went out in number 53, they went out in the waiting warning lights of the sleepy cars below.
Londoners almost never see proper darkness, not true, black-as-black, turn-from-the-sun, smother-the-moon darkness. Even when the curtains are drawn in their darkened rooms, there will be the shimmer of street light through the tiny gaps at the edges of the window frame, or the ready waiting light of a radio, or the glow of their mobile phone left on in the dark. There is no darkness darker than the darkness of the city, when all the lights go out. The stars and the moon are lost behind the bricks of the buildings. I snatched a sliver of neon as the last lamp went out outside, cradled it to my chest, let it warm the skin of my face and my curled fingertips, a tiny yellow shimmer in perfect black suffocation.
Then a trooper said, “Lights.”
I heard the racketing of equipment, the tearing of velcro, and as the first torch went on, it nearly blinded us; we flinched away from its white glare. Oda had a torch too - where she had concealed it I didn’t want to speculate - and for Anissina and Kemsley . . . we had to look twice, but yes, for certain, as I looked at the Aldermen, their eyes glowed. The mad, wild, spinning marble glow of the dragon that guards the gates of London. The sinking red vortex of an angry tiger burning bright, the kind of stare that looked at you and saw just an inanimate object standing between it - for those eyes weren’t human - and some more worthwhile meal. There’s reasons people fear the Aldermen.
We waited.
Silence. Nothing. On the whole surface of the planet, there is nowhere that silence is perfect - an engine will rumble in the distance, a bird will sing, an insect will scuttle, a leaf will sway in the wind, a footstep will fall, a brick will crumble. This was not a perfect silence either: the wind was humming outside, a low mournful tune from some forgotten folklore that had accepted death and now found the subject mundane; the drizzle was turning into rain that rattled like a thousand tiny ball bearings against the glass. But nothing in it that was human. I felt for Nair’s phone in my pocket, felt the burning brand on my right hand, aching.
Then Oda said, “I smell fumes.”
At once I looked up, and it seemed that the whole room in unison drew a long, deep breath through the nose, and all at once we all smelt what she, sharper, had detected - the unmistakable warm dry whiff of car fumes drifting across the floor. I risked a little more brightness to the neon glow in my hands, pushing the orange-pink bubble of illumination towards the door, and saw it, thin greyish-brown trickling smoke crawling in through the gaps, spilling over the floor.
I drew my light back, half-crawled to the window, and looked out. In the street below, a thing that might have been fog but for the sickly brownish thickness of it was rising, tumbling out of the exhaust pipes of the cars parked below without a sound, filling the streets like some swaying alien sea and still rising, crawling up the sides of the buildings and slithering through the gaps at the sides of the doors.
The troopers were already reaching for gas masks - say what you would, they were prepared. Kemsley and Anissina didn’t seem to care, their skin taking on a strange silverish tone, their nails already two inches too long, but in Oda’s eyes, even as she tied a scarf across her nose and mouth, I could see the fear. I drew my own scarf across my nose and mouth, but that still left eyes, already starting to sting and itch with the dirt crawling up in gaseous form from the door and floor.
And we heard, somewhere not so far off:
Dededededededededededededededede . . .
And perhaps a hint of:
Duhdeduhduh duhdeduhduh duhdeduhduh . . .
I looked back out of the window. It was a long way down, deeper since we now couldn’t see the bottom. By the faint neon clutched between my fingers, I could see the sickly fumes twist and spin around Anissina’s breath, as it seeped slowly from her peeled-back lips. She still superficially resembled a human - two arms, two legs and all the bits in between - but her skin had a metal shimmer to it, her hair a