Stoneheart

by Charlie Fletcher

  “So what?” he asked.

  “So I thought you might be like me.”

  “He ain’t,” said the Gunner, still looking hard at her. “He’s nothing like you.”

  Edie lifted her chin. Maybe it was to look up into the Gunner’s face. Maybe it was just defiance. George thought it was probably both, but what he thought on top of all that was that the only thing weirder than finding yourself talking to a statue that talked back and shot things was seeing someone else do it. Somehow, standing to one side and watching something impossible happening made you a lot more woozy than doing it yourself. He found his hand had excavated the lump of plasticene in his pocket and was kneading it nervously.

  “Why not?” asked Edie.

  “Because,” said the Gunner, as if that ended it, and walked past her, heading for the exit ramp. George and Edie looked at each other.

  “Er,” he said. That didn’t sound impressive. So he tried “Um"—which sounded just as pointless as the last time he had used it. The black eyes blinked at him once. Then turned away as Edie strode off after the Gunner.

  “Hey,” she spat, “’because’ isn’t an answer. Why isn’t he like me?”

  The Gunner stood on the ramp, looking up at the rain coming down.

  “I’m talking to you.”

  The Gunner turned very fast and grabbed her wrist.

  She went to bite him, striking in the same swift snake action with which she’d bitten the bus conductor, but stopped before her teeth hit the bronze hand. Instead she growled in anger and kicked him. All she hurt was her foot. He reached for the collar of her coat and lifted her until they were eyeball to eyeball.

  “I heard you,” he said.

  “So why isn’t he like me? He can see you. He’s just like me. He’s—”

  The Gunner cut her off. “He ain’t like you. Ain’t like you at all. No one’s like you… .”

  She struggled against the grip on the scruff of her coat, but it was about as effective as kicking him.

  “No one’s like you. No one’s been like you for years. I ain’t seen nor heard of someone like you for more than years. For decades. No one has. Some of us even think you’re …”

  Rain dripped into a growing puddle at the base of the ramp as he stood there trying to think of the right word. When he found it he rolled it around his mouth like a favorite sweet before letting it out.

  “Extinct.”

  “I don’t know what you’re taking about. I’m not gone. I’m here. I’m a—”

  “You’re a glint.”

  “A what?”

  “A glint. You’re a glint.”

  She looked at George. He shrugged.

  “What’s a glint?”

  “A glint is what you are if you can see all this. You’re a glint, a seer, a bright spark; someone so sharp and shiny they cut themselves, so sharp they slice between all the different layers of ‘what is’and ‘what might be’and end up chopping right on through into the ‘what was.'”

  There was a flicker of something close to panic in Edie’s eyes for a moment, then she pushed it away and jutted her jaw at the Gunner.

  “I don’t know that. I don’t know what that means. I’m just me—”

  “Glints is dangerous. Glints is trouble. Glints is so much bleeding trouble that they attracts more trouble. A glint is the last thing we need if we want to get where we need to go. So you stay here—and we’re going.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” Edie growled. “Put me down.”

  “Or what?” asked the Gunner with a dangerously good-natured smile.

  Edie squirmed her hand in and out of her pocket, and brandished the sea-glass disk in his face.

  “Or I’ll use this,” she spat.

  He looked at the dull glass circle with interest. He reached his hand toward it. He tapped it. It pinged dully.

  “You’ll use your bit of glass, will you?”

  Edie concentrated savagely and nodded.

  “What does it do?”

  “It glows when there are gargoyles around, and they fly away when they see it. It’s powerful.”

  He pinged it again. She began to feel silly holding it out. He put her down suddenly.

  “Frightened a lot of gargoyles with it, have you?”

  “Yes. No. One. Just now. The one that was sniffing after you. It came after me, and I held it out and it flew away.”

  The Gunner looked at the rain falling out of the black rectangle over their heads.

  “And why did you hold it out? Did you know it was powerful?”

  “It gets hot when they’re about. It gets bright. It senses them….”

  “And it’s a weapon, is it?”

