The Midnight Mayor ms-2

by Kate Griffin

  The burning blue fires went out.

  The great angel wings, blue electric angel wings that had carried us from the end of the line to here, spat and fizzed, began to melt and dissolve into a thousand wriggling blue sparks, that flashed and popped like exploding blue maggots on the line for a moment behind us, before dissolving into nothing. I twisted in the air as the last furious blast of electricity faded from across our skin, pulling Oda tighter into me and turning my body towards the platform as with a sad snap of electricity the lightning on the live rail went out and we tumbled, hissing and smoking with speed and fire, onto the platform of Balham station.

  Oda came free from my arms as we fell, sliding across the concrete and tiles, people scattering to get out of our way. I felt dull pain, followed by the hot burning of blood starting to seep through my skin, almost a friend now, an agony I knew how to deal with; and I rolled across the platform, didn’t try to fight it, just rolled until I bumped up against a wall covered in posters and bits of old chewing gum, and stopped.

  Above me, an Indian-looking man pulling a heroic face so manly it was surprising his jaw didn’t pop straight from his skull, stared sombrely down at me from beneath a sign proclaiming “THE MIGHTY ALI SINGS BOLLYWOOD’S GREATEST HITS”. I looked to my left. A collection of B- and C-list celebrities stared back at me in various character-filled poses, from a poster declaring, “NOW IS THE AGE OF HEROES!!!” I groaned and rolled onto my side. I could feel blood running down from my left shoulder, blood pooling in the palm of my right hand. Our eyes drifted past the platform edge, fell on the live rail. We whimpered, tried to crawl towards it, digging our fingers into the dull, dry tiles. I tried to get up, we staggered and fell back down, still moving towards the rail. I tried to turn my head away, but we couldn’t, could still taste the electricity on our tongue, beautiful burning brightness.

  “Please,” we whimpered, “please please please.”

  I closed our eyes.

  “Please, please, please,” we whimpered.

  I hid my head in my hands, brought my knees up to my chest, felt the blood seeping through the twin crosses carved in my skin, staining my hair where my fingers had curled around my skull.

  “So beautiful,” we whispered.

  So beautiful.

  This is why sorcerers go mad.

  I crawled onto my hands and knees, head turned away from the live rail. We wanted to look please one last look one last breath one last

  I dragged myself up onto my feet, turned away, leant against the nearest wall, gasping for breath, dirty, wonderful, spit-staining tunnel air. We were going to scream, just like a child, like an injured animal with no words to express the idea that it was going to die, we were going to scream.

  Then someone said, “Uh . . . mate?”

  I opened my eyes, stared into a stranger’s face. He was wearing the slightly undignified bright blue and white uniform of an Underground worker, holding a radio in one hand, a white signal paddle in another. He was about twenty years old. He looked terrified: his hands shook, his voice stumbled over the simplest sounds.

  “Uh . . .” he began.

  I started walking, pushed past him, keeping our eyes turned firmly away from the rails. Oda had fallen some few yards behind me, and was struggling to pick herself up. We helped her, dragging her up by an arm; she looked at us and said not a word, but turned and started to stagger towards the escalator up from the platform, and I followed.

  “Hey, mate?” The platform manager’s voice again, weak and uncertain.

  I didn’t look back, couldn’t look back. We stumbled to the bottom of the escalator and started climbing it, leaning on the black rubber handrail that dragged a little faster than the stairs could rise.

  At the top of the stairs stood the station manager, flanked by one of his assistants, radio in hand. He raised his hand as we approached, and said, “May I have a word?”

  Oda waved her ticket at him. I waved mine.

  We pushed past, tapped out through the barrier, and walked away before he could recover from his surprise.

  A witty man once announced in that very special 1950s English accent

  that today can only be used in parody:

  ‘Balham: Gateway to the South!’

  Balham — last chance to turn back, last chance to escape and get back into the city. Last place where the Underground meets the overland, last chance at least to pretend you live in the centre of town.

  Balham. A place where all good Woolworths go to die; suburbia that just wishes it was something more.

  I was bleeding.

