Kate Griffin - The Midnight Mayor

He didn’t move.

“Hey, mate, you got a light?”

He looked round, taking his time. He didn’t need to rush; his kind never do. I stepped back, reaching instinctively with my bandaged fingers for the nearest light, the nearest whiff of mains power.

It’d have been nice, for once, to be surprised.

And “he” was an “it”, and “it” had no face. It was a sack of clothes sitting on empty air, a pair of white headphones plugged into the floating nothing of his not-ears. The body of his clothes, bulked out so humanly, was held in shape by air, by an ignorance of gravity and a perversion of pressure, by floating shadow and drifting emptiness bundled together into a nothing-something in a tracksuit. He was an it, and it was a spectre.

Once, when I was a kid, I was taken to see a seer. His name was Khan. He read the future in the entrails of old shopping bags and the interweaving of vapour trails in the sky. He told me a lot of things, most of them sounding like they came out of a Christmas cracker; but finally he said “Yeah, man . . . you’re like . . . you know . . . like gonna die.”

I said something along the lines of “Yeah, I kinda figured that”. Sorcerers do not have a long life expectancy, especially urban ones.

“Hey, dude, you totally don’t get it!” he replied. “You’re like . . . gonna die. It’s after when it gets complicated.”

At the time I thought he was being pretentiously metaphorical.

There are two ways to look at the gift of prophecy. Theory the first goes like this: prophet sees future = there is a predetermined path that the prophet is capable of perceiving = destiny = no free will = almighty God with a really sick sense of fun. Which is bad news if you’re anyone lower than “pope” in the spiritual pecking order of life.

Theory the second: prophet sees future = ability to determine with an almost omnipotent degree of accuracy and skill the one most likely future from a whole host of determining factors, including human free will, random variables and continual and unexpected cock-up, what will happen next = omnipotence = God in mortal flesh. Khan didn’t look like any sort of God to me, but as Mr Bakker always said, sorcerers should keep an open mind. Just in case someone tried to hit it with a sledgehammer.

That was back in the good old days.

Back before Mr Bakker’s stroke. Back before Mr Bakker resolved not to die. Back before his shadow grew a pair of teeth and a taste for blood. Back before the Tower killed the sorcerers of the city in Mr Bakker’s name. Back before his shadow killed me, one gloomy night by the river, in its endless quest for life. Before the blue electric angels, the battles and the vengeance and the life left behind in the telephone wires.

Back before we came back into this mortal world.

No human can survive having their major organs ripped out by the angry manifestation of a dying sorcerer’s incarnated will. Or, for that matter, by any other sharpened implement. And while my continued existence may argue against this medical truth, I was always reminded when I looked in the mirror that once upon a time my eyes had been brown. Not our burning electric blue.

Khan, in his own special, unhelpful way, had been right all along.

Imagine my embarrassment.

I ran.

See what we were capable of, when the situation called?

Our feet flapped and flopped on the wet pavement, our breath was a puff of cloud lost in the rain. I’d never realised how ridiculous a man can sound when running, all bouncing bag and thumping shoe, graceless and soaked. I crossed the empty street and was inside a council estate in a matter of seconds that took an hour each to pass, rushing past doors behind iron grates, and doors with children’s pictures doodled on them, and windows broken and windows cleaned and doorsteps scrubbed and bicycles locked and bicycles smashed and bins overturned and bins emptied and flowers tended and pots abandoned and council pledges made and council policies forgotten and walls graffitied with all the rambling thoughts of the inhabitants . . .

C & J 4 EVER

WHO DOESNT LIKE BULLET TRAINS THINK ABOUT IT

CALIPER BOY SMELLS

Şapkamı geri ver!

There was a play area in the middle of a forlorn patch of grass: two sad swings above “safe” tarmac that falling children could bounce on. A bike, its handlebar, wheels and seat ripped off, was chained to some railings.

Next to the bike, another spectre was waiting. At first I thought he was just some kid. But when he looked up, there was nothing inside that hood to stare with. And that nothing stared straight at me. He was dressed identically to the one at the bus stop; but nothing could have moved that fast, and the beat out of his headphones went dumdumdumdumdumdumdumdum with relentless cardiac monotony. For a moment we regarded each other, I too tired to look afraid, he too empty to look anything at all. Then he tilted his head back, and roared. It was the sound of old brakes about to fail, screeching a last scream on an icy road, of razored metal being scraped over a rusted surface, of a guitar string just as it snaps. I ducked and covered my ears, hoping to get below the sound. Around me it made each window pane hum and crack, and set the swings swinging in distress.

Spectres always hunt together, and it’s easy to mistake a summons for a scream. I pushed my left ear into my shoulder and reached deep in my satchel until I found what I was looking for: a can of red spray paint. I shook it and, turning on the spot, drew around me a double red line. It spattered in the rain, and started to blur. I thought for a moment it wouldn’t hold — but a double red line is a powerful enchantment, even in the worst of weathers, and as I completed the shape, its paint flashed brighter and settled, gleaming, into a solid state.

The summons stopped. Perhaps the spectre reasoned that sound wouldn’t do much good against my ward on the ground. Perhaps it ran out of air from inside its floating chest. The physiognomy of a creature that isn’t there is hard to study. I could hear the wailing of car alarms set off by the din; lights were coming on behind the area’s newly cracked windows. Soon the whole estate would be up and buzzing, and then so would be the police, and then questions, about the dead and the almost dead and the should-be dead. We couldn’t afford to waste time on such details.

The spectre moved towards me. He had no shadow and, apart from the dumdumdumdumdumdumdum of his headphones, made no sound as he approached.

Behind me was the chi-chichi chi-chichi of the creature at the bus stop and, somewhere against the car alarms, another rising bass line, of:

Boom boom boom boom-te-boom boom boom boom boom-te-boom

I squatted down inside my red circle and pressed my fingers into the ground, sniffing the air. I had none of the right equipment, nothing that could do more than slow down the pack. Just checking my bag had wasted twenty yards of their inexorable stride. The nearest spectre stopped, its toes scraping the edge of my double red line. Reaching with a gloved hand into the saggy kangaroo pocket of its grey jumper, it pulled out a flick knife. The knife was cheap black plastic with a silverish blade which revealed a series of notches at the hilt end that probably served no purpose, except to make an ugly weapon somehow “cool” by being that bit more ugly. The blade was no more than four inches long; but when four inches is two inches longer than the thickness of your wrist, size doesn’t matter. We watched it, fascinated.

The spectre drew back the blade, held it up, and rammed it towards my face. As it passed through the air above the red lines it stuck, point-first, as if buried in thick foam; beneath it, the paint on the ground bubbled and hissed. Still the spectre kept up the pressure, pushing with both hands on the hilt. A little at a time, the blade began to move towards me.