In which a damnation is discussed, a hat is found, and the nature of strangers gets a thorough going-over on London Bridge.
Legwork.
Someone else’s leg, someone else’s work.
There’s pros to being management.
I sprawled across an ornate curly sofa at the back of an office just
below Mr Earle’s and waited.
Occasionally people came in. The office doctor who came to check on my stitches, take my blood pressure; the office caterer who came in with cups of coffee and biscuits of such quality and expense that our taste buds, accustomed to custard creams and jammy dodgers, found them slightly unease-making. Once or twice Oda. She seemed to have something to say, and then not, and would just look at us, nod as if to say, “still here, good, don’t try leaving” and walk out again.
Once — just once — Earle.
He came in with a big white box, put it down on the table in front of me.
“Open it,” he said.
I did carefully, expecting snakes.
It was a big black coat.
I said, “Umm. .?”
“It’s for you.”
“Uh. .”
“An Alderman’s coat. The symbol of our office.”
“But I’m not an Alderman.”
“No. But you are Midnight Mayor, and the relationship between our two offices has always been close. And your current coat is in sad need of replacement. There’s a card in there for a tailor, to make you a suit. You don’t own a suit, do you?”
I felt the comfort of my bleached and bleached again old coat, felt the little sticky enchantments stitched into the lining and did my best to smile. “No — but thanks,” I said. “I appreciate the coat. If it’s OK, I’ll keep this one on a little longer, just because. . you know. . there’s spells and stuff that’ll take time to sew. I’m sure you understand.”
He smiled a smile the width of a tapeworm’s eye, and walked out, leaving the damn white box with its damn black coat sitting in front of me.
Legs worked.
Afternoon drifted towards evening.
Evening turned the lights on in the great glass faces of the offices, sketching out mad mathematical patterns of light and dark across the towers of the city.
Somewhere in an office on another floor, someone who didn’t know why they had been given this task and didn’t understand what it was meant to achieve got their slightly grubby hands on a police report from Dollis Hill.
Somewhere else, another person who didn’t know why they were doing what they did but understood promotion lay in combining plenty of dutiful obedience with just enough initiative to be noticed found a piece of CCTV footage from a camera in north-west London.
A few minutes later, the same person would call someone in Brent Council, name a few names, offer a few figures and make a polite enquiry about traffic regulations in Kilburn.
Their promotion was looking up.
I stared at the ceiling.
It was one of those panelled things, white boards laid on a metal frame, with a strip light embedded in the middle. It looked like the sort of thing Bruce Willis would crawl through in a sweaty vest.
Rush hour.
Didn’t need to look at the clock to feel it; just close my eyes and it was there on the edge of perception: a rising heat in my skin, a brushing prickly feeling in my stomach, an itching at the end of my toes. A city that big: even to begin to comprehend the scale of it was to risk madness; and here it was, rush hour, elbow pressed into elbow on the Underground, head bumping against head with each swaying of the train, thigh rubbing thigh, close as lovers on a cold night, bags bumping and newspapers being tossed aside, rubbish bouncing in the streets, buses crawling under the weight of bottoms sitting and legs shuffling towards the exit, beepbeepbeep for the doors to open, not enough room to breathe, windows misted up with bright steam, a thousand strangers’ faces on the platforms, pushing towards that deadly yellow line; the live rail. Engines whining into life, cafés steaming, coffee and frothy milk, lights coming on in the streets, feet clacking on wet pavements, umbrellas turning inside out in the rushing wind funnelled down the streets. The live rail.
So easy to go mad, if you just let it. That’s why there were sorcerers, and sorcerers’ apprentices, and kindly old men who found you in your teenage years and took you to one side and said, “Now, Matthew, let me explain about the health and safety procedures you must follow in your use of magic.” Because if you looked close enough and began to understand the size and the beauty of it, you’d forget that somewhere there was a you at all.
And when he should have been going home, somewhere in the offices of Harlun and Phelps a young employee with a bright career ahead of him, so long as he didn’t ask too many questions, was reading a complaint filed by a traffic warden assaulted on her duties in Dollis Hill, some few weeks before, and slowly coming to realise that this was exactly what Mr Earle had asked for.
It even had a name and address on it.
Oda opened the door, stuck her head round, said, “They’ve found her.”
I blinked my eyes open blearily and said, “Uh?”
“The traffic warden. The Aldermen have found her.”
Not so hard, if you know how.
All praise be unto the Metropolitan Police and their effective data entry systems.
We met in a conference room — Earle, me, Oda, those Aldermen who hadn’t already fallen at the mark. Even Sinclair, who sat some seats away from me and didn’t meet my eye.
Afraid of us.
Judging by the number of Aldermen who were no longer meeting our eye, not even to glare, they were afraid too.
Still not dead.
Surprise!
Earle had a neat file on his desk. Someone had taken the time to print out multiple copies and staple the sheets together.
He said, “I shall be brief, as I cannot abide long meetings. Ms McGuiness is taking the minutes, and I would like to welcome Mr Sinclair, a. . concerned citizen. . whom I’m sure we all recall from previous dealings. Ms. .” He hesitated.
“Oda will do fine,” said Oda calmly.
“Ms Oda, representing the Order, and of course, Mr Swift, our new Midnight Mayor. The agenda is brief and to the purpose; you should all have copies.”
We did, on a neat, “Harlun and Phelps”-headed piece of white paper. The items were:
1. Outstanding Matters, and Apologies.
2. The Death of Cities.
I wondered which secretary had typed it up.
“Mr Kemsley is, as I am sure you are aware, currently undergoing medical treatment. His condition remains stable but critical. Flowers have been sent, and a card is being circulated round the office; I would appreciate it if you could all sign.
“The second matter arising is the issue we have come to label ‘the death of cities’. I appreciate that this is a rather more grandiose and melodramatic term than we usually like to use at such meetings, but I fear it may fit the occasion perfectly. For those who require clarification on the matter, I refer you to the minutes of our last meeting. In the meantime, Mr Swift has come up with a rather unusual suggestion.”
He turned to me. So did everyone else. I shrugged and said, “Yeah, right. I think the traffic warden did it. I think she summoned him, the death of cities. He’s her tool for vengeance, destruction, retribution, whatever. She’s going to be the thing that pops. Anything else?”
Mr Earle gave me the kind of smile I imagined he reserved for that special category of employee who came to his office at 1 p.m. on a Friday afternoon to announce there was nothing else to do so could they, like, go home, yeah? It was the kind of smile that guaranteed you a plywood coffin.
He said, eyes on me and voice for the rest of the room, “If I may refer you to the files on your table. Three weeks ago, a traffic warden on duty in Dollis Hill walked into her local police station to report that a gang of youths on bikes had stolen her hat and cycled off, in her words, ‘laughing and calling me racist names’. The police report says she was extremely distressed, which may be understandable in light of the fact that this was her third visit to the police station in three months. Two weeks before she had been spat at in the street. A month before that, and the driver of a Corsa parked illegally on a double yellow line had beaten her so badly she had required stitches, and treatment for two days in the local hospital. It was the opinion of the writer of the police report that having her hat stolen by a boy who laughed at her as he cycled away was the last straw. An act of random, careless cruelty by a stranger to a stranger; the kind of thing that, to the right mind, in the right place, with the right. . disposition. . could push you to do unwise deeds.
“The day after her hat was stolen, she quit her job as a traffic warden.
“I should also add further that our credit-check service reported a bad rating on her financial situation. Her family were immigrants; she was granted leave to stay by grace of being born in the UK, but her parents quickly abandoned her and ran back off to wherever it was they came from, leaving the state to handle matters in their usual way.
“Gentlemen, may I be bold to say that this is the kind of extremely flawed and volatile individual who could well, if circumstances were right, be so reckless — perhaps without even knowing what she did — as to cause extreme harm to our city. If we were the Samaritans then I would suggest a nice cup of hot soup and a gentle talk with the counsellor; but this situation is far beyond that. The facts are in front of you to see. If this woman is indeed the reason why Mr Pinner has come to our city — as circumstance suggests she is — then I move immediately to vote on the course of action suggested by our Midnight Mayor. That this woman — this traffic warden whose hat was so unfortunately stolen — be considered a threat intolerable to the safety of the city, and be eliminated before the death that Mr Pinner is clearly seeking comes to London. If there is no objection, let us take this vote now.”
There was no objection.
They took the vote.
Not a hand went against it.
Mr Earle said, “Mr Swift? You haven’t voted for the motion.”
“I didn’t realise I was meant to.”
“You are a member of this board.”
“I am?”
“Yes. This was your idea, your deduction, your motion.”
“Oh. I see.”
“Well? How do you vote?”
“I. . we. . I mean, I. .”
I lowered my head.
“What’s her name?” I said.
“Is it relevant?”
“Just curiosity.”
“Her name is Penny Ngwenya. How do you vote, Mr Swift?”
We studied our feet.
What would the Midnight Mayor do?
I raised my hand.
Penny Ngwenya.
Spat at, assaulted, her hat stolen.
Give me back my hat.
Dollis Hill.
Too much coincidence.
Mo had stolen a traffic warden’s hat in Dollis Hill and was punished for the crime.
GIVE ME BACK MY HAT
And Penny Ngwenya, refugee stuck in the system, no money, spat at, assaulted, robbed, had filed a report, on which no action had been taken.
And Mr Pinner had come to the city.
Penny Ngwenya.
Poor little Penny Ngwenya; she probably didn’t even know what she had done, or what had to be done in reply. I hoped she did. Then it would be easier. Then I could tell Loren.
We drove.
*
Not that far, as it turned out.
St Pancras International. Some wisecracker had announced in the 1830s that, what with the Houses of Parliament having burnt down, there should be a competition to build the replacement. St Pancras was one of the entries. If British MPs wore sweeping cloaks and cackled at the moon, it would have been the perfect place for government. Red towers with spikes on; a clock that could never quite agree with its neighbour on the tower of King’s Cross; a long, pale blue-grey arch that you could see from on top of Pentonville Hill, or from the tower blocks of Camden. Tiled steps, marbled pillars, red bricks hiding a decayed interior of exposed cables and pipes just locked out of the public’s sight. It was not a delicate building. Nor was there anywhere to park. There are downsides to putting international terminals on main roads.
I said, “You sure. .?”
“She works here.”
“Doing. .?”
“Cleaner.”
I looked up at the bright clock on the tallest tower, at the heaving traffic stop-starting down the numberless traffic lights of the Euston Road, at the people waiting for taxis under the metal overhang of King’s Cross. “Let me out here,” I said. “You find a place to park.”
“Where are you going?”
“If this Penny Ngwenya is the cause of all this, I’ll know. Seriously. You find someone better qualified to look, and I’ll give back the coat.”
Oda came with me. No point in saying no. They let us out just past the British Library, pulling, illegally, into the bus lane so I could duck into the shelter of the great beige stone buildings that kept their backs turned to the traffic, their faces towards the quieter streets of Bloomsbury. The wind was nose-bite icy, ear-dropping cold. I pulled my coat up tighter around my neck and hurried towards the traffic lights, while the Aldermen in their big cars that deserved every penny of congestion charge they had to pay went in search of a place to park.
“We’re not doing anything without the Aldermen,” said Oda.
“Sure. Just looking.”
“Sorcerer. .” Warning in her voice.
“Just making sure. You wouldn’t want an innocent to get blasted, would you?”
“You misunderstand my cause. Bigger pictures.”
“Of course. Silly me.”
The station was divided into three parts: Underground, international and overland. It seemed easier to find our way in through the low sculptured doorways to the Underground at pavement level, than through the high arches above street level leading to the mainline station. Glass and bright lights; beeping gates, whirring ticket machines, men and women in blue uniform: police. Of course — police. An international terminal, where else?
“You know,” I murmured, “if this Ngwenya is the one responsible, St Pancras may not be the best place to. .”
“There are ways.”
“Really? You mean you can. .”
“If I told you my methods,” she said calmly, “then I might not be able to use them again.”
We looked away.
The mainline station combined trains to Glasgow with services to Paris, Brussels, Lille and, for the truly masochistic, Disneyland. It was built to impress. The roof was higher than the average winter cloud on the city, the platform longer than the distance between most bus stops. Everywhere was the same pale, cold blue light, shining down on glass and steel, built one into the other like they were elements of the same nature, modern simplicity melted into Gothic grandeur. The effect should have been an uncomfortable clash of old and new, but both periods were united by the drive to achieve splendour and space, to make it clear to anyone who hadn’t guessed as they stepped off the train, that this was London, capital city, and you’d better hold on to your wallets.
The sound was the constant rumbling of the Eurostar engines, which sat right next to the main foyer, separated only by a thin glass sheet, some unsympathetic coppers and international law. Tourists about to travel could buy champagne at £70 a throw from the leather-sofa champagne bar that sat by the nearest long platform. Shoppers with space left in their bags could nip downstairs to where passport control kept its booths and, from the shops huddled around the X-ray machines and metal detectors, purchase anything from a trashy novel to an exploding bubble bath. Cafés offered travellers from Paris croissants and thick dark coffee, to cushion them against the baked-beans-based culture shock they were about to receive; off-licences offered cut-price booze to bring your family, whose present you’d failed to buy on holiday; luggage shops offered businessmen the best leatherware, and everything shone with commerce.
And everything shone, because someone was there to clean it. Oda and I stood above the escalator leading down to the main shopping hall, and watched. The station was buzzing with people, arriving, or heading for the last train to the Continent; bags and coppers and immigration control, shoppers and sellers elbowed each other for room.
Oda said, “Do we know what this woman looks like?”
“We’ll know.”
“Because of your Jedi nature?” she snapped.
“Because you can’t just summon the death of cities and not have something peculiar going on. Doesn’t your bigger picture involve using me for my essential and potent grasp of these things?”
“You haven’t been very potent so far,” she grumbled.
“We saved your life.”
Silence.
“I didn’t expect it to. .” I stopped. “Sorry,” I said finally.
“Sorry? You’re saying this as though there’s some meaning. As in, repentant, remorseful, regretful?”
“Don’t know. Just seemed like the thing you wanted to hear.”
“I should hit you.”
“There’s a queue. You still need me.”
“Even less than you could possibly comprehend. We do have your theories.”
I shrugged. “Just theories. And if I’m wrong, you still need the Midnight Mayor. Why do you think Nair lumbered me with this?” I asked, genuinely interested.
She shrugged. “What does it matter?”
“Plenty. He seemed like a sharp guy. Smart enough to find Raleigh Court; smart enough to have a good address book in his mobile phone. Earle thinks he did it in order to tame us. To make us get involved.”
“There is a logic to it.”
“It could have just been a good combination. A complete and utter accident. A stranger dials a random number on the phone, and you can guarantee that sooner or later, they’ll call us. Your fingers must twitch at the thought. You hate the idea of sorcerers per se; you despise the blue electric angels, you fear the Midnight Mayor. Wrap them up in one bundle. . I’m impressed you aren’t even hitting.”
“Utility.”
“That’s what they said about the nuclear bomb. It’ll come in handy one day — sure, let’s keep it around.”
“Matthew,” she said sharply, and then seemed to catch her own breath, draw it in, as if she could suck the word back down. “Sorcerer,” she added, firmer, “unless you have something useful to say, shut up and work.”
I shut up.
We worked.
It didn’t take long. People go out of their way not to see the cleaners. There’s a shame involved — we let the crap fall from our nerveless fingers, and someone else picks up after.
Look; and ye shall find.
When she shuffled into view, dragging the trolley with its twin bins and collection of brushes and mops hooked onto the side, we knew before I had time even to reason it through. We snapped at Oda, “Wait here a moment,” and tripped briskly downstairs to the lower concourse, elbowed through a gaggle of schoolkids just off the train, ducked the swinging banjo of a musician dressed as Mickey Mouse headed for Disneyland and walked straight up to where she was carefully laying down a yellow sign proclaiming “Caution! Slippery Floor!” She had her back to me.
Sorcerers are good at killing people. It’s not in the job description, it just. . comes naturally.
We stopped in front of the sign. She looked up. We opened our mouth, and she said, “Can I help you?”
A hundred ways to kill.
Stop it right here, right now. That’s the plan.
Burn out her heart, set her brain on fire, boil her blood, break her bones. A hundred ways to die, a thousand things we could do. Just human.
“Hey — can I help?”
There was a badge pinned to her blue overall. It said “P. Ngwenya — Hygiene Care Assistant”.
I looked into a pair of perfect brown ovals set in a face that was itself almost a perfect oval, except for the wide protrusion of her slightly squashed nose. Her black hair was done in plaits wound so tightly to the curve of her skull that the fuzzy hair in between each row looked like thin grey paint rising to a carved ridge.
Looking at her, there was something I recognised.
I said, “Uh. .”
The empty sounds you make to buy time.
She waited patiently, not smiling, not moving, just waiting to see what I’d do next, almost as if she knew what had to come.
“Um. .” I stumbled.
I was aware of Oda coming down the stair behind me. I heard a
voice say, “Do you ever clean round the University of London?” The voice was mine.
“Yes,” she said, as if I was a child asking whether falling was always down. “Do I know you?”
“Um, no. I just. .”
What would the Midnight Mayor do?
Save the city.
Save the stones, the streets, the roads, the stories, the treasures.
Dead is dead is dead.
(Ta-da! Still not dead.)
“Do you have the time?” I asked.
She looked at me sideways for a moment, trying to hide the scepticism in her face, then carefully raised a latex-gloved hand and pointed upwards. A clock the size of a park playground was projected onto the main wall overlooking the terminal. It said 9.23 p.m. I smiled at her, and said, “Thank you.”
And then, because Oda was at the bottom of the escalator, I turned my back to her and walked away.
“Well?” demanded Oda.
“Well?”
“Is it her?”
“What?”
“Is she the sorceress? Did you see? Is it Penny Ngwenya?”
“She’s Penny Ngwenya,” I sighed.
“Then we have to find a way to get her away from these people — the cleaners must have a supply cupboard, a place behind the. .”
“She’s not a sorceress.”
Still me talking?
Surprise.
“What?”
“I looked at her. We read her like a book. Just an ordinary mortal, just a cleaner, nothing more. She’s not the cause of all this.”
“But you said. .”
“I had a good hypothesis and she happened to fit it. But it’s not her. Either the theory is wrong or the Aldermen screwed up. Ngwenya isn’t our woman.”
