The City's son st-1

by Tom Pollock

  And then the freight train crashed down, its fender-jaws tearing at the tracks. The shock of it wrenched the world out of focus. The figure vanished. Beth shook her head, trying to clear it, bewildered by the din. Had she imagined-?

  No, there he was, on top of the monster, somehow. His ribs pressed through his chest with each heaved breath. He gripped what looked like an iron railing in one hand and as Beth watched he stabbed it down, again and again, into the train-beast’s metal skin. The makeshift weapon punctured the steel like tinfoil, and every time it went in the beast shrieked.

  Wheels whirred into motion, squealing against the tracks, and Beth rolled sharply out of their path. Her ears popped as the freight train clattered past her, the grey boy still clinging to its roof. The carriages it dragged behind it faded into insubstantial nothingness as it gathered speed.

  Beth shook herself like a dog, trying to get some feeling back into her stunned limbs, some sense into her head. She pushed herself up and ran to her train’s side.

  It mewled pitifully at her with its whistle.

  ‘Hey,’ she whispered, ‘hey, you okay?’ She patted and stroked it, though the metal around its wounds was almost searing to the touch. It stirred, and sounded again. She could feel the fear and pain coming off it, making the hairs on her arms stand up. Through its windows she could see the people-memories, repeating their actions, but now their faces wore terrified expressions.

  The train groaned and rolled painfully up onto its wheels.

  ‘Good boy,’ she whispered, ‘good boy. Listen, there’s a boy- That freight train’s got him. He… he pushed me, got me safe — we have to help him… can you-?’

  Maybe it didn’t understand her — why should it? Or perhaps it was simply too scared — but no, after a moment it jolted itself into forward motion, all the while lowing in animal panic. Axles churning, it roared off towards the station.

  Beth stood lonely and tiny in its wake, sucking in great gulps of air. ‘ Wait…’ she started, but her voice faltered as she stared after it.

  A thunderous drumming grew loud on the tracks behind her: the freight train was clattering back, howling victoriously. The concrete-skinned boy had been shaken almost loose and now he dangled from its side, his body snapping in the wind like a pennant.

  Beth watched in horror as the beast charged straight at the viaduct wall, but then, a second before impact, the train-beast wrenched itself sideways and a hideous sound filled the air as it scraped itself lengthwise along the bricks, a horrible, teeth-clenching metal sound — a sound pierced through by a human scream.

  As its last few carriages passed she saw him, the concrete-coloured boy, sprawled face-down on the tracks. Every atom of her body was screaming at her to run — she shouldn’t be here; she should never have got on the train. But the memory of the boy’s elbow in her side stopped her.

  He’d saved her life.

  And now she was running, but running towards him, cursing her reluctant legs, her battered arms pumping.

  In the shadow of the station the freight train was already checking its momentum, like a bull, turning for a final charge to finish its enemy. It swept around, and she could see its mad, staring headlights.

  She skidded onto her knees in the gravel. The boy wasn’t moving. His ankle was pinned down by heavy chunks of rubble. His back was cruelly torn open where he’d been dragged over the bricks. The blood that glistened there was dark as oil.

  ‘Wake up!’ Beth slapped his face. ‘Wake up!’ She shook him hard. She knew by the shudder of the rails that the freight train was close.

  Thrum-clatter-clatter ‘Wake up!’ she screamed.

  At last he stirred, but sluggishly. He mumbled something, but she couldn’t make out what it was. ‘Wake up!’ She hooked her arms under his and tried to pull him away, but it was no good: his ankle was trapped fast.

  The onrushing freight train stormed in her ears.

  One of the boy’s eyelids flickered. He mumbled again, and this time she could just about make him out as he breathed, ‘ Spear — ’

  Thrum-clatter ‘Spear? What spear? Where-?’ She looked around.

  The iron railing lay across the track, shuddering with the monster’s approach. Beth seized it in clammy hands and wedged it under the rubble. She threw her weight down on it and the smallest rock lifted, just a fraction.

  The boy screamed as he exploded up from the ground. His shoulder caught Beth in the gut, driving her feet from the ground. The railing grazed her hand as he snatched it away.

