The Midnight Mayor (27 page)

He was good at not meeting anyone’s gaze, but scanned the street constantly as if we weren’t looking at him, his ridiculous dark glasses pushed up on a great fat nose. Oda, seeing us stare, said, “
There?
You want to go in there?”

“Yes.”

“
Why?
” she sighed. “When I last checked, you were a sorcerer, not a Jedi.”

“You’ve seen
Star Wars
?”

“Seen it and denounced it.”

“You’ve
denounced Star Wars
?”

She looked me straight in the eye and said, “Hollywood should not glorify witches.”

“I think you’ve missed the point . . .”

“I also denounce Harry Potter.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Because . . .”

“. . . because literature, especially children’s literature, should not glorify witches.”

“Oda, what do you do for fun?”

She thought about it, then said, without a jot of humour, “I denounce things.”

“Let’s forget I asked.”

Anissina, as always, said nothing. I nodded towards the door. “I want to go in there.”

“Do you really think this is the most productive way you can go about . . .” - Oda grimaced, then spat the words, “. . . saving this damned city?”

“You used ‘damned’ in a . . .”

“Purely literal sense. I do not blaspheme
nor
have a sense of humour.”

“Mo’s shoes want to go into Voltage.”

“You speak as if they have a life of their own.”

“You speak as if you can’t imagine they could. I had a pair of shoes, a few years back, that had been rained on by the Singapore monsoon, got sand in them by the Indian Ocean, run the best part of the Bronx and been scoffed at by waiters in Istanbul. And that was after it was sewn together by a child in rural China, carted on the back of a truck across the country, boxed and flown around the world for me to buy. Find me a pair of shoes that hasn’t got a life of its own, and I’ll find you a blister plaster that actually works. Deal?”

Oda scowled, and looked towards the dark door of the gaudy club. “Voltage?” she asked.

“Voltage,” I said.

 

The bouncer took one look at us, and said, “Wrong shoes.”

You can’t intimidate bouncers. It’s not just that they’re paid to be tough - it’s that they’re paid
and
bored. It’s a bad combination.

I said, “Really? You sure?”

“Sorry, mate. You can’t come in with those shoes.”

As he spoke, a gaggle of kids, not out of their teens, were waved through without a glance, bundling down the dark passage of the stairs into the pumping gloom inside. I asked carefully, “Am I too old?”

“You know, mate, I’ve got my instructions . . .”

A CCTV camera was hanging over the door. I considered it, I considered him. CCTV cameras are easy to confuse, if you know how. I didn’t even have to wave at it, and it was willing to turn the other screen. I said, “Shapeshifter.”

He had shoulder muscles the size of an ox. They tensed. His coat nearly rode up a foot from his ankles. I waited. He said, “OK. Wizard.”

“Not quite.”

“It’s not your kinda place.”

We laughed. “I know that. What’ll it take to get inside?”

“I’d like to help you mate, seriously, I’d . . .”

We reached forward suddenly, not blinking in warning, and snatched the glasses from his eyes. Beneath, his irises were solid spheres of bright orange, tinted yellow at the edges and filling the expanse of his eyes. A pair of pigeon’s eyes in a human’s head. He reached for me instinctively, one hand pushing back my chin, the other going for my right arm, all martial arts glitter. A sharp and purposeful click stopped him. Oda’s sleeve was pressed to the back of his neck. There was something in it more than a hand. She said, “If this wasn’t an area of public view, it’d be
your
spinal cord on the pavement. Let go of him.”

His fingers eased back; I staggered away. Oda looked at me nicely and smiled. “Are there any alleys round here?”

“Don’t kill him.”

“Imagine the trouble if I
don’t
kill him. This is for your good as well as the city’s.”

“You’re smart. Use your imagination. Don’t kill him.”

“He’ll only . . .”

“Cause trouble, yes, I know. We just don’t care. Deal with it.” Her face flickered in annoyance. “You know, I could just . . .”

“If you kill him, we’ll know,” we snapped. We weren’t sure how we’d know, but she didn’t need to know that. We looked her straight in the eye and added, “We’ll know. Deal with it
nicely
.”