I started climbing the stairs upwards. We wanted to breathe, proper, cold, rain-drenched London air, get a smell of bus and car, get something pure into our lungs, walk and think, get to the river, give me back my hat, just think.
“Where are you going?”
“For a walk.”
“Where are you walking?”
“Don’t know. Doesn’t matter. Don’t know.”
“Sorcerer!”
I turned back so fast she nearly walked into me, tripped at the top of the stair. “You keep shouting that in public and I won’t need to worry about the gun in the dark, the stranger, silence, knife, wire, drug, needle, bomb — the NHS will get there first with a fucking straitjacket!”
Turned again, wanted out, reload, reboot, try again without the psycho shit!
(You should see what’s behind you!)
Oda scuttled after me. I felt the aching in every part of me. Strangers who’d just taken it on themselves to come and cause me pain for no damn good reason, just because I happened to be there, happened to be me, us, sorcerer, us, whatever, pick one.
Out in the cold, good wind, proper wind, a proper coat-flapper of a blast, straight up the nose and down into the lungs, a decent whallumph of a city storm, just what we needed. We ran across Euston Road in front of the angry traffic, picked a street heading away at random, started walking, past suspicious hotels with drooping neon signs, gloomy old B amp; Bs, Bloomsbury terraces, that could be fit for millionaires, inhabited by students behind plywood and broken glass. We let the shadows drag behind us, could taste them on the air again, just like the night we’d walked and the dead had come for a chat, clutching at our coat-tails, trying to pull us back.
The paving stones bounced loosely beneath our feet; second-hand bookshops, cafés selling suspicious sandwiches, schools of English and plumbers’ supply shops, all poking uneasily round corners where bombs had fallen on the older houses; gated crescents of withered green and leafless trees, neon lights illuminating the black fall of drizzle so thin that if I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have known it was falling.
“Sorcerer!”
Oda still behind us.
“Sorcerer!”
Walking and thinking, they went naturally together. Thinking without words. “Sorcerer, stop!”
She grabbed our arm. We grabbed hers, shook her where she stood, pushed her back into the street. “Get away from us!” we snarled. “Get away!”
She fell back, stumbling into the gutter and then to the middle of the narrow street, staring at us in. . something that on an innocent face might have been surprise and horror, and on hers was nearer contempt.
“I won’t kill her,” I said.
Revelation in Oda’s eyes. “She is-”
“No.”
“She is a sorcere-”
“No.”
“Why won’t you kill her?”
“Damnation.”
“What?”
“Damnation. Burn in hell, Oda. Damnation. You kill an innocent, you go to hell, isn’t that how it is? Do you think that your God is up there keeping score — hey, sure, she gunned down an innocent in cold blood, stood and took away a human life; for that, technically, she should spend all eternity suffocating in a vat of elephant dung, sure, but hey! Look! She killed guilty people too! Gunned them down just like the innocents, bang, bang, two to the head, three to the chest, isn’t that how it goes? A simple bit of mathematics, the bigger picture, let the evil live so that the good need not suffer extraordinarily — and look, she sacrificed her principles to let the blue electric angels live, because that way the innocent could be saved by the guilty, and the innocent mustn’t die, mustn’t be gunned down bang!
“Equations — let’s say one innocent soul is worth a hundred guilty ones — have you killed a hundred and one guilty people? Will their deaths buy you the way into heaven, or do you suppose at the pearly gates blood is blood is blood regardless of whose heart it was squeezed from? Greater evil, lesser evil, let’s do a risk-assessment analysis, weigh up the pros and cons, award percentage points based on who is more likely to slaughter the newborn babe, and who’ll settle for a three-week-old with hearing problems? Burn in hell, Oda! Go burn with the rest of the damned! I will not kill her!”
She looked at us like. . we don’t know. We couldn’t see.
“I’m going to end this,” I said.
“How? If you won’t. .”
“She’s not a sorceress.”
“You just. .”
“She’s not. Tell the Aldermen. Scream it until the straitjacket comes. I’m going to end this.”
“How?”
“I’m going to find the damn hat. Keep away from us.”
“Sorcerer. .”
“Burn, Oda. Let’s vote and kill a stranger. Do the maths. Then burn. Get out of the city. Run. It’s what we would do, if we had the chance.”
This time, she didn’t follow.
We walked.
Didn’t matter where.
Thinking and walking.
Brunswick Square; restaurants, supermarket, cinema — this week’s speciality: Romanian arthouse. Russell Square. Hotels and ATMs. The British Museum — great Doric columns, windows too big for a single floor to contain, posters. Those special shops that cater only for tourists: a hundred little waving Paddington Bears; shortbread at two quid a slice; tartan kilts, and “art” made almost entirely out of masking tape. New Oxford Street; Gower Street; Tottenham Court Road; Oxford Street. The shops still open, even the ones selling “I LOVE LONDON” T-shirts and big leather boots, the cafés buzzing, customers of the pubs in every by-street and up every alley spilt out into the street regardless of the cold and the drizzle. Women with piercings, wearing more metal rings than cotton clothes, men with shaven heads and white T-shirts that warp under the weight of overeating trying to explode from their innards. A thousand bright lights as far as the eye could see: the hot, tight magics of Soho to the south, the easy illusions and enchantments of Great Portland Street to the north; I could taste them, dribble my fingers in them. The shadows dragged behind me, snagged and snared on my fingertips, slipped across the palm of my hand like water blown sideways in a gale. So much magic, so much life; and it was all going to burn.
Penny Ngwenya.
Give me back my hat.
I am the death of cities.
What would the Midnight Mayor do?
Our fault — no, not quite right. Our responsibility. Our problem. Reload, reboot, without the psycho-shit.
We were going to find the hat.
Her hat.
And it occurred to me as I passed Bond Street station, I had an idea where to look.
The Jubilee Line runs through Bond Street. It’s sometimes a detail hard to remember; people think Bond Street and automatically start counting stations the long length of Oxford Street — Marble Arch, Oxford Circus, Tottenham Court Road, pleased that in this one case, the map of the Underground and the map of the city actually have some sort of geographical symmetry going for them.
Bond Street is therefore easy to take for granted — an in-between stop for people who don’t quite know where they’re going, unless they’re shopping for something extremely rare and expensive. Jewellers make the streets around the station their own, but the station itself is still on Oxford Street, still just a doorway on the way to somewhere more conclusive.
We caught the train. Jubilee Line, again, swishing new doors, clean blue and red chequered seats, not too much yet scratched into the glass, just the usual statements of:
KEN WAS ERE
Or:
MEGA!!
Or (and of course):
GIVE ME BACK MY HAT
Headed north. Baker Street, St John’s Wood, Swiss Cottage, Finchley Road — overtaken by the mainline train to Coventry, whomph and the Underground carriages gently swayed at the pressure of its passing — West Hampstead, Kilburn, Willesden Green, Dollis Hill.
Back to Dollis Hill again.
The indicator board read:
1. Stanmore — 5 mins
2. Damnation — 9 mins
3. ENDOFTHELINEENDOFTHELINEENDOFTHELINE ENDOFTHELINEENDOFTHEL
But by now, I’d got the message.
Out into a dark and sleepy street, the rain falling harder now, the chill retreating on the air, aware that the water was the main business tonight and it wasn’t quite cold enough to make it into ice.
Into the deep dark wilds of windy Willesden, where no traveller dare venture without a copy of the London A-Z, a bus map, a travelcard and ideally, a compass and all-purpose urban survival kit, through streets that changed their nature every five minutes, as if the whole area had lost faith in itself and now needed to ask its neighbour if this style was all right after all, or whether they should have stuck with terraced grot.
Back to the wide high road, with big red buses irregularly lumbering down the middle of the carriageway. Back to the purple sign above the gleaming door — VOLTAGE; and now it was locked shut, no bouncer on the door, no kids going in. A council notice had been stuck up on the front of the door, informing any would-be visitors that this place had had its licence to serve alcohol withdrawn, and if anyone wanted further information they should consult their local borough offices. I hammered on the door, shouted various obscenities until someone paid me attention, a window sliding open upstairs, a head sticking out and a man’s voice saying, “Oi, fuck off out of it!”
I stepped back into the rain, looking up at the face, and said, “I’m looking for the guy who ran this place — the Executive Officer. A prat with a cardiac condition who called himself Boom Boom! You know where he is?”
“Got his arse shifted out of here, didn’t he?” came the reply. “Try doctor.”
The window slammed shut.
I cursed quietly to myself, marched back up to the door of VOLTAGE, pressed my fingers into the padlock and chain and whispered loving placations to it until with a well-mannered click the thing came open and free in my hands. I pulled the doors open, saw nothing but darkness inside, snatched a bubble of neon from the streetlamp above, which hissed and dimmed in complaint, and lobbed it down the stairwell ahead of me.
Few things are as unsettling as a place which should have been roaring with noise, turned quiet. No windows, no lights, no sounds, except the tread of our footsteps. We pushed heat from our fingers into our floating bubble of neon, forced it to expand and blaze to drive away the clinging darkness that slipped in like loose silk from every corner. An empty bar, an empty floor, sticky with old spilt beer. Empty stools and silent speakers, unlocked doors, and switches that when flicked didn’t bother to turn anything on. I could taste the thick, lingering afterburn of that place’s magic, felt the shadows, silent and sad, faces that should have been dancing now fallen into nothing more than a sullen, bored and resentful sleep.
Downstairs. No lights, no sound, just us.
I found an office, which I had ignored last time, following the deDum of the beat. Now the door was open. I went in. Papers on a desk, a computer, an executive toy made out of ball bearings and wire. We picked it up by one bearing, let it drop, watched the whole thing swing. It was hypnotic. How could anyone work, with such distraction? The walls were covered by posters of various DJs, and bands with names like “Thunderchazz!”, “DJ Grindhop”, “The Bassline Slutz” and other excitingly ungrammatical things. I sat down in a chair too big for me, too small for the Executive Officer, twirled a few times, watching my shadow shrink and grow on the walls around me as I moved and my bubble of stolen neon stayed stationary overhead, humming faintly with trapped electric glow. I went through a couple of desks. Strange bits of wire, electronics, jacks and plugs designed to operate on systems that were never, ever as easy as it claimed in the manual. Old batteries rolling around on the bottom of a drawer, dead biros, scrap paper, a half-used box of tissues, an unopened box of “Her Pleasure” condoms, a pack of Blu-Tack, a broken keyboard, the front panel ripped off and the number keys mostly gone. Not what I needed. I kept on looking.
The solution was inside a black organiser bound with a thing that wasn’t quite leather, but dreamed of one day making the leap. I flicked through it, tried “D” for doctor, “G” for “GP” and eventually found what I was after under “Q” for “quack”. The entry in the address book said:
Howard Umbars,
158 Fryer Walk,
London W11 58P
(Emergencies call: 0208 719 9272)
I took the contact book, just in case I was wrong. The shadows dragged behind me, empty nothingness turning to watch as we walked out. In a few years, there would be ghosts in that basement, if nothing was done soon, and they’d dance to an invisible beat for the rest of time. It didn’t take much to make these things real.
To double-check my guess, I walked through the rainy streets of Willesden until I found a bus shelter. I climbed up on a ticket machine until I could lean over the top, stretched across the gap and pulled down from the stagnant pool of dirty water on the roof a sodden and sticky copy of the Yellow Pages. Quite how the Yellow Pages found its way on top of most bus shelters in London was a mystery beyond our knowing, and we put the whole thing down to higher powers and tried not to think about it. I sat in the bus shelter, shook the worst of the water out of the soggy book, and peeled my way through the glued-together pages.
What the Yellow Pages was doing on top of the bus shelters was one mystery we didn’t explore; why the Yellow Pages that we found up there happened to contain a directory for “wizards” was a mystery we actively walked the other way from. I was in there, somewhere. Matthew Swift (sorcerer), just waiting for some clumsy oaf to grab a copy of the book from on top of the shelter and read our name.
We tried “H” for healers, “M” for mystics and, with growing frustration, went back to “Q” for “quacks”.
Howard Umbars was there, in the Yellow Pages on top of the bus stop.
Higher powers had a sense of humour after all.
I tossed the book back into the puddle on top of the shelter, and went to see him.
Acton.
Acton is a borough that prides itself on not being Acton. Wherever you live in Acton, it is your noble and firm intention to make it clear that you don’t really live in Acton. You live in Ealing, or maybe, if you’re low on luck, in Ealing Borders. Or you live in Park Royal, or maybe you’re Almost Chiswick, or borderline Harlesden — wherever you are, however deep you may be inside the boundaries of the borough, if you live in Acton, then you don’t.
Howard Umbars lived in Acton. He wouldn’t admit it, but anyone who is five minutes’ walk from North Acton station lives in Acton.
Low, semi-detached houses. Fake timbering in their perfect triangular sloped roofs, set in white, gravelly stuff too smug to admit to being painted concrete. Driveways containing a mixture of slightly foxed and extremely battered cars, pubs with big gardens and expensive beer, local twenty-four-hour stores selling suspicious cakes, French cigarettes and chocolate fingers.
158 Fryer Walk could have been anywhere, and was most certainly Acton.
There was a six-pointed star on the roof above the front door. Once upon a time, this was where the Polish emigrants had come to stay, back in the days when Acton was considered practically countryside. The door itself was painted blue. There were chain curtains drawn across the windows and no doorbell, no lights on upstairs, a dim yellow glow from downstairs. I knocked on the door.
No one answered.
I knocked harder and waited.
After a while, the door was drawn back on its chain. A voice from inside said, “Yes?”
“I’m looking for Mr Howard Umbars. Actually — that’s a total lie. I’m looking for the turd with the heart condition who uses Mr Umbars as his mystical quack. He here?”
There was a moment’s pause. Then the voice said, “Please wait a moment.”
I waited.
The door stayed on the chain. There was movement in the gloom behind it. A watery blue eye appeared in the crack, looked me up and down. An indignant male voice said, “Who are you?”
“Me? I’m Matthew Swift, the last sorcerer left in this damn town, the blue electric angels made flesh, the Midnight fucking Mayor. Are you going to make me stand in the rain until I blast your bloody door down or what?”
There was a moment’s silence from behind the door. Then it closed, the chain was pulled off from the inside, and it was opened up. A dark corridor, possessed of coat rack (empty), mirror (clean) and coffee table (bare). I stepped inside carefully, looking for the owner of the watery blue eye. He stood at the top of a steep, narrow flight of steps, hands folded around a detachable TV aerial, which he held like a shield. He was bald — not just with a shaven head, but every inch of his visible anatomy shining with taut, stretched pale skin, as if the distance between bone and air was so narrow that hair simply didn’t have the chance to grow. He wore a white shirt and dark trousers; his little face, too small for the neck it sat on, wore an expression of serious mistrust.
“Who are you?” he demanded again. “What do you want here?”
“Strangely, I’ve been entirely honest with you. Are you going to try and use that” — I nodded at the TV aerial in his hand — “to hurt us?”
“If you’re what you say you are, it wouldn’t make much difference.”
“Well, quite.”
“If I believe you’re what you say you are.”
I shrugged. “Think of it as being like a nuclear bomb. You don’t want to give the terrorist his million quid not to detonate on basic principle, but on the other hand, are you really going to take the chance that that little red button is fake?”
“What do you want here?”
I looked up the dark stairwell, then past Mr Umbars to the gloomy
corridor into what I guessed was a kitchen. I said, “Look. You’re a quack, right, in a business where quacks seriously do try to make gold from lead or whatever. I don’t really care. You know a guy I’m looking for. He calls himself Boom Boom — the Executive Officer of a club called Voltage. I’m thinking you did some work for him, on a cardiac problem. I’m thinking he’s had a relapse lately owing to some. . unforgivable fool. . grabbing his beating heart in an angry and electrified fist and squeezing it until it nearly popped. Where is he?”
“Why do you want him?”
“I’m going to save the fucking city,” I replied with a chuckle.
“Are you for real?”
“You’ll never know until you press that button. We aren’t in the mood for pleasant games. Where is he?”
There was a basement.
There’s always a basement in these circumstances. You got into it via a small triangular door cut into the side of the staircase going upstairs, down a flight of grey concrete steps, beneath a bright white bulb swinging from the ceiling. I said, “For a quack, you’re not big on disabled access, are you?”
He looked at me with the expression of a man thinking about red buttons.
“Humour,” I said cheerfully. “It’s my only redeeming quality.”
The basement had been turned into a. .
Surgery did it too much credit. That implied bright lights, scrubbed floors, needles, plastic chairs and steel beds, people in overalls and machines that went “ping”. This wasn’t a surgery. It was a nightmare out of the mind of a surgery patient scheduled to have their heart bypassed in the morning, who knew, just knew, that they’d be one of the ones for whom the drugs didn’t take. The longest wall was covered with all the alchemical ingredients an urban magician might ever require — feather of albino pigeon, leg of rat drowned in a burst of raw sewage, fat from the bottom of the basin in the chip shop, buddleia from the derelict mansion on the corner of the high street, burnt tyre carved carefully off the base of a burnt-out bus, tail of squirrel that found the winter too warm to sleep through, dribble of oil from the bicycle that skidded into the cement truck, black tar scraped up from the street that had started to melt in the summer’s sun, ground ballast from the furthest platforms of Paddington station, kebab feasted on by King Fox, vodka bottle still bearing the red lipstick-kiss of Lady Neon, found left behind the bar at a club in Soho. No longer did young apprentices to the great alchemist seek silver buried at the bottom of enchanted mines. The time was of tar and plastics, of synthetic compounds and decaying reactive products in a jar.
In the middle of the room was a table the size of a double bed, made from titanium steel. On it, and that barely, was the great blubbering rolling twisted body of the Executive Officer. Over him were several layers of plexiglas casing, with air in between each level, which between them managed to reduce the great rumble of the man’s heart to nothing more than a faint deDum. Pipes and tubes had been threaded in between these layers to provide blood (mixed with a few parts petrol) for his veins, air (mixed with a tad of exhaust) for his lungs, and, sure, why bother to ask? electricity for his heart. I could see the wires running into his chest, taste their sharp fizzle on the air. Boom Boom, the Executive Officer, was running on little more than enchantment and luck.
But he was awake.
We walked towards the great table with its layers of casing, and tapped on the glass. He half-opened his eyes, saw us, and turned the colour of old bedlinen left out to dry in the rain.
