Ironhand

by Charlie Fletcher

  He pushed through another curtain of plastic sheeting and found himself in a great, long room. It was so full of builders’ equipment that in the dark it felt like an obstacle course: scaffolding towers and ladders hugged walls that were in the process of having the plaster scraped off, back to the brickwork beneath; big sacks of plaster and stacks of paint cans were piled next to blocks of Sheetrock panels; and there was even a cement mixer in the middle of the floor. George closed the door behind him and locked it for good measure. He stood there, shivering and wet. Now that he was still for a moment, he had time to realize how very cold he was.

  The room had windows on both sides. George was pleased to see that the ones where the outside scaffolding was were all boarded up. So were many on the other side, facing Euston Road. He moved slowly around the edge of the room and wondered if he was safe. He couldn’t hear any more noise from the gargoyles outside; though maybe that was because they, too, were keeping silent and trying to listen, so as to figure out exactly where he was.

  If that was so, he gave them a big clue by almost immediately knocking something off a table, something that clashed like a cymbal as it hit the floor. He bent down and stopped its rolling before it made any more noise. It came apart as he lifted it back up, and nearly spilled its contents out the bottom. He caught the lid awkwardly because his free hand still had the club hammer in it. It was a biscuit tin, and George was holding it upside down. He put the hammer down on a tabletop, turned the biscuit tin the right way up, grabbed a handful of biscuits, and ate them greedily, almost on autopilot as he moved away from the table, scanning the room for anything else useful. He wondered if there was a heater in among the jumble, and whether, if there were, would he be able to warm up in front of it. He squeezed between a stack of cylinders that looked solid but then gave and wobbled as soon as he touched them. They were rolls of soft roof insulation. He reached a hand out to stop them from toppling.

  And then he went very still, as out of the edge of his vision he saw an ominous group of men behind him, their faces standing out in the relative darkness of the corner of the room.

  He didn’t look directly at them, but carried on as if he hadn’t seen them. They were so still that there was definitely something not right about them. He didn’t know why a line of men would wait in the dark, just watching him, but he knew it couldn’t be for any good reason. He drifted slowly back to table where he’d left the hammer. He wanted the reassuring heft of it in his hand before he confronted them, and he figured the way to do that was to act nonchalant. His mouth was suddenly dry as he reached for another biscuit. He crunched into it and then put the lid back on the tin.

  He reached toward the tabletop, hoping the men would think he was just going to put the tin down. He placed it on the table, then grabbed the hammer and whirled, ready to lash out if they tried to rush him.

  “Okay,” he hissed. “What do you want?”

  As he pulled the hammer from the table, he caught a coffee mug, which went spinning off the edge. The only answer he got was the sound of it smashing noisily in darkness.

  The men didn’t move. He was now facing them directly, so he could see this clearly. They just stared at him, great white moon faces impassive in the gloom.

  He tried to swallow, but the biscuit had gone to sawdust in his dry mouth, and he choked. He stepped toward the line of men, determined that it was better to face them than turn his back and run away. There was something very unnatural in their stillness.

  He dry-swallowed the biscuit fragments.

  “Seriously, who are you—?”

  One step closer and then he stopped dead.

  They weren’t anyone. They were just a line of white hard hats and overalls hanging on the wall. It was only his fear and the darkness that had turned them into people.

  He lowered the hammer in relief. Better than not being people, they were dry clothes. He quickly rummaged through and found two work jackets and a padded shirt jacket. The shirt jacket had the flat, slightly sour smell of plaster, but George was in no position to be choosy. He stripped off his wet shirt and shrugged into the padded one. The quilted interior was cold against his skin, but he buttoned the jacket up and tied the arms of his wet shirt around his waist to keep his body heat in. He put the smaller of the two work jackets on top of it. It was rough, dark wool with some kind of plastic covering on the shoulders, but it was warm. Almost immediately he could feel the heat returning to his outer body. He stumbled over something at foot level, and was pleased to see it was a pair of paint- and plaster-covered workman’s boots, like leather Wellingtons, without laces. He jammed his bare foot inside. The boot was big, but not unwearably so. He put the other boot on and stuck his other shoe down the back of his belt, cinching it tight. He rolled up the sleeves of the shirt, went back to the table, where he filled the jacket pockets with the rest of the biscuits and looked for something to drink.

  There was nothing except a paint-splattered plastic kettle, so he drank the water from that, all the time keeping his ears open for any sign of gargoyles trying to get in. The only sounds he could hear were normal nighttime city sounds: traffic, the occasional thump of a car stereo in the street below, the high-pitched whine of a scooter, and in the distance the wah-wah and shrill electronic chirrup of a police siren. He crossed to the street side of the room and looked out one of the windows. No sign of trouble.

  A gust of wind blew cold in from the window space next to the one he was looking out of, and a rattle of chains alerted him to the fact that it was somehow open to the night air. He hurried over and found that it was open but blocked by the huge circular mouth of a rubbish chute. It was one of those long segmented tubes that you see attached to the side of buildings under renovation. The kind that are essentially made from many bottomless dustbins chained together to form a long snakelike slide that drops all the builders’ debris into a Dumpster below. This one was slightly curved, and George couldn’t see what was at the bottom.

