The Midnight Mayor

I’m damned too. I’ll find you. Tell no one, otherwise they’ll kill

me before you get the chance.

Matthew

I wasn’t in a hurry to meet Oda. Psychopathic fanatic magician-murderers with a penchant for dentistry and corrupted Christian theology were not high on my list of confidantes. She’d promised on a number of occasions to kill me, by grace of being a sorcerer, and especially to kill us by grace of being an abomination crawled from the nether reaches of the telephone lines into mortal flesh. God was her excuse, guns were her weapons, and the second I stopped being useful to her and her dentistry-crazed cult, the Order, would be the day I got to meet both. She had helped me only because she feared my enemies more than she hated me.

Besides, the last person who’d helped me . . .

. . . the last person . . .

Had been Vera.

Melted into a puddle of paint.

Hadn’t even stopped to think.

Too much to do. Too damned. Too . . . too much too.

Hadn’t even stopped.

Angry.

Sick and angry. Blink and here we are, looking back with a pair of bright blue eyes colder than the iceberg that hit the Titanic. On fire with frost. Angry. Attacked, burnt, attacked, hurt, attacked, fled, attacked, attacked, attacked, gunning for us, gunning for me, gunning for my . . . for people who stopped to help.

Angry.

Didn’t know what to do about it, except doing itself. So I kept on doing while we clenched and cramped and twisted in rage.

I kept on at the computer.

The last message was obviously bad news. A sensible user would have deleted it and been done. We didn’t. Maybe it was the arrogance from using an internet café, where the computer about to be infected by bad mail wasn’t our own; maybe it was curiosity; maybe it was inspiration; maybe it was none of these things. Whatever it was, we, in full knowledge that it wouldn’t be good, opened the message.

It said:

END OF THE LINE.

The screen went black.

I swore.

A white pinprick appeared at the very centre of the screen and started to grow. As it grew, it became a white circle, then the white circle grew a black circle within it, that expanded from the centre to fill almost its entire form, then the black circle grew white teeth within it, and the blackness wasn’t just a blackness, it was a void, a great falling void that span off for ever into . . . . . . everything, nothing, senseless perfection, freedom, death, entrapment, jubilation, emptiness, pick one, pick everything, all at once —

— and then the blackness was filling the screen and it wasn’t just in the screen, it was crawling out of the screen, cracking and popping and bursting as the white jaw with its endless open gullet stretched out of the screen, dripping writhing worms of hissing static like saliva from its fanged teeth, straining towards my face and roaring the high background whine of a cooling fan about to burst, a hungry computer virus with jaws open for the skull of a mortal —

— then I pulled the plug.

It vanished. Glass fell with a splatter onto the desk and over my trousers, black smoke rolled in eye-watering sickly sweetness from the gutted interior of the screen. I flapped ineffectually at the smoke, coughing and blinking tears from my eyes, pushing myself away from the desk even as the young man with the A-level textbook stood up and began to shout in three different languages, all of them obscene.

Then he saw our face, and fell silent.

I walked away. No one tried to follow me.

It took two night buses to get where I wanted to go. It was faster than the one-every-three-minute bus routes of the day, despite the fifteen-minute wait, the bus swishing through empty streets, their natures lost beneath a haze of sodium glow. I breathed in the deep, heavy warm air of the buses, smelling sticky beer and old chips. The familiar weight of it comforted me, washed out some of the fatigue from my bones: an elixir almost as good as sleep.

The bus crossed Euston Road at Tottenham Court Road, skirted the southern edge of Regent’s Park and headed towards Marylebone, into little neat streets untouched by chain stores, selling mostly fish and chips, Italian wine and cheese.

Raleigh Court was a nice name for a bad idea. It hadn’t been so much built as slotted together out of old grey cereal boxes pretending to be flats. They were stacked one on top of the other in four flat tombstones around a dead place of concrete and garages with locked doors and no room for cars, just tall enough to block out the sun, though not high enough to see anything but each other. It was a bad place to die, an anonymous, forgotten hole. The air hummed with mobile phones and a tight, pressed-in magic, a magic of black shadows and little rattling things in the night, the kind of power that lent itself to the summoning of rats and invocation of ghosts, to the forbidden enchantments of naughty men who thought of life as just a trick of perspective. It was easy, in this place at 4 a.m., to slip past the police tape and the slumbering copper on duty. The tarmac ate up the sound of my footsteps; the neon bent away from my passing, willing to oblige a grey friend in a gloomy time. It was a place that looked after its own, frightened strangers away.

Signs of battle were scarred on the buildings inside the police cordon. Windows were taped up with dustbin bags, the broken glass either blown inside or already swept away. Scorch marks had burst up from between the gaps in the paving slabs where the gas had ignited, to send blackness crawling a few storeys up the overlooking walls. Electricity cables had been crudely strapped back together; phone lines dangled off the sides of buildings, awaiting repair. The metal shutters of garages were twisted and bent, and rubbish bags split open and blasted flat. A bomb hadn’t exploded here. A bomb had been blasted out of the ground on a volcanic plume of gas, risen up to the height of a man’s invoking hands, and spawned a dozen little scuttling offspring that ran to each corner of the court and exploded.

The whole calamity would be in one of those police reports that D. B. Sinclair and his “concerned citizens” filed carefully under “T” for “Things” at the back of a locked filing cabinet in the vehicle-licensing centre a day before a bonfire got accidentally out of control. Dudley Sinclair and his friends were very good at losing information that they didn’t want to be found. Bureaucracy seems so innocent until it eats you up; but then this mess was pure embarrassment and mayhem written in sparkling mystic letters. Someone had to have seen it.

As it happened, someone had. I found a half-eaten kebab in the spilt litter billowing over the cobbles and, a bit below, a thrown-away end of pizza, nibbled to tatters except for the crusts. The guilty kebab shop was only round the corner, twenty-four hours a day of pulverised cardboard cooked on a spike. I bought two kebabs: one for me, one for my witness. Then I went back to Raleigh Court and sat down on the charred, wobbling remains of a bench, ate my kebab and left the second one open, salad and all, on the ground at my feet.

My witness had clearly been freaked by the night’s activities; he came out reluctantly, not at his usual jaunty trot. I waited patiently, wiping ketchup and suspicious white goo from my chin, stuffing a tattered grey watery vegetable into my mouth that the shopkeeper had claimed was lettuce. We liked all foods, even the kinds that didn’t like us, and at four in the morning, kebab in a bun is food the gods would eat.

My witness snuffled closer. I held my hand out to him, fingers stained in dubious sauce, and cooed, “Hello, come to Uncle Matthew. Come talk to us.”

He was the size of a small dog, not too small to yap infuriatingly, not large enough to bark with any great power. His fur in the lamplight was dark orange heading for auburn, his nose a black wetness with a pair of whiskers sticking out above jaws that looked fit for biting arms off. His tail might once have been bushy, but wars with others of his kind, plus feral cats and traffic, had left it a tatty stump. Personal hygiene was not high among his