We smiled and waved. “Remember us?”
A fat pair of fingers scrambled across the table inside the transparent casing that contained him, found a switch and pressed it. His voice wheezed from a speaker overhead; “Fucking get him away from me!”
He remembered us.
We felt almost proud.
“Hey!” I replied. “If we were going to kill you, we wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment. I need a bit more information — I was wondering if you might just be the guy to help.”
“Umbars! Get him away from me!”
I glanced at the door. Mr Howard Umbars stood with his hands
folded neatly in front of him, a zen-serene expression of blank nothing on his face, eyes looking at some point a few years behind the back of my head.
“Oi, fatso! Me here to save city; you possibly vessel for valuable information, so stuff it!”
It occurred to as, as we said this, that there had been a voice before Mr Umbars had come to the door, someone else in the house. I heard the click. Nasty little clicking sound. It reminded me of Oda. We said, “Of all the things in this mortal world that frighten us, guns are right down at the bottom of the list.”
I half-turned to look at the source of the sound. Guns dropped another rank in the list of frightening things, displaced by. .
. . technically. . a man. He wore a neat white shirt and black jeans, a pair of leather loafers and a loose fleecy jacket. He held a gun in one hand, and from the neck down looked in every way to be a boring member of the human race. Where the problem arose was from the neck up. The windpipe at the front of his throat had been carved out with a very sharp knife, the muscle removed and a bright blue plastic tube inserted as a replacement, emerging from just below the soft base of his jaw and disappearing into flesh again behind his sternum. Skin had been carefully grafted to the edges, some further into the middle, and a futile attempt made at some point to paint the thing pink, but neither attempt could disguise the truth of this disfigurement. One half of his jaw had been broken and plied away, replaced with a small metal frame through which I could see the teeth and hollow inside of his mouth. Into this frame had been slotted what looked like an old-fashioned cassette player, the top controls embedded in his gums. I could see the spools turning, hear the faint clacker of machinery from within his lips, and realised that, through some means we had no desire to comprehend, this was his tool for speech.
Yet if all this shocked us to our core, when we turned our eyes to his we had a worse horror to see, for his left eye had been entirely removed, along with the best part of that side of his face and all his left ear, and the long snout of a CCTV camera, glass window and all, had been stitched and fused and moulded into his skull. Its long metal nose stuck out three or four inches past the length of his nose, and I could hear it whirr faintly as it adjusted focus on me, and see my own faint reflection in the square glass. The wires seemed to have been plugged direct into his brain, and his nose pushed to one side to make space for it, so that the creature I saw was as much machine as mortal, and neither to completion. His other eye was bright green, and looked steadily at me, just like the gun he held.
I breathed, and found that was about all I could do, hypnotised by the sight of such extremity.
“Addison is my assistant,” said Mr Umbars, moving down from the doorway. “You should be afraid of the gun, Mr Swift — not of him.”
“Sure, bullets don’t kill people, people kill people,” I muttered. “Long live the National Rifle Association. What exactly. .”
“Addison suffers from a rare condition. It’s not infectious. His brain is randomly shutting down parts of his body. First it was his voice, then his left eye, then his left ear, then his lungs. The NHS can’t help him. So I did. He is my assistant.”
As he said this, Mr Umbars reached carefully past me and took hold of my right hand, with the same firm, unsympathetic grip that all doctors seem to possess. He peeled back the glove from my hand and held it up to the light. I watched the CCTV camera of Addison’s eye, and it watched me.
“Fascinating,” murmured Mr Umbars, running his fingers over the crosses carved into my hand. “The mark of the Midnight Mayor.”
He let my hand fall and then without a word reached up to my head, dug his fingers in under my chin and pulled my head towards his, tilting it back and then down, staring at my eyes. “Bright blue,” he murmured. “Not your natural colour, is it, Mr Swift?”
“I am so not in the mood for this,” I snapped. “I’ve told you everything you need to know and like I said, guns are right down the list of things that frighten me.”
“You know,” sighed Mr Umbars, “if I didn’t believe you, I would drain every drop of blood you have and make a fortune flogging it, I mean a fortune. It’s not every day you get to drain the blood of the blue electric angels, after all.”
“Tougher guys than you have tried and died,” I replied. “And thankfully you do believe me, which will make all this a lot easier. I need to talk to the guy on the table.”
For a moment, Mr Umbars hesitated. I could see him thinking about blood, and fire, and telephones, and electric gods and expensive golf courses. Then he smiled, and gestured at that. “It’s all right,” he said. “Put it away.”
The gun was slowly lowered. Mr Umbars gestured at the plastic casing. “He’s all yours. Try not to kill him again. Think of me, if the NHS should ever let you down.”
“I’ll think of you,” I said coldly. “But I don’t think I’ll ever see you again, will I, Mr Umbars?”
He smiled. “Possibly not, Mr Swift, quite possibly not. Addison!” His voice was a command; Addison obeyed, shuffling dutifully up the stairs with Mr Umbars, leaving me in the basement alone with Boom Boom, the Executive Officer of club Voltage.
I could hear his heartbeat, still faint through the casing:
deDumdeDumdeDum.
“You should try and relax,” I said, leaning my elbows on top of his transparent cover. “You’ll do yourself a mischief.”
“What do you want?” came the voice over the intercom.
“You just calm yourself down. If we were here to kill you, we would also have killed everyone else.” I could see the great mass of his heart rising and twitching quickly below the protruding spikes of his ribcage, torn upwards from his flesh. “You’re a mess, mate.”
“What do you want?! I told you about the boy.”
“Yeah, thanks for that. Found the kid, saw the kid flayed alive while I stood powerlessly by — you know, I see why Mr Pinner has you so freaked, why you played flunky for him. Now we’re going to talk about the traffic warden’s hat.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“The hat. The traffic warden’s hat that Mo — the kid — stole. He took her hat and she’s a sorceress, although she probably doesn’t know it; but she is. I took one look at her and knew it, and now I’ve gone and fibbed to the Aldermen; so let’s assume I’m running on a bit of a clock here. Mo stole a traffic warden’s hat, and she, God knows how, has summoned the death of cities. I don’t think she meant to, not really; I’m still hazy on the details, but there it goes. And so it is. Where’s the traffic warden’s hat?”
“I don’t know anything about a hat!”
“You wouldn’t be lying to me, would you? Only it seems to me that you’re a guy inside what could well be an airtight jar dependent on a whole host of fluids being fed in from the outside and that really the Gestapo couldn’t have done better if they’d tried. .”
“I don’t know anything!” he wailed.
“Would you lie to us?”
“I swear, I swear, I swear. .”
“Righto,” I sighed. “Well, I’ll admit it’s a bit of a disappointment. City going to burn because of an untrained sorceress’s rage and all that. Skin torn from flesh and so on, death by ten thousand paper cuts. You know. Good news is, state you’re in, you’ll probably be dead first. So is there anything you can tell me that might just stop London from being obliterated in a blast of untamed magical fury?”
“The. . the woman,” he stammered.
“Which woman? The traffic warden?”
“The contact. There was a woman, I dealt with a woman to arrange it. To get the boy. I dealt with a woman, working on his behalf. Someone else helping Mr Pinner.”
I folded my arms on the top of the casing, pressed my nose against
it, smiled. “Which woman?” I asked, softer than warm honey on a summer’s day.
“I was told to contact a woman, by Mr Pinner, if anything happened,
this woman. .”
“A contact? An associate of Mr Pinner? She did notice that he’s the living death of cities, the harbinger of destruction, the feast in the fire and so on and so forth?”
“I was just told to contact her.”
“Did you?”
“No. There wasn’t any need, he said. Emergencies only. He said I’d be spared, if I helped him, that I’d be spared and could live and rebuild and survive and have a new heart and. .”
“He said everything you wanted to hear and you just thought the silver lining was a cliché,” I sighed. “Great. Tell me how I can contact this woman.”
“There’s a number.”
“Which number?”
“In my organiser.”
“Seen it, stole it, got it. What name?”
“Smith — Ms Smith.”
“How inspired. You’re really not very good at this, are you? Just a fat guy with a cardiac problem. If you weren’t such a pustulent testicle with it, I’d almost feel sorry for electrocuting you. But whaddaya know!” I was rummaging through his organiser, flicking through and there it was, under “S” for Smith, written in the same neat hand, just a name and a telephone number. “You know if this doesn’t work, or if we die in the attempt, you’ll die, right?”
“I’m telling you everything. .”
“Not our meaning,” we sighed. “But keep up the moral revival!”
And once again, we walked away.
The number was for a mobile. That was good; that could help us.
We went to North Acton station, sat down on the nearest platform bench, thumbed on our mobile phone, and started to compose a text. It’s easier to lie briefly than to invent lies at great length.
We wrote:
IT’S BOOM BOOM, SERIOUS PROBLEM NEED HELP DANGER MEET?
Predictive texting might lend itself to good spelling, but it can’t fill in the punctuation. I entered the mobile number for “Ms Smith” and sent the text.
The reply came back in less than five minutes.
WHAT PROBLEM, WHAT DANGER, HE WILL BE ANGRY.
I replied:
MIDNIGHT MAYOR ALDERMEN HELP ME MEET?
This time, the response took nearly ten minutes. I watched the trains go by, counting down towards midnight and the last train.
Then it came:
HACKNEY MARSHES; NAVY CADETS BUILDING, TWO HOURS.
This, we could do.
I caught the first train heading east.
*
We could taste the beginning of the end.
I just felt tired.
Disrupted sleep patterns?
Too much of too much.
Ta-da!
Still not dead.
Still alive.
Watch us burn.
Central Line, heading east. North Acton, East Acton, White City, the beginning of the descent into tunnels, Shepherd’s Bush, Holland Park. The stretch that ran beneath Oxford Street and I could still feel it overhead, its vibrancy, brightness, tacky, gaudy glee making me feel more tired by comparison, a great fire raging just overhead and me down in the cold, empty carriages of the tunnels. Holborn, Chancery Lane, our hand ached, how it ached as we passed beneath the Square Mile, the Golden Mile, the City, the Corporation, call it what you wanted, the oldest part of the city, where the shadows were most thick, where the dragons with the mad eyes guarded long-forgotten gates. Domine dirige nos, Lord lead us, city protect us, a higher power, a miracle beyond comprehension.
St Paul’s, Bank — a vortex in space and time that made the weird corridors of the Barbican seem straight as a Roman road — Liverpool Street, Bethnal Green. We climbed off the train, the last train — well, maybe not quite the very last — up onto a crossroad junction, mainline track to one side, museum and park grounds to the other, traffic still waiting by the lights, passengers still milling around for the buses. A strange place, Bethnal Green. It sat at a junction of more than just geographical borders. Druids call it ley lines, paths of power, but the Glastonbury “away days with the faeries” had undermined some of the pride of those who believed in such things. Didn’t mean such things weren’t possible. At Bethnal Green, things met and melded into each other. Hackney borough met Tower Hamlets, and on each side of border streets hung banners proclaiming that this borough was the best in London, don’t believe the lies of your neighbours! The rich towers of the city were but a few minutes away to the west, the low slabs of Mile End but a few minutes to the east; and in the middle, old Bethnal Green, just far enough from squalor to be respectable, far enough from wealth to be poor, winding enough to be old, open enough to be new, where all the buses met and divided, to take their passengers to a place more certain than the crossroads where all these things converged.
Sure, there are ley lines. Transport for London could probably draw a map.
It was an easy hop from Bethnal Green towards Hackney Marshes, made only less so by the cordon of signs warning “Olympic Site Development — Road Closed”. I got off the bus at the edge of the marshes, and the shadows were thick, crawling up from the pavements, gnawing at our feet, aching in our fingers. The old was dying, they whispered, glaring at the Olympic signs, all going to be knocked down, washed away. East End, end of the east, place where things ended, rejects and slums, squalid history of neglect, all being washed away behind gleaming steel and glass. Wipe away the history; wipe away the shame; forget that the shadows were once alive.
Midnight Mayor, protector of the city.
Remember those memories?
“Busy now,” I snapped at the darkness. “Next time.”
Hackney Marshes — get them while you can. A few more years, and they might have been mown away to make place for a running track, a tennis field, a sports ground, a swimming pool, something, where the world can come and celebrate this strangeness that mortals seem to find so fascinating — Olympic games. We do not understand why mortals, trapped in a fleshy shell, must make their own flesh suffer.
The place had once been a swamp or marsh, and still looked it. The Lee Valley might have been tamed, the river diverted to a more useful course than through valuable real estate on its way down to the Thames, but the drooping, green-brown grass and thick, razor-stemmed reeds still told you, if the spongy ground didn’t, that this was a place with a history humanity had not fully managed to tame. It was not by any means a public park — since that implied benches, bins, children’s play areas, flower gardens, ordered hedges and tactfully planted trees. Hackney Marshes had none of these things, and was all the purer for it. It was a place for the dog walkers to ramble, for the kids to slouch, for the fishermen to wait hours on end to catch a trailing shopping bag; an open patch of sullen, sagging land just like it might once have been a thousand years ago, full of unreliable dips and delves, strange smells and unlikely strangers. We liked it, although as a meeting place, it had one serious disadvantage. It was a long way from the roads, the power lines, the gas mains, the water pipes; these things that were the most natural and useful tools of an urban sorcerer’s trade. There was magic here, time and shadow and proud defiance of the “here we are, here we remain” category — but it was fainter, unfamiliar, harder to tangle our fingers in and command to our use. It was, in short, exactly the kind of place where you might stand a better than usual chance of killing a sorcerer.
We should have taken the gun from Mr Umbars’s house.
As it was, I took a few precautions. I rummaged in my satchel for my penknife and, feeling halfway between extremely clever and utterly inane, stuck it in my right sock and pulled down my trouser over the bulge. I put a torch in my coat pocket, not wanting to risk a possibly futile effort in summoning a light so far from a reliable source of neon. I pulled my gloves off and stuck them in the bottom of my bag. We didn’t know anything about fighting with fists, but if worst came to worst, ignorance was not going to stop us.
And then, because she had guns, and I didn’t, I texted Oda.
HACKNEY MARSHES, NAVY CADETS. DANGER. SHARPEN YOUR KNIVES. SWIFT.
She didn’t text back, so I went in search of Ms Smith.
The Navy Corps building was a corrugated-iron shed whose great-great-grandfather might once have held the Titanic. It was now little more than an iron curve over a bit of concrete floor, but it was still an interior, among the dank grasses of the marsh, and above the battered wooden door a battered old wooden sign declared:
R YAL NA Y CADET
O EN 14–21 YRS OLBE T E BEST
I knocked at the door with the knuckles of my scarred hand.
The wind went through the reeds, the thin waters of the tamed river dribbled and stirred in their uncanny paths. A druid might have found it beautiful, magical, might have breathed deep of that cold, slightly muddy air and from it summoned the lightning. I could see how such things were possible. Life is magic. It just wasn’t the kind I liked.
No one answered, so I kicked the door until it opened, half falling in when it swung back suddenly on its rusted old hinges. The inside of the iron building consisted of four rooms, each one as low, grey and unimaginative as its partner. One might have once been a kitchen, with great rusted pots in which litres of baked beans had been boiled at a go. One had been a dining room, the tables kicked aside; one a bathroom, the sink long since broken, the taps too depressed even to drip ominously in the dark. Broken bulb glass was on the floor, the mirror cracked from a single smashed point. The last room had, once upon a time, been a place for people to feel proud. Pictures still hung on random hooks across the wall, showing beaming boys (and some less so) and stretching back generations to the days when stripy knee-length socks and rounded caps were considered the height of fashion. Here they proudly waved from on top of a canoe; there they sat in sombre rows, their captain holding a battered football, their coach with whistle clasped firmly in hand. Wooden panels had been nailed into the walls on which were emblazoned the names of extra-special boys who had done such and such a deed while serving in the Navy Cadets, the little silver shields now tarnished faint green, the little flags, proclaiming victory at this game of rugby or honourable inspection by such and such a rear vice admiral, now drooping limp, threadbare. There would be rats living in a building like this, hiding away innocuous in the dark. Rats we could work with.
There was no one else in the building.
We were early.
A brown sofa in one corner had had its cushions stolen, revealing the thin veil of fabric beneath. We sat down in it, stretched out our legs, folded our fingers behind our head, feeling the thick scab of the cut down the back of our skull from that night — however many nights it had been — when the telephone had rung and it had all begun — and waited. We were usually very bad at waiting. Tonight it was the most thrilling boredom we could ever have conceived.
There was no risk of sleeping, regardless of how tired we felt.
Weight, not fatigue, was the symptom of our restlessness; a great shallow pressing down on our heart and chest.
Not sleeping, we heard them coming a quarter of a mile off, feet rustling through the reeds while the wind whispered its sad resentments over the marsh.
More than one set of footsteps; we half-turned our head to the window and saw torchlight, heard the faint snatch of voices lost in the twisting of the grass. The bouncing uneven strays of white light from the bulbs sent crazy shadows across the wall, that twisted and writhed and proclaimed runrunrunrunrunrunRUNRUNRUN!
I slunk back deeper into my gutted sofa and waited, tangling my fingers in my hair to keep them still, rubbing at old scabs and scars, keeping alert through the faint pressure-pain. A footstep outside dislodged something; I heard the scuttling of little ratty feet over concrete. Then the door opened. Two men with pistols and torches slunk in, doing the SWAT-team stuff. The way they moved seemed familiar, something straight off the TV, all signals and armour and guns. They saw me straight away; one gave a cry of “Hey-oi!” and the other turned to look.
I said, “Surprise!”
Two more men, slightly more heavily armed than their colleagues, also entered the room. The four of them took up positions in a semicircle around my sofa. I sat up, pressing my feet down on the concrete floor, listening for the scuttle of ratty claws.
“Ta-da,” I added weakly.
They just stared at me. None of them looked like they had a sense of humour.
“Ms Smith?” I asked nicely.
Another person at the door, another figure entered the room. This one was a woman. She wore a big black coat. She said, “Mr Swift.”
You can get big black coats almost anywhere.
And hell, it wasn’t like I was hard to crack.
But I knew her voice too.
