by Kate Griffin
Amongst them, and I was pleased to see it hadn’t gone, was the “Cave of Wonders, Mysteries and Miracles”, advertised by a small wooden sign swinging above an open door through which the overwhelming smell of cheap incense and musty carpets hit the nose like it wanted a pillow fight. It lurked between a small bookshop and a pub with frosted windows and dark paintwork, looking embarrassed to be there. I felt embarrassed going into it. But I told myself it was for the best, took a deep breath of fresh air before entering, and began my descent.
What began as a bright stairwell with white walls was suddenly transformed. Beyond a hanging covered with mystic-esque symbols it became a dull stairwell of dark maroon walls and polished wooden floors, tormented by an eerie, nasal background droning from tiny speakers high up on the walls. The feel of the place changed too. The buzz of magic was stiller, quieter, an elusive black-silk touch across the senses rather than the shock of sensation I always used to associate with the Cave. Immediately, that made me suspicious.
The reception area had always been a makeshift affair, with plastic benches and tatty editions of last year’s Magic and Miracles – “THE GUIDE TO TRUTH!!!! – Featuring an exclusive interview with ***Endless Might *** on the rewards of proper summoning technique!!!”
These quaintly unpleasant items had been replaced with black leather sofas and a silver cigarette tray containing stress balls. I walked up to the receptionist, a sour-faced man wearing tight leather trousers and not much besides, and said, “I’m here to see Khan.”
“Uh?” His attention was fixed on a magazine which seemed to be all about What Brad Did Next, and breasts.
I tried again. “I’m here to see Khan – what are the stress balls for?”
He had a tattoo across his bare, bronzed back of a Pegasus spreading its wings. Down one arm someone had inscribed in black and red ink: “WIZARD”.
“Excuse me?” I repeated patiently. “Why do you have stress balls?”
His eyes didn’t leave an article dedicated to “How I Pulled Cheryl!!” as he replied, “Clear your aura for the reading.”
“Clear my what?”
“Your aura. You got an appointment?”
“No.”
“You’ll need to make an appointment.”
“I just want to see Khan – what do you mean ‘clear my aura’?”
“You gotta be in the zen to do a reading. Gotta have a clear head for the truth that’ll unfold, see?” he mumbled through his disdain.
I thought about it, and reached the only conclusion to be had from a lifetime of magical experience and several years of extracurricular mystic activity. “But… that’s bollocks,” I said, hoping he might be inclined to agree.
“Not my problem. Wanna make an appointment?”
“No, I want to see Khan.”
“No one here called Khan.”
“He owns this place.”
“Uh-uh. Sorry, mate, you’ll be wanting somewhere else. No Khan here.”
He still wasn’t paying us attention. We were not prepared to tolerate disrespect. We leant across the counter, grabbed him by the throat with one hand, pulled his face an inch from ours and hissed, “We want to see whoever is in charge now!”
He made a wheezing noise and pawed at my wrist. We wanted to see his eyes bulge a little further from his face, but I relaxed my grip and pushed him back. I smiled, in a manner that I hoped was apologetic but firm. “Perhaps I should just go through,” I offered.
He pawed at his neck and made gagging sounds. I nodded politely, and swept past reception and through the curtains leading to the gloom beyond.
The irritating nasal droning was even louder in the shadows beyond the curtains, and the smell of cheap incense almost giddying; its thick smoke spilled out of every corner and tickled the eyeballs. There was only one source of light: on a table in the centre of the room a crystal ball was glowing white. It didn’t really emit light, so much as hug the shadows, defining a tight area of space against which the darkness pressed. I didn’t bother with it, since its colour and texture felt entirely mains-powered, rather than anything worth the name of magical. From beyond the next curtain, of a thick black velvet, a voice like snow swishing across a mountainside said, “Since you’ve come so far, you are welcome.”
I pushed the curtain back.
