Authors: Kate Griffin
“How may I assist, Ms Li?”
“I need you to do that Alderman thing you do, and find out if any bodies have been discovered in the river in, say, the last forty-eight hours.”
“Of course.”
“… and I need you to get me a meeting with the Tribe.”
Miles hesitated. “While I’d love to oblige, Ms Li…”
“Is that a ‘shan’t’ or a ‘won’t’?”
A vein throbbed in the Alderman’s neck, where it pressed against his high collar. “Not at all, Ms Li,” he said. “Merely that the Aldermen and the Tribe… our relationship is poor, and any overtrees from our office are likely to be met with… difficulty. Perhaps if you had contacts with someone else, who might make an overture? Do you know any imps, for example?”
Sharon’s eyes narrowed. “Goblins?” she asked.
“I believe some goblin clans have made tentative diplomatic approaches to the Tribe in the past…”
“I know just the one. You won’t believe how diplomatic he can be. What about the body in the river?”
“I can absolutely conduct a search via the relevant authorities; that’s no problem.”
Sharon sat back slowly. “Okay,” she said. “Then I guess we’re getting somewhere.” She thought, then added, eyes fixed on some distant place, “Yay team.”
Chapter 14
It was one in the morning when Sharon walked through the locked door of her flat. It wasn’t that she didn’t have keys – although recently she’d got out of the habit of carrying them – but that the door itself was heavy, and would have thudded in the dark, and it seemed more civilised just to walk straight through it without disturbing her housemates.
She felt warm, tingle-skinned, exhausted, and depressingly, insufferably, awake. She crept upstairs to her room, one of three in what the estate agent had termed a “fashionable maisonette” and which her mother called “that grubby little flat”. In the sense that it had stairs, the estate agent was probably right. In the sense that you could stand in the middle of Sharon’s room, extend your arms out to either side and touch a wall, her mother was clearly onto something. She sat down on the edge of the bed, displacing a small alp of unsorted clothes whose fate would have to wait, as it had for nearly four days already.
The blue umbrella, with its missing point, balanced between her knees. She hadn’t wanted to leave it with Miles. Swift had very specifically left her the umbrella; also, she had detected an aura of mystic calamity about it that no one else seemed to have picked up on, and that, too, made it her problem. She tucked it in a drawer under her bed, burying it beneath a mess of unpaired socks and scrunched pyjamas. Then she sat and stared at nothing and wondered what it would take to go to sleep.
Finding a body in the river would take Miles some time.
Getting in touch with the Tribe would also take time.
Somewhere she’d heard a policeman say that if a case wasn’t solved in the first seventy-two hours it was unlikely to be solved at all. How long since Swift had disappeared? She wasn’t even sure she knew. She turned on her small bedside lamp and lay on her belly, pulling out her notebook and a collection of multicoloured biros from her bag. Flicking through the pages – notes on curse victims, agoraphobic djinn and claustrophobic gnomes, on gargoyles with pigeon problems and how many sugars you should and should not offer to the tuatha de danaan – she found a clear page and wrote, very carefully, in bright red ink:
MISSING MIDNIGHT MAYOR
She felt the note sufficient to merit capital letters and red ink, which she underlined twice in black, just to make it clear how important this was. Underneath this she also wrote:
Umbrella. Why? Mega-mystic.
Email. About umbrella. Requesting meeting in Deptford. Why? Cover-up. Email ate the computer.
Deptford. Cover-up. Blood. Two bleeding. Human and ‘nearly’ human (Swift?). Body in the river? Bleeder into the sewer?
Magic circle. Burnt telephone wire. Doing a spell? What spell?
The Tribe.
She paused at this last one, then carefully, this time in neat blue ink, added at the bottom of the page:
??!?!?!?!???!
Feeling a little more weary and far more satisfied, she stared at the words, then closed the book and stuffed it back in her satchel, returned the pens to their small internal pouch, rolled over and turned off the light.
Sharon Li slept.
Or, perhaps more importantly, she dreamed.
And as she dreamed, she walked.
She walked out of her body and out of her room.
Out of her flat and out of the small brick estate in Hoxton that housed it.
