by Kate Griffin
She nodded numbly. “Break it,” she whispered. “Break it!”
I felt for my bag, felt the bulk of the hat inside it again, patted it like a crucifix for comfort, looked around our narrowing circle of burning darkness for tools, felt . . . stones rumbling, sleeping stones being disturbed just a little way off . . . and saw him. He walked through the screaming roaring shattering sound and the burning suffocating filth from beneath the streets like it was sunlight in a dappled forest. Utterly clean, utterly untouched by it. He had his umbrella, which he leant on slightly as he stopped to stare at us. He looked . . . not entirely his usual self, but he still managed to muster a smile.
Mr Pinner said, as the storm belched all around us, “End of the line.” I raised a trembling hand towards him and stuttered, “Uh-uh. Blackwall.”
For a moment, doubt flickered on Mr Pinner’s face. I turned my hand, pointed it in the general direction of where I thought the street called Poultry was. “Midnight Mayor,” I added, seeing his confusion. “Duh.”
He understood, but just a bit too late. I felt a rumbling, heard the rattling of an old, badly kept engine, saw a pair of headlights breaking through the dark, pulled Oda into my chest; and we didn’t quite have it in us to look away. For anyone else, we would have — not for this.
The bus came rattling through the storm like it was just another futile traffic-calming measure on a road built for racing; it was a night bus, it didn’t believe in slowing down, not for anything. A double-decker, its walls were red, its glass was scratched, its wheels were smoking, its driver was just a shadow lost in the darkness of the compartment. On the front was its number and destination — the number 15, heading for Blackwall, and pity the creature that tried to stop it getting there. Mr Pinner was standing between it and its destination. Night buses don’t believe in braking unless it’s absolutely, entirely, and without a doubt necessary. This bus didn’t brake. I watch it slam into him too fast to really tell what happened; we felt almost disappointed — there should have been the slow-motion crumpling of the health and safety ads you got at the cinemas, a twisting of limbs into unfortunate places, a slow swinging back of his neck as his spine crumpled, a shattering of bones as his legs, then his waist went under the bus, a snap as his upper body was thrown against the wide red front. There was none of that; one second, bus driving towards man, next second, bus driving over where man should have been. It occurred to us that all this might have been like the health and safety videos, if Mr Pinner had a spine to snap.
The number 15 rolled on, vanished again through the whirling black storm, which itself began to crumple and sink, the sound and the dirt sucked back in like an obscene drawing of breath by a pair of dying lungs, dragged back down through the open gates of the subway stairs, sucked beneath the streets. A figure lay in the middle of the road, as flat and thin as a piece of paper.
It began to twitch.
I grabbed Oda by the wrist, started to run, pulled her past the not-dead thing slowly rising back up from the black tarmac. Down towards King William Street, past a church, all red brick and spike, the long narrow streets snaking towards Cannon Street and Monument; shut coffee shops and the twisted remnants of an escape exit from Bank station. Lombard Street, St Swithin’s Lane, Abchurch Lane; I could see the junction of Monument right ahead. In an electronics store on one corner, cameras were watching us and projecting onto a dozen TV screens where our image got bigger and bigger as we ran towards it.
There was something behind us. I could hear it, a great angry rumble on the air. I risked a glance back and there it was, filling the street, higher than any houses, turning the night sodium-bright with reflected glory as it tumbled up into the sky. It didn’t have any shape that I could call a creature or give a name to; it was just a tidal wave, a storm surge, a great falling mass of paper, thousands and thousands of pieces of paper, receipts, bills, demands, flyers, bank notes, envelopes, letters, cheques, invoices, statements, ads, maps, leaflets. And at their heart, somewhere lost in the tumbling weight of it, Mr Pinner, hands held up to the sky, the papers pouring out of his flesh, tumbling upwards and outwards, over the roofs of the buildings and down the street towards us, thicker than the snow of a falling avalanche.
