Nor did she know why she was drawn so repeatedly to that spot near Albert Bridge. The pull was inexorable, and whenever she stood there she always felt as though some revelation was about to break through the cotton wool of her perception, but it never did. Occasionally she toyed with the idea that she might have a brain tumour, though she felt like a New Age Holden Caulfield. Or perhaps it was some other hideous disease that was sending out psychological tremors before the full quake hit. But she was haunted by the possibility that the answer was depressingly mundane: this was simply the way life was. Feeling dissatisfied, sad, out-of-sorts, unfulfilled was the norm, and the only way to deal with it was to find something to numb the pain.
She wrenched herself away from the sunset and set off across the bridge, still feeling as though someone was walking just a few feet behind. She called in at the first takeaway she found and ate a dismal burger without any enthusiasm before making her way to a bland pub in the maze of backstreets that ran away from the river.
She passed five birds sitting on a wall watching her with beady eyes, unafraid. Only one took flight, hovering over her for several yards before disappearing into the twilight. Five red cars crawled past, one after the other. The fifth pulled in and parked, but no one got out. On the next corner, five children hopped in and out of the gutter in play. One of them smiled at her, covering his left eye until she passed.
Ruth walked on, oblivious.
She sat in the pub for half an hour waiting for her friend to arrive, nursing a vodka and Coke. Though the men in the bar attempted to chat up any single woman who entered, they all left her alone. Ruth knew they could sense something off-putting about her beyond her beaten-down appearance.
Vicky finally put in an appearance at ten-past nine, forty-five minutes later than she had promised. She made no apology. Vicky was a co-worker at the care home, a hard-faced single mother. She had little in common with Ruth, but the two of them had no other friends of note, and sometimes their shifts aligned so they could spend a night together getting miserably drunk.
After an hour and a half and several vodkas, Ruth said, ‘Do you ever get a feeling you’re living a life that isn’t really yours?’
Vicky laughed bitterly. ‘All the time, darlin’. My real life is at the side of a pool in Florida. I’m just doing this for a joke.’
‘No, I mean it. I just don’t feel right.’ Ruth looked around at the other drinkers. ‘I wonder how many other people feel the same way. Putting up with what they’ve got instead of doing what they should be doing. Except they don’t know what they should be doing.’
Vicky snorted derisively. ‘You’re always going on like this. Can’t you just shut up and be happy with what you’ve got? Lots of people would kill for your job.’
Ruth drained her glass and stood up. I’m going to the toilet.’
‘No need to tell the world.’
In the cubicle, Ruth put the toilet lid down and sat on it before letting her head drop into her hands. Vicky was right – she should just accept the way things were. At least that way she might find some kind of peace. When she looked up, her attention was caught by a piece of graffiti on the back of the door, partially obscured by messages of cheap sex and anatomically incorrect drawings: a pentacle.
Ruth was transfixed by it for a long moment as her heart beat faster and faster until she thought it would burst. Leaning forward, she reached out. When her fingers were barely an inch from the scrawled design a blue spark leaped from the tips in a flash and a smell of ozone filled the cubicle. A scorch mark obscured one of the arms of the pentacle.
She returned to the bar in a daze. On the bar stood five glasses, four empty, the fifth being filled with Coke by the barman. Ruth saw it and froze. Blue sparks fizzed across her mind.
One of five, she thought.
Feeling excited and not knowing why, she hurried back to the table to find a man sitting in her place talking animatedly to Vicky. He looked about Ruth’s age, his hair black, his looks dark and handsome. He wore an expensive suit and had an air of success about him, but not ostentatiously so.
‘Oi, look who it is!’ Vicky waved, clearly taken with the new arrival.
‘She won’t know me,’ the man said with a self-deprecating grin. I just moved into the flat next to yours. Saw you leaving this morning. It’s a real coincidence I bumped into you here.’ He shrugged, looked around. ‘I wouldn’t normally come into a dive like this, but … I’m glad I did.’
Vicky winked at Ruth over his shoulder. Despite herself, Ruth’s cheeks flushed.
‘I know you’re Ruth. My name’s Rourke,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘Nobody bothers with my first name. Too embarrassing, to be honest.’
Ruth took his hand. ‘Pleased to meet you.’ After so long feeling lonely, the charming Mr Rourke gave her a tingle of excitement.
Is it all right if I have a drink with you?’ Rourke asked.
His dark eyes were deep and soothing and made Ruth feel as if she wasn’t alone any more.
‘Don’t mind me,’ Vicky said sniffily.
‘Yeah, have a drink,’ Ruth said. Make us both laugh. We bloody well need it.’
Rourke smiled, and suddenly the pentacle, the blue spark and the five glasses on the bar were forgotten.
9
In complete confusion, Church found himself retreating through the white nothing-world, despite his consuming desire to keep watching. He didn’t want to lose Ruth so soon. The disorientation left him reeling, for the world he had been viewing had felt as real to him as the one in which his body stood. As he tried to make sense of the whirl of emotions and sensations, a wave of joy crashed against him. Seeing Ruth again reignited everything he felt for her so powerfully it was almost painful. If he allowed himself, he could entertain the fantasy that it would have taken no effort to touch her skin, or smell her hair, or even to talk to her.