She walked out of the dreams of a child, surprised to find a blue-haired woman suddenly staring at him from across his nightmare of an assembly hall, and into the dreams of an old man recalling a day when recollection was easier. She walked through the dreams of a postman, whose cart rattled in his sleeping ear and whose fingers were turned black with ink. She walked between two tower blocks whose windows flashed and shimmered with the projected thoughts of the sleepers lying within; nightmares and wonders, fantasies and the dark churnings of a mind which would rather choose to forget. She walked the slow, changing paths of the dream walk, and, as she walked, a figure fell into step beside her, brilliant and bright in this flickering world of unravelled thoughts. She barely glanced at him, and said, though no sound could exist in this slumbering world,
“Evening, Dez.”
Dez Cliff Jnr, white suit surgically plastered to his orange-adjusted skin, beamed at her from the nether reaches of Sharon’s subconscious mind. She knew, in some objective part of her soul, that she had only herself to blame for her spirit guide being, essentially, a cheap talk show host instead of, say, a glowing unicorn or radiant spirit of light. However, knowing a thing and coming to accept it were two different, and still-ongoing, processes.
“And this evening in Sharon’s dream walk,” sang out Dez, “we ask ourselves… what the hell is going on?”
Sharon sighed, as the great-bellied snake of a train driver’s nightmare hissed and spat at her from where it had coiled itself around the small yellow-brick house within which the dreamer slumbered. “It’s okay,” she said, voice flattened by the swirling shadows of the dream walk. “I think I’ve got this one.”
“Sharon,” – a microphone appeared spontaneously in Dez’s hand and was waved towards her face – “you have no experience of criminal investigation, or magical investigation, or investigation of any kind – tell me, how does that make you feel?”
“It’s gonna be fine,” she repeated. “Totally on it.”
“Sharon,” insisted Dez as they stepped over the rising black waters of a teenager’s thoughts recalling humiliation in the school showers and the laughter of his peers, “are you not concerned that you’re gonna screw this one up entirely?”
Sharon stopped so abruptly that Dez walked right through her, emerging flustered and smoothing down his white suit, the microphone gone.
“Positive bloody attitude!” she exclaimed. “Jesus, what’s the point of having a positive bloody attitude if the deepest manifestation of my unconscious mind has to turn up every night and go negativity on everything?”
Dez hesitated, tugging the ends of his shirtsleeves a little stiffer over his unnaturally tanned, orange wrists. “But,” he protested, “surely if you strive so hard to have a positive mental attitude towards everything, it’s only because unconsciously you believe yourself to be deeply, truly, stuffed?”
Sharon threw her hands up in speechless rage and marched on, leaving Dez to dissolve into the shadows whence he had come.
She walked over the chittering insects of a student’s nightmares, and around the floating umbrellas of a midwife’s dream as they soared into a starry sky. She walked across the waters of the Regents Canal, past the beggar man who dreamt, fitfully, of falling ice and caverns, before she drifted up towards King’s Cross, where cranes and bulldozers lined up before the old brick warehouses like a welcoming committee to an architectural funeral, and the water of the canal shimmered with spilt oil. Here she drifted through the walls of the abandoned workshops and up, until she came to what some might have called a den, others a nest, made of cardboard and pilfered blankets, rusty boxes and bent pieces of pipe. Here a small figure lay curled beneath a stolen waxy coat, and his dreams were of…
“Oi oi!”
… Sharon had never actually known what Sammy dreamt of, mostly because he was far too attuned to the presence of another dream walker ever to let them detect the content of his slumbers. He stood now, a figure above his own sleeping form; and Sharon couldn’t help but notice that the dream-walking Sammy was a little taller, a little prouder, and in possession of far less nasal hair than the real Sammy. A faint odour of toothpaste trailed after him as Sammy slipped through the walls and away from his own slumbering body, Sharon following in his dusty wake. “Ain’t seen you practising your dream walking much,” he grumbled. “Not that you’re any good at it anyways.”
“I need your help,” she said, as the two of them descended back into the street, where the still-churning dreams of the city slipped across the paving stones, and twisted their black-smoke shapes beneath cones of streetlight.
