by Kate Griffin
a few pearls of wisdom
… you’re kinda stuffed, sorcerer!
come be me
we be light, we be life, we be fire
make me a shadow on the wall
burn for ever
… not worth paying much attention to
You’re a nit when not them, aren’t you?
we sing electric flame, we rumble underground wind, we dance heaven!
come be me and be free
we be…
I be…
be free
I’m sorry there’s no one to take your call right now, please leave your message after the dialling tone!
Beeeeeeeeee…
… me…
And be free.
.-.-.
No more dreams.
We couldn’t stand them any more.
A tickle in our nose?
A rumble somewhere far off, like the hot sigh of underground wind coming up from the tube.
I opened my eyes, since we were too afraid to, and looked around. Somewhere in the distance, there was a deep, polite whumph.
A tickle in my nose.
A trickle of mortar dust drifted down from the ceiling. We licked it off our lips, curious. It made our dry tongue, if possible, drier, and tasted of nothing much, with a hint of salt.
I croaked, “Dana?”
From the corner behind my head, out of my line of sight, she said, “That’s a spooky thing you’ve got going there.”
“What is?”
“The way you knew I was here.”
“I was faking being asleep.”
“Then the blue eyes are spooky instead.”
“We can’t really do anything about that.”
“Another spooky thing.”
“What is?”
“The way you sound human when you speak.”
“That’s got a better explanation, all things considered. What’s going on?”
She shrugged. “There’s an underground line beneath us.”
“Which one?”
“Northern.”
“Oh. That’s what the rumbling is.”
“Perhaps.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“I’m not buying into any new faith systems.”
“I wasn’t asking for you to…”
“I think we’re going to die,” she said quietly.
We thought about this, then smiled. “All things must end,” we said. “So, in the long-term perspective, you may be right. But what’s the point of living, unless you have an end to live for?”
She grunted. I heard the sound of her shoes plodding flatly on the carpet, of something moving on a table beyond my vision. The needles in my arm were gone, the pinpricks covered with small plasters, but I didn’t feel any better for it. Her hand brushed the back of our head, tilted it up carefully. She put a plastic cup next to our lips and said, “Go on. Have some.”
We hesitated, and looked up into her face. She looked pale, thin, but her eyes were still alert, if no longer bright. I sipped. The touch of the water was absolute balm; it rolled across our tongue as if the muscles in our mouth had cracked and dried like a desert, so solidly baked it was almost incapable of absorbing the moisture. When I’d drunk, she said, “I read somewhere that it just goes straight through you, if you’re too dehydrated, like a brick.”
“Cheering,” I said.
“Would you like some more?”
I licked my lips and nodded. She disappeared somewhere behind me. Water ran. She reappeared and helped me drink. Then she said, “You haven’t asked me to help you yet.”
“I didn’t want to rush things.”
“They say you’re possessed.”
“Who ‘they’?”
“Mr Bakker.” The same tone of respect was in her voice that still, even now, instinctively filled mine.
“I’m not.”
“But you’re not quite yourself, are you?”
“No. Not entirely.”
“He said you killed Khay, Lee, Simmons.”
“I didn’t.”
“But you did see my mother.”
I looked up and she was right there, staring down at me, face impassive, voice so cold and empty I half-imagined she hadn’t spoken at all. I licked the last drops of water off my lips, and she didn’t offer to get any more. “I saw Mrs Mikeda. She’s worried about you.”
“Did you do anything to her?”
“You know I didn’t.”
She nodded slowly. Then, “If I help you, promise me you’ll leave. Just get up and go, run. Just run and don’t stop running and move east faster than the night-time and keep going. I know you can do that. I know you know how. Just…” She stopped. I waited. She took a deep breath, steadied herself. “He watches me, all the time,” she murmured. “He’ll find out.”
“Bakker?” I asked.
She shook her head. “He is kind. He tried to help me.”
“Hunger?” I said.
Her eyes turned to me, uncertainty giving them a certain light, for a moment. “You…” she began, a question trailing off in her voice.
“Tall, dark, wears Mr Bakker’s face?” I asked. “He who watches you?”
She nodded.
“Wears my old coat?”
Slowly, nodding.
“What does he want?”
“He said he’d let me live if I helped him.”
“Help him do…?”
“Summon the angels. He said…”
Realisation dawned slowly. “You called us back,” we murmured. “You brought us here!”
There it was, a spasm of fear on her face. “Yes,” she said.
“You brought us back!” we repeated, louder. “It was you, you dragged us out of the lines because we’ve always spoken to you, always known you, always been there for you and you knew where we would hide and you brought us back! We have loved you your whole life, we have whispered to you of freedom and the brightness of life and you, you brought us back! You summoned us!”
“Yes,” emotion now in her voice, trembling on the edges.
“Why?” we asked.
