“Come on, come on . . .”
The rat looked back at me uncertainly, hesitated on the edge of a hole chewed through the stuffing of a mattress, which thin orange fungus had long since made its own, then started to edge back towards me, its oval body shimmering and bright in the soaking rain, its pink claws sliding through the rising puddles on the floor. Oda looked at us with distaste, but said not a word as bending down, we picked it up in our hands, smelt slime and old rotting things from its coat, saw tiny sharp teeth in a tiny pointed mouth, felt little sharp claws tap dance on the surface of our palm. Pigeons and rats; no one knows more in a big city.
We stroked its back, our fingers sliding slime-covered off the greasy surface of its coat, whispered gentle implorings and polite commands, and bent down, let it scuttle free, followed it as it passed along small trails through the rising water. It scrambled over old black Victorian pipes dragged up from some forsaken corner of the sewers, past broken pots and vases smashed into a dozen white shards on the earth, over a hundred cracks where the grass had somehow managed to peep its way up from the grey concrete soil, round a rotting slab of sandy clay where the buddleia was trying to take root, little purple flowers crawling out of tough brown roots. I almost had to run to keep up with it; staggering past the broken hull of a yacht, a great fat tear through its belly; the twisted remains of a car, bonnet pressed up almost into its boot; wrought-iron back of an old bedstead; a lonely rocking chair, the screws just about to fall free.
“Sorcerer . . .” whispered Oda, a note of urgency in her voice. I glanced back at her, then back again and could see nothing but the towers of broken things all around, like metal hills blocking out the sky.
“Not far,” I muttered, as much for my sake as hers. “Not far . . .”
I could smell the bright warm stench of a sandwich rotting in the rain, see the yellow blur of the rat’s eyes in my own, sense the twitching of its whiskers as if they grew from my face, and there it was as well, another thing rotting, a different kind of rot, the kind that didn’t taste of bright orange rust and broken metal. I remembered the fox in Kilburn. I remembered the way Mr Pinner didn’t smell.
Old kettles turned calcium-white on the inside; half a chimney pot, through which the buddleia was beginning to peek, a shattered TV aerial still carrying traces of pigeon poop on its strands, a satellite dish, face turned upwards to receive a signal, in which now nothing but stagnant water pooled. There would be ice in the night, thick frost in the shadows; our breath was white smoke.
And then the rat stopped.
It looked at something, then looked at me, then scuttled away into a tunnel an inch wider than itself, dug out of a tower of tumbled detritus. At first we couldn’t see what it had seen, but stared at more of the same: rust and black burnt nothings. Then Oda’s hand brushed ours, just for a second, and we, startled by the touch, looked to her, then followed her gaze.
There was something in the rubbish.
It was a shoe. At some point, it had been a trendy shoe, big, white and gold and blue, all the right marks to declare that here was someone who knew who they were and it was all about the feet. That had been then. Now it, like everything else in this place, was rotting, dirt and rain and ragged tears pulling out the soft stuffing of the inner sole, limp sodden brown laces dribbled, undone. It stuck out of the pile of dead machines at a strange angle, like someone had stuck it there on a pole like a defiant flag. I looked closer. There was something in the shoe. It might have been a sock.
Oda whispered, “Oh, God.”
There was something in the sock.
It might have been an ankle.
I snapped, “Help me!”
We scrambled up the sides of the heap and started pulling. Old rusted bike frames, crinkled-up drink cans, broken bottles, a thing, all withered bone and hair, that might once have been a dead cat stuffed inside a cardboard box, a shattered lamp, a gutted radio, the panels for a speaker trailing wires, the drawers of some old filing cabinet, snapped along the lines on which they should have slid. The ankle became a leg, blue slashed jean stained the colour of black rust; the leg joined onto a hip, at the wrong angle, sticking out too far to one side; the hip was half-covered by a T-shirt, soaked through and torn; the T-shirt covered a chest, into which half a broom had at some point buried itself just hard enough to pin the body it impaled to the ground. We threw broken things aside, feeling the great mound of decayed waste shift beneath us, creaking and clanking as old lynchpins of its structure were tossed away; and there were fingers, hands, arms. And they were wrong: black - not the deep rich brown of Oda’s skin that foolish mortals called black, but the black of an ocean night when the stars are lost, coal-black, dead-black, ink-black. I could see black blood pumping through the veins beneath his skin, still moving, still, just alive, and we knew without a doubt, that it was ink-black, black as ink, black, because it was ink.
