The rest of Alfie’s afternoon and evening was spent enveloped in a curious cloud of mingled self-doubt, excitement, and incredulity. He would have moments of feeling lighter than air, buoyed up by the knowledge that there was more to the world than he, hitherto, could possibly have dreamed, and then he would pass into phases of dull, uneasy uncertainty.
What was the old saying? If something sounded too good to be true it usually was?
As soon as he left Grape Expectations, he wandered along Artillery Passage and emerged out into Sandy’s Row. From there, he meandered aimlessly into the fantastically named Frying Pan Alley, past the myriad reasonably-priced Japanese and pizza restaurants, bakeries, and coffee shops that catered to the students of the nearby London outposts of Northumbria and Newcastle universities.
The sheer normality of everything—people hurrying to and fro, the traffic on Middlesex Street, the constant sounds of construction, and a busker setting up outside a famously subpar steak house—washed against the outlandish stretch of time that had followed his first setting foot in Furbelow’s Gimcrack Emporium. Under the revealing light of the overcast day, Alfie’s memories seemed suddenly less real than they had been.
As he walked through the familiar streets, heading with unseeing eyes toward Liverpool Street tube station, reality eroded what he might have referred to as the ‘magical aspect’ until he was only half sure that it had even happened.
Perhaps I just got sidetracked and ended up having a beer too many and daydreaming in Grape Expectations? he mused.
Whenever this thought trickled insidiously into his mind though, he would bring forth from the ether an item from his inventory. Every time the box that contained the Charlatan’s Lodestone appeared in his hand, he smiled to himself.
By the time he reached the block of flats in which Uncle Vali lived, optimism had won out. He had decided to have a little faith in what the eccentric, oddly captivating, and intense Sharpe had told him. Alfie reasoned that the world, on the whole, had only really advanced by accepting absurdities. The history of the plant was, when he thought about it, one of unbelievable ideas proven to be true.
So why not the existence of magic? he thought.
Strangely, Uncle Vali was not home. The doorman knew Alfie, though, and consented to allow the young man to leave the small package in his uncle’s postbox.
After that, Alfie entered auto-pilot mode. He made his way home to his family’s end-of-terrace semi-detached house in Crystal Palace, went through the motions of dinner with his parents, and sat up and watched TV before turning in for the night.
“Alfie, love, are you all right? You’ve been very quiet this evening,” his mother, Linda, said to him as he mounted the stairs.
“Long may it continue,” his father quipped jovially from the sitting room.
“Ha-ha, old man,” Alfie called sarcastically. “Still got your wit, I see.”
“Cheers!” Steve Turner called back. There was the sound of a can of lager being cracked and a soft belch. “Night, Son.”
“Night, Dad,” Alfie said, grinning.
“Seriously though, love, you’re okay, are you?” Alfie’s mother persisted, clutching the banister and looking up at him with her soft gray eyes.
Alfie trotted back down the steps and gave her a kiss on the cheek.
“Yeah, Mom,” he said truthfully, “I’m good. I just had a bit of an eye-opening day is all. I got offered an opportunity to attend a… a university of sorts today.”
His mother’s face brightened at this. She was too tactful a woman to have ever said anything to him about his lack of direction, beyond subtle hints and questions, but Alfie knew that it preyed on her mind.
“A university?” she asked. “Did you hear that, Steve? Alfie got offered a place at a university today!”
Alfie thought he heard his father choke on his can of lager. There was the sound of the heavy footsteps moving across the floor and then the soft whisking of the heavy sash curtains being pulled open.
“Nope, no pigs flying around out there!” his dad boomed. “Are you sure?”
Alfie was glad his old man couldn’t see his smile. He wouldn’t have wanted to give him the satisfaction.
“Yep, pretty sure, Dad,” he called. “I spoke with the headmaster of the place today.”
“Are you hopeful of getting in?” his father asked.
“Almost as hopeful as I am that sense of humors aren’t passed on genetically,” Alfie said.
“Cor, you’d be lucky on that score, mate. Did I ever tell you that one about the blind man that walked into the bar?”
