The Midnight Mayor

“You think?” he chuckled. “You should see what’s behind you!”

I wouldn’t have looked.

I really wouldn’t.

But if you can’t trust yourself, even when you’re dead, then who are you going to put your faith in?

I looked.

“Ta-da!” said Matthew, the other Matthew, the one who died and didn’t come back, because you couldn’t, dead is dead is . . .

It was . . .

. . . dragon didn’t quite cover it.

Dragon implies something made out of scales, with a nod in the direction of reptilian ancestry: dinosaur meets flamethrower with wings. Sure, it includes anything from fluffy through to ferocious; and we could see a case for this thing fitting into both categories. But it felt impolite to try and tie it to any particular biology. Impolite to impose anything as mundane and boring as up, down, sideways, forwards, back, in, out, here, then, there, now. It would have cocked one black eyebrow bigger than the sky above an eye madder than the tiger, tiger that once upon a time burnt bright in some acid-drenched brain; and looked at you as though to say, “Oh. So you’re that small.”

To say it was made of shadows would be to imply that light or darkness even got a look-in. Sure, it had crawled out of them, in the way that the diplodocus had once crawled out of the amoebae of the sea. And if a comet came from the heavens to smash it, it wouldn’t be squished, just spread so wide and thin across the earth that it would look like night had fallen down, dragging all the stars with it — before, with a good thorough shake to push the stardust off its skin, the creature slid back to its brilliant, angry, maddened shape.

If its wings bothered to do something so mundane as beat, they took a hundred years to do it; if its tongue found anything in the air worth tasting, the lashing spike as it sampled the drizzle would knock down every chimney from Fleet Street to Piccadilly; if it deigned to press a claw into the earth, the Underground trains rumbling beneath would screech to a stop as the clatter of their engines became lost in the roaring of the tunnels that cowered from its touch.

And if it found any reason, and it would have to be one hell of a reason, to bother to look at you, in its gaze were a million ghosts who pressed up against the cornea of its eye and stretched their fingers through the blackness of its pupil to try and suck you down.

And it was looking at us.

We, who were born from the chatter of mankind, from the things that got left behind in the wires, who were bigger than any city or mortal, were nothing: tiny, insignificant, footsteps walking on stones where a thousand million feet a year would walk, nothing more than ants in a heap. A blink, and our lives were over. Our voices and our footsteps and all that we were would sink into its great black belly. And, while not lost, we would be too small to merit interest from anyone other than the insignificantly small librarian interested in the history of the insignificant: little stories to comfort little people who liked to believe that the heroes mattered, because otherwise, they would be nothing but forgotten ghosts before the city could even deign to shake itself free from yesterday.

It looked at us; we looked at it.

I didn’t want to know.

I closed my eyes.

And, without us wanting to attribute a digestive system to the beast, it gobbled us up.

Part 3: The Death of Cities

In which a wife is lost, an enemy is found, and a sorcerer expostulates on the cruelty of strangers.

He said, “Fag?”

I said, “What?”

“You wanna fag?”

I considered this. We were almost tempted. It seemed to calm people down. He held out a packet in a hand that had passed the point of being dirty, into the pure cleanliness of compressed earth so ground into the skin that it’s hard to imagine it could ever rub off.

The packet said, “SMOKING GIVES YOU CANCER”.

I said, “Nah. Thanks.”

He shrugged, stuck a cigarette in his mouth, and struck a flame from a bright orange plastic lighter. He sucked long and deep, coughed, and exhaled. “Jesus,” he croaked. “Fucking fags.”

I tried to work out what was happening.

I was in a gutter.

Fair enough.

The gutter was on a bridge.

To the left was Tower Bridge, to the right was Southwark.

The guy sitting next to me had my satchel open at his feet. He’d gone through the contents. My wallet lay beside it. He’d gone through that as well, and been disappointed. Now he was offering me a fag. His face was too bloodless for a beard ever to find enough strength to grow. His eyes were lost in the soft tissue round the front brain; his neck was two long tendons on a stick. At some point, and not too far away, he’d messed around with drugs, and they’d messed back. I sat up slowly. I didn’t hurt as much as I’d expected — even my hand, burnt with the twin red crosses, didn’t pain me as it should. I looked up at a sky in which a few shy stars peeped between black cloud and orange wash, and watched the flickering twin lights of aeroplanes passing overhead.

Not dead.

Still not dead.

Again.

Something had changed.

Couldn’t put our finger on what it was . . .

. . . but even we knew that being consumed by a metaphysical, metamagical, meta-most-things dragon while on a semi-philosophical LSD trip for Midnight Mayors changed something.

I said, “I need to find the boy.”

The guy smoking the cigarette chuckled. “Whatever gets you off.”

“I’m serious.”

“Sure. Serious guy like you.”

On the other side of the bridge, a taxi swished by. At the end of the bridge, a bendy bus scooted past a stop. I crawled onto the pavement, as it rushed by with the racing glee of night buses everywhere.

We looked at the messed-up man and said, “Where did you find us?”

“Here,” he replied. “Lying in the gutter, looking at the stars.”

“How did I get there?”

“Dunno. Not my business.”

“You didn’t see . . . anything peculiar?”

“Fuck shit hell.”

“No, then.”

“Hey — you got cash?”

“No. Sorry.”

“Watch, credit cards, you know?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on! You gotta have something. I just need a quickie, you know? Just a little.”

I staggered up onto my feet, looked east towards where, in a few hours — quite a few hours, judging by the thickness of the sky — the sun would come up between the yellow-blue pinnacles of Tower Bridge, crawling over the Thames Barrier and sliding across the white bulb of the Millennium Dome, to where I stood.