The Neon Court (47 page)

“Go away go away go away!”

“There’ll be speeches, if you live –
if
of course being a frail argument at this time. You’ll go to memorial services and stand above Dees’ empty coffin – I assume it will be empty – and you’ll talk about how she was a soldier who fought and died and that’s what a true hero is and there’ll be tears punctuating the quiet solemnity. I mean, Christ.” Bakker slapped his hands together in contempt. “You may even go to JG’s service and throw flowers on the coffin – this one will have a few bits in it – and, while I think you’ll have the good sense not to cry, I am sure you’ll like playing the part of the quiet black-clad mourner who understands a tragic truth that cannot be shared.”

“Get out!” we screamed, the candle flames twisting around us. “Get out get out!”

Bakker waited until we had no more breath, then rested his chin in the palm of his hand, bending closer to us. “You know,” he murmured, “you have so much more life now you’re not entirely human. Look at you. Matthew Swift, sorcerer who was born, went to school, travelled a bit, and died. Barely three lines in the obituary. Just lay in his own blood too surprised and hurt and scared to do all the wonderful things I taught you to do. Crawled to a telephone box and called for help, didn’t fight, didn’t rage, didn’t blaze, just called for help and died. I mean what is the point of that? And now look at you!” His eyes sparkled, his pale skin flushed. “Look at everything you are now that you’re not quite … not really … hardly at all … Matthew Swift. Look how hard you fight, how well you live. You came back from the dead and if you’d just been human you would have run away and curled up into a ball and got religion. But you’re not. You went about setting things right. Vengeance and retribution. When you killed me it was the most spectacular thing I had ever seen, the most power and passion and beauty that had ever been struck from a spark; you were blazing! And then the business with the Midnight Mayor, and the Midnight Mayor is notorious for sitting on his arse and letting things take their natural effect, but oh no, not you. Because the blue electric angels don’t care for the laws of men, or the practicalities of this world, or what should
or should not be. They have the morality of six-year-olds, stripped down of all complexity and, like children, you will scratch and claw and kick and bite even when the thing you’re clawing at is the rope that will pull you to safety. Such a pity there’s still a little human left. With those left-over human things, pain for example, that really a sensible deity would have burnt away. After all, it’s only the human part of you that can ever truly die.”

I peered up into Bakker’s eyes. There was an unhealthy sheen on him now, a hint of yellow in his skin, a blackness in his nails. I said, “Dunno if the dead have feelings, but if you were alive, I bet I could tell what you’re feeling now.”

He drew his lips in thin, curling in towards his teeth to wet them inside his mouth.

“I bet,” I went on, “you’re feeling hungry.”

His fingers tightened, flexed. The candlelight cast a flickering dark shadow along the wall behind him, dancing from side to side, and at each dance, it was never quite the same shadow that moved. I shifted onto my knees, staring right up into his face.

“Go on,” I breathed. “It’s just you and me now. The lights are out everywhere else, what does it matter what’s done in the dark? No one need ever know. Go on!”

His eyes glittered, his lips were parted, his chest rising and falling with steady breath.

“Go on! All you’re going to get from this experience is destruction and grief; you might as well make the most of it. It’s the end of everything, nobody cares what’s said and if you’re a bastard, nobody is left to care or be impressed, so go on!”

His shadow twisted on the wall behind him: it was too thin, too angular, too many joins and joints, too many claws. Then the candlelight twitched again in its own hot air, and there was just Robert Bakker, old man dying from too much time, sat on the pews of an empty church, staring at nothing.

I shuffled back down into my nest of sheets.

“You know,” I mumbled, running my hands through the hot air around the little candles, “it’s a lot easier to identify absolute evil when you’re a kid. Evil, you see, wears black, has glowing red eyes, puts prepositions at the end of sentences and cackles. When you get a bit
older you begin to understand that most of these things may just be a lifestyle choice. But you, Mr Bakker – I would have thought even you were smart enough to realise that your shadow, your living shadow, the moment it started eating people and drinking blood and stuff, was probably not going to win you any moral philosophy prizes.”

Silence.

Then, “Matthew?”

“Yeah?”

“When you came to kill me, did you know why?”

