“I can kill the sorceress.”
“He’s coming, Mr Pinner is coming, end of the line, damnation, give me back my hat, he’s coming please . . .”
“You couldn’t even be Midnight Mayor, could you?” breathed Oda.
“Please,” I whispered. “I saved your life. I could have let you die.
Please. Help me. I saved your life! Oda!”
She grunted in reply, lifted her fingers from my throat, turned to Anissina, twitching on the floor. She leant over her, lowered her face in so close it was not an inch off Anissina’s, breathed gentle, steady hot breath into her clammy face, and, as softly as a mother rubbing a child’s tummy, pushed the barrel of the gun into Anissina’s belly.
The woman screamed.
I turned my head away, tried to bury my cheek in the floor.
“Where is the hat?” asked Oda.
Screamed so loud the floor hummed with it.
We closed our eyes, counted, maths, if I am one eight millionth of a city what does this make me in percentage terms? Do the maths, divide and . . .
“Where is Ngwenya’s hat?”
“He’ll . . . he’ll . . . he’ll . . .”
“Mr Pinner will flay you alive, yes,” breathed Oda softly. “Of course he will. But the thing is this. You’ve been shot in the stomach. Right now, the contents of your bowels are spilling into your bloodstream. Faeces, gastric juices, stomach acids, digestive enzymes. They’re going to get into your veins, and start eating. The acid is going to burn you from the inside out, the enzymes are going to gobble away at your body until there’s nothing left for them to chew on,
digest
you from the inside out, the faeces spilt from your stomach are going to turn your blood to sewage. If you’re fortunate, septic shock will take you out before the worst of it. If not, then having the skin peeled from your bones will seem the balmy mercy of the Almighty compared to the death you will endure. And that’s just the start. Damnation awaits you, Alderman. I cannot say what manner of suffering it will be. That is a secret that will be shared only by you and the Devil, and
he
does not care for reason. Where is the hat? Anissina? Where is the traffic warden’s hat?”
“H-H-Harlun and Phelps,” she whispered. “Boom Boom took it, didn’t r-r-realise its power, what it m-meant. I hid it in Harlun and Phelps. I th-th-thought they would n-never . . .”
Oda stroked Anissina’s chin with the end of the gun. “God loves you,” she whispered. “Remember that, when the Devil comes. God is suffering as you suffer, crying out when you cry out. He loves you. He weeps for you. He sees that there is only one way for you to learn.”
So saying, she leant down, and carefully planted a kiss on Anissina’s forehead. She stood up briskly, looked down at me and said, “Are you still not dead?”
“Still
alive
,” we replied. “Ta-da!”
“Do you want to end this?” she asked.
“Depends on what you mean.”
And for a moment, Oda, psycho-bitch, almost smiled.
“Lucky man,” she said, and bending down, helped to lift us up. “He must love you too, in His own special way.”
She pulled me to my feet.
I felt things moving beneath my skin that shouldn’t have been moving, and we bit so hard on the scream that we caught our tongue between our teeth and for a moment, the pain was almost a welcome relief.
Anissina whimpered, “Swift? Help me?”
We looked down at her.
“Remember Vera?” we asked.
She didn’t answer.
Oda helped us limp away.
Hackney Marshes.
Running. There was blood running between my fingers, blood running down from my side, too fast, too hot. I hissed, “Shot . . .”
“I know. Come on.”
Grass and bumps and sticky wet mud and little flowing streams that sunk up to our ankles and reeds that pulled at our legs and I couldn’t see magic here, now, not tonight, but there it was, the bright neon glow of the city, so close, just a little more and there it would be, electric fire!
“Nearly . . . there . . .” we breathed.
“I know. Come on!”
She’d stolen a car, a Volkswagen Passat, the most boring car manufactured by man, parked it on the edge of the marshes. She opened the back door, threw me in, stepped into the driver’s seat, turned on the ignition, handbrake down, clutch up, boy-racer to the full. I groaned and rolled onto my back in the passenger seats, fumbled for a torch in my pocket, found it, shone it down onto my own abdomen. Something small and angry had torn a jagged smile in the upper-left side of my flesh, just below the floating ribs, and blood was now merrily dribbling out from the grin. I cursed and swore and threw in a bit of blasphemy just in case, groped in my satchel, found the first-aid kit, unravelled pads and bandages and pressed them in, but no sooner was one white pad applied than it had turned scarlet with blood and had to be tossed aside.
