A picture of the house of Mr Roding.
He lives alone and has done for some time. Japanese prints–flowers, wading birds, the fall of water between the trees–line a corridor painted a dubious lime green. Pale cracks line the ceiling where the pipes have begun to weigh a little too heavily. And everywhere there is the smell of air freshener. It’s an almost visible cloud, overwhelming but still not enough to cut through the unmistakable odour of rot.
No, not just rot.
Something worse.
Meat.
Rotting meat.
The kitchen is maintained to almost surgical standards of cleanliness: a box of latex gloves by the sink and a dozen kinds of antiseptic with lemon-fragrance washing-up liquid lined up on white-tiled shelves. Two small windows swing open at the top to let cold air in and the smell of—
best not to think
—out into a back garden which to a four-year-old with a plastic truck would be a full-size jungle and which Mr Roding was evidently developing to the same ambition.
“I got no milk neither,” he barked as the kettle began to boil. He snapped on a pair of rubber gloves before pulling matching mugs from a pristine cupboard. “It’s barbaric to have milk with Earl Grey. I can do you a slice of lemon.”
Sharon grinned a little too wide. “That’d be cool.”
Rhys had turned a curious grey-green, his eyes watering under the weight of chemicals in the air. “I-I-I-I-I’m fine, thank you, sir,” he gasped between pulses of histamine-laden blood.
The urge to call Mr Roding “sir” had overcome Sharon and Rhys almost as swiftly as the stench-disguising stench of the house he lived in. It wasn’t that Mr Roding looked old–he could have passed for late fifties if he’d wanted to, despite a crook to his back that pushed his neck down and head forward. It wasn’t the clothes he wore–black shirt and black slacks and a pair of brown loafers pinched up around the seams like an apple pie. Or even the way he talked. It was more in self-defence, through offering respect against adversity, though neither Sharon nor Rhys could quite say what that adversity might be.
Perhaps it was the slick sheen to Mr Roding’s skin, the almost plastic quality about his face as if, between each layer of flesh, someone had stretched a sheet of grease-coated cling film. Or maybe it was the way he’d superglued some of his nails back on, with one or two of them crooked; or his mismatching false teeth, which protruded too far from beneath his top lip. Or, just perhaps, it was the unmistakable odour of a body whose internal organs had long since given up trying to understand their neighbours and settled for doing the best job they could under difficult circumstances. Mr Roding wasn’t dead–definitely not. He was simply going through the process, and had been for nearly forty-five years.
None of them spoke while the kettle boiled.
None of them spoke as Mr Roding made three careful cups of tea. He dunked each tea bag individually, each one going in and out precisely twenty-five times. Then a single slice of lemon was carefully added to the mix and a tiny silver teaspoon dropped into the bottom of each cup. He handed them to Rhys and Sharon. Rhys quaked; Sharon’s grin stretched a little thinner. The three eyed each other up, murderers at a poisoners’ ball, and then, at an unspoken signal, sipped all together. A pause to observe effect. No one transformed into a specimen of the living dead, so all three began to sip more freely, in their own time. When a suitable quantity had been consumed to establish some kind of trust, Mr Roding pulled off his latex gloves, dropped them in an orange bag marked BIOLOGICAL WASTE–INCINERATE ONLY and said:
“So you want to commit a crime, is that what this is about?”
“Oh, no!” exclaimed Rhys, only to be silenced by Sharon.
“Why d’you think that?”
He shrugged. “Youth these days, smashing things, breaking up wards…”
Sharon bristled. “Because the youth of the 1950s were all rosemary and sunshine?”
“At least we knew how to respect our elders.”
“Respect your… what about the 1960s? What about the sex, the drugs, the rock and roll?”
Mr Roding sniffed, a dangerous thing for any man whose nasal hair was attached only by inertia.
“Besides!” Sharon felt her indignation rising. “You’re the one who wasn’t motivated by the concept of saving the city!”
“Saving the city–what do you know about that? Why do you even get to say those words?”
She hesitated. Rhys was staring at her too. It seemed he too hadn’t received an answer to this question.
