Not an angry bee, but the bass rhythm of a song turned up too loud; tune, if there was one, lost to beat. Madness was no longer talking to yourself; technology had changed all that.
But this was something more.
On the top of the shelter someone had thrown a small plastic screwdriver and what looked like a child’s left shoe, pretty pink turned dirty grey by the rain and the darkness. The single white lamp in the shelter was stained with dirty spots where a hundred insects had crawled inside it, and found it too hot for their wings to bear. A moth was the only survivor, fluttering impotently against the plastic cover.
The hoodie kept on bobbing to that invisible beat.
You don’t ask strangers their business when waiting for the bus. Especially not in the small hours of the morning. I leant against the stop with its list of what was due when, and clutched at my burning hand.
Coincidence is usually mentioned only when something good happens. Whenever it’s something bad, it’s easier to blame someone, something. We don’t like coincidence, though we were newer to this world than I. Inhabiting my flesh, being me as I was now us, we had quickly come to understand why so many sorcerers had died from lack of cynicism. I had been a naive sorcerer, and so I had died. We, who had been reborn in my flesh, were not about to make the same error. Too many people had heard of the blue electric angels for our new-found mortality to ever be safe.
Chi-chichi chi-chichi chi-chichi . . .
And because I didn’t believe in coincidence, I raised my head from contemplation of the bus timetable, turned to the hoodie on the red plastic bench and said, “Hey, you got the time?”
He didn’t move.
“Hey, mate, you got a light?”
He looked round, taking his time. He didn’t need to rush; his kind never do. I stepped back, reaching instinctively with my bandaged fingers for the nearest light, the nearest whiff of mains power.
It’d have been nice, for once, to be surprised.
And “he” was an “it”, and “it” had no face. It was a sack of clothes sitting on empty air, a pair of white headphones plugged into the floating nothing of his not-ears. The body of his clothes, bulked out so humanly, was held in shape by air, by an ignorance of gravity and a perversion of pressure, by floating shadow and drifting emptiness bundled together into a nothing-something in a tracksuit. He was an it, and it was a spectre.
Once, when I was a kid, I was taken to see a seer. His name was Khan. He read the future in the entrails of old shopping bags and the interweaving of vapour trails in the sky. He told me a lot of things, most of them sounding like they came out of a Christmas cracker; but finally he said “Yeah, man . . . you’re like . . . you know . . . like gonna die.”
I said something along the lines of “Yeah, I kinda figured that”. Sorcerers do not have a long life expectancy, especially urban ones.
“Hey, dude, you totally don’t get it!” he replied. “You’re like . . . gonna die. It’s after when it gets complicated.”
At the time I thought he was being pretentiously metaphorical.
There are two ways to look at the gift of prophecy. Theory the first goes like this: prophet sees future = there is a predetermined path that the prophet is capable of perceiving = destiny = no free will = almighty God with a really sick sense of fun. Which is bad news if you’re anyone lower than “pope” in the spiritual pecking order of life.
Theory the second: prophet sees future = ability to determine with an almost omnipotent degree of accuracy and skill the one most likely future from a whole host of determining factors, including human free will, random variables and continual and unexpected cock-up, what will happen next = omnipotence = God in mortal flesh. Khan didn’t look like any sort of God to me, but as Mr Bakker always said, sorcerers should keep an open mind. Just in case someone tried to hit it with a sledgehammer.
That was back in the good old days.
Back before Mr Bakker’s stroke. Back before Mr Bakker resolved not to die. Back before his shadow grew a pair of teeth and a taste for blood. Back before the Tower killed the sorcerers of