The Neon Court (22 page)

She said, “Well,
duh
.” Then, “You seeing OK?”

“My eyes hurt, my head hurts – actually, let’s skip the inventory and just say I hurt – and you’re kinda fuzzy round the edges, but yeah. I can see OK.”

“You look kinda boiled, you know?”

“Cheers.”

I peered in closer, studying every part of her face.

“Hey – getting pervy here,” she mumbled, drawing back.

I looked at her eyes, brown ovals set either side of an impressive nose. I said, “You crying?”

“Fuck no!”

“But there’s …” My voice trailed away. “Penny?” I whimpered. “Penny, you sure you’re OK?”

“Yeah, I feel fine. What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“Your eyes … you’re um … your eyes are bleeding.”

“They’re what?” she shrieked, rubbing her hands quickly across her eyes. Her hands came away clean, but still as I looked I could see the blood welling up in her tear ducts, running beneath the eyes, pooling, and finally bursting to tumble down her face like water from a cracked gutter.

“It’s not, I’m not, look, look at my hands, look!” She held up her hands, that should have been thick with the blood on her face but weren’t. I closed my eyes, held my head in my hands.

“Maybe it’s one of the side effects,” she said. “Maybe you see things, maybe you’re stressed, you know, or that thing … that post-trauma-tised thing Dees said …”

“We are not insane!” we snarled, briefly opening our eyes again. Her face was clean. No blood on Penny’s face, none in her eyes; she was clean. I breathed, “It’s gone. The blood is gone.”

“Well thank fuck for that.”

“This is bad.”

“Like I haven’t heard that before. Look, why don’t we go back inside, have a chat with Dees, get you a holiday or something …”

“Uh-uh.”

“Hey – every guy deserves a holiday!”

“Court, Tribe, sun,” I snapped. “My mess.”

“Why yours?”

“Because some tit made it mine and everyone expects me to fix it, and, Penny, saviour of the day as you are, I’m really not happy about the thought of you being the last sorcerer left in London with this shit going down!”

A little silence. She looked almost hurt. Then she grinned, a wide
flash of crooked white teeth and the brilliant pink inside her lips. “Hell, that’s like the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“What time is it?”

“Still not sun-up time,” she replied. “You’ve got another few hours before you get to prove to me that you aren’t like totally whacked.”

“Fair enough. Come on then.”

“Where we going?” she asked, as I turned towards the red walls and dirty stones of St Pancras.

“Going to have a chat with the Tribe.”

“You sure you’re up for that? I mean, if you can’t see properly yet, and you’re seeing weird shit …”

“Nope. But let’s not tell anyone, shall we?”

She fell into step beside me. I did my best to walk in a straight line. If she noticed, she didn’t say anything. “Where we going?”

“Kebabs,” I replied cheerfully. “We are going to need lots and lots of kebabs.”

In which academic advice is sought from an unlikely and unwelcome source, a problem is expounded upon and an encounter ends badly for all concerned.

Time was playing silly buggers.

The doors to St Pancras station stood shut, railings pulled across, though the lights still shone inside. On the odd dusty window, where the builders hadn’t finished their work, fingers had traced smiling faces, random doodles, and here and there:

help

or

still waiting for the northern line

The traffic wasn’t sure whether to put its foot down for the night run along the clear Euston Road, or to crawl in expectation of congestion at the underpass. Buses were trying to get into the red stop zones on the street, even while bus maintenance crews were attempting to paint new lines onto the same. Taxis crawled round the side of King’s Cross. The video arcade was open, and a gaggle of grey-eyed kids were playing shoot-’em-ups in the front window. The newsagent was shut. But the kebab shops of King’s Cross never closed.

The shop was too white, and too bright, as if somehow the brightness could disguise the embedded greyness trodden into every tile, or the grease spilling over the stainless-steel surfaces behind the counter. The owner, a man with cashew-nut skin and bloodshot eyes, was asleep behind his till, head rolled back and dribble pooling in the corner of his mouth, a half-open newspaper beside him. The radio was on, blasting out the traffic news.

