The Burning Man

2

Hunter spent the rest of the day in a brothel just off Wimpole Street. The girls came and went, but nothing could take his mind off everything he had seen and heard since he had first encountered Laura in Hyde Park. He felt troubled, and then angry that he felt troubled. He took great care to order his life so it would be bearable. The last thing he needed was to have it all shaken up, more responsibility thrust on him, more obligation.

When he emerged into a light rain as dusk was falling, he was in a bad mood and in need of some serious drinking. He made his way down to Soho where he could lose himself in the backstreet pubs without bumping into anyone he knew. He drank Jack Daniel’s and Coke at a rapid clip and only became more irritated when drunkenness didn’t come quickly enough.

It was past midnight and the rain was still falling when he finally gave up. The weather had driven the stragglers home or to clubs and the streets were deserted. As he made his way along Wardour Street, the instinct that had served him so well over the years came alive. It was the kind of unease he had felt moving through Belgrade at night with the Serbian security forces close behind. Slipping into an alley, he waited.

For several moments there was only the rain-slick street gleaming in the sodium lights and the drumming of droplets on fire escapes and parked cars. Then, at the far end of the street, a shimmer like the reflection of light from a moving car. Patches of mist emerged from doorways and alleys, rose up from manholes, gradually taking on greater substance before moving rapidly around. Searching, he thought. From a distance, the shapes resembled rags caught in the wind, but as they drew closer the faces of beautiful women became visible within the coalescing mist.

Entranced, Hunter believed they were the most attractive women he had ever seen; any doubts were unnaturally silenced, even the dim realisation that they were searching for him as they quickly moved into every available space.

Closer and closer, the pale figures whirled through the rain. A cat darted out of one of the alleys where it had been scavenging in a bin and froze in the middle of the road, its hackles raised. Three of the women spun around, arms raised, swaying on the spot. They looked like cobras, hissing and drawing back their lips to reveal needle teeth. In the hollows of their eyes lay something corrupt and terrifying.

Hands grabbed Hunter’s shoulders and pulled him roughly back into the alley. It was the second time he had been surprised in as many days, and the shock of it broke the spell. He whirled to confront an ageing hippie, his grey hair pulled back in a ponytail, wire-rimmed spectacles, faded combat jacket, peace symbol T-shirt.

‘I thought you people were supposed to be better than this,’ he hissed. ‘Come on.’ He hurried into the shadows further along the alley. Hunter glanced back at the rapidly nearing feral women and chose to follow.

‘Who are you?’ Hunter asked when he caught up with the man, who was now staring up into the dark.

‘Quiet. The Baobhan Sith can hear the movement of an insect.’

‘The what?’

‘There’s a fire escape up there. If you boost me up, I can pull it down and we can get up onto the roof.’

‘Remind me why I’m listening to you?’

The stranger’s eyes were filled with a power belied by his shabby appearance. ‘Because in two short minutes, those things on the street will be tearing you limb from limb. Thirty seconds after that you’ll be nothing but a fine spray of blood and a few shards of bone.’

‘Okay, you’ve convinced me.’ Hunter cupped his hands and propelled the man up to the ladder, which slid down noisily. Within a minute they were on the wet roof. Hunter grabbed the man’s arm and said, ‘What do I call you?’

‘Tom. And despite what you might be thinking, I am a friend.’

Still suspicious, Hunter crawled to the edge of the roof and peered over the parapet. The Baobhan Sith flitted across the street with mounting frenzy. They reminded Hunter of hounds scenting their unseen prey. ‘Can they follow us up here?’

‘They could, but they’re not the sharpest knives in the box.’ Tom eased next to him.

‘Why are they after me?’

‘When you lived a life of dull ignorance, you weren’t a threat. Now you can no longer be contained or condoned. The alarms have gone off. You need to be removed from the field.’

‘Oh, I get it. You’re with the other lot. The mad Dragon Family.’ Hunter ducked as one of the Baobhan Sith scanned the rooftops. ‘They sent you to get me back.’

‘No. I have yet to join up with them. In these dangerous times, a touch of subtlety is required. Frankly, I think they’re flailing around like idiots. Dragging you in from your fake lives without any thought for how much fuss they’re making. Where’s the finesse? They’re going to bring all hell down on their shoulders, mark my words.’

‘If you’re not working with them, how do you know what’s going on?’

‘I’ve been watching.’

A high-pitched shriek rose up from the street, setting Hunter’s teeth on edge. It was joined by another and another.

Tom blanched. ‘They have found us.’

Hunter drew a carbon-steel knife from the sheath strapped to his calf. ‘Shall we see if they’re any good?’

‘You’ve got a death wish.’ Tom tried to grab Hunter’s arm, but he was already scrambling to the top of the fire escape. In the alley below, the Baobhan Sith looked like a mass of billowing sheets.

