Paint it Black, page 30
It was lunchtime when Pauline sat back and sighed, rolling out her neck and cracking her knuckles.
“Now that was a challenge.” She beamed, her eyes tired though her expression was triumphant. “Your Doctor Dropnick has created layers of confusion deep in the collective unconscious. Any clairvoyance was bound to fail. It would be like trying to see to the bottom of a muddy pond. I had to start with general indicators, reflections of your husband’s persona like the objects in here, and build a profile from the deep subconscious up. There’s still more work to do to narrow things down, but this is an accurate representation of your husband’s properties and where he has directed his Influence.”
“That’s his office.” Gosha pointed to a stack of Lego bricks over Westbourne Grove. She’d been there many times.
Pauline nodded and pointed to a green plastic house from Edmund’s Monopoly set placed on a street off Holland Park Avenue, only a few hundred yards away from the border of Cheyne Heath.
“Then I think that must be his home.”
“What about all these other places?” Gosha pointed out seven or eight different clusters of knick knacks scattered across London, some as far afield as Surrey and the London Docklands.
“Properties he owns, or the residences of his acolytes.”
“And what about all the glitter?”
A dusting covered most of London except for Cheyne Heath, which remained clean. Several tiny mounds of glitter dotted the border, with others clustered in different parts of London. A large clump spread around his home.
“That is a map of his Influence. The mounds are his acolytes.”
Gosha’s heart sank. They were everywhere. She had half hoped that, with Alfie in his clutches, George would have been smug enough to call off his men.
“This is great, but we still don’t know where Alfie is, and with George’s acolytes at every exit to the neighborhood, we’re still trapped in here.”
“Give me a little more time,” said Pauline, “and I think I can get you an answer to your husband’s location.”
“Which one?” said Gosha, wishing she had never lapsed into the Cant way of speaking about Alfie. It felt like she was jinxing herself.
Pauline realized the ambiguity of what she’d said and blushed a delicate shade of pink.
“Well, either, I suppose.”
“I might be able to help you,” Mei stood, “but you lot need to clear out.”
They shuffled out onto the landing and lingered by the study door, waiting for Mei to recall them.
“At least I don’t have to worry about getting past George’s acolytes,” said Gosha. “Once Mei gives me a location, I can use the labyrinth to get there.”
All the other witches sucked in air through their teeth at her suggestion and shook their heads.
“What?”
“Terrible idea,” said Eleanor.
“Will your fairy circle protect you when you show up on their doorstep?” said Agnieszka. “Is your fancy magic strong enough to hold its own against the might of a saint and all his acolytes, not to mention Doctor Dropnick and his horrors?”
Gosha turned to Eleanor, wondering the same thing.
“Is it?”
“Lady, no.” Eleanor grimaced and shook her head. “Even the warrior witch Boudicea, the last of us to truly grasp the Between, couldn’t overcome a saint in head on confrontation. We witches never do our best in open warfare. We’re much more suited to a poisoned chalice or a knife in the back. I’ve always found Craft-laced fruit gives me the best results. The sweetness helps mask the acrid flavor of most malefic recipes. I’ve brought down a couple of dynasties that way.”
The other witches looked at Eleanor, appalled.
“Eleanor Weaver,” said Agnieszka. “It’s witches like you that give the rest of us a bad name.”
“So how am I going to get past George’s men?”
“That should be simple enough,” said Shreya. “Decoys. We make an effigy of you just like when you took your Betrayal. Eleanor can take my van and lead them on a merry chase with it, while you cross the boundary with a manglepot.”
“A manglepot?”
“It’s a fetish,” said Eleanor, “that you carry with you and makes people think you’re someone else. It’s very effective. I traveled from one end of Stalinist Russia to the other with a manglepot, and no one gave me a second glance.”
“Now you’re just winding us up,” said Agnieszka.
“Am I? I could tell you a few interesting things about Vladimir Lenin’s sexual proclivities that might convince you otherwise.”