Some sort of whisk had fallen over his face, its broken wires clinging to his throat and jaw. We untangled them, metal hooks twanging merrily as they came free, and ink flowed from the pinprick wounds. The whites of his eyes were stained with the same ink that ran through his blood, his lips were the colour of festering bruises, his hair was falling from his skull in fistfuls, barely a few handfuls left on the grey dome of his head. Alive. Still alive, bleeding, wheezing, freezing, shivering, dying, pick one, they were all leading in the same direction, racing each other for the prize.
“Is that . . .” whispered Oda.
“What do you think?”
I dragged him up by an arm and he came, a puppet without the stuffing. Oda took the other arm, slung it across her shoulder and between the two of us, we pulled him free. A rusty screwdriver was embedded in his back, just offset from his spine, sticking out like some obscene fashion accessory. Oda pulled it free with a thick pop of dead muscle, and black ink began to flow from the hole down to the seat of his fouled pants. He stank of urine and shit, dragged uneven and lumpy in our arms as we pulled him along. His legs didn’t move, his head didn’t rise; there was nothing in him to suggest life except the slow beating of black blood in his veins. I turned my head, looking for the way out, trying to judge by the distant rattle of trains the way to the exit. Picked a direction; staggered, walked, ran, dragged, tripped, stumbled, all at once, towards the way out.
“Ambulance?” whispered Oda.
“Can’t save him now.”
“The . . . hospital place?”
“Maybe. They have means at Elizabeth Anderson . . . can you reach the phone in my bag?”
My satchel was swinging uncomfortably from my shoulder; to grab it was to drop the ink-stained boy. As Oda snatched for it, I glanced at his face and saw, through the black stain under his skin, that his cheeks were still slightly puffed with puppy-dog youth; just a kid, and he was going to die. Oda grabbed my satchel, reached inside, pulled out the mobile phone.
“Black Cab,” I said. “He’s the only one who can get us there in time.” She thumbed it on. Continents drifted in the time it took the phone to power up. “Sorcerer . . .” Fear, unashamed, numb-the-senses fear. “. . . there’s no signal.”
We never call bad things “coincidence”.
“Help me,” I grunted, and she took more of the kid’s weight again. “We need to run.”
We ran, tripping and staggering through the thick rain, the sky a sullen gloom overhead making no concession to the time of day, determined to keep things uniform and dead. My hand burnt, my head burnt, my
eyes
burnt inside their sockets, I could feel them aching and stinging.
“He’s here, he’s here, he’s here, he’s here,” we whimpered.
“Shut up!”
“He’s here.”
“Shut
up
!”
I remembered the mad eyes of the dragon. Too big, too . . . too much of anything, too
too
, an endless fall into a thing too big for the mind to grasp.
So we ran, dragging the kid who I guess once upon a time had answered to the name of Mo, son of Loren; blood turned to ink, eyes turned black, dribbling black ink tears down his stained face, draining black blood from a screwdriver hole in his back, from wire tears in his neck, clothes the colour of rust, trousers the smell of shit, shoes the brown stain of rot and decay. We rounded a corner and pulled immediately back, pressing ourself into the pyramid of fallen debris.
“He’s here,” we breathed.
Oda peered past us, towards the exit from the junkyard, and immediately drew back, shoulders heaving with the effort of breath. She had seen what I had seen. Just a guy in a suit, standing in the exit. I wondered if Earle’s back-up had seen him too, and if they had lived long enough to see anything more.
“What do we do?” she hissed.
I glanced forward again, and there he was: pinstripe suit, one hand buried casually in his trouser pocket, the other holding a huge blue umbrella over his head, the water tumbling down from the edges. Smiling - just smiling. Mr Pinner, patient as the dustbin man, just smiling in the way out.
Mo, as if sensing the terror that we could see, groaned.
I turned, twisting my head towards the junk above us. “Get him to the station,” I said. “Buy him a ticket. We can hide behind the barriers.”
