Ordinary miracles, p.1
Ordinary Miracles, page 1
Copyright © 2020 Martyn Carey
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Matador
9 Priory Business Park,
Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,
Leicestershire. LE8 0RX
Tel: 0116 279 2299
Email: books@troubador.co.uk
Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
Twitter: @matadorbooks
ISBN 9781838596200
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
For Anna, for letting me do this
and
Jane, for not letting me stop
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
1
With no more than a whisper of sound the steam train hurtled into Paddington Station and crashed through the buffers. The noise was huge, shocking, a blow to the ears, even in that vast, high space. It ploughed through the concourse, blasting debris around like a bomb exploding. There had been people sitting on the banks of chairs, idly looking at the departure screens, but I lost sight of them when the mass of steam and steel gouged its way through the station. It crashed into the back wall, almost reached the lobby of the Hilton Hotel on Praed Street. The screaming started before the echoes had died.
I’d been trudging across the station, muffled against the bitter midnight wind and feeling unsettled, probably from a hasty kebab, when it happened. I dropped my bag and ran towards the crash, grabbing shocked and confused people and urging them away. One man was standing rigid, staring at a fragment of something embedded in his arm and screaming in an oddly high-pitched voice. Part of a bone from someone else’s leg, I thought, feeling a lurch of nausea. The woman next to him appeared to be uninjured, but was immobile with shock, wide-eyed and trembling.
I grabbed a bruised and limping teenager and used her to guide them both away from the area. Two men in high-vis jackets, stumbling on the debris that littered the ground, had made a cross-hand seat for a man with a badly broken leg. A mute and limp child, its face a mask of blood, was being rushed away by a distraught looking man, a palely-ineffectual woman trailing behind them weeping.
It was a blur of images, soaked in adrenaline and fear; glimpses and moments as victims fled the scene. The trail of blood behind some of them should have made me feel sick, but I felt nothing.
Once they were clear I started searching for the injured amongst the crushed and scattered benches. My mind was numb, no emotions edging in, despite the evident danger, and yet there was a tremor in my hands that I couldn’t stop. ‘Cope at the time, shake afterwards’ – what psychologists call ‘deliberate calm’ – has always been my way in an emergency.
I could see others rushing to the rescue elsewhere in the cavernous station, but that didn’t concern me. These were my people to save, to heal, although I am not a Healer. The hiss of the train’s boiler was getting worryingly loud when I discovered a man in a Crossrail jacket, clutching the back of his head and crawling in the wrong direction. I turned him towards rescue and tried to get him to walk, but the way he tracked my voice told me that he was blind. A member of the station staff darted forward to help him.
As they stumbled away I turned back to the traces of life that I could detect under the rubble, twisted steel and crushed displays. A few seconds later, and a few feet closer to the trembling metalwork, I found a child of perhaps four beneath some seats that had been thrown over by the impact. He stared up at me with wide, blank eyes and gripped his mother’s hand. She was unconscious, her hair bloody, her clothes torn. I pushed the benches away without touching them.
“Don’t worry, everything will be fine,” I said. I wasn’t certain who I was trying to reassure. “Let’s wake mummy up, shall we?” My voice felt weak, but the child nodded, his face serious but oddly not frightened. Shock, I suspect. Now I did feel sick.
I bent over the mother, fighting a horrified vision of trying to drag this child away from a corpse, but it wasn’t necessary. I placed my hands gently on the mother’s head and did my best to help her. She slowly woke, blinked at me, felt her son’s hand in her own and squeezed it gently. I helped her to sit up.
“Come on, we need to get you away from here,” I said, easing her to her feet. A younger man, his obviously broken arm supported inside his jacket, appeared from nowhere and guided them to where the blue flashing lights chasing around the walls showed that ambulances and the police were arriving. I should have been relieved that they were there, that I could escape and leave this to the professionals, but I wasn’t. I knew that there were three more people under my bit of the smashed train and I knew that I couldn’t leave them.
By now I was right up under the lee of the first carriage, with the engine and tender almost out of sight across the platform. It was leaning heavily towards me, supported by only the sagging departures board. From the way it was trembling it was obvious the inevitable collapse was only briefly delayed. The metal groaned as I edged closer. I suppose I should have been too frightened to go near it in case it finished falling over and landed on me.
I wasn’t scared because I wasn’t anything. There were people that needed help, so I had to help them. The tremor in my fingers was worse; I tried to pretend it was the cold.
