Бен Ааронович - The Hanging Tree

The werelight popped up, strangely blurred and wavering.

There was a series of painfully loud bangs as the Americans opened fire.

The light flickered and cast rolling shadows across the walls and ceiling.

‘Cease fire,’ I yelled. But, just in case they didn’t, I put up my shield.

A cold and stinking wind struck me in the face, and with it I realised what was wrong.

My werelight had materialised inside a rolling wall of water stretching from the base of the pool to the ceiling. It was racing down the length of the basement towards me, and that’s what was causing the wind.

Oh shit, I thought as I raised my shield. Wrong spell.

I noticed the shield did slow the water down a fraction before it swept me, the Americans, and the cheap plastic garden furniture down the remaining the length of the basement.

Which, incidentally, saved our lives.

Not that I appreciated it at the time, you understand.

My shield bought me enough time to take a breath, but then it was a cold, wet, spinning darkness enlivened only by the occasional violent blow and the constant distraction of my own screaming terror. My shoulders hit something and, despite having my chin tucked into my chest, my head snapped back and slammed into a hard surface. I lost my air, and my werelight , darkness crashed in and I heard a voice from far away, shrill and terrifyingly cheerful, start to chant.

Right fol de riddle loll

I’m the boy to do ’em all.

Breathing – it’s an autonomic function and, past a certain point, your body is going to take a breath whatever your consciousness says and regardless of what you’re actually going to be breathing in.

I saw light – pale strips wavering in the darkness – the skylights embedded in the front garden. I needed a way out and I didn’t have time to be subtle.

Here’s a stick!

Magic is not about passion or anger or the power of friendship. Magic is about control, focus, and being able to concentrate when you’re drowning to death.

To thump Old Nick!

Training helps, as does experience. But the key is preparation. I’d once spent a fun afternoon buried under the eastbound Central Line platform at Oxford Circus and subsequently made a point of getting Nightingale to teach me something simple and effective for breaking architecture. It’s an impello variant with a lot of complicated little twists and curlicues. Not a spell – Nightingale said – normally learnt by apprentices. It’s also a bit limited in its applicability to everyday policing.

I picked a spot half-way along one of the skylights.

If he, by chance, upon me call.

I’d done a lot of practise – and I was motivated.

And anything to get Mr Punch to shut the fuck-up.

Only it didn’t work.

There was enough light for me to see the puffs of dust across the ceiling. Fine cracks shot out in a star shape from the focal point I’d picked, but the basement was well built and the ceiling held. I tried to gather up the formae for another go, but my mind was filled with the need to breathe and a long ululating laugh of triumph.

Suddenly there was a terrible pain in my ears and a burst of light from above and the section of the ceiling I’d been casting at seemed to blow upwards. I kicked and swam towards the light. But when I was almost at the lip, the water suddenly dragged at me as if I was caught in an undertow. And back down I went.

There was a thudding hollowness in my chest and I figured I had seconds before I took an evolutionary step backwards and tried to breathe water, but my feet hit solid floor and I kicked as hard as I could back-up towards the light.

The water around me boomed and rumbled and suddenly I was flying upwards. I burst out into the air and took a breath before I could stop myself and choked on a face full of water. Somebody grabbed my arm and held me up while I coughed desperately and took a second, proper, breath.

I blinked and saw brown eyes framed by black cloth, blinked again and saw that it was Guleed with the bottom of her hijab pulled up to cover her nose and mouth. I figured out why she’d done that when I took another breath and started coughing again. The air was so brown with brick dust that I couldn’t see the street lights.

I was at the edge of a surprisingly smooth-sided hole in the garden about a metre and a half across. Dirty water was welling up over the edge in rippling pulses. Obviously my spell had weakened it before something had raised the water level with enough force to punch it out.

I’d have liked to ask what that something had been, but just then I was too busy breathing.

But not too busy to yell when something grabbed my leg and tried to drag me down. I kicked frantically as Guleed tightened her grip on my arm and shoulder and attempted to heave me up over the lip of the hole.

A head broke surface next to me and did the whole emergency air sucking thing. It was one of Crew Cut’s boys. A second head bobbed up, retching and gasping – that was two.

‘I need some help here,’ shouted Guleed, bending over our impromptu garden pond as she tried to keep all of us afloat at once.

A pair of uniforms appeared out of the dust and helped pull me out.

‘That way,’ said one and pushed me gently towards the street.

A slim, unexpectedly elegant, paramedic pounced on me as I cleared the dust and threw a space blanket over my shoulders. He wanted to know if I was in pain and I told him I was just happy to be breathing.

He wanted to drag me away to his ambulance and do medical things, but I waited until Guleed emerged from the dust cloud trailed by the two uniforms and, suitably searched and handcuffed, the two Americans.

I asked Guleed if she’d seen ‘Teddy’ or Crew Cut himself.

‘I jumped Teddy as soon as Phoebe cleared the front gate,’ she said, pulling her hijab off her lower face.

‘We’d better get back in there and find their leader,’ I said.

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ she said.

The dust was clearing and I looked back at the house and saw it wasn’t there anymore. The whole front had collapsed into the basement, leaving the floors open and exposed like a vandalised doll’s house. It looked like something from the Blitz, with broken floorboards and haphazard piles of brick. One room near the top had cheerful yellow wallpaper – a cot teetered precariously on the edge of what was left of the floor.

The weight of the initial collapse must have caused the pressure wave in the water which blew out the hole I’d being trying to magic in the skylight. A second collapse had squirted me out.

Barring a miracle, Crew Cut was probably under that lot.

Uniform was pulling back to be replaced by the Fire Brigade. They’d have the dogs and thermal sensors out as soon it was safe.

‘Oh, shit,’ I said.

Guleed looked at me, at the remains of the house, and then back at me.

‘Not one word,’ I said. ‘Not one.’

The Custody Sergeant sighed when she saw the remains of Crew Cut’s crew.

‘I should have known when I was well off,’ she said.

The Americans all maintained a stoic silence, which bothered the Custody Sergeant not all. She just wrote ‘refused’ in every box, made sure they were all DNA’d and live scanned and banged them up. To avoid confusion they were marked up on the electronic white board as Male: anon – ‘Teddy’ ; Male: anon – blond ; Male: anon – eyebrow scar .

The Americans were all adults, foreigners, and had been caught red-handed – so they could wait. Phoebe Beaumont-Jones being seventeen and – since we didn’t have direct evidence of her drug dealing yet – a witness rather than a suspect, had to be interviewed immediately. So, after I’d pulled some dry clothes from the emergency bag I keep under the shared desk in the Outside Inquiry room, I joined Guleed in the Achieving Best Evidence suite to do just that. Anyone looking for a place to kip tonight was going to have to snooze at their desk like everybody else.