The Neon Court (39 page)

I didn’t move, couldn’t move.

She sliced it a few times through the air, more curious than anything else, testing its weight.

“Matthew, run!”

She inclined her neck to examine the stab wound in herself, probing it as someone might see how bad a moth hole is in a bit of reasonably regarded clothing.

Bakker was right by me, trying to shake me and making no touch. “Matthew, I am trying to help you; if you want to live, run!”

She pulled her jacket tight around the wound, and looked up.

At us.

At me.

We ran.

Dees was in the corridor outside, half staggering, half crawling, fingers still around her throat. I grabbed her by the armpit and pulled her up; she wheezed as she came, hissed, “Matthew?”

“So much shit as you would not believe!” I sung out, hauling her towards the stairs. “Bloody hell you’re heavy when you’re doing the dragon thing.”

“Blackout …” she stuttered.

“Yeah, about that. She’s got a stab wound to the heart and another to the stomach now and is still doing fine. We’ve got to go
now
.”

I reached the stairs, started dragging her up.

“Where are we going?”

“Roof.”

“Why?”

“I know where the chosen one is.”

“Lovely.”

Behind us I heard footsteps in the corridor, the buzzing of flies, the sound of steam, the whisper of voices, the …

“Come on, come on!” I snarled, as Dees clung to the twisted handrail and hauled herself upwards.

“She’s coming for us,” she replied.

I glanced back over my shoulder, and there was for a moment in the shadows a woman moving, a child running, a trolley rattling, a door slamming, a TV crackling, a …

“Ignore them, Matthew!” snapped Bakker; he was above us, looking
down from the next landing. “They’re just the things you fear; just fear, nothing more!”

Next flight of stairs and here the sound of a woman, an old, old woman, slippers shuffling, someone crying in the night, a child’s voice raised, something falling on the floor above, the sound of a radio out of tune …

“What’s happening?” I demanded.

“You asking me?” replied Dees.

“Things that happen in the night.” Bakker right by me now, head half turned back down the stairwell from where we’d come. “All the things that happen in the night, the things we don’t talk about, this is where they happen, this place, Blackout’s place, all the shameful, guilty, despised things that people do, this is their place that you’ve walked into. You have to keep going upwards.”

A door ahead.

A familiar door, burst open, twisted to one side, rainwater pouring in under it, forming a flood that flowed around and over our feet as we climbed, and outside, a wide unlit darkness of twisted scorched TV aerials and pools of water. I half fell through the door, Dees slipping from my grasp onto the ground, gasping for breath. The water sloshed around my wrists, cold and black, and now I could hear them, crawling out of the walls, feel sweat on my back and excitement in my belly and fear in my heart and hear

did not

go on

just this once

who knows

never need know

won’t tell

you a coward

try it

go on

go on go on

no one will ever find out what you did

My fingers in the dark pool of water brushed something. It was small and hard and gleaming. I pulled it out. A small length of golden
chain, the ends shattered and twisted out of shape. I thought of Minjae San, the chains he had worn, and the look on his face when he’d died. Then a hand fell on my shoulder and Dees was by me, gasping for breath, eyes somewhere halfway between human and animal.

“She’s coming,” she breathed. “What now?”

I staggered to my feet, every muscle objecting, every nerve sulky to respond. I dragged myself to the centre of the roof, keeping my little bundle of light down low, searching through the pools of water; and there it was. A crack, wide and deep enough that the water flowed into it, tumbling down, almost fat enough to squeeze a child’s finger into. I knelt by it, sweeping the water with my hands. Dees flopped down beside me.

“I know where the chosen one is,” I stammered.

“Well?”

“You heard of people falling between the cracks?”

“Yes …”

“This place, this building, all cracks, all broken, all old. Very easy to fall through the cracks. I saw it happen to the blood, my blood, Oda’s blood, whatever, the blood that drew the symbol of the Midnight Mayor; it fell between the cracks, and not just … not just physically, I mean …”

“Mystically?” growled Dees. “I know what it means.”

“That’s where she is. JG, the chosen one. She’s fallen between the cracks.”

A sound on the stairs, more human, louder, than the constant whispering of the dark. Dees’ head snapped towards it, then she looked away. “Fine,” she said. “Three questions – can you get us in there?”

