ACK MY HAT

I looked at Judith. “This sounds strange, but I don’t suppose you saw three mad women with a cauldron of boiling tea pass by this way?”

“No,” she replied. The polite voice of reasonable people scared of exciting the madman.

“Flash of light? Puff of smoke? Erm…” I tried to find a polite way of describing the symptoms of spontaneous teleportation without using the dreaded “teleportation” word. I failed. I slumped back into the sand. What kind of mystic kept a spatial vortex at the bottom of their cauldrons of tea anyway?

“Have you called the police?”

“No,” she replied. Then casually, “Did you jump?”

Her eyes flickered to Tower Bridge. I shook my head. “No. Pushed. Don’t call the police.”

I staggered up. The rolling waters of the river didn’t wash like the sea, but crawled, by imperceptible advancement. The long straight lines of the “A” filled with foam.

CK MY HAT

I thought about the three women and their cauldron. I looked up at the Tower of London. I looked down at Judith.

I said, “Listen to me. This is very important. I need to know about the ravens in the Tower.”

I had to see it to believe it. I bought an overpriced ticket like all the good tourists who waddled in orderly queues between the barriers guiding you this way to that tower, that way to the crown jewels. The battlemented walls shut out all the city’s traffic noise, creating within the old courtyards of the Tower an eerie stillness. The air smelt of rain to come. A few yards from the executioner’s block, left out as something macabre to please the children, was a chained-off patch of grass. A small sign announced in four different languages that there were nine ravens in the tower, named after Norse gods, and legend held that should ever the ravens leave the Tower of London, then the city would be doomed. Cursed, damned, fire, water, crumble, crash: pick one, pick them all.

Even if the legend was a lie, time and belief gives everything power.

Next to that was a sign saying, Please Do Not Feed The Birds.

The grass was empty.

I took Judith, Here To Help by the arm—customer sales assistant, Tower of London, and incidentally the only person who knew first aid and had the guts to try it on floating bodies—and said calmly, “If you do not show me the ravens, I will throw myself off Tower Bridge and this time the tide will be high and you won’t be able to save me, capisce?”

She was at heart a kind woman. She wasn’t about to say no to a guy she thought had tried to commit suicide.

Below one of the towers in the wall, in a deep whitewashed room that hummed with ventilation fans and poor plumbing, were nine neat little coffins laid out on a neat little table. Inside each coffin was a black-feathered dead bird.

Judith said, “They just died. A few days ago. All of them—just died. We thought maybe poison but they hadn’t been fed by anyone except… and there’ll be an autopsy but they all just… we’re getting replacement birds, flown in special, secret like, because we don’t want the tourists to know, but they just… they all just died.”

We reached out, appalled, fascinated, and touched a feather.

“You mustn’t!” she hissed. “I’ll be in enough trouble already!”

We drew back our hand, hypnotised by the unblinking black eyes staring back at us from the little coffins.

“Was there… a message?” I stammered. “The night they died, a message… something written on a wall? Left on a phone? Something you didn’t expect to see?”

She licked her lips. “You didn’t try to off yourself, did you?”

“No, I was pushed into a cauldron of tea and woke up here, and…” we laughed, “there’s no such thing as coincidence. Not in my line of work. Was there a message?”

Nine black eyes looking up from the sides of nine black heads on nine dead feathered bodies. Judith nodded, sucking in air. “There was something painted up on one of the walls. We washed it off. Don’t know how they got it there, not easy, you know, it is a castle! It said… someone wrote, ‘give me back my hat’. In big white letters up on the wall where the ravens liked to sit. Just ‘give me back my hat’… Who pushed you?”

“Three ladies. With a cauldron, like I said. I’ve got to go.”

“Go where?”

“Anywhere,” we replied. “Anywhere that isn’t here. Judith, thanks for all your help, and now take a traveller’s good advice, and get out of the city. Get out now.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s true,” I answered. “All of it. The ravens in the Tower are dead. That’s a curse, that’s damnation. Someone is out to destroy the city and I have no idea who it is.” I chuckled, “Which is terrific, because I’m the one who is supposed to stop them! So run. Because I have no idea how I’m going to do it.”

I don’t know if she took my advice.

There were other things we had to know.

I nearly ran to Cannon Street station, an iron shed in a street one block up from the river’s edge. Opposite its square mouth was a sports shop, a small plaque nailed to the door. The plaque said: “Within these walls is the London Stone, an ancient Roman altar from which all the distances in Britain were measured. It is said that should the London Stone ever be destroyed, the city will be cursed.”

I went inside the shop. A young man with curly blond hair and a Northern tinge to his voice came up to me and tried to sell me a pair of running shoes for more money than I lived on in a month. We took him by the shoulders so hard he flinched, stared straight into his eyes and said, “We have to see the London Stone.”

“Um,” he mumbled.

“Show us!”

“Uh…”

“Show us!”

“It’s gone,” he stammered.

“Gone where?”

“Someone, um, someone, um, hit it and…”

“Where is it?”

“Broken.”

“When?”

“A few days ago.”

“The London Stone is broken?”

“Um…”

“Was there a message? Something written? On the walls, on the windows, was there a message?”

He pointed at a window. “On the…”

I hissed in frustration, let him go, pushing him back harder than I’d meant into a pile of badminton rackets, and stormed from the shop. The front had a number of metal shutters that could roll down over the windows. One of them was already closed in preparation for the evening. On it, someone had written in tall white letters:

GIVE ME B

We thumped it so hard our knuckles bled.

I ran through the London streets, not caring now about my own aching limbs. I was flying on rush-hour magic, the buzz of neon propelling me along with the swish of my trailing coat lightening the weight of my body, feeding on the raw hum of the city streets. Rush hour was a good time for sorcerers, when the streets shimmered with life, so much life pumped up into the air, just waiting to be tapped. Our shoes—that weren’t our shoes—puffed and huffed as we ran, feeling our way by the shape of the paving stones, smelling our way by the thickness of the traffic fumes, guided by the numbers on the buses, weaving through the commuters on the streets like the deer that had once danced here through the forest. It was the same magic; the same enchantment.

The nearest piece of the London Wall I knew of was tucked down to the south of the Barbican, amidst bright tall offices and renovated stone guildhalls. Its red crumbled stones had been incorporated into an excavated garden where the bank workers and clerks of the city ate their sandwiches, all shiny fountain and well-tended geraniums. As I caught sight of the Wall I thought for a naive moment that it would be all right, saw clean stones, well loved, standing along one side of this little dip full of greenery. Then as I descended the wooden steps to the garden, by the light of the windows all above, I could see more of the Wall, and we laughed, cried, shouted, bit our lip, all and none and everything at once.

On the ancient Roman stones of the Wall of London, someone had written, of course someone had written:

GIVE ME BACK MY HAT

I slumped on a bench beneath the wall, and let the pain of my aching body reassert itself over the heady rush of streetside magics. I found my left hand unconsciously rubbing at the sticky bandages of my right. I peeled off my mitten, then unwrapped the tea-stained cotton. Beneath, drawn across my skin, were the two thin crosses, one lodged in the corner of the other, bright red, still a little tender, but otherwise sealed into my flesh, like an old friend left over from my mum’s womb.

We were the Midnight Mayor. Guardian protector of the city. And now the ravens in the Tower were dead; the London Stone was broken; the Wall of London cursed like all the rest. The ancient, blessed, and secret things that had always protected the city. And now someone had destroyed them, defaced them, cursed them, damned them.

Cursed, damned, doomed, burnt, drowned, crushed, crumbled, cracked, fallen, faded, split, splintered—pick one, pick them all.

None of our business.

Not our problem.

What were we supposed to do about it?

I looked down at my shoes.

Swift has the shoes.

GIVE ME BACK MY HAT

END OF THE LINE

I am the Midnight Mayor.

Say it a few times until you get used to the idea.

My city.

I put my head in my hands, squeezed back against the aching in my skull. It didn’t make it better. I raised my head to the orange-black sky, saw the flickering lights of a passing plane, turned down to the earth at my feet, the shoes that weren’t my own, looked up at the wall. The ancient wall, protector of the city, magic and history all muddled up in one and I saw it again, what I should have seen before, plastered in great white letters:

GIVE ME BACK MY HAT

I reached into my satchel. I pulled out the phone with Nair’s sim card in it. I thumbed it on.

I dialled the number for Dudley Sinclair.

Just because I didn’t trust him didn’t mean he couldn’t be useful.

A while passed before a voice answered. It was surly, with a slight lisp. “Yeah? Who’s this?”

I said, “This is Matthew Swift. I need to speak to Sinclair.”

Silence for a second—the kind of second it takes to recognise a name, dislike it, and muster a polite reply. “OK. Hold on.”

I held on. This involved hearing tunes by the Beatles played on what sounded like a reed nose-flute. I held on a little longer, drumming my fingers. It’s hard to stay psyched up for anything in the face of a nose-flute rendition of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”. We nearly hung up.

When Sinclair spoke, his voice boomed out so loud and sudden that I nearly dropped the handset. “Matthew! So good to hear from you! How are you keeping?”

“Mr Sinclair,” I said. “I think you should know that someone has cursed the city.”

Not a beat, not a moment. “Really, dear boy?” he intoned. “How tedious of them. Any idea who?”

“No. But the ravens in the Tower are dead, and the London Stone is broken, and the Wall of London has been painted on in big white paint, and the Midnight Mayor was flayed alive without ever actually being touched, by a man who has no smell and is therefore probably not a man. Someone is systematically destroying all the magical defences that the city has.”

