The Neon Court (29 page)

She sighed. Suddenly she looked too small, too frail, tired and alone. Somewhere in South London was a husband and a kid, who might by now be wondering where the missus had got to. She pinched the bridge of her nose and with her eyes still half screwed shut said, “All right. The sun isn’t rising.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

Her mouth twitched in displeasure. “The edge of the city is shrinking. The boroughs furthest out, Barnet, Amersham, Croydon, they’re all … gone. We didn’t notice, none of us noticed, until I tried to call my family and discovered that I had forgotten my home telephone number. There are others of the Aldermen who also know people in the suburbs. They couldn’t make any contact. It’s as if the city is closing in on itself.” Then, sharper than she’d probably intended, “Did you know that?”

“Yep.”

“You’re not just …”

“An elder of the Tribe told me. Nice guy. Studied philosophy at university.”

“You went to …” She caught her breath. “Yes, of course you went to have a talk with the Tribe, why wouldn’t you? The fact that the Neon Court’s ambassador is threatening to declare war on
us
for non-cooperation would in no way hinder you from …”

“I’m sorry, the part where I convinced the Tribe not to go to war any time soon and found out more about this ‘chosen one’, a girl, by the way, going by the catchy name of JG, who the Tribe think is in the hands of the Court and vice versa – that wasn’t of any use, was it?”

“You could have been …”

“And yet happily I wasn’t and we had a lovely little chat and all things considered, I think advanced the situation. I even talked with the head of the Order, psychopathic guy by the name of Chaigneau, who asked me very nicely if I’d kill Oda and was, incidentally, lying about something but I don’t know what. Isn’t it nice the way I let myself get beat to crappiness despite our potent desire to obliterate all before us, just to ease these little diplomatic transactions?” My smile was fixed like a bayonet. Dees was almost shaking with exhaustion, with tension seeking release through some crack in her faultless exterior. We let the moment stretch, then said, “Anyway, about this whole sun not rising … ?”

Her shoulders bent, her head lapsed to one side. She said, in a voice that would never have admitted it was close to breaking, “We found references. This has happened before.”

“That’s something, I suppose. Did you find O’Rourke?”

“No. His house was empty. There was blood on the carpet.”

“Has anyone tried to get out of London?”

“It’s not …” she began. “It’s not as easy as that. There are no trains leaving the city. When we ask, we are informed there’s a delay on the line, and any further enquiries go round in circles. When will the trains run? When the delay finishes. Why is there a delay? An incident. What incident? There’s a delay. The city isn’t aware that it’s under this spell. I ordered a car to try and drive out of the city. The M11 slopes back in on itself long before it reaches the M25. You drive round a junction and the next thing you know, you’re heading back into town. The same on the M4, the M40, the M2. The Blackwall Tunnel has been closed owing to flooding. The Woolwich Ferry isn’t running. Roundabouts spin you round and round and then throw you back the way you came. Streets are become cul de sacs, and on the walls where there was once a road, someone has written, ‘end of the line’ in ancient fading paint, as if the words were there all along. The map of the city … well …” She gestured with the end of one pale finger at the nearest Alderman.

He produced an A–Z of the city from a deep dark pocket of his deep dark coat, handed it to me. I flicked through it. There were blank pages, dull creamy-yellow colour, mixed in with all the rest, where there should have been busy streets on the edge of the city. I handed it back to the Alderman, said, “I’m very tired now.”

“As are we all.”

“What good news do you have?”

She shifted uneasily. “We know what it is.”

“And you look like you’ve just swallowed a baby mouse because …”

“You’re not going to like any of it. Not one tiny part.”

“Astound me.”

So she did.

Second Interlude: Aftershocks

In which the story of the creature called Blackout is recounted in the basement of the British Library.

