“Yes. Can I help you?”
“In fact,” said Stefan, “you can.”
The man led him inside and took him to his desk. It was covered in stray objects—a stuffed seagull with its wings spread, several piles of papers, some shells, and the Voice Box.
“It’s about this box, actually,” Stefan said, reaching for it.
The man picked it up before Stefan’s hand reached it. “What of it?”
“Well, see, it was a gift from my mother, and I really shouldn’t have sold it.”
“Mmm. Yes, but you did. This doesn’t belong in a pawn shop. It’s too precious for that.”
“You know what it is?”
“I’ve read about them before, but I’ve never seen one. And this one is in such good condition.” He traced a finger over the carvings in its dark wooden surface. “I’ll have to contact my associate in Peru to find out exactly when this was made and what region it’s from.”
Stefan laughed. “It’s not from Peru. That’s just something my friend told the shopkeeper.”
“No, it is Peruvian.”
“Oh!” said Stefan. He fingered the roll of money in his pocket. He’d made another trip to the bank before this visit, and now he wondered how much the man paid for the box. “Well, like I said, it was a gift from my mother, so I’m wondering how much you’d take for it.”
MacMillan laughed. “I’m afraid it’s not for sale. You obviously have no idea how valuable this is to the museum.”
“Yes, well, I’m afraid you have no idea how valuable it is to me,” said Stefan. “I’m willing to give you back whatever you paid. But whether you take my money or not, I’m leaving with it.”
“I don’t think so,” said the man.
“Don’t test me,” warned Stefan rising in his chair.
“Don’t threaten me,” said the man, reaching for the telephone on his desk.
Stefan grabbed the stuffed seagull and threw it at MacMillan. The man wrestled with the bird’s outstretched wings while Stefan grabbed the Voice Box and ran for the door. As he fumbled with its lock, Stefan saw MacMillan making a call on his phone. He burst out onto the staircase landing, and saw a portly man in a museum jacket listening to a walkie-talkie. The man looked up at Stefan and started toward him, and a second guard ran up to join him.
Stefan bounded up the stairs. He saw a third guard through a doorway, answering his walkie-talkie. Stefan swerved away and continued up the stairs to the next floor. He ran into a room full of glass display cases and counters full of marine life models. There was only one way out of this room, so he ran for that exit.
Stefan found himself on a large rectangular balcony that looked down on a room below. Its inside edge was lined with waist-high glass-topped counters. Inside were plaster models of fish. Scanning around, he saw the exit on the other end of the room, but a security guard was coming through it. He looked back to the door he’d just entered through and saw the other two guards running toward him.
Putting the Voice Box in his good jacket pocket, he climbed up onto the display-counters. The guards walked slowly toward him as he stepped gingerly along the counters’ length. A pane of glass crunched beneath his left foot and he crushed a model of a prehistoric fish. He stretched his arms out to balance himself. Fighting his instincts, he looked down to the room below. Hanging there, halfway between him and the floor, was the skeleton of a sperm whale—a giant spine, two hand-like fins, and an enormous head like a cross between an elongated cow skull and a shoe-polishing brush.
He looked at the guards, who each shook their heads at him. He carefully put one foot then the other on the railing, steadying himself with a hand on a post. Taking a deep breath, he launched himself out from the balcony.
He hit the whale-skull hard, but managed to get a hand-hold where it parted in the middle. He kicked his dangling legs, then managed to brace them against one of the tusk-like protrusions that once formed the great mammal’s jaw.
Below him were several crusty-looking rhinos and two giraffes with peeling fur. He chose the larger of the two giraffes. Steadying himself again, he angled his body and leapt down. He hit the giraffe’s neck, raising a cloud of dust. He hugged the neck tight as it listed to one side at an unnatural angle, letting him down to the ground slowly before breaking off completely. He glanced up and saw all the security guards in the building looking down at him from above. He waved and ran off.