I reached into my pocket for my torch, and at once the guns, which had been doing little more than pointing, came closer, making their point a little more pointed. I put my hands carefully by my side, smiled my nicest smile and said, “Just looking for my torch. Dark in here.” And then, because the terror was starting to set in, we blurted, “Hello, Ms Smith. You couldn’t have found a more inspiring name, could you?”
The shadow from the door became a darkness behind the four points of torchlight, moved between them, said, “He’s coming, Swift. Coming to end it all. No phones, no redial, no ringing in the night. End of the line. He’s coming, and then it will be done.”
“I’m guessing by ‘he’ we’re talking about Mr Pinner?”
She didn’t answer.
I stood up, as slow as I dared, and the lights and the guns kept on following. “You know, I never trust people who don’t have anything to say.”
No answer.
“And you knew that it was me asking for the meeting. . because you have my number already on your phone?” I added carefully, trying out the idea for size.
No answer.
“Silence is contempt.”
And, because even people who don’t have anything to say have nerves to touch, she stepped into the torchlight, and the big black coat was stained with dirt and smog, but her face was still clean, and still familiar, and she was still, when not the unimaginative Ms Smith, comrade of the death of cities, a woman I had called Anissina.
She said, “You can’t begin to understand.”
“Try me.”
She said, “If you move, we’ll shoot you.”
“I guessed.”
“I don’t want to shoot you.”
“Bless.”
“If you die, the Midnight Mayor will still come back. Mr Pinner says he has ways. We are waiting for him.”
“Mr Pinner. . death of cities Mr Pinner? Mr ‘I feast on the flame, stand beneath the bomb, drink the flood waters, rage with the burning and lick my lips on mortal terror’ Mr Pinner? This is the ducky we’re talking about? Don’t get me wrong, but I think I’d rather get shot.”
I took a step forward, and all the guns moved, and all the breaths were drawn. “Don’t!” she snapped. “There’s a reason I chose this place to meet. I know that you are weaker away from the streets and the lights and the electricity! Don’t make this be worse.”
“Nice to think you care.”
“I don’t.”
“Ah. So much for that consolation. I know it’s cliché, Anissina, but I gotta ask you: what exactly are you, an Alderman, and one who should theoretically be dead with the rest of her men, doing here, pointing guns at me?”
She thought about it, and then, because we had nothing to do but wait, she told me.
* * *
Third Interlude: Damnation, Contempt and Traffic Wardens
In which all is explained at the point of a gun.
“The city is going to burn,” she said. “It has been damned, cursed, blighted. The death of cities has been summoned, the ravens killed, the Wall defaced, the Stone broken, the Midnight Mayor weakened. You cannot be weak in the city. He should defend the stones, the streets, the history, the ghosts. Two thousand years of ghosts are sitting on the banks of the Thames, on whose bodies the houses were raised and the stones settled, a history too big, a life too immense for any one mind to comprehend. That is why the dragons are mad, Swift, the ones who guard the gates of London. When you look into their eyes you see nothing but endless insanity. They comprehend how big the city is, how great and how deep and how beautiful and how dark, and it sends them mad.
“But you. . Midnight Mayor. . for you to be here, you must be seeking the traffic warden’s hat. You must know about her. You must know that Penny Ngwenya is a sorceress, though she does not understand it. To know this and to not have killed her is unforgivable. For a one in eight million, for 0.0000000125 of a city, you will let London burn. Damnation waits for you, Midnight Mayor. It is the ultimate failure of your office.
“I am sure you have learnt much — much too much — of what you need to about Penny Ngwenya. I have no interest in what motivates you in your mistakes. At the end of the day, regardless of the brand on your hand, of your bright blue eyes, you are also 0.0000000125 of a city, and even fewer will notice your passing this time than they did the last.
“The death of cities is coming for you, Matthew Swift.
“A child stole her hat, a kid on a bike stole Penny Ngwenya’s hat, and a stranger beat her for doing her job, and a stranger spat in her face, and strangers abused her, and strangers called her names. Little frightened sorceress, who saw life and beauty and magic in the city, who stood by the river’s edge and felt the beating of its heart as if it were her own, who stared down on the lights of the city and saw the starlight of the world spread beneath her feet for her to tread lighter than the breeze. Do you remember how it was, sorcerer, when you first began to breathe the magic of the city, to taste its burning brightness, to dream in neon and rejoice to smell the streets in your sleeves? She could have been so bright, little Penny Ngwenya, but not any more. Strangers beat, robbed and spat at her, faces she will never see again, and who will never see her, too many million between her and them. They did it not for who she was, or why she was, or what she was — but because she was there and they did not have to care for her, a stranger. A cruelty without consequence, a deed without responsibility.
“The night that this boy, Mo, stole Ngwenya’s hat, she walked to the river. You and she have that in common; you seek the river to calm you; you breathe deep of its magics and become lost in time and movement, for that is what the river is. She went to the river, as you would, and stood upon the bridge at the height of rush hour. She turned her head towards the sky and her arms towards the water. Tourists, commuters, workers, travellers, call them what you will — the bridge was full, London Bridge, the heart of the city, the oldest bridge, the last barrier to the city, the final part of the city wall, she stood there as the city moved around her and — for whatever reason it was, for whatever cruelty — she turned her hands towards the water and her head towards the sky and called out to these passing strangers, ‘Give me back my hat.’
“And no one listened.
“Not a single man or woman turned their head.
“Crazy woman alone on a bridge.
“Crazy shouting woman alone.
“Leave her alone.
“Give me back my hat — sorcerer. This was her curse. Give me back my hat!
“And no one listened.
“Except Mr Pinner.
“Sorcerers love to burn.
“It is why the blue electric angels love the sorcerers — you are moulded of the same light and fury, the same madnesses.
“You see magic where there is life.
“So it was with Penny Ngwenya.
“She stood on the bridge and saw the magic of the city, a harsh, cruel, unloving thing, stood alone and cried as a hundred strangers ignored her, and came to realise that this city, this place she had thought so beautiful, was a diamond she could never possess. A gleaming ornament on someone else’s glittering coat. A thing bought with money, carved out with blood, cold, beautiful, unyielding, cruel. And not knowing what she did, she wove on London Bridge a spell, as cold and cruel as the city that despised her. Damnation upon the cruelty of strangers, she breathed, curses on the unkind unfamiliarity. Let all who are strange be afraid, let all who are alone be left alone to their furies. ‘Give me back my hat,’ she screamed. ‘Damnation upon this city!’
“Hundreds of people must have heard.
“But as we avoid seeing the cleaners, the dustbin men, the drivers, the road painters and the sewage workers, no one heard.
“Only Mr Pinner.
“Her anger was as beautiful to him as the diamond to an avaricious eye. It summoned him, brought him up out of the streets, built him from the papers drifting in the wind, stitched the suit to his flesh and the fury to his soul, bound him to one purpose, and one purpose alone — damnation on this city! He is the tool of her vengeance, the vehicle for this city’s demise. Her magic created him, fuels him, he cannot die while her fury still lives. You cannot kill him, Matthew Swift. I am sorry that two Midnight Mayors had to die to learn this truth.
“Mr Pinner — the death of cities — is Ngwenya’s revenge made flesh. He has destroyed the protectors of the city, wiped them out, enacted vengeance on all who would hurt her. The man who spat drowned in his own spittle; the man who beat was flayed alive and his skin stitched to the ceiling of his bedroom while his eyes could still look to see. The boy who stole her hat, infected with lingering death and thrown aside like the ruined rubbish he was, condemned and tossed with the contempt he showed a stranger. But her damnation is much bigger than just her personal enemies. She said, a curse on the unkindness of strangers, and the city is nothing more than a commune of strangers, eight million of them, each of whom will never know more than a few hundred faces, a tiny sliver of a per cent of all that there is to know, who will never walk more than a few hundred streets, a fraction of the hive. She has damned the city. Her will be done. Mr Pinner is here to see to that.
“It will be soon.
“She will return to London Bridge.
“She will raise her face to the sky and her arms to the river.
“The city will burn, Mr Swift.
“Mr Pinner has seen that nothing will stop her vengeance. It is simply a matter of time; of bringing down the defences. It is strange that you should be one of these. Another sorcerer. Too late. End of the line.
“For me. .
“I have little to say.
“I am a true Alderman.
“I look at the city and it is a miracle. That for two thousand years these streets can have stood and grown; that for two thousand years a ragged union of strangers pressed in tighter than blood to a boil can have lived together, fed together, worked together; that now eight million strangers can reside in one place, pressed in like lovers — that it works! That the water flows, the electricity burns, the gas rumbles, the streets hum, the wheels turn, that this works is a miracle! Wonder! Glory! Ours is a world full of strangers, that is what gives it such life. That in this place, at this time, we live; through the actions of strangers, faces we shall never know, miracles we shall never comprehend, history we can never understand. Madness in depth; we can only scratch a tiny percentage of the life, the power that is the city. To understand any more than our little part in it is to slip into spiralling madness. I think you’ve seen it, sorcerer. I think you know what I mean.
“And now it is taken for granted.
“Obscenity.
“Damnation.
“How dare anyone, anyone who lives in this city, how dare they ignore the miracle? How dare they shrug and say, ‘whatever’; how dare they forget the size, the beauty, the wonder, the scale, the life, the vibrancy, the glory, the miracle! How dare a stranger spit in another’s face, how dare a stranger strike a woman down, knowing it is cruelty without consequence, how dare you throw your litter into the street and wait for the cleaner to pick it up, how dare you park your car and shrug at the rules, how dare you scream at the policeman, how dare you curse the bus driver, how dare you steal a traffic warden’s hat, how dare you show such contempt? Contempt! Take it for granted, damnation, contempt! Strength in the city, strength in survival, strength in being strong, in being hard, in caring for yourself and none other, a jungle in the city, preserve thyself and let the others burn, how dare you walk down the street and not notice its wonders, how dare you look just at your shoes, how dare you turn your face away, how dare you leave the man to die, how dare you, how dare you?!
“I am a true Alderman.
“Magic is in the strange.
“The cruelty of strangers.
“The kindness of strangers.
“The things that strangers have done, built, made, maintained.
“Beauty in the city.
“I am a true Alderman.
“This city is going to burn.”
* * *
She finished speaking.
We considered.
“Well,” I said finally, “you’ve clearly thought hard about this.”
She said nothing.
“To tell the truth, I’d figured a good part by myself.”
Still nothing.
“You couldn’t have gone to a shrink instead?”
“Weakness,” she replied. “Kemsley was right — you aren’t fit to be Midnight Mayor.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “I’d kinda sussed that too. But, see, if there’s one thing we’re going to agree on about the nature of the city, it’s this: time has come for a bit of change. How long before Mr Pinner gets here, do you think?”
She shrugged. “He doesn’t move like mortal creatures.”
“Sure. Why not? Hey — if you shoot me, right, do I get any say in who becomes Midnight Mayor? Like — could I make you Midnight Mayor with my dying breath? That’d be a turn-up for the books, wouldn’t it?”
“You wouldn’t know how.”
“I’ve been inaugurated.”
She shrugged, but there was a hint of unease behind it. “So?”
“I saw the dragon.”
“And?”
“I know quite how big the madness is, Anissina. Ms Smith. Whatever. Would you like to meet it? Would you like to look into its eyes until your brain dribbles out of your nose?”
Nothing.
“Scared?”
Nothing.
“Fire and fury,” we sighed. “People say these things as if they were meant to make us feel ashamed. As if a bomb going off were not, secretly, obscenely, immorally, indefinably, beautiful. We are not permitted by the customs of this world to say such things. It is regarded as unhealthy. But it is so. Has been so ever since the first caveman became lost, staring into the firelight. Where is the traffic warden’s hat? Did you destroy it? It would be the smart thing to do.”
Nothing.
“I don’t think you destroyed it. It’s like the Midnight Mayor, yes? A symbol of everything you don’t like about the city. The cruelty of strangers, a kid on a bike steals a stranger’s hat. Not to speculate too deep about your sexual predilections, but I’m just betting you couldn’t destroy it. Where’s Ngwenya’s hat, Anissina? Where did Mo hide her hat?”
“End of the line,” she said.
“Been there, done that. Where’s the hat?”
“It’s nothing personal, sorcerer.”
“I know, you said, you did maths at me you stupid, stupid woman! Where’s Ngwenya’s hat?!”
“You can’t do anything here, not here, not. .”
“We are the blue electric angels! We were born from the left-over breaths of humanity, by the fears and the thoughts and the ideas and the truths and the lies you poured into the telephone lines. We were created by you, bigger and brighter and more alive than any mortal could aspire to be! Do not think to tell us what we can or cannot do! Where is her hat?!”
The men with the guns wanted to shoot, we could feel them aching for it, see them watch the burning of our eyes, just a twitch away from firing.
“Do it,” we snarled, “and you will have the brand on your hand, Midnight Mayor. Let the city watch, the shadows drag, dream the dreams of the sleeping stones, Midnight fucking Mayor! Protect the city, protect the streets, protect the stones — and nowhere did anyone bother to mention that this tiny little ant scuttling within the heap is a best buddy of this tiny little ant who knows this ant who knows this ant who knows that ant who lives on the other side of town whose family all know these ants who just happen to know another ant who knows our initial scuttler and it’s not strangers, we are not strangers, Anissina! It wasn’t a stranger who stole the traffic warden’s hat; that would be fine, that would be nothing! It was a Londoner. It was one of the family, united because of the streets and the stones and the stories! That’s why the city is going to burn, it was a betrayal! We will kill you before we die, Anissina. Burn and be damned — GIVE ME BACK MY HAT!”
We screamed it, the curse on the city, and as we screamed, we raised our right hand, felt the twin crosses blazing blue-blooded brightness, saw the men with the guns flinch away, and felt something more, felt a stiffness in our skin, glanced at our flesh and saw. . a darkness settled over it that hadn’t been there before, a clawing, growing darkness spreading out from the palm of our right hand but now wasn’t the time, one by one, and there was something wrong with our eyes, something hot and prickling and
Here they were!
Come on, my little beauties, you know this song. .
Up came the rats. They tumbled out of every hole in the wall, hair raised on their backs, teeth bared; they spilt from the pipes and the cracked vents in the ceiling, crawled over each other to come through the doors; and they were angry because we were, because their home had been invaded when they hadn’t asked, no invite, no reboot. They spilt around our feet and crawled up the legs of the men with guns, who screamed and,
of course, as frightened men do,
fired.
Something went boom. I couldn’t name where, the blast spread so fast through my skin, tore up the back of my throat and liquidised my knees, a great big rolling cloud of mushroom-shaped fire spreading through my nerves. I went down and backwards because that seemed to be the direction the pain was headed in, and I wasn’t going to argue with the pain. The rats parted beneath me, ran across my arms, my face, my chest, scuttling still in their hundreds out of the walls, bearing down on each of the men, who didn’t have lips left to scream, just fell, black bundles melting under black bodies, the torches going out, the lights going out, everything going out inside the room. I could hear shouting, screaming, gunfire as they shot at the rats, and I could feel the blasts, little fat bodies bursting on the earth as the bullets went in, little yellow eyes dying, little claws twitching, little whiskers flicking through the air, little teeth nibbling and biting into soft, warm, human flesh, sinking in like they were eating raw pink chicken. And there was blood on my hands burning bright blue wriggling bright blue blood our blood and I’d been shot bugger that shot after all the things that could have happened some bastard had
the rats were going
running into the night
too frightened to stay
couldn’t stop them, my friends, come back and sing this song,
what bastard shoots strangers anyway?
A man was lying on the floor a few feet from me. He was still alive, wailing, just wailing like a hurt child, too low and pitiful to be a scream, too quiet to be a roar, just. . crawling and wailing. Half his ear was hanging off. The rest was too bloody for me to see. We were grateful for that. His comrades lay behind him. One of them was going, “huhn. . huhn. . huhn. .”
The blood in his breath caught the sound in his throat, made it crackle.
The others weren’t moving at all.
I tried to raise my head.
A shadow was standing against the furthest wall.
I could see a pair of red eyes blinking in the darkness. They were perfect marble spheres in the black oval of the creature’s head, deep and mad and endless. They moved towards me. A torch had fallen from the hand of one of the men; the light cut across the feet of the creature as it moved. Human legs, wearing a long black coat, but still attached to those mad red eyes. The creature knelt by me. Its skin was a silverish metal colour, its veins dark black beneath the surface. Its hair was fused black wire that trailed behind its head, its ears had stretched to spiked points, its fingers were black curved claws coming out of strangely jointed arms, and when it breathed, black smoke rolled from its nostrils and lips. If dragons were silver and human, then this was a dragon. Its eyes were the insane brightness of the creatures that guarded the city gates.
I whispered, “Anissina,” and was pleased to feel the breath move, not lungs then, still had my lungs, for the moment.
The half-creature curled back its silvered lips to reveal sharpened teeth. The shadows moved behind her, the metal walls of the shed creaked. One shadow seemed to have my name on it. Time for that in a moment. .
“Anissina,” I breathed again. “True Alderman.” Then I added, because I was feeling depressed, “You should see what’s behind you.”
She didn’t get it. She closed her metal fingers around our throat. And the shadow behind her said, “Now. . that doesn’t look like first aid to me.”
Anissina turned, hissing, claws reaching up to tear at the shadow that had spoken, and I closed my eyes. Even then, the gun was near enough and the flash so bright that I could see it explode, star-pattern, on the back of my retinas, feel it jolt through my brain. I heard an animal scream, a piteous, wailing mewl, and opened my eyes again in time to be dazzled by another bang, another flash, and Anissina fell, rolled to one side screaming, the metal shimmer vanishing from her skin, her claws retreating back into nails, hair regrowing from the metal strands on her head, and she was screaming! There was blood flowing from the half-blasted remnants of her left leg, and worse, blood now in her belly, her hands clasped over the middle of her gut and she lay on the floor screaming until the shadow that had pulled the trigger knelt down next to her and very firmly put a hand over her mouth.
The torchlight fell on that hand, the colour of rich chocolate melted in a dark pan.
I wheezed, “Help me.”
Oda said, “Of all the people to ask that of me, I would have thought you’d know better.”
Oda’s voice, Oda’s hand, Oda’s gun, Oda’s general sense of humour.
“Shot,” I breathed. “Shot.”
“Yeah. I noticed. Entry and exit, Swift, left side of your upper abdomen, just below the ribs. Stop complaining. As bad news goes, it’s one of the best of the bads. Care to tell me why this should-be-dead Alderman was throttling you, or was it just your nature again?”
