Read by Gloria Sanders
In the Uber back from the final count, Ceri and Jack were speechless with shock and delight. Neither of them had managed a mayoral campaign before – nobody else would have taken a chance on them, honestly – and they’d done it. Their candidate had fucking won!
Jack tugged feverishly at his artisanal haircut. “Oh my God. Wow. This is … Christ!” He turned to Ceri, Manga-eyed. “You know what this means?!”
“Yeah!” yelped Ceri. “CV gold! We nailed it! And also I have to call my mum right now. She’s such a Tory.”
“It means Augaenysse controls everything,” said Jack slowly. “Transport. Education. Infrastructure.”
Ceri stopped, iPhone half-out of her original 90s puffa jacket. Augaenysse was a wicked boss, truly unique, but actually, you know, running London?
“Hmm,” Ceri hesitated. “You know, I didn’t really think of that?”
“Yeah,” said Jack “me neither. I mean we had a whole alphabet of plans. Plan A if she lost, B for disqualification-”
“C for public nudity,” Ceri reminisced. “D for death threats on Question Time.”
“Literally down to Z for a rap-battle with Count Binface. But did we ever …?”
“No,” said Ceri. “I don’t think we did.” A horrible feeling like she’d left the gas on was squatting on what remained of her brain after forty-eight hours’ obsessive count-watching.
“You know that job-interview where they asked us about our worst faults and I said that I did too much forward-thinking and planned for too many eventualities?” said Jack in a dead voice.
“Yeah?” said Ceri, a tiny chick of hope cracking the eggshell of her despair.
“Yeah,” said Jack, “that was bollocks.”
There was a brief hard-thinking silence.
“We’ve fucked up haven’t we?” Jack muttered.
And Ceri said “Oh shit.”
*
Augaenysse the Violator, exiled Chaos-Empress of Corbathia, wasn’t your average candidate. There was definitely something dark and threatening about her, and her personal style was firmly on the goth side of indie. But she was eyecatching, newsworthy and above all, different.
Ceri and Jack had been hurrying back from Pret through Parliament Square when they’d first spotted her, straddling the statue of Oliver Cromwell, foretelling dominion and ruin, demanding worthless rulers be cast into the pit and anarchy unleashed. Three years post-graduation both were thin and ragged from endless internships; eyes hollow from social-media monitoring and hands ribboned by stuffing envelopes, with no career-progression in sight. Augaenysse was their chance. Specifically, the chance to put “London Mayoral Campaign” on their half-empty CVs. She wanted power, they wanted jobs, and voters wanted change. It was a slam-dunk.
So they’d gone all in, scoring interviews on This Morning and Any Questions, half-a-million Instagram followers and even sponsorship from Zara. Despite Jack and Ceri’s advice, Augaenysse’s manifesto had been less a series of considered policies than a blood-inked screed threatening to grind her enemies’ bones to dust – but nonetheless it’d really seemed to connect with a lot of voters.
Nobody could accuse Augaenysse and her Ravaging Carnage Party of sitting on the fence. Whether it was rapine, destruction, bus-fares, free childcare for under-fives or the brutal enslavement of humanity (a key talking-point for her) she had a forthright opinion and often a viral soundbite.
And now she was going to be Mayor of London.
*
“Oh well,” sighed Jack, as they walked into City Hall that Monday, “worse things have happened to London, I suppose.”
“True,” said Ceri, “I just can’t think of any right now?”
“The Plague. The Great Fire.”
“Oh yeah. The Blitz?”
“Boris for Mayor.”
“Boris for PM.” They were not Boris fans.
“People probably won’t even notice,” Jack said hopefully. “At least she’s never got stuck on a zipline. She’ll probably just –”
“Oh,” said Ceri.
They’d reached the door of Sadiq Khan’s former office-suite. There was blood seeping under it. There was blood splashed all over it. And there was a massive hole in the middle of it, through which a dangling forest of former mayoral staff was visible, swaying gently, apparently strung up by their lanyards. Some, the unlucky ones, were still twitching.
“Jesus Christ,” whispered Jack.