  Beth’s head snapped backwards. Headlights washed over them and the freight train roared. The boy grunted and threw the railing. It pierced the front fender and skewered itself deep into the ground.

  There was an eruption of blue light, an after-image of vast, blunt, churning teeth. And then darkness swallowed Beth whole.

  The world returned slowly with a hiss of distant traffic. Beth’s nose told her she was alive — as far as she knew, neither Heaven nor Hell smelled like a blocked Southwark drain. She didn’t open her eyes. Footsteps crunched in the gravel near her head.

  ‘Well, you look dead.’ The voice had a tinge of an East End accent. ‘But you don’t smell dead, and if that’s a heartbeat I’m hearing then you don’t sound dead neither.’

  A hand slipped behind her shoulders, another cupped her head and she was hoisted onto her feet. ‘Up on yer pins, come on.’ The boy helped her to steady herself, then stood back. He frowned, leaning against his railing.

  He looked about sixteen, but it was difficult to be sure because his eyes sat in deep pits and his cheeks were sharp to the point of looking starved. The skin stretched over his ribs was a mottled grey, as though he’d soaked up the soot and oil from the city and been permanently stained. He looked like a street-urchin from one of those old books, but wilder, more feral, and halfway to being grown-up.

  Beth stared at him, wide-eyed and confused. She looked around, but there was no sign of the train-beast. ‘Where’d it go?’ she asked, breathless. It felt like a more urgent question than her planned follow-up: Who the hell are you?

  ‘The Railwraith?’ he said. ‘I earthed it, spread the charge out through the ground.’ He shrugged ruefully. ‘Should’ve thought of it sooner, I s’pose, but when something that big and angry comes rushin’ out the dark at you, first instinct’s to stick it with something sharp, know what I mean?’

  He squinted at her critically as she stared at him, then he laughed. ‘Second thought, maybe you don’t. What in Thames’ name d’you think you were doing, yelling at it like that? Trying to reason with it? You think Bahngeists can talk?’

  Beth spread her hands helplessly.

  Droplets of petrol-hued sweat stood out on the boy’s bizarrely coloured skin, etching paths around starkly defined muscle, tendon and bone.

  ‘You’re weird,’ he said. He stared at her for a few more seconds like she was a particularly freakish museum exhibit, then he snorted and stomped past her towards the edge of the viaduct.

  ‘Wait!’ Beth called. ‘Wait, where are you going?’ He ignored her and Beth had to run to catch him up. She became suddenly and painfully aware of the bruises covering her legs and back.

  ‘You can’t just go — hey, I’m talking to you!’ She caught his arm. ‘I saved your life back there…’ She stumbled as he suddenly spun round.

  His teeth were bared like a hissing, feral cat. ‘Yeah?’ he snapped, ‘well, I saved yours first, and the way things are going I reckon my achievement’s gonna last a lot longer than yours does.’

  Dawn was just beginning to seep in at the edge of the sky and in the half-light Beth could see the tension around the boy’s eyes. He scowled, trying to look fierce, and her fear faded: for the first time he wasn’t some alien, cocksure street-creature but a teenager, frightened out of his wits.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she asked softly. ‘What are you so scared of?’

  ‘I’m not scared.’

  Beth just kept looking at h
im.

  ‘I don’t see what business it is of yours,’ he said after a long pause, ‘but that Railwraith was sent — sent for me. Somebody’s trying to kill me, somebody who-’ He broke off and looked nervously at the horizon, where the dome of St Paul’s breached the skyline. Cranes clutched at it like cruel metal fingers.

  ‘Trust me,’ he muttered, ‘if he wanted you dead, you’d be brickin’ it too.’ He fell silent, squinting suspiciously at a pigeon flapping overhead.

  ‘And?’ Beth asked.

  ‘And what?’ He looked at her sullenly.

  ‘Who’s trying to kill you?’

  ‘Why do you care?’

  ‘Why do I care?’ Beth was taken aback by the question. ‘I… I just-’

  He shoved his railing in between the tracks and folded his arms. The fear she’d seen vanished, hidden behind a veneer of bravado. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Look-’ Beth gritted her teeth. He might have rescued her from being crushed, burned and electrocuted, but his high-and-mighty attitude was pissing her off. ‘I just saved your bloody life, right?’