“What a pain,” sighed Sinclair. “And you have no idea who might be indulging in this scheme?”

“No.”

“Pity. I suppose this means that all sorts of nasties are going to get out onto the streets and start tormenting the innocent. Well, so much for the Christmas bonus.”

“Mr Sinclair, there’s something else I think you should know.”

“Of course, dear boy, of course, you know I always enjoy our mutually beneficial working arrangements!”

“Mr Sinclair,” I said, taking a deep breath, “I am the Midnight Mayor.”

“Really? Good grief, when did that happen?”

“About the same moment that the last Midnight Mayor expired down the telephone.”

“Oh, I see. How… unexpected. Yes, really, that is… that is most unusual and rather remarkable. I suppose it must have come as something of a surprise to you too?”

“I’m a little freaked, yes.”

“Well, naturally, yes, of course, yes, you would be! But naturally. Yes…” His voice trailed off. “You know, Matthew, I am very rarely surprised by much I hear these days, and I must admit, in a spirit of frankness and free exchange, your phone call and this somewhat remarkable information concerning your current mythical status is undeniably different. Are you absolutely sure of all this?”

“Yes.”

“Including being the Midnight…”

“Yes. It makes a sickening sense. Mr Sinclair—I think I might need your help.”

“Well, naturally, anything for you, dear boy, naturally, naturally!”

“I’ve seen the face of the… the creature that killed Nair.”

“Creature? Not a man, then, a creature?”

“Yes.”

“And you say you saw him?”

“Yes.”

“Remarkable! Yes, that is a remarkable thing, I must admit, I was wondering how you might have…”

“There was a fox that saw the whole thing. We shared a kebab and a few reminiscences. Mr Sinclair—the creature that killed Nair didn’t even touch him. I’ve never seen anything like it. And we have no reason to believe that, if it killed Nair for being Mayor, then it won’t do exactly the same to us, and we don’t know if we can stop it.”

Silence, a long while. I have almost never known Sinclair to be silent.

“All right,” he said at last. “Let’s meet.”

Purpose.

Purpose meant reason.

Reason meant thought.

Thoughts meant…

… dead men not humans just meat dead meat on the slab dead Midnight Mayor ten thousand paper cuts not even touched dead meat lost of all faces and nature and just…

Stop it.

… dead ravens GIVE ME BACK MY HAT dead ravens broken stones shattered wards broken protections GIVE ME BACK MY HAT end of the line end of the line make me a shadow on the wall no smell no smell just killed him dead meat and the fox hid no smell end of the line end of the line I am Midnight Mayor Midnight Mayor dead on a slab kill an idea kill an idea kill a city kill a city idea ward protection something coming make me a shadow…

We didn’t like thoughts.

We tried to muffle them in our walking.

Walking meant rhythm.

Fleet Street. Pinstriped trousers, perfect silk suits, swished-back hair, black leather briefcases. Lawyers and bankers, the common, rich men of the city. Did these men smell? Hard to tell in the exhaust from the buses, the coffee from the open doors, cakes and the smell of yeast from the expensive bakeries, perfect drenched cleanliness from the cafés, stiff cleaning powders from the dry-cleaners. Did their hearts beat, did they breathe, did their throats draw in and out inside the collar of their shirts? To look was to stop walking too fast, to walk slow was to think, to walk slow was to be noticed, and who knew who would be watching? And we saw endless blotchy anonymous faces blurred into pinkish-grey passing shadows moving in and out of the streetlamp glows, sharp polished leather shoes snapping on the paving stones, white shirts and crisp ties, and what colour had the tie of Nair’s killer been? We couldn’t remember, it had been smell and terror and sense and blood. Ten thousand little deaths all at once, every one stinging sharper than the finest razor on the flesh, all at once, ten thousand little deaths from a face… just a face in a pinstripe suit. And it didn’t get much more pinstriped than Fleet Street.

This was my city.

Royal Courts of Justice. News crews, knobbly stone spikes and bright white lights. Aldwych. St Clement’s Church, ringing out “Oranges and Lemons” above the tree-shaded bus stops, the London School of Economics, all chips, ring-binders and scuttling shoes, a bank, the BBC, statues of big ladies holding burning torches, the Indian embassy, swastikas and curly lettering in stone—and did that kid over there in the hood have a face? Cafés and theatres. Bright lights that drove away shadow and imagination. Cheap sandwiches, packed bus stops. We could taste the magic on the air, bright, hot, red, like strong curry settling over our stomach, filling our veins, pushing us further forward, giving us courage. We couldn’t imagine these lights ever going out, no harm here, too many people, too much brightness, too much we could use.

Drury Lane, one show that had run for ever, one show that would die in a week, five different kinds of restaurant and one warehouse piled full of furniture that no one would ever sit on, and everyone would always admire. I went for the backstreets, wiggling round the back of Covent Garden, watching my back, running my fingers over the railings, round the streetlamps, over the walls, listening with much more than ears, staying smart. I did two whole circuits of Covent Garden before I finally chose to go inside, looping the loop round the back of St Paul’s Church, its yard shut up for the evening, round the cobbled street that threaded its quiet way south of Long Acre, back towards Bow Street, into the Royal Opera House. Glass, steel, marbled pillar and thick red carpet. I rode bright new escalators up past a glasshouse laden with candle-lit restaurant tables. In the bar I ordered a packet of peanuts, a big glass of orange juice and rights to the darkest, tightest corner there was. It cost the price of a small dowry, but we were not in the mood to complain. There we sat and watched.

Theatre-goers in London’s West End are unique unto themselves. Opera-goers are a step beyond. Women in big throat-clutcher necklaces, fat silver brooches pinned above their silk-clad breasts; jackets that looked like shawls, coats that wished they were cloaks left over from some forgotten era when the top hat was still sexy, handbags on gold chains, fine-rimmed spectacles balanced on the end of ski-slope noses. For the men, suit and tie was still the norm, but even here they’d raised the bar. Walking penguins complete with silk handkerchief from a waistcoat pocket bustled against 100 per cent tartan sleeves, who in turn shuffled round with murmurs of “excuse me, excuse me, yes, thank you, excuse me” in suits of sweetcorn yellow and navy blue, to suggest that while they were dressed up for the evening, it was a casual thing that had cost great time and expense in becoming so.

Very few people stood out from this silken medley; I feared I was one of them. There were also an American couple, all big bum bags and open necks; a cluster of Japanese tourists who nodded and bobbed at everything they saw; and a pair of students whose big hair and carefully slashed jeans cried out “arty type”. Whoever had said in the guidebooks that the bum bag was a sensible device against theft had lied; no single item of dressware ever invented cried out “mug me” more than a pouch of zip-up plastic suspended by your groin.

I huddled deeper into the shadows of my corner. There was magic here, expectation, secrets, trickery, illusion, they were the business of the place and that I could use. People were more willing to sink into a spell, more willing not to notice, and both these things could keep me safe. I wrapped myself in the stuff, dragged thick blankets of shadow over me, spun distraction and expectation into the air and let every eye that glanced across my corner see nothing more than a shape in a shadow and then forget and move on to more important things. I drank my orange juice and ate my peanuts: opera house special, coated in spices and roasted in a Mediterranean sun.

Dudley Sinclair arrived three minutes before the curtain went up. He wore full evening dress complete with semi-cloak draped off his great round shoulders; his paunch was warping within the straitjacket waistcoat he’d somehow welded around himself. He wasn’t alone. I recognised Charlie, his usual companion, PA, secretary, assistant, whatever. I smelt Charlie, even in the bustle of the room: the rolling treacle smell of shapeshifters who’d spent too much time as a rat.

They didn’t bother to look for me, and I didn’t bother to introduce myself. I sat and watched and waited, looking to see if they’d brought anyone else. If they had, “anyone” was doing a good job of blending in. The bell rang as a final warning, the crowds sloshed through the open doors to the auditorium. Sinclair went with them, Charlie remained by the door. I waited until he was the last person there; then since he was, and since I was, he saw me.

He gestured impatiently. I finished my drink and walked towards him; he handed me a ticket. “Paranoid,” he snapped.

“Stabbed and burnt,” I explained, gesturing vaguely at my battered skin.

Charlie merely grunted.

Sinclair had got a box. We felt instantly uncomfortable, locked away in a little upholstered cabin with this great fat man and his friend. I had always imagined that when the revolution began and the guillotine went up, people who had their own private boxes at the opera would be the first for the chop.

I sat uneasily in my chair, shuffling it closer to the wall, wanting to get my back against something more solid. Sinclair said, “Matthew! So glad you could make it! Do you like opera?”

“Not sure,” I mumbled. “Never seen any.”

“Well then, this will be an experience. A chance to enlighten the uninitiated. Champagne?”

There was a picnic hamper set on a small folding table in front of us. We began to understand the point of boxes after all. I said, “I’d better not drink,” as we took a sandwich. We never say no to food. I’m always a little surprised to see our reflection looking so thin.

“You look tense.”

I shot him a sour look. “Lincoln was assassinated in a theatre.”

“But at least the assassin was caught, no? Matthew! You are in a dreadful way, aren’t you? You should relax a little. I’m sure all this business with the city being damned and you being responsible will be sorted out without too much fuss, and when it’s all over, you’ll look back and laugh and say, ‘thank goodness that’s over, what an anecdote for the pub’. Now sit back… and enjoy one of man’s greatest art forms.”

We tried our best.

