Glass Town

by Steven Savile

  Footsteps echoed as Seth slowly paced around him.

  The first punch landed with shocking savagery, crunching into his solar plexus. The impact spun him around in another dizzying twist. The second, a sucker punch to the jaw, split his lip and left him dazed and gagging with nothing to focus on. Flashes of light—fireworks of white every bit as intense as the Negative’s eyes—went off inside his skull. The seconds it took for them to stop were filled with burning pain.

  He grunted, trying not to give Seth the satisfaction of knowing how badly the blows hurt.

  “That’s better,” Seth said, sweetly. “Want to make sure you are focused on just how much trouble you’re in, Cuz.”

  “It’s over, Seth, I won,” Josh said, tasting blood on his tongue.

  “Hmm? Interesting idea,” Seth said after a moment. “What makes you think that?”

  “I broke the glass, the magic can’t hold.”

  “Well, well, well. It seems that you’re not an idiot after all. Wrong, but not an idiot.”

  “Take the piss all you want, Seth. You lose. Time is stealing into Glass Town. You’re wasting what little of it you have left to hurt me? That’s fine. If that’s what you need to do, have at it. I don’t care. It’s over, Cuz. I beat you. Bang-bang, you’re dead.” His voice sounded hollow in the vast space beyond the dark.

  He had no idea where he was; one of Lockwood’s old warehouses down by the Thames, maybe? Somewhere his body could be conveniently dumped? If this was how it was going to end, he thought fatalistically, at least it ends with a win. I’ve had worse days.

  “You really don’t have any idea, do you? Jesus, you poor fucking fool, Josh. I really thought you were brighter than that. Listen to me; I’m not dying any time soon. Ever, if I have my way. There’s so much living left to be done. Some days it feels like it hasn’t even started. I own this city, both versions of it, back then and here and now. I own it. I’m the most frightening fucker you’ve ever met. The most dangerous fucking fucker of all the fuckers out there. I’m the King Fucker. And that means I don’t lose to scrotes like you. All that blood’s going to your head. You look like a big purple cockhead about to explode.”

  “Is that supposed to frighten me?” Josh said, the words braver than he felt. He was alone in the dark, trussed up like a piece of meat in a slaughterhouse waiting to go under the knife.

  “It should, if for no other reason than I can back my words up.” To drive the point home Seth delivered another punishing blow, this one into the soft stuff of his stomach. The pain took endless seconds to subside.

  Seth stepped back. Josh tried to follow the sound of his footsteps as he circled him slowly, the echoes and silence between each one filled with menace.

  “You ever hear the phrase ‘putting the frighteners on someone’?”

  “I know what it means.”

  “Good, now I understand you don’t want to give the magician up. I respect that. No one likes a grass. But I’m going to take a moment to show you just how wrong you are about everything. I’m going to let your level of fuckedness sink in, and then I’m going to give you a choice.”

  Josh heard the flick of a metal lid going back followed by the rasp of a milled wheel on the flint as a small flame sprung to life before him. Behind the flame Seth looked like a man possessed, the dancing red light reflected in his wild eyes.

  It hurt to focus, stinging tears from him, but he didn’t care because it meant he wasn’t blind.

  Seth held out his free hand.

  There was something in it.

  Josh blinked against the tears filming his eyes, trying to make out what it was. It took him a moment. It was the battered gold compact Damiola had given him. Slowly, Seth manipulated the clasp to pop it open.

  There was no reflection of the flame inside the compact.

  There was no glass in it.

  “Imagine my surprise when I walked over to where you’d fallen, expecting to find that you’d broken your neck in the process, but instead found this lying in the shards of broken glass? Talk about killing two birds with one stone. I’d been looking all over London for this, and you had it all the time. The magician’s looking glass, the locus of the whole web of illusions, the secret to Glass Town, and it was in your fucking pocket? Priceless. I’d had the Comedians tearing apart the city looking for Damiola’s damned glass. I fed that bent fucking copper to one of the Rushes because of this thing. Now I understand why he failed me. I thought he was just too busy fucking the life out of his movie star whore, but no, it wasn’t there to be found because you had it all along.”

