Strangeness and Charm

by Mike Shevdon

  The woman opposite, three seats down kept glancing at her. Alex fussed with her hair, wondering if it was being unruly again. It had a habit of curling and uncurling on its own if she didn't pay attention. She met her gaze and the woman looked away. She had a nice tattoo on her arm, though. It was a butterfly with long tails on its wings.

  Alex had wanted a tattoo for ages, but she knew her mum would go mental, and there was the added deterrent that girls like Tracy Welham had them. Of course, hers were gross and anyway, she was dead. Alex shifted uncomfortably on the seat.

  She didn't care that the Welham girl was dead. She was evil. The reason Alex had the panic attacks was because of what they'd done to her – they'd made her lose control. She didn't feel guilty, no matter what the psychologists said. They should have left her alone. She'd told them, hadn't she? She'd warned them. Anyway, it was like Fionh said. They had challenged her, three against one, and they'd lost. Tough.

  Her mind wandered back to the tattoo and she found herself staring at the woman. She was about thirty or something, what was she doing with a tattoo? She looked at her own arm. Slowly colours started to emerge, faintly at first, then stronger. The problem was that it looked more like one of the drawings on her school exercise book than the woman's tattoo. She scowled and it vanished. She couldn't turn up at Mum's with a tattoo anyway.

  By the time the tube neared her station it was overground and she could look into the backs of people's gardens as she rolled past. They were little dramas, each of them, or little soap operas, except no one got murdered. She wondered if that was where the Welhams lived.

  She hopped off the train at her stop and exited beneath the notice of the station attendant. No one challenged her, no one even noticed. She walked along the avenues, noting familiar landmarks, passing the shop where she'd bought sweets, the road which led to her school. On impulse she walked towards the school, wanting to see what had become of the chaos she had visited upon them. When she reached the gate to the school field it was locked. She left it open behind her. She walked across the open field cloaked in glamour, noting the new window-frames in the changing block and the emergency door newly set in the wall of the girl's changing rooms.

  She laid her hand upon it and it clicked open for her. Inside was clean, silent and cool. There was no sign of the destruction she'd wrought. It smelled faintly of disinfectant, not the overpowering stench of raw sewage. The stalls were all new, some of the fittings still had tape on them to protect them. She walked around the changing rooms, trailing her finger across the surfaces, drawing an imaginary rising line along the walls. They had erased every mark of her. There was no memorial, no sign, no indication that four girls had died here. Well, one of them was very much alive.

  She kicked out at the door to a stall. It banged loudly against the side of the stall. She kicked it again, and again, harder, until it broke off the hinges and collapsed into the stall. She turned to look at herself in the mirrors screwed to the wall. Her hair was a winding mass of tendrils, her eyes were filled with blue fire, her hands bunched into fists.

  Her reflection admonished her but she was in no mood to be censured. The mirror was only liquid slowed down, and she was the queen of all things liquid. "Pah!" She spat an incoherent command, and the mirrors flew apart into a thousand fragments, an explosion in a glitter factory, surrounding her in a rain of tinkling, sparkling fragments.

  "Who's there? What's going on?" It was a male voice coming from the gym, the caretaker. She looked down. Under the shower of glass she had coated herself in tiny glittering fragments, yet there was no scratch upon her. She stared at the particles and they dropped or dribbled, running together, merging with all the other particles until there was a single amoeba of flat green glass where the central drain had been. Across the floor, tiny fragments of foil from the mirror drifted like silver leaf litter. She left it that way, shutting the emergency door quietly behind her, and leaving them to figure it out. Now they would remember her.

  She went back onto the field, leaving the gate wide open, taking the route home. She walked the familiar path feeling like a stranger. Even her footsteps sounded wrong to her. She marched around the avenues and cut through the short cuts. Finally she came to her road, her house. Barry's Toyota was there. He would be home. So would Mum. She caught site of herself in a neighbour's window. She didn't look like the girl that lived there. She looked wild.

  It didn't matter. You could always go home.

  She sneaked around the back by the garage, lifting the catch over the gate as she'd always done. She closed it quietly behind her. At the back door she hesitated, but then smiled to herself. It would be OK.

  She let herself in, she didn't need a key. Where was the smell of boiled potatoes? Wasn't Mum supposed to be cooking supper? Raised voices came from the sitting room. She moved carefully into the hall.

  "I'm telling you I saw her. She was right there!"

  Barry was trying to calm her mother down. "Could it have been another girl, the same age perhaps?"

  "It was her! She looked older, yes, but I know my own daughter, for God's sake!"

  "I never said you didn't'"

  "You never believe me. You always try and second guess everything I say. I'm telling you she was there and you're telling me I can't believe my own eyes. I'm not mad!"

