Part 3: The Death of Cities

In which a wife is lost, an enemy is found, and a sorcerer expostulates on the cruelty of strangers.

 

He said, “Fag?”

I said, “What?”

“You wanna fag?”

I considered this. We were almost tempted. It seemed to calm people down. He held out a packet in a hand that had passed the point of being dirty, into the pure cleanliness of compressed earth so ground into the skin that it’s hard to imagine it could ever rub off.

The packet said, “SMOKING GIVES YOU CANCER”.

I said, “Nah. Thanks.”

He shrugged, stuck a cigarette in his mouth, and struck a flame from a bright orange plastic lighter. He sucked long and deep, coughed, and exhaled. “Jesus,” he croaked. “Fucking fags.”

I tried to work out what was happening.

I was in a gutter.

Fair enough.

The gutter was on a bridge.

To the left was Tower Bridge, to the right was Southwark.

The guy sitting next to me had my satchel open at his feet. He’d gone through the contents. My wallet lay beside it. He’d gone through that as well, and been disappointed. Now he was offering me a fag. His face was too bloodless for a beard ever to find enough strength to grow. His eyes were lost in the soft tissue round the front brain; his neck was two long tendons on a stick. At some point, and not too far away, he’d messed around with drugs, and they’d messed back. I sat up slowly. I didn’t hurt as much as I’d expected—even my hand, burnt with the twin red crosses, didn’t pain me as it should. I looked up at a sky in which a few shy stars peeped between black cloud and orange wash, and watched the flickering twin lights of aeroplanes passing overhead.

Not dead.

Still not dead.

Again.

Something had changed.

Couldn’t put our finger on what it was…

… but even we knew that being consumed by a metaphysical, metamagical, meta-most-things dragon while on a semi-philosophical LSD trip for Midnight Mayors changed something.

I said, “I need to find the boy.”

The guy smoking the cigarette chuckled. “Whatever gets you off.”

“I’m serious.”

“Sure. Serious guy like you.”

On the other side of the bridge, a taxi swished by. At the end of the bridge, a bendy bus scooted past a stop. I crawled onto the pavement, as it rushed by with the racing glee of night buses everywhere.

We looked at the messed-up man and said, “Where did you find us?”

“Here,” he replied. “Lying in the gutter, looking at the stars.”

“How did I get there?”

“Dunno. Not my business.”

“You didn’t see… anything peculiar?”

“Fuck shit hell.”

“No, then.”

“Hey—you got cash?”

“No. Sorry.”

“Watch, credit cards, you know?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on! You gotta have something. I just need a quickie, you know? Just a little.”

I staggered up onto my feet, looked east towards where, in a few hours—quite a few hours, judging by the thickness of the sky—the sun would come up between the yellow-blue pinnacles of Tower Bridge, crawling over the Thames Barrier and sliding across the white bulb of the Millennium Dome, to where I stood.

“I could do you,” said the man with the fag. “I could do you and take your shoes when you’re stiff.”

He didn’t say it aggressively. He wasn’t laughing either.

We half-turned. “No, you couldn’t,” we sighed.

“You ain’t tough.”

“Sure.”

“I got friends who’ve done it, you know? They know places; you send the bodies down and they don’t ever come up, not as anything thicker than soup. A fiver? A quid?”

“Bigger picture,” I said, stooping to pick up my satchel, piling its contents inside, sticking the wallet back in my pocket without bothering to look if he’d taken anything, knowing there wasn’t anything to take.

“I’ll fucking do you!” he called after me, not moving from his perch on the edge of the gutter.

We walked away.

Sunrise in winter, in the centre of town. A quiet greyness rising between the streets; lamps on the edge of extinction, hovering with just that tiny sense of unease, not entirely sure if this is dawn, or dusk, or if the sun really will make it. The light brought a slow hum with it, subtle and growing, one bus on an empty street becoming one bus and a cab, two buses, a cab and a bike, three buses, a cab, two bikes and a delivery van, the streets thickening like porridge as the hot milk of the city was poured back into its veins.

It excited us, that slow wakening, like the dawn chorus thrills the druids skulking in the countryside. This was a choir playing the carburettor and the travelcard beep, tinkling on the brakes of the postman’s van and playing a chorus of ATM dispensers and Underground rattles. It made us feel awake, alive, our heartbeat in time to the turning over of the double-decker’s engine, our breath coming in the slow pumps of the blasts of wind up from the Tube tunnels, our feet moving in that sharper banker’s step that went click, click, click at the busy brisk leather walk of the City worker. It would be so easy, so simple, to turn our fingers towards the oncoming one-way streets and catch the life building in them, tangle it like water against the dam of our hands, and fly on nothing more than the pressure differential created before the sunrise, and after.

I kept walking.

London Bridge, Monument, Bank, King William Street, Cheapside, Guildhall, Aldermanbury Square.

Harlun and Phelps.

Still open, a rising buzz within its halls.

The security guard just waved me through.

Lift to the top floor, city falling away below you, only gods and great men could feel this big over something so endlessly small. Down the corridor, an office designed to make you work for the privilege of talking in it; and knock me down if Earle wasn’t there, still there, sat behind a desk on which a wicker tray of yoghurt, jam, croissants, toast, Danish whirls and boiling coffee had been laid, sipping from a stainless steel cup, eyes turned towards a newspaper open on his lap.

He glanced up as I entered, and for a moment, looked almost surprised.

“Mr Swift!”

“Ta-da!” I exclaimed weakly.

“You’re still…”

“Still not dead. That’s me. It’s my big party trick, still not being dead, gets them every time.”

“You…”

“Did the walk, talked the talk. Went down memory lane, Tarantino-style. Where’s the boy?”

“The…”

“Boy. The boy. I’ve been out all night and I’m a firm believer in what they say about Big Brother never sleeping. Have you found the boy?”

“As a matter of fact…”

“Yes?”

“We just might have.”

I beamed. “Mr Earle,” I said, “I got a good feeling about all this.”

CCTV.

Someone, probably a journalist, claims that there’s one CCTV camera for every twelve people in the UK.

Or in other words, Big Brother could so very, very easily be watching you, if he had a reason. That’s the whole point, really. He, or it, or them, or best of all, They, can track you by ATM, by Oyster card, by mobile phone, by CCTV, by loyalty card, by licence plate, by items bought and items sold, by programmes watched and calls made, and while the Good People need not fear—for what reason should their lives be seen and judged by strangers?—the problem arises when no one knows what that reason is. No one even knows who’s going to make that choice.

There are advantages to being legally dead.

So here’s how it goes:

About a day after Nair died and a telephone rang, a blue van, registration LS06 BDL, pulled up outside Raleigh Court. Three hired men with unsympathetic faces and unstable morphic structures, friends of a friend who knew a guy called Boom Boom, got out of the back, walked up to number 53 and pulled a kid out from inside the flat. He wasn’t looking great in the few grainy seconds of footage that the Aldermen had recovered. He wasn’t looking alive. But then if he wasn’t alive, what was the point?

They stuck him in the back of the van.

The van drove south.

The congestion charge cameras caught it entering the zone around 4 a.m. They didn’t care a damn, because at 4 a.m. no one pays £8 to drive, but they were still watching, and even if they weren’t, the Aldermen had means. I didn’t want to know, found that I didn’t really care.

Roughly half an hour after entering the zone, the van left it, heading south from Waterloo, and was glimpsed briefly at Elephant and Castle, then caught for a moment heading round Clapham Common. No wonder it had taken a day and a half to find—too many cameras, too much watching, too many things to watch, too much to see; no one mind could take it in. A heap built on a million dead heaps built by a hundred million dead ants on the crunched-down skeletons of their predecessors; who’d track one little van?

“This is all very interesting,” I said, “but where did it end up?”

“You won’t like it,” said Earle.

“Hit me.”

“Morden.”

“Morden.”

