Stoneheart

by Charlie Fletcher

  Behind him, at waist height, on the corner of the front portico of the museum, a little nubby carving of a dragon’s head stared up at him.

  It reminded him of the things his dad made—used to make—in his workshop. Not the big stuff, the serious stuff, but the little animal toys he’d sometimes squidge out of clay to make George smile when George was smaller, on days when George found him at work but not too busy.

  The memory didn’t make him happy. Maybe because he’d thought about his dad too much for one day anyway, or maybe because the dragon had fangs and the fangs reminded him of the monkey, of the taste in his mouth, of Killingbeck.

  Whatever the reason, the result was strong and sharp.

  He hated the carving.

  He hated it a lot.

  His fist was bunched and in motion before he thought about it. Once he thought about it, he knew this was going to hurt. He knew there’d be blood, split knuckles, maybe even broken bones. He knew he didn’t mind. He knew in a place that was closer to wanting than knowing that all this was likely, and all this was okay.

  His fist was the size of the dragon’s head. His fist was not made of granular stone. In the microsecond before impact, he realized he didn’t know what this would feel like. He realized he was going to break his first bone. He felt more air on his gums as his grin rictussed wider.

  He didn’t feel the impact. He heard it—a sharp, ugly crack—and the world jerked a bit.

  Something hit his foot.

  He closed his eyes and cradled his hand instinctively, waiting for the wave of pain. From the cracking noise alone he knew that bad damage had been done. Now that he’d done it he wished he hadn’t. He didn’t want to look at his hand in case something was sticking out of it. Like a bone. He checked it with his good hand, carefully. No bone, but definitely wetness.

  Something hissed at him.

  He opened his eyes. He must have imagined it. As he turned to check behind him, his foot stumbled over an obstruction. He looked down.

  It was the stone dragon’s head.

  He’d knocked it off.

  He looked at the portico. There was the stump of its neck, sheared off neat as a scalpel cut.

  Now he looked at his hand. No bone. No blood, even. Just wet from the rain. It was fine. He picked up the dragon’s head. He couldn’t believe it. Something had changed. It wasn’t looking at him anymore. It wasn’t looking at anything. Unless he was going mad, it had been looking at him. Now its eyes were closed. He decided it must have been a trick of the light.

  There was another hiss from behind him. Then a wet scrape and a dry squeal.

  He knew without looking that the noise must be one of the museum guards, maybe even Killingbeck coming out to give him a real beasting about leaving the hall. He had no idea how Killingbeck was going to react to seeing that his least favorite boy had just broken a carving off the museum wall.

  So as he turned, he jammed the dragon’s head into his coat pocket, hoping to hide it but knowing he wasn’t going to get away with it.

  It wasn’t Killingbeck. It was something worse, something so much worse that if he’d had time to think he would have given anything for it to be Killingbeck instead.

  It wasn’t anything human.

  It wasn’t anything possible.

  It was, however, peeling itself off the stone facade of the museum and looking at George with flat, blank hatred. And not just hatred—hunger, too.

  It was a pterodactyl.

  Its eyes were wide and unblinking, as if permanently surprised to find there was room for them at all in a skull that wasn’t so much a head, as a long, heavy beak that tapered back into a ribbed neck, bent under the strain of holding up all those teeth. Its body was small and surprisingly pigeon-chested, but was more than made up for by the large batlike wings and the sinewy legs that ended in bent knuckles and ripping talons.

  Something like breath hissed from deep within its stony neck.

  George’s body had entirely forgotten to breathe.

  The thing jerked off the frieze with a final effort. It tried to spread its wings, but only succeeded in getting one uncurled before it disappeared from view, plummeting below the level of the balustrade.

  George heard a noise like a sackful of wet suitcases hit the grass below. Unable to stop himself, he peered over the balustrade. The monster continued unpacking itself and getting all its wings and talons in the right order. It had its back to him. It stretched itself like an old man working a kink out of his neck.

  And then it turned.

  It looked right at him with dead stone eyes. And as the rest of the body twisted to follow the head and point itself at him, George knew what those eyes were doing.

  They were locking on. Acquiring a target.

  And that target was him.

  As if to confirm this, the pterodactyl raised its beak to the lead sky and chattered its teeth in a noise like a drumroll played on dead men’s bones.

  Then it lowered its head and began to lurch forward, dragging itself toward him on its wing-knuckles, swinging its body and foot-talons along between them, like a demon on crutches.

  George ran.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Old Running

  He hit the corner of Exhibition Road, skidded into the turn, and started sprinting, careening off the crowds filing into the Science Museum. By the time they started to protest, he was just a memory of blurring feet, fifty yards up the road.

  A traffic warden tried to grab him with the reflex action all men in uniform have when someone young runs really fast in their direction. “Hey, there …”

  George tore out of his grip and kept going. One fast look over his shoulder gave him a horror shot of the pterodactyl clipping along the pavement behind him, with a terrible jerky lope. It appeared to run with its legs and simultaneously pull itself forward on the hooked knuckles of its wings.

  Nobody paid it any notice.

