A Madness of Angels

for from an organisation that dabbled in mystic forces beyond our ken.

The most promising object, I found in the broom cupboard. Behind a pile of mops was a small security pad, clearly designed for a numerical code. It had been scribbled over with a number of protective wards in permanent red ink; but on looking closer I saw that these only covered the pad itself, and with my knife I was able to undo the screws that held it to the wall, and pull the entire thing away from the surface it rested on. Behind was a fat cable running into a small hole in the wall. I unplugged the pad from the cable, put it to one side, and snatched a small handful of static out of the nearest sleeping computer screen on an office desk, twisting it between my fingers like a cat’s cradle as I contemplated how best to make it work. I tried touching my electric fingertips to the cable, then tried sending it down the wires in short bursts, and eventually – though how I did not pretend to understand – something went very quietly, click.

I looked round for the source of the sound, and found it in a small panel that had slid back behind the bottles of cream cleaner, with a lever in it. Never the kind of man who didn’t press the button, I pulled the lever and, with a hiss of tortured hydraulics, one wall of the broom cupboard swung back. This, I felt, was much more like it; this was how things should be.

The room beyond filled with a dull bluish-white light as I stepped inside it, illuminating some extraordinarily interesting objects. One of them said, “You’re not a regular fucker, are you?”

I walked up to the chin-high blue jar that suspended the thing inside it and said, “What are you then?”

The creature belched a small cloud of car fumes, which were quickly sucked up through the ventilation tube at the top of its thick jar. “Could ask you the same bloody thing,” it said through the glass, which gave its voice an odd, almost mechanical resonance.

It was short, approximately four feet nothing, its skin a pale grey colour, and rough, like old tarmac on a road. Its eyes were big and round, reflective and multifaceted, and from its nose and mouth dribbled a pale brown liquid that looked for all the world like engine oil. I reached the obvious diagnosis.

“You’re a troll,” I said.

“Well, give the man a prize.”

“What the hell are you doing in a jar?”

“I got fucking caught; what the hell do you think I’m doing in a jar?!” it wailed.

I considered the creature from every possible angle. Back in the distant dark ages, its ancestors had probably eaten the bones of men slain in anger, and bathed in the local swamp. But evolution had done its thing with trolls, like most other creatures of magic, and now the little thing probably enjoyed nothing more than a leftover hamburger and a bath in crude oil. I squatted down until my eyes were level with its own, and managed to hold its gaze despite the initial moment of revulsion as I saw the thin sheen of ethyl alcohol secreted by its tear glands to keep the black surface of its lenses clean.

“You got a name?” I said.

“Mighty Raaaarrrgghh!” it replied.

“I was thinking of something shorter and less guttural.”

It shrugged and said in an embarrassed voice, “Jeremy.”

“Jeremy?”

“I have endured every fucking indecency, wart-face, don’t think you’re getting me high with Jeremy.”

“Jeremy the troll,” I repeated, just to make absolutely certain I’d got it right.

“The Mighty Raaaarrrgghh!” it added for good measure. “And when I get out of here I’ll suck the jelly from your eyes!”

“Why?”

“Because I’m a fucking troll!”

“I was under the impression trolls these days liked nothing more for supper than a used tea bag with a few days’ mould on it.”

“For you, I make an exception.”

“Why? I haven’t done you any harm. Surely it’s Amiltech that you have the beef with.”

“You have an ugly face,” it replied with a leer that revealed a set of sharpened steel teeth. I do not attempt to understand evolution in the age of urban magic.

“Let me put it this way,” I said patiently. “You’ve been trapped in a jar for I don’t know how long by Amiltech and all its works, you probably want out, and I’m willing to let you out, and you’re going to eat the jelly from my eyes?”

“Uh… right.”

“You see where I’m going with all this?”

“I’m waiting for the catch, there’s always a catch with fucking magicians, isn’t there?”

“I just want to piss Amiltech off.”

“Is that it?”

“Yes.”

“Why? What’s your grind?”

“You would not begin to understand,” I sighed. “So, you want to be let out?”

“You’re not going to ensorcel me, are you?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“You know, I find that really hard to believe.”

“You can just stay there…”

It waved its spindly grey arms as wildly as was possible inside a jar and said, “Hey, hey, I was just asking… release away, human!”

I undid the various nuts and bolts that secured the top of the jar and with a pop of trapped pressurised air, the thing came free. The troll sprang out of its container with a single leap, and perched on the lid, grinning hugely, a whiff of car fumes trailing down from the end of its nose. “Human?” it said, the grin stretching as far as its tiny, circular ears.

“Almost.”

“I get paid to stay in the jar.” It leapt, fingers outstretched, teeth shining, in a perfect descending line from its perch straight towards my throat. I staggered back, raising my hands instinctively, and snatched magic into them, twisting the air around us into a wall, a whirlwind, spinning thick sheets of it across our path so that they picked up the little creature as it leapt and slammed it back against the wall of the room. Then, before it had a moment to recover, we flung our hands out and reached for the nearest amenable resource, found the cold, hard sense of iron rods running through the building, leading all the way to the foundations, and, with a twist of our fingers, made them grow.

The troll wailed, but the sound was choked off as a sharp splinter of worked iron spat itself through the wall and wound round its throat, pulling it up by the neck until it twitched and wheezed. Then another wrapped itself across the creature’s convulsing legs, and a third growth of iron lodged itself under the troll’s armpit, dragging it up on one side while on the other the weight of its body dragged it down, until it looked like a misshapen accident, all lopsided and moaning.

I dragged my hands down to my side with a shudder of effort and waited for the blue rage to go out of my vision, and for the blue buzzing in my skull to subside. We were angry, we were so angry, and it had been a moment of choice, just a second, that had stopped us from asking the iron growing out of the wall to grow straight through that creature’s heart.

Around the room, there was a low, animal chitter of caged monsters, punctuated by the low, self-pitying whimper of the troll. We stabbed an accusing finger at it and spat, “If you want to live, you will be silent!”

Wisely, the troll bit its own lip until the oily black blood rolled, and made not a sound.

We looked round the room again. In various pots and jars were creatures from across the magical spectrum, fairies with their fine aluminium wings, tiny trapped elves with their burning hair, neon fireflies that sparked orange and pink as they banged angrily against the side of their jar, moths of purest moonlight, kept in a dark corner so that their strange beauty might be better admired, visible for a second only in the flap of a wing. In other jars were merely the remnants of some creatures – the concrete skull of a shambler, the steel bone of a banshee, the still- beating heart of some monster, which spat electric sparks with every pulsation across the floor of the pot it rested