In which a pair of shoes gets to complete its journey, a plot is discovered and the death of cities gets dust on his suit.
Her name was Oda. I didn’t know her last name, and it was more than possible that she didn’t either. She believed in magic, the same way the Pope believed in Satan. Vera had always called her psycho-bitch. It wasn’t far wrong. I knew she killed magicians. I hadn’t thought she’d do it to me.
And the Lord said — let there be light.
And lo it came to pass that the nine-volt battery was invented, shoved into a torch, stuffed into the right hand of a woman and shone in our eyes.
We kicked out instinctively. Our foot hit the torch, sent it flying back, struck the hand that held it, knocked it to one side. It occurred to us that we had to be lying down, and lo, that also came to pass. We rolled to one side, tried to get up, found our eyes were full of water and our stomach full of grit, crawled onto our hands and knees and verily the Lord God smote us with the butt of a 9 mm pistol swung by a woman known mostly, of course, as psycho-bitch.
There was a lot less light.
There was a bit of time. There was some blood. Mine, I guessed. It seemed the norm.
I was aware of hands pulling at mine. I turned my head and saw somewhere on the other side of the equator my right hand, stretched out on a dirt floor popping with weeds. Someone was pulling off my glove, unwrapping the bandage. A lot of light was being shone on my hand. I twitched my fingers and a boot — big, black, with straps instead of laces, in case you hadn’t got the idea — pressed down on my wrist hard enough for us to cry out, turn away, losing sight of the scrabbling at my palm.
We felt the bandages peel away. We heard a voice, male, mutter, “Fuck shit.”
The pressure on my arm relaxed.
Faces crowded in to look closer at my hand. I recognised some of them. Earle, Kemsley, Anissina and, behind them, others, more men and women dressed in preacher’s black, peering in with a collection of torches and rifles, examining me and my damned hand. Oda. A face almost as dark as her close-cropped hair. She had the damn gun pointed at my face, not in an offensive way, but casually, as if it had just happened to flop there from the end of her trigger-pulling fingers. She looked at the brand on my hand and there was nothing there but contempt.
“You’re in trouble, sorcerer,” she said.
I tried to speak. My voice was trapped somewhere behind a great warty toad that had taken up residence at the entry to my lungs, inspecting each molecule of air one at a time on their way up and down.
Earle’s face appeared upside down over mine. I was lying on my back in dirt and weeds. I could taste. . magic of a sort, but different. Distant, shut away. He said, “How did you get this?”
He meant our hand.
I licked my lips and croaked, “Nair.”
“Nair what?”
“He did it. He gave it to me.”
“No.”
“He did.”
“He would never have let you be Midnight Mayor. How did you get this?”
“The phone rang. I answered.”
“Tell me the truth!”
“I am.”
“He is.” Oda’s voice, calm and level.
Earle’s face flashed with anger. “You have nothing to do with this,” he spat. “You and your people are not involved.”
“I was invited here for a reason,” replied Oda calmly. “The Order was invited here for a reason. I know the sorcerer. He’s telling the truth.”
“What makes you sure?”
“I know him.”
“Is that it?”
“Yes. That’s it.”
“That’s nothing,” snapped Earle. “The Midnight Mayor is an Alderman, that’s how it’s done. It passes from one Alderman to another, has done for hundreds of years, never moves outside the circle. No one outside would understand what’s necessary, what is needful to be done. Nair would not have chosen this creature!”
A toe prodded the side of my head. It wasn’t meant to be a hard kick, not particularly, but it was my brain and it was a tough leather shoe and I wasn’t at my best. I could hear the thump of it roll like the sea in my ears, feel the soft tissue of my brain bounce nervously against the sides of my skull.
Kemsley said, “What happens if we kill him?”
I said, “End of the line.” We laughed, let it roll up the desert of our throat. “End of the line!” we cackled, “End of the line!”
“Get him up.”
Earle had authority. A pair of arms helped get me up. I slouched in them for all I was worth, making their lives hard, from spite mostly. Grass and trees, dead leaves and black twigs. We were in a park somewhere, a big park, couldn’t even hear the traffic. Trimmed hedges and neat rectangles of mud that might one day hold flowers. Smart, to take an urban sorcerer to a park. Things were harder here.
Earle’s face looked scalded, anger turning him livid pink. He prowled up and down in front of me; I didn’t bother to watch, but counted the beats of my heart, matching them to each turn he made.
“Sinclair thinks he’s telling the truth,” said Oda at last. “He’s good at being right.”
“What do you care?” snapped Kemsley.
“I am thinking of the sorcerer’s use,” she replied. “I have no love for his kind, and find this situation as ugly as you do. But let’s not deny how useful he can be.”
We raised our head, grinned at her, tasted blood on our lips. “She’s thinking about it,” we said. “She’s scared too — scared mortal, little scared human, seen a man turned to meat, seen a human reduced to raw flesh, so scared-”
Someone without a sense of humour kicked us behind our knees. We cried out and sank forwards. Our hand was aching and burning, the red crosses carved into our skin smarting in the cold air.
“These things,” hissed Kemsley, “can’t be allowed to desecrate the Mayor!”
“Which things?” we demanded. “Do you mean me? I am us and we are me, we are me and I am us.” Then we laughed, and turned our face back to Oda. “It’s all right to be scared,” we hissed. “The fox was scared, so why shouldn’t you be?”
“What’s he saying?” snapped Earle, to Oda, not to me.
She shook her head. “Not him,” she replied. “Them.”
“No,” I snapped. “Me. I think you’re scared too. You’re all scared. Because here’s what it boils down to — you kill me, someone else will become Midnight Mayor. Maybe one of you. And then what will you do? Go and find the thing that killed Nair? Go stand in front of it just like Nair did and have the skin carved away from your bones by a piece of paper? Go turn from walking human with a brand in the hand, to dead meat with no skin left on your bones? Isn’t that what you’re thinking?”
“You assume we think you’re innocent,” snapped Earle.
“You know I didn’t kill Nair. You’re an arrogant arsehole, but even you, even you will have had time now to find the evidence. You’ll have gone to Willesden, you’ll have found my blood on the phone, you’ll have talked to the foxes, talked to the pigeons, done all the things you should have done at the beginning if you hadn’t been so stupid! Stupid blundering stupid bastards who took one look at the dead Mayor and thought, ‘Ah-ha, let’s go beat up a sorcerer. Hey, the apprentice of Bakker is still alive, and he should be dead, because he was last time; let’s go shoot him just to be on the safe side!’ Well up yours with a pineapple, lights out, good night, good luck, good evening, goodbye, good-”
Earle hit me. It was pure anger, pure anger and redness and scalded fire, a backhand swipe like a girl, wearing as many rings as a girl, with the strength of a man. We fell away, pain and fury and indignation burning every part of us, tasted blood in our mouth, wanted to set it on fire, just a little fire, a little blue electric fire and then they’d burn. . and. .
Oda said, “As I understand it, you’re hitting your new master. Don’t let me stop you. Tear each other apart.”
I dragged my head up, fighting fire and blue sapphire fury. Something was wrong with my left arm, I could feel hot blood rolling over the pain. “She gets it,” I whispered. “She understands. You kill me, then one of you will have to deal with all this shit. One of you will have to get flayed alive. There’s a lot of you, so it’s fairly good odds, but carry on like this and there’ll be less and less and less of you. The thing that killed the ravens destroyed the Stone and killed the Mayor and it makes sense, if you’re going about killing a city’s defences, it makes sense to take out the Aldermen next. So shoot away — get on killing. It’ll only speed things up. Fire, flood, crumbled, crushed, cracked, splintered, shattered, torn, tumbled — pick one. The city is going to be ripped apart because no one stops it. End of the line.”
Earle’s puffed angry face, Kemsley’s not much better, Anissina behind them, doubt working its way down the arch of her eyebrows. I could feel blood seeping through my shirt. I looked down, saw redness crawling downwards and upwards and all around. I stammered, “You. . you tore a. .”
Never finished the rest.
She said, “Drink.”
I said, “Uh?”
She repeated, firmer, “Drink.”
I opened my eyes and was dazzled. I closed them again. I put one hand over one eye and risked opening the other a fraction, waited for that to get comfortable, then opened it the rest of the way. The dazzle was just a glow, a bedside lamp by a bed, bulb turned away to the wall. I risked opening my other eye, peering out between my fingers. Dazzle faded to glow. Somewhere distant and close all at once, a train rattled by. Oda sat on the end of the bed. There was a gun in her lap, and a humourless thing that looked stolen from the samurai section of the Victoria and Albert Museum perched by her right knee. She was holding a plastic cup towards me. It had a straw, and was full of a sharpness that could well have been orange juice.
She said, “Drink.”
I took the cup in one hand. The arm that held the hand that held the cup was bare. The arm was joined to my shoulder. The shoulder was tied onto the rest of me by an igloo of fresh bandaging. I stared at it, stared at the orange juice, stared at her. I said, “I tore a stitch.”
“Yeah,” she sighed. “I noticed.”
“You put a gun against my head!”
“You sound surprised,” she said. She did not.
“No, not really. Just a little. .”
“Disappointed?” She also had a cup of orange juice. She slurped from it through a stripy pink and white straw. “You know, sorcerer,” she said, “I was always planning on killing you one day.”
I did not credit Oda with a sense of humour. “Why haven’t you?” I asked.
“The usual.”
“Which usual?”
“Greater pictures, lesser evils.”
“Oh. That usual.”
“Make no mistake,” she added. “You are the spawn of the Devil and will burn in all eternity for your sins, for your godless, soulless existence as arrogant minion of Beelzebub upon this earth. The fact that you may be useful to the greater good is neither here nor there as regards the inevitable destruction of your warped spirit.”
“Thank you, Oda,” I said, letting my head fall back against the pillows of the bed. “I’m pleased to see you too.”
I drank orange juice, and looked round the room. It was a studio of some sort, bed and sofa and kitchen all sprawled across the same floor, counters keeping them apart. The floor was covered with great white rugs, far too clean to be lived on; a black grand piano was in one corner, a small cluster of chairs round a TV, a low dining room table and of course, the bed, pressed up into a corner by a window with the blinds drawn, into which I had been unceremoniously dumped. A clock on the wall said 16.33. I looked up at Oda and said, “Is the clock right?”
“Yes.”
“Where’d the day go?”
She shrugged. “There was a lot of shouting. A lot of arguing. You will be unsurprised to learn that much of it happened while you were bleeding to death on the grass in Regent’s Park.”
“I was in Regent’s Park?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. I was bleeding to death?”
“Someone,” she said, lips pursing round the straw, “someone might just have happened to have torn a stitch.”
“But I’m not bleeding to death now.”
“No. That was one of the conclusions of all the shouting. I had always imagined Aldermen would be good at holding committee meetings. They’re not.”
Thoughts returned slowly to us. I said, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For not thinking I killed Nair.”
She shrugged. “It’s all the same to me. Kill him, don’t kill him — one less freak on the streets.”
“But. .”
“You’re useful, sorcerer,” she said. “That’s what it boils down to. You killed Bakker and that was a useful thing; you destroyed the Tower, and that was an extremely useful thing. Now you’re on your own. And that” — she let out a long sigh — “is also, potentially, useful. The Aldermen are cowards.”
We nearly laughed. “I guessed.”
“They’re terrified of whatever killed Nair.”
“So am I.”
“They think they’re next.”
“So do I.”
“Do you believe this myth? That the ravens protect the city? That there are. . things, whatever that means, waiting to come gobble up the innocent?”
“I believe in the Thames Barrier,” I answered carefully.
“What does that mean?” she snapped.
“It means that I believe if the Thames Barrier failed, a great tide of floodwater would sweep over the city and sink most of its more fashionable areas beneath many metres of salt, sewage and slime. I have never in my life seen this, nor ever seen the Thames Barrier at work, but I believe it from the bottom of my heart. So, yes. I’m willing to run with the idea that we might all be well and truly buggered.”
Oda slurped the last of her orange juice and put the cup to one side. She leant forward, looking us straight in the eye. “You want to know what was decided?”
“I’ve got a nasty feeling. .”
“It’s the stitches.”
“That wasn’t the feeling I meant. . Why should we care what the Aldermen decided?”
“Because they were only two votes short of shooting you.”
“When you put it like that. .”
“It’s your problem.”
“What is?”
“All this. This imminent destruction thing. You’re the Midnight Mayor. They agreed on that. You’re going to have to sort it out. Your problem.”
“They’re saving on bullets,” I sighed.
“That’s the elegant thing about the Midnight Mayor. Even if you die, there’ll be another sucker along soon.”
“You really don’t care, do you?” I asked. “Why are you here?”
“The Order may not care about your life. But we are naturally concerned when the actions of your clan of freaks may destroy the city that we live in. The innocent must be protected, even if it means cooperation with the guilty.”
“Carry on thinking like that,” I muttered, “and you’ll be heading for sensible, fluffy normality before you know it.”
“Not so fluffy. I’m here to keep an eye on things.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” she sighed, “that if at any moment it looks like you’re not going to sort this out, that you’re going to run, or betray, or double-cross, or generally walk away from this situation, then I’m the one who gets to shoot you.” She added with a crocodile smile, “It’ll be just like old times.”
“Why aren’t the Aldermen doing this?”
“They considered. .” — she sucked in, choosing her words carefully — “that you might be more amenable to a conversation with an old acquaintance. It was suggested that I handle matters initially, lay out the position, tell it like it is. You’re used to that, aren’t you?”
“Tact and humour are not ideas I associate with you, no.”
“Good. See — their reasoning had something going for it, despite their thrice-damned souls. You’re going to have to work with them. Talk with them, let them help you do the thing you do until it no longer needs to be done.”
“We’re really not,” we replied.
“Oh, I think you are. You see, you may be the Midnight Mayor — which is just another proof of how twisted is this life you lead — but you don’t know what to do about it, do you? You don’t know what it means. They do. They spend their lives learning the answer.”
I said, suddenly suspicious, “Where are they?”
“There’s five of them waiting downstairs in the car.”
“Tell them to stick it up-”
“There’s five of them, all very heavily armed, all annoyed, all trying their very best to be polite despite themselves. I never thought the day would come, sorcerer, when I would be saving you from your own withered walnut of a brain, but I have my instructions. They’re going to have a word with you. You’re going to play nice. If you don’t, I will personally unpick those stitches from your skin with a blowtorch. Do we understand each other? I am that good.”
Meekly, to our infuriation, I said, “Yes.”
I got dressed. You can’t be Midnight Mayor in your underpants.
Trains rumbled by. Somewhere in South London, I decided. Old brick arches filled in with other buildings under the railway lines; maybe somewhere near Waterloo, where the chaotic street plan had fallen like custard from a trembling spoon.
Someone had given us new stitches. They hurt, a dull throb that came and went with each pulse of our heart. Our face in the bathroom mirror could have frightened a dead horse that had already seen the innards of the glue factory. Our clothes were another bloodstained write-off. Again. Oda gave me new ones. The T-shirt read, “What Would Jesus Do?” and featured a big white cross on front and back, wrapped in thorns.
We said, “We can’t wear this.”
She said, “Will it burn your flesh?”
I put it on. It was that, or shiver and be undignified. More undignified.
Oda made supper. It was grey splodge served with undercooked pasta. Fanatical psycho-bitches clearly had different priorities from the rest of us. We ate it anyway, and tried not to look as grateful as we felt. We let the Aldermen wait. We could do that, at least.
*
It was 6 p.m. when Oda let the Aldermen in. I sat on the sofa; they stood in a row in front of me. Earle wasn’t there. I wondered which way he’d voted in the should-we-shoot-him ballot. I wondered who’d voted for life.
Unfortunately, Earle’s absence was not a total blessing. Kemsley stepped forwards.
“Mr Swift,” he said through the corner of his slit-mouth.
“Mr Kemsley,” I said.
“I am here as a representative of the Aldermen.”
“I guessed.”
“There are certain things that must be rectified between us. May I say firstly, on behalf of the Aldermen, that we offer an unconditional apology for the treatment you have received. We were acting on the best of intelligence, and I am sure, in time, you will come to see the reason of our ways.”
“That’s not unconditional, but let’s stick with it for the moment.”
His fingers twitched, but he managed to keep his face austere. “We have chosen to accept your appointment as Midnight Mayor.”
“Big of you.”
“It is unconventional.” The word came out between his lips like thin bile when there’s nothing left to vomit.
I folded my arms and waited.
“Mr Swift, I am sure you understand that the situation is complicated.”
“It seems very simple. Someone is trying to destroy the city’s defences, and you’re too scared to stop it by yourselves. You want us to go and fight for you, find out why Nair was interested in the shoes, find out what’s behind ‘give me back my hat’. In short, you want me to be the one to find the guy who can flay people alive without laying a finger on them, and deal with the problem. Have I missed anything?”
A moment’s hesitation. Kemsley drew in his lips, then smiled. “No,” he said. “You seem to understand the situation. Issues arising?”
“A few.”
“Deal with them.”
“So much for the contrite apology.”
“You know what’s at stake.”
“You killed my friend.”
For a moment, his eyebrows drew together. “Did. . oh. . the White. Vera whatever-her-name-was. I might say that she turned into a puddle of paint, rather than the usual corpse.”
“Yes, I noticed that. Curious, isn’t it?”
“She was a White. They have different expectations of life than the rest of us. I’m sure you understand.”
“If I’m Midnight Mayor, do I get to sack you?”
“What do you think?”
“Kemsley,” we said calmly, “if you so much as breathe out of tune, we will kill you as casually as Vera died.”
“I had no doubt. And for my part, may I say I find the idea of you as Midnight Mayor an abomination, a sickness, a degradation of the post and all the duties, age and time that it entails. But that doesn’t change the fact that for you to be Mayor, Nair must have wanted it. He must have known what would happen when he dialled his phone, he must have known that the blue electric angels would be waiting. For his sake, I will respect the choices that have been made, and hope that they have not damned us.”
There was almost a flicker of humanity in the man. The kind of human who pulled wings off flies as a kid, but still human. I smiled. “Well, it’s nice to have that cleared up. Anything else I can do for you, gentlemen?”
“You have a badge. A cross within a cross. It belongs to my colleague, Mr Earle. He’d like it back.”
“It’s in my bag. Is it significant?”
“Sentimental value.”
A lie. He knew that I knew, and brazened it out with a willpower that declared, yes, it’s a lie, and no, I’m not going to say more.
I waited for them to fetch it, remembered Earle’s face back in the flat in Bayswater, metalled over, and the shock when I’d pulled it from his chest.
Kemsley said: “We need to discuss strategy.”
I shrugged. “Sure. What the hell.”
“We need to find out who killed Nair. It makes sense that whoever — whatever — it was is connected to the other attacks in the city. We have links that could be of use. CCTV, police records, databases, forensic techniques. .”
“What do you plan on doing with them?”
“We may be able to track the killer’s movements.”
“With CCTV? Good luck.”
“You don’t think we can do it?”
“I think that there’s nine million people in this city, and of them probably two million wear bad suits and have slicked-back hair. And they’re just the humans.”
“There are other ways to track. . creatures.”
“And what do you intend to do, having found this creature?”
“Kill it.”
“Any idea how?”
Kemsley smiled again. It felt like fingers being dragged down the back of our eyeballs. “That, we thought we might leave to you, sorcerer. Mister Mayor. In the meantime we’re arranging for nine replacement ravens to be flown to the Tower.”
“You just think that’s going to fix the problem?”
“No. But I do think it might help with whatever the problem is. Even if it doesn’t, it’s better than sitting around radiating negative attitude.”
“Did you just say ‘negative attitude’?” we asked incredulously.
“I suspect you’re not a team player,” he added, all sucrose and teeth. “And what,” he added, “do you propose to do?”
I looked round the room. “Where are my shoes?”
“If you mean the boy’s shoes, Mo’s, they’re at the lab along with every other pair of shoes we could find in his bedroom. Also every pair of shoes we think you have ever worn.”
“That seems like an overreaction.”
“Nair thought the shoes were important — he didn’t say how. Your wandering expedition might have been for nothing.”
“You have a lab?”
“We consider all possibilities.”
“I want the shoes back.”
“Why?”
“To finish what I started before all this happened.”
“Do you think that will-”
“We want them back.”
He bit his lip. “You can have them in an hour.”
“Thank you.” A thought struck us, slowly catching up with the rest. We said, “What do you mean, ‘every pair of shoes in his bedroom’?”
“We acquired them.”
“From Loren’s flat.”
“Yes.”
“You talked to her?”
“Yes.”
“What did you say?”
“Not much. It’s better if civilians don’t know.”
“‘Civilians’? Where is she?”
“We have her in a safe house.”
We stood up slowly, pain dancing down our arm. “You took her away?”
“To keep her safe; to learn more.”
“You took her away and didn’t tell her why?”
“It is for the greater good.”
“If we hear those words one more time, we will set the sky on fire,” we snarled.
Kemsley seemed almost pleased. “Do you really care?” he asked.
“She is our. . we said we would help her. She is lonely, afraid. We are. . we will protect her. One hair of hers goes missing down the bathroom plughole, and we will tear you apart.”
He smiled. Stood and stared at us and smiled.
I said, “You total bastard.”
“Just covering base,” he replied.
“She’s not part of this.”
“I am impressed that you care — really, I am.”
“We will. .”
“What? What will you do? What would you do if you weren’t as mortal and scared as the rest of us? Mister Mayor. Mister Midnight Electric Mayor. What would you do?”
We slumped back into the sofa. I stared at my hands. A mess. “What happens now?” I asked.
“There’s an inauguration.”
I laughed.
“I mean it.”
“I know you do. That’s part of the joke. Will there be cocktail sausages, and bits of pineapple on sticks?”
“No.”
“Sad.”
“The Mayor must be inaugurated.”
“What’s the point of a party without the punch?”
“You want to live? Take it seriously.”
“I am.” I rubbed the palms of my hands over my eyes. “We do. What should I expect?”
“Ghosts,” he said with a shrug.
“Thanks a bundle.”
“See me smiling?”
“Ghosts,” I repeated. “Terrific. When is this punchless, pineappleless inauguration thing?”
“Tomorrow, midnight.”
“Naturally.”
“You need to do it if you’re going to be Midnight Mayor, if you’re. .” He trailed away.
“Going to live?” I suggested.
“Yes.”
“Didn’t save Nair, did it?”
“Nair was a man.”
“I thought he was Mayor.”
“He was a man who happened to be the Mayor. You’re something else.”
“Sure. Blame the resurrection business. Go on. Why not? If in doubt reminding a guy that he got killed, got torn to pieces by black claws on a black night, saw the white light and the long corridor and all the things you see before you die, breathed a last breath — sure. Go ahead. Because that’s really going to make me more inclined to help.”
“This is about need, Swift. You need us, and we need you, and while we can both hate it, the sensible strategy would be to deal with the issues and move on. Keep your phone switched on, Mister Mayor. Remember to answer it when we call.”
And that seemed all he had to say on the subject.
The Aldermen left.
All except Anissina.
She said, “I’m the shadow.”
“Beg pardon?”
“I’m the shadow. The one that’s going to keep your back.”
I jerked my chin at Oda. “She’ll do that just fine and she brings her own knives.”
“So do I,” she replied with a twitch of her lips that might have been a smile. “And mine need not end up in you.”
“Does the little sorcerer need protecting?” crooned Oda.
Anissina didn’t bother to reply. I sunk deeper into the sofa.
“Tea,” I said. “Tea will make it all better.”
I drank tea with a painkiller chaser.
It made things a little better.
Not hugely — but enough.
A knock at the door. Oda answered it, gun tucked away out of sight. A motorbike courier, all black helmet and padded jacket, presented a box. The box had a pair of shoes in it. We felt almost pleased to see Mo’s shoes unharmed.
“What use are these?” demanded Oda.
“They’re very good for walking in,” I replied, and put them on.
Anissina had a car. It had a driver. He wore a peaked hat. I took one look at it and said, “Let’s walk.”
“To Willesden?”
“To the Underground.”
Her nose wrinkled in distaste. Oda rolled her eyes. “Perks, sorcerer,” she snapped. “I am sure you understand perks.”
“I understand free lifts,” I replied. “I also understand that driving around in a black car with windows shaded black and a driver in a black silk suit who opens a door with a black handle and black leather upholstery inside is not as discreet as you might want.”
