Stoneheart

by Charlie Fletcher

  He smiled eagerly. George shook his head and disguised a shiver. The cold was blowing in under the door, which might be Impossible but wasn’t weatherproof.

  “Um no. No chocolate.”

  The Clocker looked disappointed. He looked closely at George. Clearly not closely enough, because he swung down a magnifying glass and looked even closer. Then he sat back and started unwinding his scarf from around his neck. It was a very long scarf, and as it unwound it also became apparent that it was also a very wide scarf. As he lifted the final loop over his head, it caught on his spectacles and swept them off his face and onto the floor.

  The Clocker ducked his head on reflex, in a gesture that was half-squint, half-cringe. He scrabbled for his glasses, one eye screwed shut, the other looking for them.

  “What’s wrong with your eye?” asked George.

  “Nothing,” said the Clocker, crinkling the open eye in a smile. And he was right. Without the sinister glasses, George was surprised to see that the eye was a very friendly pale green with hazel flecks. It was an open eye, a generous eye, though its pale quality made it look a little washed out, or, like the face it sat in, worn by time. Seeing the face with an eye in it, not hidden behind a dark lens, George decided it was not a severe hatchet of a face, but a face that might even laugh every now and then.

  “The other one,” said George.

  “Ah. Other one frightening. Upset you. Keep it behind these.”

  And he looped the earpieces of the spectacles behind his ears and hid his eyes behind the dark-blue lenses again. George could see from the way the creases in the face relaxed that he had opened the “frightening” eye behind the obscuring lens.

  “Here. Let dog see rabbit. Half rabbit, anyway.” The Clocker grinned and fumbled with the lens over the normal eye. He swiveled the blue lens out of the way. The effect changed from a sinister man wearing dark glasses at night to a more ordinary person wearing a dark patch over one eye. His face changed its proportions accordingly, and was almost cheery. He winked at George and held out the scarf.

  “Borrow. Please. Ward off unseasonable cold. Take it as a favor, etcetera.”

  He delved into his pockets and rummaged.

  “No worries about chocolate. Sure have some somewhere. …”

  He produced a half-eaten bar of dark chocolate meticulously rewrapped in gold foil. He held it out to George with an encouraging nod.

  “My guest. Good for you. Perk up, perhaps. Much as you like.”

  George bit into the chocolate and immediately realized he was starving. He tried to make the taste last, relishing the bittersweet sensation on his tongue, letting it melt a bit before he chewed it to pieces.

  “Um,” he said, “if it’s not rude. What are you? Are you a spit?”

  “Spit? No. Nor taint, rest assured.”

  He watched George eating with a kindly eye. He looked like he was trying to find short-enough words to explain the complex thing he was.

  “Am tallyman. One of the Weirded. So to speak.”

  He smiled as if he knew he was probably just confusing George all the more. Which of course he was.

  “The Weirded?” said George, around a new chunk of chocolate.

  “The cursed. Forgotten men. Thralls.”

  “I don’t know what a thrall is,” George said apologetically.

  “Ah. Old word. Apologies. Thralls being curse bearers. Doomed to walk earth beyond natural span of years. Nonsense to your ears, no doubt. Detritus of old beliefs. Shards from midden of forgotten religions. Etcetera.”

  “You’re cursed? To walk the earth forever.”

  “I am the Clocker. My curse? To keep an eye on the time. And vice versa, as you see. No alarm, please …”

  He lifted the blue lens off the frightening eye. George couldn’t help flinching. The eye was not an eye, but a small clock face. It had two regular hands for hours and minutes, and the uncanny and distressing effect was added to by the fact that the clock face pulsed red, then white in time with the second hand.

  The Clocker hid his watch-eye behind the blue lens again.

  “Eye to watch, and watch for an eye. My mark.”

  He grimaced apologetically. George glanced at Edie. She slept on. He cleared his throat.

  “Can you tell me what’s happening to me?”

  “General terms? Certainly. Have found an un-London.”

  “Un-London?”