  As we staggered out of Balham station I turned to Oda and said, “My stitches have torn.”

  She looked at me, and for a moment, I was scared again. Then she took me firmly by the wrist and dragged me like a child across the street to the nearest chemist. She bought a thick pile of bandaging and a first-aid kit, and hurried me into the nearest passport photo booth.

  It wasn’t a unit designed for two, but I wasn’t about to complain. She said, “Coat!”

  I pulled off my coat.

  “T-shirt!”

  I pulled off my shirt. “What a mess,” she tutted, and started mopping. After a few minutes, a security guard pulled back the curtain to enquire what we were doing. Oda told him to call the police, or an ambulance, or both, and to get stuffed. Paralysed by the wide range of choices available, he just hovered, and when the bandages had been applied and my Jesus T-shirt pulled back on, he hustled us out as quickly as possible and snuck away to call the police.

  Oda propped me against the glass window of a supermarket and ran across the road to a charity shop. A minute later she came back with a black T-shirt in a paper bag. It said, “GARAMOND IS THE WORLD’S GREATEST FONT”.

  I said, “Please. No.”

  She said, “Shut up and put it on.”

  This time we used a coffee shop. She bought two strong coffees that turned out to be brown hot water in a cardboard cup; but I appreciated the gesture. It was something to wash the painkillers down. I changed in the toilets. By the time we emerged, cups in hand, the sirens were starting nearby. She said: “Can he follow us?”

  “Who?”

  “Mr Pinner.”

  “I don’t know. Let’s keep moving.”

  We took a mainline train to Clapham Junction, sitting in silence by the window. I couldn’t face the Tube; just couldn’t face it.

  From Clapham, we took the mainline train to Waterloo.

  She didn’t look me in the eye, just stared out of the window in silence and dug at the dirt under her nails. It was black and red from dry blood. She still didn’t look at me.

  At Waterloo she said, “Do we need to find you a doctor?”

  “Eventually,” I said. “I want to see the river.”

  Down into the subways that ran beneath the roundabout before Waterloo Bridge; a loop past the Imax and then north. I could smell the river, taste its old magics on the air, they cooled down the burning in my skin, eased some of the weight from my legs. The rain had stopped, the pavement gleaming with clean washed darkness, the tide low, with soft, perfectly smooth sand peeping out from beneath the high walls of the embankment. I slid gratefully down on a bench in front of the National Theatre, beneath the leafless branches of the fairy-light-hung trees. The wooden bench was still damp from the rain, the city a faded grey behind a monotone haze. It was quiet and beautiful. Somewhere behind all the walls a million people were doing whatever it was people did after their lunch break in offices like these. And I didn’t need to know about a single one of them, but could sit at the centre of the universe and listen to the river, flowing just for me, just mine.

  Oda stood behind me.

  Bang, I thought.

  Bang, three to the chest, two to the head.

  Bang; bang bang.

  Public place — cameras, CCTV, always CCTV, eyes in the windows of the cafés of the theatre, buying tickets, reading books, walking by the river, tourists with little kiddies hol
ding balloons.

  I slipped my fingers beneath my “GARAMOND IS THE WORLD’S GREATEST FONT” T-shirt and felt the sticky seeping of blood through the bandage Oda had wrapped round my shoulder. The blood that came away on my fingertips was thin and red. I wiped it unconsciously on my trousers and breathed a little deeper the smell of the river.

  Then, because Oda didn’t seem to want to talk to me, I stood up, walked to the edge of the embankment and climbed over the railing. A stair, practically frictionless with thin green slime clinging to it, led down to the soft almost-entirely-sand of the river’s edge. I climbed down, walked to where the Thames water slid over the bank, washed my hands in it, then walked back to the sand. Oda had come to the top of the stair. She looked . . . nothing. Folded arms and nothing in her face. Not speaking, not doing, just watching.

  I prodded the sand with my toe, saw thin clear water ooze out from the surface, and very carefully with the end of my shoe wrote,

  GIVE ME BACK MY HAT

  “Is that smart?” asked Oda from the top of the stairs.