~
As Stefan walked in the direction of the temple building, the sun gave a final burst of yellow light, then vanished.
He’d got the box back, but lost all of the previous day doing it. Peter was scheduled for the Sheriff Court tomorrow, and Stefan still had no plan for freeing him. In his desperation, he called Rab for a plan. Rab resisted at first, but Stefan reminded him that if it hadn’t been for Peter, he would be the one in jail. “You owe him this,” said Stefan. Rab agreed, and told him that he’d gather everyone together to work out a plan to get Peter free.
Something about the route had changed, and Stefan grew confused as he walked a tangle of side-streets. He found himself lost down a narrow cobbled lane and stopped, looking back and forth.
Something moved ahead of him. Stefan stepped up onto the pavement and clung close to a wall. He saw the movement again, and recognised the scratchman from his oversized hat and cloak, and the strange luminescence of his eyes, blinking in the dark. “What do you want?” Stefan called out. The figure moved tentatively toward him. “What?” demanded Stefan. It made him more annoyed than afraid now, and he had an instinct from their last meeting that it wouldn’t hurt him.
Stefan’s determination to help Peter made him bold. “What? Cat got your tongue? Look, I don’t know what you want, but I’ve got to meet some people.”
The scratchman shook his head.
“Sorry, I’m going,” said Stefan, starting to move past it.
The scratchman put his hands on Stefan’s chest to stop him, using a fraction of the force he knew the creature was capable of. It continued to shake its head at him.
“You don’t have a say in this. I’m going to see Rab, and we’re going to figure out a way to get Peter free.” He angled his way past the scratchman, ignoring the plaintive look on its face.
~
The meeting finished two hours later, and everyone poured from the temple back into the night. The plan was set, and Stefan was happy, convinced that they had a good chance of getting Peter back.
The scratchman moved from doorway to doorway, following him home. Stefan knew he was there, but ignored him. He caught a brightly-lit bus to head back home and saw the scratchman watching him through the window as the bus pulled away.
~
“I’ll get it, Mum,” said Rab, pulling a T-shirt over his head. He pulled the front door open.
“Mister Robert Donovan?” asked the police constable.
Rab rubbed at his face, blinking into the morning light.
~
“Where is he?” asked Stefan.
“Don’t worry,” said one of the gang who’d assembled to execute Rab’s plan. “Everyone’s in place. No matter which way the van approaches the court, there’ll be people there to stop it.”
“Right,” said Stefan. “You’re right. It’s all good.” He winced as he said the words: in his experience, people only said “It’s all good” when things were completely buggered.
~
The metal door of Peter’s cell slid open. He’d been waiting anxiously for hours. A warder led him past rows of doors that had been whitewashed so many times that the interior of the building looked like the exterior of a battleship. The stairs to the ground floor were metal painted a jarringly bright red.
A van waited for him. He was loaded into the back and sat on a bench there. A warder sat in the back with him, then someone closed the door on them both and locked them in. The shifting of the van’s weight told Peter that two more warders took seats in the front. He knew Stefan would have something planned, an
d hoped that, whatever it was, it didn’t involve anyone getting hurt. He smiled at the warder—a man doing a job, as far as he was concerned. Some of them were brutal, some of them kind. The prisoners were the same. Circumstance shoved them all together into an institution far too small and underfunded, and Peter didn’t blame anyone for it. Even if he wanted to, he wouldn’t know where to begin.
The van lurched. Peter felt them take several turns, then pull up to full speed. He tried to close his eyes as they made their way into the city, but his heart raced in his chest. There was no calm to be found today.
~
Stefan couldn’t wait any longer. He left the courthouse—Peter wasn’t supposed to get that far, anyway—and walked along George IV Bridge, a street that crossed at a right angle over the Cowgate below. From above, he heard wailing, confused shouts and screams. He looked up to see the seven stone figures on the National Library flailing their arms madly, their mouths open with howls and their faces wild.
