The Midnight Mayor ms-2

by Kate Griffin

  “Spectres . . .” murmured Sinclair, “are unusual in this city.”

  “Yes.”

  Drink arrived — some kind of deep purple goo in a cocktail glass. Sinclair sniffed it and winced. “Yes,” he murmured. “Well, experimental cookery. I believe that it’s supposed somehow to complement the dishes, react with tannins or proteins or some such scientific curiosity. I won’t be offended if you don’t drink it, Matthew. Had you met Nair?”

  He knew who the last Midnight Mayor was. Concerned citizens make it their business to know these things.

  “No.”

  “Interesting.”

  I said nothing.

  “You know, traditionally, the Midnight Mayor is . . . shall we call it a role? A duty, perhaps, a responsibility, something a bit more than a title. Passed on by the will of the previous incumbent to a chosen, well-trained and appointed successor. Usually an Alderman. Nair was an Alderman, before he was Midnight Mayor. It has been the way for generations. So why, dear boy, why do you suppose you have ended up with this . . . remarkable predicament?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There must be a reason. Mystic powers, metaphysical forces, fate, destiny, choice, and so on and so forth. No such thing as coincidence, not in your particular, special line of work.”

  A plate of . . . something was brought before us. It looked like mashed intestine garnished with thistles. I poked it nervously with the end of a thing that might have been a fork. I had a feeling the dim light was meant to disguise the full horror of the food. I closed my eyes, we speared a mouthful, and ate it.

  Could have been worse.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Charlie sniffing it uneasily. Sinclair tucked in, napkin folded over his collar.

  “I assume you’ve done your research, that the city really is damned — not that I doubt it for a minute. I mean, we’ve all heard the rumours, naturally, all seen a few signs and generally agreed that when the Midnight Mayor — I mean Nair — is brutally murdered then things are inclining towards the dubious, if you follow me. You must have seen a few things, asked a few questions — one does not reach these conclusions lightly!”

  I said, “‘Give me back my hat.’”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “‘Give me back my hat.’”

  “Did you have a hat, or is this a metaphor the elaborate nature of which currently evades my higher faculties?”

  “It’s everywhere. The words, the phrase. I didn’t notice before, didn’t look. But now I’ve started looking, and it’s everywhere. On the pillars below Waterloo Bridge, on the walls in Willesden, above the dead ravens in the Tower, on the shutters of the shop where the London Stone should have stood, on the Wall of London. Give me back my hat.”

  “You are suggesting that this quaint request is somehow linked to your predicament?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. But wherever bad things happen, there it is. The ravens in the Tower are dead, the London Stone is broken, the writing is on the Wall. These things have always been protectors. Keeping out the bad things in the night.”

  “What ‘bad things’?”

  “I have no idea. If I knew that, then odds are the bad things wouldn’t have been kept out to begin with.”

  “I see your point.”

  “But as you said — spectres aren’t common in London. And they did come looking for me, when I answered the phone. You destroy the defences, kill the ravens, who knows what will come out from beneath the paving stones? Someone deliberately did that, killed the ravens, killed Nair. It can only be bad news.”

  “And now you’re in the middle of it,” murmured Sinclair, more to himself than me, prodding a puddle of lumpy goo on his plate that might have been food. “How . . . controversial.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the odds are, Nair chose you.”

  “Yes. Odds are.”

  “Now why do you think he’d do that?”

  I hesitated.

  “You must have dedicated some thought to the question.”

  “I saw the face of the creature that killed him. That killed Nair.”

  “Oh? And what did he look like?”

  “Just a guy in a suit. Pinstripe suit, ironed, clean. Slicked-back hair. Just . . . just a guy in a suit. He didn’t even touch him, and there was so much blood and Nair was just . . . meat and bones by the time he was finished. I’d never seen . . . we’d never imagined it was . . . we will not die like that.”

  Sinclair leant forward, folding his chubby fingers together. “Ah. I think I understand.”

