Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) Read Online Free PDF Page A

want…”
    “Tits!”
    Derek’s eyes dance to the one who makes this rather incongruous contribution to the conversation and see him smile. His smile is lecherous, his smile is the ogling grin of a man who’s spent too much time in high places observing the things that pass below, his smile is the smile God would have worn when enjoying a dirty joke with Satan, just you and me, hate the attitude, love the wit. Then his eyes move to the other three in the room. How they entered he does not know, but how they will leave he can fairly guess, and he sees that they too are smiling.
    Four faces…
    … but all the same smile.
    A whimper escapes him before he can prevent it; his fingers scratch into the brick wall at his back. “Please…” he whines. “Please, I don’t know. She’s just vanished, that’s all, she just disappeared!”
    “How’d she do that then?” asks one.
    “Magic!” suggests another.
    “Poof–farts–poof!” cackles a third.
    “Right stinker,” concurs the fourth.
    “If you can’t help us…”
    “… then we’ll have to find someone else…”
    “… because our guvnor…”
    “… he wants her so bad…”
    “… so bad I mean it’s like he’s got this massive thing…”
    “Wanker!”
    “Arse.”
    “Lovely pair of knockers.”
    “So you see…”
    Four faces fill his world, four faces and they are all the same face, the same smile, the same eyes, the same voice, whispering their words as the floor cracks beneath his feet and the walls grow fingers of mortar and dust to wrap around his throat and dig into his skin.
    “… we ain’t never gonna stop…”
    “Overtime, yeah.”
    “Payday!”
    “… until you give us Greydawn.”
    He tries to scream, but the concrete is already giving way beneath him, sucking him down, and the walls have curled their ragged fingers around his face, stopping his mouth with mortar and dirt, filling his throat, his lungs, with thick grey sludge, and still he tries, and no sound can emerge until he is bursting from the inside out with the weight of it and his eyes dribble tar and his face is red, then scarlet, then purple, then the orange-brown of sandstone and clay, and at the very, very last a tiny puff of air escapes his lips, the very last puff that he shall ever breathe, and if you listen closely, if you crane your ear right up next to his face, before it is pulled down into the foundations at his feet, you might hear this one word:
    Howl.
    Before he is sucked down beneath the street.

Chapter 12
A Dog Will Love You More Than Any Man
    She said, “I get so lonely sometimes.”
    She said it so softly, so gently, that for a moment the gathered members of Magicals Anonymous exchanged glances, just to check that they’d heard it aright; but yes, that was the sentiment, that was the word.
    “It’s not something I can really explain,” she sighed. “But these last few years I’ve just known that I don’t belong, and people won’t understand.”
    The room lapsed into silence. The speaker was Mrs Rafaat (Hello, Mrs Rafaat).
    “And I’m not really magical at all, you know. I mean, I’ve been tested because I was having these experiences, but they weren’t so much experiences as things that happened around me but actually I don’t know any wizarding or witching or anything and apparently if I tried to cast a spell it would probably just go
puft,
but the thing is I do seem to know things, and really things do seem to happen and I suppose I’m actually a bit of an intruder here so I really hope you don’t mind, but you all seem like lovely people and I am very interested and really yes–but yes, really actually quite worried. I’ve been feeling that way for a while, something I can’t quite put my finger on but I’m rambling. I’m rambling aren’t I? So yes, that’s me. Would anyone mind if I had another cup of tea?”
    In her mid-fifties, she spoke with the faintest remnant of an Indian accent, softened by many years of life in