Existentially Challenged, page 4
But it was the expression on his face that removed all remaining doubt. Or more accurately, the fact that he was revealing the expression on his face and not walking around with his cape covering all but his eyes. His smirk combined with his thin mustache looked like stark black arrows pointing to his ears.
“Ah, girl,” he said with relish. As ever, Alison was only partly certain that he remembered what her real name was. “Excellent timing. Your calling in life awaits. Diablerie requires his assistant.”
“He does?” asked Alison innocently. “What for?”
He cut short his dramatic, thoughtful stare into the middle distance and gave her a look of mock affront, letting his cape billow around him. “Have you not heard? Do you young people never emerge from your bubble of Beatlemania and malt shops? Diablerie has been judged worthy of a most vital task. Diablerie is to shine his terrible light upon the charlatans that scavenge in the wastelands at the fringes of Eternity. To finger their hidey-holes until they squeal for succor.”
That was that, then. “Oh yeah,” said Alison. “I think I heard something about that.”
“Then we must make haste!” He took a step back and pointed smartly down the hall, causing his flowing cape to hit a passing civil servant in the face. “To the place of transference!”
Alison followed the pointed finger. It seemed to be indicating the elevators. “Do you mean the car park?”
“Yes, I mean the car park,” said Diablerie quickly, not moving.
“But . . . we don’t have any assignments at the moment.”
“Pah!” A single droplet of spittle fired across the hall with the force of a bullet, seriously upsetting the passing civil servant who was still trying to gather the armload of papers he had dropped. “The hawk needs not the blessing of any master to begin the hunt for scurrying mice. And Diablerie has had the scent of vermin for some time.”
“Really?” said Alison, suddenly interested.
“Yes! Servants of ignorance, dancing their provocative dances before Diablerie’s stony glare, assured of their safety while Diablerie is bound by the laws of Man.” He waggled his eyebrows. “The time is nigh to unleash the fury of righteousness.”
Alison followed as he half strode, half jogged away, one pointed finger held aloft. It was just possible that Elizabeth’s plan was working in ways she hadn’t anticipated. She had assumed that frustrating Diablerie was the key to getting him to play his hand, but it seemed that making him drunk on fresh power might be achieving that result a lot faster.
Elizabeth had a habit of taking the slower, more considered option, Alison realized, possibly to a fault. When the Department had still been called the Ministry of Occultism, it was ostensibly run by the Hand of Merlin, a group of aristocratic old men who liked pretending to be wizards. Elizabeth, as their chief underling, had spent ten years gradually persuading them to modernize. That was until magic had been forced to go public, at which point the man from Downing Street achieved the same result inside a week by kicking in the door, swearing a lot, and throwing the Hand of Merlin out a figurative window.
Admittedly the sudden change had been rather traumatic for the staff and for various other people, and Alison had to remind herself of that. It was hard not to get swept up in Diablerie’s excitement as he hurried down the stairwell three steps at a time, having once again refused to do anything so mundane as ride down in the lift.
By the time they burst into the car park, Diablerie was at a full sprint, his cape fluttering behind him like the wings of a diving bird of prey. He vaulted over the door and into the back seat of his open-top car. Alison tried to follow suit, swept up in the high of feeling like Batman and Robin, until she banged her ankle on the car’s wing mirror and lost faith in the attempt. She sheepishly opened the door and slid into the driver’s seat under Diablerie’s withering glare.
“Where are we going?” she asked, gripping the steering wheel. Diablerie never drove if he could help it, or did any other manual task that meant he couldn’t use his hands to make dramatic gestures throughout.
“To the serpents’ nest,” he declared, sitting back and placing his hands to his temples. “Our destiny awaits within the arms of the Builders.”
“Right.” She gunned the engine, then let her hand hover awkwardly over the satnav interface for a moment. “But, you know, in terms of number and street name?”
Diablerie didn’t reply. He was “channeling” again, closing his eyes, holding his palms either side of his face, and making a prolonged braying sound with his lips. On a hunch, she tried keying in the words serpents, nest, arms, and builders. A few false starts later, she discovered that the Builder’s Arms was the name of a pub in London’s West End, one that appeared in the list of recent destinations.
She set off, pulling out of the car park and into the streets of London, where the slow drift into evening was just beginning to turn the shadows long and stringy. As the distance between them and the Department grew, Diablerie’s gibberish became less hearty as he realized that Alison was concentrating on the road and not paying much attention.
“So, in this new Age of Awakening, as magic clumps, cheap mascara–like, upon the eyelashes of the world, our masters in government would seek to strengthen the border between the realm of that which Is and that which Can-Never-Be,” he said eventually. “And Diablerie is appointed the champion that shall guard the wall.”
The fact that Diablerie was actively trying to initiate conversation pointed to just how gigglingly excited he must have been. “Er, yeah,” said Alison. “It’s funny.”
Diablerie’s defiant smirk faded instantly as he locked his gaze onto Alison through the rearview mirror. “Why is it funny?”
“Erm, you know,” stammered Alison, caught off guard. “It’s funny that they chose you for the Office of Skepticism. Of all people.”
