Chasing Embers

by James Bennet

  Too soon, they stood on the platform, islands in the ceaseless pedestrian stream. Trains came and went, rumbling to a halt with doors bumping wide, disgorging passengers or swallowing them whole. Kids slouched by, high-fiving and giggling. Families scuttled past in brisk, watchful huddles. In the percolating air, diesel fumes blended with deodorant. Sweat with subway soot. Rats nibbled on dropped burgers and loose wiring. On the curving walls, last year’s shows competed for attention like old whores in peeling paper dresses. In Insomniac City, nothing stayed new for very long.

  Rose shouldered her bag. She said something, but a discordant xylophone announcing an approaching train swallowed her words. He could see that she was fighting back tears, and she tried again, without looking at him.

  “You’re not coming back,” she said. “You can say what you like, but you’re not coming back. Why can’t I go with you?”

  “I told you. It isn’t safe. I won’t put you in—”

  “That’s your line? For real?”

  He wasn’t going to lie again. He had told enough lies. Only danger had brought him back to her; it was the only reason the two of them were here. She might not like it, but he knew she believed him when he’d said that New York was no longer safe. Now danger was taking him away again, and she could only bruise the moment with scorn.

  “Go to your sister’s. Take my advice. Please.”

  “Take me with you, you arsehole. You arsehole.”

  He stepped forward and planted a kiss on her forehead, letting her hands beat weakly at his chest.

  “I want you to know something,” he told her. “That last night. That night in the bar, Rose, before I left.”

  “Yes.” It wasn’t a question.

  “It was the worst lie I’ve ever told. I do love you.”

  She grabbed his face then, sealing his lips with her own. Riddles and secrets gyred around them, but as the train drew into the station, at least she had answered one of his questions. Maybe one day she would believe it.

  She released him gently. Studied his face.

  “Why won’t you tell me what’s going on?”

  “I…” He really wanted to. “I can’t.”

  Rose looked ready to pursue the matter, her eyebrows knitting together. Then she threw up her hands, beyond long-suffering, knowing he wouldn’t answer.

  “So where are you running off to this time, Ben?”

  He didn’t have to think about this one. His troubles this weekend had begun with a breach, a brazen flouting of the Lore. The Pact was a burden all Remnants must bear. It was often uncomfortable, often a grind, but he had always upheld his side. What good was the Guild if it wouldn’t uphold its own? For all Fulk’s gloating, all the CROWS’ threats, their actions last night amounted to a crime. Ben was heading east to report it, to alert the Guild to their violation. Maybe, just maybe, they could help. It was a whole heap of maybes, waiting for a train.

  “Home, Rose. I’m going home.”

  He reached for her again, his damsel in distress. But his hands came up short as he looked at her face, saw her regard of weary disbelief. Had he ever really thought that she could belong to him? She had always been her own person, no possession, no trinket of his. And she made that clear as she turned and walked away.

  FOUR

  The flight back to London seemed to take forever. It was no use heading directly over the Atlantic, not unless he wanted to play chicken with one of the world’s busiest airline routes. Plus give several hundred passengers enough unexplained sightings to keep Fortean Times in business into the next millennium. Strictly speaking, he was breaking the Lore as much as the CROWS with all these red-backed manifestations, but with no money, no passport and no time to arrange funds via his bank, there was no alternative. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to ask Rose to lend him the cash; his pride wouldn’t allow it. JFK to Heathrow in a first-class seat with à la carte dining, private lounge and champagne on tap was infinitely preferable to such a basic and lengthy migration, but getting home the old-fashioned way was the only option left to him.

