—’

  ‘Ghost, as in luxury vehicle.’

  Mrs M thinks for a moment. ‘A cart, a van . . . I don’t remember the police saying anything about a Ghost. It was late at night – God knows what he was doing out—’

  ‘There were witnesses, Mum.’

  ‘No there weren’t.’

  ‘There was somebody . . .’

  ‘Who?’

  I look round and see that Marvo’s gone all weird on me again. Her eyes are drifting around the kitchen, like maybe somebody’s written a name on a scrap of paper and hidden it in one of the cups on the dresser and she just has to guess which one.

  ‘It was—’

  ‘What would you know?’ her mother says, startlingly loudly. ‘You were away.’

  ‘I know I was away.’

  Thank God we can agree on that, at least.

  I’m leafing through the notebook. Page after page of dates, locations . . .

  ‘When was Sean killed, exactly?’

  ‘August last year,’ says Marvo.

  ‘The fourth,’ says her mother.

  ‘So the last entry here is July 29th, on the Grandpont near the Red Bridge. “Crossed Keys”.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘It just says, “Crossed Keys”.’ I point. ‘He’s underlined it.’

  ‘There’s a bar called the Crossed Keys,’ says Mrs M.

  ‘Just the other side of Garsington.’

  I know it. My dad drank there for a bit, when he was barred from the Brazen Head for beating the crap out of me after I knocked over his glass. That was three months or so before I killed him.

  ‘Where’s that?’ Marvo is poring over a photograph of a Ghost passing through a gateway into a big, ugly building.

  I recognise it. ‘Saint Cyprian’s.’

  ‘But that’s miles!’ She looks up at her mother. ‘How’d he get out there?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell him what to do.’

  I’ve picked up the photo of the cleric sitting in the Ghost. ‘Did you show these to the jacks?’

  ‘Why?’ Marvo’s gone very pale. Her hands are shaking.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘The police were a waste of time, anyway,’ says Mrs M.

  ‘That’s not fair, Mum!’

  ‘What would you know? You’re just a secretary.’

  ‘I’m not a secretary. How many times—’

  ‘So why didn’t you do anything?’ There’s tears running down her cheeks. ‘May God forgive you.’

  Don’t look at me: I’ve no idea what’s going on. All I know is, Marvo’s pretty shaky, nobody’s enjoying themselves and I’m not helping.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

  Mrs M is staring at me. ‘And you don’t look like a policeman.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m a sorcerer.’

  Her hand flashes to the amulet around her neck. ‘I want you to go now,’ she whispers. ‘I don’t like sorcerers.’

  ‘I’m a good sorcerer. I wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

  But she shivers and steps back. ‘I told you to go.’

  I avoid catching Marvo’s eye as I nudge Preston out into the hall with my foot.

  At the bottom of the stairs, the door to the front room is open. Inside, nothing’s changed since the last time I was here. Same dish of sweets and jar of coloured pencils; same pair of thick glasses; same magnifying glass. Same framed photograph on the piano, with a black silk ribbon pasted across one corner. I pick it up: same plump kid, maybe eight or nine, grinning happily back at the camera.

  Sean Marvell.

  There’s a creak behind me. Marvo’s standing in the doorway.

  ‘Now what?’ I know what I want: to get back to my studio and catch up on some sleep.

  ‘I don’t want to upset Mummy.’

  ‘So let it go.’

  She shakes her head.

  Even I can see there’s something weird going on here. ‘Then get back to me when you’ve worked it out between you.’

  ‘Put that down!’ Mrs M has appeared behind Marvo, holding the amulet aloft.

  Preston and I look at each other, waiting to see who’s going to be the first to disappear in a puff of green smoke. When I realise that neither of us has, I stick Sean’s photograph back on the piano and step away.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with my memory – is that what you’ve been telling him? That you’ve got this silly old woman at home and she doesn’t even remember what happened to her own son?’

  Marvo tries, ‘That’s not what he said—’

  ‘It’s what he meant, though.’ Mrs M’s face crumples, like someone’s let the air out of a balloon. She stares down at the picture and wails, ‘He was my baby!’

  You’d laugh if it wasn’t all, I dunno . . . so sad, I suppose. I mean, my mum . . . Oh, forget it! Did I come here to make trouble? I don’t think so. But Marvo’s got her arms round her mother’s shoulders and she’s giving me this ‘what did you have to do that for?’ look as she turns her round and leads her away.

  I hear the kitchen door close, so I give Preston another nudge in the direction of the front door.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Our Beloved Boy

  IT’S RAINING. OF course it’s bloody raining! I’ve taken a shortcut across the fields and I’m thinking about my o
wn mum and dad . . .

  My old man never gave a flying fart about me. He used to watch me eat and I could see him thinking, That’s good beer money going down that skinny little freak’s gullet!

  My mum’s still alive, living on her own in the heap she bought out on Boar’s Lump, after she won the lottery. Not that I ever see her . . .

  ‘Frank!’

  For a split second I imagine that I’ve actually managed to conjure my dear mother up. But of course it’s Marvo, running after me.

  ‘What?’ I’ve had enough of the Marvell circus for one day.

  She jumps a ditch and slithers to a halt beside me. ‘I brought you this.’

  Sean’s notebook. A photograph slips out and goes face down in the mud. She shoves the notebook into my hand and stoops down.

  I open the notebook and find the rest of the photographs stuffed between two pages. ‘What am I supposed to do with all this?’

  ‘Keep it dry.’ She’s lifted the hem of her coat, wiping the wet paper on the lining. She stops and stares down at it.

  ‘Here.’ She shoves the picture at me. It’s still smeared with mud, but I can see a Ghost parked outside a swanky-looking building. ‘It’s the same,’ she says.

  ‘Same Ghost?’ All I’m really sure about is that I’m getting wet. I look down at the photo. The figure staring back at the camera is wearing a peaked cap and a black, belted jacket. I recognise an elemental: the driver of the Ghost. There’s some sort of metal badge on his peaked cap, but I can’t make it out.

  Marvo grabs the photo back. ‘You’ll spoil it.’ She’s pulled the notebook out of my other hand and stuffed the wet picture inside. She shoves the notebook under my jerkin. ‘Keep hold of it.’

  I pull my arm tight across it, so it doesn’t fall out.

  ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘I’m going to show you where Sean’s buried.’

  ‘Marvo, it’s pissing down!’ She’s already on the move and I have to call after her, ‘In case you hadn’t noticed.’