Ghost Electricity

by Sean Cunningham

  She hadn’t expected the anger. She hadn’t considered how this affected Jessica. It sank in that Jessica had been carrying this secret for quite a while by herself.

  “Is Mr Beak nearby?” she asked.

  Jessica raised her phone. “He’s keeping pace.”

  “What, he’s sending you text messages as well?”

  Jessica nodded. “They’ve got internal telepathic radios. I built them a transceiver back home they can send texts through.” She frowned at her phone. “Can’t make it small enough to fit in a phone yet, but one day.”

  “What are you doing up in the loft anyway?” Fiona asked.

  “I’m going to invent something and sell it and make us rich,” Jessica said. “And then Mum won’t have to ring Dad up every month to hassle him about paying child support.”

  They disembarked at Sevenoaks. The streets were lined with the well-kept homes of those who commuted to London to work but wanted to live outside the hustle of the city. They used Jessica’s phone to navigate and occasionally it would chime as it received an update from Mr Shell back in the loft.

  They found the house without any trouble. It wasn’t as large as the Tonnos’ and was fully detached from its neighbours, with a green-filled yard and a sense of space. It stood several steps up from the standard of living at Hawthorn House.

  Jessica consulted her phone. “Mr Shell says the person we want is in there and he’s still alone. Let’s just walk up to the door and knock.”

  Fiona glanced down at her shadow and saw the thing that dwelled within it. She checked around her and saw Mr Beak settling on a street light. “You’re sure you want this? The last time I walked into a stranger’s house someone died.”

  “I’ll restrain myself,” Jessica said.

  “And the time before that,” Fiona said, “I had vampires and sorcerers and imploding mirrors.”

  Jessica scowled. “Are you sure you want to go in?”

  “Fine,” Fiona said. “If you’re emotionally traumatised by the experience, it’s your fault.” She marched up to the front door and stabbed the doorbell.

  Jessica’s phone chimed. She tilted it towards Fiona so she could read Mr Shell’s message.

  HE IS COMING DOWNSTAIRS.

  “Doesn’t go for text speak, does he?” Fiona asked.

  “Text speak makes him huffy.”

  The man who opened the door was in his forties. His name, according to Jessica’s research, was Matthias Graef. He wore a long-sleeved business shirt and had a glass of red wine in his hand. His fair hair was receding rapidly from the corners of his brow. He was the director of a company that only existed on paper and which did nothing but deposit a small sum of money in Fiona’s bank account every month.

  He looked annoyed in an absent-minded way to have two girls arrive unannounced on his doorstep, but when his eyes met Fiona’s the colour drained from his face.

  “Aha!” Jessica said. She thrust the flashlight in his face and flicked it on. “Get back inside.”

  Fiona thought of the collapsing edge of a glacier and three red trucks.

  Matthias stumbled back, his face blank. Fiona stepped in after Jessica and closed the door. “Did you even make sure no one was watching?”

  “What were you going to do, ask him if we could come in?” Jessica asked.

  “Of course I was. What is that thing anyway?”

  “It mesmerises people,” Jessica said. “I made it so I could get into movies for adults.”

  Fiona’s eyes narrowed. “What kind of adult movies?”

  “You know, action movies like Infinity Girl.”

  “Oh.”

  “Hey,” Matthias said, blinking. “What --?”

  Jessica stunned him with the light again. Fiona thought of ear wax and jellyfish songs.

  “Stop that,” Fiona said.

  “Leave this to me.” Jessica drew herself up in front of Matthias. She came up to his collarbone. “Matthias, we’re going to ask you questions and you’re going to answer them truthfully. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Matthias said, coming to again. “Hey, what are you doing in my house?”

  “We’re asking the questions here, Matthias,” Jessica said. “You’re answering them. Got it?”

  His mouth opened, but whatever he’d been about to say got caught on a puzzled frown. “Um, if you say so.”

  “Why are you sending money to Fiona?” Jessica asked.