“Oda,” I croaked.
“I know,” she snapped. “You’re losing plenty of blood, which probably means it grazed your spleen. You’ll get anxious, your heart rate will pick up, your breathing will accelerate. Then you’ll lose more blood and get calmer, but that won’t be a good thing. Your blood pressure will plummet, your head will spin, your peripheral nervous system will essentially shut down. Then you’ll just collapse. You’ve got a few hours. Like I said: could be worse. Lucky man.”
“Anissina . . .”
“We’re going to Harlun and Phelps. If we don’t find the hat, I’ll kill her. Ngwenya. I’ll kill her, Swift. And if you try and stop me, I’ll kill you. I’ll tell the Aldermen everything. I know . . . why . . . you protected Penny Ngwenya. It was . . . human weakness. The Midnight Mayor cannot be so . . . soft. If you cannot break the spell, I will gun her down. Do we have an understanding?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Lie still, apply pressure, and consider whether you need a deity in your life.”
“I thought it was too late to repent.”
“Never too late to repent. Just too late to avoid your fate.”
“Thank you.”
“Any time.”
“I mean, thank you.”
“I know what you meant.”
The lights of the sleeping city.
What time was it?
“Oda?”
“Yes?”
“For any hurt I did you. For any hurt you think I have done. For all that there needs to be something said, that I . . . that we did not know to say. I am sorry.”
“It sounds like a death speech.”
“I mean it.”
“I know. Too late, sorcerer - it’s too late. But thank you for trying, Matthew Swift. It means nothing to me, but I imagine for you, it is important.”
Sleeping roads, sleeping streets. Even Bethnal Green was turning out the lights, the buses slinking away up Mare Street towards the mysteries of Dalston, Clapton, Stamford Hill and the north. I watched the lights go by the back window, pressed my fingers into the blood seeping from my skin. Anxiety, high breathing, high heart rate. What did a spleen do anyway? Little mortal little fleshly death by a dribble at a time.
Railway lines overhead, a face that might have been ours reflected in the black background behind the glass. Names with a hundred years of history slipping by on the street signs, the shadows watching as we swished through the soaking streets. Midnight Mayor, protector of the city, stay and fight for stones, shadows, memories, strangers, family, whatever, pick one, pick them all, all of them valid reasons to die, if that’s what it came down to. Three Colts Lane, Dunbridge Street, Shoreditch, Grimsby Street, Oakly Yard, Great Eastern Street, Holywell Lane, Curtain Road, Willow Street, Blackall Street, Old Street, City Road - and there it was! The silver-skinned dragon holding his shield, red crosses in red crosses, eyes too mad to comprehend, tongue rolled out in a hiss against the night-time air! We almost jerked with the touch of it, felt its magic hit us like electricity; closed our eyes and the shadows were still there, bleeding into the red lines of the city cross,
Domine dirige nos
, Lord lead us, trust in a higher power, a miracle day by day,
this
was what it meant to be the Midnight Mayor, mad eyes in a dragon, City Road, Finsbury Road, Moorgate, Swan Alley, White Horse Lane, Kings Yard, so close, Masons Alley, Basinghall Street, just there, Aldermanbury Square.
Empty, sleeping; but the lights still burnt in all the offices around, windows into an empty room, a thousand empty rooms, coats hung up on the backs of chairs, pictures of kids and wives, executive toys that distracted from any work and even more the personal touches of the little empty rooms. A model yacht on the lit-up sixth floor of a sleeping office tower, a conference room, table covered in old coffee cups, a meeting room with pads laid out in perfect geometric style, a floor entirely of computers in rows, an office with a tiny roll-out crazy golf course stuck into a corner. Close your eyes and you could imagine the windows of the lit-up office blocks watching you back, a thousand insectoid eyes peering out of the towers, just like the shadows.
“Oda!” we hissed. “Can you see?”
“See what?” she grunted, dragging us out of the back of the car.
“Look!” We waved at the lit-up towers.
“See
what
?”
