It all happened so incredibly slowly, like some sort of jerky stop-motion film playing out, only it was real. Life-and-death real.
“Look at the mess. Poor bastard.”
“Christ, he’s lucky he didn’t make it,” another speaker, her voice almost reverential. “I mean…”
“Who would want to live looking like that?” One of the first responders finally said what they were all thinking. His voice—and callous disregard for human life—carried across the street, but no one was arguing with him. Death, in this case, was a small mercy.
“What about the other one? Can someone get him out from under there?”
Then, “Christ … he looks like … God … who? That old comedian?”
“Holy shit, they killed Crake and Clamp,” a kid said, and laughed.
Laughed.
Julie didn’t need to see another corpse. He was more interested in the man who had been running away from the deceased. He had a story to tell.
He stood in the middle of the road, one foot on either side of the white line, staring across the street at something.
Julie went across to him. “You okay, sir?”
He didn’t say anything.
Julie put a hand on his shoulder and asked again, “Are you all right?”
The man shook his head as though to say no, no he wasn’t all right, how could he be all right, he’d just stepped out of thin air, chased by a monster that lay dead beneath a double-decker bus, why the ridiculous question?
“Sir? Are you all right, sir? Sir? Are you okay? Can you hear me? Are you hurt?”
“I need to get out of here.”
“I don’t think so, sir. What’s your name?”
“Josh.”
“Okay, Josh, you’re a very lucky man, do you know that?” He shook his head again, denying any relationship with that particularly capricious lady. Julie didn’t think arguing the point would help, so instead he asked, “Do you want to tell me what just happened?”
“I don’t…” Julie couldn’t tell if he was saying he didn’t want to, or if he’d simply run out of words in the middle of saying he didn’t understand himself, which given the face Julie had seen—all of those teeth, the eyes pushed back and away into the temples, swiveling like some apex predator’s—was pretty fucking understandable, to be blunt.
“Stay with me, Josh. What happened? Why were they chasing you? Where were you all coming from? One minute the road was empty, the next I was trying not to kill you. Talk to me, Josh. I’m your friend here.”
“I don’t have any friends,” Josh said, still staring toward the café across the street.
Julie saw a good-looking guy in the doorway who was staring right back at them.
“You know that guy?”
As he asked, the man in the doorway drew his finger across his neck in one smooth motion, as though slitting his throat. Julie recognized him then. He’d seen him a lot over the last month or so with Gideon Lockwood in the Rothery. Wherever Gideon was, there he was, on his shoulder, in the thick of it. That made the threat all the more visceral. The Lockwoods didn’t piss about with words when actions would get the message across much more emphatically.
Josh nodded. “Seth,” he said.
“Let’s get you out of here, shall we? Then you can tell me what you’ve done to upset old man Lockwood. Come on,” Julie wrapped an arm around Josh’s shoulder and steered him toward the side of the road. The ambulance turned onto the street as they reached the pavement. The paramedics were out of it and moving spectators away before the engine had stopped ticking over. “Nothing to see here, folks,” one of them called, shooing people back, making some breathing space for the crew to get in and work. “How about you let us do our jobs. Come on, thanks, yeah, back, back.”
Seeing Julie’s uniform, another one of the paramedics came over to him. “Everything okay here?”
Julie nodded. “I’ve got this guy. He’s fine. Shock. He’s a lucky lad. Could have been a lot worse for him.”
“Hard to argue. I’ve seen the others,” the paramedic said, nodding toward the bus. “Want me to give him a once-over anyway?”
“Nah, it’s fine. You’ve got enough to deal with. I’m going to take him back to the station, ask him a few questions, see if I can work out what the fuck just happened here. Just waiting for backup to arrive.”
The paramedic nodded, and was already halfway back to the worst of the accident before Julie whispered into Josh’s ear, “I don’t know what the fuck’s going on, but I saw that thing. And either I’m losing my fucking mind, or some shit’s happening here I don’t understand. So we’re going to talk. You are going to tell me everything you know. Understand? And before you think about lying to me, I know that guy—I know what kind of bastard he is, and that you’re in trouble. Okay?” He didn’t wait for Josh to answer him. Thinking about it, he knew the victims, too. Or at least of them. He’d heard a kid say they’d killed Crake and Clamp and laugh. That was the second time he’d heard those names recently, Crake and Clamp. They’d been behind The Magic Circle robbery and now they were dead. There was no such thing as a coincidence in his line of work, meaningful or otherwise. The world just didn’t work that way. “Now, we’re going to go over there and get into my car, we’re going to close the door and drive away, and you’re going to start explaining. Don’t leave anything out. Don’t try and hide anything. I’ll know if you’re lying. This is what I do and I’m good at it. Do we understand each other, Josh?”
Josh didn’t say anything as Julie led him to the car, but he didn’t resist, either, and compliance was as good as acceptance as far as the policeman was concerned. Julie put his hand on his head and eased him down into the back seat, slamming the door on him before going around to the driver’s side. The child locks kept his passenger in place. He hadn’t taken the keys out of the ignition when he’d abandoned the car. Before Julie could get behind the wheel he heard someone ask, “What the fuck?” only to be answered by an equally perturbed, “He’s melting?”
