Existentially Challenged, page 7
The girl stared at her, jaw slack, then at Abdul. The pointing finger came out again. “Can you arrest him for the hat?”
10
“Ifrig,” repeated the possessed person, whose gender, if they even had one, Victor still hadn’t figured out. They drifted closer with uncertain steps, staring into the middle distance thoughtfully. “Ifrig. Ifrig. That’s what I’m called in your head? I like it.”
“Stay back!” Victor was on his feet by now. He backed away as fast as the stranger was approaching, and the two began a lazy pursuit around the catwalk.
“My name was Leslie. I suppose I might as well be Leslie-Ifrig now.”
“Yeah, don’t care,” said Victor. He summoned fireballs to both his hands without even shaking them free of his sleeves first, and the air was filled with the scent of singed leather. “What do you want?”
Leslie-Ifrig cocked their asymmetric head, smiling vacantly with what parts of it were capable of doing so. “There’s no need to be afraid of me.”
“I’m not afraid!” spluttered Victor, on reflex.
“I think you are. I think you’re very afraid and threatened, and that’s why you’re about to hurt me.”
Victor froze for a second, then shrugged. “Eh. Can’t fault your intuition.” He threw out his arms and let loose.
A tornado of orange fire burst into life, filling the triangular area directly in front of him, roaring and swirling like a stampede of blazing tigers in a kaleidoscope. It was only when the afterimages faded that he noticed that Leslie-Ifrig had moved out of the way, and was watching it with professional interest.
Victor gritted his teeth, moved his arms as if hauling on an invisible tow rope, and the tornado swung like a gigantic baseball bat. Leslie-Ifrig hopped out of its way with astonishing speed, and a puff of magically conjured hot air swept Victor’s hair back like a lover’s hand.
He dropped his hands in exasperation and the tornado scattered. The catwalk in front of him was a lot more warped and twisted than he remembered, not to mention a lot more orange and sizzly, and Leslie-Ifrig was inspecting it with mild interest.
“Why are you doing this?” asked Victor as he took some deep breaths.
Leslie-Ifrig seemed genuinely baffled. “I didn’t do that. You did that just now. I saw.”
“I meant, in general!”
“I can do something like that. It looks a little bit different to yours. Want to see?” They held out their own hand.
Victor flinched. “Uh . . .”
Leslie-Ifrig’s fire tornado was indeed different; it was narrower and slightly yellower. Victor only had a moment to appreciate this, as he then had to fling himself out of its way. He ended up lying full length on the glowing orange gantry he had already superheated.
He felt a warmth across his leather-covered shoulder blades that was rather pleasant, at least compared to the searing pain he felt in his uncovered hands a moment later. He scrambled to get his bare flesh off the red-hot metal, and some important part of the softened catwalk chose that moment to collapse.
The floor tilted sharply, and Victor descended the newly created slide onto a pile of boxes, where the yielding cardboard slowed him down just enough to make his impact with the concrete ground painful rather than immediately lethal.
He lay on his back for a few moments, wincing as he made a mental checklist of his bones, then slowly opened his eyes. Directly above, the murky silhouette of a misshapen head and shoulders was peering down at him through the smoking ruins of the catwalks.
They tilted their head like a playful dog wondering if they had just imagined their owners briefly uttering the word walk, then brought their hand up.
Victor saw the glow in time and rolled to one side, his smoking trench coat fluttering around him as another cone of fire splattered against the floor where he had been lying. Somehow he was on his feet—the instinct to stand up hadn’t even registered with his conscious mind—and then he was sprinting into the relative shelter of the box labyrinth, throwing mushroom-shaped blasts of magical fire in all directions to cover his movement.
He headed deeper into the warehouse, away from the front section that the gantry oversaw, and where Leslie-Ifrig had the high vantage point. He turned a few more corners and ran along a long tunnel of boxes, only to find that it led to a dead end.
Which was exactly what he wanted. Above him, there was nothing but distant ceiling. So with his back to the end wall, there was only one route to get to him, and he’d see them coming. He planted his feet and held as still as he could, listening for the slightest sound.
