Stoneheart

by Charlie Fletcher

  The salamanders hissed and lashed their tails together, sliding them in and out of one another until they were braided, as they had been when he’d first seen them sliding off the side of the building. Then they reared up like a three-headed cobra, moved—and the Gunner fired.

  Blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, blam!

  Six shots rapid-fire stopped them and spun them, jerking into them, and then the revolver clicked out and there were no more bullets. One lizard twitched and rolled its way out from under the bodies of the others.

  The Gunner took off his tin hat and dropped it into George’s arms. He wiped his forehead and stepped across the gap to the salamanders, fumbling with the ammo pouch at his belt.

  As the salamander struggled free, he smashed his boot across its neck, pinning it to the ground, reloading the big heavy revolver as fast as before. Two shots sent it to dust. He stepped back and sent the other two bodies the same way.

  When he stopped, all there was to see was a faint dust smudge to show where the nightmares had been real.

  He reloaded and reholstered the gun before he turned to look at George. George just clutched the tin hat the same way he used to clutch his teddy bear.

  The dark statue crouched in front of him. George could see that his eyes were gray, like a pencil drawing of eyes in the black-tarnished face. The gray eyes seemed to look through him. Then the Gunner took the hat and scratched his neck. He stretched his neck like he was working kinks out of it, in a gesture George later felt was strangely familiar.

  Right now, George just watched.

  It wasn’t that his mind hadn’t caught up yet. It hadn’t even started.

  The Gunner propped the hat against the war memorial and hunkered down next to him, picking something out of his uniform pocket.

  Cigarettes.

  He—it—the whoever—scratched a black match on the white stone and produced a yellow flame that he applied to the cigarette between his lips. Gray smoke plumed, disappeared inside the statue, and reappeared in a perfect smoke ring. They both watched it shimmer and fade in the London air.

  George couldn’t think what else to do. Except:

  “Thanks.”

  The Gunner turned and looked at him. Took another puff. Kept looking.

  George came up with something else to say. But all it was was:

  “Urn.”

  He looked at his feet. At least they were familiar.

  An unfamiliar voice came from the Gunner’s throat. A gravelly voice. A cockney voice.

  “Thank me when this is over, mate.”

  George looked up to see the gray eyes still looking at him. Because they didn’t blink, he could see the white bits were now a very light gray and the pupils were getting even blacker.

  The Gunner took another puff and blew it out on a half-laugh.

  “Blimey. You got no idea what you just started, have you?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Caged Heat

  Deep in the City something had been woken, something so old and so ordinary that people had been walking past it for centuries without giving it a second look.

  It was so commonplace and undistinguished that anyone who came looking for it couldn’t fail to be disappointed with what they found, not that anyone had come looking for a very long time. Nothing about it gave a hint as to its purpose or its power. It looked like a roughly hewn lump of old masonry: whitish rock, about the size and shape of an old milestone. The only clue that it was more than the nothing it seemed was its setting.

  It was caged.

  It sat in the side of a building that was younger than it by at least two thousand years, and it looked out on the street through a thick lattice of iron bars.

  Given its antiquity, people who noticed this usually thought that the bars were to protect it from the public.

  Only a very few—and a very strange few at that—knew that it was precisely the other way around.

  The grille of iron had become a wind trap for the rubbish that swirled around the building on the eddies from the looming high-rise opposite. A gutted packet of crisps was stuck on top of the thing, glinting silver and brown. A fragment of label proclaimed “Barbecued Be—” to anyone who chose to peer in and see what flavor its long-gone contents had been.

  If the person peering in had been a connoisseur of coincidences, they would no doubt have smiled at what happened next, given that the label turned out to be a prophecy as well.

  There was a low-frequency hum, the kind that old refrigerators make in the dead hours of the night when they think no one is listening. And then the crisp packet slowly shriveled and shrunk and finally burst into a bright and short-lived flame, before disappearing completely.

  And it may have been nothing, or it may have been the two narrow blood grooves on the rounded top of the stone; but cleared of the debris, it now suddenly looked vacant and ready as a mortician’s slab.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Choice

  Now that everything had stopped, George’s legs began to shake for real. Once more he felt like crying; once more—but only just—he decided he wouldn’t. He felt very tired, the kind of tired that sucks you toward sleep like a dark undertow, the kind of tired you know you have to fight because the sleep it’s pulling you down into may not be a good sleep at all.

  He looked around to see if the Gunner was still hunkered down next to him. He was, his eyes panning back across the traffic in front of them.

  From high above came a keening whistle.

  George looked up at the triumphal arch on the other side of the grass. A vast statue of a woman and a chariot pulled by plunging horses loomed overhead. The whistling came again, this time sharper, this time so high and urgent that it drilled into his ears and hurt.

  The Gunner nipped the end of his cigarette, pocketed it, and stood up in one decisive movement.

  “What is that?” asked George.

  The Gunner’s eyes followed his look up to the frozen horses in the sky.

  “That’s the Quadriga.”

  “No—” said George.

  The whistling came again, and now there was no mistaking its message.

  “—that,” he finished.

