The Midnight Mayor

how hard it is to get blood out of clothes, and frankly, it’s not worth my time.”

“Say, no clothes?”

“I left some stuff under the counter. It’s too big for you, but so’s your shoes.”

It wasn’t yet the right time to explain about the shoes. I thanked her and rummaged around until I found the clothes she was talking about. In them I felt like an escapee from a children’s cartoon, all cuff and trailing trouser leg, but at least they were clean.

Food was reheated Chinese takeaway. It was a meal designed to cause stomach cramps. We had never tasted such divinity and, when we thought Vera wasn’t looking, ran our finger round the edge of the plate and licked sauce off our fingers. Vera was silent throughout the meal. She waited until a second after my plate had touched the table to say: “So. Attacked.”

I rolled my shoulder and felt the tightness of my stitches as the muscles stretched beneath my collarbone; I flexed my fingers and felt the taut hotness of that bright red cross carved into my skin, burning beneath the bandages. Not an unpleasant burning. Drugs and fire kept it interesting, alive, rather than the pure pain that dumbs all else.

“What do you want to know?” I asked.

She went straight in with the priorities. “Will your attacker come here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think they’re capable of coming here?”

“Maybe.”

“Do they know about your connection with me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Am I or any of my people at risk for helping you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“All right. What do you know?”

I thought about it long and hard. “Nothing,” I said finally. “Absolutely nothing.”

“I think I deserve more than that.”

“I swear — nothing. I don’t know who, I don’t know why, I don’t even know how. I know that a phone rang, I answered, and the next thing the sky was doing backflips. I know that some time after that, a pack of spectres came hunting and will probably not come looking for me again.”

“Why not?”

“I caught one. They know that I know how. Spectres aren’t stupid.”

“You ‘caught’ a spectre?”

I suppose I should have been flattered by the flat disbelief in Vera’s voice. It wasn’t that she thought I was a liar. She just knew enough about spectres.

“In a beer bottle,” I added for technical clarification.

“Really. Can I see this beer bottle?”

“It’s in my bag.”

She vanished into the bedroom and reappeared a second later with my satchel held out at the end of her arm as if it might start to tick. She put it at my feet. I opened it up and pulled out the beer bottle. The cigarette still burnt sullen inside.

Vera took the bottle gingerly between her fingertips.

I said, “Listen to it.”

She obeyed, holding it up to her ear. I saw her eyes widen. “Christ,” she muttered. “You captured a ghost that’s into heavy metal.”

I took it back from her, put it reverentially on the table between us. “Yeah — don’t open it in a hurry,” I said. “Spectres aren’t known for their humour.”

“Why a beer bottle?”

“Why put a genie in a lamp?” I asked.

“Don’t give me the whole metaphor bollocks. I asked a simple technical question.”

“And got a simple technical answer. You use the container most appropriate. A lamp is a precious thing that grants illumination. A beer bottle is . . . well . . . not. I hate to get all sociopolitical on you . . .”

“Please don’t.”

“. . . but there’s something to the theory that you can drown anything at the bottom of a beer bottle. Even if there isn’t something to the theory, enough people believe it so that there is.”

“Deep.”

“You asked.”

“I was being funny and sarcastic. I can do both.” She sighed, eyes not leaving the bottle. “Spectres aren’t stupid,” she said at length. “And they don’t go around attacking without reason either. You think they went after you specifically?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t believe in coincidence. The telephone rang and . . .”

“Yeah, what’s up with you and the telephone? I would have thought, what with, you know, you being you . . . blue electric angels, gods of the telephone, song in the wire, fire, light, life, static interference with knobs on made flesh, Swift and the angels and so on and so forth — and now you’re scowling?”

“It was a trap,” we muttered; and saying it, we realised we were angry. “It was a trap designed specifically for us. We hear a telephone ring on an empty road in the middle of the night and we’ll answer it, we’d always answer it, and it would always find us. We are . . . it’s part of what we are. Someone used the telephone to target us. The telephone rang and of course we answered. Then they attacked us down the telephone, and sent spectres to finish us off.”

“Who ‘they’?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Which you?” Her voice didn’t change as she asked the question. Nor did her eyes leave the bottle to observe our face, which was full of surprise.

“I suppose . . .” I mumbled. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t matter to you,” she corrected. “You’ll end up dead regardless of which you ‘they’ were after. But it might matter to ‘them’. Some guy wants to blaze electric fire across the sky, then there’s no point just attacking Matthew Swift, but there’d sure be some credit to the notion of going after the blue electric angels. On the other hand, if some girl is pissed off that Matthew Swift ditched her at a party, then, sure, she might try and hurt him, and the blue electric angels will get caught in the crossfire. Just because you happen to be both entities inhabiting the same brain and the same body, it doesn’t mean other people are going to respect the difference. So the question is . . . did whoever sent the spectres and dialled the telephone want to hurt Matthew Swift, or the electric angels? Or both at once, since you are now, technically, the same?”

“A question we’ll ask,” we replied, “when we meet ‘them’.”

Silence. Then Vera said, “Why are your shoes too big?”

“It’s complicated. I was looking for someone.”

“And that meant you had to wear big shoes?”

“This pair helped, yes.”

“Who were you looking for?”

“Just a kid.”

“You think he attacked you?”

“No. He wouldn’t know how. Summoning spectres, attacking through a telephone, these things are complicated.”

“Yeah,” sighed Vera. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? We’re not talking any nitwit doing these things to you. If you’d asked me a few years ago, I’d have said ‘sorcerer’ hands down. Summoning the monsters, sending fire down the phones — it all stinks of serious magic. But the sorcerers are either dead or mad, except you, and you’re hardly the purest example of the kind. Which leads to the question, who or what else could be after