“Yes. Morden.”

End of the line. We did not like Morden.

“Where in Morden?”

“You won’t like it.”

“Worked that out already. Where?”

He told me.

And no, I didn’t like it.

Morden.

Sometimes there are places so far, so obscure, so unlikely, so implausible and so utterly…

… well…

… Morden…

… that there’s no point driving there.

A friend once put it like this: One guy gets on a train to Isleworth, another guy gets on a train to Cardiff, and you can bet the guy going to Wales gets there sooner.

The same rule applies to Morden. A mainline train to Ipswich will get there faster than a driver departing at the same time from Liverpool Street will make it to deepest, darkest Morden.

To even the odds a little, I took the Northern Line from Bank, right down through the strange wildernesses of Monument, Borough, Elephant and Castle, Kennington, Oval, Tooting Bec, Colliers Wood, South Wimbledon and, right at the bottom of the map, Morden.

End of the line.

The driver even announced it as we arrived.

“End of the line,” he said. “All change, all change, end of the line.”

Oda was waiting at the top of the stairs. She had a big sports bag over one shoulder. As I came out through the barrier, she said, “You feeling inaugurated?”

“Sort of. Does that make me a higher priority for the hit list?”

“There’s an argument there. On the one hand, the Midnight Mayor is a magical entity whose very existence is an insult to the works of Heaven. On the other hand, we don’t yet know how to kill it, the title, even though the men die easy. So there’s a school of thought that says we should keep you alive, just so we know who you are, and how to hurt you.”

“Goodie.”

“Pleased to see me?”

“Thrilled.”

“Where are we going?”

“The Aldermen have traced our blue van to a place not far from here.”

“Why Morden?”

“It’s the end of the line.”

“Does that mean anything?”

“Maybe. Come on.”

*   *   *

Suburbia. Squalid suburbia, to be exact. Close enough to the inner city for rich retirees seeking a rural dream in proximity to a convenient supermarket to find it unpleasant; far enough away for rich workers in the centre of town to find it unsatisfactory. Morden was a left-over borough for the ones left behind. Streets of white concrete bungalows, and half-timbered semi-detached villas with lattice windows, and panes of fake antique glass in each front door, bulbous and distorted. And, every few hundred yards, a run-down shopping parade boasting the chippy, the betting shop, the newsagent and the launderette. A few unlikely hangovers survived: here the frontage of the little shop where they fixed watches, there the open garage door of the bicycle-repair shop, across the road, the post office selling beach balls, plastic toys, birthday cards with kittens on and, if you were lucky, a first-class stamp as well.

It could have been anywhere, any town in any place; and only the intrusion of the Underground and an old music hall converted for bingo let it still claim to be London.

We walked through the streets of Morden, following the instructions Earle had given me. I counted CCTV cameras, imagined a blue van driven all the way from Kilburn sliding through these sleeping streets. The sky was grey and overcast, the wind smelling of rain yet to come, the lunchtime bakeries selling suspicious sausage rolls: quiet, business not really interested today. Oda said, “No back-up?”

“They’ll meet us there.”

“And where’s there?”

“Not far now.”

“No patience for cryptic, sorcerer. ‘Cryptic’ is something people use in order to feel smug about their knowing and someone else not.”

I sighed, but she had a point. “Earle’s people traced the van to a site near here. We think it’s where the boy, Mo, is.”

“And the boy is still important?”

“Yeah.”

“To whom?”

“To me.”

“That’s what I thought.”

We kept on walking.

“What did you see, last night?”

“What?”

“The Midnight Mayor is supposed to see things. It would be useful information for us to know what you saw.”

“The Order are the last people I would possibly ever tell.”

“But you did see something, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell me?”

“Is there a difference?”

“What do you mean?”

“If I tell you, aren’t I just telling the Order?”

She thought about this half the length of the street. Wheelie-bins, parked cars, delivery vans, mothers with buggies, bright red postbox, pigeons scuttling out of the middle of the street as a learner driver pootled uneasily past. Then, “One day, I’ll kill you.”

“Yup. I know.”

“Because you’re a sorcerer.”

“Yup.”

“And one day you might have to kill me.”

“The thought had crossed my mind.”

“Because I’m part of the Order.”

“Pretty much. I think you’ll probably shoot first. But what if you miss?”

“It has nothing to do with my being Oda or your being Matthew. It’s just how it is.”

“Yeah. I know.” We kept on walking. I said, “I saw a dragon.”

“Cheesy.”

“It wasn’t Jurassic Park. I mean, I saw a thing that looked like a dragon simply because if it had looked like itself my brain wouldn’t have been able to comprehend it. Things we do not understand… the brain does its best to fit them into some sort of vehicle that allows us comprehension, to simplify it down so that the part of us that thinks with words, not instincts, has even a vague chance of understanding. It wasn’t a dragon.”

“OK.”

“It was everything else. Up, down, in, out, forward, back, time, width, length, depth, stone, brick, leaf, pipe, iron, steel, gas, breath, dirt, dust, fear, anger, madness, fury, hurt, life…”

“You’re rambling.”

“It was the city. Too big and wild to ever understand, except to call it a dragon and hope your brain doesn’t dribble at the thought.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Oda?”

“Yes?”

“There’s a reason I don’t tell you things either.”

And then, she smiled. It was such a strange and alien expression on her lips that at first, we couldn’t comprehend it. But it was in her voice as well, a moment, an actual moment, when psycho-bitch wasn’t anywhere to be seen, and there was just a woman with a gun in her pocket. “Matthew,” she said, “if you weren’t already thrice damned and stuck on a spit, it would almost be human that you tried.”

We didn’t know what to say, couldn’t think of anything except a sudden awareness of all the air inside our chest, that slipped over our tongue without being able to take anything but the feeblest of shapes.

Too much thinking, too much trouble.

Our solution for everything.

We kept walking, and said not a word.

And there it was.

It crept out of a corner and announced with a blaring self-confidence, “Voilà! Here I am and buggered if you’ll find a way round me!” It lay between two red-brick railway lines racing south towards more exciting, less smelly destinations, and on the chain-link fence someone had stuck up a sign in crude paint saying:

!!!SEAL’S SCRAP, WASTE & REFUSE SERVICE!!!

!!WASTE NOT WANT NOT!!

VAT NOT INCLUDED

Oda looked at the metal fence and said, “If this is a symptom of your sense of humour…”

“You make it sound like a disease. And no, it’s not. This is where the blue van went. It’s somewhere in there.”

I nodded through an iron gate.

Beyond it, a long way beyond it, and in it, and over it, and just generally doing its impression of the endless horizon, was rubbish. Every possible kind of decay had been placed within the boundaries of SEAL’S SCRAP, as if iron and steel might, after ten thousand years’ compression, have mulched down into rich black oil to be tapped. Dead cars, shattered and crushed in the vices of lingering, sleepy cranes; dead washing machines, dead fridges, pipes broken and the chemicals spilt onto earth and air, broken baths, old shattered trolleys, torn-up pipes, ruined engines with the plugs pulled out, tumbled old tiles shattered and cracked, skips of twisted plywood blackened in some flame, bricks turned to dust and piled upon bin bags split into shreds, shattered glass and cracked plastic, white polystyrene spilt across the tarmac, cardboard boxes in which the weeds had begun to grow. It seemed to stretch for miles, oozing into every corner between the railway lines, locked away behind its see-through fence and a small cabin for the delivery men to sit in and have their tea.

Oda said, “Where’s back-up?”

I looked for the Aldermen, and saw none.

“Don’t know.”

“We could…”

“I’ve seen enough American TV to know what happens to people who go in without back-up.”

“Jack Bauer manages.”

“You’ve watched 24? Did you denounce that too?”

She pursed her lips. “There’s a forum on the subject, but so far, no.”

“Is this why you’re a psycho-bitch with a gun?” I asked carefully. “You saw too many thrillers?”

