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 Five
‘Wild goose chase’. The thing about cliches is that you just use them and forget that they might actually mean something, be originally drawn from some actual experience. So let me tell you: chasing a wild goose is utterly pointless. Not only are they small and quite hard to catch, but they are also bloody-minded, vicious beasts and can also fly. A flying, angry goose that is dropping golden eggs from overhead is a serious hazard.
The goose and her retinue of crazed Santas were already a way down Gracechurch Street before I got out of Leadenhall Market. I sprinted after them. Fortunately the horde of pell mell Father Christmases kept stopping to pick up the golden eggs and then go through elaborate gift giving exercises with each other and passing pedestrians, and I was able to jink through their rabble, closing on the goose as she pattered through the traffic, honking back at the taxi horns, my wand waving dangerously in her beak.
But as she turned the corner at the top of London Bridge, she took to the air, flapping her way up Cannon Street, dropping golden eggs behind her, like particularly valuable and attractive bombs, bouncing unpredictably on the road, shattering windscreens and braining passers by.
This was a serious problem. Without that wand, I was sunk. I think I have suggested that the Ministry of Workings has all the magic in London, in the country, in fact, all careful controlled and marshalled. Think of it like an electricity grid. In which metaphor, the wand is my plug. With it, I can plug into that magic and use it how I want. Without it, I’m just waving around a useless hairdrier. Or electric drill, or something. Ok, that metaphor has got out of my control, but you see what I mean.
I had to do something about this goose, but the goose had my wand, and without my wand I couldn’t stop the goose.
And so here I was, lurching breathless down Cannon Street, trying to dodge falling metal eggs and fruitlessly waving my hands in the air. Like I said, a wild goose chase turns out to be utterly pointless.
It was then that I saw something that brought on a whole rash of different cliches. I stopped in my tracks. My blood ran cold. The bottom dropped out of my world.
My problems had just got a great deal more serious.
Wait. I’ve been told to be as exact as I can in this report, so, to be specific, I didn’t see something that made my blood run cold, stopped me in my tracks, etc, etc.
Halfway down Cannon Street, set into the wall, is a little window. It was behind that window that I didn’t see something. What I didn’t see was The London Stone. It had gone.
Ah yes, the other thing I have been told to include in this report: background.
Let me assume that some people who are reading this may have snoozed a bit during the PowerPoint presentation a junior wizard gave them when they joined the department (another reason I have so assiduously avoided promotion: PowerPoint). Next slide, please.
Magic is natural force that flows through the landscape, following its own ethereal gradients like water flows downhill. Charlatans call these courses ley lines. What these amateurs have noticed, though, is that these lines run between human buildings: churches, standing stones, tumuli. Because this is how you control magic: stones. Slap down a megalithic circle here, a cursus there, a big picture of a White Horse just there and bingo! You’ve got the magic running in the direction you want, which means you can just float in those really massive bluestones from Wales and build Stonehenge, and one that sucker is up and running, well… that’s a National Security issue and I shan’t go into it here.
And then, thousands of years later, Sir Isaac Newton comes along. Yes, that one: the arguments with Liebnitz, the dog setting fire to his homework, the apple. Not just a scientific genius but one of the greatest alchemists and magicians of his time.
What Newton figured out was that if you took all the standing stones and churches and holy wells around the country and just added some more buildings and monuments in just the right place, you could make a network of neatly controlled magic.
The Great Fire of London helped, first of all. New buildings could be put in, architects like Nicholas Hawksmoor could put churches of just the right design in just the right places. And then it was spread across the whole of Britain. You don’t think all those eighteenth century gentleman put up all those grottoes and classical temples in their grounds just for fun, did you? A quiet visit from one of the King’s wizards and you set off on your Grand Tour with a shopping list: a couple of classical statues, a bit of an ancient temple, just the things to push British magic into shape.
And here we are: a magic tamed, a whole country studded about with cairns and monuments and earthworks and buildings, all of them part of a vast and complex network. Some of them more important parts than others, mind. Stones like The London Stone: that’s a biggie.
Of course it’s not much in itself. Just a big chunk of battered limestone, maybe an ancient Roman marker, maybe just an old milestone, no one seems to know. But this is magic we’re talking about - it matters less what something actually is and more what it means. For centuries people have been swearing on the London Stone, taking their names from it, telling each other that the fate of the City depended on it. All of that makes it very important indeed.
And now it was gone.
Oh, I had problems now. Because with the London Stone gone, the magical network was broken. It was no longer under control, flowing where it was supposed to go, but gushing out free and wild, enchanting Santas and geese and who knew what else. And what was worse there was nothing I could do about it.
See, all of us Departmental Magicians, we’ve been trained in a world of safe British magic. Where magic behaves how it’s supposed to, does what it’s told. Wave a wand, plug into the grid and there you are. Magic at the flick of a switch, as it were. Right now, I was like an electrician watching a power station explode. No three pin plug was going to help me now. Trying to catch that bird was a wild goose chase indeed, because even if I got my wand back, there was nothing I could do with it.
For instance: as I stood there, gaping at where the London Stone wasn’t, I suddenly became aware of a noise behind me. Platform announcements from Cannon Street Station, Platform announcements for trains, bringing more people into the City. The City that was right now coursing with wild magic where it was definitely not safe for them to be. The problems were beginning to multiply.
A man with a shock of curly hair and horn rim glasses came tripping down the steps from the station.
“Get back!” I shouted, “Get back on a train!”
“What?” he froze on the stairs.
“Riot,” I said, gesturing at the capering Father Christmasses who were beginning to spill down the street behind me, “Festive, but definitely a public order offence. Get back! Go on!” and I shooed him back up into the station.
Once upon a time I could have stopped all the trains with a wave of my wand, but there was no chance of that any more. And then someone at knee height honked at me. I looked down to find the goose staring up at me with the wand in her beak and a taunting look in her eye. A thought occurred to me. Perhaps the chase needn’t be so wild.
“And you!” I shouted, waving my hands at her, too, “Up into the station, go on!”
She hissed round the wand but waddled away from me, up the steps, as I followed, shooing.
“Goose!” I yelled, as I came up onto the concourse, “Goose loose!”
A man in a high viz tabard came running towards us and then the goose shook her wings at him and squawked and a tide of Santas came sweeping up behind me and he reversed direction.
“Riot!” I shouted, “Goose! Close the station! Stop the trains!”
“Close the station!” I heard him shout into his walkie talkie as the goose ducked under the ticket barriers and all the maddened Santas piled after her.
Alarms began to sound as I turned and trotted down onto the street. One problem down, just the small matter of the biggest magical disaster since 1660 to go.
An All Too Magical Christmas #5