Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (18 page)

The man said, “I didn’t believe it either, but now Gavin too?”

As Sharon felt the walls of reality try to press in against her, she shuffled this way and that against the shelves until finally she discovered a movement, slowly circling the edge of their conversation, which maintained invisibility without crippling her at the knees. She made a mental note to shake Sammy by the throat until he told her how to stay invisible without movement.

“It’s a myth,” spat the woman. “It wouldn’t; it can’t.”

“I’m not saying I disagree with you, but you saw the reports. They were torn apart!”

“So you are disagreeing with me, Eddie?”

“No, no, I’m just… Well, yeah, I am. We took away its mistress.”

“Did we?” she snapped, and aware that her voice was once again rising above civilised levels, leaned in tight and rapidly hissed, “Did we though, did we? Because I thought we did, but then when you look again what did we actually do, because we don’t have her, do we? We don’t have her and I’m looking at the figures from the last quarter and I’m telling you it’s not enough, so if we did then we didn’t, but anyway why would it? Why would it come through now? Not that I’m saying it did, because it can’t!”

“Then how do you explain it? First Gavin, then Scott, and last night Christian thought he heard howling. How many does it have to get?”

“It might be something else.”

“You don’t believe that,” snapped the man known as Eddie.

“The Midnight Mayor?”

“The Midnight Mayor doesn’t tear the fucking heads off the people he kills; he doesn’t play cat’s cradle with their intestines!”

“Just because it came for them doesn’t mean it’ll come for us.”

“Of course it’ll come for us!” wailed Eddie, then pressed his hands over his mouth as if by holding back the words, he could hold back the thought. The woman flinched, waited for his breathing to slow as
through his fingers he whispered, “It’ll come for us and it’ll keep coming and how do you stop it? We did this, we let it out and it killed them both, and now it’s going to howl and keep on howling until we get her back. We have to get her back.”

“We can’t.”

“We must!”

“You’re not listening! We can’t, we can’t, not while—”

Coffee in hand, someone passed by so close to Sharon she felt the breeze from his passage on the back of her neck. She shuddered, straining to stay unseen, relaxed. The man and the woman smiled at him uneasily; the woman gave a mechanical little wave. Their colleague waved back, kept on going. The two huddled deeper, their bodies pressing almost into each other in an urgency to stay apart from everything else.

“What if we just tell him?” whispered the man.

“You want to? You really want to do that?”

“Maybe he’ll understand?”

“Maybe he’ll wear you for wallpaper, and anyway…” The woman paused, her head snapping round. For a moment she looked straight at Sharon, and her face flickered in doubt. Then her eyes slipped away; but it was there, an instant, a single moment. She had looked and, more importantly, she had
perceived.
“Did you…?” she murmured.

“Did I what?”

“Did you see…?”

“See what? Jesus, I can’t handle this.”

“Stop it! Stop it, it’ll be…” Again the woman’s head turned, searching the empty air. “Listen.”

“What?”

“I said, listen!”

“I don’t hear…” Then he too trailed off. “Footsteps?” he murmured.

“Do you think it’s
him?”

“Listen!”

He listened.

But by now the footsteps were gone.

Sharon walked into the single, small, women’s toilet, all stainless steel and polished surfaces, turned the lock on the door behind her and breathed.

StupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidSTUPID!

What kind of stupid bloody idiot thought they could just swan into some stranger’s office, what kind of pig-headed fool decided they were going to save the bloody city? It was insane! It was bloody stupid insane, and now she’d missed a whole day at work and why? Because a goblin–a
goblin,
which wasn’t exactly a great recommendation to begin with–had popped out of nowhere and told her it was her responsibility. Like
shit.

She pressed her back against the door and forced herself to breathe, whispering to herself, “I am beautiful, I am wonderful, I have a secret, I am beautiful, I am wonderful, I have a secret, I am beautiful, I am—” She slammed her fist into the door. “I am beautiful and wonderful and have a bloody secret!”

She hit the door again, hard enough to hurt, and felt a bit better.

Closed her eyes.

Breathed.

She was a shaman.

Think shaman.

She half-thought she heard Dez’s voice whispering in the back of her brain and raised a single imperious finger and whispered, “Zip it.”

