Last night he had been at The Café in the Crypt beneath St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church in Trafalgar Square, one of the hidden meeting places beneath the crowded first floor for those who practiced left-handed magic and were on the prowl. He’d stayed for nearly an hour, making himself scarce in a discreet corner, eavesdropping until he felt as though he might have been noticed as an outsider. He spied ashes on the floor, there to trap anyone who wasn’t on the path. The ashes could put you in a foul mood so that you’d pick a fight and you’d find yourself tossed out on the street having been beaten and bruised at your own expense for a laugh. Fool that he was he’d stepped right in the ash and as soon as he did he could feel his strength draining. He’d had too much to drink, as well, enough to become woozy, which was a drastic mistake when walking the Crooked Path. In his younger days he’d known weeks of debauchery, but now he rarely drank and three whiskeys did him in completely. He did his best to slip out unseen and unmolested, making sure to keep his mouth shut. Ian still had his robber’s ways and usually went unnoticed, dressed in black, his hair pulled back, yet all the same he’d had the sense he’d been followed when he departed the Crypt. He looked into the sky to see a cloud of crows, well aware that such birds never flew at night unless there was an emergency. He heeded the warning and took a taxi rather than the tube. His heart was pounding, the way it used to when he was attempting a robbery, but back then it had been a thrill to outsmart everyone, and he always thought he’d be the victor. On this particular night, however, he felt he might not win.
“Can you dodge around a bit?” he asked the driver once they’d headed away from Trafalgar Square.
“Wife following you?” the taxi driver guessed.
“I’m a bad boy,” Ian admitted, failing to mention there was no wife and likely would never be one given his inability to commit or emotionally connect with anything other than a book. He liked women, it was true, he simply botched up romance. You keep yourself hidden, his mother had told him. As do you, he’d shot back. He was still angry at not having known his father. And I’m alone, Margaret Wright responded. And don’t mind being so. The implication was, he was not.
“I don’t mind helping out a bad boy once in a while,” the driver said.
They’d rode around aimlessly for twenty minutes, then Ian had directed the driver to Westbourne Grove. He got let out at the corner by the pub. On most nights he would have gone in for a nightcap, but he still felt a shadow behind him, a pool of darkness spreading over the cement as if ink had spilled. Indecipherable rustlings came from the alley where dustbins were stored. Ian was over six feet tall and didn’t scare easily but he’d had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, the same feeling he’d had when old Harold caught him and sent him off to prison. Fear was fear and it came on its own like a fox.
Ian went down the lane whistling, for it was no use to hide himself and perhaps best to simply appear casual, an ordinary man not worth noticing. He let himself into the house and stood with his back to the door, clammy all over. He should have felt secure, surrounded by amulets, talismans, good-luck charms, blue beads, sacred thread, pentacles, books of great power, yet he didn’t feel in the least bit safe. Ian went to get himself a drink, and as soon as he turned to the cupboard for a glass he heard the bells above his door, that wrinkly metallic cough. After that he remembered nothing. A pool of darkness, a groan, a flutter behind his eyelids.
When he woke today in his own bed, it was already past noon, and he knew he had been hexed. Despite his expertise in the field of magic, he was frozen, unable to take even a shallow breath, suffocating in his own bed, and there was no one to call out for help.
* * *
Sally carried lavender and sage in her coat pockets and before leaving the pub, she’d taken a shaker from the table and sprinkled salt on the soles of her shoes. She was purposeful and yet despite all of her intended protection, including a dress hemmed with blue thread, she grew unmoored by the time she reached the door on Rosehart Mews. As it turned out, puddles had washed the salt from the soles of her shoes and the lavender and sage had mostly fallen out to sprinkle the road when she darted across. As for the thread she had used, it was poorly dyed and already unraveling. She wasn’t quite as protected as she’d hoped to be.