by Kate Griffin
“Forever doesn’t sound so bad; I mean, if you’re not such a bad man. What’s the catch?”
“Apart from the fact that he’s been leeching my blood?” I asked.
“Apart from that.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Oh, please. I think I got way past that lesson on day one.”
“Which way?” I asked.
She nodded round the curve of the dimly lit passageway. I grinned.
“What?” she asked, seeing my expression. “What’s so funny?”
“I’ve always liked this place.”
“You know that it’s a disgraceful example of the greed of the property industry, a crappy piece of planning and, until dead recently, a dive for druggies, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It fits the vibe.”
“Is this the right time to criticise some of your teaching techniques?”
A rumble somewhere not too far off, a ripple of sensation, a shudder of the lights, a moment where we thought we heard
hello Matthew’s fire…
“No,” I said firmly. “Come on.”
The tower’s foundations had been set deep, and there were more than on the official map; tunnels spread around the water mains, and between the passages of the underground station almost immediately beneath it. We seemed to walk, stagger, jog on our irregular progress through the maze of seemingly identical passageways under Centre Point, the smell of the underground gym – all body odour and chemicals – being replaced by the stench of urine that defined the subways passing beneath its concrete struts, which in turn faded down to the distant thrumthrumthrum of pounding club music humming through the walls.
We found a service lift, its panels rusted, its floor uneven, its wall of cardboard stuck on with gaffer tape. Dana pressed the ground-floor button and I didn’t argue, leaning against her and watching my world steady itself as we rose up with a slow cranking sound through the lift shaft. I didn’t know how much blood they’d taken or how much they’d put in me, but by the lightness of my head I was willing to guess that it hadn’t been a proportionate ratio.
We had passed the grid to the basement exit when the lift lurched, the lights went out and everything stopped.
Dana said, her breath coming fast and ragged, “What the hell?”
“Friends are coming,” I replied, straining to hear something through the dull echoes of the shaft. “It’ll be all right.”
“Is this something to do with your bloody shoes?”
“Yes. Magicians are always so hung up on magic, they never bother to check for technology.”
“You… were followed?”
“Pretty much. I’m not the only one capable of tricksy planning and cunning insight, you know.”
She scowled, staring round the tight confines of the lift, uneasy at the small space. “We’re going to sit here?”
“Too many shadows,” I answered.
“You had to say it, just when I was being steely with self-control, you had to say it!”
We took a deep breath and rubbed our hands together, searching for warmth between our fingers. The magic was easy in this place, we didn’t need much to work with. I opened up the palm of my hand and let the bubble of pinkish-orange neon light float up above our heads, illuminating the tight space of the lift. Dana’s face was pale, the fixed smile scared, but refusing to sink into any more honest expression. “He’s going to kill me, isn’t she?” she said, not bothering to raise her voice or let the terror fill it. “He’s going to kill me.”
“He hasn’t yet.”
“So?”
“The shadow… is part of Bakker,” I answered, thinking about my argument a word at a time. “Perhaps there’s a part of him – both the man and his creature – which doesn’t want you dead?”
“You’ve always got a way with the implausible.”
“I’m just theorising.”
“What now?”
The lift jerked, and started moving again, of its own accord, tossing us to the sides to cling on for support.
“Good?” asked Dana breathlessly.
“Buggered if I know.”
“You know, for a man possessed – sorry – in a complicated relationship with mystical entities of bloody magic and forgotten life – you’re pretty useless when it comes to a tight situation, aren’t you?”
“This isn’t a tight situation yet.”
“Tell that to the white room and the operating table,” she retorted sharply. “Looked pretty tight from where I was.”
“Yes,” I replied, “but you did help me, didn’t you?”
She opened her mouth to speak, then hesitated, thought about it, then opened her mouth again. “You are a total…”
The lift jerked to a stop. The door slid open with inexorable slowness. Beyond was a single cream-coloured corridor, lined with tinted glass windows that obscured the light and darkened even the shadows beyond it. Outside it was night; inside it was harsh strip-light day, the floor cold and the air dry, unstirred. I stepped out of the lift cautiously and looked around. Dana said, “This isn’t the ground floor.”
