Ghost Electricity

by Sean Cunningham

  Alice stopped and looked at her. “One of us? Those two boys cut a path of destruction across the south-east last night. Who proposes to challenge them?”

  Nathaniel, another vampire, broke from a clutch of hangers-on. “I’m sure it won’t come to that,” he said. “We’re so much more civilised these days, after all.”

  Alice narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re going to let that pass? Really, Nathaniel?”

  He stood at ease, tall and slender as a whip, dark-haired and always letting others see a hint of the sharp edge of his strength. He looked at Alice as though he’d won a victory against her.

  “The advantage of civilisation, Alice, is that that sort of thing gets taken care of for you. My condolences on the death of Vivien.”

  Alice discovered she had no interest in fencing with him. “He was your enemy.”

  “He was a worthy adversary,” Nathaniel said, “whom I shall miss. Do take care of yourself, Alice.” He let his group of lackeys and admirers close around him again.

  Irene took her arm. “Come. I have just the thing to cheer you up.”

  She led Alice into another room. Sprawled across several couches, carelessly young, were four youths not quite out of their teens. Three were boys and while one sat protectively next to the young woman at his side, the other two were enticingly unattached. Only one of the boys had earned a magician’s ring, but she could detect a hint of magic in all their scents.

  Irene leaned close and whispered, “Aren’t they adorable? And just the age you like them. The blond boy is linked to the Mandellans. Not related, but they plan to marry him in. They dug him out of some Midlands city when they discovered his talent, arranged a scholarship and have several likely family girls lined up to bat their eyelashes at him. The poor little dear is far too innocent to have the slightest clue as to the plans surrounding him.”

  “And the other boy?”

  “Andrew is a Jamaican import, one or two generations back,” Irene said. “I’m told he can ride the eyes of animals, so if you don’t want him to see you naked, don’t undress in front of any cats.” She paused. “Or if you do want him to see you naked – you get the idea.”

  Alice smiled despite herself. “You know me too well, Irene.”

  “I just want you to be happy, my dear,” Irene said.

  This was Alice’s game and it usually began like this, in a chance meeting or one that had the appearance of chance. Young, handsome and retaining some innocence or idealism, they were on a voyage of discovery into a world that was larger, more magnificent and more terrifying than they yet knew. She joined them on that voyage. She discovered her world anew through their eyes. She tasted their wonder and she loved them for it while it lasted.

  But then she felt the cold weight of the ring pressed against her skin. She remembered a time seven years ago when she met two boys at a party much like this. Jacob Mandellan had been bold, full of life and vigour and she had liked the way he dared to approach her, dared to entertain and flatter her. He was naïve only in that he imagined his grand dreams could be realised in a world far more likely to crush them, but that had been more than enough for Alice.

  Jacob’s shadow, a dark-haired boy the same age, had spoken very little. She had thought he wasn’t really paying attention until, when Jacob slipped away for a few minutes, he asked her several questions that revealed he had listened to her every word. Distracted as she was by Jacob, it was only towards the end of the night that she noticed the black ring on his finger and realised he must be a Blackwood.

  Unlike most of her kind, Alice knew all about the Blackwoods.

  She turned away from the youths Irene had brought her to see and stared over Irene’s shoulder, seeing nothing.

  “My dear? What’s wrong?”

  The sense of disaster grew stronger minute by minute. With that and with Jacob and Julian suddenly back in her life –

  “It’s a wonderful party, Irene, as always,” she said. “But I have to go.”

  “Are you sure? Please, won’t you tell me what’s wrong? We could head upstairs where it’s quiet.”

  “No, no,” Alice said. “I think perhaps a little time to let things settle. Thank you, Irene. I can always count on you.”

  “I hope you’re feeling better soon,” Irene said.

  She summoned a vampire taxi by sending a message to a number in her phone and when it arrived she rode it across town to west London, where the lines in the sky were fewer and further apart. Whatever was happening tonight, whatever it had to do with last night, she felt it would be better for her to be elsewhere.

  So she went to keep watch on Fiona’s house. When the girl arrived home, she would ask to be invited in. A way to encourage the girl to invite her in would present itself with thought, she was sure.

  She left the taxi a street beyond the house, made sure no one was watching and leapt onto the rooftops. The night sky was clear and the moon was rising, casting her pale features in bright relief, so she clung to shadows where she could. She stayed low on the rooftops and settled herself across the street from Flat 2 Hawthorn House.

  But it didn’t take her long to realise she wasn’t the only one watching the house, waiting for its residents to return.

  Chapter 26 – Friday Night

  “Merci,” Richard Mandellan said as he took a glass of champagne from the waitress’s silver tray. He stood near the warehouse door with the people who had no active role in Bastien’s ritual.

  The hour had come and Bastien, aglow with anticipated victory, had delivered a speech about the wealth that would come to them and the power they would soon possess – the power to influence the minds of the leaders of both the daylight and shadow worlds, across France, Europe and beyond.

