An uncomfortable prickle coursed down Leah’s spine. “How did you see me?”
Carol laughed, rather bleakly. “It’s not that difficult nowadays, is it? Your web site, social media. Didn’t have to be a private detective lurking round corners. So tell me.”
“There isn’t much to tell, Carol. I was a fool, that’s all. Nothing physical happened between us that you’d call him being grossly unfaithful to you. It was a silly crush that got out of hand.”
Carol took another mouthful of wine. “I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true. I never slept with him.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean it wasn’t just a silly crush, was it?”
Leah met Carol’s gaze. “No. No it wasn’t.” She shook her head. “There’s no point saying I’m sorry, because I was so enraptured I didn’t care about you.”
“Well, of course. I’m never in the way.” Carol frowned. “The problem is, Leah, I still love the bastard. I know he has this thing with women. It’s happened many times. But somehow... recently... I don’t feel I can hide behind the fancy curtains of this house any more. I feel I’m married to a ghost, who’s not really here. He’s never been bad to me, always generous, always pleasant. That’s what’s made it so hard for me. There was nothing for me to put my finger on, except for my hunches, and the women he befriended. He never hides that, you know. He always tells me about them, his friends. It’s almost like he makes it easy for me to look them up, as if he even wants me to. But I never get to meet them, as you’d expect with friends, if they really are just that.”
Leah nodded. “You’re right,” she said simply. “They’re not just friends, but neither are they lovers. I would call them... victims... prey.” She grimaced. “No, let’s keep this sensible. He likes the attention. No doubt there’s some reason for that, buried in his past. He’s stayed with you, Carol. He hasn’t exactly strayed. I think to him it’s all only a game.”
Carol sighed, stared at the counter. “I wasn’t sure whether I’d fess up like this to you. I had this urge to meet you, that’s all. Someone told me about you, your party thing, and it seemed the right time. Strange, really.”
Leah found she didn’t want to tell Carol Lyle about the destruction her husband tended to leave in his wake, the tarnished lives. “You want it to stop, of course,” she said. “You don’t want to leave him, do you?”
Carol looked up. “I want my husband to want me,” she said. “I wish he didn’t need all these... dalliances. I suppose I’m scared that one day he’ll meet someone who somehow tips him over and then he’ll be gone. He can’t be happy, can he, if he has to have this attention, as you called it?”
Leah paused. “Was there another reason why you wanted to speak to me particularly?”
“I think you know the answer to that. I know quite a lot about you.”
“You want it to stop.”
“Yes. I think you have a responsibility.”
Leah closed her eyes briefly. “OK.”
“You didn’t eat your cake,” Carol said. “Why not? What did you put into it?”
“Strength and love, like I said,” Leah replied. “They were for you, not me.”
Carol lifted her wine glass, gestured with it. “In vino veritas,” she said. “It can be a git, can’t it?”
‘Definitely,” Leah said. She lifted her own glass, clinked it with Carol’s.
AS LEAH WAS driving home, having dropped off her assistants, she noticed that the moon, so clear in the sky, had lost her first slice; the dark was on its way. Leah’s mind was empty of busy thoughts, or even analysis. She felt only a pure conviction. Carol Lyle might say she felt haunted by a husband who was barely there, but Leah felt she had seen the true ghost in that relationship. It lived in Carol’s eyes, in her nervous gestures, the joking yet bitter reference to having no chance of children. Meanwhile her husband was no doubt off somewhere, telling some woman, perhaps the unfortunate Cassy, how their friendship was special, how it sustained him. His piercing gaze would be holding hers; full of unspoken longings. Words and a gaze that were a trail of delicious crumbs leading only to a spiked pit. Brett Lyle made ghosts of his victims without a single killing. He’d had it all his own way for far too long.
In her house, Leah acted decisively, as if guided by an outer force. In her workroom, she sat down to meditate and fashioned a bullet purely from thought and intention. Into it, as into the most careful of her baking mixtures, she poured a purpose. The bullet was as silver-white as the moon; a lunar dart. Leah did not feel a magical mirror was the answer for Lyle; his armour needed to be pierced. So she fashioned the bullet and gave it to a dark angel with a gun.