  The boy made to protest, but she held up her hand. ‘ Don’t interrupt me. Admit it or not, I saved your life. Now, if you’re going to turn around and get killed, I might as well not have bothered. Frankly, I resent the wasted bloody effort.’

  The boy’s face deepened to an even filthier shade of grey. ‘I saved your life, too,’ he snapped.

  ‘Yeah,’ Beth said, ‘twice. What’s your point? Because you saved my life, I’m not supposed to give a crap that someone’s trying to take yours?’

  ‘What?’ Now the boy looked confused.

  ‘You asked why I should care.’ Beth pronounced the words with exaggerated patience. ‘Why shouldn’t I bloody care? Why did you even tell me if you didn’t expect me to care? Ooh, “ Someone’s trying to kill me ”.’ She slapped her cheeks in mock horror. ‘Am I supposed to be impressed by that?’

  The boy blinked. His forehead wrinkled. ‘Well, aren’t you?’ he said in a small voice.

  ‘YES!’ Beth yelled. ‘I BLOODY AM! THAT’S WHY I’M ASKING!’ She sat down hard on the gravel.

  The boy, looking both sheepish and thoroughly confused, sat down beside her. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Thanks for saving me.’

  Beth breathed out hard. ‘Back at you,’ she said, then stuck out a hand. ‘I’m Beth.’ He took it, but didn’t say anything. ‘And your name is?’

  He just shook his head.

  ‘Fine, be bloody mysterious.’ She sighed. ‘But if this was my school and you didn’t give yourself a name they’d give you one of their own, know what I mean? And trust me, you wouldn’t like it.’

  They’d probably just call you Urchin, she thought. That’s what I’d call you. That’s what you look like: a five-years-later snapshot from a ‘Help a London Child’ campaign.

  They sat a moment in silence He rubbed at the inside of his wrist and for the first time, Beth noticed the mark there: a tattoo, slate-grey against his lighter skin. It looked like a semicircle of tower blocks, arranged to form the spokes of a crown.

  ‘So who is trying to kill-?’ she began, but he cut her off sharply.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask questions — don’t try. You saw monsters tonight.’ He gave a sickly grin. ‘And I’m probably the worst of the lot, so just forget me. You people can forget anything if you try hard enough.’

  ‘Come on,’ Beth protested, ‘whoever it is, he can’t be that bad. The way you took on that train-thing-’

  ‘He’s worse,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Yeah, but still-Whoever he is, I bet we could take him.’ We. She didn’t know why she’d said that.

  Pavement-grey eyes met hers. He smiled, and she smiled back, but then he shook his head ruefully. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Look, you’re fun — in a bone-breaking kind of a way. Maybe, after this is all over, you can come find me.’ His smile was wan. It didn’t look like he was holding out much hope that ‘after this was over’ there’d be much left to find.

  ‘Where would I look for you?’ Beth asked.

  He hesitated, and then said, ‘Your accent says Hackney…’

  She nodded.

  ‘All right, Hackney Girl, look for me at the dance where the light itself is the music, where the Railwraith’s rush beats the drums.’ He eyed her appraisingly. ‘Look for me in the broken light, when this is all over, and maybe then we’ll dance. But for now, go. It’s gonna be bad enough me trying stand against what’s coming. I can’t be tripping over you too.’

  The dismissal felt like a fist clenching around Beth’s guts. ‘Why not?’ she whispered.

  He gave her a lopsided smile. ‘Because I saved your life,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want to resent the wasted effort.’

  ‘Look, mate-’ Beth began, but in that same moment the grey-skinned boy sprang up and sprinted away along the tracks.

  Beth swore and pushed herself after him. She had never run so fast; her battered muscles squealed in protest as the rails blurred under her. For a second they were side by side, but slowly, agonisingly slowly, he pulled away. Beth’s breath seared her lungs, but he just ran faster and faster. His motion became strangely smooth, sinuous, like a street rat’s. He almost didn’t look human any more.

  He jumped up onto the wall of the viaduct and was silhouetted against London. For an instant, the low tumble of the city’s skyline was like an army, backing the scrawny boy. Then he dropped over the edge.

