The Midnight Mayor

compartment. On the front was its number and destination — the number 15, heading for Blackwall, and pity the creature that tried to stop it getting there. Mr Pinner was standing between it and its destination. Night buses don’t believe in braking unless it’s absolutely, entirely, and without a doubt necessary. This bus didn’t brake. I watch it slam into him too fast to really tell what happened; we felt almost disappointed — there should have been the slow-motion crumpling of the health and safety ads you got at the cinemas, a twisting of limbs into unfortunate places, a slow swinging back of his neck as his spine crumpled, a shattering of bones as his legs, then his waist went under the bus, a snap as his upper body was thrown against the wide red front. There was none of that; one second, bus driving towards man, next second, bus driving over where man should have been. It occurred to us that all this might have been like the health and safety videos, if Mr Pinner had a spine to snap.

The number 15 rolled on, vanished again through the whirling black storm, which itself began to crumple and sink, the sound and the dirt sucked back in like an obscene drawing of breath by a pair of dying lungs, dragged back down through the open gates of the subway stairs, sucked beneath the streets. A figure lay in the middle of the road, as flat and thin as a piece of paper.

It began to twitch.

I grabbed Oda by the wrist, started to run, pulled her past the not-dead thing slowly rising back up from the black tarmac. Down towards King William Street, past a church, all red brick and spike, the long narrow streets snaking towards Cannon Street and Monument; shut coffee shops and the twisted remnants of an escape exit from Bank station. Lombard Street, St Swithin’s Lane, Abchurch Lane; I could see the junction of Monument right ahead. In an electronics store on one corner, cameras were watching us and projecting onto a dozen TV screens where our image got bigger and bigger as we ran towards it.

There was something behind us. I could hear it, a great angry rumble on the air. I risked a glance back and there it was, filling the street, higher than any houses, turning the night sodium-bright with reflected glory as it tumbled up into the sky. It didn’t have any shape that I could call a creature or give a name to; it was just a tidal wave, a storm surge, a great falling mass of paper, thousands and thousands of pieces of paper, receipts, bills, demands, flyers, bank notes, envelopes, letters, cheques, invoices, statements, ads, maps, leaflets. And at their heart, somewhere lost in the tumbling weight of it, Mr Pinner, hands held up to the sky, the papers pouring out of his flesh, tumbling upwards and outwards, over the roofs of the buildings and down the street towards us, thicker than the snow of a falling avalanche.

Oda had seen it too, was now overtaking me as she ran towards Monument; we weren’t going to get there, neither of us. We were going to drown first, going to be torn apart, suffocated, crushed. It was thirty feet behind us, twenty, rumbling like some great rusted locomotive down the street behind us; ten feet. I grabbed Oda, pulled her close to me, and held up my burnt hand to the storm.

Domine dirige nos.

(What a stupid way to die.)

Blood dribbled off my fingertips. I saw a big red drop run down to the joint between wrist and arm, reach the curve of that line, drool for an uneasy second, and fall.

Domine dirige nos.

And as it fell, it changed. The deep red of my blood started to burn, shine, shimmer, ignite; it wasn’t a falling liquid, but a falling twisting bubble of energy, turning, in the blink of an eye, the thickness of a piece of paper, if thickness was time, to a bright burning electric blue.

Then the blood dribbling from our side also ignited, furious blue, and the blood in our veins, and the blood in our eyes, and the blood that had seeped into the twin crosses carved into our hand. They caught fire, bursting back to their natural state of glorious electric fury; and I let it burn, boil inside, spill out of my wounds and mouth and eyes. Of all the ways to die, I was willing to let this be the one that did the job. We were going to burn, going to catch fire, going to explode with pure blue electricity, beautiful as a bomb, rolling fire through the sky, beautiful and wondrous and defiant!

And the papers spinning towards us, hitting the rising blue tempest of our fire, ignited, shrivelled, turned to ash, grey thin ash billowing in the fury at our feet; going to burn, beautiful burning, going to set the sky on fire, going to burn going to . . .