Oda grinned. “Not so easy to kill,” she said. “Still dead, though.”
“Remind me why you’re here?”
“Sooner or later, someone’s going to end up shot.”
“Any idea who?”
“I’ll write you a list.”
We took the Jubilee Line. The station was new — glass doors and glass panels in front of the platform, just in case someone wanted to jump. The train driver missed on his first attempt, didn’t slow down fast enough, didn’t quite manage to align the doors of his bright new train with the shining glass panels. He had to reverse a few clunking inches, while the platform’s scant inhabitants sighed and waited. Hard to tell which annoyed them more — delays caused by overshooting trains, or bodies on the line. It was going to be one or the other.
The Jubilee Line took us back north. Back to Dollis Hill. Darkness, cold, a slow sideways rain that came in across the streetlamps and stained the pavements, glaring reflective orange. I knew the route now, knew which way the shoes wanted to go, knew the swagger they wanted to walk with. Easier now, despite the drugs addling my brain and the ache in my bones. Despite being scared, despite the company. Easier to find a rhythm and strut like a seventeen-year-old jackass who should not, could not, must not be, and very clearly was, involved in this mess.
Back walking the streets with the swagger. Easier — much easier now I knew at least the beginnings of where we had to go. The empty skater park beneath the railway line, still empty, still dark, dry paint fading on old wood slopes. The pub showing the football, Arsenal up at half-time, an empty wall where the kids should have sat drinking booze, a pavement stained with the leftovers of some long-ago binge, the off-licence, shutters drawn down over the windows, no lights on inside, and on the shutters a scrawled warning:
ŞAPKAMI GERI VER
Along with the usual mess of scratched letters and names.
Anissina said nothing. Oda said, “If you’re wasting our time. .”
I ignored her. The swagger ignored her. It knew when it was dealing with the ignorant, not worthy of respect.
A patch of concrete that might possibly, sometimes, be a garage. A length of chain drawn low across the fence. Inside, a public phone, the receiver hung neatly on the hook, under a single fizzing neon bulb. We wanted to stop and stare, to look at it for hours and will the night to be another night, some time before; but the shoes wanted to keep on walking, and I didn’t have the time or energy to care. It was how it was. The rain had washed off our blood.
I kept on walking. Unfamiliar territory from here on, never got past the phone in the garage last time. I turned my head down towards the pavement and watched the stones pass underfoot, trusting — despite our better judgement — in Oda and Anissina to warn us of impending cement lorries — and let the shoes do the walking.
I don’t know exactly where we ended up. Somewhere to the south, doubling back on our previous route. It was a shopping street doing its very best to be trendy, and not quite making it. Pubs were pretending to be wine bars, condensation on the windows and punters pouring out into the streets, despite the rain; restaurants had hiked their prices up by two quid and added aubergine, even the curry houses, and the newsagents advertised local “cultural events” by amateur theatre groups or community choirs. We walked past it all, feeling water seeping through our shoes and itch inside our socks, shimmering bright blackness sparkling down the streets into the spitting drains. The rain drained away the usual smells of the streets — kebabs and bus exhaust — and left cold numbness in their place, invigorating until it started to stick.
Nor do I know how long we walked. Time was measured in strides, not seconds; distance in the warmth of our legs, rather than metres or miles. It seemed nothing at all. Oda said it was a long way.
And without warning, we stopped and turned, toes pointing in at a street wall. I looked up. The wall was an ordinary terraced house which had had extraordinary things done to it. Its entire surface was covered over with bright aluminium, into which a thousand glittering would-be diamonds had been implanted around a core of plastic purple jewels, the bulbs just visible within them, pulsing out in a hypnotic rhythm the blazing word “VOLTAGE”.
Beneath the sign, a pair of aluminium doors, reinforced on the inside and padded with purple silk, had been swung back. They led into darkness; a red cord strung from a brass stand marked the beginnings of a queue line into this place. A man in black with a radio stuck in his left ear was standing on the door, gloved hands folded across his belly, one on top of the other. He stank of treacle, of deep dark maple syrup without the sugar, all thickness and no charm, a stench of magic that reminded me of Charlie, Sinclair’s loyal assistant.
He was good at not meeting anyone’s gaze, but scanned the street constantly as if we weren’t looking at him, his ridiculous dark glasses pushed up on a great fat nose. Oda, seeing us stare, said, “There? You want to go in there?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” she sighed. “When I last checked, you were a sorcerer, not a Jedi.”
“You’ve seen Star Wars?”
“Seen it and denounced it.”
“You’ve denounced Star Wars?”
She looked me straight in the eye and said, “Hollywood should not glorify witches.”
“I think you’ve missed the point. .”
“I also denounce Harry Potter.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Because. .”
“. . because literature, especially children’s literature, should not glorify witches.”
“Oda, what do you do for fun?”
She thought about it, then said, without a jot of humour, “I denounce things.”
“Let’s forget I asked.”
Anissina, as always, said nothing. I nodded towards the door. “I want to go in there.”
“Do you really think this is the most productive way you can go about. .” — Oda grimaced, then spat the words, “. . saving this damned city?”
“You used ‘damned’ in a. .”
“Purely literal sense. I do not blaspheme nor have a sense of humour.”
“Mo’s shoes want to go into Voltage.”
“You speak as if they have a life of their own.”
“You speak as if you can’t imagine they could. I had a pair of shoes, a few years back, that had been rained on by the Singapore monsoon, got sand in them by the Indian Ocean, run the best part of the Bronx and been scoffed at by waiters in Istanbul. And that was after it was sewn together by a child in rural China, carted on the back of a truck across the country, boxed and flown around the world for me to buy. Find me a pair of shoes that hasn’t got a life of its own, and I’ll find you a blister plaster that actually works. Deal?”
Oda scowled, and looked towards the dark door of the gaudy club. “Voltage?” she asked.
“Voltage,” I said.
The bouncer took one look at us, and said, “Wrong shoes.”
You can’t intimidate bouncers. It’s not just that they’re paid to be tough — it’s that they’re paid and bored. It’s a bad combination.
I said, “Really? You sure?”
“Sorry, mate. You can’t come in with those shoes.”
As he spoke, a gaggle of kids, not out of their teens, were waved through without a glance, bundling down the dark passage of the stairs into the pumping gloom inside. I asked carefully, “Am I too old?”
“You know, mate, I’ve got my instructions. .”
A CCTV camera was hanging over the door. I considered it, I considered him. CCTV cameras are easy to confuse, if you know how. I didn’t even have to wave at it, and it was willing to turn the other screen. I said, “Shapeshifter.”
He had shoulder muscles the size of an ox. They tensed. His coat nearly rode up a foot from his ankles. I waited. He said, “OK. Wizard.”
“Not quite.”
“It’s not your kinda place.”
We laughed. “I know that. What’ll it take to get inside?”
“I’d like to help you mate, seriously, I’d. .”
We reached forward suddenly, not blinking in warning, and snatched the glasses from his eyes. Beneath, his irises were solid spheres of bright orange, tinted yellow at the edges and filling the expanse of his eyes. A pair of pigeon’s eyes in a human’s head. He reached for me instinctively, one hand pushing back my chin, the other going for my right arm, all martial arts glitter. A sharp and purposeful click stopped him. Oda’s sleeve was pressed to the back of his neck. There was something in it more than a hand. She said, “If this wasn’t an area of public view, it’d be your spinal cord on the pavement. Let go of him.”
His fingers eased back; I staggered away. Oda looked at me nicely and smiled. “Are there any alleys round here?”
“Don’t kill him.”
“Imagine the trouble if I don’t kill him. This is for your good as well as the city’s.”
“You’re smart. Use your imagination. Don’t kill him.”
“He’ll only. .”
“Cause trouble, yes, I know. We just don’t care. Deal with it.” Her face flickered in annoyance. “You know, I could just. .”
“If you kill him, we’ll know,” we snapped. We weren’t sure how we’d know, but she didn’t need to know that. We looked her straight in the eye and added, “We’ll know. Deal with it nicely.”
“I’ll go.” Anissina. When she did speak, she was to the point. “Give me the gun.”
Oda scowled, but carefully shifted places with Anissina, whose fingers slithered over the black metal pressed into the bouncer’s neck. Oda pulled the Alderman’s sleeve sharply down over Anissina’s hand, to hide the worst of the barrel. “Don’t think about it, sister,” she hissed, wrapping Anissina’s fingers tighter round the trigger. “When he tries something, don’t think. It’ll be easier that way.”
Anissina said nothing. We had no idea if she was going to kill the bouncer either. But I figured he stood a better chance with anyone who wasn’t Oda.
“Walk,” said Anissina, and slowly, obediently, the bouncer began to shuffle from the door. I watched them walk down the street. It looked like trouble, all awkward movements and turns; but if an Alderman couldn’t look after things, then who could? They vanished round the corner into a side street, and like the wise woman said, we chose not to think about it.
“Shall we?” asked Oda, looking into the dark mouth of the club.
“Dance?” I asked.
“What?”
“Shall we dance, it’s a. . forget it. Come on.”
We went inside.
If the outside had been all glitzy gaudy glam, the interior of Voltage did its best to live up to the name. I could smell the electricity, sizzling the air, making every breath buzz. I could feel it, hear it like the hum of a computer battery kept overcharged; it made the hairs on the back of my hands stand on end, and it was all we could do to walk without sparking.
Flat plasma screens had been embedded in one wall, round circles of not-quite-glass within which wriggles of blue, green, purple and white mini-lightning danced and twisted. When we pressed our fingers against them, all the current danced towards our finger ends, turning them the colour of their own fire. The ceiling was set with twisting lights that gave off every colour except ordinary white, while above the bar in the corner deep UV blue mingled with a flickering strobe to set off the painted faces of the bartenders in psychedelic strangeness. And all the time, there was the music.
It went:
Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum
— too loud to hear anything else, though we knew from the open mouths of the dancers pressed close on the floor that they were shouting, screaming, talking, flirting, with all these inaudible things lost behind the relentless heartbeat of the bass. Lost too, any lyrics or other rhythms and beats; there was just dum dum dum dum, to which heads bopped, hips thrust, elbows flapped, knees jerked, feet turned, sentences tumbled, blood pumped. The air tasted of salty teaspoons, smelt of thin slices of cucumber peeled away with a razored steel blade, and sweat, and static, and of course, there it was slicing through it all, a flash with every beat, the scarlet stench of magic. You don’t have a shapeshifter guard the door unless there’s something worth guarding.
There weren’t any stools at the bar. Comfort wasn’t part of the atmosphere. I leant on the counter and rubbed my temples, tried to drive the ache from the strobe out of my skull. Oda leant next to me, smiled at the barman and said, “You got anything that isn’t alcoholic?”
The barman looked at her like she was a mammoth.
She shrugged. “My hopes were few.”
There was a list of cocktails laminated to the surface of the bar. For each cherry-topped drink, I could have had three home-microwaved suppers. I pointed at one and said, “That.”
“A Hot Red Sex?”
We weren’t sure how to answer. “Sure,” we mumbled. We’ll try anything, once.
The barman turned; the barman worked. The thing he ended up putting in front of me was, in the UV light, the colour and consistency of lumpy custard. We sniffed it carefully and smelt booze and peach juice. We dipped a finger in it, licked it dry, couldn’t really taste anything. We held it up to the light. Oda said, “Are you going to drink it or not?”
We took a careful sip. It was like swallowing a fermented mango soaked in a vat of acid. We wheezed. Oda turned away, and smiled. Teetotal. It made a sort of inevitable, self-righteous sense. I pushed the glass across the counter to a safe distance, just in case it started to melt, and turned my head towards the dance.
Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum
“See anything that sets your Satanic senses buzzing?” asked Oda nicely.
“Yes.”
“Going to do anything about it?”
“Don’t know. Don’t know what it is yet.”
“That’s the problem with mystic forces,” murmured Oda. “They tell you that you’re going to die, but they never specify how. It’s so you can feel the fear before the end, as some small redress for the life of arrogance you have led.”
“You know, you could learn something from Anissina.”
“I don’t think so.”
“No, seriously. You could learn how to be quiet.”
“Information,” she replied primly, “is not truth.”
Mo’s shoes didn’t seem much help any more. Now that we had arrived, they didn’t even seen inclined to dance. I looked at the people on the dance floor, faces coming and going like a jerking film in the glare of the strobe. All young: kids, teenagers, dressed in the kind of scruff that needs a rich man’s budget, jeans slashed the right way, skin pierced with the right studs, hair done at a hundred quid for each gelled-up spike, brands artfully aged on cotton deliberately stained. The bouncer had been right — we didn’t fit in. Too old, too mundane. Only our shoes were in the right area, all style and huff.
Their dance had a strange uniformity. It wasn’t what we’d imagined dance should be; our thoughts filled with ideas of roses, moonlight, a boy, a girl, or at the very least two individuals with a thing for each other, an expression of something for when the crude mundanities of speech failed, a way to mention sex — a concept we found absurd, if fascinating — without having to go into biology. This was about sex; there was no denying it. But it had no sexiness, no intimacy nor sensuality, but was merely about fondling as many bottoms as you could in a single night, or peering down as many tops as your height would permit, all the time wiggling and shaking with strange expressions on your face as though to say, “you think I can do this with my hips now, wait till you see me naked”. Some did it better than others, and danced in a way that spoke of sex but promised you this was the nearest you’d get, distance making it more alluring. Others just fumbled and writhed, but always, always the floor twisted and rose and fell and turned and moved to the relentless bass coming out of. . where? I couldn’t see speakers, couldn’t see any source for the sound, it just seemed to shimmer into being behind the eardrums, not bothering to soften down its punches on the way in.
Oda said, “You’re ogling.”
“What?”
“You are staring lewdly at the dancers.”
“I am not!”
“You are. It is highly distasteful.”
We bit our lip. “Listen,” I said, nearly shouting over the din, “there’s something. . off.”
“You use ‘off’ like I use ‘rotting’, yes?”
“Where’s the music coming from?”
She opened her mouth to say something smart, looked round, and closed it again just in time. There was a long pause as she scanned the room, peering into every corner, over the ceiling and through the faces bobbing on the floor. Finally she said, “All right. So there’s no speakers. So?”
“So that doesn’t surprise you?”
“I am never surprised.”
“That doesn’t interest you?”
“As a means to an end, perhaps it is of some curiosity.”
“Where’s the sound coming from?”
She shrugged. “You’re our saviour.” The word dribbled out like bile from an empty stomach. “You figure it out.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be helping me?”
“I’m supposed to be keeping an eye on you. The rest was left unspecified.”
“Fat lot of use you are.”
“I got you in.”
“You were going to shoot-”
“I got you in.”
I scowled and turned away. The music made my head hurt, the beat thrummed up from my toes and used the insides of my stomach as a trampoline. I edged along the counter, trailing my fingers along the smooth metal, almost frictionless, sterile and clean, drifted to the nearest wall, where the plasma screens wriggled and writhed, pressed my fingers against it, then my ear, listened.
Dum dum dum dum dum dum. .
I could feel it in the walls, it made my ear ache. I squatted down and ran my fingers over the floor, and it was there too, setting the ground beneath my feet tingling like it was crawling with ants. A kid nearly trod on me, shouted some kind of abuse I couldn’t hear, and went on dancing. Pressing my back to the wall and facing the dancers, I edged round the length of the room, trailing my fingers over every surface I could find, tasting the air, smelling the sounds, looking for a way down deeper.
I found it: a locked door, unmarked, the same colour as the rest of the room. I felt around in my bag until I found a key of the right make, slid it in, coaxed it to an appropriate shape, turned it, opened the door. A wall of sound hit me, louder even than on the dance floor, deDUM deDUM deDUM deDUM deDUM deDUM
UV light in the ceiling, nothing else; that uncomfortable blue that hurt your eyes, the brain aware that more was hitting the retina than it could understand. I walked down the corridor, found the manager’s office; it was empty, papers and cash, mostly cash, strewn over the desk. I kept walking, found a flight of stairs, the sound crashing on my ears, deDUM deDUM deDUM. .
A door at the bottom of the flight of stairs. Above it a sign read, “Boom Boom — Executive Officer. By appointment only.”
It was not our place to question a name like “Boom Boom”. After all, you can’t run a nightclub and be called Leslie.
I looked over my shoulder; no one behind, no one in front. I knocked, but my knuckles were a nothing in the din, so, I opened the door.
The room inside was UV blue. The great semicircular arc of the sofa bed was blue, the floor was blue, the walls were blue, blue lights were hung from a blue ceiling and the two goons standing inside the door with blood trickling down from their shattered eardrums were lit up blue by the reflection of all that blueness. They caught me as I came in, grabbed my arms, pushed me back against the door as it slammed behind me. I looked into a pair of young faces, boys, spotty and greasy and pale, dressed in hoodies and fashionable trainers. Their blood looked purple in the light where it had pooled in their eardrums and dribbled down the sides of their necks, the capillaries stood out gleaming from the wide sockets of their eyes, their faces were empty of all feeling. Our instinct to hurt them faded at the sight of those faces; two walking hunks of deafened meat guarding the door, two kids who’d never hear again; it seemed pointless to set their blood on fire now.
We let them pull and shove and generally manhandle us into the middle of the room, pleased at not killing them for their indifference. If we had, it might have demonstrated our nature to the thing we could only guess at being the Executive Officer. As we were dragged before him, he looked at us and said, “Are you lost?”
His voice was a roar, but even then it was barely audible over the thundering beat that filled the room. It came from jaws whose opening was the size of my head, a great, gin-smelling depth lined with tiny white teeth set in a base of a rolling length of opening bone. His eyes were two piggy grey marbles, his skin was flushed the colour of a grilled tomato, with a surface layer of darker capillaries threaded across his flesh like a road map of the Alps. His hair, if you could call it that, was three black strands slicked over a hillside scalp. He wore a suit the size of a wedding marquee. His belly sprawled out the length of my outstretched, tugged-on arms, his feet were two stubbly protrusions wearing — how we were thrilled by this sight! — black and white spats, poking out over the edge of the sofa. He could have crushed a buffalo just by sitting on it, he could have suffocated an elk between his thumb and forefinger, and it was from his chest that the great pounding roar of noise was coming.
A hand the size of my chest reached out to a control panel designed for fat fingertips, and pressed a button. A light went on beneath a bank of speakers behind his head, and at once the great roaring deDUM deDUM deDUM grew less, covered instead by an irritating hiss. It was still there though; I felt it rising through my stomach, aching in my gut.
He repeated, smiling, from his predator’s mouth, “Are you lost?”
I tugged with deliberate weakness at the arms that held my own, testing their strength and doing my best to imply my own feebleness. I felt the stitches strain across my flesh, and grimaced in pain. “I guess so.”
“You don’t have an appointment.” It wasn’t a question.
We looked up and met his tiny eyes, almost lost in the folds of his face, then looked down. He followed our gaze and smiled. “Ah, yes,” he said. “I often get that reaction.”
Beneath the tent of his shirt, big enough to fill with hot air and fly in, something was moving inside his chest. I could see the shirt rise and warp, sink and flatten, then rise and warp again, as if a great big boil was being pumped in and out, or tectonic plate movement had decided to do its thing with his bone and skin. Its great rapid motion was in time to the beat, and it was moving above his heart.
I said, “Oh. I see.”
“Do you?” he asked. “That’s interesting. Most people go out of their way not to look.”
“Couldn’t you have gone to the NHS, like any ordinary Joe?” I asked.
“I’m not an ordinary Joe,” he replied, “and neither, I think, are you.” He nodded at his two hooded guards. They pushed me forward; I stumbled, tripped, fell at his spat-wearing feet. The white and black leather filled our vision and we bit back on a hysterical laugh. A smile must have shown because he said, “Is something funny?”
“You’re wearing spats!”
“And?”
“We just. . it’s so nice to. . we’ve always wanted to see someone wearing spats. We thought it only happened in films. Sorry. It must seem irrelevant.”
“You don’t need to apologise,” he grumbled, and now we realised what the hissing was, that irritating, needle-in-the-ear sound. The speakers were replicating the sound of his beating heart, the great swelling massive thing the size of a swallowed dog pounding inside his chest, but they were doing it a few instants out of phase. One sound met the other, and both were beaten down. That at least was the theory of it.
He leant forward. That is, his head bent down towards me half an inch. He didn’t seem capable of doing any more. He said, “Is there something I can do for you, little man?”
“I’ve got to ask — sorry about this — but I’ve got to ask — why spats?”
“Style,” he replied primly, “is more stylish if it’s done to a personal agenda.”
“And why is your heart pumping out enough decibels to shatter an eardrum?”
He smiled. This was a question he was clearly used to being asked, and enjoyed answering. “I,” he declared proudly, “am the lord of the dance.”
“You do realise that has slightly camp Irish connotations?”
His face darkened. “I,” he repeated firmly, “am the master of the heartbeat, the music maker, the drummer of fate, the. .”
“You’re a cardiac patient with complications,” I snapped. “Don’t give me this destiny stuff.”
I could see the flesh of his chest warp a little faster, hear the rhythm of his beat, faint behind the hissing of the speakers, slightly out, picking up speed. And if we looked closer still, we thought we could see his ribs rising and falling against his shirt, broken, out of joint, forced to snap up away from the breastbone to make space for that massive engine pounding away within him, and we could see the capillaries across his face flush and fade, flush and fade with each pounding of his heart. “What do you know of it?” he asked.
“Well” — I ticked the points off on my fingertips — “I know that one: cardiac problems account for a high percentage of premature deaths in the UK. Two: there’s a very long waiting list for a very small number of hearts available on the NHS. Three: even if you get bumped to the top of the waiting list, sometimes it’s hard to find a heart that will match you, owing to medicine, antigens, blood groups and all that medical stuff. Four — are we on to four? Yes, four: there are some back-street clinics not registered on the NHS, or even popping up on the regular black market, where you can get a heart transplant if you’re in a bad enough way and have a bit of ready cash, but you can bet your buttocks that the individual performing the operation believes in the power of incense and bad spirits in their work. Five: it’s not just humans who can donate working hearts. With the right attitude, the correct approach and a hefty dose of obscure occultism. . what did you get given? Sperm whale?”
He looked surprised. Then he smiled, a long, deliberate smile that clearly took a lot of effort. “You know more than I had expected,” he said.
“That’s me. Full of useful information, not that it’s the same as truth.”
“You are not just some lost buffoon.”
“Well, that depends on your point of view. .”
“What do you want, little man?”
“We’ll get to that. First, I’ve gotta tell you — I don’t like the fact that you’ve turned the brains of these kids here” — I jerked my chin to the empty-eyed hoodies — “to jelly. I mean, it’s none of my business, but we do not like life when it is but a mimicry. Life should be lived. And they are not living it.”
He shrugged. The ripples of the movement passed all the way down his arms to his fingertips, made his belly shake and shimmer. “I’m not here to manage your problems,” he said. “I’m not here to have anything to do with you.”
“Then I guess we’ll come back to this one in a minute. Right now, what I’d really like to know, is whether you’ve seen a kid called Mo.”
He hesitated. Not for very long. Then he laughed. We watched the great rising and falling of that blister in his chest, saw the pressing of his ribs against his shirt as they were pushed out with a creak, sharp broken edges scratching against the cotton. His heart was going faster now; the speakers couldn’t keep down the sound: dumdumdumdumdumdumdumdumdum
“How should I know?” he chuckled. “I see very few people, in my condition, but some random kid? How should I know? Why should I care?”
“I’ve got a photo,” I said, fumbling in my bag.
“Is this really what you came down here for? To ask me, me, if I’d seen a boy?”
“Didn’t say he was a boy, and ‘Mo’ could be anything,” I replied. “But yes, you have the gist of it.” I found the picture Loren had given me, held it up for him to see.
“Recognise him?”
He studied it, too long, too deep, too carefully, a badly played act by a man who didn’t get out much. “Nope,” he said finally, chest heaving beneath his shirt, heart twisting and boiling within his shattered ribs. “Is that everything, little man? Would you like a back massage on your way out?”
“Look again.”
“I’ve seen. .”
“And you’re fibbing. We are not in the mood for lies.”
“Arrogance!” he laughed.
