Poison City

by Paul Crilley

  But a teenager who’s in the know might do the same thing with spray paint and graffiti, hiding the tricks in a piece. When his target walks past or looks at the art, the curse will activate.

  It all comes down to what works for you. Shinecraft is like language, constantly evolving, never static, changing with the times.

  In Delphic Division, we’re given a basic education that covers as much as possible. But the sheer amount of information amassed over the centuries means there’s no way we can learn it all.

  Instead, we’re told to find what works for us, to specialize. The Division wants its agents to be masters of one, instead of dabblers in everything, and you’re encouraged to choose something that no other agent has picked. That way they have a wide spread of skills available to call on.

  That was always my problem. My mind is too fickle. I’d pick something that looked like it had potential, something that suited me. But after a while I’d just lose interest. Either it didn’t work the way I wanted to, or I decided it wasn’t suitable to use in the field.

  Take, for instance, calling on the ancestors.

  I spent months training for that. Studying trance states, learning how to call up your bloodline, then bargaining with the ancestors, doing deals that would allow me to contact them in my hour of need, all that kind of stuff. But I eventually gave up because it just didn’t work the way I wanted it to.

  Which is a polite way of saying it was hell. Calling the ancestors is like having disapproving parents standing behind you twenty-four seven, judging every single thing you do.

  Don’t believe me? Here’s how it worked. We have two worlds. We call them Nightside and Dayside. We’re Dayside, obviously, and the other world is Night. So I’d put myself into a trance and call on the ancestors. The two worlds connect. (We can see this. You can’t.) Everything becomes misty, insubstantial. The two worlds overlay each other. Everything is a bit . . . off. Like reality is off-kilter. The buildings are all there, same as in the real world, just . . . different. The windows are skewed, the buildings themselves are too tall, too thin, or lean to the side. The sky changes between storm black to apocalyptic orange. It’s like you’re in a Tim Burton movie.

  Oh, yeah, and there are all sorts of creatures wandering around. Nightside is their home. Where all the orisha and supers come from. So you can have ten-feet-long hyenas wandering the streets, or packs of roaming ghosts, or even a city full of biblical demons.

  It’s always changing, so you never really know what to expect. There’s a rumour going around that someone has a map of Nightside, but I’m not sure I buy it. We’ve been looking, investigating the possibility, but haven’t turned up anything yet. We live in hope, though.

  So . . . back to the ancestors. Say I’m in trouble. I need to use my shinecraft. It’s not like in the movies, where I just hold my hands up and spit electricity at my enemy.

  So I ask for help. The worlds connect, and suddenly I’m surrounded by my ancestors, going all the way back a few thousand years, the older ones receding into the hazy distance. I ask them to give me a hand. Politely. (Have to be polite. They take offence really easily.)

  And you know what they do next? They stand there and argue amongst themselves about whether they should even bother. Then, when they decide that yeah, OK, maybe they will help me out, it’s another discussion about exactly how much power I need. And all the while they’re criticizing my life choices, fashion sense, taste in books, and anything else that comes to mind.

  Which, if you’re in an emergency situation, is not the best method of Shining.

  So I gave that one up as a bad bet and haven’t decided on a new method yet. Not sure I ever will. I might just skim the top of all available methods, dip in to something that catches my eye then move on to the next. I mean, calling on the ancestors was a bust. And my tattoos . . . less said about those bastards the better. Christ knows what I might might saddle myself with next.

  But what that means is I’m stuck with the bone wand (stop sniggering) that every member of Delphic Division is given when they join up. The wands are supposedly made from the bones of famous magicians. Armitage says mine is from the shin of John Dee.

  It was Armitage who presented it to me in the first place. I remember the day well. I think she was drunk. She took it from a velvet case and gravely handed it over, then looked at me and said, ‘You’re a wizard, Harry,’ before doubling over with laughter.

  Only thing is, we’re supposed to outgrow the wands after the first year, when we specialize. I still have mine after four. Which explains my reliance on the dog to help me out with Shining and protective wards.

