Glass Town

by Steven Savile

  Josh wrestled with the overwhelming sadness and the disbelief laid over it. In the course of a few days, he’d lost his grandfather and his mother. The only person he had left in the world was Lexy, his sister. Beyond that he had no family, no friends to speak of, and no job. He was one of the endangered generation, at risk of becoming lost to the great hopes shunted onto their shoulders by parents who’d grown up with mottos like Loadsamoney—with the eponymous character waving wads of cash at the screen with only one care in the world—as their guiding lights. That was the sum of his dash.

  And now here he was, in the shark tank about to get feasted on by an old-school gangster who by rights should have been dead for fifty years. It was hard to get his head around just how insane it all was. Every time he thought he had a handle on it something happened to twist his sense of perspective. It had been that way from the moment he learned that the man trying to ruin his life was his own flesh and blood. That this was his family legacy. He looked down at the flagstones beneath his feet. The heel of his right foot was halfway across one of the black cracks. “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” he said, and then started to laugh hysterically, like there was nothing funnier in the world.

  The laughter lasted a good thirty seconds before it choked in his throat.

  It was Isaiah’s fight.

  It should be him going up against Seth.

  “Indeed it should,” a voice said. “And before you ask, no, I didn’t read your mind, you were talking to yourself.” The disheveled man sat down on the bench beside him. Cadmus Damiola.

  “How did you know I was here?”

  The old man smiled. “Magic,” he said, offering a wry smile along with a slight shrug. “Well, that and I heard you laughing.”

  Josh nodded. “I was coming to find you.”

  He looked at their surroundings. “Did anyone ever tell you that you spend an unhealthy amount of time in cemeteries? Anyone would think you were trying to talk to them.”

  “Who?”

  “Them, all around you, the dead.”

  “They don’t have much to say.”

  “They seldom do, lad. They seldom do. And when they talk, none of it is good, so it’s best that they keep what they’ve got to say to themselves if you ask me.”

  “I lost the glass,” Josh admitted, offering up his empty hands. “Seth has it.”

  “Well, then, it is a good thing he doesn’t know how to use it, isn’t it?”

  Josh looked at the old man, not sure he understood. “He repaired the lens I broke when I tried to fight him.”

  “He may well have, but that’s not using the glass, and to be brutally honest, that wasn’t fighting him, lad, that was playing into his hands. Fighting him means using your head.”

  Josh was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again it was to say, “I want to hurt him.”

  “I know you do.”

  “No. Really hurt him.” Josh thought about it for a moment, looking for words to put into context the level of hatred he felt for Seth Lockwood. “I’d reach down his throat and punch my way out of his arsehole if I could,” he said at last.

  “And quite a pretty word picture that is.”

  “He killed my mother last night. I found her.”

  “I’m so sorry. Death is a bastard. There’s no comfort in that, but it’s the truth.”

  “She had nothing to do with this.”

  “There are always innocents caught in the cross fire. Especially when it comes to your family.”

  “He did it to punish me because I wouldn’t join him. He had this idea we could somehow become one big happy family. Me and him, ruling this place side by side, like it had been with his brother, before…”

  Damiola shook his head. “I find that very doubtful, lad, no matter what words he might have used. His only intention was to inflict pain. You have to know your enemy. I know him. I’ve known him for the worst part of ninety years. There’s not a single sentimental bone in his body. Family has never meant anything to Seth Lockwood. If he offered you a hand, it was only to draw you close enough to twist your arm until it breaks. There was never an offer of friendship, only a way for him to win.”

  Josh couldn’t argue with that. He’d had the same thought.

  “Yesterday I wanted to kill him. I stupidly thought I could beat him. He killed her to punish me for smashing the anchor at the old church. I thought it would be enough, that it would let time catch up with him like you’d said. One hundred years lived in one hundred minutes or however long it would take to all come rushing back. I thought it would put an end to everything … I thought we’d be free.”

