When I saw him, it was almost too late. He stepped out of the doorway without a sound, driving his knife up towards my ribs. We caught it by reflex, snatching his wrist and twisting. But all that twisted in response was an empty sleeve; there wasn’t any flesh beneath it to hurt. And still the knife kept coming. I stepped aside — and realised the futility of all my usual responses. There was nothing to kick, no flesh to hurt, nothing to shock nor batter nor damage. I looked into the spectre’s face. It rippled for a moment, then spat hot ash and black exhaust straight back at me. We covered our face, felt the ash burn our sleeves and thick dirt blacken our skin, tripped as we staggered back, half blinded by heat and dust, and sprawled useless in the gutter. Through rising tears, the spectre was a blur coming towards me. I raised my hands and, just this once, the pain helped, gave focus and determination to what must be done. The pavement ticked like metal expanding under a summer sun, cracked, and broke apart. Grey wires sprouted like ivy from the earth. I dragged them up, fuelling their growth with will and fear even as I crawled away from the gutter into the middle of the street. The wires grew, divided, rippled, grew again, wildlife photography speeded up a thousand times; they spread, and uncoiled a flower of barbs. I flung the wires up from beneath the spectre’s feet and ordered them to dig deep into his feet, his legs, crawl up his ankles and wrap around his knees.
The spectre ignored them, his trousers tearing with a slow crunch as he kept on coming, revealing the nothing beneath. But his shoes were a harder proposition: the barbs caught deep and wound down into his trendy trainers, tangling with the shoelaces, which strained but did not tear with the spectre’s uneven lurches towards me. I rolled onto my hands and knees, then got up on my feet; and once more the spectre, trapped by his feet, raised his head to scream, and I was bending beneath the sound and covering my ears, then running down the street at the sound of a thousand brakes locking against old metal casings.
A beggar sleeping in the door of a church looked up as I passed by, somewhere between running and falling. I snapped, “Get out of here!” and kept on going. He just stared. A light came on in a window overhead and a woman’s voice shouted, “What the fuc . . .”
I skirted a small grassy rubbish dump that the council called a “community green space” and turned onto a road overhung by old trees. A maintenance truck was parked ahead, its orange platform raised up high to a broken streetlamp that one guy in a neon jacket was replacing, cold and miserable in the rain. I ran past it, and he ignored me, knowing better than to ask questions of bleeding strangers running through the night.
They were behind me; I didn’t need to look to know. The pain below my collarbone that shock had kept off now began to make itself known. With every step I could feel my flesh open and close like the regular gulp of a goldfish. It was oddly electrifying, as if our body were not our own, but something we carried with us, and our distress someone else’s that we experienced at a remove, like secondary smoking. Given time, that would change, and the thought of what was to come only weakened us further, made our stomach ripple. I saw a square of light off to my right, ignored it, then looked again, and could have laughed or cried.
The place was called “Qwickstop” in bright orange letters on a garish green background. Set out front of its lit-up window was a graveyard of unlikely vegetables and fruit, from the standard bruised apple to fossilised butternut squash, all overhung by a limp awning that dribbled unevenly onto the pavement. On the door a variety of signs advertised such a multitude of wonders, it was incredible that such a small shop could do so much — it was an off-licence, a ticket stop, a mobile phone top-up shop, a member of Neighbourhood Watch, an affiliate of Crimestoppers, an advertising centre for local messages and bulletins, a vendor of the
I staggered inside this place of miracles.
There was a man behind the counter, listening to a local pirate station broadcasting in Urdu. He had a salt- and-pepper moustache with its own ecosystem, a bald patch as sterile and reflective as the moon, and a darkish skin, like wax that had dried unevenly across his scalp. He looked at me and decided I was trouble. I smiled as nicely as I could and wiped some of the soot and dust off my face with the corner of my soggy sleeve. He smiled back, like the expression had been sewn into his skin. Struggling to breathe normally, I staggered over to a large glass-fronted refrigerator and pulled out four bottles of the cheapest beer I could find. With my prize I hobbled back to the counter and said, “Pack of fags, please.”
“What kind, sir?” he asked. Always be polite to possible murderers: that was the twenty-four-hour-shopping philosophy.
“Cheapest you’ve got. And the strongest painkillers in the shop.”
The least expensive pack of cigarettes was £5.99. On the back it had a picture of a blackened pair of cancerous lungs. The painkillers’ selling point seemed to be how luminously green and futuristic they were, rather than their chemical content.
“And your Sellotape,” I said.
“What?”
“Sellotape.” A roll of the stuff sat by the till, in a plastic device for easy tearing off.
“This isn’t for sale, sir.”
I leant across the counter. The action set my neck on fire and made my hip tremble. “I’ll give you twenty quid for the Sellotape.”
He answered on instinct. When an offer that good comes along, even the innocent suspect a con. “I’m sorry sir, it’s . . .”
“If you do not give us the Sellotape,” we said through gritted teeth, “you will die. The only question will be whether
He looked into our eyes. Once upon a time my eyes had been the same darkish brown as my hair. That had been then. They were now the bright blue of a summer sky, and reflective like the eyes of a cat. He pushed the Sellotape across the counter. I pulled out my wallet, and saw that a line of blood had run down my arm and over my fingers. I counted out forty pounds in stained notes, pushed them towards him, scooped up my beer, cigarettes, drugs and Sellotape, and staggered back out into the night. Behind me, he dialled 999. Forty quid doesn’t buy you much these days.
What I needed now was a quiet place to work. I found a narrow alley, that had been transformed into the local recycling station. I sat on top of the plastic jaw of a wheelie-bin and prised the lid off each beer bottle. We took a swig from one, just to make sure it was all right, then upended each bottle and let the contents dribble away. It wouldn’t be long before the spectres smelt it, even in the rain. I set down the emptied bottles and from the cigarette packet I slid out four white sheaths, carefully lighting each one. The flame flickered and spat in the rain, but these things were designed to catch in any weather, and soon gave a dull glow. I dropped a cigarette into each bottle, watching the smoke fill it. The Sellotape I put in my jacket pocket, the end sticking out ready to be peeled and drawn like a gunslinger’s pistol. Then I waited.
I didn’t have to wait long.
They came all at once, two from one side, two from the other. It’s only in movies that you get attacked by one person at a time. I gasped between the pain and the shimmering sapphire burning over my eyes,
The clothes of two were ragged black tissues draped over empty air, every part the traditional haunting ghosts, except for the headphones. A third had tears down the lower parts of his trousers, great gashes in the shoes on his feet. I slid down from the wheelie-bin as they approached, picking up the nearest beer bottle and giving it a gentle shake, feeling the suction of the air dragged in to feed the dull flame of the cigarette.
I picked the spectre who looked least battered, its grey tracksuit still intact, its head bobbing along to a muffled beat, and staggered up to it.
“Hey man,” I intoned, “like,
Any magician can tell you words have power.
Any urban sorcerer can tell you the greatest language of power is whatever the other bugger happens to speak.
So as I spoke, the spectre, recognising the beginning of a binding spell, drew back a moment askance, and
