Stoneheart

by Charlie Fletcher

  “I think I went doolally a while ago. I think all this is doolally. I think someone’s put drugs in my food or something. I think this isn’t happening.”

  The Gunner just looked at him. George wondered if he’d gone back to being a statue.

  “Look,” George said after a pause, “please tell me what’s happening. Please tell me what you are. Tell me what those things are. Please.”

  The Gunner tapped his chest.

  “I’m a statue. They’re statues—carvings—whatever. That’s all we got in common. I’m a spit, they’re taints. Taints hate spits, spits don’t care much for taints because of it. You could say there’s been zip between us since the first man thought of carving something and putting a little of himself into it. We’re both ‘made,’see? Both created by craftsmen or even artists—don’t matter which, we call them both ‘makers’—but we’re as different as chalk from cheese.”

  “Taints are evil?”

  “Dunno about evil. They’re just bad. See, there’s nothing human in them. They was made to frighten, to be ugly, to leer at you off church roofs and put the shivers up you.”

  “Gargoyles.”

  “Yeah. Sort of. I mean, all gargoyles is taints, but not all taints are gargoyles, if you follow me. But things like gargoyles was made to remind you about hell, meant to outshout the devil. Nothing human in them. Empty. And like all empty things, they’re hungry. Not for food, though. Hungry for what makes you you, and me me.”

  George thought of the pterodactyl’s toothy beak, and the look in its eye, and knew just what the Gunner meant.

  “Though, of course, I’m less me than you’re you, me being a spit and all.”

  “What do you mean?” asked George; although, as he asked it, somewhere inside him he thought he knew, thought he’d been told this before, thought that if he stopped and tried he could remember the answer. Before it came to him, the Gunner spoke.

  “A spit is a statue that the ‘maker’—sculptor, stone carver, whatever—has made to represent someone human. And because of that, while a maker works, something of that must flow into us, and fills that hole the taints have eating away inside them. I mean, a statue of Lord Kitchener ain’t Lord Kitchener, but he’s—well, he’s what the artist thought and knew about Lord Kitchener. It’s like he’s got a spark of Kitchener’s spirit in him. He’s the spirit and image of Lord Kitchener. The spit and image if you like. That make sense?”

  George needed to think before he answered. He knew about sculptors. He remembered talk about “putting something of yourself” into things, other talk of things “coming alive beneath your hands.” He felt the plas-ticene in his pocket. He nodded slowly.

  “So who are you?”

  “I’m the Gunner. No one special. Just a soldier. From the Great War. The only other name I got’s the name of the man what made me. Just like you got the name of the man what made you. Whatever your name is …”

  “Chapman. I’m George Chapman.”

  “I’m Jagger. My maker was Charles Sargeant Jagger. So I’m a Jagger. You got a big family?”

  “No.”

  “I got a few. There’s Jaggers all over London. Jagger did well out of the war. People liked what he done, making us look like heroes, but nothing crowing about it. Made us look like men who knew about mud and dying first, then made us look like heroes after. For them that had lost sons and husbands, we looked like the men they wanted to remember them as, the men they hoped they’d become before the bloody generals sent them out to be butchered.”

  “So I call you Jagger?”

  The Gunner had gone still and was looking up.

  “Wh—”

  The Gunner looked at him and held a finger to his lips.

  “Quiet as mouse.”

  He eased his revolver from the holster.

  “Cat’s on the roof.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Cat on the Roof

  The parking garage had a roof made of concrete reinforced with a grid of metal rods. It was about two feet thick. Above that was eight feet of earth, thick and sticky, like modeling clay. The earth was reinforced by its own web of tree roots, criss-crossing over and under themselves as each tree sent feelers out into the clay in a microscopically slow explosion, searching for water and food. This network was itself laced with tunnels made by earthworms burrowing blindly beneath the park as they went about their business. And on top of all this was the grass—white roots in the clay, green shoots above it, reaching into the air, trying to breathe something clean through the exhaust fumes from the sea of traffic endlessly growling past on Park Lane. In the three inches of grass that topped the clay was a tiny world of insects going about their daily grind as thoughtlessly and relentlessly as the human inhabitants of the city around them. There were ants, there were ladybirds—and for a moment there was a beetle.

