The Midnight Mayor (56 page)

“Run, Mister Mayor,” he breathed. “We will slow them, distract them, fight them where we can. Run. Get the hat to your traffic warden. Damnation on you, sorcerer, burn in hell -
run
!”

 

We ran.

Blood dripped scatty and unsure behind us, forming diamond-shaped splatters on the thin carpet. The lifts were dead, no point even trying, the stairs were concrete and grey. Oda had a torch, a gun, I had my torch from my jacket pocket. But I didn’t want to risk summoning a light. What little mortal strength we had now, we were not going to waste, not while there was still a chance that we might survive the night. The white light from our torches was gobbled up in an instant by the all-pervasive ruby glow, spilling from every inch of wall and floor. I could see it stretch and part around my feet as we ran/tumbled down the stairs, gasping for breath, heart pounding in our ears, scared, scared, just the anxiety, just scared, just nothing, just feeling, just mortal things for mortals to worry about, just run!

Eighteenth floor; what kind of penis-obsessed architect builds so high anyway?! (Land prices, think land prices, think running . . . )

Sixteenth floor, fifteenth, couldn’t breathe, just keep on falling and gravity should do the rest, fourteenth floor and a sign caught my eye - “Oda!”

“What?”

“Catering.”

“But . . .”

“Come on!”

I dragged her through the fire-exit doors onto the fourteenth floor, pushed her at the nearest line of boring plywood desks. “Fags, Sellotape! Every cigarette you can find!”

Scowling, she started to rummage through drawers. I hurried down the corridor to a pair of white double doors with a round glass window set in each one, pushed them back, lurched into a kitchen of stainless steel and giant tubs for suspicious soups made mostly of floating carrot to boil in, started tearing open everything on the shelves. We nearly screamed our frustration - what kind of big office didn’t have some hidden cache of booze?!

Big cartons of Perrier, fizzy water, lemonade, fruity fizzy water, water with added vitamins, water with added volcano, fruit juice made mostly out of sugar, fruit juice made mostly out of crushed ginger, yoghurt drinks, “power” drinks, protein drinks, more water, carbonated, decarbonated, hydrated, dehydrated, mix and match in one cup and see if your head explodes . . .

“Matthew!” Oda’s voice drifted through the doors.

“What?”

“They’re coming!”

“Get in here!”

She came through the double doors to the kitchen without complaint, carrying a depressingly small armful of cigarette packets and a roll of Sellotape. “Beer,” I muttered, “gotta find beers, where are they?”

“I saw a face . . . a not-face . . . an empty-face at the door.”

“Beer bottles!” I dragged open another stainless-steel cupboard door, dragged down sacks of flour, great packets of gelatin, opened another and there it was! Tucked away discreetly at the back, the shelf of expensive green glass. I dragged them down by the armful, started to fumble at the tops.

“Sorcerer!”

Oda’s voice from my left; I turned and there were two of them by the door, bobbing along to the silent beat, empty nothingnesses inside their hoods, penknives in hand. I raised my hands towards them, pushing my blood-soaked palms out in front of me. “Oda, light the cigarettes, empty the bottles, put the fags in them still burning, got it?”

She grabbed the fallen bottles I’d been working at, and started fumbling in her pocket for her knife, trying to get the lids off. The spectres shuffled towards me, bobbing from the hips down to their unheard rhythms, swinging their shoulders as if to say, “you think you’re hard enough?” So they swaggered towards me, arrogant nothingnesses in a tracksuit, and I held up my hands towards them and felt the crosses carved into my skin, and I said:

“‘It is apparent to me that you, being a . . . thing . . . aged ten or over namely, (a) have acted, since the commencement date, in an anti-social manner, that is to say, in a manner that caused or was likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to one or more persons not of the same household as yourself and (b) that this order is necessary . . .’”

The air thickened around my fingers; blood oozed down my palm, to my wrist, splattered onto the floor. The spectres kept coming.

“‘. . . to protect persons in the local government area in which the harassment, alarm or bloody major distress is caused or is likely to be caused from further anti-social acts by yourself; and as the relevant authority—’
Oda hurry up!
. . .”

