by Kate Griffin
His bike was parked in the street outside; and the street outside was deafening. Every car alarm wailed, every light was on in every house, and in those where they weren’t on, burglar alarms were blaring out their distress into the night. I could hear sirens in the streets around, police cars getting closer, and one or two braver souls further from the gunfire, who perhaps hadn’t worked out its context, had even opened their front doors and were peering into the street. The bike was big, with huge silver pipes and gears sprawling out of it like the tubes of some demented church organ, and with a giant leather seat and wide handlebars. We slung Sinclair across the front and the motorbiker climbed up behind him, reaching his huge arms across the other man’s mercifully unconscious form, hands just resting on the handlebars, a grin on his face. “I’ll be at UCH, find me,” he said. “Before they do.”
With that, he kicked the stand out from under the bike, and started the engine with a thick, heavy fart of fumes and a roar of the engine like the mournful wail of a dinosaur.
Left behind in the middle of the road, the woman said, “This is too easy.”
“Oh, you just had to go and say it,” I muttered, slinging my satchel into a better position.
“If they were determined to kill us, I’m sure they could have done it in a more efficient manner,” she replied primly.
“You’re jumping in there with question number two on the list.”
“And question one?”
“How the hell did they find us in the first place?”
Her eyes roamed quickly across the street. “Where’s the warlock? The seer woman?”
“I have no idea; let’s start walking.” With my least bloody hand I turned her briskly away from the house. She flinched from my touch like it burnt.
“We have to move,” I hissed.
She hesitated, then nodded and started walking. I fell into step with her, face forward, breathing steady, hand now on fire, wondering if I needed another tetanus jab any time soon, or if tetanus was even applicable any more.
Our shadows bent around us.
She was right, it was easy, far too easy. I felt cold all over, the fire in my blood simmering down to leave nothing but exhaustion and pain. We felt eyes on us, tasted the same ice-cold shimmer in the air that I had sensed that day two years ago, when I’d picked up the telephone receiver with bloody hands by the river; but this time it was stronger. Was that because I was already half-looking for it, or because it had grown in my absence? The lick of its power in the air was like drinking thin black moonlight. I looked down, knowing what I would see, and felt my stomach tighten. My hands started to shake and – we could not stop it – tears in my eyes, the memory of every single cut, stab, tear, pain, every moment, every trickle of blood from my skin, every instant – it was there, real, enveloping me, drowning out sense; and though we tried to fight it down we could see our vision blurring and feel the strength going out from our bones at the thought, astonished that a mere state of mind could reduce our physical form to the consistency of wet paper, and afraid, so afraid that we were about to experience these things for ourself, about to end sensation with these sensations…
“What’s wrong?”
The woman’s voice was a relief, a knife through the high-pitched buzz in our ears.
We pointed with trembling hands at the pavements where, slowly and surely, our shadows, defined by the orange neon outline around us, were beginning to bend towards the light.
“Run,” I whispered.
“What?”
“Run.”
I grabbed her hand when she didn’t move and though she tried to pull free, we gripped with all the strength in our bones and pulled her down the street.
We ran.
There was no sign of pursuit, no sound of running footsteps, no shouting of “Oi, you!”, no sirens, no yelling, no breath at the back of our necks, no gunshot, no symptom at all of being chased. But as we ran I watched our shadows stretch out thinner and thinner, and they didn’t bend with the light, they didn’t move as we ducked under every lamp, didn’t contract and expand they way they did when you ran through the city, moving from pool of shadow to splotch of neon, they just stretched pole-thin, dragging behind us, until my shadow felt almost like a physical weight, a cloak of lead pulling me back head first. My neck hurt with the effort of keeping my eyes forward, my shoulders creaked, every movement of my legs felt like they had sandbags tied to them. She must have noticed too – I doubt she would have kept running without the realisation that her own shadow was moving around behind her and becoming distorted, warping, the edge shimmering and melting.