  Edie saw it quite clearly, its shiny black back reflecting the orange glow from the streetlights as it moved slowly from a discarded cigarette packet toward a pile of vomit. She knew the little pyramid in the grass was vomit because she could smell it. She could smell it better than she would have liked because her nose was on the ground like the rest of her, splayed beneath a bush, hardly breathing. She knew the beetle was a beetle—but wasn’t anymore—because she saw the gargoyle land three feet in front of her, and she saw its stone claw plash into the clay beneath.

  Edie edged farther back into the shadows under the bush, trying to move as imperceptibly and silently as the tree roots beneath her. In her left hand was a small glass disk, glowing blue between her fingers. It was also hot. She slipped it in her pocket without taking her eye off the stone claw four feet in front of her nose. She didn’t need a warning glass anymore. The thing was here. It was much too here for comfort.

  It was a limestone gargoyle with the face of a snarling cat and the horns of a small devil. It had wings, but no arms, and long powerful legs that ended in the beetle-crushing foot claws Edie was staring at. Its eyes were blank stone like the rest of it, the set of its eyebrows was fierce and angry. A century and a half of weather had stained the stone in streaks of black and gray, and somewhere in the past, a hard frost had expanded the water in a crack in its right wing, and a section had fallen off, giving it a lopsided, battle-worn quality.

  Edie knew she was good—unnaturally good—at not being seen when she wanted to remain unnoticed. But she wished she was even better at it as she watched the cat-gargoyle bend low to the ground and sniff. As it breathed out, she heard a low whistle, like someone blowing across the mouth of a bottle. It moved its head from side to side across the ground, trying to pick up a scent. Edie decided to stop edging backward and tried to make herself invisible instead.

  The cat-gargoyle moved away from her toward the parapet over which George and the Gunner had disappeared. As it turned away to make its sniff-and-whistle noise scenting along the top of the wall, Edie allowed herself a deep breath. She also had a good opportunity to see the sharp ridge of vertebrae running down its back, like a line of giant thorns trying to burst through the taut stone skin. She could see the dense feline muscles bunch and relax as it moved to and fro, as if it were dancing in a slow trance, led by its nose.

  And then Edie saw the woman with the stroller and the spaniel, hurrying through the orange gloom, obviously late for something and unhappy about it. The spaniel was running ahead of the woman, ears flapping happily. And then it stopped and its ears went back and it growled.

  Edie’s first thought was that it had seen the cat-gargoyle six feet ahead of it. The cat-gargoyle turned and looked at the dog.

  The woman snapped her fingers at the dog as she passed on the strip of pathway. “Bramble. Come here. Bramble!”

  Bramble was frozen in a trembling rigor in front of the cat-gargoyle. Spaniels don’t get many ideas, so when one takes hold, they tend to stick with it. And with a horrible feeling in her stomach, Edie realized that the thought Bramble was having was not about being able to see the gargoyle. It w
as about sensing her under the bush.

  “BRAMBLE! Come!” the woman called. She left the stroller and walked toward the dog and the gargoyle. The gargoyle took a step backward and crouched, drawing its wings open, parallel to the ground, ready to scythe into action. Edie noticed that the ends of the wings had sharp hooks on them. She’d seen a bullfighter once on the TV, and he’d made the same gesture with his cape, stepping back, spreading the cape behind him, hiding the sword, seeming innocent but ready to kill when the bull got close enough.

  The woman walked right past the gargoyle. Edie thought she must have brushed it with her coat, but she clearly could not see it any more than her dog could. She grabbed the spaniel and clipped a leash to its collar.