  He didn’t say anything else for a while, seeming to savor the irony of the situation.

  “You want to know why it’s so wonderful that you turned up with this when you did? That piece of glass is exactly what I needed to repair the damage you’d done. In fact it was the only thing that would. How delicious is that?”

  Josh wasn’t looking at the glassless compact anymore, he was focused intently on the imperfections of the hand holding it. He’d never noticed it before, but then they’d hardly spent any time together. The fourth finger of Seth’s left hand was cut short at the knuckle and had no fingernail. Maybe Damiola’s half joke about Seth defying the ravages of time by cutting out his own heart and hiding it in a lead-lined box wasn’t so far from the truth after all. The fingertip wasn’t exactly vital, but if it meant he never truly left the confines of Glass Town, then the relative immortality its loss conferred was surely worth the sacrifice to a man like Seth?

  Seth capped the lighter again, taking what little light there had been with it.

  Josh welcomed the darkness. It meant that Seth couldn’t see his face and there was no way he could betray himself.

  “You interest me, Josh. I see a lot of my brother in you.”

  “That’s not particularly reassuring, given what you did to him,” Josh said.

  “Funny, I like that. For a while back there, I loved him. He was my best friend. We were brothers. Proper brothers. He helped me do what needed to be done. We started out side by side and ruled this city together. You didn’t know that, did you? The Isaiah you know is the broken man hunting for his lost love, but that’s not who he was. Not when we were young. He was ruthless. He had it in him to be a fucking warrior, Josh. A warrior. I was nasty, but he was capable of so much worse than me, because he was so cold and calculating about it. If I was fire, he was ice. I swear; you met him, you wanted to be him. Everyone loved Isaiah. But you crossed him at your peril. Christ, he could hold a grudge. But then, look at the mess you’re in, that’s because he could never let anything go. It’s been a hundred fucking years, he’s as dead as a fucking dodo, and he’s still got you lot doing his dirty work. That’s some serious grudge holding.”

  “You ruined his life.”

  “He ruined it himself. I just wanted one of the pieces. One. I left him everything else. I left him our fucking kingdom. In return I only ever wanted to be left alone. He was the most powerful man in London and he threw it all away. For what?”

  “Love,” Josh said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.

  “Don’t make me laugh,” Seth said. “Love? What is that? Honestly? Some fleeting obsession with a face? Your heart skips a beat because you like someone’s bone structure? You suffer some insane impulse to be inside someone and can’t think about anything else? What is it they say, ‘One person is pretty much like any other lying down?’ We’re all wet; we’re all hard. We’re all basically the same meat. So what are we talking about? A chemical reaction? Some kind of hormonal thing we’re helpless to resist? How the fuck does that make you feel, Cuz? A slave to the chemicals that make up your flesh? It’d depress the hell out of me, to be brutally honest.”

  “Says the man who made part of London disappear because of a woman.”

  “Yeah, well, therein lies the mystery of it, doesn’t it? Love. Ask me today and the truth I’d have to tell you is very different from the one I would have ha
d for you in 1924. So, here’s my offer: let’s put an end to this silliness, no more Lockwoods and Raineses, come back into the fold. Unify the family. Be my right hand, brothers in arms.”

  “Let’s get the band back together?” He felt ludicrous saying it, hanging there by his feet, the blood pooling inside his head, Seth’s prisoner.

  “That or just agree to go our separate ways, East is East, and all that shit.”

  “What’s in it for you?”

  “Like it or not, we’re family, Josh. My blood flows in your veins. That’s got to count for something in this fucked-up world we live in, hasn’t it? What are we without family?”

  “I don’t trust you.”