“She’s working with Mr Pinner,” I groaned, trying to sit up and thinking better of it. “Jesus, he’s coming here — we have to go!”
“An Alderman? This Alderman? With the death of cities? Why?”
“Screwed-up reasoning.”
“She know anything?”
“The hat,” I hissed. “The traffic warden’s hat.”
Oda’s eyes widened in the torchlight. She carefully pried her hand back from Anissina’s mouth, who started gasping and wheezing, on the edge of a scream but without the strength to make it, clawing at the blood flowing from out of her belly. Then she leant over to me, gun still in her hand, and carefully ran her fingers down my throat.
“Liar,” she whispered. “The sorceress. . Ngwenya. .”
“We can find her hat.”
“We can kill her, end it, should have killed her, ended it!”
Her fingers rested on my windpipe, applying just the gentlest little pressure, just enough to let me know. “Innocent,” I whispered. “She didn’t know. . she didn’t know! Spat at, beaten, stolen, hurt! Innocent! Damnation, strangers, damned, hell, burn! For God’s sake help me!”
“For His sake?”
“Help me,” I whimpered. “Please. Anissina knows where her hat is.
Give me back my hat! I can break the spell! Please! You still need us!”
“I can kill the sorceress.”
“He’s coming, Mr Pinner is coming, end of the line, damnation, give me back my hat, he’s coming please. .”
“You couldn’t even be Midnight Mayor, could you?” breathed Oda.
“Please,” I whispered. “I saved your life. I could have let you die.
Please. Help me. I saved your life! Oda!”
She grunted in reply, lifted her fingers from my throat, turned to Anissina, twitching on the floor. She leant over her, lowered her face in so close it was not an inch off Anissina’s, breathed gentle, steady hot breath into her clammy face, and, as softly as a mother rubbing a child’s tummy, pushed the barrel of the gun into Anissina’s belly.
The woman screamed.
I turned my head away, tried to bury my cheek in the floor.
“Where is the hat?” asked Oda.
Screamed so loud the floor hummed with it.
We closed our eyes, counted, maths, if I am one eight millionth of a city what does this make me in percentage terms? Do the maths, divide and. .
“Where is Ngwenya’s hat?”
“He’ll. . he’ll. . he’ll. .”
“Mr Pinner will flay you alive, yes,” breathed Oda softly. “Of course he will. But the thing is this. You’ve been shot in the stomach. Right now, the contents of your bowels are spilling into your bloodstream. Faeces, gastric juices, stomach acids, digestive enzymes. They’re going to get into your veins, and start eating. The acid is going to burn you from the inside out, the enzymes are going to gobble away at your body until there’s nothing left for them to chew on, digest you from the inside out, the faeces spilt from your stomach are going to turn your blood to sewage. If you’re fortunate, septic shock will take you out before the worst of it. If not, then having the skin peeled from your bones will seem the balmy mercy of the Almighty compared to the death you will endure. And that’s just the start. Damnation awaits you, Alderman. I cannot say what manner of suffering it will be. That is a secret that will be shared only by you and the Devil, and he does not care for reason. Where is the hat? Anissina? Where is the traffic warden’s hat?”
“H-H-Harlun and Phelps,” she whispered. “Boom Boom took it, didn’t r-r-realise its power, what it m-meant. I hid it in Harlun and Phelps. I th-th-thought they would n-never. .”
Oda stroked Anissina’s chin with the end of the gun. “God loves you,” she whispered. “Remember that, when the Devil comes. God is suffering as you suffer, crying out when you cry out. He loves you. He weeps for you. He sees that there is only one way for you to learn.”
So saying, she leant down, and carefully planted a kiss on Anissina’s forehead. She stood up briskly, looked down at me and said, “Are you still not dead?”
“Still alive,” we replied. “Ta-da!”
“Do you want to end this?” she asked.
“Depends on what you mean.”
And for a moment, Oda, psycho-bitch, almost smiled.
“Lucky man,” she said, and bending down, helped to lift us up. “He must love you too, in His own special way.”
She pulled me to my feet.
I felt things moving beneath my skin that shouldn’t have been moving, and we bit so hard on the scream that we caught our tongue between our teeth and for a moment, the pain was almost a welcome relief.
Anissina whimpered, “Swift? Help me?”
We looked down at her.
“Remember Vera?” we asked.
She didn’t answer.
Oda helped us limp away.
Hackney Marshes.
Running. There was blood running between my fingers, blood running down from my side, too fast, too hot. I hissed, “Shot. .”
“I know. Come on.”
Grass and bumps and sticky wet mud and little flowing streams that sunk up to our ankles and reeds that pulled at our legs and I couldn’t see magic here, now, not tonight, but there it was, the bright neon glow of the city, so close, just a little more and there it would be, electric fire!
“Nearly. . there. .” we breathed.
“I know. Come on!”
She’d stolen a car, a Volkswagen Passat, the most boring car manufactured by man, parked it on the edge of the marshes. She opened the back door, threw me in, stepped into the driver’s seat, turned on the ignition, handbrake down, clutch up, boy-racer to the full. I groaned and rolled onto my back in the passenger seats, fumbled for a torch in my pocket, found it, shone it down onto my own abdomen. Something small and angry had torn a jagged smile in the upper-left side of my flesh, just below the floating ribs, and blood was now merrily dribbling out from the grin. I cursed and swore and threw in a bit of blasphemy just in case, groped in my satchel, found the first-aid kit, unravelled pads and bandages and pressed them in, but no sooner was one white pad applied than it had turned scarlet with blood and had to be tossed aside.
“Oda,” I croaked.
“I know,” she snapped. “You’re losing plenty of blood, which probably means it grazed your spleen. You’ll get anxious, your heart rate will pick up, your breathing will accelerate. Then you’ll lose more blood and get calmer, but that won’t be a good thing. Your blood pressure will plummet, your head will spin, your peripheral nervous system will essentially shut down. Then you’ll just collapse. You’ve got a few hours. Like I said: could be worse. Lucky man.”
“Anissina. .”
“We’re going to Harlun and Phelps. If we don’t find the hat, I’ll kill her. Ngwenya. I’ll kill her, Swift. And if you try and stop me, I’ll kill you. I’ll tell the Aldermen everything. I know. . why. . you protected Penny Ngwenya. It was. . human weakness. The Midnight Mayor cannot be so. . soft. If you cannot break the spell, I will gun her down. Do we have an understanding?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Lie still, apply pressure, and consider whether you need a deity in your life.”
“I thought it was too late to repent.”
“Never too late to repent. Just too late to avoid your fate.”
“Thank you.”
“Any time.”
“I mean, thank you.”
“I know what you meant.”
The lights of the sleeping city.
What time was it?
“Oda?”
“Yes?”
“For any hurt I did you. For any hurt you think I have done. For all that there needs to be something said, that I. . that we did not know to say. I am sorry.”
“It sounds like a death speech.”
“I mean it.”
“I know. Too late, sorcerer — it’s too late. But thank you for trying, Matthew Swift. It means nothing to me, but I imagine for you, it is important.”
Sleeping roads, sleeping streets. Even Bethnal Green was turning out the lights, the buses slinking away up Mare Street towards the mysteries of Dalston, Clapton, Stamford Hill and the north. I watched the lights go by the back window, pressed my fingers into the blood seeping from my skin. Anxiety, high breathing, high heart rate. What did a spleen do anyway? Little mortal little fleshly death by a dribble at a time.
Railway lines overhead, a face that might have been ours reflected in the black background behind the glass. Names with a hundred years of history slipping by on the street signs, the shadows watching as we swished through the soaking streets. Midnight Mayor, protector of the city, stay and fight for stones, shadows, memories, strangers, family, whatever, pick one, pick them all, all of them valid reasons to die, if that’s what it came down to. Three Colts Lane, Dunbridge Street, Shoreditch, Grimsby Street, Oakly Yard, Great Eastern Street, Holywell Lane, Curtain Road, Willow Street, Blackall Street, Old Street, City Road — and there it was! The silver-skinned dragon holding his shield, red crosses in red crosses, eyes too mad to comprehend, tongue rolled out in a hiss against the night-time air! We almost jerked with the touch of it, felt its magic hit us like electricity; closed our eyes and the shadows were still there, bleeding into the red lines of the city cross, Domine dirige nos, Lord lead us, trust in a higher power, a miracle day by day, this was what it meant to be the Midnight Mayor, mad eyes in a dragon, City Road, Finsbury Road, Moorgate, Swan Alley, White Horse Lane, Kings Yard, so close, Masons Alley, Basinghall Street, just there, Aldermanbury Square.
Empty, sleeping; but the lights still burnt in all the offices around, windows into an empty room, a thousand empty rooms, coats hung up on the backs of chairs, pictures of kids and wives, executive toys that distracted from any work and even more the personal touches of the little empty rooms. A model yacht on the lit-up sixth floor of a sleeping office tower, a conference room, table covered in old coffee cups, a meeting room with pads laid out in perfect geometric style, a floor entirely of computers in rows, an office with a tiny roll-out crazy golf course stuck into a corner. Close your eyes and you could imagine the windows of the lit-up office blocks watching you back, a thousand insectoid eyes peering out of the towers, just like the shadows.
“Oda!” we hissed. “Can you see?”
“See what?” she grunted, dragging us out of the back of the car.
“Look!” We waved at the lit-up towers.
“See what?”
“Magic!” we exclaimed. “Can’t you see? The city is the magic, we made it, we made the magic out of the stones and the streets and the life! How can you not see?!”
“This had better be the pain talking,” she growled, and half dragged, half carried us across the lit-up neon courtyard to Harlun and Phelps.
The doors were locked, but seeing us, the security guard lounging sleepy inside unlocked them, the great swish spinning door beginning to turn automatically as they sensed our approach. We staggered inside; Oda half-dropped me in the foyer, marched up to the security guard, grabbed him by the lapels and snapped, “Get Earle, get the Aldermen, get a doctor and then get out of here. Do you understand me?”
He nodded numbly.
“Good. Which floor was Anissina’s office on?”
We took the lift to almost the top floor. I sagged against the glass walls as we rose, breathed the lights stretching beneath me. Our palm left a bloody print on the pristine glass. We could feel blood running down the outside of our leg, too much blood, couldn’t sustain this for long.
The doors opened on a dimmed floor of white strip lights and silent computers. I staggered, fell onto my hands and knees as we clambered out of the lift. Oda dragged me up. “Come on!” she snarled. “Think of Ngwenya, think of her brains on the wall, her blood on the wall, little Penny Ngwenya dead, because if you die now and don’t find this hat, don’t undo her curse, then I swear to God I’ll do it. You thinking of this, Matthew? You watching Ngwenya die, you hearing her skull burst, her blood splatter? Are you there yet?”
I nodded dumbly, she dragged me along the corridor. Pale beige doors on either side, white walls you could stick a pencil in, pictures of valued clients and random token works of could-be art, strange bits of sculpture next to the coffee machines and beside the water coolers, potted plants so bright and shiny they should have been made of rubber and saved everyone the effort. Names on the doors; I recognised Kemsley’s as we went by, locked doors, venetian blinds lowered over the window panes.
(You are a fucking disgrace to the office of Midnight Mayor.
Thanks. I really needed a skinned mystical projection to tell me that.)
We passed a kitchen, Oda paused for a minute, propped me against the door frame, grabbed a green first-aid kit from above the sink, then dragged me on. “Come on!” she screamed, almost lifting me off my feet as we lurched down the corridor.
And there it was.
Ms Anissina, Senior Executive, engraved in boring white plastic on a boring beige door. The door was locked. Oda kicked it and got nowhere, Oda shot it and got in. The office inside was quiet, dull, uninspired. A harmless company picture, showing a couple of trees by a waterfall, hung on one wall; a grey filing cabinet had been wedged into a corner; a shelf above drooped under the weight of uninspiring cardboard folders. The desk had a laptop, not a computer, a thin white thing too trendy to be plugged into anything else, next to an immaculate white pad of paper and a line of perfectly ordered biros. Oda dumped me in the nearest chair, started sweeping folders off the shelves.
I opened a drawer, saw a stapler, a couple of highlighters, a notepad, a box of paperclips. I opened the one beneath it, found papers, full of numbers, including figures that were surely too big to have anything to do with money, except possibly in the City. I opened the one beneath that. There was nothing in it except a calendar. The calendar read, “Take That 2001!” It was worn, battered, fondled, and clearly much loved. I flicked through it. Various male faces plonked on various male bodies, vacuum-sucked into distressingly tight trousers. They pouted, smiled, frothed and flirted at me out of the semi-cardboard pages. I put it carefully on the desk by Anissina’s computer and stared at it long and hard.
We wondered what it was like, being digested from the inside out.
I stuttered, “Oda?”
I heard a bang from behind me, flinched away instinctively from the noise, raising my hands to cover my face. When death did not ensue, I looked carefully back. Oda had dragged open the drawers of the filing cabinet, and was going through them, throwing paper and files onto the floor in great armfuls.
“Oda?” we stumbled again.
“There’s stuff in the first-aid kit,” she snapped back.
We picked up the kit in our bloody hands, tried to undo the zip; our hands were shaking. Anxiety first, then calmer and goodbye to the peripherals, that’s what she’d said; and we’d been grateful to not fully understand her meaning. Bandages and padding, not enough; antiseptic, as if that wasn’t the least of our concerns.
“Oda?”
Silence from behind me. I half-turned in the chair, kicking it round to see.
She stood in front of the wide glass window, eyes turned down towards her hands, hands turned up towards the ceiling. Something small, quaint and black was resting in her upturned palms. It was made out of the hybrid offspring of felt and plastic, its top dully reflecting the white light. A band of small white and yellow squares ran round its base, just above the shallow, upturned rim, and a small silverish shield had been stuck to the front, that a gleeful child might have mistaken for a sheriff’s badge. It was, in short, a very boring, rather small, quite old-fashioned not-quite-bowler hat, a piece of headgear that in the 1950s would have been the embodiment of modern style and which now was just. . a bit sad. A piece of uniform that time forgot.
Oda murmured, “Um. .”
I took the hat carefully from her hands and turned it over.
Inside, a rim of elastic had been sewn in to make the hat sit easier on the head. On this rim, in faded yellow letters, someone had written in lopsided capitals:
PENNY
We put the hat down carefully on Anissina’s desk.
We looked at it.
Silence.
“Well?” demanded Oda. “Is it. .”
“Shush!”
She shushed, then in a lower whisper added, “What’s the matter?” “I’m having a moment of reverence. I would have thought you’d appreciate it.”
“For heaven’s sake, I don’t have time for this. Is it. .”
“Yes. It’s the traffic warden’s hat. It’s her hat.”
“And can. .”
“Yes. I can break the curse.”
A pause. Then, “Well? Do it! What are you waiting for? Full moon?” We reached out tentatively, ran our hands over the black dome of the hat, picked it up by one side and turned it over in front of us. “He’s coming,” I muttered. “Mr Pinner is coming.”
“What?”
“He’s just passed across the boundary of the old London Wall. We can feel him. He hurts, right here, in the palm of our hand. He knows we’ve got the hat. The hat is the key to the spell that summoned him. Break that, undo the curse, and he’ll die. He’s coming.”
“Then do it! Do it!”
“I need Ngwenya.”
“If this is. .”
A voice from the door said, “The traffic warden?”
I looked up slowly, ran my eyes up the immaculate length of Earle’s suit, his black coat, his stern face. There were other Aldermen behind him. None looked happy. Earle carefully pulled off a pair of black leather gloves, passed them over to an Alderman in the corridor, slipped through the door, reached out for the traffic warden’s hat. We snatched it back defensively, cradling it to our chest, and seeing this, he smiled.
“I thought Ngwenya wasn’t a sorceress, Swift? After you ran off at St Pancras, Oda informed us she was. . just an innocent. And yet you seem to be holding a traffic warden’s hat, and seem to think that the death of cities is coming here, and seem, may I add, to have been shot and to be breaking into the property of one of our missing colleagues. You’ve clearly been busy these last few hours. Did you. . lie to us about Ngwenya?”
We met his eyes. “Yes,” we said. “Deal with it.”
His fingers tightened on the edge of the desk. “You lied to us about the woman who has damned this city, cursed it, condemned it, whose anger summoned the death of cities, whose power is going to rain mystic vengeance down on our streets, and you. . you dared to lie?”
We thought about it, then nodded. “Yes. And would do it again. Anissina, by the by, is a loony backstabbing bitch, and yeah, thanks for your concern, I’ve been fucking shot and yes, Mr Pinner is coming. Very very much is he coming: we can hear him on the stones, inside the city. He’s coming for this.” I twiddled the hat in the air. “So, since there’s not much time left for you to get angry in, Mr Earle, why don’t you ask me the incredibly important question — why, Mister Swift, Mister Mayor, why oh why oh why did you get shot trying to find this damn hat, and quite how are you going to save the city with it?”
“Doesn’t really matter, now I know to kill Ngwenya after all. .” he began, turning away.
We reached up, grabbed his arm, pulled him tighter towards the desk. “It matters to us. We can break the spell, and she doesn’t have to die.”
“Weakness! Stupid ineffectual blind stupid weakness! You are a. .”
“Disgrace to the office of Midnight Mayor, yes, I know!” I snarled, climbing to my feet. “Every bloody stranger in the fucking city has been telling me this at every given moment and you know what, I have had it up to here! I am a disgrace to everything that the office used to be, to the bigger picture, to the sensible solution, to the pragmatic deeds, to the necessary sacrifice, to the stones and the streets! And good! Frankly, excellent! I am honoured to have got this brand on my hand and be able to say with it, up yours, this is the big city! We exist to change the rules, and here I am, changing one now! Ngwenya doesn’t have to die! I have her hat! I can break the curse, I can destroy Mr Pinner, I can stop the death of cities. We can do it!”
“And how, exactly,” growled Earle through gritted teeth, “do you plan to do this?”
“I’m going to give her back her hat.”
There was silence while the collected Aldermen considered this.
Finally Oda said, “What?”
“Thank you, Oda, for your essential ignorance of mystic procedure,” I sighed, the energy suddenly gone back out of my bones, groping for my chair again. “I am going to give her back her hat.”
“And that’ll just do it? That’ll break the curse?”