  “It must be. It flew away.”

  “That why you got it out?”

  “No. I got it out because I couldn’t think what else to do.” The Gunner’s smile was getting on Edie’s nerves. “Anyway. Why doesn’t matter. It worked.”

  “Was it raining?”

  “What?”

  “When you thought you defeated the mighty gargoyle, was it raining? Had this rain just started?”

  Edie thought. And nodded.

  “Wasn’t your glass. Your glass is just a warning stone. Not a weapon.”

  “But it flew away!”

  “It flew away because it’s a gargoyle. S’what a gargoyle is. Just a jumped-up waterspout. A really ugly bad-tempered waterspout. That’s its purpose. When it ain’t raining, it can go where it likes, but soon as the first drop hits the roof of its building, it’s got to go. Vengeance and spits don’t mean a thing to it. It’s got to do what it was made for, same as everything else does. It can’t deny its First Purpose. It’s got to do what the maker intended.”

  George coughed.

  “The Maker? You mean God?”

  The Gunner laughed and shook his head, sending an arc of rainwater spinning away from himself.

  “Don’t know anything about gods. A makers just the bloke what makes us. I told you mine certainly wasn’t any shape of a god, not Jagger. He was just a soldier himself, fought in the Great War, come out alive with a head-ful of what he’d seen, and making-hands to help others see a bit of it too. The gargoyle’s maker was probably some medieval stonecutter with a foul mouth and a belly full of sour beer, more’n like. ‘Makers make the made, and the made must follow their makers meaning.’That’s how it goes. It’s how it’s always gone.” He turned to Edie. “Your glass didn’t save you, so don’t try it again. Rain stopped play, or it’d have had you. It’s not a weapon. It’s a warning, no more, no less. Now we’ll be going. Goodbye.”

  He snapped his fingers at George.

  “Come. We can move fast and safe while it’s raining, and we got a lot of city to cross before we make the river.”

  “Why are we going to the river?”

  “Asking the wrong question again. Just come.”

  George threw a glance at Edie. She was standing in the rain, looking down at the glass in her hand. Two steps would have taken her under the shelter of the overhang at the lip of the ramp, but she didn’t seem bothered. She looked bedraggled and sad and a little like a puppet with some of its strings cut.

  “Why can’t she come?”

  “I told you. She’s a glint.”

  Edie looked up. There was a flash of lightning above, and in that flash she flinched. And for an instant, and only a very short instant, George thought she looked much younger and less certain. She pocketed the glass and wrapped her arms around herself, as if she had suddenly noticed the cold.

  “But I still don’t know what a glint is!” she said, frustration straining the edges of her voice.

  “Glints is uncanny. And what we got to do is going to take all the canniness I can muster. Glints is bad luck. Sorry, but that’s the truth on it. Now we got to go.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Go. Fine. But I’ll follow you.”

  “Don’t,” said the Gunner, and strode off up the ramp.

  She waved George af
ter the Gunner.

  “Go on, then. Off you go. You have to go. Otherwise I can’t start following, can I?”

  George felt a tug in his guts. He wanted to stay close to the Gunner, but something made him feel bad about leaving this girl. Maybe he was feeling sorry for her, he thought. Maybe he was feeling sorry for himself. Or maybe he just wanted company in his nightmare.

  “Look,” he started, “I’m sorry—”

  Whap. She slapped him. The stinging smack to his face shocked him almost as much as anything he’d experienced so far.

  “What the … Why did you … ?”

  Edie bunched his shirt collar in her fist as she spoke, fierce and low.

  “Don’t be sorry for me. Don’t treat me like I’m soft. And don’t like me.”

  He felt the red handprint on his face. “I don’t like you. Don’t hit me again.”

  “Good. Then we’ll get along fine. You better hurry up.

