and leaning against the cold steel wall. “So why not now?”
“What the hell happened to him?”
“He ran. He was afraid of… us. The shadow killed him. When I spoke to the lord of the lonely travellers, he said a shadow was hunting Simmons. It was always going to find him before I could, and it only really has one solution to any problem.”
“You knew Simmons was dead?”
“Yep.”
“Then what the fuck are we doing here? Séance?”
“No,” I sighed. “Something much worse.”
The lights dimmed in the ceiling. Blackjack backed towards the wall. “Sorcerer!” His voice was a warning growl, his hand already going into his big sports bag. “What is this?”
A laugh started somewhere at the back of my throat and spread uncontrollably, we held in our sides with the force and pain of it. I rubbed my eyes as they ran with tears, wiped my nose on my sleeve. All around I could hear the slow snap of the lights going out, see my shadow stretching thin. “Bakker knows I’m looking for Simmons. So why shouldn’t his shadow know too?” Blackjack had a hand out of his bag holding a fistful of chain. I looked straight into his eyes, and there was something more than fear on his pale – unusually pale – face. “Simmons is going to lead me to Bakker,” I said gently. “He was always going to be a trap. But I wanted to know if you’d be the one to spring it.”
For a moment, he hesitated.
Then the shadow at his feet reached up, stretched one long, clawed hand out of the floor, clung onto the edge of a steel bed, and pulled. It pulled out a shoulder, pulled out the top of a head, tilted backwards towards the dying light of the bulb, and as its eyes started to form out of the darkness it turned to me and hissed, “There you are!”
“Charmed,” I said, and threw ourself nails first at Blackjack, stepping straight through the half-formed shadowy shape of Hunger as he pulled himself up from the darkness on the floor. Blackjack was fast, but, off-guard and big, he lumbered to one side as we hurled ourself at him, reaching up for his eyes. The lights above us popped, and sprinkled burnt glass, and Hunger lashed out at our passing ankle with still only half-formed claws that passed straight through us like ice-crystal fog. Our fingers scraped the side of Blackjack’s face, and our teeth sunk into the corner of his ear, drawing blood which tasted of nothing but burnt ash and salt.
Then something landed across our back, heavy and fast, and through his own grunting Blackjack caught us by the scruff of the neck like we were a dog and threw us back, snarling, anger in his eyes, and the chain in his hand didn’t so much move through the air as suddenly go from being in his hand to being round our throat with nothing in the middle to justify the journey. We gagged and clawed at our neck even as he tugged on the other end of the chain and dragged us down to our knees, his eyes burning, blood rolling down the side of his face and staining his necktie purple red.
“Bastard!” he screamed; “Bastard!” but that didn’t really seem enough, just empty sound with no meaning in the noise.
Then Hunger rose up in front of me and smiled a mouth full of rotten gum. “Hello, fire!”
That seemed to put an end to Blackjack’s swearing. His face turned grey.
Hunger leant down in front of me, grabbed my hair with one now solid, snow-white hand, and tilted my chin up with his other, its black nails digging deep. Turning my head so that all I could see were his dead eyes, he whispered, “Where is Matthew’s fire now?”
“It’s a better question than you know,” I replied.
A glimpse of doubt behind Hunger’s empty eyes?
Possibly. I looked at him and saw Bakker, and perhaps I only thought I saw feeling, in the replication of my old teacher’s body language on Hunger’s empty form. Hunger’s nails under my chin dug in deeper, drawing blood.
“Matthew…” and for a moment it was Bakker’s voice from Hunger’s lips, just for a moment, then gone, snatched away back into the depths of the creature’s belly. “Will you sing for me?” he asked. “Your old, favourite song?”
“‘Ten Green Bottles’?” I wheezed, feeling my blood start to run freely across my skin.
“The one that the angels sing. We be light, we be life, we be fire…”
“Shouldn’t trust what you hear on the telephone,” I replied. “You never know whether they’re laughing as they lie.”
He snarled, and then his hands became shadow across my head, and reached into me, curled around my heart and in that place, that dead place with the biker’s chain around my throat ready to strangle, I didn’t have anything to fight back with, and we were too afraid to try.
We were aware of…
… weaknesses…
… that we would not describe.
When the lights went out in the waking parts of our mind, we were secretly glad.
Journey with spaces and motion sickness.
Jumping from A to C without bothering to ask B if it wanted a look-in.
Incoherent vagaries. Flickering lights, burning around our neck, darkness in our blood, and always his voice. Give me life, he said, give me life.
We know that they drugged us.
We know that they tapped our blood. It wasn’t anything too unhygienic; they wanted us alive. They took a pint that Hunger licked at with his fingertips as if it were hot curry sauce. Then they took another because he could not understand why it tasted human. Then he shook us where we lay, and screamed, “I don’t want the sorcerer’s blood; I’ve tasted it before and it isn’t enough: boring, human, boring and grey! Where are the angels?”
It would have been easy for us to ignite my red blood in its plastic packages to our burning blue fire. It would have been so easy it would have made dying look complicated.
We stayed in darkness, and tried to stay that way, for as long as we could manage.
We had a dream. I’ve never been a big fan of the mystical interpretation of dreams, but say what you will for the implausibility of prophecy, as well as its uncomfortable metaphysical curiosity, this dream had something going for it. In it, we found ourselves drifting in a bright blue wire, while around us danced the distant humdrum sound of voices saying,
and to our surprise, we weren’t alone. We turned in the dancing space of the telephone line and looked at the stranger who’d surprised us. I was crouching on a drifting Microsoft Windows sign, face covered in blood, trailing my fingertips casually in the wake of a passing computer virus, watching the tendrils of flaky white malignancy tumble into nothing around my fingers, and we realised that I knew, even in this place,
We said, “Who are you?”
I looked up at the sound of our voice, a strange sparkling thing that, I realised, wasn’t just one voice but thousands, a burst of interference clubbed together from the myriad of human voices passing through the system at that instance to form a sound, where we had no mouth to do so, of speech. We stood in front of me, the blue electric fire of the wires passing straight through us like it was fog, or perhaps we were fog, it was hard to tell the difference, coalescing in and out of existence, staring at me through a face covered in flame.