  Bainbridge and his men had installed the sarcophagus of black metal into the frame they’d built earlier and hooked it into the power and control rig assembled by the Germans. Several young men in the casual attire of IT people were at the control consoles off to one side, running through final power-ups and system checks. The big Tesla coil near the ceiling hummed with the restricted level of current they’d routed through it to bring it online.

  The Swiss astrologers counted down the seconds on high-accuracy clocks, synchronised with more atomic clocks around the world. The Algerian warlocks Richard had supplied sat around the sarcophagus at the cardinal points, locked in ritual trances and surrounded by sigils they had painted in chicken blood. The warlocks had their gemstones on amulets rather than rings, a common practice in Africa. The German engineers had attached wires to the amulets, wound them around the gloves the warlocks wore and hooked them up to thick power cables that ran up to several small coils flowering out of a crystal array above the sarcophagus.

  Richard suspected his cousin Jacob would understand all this and would pay quite a sum to see it.

  Doubt plagued him. The warning from the Welsh seer, Catherine, preyed on his mind. It was stupid really, because too much talent, manpower and money had been brought to bear here for anything to go wrong.

  All the same, he had received some disturbing messages during the day. Last night had been a bad one for seers all across Britain and Europe, according to his family’s information. They weren’t making much sense about tonight either.

  It just means it will be big, Richard told himself. Too big for them to grasp without unhinging their half-mad brains.

  He sipped his champagne.

  Bells sounded and alarms rang. Activity, already rushed, shifted up a gear. The Swiss astrologers stood together and one had raised his arm while he looked at a clock.

  When he brought his arm down they would begin. They would reach out across the black gulf between worlds, lock on to a source of power matched on Earth only by that which lay beneath Trafalgar Square in London, and call it down into the prison of the sarcophagus. There, that source would be controlled, manipulated, used to channel and direct vast amounts of power through the coils above. They would use it to shape the affairs
of the world.

  They were going to lock the corpse of a dead wizard in a box.

  On the Piccadilly Line, Fiona and Jessica made their way back across London.

  “Did that even get us anywhere?” Fiona asked.

  “We’ve got a new name to look for,” Jessica said.

  “Oh yes, someone named Smith. We have a Smith to look for. I’m sure we’ll be knocking on his door any time now.”

  Jessica scowled. “He moved money into Matthias’s account. There’ll be a record of that. We can backtrack from there.”

  “Another bank account,” Fiona said. “Brilliant.”

  “Since everything in your life has been arranged for you, you probably don’t realise how hard it is to open a bank account in this country. There will be information we can use.”

  “Information about a false identity, Jess,” Fiona said. “This Smith is all about false identities.” She tapped herself on the breastbone. “Case in point.”

  “You’re really breaking my balls here,” Jessica said.

  Fiona sat up straighter. “You are not going to see adult-rated movies any more.”

  “Oh please, I hear worse things everywhere,” Jessica said. “I’ll do whatever I like.”

  The train surfaced near Hammersmith and Jessica’s phone got reception. It started beeping with new messages.

  “What now?” Fiona asked.

  “Mr Shell says men in vans are watching our house.”

  “Good,” Fiona said.

  “How is that good?”

  “Maybe they work for Smith and I can finally get some answers.”

  “There’s one here from Mr Beak too.”

  “What does that reprobate want?”

  “He says the aetheric winds have gone crazy.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  Jessica shrugged. “Maybe something is about to blow up.”

  The fine hairs on Richard Mandellan’s arms stood on end. For the first time he really understood the new ways of doing things that Jacob was always ranting about, because the power roiling all around him was distinctly magic, but it was just as much drawn from Paris’s power grid.

  The Algerian warlocks chanted in unison. They had dropped out of French, through Arabic and into what Richard supposed was one of the Berber dialects, though instinct suggested their words were far older. The words swooped around the warehouse and tore through all other sounds like hawks hunting pigeons. Sweat poured down the warlocks’ faces.

  The head Swiss astrologer lowered his arm. Bastien raised his champagne glass and shouted, though his words were shredded by the chanting.

  In Cardiff, Catherine sat alone in her living room. The TV was on but muted. She had been steadily smoking and drinking all day. A bottle of vodka stood on the table beside her, three quarters empty. She had stopped trying to look into the future. All she saw there was a face, looking right back at her.

  The electrical coils whistled and hooted as power poured into them. The warlocks controlled it, modulated it, bent it to their will.

  The air in the warehouse began to move. At first it went this way and that, tugged back and forth at random, but moment by moment it settled into a steady breeze that ran around the warehouse in a circle, centred on the sarcophagus.

  Richard looked behind him and saw the catering staff all gathered together in a clutch of white aprons and white hats. Those with empty trays held them tight against their chests. Someone had started passing around glasses of dregs of champagne. Richard grinned and turned back to the show.

  “The closest thing is an animal attack,” Rob said from the passenger seat of their van. He kept touching his wrist where his iron bracelet used to be fastened and ducking his head to see if the moon had risen yet. “People get attacked by pit bulls all the time, right?”

  “What do pit bull scars look like?” Julian asked. “Don’t they attack with their teeth? I was thinking more a bear or a tiger.”