“Haven’t you been paying attention? ‘Give me back my hat’!”
“But that’s. . you said that was just. .”
“A warning. A solution. You ever wonder how the ravens, the London Stone, the river, the Wall, the Midnight Mayor get any of their defending done? Bloody mystic forces and their uselessly obscure ways.”
“We could have killed her, sorcerer,” growled Earle.
“Yeah. The most efficient strategic solution in response to the onsite risk assessment analysis. The police would never have known, a crime without consequence. A stranger kills a stranger and that’s it, goodbye, goodnight, end of the line. Cold, efficient — very financial. As cruel and distant as mankind can ever really get. We will not sink to your level. We are going to give her back her hat.”
Silence.
I sighed, rubbed my eyes, and regretted it, felt sticky blood slither from my fingers to my face, heard it crackle like velcro against my skin.
“All right,” said Earle.
“You sure?” I asked, eyes closed and turned up to the too-bright afterburn of the neon light overhead.
“Yes.”
“Good. So if you gentlemen will excuse me, I need to get this hat to Penny Ngwenya before I bleed to death.”
I staggered back to my feet, pushed past Earle towards the door.
“Is that it?” asked Earle. “The end of it? The death of the death of cities?”
“Ha-ha,” I said.
“Then. .”
“Mr Pinner isn’t just going to let us bring this hat to Ngwenya! The curse that she made is his life, it is what summoned him, what sustains him. He’ll do everything he can to stop us. Which is, sadly, quite a lot.”
“But if he. .”
I waved at the window. “Have a look out there and tell me what you see.”
Oda was nearest the window, so she was the first to look, and the first to see. She sighed a long, sad sigh. “Kids in tracksuits and hoods.”
“So?” snapped Earle.
“How many?” I asked.
“Maybe. . fifty. They’re looking right up at us, if that’s of any interest to anyone. Can’t see any faces.”
“Are they? Is it? What do you think, Mr Earle?”
His jaw was locked tight, his fists clenched at his side. “All right,” he said. “Mister Mayor. What do you want done?”
“You expecting a big speech? Get off your lazy arses and fight, damnit! Oh — and pop.”
“And po-?”
The lights went out with a faint pop.
They went out in the office, in the floor, in the building, in the buildings around, in the streets, on the wings of the planes overhead, in the tunnels underneath. We grinned. “Told you so,” we said. “Where’s the nearest way out?”
Spectres.
How we loathed spectres.
And turning the lights out was just cheesy, a distraction, an itch of an inconvenience, nothing compared to the big wallop. Mr Pinner, he’s coming, always coming, can’t hold back the death of cities for ever, sooner or later they’ll die along with everything else and here he is right now, coming for you.
How we loathed mystic forces and their uselessly obscure ways. Why couldn’t the travelcard of destiny ever be left behind the sofa, why couldn’t the prophets of fate write up a spider diagram with useful footnotes and references?
So here we were, in the offices of Harlun and Phelps, surrounded by the Aldermen (how we loathed Aldermen!), who in turn were surrounded by empty hoods playing loud bass beats through their headphones, while somewhere down in the streets below a man in a pinstripe suit looked up at the black windows of the darkened office and just kept on smiling, because he knew, of course he knew, that there’s no point finding the hat if you didn’t give it back after.
I said, “Do you have beer or fags in this office?”
“Do you really think this is the time?”
“Bottles of beer, packs of fags,” I replied sharply. “Weapons.”
Earle’s face was a grey shadow in the darkness. I was grateful I couldn’t see his expression. “Catering department,” he said. “You can try office drawers.”
“Good. This place must have some sort of warding, protective spells, yes? I mean, if the Aldermen work here. .”
“Some, yes. Wards against evil, hostile intent, that kind of thing.”
“Will they fire automatically?”
“The second anything steps across the threshold. I don’t think they can stop the death of cities; our insurance doesn’t cover it.”
“Mr Earle! Was that a moment of light-hearted humour?”
“No.”
“Oh. ‘Course not. My mistake. I don’t suppose anyone here knows what the spleen does?”
Silence in the darkness, then a polite cough, Oda’s voice. “I do. But for the sake of keeping you focused on Mr Pinner, I’m not going to tell you.”
“Terrific. Mr Earle?”
“Yes, Mr Swift?”
“You Aldermen lot do whatever it is you do when forces of primal evil are about to obliterate you and your. . I nearly said loved ones, but you get the idea. .”
“Where are you going?”
“Fags and bottles of beer,” I replied. “Oda?”
“I’m coming with you,” her voice drifted from the darkness. “Just in case.”
“It’s nice to have certainty in life. These wards. .”
From somewhere below, there was a crack, a crash, distant, far-off, almost embarrassed to have its effect ruined by the weight of cold winter air between us and it. The Aldermen all at once turned their faces towards the window, and, since this was strange behaviour for anything that wasn’t a pigeon, we followed their gaze as well.
In the darkness of the city outside, a single red light came on, somewhere on the other side of Aldermanbury Square. Then another, then another, a line of little red lights, here embedded in the walls, here stuck on above the street signs, here in the tops of pavement bollards. A spreading line of bright scarlet rippled down from across the other side of the square, shimmered in the double red parking lines on the streets, reflected off the red warnings on the signs, bounced and reflected off the darkened windows of the lurking buildings around, and then more. The light crawled out of its sources, spilt across the square, seeped between the legs of the hoodies — how many spectres could one guy summon?! — illuminated the empty nothings in their hoods, the cracks of nothingness between their loose, grey clothes, and still spread.
It shimmered up the side of the tower, spilt through the windows of Harlun and Phelps and kept growing and rising, a bright, unremitting crimson light that made our head hurt, a photographer’s lamp amplified to the point where the eyes ached to see it. The red light ran up through the whole height of the tower, crawled out of the walls, the floors, the ceiling; everywhere there was a surface to shine, it shone red. When the Aldermen moved, they seemed to trail scarlet behind them, as if the light were a thin solid, or a floating fog, rather than a thing of insubstantial energy, and it occurred to us with the slow shuffling pace of a thought slightly shy to have been caught late to the party, that this same all-pervading light was the same blood-red of the dragon’s cross, and that, looked at from the right angle, the office of Harlun and Phelps might well make a strong starting line from which you could draw the same cross on the very streets of London.
By the bright blood glow, I turned to Earle. “I gotta hand it to you. .”
But he raised a hand, commanding me to silence. “Domine dirige nos,” he breathed, and the Aldermen chanted it in reply. “Domine dirige nos.”
Then, “They’re inside. They’re coming up the stairs. Spectres and. . and something else.”
Earle had never met the death of cities.
“He bleeds paper. You can’t kill him,” I said quickly, “not while the curse is still doing its thing, but you can slow him down. Protective wards, incantations, general big explosive effects. I need a way out of here, I need to get the hat to Ngwenya. .”
Earle nodded briskly. “Seventh floor, there’s a jump, but if you’re smart. .”
“Oda!”
She was by my side, face lit up dark, night-time blood in the all-pervasive redness.
“Earle. .” I began.
“Run, Mister Mayor,” he breathed. “We will slow them, distract them, fight them where we can. Run. Get the hat to your traffic warden. Damnation on you, sorcerer, burn in hell — run!”
We ran.
Blood dripped scatty and unsure behind us, forming diamond-shaped splatters on the thin carpet. The lifts were dead, no point even trying, the stairs were concrete and grey. Oda had a torch, a gun, I had my torch from my jacket pocket. But I didn’t want to risk summoning a light. What little mortal strength we had now, we were not going to waste, not while there was still a chance that we might survive the night. The white light from our torches was gobbled up in an instant by the all-pervasive ruby glow, spilling from every inch of wall and floor. I could see it stretch and part around my feet as we ran/tumbled down the stairs, gasping for breath, heart pounding in our ears, scared, scared, just the anxiety, just scared, just nothing, just feeling, just mortal things for mortals to worry about, just run!
Eighteenth floor; what kind of penis-obsessed architect builds so high anyway?! (Land prices, think land prices, think running. .)
Sixteenth floor, fifteenth, couldn’t breathe, just keep on falling and gravity should do the rest, fourteenth floor and a sign caught my eye — “Oda!”
“What?”
“Catering.”
“But. .”
“Come on!”
I dragged her through the fire-exit doors onto the fourteenth floor, pushed her at the nearest line of boring plywood desks. “Fags, Sellotape! Every cigarette you can find!”
Scowling, she started to rummage through drawers. I hurried down the corridor to a pair of white double doors with a round glass window set in each one, pushed them back, lurched into a kitchen of stainless steel and giant tubs for suspicious soups made mostly of floating carrot to boil in, started tearing open everything on the shelves. We nearly screamed our frustration — what kind of big office didn’t have some hidden cache of booze?!
Big cartons of Perrier, fizzy water, lemonade, fruity fizzy water, water with added vitamins, water with added volcano, fruit juice made mostly out of sugar, fruit juice made mostly out of crushed ginger, yoghurt drinks, “power” drinks, protein drinks, more water, carbonated, decarbonated, hydrated, dehydrated, mix and match in one cup and see if your head explodes. .
“Matthew!” Oda’s voice drifted through the doors.
“What?”
“They’re coming!”
“Get in here!”
She came through the double doors to the kitchen without complaint, carrying a depressingly small armful of cigarette packets and a roll of Sellotape. “Beer,” I muttered, “gotta find beers, where are they?”
“I saw a face. . a not-face. . an empty-face at the door.”
“Beer bottles!” I dragged open another stainless-steel cupboard door, dragged down sacks of flour, great packets of gelatin, opened another and there it was! Tucked away discreetly at the back, the shelf of expensive green glass. I dragged them down by the armful, started to fumble at the tops.
“Sorcerer!”
Oda’s voice from my left; I turned and there were two of them by the door, bobbing along to the silent beat, empty nothingnesses inside their hoods, penknives in hand. I raised my hands towards them, pushing my blood-soaked palms out in front of me. “Oda, light the cigarettes, empty the bottles, put the fags in them still burning, got it?”
She grabbed the fallen bottles I’d been working at, and started fumbling in her pocket for her knife, trying to get the lids off. The spectres shuffled towards me, bobbing from the hips down to their unheard rhythms, swinging their shoulders as if to say, “you think you’re hard enough?” So they swaggered towards me, arrogant nothingnesses in a tracksuit, and I held up my hands towards them and felt the crosses carved into my skin, and I said:
“‘It is apparent to me that you, being a. . thing. . aged ten or over namely, (a) have acted, since the commencement date, in an anti-social manner, that is to say, in a manner that caused or was likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to one or more persons not of the same household as yourself and (b) that this order is necessary. .’”
The air thickened around my fingers; blood oozed down my palm, to my wrist, splattered onto the floor. The spectres kept coming.
“‘. . to protect persons in the local government area in which the harassment, alarm or bloody major distress is caused or is likely to be caused from further anti-social acts by yourself; and as the relevant authority-’ Oda hurry up!. .”
Thick light began to shimmer off my skin, and spill down my arms onto the floor. As the spectres neared, they began to slow, arms sliding through the air like vengeful t’ai chi gurus, each movement reduced to a crawl; but still coming-
“‘. . for the purpose of determining whether the condition mentioned in subsection (1)(a) above is fulfilled, the court shall disregard any act of the defendant which he shows was reasonable in the circumstances. The prohibitions that may be imposed-’ Oda! Faster!”
The spectres were a few feet from me, moving now so slow, caught full fast in the enchantment and I screamed the words of the spell, felt the power run through my arms, burn at the ends of my fingertips: a new spell, a young spell, and still not strong enough. I let it fill my lungs, my blood, lift me almost off my feet with the force of it, feeding it everything I had: “‘. . prohibitions that may be imposed by an anti-social behaviour order are those necessary for the purpose of protecting from further anti-social acts by the defendant (a) persons in the local government area; and (b) persons in any adjoining local government area specified in the application for the order. .’”
One of the spectres raised its knife; in slow motion, the weapon screeched and hissed and spat furious angry sparks as it moved through the air as slow and gentle as a freak wave on a starlit night — I pushed back against it with everything I had, saw it slow still further, but still coming, poured out the spell with every last drop of air I had in my lungs, bellowed it at the empty hood of the spectre, “‘An anti-social behaviour order shall have effect for a period (not less than two years) specified in the order or until further order. Subject to subsection (9) below, the applicant or the defendant may apply by complaint to the court which made an anti-social behaviour order for it to be varied or discharged by a further order-’ Oda!!”
Something was pushed into my hand, moving quickly through the air that had thickened to porridge between me and the spectre. It was a green beer bottle, the sides sticky with the drink just poured out. A single cigarette smoked dully inside, dark mist crawling out from the top. We nearly laughed, and drawing back our arm, thrust the bottle as hard as we could into the slowly drifting face of the spectre, shrieking with the attack, “Hey, man! Like total respect!”
The spell I had been casting broke. The spectre should really have screamed, but what it was was already shrivelling down inside the bottle, vanishing into the mist of the smoking cigarette, behind the foggy cage of the glass. Its clothes crumpled into a messy heap on the floor; the knife fell through empty air to break its own blade on the pale tiles. I snatched the bottle back as the hood shrivelled into itself, planted my thumb firmly across the opening and snatched Sellotape from Oda’s hand, sealing the bottle and tearing the strip free with my teeth.
The other spectre, freed from the spell I had been weaving, lurched towards me, but I snatched another bottle from Oda’s hands and waved it, roaring, “Come on, then! Another nothing for eternity!”
The other spectre retreated a few paces; we stepped sharply after it, it moved too late, tried to put the knife between our ribs; but we had the bottle with its tantalising smoke, and jammed it into the empty middle of that vacant hood, sucking it down until nothing but a pile of baggy clothes remained, and another foggy beer bottle.
Oda stuttered, looking at the sad clothes on the floor, “Just like. .” “Yes. Just like that.”
“That was an ASBO you just. .”
“Yeah. I know. That’s why it didn’t really work. Bottles!”
She handed me four, put another one in my coat pocket, kept two to herself, held in either hand. “This will kill spectres?”
“Contain them. The invocation of an ASBO will slow them down as well, if there’s more than one of them, but, like you saw, it’s not a perfect spell. And if the cigarettes burn down before the bottle is filled, they won’t work either. But it should be enough to get us to the seventh floor.”
“I can’t. .”
“You push the bottle into their faces, and if it doesn’t work, tell them, ‘respect’. Say it like you mean it.”
“I can’t just do ma-”
“You can.”
“I can’t! I’m not some. .”
“It’s a simple binding, nothing more than a piece of sympathetic magic. You want to live?”
“And not be damned!”
“Well, you’re gonna have to pick one or the other. Come on!”
I dragged her, or maybe she dragged me, or maybe we just got in each other’s way, out of the kitchen, across the dull office floor turned the colour of blood, or crosses, or dragon’s eyes, or maybe just a tasteless brothel-red, to the stairway. And there it was, the beat in the stair, echoing up the concrete walls: dumdumdumdumDUH dumdumdumdumDUH dumdumdumdum. .
“Another stair?” I gasped.
“Sure, because I know-”
“It’s not really a question!”
There was another staircase, tucked in at the opposite end of the office floor.
sshssshsssCHA sshssshsssCHA sshssshsssCHA. .
“Where now?”
“Down, gotta get down. .”
“Do you even know where this Ngwenya woman is?”
“Sure I do,” I muttered. “The death of cities is about to kill the Midnight Mayor; that’s the last defence the city’s got, the last thing that’s gonna stop us all burning. Of course I know where Ngwenya is!”
“Jedi spidey-senses?”
“Obscure mystic forces.”
“The spectres are here, Swift! Mr Pinner is here; do you really think we can just walk this one down?”
“Right,” I scowled, dragging her back. “Fine.”
Red light, spinning chairs, dull desks, silent sleeping computers, big glass windows behind the doors of the executive cubicles, plywood doors, plaster walls. “Do you suppose there’s those big vents like there are in American thrillers?” I asked hopefully.
Oda grunted in reply, her eyes still fixed on the stairwell door through which was coming the sound of:
sshssshsssCHA sshssshsssCHA dumdumdumDUH dumdumdumDUH dumdumdumDUH
“OK.” I looked down at the floor. Our hands were shaking, we hadn’t even noticed this time, the edge of our vision seemed to be going off on its own business.
“I can see them coming!” hissed Oda, scrambling back from the doorway at a sight on the stairs. “They’re nearly here!”
“How many bottles do we have?”
“Maybe six? Can they hold more than one spectre?”
“What do you think?”
“I’m thinking that life was not made to be easily lived.”
“I was thinking something ruder than that, but yeah, you’ve got the basic gist.”
I could see shadows moving behind the door; taste them. And something else, something that made the fingers of our right hand curl in disgust and fear. “Back into the office,” I hissed. “There.”
Oda obeyed, kicking back a plywood door to reveal an office garnished on a theme of golf: clubs, pictures, trophies and all. The far wall was nothing but glass, slightly curved outwards, looking down on the dark/red soak of the city. I ran my hands over the window, felt the cold glass, pressed my nose up against it, ran my tongue over it, tasted the dull dirt. “This’ll do,” I muttered.
“For what?” she hissed.
“You still got your penknife?”
She handed it over; I wrenched through the blades until I found the pointed end of a four-head screwdriver. Turned the point towards the glass.
And a voice from the door said, and there was no hiding the anger, “Give me back my hat, sorcerer!”
I glanced over my shoulder, and there he was, Mr Pinner, and he wasn’t smiling, not now. His jacket billowed, his hair stood on end, his face was cold and pale, and behind him the office trembled. The furniture bounced gently on the floor like flowers in a breeze, the computer screens cracked, the chairs spun giddy on their axis, the files on the shelves split open, the paper started to tumble out, a few sheets at first, then more, dozens, hundreds, endless walls of paper spilling out into the room, caught in a whirlwind, blasting and screaming in the air behind him, filling the doorway with nothing but an A4 snowstorm.
“Give me back my. .” he began, and I drove the end of the screwdriver as hard as I could into the glass.
It went thunk. I drew it back slowly. A tiny white scar, no bigger than the end of a child’s finger, appeared on the glass. Then a little fault line shimmered out from the edge, divided, spread a bit further, split, divided again, moved again, split, divided, spread. It took no more than a few seconds, but watching each spreading fibre through the glass was like waiting for a glacier to move down a mountain.