  “He had no smell. The fox saw it all, and we asked the fox, and the fox smelt nothing. The creature that killed Nair wasn’t human. A guy in a suit and he wasn’t human. Nair wouldn’t have died if he wasn’t Midnight Mayor. That’s the reasoning, isn’t it? You get a brand on the hand, protector of the city: come gobble me up all ye nasties. Come hunt for me, spectres and shadows. We will not die like that!”

  “You don’t know what it was? The thing that killed Nair?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “But he looked like a man.”

  “Yes.”

  “But wasn’t.”

  “No.”

  “I see. That could be problematic.” Sinclair sighed, rolled back in his chair. Waiters drifted in, took away the plates. They had class — enough class not to ask how the meal was, but just to take it that you’d never eaten anything like it.

  Finally, with a great huff that puffed out his red cheeks, Sinclair said, “Tell me about your shoes.”

  He asked it so casually, so distantly, that for a moment I didn’t even notice the question. “What?”

  “Your shoes.”

  “Why do you want to know about them?”

  “They’re hardly your style, Matthew, and that interests me.”

  “Give me credit,” I snapped.

  He smiled, little neat teeth in a round mouth. “Come, now, Matthew, come. You know that I take an interest in these things. The instant I heard that Nair had been killed, I thought ‘trouble’. Then the ravens died, then the Stone was broken, and I thought ‘how tedious, someone is out to destroy the protectors of the city’; and it seemed, in light of all these facts, a sensible, yes indeed, a most sensible precaution to do a little research. Naturally I checked up on you. Who else, I thought, who else can really muster the kind of supernatural clout to do these things? Who else could have killed Nair? Who else might be mad enough to try it?”

  Our fingers tightened on the cutlery. “You know us better,” we snarled.

  “Yes, perhaps I do. Perhaps that was where the Aldermen made their mistake. I know about the Aldermen, Matthew. We have . . . mutual connections, in times of crisis. This is a time of crisis. But I’m sure you’ve noticed that. I know about the file in Nair’s desk. It says, ‘Swift has the shoes’. Now what exactly does this mean?”

  I looked down at my shoes, then back up at him. I said: “I thought it was nothing.”

  “Well, that’s what we thought about the graffiti, and now look where we are. Spectres in the streets. Let’s assume for a moment that nothing is something and feel proud of ourselves for a grasp of the quantum, shall we? Tell me about your shoes. They’re clearly not yours. While I would never judge your fashion sense . . .”

  I snorted.

  “. . . trendy red and black trainers several sizes too big for you are hardly what I would expect. Nair said, ‘Swift has the shoes’. Why would that interest him so much? Why would he make you the Midnight Mayor?”

  So, I told him.

  First Interlude: The Sorcerer’s Shoes

  In which the story of a pair of trainers is recounted over dinner.

  I said: “The shoes aren’t mine. They belong to a kid. His name is Mo. Actually, his name is Michael Patrick Hall, but you can’t be cool and be called Michael unless you’ve been to prison. So everyone calls him Mo. I’ve never met him. But that’s really the
point.”

  It happened without bothering to explain itself.

  I was in Hoxton, the street market. I can’t remember why. It can be hard, coming back. There are things, rituals, routines, that I had taken for granted. Not any more.

  Anyway. Hoxton. The word is “trendy”, but I don’t know if it can be rightly applied. It’s a mishmash. Great rows of terraced houses with new paint, next to boarded-up windows. Council estates rotting from the inside out, mould and crumbling dust dripping with water from broken pipes down the walls. New apartment blocks, all bright paint, fresh brick and steel; art galleries tucked in behind the local boozer, yoga centres nestling in between the old rip-off robbed-radio garages. Tandoori and chippy, Chinese takeaway and halal kebabs, kosher bakeries and low squatting greengrocers selling strange growths that might be vegetables. Clubs hidden away underground, the door just a door by day, a purple-lit cavern at night, guarded by big men in black. Social clubs where no one cares about the smoking laws, snooker tables underneath low neon lights; leisure centres, where every shoe squeaks on old varnished floors. Hoxton is a bit of everything, all at once, a low old grandpa squinting at the scuttling kids. There’s magic in Hoxton, if you know where to look for it; enough to start a fire, although you’ll never quite know what will catch.

