Lunchtime Gibber - the real bastards are on the right side
We were in Liverpool St Station when it happened. I mean Liverpool St for fuck’s sake! If there’s a less spooky train station in all of London I’ve never been there. So here we were, walking through the Milton Keynes of stations on our way to catch the tube to Moorgate and hop on the Northern Line when Charlie turns round and grins at us in a really freaky way.
Now my mate Charlie’s a nice guy, a really nice guy. I mean he’s there for his friends, generous with his money, not pushy, not agro, just nice. If he has a flaw in the world it’s that he’s clueless when it comes to women. Not aggressive or nasty, just a bit dumb. Other than that, as I say, nice guy.
So he’s grinning like a Cheshire cat that not only got the cream, but shagged all the lady cats, nicked their boy-cat’s cream and marked all the world as his territory. A bit of a change from his usual bashful half-grin I can tell you. And I can see then and there that something’s wrong. Very wrong.
That’s when the pigeon flies by. Fucking pigeons, rats with wings Daff calls them and she aint far wrong. They infest the City and occasionally fly just over head height through the station, mainly to get on yer nerves if you ask me. Anyway this pigeon comes right over out heads from behind, flying towards Charlie, who flicks out his right hand faster than you can blink and sweeps it down behind him.
It was so fast that, following the move with your eyes, it takes a second to realise he’s caught the damn pigeon and flung it to the floor behind it. All the while never taking his eyes off us. Now Charlie’s a big fan of animal rights, vegetarian, unfashionable open university beard type so, cool though the catch was it’s a bit of a surprise, to say the least. So much of a surprise that it takes another moment to realise that the bird isn’t moving. It’s neck is all bent the wrong way and it’s bleeding.
We can’t believe our eyes as they track back to his right hand, to the slightly too-long nails that are now dripping with fresh pigeon blood. That’s when I knew for sure, this wasn’t Charlie anymore, it was something else, riding Charlie. Right then I wasn’t sure what Demon it was, just that it was one. Baralucani perhaps? I was never to confident the bindings would hold on that bugger, but Luton’s a long way for a body-hopper to travel that quickly, and we’d know an hour after our bindings fell, maximum. That unnamed thing from the restaurant basement in Knightsbridge? Hell he’d be all slime and toothy tentacles by now if it had hold of him. Something new trying to make a name for itself? If so it’s damn stupid to pick on us. We’ve pushed some pretty big nasties back down the well when we’ve needed to and we have a serious rep in the pit by all accounts.
Never fear, I thought, it can’t be that bad. The nastier & more powerful the demon the more it alters it’s hosts’ physical form. We’ve beat-down things that turned their human bodies into shapes that’d have given Lovecraft scarier than usual nightmares so this little tosser was definitely in deep dog droppings. First things first and all that, vial of holy water from the jacket pocket into the face.
It never got there, it just sat in the air, turning slowly between us as the Thing-That-Wasn’t-Charlie grinned wider. He did look different, like his skin had tightened his hair and beard had straitened like they’d been brushed for an hour, and closed in as if oiled. It was like he’d just had a makeover. Big scruffy Charlie is now cool ‘prince of darkness’ guy. His stance was casual and yet graceful, his eyes glinted with confidence, Thing-That-Wasn’t-Charlie was fucking hardcore and knew it.
All the while the Holy water was just sitting there, turning and freaking me the hell out. Now the thing about holy water is that it’s holy. It exudes holyness. And the thing about demons is they aren’t holy, they’re unholy, it’s the point of demons. And unholy power can’t touch something genuinely holy, so how in the name of God, Allah and Buddha was it affecting the vial!
“What in the hell are you” asks Daff as I sit there dumbstruck.
Damn Thing-That-Wasn’t-Charlie just lifted it’s bloodied hand and starts licking pigeon-juice.
Now I have to say at this point I’m still not worried. What I’m actually thinking is what damn excuse we can come up with when, after we’ve booted out Charlie’s unwelcome passenger, we take him to hospital for shots and have to explain how he ‘accidentally’ drank the blood of a London street pigeon. “No ma’am he’s not mentally incapacitated, a pigeon just flew in he’s mouth and he reflexively bit down, good thing he’s not gay eh?”…Probably not.
Thing-That-Wasn’t-Charlie finished it’s languorous finger-licking good moment and replied, with a voice like a choir of Charlie’s whispering in contempt “Nothing in hell my dear”.