Man’s greatest art form, if that’s what it was, involved a cast and chorus of approximately forty people dressed in anything from tight tights and a clinging top to Viennese ballgowns of the kind that required you to turn sideways to get through any door. We regretted that we understood so much of it. The music of itself seemed beautiful, even moving, but we couldn’t reconcile ourself to the lyrics, which much of the time seemed to revolve around bickering over who sent who what letter.

I did my best, letting the spell roll over me, trying to wash out all the thoughts of fear and confusion. We had always loved a good story, and I wanted, just for a moment, or a lot of very long moments, as the show turned out to be, to feel safe, and forget to think with words.

Sounds and music helped take the trembling away, helped hold us still, if only for a while. We let it. Sinclair had probably planned it that way. He was smart, when it came to things like that.

At the interval, gins and tonics were brought to the door by a soft-footed man to whom Sinclair tipped a fiver. Charlie gave me a glass. I said, “I’m on painkillers, I’d better not.”

“Never mind,” replied Sinclair merrily, and before we could object he had taken the glass back from us and handed it without a glance to Charlie. Charlie downed it in one, like it was vodka.

The second half didn’t do much to resolve the crises of the first, but seemed to forget about them and carry on in its own strange way with a new story, involving a fool and a priest. All things were eventually sorted, courtesy of two stabbings and a bout of consumption that, for all it killed the woman who sang about it, didn’t seem to get in the way of her vocal control. At the end of each good bit, the audience stood and went as wild as an operatic audience could. We leant on the edge of the box, chin rested on our hands, and watched, fascinated. We had never before encountered the full bizarre, hypnotising strangeness of opera, never imagined it would be so bright and big and loud, and just so much so.

When it was done, the audience cheered and the cast bowed for a brief eternity.

Sinclair clapped nicely and didn’t cheer.

“Rather crude,” he muttered. “Not the finest work.”

Charlie just smiled. It was the smile of a man who’d sat through more opera than the eardrums could take, losing the ability to hear all frequencies in the soprano range, but not missing them one bit.

We drifted out into the departing crowd. It was lateish, that odd hour of the night when it’s justifiable to go to bed, but somehow it’s not honourable. Covent Garden was yellow washes of light and buzzing arcades, open doors and clattering chairs, tinkling music and strumming buskers; still alive, still heaving, despite the biting cold and settling fog, visible as a haze over the streetlamps.

“You won’t say no to a little supper, will you?” said Sinclair, as Charlie carefully wrapped another layer of coat around his boss.

“Supper would be good.”

“Excellent! I know a little place…”

The little place was a restaurant tucked into the tight dark streets between Covent Garden and the Strand, where long ago Dickens had feared every shadow, and thieves had lurked in alleyways now filled with hissing vents and rotting chips. It was the kind of restaurant that you could only go to if you knew about it. There was no menu on the door, no sign above, no indication in the brown-stained windows that, within this plain black door that could have been any stagehands’ exit, here was a place to eat. The sense of unease, which the music had largely suppressed, returned to us.

Inside the door, taking Sinclair’s coat and hanging it up behind great red curtains, was a man in a top hat and white gloves. We stared at him in amazement. He looked at us with barely hidden distaste and said, “May I take your coat, sir?”

I shook my head numbly. “I’d rather keep it.”

“Of course, sir.”

There were a pair of escalators, clad in bronze. One started as we approached, then carried us up a narrow stairwell lined with mirrors, also in bronze, that projected our warped faces at us to infinity. At the top of the stair was more red curtain, swished back by more white gloves, and an interior of dim lighting, copper and bronze, everywhere everything glimmering with twisted faded reflection. I was relieved to see other diners at the tables, and hear the low burble of good—mannered, wine-fed gossip. We were led to a circular table in the middle of the room, with three chairs already in place. We weren’t given a menu; I guessed it was bad manners to ask.

“It’s a very modern style,” offered Sinclair to my look of bewilderment. “The chef here likes to experiment with some interesting ideas… not really my thing, of course, but interesting, nonetheless. An experience.”

He knew us well.

I smiled, nudging a piece of cutlery in front of me that looked like it had escaped from an eye surgeon’s trolley.

“So,” said Sinclair calmly, “you’re the Midnight Mayor.”

“Yup.”

“And how is that working out for you, Matthew?”

“Not too well.”

“No, no, of course, no. It is of course none of my business and I wouldn’t want to give the wrong impression, naturally, naturally, but as a friend I can’t help but notice that you look a little pale.”

“Yes.”

“May I, in fact, make a great leap of judgement, and forgive me if I go astray here, but were you not, indeed, not planning on becoming the Midnight Mayor? It doesn’t seem like the kind of career path you would choose.”

“I didn’t,” I snapped. “The phone rang and I answered and next thing I know, whack. Some arsehole has gone transferring titles down the telephone line and I’ve got a hand like a boiled beetroot and four angry spectres after me.”

“Spectres?”

“Four of them.”

“How unfortunate. I take it the encounter didn’t end too badly?”

“I got one in a beer bottle,” I replied. “The others scarpered. At the time I thought they were sent by the same person who attacked me down the telephone. But now I think about it… they weren’t sent to attack me, they were out looking for the Midnight Mayor. Drawn to it. You can’t have that kind of transference of power without some sort of hitch.”

“Spectres…” murmured Sinclair, “are unusual in this city.”

“Yes.”

Drink arrived—some kind of deep purple goo in a cocktail glass. Sinclair sniffed it and winced. “Yes,” he murmured. “Well, experimental cookery. I believe that it’s supposed somehow to complement the dishes, react with tannins or proteins or some such scientific curiosity. I won’t be offended if you don’t drink it, Matthew. Had you met Nair?”

He knew who the last Midnight Mayor was. Concerned citizens make it their business to know these things.

“No.”

“Interesting.”

I said nothing.

“You know, traditionally, the Midnight Mayor is… shall we call it a role? A duty, perhaps, a responsibility, something a bit more than a title. Passed on by the will of the previous incumbent to a chosen, well-trained and appointed successor. Usually an Alderman. Nair was an Alderman, before he was Midnight Mayor. It has been the way for generations. So why, dear boy, why do you suppose you have ended up with this… remarkable predicament?”

“I don’t know.”

“There must be a reason. Mystic powers, metaphysical forces, fate, destiny, choice, and so on and so forth. No such thing as coincidence, not in your particular, special line of work.”

A plate of… something was brought before us. It looked like mashed intestine garnished with thistles. I poked it nervously with the end of a thing that might have been a fork. I had a feeling the dim light was meant to disguise the full horror of the food. I closed my eyes, we speared a mouthful, and ate it.

Could have been worse.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Charlie sniffing it uneasily. Sinclair tucked in, napkin folded over his collar.

“I assume you’ve done your research, that the city really is damned—not that I doubt it for a minute. I mean, we’ve all heard the rumours, naturally, all seen a few signs and generally agreed that when the Midnight Mayor—I mean Nair—is brutally murdered then things are inclining towards the dubious, if you follow me. You must have seen a few things, asked a few questions—one does not reach these conclusions lightly!”

I said, “ ‘Give me back my hat.’ ”

“I beg your pardon?”

“ ‘Give me back my hat.’ ”

“Did you have a hat, or is this a metaphor the elaborate nature of which currently evades my higher faculties?”

“It’s everywhere. The words, the phrase. I didn’t notice before, didn’t look. But now I’ve started looking, and it’s everywhere. On the pillars below Waterloo Bridge, on the walls in Willesden, above the dead ravens in the Tower, on the shutters of the shop where the London Stone should have stood, on the Wall of London. Give me back my hat.”

“You are suggesting that this quaint request is somehow linked to your predicament?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. But wherever bad things happen, there it is. The ravens in the Tower are dead, the London Stone is broken, the writing is on the Wall. These things have always been protectors. Keeping out the bad things in the night.”

“What ‘bad things’?”

“I have no idea. If I knew that, then odds are the bad things wouldn’t have been kept out to begin with.”

“I see your point.”

“But as you said—spectres aren’t common in London. And they did come looking for me, when I answered the phone. You destroy the defences, kill the ravens, who knows what will come out from beneath the paving stones? Someone deliberately did that, killed the ravens, killed Nair. It can only be bad news.”

“And now you’re in the middle of it,” murmured Sinclair, more to himself than me, prodding a puddle of lumpy goo on his plate that might have been food. “How… controversial.”

“Yes.”

“And the odds are, Nair chose you.”

“Yes. Odds are.”

“Now why do you think he’d do that?”

I hesitated.

“You must have dedicated some thought to the question.”

“I saw the face of the creature that killed him. That killed Nair.”

“Oh? And what did he look like?”

“Just a guy in a suit. Pinstripe suit, ironed, clean. Slicked-back hair. Just… just a guy in a suit. He didn’t even touch him, and there was so much blood and Nair was just… meat and bones by the time he was finished. I’d never seen… we’d never imagined it was… we will not die like that.”

Sinclair leant forward, folding his chubby fingers together. “Ah. I think I understand.”

“He had no smell. The fox saw it all, and we asked the fox, and the fox smelt nothing. The creature that killed Nair wasn’t human. A guy in a suit and he wasn’t human. Nair wouldn’t have died if he wasn’t Midnight Mayor. That’s the reasoning, isn’t it? You get a brand on the hand, protector of the city: come gobble me up all ye nasties. Come hunt for me, spectres and shadows. We will not die like that!”

“You don’t know what it was? The thing that killed Nair?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“But he looked like a man.”

“Yes.”

“But wasn’t.”

“No.”

“I see. That could be problematic.” Sinclair sighed, rolled back in his chair. Waiters drifted in, took away the plates. They had class—enough class not to ask how the meal was, but just to take it that you’d never eaten anything like it.

