The Neon Court (3 page)

If he heard us, he showed no sign.

He charged towards us, a man with no other mission in life than to slice our skull in two.

We opened our palms, and let the stolen poison between our fingers fly. It smacked into his face, two fistfuls of burning liquid, and he screamed, clutched at his eyes, blade falling from his hands, screamed and screamed to the little hiss of flesh burning, blood running down between his fingers where he had clasped them over his eyes, a man drunk on his own pain, blind and howling, and my stomach twisted. I tried to grab his shoulders. “Don’t touch,” I breathed. You’re not helping here.”

His fingers curled, and for a moment I thought he was going to try and pull his eyes out of their sockets, but he steadied himself, quivering with the effort of control. Slowly, my hands on his shoulders, he dragged his fingers away from his face. I saw eyes turned the colour of wet beetroot, and skin blistered black and yellow, and could not help but look away.

There was a snicker-snack.

The weight of his shoulders suddenly became too much for me to support.

He dropped, face banging into the end of my shoes, dead even before gravity got a look-in. Oda stood behind him, his glass blade in her hands, his blood being washed away by the rain. Her face was nothing, an empty pit with no bottom. She said, looking through me like I wasn’t even there, “We must leave this place.”

I found my hands were shaking. “You … He was …”

She turned the blade easily in her hands, tip pointing towards the stair. “This building will burn soon,” she said. “We cannot control the fire. We will burn with it. We must leave this place. You will find a way.”

She half-turned her head, like a curious pigeon, to one side, and there it was, there was something wrong with her eyes. I thought I heard footsteps and glanced over my shoulder, but there was nothing there, and when I looked back, her face was a crumpled piece of paper and the blade had slipped from between her fingers, limp and weak. “Sorcerer?” she said and her voice was a thin stretch short of a whimper. “I think there’s something wrong with me.”

“Yeah,” I breathed. “Yeah. I think so too.”

“Kill me?”

Her eyes were on the floor, her shoulders hunched, back bent, I half thought I’d imagined the words.

“What?”

“Kill me?”

“I … I gotta tell you, there’s a bit of a queue. I’m barely in sixth or seventh place.” She sagged, and I caught her before she hit the floor, dragging her back up. “Come on,” I whispered, “think psycho-bitch, OK?”

She nodded dumbly.

I looked for a way out.

It didn’t seem likely that the fire would stop short of the top floor. It’d just take that much longer for us to be burnt alive.

Something small, white and limp stirred in the rain, trying to escape the heat and failing. I prodded it with my toe. The sad torn remnants of a Tesco plastic bag, a rip in one side, a puddle of greenish-grey water pooling in what was left of its guts. In my pocket, my phone buzzed. We answered it without looking.

“Hi Penny,” I said.

“Hi,” she replied. “Still not dead?”

“Still a bit busy.”

“Bad time, huh? Only you left me looking like a prat holding half a packet of fish and chips that’s getting cold …”

“Kinda in a burning building full of the dead, the dying and the should-be both.”

“Oh. OK. Bad time.” Then, cautiously, “Anything I can do to help out?”

“I’ll get back to you.”

I hung up, slipped the phone back in my pocket, bent down and
picked up the limp Tesco bag with the tips of my fingers. It twitched in the wind, the hot updraught from the approaching flames, trying to escape. I let it go, watched it billow up and away like a demented nervous dove. Oda wheezed, “Any time, sorcerer.”

I picked my way across the detritus of the roof and pulled out from a small mound of dead cans and cardboard boxes another bag. This one was blue, whole, dirty, smelling of indefinable rot. I shook the worst of the stagnant water off it, wiped it down on the side of my coat, took a deep breath, held the open lips of the bag over my mouth, exhaled. The bag swelled up. I pulled it shut before the air had a chance to escape and tied the handles together. It tugged and twisted in the heat, even as its surface bent and snapped under the impact of the falling rain. I held it up over my head and let it go, caught almost immediately in the twisted, bewildered wind and carried away past the dead snares of bent aerials. We watched it go. Beside us Oda said, “This had better be good.”

“How long do you think before we burn to death?”

“Maybe fifteen minutes. It’ll seem shorter.”

