London, 1979, all sides of the city have delved into chaos. A dark fog and oleaginous smoke wafts over the horizon from dawn to dusk. The radio waves chatter that it is an astral phenomena, that this too shall pass, and the sun will rise again.
The...
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"When upon revellers the stained dawn breaks The fierce ideal comes with it; at that hour, Stirred by some terrible avenging power, An angel in the sated brute awakes."
/ Baudelaire / The Spiritual Dawn
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On a bleak night in August, the city of London momentarily paused its bustle to watch a boy die.
His pale cheek bit the pavement, black robes sopped to soak up the red. He ruptured over the rain spattered brick, a crater formed where his brow should have been, fragmented like a hammer to dry clay. One limb lay splayed while another danced through the lines of traffic, dodged and wove around as any piece of litter cast from the highest buildings. He stroked briefly, fingers clasped tight around a piece of ivory fabric, and seized once more when the dying was permanently done.
The fabric may have been taupe, it would become quite hard to tell once the torrential downpour had washed the majority of him down the sewer shafts.
Bystanders would claim that he had writhed, not seized. That an arm had been picked up in the snarling teeth of a terrier; others insisted it had been a Rottweiler. That he was blue before he fell, not after, when the chill of evening had curdled his remaining skin and painted it the color of fresh breaths in spring. They would tell more fantastical lies to cover what little sparks of truth had been caught by eyes more keen than club rats and cab drivers; the latter of which would turn the damage to the bonnet of his car over to the insurance company, claiming his full coverage should repair what the act of some god had done.
They hadn't a clue.
The dog had been a Pomeranian, no larger than the flapping handbag of the woman who commandeered him, tugging his leash taut when the wet of its nose met the liquid of the boy. The arm had been taken by a street sweeper, mulled into the grinding fabric that juggled beer bottles and soda cans down Shoreditch High Street. There was a fact in the way the shock had been dispersed; a hundred screams broke out at once, unable to reach a decibel high enough to mute the original rapture. That scream called on high drew others, a commotion that opened window shafts, sent girls to the fire escapes to gawk over the rails, caused cigarettes to stub and footfall to cackle through puddles and sillage.
Inside of a pub called The Latern, another boy, not so unalike the one that soiled a cool night in August, pulled his cloak hood over the tufts of his drenched hair. Cocking his head to the rubber of his shoes, he raised his lip and turned, begrudgingly, toward the bar.
He hated the psychedelic muggle music that crooned over the dreary walls, disliked soiling his best pair of boots, and certainly could have gone without the dramatics.
The rain continued to pour.
And in the underbelly of the city, where the rats scurried about corpses of lesser men, their toes painting the boards of a forgotten house with drops of crimson stench, a spindly hand raised his wand and carved a name out of a long list of those exceptionally lesser men.