“What are you going to do?”
We reached up and brushed the tip of an old, cracked fishing rod, sticking out from the black stinking piles of junk. “Litterbug,” we whispered, closing our fingers round the stubbly end of the rod and snapping it like a dry summer twig, “we’re going to have a conversation.”
We wrapped the end of the rod in the palm of our hand, took a deep breath, and stepped out to meet Mr Pinner.
He was smiling.
Had he ever not smiled?
He stood under the umbrella in the chain gateway to the junkyard, and smiled.
Mr Pinner, the death of cities.
After all, if the ravens and the river and the Stone and, God help us all, the Midnight Mayor protect the city, then that should suggest there’s something you need to protect it
from
.
We stopped ten paces from where he stood, and hoped our jelly-trembles would be mistaken for the cold of the pouring rain. Our hair itched where the water had dragged it down towards our eyes, our stomach felt like it had been sucked clean by a hoover that someone had forgotten to switch off after. We wanted to speak, and found we couldn’t.
Then he said, “Hello. My name is Mr Pinner. I am the death of cities. Did you want to talk about something?”
I nodded numbly.
“I’m all ears.”
His voice was polite, level, well educated, with just a hint of something more aggressive, something that deep down loathed the good grammar he used, loathed the sharp suit and the expensive watch, and dreamed of Friday night down at the pub, and the old farting motorbikes the kids used to use.
“Well?” he prompted, as we stood and stared for too long.
I licked my lips, tasted the falling rain, clutched our piece of fishing rod so tight it burnt in my hand. “Why are you here?”
“To kill you and your lady friend,” he replied easily. “Somewhere in here there are some men who had no luck. Or some of their bits. I don’t concern myself with the details.”
“Why?”
He looked slightly confused. “Because I am the death of cities,” he repeated. “I’m sorry; didn’t I make my position clear?”
“Just . . . just to clarify . . .” I stammered, “you are using it in the literal sense, right? I mean, you’re not just some twat who spent too much time playing Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, you’re the actual, I mean . . . the literal . . .”
He beamed. “When the bomb fell on Hiroshima, I saw the sky blossom above me like a flower, saw the beauty of the flames, the majesty of it. When Dresden burnt, I breathed the smoke - the night has never been so bright! When the levees broke during the storm, I let the water run through my fingers, washing away corruption and a surplus of time; when the plague came to this city, I stroked the backs of the black rats as they ran off the ship. When the baker in Pudding Lane left his oven open, I was the customer who took the last loaf before the ashes scattered onto the straw and ignited. The bread was the sweetest food I have ever tasted. When Rome burnt, I stood on the tallest hill to watch the temples tumble; when Babylon fell, I licked the dust off my lips to taste on my tongue. I stood on the walls of Jericho, danced on the lip of the earthquake when it shook down the Bosphorus, bathed in the burning rivers at Pompeii, drank vodka on the rooftops of Stalingrad, and when the order was given, spare not man, woman, or child, I raised the standard high and gave the battle cry that mortal men were too afraid to utter. I am as old as the first stone laid beside its neighbour. I feast on the fall of walls, on the shattering of roofs, on the breaking of the street, the bursting of the pipes, the snapping of the wires, the bursting of the mains, the running of the people. I have come to this city half a dozen times before, to watch the cathedrals burn and taste the terror on the bridges just before they sink beneath the weight of runners. And now I’ve come again, to finish what was started when the first stone was laid.” He smiled. “Does that answer your question?”
“Yup,” I squeaked. “Pretty much.” He reached up to close the umbrella. “
Although
,” I said quickly, “it seems to me, in an academic way of things, that you didn’t actually
cause
all those things. You encouraged them, maybe, you rejoiced in them, you found . . .
beauty
in them, sure. No one would deny that a mushroom cloud is magical, outrageous, obscene, beautiful. Whatever. But unless you’re telling me you stood next to Truman’s shoulder and whispered, ‘press the red button’ or told Bomber Harris that it would just be a little, little fire, you seem to be more of a consequence, not a cause. A feeding parasite who finds magic in life, life in death. So I gotta ask you: what brought you to London this time?”