CAROL LYLE HAD tried not to think about Leah all the time, but it had proved difficult. On that birthday evening, Carol had taken action for the first time, been someone different. Just that moment of saying to Leah “you must know why I hired you” had been empowering. And then the pivotal moment when Leah had closed her eyes for a second, her murmured word “OK”. Carol knew that Leah had meant it. She just didn’t know how she meant it.
One week following the party, Brett was home for the evening. He was camped in the front room, shorn of the mask he wore for his female ‘friends’, playing a video game. In the kitchen, preparing dinner, Carol could hear the blast of machine gun fire and the cries of computer men as they died. These sounds annoyed her; they always did. There was no good reason for him to have the volume turned up so loud. Carol threw a half peeled carrot into the sink, dried her hands and marched towards the living room. She saw Brett sitting cross legged on the carpet, looking like a boy. He did not glance up at her, hunched as he was over the game pad he was holding. On the screen, men exploded in red gouts amid loud explosions that shook the walls. Carol’s mouth opened to complain.
And then he folded out of the corner of the room. Dressed in black leather, immensely tall, a face pale like moonlight. And he held a gun. Carol saw the blue-black sheen of the weapon as he raised it; almost organic in appearance.
The shot was white, like a sky full of fireworks; it was a sound that had an image. And then her husband’s head had exploded; red splashes and gobbets over the TV screen, up the walls, all over her. Carol heard herself screaming, the kind that will never stop, saw the pale-faced assassin glance at her once. He bowed to her, walked backwards through the wall.
“WHAT THE HELL is wrong with you?” Brett was holding her, shaking her, perhaps seconds away from slapping her face.
Carol was utterly disorientated for a moment, then reality somehow see-sawed back into focus. She saw her husband in front of her, unmarked, and clearly not sure whether to be angry with her or amused. “You were shot!” Carol cried. “You were dead!”
Brett Lyle laughed, let her go. “Idiot,” he said amiably. “What are you talking about? It’s only a game.”
Carol stared into her husband’s face. She saw a red fleck amid the blue in his left eye. Had that always been there? “It’s not always a game,” she said in a low voice, “not to everyone.”
He pantomimed a double-take. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know,” she said and headed back towards the kitchen.
“Well, no I don’t, actually,” he said, in a stiffly offended tone.
Carol wheeled on him, spoke harshly but evenly. “Yes. You do. I’ll always be there now, Brett. Remember that. You’ll never be alone.”
She didn’t need to say any more than that, and wouldn’t, no matter how hard he pressed her, even when the crazy dreams started happening, when uncertainty seeped into his mind. Remember what ghosts do, she would whisper into his sleep. They haunt you.
BOTTOM LINE
LOU MORGAN
Magic is power, and there will always be those who wield power for the wrong reasons, or become corrupted by the power itself. Here is a tale of addiction, but it is also a what if? story. Lou asks what would happen if gangsters started to use magic to facilitate their illicit practices. The answe
r is chilling, but there is also a poignant denouement to this tale that will leave it lingering in your mind for a long while.
THERE’S A DOG in the middle of the road, just running. Right down the centre line, straight as an arrow. One of those little ones: the kind that resemble a handbag on legs and mostly seem to be owned by people who don’t actually like dogs all that much. It can shift, though: the way it’s going, you’d think the devil was after it.
The car closest to me pulls up; the driver winds down the window.
“Is that your dog? Aren’t you going to do something about it...?”
“Does it look like it’s my dog?” I can see him looking me up and down, figuring that one out for himself. He obviously decides not, and winds the window back up. A moment later, a blonde woman comes pelting round the corner, waving her arms and clutching a pink lead. The dog’s still running. I can sympathise.
