by Kate Griffin
That was good; that meant the inside was peaceful, without the nattering of children to disturb us. Those who had made it inside either knew its secrets already, and were there to wonder and appreciate anew, or were so surprised to discover this well of knowledge that even the most easily bored were silent with respect.
I wandered through the history of London, not paying much attention. I’d been here before, and what I was looking for was very specific.
I found it, sitting on a little stool beside a large display, lit up in shimmering orange and red, of the Great Fire of London. It was snoring, very quietly, very professionally; the snoring that could be dismissed as “heavy breath” at a moment’s notice. I poked it with my toe and said, “Excuse me?”
The snoring stopped. Set within a squashed red face, a pair of almost spherical eyes opened, drifted up to the ceiling and round the walls, and settled on me.
“Uh?” The sound was pumped out by a pair of lungs inside a great bulbous chest inside a security guard’s black uniform.
“You work here?” I asked.
“Sure, yeah, sure . . . What?” The security guard resettled himself on his stool. It looked designed to be as hard to sleep on as possible, but he’d pulled it off. “Jesus!” he muttered, as consciousness caught up with the rest of him. “Can I help you?”
I beamed.
“You lost?” he asked.
“No, don’t think so.”
“You sure?”
“Not unless we’re going metaphysical.”
“Jesus!” he added, as the rest of consciousness slammed into the forefront of his brain like a TGV without the brakes. “Right, yeah, fuck, Jesus! I mean . . .”
“I’m sure you didn’t mean it to come out like that,” I said.
“Sorry. I’ve got this medical thing . . .”
“I can tell.”
“I’m fine now.”
“Sure. I need to have a nose round your archives.”
“Uh, right, yeah, sure. You’ll be wanting to go talk to the lady at reception, she can get you an appointment . . .”
“Not those archives. I’m looking for some information, the kind you don’t find in many libraries, or even on the internet.”
His eyes narrowed. “What kind of information?”
“I’m trying to find out a few things about a guy called the Midnight Mayor.”
“Oh,” he groaned, stretching his short arms, whose hands ended in red, clubbed fingertips. “Not the Lord Mayor?”
“No. The Midnight Mayor. The museum seemed like a sensible place to start.”
“Safer to ask about the Lord Mayor. We’ve got his coach somewhere, very swish, very shiny.”
“The Midnight Mayor. I’m absolutely certain.”
His face saddened. “Well, if you’re sure . . .”
“I am.”
“. . . just remember that I warned you, OK? Health and safety and stuff.”
“Sure.”
He stood up. “You’d better come with me.”
His name was Frank. He had a hard accent coming out of a chubby mouth and said he was from Lambeth. He also said he didn’t like trouble.
“Smart to ask the security guy,” he added, as we rambled through the quiet, dark halls of the museum. “Twenty years in this place, you pick up a few things, and don’t get so fussed as the historians. They give keys to the security guards that they’d never give to the archaeologists. Can’t trust these academic types not to lose them somewhere.”
“I know. That’s why I asked.”
“Oh,” he sighed, jangling his keys absently as we picked our way through a line of panels showing the Blitzed-out ruins of the city. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”
“One of what?”
“The guys in the know. No one asks about the Midnight Mayor who isn’t already in too deep for the lifejacket to do any good. What are you? Magician, warlock, petty wizard with a thing for the big time?”
“None of those,” I answered, as he unlocked a door behind a display dedicated to the Docklands Redevelopment and led me from the gloom of the museum halls into a white, neon-lit corridor. “But you’re in the right sort of area.”
His shoes snapped loudly on the concrete floor. Mine puffed and wheezed. He spun the keys round and round, jangling on their chain, and grunted at each door he opened. “‘Course,” he went on, “none of my business. I just look after the museum, see? I don’t dabble.”
Another door, heavy, black and metal; a room of dead paper and cold dry air. He shooed me in and closed the door behind us. The room had no windows, just vents and dull strip lighting that failed to illuminate between the long stacks of shelves dividing up the floor.
“Smart not to ask too many questions,” he announced, marching down the rows of files. “You never know who’ll come knocking. I just point them in the right direction, see? That’s all that I can do — just the doorman, just keep an eye out.”
Another door at the end of the room. Two locks, and a keypad on the side. “Where are we going?” I asked.
“Thing is,” he sighed, as the locks turned and the door opened, “you’re the second guy this week to come asking about the Midnight Mayor.”
I stopped dead above a flight of metal stairs headed into darkness. “Who else?” I asked. “Who else came looking?”
“Hey — none of my business, remember?”
“Please. I want to know.”
“Knowing’s nothing unless you’ve got the qualification on your CV,” he sighed. “I know the whole fucking history of London but can I get a decent job? Fuck it.”
“A man in a suit,” we blurted. “Was it a man in a pinstripe suit? Thin dark hair, slicked back, dark suit, light shirt, shiny shoes? There’d be . . . he wouldn’t have smelt of anything. No smell.”
He waved down the dark staircase. “Hey, I didn’t say anything, OK? You want to know about the Midnight Mayor, it’s your own damn business. I don’t dabble, see? It’s the best way to get by, because otherwise, if you’re just a guy, you know, just doing your thing, that sorta thing would send you crazy.”
