A Night in the Necropolis

Night had the city by the throat, its grip a ferocious cold that gloved the spires of the churches. The frost rattled the slates like hailstone, it slowed the wind to a gentle walk and dried the streets to dusty whisperings that danced with the knife-like breeze. The cold and early January drove people off the streets, not even hardened clubbers ventured abroad this night.

I was lost.

The empty streets still retained that air of familiarity from the bustle of daylight, the roar hushed by darkness, the desert streets deserted by the day-time city. Now I searched for the same landmarks that got me through the tumbling ill-mannered traffic of the daytime hours. A glimpsed doubled golden arch, wan as it struggled for the warmth of it's reputation, sent me down one street towards a half recognised darkened building, black in the shadows.

Even the traffic lights that slowed my approach seemed slowed by the cold night as a chocolate bar wrapper performed a slow aerial ballet spiralling first up then down on the gathering air.

The buildings around me no longer had the same properties. Windows were eyeless, empty squares that were holes in the wall openings to darkness. More than that the buildings themselves had lost their substance, become flat and brittle, the yellow of the street lamps made pale as the cold distilled the warmth from it, making the illuminated buildings jaundiced and sick.

It was a sick city, hoardings screamed at the passer-by to buy, buy, buy! Complete your life by having this, that, or the other. Plywood covered nearly healed scars or bandaged self-inflicted wounds as the community constantly sought to improve itself.

I stopped the car and got out, the frost immediately lancing in through my coat, hastily I zipped the front to the top before jamming my hands deep into the pockets. Even the muted mumble of distant city, made up of tiny distant sounds, was stilled, far away a train rattled it's coaches to a siding, the slither of the catenary wires a zing before that too was unnaturally silenced.

I was the last man alive in the necropolis.

A necropolis, a city of the dead, not a catacombs or ossuary resting places for bones and the remains of the dead, but a city where the dead or undead reside. Which was fine by me, something inside me said, I was dead. Part of me had decided that it didn't matter whether I lived or died that night. Life had gone sour, problems seemed to be lying in wait for me at all turns. I had just gone through a bitter divorce and no matter how hard I tried I had written nothing of any quality for months. It wasn't just that it was beginning to look like I was going to have to get a job and earn some money, but I missed the ability to create and entertain with my words, as if I had been struck both deaf and dumb. I could identify with the dead of the necropolis.

Neither the silence nor the cold in themselves were particularly unnerving. The midweek mornings of any large town or city are less frenetic than the riotous weekends. As the cold air piled deeper and deeper upon itself it achieved a remarkable clarity and I could see the most amazing details from many hundreds of yards away. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, it didn't feel like the city I knew. The part of me that still craved life decided that I didn't belong here, now. I began to fear.

There are parts of the city that frighten, areas that scare by their scary tales, or forbid with the air of promised violence, that is a fear generated by man. It is a fear born of man against other men. It is spread by word of mouth or media it is repute as much as fact, less urban myth, more warning. What I was feeling was less fear of other men than a fear of the circumstances about me.

Unreasoned fear - fear of the unknown - is often derided as childish, ridiculed as primitive or denigrated as less than civilised. On the other hand it is a survival trait. Hormonal, certainly a product of the endocrynal system, for less sophisticated ancestors it was a useful signal - a suggestion that now is the time to leave, not hang around, come back later.

As well as opposable thumbs, speech and fire it is one of the things that lifted us from the beasts. But this was a fear that stemmed from the known, or rather the known unknown, as it was become. This was a part of the town I knew but now didn't, I didn't recognise it for what it was in daylight. I was lost in my own knowledge.

This was not now the city that I knew. For all of it's faults, it's lusts, it's pains, divisions, and fears that city had gone. It's learning and achievement, it's industry and service were forgotten as a terrible frozen death stalked the few hours at the bottom of the urban life-cycle. With the smallest of organisms first, the rodents and pigeons, then the cats and rats and dogs the piercing chill of pressing air swept the streets of it's life graduating to the beggars.

I was joined in the necropolis by the growing souls of the victims of the night.

I turned to look at my car, part of me still wishing that I could turn my back on this darkness and cold and seek it's shelter from the chill.

Sedately the moon neared the western horizon, slowly the humans shook themselves from sleep, and ventured into the frozen morning. Gradually industry and movement returned to the streets, noise cracked the frost and smothered the breeze.

Back in the car I was drawn and drove deeper and deeper into the dead zone.

The single bulb was a golden sunrise in the pale morning and I went to it, pulling the car into the kerb by the door. At first glance the cafe was as deserted as the streets had been, but it was steamy warm, and the golden bulbs were life. The man behind the counter looked as if he had stood there for ever, brown, wrinkled and liver-spotted, his face was a guarded welcome for someone else who couldn't or didn't sleep. He sold me a cup of tea and slipped rounds of toast into a grill, I sat down.

There was a paper on the red Formica table-top. The Brown man put the toast down next to it. The headlines shouted to anyone that cared to read about another murder, then in the next breath slammed the government about the way money was spent. I tried to read it as I ate the toast, the film of butter running down the slope onto my finger tips. I wiped my hands on a white paper napkin. The words on the pages made no sense, seeming to be in another language, that shared the same words but gave them a new meaning, one that I couldn't understand.

Her voice, when she first spoke, was the same, she used English words, she even put them together the same way but I couldn't hear the meanings. It was as if the cold which still chilled me deeply. More deeply than anything I have ever known, had pierced to my brain and numbed it. I mused about having contracted hypothermia, which shuts down the capillaries and starves the brain of oxygen - and which is supposed to be a pleasant way to go, the victim falls into a deadly sleep. But it was more than that. I struggled to make sense of her language.

"I said, 'Do you have a light please?'" She repeated as if talking to an idiot or a foreigner.