“I’ll go.” Anissina. When she did speak, she was to the point. “Give me the gun.”

Oda scowled, but carefully shifted places with Anissina, whose fingers slithered over the black metal pressed into the bouncer’s neck. Oda pulled the Alderman’s sleeve sharply down over Anissina’s hand, to hide the worst of the barrel. “Don’t think about it, sister,” she hissed, wrapping Anissina’s fingers tighter round the trigger. “When he tries something, don’t think. It’ll be easier that way.”

Anissina said nothing. We had no idea if she was going to kill the bouncer either. But I figured he stood a better chance with anyone who wasn’t Oda.

“Walk,” said Anissina, and slowly, obediently, the bouncer began to shuffle from the door. I watched them walk down the street. It looked like trouble, all awkward movements and turns; but if an Alderman couldn’t look after things, then who could? They vanished round the corner into a side street, and like the wise woman said, we chose not to think about it.

“Shall we?” asked Oda, looking into the dark mouth of the club.

“Dance?” I asked.

“What?”

“Shall we dance, it’s a . . . forget it. Come on.”

We went inside.

 

If the outside had been all glitzy gaudy glam, the interior of Voltage did its best to live up to the name. I could smell the electricity, sizzling the air, making every breath buzz. I could feel it, hear it like the hum of a computer battery kept overcharged; it made the hairs on the back of my hands stand on end, and it was all we could do to walk without sparking.

Flat plasma screens had been embedded in one wall, round circles of not-quite-glass within which wriggles of blue, green, purple and white mini-lightning danced and twisted. When we pressed our fingers against them, all the current danced towards our finger ends, turning them the colour of their own fire. The ceiling was set with twisting lights that gave off every colour except ordinary white, while above the bar in the corner deep UV blue mingled with a flickering strobe to set off the painted faces of the bartenders in psychedelic strangeness. And all the time, there was the music.

It went:

- too loud to hear anything else, though we knew from the open mouths of the dancers pressed close on the floor that they were shouting, screaming, talking, flirting, with all these inaudible things lost behind the relentless heartbeat of the bass. Lost too, any lyrics or other rhythms and beats; there was just
dum dum dum dum
, to which heads bopped, hips thrust, elbows flapped, knees jerked, feet turned, sentences tumbled, blood pumped. The air tasted of salty teaspoons, smelt of thin slices of cucumber peeled away with a razored steel blade, and sweat, and static, and of course, there it was slicing through it all, a flash with every beat, the scarlet stench of magic. You don’t have a shapeshifter guard the door unless there’s something worth guarding.

There weren’t any stools at the bar. Comfort wasn’t part of the atmosphere. I leant on the counter and rubbed my temples, tried to drive the ache from the strobe out of my skull. Oda leant next to me, smiled at the barman and said, “You got anything that isn’t alcoholic?”

The barman looked at her like she was a mammoth.

She shrugged. “My hopes were few.”

There was a list of cocktails laminated to the surface of the bar. For each cherry-topped drink, I could have had three home-microwaved suppers. I pointed at one and said, “That.”

“A Hot Red Sex?”

We weren’t sure how to answer. “Sure,” we mumbled. We’ll try anything, once.

The barman turned; the barman worked. The thing he ended up putting in front of me was, in the UV light, the colour and consistency of lumpy custard. We sniffed it carefully and smelt booze and peach juice. We dipped a finger in it, licked it dry, couldn’t really taste anything. We held it up to the light. Oda said, “Are you going to drink it or not?”

We took a careful sip. It was like swallowing a fermented mango soaked in a vat of acid. We wheezed. Oda turned away, and smiled. Teetotal. It made a sort of inevitable, self-righteous sense. I pushed the glass across the counter to a safe distance, just in case it started to melt, and turned my head towards the dance.

“See anything that sets your Satanic senses buzzing?” asked Oda nicely.

“Yes.”

“Going to do anything about it?”

“Don’t know. Don’t know what it is yet.”

