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    Streetlight Magic: The Sleepless Man
    Streetlight Magic: The Sleepless Man
    Streetlight Magic: The Sleepless Man
    Ebook113 pages1 hour

    Streetlight Magic: The Sleepless Man

    By Jon Kaneko-James

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    About this ebook

    The Sleepless Man is the first story in the Streetlight Magic series: Ed Quill, a government contractor in cases of the supernatural, gets called to a man who hasn’t been sleeping. In fact if he sleeps, he’ll die. The only clue about why is a jacket made from still living seal-skin. Suddenly, Ed and his friend Max find themselves hip deep in a twenty year old tale of rape and imprisonment.

    Streetlight Magic is an urban fantasy series that gets out of London and explores the rest of the country. Just as urban fantasy America tends to be either viewed as Chicago or Kansas (or maybe New Orleans,) urban fantasy Britain is basically... London. That’s it. Not even London and Birmingham. If you read UK based urban fantasy, all the weird shit happens somewhere within the M25.

    We start in the M25, but we commute. This is a word where Merrows court North Sea fisherman, Kobolds lurk in the ruins of WW2 internment camps and Yeth Hounds chase down travellers on the West-Country moors. Where humanity are just a tribe of technologically advanced monkeys huddling around our new, electrical campfire. Step out into the dark and all the old horrors are waiting.

    Yet, the government have no special Supernatural Defence Force. There is no ‘Department X’ to protect us from evil. Having a force would involve admitting that the problem existed, and we cannot admit the problem exists. Such things would lead to war; and we would not win because if we used our weapons against the monsters in the shadows, they would use theirs. For all our deadly warheads and artificial fire, we would come to nothing.

    There are more of them than us, and they are more powerful. We rule the light because they are happier in the darkness.

    However, there are times when even the governments of men must protect someone from the monsters, when there is a price too high for the peace of turning a blind eye. On those occasions the government turns to private contractors hired through an obscure club in Jermyn Street. When money changes hands it is invoiced only as ‘Streetlight Magic.’

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJon Kaneko-James
    Release dateJun 2, 2012
    ISBN9781476299464
    Streetlight Magic: The Sleepless Man
    Author

    Jon Kaneko-James

    Jon Kaneko-James started his writing career in Esoteric non-fiction with a deep interest in ‘Christian’ Kabbalah and the Western Initiatory Esoteric System. He’s written articles about everything from astrology in Tarot, to piety in Elizabethan occultism and books bound in human skin, to name but a few. His deep love of the urban fantasy genre probably comes from reading books about magic while riding on the Docklands Light Railway: once you’ve glided through the futuristic neons of Canary Wharf you can’t help start but wondering if all those financiers would sell their souls if they thought it would solve a financial crisis. He was born and grew up in Wales, moving to London in his twenties, where he immediately realised that a lot of the people who run the country and produce it’s mainstream media think that the term ‘British Isles’ refers to everything within the M25, plus the Isle of Dogs. This revelation became even more pronounced when he realised that the only urban fantasy he could find that went outside London for any length of time was Russian (Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden makes occasional trips to Edinburgh, but only on flying visits,) and decided that there was room for a series of stories that took the reader to all the strange and sacred places of Britain, all the holy sites and blessed isles. Room for a bit of Streetlight Magic. The Sleepless Man is his first self-published fiction work.

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      Book preview

      Streetlight Magic - Jon Kaneko-James

      Streetlight Magic: The Sleepless Man

      By Jon Kaneko-James

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright Jon Kaneko-James 2012

      Edited by Rhea Phillips

      Cover by Neokeroko Design

      Layout by Gregory Seales

      For all the people who worked hard to get this project off the ground.

      My Men Stand Ready In The Night…

      It might make you feel better to know that you are protected, that although there is no shortage of supernatural ‘things that go bump in the night,’ there is also no shortage of people who make it their business to stop them. As George Orwell said, ‘we sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.’

      My name is Conroy Forbes, and I employ a great number of said ‘rough men.’ Yet, we are not the government. The government does not believe in angels and daemons, black dogs and the hungry ghosts of lepers. The government could never justify a defence force against the armies of darkness because to do so they would have to prove they exist, and that would cause open warfare.

      On the occasions where we are needed the government charges our services to the Westminster Palace entertainment budget. So when our name appears in records at all, it is as a charge to a gentlemen’s club on Jermyn Street, the Mirandola Club, for a service with the self-explanatory title of Streetlight Magick.

      We handle cases from threats of international war to supernatural domestic abuse. Quill, one of our esteemed detectives, takes on the case of the Sleepless Man. I found Quill living under a bridge in Camden, learning magick. Think of that what you will.

      I

      It was a bright, humid afternoon when the London Bridge Hospital put in a request for two people: the Metropolitan Police Liaison for Unusual Crimes, and the Magus Edward Quill of the Mirandola Club. The name ‘Edward Quill’ generally put people in mind of a certain type of person: middle class, educated, good looking and suave.

      Ed was well educated. From a lot of perspectives he was also good looking, but on other counts, he usually disappointed people. His long, white-blond hair and whitish-blue eyes made him look like the violent henchman of a Bond villain. This was a man who should have been cracking his knuckles and feeding people to the crocodiles, not acting as a Magical Consultant to the Metropolitan Police.

