“Earth?”
“Mud. Clay. Gravel.”
“And they caught you? They touched you?”
George nodded. He showed his ankle and his left arm. The redness was already turning into something harsher and bruisier. Even Edie was impressed.
“Wow. Something really did grab you hard there!” Edie exclaimed.
“I told you. You said you saw.”
“I saw something. But it was like ghost trails. Like something on top of what I was seeing. Like …”
She ran out of ways to describe what she had almost seen, so she shut up. The Black Friar leaned in to George and parked his smile right in front of his face.
“If you were grabbed, and I certainly can see you have been roughly used by someone—”
“Some thing. Some things,” George insisted.
“Quite, quite, my dear fellow, quite so. But, er, if this earth grabbed you, how, it occurs to me, how did you escape its clutches?”
“I just hit it.”
Mirth crept into the Friar’s eyes again.
“You just hit it and it just stopped? You’ll forgive me, but it hardly seems likely, if the elements were raised to such a pitch that they found form and corporated so aggressively, that a mere—again, forgive me—boy could just slap them away. No, I fear this is a twice-told tale, a confection told you by another—”
“It’s not a confection! It’s not! They were pulling me apart, and I hit them like this and like this, and they fell apart—just went to, you know, mud and gravel on the floor and—What?”
The monk had been watching George miming his ordeal, and as George’s hand had opened and mimicked the blows that had saved him, the monk’s hand flashed out and grabbed it.
He pulled it gently but firmly toward him, his eyes fixed on the dragon’s mark scratched redly into the skin.
“Where did you get that?”
“Get what?”
The monk twisted the hand gently, so that both children could see the scar.
“That. That maker’s mark.”
Even though he was sitting in front of a walking, talking statue, George felt the full absurdity of his answer as he said it.
“From a dragon. A dragon slashed me. At Temple Bar.”
The friar sat back, still holding the hand, shaking his head.
“That’s not a dragon mark, and if a dragon slashes you, young fellow, you get slashed and you stay slashed until you’re burned and there’s an end of you.”
“It did!” George exploded in frustration.
“It did NOT!” replied the monk, raising his voice. “It is a maker’s mark. And you, young scallion, are no manner of thing to be bearing it!”
George looked at his hand.
“I don’t know what a maker’s mark is!”
“I don’t know what a scallion is,” said Edie. And before the monk could answer, she went on. “But if it means liar, you’re wrong. He did get slashed by a dragon, and something"—her eyes went shifty for a moment, then hardened as they met George’s—“something bad happened in the underpass out there. So.”
The monk looked from one to the other, then stood suddenly. Suddenly serious, suddenly slightly terrible in his mirthlessness.
“Stay here. Don’t leave the building, don’t leave the room, don’t touch anything, don’t talk to anything. I’ll be back.”
And in a sudden whirl of cape and cassock, he was up and out of the door; and the last they saw or heard of him was the snick of the key in the lock and his shadow striding away into the fluorescent-lit night beyond the frosted glass of the windows.
George looked at his hand.
“It’s just a scar.”
Edie shuffled over and looked at it.
“It is sort of a bit like a shape, isn’t it?”
“Of course it’s a shape!”
“No, I mean a meant shape. Like Chinese, or a symbol or something. . . .”
He closed his fist and shoved it in his pocket.
“Yeah, well—whatever it is, it hurts like hell!”
She looked at the pub door.
“You trust him?”
“Why not?”
“Dunno. I never trust people who smile too much.”
George looked around the room. It seemed stuffed with faces and statues looking at them. In fact, the whole space was getting very warm because of the heater. It was claustrophobic under the vaulted roof. The brown and black marble seemed sweaty and unwholesome, like smoky mutton fat.
“So,” she repeated, “do you trust him?”
He nodded around the room.
“I don’t think now is the time. The walls have ears—”
“Yeah. And eyes and mouths and hands and hooves and talons and, hello—”
She stopped under an alabaster light fixture that came out of the wall. At first it looked like an upsweep of decorative swirls, from which hung a strange lamp made of metal in the shape of a buxom milkmaid. She was carrying the twin hanging lightbulbs on a yoke across her shoulders.
“What?” said George, trying to see what she was looking at.
Her fingers traced the raised letters on the bottom of the alabaster bracket. They read: NOON. Her hand stopped and she pointed.
“See?”
He looked closer. The carving wasn’t just decoration.
It was a faun: half-man, half-goat; but it was a winged faun, and it hung upside down, eyes closed, arms crossed across its chest, sleeping like a bat.
“It’s a devil,” said Edie.
“It’s a faun. Half-goat, half-man. It’s from mythology,” George replied.
“It’s not very monkish though, is it. Fauns, milkmaids, those cherub things up on the corners—what’s that got to do with being a friar?”
“I don’t know. But the Gunner wouldn’t have sent us here if he was bad.”
“If he was a taint.”
“He’s not a taint.”
“Maybe there are bad spits too?”
They pondered this possibility.
