“And, Cadmus Damiola, as I live and breathe. I thought you were dead. Actually, I was sure you were dead. It seems I was wrong. Or maybe not. You don’t smell good, old man. In fact you smell like you’ve been dead for sixty years.”
“That’s about right,” the magician said, adjusting his grubby coats. He scratched at his beard.
“Well, that’s the pleasantries dispensed with. Where is she?”
“Here,” Eleanor said, stepping into view. There was something strange about the way the light seemed to suffuse her body. She stood before the door of the tomb. She’d moved into position silently while Seth grandstanded.
“Let’s get this over with,” the old-time criminal said, as if his being there was such a hardship. “I haven’t got time for this shit.” He turned to the old man. “You don’t have to die here. All I want is for you to repair the damage. Give me another hundred years with the woman I love. Give me the time to make her love me. That’s all I ask.”
“She doesn’t love you,” Josh said.
“And who the fuck asked you, Cuz? Be quiet. The grown-ups are talking. Eleanor?” He reached out a hand for the actress. She shook her head slightly. “Well, now, that is disappointing. I guess I’ll just have to kill everyone. It’s not like I don’t have the best hiding place for your bodies.” Seth reached into his pocket and pulled out an old six-shot revolver, leveling it at the woman. “What is it they always say in the movies? If I can’t have you, no one else will. That’s it.”
Eleanor didn’t move.
Josh could see the steady rise and fall of her breasts. She was calmness personified. He wouldn’t have been half as calm in her place.
And then, amazingly, she turned her back on him, offering a guilt-free shot, and took two steps toward the mausoleum’s entrance.
“Don’t you dare walk away from me! No one walks away from me, woman,” Seth howled at her back as she disappeared inside. He waved the gun from the empty doorway to the magician, to Josh, and back to the empty doorway again, frozen helplessly to the spot. “Don’t any one of you fuckers move,” he barked, finally breaking the spell that bound him. He followed Eleanor, stopping on the threshold. His face was lit gold by the infinite candlelight burning off that single wick. He turned to look at Josh. “You try anything, I’ll put a bullet in your face. Understood?”
Josh didn’t say a word.
He didn’t move.
He gave no hint he’d even understood the words coming out of Seth’s mouth. The black agony pulsing from his ruined hand gave him something other than Seth to concentrate on. He clenched his fist, biting back on the sudden flare of pain that lanced up his arm in response. He couldn’t imagine his hand would ever be the same again.
Seth disappeared inside.
Damiola reached out to rest his hand on the lintel above the doorway, touching the carving of the ancient oak tree. The stone flared bruise-purple in response to his touch, a fine curtain of northern lights shimmering across the entrance as the magician entered his tomb. Josh pushed through the barrier, following Damiola inside.
“What trickery is this?” Seth demanded. His endless reflections stared back at him. There was no sign of Eleanor Raines anywhere inside the tomb. The candlewick flickered beneath the breeze that chased them in, then suddenly stopped, leaving absolute stillness in its wake.
“This is how it has to be,” the old man told the criminal. “Glass Town is gone.”
“It’s true,” Josh said, coming into the tomb behind him. “I destroyed the Opticron. It’s lying in the street outside Ruben Glass’s movie house in hundreds of pieces. There’s no magic left in it. There’s nothing to keep it trapped in the Otherworld. It’s free of limbo. It’s back here, where it belongs. It’s over. You’re a walking dead man. Can’t you feel all of those years rushing back into your body, clawing away beneath your skin?”
Seth exhaled slowly, a sly smile spreading across his feral features. “You’re pathetic. Just like your father. Just like Boone and Isaiah. All of you, absolutely pathetic. I’m going to enjoy killing you, boy, and then your sister, claiming the full set.”
“The full set?”
“You didn’t know, did you? Let me explain: I’m the plague as far as your family is concerned. Mother. Father. Grandfather. A push down the stairs. It wasn’t difficult. He was a frail old man. I almost regretted it. Almost. If he hadn’t worked out that the anchors were failing, that the whole thing was coming apart, he might have lived a few more years, maybe even lived to see the next generation of Raines take their first faltering steps. And wouldn’t that have been something? Fresh blood for the feud. Conjuring the kid, yes that kid, from the Chaplin movie, to stick his knife in dear old daddy; then using the Rushes to have your old man fuck his wife to death. Poetry.”
“You bastard,” Josh spat, the pain of grief eclipsing anything he felt from his hand. He clenched his fist, jamming the stub of his severed finger into his palm. The sunburst of pain was enough to drown out his other senses as Seth gloated over the havoc he’d wreaked in his life.
“Absolutely. You seem to forget, this is all business as usual for me. This is what I do. You’re in my world. You think you’re so clever, but you’re not. I’m not an idiot. I was king of this city before you were born. I’ve taken precautions.”
“You mean this?” Josh held his hand out. The fragment of bone that had been Seth Lockwood’s fingertip a hundred years ago rested on his palm. “The king is dead,” Josh said bitterly. “Long live the king.”