She said, “It’s old. Almost as old as the city. When this city was founded by the Romans it – he – was the devil with the club, the mad native spirit that waited behind the temple of Mithras to bite and tear and claw at his enemies in the dark. Then later, when the streets became alleys and the roads became mud, he became the man on the edge of the torchlight, the half-seen shadow that puffed out the torches of the wandering guards and beat their heads out on the sides of the churches. They say he inspired the Mohawks to run mad in the eighteenth century, raping and maiming not because they felt any great need to do so, but because it was sport, and because they were bored, and life didn’t matter. When the streets were cobbled over he began to resemble what we know now, the footsteps heard on stone that you cannot see, turn your head and the sound may be there but he is not, blink and you die. When the Victorians began to introduce street lighting, he was the shadow at the end of the alley, half seen and then gone, who always shied away from the light, and when the gas went out, there he was. The more fanciful accounts say he was Jack the Ripper. I regard the evidence for this as faint. The Blitz gave him strength, of course. The
lights went out all across the city; the moonlight was cursed for leading bombers to London, the curtains drawn, the streets still and silent. The perfect place for the one wandering air-raid warden to hear footsteps in the night that were not his own, and then look, and then die. That’s where he got his name – Blackout – the shadow at the end of the alley, the footsteps half heard in the night.

“You may ask: but what is he?

“The answer is, no one is entirely sure. An idea, perhaps, that roams from body to body, age to age, inhabiting the minds of the cruellest, the most frightened, the most lonely and driving them to perform terrible acts. We call him ‘he’, which is a misnomer – he has no gender, he has no physical form – but his habit has been, until now, to occupy the minds of men, not women, and drive them to commit deeds that even the most hardened criminal would shy from. He does not simply kill; he murders. He does not simply stalk; he hunts, and wherever the lights go out, there he is, just the other side of a breath drawn in fear.

“But only once before has Blackout been powerful enough to stop the sun. Only once did he inhabit a mind whose rage, whose fury, whose anger and whose passion was great enough to stop the sun from rising, to keep the city from turning over, to kill all chances of escape.

“The best way, therefore, to understand Blackout is, perhaps, to understand this.

“I have said already that Blackout reached the peak of his power during the Blitz: fear, horror, doubt, these are the fuels that sustain him, and make minds most open to his presence.

“What I have not said is that the years immediately following the Blitz were also ripe for his endeavours. Soldiers returning home from five years of fighting found their homes destroyed, their families changed, their children dead or grown, their minds blackened by the things they had seen. England in the 1950s was not a good society in which to expose the scars of the time; the Dunkirk spirit was, regrettably, less than amenable to the shedding of self-indulgent, emotional tears. Minds were open to Blackout. The smog was thick and black, the streets gloomy, full of holes and dirt. He was able to influence the thoughts of men without trying, hunting with impunity. His victims were easily identifiable: their eyes turned to blood, blood in their ears, their noses, brains burst from the inside out. Those, at least, were the
simple deaths. The police could make nothing of it, and the Aldermen, I am sorry to say, hushed up the majority of cases to prevent the nature of the crime being too extensively explored. We knew what Blackout was, but a creature that roamed from mind to mind, body to body, was next to impossible to stop, harder still to kill. The Aldermen had killed plenty of his vessels; the morgues were rich with the bodies of men whose eyes were turned to slush and whose nails were black-red with the blood of their victims – but still Blackout, the idea, the thing at the end of the alley, persisted.

“Then, in 1958, Blackout entered the mind of a young man, one of the Tribe – a boy called Woods. The Tribe then was not like the Tribe now – it changes with the times, so that when a thing becomes accepted, it forgoes it, and moves on to embrace some new way of being outcast. This young man had not lived in times that were sympathetic to his condition. An orphan of the war, like many, raised in a care system that had yet to come under any form of appropriate scrutiny, I think it is fair to say that he had been abused, and shown at an early stage that there was nothing for him in this life but the abuse of others. A sensitive boy in a time in which sensitive men were not the fashion. The details of his life are heavily shrouded; neither the state system nor the Tribe kept records of them.

