Nightmares of Winter Dreaming

Prologue (Or Rather, the Beginning of Bad Things to Come)-3

The south bank of the Thames is wild.

It is a wide expanse of sonic disturbances, irritating clutters of mechanical sounds jostling with human voices speaking, shouting, laughing and crying in a multitude of accents. The ancient creature watching the fascinating interplay from his flat used to liken it to diving into the middle of the ocean and getting battered by a fierce opposing current swimming with millions of fish of various sizes, shapes and colours. The night time landscape below is one of flowing waves of gas-spewing vehicles broken up by intermittent streams of people. But it is their words that fascinate him.

From his desk by an open window overlooking the Thames, Byrd Manu Loiseau had just realized that he was typing the wrong words on his computer. Unpleasant ones such as ILLEGAL, ASYLUM, REFUGEE and CHAOS had, to his horror, mushroomed like open sores throughout his draft. Byrd was aghast and proceeded to sterilise his work by hitting backspace. The latest blog post, like every other one published since the turn of the millenium was to be about what ordinary humans perceived to be the unknown - in this case the communities of djinn inhabiting the deserts around Palmyra and other formerly-great cities being reduced to dust by human conflict - not about human populations displaced by their leaders' never-ending wars and religious struggles. His stance had always been impartial, his content tied to neither nation, nor creed, nor Zeitgeist.

He blogged about things half-remembered, pulling back the primordial mists to discuss creatures inhabiting myth and legend in detail; things fantastic and altogether frightening. He loved reminding his readers that they were not alone. Far from it.

Byrd was a storyteller, always had been - a spinner of ornate tapestries with words in place of thread. Very little of his humanity remained; he remembered the warm fires, the smell of melting animal fat and the shelters heavily-draped in buffalo skins from his distant past; but that was about it. And he loved words, loved them so much that he spent millennia moving from tribe to tribe, nation to nation, draped in feathers and skins and teeth, narrating heroic legends and sagas and ballads and romances by firelight. He still did, but the warm, yellow campfire flames had been replaced by the glow of a computer screen, the beat of skin-drums by the click-clacking of his claws on a keyboard, the hypnotic gourd rattle by an iPhone buzzing with a continuous torrent of Twitter notifications. Mesmerised Stone Age audiences had been replaced by subscribers and followers.

Byrd gritted his razor-sharp teeth, completed his last edits, now purged free of the offending words, and — trying not to scratch the cheap plastic mouse with the four sharp claws of his right foot - hit publish. 15,000 subscribers would now receive notifications. Cryptic Curiosities has just released a new post.

Unseen by both his army of readers and the sparse stream of people walking along the Thames below his apartment, he leaned back in his armchair and unfurled his black wings, stretching them a little, and folded them against the smoky feathery gap on his torso where a stomach would normally be on a human.

His phone rang. It never did.

Carefully lifting it to his earhole with his left foot, five smoothly-polished claws gleaming, he listened for the words.

Spoken words in human languages have a finite brutality. Once uttered, the sonic disturbances originating from a quivering set of vocal cords, amplified by a cartilaginous voice box and then forced into their desired forms by a human mouth, unless picked up by a receptive pair of ears, will dissipate into silence. A word unheard is not really a word, for the sonic components must first be detected, transmuted into chemical and electrical messages by nerves attached to eardrums and earbones and then transmitted along more strands of nerves to the rapidly-firing neurons of the human brain where they are finally matched to a previously-established set of meanings associated with this seemingly random pattern of sounds.

The pattern spelled out the words - spoken in an annoyed woman's voice, educated but brutal: "Byrd, get your feathery arse to Euston Road. Meet me at that gambling place in front of King's Cross Station."

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* * * *

"Well? Anything?" Flit was stamping her foot impatiently, shifting from one to the other, taking deep puffs from her cigarette to keep the interior of her lungs from turning into popsicles. She shouted to the sky; at no one at all, apparently.

An ambulance raced took off toward University College Hospital.

Byrd landed discretely at a CCTV blind spot between Birkenhead and St Chad's Street and walked up to where she had been stomping her feet.

"Someone was itching for enough money to go for his three hundredth round on the fruit machine." His accent was deliberately subdued and slippery. "And then terrible pain ... blood ... lots of chattering in Japanese."

Flit was cold and tired, "I know, I sensed all that too dummy, what else?"

"A trail." His eyes looked darker than usual. He walked away.

"s**t," exclaimed Flit. "I'm not going home tonight, am I?

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* * * *

When Flit was first assigned to work with Byrd, she had been terrified. She only knew three things about him: he was old, probably not human and never ate or drank or smoked. On paper, MIU (location: undisclosed) had designated her as MU and he, as COM. Rather like a zoo handler and her potentially dangerous animal. Just great.

Byrd Manu Loiseau always looked to be anywhere between 25 and 35, of average height and build with the kind of tanned sun-kissed complexion that people seemed to adore nowadays. His short, straight hair was jet black and he would have been considered extremely handsome in a dark, brooding way were it not for his slightly beaky nose. That and the fact that his features had a tendency to shift and rearrange themselves slightly depending on his mood. He seemed to favour faded blue jeans and a black T-shirt. Flit had been silly enough to burden him with small talk, "Hi! So where are you from?"

He had ignored her. At least for a while.

Flit gradually learned that everything about him was a façade, a mask he applied on a daily basis. In her line of work, if you didn't have a mysterious façade, you weren't cut out for the job. If you were an open book, then that book wasn’t good enough. She soon learned to stop asking questions.

Three years later, she was trudging past Russell Square in the bloody dead of night trying to light her last cigarette and screaming insults at him for dragging her arse through the cold at that ungodly hour. "Where the f**k are you taking me?"

He stopped. "Turn right." He was definitely following some invisible trail like a dog sniffing out unseen cookie crumbs. “This should be it.”

They stopped dead in their tracks.

The British Museum stood before them.

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* * * *

The following morning, a fresh-faced Byrd and a somewhat-less-fresh-faced Flit walked into the British Museum. "We have an appointment," said Flit.

The cards and badges they pulled out had been enchanted; people saw what they wanted to see. The pair of MUCOMs walked among museum pillars, attempting to sense the unseen.

Because British government institutions had a love affair with acronyms, the MIU had decided that all MU (Magic User, not Manchester United) agents and operatives were to be paired with recruited COMs (Creatures of Myth - a very broad category requiring several encyclopaedic volumes for clarification). The resulting MUCOM would then be unceremoniously assigned to specific areas of the country with particularly high levels of Unmentionable activity.

Care of the designated streets and alleyways in Central London blessed with the most haunted buildings was naturally plopped onto Flit and Byrd.

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