by Kate Griffin
Oda whispered, “Obscene. Damnation. Obscene.”
We replied, “Beautiful. Just beautiful.”
She stared at us in horror. “How can you pretend to be human, and not be afraid?”
“It is beautiful,” we replied. “You’ve just got to look at it right. Of all the things, the frightening and inexplicable things, the terrifying and the chaotic and the uncontrolled, you just had to pick on magic to fear and hate, in that order and in equal measure.”
“Don’t think you know me, sorcerer.”
“Is there anything more to know?”
That seemed to silence her. We were almost surprised, and felt again a thing, strange and hollow, that might have been sadness. The beat of Kemsley’s blood, pushing and falling against the protruding pipe of his veins, was slowing. There was no point pretending it was our imagination; that just made it worse. No point asking the driver to go faster. If Einstein couldn’t work out how the Black Cab moved, we certainly couldn’t; and besides, back-seat drivers just made the fare steeper when the cab stopped.
One problem at a time.
“Oda,” I said carefully, “when we get to where we’re going, we’ll have to pay a fare. It’ll be . . . more than money. It may be . . . almost anything. Don’t argue. Don’t shout, don’t haggle. And, for the sake of all that’s merciful, don’t try and shoot anything.”
“Why more than money?”
“The Black Cab can go anywhere. I mean . . . anywhere. Get your mind outside the boring three-dimensional trivialities of geography and you still haven’t come to terms with it. We’re not going there. Humans can’t abide ‘anywhere’; they . . . we are built for very specific environments. It is only natural that the fares are steep.”
“Sorcerer?”
I sighed. “Yes?”
“The man in the suit. He’s not human.”
“No.”
“He bleeds paper.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. There are constructs that can bleed things other than blood, but I’ve never seen one looking so ordinary as him. And he’s clearly not ordinary. Not human, not ordinary, mortal. His suit was part of his flesh; he bleeds receipts, old bits of newspaper. A summoning of some sort? But then he shows so much independence: he speaks, he enquires, he demonstrates amusement. Most things summoned from the nether reaches are incapable of much more than slobber and slash.”
“You don’t know how to kill it?”
“No.”
“That seems like quite a major problem.”
“Yes.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“What?”
She tilted her chin up to my face. I felt under my eye, found a tiny, almost imperceptible brownish stain of blood running down from my eyelid, where a paper cut no longer than a child’s toenail had been drawn across my skin. “We be blue-blood burning,” we sighed, wiping it away.
“What does that mean?”
“Mean? It is what we are.” I glanced out of the window, saw the distant windows of a lit-up Underground train fading into the night, the flicker of a traffic light going red, amber, green, green, amber, red, too fast and rhythmic to be real. “He didn’t seem to realise that I’m . . .” I rubbed my right hand. “He doesn’t seem to know I’m the Midnight . . .”
“Didn’t do you much good, did it?”
“Kemsley” — drooping flesh with a pair of shaven lips sitting opposite us, couldn’t look — “said something about inauguration. Ghosts and streets and midnight mystic doings.”
“Didn’t do Nair much good, did it?”
“No.” We were silent a while. A thought was pushing at the edge of speech, trying to get out. It was strong, angry, with claws for fingers. We let it out. “But that may have been the reason Nair made us Midnight Mayor.” Oda raised an eyebrow, a perfect half-moon. “The Midnight Mayor is just a human with complications. And we . . .”
“Aren’t,” she concluded. I said nothing. Thinking too much was always trouble. “What happens now?”
“There was a CCTV camera. In the hallway below, a CCTV camera, and only one really viable way out. CCTV everywhere.”
“So?”
“So even if Mr Pinner — the man in the suit, the death of . . . even if whatever he is destroys the camera, there’ll be an archive somewhere, records. Better than sharing the memories of pigeons, they couldn’t muster more than a day of recollections. There’ll be something, somewhere. The Aldermen can trace it, they have . . . they take their work very seriously. We can still find the boy.”
