Stoneheart

by Charlie Fletcher

  She’d come because it was inland.

  George shook her shoulder, snapping her out of her reverie.

  “Edie. Come on. We have to keep moving.”

  “Just give me a minute,” she shivered back, grumpy with cold. “Frozen.”

  He jogged on the spot. His dad had taken him walking and camping one snowy Christmas way up north. He’d told him how to keep moving to keep warm, how to check for frostnip, how to cuddle together in the tent to keep warm at night, and he’d felt in the grip of a real adventure then, sleeping in a tent in the snow with no noise except the wind buffeting the side wall and his dad’s snoring in his ear. It had felt like an adventure, but it had also seemed safe. Remembering the long-gone warmth from the bearlike curl of his sleeping father made his eyes prickle, made him notice how very cold and alone and not safe he felt right now. He snapped at Edie.

  “Edie. I’m serious. You need to move. We’re going to get pneumonia or something.”

  She just crouched further in on herself. He had to make her move, and looking at her hand, he saw how to do it.

  “Edie. You can stay here. But if you want this back, you better run.”

  And he snatched the sea-glass from her and ran off.

  Her hand closed on air, and her head snapped up and she was on her feet despite herself, already running before she was aware she’d decided to move.

  “Wait!”

  George looked back to check she was following and then just ran on. The river walk continued under the span of the bridge. The stubby pillars that decorated the piers of the bridge were floodlit, and he was so starved of warmth that he felt the heat of the lights on the side of his face as he ran under the red-painted metal arch.

  From Edie’s point of view it looked like he was running into the mouth of something.

  “George!”

  He already felt fractionally better because he was running and warming up. It was good that she was following him. He lifted the sea-glass over his head to lure her onward.

  “Come on! Catch up!”

  She watched him run into the dimly lit gullet under the metal ribs of the bridge. And first she thought it was a reflection, and then as it grew she realized with horror what she was seeing: the sea-glass was beginning to glow, then blaze. Its light strobed off the vertical iron bars that ran along the landward side of the river walk, sending long lazy stripes of shadow across the strange caged space beyond.

  But it wasn’t that that made her shout a warning.

  Not only that.

  Ahead of George, two helmeted figures were approaching at speed, although their legs didn’t move at all. They appeared to be statues eerily gliding over the ground toward him, and in their hands were weapons—spears maybe, or scythes.

  One held his weapon ankle-low, the other carried it poised on his shoulder casually, but ready to strike. Their silhouettes were bulky with armor, and light reflected off the greaves on their lower legs.

  Edie shouted George’s name just as the lead figure swooped into motion, his legs pushing from side to side in a slow powerful gliding movement, adding to his momentum as he bore down on the running boy.

  Her warning shout scarcely made it to George’s ear before the leading figure put his weapon out and ran it along the iron bars, making a harsh ratchetting noise of wood against metal as he skated up to George.

  Only, he wasn’t a monster or a taint or a statue, or even interested in anything other than making a noise with his hockey stick to amuse his friend, who took the stick off his shoulder and powered after him on his own Rollerblades, making the same noise on the cage bars as he passed George.

  As they caromed out from under the bridge, laughing and skating, Edie saw them for what they were, street hockey players heading home on their Rollerblades.

  She exhaled with momentary relief, and then doubled her speed to catch up with George.

  “Hey!”

  He waved the glass, still without looking at it, and jinked left into the mouth of a tunnel. The glass still blazed its unseen warning.

  “No! NOT UNDERGROUND!”

  He didn’t hear her.

  Ahead of him, the tunnel angled beneath the old riverbank and the roundabout at the end of the bridge.

  As he ran into it, he felt the heat rise, and he was glad of the way it seemed to have trapped the day’s warmth.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Going Underground

  It was a long anonymous box of a tunnel, like any underpass in any city. The walls were lined with vertically ribbed panels, and the floor was a checkerboard strip of yellow and black paving stones. It was a space that just goes from here to there, the kind of nothing space you don’t notice because it isn’t designed to be noticed. You forget dozens of spaces like this every day, the moment you pass through them. When you picture yourself in your mind’s eye, you’re always somewhere, never in a limbo space like this at all. And if there’s any point of human contact in this kind of space, it’s usually no more than the downcast gaze of a busker, or the smell of an opportunistic pee someone’s had against the wall when they were desperate and no one was looking, or maybe just the thought that the footsteps behind you might be a mugger. Because, of course, a rarely traveled and largely unnoticed space, out of sight, beneath the skin of the city, is just the place for a mugging.

  George wasn’t thinking of mugging when he looked back. He was just checking that Edie was still following. And because he was looking back, he didn’t see the hand that grabbed him, though he heard the crunching, cracking noise that preceded it by an instant.

  As the hand clamped tight on his arm, he knew it was a mugger. In his subconscious, like all of us, George had known that one day he’d be alone in a place like this and the mugger would appear. Though, as he turned he was wondering where the mugger had been hiding, because the tunnel had been perfectly empty a moment before.

  The hand twisting and coiling around his upper arm came from no mugger.

  It came from the wall.