Behind us, the lift door slid shut.
I walked to the window and looked down. Some distance below I saw the shape, tinted brown, of what in real life was a bright blue, floodlit fountain of three treble-pronged stone nozzles that squirted water into the pool around them and, chaotically, over the narrow pavement beyond. I guessed it to be about four floors down. Dana said, “I’m sure I pressed ground.”
“I’m sure you did too,” I answered, looking around the corridor. There was no feature in it except a red fire extinguisher next to a closed door. “But lifts can be subject to other people’s control.”
“I didn’t feel we moved that many floors…” she began again, a note of urgency entering her voice.
“Moving without covering all the distances involved,” I answered cheerfully. “It’s been known. Dana?”
“Yes?”
“If Mr Bakker got round to teaching you any sort of protective magics, now might be the time to practise them.” I could hear a humming, a sound like an angry beehive, or perhaps a very expensive, very badly treated car engine caught in traffic…
“Is this where the lights go out?” she asked.
I wandered over to the fire extinguisher and tugged it out of its rack on the wall. “Deep breaths,” I said, and kicked open the door.
On the other side was another long white corridor. Standing in it were at least half a dozen men and women, armed variously with grenades, handguns, and rifles, and assorted magical baubles that floated and drifted, or had just been slung down casually at the owner’s feet. In front of them a huge motorbike dominated the corridor, black tyre marks skidded all around it. Sitting on it, mirrored visor lowered over his face, was the wide form of the biker. He revved his engines.
Dana said, “Um…”
He put his foot down on the pedal, kicked the bike off the stand and, with a roar of engine that filled the whole corridor with an angry thrum, and a burst of black fumes that darkened the faces of the people around him, charged straight for us.
I pressed down on the fire extinguisher.
From its end came thick white billowing gas. I pressed down harder, caught a fistful of gas between my fingertips, spun it into a tornado of whiteness and threw it down the corridor, straight at Blackjack and his friends as they ran towards us. It spread out as it moved, rattling the windows and splattering the walls with patches of pale foam, thickening in an instant to the consistency of froth on hot cappuccino, blinding the eyes of the men with the guns and the women with the bombs as they ran at us, choking them and filling their noses with the stench of chemical suppressants. But not Blackjack. Behind his empty-faced helmet he just kept coming. I grabbed Dana’s hand, pulled her away from the door and said, as calmly as I could, “Run.”
Bakker had taught her as he had taught me, because she did as I said without question.
We ran.
Corridors, offices. The offices sat behind dull plywood doors. Most of them were empty. Some were missing panels on their ceilings, through which wires drooped and odd foil-covered pipes poked. Some had water coolers, the gossip-corner of any workplace; some had long rows of endless boring desks lined with endless boring computers that were probably capable of making phone calls to innocent bystanders, but had almost certainly had all the games wiped before installation, with no opportunity to install any more.
We ran into another office of neglected desks and the odd revolving chair. Right behind us, the biker burst through the doors, smashing them apart with the front wheel of his bike. Dana dove left, I dove right and the biker tore between us, spinning around a few metres beyond with a screech of burning tyre that tore a gash in the carpeted floor. He revved his engine a few times, like the challenge a knight gives before the joust, and the sound was so loud that the windows tinkled, the loose wires in the roof swayed, and the chairs creaked and rocked; the noise went straight through the eardrum and made the inside of our nose ache, shook into our stomach and blurred the edges of our vision. From the back of the bike, a cloud of noxious black smoke whirled up around him; its instant taste in our throat was like the stench from a garage forecourt, which could penetrate even the thickest glass and suck moisture from our mouth.