I nodded dumbly.

“Can Blackout follow us?”

I looked to Bakker, who shrugged.

“Don’t know.”

Dees’ scowl deepened. “Can you get us out, if we go in?”

I dug at the crack, felt dust mingling with water beneath my fingers. “I think so,” I said. “Yes,” we added.

I felt Dees’ hand close around my own. “Fine,” she breathed. “Do it.”

There was a footstep on the top of the stair. I glanced up. A woman
in the doorway, darker than the darkness, a bloody sword in one hand; and all around, other things moved, and I tasted sweat and blood and salt and smoke and ash and …

“Do it now!” roared Dees.

I looked down at the crack in the roof, dug my fingers deeper, forced it further apart, until it was now a hole, a torn fissure, a slice through the earth, a fault line, no bottom, no depth, no walls, just an endless fall beneath us growing wider and wider and wider and as Oda screamed with a sound that wasn’t human any more and ran towards us, blood running off her skin, I felt Dees’ hand in mine and threw us both, head first, into the darkness.

In which it all begins to make a horrible sort of sense; a war begins; an army is destroyed; and a conspiracy unravels.

Dust.

It was thin and beige, lit up by the yellow tungsten glow of a single flickering 15W bulb. It stuck to my fingers with the quiet tenacity of that possessive girlfriend unable to understand the meaning of ‘it’s over’. It was on one side of my face too – presumably the side that had been resting on the uneven lino floor. It was on the cracked tables and the tatty crooked chairs. It was on the piles of paper that had spilt across the floor, obscuring all writing. It was on the dirty brass handle on the door, and inside the shattered remnant of the TV screen, trying to smother the still-snapping sparks of life that leapt within the broken interior.

It was on my clothes, in my hair.

I tried to get up.

Something hard and sharp knocked into the middle of my spine, sending me the short distance back down to earth, and stayed there. A voice, that tumbled in on itself like it couldn’t say the words fast enough, gabbled, “Who the hell are you where did you come from why are you here?”

I tried pushing myself off the floor and the weight on my back responded by pushing a little bit harder. A thing that might have been a toe prodded my side for added emphasis.

It took several attempts to get enough moisture in my mouth to answer.

“Hi,” I wheezed. “Name’s Swift. Sorry to drop in like this, I don’t want to cause trouble.”

The weight on my back shifted uneasily. “But I mean really who are you why are you here you don’t have coffee do you lots and lots of big black coffee or maybe you’re from the tax man you’re not from him are you because I told the council I told them leave leave me alone and they kept saying they couldn’t but if I didn’t ask them for anything why should they trouble me do you see?”

“Um … yes. I think I do. Can I get up now?”

“You’re not from the council are you only I told them they mind me I’ll mind them you understand what I’m saying do you?”

“I’m not from the council, no.”

“Oh.”

The weight on my back eased. A hand, skin like the frozen back of a frozen ocean, reached down. I took it, let it pull me to my feet, turned slowly, ready for pretty much whatever I had to see.

What I saw was a man. His nose was round, his beard neat and grey, his hair showing signs of receding on the top, his posture hunched. He wore a torn green waxy coat, a pair of ragged corduroy trousers, a pair of trainers through whose holes I could see equally holey grey socks, and was carrying a crooked piece of pipe. The dust had settled on his back like fine snow, and was settling even now, a continual gentle shower tumbling from the spider’s web of cracks sliced through the ceiling. The only disturbance in the dust was on the floor: a set of footprints, his, from a crooked rocking chair to the scuffed marks of where I’d fallen. No others, not in, not out of the little windowless room.

I held out my hand uneasily. He looked at it for a while, then put the pipe down, and shook it. “Hello,” he stammered. “Sorry about that but I don’t usually have people just fall through my ceiling like that and you did give me a start and I like my privacy but don’t think I’m rude will you?”

“Not at all,” I mumbled. “Um … and in an equal spirit of openness, where am I?”

“Here, here.” He gestured grandly round the room. “Where else would you be?”

“And where is ‘here’?”

“It’s where I live isn’t it!”

“And that is … ?”