I looked at the stairs descending into blackness. “The answers are down there?”
“You wanna know about the Midnight Mayor?”
“Yes.”
“You gotta get in deeper. Sign these.”
He handed me a couple of sheets of paper on a clipboard. I read them over in the gloomy light. “What’s this?” I asked, as their meaning utterly failed to sink in.
“Legal waivers.”
“What?”
“You want to find out about the Midnight Mayor, and you do it on museum premises, then I need your written consent not to hold the museum liable for any damage that may happen to you.”
“‘Damage’?”
“Not my business. You gonna sign? Can’t give you answers unless you sign.”
“Does it have to be in blood?” we asked, curious.
“What? No, Jesus! You’ve got one fucking twisted head on your shoulders.” He handed me a biro. I read, and signed. He snatched pen and paper back from me and gestured down the dark stairs. “Great knowing you, good luck in your research, give me a mention in the credits, right? Byeeeee!”
“What about . . .” we began.
He slammed the door.
We stood on a staircase painted black in a black corridor leading down to unending blackness, with any light switches that might have illuminated the blackness probably having been painted black.
We swore.
I let out a long patient breath, pressed the palms of my hands together, as much to calm myself as anything else, then opened them up. Light, the shimmering pinkish-sodium glow of the streets, rippled between my fingers. I let it fold out of my skin, taking warmth with it, pressed it into a bubble and threw it up above my head. Our shadow stretched down to a black door at the end of the black staircase. We walked down carefully, trailing our fingers along the cold walls. I could taste something on the air, old and
slippery. It smelt of fishmonger, of thin fog and old forgotten things. It set my stomach turning, made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, made my little sodium glow twist and shimmer above me in shared unease. I reached the door at the bottom of the stair, and pushed it open. Not locked. Beyond it was a room. In the middle of the room was a cauldron, placed squarely beneath a single overhanging, metal-shaded lamp.
I said, “You are taking the mick.”
I was talking to the cauldron; but the voice that answered me came from a woman.
She was in her mid- to late thirties, had a haircut that reduced her blonde hair to straight shoulder-length discipline, and wore sensible leather pumps and a neat woollen jumper. She came out of the endless shadows so suddenly that despite her smiling, friendly face I started away from her. Putting her hand, with its short, tidy nails, around my shoulder, she said, “Cup of tea?”
I looked at the contents of the black iron cauldron. A dozen sad, drained tea bags were floating on the surface. I said, “Oh, you have got to be taking the piss!”
“You disrespectin’ us?” demanded another voice. I looked up and saw another woman’s face, younger, not out of her teens, hair dyed black and bright purple, face drilled with metal rings, in her ears, her lips, her cheeks, her tongue, her eyebrows, her nose.
“Erm . . .” I mumbled.
“Biscuit?” A third voice, a third woman. This one had steel-silver hair, a cream blouse with gold buttons done all the way up to her drooping chin, a dark blue tartanesque suit and an expression of mild reproach. She held a small plate of assorted biscuits, neatly arranged.
“Um . . . thank you.” We never say no to free food.
“You can dunk, you know,” added the old woman, and to prove her point, selected a digestive from her plate, and dipped it in the bubbling black cauldron.
“You know, this isn’t how I imagined the Museum’s archives department . . .”
“Huh!” grunted the young woman.
“Oh, dear,” sighed the middle-aged woman.
The old woman looked at me like I was a persistent fly circling closer to the sticky paper.
“. . . but I mean I’d heard stories, wouldn’t have come if I hadn’t heard stories . . .”
“Of course you have.”
“. . . and I suppose in a way, it makes sense . . .”
“Well, duh.”
“Maybe we can help, dear.”
“Another biscuit?”
I looked at them. Three ladies in a room beneath a museum, with a cauldron full of tea. There are certain things that never change. Call them Fates, Muses, Furies, Prophets, Seers or just three twisted biddies with a caffeine fixation, the magic of three women and a cauldron will never fade, even when the cauldron is full of PG Tips.
So I bowed, opening my arms wide in a gesture of peace, and said, “Ladies.”
The young one said, “Fucker!” It would have been nice to call her the Maid. I doubted I could.
The middle-aged one said, “So nice to meet a polite young man!” It would have been appropriate to call her the Mother, but I wasn’t sure how she’d take it.
“Society is on the down!” concluded the old woman. We wanted to call her the Hag, and were smart enough to steer clear of the idea.
But whatever we called them, we could recognise them for what they were. Three women with a cauldron — that meant power, ancient and old power, and old power meant old traditions, and that meant rules, and rules usually meant risk, since 90 per cent of the time rules are invented to stop something, that could be bad, from being even worse.
Then the Maid said, “He’s a fucking sorcerer. Jeezus.”
Then the Mother, patting me nicely on the shoulder, said, “They’re the blue electric angels.”
Then the Hag, putting the biscuits down, leant straight over to me and grabbed my bandaged hand. She jerked it towards her and I, still seeing just old woman — forgetting the rules — staggered straight into her grip and half fell at her feet. Turning my hand every which way, she dug her sharp fingers into the bandages until we nearly screamed.