  Or it came from a split that it had punched in the wall, with a crunch and a crack. And with the crack came a blast of warmth that ramped up the heat in the passage, as if someone had just opened an oven door.

  He had one moment of calm clarity before the panic hit him, and in that frozen extended instant he saw the hand and the arm with almost scientific detachment and detail.

  It wasn’t a human arm, because the hand had too many fingers and no discernible joints in any of them. They twined around his arm like a team of small competing snakes, pulsing and constricting and growing longer and thicker in front of his eyes.

  It wasn’t a human arm, because it wasn’t covered in skin. It wasn’t covered in anything, and what wasn’t covered was not flesh or bone, but the very soil of the city, the living earth and mud that is always only a few inches beneath the surface layer of stone and tarmac. As he stared in shocked fascination, fragments of gravel and larger pebbles popped out of the clay and writhed and rippled along the surface of the forearm, forming themselves into stony trails that flexed and twisted together like tendons.

  And finally, it wasn’t a human arm, because it was already four feet long.

  Panic finally arrived, and George dropped the sea-glass and jerked and tugged, trying to get free. The heat intensified and seemed to thicken the air around him, making it as hard to breathe as soup.

  “EDIE!” he screamed, trying to look backward and kick at the arm at the same time.

  A rhythmic growing chunka-chunka noise turned his head back to the front, and froze him for a second time. Something was speeding toward him at floor level, like a shark attacking from beneath the pavement, rippling the yellow and black paving stones into a menacing bow wave as it came for him.

  Though he was still firmly pinioned by his arm, he managed to lurch away and run his legs up the side of the passage, desperate to get his feet up out of harm’s way. Sweat was pouring from him, and he could see his wet clothes beginning to steam in the he
at of the air that closed around him.

  “EDIE!”

  He was stuck, jammed horizontally across the passageway, his feet scrabbling for purchase on the wall.

  The under-floor attacker just switched tack. The rippling paving stones headed to the edge of the floor and then up the side, and the wall itself bulged in its own bow wave and the thing broke surface with a ripping noise. A single clay finger jagged out and developed into a roiling knot of tendrils, like a giant clay model of a sea urchin on the end of another arm, heading right for George’s ankles. In a final surge of panicked energy, he found himself contorting in horror, trying to run even farther up the wall and onto the ceiling, before the tendrils slapped into his right leg and whipped around it in a grip that was, if anything, tighter and more painful than the one on his arm.

  Edie ran into the end of the tunnel and bounced off the side wall before she got a fix on what was happening in front of her. Or rather, she didn’t get a fix, so much as an impression. There were two Georges it seemed: one standing in the middle of the passage, unmoving, and then another George being held in the air, at right angles to the standing George—or a maybe-George because it was a wispy image, see-through and almost invisible, like a skein of smoke with a faint moving picture projected on it. She couldn’t see exactly what was holding the nearly-George, but she could see from the way he was struggling that he was fighting it, and fighting it hard.

  And then she saw the ceiling ripple, as if a ghost-ceiling was flexing, and then the ghost-ceiling split and she thought, very, very far away she could hear someone quietly whispering her name—

  “Edie!”

  George saw the solid brown mass rip out of the ceiling in front of him, and he shouted louder than he could ever remember doing before in his short life—a life that looked like it was not going to get any longer than the next second or so.

  A column of clay dropped out of the gash in the roof and hung in front of him. As he watched in horror, it started to whirl slowly, as if being kneaded and shaped by an army of invisible hands. The bottom of the column spread out, while the top thinned into a sinewy cable as thick as a telegraph pole. When the column had mor-phed itself into a rough cone shape, the cable flexed and bent, and tilted the base of the cone toward George.

  George stopped shouting. He stopped doing anything. The only movement he made was a reflexive blink as his brain dealt with the stinging sweat pouring into his eyes. He just stared.

  The base of the cone was a mouth, and in the mouth were teeth: teeth that moved and ground and clashed and shattered against each other: teeth that weren’t really teeth, but sharp flints and jags of broken glass, torn and rusted soda cans and shards of broken china. And they were constantly churning and rotating in the earthy maw of the cone, chipping and skreeing against each other.

  George was looking into the heart of a slow whirlwind of mud. And what he saw was a meat grinder.

  The hand and the tentacles holding his arm and leg pulled apart and twisted, and the pain screwed through him as he was stretched, wrung out like a dishcloth, and he realized that he was being held for the mouth like a cob of corn about to be bitten into. The grip on his ankle was especially tight, and as it twisted he felt his leg being pulled out of its socket, and he realized the pain was about to become beyond excruciating, and that he was going to pass out. And simultaneously he realized that passing out would mean that he was dead meat in the grinder, and he found a treacly blackness within himself that pushed the pain down to a place where he could find it later, and he used every ounce of strength left in him to chop his hand at the arm attached to the tendrils holding his leg.

  And again thinking two things at once, he knew it was a futile gesture, and he knew sometimes all you have is the lost hope. And his hand hit the arm and felt thick wet earth and sharp pebbles and long dead roots and then air again, and his feet were suddenly free, and gravity did its thing and his body dropped from the horizontal to the vertical.

