A Madness of Angels ms-1

by Kate Griffin

  “You’re wrong,” he said simply.

  “Because you’re a sorcerer,” I went on, drained, empty. “Because you have a certain view on life, this other part comes alive. Perhaps it’s harmless for a while, but then its thoughts seep into your own, its dreams infect your own, and you start thinking, ‘Hey, let’s see if I can stay alive, I’m sure it wouldn’t cause anyone any trouble, where to start?’ And you think of the blue electric angels and go, ‘They’re just surplus life waiting to be tapped, I wonder if they’d like to give some of their power to me?’ And somehow in this process you forget the rules. You forget that the angels are about freedom from restraint and laws and all the earthly things, and you forget that they are not just life, they are power. And the hungry part of your brain might be thinking, ‘I shall be a burning blue fire across the sky,’ but you sure as hell don’t say it. You could steal the electric angels’ power and be a god, without flesh, form, feeling, substance, without restraint by the laws of man. And you’re already halfway there, as we’ve established, because there’s your shadow doing its thing. So you ask your apprentice round. And I said no. Probably didn’t explain it well at the time – sorry – but no was the answer and it was the right answer. And you’re a bit pissed at that.”

  “Matthew, I didn’t…” he tried again.

  “Let me finish,” I snapped. “I need to get it right this time. You’re a bit pissed off and, whether you like it or not, there’s a part of you going, ‘Little bastard betrayed me! The angels always talk to him, why not to me, little shit!’ or words to that effect and, Bob’s your uncle, I am surprised to find myself dead at the claws of a creature that wears your face but is distinctly, definitely not alive, merely hungry. So very, very hungry.”

  We clicked off the safety on the gun, and turned it this way and that in our grip, wiggling a finger into the trigger guard. “So there’s really two things, as far as we see, which need explaining on our part, us to you. The first thing is why we didn’t talk to you, when you listened for us in the phone lines. And the short answer is this – you are a great sorcerer, a brilliant master of your arts, you see magic wherever you go. But you said, ‘Magic is life,’ and that’s not quite right. You think that the study of magic, the understanding of it, gives you some sort of better grasp of life. Unfortunately, even I worked out that this isn’t quite true; it’s a bit skewed, see? We understand this. Magic is not life. Life is magic. Even the boring, plodding, painful, cold, cruel parts, even the mundane automatic reflexes, heart pumping, lungs breathing, stomach digesting, even the uninteresting dull processes of walking, swinging the knees and seeing with eyes, this is magic. This is what makes magic. Understand that, and you are some way to understanding why we are what we are.

  “And I guess that covers point the second – why I didn’t help you summon the angels. It pretty much boils down to this: a man who looks at everything and sees a tool to be used, a force to be manipulated, rather than just good, old-fashioned stuff doing its thing, should not be free of the restraints of humanity. Have we missed anything?”

  He thought about it a while, then smiled. “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t seem particularly surprised.”

  “I knew you had to believe something like this.”

  “You don’t seem particularly surprised that Dana’s dead.” He didn’t answer. “Why did you keep her alive?”

  He thought about it a long while, then said, “I doubt you’d really care for the reasoning. And it really is worth staying alive, however you can.”

  I saw it coming a second before it happened, a flick of his wrist. I raised the gun, swinging it up instinctively towards his head, but he’d already opened his fingers. The wall of twisted air slammed into me and picked me off my feet, knocking me back and wrenching my wrist as I skidded across the floor. The barrel of the gun smoked and burnt red-hot. I threw it aside and crawled back onto my feet, spinning my fingers through the air to catch a fistful of the magic of that place, dragging the reflected orange light in the clouds around me like a fluffy blanket to ward off the cold, until my skin burnt with its dull gleam. Bakker hadn’t moved from his chair, hadn’t stood; his back was half-turned to me. But as I watched and prepared a spell, he reached over and slipped out from his skin the needles carrying blood and other fluids, put them to one side and, very carefully, stood up. His legs buckled, but he caught himself on the handles of the chair, and rose nonetheless. He steadied himself and turned to look at us, standing on his own two feet, unsupported; and his face was white, his eyes empty, his teeth rotten, he trailed darkness as he moved, and he cast no shadow.

