Page 47 of The Magpie Lord
After a moment, whatever Stephen was doing in his throat melted away. “I think that’s all.”
Crane wiped the back of his hand across his face, began to speak, couldn’t command his voice. He gulped from the glass Merrick handed him and tried again. “That was disgusting.” The skin of his throat felt raw and scraped, and his voice was hoarse and shaking. “What the hell happened?”
Stephen poked the saliva-matted tangle of hair on the floor with disgust. His face was grim.
“Not to state the obvious, you’ve got an enemy,” he said. “That was a calculated—hellfire!”
Crane looked at him in alarm that rapidly turned to paralysing terror as he felt the awful tangle of hair fill his throat again. He tried to call out but it was coming faster and harder this time. He could feel it thrusting and pulsing like some malevolent growth, blocking his airways, pushing down as well as up now. He opened his mouth to scream and felt the choking hair roll forward over his tongue.
Stephen seized his head again but almost immediately let go. The expression on his face was no longer one of calm professionalism. It was alive with rage.
“Candle,” he snapped, holding out an imperative hand, taking hold of Crane’s neck with his other hand as if to throttle him.
Merrick leapt to the side table, grabbed a candelabra and thrust it towards the magician. Stephen wrenched a lit candle out of it. He glanced down at the floor, up at Crane as he choked. His pupils were so dilated that the tawny iris was all but invisible, leaving his eyes as black holes in his head.
“Don’t move at all,” he said, with stiff lips. “Choke—on—this.”
He turned the candle over. Crane had just time to register that the flame continued to burn straight and tall anddownwardbefore Stephen stabbed it savagely into the mass of wet hair on the floor in front of him.
Crane gave a desperate, shrieking gasp for breath, and inhaled again, more easily, as the hair in his throat shrivelled away to nothing. Stephen’s left hand was gripping his neck firmly but not painfully. His right hand was white-knuckled on the candle. The flame burned downwards into the hair, licking out to all sides around the wax cylinder. The hair wasn’t burning.
Merrick’s eyes flicked to Crane’s and down to the candle. Crane followed his gaze and saw that Stephen’s nails were outlined with thin lines of red. As they watched, the blood seeped out and spread in a thin film across his nails and finger ends.
Stephen was frozen still, his whole body tense and concentrated. His eyes were black holes that looked at nothing, and the blood wasgathering into drops on his nails. The air seemed shimmery, as though in a heat haze. Quite suddenly, all the candle flames in the room bent inwards at once, the flames streaming towards Stephen, and Crane felt the hairs on his arms and chest and head stir as if pulled in the same direction.
Blood drops were splashing onto the carpet from Stephen’s fingers now, faster and faster, and Crane could feel a warm wetness on his own neck where Stephen’s fingers dug in. He was arching backwards as though his spine was contracting, and there was a distinct red tinge to the light in the room that was starting to hurt Crane’s eyes. The candles were all burning down at incredible speed, wax melting visibly. Crane saw Merrick’s white-faced terror, realised that his own body was shaking, and belatedly knew that he was holding himself rigid to prevent himself from leaping up and running.
The mat of hair leapt into sudden bright flame. Stephen jerked forward, releasing Crane and dropping the candle, and the light snapped back to normality as Crane spasmed away from him.
Merrick stamped on the smouldering candle end, sat down abruptly on the floor, and put his head between his legs. Crane wiped a trembling hand across his throat, and wasn’t surprised to see the red stain on his hand or feel that his own skin was intact.
“Can you breathe clearly?” Stephen demanded, sitting back on his knees. “Anything at all happening now?”
Crane shook his head, lips clamped together. Stephen looked around the room, bloody hands stretched out to feel whatever strange currents he could pick up. He pulled a stained handkerchief out of his pocket with two delicate fingers, carefully wiped his nails, wiped the floor of any stray drops of blood, returned the handkerchief to his pocket, folded his arms to stuff his hands under his armpits, and only then keeled forward, hissing, “Ow ow ow, blast it,hellfire.”
“Are you all right?” said Crane. His throat didn’t hurt as much as he’d feared.
“Fine. Fine. Stings a bit.” Stephen did some deep breathing, in and out.
Crane got up on the second try, poured himself a very large brandy, spilling quite a lot, knocked it back in a single, painful gulp, sat on the floor again, and began to swear. He swore fluently, inventively and with spectacular obscenity in Shanghainese until he ran out of epithets, switched to English, and started at the beginning again.
“You’re feeling more yourself, then,” said Merrick, when Crane reached an impressively foul climax.
“No, I am not. What the fuck, what the fucking, bloody devil-shit, what in the name of Satan’s swollen cock wasthat?”
“Do you speak in the House of Lords with that mouth?” Stephen uncoiled his arms and shook his hands out. “Ouch. Can someone pass me the port please?”
“The brandy’s better.”
“The port’s sweeter.” He shook his head as Merrick started to pour him a glass. “Just the decanter please.”
Merrick handed Stephen the cut-glass bottle, which he drank, gulp after gulp, from the neck, red liquid running down his chin. He downed the entire bottle’s worth of port, took a very deep breath, and said, “Watered.”
“You did that thing,” Crane said. “Stripped yourself.”
“Only a bit,” Stephen said. “There’s nopowerin this house.” He wiped his hand across his mouth, replacing the trails of port with a smear of blood. “How do you feel?”
“Fine. Unhappy. You?”
