Flight of Magpies Read online

  Earthquake! An earthquake in Bakewell? Home of well dressing and famous for pudding? The sheer ludicrousness of the idea flashed through his mind even as he raced down the stairs. You… What did you do in an earthquake? Stand under a door lintel, wasn’t it?

  As he reached the living room, it happened again. He clutched at the back of the sofa while the entire house raised itself into the air and fell jarringly down with an impact that threw him against the wall. Bricks moving beneath his fingers, he pulled himself along the still-drying wallpaper into the hall, flung open the front door.

  There was blackness outside—the streetlamps all guttered out—and silence, a silence so profound that the pressure began again inside his throat. It was so much like being buried underground. As he strained his ears for something friendly—a barking dog, a car alarm—a wind drove up from the Wye, filling his ears with whispering.

  No stars shone above. But in the neighbour’s windows, he could see something silver reflected, something that moved with liquid grace.

  No way!

  The curve of a horse’s neck traced in quicksilver reflected in a driving mirror. A stamping hoof—drawn out of lines of living frost and spider web—splashed in a puddle. Drops spattered cold over his bare ankles.

  Coming up from the river, across the bridge, up the sleeping suburban street they rode, knights and ladies. Glimmering, insubstantial shreds of banners floated above them like icy mist. Harps in their hands, hawks on their fists, and now he could hear the music; it was faint, far away, wrong as the feeling that had driven him out of bed. Alien and beautiful as the moons of Saturn.

  “No way!”

  He clapped both hands over his mouth, but it was too late. The words were out, full of blood and earth and inappropriate, human coarseness. Their heads turned. He caught a glimpse of armour, shadows and silver, as one of the knights reined in his horse, glided close, bending down.

  The creature smelled of cool night air. Its inky gaze raked over Ben from head to toe, like being gently stroked with the leaves of nettles, a million tiny electric shocks. His skin crawled with the prickle of it, ecstatic and unbearable, and he gasped, held on the point of a pin between violent denial and begging it to do more.

  Long platinum hair slid forward over a face drawn in strokes of starlight. “Which eye do you see me with?”

  “I…” croaked Ben, his mouth desiccated, his lungs labouring. “What? I…”

  Something in the garden—something huge, covered in spikes, lifted up the house, foundations and all, and shook it like a child’s toy.

  “Fuck!”

  Terror goaded him into action. Lurching back into the hall, Ben slammed the door, locked it, shot the bolts top and bottom, fumbled the chain into its slide and reached for the phone. Nine-nine-nine got him a brisk, polite young woman saying “What service please?”

  Outside, crystalline laughter tinkled in the starless night. The walls flexed like a sheet of rubber. “Police please! I…” …think I’m being attacked by fairies.

  And everything went quiet. Down the street a burglar alarm brayed into the night. He opened the door a crack to see the streetlamps shining vulgar yellow-orange over a score of double-parked cars. There was, of course, no evidence the creatures he’d seen had ever been there at all. He took a deep breath, decided against setting himself up for a charge of wasting police time, and let it out in surrender. “Never mind.”

  “Yes? Was it corporeal, would you say, or etheric?”

  Ben rubbed his fingertips over the rough paper and vivid blue ink of the advert in the Yellow Pages. Whatever he had expected from a man who helmed an outfit called The Matlock and District Paranormal Investigation and Defence Agency—MPA for short—this clipped, military baritone was not it.

  He’d phoned up in the sheer need to talk to someone who wouldn’t think he was a loony. Hoping, perhaps, for a nice old lady who would invite him round to the shop for a stress-relieving chat about accidental exposure to hallucinogens, and what he could best do to realign his chakras. He didn’t expect to be going over the incident like a mission debriefing with a man whose voice sounded as if it came accompanied by a huge handlebar moustache and a nasty attitude towards what he would undoubtedly call “arse-bandits”.

  “Um, ethereal, I suppose. I don’t know, I didn’t…” Perhaps he should have tried to touch? They’d looked as substantial as wisps of mist, but what if they were really solid, capable of fading in and out of the visual range of the human eye? “I’ll, um, next time I’ll do tests.”

  “Put the kettle on. I’ll be round in fifteen minutes.”

  Oh God! Supernatural attacks and suburban disapproval in the space of a single morning. And he was late for work. He tucked the phone into his shoulder and rearranged the keys hanging in the key cabinet into order of size. Not so that he could more easily find them in the dark, just because it was more pleasing that way. What was he doing, phoning a random bunch of cranks like this anyway? It was a doctor he needed.

  “Please, just forget it. I’ll…I expect I was dreaming. I’m sorry to trouble you.”

  Putting the phone down Ben wandered into the kitchen. Groggy after a sleepless night, he wiped the table and put out cups and the sugar bowl, opened a packet of biscuits and slid a few onto a plate beside the milk jug. Bright summer sunshine poured into the room, glittering from the gold edges of his dinner service, displayed neatly on the pale oak dresser. The walls gleamed, buttercup yellow, and flecks of silver in the dark granite work surfaces pinged the eye with sparkles. He’d just poured water on the tea leaves and set the pot to steep when the half-expected rat-a-tat-tat came at the door.

