I half-turned to look at the source of the sound. Guns dropped another rank in the list of frightening things, displaced by . . .
. . . technically . . . a man. He wore a neat white shirt and black jeans, a pair of leather loafers and a loose fleecy jacket. He held a gun in one hand, and from the neck down looked in every way to be a boring member of the human race. Where the problem arose was from the neck up. The windpipe at the front of his throat had been carved out with a very sharp knife, the muscle removed and a bright blue plastic tube inserted as a replacement, emerging from just below the soft base of his jaw and disappearing into flesh again behind his sternum. Skin had been carefully grafted to the edges, some further into the middle, and a futile attempt made at some point to paint the thing pink, but neither attempt could disguise the truth of this disfigurement. One half of his jaw had been broken and plied away, replaced with a small metal frame through which I could see the teeth and hollow inside of his mouth. Into this frame had been slotted what looked like an old-fashioned cassette player, the top controls embedded in his gums. I could see the spools turning, hear the faint clacker of machinery from within his lips, and realised that, through some means we had no desire to comprehend, this was his tool for speech.
Yet if all this shocked us to our core, when we turned our eyes to his we had a worse horror to see, for his left eye had been entirely removed, along with the best part of that side of his face and all his left ear, and the long snout of a CCTV camera, glass window and all, had been stitched and fused and moulded into his skull. Its long metal nose stuck out three or four inches past the length of his nose, and I could hear it whirr faintly as it adjusted focus on me, and see my own faint reflection in the square glass. The wires seemed to have been plugged direct into his brain, and his nose pushed to one side to make space for it, so that the creature I saw was as much machine as mortal, and neither to completion. His other eye was bright green, and looked steadily at me, just like the gun he held.
I breathed, and found that was about all I could do, hypnotised by the sight of such extremity.
“Addison is my assistant,” said Mr Umbars, moving down from the doorway. “You should be afraid of the gun, Mr Swift — not of him.”
“Sure, bullets don’t kill people,
“Addison suffers from a rare condition. It’s not infectious. His brain is randomly shutting down parts of his body. First it was his voice, then his left eye, then his left ear, then his lungs. The NHS can’t help him. So I did. He is my assistant.”
As he said this, Mr Umbars reached carefully past me and took hold of my right hand, with the same firm, unsympathetic grip that all doctors seem to possess. He peeled back the glove from my hand and held it up to the light. I watched the CCTV camera of Addison’s eye, and it watched me.
“Fascinating,” murmured Mr Umbars, running his fingers over the crosses carved into my hand. “The mark of the Midnight Mayor.”
He let my hand fall and then without a word reached up to my head, dug his fingers in under my chin and pulled my head towards his, tilting it back and then down, staring at my eyes. “Bright blue,” he murmured. “Not your natural colour, is it, Mr Swift?”
“I am so not in the mood for this,” I snapped. “I’ve told you everything you need to know and like I said, guns are right down the list of things that frighten me.”
“You know,” sighed Mr Umbars, “if I didn’t believe you, I would drain every drop of blood you have and make a fortune flogging it, I mean a
“Tougher guys than you have tried and died,” I replied. “And thankfully you
For a moment, Mr Umbars hesitated. I could see him thinking about blood, and fire, and telephones, and electric gods and expensive golf courses. Then he smiled, and gestured at that. “It’s all right,” he said. “Put it away.”
The gun was slowly lowered. Mr Umbars gestured at the plastic casing. “He’s all yours. Try not to kill him again. Think of me, if the NHS should ever let you down.”
“I’ll think of you,” I said coldly. “But I don’t think I’ll ever see you again, will I, Mr Umbars?”
He smiled. “Possibly not, Mr Swift, quite possibly not. Addison!” His voice was a command; Addison obeyed, shuffling dutifully up the stairs with Mr Umbars, leaving me in the basement alone with Boom Boom, the Executive Officer of club Voltage.
I could hear his heartbeat, still faint through the casing:
“You should try and relax,” I said, leaning my elbows on top of his transparent cover. “You’ll do yourself a mischief.”
“What do you want?” came the voice over the intercom.
“You just calm yourself down. If we were here to kill you, we would also have killed everyone else.” I could see the great mass of his heart rising and twitching quickly below the protruding spikes of his ribcage, torn upwards from his flesh. “You’re a mess, mate.”
“What do you want?! I told you about the boy.”
“Yeah, thanks for that. Found the kid, saw the kid flayed alive while I stood powerlessly by — you know, I see why Mr Pinner has you so freaked, why you played flunky for him. Now we’re going to talk about the traffic warden’s hat.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“The hat. The traffic warden’s hat that Mo — the kid — stole. He took her hat and she’s a sorceress, although she probably doesn’t know it; but she is. I took one look at her and knew it, and now I’ve gone and fibbed to the Aldermen; so let’s assume I’m running on a bit of a clock here. Mo stole a traffic warden’s hat, and she, God knows how, has summoned the death of cities. I don’t think she meant to, not really; I’m still hazy on the details, but there it goes. And so it is. Where’s the traffic warden’s hat?”
“I don’t know anything about a hat!”
“You wouldn’t be lying to me, would you? Only it seems to me that you’re a guy inside what could well be an airtight jar dependent on a whole host of fluids being fed in from the outside and that really the Gestapo couldn’t have done better if they’d tried . . .”
“I don’t know anything!” he wailed.
“Would you lie to
“I swear, I swear, I
“Righto,” I sighed. “Well, I’ll admit it’s a bit of a disappointment. City going to burn because of an untrained sorceress’s rage and all that. Skin torn from flesh and so on, death by ten thousand paper cuts. You know. Good news is, state you’re in, you’ll probably be dead first. So is there
“The . . . the woman,” he stammered.
“Which woman? The traffic warden?”
“The contact. There was a woman, I dealt with a woman to arrange it. To get the boy. I dealt with a woman, working on his behalf. Someone else helping Mr Pinner.”
I folded my arms on the top of the casing, pressed my nose against it, smiled. “Which woman?” I asked, softer than warm honey on a summer’s day.
“I was told to contact a woman, by Mr Pinner, if anything happened, this woman . . .”
“A contact? An associate of Mr Pinner? She did notice that he’s the living death of cities, the harbinger of destruction, the feast in the fire and so on and so forth?”
“I was just told to contact her.”
“Did you?”
“No. There wasn’t any need, he said. Emergencies only. He said I’d be spared, if I helped him, that I’d be spared and could live and rebuild and survive and have a new heart and . . .”
“He said everything you wanted to hear and you just thought the silver lining was a cliché,” I sighed. “Great. Tell me how I can contact this woman.”
“There’s a number.”
“Which number?”