“Impatience,” we snapped. “You have a great bursting blister contracting and constricting within your chest. A better liar might be able to stop it from accelerating. But like you said — you don’t get out much. Should have waited for the NHS.”
“Waiting was death.”
“This,” we retorted, “isn’t living. But since you seem to value it so highly, let us make ourself clear. Tell us the truth, or we will kill you.”
He just laughed, arrogance and error. We picked ourself up carefully, half-turning our head to eye up his deafened drones.
“Death couldn’t kill me!” he said. “They thought it would, but I stopped it. I locked death out and now my heart is life, my heart is. .”
“‘Give me back my hat’.”
His face froze. We smiled. “You recognise it,” we said. “That’s good. That means we’re right. Tell us about it. Tell us about the boy called Mo.”
“Who are you?” he asked.
“My name is Matthew Swift.”
“So who are you?”
“I was the apprentice of Robert James Bakker. I’m sure you’ve heard of him.” He had; his accelerating heart was a great thumping blister, an alien out of a monster movie trying to break free of his bones. “I am a sorcerer. I was there when Bakker died. We. . made it happen. I too have met death, and did not have to peel the bones away from my chest to survive the encounter. I am also, and incidentally, the Midnight Mayor, the blue electric angels, the fire in the wire, the song in the telephones, and we are having a bad week. Be smart; fear us.”
He licked his lips. His tongue was the colour of rotting strawberries. He nodded carefully and said, “OK. I get it. I see what you’re saying. And sure, yeah, I’m smart enough to be scared of sorcerers, they always end in a bang. But the thing is, while it’s sharp to fear you, I just fear him a whole lot more.”
Like a schmuck, I turned my head looking for the him. I guess I wasn’t at my best. There was no one there, just the two guys with the bloody ears. I looked back. He had one hand over the controls that turned on the speaker. His other was pulling at the buttons of his shirt.
He turned off the speakers; he pulled back his shirt. His ribcage was a mess of broken bones, sticking up from his skin, creating great dark voids between his flesh into which muscle had long since sunk and withered, ragged torn bone shattered away from the twisted breastbone protruding upwards like ruined towers in an ancient desert. We could see his heart beating beneath it, four great, coated valves smeared in clinging white flesh pumping one to the other, could see it shrink down to the size of a pear and then burst upwards again, pressing the ribs out so far that they creaked and cracked, little fracture lines running down the stuck-up grey bones where they had ruptured from his chest.
And his heart went: deDUM!
The shock of the sound had nothing to do with ears; it was long past the point where audible frequencies played a major part. His ribs twisted outwards with the blast, his whole chest rising up; then the force of the sound knocked into me and threw me back shaking, slamming into me so hard that all I could hear was a rumble like the sea.
We landed face-down on the floor and crawled away from him. It went again, deDUM! We covered our ears with our hands, with our elbows, buried our face in the floor and our knees in our face and again it went deDUM! The plaster cracked on the wall, and spilt trickles of dust; the lights hissed and swayed, flickered, began to shatter and go out. The two kids with the bloody ears were on the floor, blood running from their ears, their noses, their eyes, with ugly bruises where the blood from a thousand broken capillaries was spilling out beneath their skin. I tried to get up and another heartbeat knocked me down. We might have called out, we couldn’t tell, couldn’t hear anything but our own dying cells singing in our ears. His heart was going too fast, beating too fast for us to move, to stand a chance against the roar, everything we did took a heartbeat and one beat was one too many.
So we lay still. We pressed ourself into the ground, dug our fingers into the thick blue carpet, and let it buffer us, let the sound push us across the floor, deDUM! until we were up against the door, all twisted limp limb, and our head was screaming, bursting; our eyes ached in their sockets, such a frail little body to hold us and die and. . deDUM!
. . think sound. .
deDUM!
My fingers were knocked against the wall. Through a static haze, I looked at it. I pushed my fingers closer into the wall, sensed its warm dry touch. Then I pushed a bit deeper. I curled my fingers into it, felt the concrete slide around them, dug in up to my fingertips, up to my wrist, closed my fingers around the sense of it, and pulled. deDUM!
I saw the wall warp and twist, seem to shrivel into itself as its middle was dragged out along the pipe of my arms, saw grey dryness wriggle over our skin, settle between the gaps in our fingers, stiff and locked in place, run up our arm, crawl into our armpit, slide over our chest, press against our neck, a thick, suffocating solid scarf that dug into our throat, made it hard to breathe, tiny twitches of the lung within its fixed frame. I pressed my lips tight shut and closed my eyes, but still tasted the dust on my lips, dry sickly nothing sucking out everything good from sense, felt it dribble into my ears, snatched one last frantic breath before it bunged up my nose, a bad cold backwards, felt it dribble over my eyelids, slide into the hairs of my eyebrows and close over the top of my head. As the concrete drained down my legs, the wall began to buckle and bend in on itself, its substance sucked away; and before it could set around my knees, I stood up, and turned to face what seemed to be the source of the sound.
deDum!
deDum!
deDum!
Concrete locked my feet in place. My fingers were turned towards the heartbeat, I could feel it shake my solid shell, see nothing but darkness, breathe nothing, smell nothing, every sense blocked, except that distant
deDum!
deDum!
deDum!
My head was burning up, air that was no longer air unable to get out of my lungs, blocking my throat, a stone sinking deeper and deeper down into my chest, every part withering inside, every blood vessel in my body stalling, warping, fracturing. We were going to die, us alone in a concrete shell, die from a heartbeat in a basement in. .
. . in Willesden.
We didn’t want to die please no not the end not the end not back there not again not the end not us not no-sense not no-sight not no-colour please not prison again please not
Shut up!
please please please please
SHUT UP!
I listened for it, found the rhythm again, pounding against my shell, and as it came
deDum!
deDum!
I forced my legs to move. Strained against the concrete around my knees, forced my whole weight forwards, like a tree about to topple, felt it fracture, crack and as the deDum! split the world, I pushed into it. Against it. Turned myself against the sound, and sent it back.
The shock sent fault lines rippling up my shell, but that just made it easier to move, I listened again,
deDum!
moved again, pressing myself into it, pushing back on the sound with every gram of will and strength I had, saw light ripple across my vision as a fracture line ran across the concrete over my face, tasted dust worming between my lips, stepped again, each step a giddy flight up to boiling clouds and back down again, heart bursting inside, ready to pop, hammering dedumdedumdedumdedumdedum in tiny terror in our ears oh God not like this please please please
deDum!
Pushed against it, threw it back again, felt a shock run down the length of my spine as the backlash from the sound cracked my armour shell, felt concrete jar against my ribs as it began to tear and break, but I was moving now, dust falling from my legs, I had momentum and with each step I took, I sent as much sound bouncing back as I received. I could feel broken glass from shattered lights fall across the solid frame around my head, see the lights go out through the little spreading cracks across my vision, kept moving, pushing back against the sound like it was an avalanche and I a very angry rock.
deDum!
The concrete shattered around my right hand, I felt it fall away and my fingers come free, pale and dusted, felt the sound twist at my palm, try to crash down against the little bones in there, clenched my fist against it and kept moving.
deDum!
The lower concrete covering of my left leg fell away. I nearly fell with it; kept going, bowing head first into the force of the roar, and
deDum!
the concrete skull cracked; I could feel it rippling down my neck, playing pins-and-needles across my shoulders
deDum!
began to shatter; not around my ears, I prayed, sound and pain, no more pain, not there, not. .
deDum!
and our right hand was on fire, blood seeping down our wrist and we were nearly there, so close, red blood catching with blue fire, blue electric flames that spat and hissed and threw angry sparks across the floor as it writhed over our skin, electric oil burning electric flesh and we let it burn, let the fire spread throughout our body, set the cracks running through this concrete coffin ablaze, let the neon flame spread throughout and carry us that last pace as our lungs prepared to give up the ghost, fed them on fire and fury and
deDum!
and it was right there, right in front of us, we could feel it, hear it, knew it. We reached out with a hand on fire and felt our fingertips brush spiked bone as deDum!
the shock blasted away the concrete across our chest, ripped it from our neck, sent dust spilling out from around our ears and. .
One more beat of the heart, that’s all it needed, one more beat and goodnight and goodbye and. .
Our fingers closed around his heart. His contracted heart, waiting to pump. We could feel bright hotness, stiff, solid flesh, like a lump of uncooked steak, feel his ribs scratching at our dust-covered sleeve, feel the valves trying to move and expand in the claw of our grip. We held on tighter, fighting that strength back within his chest, pushing his heart shut within him, and it was strong but so were we, and we were on fire.
He screamed.
Big men shouldn’t scream. It’s the yowling of a baby with a soiled nappy, the wail of the kid on the landing plane whose ears have just started to pop. It’s pure and animal and ugly.
I shook the last of the concrete shield from me, tumbling it to dust all around. Glancing over my shoulder I could see the whole near wall was largely down, just a few foundation spikes and a lot of shattered slabs, and in my wake a floor of dust and broken dirt, running from the wall to where I now stood, fingers buried in the Executive Officer’s chest.
By the burning of our skin, by the bright electric fire running over our flesh, I could see his face, almost black now with the effort of death, and we hissed, “Tell us!”
His lips were the blue-black of an evening storm, his eyes were nearly all out of their sockets, the equators of the spheres starting from between his rolled-back eyelids. I relaxed the pressure on his heart a moment, let it beat a frail, constricted beat within my fingertips, then tightened my fist again. Someone, with a scalpel dipped in acid, had scrawled blessings, incantations, inscriptions and wards all over the inside of his ribs, carved them into the muscular wall of his heart. They were the only reason he wasn’t dead. They were the things that kept him almost alive.
“‘Give me back my hat’,” we said. “Tell us what it means.”
“Don’t know!” he wheezed, tongue waggling like a sick pup between his lips. “Don’t know!”
We tightened our fingers on a valve in his chest and he couldn’t even scream, there wasn’t enough blood and air. But his mouth opened, his head rolled back and every part of him spoke of agony until I relaxed our grip again. “What about the kid? Where’s Mo?”
“Took him. . hid him. .”
“Why?”
“Paid. Told. . paid. He came here. . he said to take him, hide him. The kid used to come here with his mates, he said to take the kid, kill the rest, I didn’t argue. .”
“Why?”
“Didn’t say. Just said he wanted kid hidden, just said. . he said. .”
I let his heart beat a shallow beat; then we dug our fingers in deep again. “Tell us!”
“Had to keep the kid hidden. Very special kid, he said, very special, gotta have a special end, needed someone who could get him snatched, keep him hid, kept him moved. .”
“You provided the logistics to a kidnapping?”
“Didn’t argue with him!”
“Where’s Mo?”
“Took him. . hid him. .”
“Where?!”
“Kilburn,” he hissed. “Raleigh Court. Gone, 53 Raleigh Court, took him, hid him, I was told, kill the rest, but Mo, keep Mo alive.”
We almost forgot to let his heart pump. The breath slithered from his lungs, his head began to sink. We tightened our fingers and relaxed, tightened and relaxed, forced the blood to flow. “Where in Raleigh Court?”
“Top floor, fifty-three, safe house.”
“Why?!”
“Didn’t ask. Paid. Scared. Didn’t ask. Just did.”
“Who? Who told you to do this? What did he look like?”
“He wore a suit. A pinstripe suit.”
“What did his face look like?”
“Pale. Slicked-back dark hair. Grey eyes. Pinstripe suit. Handkerchief in his pocket.”
“Who is he?”
“He said. . he said he. .”
We jabbed at the arch of his aorta with a fingertip and he screamed, screamed and screamed, shrieked at last, “His name is Mr Pinner! You can’t stop him! He’s not human!”
“Boring name for someone who isn’t human,” we snapped. “What is he?”
“He said. . he was. . he said. . he’ll kill me. .”
“Probably, sorry, sad loss. What did he say?”
His little eyes fixed on me from a face about to burst. He choked, “He is the death of cities. He’s here for yours. End of the line.”
His head started to roll back. We dug our fingers into his heart, but his mouth was a dribbling slackness, his great jaw hanging down almost as low as my fist buried in his chest. I let go of his heart slowly, saw it flicker feebly, and not move any more. We backed away a few paces, skin still burning by the fire of our blood running down our wrist. The furious blue glow of our anger began to recede into a paler neon-white shimmer. His blood, ordinary, boring, red, dribbled between our fingers. We backed away towards the place where there should have been a wall holding a door, saw the lights in the corridor burning towards the stairs. We walked away. His heart was dead behind me, a dead thing in ripped-apart flesh and we kept walking, but I wanted. .
Walk away
I wasn’t
walk away
we are
but that’s not what I
we do
Not human.
I turned and looked back at him. A great dead whale beached on a fluffy blue sofa. I raised my hands up to the ceiling, spun my fingers for the bright burning electricity in the air, dragged it down, let it ooze out of the lights, out of the walls, the floors, the roof, let it drag in from the mains and spun it like a cat’s cradle in the air in front of me, wove it between my bloody and dusty fingers, concrete mortar and human ooze fusing into ugly lumps on our flesh, twisted it into new and exciting shapes and, as we reached the bottom of the stairs, I threw it. It danced through the air, spitting our anger and frustration, and slammed into the Executive Officer’s heart.
Which went deDum.
We started to climb the stairs, as the lights behind us died and went out.
Behind us came the rhythm.
deDum deDum deDum deDum deDum deDum deDum deDum deDum
I fumbled for the door, opened it in the dark, and slipped out into the chaos of the club.
The dancers were in uproar. The bass to which they’d been dancing had failed, the lights had died, the electricity had been sucked out of the circuits and all this after paying an £8 admission fee and ridiculous prices for cocktails! If they weren’t so young and cool they’d write to the council and complain; as it was, being young and cool, they’d rather have free drinks or smash things, thanking you kindly.
Oda was leant against the wall inside the exit. The door was standing open, thin neon overspill from the streets pouring in. She saw me and said, “I’m guessing you didn’t have a toilet break. You know, if you’d told me where you were going. .”
We glowered at her and staggered out into the half-light of the street, trailing dust and blood in our wake. Anissina was leaning on the wall outside. I guess the two ladies felt they had nothing to talk about together. She looked me over and said, “Hurt?”
“My ears.”
“We can get you to a doctor.”
“No. No. Thanks. I’ll be fine.”
“He’ll be fine,” added Oda quickly. “They’re good at blood and dust.”
I ignored her, turned into the street. “I want. .” I hissed, and then didn’t know what to say. So I started walking instead, fumbling in my bag for a fistful of painkillers, my bloody fingers slipping off the cap. “There’s a. .”
“Where are you going, sorcerer?” demanded Oda, scampering to keep level with me.
“You” — I jabbed a finger at Anissina. “Tell the Aldermen, there’s a guy in there who does things. Wrong things. Tell them to sort it out.”
“Sorcerer!”
“Stop calling me that!” I had shouted. I hadn’t meant to shout. “Sorry,” I muttered. “Sorry. I’ll. . I just need. .”
I kept walking, nearly running now. A few hundred yards ahead was a pub, still open, lights still on, a place for men with puffy noses and not much conversation. I pushed through the door, past the flashing bingo machine and tables an inch thick with old dried spillage, looked around, saw the sign, followed it, marched into the toilets. They were dirty, everything chipped, toilet paper across the floor. Who these people were who came into public toilets and threw paper around, I did not know. A guy with a faintly ginger beard and a ruffled blue shirt was already in there. We said, “Out.”
He left without a word. Oda marched through the door behind me, while Anissina, more discreet, loitered in the opening. It took three taps before I found the one hot tap that was working. I stuck my hands under it and scrubbed, felt thick dust and clogged blood break free from my skin, saw it swish down the sink in red dribbles and little black lumps where the two had combined. My hands were shaking, we were shaking, as strange a physical reaction as we had ever experienced. I stuck my head down as far into the low sink as I could get it, threw water over my face, buried my face in it, closed my eyes and let the warmth seep into them, leach dust from my eyelashes, let it run over my lips and into the mortar-filled cracks of my skin. My sleeves were stained with blood, not mine, and I scrubbed uselessly at them with toilet paper and cold water until Oda said, “You know, that’s not the way to do it. You need to get it in a soak.”
“No time.”
“OK. Why not?”
“I know where the kid is.”
She gave a little laugh. “So all that walking was for something. Did this guy at the club do it?”
“No. He’s just logistical support. A guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who has a van and a few friends who don’t mind lifting a kid quietly off the street and carting him away with a gag in his mouth. He’s just a bit of executive muscle, nothing more. Mo’s in Raleigh Court.”
Anissina looked up sharply. Oda shrugged. “And. . is this is an ancient Indian burial site?”
“It’s where Nair died,” said Anissina quickly. “It’s where the Midnight Mayor died.”
“Does that make it mystically significant?”
“Not of itself,” I said. “But I got a hint as to who killed him.”
“You’re full of it today, sorc. . you’re full of it today,” she said. “Go on, then. Who did it and will they die quiet?”
I wiped my soaking hands on my coat, felt water drip off the end of my nose and trickle under my chin. “His name is Mr Pinner. That’s who killed the Midnight Mayor.”
“A name is a start. Anything else?”
“Yeah. He said he was the death of cities.”
“How typically pretentious of the man,” muttered Oda.
Anissina said nothing, but her eyes were locked onto mine. She knew, she said nothing, but she knew; she was that smart. “Oda,” we sighed, “has it ever occurred to you that, if there’s mystic protectors out there protecting us, there might be mystic nasties out there we need protecting from?”
“Sure it has,” she said evenly. “That’s the problem with all things mystic.”
“That’s the problem with life,” I snapped. “By your logic, the communists would have nuked the capitalists and the capitalists the communists and never a bomb would have been irrational.”
“Is this the time to talk philosophy?”
“No. Please shut up and go away.”
She shut up. She seemed surprised. She didn’t go away.
Finally, Anissina, seeing that Oda wasn’t going to, said, “Raleigh Court?”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
“I’ll call back-up.”
“You have ‘back-up’?”
“Of course.”
“Like guys in bulletproof vests?”
“Something like. Even sorcerers can’t stop bullets.”
“I don’t think I like you either.”
“I’ll make the call,” she replied, and reached into the depths of her black coat for a phone.
Back to Raleigh Court.
The bus was full of late-night revellers going home. At the bus stop, a guy with curly hair was bent over the nearest bin, bile dribbling down from the corner of his mouth. On the bottom deck, a young woman’s mascara had run from crying and now she sat stoically next to a middle-aged stranger who looked older than he was, and who politely ignored the tears in her eyes. Three separate pairs of lovers were holding hands. Two of them were doing a bit more than that. On the top deck, a group of six revellers with big boots and matching black hair were jovially exclaiming on the woes of the world in loud, cackling voices, punctuated every now and then by a cheerful “Oops! Had a bit too much!” followed by more hysterical laughter.
The revellers thinned as the bus journeyed on, staggering away in small groups into the drizzle at the bus stops. A thick, rattling wind was picking up, a proper north-west stonker that came in sideways round every street corner and whistled across the chimney tops. We didn’t want to go back to Raleigh Court. We didn’t want to meet Mr Pinner, more than anything else, we did not want to meet him. There was more than just mindless pretension to the name of the death of cities.
Lights going out in the houses, streets reaching that moment when passers-by stopped being safety in a company and became lonely dangers walking through the night. Urban foxes poking their noses out, lured by darkness and the smell of wasting food, trotting down the pavement closer and closer to the wanderers every year, less fearful of humanity, stretching their thin bodies through the railings of public parks, the masters of daylight invisibility, and night-time rulers of the streets.
The driver of the bus, as his vehicle became emptier, began to drive like a proper night racer, the empty streets tempting his feet towards the accelerator and fingers over to the higher gears. We were at Raleigh Court quickly — too quickly for my taste, and the three of us got off, as unlikely a collection of mystic storm troopers as had ever assembled.
Anissina said, “Kemsley is bringing support.”
“Support and back-up — you do take your work seriously.”
“Yes,” she replied flatly. “I do.”
I looked at Oda, half-expecting her to want to charge straight in. She saw my look, and said simply, “It’s only in computer games that you get to reload after the zombie kills you. I can wait for support. I am good at waiting.”
“We’re not.”
“Deal with it.”
*
I waited.
Every second we spent standing by the bus stop, looking up at the square slab wings of Raleigh Court infuriated us, made our skin itch, hair stand on end. But I’d seen the films, and I knew — the guy who went in first was either the first one dead, or a tortured hero going solo because no one else could do it. I wasn’t prepared to be either. So I waited, fingers turning blue, hair slowly soaking through with drizzle, laced with a slight sting of acid.
I knew it was Kemsley the second I saw the big blue truck turn round the corner at the end of the street; I just couldn’t bring myself to believe it. When it lumbered to a halt in front of us, the back doors opened and five men with body armour and rifles got out. I laughed. We couldn’t help ourself; I put my head back and laughed.
Kemsley climbed out of the front seat and glared at me. “Funnies?” he asked.
“Sorry. Serious face.”
“You wanted back-up?”
I jerked a thumb at Anissina. “She wanted back-up.”
“Any good reason why?”
“You don’t seem pleased to be here.”
“And you don’t seem to consider the cost to the local councils this little operation will incur,” he replied. “Overtime fees, vehicle rental, health and safety, logistic support, equipment and maintenance, property damage, personal and third-party insurance, property insurance. Management and finance aren’t your specialities, are they, sorcerer?”
Our jaw tightened. “We’re looking for a. . thing calling itself — himself — whichever — Mr Pinner. I imagine he’ll introduce himself something like this. ‘Hello. My name is Mr Pinner. I am the death of cities. Do you think bullets can really stop me?’ I mean, I’m just speculating, but that’s all I’ve got at the moment. Thanks for coming.”
“What do you mean ‘the death of cities’?”
“I don’t know. It’s a bit vague. I mean, on the one hand, it might be a pretentious title adopted by a man who spends too much time playing online fantasy games or an attempt to confuse and befuddle his opponents — in which case congratulations to him for a successful scheme! On the other hand, it might be exactly what it says on the cover. A walking talking thing in a pinstripe suit who is, quite literally, the death of cities. The embodiment of the end made flesh upon this earth, one of the riders of the urban apocalypse and so on and so forth. It’s just not clear yet.” We put our head on one side, stared straight into his eyes. “Are you going to stick around to help us find out?”
Now it was Kemsley’s turn to tense. “Tell us where and when, and we’ll handle the rest — if you’re not up to it.”
I pointed into Raleigh Court. “In there. Where Nair died. We’re looking for a safe house run by an individual called Boom Boom. The Executive Officer of a nightclub called Voltage who got a little bit scared of a guy in a pinstripe suit and agreed to help him kidnap a kid who liked to visit his club. That’s where the shoes went, by the way. They like clubbing. Pity the owner lacked moral fibre. And a heart. But anyway — somewhere in here, we hope, is the kid Mo. And that would all be fine and grand of itself, except, you may have noticed, this is where Nair got the skin peeled from his flesh. It’s number 53, top floor. Shall we meet you up there?”
“You know,” murmured Oda, “testosterone is one of the many ways in which God tests our natures — women, as well as men.”
“Sorcerer. .” began Kemsley.
“I swear, I swear, the next person to call me ‘sorcerer’, as if I didn’t have a name and a small intestine, will get a sharpened pencil shoved firmly up their flared nostril.”
There was a slightly taken-aback silence. Then Kemsley said, “Mr Swift.”
“Yes?”
“Are you ready?”
“Sure.”
“Good. As Midnight Mayor. .”
“You want me to go first?”
“No. I want you to stay as far back as you can.”
“With pleasure.”
They did the assault/SWAT thing. Rifles, corners, kneeling, standing, running, climbing, gestures — fist, two fingers, flap, twiddle — the whole lot.
We tried not to laugh as we trailed along behind. Even Anissina was playing along, pistol in hand. You have to have a lot of training to be a storm trooper, we concluded. It wasn’t just about learning when to duck and when to fire; it was about learning to take yourself seriously as you did it. I looked at Oda in the hope she was appreciating the humour. It was a naive look.