“Here! I live here!”

“I see. And … how long have you lived here?”

His eyes narrowed. “Why are you asking so many questions?”

“I’m just … confused and bewildered, you know.”

“You sure you’re not from the council I don’t want anything to do with …”

“No, I’m not from the council. Honest.” I looked round the little room, but I saw nothing, food, sink, bed, that suggested this was a
place a man could live. “Um, you haven’t seen a woman disguised as a dragon walking about here, have you?”

“Disguised as a dragon?” he echoed. “No sorry not that.”

“But … you have seen a woman?” I hazarded.

“Oh yes a while back I think.”

“How long ago?”

He shrugged. “About sort of around I think maybe well it was certainly after but …” His voice trailed off. He smiled a desperate grin of gaps and inclines.

“Thanks for your help,” I mumbled, and headed for the door. He didn’t try to stop me. It opened in clouds of dust. It felt like it hadn’t been opened for a very long time, and left an arc scoured in more dust outside. The corridor outside was dark, barely lit by dull fluorescent light streaming in the small window at one end. He didn’t move. I stepped out, then hesitated and looked back.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“My name?” he echoed. “Um well it’s uh it’s …” He started riffling through the great pile of paper stacked up against one wall, wading in knee-deep. “It’s somewhere here it’s um … hold on I’m sure I’ve got it somewhere …”

“Never mind.”

He looked back up, unease behind his wide grey eyes. “Close the door on your way out will you?” he asked.

I smiled, and pulled it shut behind me.

The corridor was covered in the same dust. Debris was strewn about, creating dense islands and archipelagos for the traveller to sidestep. There the torn-off arm of a plastic doll. Here, an envelope, open, a letter, half-written, inside, the stamp never attached; a pen, its plastic case cracked, the ink spilt out in a solid dry stain; a folder, its paper torn and curling; a ticket to the theatre, never used. A pram still in its plastic wrapping. A pair of false teeth tumbled out of their glass, liquid long since evaporated, grinning for ever at nothing. And always, falling around it all, the thin beige dust. There was nothing in this place that wasn’t shattered and broken, and no sign that it had ever been disturbed.

I walked towards the small square window at the end of the corridor. It was frosted: all I could see beyond were thick patches of flickering light, and its lock didn’t give. Upstairs, I heard a human sigh
and headed towards it, past books with half their pages torn out, broken fridges with doors standing open and the shattered silver pieces of broken CDs. My footsteps left uneven splodges in the dust.

A single door stood open on this floor, a dull yellow light spilling from it. I walked towards it, knocked. No answer. I peered round.

A man stood in the middle of the room, arms stretched out at his sides, head turned upwards. His flesh was nine parts blue vein to one part white skin, his hair tatty and frayed, his eyes wide and darting, fixed on nothing. He wore a pair of blue underpants and a knee-high pair of black socks that had rolled down in thick bands to his ankles. I said, “Excuse me?”

He didn’t move.

“Excuse me, mister?”

Didn’t budge.

I walked up to him, touched him on the shoulder. Nothing. I shook him harder. Nothing.

“Mate! Hey, you!”

We shook him again, his head snapping back and forwards like a toy puppy in a car, but his eyes never once fixed on us. I let him go, and slowly he seemed to reset to where he’d been, head fixed upwards, unmoving, silent.

A voice behind me said, “He won’t answer.”

I jumped, hands flying up ready to fight.

How he’d got there, this man in the door, without my seeing, I didn’t know. He was pushing a shopping trolley, one wheel stuck on with gaffer tape, the basket laden with old coat-hangers, bent teaspoons and bits of rusted metal. He had a broad dark beard, salt and pepper hair, raggedy padded coat, and a body odour that should have made him stand out like a samurai in the Senate. His face was familiar, the taste of his magic more so. He looked at us a good long while, and seemed mildly dissatisfied with what he’d seen, then, with a shake of his head, and a rattle of his trolley, he walked on. I followed a few paces behind, and when this didn’t annoy him, I came closer. He stopped suddenly, bent down, and from beneath the dust picked up a silver watch, the face shattered. He shook it, listening for a beat, then with a sigh threw it onto the trolley and kept on rattling.