“The Tribe gave Woods some refuge, for a time, and he embarked on the usual processes of transformation that characterise the Tribe’s actions: self-harm, cutting, dressing skin with ink and blood, and through these things acquiring new strengths and new magics, becoming, so I believe the philosophy goes,
more
than human through systematic destruction of those characteristics that we use to define humanity. But even with the Tribe he was unhappy, since they, for all their talk of being free, conform to each other, and to an idea of difference that can make them all very much the same. And the elders of the Tribe, looking at Woods, could see in him a darkness, a pit of tar at the bottom of his soul, deeper and more violent than anything they were used to even among the denizens of the Tribe, and it scared them.

“For what action, we do not know, Woods was expelled from the Tribe, and some few weeks later attempted to take his own life. He failed, and for trying to commit suicide he was given a prison sentence. In prison he attempted suicide again, cutting his wrists in his cell. He
bled out and should have died, but at the moment of death, something changed in him. His eyes turned, according to one source, totally black; another corrected this, saying that his eyes weren’t black, but it was like spilt ink and burst flesh mixed up together to make his eyes seem black, whereas each was more like an ink–meat pudding in his skull. Pale from blood loss, the cuts on his wrists still bleeding, he rose, and calmly walked out of his cell. Stories then become chaotic. Some say the lights went out and all went silent except for the passing of his footsteps. Others say that the guards tried to restrain him, and by simply looking him in the eye, they died. Some hid. Some ran. Some tried to escape when he did. One says a guard fired a shotgun straight into Woods’s chest, and that Woods simply staggered, then raised his head and kept on marching out.

“Whatever stories you believe, the Aldermen’s records give us twelve dead, four blind, two with significant brain damage from internal bleeding. Matter hushed up as quickly as possible. And then, of course, the sun failed to rise.

“I regret to say that the pattern on this occasion was similar to what we see now. Few individuals in the city noticed the failure of the sun to rise: the Midnight Mayor, the Old Bag Lady, the Beggar King, one or two others, the odd seer and sorcerer. But the Midnight Mayor’s word was law, and once others were made aware of the problem, it was easy enough to convince them. I regret that times have changed; we now live in a more dynamic corporate age. A meeting was called of all the most senior figures in the city – Tribe and Court included – and it was resolved that together they would find a solution for the problem of Woods and Blackout, and end the matter once and for all. The Court was still a small operation, and the Tribe reluctant to engage with one of their own. An agreement was made, however, with the Midnight Mayor as its head. His name was Aronson – a peer, as a matter of fact, but then again, these were very different times. Aronson, with a team of Aldermen, assisted by various seers, sorcerers and magicians, tracked Woods down and attempted to capture him. Eleven people died, four survived, Woods was not captured. Aronson was one of the dead, his eyes turned to nothing, a fist-sized hole punched through his heart.

“The next Midnight Mayor was, rather against the fashion of the time, a lady, called Manswala, who wasn’t even an Alderman, but rather
Aronson’s personal secretary. There was some unease at her succession, but it soon became clear why she had acquired the title: she was more cautious, and less arrogant, than the norm. Rather than engage Blackout directly, she embarked on research. Some have criticised her for the slowness of her response to this matter, for in the days she spent attempting to work out every detail of Blackout’s and, indeed, Woods’s existence, seven people died slow, cruel deaths at the end of the alley.

“One of those killed was a member of the Neon Court, a thrall, a favourite of Lady Neon for her beauty and charm. An Indian, it was said she had eyes the colour of emeralds and hair as black as night, and that Lady Neon loved her, and worshipped her, and she returned the honour. It was, no doubt, that beauty and charm which led Woods to take extra care with her, keeping her alive, so the pathology report said, for nearly two days while he performed on her … deeds that I suspect we can all imagine. Lady Neon was furious and immediately ordered the Court to send out a force against Woods. Manswala argued against rash action, but Lady Neon was mistress of her own people and they could not be stopped. The body of the daimyo that led the attack was found hung upside down by his ankles outside the main palace of the Neon Court a day and a half later, the body mutilated both before and after death.

“To this day, she has always blamed the Tribe, Woods’s people, for what happened to her daimyo and her favourite; the mutilation, and their failure to curb Woods when they had a chance, were merely two excuses to fuel the fire of a long-held mistrust, and in the face of such humiliation and disgust, it was hardly surprising that she needed someone to blame.