and started to climb, scrambling over the old red tiles to the chimney stack and dragging me up behind her. My hand slipped in her fingers, blood sliding over skin between us; she caught me by the wrist and pulled, dragging me up to the top of the roof and looking down. On the other side of the slope, the roof dropped down into darkness, promising at something else: a flatter roof, another building, just below. We slid down the other side, tiles bumping and banging uncomfortably beneath us, reached the gutter, crawled over it, the old black metal creaking uncomfortably, jumped the little foot or so between us and the next building, landed on a roof of stagnant dirty water, old pigeon poo, silent, rusted vents and cracking grey concrete.
“London Bridge,” I hissed. “We have to get to London Bridge.” Behind us, Harlun and Phelps was a burning crimson brightness, the whole tower lit up with it, and there was someone in the door, the same one we’d jumped out of, hands in pockets, looking at us, just looking.
Oda had seem him too, and didn’t seem to be able to take her eyes away. I shook her, and still she didn’t turn. We slapped her, hard, across the cheek, and her hand instinctively rose into a fist, that stopped its swing an inch from our nose.
“Listen!” we hissed. “She cast the curse on London Bridge, she summoned him on London Bridge, it’s where it has to end; we have to get there!”
She crawled to the edge of the roof, looked down. Below us were concrete tiles, a walkway, a hangover from the days when architects had big dreams and only limited budgets, part of an overhead network that stretched from the northern reaches of the Barbican on the Goswell Road to the southern face of Moorgate and London Wall. In the 1960s, it would have seemed like science fiction; today, almost no one knew the walkways even existed. Oda slithered off the edge of the roof down the short drop onto the tiles, which thudded and echoed heavily, the mortar never even laid. I crawled after her, flopped, fell, landed on my toes and fell onto my knees, banging my hands against the stones.
Oda picked me up by the armpits, pulled me away from the burning-blood building behind; and there they were, those friendly mystic yellow lines on the floor that would always lead you somewhere you never expected to be. I pointed away from them: “There! Moorgate - there!”
We ran, as graceful as a burst beetroot. Concrete flags, lights coming on around us, the area of darkness fading as we fled from Harlun and Phelps, dead container plants, old cigarette packets tumbling in the street, blood between our fingers. There were stairs down from the highwalks, strange dark concrete stairs smelling of piss and old thin mould, running down the square back of a black-glassed slab of a building, moulded out of the old walls of a domed pub; the street below, Moorgate, all yellow-orange neon glow and sleepy shops selling chocolate, coffee and suits. An Underground stop, but the trains wouldn’t be running; a bus stop, but it was waiting for night buses, for twenty-four-hour routes, both of which by their very natures were destined never to quite turn up when you needed them.
Not a car in sight, not a cab, not a truck, the city was as dead as a street could be, the utter silence of an empty road that should have been heaving, that lived to heave, roadworks and traffic jams. We could half-close our eyes and there they were; the shadows ran to our feet, tumbled up from the pavements and between the cracks in the tarmac, remembering the daylight when they buzzed and shuffled and heaved and pressed against each other in the busy need to get from A to B as quickly as possible, important business, important things to do in the city, the smell of traffic and the juddering of builder’s tools into the earth. Silence in the city is terrifying, beautiful, a reminder of just how small man is in the streets he built. We ran down the middle of the road, letting the shadows trail us, feeding on some of their memories, recollections of rush hour and busy, busy, busy, feet slapping dully on the white hazard lines in the middle of the too-narrow street for all the traffic of day, and Oda followed, stumbling like a deranged