  “There you are,” we said.

  Hunger/Bakker grinned. “And we are so hungry!”

  “No, really?”

  He opened his mouth and the darkness poured out like he had swallowed a bellyful of black, breeding locusts. It buzzed on the air and filled the room, expanding into every corner to block out the moonlight Its touch was ice on our skin, but we drew our neon blanket tighter around us and half-closed our eyes, letting the bite of it settle down on us like a winter’s wind after leaving the confines of a warm house. We couldn’t see anything other than our own hands, lit in neon; the windows, the walls and even the floor were obscured by the almost liquid dark that swirled around us as we drew our hands through the air.

  We heard, very faintly, an electric crackle. Unwilling to trust to chance, we threw up our hands to catch the bolt of mains-powered lightning that lashed out of the darkness in a burst of blinding white fire, snatching it into our fingers and spinning it towards the floor before it had more than a chance to singe our sleeves. Beneath us, the floor itself started to spout barbed wire that crawled up around our ankles. We ignited a gas pipe overhead and spilled the roiling liquid fire around our feet until the wires melted and withered away, before batting out blobs of smelly flame into the darkness all around where, to one side, briefly, they illuminated a flash of white skin before it was eaten up again by the dark.

  He spat a billow of hot ashes at our face; we burst the pipes under our feet to smother it in backwards-falling rain. He shattered a window, letting in a dragging blast of wind that pulled and clawed at us both, then sent the jagged glass flying towards us. We spun the wind from the smashed window into a tornado around us, calm at the centre, that snatched each shard of glass and reduced it in a second to sand; he pulled the steel skeleton of the building up from beneath our feet, jagged rods lashing at us from the floor we stood on; but we simply jumped aside, weaving our way through them as they danced. He pulled the wires down from the ceiling cavity and wound them round our wrists and throat, choking us and dragging us off our feet in their snare; we pumped electricity through them until they melted and burnt through, dropping us back down onto our knees in the whirling darkness.

  We felt him prepare another spell, sensed the tug of his magic in the air, and this time we struck instead. We put the warmth of our skin into the sodium-coloured neon light that blanketed us, then the touch of our breath, then the beating of our heart, so that in each second it grew brighter, and brighter. It burnt into the dark like a Mediterranean sun, it boiled off our skin like a corona, it made our hair stand on end, it scalded the floor and blackened the ceiling, and we put more and more and more into it, filled it with ourself until the flames started to turn blue and our feet no longer touched the ground and we opened our arms like the angel, ready to embrace any enemy who came towards them, and opened our mouth to let out the buzzing blue locusts in our belly, the flaring blue sparks that danced like living light, let them roll across our tongue in a glittering icy sea that gnawed into the darkness and congregated in dizzying hordes, like the lights that magicians had once called will-o’-the-wisps, and we blazed

  so cold

  because we could, we let our skin turn white with the ice of it, let our bones shiver, let our feet drift up off the floor and the eddy of our own breath spin us round, let the blue electric fire shatter every last window, and
blast holes in the roof that lashed up towards the moonlight, let it burrow deep black burns in the floor and melt the walls; we let it consume every last vestige of warmth and anger and pain and fear inside me

  inside me!

  inside us, we let it eat up every feeling inside us

  inside me!!

  and through the burning we saw the shadow staggering, struggling to stay upright as the fire ate at his flesh, burnt his hair, dissolved the darkness of his coat, ate at his fingers, his nose, until black blood ran across him and until even that blood started to bubble and burn, steam and boil on his skin and he screamed and screamed and

  was for a moment

  as he screamed

  just a frail old

  His knees buckled.

  His legs gave way.

  His blood was bright red, his shadow a tiny pinprick under him.

  And we were laughing.

  because we were so bright and so powerful and no one could control us because we were

  I was

  unstoppable, untameable, so alive that we could burn for ever, light and life and fire and

  laughing at his screaming

  our skin cracking and the blue light blazing through underneath it

  through our mouth and eyes and under our nails

  because

  I was

  we were

  blue light pouring out under our clothes, bursting out of us with every breath and we couldn’t inhale there was so much of it

  because I was…

  because

  we am

  so much power… we were light, we were fire, we were life, we were the slithering underground wind, we were dancing heaven, we were blazing blue fire and

  we were the angels!

