The Midnight Mayor

“Listen!” we hissed. “She cast the curse on London Bridge, she summoned him on London Bridge, it’s where it has to end; we have to get there!”

She crawled to the edge of the roof, looked down. Below us were concrete tiles, a walkway, a hangover from the days when architects had big dreams and only limited budgets, part of an overhead network that stretched from the northern reaches of the Barbican on the Goswell Road to the southern face of Moorgate and London Wall. In the 1960s, it would have seemed like science fiction; today, almost no one knew the walkways even existed. Oda slithered off the edge of the roof down the short drop onto the tiles, which thudded and echoed heavily, the mortar never even laid. I crawled after her, flopped, fell, landed on my toes and fell onto my knees, banging my hands against the stones.

Oda picked me up by the armpits, pulled me away from the burning-blood building behind; and there they were, those friendly mystic yellow lines on the floor that would always lead you somewhere you never expected to be. I pointed away from them: “There! Moorgate — there!”

We ran, as graceful as a burst beetroot. Concrete flags, lights coming on around us, the area of darkness fading as we fled from Harlun and Phelps, dead container plants, old cigarette packets tumbling in the street, blood between our fingers. There were stairs down from the highwalks, strange dark concrete stairs smelling of piss and old thin mould, running down the square back of a black-glassed slab of a building, moulded out of the old walls of a domed pub; the street below, Moorgate, all yellow-orange neon glow and sleepy shops selling chocolate, coffee and suits. An Underground stop, but the trains wouldn’t be running; a bus stop, but it was waiting for night buses, for twenty-four-hour routes, both of which by their very natures were destined never to quite turn up when you needed them.

Not a car in sight, not a cab, not a truck, the city was as dead as a street could be, the utter silence of an empty road that should have been heaving, that lived to heave, roadworks and traffic jams. We could half-close our eyes and there they were; the shadows ran to our feet, tumbled up from the pavements and between the cracks in the tarmac, remembering the daylight when they buzzed and shuffled and heaved and pressed against each other in the busy need to get from A to B as quickly as possible, important business, important things to do in the city, the smell of traffic and the juddering of builder’s tools into the earth. Silence in the city is terrifying, beautiful, a reminder of just how small man is in the streets he built. We ran down the middle of the road, letting the shadows trail us, feeding on some of their memories, recollections of rush hour and busy, busy, busy, feet slapping dully on the white hazard lines in the middle of the too-narrow street for all the traffic of day, and Oda followed, stumbling like a deranged zombie, eyes fixed on nothing at all, legs moving simply because they didn’t know what else to do with themselves.

The traffic lights between Moorgate and London Wall flickered red to green and back again as we approached, signalling invisible drivers to go about their business; to one side of the junction, a digger had dug a fat hole in the earth, revealing plastic pipes and ancient, dirt-encrusted black neighbours running through the ground, marked out by a sign thanking us for our patience while these vital works were undertaken. The bright burning redness of Harlun and Phelps was going out; I could see the scarlet overwash of the light fading, as the wards that had ignited within the building also died; for what reason, I didn’t know, couldn’t guess, didn’t want to guess. The street narrowed further as we crossed the traffic lights, tall, gloomy buildings with high imperial windows turned dark in the night, blocking out all but the thinnest pathway of sky overhead. Banks, their names written up in a different language and script above every door; ordinary money wasn’t their trade, not pounds and pennies like we were used to. The figures they dealt with had more zeros in them than most mortals had vocabulary to describe. Alleys winding off the side, a reminder of a time when the streets had sprung up contrarily, to their own devising, so much for urban planning, can’t stop us building here, can’t make it right, this is our city. Pubs, leather sofas, brass taps, low dark tables covered with stained green towels; a telephone box down one alley, defaced with white letters on one wall:

VE ME BA

A building overhead, cherubs carved into the gutters; another where Greek maidens in drooping robes held up the roofs; and here, if you looked, a tiny dragon in black iron placed as a weathervane on top of a domed tower, looking south-west across the city with two eyes set above a jaw open in perpetual fury. These were buildings made to demonstrate imperial glory, grandeur, wealth as power, great slabs of yellow stone fretted with ornaments across the roofs, forcing the passer-by in the street to crane their head right up to appreciate the skill of the mason’s work.

