Shift

by Mia Gallagher

  My guise’s bright eyes reduced to maggotcans, cartwheeling along the grooves of her brain.

  You know how to master a kelpie, Magpie? Take away his silver bridle.

  I lose charge.

  My ions rupture from their opposite poles. My droplets wheel into space, howling for their stable, their nearest body of water. The boiler system coiled in the services room behind the empty unit makes a sound like a shriek as the heated rainwater inside it, hearing my call, balloons around an airlock. The rivets creak. And she, she—

  What?

  She has grabbed her bags and is running.

  No, I should say. You are to—

  What’s left of my water should be fire across the shrinking space, my teeth blistering steam scalding for her neck. But I cannot scald. I cannot adhere. My own bridle’s power repels me. She finds the handle. My hydrogen and oxygen pop. They should be combining to chase her, stop her in her tracks. Instead they hover, dull, inert, gassy. She fiddles, wrenches. The washers and nuts in the boiler system screech. A click, and the door opens, knocking the nasty little bitches off their perches, setting them swishing like jellyfish, glossy hair rippling in the light of their crashing, flickering phones. The pipes squeal as – hah! – the backdraft from the open door finally sucks my vapour to it, and I am after her, have enough now to open my maw for a bite of something, anything, but I am still too slow, too late, held back by the limits of my own incohesion, and the door is closing in the drifting remnants of my face, slicing plastic, aluminium, glass between me and my lifesource and – aagh – that can’t be me, pleading—

  no Magpie please Magpie lady Magpie at your service Magpie

  —as she emerges onto the surface, into the bright neon of the shopping daze, gasping while the smarmy man on the tannoy welcomes her back, Oh, Valued Customer, to Cheeky Monkey’s Jungle Maze.

  Of course that’s a kelpie, Magpie, sweetheart. It’s real.

  There are stories of kelpies who lose their bridles and are made to serve.

  e.g., the one who built the Laird’s castle.

  e.g., the one who ploughed for the Maiden’s father.

  There are stories of kelpies who lose their bridles and do not serve.

  e.g., the McGrigor kelpie.

  The ones that serve die, eventually.

  The ones that don’t die too, within twenty-four hours.

  There are no stories of humans wearing the bridles of kelpies, though there are rumours that if you steal a bridle you may become half-kelpie, and gain certain gifts, so who is not to say…

  I bead on the window, clumping to the toxic calcium and pyrophosphate Windolene mist. She is lifting my bridle over her head. The boiler whines. Or is that me – me? – whimpering like a sprog? The bitches, spotting her, readying themselves for the jeer, stop. Their spines undulate, sprigs of hornwort making space around her. The links settle, meet her skin.

  It only takes a moment.

  Her hair straightens and monocolours, her ankles narrow. I try to curse her, but all that comes out is a simpering plea, echoed by the boiler’s gurgle. Command me. The years fall off. She is plumping and rounding, growing juicy in the right places. I try again to curse, my high-and-mighty Magpie, and her unwitting vassal cunt-pack that yanked me out of my ancient bed, and the poxy Luas, and this plagued centre of filthy commerce which has seen me so unfuckingdone. The boiler squeals. Command me. Am I come so impotent? Her smell loses its pheromonal distinction, turns sweet and harsh. Her skin is dropping hairs, toes to neck. I try again. In the pipes, a rivet pops and as her pores plug with aluminium and synthetic perfume – yes! – a jet of boiling water spurts. It comes to me, comes to me, then—

  What? Something happens in her brain and—

  The water swerves against its own nature, ricocheting against the proudly erect if slightly rusted fishing rod propped against the counter, slanting sideways into the nest of wires dangling from a half-open fuse box.

  What used to be my tail connects, hard. My hydrogen and oxygen collide. A bang, like thunder. The lights snap out. The travellators stutter. The music groans and slows. A wrench and I am pulled – oh, agony – through the silica of the windows.

  ‘Missus?’ says Redser. In the underwater glimmer of the exit signs, her eyes are wide, woken.

  ‘You what?’ says Magpie. ‘I’m your pal. Maggie. D’yous not recognise me? Now shut your ginger hole and let’s go robbing.’

  The pack yelp.

  The trip is flicked. The lights snap back on. The travellators whirr.

