Fearsome Magics

by Jonathan Strahan

  I hold open one half of the wide double doors and Father distractedly thanks me as he hurries inside. I wait until the little boy is dragged by and I follow them in, unnoticed.

  The reception area is crowded with people: the bruised, cut, scratched, bleeding, wounded and syphilitic human garbage that Dream London contrives to manufacture each and every night. I slip amongst them, just another refugee from the world of pain that lies outside the doors. I loiter a moment in the queue by the reception desk, listening as Father begins to explain:

  “It’s our Eldest, he’s...”

  “He’s in the egg!” interrupts Mother, pointing to the pram. “I know it! No sound from his bedroom and I go up there and this great big egg is on his bed! Well, you hear stories, don’t you? So I say to Father...”

  The nurse behind the desk is having none of it. She’s a big woman herself, grown fat on a desk job and too many biscuits. You can see the crumbs scattered around the desk. Yellow crumbs cover her starched white blouse, and yet she clearly doesn’t care. Why should she? She is the Queen of the Waiting Area.

  “I think,” she says, oh-so-condescendingly, “that the doctor will decide whether or not your Eldest is in the egg.”

  “I don’t need the doctor to tell me that,” says Mother, leaning closer to the Waiting Area royalty. She drops her voice as she puts claim to a higher authority. “A mother knows,” she whispers.

  Score one to Mother. But Biscuit Crumb Nurse isn’t so easily beaten.

  “I shouldn’t think you’d need a doctor to crack that egg open,” she observes.

  “Mrs Matthews did that,” replies Mother with grim satisfaction, “and she found her son dead of suffocation. You have to let these things work their way through...”

  Mother is so intent on the argument that she doesn’t notice that Daughter has let go of Son and he’s wandered off into the crowd, teddy bear under his arm. Daughter has been captivated by the louche young man with the sideburns who is turning his smouldering gaze on each of the females in the room in turn. Daughter is too innocent to notice the smell of ointment that tingles from the man’s trousers. I would tell Mother—I should tell Mother—but it’s not in my interests to be noticed.

  There is a set of double doors at the back of the waiting room from which the nurses emerge, all starched linen and black stockinged legs. That’s where I need to go.

  I leave Mother and Father and take a seat by Husband and Wife, the better to watch the doors. Husband has no feet; he seems embarrassed by the way his legs end just short of his ankles. Two bloody rags are tied there.

  “What happened to his feet?” asks a man in a motorised green hat. Husband shrivels under Wife’s glare.

  “He went for one of those fish pedicures,” she says.

  “Don’t start that again!” says Husband, angrily, “how was I to know they were using piranhas? Anyway, the man said they would grow back.”

  The door opens at that point and I slide from my seat to slip past the emerging nurse. I leave the Waiting Area and enter Dream London Hospital’s interior.

  I smell antiseptic. Nurses move back and forth. Some of them are carrying bottles of pills, some are carrying ridiculously large syringes. Some of them push trolleys around but they do so without acknowledging their human cargo. The Dream London Hospital nurses are all busy busy busy doing the maximum amount of work with the minimum amount of empathy. I scan the pale blue corridor, I look through doors into tiny rooms containing single couches. Patients sit or lie in those rooms, waiting to be seen. They press cloths to wounds, they struggle to breathe, they hold their heads in pain, they gaze out into the corridor at the hurrying nurses, feeling as if they have been forgotten. I ignore them, I need to press on. I’m late for her. I have to find her.

  Three sets of lifts lie at the end of the corridor, their doors painted the dark red you would expect to find in Hell’s entrance hall. I don’t like the look of those lifts, I resolve to take the stairs. I find a little door to the side of the lifts and I stand a moment in the cold, yellow stairwell.

  It’s pleasant in here. It’s always nicer to be alone, where you don’t have to hide. I could stay in here for hours, stay here in this no man’s land. But there is work to be done. I have to decide which way to go.