  “It’s a warning,” the Gunner said.

  “What about?”

  The Gunner scanned the rooftops over the road.

  “This isn’t the time for questions, son. This is the time for a choice.”

  George opened his mouth. The Gunner rode right over to him.

  “Choice is stay—-or go.”

  Tiredness sucked at George so hard that he felt like stopping swimming and sinking into it instead. Closing his eyes seemed like such a good thing to do that he let them flutter before he shook his head and tried to think.

  “I don’t know what’s happening,” he began.

  “Yeah, you do. You’re choosing. Now. Go or stay? Live or die?”

  Suddenly and without knowing why, George got angry.

  “That’s ridiculous. …”

  The Gunner spat.

  “’Course it is. Death’s always ridiculous. So what? Life’s a joke an’all. That’s why you might as well have a laugh and enjoy it while you’re ‘ere. But it’s your shout. Which way you gonna jump?”

  George’s leg shake turned to a disjointed yammering against the stone. When he spoke, it came out more like a whine than he meant it to.

  “I really don’t know what’s happening.”

  The whistling became staccato and even more intense. The Gunner grabbed George’s arms and lifted him until they were nose to nose.

  “I do.”

  George’s mind fused. He couldn’t say anything. He couldn’t really think anything. The Gunner shrugged.

  “Right. I’m getting back up on that plinth and I’ll watch what the thing that’s on the way here does to you, because if you’re too stupid to save yourself, you’re too stupid to bother about.”

  He dumped George back on his feet and turned. George grabbed his arm and clamped on. />
  “No. Help me.”

  The black face looked back at him for a long beat. Something changed in the face, maybe the set of the jaw, maybe the eyes crinkled.

  “God helps them what help themselves.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Means hold my hand and run like a bastard.”

  George let his hand be enfolded by the big, black hand. He had just enough time to wonder at the fact that the metal felt soft and pliable and not as cold as he’d expected, before his arm was almost yanked out of its socket as the Gunner headed for the underpass.

  They skidded into the fluorescent-lit tunnel and clattered down the low ramp, heading north, beneath the traffic. Halfway down the underpass there was a busker strumming a guitar, singing an old Simon and Garfunkel song about being safe in a fortress deep and mighty, with more attack but less accuracy than the original.

  His eyes watched George approach. He gave no sign of seeing the Gunner, or of hearing the hobnailed crash of his ammo boots on the concrete floor. He just watched George’s approach with boredom then disgust. He cut the song long enough to spit an ironic “Thank you” as George passed the open guitar case without adding to the spattering of coins in its scarlet interior.

  George was still looking back as the Gunner dragged him up the steps into the darkening, tree-shrouded end of Hyde Park.

  “He didn’t see you!”

  The Gunner just kept running, weaving through the pedestrians heading home through the neon-enhanced gloom, heading away from the traffic, deeper into the park.

  “None of them can see you!”

  The Gunner tugged George’s arm just in time to make him look ahead and sidestep the tree trunk that loomed out of the orange-tinged darkness.

  Which was a pity. Because if he’d kept looking back he might have noticed that he was wrong.

  One pair of eyes had seen them. One pair of eyes stretched in something more intense than disbelief. The eyes stared out from beneath a long sweep of dark and shiny brown hair. They were wide-spaced eyes with hooded lids set in a creamy white face.

  On the top floor of a red double-decker bus speeding west on the open bus lane, a girl of George’s age wrenched out of her seat and stumbled back through the standing passengers, eyes locked on something disappearing into the park, as the bus drew her farther and farther away.

  She yanked the stop cord and serpentined down the stairs, oblivious to the complaints of the other passengers, ignoring the “Hoi!"s and the hands that plucked at her long sheepskin coat as she launched onto the rear platform of the bus, eyes raking back into the darkness, searching for something she could no longer see.

  The conductor grabbed her.

  “Oi, missy, simmer down.”

  She didn’t even look back.

  “I have to get off!”

  The bus hammered down Rotten Row.

  “Next stop in a minute,” said the conductor, not letting go.

  The bus slowed for a taxi. The girl twisted her head like a snake and bit the conductor neatly between his thumb and forefinger.

  As he yelped and let go in surprise, she leaped off the back of the slowing bus, stumbled, fell, got up, dodged another bus that braked hard, and ran off into the park. The girl—whose name was Edie—didn’t seem to mind the new graze on her knee any more than the honking and shouting behind her.

  But then the other thing about the pale face beneath the shiny hair was that it was tough beyond its years, a toughness that came from having decided she wasn’t going to mind about little things ever again.

  And it had the look of a face hard on the trail of something big.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Parking

  The Gunner pulled George to a halt in the intricate tracery of shadows cast by a neon light above a spreading plane tree. He looked all around.

  George concentrated on getting oxygen into his lungs. He waited until he’d gotten enough for a short question.

  “Are we safe?”

  The Gunner just set off again, but this time George noticed that it wasn’t a headlong run. It was more like a game of hide-and-seek, where the Gunner flitted them from one pool of shadow to the next, always keeping an eye behind them for whatever it was that seemed to be stalking them.

