The Glass God (18 page)

Well
, he muses,
fancy that
.

Chapter 30

We Are Different for Everyone We Meet

She said, “He’s gone. Swift’s gone.”

They stood round the black-smoke-belching fire in its scarred metal can, Gold Mnkey and Hobo Grlz hovering uncertainly behind them, and Sharon said, “Matthew Swift’s brain is no longer in Matthew Swift’s body.”

There was silence. Then Rhys asked, “Really?”

Sharon scowled at him. “I mean, it’s still there,” she pointed out. “It’s not like there’s this big empty space full of foam where there should be grey squelchy stuff!”

“Oh. Sorry, Ms Li…⁠”

“But,” she asserted, “his
consciousness
has fucked right off. Which would be fine, were it not for what got left behind.”

“blu electric angels,” murmured 8ft, eyes fixed on the firelight. “dey r stil in da body.”

“Right. And, I’m no expert in the thought processes of mystic entities, but I’m guessing, based on the screaming and the burning and that, they’re really not coping well.”

“Um… excuse me?” Rhys had a hand raised in polite enquiry. “I know this is probably a very foolish question, but I think it might be important, see…
why
isn’t Swift’s brain in his body any more? I mean, doesn’t that seem a little… excessive?”

“Excessive?”

“I just mean, considering the times and the economy and the problems of people management and the current political and social climate…⁠”

“Rhys!” barked Sharon, impatiently.

“⁠… wouldn’t it be easier just to kill him?” he persisted. “I mean, not us, of course not us, we wouldn’t, but if you wanted to hurt him, why not just kill Swift? Why… do this?” he gestured back down the darkened hall.

8ft didn’t appear to have an answer. Sharon turned and met the nervous stares of Gold Mnkey and Hobo Grlz. “Hi, there,” she said with a forced smile. “You two found him, right?”

Brief half-nods.

“Before or after he went blue and shouty?”

Eyes flickered from one to the other, and at their hesitation, 8ft lurched a step towards them, fist raised in warning. “she is da 1 wat knos da truf!” he barked. “u tel her everthin els she tak it from u!”

They cowered before 8ft. Sharon laid a placating hand on his arm. “And while all that is kinda true, did I mention my thing about gratuitous violence? If we had a kettle, I’d suggest we have a cuppa tea and a sit-down, but I’m guessing that’s not the vibe here, and while I don’t want to question your social choices, I think that’s a bit of a shame. But!” She clapped her hands together, sending an echo down the darkened halls. “Now probably isn’t the time to have a cultural revolution, so let’s just talk about the Midnight Mayor. Where did you find him?”

Hobo Grlz spoke first, her left foot twisting in and out beneath her, shoulders down, chin up, a contorted picture of a body infuriated by its own skeleton. “@ da hospitl.”

“Swift was at the hospital?”

She shook her head. “B-Man woz @ da hospitl. we went der 2 c B-Man, but B-Man wer alredy ded.”

Sharon looked at 8ft, whose face was hard and set, and who said nothing. “Okay,” she sighed. “Who’s B-Man?”

“he wer of da Tribe,” replied Hobo Grlz, voice rising, daring the world to disapprove. “he wer… doin fins 2 get by. dat wat u do. u get by. al els is jus feelin, n feelin is lies.” Here she glanced at 8ft for approval of her philosophy, and received a single, brisk nod for her pains. “he wnt 2 do dis thin, but wen he didnt com bak, we wnt 2 find im. he wer in da hospitl, he wer sick, he wer dyin. den he wer ded.”

“Um… what ‘thing’?” asked Rhys. Already he wore a grimace, in expectation of not liking the answer.

Hobo Grlz shrugged. “dunno. he wer fast. he wer smrt. he did fins 2 get by.”

“he tok fins,” explained 8ft briskly. “ownin fins is a lie 2.”

Sharon looked from 8ft to Hobo Grlz then back again. “Okay,” she said. “There’s a whole ethical can of worms there which I’m not gonna go into right now, but one day, when there’s not a screaming Midnight Mayor doing the blue-fire thing in the room behind us, I really think we should sit down and have a proper chat about society and shit.”

No one responded to this. Rhys shifted his weight from foot to foot, and avoided Sharon’s eye. “Look,” she insisted. “No one ever said that being able to see the truth of things extended to academic or philosophical ideas, okay? Otherwise I wouldn’t be here, I’d be a frickin’ captain of industry or whatever, so can we move on? B-Man was in hospital and he was dying…⁠”

“he ded,” corrected Gold Mnkey sharply. “he ded.”

“Sorry. How’d he…⁠?”

“dey say it woz blck deth.”