  “But you don’t anymore?”

  “No, now I know there’s no escaping him.”

  “So do you still want him dead?”

  Josh shook his head. “No. Not anymore. Dead is too clean. I want him to live,” Josh said. “For a very, very long time. He can live forever for all I care, as long as he is in agony for every single second of his wretched life.”

  “That kind of anger is dark, lad. You might not feel that way in a week or a month.”

  “He killed my mother,” Josh repeated. “The way I feel isn’t going to change. There’s no going back from that. There needs to be a reckoning. Balance.”

  “And you see some sort of balance in pain?”

  “I want to hurt him. And I mean really hurt him. I’m not talking about punching him in the face or kicking him in the bollocks. I want to hurt him so badly he can’t remember who he is for all the pain he’s in.”

  “And how, pray tell, do you intend to do that?”

  “Magic.”

  Damiola raised an eyebrow at that. “Do tell.”

  “There must be a spell. Something.”

  “Must there?”

  “One last trick? You’ve got powers. I know you have. Look at you, you’re into a second life in terms of years and look younger than my grandfather.”

  “And that’s why you were looking for me?” Damiola said, pushing himself up from the bench. “You want me to do your dirty work? Sorry to say I’m finished, lad. Look at me. I don’t have the strength. These old bones are done. I shouldn’t be here. I should be rotting away in there,” he hoisted a thumb over his shoulder in direction of the mausoleum. “This isn’t my fight anymore. I’m not the hero, I’m a bit-part player, and my cue to exit stage left has long gone.”

  “You started this,” Josh had been thinking it since he buried his hands in prayer. It might have been Seth’s obsession and Isaiah’s love that kept this family feud running for the best part of a century, but it was Cadmus Damiola’s magic that made it possible. It was Damiola’s grand illusion that stopped it from simply burning itself out. Without him the brotherly feud would have ended in the ’20s. There would have been blood, but that would have been an end to it. Instead, because of Damiola’s magic, they’d been kept apart. They’d been denied that resolution. Those hatreds had festered on both sides of the invisible wall between Glass Town and London. They took on a life of their own, becoming, in a sense, immortal.

  “And you think it falls to me to finish it? Is that it?”

  “No. This is on me. But I can’t do it alone.”

  “I told you, lad, I don’t have the strength,” Damiola held up his hands, offering them as proof. All Josh could see were the thick veins of dirt crusting them. “I’m spent. Or all but. Death’s standing at my shoulder, waiting to finally get his bony hands on me.”

  “Then make your death mean something. Help me.”

  “You’re good with words, lad. Quick on your feet. Make my death mean something. Get revenge on Lockwood. Who wants their deaths to be meaningless? Who wants the bad guys to win in this life? No one, am I right?”

  “You came looking for me,” Josh said. “You didn’t do that out of the kindness of your heart.”

  “Clever lad.”

  “You came here to die?”

  “I died a long time ago. Nineteen twenty-nine was the l
ast time. Nineteen twenty-three the first. I came here to see about making it stick this time.”

  “You’re going to help me?”

  “I’ve been helping you all along, if you didn’t notice.”

  “Eleanor described Glass Town as her prison,” Josh said. He’d been thinking about it for a while without realizing he was actually thinking about it.

  “That’s what Seth asked me for.”

  “But it’s as much his prison as hers, wasn’t it?”

  “It was meant to be. A few streets lifted out of today and hidden away in the Otherworld, pushed through a weakness in the veil that ran along the ley lines here. My teacher used to call them obliques; I prefer ley lines. But he’s been coming and going freely for years, as you pointed out, without time catching up with him, so maybe I’m wrong about everything, boy.”

  “I know how he does it,” Josh said, remembering Seth’s missing fingertip. “You were right, he has left a piece of him inside Glass Town. Not his heart in a lead-lined box, though. His fingertip. That means he never truly leaves, doesn’t it?”