“So many dead,” she replied. “He killed them – Akute, Pensley, Foster, all the sorcerers who you told me to run to if things got bad – he killed them all! Not just because they were his enemies, but because they were your friends! To have his revenge on you even once you were dead because you wouldn’t help him; wherever I went he killed! And you left me!”
Talking to me, I guessed, not us; we had never entirely left her.
“You left me half-trained, unprepared, what was I supposed to do when you were dead?” Her voice was rising in anger and fear and, perhaps, something else. “He said he’d kill everyone I knew, everyone I touched, everyone I… but I’d be alive because they’d never found your body, because he saw you the night you died, he saw you breathe your life into the telephone lines, saw your flesh eaten away in a second by a mountain of blue electric maggots that fed on you until there was nothing but blood left, and I hoped, I thought, that perhaps… what was I meant to do?”
We stared at her, and there were the beginnings of tears in her eyes, although she was fighting with all her pride to hold them back, daring me to disagree. We said, “We’re sorry.”
She grunted, half-turned away from us to wipe her eyes with her sleeve, snuffled and turned back, as if somehow we hadn’t noticed the gesture.
I said, “I’m sorry. Dana – I’m sorry.”
She swallowed and nodded. “Run away,” she said. “You can’t stop him. Please. Run away.”
“It may be a bit too late for that,” we answered. “Dana?”
“Yes?”
“What did your mother have to say?”
Dana half-laughed, a choked-off, failed sound. “She said you were an arrogant bastard and probably in league with the Devil.”
“Really?” I asked, not too surprised.
“She said you told her everything. She said you apologised.”
/>
“That’s true.”
“In all the years since you’ve been gone, with all the things that have happened,” murmured Dana, “Bakker has never apologised. He doesn’t know that he needs to.”
A distant thud, another trickle of mortar dust from the ceiling. I said, “That’s not the Northern line.”
A flash of a grin on her face, wry and familiar. “Central line around here too.”
“Really?”
“Sure.”
I thought about it, then started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“I know where we are. Christ, the guy’s got some cheek,” I muttered. “Dana?”
“Yes, Matthew?”
“Will you help me?”
“He’ll kill us.”
“I can handle Bakker.”
“It’s not him I’m talking about.”
“We know. We can handle him.”
“Mum said you were possessed. Mr Bakker said you were possessed too.”
“It’s too short a word for the relationship,” I murmured. “Please, Dana. You wouldn’t be here at all if you weren’t going to help me. So I’m sorry to rush this, but please, please do what you had to, sooner rather than later?”
“Why’d you see my mum?”
“I was worried!”
“About me?”
“Of course about you!”
“But you thought she might call me. Say you came by. You counting on me to help you out? You were dead until a few weeks ago. You’ve got the wrong colour eyes.”
“Please,” I said. “Please, you know that this is still me. Help me.”
She thought about it. “Maybe we should talk,” she said.
We talked.
She told me about being Mr Bakker’s apprentice. That he had shown her the wonders of the city, taught her to find beauty in all the brightest things, taught her that everything was alive, and bright and full of potential and wonder if you just bothered to see, and that this was good, this was how sorcery felt it should be.
Then she told me that he’d told her that magic was life. That there would be no life if there wasn’t magic, that the study of magic, the pursuit of it, the analysis of it, the understanding of it, all these things were key to understanding life.
Then he’d told her to listen to the voices in the wire, the angels that had always talked to her in her childhood, because we’d always sensed that she had a love for life and could live it so fully, we were drawn to that delight in all things that she had in her voice even over the phone. Even when speaking to a faceless machine her words had been full of feelings and thoughts and honest truths, even in the wire we had sensed the expressions on her face, she had given us so much life.
Then he’d told her to talk back to the angels.
Then he’d told her that they were another form of magic, and that as such, they could give life.
Then he’d told her to summon them.
And after the shadow had appeared in her room at night and all the spells she’d thrown at it had been for nothing, she had. After it had told her that it was hungry, so hungry, that it wanted to drink the blue fire of the angels and, if it could not, it would have to feast on the meagre blood of sorcerers – or sorceresses – so, instead, she had.
We were going to say something rude, but I bit it back. Thinking about it, I pointed out a few basic flaws. It wasn’t about talking; all I had to do was listen, and I wasn’t going anywhere until the story was done.
Then she let us go.
We were surprised how weak we were. We did not understand how I could bear it; but then, I wasn’t in the mood to consider what could go wrong for us next.
Dana helped us to the door of the white room, and pushed it open. There was nothing outside but an empty corridor, with strip lights buzzing quietly overhead, and the humid hotness of water pipes running through the ceiling. There was also, however, the familiar smell of…
rich deep blue magic rising up from the underground lines
rumbling reddish-brown tints of the traffic overhead
silvery sparkle from the water pipes
flashing blue fire from the electricity!
… enough magic to grasp hold of and tangle in our fingers, a remembrance of our power, thick and compelling.
We let out a sigh of relief.