“On the plus side,” said Ceri thoughtfully, because she was (as stated at interviews) a proactive glass-half-full can-do-er, “she does walk the walk. Slaughter and destruction-wise, I mean.”
Jack stared in horror. “What?”
“A lot of candidates make empty promises, talk big and do nothing, but Augaenysse is that rare thing, an honest politician.” She ignored Jack, now being extravagantly sick into a recycling-bin. “I really think we can spin this, you know?”
Inside Augaenysse’s office, the new Mayor was idly surveying the magnificent panorama of the city, reclined atop Khan’s old desk. The glass in the floor-to-ceiling window had been punched out and a cold, gritty wind scythed through the room, keening like unquiet souls. She’d dug out or conjured gorgeous regalia from somewhere, a gilded staff and scarlet ermine cloak, and was modelling it with nothing underneath.
“Fierce!” chirped Ceri, snapping away. “Statement style. Sexy but dignified. Insta-catnip!”
Jack, white-eyed, staggered in. “What did you do?” he moaned. “Why did you kill them all?”
“They were the vassals of my foes,” hissed Augaenysse, lifting a night-black brow. “Annihilation was a mercy.”
Jack slapped his forehead. “But, no… they were working for you now! You’ve just slaughtered your entire staff!”
“Meh,” said Augaenysse, inspecting her blood-crusted nails, “I need not the aid of turncoats to conquer this cesspit. I have you, have I not?”
“What?” frowned Ceri. “We still have to do everything?”
Augaenysse narrowed her eyes. “Some begged for death, at the last.”
“I mean obviously it’s an honour, a privilege to work with, for, under you,” said Jack hastily, “but I mean you can’t just massacre… you… people won’t stand for it!”
Augaenysse stalked to the shattered window. “Why not? ‘Tis what they voted for, no? What I foretold shall now come to pass. Crush my foes, enslave the populace, a freeze on bus-fares whatever they are, and unleash chaos.”
“You said, we did,” Ceri murmured approvingly.
“Hang on,” said Jack. “Where are your foes? The other candidates I mean.”
“Some yet survive,” Augaenysse admitted. “The vile wench. The bumptious cretin. The burbling child-man.” She’d refused to learn the names of her opponents on the principle that they would be obliterated unto the thousandth generation anyway, so it was often unclear who she meant. “Oh, and the yellow-haired one? He is my eunuch now.”
“Look,” said Jack gently. “Thing is… I mean, yes, people voted for you, but most of them, I hope anyway, thought it was a… you were a…”
The Empress’s eyes pierced him like an obsidian dagger.
“Yes?”
He swallowed. “A satirical candidate.”
“A what?” Behind Augaenysse, Ceri made vicious hushing motions.
Jack’s chest tightened. “A… a joke?”
“A JOKE?!” Augaenysse slammed a gauntleted fist upon the table. “I have licked the face of evil but ne’er have I found a world where unchained chaos is considered a subject for laughter! What kind of decadent, maggot-ridden corpse of a society is this… London?”
“Good question,” Ceri said, thumbing open Twitter to create a poll.
“I don’t think most people realised you were… you know… for real.” quavered Jack.
Augaenysse laughed, and the louring sky echoed with madness. “What of when I conjured storms from cloudless heavens to demonstrate my power? Was that not for real?”
“Well this is England,” said Jack.
“In April,” added Ceri.
“’Tis not so in Corbathia!” the Mayor snarled. “There, the seasons keep their proper places, and ‘tis I who bring the chaos! Not for real?! What of when I transformed into a wingéd serpent for YourTube?”
“That was amazing,” Ceri acknowledged, “but tbh people just thought it was a deepfake.”
“You promised me power,” growled Augaenysse, towering over them both, her face a mask of fury. “Where is it?!”
“Well,” said Jack, gesticulating desperately, “it’s all around. You’re now the head of sixteen separate UrbanFutureVision committees and our first meeting’s in… wow, look at the time! Fifteen minutes. So maybe we should just clear away the bodies and…?”
