The Neon Court (23 page)

“Oh yeah.”

“And … and I’m guessing that we’re not carrying all this cold kebab for a slap-up feast with the White Rabbit and the Queen of Hearts, right?”

“Right.”

“Shit.”

“Penny, if you’re going to be an urban sorceress, you’re really going to have to learn to deal with rats.”

“Sure.” Her voice was weak and strained. “Yeah, totally. Me and rats. We’re like that.”

The sounds ahead were growing louder; a spill of white light came tumbling from round the bend of the track. I stopped on the edge of it, pulled my yellow jacket tighter about me, my helmet down over my eyes. There were black shadows eclipsing the brilliant white light from raised tripod lamps, half seen in the dark, voices stirring the air around the tracks. I said, “OK, the rule is simple. You keep your eyes down and your steps fast. Walk like you know you’re supposed to be there. Walk like a sorcerer, the magic will come from the movement, from the hat, the boots, the jacket. This is a simple spell of invisibility. You’ll ace it.”

“Yeah, jeez, great,” sighed Penny. “What if someone spots me anyway?”

“They won’t.”

“But if they do?”

I hesitated. Then I said, “Stand still.” I reached up and touched her face, ran my hand over either cheek, across her forehead and round her chin. Her skin was warm and dry. Where my fingers passed, they left a thick trail of dirt, coal black, almost as thick as paint. “There,” I said. “You look quite the tunnel-crawler.”

“Yeah,” she scowled, “I want a wand and a pointy fucking hat, please.”

“Move to Glastonbury. Ready?”

“I guess.”

I didn’t give her time to change her mind, but picked up my plastic bags, bowed my head, and started to stride. It was the confident, easy stride of the kinda guy that has walked these tunnels a thousand times before, who knows what he’s doing and where he’s going, who has no fear of anything that might lurk in the dark and, above all, is one of us, one of the boys, face blackened and boots worn. The magic came with the walking, quick, easy magic that rose up from the dust beneath my feet and slipped out of the metal wall with the stomach-humming buzz of a million million trains echoing in the dark, magic pulling at the back of my hair like the blast of wind from an oncoming engine, though no wind stirred now in the dark.

As we approached the pool of white light, the faces of the men working became clearer, pale skin stained coal black so that only the hollows of their ears and the shallow places of their necks revealed the skin colour that had gone before. They were working under the rails, and had pumped up a section of track to get easy access. Grease was spilt across the floor around their feet, thick and brownish-yellow sludge from a small black box set on the heart of the curve. There were wrenches and mallets, pneumatic pumps, and devices whose names I couldn’t guess, strewn around the working area. As we passed, one or two glanced up, and seemed to look straight at us, into the bright reflective yellow of our hi-vis jackets. Then they looked away again, not so much not seeing, but not seeing anything that was worth the looking. I kept walking, head down, focused on the next step. My feet splashed into a shallow puddle, sending water rippling out around it. I kept walking, but the puddle grew deeper. I glanced up to see if anyone else had noticed this, but no one had. Behind me I heard Penny’s footsteps, dry and sharp, walking a little too fast, pushing the spell to its breaking point in her eagerness to get past these prying, albeit unseeing, eyes. I kept walking and the water was now up to my ankles; with the next step it came up almost to the top of my boot. I couldn’t see where it was coming from. Something cold and wet hit the back of my neck; I jerked, and in that moment, stopped. Instinctively
I looked up and water fell onto my cheek, ran down it and off the edge of my jaw. Another drop; then another. I tried to see the source of the water in the ceiling, but couldn’t make out either a cracked pipe or broken metal plate; but still the water fell, a drizzle now, now a shower, now rain, thick dark solid rain, sending dancing drops of water flying up around my ankle, and I had stopped, the spell was breaking. Penny brushed by me and whispered, “What are you doing?” and her face was soaking, everything was soaking but she showed no sign of having even noticed the water.

I whispered, “Rain?”

“What? What the hell are you talking about?”

I closed my eyes, grabbed her arm, forced myself to keep walking, head down. I had been out of the spell for too long. A voice said, “Uh … um … ?”

