Glass Town

by Steven Savile

  They were parked at the side of the road, three streets away from the back of the Scala, overlooking the ruin of the old Latimer Road cinema. It had been a long time since any celluloid gods had entertained on that particular silver screen. It had been almost thirty years, in fact, since the last Saturday morning picture show.

  Given the value of prime real estate in the heart of London the land itself must have been worth a not-so-small fortune regardless of the fact the building was a death trap, but still the old cinema stood abandoned and slipping evermore into decay without any sign of redevelopment. That might have surprised the casual observer, but a little digging in the right places would have revealed the name on the freehold as one Gideon Lockwood, the sale having gone through at the price of a peppercorn the week the old cinema owners filed for bankruptcy. More digging would have unearthed articles about the incessant vandalism the old Latimer Road cinema had been subjected to, including two attempts at arson, which suddenly stopped after ownership changed hands. A suspicious mind might draw certain conclusions from that evidence. There were reasons the Lockwoods had wanted the old cinema, of course. There were always reasons.

  Seth took two things from the glove compartment: a box of matches and what looked like a Victorian wind-up toy.

  “What on earth are you doing?” Gideon Lockwood asked as his ageless father turned the carousel. He saw the flicker of movement within the inner circle of mirrors that lined the carousel. “It’s a praxinoscope, an early projection device. It is called Damiola’s Carousel, and was part of the illusionist’s stage show and quite unlike any zoetrope that came before or after it. Just sit back and watch. There are different ways to put the frighteners on guys now. Like this.” The old man’s cheek twitched again. His fingers had the same flutter, a sure sign that the disease was spreading. It made him look even weaker than he was. Seth Lockwood had no stomach for weakness. “Now do not fight me, boy, or disease won’t be what kills you.”

  He planted the carousel on the dashboard, fitting a paper with a woman’s silhouette cut from it onto the drum, and turned the small handle through seven revolutions until it spun under its own momentum, then he teased a match from the box and struck it, holding it in the center of the carousel as it turned. He opened the carousel’s hood, and a moment later the flickering match light was projected into the middle of the street in front of them. Slowly, with each rattling revolution of the carousel, a stuttering silhouette began to take shape within the light. Two more turns of the handle and the flickering frames settled on the shape of a woman, though her face was horribly blurred from the carousel’s erratic motion. It didn’t become any clearer even though the image became more and more substantial until an actual woman appeared to stand in the middle of the road—though as the clouds shifted to reveal the moon, the moonlight streamed through her, undoing the illusion.

  The match burned out and the carousel came to a stuttering stop.

  She didn’t disappear.

  The woman conjured up by the carousel turned to face them. Her face remained a featureless smudge, but every other detail was in sharp focus. She wore a white dress that billowed around her knees and accentuated her movie star bust. She had a blond bob cut short above her shoulders. There was no color anywhere on her. She was a stark black-and-white projection made real in shades of gray.

  “Meet the Rushes,” Seth said.

  He opened the car door and clambered out. He walked up the middle of the road to stand face-to-face with his invocation.

  In the car, Gideon couldn’t hear what his father said to his creation. He didn’t need to. He knew he was filling its head with orders and sending it out to hunt. He couldn’t bear to look at the apparition; it did strange things to him. It stirred things inside the old man he’d been sure were long since dead.

  After a moment the conjuration seemed to shift ever so slightly, causing the moonlight to diffract, and moved off, not running, not walking, but seeming to blink in and out of existence with each jarring step because her new body lacked all the frames it needed to move smoothly.

  And then she was gone.

  Seth Lockwood walked back toward the car.

  “She’s off hunting,” he said, clambering back into the driver’s seat. “She will tear Boone’s house apart. If there is something to be found, she will find it and bring it to us.”

  “What is that thing?”

  “I told you.”

  “Not its name. I mean what is it?”

  “It’s from that place, that’s all you need to know. Think of it as a dream if that helps.”