Yet if he were truthful, he also felt a twinge of jealousy. He saw the way she had looked at Rourke. Had she already forgotten him?
He snapped back into the sunlit chamber, staggering so that Jerzy had to support him.
‘You saw her?’ Jerzy asked.
Church nodded as he reacclimatised himself. He had felt as if he was in a dream, but now he was back other details began to surface. ‘She was a Sister of Dragons,’ he said with a certainty that came from somewhere deeper than the information he had observed, but she didn’t seem to know it. I don’t get it.’
‘But she was safe?’
‘She looked as if she was, but there was something not quite right about the whole scenario … I don’t know.’ He silently cursed his broken memory. ‘At least I can keep coming here to check on her. Even if I can’t do anything about it.’
Church made to walk away from the Wish-Post, but it pulled at the back of his head. He had looked into it, and it into him, and it was not yet prepared to let him go. He decided he would stay there for as long as it took, drinking in every detail, every scene it was offering him.
As he swam in the white, another scene coalesced: a run-down fast-food joint, and leaning over the grill a young woman with rough-cut white-blonde hair, eyes heavy with mascara. Her skin had a vaguely unhealthy tinge, which may have been a result of the strip lights that turned the place into an oasis of artificiality. The woman had a hard face made even harder by the contempt she exuded as she pushed a thin, grey burger around the hotplate.
Who are you? Church thought.
10
‘Why do people eat this shit?’ Laura DuSantiago could barely stop herself from gagging. She’d decided she was very definitely a vegetarian, but the work was regular and, really, what else could she do?
‘I told you, you daft cow – not where the customers can hear.’ The owner was overweight, short and balding, his arms covered with tattoos.
‘Don’t worry. They’re all too thick to understand plain English.’ Laura scooped up the burger and flicked it into the warming cabinet. ‘They shuffle up here every day, follo
wing the same routine that’s been programmed into them, and stare at me with their fat, stupid faces. And they knowingly risk growing extra breasts thanks to all the hormones stuffed into the shit you serve. You think they have the sense to listen to me?’
‘You’re well on the way to the sack.’
‘No, I’m not, because you couldn’t get anyone else to do this crappy job on the wage you pay, and you know it.’
The owner looked ready to punch Laura, but she pushed past him and stripped off her plastic apron. ‘Ten o’clock and all’s hell. That’s my shift over.’
‘This is your first warning!’ the owner bellowed after her as she marched out of the café and into the dingy side street not far from Northampton’s main shopping area.
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ she mumbled bitterly, battling down the self-loathing that threatened to break through every minute of every day.
The sodium glare of the street lamps made her feel worse. She wanted to be in a cool, dark wood looking up through the branches to glimpse a clear night sky. She wanted the scents of cooling vegetation, but all she could smell was the rancid odour of fat coming off her clothes.
She wondered where it had all gone wrong. She was sure she must have had dreams some time. Surely she hadn’t always planned on a career flipping burgers and a wage that was just enough to cover her rented bedsit in the shittiest part of town, but not enough to buy her time to look for better employment. Not that she had the qualifications to support it. She tried to recall the moment when everything had soured, but her past life was a blur of days in front of the hot griddle and it made her queasy just to consider it.
She didn’t have enough cash to get drunk or buy some drugs to expunge her thoughts. She was almost desperate enough to consider giving her dealer a blow job for some E.
In the window of the house where the old hippie woman lived, five candles burned. It wasn’t a particularly intriguing image, but it triggered odd stirrings inside her that she recognised with surprise as incipient excitement. As she watched, Hippie Helen appeared to extinguish one of the candles. Laura literally jumped with a surge of electricity that made her feel like sex. She got a strange itch in the tattoo on the back of her right hand – interlocking leaves in a circle – the one she didn’t remember getting.
‘Hi. How are you doing?’
She turned to see a smiling, handsome face.
‘Sorry, didn’t mean to frighten you,’ the man said. ‘The name’s Rourke.’
11
Shavi should have gone home a long time ago, but these days it felt as if the offices of Gibson and Layton never closed. In the window he saw the reflection of a handsome Asian face framed by long black hair, a sad expression, a cheap suit; it was him, but not him, somehow. There were too many invoices to go through, too many columns to balance, the whole of the world broken down into numbers, profit and loss. Whenever he got to the end of one client file, another would appear as if by magic. It felt a little bit like purgatory.
Yet he had now managed to reach a state where he could immerse himself in the figures so fully that his tap-tap-tap on the calculator became a mechanical act, almost meditative. It allowed his mind to free itself and fly, considering what it might be like to live another life, one with meaning, where worthy deeds were done despite the danger.
And in that state he knew he was not a man who considered cash important. He had an extensive knowledge of diverse spiritual paths, though he had no idea how he had amassed it; his parents were strict in their observance and would not have condoned any study of other religions. It was one of many mysteries clustering around his life.
Everybody in the company recognised he was different. They never involved him in the office gossip or invited him for after-work drinks. The bullies amongst the staff saw his benign, thoughtful nature and mistook it for weakness, attacking him with a thousand barbs of pettiness every day. His resilience drove him through it easily, but it didn’t prevent the creeping depression. This was not the way life was supposed to be.
