Glass Town

by Steven Savile

  “Why? Because you want one? Because it’s unfair?”

  “Because of Seth. He is out here now, in our London, coming and going as he pleases. He hasn’t turned to dust. He’s not aging like that. He’s just … him.”

  “Then he’s never left the safety of the illusion.”

  “He has. I’ve seen him. He was at the funeral. He threatened me afterward. He was there when I stepped out of Glass Town a week after I set foot in it, waiting. He’s spending a lot of time outside of the safety of the illusion.”

  “Maybe he cut his heart out and keeps it buried in a lead-lined box, beating away?” Damiola said. Josh couldn’t tell if he was entirely joking.

  “Would that work?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know everything, lad. I’m not ineffable. I didn’t create that world, I only opened the door.”

  “What if I kill him?”

  “Hard to do if his heart’s in a box,” Damiola said, offering a wry smile. “But, assuming it isn’t, it won’t change a thing. And to be honest it could do more harm than good. You don’t know what the effect of spilling blood in there will do. Blood is strange, it carries the essence of life in it, and the essence of life is time.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing,”

  “I know it can’t be a good thing, that is enough. Everything is connected. I don’t know how quickly it will happen, hours, days, maybe, but it will happen. So to beat Seth you shatter the anchors, allowing the door into that other place to close once and forever, bringing about an end to Glass Town, and you win. The years will race in to fill the void, catching up with themselves. Look at her face. Look at what’s happening to her.”

  This time as the ghost of Eleanor flickered, the cracks widened to finger-thick fissures now, its light went out like a pinched flame, casting them in darkness.

  The silence in the tomb was absolute.

  “There must be another way,” Josh said finally.

  “You either break them all and shatter the illusion forever, no going back, let time take both of them, or you repair the broken anchor by using the glass from the compact—it’s the same stuff that I used to push Glass Town into the underworld in the first place, and the only piece of glass that remains—and in doing so trap her in that place for another hundred years, or however long it takes for the anchors to finally fail. The world will have forgotten all about both of them, and us. So at least you won’t have to watch it happen, but it is going to happen. So, what is it to be?”

  36

  FRIENDS LIKE THESE

  Julie Gennaro was in over his head, and thanks to the Lockwoods learning a very important life lesson: You didn’t need water to drown; you could do that just fine on dry land.

  He looked up at the windows of Joshua Raines’s Rotherhithe flat.

  There was no obvious way in apart from the front door, which suited him just fine. He’d taken something from the evidence room at the station: a bump key.

  The science behind it was pretty simple, all he had to do was slip the key into the lock, bump it hard, once, maybe twice, and fool the tumblers into thinking they’d been tripped and that was that. It was an essential bit of every thieves’ kit. The skill was in fashioning the key, not using it. The principle was simple enough, by not sliding the key all the way in there was one pin at the end that wasn’t tripped, and when the key was bumped it forced it deeper into the keyway. The specially designed teeth worked to fool the pins, and the lock thought it had been opened. It only took a second, and done right barely left a trace on the barrel.

  As he walked up to the door Julie couldn’t help but glance back over his shoulder, just the once, to see if anyone was watching. It wasn’t exactly the behavior of an invited guest, but he’d done it before he could stop himself. It was still a couple of insomniac hours before the dawn chorus so he was banking on the fact that there was no one around but the birds to see him acting like an idiot.

  He shuffled up to the door and did the trick with the bump key, praying it would work.

  It did.

  He opened the door quickly and closed it behind him without looking back.

  The hallway smelled musty. He hadn’t noticed it the first time. He’d been too busy trying to take in the craziness of the Raines family obsession, struck by the sadness of generations of men never getting over the kidnap of the woman they were named after. He stepped through the sea of unopened mail, newspapers, and gaudy fliers and restaurant menus, then climbed the stairs two and three at a time to the top. He wanted to be in and out quickly, less chance of being caught, as he reached the top of the stairs he was struck by how little thought he’d given the crime.