Half lost in a cloud of incense, the woman sat at the back of the room on a chair upholstered in red silk. Her hands were folded neatly in her lap, and a deck of cards lay on the table in front of her. She was wearing more gold medallions and fake gold chain than I had ever seen on a single living creature. The jewellery hung from a headpiece resting precariously on her dyed-black hair, dangled over her heavily made-up face, swept across her shoulders and down her arms, tinkled along her fingertips, drooped down her front and spread out in waves around her ankles and across her bare feet and polished toenails. When she moved, each motion a delicate twitch, she jingled, she glinted, she glowed.
She said, not raising her eyes from the cards, “Will you not sit, since you are so eager to hear your fortune told?”
I said, spreading my arms wide in disbelief, “What the bloody hell is this?!”
“The mystical often takes us by surprise…”
“No, but seriously, what the bloody hell is going on? Where’s Khan? What’s all the shiny stuff for, why do you have a glow-in-the-dark crystal ball, who’s the man in the tight trousers, what’s up with all the incense, I mean really and right now? What kind of establishment is this meant to be?”
For a moment, just a moment, she looked surprised. Then her expression reset itself into one of semi-divine entrancement, her hands drifting up around her face in the swirling patterns of the smoke she disturbed, a beatific smile settling over her bright scarlet lips. “I am the seer of the future,” she intoned, “I am here to grant to you…”
“Where’s Khan?”
“I am here to grant you a vision into…”
“Bugger a vision into the unknown mists of fucking whatever, I want to see Khan, and I want to see him right bloody now!”
She hesitated, a flicker of something real passing over her serene features for a moment, and in a slightly more sensible voice, tinged with a hint of Peckham, she enquired, “Why would you seek this man?”
“Do you know who Khan is?”
“A king, an emperor, a lord…”
“We are not here to play games!”
She froze, and this time made no effort to recover, the surprise clear on her face. I glared at her, daring her to mumble a single line more of inane waffle, itching to throw something. Finally, with a little breath, half a laugh, half a start of surprise, she said in a much clearer, sharper voice, “Why are you here? What do you know about Khan?”
“Alfred bloody Khan,” I snapped. “Seer of the bloody future. Something, may I add, which you are not.”
There was a flash of anger behind her eyes. She stood up, gathering her skirts in a single sweeping, practised gesture, and exclaimed, “Be careful. You were not invited here.”
Then, to our surprise, she stepped right up close to us, and stared at our eyes. She drew in a long breath between her teeth and whispered, “Well then…”
She reached up to touch my face, and instinctively I caught her wrist, the metal across it cold and uncomfortable. “Tell me” – I struggled to keep our voice tame – “where Khan is.”
She hesitated, then smiled a thin, humourless smile. “Alfred Khan died two years ago,” she said flatly. “You are behind with the news. Anything else I can do for you, sir – aura cleansing, mystic divination, unfolding of the sacred secrets? No?”
I let go of her wrist, before I could forget that I held it. We were not entirely surprised; nevertheless I didn’t know what to do, what to say, how, exactly, I should behave. So we did nothing, but waited to see if an emotion would strike, curious to know how we responded to such news, whether we cried or shouted or became angry or felt nothing at all. We hoped we would cry; it was the most
human response. My eyes remained firmly dry, my mouth empty of any words.
The woman was staring at us, waiting to see how we reacted. We sat down on a padded stool covered in silk. In that close space, she towered over us, a proud tilt to her chin. I guessed she was in her mid-thirties, that the yellowish colour of her eyes came from a pair of tinted contact lenses, and that somewhere underneath that headdress the roots of her hair were blond. She waited for the news to settle, and the flat waters of incomprehension to start bubbling into a sea of embarrassing self-pity, before she said, “You knew Khan well?”
“Sort of.”
“Former client?”
“He once read me my future in the flight of a plastic bag,” I replied with a shrug. “He derived the secrets of time in the patterns of vapour trails in the sky, or the drifting of scum on the surface of the canal. Sounded like a load of pretentious balls at the time, but I guess, in retrospect…”
“What did he tell you?” she asked.