That night we ran like we had run all our life, like it was all we knew, all we needed, all that there was.
We ran south, across Wigmore Street and back into the mess of alleyways where I’d first encountered the fortune-teller in Khan’s old Cave of Miracles. We ran out onto Oxford Street, still busy but less so at this hour. Beggars, drunk men and skimpily dressed women paid us little attention as we crossed in front of the oncoming night buses towards the half-shut gate of Bond Street station, pushing past the large sign saying “Station Closed” and the half-asleep guard in dark blue who was writing it, and scampering down the stairs into the station proper.
“Wait a minute!” piped the guard.
The woman, with a surprising show of pragmatism, pointed to me and shouted, “He’s got a gun, fucker!”
There were only two things for the guard to do in answer to a statement like that – test it or not test it. I had a feeling he wasn’t paid enough to find out if I did have a gun. With an exclamation of “Fuck, shit,” he turned and ran.
Bond Street station was still lit up – indeed, I doubted that the lights ever went off – but the ticket machines had black screens, and the shutters were down on all the booths. In the artificial brightness, our shadows weren’t even visible, blotted out by the white strip lights across the ceiling.
“Is that it?” asked the woman.
“You wish,” I muttered. “Do you have a travelcard?”
“The tube’s not running. We’ve missed the train…” she began.
“This is not the time to argue,” I said in my nicest voice, “just say bloody yes!”
“Yes,” she muttered.
“Good. Through the barrier, now.”
“But the train…”
“Either it will kill you or we will unless you move now!”
I had shouted; this surprised us all. She nodded numbly, fumbled in her pocket with bloody fingers, found the card and, without a word, shoved it into the ticket mouth of the electronic barrier.
“Not working!” she called out even as I fumbled for my Oyster card. “Shall I jump?”
“Don’t bloody jump!” I snapped. “It won’t work if you jump.”
“What won’t work?”
I ran over to the barrier, and slammed my Oyster card as hard as I could onto the card reader. Sparks raced from my hand into the machine – I hadn’t even consciously tried for the spell, everything was running on adrenalin – and with a polite beep, the gate opened. I stepped through. “Try again!” I exclaimed at her.
There was a movement at the top of the stairs. The lights flickered on the ceiling, pushing us in and out of darkness.
“But I…”
“Do it now!”
She pushed her travelcard into the reader and this time it accepted and, with a beep, opened the gate. She scuttled through, and the gate shut behind her.
I turned my attention to the stairs coming down into the station. The lights at the top of the stair died with a tiny whining sound, as if they’d simply given up the ghost. Then the lights in front of those, and in front of those, and in front of those. The darkness spread down from the mouth of the staircase like a tide coming in from the sea. As it crawled across the barrier and snuffed out the illumination over our heads I reached up and snatched a glimmer of white light out of the last lamp before it could expire, clutching it between my finger
tips, while the other hand was clenched tight around my Oyster card.
The darkness spread past us, running down the escalators at our back and leaving us in just a tiny spot of white light encased by shadows. An inch from me, the woman murmured, “What is it?”
“Don’t let go of your ticket,” I replied.
In the gloom on the other side of the barrier, a deeper patch of darkness seemed to rise up from the floor, thicken, move, open eyes the colour of star-filled night. It opened a mouth, and it was a he; and though he seemed like the withered corpse of a man, I recognised him nonetheless. In a voice like the swish of silk across polished bone, he whispered, “Hello, Matthew.”
“Hello,” I murmured, unable to muster anything better. “Hungry?”
“Always, always an aching belly. And hello, Matthew’s fire,” he added. “And such fire you are!”