  He felt the air move as the mouth lunged for where he had just been, and he heard the teeth gnash. And then he felt the pain in his arm double as it took all his weight, still clenched in the other earth hand. His feet were dancing six inches in the air, looking blindly for pavement to relieve the pressure, and as the cone of teeth pulled back, like a snake preparing to strike again, he lashed out at it.

  Again he felt earth and stone and debris and then air, and this time he saw what his hand could do: the cone simply stopped being a cone in front of his eyes and just dropped to the ground in a spatter of soil and pebbles, as haphazard as a thrown shovelful of dirt splayed across the checkerboard at his feet.

  He grabbed at the many fingers boa-constrictoring around his arm, and found that they too dissolved into a formless scrabble of soil as he touched it with his hand, as if it were just as simple and easy as brushing dirt from his sleeve.

  He dropped to the floor and stumbled a little.

  Edie saw the floating almost-George lash and fight and then drop into a stumble, and then the two Georges were one, like something coming into focus. And then there was one boy and no ghost images, and Edie ran for him.

  “George. Out of here, now!”

  She had no idea what she’d just seen, but she knew it wasn’t good, and she knew it was to do with being underground, and she needed to get them both into the open air as soon as possible. She grabbed his wet arm and pulled. He took a step forward, then stopped.

  “H-hang on.”

  He dipped and snatched something from the floor, and then they were both running up the steps and out into the night—and as they hit the air, George gulped it like a man drinking cool water after a day’s work in a blast furnace.

  And of course the cold air and the shock made him shake all over again, and his teeth rattled together until he looked at Edie.

  “What?” she said.

  He handed over the thing he’d dropped in the underground passage. She took it and looked into it. If there was any light in it, it was very pale—so pale it might just be her imagination, she decided.

  “I’m sorry I took it. I did it so that you’d run after me. I didn’t know how else to make you move… .”

  She slid the sea-glass into her pocket and zipped it up with an air of finality.

  “Well, don’t take it again. Ever.” “I won’t.”

  She shivered and rubbed at her soaking arms. Her teeth began to chatter again.

  “And if you do nick it, at least look at the stupid thing. It’s what it’s for, you mung. You ran right into whatever just happened.”

  He felt the ache in his arm and ankle, and thought of the earth rippling with gravel tendons and the mouthful of sharp forgotten debris, and decided he’d think about it later. He wanted to move on.

  “Yup.”

  “Could have saved yourself a lot of trouble.”

  He nodded, just glad to be out of the tunnel, above-ground and breathing normally. He cleared his throat. Maybe he could talk about it if she’d seen it, and of course she had to have seen it. Maybe she could make sense of it.

  “Do you know what that was?” he asked.

  “Apart from horrible and frightening?”

  “Yeah.”

  She shook her head.

  “Not a Scooby. Just more nightmare.”

  “But you saw it?”

  It was important to George, suddenly, that she had also witnessed it.

  “I saw something. Like layers or—I dunno. Bits of a thing. You were there and just standing, and then there was like another wispy you floating about and fighting away, and then—it’s complicated.”

  He nodded.

  “Maybe the Black Friar can explain.”

  She shook her head.

  “Just ask him about the London Stone, like the Gunner said. Keep it simple.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged and walked across the pavement, heading away from the river, rubbing herself as she went, trying to stop her teeth chattering.

&nbs
p; “Don’t know. Every time we talk to one of these spits they’re confusing enough without giving them more reason to get all ambiguous on us. London Stone’s the key, so let’s not give him the excuse not to give us a simple answer.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Dark Shaveling

  George followed Edie toward a narrow triangular four-story pub that jutted its sharpest angle toward the river, like the prow of an earthbound boat. On the first floor, above a green and gold mosaic number 174, a black statue of a large monk was positioned like a figurehead, his hands folded contentedly on the upper slopes of an expansive stomach kept in check by a long tasseled belt. The children stopped beneath it. The pub was closed. Looking up at the Friar, all they could really see of his face were double chins and fat cheeks and a jutting nose. He appeared to be beaming merrily, but it was just an impression, since they couldn’t see his eyes. Above his head there was a halolike yellow clock face. George looked at it in disbelief.

  “It can’t be five to seven! It’s got to be later than that.”

  “It’s always five to seven here, young man. Always such a convivial, promising time, five to seven; the day’s 5:21 PM 4/22/2010work done, the evening spread before you like a banquet to pick and choose what diversion you will; a time for warmth and conviviality and conversation.”

  The voice boomed down at them, a rich, honeyed voice in which you could hear barely controlled laughter and good cheer ringing through like a peal of bells.

  “Conversation is what we’ve come for,” said Edie, stepping back for a better look.

  The Black Friar jerked his head down to look at her, his pouchy face wobbling in surprise.

  “You heard me?”

  “Mind you, the warmth sounds pretty good, too,” added George, jogging on the spot and rubbing at himself to try and get some heat going.

  “You both heard me?” said the Friar, looking from one to another.

  “We’re both cold,” said Edie.

  “And wet,” added George. “Cold and wet.”