Stoneheart

by Charlie Fletcher

  He smiled, and then felt something sharp under his foot and skipped sideways before it broke his skin. Off balance, he yanked them both away from the wall. The mud got thinner under his feet and he dipped in, falling on one knee.

  “I’m sorry,” he blurted.

  Edie stumbled after him—falling down on all fours, dropping her end of the belt in the effort to stay upright, chin above the water. I m not—

  And her hand closed on something solid in the mud, something that felt like old slimy wood, like an ancient stump or a piling, and she felt a surge of energy weld her hand to it, and she couldn’t pull it away, and then …

  “Oh, no,” said George, seeing her with her eyes wide and her chin barely breaking water.

  And the rippled surface of the water blew flat around her, the shock wave of the past winnowing out from her at the epicenter, and her wet hair fanned wide in dripping spikes, and her eyes convulsed shut, and the two-century-wide gap between where they were and what she was seeing hit her like a down-bound freight train.

  It was dark but it was lighter.

  There were fewer lights across the wide river but there were many more on it, and what lights there were were softer. No sharp-edged electric light reflected off the fast moving ripples on the Thames, because there was no electric light at all, and more important, no ripples, only white ridges of ice—and they didn’t move a bit.

  The river was frozen.

  And covered in snow.

  The lights were lanterns and flares and braziers, and in their light, reflected off the snow and ice beneath, there were people.

  There were men in top hats with their necks swaddled in scarves. There were women in bonnets and long wide skirts that trailed on the ice as they walked carefully, hands hidden in fur-trimmed muffs that hung in front of them. Everyone’s eyes reflected the torch flares and the fires and a general excitement at the otherness all around them. Everyone seemed happy, and there were laughing children everywhere, running and sliding, long mufflers flying out behind them in the night air.

  A child launched herself into a slide, her bonnet snapping back off her head, held on by the ribbons, her red cheeks and red nose framing the redder hole of a mouth stretched wide in an excited shriek. She stopped herself by grabbing on to a thick pole set upright in the ice, and hung there, laughing as her friends caught up with her.

  From the top of the pole stretched a banner, with crude writing swirled across it in blue and green, reading: FROST FAIR, and below it, in smaller script, the invitation: COME ONE, COME ALL!

  It all looked like a dream, and the unreal quality was heightened by the mist that seemed to rise from the ice and surround everything, softening the edges of people and things, creating haloes around the burning torches illuminating the street that ran down the center of the river toward the bridge ahead of them.

  It was a street of tents and rough shelters, in all shapes and sizes. From the back, most of the structures had a hurried shipwreck quality to them, but at the front, in the mouth of each one, there was light and painted billboards and colored lanterns and cheery activity. Beneath flags and looping swags of bunting, London’s merchants and innkeepers had taken to the ice, and wherever Edie looked it seemed like there was someone selling or shouting or serving hot drinks that gave off thin skeins of steam that added to the eerie fog hanging in the air.

  And there was laughter and shouting and the sound of different kinds of music fighting each other to be heard. Edie could hear the distant skirl of bagpipes and the rattle of snare drums, and closer, she could hear fiddle players, and something like a barrel organ jigging and popping away in between.

  She heard a chunk to her left, and when she looked she saw three men with pickaxes chopping ice out of a channel dug between the river ice and the bank. The men were thickset and unshaven, with outdoor faces and high boots turned back at the knee. They all had brass badges hanging from their necks, which swung as they threw the picks into the ice. Farther along the channel, another group of similar-looking men had put a plank across it, and were busy charging finely dressed people for the privilege of crossing the water onto the snowy pleasure ground beyond.

  As Edie watched, she saw a heavy-jowled man question the charges, as if he thought that paying for crossing three feet of water the lowest and most impertinent sort of insult. They showed him the brass badges and mouthfuls of discolored teeth. She heard a snatch of what they said, and heard that they said it with pride.

  “Watermen, sir—with your leave—ancient custom and tradition of the river. Safe and efficacious carriage across the hazardous flow, sir.”

  The jowly man was about to continue his protest when a little girl in a green cape started jumping up and down at his side and pointing to the ice beyond.

  Edie followed the line of her finger and saw that everyone was now moving in that direction, drawn as if by a large magnet to the spectacle now progressing down the impromptu tented mall in the center of the ice.

  First came a drummer. Then men carrying large flaming torches that smoked darkly into the air. Then came three bagpipers in full Highland dress, cheeks bulging as they played, long horse-tail sporrans swinging in time as they marched slowly ahead of another pair of torchbearers. And then there it was, its massive feet lurching it forward in time to the leisurely swing of the sporrans ahead of it.

  An elephant.

  A white elephant.

  Edie was used to horror and pain when she glinted the past, but sometimes the past didn’t come in sharp hurtful jags that sliced at her. Sometimes, very rarely, it was even close enough to something else for her to actually enjoy it and not be too scared.

  But it had never, until now, seemed to be like this.

  She exhaled. Some knot deep in her chest loosened, and she took a breath of air that felt cleaner and almost refreshing, despite, or maybe because of, the sweet and smoky smell of roasted chestnuts that came with it.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  She heard the words before she recognized the voice, and knew that she had said them herself.