He–or it–or possibly she, if he really was just another part of herself–zipped it.

She breathed through her nose until she felt confident enough to breathe through her mouth without hyperventilating. She turned to face the door and tried to remember the feeling of being unseen, the cool casualness of it. It wasn’t a conscious will, there was no intoning or furrowing of brow; it was something deeper than that. An invisibility that came from the overfamiliar, a sense that she was a part of something so big that no one could really understand it, and, as no one could understand it, no one really tried to look.

She thought she could hear Sammy, see him gesturing furiously at the vacant air, proclaiming,
You can see the city and it can see you…

She opened her eyes, and there it was again, that tinge overlaid on reality, the smell of things that had come before, the whisper of

     
God I need more coffee

did he see me do that?

         
#myinsanity tweets what a fucking waste of time

“Shut up,” she whispered under her breath. “Shut up shut up!”

    
Jesus Christ what does she want now?

        
if you could just flag the issues here

concerned client, I’ll give you concerned fucking client!

           
Help us

“Stop it!” she hissed at the twisting shadows hanging off the walls. “Stop it stop it now!”

      
What will he do if he finds out?

oh God, Prozac

         
Help us

don’t want to tell don’t wanna don’t wanna

      
Help us

he’ll kill me Jesus he’ll kill me

      
howl? howl? I didn’t mean it. Didn’t mean it didn’t mean

      
HELP US, SHAMAN!!

The words cut through so loud and hard that Sharon yelped, jumping against the door of the toilet and slamming her elbow into the handle. She grabbed at the nearest stable object, which turned out to
be a hand dryer that whirred into instant and obedient life, yelped again, and jumped back against the door one more time.

Being a shaman, she was beginning to suspect, was not necessarily a dignified career move.

Help us,
whispered the walls.
Help us.

She pinched the skin on the back of her hand until it hurt, then rubbed her hand until it didn’t, took a steadying breath and walked out through the shut toilet door.

A second later she walked back in and undid the lock, just in case someone needed to use it later.

Help us,
and the voice that whispered it in her head wasn’t male, wasn’t female, wasn’t loud, wasn’t quiet, wasn’t soft, wasn’t hard, wasn’t furious, wasn’t breathy; it was just… a sense without sound, meaning without words, pictures with no colour, a collection of certainties that assembled in her consciousness to proclaim, simply, truly and with no respect for the boundaries of language,
Help us, shaman, help us.

Papers billowed gently in the draught from her passage, and deskbound eyes flickered up at the faint thud of her boots on the carpet, only for heads to turn back down as people failed to perceive the source of distraction, this moving unease on the air. Sharon walked without quite knowing where she was bound, confident and brisk, with the office stride of a busy worker, invisible to all. And now that she looked, really looked, there were echoes of other things, of truths unperceived. The taste of pills, dry on her tongue, dissolving to a sticky slime before swallowing; the feel of sweat sticking to the cotton shirt on her back, not that she wore such a thing; and, perhaps, hanging over it all, clinging like cobwebs to the fluorescent lights in the ceiling, the bitter adrenaline taste of fear.

Help us,
whispered the walls,
help us.

She thought she caught a glimpse of Dez moving beside her, his reflection layered over hers in the great panes of internal glass wall. He seemed to be slightly ahead of her, his face fixed towards a door at the end of the open office on which a yellow sign proclaimed,
AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY. DANGER–ELECTRICITY
. There was a greyish shimmer to the door, a thickness in the air about it, but Sharon put her best foot forward and her head down and, like a bull faced with a bright red flag, marched straight towards it. She swung her arms from the elbows, took
a deep breath, heard,
Help us, shaman, help us,
strode into the door and, like a bumble bee bouncing off cold glass, slammed straight back and fell on her arse.

The world seemed to freeze. She sat there as Dez faded, along with the whispers of the office walls, the magical tastes and senses of the place, the dirty secrets left scratched into the air, receding all at once as reality reasserted itself. Her bum smarted, her ears rang, and the door remained resolutely (a) a door and (b) in front of her rather than behind, as she sat on the floor, legs splayed out, mouth open. And she was visible.

