A Madness of Angels

flinched from my touch like it burnt.

“We have to move,” I hissed.

She hesitated, then nodded and started walking. I fell into step with her, face forward, breathing steady, hand now on fire, wondering if I needed another tetanus jab any time soon, or if tetanus was even applicable any more.

Our shadows bent around us.

She was right, it was easy, far too easy. I felt cold all over, the fire in my blood simmering down to leave nothing but exhaustion and pain. We felt eyes on us, tasted the same ice-cold shimmer in the air that I had sensed that day two years ago, when I’d picked up the telephone receiver with bloody hands by the river; but this time it was stronger. Was that because I was already half-looking for it, or because it had grown in my absence? The lick of its power in the air was like drinking thin black moonlight. I looked down, knowing what I would see, and felt my stomach tighten. My hands started to shake and – we could not stop it – tears in my eyes, the memory of every single cut, stab, tear, pain, every moment, every trickle of blood from my skin, every instant – it was there, real, enveloping me, drowning out sense; and though we tried to fight it down we could see our vision blurring and feel the strength going out from our bones at the thought, astonished that a mere state of mind could reduce our physical form to the consistency of wet paper, and afraid, so afraid that we were about to experience these things for ourself, about to end sensation with these sensations…

“What’s wrong?”

The woman’s voice was a relief, a knife through the high-pitched buzz in our ears.

We pointed with trembling hands at the pavements where, slowly and surely, our shadows, defined by the orange neon outline around us, were beginning to bend towards the light.

“Run,” I whispered.

“What?”

“Run.”

I grabbed her hand when she didn’t move and though she tried to pull free, we gripped with all the strength in our bones and pulled her down the street.

We ran.

There was no sign of pursuit, no sound of running footsteps, no shouting of “Oi, you!”, no sirens, no yelling, no breath at the back of our necks, no gunshot, no symptom at all of being chased. But as we ran I watched our shadows stretch out thinner and thinner, and they didn’t bend with the light, they didn’t move as we ducked under every lamp, didn’t contract and expand they way they did when you ran through the city, moving from pool of shadow to splotch of neon, they just stretched pole-thin, dragging behind us, until my shadow felt almost like a physical weight, a cloak of lead pulling me back head first. My neck hurt with the effort of keeping my eyes forward, my shoulders creaked, every movement of my legs felt like they had sandbags tied to them. She must have noticed too – I doubt she would have kept running without the realisation that her own shadow was moving around behind her and becoming distorted, warping, the edge shimmering and melting.

That night we ran like we had run all our life, like it was all we knew, all we needed, all that there was.

We ran south, across Wigmore Street and back into the mess of alleyways where I’d first encountered the fortune-teller in Khan’s old Cave of Miracles. We ran out onto Oxford Street, still busy but less so at this hour. Beggars, drunk men and skimpily dressed women paid us little attention as we crossed in front of the oncoming night buses towards the half-shut gate of Bond Street station, pushing past the large sign saying “Station Closed” and the half-asleep guard in dark blue who was writing it, and scampering down the stairs into the station proper.

“Wait a minute!” piped the guard.

The woman, with a surprising show of pragmatism, pointed to me and shouted, “He’s got a gun, fucker!”

There were only two things for the guard to do in answer to a statement like that – test it or not test it. I had a feeling he wasn’t paid enough to find out if I did have a gun. With an exclamation of “Fuck, shit,” he turned and ran.

Bond Street station was still lit up – indeed, I doubted that the lights ever went off – but the ticket machines had black screens, and the shutters were down on all the booths. In the artificial brightness, our shadows weren’t even visible, blotted out by the white strip lights across the ceiling.

“Is that it?” asked the woman.

“You wish,” I muttered. “Do you have a travelcard?”

“The tube’s not running. We’ve missed the train…” she began.

“This is not the time to argue,” I said in my nicest voice, “just say bloody yes!”

“Yes,” she muttered.

“Good. Through the barrier, now.”

“But the train…”

“Either it will kill you or we will unless you move now!”

I had shouted; this surprised us all. She nodded numbly, fumbled in her pocket with bloody fingers, found the card and, without a word, shoved it into the ticket mouth of the electronic barrier.

“Not working!” she called out even as I fumbled for my Oyster card. “Shall I jump?”

“Don’t bloody jump!” I snapped. “It won’t work if you jump.”

“What won’t work?”

I ran over to the barrier, and slammed my Oyster card as hard as I could onto the card reader. Sparks raced from my hand into the machine – I hadn’t even consciously tried for the spell, everything was running on adrenalin – and with a polite beep, the gate opened. I stepped through. “Try again!” I exclaimed at her.

There was a movement at the top of the stairs. The lights flickered on the ceiling, pushing us in and out of darkness.

“But I…”

“Do it now!”

She pushed her travelcard into the reader and this time it accepted and, with a beep, opened the gate. She scuttled through, and the gate shut behind her.

I turned my attention to the stairs coming down into the station. The lights at the top of the stair died with a tiny whining sound, as if they’d simply given up the ghost. Then the lights in front of those, and in front of those, and in front of those. The darkness spread down from the mouth of the staircase like a tide coming in from the sea. As it crawled across the barrier and snuffed out the illumination over our heads I reached up and snatched a glimmer of white light out of the last lamp before it could expire, clutching it between my fingertips, while the other hand was clenched tight around my Oyster card.

The darkness spread past us, running down the escalators at our back and leaving us in just a tiny spot of white light encased by shadows. An inch from me, the woman murmured, “What is it?”

“Don’t let go of your ticket,” I replied.

In the gloom on the other side of the barrier, a deeper patch of darkness seemed to rise up from the floor, thicken, move, open eyes the colour of star-filled night. It opened a mouth, and it was a he; and though he seemed like the withered corpse of a man, I recognised him nonetheless. In a voice like the swish of silk across polished bone, he whispered, “Hello, Matthew.”

“Hello,” I murmured, unable to muster anything better. “Hungry?”

“Always, always an aching belly. And hello, Matthew’s fire,” he added. “And such fire you are!”

He started walking towards the barrier, dragging shadow as he came. In the dull reflected light of the sphere of whiteness in my fingers, I could see his face, corpse-white, shrunken, bone protruding at every angle, a skull on which skin had been thinly draped, teeth misshapen, eyes a sickly, watery blue, almost as pale as his skin, hair a thin white rag drooping down from the uneven, pocked skin across the rough plates of his skull, just visible beneath the broad black hat he wore to shield his eyes. His neck was barely thicker than his spine, his fingers unnaturally long, and when he moved he didn’t seem to lift his bare feet, with toes like stretched matchsticks and veins protruding like baby snakes between the long tendons of his legs, but glide across the shadows on the floor, pooled around him in thick oily waves. He wore a pair of thin, tattered trousers, half-rags, spattered with whitewashed stains, a loose white shirt that hung off his frame like a deflated air balloon, and a coat. I recognised the coat with a