by Chris Ward
Jun shook his head. ‘That’s what Crow wants. He likes an audience. Look what happened last time.’
‘Then what do we do?’
He opened his mouth to say something sharp and conspiratorial. We’ll hunt him down. We’ll lay a trap for him, then when he bites down on the bait we’ll snap the trap shut and take the sucker in. We’ll rescue Nozomi and Akane—She’s dead, Jun, she’s dead. No no no, she’s still alive—and leave this hellhole behind.
‘I just got out of a mental hospital,’ he said, giving a slight shake of his head. ‘I haven’t got a clue. I feel like getting drunk and falling asleep in front of some shitty movie.’
‘Well, I think the movie might be a good idea, but perhaps we shouldn’t drink so much. Not straight after the flight.’
Jun stared at her. He wanted to scream. In her elegant dress with her make-up done and her hair tied up, she looked like a princess. She was so achingly beautiful that if he looked at her too long he might cease to breathe. She had survived, and in the ashes of the dead around her, she had bloomed.
He still lay face down in the dirt, haunted by a thousand ghosts.
And he hated her for it.
‘I want to drink,’ he said, picking up his glass and draining it.
She looked down at the table top. ‘If it makes you feel better,’ she said.
It did.
#
He remembered her crying, perhaps after something he had said, perhaps through concern for him. He didn’t know. He had ordered whiskeys until his stomach felt so tight he’d needed to go off to the toilet to be sick, but there was too much of it already in his system. All he could remember of the elevator was the blinking floor lights.
#
He was sure it had to be a dream. His eyes were open, but the lights were off, the only light in the room coming from the glow of the airport spotlights through a curtain that had been half torn off its rail.
She was silhouetted against it, her shoulders and face outlined in black. As he stared disbelievingly, she cocked her head to one side.
‘Akane….’
She took a couple of steps towards the bed, and her silhouette expanded to fill the grey space. He could hear her breathing now, and the rustle of her hands as they sought out the bedclothes and climbed into the bed beside him.
‘Jun, I’m sorry….’
‘Akane!’ he cried, his voice breaking up. ‘Akane! Don’t leave me! I miss you! I … miss you!’
Tears streamed down his face as her arms reached for his shoulders. He was crying like a child as she pulled him close. He nestled his head into the crook of her shoulder and smelt the gentle scent of her skin that he had missed for so long. She had returned. Akane had come back to him.
‘Akane,’ he cried over and over again as she held him, her fingers tracing lines over his skin, lips whispering soothing words into his ears.
‘Don’t cry, Jun. Don’t cry. It’ll be all right….’
‘I miss you….’
#
He was alone in the room when he woke. The sun was streaming through the gap in the broken curtains and the digital clock built into the headboard read 8:54. He felt curiously at peace, and reached across to where Akane had been lying, but found only empty space. Where her body had been there was a crumpled depression in the sheets.
He gasped. She had really been there.
Akane.
His lost love.
He sat up and looked around him. The room was a mess; aside from the broken curtain one of the chairs lay on its back and the cushions from the sofa were strewn across the floor.
He was holding the pillow to his nose when the door opened and Jennie walked in. Gone was the elegant dress he vaguely remembered from the night before. Now she was wearing plain black trousers and a t-shirt. Her hair hung to her shoulders and she wore no makeup. She gave him a brief smile as she held up two paper cups.
‘I found a Starbucks,’ she said. ‘Should help with your jetlag.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You should get dressed. I’ll clean up the room.’
He opened his mouth to speak, to tell her Akane had visited him, but she had already turned away and was trying to fix the damaged curtains. He sighed and climbed out of the bed, shuffling towards the bathroom.
When he came out fifteen minutes later Jennie was sitting on the end of the bed with her suitcase packed in front of her. Jun’s suitcase stood on the floor beside it. Jennie had tidied the room too. She had put the furniture back, and the curtain now hung back on its rail. She had even made the beds.
