Oscar and the Magi: Through the Streets of London
The fog was a thick, enveloping pea-souper the like of which London hadn’t seen for over fifty years. They used to be a feature of the city, impenetrable fogs that would fill up the streets, creeping through cracks and under doors, blanketing the everything in a suffocating smog. But running through this fog wasn’t just like running back through time; it was like running between two different worlds.
You couldn’t see more than a few feet so that people and objects would suddenly loom out of nowhere, quite unexpected, and then vanish again, almost before you’d had time to realise what they were. And in this fog you never knew what you were going to see next. Here were a couple of Japanese tourists, torn between bewilderment and wonder, lighting up the fog with their flash as they tried to take pictures of it. And then they were gone and here instead was a Wyvern, encircled by a group of rubbish bins that jumped and flipped and snapped their stinking mouths at it, driving it backwards against a shop window.
Everywhere, appearing and disappearing in the mists, sudden glimpses of everyday London - a bus, two taxi drivers swearing at each other, a group of pedestrians stranded on a traffic island like castaways, unable to make out the green man through the fog - and then of this extraordinary new London that Oscar had suddenly found himself swallowed up in. Here were a couple of Wish Hounds, snapping at the heels of a galloping park bench, here was a figure from an advertising hoarding, a beautiful woman no thicker than a sheet of cardboard, flapping along after a fleeing Knight Watchman, a post-box with shiny white teeth showing in its letter slot, a Wyvern darting overhead, a leather foot stool jumping past.
And, suddenly, the fog thinned and, in a matter of a few steps, disappeared, and they were back in the normal world again, standing on the rain slicked pavement under the church they had passed by earlier.
“Come on!” Thursby was insistent and enthusiastic, “There’s no time to stand around gawping!” And then he was off down the street again, with the others following along as fast as they could.
As strange as their escape through the fog had been, somehow this run was even stranger. Here there was only normality, ordinary shoppers scurrying through the rain to try and snatch up the last few Christmas bargains, and that made their little procession - the rebel wizards, the old woman who wasn’t a wizard anymore, the mysterious black cat and the boy who was there completely by mistake - all the stranger and inexplicable.
There was a shop with its windows full of film stars and famous monsters, superheroes and action figures - what would the customers think if they knew that the real thing was battling it out with genuine magic only just down the street? Here were, everywhere, people in fashionable outfits, shops with bizarre fittings and confusing windows, but nothing half so strange as what was lumbering through the fog behind them.
They had passed through a little square with a column in the centre of it that Maggs had, breathlessly, told Oscar was ‘Seven Dials’ and were now racing up one of the streets that radiated off it, passing through an area thick with shoppers. Oscar noticed that wherever they went traffic lights seemed to change in their favour and cars just stopped to let them past.
“How come no one notices?” He shouted across at Maggs as they dodged between groups of heavily laden shoppers.
“Notices what?” She gasped back.
Ridley suddenly appeared at Oscar’s shoulder, jogging along easily, barely showing the effort of running.
“People don’t see what they don’t want to see,” she said, “Ask me, they don’t even need to hide the battle in the fog… most of these people would simply refuse to believe what was going on in front of them and just ignore it.”
It suddenly struck Oscar how all of this must have been going on already, all his life, the Magi, the Knights Watchmen, the Wild Ride, the Knights Errant, all of this must have been happening, just out of sight and round the corner, and he never noticed, no one had ever noticed - except, of course, his godfather, Uncle Rufus, who had sent him the textbook… he hadn’t thought about it properly before, but that could only mean one thing: his uncle must be a Magi! Surely he must be at the Temple, surely Oscar would find him soon, and then how astonished he was going to be, how proud! Oscar couldn’t wait.
Which was when he ran into Cuddy’s back. The group had stopped dead at a junction. Ahead, on the other side of a road junction was a huge building. An enormous door, too large for normal people was dwarfed by an even bigger portico on two great columns with flaring lamps on each. Above that the building massed up into great steps leading up to a square tower topped by a single arched window. Above that was a large red star that glittered dimly in the streetlights. At the base of the tower was a single square window. It was dark but Oscar couldn’t help feeling that there was something large and important behind it, something pressed up against the glass, anxious to burst out in a blaze of light.
“The Temple,” whispered Maggs.
The main doors were open, spilling out a warm light onto the wet streets, and they all pushed their way through after Thursby into a brightly lit hallway. The hall was six sided, lit by flaming torches on each of the six columns that held up the distant ceiling. Each column was of a differently coloured marble and all the walls were covered in rich decorations of red and green and gold. Far above them, on a painted dome, a group of men in long white wigs and Roman togas were gathered around a building that looked very much like the Temple. Oscar couldn’t be sure whether it was the flickering torches or something else, but the painting seemed almost to be moving.
Two Knights Watchmen stood, irresolutely, by a pair of large double doors opposite the main entrance, apparently more interested in what was going on in the room beyond than in anyone entering the hallway. Ridley saluted them and Thursby and his friends walked in.