Bone Gods

me this is good news, because otherwise I’m going to start kicking small, fluffy things,” Pete said.
    “I got a place,” Lawrence said. “You close?”
    “I can be,” Pete said. “I’m near the tube.”
    “Okay,” Lawrence said. “Meet me at Kensington High Street, but make it quick. These types, they don’t linger for long. They do the damage and move on.”
    “I’ll be there,” Pete insisted, shoving her way down the steps of the tube station. Once, she thought she’d been followed by another man in a black coat, but he got off in the city and Pete rode the rest of the way to Kensington alone.
    She met Lawrence on the high street, a place Pete had always considered London as the outside world thought of it. Narrow streets, uneven pavement, quaint shops full of posh artifacts, begging for Hugh Grant or Colin Firth to pop out from amongst the antique books and obscure oil paintings and sweep you off your feet, into a charming adventure full of eccentric side characters with amusing accents. As far from the real city as one could get and still be in it. Lawrence waited in front of one of the few closed-down shops in view, jiggling his left foot and habitually checking his watch. Pete figured from the stares of the well-heeled passersby that she looked out of place as he felt. Neither of them belonged to storybook London, and unless they were rock stars looking to snap up a row house, nobody in Kensington wore army boots, black canvas pants, and a Penetration shirt with the neck cut out. Pete returned the stares of a pair of helmet-haired biddies with a snarl before she reached Lawrence.
    “This is not where I’d expect some kind of shadowy memory-eater to hang his hat. Its hat. Whatever.”
    Lawrence shrugged, a bit jerkily. He was nervous as a scalded cat, and Pete wished he’d listened to her and just stayed home. “This is where they say to go, this is where we go. Or we could just forget the whole thing. Like I been sayin’ we should.”
    “We’ve come this far,” Pete said. “What’s a little divination between friends?”
    Lawrence mumbled something that could have been either a prayer or an impressive string of curses, and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “In there, then.”
    The closed shop’s window held a globe painted with drawings of constellations, a dead and mummified fern, and an impressive amount of dust. The fading gold script across the glass read simply CURIOSITIES.
    “Remember what we discussed, and keep your trap shut,” Pete said. “You’re jumpy enough without chatting up a storm.”
    “Fine by me. We go in there, I blind, deaf, and mute. Don’t want none of what he’s selling.” Lawrence hunched inside his army coat, managing to look small even though he had a good half a foot on Pete.
    A bell chimed, musical and out of place when they entered. The interior of the shop was as musty and cluttered as the window was bare. It wasn’t a comfortable sort of clutter, to support the cultivated air of the mysterious that so many antique shops in Kensington worked to maintain, but the books cramming the cases and cascading across the dust-covered counter were the genuine article. “Fuck me,” Pete murmured. “Are they all grimoires, then?”
    “Most,” Lawrence said. “Bloke who ran this place dropped off a few years ago. Inland revenue. But he were a twat before, and I ain’t surprised he dealt with the Antiquarians.”
    Pete picked up the plain cloth volume on a display stand and opened the front cover. Plain black print declared, with frightening practicality, Malleus Maelificarum. Even though the book itself was utter nonsense and Cotton Mather was a sexually repressed twat of the first order, the thin paper and running ink, and the many notations in the margins on effectiveness and practical results, made Pete drop the thing again and swipe her hands on her trouser legs. She banged on the counter bell instead. “Oi! Anyone home?”
    Lawrence stayed as close to the door as he could without being outside on the pavement, hands shoved in his pocket, boot tapping. Pete tossed a paperback pulp at him, cover depicting a heaving-bosomed blonde tied to a cross, menaced by faceless figures in crimson robes. The Demon’s Bride. “Will you cut that out? You look like we’re in here trying to cop.”
    “Aren’t we?” Lawrence muttered. “In one fashion or another?”
    “Oh, for the sake of all the saints.” Pete chimed the desk bell again. “ Hello.