“I wish the Gunner was here.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Dead in the Water
The Gunner was facedown in the mud and not moving. He’d walked down the Strand, every step hurting worse than the one before, and by the time he’d reached Trafalgar Square and turned left under the lofty pillars of Admiralty Arch, he knew he was in worse trouble than he’d imagined.
He carried the heat of the Temple Bar dragon’s fire in him like a growing poison. It was a heat that sapped all his energy. Never before had he felt like he was made of bronze. He had been made to be a man in uniform, and if he had ever been asked, he would have said he felt like any other man. But no one asks statues these kind of questions, not even other statues.
Inside himself, where the poison of the fire was lodged, he felt looser, almost liquid. Where he had felt solid he now felt soft, and the outer skin, beyond the heat, felt like scrap metal that he had to drag along with him, metal that could burst or break at any moment. He hated the feeling. It was the memory and the pain of his birth, the time when something that was not him but just a possibility of him poured hot and molten from formlessness into his present shape; and in the birth memory was the realization that this is what his death would feel like, and in that thought was the corroding poison of the dragon’s fire.
The pain he remembered was not the pain of the molten bronze pouring into the gunner-shaped cast at the foundry. It was the pain of cooling into that shape, of becoming solid. It was the pain of all the other things that the metal could have been made into dying as he became the Gunner and not them. And because the number of things the molten bronze could have been shaped into was infinite, so was the pain of their possibilities dying.
He stumbled up the Mall, and as he passed St. James’s Park to his left, he caught the flat sheen of the lake through the trees. And he thought that if he could get to the lake and get into the water he might cool this burning, sapping pain enough to continue across into Green Park and from
there to Hyde Park Corner, and get to his plinth before midnight. Although, by the time he thought it, the fire-poison was gnawing at him so badly that he really would have been happy to lie in the cool inky-black water until midnight came, and the consequences of not being on his plinth at turn o’day happened anyway.
Dead in the Water The pain and the damage was so severe that oblivion and never moving or seeing again didn’t seem so bad.
He hoped the kid would be okay. He was pretty sure the Friar wasn’t as black as he was painted. Not like there was much choice. And the strange girl, the glint. All that hurt inside her. All that pain she would give to those close to her. Still, she was all he could trust.
The boy probably deserved better.
He splashed into the lake, sending a family of sleeping ducks skittering away across the ripples in protest. He fell to one knee, then sat back and laid his body in the cold mud just below the shallow water.
It didn’t help.
He’d expected the water to fizz and steam off him as he lowered himself into it, he felt so hot inside. But the water didn’t boil, and there was no hiss, no hot water vapor rising beneath the spreading plane trees.
It didn’t help a bit.
And now he had used up all of his energy getting to the lake, and he had none left to get home in time. Maybe ever.
“Stupid,” was the last word he said.
Then, with a last gargantuan effort, he rolled onto his great chest and tried to crawl out of the mud, knowing he wouldn’t make it, knowing he’d try anyway. He almost made three feet, and then his arms and legs gave out and he slumped facedown into the mire at the water’s edge. His head twisted sideways, and his helmet came off, and his cheek plowed into the mud and water.
And then he was still.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Little Tragedy
Edie sat in front of the heater, pulling on her tights. George looked over at her.
“Are they dry already?”
She tugged them on with satisfaction.
“Any drier and they’d be burning. You want to watch your jeans don’t scorch.”
He reached over and felt his trousers. They were pretty dry. He took them off to a dark corner of the pub and changed into them. Edie disappeared behind the bar, and from the crunching noise she was making, he knew she was taking more packets of crisps.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Nicking food. You want some?”
“No.”
She carried on rustling. Then clinking. Then her head popped up over the bar and looked at him through the gloom.
“What?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Yeah, you did. I heard you, I . . .” She cocked her head, hearing something. It was George’s turn to ask the questions.
“What?”
She shook her head and stuffed a juice bottle inside her coat.
“Nothing.”
“Did you hear something?”
“I thought I did. It’s this place. All the mirrors and the dark nooks. Feels like there’s more people in here than you think.”
“There are more people in here than you think,” said a voice neither of them had heard before.
It was a puckish London voice, like that of a very old child with a swagger in it. They looked toward the pillared alcove and saw a mask hanging upside down in the archway, grimacing at them. Then a hand pulled the mask away, and they saw it was one of the imp-cherubs that had been sitting on the cornicing. His face was grinning and mischievous, and his hair hung down in an unruly mane beneath it.
“Really,” said George, speaking slowly.
He had the impression that this small boy might disappear at any moment, a thought confirmed by the way the child kept one eye on the door at all times, as if waiting for it to open and the Friar to return.
“Ho, yes. And there are more ‘heres’ here too, if you know how to see them,” said the boy.
Edie opened her mouth, but George waved at her to keep quiet—which she unexpectedly did.
“What’s your name?” George asked.
“Me? I’m Tragedy. Or Little Tragedy. Or You Imp.”
George pointed at the boy’s grinning face.