The lights faltered around us and, for a panicked moment, I looked down at the floor to see my own shadow; it was not turning. I looked over to Dana and saw that she had one hand raised towards the ceiling, and was dragging crackling jagged arcs of blue electricity out of the wires above us, causing the lights to dim as she spun it between her fingers. The motorbike roared into life, and went straight for her. She threw her bundle of voltage at the biker, but at the last instant he swerved; and for a moment, there were two of him, one swooping straight into the oncoming blast of Dana’s spell, the other spinning away from it, behind her already, the two images flickering for a moment as Blackjack worked his magic and moved from A to C, without calling in at B.
He disappeared from in front of Dana.
Instantly, he reappeared, a few feet behind her, and his front wheel was still headed straight for her. I called out a warning and swatted a wave of pressure through the air that wasn’t nearly enough to dislodge something as heavy and as fast as the motorbike, but knocked Dana aside enough so that the front wheel missed her. It slammed on past, pounding through a plywood desk that didn’t even slow the bike down, but splintered right through the middle without the biker losing an instant of speed. I ran to Dana, grabbed her by the wrist, dragged her up and pulled her through the nearest door. A corridor away there was a flight of stairs, winding round one corner of the building; below I could see a theatre and the bright lights of the crossroads outside it, the evening’s crowd pouring out after a performance, the buses struggling round the tight corners and the taxis lining up for their fares in the narrow bus lanes of New Oxford Street to the indignant tooting of other traffic.
We wanted to go up; up would be where he was – but with Dana I didn’t dare risk it, didn’t want her in the same building as that man and his shadow for a second longer than necessary, so we went down, winding round the narrow confines of the stairwell, third floor, second –
– just after the second floor, we felt a tugging of sickness in our stomach, a moment of dislocation, and looking down, we saw that below us was the third floor. We tried again, reached the second floor, dropped down another flight of stairs and were instantly back at the third floor. We could taste Bakker’s magic in this, we could feel the familiar taste of his spells, the unique craft and skill of them, but under it, too, a faltering of the lights, a pulling in our stomach.
We looked down at the floor and saw our shadow starting to stretch long, even though we weren’t moving. Dana followed our gaze, and her hand tightened around ours.
“He’s coming,” she whispered.
The lights dimmed in the stairwell, and this time it wasn’t our doing. I turned to the window and started kicking at it. Dana, realising what I was doing, joined in, but the glass just went bonk, as if it was a solid plastic sheet. I cursed in frustration, looking around for some sort of inspiration; Dana got there first. She dug the nails of her right hand into the palm of her left, flinching as she did, until the skin tore and a thin line of blood crawled out. She dipped a finger into the blood and drew, on the glass, the image of a keyhole. For a few moments the shape was nothing more than a dark stain on a dark surface; then it began to hiss and smoke. She clenched her right hand into a fist and punched the glass as hard as she could in the heart of the keyhole.
The glass cracked. She punched again. Little fault lines spread out, thickened; the whole thing started to creak. She drew her fist back for one more punch, and a fist emerged out of the darkness of the glass, and caught her by the wrist, black nails digging into her skin. She screamed, a sound of genuine terror that was the product of I couldn’t imagine how many months of fear. I grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her back, and the arm that held hers reached out of the glass, the blackness of its shape growing sickly white flesh, and her blood trickling around his fingertips as he became real.
We snarled, and lashed out at the forming flesh of Hunger, our fingers trailing sparks through the air; and our nails drew three parallel lines of black blood through his flesh. His hand spasmed around Dana’s arm and she whimpered again, cowering away and shaking her head in numb horror, every instinct she had shut down behind the fear. Then out of the dark glass the head appeared, and leaned forward with its mouth already open, teeth sparkling, tongue licking its blue lips as it reached out for Dana’s blood, its eyes, nose, skin gradually becoming solid.
I waited for its ears to become real and, though it was probably only moments, that waiting seemed to take for ever. Then I put my hands over Dana’s ears, drew my foot back and kicked the metal banisters of the stairwell with the sole of my bare heel.