“And the table? And the chair?” Alfie replied in a wooden voice. “Only about… six hundred and nine times.”
“How about the one about the dyslexic that walked into a bra?” Alfie’s dad shot back.
Alfie raised his eyebrows at his mother and said quietly, “That’s actually not bad for Dad.”
Linda Turner’s eyes twinkled.
“Rubbish,” Alfie said loudly.
“Well, how about the—?”
“Tell us some more about this university, love,” Alfie’s mom interrupted loudly.
“I’m going to find out more about it tomorrow,” Alfie said, taking a backward step up the stairs.
“Ruddy hell,” his father said from the other room, the creak of leather audible as he lowered his big frame back onto the sofa. “Miracles never cease. Well done, mate. I’m proud of you.”
“Proud enough to come and give me a big hug?” Alfie teased.
“Let’s not get carried away, Son. Match of the Day’s on.”
Linda Turner rolled her eyes.
“What does the university offer, Al?” she asked. “You must know that.”
Alfie considered this. “Let’s just say that it sounds pretty specialized. Goodnight, Mom.”
As he shut the door, he grinned. Now that he was alone, he could put in some time figuring out exactly what his magic could do.
Alfie spent the next hour casting his Stone Fist spell over and over again, stopping only to wait until his mana regenerated. During this brief period where Alfie’s fist wasn’t some freakishly large and freakishly strong appendage encased in stone, he summoned and unsummoned items to and from his subspace.
Midway through using Stone Fist for the sixth time, there was a great banging against his bedroom door.
“Hey, Alfie, what the bloody hell do you think you’re doing in there?” came the voice of his old man. “You trying to bring the house down?”
“Uh…” was all Alfie managed to say as he scrambled to dispel his stony fist and force some order upon the great catastrophe that his magical practicing had turned his room into.
“Packing, are you?” his father said, poking his head into the room. “Oh. I see.”
During Alfie’s last attempt at summoning and unsummoning items from his subspace, he’d experimented with putting clothes he was already wearing into the inventory. It worked a treat. He hadn’t realized until now that he had forgotten to summon them again.
His hands went straight to cover his meat and potatoes.
“Yeah. Packing,” he managed to say with a swallow. “You mind giving me some privacy, Dad?”
“Yeah, righto mate.” His father sighed as he turned around. “Listen, Alfie. I know you’re off to university and all that, but maybe it’s time I had the chat with you. Your mother reckoned she would be the one to do it, but then she found your stash beneath--”
Alfie grimaced. “Nah, I’m good. I’ve done alright for twenty years without the chat, so why start now?”
Now that his father wasn’t looking, Alfie tested summoning his clothes again. With a single thought, they appeared out of thin air (or out of his subspace) and fit around him, exactly the way they’d been when he’d first put them into his inventory.
“I guess you don’t want to talk about it, and I don’t blame you,” his dad continued. “It’s a little awkward, isn’t it? But I wouldn’t be a good dad if I didn’t at least give you a warning. From all that banging and crashing, it sounded like you were really going at it. How about easing off a bit? Nothing worse than friction burn on your todger, and you want him in top shape before you go galivanting off to uni.”
With a shove that may or may not have been enhanced by Stone Fist, Alfie shut his door.
“Good talk,” came the voice of his old man through the closed door.
* * *
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
The next morning, Alfie was awoken early by his old man bustling about his room.
“Dad,” he said in a husky voice, “what are you up to?”
Steve Turner rotated on his axis and grinned down at Alfie. He was a big man with a florid, cheerful face, perpetual stubble, and deep laughter creases at the corners of his dark eyes. Mechanic as he was, he was dressed in his boiler suit, ready for work. In one large, perpetually grease-engrained hand, Alfie saw he was holding a tape measure.
“Morning, son!” he beamed. “Just measuring up your room. Don’t mind me.”
“Why?” Alfie asked, sitting up and rubbing his eyes.
“Well, I pay the mortgage for starters.”