  It was kicking off, no mistake. They could be at it a while. When her mother got going there was no stopping her. No wonder there wasn't any supper. Alex turned away from the living room and quietly mounted the stairs, much as she'd done a hundred times when her mother and father had been arguing. She went straight to the room at the back of the house – her room, her sanctuary.

  She stood in the doorway and looked around. There was a desk with a new computer on it that hadn't been there before. Where was her bed? Where was her homework table? What had happened to her dresser, her make-up, her hair clips, her clothes? Where was her posters, God! They'd even changed the wallpaper!

  She went to the wardrobe and wrenched it open. Inside empty hangers clinked slowly against one another. All her clothes, gone. She went to the desk opening the drawers, looking for her pants, her tights, her bras, anything that might vaguely have been hers. The room had been stripped, cleansed, disinfected like the changing rooms at the school. Every trace had been removed.

  The only remnant she could find was a small silver ring her father had given her for her birthday. She wasn't allowed rings at school, so she'd left it on a hook inside the wardrobe. They must have missed it when they took everything else she had and tipped it into the bin.

  She grabbed the ring from the hook and pressed it into her palm. She looked around at the empty room, her eyes welling, the sharp edges of the ring pressing into her hand. The room had been stripped, cleansed, purged of all trace.

  She ran out, taking the stairs two at a time, burst through the kitchen, slammed through the kitchen door, banging it wide. She veered around, blinded by tears, fumbling with the lock on the back gate until her numb fingers flicked it open. Running into the street, a car blared its horn noisily as she ran into the road. Behind her she could hear them, questioning, searching. She blundered across the road, then cut down a shortcut, smudging tears from her eyes as she ran.

  Far behind her she could hear them calling, "Alex! Alex! Come back!"

  There was no going back. You couldn't go back. You could only go on. The world erased you until there was nothing left. You left no mark, no sign of your passing. They pasted you over, just like wallpaper.

  Until there was nothing left.

  I followed Amber through a run-down estate in London, somewhere off the North Circular. Litter accumulated in the gutters and discarded takeaways overflowed the bins. Groups of youths in hoodies watched with resentful eyes as we passed, probably wondering whether we were bailiffs.

  We went through an underpass below the railway and emerged into a deserted industrial estate. Half-demolished offices were open to the elements, ragged edges of floors j
utting out into space, demolition left unfinished as demand evaporated in the teeth of recession. From the buddleia and elderberry growing in the exposed concrete, it had been like that for some time.

  "You take me to the nicest places," I said to Amber. She ignored me.

  Our path wound around piles of rubble and oil cans used for long-cold fires. If there had been watchmen, they were made redundant when it became apparent there was nothing worth protecting. Panel after panel of cracked glass looked down on us, as if someone had carefully cracked each pane, individually, as an art-installation statement. There was no one to appreciate their care.

  I stopped. "The place is deserted."

  Amber paused and turned. "That's what you're meant to think."

  She walked on until she reached a long building at the end of the row, surrounded by verdant saplings and nettles. It had been a factory; the ducting for the heat extraction and where the cables for heavy-duty power had been stripped for their copper could still be seen. Floor upon floor of machinery, all gone – presumably sold for scrap or exported to the third world.

  We circled round the end of the building and pushed through a door that had been kicked in until it collapsed inward. Inside corroded pipework networked the ceilings but the floor was bare, apart from the occasional rusty bolts sticking up, or a fragment of discarded mangled ironwork.

  Light permeated through the crazed glass, showing distorted outlines of the outside world and intensifying the shadows at the rear. We moved along the building to the far end where concrete stairs led to the next floor. Above was the same, another gallery of despair, the machinery removed, the wiring stripped. We wandered that floor then went back to the stairway.

  "Do you know what you're looking for?" I was beginning to suspect that we were on a wild goose chase.

  She mounted the next set of stairs quickly, and I followed. The floor above had sacks and old tarps hung against the windows. The shadows were deeper, but the story was the same. Everything had been stripped away.

  "Bring them down." Amber gestured towards the tarps draped over the windows.

  I went down the gallery, pulling down plastic sheeting and old tarpaulins, spilling light across the floor. As I reached the far end, something stirred in the shadows at the back.

  "Now what did you wanna do that for?" The voice came from a figure outlined against the dark, moving forward from the deeper shadows.

  "Upstairs, Dogstar. I will handle this."

  I moved back along towards the stairs only to be intercepted by others moving out from the shadows. They moved in across the gallery, converging on us – four of them, all male, wearing the much-vaunted hoodies. They had crude weapons, an iron bar, a piece of piping. One of them had a piece of wood with nails spiked through the end. My hand moved down to my weapon.