Something’s wrong, thought Stefan, stopping on an island midway across the street. The cobbles around him jiggled and clattered. From where he stood, he saw three converted church-buildings, points in a triangle, and he was in the middle. Together, the churches stretched upward. Their spires elongated into the sky as their bodies grew narrower, pulling the buildings around them closer together. In seconds, they were nothing but black lines. With a crack like thunder, they vanished.
A bronze statue of a dog yapped on the other side of the street. Stefan ran across and stood next to it. It barked at the sky. Stefan looked up at the low-hanging clouds. One black cloud passed lower than the others. It alone dropped rain in drizzly sheets. As the water hit the figures on the national library, they screamed. The surface of the building rippled with the drops, then the rain fell in earnest. The recessed rectangles the figures stood in filled up sideways. They drowned, helpless, in sandstone, leaving the front of the library completely flat.
“Run!” Stefan yelled to the dog. He tried to push it, but it wouldn’t budge. It nipped at his hand with a metallic clang. “Fine then,” said Stefan, leaving it. Another thunderclap pealed out from somewhere in the city. The dog jumped off its perch and ran through an archway into a nearby cemetery.
Stefan ran further up the street past the public library, which stood across the road from the national library. Its ornate spires, gables, and window-frames were melting in the rain like bits of a sand castle.
The clouds grew denser, scudding across the sky, not travelling in straight lines, but circling around this one part of the city as if caught in an eddy there. A column broke from one of them, blue black, the inverse of a beam of sunlight. It passed over the surface of the public library. Like a wind, it caused the extraneous bits of masonry to blow away, leaving nothing behind the library’s green wrought-iron fence but a giant stone cube.
The cloud blew in Stefan’s direction.
~
The van shuddered to a stop. The warder pressed his small earpiece-microphone. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Who’s on the road?” He scowled at Peter. “Take another route then!”
The van pulled off in a different direction. In moments, they stopped again. The warder pressed his earphone again, but there was no one on the other end.
With a deafening sound of tearing metal, the front of the vehicle sheared off and vanished. The rear half tipped forward, throwing Peter and the warder onto the street. Where the front of the van had been was nothing, and the ground beneath was a swath of hot, fresh tarmac. The sky was so dark they could hardly see.
The warder reached out for Peter, but something stopped him short, grabbing him by the front of his jacket. Peter watched, stunned, as a figure in a cloak and a broad-brimmed hat emerged from the darkness. He lifted the warder and threw him back into the van. The scratchman nodded to Peter and made a frantic gesture, waving him away.
Something Peter had never seen before and didn’t understand, a pillar of nothingness, moved between them. When it passed, the scratchman looked aghast at the place where his hand had been. Grey smoke spilled from his wrist. Peter looked up and saw the sky bursting with lines, columns, and sheets of blackness that searched and scoured one small area of the city below.
He nodded his thanks to the dark figure and ran up the street toward George IV Bridge.
The scratchman pulled something from his pocket with his remaining hand and fingered it. Suddenly understanding something, the creature gave a horrified look and chased after Peter.
~
Stefan looked around, searching for a clear path through the criss-crossing beams of oblivion. He saw one ahead and went for it, running down the street, then into a narrow close. The close didn’t lead to another street, as he’d expected, but to a tiny courtyard.
He looked back up the close and saw that its opening was now blocked by a shaft of darkness. He pulled at the handles on the old wooden doors facing into the courtyard, but they were all locked. Looking up, he saw that the courtyard was open to the sky. A low cloud moved in, blocking out the sun. As the darkness descended, Stefan pulled something from his jacket pocket and traced his fingers over its surface, trying to find a way to open it.
~
Delonia smiled as she looked out into the audience. She couldn’t really see them because of the stage lights that reduced them to a bright fog. But she could feel them, and tonight it was a very good feeling: the rapport between her and them was palpable. Her new songs struck a resonant chord in her listeners, possibly for the humanity they exposed. People like mess, she thought. First her son ran away, then Cerise left her without warning or explanation, taking away her cellos, her cats, and her companionship. It was a lousy time. At least her listeners still needed her.