  “It doesn’t.”

  “An ancient spirit. A thing of the mist. A demon. A succubus. Eater of Souls. There are lots of names for what she is.”

  “Dear God,” Gideon said,. “You’ve turned that thing loose to feed, haven’t you?”

  “I am just protecting what I love, son, like anyone would.”

  “Can you control it?” Gideon Lockwood shook his head at the sheer staggering stupidity of what his father had just done.

  “Well enough. She has Joshua Raines’s scent,” he held up the dog-end of Rizla rolling paper and a few tufts of burned tobacco that Josh had stubbed out before entering the church that afternoon. “She won’t fade out until she has finished her duty to me. I didn’t lie; the feud ends now. Joshua Raines is the last of Isaiah’s line. I will not lose Eleanor. Not now. Not after all this time. I will not stand by and watch the dweomers around Glass Town fail one by one until any idiot can stumble upon our haven and take her away from me. I have sacrificed everything. I will not let Isaiah win. The bastard is dead. If Joshua Raines has to die for Isaiah’s hold over me to be laid to rest, then so be it. It is a price I am willing to pay. By the time I am through I will have scoured every last recollection of his damned bloodline from the world. There won’t be a living soul that remembers so much as his name, never mind his obsession with Eleanor. He won’t win. He can’t.”

  And there, in that last confession, Gideon Lockwood heard the depths of his father’s madness. He didn’t understand half of what was happening. Words like dweomers meant nothing to him. What he did understand was the intensity of his father’s hate. The same emotion had fueled most of his adult life. The rest of it came down to one thing: Damiola’s magic, whatever it was, was failing and Glass Town was coming undone. Seth would do anything to stop that from happening—including murder.

  5

  WHITE NOISE

  Josh didn’t go back inside.

  He couldn’t face the noise and the heat and the smell of too many people crammed in too close together drinking, but more than anything he couldn’t face any more sympathy. Instead, he decided to sneak off. He figured Boone would forgive him even if his mother wouldn’t. Real life was going to kick in soon. A day or two at most and then it’d be back to the office in Soho and the endless phone calls to strangers trying to sell them ad space in a magazine going not so slowly out of business. There was nothing more soul-destroying than dialing number after number, reading the script, and trying to inject some sort of life into it all.

  Meeting his cousin had thrown him. There was something about the guy he didn’t like. It wasn’t just that he was slick, smarmy, or any other unpleasantly greasy adjective that came to mind when he thought of secondhand car salesmen. It was more fundamental than that. There was just something inherently off about him. Of course, it was quite possible his judgment had been clouded by the fact that he was a Lockwood. Old hatreds ran deep, even when you’d just inherited them.

  People said names had power, the Lockwood name certainly did, and that had nothing to do with the arcane or mystical and everything to do with cricket bats to the knees, coshes made from socks stuffed with pool balls and wrapped around the side of someone’s skull, shivs in the base of the spine and other makeshift weapons of pain. They were particularly good with pain.

  Josh rolled another cigarette.

  There was an art to it that he hadn’t quite mastered,
but then he’d never been a smoker. Since Boone’s death it had felt like a way of being connected to the old man, so he lit the straggly rollie and sucked on the end of it, allowing himself to remember his grandfather.

  He coughed out smoke and fell back against the wall, half-laughing at the ridiculousness of it all and flicked the cigarette end over end toward the trash. He walked away, leaving the faint strains of conversation and laughter behind. The Rothery at night was a curious animal at the best of times. Tonight was not the best of times. He walked with his hands stuffed into his grandfather’s pockets, head down, from one puddle of streetlight to the next puddle of streetlight. He could hear the forlorn cries of a siren somewhere in the distance and the roar of a car racing around the fringe of the estate. It didn’t take any great imagination to link the two together: boy racers out for a joyride.

