The Neon Court (35 page)

I raised my eyebrows. “Really? I had heard that the Neon Court wasn’t exactly employer of the month, but …”

His eyes flashed. “You know nothing about us.”

“I know,” I replied, “that when you grow too old or ugly or tired or unwilling, you are thrown out. Not the nice-pension-with-benefits thrown out. The Neon Court is everything to those in it, life and bread and universe. Thrown out is on-the-streets-without-a-toothbrush thrown out. It is old age – very briefly – without friends. And that’s just what happens if Lady Neon is bored with you. Christ knows what happens when she’s angry.”

“And what about the Midnight Mayor?” he replied. “I don’t hear about many of your kind living to collect benefits.”

“You’ll watch your tongue,” sighed Dees, as light as a summer spring, “if you hope to keep it attached to your gullet.”

Sulky silence resumed.

Bakker said, “He makes a valid point, Matthew. You are already aware that you are going to die in this service. Five years? Ten perhaps, if you are lucky? Of course, your life expectancy would be hugely increased if you were capable of a few essential management skills. If you were able, for example, to put your faith in other people, delegate! But then, how you would moan when others died the death that had been waiting for you. Your level, Matthew, is perpetual NCO.”

Theydon said, “Do we have a plan to find the chosen one? Besides, I mean, attempting to cross into a part of the city judged to be either non-existent or utterly inaccessible?”

“Mr Mayor?” prompted Dees.

“Yeah,” I lied. “There’s a plan.”

“Care to share?” suggested Theydon.

“No.”

“Of course” – Bakker again – “if there really was a chosen one, then she’d probably stand out like a bonfire in Antarctica. But there isn’t, is there? After all, chosen one equals a god doing the choosing equals a higher power equals a plan equals a purpose equals a point to this universe, which of course there isn’t. Can’t be. For if it were, then you and I would both be utterly damned.”

“Why these shoes?” asked Dees suddenly. She was wearing a politely quizzical look and holding up the pair of ridiculous red shoes in which she’d limped down Grays Inn Road.

“Oh, yes, sorry,” I said. “The night bus –
this
night bus – obeys the rules of its more mundane counterparts in one other way.”

“Being … ?”

“It’ll only ever come when it’s absolutely pissing down, you’re freezing cold, soaking wet, and horribly uncomfortable and frankly you’ve given up on the bus ever coming and just decided to walk home while wearing the world’s worst shoes. And even then, it’ll only come when you’re a good hundred yards off the nearest bus stop and you’re going to have to belt it to reach the stop in time.”

“The spell to summon the night bus is based on
pain
?” asked Theydon.

“No no no no no!” I replied. “You’ve missed the point. The night bus is about alleviation of pain, it is the revelation, the relief, that thing that comes when nothing else is running and when you’ve reached the absolute depths of misery, the thing that saves you! Unfortunately, of course, you have to be at the depths of misery already, in order to be plucked out of them. Sorry about that.”

Sulky silence all around.

Then the woman, the little Chinese woman with the friendly smile, leant forward and said, “Excuse me?”

We all turned. She nodded politely to each of us and then, her smile not even wavering, nodded to where Bakker sat and said, “Good evening, I hope you don’t mind the intrusion.”

“It’s the night bus,” I replied with a shrug. “It’s a great place for social weird.”

“I couldn’t help overhearing you talk; am I right in thinking, ma’am, that you’re an Alderman?”

“Yes,” replied Dees carefully. “May I be of assistance?”

“Such an honour to meet you!” exclaimed the lady. “You know, I’ve admired your work for nearly two hundred years.”

“Oh … well, I’d love to take credit for all that,” mumbled Dees. “But, alas, you know how linear temporal mechanics generally relate to the human lifespan …”

“And you!” added the lady, cheerfully turning her attention to Theydon. “May I say that you look fabulous for your age. If Mr Wong and I didn’t have such fantastic sex, I would, I must admit, find your glamour irresistible, your charm utterly tempting. What do you put in your eye cream? Newborn babe’s blood, or something a bit richer?”

Theydon blurted, “Who the hell are you?”