Oda had seen it too, was now overtaking me as she ran towards Monument; we weren’t going to get there, neither of us. We were going to drown first, going to be torn apart, suffocated, crushed. It was thirty feet behind us, twenty, rumbling like some great rusted locomotive down the street behind us; ten feet. I grabbed Oda, pulled her close to me, and held up my burnt hand to the storm.
Domine dirige nos.
(What a stupid way to die.)
Blood dribbled off my fingertips. I saw a big red drop run down to the joint between wrist and arm, reach the curve of that line, drool for an uneasy second, and fall.
Domine dirige nos.
And as it fell, it changed. The deep red of my blood started to burn, shine, shimmer, ignite; it wasn’t a falling liquid, but a falling twisting bubble of energy, turning, in the blink of an eye, the thickness of a piece of paper, if thickness was time, to a bright burning electric blue.
Then the blood dribbling from our side also ignited, furious blue, and the blood in our veins, and the blood in our eyes, and the blood that had seeped into the twin crosses carved into our hand. They caught fire, bursting back to their natural state of glorious electric fury; and I let it burn, boil inside, spill out of my wounds and mouth and eyes. Of all the ways to die, I was willing to let this be the one that did the job. We were going to burn, going to catch fire, going to explode with pure blue electricity, beautiful as a bomb, rolling fire through the sky, beautiful and wondrous and defiant!
And the papers spinning towards us, hitting the rising blue tempest of our fire, ignited, shrivelled, turned to ash, grey thin ash billowing in the fury at our feet; going to burn, beautiful burning, going to set the sky on fire, going to burn going to . . .
. . . I could see nothing except the blue tumbling fire which still seemed in some way to stem from the burning twin crosses blazing on my right hand; the paper, the streets, the sky, everything was lost within this cocoon, going to burn going to burn skin cracking blue fire in eyes, mouth, nose, ears, tongue, burning screaming delight going to . . .
A hand reached through the fire. It was paper-white. It was attached to a sleeve. The sleeve was pinstriped. It reached calmly through the flames without a second of hesitation, grabbed Oda by the throat, pulled her free from my arms and with the easy strength of a hydraulic ram, threw her aside. She vanished into the fires, and somewhere beyond that, into the storm, the street, the stones, the whatever lay beyond our burning brightness. We screamed, raised our hands up and let the fires burst from every part of us, blazed electric fury dragged up from the streets, breathed the gas from the shattered pipes, sucked the water up from under the cement, the glass out of the windows, the scrabbling from the telephones, the chittering from the radio waves. We took it all, pushed it all towards that paper-pale hand fumbling in the fire and let it burst, fire and fury and light and electricity and sound and lightning and digital screaming and glass and stone and dirt and heat and shadows — how many shadows could one city hold? — we threw them into it as well, sucked them up from the streets and let them rage, scream through the air towards Mr Pinner, too thick to see, closing our eyes against their weight, crumpling down into the middle of the street, hiding our head in our hands as they screamed up from all around, too many to comprehend; too thick, too heavy, too much of too much. Open your eyes and understand it, and you know why the dragons were mad; too much of too much couldn’t stop it, couldn’t do it, too much of too much, burn!
Something dragged us forwards, like the sucking in of air to a fire. Then, the fire being sated with what it could eat, it threw us backwards, twisting and turning us on the air and throwing us across the street, blasting stones and glass and electric fire and paper, so much paper, throwing it into the sky and then dropping it back down. We
fell into the gutter, the shock of it knocking the fires out in our blood, sending us reeling into some dull, stupid part of our mortal skull, little mortal frail flesh trembling at the blast, and it was all I could do to tuck our chin into our legs and shield our face from the shockwave as it rippled down the street, shattering every brick and pane of glass that had survived the storm, blasting spinning paper along the road and into the sky, suffocating heat in the cold night air.
And slowly, it too settled.