  “Ah,” Damiola said, nodding thoughtfully. “It does indeed. He always was a devious bastard. I should have known he’d find a way around the restrictions the enchantment imposed on him.”

  “But we can make it work for us,” Josh said, no idea if that was true or not. “We have to. So, you can’t make anything new, you’re too weak, does that mean you can’t work with something old? Old magic.”

  “I’m not sure I follow, lad. Old magic? All magic is old. All magic is rooted in the mosaic. The mosaic is life. God. Our old Celtic brethren understood that better than we do today, worshiping the land for her majesty and might. They understood earth nodes and ley lines and how those primeval forests gave back to the land whereas our modern buildings just drain from it.”

  Josh shook his head.

  “I’d been focused on destroying the anchors, but that’s only one way of doing this, and it’s the one he’s expecting. That’s why he beat me at the church. He’s got his pet defenses, that dog-thing that sucks the life out of you, and the Comedians and whatever else he can conjure, so he’s prepared to defend Glass Town. He’s expecting me to go after him head-on. And I was stupid; I told him I knew the secret to beating him. I told him I knew about the anchors. But maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing?” Josh was thinking on his feet now, but it was beginning to make sense. The makings of an idea were taking shape. “What if we don’t try and destroy it? Do the unexpected, right? What if we use it?”

  “How would you intend to do that, exactly? He can come and go as he pleases, so as we’ve already decided, it’s not much of a prison.”

  “Not at the moment it isn’t,” Josh said, standing up. He was getting excited now. His mind was buzzing with possibilities. “But we’ve got thirteen lenses. You’ve already done the hard stuff. You know where they are. You know how they function better than anyone. How they simultaneously keep one side of the veil closed and yet the other open, like a two-way mirror.”

  “I do indeed.”

  “You said Seth doesn’t know how the glass works; you do, you made it. It’s your magic.”

  “Yes.”

  “The lenses are physical things, too, aren’t they? Not just some magical trace.”

  “Yes,” the old magician said again.

  “Objects can be moved. I held one of the lenses in my hand. I shattered it.”

  “And as you remarked, Seth repaired it with the glass.”

  “That’s not what I’m thinking. If I’d moved it, the barrier between here and Glass Town would have moved with it, wouldn’t it?”

  “Theoretically,” the magician conceded. “The thirteen points are anchors. The veil is tied to the anchors, not to the ground the anchors are set in. It’s harder to bind magic to a place than to a thing, a residual effect from days magic still ran along the ley lines.”

  “Right, so they don’t have to be there?” Josh stressed. “That’s what I’m getting at. They don’t have to be exactly where you placed them. We could move them.”

  “I honestly don’t know if the spell would hold or rip apart. There’s nothing to say the whole thing wouldn’t just leak away.”

  “But if it did?”

  “If it did,” Damiola said, with a shrug. “You tell me?”

  “It doesn’t have to ward off the entire movie lot, does it? Glass Town. The illusion could be refocused around a single house. Or even a single room,” and now it was slowly crystallizing. He liked it. It was simple. Elegant. Poetic even. It was the kind of thing a Lockwood would do. “Only one way in, one way out, no cracks he could exploit. He’d be forced to live out his entire life in that one room. No view, never seeing the sun again. Alone forever, to slowly go mad from it. A man living out the end of his days in a deep dark hole.”

  “He wouldn’t last long without food and water,” the magician noted.

  “Then you drip water in, down the walls; just a trickle, enough that he wouldn’t dehydrate. But so little of it he’d always be thirsty and forced to press his lips up against the stone to get any kind of refreshment. As to food, stack the place with tinned food, enough to last a very, very long time, assuming he was ever industrious enough to work out a way to break open the tins. No tin opener, no tool he could use to end his own misery. You give him a chance; it’s just down to how desperate he is if he takes it. And if he can’t work out a way to break into the tins, then maybe the nearness of food—right there in his hands, but with no way to get into the tin to eat it—would be the kind of mental anguish that would tip him over the edge?”