  ‘Kids,’ says someone, tutting, but the moment for the collective nod has passed.

  The afternoon settles. Robbing and laughing and more shakes. I am dragged in their wake, every shift in direction stretching my molecules thinner. Make-up counters, mirror selfies. A fresh quarry, name-calling and hooting. The fusion has cost me. I try to resist, but with each attempt my ions spark, losing more charge. My gases spiral off, my unwilling meniscus lengthens. I adhere, I adhere, capillary-sucked into her pack, fruitlessly trying to calculate through the elemental, disintegrating courseways of my limbic mind how to win my bridle back.

  Coaxing, trickery, servitude, crucifix.

  The Inverness kelpie thought he would win, Magpie. McGrigor had a cross over his door, which wouldn’t let the stolen bridle pass the threshold. But McGrigor cheated. He flung the bridle through his window and the kelpie—

  In all the archive, there are no examples.

  Lovely chain, Maggie, says Redser. Very stylish. Her voice has softened at the edges; on another girl, might almost sound unsure.

  The pack’s attention catches, bound.

  It is then my ears should prick. But I’m too fucked-up on rage, too focused on my loss, to remember that thralling pulls two ways.

  It’s what we call a deficit, explained the first psychiatrist to her mother. A symptom associated with the blahdiblah. Shaking his head with something that looked like it was intended to be sorrow but hadn’t quite got there. You see, she has no insight, no words to describe what she is experiencing.

  Says who?

  The kelpie’s bridle, her ignorant father once told her, has the power to heal.

  And now Magpie’s smoothed-out body laughs and chases, her pack flowing slipstream behind her, while Magpie’s becalmed mind, running on the clear multi-lane highways of what is consensually agreed to be normal, sights inwards. If I was not so maddened, split asunder from myself, I might be sighting her innards too. Was this what she saw, thieving Magpie?

  The afternoon continues, and will continue again. It will keep settling, kneeling into the next, the next into a week, the week into months, the months into years. Magpie at its fore: mistress of the harry, glorious lady of the bitches. The girls will grow, sprout boobs and pubes, hips and babies. They’ll grow defunct: shrink, bloat, fail, drink, fall, swell, wither, die. What matter? Their younger selves will continue the hunt. While she, chained by a glamour designed for a god to wear, remains unchanged, floating up the travellator, floating down, fluid as plankton under the uneasy light of a fisher’s ball.

  In all fables comes a point where someone has to choose.

  I am an amoralistic entity. I am an alluring fuck. I am a nasty, horny bastard who likes nothing better than a good ride. I am a warning to the young and vigorous. Ride with me, and I will take you to the depths, rip out your guts, eat your parts and send a seared token back to the land of the living to let them know you do not get away. To the virgins: do not mess with strange men. To the children: do not play in rushing water. To the men: do not dare change the course of rapids, poison lakes and groundwaters or think, just because you fly over clouds, you can master them. I, a face of God, was begot out of the terror of dumb beasts, a herd throat-slit and hobbled and driven into fjords to drown by Vikings desperate to appease the force of wild waters.

  Healing? Fuck off. Look to your own kind for that, please.

  Magpie stops. And it’s only then – curse me for my giddy attention – t
hat my ears prick.

  ‘Boring,’ she says. She should have better words, but assimilation always comes at a cost.

  She shrugs off Redser’s arm. The girls stare.

  ‘Ah here,’ says Redser.

  ‘She taking that chain with her?’ says another.

  Before they know it, they’re running after her. Little glossy links, alive, young and foolish. And me, this craven gentled thing she has reduced me to, I—

  Have I a choice?

  —follow too.

  She leads them down and out of the centre, through the carparks, past the curry house and the tanning salon, across the two main roads and into the college grounds. The evening is fading; the rain greying. My own element conspires with her against me, pushing me down, sweeping me on. Some of the girls gabble about finding action, getting hold of lads or buying cider or making a show of the snobby yokes from the college. Magpie pays them no heed. Her feet pump faster, meeting soggy earth, a hollow near a fence. I meet earth and hollow too; instead of wetting, I bead, roll forward. She is not sure where she’s going, and the freedom of that sings at her throat. Don’t ask me what it tastes of. Beside her chuckles a thin brown ribbon of water, reflecting the lights of the industrial estate, its narrow banks shielded by the poplars and the haw, wild rose, nettles, thistles and docks. I’m on it, but not merged, my incoherent molecules refusing to sink, scuttling forward on its surface like marbles.

