Glass Town

by Steven Savile

  And his “vice”?

  Drink?

  Drugs?

  Sex?

  No, no, and no.

  Gambling?

  No. No cards, no ponies, no big-game rollovers. He didn’t even play the lottery.

  He was a mother’s boy.

  She was in a nursing home, bills spiraling and threatening to get out of control because her treatment was so expensive—it had started out at 600 quid a week that became 770 within two months and that was better than the 900 it had been for the last eleven months. A letter had arrived that morning extorting another 150 quid out of him a week that he simply didn’t have, putting her care at 1,050 quid a week—and that treatment only amounted to waiting for her to die. But that was the money-grabbing Tories running the country for you, with their health panels and care councils and everything else that made them money and cost guys like Taff everything they had. They’d started taxing bedrooms and god knows what else in their austerity program and sent good people to food banks to survive while giving themselves big fat pay raises. It was a new, ugly world they were living in where profit mattered more than life. He worked extra shifts, pounding the beat all hours God sent. It wasn’t enough. He just wound up feeling guilty as the dementia claimed her deeper by the day. She didn’t recognize him when he went to see her, so he stopped going to see her, but he kept paying for her like a good son even as it cleaned him out. Of course, he should have declared it to the suits higher up the food chain, that was his mistake.

  When Gideon Lockwood had offered to see his old mum right, make sure she was taken care of, how could he say no?

  He closed his eyes and listened to the music, waiting for the woman to come.

  Lockwood had promised him she would, and one thing the Lockwoods were good for was their word.

  The music swelled, filling his mind until there was nothing else in the world to think about, only the cascading notes. Over fourteen minutes worth of them. It regulated his breathing. If he’d been a smoker, he would have had a cigarette as the song ended like some postcoital ritual, with John Coltrane’s haunting tenor sax not playing so much as sighing its way through “Blue in Green.”

  He didn’t have long to wait.

  She didn’t knock at the door or ring the bell. The first he knew of her presence in his two-bedroomed terraced house was the cold chill that accompanied the eerie luminescence as the wraith bride’s light touched his skin.

  He opened his eyes.

  She was beautiful.

  More beautiful—if that were possible—than he remembered from their brief encounter. Her face belonged to that rare and precious breed capable of driving a man to the depths of despair and the heights of covetousness in the silence between breaths. He envied the Lockwoods their hold over the city, their ability to get anyone to dance to their tune, even a woman as stunning as this to come and fuck a fat man like him just because they said so.

  “Tell me your name,” Taff Carter said, looking up at her.

  She didn’t say a word.

  She reached down for his knees and parted them, and knelt between his legs. He squirmed beneath her silent touch. Somehow she conveyed so much raw sexuality without uttering a single word: not for her the boorish entreaties to “Fuck me now, I want you inside me,” or any of those other fifty shades. She was too classy for that, just as he’d known she would be. And no matter what Lockwood has said, he couldn’t believe this was just business; not the way she looked up at him with her smoldering eyes as she traced her fingers across his zipper and teased it down.

  He trembled beneath her touch, chewing at his lower lip.

  Taff reached out to tangle his fingers in her hair. He wanted to savor this moment, this victory. He wanted to enjoy it. Fuck that, he wanted to revel in it as she took him into her mouth. He wanted to own her, just like Lockwood owned him.

  He wanted to win for once. Just once.

  He gasped and grabbed a fistful of her hair as she went down on him, throwing his head back so hard it hit the wall behind him.

  He couldn’t think.

  Every muscle in his body was taut.

  Taff opened his eyes again as he clenched his fist. The suddenness of it tore at her hair. He couldn’t help himself. He wanted to see everything, to burn it onto his mind forever, because he knew this was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but the agony and the ecstasy of it combined was too much for him. His head went back again and he closed his eyes as he gasped a “My God,” up toward the ceiling. But there was no God for a man like Taff Carter, not here.

  She climbed up him, her hands on his arms, taking her weight, until they were eye to eye. He couldn’t focus on her. She flickered uncontrollably, blurring before his eyes before coming back into sharp focus. There was nothing romantic about the look she gave him; it was pure appetite. She opened her mouth again, a burst of white noise shredding the silence of the room. There were words in it, he was sure, like before, promises that reached all the way down to the core of his being and promised him devotion, desire, and eventually the gentle release of death.

  “Tell me your name,” he begged her as she reached up to place both of her hands on either side of his head, fingers pressing a little too hard, a little too hungrily, into his temples.

  She said nothing.

  She traced her thumbnails across his eyes.

  She traced her fingernails around his temples.

  She moved against him, taking him deeper.

  And this was all he’d ever wanted.

  This was better than money.

  This was worth losing his soul for.

  How could Lockwood even question it?

  And he held onto that thought as he looked at her—really looked at her—and she pushed her thumbs into his eyes, making Myrna Shepherd’s ethereal face the last thing he saw even as he came inside her.

  When she finally spoke to him it was through a crackle of static that masked her voice. “Is there anything better than this?”

