The Neon Court (34 page)

Behind her was Bakker.

Dry as dust and ashes.

His shadow was not his own. His shadow had claws.

Grays Inn Road was not, by any standards, a beautiful road. A oneway system led to the kind of junction where anyone lied who told you it was quicker to stay on the bus till the next stop. Victorian terraced shops still carried half-visible daubs of faded paint advertising penny cures and machine weights, but their windows offered suspicious fruit, lipsticks, tights, milk and half-price telephone calls to Somalia. A shop selling office furniture declared “closing down – everything must go!” and had done so for five years. The lights were down inside sandwich bars and little greasy cafés, bicycle repair shops and chemists offering free Botox consultation. I could feel the city below my feet, tunnels and pipes and gleaming tracks; there was more than just the Underground happening beneath Grays Inn Road.

We halted some hundred yards short of a bus stop. It had no shelter, but was just a stand with a sign. Dees made an instinctive beeline for a doorway, but I caught her and said, “Uh-uh! We gotta get as cold and miserable as possible!”

Dees staggered obediently back into the middle of the pavement. A van swooshed by, sending up a sheet of water that fell across our feet.

“This may just be a failure of imagination on my part.” I could hear Dees’ teeth knocking as she spoke. “But I can’t conceive of getting much more cold or miserable than I currently am!”

Theydon said nothing, but his knuckles were white and his face was drawn.

“Good!” I exclaimed, running my hands through my hair and releasing a small waterfall down the back of my neck. I flinched: a curve of my back had evidently been dry, and was no longer so. “That means it’s nearly time!”

An estate car, its back seats ripped out to make way for speakers, thundered by to a
boom boom boom
of bass beat. In the distance I saw it rounding a corner, the lights turning red behind it. The road fell silent:
the thick, silken, sudden silence of engines stopping, of blood pumping in your ears, the sound you were born with and hadn’t known you were hearing.

Dees felt it.

Then Theydon too.

I looked back the way we’d come, wiggled my numb toes in my soaking socks, breathed, “It won’t stay long; we get one chance.” I looked at Dees and added, “You may want to lose those shoes.”

She pulled them off gratefully.

Nothing moved.

Not a car, not a bike, not a soul stirred.

Then I heard it: an engine coming up to speed on the straight after rounding the corner; then I saw it, a pair of bright headlights in the distance, obscuring whatever the thing was behind it; but I knew, didn’t need to see.

I said, “Run!” and turned and belted for the bus stop as fast as my slipping frozen feet would carry me.

Theydon was by me in a second; then overtook. I risked glancing over my shoulder: Dees was right behind me. And there was something else, flickering in and out of the reflections from the shop windows: a grinning shadow, yellow teeth, grey eyes, loose tangles of hair, keeping pace with us, a thing that should be dead. I strained to look further behind, saw the lights, heard the engine, the swoosh of the windscreen wipers, saw a tall dark shape behind the light, hurtling towards us with the reckless abandon of a boy racer; the night-bus drivers of London had always enjoyed putting their foot down. The bus stop was ahead, Theydon nearly there, then the bus, a double-decker, the redness of its paint so deep and thick it was almost that blood black of a dried scab; brakes screeching, it slid by, steam bursting from the grating at the back of the engine, and stopped, its front door dead level with the bus stop. Its windows were yellow-grey from internal light diffused through thick condensation; impossible to see more than shadows inside. On the back, in tatty yellow-on-black, was the number N1. The rear doors opened with a hiss and a snap. A single woman got off. She was old, face like a roast pumpkin, a mass of hair sticking out from an ancient velvet hat. A huge purple coat, folded down over a stumpy pair of legs, that might
at some point hide knees. In one hand she pulled a small shopping bag on wheels. In the other she held a walking stick of black wood. She looked us straight in the eye, and knew us, then turned away with a little humph of contempt and started rattling towards the traffic lights.