“We’ll need to communicate with each other,” said Elsie, flushing pink with embarrassment. “A Devil’s Star won’t work outside the boundary. Do you remember the Christmas before all the trouble with Mr. Armitage began?”
Until George had been helped by Emerson Margrave to kill his father and assume the sainthood of Authority, Elsie had been Gosha’s housekeeper, keeping watch on her without her knowing, and knew the house and its contents better than Gosha.
“He gave the boys walkie talkies. May I use them?”
“Yes, but those things are just toys. They barely have any range.”
“Give me five minutes with them and they’ll reach the moon.”
Elsie tittered and went downstairs to retrieve them.
“Gosha,” called Margie from below. “Joel and Johnny are back.”
Gosha went down to the foyer to find Adair in a huddled conference in the living room with his colleagues, their expressions dark at the severity of his news. Johnny stood by the door, watching.
“We found ten of his friends,” he whispered to her as she entered.
“Were they…” She didn’t want to say dead.
Johnny shook his head. “But they were all paralyzed like he was. We couldn’t do anything to help. And then we drove around to check on the others. Bar de Bauche was empty. We found the doors unlocked and everyone gone. Same with everyone else. We tried Liberation, Devotion. We even went to the fancy Convocation building in Whitehall. Everyone’s gone.”
Adair’s group broke up, some in tears, some hugging each other, and he came over to join her and Johnny.
“Did Johnny tell you?”
“I’m so sorry.”
“We have to help them. Can you do for them what you did for me?”
She wanted to help so badly, but ripping the partner’s mark from his back hadn’t been easy. To do it ten times more would take forever.
“Goga, quick!” shouted her mother from the landing. “Something’s happening.”
Guilty to be running from Adair’s request, but relieved she didn’t have to say no, she fled upstairs.
Mei stood guard outside the study door.
“Only two at a time,” she said. “The layout in there is very delicate. Only Gosha and one other person.”
Gosha could feel the anticipation of the other ladies behind her press against her back. She loved them all, but there was only one person she wanted in there with her.
“Mamusha, come.”
Inside, the study was dark, the curtains pulled. On every available surface, Mei had set up a small votive candle with a folded card perched in front of it with a Chinese character written upon it. The glow of a hundred candles flickered in the room, and yet Gosha shivered with cold. As Mei clicked the door shut behind them, the peacock screech of shadow wraiths echoed through the walls. Somehow, Mei and Pauline between them had fashioned a connection to the Shadowlands within the room.
“Sit.” Pauline patted the spot on the couch beside her. As Gosha sat, Mei and Agnieszka kneeled on the floor on the other side of the coffee table.
Four candles were set up at the corners of the map, each with their own card and Chinese character in front of them, the flickering lights creating an illusion of depth and movement as if Gosha were looking down on the city from a great height. Over the Docklands in the East End of London floated a shimmering veil of shifting colors, the Northern Lights in miniature.
“There,” said Pauline. “That’s where your doctor is preparing his evil.”
“How did you find him?” said Gosha, amazed. “A thousand witches have been searching for him for over a year.”
“I had to dig deep, but everyone dreams. And every dream leaves its mark on the Shadowlands.”
“But what about Alfie and George?”
“If they’re not there already, they’ll be going there. Every sign tells me so.”
“What’s that?” said Agnieszka, pointing to a line of glitter radiating outward from a red Lego brick in Wembley and heading East across the map like a parade of ants.
Pauline shuffled and dealt three cards: one showed a picture of George, one a picture of Alfie, the third a swirl of colors rendered a dark miasma by the candlelight.
“Come,” said Agnieszka without waiting for Pauline’s interpretation. “We must leave now.”
38
By the time Gosha made it to the border of Cheyne Heath, the march of glitter had passed Kensal Green and was halfway to Maida Vale. She would have to floor it if she was to have any hope of catching up. She stopped at the corner of High Coxcomb and Barnet’s Way, ready to cross over the border into Kensington. If she needed to, she could get on the Westway flyover and make up some time. She put the Mini Cooper in neutral and pulled the handbrake a few feet away from the boundary around Cheyne Heath.