I rubbed my fingers together, trying to work some life back into them. “I thought I did. At the start. I mean, I told myself some really smart things. How you were a threat to everyone, how you had to be stopped, the good of the city and so on and so forth. That it wasn’t about killing you, it was about stopping your shadow, you know. That stuff. Then by the time I found you, there were so many people dead on the way, just … on the side, you know? People who’d died in the name of saving the lives you’d take and if I hadn’t … but by then I was so far down the line, and I had nothing, just … We hated you. We hate you. You made us mortal, made us see things …
feel
things … we have found names for things we could not have conceived of. Colour. Smell. Taste. Desire. We had no conception of such things. Nor did we conceive of pain. Horror. Fear. Disgust. And you made us feel all of that. You thought you would control us, make yourself better, through us. Diminish us. For that arrogance alone we would have … but humans complicate everything. Things that should be clear become … bewildering. We had never killed before.”

“But you still went through with it.” He didn’t sound angry, or sad, or accusing. Just old, tired.

“Dana Mikeda.”

A little sigh passed his lips at the name; a slight nodding of the head.

“You are right about that, at least,” we conceded. “The death of Dana, it was … it made complex things simple.”

He nodded. For a while neither of us moved. Then with a great grunt of effort he stretched, from his toes to his fingertips, turning his head this way and that, like a man working out an old ache. “You can’t kill Blackout,” he said flatly.

“I know.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Do you? Do you indeed? Well, I suppose your education wasn’t completely wasted. Do you know why?”

“Yes. Blackout is the things that are done in the night. Eyes bleed because we cannot look. The lights go out because we do not want to see. And yet these things will still happen. Can’t kill that. That much I sussed way back.”

“You can’t kill Oda,” he added, stern.

“Because she’s already dead,” I interrupted. “Yeah, I worked that bit out too. I even worked out why JG was really important, and who stands to gain if the Tribe and the Court go to war. Dig that IQ.”

To our surprise, Bakker smiled. “You were a very average sorcerer, Matthew.”

“Gee, boss, thanks.”

“But, I think,” he went on, “a slightly above-average person.”

“I’m coming over teary-eyed.”

“If a little flippant.”

“It’s a defence mechanism.”

“You know,” sighed Bakker, standing up and patting invisible dust off his trousers, “if I hadn’t trained you from childhood, nurtured you down the paths of magic, killed you, been killed by you, and finally concluded my already concluded time by sharing the rather self-indulgent place that is your consciousness, I might never have guessed.”

We found ourself smiling. I said, “I know how to stop Blackout.”

“Wouldn’t want to be in your shoes,” he answered with a little shrug.

I pulled myself up one limb at a time. Everything seemed distant and heavy, even thought was shuffling about looking for the slippers. “You know, it occurs to me that things would have been a lot simpler if you had just agreed to tell me, straight up, Mr Bakker, how you beat Woods in the first place.”

He feigned outrage. “And give away my great secret? My reputation was built on that battle.”

“You’re an arse.”

“Petty petty.”

“A murdering arse.”

“I have killed no one.”

“No,” I growled. “The charge would be manslaughter, not murder, wouldn’t it? Death by association, never by action.” I marched to the
church doors, pressed my fingers against the cold walls. Outside, the rain fell on darkness.

“Afraid?” asked Bakker.

“Petrified.”

“Sensible man.”

“You wonder why this light” – I gestured back at the flickering warmth of the church – “stayed lit when everything else went out?”

“I imagine the Christians would say it has something to do with Jesus.”

“And you know that’s bollocks?”

“Of course,” he replied. “I mean, the symbolism is curious but entirely predictable. The light burns because Oda wants it to burn. Some tiny part of her left alive, some tiny flicker of her that won’t let all the lights go out. Not all of them. Not quite yet.”

“Yeah,” I sighed. “I never thought the day would come when we cheered for Oda’s immortal soul.”

“She could have killed you,” he chided quickly. “On many, many occasions, and with sufficient motivation at each. And yet, quaintly, she didn’t. Don’t get too relaxed – I personally wouldn’t lay any money on you surviving past …” He glanced at his watch, then tutted and looked away, up at the darkened sky. “What does it matter anyway?”