  Lockwood wanted him to convince Josh to let it go, but how was he supposed to do that? This thing, the story of Eleanor Raines, had clearly obsessed his family for generations. It wasn’t as if he could just lean on the guy and say it’d be bad for his health like some dodgy scene in a gangster movie. He needed to be cleverer than that.

  And that was hard, because right now his brain wasn’t working properly.

  The key to stopping Lockwood had to be in one of these rooms. He was banking his life on it. That was what Josh Raines had been trying to tell him, when he’d brought him here and again when he’d dragged him out to that empty street at the other end of the city wasn’t it? Julie needed him to be right. But facing the sheer mass of information gathered in the flat, it quickly became obvious that the problem was identifying that single piece of information amid all of the madness.

  He needed to think smart, use the time here alone to really get a grasp of everything on those walls.

  The first time he’d skimmed stuff, his mind already made up even before he’d ducked under the first red thread to read about some long-forgotten stage act, a bunch of long-dead East End villains and weird ancient mythology. Between then and now he’d come face-to-face with celluloid sex demons and murdered his own partner.

  Everything was different now.

  He needed to absorb it all, let it wash over him, lose himself in it in the same way that Josh had obviously done in that week he’d disappeared.

  But he didn’t have a week.

  He wasn’t even sure he had until sunrise.

  Where to start?

  He looked around for something, an image, a headline, something that would serve as a cipher to unlock the whole puzzle, and chose a photograph of Eleanor Raines. He crossed the bare floorboards with their scorched-in map of London, ducking under the cat’s cradle of red threads linking the articles and images, and spent a full minute just staring at the woman. He stood on the scorched words, one for one. They didn’t mean anything to him so he ignored them. There were enough things he didn’t understand without worrying about three little words.

  There was no getting away from the fact that she was beautiful. Not modern beautiful, not heroin chic or Hollywood plastic, properly beautiful, timelessly beautiful. It wasn’t hard to imagine two men becoming so utterly obsessed with her they went to war. Men had gone to war over less.

  He followed the red thread from her portrait to an article mentioning the entrepreneur Ruben Glass and his failed attempt to get a movie town established in the East End, which was where a young director by the name of Hitchcock was looking to shoot many of the scenes of his first movie, Number 13. Glass, it seemed, was heavily invested in the success of the young director’s first movie. Until today—yesterday now—Julie had never even heard of it. The article was dated more than a decade after the disappearance of Eleanor Raines, but that wasn’t what caught his eye, it was a reference to a coup the young director had tried to pull off, a cameo from none other than the Hollywood goddess Myrna Shepherd. According to the reporter there was no proof that she’d ever been on set, and with the film itself lost, no way of ever knowing as Hitch refused to talk about Number 13 save to say that it wasn’t very good.

  Did a sex demon with Shepherd’s face feasting on his partner count as a link?

  On
ce that image had crept back into his thinking there was no getting away from it. He’d tried telling himself it was mercy, but that was easy to say, harder to believe. He’d pulled the trigger, even if there’d been no choice. He had his partner’s death on his hands. That was the sort of thing that changed a man. Forever. For good and bad. Whatever sort of man Julie Gennaro had thought he was, he wasn’t; he was something else now. Like it or not, as long as Seth had the murder weapon he was Lockwood’s man. And that meant facing the very real possibility that there would be more blood on his hands before this was over.

  He followed the red threads to another article, this one about a rumored falling out among thieves, with a new Lockwood rising to fill the power vacuum left by the disappearance of Seth. Gideon Lockwood. Seth’s son. At seventeen, the article claimed, young Gideon had committed more atrocities than any of the generations before him, hiding the worst of his brutality in the ruins of The Blitz. Julie tried to picture it; a new breed of gangster emerging during the horrors of the Second World War to run the streets of London, getting away with murder under the camouflage of the Luftwaffe’s nightly bombing raids. All of those images of Londoners coming together at the time of the city’s greatest need vanished in rock dust and rubble and opportunity. There was always someone who would look to profit from the pain of others. It was a case of entering the family business, with all the ruthless aplomb of the bastard who went before him. It made fascinating reading, but it didn’t solve anything.

