The Midnight Mayor ms-2

by Kate Griffin

  “I can see them coming!” hissed Oda, scrambling back from the doorway at a sight on the stairs. “They’re nearly here!”

  “How many bottles do we have?”

  “Maybe six? Can they hold more than one spectre?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m thinking that life was not made to be easily lived.”

  “I was thinking something ruder than that, but yeah, you’ve got the basic gist.”

  I could see shadows moving behind the door; taste them. And something else, something that made the fingers of our right hand curl in disgust and fear. “Back into the office,” I hissed. “There.”

  Oda obeyed, kicking back a plywood door to reveal an office garnished on a theme of golf: clubs, pictures, trophies and all. The far wall was nothing but glass, slightly curved outwards, looking down on the dark/red soak of the city. I ran my hands over the window, felt the cold glass, pressed my nose up against it, ran my tongue over it, tasted the dull dirt. “This’ll do,” I muttered.

  “For what?” she hissed.

  “You still got your penknife?”

  She handed it over; I wrenched through the blades until I found the pointed end of a four-head screwdriver. Turned the point towards the glass.

  And a voice from the door said, and there was no hiding the anger, “Give me back my hat, sorcerer!”

  I glanced over my shoulder, and there he was, Mr Pinner, and he wasn’t smiling, not now. His jacket billowed, his hair stood on end, his face was cold and pale, and behind him the office trembled. The furniture bounced gently on the floor like flowers in a breeze, the computer screens cracked, the chairs spun giddy on their axis, the files on the shelves split open, the paper started to tumble out, a few sheets at first, then more, dozens, hundreds, endless walls of paper spilling out into the room, caught in a whirlwind, blasting and screaming in the air behind him, filling the doorway with nothing but an A4 snowstorm.

  “Give me back my . . .” he began, and I drove the end of the screwdriver as hard as I could into the glass.

  It went thunk. I drew it back slowly. A tiny white scar, no bigger than the end of a child’s finger, appeared on the glass. Then a little fault line shimmered out from the edge, divided, spread a bit further, split, divided again, moved again, split, divided, spread. It took no more than a few seconds, but watching each spreading fibre through the glass was like waiting for a glacier to move down a mountain.

  Behind me, Mr Pinner shrieked his fury and rage, raised his hands and seemed to throw his whole weight towards us. The paper whirlwind burst around him, shrouded him in a second, filled the room with a thousand screaming edges of white, razored sheets that cut and tore and slashed. I pressed my palm against the scar in the glass and pushed, throwing the weight of my arm, my shoulder, everything, jumping, lifting my feet off the floor to push against the glass and it shattered with a roar, splintered into a thousand thousand shards that burst outwards around me.

  And that was nothing. Nothing; in the offices above, below, on either side, everywhere, the little cracks had spread to run their course. The glass burst and shattered, spilling out into the crimson night, and from every office tumbled a whirlwind of paper, spiralling and floating out on the cold air. I grabbed Oda as the glass began to fall, pulling her down until we were both crouching almost to the floor and, kicking aside the last clinging remnants of glass still hanging off the blasted steel frame of the office, I pulled her over the edge, into the night.

  Not far, as luck and sensible precaution would have it. As we fell, we twisted, turned; I grabbed at the frame and swung with my legs, and she, clever, strong Oda who was so very good at killing things that should have killed her, swung as well, pulling me as much as I pushed her through the shallow fall from our broken office window down and through the shattered window of the office below. Outside, the glass and paper fell like hail and snow in a gale, splattering and spilling down to the street below. We landed on a floor covered in twisted files and warped plastic, Oda pulling my head down as the computer on the desk above us popped and flared in angry, futile explosion at the indignity of its circumstances. And then she was dragging me to the window again and already halfway out, lowering herself down over the shattered steel edge where carpet met open air, and swinging her legs down to the floor below. I looked down; it was much easier to do now there wasn’t a window to stop me craning my head. It was a long way. I wheezed, “Oda, I can’t . . .”

  “Ngwenya dead with a bullet in her brain!” she snarled back, already in the darkened office below. “I swear to God, Swift, I swear by all that is sacred, by all that is holy, I shall put a bullet in her brain and it will be your fault, the sin on your head, burn in hell, Matthew Swift! Now come on!”