His eyes narrowed. “And pray, what do you mean by that?”
Alison coughed. “Nothing. I was just thinking, the job is to debunk fake psychics and stuff and . . .” A keener instinct than the one she had been allowing to speak thus far kicked in and her words died, leaving her mute and with hands splayed over the steering wheel in a frozen placatory gesture.
“Your inarticulate blitherings are as chaff upon stony ground,” growled Diablerie, his upbeat mood vanishing by the moment. “But I read from your aura the sense that you struggle to associate the figure of Diablerie with the concept of incredulity. Would that be so?”
“I . . . genuinely don’t know what you mean.”
Diablerie snorted. “Rest assured, girl, Diablerie’s grip on reality is as firm as any man’s. I am assured of such by my daily tarot.”
Alison tapped her fingers against the steering wheel a few times. “Do you think these red lights are taking longer than they used to?”
MEANWHILE
06
At the same time that Alison and Diablerie were making their way to the West End, Adam Hesketh and Victor Casin were being transported to a destination neither was entirely clear on in an old police van that had been refitted for use by the Department of Extradimensional Affairs. The process of this refitting had largely involved putting purple tape over the recognizable parts.
“You know what ‘Internet Miracle’ is?” asked Adam.
Victor had been sitting with arms folded and his head to one side, his cheek resting on the cool metal of the van’s interior. In reply, he slowly let his head rotate and flop into withering eye contact. “No, I don’t know. Tell me all about it.”
“I don’t know either. I was hoping you would. It might help an investigation I’m doing.”
“Oh.” Victor rested his face on the wall again. “Well. Why don’t you ask all your amazing new friends in the Hinvestigations Hoffice. I’m sure they’d be much better qualified.”
“I did,” said Adam. “They said I shouldn’t worry about it.”
Victor whistled. “They really are a smart bunch.”
Adam sighed, and let a few minutes pass in silence, listening to the van’s engine and letting the warm atmosphere of convivial reunion between two old friends continue failing to occur. “So. You handling your missions all right by yourself?”
Victor didn’t look at him. “I’ll let you know when they give me one.”
“Oh. They not keeping you busy?”
“No, they are not. I’ve spent the last three days in the cafeteria beating all my Joogie Bounce high scores.”
“Oh.” Adam stared at his feet knocking together. “Still, you’re on a mission now.”
“Yeah. Remind me where we’re going?”
Adam referred to the printout he had been handed on his way into the van. “Some kind of warehouse in the docklands. Destructive magic in use. Perpetrator unknown and still on the scene. Situation not secure. Not much detail. Apparently the phone call to the emergency line was a bit panicky before it cut off.”
Victor punched his palm with slow deliberation, letting a little wisp of orange flame escape. “Right then.”
“Standard procedure for unknown threats. Locate, identify, if necessary pacify.”
“I know. I know. The usual. LIP.”
“L, I, and if necessary, P.”
“Not quite as snappy, now, is it. Come on. We’ve been sent after this sort of thing millions of times, right?”
“I guess.”
“So what’s with the babysitters’ club?”
Adam followed Victor’s glare in the direction of the van’s front, where Agents Rawlins and Black from the Investigations Office were taking care of the business of driving and navigating, respectively. “You know why,” he said.
“Assume I don’t.”
Adam sighed. “Because this could be a human with a dual consciousness. And the more people we have on the ground, the more likely we can keep things under control.”
“You mean keep me under control,” said Victor sulkily.
“Look, you don’t need to take it personally. The Department’s making everyone roll back the extreme force. They want to avoid another media pile-on like what Alison got last time.”
Victor cocked his head, a wistful expression crossing his face for a moment. “That was classic, wasn’t it. We spent years and years killing hundreds and hundreds of monsters before magic went public, and the very first time a stink is raised, the new girl gets all the blame.” He shook his head. “Funniest shit.”
“Didn’t you almost die?”
“Almost died of boredom, yesterday.” Victor bowed his head and folded his arms, then glared at Adam through his shaggy fringe. “While you were out doing investigations and getting pats on the head for being a good boy . . .”
Adam was pinching his eyes. “Victor, what exactly do you want me to say? I’m sorry that you haven’t had a chance to kill anything lately?”
Victor held out both hands and delivered his words slowly and measuredly as he felt his irritation—and, relatedly, the ambient temperature—rise. “I. Am capable. Of more than just killing things.”
“Like what?” said Adam. Then, as Victor pressed his lips together to pronounce an m, he quickly added: “And don’t say maiming things. Or traumatizing them in any way.”
The awkward silence that followed ended when the van pulled to a halt, making both men rock sideways like a pair of oil pumps. “We’re here,” said Rawlins, punctuating his statement with a yank on the hand brake.
Adam and Victor emerged into the docklands around Tilbury, in the middle of a flat expanse of concrete where a scattering of large cargo containers didn’t so much break up the emptiness of the scenery as highlight it.
