Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (48 page)

Gretel was rolling, using her free arm to tug away the rest of the bags holding her down, while Sally kicked and bit and slashed at the rustling clouds that threatened in turn to engulf her. Edna managed to wriggle, snake-like, across the floor to where Kevin lay choking and hacking, his face almost lost beneath a writhing mass of plastic. She struggled to drag a couple of bags away from the vampire’s face, then threw them aside, at which they drifted upwards to join the swarm attacking Sally.

As Kevin’s mouth and face came free, the vampire looked up, and shrieked, “Stop the spell!”

“I don’t know how.”

“Find the trigger mechanism!”

“I don’t know what that looks like!”

“Smash stuff until you do!”

Faced with this uncouth suggestion, Edna hesitated. Meanwhile a sudden ear-splitting shriek announced that Sally, raining shredded plastic around her, had pulled herself free enough to stagger to her feet and snap her wings open. Hopping clumsily, one foot still tangled in plastic, the banshee struggled to the window and, with the aerodynamic elegance of a sofa, launched herself out into the night. A great billow of plastic bags followed, twisting like live creatures. For a moment, writhing across the sky, the swarming mess of plastic seemed to take on a single dragon-like form.

Then Sally was gone, plummeting towards the earth. The mass of plastic followed, snapping in the sky with the sound of a battle pennant in a storm. The banshee got to within a few feet of an uncomfortable encounter with gravity, then snapped her wings back open and twisted in the air, passing over neat hedges and tidy stone paving with enough speed to send leaves dancing up in her passage. She skimmed over bus shelters, then looped her way above the nearby railway, and still the plastic swarm snaked after her, hissing in her wake.

“Smash things!” hissed the vampire amid the wreckage of the office. Edna, shaking from the ends of her pendant earrings to the toes of her sensible slip-on shoes, grabbed the nearest waste-paper bin and started to break up what remained of the place. Glass flew from computer screens, desks splintered, drawers spilt their contents across the floor, books tumbled from shelves, paper exploded in the air as Edna tore through the office, apologising silently to each and every item that she trashed.

Outside, Sally folded her wings in tight and swerved along the platforms of Heron Quays station, dipping so low her claws nearly scratched the shining metal rails. Behind her, the snake-swarm, lashing wildly in its flight, lost half its tail as it tangled itself on the station announcement board and shed a storm of ripped plastic across the platform and track. Sally swerved again and spread her wings, beating her way across the short distance to Canary Wharf station, whose raised platforms stood overshadowed by two great towers. There she turned once more, swooping almost vertically upwards and away, climbing between walls of steel and glass towards the narrow glimpse of sky far above.

Rhys opened his eyes.

He coughed.

He coughed mortar dust, phlegm and…

… canal water?

Broken potion-bottle glass crunched beneath him as he got to his feet.

Something wet slid down his face, pausing at the end of his nose. For a moment of panic he thought it might be blood, but it was too cool and dripped too easily into a puddle on the floor. Rhys ran his one good hand through his hair, and it was soaking. So were his clothes. So, in fact, was a large part of the corridor, whose brickwork now oozed a sheen of canal water into a growing pool on the floor. The thick green algae taken from the canal was embedded in the walls as if it had always been there.

The riders on their bicycles were gone.

So was the light from most of the bulbs that lined the corridor. Their broken globes were now dripping with the same water that had started running from the ceiling and across the floor.

Rhys had a feeling, if nothing more, that the potion known as Peaceful could have some unpredictable effects. But, he told himself,
if you ignored the wet and the freezing cold, his spell might well have turned out worse.

He listened, but no sounds of bicycles or riders could he heard.

Rhys turned and began to make his way back towards the great black pit into which Sharon had fallen. He knew there was nothing to be achieved by this. On the other hand, it seemed nothing would be achieved by going anywhere else. He decided to let instinct guide him while the rational part of his mind gratefully relinquished all duties.

The spirit-trap hole seemed quieter now.

He wondered if, in some way, being fed the body of a wendigo and…

… yes, and that of a shaman…

… had briefly calmed the ragings of the spirits trapped within. He wondered if anyone other than a shaman knew how to free them, release them back to where they’d come from.

He wondered if he wondered too much, and sank back against a wall to catch his thoughts.