A hand pushed aside some fractured and jagged metal, and I saw a face. A man, a man I’d never seen before, trying to pull himself out from under the mass of razor-sharp steel and broken stone. He reached out, a gesture of supplication, a wordless cry for help. I dashed forward, and his face changed from despair to hope to relief. I had just touched his hand, felt the cold sweat and recognised the copper smell of fresh blood, when the departure board finally gave up the unequal struggle and collapsed.
The noise, the shock, the blast of air was violent, terrifying. Everyone in the station turned to look. Except me. The falling steel had missed me by bare inches, but had landed squarely on the man I was trying to help. I felt his hand jerk, tighten and then fall slack as the life went out of his eyes. Something powerful rushed through me then, driving me to my knees, leaving me dizzy and disorientated for a moment. I gashed my shin on some broken glass as I fell, but I didn’t feel it. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, then finally let go of his hand.
I was numb again. There should have been fear, rage, fury, sadness, sickness… there should have been something, but there was just nothing. The twisting collapse, the fall of the huge departures board, had exposed the other two people I had known were there. One was far beyond help, and I looked stony-eyed at the ruin of the man and didn’t even try. The other was a dark-haired slip of a girl, barely into her teens, just conscious, with a long bloody gash down one thigh, bone and muscle exposed. I couldn’t see or feel any other injuries, but I knew that she was in danger of bleeding to death.
I ran over to her, pushing back the teetering metal that was almost brushing her face. I used so much force that one of the departure board stanchions snapped as it fell away and shattered, and the fragments fell around me like lethal iron hail. I wrapped my hands around the gash and tried to stop the bleeding.
I could feel the blood slick and throbbing as her pulse raced her towards her own death, but I didn’t stop. I tried not to think about what I was doing, the closeness of the dead man and the groan of the metal as it started to sink towards me again. The bleeding had slowed when the paramedics arrived.
“We’ll take over now.” With kindly force they moved me out of the way, flushed the wound, strapped it up and had the girl on a stretcher within half a minute. I just stood and watched. “You’d best get back,” said one of the paramedics. “That don’t look too safe to me.” I took his advice, moving back away from the train. I didn’t know who the girl was, or if she would survive.
Then the most astonishing, most terrifying thing of all happened. The train re-formed into its undamaged state, in exactly the reverse order of its disintegration, and then disappeared.
The engine vanishing made everyone in the huge space stop and stare. They were surprised; so was I, but it frightened me more than anything else that had happened. Because that meant this wasn’t terrorism, a tragic accident or a spectacular suicide. Th
2
I kept my head down and went on doing what I could to save lives, limbs and sanity until there was no more that I could do. I stumbled into a corner with the other people who’d been helping and was given coffee – which was awful – and then, huddled in my coat, fell into a shallow, troubled sleep, despite the noise, at around two in the morning. Nobody asked us to leave, or seemed to pay us much attention at all. They were far too busy with people who needed immediate assistance.
The damage didn’t look any better when I woke up about three hours later, but by then all the bodies were gone and a bloody catastrophe had become an exercise in civil engineering. Without the train itself the destruction seemed less, as if removing the cause had somehow diminished it.
All the civilians who had helped gave their details to the police and were officially thanked by the emergency services. I was taken into the station staff changing room, where they let me have a shower and put on some clothes that weren’t soaked in blood. After some rudimentary first aid to my hands and leg they found me a taxi to take me to St Pancras for the first train home.
I picked up the early editions of the newspapers when I got there. Information was scarce, so they said little beyond a basic description of what had happened. As I rode the escalator up to the platform I realised that none of the people reading the newspaper had any idea that the ordinary looking twenty-something man in the background of some of the photographs, exhausted, haggard and bloodstained, was me. For some obscure reason I felt cheated by that. The newspapers were calling us heroes, but I couldn’t accept it. I didn’t feel like a hero for having done it, but I would have felt like a coward if I hadn’t.
The journey home took the usual hour and a half, and it passed with the speed of a tranquilised sloth. My thoughts were incoherent, racing then sluggish. I felt detached and, now, scared. I knew I had Healed people but I didn’t know how, because Healing is not a Talent I possess. Had I made any mistakes?
If I’d gone to help the man under the stanchion first, would he have survived? But if I had, would I have been able to save the mother and her little boy as well? Would the teenage girl have bled to death in the meantime? There were no answers, just an acid parade of ‘what ifs’. I spilled my coffee because my hands were shaking so much.
*
The fuss when I got to the college in Nottingham that afternoon was, unsurprisingly, huge. When I got to the common room, all worn chairs, chipped tables and scattered papers, I had expected to see the usual collection of people drinking coffee, staring at their mobiles and treating the laws of physics as a matter of opinion. Instead, everyone in the room was facing the front where Professor Wicks, the head of the college, was about to speak. She looked grim.
