The Midnight Mayor (45 page)

Then, he turned his head towards the nearest ticket machine, and walked towards it. The spirit went out of me; I nearly fell under the weight of my own travelcard. He pressed a button, chose a ticket, started to dig into his pocket for change, couldn’t find any, looked up at the empty glass where the station manager should have been selling, then smashed it with the end of his umbrella in a single swipe and reached through for the cash till.

I screamed at Oda, “It’s not going to work! Move!”

She’d already dragged Mo down to the bottom of the stairs. We took the steps two a time after her, skidded on the dirt-engrained tiles at the bottom, grabbed her by the sleeve and pulled her towards the platform.

“What do you mean it’s not going to work?” she shrieked. “I thought that spell of yours stopped everything!”

“It stops everything that doesn’t have a
right
to be on the Underground,” I replied, looking up for the indicator board, “and he’s buying a fucking ticket as we speak!”

And there was the indicator -

“Can we use the train?”

“Depends how much change he can find for the ticket,” I snapped, shoving her towards the further end of the platform. We dumped Mo on the concrete floor, and I turned to look back, searching for inspiration, protection, anything. I felt in my satchel, found a can of blue spray paint, started to draw the symbol of the Underground; then I thought better, switched to a can of red and drew the twin crosses, one inside the other, muttering, “
Domine dirige nos
, please, please,
domine
bloody
dirige nos
. . .”

The paint began to burn on the concrete in front of me.

“Sorcerer!” shrilled Oda.

“Not right now!”

“
Matthew!
”

I glanced back.

Mo was lying on the floor, and he was blinking.

“He’s awake!”

GIVE ME BACK MY HAT GIVE ME BACK MY HAT GIVE ME BACK MY HAT GIVE ME BACK

“I’m glad for him!” I snapped. “Seriously!”

“
Matthew!!
”

I glanced back and Mo was pointing; he had raised one hand the colour of a spilt biro and was pointing at the indicator. “‘Give me back . . .’” he whispered, and his voice was full of popping bubbles; little spurts of black ink ruptured from his lips as he spoke. “‘Give me back . . .’”

“‘Give me back my hat’,” whispered Oda, and for a moment there was almost a kind woman there, leaning over a dying kid. “What does it mean?”

“‘Give me back . . .’”

“What does it mean?” she hissed, shaking him gently by the shoulders. “What does it mean?!”

“I took it,” he whispered. “I took her hat. I’m sorry, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so sorry Mum? I’m sorry I’m sorry Mum! Fuck shit please God fuck!”

“Whose hat? Whose hat did you take? His? Mr Pinner’s? Did you take his hat, is that why this has happened? Whose hat did you take, Mo?!”

“Mum! I’m sorry I’m sorry I’ll never again honest please you fucking help me fucking shit please help bitch help me sorry so sorry please . . .!”

I looked up sharply, there was something happening at the far end of the platform, a shadow in the corridor.

“Whose hat did you take?!” screamed Oda, shaking him now, not gentle at all. “Tell me!”

A light went out at the end of the platform, then another, and another, the long neon strips dying around us. And there was someone moving in the darkness, a man moving in it, the twin red crosses painted on the floor burning now with thick angry smoke, popping and spitting in rage. I dropped the spray can, backing away from the smell of it. One minute, said the indicator, just one little minute and then it’d all be OK, the train would come and we would go and Mo would live and Loren wouldn’t cry and we’d live ohgodohgodohgodohgod just let us live please just live a little longer just a little live and see and smell and

“Whose hat?!” shrieked Oda’s voice as the darkness spread.

“Hers,” whispered Mo. “
Hers.
The traffic warden’s hat.”

“Oda,” I whispered, as the light went out from the twin red crosses and the last neon tube died. “Oda, get away . . .”

“Which traffic warden, what traffic warden . . .”

“Dollis Hill,” he whispered, “the traffic warden’s hat.”

“Oda! Get away from him!”

She staggered back just as he started to scream. I grabbed her, turned her head away, turned my face away, heard him scream and scream, heard his skin tear and part, saw in the dying neon glow the blood tumble black across his flesh, spill black into the platform, roll black down into the trench for the trains to run in, spitting and sparking when it struck the tracks, and he just screamed and screamed and screamed until there was no breath left to scream with, no mouth left to scream with, no human left to scream, just a piece of dead, flayed meat lying on the platform and Oda was holding us, she was holding
us
as if we were going to be any use in the buried darkness of that place.

And that was it.

Polite silent death.

A drip, drip, drip of black, ink-stained blood rolling down off the platform’s edge. The rapid breathing of Oda, her face pressed against my shoulder, my head turned into her hair. The only light came from the indicator board, orange letters scrawling across the thin rectangular screen.

1. High Barnet via Bank - 1 mins

2. Edgware via Bank - 7 mins

3. Edgware via CharingX - 13 mins

A pair of footsteps, leather soles, walking down the platform, a smiling face half-lit up in reflected orange glow. Mr Pinner, not a mark on him, examining the burnt-out twin crosses I had painted onto the concrete.

“
Domine dirige nos
,” he said at last. “The blessing of the city.”

I couldn’t speak, we couldn’t breathe.

He looked up slowly, considered first me, then Oda, then me again. Then he started to smile. “Oh,” he breathed. “How unlikely! Not
just
a sorcerer and some Aldermen. The Midnight Mayor made a phone call before he died.”

I held up my right hand, trembling with fear, and cold from the rain. The twin crosses ached across my skin. “
Domine dirige nos
,” I whispered. “Keep back.”

“
You!
” breathed Mr Pinner. “Well . . . I have to admit I’m surprised! Considering that it was you who killed Bakker,
you
who brought down the Tower,
you
who destroyed the only institution that might have kept your city safe from my revenge . . . and Nair made you Midnight Mayor?”