Josh took three quick steps toward Seth, grabbing hold of his jaw and slamming him back against one of the many mirrors hard enough to have a spiderweb of cracks race across it like wings at his back. The candlelight didn’t waver. The flame hadn’t burned down a millimeter. It wouldn’t. It would burn for a hundred years and a hundred more. On and on. Unlike the three men in the tomb it was eternal. With his good hand he pried Seth’s mouth open, and before he realized what was happening, Josh rammed both bones—his own fingertip and Seth’s that he’d found in Glass Town—down Seth’s throat, pushing his fingers in, curling back the other man’s tongue until he gagged and choked on the bones before swallowing them. Josh stepped back.
Seth fired two shots, both missing. Before he could fire a third, the gun tumbled from his fingers and clattered to the floor. It spun in place for a second, the barrel scraping on the stones, then shot across the floor, coming to rest at the magician’s feet. “Don’t look so frightened. I’m not about to let you die, Cuz.” Josh turned to Damiola. “Do it. Banish this place.”
The old man crouched down, placing his hand flat on the stones, and began to chant. The words were in no language Josh had ever heard. It was the oldest of English, bearing no resemblance to their modern tongue. The flagstones shimmered in response to his words. Filaments of bluish light chased along each and every crack, creating a latticework of raw energy that enclosed Seth Lockwood.
Mirrors behind the magician began to move, sliding across the doorway to seal the tomb.
Damiola lifted his hand from the stones, the energy dissipating in a chase of crackling electricity as it surged away through the cracks in search of the fastest route to the earth. The old mausoleum had been built on a confluence, a crossing of ancient power lines. It was potent ground, deliberately chosen. Some of the ancient magic still resided in the dirt, not yet choked to death by the concrete and steel of the city beyond. It was precious little, but it was enough.
The old man stood slowly, looking every one of his years.
He reached out for Josh’s hand, and then pulled him back through the glass, leaving Seth screaming at the walls of his mirror prison.
Josh reached out with his ruined hand and rested it on the cold surface. There was no ripple or give in it, and it didn’t matter how many times Seth beat his fists bloody on the other side, Damiola’s last grand enchantment wouldn’t let it break.
“I’ll find a way out,” Seth raged. Josh could only hear him when his hand wa
s in contact with the glass. Somehow it conducted the words through from there to here, even as time began to slow around Seth and deny them any sense. He emptied the four remaining bullets into the glass. They had no noticeable effect, the mirror absorbing them as they fell somewhere out of time. “So help me God, I’ll find a way out and I will end you!” Seth screamed.
“No, you won’t,” Josh said. “There are no anchors to fail this time. Before there was always a way back, because the anchors kept the veil open on one side. This time you are gone. Banished. You are in Hell. The old races used to call it the Annwyn. It is a place of ghosts. There’s no fake movie set for you to pretend life goes on as normal around you, you will wander alone through a shapeless landscape, endlessly the same, wreathed it mist to hide whatever creatures lurk in the mists. That infinite solitude will strip you of your mind long before your body fails you.”
Josh stayed there for an hour, watching Seth prowl around the infinite glass prison, confronted by an endless array of impotent doppelgängers reflected in the backward land of the glass. His pacing slowed and slowed until he appeared to be frozen in the mirror world. Josh wished that time flowed the other way, that Seth was being thrust into the future so that a century on the other side of the glass might pass in a single year on this side. That way he could have watched the man break, his spirit crumble.
He wasn’t going to feel that satisfaction staring at Seth’s twisted face trapped in time.
He felt hollow.
Winning hadn’t solved anything.
The world wasn’t a better place.
And there was still one more grief to face: Eleanor.
He hadn’t saved her.
He was a hollow man who had won himself a hollow victory.
How was he going to face her? How was he going to tell her he’d failed to do the one thing she’d asked of him?
Josh turned his back on Seth and walked away, leaving him to slowly rot.
Damiola stopped him before they walked out into the light. “I know what you’ve done, lad. You’re going to need to get that hand of yours seen to.”
“I will, eventually.”
“Before it festers.”
Josh nodded.
“I won’t let you damn yourself, lad. I know what you’ve got in mind. I knew the moment you said you’d worked out how Seth came and went as he pleased. I didn’t think you’d go through with it. I guess I didn’t realize how badly he’d hurt you. But, know this, I’m going nowhere. I’ve got nowhere to go. This is my tomb, after all. I’ll sit vigil on that bench out there guarding this place just like I’ve done for the last hundred years. I won’t let you back in. The gateway to the Annwyn is closed and has to stay that way … you may think you can just walk into Hell and kill him because part of you is in there with him, or live forever out here, but the cost of that, the price, is too much, boy. Let it end here.”
“You won’t live forever,” Josh said.
“That’s what you think,” the old man smirked, putting his hand on Josh’s shoulder. “Stranger things have happened.”