  So, this stepping-stone jaunt. His stamina was great, his reserves of energy a deep well. Under his wings, discreet gills – lined with filaments of tissue and hair – sucked at the rushing air, cycling in time with cavernous lungs. The taut anatomical grille augmented and smoothed his great speed. Coupled with his mill-vane wings, he could cross hundreds of miles in a matter of hours. Whether in his original skin or in forma humana, it took a lot to tire him out, though long distances and aerial boredom would eventually take their toll. Monstrous muscles, keen sight and an aerodynamic frame were all great biological gifts. The magic responsible for his birth, liquid starlight running through his veins, translated these gifts into his morphology. A punch thrown by a fourteen-stone man could carry a seven-ton weight behind it. A fall from a building usually only left him with bruises. Conversely, a fast-food bucket meal could satisfy a Moby Dick stomach, when shrunk to anthropoid size. How to control these strange abilities had been the first lessons of his youth, lessons that proved key to discretion as much as to survival. But control and discretion did not always work. Four-hundred-odd Fulks would attest to that. So would Mordiford, a tiny village on the Welsh border, if only it remembered its troubled past as anything more than legend…

  Wings stirring the midnight smog, Ben soared into the northern skies, leaving New York and heartache behind. When it came to distance and speed, not even an albatross could rival him. The Arctic tern ate his dust. He swept upwards at a sharp incline, a corneous shadow across the moon, piercing the clouds and startling birds. Far below, the Eastern Seaboard glittered like diamanté on widow’s weeds. Twinkling ships scrawled their journeys across the polished slate of the sea. Up and up he soared, mainmast pinions spurning gravity. His underbelly of tough white flesh shone in the moonlight. The thermosphere dwindled in his wake, until the cities and the towns sank under the clouds, the roads vanishing like threads in a rug, and his snout streamed with vaporised crystal. Bladed spine skimming the heavens, inner gases keeping him warm, Red Ben Garston crossed the dreaming world.

  He touched down for a drink at a lake in Newfoundland, then arched with the dawn towards Greenland. On Tunu’s snow-draped shores he spent an hour catching his breath and then plunged over the Denmark Strait, carried by the winds of day across the southern rim of the Arctic Circle. He raced the shadows of whales into the dusk, their depthless dirge leading him on. The sun found him again in Iceland, Vatnajökull rumbling far below, a bubbling red eye, smoke wreathing his aching wings. He rested for a while on the mountainside, the restless volcano dwarfing his heat. Then on and on across the waters, the waves licking the dying sun, bronze upon the Scottish coast, the fanged boundaries of Britain. The stepping stones passed in miles and hours, in ragged breaths and twitching muscles. After a nap in a hinterland glen, Ben arose as dawn kissed the hills and began the final leg of his journey.

  Monday afternoon saw him reach his destination. April fog wreathed the Thames, Tower Bridge afloat, castles in the air. The grey skies shrouded his descent as he landed wearily in Regent’s Park. Unable to see the pentagram of paths, he alighted in some hawthorn bushes next to an empty bench, whipping up a tornado of twigs, leaves and broken branches. As the noise died down, he reached out his five-fingered pink-skinned hands just in time to catch a football flying at his head. Too exhausted to hide, he staggered out across the open green, in the direction of Barrow Hill Road.

  “Afternoon, lads.”

  Emerging from the fog, he handed the ball back to the gaggle of teenage boys, trying to ignore their gaping mouths, and then their laughter at his naked behind. He walked as quickly as he could into St John’s Wood, keeping to wheelie bins, parked cars and alleyways, and only prompting one or two screams.

  The spare key was where he’d always kept it, under the stone gryphon at the top of the steps to his Victorian town house. The classical pillars and tall façade of number 9 Barrow Hill Road might fit the archite
ctural style of the area, but to Ben the house was also a trespasser, an encroacher here as much the newsagent’s on the corner and the double yellow lines painted on the road. Once, the Great Forest of Middlesex had covered all of this space, dense trees concealing all kinds of wild animals, stags, boars, wolves and bulls. The forest was old when the Romans came, older still when the Saxons followed them. And before both the Romans and Saxons, when the Old Lands had still lapped against these shores, a slowly ebbing tide, there had been other beasts besides, among them pale, glittering beings who called the forest by different names depending on their moods. Even though the Fay had been centuries gone by the time Ben was born, the place still held a magic for him. He had found his way here many years ago, after fleeing a certain borderland village…

  The forest was gone. Long gone. The gnarled stumps buried under tarmac, train tunnels and pipes, and under them a millennium of muck. Street lights formed the new canopy, gutters and eaves the new boughs. Parking meters lined the kerb like fossilised grey plants. To most of the residents of St John’s Wood – of London, Britain and the world – the Old Lands didn’t even amount to a memory. These days, they were only a quaint, subconscious echo, glimpsed in flashy genre movies, Romantic art and children’s books.