“Committees?” spat the Empress. “I do not need committees! What I need is blood-hungry armies of darkness to sow discord and desolation! Your so-called Met will not even put my adversaries to the sword!”
“I’m sure we can work out a strategy going forward at the meeting,” said Ceri, trying to shoo her enraged boss out of the wrecked door.
Augaenysse reared up like a stepped-on cobra. “I piss on meetings! I have observed your idiot process. Twenty humans cowering in a room that one may speak! Or else a dozen dozen rectangular faces upon a rectangular screen, all loathing and ignoring one another, all playing Crusher of Candy under the table! Chaos is the sworn enemy of meetings! Why must we have them at all?”
There was a silence stirred only by the broken whimpering of the wind, and Jack.
“Yeah,” said Ceri slowly, “why do we have to have meetings? And all these committees. I mean they’re functionally useless, you’re right. It’s just a lot of bored overpaid people talking over each other. Why not rule by decree –”
“Nay!” interrupted Augaenysse, “chaos shall reign!”
“Yes, absolutely… eventually, but hear me out. If I remember your initial Mayoral pitch, you want to pillage and destroy the city, slay all that walks or crawls, seed the greenspaces with human bones and then move on to your next challenge. Correct?”
Augaenysse nodded warily. “Indeed.”
“Well, while I know chaos is absolutely a core value and I wouldn’t for a moment want you to betray your principles, despoiling a city so vast and carrying off all its treasures does take a certain amount of organisational skill. And me and Jack … we’re planners. Right Jack?”
From the floor, Jack nodded.
“How long does it usually take to despoil a city?” asked Ceri. “Out of interest.”
“Months,” admitted Augaenysse. “Sometimes years. There is always resistance until I have left no stone resting upon another.”
“Exactly! Highly inefficient, which is, no offence, a major drawback of unchained chaos. But if we commit to a really robust short-term plan for asset-stripping the city; gold, gems, virgins and so forth, maybe create a public-private partnership, bring in Serco, that’ll save you a lot of time. Time better spent relaxing, unwinding. Or, you know…” Ceri added casually “…finding the next wealthy city to sack?”
“I see what you are saying,” hissed Augaenysse, who’d picked up several useful phrases in her brief sojourn. “Let it be done.”
*
“And so, in conclusion,” thundered the Chaos-Empress Mayor as flashes popped like firecrackers, “bus-fares shall be frozen and so too shall fare-dodgers, in the ice-walled malebolges of Hell!”
There was a heartfelt round of applause and Ceri, grinning robotically behind her boss, nearly fainted with relief. It was going to work. If they just gave Augaenysse all London’s material wealth and grovelled abjectly before her, she’d get bored and sod off to some other unlucky city, hopefully somewhere in a galaxy far, far away.
“What about the surviving candidates?” yelled one reporter. Shit. Ceri had forgotten about the other would-be Mayors, still imprisoned in the Tower.
Augaenysse’s smile was thin as a needle. “Excellent question. I considered a gladiatorial contest to determine who inherited the smoking ruins of this city once I abandon it, but my adviser Jack had a better idea.”
Ceri frowned. What the hell was this?
“Each and none shall rule after me!” Augaenysse declared. “Because true chaos is not about one person. It takes many to create infinite disorder: ignoring each other, contesting and competing, scheming, manipulating, betraying and undermining, each for themselves and their own petty gain. None of these suppurating weaklings are evil enough to govern alone, yet together they shall be my final gift to you all: ultimate chaos.”
Her smile broadened, dazzling as the light from a hundred suns. “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the London Mayoral Committee.”
(c) E. P. Henderson, 2021
E. P. Henderson started writing stories years ago, stopped for ages, and has just started again. Stories in MTM and Error 404, and have been read live by Liars' League in London, Hong Kong and New York. She’s a Londoner by adoption, and is working on a novel.
Gloria Sanders trained at Drama Studio London. She regularly narrates audiobooks for the RNIB and recently joined the cast of Time Will Tell’s Dracula at Whitby Abbey. She often works as an historical interpreter at heritage sites around the country and has continued her training in clowning and historic fooling. She recently qualified as a Spanish Interpreter.
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