“I think we both know that isn’t true, and I think we both want to avoid discussion on the matter.”

No smiles now. Perhaps we’d imagined it after all.

We waited. It started to rain. This is what usually happens when you’re outside and not too busy to notice.

Oda had an umbrella in her sports pack, along with a rifle and a sword. She didn’t offer to share.

I rang Earle.

“H-H-Harlun and—”

“Ask Earle where this fabled back-up of his is.”

The stuttering boy asked Earle.

Earle said, “Swift? What do you mean? They should have been there an hour ago.”

His voice was big enough that Oda could hear it over the phone. She looked at me, I looked at her.

We both looked at the scrapyard.

“Earle,” I said, “if I should die, I want you to know that the phones will scream their vengeance at you when you sleep.”

I hung up. I figured he’d work out the problem all by himself.

Oda said, “What do we do now?”

“Did you denounce Alien?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It’s just a film.”

I wagged a finger at the scrapyard, half lost now in the falling rain. I felt dirty just looking at it, and the seeping through my clothes of heavy London drizzle didn’t help. “Let’s say, hypothetically, that back-up has been and gone and it ended badly. The biggest mistake made in Alien…”

“Was going in after the monster?”

“Yes.”

“Then we should walk away.”

“But that’s the point, isn’t it? A blue van drove into the scrapyard with a kid inside who should hold the key to this entire farcical cock-up of a disaster. It didn’t come out. Now, if we go in there…”

“The kid is probably dead.”

“Then why not kill him at Raleigh Court?”

“You want him to be alive.”

“Yes! Of course I do! For so many, many reasons, and only one of them is mine! And if he is, and we just walk away then how stupid will we feel when everything goes splat?”

“You want to go looking for him. Now?”

“Yes.”

“In there?”

“Yes.”

“You know, I never had you for a fool.”

“Thanks, I think.”

“A coward, yes, but not a fool.”

“Wait here, then. You can save your bullets.” She sighed, reached into her bag, pulled out a gun, ugly, big and black. “Thank you,” I said.

“I know where my soul is going,” she replied sharply. “I don’t think this enterprise is helping the cause of yours.”

I was almost touched my soul had a cause to fail.

We went into the scrapyard, as the rain grew heavier.

There was no one inside the gate cabin. I found a kettle, as cold as dead men’s flesh. Our terror had subsided to a calm and level fury, as if every receptor for sense was so bombarded that the whole system had shut down for a diagnostic reboot, unable to believe this was the information it was meant to process. It gave the movement of our hands in front of us, the tread of our feet, a detached quality. We were observers, observing someone else, no more.

Rain pooled grey-black on the uneven tarmac floor of the yard. A few twists, a few turns, and all was lost behind the great piles of stuff, the endless cairns of dead equipment rising up taller than three basketball players with an acrobatic fondness for each other’s shoulders. The railway lines were quickly gone behind the tottering pyramids of broken metal, twisted plastic, rusted iron, pocked steel, rotten stuffing and slashed foam, just dead bits of comfortable lives, left over to no purpose that I could see. The rain helped keep it a bit real, tickled down the back of my neck and bit ice into my spine, oozed through my shoes—still not my shoes, still too big—and started wrinkling itchy around my toes. I buried my hands in my pocket, stuck my chin inside my collar and kept walking, scanning each great mound of abandoned nothing stuff from top to bottom in search of something softer than metal.

There wasn’t a smell, not with the rain and the heavy, sinking cold. There was a taste, salt and dry spilt chemicals, old bleach and broken bottles of things that shouldn’t have had the safety cap removed. Two turns in the maze and the sounds of the road were already a long way off; a train rumbled by distantly, wheels screeching like a maddened witch. I slipped on a torn pile of builder’s bags, sand still clinging to their inner edges; ambled past a wall of shattered safety glass, so safe that the million greenish pieces hadn’t had the heart to fall away from their friends. A fat black-brown rat scuttled away towards the gutted and half-burnt remnants of a sofa, the cushions long since vanished. I scuttled after it, bending down towards the ground and holding out my hands, cooing gentle noises.

“Come on, come on…”

The rat looked back at me uncertainly, hesitated on the edge of a hole chewed through the stuffing of a mattress, which thin orange fungus had long since made its own, then started to edge back towards me, its oval body shimmering and bright in the soaking rain, its pink claws sliding through the rising puddles on the floor. Oda looked at us with distaste, but said not a word as bending down, we picked it up in our hands, smelt slime and old rotting things from its coat, saw tiny sharp teeth in a tiny pointed mouth, felt little sharp claws tap dance on the surface of our palm. Pigeons and rats; no one knows more in a big city.

We stroked its back, our fingers sliding slime-covered off the greasy surface of its coat, whispered gentle implorings and polite commands, and bent down, let it scuttle free, followed it as it passed along small trails through the rising water. It scrambled over old black Victorian pipes dragged up from some forsaken corner of the sewers, past broken pots and vases smashed into a dozen white shards on the earth, over a hundred cracks where the grass had somehow managed to peep its way up from the grey concrete soil, round a rotting slab of sandy clay where the buddleia was trying to take root, little purple flowers crawling out of tough brown roots. I almost had to run to keep up with it; staggering past the broken hull of a yacht, a great fat tear through its belly; the twisted remains of a car, bonnet pressed up almost into its boot; wrought-iron back of an old bedstead; a lonely rocking chair, the screws just about to fall free.

“Sorcerer…” whispered Oda, a note of urgency in her voice. I glanced back at her, then back again and could see nothing but the towers of broken things all around, like metal hills blocking out the sky.

“Not far,” I muttered, as much for my sake as hers. “Not far…”

I could smell the bright warm stench of a sandwich rotting in the rain, see the yellow blur of the rat’s eyes in my own, sense the twitching of its whiskers as if they grew from my face, and there it was as well, another thing rotting, a different kind of rot, the kind that didn’t taste of bright orange rust and broken metal. I remembered the fox in Kilburn. I remembered the way Mr Pinner didn’t smell.

Old kettles turned calcium-white on the inside; half a chimney pot, through which the buddleia was beginning to peek, a shattered TV aerial still carrying traces of pigeon poop on its strands, a satellite dish, face turned upwards to receive a signal, in which now nothing but stagnant water pooled. There would be ice in the night, thick frost in the shadows; our breath was white smoke.

And then the rat stopped.

It looked at something, then looked at me, then scuttled away into a tunnel an inch wider than itself, dug out of a tower of tumbled detritus. At first we couldn’t see what it had seen, but stared at more of the same: rust and black burnt nothings. Then Oda’s hand brushed ours, just for a second, and we, startled by the touch, looked to her, then followed her gaze.

There was something in the rubbish.

It was a shoe. At some point, it had been a trendy shoe, big, white and gold and blue, all the right marks to declare that here was someone who knew who they were and it was all about the feet. That had been then. Now it, like everything else in this place, was rotting, dirt and rain and ragged tears pulling out the soft stuffing of the inner sole, limp sodden brown laces dribbled, undone. It stuck out of the pile of dead machines at a strange angle, like someone had stuck it there on a pole like a defiant flag. I looked closer. There was something in the shoe. It might have been a sock.

Oda whispered, “Oh, God.”

There was something in the sock.

It might have been an ankle.

I snapped, “Help me!”