“You think it’s that important?”
“I think that if Kemsley dies, then it’s because Mr Pinner thinks it’s that important. I think that Mr Pinner had Boom Boom abduct the boy from his club; I think that’s interesting. Why keep him alive? He said alive. So yes. Find the boy, find some answers. ‘Give me back my hat’. He might know . . . he has to know something.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
“Well, I would hope that if I get flayed alive and the city burns, you’ll have the good manners to die an excruciating death with the rest of us.”
“Sorcerer, have you ever wondered why you have never been appointed to a managerial position before?”
“My honest honest face?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.” She paused, sharp eyes fixed steadily on Kemsley. “You really think finding the boy will make this better? Stop what happened to Nair happening to you?”
“Yes.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not.”
“Why?”
“I think you’re doing it for this woman — Loren. I don’t think there’s enough proof for any of it. Mo, Mr Pinner, the club, the shoes, the ravens, the Mayor. A lot of circumstance, but nothing else. I think you want the boy to be involved. Then you can help her while helping yourself.”
I thought about this a while.
Lights turned and drifted outside, a thousand miles away, as tall as a skyscraper pressed up to the eye of the window.
“OK,” I said. “All right. Yes. She’s lonely. She’s scared. And we are . . . we have never had a friend. Just strangers out to get something done. Acquaintances with an agenda. Never this thing, ‘friend’. I want something ordinary. It was nice. It was unremarkable. Just a friend. That’s what they say, isn’t it? We’re ‘just’ friends.”
“Matthew?”
“Yes?”
Silence. Just the rumbling of the taxi’s engine.
A moment that might have been something different.
“We’re slowing down.”
Just a moment.
I looked out of the window. I could see the reflective black slab of Euston station, the slow flickering lights of Euston Road, crawling into existence in the darkness. “Yeah,” I said. “We are.”
My satchel was on the floor. I picked it up, rummaged through for my wallet. I had £40 left. It wouldn’t be enough, but it’d be a start.
The streets were becoming more solid, pavements growing out of the gloom, shopfronts edging closer and closer towards us, growing bricks and settling their way into solid reality. The driver’s voice came in over the intercom.
“Anywhere round here in particular?”
“If you could just drop us off outside the main entrance . . .”
“No problem.”
We turned, actually turned, something I couldn’t remember the cab doing in our whole journey, down a side street off from Euston, round the back of a grey office block and a Gothic fire station, towards a red, turreted building with broken windows and bright blue hoarding all around its walls, stuck with signs saying, “DANGER KEEP OUT” and posters for dubious gigs and, of course, scrawled in white paint over the blue hoarding by the door:
GIVE ME BACK MY HAT
The Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital for Women. Abandoned by almost everyone and left to rot. Almost being the important part.
The taxi sl
id to a stop outside the padlocked dark entrance, covered over with plywood. There wasn’t any traffic on the street, not at this hour, not even night buses turning onto Euston Road towards King’s Cross. Even the lights in the hotels ahead were out, even the receptions just distant dim puddles. I had to remember to breathe, watching the dark shadow of the driver’s hands reach up to check the tariff, to stop the clock, watching a hand push back the plexiglas between him and us, waiting for the damage.
“It’s thirty quid,” he said, just a voice drifting in from the driver’s compartment.
“What?”
“Thirty quid,” he repeated.
“OK. Great. Thanks.”
I fumbled in my wallet for the money.
“And her gun.”
I glanced at Oda, whose lips pursed. I mouthed, please, and she reluctantly pulled a gun from a pocket, all black metal and power, and pushed it through the gap between passenger and driver compartments. As her fingers slid in, a hand moved in the front, locked down on her wrist and dragged her forward so sharp and hard I heard the seat belt lock around her chest and saw her face wrinkle in pain.
“Her hand,” said the driver. “You seen her hand?”
I realised he was talking to me. “Um . . . yes?” I hazarded.