The door at the front of the bus opened. Theydon reached it first, got one hand inside the frame, then stopped so suddenly I nearly ran into him. I looked past him to where the driver sat. With skin the colour of dirty bath water, he sat bolt upright in his seat, head turned stiffly forward, more robot than man. He wore a little black cap, and every time he breathed there was the rattle of broken pipes inside his chest. There were chains on his wrists, at his throat, around his middle. Big, black iron chains, bolted into the bus itself. Theydon opened his mouth to say something and I heard the warning beep of the door about to close. I shoved him hard in the middle of the back, pushing him inside, grabbed the panting Dees by the wrist and dragged her up onto the deck as with a hiss of steam and whine of ancient pistons, the door slammed shut with enough force to break bones. The driver’s head didn’t turn. He didn’t move. I reached down and found my fingers shaking from cold and something else besides, and touched my travelcard to the reader. Dees followed suit.

Theydon said, “I don’t …”

The driver’s head snapped round, metal clanking, and a pair of eyes glazed over with silver-purple cataract stared straight at him. Dees fished in her pocket, produced a couple of pound coins, dropped them into the small dish between driver and passenger. Slowly, the driver’s head returned to normal position. The ticket machine beeped and rattled. The bus began to accelerate away from the stop. I pulled free the ticket that the machine had produced and looked down at it.

It said:

Single.

Stage 1 to 387

Valid once.

Terms and conditions apply.

Have a pleasant journey.

I looked on the back.

In tiny letters, someone had printed over and over again,

nowhere to run nowhere to run nowhere to run nowhere to run nowhere to run nowhere to run nowhere to run nowhere to run

I handed the ticket to Theydon. “Next time you decide to join the let’s-save-the-city club,” I growled, “buy a bloody travelcard.”

He took the ticket, his face halfway between a sneer of contempt and a shudder of shame.

We staggered, dripping and shivering, inside the bus.

We were not the only ones riding the night bus.

Sprawled across most of the back seats above the engine, the warmest and most shaken part of the bus, was a man with a tatty beard stained with tomato ketchup, a broken red nose and a face that had gone straight through ripe and out the other side. He was snoring loudly. A single empty beer bottle rolled downhill between the seats as we decelerated, and back the other way as we accelerated, bumping and banging with a regular
tonk tonk.

A child sat next to the door. She looked about five years old. She wore a black and grey school uniform, including a felt bowler hat with a grey ribbon round the base. Her eyes were old. Her teeth were too small and sharp. She looked at me, she looked at Dees, and her lips parted in hate. “Upstairs,” she said, voice small and high. “Your kind isn’t wanted down here.”

I shrugged and headed upstairs, Theydon following. But Dees paused at the foot of the stairs, then turned and looked the child straight in the eye. “You got a licence, little girl?”

The child’s scowl deepened. “No rules on the night bus.”

“When you get off, if you get off, call us,” replied the soaked, bedraggled Alderman, and from somewhere inside her suit produced a creased, damp business card. The child took it reluctantly, cowed by the force of Dees’ glare. We went upstairs.

On the top deck there sat just one Chinese woman. She was tiny, from her tiny straight black hair to her tiny shoes, from her hands, almost too tiny to grasp the rail on the seat in front of her, to her tiny brown eyes in a tiny oval face. The only big thing about her was the cream lace collar that stuck out from her tiny grey jacket. She had no baggage, but sat leaning forward in her seat as if any moment she expected the bus to crash and everyone to die except her, who had taken the precaution of clinging on. Her smile was friendly enough.

I sat down. The condensation on the windows was too thick for us to see anything outside other than splodges of street light. Blobs of sodium pink, flares of brilliant white, on-off flashes of red and blue circled round us like flies to blood. The heat was the jungle heat of suspended moisture with a hint of suffocating humanity. On the cold window panes, smiling faces had been traced, doodles, messages in a dozen languages.

Super mouse!!