As council estates went, the interior wasn’t so bad. Someone had recently painted the stairs an unoffensive pale blue, and there was a general soft smell that I associated with my gran’s cooking and fat cushions on padded chairs, and the regular shifting of dirt by plastic brooms and warm soapy water. The troopers stormed the stairs; I shuffled along behind. Number 53 was, as promised, on the top floor, a long balcony punctuated by the occasional bike, kitchen windows and wilting geraniums. The Aldermen and co. clattered along to the green door, spread themselves out around it, and at a cry of “go!”, kicked it open with a heavy studded boot, and threw something in there that went snap! There was a burst of bright light and a high buzzing noise. I leant against the edge of the balcony and looked down into the courtyard below, wondering where Mr Fox had gone and if my furry friend was eating enough kebabs. The armoured men counted to three, then burst inside the flat, shouting impressive things like “clear!” or “go go go!” as they did. Oda said, “Gum?”
“You chew gum?”
“No. But I always carry it, to use as barter when visiting prisons.”
“Do you see how I’m not asking?”
“Smart. So, how scared are you?”
Inside I could hear the thumping of many heavy boots, the slamming of many light doors, the rattling of many, probably futile, loaded weapons.
“On a scale of one to ten?”
“If you insist.”
“Where one is ‘so doo-lally-happy I could jump off a cliff and whistle numbers from The Sound of Music on the way down’ and ten is ‘can’t open the window in case the air eats me’ scared?”
“If you feel obliged to use these assessments — then yes.”
“Pretty much up there.”
“Why?”
“Why do you care?”
“Because,” she said carefully, as in the flat lights began to be turned on and orders barked in brisk military voices, “being, as you are, an arrogant spawn of the nether reaches of creation, for something to have frightened a creature so relentlessly self-certain as you, it must be significant. It is in my interest to know about it.”
I smiled sideways at her. We respect honesty, even if we can’t stand its owner. “You’ve never heard of the death of cities.”
“As a concept?”
“As a man.”
“Then no. I never have.”
“It’s a myth.”
“Like the Midnight Mayor?”
“In that sort of region, yes. Just a rumour, a legend. You hear stories. Stuff like. . when the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, there was a house right in the middle of the blast, at its very heart, untouched while the rest of the city was levelled. They say that there was a man in the house, who had his face turned towards the sky as the bomb fell and who just smiled, smiled and smiled and didn’t even close his eyes. But then again, you’ve got to ask yourself. .”
“. . who survived that close to the bomb to tell?”
“Right. It’s always the problem with these sorts of stories. Or they say that when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, there was a man who walked through the flooded streets and laughed and the water could not buffet him, or when they firebombed Dresden there was a guy untouched by the flames, or when the child tripped running into Bethnal Green station during the Blitz, that there was someone who knocked her down and climbed over the bodies piled up in the stairway. Myths. That’s all. Rumours and myths. And just in case these things aren’t scary enough on their lonesome, they just had to go and give this smiling, laughing, burning man a name, and call him the death of cities. Naturally, I don’t believe a word of it. And yes, of course I’m scared. Just in case.”
She looked, for a moment, like she was going to say something else. Then Kemsley was there, and his face did not glow with happiness.
“There’s nothing in the flat.”
I shrugged. “Makes a kind of sense.”
“If you thought. .”
“I thought. I thought that Boom Boom probably wasn’t going to lie to me, what with me having my hand in his chest cavity at the time. Then I thought Nair came here; Nair was killed. It makes sense that whoever — whatever — killed him would only do so if Nair was getting close to something important. It makes even more sense to have moved that something to somewhere less likely to be found. Sorry. I just can’t pretend I’m surprised.”
“Then why are we here?” he growled.
“Think how stupid you’d feel if we’d known about this place and just ignored it,” I said, beaming as sweetly as we could in the face of his dentistry. “Let’s have a gander, yes?”
Kemsley was right.
The place was empty.
Surgically empty. You could have removed cataracts in the kitchen; you could have skated across the bathroom floor. It smelt of bleach, a stomach-clenching, eye-watering smell. No furniture, no curtains, no pictures, no nothing to indicate any sort of life. Even the carpets had been bleached a faded grey-white, even the pipes. An estate agent would have called it “full of promise”, and that’s all it was, four rooms of great potential and not much else, being walked over by size-twelve assault boots.
Kemsley said, “Nothing. See? This hasn’t helped at all.”
“Mo was here,” I replied firmly.
“How’d you know that?”
“The Executive Officer didn’t lie to us.”
“Sure. Because no one would.”
“Because we had our fingers closed around his heart,” we replied. I felt cold, hearing us speak so flatly of these things. “Because when a place is cleaned this thoroughly, it’s because there is something to hide.”
“Great. Good job the hiders, I think it’s pretty well hid, don’t you?”
I looked around.
He was right. It made our chest ache to think of it. Kemsley was right. There was nothing here.
Then Oda said: “There’s a CCTV camera in the entrance hall. So much for mystical stuff.”
I could have kissed her.
“A CCTV camera,” I repeated firmly, trying to hide our sudden thrill. “And only one way in and out, yes?”
“I think so.”
I beamed at Kemsley. All praise the poor fire regulations of North Kilburn. “We can use CCTV,” I said. “There’s. . what? At least a dozen cameras around this estate alone, probably more in all the high streets. You lot seem like escapees from an American spy thriller, right? If they moved him, we can track it.”
“Assumptions. .” began Kemsley.
“Not really,” retorted Anissina. “Not at all. We know Nair came here, and Nair was killed. We know that the shoes of this boy were regarded by Nair as important; we know they led us to Voltage, we know that Voltage led us here. We know that this room was sometime full and is now recently empty. We know that these things are connected. You’re wrong, Kemsley. If the boy was here, we must find him, and we can.”
We fought down the desire to say something triumphant, to stick our tongue out at Kemsley and hug Anissina round the middle, to hop on the spot and gloat that despite everything, despite our fear of oh God of too many things, we were right. This was right.
Then a voice from the door said, “There’s a guy in the courtyard.” Kemsley ignored it, turning to Anissina, face red, clearly trying to find something to say that wasn’t the grown-up equivalent of a farting sound, trying to be rational in the face of his own crippling irrationalities. We turned to the man who’d spoken. A trooper, an escapee from another world, all gun and big boot and only the slightest whiff, the merest tracery suggestion that on the inside of his bulletproof vest, someone had stamped a set of defensive wards. We walked slowly towards him, his face turned down across the balcony edge into the courtyard below. I could feel Oda watching me; the Aldermen busy in their bickering. The man on the door had a face like a swollen mushroom, from which peered a pair of sharp, smart eyes. I said, “What guy?”
He nodded down at the courtyard. “That guy.”
I shuffled to the balcony and looked down.
He stood in the middle of the courtyard, black shoes planted firmly on the cracked paving stones. His hair was dark brown, not quite black but doing its best, sliced back thin over his almost perfectly spherical skull. His suit was black, his hands were buried in his trouser pockets, buttoned jacket swept back behind his wrists, as casual as a primrose in spring. His skin was that special kind of pale that has been tanned by neon strip lighting. His smile was polite, expectant. His eyes were fixed on us.
We jerked back instinctively. Our heart, without asking permission, started doing the conga down our intestines, our intestines tried to throttle our stomach, our stomach tried to crawl up our throat. I looked at the guy with the gun; he looked at me and said, “Sir?”
“We have to get out,” we whispered. “We have to get out now.”
“Sir,” he muttered, and he was too well trained to pronounce fear, but it was there, we could smell it, “there’s more.”
We crawled like a child to the edge of the balcony, peeked over the edge. There was more. A kid in a hoodie had joined the man in the pinstripe suit, standing behind, bobbing to an unheard beat. I couldn’t see his face. I didn’t think there was going to be a face to see.
“We have to get out,” we whimpered. “We have to go!”
Oda had noticed. “Sorcerer?”
“He’s here. He’s here, he’s here, he’s here, he’s. .”
She leant over the balcony. “Who, him?”
“Him!” She was reaching for her gun. “Don’t shoot!”
“Why not? He’s just a guy, and even sorcerers can’t stop. .”
“Bullets don’t stop spectres.”
“The kids in the hoods?”
“Spectres, yes! You’ll just make holes in them.”
“All right. So how do I kill them?”
“Beer and cigarettes.”
“If this is one. .”
“Beer and cigarettes! Get down!”
We dragged her down from where she was leaning over the balcony behind the protection of the yellow brick wall. She looked at us in surprise. “Are you really that scared?”
“Really, honestly and entirely. From the bottom of our being, yes.”
“But he’s just. .”
“No just.”
By now, everyone was paying attention. Kemsley strode forwards, looked at us in contempt, peered over the balcony, turned to the man with the mushroom face and said, “What is this now?”
“Possible hostile down below, sir,” replied the soldier briskly.
“It’s just a man in a suit, and a couple of kids.”
“See the kids’ faces?” we snarled.
“Well, no. .”
“Spectres!”
“And you propose what? Cowering behind a brick wall until he goes away?”
“It’s a sensible start.”
“Is this. . did this man below kill Nair?”
“He peeled the skin from his flesh.”
“Then that is Mr Pinner?”
“I’d guess so.”
“Then this is it! This is our chance to end it, right here!”
“Didn’t you pay attention to the part where he peeled skin?”
“Someone has to do something.”
“Someone doesn’t know what that something is!”
“And you do?”
“No!”
“I don’t have the patience for this game. .”
“Kemsley, if he could kill Nair without touching him, think what he’ll do to you.”
“Sir?”
It was the note of urgency, that ever so slightly unprofessional rise at the end of the trooper’s words, that brought all attention to him. He nodded down at the courtyard and said, “He’s gone, sir.”
We all peered over the edge of the balcony.
There was no one there.
“Well,” exclaimed Kemsley brightly. “Not so much trouble.”
“So much worse,” we whimpered. “So much worse.”
“Pull yourself together! My God, you’re supposed to lead us! Sorcerer, angel, Mayor, get your arse in gear, Swift!”
I climbed to my feet, leant against the balcony wall, looked, looked again, saw nothing, staggered back, pressed our back into the wall behind us, safe and solid and reassuring. I turned to Anissina and said, “Call 999.”
“You want me to bring the emergency services?”
“Yes, fire, ambulance, police and the Good Samaritans too, please. Do it! You — ” I turned to Kemsley. “Find out if this place has a big and loud fire alarm. Then start it. You — ” I looked at the trooper with the mushroom face. “I don’t suppose you know anything about magic?”
The end of his nose twitched as he thought about it. “Yes, sir,” he conceded. “But to tell the truth, there’s nothing a magician can do that a shotgun won’t do better.”
“Don’t hold on to that thought,” I sighed. “Get back inside the flat. Watch windows and doors. And walls, for that matter — you never know where they’ll decide to come in. You — ” I stared at Oda. “You know, I have no idea what it is you do to stay alive, but I guess you must do it well, so do that.”
“Leadership skills,” she retorted. “You can look them up another time.”
We were going to say something rude, but nothing seemed to come to mind. We hustled back into the flat, a tumble of black coat, armoured soldier, armed fanatic and sorcerer in “What Would Jesus Do?” T-shirt. What would Jesus do, we wondered? He seemed to have an occasional temper.
The last man in was Kemsley. He closed the door behind us, pulled the chain across, as if that would make a great deal of difference, and hustled us all into the largest room of the flat, at the end of the hall. The troopers took up various armed-to-the-teeth positions, and I found myself shuffled to the back wall. The street was behind us, neon yellow light sifting through the curtainless glass, the occasional distant swish of traffic. I could hear Anissina on the phone, whispering quietly and urgently.
“Yes. . they’re armed. . armed men. . shotguns. . and burning bottles. Raleigh Court, they’re at. . yes. . yes. . no, Raleigh Court. .”
I thought of the phone in my bag. Where was the Midnight Mayor to rescue us? I’d died once before and the bastard hadn’t shown up then on a chariot of winged steel, and now that we had the job, who was going to get us out of trouble? I opened my satchel, looked inside at the spray paint and old socks. Nair’s phone sat sullen and silent in one pouch. I pulled it out. There was a number there, it occurred to me, just one number in that great list that might actually be some use. Not yet, though — not quite yet. I slipped his phone into my pocket and looked up at the door. Kemsley half-turned and whispered, since this seemed to be what the moment called for, “What now?”
“Oh, you just had to. .” I began.
The lights went out. They went out on the balcony outside, and in the stairwell. They went out in the streets behind us, in the streetlamps and the little “ready” LEDs on the TV sets in the houses opposite, they went out in every room of every flat in the court, they went out in number 53, they went out in the waiting warning lights of the sleepy cars below.
Londoners almost never see proper darkness, not true, black-as-black, turn-from-the-sun, smother-the-moon darkness. Even when the curtains are drawn in their darkened rooms, there will be the shimmer of street light through the tiny gaps at the edges of the window frame, or the ready waiting light of a radio, or the glow of their mobile phone left on in the dark. There is no darkness darker than the darkness of the city, when all the lights go out. The stars and the moon are lost behind the bricks of the buildings. I snatched a sliver of neon as the last lamp went out outside, cradled it to my chest, let it warm the skin of my face and my curled fingertips, a tiny yellow shimmer in perfect black suffocation.
Then a trooper said, “Lights.”
I heard the racketing of equipment, the tearing of velcro, and as the first torch went on, it nearly blinded us; we flinched away from its white glare. Oda had a torch too — where she had concealed it I didn’t want to speculate — and for Anissina and Kemsley. . we had to look twice, but yes, for certain, as I looked at the Aldermen, their eyes glowed. The mad, wild, spinning marble glow of the dragon that guards the gates of London. The sinking red vortex of an angry tiger burning bright, the kind of stare that looked at you and saw just an inanimate object standing between it — for those eyes weren’t human — and some more worthwhile meal. There’s reasons people fear the Aldermen.
We waited.
Silence. Nothing. On the whole surface of the planet, there is nowhere that silence is perfect — an engine will rumble in the distance, a bird will sing, an insect will scuttle, a leaf will sway in the wind, a footstep will fall, a brick will crumble. This was not a perfect silence either: the wind was humming outside, a low mournful tune from some forgotten folklore that had accepted death and now found the subject mundane; the drizzle was turning into rain that rattled like a thousand tiny ball bearings against the glass. But nothing in it that was human. I felt for Nair’s phone in my pocket, felt the burning brand on my right hand, aching.
Then Oda said, “I smell fumes.”
At once I looked up, and it seemed that the whole room in unison drew a long, deep breath through the nose, and all at once we all smelt what she, sharper, had detected — the unmistakable warm dry whiff of car fumes drifting across the floor. I risked a little more brightness to the neon glow in my hands, pushing the orange-pink bubble of illumination towards the door, and saw it, thin greyish-brown trickling smoke crawling in through the gaps, spilling over the floor.
I drew my light back, half-crawled to the window, and looked out. In the street below, a thing that might have been fog but for the sickly brownish thickness of it was rising, tumbling out of the exhaust pipes of the cars parked below without a sound, filling the streets like some swaying alien sea and still rising, crawling up the sides of the buildings and slithering through the gaps at the sides of the doors.
The troopers were already reaching for gas masks — say what you would, they were prepared. Kemsley and Anissina didn’t seem to care, their skin taking on a strange silverish tone, their nails already two inches too long, but in Oda’s eyes, even as she tied a scarf across her nose and mouth, I could see the fear. I drew my own scarf across my nose and mouth, but that still left eyes, already starting to sting and itch with the dirt crawling up in gaseous form from the door and floor.
And we heard, somewhere not so far off:
Dededededededededededededededede. .
And perhaps a hint of:
Duhdeduhduh duhdeduhduh duhdeduhduh. .
I looked back out of the window. It was a long way down, deeper since we now couldn’t see the bottom. By the faint neon clutched between my fingers, I could see the sickly fumes twist and spin around Anissina’s breath, as it seeped slowly from her peeled-back lips. She still superficially resembled a human — two arms, two legs and all the bits in between — but her skin had a metal shimmer to it, her hair a wire quality, her tongue a twisted red forked sliver on the air. The fumes didn’t seem to be bothering her. They were bothering us.
Then the door opened. I said, “No, wait, don’t. .”
Kemsley said, “Shoot it!”
Gunshots in a confined space are like having popcorn explode inside your eardrum; automatic gunfire was the popcorn, the bag, the oil and the whole microwave. I half-saw in the flashes from the barrels a figure, all hood and faceless shadow, staggering back as his clothes were ripped to shreds, as fabric popped and burst backwards and outwards and severed and snapped and spat and the men emptied out every bullet they had in the barrel, I could hear the clitter-clatter of falling casings, smell over the stench of the exhaust fumes the sweeter stench of burning powder and overheated metal and, when it stopped, I could hear nothing but banging in our head and taste nothing but dirt and smoke and see nothing but afterburn star flashes on the inside of our eyes. “Stop!” we screamed, “Stop!”
And they stopped. Eventually.
I crawled to my feet, pressed my neon bubble into my chest for childish safety. In the torchlight, I could see the thing standing in the door. Its clothes were nothing but a scalded, smoking spiderweb, blasted threads clinging to each other by the thinnest strain of grey fabric, hood shot straight through so I could see the smog rising behind it, look straight through that non-face, through the nothingness, empty air, that supported the almost nothing of its clothes. The spectre seemed more surprised than hurt, its hood turning downwards as it examined the shrivelled remnants of its garb, no flesh beneath, nothing to suggest that anything worse had happened to it than a saunter through a very thick shrubbery. Then its head — the emptiness that was its head — turned upwards and seemed to fix its attention on the nearest soldier, who, without a finger falling upon him, started to scream.
It was an animal noise, pure and without thought. It wasn’t just that his vocal cords were tightened by agony or terror, it was his whole throat, his lungs, every part of him that had anything to do with air, seemed to clench. His feet left the floor, his fingers spasmed wide, the gun falling down at his feet, his face went back and his throat seemed to buckle. He screamed and screamed so loud and so high and I could see the bottom of his ribcage seem to twist into it, heard it buckle, snap and crack like dry cereal hitting hot milk, pushing more air up through his mouth.
Then we saw it. A thin line of redness drew itself across an eyelid, tiny and vivid in the torchlight, then another across his cheek, then another down his chin, then another over the twisted, warped protrusion of his tortured windpipe, then another, and another, slashing through his nostrils, inside his nostrils, across his lips, over his gums, over the white of his eyes that began to fill with scarlet blood as, faster than the mind could register them, his skin began to break and crack, tear and slice and slide with a thousand little dribbling cuts, never longer than an inch, never wider than the thickness of a sheet of paper, and now there was no air left in his lungs to scream by nor nothing in his body that seemed to let him inhale but he hung suspended there as his skin cracked and parted and sliced and his eyes went red and filled with blood and his teeth stained with blood and there was just blood and the rattle of his bones and breaking cartilage of his windpipe and Kemsley was screaming, “Do something, do something!” in a voice that rolled unnaturally deep and full of bubbles from inside his throat and we realised he meant us, do something, and there was still the spectre in the door just watching and Oda stepped past us, levelled her gun at the soldier’s head and fired. Just fired, just. . did it. But his head rocked back and his body jerked by the cuts still kept cutting, slicing under his nails, tearing apart his flesh, wiping away all trace of skin except a few loose white shreds like the thin roughness of dry skin exposed to too much sun, drooping off bright red flesh.
We looked at the spectre. We opened our hands and snarled, let the neon bloom around us and bending our head like an angry bull, charged for it, past the dead body being turned into dead meat in an assault jacket, through the door and slammed the top of our head crown-first into the spectre’s chest. We felt something resist, the strength and softness of a pillow, and kept on pushing, driving the spectre back to the edge of the balcony and there, on the very edge, bent down all the way and tipped it, grabbed it by its trendy trainers and hurled them up with all our strength, vision a blazing blue, and threw it hood-first into the smog below.
It fell without a sound. No voice, to make no noise.
We straightened slowly as it vanished into darkness, turned and by our neon glow stared into the face of the man known as Mr Pinner, the death of cities. We were sure of it. He stood at the end of the balcony walk, head on one side, smiling at us. Just smiling, hands in pockets. He looked. . ordinary. An ordinary man in a silly suit, no taller, possibly a few inches less, than we stood, in his thirties and trying not to think about middle age, smiling, an expression of almost fond amusement, like a teacher watching the smug pupil in the class struggling with an idea that the other kids have already grasped.
He didn’t seem to have anything to say, just stood and smiled.
Then we said, “Mr Pinner?”
And his smile flickered. Just for a moment, it flickered. Recognition — surprise.
Then Kemsley had pushed past me, he was shouting, roaring, an animal snarl from animal lips, he’d forgotten which fire was anger and which was fear, which was cause or effect, and just shoved straight past me, gun in one hand, flames, bright, gas-stink flames shedding carbon crispiness, in the other. He fired, emptied the entire magazine at Mr Pinner and threw the fire, a billowing burst of cooking stench and searing heat. We covered our eyes, heard it hit, heard the soft whumph of it slamming over a solid mass, smelt burning, just charred and crispy burning, heard tortured warped glass crinkle and crack.
I opened my eyes. Mr Pinner was standing in a shroud of smoke and fumes. His pinstripe suit was untouched, not even scorched; but the bullets had entered his flesh. I could see a mass of them, five, bunched in the middle of his chest. He looked at them with mild disinterest. Then he reached carefully with thumb and forefinger, and stuck them into the nearest bullet hole. His lips and eyes narrowed in concentration as he twisted and turned his fingers inside the gap in his flesh. They tightened; he pulled them out. There was a small, snub bullet in his hand.
I looked for blood. There wasn’t any. The hole in his chest was white, an off-white beneath the padding of his suit, and the only thing that seemed to come from it was a tiny slip of paper. It slipped from his flesh, dropped onto the floor, tumbled over the balcony towards us. I bent down to pick it up, even as Kemsley screamed and threw more flames, belched electric sparks from his sharpened teeth, fumbling in his pocket for more ammo as he did.
I scooped up the piece of paper. There was lettering on it, faint, in dull ink. It said:
Thank you for shopping at Tesco.
Mr Pinner was still standing, still unscathed, Kemsley pushing another magazine into his pistol. I grabbed him by the shoulder, was shrugged off, grabbed him again and hissed, “You can’t kill him like this!” and dragged him back into the flat.
I kicked the door shut behind us and Kemsley collapsed against the wall. His eyes were streaming, clear lines streaking down the dirt clinging to his face, to all our faces, from the ceiling-high smog now filling the room. Oda was coughing, even Anissina looked unhappy, and our lungs burnt, ached, our eyes stung, every part of us calling for water and none to hand. Our head wanted to fly away from our stomach, our stomach wanted to see what it was like where the feet were at. We pressed our hands against the door, whispering, “Domine dirige nos, domine dirige” — the old blessing of the city, “Lord, lead us” — telling the lock, dear lock, be our friend, just for a minute, be our friend.
“My bag!” I wheezed. “Paint!”
Oda staggered forwards, half-tripping over the skinless, faceless, humanless flesh that had a few moments before been a guy with a gun, opened the satchel hanging off my back and handed me a can of paint. I drew quickly, the first ward that came to mind — a cross within a cross, in bright blue paint. Someone was trying to force the door, slamming it back on the hinges, but as the last dribble of paint went on, the thundering stopped.
A voice from outside said, “Are there Aldermen in there, by any chance?”
It was a polite, well-educated voice. It knew the answer to its own questions. The paint on the door began to burn, to bubble and peel. I turned to the window and said, “Only way out.”
No one, not even sobbing Kemsley, seemed inclined to argue. Not any more.
“No way down,” pointed out Oda.
We strode to the window, slammed our palms towards the glass. Not touching, we didn’t need to get that close, the movement and the magic were enough. The glass burst out, not a shard left in the frame, and tinkled merrily away down into the swirling smog below. Oda leant out, tears — not of sorrow, but of pain and chemical suffocation — running down her dirty face, and said, “We don’t know what’s down there.”
“Gotta be better than in here.”
“We’ve no way down.”
“Don’t troopers carry rope?” We turned to look at them. They shrugged, and didn’t offer rope. “Terrific,” I sighed. I looked up to the ceiling, smelt paint simmering, roasting, heard Anissina say, “He’s coming through the door!”
I reached up to the ceiling. I could taste electricity, still feel it lending me a little more strength, a little more speed. Electricity that happy meant something friendly to carry it in. I heaved with all my strength, closed my eyes and told it to come to me, to bring its friends with it, strained and dragged until my head spun and my knees bent, felt dust falling in my hair and down my face, mixing with dirt, smog and tears, and here it came, the great coils of wire, twisting out of the ceiling, the floor, the walls, spinning and spitting like angry snakes on a hot plate, rising at my command. I waved furiously at the cables, commanding them towards the window, imploring, please, please, please be my friends. .