  …

  Then he said my name.

  And we were surprised to realise that I could still remember it. And we screamed and kicked and struggled as I forced us to breathe in, we screamed and punched and tore at our own skin, trying to pull the light out of us so that we would dissolve our flesh and be nothing but a blazing comet in the sky as I made us close our eyes against the blue blanket across our vision, we punched and bit and tore as I dragged our arms back down and clenched our fingers into fists and we screamed

  WE BE LIGHT, WE BE LIFE, WE BE FIRE

  COME BE WE AND BE FREE

  WE BE

  WE BE

  WE BE…!

  “Matthew?” His voice was weak, old, frail and dying.

  WE BE BL… WE BE… WE BEEEEEEE…

  And blood started running out of the cracks in my skin instead of our light, started seeping into our clothes and I was so weak, so small inside of us and we said

  weeee beeeeeee…

  but I am

  come be…

  Sinking to our knees, pain, so much pain

  we can make you free!

  from so much pain

  come be we… we blaze for ever across the sky…

  so weak

  we set you free

  nothing but ice left inside.

  come be we and be free…

  I shook my head. “Not today,” I said. “Not yet!”

  a fading remnant of fire worming its way beneath our fingers. We whispered, “So bright, so bright…” our fingers scuttling after it as it disappeared into the floor, “so beautiful…”

  “Matthew?”

  I looked up.

  Just me.

  He lay in a growing pool of his own blood, awkward, on one side, head towards the window. He coughed, spittle and blood mixing around his lips. I crawled on hands and knees towards him, knelt next to him and murmured, “Sorry, Mr Bakker.”

  A glimpse of a smile. “What’s there… to be sorry?” he croaked.

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Always is. You’re a sloppy sorcerer, Matthew Swift.”

  I shrugged, and even that was agony. “Could be worse,” I replied.

  His fingers closed around my wrist, and I noticed that, even though the face was Bakker’s, the nails were still long and black. “Dying,” he said. I stared down into his watery eyes. “Dying,” he added, and his nails dug deeper into my skin, long, black nails. “Something we never understood about life,” he explained and in that instant there was a pallor on his skin, more than just blood loss.

  We snatched our wrist away, and threw ourself back even as his other hand reached up for our neck, nails gouging a slash just in front of our jugular vein, and his blood was still black as it came out of his skin, and his tongue licked rotten teeth and he screamed, “Want it! Want it now!” and he raised his head up on a shattered old body, ready to bite with yellow teeth, seizing my head by the hair and dragging it towards his with a strength that no one should have had, screaming, “Want it! Want to burn!”

  I wound my fingers together, pressed electricity into them, drew them back, and slammed them as hard as I could into his chest. At least, I think I did it. In that moment, it was hard to tell.

  The shock knocked him backwards, picking his feet up off the floor as he went, snapping his head back with a loud crack of bone on bone, and thrust him shoulders first out of the remnants of the window. I heard the screaming fade, and then stop abruptly with a splash, thirty-five floors below.

  Epilogue: The Brief Act of Living

  In which things, having ended, continue pretty much the same, despite all probable circumstance.

  There was a hospital intensive-care ward.

  Then there was a less intensive ward.

  Then there was outpatients.

  Then there was the street with a discharge notice, a single change of clothes, my old coat, my bag and a new pair of shoes; everything, in short, that I owned in the world.

  I had no way to prove that I was alive, no home address and no money of my own. Sinclair gave me ten grand in a brown paper bag and said that the concerned citizens were grateful for my assistance.

  In a way, the absence of these things seemed liberating.

  I stayed with the Whites for a few weeks, in order to get my bearings. Then I stayed with a couple of friends in the countryside, who were close enough to put me up but not so close as to have realised that I was ever dead to begin with. I went walking in the hills, sploshing through mud and after a few weeks of it, despite the unfamiliarity of the place, I was beginning to understand how the countryside too could produce sorcerers, who summoned ivy instead of barbed wire.

