Mike Shevdon - Sixty-One Nails

Images hammered into my head: a heavy door that swung ponderously shut, the dull thud reverberating; letters carved into pale stone that I couldn't read; a familiar looking building with a roof stained with livid green verdigris; a black cat, ready to pounce, silhouetted against a darkening sky. Autumn leaves swirled around me in a vortex of red, orange and gold. There was a green twig haloed in a sickly light and a room striped with sunlight, bedclothes scattered across the floor. It shifted into a vaulted ceiling like the roof of a wine-cellar, walls lime-washed and inset with dark stones.

I spun upwards like a reverse skydiver, the wind whipping my clothes around me. I recognised the Thames wriggling out below me until I floated momentarily. Then I fell, my eyes streaming with blurred tears as London rushed up to meet me, the river suddenly large and gleaming in dull menace. At the last second, I swerved aside to pass through a heavy metal grating into a brick-vaulted tunnel where I twisted manically, left and right, to a giant hall filled with the sound of rushing water. In the centre was an island with an altar, strung with detritus and misshapen in the darkness.

My final image was of a square iron door in the wall above the water, its edges caked with rust, a keyhole, black at its centre.

Breath rushed into me and I collapsed backwards, rolling off the cushion onto the cold tiled floor, banging my head in the process. The reprise of my experience this morning was not lost on me as I coughed and retched onto the floor, pins and needles prickling my legs as the flow of blood returned. Kareesh and Blackbird watched, waiting for me to recover myself.

After I had calmed and wiped the spittle from my lips with the back of my hand, Kareesh spoke to me.

"Were you ready?"

I shook my head slowly and had the grace to laugh at myself. The gift I had bargained for had turned out to be a thumping headache and a series of fractured images. I felt cheated and somehow soiled by it, as if something dirty had trampled through my head.

Blackbird was more practical. "Did you see what it was?"

I looked up at her from the cold floor. The memory of what I had seen was already indistinct. I remembered the door with the keyhole and the tunnels, and there had been a cat. What was the green twig, and where was the familiar building? It was like remembering a badly edited movie. "I'm not sure."

Blackbird let out a sigh of frustration and turned to Kareesh, but before she could say anything Kareesh held up her strange hand to pause her. "No child, you know how it is."

Blackbird's face fell, but whatever she'd been going to say she kept to herself. She stood up and moved closer to me so she could help me to my feet. I felt as though I had been beaten in the middle of a hangover. My first attempt at standing was unsuccessful. I only made it to my knees. Then Blackbird, with surprising strength, put her hands under my arms and lifted me so I could stand. She kept hold of one arm, supporting me emotionally as well as physically. My mouth tasted of dry ash and there was shimmering in my vision that screamed migraine.

Kareesh addressed her. "Take him somewhere quiet and dark, girl, and he will recover in a little while. He'll sleep well tonight, perhaps too well." She ushered us slowly out onto the head of the steps, patting Blackbird's cheeks affectionately. "Don't be so long next time, girl. And bring an old one some boiled sweets, eh?"

"They're bad for your teeth," Blackbird objected half-heartedly.

"There are lots of things that'll be the death of me before my teeth, girl, and I can always grow new ones."

Kareesh looked up at me, as you might at a curiosity.

"Goodbye, Kareesh, and thank you for your gift," I whispered, my voice unsteady.

"You can thank me later, Rabbit. If you live."

She stood at the top of the steps while Blackbird helped me down into the dark. There was no sign of Gramawl, either in the corridor or at the base of the stairs, though he may have been lurking in the darkness somewhere. My own vision was still haunted by glowing after-images of things I'd never seen.

Using a mixture of cajoling and support, Blackbird got me up the steps and into the lift. We were joined by a group of German tourists who looked distastefully at me when I came close to throwing up as the lift jolted into motion. The lift reached the surface and we let them disperse. Blackbird steered me after them to the exit.

"Do you have your card?" Blackbird asked me.

"Yes, it's in my wallet somewhere." I made a hesitant attempt to find it, but Blackbird walked me forward to the barrier.

"Just know that you're allowed to pass," she instructed, and walked into the gap between the barriers. I concentrated my limited resources on remembering that I was a valid ticket holder and to my surprise the barrier flipped open.

Outside I was confused. The day had vanished into twilight. I looked around, able to support myself now, at least physically. "Where did the day go?" I asked Blackbird.

"We were down there some while."

She guided me over the cobbles and down a side street to a pub that had emptied of tourists and not yet packed with office-workers released from their labours. We entered between floods.

It was dimly lit and although there was a juke-box, it was mercifully quiet. At the back, there was booth seating where Blackbird left me at a table propped against the cushioned back while she went to get me a drink. I closed my eyes momentarily, trying to recapture the vision, then shied away from it when the sense of vertigo returned. It hadn't been the best of days, overall. I had started out dead and now I felt like crap.

I thought of Kareesh sitting in her nest of cushions and hangings somewhere beneath my feet. It was hard to reconcile the waking world around me with the dream-like one she inhabited. I had once had a bad dose of flu with a temperature that made me delirious. The way I felt reminded me of that. The sense of disconnection, of unreality, was overwhelming.

I looked at Blackbird's back, over at the bar. Here she was, shepherding me around, introducing me to creatures I hadn't even known existed a day ago. What did she get from all this? She had said that she'd gained a degree of responsibility for me. How far did that responsibility extend?

She was close to both Kareesh and Gramawl; affectionate even. What was it that was between them? Kareesh said that she was hiding. What was she hiding, and from whom? I hadn't even had the opportunity to ask whether Kareesh was a female troll. She was much smaller and not hairy, but maybe she was just old. All those teeth in their measured rows; I felt cold inside.

And then the thought occurred to me that actually I had no idea what Blackbird really looked like. As I had discovered, she could appear how she pleased. I had a sudden mental image of Blackbird sitting in the booth beside me, rows of tiny sharp teeth reflecting the mood lighting. Could she and Kareesh be related? Is that what Blackbird really looked like?

Had we been visiting an old friend or had I really just been introduced to her mother?

My mind was buzzing with the after-effects of the vision Kareesh had granted me and stray thoughts as to Blackbird's true appearance were doing nothing to calm me. My sight shimmered at the edges with the promise of migraine. I closed my eyes in the hope that it might cease, the thumping headache easing slightly.

"Lost, are ya?" The tone was belligerent, but not out of the ordinary in the back-streets around Covent Garden. It was a nice area as long as you stuck to the tourist track. I opened my eyes to view the couple that had appeared in front of my table.

"Sorry?" I tried to focus on them. I was having a bad moment and suddenly felt quite nauseous.