“Everyone does, but they’re usually too thick to notice till it’s too late.”
“It’s about the Tribe. I need to get a meeting.”
“Which tribe?”
“The Tribe. With a ‘the’ and unsterilised knives.”
Sammy rolled his eyes, always an impressive sight, considering how disproportionate they were to the rest of his head. “Self-mutilating tossers!” he exclaimed. “Bunch of incompetents!”
“Nevertheless,” she persisted, “there’s this whole fate of the city thing, a missing-Midnight-Mayor thing, and apparently I’ve been made Swift’s deputy, which I think means I’m supposed to clean it all up, which is really kinda crap actually, but okay, so if you’d do that expert goblin thing you do so well, that’d be really great.”
Sammy fumed. In the real world, this might have consisted of little more than a certain firmness of step. In the dream walk, steam rose off him in thin blue-grey clouds which fizzled and dissolved around his walking spectral form. “Thing is,” he grumbled, “the Tribe ain’t never really forgiven me for that time with the garbage truck and the naiad’s foot…”
“Sammy. Fate of the city and that.”
Sammy the Elbow gave a profound, lingering sigh. “Fine fine fine!” he declared, flapping his stubby-fingered hands in indignation. “I’ll go out and just fix everyone’s problems, shall I, because that’s what I do, don’t you worry about me. Sammy do this, Sammy do that – just don’t expect ’em to be pleased to see you, is all, cos damned if I’m gonna do your dirty work all the time.”
“Thanks, Sammy.”
“‘Fate of the city’,” muttered the goblin, even as he began to fade back into the swirling ether. “‘Deputy Midnight Mayor’ what a load of swollen bollocks…”
He shimmered into nothing. Sharon stood a moment longer, listening to the sound of a song half remembered in the wandering mind of a shop assistant who can’t get this tune out of her head, before sighing, closing her eyes, and drifting finally, and at last, off to sleep.
Chapter 15
Sharon turned her mobile phone off at night.
Later, when she stopped to think things through, she decided this was probably a mistake as, being responsible for the fate of the city, you couldn’t expect to be working to sensible hours. However, in the age of instant messaging, smartphones and text messages sent drunkenly at two o’clock in the morning, the fact was that Sharon Li, in an act of technological defiance,
had
turned her mobile off and this was why, when he rang, all he got was a message which went:
“Hi, you’ve reached the phone of Sharon Li. Sorry I can’t pick up at the moment, but I’m probably in a meeting or walking the misty path right now, so please leave your message, after the beep. Thank you!”
Beeeep!
A static whine which hisses like a snake, the open sound of transmission with no breath. It whispered:
Hhhhsssssssssssss…
Listen.
Beneath.
hhhhsssssssssssssshhhhhhhhaarrooon!!
ssssssssssssshhhhhhaaarrrrroonnnnn!
SSSSSSSSHARON!!!!
There may have, perhaps, been more.
But the caller seemed to run out of credit.
Chapter 16
Rhys was halfway to the office when the text message came. He was going to the office because, frankly, that was all he knew what to do on a weekday at 8.45 a.m., and, even though he couldn’t shake the feeling that today would not be an ordinary working day, the day had to start somewhere and not turning up at the office could well be deemed worthy cause for disciplinary action. As it was, the text message forced him to hop off the bus, cross over the street and return from whence he’d come.
He arrived, twenty-five minutes later, breathless and red-faced, halfway up Hampstead Hill. Sharon was already there, leaning against the burgundy tiles of the Underground station, a cup of coffee in one hand, a sign at her back declaring that the recent hike in fares was entirely in the public interest. She was hunched into a black padded jacket against the cold. As Rhys sidled beside her she glanced up and exclaimed, “Do you know how much a cuppa coffee is in Hampstead?”
“Um… two pound thirty?” Hearing him get it right, her mouth dropped open.
“I go to a book group on the first Friday of every month round the corner,” he explained. “Last month we read
Wild Swans
which I didn’t really like but everyone else said was amazing, and this month we’re reading
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
and everyone has said that it’s going to be crap but I’m really enjoying it so far, so… uh…”