We scrambled up the sides of the heap and started pulling. Old rusted bike frames, crinkled-up drink cans, broken bottles, a thing, all withered bone and hair, that might once have been a dead cat stuffed inside a cardboard box, a shattered lamp, a gutted radio, the panels for a speaker trailing wires, the drawers of some old filing cabinet, snapped along the lines on which they should have slid. The ankle became a leg, blue slashed jean stained the colour of black rust; the leg joined onto a hip, at the wrong angle, sticking out too far to one side; the hip was half-covered by a T-shirt, soaked through and torn; the T-shirt covered a chest, into which half a broom had at some point buried itself just hard enough to pin the body it impaled to the ground. We threw broken things aside, feeling the great mound of decayed waste shift beneath us, creaking and clanking as old lynchpins of its structure were tossed away; and there were fingers, hands, arms. And they were wrong: black—not the deep rich brown of Oda’s skin that foolish mortals called black, but the black of an ocean night when the stars are lost, coal-black, dead-black, ink-black. I could see black blood pumping through the veins beneath his skin, still moving, still, just alive, and we knew without a doubt, that it was ink-black, black as ink, black, because it was ink.

Some sort of whisk had fallen over his face, its broken wires clinging to his throat and jaw. We untangled them, metal hooks twanging merrily as they came free, and ink flowed from the pinprick wounds. The whites of his eyes were stained with the same ink that ran through his blood, his lips were the colour of festering bruises, his hair was falling from his skull in fistfuls, barely a few handfuls left on the grey dome of his head. Alive. Still alive, bleeding, wheezing, freezing, shivering, dying, pick one, they were all leading in the same direction, racing each other for the prize.

“Is that…” whispered Oda.

“What do you think?”

I dragged him up by an arm and he came, a puppet without the stuffing. Oda took the other arm, slung it across her shoulder and between the two of us, we pulled him free. A rusty screwdriver was embedded in his back, just offset from his spine, sticking out like some obscene fashion accessory. Oda pulled it free with a thick pop of dead muscle, and black ink began to flow from the hole down to the seat of his fouled pants. He stank of urine and shit, dragged uneven and lumpy in our arms as we pulled him along. His legs didn’t move, his head didn’t rise; there was nothing in him to suggest life except the slow beating of black blood in his veins. I turned my head, looking for the way out, trying to judge by the distant rattle of trains the way to the exit. Picked a direction; staggered, walked, ran, dragged, tripped, stumbled, all at once, towards the way out.

“Ambulance?” whispered Oda.

“Can’t save him now.”

“The… hospital place?”

“Maybe. They have means at Elizabeth Anderson… can you reach the phone in my bag?”

My satchel was swinging uncomfortably from my shoulder; to grab it was to drop the ink-stained boy. As Oda snatched for it, I glanced at his face and saw, through the black stain under his skin, that his cheeks were still slightly puffed with puppy-dog youth; just a kid, and he was going to die. Oda grabbed my satchel, reached inside, pulled out the mobile phone.

“Black Cab,” I said. “He’s the only one who can get us there in time.”

She thumbed it on. Continents drifted in the time it took the phone to power up. “Sorcerer…” Fear, unashamed, numb-the-senses fear. “… there’s no signal.”

We never call bad things “coincidence”.

“Help me,” I grunted, and she took more of the kid’s weight again. “We need to run.”

We ran, tripping and staggering through the thick rain, the sky a sullen gloom overhead making no concession to the time of day, determined to keep things uniform and dead. My hand burnt, my head burnt, my eyes burnt inside their sockets, I could feel them aching and stinging.

“He’s here, he’s here, he’s here, he’s here,” we whimpered.

“Shut up!”

“He’s here.”

“Shut up!”

I remembered the mad eyes of the dragon. Too big, too… too much of anything, too too, an endless fall into a thing too big for the mind to grasp.

So we ran, dragging the kid who I guess once upon a time had answered to the name of Mo, son of Loren; blood turned to ink, eyes turned black, dribbling black ink tears down his stained face, draining black blood from a screwdriver hole in his back, from wire tears in his neck, clothes the colour of rust, trousers the smell of shit, shoes the brown stain of rot and decay. We rounded a corner and pulled immediately back, pressing ourself into the pyramid of fallen debris.

“He’s here,” we breathed.

Oda peered past us, towards the exit from the junkyard, and immediately drew back, shoulders heaving with the effort of breath. She had seen what I had seen. Just a guy in a suit, standing in the exit. I wondered if Earle’s back-up had seen him too, and if they had lived long enough to see anything more.

“What do we do?” she hissed.

I glanced forward again, and there he was: pinstripe suit, one hand buried casually in his trouser pocket, the other holding a huge blue umbrella over his head, the water tumbling down from the edges. Smiling—just smiling. Mr Pinner, patient as the dustbin man, just smiling in the way out.

Mo, as if sensing the terror that we could see, groaned.

I turned, twisting my head towards the junk above us. “Get him to the station,” I said. “Buy him a ticket. We can hide behind the barriers.”

“What are you going to do?”

We reached up and brushed the tip of an old, cracked fishing rod, sticking out from the black stinking piles of junk. “Litterbug,” we whispered, closing our fingers round the stubbly end of the rod and snapping it like a dry summer twig, “we’re going to have a conversation.”

We wrapped the end of the rod in the palm of our hand, took a deep breath, and stepped out to meet Mr Pinner.

*   *   *

He was smiling.

Had he ever not smiled?

He stood under the umbrella in the chain gateway to the junkyard, and smiled.

Mr Pinner, the death of cities.

After all, if the ravens and the river and the Stone and, God help us all, the Midnight Mayor protect the city, then that should suggest there’s something you need to protect it from.

We stopped ten paces from where he stood, and hoped our jelly-trembles would be mistaken for the cold of the pouring rain. Our hair itched where the water had dragged it down towards our eyes, our stomach felt like it had been sucked clean by a hoover that someone had forgotten to switch off after. We wanted to speak, and found we couldn’t.

Then he said, “Hello. My name is Mr Pinner. I am the death of cities. Did you want to talk about something?”

I nodded numbly.

“I’m all ears.”

His voice was polite, level, well educated, with just a hint of something more aggressive, something that deep down loathed the good grammar he used, loathed the sharp suit and the expensive watch, and dreamed of Friday night down at the pub, and the old farting motorbikes the kids used to use.

“Well?” he prompted, as we stood and stared for too long.

I licked my lips, tasted the falling rain, clutched our piece of fishing rod so tight it burnt in my hand. “Why are you here?”

“To kill you and your lady friend,” he replied easily. “Somewhere in here there are some men who had no luck. Or some of their bits. I don’t concern myself with the details.”

“Why?”

He looked slightly confused. “Because I am the death of cities,” he repeated. “I’m sorry; didn’t I make my position clear?”

“Just… just to clarify…” I stammered, “you are using it in the literal sense, right? I mean, you’re not just some twat who spent too much time playing Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, you’re the actual, I mean… the literal…”

He beamed. “When the bomb fell on Hiroshima, I saw the sky blossom above me like a flower, saw the beauty of the flames, the majesty of it. When Dresden burnt, I breathed the smoke—the night has never been so bright! When the levees broke during the storm, I let the water run through my fingers, washing away corruption and a surplus of time; when the plague came to this city, I stroked the backs of the black rats as they ran off the ship. When the baker in Pudding Lane left his oven open, I was the customer who took the last loaf before the ashes scattered onto the straw and ignited. The bread was the sweetest food I have ever tasted. When Rome burnt, I stood on the tallest hill to watch the temples tumble; when Babylon fell, I licked the dust off my lips to taste on my tongue. I stood on the walls of Jericho, danced on the lip of the earthquake when it shook down the Bosphorus, bathed in the burning rivers at Pompeii, drank vodka on the rooftops of Stalingrad, and when the order was given, spare not man, woman, or child, I raised the standard high and gave the battle cry that mortal men were too afraid to utter. I am as old as the first stone laid beside its neighbour. I feast on the fall of walls, on the shattering of roofs, on the breaking of the street, the bursting of the pipes, the snapping of the wires, the bursting of the mains, the running of the people. I have come to this city half a dozen times before, to watch the cathedrals burn and taste the terror on the bridges just before they sink beneath the weight of runners. And now I’ve come again, to finish what was started when the first stone was laid.” He smiled. “Does that answer your question?”

