“Well I’ll be jiggered,” said the Friar. “Watch out below.”
He stepped off the front of the building and dropped to the ground, his cassock billowing around him like a dark parachute. He hit the pavement with a crash that did justice to his considerable girth, straightened his legs, smoothed his robes, and looked at them both appraisingly. Close to him, they could see his eyes were indeed set in deep laugh lines, making him look a very friendly and cheery sort of monk—which was a relief, because his size was just looming enough to have been threatening in other circumstances.
“Conversation, you say? And what of? And why? And whence? And wherefore too, no doubt?”
George and Edie exchanged a look that translated as “Huh?” in any language you chose.
“Sorry?”
“Apology accepted. Think no more about it. It’s forgotten,” said the Friar, beaming down at them.
George began to wonder if the monk was a bit mad. Edie just thought he was annoying.
“The Gunner said you could help us. And we could do with the help.”
“The Gunner, you say?”
“Please,” said George.
“I know of several Gunners.”
“We just know the one. He’s a spit, like you.”
There was a long pause as the Friar examined them. Then he chuckled and pointed to the door of the pub.
“Please. Any friend of the Gunner, whatever Gunner, is a friend of mine and so forth! You find us at a disadvantage; the hostelry doors closed due to a refurbishment of the lavatories beneath the bar, which were, I’ll admit, a little noxious with age and overuse. But enter, please do. Hospitality is ever our watchword, no matter what the time.”
George tried the door. It wouldn’t budge. Edie stepped in and rattled it to no more effect. She turned an accusing eye on the friar.
“It’s locked.”
“Ah, well, love laughs at locksmiths.” He chuckled.
“What?”
He pushed in front of them.
“To the pure of heart no door is ever locked.” He fumbled for a moment, then the door swung open. “As you see.
“You used a key,” Edie observed quietly.
He gave a theatrical sigh, shoulders slumping good-humoredly, like a disappointed conjuror.
“Bless your sharp little eyes, we shall have to watch you, and that’s a fact.”
He stood to one side and the two of them walked into the pub. It was a narrow, awkwardly angled space. In the dark there were odd shapes and reflections that seemed to loom and then lurch away as the lights of passing cars swept past the windows. The bottles behind the bar and the brassware on it glittered with the fragmented reflections of the streetlights outside.
There were stepladders and other evidence of builders spread across the floor, and a dust sheet hung protectively over the bar surface, like a discarded shroud.
The door snapped shut behind them. The Black Friar swept past with unexpected nimble-footedness for such a large and bulky man.
“Come, come, mind the tradesmen’s mess; into the chamber here, the alcove, and we will have heat and light and see what we can do for you, for it’s clear that unless we do something, you will likely come down with the sniffles.”
He bustled them through the left-hand of three low arches and pressed them onto a bench at the end of a dim vaulted space, and left them, suddenly ducking down a flight of steps beside the bar. Edie stared at George.
“Sniffles!”
“I know.” He shrugged.
He was freezing again. His clothes stuck to him like soaked bandages.
“We’re meant to trust something that says ‘sniffles’?”
He could hear her teeth chattering in the dark. Before he could say anything more, there was a clattering and the Friar reappeared, dragging something heavy that clanged on each step as he came up the stairs.
He blocked out the streetlight as he lurched through the arch, and then bent to lower a gas canister and a stubby torpedo-shaped heater onto the floor in front of them.
“The tradesmen have been trying to dry out the cellar. I’m sure they would think it unchristian to deprive you of this warmth in your hour of need.”
He lifted his arm, and a bundle of clothing fell to the floor.
“Dry clothes. Towels of a sort. People leave things,” he explained. “Peril of overindulgence in a hostelry such as this, waking up at home having gained a headache and lost a topcoat, d’you see?”
He chortled at his own good humor.
“Everyday tragedy of the convivial man, no doubt! Help yourself, do. I shall give you privacy while you change. Perhaps food would be—”
“Yes,” said Edie, so fast that George suddenly realized she couldn’t have eaten in a long while.
She knelt over the clothes and lifted a handful of towels.
“These are beer towels. They’re tiny.”