  Ben sighed. Mr. Matlock Paranormal was certainly living down to his expectations. Ignoring anything he didn’t want to hear? Check. Too manly to use the doorbell? Check.

  Straightening his tie, Ben took a deep breath, walked down the hall corridor and opened the door with a touch of defiance. His visitor stood half in the porch’s shadow, half in sunshine, backlit by the strong summer light, and for a moment all Ben could process was tawny gold and earth colours. Then the man stepped forward into the shade—a tall fellow with sandy, spiky blond hair, an air of athleticism, and an open, confident face made quirky by a nose once broken, set slightly askew.

  He held out his hand. “Wing Commander Gatrell. Call me Chris.”

  It was worse than Ben had imagined. Military and hot. A combination that spelled trouble at the best of times—and this was very much not the best of times.

  “How d’you do.” He made sure his handshake was firm and brief. “And, well, what do you do, exactly?”

  The Yellow Pages lay open beside the phone. Gatrell nodded at the advert without looking away from Ben. “We do exactly what it says. Investigate and defend against the paranormal.”

  “Who’re you going to call: Dambusters?”

  Gatrell gave him a startled, piercing look before forcing a chuckle that revealed the beginnings of laughter lines around his eyes. “I hear the Ghostbusters one twice a day on average, but that’s new. Not bad.” He shrugged off his tweed jacket and hung it up on a coat hook without asking, as if he were in his own home. “I should paint it on the car. Give me a hand in with the equipment.”

  Doesn’t include “please” in his vocabulary, Ben thought, to distract himself from the sight of the man bending down to bring a Geiger counter and something that looked like a short-wave radio with extra tubes out of the boot of his shabby white Volvo. Suggesting he was a man whose fashion sense had been formed by the Famous Five books, the wing commander wore olive-drab moleskin trousers, his lighter green shirt tucked in and topped with a beige-and-russet knitted tank top.

  “Take this.” Gatrell dropped a grey scuffed device into Ben’s hands. “As we’re here, we’ll do the outside first. Walk round the house, tell me if it beeps.”

  Ducking his head over the scanner, watchi
ng the needle tremble as he passed the yew arch his father had spent so much time clipping, Ben allowed himself a small smile. It was good, after a long night spent terrified to look out of the window, not to be alone any more. He knew himself well enough to realise that if he had really believed last night’s incident was a mere hallucination, he would have called the doctor. The fact that he had not done so meant that, on some level, he believed what he had seen was real. He could bear a little contempt, surely, if it brought with it the flesh-and-blood company of another human being. Particularly one who just might know what to do next.

  A noise disturbed his thoughts. In his hands the grey box vibrated, the needle flickered between red and black fast as a snake’s tongue. As he approached the corner of the new extension, the machine’s buzz became a beep and then a shriek.

  “Aha.” Gatrell appeared at his shoulder, checked the readings against his own and gave Ben a triumphant grin. “Inside, then.”

  Going indoors, they walked carefully together around each room, scanning the walls. Ben’s apprehension returned as Gatrell’s clear, observant gaze took in every detail of his life from the thousands of CDs to the sheet music, perfectly squared up, on its stand.

  “You keep it nice.”

  Was it a compliment or a hidden jibe? Ben tightened his grip on the whatever-it-was meter and scowled. “I like neat. Don’t expect me to apologise for not being slovenly.”

  Gatrell paused in front of the bookshelf full of gay fiction. As he browsed the titles, Ben waited for the inevitable recoil, waited for him to angrily demand the machine back, invent some spurious excuse to walk out the door, leaving Ben to fight the underworld alone. Oh, here it comes. He swallowed hard, bracing himself. But Gatrell just drew a sergeant-majorly fingertip over the top shelf, raised a sandy eyebrow at the complete lack of dust and said, “You’ll make someone a lovely wife.”

  Damn you! Ben thought, feeling more bitterly stabbed than the little jibe really merited. Get out of my house.

  The retort, Why, Wing Commander, I didn’t know you were interested, formed in his mouth. Before he could say it, Gatrell had opened the door, gone through into the newly built living room, and Ben’s anger and sarcasm was foiled. The moment during which he could say something without making it into a big issue passed in silence, leaving him fragile and resentful and looking for trouble.

  As Ben came into the room, Gatrell opened the side panel of the bay window and leaned through, looking out at where Castle Road made a sudden swerve, just outside Ben’s front garden. Closing the window, he turned round and brushed his hands on his trousers. “I believe you.”

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  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Samhain Publishing, Ltd.

  11821 Mason Montgomery Road Suite 4B

  Cincinnati OH 45249

  Flight of Magpies

  Copyright © 2014 by KJ Charles

  ISBN: 978-1-61922-429-2

  Edited by Anne Scott

  Cover by Lou Harper

  All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: October 2014

  www.samhainpublishing.com