“Fifteen minutes! I should have brought a book.”

“Are you really going to meet death reading trashy fiction?” Oda was swaying, the smoke forming odd eddies around her as it tumbled over the roof. Her eyes were shut again; had she looked too long at the fire?

“If it’s a choice between trashy fiction and abject terror, I know which one I’d go for any day.” I reached out for her instinctively as pain flickered over her face, then held back, uncertain, not wanted. The body of the man with lilac eyes and hedgehog hair lay between us.

“Getting hot,” she breathed, and there was a glow now in the doorway, and a sound of ticking metal beneath our rapidly warming feet.

“All in hand,” I sighed.

“I feel sure you should start incanting about now.”

“You hate magic.”

“We will live.”

“We?”

She hesitated, words catching at the back of her throat. I thought I saw something move above and behind her, and looked up, saw the shimmer of something dark and fast caught silver-black in the rain.

“Sorcerer?” What little of Oda’s voice had escaped the trap of her tongue was thin and weak. “Matthew?”

“Still here.” The building groaned under us, a giant with indigestion, a volcano about to go, drowning out the sirens on the ground a long, long way below.

“There’s something waiting for you at the end of the alley.”

“Is that a threat, or a geographically obscure statement of fact?”

“It’s … I don’t know. It’s true. It’s what it is. It is the end.”

Something wide and dark caught the orange flicker of the reflected street lamps, turned overhead, gathered more speed and began to dive. “Oda, you’re wet, you’re burnt, you’re a little oxygen-deprived and, if you don’t mind me saying it, you’ve got what looks like a kinda nasty stab wound through your heart. I don’t want to leap to any conclusions, but I’d suggest you’re not in your right frame of mind.”

She looked up, straight into our eyes, and on her face was misery, true and as deep as the darkest ocean. “Help me?”

“You asked; I did. Fancy that.”

“Kill me?”

“It’s on the list.” I held out my hand to her, right hand, twin cross scars aching beneath its fingerless black glove. “Come on.”

She hesitated.

Put her hand in mine.

I couldn’t remember ever feeling the touch of psycho-bitch’s skin before.

“Where are we going?”

I tilted my head upwards. She followed my gaze. Something passed overhead; momentarily, no rain fell around us, and there was the pattering of water on plastic. I pulled her close to me, felt the rain resume across my upturned face, washing away the skin of carbon. She was breathing fast and shallow, but didn’t shy away. I heard

water beating on the skin of a drum

rustle of plastic

air beneath mighty wings

And I saw a thing catch the glow of the fire on its belly as it swung round through the sky towards us, as slow, ponderous and inevitable as an oil tanker down a mountainside, its wings of spun white, orange and blue, rolling tapers of plastic streaming back from its parted beak,
and it was bigger than an eagle and smaller than a jet plane and wider than a bus and longer than a car and as it swooped down towards us I saw that its belly was sagging with loose plastic handles and its skin rippled and beat in the passing of the wind and on its flesh were written the words:

…
for Mums who
…

…
every penny
…

…
thank you for shopping at
…

…
finest quality
…

…
recycle your plastic bags
…

And its wings were the same inflated plastic bags that made up the rest of its flesh, rolled and round at the front like the aerofoil of a plane and free, gaping at the back where the mouths of the bags parted. It came towards us, this more-than-eagle, talons of plastic outstretched and I heard Oda draw in breath, I reached up, felt the dry underbelly of bags brush my fingers and caught a handle, twisted my wrist into it and Oda was doing the same, was yanked off my feet by my wrist so hard and fast I thought it was going to pop from the socket. My knees banged against the rail on the edge of the roof, the force spinning me round, plastic biting into my skin, the shock running up the length of my spine. I closed my eyes instinctively as the world dropped away beneath our feet; we opened them again.

Two pairs of feet flapping over a great dark drop.