  He stuck his head out of the small triangular gap at the side of the chute to see if the angle was shallow enough for him to even think of using it as an escape slide. The bad news was that it wasn’t, really. The worse news was that something hissed on the wall to his right. George looked up to see three gargoyles flattened like geckos on the exterior of the building, all staring at him.

  He ducked away fast, but not fast enough to miss seeing that the outside of the building was swarming with stone creatures, all listening at windows or scanning the brickwork. He ran back to the door, knowing he had to get out of there. He bumped into obstacles as he went— sending a teetering pile of felt roofing rolls scattering ahead of him. He hurdled one and then caught his shins against the sharp, hard edge of a paint can and reached the door in an ungainly stumble, dropping his hammer as he reached out to steady himself. It clattered loudly on the floor. He figured that the gargoyles must know where he was by now, so he definitely had to get somewhere else fast.

  He tugged at the dead bolt on the door. It was stuck. He’d rammed it too tight when he’d locked the door. He gritted his teeth and pulled harder. It wouldn’t budge, no matter how hard he pulled—then something hit the other side of the door, which freed the bolt, and the door flew open, sending him flying backward.

  Two stone talons appeared on either side of the doorjamb, and as George scrambled to his feet, a gargoyle that had once had two horns but now only had one and a stump snarled into the space between them. The gargoyle was too big to get into the room without ducking and edging sideways—and that was what saved George.

  He knew he was too far from his hammer to get it, but his hand closed on the wire handle of one of the paint cans he’d tripped over. As the gargoyle was ducking sideways and starting to unfold one wing into the room, George lunged forward, swinging the paint can in a desperate haymaker.

  The weight of the can developed a powerful centrifugal force as he swung it over his shoulder, so that by the time it was coming back around on the upswing, it wa
s going at quite a speed. The gargoyle snarled and launched a wild bite at George—and thereby stepped into the blow. The can caught it right under the chin. The force of the blow jarred George’s hand, but he managed to keep hold of the can as the gargoyle went cartwheeling backward out into the corridor and ended up flat on its back. It lay there stunned, then shook its head and tried to right itself.

  George felt adrenaline spiking in his nostrils and heard his teeth grind as he clenched his jaw and went after the creature. He swung the can left, and hit it hard on the side of its head, and then he caught it on the back-swing. The can burst as the gargoyle’s head bounced on the floor, and sprayed red paint all over its face and wing.

  George saw its neck go slack, and backed up fast, rebolting the door behind him. Something else was rattling the boards that obscured the windows on the opposite side to the street. As the bolt slammed shut, the thought occurred to George that unless he came up with a plan for getting out of the room, he might just be caught like a rat that had locked itself in its own trap.

  He wondered if he could survive the five-floor drop by sliding down the rubbish chute. He thought of the Dumpster that it must empty into, and all the lethal, hard, and sharp rubbish it could be filled with. Bad idea.

  His legs were starting to shake, wanting to run but having nowhere to go. And now something started rattling the boarded-up windows on the chute side of the room. It really was time to go. He kicked out in frustration, to stop his leg from shaking as much as anything else, and connected with a soft roll of roof insulation. It thudded across the room, and as it did so, George knew what he was going to do. He picked up the nearest roll. Although it was unwieldy, he ran across the room and threw it down the chute. It just fit, with about four inches on either side. He turned and grabbed another, threw it after the first, and then went for another one, working fast and methodically so he wouldn’t have time to listen to the second thoughts banging insistently on the back door of his consciousness.

  There was an alarming splintering noise from the blocked window behind him, and he saw that the creature on the other side had managed to get one corner of the boarding free. It was definitely time to leave.

  He took a deep breath and swung one leg into the chute. Then one of those second thoughts got through. If he reached the ground in enough of one piece to walk away, exactly how was he going to do that? The gargoyles on the outside wall would recognize him and swoop down.

  He swung his leg back out and ran across to the hooks where he had gotten his jacket. He quickly jammed a second work jacket over the one he was already wearing. It was a tight fit, but when it was done, he felt bigger and fatly padded. Then he pulled a hard hat onto his head, snatched up the gloves he’d left on the table, and hammed his hands into them as he ran back to the chute, trying not to look behind at the new banging noise that was rocking the door on its flimsy hinges.

  He didn’t let himself think twice this time; though he did grab the hammer and another roll of insulating felt as he passed. He tossed the roll down the chute and swung straight after it into the yawning plastic gullet.

  As his hands released the rim of the chute, he heard a loud crack from the window on the other side of the room—but then he was gone, plunging groundward at speed.

  He could feel his stomach leap skyward as he fell in the opposite direction. Everything happened at once as he tried to remember to keep his mouth closed so he wouldn’t bite his tongue on impact, as he’d once done on a high flume at a water park. His hard hat bobbled off and fell after him as he attempted to slow his descent by braking with his shoes and elbows and gloves, bracing his back against the curved interior of the pipe.

