Stoneheart

by Charlie Fletcher

  George jogged to keep up with the Gunner, who was crossing the traffic and heading away from the river.

  “You know where we can find a dictionary? A bookshop maybe, or—”

  “I got no idea where we can find a dictionary, son, but I can do us one better.”

  “Better than a dictionary?”

  “Yeah. I know where we can find a man what wrote one. Come on. Mind that taxi.”

  George hopped up on to the curb as a cab whined past, narrowly missing him. He looked back. He couldn’t see Edie.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The One Who Walks Behind

  The woman in the red raincoat pulled it a little tighter around her neck and hurried through the light drizzle toward Cannon Street station. All around her, people swerved and stutter-stepped past each other on the pavement. The traffic was moving slowly enough for some of them to walk on the edge of the road instead, and all of them had, in some way, the same thought: home.

  These were the professional commuters, London’s foot soldiers, each determinedly plowing their own way homeward in the way they had done yesterday, and the way they would tomorrow. Almost all walked on autopilot. People with trains to catch walked faster than those who just needed to take the tube. People who needed a bus walked irritably between stops, gauging their speed with one eye constantly darting back over their shoulders in case a red double-decker should unexpectedly materialize where there had been none a moment before.

  The only ones displaying any kind of self-consciousness were the ones looking for a taxi. They were the only ones looking at the other pedestrians too, in case someone darted ahead of them and pulled a cab from under their noses.

  The woman in the red raincoat had no thought of a taxi on her mind. She was looking forward to the Northern Line and twenty-five minutes—she hoped seated—head down over the paperback now bumping on her hip in the pocket of her coat.

  And then, like a deer in the forest when it catches a sound or unexpected smell, her head came up. She felt something behind her. She turned, not knowing why, and saw no one. Or rather, she saw everyone but nobody in particular, nobody looking at her.

  Except, someone was looking at her. In the city someone is almost always looking at you, even when you think you’re alone. And when you think you’re most alone—say, on a dark street, late at night, when everyone honest and sober is safe in bed—and you get that prickle between your shoulder blades that tells you someone is watching you, and you turn quickly and see no one, and you sigh with relief—don’t kid yourself: there’s always someone there. Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

  The walker behind the woman in the red coat had had a long time to perfect not being seen. He had had a long time to perfect his walking too, and if you had the knack of seeing him, of noticing him even though he was making sure that no one saw him, you might notice that he was never actually still—he never stopped walking. Even when he looked like he might be standing still, he rocked from foot to foot, walking on the spot. Sometimes he walked on the spot, so slowly and deliberately he looked like an animal pawing the ground just before it springs on its prey. If you were able to keep him centered in your eyes and, perhaps more important, your mind, then you might begin to see that this perpetual motion hung on him like a curse.

  And if you thought that, you might be more right than you knew.

  He walked tall, a long once-green tweed overcoat flapping at his heels. His face was hard to see, as he wore an old green hoodie with the hood turned up. Long tendrils of gray and black hair escaped into the night breeze. The coat partially obscured the yellow outline of a prancing stag leaping across the front of the grimy sweatshirt, below a John Deere logo. The faintly hippy-ish atmosphere about him was enhanced by the jewelry he wore around his neck—a rough stone hanging from a thick silver chain, worn tight as a choker—so tight that the stone bobbed up and down in sync with his Adam’s apple.

  The Walker felt the thing that had pulled him from his normal meandering passage through the city tug insistently at him from the side of the building across the road, like a dark magnet. His tongue made a rare appearance and flicked over dry lips. It was the sinister pull dragging at him with a renewed intensity that made him forget to prevent the woman from seeing him. She looked around a second time and gasped to find this tall, ominous figure so close behind her.

  The dry lips parted in something like the almost-forgotten memory of a smile. His hand reached out and touched her lightly on the shoulder.

  “It’s not all right,” he said gently, as if comforting her. Her eyes widened. His voice was like the dry rustle of leaves blown across a tombstone.

  “It’s not all right at all. None of it. And it never will be.”

  And because she had heard him and because he had allowed her to see him, she started to scream. She dropped her bag and opened her mouth and screamed: not at him—because being instantly forgotten was another skill he had—but at everything else.

  As he walked across the street toward an undistinguished office building, the woman in the red coat continued screaming, her high voice cutting sharply through the endless growl of the traffic. The crowd eddied and parted around her as the commuters noticed and avoided another lone street-crazy howling at the city in the growing darkness.

  The Walker crouched in front of a low wrought iron grille set into the side of the building. He reached his hand through and rocked slightly, his feet flexing beneath his bent legs, as if trying to push the building. He stared intensely through the grille, listening. He nodded.

  I see.

  He listened some more.

  “If the taints fail again. I will bring him. We will bring him.”

  His hand jerked out from behind the grille—and it was hard to tell if it was being spat out or he was just relieved to get it back—and he rocked up onto his feet and started walking north. As he did so, he tugged at the bulging hood around his head. A large black bird hopped free and shook its wings out, perching firmly on the green tweed shoulder of his coat.

  “Go and find the ones that failed.”

