Glass Town

by Steven Savile

  Josh followed the path down the side of the King’s Stairs Gardens, which were a vast field of black out of the reach of the streetlights. He could make out a few outcroppings of stone that appeared to be some sort of ruin that had been half-excavated. A boat out on the Thames sounded its horn. It had to be one of the most melancholic sounds of the city, encapsulating the loneliness of so many of the people who lived in London in one forlorn note.

  After a couple of minutes Josh found himself face-to-face with The Angel pub, which stood all alone against the backdrop of the Thames.

  Even isolated from all of the workhouses and other buildings that had been in the grainy photograph with it, Josh knew he was standing in the exact same place Hitchcock had stood when the photographer had taken the photograph of Claire Greet and Ernest Thesiger on the steps. There was something wonderful about that, the way it connected one place and two times. Not, he realized, that it helped. None of those old buildings were still standing, so any hope of walking up to a door and finding The Peabody or some other clue left like a trail of bread crumbs by Boone came crashing down with them. He took a moment to really take in his surroundings; aside from the lonely public house there was a terrace of what appeared to be dockworkers’ tenements on the far side of the green, there was a fairly modern block of apartments or offices, it was difficult to tell, and of course the railed-off section of the Bermondsey wall excavations.

  All in all, not very much.

  He walked across the street to check out the pub. The sign beside the door told the story of the old building, claiming it had stood in the same place for over five hundred years and hosted the likes of Samuel Pepys; Captain James Cook before his journey to Australia; and Christopher Jones, captain of the Mayflower, who hired his crew from inside The Angel. The place fairly reeked of history. There was mention of an old priory and how the monks themselves had brewed the ale for The Angel. Behind the pub was a stretch of land known as Cuckold’s Point, where the corpses of river pirates had been strung up as a deterrent to the rest of their kind. It was also the starting point for the riotous Horn Fair, where the mores were discarded for the day and women especially could surrender themselves to indecency and immodesty while the men drank and fucked with merry abandon. The legend was that King John himself had given the land to a miller he cuckolded after a hunting trip. That certainly set the tone for the wild fair.

  There was no mention of a place called Glass Town, no images of glassblowers or anything else to do with fashioning glass or optics or lenses, nothing that might have linked the place to Isaiah’s letter, and nothing to suggest Hitchcock’s career had begun, if falteringly, on this very spot.

  Josh didn’t need to close his eyes to imagine the press gangs working the waterfront and the old wharves or the women dancing with wild abandon, drunk on laughter and lust.

  There had been so much life here, and The Blitz had left it a wasteland.

  Yet The Angel survived.

  The pub was locked up tight for the night.

  Josh did a circuit around the building, walking the same steps those condemned pirates must have walked to the gallows, but despite the slightly unnerving thought, it offered no clues. There was nothing that screamed out Boone. He was beginning to doubt himself, or his late-night reasoning at least, but before he gave up entirely and went back home, Josh decided to check one last thing. He walked back around the edge of the priory land, following the rusted railings to the workers’ cottages. He opted to start there because that row of houses offered the most possibilities, or at least he hoped they did. They were the only buildings that could reasonably have been around when Hitchcock filmed Number 13. He was clinging to that, that somehow it all came back to the film, otherwise why would Isaiah have made a point of mentioning it at all?

  The first thing he looked for was a number 13, but he was never going to be that lucky.

  There were twelve doors on the street, and all of their numbers were even. That was typically English, too, a conspiracy to confuse the hell out of the postal workers. In the absence of a 13 he looked for something else to hang his hopes on, another clue that might have led back to Hitchcock or his family.

  Josh half-expected to hear sirens after a few minutes; he couldn’t have looked more suspicious if he tried, moving from door-to-door, checking them and then moving on to the next, but it was late enough that even the nosiest neighbor was asleep.

  Each of the doors had buzzers, each buzzer seemingly calling multiple occupancies. Most had names that meant nothing to him. Most. There was one, in the middle of the street, that was more than just a little familiar.