“Yup,” I squeaked. “Pretty much.” He reached up to close the umbrella. “Although,” I said quickly, “it seems to me, in an academic way of things, that you didn’t actually cause all those things. You encouraged them, maybe, you rejoiced in them, you found… beauty in them, sure. No one would deny that a mushroom cloud is magical, outrageous, obscene, beautiful. Whatever. But unless you’re telling me you stood next to Truman’s shoulder and whispered, ‘press the red button’ or told Bomber Harris that it would just be a little, little fire, you seem to be more of a consequence, not a cause. A feeding parasite who finds magic in life, life in death. So I gotta ask you: what brought you to London this time?”

He seemed almost to hesitate. Then he smiled. “You must be Bakker’s apprentice,” he said. “The sorcerers are dead, which saved me killing them. The Tower has fallen, which saved me destroying it. When you killed Bakker, you made my life so much easier. I would not have come here had he still been alive. I should thank you for that, sorcerer.”

The vacuum cleaner in my stomach turned from suck to pump, filled it with ice and vomit and dust.

So I said, just to see, because if I didn’t ask, I’d never know, “ ‘Give me back my hat’.”

His face darkened, his fingers tightened in his trouser pocket. We grinned. “Come on,” I said. “Like it was never not going to be important.”

And for a moment, just a little, little moment, Mr Pinner, the death of cities, was afraid.

Then I felt the first slither of blood run down my face, felt the first sting of the paper cut. We drew back our right hand, behind our shoulder, and then flung it forward, throwing the snapped end of fishing rod like a dart, like a spear. It slammed dead-centre into his chest, point-first through the place where there should have been a breastbone. He looked at it, a little surprised, then back up at us. “Nothing can stop me,” he murmured. “You cannot begin to comprehend.”

I shrugged. We opened our palms out to our sides, felt the electricity crackle through our blood. “Waste not, want not,” we said. He reached to pull the fishing rod from his chest, utterly unconcerned to have it sticking from his paper flesh; and as he did so, we pushed.

Not at him; we pushed sideways, backwards, down, closed our eyes and twisted our fingers towards the great piles of discarded junk, remembering the smell of it, the rusted touch, the slime, the rot, the stink, the decay, the dead cat in its cardboard box, the fungus oozing over rotted things, the torn stuffing, the biting wire, the razored shattered edges, the tumbled glass, the melted plastic, the burnt steel, the broken pipes, the shattered cans, the twisted hinges, the abandoned everything. Everything we didn’t want to see and didn’t want to know, thrown aside; didn’t care, didn’t think, didn’t need, didn’t use, didn’t work, tossed and discarded and abandoned and forgotten and alone.

Life is magic, magic is life. It’s a conundrum sorcerers have always worried at. So much that had once been alive, so many abandoned forgotten things that had been a part of life. It was only logical, only natural, only the most sensible conclusion in the world that with so much association and neglect piled up in one place, there would still be a shard of forgotten life, waiting to burn. And it, being lonely and abandoned and left to die, was angry.

Mr Pinner pulled the piece of fishing rod from his chest, and looked at it with an expression of surprise. Small scraps of paper drifted down from the wound, caught in the wind and billowed upward for a moment, before the falling rain cast them down into the puddle at his feet.

Then, quietly and off to our left, something went thunk.

He looked up sharply and, just a bit too late, realised. Something else went eeeeeeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiicccccccckkkkkk…

A plastic bottle tumbled from a pile and bounced away. A piece of rotting brown string snapped free from a Gordian knot. A sprout of purple buddleia twisted and shrivelled, its roots dislodged. Then came the scuttling. It started as a distant tap dance performed by a flea circus, rose into a tumbling of meltwater, the ice still in it, became a high chattering noise, and only at the last moment did we understand. The rats were coming out of the junk: hundreds of fat brown rats. They slithered from inside the humming piles of twisted debris, plopped down onto the earth, onto each other and scuttled for the exit, worming past my ankles, brushing against my legs, flowing over my feet and past me without even bothering to slow down, streaming around Mr Pinner and away, tumbling into the street and gutters, searching for a way out.

Then I felt something move past my head. I ducked instinctively, shielding my face with my hands. Through my parted fingers I could see what it was. A fishing rod, the end snapped off. It spun past my ear and struck Mr Pinner across the side of the head, too fast for him to dodge. A broken umbrella flew point-first from a pile of rubble and embedded itself in his shoulder; a deflated plastic football spun from the ground and tangled around his feet, a blackened barbecue spun past me and knocked into him; and now it wasn’t just one thing, it was a dozen, a hundred, the whole yard spinning and screaming and rattling and twisting and rising and turning and falling, all falling in, tumbling down from the great pyramids like iron filings drawn to a magnet, like a rocket into the sun.

We threw ourself on the ground as the tarmac cracked and splintered beneath us, covering our head, tucking our arms into our ears and our hands over our eyes and willing fury and life still into the old dead things left to rot around us, pushing every drop of fear and anger and strength we possessed into the rust and mould and telling it, him, get him. Somewhere nearby I was vaguely aware of running; I half thought I heard Oda call my name; kept my head down and started to crawl on my belly, the last rats running over my spine and the back of my neck in their desperation to escape, as I headed for where I thought the exit might be.

I couldn’t see; the air was too full of spinning broken objects that, even as they travelled, shed spare parts, clattering to the earth around them. A thick orange dust of metal shavings, sawdust, sand, rust, old spilt chemicals, shattered moulds, ripped-up mosses and bits of thick purple fungus and thin green slime filled the air, turning clear lines of perspective into a maddened oil canvas painted by a drugged-up loon. I breathed through the sleeve of my coat, and even that hurt, my nose burning with the rust that tried to slash and tear the soft tissues, my eyes running and every sense overwhelmed with so much information all at once that I could barely register any thought at all. Just crawl, keep it simple, too much thinking, too much trouble, too much of too much, just keep crawling…

I bumped into the chain fence, bent back like a clifftop tree in a storm, and crawled along it, feeling my way to the edge. I half thought I heard Oda again, but it was hard to tell, beneath the tumbling of a thousand dead bits of steel, iron, plastic, brick, concrete, rubber, glass, Plexiglas, clay, tin, plywood, chipboard… a hand closed over our ankle and we whimpered, glancing back into the storm and half-blinded by the blast of everything that hit our eyes, so weak, small, frail, mortal,

Mr Pinner

his hand was paper

for a moment we blinked and pushed back against the storm and saw

the skin torn away. It was just white paper, covered in tiny illegible writing and the suit, his suit tearing in the wind, was sewn into the paper; I could see the tiny stitches as the cuff was pulled back by the whirlwind. His eyes were full of blue ink; his hair was unravelling, each strand unfolding into a tube, a receipt or a bus ticket or some small marker, that flew away and unfurled behind him. His teeth were rubbers, tiny white rubbers set into a broader rubber gum; his tongue was some sort of thick moleskin or leather, dry, like the kind used to bind an executive diary. It occurred to us quite how much he looked like a thing summoned, a creation of someone’s fury: consequence, not cause…

His other hand came up, holding a not-quite-gold-nibbed pen, the end dripping black ink drops that were snatched away into the whirlwind. He was on his belly, an arm, part of a head sticking out from beneath a falling tonnage of rubbish and scrap, which writhed and twisted above him like a great angry worm, bits of old fridge and shattered chair rising to the surface and falling into the depths, like a liquid creature, not a thing of solid mass at all. I kicked at the hand that seized my ankle, grabbed the strength in my chest, the heat and the fear and sent it blasting down my leg, smoking and spitting electric anger off his fingertips. His grip relaxed for just a moment and I crawled free, staggering onto my hands and knees even as Mr Pinner shrieked in frustration and a wardrobe, the doors gaping like jaws, tumbled down on him from out of the whirlwind.