  But my heart was still in the city, and eventually I drifted back.

  I took casual work in odd places here or there. My skills weren’t necessarily that useful, but I supervised a few exorcisms and blessed the odd business about to set up shop, scratching very carefully into the walls of one or two abodes, Domine dirige nos, just for good luck.

  I was leaving the swimming pool when she found me. I’d taken to making regular visits, partially because we enjoyed the act of swimming so much, but mostly because there was the promise of a hot shower afterwards, to keep me clean. It was in Highbury Fields, at that cool time of the evening on an overcast day when the sun is already below the horizon but its reflection is still bright enough to see without the street lamps’ sodium glow. I walked away from the swimming pool, turned towards my regular bus stop, and she was there, emerging without a sound from the shadows of a shrubbery, pressing the gun to the back of my head and grabbing me by the shoulder to stop me flinching from its metal.

  “Bang,” she said.

  “Oda,” I replied breathlessly. “We wondered.”

  “Bang,” she repeated. “Two in the head, and then three to the chest. Bang bang bang. No coming back from that; no phone boxes to hand either, just to make sure. Lights out, game over, good night the sunny time and so on.”

  “I didn’t think you’d be the kind of person to go on about it,” I said reproachfully. “If you’re really going to do it, then just do it.”

  “You don’t seem too freaked?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Wh
at about them?”

  “What is life, if it doesn’t end?” we said.

  “That’s a really unhealthy attitude you’ve got there,” she pointed out.

  “And I thought the Order was all about the spiritual things?”

  Oda grunted, gently lifted her hand from my shoulder, and removed the gun from my head. She stepped back. I turned to look at her, curious. She met my gaze easily and said, “I wanted you to know. Any time, at any moment, wherever you are, whatever you do, I can do it. I can. I’m really that good.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Good. Think about it if you should be feeling Satanic.”

  She turned, swept her bag up off the pavement, and started to walk away. “Wait!” we called out.

  She stopped, turned, looked back, eyebrows raised.

  “We were informed that you’d kill us anyway,” we said.

  “I’m sure I will, some day. When you lose control or start sacrificing kiddies or eating rabbits’ skulls for kicks, I’ll be there. But as it is, right now…” She hesitated, half-turning her head up to the street lamp as if looking for it to click on in a moment of inspiration. Then she shook her head. “Right now, you’re still on the side of the angels.”

  “Oh, the irony.”

  “Isn’t it just?”

  “Did you think of that now, or was it a pre-planned kinda thing?”

  “See you around, Matthew Swift,” she said in reply.

  “You too, Oda. I’ll see you around.”

  And she walked away.

  Using Sinclair’s money, I bought a PO Box at Mount Pleasant Post Office, and kept the rest in a small metal box buried in Abney Park Cemetery, since I didn’t really know what else to do with it. A few days later, leafing through a copy of the Yellow Pages left on top of a bus shelter, I found under S the following entry:

  “Swift, M. (sorcerer): PO Box 134B, Mount Pleasant, Rosebery Avenue, London, EC1R 2JA.”

  Since I hadn’t put it there, I dismissed it as being down to damn mystical forces again, and tossed the fat yellow document back up on top of the shelter. I slung my bag over my shoulder, stretched my legs, patted down my pockets to make sure I hadn’t dropped anything and, not knowing where I was going, or how I was going to get there, started walking. In the distance, we could hear the rumble of buses, the honking of cars, the shriek of a scooter’s brakes, the tinging of the bicycle bells, the flapping of the pigeons, the scuttling of the rats, the shouting of the children, the mumbling of the old bag ladies, the cursing of the young men, the flirting of the pretty women, the slamming of windows, the venting of pipes, the dripping of taps, the hissing of televisions, the pinging of ovens and the ringing of the telephones, all around on every side, at every hour of every day, every day of every week, for ever, unending, an infinity of sound, sight, smell, life, light, wonder, a quiet endless mundane magical clamour that filled every corner of every street with the promise of adventure; a world too big for mortals, immortals and all the creatures in between.