Finally, with a great huff that puffed out his red cheeks, Sinclair said, “Tell me about your shoes.”

He asked it so casually, so distantly, that for a moment I didn’t even notice the question. “What?”

“Your shoes.”

“Why do you want to know about them?”

“They’re hardly your style, Matthew, and that interests me.”

“Give me credit,” I snapped.

He smiled, little neat teeth in a round mouth. “Come, now, Matthew, come. You know that I take an interest in these things. The instant I heard that Nair had been killed, I thought ‘trouble’. Then the ravens died, then the Stone was broken, and I thought ‘how tedious, someone is out to destroy the protectors of the city’; and it seemed, in light of all these facts, a sensible, yes indeed, a most sensible precaution to do a little research. Naturally I checked up on you. Who else, I thought, who else can really muster the kind of supernatural clout to do these things? Who else could have killed Nair? Who else might be mad enough to try it?”

Our fingers tightened on the cutlery. “You know us better,” we snarled.

“Yes, perhaps I do. Perhaps that was where the Aldermen made their mistake. I know about the Aldermen, Matthew. We have… mutual connections, in times of crisis. This is a time of crisis. But I’m sure you’ve noticed that. I know about the file in Nair’s desk. It says, ‘Swift has the shoes’. Now what exactly does this mean?”

I looked down at my shoes, then back up at him. I said: “I thought it was nothing.”

“Well, that’s what we thought about the graffiti, and now look where we are. Spectres in the streets. Let’s assume for a moment that nothing is something and feel proud of ourselves for a grasp of the quantum, shall we? Tell me about your shoes. They’re clearly not yours. While I would never judge your fashion sense…”

I snorted.

“… trendy red and black trainers several sizes too big for you are hardly what I would expect. Nair said, ‘Swift has the shoes’. Why would that interest him so much? Why would he make you the Midnight Mayor?”

So, I told him.

*   *   *

First Interlude: The Sorcerer’s Shoes

In which the story of a pair of trainers is recounted
over dinner.

I said: “The shoes aren’t mine. They belong to a kid. His name is Mo. Actually, his name is Michael Patrick Hall, but you can’t be cool and be called Michael unless you’ve been to prison. So everyone calls him Mo. I’ve never met him. But that’s really the point.”

It happened without bothering to explain itself.

I was in Hoxton, the street market. I can’t remember why. It can be hard, coming back. There are things, rituals, routines, that I had taken for granted. Not any more.

Anyway. Hoxton. The word is “trendy”, but I don’t know if it can be rightly applied. It’s a mishmash. Great rows of terraced houses with new paint, next to boarded-up windows. Council estates rotting from the inside out, mould and crumbling dust dripping with water from broken pipes down the walls. New apartment blocks, all bright paint, fresh brick and steel; art galleries tucked in behind the local boozer, yoga centres nestling in between the old rip-off robbed-radio garages. Tandoori and chippy, Chinese takeaway and halal kebabs, kosher bakeries and low squatting greengrocers selling strange growths that might be vegetables. Clubs hidden away underground, the door just a door by day, a purple-lit cavern at night, guarded by big men in black. Social clubs where no one cares about the smoking laws, snooker tables underneath low neon lights; leisure centres, where every shoe squeaks on old varnished floors. Hoxton is a bit of everything, all at once, a low old grandpa squinting at the scuttling kids. There’s magic in Hoxton, if you know where to look for it; enough to start a fire, although you’ll never quite know what will catch.

There was a chippy in the street market. I went there one night, for no good reason. Because we smelt vinegar on the air and cannot resist fish and chips. It was late, maybe elevenish, the shops shut up, the usual left-over debris of the market billowing in the street. Broken splattered fruits, empty cardboard boxes, torn-up plastic bags. The guy serving up the chips was called Kishan, an Indian name, though he was as white and freckled as dirty snow. He had dreadlocks and dyed black hair, and an earring that wasn’t just a piercing—it was a great round gaping hole, the size of a ten-pence piece, pushed out of his lobe by a plastic hoop. We were fascinated and appalled by it. I did my best not to stare.

I had plaice and chips and sat at a table in the window. Everything about the place was plastic, and just two squeaks short of sterile.

I had been there about half an hour when Kishan said, “Closing up, now.”

I shrugged, and ate up faster.

“Hey, mate, you getting back OK?” he asked.

This is not something I usually get asked. Men don’t ask other men if they’re getting home OK, they just assume that beneath the frail, weak exterior lurks a muscle-building kung fu master fearless of ever being mugged. I said, “I’m fine, thanks.”

He was uneasy, we realised. His eyes kept dancing from us to the window and back again. “Yeah,” he muttered. “Sure.”

I followed his gaze out of the window, but saw nothing but the slow rumpling billow of the litter in the streets. We finished the last chips, wiped our hands on the edge of the greasy paper, stood up.

“Hey, are you sure everything’s OK?” I asked.

He looked at me sideways and said, “Yeah. Fine. Yeah. Just fine.”

These things don’t take much translating.

“Well, OK,” I said. “ ’Night.”

And we walked out of the chippy.

There’s a phrase—curiosity killed the cat.

We are very curious. The world, this living world is so full of incident, strangeness, experience, event, happening so busy and so fast, that it’s a wonder you mortals don’t go mad. But you learn how to shut it out, to perceive only that which is relevant to you. You say things like—curiosity killed the cat. So very sensible. Such an unforgivable waste.

We are curious and, like I said, I didn’t have much better to do.

We walked about fifty yards, then looked back. The street was bare. I turned up the collar of my coat feeling for those little enchantments sewn into the lining. Then I walked back. There was a doorway between a chemist and a bakery where I snuggled myself out of the wind. Waiting is an innately boring process. In the old days, men who watched and waited would smoke a cigarette, for something to do. We’d read detective books, devoured the films. Philip Marlowe, loitering in some handy bookshop opposite the staked-out joint, would find a girl with blonde hair, and glasses that transformed her when they came off, and they’d drink bourbon and talk about nothing in particular and everything, without it needing to be said.

That was there; this was Hoxton.

When it started, it was a smell. We thought there was an open drain somewhere, the wind carrying the sharp stench of it. Not turn-your-stomach sewage; it was too precise a bite. It went in via the tear ducts, then wriggled down the nose, and by the time it had drifted into pockets in your lungs and writhed down your gullet there was little sense left for the stomach to be repulsed by.

Then came the sound.

It was like plasters being peeled off hairy skin, all crackles and splats and slow ripping of a thousand tiny needles. It was like thick oil being poured out of a can from a great height, a long way off. I saw the lights go out in the chippy on the other side of the street, the shutters go down. Kishan came outside, and there was dread in his eyes, looking down the street, straight over me like I wasn’t there, and now fear on his face, in every part of him. He had seen this before, I realised, smelt this before. In the chippy, he had been trying to warn me, get me away, and I hadn’t gone. Now he stood in the street, frozen with a familiar fear that was no less for being a regular occurrence. I followed his stare, and realised why.

The thing was yellow-white, with a surface ooze of thick olive-brown that sloshed out from its surface skin and trickled slowly down it like water off a fountain. It had no recognisable shape, but crawled up from a drain in the middle of the street in great splats, from a warping bubble of a body which extended limbs like a jellyfish extends its tendrils. It was a squid out of water, liquid but not so: its surface gleamed with slime but its innards were a viscous mass that split and parted and re-formed as it rose up between the grates like it was made of hot rubber. It had no eyes, no ears, no organs at all that I could see, but moved like a great slobbering amoeba down the street, trailing oil and grease. A snail-squid-amoeba-rubber thing, crawling up from underneath our feet, squeezing up from the sewers. I could give it a name; a simple name for a simple thing. It was a saturate.

Kishan stood in the street staring at it, jaw half-open, dribble pooling in one corner of his mouth. The thing was still gathering its dripping mass out of the drain thirty yards away. I walked briskly up to Kishan, poked him firmly in the shoulder and said, “Oi. You.”

His head turned to look at me, his eyes stayed fixed. I poked him harder. “Oi. Sunshine.”

His eyes flickered to me. “You,” we snapped. “Run.”

His body was smarter than his brain.

He ran.

We looked back at the beige-white thing crawling up from the drains. A puddle of yellow oil was building around its base, trickling out across the tarmac to lubricate the mass of not-flesh that composed the creature’s not-body. I turned my fingers up towards the nearest lamp, snatched a bundle of pinkish light from it and cast it over the creature’s head. It didn’t care. Oblivious of me and my doings, it just kept dragging itself up. Now the size of a dog, now the size of a wolf, now the size of a tuna fish, now the size of a small car, the great mass of its dripping body rose from the drain, a pool of goo spreading around its spilling rolls of fat.

By my stolen light, I could see its body in more detail. Beneath the oil that flowed out of its skin, things moved within it. Half an old yellow chip burst to the surface for a second and then sunk back down; a torn condom slid down its flesh and spilt into the expanding puddle of oil at its base; a lost, broken and gouged teaspoon surfaced briefly at the top of its spilt bubble-body, and then sank back down into the churning flesh. We drew more light from another streetlamp, dragging it down close, fascinated by this strange, inhuman stench-splat growing upon the street, the size of a small car, the size of a large car, the size of a small truck…

Its flesh, if you could call it such, was held together by friction and hair. Not hair of its own, we realised, but human hair, webbed and matted and foul, spun over every part of it like a net, sometimes in thick dirty clusters, sometimes in sticky strands of every colour. It rose up in front of us, liquid fat flowing off and then rising from within, a constantly moving fountain of grease and oil; and now it was almost as wide as the street. And the smell! Its stink knocked us backwards, made our eyes water and our head spin. Now it was almost a storey high, a great wobbling blancmange, and the oil spilling off it had rolled almost as far as my feet, running down the gutters and then filling the centre of the street.