  Now that they were moving slower, George’s brain had room for more than just terror and the hard job of breathing despite the stitch in his side. Thoughts tumbled into his head, hopping in on top of each other before he could really focus on them, like watching TV while someone else held the remote and speed-hopped the channels. He thought of Killingbeck. He thought of home, the empty house where his mother would not be there to miss him yet. He wondered if and when she’d notice. He flashed a horrible image of the pterodactyl crawling toward him over the stationary traffic. He thought of his mobile phone, stuck in his backpack, unclaimed in the dark recesses of the museum cloakroom. He saw the stone salamanders writhing into a strike in front of him, ready to kill.

  And then he was sick.

  As the Gunner tried to pull him on, he kept his hand on a thin plane tree and bent over and was sick. Twice. Then his stomach tried for a hat trick, but there was nothing left but a hot prickling sensation all over the back of his neck, and a tremor that calmed as the Gunner put a big hand on his shoulder.

  “All right now?” he asked.

  George shook his head.

  “You done well there. Didn’t get any on your shoes or anything. Hold on.”

  He suddenly hoisted George into his arms and stepped over a low wall on the edge of the park. George opened his mouth, but then the lurching sensation of falling into a deep space took the words out of him unsaid. There was a jolting instant of rushing vertigo before the Gunner’s boots crashed to the concrete. George looked around to see that they had jumped over the wall into a fifteen-foot drop, that ended on the ramp, into an underground parking garage. The Gunner set him on his feet and walked him very quietly down the ramp into the subterranean space.

  The parking garage was empty of people and full of cars. Somewhere in the distance came the lonely sound of a tire shrieking in protest, but right now the Gunner and George were the only figures among the bonnets and windshields stretched out below the fluorescent lights. The Gunner walked between two cars, found a shadow behind a concrete pillar, and hunkered down again.

  George looked at him. “What are we doing?”

  “Waiting.”

  “What are we waiting for?”

  “For it to go away.”

  “What is it?”

  “Dunno. Want to go back up there and have a look-see?

  George didn’t.

  “Besides, you’re run out. That’s why you just chucked it all up. There’s a point of exhaustion, and you just ran through it. S’ like horses. You just need to lie up for a bit. … I was good with horses.”

  George noticed that the Gunner had a bridle chain tucked into his belt, under the cape. The Gunner noticed him looking.

  “Horse Artillery. We pulled the guns through the mud and tried not to kill the old nags doing it. Lose a horse, lose the guns. Lose the guns, lose the battle. Lose enough battles, and well—”

  He seemed to catch himself. George thought it looked like he was pulling himself back into the here and now from somewhere a long way off.

  “Anyhow. This ain’t about that. Get your breath.”

  The Gunner retrieved his part-smoked butt and fired it up.

  George looked at him, then at the fire sprinklers in the ceiling. The Gunner’s eyes stayed on George’s through the smoke curling roofward from the cigarette.

  “What?”

  “I don’t think …” began George.

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t think you can smoke in here.”

  The Gunner’s eyes held steady, but something rippled under his dark bronze skin, something near his mouth. Despite himself, George felt an answering twitch on his face. The last thing in the world he felt like doing was smiling, but as t
he Gunner’s face cracked, he felt his face going with it. And like the small crack that signals the dam is going to burst, as the Gunner began to laugh, so did he.

  “Can’t smoke? Can’t smoke!”

  The Gunner was laughing like a deep rolling bell. George’s laughter fired along underneath it, sharper, thinner, and echoing with hysteria. Somehow all the fear and incomprehension found a voice in his laughter. He had no idea why things were so funny, only that the laughter was right. He flashed a memory of his dad belching at the dinner table, and responding to his mum’s disapproval with a cheery “Better out than in.” That’s what this felt like, this laughing on the shank end of terror. He had no idea what was finding voice in his laughter, but he knew it was better out than in. Keeping it in would have burst something inside. The Gunner wiped his eyes.

  “Can’t smoke? I can step off a monument in the heart of the city and shoot me four taints and drag you through the park double-time, and no beggar sees me, no one turns a hair—and you say I can’t spark up? God’s truth!”

  He stopped laughing. George rolled on for a bit and then dried up as inexplicably as he’d begun, as he felt the Gunner waiting for him.

  “You need to pay attention, son. Because, whatever you woke up thinking were the rules? Well, up’s still up and down’s still down—but everything in between? All bets are off. It’s a whole new ball of chalk.”

  He kept George in the grip of his eyes as he blew a long plume of smoke right at the fire sprinkler.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean: you want to survive this, you need to think first and ask the right questions. And ‘What do you mean?’ain’t the right question.”

  George started to shiver. He opened his mouth. Thought some more. Shut it.

  The Gunner grunted approvingly.

  “That’s good. Engage the brain before running your mouth. Don’t worry about the shivering. It’s shock. It’ll pass, or you’ll go doolally for a bit.”

  “I don’t want to go doolally.”

  “Might not be the worst thing that could happen.”

  George looked at the damp concrete at his feet.