“No, not why shouldn’t I mind you being in here? I mean, why are you measuring up my bedroom?”
“Well, if you get this university gig, presumably you’ll be moving out—going in dorms or flatting or what have you,” his dad said, running a speculative eye over the wall that Alfie’s bed was against. “I was thinking that your room would be perfect for converting into my hobby room.”
Alfie made a noise of understanding. His old man was a model car and plane-building enthusiast. Currently, he had to set up a trestle table in their garage when he wanted to bust out the glue and paints and get his Revell or Airfix on.
“So,” Alfie said, swinging his legs out of bed, “no pressure, then.”
“No pressure, Son. No pressure,” his old man assured him.
A little later, while Alfie was finishing his breakfast and his mom was busying herself with the juicer, Alfie’s dad came into the kitchen.
“I’m off,” he said.
“See you later, sweetheart,” Linda said, coming over to stand on tiptoes so she could kiss her husband on the cheek.
Steve clapped his son on the shoulder. “Good luck today, mate. I’ll be thinking about you.”
“‘No pressure’, he says,” Alfie said, giving his dad a narrow-eyed look and patting his thick-fingered hand. “I guess I’ll have to make sure I fight for this position, huh?”
His dad snorted a laugh and slapped him on the back, which almost resulted in Alfie taking a morning dip in his cornflakes.
Alfie looked up at his old man, at the ruddy face, bushy eyebrows, broad stomach and chest that was slowly trading muscle for fat, and the hair that was growing increasingly sparse on top.
“You just remember what I’ve been telling you, ever since that little Slater brat gave you grief at school, Son,” his dad said. “You shouldn’t try and fight, boy. Not physically. Not for anything. That ain’t the way. But if you find yourself in a position where you’ve got to fight then… Well, then you fight like you’re the third monkey walking up the gangway to the ark and it’s just started to rain, yeah?”
Alfie matched his dad’s gaze for a meaningful moment, then slapped him on the gut, eliciting a cry of, “Ah, you cheeky sod!”
“I’ll remember, Dad,” he said.
“Top man.”
As he went to close the front door, his father paused. “I’m really excited for this, Alfie.”
“Me too, Dad,” Alfie said, touched by this sincerity from the usually jovial and sarcastic parent.
“Yeah. I’ve been looking forward to a hobby room ever since you finished school.”
Alfie threw his toast crust at the closing door. He was rewarded with an exasperated reprimand from his mother, while outside he heard his father laughing his way down the front path.
It was a fair old jaunt from Crystal Palace in the south, north of the River Thames, to Hackney Wick. After an hour and a half—an overground train, followed by a short dash on the Elizabeth Line underground, followed by a second overground train to Hackney Wick, and then a fifteen-minute walk to the River Lee Navigation—Alfie arrived at his destination.
The Nightingale narrow boat was moored up on the west side of the canal. It was, so far as narrowboats went, fairly unremarkable. It was about seventy feet long, painted in a garish, if slightly faded, red, white, and blue color scheme, and had a veritable jungle of an herb garden growing over most of its roof. Alfie noticed that there were several of the fouler variety of garden gnomes dotted through the tangled and fragrant greenery.
Alfie watched it for a while. Every now and again, he would reach up and touch the front of his shirt, where the key that Provost Sharpe had given him hung about his neck on a tarnished chain that he had found at the back of his mother’s jewelry box. It felt strange lying against his chest; he’d never gone in for pendants or anything like that. But he much preferred wearing it rather than keeping it stowed in his subspace. He figured that, if he came upon anyone else who might be heading to the magical school, it might allow them to strike up a conversation.
After about fifteen minutes spent leaning against a graffiti-covered wall, Alfie was just thinking that it was about time he found out whether he had been the butt of the most elaborate and nonsensical practical joke ever when The Nightingale’s engine started. A moment later, a very large and impressively ugly man, wearing a shabby bowler hat and a wool cardigan, squeezed himself out of the main hatch.