  George screamed and doubled his speed, ducking into a side street, then almost immediately turning into another. He shouted “Help!” but London’s a busy city, and by the time people heard it he was gone.

  He got a stitch.

  He kept running, pounding through the backstreets, heading for the park.

  Usually you can run through a stitch and get over it. This one must have been a different kind. This one just got another one on top of it and hurt twice as bad.

  He didn’t slow down.

  Running from nightmares is how nightmares begin. Our bodies have really old memories that our minds know nothing about. And these memories made him speed up as he skidded into the road that runs along the bottom of Kensington Gardens.

  He couldn’t see how to get into the park, so he turned right and kicked harder.

  Behind him, the pterodactyl pulled itself around the corner and sniffed the air. George ran. Looking back, he saw it getting smaller. It seemed to have stopped to look at all the greenery in the park. He ran and ran until a lorry pulled across the pavement and he couldn’t see it anymore.

  As soon as he couldn’t see it, George had time to feel the pain in his side. He stumbled and went sprawling as his feet hit a paving-stone edge.

  He bounced up on his feet and looked back. Clear.

  He didn’t see the tramp until the tramp grabbed him and stopped him dead on the edge of a junction.

  George whirled.

  “Wha—?”

  A lorry thumped through the junction, right over where George would have been.

  The tramp let him go. George looked over his shoulder. He couldn’t see anything. He gave in and bent double, gasping with pain and exhaustion, wondering if he was going to be sick.

  “Don’t mention it…” wheezed the tramp.

  George pointed back down the empty road. The tramp looked back along his arm. The pterodactyl stepped out from behind a tree and looked at them. Then it scuttled behind another tree.

  “Did you see it?” George gasped, trying to get the right amount of oxygen
into his body as he grasped at the receding wisp of his normal world.

  The tramp shrugged and shook his head.

  “Just ‘cos you’re paranoid don’t mean they ain’t after you, mind,” he said, and dissolved into a series of lumpy giggles that sounded like he was being choked.

  George gulped air. Everything hurt. His feet, his muscles, and his lungs. His head hurt worst of all.

  There was no movement from the distant tree.

  There was movement closer to him. There was something above the tramp’s head, on the side of the building.

  On an elaborate drainpipe, a carving of three fantastical lizardly salamanders fanned out, their tails decora-tively plaited together, their heads facing down, each about eight feet long. That wasn’t what had caught George’s eye.

  What caught his eye was the fact that they moved.

  George’s jaw fell open.

  Above the tramp’s head, the three architectural details had started to writhe. He could hear the hiss and slither of scales against scales as the tails began to unplait themselves. He could see the salamanders’ eyes turn to him, their noses sniffing.

  Cold fear wrapped his neck. He pointed. The tramp followed his gesture. He looked puzzled. “What?”

  One of the lizards got its tail free of the others and reared back, hissing at George. He looked at the tramp for a fast second.

  “Can’t you see?”

  George heard a distant clack. He tore his eyes from the new horrors on the building wall to see the pterodactyl awkwardly loping toward him, only thirty yards away.

  George was running again. He ran past joggers, past dog-walkers, past cyclists.

  Nobody stopped. Nobody looked. Nobody helped.

  But he didn’t slow down. The one time he did snatch a look back, he could see the salamanders scuttle and slither along the gutter beside the creature, with an un-lizardly sidewinding motion he’d seen in a program about rattlesnakes. It was a movement that was horrible in itself, full of threat and power and evil.

  George pumped down the pavement, now running alongside Hyde Park past a modern red-brick building with a tower and a soldier and a horse outside.

  The soldier didn’t give him a moment’s look.

  He could feel each pace through the soles of his shoes, like the pavement was hitting him, rather than the other way round. He could hear his breath like it was someone running beside him. His chest hurt as if it were being burned inside.

  He risked a look behind him.

  “Hoi!”

  He hit the street cleaner’s barrow at full tilt, smacking all the wind out of his body and sprawling in a mess of brooms and rubbish bags across the pavement.

  “HOI!”

  George found a breath, and another one, and then a lot more ones that each hurt worse than the last. He wiped tears from his eyes.

  “You mad?” the street cleaner wanted to know.

  George shook his head, no words left in him.

  “You clean that up, pal,” said the sweeper, coming out of the gutter. “You clean that up right now!”

  George started to cry.

  The big sweeper stepped back. Spooked. “Oi. Steady.”

  Snot ribboned out of George’s nose as he sobbed. The sweeper looked around, scratched himself, and looked as embarrassed as a man with a bulldog tattooed on his neck can do.

  “Steady, mate. It’s …”

  He looked around again. People in the bus stared at them, like they were on TV. Disconnected. Bored. Passing the time. People in cars ignored them and concentrated on the car in front. A motorcycle despatch rider roared past.

  The sweeper picked up two halves of a broom.

  “You broke my broom, you …”

  George froze. Behind the sweepers shoulder, on the other side of the road, as a red bus jerked forward, he saw a flash of scale. A sliver of beak. And a dark, dark glint of eye.

  The pterodactyl had been pacing on the other side of the road, on the park side, using the traffic as cover.

  The bushes on his side rustled again, and this time he turned fast enough to see three salamander tails disappear into the foliage.