“You seen the blood?”
I glanced instinctively at her fingers, grasped in his, stretched across the panel separating front from back. I couldn’t see any blood, not a shimmer of darkness on that deep chocolate skin, dry and thick.
“No?” I mumbled.
“Hey, now, I just drive cabs you know, but I gotta tell you, I’ve noticed, and it wasn’t like that a few years ago. Fucking government!”
“Um . . .”
“Immigrants! I mean, I’m no racist, some of my best friends are foreign, but no one can deny it’s a problem and now look at this.” He dragged her hand forward and Oda cried out as her chest strained against the seat belt, which seemed to refuse to budge. “Look at this! A disgrace!”
I couldn’t see his face, couldn’t see if he was smiling, joking. There was just a dark oval where features should have been. “Here’s your thirty quid,” I mumbled, leaning forwards against the line of my seat belt, forty pounds in hand. “Keep the change.”
“£30, her gun, her hands.”
“What?”
“What?!” Oda didn’t do shrill, but she was close.
“You see the blood?” asked the driver. “Look at it! Dead wizards, dead magicians, dead witches, dead warlocks, dead, dead, dead — and you know, none of my business, but the smell! It’s just been rotting down under the skin for like, you know, like years. Little brother and little sister and little sister and all dead and rotting and you know, sure, you know she buried them back home but they’re still rotting, can’t stop the air, you know? It’s like the fucking taxman, gets everywhere and you’d be surprised how long it takes the eyes to decay until they’re no longer staring, it’s the casing, you see, once the outer muscle’s gone then the jelly just sorta evaporates. Nah, trust me. Better this way.”
He pulled at her hand, so hard that Oda now cried out, face bunching in pain, dragging her forward against the tightness of her belt. “Wait!”
He meant it, he actually meant it, the silhouetted black oval shape of the driver: he was going to pull the hand from her arm, pop it out of the bones and just pull until the muscle tore and it was snapped away from her flesh, just like that.
“Wait!”
I tried to lean forward, but the belt held me back. I fumbled at the catch, but it wouldn’t open, wouldn’t unlock. I tried to duck my head beneath the diagonal strap, and it just tightened, so sudden and so hard I was pressed back against the seat barely able to breathe, choking and wheezing. Oda wasn’t a screamer, wasn’t a moaner, but every part of her shook with pain; I could see the skin around her wrist turning strange beige-white, hear every terrified breath.
“Wait!” I shouted. “For God’s sake, wait! Look at my hand before you take hers!”
The dragging stopped. The pressure on Oda’s arm seemed to relax for a second. The strain of the seat belt against my chest relaxed a little; in the tiny extra space it allowed, I gasped for breath.
“Let’s take a gander,” said the driver.
The belt let me lean forward just far enough. I got the glove off my right hand, slipped it through the narrow gap in the dividing glass, unfolded my fingers. The twin red crosses were still burnt on my skin, glaring in the gloom. I felt a pair of hands, metal-cold, steel-hard, take my palm and turn it this way and that, dragging me further towards the driver’s compartment. The belt was cutting into my throat, a dull knife against my windpipe.
This close, I could see more of the driver’s face.
Nothing to see.
The black, face-shaped, featureless thing that I had glimpsed from the back of the cab was, close to, the same. Empty, a pair of carved eyes around a carved nose and a pair of carved, slightly parted lips, drawn out of ebony darkness. Taxi drivers are among that great mass of people in the city who you go out of your way not to notice — just extensions of the machine. This one had taken it literally. His back melted into the chair he sat in, his feet were the pedals. His fingers clackered like the click on the fare indicator when he moved them over the palm of my hand, tracing with one metal fingertip the twin crosses.
“So,” he said finally, “you’re like, you know, Midnight Mayor, yeah?”
“I guess so.”
“What happened to the last guy?”
“Killed.”