‘I’m sorry about last night,’ he said. ‘What happened?’
‘You tried to wreck the room. Luckily you were too drunk to do much damage.’
‘Oh. Well, I’m sorry.’
She shrugged. ‘Don’t worry about it. Are you sure you’re ready, Jun? We don’t have to do this is you don’t want to. We can get the next plane back home if you like.’
‘I’m ready,’ he said, hoping that Jennie wouldn’t hear the tremble in his voice.
9
Trouble on Las Ramblas
It wouldn’t do to be seen moving too much unless coin was involved, but as he stood up on his pedestal in the centre of Las Ramblas, Merlin inched his head around fraction by fraction to get a better look at the newcomer.
He had set up in the shadows beneath the overhang of an old magic shop, in the gloom that would only deepen now the sun had dipped behind the houses to the west, stretching shadows long across the street. Some of the other performers had already packed up and left, because once the shoppers and sightseers gave way to the rowdier crowds that seeped out on to the streets around twilight, life could get a little more disconcerting. Trouble was rare, but the British stag party groups and the drunken tour groups from Germany and Belgium wanted a lot of photographs for not a lot of money. And a wizard wasn’t supposed to accept offerings of beer. It made casting spells all the more difficult.
The newcomer was dressed all in black. He looked like some kind of animal, a dog or a werewolf perhaps, with a squat, flattened snout and little ears poking up out of a furry face.
Only when he climbed up onto a pedestal painted to look like a rock and took up a positioning pose did Merlin realise what his act was.
Huge billowing wings unfolded behind and above him like a great black canopy. Merlin swallowed down a little bit of envy for the quality of the newcomer’s set up; that was some set of canvas and wires he had erected. And they looked so real….
Merlin considered himself one of the lucky ones where poses were concerned. While other human statues maintained some sort of athletic position—the poor guy masquerading as an Olympic skater had quit a month before due to ongoing back problems—Merlin’s stock pose was straight upright, with his eyes lifted slightly to the sky, his gaze taking on a lofty, contemplative look. He even had a staff to lean on. He had two signature moves whenever money was dropped in the box at his feet. Anything less than five Euros got a nod and a wink. Five to ten got a pose on one knee with the staff outstretched, while anything over ten got a twirl of the staff around his head and a battle cry. The twirling staff had taken several weeks to perfect; even now he felt close to dropping the damn thing every time. It was lucky that outside the summer months there weren’t too many generous tourists about.
The man dressed as the giant bat had taken up a pose with his body partly hunched over, his knees bent, his arms lifted and his hands stretched out like claws. Even his face was set into a permanent snarl which had to leave his jaw with a terrible ache.
There were tricks of the trade, of course; hidden wires and metal poles which could create all kinds of illusions, like the couple further down Las Ramblas who appeared to be sitting in mid-air. The bat guy had just arrived though, and had shown no signs of hiding anything under his clothing. Most of the statues turned up early in the morning, before the crowds arrived, in order to set up without their illusions being revealed.
As
the first tourists wandered past, a young girl in the centre of the group gasped and jumped away. Merlin strained his ears to listen and could just hear a low growling over the rumble of the crowd. The bat guy was snarling at his audience.
About twenty metres to Merlin’s left, Peter Salvadore was standing in his gorilla suit, straddling his miniature Empire State Building and holding his furry paws above his head. Peter had a metal brace which allowed him to hold the position for long periods of time, one that worked rather like a retractable cable; if he stretched it a little past the locking point it would slowly fold back into itself, allowing him to drop his arms. The clicking of the metal parts would be hidden by a primal gorilla roar.
He wondered if Peter had noticed the newcomer. He had taken a couple of days off the week before, straight after Merlin had taken him to see where the spider guy had been. Peter had probably taken some time to ask around, try to get some legal documentation for the newcomer’s presence, find out if he was legit or not. It was the kind of thing Peter would do; he was a good guy, and it was nice to have him at the wheels of their somewhat shaky union. If anyone could get to the bottom of it, Peter could.