“That’s the problem with mystic forces,” murmured Oda. “They tell you that you’re going to die, but they never specify how. It’s so you can feel the fear before the end, as some small redress for the life of arrogance you have led.”

“You know, you could learn something from Anissina.”

“I don’t think so.”

“No, seriously. You could learn how to be quiet.”

“Information,” she replied primly, “is not truth.”

Mo’s shoes didn’t seem much help any more. Now that we had arrived, they didn’t even seen inclined to dance. I looked at the people on the dance floor, faces coming and going like a jerking film in the glare of the strobe. All young: kids, teenagers, dressed in the kind of scruff that needs a rich man’s budget, jeans slashed the right way, skin pierced with the right studs, hair done at a hundred quid for each gelled-up spike, brands artfully aged on cotton deliberately stained. The bouncer had been right - we didn’t fit in. Too old, too mundane. Only our shoes were in the right area, all style and huff.

Their dance had a strange uniformity. It wasn’t what we’d imagined dance should be; our thoughts filled with ideas of roses, moonlight, a boy, a girl, or at the very least two individuals with a thing for each other, an expression of something for when the crude mundanities of speech failed, a way to mention sex - a concept we found absurd, if fascinating - without having to go into biology. This was about sex; there was no denying it. But it had no sexiness, no intimacy nor sensuality, but was merely about fondling as many bottoms as you could in a single night, or peering down as many tops as your height would permit, all the time wiggling and shaking with strange expressions on your face as though to say, “you think I can do this with my hips
now
, wait till you see me naked”. Some did it better than others, and danced in a way that spoke of sex but promised you this was the nearest you’d get, distance making it more alluring. Others just fumbled and writhed, but always,
always
the floor twisted and rose and fell and turned and moved to the relentless bass coming out of . . . where? I couldn’t see speakers, couldn’t see any source for the sound, it just seemed to shimmer into being behind the eardrums, not bothering to soften down its punches on the way in.

Oda said, “You’re ogling.”

“What?”

“You are staring lewdly at the dancers.”

“I am not!”

“You are. It is highly distasteful.”

We bit our lip. “Listen,” I said, nearly shouting over the din, “there’s something . . . off.”

“You use ‘off’ like I use ‘rotting’, yes?”

“Where’s the music coming from?”

She opened her mouth to say something smart, looked round, and closed it again just in time. There was a long pause as she scanned the room, peering into every corner, over the ceiling and through the faces bobbing on the floor. Finally she said, “All right. So there’s no speakers. So?”

“So that doesn’t surprise you?”

“I am never surprised.”

“That doesn’t interest you?”

“As a means to an end, perhaps it is of some curiosity.”

“Where’s the sound coming from?”

She shrugged. “You’re our
saviour.
” The word dribbled out like bile from an empty stomach. “You figure it out.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be helping me?”

“I’m supposed to be keeping an eye on you. The rest was left unspecified.”

“Fat lot of use you are.”

“I got you in.”

“You were going to shoot—”

“I got you in.”

I scowled and turned away. The music made my head hurt, the beat thrummed up from my toes and used the insides of my stomach as a trampoline. I edged along the counter, trailing my fingers along the smooth metal, almost frictionless, sterile and clean, drifted to the nearest wall, where the plasma screens wriggled and writhed, pressed my fingers against it, then my ear, listened.

Dum dum dum dum dum dum
. . .

I could feel it
in
the walls, it made my ear ache. I squatted down and ran my fingers over the floor, and it was there too, setting the ground beneath my feet tingling like it was crawling with ants. A kid nearly trod on me, shouted some kind of abuse I couldn’t hear, and went on dancing. Pressing my back to the wall and facing the dancers, I edged round the length of the room, trailing my fingers over every surface I could find, tasting the air, smelling the sounds, looking for a way down deeper.

I found it: a locked door, unmarked, the same colour as the rest of the room. I felt around in my bag until I found a key of the right make, slid it in, coaxed it to an appropriate shape, turned it, opened the door. A wall of sound hit me, louder even than on the dance floor,
deDUM deDUM deDUM deDUM deDUM deDUM