He surrendered the gun, knowing it was the worst thing he could possibly do. Seth took the murder weapon from him.
“What about his body? You can’t let her just … eat him…”
“Don’t worry about that, now that he’s no longer with us she’ll lose interest in poor old Huw pretty quickly,” he turned to the ethereal actress who was crouched over Taff’s corpse. She turned her head to look at Seth, obviously responding to her master’s voice. Lockwood offered her an indulgent smile. “Won’t you, my dear?”
Her mouth opened and static crackled out of it followed by a line Julie had heard a thousand times. It was one of those iconic movie moments everyone thought they could imitate, like Bogart’s beginning of a beautiful friendship or Mae West’s invitation to come up and see her. “I’m frightened … but when you strip away all of the things I’m afraid of the only thing that remains is love … I’m just a fool in love…” Though far from sounding seductive or enticing, the line sounded positively repugnant, like the promise of a serial killer to his next intended victim.
“We’ll put Taff somewhere no one will find him, trust me. It’ll be like he never existed. Now, I think it’s time we talked about what you can do for me, Julie. For starters, my cousin Josh. He’s becoming an inconvenience.”
“I’m not going to kill him for you,” Julie said, unaware just how similar his words were to his partner’s when Lockwood had asked him to deliver Julie to the old cinema. If he had been, perhaps he would have been more afraid that a similar outcome awaited him should he fail his new paymaster.
“What is it with you policemen and death? Always assuming everything has to be so absolute? Convince him to let this go. That’s all I’m asking. I don’t care how you do it, just find a way.”
“And if I can’t?”
“I’ll have to convince him.”
35
DOWN AMONG THE DEAD MEN
It was a familiar feeling. He’d put himself out there, taken a risk, told the other person the secrets of his heart, and they’d walked out on him. It wasn’t love this time, but he could so easily have been describing his love life. It wasn’t as though he lived in a Joy Division lyric, but in matters of the heart Josh had never been all that successful. It was the same when it came to understanding people. He’d thought it would be different with Julie, that the young policeman would understand because he’d seen the Comedians with his own eyes and experienced the dread their presence conjured, but it wasn’t.
He looked at the gold compact for the umpteenth time, turning it over and over again in his hands. It was curiously lacking in ornamentation or embellishment. There were no engravings, not even a crown hallmarking or any indication of its carat. The hasp was well worn as were the hinges, and when he opened it he saw the vines that cracked the mirror’s face where the silvering had begun to wear away from the back of the glass. There was a dent the size of his thumb in the top of the case. He closed it and slipped it into his pocket.
Josh lay on his bed, still dressed.
He could hear his mum snoring softly in the next room. It was a remarkably normal sound, the only thing remotely normal about the last day—or was it a week? It was hard to believe that something as simple as the passage of seconds, minutes, and hours could be so totally undermined.
The compact was his only link to Eleanor. Unfortunately, he couldn’t trust it. He’d learned that the hard way. But he’d promised he’d save her so what was he supposed to do now?
It was a rash promise. A stupid, unkeepable one. The kind of thing lovers said all too glibly, knowing that reality could never come back to haunt them, but they weren’t lovers. They weren’t even friends. She was a face on the wall, a few seconds on film, nothing more. She wasn’t his obsession.
Or she hadn’t been until now.
Obsession, desire, to want something so badly it hurts, to be willing to trade everything you had for the one thing you didn’t … Here he was, wide awake when he should have been dreaming, seriously contemplating that kind of deal with the devil.
Nothing was going to be resolved by lying on his back looking up at the ceiling. He needed to get back out there. So what if he didn’t have Julie Gennaro on his side? He’d done fine without him so far. Better than fine. He’d found the flat down in Rotherhithe; he’d found the map marking out the anchors of Glass Town; he’d found the magician who’d conjured the illusion up; he’d even found a way inside. And he’d done it all by himself. He didn’t need Julie Gennaro.
