Ghost Electricity

by Sean Cunningham

  “Are you a Tonno?” the woman asked.

  “No.”

  The buzzer sounded and the door clicked. Fiona pulled it open before the woman changed her mind.

  The lights came on as she climbed the plain concrete stairs, but many of the bulbs were faulty and they blinked on and off. Fiona went up four flights of stairs. With each flight her doubts about being at the block of grungy flats increased, but she had a reason for being here and that hadn’t changed.

  A woman waited for her on the next flight up, standing outside an open door. She was well over the other side of middle age and so large as to be barely mobile. Her mouth was set in a crooked line of dislike even before her shadowed eyes fixed on Fiona.

  “Margaret Bray?” Fiona said when she was a few steps down from the woman.

  “Marwan sent you?”

  “He referred me, yes,” Fiona said.

  “Are you sleeping with him?”

  Her brows drew together. “I don’t make a habit of sleeping with middle-aged men.”

  “The wretched snake,” Margaret said. “They can both be charming when they want to be, him and his brother, so you watch out for them.”

  She went back inside her flat. Fiona assumed that counted as an invitation and followed. The apartment inside was small and not well maintained. Every available shelf surface was jammed with the accumulated junk of a lifetime, much of it bought in seedy London markets to look at it. Hanging around the room at various points were little mobiles made from what looked like bones. They glimmered to her new, awakened senses and she got the feeling they were twisting back and forth, even though they hung motionless.

  Margaret flumphed into an old couch. A small dog leapt onto her lap and stared at Fiona with the excited, brainless gaze of small dogs everywhere.

  “Close the door,” Margaret said, “or don’t come in at all. But make up your mind.”

  Fiona closed the door and sat down in the chair opposite her hostess.

  “How are you mixed up with the Tonnos?” Margaret asked.

  “I’m not, really. I’ve only met them once before tonight.”

  “Keep it that way,” Margaret said. “They’re cold-blooded reptiles, even worse than those monsters they like rubbing elbows with. Bad news to anyone who gets to know them, worse if you’re a woman.”

  “What did they do to you?” Fiona asked before she could stop herself.

  Margaret snorted and stroked her dog. “Used me and tossed me aside. Wanted to know everything I knew about dreams, he did. He was all smiles and flattery and chocolates while I had anything to teach him. Once he knew everything I knew –” She snapped her fingers. “Gone.”

  The little dog growled.

  “Along with his promises of a business partnership, never mind the rest.” Margaret’s mouth worked from side to side. “Did he tell you his story about the vampire girl?”

  Fiona blinked. “Alice? Um, yes, he did.”

  “His big sob story about being young and broken-hearted. Well he’s no better, missy. He does the same thing to women when he wants something from them, believe you me. He says the vampire girl left him, well that’s his side of the story. Maybe she saw him for the back-stabber he is and kicked his lying arse out!”

  Margaret clearly preferred this version of the story. “I’ll be careful,” Fiona said.

  “What do you want then?”

  She spoke without thinking. “Why are their lines of light in the sky?”

  “Is that what you came here to ask me about?”

  “No, I –”

  “Because anyone can tell you that. What do you really want?”

  Fiona shook off the uneasiness the threads of light had left her with and marshalled the details of her lie. “Someone has changed my past to suit themselves. I caught a glimpse of my true past while I was in London’s dream and I want to go back, there or somewhere else or however this sort of thing is done. I want to know who I really am.”

  “It takes much learning to take yourself deliberately into London’s dream and make use of it,” Margaret said. “The kind of learning that means you shouldn’t need someone like me to help you along.”

  “I don’t know how I did it,” Fiona said. “I was just there.”

  “You can do things but you don’t remember how?” Margaret said. A hint of something other than bitterness lit in her eyes, a spark of a once keen mind dulled by age and disuse.

  “It’s more a case of I don’t remember what I can do at all until I find myself doing it,” Fiona said. “Can you help me?”