The metal went booooiinnnnggg.
Hunger flinched.
He was scared of us.
We grinned and kicked it again.
The rails responded with a hollow, long, resounding boooooii innnnggggooinnggggoinnnggg…
Bakker had taught me this spell, and knew how it would end. And, because Hunger was, in the end, Bakker’s shadow, so did he; even before I levelled a final kick he was retreating, drawing back into the shadows while the lights around us brightened. But just to make sure, to finish him off, I aimed one final kick, and drove my heel as hard as I could against the metal banister.
The stairwell shook. The sound was the sound of hollow metal vibrating, but rising up through more than just a single long rail. It filled the stairwell, hummed up every banister, and the sound fed off itself, the hum in one setting off a vibration in another which set off resonance in the next, filling the whole stairwell with such a clamour of magically enhanced ringing that the cracks in the windows spread of their own accord, that the light fixtures tingled, that dust shimmered down from the plastic-padded walls, that the edges of the black rubber sheath over the top of the banister started to warp under the strain, that the whole world seemed to quake. In the street outside, car alarms sounded; in the blue pool of the three ugly fountains, water sloshed against its sides and one fountain spurted the half-hearted residue left in its pipes over a passing tourist who clung to a lamp-post as the hum rippled through the street.
Hunger’s fingers uncurled in an instant, his face stretching with pain; and he was gone, retreating into the window. Dana’s bloody hands were pressed over mine, which were covering her ears; her eyes were shut and her face a twisted mass of confusion and distress. I felt my ears pop and my nose start to run with hot blood – something we didn’t feel we could afford to lose right now. I staggered up the stairs, pulling Dana along with me by her head, kicked open the nearest door and, blind to which floor or what spell we were trapped on or in this time, fell onto the carpet beyond, pulling Dana down with me, and shoving the door shut behind
us.
The echoes slowly faded. I sat up, my ears ringing. Dana pulled herself up and experimentally lifted her hands over and away from her ears. Then she turned to me, her voice shaking, and said, “You never taught me that.”
“It was luck,” I replied. “Damn things could have been solid, for all I knew.”
“In this building?” Her voice was distant and slightly too low, as if heard through a thin sheet of water. I wiped the blood from my nose and shook my head, as if that would be enough to banish the tinnitus buzzing just behind my eardrums.
“Fair point,” I conceded. “Where are we?”
She staggered onto her feet and pulled me up with her. “It all looks the same to me,” she admitted. “But I’m pretty sure we should have hit the ground floor by now.”
“Good old-fashioned spells to confuse, baffle and bewilder,” I groaned. “We are starting to lose patience with this game.”
“Is that what it is?”
“For him,” we replied, and felt that we didn’t need to specify for who.
“You hear that?” she asked.
We put our head on one side, not sure if the tinnitus was fading or if we were simply getting used to it. Perhaps a hint of …
“Motorbike,” said Dana.
“Now we really are out of patience,” we announced.
The door at the end of the corridor burst open, and this time, the motorbike was trailing fire. Dana threw herself through the nearest door and I followed. A female toilet, somewhere neither I nor we had ever been before, and which disappointed us in its plainness.
Dana slammed the door shut behind us and pressed a large metal bin against it as the bike swept by. The sound of it stopped too suddenly for it to have gone into the stairwell; the engine noise just winked out, leaving us in sudden and uncomfortable silence.
Dana looked at me, I looked at her. She rolled her eyes, marched over to the bank of low, cracked metal taps and started running every single one, putting in the plugs and dipping her hands into every basin as they started to fill. I groaned as I saw what she was doing; but, not having a better idea, I picked up the lid of the bin lodged against the door, and smashed it against the long mirror above the sinks. I carefully picked out a shard of glass from the cracked spider’s web clinging to the wall, curling my fist around it until it bit into my skin, drawing blood. Dana raised her hands from the final basin, water pouring off them, and grinned. “Right,” she said. “Not so useless!”