His thinking was wrongheaded. The compact wasn’t his only link back to Glass Town; the magician was, too, he realized. Cadmus Damiola. It began with him, and assuming he’d survived the Comedians, the end of Glass Town rested with him. He was the one man who knew all of its secrets.
Josh pushed himself up off the bed and padded silently across to the window. He looked out across the street at the row of identical windows, at the neatly trimmed hedges, and the lines of garbage bins on the curbside, and was struck by just how normal it all was. Through the double glazing, he heard the distant full-throttle roar of a motorbike powering toward one of the bridges that would take him across the river.
It was hard to believe that beneath the veneer of banal bricks and mundane mortar there lay anything approaching a secret life of London when other miracles passed by unremarked every day. But he’d seen it with his own eyes, set foot in it—however briefly—and now hungered to return there. That was what happened when you let the idea of the impossible, of hidden cities and men trapped forever in the prime of their lives, into your life; it wasn’t much of a stretch to start to see all of the little miracles that otherwise went unnoticed every day. The inner city became a red-brick miracle, the suburbs a wisteria-covered wonderland fit for any Alice who tried to find it.
So even if Damiola was dead maybe his part wasn’t over in all of this?
It was somewhere to start again, but this time he wasn’t about to run out into the middle of the night. He went downstairs and wrote a note for his mother, telling her not to worry, which of course guaranteed she would, and called a cab to take him across London.
Twenty minutes later Josh stood outside the rundown old cemetery feeling woefully underdressed for the cold. The magician had given up his vigil at the gates. Josh stepped between the lopsided raven’s wings. The cemetery at night was a very different animal to the cemetery by day; the shadows of the dead clung to the dark places, lending the old stones the feel of perdition. Walking down the gravel path it was easy to imagine the lost souls trapped within the cemetery’s crumbling walls, unrepentant even as their eternal torment began in earnest, their cries being drawn out of their dead lips even as the gravel crunched beneath his feet.
But perhaps that was just the wind?
He resisted the urge to call out. If the magician were here, he wouldn’t take kindly to being summoned in that manner. Instead he walked among the gravestones, his breath becoming louder in his ears with each step until it drowned out the crunch of gravel underfoot. The specter of the mausoleum rose out of the shadows ahead of him. The moonlight transformed what had been a modest structure into an imposing house of the dead. The gates still hung open though they lacked the ornamentation they once had thanks to Damiola’s defensive magic. The bird he’d conjured forth from them was reduced to a tangled heap of wrought iron on the grass. Behind it the door to the tomb itself was still open a crack, the ancient oak embossed onto the door casting deeper shadows around the lock.
There was nothing to suggest that the magician had survived the showdown with Seth’s Comedians, but plenty to intimate that he hadn’t.
He was sure he could smell blood on the air as he pushed the door open wide.
So many things begin with something as simple as opening a door. It wasn’t just a clumsy metaphor for life’s choices. It was more than that. There was the fear of what lurked on the other side of a closed door, of what made those sounds in the night; there was the hope that went with the idea that st
epping through could lead to something different, somewhere new; there was the belief that somehow the door protected you from the outside world and the knowledge that it didn’t.
Josh went inside.
The passageway leading down to the chamber beyond was dark. There was a vague flickering light at the far end. No doubt that was another metaphor for the path he was on, Josh thought as he descended the few steps into the tomb proper.
He heard labored breathing in the darkness up ahead.
He walked cautiously toward the light, not sure what he expected to find waiting for him there.
This time he did call out, just the one word, “Hello?”
The call went unanswered.
He walked slowly toward the light, entering the tomb.
For a moment he thought it was empty. The single source of light, a guttering candle stub that didn’t seem to burn down—despite the fact the wick was buried in less than a fingernail of wax—reflected in the steel toe cap of a worn-out boot that stuck out from beneath a pile of rags.
Cadmus Damiola was a broken man.
