tissues draped over empty air, every part the traditional haunting ghosts, except for the headphones. A third had tears down the lower parts of his trousers, great gashes in the shoes on his feet. I slid down from the wheelie-bin as they approached, picking up the nearest beer bottle and giving it a gentle shake, feeling the suction of the air dragged in to feed the dull flame of the cigarette.
I picked the spectre who looked least battered, its grey tracksuit still intact, its head bobbing along to a muffled beat, and staggered up to it.
“Hey man,” I intoned, “like, respect.”
Any magician can tell you words have power.
Any urban sorcerer can tell you the greatest language of power is whatever the other bugger happens to speak.
So as I spoke, the spectre, recognising the beginning of a binding spell, drew back a moment askance, and perhaps, in that non-brain behind that not-face drifting beneath its grey hood, realised what was about to happen. Much too late. We were too angry for repentance now. I drove the open lip of the smoking beer bottle straight into the middle of that empty void, stuck into that thick nothingness like it was a spear and this was war. I think it tried to scream, but the sound was sucked straight into the smoky glass; it raised its hands and clawed at the air, too late, much, much too late, whined and whistled as the essence of its not-being got sucked down into the interior of the beer bottle, and wriggled and writhed. The grey hood on its head began to droop as the non-skull supporting it collapsed and shrivelled inside my glass prison, then the shoulders drooped away, the torso began to flop and flap in the wet wind, the gloves dropped away from wrists too loose to support them, the arms withered down to flat nothings, the trousers dropped from the top and collapsed, the shoes seemed to shrink into themselves.
In a second, barely one second, there was nothing more than a pile of flopping grey clothes on the floor. I stuck my thumb over the mouth of the beer bottle, glancing inside it. The cigarette was still burning bright, as it would burn now for ten thousand years unless some idiot went and smashed it; in the smoke of its interior eddying shapes spun back and forth in indignant distress like an miniature ocean storm caught inside a bottle with its model ship.
The other spectres were nothing if not taken aback. I slapped a seal of Sellotape over the mouth of the bottle and picked up another, flourishing it at them. “Come on!” I said. “You want to spend the next ten thousand years stuck at the bottom of the dumpster?”
They hesitated. “Come on!” we shouted. “If you think that shadows and gloom can really harm us, then do what you will! We have no reason to spare you the consequence!”
Our voice echoed, a muffled whisper in the rain. The remaining spectres began to back away. We laughed, shook the beer bottle with its trapped nothing inside, watched the smoke twist and billow beneath the Sellotape seal, watched the orange cigarette flare angry crimson, and roared after them, “Come on!”
Then they were gone.
Even nothingness, it seems, knows how to keep itself alive.
We stood in the rain on a pavement stained with beer and overflowing with litter, not sure if we were going to laugh, cry, or both. In the event, we did nothing; for all our blustering, we were not about to chase after the spectres and finish the job. They knew how to recognise danger when they saw it. At my feet, a sopping tracksuit lay flopped like the rotting guts from a soothsayer’s ritual, turning black in the rain.
I picked up the bottle I’d pressed into the spectre’s face, pressed my ear against the side, and listened. Imagination playing tricks? From within the glass I thought, perhaps, just perhaps, I could hear . . .
Boom boom boom boom-te-boom boom
I shook the bottle for extra good measure, and slapped a half-centimetre thickness of Sellotape over its smoky lips. As I did, I noticed blood had seeped through the bandages on my right hand, and was dribbling into the sticky recesses of my sleeve. The thought that I needed help made us want to cry, like a shameful child.
I went in search of a night bus from nowhere-everywhere to somewhere else.