I opened my eyes, peered out between my red bloody fingertips. Mr Pinner stood in the middle of the street, paper falling gently all around. His hair was dishevelled, his coat torn, his skin dripping small receipts and lines of ticker tape. He wasn’t alone. His head was turned upwards to the thing that had grown out of the darkness behind him, his eyes fixed on the twin points of red madness that stared back down at him. I heard him start to laugh, but he didn’t take his eyes from the creature. “Is this it?” he chuckled. “Is this the best your city has?”
The thing, standing as high as the street, its wings bent back uncomfortably to make space for the buildings, put its head on one side and looked down at him. To call it a dragon was . . .
. . . an efficient way to describe something we did not wish to comprehend.
“I am the death of cities!” roared Mr Pinner, opening his torn arms to the beast. “I am your undoing, the breaking of the legends, the stories and the shadows! Your city is damned by its own people, condemned out of the mouths of your own! Betrayal and vengeance! You cannot harm me!”
I crawled to my feet. Bits of me that shouldn’t have made the sounds they did made sounds. My heart was a steady, dull dedum in my chest — too steady, too dull, as if it had run out of the strength to race. I called out, “Mr Pinner?”
He half-turned, saw me, smiled. “Mr Mayor!” he called out merrily. “Do you keep a pet dragon?”
“No,” I replied with a sigh. “It keeps me.” I turned my head up to the black shape of the shadow-beast, skirted my eyes over the edge of its mad own, couldn’t look, couldn’t bear to look, to risk infinite falling into a red void. I looked just past it and said, “Fido! Walkies!”
Mr Pinner spun back round, raised his hands up towards the beast. It opened its jaws and fell, spinning darkness and scarlet endless falling, down on top of him.
London is a dragon.
New York is probably King Kong.
It’s just a way for mortals to understand something too big for the brain.
On the other hand, Mr Pinner did have a point.
What good is a city against its nemesis?
We turned our face away from the darkness in King William Street, and as the paper tumbled gently from the sky, hobbled towards Monument. Behind us we heard . . . sounds not fit for the human ear, sounds we could not explain, comprehend, had not the vocabulary to describe. We call them sounds only because the human brain cannot find another way by which to understand them, did not have the means to grasp, without going insane, the clash between the dragon and the man in the pinstripe suit. Had we been just blue electric angels, just ourself in the wires, we would have known then how to speak of it. But I could not have spoken of the sound without going insane, so will say simply and true — that in King William Street that night, a dragon summoned from the stuff of the city met the creature summoned to destroy it.
And the creature was going to win.
Buying time; we’d seen Terminator, we knew the value of buying time.
We hobbled past Monument as the paper fell, saw our face reflected a hundred times in the window of the electronics store, heard the thud of our footsteps echoing off the glass front of the chemist and the window of the sushi bar, stumbled above the top of a stair leading down to Cannon Street, snaking away below us. Tucked away to the left, a discreet nothing bursting into sight, was the spike of the Monument itself, golden flame sat dull and silent on its top, scaffolding around its base to support the old monument to another time when the death of cities had come to London, another burning, another loss. Office block to the right, symbols carved into the stone — an all-seeing eye, a pair of compasses, a thing that by a different light might have been a swastika, hangovers from a day when London liked to flaunt its mysteries.
A dropping away of buildings.
Neon-filled darkness to either side.
A broad street widening out into a bridge, an empty nothing over
water; on the far side, railway bridges, glassy reflective buildings set all at odd angles: Hay’s Wharf and Tower Bridge to the east, Southwark to the west, Southwark Cathedral poking up above the offices and pubs, the Golden Hinde sitting in its dry dock, bow just pointing out over the water, the curve of the London Eye sticking up over the edge of the tallest building, the numberless clock on Waterloo Bridge, the white blade of the Millennium Bridge, the tower of Tate Modern. Please, dear God, please any higher power which may or may not be watching over us, this is the moment to do your thing, please . . .
London is a dragon.
Protector of the city.
Light, life, fire.
