couldn’t do it, when I couldn’t do it, he said it was all right, he was sorry, he said he loved me, he forgave me and… and …”
And Elizabeth Jane Bakker, just like her brother, was a sorcerer, and her skin burnt my cheek to the touch, even through the bandage, and the lights spat and fizzed around her and the floor hummed like a train was passing beneath us. I grabbed her arm and whispered, “Listen to me, listen to me… what did Bakker want you to do?”
“He is so hungry!” she whispered. “So hungry…”
“Did he bring us back?” we demanded. “Does he still want the angels, did he bring us back?”
“Make me a shadow on the wall.” She nearly wailed it, clung to my face like she wanted to press it into some new, better shape. “I said I was sorry, so sorry, that I wouldn’t say no again and it just kept on, kept on burning, kept saying that I didn’t understand, so sorry, so sorry, make me a shadow on the wall…”
“Bakker did this to you, because you wouldn’t help him?”
“So sorry…”
She was shaking again. I ran my hand over the top of her head, across the white fabric of her veil and felt the odd stubble of patchy hair underneath it, and whispered soothing noises as she pressed her face into my shoulder and the humming in the floor gently started to die down and the rats scuttling in the walls began to breathe again. “It’s all right,” I whispered. “It’s all right. We’re here now.”
“He wouldn’t kill me, he wouldn’t. He said I should feel what it’s like, know how it felt, understand…”
“It’s all right,” we repeated, not sure what else we could say. “Shush, it’ll be all right.”
“So hungry,” she whispered. “I’m so hungry.” We leant away slowly, staring into the vague shadow of her eyes. She stared straight back, lips twitching under the veil. “He said I should live and that I would always be hungry, always be thirsty, always be ugly, always be in pain, because I didn’t help. Matthew?”
“I’m here,” I murmured.
“Why didn’t you do what he asked you to? Why didn’t you help him?”
I thought about it. “Because it was obscene,” I said finally. “What he wanted was obscene.”
“Missed you,” she whispered. “Just like the song said. They always said the world was bigger than the current could flow, and when you’d touched every corner, you could drift away into the stars… did it hurt, your death? He said you were dead. I screamed at him and called him names. I screamed and screamed until they burnt my tongue, make me a shadow on the wall, I said, make me a shadow… I would have helped if you weren’t dead. I called him murderer. He said I couldn’t understand, that it wasn’t… that you weren’t… but they kept on and he said… they were always there and then it just stopped!”
“Shush, shush,” I whispered, stroking the odd, coarse tufts of her hair. “I’m here now. We’ll see you safe.”
She leant up and with the rough, uneven edges of her mouth, through the veil, kissed my lips, once, gently, and put her head into my shoulder. “My angels,” she whispered. “My electric angels.”
I stayed with her for the rest of the day, and she didn’t say anything more, and neither did I. And that, too, was sorcery.
Shortly after dusk, we left her sleeping, kissing the whisper of our voice into her tiny, lobeless ear, and went to finish San Khay.
The newspapers reported pretty much what I knew. The Amiltech office was in ruins, the staff had been sent home. It wasn’t safe any more, they said, and those who stayed too long thought they saw the glimmering of aluminium wings in the fan vents, and heard the chittering of the fairies.
Clients, while sympathising greatly with the clear campaign of hate that had been taken up against Amiltech, were making tactful enquiries about switching security firms for the simple reason that Amiltech was plainly unable, in its current state, to fulfil obligations.
There was more I could do, and I knew it. A little arson, a bit of trashing – this was not enough to bring down a company permanently, this was something insurance could still cover. I could be methodical, thorough, find every blood bank and illicit financial record, burn them all, expose them all, tear Amiltech apart.
But now, we were not in the mood to wait. We wanted San Khay, we wanted to pull down the king at the top of this particular house of cards, and with him gone, we knew that even the Tower would feel the blow.
What we didn’t know was whether we wanted to kill him, or if he was simply a pawn on the way to the ace in the sky – Bakker.
We knew now that we wanted to kill Bakker.
I thought about the blue drawing of a burning angel I’d found under San Khay’s desk.
I remembered the taste of blood.
I remembered…
…
…
…
Bakker had to die. And if that meant going through San Khay, so be it.
I needed equipment.
I spent a night and a morning in bed recovering from my encounter with Charlie. I spent the afternoon purchasing from every general store, haberdasher and art shop I could find, as much dye of every kind as I could find. Bottles of ink, capsules of fabric dye, in every conceivable colour; I purchased everything I could get my hands on and which could fit into my bag. I also went round the junk stores until I found the shattered remains of a large grandfather clock, from whose face I stole the minute and hour hands, and acquired a small bell, a set of six six- sided dice, a blanket and a very large, heavy-duty permanent marker. From the supermarket I bought a week’s supply of egg and cress sandwiches, a bunch of bananas, a pair of buckets and six litres of bottled mineral water. Lastly, I went to the second-hand bookshops on Charing Cross Road and trawled up and down through their shelves until I found a copy of
Then, I hired a van. The man who let it to me was willing, for £400, to ignore my lack of valid driver’s licence and ID. The van stank of cabbage and cornered like a drunken elephant. It would do.
The next day I spent looking for just the right kind of place. In the newspapers, San Khay vowed to take revenge on the enemy of his company and his employees, and bring them to justice for their crimes. His share price fell by sixteen pence on the London market, and everyone expressed immense sympathy. The vice-president of the company moved his family to Cornwall, after all the walls of his house were scratched by dozens of very, very tiny aluminium fingernails. San’s personal secretary complained that she couldn’t sleep because the shadows kept moving on her walls, and there were voices in her head, and as a result, she’d have to take a holiday in Corfu as soon as possible while the company repaired itself.
I found what I needed eventually in a for-let garage space underneath a railway line in Camden, with solid metal doors and a single light high in the roof. I cleared out a dead fridge and half a bicycle from inside the garage, and then set to, creating my magic circle.
Circles are a very traditional form of magic; mine was no exception. With my permanent marker pen (do not be deceived by those who favour chalk – an unreliable, amateur substance) I drew a big, slightly wonky circle on the floor. Inside this I placed the buckets, and next to them I put the pile of preservative-heavy sandwiches, the six litres of water, the bananas, and the blanket, neatly folded.
Around the edge of the circle on the outside I placed the six dice, going clockwise in ascending order with the top side showing one to six as they went round, at equal distance from each other. At the top of the circle I put the salvaged hour hand, pointing inwards, and at the bottom, nearest the door, I put the minute hand, also pointing inwards, directly towards its counterpart in the north.
This done, I then did something that I do very rarely, and got down on my knees at the bottom of the circle, and prayed.
It was a summoning as much as a prayer, an invocation, that passed my lips. I knelt on that spot for the best part of an hour whispering my hopes and aspirations to the spirits of that place. The floor was hard, and my knees ached, but once embarked on such an incantation, you do not break out of it lightly. I summoned all the powers that might watch over that small garage under the railway line, begged them, cajoled them, enticed them with every