He started walking towards the barrier, dragging shadow as he came. In the dull reflected light of the sphere of whiteness in my fingers, I could see his face, corpse-white, shrunken, bone protruding at every angle, a skull on which skin had been thinly draped, teeth misshapen, eyes a sickly, watery blue, almost as pale as his skin, hair a thin white rag drooping down from the uneven, pocked skin across the rough plates of his skull, just visible beneath the broad black hat he wore to shield his eyes. His neck was barely thicker than his spine, his fingers unnaturally long, and when he moved he didn’t seem to lift his bare feet, with toes like stretched matchsticks and veins protruding like baby snakes between the long tendons of his legs, but glide across the shadows on the floor, pooled around him in thick oily waves. He wore a pair of thin, tattered trousers, half-rags, spattered with whitewashed stains, a loose white shirt that hung off his frame like a deflated air balloon, and a coat. I recognised the coat with a shock – long, beige, and with the faded brownstain of where my blood had seeped into it, dried, and been crudely washed out again.
He saw my expression and murmured almost petulantly between his jutting yellow teeth, “I keep something in honour of all my friends. I was going to take your heart – but when I looked again you had kept it for others!”
He neared the barrier, slowed, looking it over with a scornful air.
The woman’s fingers tightened on my arm.
He hunched down in an almost animal pose, head on one side, and then without any apparent effort, leapt. As he rose, the darkness seemed to stretch around him, and for a second, his coat – my coat, on his body – was nothing more than a raven’s wing, catching at the air, and his form stretched and shimmered like it was made of bent fog. His leap carried him up and forward. He sailed over the barrier, hit the space directly above its middle, and was, with a bang, thrown backwards. He sprawled across the floor in the darkness, and then, not showing any sign of injury or pain, picked himself up again. His eyes glowed with silvery light.
“Will you think to hold me?” he hissed.
I held up my Oyster card like a policeman’s badge in front of me, pointed directly towards him, and said, “These are the terms and conditions of carriage: ‘If you do not have an Oyster card with a valid season ticket and/or balance to pay as you go on it, you must have with you a valid printed ticket(s), available for the whole of the journey you are making. You may use your printed ticket in accordance with these conditions. All printed tickets…’”
The creature threw itself with a roar at the barrier again, his form stretching out around him until he almost filled the station; and again he was thrown back with a sharp electric bang.
“‘… remain our property and we may withdraw or cancel any printed ticket at any time. We will only do this for a good reason, and if we do, we will give you a receipt.’”
He opened his mouth and roared, and from his throat came the smell of rotting flesh and a rolling tide of darkness, physical darkness taking shape like moths that threw themselves at the barriers and the air above them and the spaces below and, whenever they hit the middle of the barrier, shattered into little black pieces of ash that faded as they sank to the floor.
I kept speaking, lost now in the spell, thrilled with it, and as I did, the air around the barrier thickened, growing firmer with every word until the shadow of the creature on the other side of the barrier was distorted by the sheer density of magic between us and it. I yelled, revelling in the feeling of it, “‘You must only buy printed tickets from official ticket outlets. If you buy a printed ticket from anyone else, it is illegal and may result in the ticket being withdrawn and the seller/you being prosecuted…’”
On the other side, the creature grew claws of ebony blackness and raked them across the barriers, but they didn’t even wobble. I screamed, the spell burning around me, filling me from head to toe, “‘The single fare that you must pay at London Underground stations or for journeys on London Underground and for journeys to places served by other operators, is the fare from the station where your journey begins to the station/Tramlink stop where…’”
With one last, almighty hiss of frustration, the creature launched itself at the barrier, scrabbled at the invisible wall of power suspended in its path, tore and snatched and pummelled at it and finally, wailing like an injured animal, fell back.
“‘… where your journey finishes.’”
I realised I was out of breath, my head spinning, my entire body now feeling light to the point where if I moved, I thought I’d float off the ground.
The lights started to come on around us. They spread back up the escalator and curled round the walls, encircling the black shadow, which now looked vaguely human again, standing in the middle of the concourse.
Through the wavering wall of force between us, it said, “I’ll come again, Matthew. For the blue electric fire, for your guardian angels, I’ll come again.”
