The Midnight Mayor

available on the NHS. Three: even if you get bumped to the top of the waiting list, sometimes it’s hard to find a heart that will match you, owing to medicine, antigens, blood groups and all that medical stuff. Four — are we on to four? Yes, four: there are some back-street clinics not registered on the NHS, or even popping up on the regular black market, where you can get a heart transplant if you’re in a bad enough way and have a bit of ready cash, but you can bet your buttocks that the individual performing the operation believes in the power of incense and bad spirits in their work. Five: it’s not just humans who can donate working hearts. With the right attitude, the correct approach and a hefty dose of obscure occultism . . . what did you get given? Sperm whale?”

He looked surprised. Then he smiled, a long, deliberate smile that clearly took a lot of effort. “You know more than I had expected,” he said.

“That’s me. Full of useful information, not that it’s the same as truth.”

“You are not just some lost buffoon.”

“Well, that depends on your point of view . . .”

“What do you want, little man?”

“We’ll get to that. First, I’ve gotta tell you — I don’t like the fact that you’ve turned the brains of these kids here” — I jerked my chin to the empty-eyed hoodies — “to jelly. I mean, it’s none of my business, but we do not like life when it is but a mimicry. Life should be lived. And they are not living it.”

He shrugged. The ripples of the movement passed all the way down his arms to his fingertips, made his belly shake and shimmer. “I’m not here to manage your problems,” he said. “I’m not here to have anything to do with you.”

“Then I guess we’ll come back to this one in a minute. Right now, what I’d really like to know, is whether you’ve seen a kid called Mo.”

He hesitated. Not for very long. Then he laughed. We watched the great rising and falling of that blister in his chest, saw the pressing of his ribs against his shirt as they were pushed out with a creak, sharp broken edges scratching against the cotton. His heart was going faster now; the speakers couldn’t keep down the sound: dumdumdumdumdumdumdumdumdum

“How should I know?” he chuckled. “I see very few people, in my condition, but some random kid? How should I know? Why should I care?”

“I’ve got a photo,” I said, fumbling in my bag.

“Is this really what you came down here for? To ask me, me, if I’d seen a boy?”

“Didn’t say he was a boy, and ‘Mo’ could be anything,” I replied. “But yes, you have the gist of it.” I found the picture Loren had given me, held it up for him to see.

“Recognise him?”

He studied it, too long, too deep, too carefully, a badly played act by a man who didn’t get out much. “Nope,” he said finally, chest heaving beneath his shirt, heart twisting and boiling within his shattered ribs. “Is that everything, little man? Would you like a back massage on your way out?”

“Look again.”

“I’ve seen . . .”

“And you’re fibbing. We are not in the mood for lies.”

“Arrogance!” he laughed.

“Impatience,” we snapped. “You have a great bursting blister contracting and constricting within your chest. A better liar might be able to stop it from accelerating. But like you said — you don’t get out much. Should have waited for the NHS.”

“Waiting was death.”

“This,” we retorted, “isn’t living. But since you seem to value it so highly, let us make ourself clear. Tell us the truth, or we will kill you.”

He just laughed, arrogance and error. We picked ourself up carefully, half-turning our head to eye up his deafened drones.

“Death couldn’t kill me!” he said. “They thought it would, but I stopped it. I locked death out and now my heart is life, my heart is . . .”

“‘Give me back my hat’.”

His face froze. We smiled. “You recognise it,” we said. “That’s good. That means we’re right. Tell us about it. Tell us about the boy called Mo.”

“Who are you?” he asked.

“My name is Matthew Swift.”

“So who are you?”

“I was the apprentice of Robert James Bakker. I’m sure you’ve heard of him.” He had; his accelerating heart was a great thumping blister, an alien out of a monster movie trying to break free of his bones. “I am a sorcerer. I was there when Bakker died. We . . . made it happen. I too have met death, and did not have to peel the bones away from my chest to survive the encounter. I am also, and incidentally, the Midnight Mayor, the blue electric angels, the fire in the wire, the song in the telephones, and we are having a bad week. Be smart; fear us.”

He licked his lips. His tongue was the colour of rotting strawberries. He nodded carefully and said, “OK. I get it. I see what you’re saying. And sure, yeah, I’m smart enough to be scared of sorcerers, they always end in a bang. But the thing is, while it’s sharp to fear you, I just fear him a whole lot more.”

Like a schmuck, I turned my head looking for the him. I guess I wasn’t at my best. There was no one there, just the two guys with the bloody ears. I looked back. He had one hand over the controls that turned on the speaker. His other was pulling at the buttons of his shirt.

He turned off the speakers; he pulled back his shirt. His ribcage was a mess of broken bones, sticking up from his skin, creating great dark voids between his flesh into which muscle had long since sunk and withered, ragged torn bone shattered away from the twisted breastbone protruding upwards like ruined towers in an ancient desert. We could see his heart beating beneath it, four great, coated valves smeared in clinging white flesh pumping one to the other, could see it shrink down to the size of a pear and then burst upwards again, pressing the ribs out so far that they creaked and cracked, little fracture lines running down the stuck-up grey bones where they had ruptured from his chest.

And his heart went: deDUM!

The shock of the sound had nothing to do with ears; it was long past the point where audible frequencies played a major part. His ribs twisted outwards with the blast, his whole chest rising up; then the force of the sound knocked into me and threw me back shaking, slamming into me so hard that all I could hear was a rumble like the sea.

We landed face-down on the floor and crawled away from him. It went again, deDUM! We covered our ears with our hands, with our elbows, buried our face in the floor and our knees in our face and again it went deDUM! The plaster cracked on the wall, and spilt trickles of dust; the lights hissed and swayed, flickered, began to shatter and go out. The two kids with the bloody ears were on the floor, blood running from their ears, their noses, their eyes, with ugly bruises where the blood from a thousand broken capillaries was spilling out beneath their skin. I tried to get up and another heartbeat knocked me down. We might have called out, we couldn’t tell, couldn’t hear anything but our own dying cells singing in our ears. His heart was going too fast, beating too fast for us to move, to stand a chance against the roar, everything we did took a heartbeat and one beat was one too many.

So we lay still. We pressed ourself into the ground, dug our fingers into the thick blue carpet, and let it buffer us, let the sound push us across the floor, deDUM! until we were up against the door, all twisted limp limb, and our head was screaming, bursting; our eyes ached in their sockets, such a frail little body to hold us and die and . . . deDUM!

. . . think sound . . .

deDUM!

My fingers were knocked against the wall. Through a static haze, I looked at it. I pushed my fingers closer into the wall, sensed its warm dry touch. Then I pushed a bit deeper. I curled my fingers into it, felt the concrete slide around them, dug in up to my fingertips, up to my wrist, closed my fingers around the sense of it, and pulled. deDUM!

I saw the wall warp and twist, seem to shrivel into itself as its middle was dragged out along the pipe of my