  I looked up and there was Mr Pinner, standing on the edge of the office above, looking straight down at me, like Harlun and Phelps was nothing more than an open dolls’ house, and we no more than its occupants. We snarled, stretched our fingers to the air, felt for a fistful of glass spinning by and hurled it furiously back at him. He ducked away, but a fat spinning shard of glass tore his cheek, right across his eye, and from the whitened centre I saw slide another sliver of paper, which he pulled carelessly from his skin and threw away.

  We scrambled down, flopping like a dying fish from one window to the other, Oda catching us at the bottom of each drop and throwing us, speed more than strength her advantage, into the room below before we had a chance to fall.

  We went down three floors in this clumsy way, before enough glass remained on the floor below to make the jump impossible, and I crawled onto my knees and gasped, “Just a moment, please, just a . . .”

  “No time!”

  Oda grabbed me by the arm, dragged us through the office floor to the nearest stairwell, and there it was still playing, duh-duh . . . de-dum! Duh-duh . . . de-dum!

  Tenth floor, ninth, it was getting louder, getting nearer, and above me I could hear doors being blasted back, the roar of paper, smell paper as it started to fill the stairwell, spinning up and down like a tornado in the middle of the stairwell to tear and batter at us. Eighth, seventh; Oda kicked the door back and there it was, just waiting on the other side. The spectre raised its knife and I wasn’t close enough, I was still in the stairwell. She’d led the way and it was there, going to tear her apart. Instinctively she raised her hands and in one of them was a bottle that had once held beer. She plunged it deep into the spectre’s hood, not thinking, too fast to breathe; and all at once the spectre started to crumple, sucked into the hot smoking interior of the bottle. I caught her arm as her fingers began to let go, held the bottle in place, kept pushing it into the hood until the creature’s clothes were nothing but a pile on the floor; then stuck my thumb over the lip, slipped Sellotape over the hole. Oda was just standing, staring, not moving, mouth hanging open. I grabbed her by the shoulder, dragged her into the office; we hurt, every part hurt; pulled her past the desks and the computers and the water coolers and all the samey sames of any office anywhere, tangling our feet in the fallen tracksuit of the spectre as we went.

  We looked for signs, markings, anything to tell us the truth of this wonderful exit Earle had spoken about; and there it was, fire muster point, in big white letters on a green board. We rushed towards it, pushed the door open, stepped into a corridor that was bare except for a few recycling bins left forlornly on the concrete floor, ran to the end, saw a door, a handle, a sign warning of alarm, and there it was, burning blood-red on the door: the twin crosses, on fire, emitting too much light to look directly at them. I covered my eyes with my sleeve, slammed down on the door release with my elbow, kicked it open and looked out onto a dark rooftop on a cloudless night.

  There weren’t any stairs down. Just a rooftop, sloping at a shallow angle, red tiles, old-fashioned chimney stack, new-fashioned TV antennae and satellite aerials, and this door, leading onto it from Harlun and Phelps. The roof was part of some old guild building, leading down from here to there, whereve
r there was.

  There, rather than here. I pulled Oda out of the door, stepped past the uneven angle onto the sloping roof, slid, caught at the tiles, felt them hard and sharp beneath my fingers, slid a few steps and pressed myself flat, belly-down onto the slope. Oda was beside me, breathing even faster than us. We were . . . our eyes were . . . and our hands were doing some other business, and we’d slipped because there was blood beneath our feet, and it was our blood, what had Oda said? What was a spleen good for anyway?

  My bag was still on my back.

  The hat was still in the bag. I looked up, saw Harlun and Phelps lit up like a giant crimson warning against careless playing with matches, and half-imagined that somewhere in its depths, I could hear screaming. Aldermen fighting, Aldermen dying, while we snuck away in the night.

  “We have to get away,” I hissed at Oda. “Come on! We have to find Ngwenya.”

  Oda’s head was turned back towards the red tower, her eyes wide. “They’re . . .” she began.

  “We can’t kill him! We can’t stop Pinner without undoing this spell! We have to move! Oda! You have to help me!”