  “Come on, bad dog, there’s nothing there!” she snapped as she pulled the spaniel away. The dog started to bark back over its shoulder, the bark getting louder the farther his mistress pulled it. The bark ended in a yelp as the dog was swatted over the nose and attached to the stroller, whose occupant had now started squealing and yelling. There was a flurry of wind in the trees above, and the woman grimaced. She pulled an umbrella from the bags hung on the back of the stroller and opened it one-handed.

  “Come on. It’s going to rain. We’ve got to get home. Good dog.”

  The smack on the nose had dislodged the thought of Edie from the spaniel’s mind, and she trotted after the cooing mother who trundled off into the darkness, putting a rain hood over the baby as she went.

  Edie was about to breathe again when she realized something chilling. The cat-gargoyle remained braced and ready to attack—but its head had slowly turned, and it looked back over its shoulder in the direction the dog had barked.

  Toward Edie.

  Suddenly—so fast your eyes had to twist to keep up—it switched the position of its body so it faced her bush. Keeping the claw-tipped wings spread in a nasty echo of the umbrella Edie had just watched the woman unfurl, it crouched lower to the ground and sniffed toward her.

  Very slowly, one wing tip pushed the bush aside, and suddenly Edie had nowhere to run. The stone eyes looked at her. Edie had time to note that the whistling breath came from a corroded copper pipe sticking straight out of the things mouth, like a gun barrel.

  Edie reached into her pocket and pulled out the disk of glass. Where it had glowed blue, it now blazed like a torch, like a blue-green torch. She held it out straight at the end of her arm, with only the merest fraction of a shake. The rest of the shake was in her voice. Go away.

  She cleared her throat. Lost the shake from her voice and tried again.

  “GO AWAY! You have to GO AWAY!”

  One stone eyebrow rose in a question. And then the fierce snarl stretched even farther back, and the horns flattened like the dog’s ears had. And it didn’t go away at all. It stepped toward her, pulling the bush apart, opening her to the world and whatever it was about to do.

  And then the rain came—a spitter, a spatter, then all at once like a block falling from the sky. Edie set her jaw and glared defiantly at the stone eyes through the falling water.

  “You. Don’t. Scare. Me,” she lied. “Nothing scares me. Not anymore. You can’t hurt me. You have to GO AWAY!”

  The cat-gargoyle shook itself in a shiver, looked her in the eye.

  “You don’t scare me… .” she lied again.

  And then the cat-gargoyle jumped.

  Backward. Up into the sky. Into the rain. Away from her.

  Edie stared very hard at the place where it had been, until her eyes had convinced her brain that there was nothing to see except rain and grass and the ugly orange light.

  She looked at the glass disk in her hand. As she was staring at it, the light died in it, and it looked like what it was, an old piece of sea glass, the bottom of a bottle washed to and fro by the tide, worn smooth by the pebbles and sand. Something anyone might find on a day at the sea. She stuffed it back in the pocket of her sheepskin jacket. Took several deep breaths, and headed across the grass down onto the ramp of the parking garage.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Parked Up

  George and the Gunner stared up at the concrete ceiling. The gunner smiled. Its gone.

  George slumped back against the wall and stared at the radiator grille of the Mercedes in front of them. “What was it?”

  “A taint.”

  “A taint?”

  The Gunner shrugged and scratched himself with more human pleasure than you’d expect from a statue.

  “Probably a gargoyle. It was flying. Most of the flying taints are gargoyles.”

  George filed this under “New Information” and found he was overloaded in that department.

  “Wait a minute. The thing that chased me from the Natural History Museum. The three lizard things that came off the building. The things you shot. Were they taints?”

  “There you go. Catch on quick, you do. Keep going like that you might even make it through the night.”

  George was opening his mouth to ask a question he didn’t really want the answer to, when there was a scuff of feet approaching. The Gunner held him still with a hand on his knee. The footsteps stopped in front of them. There was the scrape of a key in a lock, the solid click-clunk of a Mercedes door opening and closing, and then the boom of an engine coming alive behind the radiator grille in front of their noses.

  “Er …” said George.