“Magic!” we exclaimed. “Can’t you see? The city is the magic, we made it, we made the magic out of the stones and the streets and the life! How can you not
see
?!”
“This had better be the pain talking,” she growled, and half dragged, half carried us across the lit-up neon courtyard to Harlun and Phelps.
The doors were locked, but seeing us, the security guard lounging sleepy inside unlocked them, the great swish spinning door beginning to turn automatically as they sensed our approach. We staggered inside; Oda half-dropped me in the foyer, marched up to the security guard, grabbed him by the lapels and snapped, “Get Earle, get the Aldermen, get a doctor and then get out of here. Do you understand me?”
He nodded numbly.
“Good. Which floor was Anissina’s office on?”
We took the lift to almost the top floor. I sagged against the glass walls as we rose, breathed the lights stretching beneath me. Our palm left a bloody print on the pristine glass. We could feel blood running down the outside of our leg, too much blood, couldn’t sustain this for long.
The doors opened on a dimmed floor of white strip lights and silent computers. I staggered, fell onto my hands and knees as we clambered out of the lift. Oda dragged me up. “Come on!” she snarled. “Think of Ngwenya, think of her brains on the wall, her blood on the wall, little Penny Ngwenya dead, because if you die now and don’t find this hat, don’t undo her curse, then I swear to God I’ll do it. You thinking of this, Matthew? You watching Ngwenya die, you hearing her skull burst, her blood splatter? Are you there yet?”
I nodded dumbly, she dragged me along the corridor. Pale beige doors on either side, white walls you could stick a pencil in, pictures of valued clients and random token works of could-be art, strange bits of sculpture next to the coffee machines and beside the water coolers, potted plants so bright and shiny they should have been made of rubber and saved everyone the effort. Names on the doors; I recognised Kemsley’s as we went by, locked doors, venetian blinds lowered over the window panes.
(
You
are a fucking disgrace to the office of Midnight Mayor.
Thanks. I really needed a skinned mystical projection to tell me that.)
We passed a kitchen, Oda paused for a minute, propped me against the door frame, grabbed a green first-aid kit from above the sink, then dragged me on. “Come on!” she screamed, almost lifting me off my feet as we lurched down the corridor.
And there it was.
Ms Anissina, Senior Executive, engraved in boring white plastic on a boring beige door. The door was locked. Oda kicked it and got nowhere, Oda shot it and got in. The office inside was quiet, dull, uninspired. A harmless company picture, showing a couple of trees by a waterfall, hung on one wall; a grey filing cabinet had been wedged into a corner; a shelf above drooped under the weight of uninspiring cardboard folders. The desk had a laptop, not a computer, a thin white thing too trendy to be plugged into anything else, next to an immaculate white pad of paper and a line of perfectly ordered biros. Oda dumped me in the nearest chair, started sweeping folders off the shelves.
I opened a drawer, saw a stapler, a couple of highlighters, a notepad, a box of paperclips. I opened the one beneath it, found papers, full of numbers, including figures that were surely too big to have anything to do with money, except possibly in the City. I opened the one beneath that. There was nothing in it except a calendar. The calendar read, “
Take That 2001!
” It was worn, battered, fondled, and clearly much loved. I flicked through it. Various male faces plonked on various male bodies, vacuum-sucked into distressingly tight trousers. They pouted, smiled, frothed and flirted at me out of the semi-cardboard pages. I put it carefully on the desk by Anissina’s computer and stared at it long and hard.
We wondered what it was like, being digested from the inside out.
I stuttered, “Oda?”
I heard a bang from behind me, flinched away instinctively from the noise, raising my hands to cover my face. When death did not ensue, I looked carefully back. Oda had dragged open the drawers of the filing cabinet, and was going through them, throwing paper and files onto the floor in great armfuls.
“Oda?” we stumbled again.
“There’s stuff in the first-aid kit,” she snapped back.
We picked up the kit in our bloody hands, tried to undo the zip; our hands were shaking. Anxiety first, then calmer and goodbye to the peripherals, that’s what she’d said; and we’d been grateful to not fully understand her meaning. Bandages and padding, not enough; antiseptic, as if that wasn’t the least of our concerns.
“Oda?”
Silence from behind me. I half-turned in the chair, kicking it round to see.