  Upstairs lie the private wards, the places where the rich of Dream London come to fake illness and gain sympathy, to have a little time out from the day to day. Upstairs are the places for people suffering from the vapours; the humours; from inflamed organs of sensibility and infected hermeneutics. Upstairs are rich women needing pampering and rich men having their sex addiction worked through by a series of nubile young nurses. She won’t be up there.

  I need to head downstairs. The lower you go in Dream London Hospital, the more serious the illness. Down the stairs, past the day wards; recuperation; in-patients; intensive care; keep heading down until you reached the deepest basements. There you find the furnaces, the place where they burn all the waste, the bloody bandages, the body parts, the dead. The very end of Dream London Hospital. That’s the direction I need to go.

  Just as I come to that decision, someone grabs my leg.

  I look down into the eyes of Son, off exploring the hospital whilst Mother and Father and Sister fuss around their egg. He must have tripped, grabbed on to me to steady himself. Son nods by way of apology, lets go of me and then sets off downstairs. I wait for a moment to make sure no one else is around, and I follow him.

  DOWN THE STEPS, fifth floor, fourth floor—I feel something on the third floor, and I leave the peace of the stairwell to look around. This floor is filled with little wards, eight beds to a room. The people here aren’t so sick; they walk around carrying little clear plastic bags containing their bodily fluids, holding them up for the world to see. I make my way down to Ward 33a.

  This ward is better than the others—it has windows. You can see a graveyard outside: broken gravestones overgrown with brambles; white tombs, their doors gaping open invitingly. The moon hangs heavy over the landscape, white as bone. It shines on the bodies of the gasometers that have drifted here on the Dream London tides, their metal tummies split apart where they have crashed into each other. Someone has flung the windows wide to let out the smell of sickness. It was a vain move, the thick smell of Dream London has poured into the room instead. Dream London smells of flowers and fecundity. The ward smells of gangrene and perfume. The mixture is enough to turn even my stomach.

  I turn around, feeling for her.

  There’s a bird staring at me from the bed by the door. Her eyes are wide, her beak open slightly. Her soft, black feathers are dull and unhealthy, they have moulted across the white linen of the bed clothes. She recognises me.

  “Leave me alone, Carrionman,” she says. She scrabbles to sit up, and her clawed feet emerge from the bottom of the sheets, pink and scaly.

  “You can’t take me,” she declares. She nods her head. “Yes. I’m not your prey. I fell down, but I got up all by myself. I’ll heal on my own. These Dream Londoners, they brought me here against my wishes. I don’t need their help!”

  She’s scared and proud and defiant, and I realise that she’s right. She’s not the one I’m looking for.

  “I’m not here for you,” I say.

  “I think you’re lying to me, Carrionman.” She looks around the room. No one else is paying us any attention. “You have no jurisdiction here,” she says.

  “I have jurisdiction over people, not places,” I say. “And I don’t lie. I’m not here for you. Tell me, have you heard of any others like us in this place?”

  Bird woman shakes her head.

  “There’s none of us up here in the daylight. You need to head down underground. You don’t need me to tell you that.”

  She’s right, of course. I look at her.

  “You’ll get better,” I said.

  “I’ll do it on my own,” she says, and I know she’s right. I have no claim over her.

  I leave the ward. There i
s a trolley full of legs waiting outside, they stand bent at the knee. A man is sorting through them.

  “Get away from there!” shouts a nurse.

  “But they cut the wrong one off!” he shouts. The nurse steps towards him and he hops off, down the corridor.

  BACK IN THE cold yellow stairwell I take a moment to myself. I prefer it in here, I really do. But I have work to do, so I fluff my feathers and I descend to the last floor above ground.

  The ground floor is lit by an eerie green glow. Down here the nurses wear thick lead aprons, they have dark glass visors covering their eyes. The air crackles with energy, and I jump at the two bright flashes that suddenly flare from around the corner. I’m looking around to see if there is a place to get my own lead apron when I hear a commotion behind me. An approaching rumble, a patter of footsteps...

  “Out of the way! Coming through!”

  It must be the strange energy that makes me so visible down here. Not that anyone cares. I’m jostled aside by Father and Mother, pushing their egg in a pram towards the X-ray machine.