“What…?” I began, but my friend Amy, serious water Talent and trainee psychopath, grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into a seat next to her wheelchair. Clara, her magical partner, nodded from the other side of her, but didn’t speak.
“Mike, sit down and shut up,” said Amy quietly, then ignored me, which is fairly typical. Professor Wicks didn’t glare, because it’s hard to glare and look that disturbed at the same time.
“You’re aware of the incident in London,” she said. She’s short, blonde and from Texas or Arizona or somewhere else that’s hot and American. “People ain’t happy. We gotta become acclimated to being under suspicion. What we do ain’t exactly secret, and most folk can’t recognise us with a flashlight and a mugshot, but who we are is gonna leak out.”
“Like sewage from a broken drain,” muttered a dark brown voice behind me. It just had to be Ambrose. He’s a pure-blood Ghanaian and as usual he was dressed in the traditional clothes of his homeland; jeans and a sweatshirt with something rude on it – he comes from Bethnal Green.
“What can we do?” The man speaking from the front row had shoulder-length ice-white hair, with suspiciously dark roots, and a taste for flowing black and emerald clothes. Unfortunately his name is Brian, which rather spoils the effect.
“Do?” Professor Wicks snorted. “What do ya think? Keep your fool heads down, don’t mention magic, don’t let anyone see your books and focus on your normal degree work.”
“But surely there is something that we can do to track down this dastard?” Brian said. He can’t spell sententious but, boy, does he know how to do it.
“No. Somebody capable of doing this would eat most of you for breakfast. You’d end up with brains like kitty litter, those of you that ain’t like that already. The Central College is putting together a team. None of you will be on it.” She paused. “You understood all that?” None of the two dozen or so people in the room spoke. “Good. Now push off – I’m busy.” She strode away without another glance.
Terry-Anne Wicks would, I suspect, be happier if there were no students getting in the way of her research.
“Who in hell would want to wreck a railway station?” Ambrose asked the room.
“Who the hell would want to wreck a railway station in the middle of the night?” Amy replied. “Would have been much more effective if it was full of people.”
Psycho under construction, yeah?
“What I don’t get is how they did it,” I said tentatively. Already the abstract, intellectual discussion in this drably familiar space had begun to soften the impact. It felt like it might not have even been me that was there, but some alternate version of me.
I had been able to tell my parents something of what had happened when I got home, but not all of it. They knew that there was very little that they could say, so mum had just given me a hug, put me in the shower, fed me breakfast and let me sleep for a few hours.
“That’s because you don’t have any magic bone in your body,” said a light voice behind me.
“Hello, Sam.” Sam is my magical partner and a stupendously powerful air Talent. She draped her arm around my shoulders and leant heavily on my back. I’m no more than averagely big, if fairly heavily muscled, but Sam is short and slight and fragile looking. I can just about claim to be five-foot ten – that’s 1.77m for the metrically inclined – and she barely comes up to my chin.
Her magic is amazingly powerful, but that means that she tires quickly when doing big spells. Her leaning on me might have seemed like an affectionate gesture, but I could feel her drawing Indar (strength) from me. I winced – the back of my left shoulder was quite sore. Some unfelt impact at the station, probably. My shin was certainly still painful.
“Aah, sweet,” said Amy, pulling her strawberry-blonde hair back into a metallic tie. She does have a powered wheelchair, but only uses it occasionally, so her arms and shoulders are shapely with muscle.
“Stick it,” I said with a tight smile, although I felt sweat touch my forehead.
“You want to try sticking something near me?”
“In your dreams, buddy.”
She laughed, made a half-hearted attempt to run me over and headed for the college coffee shop. I swear she would put blades on the wheels if she were allowed.
“The technique that appears to have been employed in this case – although making such a swingeing assumption on such scant evidence is barely defensible – was a variation of Irmo Argi.”
“Damn,” said Ambrose, which earned him a disapproving glare from the cadaverous Professor Weaver, who had been standing, unnoticed, at the back of the common room.
“Indeed,” said Weaver and coughed. I don’t know if it’s a nervous habit or a persistent respiratory infection, but he seems to punctuate almost everything with a cough. “Creating ‘hard-light’ objects, although the term is no more than approximately accurate, is very advanced and requires intense focus and concentration. Other than in truly exceptional cases, one would have to be Jaun 4 to create such a thing.” Weaver had a faint trace of a West Country burr, but it was mostly overlain by the more dominant accent of desiccated academia.