“You have everything you need?” said Agnieszka as she opened the passenger side door.
“Yes, Mamusha.”
“You have the manglepot and Elsie’s drugs?”
A large sack of individually wrapped psychedelic lozenges sat on the back seat next to a mason jar filled with amber liquid and other things Gosha would rather not think about.
“Yes, everything’s here.”
“Did you take one of the drugs? Shouldn’t you have taken one already? Eleanor!” Her mother shouted at the Craft-doctored child’s walkie talkie stuck to the Mini’s spartan dashboard with gaffer’s tape. “Can you hear me?”
“Agnieszka, what is it?” Eleanor’s voice crackled over the airwaves. “I don’t know how Shreya manages this wretched van. It’s like driving an ice cream truck with a damned wobbly wheel.”
“Are you certain your fairyland will behave? It seems untrustworthy. What if it fails? She’ll be all alone there with no one to help her. You said even the warrior witch died.”
“She’ll do just fine. Boadicea was a cranky fusspot who wouldn’t listen to anyone else’s advice. Your daughter has befriended the Lady of the Lake. She knows her way around the twilight. Now leave me alone. I’m nearly at the border, but I have an annoying police car to deal with.”
Eleanor had with her a wax effigy of Gosha with her in Shreya’s van complete with a lock of Gosha’s hair, toenail clippings, spit, and snot molded into it in as she raced toward Kensington High Street hopefully to lead George’s thugs on a wild goose chase.
Gosha glanced up through the window at nine towers of inky flame that jutted up over the skyline and reached back for a handful of lozenges. She stuffed them into her pockets.
“What if the charade fails and his men stop you?” Agnieszka took from her string grocery bag one of half a dozen stoppered milk bottles filled with more Crafted unspeakableness and hefted it in one hand.
“I’d rather find him on my own terms,” said Gosha. “But I’m ready to be my own Trojan Horse, if I have to.”
“Good,” said Agnieszka, her face pulled tight in an expression of terrifying ferocity. “Remember, a witch obeys no rules other than her own. Seduce him with sweetness and stab him in the back if you must. A witch does the job no others will and answers to no law. Every ounce of blood you spill is an ounce of blood that remains in the veins of an innocent.”
Gosha found her mother’s vicious intensity surprisingly comforting.
Agnieszka got out of the car and slammed the door behind her.
“Mei,” said Gosha to the walkie talkie. Mei sat coordinating in George’s study with Pauline and her map. “Where are we?”
“The bastard is crossing Paddington,” came her crackling voice. “His rats have taken Eleanor’s bait, but there’s one lurking in wait at the end of the road ahead of you, just round the corner. Be careful.”
“Don’t worry about that one, Goga,” said Agnieszka standing inches from the border, spinning her milk bottle like a juggler’s club with one hand, the grocery bag hanging from the crook of her other elbow. “I’ve lobbed a few Molotov cocktails in my youth. If he comes near you, I’ll burn the skin from his face.”
For once, Gosha was grateful her mother didn’t have a soft bone in her body.
“All right.” Gosha unwrapped a lozenge and popped it in her mouth.
Mm, strawberry, she thought as a tart sourness made her salivary glands contract.
The mild hallucinogenic effect seeped into her awareness, and the colors of the world around her became a little more garish. Her mother sparkled like a New Romantic Barbie Doll as her second sight deepened and strengthened with the radiant twilight glow of the Between.
“Time to go.”
She wanted to floor it and push the Mini Cooper as fast as it would go to catch up with George and Alfie, but couldn’t risk drawing the attention of the lurker, so she edged the car over the border and paused. Her lipstick, lodged in place in her bra, cracked loudly, the concussion reverberating into her chest as Dropnick’s devices once again neutered it. The tone of her second sight shifted, losing some of its vigor and bombast. The feeling of barely controlled wildness faded, but her awareness of the Influence around her remained thanks to Elsie’s lozenge.