  George looked up the ramp. The Gunner was gone. He didn’t stop to think. He just raced up the wet incline, shouting, “Wait!”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Higher Ground

  There are steep roofs on the north side of London’s Euston Road, roofs pierced with clock towers and turrets and spires and chimneys. They are so high, and the sweep of the building is so fiercely decorated that no one looking up at its gothic exuberance really notices the watchers looking back at them. But above the sixty million bricks that make up St. Pancras station and the hotel attached to it, there is one of the largest rookeries of gargoyles in London.

  On the north side of the building, its stone eyes staring out over the sweep of wet rails heading out of London beneath it, a cat-gargoyle arched over the gulf of air between it and the glass train shed below, as water spouted from the copper pipe jutting from between its snarling teeth. It was the same as all the other gargoyles on the roof, except for one thing. It was steaming, like a racehorse after a long hard race.

  It didn’t know much, but what it did know was this: it had failed. The other gargoyles of St. Pancras knew this. Next time, perhaps more than one would have to take to the air, and hunt in a pack. And next time they would not fail.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Running on Shingle

  Perhaps because it was still raining, the Gunner no longer ran. Instead he walked fast and purposefully down Park Lane, keeping the well-lit massif of Mayfair’s western edge on his left shoulder, and the tree-filled void of the park on his right. Even though he wasn’t running, George had to trot to keep up. George didn’t say anything as they pressed on through two more underpasses and into Green Park. He had a head full of questions, but perhaps because he felt bad about leaving the girl behind, he said nothing. He knew if he asked another question right now, it would lead back to her in some way. So he left well enough alone. What he did do was glance back when he thought the Gunner wasn’t looking, and saw that she was trailing them, about forty feet behind.

  Edie watched the boy as she trailed them. She noticed him looking back, then turning away in case he was caught looking. He was only a couple of inches taller than she was, but then she was tall for her age and he seemed sort of hunched apologetically in on himself. His hair was longer than most boys his age, and it wasn’t spiked or gelled or anything. His jacket flapped as he hurried along, too big for him—bought to grow into, no doubt—and as if to compensate, his ankles poked out below trousers that had clearly failed to keep up with a growth spurt. She remembered the look on his face as he’d said sorry. It had been an honest face, and he’d looked her right in the eye as he said it. He seemed kind underneath the sadness and fear. Which is why she had hit him.

  She followed them into an underpass—only to find the fork in the tunnel, and that she suddenly had no idea which way they’d gone. She headed left, running, deciding if they had gone right she’d sprint back and catch them up.

  In the right-hand tunnel, the Gunner had broken into a run of his own. George didn’t catch him until they’d burst back out into the air.

  “Why are we running?”

  The Gunner jerked his head back.

  “We’re losing the baggage. Come on.”

  He pulled George through a hedge and ran on.

  Under their feet, Edie realized she had taken the wrong turn. She doubled back and took the other tunnel. By the time she made it back out into the evening air, there was no sign of them.

  She kicked savagely at the gravel. She did it again. Then she started running, cutting a wide arc through the trees, heading toward St James’s Park and the river beyond. The Gunner had said they were going to the river. Maybe she’d catch them there. As she felt gravel spit under her running feet, she thought of the beach. And why she was running.

  Edie knew the Gunner was right about one thing: she was bad luck. The thought caught at her like a riptide, sucking her back and down into a dark place where she found it harder and harder to breathe. The more she tried to run her mind away from the thought, the stronger the feeling grew. She knew the feeling was panic, and she knew giving in to panic was dangerous, because she’d stop thinking clearly. And thinking clearly was how Edie survived. Trying to escape the panic wasn’t easy. It was like running in pebbles, like trying to scramble up a steep shingle beach, when every step forward slides back in a scrabble of unstable stones, and the faster you try and move, the more tired you get.

  Edie had got very tired once, running up a shingle beach. Someone had been chasing her. She had run from the water across the sand and up the steep shelving wall of pebbles, hearing him behind her. The pebbles close to the sea started small, and got bigger as the slope rose toward the railway line at the top. Her feet made a crunching noise as she ran up the gravel-size stones; as they got bigger the noise changed to a scrabble, then a clacking as bigger stones cracked against each other, dislodged by her bare feet scrambling toward the top of the mound.