I stared up at it, and it seemed to look back at us, a sort of head-bubble twisting at the summit of its rolling form. There was a good reason why the magicians of the city feared the saturate: the grease-monster, the oil-devil, the demon of fat poured down the drain, of tallow and cookery grime, of burnt-up crispy bits and congealed animal liquids poured down the plughole. It was disgusting, foul, vile, an abomination and, just perhaps, a bit beautiful. Life is magic, and this thing of fat and tallow was so clearly alive.

Alive, and not a little angry.

We laughed, not because there was anything funny, but to have seen this sight. Then we tossed the stolen neon back to its tubes, and retreated a few paces from the bubbling oil at our feet. I threw my satchel to one side and looked for the nearest likely weapons.

And the saturate was shaking itself now, sending splatters of grease and dried fat onto the walls, pulling itself out of the drains with one last great shloooop and rolling forwards in its own liquid.

I looked round at the window of the chippy, threw my arm and my will at it and shattered the glass with a thought. Reaching past, I found the warm, familiar hum of gas in the mains: heat and fire to burn the fat. I dragged at it, pulling faster than I had planned, sucking out the smell and rippling it upon the air until the street was a mirage of twisted neon and competing stenches. Adrenalin kept us moving, backing away from the advancing tide of yellow-brown oil dribbling over the pavement and the tower of fat rippling in its wake.

My plan was easy; so very easy. We were going to burn it.

I spun the gas around me, let it fill and hiss and shimmer against the flesh of the rolling white saturate-slug. I pushed a tendril of it up towards the pink tube of a neon light—all I needed was a spark, just one and that would be it, so long saturate, goodnight and good luck with your next coagulation…

… and someone muttered, “OhJesusohGod.”

I looked around and saw what I should have seen before: a woman, standing with her back pressed against the wall of a cobbler’s shop, handbag draped in the crook of her elbow, high-heeled shoes and pasty face, staring up at the saturate with the frozen terror of a squirrel in front of a cement truck. There was oil around her feet, staining her shoes, sliding along the pavement like meltwater over sand.

For a moment, just a moment, holding on to the gas, the spark, woven tight into the palm of our hand, we thought about doing it anyway.

Then I crushed out the spark, let go of the gas, let it spill upwards from the street and roll in thick smelly shimmers towards the open air, stopped the spillage from the chip shop and turned my attention towards the woman. She was only a few yards from the main body of the saturate as it rumbled at slug’s-crawl down the street; in a few moments more, she’d be lost behind it. Yellow fat and white drool ran down the walls beside her, shaken off the main body of the beast, and splattered on her black shoulder jacket. I shouted, “Move, woman!”

She didn’t move, couldn’t move, just saw rolling flesh as high now as a bus, stubby white limbs sprouting and shrinking back into the flesh like a hedgehog uncertain about growing spines.

“Move!” we screamed.

I looked up at the saturate, and it was so close now, so close, it didn’t need to grow a mouth or teeth or jaws, it just needed to keep coming and that was it, death by drowning, drowning by fat. It would suck me up and crush me and the only question would be whether it was suffocation or broken bones that stopped our heart.

She was going to die like that too.

I ran. My feet slipped and went out beneath me the second I hit the oil; I crawled back up, human hair tangling between my fingers, warmish brown goo seeping through my trousers, sticking to my knees. I reached the pavement, staggered to my feet, and grabbed the frozen woman by the shoulders. The saturate was only a few feet away, it filled the world, the smell worse here than ever, making it hard to breathe.

I shook her, and she looked at me, jaw moving in silent prayer.

“Run,” I hissed.

She didn’t move.

We slapped her, not particularly hard, across the cheek. She blinked, once. I put my slippery hand into hers, and felt it slide straight out again. I grabbed her by the sleeve.

“Run!”

She jerked, started to move. I dragged her towards the end of the street; and it was right behind us. I could feel a dollop of white flesh dribble down the back of my neck as a limb reached out for us, shedding matter as it went.

At the end of the street was a park, dark and shut up for the night. I pushed the woman off the pavement into the street and shouted, “Get out! Move!”

She staggered back towards the park, half slipped and kept on staring, just staring at the thing coming after us.

No time to bother, too late, much, much too late. We turned to the saturate, thought again of fire, saw the fat and oil dribbling down our fingers and gave up on the idea as a bad one. We raised our head towards the rolling jelly-thing, vile, repulsive, amazing, and I said, “Veolia!”

It kept on coming.

Words have power. You just had to pick the right words. In the good old days, this involved a lot of Latin and some very fruity intonation. These days, the words were different, new, bright, and in this case, plastered on the sides of most refuse collection carts in London.

I raised my hands to the sky and called out, shouted into the air, “Veolia, Accord, Kiggen, ECT, Onyx, ELWA, in accordance with Hackney Borough Council, you are contracted to collect, remove and recycle household refuse and waste…”

Still it kept coming.

“… all commercial and household refuse and waste produced within the boundaries laid down within Hackney Borough, Veolia, Accord, Onyx, I invoke you…”

Not ten yards away, it drew tendrils of dripping fat that crawled out towards me.

I screamed to the heavens, spread my fingers wide and prayed for magic, miracles and a speedy demise, “Geesink Norba collecting and recycling waste and refuse for you!”

And from somewhere behind the creature, there was the diesel-thumping roar of an engine coming to life.

I staggered back from the creature, slipped in oil, crawled towards the hypnotised woman, grabbed her by the sleeve. The roar behind the creature turned into the steady thudathudathudathuda of a badly tuned, unloved engine. It filled the street, echoed off the houses; and with it there was light now, a spinning yellow madness that flashed on-off-on-off too fast to see, an epileptic nightmare, reflecting like a sick sun off the walls. A great white limb of grease descended towards us and I pushed the woman out of the way, skidded to one side. It hit us across our back, we felt our teeth jar, our spine try to hide in our stomach, we felt fat dribble down our back and saw great dollops of it splatter onto the ground beside us. The blow had knocked us flat; on our belly we crawled towards the park, grass and dirt suddenly seeming the cleanest thing in the world. Slime was running down our hair and pooling in our ears. The yellow flashing light in the street cast twisted shadows all around.

“Geesink Norba,” I whispered. “Geesink Norba, Geesink Norba, by the terms and conditions of contract to remove all commercial and household waste within the borough, Geesink…”

The roar became a rattling battle cry; with it, there came another sound. It said:

“Please stand clear. Vehicle reversing. Please stand clear. Vehicle reversing.”

I reached the grass, rolled onto my back, looked down the street I’d crawled from and saw the saturate start to turn, infinitely slow, currents and counter-currents spinning within its great belly as it began to think about the thing that was behind it. The woman was fallen a few feet from me. I turned to her and hissed, “Cover your head.”

She obeyed, and I curled up as tight as I could, arms over my skull.

I saw the saturate contort and twist as the flashing yellow light and mechanised voice came closer. I saw it seem to contract downwards and expand outwards, as if it was somehow going to leap. I heard, “Please stand clear. Vehicle reversing,” saw flashing yellow madness, heard wheels sloshing through oil, engine thundering, heard a sucking sound like the whole ocean being pulled down a very small plughole, heard a great grinding as of metal jaws, and whispered, “Veolia, Accord, Geesink Norba, Onyx, rubbish collected on your scheduled day…”

And something hit the saturate. It hit it smack in the middle, punched a hole straight through its belly and out the other side, a great darkness that seemed to suck everything in, and the darkness had teeth, heaven help the ignorant, the darkness had teeth made of aluminium and steel, silver flashing teeth that crunched down on all that fat and swallowed it whole into some forsaken black gullet, sucked it all in with a roar of diesel and pumped out black smoke in its place, until the saturate was half its size, a quarter, just rivers of white fat pouring into that darkness, sinking deeper and deeper until with a final splatter…

There was just oil and grease spilling across the road. Inanimate liquid, dribbling from the jaws of the beast that had sucked the life from it. Little blobs dripped from the branches of the trees like smelly snow. I got to my feet and looked at the thing that had killed the saturate.

It was a dustbin truck. Its sides were black, not through paint, but time and use. Burnt-black, charred-black, dirt-black, coal-black, every kind of black there could be, all spattered and scratched and scorched onto its flesh. The welding that held it together was brown chipped rust that shed breadcrumbs of reddish copper onto the ground as it drove; its wheels were the height of a large child; its light, spinning on a roof of twisted, crooked metal, was yellow, too bright and too fast to look at. I shielded my eyes, and saw in the dull remnant of my vision a man get out of the driver’s cabin, a whole man’s height above the pavement, and walk carefully round to the back of the truck. He knelt down beside it, reached under the back wheel, and twisted something. A great gout of black smoke burst from a pipe in the top of the truck’s roof, and slowly, two metal vault doors began to ease shut over the open back of the truck, sliding down over silver teeth gleaming in the reflected light and dripping white fat. They came together with the clang of the doors of Fort Knox. The dustbin man looked up.

His eyes were two blown light bulbs, the little twisted wires gleaming in their sockets. His skin was the same charred blackness as his truck; his hair, which had one time been dreadlocks, was now just living blacknesses, writhing and twisting around his face with the mess of insect life and vermin that crawled from it. When he exhaled, the same black smoke of his vehicle rolled across his silverish lips, and as he walked, his green-yellow neon jacket shimmered and flashed, almost drowning out all other perception. I flinched back from the brightness of it as he approached, three-inch boot heels clanging on the ground, tangled old string tying together their ruptured leather and soles of melted rubber. He was coming straight towards me, impassive, face drained of all feeling. I turned to the woman and hissed, “Do you have a tenner?”