  The pack are starting to whinge about their shoes. Redser’s steps splash behind Magpie’s, anxious and grim.

  Across the pedestrian walkway into the park. Past the five fairy bridges, and the empty school, creepy without the kids playing in it, and the brick culvert dammed with dead mattresses and rotting shopping baskets. Magpie’s almost galloping. There’s a breathless mutter from the pack about going robbing in the Penny Black, but they’re past the pub before they know it.

  The sky is the colour of dirty silver. The rivulet’s banks have widened, the ground marshy. The girls are muddy, tired. One or two are sobbing. But they can’t halt and nor, sad creature, can I. The park is deserted, the red and yellow exercise toys at the edge of the man-made pond catching the last bit of light. We pummel towards it. Only a lone heron is awake, standing on the far bank.

  Magpie stops. The poplars sigh.

  I stop too, swirling above the water. The surface is a pinpricked lead under the no-moon rain. My edges droop, brush it, and—

  Stick.

  Redser’s stare is a clenched fist, white at the rims. ‘Why are we here?’

  And: Hahh, I sigh, as, with an effort, Magpie pulls my bridle off her neck. I feel her hair tangle and lift, sheen black-blue and pearl-green, her ankles swell, her shape lurch back to its older self, her lungs coarsen, her bloods clog, eau de Magpie filling the air as the grooves in her mind begin to fractal again.

  Redser grunts, recoils. The others don’t see, still gazing at my bridle, transfixed as Magpie shakes its silver links over the water.

  The pond roils. Its surface tension screams. Breaks. Gives itself to me, and up I geyser. Eyes wheels of fire, teeth like JCBs.

  They are aghast. Redser can’t even speak. She looks at Magpie and the bitter loathing of her disbelief—

  Oh, child.

  —makes my incipient cum turn to bile.

  I puke my ring up, right in front of them. I spurt steaming water, I spit pebbles. I split and drop, drenching them. I duck my head, shake my mane, spatter my sourness over them. The girls shriek.

  Magpie points at me, the nub of her little finger grey in the twilight.

  Command.

  Finally I see.

  The story of the ten children. A gaggle of smartarse little bitches on the monster’s back, taken by his savage dive through the pond’s soggy bed into the bottomless nexus of the water-table, devoured, destroyed, only their empty guts floating up to the surface of this pathetic machine-built excuse of a pond to show they ever existed. I can taste their parts already and it sickens me. She’ll use me, and keep using me, until all the bitches of the world are gone and I am spent, my guts corroded from breaking down their base materials.

  Can I refuse? Like McGrigor’s kelpie, shrinking, screaming, into oblivion over the span of a day? Or must I accept? Like the other pathetic craythur who surrendered his immortality to serve a farmer’s daughter, for the sake of a lie your limited kind call love?

  There’s one chance. Maybe, when all the bitches are gone, she’ll give my bridle back to me. And, though by then I’ll be too far gone to be restored, I may still curse her with my dying breath.

  In all fables, the hero has to choose.

  No good ending here. I might as well get fed.

  I rear back, a tower of roiling black, my stallion cock hardening again, my spine stretching, growing the extra vertebrae to fit them.

  The girls moan, cower.

  ‘No,’ says Redser. ‘That isn’t. You’re fucking—’

  ‘Get up on him,’ says Magpie, fighting through her brain’s returning frazzle. She pushes Redser, hard, in the small of her back. The child falls forward, yelps, gurgles, flails. Not waiting for the push, the others follow, fast, and meet my watery spine. Under their squealing, I hear their sitbones grate, pissy with fear.

  Magpie lifts her pinkie again. Then—

  What?

  A flick of her swollen wrist. My bridle’s in the air.

  ‘Mine!’ yowls Redser, surfacing.

  Fuck, no.

  I leap. They scream.

  The sinkhole opens.