“
Congestion on the Cromwell Road heading west owing to an earlier road accident
…
a power cut in Mile End leading to
…
Cockfosters has vanished
…
an overturned truck on the Blackwall Tunnel Approach
…”

A stained brown-black lump that bore no resemblance to any animal I’d ever seen alive or on the TV spun slowly on a spit in front of an orange grill. Limp bits of lettuce sat in tubs next to chemical pots of white and red gravy. Penny said, “There’s nothing like chips at two in the morning.”

“It’s not for us,” I replied grimly, leaning over the counter towards the sleeping man. A little disappointed sigh drifted from Penny’s lips. I said, “Excuse me, mate? Mate?”

Magicians have written whole books on the magical power of the word ‘mate’. It wove its spell now. The man’s eyes flickered open, he jerked in his chair, nearly fell off it, mumbled something incoherent and finally managed to focus on Penny and me. He rubbed his eyes, as if unable to quite believe what he was seeing, and finally, this ritual done, managed a guttural “Yeah?”

“Hi,” I said. “I’ve got …” I fumbled in my pocket. “About twenty-seven quid. Penny, how much are you carrying?”

“You’re serious?” she asked.

“Penny!”

She scowled, but patted down her pocket and produced at length a much crumpled tenner. I snatched it from her before she could protest. “OK. I’ve got thirty-seven quid. Give me everything I can buy.”

“You what?” he croaked.

“You what?” echoed Penny.

“See my serious, serious face?” I replied. “Load me up.”

Thirty-seven quid bought us five white plastic bags of various hideously tortured, grease-soaked meats in white cardboard buns with limp vegetables. As we trudged back outside and towards the line of bus stops on the north side of the road, Penny said, “This had better be one hell of an awesome thing you’re gonna do next, Matthew.”

“Nag nag nag.”

Buses at King’s Cross, even in the middle of the night, were fairly regular, and most had a limited choice of places to go. We caught the 205 to Angel, a seven-minute ride in which the smell of congealed, compressed, liquefied and resolidified meat slowly filled the grey interior of the bus. We got out of the bus beside a low blue-grey iron wall with a blue-grey iron door set in it and a blue-grey iron roof sloping down from behind. There was a padlock on the door, but other than that, no indication as to its purpose. I put my plastic bags of food down and fumbled in my satchel for my wad of keys. I found the one whose make most nearly matched the padlock, slipped it inside, and coerced and cajoled until the metal of the key warped enough to fit
the tumblers of the lock; turned it, pulled off the chain, opened the door.

Inside was the low deadened white of fluorescent tubing, on a tiled beige floor. We stepped through, closed the door behind us, locked up. A low brick wall that had once been an exterior to another building, now encased, opened through a wide black maw into a hallway of more fluorescent lighting and dark, intense green tiles on every wall. The odd tracery of its former function was still explicit: the mesh grid of a counter, the bolt holes in the floor where there had been ticket stiles. On the wall was a poster advertising a trip to Ongar – ‘You Don’t Have to Leave London to Go On Adventures!’ A thin coating of grey dust stirred beneath our feet. An opening, lifeless darkness, was the remnants of two lift shafts, the occasional lamps that filled its depths dying from too much time and neglect. I could hear water dripping somewhere near by. Half obscured in the shadows was the remains of a London Underground sign, as proud as a coat of arms, proclaiming across its middle, ‘Angel’.

Penny said, “Nice. Sweet. What the fuck are we doing here?”

“So impatient!”

The newest feature of the place was a long line of lockers and, beside them, a metal door leading to another room. I eased it open. A small line of showers stood on fresh white tiles. The pooled water around the plughole was grey-brown from dirt, but the water dripping incontinently from the shower heads was clear. I closed the door again, kicked the various lockers until one of them bounced open. Inside was a picture of a toothless grinning child held in a woman’s arms, a copy of the
Daily Mail
, an empty, somewhat greying coffee flask, a pair of knee-high boots, a yellow hard hat with a torch on, and a vivid yellow fluorescent jacket. I pulled out the jacket, threw it to Penny. “Take off anything that you love,” I said, “put on this, the hat, the boots.”

“We’re going down there?” she asked, nodding towards the black hollow of the lift shafts.

“Yep.”

“Why?”

“Going to have a chat with the Tribe.”

“
Why?
”

“Only thing I can do right now, isn’t it? Dees is dealing with Oda,
can’t do anything about the Court; ergo, talk to the only guys I haven’t talked to so far, see if they have anything interesting to say about this chosen one bollocks.”