  “Maybe I can,” Margaret said. “I charge eighty pounds an hour.”

  Fiona’s mouth opened and closed. “Marwan didn’t say anything about that.”

  Margaret laughed and it wasn’t a nice sound. “See? A snake in the grass, that lad. You give me your address and I’ll let you pay me later. First time only, mind you. Next time you come to see me, you make sure you have money. How do you want to take the drugs?”

  Fiona felt a sinking sensation in her stomach. “Marwan didn’t say anything about drugs, either. I didn’t take anything to get to the dream of London last night.”

  “Need herbs,” Margaret said. She picked up a small metal case from the table beside her chair, took out a hand-made cigarette and lit it with the lighter that had sat beside the case. The dog stayed on her lap while she puffed several times and then passed the cigarette to Fiona.

  This would be a stupid time and a stupid reason to stop, she thought to herself.

  Getting high when people, or things that mostly looked like people, were hunting for her was, she thought, pretty stupid too.

  She took the cigarette, sucked in the smoke and then doubled over with a fit of coughing.

  “Get it into you, girl,” Margaret said. “Cough up a lung if you have to, but get it into your bloodstream.”

  “How much do I need to smoke of it?” Fiona croaked.

  “Probably not much, if you haven’t touched it before.” She held out her hand and Fiona passed the cigarette back. Margaret drew deeply, held the smoke in her lungs and blew it towards the ceiling. The dog in her lap whined and settled deeper into the folds of her dress.

  Fiona clutched the arms of her chair. “Should I be feeling dizzy?”

  “Very,” Margaret said. Her words made smoky shapes in the air. Her skin was dissolving into dust that floated up around her, until it was all she was. Fiona tried not to breathe her in.

  “Is there much work in dreams?” Fiona asked. They stood on a shore of grey sand. She smelled dead water and organic decay. Seagulls squabbled as they picked through the mud-fouled garbage cast across the shore.

  “Some,” Margaret said. “It’s a living.”

  “Does it, I don’t know, help? Do people really have breakthroughs or discover their repressed childhood memories or that sort of thing?”

  “It happens,” Margaret said. “Once in a while it happens. Other times a fancy witch or warlock will come to you, wanting to jump behind the curtain to where the inner workings of the mind rattle away, to get a peek at what’s going on. Keen on that, those people. Think they don’t have to wait like ordinary folk for whatever’s happening in the back of their brain to step on stage in its own good time.” Margaret took a long pull on her cigarette. “But most people just come to get high.”

  The river oozing before them was flat, brown where it wasn’t black and coated here and there with rainbow swirls of oil. Refuse bobbed slowly seawards on a lethargic tide. Water craft had been abandoned on grey sandbanks, from cabin cruisers cracked and drying and long since naked of paint, to the rusting hulks of container ships so brittle they had half crumbled away.

  On the other side of the river lay a city, or at least the ruins of one. Warehouses in the docks district stood open, missing corrugated iron panels from their sides. A forest of cranes lined the waterfront but many had fallen, rust having weakened their trunks.

  Beyond the docks were blocks of houses and high-
rise apartments from different times and places, collected together as though the place was a central dumping point for the cast-off pieces of other cities. Early twentieth century British terraced houses stood opposite overgrown Detroit family homes. Grey council flat towers were neighbours with buildings in bland colours from modern, never-inhabited Chinese mega-cities.

  Some of the tall buildings stood together as though trying to get warm. Others were lone fingers thrust at the sky. Their sides were pitted with holes where long-forgotten violence had shattered windows. Further along the river, away from the sea barely seen beyond the breakwater, stood what Fiona thought might be a business district. Its towers of glass and steel were riddled through and ragged.

  Dusk was fading towards night. Fiona could just make out shapes and features, but writing would be a blur. No moon and no stars hung above them, just a filthy blanket of old pollution in the burnt-out air.

  “Did you bring us here?” Fiona asked.