London Bridge in the small hours of a winter morning.
No traffic, no buses, no taxis, no lorries. Just an empty street, lit from above by a long line of silent, sad lamps, and by red floodlights illuminating the sides of the bridge. Railings cut off the pavements from the road. I staggered down the side of the left-hand lane, clutching my satchel to my side, gasping and reaching out for the railings to carry my weight. Someone had filled my eyes with empty honeycomb, thick, solid, airy, sticky, all these things at once and none of them natural; the pain that should have been in every part of my skin was just a distant prickling of pins and needles, too much blood between our fingers, some bastard shot us! Too much blood . . .
Where was Oda?
Where was Earle?
Where were the Aldermen?
Digested from the inside out.
Poor Loren alone in her room in Camden.
Vera dead and turned to paint.
And Nair had screamed, just like little Mo had screamed, just like all those dead men had screamed when they were still human to do it.
Give me back my hat.
Light, life, fire.
Protector of the city.
A dragon’s pet.
There was a woman standing alone in the middle of the bridge.
She was looking east, towards the place a sunrise might pretend to be in a few hours or so.
Her hands were turned towards the river, her face towards the sky.
She was breathing in the river air. That beautiful, calming, relaxing, cooling river air, sorcerer’s balm after a hard day with the voltages; time and stillness and movement all rolled into one breath on the bridge.
The palms of her hands were girly pink, the outsides deep, dark brown. Her hair was woven in plaits so tight it must have hurt, had no choice but to hurt.
We staggered towards her.
She didn’t notice.
Her eyes were closed, her heart beating in time to the running of the water below the bridge.
Ten paces, five, three, two.
We stopped a step away from her, leant against the side of the bridge, gasping for breath.
Penny Ngwenya didn’t move, didn’t blink, just stood on the bridge and smiled at the smell of the river.
I said, “Miss?”
Nothing.
“Miss?!”
Nothing.
I fumbled in my satchel, pulled out the traffic warden’s hat, smearing its surface with my bloody fingertips. “Miss Ngwenya?”
A flicker on her face. Her head half-turned, her eyes half-opened, distant, but still there, looking at me, even if she didn’t entirely see.
I held up the hat. “Penny Ngwenya?”
Her eyes went to the hat in my blood-covered hands. Her fingers twitched, her mouth opened to let out a little, sliding breath.
I reached out with one shaking hand, took her hand in mine, pressed the hat
into her fingers, closed them, unresisting, over the black fabric. “I brought you back your hat,” I said.
A moment.
A pause.
She didn’t seem to understand.
Her eyes fell slowly down to thing in her hand. “My . . . hat?”
“Yes. I heard you lost it. I brought it back.”
“Do I know you?” she asked, turning it over in her fingers, looking at the yellow “Penny” written inside.
“No,” I replied. “My name’s Matthew.”
“You . . . you look . . .” she began, voice a million miles away, eyes fixed on the hat.
“I happened to be passing,” I said carefully. “No trouble.”
“We . . . haven’t met, have we?”
“No,” I replied. “Just strangers.” And then, because up seemed to be wanting to give down a try, and down was feeling flexible enough just this once to let up have its way, I slid down against the side of the bridge, burying my fingers into the cold concrete in case sideways wanted to try the same trick on me. I saw the edges of my vision start to cave.
“Jesus!” exclaimed Penny, dropping down with me, trying to hold me up. “You’ve . . . you’ve been . . .”
“It’s fine,” I muttered. “It’s fine, just fine, it’ll be . . . I had to bring you back your hat, you see?”
“You’ve been fucking shot!”
“Yeah, I noticed.”
“Don’t move, OK? You’ll just make it worse, I’ll . . . I’ll call an ambulance.”
Her attention had for a moment been taken from the hat, but as she reached into her pocket for her mobile phone, her eyes skated across the fabric again and she froze, mouth slightly open, staring at the little, old-fashioned, ugly black dome.