  “No,” Fiona said. “You recognised me when you saw us on your doorstep. Tell me how you know me.”

  “Yeah, that’s a better question. Go on, tell us.”

  Matthias glanced from one to the other. He put his wine glass down on a table. “It will be easier to show you. Come with me.”

  He took a set of keys from his pocket, opened a door in the hallway and led them down into a cellar. Fluorescent lights stuttered on when he hit the switch and revealed a dusty room empty but for one thing.

  A sarcophagus stood in the centre of the room. It was made of stone and its sides were scrawled with words in a language Fiona didn’t recognise. The front of the sarcophagus was engraved with curving lines that evoked the shape of a woman. The engraving’s hair spilled down below her waist and hid her arms like a cape. There were no facial features, just a single large gemstone set in the middle of the face and a matching one in the centre of the chest.

  To Fiona’s new senses, the sarcophagus slept, but not deeply.

  “You were in this,” Matthias said.

  “I was – what? Asleep?”

  “I don’t think so. You were awake and alert when you came out.”

  Fiona eyed the sarcophagus warily. She moved close and put a hand out, not quite touching it. The air around it was cold. Just above the gemstone set in the engraving’s chest she felt a kind of current moving past her hand, like cold water.

  “When was this?” Fiona asked. “When was I taken out?”

  “Two or three years ago,” Matthias said. “I don’t remember exactly. It was a strange day but the weirdest thing was that you were so young.”

  Fiona frowned. “Why do you say that?”

  “This thing’s been sitting here for more than thirty years,” Matthias said. “I was a boy when it was placed here.”

  Jessica beamed. “See? I was right. You’re ancient.” She fished around in her bag and took out her pink glasses, slid them on and circled the sarcophagus.

  Fiona tried to ignore her. “What happened? What do you remember? Who were the people who brought me here?”

  “The same man who came back and said it was time to open it,” Matthias said. “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you anything about him. Every time I try I find that I don’t remember much. I can’t even describe him.” He shook his head. “I worried I might be losing my mind.”

  “You don’t even know his name?” Fiona asked.

  “He said his name was Smith,” Matthias said.

  “Brilliant. Why you though? Why here?”

  Matthias shrugged. “He said no one would think to look here. My father was a bank clerk and I’m a buyer for a large company. We’re no one remarkable, really. He paid my father rent for the cellar and it was useful to have that little bit of extra money every month.”

  “That money must come from somewhere,” Fiona said.

  “I – yes, I suppose it must.” Matthias’s brow crinkled. “See? Everything about Smith goes grey and vague. I’ve never even thought about that before.”

  “I’ll find out where it comes from,” Jessica said from behind the sarcophagus. She swept her phone out of her bag and started taking photos.

  “When he came back,” Fiona said, “when you – you let me out. What happened then?”

  “He said it was safe for you now,” Matthias said. “He wouldn’t explain. He said he would pay me more money, but that I was to arrange for most of it to go to another account. It was yours, wasn’t it?” Matthias waved a finger at her. “Lucy, that’s right. Your name is Lucy.”

>   Jessica snorted.

  “My name is Fiona,” she said.

  Matthias rubbed his right temple. “He called you Lucy.”

  “He must have taken you away from here before he turned you into Fiona,” Jessica said.

  Fiona tried to suppress the shiver that ran down her spine. “You’ve been staring at this thing with those silly glasses of yours. Do you know anything about it?”

  “I know one thing,” Jessica said. “Ever wondered what the opposite of a clock looks like?”

  Chapter 24 – Rob and Julian, Friday

  The third dead seer’s room was furnished like an office, a little old-fashioned but not out of place in London. The seer was slumped over the desk. Blood pooled under his head. Alistair Sacker, Shield Foundation director, noted that one of the man’s ruined eyeballs had landed in a cup of paperclips.

