Poison City Read Free

looks me up and down. ‘You are going to a wedding today?’
    I frown. ‘No. Why?’
    ‘Oh. You are a very smartly dressed man, then.’
    ‘Thanks,’ I mutter, ignoring a sound from the dog that sounded suspiciously like a snort of laughter. I take a fifty rand note from my wallet and hand it over. Ten times what people usually pay car guards. ‘You been on this patch long?’
    He makes the money disappear. ‘Two years.’
    I nod at Addingtons. ‘Anything strange going on over there?’
    His smile vanishes. He shrugs, uneasy.
    ‘Tell me,’ I say.
    ‘Lots of talk,’ he says reluctantly. ‘No one sleeps there. Not anymore. They say it’s haunted. That’s all I know. I don’t ask about that place.’
    I nod and grab my satchel.
    ‘You’re going in there?’ asks Moses, surprised.
    ‘Have to.’
    ‘Oh.’ He squints at me. ‘If you don’t come back, can I have your car?’
    ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘If you come in and get my keys.’
    The dog and I cross the street and do a full circuit around the property. It’s pretty big, at least three acres. The gates are padlocked but someone has used a crowbar to bend the bars apart.
    We slip inside, me being careful not to get rust and dirt on my shirt. The dog sees this.
    ‘Why are you dressed like you’re auditioning for a role in Inception ?’
    I look down at my clothes. A Gucci three piece, sans the jacket. White shirt, sleeves rolled up. It cost me an absolute fortune, but buying nice clothes is my one vice.
    ‘It’s how I always dress.’
    ‘Yeah, but . . . you don’t think this kind of thing is better suited to jeans and T-shirt? That shit is going to get ruined. I’ve told you this before.’
    ‘Yeah, but you know I don’t listen to a word you say.’
    He’s probably right. But I’m not going to let him know that.
    I check out our surroundings. We’re standing on the ruined driveway leading up to the hospital. Uneven grass spurts up in tufts and clumps. Weeds push through cracked asphalt.
    We approach the building. Empty windows gaze down at us, like the vacant eyes of a retail worker at Christmas. The main door is wooden, recessed beneath a portico and balcony. Just below the balcony is a frieze of what looks like Jesus standing with some children. They’re holding fruit, the only splash of colour on the dirty beige paint.
    There’s a silence here, a stifling emptiness that hangs over everything.
    I take a deep breath, let it out slowly. ‘You ready?’
    ‘Ready,’ says the dog.
    ‘Hit me.’
    A surge of . . . energy . . .  power  . . . rushes through my body, tingling through my veins, sparking into every corner of my being. I feel a wave of euphoria, a sense of well-being I haven’t felt in three years. A golden warmth that slides through my soul like a liquid orgasm.
    Little known fact, and not one they tell you before you join up. Wielding magic (or Shining, as I call it) is like using drugs. From the way it makes you feel, to the effects of the magic itself. It changes you inside. Your body comes to crave it, and every time you use shinecraft (again, one of mine), it picks a little bit of your DNA apart, unravelling you in ways you can never predict.
    Keep using it and one day you’re going to go for an X-ray on a routine medical and find an extra brain growing in your lungs. Or you’ll wake up one day and find your chest has become transparent, a window looking out into another world. (This happened to a guy who used to work at Delphic Division. Near as we can figure it from checking the configuration of the stars in the sky through his chest, the world was a couple thousand light years away. The guy eventually got pulled through the hole in his chest, literally sucked inside out. I was there. It wasn’t pleasant.)
    So yeah, magic is a drug. Don’t do it, kids.
    I shudder in delight and try to pull the fragments of my mind back from wherever they’re tripping out to. ‘Jesus, that feels good,’ I say.
    ‘Shut