  “And about time too,” says Mother to the nurse hurrying along at her side, pulled along by Mother’s directed rage. “We’ve been waiting for hours.”

  Half an hour would be more like it, I think. Nonetheless, I follow them to the X-ray room, feeling less visible in the middle of the group of people.

  The X-ray room is filled with chugging and rattling energy. Green machinery pumps and wheezes and glows all around us. The radiologist is waiting, his bones visible through his skin. He’s completely hairless: no eyebrows, no eyelashes, no down on the back of his hands. He’s much too thin, he looks as if he lives on radiation alone. His eyes are bigger than light bulbs and they sweep a green glow across the egg shell.

  “You sink your son iz in here?” he says. “Put him in ze machine und I will see.”

  “Will we be able to see him through the shell?” asks Father, impressed by all the machinery.

  “Ze machine does not see objects,” says the radiologist, impatiently. “It looks at people’s souls und tells zem vot zey are really like. I vill tell you if your son is good or evil or just plain dead. Zis is acceptable, yes?”

  “Bloody ridiculous,” says Mother.

  “Steady, Mother,” says Father. “The man’s just doing his job.”

  “You do not vant?” asks the radiologist.

  “I’ll bloody vell have vot’s going,” says Mother. “But there’ll be complaints, I can tell you. People in this place don’t give a damn about patients. It’s all just about souls. You don’t look after anyone in your care properly.”

  Funny she should say that just as Son is walking by unnoticed behind her. She doesn’t see that he’s having a great time in the hospital. Someone has given him a lolly and he sucks on it as he heads, with unerring bad sense, towards the large archway that leads to the basements. The engraving over the archway reads:

  Abandon bodily fluids, all those who enter here.

  I wonder if I should tell Mother, but I’m not here to help, nor to hinder, so once more I follow Son down the stairs. I can hear screaming. Or maybe it’s just birds singing.

  THE FIRST PLACE I come to under the earth is a ward the size of an aircraft hangar. Just like one of the really big ones back home where the powerful keep their Zeppelins. This ward has beds arranged in a grid pattern across the floor, each with a yellow light hanging above it, suspended from a cord nearly a hundred feet long.

  The people in this ward aren’t like those in Ward 33a. Most of them just lie in their beds, faces illuminated yellow as they stare at the ceiling. These people hardly move. In fact, I notice there is less movement the farther you are from the door. I wonder how far the nurses venture into the room.

  But that’s not my business. I tilt my head, listening for her.

  On a bed nearby, Boyfriend sees Son wander by.

  “Someone should get him out of here,” he says. “A young lad like that? You don’t want the Doctor to get his hands on him.”

  Girlfriend is watching. She’s holding Boyfriend’s hands. Actually, now I come to look properly, I see that neither of them have hands. Her arms lead directly into his. These two must be just so into each other.

  “Little boy!” calls Girlfriend. “Are you lost?”

  Son looks at her, sucking on his lollipop, his—how sweet—teddy tucked in his other arm. Girlfriend leans towards him, as best she can. Boyfriend is tilted off balance. Girlfriend continues:

  “Little boy, you should head back upstairs if you can! This is no place for little boys.”

  Son gazes at her.

  “What’s your name?” asks Boyfriend.

  “I’m not supposed to speak to strangers,” says Son, and he turns around and heads off out of the ward.

  A gong sounds. Matron appears in the doorway, beater in hand.

  “The anaesthetist is coming,” she says. “Sit up straight and answer his questions nicely.”

  I feel uncomfortable now, the only person standing in a ward where everyone is weakly struggling to sit up in bed. Everyone here is clearly in terror of the anaesthetist. I need to get out, but they’re all looking towards the only exit. As I stand there, gripped in indecision, I suddenly feel her, there at the edge of my senses.

  She’s close.

  There’s a disturbance outside. Matron is called, and she hurries from the room. I take my chance and slip out behind her.

  Son is sleeping peacefully on the corridor floor. The anaesthetist is bending over him, a fussy little man in a white coat.