. . . I could see nothing except the blue tumbling fire which still seemed in some way to stem from the burning twin crosses blazing on my right hand; the paper, the streets, the sky, everything was lost within this cocoon, going to burn going to burn skin cracking blue fire in eyes, mouth, nose, ears, tongue, burning screaming delight going to . . .

A hand reached through the fire. It was paper-white. It was attached to a sleeve. The sleeve was pinstriped. It reached calmly through the flames without a second of hesitation, grabbed Oda by the throat, pulled her free from my arms and with the easy strength of a hydraulic ram, threw her aside. She vanished into the fires, and somewhere beyond that, into the storm, the street, the stones, the whatever lay beyond our burning brightness. We screamed, raised our hands up and let the fires burst from every part of us, blazed electric fury dragged up from the streets, breathed the gas from the shattered pipes, sucked the water up from under the cement, the glass out of the windows, the scrabbling from the telephones, the chittering from the radio waves. We took it all, pushed it all towards that paper-pale hand fumbling in the fire and let it burst, fire and fury and light and electricity and sound and lightning and digital screaming and glass and stone and dirt and heat and shadows — how many shadows could one city hold? — we threw them into it as well, sucked them up from the streets and let them rage, scream through the air towards Mr Pinner, too thick to see, closing our eyes against their weight, crumpling down into the middle of the street, hiding our head in our hands as they screamed up from all around, too many to comprehend; too thick, too heavy, too much of too much. Open your eyes and understand it, and you know why the dragons were mad; too much of too much couldn’t stop it, couldn’t do it, too much of too much, burn!

Something dragged us forwards, like the sucking in of air to a fire. Then, the fire being sated with what it could eat, it threw us backwards, twisting and turning us on the air and throwing us across the street, blasting stones and glass and electric fire and paper, so much paper, throwing it into the sky and then dropping it back down. We fell into the gutter, the shock of it knocking the fires out in our blood, sending us reeling into some dull, stupid part of our mortal skull, little mortal frail flesh trembling at the blast, and it was all I could do to tuck our chin into our legs and shield our face from the shockwave as it rippled down the street, shattering every brick and pane of glass that had survived the storm, blasting spinning paper along the road and into the sky, suffocating heat in the cold night air.

And slowly, it too settled.

I opened my eyes, peered out between my red bloody fingertips. Mr Pinner stood in the middle of the street, paper falling gently all around. His hair was dishevelled, his coat torn, his skin dripping small receipts and lines of ticker tape. He wasn’t alone. His head was turned upwards to the thing that had grown out of the darkness behind him, his eyes fixed on the twin points of red madness that stared back down at him. I heard him start to laugh, but he didn’t take his eyes from the creature. “Is this it?” he chuckled. “Is this the best your city has?”

The thing, standing as high as the street, its wings bent back uncomfortably to make space for the buildings, put its head on one side and looked down at him. To call it a dragon was . . .

. . . an efficient way to describe something we did not wish to comprehend.

“I am the death of cities!” roared Mr Pinner, opening his torn arms to the beast. “I am your undoing, the breaking of the legends, the stories and the shadows! Your city is damned by its own people, condemned out of the mouths of your own! Betrayal and vengeance! You cannot harm me!”

I crawled to my feet. Bits of me that shouldn’t have made the sounds they did made sounds. My heart was a steady, dull dedum in my chest — too steady, too dull, as if it had run out of the strength to race. I called out, “Mr Pinner?”

He half-turned, saw me, smiled. “Mr Mayor!” he called out merrily. “Do you keep a pet dragon?”

“No,” I replied with a sigh. “It keeps me.” I turned my head up to the black shape of the shadow-beast, skirted my eyes over the edge of its mad own, couldn’t look, couldn’t bear to look, to risk infinite falling into a red void. I looked just past it and said, “Fido! Walkies!”

Mr Pinner spun back round, raised his hands up towards the beast. It opened its jaws and fell, spinning darkness and scarlet endless falling, down on top of him.

London is a dragon.