  “Place with spits, taints, etcetera. Unseen by inhabitants of your London. But your London only one London. One of many. And what you see as London? Merely another’s un-London. More things in heaven and earth, Horatio. Yes indeed. And more heavens and earths. More hells, too. Some slip. Some walk. Some fall. Between worlds, you see.”

  George thought about Little Tragedy saying there were more “heres” here than they imagined. His head was spinning.

  “Is this like—magic, or something?”

  The Clocker looked faintly appalled at the idea. He shook his head, and all the hanging objects jangled on his coat for emphasis.

  “Not magic. Magic tommyrot. All done with mirrors.”

  “But can I walk between the worlds? I mean, is that what’s happening to me?”

  “No. You fell into an un-London. Didn’t walk. Were pushed. Something about you. Smell it. Ever smell lightning rod after strike? Same smell. Hot metal and static electricity. Could be gift, could be curse. Probably both.”

  “I’m cursed? You mean I’m one of the Weirded?”

  “Cursed maybe too strong. Sorry. But marked, certainly.”

  George felt the throb in his hand and folded it into his pocket.

  “Why would I be cursed?”

  The Clocker shrugged. “Done bad things?”

  “No. No. Not bad enough for a curse, I mean.” George said.

  “A bad thing? People usually know why cursed. Start at baddest thing. Then work back.”

  “There isn’t a baddest thing.” Said George emphatically “Not like that. I haven’t, don’t—”

  He stopped. A black feeling rising in his throat.

  The Clocker looked at him with one kind eye and nodded.

  “Better out than in. Or not. No wish to intrude. Englishman’s secrets his castle, and all that. But may help.”

  “I said something. Something bad.”

  “Not likely cursed for bad language. Though would be appropriate. Ha.”

  “It wasn’t bad language.”

  He felt he was suddenly unable to speak or breathe, and what was stopping him was like a huge bubble of air that was stuck in his chest.

  “Don’t tell me. Your business. Impertinent. Time my only business, really. Speak to others so rarely, forget myself. Impose too much. Apologies etcetera.”

  He offered George the last piece of chocolate. George wanted it but shook his head. The Clocker wrapped it back up in its foil and handed it over.

  “For girl. Glint. Hungry when wakes, no doubt.”

  George took it and put it in his jacket pocket. Somehow, after all he’d been through, this kindness was a bit hard to take.

  The Clocker smiled and looked away, giving George space and quiet. It was a surprisingly companionable silence.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Cold as Hell

  If you walk up a stony mountain stream, and find a place where pebbles have been trapped by a certain combination of flowing water and flaws in the streambed, you can sometimes see an unnaturally perfect circular hole in the rock made by one of the pebbles—a pebble stuck in the eddying water—endlessly turning in the base of the hole. The pebble cuts a hole in the stone because it never stops moving.

  The Walker, a man trapped by the flow of events in his own life, also never stopped moving and found the only relief from this curse in finding enclosed circular spaces around which to shuffle as he dozed in the between-state that was the nearest a man doomed to walk forever achieved instead of sleep.

  He favored the sunken stone circle in the library piazza beside St. Pa
ncras station, and had the habit of turning in its closed circuit for hours on end in the quiet times of the night.

  Only it wasn’t quiet this time.

  His laps around the space were accompanied by a scraping noise, and the noise was one of metal against stone as he dragged the blade of his long knife along the stone bench curving him. His eyes were closed, but every time he completed a circuit, he paused, turned around, and retraced his steps the way he’d just come, thereby ensuring that the blade was honed on both sides equally.

  He prided himself on the blade’s sharpness. He’d had a long time to perfect this means of honing it. He was almost doing it in his sleep.

  There was a crump and a scree, and something hit the ground at a low angle and skittered into the circle in front of him. Because he was used to noises in the city at night, he kept his eyes closed, and thus tripped over the hard icy bundle that had appeared. His knee hit the ground as his eyes snapped open.