Thick light began to shimmer off my skin, and spill down my arms onto the floor. As the spectres neared, they began to slow, arms sliding through the air like vengeful t’ai chi gurus, each movement reduced to a crawl; but still coming—

“‘. . . for the purpose of determining whether the condition mentioned in subsection (1)(a) above is fulfilled, the court shall disregard any act of the defendant which he shows was reasonable in the circumstances. The prohibitions that may be imposed—’
Oda! Faster!
”

The spectres were a few feet from me, moving now so slow, caught full fast in the enchantment and I screamed the words of the spell, felt the power run through my arms, burn at the ends of my fingertips: a new spell, a young spell, and still not strong enough. I let it fill my lungs, my blood, lift me almost off my feet with the force of it, feeding it everything I had: “‘. . . prohibitions that may be imposed by an anti-social behaviour order are those necessary for the purpose of protecting from further anti-social acts by the defendant (a) persons in the local government area; and (b) persons in any adjoining local government area specified in the application for the order . . .’”

One of the spectres raised its knife; in slow motion, the weapon screeched and hissed and spat furious angry sparks as it moved through the air as slow and gentle as a freak wave on a starlit night - I pushed back against it with everything I had, saw it slow still further, but still coming, poured out the spell with every last drop of air I had in my lungs, bellowed it at the empty hood of the spectre, “‘An anti-social behaviour order shall have effect for a period (not less than two years) specified in the order or until further order. Subject to subsection (9) below, the applicant or the defendant may apply by complaint to the court which made an anti-social behaviour order for it to be varied or discharged by a further order—’
Oda!!
”

Something was pushed into my hand, moving quickly through the air that had thickened to porridge between me and the spectre. It was a green beer bottle, the sides sticky with the drink just poured out. A single cigarette smoked dully inside, dark mist crawling out from the top. We nearly laughed, and drawing back our arm, thrust the bottle as hard as we could into the slowly drifting face of the spectre, shrieking with the attack, “Hey, man! Like
total
respect!”

The spell I had been casting broke. The spectre should really have screamed, but what it was was already shrivelling down inside the bottle, vanishing into the mist of the smoking cigarette, behind the foggy cage of the glass. Its clothes crumpled into a messy heap on the floor; the knife fell through empty air to break its own blade on the pale tiles. I snatched the bottle back as the hood shrivelled into itself, planted my thumb firmly across the opening and snatched Sellotape from Oda’s hand, sealing the bottle and tearing the strip free with my teeth.

The other spectre, freed from the spell I had been weaving, lurched towards me, but I snatched another bottle from Oda’s hands and waved it, roaring, “Come on, then! Another nothing for eternity!”

The other spectre retreated a few paces; we stepped sharply after it, it moved too late, tried to put the knife between our ribs; but we had the bottle with its tantalising smoke, and jammed it into the empty middle of that vacant hood, sucking it down until nothing but a pile of baggy clothes remained, and another foggy beer bottle.

Oda stuttered, looking at the sad clothes on the floor, “Just like . . .” “Yes. Just like that.”

“That was an ASBO you just . . .”

“Yeah. I know. That’s why it didn’t really work. Bottles!”

She handed me four, put another one in my coat pocket, kept two to herself, held in either hand. “This will kill spectres?”

“Contain them. The invocation of an ASBO will slow them down as well, if there’s more than one of them, but, like you saw, it’s not a perfect spell. And if the cigarettes burn down before the bottle is filled, they won’t work either. But it should be enough to get us to the seventh floor.”

“I can’t . . .”

“You push the bottle into their faces, and if it doesn’t work, tell them, ‘respect’. Say it like you mean it.”

“I can’t just do ma—”

“You can.”

“I can’t! I’m not some . . .”

“It’s a simple binding, nothing more than a piece of sympathetic magic. You want to live?”

“And not be damned!”