I’m tempted to hang around to see how the dog drama turns out, but frankly, it’s more excitement than I can handle at this time of the morning. Besides, I’m late enough already, and however relaxed my boss is about life in general, opening up late is more than my life’s worth. Before I can do that, I need coffee so I tear myself away from the street theatre and make for the café on the corner. They’ve got my coffee waiting – same as always, sitting on the counter in its little cardboard cup. It’s too milky – again, same as always – and they’ve forgotten the sugar, but I wouldn’t go anywhere else. Partly because this place is the closest to the shop, and partly because I’d have to pay for it. As it is, I get away with a wave of my hand in the general direction of the till and I’m gone.
Opening up the shop isn’t particularly taxing, which is just as well given that the coffee’s not kicked in yet. Working here... well, it’s not particularly glamorous, but at least it’s legal. Legal enough, anyway, and that’s what counts. Mostly I sell marked cards to smartarses who think they’re something at poker (and who’ll probably end up getting their hands broken with the business end of a hammer) or to kids with tattoos who fancy themselves the next Criss Angel. And don’t even start me on the light-fingered little toerags who come in here after school. I nearly lost my temper with one of them last month and Simon had to stop me from turning him inside out. Literally. It would’ve been messy, granted, but it would have been worth it. Apparently, however, that kind of thing counts as being “bad for business”. That’s Simon for you. But I owe him: he was the only one who would touch me when I got out and I can still remember the look on his face when I asked him for a job. He was sitting at the counter, stringing cards onto wire for the window display. He put the wire down, and he looked me dead in the eyes and said, “Donnie. Of all the places in the world, with your history, why in God’s name would you want to work in a magic shop?”
He had a point. You don’t send an alcoholic to work in a distillery, do you? But that’s just it. There’s magic and there’s magic. There’s tricks and illusions and sleight of hand... and there’s what I do. What I did.
I was a kid when it started – maybe seven or eight. It was little things: handing in homework I hadn’t done; the fiver in my mother’s purse that wasn’t really there... It made me feel clever. It never occurred to me that it meant anything, not until I was with my granddad and I booted a football straight through the greenhouse. It was an accident, and I panicked. He heard the glass break – Christ, he saw the ball go through – but when he went to clear up, the glass was gone. The pane had mended itself, good as new. He stood there and scratched his head and frowned, and all the while I did my best to look innocent. I thought I was smart for avoiding a thrashing, but later on, he called me over to sit with him. He always used to sit in the same chair, the one closest to the fire. “Donnie,” he said, “I want you to tell me the truth. What did you do to the glass?”
“Nothing, Granddad.” I always was a terrible liar.
“Is that so? Well, then.” He sat back in his chair and he smiled. “Nothing. Nothing, indeed.” And he winked at me, then pointed to the fire. Which had turned blue; the same blue as the sky on the first warm day in spring, or the blue of a pretty girl’s eyes. I watched, and the flames turned purple, then black, and slowly back to orange. He laughed, and told me to close my mouth, which was wide open. “You’re not the only one who can do tricks, you know,” he said, folding his arms.
And that’s how I found out. It runs in our family, the magic. Real magic. Always the men, generation to generation, back as far as anyone cares to remember – and then some. It runs down the male line, and the first time you use it, your clock starts ticking. My granddad lasted another three years after the day we had our chat. My father, he made it to his fifty-fifth birthday.
Me? I’m on borrowed time.
“Be careful with it,” my granddad said. “It’s a gift, and it’s a curse. No, don’t laugh. I mean that. You see, you can do anything you want with it: anything. The world’s yours. But magic... it eats you up from the inside. It’ll take another bite out of you every time you try it until there’s nothing left of you but a shell. And once you start...” he shook his head, “You take it from me, boy, once you start, it’s mighty hard to stop. Or at least, to stop in time...”