And then I was scared, cos I realised that, somewhere along the way, we’d pissed off the Other Side as well, and they’re the real bastards.
Now my mate Charlie’s a nice guy, a really nice guy. I mean he’s there for his friends, generous with his money, not pushy, not agro, just nice. If he has a flaw in the world it’s that he’s clueless when it comes to women. Not aggressive or nasty, just a bit dumb. Other than that, as I say, nice guy.
So he’s grinning like a Cheshire cat that not only got the cream, but shagged all the lady cats, nicked their boy-cat’s cream and marked all the world as his territory. A bit of a change from his usual bashful half-grin I can tell you. And I can see then and there that something’s wrong. Very wrong.
That’s when the pigeon flies by. Fucking pigeons, rats with wings Daff calls them and she aint far wrong. They infest the City and occasionally fly just over head height through the station, mainly to get on yer nerves if you ask me. Anyway this pigeon comes right over out heads from behind, flying towards Charlie, who flicks out his right hand faster than you can blink and sweeps it down behind him.
It was so fast that, following the move with your eyes, it takes a second to realise he’s caught the damn pigeon and flung it to the floor behind it. All the while never taking his eyes off us. Now Charlie’s a big fan of animal rights, vegetarian, unfashionable open university beard type so, cool though the catch was it’s a bit of a surprise, to say the least. So much of a surprise that it takes another moment to realise that the bird isn’t moving. It’s neck is all bent the wrong way and it’s bleeding.
We can’t believe our eyes as they track back to his right hand, to the slightly too-long nails that are now dripping with fresh pigeon blood. That’s when I knew for sure, this wasn’t Charlie anymore, it was something else, riding Charlie. Right then I wasn’t sure what Demon it was, just that it was one. Baralucani perhaps? I was never to confident the bindings would hold on that bugger, but Luton’s a long way for a body-hopper to travel that quickly, and we’d know an hour after our bindings fell, maximum. That unnamed thing from the restaurant basement in Knightsbridge? Hell he’d be all slime and toothy tentacles by now if it had hold of him. Something new trying to make a name for itself? If so it’s damn stupid to pick on us. We’ve pushed some pretty big nasties back down the well when we’ve needed to and we have a serious rep in the pit by all accounts.
Never fear, I thought, it can’t be that bad. The nastier & more powerful the demon the more it alters it’s hosts’ physical form. We’ve beat-down things that turned their human bodies into shapes that’d have given Lovecraft scarier than usual nightmares so this little tosser was definitely in deep dog droppings. First things first and all that, vial of holy water from the jacket pocket into the face.
It never got there, it just sat in the air, turning slowly between us as the Thing-That-Wasn’t-Charlie grinned wider. He did look different, like his skin had tightened his hair and beard had straitened like they’d been brushed for an hour, and closed in as if oiled. It was like he’d just had a makeover. Big scruffy Charlie is now cool ‘prince of darkness’ guy. His stance was casual and yet graceful, his eyes glinted with confidence, Thing-That-Wasn’t-Charlie was fucking hardcore and knew it.
All the while the Holy water was just sitting there, turning and freaking me the hell out. Now the thing about holy water is that it’s holy. It exudes holyness. And the thing about demons is they aren’t holy, they’re unholy, it’s the point of demons. And unholy power can’t touch something genuinely holy, so how in the name of God, Allah and Buddha was it affecting the vial!
“What in the hell are you” asks Daff as I sit there dumbstruck.
Damn Thing-That-Wasn’t-Charlie just lifted it’s bloodied hand and starts licking pigeon-juice.
Now I have to say at this point I’m still not worried. What I’m actually thinking is what damn excuse we can come up with when, after we’ve booted out Charlie’s unwelcome passenger, we take him to hospital for shots and have to explain how he ‘accidentally’ drank the blood of a London street pigeon. “No ma’am he’s not mentally incapacitated, a pigeon just flew in he’s mouth and he reflexively bit down, good thing he’s not gay eh?”…Probably not.
Thing-That-Wasn’t-Charlie finished it’s languorous finger-licking good moment and replied, with a voice like a choir of Charlie’s whispering in contempt “Nothing in hell my dear”.
And then I was scared, cos I realised that, somewhere along the way, we’d pissed off the Other Side as well, and they’re the real bastards.