Ghost Electricity

by Sean Cunningham

  She turned to Margaret and said, each word coming out in a white cloud, “What’s happening over there?”

  But Margaret was changing. Like cloth being drawn in, her bulk vanished. Her dress turned black, became a high-collared soldier’s uniform. The fat beneath her skin slid away and her skin itself drained of life.

  “Oh no, not again,” Roy said. He hopped off the crate and legged it.

  “Yadrim,” Fiona said, her insides frozen.

  His face was all sharp angles. His amber eyes gleamed bright in the near-night. He straightened his fingers, then curled them into claws.

  Two arms of blackness shot up out of Fiona’s shadow. Yadrim grabbed them by the wrists and the big black hands groped impotently at him. Yadrim had to shift his feet to balance himself, but this time he appeared to be much stronger than the thing in her shadow.

  Fiona turned round and tried to run. She made it no more than a step before her feet were yanked out from under her. She landed painfully on her elbows and cried out. She kicked, but whatever gripped her didn’t let go.

  She rolled over.

  Yadrim still had the two black arms held tight in his white hands. He leaned back, bracing his feet against the rough ground.

  It’s your shadow, stupid, she said to herself. He’s holding you by your shadow.

  Fiona thrust downwards with her hands and shot into the air. Yadrim pulled hard and she crashed back down onto the rough ground.

  Like a sailor hauling in a fishing net, Yadrim pulled her towards him. Fiona clawed at the loose soil for purchase but found nothing.

  Behind Yadrim’s head, she saw the wood and paper birds drawing closer.

  Fiona shoved herself off the ground and plunged at Yadrim feet-first. She caught him off-balance and before he could recover, her boots slammed into his face. Even then he didn’t fall. He grabbed her ankle in a grip like a cold iron vice. Pain shot up her leg. Fiona screamed and kicked him again with her free foot. Yadrim thrust her out to arm’s length.

  The cloud of battling wood and paper birds parted.

  A shrieking glass raven shot out of it. It curved at the last second, extended a wing and sliced cleanly across Yadrim’s throat.

  He let go of Fiona and clutched his neck, where sluggish blood had begun to flow. Yadrim staggered backwards and above him, the wooden pigeons and paper birds scattered in a thousand directions.

  Fiona shoved downwards with her hands and shot upwards. As she tumbled into the sky she heard the glass raven. “Get out of here!”

  Without knowing what she did, Fiona pushed down again, not on the air but on the fabric of the dream of the Ruined City itself. She burst free and plummeted into the shapeless ocean of formless dream.

  Chapter 20 – Fiona, Thursday Night

  Fiona stood by the bank of a river. She knew it was the Thames and that she had washed ashore in the dream of London, though again she had returned to a time before the city itself had existed.

  In the way of dreams she moved effortlessly from the context of one to the other. The fear of being caught in Yadrim’s grip and the exhilaration of freedom faded. She was here by the river and the tide was coming in.

  There was no sun, but Fiona’s shadow was behind her. Turning, she put her fists on her hips and glared at it.

  “Come up out of there,” she said.

  Her shadow didn’t move.

  “I can see you in there,” Fiona said and that was half true. She could see her shadow was not empty, though she could not make out what lay within it. “It’s about time we had a talk.”

  Her shadow remained silent.

  “I’ve had enough of this. You know what’s going on. I know you do. I order you to come out of there and explain yourself.”

  Nothing happened.

  “I don’t think it has to do what you say,” said a voice behind her. “If you’re in danger, perhaps, but otherwise it can do as it pleases.”

  Fiona whirled, ready to defend herself or flee, but the person who had spoken was the boy she’d met here before.

  He wasn’t a boy any more though. He was several years older and those years had done him a lot of good. He had an easy self-assurance to him now and the kind of smile that suggested a joke only the two of them shared. Fiona’s angry retort stumbled on her tongue.

  You like him a lot more this time, don’t you? said an entirely unwelcome voice in the back of her mind.

  “You know all about shadow monsters now, do you?” she asked.