  See, as well as the wand, every magician at Division is assigned a spirit guide, something to help him navigate those first confusing months and years.

  It’s kind of an initiation thing. You head down to the litter-strewn basement where an ancient stone circle has been relocated, cemented into the floor and sharing space with empty beer bottles and mouldering porn magazines.

  You stand in the middle of the circle and the other conjurers at Delphic Division help open the gate to Nightside, and then in a ceremony not very magical at all, you’re assigned your guide.

  When the gate opened for me I saw some tall, horned, glowing creature walking confidently towards me. This being was . . . filled with wisdom. I could feel it shining through the gate, touching me with these mystical tendrils of knowledge. I had no idea what it was. Demon. Babylonian god, trickster spirit. I didn’t care. Because I knew this thing was going to teach me everything.

  Score, I thought. I’m gonna bag me one of the Big Boys.

  Then what happens? The figure stumbles and falls to its knees, and I see the dog rip out its achilles tendon, cock his leg, piss in my spirit guide’s face, and limp though the gate into the basement.

  ‘All right, dipshit?’ he says, sitting down at my feet.

  And that was that. Rules are, you get the first guide that comes to you, no returns.

  So I was stuck with him.

  I didn’t sleep well last night. The after-effects of using the tattoos left me feverish and ill, vomiting into a bucket until dawn eventually clambered into my room and told me to give up even trying to close my eyes.

  Now, stuck in morning traffic as I make my way to work, I feel like I’ve got a bad case of the flu. Or the worst hangover ever. Queasy stomach. Throbbing head. Shaky limbs.

  Whoever thought humans dabbling in magic was a good idea was a fucking moron. Our bodies are just not designed for it.

  The Delphic Division headquarters are located in an abandoned cement factory bordering the N4 as you head out towards the old airport. It always reminds me of that place the bad guys hide out in at the end of the original Robocop. Grey concrete, huge chimneys, rusted metal lying everywhere, chain-link fences, and broken-down walls. A lovely place to work.

  Of course, that’s all a carefully maintained facade, bolstered with glamour shinecraft powered by aether generators stacked up in the basement.

  I peel out of the Monday morning traffic onto a seemingly incomplete off-ramp, descending into a tunnel that loops beneath the freeway and out onto a newly tarred road leading to reinforced metal gates. (Anyone glancing over from the freeway will see rusted gates hanging from their hinges.)

  My car has an RFID chip hidden inside and the gates swing wide and allow me to enter without me even having to slow down.

  Anyone trying to get in without authorization will hit the wards Eshu has built up around the premises. I’m told it’s like a million volts of electricity surging through your body while you’re being read bad poetry by love-sick teenagers. Not sure about that last bit, but I don’t really want to test it out.

  I steer around the rear of the old factory, then down the ramp to the underground parking garage. I pull into my bay and switch the ignition off. I grip the steering wheel and stare at the yellow bollard in front of me.

  Sitting here is a morning routine. Waiting while I try to slip int
o character. While I remember what it’s like to be me.

  Sometimes it takes me five minutes, sometimes twenty.

  Everyone wears a mask. To fit in. To hide the real person inside. Because, let’s face it. If we didn’t have masks, if we all saw who we really were beneath the facade, beneath society’s norms, and lies we tell ourselves, the human race would be extinct. We’d be too scared to leave the house.

  I wear a mask because I sometimes forget what it feels like to be human. The mask is the me that existed before everything happened. It’s a construct built up from memories and remembered responses.

  I take a few deep breaths, trying to remember what I used to be like, dredging up the memories. The cockiness. The bad jokes. The sarcastic comments. Not exactly the best traits to aspire to, but they’re the ones everyone expects.

  It feels . . . nice, like welcoming an old friend.

  I uncurl my aching fingers from around the wheel and climb out the car, jogging up the stairs to ground level. I could have just taken the elevator into the main building, but I’m hoping to talk to Armitage before I see anyone else to tell her what happened yesterday.