A warehouse with a slanted roof hugged the area to the north like a gigantic hibernating bear slumped forward on all fours, a mountainous black silhouette against the darkening evening sky. The four men began to walk tentatively across the concrete toward the steel double doors of the entrance.
“It’s quiet,” said Rawlins. The only sound was the gentle sloshing of the river Thames from just over the horizon.
“There’s traces everywhere,” said Adam, squinting as he applied his special vision to the building’s entire frontage. “It’s like a frozen ticker tape parade. Someone or something has definitely been throwing a lot of dangerous magic around recently.”
“No bodies,” added Rawlins, who had acquired a reputation for terseness among his peers that he now felt somewhat pressured to live up to.
“Yeah, that’s a bit weird,” said Black. “Maybe the local authorities got things under control?”
“Ha!” barked Victor. “Good thinking, Black. Defuse the tension with a joke.” He looked to Adam. “What sort of dangerous magic is it, anyway?”
“Um.”
As if in reply, a shattering boom rang out that made all four men simultaneously drop into crouches. An elongated orange fireball emerged from one of the upper windows like the unfurling tongue of a hungry beast. A moment later, a brief shower of small glass fragments made the agents cringe in an attempt to will themselves thinner.
Adam waited until the last tinkle of falling glass faded away into the silence. “Um. Pyrokinesis,” he said.
“Victor, maybe you should take the lead,” said Black, not rising from his crouch.
Victor turned a slightly manic smile on him. “Aren’t you supposed to be trying to talk to them at this point? Isn’t that the policy now?”
“So talk to them,” said Black. “You’re pyrokinetic too. That’s a conversation starter.”
“Oh sure. I’ll just flash my club membership card.” Victor stepped gingerly through the broken glass and pressed himself against one of the double doors, preparing to push them open with one hand while readying a fierce orange glow in his other. He glanced back at Adam, who hadn’t moved. “Got their position?”
Adam threw several glances of his special vision around, looking like a nervous hen trying to remember where it had laid its eggs that morning. “They’re a ways inside the building. Door should be clear.”
Victor pushed the door. The heavy metal only moved a couple of inches, but it was enough to spill a line of illumination from the building’s watery exterior lights across a stack of nondescript cardboard boxes. They were, all things considered, probably not hostile.
“Hello?” called Victor. “Department of Extradimensional Affairs!” Silence. “I’m not going to hurt you. They say I can’t anymore, so I genuinely mean it this time.”
“Victor!” hissed Adam.
“There’s no one around. I’m going in.” Victor turned back to the door. “I’m coming in!”
He pushed the door open the necessary two or three inches to admit his skinny form, and inched through the gap with his glowing hand forward. Partly to illuminate the room beyond, partly to give any waiting ambushers second thoughts.
The stack of boxes he had seen earlier was actually an entire wall of boxes running parallel to the door, obscuring most of the warehouse’s interior. Victor glanced left and right, but the light from his glowing hand couldn’t penetrate more than a few yards of the dusty black. He took a more confident step into the building.
“Careful,” said Rawlins.
“Oh, suck it up, Team Courage,” said Victor, with withering spite. “Adam already said they’re a ways inside.”
“Yeah,” said Adam. “But they might still have set up a—”
A metallic crash to Victor’s left made him jump, and he instinctively projected flame in that direction. The corner of the warehouse was bathed in orange, illuminating an extremely unsteady stack of corrugated metal pieces and scaffolding poles for just long enough to reveal that it was in the process of toppling over.
Victor flung himself against the wall of cardboard boxes as the pile of rusty metal clattered to the ground with an aural catastrophe, an earsplitting wall of groans and clangs that clenched every sphincter within a fifty-yard radius. When the last metal object had tinkled into place and Victor finally unscrewed his eyelids, he found the door being firmly held closed by several tons of scrap, cutting him off from his allies outside.
“Trap,” he muttered.
07
Alison had certain associations with the word pub. Especially pubs with names like the Builder’s Arms. It came of having grown up in a house where the adults had an insatiable appetite for banal teatime detective shows set in country villages, and a permanent death grip on the television remote. She pictured mock Tudor, wooden shingles, and a bartender who wore braces and was forever behind on keeping his glassware polished.
Absolutely none of which was the case with the Builder’s Arms, whose car park she found herself pulling into. It was a brutal concrete building on the blurring border between an expanding commercial district and a run-down industrial zone for some kind of heavy concern that must have fallen out of favor in more environmentally conscious times. Some modernish black windows had been installed in the frontage to give a more welcoming vibe, but they clashed somewhat with the heavy entrance doors, which would have looked more appropriate admitting clusters of hard hats than the evening hipster crowd.
The effect was only barely reduced by the neon sign above the door, which read “The Builder’s Arms” in a flowing cursive style, alongside a piece of imagery that Alison found utterly baffling, until she realized that it was supposed to be a flexing muscular arm. For a moment she had thought it was an advertisement for fried chicken.
Diablerie had regained his cheerful mood over the course of the mostly silent car journey. He even opened his car door himself and posed briefly under a streetlight before confidently sauntering toward the main doors like a traffic policeman approaching the window of a pulled-over motorist.