  “Maybe,” Rob said. “Works in with your whole travelled-the-world story, but it’s a bit memorable for my liking. What you really want is a story that’s believable but forgettable. Still, if it’s plausible enough just about everyone goes for it.”

  “But some will see through it?”

  Rob shrugged. “You might need to go into a bit more detail with a girl you’ve just shagged. On the other hand, you can probably think of a way to distract her if she asks.”

  “I expect something would spring to mind in the circumstances, yes,” Julian said.

  “What’s wrong, man?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You smell like you’re about to start sweating blood. I’m supposed to be the tense one here.”

  Julian frowned. “Must be just tiredness.”

  “Not to worry, we’re almost home,” Rob said. He rubbed the back of his neck. For some reason the hairs there were standing on end.

  The magic in the warehouse gathered itself up and reached out, way out. Richard felt it tugging at him, trying to pull him into the vastness beyond three-dimensional space. He felt the distant madness of those who dwelled in that vastness as all the shadows in the warehouse rearranged themselves.

  Cold air billowed off the sarcophagus. He could see frost forming on the electrical parts, but this had been anticipated and insulation was in the design.

  He noticed the Swiss astrologers were looking at their timepieces with puzzled frowns.

  On her rooftop in west London, Alice shivered. Cold was something she barely felt, but this was no physical chill. She felt like the sky had reached down and pinned her to the roof. She felt like the rest of eternity had squashed itself into a mere few remaining seconds.

  Beneath her shirt, the black ring she wore on its chain felt like ice.

  The warehouse roof was gone. Richard looked up into a sky full of stars.

  But they rippled and shifted and Richard knew he viewed them through more than just the lens of reality. This was the vast chasm across which reality was a narrow bridge. He felt vertigo assailing him, flattening his thoughts and distorting all his senses. The people around him bent and warped. His hands and feet felt heavy on the ends of overlong-limbs.

  The Algerian warlocks reached out across space and found what they were looking for. Richard sensed a startled presence.

  But it’s supposed to be dead, Richard thought.

  Bastien shouted. His words were rippling noise, but the men at the control station needed no more signal.

  Wait, Richard wanted to say.

  The trap was sprung.

  “You’re being obscure on purpose,” Fiona said. “You’re just trying to sound clever.”

  Jessica made a loud sound of frustration. “What is it with you? Why are you suddenly so worked up?”

  “Because I’m stuck in a crowd of people.” They had reached their station and were caught in a press of commuters and evening diners on their way home. One of the toll gates had broken down and people moved through at a snail’s pace. “Because we’re getting nowhere. Nowhere. I still don’t know who I am. I still don’t know who did this to me. The aetheric winds have changed? So what?”

  “You’re freaking out, Fiona,” Jessica said. “You’re freaking me out too.”

  “What does the wind have to do with anything? I just want to find the people who decided to break me down and reassemble me and find out why they did it. Why are we moving so slowly? Why haven’t they opened up another gate? What’s with this Tube station?”

  Jessica put her hand in her pocket and curled her fingers around her flashlight.

  The warehouse shook with a crack of thunder. The air rushed inwards as a void opened within the heart of the sarcophagus. Space itself slammed into the warehouse, making the whole structure larger for several seconds. Then it all twisted back into shape.

  Richard discovered his hands were trembling. His attention was locked onto the sarcophagus. What he could feel there was the exact opposite of everything they’d predicted.
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  Ice formed all over the black sarcophagus. The air crackled as electrical flows were adjusted. At the control station, everything was managed chaos.

  “We’ve done it!” Bastien cried. “We’ve done it! The power to control the world!”

  No one else could see it. No one else realised they had made a terrible miscalculation.

  The lights dipped and shifted through the spectrum.

  A voice roared in Richard’s mind.

  YOU DARE?

  The array of control crystals shattered and sprayed shards through the air. The heads of the four warlocks exploded and their bodies caught fire. Richard stumbled as something hooked into him, not into his flesh but the life force within, and sought to tear it out of his chest.

  The black metal of the sarcophagus bent outwards with a screech. Richard saw several people running for the warehouse exit. He felt the twist as reality changed and the exit vanished. He fell to his knees, shaking, his mind ringing with that voice. His eyes were fixed on the darkness within the broken sarcophagus, a darkness that erupted into searing light, melting that half of his body facing it. His eyes were now gone, though still he could perceive the light changing, revealing a grey corpse desiccated by time.

  The not-dead not-alive man emerged from the ruins of the sarcophagus. He glided through the air, but it seemed to Richard that it was the warehouse itself that moved around him. Fluttering around the not-dead not-alive man were the tatters of an ancient garment that hung from his waist to his knees. He did not wear a ring as Richard did. He did not need to.

  He opened his mouth and spoke a word that killed them all.

  Rob had almost reached the front door of the house when dread filled his stomach. Dizziness swept over him. He stumbled against the brick wall that divided the front yard between Flat 1 and Flat 2. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Julian clutch his head and fall to his knees.