“Good job there’s a bunch of them,” George said. He knelt by the heater and looked at it. He turned the knob on the top of the gas bottle. He heard a rustle of clothing from behind him and started to look back.
“Er, I’m changing,” said Edie, the shiver still in her voice.
“It’s all right. I’m not looking,” he said, trying to make out the controls in the meager streetlight. “I’m trying to get us some warmth.”
“You know how that works?”
He found an electric plug on the end of a wire. There was a socket by his knee, so he plugged it in. A fan started blowing inside the stubby torpedo.
“My dad had one like it in his studio. Used it in winter. Hang on.”
The Dark Shaveling He turned a taplike switch. Nothing happened. Edie snorted in derision.
“I thought you said you knew how to work it.” He carried on, counting to ten, then pressed a button. There was a click and a tiny spark noise, then a big Whoomf and the space heater roared into life. A circle of flame inside the metal casing was blown forward by the fan onto a grid that started to glow red. As George held his hand in front of the big opening, the heat began building fast. The flames went from blue to red to almost white, and then the heat was too strong for him to leave his hand in the way.
“Nice one,” said Edie, almost impressed. “Oh, wow.” The flames from the heater were also lighting up the alcove they were in. It was a barrel-vaulted space, about two meters wide by five long, and every inch of it was decorated with smoky-brown marble shot through with black streaks. There were columns and pilasters and mirrors and ornate alabaster light fittings and pieces of statuary everywhere. Above their heads, the curve of a barrel-vault reflected back the light from thousands of gold mosaic chips, outlined in thin lines of black-and-white checkerboarding. In the center of the ceiling was a star-shaped compass, and all around the cornicing below ran ornate lettering, each one a quotation, none of which made any connection with the others around it. George was facing one that read: HASTE IS SLOW. He turned to read another that suggested: FINERY IS FOOLERY.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Edie pulling on a long man’s sweatshirt. “Hey,” she said.
“Sorry,” he said, looking away quickly. “This place. It’s pretty weird, no?”
“Weird is right.”
“It’s like being inside a church or something.”
She pushed past him and spread her skirt and tights on a chair in front of the heat blasting out of the heater.
“You want to get dry and change?”
He stepped back. She stood in front of the heat, looking up at the decoration around them, rubbing her hair with a beer towel. He noticed she clutched the sea-glass in her hand.
He stripped off his coat and shirt, and rubbed his chest with the bar towels. It felt great, and the ache in his arm and hand and ankle all seemed bearable now. He rummaged in the pile of clothes, found a woolen cardigan and put it straight on, next to his skin. He was so happy to be dry that he didn’t mind the scratchiness. It felt comforting and real. He unbuckled his belt.
/> ‘"Don’t advertise it—tell a gossip,'” Edie read from the far cornice. “Don’t know what that means. Doesn’t make sense. Tell you what, though, this heat is brilliant.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
A Flick of the Wrist
On the Royal Artillery Memorial there are other statues. The Shell-carrier stands at the gun end, two big shell-holsters hanging on either side of his legs. At the breech end of the gun stands the Officer, legs apart, a coat folded over hands held together in front of him.
A motorbike’s ripped exhaust growled around the unusually empty curve of Hyde Park Corner, making use of the temporary lull in the traffic to get some unaccustomed urban velocity. The rider was going too fast to have noticed the little movement, even if it had been one that he could have seen under normal circumstances.
The Officer flicked his wrist toward himself and flipped the cover off a lidded wristwatch. He looked down. Snapped the cover closed and resumed his normal position, staring toward the bottom of Buckingham Palace Gardens, where the queen presumably keeps her potting shed. And though he stood at ease, with his legs apart, his face was as blank and unreadable as if he were standing at attention on a drill square. It was a face made to endure.
The only sign of what he thought was a minuscule tic, as he sucked his teeth, making an irritable snapping noise.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The Maker’s Mark
George rubbed at his legs with a towel, then pulled on a pair of plaster-spattered builder’s trousers. They were about ten years too big for him, but he slid the belt through the loops and cinched them tight.
“I almost feel human.” He grinned as he rolled up the bottoms above his ankle.
“I know what you mean, young fellow.”