I smiled despite myself, ran my hands nervously through my drying hair. “He said, ‘Hey man, you’re like, totally going to die.’”
“That sounds like him,” she conceded. “Tact is not part of the service.”
“He was right,” I scowled. “He was bloody right.”
Silence a while.
Then she said, “You really didn’t know? That’s he’s dead?”
“No. I’ve been away.”
“It was two years ago,” she repeated. “I run this place now.”
“You’re not a seer,” I snapped. “How can you even breathe in all this bloody incense?”
She shrugged. “I understand what people want to hear, I have a good enough brain to see things, an excellent manner and a husky, sensual voice.”
“Is that the qualification, these days?” I asked.
“And I know things,” she added, firmer.
“Any useful things?”
“I know how to spot a magician.”
I looked up sharply, found her staring straight back down at me. “Yeah,” I said at last. “I bet you can. But you’re still not quite hitting the money, are you?”
“You come here to have your fortune read, magician, or is it something else you’re looking for?”
I found myself forcing a smile. “I was never a believer in having your fortune read, even by Khan. It was all too fatalistic.”
“Even the best-told fortunes can be evaded,” she said with a shrug and a jangling of metal. “I don’t take kindly to anyone barging in, by the way, magician or not. It’s rude, and it’s unprofessional.”
“It’s not been a good day.”
“A poor excuse. Stand up, I want to look at you.”
“Why?”
“You have interesting eyes.”
“I do?”
“Very blue.”
We were surprised she had noticed; not a total fool, then. Perhaps she could see in our eyes a signal, to all who dared look, of our true nature. “That interests you?” I asked, for want of anything more intelligent to say, and to buy time.
“I am interested in all unusual things.”
Then, and I was too numb by now to resist, she grabbed my wrists with the same forceful gesture by which I’d grabbed hers, and turned my hands over. She studied my palms, my fingers, my knuckles, my nails, the veins in my wrists. Having turned my hands this way and that, she then tossed them aside like rotten potatoes. She took hold of my face, with the same unsympathetic grip the doctor uses when examining a swelling, and turned it this way and that, scrutinised the colour of my eyes, the shape of my ears, even the condition of my teeth, smelt my breath.
Suddenly her fingers were at my throat, digging in, pushing my chin up as the tips of her nails drew half-moon rims of blood. We half-choked, reached instinctively to find the electric fires that always burnt inside. But her fingers went no deeper, and I held back, uncertain.
She hissed, her face an inch from mine, “Sorcerer.”
“How’d you tell?” I asked through the pressure of her fingers on my neck.
“I told you – I know things. I know the smell of magics; and you don’t just dabble, you swim in it, you breathe it. An urban sorcerer, in my shop? Who are you?” When I didn’t answer, her grip tightened, sending a wave of heat into my head as the blood strained in its arteries. “I am not defenceless,” she added. “As I’m sure you can imagine.”
“Very much so,” I croaked. “Are you like this with everyone you meet?”
“Your name!”
“Swift,” I said, and was pleased at how easily the remembrance of it came to me. “My name is Matthew Swift.”
Her grip relaxed for a moment; surprise, not intent. “Matthew Swift?” she echoed flatly.
“That’s me. Ta-da!”
“You want to tell me that you’re Matthew Swift.”
“Is this a bad thing?”
“You are a dead man, Matthew Swift.”
“You must have customers flocking to hear your predictions.”
“It was a statement of fact, of history.”
“It pays for prophets to be cryptic, particularly in this litigious age,” I wheezed.
“You misunderstand,” she said gently, her breath tickling my skin. “Now, right now, as we are talking, your corpse is rotting in the earth.”
I shrugged weakly. “Clearly, it isn’t.”
“Matthew Swift,” she said, slowly, “the sorcerer called Matthew Swift, died two years ago.”
“Question!” I said, raising one meek hand. “Did you actually see the body?”
She hesitated.