  He used the narrow alleyways between the terraces to cut across the municipal park without having to so much as set foot on a blade of grass, and then cut through the garages and up the hill toward home. He saw kids coming out of the sports hall, sweaty from football practice. There’d been something about one of the lads in the magazine recently, a local interest piece, he was supposed to be the real deal. A genuine talent. The route avoided the shops and shaved about ten minutes off the walk.

  Long before he made it to the door he saw the peculiar flickering light through the chink in the curtains of the downstairs window, like someone had left the television playing to itself. He tried to think back, but it wasn’t like they’d watched anything for days. The house had been a silent shrine since Boone’s death.

  Josh stopped at the end of the drive. He could just make out a darker shadow around the doorjamb where it was slightly ajar. He knew he’d locked up. Someone was in there. Some little bastard was robbing them on the day of his grandfather’s funeral.

  Something inside Josh snapped.

  Instead of calling for help he ran to the door and flung it open, making as much noise as possible as he entered, hoping that it would scare the intruders off. Perhaps it would have, had they been kids looking to get in and out to make a quick score. But this was no simple smash-and-grab. The downstairs rooms looked like a war zone: the contents of every drawer had been turned out; papers, bills, magazines, and everything else that had been accumulated over far too long was scattered across the carpet; the furniture had been overturned, the back of the couch peeled away to expose the wooden frame and springs beneath the thick corduroy; glasses and ornaments from the dresser added to the debris, a tiny porcelain dancer in pieces beside a Herefordshire bull and a Shire horse. The horse’s matchstick cart was in splinters; broken frames were discarded on the floor beside the torn photographs that catalogued generations of their family that had been torn out of them and cutlery glittered like treasure amid the ruin of their lives.

  Josh’s heart hammered wildly as he reached down for a knife, not that it was sharp enough to do anything more than butter someone to death.

  He realized that the television, the Blu-ray and satellite decoder and all of the other expensive electricals were untouched, and he saw Boone’s watch amid the mess. It was an old gold fob watch and chain, probably worth three or four hundred pounds, easily portable, simple enough to sell on. This wasn’t just wanton vandalism; they were looking for something.

  But what?

  He picked his way through the mess, calling out, “I know you’re in here. I don’t want to hurt you. Just go and I won’t call the police. I won’t chase you. I won’t even look to see who you are. Just go and we can forget all about this.”

  No answer.

  He walked through to the kitchen.

  The ransacking was every bit as thorough in there, with every drawer turned out, crockery broken on the linoleum floor, the plant pots in the window overturned and spilling their dry dirt across the sill, but the room was empty.

  He heard something upstairs: the groan of a floorboard above his head.

  Josh gripped the handle of the knife as tightly as he could and walked back through to the hallway and the phone. He dialed 999 and interrupted the operator as she asked which service he required. “There’s someone here,” he whispered urgently. “Upstairs. I can hear them.”

  “There’s someone in the house with you?”

  “A break-in.”

  “And they are still in the house?”

  “I can hear them moving about.”

  She confirmed the address with him, then said, “Listen to me carefully; don’t say another word. I am dispatching officers to your location. They will be there in less than five minutes. Do not draw attention to yourself. Go outside. Wait for them. Do not remain in the house. Do not take any unnecessary risks. Let us do our jobs. Property can be replaced. The most important thing is that you do not put yourself in harm’s way. Do you understand?”

  Josh could hear the intruder moving around upstairs.

  “I understand,” he said, laying the handset back down beside the phone. He could still hear the operator telling him to go outside now and wait, but instead of doing what he was told, he climbed the stairs one step at a time, listening at each one until he was at the top.

  He could see the weird flickering light bleeding out from under the door of what had been Boone’s bedroom.

