blood seeping into our clothes, and I needed help.
So, since the bus was headed in that direction anyway, I went in search of the Long White City clan.
I do not know how the Long White City clan came to be founded. To find the answer to that would require a history of graffiti that I never came to grips with, since it is in the nature of the art that no one keeps an official log except the police, and they don’t like to talk about it much.
What I do know is that sometime in the late 1960s, it was observed by those who bother to keep track of such things that a mutual collective of painters and magicians were coming together in the area of London known as White City, and between them practising a new and interesting form of magic. It was the Whites, more than any other group, who pioneered research into the new symbols of magic that were emerging with the urban evolution of the craft. The pentangle star was rejected in favour of the red “stop” octagon as a symbol of power; mystic runes in the Viking style were swept away in favour of the scrawled loop of silver paint plastered across an open wall. It was discovered that it was cheaper to paint a gargoyle protector than to commission one in marble, and that they served roughly the same end; it was realised that the image of a great eye painted at the end of Platform 14 of Clapham Junction station was a scrying tool of infinitely more value than your traditional bowl of silver water, and that nothing bound as effectively as a double red parking line burnt chemically into the earth. It was realised that those who found magic in the words and pictures drawn in the night would be better off as a whole if they stuck together.
So the Whites came into existence, as a rag-tag formation of egoists, magicians, artists and all-purpose mystic dabblers, donating to a common union. I have some time for their methods, since only a fool denies the power of what they do, but generally my interest has been elsewhere.
The development of a new “mega-mall” in White City forced the majority of the clan to seek housing somewhere else. A war with the Tower, which at one time was the single most powerful mystic body in the city, drove them underground into the old tunnels of the Kingsway Telephone Exchange. That had been in Mr Bakker’s day; the bad old days of living shadows, dead sorcerers and broken promises. It was a war that had killed me before I even knew it had started. When we had come back, I and us, we and me, together in the same flesh, we fought back. Mr Bakker had died. So had his shadow. So had . . .
. . . others.
Mortals died so easily.
The ending of the war brought the Whites above ground again, albeit in smaller numbers than before. That the war ended and they survived had more than a little to do with us; we hoped they’d remember that tonight.
I looked for the signs.
An empty spray-paint can tossed onto the top of a bus shelter.
A painted elephant on the side of a house, playing a large trombone whose nose pointed further south.
A wall with four windows added onto it and a front door, from which a child with a red balloon peeked towards the nearest bus stop.
I changed buses.
A message scratched into the glass window of the bus - END OF THE LINE.
Not one from the Whites; they knew that such a message could be a threat, as well as an instruction. I ignored it.
A rat on the side of a green telephone router box, holding in its painted claws a tin of peanut butter, a knife dripping with a compromising yellow blob of the stuff, tip pointed towards the west.
I stayed on the bus.
A post standing up taller than the houses, laden with CCTV cameras, onto which a single white hand mark had been pressed in indelible paint. Another white hand a few doors down, and then more, getting more regular in succession until a school wall covered in a thousand multicoloured hand prints, of which only one was white, a single finger extended and pointing towards a door.
I got off the bus.
My head was the inside of a tumble-dryer, my throat the pipe for hot air. Someone was feeding old socks bound together with