  Ben slipped through his front door and leant against it in relief. He waded through bills, charity bags and pizza pamphlets, the impersonal bumf of his solitary life, past the stairway and into the lounge. It was a sparsely furnished, neglected space, the huge bay windows shaded by blinds, the floorboards covered in dust. The walls were all but bare. A Queens of the Stone Age poster hung by the door and a large framed print of William Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with Sun hung over the fireplace. The latter disturbed him more than impressed him; the painting so closely resembled his own fabled state. There was no computer and no phone. Potential clients found him via word of mouth or happened upon him in bars. An ad on the web would be as good as sending up a flare. The Guild forbade any trace of his existence, his presence in society, as anything other than a man, a rich one perhaps, but otherwise reclusive and ordinary. That was a crucial condition of the Pact. Of course, the crooks who hired him did so because he was anything but, his feats of strength and endurance turning him into another kind of myth, a whispered story over cards in a back room and a secret weapon of the underworld. It was another example of Remnant survival, the Lore bending, but never to the point where it actually broke. Naturally, Ben never revealed his true self to his clients. He did their dirty work, took their money, then, muscles stretched, boredom alleviated, faded back into the shadows…

  Tins filled the kitchen cupboards to last through the next Ice Age. Fruit and vegetables rarely graced the racks. Ben didn’t kid himself by tending plants, and he was absent much too often for pets, flying away on shady missions for generally shady men. Not that cats or dogs would come near him anyway. Only a lizard or a fish wouldn’t think he had bought them for lunch, and neither gave a shit about companionship. Ben rarely ventured upstairs, but he knew that the sparseness continued up there, a maze of cobwebs and blank white walls. All the furniture was modern and stylish. Beds stood in bare rooms with carefully aligned, pristine pillows, just as he’d left them months before, clean and collecting dust. The bathrooms lacked the usual items of personal care, no towels, toothpaste or soap. The inside of the house was a tasteful tomb. Loneliness by IKEA.

  A shadow to his naked flesh, number 9 Barrow Hill Road was a mask.

  Christ, Rose. I wish you were here.

  But that was a fire hope couldn’t quench, so he went to the fridge and quenched it the only way he knew how. Jack in hand, he left footprints across the dusty floor as he padded to the couch and sank into its plush black leather.

  He flicked on the TV and half watched the news, the various reports flickering across the screen. More on allied manoeuvres in Iran. Anti-capitalist riots in the City. North Sea oil rigs running dry. Massive cracks in the Arctic. Unprecedented drought across the Horn of Africa…

  “Plague and pestilence. Famine and war. Same as it ever was.”

  Except it wasn’t, not really. The world was changing, and not for the better. The disasters of the past, from the Black Death to the world wars, had all left their scars, but now it seemed like the earth itself was in revolt, straining under pollution and industrial advance, threatening to destroy the swelling population. And perhaps the waves surging on the surface swayed the vestigial weeds in the depths, the Remnants growing restless, sensing the turn of the tide…

  The broadcast ended on the usual sunny note, the newsreader perking up to mention an eclipse in Egypt, best viewed from Cairo the following Sunday. A darkening sun blazed on the screen – some recent stock footage – a shimmering crown of shadow and gold, nature flaunting her mystery.

  Ben was too tired to feel awed by it. He switched over to an afternoon game show, let cheesy one-liners and canned laughter wash away the taste of social decline. He sipped Jack, his old friend, and slipped snoring into sleep.