For a moment, Alfie tried to think why the man’s appearance was so strange. Then he realized it was because his arms were so long that his hands hung well past his knees. He pulled out a pocket watch, examined it minutely, then took hold of the tiller and swung the narrowboat slowly about so that its prow nosed into the opposite bank. The back end just touched the near bank, meaning that the canal was good and blocked. Then the weirdly proportioned man placed his watch carefully on the top of the roof in front of him, pulled a dog-end cigarette from behind an ear, lit it, wedged it into the corner of his mouth, and then just settled down to stare at the watch with ferocious concentration.
“Yep, that’s pretty absurd,” Alfie said under his breath. “That’s probably my cue.”
Alfie walked toward The Nightingale. As he approached, he looked to the other side of the canal. There was nothing on the other side except for a footpath. Just beyond that, blocking out everything else, was a twelve-foot temporary wall, the likes of which construction companies throughout the capital put up to dissuade hoodlums from using their multi-million-pound sites as impromptu party venues. There was, so far as Alfie could make out, nothing beyond that wall. No heavy-duty earth-moving equipment, no scaffolding, and no bones of a new build going up.
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” he muttered to himself and stepped up to the rear of the thin vessel and cleared his throat.
The great hulking man, assiduously watching his pocket watch, turned to cast a baleful look at Alfie. His eyes were bloodshot to the point of being red, droopy, and had bags under the bags that were under them. Clearly, he’d picked them out from the basset hound section of the catalog.
“What you want?” he grunted through a haze of acrid cigarette smoke.
Alfie opened his mouth, wondering what to say.
‘I’m here for the magical market’ rang a little too weird in his head when he tried the words on for size.
“Ignotus Market?” he managed, internally cursing himself for putting an inflection on the end so that it sounded like a question.
The big man puffed on his tiny cigarette. Then he glanced at his pocket watch.
“You better ‘urry, mister,” he rumbled. “You got nine more minutes before I close the bridge up for another hour.”
Alfie looked across the bank. The canal was narrow enough that the boat was at a heavy diagonal touching the far side. He could almost have spat across the water.
“Bridge?” he asked.
“That’s right,” the man said slowly, beady little eyes peering out from the edge of the tatty bowler hat. He nodded toward the hatchway next to him. “Off you trot. I ’ear it’s busy today. You know what it’s like sometimes.”
“Ye-eah,” Alfie said.
He took a breath and stepped onto the boat. At once, he felt… something. A shift. A slight unbalancing. Almost as if someone had hit his inner ear like a gong, unsteadied him, and sent a squirrelly feeling racing through him with the speed of lightning.
“Do you mind if I ask you a question?” Alfie said, eyeing the tiny doorway and then looking at the man, whose knobby face resembled a topographical map of the Himalayas.
“Not so long as you don’t mind me answerin’ it in any way I see fit,” the man replied slowly.
“Is there really a market down there?”
The man blinked at him. Then the chunky brows slid together like a couple of tectonic plates colliding.
“Are you takin’ the mick, mister?” the huge man rumbled.
Alfie shook his head and smiled in what he hoped was a winning manner.
“Just pulling your leg, mate,” he said. “See you shortly.”
He stepped down into the dark recesses of the narrowboat.
Once Alfie’s eyes grew accustomed to the dimness within, he was surprised at what he saw.
Nothing out of the ordinary. That was to say, the interior of the narrowboat was just as you would expect the inside of such a vessel to look. Standing at the stern end of the boat, Alfie found himself in a utility area with storage space, a dusty washer and dryer unit, and other miscellaneous equipment. He moved forward, past a compact toilet, sink, and shower set-up, through the sleeping quarters that could have as easily accommodated the figure sitting at the tiller as it could a hippopotamus, and into the main living area.
Alfie looked around at the combined living room and dining room area. This space was typically outfitted with seating, a table, and storage cabinets or shelves. Some narrowboats also had a small desk or workspace in this area, but The Nightingale hadn’t bothered with that. Everything was immaculate if somewhat old in style and covered with a thin layer of dust.
Alfie was just thinking to himself that this narrowboat looked to be, as those in organized crime might refer to it as, a front, when the sounds of hurrying feet moving toward him from the other end of the boat made him look up.
