Ironhand

by Charlie Fletcher

  Unwilling to look around at the source of all this horrifying sound until she had to, Edie looked at her feet and saw they were on the step of a shop. There were fragments of brick and glass all around her. She looked to her side and saw a mirror on the doorpost. She saw her face staring back at her, a white smear of shock side lit by flames. Before she could see if there was a matching mirror on the other side of the door, there was a huge thump that knocked her to her knees as the ground kicked and buckled beneath her. When she looked up, stunned by the violence of the invisible blow, halfway back onto her feet, she saw something that stopped her from moving at all. She remained there, one knee on the ground, eyes wide, mouth open, staring at the infernal vision towering over the other end of the street.

  It was a firestorm. Out of the very center of the flames rose the familiar dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, wreathed in conflagration and black smoke—but untouched. It was a vision of the end of the world. But from the heat on her face and the twinging pain in her shoulder where she’d rolled onto the half brick, Edie knew this was no vision. She wasn’t glinting this.

  This was real.

  When she glinted, the past came in jagged slices, and she had no choice about what she could see. She never ended up with brick dust in her mouth. This wasn’t glinting; this was being.

  “Hey you, girly, get off the bloody street, get down the shelter!”

  A voice shrieked at her from the other side of the road. She turned to see a middle-aged man in a suit, with a canvas bag over one shoulder and a tin hat like the Gunner’s, except the Gunner’s didn’t have a white W painted on the front. He was waving at her angrily, thin mustache bristling like a furious hairy caterpillar.

  “It’s that way, down the end, you trying to get yourself killed or—”

  The side of the ancient brick building behind him jerked as if it had been kicked by an unseen giant. The man never got to what came after the “or,” because the front of the building just dropped on him in a brutally short avalanche of brick and stone.

  Edie instinctively put her hand over her mouth as the dust cloud rolled out. It thinned, and she saw the white W of the hat slowly rolling toward her. It hit the curb at her feet and turned over. She got a glimpse of something wet inside, and looked away.

  In the inferno surrounding the unscathed dome of the cathedral were plumes of water arcing futilely into the roiling mountains of fire. At their base were the dark outlines of small groups of men wrestling fire hoses. In the sky above, the fingers of the searchlights quested back and forth, and the intermittent lines of tracer fire squirted into the dark heavens like fiery echoes of the water jets playing on the devastation below.

  Edie realized she had her hands jammed over her ears, trying to keep the jarring assault out of her head.

  And then something grabbed her arm.

  She spun to see the Friar. His normally jolly face was tight and worried.

  “Come,” he shouted over the sound of another building crashing to the ground on the next street. “Back into the mirrors. You don’t want to die here.”

  For once in her life she didn’t even think of arguing. She let him drag her back toward the shop entrance, where she saw, with relief, two mirrors facing each other on either side of a bookshop window. That was their way out of this nightmare.

  The Friar stopped dead.

  “What?” Edie began.

  And then she heard it, an instant before it hit: a whistling sound from out of the chaotic sky overhead, shockingly, intimately close.

  There was another sharp jerk on her arm, and the Friar pulled her to him and turned away from the bookshop and the safety beckoning in its mirrors just a pavement’swidth away. He curved around, enveloping her.

  The bomb hit, and Edie’s feet were blown out from under her. Only the unbreakable grasp with which the Friar held her to his chest stopped her from falling. The very air seemed to punch them viciously, and there was a sudden jagged horizontal silver hailstorm as the windows of the shop blew out. If she hadn’t been completely shielded by the arched metal back of the Friar, she’d have been just a red mist and so much ground meat blown across the cobbled street. The shop window was followed by the shop’s contents. Whole books spilled across the pavement, and a snowstorm of pages from volumes shredded by the explosion swirled around them.

  After a second the Friar straightened, and they turned to see that they were in the middle of a slow-moving blizzard of paper, some pages on fire, some not, but all whirling up into the night sky on updrafts created by the heat around them.

  The Friar crossed the pavement in four fast paces, batting the airborne page storm out of his way as he went. Edie stumbled after him—and she stopped when he stopped.

  The mirrors were gone, shattered by the same blast that had destroyed the shop window. Even through the maelstrom of the Blitz around them, Edie could hear the single sharp tutting noise the Friar made. It was more ominous than a building falling.

  “Those were the mirrors,” she said.

  He tutted again.

  “Those were our way out,” she went on, voice rising.

  He peered up at the sky. She tugged at his robe. Glass shards fell out of the folds and tinkled to the ground around his feet.

  “What do we do now?”

  The Friar looked up and down the street. Seeing him unsure made Edie more frightened than she already was. Finally he looked at her.

  “Can you run?”

  She glanced up at his great bellied bulk standing over her. “Can you?”

  The ghost of a smile flickered across the flame-lit face above her.

  “Lady, when my survival depends on it, I can practically fly. . . .”

  He hiked up his cassock above the knee with one hand and grasped her hand with the other—and ran. And even though she would never have admitted it later, the fact that he held her hand did pull her out of her stunned state, and she ran alongside him, matching his every long pace with two of her own.