  I looked up at her. “Oda?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think I know what’s going on.”

  “Do you.” Not a question, not wanting an answer. But I had one to give, and the novelty kept me talking.

  “Oda?”

  “Yes?”

  “I think I know how to kill Mr Pinner.”

  Now, and for the first time, Oda started to look interested.

  Legwork.

  I loathe the Aldermen, but it is nice having someone else’s legs to do the working.

  We went to Aldermanbury Square.

  Earle said, “You’re still . . .!”

  “Not dead, no. I noticed.”

  Still behind that desk. Still in an immaculate suit, still unfluffed, still not rattled. Still drinking coffee. No wonder the man never seemed to sleep.

  “Forgive me, I did not mean to sound so . . .”

  “The good thing about my party trick, is that it is always surprising,” I replied, slumping down into the chair in front of his big desk. “Your ‘back-up’ is dead.”

  His face darkened. “You found . . .”

  “Dead. They’re dead. And the kid . . . and Mo . . . dead.”

  Loren.

  I hadn’t thought but

  what would we say?

  “But you appear to be . . .”

  “Still not dead, yes, I know. Funny, isn’t it? I have a theory, Mr Earle. Actually, I have a whole fat bundle of plausible hypotheses which, taken together, may make one great whompha of a theory. Wanna hear it?”

  He shrugged. “If it’s relevant to our current dilemma.”

  “Mr Earle, does it worry you that, if I am the irreparable prat you seem to think I am, I’m still alive?”

  “It is conceivable that you are a villain rather than a prat, Mr Swift.”

  “You want to hear this theory or not?”

  “Will it offer possible solutions to the deaths that seem to be occurring in ever-increasing quantity?”

  “Quite possibly. And I’m just half an hour of medical attention away from divulging it.”

  They had a small medical room in the offices of Harlun and Phelps.

  Of course they did.

  They also had a gym, two canteens, an ATM and a psychotherapist. Everything to make the running of orderly business more orderly.

  They gave us painkillers.

  We were beginning to understand why, in pre-anaesthetic days, the Bible had stipulated that suicide was a sin. Anything other than the prospect of eternal damnation, and the human race would probably have done away with itself at the first sign of the dentist.

  Oda stood by the door, arms folded, eyebrows low over her brown eyes. Earle sat with his legs folded on the small chair of the medical room, looking displeased to be holding a meeting in a place without a PowerPoint projector. I sat on the paper-covered bed and ate. We hadn’t realised how hungry we were, until someone had offered us food. Now we scraped gravy off the plate with our fingers, and licked our fingertips, and wished I was not too inhibited to just run our tongue round the edge of the dish.

  I said, “‘Give me back my hat’.”

  Earle said, “This had better be good, Swift.”

  “Didn’t it strike you that it was a strange thing to appear with the arrival of the death of cities? The ravens are killed and there it is; the Wall is defaced and the writing says ‘give me back my hat’. The London Stone is smashed and there it is, always, ‘give me back my hat’. I mean, I know that mystics tend to be obscure; it’s the only way they can stay in business in this litigious age. But surely this phrase, occurring endlessly across the city streets, is about as unlikely a harbinger of the end as Abba at Armageddon? It has to have a meaning, it has to have . . . something more than just random words to it, otherwise why would it appear? That’s the first thing.

  “Second! The death of cities. Why is he in London, here, now? Look at the patterns of his appearances . . . Hiroshima when the bomb fell, Rome when the Vandals came, Babylon when the walls fell, London when the fire burnt, Pompeii when the volcano blew, New Orleans when the levees broke. Are we to assume that he created all these events? If so, then why hasn’t he just obliterated London already? The death of cities is not the creator of these disasters — he’s summoned by them. Sure, his presence might exacerbate them, might make them worse; he might fan the flames or shine a light in the dark to guide the bombers to their targets. But always he’s there because something is going to happen. He’s feeding off the death of cities, he is not the cause.