He heard a thump on the other side of the pit.

He looked up to see a pale hand emerge from the darkness below and grasp the edge of the walkway. There was a moment of gravitational doubt, then another hand caught at the metalwork. The two hands, having settled their grasp, gave a great tug, and a body followed them.

The body was…

… not quite how it should have been.

The suit was now torn, its fine silk sheared into snippets. The tie had been shredded, and a shoe had had its sole almost torn away. More significantly, the fraying of the suit had produced a certain… exposure… of the man beneath it. It wasn’t so much a revelation of flesh and bone, but rather that the skin itself seemed… flayed. Banners of ripped fabric and thin white flesh swelled and flapped around the man–or not-man, as the case had to be. And where before his smile had been too neat to be possible, now there were signs of sharpened fangs inside the lipless curling mouth.

Having swung himself up onto the metal walkway, Mr Ruislip paused to gasp for breath. A hint of black claw showed through his disintegrating shoe and a fine rust-coloured dust had settled on his skin.
As he staggered to his feet, the wendigo swayed. His eyes drifted in and out of focus before, finally, they settled on Rhys.

“Right,” groaned the druid. He raised his swollen, broken hand in a gesture of conciliation. “Okay,” he muttered, leaning against the wall for support as he tried his best to square off against the battered wendigo. “So I think we should now fight a bloody battle to the death, you and me.”

Confusion showed on Mr Ruislip’s face. His tongue flickered over the place where human lips should have been, and the tongue was too pointed and too yellow for Rhys’s comfort. “You… wish to duel… with me?”

“Yup.”

“But… I am wendigo. You are human. You will die.”

“Maybe,” grunted Rhys. “But, and I hope you’re taking note of this, because it’s an important thing you need to understand, I’ve thought this through very carefully and decided. To hell with it.”

Mr Ruislip blinked at Rhys as if attempting to reconcile the sight of the druid with the words he was saying. Then, having failed to do so, the wendigo scowled. “I do not understand you people,” he hissed, “but now I do not care.”

So saying, Mr Ruislip took hold of his jacket and peeled it away. As it fell from him, so he seemed to expand beyond the confines of his clothes. The tatty remnants of his shirt warped around him as claw and bone and flesh outgrew his human disguise. Flesh sank back into bone; skin spread out to billow around him like a warrior’s flag; fingers stretched into claws, and teeth expanded out of a black, mawing mouth. His eyes turned to boiling red, nose flattened, ears stretched, and as his knees clicked backwards and talons ripped out through the constraint of his leather shoes, Mr Ruislip rolled his neck from side to side and hissed:

“So good to be me!”

Rhys braced himself and wiped a drop of canal water off the end of his nose.

The great red eyes focused on him as a cat might study a scurrying mouse. “Goodbye, druid,” the wendigo hissed, raising his claws to strike. “I regret that I shall never come to understand the motives behind your death.”

A great black talon swung through the air, taking its time, for it needed no speed to finish its work. Rhys looked up at it and wondered what his motivation for dying was anyway.

Then something fast and hard slammed through the air just above his right eye, punching the talon aside and knocking Rhys to the floor.

“Hey, you! Wendigo!”

The voice came from the pit itself, loud and clear, and carried by more than just human breath, and it had force and weight, and sent concrete dust spinning around the room. Rhys looked down, but there was only darkness and swirling air.

“Don’t you dare touch my druid!” said Sharon.

Edna was…

… rather enjoying herself.

She’d never smashed things like this before. Now, as she tore through the office of Magical Affairs, ripping out drawers and knocking over desks, she felt a certain sense of liberation.

In the skies outside the office, Sally’s marvellous aerodynamics might also have made the banshee glory in the moment’s experience, were it not for her suspicion that the plastic-bag snake rippling through the air behind her was catching up. How this could be, the banshee had no time to speculate. But as she swung round the great silver summit of Canada Tower and began a nosedive back down towards the street in a dizzying blur of windows passing at her back, the plastic was undeniably gaining.