  “As it happens, it’s a part of my training,” he said. “If you aren’t the one who placed it there to protect you, I’m afraid your ability to command it is limited. But that’s an answer of sorts, isn’t it? You’re always looking for answers when we meet here.”

  He had filled out too, she noticed. He wore a black tunic this time, but it left his arms bare and he had developed lean, well-toned muscles. His clothing looked more martial, as though he’d become a soldier. A sword in a leather scabbard hung at his side. He wore a glove on his left hand. Gold bands like strips of circuitry ran from a metal ring on the glove’s palm to a gleaming crystal set on the back.

  “Are you here to guide me this time?” he asked.

  “You tell me.”

  He took a step closer and looked deep into her eyes. “It has been no time at all for you, has it?” he asked.

  “Since we last met? That was last night.”

  “And it’s the beginning for you.”

  She frowned. “We’ve met more than once?”

  “Many times,” he said. “Though I think it might upset my wife to know that.”

  Damn, she thought at the mention of a wife.

  “Shall we trade?” he asked. “Something you want for something I want?”

  “What do you think I want?” Fiona said.

  “To know who you are. That’s always what you want.” His smile was wry. “I still remember trying to show off by finding that old reflection of you. I’m sorry it upset you. I’ve never been able to make amends for that.”

  “And what do you want in return?” Fiona asked.

  “Hope.”

  Fiona frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “War is coming.” He looked even older then. She saw responsibilities gather on his shoulders and a determination to meet them in the set of his jaw. “If there was a time when peace could have been found, it has passed. I will fight for my people but I fear the worst. I believe we will destroy each other and everything we have ever been. Show me your future. Give me hope that we will live beyond the terrible mistake we are about to make.”

  Her eyes traced the lines of care and worry starting to draw themselves over his youthful features. I should meet a guy like this, she thought, and he’s from thousands of years ago.

  “There’s someone after me,” Fiona said. “I don’t know what he is. I’ll show you my future if you show me how to fight him.”

  He nodded. “Done.”

  She held out her hand and he took it. His grip was firm but careful. She could feel the calluses on his hands from long hours of working with a sword.

  The dream of the place where the river floods spun around them. They stood in spring sunlight on the bank of the Thames, on Southbank, and the air was clean as if washed by recent rain. Tourists flowed along the river walk, impressions of people blurring in and out of visibility. The white wheel of the London Eye towered to their left. Ferries puttered up and down the river and on the far bank the city raised its towers to the sky. Some old, some new, all trying to capture and create some aspect of a city that had been so many things in its long history.

  She studied his profile as he stared at the scene. His need for hope was plain to see in his furrowed brow and the set of his mouth.

  She was aware that they were still holding hands.

  “It’s like green shoots in old ashes,” he said. “The magic here is still weak, but the earth recovers. We burn it all the way down to the rock and it takes millennia, but it recovers.”<
br />
  “Is it what you were looking for?”

  He turned to face her and took her other hand. It felt ridiculous, what with the glove he was wearing, but she didn’t shake him off. “Thank you,” he said. “It will do.”

  He stepped back and his demeanour changed. “Let’s see what you can do. Visualise an object, something you see every day. Imagine it in your hand.”

  Fiona drew a blank and then thought of a series of completely useless things, like music and water and a grey funeral barge. She finally settled on a fork. She held out her hand and concentrated on it.

  A fork, the kind in the Kendall kitchen, flickered briefly in her palm.

  Fiona made an annoyed sound and tried to focus harder. The fork appeared again, briefly became a spoon, then a wooden spoon and then vanished.

  “Enough,” he said.

  “I can do it,” Fiona said.

  “That was just a test to see how far you’ve come. You have power but no control and what I asked you to do is adept level.”

  “I have to do it,” Fiona said. “You don’t know what’s after me. I don’t want to just run away again like – like –”

  “Less skilled dreamers learn to use what is around them,” he said, “to make weapons from the dream itself.” He gestured to the river. “How well do you know the history of this place in the waking world?”