“Shouldn’t you be Comedy?”
“Garn, ‘course not. That’s why I got given the bleedin’ mask, to hide my face. Comedy don’t need a mask, trust me!
“Why?” said Edie.
“Why what?”
“Why trust you? People wearing masks usually have something to hide.”
Little Tragedy looked hurt and offended.
“Edie,” said George in a low, warning tone.
“I ain’t wearing it now, am I?” said the boy, waving the mask in the air beneath him.
“No,” admitted Edie, after a sharp glance from George.
Little Tragedy’s face split in a smile.
“There you go, then. Besides, everyone’s got a mask of some kind, don’t they? Everyone’s not quite what they seem.”
“Aren’t they?” said Edie.
“No, they ain’t. Blimey, sit under a pub roof without ever leaving for a hundred years, you see things. You hear things. And after a bit, you think things and all.”
“What do you think?” George asked carefully. He sensed that the boy wanted to say something to them, but needed it to be teased out of him somehow.
“Well. It’s all a lark, isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
“So he says. Old Black. He says it’s all a great lark, and that the trick of it is to have the last laugh, and the first laugh, and as many of the ones in between as we can.” His face dropped the smile and became suddenly worried as he went on. “Only, my question is, who are you?
“Who am I?”
“Who am both of you? Because, like I said, I seen things, but I never seen Old Black stop smiling—or looking like he’s smiling—like he done when you telled him what you been up to and how you got here. So what I’m thinking is, who are you?”
George shrugged. His fingers itched and felt for something that wasn’t there. He picked his coat off the back of the chair where it was hanging and put it on. He found the piece of plasticene and squished it with his thumb.
“I’m just ordinary. I mean, today I can see spits like you. I mean, I hope you’re a spit. . . .”
“Which I certainly ain’t a taint, begging your pardon, I don’t think so!” spluttered the boy in outrage.
“Sorry. No offense. And I see taints and I’m in this nightmare. But most of the time I’m just ordinary.”
“It’s not seeing us as we are what makes you different. We seen people who can see us before—”
“What happens to them?” broke in Edie.
“Dunno. They don’t usually hang around for long. I think they get got.”
“’Got’ by what?”
“Dunno. But something gets them, because they don’t come back.”
“Cheerful,” said Edie grimly. “Thanks.”
“I’m not saying they get snuffed out, mind. Not necessarily. There’s other ways to go than popping your clogs, other places. I’m just saying they maybe go there.”
“To other places?” asked George. Little Tragedy wasn’t making much sense to him, but he still had the feeling that the mischievous-looking boy was bursting to tell them something. Or maybe, he thought, he wasn’t bursting to tell them something at all, but just swollen with the big joke that he knew something he wasn’t going to tell them. Despite his snub nose and twinkling eyes, there was perhaps something not entirely wholesome about him.
“What other places?” asked Edie.
He paused for effect, and his smile went from puckish to something closer to a leer. He said the words slowly and deliberately.
“Other ‘heres.'”
“What other ‘heres’?”
The boy grinned conspiratorially and reached out his arm toward her, little fingers beckoning.
“I’ll tell you if you touch
me,” said the boy.
“What?” said George.
“She’s a glint, isn’t she? So if she touches me, she’ll know.”
“Know what?” asked George.
“Know if something bad happened to me. And if she can tell me that, then I’ll tell her about the other places. I might even show her how to get to them, too.”
Edie and George exchanged a look. She cleared her throat.
“Do you think something bad happened to you?”
Little Tragedy put the mask in front of his face. Then took it away. Then put it in front and then took it away again.
“See? Two of me.”
“One’s a mask.”
“I know it’s a mask,” he said, as if explaining something very obvious to two people who were very slow on the uptake. “I’m just showing you what I feel like. Two people, two types of people, and I don’t feel right. Like I’m made wrong. So if you glint me, you can see if I’m made proper. Or if something bad happened that I don’t know about.”
He smiled at Edie, and George could see it was a brave smile, as if he were trying not to cry. Edie walked toward him.
“I don’t like glinting,” she said. “It hurts me.”
Little Tragedy reached out a thin arm and waggled his fingers again.
“Don’t do it,” said George sharply.
Edie stopped in the archway and looked back at him.
“What?”
“All the other statues, the Sphinxes, the Gunner, all of them are frightened of you. Or at least they really don’t like being around you when you glint.”
“So?” she asked, the old challenging look rekindling in her eyes.
“So it’s not right, him being so keen to be glinted. It might be a trap.”
“A trap? You’re joking,” snorted the boy. “Bit late to worry about that, isn’t it?”
George looked at Edie. Edie looked at the door. They both were remembering the snick the lock had made as the Black Friar had left.
“Are you saying we can’t trust the Black Friar?”
“Trust Old Black? ‘Course you can trust him! You can trust him for just about anything. Just as long as you trust him never to be what he seems. …”
Edie shivered suddenly as she remembered the drowning girl shouting “He’s not what he seems!”
Stoneheart Page 17