  He grimaced in pain and displeasure, and lifted himself back up into a walking position. He walked around the thing and kicked at it with his boot, raising a puff of ice crystals. It spun on its axis, and from within there came a faint and shivery “Caw?”

  The Walker circled it two more times, then tapped it gingerly with the heel of his boot. The ice pod cracked, and a very sad-looking Raven staggered out, beak clattering with cold.

  The Walker slid his dagger back into the scabbard.

  Cold as Hell “Where in hell have you been?” he asked, with a twisted smile that lasted no time at all.

  The Raven shook snow from between its feathers and flapped up onto his shoulder, burrowing in beside his neck, finding a roost in the voluminous hood of his sweatshirt. It didn’t answer the question because firstly it was rhetorical, and secondly it was the joke the Walker never tired of in this situation.

  The Raven just took up its position inside the hood and closed its eyes and tried to stop shivering. It didn’t need the Walker for his sense of humor. It needed him for his warmth.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Telling the Time

  George and the Clocker sat in the dim light, watching Edie sleep. And in the end—perhaps because it was a companionable silence—George found himself filling it with unexpected words.

  “I said something bad to my dad.”

  “Ah,” said the Clocker, “most sons do. One day or another.”

  “Something really bad. I was angry and I said stuff that was bad and a lie, and I was just trying to hurt him. And I did hurt him. He told me I didn’t mean it. And I told him I did. And I spat at him. I mean, I was a kid, I was ten . . . and he left and drove off. And there were—”

  He stopped because it suddenly seemed very important to examine the peeling plaster on the wall to his right. The only sounds were Edie’s breathing and the quiet click of the Clocker’s tally beads marking off the seconds.

  Telling the Time “You see, there were tears in his eyes, and I didn’t say sorry or good-bye or … I didn’t say anything. He wiped the spit off his cheek and said I didn’t mean it, and I was just trying to hurt because I was hurting. And I swore I meant it, swore I would always mean it, and he looked stranger than I ever saw him look. I thought he was going to . . . then he left.”

  He paused to examine more plaster and wipe his nose.

  “Don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

  The Clocker smiled.

  “Because you can. Everyone can tell the time.” Sorry?

  “Joke. Wordplay. Lighten atmosphere. Bad habit. Apologies again.”

  “Oh,” said George.

  “Can tell the time everything. Won’t change anything. Time ticks on regardless.”

  “Right,” said George. And then he told the Clocker of how his father had driven off and never driven back, because someone else hadn’t been looking and had driven into him the next day, and he’d been killed instantly, and so there was nothing left to say except a sorry that seemed as hollow and empty as a coffin now no one was there to hear it. And then because he had got over the hardest thing, the rest of the words came easy.

  They flowed so fast that he suspected he was gabbling hysterically, but each time he checked the Clocker’s eye for a reaction, it was just smiling in friendly understanding. George told him about everything that had happened since the Natural History Museum, and the Sphinxes’ words and the need to find the Stone Heart and the sacrifice that must be made, and he told him about the Black Friar and his word-map of how to find the heart of stone. He told him about the Winding Stair leading to the Memory of Fire where the memory is caged, and how he was to catch a fire to show him the path to the Stone Heart. And then he was suddenly exhausted and talked out, and he closed his eyes and wished he were home in bed, where everything seemed real.

  He jerked awake with the touch of the Clocker’s hand on his shoulder.

  He hadn’t realized he had nodded off.

  “How long have I been asleep?”

  “Too long and not long enough, perhaps. No harm. Time to think.”

  “I wasn’t thinking. I was asleep.”

  In rising panic he realized he had wasted time when he could have been puzzling things out.

  “No harm. Sleep good. Thinking done by self. Now, re: Black Friar. Your worries? No reason to mistrust, per se. None known to me, any rate. But right to mistrust all. Your predicament? Wariness essential. Take pinch of salt every time. Self included. Take pinch of salt with me. But if interested, have thoughts.”

  George sat up straight.

  “Of course I’m interested! It’s all mumbo jumbo to me!