Bricks tumbled from the walls, the whole building seemed to creak as length after length tore from the crackling gaps in the floor: a tarantula’s web, an earthquake’s playground of cracks rippling and writhing as the cables crawled at my command down the side of the building. I gestured furiously at the nearest trooper, “Get your arse down it!”
He looked with doubt for a moment at this snapping, angry coil vanishing into smoggy darkness, but good training and a better brain were his saviour, and he threw his leg over the window ledge and wriggled down into darkness without a word. Coughing and hacking, I gestured more troopers towards the cable, caught Oda as she staggered, legs wobbling in the fumes, and felt her immediately pull away from my touch, as if I was somehow dirtier than her. Even with death knocking, I had time to feel a soft warmth in my throat that might have on a better day been sorrow.
Then Anissina said, “The door!”
I turned, saw a flash of light around the hinges, heard the bolts snap, then bury themselves in the ceiling, saw Anissina stumble across the twisting floor as more cables crawled from beneath us and lashed out of the walls in a zigzag of twisted wire. I saw Kemsley raise a child’s face, too much going on for that mind of his to comprehend, look up towards the door, and see for a moment in it a man in a pinstriped suit, from whose chest thin wafts of paper tumbled where there should have been blood.
Then Kemsley started to scream, and it was the same pressed-down scream of Nair, of the soldier who had died, of lungs that couldn’t stop, of a throat drawn too tight for anything other than sound to escape, and I grabbed Anissina and half threw her out of the window, one wrist tangling in cables as she dropped, heard her shoulder crack and a cry burst from her lips, saw those mad red eyes that weren’t her own.
“Oda, get. .” I began, but my words were lost in the sound of Kemsley’s scream, and there was Mr Pinner in the door, smiling, just smiling like always, and the spectres behind him, filling the balcony, faceless non-eyes staring straight at us. I felt a tear down my arm, felt a stabbing across my hand, a burning below my eye, tiny, microscopic, agony. We looked at our fingertips and saw the ringed pattern of our flesh part in a tiny, crawling line of blood, too shallow even to ooze, and knew in an instant we would scream like Kemsley and die like Kemsley and that would be the end, it, unnameable it, whatever that was, goodbye to sense, goodbye light, dark, fear, sorrow, pain, blood, flesh, humanity, mortality, Midnight Mayor. .
So I said, “No!” because that was all I knew.
And we saw a tiny droplet of blood rise from our breaking flesh, and that was enough, just enough. We looked into Mr Pinner’s smiling grey eyes, and raised our right hand, skin breaking inside the fingerless mitten, and screamed with the beginning of our final breath, “Domine dirige nos!”
The world went blue.
Beautiful, electric blue. Blue blood dribbling down our fingers, blueness blazing across our eyes, blue fire spilling from our hands, blue fury in our veins, blood blue inside and out, soul blue electric rage, we are the angels, we be light, fire, life, freedom, fury. .
and all I knew was
set our blood on fire!
he wasn’t scared
not even of us
but then, that hadn’t been the point.
We turned our hands down towards the floor of writhing wires and spitting cables, burst up from the carpet and the concrete, and turned the fury of our fire downwards, shook our fingertips until that single drop of blood that had wormed out of the paper-thin cut on our flesh shook itself free and fell.
When it hit the floor, it went boom.
And for a moment, even Mr Pinner looked surprised.
The floor buckled. It creaked, it twisted, it bent, it sagged. The cracks ran across it, up the walls, and crawled into the edges of the ceiling.
Then the floor collapsed.
It went out beneath me, beneath Oda, and beneath Kemsley. We tumbled in dust and shattered cable that flopped like dead creepers from the hole of our passage, spilt like so much old flour in a torn sack down into the floor below. I bounced, head hitting the lower end of a sofa, feet knocking over a coffee table — we had fallen into someone’s living room. Oda landed on her feet, like a cat, rolled and rose in a movement, twisting away from the radiator against the wall and coming up by a small shelf of cheesy books. Kemsley fell where he had fallen above, a limp bloody sack in the hall towards the door. I rolled to my front, then crawled to my feet. Nothing felt broken but that meant nothing, we were on fire, blazing inside with fury and terror and stolen electricity snatched from the wire, pain wasn’t going to get a look-in until it was too late to care, so we didn’t care, staggered forwards, tried to pick Kemsley up and found his sleeve saturated with blood that slipped from our fingers. “Oda!” we screamed. “Help us!”
She was forward in an instant, ducking her head under one arm and lifting him bodily, crouching and rising like a weight-lifter at the gym to get the man to his feet. His face was a nothing, an acid burn from which strips of loose whiteness dangled, but his breath still came, even as the hair fell from his head, the roots torn loose by the laceration his skull had received. I heaved open the front door, ran onto the balcony — no spectres, not yet — ran to the end, snatching electricity from the walls around me until our skin was bright white lightning and our hair stood on end, saw the stairwell by the faint neon glow clutched to my hand, heard above,
De de de de de de de de de
And maybe:
Kaboom kaboom kakakaboom kaboom kaboom. .
Even Oda, superhuman, subhuman, inhuman, utterly human — didn’t know, didn’t care — even Oda was struggling with the dead weight of Kemsley. I took his other arm, slipped it over the back of my neck, dragged him into the stairwell and downstairs, staggering and stumbling in the faint glow of neon by which we ran. Ground floor; courtyard, the courtyard where Nair had died, smog, so thick that two steps were two too many and now behind was nothing more than a vague recollection lost of all geographical meaning, and “out” was a naive illusion from brighter times. I felt in my pocket, found Nair’s phone, shrieked at Oda, “Road! Get to a road!” and she chose a direction; faith, random, someone had to choose.
So we staggered/ran/fell in our bubble of stolen pinkish-orange light, could have been at sea, could have been alone in the world, no way to tell, just silence and perhaps:
Chachachachabang chachachachabang. .
De de de de de de de. .
Kakakaboom kaboom kaboom kakaka. .
Nair’s phone took all of time and much of space to warm up; then did; I found the phone book, I flicked through; a number, a long shot, but still a number. It was labelled Black Cab and nothing more, no company, no nothing, and that was why it was a shot fired in the dark. I called it, our staggering in the smog had found a wall, not an exit, Oda pressed us to it as she directed our course and used it as a guide, coughing and choking as we staggered through the dark.
A voice on the other end of the phone said, “Black Cab, how may I help you?”
“I need a ride!” I whispered it, but the words came out an old man’s wheeze through the scarf across my nose and mouth.
“From where to where?”
“Raleigh Court, Kilburn, to anywhere safe!”
“What time do you require collecting?”
“As soon as possible!”
“Very well, sir, please make your way to Raleigh Road and a cab will be there to collect you in the next few minutes. .”
I hung up, Oda had found dustbins, dustbins rang a bell, it was near where I’d found my Mr Fox. I hissed, “This way!” and dragged her by the weighty bridge of Kemsley in the way I thought I remembered the road. A few steps on, and Oda trod on something and hissed. I looked at it. A trooper, one of the Aldermen’s, lay on the pavement in front of us, a penknife stuck calmly through the wrinkled pipe of his throat.
“Quiet!” I whispered. “Quiet!”
We stopped, and listened.
De de de de de de de de de. .
“Where is he?” hissed Oda.
“Don’t know. Shush!”
Kakakaboom kakakaboom kakakaboom. .
“Sorcerer. .”
Fear, not question, reassurance, not answers. She could probably have done with answers, but knew better than to think I’d have any going spare.
I curled my fingers tighter around our neon bubble, let it become nothing more than a tiny flame between my clutching fingertips. “This way,” I whispered. We staggered forwards at an old man’s totter, each step the one before the last that ruptures that ageing artery, this one, maybe this one, maybe now. . so we kept moving, counting maybes, no sound except the tiny whisper of a bass beat in a pair of headphones and our own gigantic shuffling steps.
When we reached the pavement of the road, I nearly tripped on it, feet staggering into a gutter full of foul, blocked and rotting leaf-mould-rain. I hissed, “Here!” and Oda stopped too.
“What now?” she asked.
“Shush! Listen!”
We listened. There was a faint wind now, blowing in from the edges of the smog, promising, somewhere, a slightly fresher air. It blew something else. I looked down at my feet. A small piece of paper had blown up from the gutter and tangled round my ankle. I half-bent down to pick it up. It was a piece of newspaper, torn at the corner. It said:
SHOCKER IN
CHERYL SAYS
utrageous party pranks have led
commented to said that she wo
me back my
of the
en
I looked up.
The only light was coming from my fingertips. It seeped upwards over a foot, no more, from where I stood, before becoming lost in the smog. I should have been able to feel his breath, had he lungs to breathe. I felt his toes brush mine; hard leather toes pressing down on the soft space of my too-big shoes, where my toes should have been. Mr Pinner smiled. We screamed, “Oda, ru-”
His hand came up. It was holding something bright and shiny, which stabbed down towards our eye. We caught his hand, wrapped our fingers around his sleeve and let the neon blaze, let it burn from inside us and screamed again, “Oda, run, get to the end of the-”
His other hand came up and pushed into our throat, pressing our chin back and taking the rest of us with it, and now we could see what was in his raised hand. It was a fountain pen, titanium-gold, hinting at all the shiniest colours of the silvery rainbow as he brought it down towards us, the end stained slightly with black ink. Even ignoring what he was, what he might be, the threat of that stuck through our eye filled us with enough terror to lend us strength, and we let the electricity blaze across us. It should have killed him, would have killed a man, set his hair on fire, but it just flickered harmlessly over his flesh and down to earth, didn’t even singe his suit, and we could hear Oda staggering down the street and see the nib growing bigger and bigger, filling the left-hand side of our world.
The phone in my pocket started to ring. I screamed, “Oda, get to the cab, get to the. .”
An engine started at the end of the road, I saw a light, a bright orange-yellow light, letters lost somewhere in the smog. “Oda! Oda, get to the-”
Mr Pinner’s fingers tightened around our windpipe, pushing down on the thick muscles, and his eyes were our universe and he murmured, “What are you, blue-blood?”
The orange light grew closer. I could hear the rattle of a great, old engine, that would one day shake itself apart in a shower of bolts and blackened iron, and run without a hitch until that happened. We looked him in the eye and replied, “We are Swift, and I am the angels!”
I let go of his wrist. I let his fingers push back on my throat, I tumbled head-over-heels, flopped back like someone had replaced my bones with jelly and caught him off-balance, threw his entire weight forwards as I went back and kicked and jammed my elbows together as we fell, tried to push my bottom into the pavement as being my least delicate part, landed badly, felt my leg twist beneath me and rolled, heaving him to one side and pushing him away. His fingers fell from my neck and I crawled up, my fingers tangling in his suit, which didn’t tear. It didn’t come away from his flesh, didn’t reveal the shirt beneath, but stayed fused to him, as if a very part of his body and skin. No time, not now, not now. .
We staggered back onto our feet and ran, waiting for the pain of a thousand paper cuts, ran towards the yellow light, saw Oda already by its source, pushing the bloody Kemsley into the back of the cab, and there it was, TAXI in large letters against the light and it was big and black and curved and belched black smoke from its rear and shuddered on its rickety suspension and it was a black cab, no, not enough: it was the Black Cab, its skin so black it stood out deeper against the darkness; its windows so fouled over with dirt and unwashed filthy rain that you couldn’t see inside, its wheels spitting smoke, its engine roaring like a caged animal. Oda was already halfway inside. I tumbled in after her and shouted at the driver, “Out of here! Go!”
He put his foot to the accelerator.
We went.
There are stories. Some of them, unlike most, are true.
Stories of. .
A train that goes round and round forever on the Circle Line, will go for ever, will never stop, never rest, never take on a new passenger except for those who know the secrets of the Last Train and when it runs.
The Night Bus, which collects the spirits of the dead who died sleeping and alone in the dark.
Lady Neon, whose eyes are too bright for any mortal to look on without being driven mad.
The Black Cab, which can go anywhere, whose driver has heard of Isaac Newton and thinks he missed a few points, and which will always charge a fare. Usually, a very high fare.
Something to worry about at a later point, we decided.
One problem at a time.
Oda said, “He’s not dead.”
Kemsley lay on the floor of the cab. The driver’s voice drifted in from the intercom, his face lost somewhere in the murky darkness behind the glass shutter. “If he bleeds on my floor, you’ve got to pay for cleaning.”
I said, “Strap him to something.”
She scowled but, grunting and groaning, heaved him into one of the fold-down seats on the backwards-facing side of the cab, and strapped him in. I buckled myself into the seat behind the driver, and added, “Now strap yourself in.” The belt felt hard across my chest, stiff, and a little bit too slippery.
“Why?”
I pointed at a sign. It said, “Passengers Must Wear Seat Belts At All Times”.
“Is this. .”
“Do it.”
She looked at us, saw through the dirt and grime and knew better than to argue. She strapped herself in. Kemsley was something from the butcher’s yard that had been left out in the rain and the sun for too many weeks, and by this process acquired a twisted mimicry of life. The driver said, “So where can I take you?”
His voice was a muffled crackle over the intercom, the red LED on the door a little bit too bright, the windows between us and him a little too dark. All I could see was smog in the bright headlights of the cab. I leant forward and said, “The City. Corporation of London. The Thames.”
“That’s three places.”
“Are we caring if the Alderman dies?” asked Oda carefully.
I looked at her, saw a face hacked by stone out of an iceberg, looked at Kemsley. It occurred to us, for a moment, that we didn’t care. Not our problem. I said, “Damn. Damn damn damn. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital for Women, Euston Road.”
“Righto.”
I could see the red lights of the tariff metre in the front of the cab. They were clocking up numbers and letters as we drove, but not by any mathematics I knew.
“You want to go to an abandoned hospital?” asked Oda. She was getting her breath back, wiping dirt from her eyes with hands dirtier than her face: instinct, not practicality.
We turned sharply to her. “If the Order raids it, when this is done, if they attack the hospital, if they dare go after the healers, we swear, we swear we will bring you and them down.”
She just smiled. “Right,” she said. “More magic.”
“Sure, because black cabs just happen to drive into magical war zones on a regular basis,” I snapped.
“I am serene, am I not?”
“Getting used to it?”
Her face darkened, but she said nothing. The head of our driver was just a black outline peeking out from behind the slab of his headrest, lit up only by the reflected glow of his headlights and the dull red illumination from the tariff metre. I looked across at Oda and said, “You carry much cash?”
“No. Why?”
“Cab rides are always expensive.”
Especially this one.
“You’re worried about the fare?”
“I thought you’d be pleased with me. A good, noble, avoiding-whichever-sin-it-is sentiment.”
“He sees your heart, not your smile,” she intoned.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that twenty quid slipped to a cabby can’t redeem your soul.”
“That’s a ‘no’ on the fare, then?”
“Yes, that’s a no.”
“Fine.” I turned away, and our eyes passed over Kemsley. He was leaning forward against his seat belt and wheezing. I could see the veins pumping through the remnants of the skin on his neck, jerking in and out like some obscene production line in a food factory, filling with thick blue blood and then deflating to a bruised tube among the ruined mess of his skin. We looked away. Outside, the smog seemed to be lifting, streetlights flashing between the sickly mist, reflected orange stains moving from back to front across the ceiling of the cab, too fast and too erratic to pick out any shapes or shadows. I thought about Anissina. I slipped my hand into my jacket pocket for Nair’s phone, thumbed through the address file, found her right near the top, dialled.
“Who are you-” began Oda.
“Anissina.”
“Why?”
“She might still be lost.”
“We can’t do anything for her, even if it should be done,” replied Oda primly. “She falls or she fights. That’s how it is.”
A phone rang on the other end of the line, and kept on ringing. There was no reply. It went to answerphone. We hung up. We knew better than to leave our voice floating as electricity in the wire. Outside the window, the smog was almost entirely gone, just a few loose traceries being washed away by falling rain, that slipped sideways like tiny transparent snakes across the taxi’s window. I could see flashes of houses, but that’s all they were — shadows that came and went in some impossible, too-far-off distance, perspective playing tricks, architecture playing tricks as terraced house melted into flashy apartment melted into rickety shed melted into bungalow. It gave us a headache to look at it, would have set an epileptic screaming. Oda had noticed too, a warning was in her voice: “Sorcerer?”
“Don’t look too hard.”
“What is this?”
“It’s the Black Cab. It goes anywhere.”
“Does it take the North Circular?”
“Oda! That almost sounded like desert-dry humour.”
“It wasn’t.”
“It doesn’t take the North Circular. If Einstein had seen how the Black Cab moved, he’d have given up physics and gone back to playing the trombone.”
“Einstein played the trombone?”
“I don’t know. But it would fit the hairstyle.”
I had the sense we were picking up speed. I risked glancing out of the window. Signs drifted by, seemed to hang in gloomy nothing, pointing at nothing, suspended in nothing, just floating by in the darkness outside, lit up by no source I could see. The road was nothing but a black shimmer beneath us, defined only by the painted-on markings that lit up blinding yellow and white as we skimmed over them. In the distance, I could see neon signs drifting by like a lit-up ship far out to sea, promising plays, shopping, films, long hours and cheap prices. A billboard drifted by too slow for the speed our wheels were spinning at, the long eyelashes of a perfume-soaked model blinking at us from the pale paper; a single pedestrian, hat drawn down across his eyes, every inch of him as dark as shadow, without variety in texture or tone, vanished round an unseen corner, not once looking up. We felt suddenly tired, sad and alone. A blazing billboard advertised a car whose engine revved inside the hoarding’s plywood frame; it floated up overhead, drifted above the roof of the taxi and set down on the other side. A great fat rat, larger than any urban fox, looked up from where it was chewing a grey-green soaking hamburger, and blinked a pair of bright red eyes at us as we drove by. A short road of bright pink streetlamps flashed, came, went; a lorry, as tall as a house, driver lost in the soot-black, burnt-black darkness of his roaring vehicle, streaked by outside, horn blazing: a sheet of spray containing more than its fair share of goldfish and flapping river eels slapped over the cab. A pair of headlights flashed for a second, then vanished; a pair of pulsing yellow bulbs declared a zebra crossing, on which a zebra grazed, its skin carved from curved aluminium, its legs glued together out of old toilet rolls. It chewed on spilt chicken tikka with a patient gnaw and watched us as we sped on.
Oda whispered, “Obscene. Damnation. Obscene.”
We replied, “Beautiful. Just beautiful.”
She stared at us in horror. “How can you pretend to be human, and not be afraid?”
“It is beautiful,” we replied. “You’ve just got to look at it right. Of all the things, the frightening and inexplicable things, the terrifying and the chaotic and the uncontrolled, you just had to pick on magic to fear and hate, in that order and in equal measure.”
“Don’t think you know me, sorcerer.”
“Is there anything more to know?”
That seemed to silence her. We were almost surprised, and felt again a thing, strange and hollow, that might have been sadness. The beat of Kemsley’s blood, pushing and falling against the protruding pipe of his veins, was slowing. There was no point pretending it was our imagination; that just made it worse. No point asking the driver to go faster. If Einstein couldn’t work out how the Black Cab moved, we certainly couldn’t; and besides, back-seat drivers just made the fare steeper when the cab stopped.
One problem at a time.
“Oda,” I said carefully, “when we get to where we’re going, we’ll have to pay a fare. It’ll be. . more than money. It may be. . almost anything. Don’t argue. Don’t shout, don’t haggle. And, for the sake of all that’s merciful, don’t try and shoot anything.”
“Why more than money?”
“The Black Cab can go anywhere. I mean. . anywhere. Get your mind outside the boring three-dimensional trivialities of geography and you still haven’t come to terms with it. We’re not going there. Humans can’t abide ‘anywhere’; they. . we are built for very specific environments. It is only natural that the fares are steep.”
“Sorcerer?”
I sighed. “Yes?”
“The man in the suit. He’s not human.”
“No.”
“He bleeds paper.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. There are constructs that can bleed things other than blood, but I’ve never seen one looking so ordinary as him. And he’s clearly not ordinary. Not human, not ordinary, mortal. His suit was part of his flesh; he bleeds receipts, old bits of newspaper. A summoning of some sort? But then he shows so much independence: he speaks, he enquires, he demonstrates amusement. Most things summoned from the nether reaches are incapable of much more than slobber and slash.”
“You don’t know how to kill it?”
“No.”
“That seems like quite a major problem.”
“Yes.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“What?”
She tilted her chin up to my face. I felt under my eye, found a tiny, almost imperceptible brownish stain of blood running down from my eyelid, where a paper cut no longer than a child’s toenail had been drawn across my skin. “We be blue-blood burning,” we sighed, wiping it away.
“What does that mean?”
“Mean? It is what we are.” I glanced out of the window, saw the distant windows of a lit-up Underground train fading into the night, the flicker of a traffic light going red, amber, green, green, amber, red, too fast and rhythmic to be real. “He didn’t seem to realise that I’m. .” I rubbed my right hand. “He doesn’t seem to know I’m the Midnight. .”
“Didn’t do you much good, did it?”
“Kemsley” — drooping flesh with a pair of shaven lips sitting opposite us, couldn’t look — “said something about inauguration. Ghosts and streets and midnight mystic doings.”
“Didn’t do Nair much good, did it?”
“No.” We were silent a while. A thought was pushing at the edge of speech, trying to get out. It was strong, angry, with claws for fingers. We let it out. “But that may have been the reason Nair made us Midnight Mayor.” Oda raised an eyebrow, a perfect half-moon. “The Midnight Mayor is just a human with complications. And we. .”
“Aren’t,” she concluded. I said nothing. Thinking too much was always trouble. “What happens now?”
“There was a CCTV camera. In the hallway below, a CCTV camera, and only one really viable way out. CCTV everywhere.”
“So?”
“So even if Mr Pinner — the man in the suit, the death of. . even if whatever he is destroys the camera, there’ll be an archive somewhere, records. Better than sharing the memories of pigeons, they couldn’t muster more than a day of recollections. There’ll be something, somewhere. The Aldermen can trace it, they have. . they take their work very seriously. We can still find the boy.”
“You think it’s that important?”
“I think that if Kemsley dies, then it’s because Mr Pinner thinks it’s that important. I think that Mr Pinner had Boom Boom abduct the boy from his club; I think that’s interesting. Why keep him alive? He said alive. So yes. Find the boy, find some answers. ‘Give me back my hat’. He might know. . he has to know something.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
“Well, I would hope that if I get flayed alive and the city burns, you’ll have the good manners to die an excruciating death with the rest of us.”
“Sorcerer, have you ever wondered why you have never been appointed to a managerial position before?”
“My honest honest face?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.” She paused, sharp eyes fixed steadily on Kemsley. “You really think finding the boy will make this better? Stop what happened to Nair happening to you?”
“Yes.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not.”
“Why?”
“I think you’re doing it for this woman — Loren. I don’t think there’s enough proof for any of it. Mo, Mr Pinner, the club, the shoes, the ravens, the Mayor. A lot of circumstance, but nothing else. I think you want the boy to be involved. Then you can help her while helping yourself.”
I thought about this a while.
Lights turned and drifted outside, a thousand miles away, as tall as a skyscraper pressed up to the eye of the window.
“OK,” I said. “All right. Yes. She’s lonely. She’s scared. And we are. . we have never had a friend. Just strangers out to get something done. Acquaintances with an agenda. Never this thing, ‘friend’. I want something ordinary. It was nice. It was unremarkable. Just a friend. That’s what they say, isn’t it? We’re ‘just’ friends.”
“Matthew?”
“Yes?”
Silence. Just the rumbling of the taxi’s engine.
A moment that might have been something different.
“We’re slowing down.”
Just a moment.
I looked out of the window. I could see the reflective black slab of Euston station, the slow flickering lights of Euston Road, crawling into existence in the darkness. “Yeah,” I said. “We are.”
My satchel was on the floor. I picked it up, rummaged through for my wallet. I had £40 left. It wouldn’t be enough, but it’d be a start.
