The Midnight Mayor

A mug proclaiming “I really love Mum” was handed to me from the darkness beyond the cauldron. I dipped it in the bubbling liquid.

“Tea, sugar?” asked the Mother.

I shook my head, reached for my satchel, seized a handful of painkillers, drowned them in tea. For a liquid boiled in a cauldron that probably hadn’t seen daylight for two thousand years, the tea wasn’t half bad. They waited for me to drink, draining down the whole mug and putting it carefully aside. I wiped my mouth on my sleeve. On my right hand I felt the burning brand ache and stick to the bandages.

“I’m guessing,” I said at last, “that there are rules. I’m guessing it’ll be something like ‘you can have three questions’ and I want to make it absolutely clear right now that I do not believe that rhetorical flourishes or prompting statements qualify as a direct question.”

“Hey — you flunked out too,” said the Maid, with what I guessed was the nearest to understanding I was going to get from her.

“While you’re broadly correct, my pet,” sighed the Mother, “‘three questions’ is so old-fashioned. This is the age of modern educational initiatives!”

“That’s a very unhelpful answer,” I said, “since it doesn’t really answer anything, while still leaving the option open for me to make a pig’s ear of this whole procedure and blow one of my questions on something banal like ‘duh, so are there more than three questions, then?’ — which isn’t, by the way, a question!”

“Sharp, aren’t you?” The Hag spoke from the corner of her mouth, something either a smile or a grimace. “But which one of you is sharp?”

“Please,” I growled. “Let’s establish this right now. I am we and we are me. We are the same thought and the same life and the same flesh, and frankly I would have thought that you, of all entities to wander out of the back reaches of mythical implausibility, would respect this.”

“But it’s not healthy!” replied the Hag. “A mortal and a god sharing the same flesh?”

“You know, this isn’t why we’re here. I can get abuse pretty much wherever.”

“Yeah,” sighed the Maid, “but I bet a tenner I can make you cry in half a minute.”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” added the Mother, slurping tea.

“Did you hurt your little handywandy?” crooned the Hag.

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “All right,” I said. “Let’s play this game. Statement: I am the Midnight Mayor.”

“Yes,” said the Mother.

“Don’t give the fucker a freebie. Christ!” exclaimed the Maid.

“Sorry, dearest,” muttered the Mother, with every sign of genuine contrition.

“Statement:” I tried again. “I became Midnight Mayor when Nair died.”

Three stony faces stared back at me. I didn’t need an answer to know I was right. “Statement: when Nair died, he made a telephone call. He breathed his dying breath into the wires and with his dying breath went the idea, the title, the power, the brand, everything that makes up Midnight Mayor. But it couldn’t stay as signals in the wire; the Midnight Mayor needs to be flesh and blood. So it went in search of a phone to ring and it found us. It was always going to find us. It is our nature.”

“Isn’t it nice to see that youth can still reason?” sighed the Hag.

“Statement: the Aldermen think I killed Nair because, let’s face it, if we’d known what he was about to do to us, we probably would have. Because they don’t understand what we are; they don’t understand why we are alive. Because . . . because they don’t know who else to blame. Because Nair was killed by a man who basically flayed him alive while Nair was still in his clothes, peeled away the skin under his nails without even trimming them down, and that, that isn’t just sorcery. That’s the kind of magic that makes the moon think twice about its orbital path. That’s . . . that’s the kind of magic that people don’t want to understand, don’t want to know about, because it makes them tiny.

“Statement: fact! Nair died and I was hit by a curse out of the telephone! One Midnight Mayor is dead and another walks, because you can’t kill a brand on the hand, not while there’s a city that made it.

“Fact! The man who killed Nair had no smell, and men — mortal walking, breathing men — always smell.

“Question:”

“Finally,” groaned the Maid.

“Yes, dear?”

“Well?”

“Question:” I licked my dry lips, tasting of peeled skin and tea. “Who or what killed Nair?”

There was a long silence. Finally the Maid said, “Shucks. You ain’t gonna live long, sunshine.”

“Well, now, you see, that’s an interesting one,” murmured the Mother.

“If you care about these things,” snapped the Hag.

“But you’re three ladies with a cauldron,” we said, managing another bow. “You’d know without needing to care.”

“Hey, sunshine!” snapped the Maid. “It wasn’t a fucking man! You said it like — blokes what breathe and piss and eat don’t fucking not smell.”

“And of course the question is,” added the Mother thoughtfully, “did the man kill the Mayor, or the man’s maker?”

“He’ll be after you now,” concluded the Hag. “It doesn’t matter whose skin it is, it’s the brand on the hand. You could be any little wormy maggot crawling up from the biscuit plate and he’d still come to squish you down. Thought about running away?”

I bit my lip, pulled my hand tighter into my chest. “All right,” I muttered. “OK. Cryptic I can deal with. Sure. Whatever. Statement: you said . . . the man or his maker.”

“That’s conversation skills he’s got there,” chuckled the Hag.

“Statement: ergo — the man who killed Nair wasn’t in fact a man. Something else. The possibilities are endless!”

“Pity you’ve only got so much time, then, isn’t it?”

I wiped my forehead with my sleeve. I felt hot. The stitches in my chest ached and throbbed, my hand burnt. The world seemed a mirage away. I stammered, “Question: in Nair’s house there was a file, and in the file there was a note, and the note said, ‘Swift has the shoes.’ What does this mean?”

“Trendy pair of trainers,” said the Maid appreciatively, nodding at my feet.

“Very clever of him to notice, really,” added the Mother.

“You’re wearing the boy’s shoes,” concluded the Hag. “Or didn’t you think it would be important?”

I looked down at my shoes. “These?”

“Was that a . . .”

“No, no, it wasn’t a question. It was more . . . thinking aloud. It would be fair to allow me to get a little clarification before I blow my next question.”

“Fair!” laughed the Maid.

“Well . . .” sighed the Mother.

“Huh!” grunted the Hag.

“It would be moving with the times . . .” I added. “Education being what it is.”

“I got an A at Art.”

“All right then.”

“Clarify away.”

“Statement: these shoes” — I twitched my toes inside the flashy trainers — “aren’t mine. I took them from a boy’s room in Wembley. They belong to a kid called Mo. I was using them to find him, for his mum’s sake. He’s been missing. He’s got nothing to do with magic, as far as I can tell, and she certainly hasn’t. Just a favour for a friend. But — still statement — the Mayor’s files mentioned these shoes. Nair thought they were important. So here’s my clarification question: was Nair also looking for the kid who owned these shoes?”

To which, simply and flatly, the Hag said, “Yes.”

We wanted out. We knew it with a sudden and absolute certainty. We wanted a ticket to somewhere foggy, a nice thick green haze to get ourselves lost in, deep tunnels and obedient lights. We wanted out and down and gone, it was nothing to do with us, none of this was anything to do with us and we weren’t prepared to die for it.