The Minority Council (34 page)

Alan began an incoherent splutter; a look from Templeman cut him off. I shuffled to the door and let myself out, forcing us to breathe long and slow, driving back the sapphire rage that blurred our vision. The cold air outside was a relief, a slap to the senses; and as we marched downstairs to the car the shadows scuttled out of our way.

Templeman followed a few minutes later.

He didn’t start the engine, but sat behind the wheel, looking at nothing much. Finally, “Do you have a plan?”

“I’m getting there.”

“Do you think summoning this creature is the right move just now? You are hardly at your best.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Matthew,” insisted Templeman, leaning back against the headrest, “you can’t be a hero for everyone.”

“This is just good housekeeping.”

“Then we can help you,” he said.

“And you bloody will, too! You, Caughey, the whole bloody Minority Council, you are bloody going to be there when we deal with this thing and, for all I care, you can bloody stick your arm into its belly and go rummaging around for a burning heart, because there’s nothing quite as heroic as an amputated arm and death by decapitation.”

He let me seethe a bit longer, then asked, “Where would you like to go now?”

“Enfield.”

“Enfield?” he asked, unable to keep the surprise from his voice. “Why—what’s in Enfield?”

“A problem I’ve been neglecting.”

“Can you share?”

I thought about it.

Thought about the Beggar King, and heard at the back of my mind the rolling voice of Dudley Sinclair, the sudden pressure of his hand gripping my arm.

“Maybe later.”

We drove north in silence.

I leant my head against the window and looked at nothing much and everything in particular. Green Lanes was a suburban road that stretched for miles, crawling past traffic lights until the road signs started offering directions to motorways, to giant shopping centres clinging to the edge of the metropolis, and, all-purpose, to ‘The North.’

In Enfield, Templeman asked, “Is there somewhere particular you want to go?”

“We’re looking for Windmill Lane.”

“What’s at Windmill Lane?”

“A house the Beggar King mentioned.”

“The Beggar King? What has the Beggar King to do with this?”

“Hopefully, nothing.”

We turned off into a network of back streets, the kind that are a rat-runner’s dream and a council nightmare: cars parked on both sides, creating just enough room for one vehicle to go one way and get stuck behind a garbage truck. Houses of red brick, with white-painted woodwork around the front porch and the bay window, looked out onto a street built just too early for garaging. To a cursory inspection, nothing in these roads marked left from right, north from south; but look closer. Here, a family with children of an age that liked painting and pasting had filled the windows with cut-out fairies, and cats with crayon eyes. There, a woman who loved lavender had filled her entire front garden with the stuff. Next door
lived a family who believed in designer landscaping, as evidenced by zen pebbles and a stone vase. There, a house turned into flats, a worn buzzer by the scruffy front door; here someone with a belief in privacy, thick net curtains and a privet hedge eight feet high; next door a family who’d had experience of crime, bars on the ground-floor windows and another gate across the porch. Round the corner, and there was the house of the obligatory nationalist family, a Greek flag flying in splendour atop a pole in the front garden; two houses down, another family had felt the knee-jerk need to fill their windows with tatty Union Jacks. An upstairs window carried a scarf proclaiming the wonders of Enfield Town F.C., for this will be the year that they are promoted from the Ryman League Division One North to the full glories of the Conference South.

And there was Windmill Lane, a street like any other, uphill towards where once there might even have been a windmill and where now a sixth-form college invited attendees to Be All You Can Be.

The house where we stopped looked unremarkable. A tall laurel hedge had grown wild, and one of the numbers on the front door hung crooked by a single nail. The one black dustbin was empty, its lid greasy with rotting leaves from an overhanging lime tree. Templeman said, “What’s here?”

I didn’t answer, levering myself out of the car one cautious limb at a time.

The windows were dark, barred and shuttered on every floor. A frosted bathroom window had been broken on the first floor, the glass uncleared on the ground below. Broken from the inside, glass falling out.

At the front door I jiggled a set of keys in the lock until one of the right make fitted, and coaxed it to assume the right ridges and dips, metal moving at my command until, with a click, the lock sprang open. The hall was cold; the door slammed heavily behind. A tiled hall, high ceiling, wallpaper peeling away. Someone had left the mains sockets on, but I couldn’t taste power in them. There was a no-smell; not dirt or bleach, dust or mould; not smoke or cooking, or any warmth that suggested people had been here. Wide rooms led off either side of the hall, but held no furniture. A flight of stairs led to a first floor as bare as the one below. We ran our fingers along the cold walls, feeling for electricity in the wires, sounds in the telephone, the warmth of someone else’s skin staining the sense of the place, and found none of it. A minimum of light crawled round the shutters. In one room, a fireplace had been boarded up. Finger marks had been scratched into the top of the ply: white ragged dents in lines of four. We traced our fingers into those lines and our tongue went dry, thick leather in our mouth, and we tasted dust. In the bathroom, greasy tidemarks were layered above a hair-filled plug. A spider scuttled away down the hole of the sink, and where there should have been a mirror in a frame, now there was just a pale patch on the wall.

Downstairs, the door to the back garden was bolted shut, the garden itself overgrown with stinging nettles, buddleia and brambles. I cast my mind out for the usual tribes of rats and burrowing foxes that thrived in these places, and found nothing. Not even the limp-clawed grandfather rat that scuttled through the back gardens of the city without fear, not even the mangled pigeon with nowhere better to hide; nothing moved or answered my call.

Templeman murmured, “What is this place? Why is the Beggar King so interested?”

We made no reply. The cold was more than a condition of the weather; it was a thing that came from the walls, that had been scratched into the wood with bloody nails, raised up where a mirror should have stood, crawling out of the cracks between the broken tiles on the floor.