  “Of course I did,” Margaret said. “Why else would we be here? It’s what I do.”

  “Where are we?”

  “The Ruined City,” Margaret said. “Since the first city was built, there was the dream of a ruined city. It’s probably changed some over the years, what with the first cities being huts and so on. Still, it is what it is.”

  “Why are we here?”

  “I like it,” Margaret said. “Come on, girl.”

  Margaret lifted both her feet off the ground. She curled her legs under her, kicked down and floated a few feet off the ground. Without waiting to see if Fiona followed, she floated out across the river. A snake of cigarette smoke twisted in her wake.

  Fiona took the opportunity to check her shadow. Even though the light was poor, a black pool stretched out from her feet. She allowed herself a smug smile. She would see what Margaret could reveal for her first. If that failed, she planned to have a few words with the monster in her shadow and this time she wasn’t taking silence for an answer.

  She thrust downwards with her hands, lifted off the shore and drifted after Margaret.

  In dreams, Margaret did not appear exactly as she did in the waking world. She was thinner, for one thing, though not thin. Her limbs were not straight, but rather twisted like the branches of an ailing tree. Her hair did not stay quite still and it made Fiona think of snakes sliding beneath a carpet of dead vines.

  Fiona was exactly as she appeared when awake.

  They passed the corpses of sea craft and were watched by the mad eyes of hundreds of seagulls roosting in white lines. They flew over wharfs and jetties that had half fallen into the estuary. Crustaceans moved in and out of the water, rapping their claws on the shells of hardy barnacles. The crabs were a sickly white in colour, streaked by the pollution of the river.

  From one of the warehouses in the docks district there rose the rapid beat of music, putting Fiona in mind of an underground rave. She saw a grey van creeping along a narrow lane between warehouses, the finger-like yellow beams of its headlights swinging back and forth across the way ahead.

  Margaret swung them wide around two tall chimney stacks. It wasn’t until they were on the other side that Fiona saw the web strung between them, invisible on one side like a one-way mirror. Big grey spiders with the heads of boys clung to the brick chimneys. Their rows of big, black eyes remained fixed on their web with terrible patience.

  Fiona realised she was falling into dream logic, accepting what she saw without questioning it. She had come here to find things out, not just have a holiday. She shook herself and opened her mouth to ask Margaret what was going on.

  But Margaret had begun to descend. She dropped down into a small square that looked like it belonged in seventeenth or eighteenth century Europe. The walls were rough brick interspersed with shuttered windows. The ground beneath their feet was a riverbed of uneven cobblestones. A well jagged up out of the middle of the square but no rope hung from its cross-beam.

  “Where are we now?”

  “This is the Rat Court,” Margaret said.

  “I should ask why it’s called that, but I suppose I’m going to find out.”

  Margaret’s smile was not pleasant. “Not afraid of rats, are you?”

  “I’ll survive,” Fiona said.

  “They’ll eat you alive if they’re of a mind, girl.”

  She saw the rats then. They appeared in their dozens, in cracks and gaps in the walls, out of old boxes and from beneath piles of rubble swept into corners. Their fur was almost black and their eyes were very bright. Their pink tails writhed, tangling and untangling from each other. Plagues clouded in the shadows behind them.

  A number of them broke away and scuttled into the square. Fiona held herself rigid as they went past her. They converged on a black cloak or robe Fiona hadn’t noticed before, discarded on the ground near the well.

  The rats disappeared under the cloak. It bulged upwards as the rats climbed on top of each other within it. More and more of them joined until they stood almost as tall as the two women facing them. The movements of the hunched figure were too boneless to be mistaken for a human being.

  Fiona caught a glimpse of tails writhing inside its hood and then a voice spoke.

  We are the Rat Court. Why have you come to us?

  Margaret looked at Fiona and when she didn’t speak, she made a curt gesture with her cigarette. Fiona frowned at the hunched, bulging figure, tried to ignore the way its shape kept changing and cleared her throat.