“I know where we are,” I repeated, pressing my fingers into the dry, unadorned concrete of the walls. More than just the ordinary hodgepodge of sensation, I knew why Bakker chose this place for his home. It buzzed with something more, a deeper line of power that in the good old days of naked dances and ritual sacrifice would probably have been worshipped at dawn.
“You’ve been here before?” she asked.
“No. But, Central line, Northern line, the Tower; and Mr Bakker always had a sense of the ironic. You didn’t need to tell me anything more.”
“I don’t like this dark,” she muttered. “He keeps on popping out of it.”
“It’s all right,” we answered. “We can protect you.”
“I’d rather Matthew did,” she replied.
“I’ll do my best,” I said. “Tell me: when I was brought here, was I wearing shoes?”
“What?”
“It’s important.”
“Yes. Why?”
I smiled, standing on tiptoe to brush the ceiling, feeling the warmth seep into my fingers from the cables clustered within it. “Friends are coming. We need to get you out.”
“Me? Why?” Then she thought about it some more and added, “Friends? How?”
“Because they’re not very sympathetic,” I replied. “And you’ve been keeping bad company. What were the other questions?”
“Is this about your shoes?”
“Yes.”
“Thought it might be.”
“Good. Which way to out?”
The map of the London underground system was an elegant bit of design by any standard. In other cities, the equivalent looked like a faded imitation, full of implausible destinations highlighted in unsuitable colours, and confusing junctions between overlapping stations, where dotted lines were indistinguishable from coloured blobs meant to inform the viewer that here you could get three escalators, or just walk between stops without violating the terms and conditions of your ticket.
Be that as it may, on the map of the London underground there were only two places where the Central and the Northern lines met, as they ran through the city nearly at right angles to each other. The first was the strange vortex of direction-distorting tunnels, platforms and winding white-tiled stairways that made up Bank station, a place in which even the shrewdest geographers armed with compass and map could get lost while trying to track their way between DLR and Circle line platforms. A place indeed, so some practitioners said, where the borders between spaces were more flexible than usual, and where the bikers swore that, even at the slowest speed, it was possible to find those weak points and slip through to a destination entirely different from any on the map.
But the buzz of magic in the place where I stood, feeling the warm, familiar rumble of the trains under my feet, wasn’t that of Bank. That left one other station: Tottenham Court Road, serving an area of suspicious computer shops, hi-fi warehouses and dodgy second-hand dealers, together with the megastores and brothels of Oxford Street and Soho.
And there was a tower. It amazed me that I hadn’t thought of it before; there was a tower, and it wasn’t just a giant building stretching up into the sky, it wasn’t just an expression of power or, as some feminists would have it, a symbol of masculine insecurity, as so many tower blocks in so many cities seemed to be. It was the Tower; it featured on postcards; and the air inside it buzzed with all the magic that such a position entailed.
If I hadn’t been certain before, I was by the time Dana helped me up a flight of stairs, pushed back a door with the words “Danger!! High Voltage!!” plastered in big yellow letters on it, and led me out into a concourse that smelt of
sweat and chlorine. Opposite me was a sign. It read:
Men’s Toilets→
←Women’s Toilets
** Centre Point is a Non-Smoking Zone **
Dana said, “What d’you think?”
I laughed.
“Thought you’d say that,” she grunted.
“Bakker lives here?”
She shook her head. “He moves around.”
“But he’s here, tonight.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes. How’d you know?”
“He wants our blood,” we replied. “He’s trying to make it catch fire, he wants us to give him life. I knew he wouldn’t want to be too far from us, once he found us.”
“You… wanted to be found?”
“I knew Simmons was most likely dead. I knew Bakker wanted us alive. I knew that, with San Khay and Guy Lee both gone, the shadow would have to deal with me myself. I knew I was going to be betrayed, and a process of elimination led me to think it would be by my friend. With such a wonderful array of information at your fingertips, what would you have done?”
“But… you were… there were needles and…”
“I was keeping my fingers crossed that you might let me go.”
“You didn’t know?” she asked sharply.
“Didn’t seem good manners to presume.”
She scowled. Then, sharply, out of nothing asked, “Can you?”
“What?”
“Give him life? Can you cure Bakker?”
We shook our head. “Not as he’d see it.”
“He said that you could save his life. He’s dying,” she added, with reproach in her voice.
“I know, and no one can,” I replied gently. “Least of all us.”
“Then what can you do? Sorry to sound like the naive one, but wouldn’t it have saved a lot of trouble if you’d told him this?”
“We are creatures of the life you leave behind. We feed off the feelings you forget, we were born of the thoughts that faded the moment they were spoken, of the unseen things, of the unspoken things that got trapped in the wire when the phone was cut off or the words lost in interference, or when the mouth that spoke them lied, but on the other end of the line they couldn’t see their faces. We are all this, and he thinks that if he takes it, for himself, takes that which makes us alive, he will live for ever.”