“Fading.”
“Where the hell did he go?”
“Jesus, I’m losing my fucking mind. There was a corpse here two seconds ago.”
He didn’t wait to find out what they were talking about. He clambered into the driver’s seat, and with the sounds of fresh sirens rolling into the busy street, gunned the engine, putting the car into reverse.
He was two hundred yards from the scene before he said a word. When he did, it was only the one. “Spill.”
His passenger looked back at him through the rearview mirror.
There was something about him that Julie recognized. Some nagging familiarity. He’d seen him before somewhere. But where?
Julie looked him in the eye, waiting for him to say something, but he didn’t. And then it hit him; he hadn’t actually seen the man before, not in the flesh, but he’d been looking—or rather not looking—at his face on and off for the last week on lampposts all across the Rothery. “You’re him, aren’t you? That guy who went missing from the funeral last week?”
“I don’t think so,” Josh said.
“Oh, no, it is you.” He was sure of himself now. “I was out at your place twice. Once with my partner, responding to a burglary call in the middle of the night, the place had been tossed. A woman met us at the door. I thought she was the owner. She wasn’t. I realized that the second time I was there, when I sat with your mother and your sister and they told me how you’d called to say you wouldn’t be home that night, but then hadn’t come home at all and they were frightened you’d gone after the burglars yourself. Oh, believe me, I know you. I’ve been turning the estate over brick by brick looking for you and dreading telling your mother if I’d actually found you under one of them.” He shook his head. “Where the fuck have you been for the last week?”
Josh had no answer for that.
“Okay, well I guess I’m taking you home and you can explain it to your family,” Julie said, indicating right at the end o
f the street, and merging with the main flow of traffic that would eventually lead them back to the Rothery. “What the hell kind of trouble are you in, mate?”
28
PRODIGAL SON
Josh didn’t say a word all the way back to the house.
He didn’t know what he could say.
A week?
It couldn’t be a week since the funeral.
It was impossible.
But as they turned into the estate he saw the first of the posters his mother had glued up on one of the telephone poles. It was his face. The word MISSING was right there in block capitals above it and their phone number beneath it. He didn’t know what he was supposed to think. He’d been at the funeral two days ago. He’d spent the night at the flat in Rotherhithe and then the rest of the day chasing clues left by Boone. He’d stood face-to-face with Damiola last night. He’d seen incredible things, yes, but they’d only happened to him yesterday. He’d seen an iron raven do battle with dead comedians with mouths like sharks. He’d met a woman who hadn’t aged a day in ninety years, and set foot in a part of London that hadn’t existed for just as long. He was surrounded by impossible things. What was one more?
He was about to ask the obvious question, but took his phone from his pocket to check the date and time on it instead, forgetting that the battery was dead. It didn’t matter; he was already beginning to believe crossing the length of Glass Town had taken days not minutes.
I can’t leave this place—not for more than a few minutes. You’ll see why when you leave.
Now he was seeing why: minutes there were days here.
The policeman looked at him through the mirror again.
Josh turned away from his scrutiny, looking out through the window instead of making eye contact.
It was the first time he’d stopped running since the break-in, and with the adrenaline draining from his system he was left feeling utterly and completely exhausted. And lost. There was no fight left in him, just acceptance. If this was the way the world was, then this is the way the world had to be. It really was as simple as that. If a man could weave magic and make people and places fold away in space and time somehow, then men could weave magic and make people and places fold away in space and time. QED. Denying that, pretending it wasn’t happening, that the wonderful wasn’t possible, forcing himself to believe that the amazing wasn’t actually part of the human condition, all of that, was counterproductive. It was. It had to be, because he’d experienced it. He’d run through streets in minutes only to emerge from them a week later. He’d been chased by monsters and talked to a woman who was 109 years old and looked bloody good for it. Who was to say what was and wasn’t possible anymore? Not him, that was for sure.
The streets became more and more familiar until they finally pulled up outside of Boone’s house. Only of course it wasn’t Boone’s house anymore, it was their house and only their house. That would take some getting used to.
The policeman clambered out of the car and came around to open his door.
Josh didn’t want to get out.
But then he saw the front door open and he saw his mother, Rosie Raines, standing there, the look of desperate fear on her face. He knew what she was thinking in that moment: a police car at the door, the driver had to be the bearer of bad news. Then, even as grief tore at her, there was no mistaking the sudden overwhelming flood of relief as she saw Josh emerge from the back seat.
Rosie stood there for the longest time staring at her son, then came running up the drive toward the car, arms out blindly.
She swept him up in a fierce embrace before he could straighten up, only to push him away and start beating at his chest with the full force of her fists, weeping and gulping down air and trying not to choke and say something all at once. It took Josh a second to realize what she was saying: “I thought you were dead! I thought you were dead!” The same words over and over until they lost all sense and meaning. “I thought you were dead!”