  And the elephant on the ice was indeed beautiful. Walking with slow deliberate steps, it swayed past the open mouths and the garish bunting with an other-worldly dignity. On its back it carried a howdah, which was a sort of tented castle that swayed from side to side as it moved. More flaming torches were fixed to each of the four corners of the little pavilion, and from inside, a very beautiful woman in a white fur cloak and bejewelled turban waved at the onlookers.

  A small dark-faced boy in a smaller fur coat sat behind the elephant’s ears, waving at the crowd and flashing his own white teeth at them as they passed.

  The elephant was not only white, but patterned. In the torchlight Edie could see that someone had painted garlands of flowers along its sides and on its face, and even made bands of pale colors all down its trunk. As it moved through the crowd, every eye was on it, and the low-hanging ice-smog only added to the dreamy beauty of the spectacle.

  Edie was transfixed.

  And then she thought she heard someone call her name. She looked up and saw someone, someone shorter than a man, running toward her, away from the crowd, the only face against a sea of backs.

  And he seemed to be shouting something, hands cupped in front of his face to make a megaphone—and she couldn’t hear, and then she could, just an urgent snatch: “Don’t look at the elephant!”

  And then the beauty stopped, and time went jagged and the past ceased to be a soothing dreamy flow, and hit at her in juddering slices.

  The running figure tripped and fell before she could make out its face in the fog.

  There was a shout to her right.

  Her head snapped around.

  Another figure, a girl in a bonnet was running toward her, arms waving, shouting and shaking something bright. And behind the brightness, Edie caught a glimpse of something big and burly and man-shaped lurching out of the fog.

  And then time sliced.

  And, closer now
, a big man was struggling with something that was fighting like a wildcat.

  The something broke free and was, suddenly again, the girl, running for her life straight at Edie.

  The man bent and pulled steel from inside his double-caped coat.

  The steel of a long burnished knife.

  Torch-flare reflected redly off it as he started to run after the girl.

  Time sliced again, and the girl ran toward Edie, stumbling blindly, really close now. Her bonnet had been mashed forward over her face by the struggling.

  Edie saw her.

  Saw the three-foot-wide channel of freezing water in front of her.

  Saw the girl could not see it through the bonnet blindfold.

  Edie tried to shout a warning but her mouth was already at full stretch, just screaming with the unexplain-able pain of the past flowing through her.

  And then time jumped forward again, and the girl was in the water and under it, and her face broke into the air covered in hair like a thick flap of seaweed, and the one visible eye seemed almost to see Edie, and she was shouting something, and all Edie caught was: “He’s not what he seems! Tell—”

  And then a rescuing hand reached over and grabbed her hair, only it wasn’t rescuing at all. It was pushing her back under, and all there was were bubbles and splashing and black water, and then the girl broke free for an instant and fishmouthed for air; and Edie heard her scream like she was shouting directly into the core of Edie’s being without going via the ears. And the words had the terrible panicked urgency of last words: “… gates in the mirrors …”

  Then the man’s hand spread once more and grabbed the bonnet and plunged the spluttering face under the water for the last time, and the hair spread apart, and Edie saw the distorted face suddenly clean and white under the water, eyes wide in terror, mouth still shouting and then breathing water. Edie couldn’t tell why, but she felt she knew the face, and then the mouth stopped moving and the eyes went still, and something dark swooped between Edie and the “then,” and she was gasping for air in the “now.” The Frost Fair and the elephant and the drowned girl were gone, and she was staring across a moving river and electric light made hard edges of everything, even the blackness.

  George was at her side, looking sick and perturbed.

  “What happened?”

  And all she could say, with a heart full of a new and inexplicable sadness, was: “I missed it.”

  “What? What did you miss?”

  She lurched out of the deeper water and stood for a moment, gazing across the river as if she were trying to conjure the past back into being one more time. Then she shook her head and wiped her face.

  “I don’t know.”

  She started walking toward the bridge louring over the water ahead of them.

  “I was looking at the elephant.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Rough Edges

  The Walker was pacing around George’s room, looking at all the toys and models and clay animals. He pushed back his hood as he paced, and grimaced.

  His mouth was the kind that settles in a permanent scowl, the sides pulled back to expose teeth and gums, as if the very air were distasteful to him. His eyes were a dark violet, sunk deep in their sockets. He had a small beard around his mouth, although his cheeks were, in a grizzled fashion, clean-shaven. The beard hooked into a goatish tuft on the end of his chin. There was a single pearl dangling from a gold hoop looped through one ear, and he wore a black rimless cap on the back of his head.

  He looked like a magician turned pirate.

  But not a kind magician or a good pirate.

  He suddenly reached up and took a small clay model of George as a baby and stuck it in his pocket. Then he pulled a long dagger, with a surprisingly ornate jeweled handle, from a scabbard hung at the back of his belt, under his coat, and pulled open a drawer.

  He removed a T-shirt, smelled it, and discarded it.

  He crossed to a laundry bin and pulled out a dirty T-shirt.

  He smelled it and smiled.

