“
That’s three places
.”
“Are we caring if the Alderman dies?” asked Oda carefully.
I looked at her, saw a face hacked by stone out of an iceberg, looked at Kemsley. It occurred to us, for a moment, that we didn’t care. Not our problem. I said, “Damn. Damn damn damn. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital for Women, Euston Road.”
“
Righto
.”
I could see the red lights of the tariff metre in the front of the cab. They were clocking up numbers and letters as we drove, but not by any mathematics I knew.
“You want to go to an abandoned hospital?” asked Oda. She was getting her breath back, wiping dirt from her eyes with hands dirtier than her face: instinct, not practicality.
We turned sharply to her. “If the Order raids it, when this is done, if they attack the hospital, if they dare go after the healers, we swear, we
swear
we will bring you and them down.”
She just smiled. “Right,” she said. “More magic.”
“Sure, because black cabs just happen to drive into magical war zones on a regular basis,” I snapped.
“I
am
serene, am I not?”
“Getting used to it?”
Her face darkened, but she said nothing. The head of our driver was just a black outline peeking out from behind the slab of his headrest, lit up only by the reflected glow of his headlights and the dull red illumination from the tariff metre. I looked across at Oda and said, “You carry much cash?”
“No. Why?”
“Cab rides are always expensive.”
Especially this one.
“You’re worried about the fare?”
“I thought you’d be pleased with me. A good, noble, avoiding-whichever-sin-it-is sentiment.”
“He sees your heart, not your smile,” she intoned.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that twenty quid slipped to a cabby can’t redeem your soul.”
“That’s a ‘no’ on the fare, then?”
“Yes, that’s a no.”
“Fine.” I turned away, and our eyes passed over Kemsley. He was leaning forward against his seat belt and wheezing. I could see the veins pumping through the remnants of the skin on his neck, jerking in and out like some obscene production line in a food factory, filling with thick blue blood and then deflating to a bruised tube among the ruined mess of his skin. We looked away. Outside, the smog seemed to be lifting, streetlights flashing between the sickly mist, reflected orange stains moving from back to front across the ceiling of the cab, too fast and too erratic to pick out any shapes or shadows. I thought about Anissina. I slipped my hand into my jacket pocket for Nair’s phone, thumbed through the address file, found her right near the top, dialled.
“Who are you—” began Oda.
“Anissina.”
“Why?”
“She might still be lost.”
“We can’t do anything for her, even if it should be done,” replied Oda primly. “She falls or she fights. That’s how it is.”
A phone rang on the other end of the line, and kept on ringing. There was no reply. It went to answerphone. We hung up. We knew better than to leave our voice floating as electricity in the wire. Outside the window, the smog was almost entirely gone, just a few loose traceries being washed away by falling rain, that slipped sideways like tiny transparent snakes across the taxi’s window. I could see flashes of houses, but that’s all they were - shadows that came and went in some impossible, too-far-off distance, perspective playing tricks, architecture playing tricks as terraced house melted into flashy apartment melted into rickety shed melted into bungalow. It gave us a headache to look at it, would have set an epileptic screaming. Oda had noticed too, a warning was in her voice: “Sorcerer?”
“Don’t look too hard.”
“What is this?”
“It’s the Black Cab. It goes anywhere.”
“Does it take the North Circular?”
“Oda! That almost sounded like desert-dry humour.”
“It wasn’t.”
“It doesn’t take the North Circular. If Einstein had seen how the Black Cab moved, he’d have given up physics and gone back to playing the trombone.”
“Einstein played the trombone?”
“I don’t know. But it would fit the hairstyle.”