  Julie crossed the scorched floorboards again, following another thread.

  There were thirteen scars on the wooden floor. Josh had tried to explain what those marks meant, or at least give him a practical demonstration with that mirror of his, but there had been nothing to see, no matter how insistent Josh had been that he was about to offer up miracles. Julie stood on the same scorch mark that represented the street where he’d last seen Josh turning in desperate circles, looking for something in the glass that wasn’t there.

  Julie Gennaro was drowning and there was no easy way to save himself. Lockwood had him by the short and curlies. Whatever came next, whatever person emerged, it wouldn’t be Julie Gennaro even if it walked like him, talked like him, shared his past and his face; it wouldn’t be him. That Julie Gennaro was dead and had been from the moment he pulled the trigger to save Taff.

  This thread took him to an entire wall dedicated to Seth Lockwood’s gangland empire, and from that another mosaic of newspaper cuttings obsessed with the missing actress.

  These things, no matter how exotic they seemed from afar, only ever came down to one of two things, sex or money.

  He needed to keep it simple.

  Follow the money. Find the lady—or in this case the lady’s bones and hope some sort of evidence had survived that could be used to bring down the Lockwoods. Good old-fashioned police work. That was what this entire room was all about, even if it got lost in Crazy Town. There were key players in this and Lockwood was only one of them. There was Isaiah Raines, the stage magician Damiola, the moneyman, Ruben Glass.

  Follow the money. Find the lady.

  Lockwood had been so eager for him to believe he didn’t want to be here, but if not here, where?

  He was standing on top of the answer, he realized.

  Glass Town, where else? That was where every single thread tangled together in one angry red knot after all.

  But before he could find a way out of this Hell of Lockwood’s making, Julie heard the telltale sound of the key in the door downstairs followed by panicked surprise at the revelation that it had been forced open.

  Julie counted to five as Josh came running up the stairs, fearing the worst as he raced into the room pumped up on adrenaline.

  He didn’t move.

  He stood in the midst of the red threads, his feet on two of the anchors, and faced Josh. He had no idea what he was supposed to say. There was a moment, the silence between heartbeats, when Josh clearly couldn’t place him, and then he seemed to collapse inwardly as the fear gave way to recognition.

  “You? What the fuck are you doing in here?” The subtext being: I thought you were him. I thought you were Seth. I thought he was going to kill me in my own house.

  How did he answer that?

  Carefully.

  “Looking for you.”

  “And you just thought you’d break in? Why did you come here? Why not come to the house?”

  “I could lie to you, but I won’t. I thought about going to the Rothery to find you, but I didn’t think you’d be there. I didn’t want to turn up on your mum’s doorstep and bring more worries for her. But that was only part of it. Lockwood owns the Rothery. If I turned up on your door, he’d know.” He met Josh’s doubtful stare and decided to push his luck. “You don’t beat a man like Seth Lockwood if he knows you are coming.”

  “Now you want to help me?”

  “No. I want to understand. You tried to show me something back there…”

  “And you didn’t want to see it,” Josh said. “So what’s changed?”

  I gunned down my partner because he was being gorged on by a ravenous sex demon, because he’d sold himself to the Lockwoods, because he was corrupt, and now Seth Lockwood has me by the balls and he wants you out of the picture, Julie thought, but he didn’t say any of that. Instead he said, “We both know there’s something going on here, I may not understand it, but just because I don’t understand, it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. That accident, where I picked you up, the two guys in those masks—”

  “The Comedians, no masks; that’s what they were, who they were. They were fused together at the hand and hip,” Josh corrected him.