Josh pulled her close, crushing his mother’s fists between their chests and held her tight until she stopped fighting him. Rosie shuddered against him, struggling to breath, but he refused to let her go. “It’s okay. I’m here,” he said. “I’m home.”
She leaned back, arching her spine to pull away from him so that she could look at his face, like she couldn’t believe it was really him, that it had to be some horrible prank being played on her by the universe.
And then she hit him again.
Just once.
Hard.
Before she broke down into uncontrollable sobs, snot and spittle dribbling out of her nose and mouth as she tried to say thank you to the policeman who had brought the prodigal son home.
Then behind her, Josh heard his baby sister yell, “You bastard! You thoughtless fucking bastard!”
Alexandra Raines came running out of the house.
“Not the sort of homecoming you were expecting, eh?” the policeman said, wryly. “That’s what happens when you disappear for seven days without so much as a peep.”
“Where the hell have you been, Josh?”
He shook his head. It was no easier to explain now than it had been ten minutes ago and it would be no easier in ten minutes, ten days, or even ten years’ time for that matter. There were no words that wouldn’t sound like lies. “I don’t know,” he said.
Lexy was chalk to his cheese, salt to his pepper, yin to yang, tortoise to hare, and every other diametric and polar opposite. They couldn’t have looked more physically different if geneticists had taken random eggs and sperm from donors and fused them in a petri dish. Growing up he’d tormented her mercilessly, claiming that she was variously the window cleaner’s daughter, the postman’s, the milkman’s—while they still had a milkman—and in return she came home from art class one day to present him with a homemade birth certificate that named him heir of some Nigerian prince’s millions. Family stuff. Normal. She was a nurse down at St. Thomas’s by the river. She’d been on the long-term care ward for five months. She spent most of her nights looking after an old woman who never woke up. He knew everything about her; she knew everything about him. But the way she looked at him now it was like she’d never seen him before in her life. That scared him more than anything that had happened since the funeral. This was his baby sister, she knew him better than he knew himself.
“We should take this inside,” the policeman said, gently easing them in the direction of the door. “Especially if you intend on killing him now he’s home safe and sound.” He nodded toward twitching curtains across the street. “Fewer witnesses.”
Rosie nodded, allowing herself to be led inside. She didn’t seem to realize it was a joke.
They’d cleaned up the mess since he was last here. The memory of the woman upstairs going through Boone’s things was visceral; it gripped him, clenched his gut and twisted. He winced, looking instinctively toward the stairs like he still expected to see her waiting at the top.
The landing was empty.
There was no Myrna Shepherd looking down at him. Still, he shivered at the thought of it.
“I’ll make a cup of tea,” Rosie said, as though she’d hit up on the last great secret of the universe in a perfect eureka moment. “You like tea, Officer Gennaro?”
“That’d be great,” the policeman said. There was a look that passed between the policeman and his sister. It was there and then it was gone, but it had definitely been there. They weren’t strangers. “We’ll go sit down in the front room while you put a brew on.”
She came back through a few minutes later balancing a tray loaded with the finest china and a pot of tea stewing. She took a seat opposite them. No one really seemed to know what to say now they were all face-to-face with no pretend errands to run. There was one question they obviously wanted to ask.
Lexy broke the silence, “Where have you been?” She leaned forward, her fringe falling over her face.
Josh looked at her, and for just a moment wished they shared s
ome sort of telepathic bond so she could see it, so that he could make her understand. But he knew she’d never believe him, so he said, “I don’t know,” and offered a shrug.
“What do you mean you don’t know?” Lexy pressed. His sister never had been one for letting go of a bone once she’d got her teeth into it. “Are you seriously going to pretend you’ve got amnesia? That you just woke up now and everything that happened since Granddad’s funeral is just a bloody blur?”
“No. Not that.” Josh said, helplessly.
“Then what? Why the hell didn’t you just ring? Do you know what we’ve been going through here? We thought you were dead, Josh. We thought you were dead. So the least you can do is tell us where the fuck you were.”
But he couldn’t.
No matter what he owed them, no matter what they’d been through, he couldn’t tell them where he’d been because it was one thing to think something, to come around to accepting it, no matter how impossible, even embrace it, but it quite another to share it with someone you loved when you knew they’d think you were mad for believing it.
He reached across and took his mum’s hand, ignoring Lexy for a moment. The room reduced to two people. “I’m sorry, Mum,” Josh said, and meant it. He’d never meant anything more in his life. She looked up at him with so much sadness in her eyes he thought his heart might just break beneath the burden of it. He squeezed her hand. He knew it wasn’t just about him; it was about Boone and about his father and her own father. All of the men in her life, the ones she gave her heart to, always left her. He was her last man, and she’d thought she’d lost him just like she’d lost his dad when he’d gone out to buy that packet of cigarettes.
Life had a cruel sense of humor sometimes.
He didn’t know what to say to make that better.
“They fired you, you know? Mike Nicholson called from the office. He was very polite about it, but said they couldn’t keep your job open indefinitely. The second time he called he was less polite, concerned, I think, that you might never come home, but he said they had to fill your post. Still, you’re home now, that’s all that counts.”
Glass Town Page 18