Beaten, battered, and cast aside by the Comedians before they came after Josh, he lay now beneath layers upon layers of grimy and filth-ridden coats that shrouded his ruined body.
The magician looked up.
He didn’t seem surprised by the intrusion as he said, “You again?”
“You’re not dead,” Josh said.
“I am. I told you, 1929. It says so on the door. It’s just taken a while to catch up with me.” He held out a hand. Josh could see dark lines that at first he mistook for fine hairs across the back of it until he saw them for what they really were: cracks. “I’m coming apart,” Damiola explained, no fear in his voice, only resignation. “It can’t be helped. Death is catching up with me after all of these years. I’m done. Now it’s only a matter of how long before I unravel. Leave me be. I’m too tired for all of this. I’ve told you what needs doing. It’s your fight now. Seth has bested me for the last time. There are only so many times you can get knocked down and get back up again. I don’t have the indignation to go down fighting. I’m done. I’m out. Just leave me alone.”
“I’ve been there,” Josh said, not exactly a protest, not exactly begging the old man for help, but hoping those three words would catch his interest. That had been the point, after all, hadn’t it? By giving him the compact and telling him where to go, Damiola had been guiding him to the hidden city within the city. He wanted him to tear the illusion down, to find a way to save the girl. “I’ve been into Glass Town,” Josh held out the gold compact. “That’s what you wanted me to do, wasn’t it? Find your workshop, find the way through to the other side.” His lips were suddenly dry. He crouched down beside the magician. “When I went back to try and find another way in … it didn’t work. The mirror didn’t show me the way. I didn’t know what else to do apart from come here to find you.”
Damiola shook his head. “Impossible.”
Josh didn’t know if he meant it was impossible that he’d set foot in the hidden city, or that it was impossible that the mirror hadn’t revealed a second way in to him. “I know how it works,” Josh pressed on. “I know that it messes with time.”
“You don’t understand what you are talking about, do you? It’s all just words to you.”
“I might not know how it does it, but I was in there for a few minutes, inside Glass Town, and when I came out the other side a week had passed. I know how it works, how you hid them from Isaiah.”
That stopped the magician’s denials.
He didn’t say anything for the longest time, and when he did finally make to speak, a vicious bout of coughing rattled his old bones. He wiped the spittle from his lips with grubby fingers. It was a full ten seconds before he said, “I thought the anchors dilated time, like an optical, spatial, and temporal illusion, city within a city, hidden behind glass, an hour within a month, a year within a hundred, all coming together to slow the passage of time, but I was wrong, it was so much more than that. They keep the way through the veil into the otherworld closed on this side, but open on the other.”
“The Annwyn?” Josh said, as though he understood. It was a convincing lie.
“Perhaps you aren’t as clueless as you look, dear boy. Yes, the Annwyn, the druidic otherworld, the underworld, Mictlan, Naraka, Diyu, Duzakh, the lake of fire, the outer darkness, what we now call Hell was so much more in the understanding of our ancestors. I didn’t know. Not at first. I was naïve enough to think it was my masterpiece; that I was in control. That I had fashioned a miracle; not tapped into a nightmare. But in reality it was just a prison.” The magician hawked and spat in disgust. “It was such an amazing feat … the sum of my life’s work, bringing two phases of existence together. And for what? So that bastard could escape from his crimes and live happily ever after? What a travesty.”
“Then help me. Help me stop him.”
“You can’t beat the devil, boy.”
“He’s not the devil, he’s a lunatic.”
“Oh, no, no; he’s so much more than that. He doesn’t need horns, he has the heart of Lucifer inside him.”
“If you’ve already given up, why did you give me the compact? Why did you send me to your workshop?”
“Honest answer? To keep the glass out of Lockwood’s hands,” Damiola explained, shuffling his back up against the wall. The cracks in his neck and cheek were deeper and more pronounced than they had been a few seconds ago. “It was only ever about getting the glass away from me while his playthings were so close. All these years he’d left me alone. I’m sure he thought I was dead. Now he knows I’m not. Those freaks of his will have spilled their guts as soon as they reported back to him.”
