Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) by Kate Griffin Page B

of
                 
Drip drip drip on the cobble stone
    Spring-heeled Jack jumping over the rafters
                           
Ten for a pound, ten for a pound, get ’em ’ere!
    Howl!
             
Howl!!
                        
Howl!!!
    And as she ran she felt lighter, thinner, as if she wasn’t merely becoming invisible to the eye that saw, but growing invisible in herself, her very matter melting about her, and on the streets there were creatures clinging to the walls, there were finger bones scratching their way out from between the lines of mortar, and a smell of… wet dog?
    Something was sticking to her feet. She glanced down and there was a viscous goo on the pavement, coming up from below the pavement, thick and black and not black
    thick and red and seeping through her shoes, and it wasn’t real, of course it wasn’t real, she knew it wasn’t real, but the streets were bleeding, seeping blood upwards, and the stench! She gagged and nearly fell, briefly flickering into visibility before picking up the pace again and forcing herself on, running, and she thought she could hear
    something running with her.
    In the darkness behind.
    A great heaving of lungs.
    A great falling of paws.
    A great gasping of breath.
    A great running monster whose breath stank and whose bellow-lungs pushed out air like
    She wanted to look but then
    “Don’t look back,” he’d said. “It wants you to look.”
    Traffic surged past Old Street roundabout, but it was far, far away, horses pulling against the reins of the man in the Ford Mondeo who drove them, scuttling thief-boys spilling their Starbucks coffee, time mixing as past and present clashed in silent explosions around her, and she could taste blood in her mouth and knew it wasn’t her blood, and see the howling of the thing, of the whatever-it-was behind her, as movement in the air, like heat haze disturbing the sky, but this haze was all around, rippling against the street light and sucking the colour from it and
    Don’t look back. It wants you to look.
    Her heart was racing and her mouth was parched and crusted around the lips where blood was drying, and she wanted to laugh andthrow her hands up to the sky and scream at the moon–which was not there–and tear at the silent traffic that stop-started against the lights and could not see her, nor even perceive itself, the drivers oblivious as the black fog of their engines melted with the black fog that had hung over London for a hundred, two hundred years and
    She ran across the street and felt something move beneath her.
    It was a jolt, a shock, an almost physical force that threatened to trip her, knocked the breath from her and sent her staggering, hands out to support herself against the nearest wall.
    Her hands passed straight through and so did she, tumbling head first, through the wall of a private dental clinic and its posters of patients who reported their immaculate smiles to be the most important thing in their life, onto a scrubbed tile floor. She lay there gasping as the blood thundered in her ears and the world outside seeped back into place, reasserting the sodium colours of the night, the busy crawl of the buses and the weary honking of horns by irritated drivers.
    Some lingering tracery of that shadow vision, the shaman’s vision that came with the shaman’s walk, was still settled over her eyes. She crawled to her hands and knees, then got up, keeping her back turned to the wall through which she had stumbled.
    She listened but heard no howl.
    There was, however, a breathing, a slow rise-fall, a steady drawing in and pushing out of breath, like a huge motorbike engine made of muscle, waiting to start.
    She tightened her fingers around the strap of her bag, closed her eyes and prayed to who-cared-what-for-anything-good and slowly, stomach spinning faster than her step, turned.
    No one there.
    Just the slow thump-thump of breath that wasn’t her own.