  “So what has brought him to London? Why now? What could be so catastrophic that he has come to our city and interests himself in the activities of a kid who likes to hang around in Willesden, and goes out of his way to kill the Midnight Mayor, to poison the ravens in the Tower? What summons him to our city, when there is no war and the Thames Barrier still rises and falls? I think we can safely assume that his presence bodes a disaster of a mystical nature — if we’re talking a bomb in Westminster then I suspect Mr Pinner would be far too busy killing MI5 officers to bother with us. This is about magic, straight and thorough.

  “In other words: something magical has summoned him to London.

  “Are we happy with this so far?”

  I looked at the faces in the room.

  They looked unhappy, but no one wanted to say anything, so I ploughed right on.

  “Mo said before he died, before Mr Pinner went out of his way to make sure that Mo died, having hurt him, punished him, inflicted on him . . . terrible things . . . Mo said, ‘the traffic warden’s hat’. He took a traffic warden’s hat, and for this he has been punished. The death of cities — and I think we can be fairly sure that’s what he is — doesn’t bother with individuals. He’s about bricks and stones and streets, about ideas bigger than you or me. So why bother with Mo? He was punishing him, very deliberately, very cruelly. He got Boom Boom to lift him, and him alone from the club floor, specified the kid must be alive. Alive, in order to hurt him, throw him out with the garbage, turn his blood to ink. Mo took a hat, a traffic warden’s hat, and on the walls the writing now says, ‘give me back my hat’.

  “And Mr Pinner said — I made his life easier. By destroying Bakker. That . . . that by bringing Bakker down, I gave him a way into the city. Now, the Tower was powerful, but I don’t think even Mr Bakker was up to keeping out Mr Pinner if he wanted to come. But what Mr Bakker did do, did so brilliantly and without even a thought that he was doing it, was kill sorcerers.

  “When Nair died, you assumed I killed him, because I am the last trained sorcerer left in the city. You dislike sorcerers, Mr Earle. You regard us as dangerous, unstable, running the constant risk of madness. You think that most of all about us. You are wrong; but just this once, that’s not the question. When I killed Mr Bakker, I stopped the systematic murdering of sorcerers, but not before we had nearly all been wiped out. There is no one left to train new apprentices.
And if anyone would go mad, an untrained sorcerer is a loony job waiting to happen.

  “So here’s how I think it goes.

  “I think that ‘give me back my hat’ is a warning. Not from Mr Pinner, but from the city. The London Stone, the Midnight Mayor, the ravens; these are all part of the city’s defences, and while even one of them is alive, the magical defences still stand. I think it’s a warning, trying to tell us what’s happened.

  “I think when Mo stole the traffic warden’s hat, he stole something from someone who has enough anger, enough vengeance, enough fury and enough power in them to summon the death of cities. Mr Pinner was summoned here by the traffic warden. I stole her hat, Mo said. That’s why Mo was left to die in the scrapyard; it was a punishment, vengeance on a kid who was scornful and contemptful enough of strangers to steal from them, just for a laugh. So, for revenge, a stranger poisoned him and left him to die as agonising a death as they could manage. ‘Give me back my hat’; that’s what it says on the walls. Think about the geography — Mo hangs around in Willesden, Mo is kept in Kilburn, Nair dies in Kilburn, the hat is stolen in Dollis Hill, in all these places just a few miles apart. Think about the writing on the wall, think about the timing of when Mr Pinner came, about what happened to the kid, about why Nair died, about the nature of all that has happened so far. There is no profession in the city more hated than traffic warden — not even the police get as much abuse or assault or common cruelty. Think about what that would do to an untrained sorcerer, who knows that the city is screaming to them, who can taste the life and the magic on the air, and finds in it nothing but hostility. Think about why you suspected me. A sorcerer could do it, a sorcerer is perhaps the only person in the city who could do it, who could summon something as powerful and vengeful as the death of cities. The traffic warden is the mystical disaster that is going to happen. She is going to destroy us, the death of cities is her vengeance on the contempt of a stranger.

  “Of course, all of this is 99 per cent hypothesis.

  “But unless you’ve got anything better to go on, I think we should find this traffic warden whose hat was stolen.