A group of young guys had wandered up to the bat statue. Merlin could tell they’d been on the sauce from the way one had his arms around the shoulders of another, and two in the middle were cracking up with laughter as if they’d just seen the funniest thing in the world.
Stay back. The thought crept into Merlin’s mind and he had an overwhelming urge to shout it out loud. Some of the performers on Las Ramblas were a bit offbeat. There were a couple of vampires further down and even a guy made up like Frankenstein who would actually chase generous donators a few metres down the street. Merlin knew those guys, though. They came to the union meetings. Their costumes were creepy, but the bat guy was on another level of sinister.
Merlin recognised the tinkle of a one Euro coin landing in the bat guy’s basket. As the young men gasped, the bat guy rose up, his wingspan expanding to something like fifteen feet across. He held the pose long enough for a few photographs, then dropped back into his previous position.
Merlin let out a slow breath. Below his pedestal, a couple of young girls were staring up at him, their mother standing between them. One of them tossed a handful of change into his basket, so he dropped into his middle pose, down on one knee, staff outstretched, a frown of deep concentration on his face.
The girls laughed as they ran up in front of him for the mother to take a photograph. Merlin tried to concentrate, but to the right he heard several more coins dropping into the bat guy’s basket. His audience wanted to know what else he could do.
The girls ran off and Merlin straightened at the same moment that one of the bat guy’s onlookers cried out. Merlin forgot himself for a moment and turned around as a man staggered backwards, clutching his face. The bat guy was straightening up again, a trickle of red on his chin that had to be—had to be had to be had to be—tomato juice or milk mixed with food colouring, not blood from the man’s face. Blood was streaming down between his fingers, and Merlin could only hope that it had been part of the act.
‘You asshole!’ one of the other men shouted. ‘You bit James!’
He stepped towards the bat guy with a fist raised, but the bat guy screeched at him, claws coming up. The man backed off, even as others bumped into him from behind, collectively trying to rile themselves up for a fight. There were six of them, surely too many for a man dressed in a bat costume, but after jostling around for a few seconds, they started to back away. As James’s blood dripped from the bat guy’s lips down onto the ground, they turned and headed up Las Ramblas in the direction of the nearby subway station, occasionally turning back to hurl insults in the bat guy’s general direction.
The altercation had cleared out their section of the street. Merlin quickly regained his pedestal, but it was too late; the only people in his general vicinity had started moving away. It was almost time to go home anyway. Most of the shops had closed and the market stalls had packed up, leaving just the tourist trinket shops and a few cafés. The crowds would be changing soon, but the atmosphere had already changed too much for Merlin’s liking.
He glanced back towards the bat guy, and saw that one of the statues from further down the street, a guy dressed like a giant watermelon, who for five Euros would miraculously split in two when struck by a giant foam hammer, was walking up towards the bat guy, hands perched comically on over wide hips.
‘Hey motherfucker, what was that all about?’ he shouted.
The bat guy had regained his pose and didn’t move.
‘I’m talking to you!’ The giant watermelon took a step forward and tugged at one of the bat guy’s wings. Despite the bloodshed and the violence, Merlin could only see the absurdity of the situation.
‘You don’t hurt people, you got that? You piece of shit—’
The bat guy screeched. Merlin, initially frozen to the spot, climbed down from his perch again. Unsure quite what he could—or indeed should—do, he took a couple of tentative steps towards the altercation and hoped that he didn’t get dragged into it. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Peter climbing down from his plastic building to head over too.
The watermelon guy took a swing at the bat guy’s furry snout. The bat guy easily avoided it, then his huge wings flapped and he rose up a few feet off the ground.
The watermelon guy gasped and fell backwards, his watermelon suit crumpling like a sponge beneath him. The bat guy flapped again and suddenly he was rising straight up into the air, high above them even as he screeched like a hawk issuing a challenge to a competitor.