  “Wha—?” asked the sweeper.

  But he was talking to thin air. George had gone.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Gunner

  George ran into Hyde Park Corner, the busiest junction in London, a sea of traffic grinding around a roundabout full of thick monuments and thin grass.

  He pinballed across the slow flow of cars, bouncing from boot to bonnet and back again. Cars hit their horns, and a cyclist hit the brakes and shrilled a whistle at him, but George plowed on, pushed by the mind-killing panic that follows cold fear. A truck screeched its air brakes as he slammed in front of it and hit the concrete and railings on the other side. He looked back.

  The pterodactyl followed him in an implacable straight line, deliberately, without hurry, like something that now knew it had gotten him.

  And worse than this slow horrible thing that clattered its leathery wings and chattered its teeth as it came, was the fact that George now knew that no one else could see it.

  It pulled itself toward him over car bonnets in front of the eyes of drivers who just looked through it.

  It scraped over the roofs of taxis, and the drivers didn’t stop talking for an instant. No one in the bus looked around, no one registered that this prehistoric nightmare of bones and teeth was stalking a child through the most crowded thoroughfare in London.

  The thing hopped up onto the backseat of a motorcycle and looked right at him for a long moment. The motorcyclist didn’t notice, even when it threw its head back and snapped its beak to the skies in a mocking victory clatter.

  People say you’re never as alone as when you’re in a crowd, but being alone in a crowd when something’s hunting you down and the crowd can’t see it is a lot worse.

  George dragged himself backward over the railings before he realized what he had done.

  He backed up until he was stopped by seventy tons of white Portland stone. He had backed into the Royal Artillery War Memorial.

  He looked around and for a moment thought the pterodactyl was impossibly hanging above his head, ready to drop on him and end the nightmare in a horrible and painful way.

  Then the last bit of his mind that could think straight realized he was looking up at a dark statue, a soldier, a gunner in a World War One uniform, tin hat tipped down over his eyes, arms spread out against the stone, like he was resting. And over his shoulders was a waterproof cape that, for an instant, George had mistaken for wings.

  There was a clatter in front of him. He looked around, and with a freezing twist in his guts, saw the pterodactyl slowly pulling itself up onto the railings only six feet away.

  His body, thinking for itself, began to edge right along the base of the war memorial. Amazingly, the monster looked away. He edged consciously now, reaching for the corner.

  The corner of his eye must have caught the movement, because he wasn’t looking for it. He stopped before he knew why.

  There, slithering into view, was one of the stone salamanders. George scuttled back along the memorial, toward the other corner.

  Again he heard his feet scrape to a halt on the gravel before he knew why. The other two salamanders reared slowly around that corner, mouths open in a silent, gaping hiss.

  George had run out of ideas.

  The pterodactyl turned to look at him, slowly, easily, hatefully And the hate in its eyes was an old hate, a hate that George didn’t understand, but felt right in his core. And on top of the hate was cruelty and glee.

  It knew it had him.

  It seemed to grow bigger in front of him as it raised its reptilian wings in triumph and blocked out the last of the sun. Its mouth began to open, and from inside came an ancient smell, fouler than anything George had ever smelled, a smell that was old and inhuman and purely frightening.

  George had nowhere to run.

  He felt nothing but fear
and the wall at his back. His mouth made shapes. No sound came out. He saw his tears hit the ground in front of him.

  But one word made itself and spilled quietly out of his mouth, falling to earth too silently for anyone but him to hear, as the thing got down off the railings and started toward him.

  “Please.”

  The monster opened its beak and reared back for what George knew was the killing blow. If its long fanged beak wasn’t already one big grin, you’d have said it grinned even more as it hissed and flexed its sharp talons.

  “Please …”

  It was over. The thing struck.

  Blam!

  The thing stopped.

  Blam!

  The thing looked surprised.

  Crash!

  Something else landed in front of George.

  Something with steel tacks on its boots.

  Something with a gun.

  Someone.

  The pterodactyl looked at the two holes in its chest. Shook its beak in disbelief. In rage. Coiled itself and leaped for them—

  Blam, blam, blam!

  The first shot stopped it. The second shot dropped it. And the third shot smithereened it, blew it into shards of stone, turned it to dust.

  George looked up. He saw a man made from tarnished bronze from the bottom of his army boots to the top of his tin helmet. The Gunner from the war memorial looked back down at him as he broke the revolver in his hand, shook out the spent shells, and reloaded in a movement so fluid that he didn’t seem to need to look at his hands while he did it.

  He moved so fast that he snapped the reloaded revolver back together while the shells were still tinkling at George’s feet.

  George felt his nightmare wasn’t over. He scooted away from the Gunner, but not fast enough. The Gunner grabbed him and yanked him back against the wall and then stepped in front of him. Protecting him.

  Over the shoulder of the rain-cape, George saw the three salamanders boil across the ground and meet in the pile of dust that had been the pterodactyl.

  They writhed blindly as if trying to find it, to smell it out, and then they turned and looked at George and the Gunner. George saw it again. The ancient hatred multiplied in three pairs of eyes.