I had the sense we were picking up speed. I risked glancing out of the window. Signs drifted by, seemed to hang in gloomy nothing, pointing at nothing, suspended in nothing, just floating by in the darkness outside, lit up by no source I could see. The road was nothing but a black shimmer beneath us, defined only by the painted-on markings that lit up blinding yellow and white as we skimmed over them. In the distance, I could see neon signs drifting by like a lit-up ship far out to sea, promising plays, shopping, films, long hours and cheap prices. A billboard drifted by too slow for the speed our wheels were spinning at, the long eyelashes of a perfume-soaked model blinking at us from the pale paper; a single pedestrian, hat drawn down across his eyes, every inch of him as dark as shadow, without variety in texture or tone, vanished round an unseen corner, not once looking up. We felt suddenly tired, sad and alone. A blazing billboard advertised a car whose engine revved inside the hoarding’s plywood frame; it floated up overhead, drifted above the roof of the taxi and set down on the other side. A great fat rat, larger than any urban fox, looked up from where it was chewing a grey-green soaking hamburger, and blinked a pair of bright red eyes at us as we drove by. A short road of bright pink streetlamps flashed, came, went; a lorry, as tall as a house, driver lost in the soot-black, burnt-black darkness of his roaring vehicle, streaked by outside, horn blazing: a sheet of spray containing more than its fair share of goldfish and flapping river eels slapped over the cab. A pair of headlights flashed for a second, then vanished; a pair of pulsing yellow bulbs declared a zebra crossing, on which a zebra grazed, its skin carved from curved aluminium, its legs glued together out of old toilet rolls. It chewed on spilt chicken tikka with a patient gnaw and watched us as we sped on.
Oda whispered, “Obscene. Damnation.
Obscene.
”
We replied, “Beautiful. Just beautiful.”
She stared at us in horror. “How can you pretend to be human, and not be afraid?”
“It is beautiful,” we replied. “You’ve just got to look at it right. Of all the things, the frightening and inexplicable things, the terrifying and the chaotic and the uncontrolled, you just had to pick on magic to fear and hate, in that order and in equal measure.”
“Don’t think you know me, sorcerer.”
“Is there anything more to know?”
That seemed to silence her. We were almost surprised, and felt again a thing, strange and hollow, that might have been sadness. The beat of Kemsley’s blood, pushing and falling against the protruding pipe of his veins, was slowing. There was no point pretending it was our imagination; that just made it worse. No point asking the driver to go faster. If Einstein couldn’t work out how the Black Cab moved, we certainly couldn’t; and besides, back-seat drivers just made the fare steeper when the cab stopped.
One problem at a time.
“Oda,” I said carefully, “when we get to where we’re going, we’ll have to pay a fare. It’ll be . . . more than money. It may be . . . almost anything. Don’t argue. Don’t shout, don’t haggle. And, for the sake of all that’s merciful, don’t try and shoot anything.”
“Why more than money?”
“The Black Cab can go anywhere. I mean . . .
anywhere
. Get your mind outside the boring three-dimensional trivialities of geography and you still haven’t come to terms with it. We’re not going there. Humans can’t abide ‘anywhere’; they . . . we are built for very specific environments. It is only natural that the fares are steep.”
“Sorcerer?”
I sighed. “Yes?”
“The man in the suit. He’s not human.”
“No.”
“He bleeds paper.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. There are constructs that can bleed things other than blood, but I’ve never seen one looking so ordinary as him. And he’s clearly not ordinary. Not human, not ordinary, mortal. His suit was part of his flesh; he bleeds receipts, old bits of newspaper. A summoning of some sort? But then he shows so much independence: he speaks, he enquires, he demonstrates amusement. Most things summoned from the nether reaches are incapable of much more than slobber and slash.”
“You don’t know how to kill it?”
“No.”
“That seems like quite a major problem.”
“Yes.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“What?”
She tilted her chin up to my face. I felt under my eye, found a tiny, almost imperceptible brownish stain of blood running down from my eyelid, where a paper cut no longer than a child’s toenail had been drawn across my skin. “We be blue-blood burning,” we sighed, wiping it away.
“What does that mean?”
“Mean? It is what we are.” I glanced out of the window, saw the distant windows of a lit-up Underground train fading into the night, the flicker of a traffic light going red, amber, green, green, amber, red, too fast and rhythmic to be real. “He didn’t seem to realise that I’m . . .” I rubbed my right hand. “He doesn’t seem to know I’m the Midnight . . .”
“Didn’t do you much good, did it?”
“Kemsley” - drooping flesh with a pair of shaven lips sitting opposite us, couldn’t look - “said something about inauguration. Ghosts and streets and midnight mystic doings.”