She was a whimpering huddle on the ground. “Uh?”

“A tenner, a tenner! Your purse!”

I covered my eyes with my arms against the brilliance of his jacket; but I could hear him, smell him only a few inches away: the rank odour of an old bin left out in the summer sun. Numbed, the woman tried to open her purse. I felt movement beside me, saw his hand gloved in thick red leather that oozed ancient blood between the old stitches, as if the fabric itself could bleed. The woman held up a ten-pound note. I grabbed it, turned and, keeping my head bowed against the neon dazzle, pushed it into his outstretched palm.

For a second, the dustbin man just stood there. I knew he was staring at me, but couldn’t raise my eyes to see. Then he closed his fingers around the ten-pound note, which began to wilt, shrivel, and stain with smudged darkness as he slipped it into his trouser pocket. As stately and careful as he had come, he turned, dreadlocks writhing around his head, and walked away.

We stayed frozen in place for… I do not know how long.

The engine roared again in the dustbin truck, the wheels turned. I smelt black smoke and the lingering odour of rot. Then it drove away, oil dribbling off its wheels as it sped up the street, yellow light fading until, at the far end, it turned, and vanished from my sight.

Drained, we sank to our knees on the grass, pressed our head into it and trembled.

A hand brushed our shoulder. A voice said, “Um…”

We looked slowly up. “This,” I said, “is a really bad time.”

“You OK?”

I looked round me. Oil was dribbling into the drains, and a greasy trail stretched all the way up the street to the drain, that damned drain, outside the chippy.

“Curiosity killed the cat,” I said, and pressed my head back into the grass and felt grateful for how clean the dirt was.

Her name was Loren.

Her world-view had just been shattered, but she was dealing with it the most sensible way she could; by dealing with other things first.

She said, “You owe me a tenner.”

I said, “What?”

“A tenner.”

“Are you seriously telling me, that having just saved your life from a monster made out of grease and fat crawled up from the nether reaches of the sewers, you want me to give you a tenner?”

“When you put it like that… it’s just tenners aren’t easy.”

“It was give the guy a tenner, or be consumed by a supernatural dustbin truck.”

There was silence. Fat dripped and pooled slowly around us.

“So why couldn’t you give him a tenner?”

“Because I dropped my bloody bag while trying to save your bloody life.”

“Sorry. It’s all a little… you know.”

She flapped. We seethed.

Finally she said, “The thing…”

Here it came.

“Yes?”

“You know, I always said to myself, if I go mad, I’ll like, you know, go with it? Because I figure if you’re mad then you can’t really do anything about it so you might as well just… It was a monster, wasn’t it?”

We wiped a dribble of fat off our nose. “That depends.”

“On what?”

“Your point of view. In the sense that it would have crushed the life out of you and you would have drowned in a sea of animal fats and other remains, yes, it was a monster. But it meant you no harm. You just happened to be there.”

“You killed it.”

“No.”

“I saw you, you spoke those words, magic words.”

“Brand names.”

“What?”

“Brand names. Waste collection companies. Geesink Norba, Accord, Onyx—they collect rubbish in the city.”

“But… you spoke their names and…”

“I spoke words that, unless you pay close attention to these things, have no meaning. People don’t pay attention to the rubbish men; they cross over to the other side of the street to avoid them. Geesink Norba… they are sounds on the air. Meaningless, unless you know how to look. I invoked an idea.”

“What do you mean, ‘invoked’?”

“Summoned. Commanded. Requested for the cost of a ten-pound note.”

“You’re some sort of wizard?”

“Some sort, yes.”

“So there’s magic? And wizards? And monsters?”

“Yes.”

“In Hoxton?”

“Well, yes.”

“Oh. And the thing that came? The dustbin truck?”

I tried my best. “There are… things in this world, made up of other things—ideas—that are given life just by the nature of that idea, by the nature of living, life making magic, magic coming out of the most ordinary, trivial bits of life. Like… like when you speak into the telephone and your words are life and passion and feeling and they’re in the wires and sooner or later the wires will come alive or else they’d burst, with all that thought and emotion in them… or like a dustbin truck, just one dustbin truck because we have no idea how much waste a city can produce, just one tidying up afterwards, asking nothing but a tenner at Christmas and your council tax, anonymous faces picking up anonymous crap that no one wants to pay any attention to and sooner or later you ignore so much, you turn your face away so much, don’t want to think about it so much that… even that gets life. Do you see? Furious, passionate life, waiting to be seen, cleaning up afterwards, struggling out of the shadows. And where there’s life, any life, anything that…”

I saw her face. She was crying.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s a bit…” she mumbled, waving her hands uselessly. “It’s just… uh…”

I said, “My name’s Matthew.”

“Loren,” she whimpered.

“Where do you live, Loren?”

She flapped a hand in a general direction.

“Near?” I asked.

She nodded.

“With a shower and a lot of soap?”

She nodded again.

“Good. Let me take you home.”

It was a council block a few streets back from the canal. On the ground floor there were grey metal shutters nailed over the windows, and bars across the front doors. The windows on the higher floors had little balconies with dead flowers withering on them. The stairwell smelt of piss, the lifts were scarred on the inside with who knew what mad burning. She lived on the fifth floor. The lights were on in the flat to her left, and as we went by, the door was opened and a man in a white skullcap leant out.

“Loren!” he exclaimed. “He’s gone out again; I’m sorry.” Then his eyes fell over us, and his look turned to one of brief disgust followed by forced concern. “Are you all right? What happened?”

“Fine,” she mumbled, red puffy eyes and a swollen puffy voice. “Thank you, fine.”

There were three locks on her door. She fumbled with the keys, dropped them, picked them up again, unlocked the door. A narrow corridor, occupied 99 per cent by a black sports bike, all pumps and shallowness; a single bulb swinging from a low ceiling, lampshade long since lost. She waved me towards a kitchen the size of a cockroach’s cupboard and said, “You can help yourself to whatever you want.”

I looked at an array of empty pizza boxes and used tea bags.

She headed into the bathroom. As the shower went on, the boiler above the sink started rattling and roaring, shaking so hard I thought it would pull itself free from the wall. I made do with rubbing my hands on an old dishcloth and my face with some kitchen towel, until I just felt thinly slimy, rather than all-over glooped. From the kitchen window, I could see Hackney, low lights and uneven streets, council estates and long, Victorian-lamp-lit terraces, stretching away.

Loren emerged from the shower, disappeared into the bedroom. Her voice drifted to me: “You can use it, if you want.”

I wandered from the kitchen into a small living room, containing a single brown sofa and sunflower wallpaper that had never been a good idea, even before it started to peel. There were shoes everywhere—men’s shoes, and boys’, strewn in boxes and around every wall, and dirty clothes, tracksuits and baggy jumpers, messy old plates and fallen library books with catchy titles like Pass GCSE IT in 28 Days! and Foundation French for Dummies.

A door opposite the living room had, among a collection of posters featuring everything from dinosaurs to heaving models with extra-heaving bosoms, a sign written in big red letters—KEEP OUT. A boy then—a teenage boy.

“Take some of Mo’s clothes! Towel’s under the sink.” Loren’s voice carried from the bedroom.

Clearly Mo was not in residence. I opened the KEEP OUT door, and was hit by the smell of tomato ketchup and hair gel. I rummaged through the wardrobe until I found a T-shirt and a pair of trousers, both too big for me. Whoever, wherever Mo’s father was, he had clearly evolved from another breed of men.

The shower was at once the most pleasurable and most disgusting experience of our life. The water kept drifting from hot to cold, and only scalding hot and the application of half a bar of soap could remove the grease that wanted to cling to every part of our skin. Our hair was like raw slices of chicken in our slipping fingertips, and bubbles of white fat spun in the stained old plughole.

I changed into Mo’s clothes. In the kitchen Loren was wearing pyjamas, a dressing gown, and fluffy pink slippers. She leant pale-faced by the sink, cradling a hot mug of tea between her hands and looking at nothing. I raised my grease-spattered clothes. “Uh…”

“Just stick them in the washing machine, OK?”

I turned the machine up hot, threw in powder and watched it go. We do not understand why people who watch the workings of the washing machine are mocked. Meditation classes and serene chants have nothing on the slow turning of socks in soapy water.

She gave me a mug of tea and said, “Sorry, I don’t have any…”

“Thank you. This is fine.”

I felt I should say something more. “Look, I can just go, once…”

“Are you human?”

The question caught us off guard. “What?”

“Are you human?” she asked.

“Yes.” Mostly.

“Oh. Then, I mean, what happens now? Like in films, and on TV, there’s rules, like amnesia and stuff. I mean, is there…?”

“No. I’m sorry.”

“OK. Uh, I can’t afford counselling; so, if you could just…”

“I can go,” I said.

She gave up, seemed to shrink into her dressing gown, became, for a second, aged. I wondered how old she was: a young voice from a lined face, dark hair greying at the edges. “Look,” she said, “you seem like a nice guy. I mean, you saved my life, so I figure, you can’t be all shit, unless this is some cunning plan of yours to be like a rapist or something, in which case I figure…

“I mean, what I’m saying is that I get up at six-thirty every morning to go to work and come back at six-thirty every evening and make pasta for supper and watch the telly and go to bed at ten-thirty and on the weekends I clean up and see some mates and my kid is… and you know, sometimes there’s guys and that’s nice and I get support from the council and there’s like so much fucking paperwork you would not believe and it’s just… it’s ordinary, get it? Five hours ago, it was just…”

“Ordinary?” I suggested.

