A Madness of Angels

“Why?”

“Perhaps because we are what you want to see.”

“Why should that be? You think I’m pleased at what’s happened to my apprentice? Glad to discover the kid I taught is now possessed by the spirit of telephone interference?”

“We think that you are dying, Mr Bakker,” we said simply. “We think that you’ve been dying all these years, and you’re terrified of it; and we think that when you tried to coax us out of the wire all those years ago, you wanted us for more than just a dance in the fire. Why don’t you swallow a piece of paper, like Lee did?”

“Necromancy is such a clumsy way to survive – I told you that, almost the first week.”

“I take it then that drinking the blood of the black-mass-baptised babe is out of the question too?”

“My God, what do you make of me?”

“Hungry,” I said, rubbing my eyes to wipe away the fatigue. “So hungry.”

“What does that mean?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Matthew!” He raised his arms in an expansive, open gesture. “I’m the one trying to understand! Am I next? Is that what all this is leading up to?”

“My God, haven’t you seen it? Look at the Tower!”

“This is about the Tower?”

“Haven’t you noticed the bodies, the threats, the extortion, the death, the battles, the…”

“This is about the organisation that I created which, for the very first time, brought together under one roof all magicians, witches, warlocks, voodoo practitioners and… and bloody enchantresses of ancient and mystic lore, united at last, regardless of race, faith, creed, colour, gender, social status or wealth, to protect all magic-users in the city from the bias and bigotry of…”

“It’s a monster! It gobbles up the best of the magicians and spits out the bones in a voodoo way! You really think employing a man whose guards carry guns under their armpits, or a dead necromancer with a sheet of paper down his throat, was going to create a friendly public image? You think it was nice of Lee to wage war against the Whites, or charming of Khay to guard a warehouse full of human organs that were most definitely not for the transplant business? The Tower is a unified organisation – a massive one – and the thing that unites it is fear! Of you! Of your servants and your power and your ambition and your …”

“How dare you judge me? I’d like to say that you were my apprentice and thus should have learnt some respect; but you’re not even that! A blue-eyed demon crawled out of the telephone lines into the skin of someone I used to know – and you speak like this to me?”

Our voices had grown too loud. People were looking towards us, their conversation turning to a low buzz, while curious hearers tried not to be seen snooping. Bakker scowled and put his fingertips together in front of his nose; took in a long breath. Quieter, struggling to control his anger, he said, “You are correct; I have wanted to meet the angels for some time now; but I do not know what purpose you think I had in mind. I wished to study them, to learn about them, to understand what kind of a creature the angels are, nothing more.”

“Hungry,” we muttered, feeling tired and drained. “Hungry.”

“Should have had a vol-au-vent then.”

“The last time we met,” I said, “you said you wanted to summon the angels; you wanted to bring them out of the phone lines into this world. You said you couldn’t hear them any more, that you needed the help of another sorcerer to make the spell work. I asked why you wanted them out of their natural realm, and you said, ‘Because they are alive; because they will not die.’ I asked what you wanted. You said, ‘Life. Just life.’ Did it ever occur to you that there was a reason we didn’t want you to hear us when we played in the wire? Did the thought cross your mind that perhaps the reason you couldn’t hear us any more was because we didn’t want you to? Did you think we were unaware of your attempts to summon us, to pull us out of the wires even before you approached me and asked for my help? What made you think you could just snatch us from our home and bind us to your desires? And Mr Bakker, give me credit for a little imagination. You don’t want to study us; it was quite clear what your aims were. When you taught me you said that the angels were too dangerous to be listened to; that they preached freedom from all restraint, all laws, that they had no conception of responsibility, duty, need or even basic moral principles; that they were free in the purest, most unbound sense. You don’t summon creatures like that to study them. You summon them if you’ve got their song in your head, if you think that perhaps, the freedom that they enjoyed could be yours. Power and fire and light and movement in a simple, cure-all spell.”

“Well,” he replied softly, fingers tight around the arms of his chair, knuckles sticking up through the skin like at any moment they might pop out, “that part at least sounds like my mistaken apprentice.”

“We kept away from you,” we said, “because even then we could sense that there was something about you that did not conform to our sense of what we should be, and what we are. It poured off you then and you stink of it now.”

“And what, tell me,” he half-growled, fighting to keep his voice civil and his face fixed in the polite smile of good company, “is that?”

“Hunger,” we replied. “You do not simply want to study us, you were hungry for it, a starving creature desperately scrabbling for life – but not your life. Ours. You had passed the point where you made a distinction between what others had and what you desired for yourself. We sensed your intent, and I know it.”

He half-lowered his head, tucking in his chin and nodding to himself in silence for a moment. Then he looked up sharply and said, perfectly level, “I’m sorry.”

“You are?”

“I’m sorry for the bad opinion you have of me. I do not know how you have reached this, but I am sorry for your…”

“How I’ve reached it?! I reached it at roughly the same point the first set of claws severed a long list of my arteries! I reached it about the time my blood pressure dropped so low I started to go blind. I reached it at approximately the same moment that the shadow – your bloody shadow – pressed its fingers into my face, stared into my eyes and whispered through my blood on its teeth, ‘Give me life!’ Try that and see how it alters your long-held opinions in a very short time!”

A tremor of confusion on his face. “What?”

“When I walk out of here, do you know the first thing I’m going to do?”

“No.”

“I’m going to find an underground station and sleep in it behind the biggest protective ward I can raise with a travelcard and a good spell until sunrise, so that the creature that you sent after me last time we met has a hard time killing me this time round too!”

“Matthew, what creature? What happened?!”

His voice was pained, shrill, tense. But I didn’t know whether it was from the effort of lying – something I felt sure he could do perfectly well – or a genuine sound of need and upset. And just then, for an instant, we felt a hint of uncertainty, and almost pitied him. But this was what we were here for, what we wanted to know.

“It’s a shadow,” we said. “He has your face.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He comes up out of the paving stones, wherever there’s a thick enough patch of darkness. He killed Patel, Awan, Khan, Akute …”

“A creature? A summoned creature?”

“He has your face, this shadow,” I repeated gently, studying his eyes for any hint of a reaction that wasn’t a trembling uncertainty, tainted with fear. “The night we argued, he attacked me when I was alone, by the river. I’d never seen anything move so fast. He just appeared, bang, right behind me, and he had won before I even had a chance to raise a spell. Now that we are here, he is less certain in what he does. It seems he doesn’t just want to kill; rather, he is interested in what makes us alive. ‘Hello, Matthew’s fire,’ he says; and we are sure that if he wished to kill us he could have done so. But instead he toys, watches, studies, tries to work out what makes us what we are. We can hold him off for a while. But in the end, we doubt there is a way to kill just him, and for what he did to me, and what he wants with us, we will kill him.”