  It said: “Lockwood.”

  More precisely, it said: Isaiah Lockwood.

  It took him a second to realize what was wrong with that, and that second was all he needed to be sure he was in the right place. Isaiah must have secured the place before he changed his name, or used his real name to hide it from his brother, Seth. Or Boone had, and chosen to hide behind his father’s real name. This was it, he realized; Boone’s secret place. Once he opened the door there could be no going back. Everything that had obsessed his great-grandfather and consumed his life was on the other side of the door.

  Josh had the key out of his pocket and in the lock before any second thoughts could stop him.

  The key turned in the lock.

  The door opened.

  He went inside.

  12

  TIMELESS BEAUTY

  Isaiah Lockwood, whoever he may be, owned an upstairs flat. The narrow hall had that distinctly damp smell of abandonment.

  Josh turned on the light.

  A bare bulb burned too brightly after the darkness, sizzling.

  He closed the door behind him.

  The stairs rose steeply, the outsides of the runners whitewashed, the inside bare floorboards. It had obviously been carpeted once. Now the only carpet was one of ignored fliers, special offers, takeaway menus, and discount coupons that covered the floor completely.

  He picked a path to the stairs and climbed them.

  Upstairs was no better. As his mum was fond of saying, it looked like a bomb had hit it; but where the aftermath of a bomb was chaos, there was a madman’s order to the mess here.

  Josh walked into what had obviously been intended by the architect to be the lounge. It was utterly devoid of anything that could remotely be called furniture. It wasn’t empty, though. It was full of crazy as far as Josh could tell. Every inch of the place was covered in newspaper cuttings with color-coded threads strung from one to the next. Strings stretched from wall to wall crisscrossing the room like a loom. He saw headlines from familiar papers like The Standard, Daily Mail, and The Times, to ones he’d never heard of where the presses had long since stopped turning, The Westminster Gazette, The London Daily News, and a mix of Informer’s and Ledger’s and Advertiser’s that catalogued London life from the ’20s all the way through to the turn of the century. The old papers were so much more crammed with words—as though they could barely contain all of the stories they were trying to tell—than the more modern ones.

  They weren’t all about the disappearance of Eleanor Raines, either, but plenty were, chronicling the investigation and the frustration at the lack of evidence it unearthed, suspicion gradually coming around to Isaiah, the jilted lover, with the lack of anyone else to blame. Josh couldn’t absorb it all in one cursory glance; it would take some serious reading to digest everything gathered in this room. Suspects’ names came and went, some like Jack Sykes appearing over and over, then suddenly never appearing again, while others were mentioned only once, instantly forgettable.

  Some of the threads, he realized, seemed to be charting sightings of Eleanor after her disappearance.

  And there were finds, too. Bodies of unfortunate women they thought were her but weren’t. For a while there every corpse in London was Eleanor Raines. It was as though the press were willing her to be dead rather than just gone, like it would have been a better story for t
hem. Which of course it would have been, a dead actress would sell more papers than a missing one. Stay gone long enough and the world forgot you were there in the first place. But turn up murdered and you would never be forgotten.

  As difficult as it was, Josh turned his back on her story and moved across to one of the other walls. This one couldn’t have been more different if it tried. It was filled with weird drawings of Celtic knots and green-leafed faces, images of stone circles and dolmen, some huge like Stonehenge, others tiny like the fairy ring in Coldfall Wood. There were maps of ley lines and all sorts of endless knots of what might have been occult paraphernalia, he really couldn’t tell. He saw words scrawled in a language he couldn’t read, and others, like old earth magic, that he could. They were repeated all over the wall. There was one word he’d never seen before, Annwyn, and beside it a question: The land of the dead? Among the paragraphs of crossed-out research he saw the words primeval forest, and another drawing of the fairy ring like the one in Coldfall Wood. There were other drawings of chalk giants. It all seemed so out of place against the rest of it, which was so mundane by comparison.