“Believe me, it’s as inexplicable to me as it is to you.”

 

1. High Barnet via Bank

 

 

It didn’t say the train was due - these things were never clear. Did the lack of a “1 min” statement mean it was due right
now
, or in fifty-nine seconds? I doubted if we’d survive fifty-nine seconds of this conversation.

“So . . . this makes you what? Sorcerer and Midnight Mayor? A heady combination! How do you sleep at night, how do you not get lost in it, all the power you could have, heart beating in time to the rumbling of the engines waiting at the lights, breath gusting like the vents up from the kitchens, eyes moving with the twitching of the pigeons and the sweep of the cameras? So much
life
, so big and so mad and so wild and so bright - I’m impressed you’re not drooling! Seriously. Man to man - well
,
as the phrase goes, respect. Still not enough to keep you alive.”

The last ashes of my twin crosses, burnt onto the platform floor, shimmered out. I wrapped my arms around Oda, felt her tense against the touch, looked into her eyes and smiled, hoped she would see my apology for what we had to do.

“OK,” we murmured. “OK. You’ve got us. A sorcerer can’t stop you, the Midnight Mayor can’t stop you.”

A distant rumbling, a distant breath of cold air in the tunnel, a distant grumbling of wheels, a distant white light in the darkness . . .

Too distant.

“You missed something,” I said. “About me.”

“What was that?” he asked, sounding genuinely interested.

A cold push of air from the tunnel, a pair of white lights grinding

down towards us, an asterisk running across the indicator board, wiping out all previous statements, clean slate, end of the line, goodnight, good luck, reload, reboot . . .

“
Us
.”

And holding Oda by the waist, we pulled both her and us head-first onto the tracks.

 

There is an idea: the live rail.

We have always liked it.

Electricity, alive.

They say: don’t step on the live rail.

We tumbled over tracks rumbling with the approach of black razored metal wheels, slipped into the mouse-infested, litter-filled dip in the middle, and I heard Oda gasp as her nose came within an inch from the live rail, raised on its insulating white supports just above the height of the tracks. She tensed, pushing back against my weight, and above us I heard Mr Pinner start to laugh, start to clap.

She looked at us, saw the blue of our eyes, whispered, “No.”

We grinned, raised our hand burnt with the sign of the Midnight Mayor, and as the approaching train saw us in the blackness of the station and slammed on its brakes, too late, much too late, we pulled Oda closer to our chest, and wrapped our fingers around the raised bar of the live rail.

It takes a lot of electricity to move a train.

The shock of it blasted us up and sideways, pitched us into the air, fingers fused to the metal by a screaming, writhing tangle of white lightning snakes that bit and snapped with poisoned teeth, scorched the air black and sent furious screaming sparks spurting out of every join of the tracks. We let it burn through us, set our blood on fire, our skin on fire, our eyes on fire, let it blaze and scream and burn and dance and flash and flare and fury and

caught it up beneath our feet, let it fill us, sucked in every drop from the live rail and then a little more, fed on the left-over neon clinging in the snuffed-out tubes, ate up the orange glow from the indicator board, sucked in the taste of black blood running down the rails, feasted on the screaming of the train’s brakes, and more still

We spread our wings.

We dragged in the fire from the live rail, the rushing of the train, the pumping of the cold air in the tunnels, the light, the darkness, the blood, the heat in my stomach that I couldn’t give, the strength in my blood that I didn’t have left, the warmth in Oda’s body clutched to our chest; we dragged in a million million million ghosts who had died to dig the tunnels, who had lived their lives on the train going from here to there and back again, touch in, touch out, ticket, escalator, platform, chair, a million, million, million dead and living things who every day prayed for their train to come for the seat to be free for the paper to be left for the strangers to be kind for the journey to be swift for the ticket to be cheap for the stairs to be empty for the tunnels to be cool for the announcers to be gentle. And with all this life poured into the tunnels beneath the streets, was it any surprise that here, of all places,
here
, we could grow a pair of blue electric wings?

Was it any surprise that here, where the business was movement, with our hand burnt to the live rail, we could fly?

The electricity blasted us into the tunnel ahead of the incoming train and we let it. We lifted our feet from the earth and let the fire burn across our flesh and outside our flesh and with a single beat of the burning blue electric wings, beautiful and immortal as the darkness in the tunnels, we flew into the waiting depth of the Underground.

 

When the first train was built, back in Victoria’s time, the passengers who rode it were terrified that having got to about 40 m.p.h., they would die, the human frame unable to support such strains.

NASA probably had a similar worry the first time they blasted a man at 11 kilometres per second into outer space. But that worked out OK.

This wasn’t escape velocity. The London Underground was not designed for rocket testing. On the other hand, the electricity that fuelled our flight, gave us blue electric wings whose brightness split the darkness into a sapphire blur as we passed by, was intended to power a train at reasonable speeds, and we were a lot lighter than a train.

Ergo, a lot faster.

The tunnel turned and bent, the darkness ahead parting to the blue fire spilling off every inch of our flesh, the live rail lit up as far as I could see with writhing white lightning. Behind us we shed dollops of blue sparks that hissed and crackled on the black floor of the tunnel; turns and twists took care of themselves, we were anchored now to the live rail, feeding off every volt it had to spare to propel ourself along. A flash of light to our right might have been South Wimbledon station passing us by, but it was gone in the speed of a blink, the cries of the passengers ducking down from the spinning blaze of flame that was what we were

lost in an instant, snatched away by the scramble of the parting air to get out of our way or be lost to the flame. Another flicker of light ahead, seen and gone