  The bird clacked its beak and lofted into the sky, sideslipping between two tall buildings, and was almost immediately lost to sight.

  Back on the street, the Walker waited unnoticed in a phalanx of uninterested pedestrians for the lights to change, before striding off to the north. As they waited, a police car sirened past and stopped farther down the road, where a screaming woman in a red coat was being helped by two other women who were finding it impossible to calm her, or discover what it was that had filled her with such deep horror.

  The lights changed and the Walker paced until he found someone heading in his direction to follow. And then they were gone as the swirl of humanity closed in behind them.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A Man Called Dictionary

  The Gunner walked fast, and George jogged to keep up. The Gunner had something on his mind. He cleared his throat, as if approaching a difficult subject with a delicacy he wasn’t used to displaying.

  “He herks and jerks a bit. Don’t mind it. He doesn’t. Unless you let on you notice.”

  “Herks and jerks?” said George, who was getting quite used to not understanding what anyone was saying to him.

  “Yeah, slobbers. And twitches. He don’t mean anything by it, he can’t help it; but I’ll tell you what, he’s got a brain on him. He knows all about words and history, and London … and anything else you can think of, I reckon.”

  The Gunner walked on a few paces.

  “Mind you, he is sensitive about the twitching. And he’ll make funny noises all of a sudden, like he might bark out a strange word, maybe like he’s a bit, you know …”

  He tapped his tin hat.

  “Mad?” George ventured.

  “Nah, not mad. As such. Not Dictionary. But you might think he’s got a few tiles loose on the roof, so to speak. He hasn’t, though. His bark’s worse than his bite, and his brain
—well, way he tells it he wrote a whole dictionary by himself in half the time it took a roomful of Frenchies to do it, so his brain’s top of the line. He don’t much like Frenchies, of course, but that was the way of it when he was alive—”

  George stopped in his tracks.

  “When he was alive? So he’s dead?”

  “He’s not dead, you idiot. He’s a statue, right?” Edie was walking right behind him. He didn’t know how long she’d been there, and he jumped a bit at the sound of her voice so close in his ear.

  “Right,” growled the Gunner. “He’s the spit of a man who lived three hundred-odd years ago, which was a time when little misses was meant to be respectful and silent, so you keep a mind of it when we talk to him, right?”

  Edie’s expression said anything but it was all right with her, but she didn’t say a word as they came up out of the side street and into the Strand, heading east into the flow of pedestrians hurrying toward Charing Cross station.

  Strangely enough, although no one noticed the Gunner, everyone got out of his way, so George and Edie were able to make good progress by tucking in behind him and staying close.

  “Weird how they can’t see him, isn’t it?” puffed George.

  Edie said nothing. After several yards of nothing, George decided he wasn’t going to speak to her anymore. When he had first realized she could also see the Gunner, back in the underground garage, he had felt a flicker of relief that at least here was someone else who might share his nightmare and make it less horrible. He now realized this had been the fear talking.

  Edie might be his age, she might be able to see the unbelievable things he saw, but there was no inch of give in her. He’d tried to talk to her and she’d started out by hitting him—and things had gotten worse from there. Much worse. He could still taste the bile in his mouth from his reaction to her glinting with the Sphinxes. Nothing good had come from her yet, and he’d be a fool to expect anything from her. Least of all a conversation.

  “It’s horrible,” she said.

  Despite himself, he looked around at her. She shrugged, her eyes on the ground.

  “When I first saw them moving—the statues—I thought I’d gone loony. I thought the first one I saw was some kind of trick for the tourists, some bloke dressed up, covered in black paint or something. I thought it was a good trick. Then I noticed no one else paid him any attention at all. And after a bit I got sc—I got what you said. Freaked out. Then I saw you running through the park with him, so …”

  “So you ran after us.”

  “I thought it’d make it less horrible.”

  “Here we go, come on, mind that bus… .”

  The Gunner suddenly lurched into the traffic, making for a small, pale stone church marooned on its own island where the Strand was joined by the curved tributary of the Aldwych, just before they both hurried on to become Fleet Street. The church’s spire ascended to the sky in elegant steps, sharply defying the taller and more impressive buildings around it, flanked by a scrabble of twisted plane trees reaching up in half-hearted solidarity.

  Three statues stood facing east in front of it. George looked at each one expectantly. There were two men in World War II uniforms and peaked caps; and farther off, the back view of a man in a long gown on top of a very elaborate plinth peered back down the Strand as if expecting something distasteful to appear at any moment. George looked at the Gunner.

  “Is he the Dictionary?”

  “Why d’you think it’s him?”

  “Because he looks like a professor. In his robes. He looks distinguished.”

  The Gunner shook his head.

  “He’s not distinguished. He’s just a politician. Come on.

  George eyed the two statues in peaked caps as they approached them. Is it—

  The Gunner pointed past the stautes.

  “Not them. He’s at the other end.”

  George felt odd walking past the statues, as if either one might suddenly jerk into life at any minute. Despite their uniforms they both looked a bit schoolmastery. Edie eyed them both carefully. She nodded at George.