Her face crinkled, disappointed at his rudeness. “Oh dear,” she sighed. “Only a little time now until her ladyship grows bored of you, and then they’ll laugh. Drip drip drip goes the cistern and knock knock knock no one to answer the door. So sad. But! Can’t be helped, really, can it?”

Finally she turned to me, and her beam was a lighthouse on a foggy night. “And you!” she exclaimed. “All three of you, busy busy busy!”

“Hi,” I said. “And … hi and hi,” I added helpfully.

“Two corpses and an angel, bless, all wearing one face, and it a sad one.”

Bakker leant in suddenly, held out his hand to the little woman. “A pleasure to meet you, ma’am; may I say, as one dimensionally challenged soul to another, it is an honour.”

She attempted to shake his hand, but her fingers just passed through thin air. “Whoops,” she chuckled. “Difficult difficult difficult, isn’t it?”

Theydon breathed, “The woman is mad.”

Dees’ face was tight, every part of her scrunched in concentration. “No,” she murmured. “Not mad. Not that.”

“You fine people wouldn’t be adventuring to battle unspeakable evil, would you?”

“Oh, no evil is unspeakable!” replied Bakker. “How may you fight a thing if you will not name it?”

“True, so true,” sighed the woman. “First time on the night bus?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“No,” added Bakker.

“Well, for those of you who do have corporeal frames which may sustain injury,” she said cheerfully, “may I advise holding on tight to something?”

Dees opened her mouth to put a question.

I held on.

Something in the engine beneath us went
clunk
.

Something bright and sodium flared in the condensation on the glass.

Then the fist of a giant curled round the shell of the bus, picked us up in all defiance of gravity’s whims, and shook. We were snowflakes in a glassy globe. My feet hit the ceiling and my head found itself staring down at the floor as the bus lurched out from underneath me, knuckles white on the cold metal of the handrail on the back of the bench. My stomach had just about managed to catch up when the entire contraption tilted onto one side and the grip I had with one hand failed, swinging me round like a pendulum. I caught the upright bar of a handhold in passing, hooked my elbow into it; and someone had tied stones to my legs, was trying to drag the entire bus sideways
with the inexorable slide of lead weights. The lights inside were flashing with an epilepsy-provoking pulse, and as I tried to crawl my way upwards, one inch at a time, wrapping myself round the bar I’d found, I could see the words dancing in the condensation on the window glass, changing with every lightning strike of fluorescent flashing white

Did not …

Have not …

Meant to …

Been there …

Saw that …

Theydon was sprawled across the back window, pinned like a butterfly, his spreading coat a pair of glorious red wings. He’d drawn one of his short stabbing glass swords, beer-bottle green, but had nothing to strike at, and each time he tried to raise his head he fell back, crushed beneath an invisible mass. The little Chinese lady sat as calmly as before, her body at ninety degrees to the angle at which I dangled, so it appeared to me for all the world as if she protruded from the wall. She was smiling away with a hint of regret, as if apologising for her lack of team spirit in not getting involved. Of Bakker and Dees I could see no sign.

Then the bus lurched again, flinging us back to something resembling an upright position. My knees slammed against the floor, my head bounced against the back of a bench, my grasp loosened and I dropped down, dazed. The lights inside the bus were out, but cold grey light from outside diffused through the mist on the glass and, by its glow, I could see that the bus was now packed. Dozens, hundreds of people, maybe more, pressed in on top of each other, inside each other, folded out and over and around each other, one seat carrying five people whose shadowy forms had blended into one, and who were only distinguishable by here the move of three arms not two, or there the nod of another head emerging from the first. So many were crushed together that there was no one clear feature or face in the entire pile, but rather formless ridges and dunes of grey skin. I was trapped in a maze of pale legs, bumped and bustled all around; and this in silence. Not a voice, not a breath, not an engine stirred. I eased my way up, found that the figures around me were
just a whisper cooler than room temperature, and at my passage they parted easier than air. The little Chinese woman was gone, but there was, perhaps, a shadow that might have been like her, sitting in a medley of shadows on the bench where she had been. I could partly see Theydon, his arm lying limp, the fingers bent and loose. Gravity’s resumption of normal service had dumped him at the foot of the stairs. I made my way through the shadows, until I reached the front of the bus. There was no indication of anything else alive. I went to wipe away the mist from the window and look outside, and hesitated.