“He’s the Midnight Mayor,” she said. She leant up close, steel-coloured eyes beneath silver hair that didn’t even twitch with her moving. “That’s what you wanted to know, isn’t it?” I looked into her perfect false teeth made of plastic, smelt tea on her breath and ancient, ancient magic in the dull thick cut of her jacket, and heard her say, “You’re the Midnight Mayor. Say it until it becomes natural, say it until you believe it. You’re the Midnight Mayor, sorcerer. Electric angel. Isn’t that what you needed to hear? That bit of info’s a freebie, take it or leave it.”
She squeezed one last time on our bloody hand and let go. We flopped against the edge of the cauldron, cradling our hand and hunched around the pain until our eyes were no longer full of blue electric fire, biting our tongue to force away everything but staying in control.
“He doesn’t look much like a Midnight Mayor,” sighed the Mother.
“You look kinda a dork, mate,” concurred the Maid.
The Hag grunted, picked up the biscuits and set about carefully nibbling around the sticky centre of a jammy dodger, saving the best for last.
I dragged us back onto our feet, leaning heavily on the edge of the cauldron. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a cup?” I asked at last.
“Of course!”
A mug proclaiming “I really love Mum” was handed to me from the darkness beyond the cauldron. I dipped it in the bubbling liquid.
“Tea, sugar?” asked the Mother.
I shook my head, reached for my satchel, seized a handful of painkillers, drowned them in tea. For a liquid boiled in a cauldron that probably hadn’t seen daylight for two thousand years, the tea wasn’t half bad. They waited for me to drink, draining down the whole mug and putting it carefully aside. I wiped my mouth on my sleeve. On my right hand I felt the burning brand ache and stick to the bandages.
“I’m guessing,” I said at last, “that there are rules. I’m guessing it’ll be something like ‘you can have three questions’ and I want to make it absolutely clear right now that I do not believe that rhetorical flourishes or prompting statements qualify as a direct question.”
“Hey — you flunked out too,” said the Maid, with what I guessed was the nearest to understanding I was going to get from her.
“While you’re broadly correct, my pet,” sighed the Mother, “‘three questions’ is so old-fashioned. This is the age of modern educational initiatives!”
“That’s a very unhelpful answer,” I said, “since it doesn’t really answer anything, while still leaving the option open for me to make a pig’s ear of this whole procedure and blow one of my questions on something banal like ‘duh, so are there more than three questions, then?’ — which isn’t, by the way, a question!”
“Sharp, aren’t you?” The Hag spoke from the corner of her mouth, something either a smile or a grimace. “But which one of you is sharp?”
“Please,” I growled. “Let’s establish this right now. I am we and we are me. We are the same thought and the same life and the same flesh, and frankly I would have thought that you, of all entities to wander out of the back reaches of mythical implausibility, would respect this.”
“But it’s not healthy!” replied the Hag. “A mortal and a god sharing the same flesh?”
“You know, this isn’t why we’re here. I can get abuse pretty much wherever.”
“Yeah,” sighed the Maid, “but I bet a tenner I can make you cry in half a minute.”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” added the Mother, slurping tea.
“Did you hurt your little handywandy?” crooned the Hag.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “All right,” I said. “Let’s play this game. Statement: I am the Midnight Mayor.”
“Yes,” said the Mother.
“Don’t give the fucker a freebie. Christ!” exclaimed the Maid.
“Sorry, dearest,” muttered the Mother, w
ith every sign of genuine contrition.
“Statement:” I tried again. “I became Midnight Mayor when Nair died.”
Three stony faces stared back at me. I didn’t need an answer to know I was right. “Statement: when Nair died, he made a telephone call. He breathed his dying breath into the wires and with his dying breath went the idea, the title, the power, the brand, everything that makes up Midnight Mayor. But it couldn’t stay as signals in the wire; the Midnight Mayor needs to be flesh and blood. So it went in search of a phone to ring and it found us. It was always going to find us. It is our nature.”
“Isn’t it nice to see that youth can still reason?” sighed the Hag.
“Statement: the Aldermen think I killed Nair because, let’s face it, if we’d known what he was about to do to us, we probably would have. Because they don’t understand what we are; they don’t understand why we are alive. Because . . . because they don’t know who else to blame. Because Nair was killed by a man who basically flayed him alive while Nair was still in his clothes, peeled away the skin under his nails without even trimming them down, and that, that isn’t just sorcery. That’s the kind of magic that makes the moon think twice about its orbital path. That’s . . . that’s the kind of magic that people don’t want to understand, don’t want to know about, because it makes them tiny.
“Statement: fact! Nair died and I was hit by a curse out of the telephone! One Midnight Mayor is dead and another walks, because you can’t kill a brand on the hand, not while there’s a city that made it.
“Fact! The man who killed Nair had no smell, and men — mortal walking, breathing men — always smell.
“Question:”
“Finally,” groaned the Maid.
“Yes, dear?”
“Well?”
“Question:” I licked my dry lips, tasting of peeled skin and tea. “Who or what killed Nair?”