I turned away from the storm and ran, sparks flashing off the surface of my skin as I struggled to control it, too much, too much magic, too much electricity, too much of anything that was too too much…

And there was the street, the road, the cars, alarms wailing in furious distress, the windows opening in streets around, the telephone lines swaying and jangling uneasily, and Oda, already halfway up the street and headed for the station, Mo slung across her shoulders, not looking back, never looking back. I staggered after her as behind me the great mound of scrap that had upended itself on Mr Pinner heaved and warped, buckled and screamed and

it was going to go.

I ran down the street, staggering and bumping against the sides of the cars, heard the little jangling sound of the iron fence giving out behind me, heard the whooshing of the telephone lines as they tore free from their moorings, heard the distant screech of some passing train slamming on the brakes and an almost sad, gentle, whumph.

I threw myself down into the gutter, crawled underneath the bumper of the nearest car and put my hands over my head as behind me, the scrapyard blossomed like a mushroom cloud. It went up into the air, spread out in blissful photographic slow motion, and fell. It rained stuffing, wire, broken pipe, rusted metal, old fridge and split tyre. Half a dresser smashed through the bedroom window of a nearby house; a truck found its roof caved in by an upside-down van, the engine, tyres and windows gone, that fell from the heavens like a burning bush. An armchair managed to catch itself on the sharpened antennae of a rooftop TV aerial; a chimney pot smashed down on a garden gnome. Everywhere there was dust, and dirt, and rust, shimmering like orange snow down onto the ground. It seemed to take a lifetime to settle; it probably took less than five seconds.

I looked around me. A grandfather clock had landed half a foot from my hiding place, top-down, and spilt its ancient blackened gears across the pavement. An old crowbar was buried like King Arthur’s sword in the bonnet of the car in front of me; a sheet of thin insulating foam drifted from the sky to land at my feet. Wherever there was an alarm, it was wailing, on every house, and in every car. I crawled to my feet and looked back at the scrapyard. Black smoke obscured everything, but it seemed like most of the contents of the yard were now spilt across an area roughly five times wider and five times shallower than before. A piece of paper drifted past my feet, turning rapidly grey in the rain. It said:

Gas bill in the period 06-07 to 12-07—£257.13

I looked up.

There was a man standing in the smoke.

Smoothing down his suit.

We ran.

Oda had been knocked flat by the blast. As I caught up with her, she was trying to pick Mo up with one arm while pulling the remnants of yellow sealing foam out of her hair. “Help me!” she snapped, and I guessed she meant with the kid.

I dragged him up and together we staggered towards the end of the road.

“Did you kill him?” she asked.

“Ha ha,” I replied.

“Terrific. Where is he?”

“Smoothing down his suit. If we’re lucky I’ve rattled him and we’ll have a few minutes. If not…”

“Where are we going?”

“The station.”

She glanced sharply at me. “You’re going to…”

“Power of the travelcard,” I replied. “You know how this song goes.”

If anyone paid us attention on the streets of Morden, they paid just enough to get out of our way.

They’d heard something explode and were thinking of terrorist bombs and the ten o’clock news. And we were moving too fast now, as we dragged Mo down the rain-drenched street, for anything to make us stop. I could hear sirens, getting closer, every pitch and tone of distressed vehicle, see people running in equal measure towards and away from the blast. We got Mo across the street towards the station, saw the bright sign of the Underground, that most holy of symbols, protection and safety and movement and freedom, and tumbled into the station even as the guard started to close the gates. “Hey, there’s been a—” he began.

“He’s got a gun, fucker!” Oda screamed at him.

The station manager looked from me, to Oda, to Mo. Oda, to prove her point, pulled out her own gun, fired two shots in the air and shouted, “Run for your lives!”

They ran, guard, manager, passengers and all. I loaded the full weight of Mo into Oda’s arms and staggered towards the ticket machines, fumbled for ever in my bag, looking for coins, anything, found some, bought a ticket for him, pulled out my own, handed Mo’s to Oda and snapped, “Get him through!”

We passed through the barrier and nearly fell into the hall inside, Oda crudely dragging Mo as she held their two tickets in her teeth. “Down, down!” I snapped, waving at the stairs. I felt movement behind me, turned back towards the half-open grille on the entrance; and there he was, Mr Pinner, walking in calmly out of the rain, shaking the droplets off his umbrella, which wasn’t even scratched, he wasn’t even scratched, the illusion of skin back on his face, all hint of paper gone, nothing torn, not even a thrown stitch in all his suit. He smiled at me and started to walk towards the barrier. I raised my travelcard, bracing myself for the spell, and began the incantation.

“These are the terms and conditions of carriage: ‘If you do not have an Oyster card with a valid season ticket and/or balance to pay as you go on it, you must have with you a valid printed ticket(s)…’ ”

He hesitated, seeing what I was doing, seeing the air thicken between us as I threw myself into the protective spell, invoking all that was sacred about the Underground.

“ ‘… available for the whole of the journey you are making. You may use your printed ticket in accordance with these conditions.

All printed tickets remain our property and we may withdraw or cancel…’ ”

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

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

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

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

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

And there was the indicator—

1. High Barnet via Bank—3 mins

2. Edgware via Bank—9 mins

3. Edgware via CharingX—15 mins

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

“Can we use the train?”

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

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

“Sorcerer!” shrilled Oda.

“Not right now!”

“Matthew!”

I glanced back.

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

“He’s awake!”

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

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

“Matthew!!”

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

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

“ ‘Give me back…’ ”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Which traffic warden, what traffic warden…”

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

“Oda! Get away from him!”

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

And that was it.

Polite silent death.

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

1. High Barnet via Bank—1 mins

2. Edgware via Bank—7 mins

3. Edgware via CharingX—13 mins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. High Barnet via Bank

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

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

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

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

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

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

Too distant.

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

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

A cold push of air from the tunnel, a pair of white lights grinding down towards us, an asterisk running across the indicator board, wiping out all previous statements, clean slate, end of the line, goodnight, good luck, reload, reboot…

“Us.”

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

There is an idea: the live rail.

We have always liked it.

Electricity, alive.

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

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

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

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

It takes a lot of electricity to move a train.

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

I screamed God just screamed and

we sucked it in through our burning hand

my skin on fire

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

I could taste more as my tongue ignited with blue burning

going from here to there faster than the electricity in the wire

just a little mortal going to burn going to catch fire going to

here it is…

… blue blood burning…

… blue electric angels…

We spread our wings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ergo, a lot faster.

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

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

Colliers Wood

and we were laughing now, spinning and turning in the air, beating electric wings and listening to the roar of the flame and so much more the beat of the tracks the rumble of a thousand parted trains the breath of the Underground air the special dry stench of the black dirt that stained your spit the swoosh of the door the endless echoed voices of a million million million announcements please mind the gap please mind the gap please mind the gap please mind the

Tooting Broadway

going to burn going to burn going to burn oh god please

we laughed and laughed and laughed, thrilled and danced in it, revelled in the burning flames and

too much of too much this is why sorcerers forget their names

I am

Blazing blue electric glory as

Tooting Bec

Listen to me!! Listen!!

We blazed blue fire light life fury freedom

Listen to me!! We are going to burn!!

Light up ahead blink and it’ll be gone, we will be in the heart of the city before you can whisper our name blink and it’ll be gone we’ll be gone too fast to stop and catch and

Train up ahead.

And we’ll be

Train up ahead!!

for ever free and fast and just like we were before this human flesh and

There’s a fucking train!

A train up ahead, sitting squarely in the platform of Balham station, rear lights showing red, doors just closing, just starting to pull into the tunnel ahead, engine whining slowly as it tried to eat the electricity we were feasting on. And even though we were greater and mightier than ever any mortal machine, it was sucking down the power, eating up our speed as we competed for the live rail and besides, there wasn’t enough room for it and us in the tunnel, one would have to go and we weren’t going to stop never stop never give up the fire or the blaze or the

I pulled our hand free from the live rail.