“They never made it back. There was an accident. They got hit by a bus.”
“That wouldn’t have stopped them,” the magician said.
“It did.”
“No,” the magician shook his head. “The only thing that could have stopped them would be Lockwood snuffing their light out. As long as that flame keeps on burning, they live.”
“They’re gone.”
“Then he made a mistake.”
“That’s good, isn’t it? Proves he’s not unbeatable.”
“It just proves he’s impatient,” the magician said.
“And that’s something we can use against him,” Josh said. “Just help me. Tell me how to fight him.”
“I already did. I told you his weakness. He’s obsessed with the woman. It’s beyond desire. He needs to possess her. The problem is what it means for her, that woman he took, Eleanor. To beat him, you damn her. Is that a consequence you are willing to face? If it is, you know what to do.”
“There must be another way.”
“If you’ve been there, you understand. You know what I am saying. Beyond the glass one year passes as one hundred. You were gone barely fifteen minutes if you lost a week. Eleanor Raines is almost a year older than when he took her. She’s still the same vibrant young woman he ripped out of time.”
“But that’s good, isn’t it?”
“It means she can never leave the other place.”
“She can,” Josh protested. “She was at my grandfather’s funeral. I saw her again not far from here.”
“I’m not making myself clear. She can’t leave what you call Glass Town without the universe making moves to protect itself. It’s bigger than her now. The world as we know it is a delicate ecosystem. Eleanor Raines doesn’t belong here. She is intrinsically linked to the London of the 1920s. That is her place in space and time. Take her out of it and you create an absence. An Eleanor Raines–shaped hole in the universe. If you then put her here, now, in the London of today, that creates a fault line between then and now,” he lifted his hand again, “like these, but instead of being limited to one man’s frail body they are all around you. Cracks in the here and now as time looks to reassert itself. Her being here creates paradoxes by the minute. Think of reality as a sheet
of glass, and all of those paradoxes are little hairline fissures in it. It doesn’t take a lot to shatter it. Her being here is like taking a hammer to that glass. It is as simple as that.” The magician shuffled up against the wall, using it to help himself stand. He was weak despite the absence of any obvious wounds beyond the cracks in his skin. He leaned on Josh for support. “Existing outside the Annwyn, even for a few minutes, is enough for the whole thing to start unravelling. She can’t come back. The consequences are too much to bear.”
The magician snuffed out the stub of candle, but the tomb didn’t go dark. There was a second source of light, Josh realized, as Damiola brought forth a ghost with the slightest turn of his right hand and index finger.
It looked like Eleanor. Exactly like her save for the fact that her red dress had a vaporous hue, no solidity or substance to it. The conjuration was absolutely still. Josh could see straight through her to the wall behind her. The red light cast an ashen glow across the magician’s face. Damiola coughed, phlegm rasping at the back of his throat wetly. Josh didn’t know how the old man was doing it—some sort of optical illusion. That was how he did everything wasn’t it? Mirrors, with or without smoke.
The woman slowly turned in place to face Josh and as she did she began to crumble. It began as a single black crack through her cheek, then another and a third, as her complexion was ruined. The cracks became a web of black lines.
“Time forces itself to catch up with her,” Damiola explained, as the ghost aged rapidly, her youthful beauty replaced by a hard-worn middle age, which crumbled into those twilight years in a matter of seconds. “The reality is that Eleanor Raines is over one hundred years old. She can’t be here and not be over one hundred years old. It doesn’t work like that. And people don’t live to that kind of age. Seventy? Eighty? Ninety, maybe, but there’s a limit; no one lives forever, not even me, and what happens then? The natural order reasserts itself. There’s no other way this ends for her.”
“There must be.”
Glass Town Page 23