  The details of that headlong dash through the firestorm and the falling bombs blurred together so that later she could not remember exactly what had happened. But single moments remained, disconnected with each other, one minute there, next minute gone. An old-fashioned taxi with spoked wheels was blown across the road in front of them, burying itself upside down in a second-floor bay window. They ran on. At some stage, a stream of fire suddenly flashed out of an alleyway, blocking their way. The Friar just grabbed Edie and hurdled through it. There was one point where she remembered running past a London bus, on its side, and she registered the curling staircase that ran up the back to a top floor that had no roof. She turned away before her brain could make sense of the twisted coat and hand sticking out from under the side of the bus.

  They ducked down narrow lanes between vertiginously high walls, and at one point dodged through an old graveyard that appeared out of nowhere in the warren of streets. She remembered the whump of a bomb hitting the graveyard behind them as they left it, and turning and seeing a long box toppling back down out of the sky and dashing itself to pieces on a church wall, and turning away before she had to see what was in the coffin. She remembered the Friar saying:

  “They’ll be burying those poor souls again in the morning.”

  They were running on and on, through strangely empty and quiet streets one minute, then through flaming ruins the next. And it was only when she saw a street sign hanging off the corner of a building reading “Puddle Dock” that she realized where they were running to.

  Though tired, she redoubled her effort, and they skidded around the final corner to see the Black Friar standing on the prow of his building above them. He didn’t look down to see himself running past, or if he did, Edie was sprinting too quickly to notice.

  The Friar pushed open the door, and they tumbled in. She had time to notice that the windows were crisscrossed with tape, before he yanked her forward in between the two mirrored arches.

  “Right,” he panted. “Home, I
think.”

  “James who?” inquired a familiar voice from the alcove within.

  Edie peered in but couldn’t see him. What she could see was a poster, a finely drawn cartoon of two men leaning on a bar, talking—and the bottles, and even the beer-pump handles behind them, all had the familiar face of a man with an angular sweep of hair and a—in fact the— Hitler mustache, listening carefully. Below it, the message, “Careless Talk Costs Lives.” It was a colorful and funny-looking poster.

  “You’re right,” she said into the darkness, aiming her voice toward where she knew Little Tragedy would be listening. “I do like the poster.”

  The Friar snorted and pulled her arm, and they were falling back into the mirror; she staggered and found she had different carpet under her feet and the world outside wasn’t blowing itself to hell, only grinding itself quietly down with the traffic beyond the windows—windows no longer crisscrossed with antiblast tape.

  “I think,” said the Friar, “that that explains the mirrors.”

  “Yep,” said Edie, trying to stop her legs and voice from trembling. “Got the mirror thing. Definitely not for saddoes. Definitely real.”

  She sat down suddenly, right there on the floor, because something had to give, and her shaking legs just did so first.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Eigengang

  It was the football that woke George up—that, and a man’s voice shouting energetically somewhere far away.

  “Over here, my son, on the head!”

  And then there was the unmistakable dull thump of a boot kicking a wet leather football. George opened his eyes and came out of the dark and saw a white-and-red ball spinning up into the air below him and then slowly drop away to meet a group of players rammed in around a crowded goalmouth. There was a tussle and some muddy skirmishing, and then the ball billowed the back netting. One of the players pulled his shirt over his head and ran off in a victory circuit, hand held high, and there was the sound of good-natured laughing and catcalls from the others. The only abnormal thing about it was that George was seeing it from a teetering bird’s-eye view.

  He felt the stone talon wrapped around his chest and remembered Spout, and the fact that he was meant to be dead, and the screaming golden girl on the end of the lance; and the past dropped back in and hit him like a bag of wet cement.

  The floodlit green space below was Coram’s Fields, an oasis of grass and trees just south of Euston Road. Spout was flying faster now, as if he were nearly home and didn’t have to conserve his energy. The rain had eased, but was still coming down—a light drizzle instead of the downpour that had soaked him earlier.

  George was wet to the skin, shivering badly, and trying to figure out exactly what had happened and why he wasn’t dead.

  Ariel had pinned and held him to the gate, so hard that he couldn’t move. The Knight had thundered in behind the lance. George had looked away at the last minute and closed his eyes. And then he’d felt the colossal impact. He really should be dead.

  Except now that he was conscious again, he replayed the final moment more slowly and realized that what had felt terribly wrong was not the impact so much as the direction it had come from. The lance had been about to punch heart-high through his chest, impaling him like a butterfly on a pin. But the impact hadn’t come from the front. It had come from the side. He remembered thinking that he’d heard Death’s wings flying in to gather him. But now that he thought about it, it hadn’t been Death but Spout diving out of the night sky at the very last minute, snatching him out of the way so that the Knight’s lance had punched past the empty space where George now wasn’t, and through the gap in the gate railings into the space where Ariel still was.

  There had been a feeling like his head exploding, and that must have been Spout clattering him up something like the roof of the sentry box as he snatched him into the sky, because George could feel a definite bump throbbing behind his ear.