I half turned, saw a man in a white hard hat, a wrench held over his shoulder like a sword, staring at me with the bleary half-recognition of a man who’s sure that something here is a little amiss, even if he can’t quite name what it is. The rain was gone. The tunnel was as dry as the Gobi Desert. I opened my mouth to mumble something incoherent when Penny said cheerfully, “Morning, mate!”

The man blinked, bewildered. Then smiled. “Morning,” he said, and turned back to his work.

Penny half dragged me the next twenty yards back into the darkness of the track. “What the hell was that?” she hissed.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “Uh … sorry. Couldn’t … went a bit peculiar.”

“Some educational fucking experience.”

“Hey – worked, didn’t it?”

“Christ,” she hissed. “Me Penny Ngwenya, saviour of the city, plus one token whacked sorcerer. Are we bloody there yet?”

“We’ll know it when we see it.”

“Terrific,” she growled. “If I get electrocuted or hit by a speeding Tube train, I’ll be so coming back to get you.”

We staggered on, through the dark.

Shortly before Old Street, we found it.

Or more to the point, we trod in it.

It was a turd.

Penny said, “Oh that is just fucking …”

“We’re near!” I interrupted.

“Near what?”

I got down on hands and knees and pressed my ear against the rail. I could hear the faintest echo of something scrabbling in the distance, of metal on metal, moving fast. “You ever heard of Fat Rat?” I asked, dragging myself back up with a creak of protesting bones.

“Sure, I’ve heard of him. But I was kinda naively hoping that this waddle into the Underground with forty quid’s worth of kebabs wasn’t gonna like go that way, you know what I’m saying? What’s the deal with this Fat Rat thing anyhow?”

I opened up one of the plastic bags, pulled out a yellow polystyrene box, laid it on the ground, lid open. “Well, some argue that he’s just the inevitable biological consequence of a hundred and fifty years of underground sewers and railways. The nuts are convinced he’s the product of a scientific experiment, and the magicians obviously regard him as the inevitable result of the exponential expansion of urban magic within the city. Pick one.”

We kept on walking, laying down open kebab boxes every twenty yards. “And what do you think?” asked Penny, eyes on the darkness ahead.

“Me? Dunno. I mean, whatever caused him, I know what he is
now
. Fat Rat, king of the underground, lord of the sewers, you know. Doesn’t really come up much to play – thing about building a modern city on a Victorian one on a Tudor one on a medieval one on a Saxon one on a Roman one, is you can guarantee there’s always going to be more down there than you bargained for. Tribe worship him, though. He’s sorta like a mascot at a baseball game? Their protector, their big slobbery all-purpose god and – oh.”

Something small and furry moved by my boot. It was a mouse, fur dull grey-beige. It stopped a few centimetres from my toecap and looked up at me thoughtfully, whiskers twitching. Penny said, “Cute.”

“Yeah. Charming. Why’s it not eating the food?”

Slowly, we turned to look back the way we’d come. The polystyrene yellow boxes were empty, not a shredded soggy lettuce leaf or lumpy cardboard kebab left. Penny said, “OK, did I mention that I didn’t like rats?”

“What’ve they ever done to you?”

“When I was eight, one of them ate half my aunt’s breakfast and she made me go to bed early for refusing to admit that I’d done it.”

“So it’s personal, then.”

I glanced back; was the darkness thicker behind our shoulder than it should be, or was the torch on my helmet just giving up the ghost?

We kept walking, kept laying down the kebabs. I could hear something in front, a sound like leaves stirring in a forest. “How’d you know a rat did it?”

“What?” asked Penny, eyes not moving from the darkness in front. She’d heard it too then, a rising sound of twig on twig on the bare winter trees, of skin on skin, of breath mingling with breath ahead.

“How’d you know a rat ate your aunt’s breakfast?”

“Saw it two days later trying to get into the fruit cupboard.”

“I guess that’s pretty conclusive, then – put your bag down.”

“What?”

“Drop the bag of food,” I said quickly, and the darkness ahead was moving, it was churning, it was the sea swelling before a storm. I tossed my white plastic bag aside and caught Penny by the shoulders as she did the same, pushing her into the wall of the tunnel, against the black racks of cabling. “You really don’t like rats?”

“I really don’t,” she whispered, and her breath was fast and her eyes scared.

I wrapped my arms around her, she put her head into my shoulder and held tight. “Don’t look.”