“Well, there you go.”
“Nothing bleeds that much and lives.”
We wound our fingers carefully around hers, started unpicking them from our throat. “Then consider this. If, hypothetically, I am the same Matthew Swift who was attacked two years ago and who lay expiring in his own blood while his killer walked away, happy with the thought that no doctor nor hospital in the world could repair such a hole in the heart, such a tear in the lung, such a rip in the chest – if, say, I happen to be the kind of man who can survive that to stand here now, shouldn’t you be more concerned about threatening me?”
We detached her last finger from our neck, pushed her hand carefully back to her side. She stood in front of us, jingling faintly with the weight of breath she drew. Finally: “How would Swift survive?”
“Precariously.”
“It’s not possible to…”
“No,” I said firmly. “It isn’t. Now will you tell me what happened to Khan?”
Silence.
I smiled my most beatific smile. A kind of serenity was settled over me. I knew now, standing in that stench of incense and beneath that endless nasal drone, that things had got just about as bad as they could conceivably get. Therefore it stood to reason that things could get no worse; therefore I was finally almost calm.
“His throat was cut,” she said flatly, after a pause. “He saw it coming, and couldn’t stop it. That’s power – to kill a man even when he knows every detail of his own demise – that’s truly a cruel death. If you are Swift, where have you been for two years?”
“Around.”
“I deal in cryptic answers every day, Mr Swift; don’t try and distract me with my own devices.”
“Fair enough. I will not play with you and invent some story; I will simply not tell you where I went or how I got there. Is that satisfactory?”
“No.”
“Well, shucks.”
“Can you prove you’re who you say?”
I thought about this. “No.”
“No,” she repeated with a nasty twist to her lip. “Of course you can’t.”
“I can’t prove it,” I growled through my teeth, “because I own nothing that was my own. Everything that I thought I had, everyone I knew… no, I can’t prove anything.” I added, “You are a terrible prophet.”
“My opinion of you is hardly in the stratosphere,” she retorted. “
Why did you want to see Khan?”
“That’s my business.”
“You… wanted his help?”
“That’s not important.”
“Then what do you want?”
When we answered, we spoke without my noticing, with a word that slipped out as naturally as breath.
“Revenge.” Once spoken, it seemed so right, so honest and comforting, that I was amazed I hadn’t said it before. “I want revenge.”
“Against…?”
“The one who attacked me. Who left me to die. And… And against the one who brought us back.”
She hesitated, her narrow eyes flicking to and fro, her fingers dancing a tiny rhythm at her side, their jewellery jangling like wind chimes. “Where have you been?” she murmured. I had the feeling it wasn’t a question intended for me. Then, clearer, “Do you have a plan?”
“Not yet.”
“Does anyone know that you’re… that you claim to be Swift?”
“No. And if you tell anyone…”
“If I tell?” she snapped, defiant.
“We will kill you,” we said gently. “You are nothing before us. We can stamp you out like a whisper of static in the wire. We will kill you. I’m sorry about it, but that’s just how it is.”
She didn’t seem frightened by this, more curious. She put her head on one side and breathed, “Interesting.”
“Really?”
“You keep on saying ‘we’.”
I shrugged.
“I may be able to help you, possibly – Matthew Swift.”
“How?”
“I have… friends. People who share a common interest.”
“Why would you help me?”
She smiled. “Even if you aren’t Matthew Swift, you could be of use.”
“I thought you were helping me.”
“There could be mutual benefits.”
“I’m not really interested.” I turned to go, seizing the curtain. She reached out and grabbed my arm, her fingers digging into my skin. Instinctively we shied back, flexing our fingers for the feel of the power, ready to strike; but, sensing our fear, she snatched her hand back. “Matthew Swift and Alfred Khan are not the only ones who died these last years. Do you know that? Have you asked? If you want to know who else is dead, and why, go to the Eye tonight, at nine. Things have changed; perhaps you do not know. There are new rules, new… dangers.”