  “You’re describing torture.”

  Josh nodded, his expression cold. “That’s exactly what I’m describing, a lifetime of torture, however long or short that life is.”

  “And that is the kind of pain you are hoping to inflict on Seth?”

  “Not even close,” Josh said, and meant it. “I want him to be so desperate he finds a way to feed himself, even if it means chewing his own arm off. I want him to be so desperate to see the light he claws his own eyes out in the end, just for those few moments where sparks and flashes ignite behind them before he’s forever blind. I want him to live in the dirt, grubbing around on his hands and knees, clawing at the walls of his prison until his fingernails are shredded and bloody and the idea of feeling the sun on his face is some impossible dream, like coming face-to-face with God.”

  “I don’t know that I should help you,” Damiola said, looking back across the headstones in the direction of his mausoleum. “That kind of vengeance would change you. You wouldn’t be you anymore. You’d be him. In defeating him, you’d become another generation of the bastard Lockwoods.”

  “Don’t call me that. That’s not my name.”

  “But it is your blood, boy, and that makes it your legacy. Listening to you now just proves that. All of that violence is in you, just like it is in Seth. You might look like Isaiah Raines, but your soul is pure Isaiah Lockwood.”

  Josh wasn’t about to admit just how right he was, but there was no ignoring the second idea bubbling away in the darkest recesses of his mind. Seth came and went because he’d sacrificed a fingertip. Josh wasn’t against making the same sacrifice if it meant a century to take his rage out on Seth. That wasn’t something he was about to share with Damiola, but he couldn’t stop himself from making a fist, then as he caught himself doing it, relaxing it. He deliberately flexed his little finger a couple of times in the process imagining it not being there.

  Damiola gave no indication that he caught the small tick. Josh tried to deflect the old man’s attention from it, because whatever else he might be becoming, he wasn’t and would never be a particularly good liar.

  “You’ve been guarding that tomb of yours for years, waiting to see who would come looking for you. That’s why you sit here, isn’t it? Guarding. Watching. Not knowing who would turn up or what they would want from you, but you knew they would come wanting something. And th
ey did. Things were set in motion, secrets exposed and a chain of events begun that culminated in the death of my mother. That’s the long and the short of it. Now either we go into this like victims, and try to save ourselves, and maybe we will or maybe we won’t. The alternative is we take him on on our terms. That tomb of yours, apart from anything else, is designed to keep the dead in and the living out. Four walls, no windows. It’s isolated. Look around you; no one comes or goes, there are no idle passersby. It’s almost a lost part of the city. It would make the perfect prison. It’s exactly what we’d need. The only other possibilities are my grandfather’s old flat in Rotherhithe or the house back on the Rothery. We could hardly make either of those disappear.”

  “Theoretically no more challenging than making the old tomb vanish,” the magician said. “But I take your point.”

  “What if instead of shattering the lenses we use them to move the barrier? Rebuild the illusion on a much smaller scale? Use it to isolate your mausoleum? Then all we’d have to do is lure Seth out to the graveyard, which shouldn’t be that difficult. The only question is could you repurpose the illusion?”

  “It could work,” the old man said. “But are you sure this is what you want to do?”

  “Yes,” Josh assured him, making a fist again, flexing his little finger again.

  “You’re forgetting about the woman, aren’t you? The actress. Eleanor Raines. She’s still a part of this. What about her part in all of this? Glass Town is her prison, too. Do you intend to keep her in that dusty old tomb with Seth?”

  “No.”

  “But you can’t set her free, it doesn’t work like that. Tear down the barrier surrounding Glass Town and you damn her. That hasn’t changed. It’s the natural order of things. She cannot survive now that she’s been out of time for so long. I thought this was all about saving her?”

  “I can’t save her, you’ve made that abundantly clear.”