Stoneheart

by Charlie Fletcher

  “What wars between spits and taints?” she asked.

  “Just ancient history,” he finished quickly, wanting to move on. He made a great play of looking at his watch. “We better get a move on. I’ve not got much time.”

  He wasn’t going to tell her that he might, by making the Gunner save him from the pterodactyl, have triggered the beginning of a war between the spits and taints that was going to be anything but ancient.

  “Look. We’re probably fine,” he said, nodding at the dull sea-glass.

  She zipped it back into her pocket. “Huh,” was all she could come up with at short notice, but she gave it all the feeling she could muster.

  The two of them watched the dragons very carefully for the first sign of any movement as they walked in under the lee of the pillar.

  “George,” she said, nodding at a sign on the stone to the left of the door.

  It showed the admission charges for the Monument. Children were one pound.

  “We haven’t got two quid,” she said. “You’ll have to go alone.” He looked up at the cage in the sky.

  “I’ll be quick. You wait under cover over there.” He pointed at a modern building faced in shiny brown marble.

  She shivered. He took his coat off.

  “Here. You wear this. Keep you warm. I’m going to be inside, running up those stairs. I’m going to be dry in there. Probably too hot by the time I get to the top.”

  She was unexpectedly thrown by his offer of the coat. She took it tentatively, and then thrust her arms into the sleeves decisively.

  “Thanks.”

  After Pudding “No bother.”

  “What are you going to do if it stops raining, and one of those dragons isn’t dead and does wake up?”

  He shrugged and tried to sound more confident than he actually felt. Although he already felt that trying to hide things from Edie was a bit pointless. Her eyes seemed to suck the truth out of things. Either that or he was getting light-headed with all this running around and sleeping rough. A hunger pang twinged through his gut. He ignored it.

  “There’s a cage up there. Like a shark cage. You know, for when you dive with sharks.”

  “I don’t dive with sharks. How bored do you have to be to do that, anyway?” she asked.

  After a long beat he decided it was a rhetorical question.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  She knew by now that “I’m fine” or “I’ll be fine” was George’s equivalent of whistling in the dark, a way of dealing with his nerves and fears. She decided to let him get away with it, because he’d lent her his coat and she was warming up.

  He looked up at the drab mottled stone column and the matching clouds rolling past over its head.

  “Better get on with it. It looks like it might clear up any minute.”

  He blew his cheeks out in a big breath, like a diver about to start his run up on the springboard.

  “Though, how the heck I’m supposed to catch a fire anyway in all this rain I’ve got no idea. Right.” He swiveled on his heel and headed for the door, one eye tracking the immobile dragons as he passed under them.

  “Good luck.”

  She headed for the shelter across the square. Halfway there she turned, and was a little surprised to see him standing at the door to the stairs, looking back at her with a strange expression. He changed it as soon as he realized she was seeing it; but for an unguarded instant, she saw all the hesitancy and the tentativeness beneath the bravado he’d been adopting all the way here from Fleet Street. He switched to a confident smile and waved at her, before pushing at the door.

  “George!” she shouted, and ran back through the thinning rain. And ever after she never knew why she did what she did next, but she unzipped her pocket and handed him her sea-glass. “It’ll give you warning if things change. You know.”

  He felt a lump in his throat. He sensed how much the sea-glass meant to her.

  “Edie—”

  She waved him off and jogged away.

  “Just don’t lose it. Get a bend on.”

  He watched until she made the shelter of the building overhang. Then he pocketed the glass and pushed in through the door.

  After Pudding Inside, there was a two-way turnstile and a narrow little booth on the right where a man was reading the paper and drinking steaming tea out of a thermos. He scarcely looked up as George dropped his coin into the depression in his narrow counter. He produced a ticket and a pamphlet and went back to his paper with a grunt that sounded like “No monkey business.”

  George cleared his throat and walked into the center of the plinth, and looked up. Illuminated by the regularly spaced lightbulbs, a stone staircase spiraled up the inside of the column, a black-painted safety railing, framing the narrow void of air in a snail’s whorl. At its center, two hundred feet above, was a core of whiter light where the door opened onto the cage and the sky beyond. Despite the lightbulbs, the space felt very old and distant from the city beyond. It had the clean smell of dry stone despite the rain outside.

  George checked the sea-glass and started climbing. He climbed three steps at a time and counted as he went.

  By the time he got to thirty, Edie, on the outside, was feeling worried. It wasn’t a specific worry. Though, with statues jumping off buildings and chasing her and trying to waffle her head flat, she didn’t suppose she really needed anything to be that specific about. In fact, it wasn’t specifically worry as such. It was more like a nagging void or a suddenly noticed absence. She’d once had an earache, and it had been really horrid, and she hadn’t known how she would go on bearing it. And her mother had read her a story, and that story had led to another. And after a bit she’d forgotten about the pain—which was fine and dandy, but all stories come to an end, and the ones her mother had been reading to her were no exception to the rule. And when she’d stopped listening to the last story, the real world returned, and she remembered the pain, and then it had throbbed back into action. What she felt now was exactly what she’d felt in the gap between realizing the story was over and knowing she’d forgotten the pain in her ear, and the sure and certain knowledge that it was about to come back, big time.