“Just tell me it was a coincidence. A thing came up from the sewers, and it was just luck, right?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Bad luck, to be exact, but still just luck. There was no reason for you to be there, no reason for it to be there. It just happened. Sometimes things do just happen.”

“You don’t sound like you believe that.”

I shrugged. “I guess sooner or later the rationale is, I just happen to be crossing the road when a car comes and knocks me down, and he’s only there and I’m only there for a world of reasons an infinity apart and because it was going to happen to someone, so why not me?”

“Why were you there?”

“We wanted fish and chips.”

“How come you can do things?”

“It’s just a point of view. I’m a sorcerer. It’s just a way of seeing things differently. That’s all.”

“Sorcerer.”

“Yup.”

“Like, big beards and stuff.”

“Times have changed. You can always tell you’re being sold a bad product if it comes attached to a pentangle star. New times—new magics. Different symbols.”

“Symbols? Like spells?”

“Sort of.”

“Show me.”

“You don’t want to—”

“Show me!”

So I did. I got a piece of paper and drew a sign of power, a protective ward. She looked at it, unimpressed. “It’s the Underground sign.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, God. You are a whack-job.”

“You’re not listening. Life is magic. Ideas, symbols, words, meanings. New meanings, new words. In the old days if you wanted to banish a demon you invoked the powers of the winds, north and south. These days, you summon Geesink Norba. In the old days, a wizard would call on silver moonlight to guide them through a monster’s lair. These days, we summon sodium light and a neon glow, and the monster’s lair tends to have a trendy postcode and pay council tax.”

“You make it sound…”

“Ordinary?”

“Boring.”

“It’s not boring. Keep away from it.”

And she looked at me, at us, she looked us in the eye, and wasn’t scared. She took our hand. Clean fingers, dry from soap. She said, “Do you have a home?”

“Not really.”

“Why not?”

“I lost certain things.”

“Where do you live?”

“I move around.”

“Do you have a job?”

“Sometimes. It’s not very glamorous.”

“Do you pay income tax?”

“No. I did, though, before… I did pay tax.”

“What’s your favourite food?”

We licked our lips. “Too many choices.”

“Where did you last go on holiday?”

Hard to remember. A world ago, a different meaning. “Istanbul.”

“What’s your favourite colour?”

“Blue.”

“Worst bus route.”

“91, Crouch End to Trafalgar Square. It gets stuck up at Euston, crawls round King’s Cross, takes for ever—faster to walk.”

“Favourite…” she drawled, “… favourite ice cream flavour.”

“Too many choices.”

“Everyone has a favourite flavour.”

“Strawberry. Although it depends on how sunny it is.”

“All-time best memory.”

“Living,” we said instinctively, and was surprised to hear our own words.

“Tad tossy,” she replied.

“There’s a story.”

“Worst memory.”

“Dying,” I said.

“And you’re not smiling.”

“No.”

“You know what—not going there.”

“Probably for the best.”

“Matthew,” she said firmly, “will you stay here tonight?”

She slept in the bed; I slept on the floor.

She didn’t sleep. At three in the morning she got up and pronounced, “Buggerit.”

We watched TV, wrapped in duvets. You haven’t seen bad until you’ve seen 3 a.m. TV. It made EastEnders look like class. At 3.30 a.m. she put on a DVD. It was some kind of fluffy romantic thing, that baffled and bemused us in equal measure. At 4.00 a.m., without ever planning on it, Loren fell asleep at just the right angle to trap my legs and sever blood supply to my left arm. I didn’t move. It wouldn’t have been right.

The boy got the girl, the girl got the boy, they sailed away beneath the Golden Gate Bridge as fireworks went off in the background. I thumbed the DVD player off with the remote control, watched a bit more telly, and eventually, even we fell asleep as the first touch of sunlight slid through the window in the smallest hours of the morning.

*   *   *

My friends are dead. That, or they think I’m dead. But most of them are dead. They died. They were killed; murdered. Just like me. The annihilation of everyone who stood in the path of Robert Bakker and his shadow.

Dana Mikeda helped us and died. My apprentice, grumbling, to-the-point Dana Mikeda who had stood over my grave when I died and helped me when we returned and for her pains, her neck had been torn apart by the shadow of Robert Bakker. An act of spite; pure spite. Vera helped us, and her body is paint on the floor, a bullet spinning in the colours. I say sorcerer and people are afraid; we say blue electric angels, and people run from us as though we were vengeance and fire sent upon them for their sins. Why should we care for their failures?

Dead friends dead for me.

We still do not, to this day, understand why I gave Loren my mobile number.

I left after breakfast. She had work to do, was already late. Work is routine, routine is ordinary, and there is always some salvation to be found in the ordinary.

There was some passing time.

A few weeks.

She called me once, in the middle of the night, crying. She was hearing sounds, strange sounds. I came round. The kid’s bedroom was empty again, but she didn’t speak about that. The sound turned out to be from a mouse. I don’t know how it had got in, but the thing was in the kitchen, confused, rattling around trying to find its way out. I crooned pretty sounds at it until it came out from where it was hiding behind the washing machine, stroked its tiny back, not as long as my thumb, let it run into the palm of my hand and told it firmly that here was not the place to be. Then I went away again. Ordinary routine; get up, go to work. Safety in ordinary. Nothing needs to be said or done that isn’t…

… ordinary.

Then one day—only a few days ago, it seems longer—she rang me.

She said, “My son has gone.”

His name is Mo. He is seventeen years old—just the wrong age to be almost anything. He dropped out of school, wants to be a stuntman. Drives fast motorbikes, none of which are ever his own.

His room is a biological warfare strike zone.

His shoes are two sizes too big for me.

She said, “My son has gone. Please—the police have looked and can’t find anything. His friends have gone. It’s been four days. He’s been gone before, but not four days. And there was… things have been… please.”

Mothers are the last people you should ask about their seventeen-year-old sons.

The police said he was a kid heading for trouble. Some graffiti, some vandalism, some “anti-social behaviour”. ASBO kid. All hood and attitude, proud to be against the law, proud just to be against. And there was something else—his friends were missing too. Kids he’d met not at school, but at a club, she didn’t know what kind of club it was. Somewhere in North London, a club where the kids went. Or maybe the kidz. You can’t be cool and spell well at the same time.

Never ask a mother about their kids.

Far more sensible to ask their shoes.

It’s a lie that women care more than men about their shoes. Women may buy more pairs, to match up with this or that outfit, or to serve this or that purpose, but they do it easily, with a casual statement of “I’m going to buy some shoes now”.

Men, when they buy shoes, invest body and soul in the effort. This is not just a pair of shoes—this is the pair of shoes, the one and only; they have to be perfect, they have to be right.

Mo was a kid who liked his shoes. Every six months he seemed to have invested what little money he had in a new pair, sometimes Nike, sometimes Adidas, never anything in between, always the right brand, at the right time. This month, gold with blue stripes was in; this month, and black and white football boots, spikes sticking out of the soles, were the only things to have.

“What’s the most recent pair?”

Loren pointed at a pair of red and black trainers, all sponge and wheeze. I tried them on for size. Too big. I put on some more socks, tried them again, shifted round until my weight was right.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Go for a wander.”

“Can you find him?”

“Dunno. I’ll do my best.”

“If you find him… don’t say anything, will you? It’ll only make it worse if you say something.”

She gave me a photo. It’s in my bag. The kid is ugly. He has a big head made bigger by having shaven off his hair. His jaw alone could demolish an old wall; his mouth is too small for the length of chin that surrounds it.

I left my shoes with Loren, a promise that I’d come back, and walked out of the door with the kid’s shoes on my feet.

It is surprisingly hard to scry by footware. It requires a submergence of will, an utter belief that your feet know where they’re going. Sometimes magicians learn how to do this by literally blinding themselves, tying rags over their eyes so that they have to trust entirely in the direction their body takes them, and never question, never doubt, that this is where they have to be. The problem about that is that a pair of shoes, while it may remember where it wants to go, is less likely than a brain to stop at a red light.

You need just enough awareness to stay alive, to stay smart, but not so much that you ever take control. Never question, never doubt. Just take a deep breath, and start walking.

So that’s what I did. Let the door to Loren’s flat click shut behind me, and started walking. I was lucky—there was only one way in and out of the flats, and that gave me momentum, got me going in the right direction without having to think about it. I walked out of that council block behind the canal, to the end of the street and kept on walking, past fenced-off football fields, past empty grass greens, past a Costcutters and a grand new development built up from the remnants of a warehouse; and my walk wasn’t my own.

I was swaggering. I was swinging my hips and bouncing at the knees, I was walking to an invisible hip-hop beat and only a second of awareness short of gesturing in the inexplicable, untold language of all wannabe bros out to be cool. That was good—now I knew that I was swaggering, it gave me a way in. If the spell was ever broken, a good swagger, and the shoes could take over again, recognise a familiar step, find the key to the magic.

So I swaggered, past old schools with portable cabins in the playing fields to make room for big classes pressed into a small space, past a swimming pool smelling even on the outside of thick chlorine, past little roundabouts which every driver swept across, careless of the rules of the road, past clamped vehicles and old broken telephone boxes. There was a bus stop, request; and seeing it I started to run, a strange, sideways lope, that made me feel like I had rickets. You can’t be cool and run for a bus; but I did, and got on it, knowing with absolute certainty that this was the right thing to do.