A moment. Rhys managed not to step involuntarily back; Sharon stood still, head on one side, and tried to work out if she felt the itching of fleas, or just general grime on her skin. “Black Death, huh?” she said, soft and low. “That’s kinda… unusual.” Gold Mnkey shrugged. ‘“Unusual” clearly didn’t mean much to the Tribe.

“And the Midnight Mayor…⁠”

“he woz der.”

“At the hospital?”

“yeh.”

“Which one?”

“U – C – H.” She pronounced the letters slowly, with difficulty, as if the clarity of the sounds had somehow been lost from her over the years.

“Did Swift… hurt B-Man?” suggested Sharon, trying not to wince. She wasn’t sure if giving someone bubonic plague was within the Midnight Mayor’s remit; but, then, she
could
imagine Swift doing it, if he was really, really angry and, frankly, when wasn’t he?

Hobo Grlz shook her head. “dunno. dont fink so. he wer tryin to tlk 2 im, tryin 2 spek 2 B-Man, but den B-Man ded and mdnight mayr he real angry, he shout n curs n bang his fist inna wall. den he get phoncal n he go n we folow cos we dont kno wat hapned 2 B-Man n we wnt 2 find out. n he go inna city, n we hid n we watch, n he go to offic, n stay der a whil, den he com out n tak da tran n we folow n now its dark n he stil lok angry n wen we get to deptford he c us n say ‘u! wat do u kno bout B-Man?’ n we run awy.”

“In Deptford? When was this?”

“nght b4 lst.”

“Why did you run away?”

Hobo Grlz’s body curled in a little tighter on itself, her arms pinning each other across her chest. “he da mdnght mayr. mdnght mayr sometim enemy. n he… blu electric angel. angel. devil. god. wat u say 2 dem?”

“But he was still Swift, right? I mean, he wasn’t yet doing the blue fire, screaming stuff?”

“no. dat woz later.”

“So what happened?”

Hobo Grlz glanced at Gold Mnkey for support, but the boy stubbornly refused to meet her glare. “we run… den we c ligt ovr da estat, big, brigt ligt, n we hear shoutin n voics n den dis truck com out of da estat n der r faces in it, ppl, den silenc. somthin hapned, n we go bck, cos,” her voice lifted in defiance, “cos fear is somfin mad up, cos der aint nofin 2 fear, cos we woz taugt 2 fear is 2 kep us in our place n cos we… we dont fear n we r free.”

This little pep talk earned another grudging nod of approval from 8ft.

“we go bak,” she repeated. “n der is blod on da wals of dis place, n a woman is lyin der, ded, she is ded n he – da blu electric angels – r jus standin der, lokin @ her, standin der in dis mesed up place, n der skin is cracked n blu, n der hair is on fire, n der hands burn n dey r red wif blood but der blood is burnin blu n dey lok @ us n… n u dont fear death neithr, cos death is jus a plac wer all thins stop, so we wernt afrad, but he loked @ us n it wer not a ‘im’ no more, it wer an ‘it’ an its fac wer death. it wer death. n it say…⁠”

“help us.” Gold Mnkey spoke soft, the words a distant whisper, a memory of a thing still burning strong. “it say ‘help us’.”

For several moments no one spoke.

“wat shuld we do?” breathed Hobo Grlz. “wat do u do 4 a god?”

Sharon stared into the girl’s ravaged young face. “Dunno,” she confessed. “I guess you do as it asks.”

“we tok it ere,” concluded Hobo Grlz with a sad little nod. “it said no mor, jus walkd inna dis rom, tok off its coat n mad itself a cage. it stod der n da wires tied demselves round it, n it stood der lik it wantd 2 b trapd. its skin wer crackin, its fac burnin, but in der… somtimes da screamin stops.”

As the girl finished speaking, Sharon was nodding with fatigue in the firelight. The warmth was making her sleepy, driving the last of the damp from her bones. She wondered how long it was until sunrise, how many hours they’d spent down in these blackened brick tunnels, and how they were going to get home. “Okay,” she said. “All right.” A moment or two passed, while she thought it through. “Well, I guess things could be worse.”

“Um… could they, Ms Li?” asked Rhys.

She shot him a glare. “He could be dead,” she pointed out. “That’s kinda worse.”

A thought crawled through the muddied mess of her thoughts, made a request for attention and wriggled through the barbed wire of her fatigue to hoist its flag somewhere on the edge of her tongue. Her head turned slowly, puppet-like, and she fixed Hobo Grlz with a steady gaze. “Hold on a second…⁠” she said. “He gave you his coat?”

The coat of the Midnight Mayor should, Rhys felt, have been long, black, thick and possibly inscribed with mystic sigils. The fact that it was beige, splotched, smelly and hemmed with grease around the cuffs did not enhance the gravity of the office.