  He took the dagger and ripped out a section of it in three jagged slices.

  Then he pocketed the scrap of material and left the room.

  As he walked across the living room he paused in front of the bust of George’s mother. Her head was thrown back in a laugh, hair caught in a permanent swirl of joy. His hand stroked the naked shoulders and the exposed curve of her neck and traveled on to the edge of the piece, where the smooth sensual curves suddenly ended in a sharp jagged edge, as if someone had taken a hacksaw and angrily removed something from a sculpture that was—when you looked closely at it—a little lopsided. His fingers enjoyed the rough edges a second time, and then he suddenly turned and left the room to itself and the night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  George in Charge

  A metal ladder was fixed to the embankment wall, leading up the greasy slabs of stone toward the orange fluorescent lights above. George climbed as far as he could, then came to a sheet of hinged metal that had been padlocked in place on the top six feet of the ladder, to stop people climbing down into the river. He hunched his feet up closer to his body, and used the slope of the metal and his two arms to brace himself as he climbed up the last bit of ladder, his feet held in place by friction and willpower.

  He took a deep breath and stuck his head over the parapet. His arms were burning with the strain of holding his weight, but he wasn’t going to climb onto dry land until he saw if they’d come far enough to be safe. He peered to his left and, with relief, saw no sign of the dragon. They were a long way past it. He checked right and saw nothing more threatening than the river walkway disappearing under the bridge almost directly above him.

  He turned and gave Edie the thumbs-up. She wasn’t watching him. She was still looking back along the river.

  “Hey!”

  She looked up, her eyes taking their time to return from a long way off. He gave her another thumbs-up.

  “It’s safe. We’re in the City. No dragons.”

  He clambered over the wall and onto the river walk. Below him, she began climbing.

  “No dragons doesn’t mean we’re safe.”

  Her gravelly voice sounded even rawer than usual. He wondered if it was the cold. And now that he thought about it, he noticed what he had been ignoring, that he was soaked and muddy and very very cold indeed. Now that he was on dryish land, his body let him feel the full force of the exposure they’d just put themselves through. The body works on autopilot when you’re running scared, and pumps adrenaline into your system to help you fight or—as in George and Edie’s case—flee. Sadly, there’s only so much adrenaline in the system; and it runs out. George felt like his was running out through the soles of his feet and making him notice every detail of how uncomfortable he was, all at once. Even the stone under his feet felt like a jagged sheet of ice.

  But one thing was good. One thing had changed. Maybe it was the jolt that Edie had given him telling him that the Gunner was gone, or maybe it was pulling her out of the water when she’d disappeared and he’d thought he was alone again: but since he’d decided to take the lead, he actually felt less out of control. He didn’t expect Edie would accept he was leading anything, but for the moment he was, and it felt good. He was less panicked because he had someone else to think about rather than just worrying about himself. It was strange.

  He pulled his shoes out of his pockets and tried to put his feet into them. Wet feet resisted the leather lining, and his feet seemed to have grown two sizes anyway, so he gave up—just as Edie slid over the wall and joined him and dripped onto the pavement. They both shivered uncontrollably.

  Edie looked terrible, as if the wet and the mud had dampened her normal fire. Her shaking was like a flame guttering out. Her lips were tight and tinged in blue.

  George knew that she was colder than he was, and he knew he still had to stay in charge.

  “Come on. Let’s run.”

  Her eyes came up, their normal
light frosted over with sadness and cold. For a change she didn’t say anything, didn’t argue or jab or complain. He jerked his thumb toward the bridge.

  “Is that Blackfriars Bridge?”

  She nodded.

  “Then let’s run up there and find this Black Friar.”

  “I don’t want to run.”

  She hunched down on her heels, trying to curl her body around the last flickering lick of heat in her core. Her hand found the sea-glass, and she checked it. It was dull and safe and wet from the river. Seeing it wet reminded her of the seaside, the beach where she had first found the glass and pocketed it. She realized even that first moment had been surreptitious: she had seen it at her feet in the wet pebbles, and had picked it up without thinking much, but once it was in her hand she had realized that she felt something about it, and hadn’t wanted him to see it or touch it or take it away from her.

  He hadn’t noticed her crouch and scoop it up, because he’d been awkward and looking out to sea and trying to light a roll-up at the same time. He’d been awkward because he’d taken her onto the beach to tell her that her mother was not coming back, and that it was just the two of them for now, “until things sorted out.”

  On the train that had brought Edie into London, she had sat next to two happy families returning from a day at the sea, and one of the posh mothers told the other that the thing she always loved about the seaside was that you never saw unhappy children at the beach. And the other mum had laughed and said no, not until it was time to go home. And Edie had wanted to scream. All the worst things that had happened to her had happened at the beach or—if they hadn’t—the news of them was first given to her on a beach, in front of an uncaring bloody sea whose waves rolled in endlessly, their greeny-brown surfaces flaked and scalloped by the wind, hard and relentless as liquid flint.

  It was one of the reasons that she’d got on a train to London when she had had to run away. All the other trains went to places that she knew were by the sea. She hadn’t come to London because of the bright lights, or because it was the capital.