  “I want to know who I am,” she said.

  Don’t you know?

  “No,” Fiona said. “Someone has changed my memories.”

  Shall we crawl into your thought-ways? Shall we find the forgotten cracks and secret spaces in your mind and tell you what we find within?

  “I would rather you didn’t, thank you.”

  Shall we tell you what we know? Shall we tell you where to go?

  “That’s more what I was thinking,” Fiona said with a dark look at Margaret. “Wait, what do you mean what you know? You know something already?”

  Don’t you remember us?

  “I’ve been here before?”

  What do you offer us? What will you give us?

  Fiona turned to Margaret.

  Margaret lifted her cupped hands. Her dog appeared in it, sleeping, looking just as it had before they entered the dream. All around the square, dozens of rats lifted themselves up and wrinkled their noses. Fiona felt the blood draining from her face.

  Margaret threw the dog down the well. It yelped once.

  Rats swarmed in from all sides. They climbed over each other, spilled over the lip of the well and plunged down after the dog. Fiona heard several muffled sounds of canine fright and pain.

  Fiona was not surprised to find herself trembling. “If you die in a dream, don’t you wake up?”

  “Not if I don’t want you to,” Margaret said.

  “You didn’t have to do that.” An edge of anger crept into her voice. “There must have been some other way.”

  “Rats don’t want much,” Margaret said. “But they see everything that happens here. Ask them your questions.”

  She made herself face the cloak with its pile of rats inside. Her mouth was dry. “Have I been here before?”

  We have seen you here before. It has been some time. You have danced with the chimney spiders and flown with the wooden pigeons.

  “Was my name Lucy?”

  Was it?

  “They’re not good with names,” Margaret said. “Don’t have much use for them.”

  Fiona tried to think of something else to ask. “Did I have friends here?”

  Friends?

  “You’re not really being a dog’s worth of helpfulness here, you know,” she said.

  The Rat Court hissed at her from several different parts of its shape. Speak to us like that again and we will pick your bones clean.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve just never spoken to a pile of rats before. What can you tell me about my time here?
”

  You have walked the Ruined City before. You have made your bargains with many of the inhabitants. You were here and then you were not. It was cold and then you were gone.

  “What does that mean?”

  It is getting cold again.

  The robe crumpled as rats ducked out from beneath it. Fiona tried not to back away as they passed her. It took barely seconds for them to vanish into the cracks and crevices around the square. In no time at all, they were gone.

  “Was that useful?” Fiona asked.

  “It tells me where we go next,” Margaret said. “I knew you must have been here before. Skilled dreamers always come here.” She drew on her cigarette, which had not burned down at all since they’d arrived in the dream. When she breathed out, the smoke turned into little winged shapes that flew upwards.

  “All right,” Fiona said, “where to now?”

  “They said you’ve flown with wooden pigeons. I know who we need to find.”

  “What was that about the cold?” Fiona asked as they pushed themselves into the air.

  Margaret shrugged. “Don’t let it bother you. Rats don’t think like people. Not much of what they say makes sense.”

  Yadrim followed the trail of Fiona’s living warmth up the stairs to Margaret’s apartment.

  He had been following her since their encounter outside the Tonno house. The monster in her shadow had grown in strength, much more than he might have expected. He had thought it wise to study her unseen and consider his tactics.

  For all the monster’s power, Yadrim did not think Fiona could control it. Without that control, the monster had limits. So he had killed and fed to rebuild his untended strength and waited until those limits presented an opening.

  Yadrim was not familiar with the herbs he could smell burning within the apartment, but he could guess their purpose from the chiming dreams he heard. He put his hand on the door and whispered a word. The door unlocked with a click and swung wide.

  Fiona sat slumped in an old chair, opposite a fleshy woman who was also unconscious. A dog, trapped in a nightmare, trembled in the woman’s lap. Petty bone charms of alignment and warding rotated at the cardinal points around the room.