  “And you shouldn’t, but you’re alive aren’t you? I could have let the Negative drain you until you were nothing but an empty husk; that’s what it does, you know. Your magician friend created it to be a guardian on the threshold, to make sure nothing got into or out of his precious Otherworld. I could have put my hand over your mouth and nose and watched you kick and scream pitifully until you ran out of air. You couldn’t have stopped me. I could have killed you back in the street when you ran out of Glass Town straight in front of Officer Gennaro’s car. It wouldn’t have been difficult. It was chaos. Cars, buses, people. I could have made it look like an accident. But I didn’t.”

  “Am I supposed to thank you?”

  “Maybe you should. You owe me. Can I ask you a question, Josh?”

  “Can I stop you?”

  “What have you got?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you don’t have the glass. That means you can’t see the anchors anymore, they’re lost to you. You can’t find your way back into Glass Town. Your ally, the man who promised to fight at your side to bring me down? Julius Gennaro is my bitch. After he put a bullet in his partner’s head he became mine. His prints are on the smoking gun and the body’s hidden away where no one is going to find it unless I want it found. I own him. How do you think I found you? He told me where you were. So, I’ll ask you again, what have you got?”

  Seth waited for an answer.

  Josh didn’t have one for him.

  “I can tell you if you like: You’ve got nothing. I’m offering you a way out of this nightmare, Josh. No recriminations. I’m not saying you and me forever, but we can finish what Isaiah and I started. Think about it. It’s symmetry. It fits. It’s right. Take your time, don’t just be pigheaded and dismiss my offer.”

  “And if I say no? Then you kill me?”

  Seth didn’t answer that, not at first. He simply walked another circuit around him in the darkness.

  “Is that your answer?” he asked finally. “Because honestly, I’ll be pretty disappointed if it is.”

  Josh said nothing.

  “Man, you’re making this so fucking hard. It doesn’t have to be. Just let it go, Cuz. Please. Not for me, for the people around you that you love. Do it for Rosie. Do it for that lovely sister of yours; what’s her name again? Alexandra? Pretty little thing. Do it for them. Forget you ever heard about Glass Town and Eleanor Raines. It’ll be better that way. Because as much as I might want to, I won’t kill you. I promise you that. What I will do is strip you of everything you have ever loved. Everything that’s ever meant anything to you. I’ll take everything you’ve ever cared about, everyone you’ve ever cared about, and I’ll put a torch to them. I’ll burn them until there’s nothing left but bones and ash. It’s who I am. So think about it, and remember that whatever happens now, it’s on you. You did this. I gave you a way out. All you had to do was take it, not try and be clever and piss on my outstretched hand.”

  Seth didn’t say anything else.

  He didn’t need to.

  He walked away, leaving Josh hanging by the feet in the darkness to regret what he hadn’t said.

  The death rattle of the shutters rolling up and slamming back down into place filled the darkness, stealing hope far more cruelly than the Negative had. He squirmed against the chains, thrashing about in an attempt to pull himself up for more than a couple of seconds. Josh snatched hold of the chains around his feet, rubbing the skin of his ankles raw and bloody as he tried to work them loose.

  There was no way he was getting out of here.

  He fell back, tears of frustration burning his cheeks.

  He hated Seth Lockwood with all of his soul. He hated Julie Gennaro for betraying him. But most of all he hated himself for losing. He’d had the glass, he’d known what he had to do, but he’d broken his promise. He hadn’t saved Eleanor. He hadn’t even come close. She’d put her faith in him, and he’d let her down by playing right into Seth’s hands. The taste of disappointment was as bitter as the blood in his mouth. Who was going to save her now?

  Seth was right; he had nothing.

  He saw a light—the beam from a torch spearing through the darkness up ahead, roving all over the place, to reveal the contours of his dark world. He was inside some sort of warehouse. Chains and hooks for freight hung from steel crossbeams. Crates lined one corrugated iron wall. They were stamped with the crest of some company that had gone out of business long before he’d been born.

  “Take me to him,” a brittle voice said from behind the light. A few seconds later the light was bright in his face, and there were hands on his body.

  “Don’t try and move. Hold on.”

  It was Julie. He wrestled with the padlock securing his chains. He didn’t have a key. He had a pair of bolt cutters.