  The outward friction didn’t seem to slow him much, but he hoped it was enough to do more than turn a clean but fatal free fall into a juddering death-slide. His attempt to slow himself down kicked dirt off the sides of the tube, so he was falling into a blinding cloud of choking dust as he went. He stopped breathing and was trying to think how he’d know when to stop his feet from pushing outward in time to bring them together and attempt a parachute landing, when it all became academic: he hit bottom with a slamming jolt that knocked out all the air left in him as his knees pistoned upward toward his chin, and he stopped dead. But alive, he realized with a wave of elation that didn’t diminish half a beat later as his hard hat caught up with him and bounced off his head.

  He stayed very still, surrounded by the soft pink plug of roofing felt that had cushioned his fall, trying not to cough and splutter in the dust cloud his impact had kicked up. Once he’d really believed the evidence of his senses and ascertained that nothing was broken, he grabbed his hat and gripped the hammer tightly as he squeezed himself down through the roofing felt and into the half-empty Dumpster beyond.

  It was covered with a tarpaulin and tied down against the wind, but he found a gap and managed to serpentine, headfirst, out of it. He risked a glance upward, and saw that all the gargoyles were massed around the windows of the room he’d just left, five stories above. He darted into the protection given by the overhanging scaffolding and walked as quickly and quietly toward the corner of the building as he could manage.

  If the gargoyles hadn’t heard him falling down the chute, he was sure they must be able to hear his heart hammering. He remembered to put the white hard hat on his head as he came to the end of the scaffolding, and walked out into the street with only the slightest hesitation. Not looking back and up was almost the hardest thing he’d had to do, but he knew he couldn’t. Because any gargoyle who looked down mustn’t see his face and realize that the bulky man walking away beneath the hat was, in fact, a boy.

  His shoulders itched and his ears strained for the sound of anything whistling out of the sky behind him, but by the time he had walked halfway past the next building, he thought he might have gotten away with it. As he passed the cascading fonts announcing the entrance to the British Library, he gave himself the luxury of twirling nonchalantly on his feet. He saw that the coast was clear, and his knees almost buckled with relief as he hurried down Euston Road.

  He didn’t notice a huge statue turn its head and look at him from a vantage point set back in the piazza outside the British Library. The huge male figure was bent over a large pair of dividers, as if measuring the world. He looked as though he had been made, cut up into chunks, and then badly reassembled, with gaps where the joins didn’t quite meet.

  The giant looked at him, then up at the rookery on St. Pancras. He put his fingers in his mouth and whistled.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Escape to Silence

  “Come on, Glinty, time to be somewhere else,” said Little Tragedy, tugging Edie back through the mirrored arches, into the dark alcove beyond.

  At the front door of the pub, she could see the Friar talking earnestly to whoever was on the other side. Being somewhere else seemed like exactly the right idea. The only thing was that once she looked around, she realized there was no door out of this cloistered space. It didn’t feel like a place of escape. It felt like a dead end. She suddenly felt like a rat in a trap.

  As if reading her thoughts, Little Tragedy put his finger up to his lips and monkey-swung up onto one of the wall lamps and did something to the mosaic roundel in the ceiling. He dropped to the ground, nimble as a cat.

  “Trust me. I know somewhere the Tallyman won’t find yer.”

  He beckoned her to the parallel mirrors. Edie’s feet braked on the carpet. She had no intention of going back to the Blitz. Little Tragedy shook his head impatiently.

  “’S all right. I changed the wossit in the ceiling. We ain’t going to the past, just somewhere else in the city, somewhere they can’t find yer. It’s an ’ouse, a safe one, don’t worry. Look, it’s nuffink bad.”

  He pointed into the mirror. Edie let her feet take her close enough for a look. There was no conflagration on the other side of the mirror. There was just an empty gray room, bare gray walls meeting dusty gray floorboards. The only relie
f from the plainness silvering everything was the crisscross lattice shadow thrown across the floor by the window in the moonlight. There was nothing else in the room, and no shadows where danger might lurk.

  She heard the Friar raise his voice in the doorway. She heard the words “walker” and “stone,” and that alone evaporated any misgivings she was having about reentering the mirrors.

  She nodded at Little Tragedy. Her eyes slipped over his shoulder and were caught by the sight of George’s jacket hanging on the beer-pump handles. Little Tragedy saw what she was looking at and nodded.

  “You’re right. Don’t want to forget the dainty, do we?”

  He nipped out into the barroom proper, and quick as thought, had snatched the blazer and was back at her side.

  “Ladies first,” he whispered.

  Just before Edie stepped into the mirror, she hesitated.

  What if—?

  Before the thought could go further, Little Tragedy had clucked with impatience and pushed past her, into the mirror, tugging her arm as he went. She stepped in after him and felt the surface tension on the mirror stretch and pop as before, and then she was in the room beyond.

  This time, instead of her ears being assaulted by a hellish barrage of noise, she experienced the opposite— complete quiet. It was the sound of a city at peace with itself. It was so silent that she could hear her heart begin to slow from the panicked tempo it had risen to when she had been in the pub only an instant before.

  It wasn’t just the lack of explosions and fire that was different from the last trip she’d made into the mirror. It also wasn’t hot. In fact, it was the opposite. The air was still, so there was no draft, but it was not even warm.