  "Where you going, bro?" one of them taunted. "This party just startin'."

  "Upstairs, Dogstar," Amber ordered. "Or we'll lose them."

  The one nearest the stairs moved into my path, blocking my exit. "You outta luck. There's nothing here but us, and we ain't leaving," he said.

  "Neither are they," the one closest to me chuckled, slapping the pipe into his open hand.

  "This is not your lucky day," said the third.

  "If you got any money, it'd be wise to hand it over now. It'll save us searching the bodies later," said the fourth.

  Amber stood easily in the centre. I knew better than to move closer to her; that would restrict our opportunities for movement. Instead I moved apart slightly, forcing them to split their attention in two directions and spread out when they would have closed in. Their attempt to bunch us together faltered.

  Amber stood, head bowed, waiting.

  "Got nothing to say, little girlie?" the first one taunted.

  Amber lifted her head. "How are you," she asked quietly, "on nursery rhymes?"

  The one who'd spoken first laughed. "You're a long way from the nursery now, bitch. You're out in the wild woods is where you are."

  "How about this one," she said. "One upon a time there were four little piggies…"

  I blinked. Amber had gone. There was a whine from the one who'd spoken last. Amber was behind him, the bright slash of her blade held across his throat. He dropped the iron bar.

  "This little piggy went to market," she said into the silence. I blinked.

  The first guy was on his knees, holding his neck, the second fell to his knees, Amber's blade under his right ear.

  "This little piggy," she said, "should have stayed home." I blinked again.

  The third was staring about him warily, brandishing the nailed club. There was a flash as her blade swept up from behind, up the inside of his thigh, holding him on tiptoe.

  "This little piggy was roast meat," she said.

  "Don't you cut me, bitch!" His voice squeaked like the piglet in the rhyme.

  I blinked.

  The guy with the pipe stood there, swinging it back and forth. Suddenly his legs were kicked out from under him and he crashed backwards, the pipe bouncing out of his hand to ring noisily on the concrete.

  "And this piggy's blood, will run and run and run…" The tip of Amber's blade was half an inch from his eye.

  I blinked. She was in the middle of the circle again.

  "Shall we try again?" She said quietly, "this time with real piggies?"

  She paused. For one second they stared at each other. Then she smiled.

  "Once upon a time there were four little piggies…"

  They scrambled to their feet, abandoning their weapons and running for the stairs. They collided with each other in their haste to get down and away from the crazy woman and her nursery rhymes. I could hear the clatter as they went down the floors, the thud as they burst through the ruined door.

  Her smile faded as the noise died away. The only problem was that I was left with the crazy woman.

  "I said, upstairs," said Amber, sheathing her sword.

  "They blocked my way," I protested.

  "No wonder you have problems if you let their kind come between you and your quarry." Amber went to the staircase leading upwards and listened.

  "Do you think there's more of them?" I asked.

  "No. They were just the alarm system. The real quarry is upstairs."

  She vanished upwards and I followed after her. When I reached the floor above I saw her standing at an open fire door, looking down a rusty fire escape.

  "They've gone," she said.

  "We could follow them?"

  "And play cat and mouse when they know all the bolt holes and we're not sure which of us is the cat?" What she didn't say is that if I'd been quicker getting past the watchmen then we would have had them bottled in up here. As it was they were long gone.

  The upper floor had been kitted out as a grand open living space. There were multiple sofas, old metal cupboards, bookshelves and mattresses. They'd found a generator and wired up an Xbox to a flat-screen perched on top of a metal file drawer. The furniture was an odd mix of discarded seconds and the spoils of skip-diving.

  "Expensive taste," she said, picking up a cashmere scarf carelessly draped over a tired sofa.

  "You think they've got money?" I looked sceptically at the holes in the nearest sofa.

  "No, I think they have light fingers. Anything too big to steal is second hand. All the small stuff is new." She walked through and around piles of CDs, DVDs, games and books. "There are a lot of books for teenagers."

  "Some teenagers like books," I replied. "Mine does."

  "Alfred Watkins, The Old Straight Track, and Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley." She tossed the books back onto the pile. "Dangerous rubbish."

  "Sounds a bit New Age to me."

  "We'll need to watch the cults and the nutcases," said Amber. "If they get a foothold with one of the extreme groups then we'll have a problem. The last thing we want is them setting up a new religion."

  "How many are they?"

  "Four, maybe six? They hav
e beds for four but they could be sleeping together."

  "Four could be difficult. They are fey," I pointed out.

  "And we're Warders," she said. "Sounds like the odds are in our favour. Besides," she looked back at the fire escape, "the first sign of trouble, they abandon everything and scarper. They're not looking for a fight."

  "They might come back."