  “Get away from me,” Josh hawked and spat a wad of bloody phlegm into the middle of the light. As defiances went it was petty and pointless. He wasn’t getting out of here without help, and like it or not, his betrayer had just become the cavalry.

  Beside Julie a man in a wheelchair looked on. Gideon Lockwood, the king of East London in his wheelchair chariot. Josh had been wrong when he’d seen him at the funeral, he wasn’t a shrunken soul; he had been hiding his strength behind the ravages of age.

  The old man rose slowly from his chair, coming to stand in front of Josh. “Before we free you,” he said, “I want you to promise me one thing. Promise me that you will kill my father.”

  It hung in the air between them, demanding a truth he was more than happy to give.

  “I’ll try.”

  “Cut him down,” Gideon told Julie.

  “With pleasure.”

  41

  THESE DREAMS

  Seth drew the film out of the old cassette. He’d watched it on fast-forward until he’d found what he was looking for: Barclay Raines caught full frame looking toward the camera; love in his eyes, the sun in his face, his son disappearing off camera. It was the perfect shot. He wasn’t entirely sure what he had in mind would work, but if it did, well, it would be sheer poetry. He clipped the individual frames out and fitted them into the barrel on Damiola’s Carousel, then carried the old praxinoscope out to the car. He didn’t bother locking the door. No one would be foolish enough to rob him.

  It was only a few streets back through the Rothery to the house on Albion Close where Rosie Raines would have all of her Christmases rolled into one. He smiled at the thought of his own generosity.

  He clambered out of the car and crouched down on the grass outside of her house, the carousel in the dirt beside him. There were lights on in other houses around the cul-de-sac, but no one was playing nosy neighbor. He scratched out a pattern in the dirt, each stroke rendered with precision. Satisfied with his artwork, he took a knife from his pocket, flicked open the blade, and drew a shallow gash the length of his palm to drip blood onto each of the symbols carved into the ground before he took a match from the box in his pocket, and lit the candle in the center of the zoetrope with it. He let more blood drip into the wax puddling around the base of the carousel. His blood sizzled, crusting around the candle, the smell of burning rich in the air as he conjured forth one of the Rushes.

  He turned the small handle through seven revolutions until the drum spun under its own mo
mentum, before he opened the carousel’s hood.

  The flickering candlelight was projected into the middle of the small garden in front of him.

  Slowly, with each rattling revolution of the carousel, a man’s stuttering silhouette began to take shape within the light.

  Two more turns of the handle and the flickering frames settled on the shape of a man, his face still indistinct as the drum rattled around another revolution. It didn’t become any clearer as he whipped the small handle around another couple of turns, setting the drum to clattering against the central rod it spun around. The man before him became ever more substantial. In just a few seconds it looked as though he had never died at all. Barclay Raines stood in the middle of the grass. The amber glow from the streetlight betrayed the solidity of the illusion.

  The match burned out as the carousel came to a stuttering stop.

  Barclay Raines turned to face Seth. His smile was just as it had been in the home movie. Unlike Myrna Shepherd, who had been conjured from a much cruder image, Barclay Raines’s face was beautifully rendered. He wore the same casual white cotton shirt and jeans he’d worn on that day, the lick of unruly hair that refused to follow the line of his parting seemed to ripple in the wind, so perfect was the illusion. Unlike Myrna Shepherd, he was also rendered in vivid color.

  Seth stood slowly and walked up to the man he’d had killed—at least tangentially—once already in this lifetime, and stood face-to-face with his invocation.

  He walked around the apparition, looking at it from all angles. It was perfect in every detail. It was Barclay Raines. Right up until the moment it opened its mouth and a burst of static crackled out of it, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. Besides, Rosie Raines wouldn’t see that far into the illusion. It didn’t need to be a smooth talker or woo her with promises of love. The heart wants what the heart wants. And in this case the impossible yearning of grief left to fester slowly for nearly two decades would make sure there was nothing rational about the way she welcomed him.