  The headlights came on. George and the Gunner were splashed against the raincoat gray of the walls by the high beams, like cartoon prisoners caught in a searchlight.

  “Help?” George shouted hopefully to the face behind the steering wheel in front of him. The face looked through him, then away as it craned around to back out of the parking space.

  “He can’t see you,” said the Gunner.

  The lights swept off them as the Mercedes chunked out of reverse, found drive, and squealed away down the rows of parked cars, looking for the exit.

  “Why can’t he see me?” he asked, feeling like he shouldn’t have shouted help, as if it had somehow, given his situation, been rude.

  “Oh. Well, he can see you. His eyes work, but he can’t see you in his head. His brain won’t let him.”

  “Because?” said George.

  “Because he’s a normal rational bloke—apart from driving a German car—and normal rational people don’t believe you can walk around London with statues. Stands to reason—it’s impossible. So his mind won’t believe his eyes. It’s a protection thing. If he could see us he’d know he was, y’ know …”

  “Doolally.”

  “That’s the ticket.”

  “Why can/see you?”

  The Gunner indulged in some more scratching, then stood up suddenly and stretched out the kinks in his neck.

  “Because you done something. Dunno what, but it must have been bad to get the taints so angry. Suppose we’ll have to find out what it was, but I’ll tell you this, and I’ll tell you for nothing an’all—it was bad enough to drop you out of your London, into my London. And that ain’t good. Not for you.”

  “What do you mean, your London?”

  “I mean the London where the taints hate the spits, and things that stay still in your London move and hunt and fight. Didn’t think your London was the only one, did you? London Town’s more than just any old city. It’s like the rock and the clay and the dirt it sits on. It’s got layers. You just fell through one into another. Now, come on, we got to go ask the sphinxes how we can best solve—”

  He stopped. Ears pricked. George stepped closer to him without thinking about it.

  “What did you hear?”

  “Nothing. I mean, I heard something stop, but the something was so quiet I didn’t notice it until it suddenly wasn’t there.”

  Footsteps started again, this time easily audible, heading for them. The Gunner relaxed.

  “It’s all right. It’s just a person. Stand easy. Nothing to worry about.”

  “Nothing to worry about?”

  The Gunner
shook his head in disappointment.

  “If you ain’t going to listen there’s no point me flapping my lip, is there? I told you. Normal people can’t see us, because to them we, I, am impossible, right?” He pointed. “So she can’t see us. Look.”

  A twelve-year-old girl with dark hair and a sheepskin coat walked toward the empty car bay they stood at the end of. The Gunner waved at her. Looked at George.

  “See. Nothing. Try it. Make a face. Blow a raspberry. She won’t be able to see you, I promise.”

  He nudged George. George waved at her. Her face didn’t change. He stuck his tongue out and made a face.

  “See,” said the Gunner, “she can’t see us because her mind won’t let her.”

  “I can see you fine,” said Edie. “I’m just waiting for you to stop making stupid faces and say something sensible.”

  The Gunner stared at her.

  George stared at the Gunner.

  The Gunner looked down at George.

  “Ah,” he said. “Interesting. That’s not meant to happen. Unless …”

  His voice trailed off like the smoke from his cigarette. And they all stood there for quite a long time, not saying anything, just looking at each other. George looked at Edie, Edie looked at the Gunner, and the Gunner looked right back at her. George felt the tiniest bit left out of the staring contest. So he broke the silence.

  “Who are you?”

  Edie didn’t answer.

  “Okay. Why are you here?”

  She broke eye contact with the Gunner long enough to shoot George a look that was fierce and contemptuous in roughly equal proportions.

  “I followed you. Obviously.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ve seen statues move. Lots of times. But I’ve never seen anyone else see it. So.”

  Now she gave up trying to outstare the Gunner and looked at George. He realized her eyes were the same deep dark brown as her hair, as deep brown can get before it becomes black. So dark that you couldn’t really see where the eye stopped and the iris began. This was a little unsettling. For all he knew, the irises were pinpricks of hate.