  There was a chippy in the street market. I went there one night, for no good reason. Because we smelt vinegar on the air and cannot resist fish and chips. It was late, maybe elevenish, the shops shut up, the usual left-over debris of the market billowing in the street. Broken splattered fruits, empty cardboard boxes, torn-up plastic bags. The guy serving up the chips was called Kishan, an Indian name, though he was as white and freckled as dirty snow. He had dreadlocks and dyed black hair, and an earring that wasn’t just a piercing — it was a great round gaping hole, the size of a ten-pence piece, pushed out of his lobe by a plastic hoop. We were fascinated and appalled by it. I did my best not to stare.

  I had plaice and chips and sat at a table in the window. Everything about the place was plastic, and just two squeaks short of sterile.

  I had been there about half an hour when Kishan said, “Closing up, now.”

  I shrugged, and ate up faster.

  “Hey, mate, you getting back OK?” he asked.

  This is not something I usually get asked. Men don’t ask other men if they’re getting home OK, they just assume that beneath the frail, weak exterior lurks a muscle-building kung fu master fearless of ever being mugged. I said, “I’m fine, thanks.”

  He was uneasy, we realised. His eyes kept dancing from us to the window and back again. “Yeah,” he muttered. “Sure.”

  I followed his gaze out of the window, but saw nothing but the slow rumpling billow of the litter in the streets. We finished the last chips, wiped our hands on the edge of the greasy paper, stood up.

  “Hey, are you sure everything’s OK?” I asked.

  He looked at me sideways and said, “Yeah. Fine. Yeah. Just fine.”

  These things don’t take much translating.

  “Well, OK,” I said. “’Night.”

  And we walked out of the chippy.

  There’s a phrase — curiosity killed the cat.

  We are very curious. The world, this living world is so full of incident, strangeness, experience, event, happening so busy and so fast, that it’s a wonder you mortals don’t go mad. But you learn how to shut it out, to perceive only that which is relevant to you. You say things like — curiosity killed the cat. So very sensible. Such an unforgivable waste.

  We are curious and, like I said, I didn’t have much better to do.

  We walked about fifty yards, then looked back. The street was bare. I turned up the collar of my coat feeling for those little enchantments sewn into the lining. Then I walked back. There was a doorway between a chemist and a bakery where I snuggled myself out of the wind. Waiting is an innately boring process. In the old days, men who watched and waited would smoke a cigarette, for something to do. We’d read detective books, devoured the films. Philip Marlowe, loitering in some handy bookshop opposite the staked-out joint, would find a girl with blonde hair, and glasses that transformed her when they came off, and they’d drink bourbon and talk about nothing in particular and everything, without it needing to be said.

  That was there; this was Hoxton.

  When it started, it was a smell. We thought there was an open drain somewhere, the wind carrying the sharp stench of it. Not turn-your-stomach sewage; it was too precise a bite. It went in via the tear ducts, then wriggled down the nose, and by the time it had drifted into pockets in your lungs and writhed down your gullet there was little sense left for the stomach to be repulsed by.

  Then came the sound.

  It was like plasters being peeled off hairy skin, all crackles and splats and slow ripping of a thousand tiny needles. It was like thick oil being poured out of a can from a great height, a long way off. I saw the lights go out in the chippy on the other side of the street, the shutters go down. Kishan came outside, and there was dread in his eyes, looking down the street, straight over me like I wasn’t there, and now fear on his face, in every part of him. He had seen this before, I realised, smelt this before. In the chippy, he had been trying to warn me, get me away, and I hadn’t gone. Now he stood in the street, frozen with a familiar fear that was no less for being a regular occurrence. I followed his stare, and realised why.