Just after ten and he was the last one in the office. He’d had enough. He pushed back his chair, stripped off his shoes and socks and put on his iPod, winding down before the journey home. The music drifted into his head, some Celtic house, some Balinese temple music, followed by Indian and African beats.
For a while he drifted with his eyes shut. When he opened them, the shock of what he saw brought a convulsion that tore the headphones from his ears. On the desk was a silver picture frame containing a snap of the Avebury stone circle, which he had recently visited. It was an unconventional choice for a desk at that company and had attracted many snide comments from his workmates, but in his more harried moments it calmed him to look at it.
Now, though, the Avebury circle was obscured by a head that appeared to be forcing its way out of the frame, writhing with the pangs of birth. Its features were barely formed, like a clay model with the barest indentations marking eyes, nose and mouth. A white, foaming, gaseous substance leaked out from where the head protruded, and quickly evaporated.
‘You called me,’ it said in a whining, faintly metallic voice. ‘Brother of Dragons, you called!’
Shavi was struck dumb for a moment. The head mewled as if in pain. Eventually Shavi managed, What are you?’
‘I am from the Invisible World. You called.’
‘I … I did not,’ Shavi said, but then realised he had been daydreaming, a cry for guidance to rescue him from the misery of his job.
‘This world is sour.’ The head spat and pursed its incipient lips. ‘I have no taste for it. I cannot understand why you tolerate it, Brother of Dragons, when it is in your power to change it.’
Shavi’s heart pounded, yet he was surprised to find the encounter was not as terrifying as he would have anticipated before it began. Brother of Dragons – why do you keep calling me that?’
‘Is that your question?’ The voice was a little too eager.
‘No,’ Shavi said hurriedly. ‘I have no question.’
‘Then I go. But heed my advice, given freely, though you have not heeded such advice in the past: beware the one with cold hands.’
The head wriggled back into the picture frame and disappeared with an obscene sucking noise. In the ringing silence of his starkly lit office, Shavi had the unnerving feeling of being cut adrift from mundane reality; yet it was a good feeling, too.
Eagerly he replaced his shoes and socks, picked up his coat and headed down the stairs. Questions raced through his mind and he was keen to start piecing together the answers.
In the quiet street, he came across a blandly handsome man frustratedly pacing back and forth. He turned when he saw Shavi and smiled warmly. Any idea where I can get a cab?’
‘There is a minicab office down towards the crossroads. I was just going there myself.’
‘Mind if I walk with you? If we’re going in the same direction, we can share one. Keep costs down. The name’s Rourke.’
He held out a friendly hand.
12
This time Church found himself in a flat. The furniture and decoration were threadbare, but it was clean and the occupant had made the best of it. Inexplicably, his attention was drawn to a wardrobe standing against the far wall. One of the doors was ajar, the interior as black as pitch.
He heard a woman humming to herself. Through the open door leading into another room he saw Ruth cross the lounge, tidying up as she went. She appeared happier than the last time he had seen her. Yet she was alone and he felt relieved that Rourke had not come back with her. She hummed a few more bars: it was ‘Fly Me to the Moon’.
Church’s attention returned to the wardrobe. What was it about it that bothered him so? It was filled with shadows. His instinct was calling to him. Had Ruth hidden something in there?
He approached the wardrobe slowly. With each step his nerves jangled a little more until they were ringing wildly. He peered into the thin, dark crack, trying to pierce the gloom.
So dar
k.
Another step, almost close enough to reach the handle. He stretched out an arm unconsciously, knowing in his ghost-like state that he couldn’t open the door. One final step …
The door slammed shut with a tremendous crash and Church was thrown across the bedroom. From inside the wardrobe, he could hear a sound like low breathing, warning him off.
In the other room, Ruth hummed on, oblivious.
13
Church reeled. Three Rourkes. Or one Rourke in three different places simultaneously.
He grabbed Jerzy’s shouders. ‘I saw three Brothers and Sisters of Dragons. I think they’re part of my five. There always have to be five—’ He caught his breath. ‘I think they’re in danger … Ruth … all of them—’
‘From what?’
‘I don’t know. The Wish-Post shows you things, but it doesn’t tell you what they mean. I need to try to make some sense of all this.’
Church and Jerzy left the Court of Peaceful Days within the hour. A storm rumbled on the horizon, and birds swooped and dived overhead, their cries agitated. Everything he had witnessed through the Wish-Post left Church with a feeling of dread, though he was unsure what he had seen.
One thing was true, though: there was nothing he could do about it.
14
Church arrived back at the Palace of Glorious Light wet and cold and unable to shake the dark mood that had gripped him since he had looked into the Wish-Post. All he wanted was a hot bath and to be left alone with his thoughts. Instead, he had not even dismounted in the rain-lashed cobbled courtyard when Niamh breezed out of the entrance hall wrapped in a thick cloak. Her face was lost inside the heavy shadows of her hood until the flare of a torch revealed an expression that was more troubled than any Church had seen before.
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