“Well, you’re gonna have to pick one or the other.
Come on!
”

I dragged her, or maybe she dragged me, or maybe we just got in each other’s way, out of the kitchen, across the dull office floor turned the colour of blood, or crosses, or dragon’s eyes, or maybe just a tasteless brothel-red, to the stairway. And there it was, the beat in the stair, echoing up the concrete walls:
dumdumdumdumDUH dumdumdumdumDUH dumdumdumdum
. . .

“Another stair?” I gasped.

“Sure, because I know—”

“It’s not really a question!”

There was another staircase, tucked in at the opposite end of the office floor.

sshssshsssCHA sshssshsssCHA sshssshsssCHA
. . .

“Where now?”

“Down, gotta get down . . .”

“Do you even know where this Ngwenya woman is?”

“Sure I do,” I muttered. “The death of cities is about to kill the Midnight Mayor; that’s the last defence the city’s got, the last thing that’s gonna stop us all burning. Of course I know where Ngwenya is!”

“Jedi spidey-senses?”

“Obscure mystic forces.”

“The spectres are
here
, Swift! Mr Pinner is
here
; do you really think we can just walk this one down?”

“Right,” I scowled, dragging her back. “
Fine
.”

Red light, spinning chairs, dull desks, silent sleeping computers, big glass windows behind the doors of the executive cubicles, plywood doors, plaster walls. “Do you suppose there’s those big vents like there are in American thrillers?” I asked hopefully.

Oda grunted in reply, her eyes still fixed on the stairwell door through which was coming the sound of:

“OK.” I looked down at the floor. Our hands were shaking, we hadn’t even noticed this time, the edge of our vision seemed to be going off on its own business.

“I can see them coming!” hissed Oda, scrambling back from the doorway at a sight on the stairs. “They’re nearly here!”

“How many bottles do we have?”

“Maybe six? Can they hold more than one spectre?”

“What do you think?”

“I’m thinking that life was not made to be easily lived.”

“I was thinking something ruder than that, but yeah, you’ve got the basic gist.”

I could see shadows moving behind the door; taste them. And something else, something that made the fingers of our right hand curl in disgust and fear. “Back into the office,” I hissed. “There.”

Oda obeyed, kicking back a plywood door to reveal an office garnished on a theme of golf: clubs, pictures, trophies and all. The far wall was nothing but glass, slightly curved outwards, looking down on the dark/red soak of the city. I ran my hands over the window, felt the cold glass, pressed my nose up against it, ran my tongue over it, tasted the dull dirt. “This’ll do,” I muttered.

“For what?” she hissed.

“You still got your penknife?”

She handed it over; I wrenched through the blades until I found the pointed end of a four-head screwdriver. Turned the point towards the glass.

And a voice from the door said, and there was no hiding the anger, “Give me back my hat, sorcerer!”

I glanced over my shoulder, and there he was, Mr Pinner, and he wasn’t smiling, not now. His jacket billowed, his hair stood on end, his face was cold and pale, and behind him the office trembled. The furniture bounced gently on the floor like flowers in a breeze, the computer screens cracked, the chairs spun giddy on their axis, the files on the shelves split open, the paper started to tumble out, a few sheets at first, then more, dozens, hundreds, endless walls of paper spilling out into the room, caught in a whirlwind, blasting and screaming in the air behind him, filling the doorway with nothing but an A4 snowstorm.

“Give me back my . . .” he began, and I drove the end of the screwdriver as hard as I could into the glass.

It went
thunk
. I drew it back slowly. A tiny white scar, no bigger than the end of a child’s finger, appeared on the glass. Then a little fault line shimmered out from the edge, divided, spread a bit further, split, divided again, moved again, split, divided, spread. It took no more than a few seconds, but watching each spreading fibre through the glass was like waiting for a glacier to move down a mountain.

Behind me, Mr Pinner shrieked his fury and rage, raised his hands and seemed to throw his whole weight towards us. The paper whirlwind burst around him, shrouded him in a second, filled the room with a thousand screaming edges of white, razored sheets that cut and tore and slashed. I pressed my palm against the scar in the glass and pushed, throwing the weight of my arm, my shoulder, everything, jumping, lifting my feet off the floor to push against the glass and it shattered with a roar, splintered into a thousand thousand shards that burst outwards around me.