She closed her eyes, and here they came, hundreds of them, thousands of them, black matted fur and grey fluff, pink twitching noses and yellow little eyes, claws like shrivelled babies’ bones, some no bigger than the length of my index finger, some the size of small terriers with yellowing teeth visible above their worm-tongues, scuttling and clawing and rolling all over each other, climbing over the bodies of the slower rats like a wave breaking onto a shingle beach, obscuring the silver shine of the rails, running along the walls, some with clawed-off tufts of bloody skin visible, others missing half an ear, some with a ravaged black hole for an eye, some with a stubby tail, some coated in grease, others in slime, some stinking of the sewer they came from, white tallow-fat clinging to the fur beneath their
bellies, others the dry colour of the dust they rolled in; their claws on concrete were the hard bone sound of locust wings. I felt Penny’s whole body tighten as they rolled over our feet, tumbled round the edges of our boots; one climbed up towards my knee to sniff and examine me, trying to work out whether I was poison or feast, before the mass of its comrades knocked it on, and still they kept coming like water draining from a dam, knee-high warm black bodies spinning off into the darkness of the tunnel and there was something behind them, I could feel its footfalls on the ground, the hum of its approach as a regular drumbeat through the pattering, I could smell it, soapy sewer fat, taste the magic of its approach, a rancid thick brown stain on the air.

Then, as quickly as they had come, the flood became a tide, the tide became a trickle, and the rats were past, just a scrambling in the dark behind us as they spread like mist through the tunnel. Penny’s breath was a rush in my ear, her fingers digging into my back. I uncoiled my arms from around her and whispered, “You OK?”

Her eyes were still squeezed shut, her cheeks puffed up with the effort of not looking, her forehead drawn. She nodded, but didn’t let go.

I felt something warm brush the hairs on the back of my neck. I turned my head slowly, keeping the rest of me absolutely still, and looked into the headlights of a Tube train.

The headlights blinked.

Then blinked again.

I eased myself from Penny’s grip and looked up, and then a little more so, at the creature standing before me. It stood some feet taller than me, and the rusting iron mesh over its nose through which air rushed and puffed was the size of a human face. Each eye was the white bulb of a headlamp, its teeth were coated with the same yellow-brown grease the Underground men had spilt on the line, its tongue was ash black where it flickered at the air, its fur was iron metal filings that rose and fell with each breath it took, its lungs pumped the hot blast of Tube air of an approaching train. Human hair was tangled in its fur, long strands of blond and black, and its claws, each longer than my arm, were electricity-conducting copper. It could have taken my head off like I was a jelly baby. Fat Rat, king of the underground. We reached
up towards its metal nose, half-glimpsed fan blades whirring just inside the protective rust mesh, felt the blast of air nearly knock us back. My hand was shaking, throat dry, heart headed for my knees as quickly as it dared. Our fingers brushed the quivering surface of its fur, felt it bend and part beneath our hand, soft, as the thinnest of metal sometimes is. It puffed, knocking the hair back from our face, but didn’t move, didn’t attack.

“Penny?” I breathed.

She still had her eyes shut. “I can hear breathing,” she whimpered, “and it’s not yours.”

“It’s OK. You can look.”

“Will I like what I see?”

“You’ve got to look.”

“Why?”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Slowly, eyelids shaking as if her mind said open and her body said close and neither could win the argument, she looked. Fat Rat turned a head the size of a sleeping human body to examine her. Her breath caught, her body tensed, I felt her pull away as he leant his head down towards her until his nose nearly bumped the top of her head. The ash-black tongue ran around the edge of his teeth, whiskers of thin aerial blades quivered either side of his cheeks. She bent backwards as he considered her smell, and then, his decision made, he drew back again, unexcited by what he found.

“Matthew?” Her voice was shaking, high, a child about to cry.

“It’s OK. He’s not going to hurt us.”

“Doesn’t look like he knows how to do anything that isn’t hurting us.”

We stroked him, looked into the brilliance of his lamp eyes. “We’re no threat.”

“Too fucking right!”

“He knows we fed his kin.”

“No offence, right, but cold kebab isn’t my idea of a great peace offering.”

“But it’ll do. Now he’ll take us to the Tribe.” I eased round to the side of Fat Rat, pulling Penny reluctantly along with me.

“He will?” she squeaked.