  If he dreamt, he didn’t remember. He awoke with a start. Orange slashes through the blinds told him that night had fallen. It was half past anytime. Some midnight limbo. The TV was a blizzard of static and it took him a moment to register the oddity. Show schedules didn’t end these days, certainly not on the mainstream channels. Soap operas and documentaries partied until dawn. This fact made him fully open his eyes, and he blinked in confusion at the screen. A power cut, surely. The draught on his neck turned his head, sucking his forehead into a frown. As far as he could see, the windows were closed. Why was the room so bloody cold? His draconic senses snapped around, ears straining for a squeaky floorboard, a creaking door, quickly confirming that the house was empty – so why didn’t it feel that way?

  That smell. What was that smell? It reminded him of a blown fuse, although a lot more pungent. The fuse box was down in the cellar, so maybe a plug in the lounge had overheated…His rational mind suggested these things at the same time that his instincts dismissed them. The TV static was prickling on his skin, some residual charge crackling in the space, a subtle, needling pressure. No fuse or plug was capable of that. Even a split SCART lead wouldn’t infuse its immediate surroundings. And the scent held more than electricity, more than escaping volts. There was life to it. Organic energy. If a thunderstorm could sweat…His nostrils flared with the impression.

  He surveyed the room again, nictitating membranes working overtime, increasing the available light through his pupils. His human eyes vanished. Reptilian slits became golden moons. A realisation wrenched him to his feet, where he stood like a naked statue in the gloom. Footprints wove through the dust across the floor, and some of them weren’t his.

  No fucking way.

  He dropped into a crouch, instantly defensive. Scales wavered across his back, muscles bulging, battle-ready. A small array of blade-like plates rattled up from his shoulders and down his spine, a quick, tense undulation. Transformation was merely a thought, an extension or retraction of will, and he could slide with ease between its varying stages, fluid and chameleon-like. He was rhino-sized and steadily swelling, but when no enemy presented itself, the lounge remaining dark and silent, his shape gradually dwindled to a red, bristling figure that was not quite beast and not quite man.

  Ben-between-states sniffed the interloper’s footprints. His shortening tail thumped the floor.

  Who was it? Who the fuck broke into my lair?

  He didn’t think it was Fulk. If House Fitzwarren knew of his whereabouts, an assassin would have tried their luck long ago, tossing a hand grenade through the window or posting an anthrax letter through the door. That was their style. The CROWS would’ve hidden in the trees on the street, waiting for him to step outside and into some vile spell, indirect and complex, of course, but no less murderous. Witches heeded a plethora of codes – their magic wouldn’t work otherwise – and even a novice understood the repercussions of breaching certain, secret thresholds, particu
larly one belonging to his kind. You didn’t just waltz in, whistling and hoping for the best, not unless you wanted your beldam buddies to sweep up your ashes with a broom…

  And then there was the matter of the Lore.

  Babe Cathy cackled in his head.

  Things change…

  Ben studied the footprints. They were smaller, narrower than his, easy to make out. They danced among his prints like mockery, a confident, shameless taunt. I can walk here and you can’t stop me. They danced up to the edge of the couch and then stopped dead. Fanned dust betrayed the place where the interloper had stood, dallying there, looking down at him. Watching him while he slept. Watching him…

  He pulled a face, one clammy palm squeezing the back of his neck. Then, hunched over and breathing hard, he followed the tracks. The footprints danced back the way they had come, then diverged from his. As he headed into the hallway, another realisation struck him, a pail of ice poured down his back. Bare feet had left these prints, the toe marks and curve of the soles apparent in the dust. Clenching his jaw, he saw a bold, slender twin to his own tread and the taunt became a slap. Whoever had dared to enter his house had done so without wearing shoes.

  The footprints ran out six feet or so from the front door. Vanished like smoke. The door was open, the source of the draught. Ben loped over to it, inspecting the lock and finding it undamaged. Someone just walked the hell in here? The automatic bolt dispelled any doubts about vigilance. So did years of caution. He would have locked the door. Hadn’t he leant against it when he came in? Yes. He poked his head out, peering up and down the road. A fox crossed the street through sodium pools, on its way to the park. Nothing else moved.