Sharon patted it down, and with each touch of her fingertips she exclaimed, “Uch old curry uch old coffee uch bad night sleeping uch uch uch uch…⁠”

“I could look, if it helps?” suggested Rhys. “I mean, if you don’t want to see
all
the truth all the time, that is?”

“It’s fine,” she grumbled. “Always figured Swift for a slob, and now I know it’s true.”

She rifled through the pockets, producing old paper napkins, stubs of chewed pencil, grubby receipts and, in one pocket, a single, grey sock which she threw on the ground with a cry of, “Oh, for God’s sake.”

“Do you… see anything?” hazarded Rhys.

“Bad food, sleepless nights and long walks,” she retorted, pulling yet another receipt from the pocket and holding it up to the faint glow of firelight. “Hey – you ever seen Swift smoke?”

“Um…⁠”

She stuck her nose into the coat, sniffing deeply. This turned out to be a mistake, as a moment later she was reeling back, trying to cough through her nostrils. “Oh, God, there’s way too much sewer-to-starch happening there.”

“Cigarette smoke, too?” asked Rhys.

“No. Everything else, but no cigarettes. Here.” She handed Rhys the receipt. He peered at it, a scrunched-up, grubby piece of paper which proclaimed at the top:

Archway News & Films
 

Beneath this was an address, a date and an itemised list of purchases. “He renewed his travel card and bought… pouch tobacco?” murmured Rhys. “Day before he disappeared.”

“Uh-huh,” replied Sharon, brushing her hands off on her trousers, in the hope that a very dirty object could cleanse the effects of an obscenely dirty one. “Also, Archway? Lotsa little red dots on his map in that area.”

“Do you think it could be significant?” Rhys liked saying “significant”; he felt it carried a sense of importance.

“Buggered if I know. But I think we’d feel right pillocks if we ignored it and then it turned out it was.”

Sharon turned back to where 8ft was waiting uneasily, his fists clenched at his side. “I know I’m gonna regret asking this,” she said, “but if the Aldermen wanted to pop down here and take a gander at…⁠” 8ft’s face had collapsed into a snarl of contempt. “Yes, well, I’m guessing you guys aren’t that pally with the Aldermen.”

“dey r da bigst liars of al.”

“Are they?”

“yeh. dey fink dat der is order 2 da world.”

“Yes,” she admitted. “I guess they do at that. Thing is, I feel kinda bad leaving you down here with this screaming, glowing, burning blue dude…⁠”

“he com 2 us. we protect.”

“⁠… which is really sweet of you, I mean, I’m so impressed, aren’t you impressed, Rhys?”

“Yes, Ms Li.”

“⁠… but I’m sure there’s health and safety implications here, questions of moral and maybe legal responsibility and that. I mean, the guy is my boss, and I gotta think about what I’ll do if he, like, spontaneously combusts on my watch. You see what I’m saying?”

8ft’s pained expression said more than words could.

Sharon tried one last time. “Let me put it like this… I get where you guys are coming from with your whole truth and lies thing, I really do. And, in a way, I respect that, because it takes a lot of personal courage and perception to turn round and say that everything you’ve ever been taught is a lie, including some of the basic human instincts, like fear and that – in fact, I think it’s really cool the way you’ve done that, isn’t it, Rhys?”

“Oh yes, Ms Li!” chorused the druid.

“But you guys do believe in the truth, I mean, the
real
truth, the truth that’s underneath once you’ve got through the lies about work and the lies about beauty and the lies about who we are and the lies about who we want to be, yeah? I mean, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?”

A hesitation; then 8ft nodded, his eyes fixed on her, the veins thick and dark on his neck.

“Well then,” she sighed. “Here’s a truth for you, one of the ones that’s underneath, and the truth is this… the psycho-screaming guy in there,” she jerked a thumb back towards the metal door at the end of the dark passage, “could kill you all by accident. And you wouldn’t be afraid, and once it’d happened, you wouldn’t be sad, because you’d be dead and that, and I’m not gonna wax theological about the afterlife because, frankly, I ain’t got the training, but whatever it is, whatever you may think about it, it would be a bloody stupid fucking waste. So,” her smile stretched a little thinner, a little wider, “how about letting me help?”

8ft hesitated. There was a long, slow silence as his eyes roamed around, examining unseen thoughts from the hidden reaches of his mind. Then his head bowed, and his pupils drifted up, and locked onto Sharon’s. “u r shaman,” he breathed. “so u must kno dis truf too.”

“Which one?”

“dat carin is a lie. dat ppl only care 4 wat it is dat mak em feel betr, or mak em fel mor gr8, or giv em somthin els, in a tim not yet com. u kno dis. u r shaman. u must kno.”