47
THE FINAL CURTAIN
“Pepper’s Ghost,” Eleanor said, explaining why she’d not reacted to having the gun pointed at her. She could see that Josh rather enjoyed the irony of an illusion that was already half a century old when she’d disappeared so thoroughly fooling Seth.
They were talking about everything apart from the one thing that was truly important: What happens next. Because, for Eleanor Raines there was no next. This was it. They both knew it. There was no point trying to say everything was going to be all right. It wasn’t. Not that way. There was no happily ever after for her. She couldn’t live in this new world, and there was no way back into the prison that had been her life for the last year, not that she ever wanted to go back there. As far as the world was concerned she’d been dead for a hundred years. It was time for reality to catch up with the headlines.
“I want to see it all for one last time,” she told Josh.
He really did look so much like Isaiah—so much so she could almost imagine she was walking through the streets of London toward Primrose Hill to watch the sun rise one last time with the man she loved.
There were worse ways to die.
She was frightened it was going to hurt. Of course she was. How would her body, still so young and soft, react to the ravages of time, all of those years finally staking their claim on her?
“I shouldn’t have promised,” he said, halfway up the hill. She could tell he was struggling with the fact that in real life it was hard to be a hero, and so much easier to fail.
“I never should have asked it of you. Not those two words. Not ‘save me.’ I should have said ‘free me.’ Because it was never about being saved. Not the way you think. Not in the damsel in distress being plucked from the tracks barely seconds before the train rolls over her, foiling the villain’s dastardly plans.” That was an end that was hackneyed even before she set foot on the set outside The Peabody and heard Alfred Hitchcock utter that magic word for the first time: “Action!”
No, what she had meant with those two words was more about putting her fate into her own hands finally, letting her die on her own terms.
Of course she’d dreamed about making a new life here in this London ever since she’d bumped into Isaiah in Spitalfields. But she was a woman out of time. She didn’t belong here. She didn’t belong anywhere anymore. Everyone she had ever known was gone. Even the stars overhead were different tonight.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Don’t say that,” she told him. “You gave me my life back. You ended a nightmare that haunted your great-grandfather, your grandfather, and ultimately saw both of your parents murdered. You did what none of them could. You won.”
“So why does it feel like I lost so badly?”
“Because it’s all still raw. But in time you’ll feel different about all of this. You glimpsed the miraculous. You made a difference. And in a very real way you did save me.”
“I killed you,” he said.
“That, too,” she said, with a wan smile. “But there are different routes to salvation, sweet boy. I get to see my true murderer banished to a very literal hell. How many murder victims get to say that?” This time the smile was sweet, and for just a moment he smiled back and she saw the man she had loved written all over his face. Dying with him beside her wouldn’t be so terrible. It was as close to a perfect end as she could have hoped. She was ready to die now. Maybe she would be reunited with Isaiah, maybe she wouldn’t. It didn’t really matter. All that did matter was that Seth wouldn’t be there.
She could feel it happening already.
But that was fine.
She’d never wanted to be saved.
She was free, walking the real streets of London one last time, not those fake wooden ones of Glass Town with their empty insides, and that was all that mattered.
Sunrise was only a few hours away.
She walked toward it, looking forward to climbing the hill and seeing the city in all of its glory for one last time, knowing that there would be no tomorrow for her.
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A great magician never reveals his tricks. Luckily I’m not a great magician, so I can spill my guts to anyone who’ll listen. At this point, that means you, because you’re still here. A lot of people have helped make me look better than I am, so this one goes out to them.
To Peter Wolverton, as insightful an editor as a writer could ever ask for, for bringing out the very best of the story you’ve just read, and all the team at St. Martin’s who worked so hard to make this happen. Most notably, to Jennifer Donovan for running interference.
To my agents, Judith Murray and Chris Wellbelove at Greene and Heaton, who put up with my mad ideas.
To Mike Nicholson, Thomas Alwin, Stephen Morris, Andy Coulthard, and Stefan Lindblad for the coffee and friendship that made the obsessive search for Glass Town so much easier tha
n it might have been alone. To Pat Cattigan for years of fantasy football rivalries to match the best of them. To Marie, my long-suffering wife, who won’t read this line and will never know.… I could say anything at this point. Anything. I could promise a shopping spree in London, all-expenses paid, and she’d be none the wiser. Don’t blab. This can be our secret.
And for my next trick …
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
STEVEN SAVILE has written for popular franchises including Doctor Who, Torchwood, Stargate, and Sherlock Holmes. He was a finalist in the People’s Book Prize in the UK and has won the Lifeboat Foundation’s Lifeboat to the Stars Award and the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers Scribe Award. He wrote the storyline for the bestselling computer game Battlefield 3, and his novel Silver was one of the top thirty bestselling novels of 2011 in the UK. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
1. The Upright Man
2. The Crooked King
3. Family Reunion
4. The Rushes
5. White Noise
6. Myrna Shepherd’s Eyes
Glass Town Page 35