Delonia stepped forward, still smiling. This was the big finale, the hit single she’d wrung out of her experiences, and she would launch into it without an introduction. The conductor watched her closely, and knew to bring in the whole orchestra with her first huge, belting note. She took a deep breath and raised her microphone. She sang out. Her diaphragm compressed. The orchestra ran bows across strings and blew breath into brass and wood.
There was no sound.
The audience sat, stunned. The conductor dropped his hands, perplexed. In a split second, Delonia realised what was happening. Her son needed her. She continued to sing into the void, dropping into a sweet, soft rendition of her song for him.
~
The Voice Box flipped open in Stefan’s hands and his mother’s voice burst from it, a giant note, fully orchestrated. The courtyard filled with the light of a summer afternoon. The clouds overhead parted with the force of it, then settled back into place as the song changed into a lullaby. Stefan knew the void couldn’t touch him as long as the song went on. He dashed from the courtyard to find Peter.
He ran along the street, jumped down stairs three at a time, and darted across the Grassmarket. The storm raged over and around him, but it couldn’t reach him. How long the lullaby would last, he didn’t know. He guessed at the prison van’s route to the court and headed for the Cowgate. From above, he heard someone call him.
“Ste!” called the voice again. Stefan looked up at the giant Cowgate arch, the underside of George IV Bridge, and saw Peter leaning over the ornate black iron railing, waving his arms. Above Peter’s head, Stefan saw a giant cloud.
“Get down from there!” Stefan yelled.
Lightning flashed, followed by a split second of complete darkness. Light returned, the railing was gone, and Peter fell.
~
Stefan dragged Peter from the Cowgate arch as it narrowed, then filled in completely. He pulled Peter into the shelter of an archway and held him tight. Peter’s face looked fine, as beautiful as it had ever been. But the angle of his body was wrong. Stefan stroked his forehead, running his fingers through Peter’s black hair. Peter’s body did not respond, because Peter was not present to respond.
No, said Stefan to himself, no.
Tw
enty-Six
Forgetting
Stefan raised his head to wipe his eyes and nose on the sleeve of his jacket. From a dark recess across the street, he saw two small zeroes blink at him.
“Help him!” Stefan screamed at the scratchman. His voice broke and he sobbed. The scratchman’s head tilted. His fingers consulted with something in his pocket for a moment, then he nodded slowly.
Thunder clapped overhead. The scratchman gestured with his remaining hand for Stefan to stay where he sat on the ground with Peter. He checked the air, searching for rays of nothingness. Assured safe passage, he tilted his head, his face hidden by his large hat, and ran across the street.
He knelt down and touched the patches of wetness beneath Stefan’s eyes. The pencil-scratch figures worked across his grey hand as he put it to his mouth and tasted his finger. Stefan could feel the thing’s extreme age. Some echo of humanity remained in it.
It reached for Peter’s body, and Stefan clutched it tighter. Surrendering it to anyone else seemed wrong, but the scratchman held in his power the only hope Stefan had in the world. He loosened his grip. The scratchman reached his good hand around Peter and stood, easily lifting him over his shoulder. Afraid he might lose them, Stefan grabbed the figure’s greasy cloak with both hands as the creature checked the air then headed back into the shadows across the street. The darkness, cold and dry, enveloped them completely. Stefan felt the air suck at him, and in the next instant they stepped from a doorway across town.
The scratchman strode, with Peter over his shoulder and Stefan clinging close, toward a dilapidated church. Its features were half-melted from age and neglect, and its windows and doors were bricked up. The cloaked figure took them to the back of the building, where there was a low, angled double door in the wall, like a coal-cellar or something once used for funereal purposes. The creature stooped to lift the heavy door, then led them down into the basement.
Idea in Stone Page 31