  ‘What happened, Maggie, pet?’ said her mother, cowering in her midnight bed. Magpie at nineteen, pale and nude and drenched, crazy hair a tangle of corkscrews down her back. Her left hand out, a slow drip of blood. The pinkie gone from the first joint. Wagging her head, no words. Brainfuse. Overload of insights meant only for the holy and the dead. Me in the shadows, the face of God grinning at her.

  Her father, Duncan, slunk back against his pillow. His eyes a stranger’s, dull and lifeless.

  In Barra, where he hails from, though he’s been dead twenty years, they talk about the tenth child, the one who is always last. The one on the shore who doesn’t follow its friends, and get up on the waterhorse’s back to be turned into sausage meat in its fiery belly. But smart though this child be, it’s only human, so it can’t help petting the monster’s mane – us kelpies is alluring fucks, after all – and once it does its flesh adheres to ours, so something has to give. In some rivers the child cuts off its own hand. In others it just severs a finger.

  He went wandering after that, Duncan. Split the day before Magpie got out of the first bin. It was the last time she or her mother would see him.

  The little girls are gone into the night, drenched and shivering. Some sobbing, some laughing. Some already starting to dispute and minimise. A couple silent.

  Now it’s just us. Magpie, sitting on her favourite bench, her hoard of bags safe around her, smoking a quiet fag and watching as, lissom in my coat of wetsuit black, I prowl over the settling pond while it lowers down the barrel-innards of the sinkhole. Broken bits of red and yellow plastic bob and catch, tugged down, sink, resurface, swim.

  I smell her neurons hiss. She is thinking. Of the girls, I’m sure, sailing high across the sinkhole into their uncertain futures. She may be reflecting on Redser, the awful disappointment that shone through the child’s eyes when her grabby little fingers brushed my bridle and, for a heartbeat, de-alchemised my silver links into a shitty tangle of bent beercan pull-tops and mouldering lures before my teeth ripped it away from her, restoring the liquidity of wonder to its rightful state. Fool me twice, yeah, yeah. She may be speculating about what shadow, if any, that moment will cast on Redser’s life, and finding she doesn’t much care. Not even I can tell if Magpie is approaching her own nub; the memory of her pinkie stump as it pushed against the ginger’s skinny back, and if that recollection carries anything beyond sensation – remorse, satisfaction, shame. I’d hazard a bet, say no. The feeli
ng of things brought into balance is usually weightless.

  She throws her fag-butt away. She stands.

  Does she see me?

  No matter. I see her.

  The lights of the House twinkle in the distance.

  She turns.

  I could follow. I have my tricks, after all. I can be anything: seeping mud, falling rain. I could lick her face, nuzzle her openings, brush my dreads against her cheeks, her body, her hands. Cup her elbows, tickle her feet, stroke my fingers through her hair, rub my glittering chain of droplets against her nipples. I could stalk, pounce, watch her tease and kick. Lift her, hold her, observe her bend and strain against me, scrape her pointed foot up the length of my flank. Raise her arms, waving. She, I have no doubt, knows this. I’ll have you yet, I say as she disappears, blending into the greyness, and across the empty parkland, I hear her brain spark. I smell her lungs creak. I see her heart’s hoofs gallop through her miraculous flesh, course wanton in her bloods, doing patient battle there with the meds and serial vaccinations and antivirals and nicotine-caffeine hits. Under the putrid chemi-foam I taste the proud steel of her will—

  Oh, woman.

  And spent, I come to rest, sinking in spirals down the unknowable labyrinth of her perfect human mind.

  Headhunter

  The room smells of disinfectant and urine and, underneath that, something else. Semen, thinks Sonia. The walls are a grimy institutional yellow, even yellower in the light of the overhead fluorescent. The first time she visited, the tiled floor was stained dark brown and had to be scrubbed. She couldn’t help thinking of shit.

  Tinny rave music pumps from a cheap black player. Crap, cheesy beats under an insincere honeyed vocal. The Bear likes it, though, and if the Bear likes it, it stays.

  He’s kneeling on the floor in front of Sonia, hard at work. His enormous shoulders pull at the cloth of his sodden tee-shirt. Stretch and strain, ole man river. When he lifts his head, sweat glistens on his waxy forehead and catches in the scar which maims the left side of his face, carving through the eye socket like an ugly white worm. His black hair – a hedgehog crop, baby soft but bristly – glitters.