He heard a harsh, ringing sound of something tapping metal, then the flutter of soft soles landing on concrete. Leslie-Ifrig must have come down to ground level. “Victor?” Their strange, layered voice carried even from a distance and through several walls of cardboard. “Why are you scared?”
Victor frowned, confused. “Because . . . you’re trying to kill me?” he called back. He was giving away his position, but at least it would get this over with faster.
“I meant, in general.” There were a few mysterious movement sounds, and then Leslie-Ifrig’s voice seemed to come from a completely different direction. “Why are you so hostile?”
“Are you serious? You’re Ifrig!” Something clonked to the floor less than ten feet away and Victor flinched. “You spent years trying to possess me. Trying to make me burn and kill things.”
“You do burn things.” The voice was very close now, possibly even just on the other side of the wall to Victor’s left. “And kill things. It says on the wiki.”
Victor tried to peer through the cracks between the boxes, but there was no sign of movement. It was still too gloomy in the warehouse, even with the ever-increasing number of burning things inside it. “Yeah,” he conceded. “But I’m capable of other things.”
“Why do you need to be?”
Leslie-Ifrig was definitely close by. Victor ground his teeth for a few moments. “Tell you what. Come around the corner and talk to me face-to-face and we’ll have a proper conversation about it.”
“Okay. I’m going to do that.”
Victor tensed and held his arms forward like a conductor, staring at the corner ahead where the passage turned ninety degrees, ready to unleash at the first sign of movement.
Then the entire wall exploded.
A blizzard of boxes flew through the air like a cloud of buckshot, each one with enough sharp corners that, however heavy their contents, anything on the receiving end was in for a miserable evening. Victor’s fight-or-flight instinct kicked in, and took the usual option.
Everything within his field of vision disappeared behind a wall of yellow-orange, angrily writhing and fluctuating like television static. Ifrig’s power flowed through him like water through a sieve, filling his body with a tingling sensation to the ends of every nerve. It was unpleasant, but at the same time, satisfying, like the feeling of finally getting to a urinal after a long car journey.
When the conflagration faded, all the boxes that might have been flying toward him were reduced to a coating of ash upon the ground, along with every other box in a radius of a hundred yards. The interior of the warehouse was now almost entirely transformed into a smoking black fan-shaped scorch mark, still hissing and tinkling where parts of it had turned to glass.
Victor tottered. His entire body felt hot and tingly, and he was hyperaware of everything touching it. All his clothes felt too big and itchy. His pulse thumped in his ears, and something dark and unnatural added a pounding bass to it. But it seemed that Leslie-Ifrig was finally . . .
“That was interesting.”
. . . behind him. Victor spun around, reflexively throwing out fire again, but this time it sputtered like the last moments of a catherine wheel, and his aim was thrown by another blast of hot air that lifted him off his feet. He landed in a pile of unburnt boxes that had been slightly behind him, and the moment he had settled, his legs made it quite clear that they were not going to be moving again until after a union-mandated coffee break.
Leslie-Ifrig, still unharmed and unsmoking and wearing that damn smile, came forward with hand outstretched. Victor was spent. He couldn’t even lift his arms. All he could do was stare, panting.
Then the hand became a finger gun, which Leslie-Ifrig “fired.” “Pow! I win.” Their smile broadened even further. “That was fun. We should do this again. Can I friend you on Facebook?”
11
“Make yourself at home,” said Abdul the Astonishing, now talking in the accent of a man born and raised in London.
He held the door of the tiny dressing room open to allow Diablerie and Alison inside. Alison guessed that the room had been converted from a spare toilet, and going by the smell, probably still moonlighted as one. A musty old office chair was set up in front of a sink with a mirror, and Abdul sat there to start busying himself with the removal of his costume and makeup.
After peeling off his absurd mustache and removing his turban—which, when put aside, took up a good percentage of what little floor space was available—Alison could see that he was, indeed, a completely normal man in his late thirties, with a boyishness to his features that she thought made him quite handsome—although it was hard to tell, as he was still wearing black eyeliner that looked as if it had been applied with a spoon.