A triangular door in the side of the staircase opened into another, steeper stair to a basement. Here there was no light past the low ceiling, and where there should have been more rats and the dripping of busy pipes changing temperature, silence. I summoned a bubble of sodium orange light to my fingers, lobbed it ahead of us and, one hand on the ceiling and the other on the wall, eased down the stairs.

The basement was one room, in which my bubble of light merely thickened the shadows in the corners rather than dispelling the dark. The floor was concrete, smeared with a fine white grain of dirt. Heavy furniture with square hard legs had been dragged through the concrete recently, taken chips out of the stairs and scraped along the walls. In the centre of the ceiling a bare pendant sat where a light-bulb should have hung; a fuse box squatted with its door hanging.

Where the basement met the front wall of the house, there was bare brick, the mortar exposed and crumbling. There was a taste on the air, a buzz against the skin, that went to the brain without asking permission of the nerves. It made our teeth itch, the little bones inside our hand ache, each part with an individual distress.

Templeman stood at the bottom of the stairs, unsure where to go or what to see. We said, “Do you feel it?”

“I feel… something.”

“Why would the fairy godmother experiment with dust?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps to increase its potency. But that would also kill his clientele faster, so I do not think that could be it. Maybe to reduce its lethality? Just how does this place connect to the fairy godmother?”

I looked round at the bare walls, scratched my heel into the empty floor. “I’m not sure that it does.”

Our gaze drifted back to the cracks in the wall. Even in the little light from our spell, there was something visible between the bricks, something about the way the mortar crumbled, a scattering of fragments on the floor. I edged closer, scratched my fingers along the gaps, peered at the dirt in my nails, licked our lips and tasted… a place where taste should have been, but wasn’t.

“Careful,” rasped Templeman. “There’s something here that shouldn’t be.”

“I never thought I’d hear you say that,” I replied, running my fingers over the bricks. More mortar dust fell away, tumbling around my feet; and there was something more than mortar in it. Something pale, yellowish, embedded in the dust, which, as it fell, tumbled across the concrete floor a bit too far, and rolled in just the wrong direction. I rubbed some between my thumb and finger, breaking down the larger lumps of mortar until there was just a yellow stain.

And looked down, at the faintest of rattlings.

At my feet, where the dust had crumbled from the wall, making a sad little pile on the floor, some of it had started to bounce. The fragments of mortar and dirt tumbled around each other like water bouncing in a puddle during
heavy rain. I took a sharp step back, and the cracks in the wall began to spread, running through the mortar, and there was something in the crevices, a whooshing, a pulling, a pushing all at once and, just on the edge of hearing, what might have been the start of an animal scream.

I heard Templeman shout and ducked down, covering my head with my arms as, bursting like steam under pressure, the mortar crumbled and the dust shot out, in great yellow billows. It exploded from the wall in a shower of broken masonry; unmistakable, though, the smell of it, the taste of it, the feel of it on the skin, oily and dry at the same time: thick yellow clouds of fairy dust filling the room.

I held my breath, pressed my sleeve across my nose and mouth, and tried not to look. But there was a noise with it, a more than natural noise, more than dust roaring as it burst out of the cracks. There were

voices in the dust

screaming voices all of them screaming at once trying to be heard and for just a moment as we opened our eyes, we looked up into the yellow roaring mass and saw

faces

just a moment.

Just an instant.

There and gone, swallowed up whole into the dust but there were eyes moving in that cloud, made of that cloud, eyes as yellow as the dust itself and mouths that opened to scream but had no throats to swallow and fingers that clawed at the air and were the air itself and as soon as you looked, they were gone, consumed back into the mass.

I heard Templeman shouting something, heard the crack of concrete under strain, felt a hand grab me by the
back of my shirt and there was a thing spinning out of the darkness

and then darkness absolute.

He was saying, “When the Beggar King calls, of course it’s important. No. I understand that. I understand that, but what you need to understand is this: the beggars have eyes everywhere and if they’ve found… I know that. Of course I can arrange that, I understand. No. No, listen. Yes. I understand. I’ll handle it.”

I risked lifting my head. Instantly he was there, phone vanishing into his pocket. His clothes were smeared with dirt, but somehow Templeman had cleaned his face and hands back to their usual polished selves; and his expression as he looked down was all concern. “Mr Mayor, are you all right?”

I considered the hypothesis.

“No,” I concluded. “Not really, but what’s new?”

Templeman had somehow dragged me to the top of the basement stairs. Below, only a few feet below, the basement floor was a mess of broken bricks and shattered concrete. I shook off splinters of mortar and patted dust from my clothes. He flinched as the yellow stuff rose in the air. “Please do be careful, Mr Mayor. The circumstances were less than hygienic.”

He held out a hand to help pull us up, and we were not so far above our own distress that we refused it.

“The wall,” he explained as I felt my head for a new patch of crusting blood. “There was fairy dust in the mortar. Somehow our presence must have disturbed it, and the reaction was… unfortunate. I pulled you out of the basement; it seemed the least that could be done.”

“Fairy dust in the walls of the house,” I acknowledged. “And in the floors and ceiling, I’d guess. Dust everywhere, and doesn’t it love to scream.”

“I am not familiar with this phenomenon,” he admitted. He stood at a tactful distance, a man ready to catch a fall, as I limped towards the door. “By my understanding, fairy dust is inert until activated by an interaction with human physiology.”

“They were experimenting.”

“ ‘They’?”

“That’s what the beggars said. Find a house like any other in a street with not much going for it, and you’ll find some bastard experimenting with fairy dust.”

“The fairy godmother?”