Behind me, Mr Pinner shrieked his fury and rage, raised his hands and seemed to throw his whole weight towards us. The paper whirlwind burst around him, shrouded him in a second, filled the room with a thousand screaming edges of white, razored sheets that cut and tore and slashed. I pressed my palm against the scar in the glass and pushed, throwing the weight of my arm, my shoulder, everything, jumping, lifting my feet off the floor to push against the glass and it shattered with a roar, splintered into a thousand thousand shards that burst outwards around me.
And that was nothing. Nothing; in the offices above, below, on either side, everywhere, the little cracks had spread to run their course. The glass burst and shattered, spilling out into the crimson night, and from every office tumbled a whirlwind of paper, spiralling and floating out on the cold air. I grabbed Oda as the glass began to fall, pulling her down until we were both crouching almost to the floor and, kicking aside the last clinging remnants of glass still hanging off the blasted steel frame of the office, I pulled her over the edge, into the night.
Not far, as luck and sensible precaution would have it. As we fell, we twisted, turned; I grabbed at the frame and swung with my legs, and she, clever, strong Oda who was so very good at killing things that should have killed her, swung as well, pulling me as much as I pushed her through the shallow fall from our broken office window down and through the shattered window of the office below. Outside, the glass and paper fell like hail and snow in a gale, splattering and spilling down to the street below. We landed on a floor covered in twisted files and warped plastic, Oda pulling my head down as the computer on the desk above us popped and flared in angry, futile explosion at the indignity of its circumstances. And then she was dragging me to the window again and already halfway out, lowering herself down over the shattered steel edge where carpet met open air, and swinging her legs down to the floor below. I looked down; it was much easier to do now there wasn’t a window to stop me craning my head. It was a long way. I wheezed, “Oda, I can’t. .”
“Ngwenya dead with a bullet in her brain!” she snarled back, already in the darkened office below. “I swear to God, Swift, I swear by all that is sacred, by all that is holy, I shall put a bullet in her brain and it will be your fault, the sin on your head, burn in hell, Matthew Swift! Now come on!”
I looked up and there was Mr Pinner, standing on the edge of the office above, looking straight down at me, like Harlun and Phelps was nothing more than an open dolls’ house, and we no more than its occupants. We snarled, stretched our fingers to the air, felt for a fistful of glass spinning by and hurled it furiously back at him. He ducked away, but a fat spinning shard of glass tore his cheek, right across his eye, and from the whitened centre I saw slide another sliver of paper, which he pulled carelessly from his skin and threw away.
We scrambled down, flopping like a dying fish from one window to the other, Oda catching us at the bottom of each drop and throwing us, speed more than strength her advantage, into the room below before we had a chance to fall.
We went down three floors in this clumsy way, before enough glass remained on the floor below to make the jump impossible, and I crawled onto my knees and gasped, “Just a moment, please, just a. .”
“No time!”
Oda grabbed me by the arm, dragged us through the office floor to the nearest stairwell, and there it was still playing, duh-duh. . de-dum! Duh-duh. . de-dum!
Tenth floor, ninth, it was getting louder, getting nearer, and above me I could hear doors being blasted back, the roar of paper, smell paper as it started to fill the stairwell, spinning up and down like a tornado in the middle of the stairwell to tear and batter at us. Eighth, seventh; Oda kicked the door back and there it was, just waiting on the other side. The spectre raised its knife and I wasn’t close enough, I was still in the stairwell. She’d led the way and it was there, going to tear her apart. Instinctively she raised her hands and in one of them was a bottle that had once held beer. She plunged it deep into the spectre’s hood, not thinking, too fast to breathe; and all at once the spectre started to crumple, sucked into the hot smoking interior of the bottle. I caught her arm as her fingers began to let go, held the bottle in place, kept pushing it into the hood until the creature’s clothes were nothing but a pile on the floor; then stuck my thumb over the lip, slipped Sellotape over the hole. Oda was just standing, staring, not moving, mouth hanging open. I grabbed her by the shoulder, dragged her into the office; we hurt, every part hurt; pulled her past the desks and the computers and the water coolers and all the samey sames of any office anywhere, tangling our feet in the fallen tracksuit of the spectre as we went.
We looked for signs, markings, anything to tell us the truth of this wonderful exit Earle had spoken about; and there it was, fire muster point, in big white letters on a green board. We rushed towards it, pushed the door open, stepped into a corridor that was bare except for a few recycling bins left forlornly on the concrete floor, ran to the end, saw a door, a handle, a sign warning of alarm, and there it was, burning blood-red on the door: the twin crosses, on fire, emitting too much light to look directly at them. I covered my eyes with my sleeve, slammed down on the door release with my elbow, kicked it open and looked out onto a dark rooftop on a cloudless night.
There weren’t any stairs down. Just a rooftop, sloping at a shallow angle, red tiles, old-fashioned chimney stack, new-fashioned TV antennae and satellite aerials, and this door, leading onto it from Harlun and Phelps. The roof was part of some old guild building, leading down from here to there, wherever there was.
There, rather than here. I pulled Oda out of the door, stepped past the uneven angle onto the sloping roof, slid, caught at the tiles, felt them hard and sharp beneath my fingers, slid a few steps and pressed myself flat, belly-down onto the slope. Oda was beside me, breathing even faster than us. We were. . our eyes were. . and our hands were doing some other business, and we’d slipped because there was blood beneath our feet, and it was our blood, what had Oda said? What was a spleen good for anyway?
My bag was still on my back.
The hat was still in the bag. I looked up, saw Harlun and Phelps lit up like a giant crimson warning against careless playing with matches, and half-imagined that somewhere in its depths, I could hear screaming. Aldermen fighting, Aldermen dying, while we snuck away in the night.
“We have to get away,” I hissed at Oda. “Come on! We have to find Ngwenya.”
Oda’s head was turned back towards the red tower, her eyes wide. “They’re. .” she began.
“We can’t kill him! We can’t stop Pinner without undoing this spell! We have to move! Oda! You have to help me!”
She half-turned, stared straight at us, and in her face was a look of such hollow nothingness that for a moment I thought I saw the empty hood of the spectre, not the flesh of a woman at all. “Damnation,” she whispered. “Damnation.”
“We can undo it!”
“Not this.”
“Oda! Listen to me, I need your help, we need to get to Ngwenya, I know where she’ll be, you have to help me! Oda!”
Our shout seemed to shake her for a moment, and there was something still there, hard old psycho-bitch, tough as tar. She turned her head up to the top of the roof and started to climb, scrambling over the old red tiles to the chimney stack and dragging me up behind her. My hand slipped in her fingers, blood sliding over skin between us; she caught me by the wrist and pulled, dragging me up to the top of the roof and looking down. On the other side of the slope, the roof dropped down into darkness, promising at something else: a flatter roof, another building, just below. We slid down the other side, tiles bumping and banging uncomfortably beneath us, reached the gutter, crawled over it, the old black metal creaking uncomfortably, jumped the little foot or so between us and the next building, landed on a roof of stagnant dirty water, old pigeon poo, silent, rusted vents and cracking grey concrete.
“London Bridge,” I hissed. “We have to get to London Bridge.” Behind us, Harlun and Phelps was a burning crimson brightness, the whole tower lit up with it, and there was someone in the door, the same one we’d jumped out of, hands in pockets, looking at us, just looking.
Oda had seem him too, and didn’t seem to be able to take her eyes away. I shook her, and still she didn’t turn. We slapped her, hard, across the cheek, and her hand instinctively rose into a fist, that stopped its swing an inch from our nose.
“Listen!” we hissed. “She cast the curse on London Bridge, she summoned him on London Bridge, it’s where it has to end; we have to get there!”
She crawled to the edge of the roof, looked down. Below us were concrete tiles, a walkway, a hangover from the days when architects had big dreams and only limited budgets, part of an overhead network that stretched from the northern reaches of the Barbican on the Goswell Road to the southern face of Moorgate and London Wall. In the 1960s, it would have seemed like science fiction; today, almost no one knew the walkways even existed. Oda slithered off the edge of the roof down the short drop onto the tiles, which thudded and echoed heavily, the mortar never even laid. I crawled after her, flopped, fell, landed on my toes and fell onto my knees, banging my hands against the stones.
Oda picked me up by the armpits, pulled me away from the burning-blood building behind; and there they were, those friendly mystic yellow lines on the floor that would always lead you somewhere you never expected to be. I pointed away from them: “There! Moorgate — there!”
We ran, as graceful as a burst beetroot. Concrete flags, lights coming on around us, the area of darkness fading as we fled from Harlun and Phelps, dead container plants, old cigarette packets tumbling in the street, blood between our fingers. There were stairs down from the highwalks, strange dark concrete stairs smelling of piss and old thin mould, running down the square back of a black-glassed slab of a building, moulded out of the old walls of a domed pub; the street below, Moorgate, all yellow-orange neon glow and sleepy shops selling chocolate, coffee and suits. An Underground stop, but the trains wouldn’t be running; a bus stop, but it was waiting for night buses, for twenty-four-hour routes, both of which by their very natures were destined never to quite turn up when you needed them.
Not a car in sight, not a cab, not a truck, the city was as dead as a street could be, the utter silence of an empty road that should have been heaving, that lived to heave, roadworks and traffic jams. We could half-close our eyes and there they were; the shadows ran to our feet, tumbled up from the pavements and between the cracks in the tarmac, remembering the daylight when they buzzed and shuffled and heaved and pressed against each other in the busy need to get from A to B as quickly as possible, important business, important things to do in the city, the smell of traffic and the juddering of builder’s tools into the earth. Silence in the city is terrifying, beautiful, a reminder of just how small man is in the streets he built. We ran down the middle of the road, letting the shadows trail us, feeding on some of their memories, recollections of rush hour and busy, busy, busy, feet slapping dully on the white hazard lines in the middle of the too-narrow street for all the traffic of day, and Oda followed, stumbling like a deranged zombie, eyes fixed on nothing at all, legs moving simply because they didn’t know what else to do with themselves.
The traffic lights between Moorgate and London Wall flickered red to green and back again as we approached, signalling invisible drivers to go about their business; to one side of the junction, a digger had dug a fat hole in the earth, revealing plastic pipes and ancient, dirt-encrusted black neighbours running through the ground, marked out by a sign thanking us for our patience while these vital works were undertaken. The bright burning redness of Harlun and Phelps was going out; I could see the scarlet overwash of the light fading, as the wards that had ignited within the building also died; for what reason, I didn’t know, couldn’t guess, didn’t want to guess. The street narrowed further as we crossed the traffic lights, tall, gloomy buildings with high imperial windows turned dark in the night, blocking out all but the thinnest pathway of sky overhead. Banks, their names written up in a different language and script above every door; ordinary money wasn’t their trade, not pounds and pennies like we were used to. The figures they dealt with had more zeros in them than most mortals had vocabulary to describe. Alleys winding off the side, a reminder of a time when the streets had sprung up contrarily, to their own devising, so much for urban planning, can’t stop us building here, can’t make it right, this is our city. Pubs, leather sofas, brass taps, low dark tables covered with stained green towels; a telephone box down one alley, defaced with white letters on one wall:
VE ME BA
A building overhead, cherubs carved into the gutters; another where Greek maidens in drooping robes held up the roofs; and here, if you looked, a tiny dragon in black iron placed as a weathervane on top of a domed tower, looking south-west across the city with two eyes set above a jaw open in perpetual fury. These were buildings made to demonstrate imperial glory, grandeur, wealth as power, great slabs of yellow stone fretted with ornaments across the roofs, forcing the passer-by in the street to crane their head right up to appreciate the skill of the mason’s work.
Lothbury, the great cliff walls of the Bank of England, a palace fit for an arrogant Pharaoh, guarded by bare-breasted Britannias and huge iron doors; another wall too high for any mortal to see over, another street too narrow for the traffic that flowed through it during the day. To one side the stone wall built to celebrate wealth and glory, to the other a length of black reflective glass built by people who knew that real wealth was fickle, and could be more sensibly contained. I could see the should-be-roundabout ahead where so many things met; Cheapside, Poultry, Moorgate, Bank, Threadneedle Street, King William Street, the Merchants’ Exchange, Mansion House; the richest junction in all England, full of old names and uneven glittering prosperity. Statues of stern-faced old dead men looked down on the narrow twisting of joining streets; a clock ticked in an illuminated plastic frame for no one to see, shop windows were still lit up bright and cold to show you the suits on offer, the range of cufflinks, the finest whiskies that they had to sell.
I ran out into the middle of the junction, heard Oda a few steps behind me, felt something move, looked up to my left, saw a shadow on the walls of the Bank of England, raised my hands, and heard a roar of air. I looked to my right, and too late saw the gates of the steps down to Bank station burst open, heard the roar come up from inside it — not just air but feet and footsteps and trains and escalators and beeps and tickets and shouts and cries and commands and everything all at once, the great rumble of the Underground — put my hands over my head and threw myself on the ground.
Around me, across the whole junction, the gates of the subway stairs blew upwards, outwards, spinning broken metal across the streets, and up came the roaring, a trapped unheard din of music players, announcements, warnings, cars overhead and trains below, printing machines and tapping keys, in a blast of air so hot and so dirty it looked like ash bursting from the volcano, spilling and spiralling up from under the street and around the streets and from every exit all at once, turning the cold orange-sodium night black and hot in an instant of furious shrieking ash. I looked behind me, saw Oda crawling away from the nearest subway on her hands and knees, hair smoking from the blast, face burnt, ears bleeding, she had been too close, even closer than me. I scampered on hands and knees towards her, caught her in my arms and dragged her away from the spinning, writhing wall of furious darkness that tumbled and spat hot fury out of the subways, rising up to block out the sky overhead. I couldn’t see the streets beyond this wall of blackness, couldn’t see through the volume of dirt and dust piling up from the subway’s open mouths, forming an arena wall around the junction. I shook Oda gently, hissed, “You OK?” and felt the warmth in my breath snatched away, my tongue turn to dirty dry meat in my mouth at the effort of speaking through the storm.
She nodded numbly. “Break it,” she whispered. “Break it!”
I felt for my bag, felt the bulk of the hat inside it again, patted it like a crucifix for comfort, looked around our narrowing circle of burning darkness for tools, felt. . stones rumbling, sleeping stones being disturbed just a little way off. . and saw him. He walked through the screaming roaring shattering sound and the burning suffocating filth from beneath the streets like it was sunlight in a dappled forest. Utterly clean, utterly untouched by it. He had his umbrella, which he leant on slightly as he stopped to stare at us. He looked. . not entirely his usual self, but he still managed to muster a smile.
Mr Pinner said, as the storm belched all around us, “End of the line.” I raised a trembling hand towards him and stuttered, “Uh-uh. Blackwall.”
For a moment, doubt flickered on Mr Pinner’s face. I turned my hand, pointed it in the general direction of where I thought the street called Poultry was. “Midnight Mayor,” I added, seeing his confusion. “Duh.”
He understood, but just a bit too late. I felt a rumbling, heard the rattling of an old, badly kept engine, saw a pair of headlights breaking through the dark, pulled Oda into my chest; and we didn’t quite have it in us to look away. For anyone else, we would have — not for this.
The bus came rattling through the storm like it was just another futile traffic-calming measure on a road built for racing; it was a night bus, it didn’t believe in slowing down, not for anything. A double-decker, its walls were red, its glass was scratched, its wheels were smoking, its driver was just a shadow lost in the darkness of the compartment. On the front was its number and destination — the number 15, heading for Blackwall, and pity the creature that tried to stop it getting there. Mr Pinner was standing between it and its destination. Night buses don’t believe in braking unless it’s absolutely, entirely, and without a doubt necessary. This bus didn’t brake. I watch it slam into him too fast to really tell what happened; we felt almost disappointed — there should have been the slow-motion crumpling of the health and safety ads you got at the cinemas, a twisting of limbs into unfortunate places, a slow swinging back of his neck as his spine crumpled, a shattering of bones as his legs, then his waist went under the bus, a snap as his upper body was thrown against the wide red front. There was none of that; one second, bus driving towards man, next second, bus driving over where man should have been. It occurred to us that all this might have been like the health and safety videos, if Mr Pinner had a spine to snap.
The number 15 rolled on, vanished again through the whirling black storm, which itself began to crumple and sink, the sound and the dirt sucked back in like an obscene drawing of breath by a pair of dying lungs, dragged back down through the open gates of the subway stairs, sucked beneath the streets. A figure lay in the middle of the road, as flat and thin as a piece of paper.
It began to twitch.
I grabbed Oda by the wrist, started to run, pulled her past the not-dead thing slowly rising back up from the black tarmac. Down towards King William Street, past a church, all red brick and spike, the long narrow streets snaking towards Cannon Street and Monument; shut coffee shops and the twisted remnants of an escape exit from Bank station. Lombard Street, St Swithin’s Lane, Abchurch Lane; I could see the junction of Monument right ahead. In an electronics store on one corner, cameras were watching us and projecting onto a dozen TV screens where our image got bigger and bigger as we ran towards it.
There was something behind us. I could hear it, a great angry rumble on the air. I risked a glance back and there it was, filling the street, higher than any houses, turning the night sodium-bright with reflected glory as it tumbled up into the sky. It didn’t have any shape that I could call a creature or give a name to; it was just a tidal wave, a storm surge, a great falling mass of paper, thousands and thousands of pieces of paper, receipts, bills, demands, flyers, bank notes, envelopes, letters, cheques, invoices, statements, ads, maps, leaflets. And at their heart, somewhere lost in the tumbling weight of it, Mr Pinner, hands held up to the sky, the papers pouring out of his flesh, tumbling upwards and outwards, over the roofs of the buildings and down the street towards us, thicker than the snow of a falling avalanche.
Oda had seen it too, was now overtaking me as she ran towards Monument; we weren’t going to get there, neither of us. We were going to drown first, going to be torn apart, suffocated, crushed. It was thirty feet behind us, twenty, rumbling like some great rusted locomotive down the street behind us; ten feet. I grabbed Oda, pulled her close to me, and held up my burnt hand to the storm.
Domine dirige nos.
(What a stupid way to die.)
Blood dribbled off my fingertips. I saw a big red drop run down to the joint between wrist and arm, reach the curve of that line, drool for an uneasy second, and fall.
Domine dirige nos.