A trio of people hustled past him.
“Sorry, pal, ’scuse us,” the lead woman said in a northern accent. She flashed a smile at Alfie as he pressed himself into the side of the cabin.
“Cheers, mate. Running a bit low on time,” said the man behind. “You know how it goes.”
“The missus got caught up in an amulet sale at Taboos and Voodoos,” the last man said in a hushed voice as he hurried by.
“Yeah, right. Uh, no problem,” Alfie said. “Hey…”
But the trio had clattered hurriedly down the narrowboat and disappeared into the shadows.
Alfie turned around and carried on, moving through the similarly untouched, but perfectly laid out, galley, which was the narrowboat’s kitchen. This area was equipped with a sink, a small stove and oven, and some basic storage and counter space, but it looked as uninhabited as the rest of the vessel.
Then, Alfie was walking through the musty bow, climbing up a short flight of dodgy steps, and stepping out into…
“Woah,” he said in a voice gone suddenly hoarse.
Alfie had emerged out into a cobbled street lined on either side by run-of-the-mill market stalls. Beyond them, he could see the more makeshift stalls were gradually replaced by more permanent-looking structures of wood and canvas.
Alfie turned around. Behind him, the makeshift wall erected by whatever developer that had secured this prime bit of real estate stood. Just over the top of that, he could see the tops of the ubiquitous cranes that had dotted London’s skyline ever since cranes had been invented. He looked down. It appeared that he had clambered, not out of a boat, but out of a hatchway that opened up out of the surface of the street. It looked a little like the hatch that you might expect to see on a fallout shelter or something.
“Ah, there’s the face of someone enjoying their first glimpse of Ignotus Markets!” someone jeered from the interior of a smoky stall nearby.
As Alfie turned to peer more closely into the vapor-shrouded canvas structure, another, far more sultry voice spoke in his ear. “You need a guide, darlin’?”
Alfie stepped backward. A woman with perfect skin the color of pitch and wavy hair as pink as candy floss was standing just behind him. She was leaning coquettishly against a Dickensian lamppost, which was topped with a glowing, revolving sign that read ‘The Nightingale’.
“Uh, no. No thanks,” Alfie said, trying his best to smile and appear in command of himself, regardless of the fact that he felt like a fish that had unexpectedly found itself at the top of the Pyramid of Giza.
“You sure?” she crooned. Something swished through the air behind her.
That’s a tail, Alfie’s brain told him, registering this fact as he might ordinarily register a nice coat someone in the street was wearing or a cool car passing him in traffic. That’s a forked tail. That’s a f—
“You don’t want to waste time faffing around in here, do you?” the woman with the pitch-black skin said, cocking her head to one side and plucking casually at the sleeve of her leather jacket. “I could help you miss the naff places… Then, afterward we could—”
“Thanks. Thanks very much, but I’ve really got to be heading in, uh, this direction,” Alfie said hurriedly. “Thanks ever so much. I’ll… I’ll be seeing you!”
“If you’re lucky,” the personification of female seduction purred.
“Thanks again!”
He hurried up the cobbled street, stepping around a man pushing a hand barrow with a wooden sign reading, ‘Dribbler’s Delicatessen’ floating—actually floating— over the top of it. The man was yelling, “Crocotta cheesecake slices, two for a fiver! Dragon trifle! Steamed oysters on a stick! Jellied eels! Wash it all down with a nice builder’s tea or date juice! How about it, son?”
Alfie didn’t bother answering. He didn’t trust himself to make sense. He was still trying to get his head around what he was seeing. It was like peeling back a layer of London and finding the extramundane lying just under the surface. When he looked back at the gorgeous sable-skinned creature with the pink hair, he saw that she was gone. All that was left was a faint pink smoke drifting in the air.
Alfie hurried on.
With his head in such a whirl, it was no surprise that he didn’t see a shadow detach itself from the deeper shadows that lay under the drooping eaves of a shabby stall and start to follow him.