George Martin - The Way of the Wizard

If everyone could See the world as it really is, and not as we would have it — if they could See everything and everyone they share the world with — they’d shit themselves. They’d go stark staring mad. They couldn’t cope. It’s a much bigger world than people think, bigger and stranger than most of them can imagine. It’s my job to see that the hidden world stays hidden, and that none of it spills over into the safe and sane everyday world.

I walk up and down the streets, pacing myself, covering my patch. I have a lot of ground to cover every night, and it has to be done the traditional way, on foot. They did try cars, for a while. Didn’t work out. You miss far too much, from a car. You need good heavy shoes for this job, strong legs and a straight back. And you can’t let your concentration slip, even for a moment. There’s always so much you have to keep an eye out for.Those roaming gangs of Goths, for example, all dark clothes and pale faces. Half of them are teenage vampires, on the nod and on the prowl, looking for kicks and easy blood. What better disguise? You can always spot the real leeches, though. They wear ankhs instead of crucifixes. Long as they don’t get too greedy, I let them be. All part of the atmosphere of Soho.

And you have to keep a watchful eye on the prossies, the hard-faced working girls on their street corners. Opening their heavy coats to flash the passing trade, showing red, red smiles that mean nothing at all. You have to watch out for new faces, strange faces, because not everything that looks like a woman is a woman. Some are sirens, some are succubae, and some are the alien equivalent of the praying mantis. All of it hidden behind a pleasing glamour until they’ve got their dazzled prey somewhere nice and private; then they take a lot more than money from their victims.

I pick them out and send them packing. When I can. Bloody diplomatic immunity.

Seems to me there’s a lot more homeless out and about on the streets than there used to be: the lost souls and broken men and gentlemen of the road. But some have fallen further than most. They used to be Somebody, or Something, living proof that the wheel turns for all of us. If you’re wise you’ll drop the odd coin in a cap, here and there, because karma has teeth; all it takes is one really bad day, and we can all fall off the edge.

But the really dangerous ones lurk inside their cardboard boxes like tunnel spiders, ready to leap out and batten onto some unsuspecting passerby in a moment, and drag them back inside their box before anyone even notices what’s happened. Nothing like hiding in plain sight. Whenever I find a lurker, I set fire to its box and jam a stake through whatever comes running out. Vermin control, all part of the job.

From time to time I stop to take a breath, and look wistfully at the more famous bars and night clubs that would never admit the likes of me through their upmarket, uptight doors. A friend of mine who’s rather higher up the magical food chain, told me she once saw a well-known sitcom star stuck half way up the stairs, because he was so drunk he couldn’t remember whether he was going up or coming down. For all I know, he’s still there. But that’s Soho for you: a gangster in every club bar, and a celebrity on every street corner doing something unwise.

I stoop down over a sewer grating, to have a chat with the undine who lives in the underground water system. She controls pollution levels by letting it all flow through her watery form, consuming the really bad stuff and filtering out the grosser impurities. She’s been down there since Victorian times, and seems happy enough. Though like everyone else she’s got something to complain about; apparently she’s not happy that people have stopped flushing baby alligators down their toilets. She misses them.

“Company?” I ask.

“Crunchy,” she says.

I laugh, and move on.

Some time later, I stop off at a tea stall, doing steady business in the chilly night. The local hard luck cases come shuffling out of the dark, drawn like shabby moths to the stall’s cheerful light. They queue up politely for a cup of tea or a bowl of soup, courtesy of the Sally Army. The God botherers don’t approve of me any more than I approve of them, but we both know we each serve a purpose. I always make a point to listen in to what the street people have to say. You’d be amazed what even the biggest villains will say in front of the homeless, as though they’re not really there.

I check the grubby crowd for curses, bad luck spells, and the like, and defuse them. I do what I can.

Red turns up at the stall, just as I’m leaving. Striding out of the night like a ship under full sail, she crashes to a halt before the tea stall and demands a black coffee, no sugar. Her face is flushed, and she’s already got a bruised cheek and a shiner, and dried blood clogging one nostril.

“This punter got a bit frisky,” she says, dismissively. “I told him; that’s extra, darling. And when he wouldn’t take the hint, I hit him in the nads with my knuckle-duster. One of life’s little pleasures. Then when he was down I kicked him in the head, just for wasting my time. Me and a few of the girls rolled him for all he had, and then left him to it. Never touch the credit cards, though. The filth investigate credit cards. God, this is bad coffee. How’s your night going, Charlie boy?”

“Quiet,” I say, and work a simple spell to heal her face. “You ever think of giving this up, Red?”

“What?” she says. “And leave show business?”

More and more drunks on the street now, stumbling and staggering this way and that, thrown out of the clubs and bars once they run out of money. I work simple spells, from a safe distance. To sober them up, or help them find a safe taxi, or the nearest Underground station. I work other protections too, that they never know of. Quietly removing weapons from the pockets of would-be muggers, driving off mini-cab drivers with bad intent by giving them the runs, or breaking up the bigger street gangs with basic paranoia spells, so they turn on each other instead. Always better to defuse a situation than risk it all going bad, with blood and teeth on the pavement. A push here and a prod there, a subtle influence and a crafty bit of misdirection, and most of the night’s trouble is over before it’s even started.

I make a stop at the biggest Chinese Christian Church in London, and chat with the invisible Chinese demon that guards the place from trouble-makers and unbelievers. It enjoys the irony of protecting a Church that officially doesn’t believe in it. And since it gets to eat anyone who tries to break in, it’s quite happy. The Chinese have always been a very practical people.

Just down the street is an Indian restaurant once suspected of being a front for Kali worshippers on the grounds that not everyone who went in came back out again. Turned out to be an underground railroad, where people oppressed because of their religious beliefs could pass quietly from this dimension to another. There’s an Earth out there for everyone, if you only know where to look. I helped the restaurant put up an avoidance spell, so only the right kind of people would go in.

I check out the dumpsters round the back, while I’m there. We’ve been having increasing problems with feral pixies, just likely. Like foxes, they come in from the countryside to the town, except foxes can’t blast the aura right off you with a hard look. Pixies like dumpsters; they can play happily in them for hours. And they’ll eat pretty much anything, so mostly I just leave them to get on with it. Though if the numbers start getting too high, I’ll have to organize another cull.

I knock the side of the dumpster, but nothing knocks back. Nobody home.