Before they could rise up the ladder, there was a disturbance at the entrance to the alley. A drunken couple were engaging in an argument en route home from the pub. She was shouting, ‘You didn’t have to keep looking at her!’

The Baobhan Sith stopped their relentless approach and turned as one. The couple were ripped to pieces in seconds. Hunter gaped at the speed and brutality of the attack; of all the many atrocities he had seen in his life, that was the worst.

‘If you’d run when I said, they might not have died,’ Tom said cruelly. ‘The Baobhan Sith are attack dogs. Anything that wanders into their vicinity is a target.’

Hunter felt a real weight descend on him as he led the way across the rooftops, and became increasingly uncomfortable when it refused to dissipate. Climbing down another fire escape, they emerged into the crowds around Piccadilly Circus as the rain stopped. Hunter propelled Tom into an all-night cafe, where they sat at the back, drinking espresso in the steamy atmosphere.

‘What were those things?’ Hunter was angry, and in two minds about giving the irritating old hippie a pasting just to make himself feel better.

‘They come from another place, a world that’s only a step away from our own.’ Tom removed his glasses to clean the raindrops from the lenses. ‘The things there have populated our myths for millennia as they crossed back and forth between worlds, and the Baobhan Sith are one of the worst nightmares to crawl out of that place. Any time you read a tale about some blood-sucking woman drifting out of a cemetery in a shroud, you can trace it back to them.’

‘This wasn’t some random attack-’

‘The Enemy controls them. The Enemy controls everything monstrous and frightening and unpleasant because its currency — its entire ethos — is despair. The Baobhan Sith spread poison in this sad and miserable reality, but on this occasion they were directed to eliminate you.’

Hunter tapped his spoon on the Formica table. ‘So essentially I no longer have any choice about getting involved in this madness.’

‘Correct. The Hunter has become the hunted.’

‘Nice joke. You know I can actually kill a man with this spoon?’

‘The smell of testosterone is overpowering.’

‘Where do you come into this? Are you the Grandpa of Dragons?’

Tom eyed Hunter over the rim of his coffee cup. ‘I have an interest in your success, shall we say. I accompanied Master Churchill for several hundred years-’

‘You wear it well.’

‘-most of it spent in the timeless Otherworld. The war has affected everything. It has destroyed lives, changed the course of time, shifted reality once, perhaps on many occasions. The stakes are the highest imaginable-’

‘Survival? That’s what it usually comes down to.’

‘On one level. The survival of our dreams for a better world, for meaning, for humanity finally to attain its true potential.’

‘So why am I so special?’

‘Yes, hard to believe, isn’t it?’ Tom sipped his coffee and smacked his lips. ‘The story goes that at the start of everything, two powerful opposing forces were created. Call them Good and Evil, if you want to be stupid. Dark and Light, in symbolic terms. The Dark got the upper hand and decided how the universe should be, and it got to rule it. That explains why there’s Evil in the world, because if the universe was ruled by Good, Evil would not be tolerated. That’s the essence of Gnostic thinking.’

‘Okay — Good, Evil, Light, Dark. I think I can get my head round that.’

Tom kept one eye on the door. ‘When the Light and the Dark were formed, slivers of Light were embedded in all humanity. It’s the key to our salvation — if we use that Light we can oppose the Dark, and turn things around for the universe. And those slivers of Light go by another name around these parts. The Pendragon Spirit.’

‘And that’s what links the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons.’

‘You lot get to access what everyone has hidden within them. That’s what makes you champions of Life, whether you want to be or not.’

‘Not a very good story, is it?’ Hunter finished his espresso and ordered another.

‘I’m just repeating what I’ve been told. Who knows what the truth is?’

‘So there’s a little group of us — a few plucky guerrillas — hoping to overthrow the evil god of the universe.’ Hunter considered that for a moment. ‘I like those odds.’

‘You’ll fit right in.’

‘You’re saying the Enemy won’t let me walk away. That I don’t have a choice about getting involved in this.’

‘You always have a choice. You just have to be prepared to live with the consequences.’

‘Basically, it’s suicide whichever way I turn.’

‘Death’s not all it’s cracked up to be.’

Hunter saw a shift in the impassive edifice of Tom’s face. ‘What?’

Tom looked into the black depths of his coffee and mused, almost to himself, ‘Sometimes I dream of my death. I remember the details of it as clearly as if it really happened. Yet here I am.’ Absently, he stirred in another sugar. ‘I feel out of joint and I don’t know why.’

Hunter watched cars pass the window in a wet haze of reflected light. Piccadilly Circus throbbed with the comfortable rhythms of steady life, red, amber, green, red, amber, green. Yet now he found his attention drawn beyond the surface to details he had never found a need to recognise before: the movement of mysterious shadows across the upper storeys of a building; the sudden, frightened expression on the face of a passer-by, as if a terrible secret had been whispered into their ear; vibrations permeating the walls and floor that felt like a distant heartbeat. He knew then and there that no good would come.