Sally turned out of her dive at the last instant and swooped down a silent street which by day thronged with suits and taxis. Swerving beneath a sign proclaiming that the future of futures lay in sensible spread betting, with a talon she snagged a giant awning over an area of empty café tables, which crashed and clattered down behind her. She darted over the low black chain that bordered the quayside and threw up a great wake of spray as she passed over the still surface of the water, soaking the snake at her back. Something rustled close by and
lashed out at her feet, dragging her down. She lurched in mid-flight, and her wingtips scraped the water itself before, with an effort of will and a great leathery flap, she pushed up. Banking hard, she tried to escape her pursuer by darting through the masts of the yachts moored beside the Thames.

Behind her a flapping and a burst of feathers caught her attention. Part of the plastic-bag snake had been caught by a dive-bombing mass of pigeons, which now struggled with it and writhed in fury, plummeting towards the surface of the river. The airborne snake-shape wobbled as if deciding what to do, then, with a great swell of bag, it split in two, dropping its pigeon-laden half like a snowstorm towards the ground, while the front half, relieved of this burden, accelerated towards Sally.

Inside the office of Magical Affairs, Edna swung her waste-paper bin with increasing zeal, knocking a calendar off the wall and sending a jar of biros flying across the floor. She turned, seeking something else to smash and, from the corner of her eye, saw a flash of green metal in the wall itself. A safe, until now hidden behind the calendar, sat squat and forbidding and very solid. She went for Gretel, but the troll was still struggling to pull plastic bags off herself as fast as they settled. In vain too she turned to Kevin. The vampire was gasping for breath, blood running freely from his nose, ears and eyes as his body went into full rejection of the blood he’d supped on a few minutes before.

Edna stared at the safe, then reached up for the combination lock.

A hand fell on hers.

She swung the waste-paper bin, slamming it into the source of the unwelcome grasp. In response there came an unintimidating cry of “Bloody hell!”

Edna dropped the bin and exclaimed, “Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t realise it was—”

“I can see that!” exclaimed Swift, batting away a plastic bag trying to settle onto his head. “This is a fine spell you’ve unleashed…” Another bag began to wrap itself around Swift’s ankle. It was met with a blast of rolling power that propelled plastic, paper and shards of broken furniture across the room from the epicentre of Swift’s upraised hand, which was still smarting from Edna’s assault with the bin. “The
safe’s warded,” he added, pulling a penny from his pocket. He flicked it at the heavy green door and ducked as the copper rebounded with enough speed to bury it in the far wall. “You touch that and you’re crispy.”

He approached the safe warily. Edna took a nervous step back as blue sparks flickered briefly around the sorcerer’s fingers. She saw him move his lips, fingers twitching at the air. Then she felt a pressure, a great ear-aching pressure, gather, grow, stretch and suddenly snap with an audible collision of metal, magic and will.

The safe went “click”.

Swift pulled it open, handling it through the end of his sleeve. “Hot hot hot hot hot.”

Edna craned to look past him. Inside she saw…

One woman’s slipper, old and grubby.

One child’s mitten, pink and with a bobble hanging from the wrist.

One broken umbrella, the spokes blown backwards.

One greasy sheet of paper in an empty fried-chicken box.

And one woven hemp bag. The bag was old, worn and torn at the bottom. The lettering on the front, much faded, read,
T IS BAG W LL LAST YOU A LIFETI E
.

Swift snatched it from the safe, turned to the room, opened it wide.

Edna thought she heard some words slip from the sorcerer’s lips. But later, when asked, she couldn’t believe that what she’d heard could possibly have been uttered.

“Choose biodegradable,” whispered the sorcerer. “Consider your environment.”

In the skies above the Isle of Dogs, Sally felt a sudden turn in the movement of the snake at her back. Glancing behind her she saw the great plastic creature twist in midair and begin to fly back towards the silvery lights of Canary Wharf.

In the office of Magical Affairs the still-dancing plastic bags coalesced into great knots of blue, white, orange and grey, and flew all at once, like bats to a cave, towards the opening of the hemp bag. They flooded into it: dozens, then hundreds, more than the one saggy bag could possibly contain. But still they kept filling it, while Swift held the bag open as if it weighed no more than a T-shirt, watching and waiting
as the cascade of plastic tumbled and collapsed into its depths. The last piece settled with sullen slowness into the bag, which Swift quickly clamped shut, weighting it down with a desk fan wrenched from its socket.