  “Ah, Matron,” he says. “I found this young lad wandering the corridors. I can’t see his ID bracelet. I suspect that he shouldn’t be here. Would you be so kind as to check for me?”

  “Certainly, Doctor Collins,” says Matron, blushing. She pats her hair, she’s clearly rather taken by the anaesthetist. “And if he isn’t a registered patient?” she asks.

  “Then I would be grateful if you were to load him onto a trolley and take him down to spare parts.” The anaesthetist squeezes Son’s middle and smiles. “There are some nice healthy organs in this firm little body. I’m sure they’d appreciate them up on the fourteenth floor.”

  “I shall get this seen to right away, Doctor.”

  Matron signals and a nurse runs forward, scoops up Son in her arms, and carries him off.

  “Now then, Doctor,” says Matron, “are you ready for your round?”

  “Let us proceed, Matron.”

  They head off into the ward. Only I have noticed Son’s teddy—how sweet—left lying on the black and white tiles of the floor. I pick it up and stroke it. Feathers on fur: it’s an odd feeling.

  But all this is just a distraction. It’s time to go back into the cold yellow stairwell. Down a few more flights. She’s getting closer, I can feel her.

  Not on the next floor, or the next. Maybe here?

  The corridors on this floor are padded with thick white cushions. I can hear giggling coming from behind a door. The patients in this soft white world wander around in straitjackets, they pick up pens with their feet and write letters in flowery script. They hold cups in their toes to drink their tea.

  “Hello, Welcome!”

  The man hugs me, he rubs his moon face on my feathery cheek, he holds my scaly foot in his pink hand and pumps it up and down.

  “So pleased you could make it,” he says. “I’m mad, you know.”

  “He’s not mad,” says Queen Victoria. She is standing at his side, holding an orb in one hand and a sceptre in the other. She is clearly not amused.

  “I am mad,” said the man. “Aren’t I?” he winks at me. “Why else would I be talking to a huge crow? You are a crow, aren’t you?”

  “I’m related,” I say.

  “Don’t listen to him,” says Queen Victoria. “He’s only pretending to be mad. He’s spreading diseases to everyone in Dream London Hospital. He pretends to be so friendly: a hug here, a reassuring pat on the hand there, a kiss on the forehe
ad. Spreading germs all the time. He used to be on the second floor, but they all died of the ’flu. They say it sent him mad, being the only survivor, so they sent him down here. Really, it’s what he had planned all along.”

  “How do you know that?” asks the man, suspiciously.

  “You talk in your sleep,” says Queen Victoria. She nods at me. “He sold his body to the influenza virus for one month of passion. One month of drink and debauchery and unending appetites. When all that passed and he was left weak and dying in the gutter, he was brought to Dream London Hospital and now it’s the turn of the virus to have its fun. We’ll all be dead by the end of the week.”

  “Don’t listen to her,” says the man. “She’s the mad one.”

  Queen Victoria sneezes. Her nose is running, her eyes are running, she’s even running a temperature.

  “Have you told the nurses?” I ask her.

  “What nurses? There are none here! They know what he’s doing. They’re hoping to clean out these wards. They want us all to die so they can get some new patients in.”

  “Oh hush,” says the man. “Go and lie down. You’re feeling weak and tired.”

  “If I am it’s all your fault.” says Queen Victoria, but off she goes anyway.

  The man kisses me and heads off in the other direction. Now that I have some peace I tilt my head and listen for her.

  She isn’t here on this floor, I realise, but she is close. Not ten feet away, directly below me. It’s an easy mistake to make. I am thinking like a bird, ready to swoop down on my prey. I can’t be a bird in this human place, I have to take the stairs.

  Down the stairs one last time and into intensive care. The patients here are joined to the walls by wires and tubes. Red and brown and clear fluids are constantly pumping, out of one body and into the next. These people share their kidneys with one another, one man lives on blood oxygenated by another woman. Orange and brown liquids bubble and squelch, into arms, out of tubes in their sides. The patients drip and gurgle and spread their lives out over several yards.