Ordinary Miracles

Martyn Carey

Description

A train crashes at Paddington station. What follows is a series of dangerousand deadly magical incidents that no one could have predictedWhen wizard Mike Frost undergoes an unexpected elevation in his magical skills, he is sent to a training course to cultivatehis newfound powers. But it soon becomes apparent that a deadly force is following his every move, using his power tolaunch devastating attacks across the UK.Danger mounts, and it seems as though nothing can protect Mike and his friends. Time is running out. Can anyone find andstop those responsible before it's too late?

Sujets

• Miracle
• Fantasy
• Magic realism
• Fantasy (canción de Mariah Carey)

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 13 juillet 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781838596200
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2020 Martyn Carey

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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ISBN 9781838596200

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For Anna, for letting me do this
and
Jane, for not letting me stop
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
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20
1
With no more than a whisper of sound the steam train hurtled into Paddington Station and crashed through the buffers. The noise was huge, shocking, a blow to the ears, even in that vast, high space. It ploughed through the concourse, blasting debris around like a bomb exploding. There had been people sitting on the banks of chairs, idly looking at the departure screens, but I lost sight of them when the mass of steam and steel gouged its way through the station. It crashed into the back wall, almost reached the lobby of the Hilton Hotel on Praed Street. The screaming started before the echoes had died.
I’d been trudging across the station, muffled against the bitter midnight wind and feeling unsettled, probably from a hasty kebab, when it happened. I dropped my bag and ran towards the crash, grabbing shocked and confused people and urging them away. One man was standing rigid, staring at a fragment of something embedded in his arm and screaming in an oddly high-pitched voice. Part of a bone from someone else’s leg , I thought, feeling a lurch of nausea. The woman next to him appeared to be uninjured, but was immobile with shock, wide-eyed and trembling.
I grabbed a bruised and limping teenager and used her to guide them both away from the area. Two men in high-vis jackets, stumbling on the debris that littered the ground, had made a cross-hand seat for a man with a badly broken leg. A mute and limp child, its face a mask of blood, was being rushed away by a distraught looking man, a palely-ineffectual woman trailing behind them weeping.
It was a blur of images, soaked in adrenaline and fear; glimpses and moments as victims fled the scene. The trail of blood behind some of them should have made me feel sick, but I felt nothing.
Once they were clear I started searching for the injured amongst the crushed and scattered benches. My mind was numb, no emotions edging in, despite the evident danger, and yet there was a tremor in my hands that I couldn’t stop. ‘Cope at the time, shake afterwards’ – what psychologists call ‘deliberate calm’ – has always been my way in an emergency.
I could see others rushing to the rescue elsewhere in the cavernous station, but that didn’t concern me. These were my people to save, to heal, although I am not a Healer. The hiss of the train’s boiler was getting worryingly loud when I discovered a man in a Crossrail jacket, clutching the back of his head and crawling in the wrong direction. I turned him towards rescue and tried to get him to walk, but the way he tracked my voice told me that he was blind. A member of the station staff darted forward to help him.
As they stumbled away I turned back to the traces of life that I could detect under the rubble, twisted steel and crushed displays. A few seconds later, and a few feet closer to the trembling metalwork, I found a child of perhaps four beneath some seats that had been thrown over by the impact. He stared up at me with wide, blank eyes and gripped his mother’s hand. She was unconscious, her hair bloody, her clothes torn. I pushed the benches away without touching them.
“Don’t worry, everything will be fine,” I said. I wasn’t certain who I was trying to reassure. “Let’s wake mummy up, shall we?” My voice felt weak, but the child nodded, his face serious but oddly not frightened. Shock, I suspect. Now I did feel sick.
I bent over the mother, fighting a horrified vision of trying to drag this child away from a corpse, but it wasn’t necessary. I placed my hands gently on the mother’s head and did my best to help her. She slowly woke, blinked at me, felt her son’s hand in her own and squeezed it gently. I helped her to sit up.
“Come on, we need to get you away from here,” I said, easing her to her feet. A younger man, his obviously broken arm supported inside his jacket, appeared from nowhere and guided them to where the blue flashing lights chasing around the walls showed that ambulances and the police were arriving. I should have been relieved that they were there, that I could escape and leave this to the professionals, but I wasn’t. I knew that there were three more people under my bit of the smashed train and I knew that I couldn’t leave them.
By now I was right up under the lee of the first carriage, with the engine and tender almost out of sight across the platform. It was leaning heavily towards me, supported by only the sagging departures board. From the way it was trembling it was obvious the inevitable collapse was only briefly delayed. The metal groaned as I edged closer. I suppose I should have been too frightened to go near it in case it finished falling over and landed on me.
I wasn’t scared because I wasn’t anything. There were people that needed help, so I had to help them. The tremor in my fingers was worse; I tried to pretend it was the cold.
A hand pushed aside some fractured and jagged metal, and I saw a face. A man, a man I’d never seen before, trying to pull himself out from under the mass of razor-sharp steel and broken stone. He reached out, a gesture of supplication, a wordless cry for help. I dashed forward, and his face changed from despair to hope to relief. I had just touched his hand, felt the cold sweat and recognised the copper smell of fresh blood, when the departure board finally gave up the unequal struggle and collapsed.
The noise, the shock, the blast of air was violent, terrifying. Everyone in the station turned to look. Except me. The falling steel had missed me by bare inches, but had landed squarely on the man I was trying to help. I felt his hand jerk, tighten and then fall slack as the life went out of his eyes. Something powerful rushed through me then, driving me to my knees, leaving me dizzy and disorientated for a moment. I gashed my shin on some broken glass as I fell, but I didn’t feel it. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, then finally let go of his hand.
I was numb again. There should have been fear, rage, fury, sadness, sickness… there should have been something , but there was just nothing. The twisting collapse, the fall of the huge departures board, had exposed the other two people I had known were there. One was far beyond help, and I looked stony-eyed at the ruin of the man and didn’t even try. The other was a dark-haired slip of a girl, barely into her teens, just conscious, with a long bloody gash down one thigh, bone and muscle exposed. I couldn’t see or feel any other injuries, but I knew that she was in danger of bleeding to death.
I ran over to her, pushing back the teetering metal that was almost brushing her face. I used so much force that one of the departure board stanchions snapped as it fell away and shattered, and the fragments fell around me like lethal iron hail. I wrapped my hands around the gash and tried to stop the bleeding.
I could feel the blood slick and throbbing as her pulse raced her towards her own death, but I didn’t stop. I tried not to think about what I was doing, the closeness of the dead man and the groan of the metal as it started to sink towards me again. The bleeding had slowed when the paramedics arrived.
“We’ll take over now.” With kindly force they moved me out of the way, flushed the wound, strapped it up and had the girl on a stretcher within half a minute. I just stood and watched. “You’d best get back,” said one of the paramedics. “That don’t look too safe to me.” I took his advice, moving back away from the train. I didn’t know who the girl was, or if she would survive.
Then the most astonishing, most terrifying thing of all happened. The train re-formed into its undamaged state, in exactly the reverse order of its disintegration, and then disappeared.
The engine vanishing made everyone in the huge space stop and stare. They were surprised; so was I, but it frightened me more than anything else that had happened. Because that meant this wasn’t terrorism, a tragic accident or a spectacular suicide. This could only be magic, and because I am a mage, a wizard if you like, that meant that when they went looking for someone to blame, they might well come looking for me.
2
I kept my head down and went on doing what I could to save lives, limbs and sanity until there was no more that I could do. I stumbled into a corner with the other people who’d been helping and was given coffee – which was a