      DC Muthy had been looking forward to meeting a dishevelled but gorgeous consultant sorcerer. He would have preferred a woman, so somewhere in the distant future there might have been a will-they-won’t-they moment that might have ended in sex. What he actually got was much different.

      What he got was the drummer from a rock band. Drummers are not like guitarists or lead singers. Drummers aren't typically glamorous; they're 'sturdy,' or 'solid.' Quill wore a trench coat without sleeves, a band t-shirt and scuffed Doc Martins. He had the kind of body you get from lifting very heavy weights at the gym and then celebrating with a gallon of real ale and three burgers.

      Hello there, mate, Quill paused to check his mobile. You’re DC Muthy? I read the stuff you sent on my way over… is Max around?

      Muthy didn’t quite know how to react. Quill was Welsh, with the carefully modulated accent of a provincial who’d been living in London for a long time and had gotten used to no-one understanding him if he didn’t Pronounce Every Word Very Carefully And Enunciate As Well As He Could. It made him sound like a Welsh language newsreader. Murthy resisted the urge to peer behind him in case the real Occult Consultant had brought a bodyguard.

      I’ll need to call up and see if it’s alright for you to be on the crime scene, if that’s what it is. The victim is quite fragile. Muthy said, resisting the urge to scream piss off and get me the proper wizard.

      It’s alright mate, Quill offered him a slim leather document holder. I've got my warrant from the Home Office.

      Muthy stared. Quill waited for a response but none seemed forthcoming so he pushed on. I don't mean to be patronising but, Quill continued, edging towards the lift. You're a bit new, aren’t you?

      ****

      After getting into the lift, leaving the mute and silently fuming DC Muthy in the foyer, Quill put his glasses back on. They were tiny chrome circles that he felt made him look like a serial killer. He’d ended up with them after a particularly intimate eye test with a tiny optician in Peckham. She had to climb onto him to use some of her equipment, which had made something switch off in his brain. After that it had just been a haze of perfume and blind compliance.

      Well, that’s a well-made first impression, Quill muttered.

      He studied himself in the lift mirror, running his fingers through his hair, grimacing every time he caught a strand under his jagged nails, before retying it neatly. The thirteenth floor of the London Bridge Hospital was for members of the Mirandola Club ‘in good standing,’ meaning almost anyone who’d paid their dues and not buggered the chambermaids. It also occasionally doubled as a magical A&E, although not often. Contrary to what people read in fiction the magical world was as dull as the mundane one and there weren’t too many people running around with ancient curses, or ghostly hounds hot on their trail anymore.

      The doors opened out onto a room that contained beige walls, plush furniture and DI Max Erstwhile. Max was a bassist, but he could have gone as far as lead guitar if he'd bothered to learn the other two strings. He was short and slim, with wild hair tamed back into a loose ponytail. Quill knew that at the slightest provocation it would rear up and break into a mullet.

      You've bleached your bloody hair again? Quill said. Every time we go on stage they think we're fucking white supremacists.

      Max smiled. Today he was wearing a faintly 80s looking suit and drowning in a grey woollen overcoat.

      It's not a proper band anyway, Max said. "You just wanted to plaster Camden with posters saying, 'Fuck Richard Dawkins.'

      It's a good name for a band, Quill barked Anyway, what’s the situation?

      Max put on his business face, Forty-six year old white male, goes by the name of Thomas Diogenese Jennings. He was admitted just over two hours ago after the Maudsley took delivery of a man claiming he was cursed. Said if he fell asleep he'd die, which nearly happened when they put him in a side room. He's not in a good way at the moment, all his organs started shutting down when he dropped off. They couldn't send him here fast enough after that. He said.

      Is this Mirandola business, or Civic Safety Fund? Quill asked.

      Mirandola, Max said. Paid up member, had one of those nice, metal cards with the sharp edges.

      Nice one, Quill said. Do you mind if I see him?

      Max nodded, You might not get much sense out of him, he said. From the receipts in his coat pocket it looks like he's been awake for about four days.

      ****

      Tom Jennings looked about as good as you expect after surviving organ failure and sustained period of insomnia. He was awake in name only: his eyes open and glazed, fitfully flickering around, following movement in some invisible spectrum. They'd seated him on a high stool, tethered to a jellyfish-like arrangement of bags and tubes that fed him the potions and chemicals keeping him awake and alive.

      There was only room in the side ward for three people, or one person and Quill. A young Asian doctor looked slightly startled from being interrupted from his ministrations to being trapped in a small room with Erstwhile and Quill, who had to hunch to duck under the arm of a monitor and suck himself in to squeeze between the wall and the bed.

      So this is him, Quill said. He looked over at the young doctor, Am I okay to try and talk to him?

      Anything that makes him respond, the Doctor said. It might keep him awake a bit longer.

      Quill had an easy manner with children and the mad. It involved speaking loudly and slowly with lots of bonhomie.

      Hello there, mate, he enunciated cheerfully. What happened to you then?

      Jennings' glazed, flickering eyes turned onto Quill. His brow knitted with the effort of someone doing quantum calculus on a rollercoaster.

      I'm from the Mirandola club, Quill said. You said you were cursed.

      That got a faint reaction. Jennings' troubled look turned into abject

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