“Because a goblin shaman told me that the city is dying, the soul of the city is being ripped away; and because wherever this happens there’s this firm called Burns and Stoke. And when I went to their office I heard the walls whispering, Help us, help us, and they were talking to me. And I couldn’t see anything bad, but there was this locked door, and when I tried to go through it I couldn’t because it was warded. And people there were scared, and Greydawn is missing, whoever that is, but everyone seems kind of worried ’bout that so I figured yeah, it’s like, the fate of the city. You gonna help or what?”
The only sound came from Mr Roding, dinging his silver spoon against the rim of his cup. He laid the spoon down with a tiny clink and sipped his tea.
“What do you know about Greydawn?” he asked.
“Uh… nothing,” confessed Sharon. “Only what this goblin said.”
“I’ve heard of her,” offered Rhys. Two pairs of eyes turned to stare. Under their semi-disbelieving gaze, he sensed sneezing soon to come, and babbled as fast as he could. “She’s Our Lady of 4 a.m., the One Who Walks Beside, the Keeper of the Gate, the… the… aaaaahhh…”
“You might wanna stand back,” offered Sharon.
Mr Roding raised his eyebrows and took a step back just as Rhys erupted in a sneeze that sent clouds of air freshener gusting across the room.
“I’m so sorry, it’s just that I… aaahh… aaaahhhh…”
“He does this a lot?” asked Mr Roding.
“Dunno,” replied Sharon. “Don’t really know him. But yeah, so far I’d say it’s like, a serious thing.”
“I don’t mean to, it’s just I… I… I…”
“You tried anti-histamines?” asked Mr Roding.
“They make me dro… drow… sleepy.”
“What’s so special about this Greydawn?” asked Sharon as Rhys turned his back to dab his streaming eyes. “Why’s everyone worked up?”
Mr Roding put his cup down and leaned against the padlocked fridge. “Been a shaman long?”
“I’m learning,” she replied, sharper than she’d meant.
“Then you might want some pointers on the city’s major powers. Seven Sisters, Bag Lady, Fat Rat, Greydawn, Midnight Mayor, Beggar King…”
“I think I’ve met the Midnight Mayor.”
Mr Roding looked surprised. “You met him?”
“Yeah, sure. Dark hair, blue eyes, bit of a twat, that him?”
“I don’t know,” murmured the necromancer, a thoughtful expression spreading over his face. “Very few know him personally. He’s rumoured to be incredibly powerful and extremely dangerous.”
“He looked kind of… scruffy.”
“ ‘Scruffy’?”
“Yeah. You know. A bit… crap.”
“You’re certain it was him?”
“Well… he did grow these blue electric wings, and had blood on his hands and, like, Sammy–he’s my goblin–was all like ‘Yo, Midnight Mayor’ and that. So, yeah, I’m guessing he was the guy. He important?”
Mr Roding scratched thoughtfully at his chin, tracks of white skin flaking off beneath his nails. “Midnight Mayor only comes out for bad things,” he murmured. “His involvement never bodes well. Did he tell you anything?”
“Um… he told me to find the dog. Which, I gotta admit, even though I’m supposed to be a shaman and know all sorts of crap, I found majorly unhelpful.”
“And you say Greydawn is ‘missing’?”
“Yeah. Like vanished, only in a spooky mystic way that no one is telling me about. And, actually,” Sharon demanded, “what the hell is the point of going ‘You’ve gotta do shit’ and then not telling me what the shit is I’ve gotta do?”
“I can see your problem. But then Greydawn is of the spirit realm, and only the shamans can understand that.”
“D… druids are also… interested… in spirits…” tried Rhys, his shoulders shaking with the effort of suppressing the latest allergic reaction.
“Druids!” groaned Mr Roding. “Preserving the urban lore is all very well, but what do they do with it? Not even bingo nights!”
“Bingo nights!” exclaimed Rhys with a sudden enthusiasm that briefly overcame even his endocrine system. “We should have bingo nights for Magicals Anonymous! Or those social nights with a band?”
“I’m not sure we’re kinda there yet.”
“Or maybe trips to Margate? Although,” Rhys said, deflating at the thought, “I guess it’d have to be night-time trips for Kevin and Sally.” “Have you been to Margate, young man?” demanded Mr Roding.
“No…”
“That must be why you consider this a good idea.”
“Can we just focus on the fate of the city?” said Sharon. “Like, who the hell is this Greydawn and why is everyone so like ‘Whoa’ about her?”
