by Kate Griffin
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.