  The thing was yellow-white, with a surface ooze of thick olive-brown that sloshed out from its surface skin and trickled slowly down it like water off a fountain. It had no recognisable shape, but crawled up from a drain in the middle of the street in great splats, from a warping bubble of a body which extended limbs like a jellyfish extends its tendrils. It was a squid out of water, liquid but not so: its surface gleamed with slime but its innards were a viscous mass that split and parted and re-formed as it rose up between the grates like it was made of hot rubber. It had no eyes, no ears, no organs at all that I could see, but moved like a great slobbering amoeba down the street, trailing oil and grease. A snail-squid-amoeba-rubber thing, crawling up from underneath our feet, squeezing up from the sewers. I could give it a name; a simple name for a simple thing. It was a saturate.

  Kishan stood in the street staring at it, jaw half-open, dribble pooling in one corner of his mouth. The thing was still gathering its dripping mass out of the drain thirty yards away. I walked briskly up to Kishan, poked him firmly in the shoulder and said, “Oi. You.”

  His head turned to look at me, his eyes stayed fixed. I poked him harder. “Oi. Sunshine.”

  His eyes flickered to me. “You,” we snapped. “Run.”

  His body was smarter than his brain.

  He ran.

  We looked back at the beige-white thing crawling up from the drains. A puddle of yellow oil was building around its base, trickling out across the tarmac to lubricate the mass of not-flesh that composed the creature’s not-body. I turned my fingers up towards the nearest lamp, snatched a bundle of pinkish light from it and cast it over the creature’s head. It didn’t care. Oblivious of me and my doings, it just kept dragging itself up. Now the size of a dog, now the size of a wolf, now the size of a tuna fish, now the size of a small car, the great mass of its dripping body rose from the drain, a pool of goo spreading around its spilling rolls of fat.

  By my stolen light, I could see its body in more detail. Beneath the oil that flowed out of its skin, things moved within it. Half an old yellow chip burst to the surface for a second and then sunk back down; a torn condom slid down its flesh and spilt into the expanding puddle of oil at its base; a lost, broken and gouged teaspoon surfaced briefly at the top of its spilt bubble-body, and then sank back down into the churning flesh. We drew more light from another streetlamp, dragging it down close, fascinated by this strange, inhuman stench-splat growing upon the street, the size of a small car, the size of a large car, the size of a small truck . . .

  Its flesh, if you could call it such, was held togethe
r by friction and hair. Not hair of its own, we realised, but human hair, webbed and matted and foul, spun over every part of it like a net, sometimes in thick dirty clusters, sometimes in sticky strands of every colour. It rose up in front of us, liquid fat flowing off and then rising from within, a constantly moving fountain of grease and oil; and now it was almost as wide as the street. And the smell! Its stink knocked us backwards, made our eyes water and our head spin. Now it was almost a storey high, a great wobbling blancmange, and the oil spilling off it had rolled almost as far as my feet, running down the gutters and then filling the centre of the street.

  I stared up at it, and it seemed to look back at us, a sort of head-bubble twisting at the summit of its rolling form. There was a good reason why the magicians of the city feared the saturate: the grease-monster, the oil-devil, the demon of fat poured down the drain, of tallow and cookery grime, of burnt-up crispy bits and congealed animal liquids poured down the plughole. It was disgusting, foul, vile, an abomination and, just perhaps, a bit beautiful. Life is magic, and this thing of fat and tallow was so clearly alive.

  Alive, and not a little angry.

  We laughed, not because there was anything funny, but to have seen this sight. Then we tossed the stolen neon back to its tubes, and retreated a few paces from the bubbling oil at our feet. I threw my satchel to one side and looked for the nearest likely weapons.

  And the saturate was shaking itself now, sending splatters of grease and dried fat onto the walls, pulling itself out of the drains with one last great shloooop and rolling forwards in its own liquid.

  I looked round at the window of the chippy, threw my arm and my will at it and shattered the glass with a thought. Reaching past, I found the warm, familiar hum of gas in the mains: heat and fire to burn the fat. I dragged at it, pulling faster than I had planned, sucking out the smell and rippling it upon the air until the street was a mirage of twisted neon and competing stenches. Adrenalin kept us moving, backing away from the advancing tide of yellow-brown oil dribbling over the pavement and the tower of fat rippling in its wake.