  She half-turned, stared straight at us, and in her face was a look of such hollow nothingness that for a moment I thought I saw the empty hood of the spectre, not the flesh of a woman at all. “Damnation,” she whispered. “Damnation.”

  “We can undo it!”

  “Not this.”

  “Oda! Listen to me, I need your help, we need to get to Ngwenya, I know where she’ll be, you have to help me! Oda!”

  Our shout seemed to shake her for a moment, and there was something still there, hard old psycho-bitch, tough as tar. She turned her head up to the top of the roof and started to climb, scrambling over the old red tiles to the chimney stack and dragging me up behind her. My hand slipped in her fingers, blood sliding over skin between us; she caught me by the wrist and pulled, dragging me up to the top of the roof and looking down. On the other side of the slope, the roof dropped down into darkness, promising at something else: a flatter roof, another building, just below. We slid down the other side, tiles bumping and banging uncomfortably beneath us, reached the gutter, crawled over it, the old black metal creaking uncomfortably, jumped the little foot or so between us and the next building, landed on a roof of stagnant dirty water, old pigeon poo, silent, rusted vents and cracking grey concrete.

  “London Bridge,” I hissed. “We have to get to London Bridge.” Behind us, Harlun and Phelps was a burning crimson brightness, the whole tower lit up with it, and there was someone in the door, the same one we’d jumped out of, hands in pockets, looking at us, just looking.

  Oda had seem him too, and didn’t seem to be able to take her eyes away. I shook her, and still she didn’t turn. We slapped her, hard, across the cheek, and her hand instinctively rose into a fist, that stopped its swing an inch from our nose.

  “Listen!” we hissed. “She cast the curse on London Bridge, she summoned him on London Bridge, it’s where it has to end; we have to get there!”

  She crawled to the edge of the roof, looked down. Below us were concrete tiles, a walkway, a hangover from the days when architects had big dreams and only limited budgets, part of an overhead network that stretched from the northern reaches of the Barbican on the Goswell Road to the southern face of Moorgate and London Wall. In the 1960s, it would have seemed like science fiction; today, almost no one knew the walkways even existed. Oda slithered off the edge of the roof down the short drop onto the tiles, which thudded and echoed heavily, the mortar never even laid. I crawled after her, flopped, fell, landed on my toes and fell onto my knees, banging my hands against the stones.

  Oda picked me up by the armpits, pulled me away from the burning-blood building behind; and there they were, those friendly mystic yellow lines on the floor that would always lead you somewhere you never expected to be. I pointed away from them: “There! Moorgate — there!”

  We ran, as graceful as a burst beetroot. Concrete flags, lights coming on around us, the area of darkness fading as we fled from Harlun and Phelps, dead container plants, old cigarette packets tumbling in the street, blood between our fingers. There were stairs down from the highwalks, strange dark concrete stairs smelling of piss and old thin mould, running down the square back of a black-glassed slab of a building, moulded out of the old walls of a domed pub; the street below, Moorgate, all yellow-orange neon glow and sleepy shops selling chocolate, coffee and suits. An Underground stop, but the trains wouldn’t be running; a bus stop, but it was waiting for night buses, for twenty-four-hour routes, both of which by their very natures were destined never to quite turn up when you needed them.

  Not a car in sight, not a cab, not a truck, the city was as dead as a street could be, the utter silence of an empty road that should have been heaving, that lived to heave, roadworks and traffic jams. We could half-close our eyes and there they were; the shadows ran to our feet, tumbled up from the pavements and between the cracks in the tarmac, remembering the daylight when they buzzed and shuffled and heaved and pressed against each other in the busy need to get from A to B as quickly as possible, important business, important things to do in the city, the smell of traffic and the juddering of builder’s tools into the earth. Silence in the city is terrifying, beautiful, a reminder of just how small man is in the streets he built. We ran down the middle of the road, letting the shadows trail us, feeding on some of their memories, recollections of rush hour and busy, busy, busy, feet slapping dully on the white hazard lines in the middle of the too-narrow street for all the traffic of day, and Oda followed, stumbling like a deranged zombie, eyes fixed on nothing at all, legs moving simply because they didn’t know what else to do with themselves.