  “No,” he said. And meant it. Now that he was blind he could truly see his goddess for what she was and she owned him body and soul because of that.

  “Worship me.”

  He did, with blind devotion.

  11

  THE ANGEL

  Josh Raines read Isaiah’s letter again, for the second time that day, looking for answers.

  He had been wrong; there were addresses in it. Boundary Street—or as it had been, Cock Lane—Spitalfields, Friars Mount, but there was one that seemed to stand out because it was more than just a street, it was a building, too; The Peabody in Rotherhithe from Hitchcock’s unfinished Number 13.

  All roads led to Rotherhithe.

  It was late. Getting on for midnight. Cross-city traffic wasn’t the best, the last Underground had already rolled through, and he wasn’t about to walk all the way to Rotherhithe, but he couldn’t go home, either. Not while that thing was still out there. A chill ran down the ladder of his spine as he thought about the white wraith with Shepherd’s face and those haunting static-filled recitations that spewed from her mouth. Things were happening. Things he didn’t like and didn’t understand. Reading Isaiah’s letter just left him with more questions.

  But if there were answers to be found, then maybe just maybe he had the key. The only way to find out was to go to Rotherhithe and see for himself.

  The candle had burned down to a stub while he’d been reading.

  He snuffed it out, leaving the shed in darkness.

  He didn’t know anything about Hitchcock. He had no idea if The Peabody had been a real building or if they’d used the façade of some old warehouse down by the waterfront to double as the low-income housing project from the movie, and if they had, what were the chances that it would still be there now and not have been converted into some luxury apartments for city boys with more money than sense?

  Even five or six years ago it would have been next to impossible to find anything before sunrise. That was just the way it was. A decade a
go a mobile phone could barely even be called that, at worst it was a brick, it certainly wasn’t smart, but now he had access to all the information in the world in his pocket, all he had to do was sift through it. Hitchcock was a public figure, and even a lost film of his had to be the stuff of film legend, surely? There were people out there who were experts on this stuff and he had access to them without having to leave the shed.

  Josh used his phone to sift through the hits his search returned.

  Within a minute he was looking at a grainy black-and-white behind-the-scenes still of Claire Greet and her leading man, Ernest Thesiger. They sat on the steps of what, he hoped, was The Peabody building from Number 13. It appeared to be an intersection in Rotherhithe, but it was hard to really see any details and there were no real landmarks to speak of to help him get his bearings. There was a set of high steps leading up to the door while the footpath curved around the portico of a shop. No, he realized, studying the tiny image. It wasn’t a shop. The signage read: The Ang, the rest of the name invisible as it curved around the façade. He could only think of one kind of establishment that had a “The” like that in their name: a public house. The Angel? The Anglers? Assuming the place hadn’t been torn down during the intervening years—or flattened during The Blitz—there couldn’t be that many pubs in Rotherhithe with “The Ang” in their name, could there?

  There was only one way to find out.

  Josh eased the shed door closed behind him and used a broken stone to hold it shut. He checked his watch. His mum would be getting back to the house soon. He really should go home to make sure she was okay, and at the very least warn her what she was walking into. He couldn’t imagine how it’d feel finding her entire life turned out all over the floor on the day she buried one of the two men left in her life. But he couldn’t go home. And calling her to tell her what was waiting for her rather than doing it in person, standing side by side with her as she surveyed the damage, felt somehow cowardly, so he called his sister, Alexandra. Lexy. She picked up on the second ring. No hello, just a barked, “Where the fuck are you?” The emphasis heavily on the fuck.

  Josh didn’t even try and deflect the question; he ignored it completely and told her, “Sis, I need you to go home with mum. Don’t let her go home alone. Promise me.”

  There was silence at the other end of the line. He could hear the cogs in her mind grinding.

  “What’s going on?”

  What did he tell her? The answer was obvious: as little as possible. Nothing, if he could get away with it.

  “Please, just promise me. Don’t let her go back by herself.”

  “What’s going on, Bro, you sound weird.”

  “I am weird,” he said. He wanted to say that he was good, everything was fine, but he didn’t. “There’s been a break-in. The place is a state. The police are here. I don’t want her going back there alone. She doesn’t need it tonight.”

  “Christ. What kind of sick cocksniff robs someone when they’re at a fucking funeral?”

  “Welcome to the Rothery. You’ve been gone too long.”

  She breathed in sharply. “Okay, I’ll keep her away from there.” Another hesitation, then she asked, “You aren’t trying to find them are you?” She knew him too well, but then that was brothers and sisters the world over, wasn’t it? “Promise me you’re not doing something stupid, Josh.”

  “Promise,” he said, and they both knew he was lying.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t expect you to. I’ll be home soon. Don’t worry, it’s going to be fine.” He killed the call before she made him tell her any more lies.

  He walked out of the vegetable gardens, back up the muddy hill, and eventually back out onto the main road. The streetlights weren’t working in this part of the estate, and several cars were almost invisible in the darkness because of it, but unlike a lot of his neighbors Josh had never nurtured the necessary skills that would have allowed him to drive off in one of them without the key.