Then, without a sound, without a sigh, it melted, darkness shimmering off its frame and boiling down to nothing but a shadow on the floor that raced away, up the stairs and into the night, as the lights all came back on.
I slid to the floor. Bewildered, I sat on the dirty tiles of Bond Street station, the slow, sneaky awareness slipping through my bones that I was alive.
The woman squatted down in front of me, keeping her distance. After a while she said, “You all right?”
“Uh?”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes. Fine.”
“Can you walk?”
“What?”
“We need to leave this place.”
“We do?”
“I told the guard you had a gun.”
“Oh, yes, right. Walk. Sure. No problem. Give us a hand?” She hesitated, face crinkling in displeasure at the thought. “Fine,” I muttered, crawling onto my hands and knees and laboriously up. I felt like I hadn’t eaten for a week, or that this was the precursor to an almighty hangover. “Fine.”
I staggered up to the barrier and beeped myself out. She followed suit. The barrier opened and closed like the wings of a butterfly around us, no problems, no questions asked, the miracle of a valid ticket on the London Underground.
“Will it come back?” she asked, as we staggered up the stairs.
“You know,” I said honestly, suddenly very tired, “I have no idea. But I doubt it. Not tonight.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not used to being thwarted. Let alone twice.”
“Twice?”
“Come on,” I sighed and, fixing my eye on the nearest bus stop, went to find a way from that place.
On the night bus as I lay across the front seats of the top deck, she said very quietly, from the row behind me, “Twice?”
“Give it a break.”
“That… abomination… knew you. It called you by your name.”
“Uh-huh. It did too.”
Outside, the shop lights were green, yellow, orange, white, lighting up mannequins in all the latest fashions of the day, staring out contemplatively onto the quiet street below. Even the beggars were calling it a night, opening up their piece
s of cardboard in front of the shop doors and stretching out their sleeping bags at the feet of the ATMs while the day’s litter – takeaway boxes and McDonald’s packaging, HMV bags and the plastic wrappings of newly purchased CDs, receipts and cigarette butts – billowed in the wake of the passing night bus.
“You knew what it was. You knew that it was coming.”
“We’ve met before,” I said. “I’m sure you’ll work it out.”
“What was it?”
“A shadow,” I said. “Just a shadow. You can call it Hunger. That’s all. All there is to see.”
“What was the spell that stopped it?”
“Basic warding.”
“With an underground ticket?” She sounded amused, rather than surprised.
I groaned and sat up – explaining the intricacies of magical theory while sprawled across the top deck of a bus wasn’t, I felt, the appropriate way to deliver the lesson. “What exactly is your part in this?” I asked flatly. “You seem to know bugger-all about magic, have sod-all feel for it. You have no… flavour on the air, your movements leave no colour, no smell of spice. What the hell are you doing with Sinclair and that lot?”
She smiled thinly, and looked down at her bloody hands, folded in her lap. “My disposition lies elsewhere.”
“What’s your name?”
“Oda. You can call me Oda.”
“Matthew,” I said. “You can call me pretty much anything you like.”
She smiled again, lips shockingly pink in an otherwise dark, finely formed face. Her black curly hair was braided so close to her skull it had to hurt, and her eyes were wide and alert. “Very well. Explain to me – the underground ticket.”
I scrunched my hands into fists and covered my eyes, trying to press some of the fatigue out of my brain. I gave it my best shot. “Everything, everyone and every place has its own unique magic. The underground’s magic is defined by the rhythms that go through it. It’s like a heartbeat, a pulse, the flow of life like blood through its veins, describing in every detail the shape of power in its tunnels. When you go into the underground, you buy a ticket, you pass through the barrier, you enter its tunnels, you take the train, you use your ticket, you exit through the barrier. This is part of what defines it, this is part of what makes the taste of its magic different, heavy, crowded, full of dirt and noise and life and strength. If you know that this magic is there, if you understand the rhythms that shaped it, it is a very simple matter to harness it to an appropriate spell that utilises to the full its unique signature. In this case –”