“She divides the day from the night,” sighed Mr Roding, the patient teacher faced with a particularly dense student. “Which, in more practical terms, is to say that she is the gatekeeper between what is, and what is underneath”.
“That’s practical terms?” asked Sharon.
Mr Roding’s lips curled in annoyance, revealing a hint of purple gums and yellowing tongue. “There are layers to the city,” he proclaimed. “There’s what people see–cars and buses and windows and all the rather more superficial aspects of our existence. Then there is what people choose not to perceive–runes in the graffiti, spells woven from telephone wires, wards cut out of pieces of scrap paper, those who walk under glamours and enchantments, or those who have mastered the shaman’s walk–at which all eyes look away and don’t know why. And beggars, of course. Beggars and shamans both know the way to move in the city, and be seen without ever being perceived.
“Then there are the things that lurk just beneath perception, a thing that is neither seen nor perceived, but is sensed in the deepest part of the soul. They are the shadows at the ends of alleys, the urge to run down an empty street in the middle of the night, the fear of the thing that falls on the floor upstairs when the house should be sleeping, the creak of a door that should not be open–the thing, if you like, in the cupboard, the nightmare that has no name.
“Everyone knows it’s superstition, that none of it is real, and for the most part it isn’t. But there are some truths, some buried truths, that lurk just the other side of the dark, in the place where the dream walkers go, in the corners where the darkness is a little too thick; and they are always watching, looking for a way to crawl from the night into the day. Shadows and ghosts, spectres and wendigos, the death of cities and the memory of a blackout, they probe continually, looking for weaknesses. Greydawn keeps them at bay. She is the Keeper of the Gate, the One Who Walks Beside. She keeps the unreal things unreal. And now, you say, she is missing, and the Midnight Mayor is talking to the shamans, and you want my help.”
In the silence that followed Rhys even stopped sneezing.
Then Sharon said, “Mr Roding, may I shake your hand?”
Surprise flickered over the necromancer’s face. He examined his own hand curiously, just in case he’d misremembered the decaying nails and the shedding skin. Then, to make sure Sharon wasn’t just embarking on a joke too rude to be borne, he held it out to her, and she clasped it in her own and warmly shook the clammy flesh. “That,” she explained, “is exactly the kinda thing people should just straight up tell me. What the hell is it with this cryptic crap?”
“It’s curious,” added Mr Roding, reclaiming his hand and turning it over a few times in surprise, “that the Midnight Mayor should make mention of a dog.”
“In traditional images of Our Lady of 4 a.m. she is sometimes depicted as having a dog at her side. But if you really want to know about Greydawn,” offered Mr Roding, “I’d try talking to the Friendlies.”
“Who are they?”
“They’re her followers. Worshippers, if you will.”
“Um… do you mind if I ask my standard questions when someone tells me something like that?”
“Your standard questions?”
On her fingers Sharon ticked off the by-now regular list of enquiries. “No nudity? No drumming? No animal sacrifice?”
“Not when I last enquired. Why, is that something you’ve encountered a lot in your work?”
“Just playing safe. What about this ward?”
Mr Roding examined his crooked flaking fingernails. Then, “You think that this… Burns and Stoke is connected to Greydawn’s disappearance?”
“I think they’re connected to all the other spirits going missing. And Greydawn sounds like a spirit, and she’s missing. So, yeah, you know what, as I’m a shaman and supposed to just know shit, then yeah, I’d say it’s probably not gonna be a coincidence.”
“In that case, if you can get me into Burns and Stoke without causing any unwanted questions, I will dismantle their wards for you.”
“Seriously?”
“Necromancers have an unjustifiably bad reputation,” complained Mr Roding. “And,” he turned to Rhys, “do you really think lavender oil will work?”
Rhys brightened. “Oh yes. All I need is some lavender, a saucepan, some polenta, a tub of half-fat yoghurt, three cinnamon sticks and some water from the stagnant puddle that grows above a three-days-blocked drain, and I can do marvellous things for your skin!” He hesitated. “And maybe some rubber gloves.”
Mr Roding, in as much as his facial muscles were animated, looked almost pleased.
“These Friendlies,” asked Sharon, putting down her cup of tea. “You got their number?”
“No,” he admitted. “But you can probably find them in the Yellow Pages.”