  He kept his head down and walked back toward the edge of the Rothery, hoping to flag down a passing taxi. The night was bracing. He felt the sting of the wind on his face and wished he were better dressed. But at least it wasn’t raining.

  Kids far too young to be out at this time of night loitered on the street corner, hands stuffed in pockets, heads down, feet scuffing the pavement. There were half a dozen of them with lightning bolts and other decals shaved into their scalps like the urban equivalent of a peacock’s feathers. A couple of them eyed Josh suspiciously, but none of them moved. On a normal night they would have been intimidating. Tonight, though was anything but normal. They looked exactly like what they were: kids. He passed near enough to overhear what they were saying, but it sounded like a foreign language to him.

  It would take ages to walk to Bermondsey, but he had nowhere else to go.

  The Rothery was a warren of streets that all fed back toward the green, The Hunter’s Horns and the lightning-struck tree in its heart. Getting out of it felt like a rat trying to work its way back out of a maze after it had snaffled the cheese—something that wasn’t meant to happen. A pair of trainers hung from the arms of one of the lampposts; it wasn’t quite LA with the trainers strung up to mark fallen gang members, more like a bully who’d decided to make some kid’s life hell for a morning. Josh passed a dozen boarded-up windows. Some of the houses had been left empty after a fire in the summer had gutted them. The bricks around the windows were still blackened with soot. There were cars up on bricks where their wheels had been spirited away. England, my England, this green and pleasant land, Josh thought as he crossed the road and made his way toward the real world outside the Rothery.

  He saw the back of a red night bus cross the mouth of the housing estate in front of him, and the light indicating that it was pulling in.

  He ran after it, barely reaching the doors before the driver could close them in his face and drive off.

  Josh paid his fare and made the journey as far as Tower Hill with the drunks and the damned, that entire subculture of London that only came out at night. He sat upstairs at the back, and spent the best part of an hour gazing out of the window. At one point he found himself staring at two young Goths in the relative seclusion of an overgrown cemetery. It took him a moment to realize that they were fucking up against one of the gravestones while across the street a guy filled his car with petrol from the all-night garage. If he’d been a philosopher, Josh might have drawn some kind of conclusions from the juxtaposition, but he wasn’t looking for the ties that bind. He just wanted to get to Rotherhithe.

  He rested his forehead against the glass, feeling the vibrations of the old bus as it rumbled down the potholed road.

  Drunks stumbled up the stairs, drunks stumbled down the stairs, and the only thing they left behind them was the stench of kebabs. A group of Chinese tourists looked less than impressed in their corporate windbreakers. They talked among themselves animatedly, their voices like birdsong. Josh liked listening to languages he couldn’t understand; without the structure of words and knowing where one ended and another began, the sounds became musical. It didn’t take him long to get caught up in the rise and fall, fall and rise of their strange tongue to the point that he almost missed his stop.

  He thanked the driver out of habit and stepped off the bus into the shadow of the Tower. Rather than try and find a connection, he started to walk around the back of the tourist attraction toward perhaps the most famous bridge in the world and crossed the river. There were so many songs about the city, from “Waterloo Sunset”—which was still a few hours away—to “Baker Street” and “London Calling,” and walking across the water it was easy to see what it was about the place that inspired so many artists. He caught himself trying to hum at least half a dozen of them without actually knowing the tunes well enough for anyone to distinguish one from the next, but it put a smile on his face for the first time in what felt like forever and helped pass the half an hour it took to walk
to Bermondsey.

  Now that he was there he didn’t know where to start looking. It wasn’t exactly a small borough, but given every reference to Number 13 mentioned Rotherhithe not Bermondsey it was safe to assume he could head down to the end of the Jamaica Road and start looking from there.

  Jamaica Road could have been any inner-city road in England; it had the same red-brick snakes of terraced houses with the downstairs converted to shops and restaurants, all of the shop fronts covered by roller shutters, the roller shutters in turn covered by fly-posters for upcoming concerts in and around the town. It was a concrete-and-steel version of the old woman who swallowed a fly and didn’t know what to do. There was no one on the street, but unlike the Rothery, Josh didn’t feel like he was taking his life in his hands venturing out alone.

  Soon enough he had crossed through Southwark Park and King’s Stairs Gardens and reached the roundabout at the end of Jamaica Road. He was confronted by choices, as he stood facing the water. It wasn’t just a simple case of eeny-meeny, left, right, or straight down to the waterfront, either. Yes, there were three main streets in front of him, but within a hundred feet those three streets became seven, and a hundred feet after that those seven became nineteen as Neptune Street, Albion Street, and Brunel Road fed into the Norwegian mission and the Finnish church and a warren of courts and estates all the way to Surrey Water. A man could get lost trying to track them all street by street, he realized, confronted with the reality of trying to do a predawn grid search of the place. There were too many places to get turned around. He decided to start down by the water for no better reason than it meant there was a clean dead end he could keep returning to as he worked his way along the riverbank.