Below the palm of my hand, dribbling water, someone had, once upon a time, written these words:

We be light, we be life, we be fire!

We sing electric flame, we rumble underground wind, we dance heaven!

Come be me and be free!

We be blue electric angels.

We drew our hand back, watched the drops of water running down from the letters distort the characters below.

A hand fell on our shoulder. It was cold; colder by far than the grey ghosts packed a hundred to a dozen into the seats of the bus. Its nails were cracked and thick, stained sickly yellow. Its fingers were long, ridged skin over thin bone. It gripped hard, tight, deep. I looked up and saw the reflection of its owner’s face in the glass. Thin. Grey. Withered. Teeth rotting. Hair falling out. Eyes a familiar watery grey. The face grinned. Those rotting teeth were still sharp, a dark tongue passing behind their battlements.

The voice said, “Hungry!!”

I tried to turn and push him away but he already had his mouth at my throat, his fingers in my spine. I felt hot pain break out in the soft hollow between my shoulder and my neck, tasted phlegm and blood and bile thick enough to suffocate, screamed and scrabbled at his face, tried to bury our fingers in his eyes. We found something that yielded in his features, and the hot pain became cold as, with a shriek of rage, Hunger, Bakker’s shadow, the thing that had come alive as he started to die, resisted. Still trying to turn, we found electric flame flickering unbidden to our fingertips, hairs standing up on end, the smell of gas
in our nose and taste of dust on our tongue; but his hands curled like a vice around our skull and slammed us temple first into the thick glass of the window. Static burst across my vision and for a moment I saw out of the corner of my eye

STOP! CHILDREN CROSSING!

and heard

engines rumbling louder than cracking earth

and saw

headlights swerving to avoid the outline of a child

too late

and then the floor was there, I was landing on the floor, breath knocked out of me. We tried to force ourself up, but the frame of flesh that we were trapped in, sluggish and mortal and sick and slow, wasn’t obeying our commands. Hunger’s hands caught us by the throat, pulled us round so he could see into our eyes. His face filled our world, his breath was rotting stomach-sick, and he said, “More fire?”

I closed my eyes.

He shook us, and we could feel blood swerve and dribble down the side of our head.

“More fire?” he breathed.

Hard to think through pain.

We reached inside ourself, caught a fistful of sickness, found the needle-sharp point of pain at the front of our skull, focused on it until it became a throbbing, a burning, a raging pinpoint of flame.

“Beautiful blue angels,” whimpered Hunger. “Just want to live, is that so bad? Just want to live …”

We opened our eyes.

Sapphire brilliance across our vision, and we could see him clearly now, the thing that was Bakker-Hunger, could see straight through him, dust and shadow, right out the other side and we laughed, and the engine of the bus roared with our laughter, shook and hummed and spat back into life, and the mist of the windows of the bus dribbled and flowed downhill, sweeping the glass clean to reveal a giddy chaos of light outside that bore no relation to geography, space, time, or any of those piddling mortal considerations that humans liked to wrap themselves in.

We found our hands free to move, reached up and grabbed Hunger
by the throat, saw his eyes flicker and widen in fear; and our fingers were on fire, blue electric fire that spun and twisted down the length of our arm, made our spine hum like cables in a storm, sent sparks flickering off us with each move we made, filled the air around us with the snapping of electric flame, made the air freeze with each breath we took. Hunger scrabbled at us, trying to pull himself free, but we held on, clung to his ghostly neck as his fingers of nothing scratched and clawed, picked ourself up, pulled him up until his feet no longer touched the ground, and the air around us bent and shimmered with the flame, we could feel it burning across our back, and for a moment, in the reflection from the window

I saw a creature that wasn’t human

Beautiful

Burning blue fire

Laughing as it throttled a shadow

Pair of angel wings in blue electric flame

Not human

Not me

And the creature in our grasp had Robert Bakker’s face, and Robert Bakker’s weak withered old arms were scrabbling at ours, and his old face was turning beetroot purple, then dry-ice blue: his lips, then the hollows of his eyes, then the rest of his skin, and he wheezed, “Matthew! Please!”