I followed his gaze, and saw nothing but darkness stretching upwards.

“I cocked this one up something shitty, didn’t I?” I heard myself say. “All those things I was supposed to stop, all those dead, all that blood, and they died anyway. I didn’t make anything any better. May have made some of it worse.”

“Maybe,” sighed Bakker. “Not for want of trying, though. I suppose that just leaves want of ability.”

“I don’t suppose it’d be too much to ask for a little moral support at this time?”

“Speaking as the only one of us who is currently deceased and incorporeally being projected via your subconscious into a semi-hallucinatory form, I really feel you’re asking me to act beyond my remit.”

“So … no. Thanks.”

I reached out beyond the doorway, watched the rainwater splatter and run down my hand, pool in my palm. Didn’t move.

“Matthew.” A note of warning in Bakker’s voice. “Sooner or later she’ll come find you.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“There’s no glamour in being the last thing left alive.”

“Yeah.”

Didn’t move.

“If it was Dana’s death that convinced you to kill me,” he said, “then surely there has been enough blood, more than enough, for you to do what has to be done tonight.”

“Oh yeah,” I replied with a little laugh. “Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t lack of motivation. I know what I’ve gotta do and that’s fine; it’ll get done because frankly, there’s nothing else to do. This is …” We plucked at the words. “… watching our life pass before our eyes. We concluded that it was better to stand here, out of the rain, and contemplate all the sights that we have seen now, rather than later, when we might be preoccupied.”

“And?” prompted Bakker.

“And … all things considered … it’s been interesting.” We thought a little longer. “If perhaps rather brief.”

I stepped out into the rain, dragging down the last glow of yellow tungsten from the light above the church doors, spreading it around myself in a little umbrella of illumination. I started walking, down the wet flagstone path towards the iron gate to the darkened street outside. A chill made me look back. Bakker was still standing in the doorway of the church. I said, “Come on, then, if you’re coming.”

“If you could stop it,” he called back, “if you could not die, make it so you didn’t have to fear dying, would you do it? If you could?”

I laughed, the sound running off the high walls of the buildings all around and melting into the churned-up muddy grass of the churchyard. “Mr Bakker,” I chided, “now what is the use of sharing my head if you have to ask a question like that?”

I kept on walking. After a while, he fell into step beside me.

The city slept.

Even the rats and cats and dogs and pigeons, even the thieves and midnight-delivery men, even the sweepers and the underground engineers, the maintainers of wire and painters of roads, slept.

We walked down the middle of streets where, in the day, traffic roared and bicycles skidded, in a little blossom of yellow light, alone, except for a well-dressed ghost.

I stopped at a supermarket on the corner. Its lights were out, its shutters drawn. I smashed one of its high windows and crunched my way through the crumbled glass. The alarm didn’t even bother to wail. The shelves were almost entirely empty, just a few sad not-wants sprawled on clean metal racks. I found a squishy pack of tomatoes and a ham and pickle sandwich. I ate the sandwich while wandering down the drinks aisle. A bottle of sugary tooth-eating not-really-water washed down a second course of coffee beans coated in chocolate and pick-me-up pills. I bundled bandages and plasters into my pockets from the medicine shelf.

“Assuming,” pointed out Bakker, “you’ve still got enough fingers to use them.”

I considered leaving money on the till. The idea was rejected without much in the way of qualms. A small rack carried umbrellas by the door. I picked one at random. Opened up, it carried the face of Minnie Mouse, complete with a pair of round stick-up ears.

“Tasteful,” sighed Bakker.

Out on the street, I stood in a crooked crossroad. Old newspaper blew down the street, caught itself in the wheels of the parked cars. I looked left, right, up and down, then glanced at Bakker. “High road or low road?”

“All roads will lead to Oda.”

“For such a patron of the arts, you’re a right charmless bastard, aren’t you?”

I walked left, not knowing why, not caring much either. Sushi bars and bookshops, sandwich cafés and dealers in rural watercolours.

“If we’re discussing art, there are at least three cultural institutions that are now going to run short on donations, courtesy of you killing me,” pointed out Bakker as we walked together down the middle of the street, which bubbled and bounced with rainwater.