The streets were becoming more solid, pavements growing out of the gloom, shopfronts edging closer and closer towards us, growing bricks and settling their way into solid reality. The driver’s voice came in over the intercom.
“Anywhere round here in particular?”
“If you could just drop us off outside the main entrance. .”
“No problem.”
We turned, actually turned, something I couldn’t remember the cab doing in our whole journey, down a side street off from Euston, round the back of a grey office block and a Gothic fire station, towards a red, turreted building with broken windows and bright blue hoarding all around its walls, stuck with signs saying, “DANGER KEEP OUT” and posters for dubious gigs and, of course, scrawled in white paint over the blue hoarding by the door:
GIVE ME BACK MY HAT
The Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital for Women. Abandoned by almost everyone and left to rot. Almost being the important part.
The taxi slid to a stop outside the padlocked dark entrance, covered over with plywood. There wasn’t any traffic on the street, not at this hour, not even night buses turning onto Euston Road towards King’s Cross. Even the lights in the hotels ahead were out, even the receptions just distant dim puddles. I had to remember to breathe, watching the dark shadow of the driver’s hands reach up to check the tariff, to stop the clock, watching a hand push back the plexiglas between him and us, waiting for the damage.
“It’s thirty quid,” he said, just a voice drifting in from the driver’s compartment.
“What?”
“Thirty quid,” he repeated.
“OK. Great. Thanks.”
I fumbled in my wallet for the money.
“And her gun.”
I glanced at Oda, whose lips pursed. I mouthed, please, and she reluctantly pulled a gun from a pocket, all black metal and power, and pushed it through the gap between passenger and driver compartments. As her fingers slid in, a hand moved in the front, locked down on her wrist and dragged her forward so sharp and hard I heard the seat belt lock around her chest and saw her face wrinkle in pain.
“Her hand,” said the driver. “You seen her hand?”
I realised he was talking to me. “Um. . yes?” I hazarded.
“You seen the blood?”
I glanced instinctively at her fingers, grasped in his, stretched across the panel separating front from back. I couldn’t see any blood, not a shimmer of darkness on that deep chocolate skin, dry and thick.
“No?” I mumbled.
“Hey, now, I just drive cabs you know, but I gotta tell you, I’ve noticed, and it wasn’t like that a few years ago. Fucking government!”
“Um. .”
“Immigrants! I mean, I’m no racist, some of my best friends are foreign, but no one can deny it’s a problem and now look at this.” He dragged her hand forward and Oda cried out as her chest strained against the seat belt, which seemed to refuse to budge. “Look at this! A disgrace!”
I couldn’t see his face, couldn’t see if he was smiling, joking. There was just a dark oval where features should have been. “Here’s your thirty quid,” I mumbled, leaning forwards against the line of my seat belt, forty pounds in hand. “Keep the change.”
“£30, her gun, her hands.”
“What?”
“What?!” Oda didn’t do shrill, but she was close.
“You see the blood?” asked the driver. “Look at it! Dead wizards, dead magicians, dead witches, dead warlocks, dead, dead, dead — and you know, none of my business, but the smell! It’s just been rotting down under the skin for like, you know, like years. Little brother and little sister and little sister and all dead and rotting and you know, sure, you know she buried them back home but they’re still rotting, can’t stop the air, you know? It’s like the fucking taxman, gets everywhere and you’d be surprised how long it takes the eyes to decay until they’re no longer staring, it’s the casing, you see, once the outer muscle’s gone then the jelly just sorta evaporates. Nah, trust me. Better this way.”
He pulled at her hand, so hard that Oda now cried out, face bunching in pain, dragging her forward against the tightness of her belt. “Wait!”
He meant it, he actually meant it, the silhouetted black oval shape of the driver: he was going to pull the hand from her arm, pop it out of the bones and just pull until the muscle tore and it was snapped away from her flesh, just like that.
“Wait!”
I tried to lean forward, but the belt held me back. I fumbled at the catch, but it wouldn’t open, wouldn’t unlock. I tried to duck my head beneath the diagonal strap, and it just tightened, so sudden and so hard I was pressed back against the seat barely able to breathe, choking and wheezing. Oda wasn’t a screamer, wasn’t a moaner, but every part of her shook with pain; I could see the skin around her wrist turning strange beige-white, hear every terrified breath.
“Wait!” I shouted. “For God’s sake, wait! Look at my hand before you take hers!”
The dragging stopped. The pressure on Oda’s arm seemed to relax for a second. The strain of the seat belt against my chest relaxed a little; in the tiny extra space it allowed, I gasped for breath.
“Let’s take a gander,” said the driver.
The belt let me lean forward just far enough. I got the glove off my right hand, slipped it through the narrow gap in the dividing glass, unfolded my fingers. The twin red crosses were still burnt on my skin, glaring in the gloom. I felt a pair of hands, metal-cold, steel-hard, take my palm and turn it this way and that, dragging me further towards the driver’s compartment. The belt was cutting into my throat, a dull knife against my windpipe.
This close, I could see more of the driver’s face.
Nothing to see.
The black, face-shaped, featureless thing that I had glimpsed from the back of the cab was, close to, the same. Empty, a pair of carved eyes around a carved nose and a pair of carved, slightly parted lips, drawn out of ebony darkness. Taxi drivers are among that great mass of people in the city who you go out of your way not to notice — just extensions of the machine. This one had taken it literally. His back melted into the chair he sat in, his feet were the pedals. His fingers clackered like the click on the fare indicator when he moved them over the palm of my hand, tracing with one metal fingertip the twin crosses.
“So,” he said finally, “you’re like, you know, Midnight Mayor, yeah?”
“I guess so.”
“What happened to the last guy?”
“Killed.”
“Shit. See? Didn’t I tell you? I mean the radio talks about it plenty but no one listens — times are getting hard. Fucking politicians. Corrupt, the whole lot. Need a clean sweep, if you ask me.”
The pressure around my hand released. I drew it back, rubbing at the fingermarks in my skin. Then Oda’s hand was released as well, and her gun handed back.
“Keep the thirty quid.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Midnight Mayor’s got an account. Direct debit. I’ll send the bill to the Aldermen. Receipt?”
“The Midnight Mayor has an account?”
“Yeah. Jeez, didn’t they fucking tell you?”
“I’m new.”
“You should get your act sorted, I mean, seriously! The perks, man, the perks of a cushy job like that — if I had the damn perks you think I’d ever walk anywhere? Hell no. Bureaucrat fat cats — hey, but all respect, like.”
Oda had undone her seat belt, so I undid mine. It snapped free in a perfectly ordinary, respectable way. A piece of paper was handed back to me. I took it carefully. It was a receipt. It said:
Thank you for using Black Cab Ltd. Your account will be billed at a later date. Have a pleasant onward journey.
And a serial number.
One problem at a time.
Keep moving. Don’t stop to think. Thinking only led to trouble. Keep moving. Your body is smarter than your mind. It gets hurt easier.
Oda and I unloaded Kemsley from the cab. There was no gentleness in what we did; there didn’t seem any point. Nothing we could do could possibly make it worse than it was. The taxi rumbled away behind us; Oda dragged Kemsley by the armpit. I hammered on the plywood door of the hospital, slashed at the padlock, which was smart enough to know when not to argue, unlocked the door, barrelled Oda and Kemsley inside.
“Hello?! We need help!”
Dead, dark corridors. Buddleia was growing out of the walls, water dripping down into stagnant, green-drifting pools, walls of faded drained colour, floors of broken forgotten trolleys and shattered old glass. I dragged neon out of my skin, tired, we were so tired now, wanted to sleep, hadn’t slept for too long; too many days, too many nights, it seemed longer than it was, too long; by the pinkish glow I managed to drag into my hands I spread light across the corridor, called out again, my voice inhumanly loud, “Help! We need help!”
A voice from the darkness said, “Well, don’t stand there fussing, come on!”
I dragged the light across the shadows cast from the shattered, badly boarded-up windows, to where a nurse stood, wearing an old-fashioned blue and white uniform, complete with peaked hat, hands folded neatly in front of her apron, watch hanging off its silver chain by her breast, a pair of sensible shoes turned slightly outwards, toes towards the distant walls. Her steel-grey eyes fell on Kemsley. She tutted. “Well,” she said, “hardly nothing, is it?”
Oda looked at me in surprise and unspoken question. We didn’t answer, but helped her drag Kemsley down the rotting hall, following the nurse to where a chipboard blue door had been pushed back into a room full of yellow foam. It had been dribbled along the cracks of the walls and floor, along even the ceiling, in an attempt to stop the cracks spreading, and keep out the wind; but it had expanded too much, and now the room looked like a great yellow fungus had come up from the bowels of the earth to colonise with sticky alien threads this friendly, dripping, rotting warm planet for itself.
There was a trolley in the middle of the room, all metal slat and thin white covering, and a single lamp. The lamp wasn’t connected to any power source, but hummed and glowed with white electricity despite itself. The nurse clapped importantly, and we lowered Kemsley onto the trolley. She waved us back, barking, “Are you friends or family?”
“Neither.”
“Then you cannot remain for the procedure!”
“But we. .”
“How was this done?” she asked, examining the shattered skin.
“By a creature who bleeds paper and calls himself the death of cities,” I replied with a sigh.
“Have you given him anything?”
“No.”
“Not for the pain?”
“We didn’t have anything.”
“Does he have any allergies?”
“I don’t know.”
“Disabilities, is he diabetic, asthmatic, cursed, bane-spawn, epileptic, any long-term medical conditions?”
“None that I know of.”
“He’s an Alderman, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. Kindly call the office of the Aldermen and request full medical information is sent here as soon as possible.”
“Can you do anything for him?”
“I can always do something, but that may simply be the relieving of pain. This is not a place for miracles! This is merely an A and E ward that happens to have a subspeciality in magical injuries! That does not mean we can perform magic beyond the laws of nature!”
“Is he going to die?”
“Everyone is going to die,” she replied. “And when, is a question no one, not even the NHS, can predict with any accuracy. Now if you will excuse me, I have work to do and you are not going to be able to assist me. Shoo!”
In the corridor, Oda turned her gaze upwards and murmured, “What kind of place is this?”
“It’s what it says on the cover,” I said. “An A and E ward that happens to have an unusual speciality.”
“And is there a fee here?”
“It’s NHS.”
She shrugged, waiting for my meaning.
“Free.”
“The NHS runs a unit specialising in magical injuries?” It was a question that maybe wanted desperately to be a shout.
“Yes.”
“Taxpayers’ money is going to. .”
“Magicians pay tax.”
“You don’t.”
“I did. I know the thrill of a rebate and all. And look on the bright side — the Order kills so many magicians so efficiently so much of the time that we are rarely a burden on the NHS in our old age. That, or we feast on newborn babe’s blood by moonlight and thus spare ourselves the indignity of the nursing home.”
Her face darkened. “In the taxi. .”
“Let’s not talk about it.”
“What he said. .”
“Is true. We’ll only fight if we have this conversation. You want to keep me useful, I want to keep you useful. We don’t want to get hung up on the details. Let’s not talk about it.”
She shrugged. “OK.”
We were silent a while. Then, “What now?”
“I guess we should do what the nice lady said.”
“The nice. .”
“The nurse. Let’s talk to the Aldermen.”
Just a thought.
Anissina?
Dead meat in assault gear.
Smog and biting cables dragged from the floor.
Anissina?
Just a thought.
Too much thinking is trouble.
Someone had to call Earle.
It was always going to be me.
“H-H-Harlun and Phelps.”
The boy with the stutter was on duty on Earle’s number, even in the little hours of the morning.
“It’s Matthew Swift. You might remember me. I want to talk to Earle.”
“M-M-Mister Earle is a-asleep.”
“Does he sleep in the office?”
“I’m his p-personal assistant.”
“You should get another job.”
“C-can I. .”
“Tell Mr Earle that Kemsley is in hospital, probably going to die; that Anissina might be dead already, along with a number of your pet mercenaries; and that the death of cities is in London and wearing a pinstripe suit, please. He’ll know how to contact me.”
He did.
He contacted me in under two minutes, and didn’t sound like a man who’d been asleep.
“Swift? What in God’s name is going on?”
“Nothing in God’s name, unless you want to discuss theology with Oda. But enough to go around for the rest of us.”
“What is this about Kemsley? And Anissina?”
“He’s dying, Mr Earle. His skin has been peeled from his flesh — most of it, from what I can see. Anissina is. . I don’t know where. She isn’t answering her phone. She vanished into smog and that’s the last I saw of her. We were attacked by a Mr Pinner. He bleeds paper, bullets won’t stop him, magic won’t stop him, his suit is sewn into his flesh. And. . no, no I think that’s about it. I don’t want to rush to conclusion, but I think we’re buggered. Oh, and the nurse wants to know Kemsley’s medical history.”
“What nurse?”
“We’re at Elizabeth Anderson Hospital.”
“Have you been followed? Is this Mr Pinner there?”
“We took the Black Cab.”
“I wish you hadn’t. The bill will be. .”
“We were being flayed alive by a man with a smug smile, Mr Earle. I’m sure you don’t want to go through the trouble of having to find another Midnight Mayor so soon after the previous incumbent died that particular death.”
“Christ. Jesus fucking Christ,” muttered Earle. “Don’t move. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
He was there in fifteen.
What kind of man wore a suit to bed?
He brought minions. Aldermen: nameless, stone-faced men and women. How we loathed Aldermen.
“Where’s Kemsley?”
I jerked my head at the door. I’d had to let the light go out in my fingers, too tired to hold it. I’d found a bit of wall that didn’t look like it was going to collapse immediately, and made it my friend. The Aldermen had torches. They hurt our eyes.
“In there. There’s a nurse looking after him. You’d better not be too rude. The NHS has a policy on rude visitors.”
Earle gestured at the chipboard door, and one of the black-coated silent Aldermen detached himself and drifted through it, pulling it shut behind him.
“What about Anissina?”
“I told you. I don’t know.”
“What about my-”
“I don’t know. One is dead, at least. We got separated. Mr Pinner was waiting. I guess he must have known we’d go looking again after Nair died there. I guess he didn’t mind, until we got too close to the flat where the kid stayed. Then he did his thing.”
“What about this kid?”
“Not there.”
“So at least one of my men is dead for nothing?”
“No. At least one of your men is dead for confirmation that Mr Pinner is a mean son of a bitch who would probably have a bit of a giggle at a strategic nuclear strike. Also for confirmation that Nair was killed by this. . thing. And to prove that the kid is connected; to conclude that this whole bloody thing has been tied up in a way that gives me a migraine just to think of; and to find that there was a CCTV camera in the stairwell. I know it’s not like dying to save puppies and children, but I’d go to the funeral and we’d honour their memory with true gratitude.”
“You’re gabbling, Swift,” snapped Earle.
“I’m a little fried.”
“How did you survive?”
“It was all a bit of a blur.”
Earle glanced quickly at Oda, who turned her head away. It meant something, that movement — I just didn’t know what. Add it to the list.
“This CCTV camera” — the guy could prioritise — “It was working?” “When I last checked. You people have a thing for this, right? I mean you’ve done the assault rifles and stuff” — we wanted to laugh, or possibly cry, or some hysterical thing in between, a madness on the edge of my voice — “so you’ve gotta be up there with the whole spy surveillance shit, right?”
“We can probably manage something.”
“Good. You should probably do it soon. I’m guessing Mr Pinner is kinda pissed that anyone survived. He’ll probably come looking. And we’re not in any condition to fight, not against a guy who can’t die.”
“There are scratches on your face.”
“Paper cuts.”
“He. .”
“Yes.”
“What is he?”
“You’re asking me?”
“Yes. You were Bakker’s apprentice, and whatever he was in life, there is no denying that he was an expert in these matters. Do you have any idea what this Mr Pinner is?”
I thought about it long and hard. “No.”
“No?”
“Not a clue. Not a finch’s fart. He’s going to kill us, isn’t he?”
“From the sounds of it, yes,” murmured Earle thoughtfully.
So we laughed. And realising that what we really wanted to do was cry, we laughed just that bit harder, so no one would see the truth.
Safe places.
Strange how these things get redefined. A guy walks behind you in an empty street and safety is the home. A couple of kids burgle your house and safety is with Mum and Dad’s home. A bomb goes off at the end of the street and safety is in the countryside. A guy comes looking for you who bleeds paper and shredded the last bloke with your job title like an unwanted telephone bill, and safety is. .
Thinking is trouble.
The Aldermen found me a place to stay. They didn’t want me in the office, and I didn’t want to be there. I had no home of my own, hadn’t had one since my death certificate had been put on file. So, grumbling all the way, they found me a hotel to spend the night.
I wanted to sleep.
I wanted to feel safe.
And as safe goes, it wasn’t bad. It ticked the mundane choices — twenty-four-hour security staff, police station practically across the road, busy streets outside, CCTV surveillance up the kazoo and Aldermen stationed on the corridors and doors at all times. It also met some mystical choices — the River Thames only a few yards away in one direction, the lights of the West End only a few yards the other way; and, just down the road, Charing Cross station, generally accepted as the heart of the city. There was power in that, even if it wasn’t true. Ideas are power, and the constant burning of the lights gave the place a magic that we could practically float on, an electric-orange lick in the air. Look out of any window, and whether you saw reflected lights on the water or the flashing signs of the Strand, it was beautiful. Even we could sleep, safe in so much busy, beautiful life around us, trusting to strangers and their ways to keep us from danger.
And whaddayaknow?
It even had room service.
As a rule, I dislike hotels. Too much money, too little soul. Plus the bed had ten layers of sheet and blanket that needed a hydraulic pump to pry them away from the mattress, and the radiators were turned up too high. But it was peaceful, and it was safe.
So we curled up beneath the sheets, and we slept.
Sorcerers are supposed to have prophetically insightful dreams.
I guess I wasn’t in the zone.
My dreams were drenched in terror. They woke me every half-hour, gasping for breath, face burning and arms goosebumped, without being able to name the dread that hunted me across the synaptic snooze of my mind. When I went back to sleep, turning in the wrecked mess of blanket, it would come back, beating against the edge of my skull the chant:
GIVE ME BACK MY HATGIVE ME BACK MY HAT
GIVE ME BACK MY HAT!
GIVE ME BACK MY HAT!!
GIVE ME BACK MY HAT!!!!
Another thing to add to the list of things that needed to be thought about, and about which I did not want to think.
We slept.
Morning began at three in the afternoon.
Still here.
Still not dead.
Surprise!
Our heart missed a beat as we opened the bathroom door, but no, no flayed victims or vengeful pinstriped. . things waiting for us.
Surprise!!
I didn’t get up in a hurry, reasoning that if Earle had anything heartbreakingly important to tell me, he would. It occurred to me that, it now being three in the afternoon, Earle might already be dead along with the rest of the Aldermen and for all I knew the remainder of the city, and we were all alone in the ruined remains of London — but the water ran hot from the shower and the slippers were too fluffy for this to be Armageddon quite yet.
Besides, there was a phone call I had to make before the end of everything, the death of the city. I made no conscious decision to do it. But I knew, with the certainty that comes over you in a hot shower after a long day, that it had to be done.
While I slept, someone had cleaned my clothes, even my coat. Polishing my shoes had been out of the question, but the worst of the dirt seemed to have been scraped off with a hard brush, my trousers folded and my “What Would Jesus Do?” T-shirt, for which we were starting to develop a strange and uncomfortable fondness, smelt of fabric softener. They’d even managed to shift the worst of the blood from the cuffs of my coat. I was impressed. Suspicious, but impressed.
There was an Alderman on the door, when I opened it. He had a face that had been polished in olive oil. He glanced at me, I stared at him. He didn’t smile. I guessed he was one of the ones who’d voted to have me shot. I guessed he wasn’t currently a fan of the democratic process. I said, “Have we met?”
“No.”
“I’m Matthew.”
“I know who you are.”
Five words were four too many to prove that this line of enquiry would get nowhere. I gave up on good manners and snapped, “Where’s Earle?”
“Mr Earle is working.”
“At what?”
“At the current situation.”
“Where can I find him?”
“His office is Harlun and Phelps. Overlooking Aldermanbury Square. We’re under orders to keep you safe.”
“Whose orders?”
“The majority’s orders.”
“What’s Harlun and Phelps?”
“Trust fund managers.”
“The Aldermen are trust fund managers?”
“It pays to be paid.”
Couldn’t argue with his reasoning. “Has he found the boy, Mo?”
“I would inform you if he had.”
“Has he found Anissina?”
“No. But then, he hasn’t found her body. Unlike those of four others of our employees.”
I thought of the mercenaries skidding down the cable into the smog of Kilburn. “I’m sorry.”
“They were just employees.”
The Alderman intoned it like a bored priest too indifferent to care that he’d lost his faith. He didn’t look at me, but focused his attention on a part of the wall just above my left ear. He had a ring on his left hand; it carried the twin crosses.
“Where’s Oda?”
“She had to consult with her employers.”
“Why?”
“We need a coordinated strategy if we are to tackle the current situation.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Everyone.”
“You don’t like me, do you?”
“I would not presume to question your judgement,” he replied.
I took a deep breath. “Fine. I want to talk to Loren.”
Loren wasn’t in her flat.
The Aldermen had moved her.
Sure, they’d moved her to a reasonably comfortable B amp; B just north of Mornington Crescent and made sure her boss didn’t mind; but they’d still plucked her out of her home and dragged her, strangers, to a strange place, and not bothered to explain themselves.
Which explained why, when I rang the number that the Aldermen had given me, she said: “WHO THE FUCK IS THIS?!! I SWEAR I WILL GODDAMN KILL YOU, I’LL KILL YOU I’LL. .”
“Loren?”
The shouting stopped. There was a long pause, full of a rapid and distant drawing of breath. Then, “Who’s this?”
“It’s Matthew.”
“Jesus, shit.”
“Are you all right?”
“No. I am very much not all right. I am the least all right I think I have ever been in my whole life, and it’s been pretty shit so far anyway. Where’s Mo? Have you found him? I’m in this place in Camden, these men turned up and they. . they said they were the police then I asked for ID and they said they weren’t but that I’d have to come and. . have you found Mo?”
“Not yet. No. I’m sorry.”
“God. But you haven’t. . I mean, you haven’t not found him because he’s. . I mean, you haven’t not found him and you’re just not telling me because you think I can’t. . look, I want to know, OK, I need to know whatever way it is if you’ve. .”
“I haven’t found him. In any sense, I swear. I’m trying. I’m. . getting there.”
“But if you can’t, then why. .”
“Loren, I need to know some more things about him.”
“Matthew, what’s going on? Anything, but. .”
“The guys who took you to Camden did it, for all their screwed-up reasoning, to keep you safe. You’ll be safe.”
“What’s not to be safe from?”
“There are things happening. Different things; I mean, different. But I’m looking, they’re looking all the time. I promise.”
“This is. . there’s mystic stuff, right? Bad?”
“Maybe.”
“Involving Mo?”
“Perhaps. Yes. Probably.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s. .”
“You told me the truth, Matthew. When that thing came up from under the street you turned and said, sorcerer, magic, monster, just straight out. And I thought ‘hell, this guy is either so whacked off his own head that he just can’t tell the difference any more so might as well run with it or, shit, this stuff is real, deal with the madness’. That’s the only way, do you see? I thought about it. If I don’t know then I’ll just imagine, all the things I might not know, all the terrible things that are out there, without limits, without reason, I need to know that it makes some sort of sense!”
There was no reason not to tell her.
No sensible reason.
We couldn’t.
Good sense had nothing to do with it.
We couldn’t, and didn’t know why.
“I don’t know what’s happening,” I said. “Not yet. Not all of it. I promise, when I know, when it’s finished, I’ll tell you it all. But anything I tell you now would just be a white lie or a bad lie or a half-truth with nothing to sit on and that might be OK for a time, but when it’s done, if I got it wrong. . I’m sorry. I am looking. Please. I just need to know a few more things about Mo.”
“Is that it?”
“Yes. For the moment.”
“I see.” Her voice was the flat distant fall of the criminal who’s been caught, who knows it’s the chair, who knows the lawyer is just making noise, who knows there’s no way out, no point left in crying. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
And, as much as she could, she told me.
Mums and sons.
We struggled to understand. It was something people seemed to think would be instinctive. Flesh of my flesh. We found the idea distasteful.