  Church bells tolled close by and in many different directions. Fiona didn’t count the chimes and didn’t think they could be counted. They didn’t mark out any hour that stood within the march of linear time.

  Closer, on the streets of London, men rang bells and cried out, “Bring out your dead!” They pushed carts stacked with yellow bodies covered in swollen sores. They wore cloth masks or held bundles of pungent herbs to their noses.

  The fear in the air was like mist.

  Few people lasted long in the dream. Regular dreamers only intersected the great dreams by accident and rarely for more than a few moments. The dreamers were memories, impressions, there and gone once they’d printed themselves on her mind. Fiona saw men and women hurrying about their business, unqualified plague doctors offering their diagnoses and women offering herb bundles for sale. The city tried to cling to its daily routines, but the plague had spread up from the dockland slums and changed everything.

  Black-winged angels roamed the streets with faces shadowed by hoods, and they were the plague, or at least what some people imagined it to be. Like everyone else, they were there and gone, embracing those who succumbed at last and reaching contagious hands towards healthy passers-by.

  London was a crowded city of wood and thatch. The buildings stood jammed against each other and cantilevered out over the streets in jetties. Had there been a sun, they would nearly have obscured it. The buildings almost hid the smoke from the fires the city authorities thought would cleanse the air of the Great Plague.

  In this dream Fiona waited, until Yadrim arrived.

  He was whole again. Above the collar of his uniform, his neck showed no sign of injury or scar. Fiona assumed he had managed to convince himself he wasn’t dying and so had remained in dreams. He might not have had to try hard.

  “Going to face me again?” Yadrim asked. Dreams of plague-wracked London streamed around him. He approached her in no great hurry. “That has not gone well for you in the past.”

  “If you have a sore throat, I could try dreaming up a cough lolly for you,” Fiona said.

  “Bravado this time,” Yadrim said. “Quaint. We’ve spent so little time together as the clock measures it, but having watched you grow up really does leave me feeling like I know you well. Here, a screaming little girl, there a sarcastic teenager trying not to lose control of her bowels. Then a baby crying and now almost a woman.”

  She stood her ground. “What do you want with me?”

  “They never tell you much, do they?” He prowled closer. “I want to live.”

  She looked at the pale skin stretched across the blades of his cheekbones. She glimpsed the fangs in his mouth. “You appear lively enough to me.”

  “Oh, this other life?” He held up a hand and displayed his claws. “To be sure, I was turned willingly. To be so strong and aware of so much is, as you might expect, a rush greater than anything I experienced as a human being. I have hungered for the lives of others and I have known the ecstasy of consuming them. I have walked a thousand battlefields and I have revelled in slaughter you could not imagine.”

  He lowered his hand. “But for all of that, I miss being alive. I miss it very much.”

  “You might have thought of that in the first place,” Fiona said. “Besides, I don’t see how killing me will make you human again.”

  “No you don’t, do you?” His clawed feet were silent on the cobblestones. “By taking your life I may well live forever. I will be human and more than human. They never tell you about that, do they? It does strike me as unfair but, all things considered, it is an injustice I can” – the corners of his mouth turned upwards – “live with.”

  He was on her in a blink, grabbing her by her hair and pulling her head back to expose her neck. His mouth stretched wide and his fangs were bright in the gloom of the narrow street.

  Two arms shot up from her shadow and seized Yadrim. The three of them locked in place and Yadrim hissed. The thing in Fiona’s shadow had one of his arms pinned against his side. Yadrim began, inch by inch, to lift it outwards.

  Fiona struck.

  The dream lurched and they were in a different time. They were one year forward from the Great Plague of 1665. Fiona had brought them to the Great Fire of London.

  Yadrim snarled. He threw Fiona to the ground and grappled with the monster in her shadow.

  Burning buildings surrounded them. The fire, which had supposedly begun in a bakery, had advanced steadily across the wood and thatch of London’s architecture. The tar and paper shacks of the poor burned and the lead roof of Saint Paul’s Cathedral melted.