And as it fell, it changed. The deep red of my blood started to burn, shine, shimmer, ignite; it wasn’t a falling liquid, but a falling twisting bubble of energy, turning, in the blink of an eye, the thickness of a piece of paper, if thickness was time, to a bright burning electric blue.
Then the blood dribbling from our side also ignited, furious blue, and the blood in our veins, and the blood in our eyes, and the blood that had seeped into the twin crosses carved into our hand. They caught fire, bursting back to their natural state of glorious electric fury; and I let it burn, boil inside, spill out of my wounds and mouth and eyes. Of all the ways to die, I was willing to let this be the one that did the job. We were going to burn, going to catch fire, going to explode with pure blue electricity, beautiful as a bomb, rolling fire through the sky, beautiful and wondrous and defiant!
And the papers spinning towards us, hitting the rising blue tempest of our fire, ignited, shrivelled, turned to ash, grey thin ash billowing in the fury at our feet; going to burn, beautiful burning, going to set the sky on fire, going to burn going to. .
. . I could see nothing except the blue tumbling fire which still seemed in some way to stem from the burning twin crosses blazing on my right hand; the paper, the streets, the sky, everything was lost within this cocoon, going to burn going to burn skin cracking blue fire in eyes, mouth, nose, ears, tongue, burning screaming delight going to. .
A hand reached through the fire. It was paper-white. It was attached to a sleeve. The sleeve was pinstriped. It reached calmly through the flames without a second of hesitation, grabbed Oda by the throat, pulled her free from my arms and with the easy strength of a hydraulic ram, threw her aside. She vanished into the fires, and somewhere beyond that, into the storm, the street, the stones, the whatever lay beyond our burning brightness. We screamed, raised our hands up and let the fires burst from every part of us, blazed electric fury dragged up from the streets, breathed the gas from the shattered pipes, sucked the water up from under the cement, the glass out of the windows, the scrabbling from the telephones, the chittering from the radio waves. We took it all, pushed it all towards that paper-pale hand fumbling in the fire and let it burst, fire and fury and light and electricity and sound and lightning and digital screaming and glass and stone and dirt and heat and shadows — how many shadows could one city hold? — we threw them into it as well, sucked them up from the streets and let them rage, scream through the air towards Mr Pinner, too thick to see, closing our eyes against their weight, crumpling down into the middle of the street, hiding our head in our hands as they screamed up from all around, too many to comprehend; too thick, too heavy, too much of too much. Open your eyes and understand it, and you know why the dragons were mad; too much of too much couldn’t stop it, couldn’t do it, too much of too much, burn!
Something dragged us forwards, like the sucking in of air to a fire. Then, the fire being sated with what it could eat, it threw us backwards, twisting and turning us on the air and throwing us across the street, blasting stones and glass and electric fire and paper, so much paper, throwing it into the sky and then dropping it back down. We fell into the gutter, the shock of it knocking the fires out in our blood, sending us reeling into some dull, stupid part of our mortal skull, little mortal frail flesh trembling at the blast, and it was all I could do to tuck our chin into our legs and shield our face from the shockwave as it rippled down the street, shattering every brick and pane of glass that had survived the storm, blasting spinning paper along the road and into the sky, suffocating heat in the cold night air.
And slowly, it too settled.
I opened my eyes, peered out between my red bloody fingertips. Mr Pinner stood in the middle of the street, paper falling gently all around. His hair was dishevelled, his coat torn, his skin dripping small receipts and lines of ticker tape. He wasn’t alone. His head was turned upwards to the thing that had grown out of the darkness behind him, his eyes fixed on the twin points of red madness that stared back down at him. I heard him start to laugh, but he didn’t take his eyes from the creature. “Is this it?” he chuckled. “Is this the best your city has?”
The thing, standing as high as the street, its wings bent back uncomfortably to make space for the buildings, put its head on one side and looked down at him. To call it a dragon was. .
. . an efficient way to describe something we did not wish to comprehend.
“I am the death of cities!” roared Mr Pinner, opening his torn arms to the beast. “I am your undoing, the breaking of the legends, the stories and the shadows! Your city is damned by its own people, condemned out of the mouths of your own! Betrayal and vengeance! You cannot harm me!”
I crawled to my feet. Bits of me that shouldn’t have made the sounds they did made sounds. My heart was a steady, dull dedum in my chest — too steady, too dull, as if it had run out of the strength to race. I called out, “Mr Pinner?”
He half-turned, saw me, smiled. “Mr Mayor!” he called out merrily. “Do you keep a pet dragon?”
“No,” I replied with a sigh. “It keeps me.” I turned my head up to the black shape of the shadow-beast, skirted my eyes over the edge of its mad own, couldn’t look, couldn’t bear to look, to risk infinite falling into a red void. I looked just past it and said, “Fido! Walkies!”
Mr Pinner spun back round, raised his hands up towards the beast. It opened its jaws and fell, spinning darkness and scarlet endless falling, down on top of him.
London is a dragon.
New York is probably King Kong.
It’s just a way for mortals to understand something too big for the brain.
On the other hand, Mr Pinner did have a point.
What good is a city against its nemesis?
We turned our face away from the darkness in King William Street, and as the paper tumbled gently from the sky, hobbled towards Monument. Behind us we heard. . sounds not fit for the human ear, sounds we could not explain, comprehend, had not the vocabulary to describe. We call them sounds only because the human brain cannot find another way by which to understand them, did not have the means to grasp, without going insane, the clash between the dragon and the man in the pinstripe suit. Had we been just blue electric angels, just ourself in the wires, we would have known then how to speak of it. But I could not have spoken of the sound without going insane, so will say simply and true — that in King William Street that night, a dragon summoned from the stuff of the city met the creature summoned to destroy it.
And the creature was going to win.
Buying time; we’d seen Terminator, we knew the value of buying time.
We hobbled past Monument as the paper fell, saw our face reflected a hundred times in the window of the electronics store, heard the thud of our footsteps echoing off the glass front of the chemist and the window of the sushi bar, stumbled above the top of a stair leading down to Cannon Street, snaking away below us. Tucked away to the left, a discreet nothing bursting into sight, was the spike of the Monument itself, golden flame sat dull and silent on its top, scaffolding around its base to support the old monument to another time when the death of cities had come to London, another burning, another loss. Office block to the right, symbols carved into the stone — an all-seeing eye, a pair of compasses, a thing that by a different light might have been a swastika, hangovers from a day when London liked to flaunt its mysteries.
A dropping away of buildings.
Neon-filled darkness to either side.
A broad street widening out into a bridge, an empty nothing over
water; on the far side, railway bridges, glassy reflective buildings set all at odd angles: Hay’s Wharf and Tower Bridge to the east, Southwark to the west, Southwark Cathedral poking up above the offices and pubs, the Golden Hinde sitting in its dry dock, bow just pointing out over the water, the curve of the London Eye sticking up over the edge of the tallest building, the numberless clock on Waterloo Bridge, the white blade of the Millennium Bridge, the tower of Tate Modern. Please, dear God, please any higher power which may or may not be watching over us, this is the moment to do your thing, please. .
London is a dragon.
Protector of the city.
Light, life, fire.
London Bridge in the small hours of a winter morning.
No traffic, no buses, no taxis, no lorries. Just an empty street, lit from above by a long line of silent, sad lamps, and by red floodlights illuminating the sides of the bridge. Railings cut off the pavements from the road. I staggered down the side of the left-hand lane, clutching my satchel to my side, gasping and reaching out for the railings to carry my weight. Someone had filled my eyes with empty honeycomb, thick, solid, airy, sticky, all these things at once and none of them natural; the pain that should have been in every part of my skin was just a distant prickling of pins and needles, too much blood between our fingers, some bastard shot us! Too much blood. .
Where was Oda?
Where was Earle?
Where were the Aldermen?
Digested from the inside out.
Poor Loren alone in her room in Camden.
Vera dead and turned to paint.
And Nair had screamed, just like little Mo had screamed, just like all those dead men had screamed when they were still human to do it.
Give me back my hat.
Light, life, fire.
Protector of the city.
A dragon’s pet.
There was a woman standing alone in the middle of the bridge.
She was looking east, towards the place a sunrise might pretend to be in a few hours or so.
Her hands were turned towards the river, her face towards the sky.
She was breathing in the river air. That beautiful, calming, relaxing, cooling river air, sorcerer’s balm after a hard day with the voltages; time and stillness and movement all rolled into one breath on the bridge.
The palms of her hands were girly pink, the outsides deep, dark brown. Her hair was woven in plaits so tight it must have hurt, had no choice but to hurt.
We staggered towards her.
She didn’t notice.
Her eyes were closed, her heart beating in time to the running of the water below the bridge.
Ten paces, five, three, two.
We stopped a step away from her, leant against the side of the bridge, gasping for breath.
Penny Ngwenya didn’t move, didn’t blink, just stood on the bridge and smiled at the smell of the river.
I said, “Miss?”
Nothing.
“Miss?!”
Nothing.
I fumbled in my satchel, pulled out the traffic warden’s hat, smearing its surface with my bloody fingertips. “Miss Ngwenya?”
A flicker on her face. Her head half-turned, her eyes half-opened, distant, but still there, looking at me, even if she didn’t entirely see.
I held up the hat. “Penny Ngwenya?”
Her eyes went to the hat in my blood-covered hands. Her fingers twitched, her mouth opened to let out a little, sliding breath.
I reached out with one shaking hand, took her hand in mine, pressed the hat into her fingers, closed them, unresisting, over the black fabric. “I brought you back your hat,” I said.
A moment.
A pause.
She didn’t seem to understand.
Her eyes fell slowly down to thing in her hand. “My. . hat?”
“Yes. I heard you lost it. I brought it back.”
“Do I know you?” she asked, turning it over in her fingers, looking at the yellow “Penny” written inside.
“No,” I replied. “My name’s Matthew.”
“You. . you look. .” she began, voice a million miles away, eyes fixed on the hat.
“I happened to be passing,” I said carefully. “No trouble.”
“We. . haven’t met, have we?”
“No,” I replied. “Just strangers.” And then, because up seemed to be wanting to give down a try, and down was feeling flexible enough just this once to let up have its way, I slid down against the side of the bridge, burying my fingers into the cold concrete in case sideways wanted to try the same trick on me. I saw the edges of my vision start to cave.
“Jesus!” exclaimed Penny, dropping down with me, trying to hold me up. “You’ve. . you’ve been. .”
“It’s fine,” I muttered. “It’s fine, just fine, it’ll be. . I had to bring you back your hat, you see?”
“You’ve been fucking shot!”
“Yeah, I noticed.”
“Don’t move, OK? You’ll just make it worse, I’ll. . I’ll call an ambulance.”
Her attention had for a moment been taken from the hat, but as she reached into her pocket for her mobile phone, her eyes skated across the fabric again and she froze, mouth slightly open, staring at the little, old-fashioned, ugly black dome.
“Where did you. .?” she stumbled.
“I heard it was important to you. I thought, since I was in the area, I could bring it back.”
“Why would you do that?”
“It’s your hat. It seemed the least I could do.”
“But. .”
She had the hat in one hand, was fumbling for the phone with her other.
A voice said, “Get away from him.”
She looked up.
So did I.
A thing that might have once been Mr Pinner stood in the middle of the road. His suit was a raggedy painted thing of badly torn paper trailing down from the thin, uneven ripples of his flesh. His neck was bent in and then sharply out again, like a crumpled old Christmas cracker, his trousers were wrapped up tight in old receipts and bits of soggy newspaper. A thousand cuts had been torn in his flesh, from which dribbled little pieces of paper falling away into the street. One eye had been slashed straight through and was now oozing blue biro ink down his cheek. When he spoke, his voice was a distorted, lumpy thing.
He said again, “Get away from him. Penny. You can’t trust him.”
She stuttered, “Who are you? I don’t know you.”
“I’m Mr Pinner,” he replied. “I’m here to help you. I’m a friend. He’s out to use you, Penny. He wants to hurt you.”
“But. . he gave me back my hat. .”
“Don’t you wonder how he got it? A little prick on a bicycle stole your hat!” Mr Pinner was shouting; I had never seen that before. “A little arrogant cocksure prick stole your hat and pedalled away laughing and you really think some random stranger would go to any effort at all to bring it back, that he cares, that it matters anything to him? There’s no reason for him to help you: just another fucker in the street, another guy you can’t trust, another harmless man who at the slightest word is going to hit, or stab, or shout, or spit, or do all the things these pricks do because they can, because they’re fucking strangers and you can’t trust them! Get away from him!”
Penny looked down uncertainly at me.
Mr Pinner blurted, “You think he just found your hat, Penny? There are eight million people in this city! You are tiny, you are nothing to them, an infinitely small part of a great machine too big to ever be understood; people don’t care! You can walk down the same street a million times and never see the same faces, never be recognised, never be appreciated, smiled at, laughed with, loved, known, because you’re just a nothing to them, another person who happens to live in the city, getting in their fucking way, so why should he bother? Why would anyone ever fucking bother with you?
“You’ve seen it, Penny Ngwenya, stood on the edge of the hill and looked down on the city and known you can just lift up your toes and fall for ever, tumble for ever into the void and no one will ever notice, no one will ever even know! Cretin! Maggot! Scum! Stupid kids in their fucking hoods, stupid fuckers pissing in the street! He’s part of it! He’s come here tonight to hurt you! He’s part of the fall, one of the men who laugh when your back is turned, part of the insanity!
“Give me the hat, Penny. Give it to me, and we can end this. Just like you wanted to, we can end this tonight, just give me the hat. .”
Penny half-rose, turned towards Mr Pinner. I grabbed her hand as she stood, pulled her back towards me; she jolted at our touch, as if surprised to find us still there.
“There’s no such things as strangers, Penny Ngwenya. Not in the city. Just other Londoners. Not strangers at all.”
She looked at me with a pair of perfect oval eyes in a perfect oval face.
She smiled, and carefully pried her fingers away from mine, wiping the blood off casually on her trousers as she rose.
She stood up, straightened, and turned towards Mr Pinner, who held out his arms towards her, paper frame twitching and shuddering as if short of breath.
She raised the hat in her hands, turned it, dome up towards the sky.
Mr Pinner smiled.
She lifted the hat towards him, and then past him, up in a long, careful arc, and without a word, put it down on her head, twisting it into a familiar, comfortable position.
She let out a sigh, closed her eyes, seemed to relax over every inch of her body.
Mr Pinner made a little sound. It was somewhere between a choke and the rustle of old crumpled paper.
Penny looked up, stared Mr Pinner straight in the eye and smiled.
She said, “You weirdo psychopath. Fuck right off out of here before I call the fucking police, I mean Jesus.”
Mr Pinner whimpered. He staggered away from her a few paces, his arms falling limp to his sides. “But I. . I. .” he stammered.
“Seriously, I’m not shitting around. I mean, where do you get off with this crap?”
“I meant. . I meant it for. . I only wanted to. .” he gabbled. Paper drifted from the tears in his arm, popped out of his left ear, dribbled down his right nostril in thin pale strands.
“Look, I’m calling the police, seriously,” she said, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a mobile phone. “You can do all the shouting and spitting you fucking want; I’ve got community support officer training and I’ve had it up to here with weirdo psychopaths thinking they can get away with it. I mean, look at you! You wanna go to jail, arsehole? You wanna? Because I swear that this is the last time some testicle of a male mouths off at me! Look! Dialling!”
She dialled 999, held the phone to her ear.
Mr Pinner held out his hands imploringly. His thumb started to unravel, long white sheets spilling down from his fingers like a mummy’s bandages. “Please,” he whimpered, “I only wanted to help, I was. . I was. .”
Paper tumbled down from underneath his tattered trouser, spun in the river breeze.
“Yeah, police and ambulance please. Yeah? Yes, that’s the number. Penny Ngwenya. Yes.”
Mr Pinner’s eyes fell on me, blue biro ink dribbling out of the tear glands. “I’ll. . I’m. . I’ll. .” he croaked, but his mouth was filling with fat reams of paper, choking on it. His jacket had come undone to let out files and sheets that tumbled from his thinning chest like it was skin shaven from a corpse.
“You still here?” she asked, holding one hand over the receiver of her phone.
Mr Pinner tried to speak, couldn’t, his jaw was melting away into spinning thin shards. His shoulders dribbled down his back, his legs crumpled and began to give way, revealing thin tubes of cardboard, that bent and twisted beneath the little remaining weight of documentation on his torso.
“Hi, yeah, London Bridge. The middle of the actual bridge. There’s this guy. . looks hurt. . yeah, this other guy’s been mouthing off at me, but. .” Penny’s eyes rolled over the skeletal paper remains of Mr Pinner. “. . but I don’t think it’s gonna be a problem. Yeah. Ambulance. Yeah.”
“I. . I. . ah. .” gasped Mr Pinner, and then there wasn’t a throat left to gasp with, a body left to gasp.
Bits of limp paper drifted by me.
I caught a few in my bloody fingertips.
. . buy now and save £25 on the initial. .
A water meter fitted to your system can greatly reduce. .
. . ISA investment profit projection of. .
— GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS -
The last piece of paper to fall from Mr Pinner’s body was half the size of a sheet of A4, covered in small formal text. It said:
Road Traffic Act 1991 (as amended)
(Sections 48, 66, 75, 77, Schedule 3 and Schedule 6)
Notice No.: 0215911Date: 03-10-2009
Time: 15.19
The Motor Vehicle with
registration number: L602 BIM
Make: Volvo Colour: Green
was seen in: Dudden Hill Lane
By Parking Attendent no.: 11092
Who had reasonable cause to believe that the following
parking contravention had occurred. .
I let the paper go, watched it drift out over the edge of the bridge, spin into the air, fall down into the darkness above the river. Penny, standing on the edge of the pavement, lowered her phone and said carefully, “That guy just turned into paper.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “How about that?”
“Um. .” she began.
“The city is a dragon, Penny Ngwenya. A great big, mad, insane, dark, brooding, furious, wild, rushing, fiery, beautiful dragon. Do you know what the spleen does?”
“No, I. .”
“No,” I sighed. “Me neither.”
And then, because it seemed like the right and most sensible thing to do, I closed my eyes, put my head down on the pavement, and let the gentle rustling of the river below me and the whispering of paper falling through the air sing me into an endlessly falling darkness.