“Didn’t do Nair much good, did it?”
“No.” We were silent a while. A thought was pushing at the edge of speech, trying to get out. It was strong, angry, with claws for fingers. We let it out. “But that may have been the reason Nair made us Midnight Mayor.” Oda raised an eyebrow, a perfect half-moon. “The Midnight Mayor is just a human with complications. And we . . .”
“Aren’t,” she concluded. I said nothing. Thinking too much was always trouble. “What happens now?”
“There was a CCTV camera. In the hallway below, a CCTV camera, and only one really viable way out. CCTV everywhere.”
“So?”
“So even if Mr Pinner - the man in the suit, the death of . . . even if whatever he is destroys the camera, there’ll be an archive somewhere, records. Better than sharing the memories of pigeons, they couldn’t muster more than a day of recollections. There’ll be something, somewhere. The Aldermen can trace it, they have . . . they take their work very seriously. We can still find the boy.”
“You think it’s that important?”
“I think that if Kemsley dies, then it’s because Mr Pinner thinks it’s that important. I think that Mr Pinner had Boom Boom abduct the boy from his club; I think that’s interesting. Why keep him alive? He said alive. So yes. Find the boy, find some answers. ‘Give me back my hat’. He might know . . . he
has
to know something.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
“Well, I would hope that if I get flayed alive and the city burns, you’ll have the good manners to die an excruciating death with the rest of us.”
“Sorcerer, have you ever wondered why you have never been appointed to a managerial position before?”
“My honest honest face?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.” She paused, sharp eyes fixed steadily on Kemsley. “You really think finding the boy will make this better? Stop what happened to Nair happening to you?”
“Yes.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not.”
“Why?”
“I think you’re doing it for this woman - Loren. I don’t think there’s enough proof for any of it. Mo, Mr Pinner, the club, the shoes, the ravens, the Mayor. A lot of circumstance, but nothing else. I think you want the boy to be involved. Then you can help
her
while helping yourself.”
I thought about this a while.
Lights turned and drifted outside, a thousand miles away, as tall as a skyscraper pressed up to the eye of the window.
“OK,” I said. “All right. Yes. She’s lonely. She’s scared. And we are . . . we have never had a friend. Just strangers out to get something done. Acquaintances with an agenda. Never this thing, ‘friend’. I want something ordinary. It was
nice
. It was unremarkable. Just a friend. That’s what they say, isn’t it? We’re ‘just’ friends.”
“Matthew?”
“Yes?”
Silence. Just the rumbling of the taxi’s engine.
A moment that might have been something different.
“We’re slowing down.”
Just a moment.
I looked out of the window. I could see the reflective black slab of Euston station, the slow flickering lights of Euston Road, crawling into existence in the darkness. “Yeah,” I said. “We are.”
My satchel was on the floor. I picked it up, rummaged through for my wallet. I had £40 left. It wouldn’t be enough, but it’d be a start.
The streets were becoming more solid, pavements growing out of the gloom, shopfronts edging closer and closer towards us, growing bricks and settling their way into solid reality. The driver’s voice came in over the intercom.
“
Anywhere round here in particular?
”
“If you could just drop us off outside the main entrance . . .”
“No problem
.”
We turned, actually turned, something I couldn’t remember the cab doing in our whole journey, down a side street off from Euston, round the back of a grey office block and a Gothic fire station, towards a red, turreted building with broken windows and bright blue hoarding all around its walls, stuck with signs saying, “DANGER KEEP OUT” and posters for dubious gigs and, of course, scrawled in white paint over the blue hoarding by the door:
The Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital for Women. Abandoned by almost everyone and left to rot. Almost being the important part.
The taxi slid to a stop outside the padlocked dark entrance, covered over with plywood. There wasn’t any traffic on the street, not at this hour, not even night buses turning onto Euston Road towards King’s Cross. Even the lights in the hotels ahead were out, even the receptions just distant dim puddles. I had to remember to breathe, watching the dark shadow of the driver’s hands reach up to check the tariff, to stop the clock, watching a hand push back the plexiglas between him and us, waiting for the damage.