The Midnight Mayor

It was a woman’s voice. It was accompanied by a woman’s hand. The hand went round my neck, fingers under my chin, pulling it back. The other hand was somewhere nearby. Probably at the other end of the gun pressed into my skull. We recognised the voice.

“Bang,” she said.

“Oda,” we whispered. “We wondered.”

That’s the problem with psycho religious nutcases. They’re never there when you need them. And when you could really do without, they decide to crash the party. Oda had never been a social animal.

Sinclair stood up, pulled the napkin from his throat and folded it up neatly in front of his plate. “I am honestly sorry about all this,” he intoned. “But while I trust you, Matthew, to come round eventually and do the right thing, or at the very least, the thing that needs to be done, there is no guarantee I can offer in heaven or earth that they won’t take the first option you happened to suggest, and just run. Fire and light and freedom and life, isn’t that how it goes? Terror and love of life, so big and so bright that you think you’ll drown in it? Too big and too bright to ever let go. I am sorry, Matthew, that for their sake this has to happen.”

I tried to turn my head; Oda’s fingers pinched into my throat, her arm pressed against my windpipe. She leant in close, so close her breath drifted over my eyes, and whispered again, “Bang.” I could just see the blackness of the gun out of the corner of my eye; you can’t outrun bullets. The other guests in the restaurant didn’t seem to be paying any attention, were bent over scrupulously studying their dishes, not looking up, the buzz of good- mannered chit-chat continuing in the gloom. A waiter came over, laid down the bill in a leather case by Sinclair’s plate.

“If you kill us,” we hissed, “what will happen then to the Midnight Mayor?”

“You pose an interesting and pertinent academic question,” exclaimed Sinclair. “One that, in truth, I have never really considered until now. No doubt the brand will move on to some other unfortunate, who will no doubt be as confused as you were to discover themselves so cursed. Or blessed, I suppose, depending on your point of view. Traditionally the Midnight Mayor could control these matters, command them before he died — but then, I don’t think you really know how, do you? You have no idea what it really is to be the Midnight Mayor, because as I believe you yourself have suggested, you don’t even believe he exists. Thankfully,” he exclaimed, flicking open the leather case with the bill and glancing down the list, “there are concerned citizens willing to consider this possibility in further analytical depth that I, alas, in my ignorance, cannot.”

He turned his head. I couldn’t see what he was looking at, who he was smiling at; there were just shadows, noise in the corner of my vision. But I could guess. Charlie was on his feet as well, reaching into his pocket for something, a slim black box from which came a slim silver needle attached to a very small glass tube.

We snarled, “Keep away!”

“Bang,” whispered Oda in our ear. “Bang three to the chest two the head. Bang, bang.”

“Oda,” I whimpered. “Please, Oda, this isn’t . . .”

She didn’t care. Or if she did, I couldn’t tell.

There was some sort of drug behind the needle.

It had my name on it.

Lights out. Goodnight and good luck with your next coagulation . . .

. . . sweet dreams my sweet . . .

End of the line . . .

Darkness.

Part 2: All Roads Lead to Kilburn

In which a pair of shoes gets to complete its journey, a plot is discovered and the death of cities gets dust on his suit.

Her name was Oda. I didn’t know her last name, and it was more than possible that she didn’t either. She believed in magic, the same way the Pope believed in Satan. Vera had always called her psycho-bitch. It wasn’t far wrong. I knew she killed magicians. I hadn’t thought she’d do it to me.

And the Lord said — let there be light.

And lo it came to pass that the nine-volt battery was invented, shoved into a torch, stuffed into the right hand of a woman and shone in our eyes.

We kicked out instinctively. Our foot hit the torch, sent it flying back, struck the hand that held it, knocked it to one side. It occurred to us that we had to be lying down, and lo, that also came to pass. We rolled to one side, tried to get up, found our eyes were full of water and our stomach full of grit, crawled onto our hands and knees and verily the Lord God smote us with the butt of a 9 mm pistol swung by a woman known mostly, of course, as psycho-bitch.

There was a lot less light.

There was a bit of time. There was some blood. Mine, I guessed. It seemed the norm.

I was aware of hands pulling at mine. I turned my head and saw somewhere on the other side of the equator my right hand, stretched out on a dirt floor popping with weeds. Someone was pulling off my glove, unwrapping the bandage. A lot of light was being shone on my hand. I twitched my fingers and a boot — big, black, with straps instead of laces, in case you hadn’t got the idea — pressed down on my wrist hard enough for us to cry out, turn away, losing sight of the scrabbling at my palm.

We felt the bandages peel away. We heard a voice, male, mutter, “Fuck shit.”

The pressure on my arm relaxed.

Faces crowded in to look closer at my hand. I recognised some of them. Earle, Kemsley, Anissina and, behind them, others, more men and women dressed in preacher’s black, peering in with a collection of torches and rifles, examining me and my damned hand. Oda. A face almost as dark as her close-cropped hair. She had the damn gun pointed at my face, not in an offensive way, but casually, as if it had just happened to flop there from the end of her trigger-pulling fingers. She looked at the brand on my hand and there was nothing there but contempt.

“You’re in trouble, sorcerer,” she said.

I tried to speak. My voice was trapped somewhere behind a great warty toad that had taken up residence at the entry to my lungs, inspecting each molecule of air one at a time on their way up and down.

Earle’s face appeared upside down over mine. I was lying on my back in dirt and weeds. I could taste . . . magic of a sort, but different. Distant, shut away. He said, “How did you get this?”

He meant our hand.

I licked my lips and croaked, “Nair.”

“Nair what?”

“He did it. He gave it to me.”

“No.”

“He did.”

“He would never have let you be Midnight Mayor. How did you get this?”

“The phone rang. I answered.”

“Tell me the truth!”

“I am.”

“He is.” Oda’s voice, calm and level.

Earle’s face flashed with anger. “You have nothing to do with this,” he spat. “You and your people are not involved.”

“I was invited here for a reason,” replied Oda calmly. “The Order was invited here for a reason. I know the sorcerer. He’s telling the truth.”

“What makes you sure?”

“I know him.”

“Is that it?”

“Yes. That’s it.”

“That’s nothing,” snapped Earle. “The Midnight Mayor is an Alderman, that’s how it’s done. It passes from one Alderman to another, has done for hundreds of years, never moves outside the circle.