  She was missing the sea-glass more than she’d expected, she realized. It must be that. It couldn’t be that she was missing George, who she wasn’t—she reminded herself—even sure if she trusted.

  Though, why had she lent him the glass if she didn’t trust him? She pulled the jacket—his jacket—tighter. And in doing that she felt something bump against her, and she felt in the pocket and found the broken dragon’s head. Its blank eyes stared back at her, and she quickly put it back in the pocket, suddenly worried that it might rouse the nearby dragons by some sympathetic process she didn’t understand.

  She wished she had the sea-glass. It had been with her for so long. It had only revealed its purpose once she had come to the city—but maybe that was because there weren’t things like taints at the seaside, or at least not where she’d grown up. Her seaside was not affluent enough to pay for bins to put your dog’s mess in, let alone statues or gargoyles.

  A dark shadow flew between her and the sky. Her head came up on reflex, but she relaxed when she saw it was just a bird, not a dragon or a gargoyle.

  And then she froze again. The rain was stopping. In fact, by the time she had realized it was stopping, it had stopped. And although Edie was right to be alarmed, the thing she was about to be terrified by was something else entirely.

  It was behind her.

  Something emerging from the shadows, like darkness becoming visible.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Behind Edie

  Everything goes in circles: if Edie hadn’t lent her sea-glass to George, she wouldn’t have been thinking about the seaside and the day she was told her mother wasn’t coming back. If she’d had the sea-glass, maybe she’d have sensed something. Of course, if she’d had the sea-glass in her hand, maybe it would have sensed it for her. But she hadn’t, and it didn
’t, and so she had no idea anything was behind her until one hand closed over her mouth, and the other one pulled her into the unseeing darkness of the shadows surrounding the square.

  George was puffed and had lost count of the steps. He was at three hundred and something when he got to the door at the top. He stumbled out into the wet breeze and looked at the lowering skies hanging over the disordered jumble of buildings around him. The gloom was lit with treacherous flashes of low bright winter sun that was breaking through over his right shoulder. The Thames rolled past, surprisingly close, spreading wide and flat under the familiar silhouette of Tower Bridge to the east. As he turned north he saw a cluster of taller and more aggressively shiny and modern buildings sprouting above the older grubbier office blocks. The gherkin-shaped building jutted perkily above the polished jumble of a steel and pipe work that he recognized as the Lloyds Building.

  He saw a lot of tall and spindly cranes spiking like transitory weeds between the finished and half-built buildings as he kept turning westward and came to a stop facing the reassuring half-globe of St. Paul’s Cathedral. It would have been a perfect view of the dome and its supporting colonnade of pillars, were it not for a modern black block that obscured the view halfway between it and the Monument. The black tower was sheathed in a distinctive diagonal grid of silver metal reflecting the few hopeful rays of sun poking through the cloud base.

  As he got his breath back, he thought how sad and unloved all these roofs seemed, like the orphan bits of buildings that no one looked at or thought about unless they were up in some unusual place, like he was. And just as he checked himself for letting his mind wander, he realized the wetness in the breeze was water being blown off the cage that surrounded the walkway, not from raindrops actually falling anymore.

  He looked up at the golden urn of frozen fire above him. Some of the sun was hitting it, and it glittered against the underbelly of a sooty cloud buffeting overhead. A bird flapped past and came in to roost.

  He decided the flames in the urn above him looked more like a gilded thistle, or maybe an artichoke. He thought the bird perched on top of it looked like it was going to have a very uncomfortable time roosting among those spikes, no matter how golden they were.

  And then he remembered how it had just stopped raining, and thought of the crouching dragons with their tigerish grins below him, and he fumbled for Edie’s glass.

  It was dull, but somehow humming, filling his hands with a slight but persistent vibration. He stared around at the city below.

  Above him, the bird stepped off the crown of flames and occupied the air in between the sun and the glass. The shadow falling on his hands seemed to still the vibration. Without thinking, he moved the glass back into the weak sunlight and it purred into life again, just for an instant. Then the shadow flapped across it and hung there. George moved the glass, and this time the shadow anticipated him and kept the glass out of the sun. George looked at the bird.

  It was a raven.

  And though the whole bird/beak arrangement might well have been designed to prevent the raven from smiling, he had a strong sense that the flash of life in the beady eye was mockingly challenging him, as if to say, Try again.

  He did try again. He faked left, then thrust the glass right. The Raven moved with him, as if connected by strings. Its eye blinked sympathetically at him. And he knew for sure that this was the Raven. He noticed that the way it hung in the sky did seem to defy the basic laws of avian aeronautics. And he remembered exactly where the Fusilier had said he’d blown it to, and where, therefore, it had come back from.

  The Raven looked as if he knew just what George was thinking. It seemed to nod its head in acknowledgment as it hovered there.

  Knowing that it was doing everything it could to stop the sea-glass get in the sun made George determined to beat the Raven and get the glass into the light. How difficult was it going to be? As he jogged around the corner, the Raven slid through the air between him and the glimpse of sun, keeping station with him as if on rails.