Normally, when she crossed over the boundary, something she did every couple of month to test herself and George, his henchmen announced themselves by the squeal of tires as her watchers raced to catch her, but today she heard nothing. As she put the car in gear and rolled away at a respectable rate, she thought about the unmarked cars with dark-tinted windows that had been lurking on Canterbury Gardens for months. She still didn’t know who sent them. Perhaps they were George’s all along.
“Okay,” said Eleanor over the walkie talkie. “This is good. They’re following. I’m going to lead them down to the King’s Road where there’ll be plenty of witnesses. Bugger! Why are there so many coppers around? Is it always like this on a Saturday afternoon?”
“Careful, Gosha,” said Mei. “You’re passing George’s rat right now.”
Gosha drove past a sporty black Porsche. In the driver’s seat sat a man in his twenties dressed in a tan suit with broad shoulders and the haircut of a cut-price Richard Gere. The aura of an acolyte of Authority radiated around his body, a glowing suit of armor, complete with elaborate crown-like helm. He was talking into a radio mouthpiece, more concerned with his conversation than with her. She slid past him undetected.
“Eleanor?” she spoke to the walkie talkie. “Eleanor? What’s going on.”
“Trouble,” crackled Eleanor’s voice from the tinny speaker. “Can’t talk.”
“She’s giving them a run for it,” said Mei. “Several of the other rats are converging on her.”
“Don’t take too many risks,” said Gosha. “Duck back beyond the border if you have to—”
The sound of shattering glass came from the back seat. She glanced behind her. The manglepot had broken. Its contents spilled out over the seat. Behind her, at the other end of the block, the Porsche revved into action, pulling away from the curb in a burst of acceleration, its wheels screeching and smoking on the tarmac as it spun around toward her.
“The manglepot’s broken!” she shouted into the walkie talkie as she slammed her foot down on the gas pedal and lurched forward. “He’s onto me!”
She had no hope of outrunning a Porsche on the open road. Her only advantage was knowing the area and the sunny Saturday afternoon crowds. The streets were full of people out and about. She zipped along side streets, cutting it fine as she crossed intersections without waiting for the path to be clear, careening around buses and taxis as she made her way deeper into Kensington.
Pedestrian traffic increased the closer she got to the High Street. Crossing to the other side of the street would be risky. If the traffic lights weren’t in her favor, she could find herself walled in with no escape. Or worse, she might cause serious harm.
Fortune favors the bold, she thought. And, hopefully, the desperate.
She could always abandon the car and duck into the shops along the High Street to throw the acolyte off. All she needed was enough calm to gather her thoughts and summon a makeshift spell of concealment. A saint might be able to sense her, but she would be fine hiding herself from an acolyte. Then she could jump the Underground turnstiles unseen and make her way East as far as she could on the tube. A taxi could take her the rest of the way to the Isle of Dogs and the London Docklands.
She made a right off Holland Park Road toward the High Street and found herself surrounded by people. A dense crowd of ordinary pedestrians pushed into the car, making it impossible for Gosha to move.
“Get out of the way!”
She leaned on the car horn, but they refused to budge. Men and women, young and old, they all stared blankly at her.
“Bugger!”
She craned her neck, looking around to locate the acolyte—clearly this was his work—but the wall of bodies obscured any view she had of the street beyond them.
She roared and slammed the steering wheel with her fists in frustration. She should have abandoned the car at the top of Ladbroke Grove and run up Portobello Market to the tube at Notting Hill Gate.
The market!
The memory of frustrating afternoons trudging up and down Morel Road in tow of her mother as Agnieszka droned on with her endless litany of grudges and insults against the market’s denizens, barrow witches and civilians alike, clearing her path of annoying market shoppers with minor hexes to make a foot slip or a bag of groceries inexplicably burst open, flooded her mind. She went with it, turning the memory into a wish for the Between.