Not that I paid the slightest bit of attention. You don’t, at that age, do you? Take Lizzie, for example. Lizzie was a girl I was in school with. I had a bit of a thing for her, and being a nice, sensible sort, she wouldn’t give me the time of day. So I gave her a tree. Like you do. Not just any old tree: this one grew overnight, right by her bedroom window, and instead of fruit it was covered in little silver bells. When the wind blew, they sang. At the time, I thought it was the best idea anyone’s ever had. In retrospect, it might have come across a touch stalkerish. Didn’t matter, as it turned out: within a week, she was going out with one of the football team, the tree had rotted and the bells had rusted, and I promised myself I’d never waste magic on a woman again.
So instead, I took my magic to Rudge.
Rudge is a fixer. He’s always got an eye out for magicians, and for a kid with a certain moral flexibility (not to mention, in my case, a growing magic addiction and a general dislike of authority) he can be a pretty attractive option. He gave me a trial, had me work a couple of illusions that I could have done in my sleep, and then he put me to work. My first job was to act as a lookout. No magic, he said. Of course, I didn’t listen. and in the process of not listening, I saved everyone’s bacon. Rudge was impressed, and it wasn’t long before he had me working every job he ran.
I’m what’s known in less law-abiding circles as a Ledru. There’s a very specific skill set required for that line of work, and we’re hard enough to come by. Did you ever see one of those cold-case shows, where the bank’s been robbed and no-one can quite work out how it was done? If nobody can crack it, then I’d bet my life on them having used a Ledru. We’re illusionists – often prestidigitators too, but that’s just part of it. We get you looking one way while the money goes the other. Easy. Back in the old days, when I ran with Rudge’s boys, we had a Houdini and a Farla; a Belzoni for muscle and a Banachek as a front man. Then there was me, and the Marvey. But while all the others were your common or garden lowlifes that Rudge so liked to rely on, me and Marvey, we were the real deal. Put the two of us on a job and you couldn’t go wrong.
Well. Until Marvey pulled his own vanishing trick and waltzed off with the money.
Rudge didn’t take kindly to that. Not at all. The way he saw it, I should’ve stopped Marvey as soon as I knew what he was doing... which just goes to show how little Rudge understands it. It’s magic. I didn’t know: that’s the whole point. It didn’t matter to Rudge, though: one of his little blue errand boys had me stopped and searched – and lo and behold, who’s suddenly got a pistol in his pocket? You’d think I’d have noticed, wouldn’t you, but magicians don’t usually expect to be on the receiving end of a trick.
Five years, that got me, and that was only because I gave up our Houdini and Belz
oni. Farla had already washed up on a beach by that point, and God only knows where Banachek got to. Somewhere a long way away, I hope.
Still, five years is long enough to get yourself straight when the most your magic can extend to is doubling your cellmate’s cigarettes just to get him to stop bloody whining. When I went in, I was so far gone on the magic that I didn’t care. It was only when I realised I couldn’t do any in there – not if I wanted to keep myself in the same number of pieces I’d started out in, anyway – that it hurt. And believe me, it hurt. Those first couple of nights, soaked through with sweat and shaking like it was the end of the world... you could’ve heard me screaming from a long way outside those walls.
The upshot is that five years later, I come stumbling back out onto the streets. I’m clean(ish) bar the occasional little hiccup and the odd free coffee; not enough to get me into trouble, but something to keep my hand in. Simon gave me a chance, and working in the shop does seem to do the job, in a funny way. There’s something about the place that keeps the urge, that all-encompassing need, at bay. The props and the cards and the party pieces. If I wanted to, I could pull flowers out of top hats until I dropped, but it wouldn’t be the magic that killed me; it would be the sheer mind-numbing monotony.
Five years. Like I said, it’s a long time. But that’s the thing about Rudge: he’s got a hell of a long memory.
I’M CONTEMPLATING THE untold pleasures of a stock-check when the bell over the door rings, and the atmosphere immediately changes. It’s like a thunderstorm just walked in. His name is Marcus, he’s built like a tank and he’s one of Rudge’s goons. He’s exactly the kind of person I don’t want to see. The ventriloquist’s doll by the door slowly opens its eyes and turns its head to follow him as he walks across the shop floor towards me.
The Future of Horror Page 56