There was more. Of course there was. Problem about asking questions is that most of the time, you only know what the question is once you have the answer.
He’d met some friends.
At the city farm, of all places. It was part of being young in the city; you got shipped off to do healthy, hearty things in order to make you a better person, until that day comes around the age of thirteen when you suddenly realise that goats are horrid, and the city is clean.
She didn’t really know them. They were from the Wembley area. Sometimes he’d come back late at night with them, but they never came in. Always polite — sort of — but never came inside, as if they were embarrassed or afraid of her. And in time, that’s how he seemed to be. Embarrassed.
And then he kept on not coming home.
And the school complained.
And she’d send him to school but what could she do? Her job didn’t let her stand at the school gate all day to watch him, a job meant no time; no job, no money. She knew the others weren’t going either, just knew, without having to be told — what’s there for a kid on his own to do, when the rest are in the classroom? He’d disappear and not say where he’d been. He’d come back stinking of beer and sweat — when he came back. He’d talk about being “down the club”. She didn’t know what club, or where.
Then the police had called.
He’d stolen a bike.
The whole gang had been involved, and he was the youngest, so he got a caution, because they couldn’t really nail anything bigger onto him.
Then they called again.
ASBO, they said. She’d thought it was just a phrase journalists used on the TV. Riotous behaviour, drinking, shouting, threatening behaviour. They’d grabbed an old guy’s shopping and thrown it into the street — not because they wanted anything in it, but just because they could. Just for something to do. You should keep an eye on Mo, they said, this is the start of a downhill path that ends in a very thorny thicket.
Not that the police were big on metaphor.
And then one day, a few weeks ago, he’d come home, and he was hiding something. Something in his bag, something he didn’t want her to see, and he banned her from his room and didn’t talk to her and just spoke to his friends and there was something. . shameful. Something shameful had happened, had been done, he had done it, something shameful. And then he went away and didn’t come back, his friends didn’t come back, and she’d spoken to the police and it wasn’t just Mo. The patrols up in Willesden, where they used to hang, had noticed it, an absence. The whole gang, however many there were, had just stopped. No more hanging outside the pub, no more skating beneath the overpass, no more spitting in the off-licence, no more stealing old guys’ shopping, no more doing, just because it could be done. All at once, they had just vanished.
They’d done something shameful.
A gang of kids, bored, arrogant, cocksure, cock-up kids, who liked to go to a club in Willesden, just vanished.
I could have told her I thought they were still alive.
It would have been a lie, and one that she would probably have come to hate.
So I just told her nothing, just the same tune as before.
I’ll look, I promise. I’ll find Mo.
We went to see Earle.
Harlun and Phelps were trust fund managers.
I wasn’t entirely sure what this meant. I associated it with suits, shiny shoes, gleaming teeth, polished hair, questionable moralities and big glass foyers. I wasn’t disappointed.
The sunlight falling on Aldermanbury Square was promising a glorious spring and a scorching golden summer, just as soon as this part of the planet could get on and lean closer to the sun. The sky was the glorious blue, with clouds of fluffy whiteness, that you find in a child’s drawing. Trees, spindly half-grown afterthoughts, lined the space between the buildings of the square; and the old guildhouses nearby competed with the giant glass growths of modern offices. Overhead, concrete walkways from the heady 1960s, when everyone believed the Future To Be Today, jutted across the slim gaps between constructions.
The foyer of Harlun and Phelps was three storeys high of itself, a great swimming-pool expanse of slippery white marble in which a small forest of potted plants and trees had been installed. Water ran down one wall behind reception, into a small pond of zen pebbles designed to create an impression of serene, expensive tranquillity; and even the receptionists, sitting behind desks adorned with artfully twisted metals including labels (to assure you that they really were art), had the most expensive, modern headsets plugged into their ears. The future is here, and it wears pinstripe.
“The majority of employees here are civilians,” explained my Alderman guide/protector/companion/would-be-executioner as we strode without a word to the security guards through the foyer towards the lifts. “They conduct themselves within perfectly standard financial services and regulations. There is one specialist sub-operational department catering to the financing of more. . unusual extra-capital ventures, and the executive assets who operate it have to undergo a rigorous level of training, psyche evaluation, personality assessment and team operational analyses.”
We stared at him, and said, “We barely understood the little words.”
“No,” he replied. “I didn’t think you would.”
The lift was all in green glass, even the floor. It crawled up the side of the building, faced outwards to the falling city below. Aldermanbury Square became just a blob within a maze of streets, alleys, bus-clogged roads, cranes, building works, Victorian offices and gleaming new towers, and then lost amid the snake of the river and the sprawl of the city, the familiar floodlit landmarks of London, the sun fading into evening towards Richmond, the early winter gloom spreading in from the estuary.
Earle’s office was on the very top floor. From there, presumably, he could stare down and survey all his little people toiling below, from his nest of triumphant endeavour.
The office itself was in the same stylised, soulless vein as the rest of the building. It took ten seconds to walk from his door to his desk. Ten seconds is an eternity, when it’s just you and another guy in a room that could have hosted the Olympic curling championship.
He wasn’t dressed like an Alderman. His black coat was hung on a deliberately old-fashioned coat stand behind his black marble desk. He wore a suit, dark, dark blue with a matching navy-blue tie, and cufflinks on which were engraved a pair of ebony keys on a background of pearl. As I approached across the endless floor, he smiled. It was done for good manners’ sake, not that that was a cause for which he had much time.
“Mr Mayor.” He waved me at a chair designed to give you good posture and a bad temper.
“Mr Earle.”
“Have you slept well?”
“I slept. What news?”
“We have been working on finding the boy, Mo.”
“And?”
“There is some progress. CCTV cameras in the Kilburn area saw the boy being removed two nights ago from Raleigh Court and loaded into a van. He appeared to be unconscious but alive. We are attempting to trace the men who moved him, but most likely they were just hired help.”
“Was Mr Pinner there?”
“No. We do, however, have his face on CCTV from your encounter, and are circulating it to all relevant areas. We were unable to find further information on Anissina. The smog obscured all imaging.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It isn’t immediately relevant,” he replied with a shrug. “The focus of our investigation must be on the boy, as he appears to be the strongest link we have to this Mr Pinner, this death of cities. So far we have tracked the vehicle entering and leaving the congestion charge zone on the same night. It appeared to be heading in a southwards direction, leaving the congestion charge zone after crossing Waterloo Bridge.”
“You can access the congestion charge database?”
“Of course.”
“And where is the vehicle now?”
“There are teams working on it.”
“Teams?”
“Human Resources allocated us some appropriate assistance.”
“When will you have an answer?”
“Mr Swift,” he said, fingers whitening on the edge of the table, “do you know why Big Brother isn’t watching you?”
“Because he has my death certificate on file and a literal mind?”
“Because, Mr Swift, because, in this city there are anywhere between eight and nine million other people to watch. In a single day, tens of thousands of people will pass through one Underground station alone; in a single week, hundreds of thousands, all moving, all turning. Millions of vehicles every month will pass in and out of the congestion charge zone, millions, and at any given moment you can be certain a train is breaking down or a pipe is bursting under the strain or a police car has been called to clean up the blood or a window has been smashed or a bomb threat has been issued or a fire alarm has been sounded or an ambulance has been caught up in traffic behind a stalled pair of traffic lights and a confused learner driver. Big Brother isn’t watching you, Mr Swift, because there’s just too much for Big Brother to keep an eye on. You are. . not important.”
“You’re breaking my heart.”
“Do you understand what I mean?”
“Yes. I understand. You mean that I should be patient a little while longer and let you people find Mo in your own time, right?”
“Essentially. Yes.”
“You want us to wait.”
“Yes. Besides, there are other matters.”
“What other matters?”
“Inauguration.”
I sighed. “Oh, yes. This pineappleless, cocktail sausageless party of an inauguration.”
“There’s more to it than you think.”
“There usually is.”
“All the Midnight Mayors have to do it.”
“Of course.”
“It can be dangerous.”
“I was waiting with baited breath for you to say that.”
“You were?”
“It seemed like you were building up to something — ‘dangerous’ made a certain inevitable sense. What do I need to know to live — you do want me to live, don’t you?”
He took just a moment, just a moment, too long to answer. “Of course. We’ve made the investment in you now. We need to see it come to maturity.”
“Then tell me.”
He sighed, swivelled slightly in his chair. “Do you know,” he said at last, “how the Aldermen are chosen?”
“Nepotism. And the old boys’ club.”
“You might be thinking of our more mundane counterparts. .”
“Perhaps. I don’t know much about them.”
“It is not nepotism,” he said. “It is about dedication. To an idea; to a cause bigger than any individual. To become an Alderman requires a lifetime of study, work and commitment, and most of all, it requires an understanding of the smallness of man within this great machine of the city. London is an antheap, Mr Swift. It is a great, sprawling, beautiful nest, built by two thousand years of man, so deep and so dark that its people can never see or know it all, but live their lives rather in this or that complex of the city, burrowing deeper and deeper into their little caves, because to know the full extent of the nest is to realise that you are nothing. An insect crawling down tunnels which only exist because two thousand years ago, a thousand, thousand other insects also crawled this way, each one as unimportant as you, each one a stranger. There is nothing that binds these ants together, that stops them from ripping each other apart, save that they share the same structure, the same city, the same physical structure that only exists because, for two thousand years, the ants have carved. We are tiny, Mr Swift. We are insignificant, living in a world of life and wonder and miraculous existence and excitement, not because of who we are, or whom we know, but because the construction around us, the bricks and stones of London, shapes and guides us, and gives unity to the millions of strangers who inhabit its caves, so we can all say, ‘I live in the city’. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Then this is what the Aldermen are. We are the ants who climbed to the top of their hill, who looked down from the highest tower of the maze and saw the darkness and the time and the caverns, and realised the smallness of man within this heaving world. We are the ones who saw this, and were not afraid. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“I have been told that for sorcerers, magic is life, that to live is to be magical. The same is true for Aldermen. We find our magic in being nothing. Ants on top of a heap. Do you understand?”
I smiled. I tangled my fingers together between my knees. “Yes,” I said. “I understand what the Aldermen are.”
“Then you understand why the Midnight Mayor has always — usually — come from the Aldermen’s ranks.”
“Maybe.”
“It is the city, Swift. The city is so old, now. So many millions of dead men and dead women buried beneath it. They all scuttled through the streets and made the city what it is, and now they are forgotten. Millions of wandering forgotten ghosts; but the city! It is so alive. The Midnight Mayor must protect the city. Do you understand what this means?”
“I understand what you think it means.”
“Swift. .”
“I have a theory as to why Nair made us Midnight Mayor.”
“Well?”
“I think he knew the Midnight Mayor couldn’t fight Mr Pinner. Of course he knew it, he was dying as he made the phone call. But I think it was something more, something earlier.”
“Go on.”
“I think Nair understood that cities change.”
Earle was silent as he contemplated this. Then he shook his head, almost sadly. “Would you like to hear my theory?” he asked. “I’ve been thinking about it too, of course. We all have, all the Aldermen, all the ones who seemed more qualified.”
I shrugged.
“I think. .” He took a deep breath, as if perhaps this was too important to bungle. “I think that Nair made you Midnight Mayor in order to eliminate a threat.”
“Mr Pinner?”
“No. Well — Mr Pinner too. But another threat, possibly one even worse.”
“Which is?”
“You.”
“I’m confused.”
“You. I think Nair made you Midnight Mayor in order to force you to take responsibility, to make you become involved, to drive you to take a side and fight for it. I think he did it to control you, to bind you, to curse you with this office. I think he did it to eliminate the threat of the blue electric angels.”
We stared at him long and hard, too surprised to say anything. He let us stare, then smiled a real smile, cruel and dry. “If you can’t beat them. .”
“We don’t believe that.”
“That doesn’t matter, does it? What matters, is whether Nair believed it. And there, I fear, is something we’ll never know.”
We didn’t speak. He let out a great, tummy-clenching sigh, and stood up sharply, his leather shoes snapping against the polished floor. “Still, none of this is really to the point, is it? You want to know about the inauguration, how to survive? The answer is I can’t really tell you. It’s always different for each new Mayor. Being, as they are, just a man with a brand on the hand. I know it has to be done, in order for the transfer of office to be complete. And if you are going to survive any more encounters with Mr Pinner, I suggest you take every advantage presented to you.”
“What do I need to do?” A voice that might have been ours, somewhere a long way off.
“You have to walk the old city walls, seal the gates against evil.”
“That’s not just unhelpful, it’s pretentiously vague.”
“It’s what it says on the cards.”
“And how do I do that?”
“I don’t entirely know. Not being, myself, Midnight Mayor.”
“I’m a sorcerer, not a Jedi.”
“Is that something you tell yourself in times of doubt?”
“It’s something a religious nutcase pointed out to me in a moment of prophetic insight.”
He shrugged. “I can only hold your hand so far. You’ll work it out.”
“You’re really not much use, are you?”
He treated me to the crocodile smile. “May the Force be with you,” he said, and gave me a Vulcan V for good luck. And then his smile almost became a chuckle. “No one else is.”
Afternoon melted into evening.
Evening asked night if it was free for a coffee.
Night sheepishly went in search of its dancing shoes, having left them somewhere behind the spotlights.
The orange glow of urban darkness slithered over the sky.
We ate Thai fish cakes with sweet and sour sauce.
We felt a bit better.
We ordered more food.
Pad Thai noodles with chicken, lemon and crushed peanuts.
We felt a lot better.
The smiling waitress at the restaurant, a small place shimmering in soft candlelit cleanliness on Exmouth Market, asked us if we wanted anything more.
We thought about it, and said yes. Anything with a theme of coconut.
The evening passed on by nicely.
We almost managed to forget.
That special, subtle “almost”, that drives the fear out of the stomach, leaves only a few claws scratching away at the junction of small and large intestine.
We went to the toilet more often than was our inclination.
We had no reason to believe that there was a God, but if he/she/it existed, it had a sick sense of the silly.
Time passed.
Can time take its time?
It did tonight.
Then, just when I was getting used to its saunter, it started to jog, and my Alderman watcher/carer/guardian/assassin said, “We have to go.”
They took me by car to the base of London Bridge. They unloaded me in the bus lane on the south side, and sped off, citing traffic regulations. The tin shed of London Bridge station squatted behind, the yellow towers of Southwark Cathedral across the other side of the street. It was midnight in London, and the city was taking its time, or maybe time was taking it. The wind carried the sound of the bells of St Paul’s as they banged out the hour. Behind HMS Belfast, Tower Bridge was lit up in dangling red and green lights. The Tower of London sat squat and orange, like an angry garden gnome in the family too long to care that it was now cracked and ugly. The black lamp-posts along the river, stretching out past Butler’s Wharf, were hung with shining white bulbs; the grey concrete of London Bridge was lit up with shimmering pinks and purples the entire span of its length.
I took a deep breath of clear Thames air.
It made me feel cooler inside, sharper on the edges, drove the weariness out of my eyes and the lead from my brain. They say yogis can live a whole day on just one breath. If it was the breath of the river of the city they loved, then I can see how it might work.
Earle had said: magic is life.
He’d got it only slightly wrong.
The rest of what he’d said seemed, to our mind, utter bollocks.
I started walking.
Or maybe, we should call it processing.
Whatever that walk was that the Midnight Mayor did, I did it that night.
* * *
Second Interlude: The Inauguration of Matthew Swift
In which various dead things make their point, the ethics of urban planning come under scrutiny, and a new Midnight Mayor learns some important lessons about some old ideas.
The Lord Mayor, when he gets inaugurated on that cold, drizzling November evening, doesn’t just get cocktail sausages — he gets champagne, pineapple, cheese on sticks and someone to hold the umbrella.
So much for perks of office.
I wondered, as I walked across London Bridge, trailing my fingers along the railing and watching the water gush and slide beneath me, if Earle was just holding out on the cocktail sausages as a matter of principle. The life of Midnight Mayor seemed a precarious one, obtained for the most part after years of questionable service. And to be Midnight Mayor and face various unnatural and, in my case, unkillable dangers, all of which seemed out to get you, thank you kindly, without even a piece of pineapple on a stick as a reward, seemed. .
. . unnatural.
Which was probably the point.
So much for the ruthless application of reason.
I walked.
Earle had said I had to follow the old route of the city wall. All but a few pieces had been demolished years ago, and those I’d seen were nestled away.
GIVE ME BACK MY HAT
Lock the gates against evil, whatever that meant. If I took “evil” in the traditional Christian meaning, 90 per cent of the city’s inhabitants wouldn’t be able to get to work in the morning, ourself included. Even limiting the definition to things actively out to kill and maim, it still presented semantic as well as practical problems.
You’ll work it out, he’d said.
Assuming he even wanted us to live.
Still, any advantage, anything against Mr Pinner, seemed worth getting, and it couldn’t take more than an hour, maybe an hour and a half, to walk the course of the old wall. Even if it achieved nothing material, it would calm us down, let us soak up some of the older, quieter magics that slithered across the pavement like low mist, as we fed off the rhythm of the wander.
Magic is life, my old teacher had said.
Turn it round, and you begin to get something.
We walked.
Shops, shut; camera shop, TV in the window showing our face in a dozen screens from a single camera as we passed by; shop selling suits and ties; Monument station, shut; the Monument itself, its golden ball of fire peeking over the top of the surrounding buildings; cobbled streets leading to ancient, low, forgotten churches, smothered in the gross concrete buildings bursting up around. A giant chemist, where you could purchase things to make your skin brighter, darker, tighter, softer, gentler, warmer, hairier, smoother — and who knew, even find some medicines too. Spitalfields off to my right, the streets empty, the city workers long since gone home, the traffic nothing more than a lost 15 bus on its way to Blackwall, before the night buses took over. A wide street, concrete buildings edging against black reflecting windows that stared angrily down on the grand decadence of the older Victorian offices squatting in tight streets with names like Cornhill, Leadenhall, Fenchurch Street, St Helen’s Place, Clark’s Place, Camomile Street, Houndsditch, Liverpool Street, Wormwood Street, and all their little friends and relations scrabbling away into the crowded gloom of the night-time emptied city. A few miles to the north and a few streets to the south, the night would be loud and lively, full of partying, drinking and general wassail. Here, where the offices were, no one lived, and little stirred except myself and the occasional passing dustbin man.
I headed for Aldgate, that strange junction where the run-down old window frames of the East End met the pampered corniced doors of the City, no apology, no excuse; just bang and there it was: humming, buying, selling, smelling, bustling squalor and the death of brand names. A subway beneath a broad roundabout where the narrow city roads began to spread out into the urban-planned highways towards the estuary, the east, and the Blackwall Tunnel; newspaper drifted beneath the dull lamps; shops, built underground as part of a cunning scheme that had never worked, lurked behind abandoned blankets too tatty even for the beggars to take. The writing was on the wall, declaring such mystic statements as:
ABP RULZ!
Or: I LOVE CALIPER BOY
Or in sad scratched letters:
make me a shadow on the wall
I kept on walking, ignoring the signs that lied about which exit led where with ancient yellow arrows half torn from the walls. The feeling that I was not alone crept up on me with the gentle padding walk of the polite assassin. I let it get close, until I could feel it tickling the back of my neck, then stopped, hands buried in my trouser pockets, and turned.
There was no one there.
I felt like the justifiable fool I was.
I turned back, kept on walking.
I was still not alone.
I reached the ramp up from the subway, and stopped again. This was, I figured, the last chance to check for followers and get it wrong, without making a fool of myself in public.
Still no one there.
There was, however, something on the wall.
I looked at it carefully.
Someone had spray-painted on the image of a woman. She wore blue jeans and a white T-shirt and appeared to be drinking some sort of yoghurt drink from a plastic cup. Her top lip had folded over the pink straw from it to her mouth and the movement had tilted her head down, but her eyes were up, and fixed on me. They were laughing.
They were also blinking. A rhythmic, silent, steady on-off, one-two count, long eyelashes moving over the soft reflected pink of her eyes.
I recognised the painted woman’s face.
I said, “Vera.”
The painted face stopped drinking the painted yoghurt through the painted straw and looked up. Then the two-dimensional flatness said, “Ah, shit.”
Her lips moved; a pink thing wiggled inside the redness of her mouth. No depths to it, just a change in colour to imply an alteration of perspective. A cartoon on the wall, and the wall was speaking. Her voice echoed the length of the subway. I repeated numbly, “Vera?”
She gestured with the plastic cup, which slid silently over the chipped concrete as if paint was nothing more than a sheet of silk to be moved and slid back at will. “You gotta keep walking,” she said. “You don’t walk, and it won’t work.”
I turned, and kept on walking. Never argue with the surreal; there’s no winning against irrationality. The image of Vera slid off the wall behind me and onto the wall by my side. She was walking with me. I could only see her profile, like an ancient Egyptian painting turned sideways in a Pharaoh’s tomb, and her outline was wobbling, uneven, as if the invisible cartoonist sketching her onto the concrete couldn’t keep up with the speed of her swagger. I said, “This is peculiar.”
“You think?!” she chuckled. “Jesus.”
As we neared the top of the ramp, her whole form was gently eaten away by the lack of concrete on which to project itself, until there was nothing more than a pair of knees, a pair of ankles, a pair of feet walking beside me, before even that was erased by the lack of wall onto which to walk. Then there were just a pair of painted footprints walking next to mine, that landed with an audible splat splat splat as they stepped along beside me, drawn in white paint. As we passed by a lamp-post she was briefly back again, her image keeping track of her footsteps, painting itself onto the nearest handy surface: postbox, telephone box, as we walked on.
Not having a mouth didn’t stop her talking. Her voice drifted out of the air, somewhere above those painted steps on the floor.
“So, how’s it going, Swift?”
“Not too well,” I answered, watching the street around me for someone with a straitjacket and a literal mind. “I’ve wound up Midnight Mayor, been chased, pursued and misunderstood, and now I’m talking to, with all respect, a dead pair of painted footsteps.”
“Yeah. That must be a bit freaky.”
“It could be worse.”
“Seriously?”
“Someone says ‘inauguration’ in my line of work, and you can just bet there’ll be freaky shit. It’s like quests. You get told ‘go forth and seek the travelcard of destiny’ and you know, I mean, you seriously know that it won’t have just been left down the back of the sofa. You read — seen — Lord of the Rings?”
“Yessss. .”
“Ever wondered why they didn’t just get the damn eagles to go drop the One Ring into the volcano, since they seemed so damn nifty at getting into Mordor anyway?”
“Nooo. .”
“See? Fucking quests! So talking to a dead pair of footprints. Fine.”
We passed a parked white van, and for a moment Vera was back, her painted form shimmering across its glass and metal sides. She looked worried.
“Something bad is going down, isn’t it?” she said.
“Yup.”
“Seriously bad?”
“Pretty much.”
“I know. I guess what you said about the whole quest thing — it makes sense that I should know, yeah?”
“I guess so. Any useful tips?”
She’d vanished off the side of the van. For a while there was nothing but the splat splat splat of her footsteps, as the only sign she still walked by me. Then, “End of the line.”
“Thanks.”
“Swift?”
“Yeah?”
“You heard of the death of cities?”
“Yeah.”
“You know he’s real? That he’s been real ever since Remus turned to Romulus and said, ‘hey, cool digs, bro’?”
“Yeah.”
“You know he can be summoned? Sometimes he’s called by the volcano, or the thunder, or the war, but always, something summons him.”
“Yeah. I’d heard.”
“Swift?”
Her voice was fading, the painted footsteps on the ground growing fainter.
“Yeah?”
“Am I really dead?”
“You got shot and turned into a puddle of paint.”
“That’s not normal corpselike behaviour.”
“No. It did occur to me that it was a little unusual. You are — were — leader of the Whites, a clan with a big thing for life, paint, graffiti and all the magics in between. But then again, if you’re not dead, what are you doing here?”
“Good bloody point.”
Her footsteps faded to a thin splatter, then a little smear, then died altogether. We didn’t look back. It wouldn’t have been appropriate to the vibe.
Just above Aldgate, I turned west, heading towards Old Street and Clerkenwell Road, watching offices dissolve slowly into a mixture of shops and flats, piled up on top of each other, joining briefly the ring road that was at all hours laden with traffic, and then heading further along, skimming the northern edge of the Barbican to where those painted statues of those mad-eyed dragons holding the shield with the twin crosses stood guard over the city. The white towers of the churches built after the Great Fire were mainly behind me, twenty-six in all, most of their bodies gutted in the Blitz.