The burning blue fires went out.

The great angel wings, blue electric angel wings that had carried us from the end of the line to here, spat and fizzed, began to melt and dissolve into a thousand wriggling blue sparks, that flashed and popped like exploding blue maggots on the line for a moment behind us, before dissolving into nothing. I twisted in the air as the last furious blast of electricity faded from across our skin, pulling Oda tighter into me and turning my body towards the platform as with a sad snap of electricity the lightning on the live rail went out and we tumbled, hissing and smoking with speed and fire, onto the platform of Balham station.

Oda came free from my arms as we fell, sliding across the concrete and tiles, people scattering to get out of our way. I felt dull pain, followed by the hot burning of blood starting to seep through my skin, almost a friend now, an agony I knew how to deal with; and I rolled across the platform, didn’t try to fight it, just rolled until I bumped up against a wall covered in posters and bits of old chewing gum, and stopped.

Above me, an Indian-looking man pulling a heroic face so manly it was surprising his jaw didn’t pop straight from his skull, stared sombrely down at me from beneath a sign proclaiming “THE MIGHTY ALI SINGS BOLLYWOOD’S GREATEST HITS”. I looked to my left. A collection of B- and C-list celebrities stared back at me in various character-filled poses, from a poster declaring, “NOW IS THE AGE OF HEROES!!!” I groaned and rolled onto my side. I could feel blood running down from my left shoulder, blood pooling in the palm of my right hand. Our eyes drifted past the platform edge, fell on the live rail. We whimpered, tried to crawl towards it, digging our fingers into the dull, dry tiles. I tried to get up, we staggered and fell back down, still moving towards the rail. I tried to turn my head away, but we couldn’t, could still taste the electricity on our tongue, beautiful burning brightness.

“Please,” we whimpered, “please please please.”

I closed our eyes.

“Please, please, please,” we whimpered.

I hid my head in my hands, brought my knees up to my chest, felt the blood seeping through the twin crosses carved in my skin, staining my hair where my fingers had curled around my skull.

“So beautiful,” we whispered.

So beautiful.

This is why sorcerers go mad.

I crawled onto my hands and knees, head turned away from the live rail. We wanted to look please one last look one last breath one last

I dragged myself up onto my feet, turned away, leant against the nearest wall, gasping for breath, dirty, wonderful, spit-staining tunnel air. We were going to scream, just like a child, like an injured animal with no words to express the idea that it was going to die, we were going to scream.

Then someone said, “Uh… mate?”

I opened my eyes, stared into a stranger’s face. He was wearing the slightly undignified bright blue and white uniform of an Underground worker, holding a radio in one hand, a white signal paddle in another. He was about twenty years old. He looked terrified: his hands shook, his voice stumbled over the simplest sounds.

“Uh…” he began.

I started walking, pushed past him, keeping our eyes turned firmly away from the rails. Oda had fallen some few yards behind me, and was struggling to pick herself up. We helped her, dragging her up by an arm; she looked at us and said not a word, but turned and started to stagger towards the escalator up from the platform, and I followed.

“Hey, mate?” The platform manager’s voice again, weak and uncertain.

I didn’t look back, couldn’t look back. We stumbled to the bottom of the escalator and started climbing it, leaning on the black rubber handrail that dragged a little faster than the stairs could rise.

At the top of the stairs stood the station manager, flanked by one of his assistants, radio in hand. He raised his hand as we approached, and said, “May I have a word?”

Oda waved her ticket at him. I waved mine.

We pushed past, tapped out through the barrier, and walked away before he could recover from his surprise.

A witty man once announced in that very special 1950s English accent that today can only be used in parody:

“Balham: Gateway to the South!”

Balham—last chance to turn back, last chance to escape and get back into the city. Last place where the Underground meets the overland, last chance at least to pretend you live in the centre of town.

Balham. A place where all good Woolworths go to die; suburbia that just wishes it was something more.

I was bleeding.

As we staggered out of Balham station I turned to Oda and said, “My stitches have torn.”

She looked at me, and for a moment, I was scared again. Then she took me firmly by the wrist and dragged me like a child across the street to the nearest chemist. She bought a thick pile of bandaging and a first-aid kit, and hurried me into the nearest passport photo booth.

It wasn’t a unit designed for two, but I wasn’t about to complain. She said, “Coat!”

I pulled off my coat.

“T-shirt!”

I pulled off my shirt. “What a mess,” she tutted, and started mopping.

After a few minutes, a security guard pulled back the curtain to enquire what we were doing. Oda told him to call the police, or an ambulance, or both, and to get stuffed. Paralysed by the wide range of choices available, he just hovered, and when the bandages had been applied and my Jesus T-shirt pulled back on, he hustled us out as quickly as possible and snuck away to call the police.

Oda propped me against the glass window of a supermarket and ran across the road to a charity shop. A minute later she came back with a black T-shirt in a paper bag. It said, “GARAMOND IS THE WORLD’S GREATEST FONT”.

I said, “Please. No.”

She said, “Shut up and put it on.”

This time we used a coffee shop. She bought two strong coffees that turned out to be brown hot water in a cardboard cup; but I appreciated the gesture. It was something to wash the painkillers down. I changed in the toilets. By the time we emerged, cups in hand, the sirens were starting nearby. She said: “Can he follow us?”

“Who?”

“Mr Pinner.”

“I don’t know. Let’s keep moving.”

We took a mainline train to Clapham Junction, sitting in silence by the window. I couldn’t face the Tube; just couldn’t face it.

From Clapham, we took the mainline train to Waterloo.

She didn’t look me in the eye, just stared out of the window in silence and dug at the dirt under her nails. It was black and red from dry blood. She still didn’t look at me.

At Waterloo she said, “Do we need to find you a doctor?”

“Eventually,” I said. “I want to see the river.”

Down into the subways that ran beneath the roundabout before Waterloo Bridge; a loop past the Imax and then north. I could smell the river, taste its old magics on the air, they cooled down the burning in my skin, eased some of the weight from my legs. The rain had stopped, the pavement gleaming with clean washed darkness, the tide low, with soft, perfectly smooth sand peeping out from beneath the high walls of the embankment. I slid gratefully down on a bench in front of the National Theatre, beneath the leafless branches of the fairy-light-hung trees. The wooden bench was still damp from the rain, the city a faded grey behind a monotone haze. It was quiet and beautiful. Somewhere behind all the walls a million people were doing whatever it was people did after their lunch break in offices like these. And I didn’t need to know about a single one of them, but could sit at the centre of the universe and listen to the river, flowing just for me, just mine.

Oda stood behind me.

Bang, I thought.

Bang, three to the chest, two to the head.

Bang; bang bang.

Public place—cameras, CCTV, always CCTV, eyes in the windows of the cafés of the theatre, buying tickets, reading books, walking by the river, tourists with little kiddies holding balloons.

I slipped my fingers beneath my “GARAMOND IS THE WORLD’S GREATEST FONT” T-shirt and felt the sticky seeping of blood through the bandage Oda had wrapped round my shoulder. The blood that came away on my fingertips was thin and red. I wiped it unconsciously on my trousers and breathed a little deeper the smell of the river.

Then, because Oda didn’t seem to want to talk to me, I stood up, walked to the edge of the embankment and climbed over the railing. A stair, practically frictionless with thin green slime clinging to it, led down to the soft almost-entirely-sand of the river’s edge. I climbed down, walked to where the Thames water slid over the bank, washed my hands in it, then walked back to the sand. Oda had come to the top of the stair. She looked… nothing. Folded arms and nothing in her face. Not speaking, not doing, just watching.

I prodded the sand with my toe, saw thin clear water ooze out from the surface, and very carefully with the end of my shoe wrote,

GIVE ME BACK MY HAT

“Is that smart?” asked Oda from the top of the stairs.

I looked up at her. “Oda?”

“Yes.”