I jumped, and struggled to search all of my pockets at once, eventually finding the lighter that I normally carry tucked into one corner of my coat. I lit her cigarette, which she drew on deeply before releasing the smoke with exaggerated relief. "Thank you," she said and went to retreat to the corner, unconvincingly.

"I'm sorry I was a little distracted, I wasn't being rude." I apologised, she took the proffered conversation.

I really must have been distracted to miss her. She looked like she had come from a club, or one of the casinos, in her evening gown, and long coat. She reminded me of something I had once seen in a museum, a sword. It had been made years ago, but it looked new and it had a balance and quality to it, in it's proportions, that made it a thing of beauty. You just had to look at it to know that it was sharp, the edges seemed to split the light and it warned you not to touch because it was as dangerous to the person that wielded it as to the person that would be struck by it. The woman in front of me now had the same quality, the same deadly beauty. Like the sword you would have been hard put to place her age, sort of mid-twenties going on timeless.

"I could tell_" she said, "That you were deep in thought. I sometimes feel like that at this time of the morning. That's why I come here. I can think. What brings you out?"

Something in my head was telling me not to answer, to shut up, to leave it, let it go. Vampire queens looked like this woman, ageless, used, but beautiful. Strong, lithe, hard, deadly, but somewhere in the night I had crossed into the necropolis, and I was already a dead man walking. I didn't give a fuck anymore. I started to talk, to tell her about the way my life had gone recently and she listened, she listened attentively and, I felt, compassionately. I unfolded the sad history of my divorce and the writing.

She asked intelligent questions and nodded sympathetically in all of the right places, and I went deeper, probing my own sadness and anger. I couldn't stop talking to her. I wanted to tell her everything. Occasionally I would ask her something but she evaded my questions easily, skilfully and gently, although she did volunteer her name, Jessica. Not that that mattered I babbled and spewed my life out onto the table for her.

"Sounds a little like my life_" she said at length.

"No way!" I said incredulously, not realising how stupid I sounded.

She nodded, "I had a night like the one you've described, a few years ago, not too far from here. In fact," she declared emphatically, "It was identical, and I met someone, but that's where the similarity ends." She jammed out the smouldering stub of her cigarette.

"How do you mean?" I asked, and offered her another light.

"You met me and I'm going to do you a favour." She smiled bewitchingly, if she'd asked for my testicles there and then, I'd have used my butterknife to remove them for her.

"You're a nice bloke, from the sound of it you've have a good life, some bad breaks but nothing you won't come back from. But you're at a cross-roads. Go one way and you'll go back to the light and life and you'll survive.

"But right now you're looking down another road, the one I'm on, and you want to go down it. To tell the truth I think you'd enjoy walking a little part of the way." Again she smiled, "You would like to sleep with me wouldn't you?"

My mouth fell open. That's not a question that I'm used to being asked. Only one other woman has asked me that and I married her. But Jessica laughed, "You see? That's what I mean. In my world you wouldn't last five minutes."

"What world is that?" I asked dry mouthed.

"Some people, who don't know better, call it Sin, as if it was a place you could drive to. It's a world of hard men and even harder women, drugs and money that sort of thing. You've got to watch your back constantly, not only for your enemies, but for your friends as well.

"Look out there and see the clubs and the clubbers - there's not many about tonight - they're nomads, moving from one noise to another. But there are other clubs, other people out there, Steve.

The clubbers you can see are fish, in the upper part of the water, if you like. The people I'm talking about are the sharks and predators that swim deeper and only come up to the surface to prey on the smaller fish. They're people who'd cut you up as soon as look at you, and not worry about it. You'd never be missed, and never be found. If you were they'd never identify you."

"And this is your world?" I asked. I'm not a complete idiot, I know there are people out there like that, it's just that those I have met had never had Jessica's articulate charisma.

"I fell into it the same way you're about to - I reached the cross roads you're at and I met someone who drew me in. Now I'm one of the sharks that's always swimming looking for fresh meat, scenting out blood in the water.

Do yourself a favour Steve, go home, get some sleep, get a bath, have a shave and get your life sorted."

And with that she got up.

"Why?" I asked, as she walked out into the morning, I was asking eight questions at once.

She turned, "I'm not hungry," she said simply, answering none of them and left.

I sat there for a while, gobsmacked by what had just happened.

The Brown Man behind the counter spoke, "She's right, listen to her. Go. Now!"

I walked out to the car and things slid into place. The buildings outside leafed out of the morning light and assumed their usual solid, reality, the sounds of the city were back to normal. The day even seemed warmer, I'd come out of the far side of the necropolis and I was still alive. More than that I cared about being alive.

I did as Jessica suggested, went home and got myself sorted out, things are coming together, the writing's much better and I've even got an agent now.

Other men - greater and lesser than I am - would have gone back and sought her. Perhaps they'd be arrogant enough to believe that they could hack it, perhaps they'd believe that they could redeem her. I couldn't, wouldn't go and look for her, I've never had that kind of self-belief, but more than that_.

I've been around a bit, I've met a lot of women. I've met women

who were like my mum, or a sister, or a neighbour. I've met women who I'd ached to spend the night with, and women that have made me run a mile. I've met women that were wet dreams made flesh and others that were real pigs in skirts, some that had genuine inner beauty and those that were as false as their make-up. But Jessica transcended all of those. It's a cliché I know, but I felt like I'd been blessed by meeting a goddess.

I've thought about it a lot but I've never decided exactly what kind of goddess I did meet. Part of me said I had had a close encounter with Aphrodite, another part of me said she was some kind of Death Queen, which ever it doesn't matter, I still dream about her.

The thing is, the real reason I don't go looking for her, and perversely it was one of the things about her that I found particularly attractive, is that she scared me shitless.