Blue lights flashing below, firemen with heads turned all towards the blaze, no one marking us, and the tower block was on fire, it was going to go all the way, windows spurting flames like a Satanist’s lips bursting obscenities, and both top and bottom now catching alight, the thing already looked lopsided, the place sagging where the fire began as if too tired to fight, it was going to go, the entire thing was going to go and leave nothing but black bones behind. I saw metal glowing red on the lower windows where safety shutters were starting to tick and expand in the heat, I saw workmen’s huts and warning signs scattered around its rim and then we were up, swept over it all by my summoned plastic-bag eagle towards the rain, buoyed up by the heat tearing off the building and we saw the city stretching out beneath us, starlight, galaxy-light, an infinity of tungsten stars spread upside down across the universe, flowing rivers of red brake lights and white
headlamps, silver snaps of light from the wheels of a rolling train, a horizon of shadow where night sky met night city, magic, pure and brilliant magic the city at night, so beautiful we could have caught fire with the power of it and we saw …

I saw a shape move on the roof below us as the plastic eagle turned slowly on the air like a harpist’s fingers over the strings.

There was a man, on the roof, bursting out of the door, and he was on fire. His ragged old woollen hat, his stained coat, dirty trousers and his torn boots, his beard that stretched down over his chin and neck, his hair stuck out around his ears: he was on fire, screaming, clawing at his own skin like he would try to pull it free, douse the flames in blood. And he looked at us, and screamed. It took too long for him to die, and it was not a quick turning out of the lights, and he did not stop fighting until his throat had shrivelled too tight for air to pass. The body, when it fell into the pools of water on the roof of the building, kept burning, and steam rose from the ground all around it like a sauna in a mortuary.

So we too closed our eyes.

Touchdown was too dignified a term for our landing. Our plastic saviour came in low over a terrace of houses with freshly painted black doors and the lights out in the clean windows, and as my toes brushed the first blade of grass on the nearby common, the thing I held was no longer an eagle as wide as a truck, but just a plastic bag. I dropped, caught by surprise, falling flat onto damp mud, the orange-yellow street lights round the edge of the common barely twisting my shadow as I fell. Oda landed next to me, and didn’t bother to get up again. My arm was the lead handle that had wound a giant catapult: a dead thing reluctant to obey command. Something cold and soft brushed the back of my neck. I pulled it clear. It was a plastic bag. They fell from the sky around us, pattered upon by the rain, spun in wind-drifted shoals, spilling over the grass where the breeze caught them. I dug myself out of a gathering blanket of plastic, caught Oda by the arm, tried to pull her up. She came slowly, her eyes not looking at anything in particular. “Still not dead?” I asked her.

She looked past me, over my shoulder, and I turned to follow her gaze. On the cut-off horizon made by the rooftops of the houses, the
sky had turned to pink-crimson. I could just make out the top of the tower block, little more than a giant funeral pyre. Sirens echoed off the streets around us, but there was nothing now to be done but watch it burn.

“Come on,” I breathed, pulling her towards the edge of the green.

She managed what in a baby antelope might have counted as a walk. We reached the nearest bus stop, a stand devoid of even a shelter from the weather, and she leant against it, gasping for breath as the rain shimmered between the scars on her face. Only one night bus ran, once every twenty-five minutes. I pulled off my jacket, put it around her. She pulled it tighter.

“Cold.”

“What, you want fire, you want rain, you want the earth, gimme a little to go with,” I chided.

“Where’s the girl?” she asked.

“Which girl?”

“There was a girl.”

“Where?”

“In there.”

“The fire?”

“Don’t know.”

“Helpful.”

A truck swished by on the other side of the street, sending a spray of water up from a blocked black drain.

Somewhere in the night, a door banged on its hinges. I could hear a female voice screaming, “So you just take it and stick it up your …”

The door slammed shut.

The rainwater running off my face was ash grey.

My phone rang.

I answered. Penny again. “Just checking in,” she sighed.

“Hey – got out of the burning tower!”

“Neat. Anything I can … you know … sorta do?”

“Um. Dunno. Look, about tonight’s class …”

“Yeah, you know I’m still holding your sodding supper?” she replied. “I mean it’s fucking freezing and you just kinda vanished and I figured, you know, I’d be big about it and all, but you’re kinda taking the mick now, you know what I’m saying?”

“Penny, I didn’t exactly
ask
to be summarily summoned into the middle of a burning building …”