GET OFF THE BUS

Left at Dulwich

wasnt me lik they said it was

Dees sat down and examined her feet. The shoes I’d forced her to wear up the length of Grays Inn Road had bitten into her heels. Theydon’s nose wrinkled in distaste as he examined the tatty blue-and-red coverings on the seats, before perching on the edge of one he judged the least grimy. I rummaged in my satchel and produced a small towel. It was little more than a grey furry tissue, wrapped round the toothbrush and toothpaste that were the sum of my domestic property. I handed it to Dees. She looked at it longer than was necessary, then cold overcame all other senses and she took it from me and started vigorously rubbing at her arms, her feet, her face, her hair, as much trying to warm with friction as dry herself off. Theydon looked at her, looked at me, then turned away from us. He covered his features with his hands and I half wondered if he was about to cry. Then he swept his hands back from his head and I tasted, just for a moment, the sugar-tingle touch of magic on the tip of my tongue. He looked back, and what had been before a man soaked in rain and prickled with cold was now Alpha Male, Natural Man, every bit the hunter-gatherer who could stand before the elements and proclaim ‘the tempest holds no fear for me’. His physical appearance hadn’t particularly changed, but now it was as if the elements had become just another coat he had decided to wear, and there was defiance in his eye, and pride, the cocksure pride of a man who knows that yes, he does look that good. We scowled.

“Cheap tricks,” we said.

“Rich enough for the company I’m in,” he replied.

“I’m guessing you won’t want the towel, then?”

In answer, he stretched himself out further over the seat, achieving that posture seen on any form of public transport whereby one man and his testicles, by the simple act of sitting back and spreading his knees, can occupy enough space for five.

Dees finished with the towel and passed the soggy rag back to me. There was a sharpness in her eye that, to my surprise, fixed on Theydon.

“You – Neon Court man – let’s establish a few essential rules,” she barked. “While in the company of the Midnight Mayor you will address him as ‘Mr Mayor’, and if you are extremely lucky he might deign to reply. When the Mayor tells you to do something, you will do it immediately, and without question. This is not merely because you are a stranger in our affairs; it will be for your own survival. Do you understand?”

Silence.

I waited for the knives to come.

“Do you understand?” Dees’s voice was ice, but there was fire in her eyes, a red tint around the iris, a touch of the madness that you could see in the image of the dragon that guarded the gates of London, and her fingernails were tinted silver, and just a little bit too long. I’d seen the Aldermen fight, seen the changes that came over them when they did; but I had never associated Dees with that power, until now.

Theydon considered being an idiot.

Then he changed his mind.

“Yes,” he said, voice dead and flat.

“You understand?” snapped Dees.

“Yes,” he repeated. “I understand.”

She smiled, and I could smell metal magic shimmering off her as she relaxed. “Good,” she breathed. “I’m sure we’ll all find this relationship mutually beneficial.”

She sat down. Bakker was next to her, sat with his chin resting on the palms of his hands, leaning forward like a child towards the front window of the bus. I hadn’t seen him get on, but then again, he didn’t need to.

“I hope you know where this bus is going, Matthew,” he said.

In vain I tried drying myself off with the tatty towel. Outside, flares of colour flashed and danced like oil being burnt in the desert.
Theydon raised a languid finger to the condensation, thought about writing something in it, changed his mind. Dees said, “You could have told us, Mr Mayor, that you were planning on catching
this
night bus.”

“Yeah,” I said with a shrug. “But then you might have refused.”

“What is this thing?” demanded Theydon, looking around. We were surprised he bothered to ask.

“This is the night bus,” I replied. “It has all the characteristics of any night bus in London. It drives far too fast down roads where during the day there is usually clogged traffic; it misses half the stops where you’d expect it to pull up; its inhabitants are usually less than salubrious; it only runs after midnight; and it gets you into places where nothing else can go.”

“For example … ?” said Dees.

“Sidcup. The night bus is one of the big unstoppables of London magic. There’s no wall I know of can stop it getting where it’s going to go.”

“And the driver?” prompted Theydon. “He was …”

“Chained, yes,” offered Bakker, a finger trying to draw in the condensation and leaving no mark. “Condemned, quite literally, to perpetual night.”

“They say there’s a curse,” I answered. “It binds its victims to ser vice on the bus for twelve years. No rest, no food, no drink, just the night and the driving.”

“It’s a rumour,” added Dees. “The Aldermen have seen no proof of such an accord.”

“It’s real,” said Theydon, utter certainty in his voice. “I have seen things like it before.”