  The air burned in Fiona’s lungs. She fixed watering eyes on the flames consuming the wooden houses and tried to breathe without coughing. She reached for the fire.

  It was like moving water. If her will was the shape of a hand, the fire ran through her fingers in burning streams. She scooped up the dream flames, leaving arcs of fire in the air, and hurled them down on Yadrim.

  The fire roared up around his cold, dead flesh. He howled in pain.

  “Stay here,” Fiona whispered. Like Margaret’s dog. “Stay here.”

  Yadrim spun and danced. He smashed a wall apart and brought it tumbling down on top of him. Bursting clear of the burning rubble, he rolled uselessly on the ground. Fiona could feel him trying to slip away, to flee from the dream, but she held him there.

  When Yadrim had fallen into a shuddering, smouldering heap on the road, Fiona allowed herself to collapse on her back and he vanished. She put her arm over her face so her sleeve was against her mouth. She felt exhausted, as though she’d run every muscle in her body to its breaking point. She closed her eyes against the stinging smoke.

  Wake.

  Fiona had a headache when she came to. With one hand pressed to the spike of pain driven through her right eye, she pushed herself out of the couch and wobbled to her feet.

  Margaret’s filthy apartment had a new stink riding over the top of the smell of dog. She didn’t recognise it, but when she looked down at her feet she saw the burned form of Yadrim.

  She had heard that burning human flesh smelled like cooking bacon, though she couldn’t remember where she’d learned that. Yadrim didn’t smell like that. He stank like a burning rubbish tip.

  His entire body was red and black and scoured down to the bone in some places. She didn’t know precisely how hard he was to kill, but surely this was enough. Fiona looked around for something to brain him with just in case, but Margaret’s belongings were either uselessly small junk or far too heavy for her to lift.

  Margaret was dead. Her head lolled back and the side of her thro
at lay raggedly open. Blood had run down her lifeless body. Her dog huddled in her lap, torn between watching Fiona with large, frightened eyes and licking at the drying blood.

  Vertigo tugged at Fiona as she turned. She walked carefully out of Margaret’s apartment, down the stairs and into the clear air of London’s night. She had no idea what time it was. It felt like days had passed. She took deep breaths and tried to remember which way she’d come to get there. She wondered where to find the nearest all-night pharmacy.

  A black shape swooped out of the night. It was the size of a bird but it reflected too much light and was making the wrong kind of sounds. It alighted on a low balcony railing with a clink of glass on cheap metal.

  It was a mechanical bird with tinted glass feathers and black gems for eyes. Fiona could just make out the ticking shapes of clockwork inside it.

  “Got out alive, huh?” the bird said. “Feel free to thank me any time now.”

  Chapter 21 – Rob and Julian, Thursday Night

  “After all this time,” Jacob said. He was grinding his teeth together. He took the streets of central London at a speed even he would call fast.

  “What?” Miss Koh asked.

  “I wasn’t talking to you.” He overtook one bus and narrowly avoided a head-on collision with another. The driver blared his horn and flashed his headlights as Jacob swung out of the way. “He doesn’t get to do this to me. Not after all this time.”

  Xrixl, the daemon in the satnav, had already located a nearby parking space. The arrows on the satnav screen kept changing from green to red as the daemon picked up on the mood of its master. Jacob swerved into the parking space, shut the engine off, grabbed his coat from the back seat and swung out the door all in the space of three seconds. Miss Koh barely managed to get her door shut before the central locking chirped.

  They were at Trafalgar Square, the heart of London from which all distances were measured, and from where a spider that Jacob meant to see waited at the heart of his web. Power invisible to ordinary people hummed in the four plinths spaced around the square and arced up to meet Nelson’s Column. It spread across the city in numerous discrete cords, each stretching out to an old plague pit or cemetery. Jacob strode across the square so quickly Miss Koh had to run to keep up. He could feel the eyes of the bronze lions at the foot of the Column on him, feel their hunger for ghost electricity, but he ignored them.