“So . . .” he began.
“Enough small talk!” barked Diablerie, slamming the door closed behind him. “You stand accused of flagrant violation of the law. What say you in your defense?”
“I thought we’d cleared that up,” said Abdul.
“Oh?” Diablerie took up his traffic-policeman saunter again, pacing meaningfully around Abdul’s seat with hands behind back. Alison had to flatten herself against the closed door to give him room to do so. “Confident, are you, that your little technicality will not crumble under higher scrutiny? Mayhaps your true calling lies in tightrope walking, for the line ye tread is near as thin.”
Abdul rolled his eyes. “Oh goodness. Looks like you have me bang to rights.” Alison had seen many people’s reactions to Diablerie’s performances, usually somewhere on the spectrum of fear and confusion, but Abdul’s show of bored tolerance was something entirely new. “Have mercy, milord, for I am but a small fish, and if you would overlook my transgressions just this once, I can give you information on someone higher up the ladder.”
Diablerie paused in his pacing. “Your craven wriggling in the light of Truth fills me with contempt. But Diablerie may yet be open to your proposal.”
Abdul snorted. “It’s nice to see you again, by the way, Doctor. Feels like it’s been too long.”
“You . . . know him?” said Alison, taken by surprise.
Abdul stopped cleaning off his eyeliner for a moment to offer her a look of pity. “And you haven’t clued your assistant in. Of course you haven’t. Why would you?” He held out a slightly mascara-stained hand to shake. “Rajesh Chahal. Scholar of the occult.”
Alison let him take her unresisting hand and wobble it up and down a couple of times. “So this whole thing was a setup?”
Rajesh looked to Diablerie, saw that he was standing stiffly with his lips pursed and showing no signs of replying, and sighed. “He called me a few hours ago. Told me he was coming here, about the new skepticism laws, and asked me to give him a reason to come backstage and talk. A nice public, easily explained reason, so no one would suspect we were doing business. I hadn’t even planned an act for tonight, I had to throw together—”
“Diablerie has considered your proposition,” shouted Diablerie, who had gone quite red. “You shall be permitted to submit your intelligence for consideration.”
Rajesh offered him a patronizing little half smile, then very pointedly turned his gaze back to Alison. “I had to throw together that disaster you saw back there. Those hecklers weren’t part of the plan, but it was nice of them to help our cover.”
“So you’re, like,” said Alison, drawn by the encouraging twinkle in Chahal’s eye. “One of those people who . . . tell . . . people . . . things? Important things?”
“Informant,” he said, gently. “I think the word you’re looking for is informant. My main interest is trends in magical subculture, and Diablerie and I—”
“Diablerie has no more patience for this prattle,” interjected Diablerie, spitting his p’s with visible bursts of droplets. “Elucidate us! Or contemplate a stay in Diablerie’s most dismal oubliette!”
“He doesn’t change, does he?” sighed Rajesh as he leaned over to fish around in a small backpack that was wedged between the sink unit and the wall. “All right. I’ve got something here that should fit into the remit of government skepticism officers. Check it out.”
He produced a small tablet computer and woke up the screen. A web browser was already loaded with a paused video, currently displaying what looked like a conjoined kitchen and dining area in an average middle-class home.
When Rajesh unpaused the video, a pudgy man with a colorful T-shirt and an infectious grin stepped into frame. “All right, Miracle Mob!” he said, bobbing left and right excitedly. “I’m Miracle Dad, and welcome to another stream! First thing today, we’re going to reward another lucky subscriber with the blessings of our lady, El-Yetch.”
The camera turned slightly to reveal a pale young man sitting at the breakfast bar, wearing a T-shirt identical to the first man’s. He wrung his hands and smiled nervously, his confused eyes focused squarely on the first man the way a zebra on the Serengeti keeps an eye on a suspiciously quiet patch of long grass.
“Your name?” asked Miracle Dad, now out of shot.