  She had heard no noise behind her, so she risked a look. For a moment she could see nothing but the shingle and the gray sand beyond, and in the distance the wind blowing whitecaps across the rollers coming in from the Channel. Then she saw a flash of red as he came over the wooden beach divider, and she turned and ran faster. In panic.

  She didn’t see the half-buried tire that caught her foot and sent her sprawling on the very lip of the slope. It sent her crashing to the ground, smacking her cheek on a sea-flattened piece of flint; but it saved her. She found herself looking down into a deep trench, maybe six meters deep. On her side of the trench the pebbles sloped sharply down until they met a wooden wall that rose even higher than where she was. It was new wood, massively cut beams—three times as thick as a railway sleeper bolted together—to make a new beach defense. In the distance she saw yellow bulldozers and a construction shed, but it was too far away and on the wrong side of the wind for anyone to hear her even if she screamed, and there was no one there that she could see anyway.

  It was Saturday afternoon, after all, and nobody works on a Saturday if they can help it. She was alone, and behind her she could hear crunching footsteps changing to clacking. She got to her feet, took one step forward—and fell again. Her ankle had turned. In the distance she heard a train approaching. She looked behind her. He was puffing up the last part of the slope, face as red as his anorak, almost as red as the blood staining the handkerchief he held to his cheek. His eyes were hot and angry but he was smiling. He wasn’t smiling like a villain in a film; his smile wasn’t saying “Gotcha.” It was much more frightening than that, given what he’d said and what he’d tried to do, and what she’d done to stop him. It was a smile that said “I’m your friend—we’re pals.”

  She knew the smile well. Out of that smile came lies and promises and threats and the smell of The Red Lion and the rank stale reek of rolling tobacco. Out of that smile came the sounds and smells of pain and betrayal and fear.

  He stopped, and puffed and sucked air. He looked at the blood on his handkerchief. He scowled briefly around at the empty beach a
nd the railway line beyond the deep trench and the beach defense.

  “I’m going to have a heart attack, you carry on like this.”

  He smiled at her.

  “Come on. Stop this nonsense. It’ll be all right.”

  Edie would have been a lot more likely to believe him if he hadn’t still been carrying the open lock knife in his other hand.

  “Come on. It’s just you and me. Don’t be silly.”

  Edie heard the train approaching. It was coming fast. It would pass quickly and be gone, and she would still be here alone with him and the knife and nothing but the wind and the sea and the big heavy stones under her hand.

  He spat and put the handkerchief away in his pocket. It’s just us.

  The train boomed around the curve and into sight, suddenly upon them. The wire mesh on the rusting fence posts rattled in protest. Edie lurched to her feet and waved at the train—her cries for help drowned by the noise. The train was empty. The only pair of eyes belonged to the driver at the front. He misunderstood, smiled and waved at what he took to be a happy girl and her father on the beach, and was gone. Edie watched the empty windows flash past like hollow sprockets, with no human shape breaking their rectangular uniformity.

  With another boom and the thump of empty air closing in behind it, the train was gone—and suddenly she was looking at the sea marsh beyond the rails, and the farewell flash of yellow as the last carriage pulled away, headed for the small town where nobody was expecting her home for tea.

  And then she felt three distinct things all at once. She felt his hand grip her hair. She felt panic. And she felt the heavy smoothness of the rounded flint in her hand.

  She knew she was bad luck. And she knew all about panic. That’s why she would always do whatever she could to steel herself against it. She would always stare at her fears rather than ever turn and run without thinking again.

  She stopped running. She hadn’t been thinking. She’d been remembering. She’d been looking back. She needed to look forward. She stood in the dark and tried to calm her mind enough to think ahead. Her right hand reached unconsciously for the sea-glass in her pocket. It closed tightly around it as she steadied her mind, eyes closed, concentrating on getting her breathing steady and her mind clear. And then her eyes opened as it came to her: before they had seen her, she had seen them, while she was creeping up on them in the underground parking garage; she’d heard them talking.