  “I know what you mean.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “They look like each other. But they’re different. You can sense it.”

  “No, I can’t. I was just thinking it’s really weird not knowing when or if they’re going to come alive.”

  “Oh. I thought you got the vibe.”

  He looked at her. She looked disappointed.

  “What vibe?”

  “Dunno.” She nodded at one of the uniformed men. “But there’s a lot of death there.”

  George realized something else about Edie. Nothing she said ever made anything better. He shivered and followed the Gunner around the corner of the church.

  “There’s a lot of death everywhere,” grunted the Gunner. “This is London. Lot of life, lot of death, lot of everything. Here he is.”

  “Here who is?” said a new voice.

  George looked up. A statue of a man in eighteenth-century dress looked down at him, a bird perched incongruously on top of a wig that in real life would have been powdered, but now was peppered with pigeon splat. Between the bun-shaped sides of the wig, his face hung fleshy and lopsided, mouth working silently, as if he were chewing his tongue.

  The Gunner tipped his helmet back on his head and nodded a greeting.

  “Dictionary, if you can spare a moment of your time, we’d like a word.”

  Dictionary cleared his throat explosively and spoke. His voice was deep and rough and had the flattened vowels and blunt consonants of the Midlands. George couldn’t help noticing that he sounded more like a farmer than a man who knew all about words and London.

  “What time I have is not my own, but that granted by an unknowable Providence and so not mine to give. However—” Dictionary nodded at a thick book held in his left hand, as his right—as if it had a life of its own—plucked at a frock coat and knee breeches. “—what words I have are in this book, and placed there by mine own labors, so of them I may make free as I will, and they are, as ever, at your pleasure.”

  George’s eyes edged sideways to look a question at the Gunner.

  “He says yes.”

  Edie spoke quietly under her breath, “Well, he takes a lot of words to say it.”

  The Gunner fired a look at her. Dictionary squirmed briefly, like a man surreptitiously trying to dislodge an ice cube someone has slipped down the back of his shirt.

  “Well, it is not often that we see children who see us as we are, Gunner. I’ll warrant there’s a history here, eh?”

  Dictionary plucked at his breeches and dropped creakily to one knee as he looked down at them.

  “You might say, Dictionary. The boy here’s in a spot of bother—”

  “Tchah—the ‘boy’has a name, no doubt?”

  The Gunner brought George forward. George looked up at the lopsided slab of Dictionary’s face and decided that it was a face that appeared angry and forbidding until you looked closer, when you saw something kinder in it. It was a face that wasn’t used to smiling—but wanted to.

  “He’s called George. George, this is Dictionary Johnson. Dictionary—George.”

  Dictionary spasmed suddenly, as if trying to jerk himself out of his coat in one fast movement. His neck twisted twice in a stuttering reflex, and he barked something that may have been a word but might have been mere noise.

  “Gah—pleasure of your acquaintance, sir.”

  Gunner prodded George in the back.

  “Oh. Pleased to meet you.”

  Dictionary looked at George, which made him feel uncomfortable.

  “I observe you are exercised, sir, exercised by some strong emotion.”

  “Yeah,” said George, “I’m confused.”

  “Confused—or scared, perhaps?”

  “Perhaps,” muttered George quietly, looking away from Edie.

  “When I was young and fearful, a wise woman gave me this advice, w
hich I treasured and now pass on to you: just as hope enlarges happiness, so fear aggravates calamity.”

  “Ah,” said George, still trying to untangle the words into some kind of sense.

  “You make things worse by worrying about them,” explained Edie.

  He turned on her.

  “They can’t be much worse than things trying to kill me, can they?”

  “Of course they can. They can be much worse.”

  Before he could ask her what she meant—or even ask himself whether he wanted to ask her, in case she told him—Dictionary cleared his throat.

  “You would perhaps oblige me with an outline of the events that bring you to my humble plinth? I am starved of conversation, you understand, which is vexing, pinioned as I am here on this lonely outcrop as the life of the fair city swirls round and past me. There is no wit, no variation to divert me from the depressing spectacle of the gentlemen of the law strutting in and out of that magnificent theater of lies opposite.”

  He jabbed his book at the vast white stone jumble of pinnacles and arches across the road.

  “That’s the Law Courts,” said George.

  “Indeed.” Dictionary nodded. “And a fine excess of architecture it is for such a plain purpose as deciding right from wrong. It is my observation that on the outside, all the light exuberance of spires and turrets point upward to the heavens in order to distract one’s attention from the fact that inside, within the dark chambers of the law, all points downward, into the fell attorney’s pocket. ‘Tis like paint on a tart’s face, mere distraction. Why—”

  The Gunner interrupted.

  “The boy has a problem, Dictionary. Pardon me for breaking in, but it’s a serious one. We’ve come from asking the Sphinxes—”

  “The Sphinxes? Gah—then you’ll be none the wiser and twice as confused, no doubt. Only a jobberknowl would go to a sphinx for an answer—”

  “Jobberknowl?” George looked at Edie, who shrugged.

  Dictionary’s fingers flew through the pages of his book.