“You could, like, you know, go to bed.”

“I think you’re missing the point of this whole protector of the city business.”

She shrugged. “Seems like a good idea to me is all.”

“Besides!” I added, gleefully kicking open another locker and pulling out its yellow jacket, “this is all highly educational.”

“Yeah,” she sighed, dragging off her boots. “Sure.
That’s
what it is.”

I left my shoes in the vandalised locker, pulled on the yellow jacket, hard hat and safety boots. There was a spiral staircase, two shoulders wide, dirt and dust on its old stones, the handrail cracked, the lights dull yellow pinpoints in old wire frames. It went down past the point where you imagined down had to end, and then a little bit further. At the bottom it opened onto a wide dark hall, made darker and wider by the odd dusty yellow glow of light from a neglected lamp, from which tunnels with no light at all led away. There were some footprints in the dirt, the rugged large shapes of the same reinforced boots we were wearing. I turned on my headlamp, casting the white light over old bits of graffiti and tattered rotting posters.

FLOP CULTURE MAKES FLOP MIND

WRONG WAY →

NO MOUSE

A bright pinprick of light through a crack in a wall revealed on the other side the grey-white glow of the other Angel station, the real Angel station, the one that every day fed thousands of commuters to and from the Northern Line. I thought I could hear voices, far off, somewhere beyond the thin walls separating it from us. I turned away. We walked down a darkened tunnel with no lights at all in it, the walls lined with bare black metal like a nuclear bunker, until we reached a mesh grid at the far end. It was locked. On the other side I could see the bright silver tops of the rails, brilliant among the dull dirt-crusted blackness of the cables that had once been orange and the walls that had once been clean in the tunnel. Strands of human hair were tangled in the mesh of the gate, and dust billowed thinly in
the beam of my headlamp. We sniffed the air, smelt the dry heat of the Underground.

“Live rail’s off,” murmured Penny in my ear. “I can feel it.”

“Handy,” I replied, fiddling with the lock on the gate until, with a dry reluctant snap and a puff of red-rust dust, it opened. We stepped out into the tunnel, and turned away from the light of the platform some few hundred yards behind us, towards the dark of the tracks. “Which way we going?” asked Penny, voice hushed in the dead silence of the tunnel.

“South,” I replied. “Towards London Bridge.”

“Kebabs are cold,” she said, hitching up the white plastic bags as we started to walk.

“He’ll like them that way.”

We walked, footsteps flat in the dark, the only light coming from our head torches, the air warm and dead and still. The skin on the backs of my hands was already turning greyish-black from the dirt on the gate and the dirt in the air; my boots were too big and the hard hat made my scalp prickle with rising sweat. It was some small comfort that the gloom, at least, was easy on my eyes.

The silence grew heavier with every step until at last Penny said lightly, “I heard there was a ghost at Angel station.”

“‘Ghost’ is a magically inexact term,” I replied primly. “The question you have to ask yourself is this – is a ghost proof of the existence of the soul after death, and thus, by implication, of heaven, hell, torment, destiny and God? Or is it just an echo, a reflection of a life that went before?”

“Well? Which is it?” she asked.

“Buggered if I know. I choose to think an echo, but there’s no proof either way.”

“You choose to not believe in the soul’s immortality?”

“Oh yeah. Because if the soul is immortal, and there is a destiny, and there is a God, I can’t imagine he’ll have nice things to say to me.”

“You don’t do
bad
things,” she mumbled. “I mean, you may not believe, but you’re not a
bad
kinda bloke. Kinda.”

“‘Bad’ is a bit too … inexact … for my tastes. God might have a different opinion and then how stuffed am I?”

We walked on again in silence a little while more. Then Penny said, “There are footprints in the dirt.”

“Men maintain the tracks down here all the time, when the trains stop. Don’t worry; they won’t see us.”

“Because of our hi-vis jackets?” she asked with only nine-tenths of her usual sarcasm.

“Exactly.”

I thought I heard a scuttling in the dark, and chose to ignore it. There were sounds on the air ahead, distant echoes of metal on metal, voices in the dark. Penny said, “I know it’s kinda late in the day to ask this, but are there … rats … down here?”