  Alistair began unbuttoning his coat. He was an orderly, meticulous man, from the trim of his grey beard to the seam pressed into his trousers. The chaos he had seen this morning offended him. “Well, David?”

  His son David left the woman passed out in the corner of the office, a pretty young thing who had served as the seer’s carer by pretending to be his secretary. “It’s been a busy night sir. A portal event in Birmingham, an outsider attack, Vivien LaPage’s vampire group either wiped out or near to and Jacob Mandellan in hospital in a coma. Word in the community is that every seer in Britain had a night from hell. I have a full incident report ready, but we will need to move quickly.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Dangerous materials from an unknown source have been couriered through England to France,” David said. “Bastien is up to something big. What little sense we had from the seers before they burned out tells us it’s tonight and it’s catastrophic. We expect the couriers to return today and I would like your permission to intercept them for questioning.”

  Alistair handed his coat to the third man in the room, his secretary Iain. The bald, hunched man scuttled forward, folded Alistair’s coat over his arm and retreated. Iain had intercepted him in the foyer of the Shield Foundation headquarters in Temple and sweated as much for interrupting the routine of Alistair’s arrival as he did for the news he bore.

  Iain had shown Alistair the Foundation’s other two seers before this one. The first, whose room was furnished like a rec room, had been laid on the floor beneath a white sheet. The second, who made her predictions from a psychiatrist’s couch, was sedated, her face covered in self-inflicted wounds. She would not be useful again.

  The loss of such vital resources stoked Alistair’s temper. “Intercepting them before they crossed the Channel was the obvious move, David. You were operational commander last night and it was within your authority to make it happen.”

  “By the time we understood what was happening, the couriers were in France.” David looked uncomfortable and not because of Alistair’s disapproval. “Sir, there may be political consequences if we pick up the couriers.”

  “Who are they then?” Alistair asked.

  “Robert Cromwell, who you may recall is an outcast from the London werewolf packs.”

  “Then we have the opportunity to rid the world of a damned werewolf,” Alistair said. “The London packs have no grounds to object as he isn’t one of their own.”

  “The other is Julian Blackwood sir,” David said. “He’s resurfaced. We believe he is without his warlock’s ring.”

  Alistair’s brows drew together. The room was dead silent.

  To Iain he said, “I want to speak to Orson Mandellan in fifteen minutes.”

  Iain shot out of the room like a greyhound.

  David stepped closer. “Sir, do we want to pick this fight? With Bastien making trouble in France, the Blackwoods –”

  “We want this fight,” Alistair said. “Julian Blackwood is guilty of murder. Bringing him down will give us considerable gains of authority in London specifically and Britain generally. Prepare a capture team, David, and bring them both in, dead or alive.”

  The old magical families of Britain presented the largest obstacle to Alistair’s plans to lock down the shadow world, an obstacle he had yet to find a way to demolish. The most powerful of the families could trace themselves back over two centuries, to the time when they were folding talented commoners into their ranks via marriage and scouring the world for anything that looked like it might be more than primitive superstition.

  The Mandellans were a solid power by the beginning of the nineteenth century, long before the creation of the society that would become the Shield Foundation. They were the most visible of the old families and had held a place on the council since its creation in the late 1800s. Where they led, other families appeared to follow.

  But Alistair knew better. He had long ago realised the key to bringing order to Britain’s shadow world was the Blackwood family. Thought by most to be of the same vintage as the Mandellans, Alistair had found traces of that secretive clan going back a thousand years. What little he had learned of them led him to believe their power came from five black rings passed down through their line, rings that were nothing like those worn by other witches and warlocks.

  Alistair knew that the Blackwoods had been at the heart of British magic since the new age began. If he could break their power, or take it for his own, all the rest would come apart. The ancient schemes, the alliances with human-killing monsters, it could all end.

  All he needed was a crack in their armour – like a wayward heir, far from the protection of his family.

  Dead or alive, he’d told David, knowing full well that David wasn’t good at bringing targets in alive.