  The traffic lights between Moorgate and London Wall flickered red to green and back again as we approached, signalling invisible drivers to go about their business; to one side of the junction, a digger had dug a fat hole in the earth, revealing plastic pipes and ancient, dirt-encrusted black neighbours running through the ground, marked out by a sign thanking us for our patience while these vital works were undertaken. The bright burning redness of Harlun and Phelps was going out; I could see the scarlet overwash of the light fading, as the wards that had ignited within the building also died; for what reason, I didn’t know, couldn’t guess, didn’t want to guess. The street narrowed further as we crossed the traffic lights, tall, gloomy buildings with high imperial windows turned dark in the night, blocking out all but the thinnest pathway of sky overhead. Banks, their names written up in a different language and script above every door; ordinary money wasn’t their trade, not pounds and pennies like we were used to. The figures they dealt with had more zeros in them than most mortals had vocabulary to describe. Alleys winding off the side, a reminder of a time when the streets had sprung up contrarily, to their own devising, so much for urban planning, can’t stop us building here, can’t make it right, this is our city. Pubs, leather sofas, brass taps, low dark tables covered with stained green towels; a telephone box down one alley, defaced with white letters on one wall:

  VE ME BA

  A building overhead, cherubs carved into the gutters; another where Greek maidens in drooping robes held up the roofs; and here, if you looked, a tiny dragon in black iron placed as a weathervane on top of a domed tower, looking south-west across the city with two eyes set above a jaw open in perpetual fury. These were buildings made to demonstrate imperial glory, grandeur, wealth as power, great slabs of yellow stone fretted with ornaments across the roofs, forcing the passer-by in the street to crane their head right up to appreciate the skill of the mason’s work.

  Lothbury, the great cliff walls of the Bank of England, a palace fit for an arrogant Pharaoh, guarded by bare-breasted Britannias and huge iron doors; another wall too high for any mortal to see over, another street too narrow for the traffic that flowed through it during the day. To one side the stone wall built to celebrate wealth and glory, to the other a length of black reflective glass built by peo
ple who knew that real wealth was fickle, and could be more sensibly contained. I could see the should-be-roundabout ahead where so many things met; Cheapside, Poultry, Moorgate, Bank, Threadneedle Street, King William Street, the Merchants’ Exchange, Mansion House; the richest junction in all England, full of old names and uneven glittering prosperity. Statues of stern-faced old dead men looked down on the narrow twisting of joining streets; a clock ticked in an illuminated plastic frame for no one to see, shop windows were still lit up bright and cold to show you the suits on offer, the range of cufflinks, the finest whiskies that they had to sell.

  I ran out into the middle of the junction, heard Oda a few steps behind me, felt something move, looked up to my left, saw a shadow on the walls of the Bank of England, raised my hands, and heard a roar of air. I looked to my right, and too late saw the gates of the steps down to Bank station burst open, heard the roar come up from inside it — not just air but feet and footsteps and trains and escalators and beeps and tickets and shouts and cries and commands and everything all at once, the great rumble of the Underground — put my hands over my head and threw myself on the ground.

  Around me, across the whole junction, the gates of the subway stairs blew upwards, outwards, spinning broken metal across the streets, and up came the roaring, a trapped unheard din of music players, announcements, warnings, cars overhead and trains below, printing machines and tapping keys, in a blast of air so hot and so dirty it looked like ash bursting from the volcano, spilling and spiralling up from under the street and around the streets and from every exit all at once, turning the cold orange-sodium night black and hot in an instant of furious shrieking ash. I looked behind me, saw Oda crawling away from the nearest subway on her hands and knees, hair smoking from the blast, face burnt, ears bleeding, she had been too close, even closer than me. I scampered on hands and knees towards her, caught her in my arms and dragged her away from the spinning, writhing wall of furious darkness that tumbled and spat hot fury out of the subways, rising up to block out the sky overhead. I couldn’t see the streets beyond this wall of blackness, couldn’t see through the volume of dirt and dust piling up from the subway’s open mouths, forming an arena wall around the junction. I shook Oda gently, hissed, “You OK?” and felt the warmth in my breath snatched away, my tongue turn to dirty dry meat in my mouth at the effort of speaking through the storm.