  “Whatever. It was no coincidence Seth Lockwood was in that café, was it? He was waiting for you. He wants to hurt you. And this,” Julie spread his arms to encompass the contents of the room. “All of it, from the floor to the ceiling, this is why, isn’t it?”

  “I showed you the film. You saw it for yourself. He’s not Gideon Lockwood’s grandson, despite all appearances, no matter how impossible it sounds, Seth Lockwood isn’t just named after Gideon’s father; he is his father.”

  “You showed me the film,” Julie said.

  “But you still don’t believe me, do you?” It wasn’t so much an accusation as a statement of disappointed fact.

  Julie didn’t know if he could sell the next part. It’s hard to peddle something you didn’t believe in. “I don’t not believe you,” he said, shrugging. “Put yourself in my shoes for a minute, it’s hard to take it all in. You’re talking about a world I’m not familiar with. The kind of stuff you are telling me, long-dead actresses breaking and entering, conjoined comedians hunting you?” He looked down at his feet, seeing for the first time the distortion of the map and the streets he’d never seen in his London, and put two and two together, “And this,” he jabbed his foot toward one of the anchors, letting Josh assume he knew what it meant. “It’s a lot. It’s more than a lot. You want me to believe Seth Lockwood is, what, the devil?”

  “Not the devil,” Josh said. “The devil doesn’t exist, Seth does. That makes him so much worse.” Julie couldn’t help but smile at that. Sound logic.

  “Then prove it to me. Make me understand, Josh. Because right now all I see are the shadows you’re jumping at,” he deliberately turned slightly, his gaze going to Eleanor Raines’s beautiful face where it was taped up on the wall, “And a hundred-year-old obsession that’s anything but healthy.”

  Josh looked at him. Julie wished he knew what was going through his mind. “Why have you come here? What’s changed? You didn’t want anything to do with what I had to say. You basically left me to die back there.”

  He didn’t say anything else for a moment, then said, “Bit of an exaggeration, but I take your point.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I saw the woman who broke into your house…” he swallowed, biting back on the memory of Myrna Shepherd crouching over Taff’s corpse, his blood smeared ac
ross her lips and chin. “There was nothing natural about her.”

  “Because she isn’t. But that’s not it. It can’t be. You’re lying to me—or at least not telling me the truth.” He was shaking his head over and over.

  “You’re right,” Julie said, wishing that Josh Raines wasn’t half as perceptive or good at reading people as he obviously was. That made it so much tougher to sell him a lie. So he kept it as close to the truth as he could. “He killed my partner right in front of my eyes.”

  “Seth?”

  Julie nodded. “You can’t fight him, Josh. He’s untouchable. He owns the Rothery and plenty of other places besides. Just think about it for a second. He killed a police officer before my eyes, acting with impunity, knowing I couldn’t touch him. That’s a special kind of monster. So, ask yourself this, is it really worth it, all of this, this family feud or whatever it is? Is it really worth dying for, because he will kill you.”

  “What do you suggest I do?”

  “Walk away.”

  “Is that your advice as an officer of the law?”

  “No. That’s my advice as a human being. You didn’t see what he did to Taff. It doesn’t matter whether he’s thirty or one hundred and thirty; this is his town, mate. He might pretend he’s not Gideon, and that might be true, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a different kind of monster. You can’t beat him. None of us can.”

  “I can’t walk away,” Josh said.

  “How are you going to fight him?”

  Josh looked down at his feet and for a moment Julie thought it was the cowed gesture of a broken man. It wasn’t. Without looking up, Josh Raines said, “I know how it works now. All of it. The grand trick. The great illusion. I know how he did it. How he spirited away Eleanor, all of it. And I’m going to bring the whole thing crashing down. I’m going to burn it to the ground if I have to. Let him come for me, I don’t care. I’m not going to fight fair. I know his weakness.”

  “Okay … then I guess you’re going to need some help,” Julie said. “Wind me up and point me in the right direction. I’m in. I owe it to Taff.”