“Um, online I’m StonyTuna,” said the man, embarrassed, in some kind of European accent that Alison couldn’t quite place.
“And StonyTuna’s come all the way from the StonyTunaGaming YouTube channel to be here,” said Miracle Dad. “And you’re having a problem with your wrist, you said?”
StonyTuna held up one skinny arm and let the hand flop over pathetically. “Um. Yeah. The doctor thought it might be tendinitis, but none of the exercises she gave me have been doing anything . . .”
“Okay, great story!” said Miracle Dad, jumping back into shot. “So, will the powers of our lady El-Yetch be enough to relieve StonyTuna of his pain? Only one way to find out! Time to take the Walk of Worship!”
The camera rotated again until it was pointing down a darkened hallway, at the end of which lay an open door, and beyond that a small bathroom, from which bright fluorescent light was spilling. The sound of angelic choirs began playing as StonyTuna, having been awkwardly prodded into place by the hand of Miracle Dad, uncertainly began to walk toward the light, the camera following shakily.
“And remember, like this video and subscribe to our channel if you’d like to be in with a chance to win the blessings of El-Yetch, the Mother Goddess, and get Miracle Meg to personally heal your bodily injuries. Here she is now!”
StonyTuna was now close enough to the light that the camera could adjust and finally reveal the bathroom’s interior. It was an ordinary suburban bathroom with white fittings, and there was a young girl of around ten years old sitting on the toilet. She was wearing yet another T-shirt identical to the others, albeit child sized, with a long white skirt that rippled as she absent-mindedly kicked her legs. She was holding a handheld gaming system as close to her face as a jeweler would hold an intricate piece of work.
“Meg?” hissed the voice of Miracle Dad from behind the camera.
The girl quickly stashed her device by the side of the toilet, then looked to StonyTuna with a very well-rehearsed expression of messianic calmness. She took StonyTuna’s unresisting hand and clasped it between both of hers.
The handheld footage was very poor quality, but something was definitely happening; whether it was magic or an understated video effect, Alison couldn’t have said. StonyTuna’s body trembled, and his skin became flushed pink with supernatural speed. When Meg let go, he staggered back and collapsed, presumably into Miracle Dad’s arms, judging by the way the camera shook like amateur UFO footage and, after some confused movement, started capturing footage of the skirting board.
In short order Miracle Dad’s round face returned, and after he had corrected the angle, he was standing with an arm around a dazed StonyTuna. “All right!” he said. “How’s the hand, Stony?”
StonyTuna gawped at Miracle Dad as if he’d just been shook awake, then at his own wrist, clutching it in his free hand. “It . . . wow. That really worked.” He wobbled it back and forth. “It doesn’t hurt!”
“That’s the magic of Miracle Meg!” announced Miracle Dad, squeezing the other man chummily. “Are you a believer in the wonderful power of El-Yetch now?”
“Well, yeah, I mean, I was already, that’s why I subscribed . . .”
“Yes!” Miracle Dad centralized his own face in the shot, bisecting StonyTuna’s with the edge of the frame. “And you too could receive the blessing of El-Yetch and Miracle Meg if you subscribe to the Modern Miracle channel. There’s also a new range of T-shirts . . .”
Rajesh suddenly paused the video, fixing Miracle Dad’s expression at a moment when he looked particularly pleased with himself. “So, they call themselves Modern Miracle, and they’re one of the fastest-growing magic-focused streaming channels right now.”
“Faith healers,” intoned Diablerie ominously with a curl of his upper lip, pronouncing it the way one would pronounce a phrase like train station lavatory.
“Well, that and playthroughs of popular video games, but the faith healing stuff is starting to take over. They seem to be trying to establish a religious cult, and not without success. That little girl, Miracle Meg, she’s the figurehead.” He pointed to the corner of the frame, where Meg’s face was still visible. She appeared to have gone back to her game console. “Her father claims that she’s in a dual consciousness with El-Yetch, which you may have gathered is the Ancient they claim to worship as a god, and that she’s capable of magical healing.”