I swaggered to the back of the bus, the bottom deck, and sat myself in the darkest, hottest corner, knees stuck out, one foot propped up on the seat in front of me, hands draped out across the back of the bus like it was a throne and me the king. It’s easier if your whole body speaks the same language as your shoes; it’s another way to keep the spell.

At Old Street, my feet jerked towards the door and I followed, head bopping to a beat that even I couldn’t hear. I ambled down a long curved ramp, past several beggars, and didn’t give them a single penny. I would have—we would have—but not these shoes; they moved too fast, too cool, they weren’t going to stop.

It was late—rush hour dribbling to an end. I bounded down the escalator, elbowing passengers out of my way, swaggered onto the northbound platform, found a bench, sat on it, legs stretched out to occupy two seats with one movement, waited. The shoes hated waiting, tapped and fidgeted, but it was the Northern Line—waiting was what you did.

Train to King’s Cross; there we changed, going west to Baker Street; there we got out, and bought some kind of pasty that burnt through the paper that held it, ate it, crumbs across the seats, and rode the Jubilee Line north to Dollis Hill.

Dollis Hill. The area round the station felt not so much built as dropped down in a game of Monopoly. White houses too small for the floors they contained, streets too narrow for the cars that crawled through them.

Tired. It is tiring, sharing the journeys of a stranger. Late, now, late and no supper. I forced myself to walk like a human being when I came to the first pizza parlour that was open, ordered food, devoured it. It was past eleven when I finished, and my feet in my borrowed shoes felt like soggy prunes.

I walked again. Swaggered to get back into the feel of it, bobbed my head, twisted my hips, let the rhythm of the movement restore my confidence. We walked… miles. I don’t know how many. There were… things. Strangenesses. We would come to places and just stop and stare, and our feet would itch and we would see things, that… that made us uneasy.

A length of wall beside a quiet pub, where drunken youth should have sat, guffawing at passers-by and scaring the old ladies, and where now there was nothing. Just shadow and empty beer cans.

A skater park beneath a railway bridge, the wooden slopes empty, and on the walls, old graffiti.

Or:

HMT GMO 2

Or:

FREE PALESTINE

There should have been something more. A “Mo was ’ere” wouldn’t have gone amiss. There was… a strangeness. A bite in the air, like the distant taste of the street from inside the tree-sheltered stretches of an urban cemetery. A sense of something that should have been, but wasn’t any more.

So we kept on walking, our swagger losing some of its confidence as the hours rolled by and all the places where there should have been something—the pub showing the football, the empty skater park, the closed off-licence, the houses with their lights turned down—there was nothing.

And then a telephone rang.

It was the small hours of the morning by then, and we were still walking, just walking and walking and the shoes wanted to go further, but a telephone rang, somewhere near Dudden Hill Lane.

And it was…

… of course we were going to answer but…

… it is our nature…

I had no reason.

We just had to.

*   *   *

“Well. You know the rest.

A telephone rang in Willesden, between Dollis Hill and Dudden Hill Lane. It rang at 2.25 in the morning, and I, despite having Mo’s shoes on my feet, I went and answered it. I answered the telephone and after that…

… I guess my priorities changed.

I thought he was just some missing kid. We had no reason to think of it as anything else. I went looking for him in order to help a friend. Then the phone rang and we answered and all this began: the Midnight Mayor, the spectres, the dead ravens, the broken Stone, Nair, Vera, the Aldermen. It all happened and we were caught in it and didn’t think, didn’t stop to think that Loren would be…

… didn’t stop.

I think that’s all I can really say on the matter.”

*   *   *

I finished talking.

Sinclair was eating something that looked like a miniature version of Table Mountain, carved out of yellow goo and black grain. He took a careful sliver, and ate it. He put his fork down. He dabbed at his round lips with the end of a napkin. Charlie’s food sat uneaten on the plate in front of him. We scraped something that might have been gravy on the end of our fork, and licked. The restaurant was emptier, people gone on to a sexy midnight time, or maybe just to bed, only a few tables still inhabited in the gloom.

At last he said, “Well…” And then stopped. Then tried again. “Well, what times you have been living. You know, saturates are…”

“Rare. Yes. I know.”

“Saturates and spectres.”

“Both rare.”

“And you seem to walk into both—unfortunate, so very unfortunate.”

“We’re rare too.”

He smiled, a knife-thin flash of teeth in a great stretch of mouth. “So,” he said at last, “what do you propose to do about all this?”

I hesitated. “Well, there’s some choices.”

“Such as, Matthew, such as?”

“One—run away.”

“A somewhat ignoble suggestion, perhaps, in light of your otherwise gentlemanly conduct so far.”

“Two—find the creature that killed Nair.”

“That would make some sense.”

“No it wouldn’t. If it could flay him alive without trying I have no reason to believe it wouldn’t do the same to me. It would be madness. Pointless. Suicide by pinstripe suit. Besides, I have every confidence that if I stick around long enough, trouble and abuse can find me out just fine on their own terms. Which leaves option three—find the kid.”

“You’re not interested in this… this curious writing on the wall? This ‘give me back my hat’?”

“I am interested. But I don’t know what I can do about it. If Nair was looking for Mo, then he must be more important than I thought. He said—Swift has the shoes. Their only use is finding the kid. Nair was killed only a few miles from where I was when I let the shoes carry me walkies. And we promised… I promised to help her. Loren. What else can I do?”

“So you’re going to, as it were, carry on as normal? Continue doing what you were doing, regardless of the fact that you are now Midnight Mayor, last defender of the city, protector of the magicians and midnight magics of the streets, saviour and general all-purpose valorous champion and so on and so forth?”

“Yes. Pretty much.”

“I imagine the Aldermen won’t be entirely pleased about that.”

“That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I don’t want the Aldermen involved. I don’t want anything to do with them. I know you have… connections.”

Sinclair sighed, long and low. “Yes,” he said at last. “I have connections. It is my business, my pension, if you will, to have connections. To keep a keen interest on matters such as these—tiresome though it can be. But you have to understand, Matthew, having connections is about much, much more than being a messenger boy. I can inform the Aldermen that you are the Midnight Mayor, ask them to help you or, if you really feel it is necessary, to leave you alone. Of course I can do this, of course.

“But then how will they feel about me, who let you walk away into an almost certain—as certain as these things can be for yourself—almost certain death, without clarifying what is going on, what the brand on your hand means, what must happen for the good of all? It is a fine balance, keeping my connections. Sooner or later you have to make some sacrifices.”

It wasn’t just the way he said it.

We reached for the nearest knife.

“Bang,” said a voice. “Bang.”

It was a woman’s voice. It was accompanied by a woman’s hand. The hand went round my neck, fingers under my chin, pulling it back. The other hand was somewhere nearby. Probably at the other end of the gun pressed into my skull. We recognised the voice.

“Bang,” she said.

“Oda,” we whispered. “We wondered.”

That’s the problem with psycho religious nutcases. They’re never there when you need them. And when you could really do without, they decide to crash the party. Oda had never been a social animal.

Sinclair stood up, pulled the napkin from his throat and folded it up neatly in front of his plate. “I am honestly sorry about all this,” he intoned. “But while I trust you, Matthew, to come round eventually and do the right thing, or at the very least, the thing that needs to be done, there is no guarantee I can offer in heaven or earth that they won’t take the first option you happened to suggest, and just run. Fire and light and freedom and life, isn’t that how it goes? Terror and love of life, so big and so bright that you think you’ll drown in it? Too big and too bright to ever let go. I am sorry, Matthew, that for their sake this has to happen.”

I tried to turn my head; Oda’s fingers pinched into my throat, her arm pressed against my windpipe. She leant in close, so close her breath drifted over my eyes, and whispered again, “Bang.” I could just see the blackness of the gun out of the corner of my eye; you can’t outrun bullets. The other guests in the restaurant didn’t seem to be paying any attention, were bent over scrupulously studying their dishes, not looking up, the buzz of good-mannered chit-chat continuing in the gloom. A waiter came over, laid down the bill in a leather case by Sinclair’s plate.

“If you kill us,” we hissed, “what will happen then to the Midnight Mayor?”

“You pose an interesting and pertinent academic question,” exclaimed Sinclair. “One that, in truth, I have never really considered until now. No doubt the brand will move on to some other unfortunate, who will no doubt be as confused as you were to discover themselves so cursed. Or blessed, I suppose, depending on your point of view. Traditionally the Midnight Mayor could control these matters, command them before he died—but then, I don’t think you really know how, do you? You have no idea what it really is to be the Midnight Mayor, because as I believe you yourself have suggested, you don’t even believe he exists. Thankfully,” he exclaimed, flicking open the leather case with the bill and glancing down the list, “there are concerned citizens willing to consider this possibility in further analytical depth that I, alas, in my ignorance, cannot.”

He turned his head. I couldn’t see what he was looking at, who he was smiling at; there were just shadows, noise in the corner of my vision. But I could guess. Charlie was on his feet as well, reaching into his pocket for something, a slim black box from which came a slim silver needle attached to a very small glass tube.

We snarled, “Keep away!”

“Bang,” whispered Oda in our ear. “Bang three to the chest two the head. Bang, bang.”

“Oda,” I whimpered. “Please, Oda, this isn’t…”

She didn’t care. Or if she did, I couldn’t tell.

There was some sort of drug behind the needle.

It had my name on it.

Lights out. Goodnight and good luck with your next coagulation…

… sweet dreams my sweet…

End of the line…

Darkness.