“I think I know what’s going on.”

“Do you.” Not a question, not wanting an answer. But I had one to give, and the novelty kept me talking.

“Oda?”

“Yes?”

“I think I know how to kill Mr Pinner.”

Now, and for the first time, Oda started to look interested.

Legwork.

I loathe the Aldermen, but it is nice having someone else’s legs to do the working.

We went to Aldermanbury Square.

Earle said, “You’re still…!”

“Not dead, no. I noticed.”

Still behind that desk. Still in an immaculate suit, still unfluffed, still not rattled. Still drinking coffee. No wonder the man never seemed to sleep.

“Forgive me, I did not mean to sound so…”

“The good thing about my party trick, is that it is always surprising,” I replied, slumping down into the chair in front of his big desk. “Your ‘back-up’ is dead.”

His face darkened. “You found…”

“Dead. They’re dead. And the kid… and Mo… dead.”

Loren.

I hadn’t thought but

what would we say?

“But you appear to be…”

“Still not dead, yes, I know. Funny, isn’t it? I have a theory, Mr Earle. Actually, I have a whole fat bundle of plausible hypotheses which, taken together, may make one great whompha of a theory. Wanna hear it?”

He shrugged. “If it’s relevant to our current dilemma.”

“Mr Earle, does it worry you that, if I am the irreparable prat you seem to think I am, I’m still alive?”

“It is conceivable that you are a villain rather than a prat, Mr Swift.”

“You want to hear this theory or not?”

“Will it offer possible solutions to the deaths that seem to be occurring in ever-increasing quantity?”

“Quite possibly. And I’m just half an hour of medical attention away from divulging it.”

They had a small medical room in the offices of Harlun and Phelps.

Of course they did.

They also had a gym, two canteens, an ATM and a psychotherapist. Everything to make the running of orderly business more orderly.

They gave us painkillers.

We were beginning to understand why, in pre-anaesthetic days, the Bible had stipulated that suicide was a sin. Anything other than the prospect of eternal damnation, and the human race would probably have done away with itself at the first sign of the dentist.

Oda stood by the door, arms folded, eyebrows low over her brown eyes. Earle sat with his legs folded on the small chair of the medical room, looking displeased to be holding a meeting in a place without a PowerPoint projector. I sat on the paper-covered bed and ate. We hadn’t realised how hungry we were, until someone had offered us food. Now we scraped gravy off the plate with our fingers, and licked our fingertips, and wished I was not too inhibited to just run our tongue round the edge of the dish.

I said, “ ‘Give me back my hat’.”

Earle said, “This had better be good, Swift.”

“Didn’t it strike you that it was a strange thing to appear with the arrival of the death of cities? The ravens are killed and there it is; the Wall is defaced and the writing says ‘give me back my hat’. The London Stone is smashed and there it is, always, ‘give me back my hat’. I mean, I know that mystics tend to be obscure; it’s the only way they can stay in business in this litigious age. But surely this phrase, occurring endlessly across the city streets, is about as unlikely a harbinger of the end as Abba at Armageddon? It has to have a meaning, it has to have… something more than just random words to it, otherwise why would it appear? That’s the first thing.

“Second! The death of cities. Why is he in London, here, now? Look at the patterns of his appearances… Hiroshima when the bomb fell, Rome when the Vandals came, Babylon when the walls fell, London when the fire burnt, Pompeii when the volcano blew, New Orleans when the levees broke. Are we to assume that he created all these events? If so, then why hasn’t he just obliterated London already? The death of cities is not the creator of these disasters—he’s summoned by them. Sure, his presence might exacerbate them, might make them worse; he might fan the flames or shine a light in the dark to guide the bombers to their targets. But always he’s there because something is going to happen. He’s feeding off the death of cities, he is not the cause.

“So what has brought him to London? Why now? What could be so catastrophic that he has come to our city and interests himself in the activities of a kid who likes to hang around in Willesden, and goes out of his way to kill the Midnight Mayor, to poison the ravens in the Tower? What summons him to our city, when there is no war and the Thames Barrier still rises and falls? I think we can safely assume that his presence bodes a disaster of a mystical nature—if we’re talking a bomb in Westminster then I suspect Mr Pinner would be far too busy killing MI5 officers to bother with us. This is about magic, straight and thorough.

“In other words: something magical has summoned him to London.

“Are we happy with this so far?”

I looked at the faces in the room.

They looked unhappy, but no one wanted to say anything, so I ploughed right on.

“Mo said before he died, before Mr Pinner went out of his way to make sure that Mo died, having hurt him, punished him, inflicted on him… terrible things… Mo said, ‘the traffic warden’s hat’. He took a traffic warden’s hat, and for this he has been punished. The death of cities—and I think we can be fairly sure that’s what he is—doesn’t bother with individuals. He’s about bricks and stones and streets, about ideas bigger than you or me. So why bother with Mo? He was punishing him, very deliberately, very cruelly. He got Boom Boom to lift him, and him alone from the club floor, specified the kid must be alive. Alive, in order to hurt him, throw him out with the garbage, turn his blood to ink. Mo took a hat, a traffic warden’s hat, and on the walls the writing now says, ‘give me back my hat’.

“And Mr Pinner said—I made his life easier. By destroying Bakker. That… that by bringing Bakker down, I gave him a way into the city. Now, the Tower was powerful, but I don’t think even Mr Bakker was up to keeping out Mr Pinner if he wanted to come. But what Mr Bakker did do, did so brilliantly and without even a thought that he was doing it, was kill sorcerers.

“When Nair died, you assumed I killed him, because I am the last trained sorcerer left in the city. You dislike sorcerers, Mr Earle. You regard us as dangerous, unstable, running the constant risk of madness. You think that most of all about us. You are wrong; but just this once, that’s not the question. When I killed Mr Bakker, I stopped the systematic murdering of sorcerers, but not before we had nearly all been wiped out. There is no one left to train new apprentices. And if anyone would go mad, an untrained sorcerer is a loony job waiting to happen.

“So here’s how I think it goes.

“I think that ‘give me back my hat’ is a warning. Not from Mr Pinner, but from the city. The London Stone, the Midnight Mayor, the ravens; these are all part of the city’s defences, and while even one of them is alive, the magical defences still stand. I think it’s a warning, trying to tell us what’s happened.

“I think when Mo stole the traffic warden’s hat, he stole something from someone who has enough anger, enough vengeance, enough fury and enough power in them to summon the death of cities. Mr Pinner was summoned here by the traffic warden. I stole her hat, Mo said. That’s why Mo was left to die in the scrapyard; it was a punishment, vengeance on a kid who was scornful and contemptful enough of strangers to steal from them, just for a laugh. So, for revenge, a stranger poisoned him and left him to die as agonising a death as they could manage. ‘Give me back my hat’; that’s what it says on the walls. Think about the geography—Mo hangs around in Willesden, Mo is kept in Kilburn, Nair dies in Kilburn, the hat is stolen in Dollis Hill, in all these places just a few miles apart. Think about the writing on the wall, think about the timing of when Mr Pinner came, about what happened to the kid, about why Nair died, about the nature of all that has happened so far. There is no profession in the city more hated than traffic warden—not even the police get as much abuse or assault or common cruelty. Think about what that would do to an untrained sorcerer, who knows that the city is screaming to them, who can taste the life and the magic on the air, and finds in it nothing but hostility. Think about why you suspected me. A sorcerer could do it, a sorcerer is perhaps the only person in the city who could do it, who could summon something as powerful and vengeful as the death of cities. The traffic warden is the mystical disaster that is going to happen. She is going to destroy us, the death of cities is her vengeance on the contempt of a stranger.

“Of course, all of this is 99 per cent hypothesis.

“But unless you’ve got anything better to go on, I think we should find this traffic warden whose hat was stolen.

“Stop her, stop the death of cities.

“I think we should kill her, before it’s too late.”