Prologue (Or Rather, the Beginning of Bad Things to Come)-2
808 Words
Blame it on Churchill.
One thing about brilliant men is that brilliant men are never happy with leaving things well alone. They need to poke, pry and prick at the establishment to their hearts' content. And so, one evening sometime before his last stroke, the great wartime Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill, after reading old reports about Nazi occultism and dark magicians Aryan or otherwise being recruited to serve the Third Reich, had experienced what some would later call a paradigm shift. He had suddenly realised that the United Kingdom was indeed a hotbed crawling with the wild, the weird and the wonderful. Ghostly things that go bump in the night and all that. So much so that he somehow decided that it would have been a waste of taxpayers' money to let those things loiter about in dank old castles, haunted houses, cursed pubs and certain creepy locations along the Underground, doing nothing particularly productive except scaring people half to death. Therefore, he personally oversaw the formation of a branch of the government that dealt in the Unmentionable. With a capital U, to distinguish it from the other existing branches of the government that dealt in the unmentionable, of which there were surprisingly many.
And so it came to be that Felicity Fish, the current scion of a long line of English (and before that, Pictish and Brythonic) witches, Druids, seers and village wise-women, found herself recruited as a third-generation magic-wielding servant in Her Majesty's service. In the late fifties, her grandmother, a well-known North London occultist and medium, was one day approached by a bevy of bowler hat-wearing, umbrella-wielding gentlemen in dark suits inviting themselves into her house for tea and very subtly threatening to arrest her with the usual trumped-up charges the government typically employed to coerce innocent people into cooperating with them during the Cold War era. Granny Fish had remained very silent. But once the burliest MI6 agent (for that was certainly what they were) had started coughing uncontrollably while the others soon followed suit - noticing their hands and feet suddenly becoming numb and an odd tingling sensation spreading on the tips of their tongues - the old battle axe gently informed them that her delicious tea had been spiced with the ground up gonads of a particularly deadly species of venomous Caribbean pufferfish. The kind that Haitian voodoo practitioners used to put their hapless victims into a brain-dead coma, only to be revived with yet another concoction specially formulated to turn them into mindless zombies. She also mentioned that if they did not continue the meeting on her terms, she would then withhold the antidote and wait for them to perish one by one. Or administer the aforementioned herbal concoction designed to transform them into her personal zombie slaves, depending on her mood.
After a few tense moments of frenzied negotiations (imaginably difficult, considering the fact that the men were paralysed in their chairs, their tongues progressively becoming more and more numb) the MI6 agents finally left her house; alive, visibly shaken, covered in cold sweat and somewhat green around the gills. Granny remained sitting in her favourite chair, broad smile on her face. From that day on the Fish family served as extremely well-remunerated consultants of the Crown on affairs deemed too Unmentionable to be made public.
One winter's night, the current descendant of this family in Her Majesty’s service, Felicity Fish, was assigned to maintain the alarm systems along Pentonville Road. Given Felicity's family heritage and field of expertise, it would come as no surprise that the alarms she had been assigned to maintain were, as a matter of fact, not of the electronic kind. MIU (Military Intelligence, Unmentionable) had given her strict instructions to ensure the mystical wards all along London's various nexus points and ley lines were in working order. They had to be painstakingly calibrated. In the dead of a Tuesday night. In winter.
Cursing, cussing and swearing at her superiors, the British government and the world at large for denying her the warmth and comfort of her bed and a hot late-night snack, the knackered Felicity Fish (henceforth to be referred to by her nickname, Flit, because the last person to make fun of her full name had ended up in hospital after surviving a fall from his bedroom window following a series of mysterious and eerie night time happenings in his house) was about to finally call it a night when her head suddenly ached, ears rang with a phantom gong-like reverberation and lungs spasmed uncontrollably
Something was triggering the alarms. Her head turned west toward Euston Road, the disappointment of being denied a hot bath and a chance to finally curl up in bed causing the chill air around her to seethe slightly with unseen energies. She reached for her phone.
Blame it on Churchill, blame it all on Churchill.
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- Writer