  “What do you want?” he shouted at it.

  “Caw,” it croaked almost maliciously.

  “Bog off!” he yelled, and held the glass out at the end of his arm. That brought it quite close to the bars on the cage, and in a move that was quick as thought, the Raven punched forward in the air, stuck its head through the bars, and tried to snatch the glass from his hand.

  “No, you don’t!”

  George leaped backward and found himself jammed against the stone of the Monument. He hid his hands behind him for extra safety. The Raven clung on to the bars and just cocked its head this way and then that, as if quizzically wondering for how long George thought it was going to keep this up? It looked even blacker than it normally was, with the sun directly behind it. It seemed like a hole in the light.

  George felt a narrow ridge on the wall at his back. He had an idea. He placed the sea-glass on it. Then he closed his hand as if he still held it, and faked left again, then went right. The bird followed his hand as if it still held the glass, keeping it in shadow.

  George spun as fast as he could. The sea-glass sat on the wall where he’d left it, caught, as if in its own spotlight, by a ray of sun. The glass hummed and vibrated and suddenly ignited in a burst of pale flame that rolled around its edges like a fiery wreath.

  “Yes!” shouted George.

  “CAW!” croaked the Raven, as near to a yelp of surprise as a beak could make.

  The vibrating fiery disk shook itself off the little ridge and clinked to the floor of the cage. The Raven made a hopeless lunge for it, but missed by a yard because of the restraining bars. George dived for the sea-glass. The fire flickered greedily, so he decided not to pick it up, but he crouched over it, staring into the smooth glass rimmed by the fire.

  He didn’t know what he was expecting to see. Maybe words written in letters of flame. Or a map. Or something like a swirling crystal ball. What he saw was—nothing.

  Just an opaque glass surface with a ring of flames licking around it.

  And then the flames died, and it was what it always seemed to be—the bottom of a bottle broken long ago, worn smooth by the sea and the beach.

  He was so disappointed that, when the flames guttered out, he reached for it without thinking, with his scarred hand.

  If the dragons bite had been unimaginably painful, this was worse, because the other bite had only hurt his hand. This pain began in his fist as he clasped the glass. Then it spiraled out from the pain of the mark in his hand, coiled around his wrist, and serpentined down his arm. It felt as though a twisting briar had grown at immense speed, twining its thorns around his forearm, climbing over his elbow and tightly puncturing its way over his upper arm. And then, instead of continuing to hurt his arm or his skin, the pain plunged inside him at his armpit, as if the thorny briar were stabbing its roots down into the core of him, tightening them around his heart and his lungs and his guts. He couldn’t breathe, his heart pounded irregularly and he felt sick, sicker than he’d ever felt before. The only thing stopping him from throwing up was the tight grip the pain had his guts clenched in.

  And then he started to jerk and shudder as the message of the fire caught in the glass spoke to him. He suddenly felt a brief lifting of all the pain and the shuddering, and in the treacherous instant of relief, he had time to realize that this was what Edie must feel when she glinted. And then it hit him.

  But what hit him wasn’t the past, like with Edie.

  What hit him was the now.

  It felt like a huge and inexorable hand was forcing his head down over the glass. His eyes were wide, and he found he couldn’t blink, even when they began to sting and dry out. In massive jerks of pain and nausea, the glass revealed an image, then another, and another. And what the image was, the thing that George saw, was the view from the top of the Monument. He saw the view in the direction he was facing, sprawled on the floor of the cage.

  It was of a narrow square of turbid river, framed
between the horizontal stripes of concrete cladding on an office building on one side, and the partially domed spire and tower of an old church on the other.

  Then the view jerked forward and sideways, and he was looking at the top of an office building, where an unlikely wooden pergola twined with dying plants bordered an immense block venting steam into the sky.

  Another sickening jerk and zoom, and he was looking at the curving wall of the building beyond it, a modern stone facade echoed by the contrasting curve of a line of old Victorian buildings next door.

  And then as the view jerk-zoomed onward in its lurching fly-through of London, he saw something he recognized: it was the base of the Black Tower, the one caged in diagonal silvered steel braces.

  The pain and tightness in his guts released in the moment of recognition, and he had to focus on not throwing up as the next jerk of perspective showed him St. Paul’s, before suddenly diving down and around the base of the Black Tower, and swirling to a halt in a final frame that was, he knew—because it was suddenly outlined in flames—what he was looking for.

  The London Stone.

  Only it didn’t look like anything mythic.

  It didn’t look magical It didn’t look especially historical.

  It didn’t even look interesting.

  It did look like one of the dingiest, saddest, most forgotten buildings in London; a building without even the dignity of age.

  True, there was something at pavement level that throbbed with dim light, but the rest of the building was a ratty looking 1960s office block, dull-eyed with neglect and lack of tenants.

  George stared at the final frame, trying to control his clenched gut and pounding heart, trying to make sense of how it could be that the end of his nightmare and the end of his quest seemed to lie in a place that looked like somewhere an import-export business might rent an office for a month or so, before failing and leaving without paying the rent or emptying the wastepaper baskets.