  I emerge into daylight and skirt around the closest building, a towering, brutal grey silo with a radius of about two hundred feet. That’s the Division’s main building, where we have our offices.

  I approach the first of six smaller silos that surround it, stopping before a smooth section of concrete.

  I knock. A section of the wall fades to darkness and I step through, the concrete reforming behind me. Just before it does, the dusty sunlight illuminates a set of stairs leading down. Way, way down.

  Energy-saving globes flicker to weak life as I descend, their anaemic glow lighting the way forward. I head down and find Eshu waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs.

  Eshu is one of the Division’s convict gods. He’s a trickster deity, the Orisha of advice and communications. Which is why he’s been put in charge of our comms and internet servers and . . . well, pretty much everything electronic really.

  He looks like a seventeen-year-old street kid. Faded Levis. Converse high-tops and a George Romero T-shirt.

  ‘Hey, London,’ he says in greeting. ‘Why do you never use the front door?’

  ‘Uh . . . Don’t know. Guess I’m just a backdoor kinda guy.’ I wince as I re-run the sentence through my mind, but Eshu says nothing, just turns and walks away. No sense of humor, these gods.

  ‘Armitage around?’ I ask, following Eshu into his base of operations. (And his prison cell.)

  The place never fails to impress me. It’s as if a set designer from Blade Runner and The Matrix got together and created the ultimate SF computer room. There are monitors everywhere, drilled into the walls, bolted to the end of extendable swing arms, even piled one atop each other to form huge, multi-part screens.

  Some are showing live CCTV feeds from all over the world. Others are playing movies, TV shows, music videos. Still others have 24-hour news channels on an endless loop while others are showing porn and cartoons. Thick black cables loop through the air and sprawl across the floor like burned snakes. There’s a cot bed in the corner and boxes of instant noodles, the only thing Eshu eats.

  I never actually found out what Eshu did to warrant his prison time here. It must have been pretty bad, though. I hear his sentence is a cool two centuries.

  ‘She came in an hour ago,’ he says. ‘Said to tell you that if you came crawling in the back way like the yellow-bellied coward she knows you really are, you’re to sit tight and wait on her call. She’s dealing with Ranson.’

  Ranson. Christ, I hate that guy. A politician. An officious pencil-pusher. He’s our Divisional Commissioner and reports directly to the National Intelligence Co-ordinating Committee. And yes, he’s as annoying as all those titles sound. Petty in the extreme. I could go my whole life without laying eyes on him again.

  Only problem is, he’s in charge of Delphic Division and seems to be doing his best to get us shut down. Or at least crippling our funding. He won’t even acknowledge that shinecraft is real, for Christ’s sake. How messed up is that?

  I cross the room and duck through a heavy-duty blast door, emerging into a dimly lit tunnel. I duck through an identical door at the far end of the passage and I’m standing in the Hub, a round room with tunnels radiating off to the other sections of the Division, like spokes in a wheel.

  There’s a round metal plate beneath my feet. An LED light embedded in the plate flashes blue. Apparently this is where they keep our namesake, the Delphic Oracle, locked away and kept out of sight. I say apparently, because none of us really know if she’s down there. We’ve never seen her.

  I follow a tunnel into the heart of Delphic Division, the massive silo that I passed on my way to Eshu’s door.

  The inside of the silo is open all the way to the top. A massive post-modern office structure that wouldn’t look out of place in London’s financial district. The silo has been sectioned off into twenty floors, all holding offices, conference rooms, prisons, kitchens, sleeping quarters etc. A balcony circles each floor, a set of stairs leading between levels.

  The entire bottom floor is taken up by our open-plan office, desks and partitions and white boards, the stuff you’d see in any police station. Except our white boards are covered with pictures ripped from fantasy books, D&D paintings of orisha, photographs of supernaturals, anything that helps us visualize work on our open cases.

