When a magician (second class) chooses to do Christmas duty in the City of London, it's because he's hoping for a nice, quiet, seasonal time, not for ancient magic to break loose and the enchanted city to be filled with ghosts, monsters, wonder and danger. Not on his watch. Not when he's going to have to deal with it all on his own. That would be an all too magical Christmas.
An All Too Magical Christmas is a seasonal adventure story of magic, mayhem and mystery told in 24 instalments. It is written by Tobias Sturt and read aloud by Jon Millington.
Incident report YUL-XX/12
Section Two
It has been pointed out to me, forcibly, I might add, that I am not explaining enough. So here goes.
I am a civil servant; a magician, second-class, working for the Ministry of Workings, the secret Government department responsible for magic. It sounds exciting when you put it like that, doesn’t it? Magic, secret Government organisations, spy wizards of the streets of Britain. Well, let me tell you, it isn’t. What it is is paperwork. It is reading runes off dials and writing them in record books. It is daily rounds of checking magic circles to make sure they’re all still intact, which they always are, and calling in on ghosts to make sure no one’s disturbed their graves, which is always weird and always pointless.
This duty, the one this report is about, is a good example. Christmas in the City of London. Christmas, the season of enchantment, the solstice, the time of darkness, when the gap between worlds narrows. And the City of London, over two thousand years old, the city of Roger Bacon and John Dee, an ancient, haunted city, full of spirits and strange tales.
You’d think it’d be full of mystery and monsters, wouldn’t you? And yet I, as a magician, second-class, chose this as a nice, quiet posting for the holiday season.
This is because, for all of our grousing, the Ministry does a pretty good job. Over the last four hundred years, the City has been locked down tighter than a sphinx’s treasure. It’s so covered in wards and spells that you can’t even say so much as ‘Bless you’ without an alarm going off somewhere. Only a little alarm, but I still have to write down how many times it goes off. Think about that next time someone sneezes.
But this is the way I like it, frankly. There’s only one thing that scares me more than dark and fabled magics, and that’s promotion. Oh, you get a nice office if you’re a fully fledged Wizard, a nice view of Whitehall and tea and biscuits in your meetings, but then there’s a dragon gets loose in Wales or a Russian Necromancer stalking Embassy Row and all of a sudden it’s ghastly curses and gruesome deaths. No, no thank you. Magician, second class is fine with me. Don’t do anything flashy, file your reports and take a retirement in a nice new suburb where there’s not thousands of years of legend breathing down your neck.
All of which should mean that if someone in the City of London starts making trouble - by, I don’t know, trolling people online with the rumour that the British Government has a secret order of wizards in its employ - I should know about it. A bell should ring, the crystal ball in the duty room should start glowing ominously and, more importantly, I should get a text message from central monitoring down in Greenwich, with GPS coordinates to go to, some guidance on the sort of spells to prepare and a recommendation on whether to take an umbrella.
But not this time. This time the first I knew of it was when kids started calling me Gandalf in the street. Even Brassneck, the magical mechanical head who is very good at Internet, couldn’t trace where the messages were coming from. Whoever it was knew the Ministry well, well enough to dislike it, well enough to publicise it, and well enough to avoid it. All of which gave me a pretty good idea of who it might be.
Because this is not to say that there isn’t any magic in the City of London. We still have our fair allotment of shadowy corners, ghosts and odd creatures.
Like Bertha the Bird Lady, for example. It occurs to me that I’ve never actually properly ascertained what she is: fairy, witch, fictional character, she could be any of them. They all become the same thing in the end. The old powers become folk tales, become children’s stories and there they are, trapped by their own legend. And there she is, stumping back and forth with her bad leg, in front of the Royal Exchange, feeding the birds.
You, if you just passed her in the street as you hurried to another meeting or a late train, would probably just take her for another homeless person, muttering at pigeons, but while I might not know what precisely she is, I know one thing: she isn’t human. At least not in the way you might mean it.
London is full of them, lost magical people. Just like the humans, they’ve eddied here over the centuries from all over the world, swept up by history and drowned in the thin grey streets and sparse grey parks of the City. Countryside Hobgoblins and Cornish piskies, Djinns and Rahkshahas and Wendigos, a stunted giant crammed into a bedsit and a sea monster in the Pool of London. They’re everywhere, all around, and you never pay them a blind bit of notice, and they you, most of the time. Which is how I like it, because when they do, I have to do something about it.
Like I was having to do now.
Fortunately for me, if one of them were making trouble, plenty of the rest of them would know and some of them might even tell me about it too.
The Bird Lady was sat under the Duke of Wellington’s statue, watching the pigeons fight over a piece of fried chicken. Her shoes were peeking out from underneath her voluminous and grubby skirts and for the first time I noticed that one of her feet was much bigger than the other. That must be why she walked in such a distinctive, rolling way.
“Nice afternoon,” I said.
“Getting cold,” said the Bird Lady.
“I suppose,” I said, not wanting to seem unfriendly, “Though it never really gets that cold in December these days.”
“Winter coming,” said the Bird Lady, throwing bacon flavoured crisps at the pigeons, “Snow.”
“Well, I suppose it’d be nice if it snowed for Christmas, yes.”
“Nice?” she asked, “Nice for who?”
This, I realised, was probably a good point. A white Christmas likely isn’t all that fun if you sleep on the streets, as I strongly suspected the Bird Lady did.
“Speaking of Christmas,” I said, changing the subject to something I really wanted to talk about, “I’m looking for the Yule Lads.”
“It’s mother you should be worrying about,” said the Bird Lady.
“Their mother never left Iceland,” I said. A conversation with the Bird Lady was often like this: she seemed to wander - to answer the question after the one you were asking, or one you didn’t know to ask. Sometimes things seemed like a non-sequitur until you suddenly realised, weeks later, that she had been talking about what you had for lunch the following Thursday.
“Someone’s making trouble,” I said, “They’re going to bring the whole Ministry down here if they're not careful.”
That got her attention. A beady little eye peered up at me from under her battered hat brim.
“That’d kill the goose laid the egg, wunnit?” she said, “Want me to ask the birds, do you?” and she suddenly lifted her big foot and brought it down on the pavement in a hard slap. At the noise, the pigeons all clattered into the air in a jostling flock.
Once, when London was a Roman city, there would have been augurs here, respected and honoured priests who divined the will of the gods by observing the flight of birds. Now there was just this little beetle of an old lady, flapping her hands at pigeons on a traffic island.
The pigeons flew off eastwards.
“Hospital fields,” said the Bird Lady, “The Ditch.”
Shoreditch, of course: Silicon Alley. Where else would someone be casting spells on the Internet?
An All too Magical Christmas #2