“I don’t suppose you know anything about magic?”
The end of his nose twitched as he thought about it. “
“Don’t hold on to that thought,” I sighed. “Get back inside the flat. Watch windows and doors. And walls, for that matter — you never know where they’ll decide to come in. You —” I stared at Oda. “You know, I have no idea what it is you do to stay alive, but I guess you must do it well, so do that.”
“Leadership skills,” she retorted. “You can look them up another time.”
We were going to say something rude, but nothing seemed to come to mind. We hustled back into the flat, a tumble of black coat, armoured soldier, armed fanatic and sorcerer in “What Would Jesus Do?” T-shirt. What
The last man in was Kemsley. He closed the door behind us, pulled the chain across, as if that would make a great deal of difference, and hustled us all into the largest room of the flat, at the end of the hall. The troopers took up various armed-to-the-teeth positions, and I found myself shuffled to the back wall. The street was behind us, neon yellow light sifting through the curtainless glass, the occasional distant swish of traffic. I could hear Anissina on the phone, whispering quietly and urgently.
“Yes . . . they’re armed . . . armed men . . . shotguns . . . and burning bottles. Raleigh Court, they’re at . . . yes . . . yes . . . no, Raleigh Court . . .”
I thought of the phone in my bag. Where was the Midnight Mayor to rescue us? I’d died once before and the bastard hadn’t shown up then on a chariot of winged steel, and now that we had the job, who was going to get us out of trouble? I opened my satchel, looked inside at the spray paint and old socks. Nair’s phone sat sullen and silent in one pouch. I pulled it out. There was a number there, it occurred to me, just one number in that great list that might actually be some use. Not yet, though — not quite yet. I slipped his phone into my pocket and looked up at the door. Kemsley half-turned and whispered, since this seemed to be what the moment called for, “What now?”
“Oh, you just had to . . .” I began.
The lights went out. They went out on the balcony outside, and in the stairwell. They went out in the streets behind us, in the streetlamps and the little “ready” LEDs on the TV sets in the houses opposite, they went out in every room of every flat in the court, they went out in number 53, they went out in the waiting warning lights of the sleepy cars below.
Londoners almost never see proper darkness, not true, black-as-black, turn-from-the-sun, smother-the-moon darkness. Even when the curtains are drawn in their darkened rooms, there will be the shimmer of street light through the tiny gaps at the edges of the window frame, or the ready waiting light of a radio, or the glow of their mobile phone left on in the dark. There is no darkness darker than the darkness of the city, when all the lights go out. The stars and the moon are lost behind the bricks of the buildings. I snatched a sliver of neon as the last lamp went out outside, cradled it to my chest, let it warm the skin of my face and my curled fingertips, a tiny yellow shimmer in perfect black suffocation.
Then a trooper said, “Lights.”
I heard the racketing of equipment, the tearing of velcro, and as the first torch went on, it nearly blinded us; we flinched away from its white glare. Oda had a torch too — where she had concealed it I didn’t want to speculate — and for Anissina and Kemsley . . . we had to look twice, but yes, for certain, as I looked at the Aldermen, their eyes glowed. The mad, wild, spinning marble glow of the dragon that guards the gates of London. The sinking red vortex of an angry tiger burning bright, the kind of stare that looked at you and saw just an inanimate object standing between it — for those eyes weren’t human — and some more worthwhile meal. There’s reasons people fear the Aldermen.
We waited.
Silence. Nothing. On the whole surface of the planet, there is nowhere that silence is perfect — an engine will rumble in the distance, a bird will sing, an insect will scuttle, a leaf will sway in the wind, a footstep will fall, a brick will crumble. This was not a perfect silence either: the wind was humming outside, a low mournful tune from some forgotten folklore that had accepted death and now found the subject mundane; the drizzle was turning into rain that rattled like a thousand tiny ball bearings against the glass. But nothing in it that was human. I felt for Nair’s phone in my pocket, felt the burning brand on my right hand, aching.
Then Oda said, “I smell fumes.”
At once I looked up, and it seemed that the whole room in unison drew a long, deep breath through the nose, and all at once we all smelt what she, sharper, had detected — the unmistakable warm dry whiff of car fumes drifting across the floor. I risked a little more brightness to the neon glow in my hands, pushing the orange-pink bubble of illumination towards the door, and saw it, thin greyish-brown trickling smoke crawling in through the gaps, spilling over the floor.
I drew my light back, half-crawled to the window, and looked out. In the street below, a thing that might have been fog but for the sickly brownish thickness of it was rising, tumbling out of the exhaust pipes of the cars parked below without a sound, filling the streets like some swaying alien sea and still rising, crawling up the sides of the buildings and slithering through the gaps at the sides of the doors.
The troopers were already reaching for gas masks — say what you would, they were prepared. Kemsley and Anissina didn’t seem to care, their skin taking on a strange silverish tone, their nails already two inches too long, but in Oda’s eyes, even as she tied a scarf across her nose and mouth, I could see the fear. I drew my own scarf across my nose and mouth, but that still left eyes, already starting to sting and itch with the dirt crawling up in gaseous form from the door and floor.
And we heard, somewhere not so far off:
And perhaps a hint of:
I looked back out of the window. It was a long way down, deeper since we now couldn’t see the bottom. By the faint neon clutched between my fingers, I could see the sickly fumes twist and spin around Anissina’s breath, as it seeped slowly from her peeled-back lips. She still superficially resembled a human — two arms, two legs and all the bits in between — but her skin had a metal shimmer to it, her hair a wire quality, her tongue a twisted red forked sliver on the air. The fumes didn’t seem to be bothering her. They were bothering us.
Then the door opened. I said, “No, wait, don’t . . .”
Kemsley said, “Shoot it!”
Gunshots in a confined space are like having popcorn explode inside your eardrum; automatic gunfire was the popcorn, the bag, the oil and the whole microwave. I half-saw in the flashes from the barrels a figure, all hood and faceless shadow, staggering back as his clothes were ripped to shreds, as fabric popped and burst backwards and outwards and severed and snapped and spat and the men emptied out every bullet they had in the barrel, I could hear the clitter-clatter of falling casings, smell over the stench of the exhaust fumes the sweeter stench of burning powder and overheated metal and, when it stopped, I could hear nothing but banging in our head and taste nothing but dirt and smoke and see nothing but afterburn star flashes on the inside of our eyes. “Stop!” we screamed, “Stop!”
And they stopped. Eventually.
I crawled to my feet, pressed my neon bubble into my chest for childish safety. In the torchlight, I could see the thing standing in the door. Its clothes were nothing but a scalded, smoking spiderweb, blasted threads clinging to each other by the thinnest strain of grey fabric, hood shot straight through so I could see the smog rising
It was an animal noise, pure and without thought. It wasn’t just that his vocal cords were tightened by agony or terror, it was his whole throat, his lungs, every part of him that had anything to do with air, seemed to clench. His feet left the floor, his fingers spasmed wide, the gun falling down at his feet, his face went back and his throat seemed to buckle. He screamed and screamed so loud and so high and I could see the bottom of his ribcage seem