A voice behind her said, “Um… Ms Li?”

The words took a few seconds to register. Then she was on her feet in a single movement and already proclaiming, “Yeah, but see I’m here to deliver the coffee yeah, Coffee Unlimited, the best coffee ever and… How do you know who I am?”

She turned and looked at her unlikely accoster. Straight carrot-coloured hair, a face frazzled with freckles, a striped shirt that someone may have told him was smart as a practical joke, and a blue tie covered in big white spots. He stood holding a coffee in one hand and a visitor’s badge in the other. His face was set in a grin of apology and hope; his voice was Welsh, and his tone was the urgent tone of a man who doesn’t understand how he could be in trouble but feels sure he is anyway.

A name surfaced from the marshland of memory.

“Rhys?” she hazarded.

Rhys, the not-quite-qualified druid and sometime IT consultant, grinned with his teeth and cowered with his lips, a strange battle working across his face. Sharon looked left, looked right, saw no one else who might have witnessed the less-than-shaman-like incident with the insufferably solid door and added very carefully, “You’re not here serving forces of darkness and destruction, are you? Only that’d be a mega-problem.”

“Um, I don’t think so,” mumbled Rhys. “I’m serving the servers, in fact.” He almost laughed at his own joke, then thought better of it and hung his head. Across his features hope and shame fought their long-running battle, and the favourite took the prize.

Sharon looked from the druid to the door and back again, then grabbed Rhys by the sleeve. “You! Toilet! Now!”

“Oh, but I…” he began. But he was already being frogmarched away, his grin of unease and confusion stretching almost to his ears. He found himself, to his surprise, pushed bodily into the nearest women’s toilet and the door slammed behind him.

Rhys cowered as Sharon smacked one palm against the wall by his left ear and, with her other hand, snatched the coffee cup from his grasp and deftly threw it in the bin.

“Oh, but see…” he began as the liquid seeped away.

“What the bloody hell are you doing in this bloody place and what the hell is wrong with that bloody door and you’d better tell me because I know bloody kung fu and am the knower of the hidden bloody path!”

A finger capped with a carefully trimmed nail, which had been painted blue until Sharon got bored with the maintenance work, quavered before the tip of Rhys’s nose.

“I um… Well, see, it’s, uh… We’re in the ladies’ loo,” muttered Rhys, “which is fine, because it’s, uh… but I’ve never been in a ladies’ loo, see, and it’s not that it’s not nice to see you, because it is, it’s very nice indeed, but—”

“Rhys!” barked Sharon. “Doors! Walls! Voices! You! Spill!”

“Ah, now, yes, I see, I, uh…” He paused, his chest swelled, his shoulders drew back and, with a sudden dread of what was to come, Sharon found herself leaning away as Rhys spluttered, “I uh… I… I… aaaaahhh…”

He sneezed.

The first sneeze was merely a shriek from the back of the throat, punctuated by an “I’m so sorry, it’s just that…” The second was a great heaving from the shoulders. “When I get nervous, see, it’s this…” By the third sneeze, Sharon was taking cover as far away as she could in the tiny space. Rhys’s eyes dribbled, his nose turned red, and he rummaged frantically in his pocket for a much-used tissue. “Had it all my life, see, and it’s… it’s…
it’s…”

“Allergies?”

“Allergies,” he agreed. “Though they say it’s also psycho… psycho… pssyycchho–
atchoo!
–somatic, a stress thing.”

“I wasn’t judging.”

“That’s very nice of you, it’s very nice, only I… I… aaahhhh…”
She waited as Rhys’s body shook and his nose ran and his eyes seemed to swell in their sockets and his ears turned pink. “I don’t want to be any trouble, see?” he managed to whimper.

“What are you doing here?” Her words, in the confined space of the toilet, should have been a furious hiss. Yet somehow Rhys’s look of abject allergy-racked desperation made it dissolve into a gentler, more consoling enquiry.

“I maintain the servers,” he explained. “I’m an IT consultant. I came to consult.” Then, nervously dabbing the sweat and snot off his top lip with the sodden end of his tissue, “Are you… are you really delivering the coffee, Ms Li?”