  So that was how come he was now being flown over Euston Road toward the lavishly ornamented roof scape of St. Pancras Station: Spout had snatched him back. Spout had rescued him, just as earlier Ariel had saved him from the gargoyle. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. The only thing was, he wasn’t sure who was frying pan and who was fire anymore. He was pretty certain Spout hadn’t suddenly changed from an enemy into a friend, so it had to be that the rescue was accidental, and Spout had taken him back for his own reasons. It was all too complicated, and he was hurting and cold and confused.

  The memory of Ariel—her smile, her joy in just flying around the gherkin, pirouetting on the top of the world— all that hurt him too, especially when overlaid with the ice in her voice as she had gripped him and held him for the Knight. The hurt was because she’d betrayed him.

  Spout was slowing as they flew up and around the tall illuminated clocktower on the eastern end of the building. He registered the green slate roof thrusting sharply into the sky above the clock faces on each of its sides, and the accompanying pinnacles decorating each corner, as they circled the massive exuberant confection of orange brickwork and clean white stone.

  The engine shed of Kings Cross passed his right shoulder. Spout flapped down the roof of St. Pancras, over a sharp ridge with a narrow, flat runway on the very top. They flew west between tall chimneys that swept up from the vertiginously sheer roof slopes on either side. Before the building curves abruptly ended, in a squatter tower on the far end, there was another tower, and it was to this tower that Spout was flying. As it loomed ahead of them, Spout stopped flapping and spread his wings wide, making them act as air brakes, slowing their speed to a stalling point. Just when it was clear to George that flight was no longer viable and they were going to start falling, Spout reached out a talon and stuck to the corner of the wall.

  “Geer!” he coughed, and put George down on the narrow space behind him. There was no question of George’s running away from this position. Spout’s aerie was a small space where three angles of roof met and then fell away sheer. There was a lead gutter box, a sort of inset tray with a hole, and a piece of broken masonry wedged in one corner that provided a place for George to squat and watch the gargoyle as he settled into position. Except, unlike all the other gargoyles on the building, which were facing out at the city, Spout turned in and looked at George.

  George had no clue as to what was going to happen next. The gargoyle stared at him and then shook himself like a dog, slowly stretched his wings, and folded them neatly down around his back. It was the first time George had really had a chance to look at Spout properly, at rest. Every time he’d seen him before, he’d been moving, running, flying, or chasing. And George had been so busy trying to stay as far from the creature as he could that he’d never had a chance to really take him in, in all his glory.

  Not that he was very glorious. He definitely had, as George’s dad used to say, been hit with the ugly stick. He was a stringy feral cat with wings where his front legs should be. There was something strained and tortured in the way the sculptor had made him, and life on the roof had clearly not been kind to him. He was streaked with dirt; his mouth leaked green from where the old copper pipe had been that George had pulled out of his mouth; the weather had not only beaten him, but had shattered off the knuckle tip of one wing, which gave him a lopsided quality. In fact, George wondered if it were this missing bit of wing that made him fly so lopsidedly, too.

  Spout bared his fangs, and George saw how deep the green staining went, curling out around the lower teeth like blood.

  “Gack,” rasped the creature.

  “Yes,” said George. “Nice place you’ve got here.” He had his arms wrapped around himself and was hunched down into a ball, trying to get some warmth trapped in his middle. “Shame you haven’t got central heating,” he said.

  “Gowk,” said Spout, leaning in and tapping his own mouth, then prodding George back against the tiles. “Gowk!”

  He was trying to say something, George realized. He was definitely tryin
g to communicate. And he looked irritated at George’s inability to understand.

  “Gowk!”

  “Yes, gowk,” said George.

  Spout didn’t look impressed. His fangs ground against each other in silent irritation, and his throat worked as if he were trying to cough out a fur ball or a fish bone.

  “Sorry. I don’t speak Gargoyle,” George apologized.

  Spout shook his head and batted at his mouth again, wingtips clattering against the bared fangs. And George suddenly realized what he must be saying.

  “You want the spout! The spout I pulled out of your mouth. Yes, of course, I’m sorry. . . .”

  Now it all made complete sense. It explained why the creature had been so tenacious in his pursuit of him. He’d wrenched an important part out of Spout’s mouth. In fact, before he’d done that, he couldn’t remember the thing making any noise at all. These attempts to speak sounded so painful, George wasn’t surprised that the gargoyle wanted it back.

  His hands scrabbled in his trouser pocket and disentangled the corroded metal pipe. He held it out like a peace offering.

  And then he got clever just in time, and snatched it back out of Spout’s grasp.

  “Although . . .” he said slowly, thinking as he spoke. “Although, perhaps we can make a deal. You put me down on the ground, and then I give you your spout back. You understand?”

  He mimed flying down and handing over the pipe. Spout cocked his head. His talon flashed out and back with surprising speed, and George’s hand was suddenly empty. The gargoyle looked at the metal pipe he now held in his own grasp.

  “Yes,” said George. “Or you could take it now and then put me back on the ground. If that works better for you, I’m, um, easy. . . .”

  He knew he was clinging on to the frayed coattails of a very forlorn hope, and so he folded his arms around himself and tried to look on the bright side.

  “Still. As long as you got your spout back, I’m happy. You’re happy, and—”