  Rob ran with the other werewolves through the moonless, starlit night. They ran on all fours, as wolves. Grant was in the lead, as the pack leader, and the four other werewolves of his pack followed in a narrow formation, their place determined by their status. Rob ran at the back. He was larger than any of them, even Grant.

  They were far from any signs of civilisation. The nearest farmstead was twenty kilometres away and no roads passed anywhere near them. Cattle ranged free across the enormous outback property and wild pigs snuffled through the tangles of dry scrub, but no animal that caught their scent was brave enough to come near them.

  Ahead, far across the parched land, a column of white light shone up into the vault of the sky. Rob would see the same light years in the future in a warehouse in Birmingham, but fail to recognise it. Grant and the others had talked of stellar alignments and the position of Mars. Rob didn’t understand much of it.

  What he understood was that the man who had called down the strange werewolf that had bitten him, the one who had ended forever Rob’s dreams for the future, that man had escaped the pack last time. Tonight he was trying again.

  The black rage in Rob’s mind wanted vengeance. It wanted to rend the flesh of this man, to hear his howls of fear and pain as Rob tore him apart. But another part of Rob, a quieter part all but drowned out by the monster’s fury, just wanted to stop the man, so he couldn’t do to someone else’s life what he’d already done to Rob.

  Julian used a towel to wipe condensation off the hotel bathroom mirror. He turned his face this way and that to examine the damage done last night. He looked like he’d been in a knife fight a few days since and the dark circles beneath his eyes suggested illness or a committed drug habit.

  But he had the day off work and the weekend after that. He could put himself back together by Monday.

  His body felt hollow. He was almost numb to the electric current in the white fluorescent light above the mirror. It was a familiar feeling from other times when he’d pushed himself too hard. He had gone through worse, but whatever was in that damned crate had taken more from him that he realised at the time.

  The reflection in the mirror rippled like a pond and the bathroom wall behind him faded away to white clouds tumbling in the wind.

  Julian blinked and the vision was gone.

  Last night, half-dead by the mo
torway after their fight with Vivien’s vampires, he had touched the deep power of the Earth. He had touched it during his childhood, in rituals conducted on convergences of ley lines and beneath certain stars. But the power that moved along those cosmic alignments was a soft whisper, barely heard and amplified only with great effort. He had scoffed at that power, he and Jacob both, as they learned to channel the power of cities and civilisation. But next to the motorway he had reached down, reached deep, in a way he never had before. And the Earth responded.

  He suspected it had not left him unscathed.

  He heard a knock at the hotel room door and Rob’s voice as he answered it. Julian wrapped a towel around his waist and it meant nothing more dangerous than breakfast.

  “Got us food,” Rob said. He wore what was left of his work trousers, lashed around his waist with a rope from the van. He stood guard over a trolley laden with pastries, fruit, cheese and several covered dishes of hot food. Beads of moisture rolled down the outsides of jugs of juice. Miraculously, he wasn’t yet eating any of it. “I don’t know about you, but I didn’t eat enough vampires last night.”

  Julian nodded towards several bags sitting on one of the beds. “What are those?”

  “Clothes,” Rob said. “The guy down in reception gave me a number to call for a place that delivers. I didn’t think you had anything left in your magic bag.” He tipped the contents of the shopping bags out on the bed. “I don’t know what size you are but you’re pretty close to my height.”

  In the pile were big t-shirts with a familiar designer label on them and packets of socks and underpants. Rob had covered the rest of their needs by choosing baggy sportswear.

  “I see we’re returning to London in black and fluorescent yellow,” Julian said.

  “They had pink too.”

  “Yes, pink isn’t quite my colour.” He picked up a shirt. “What do I owe you?”

  “Nah, forget it,” Rob said. “I just about got you killed last night. This is the least I can do.”

  “The vampires were at least half my fault,” Julian said.

  “But I started it by knocking off my old flatmate after Dean turned him. Don’t worry about it. I owe you.”