  Beth arrived seconds later, wheezing and cursing. She craned her head over the wall. Early morning cars hooted up at her from the street below. But in between their fleeting shapes she saw nothing.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Thames Barrier breaches the water, glinting like the knuckles of a giant gauntlet. It’s a Saturday, and the industrial estates of North Greenwich are empty: little fenced-off wastelands. Gutterglass can manifest anywhere in London, but there are places where the spirit of rubbish is stronger, where it accretes in every brick and concrete pore.

  I’m squatting in a car park, behind a car with two missing hubcaps and a cardboard for-sale sign in the window. Rats skitter past, but I ignore them. They’d get a message to Glas eventually, but I want it to travel faster than that.

  I dig my hand into the ground. The soil crumbles between my fingers and tiny black ants teem over my palm. That’s better. I pull a small bottle from my pocket, yank the cork out with my teeth, and allow the fumes to waft over an insect’s antennae. It freezes for an instant, then vibrates ecstatically and races away over the back of my hand, down my leg and into the earth. You can’t beat a hive mind for speed of transmission.

  Now I wait.

  I think of the girl from last night, her broad, flat cheekbones and messy hair. We can take him, she said: we, even though I’d only met her five minutes before and I could have smelled the terror in her sweat through the Oxford Circus crush on a Saturday afternoon. What kind of person thinks like that? We.

  Because I’m alone, because it’s a secret, I let myself smile at that.

  Seagulls gyre overhead, cawing. As I watch, one of them drops out of its lazy circle and spirals fast towards the ground, flapping its wings rapidly to break its landing. The gull looks at me with one yellow eye. I can see a lump distending its throat. It jerks its head back and forth and gags.

  With a slippery sound, a tangle of worms and woodlice spills from its beak onto the ground, spreading over the concrete. My little ant races away from the pack, its job done. It leaves a sticky trail of bird saliva behind it.

  I watch as the bugs work, dragging empty foil tubes, crisp packets and chunks of plywood to the centre of the courtyard. Plastic bags are torn into strips by ferocious, gnashing weevils. Toes form first, and then legs and hips, and a higgledy-piggledy sculpture of rubbish rises uncertainly in front of me.

  The eggshell eyes blink. They, and only they, are always the same. Glas is a woman this time, the rusting handlebars of a bike making up her hips, long st
rands of torn plastic her hair. The head of a worm wriggles unhappily at the end of one hand. I find an ice-lolly stick from the dirt near my feet and hand it to her. The worm coils itself around it and breaks it into knuckle-joints.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says. Her eggshell-gaze catalogues the burns and black blood-bruises on my chest. Yesterday she’d have tutted or cooed in sympathy, but a lot’s changed since then.

  ‘Nothing beyond your ability to heal,’ she notes with satisfaction. ‘The wraith’s dead, I take it?’

  ‘Earthed behind Waterloo,’ I confirm. ‘I got off light. I reckon the extra power was too much for her; it broke her after a few hours. She was confused, already bleeding out. It was a mercy at the end.’

  ‘That’s something then.’ A little thing. She sighs like she has to be grateful for the little things now. She hesitates, and then says, ‘My pigeons have seen wolf-shapes stalking the building sites. And the Pylon Spiders report feeling a power-surge through the grid at around midnight, night before last. Just when you said the wraith entered Reach’s domain.’

  Sympathy edges into her voice. ‘I’m sorry, Filius, I really am, but Reach is gathering his strength. There’s no doubt any more: it is him.’

  I feel like I’m trying to swallow a chunk of brick. I hadn’t realised until now just how much I’d been hoping Glas was wrong. ‘I don’t understand,’ I mutter. ‘Why now?’

  She turns her head away. The breeze flaps the strands of her binbag hair against her face. ‘Filius,’ she says carefully, ‘there’s something else you need to know. There have been rumours — if Reach is preparing for war, it can only be because he’s been listening to them.’ She wets her lips with a tongue, made from an old sponge.

  Unease creeps through me. ‘What rumours?’ I ask.

  ‘That soon the street-signs will rearrange themselves,’ she speaks very quietly, ‘and feral cats will walk with their tails high in procession through the streets.’

  For a long moment I do nothing but stand there, feeling, and no doubt looking, heroically stupid.