  An entire section was given over to gangland feuds between the Lockwoods and various East End families. Much of it was just bloody knuckles dishing out back-alley beatings, a proper ’20s turf war with the kind of trademark brutality that would have gone down well in the Chicago of the same era judging by the reports. Skimming the headlines and the story leads for the meat, Josh learned a lot about his great-grandfather’s family and the brutal extremes they had gone to when they took over the streets. It wasn’t pretty, but then very little had changed, had it?

  Beside the papers was an array of fly-posters for Damiola, Lord of Illusions, with grand claims promising to confound the mind and delight the heart. His illusions included self-decapitation, levitation, talking with the spirits of fallen soldiers, and mystifying legerdemain in a theater of wonder. In the center one poster boldly proclaimed: Witness the Wondrous Opticron! Watch As It Opens Windows into Fabulous New Worlds! Marvel at the Miraculous Sights It Has to Show You! You Cannot Believe Your Eyes! And again beside that new-worlds promise he saw the handwritten question: Annwyn? Beside that one word was a photograph of the Lord of Illusions himself, a very smug-looking Damiola. It was quite the juxtaposition against the mythologies and crime reports on the other wall.

  There were maps, too; old-fashioned street maps from the 1890s and 1920s with the same area ringed in red. And then there were other maps and it just wasn’t there anymore, like the cartographers had erased it and joined the ragged seams it left behind to mask its disappearance.

  His head was spinning with it all. There must have been a thousand articles cut out and pasted up on the walls covered with the same barely literate scrawl, which he took to be Isaiah’s, but some no doubt were the result of Boone adding to his father’s obsessive detailing of the crime.

  He found a name in red marker: Ruben Glass.

  It stood out because Isaiah had mentioned him in his letter. Josh worked his way around the walls quickly, scanning the articles as he went, but at first glance he couldn’t find any other mention of Ruben Glass.

  But of course there were other rooms, and Isaiah’s confession had promised him all of the answers. What had he called him, “the King of Glass Town”? Perhaps the link was to the organized crime detailed on the other wall—the Lockwood purge? But there were no colored threads for him to follow back there, though, so maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe he was linked to Hitchcock, or the actress, Claire Greet? Isaiah had mentioned her, too. If there were answers, it would take time to find them in here, that much was obvious.

  The second bedroom was no better, either, though it did at least have a single piece of furniture: an old cinema projector resting on an East India Company tea chest. The East India Company had ceased trading over 150 years ago. The right someone would no doubt have considered the tea chest a treasure. There was a single canister on the floor beside the tea chest. The reel of film was already in the projector, which faced the only wall in the entire flat that wasn’t covered in cuttings documenting Isaiah Lockwood’s obsessive search for his beloved Eleanor.

  And then of course there was the shrine to Eleanor, otherwise known as the master bedroom.

  Her face was everywhere, over every inch of the wall; publicity stills, candid shots, newspaper cuttings, just thousands upon thousands of photographs of her. This was the room Isaiah slept in, surrounded by her face. There was a mattress on the floor in the corner and the sweat-stained sheet that hadn’t been washed since it had been bought covering it.

  Josh stood in the middle of the room trying to look at the pictures all at once. There was no doubting she was an incredibly beautiful woman, but there was something about them that didn’t feel right. He couldn’t put his finger on it. He stared and stared, turning and turning about, taking them all in, every angle of her beautiful face. Eleanor Raines had been blessed. The camera loved her. It didn’t matter if the images were candid or posed—color, sepia, or black and white—her bone structure and perfect porcelain skin was the stuff of Max Factor dreams, but it was her eyes that transformed the photographs into art. There was so much pain in them. This was a woman who understood loss.

  That was unexpected.

  Whoever had assembled the shrine had gone to pains to cut out all of the accompanying texts, and considering her brief time in the sun this room quite possibly collected every single photograph ever taken of Eleanor Raines. The bedroom was decorated with one man’s obsession.