  “Memory of Fire? Hearts of Stone? Winding Stairs? Many things in London. Needles in haystack.”

  “I know.”

  “Many things. But only one Fire. Only one Great Fire.”

  The eye looked at George encouragingly. George thought of London and fires, and thought of the Blitz, and then he thought further back in history lessons—and he got it.

  “The Fire of London?”

  “Indubitably. Corroborating evidence? Memory of Fire? Memorial to fire?”

  George scrabbled back in his own memory, raking over the lukewarm coals of past lessons. They’d done a wall chart of the Great Fire. Men in wigs pulling down flaming timbered houses, and the great plague that had happened before the fire. And after, he remembered helping cut out the tall cardboard outline of a pillar—

  “The Monument!” he said.

  “Exactly. Monument memorial to fire. And inside monument? Stair, circular. Winding, might say. Lead to top. And on top? Urn. Urn of fire.”

  “That,” said George with a grin, “is just brilliant.”

  He began to get up. The Clocker pushed him gently back.

  “That,” he said, “is not open to public in middle of night. You sleep. Bad time to be on streets. Low hours of night. Servants of the Stone walk.”

  “Servants of the Stone?”

  “Doom-thralls like self. Thralled to ancient vows broken on blood stone. Self free of servitude to any but own doom. Keep eye on time as punishment. Not service like Stone Servants. Watch for them. They will watch for you. Now sleep. In morning can leave by other door. Via church. Will be open. Used by Russian Orthodoxes. Early risers. Better than alarm clock.”

  He clicked his beads with a smile and bent his head over them. Something in the way his head bent reminded George of the Gunner, and remembering the Gunner brought another question to his mind.

  “Excuse me. One more thing. When all this began, when the Gunner saved me, he said something.”

  “No doubt. Startling event. Worthy of comment.”

  “He said I’d got no idea of what I’d started.”

  “Man of perspicacity.”

  “No,” said George. “I mean—yes, but he didn’t know about any of this, about the Stone Heart or the Heart of Stone or whatever. He was speaking about something else, I think. Something about spits and taints. . . .”

  The Clocker nodded grimly.r />
  “Spits, taints. Hostile. Uneasy peace always. Equilibrium of distrust. Gunner kills four taints? Equilibrium gone. Things out of balance. Gauntlet thrown.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t know. Not fully. But has happened before. War between spits and taints always on cards. In background. Is why some statues walk and others don’t. Non-walkers are—

  “Dead statues?”

  “Precisely. Casualties of earlier wars. Taints, see, just voids with no spirit. Only lack and need to fill void. Appetites, envy, green-eyed monster, etcetera. Hate spirited statues. Hate meaning. Want it, too, always hate what can’t have. But not worry self. If spit-war to come, beyond stopping.”

  “But you’re saying I might be starting a war?”

  “Only a ‘might.’Never sleep worrying about ‘might.’Especially if beyond control. Concentrate on what can do. Understand? Now sleep. Will keep watch.”

  There was no way George was going to sleep; his mind was racing with all this new information. He turned it over and over, and as he tried to sort it out, the loops in his thinking kept repeating themselves, and he returned to his fears and his memories in such a repetitive and inescapable pattern that it became soothing and regular—and this was the thing that did, in the end, send him to sleep.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  The Dead Statue

  The Grid Man stared fixedly across the street. A long bony hand waved itself in front of the eyes. He didn’t move. The hand spread itself across the gap in its chest and pressed itself against the dull bronze, as if feeling for a heartbeat or some hint of a vital spark. The hand gave up and curled into a contemptuous fist, rapping a curled forefinger against the metal brow.

  The Raven sat on top of the Grid Man’s head. It squinnied a thin dribble of droppings down the unmov-ing face, leaving a whitish streak running vertically through the unresponding left eye.

  “Exactly. No one here anymore, just a pile of metal,” said the Walker. “Unlike your good Self. A bird of a quite different feather, so to speak. Didn’t take you long to pull yourself together, did it?”