“I suppose so. Is it important?”
“Yes – could be.” I tried a stretch and immediately regretted it, nausea filling my belly, and the taste of bile rising in my mouth. “What are you going to do?” I asked.
“I protect Sinclair.”
“Has anyone come looking?”
“The police. I hid. They can’t find out much from the sleeping body of a patient with no medical record, so they leave a man on the door. When he is awake, I hide as a rat and crawl through the water pipes. When he sleeps, I move like the fox so he doesn’t hear me pass. I make sure that if they should return for Sinclair, they will fail. Will you kill Bakker?”
The question came so suddenly, I almost didn’t hear it. “What?”
“Will you kill him? I read that Amiltech is suffering – that is, San Khay; he is loyal to Bakker. You wish harm to the Tower, but you haven’t said if you’ll kill him. I want you to. Kill him and destroy everything he’s made. Can you?”
“We can kill Bakker,” we said thoughtfully, “but it is not him who we fear.”
“Then who? Who if not Bakker?”
I didn’t answer.
“Kill him.”
“Why?”
“He is a monster.”
“Is he? I haven’t seen any claws.”
He flinched, but said, “If you want to know what Bakker has done, visit Carlisle.”
“The city?”
“No. The care centre.”
“Why? What’s there?”
“If you go, you’ll want to kill him.”
I stood up, and that was an achievement. “If I need you, you’ll be…”
“With Sinclair,” he said firmly. “I’ll see you. Although,” he grinned, and the teeth were yellow and ratty, “you may not see me. Goodbye, sorcerer. Bring me some of his blood on your hands, when you make up your mind.”
“You’re a funny guy,” I replied, and walked away.
I don’t know why I let myself in for these things.
I went to Carlisle.
The care home was on the southern edge of Croydon, in a converted red-brick house with a big driveway, near a park rolling down towards the green belt and its countryside. Even here the taste of the air was different, not as sharp and strong as in the city, but hinting at that other magic, the strange magic that so few people understood these days – that of places beyond the city, the slower, sluggish, calm magic of the trees and the fields, that had, once upon a time, burnt as brightly as the neon power through which I now wandered. There were still some left who could harness it as it had once been used – druids and the odd magician out in the countryside who summoned vines instead of barbed wire from the earth – but they were few in number and generally didn’t talk to their urban counterparts, whose magic they regarded as a corruption rather than an evolution of the natural order of things. It was a debate I kept well out of.
I didn’t exactly know who I was there to see when I arrived at the Carlisle care home. But the question was quickly answered when I got a glimpse of the residents’ book in reception. One name leapt out at me – Elizabeth Jane Bakker.
I signed myself in as Robert James Bakker, and went to meet her. They didn’t question who I was, but the nurse informed me that she was delighted I had finally come to the home and that Elizabeth was showing good signs of improvement, though she still screamed at the sight of mirrors.
Elizabeth Jane Bakker sat in a wheelchair at one end of a living room full of beige furniture. She wore a white veil over her face and a bandage of white around what was left of her hands, as well as the obligatory, shameful blue pyjamas of the other residents. On her lap was a tray of untouched food – mashed potato, carrot and some kind of sausage meat in suspiciously fluorescent gravy. I sat down on a stool opposite her and said, “Hello, Elizabeth.”
The veil twitched. Between its hem and the top of the pyjamas, I could see the scrambled, scarlet remnants of the burnt skin on her neck. When she spoke, her voice was distorted by the effort of shaping words with the twisted remains of her mouth, and came out almost inaudible at first, so I had to lean right in to catch it.
“I see… to be free… they say… be me…” she whispered.
“How are you?” I asked, and immediately felt stupid.
“The rats keep singing when I try to sleep. All the time, singing singing singing. But the voice in the phone went away.”
“Aren’t you hungry?” I tried.
Her glance moved down to the plate. With a deep grunt from the back of her throat, she seized the tray with the remnants of her hands, throwing it across the room. Mash flew out from the little plastic indents as it smashed against the far wall. The nurse hurried in from the corridor, saw the mess, and merely rolled her eyes, as if this was something regular and understandable, before cleaning it up.
Elizabeth lapsed into sullen silence. Unsure what else I could say that wouldn’t be either dangerous or mad, so did I.
We stayed sitting in silence for almost ten minutes before she looked up slowly and said, “Is it free, where you are?”
I hesitated. “It’s all right,” I said, hoping this was a safe answer.
“Come be me,” she sang, in a faint, distant voice of one remembering a nursery rhyme. “Come be me and be free!”
We felt a shudder run all the way down from the hairs on our skull to the tips of our toes. “Where did you hear that?” we asked.
“They used to burn in the telephones. I danced with them before they went away. Did you lie?”
“Did your brother hear them sing too?” we asked.
She shook her head, slowly, uncertainly, then added in a more cheerful voice, “Have your pudding and eat it, that’s what they said, save the best for last, meat and two veg, do you see?”
“Did he hurt you?” I asked, as gently as possible.
“Said to dance, said to burn and we’ve always loved the city…”
“Did he do this to you?”
“He just sits in the chair that’s all, nothing bad, just sits and likes to eat, watches, gets on with things, although the water doesn’t taste so good any more, vodka, vodka and lick the lamp post…” Her shoulders were starting to shake – with a shock, we realised that she was starting to cry.
Uncertainly, I leant forward, and put my arms round her shoulders, although she was so limp that it was hard to tell what good it did. We put our mouth near her ear, and so close now we could see through the veil, the burnt, sunk flesh, the remnants of a nose, the unevenness of burnt-off lips, and murmured as quietly as we could, like a mother singing her lullaby, “We be fire, we be light, we be life, we sing electric flame, we slither underground wind, we dance heaven – come be we and be free. Come be me.”
Her shaking slowly stopped. She pulled away from our hold and looked through the veil straight into our eyes. The bandaged stub of a hand brushed our cheek, sending a shudder through our skin. “So blue,” she whispered. “No wonder you went away.”
“Why did Bakker do this to you?” I asked quietly. “Why would he do this thing?”
“He wanted to hear the angels,” she whispered. “He wanted to find them, to see the blue, but he couldn’t, he couldn’t, he tried and they wouldn’t answer, he was too far, too quiet, they didn’t come for him, he couldn’t understand and he said… he said…” The bandage pressed against my cheek. “