A voice said, “Spare some change?”
A beggar with a big beard sat in the doorway of a recruitment firm, dark eyes staring up at us. I fumbled in my pocket, found nothing, dug into my satchel, felt the desire to keep on walking, the rhythm briefly broken, found my wallet, found the £30 I carried inside, handed it over.
“Cheers,” said the beggar.
“Any time,” I replied, and kept on walking.
A few doorways later and a voice said, “So you like to walk?”
It was the same voice.
It was the same beggar.
“Sure,” I replied, and kept on walking.
By the bolted metal door round the back of a photocopy shop, he was still here, knees huddled up to his chin, blanket pulled over his shoulders. “It’s the new thing, you know. Walking,” he said.
“No it’s not. In the old days people used to walk all the time.”
“Yeah. . but that was because it was walk or sit behind a shitting horse in a flea-infested coffin smelling of sawdust and widdle.”
“You may have a point, although I imagine that most of the early modern period smelt of sawdust and widdle regardless of your means of transport.”
There was a long brick warehouse ahead, its back turned to the street, no doorways for the beggar to sit in. That bought me a few more moments to gather my thoughts, and sure enough, sat in the next doorway past that, there he was again, lighting a fag.
“You know,” he said, “it’s amazing it took until 1865 for some bright spark to build a proper sewerage system.”
“Antheaps,” I replied. “Or wasps’ nests. With a small nest, you don’t have to worry. It’s got to be big before you wonder if it’ll fall off the tree.”
“Someone’s been using metaphor on you, right?”
I had to wait two more doorways to reply.
“Yup.”
“Sounds to me like a paddle full of shite.”
“You’ve got to admit it has a certain chaotic something. London burnt down in 1666 and everyone went, whoopee, let’s rebuild! A golden city! But look what happened. Chaos and fluster. Everyone was so eager to live in this golden city that they didn’t even have time to build it.”
Goswell Road. Nowhere for a beggar to sit on the junction of the Goswell Road and Clerkenwell Road, just two staring dragons in a traffic island. I waited, leaning against the traffic lights. They changed. I crossed, still heading west. There were very few doorways on this side; a pub ahead, but it was occupied by a group of scruffy trendies in carefully slashed jeans sharing a bottle of wine. I kept walking. An art studio of some kind presented a low, grubby doorway.
The beggar said, “Can I make a suggestion?”
“You’ve got an agenda, right?”
“Sure.”
“OK. Suggest away.”
“Don’t do the walk. Don’t get inaugurated.”
“Why not?”
Art studio to chippy; he was in the door between that and the strip club pretending to be a pub.
“You want to be Midnight Mayor?”
“No.”
“There you go!”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Sure it is. You be free.”
I kept on walking.
He wasn’t in the next doorway.
Or the one after that.
He’d had his say.
We kept on walking.
Keep moving. If you keep moving you might just manage to leave thoughts behind, you might get it done before they catch you.
Keep on walking.
Come be me. .
Aching right hand.
We be light, we be life, we be fire!
What would Jesus do?
We sing electric flame, we rumble underground wind, we dance heaven!
I like walking. Each step is a thought without words, a thought without words is a thought without blame, without retribution, without consequence.
Come be we and be free. .
I think he did it to control you, to bind you, to curse you with his office.
. . we be blue electric angels!
Mr Mayor.
“Mr Fucking Mayor.”
I looked up.
Kemsley’s face was a badly peeled tomato, grilled at a high heat and left to sag. You couldn’t look like that and be alive, and there was no way the Kemsley I had seen a few hours — maybe a day? — ago was up and walking. No way he’d be here, just to talk to me. I skirted south towards Holborn Viaduct, and he fell into step beside me. Boarded-up butchers’ shops, renovated Victorian ironwork painted green, red, gold, with the little dragons guarding the city wall, the shields, twin red crosses on a white background, one cross smaller than the other, one cross a sword; Domine dirige nos, the motto of the city, everywhere, once you looked, if you stopped to look.
“You want to know what I really think?” he said.
“Not really, but I guess you didn’t go to all this trouble not to tell me.”
“You are a fucking disgrace to the office of Midnight Mayor.”
“Thanks. I really needed a skinned mystical projection to tell me that.”
“You want my advice?”
“No.”
“Lie down and die. Let Mr Pinner do his thing. Let someone better take over the office. That’s the best thing you could do as Mayor, for the Mayor. Just lie down and die.”
“You know, people pay therapists to get this kind of abuse.”
He just grunted, turned his back on me, started walking briskly the other way. We called out after, “Where are you going?”
He looked back.
Just a guy. Just some guy in a black jacket, frightened at a stranger’s voice shouting after him in the night.
I raised my hands in apology, smiled, shook my head, turned and kept on walking the way I’d gone.
With my incisive detective skills, I was beginning to notice a pattern at work.
I could see the golden cross of St Paul’s Cathedral peeping above the nearby offices. As I walked, the streetlamps flickered, flashed unevenly when I passed beneath them, splitting my shadow into a dozen different mes that spread out like a sundial around my feet.
I heard a squeaking.
At first I thought it was some sort of cartoon rat.
It would have made a strange kind of sense.
Then the squeaking grew nearer, and now it was more a sound of metal sliding off metal. I kept on walking, figuring that if it was something important, it would catch up with me.
It did. But it gave us a strange pleasure to make it work for the privilege.
For a moment I thought I smelt curry powder and plastic bags, heard the distant muttering of the mad old lady with her trolley of bags, buggery, buggery, youth today, buggery. .
But it wasn’t her. Not tonight.
“Hello, Matthew.”
I looked to the voice, and didn’t stop walking. Our fists curled in anger.
The squeaking came from a pair of big wheels behind two smaller ones. Above the wheels was a black leather chair. Attached to it was a man. Attached to him were two stands on more wheels, trailing along behind. One stand held a bag of some clear liquid, drugs or fluids or whatever; the other held a bag of blood, and I could just guess whose it was.
Pushing the wheelchair was a man dressed all in shadows and my old coat.
Angry.
Don’t look.
Angry.
“Matthew,” said the man in the wheelchair, “how exactly do think this business is going to end?”
“Terminally,” I replied. “But at least it will end. Dead is dead is dead. Especially for you.”
We walked/wheeled on a little further. “Matthew,” said the man in the wheelchair, with a slightly reproving tone in his voice, “do you really understand what it is to be Midnight Mayor?”
“Nope. Totally winging it.”
“You have to serve the city.”
“Sussed that.”
“Not the people, Matthew. The city.”
“I wasn’t signed up to be Robin Hood, if that’s what you mean.”
“Let’s please not be coy about this.”
“This isn’t me being coy, this is me being angry.”
“Why are you angry?”
“Because I didn’t ask for this gig. Because some bastard chose me for it without so much as a cocktail sausage and pineapple on a stick, because Vera was shot and Anissina fell into smog, because Mo is gone and Loren cried, because the spectres stabbed me and Earle sat in his office drinking coffee, because I saw a guy flayed alive and another bastard lumbered in hospital with no skin, and because you” — I stabbed an angry finger at the man in the wheelchair — “you, Mr Bakker, you are dead. We killed you. We killed you and we did it because you. . because. . We killed you and you should stay dead and so should your bloody fucking shadow!”
I was shouting. My voice echoed off the buildings on the empty street, hummed in the cold water pipes. I turned away, looked down at the paving stones, counting my own steps, how many stones they covered with each stride, how many they’d cover in ten, in twenty, how many strides to a mile.
The wheelchair rattled on peacefully beside me. Mr Bakker sat, his pale, spotted hands folded across his belly, his head tilted up and to one side, being pushed by his shadow. His blood-soaked shadow in the bloodstained remnant of my old coat, the one I’d died in. The one I’d been killed in. That coat.
“What’s the point of all this?” I asked at last, as we swung into the mess of up-down streets between Farringdon Road and Fleet Street. “I get that there’s mystical shit going on and all that, but what exactly is the point? Am I supposed to derive some great moral message from all this, become a better person, a nicer Midnight Mayor? From what I can tell, ‘nice’ isn’t the qualifying term.”
“I think,” said Bakker, drawing in that long, slow, thoughtful breath he’d always used as a teacher, just before the answer “maybe”, “I think that you’re supposed to find out what kind of Mayor you’re meant to be. I don’t know. It’s not really my field of expertise.”
“Great. You know, that implies all sorts of unpleasant things about higher powers.”
“Or a lot about your current state of mind. How is your current state of mind?”
“I see no reason to tell you about it.”
“But isn’t that the point?”
“I don’t know. No one has told me the point. And until someone does, I’m just going to assume there isn’t one and keep on walking for the hell of it.”
I kept on walking.
“Matthew?”
“Still here.”
“On the subject of higher powers. .”
“Yup.”
“I’d like to posit one to you, purely, you understand, hypothetically.”
“I’m paying attention only because there’s nothing else to occupy me at the moment.”
He took a deep breath and went, “The city.”
“Yup.”
“As higher power.”
“I’m still only here out of shitty luck.”
“Well, no. If you see what I mean.”
“I don’t.”
“Let me try and explain it.”
“Happy day.”
“A woman gets up for work. Her alarm is powered from the mains, and doesn’t go off this morning because on the other side of the city another woman whose clock was powered by battery missed the wake-up call and didn’t press the right button at the transformer station. She’s running late. She doesn’t have time to make breakfast so she runs to the supermarket where at three a.m. the previous night three students and a disgraced manager loaded freshish sandwiches onto refrigerated shelves so that this woman could run in all a fluster, buy one and get out. She’s still running late. She runs for a bus that doesn’t come. The driver has been caught in traffic because pipes have burst further up the street, and it’s going to take him twenty minutes to get moving past the junction and then five minutes to do double that distance. The bus comes. She gets on. The bus takes her to work. At work, she toils for eight hours without much of a break then has to go and see friends in the evening. They’re going to have a Chinese takeaway. The food is being prepared by a chef, whose cousin runs a Chinese goods import-export on the edge of Enfield. Every day he receives and delivers a whole city’s orders for mandarin duck, chilli sauce and yaki noodles, a fleet of two dozen vans at his command, fifty workers on staff at any time, collecting orders from airports, delivering them to cities within a two-hundred-mile radius. The woman gets her food because the van turned up on time, the driver paid his congestion charge zone fee, the MOT was clean, the engine was full of petrol. She eats her Chinese meal. As she goes home, the streetlamps come on, the rubbish is removed, the buses drive along lines that have been painted, roads that have been laid, the water mains are repaired and it is an easy run back to watch the telly, and so goes her day.”
I waited a moment after he’d finished talking, to see if there was something else.
“Yessss?”
“Matthew — does it not occur to you that even to live in the city as we do, to go day by day and do what is done, see what there is, live surrounded by eight million strangers, dependent on strangers to drive the bus, prepare the food, clean up the rubbish, pipe the water, supply the electrics, answer the-”
“I get the idea.”
“Then you see my point?”
“Not quite. .”
“Matthew! I taught you better than this!”
“You killed me better than this too, remember?”
“‘You killed me too’ — must we be playground infants? Dead is dead is dead.”
“OK. Your point?”
“My point is this: that the city even exists, even lives, so alive! So gloriously, wonderfully, amazingly alive! That for all this to be so, day by day, is a miracle. And since miracles are by definition rare, is it not possible, even reasonable to turn what seems a constancy of miracles into the idea of a higher power, and call it simply, the city?”
“Oh. I get it now. Philosophy 101 for Midnight Mayors.”
“Life is magic, Matthew. You said it yourself. Even the boring, mundane acts, even breathing, seeing, perceiving, being perceived. Life is magic. That is all a sorcerer is.”
“I know,” I sighed. “I remember.”
We were nearing Ludgate. A great joining of places, confused, wriggling in from all sides, monuments to the war dead, supermarkets for the living, and coffee shops for all. The squeaking of Bakker’s wheelchair was growing less. I glanced down at him. His face was sunk, dark, grey, fading into shadow. His chair was fading into shadow, stretching thin and flat across the floor.
I looked away.
We had no need to see such things again.
There was something wrong. It wasn’t that Bakker faded into shadow; it was that he faded into his own shadow, and that shadow faded into my shadow, and my shadow was doing the pencil-thin thing behind me as I walked towards the light, and in front of me, and around me, and it wasn’t so thin as it ought to be and wasn’t so flat on the pavement as the normal laws of optics demanded. If water was nothing more than moonlight on the earth, this is how it would behave.
My hand hurt.
It more than hurt.
I cradled it to my chest. The stitches in my skin hurt. My head hurt. The paper cuts stung across every part of me. We could feel warm blood rolling down from the tiny slice below our eye, feel itching in the palm of our hand. The travelcard of destiny is never behind the sofa, these things are never as easy as a party with pineapples. I opened my hand. The twin crosses were burning, the blood in them turned to warm red flame. I didn’t know if this was a good sign or a bad one. We turned our face away. I walked the southern edge of Gray’s Inn, past shuttered shops and gloomy, lights-out banks, past bus stops declaring on their orange boards:
1. 341 — North’land Pk — 14 mins.
2. 11 — Liverpool St — 15 mins.
3. 17 — runrunrunrunrunrunENDOFTHELINErunrunrunrun run — Due
4. 11 — Liverpool Street — 18 mins
Want flexible hours and excellent pay? Be a bus driver! Then you too can become a shadow on the wall! Phone Arriva on 0800 924 7100.
A splat of a pub was turning out for the night, customers, mostly drunken students, spilling onto the streets, arms full of stolen ketchup sachets and packets of brown sauce, cackling merrily under the streetlights. A couple of taxis went by. A woman was leaning against the window of an electronics store, arms folded, head turned towards me. I recognised her as I approached, but turned my eyes away from her face. She fell into step with me as I passed, saying nothing. It’s hard to say anything when your throat is half missing. In films it’s always neat, a single cut, one slice and that’s it, just another scarlet smile a bit lower than your first. This wasn’t a neat missing throat. This was a five-fingered yawn torn from muscle and flesh, that gaped and laughed obscenely with each rattle of her jaw.
In life, the woman whom this obscenity mimicked had been called Dana Mikeda. My former apprentice. The half-Russian daughter of a sandwich shop owner in Smithfields. She’d been taken in by Mr Bakker, when I’d died. She’d been the one who cast the spell that brought us back.
She hadn’t died a tidy death.
When she talked, her voice bubbled through crimson blood popping out of the gaps in her neck. She said, “You can still run away.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”
“Seriously. Find another city, find somewhere else. The world is big enough, even for you. What loyalty do you have to this city?”
“I was born here.”
“And what loyalty do you have to this city?”
“We were born here too.”
She smiled, and so did her throat. “Haha. Deep. You should write Christmas crackers. Still, plenty of people stuff their domestic loyalties.”
“Nah. You get born in London, you get raised in London, sooner or later you’ll put ‘Londoner’ on your passport. Hey — I can even give you a bit of Midnight Mayor pep talk, while you’re here, Dana, not being dead. How’s this for Alderman crap: the city defines you. Or even better — I am born in this city and it makes me who I am. The streets, the stones, the strangers, everything, whether I meant it or not, made me me. Ergo, we will not abandon it. You like?”
“Christmas cracker.”
“Yeah. Flawed logic, in my opinion.”
“Then why’d you say it?”
“I think it’s the point. Of the walk, I mean. To get that whole sense of perspective. Get whacked up on the conviction that I’m fighting for something and, most likely, being flayed alive for something.”
“You feeling convinced?”
I looked at her face. We felt. . almost pleased. . to see it again, talking, moving, even above that shattered throat. A mimicry of life, an abomination, but perhaps, a recollection of something living, whose memory had threatened to die. I remembered, so she lived, just like the poets went and said. Easy to forget, when you want to.
“Sorry,” I said.
“What?”
“For what happened to you.”
“Me? You really think I walk around with this shit in my throat?”
“No, that’s not the point. I fully comprehend that you’re just another metamagical manifestation of whatever crackpot Mayorish madness this particular acid trip is. But you have her face, and I never got to say sorry to the real one. So. . sorry. I’m sorry. We’re sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Aw,” she said. “Nice of you to say, bit late.”
Slipping down past Lincoln’s Inn, alone again on the empty streets, following the route of the old wall as best I could, shadows thick at my back. Look out of the corner of our eye and we could see them, bubbling, twisting, rising up the walls, crawling out of the streets, dark faceless masses trying to be heard. Earle had said: so many millions of dead men and dead women buried beneath the city.
Dead is dead is dead.
Dead memories, dead names, dead things.
Dead is dead is dead until someone happens to remember.
And life was, after all, magic.
So here we are, heading towards Fleet Street, and the lights are being smothered in the shadows that follow us. Here we are, wandering past old-fashioned terraced houses of black brick and white facings, of thick wooden doors and cross-sashed windows, of pointed roofs and old, disused chimney stacks, past old forgotten greenery tucked into car-filled streets. And here’s the shadows, the memories that no one bothers to remember: who put down the stones and laid the streets and painted the lines and powered the wires and pumped the water and stacked the sandwiches onto the shelves; and who died and were buried and covered over by the spread of the city, and the bones of the more recently dead, whose families could pay for their lot in a currency that buys more interesting things to smother over the smell of sawdust and widdle. And our hand is bleeding and our head is aching and the dead should just stay dead is dead is dead, just like me.
Now we knew what Vera — the painted cartoon of Vera — had meant. If we stopped walking now, the tidal wave of darkness writhing at our back would fall, tumbling under its own weight, spiral tip-down on top of us and suffocate the life from our chest, press until we couldn’t breathe and that would be it: so long, goodbye, goodnight, farewell. Keep walking and you didn’t have to look, didn’t have to stop and notice the bricks laid by dead hands on a plan drawn by a dead stranger who was commissioned by another stranger who earned his money off the thoughts of strangers who ate the food of strangers who sat huddled kissing-close every day to strangers on a train, armpit-close because that was what you did, that was how you got around, as intimate as a lover and probably more honest too, blood in our hand, shadows at our feet. And here it is, Fleet Street, the mad-eyed dragon guarding its shield with the twin crosses that burnt brighter than the red glow of the traffic lights, watching us with a spinning chaos in its eyes as if it too had seen the endless hole into which the forgotten dead of the city had plummeted and knew how deep the bones went below.
And there was someone leaning against the base of the dragon. I couldn’t stop walking, not now, and he didn’t seem inclined to follow; just watched me calmly from where he stood, drinking a cup of coffee. I walked straight by, heading back towards the river, dragging the darkness and the shadows and the memories and painted footsteps and whispered voices along behind me and he, at last, drained the remainder of his cup, threw the thing into a bin, and followed, hands buried in his pockets. He was wearing a coat I’d seen already in the night. He came level with me as I headed down the side of a newsagent’s towards the river, a tight little street of too few lights held too high up above too little pavement.
I said through gritted teeth, almost too breathless to talk, too busy to slow, “What the hell do you want? This is a walk for the dead.”
Blood dribbled from my closed palm, splattered onto the street at my feet, slipped into the mad gaps in the tarmac.
“Oh — I’m totally dead,” he replied. “I mean, totally.”
“You’re not. Unless we’re talking prophetically.”
“Noooo,” he said carefully. “No, I think we’re dealing with the past here. See, I got gutted by the shadow of my former teacher. He let me die by a phone box near the river. The last breath left my lungs, my heart beat its last, my internal organs decided to give the open air a try and my brain stopped crackling. Medically, dead. You seen Star Trek?”
“Of course I’ve seen Star Trek — do you mind, I’m busy here?”
“You thought about the teleportation stuff?”
“No.”
“You should think about it. A beam comes out of an empty vacuum and dissolves your entire body. I mean literally, everything stops. Your brain stops, your thoughts stop. You are nothing more than a 01010101001 in a computer! Jesus Christ, if that isn’t the definition of so dead you could drop it down a pyramid for a party then I don’t know what is! Sure, you get assembled at the other end, but it’s by a machine that could assemble spare ribs just as easy — it’s piling you back together bit by bit, like some ready-made sausage squeezed from a tube. That’s not life! That’s. . cloning, at the very best. A reconstruction, probably a flawed one, of an entity that naturally died when you went and bloody dissolved its entire nature! So you see, and this is really the point, I’m dead. I mean, seriously, totally whacked.”
I could see the river ahead, blue lights on the other side, shimmering reflection of a thousand shattered colours on the black racing water.
“But,” I croaked, as the lights went out behind me and the mad eyes of the dragon spun and sunk down for ever in the streets, “if you’re dead, then what the hell am I?”
The man in my old coat shrugged. “Dunno. If I were you I wouldn’t worry about it too much.”
“Why not? Dead is dead is. .”
“Is dead, yeah. But, you feel like Matthew Swift, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And remember like Matthew Swift?”
“Yes.”
“And hate like him, and fear like him, and want like him, and live like him, and marvel like him, and bleed like him?”
“Ticking all these boxes.”
“So I figure, fuck it! Sure, I might be dead,” he said. “But you’re an excellent copy of me.”
I looked at him out of the corner of my eye.
They, whoever They are, say you’d go mad if you ever saw the back of your own head. Or the universe would explode or something; paradox and physics and something along these lines. I didn’t see the back of the man’s head. But he had my face, he was Matthew Swift, right down to the blood soaked through his clothes and the tears across his throat and chest which had killed him. But his eyes were brown, not blue, and there was no scar upon his right hand.
I said, “This is turning from the surreal to the downright sick. I want my money back. I want to reload, reboot, try again without the psycho shit!”
“You think?” he chuckled. “You should see what’s behind you!”
I wouldn’t have looked.
I really wouldn’t.
But if you can’t trust yourself, even when you’re dead, then who are you going to put your faith in?
I looked.
“Ta-da!” said Matthew, the other Matthew, the one who died and didn’t come back, because you couldn’t, dead is dead is. .
It was. .
. . dragon didn’t quite cover it.
Dragon implies something made out of scales, with a nod in the direction of reptilian ancestry: dinosaur meets flamethrower with wings. Sure, it includes anything from fluffy through to ferocious; and we could see a case for this thing fitting into both categories. But it felt impolite to try and tie it to any particular biology. Impolite to impose anything as mundane and boring as up, down, sideways, forwards, back, in, out, here, then, there, now. It would have cocked one black eyebrow bigger than the sky above an eye madder than the tiger, tiger that once upon a time burnt bright in some acid-drenched brain; and looked at you as though to say, “Oh. So you’re that small.”
To say it was made of shadows would be to imply that light or darkness even got a look-in. Sure, it had crawled out of them, in the way that the diplodocus had once crawled out of the amoebae of the sea. And if a comet came from the heavens to smash it, it wouldn’t be squished, just spread so wide and thin across the earth that it would look like night had fallen down, dragging all the stars with it — before, with a good thorough shake to push the stardust off its skin, the creature slid back to its brilliant, angry, maddened shape.
If its wings bothered to do something so mundane as beat, they took a hundred years to do it; if its tongue found anything in the air worth tasting, the lashing spike as it sampled the drizzle would knock down every chimney from Fleet Street to Piccadilly; if it deigned to press a claw into the earth, the Underground trains rumbling beneath would screech to a stop as the clatter of their engines became lost in the roaring of the tunnels that cowered from its touch.
And if it found any reason, and it would have to be one hell of a reason, to bother to look at you, in its gaze were a million ghosts who pressed up against the cornea of its eye and stretched their fingers through the blackness of its pupil to try and suck you down.
And it was looking at us.
We, who were born from the chatter of mankind, from the things that got left behind in the wires, who were bigger than any city or mortal, were nothing: tiny, insignificant, footsteps walking on stones where a thousand million feet a year would walk, nothing more than ants in a heap. A blink, and our lives were over. Our voices and our footsteps and all that we were would sink into its great black belly. And, while not lost, we would be too small to merit interest from anyone other than the insignificantly small librarian interested in the history of the insignificant: little stories to comfort little people who liked to believe that the heroes mattered, because otherwise, they would be nothing but forgotten ghosts before the city could even deign to shake itself free from yesterday.
It looked at us; we looked at it.
I didn’t want to know.
I closed my eyes.
And, without us wanting to attribute a digestive system to the beast, it gobbled us up.