Lothbury, the great cliff walls of the Bank of England, a palace fit for an arrogant Pharaoh, guarded by bare- breasted Britannias and huge iron doors; another wall too high for any mortal to see over, another street too narrow for the traffic that flowed through it during the day. To one side the stone wall built to celebrate wealth and glory, to the other a length of black reflective glass built by people who knew that real wealth was fickle, and could be more sensibly contained. I could see the should-be-roundabout ahead where so many things met; Cheapside, Poultry, Moorgate, Bank, Threadneedle Street, King William Street, the Merchants’ Exchange, Mansion House; the richest junction in all England, full of old names and uneven glittering prosperity. Statues of stern-faced old dead men looked down on the narrow twisting of joining streets; a clock ticked in an illuminated plastic frame for no one to see, shop windows were still lit up bright and cold to show you the suits on offer, the range of cufflinks, the finest whiskies that they had to sell.

I ran out into the middle of the junction, heard Oda a few steps behind me, felt something move, looked up to my left, saw a shadow on the walls of the Bank of England, raised my hands, and heard a roar of air. I looked to my right, and too late saw the gates of the steps down to Bank station burst open, heard the roar come up from inside it — not just air but feet and footsteps and trains and escalators and beeps and tickets and shouts and cries and commands and everything all at once, the great rumble of the Underground — put my hands over my head and threw myself on the ground.

Around me, across the whole junction, the gates of the subway stairs blew upwards, outwards, spinning broken metal across the streets, and up came the roaring, a trapped unheard din of music players, announcements, warnings, cars overhead and trains below, printing machines and tapping keys, in a blast of air so hot and so dirty it looked like ash bursting from the volcano, spilling and spiralling up from under the street and around the streets and from every exit all at once, turning the cold orange-sodium night black and hot in an instant of furious shrieking ash. I looked behind me, saw Oda crawling away from the nearest subway on her hands and knees, hair smoking from the blast, face burnt, ears bleeding, she had been too close, even closer than me. I scampered on hands and knees towards her, caught her in my arms and dragged her away from the spinning, writhing wall of furious darkness that tumbled and spat hot fury out of the subways, rising up to block out the sky overhead. I couldn’t see the streets beyond this wall of blackness, couldn’t see through the volume of dirt and dust piling up from the subway’s open mouths, forming an arena wall around the junction. I shook Oda gently, hissed, “You OK?” and felt the warmth in my breath snatched away, my tongue turn to dirty dry meat in my mouth at the effort of speaking through the storm.

She nodded numbly. “Break it,” she whispered. “Break it!”

I felt for my bag, felt the bulk of the hat inside it again, patted it like a crucifix for comfort, looked around our narrowing circle of burning darkness for tools, felt . . . stones rumbling, sleeping stones being disturbed just a little way off . . . and saw him. He walked through the screaming roaring shattering sound and the burning suffocating filth from beneath the streets like it was sunlight in a dappled forest. Utterly clean, utterly untouched by it. He had his umbrella, which he leant on slightly as he stopped to stare at us. He looked . . . not entirely his usual self, but he still managed to muster a smile.

Mr Pinner said, as the storm belched all around us, “End of the line.” I raised a trembling hand towards him and stuttered, “Uh-uh. Blackwall.”

For a moment, doubt flickered on Mr Pinner’s face. I turned my hand, pointed it in the general direction of where I thought the street called Poultry was. “Midnight Mayor,” I added, seeing his confusion. “Duh.”

He understood, but just a bit too late. I felt a rumbling, heard the rattling of an old, badly kept engine, saw a pair of headlights breaking through the dark, pulled Oda into my chest; and we didn’t quite have it in us to look away. For anyone else, we would have — not for this.

The bus came rattling through the storm like it was just another futile traffic-calming measure on a road built for racing; it was a night bus, it didn’t believe in slowing down, not for anything. A double-decker, its walls were red, its glass was scratched, its wheels were smoking, its driver was just a shadow lost in the darkness of the