  The place is already bustling with activity. There are about thirty operatives in Delphic Division, and we all have a little space to call our own. I weave through the narrow lanes between the desks, nodding at people who insist on greeting me even though it’s first thing on a Monday morning and that kind of thing should be forbidden. No talking till ten would by my rule if I was in charge.

  I flop down into my ancient chair. It creaks and sinks down a few inches, the pneumatic gas long since dissipated. I pump the lever and it rises reluctantly upward.

  A pile of coloured files has been placed neatly in the exact centre of my desk. My case load for the week. I stare at it resentfully, then prod it with a pencil. I grab a bottle of aspirin from my desk drawer and swallow a few dry. I can feel it already. It’s going to be a long day.

  Parker is sitting at her desk opposite mine, glowering at nothing in particular.

  ‘Morning, sunshine.’

  She grunts noncommittally.

  Parker is our resident resurrectionist. Anything to do with dead bodies, zombies, death magic, hoodoo, voodoo, astral planes, whatever, she’s your woman. We were recruited at the same time, so we learned about the hidden history of the world alongside each other. She’s five-six and has a thin, muscular frame. Dark hair, dark eyes. Tattoos all across her arms and back. She may be small, but I pity anyone who mistakes that thin frame for weakness. She’s got a punch that can fell an African Rhino and has a pair of knuckle dusters hidden away that spring to hand at a moment’s notice.

  She also has the most extensive T-shirt collection known to mankind. I’ve known her four years and I’m sure she hasn’t worn the same T-shirt more than once. Today, she’s wearing a faded Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds tour shirt.

  She doesn’t seem to be in a talkative mood. She’s like that until she gets a few cups of coffee in her system. She lives on the stuff. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her without a cup of thick tar close at hand.

  I leave her to carry on with her system reboot and open up the first file on my desk.

  It’s a complaint from someone in the SAPS, a request to investigate the National Police Commissioner’s in-house sangoma. The complaint alleges that the sangoma is actually a charlatan, and is using fear of the occult to influence the commissioner. Boring. Should never have come to us. That kind of thing is usually dealt with by ORCU.

  The next file is a case being built around a bishop who mutilated children on the advice of a traditional healer. Apparently, the healer told him that mixing herbs and human tissue would boost
his dwindling church numbers.

  I toss it back to the desk. I hate these cases. No real connection to Night and Day. Just desperation and ignorance.

  The next file is more interesting. An investigation into why more and more fairy circles are appearing in Namibia. Armitage’s notes say she thinks it might be due to the migration of our own abatwa faeries. But that doesn’t explain why they would be leaving their homes here in Natal. Faeries the world over are notoriously territorial, tied to the land itself. For them to leave meant something had to be driving them. We’d have to look into that.

  The next folder is a series of suggestions to add secret amendments to the Human Tissues Act. These amendments are to give Delphic Division more power to carry out sentences against the country’s vampires. Armitage wants me to read over her suggestions and add notes.

  I groan. I hate that kind of stuff. Parker is much better at it than me. Maybe I can trade one of her cases for it.

  I tuck the file to the bottom and move on to the next.

  A report about Swaziland’s ban on witches flying their broomsticks below 150 metres. I chuckle. That’s not real. Witches didn’t really fly broomsticks. Boil down the fat of children and coat themselves in it to fly, sure. But broomsticks? Nah.

  Beneath the report is Armitage’s untidy scrawl. ‘How the hell are the poor buggers going to play Quidditch now?’

  Armitage is the one who recruited me into Delphic in the first place. I suppose I’m DS to her DCI, although we don’t really have those ranks out here.

  She came over from London on a case for the Ministry, the UK’s version of Delphic Division. But she decided she liked the weather here better, so just sort of stuck around.

  I asked her once if she didn’t miss England and she squinted at me through wreathes of cigarette smoke, sipped her whisky and said, ‘I won’t lie to you, pet, I do, I do. And you know how I get over it? I get in the shower and stand under the cold water for ten minutes straight to remind me exactly what I’m missing. After that, I’m golden.’