  And then he realized what it was that jarred in his mind: some of the photographs just didn’t look old enough.

  Josh walked up to the wall, peeling one of the newer-looking ones away.

  The date and timestamp on it, added digitally, claimed that the shot had been taken nineteen years ago. 1994. He’d seen that date before, on Isaiah’s letter. That didn’t make any sense. Eleanor Raines would have been pushing her midnineties by the time that photograph had been taken, but the woman looking back at him was young.

  He would have thought it was some kind of mistake—that the photograph had actually been taken from an existing negative of something that was much older—but for the fact that people in the background were dressed very much in ’90s fashion. One clutched a pre-CFC-free polystyrene burger box from McDonald’s. Josh was pretty sure that the backdrop of heart-attack burgers and fries weren’t pre-1924. He recognized Spitalfields market.

  Josh took Isaiah’s confession from his pocket and skimmed through it again, looking for one paragraph in particular:

  I saw her yesterday. It was a crowded street around Spitalfields. She stepped out of a narrow grotty little alleyway; turned, saw me, but didn’t recognize this grizzled old face of mine because time is such a feckless bastard and makes husks of us all. She disappeared into the crowd before I could catch up with her. I don’t know what I would have said even if I had. I can’t even be sure it was her. It might have been the weight of decades of grief on my soul, the burden of all that longing manifesting itself in her presence, because she hadn’t changed. Not in the slightest.

  And here it was in a photograph, the proof of that letter. She hadn’t changed. He looked at Eleanor Raines’s face captured in 1994 by some photographer’s camera lens and knew it was true. She hadn’t changed in the slightest. It was exactly the same face as the one in the photographs from seventy years earlier. Exactly. Like she wasn’t a day older.

  He had no idea how that was possible.

  1994.

  He checked the letter again. Isaiah had written his confession in January that year, and died soon after. This photograph was from January 1994. He’d written that she hadn’t recognized him, but what if it wasn’t a coincidence that he’d seen her right before the end? What if she’d somehow found a way to come back to see him one last time?

  On any other night he would have castigated himself for letting his imagination run away with itself, but hadn’t he just walk
ed in on Myrna Shepherd in his grandfather’s bedroom? Didn’t that mean anything was possible?

  Another photograph caught his eye. It took him a moment to realize what he was looking at—his first impression was of Eleanor standing in the rain—it took a little longer for the context of the image to settle in. It was a beautiful shot, of course, haunting in its simplicity, the woman silhouetted against the backdrop of broken angels and mausoleums, but that wasn’t what drew his eye to it. She stood with her head bowed beside a grave. He couldn’t read the writing on the headstone, but recognized it nonetheless. It was in the old Bunhill Fields cemetery, famous as the resting place of Bunyan; Defoe; the comedian, Al Clamp; and a smattering of Cromwells. He recognized the gravestone because he’d visited it before.

  It was Isaiah’s.

  So there was a photograph of a woman who was a dead ringer for Eleanor Raines at the graveside of the man who after being accused of her murder had spent his entire adult life obsessed with discovering the truth about her disappearance?

  It was hard to believe that it was just a coincidence.

  It was hard to believe that anything was a coincidence now.

  It was as though the world around him was actually a fractured mosaic, that there were cracks that broke the pattern and made it difficult to see how things connected, but cracked or not that didn’t mean they didn’t connect somewhere, somehow.

  Josh left the shrine and went back through to the room of crazy with all of its cuttings and colored threads, and took up a place in the middle of it all.

  It was only then, standing on top of it, that he noticed the damage to the floorboards. He hadn’t noticed it before because of the thick layer of dust. They had been scored and scorched over and over again, but not like someone had tried to start a fire. The damage was much more precise than that. It gradually dawned on Josh that it wasn’t damage at all, but rather a drawing. He dropped to his knees and began brushing the dust back to reveal the image it hid. Someone had scored a map of a part of London into the floor. The reason he hadn’t recognized it for what it was initially was that it was wrong. Even the curve of the Thames was off.