  He thought about going back downstairs, doing what he had been told and going outside to wait for the patrol car, but five minutes might as well have been an eternity. They were in the room now, rifling through Boone’s stuff. He kept thinking about Lockwood and how he’d asked if Boone had left him anything. It was too much of a coincidence that within an hour of that he’d returned home to find the place being torn apart, wasn’t it? Isaiah’s letter had promised a wealth of material from his obsessive investigation into Eleanor Raines’s disappearance. Did the Lockwoods know about that stuff?

  Of course they did, he thought bitterly. They were wrapped up in this and had been from the very start.

  All that talk about a clean slate, about new beginnings, it was all rubbish. Life wasn’t random; it was a weave of complex events, causes and effects both on a personal and an impersonal level. Things didn’t just happen. Lockwood hadn’t just happened to be outside the Scala. His “cousin” had been lurking in the shadows, playing lookout. Gideon Lockwood had sent some of their thugs around to hunt for Isaiah’s legacy while they knew he was at the wake. It was the one time they knew for sure Boone’s house would be empty.

  The thought scared him.

  Really scared him.

  He’d grown up hearing stories of what they were capable of, and always thought them exaggeratedly tall tales, but suddenly risking coming face-to-face with the reality was so much more frightening than any gossip, no matter how colorfully violent.

  He knew he should have waited outside like the operator said, and on any other day he might have, but not today. He wasn’t going to run scared today. Boone hadn’t been in the ground more than a couple of hours. This was his home, and anything Boone had left here, he’d left for Josh to find, not some bastard in Lockwood’s pocket.

  Josh crept across the landing.

  He stopped outside the door to his grandfather’s room and listened.

  He could hear them tearing the place apart.

  Josh pushed the door open.

  The room was a mess.

  Sheets had been stripped from the bed, the mattress overturned, and clothes pulled from the wardrobe and strewn about. In the middle of it all, the source of the weird light: a woman in a dress so white he could barely stand to look at it. She had her back to him, and was tearing into a pillow, though what she hoped to find inside it, he had no idea.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Josh said. The adrenaline flooded out of his system at the sight of a woman where he’d dreaded seeing a bunch of hoodie-wearing thugs or old-school bald-headed, overweight, Doc Martens–wearing bovver boys.

  The relief was short-lived.

  She straightened up slowly, s
eeming to flicker with each jerky movement, hands still deep in the foam of the pillow, and turned to face him—but without a face that was next to impossible. Where there should have been eyes there were dark hollows, where there should have been cheekbones, brow, and nose, they were smudges of light and dark that blurred together as though her creator had tried to erase her from the face of the world. The tear of her mouth opened and a sound like the crackle of white noise emerged.

  Josh dropped the knife.

  He stepped back a half step, shaking his head. She didn’t come into focus.

  Every movement was jerky and incomplete, like a film reel skipping over vital frames. A dark smear opened in the middle of her face and she cocked her head to the left. He realized she was sniffing him out, drawing his scent down into her like some kind of ethereal bloodhound. And then when she had it, she came at him, bursts of static crackling out of the tear in her face.

  Outside, he heard the distant wail of sirens.

  The police were still streets away.

  The woman in the white dress rounded the bed.

  For just a second her face seemed to come into sharp focus and he knew her. How could he not? She had one of the most famous faces of the twentieth century, blond bob cut to her shoulder, high cheekbones, pencil-thin arched eyebrows, sharp nose, and rich-red adulteress’s lips and smoky eyes: Myrna Shepherd, one of the first beauties of the silver screen who had smoldered beside the likes of Louise Brooks, Greta Garbo, Hedy Lamarr, Fay Wray, and Mary Pickford. The poster of Wallflower Girl was a student dorm room classic. That poster had hung on the wall above his first girlfriend’s bed for all the months they had been together. The look the photographer had captured in her eyes was anything but platonic and had caused thousands of young men down the century to fall in love with an impossible-to-live-up-to girl. Vicky—an earnest, intellectual, tragically hip girl trying to work out the woman she was going to become—never had a chance. How could she have when every time he made love to her he was looking up into Myrna Shepherd’s eyes?