“Shit. See? Didn’t I tell you? I mean the radio talks about it plenty but no one listens — times are getting hard. Fucking politicians. Corrupt, the whole lot. Need a clean sweep, if you ask me.”
The pressure around my hand released. I drew it back, rubbing at the fingermarks in my skin. Then Oda’s hand was released as well, and her gun handed back.
“Keep the thirty quid.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Midnight Mayor’s got an account. Direct debit. I’ll send the bill to the Aldermen. Receipt?”
“The Midnight Mayor has an account?”
“Yeah. Jeez, didn’t they fucking tell you?”
“I’m new.”
“You should get your act sorted, I mean, seriously! The perks, man, the perks of a cushy job like that — if I had the damn perks you think I’d ever walk anywhere? Hell no. Bureaucrat fat cats — hey, but all respect, like.”
Oda had undone her seat belt, so I undid mine. It snapped free in a perfectly ordinary, respectable way. A piece of paper was handed back to me. I took it carefully. It was a receipt. It said:
Thank you for using Black Cab Ltd. Your account will be billed at a later date. Have a pleasant onward journey.
And a serial number.
One problem at a time.
Keep moving. Don’t stop to think. Thinking only led to trouble. Keep moving. Your body is smarter than your mind. It gets hurt easier.
Oda and I unloaded Kemsley from the cab. There was no gentleness in what we did; there didn’t seem any point. Nothing we could do could possibly make it worse than it was. The taxi rumbled away behind us; Oda dragged Kemsley by the armpit. I hammered on the plywood door of the hospital, slashed at the padlock, which was smart enough to know when not to argue, unlocked the door, barrelled Oda and Kemsley inside.
“Hello?! We need help!”
Dead, dark corridors. Buddleia was growing out of the walls, water dripping down into stagnant, green-drifting pools, walls of faded drained colour, floors of broken forgotten trolleys and shattered old glass. I dragged neon out of my skin, tired, we were so tired now, wanted to sleep, hadn’t slept for too long; too many days, too many nights, it seemed longer than it was, too long; by the pinkish glow I managed to drag into my hands I spread light across the corridor, called out again, my voice inhumanly loud, “Help! We need help!”
A voice from the darkness said, “Well, don’t stand there fussing, come on!”
<
br /> I dragged the light across the shadows cast from the shattered, badly boarded-up windows, to where a nurse stood, wearing an old-fashioned blue and white uniform, complete with peaked hat, hands folded neatly in front of her apron, watch hanging off its silver chain by her breast, a pair of sensible shoes turned slightly outwards, toes towards the distant walls. Her steel-grey eyes fell on Kemsley. She tutted. “Well,” she said, “hardly nothing, is it?”
Oda looked at me in surprise and unspoken question. We didn’t answer, but helped her drag Kemsley down the rotting hall, following the nurse to where a chipboard blue door had been pushed back into a room full of yellow foam. It had been dribbled along the cracks of the walls and floor, along even the ceiling, in an attempt to stop the cracks spreading, and keep out the wind; but it had expanded too much, and now the room looked like a great yellow fungus had come up from the bowels of the earth to colonise with sticky alien threads this friendly, dripping, rotting warm planet for itself.
There was a trolley in the middle of the room, all metal slat and thin white covering, and a single lamp. The lamp wasn’t connected to any power source, but hummed and glowed with white electricity despite itself. The nurse clapped importantly, and we lowered Kemsley onto the trolley. She waved us back, barking, “Are you friends or family?”
“Neither.”
“Then you cannot remain for the procedure!”
“But we . . .”
“How was this done?” she asked, examining the shattered skin.
“By a creature who bleeds paper and calls himself the death of cities,” I replied with a sigh.
“Have you given him anything?”
“No.”
“Not for the pain?”
“We didn’t have anything.”
“Does he have any allergies?”
“I don’t know.”
“Disabilities, is he diabetic, asthmatic, cursed, bane-spawn, epileptic, any long-term medical conditions?”