‘What the hell is going on?’ Peter gasped at Merlin’s shoulder, but Merlin was looking up at the bat now hanging fifty feet above them. It looked uncertain, as if it could fall at any moment, but with each huge flap of its wings it lifted a few feet higher, until it was level with the roof of the building. Then, its wings suddenly inclined and it glided out of sight, disappearing into the warren of streets that surrounded Las Ramblas.
Merlin turned to Peter with the obvious question on his lips, but it was cut off by cheers and clapping coming from the bars on the other side of the street, where customers were enjoying the early evening happy hour prices. A couple of coins even came sailing through the air to land at Peter and Merlin’s feet.
‘What just happened there, Merlin?’
‘Bastard flew away,’ the watermelon guy said, sitting up. ‘Bastard bit a chunk out of our livelihood then upped and flew away. Cocksucker.’
‘I think it’s time we all called it a night,’ Peter said.
‘How did he do that?’ Merlin said. ‘I mean, how?’
‘Motherfucker looked like trouble from the moment he showed up,’ the watermelon guy said. ‘I’ll cut his fucking throat if I see him again.’ He followed up the threat with a loud burp.
‘How many have you had, Dave?’ Peter said. ‘I think you should get home, don’t you?’
‘Fuck you, Peter. Member of the union, was he?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about—’
‘Protecting our rights, my ass. Maybe I’ll stand for goddamn president next time.’
Merlin looked from Peter to Dave the watermelon guy and back again. There was nothing much he could add.
‘I think I’m done here for tonight,’ he said, hefting his staff ready to head for the nearest subway.
‘Done here for tonight or for good? Because that’s what’ll happen if we keep letting these cunts push on to our turf,’ Dave said. ‘I heard about that spider guy scaring people the other week. And now this guy. Shows up for five minutes and bites some kid’s face half off. What the fuck?’
Peter, still dressed in his gorilla suit, patted Dave on the spongy green shoulder. ‘Let’s go home, Dave. Things will be better tomorrow, I’m sure.’
Dave shook his head. He walked up to the fake stone pedestal that the bat guy had left behind and aimed a flat footed kick at it. As h
is sole landed he cried out and fell backwards again, bouncing off the street. Behind them, the growing crowd of drinkers outside the strip of cafés roared with laughter.
The pedestal hadn’t moved.
Merlin went over and poked it with his staff as Dave climbed to his feet. Peter, with his head cocked, looked like one of those monkeys in 2001: A Space Odyssey encountering the monolith for the first time.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Merlin said. ‘It’s solid rock.’
Dave was on his feet again, shaking his head. He went over and gave the rock pedestal a shove, managing to move it a couple of centimetres before he gasped and gave up.
‘Trouble, I told you,’ he said. ‘You saw that spindly motherfucker fly away like a goddamn bird. You saw that with your own eyes. Now you tell me how he carried in that lump of rock like it was nothing?’
Merlin glanced at Peter, who shook his head.
Neither of them had an answer.
10
The making of dark plans
Kurou wandered through the dark, his sharp eyes picking out the walls of the tunnel around him. The occasional glow through a gutter far above was enough to illuminate the rain drainage system for his powerful eyes to follow. Oh, how his eyes had been mocked! He’d been called mouse-eyed, bat-eyed, rat-eyed … almost every insult dredged up from living memory had been tossed casually in his direction over the years, but if there was one part of his considerable anatomy that he was proud of, it was his sight. With the barest minimum of natural light he was able to negotiate these tunnels with the ease of a cat stalking her prey, or a hawk pinpointing an innocent little mouse in a field hundreds of metres below.
He also had what he liked to call foresight, the ability not only to predict what might happen but to guess what others were thinking. Sure, he’d been wrong a number of times, not least on a couple of occasions when it had really mattered. But hadn’t he won in the end?