The booming voice entered the room ahead of the Friar, who ducked under the arch, carrying bags of crisps and rolls and a bottle of green liquid, all of which he placed on the table in front of them.
“Sit in the heat, and eat. Then when you’ve stopped shaking like a pair of Quakers we’ll have our conversation. But first—drink this.”
He uncorked the bottle and poured two measures of sticky-looking greeny-yellow liquid into glasses.
“What is it?” asked Edie, in a voice slow with suspicion.
“Made by monks.” The Friar smiled. “Herbs and flowers, and a little kick in the tail. It’ll warm you from the inside. Down the hatch!”
George picked up the glass and slugged it back. Fire, more than heat, slid down his throat, and he choked at the strength of it. It was sweet and pungent fire, though, tasting of honey and medicine and herbs he didn’t know the names of; and when he’d finished spluttering he felt the fire settling inside him, as if something had been rekindled.
“It’s not bad,” he said to Edie, who was watching to see if he convulsed into a poisoned stupor. “Fine,” she said, downing her glassful. She didn’t choke or sputter, but her face grimaced so much that he could see her back teeth.
“Gah!” She shuddered. “That’s foul. I suppose you think that’s funny!”
“I thought it was okay,” he said.
“Tastes like old ladies’ foot baths. After they’ve used them. Ugh!”
She tore open a roll and ripped the top off a bag of prawn cocktail crisps. She emptied the crisps into the roll, closed it, and bit into it. The crunch of her teeth meeting the crisps preceded an ecstatic smile.
“Thath got rid of the tathte,” she announced through a mouthful of bread and crisp shards. “Try thome.”
It was George’s turn to look disgusted.
“No, thanks.”
The Maker’s Mark She shrugged, finished the roll in two huge bites, and set about making another sandwich.
The Friar eased himself down onto a padded bench that ran along the end of the chamber. He beckoned the children with a smile.
“Now gather round and tell me what’s what, my little friends. Tell me what you’ve been up to, to find yourselves in such a pickle.”
“It’s not a pickle,” said Edie.
The monk chortled indulgently.
“And it’s certainly not funny,” she continued, before burying her teeth into her new creation with a defiant crunch.
“She’s right,” said George.
“Everything is funny from some angle, I assure you it is. It’s just a matter of where you’re standing.”
George understood where Edie’s frustration was coming from. He’d just been through a nightmare, and all this spit could do was laugh at them.
“From where we’re standing, it’s serious.”
The Friar looked hard at him. Then he passed his hand over his face from forehead to chin, and as the hand passed, all the features had the smile wiped off them, and a dark and somber expression flooded in to fill the gap.
“Quite so. Quite so.”
The monk leaned back and looked around the room. He looked at the four imp-cherubs that sat high in each corner, but George saw no answering movement in them. The monk stretched a kink out of his shoulders.
“And why should I help you?”
“Because you’re one of the good guys,” said George.
“Am I? I wasn’t aware of that. Indeed, I wasn’t aware of being a ‘guy’at all. A ‘guy’is something you burn on Bonfire Night, and I can assure you an incendiary finale is the very last thing I foresee for myself. My whole life’s work has been committed to avoiding a fiery end, you might say.”
The Black Friar clearly savored the taste of his own words rolling around his mouth, thought George with a strong twinge of irritation. It seemed like people—things, really—had been talking at him all day, and none of them had really given him a straight answer, just pushed him from one horrible experience to another. His voice was unexpectedly curt.
“You know what I mean.”
Edie caught the tone and looked up at him in surprise. The Friar cocked his head to balance the irritatingly raised eyebrow.
“Not at all, goodness gracious. I only know what you say. Who told you I was ‘a good guy’?”
“You’re a monk,” Edie cut in.
“And monks help, do they?”
“Yes. Monks are on the side of good.”
“Well, let me tell you what I am.” He spread his arms wide in the expansive gesture of a man with nothing to hide. The sleeves of his robe fell back, revealing strong muscular arms that didn’t look as fat as George had expected.
“I am what I seem, no more no less. I am both a fat monk and a merry innkeeper, the halest of fellows well-met, and the watcher who stands at the road’s fork. I am also a man who likes talking with men who like to talk. I provide mirth and happiness, warmth and cheer, and absolution for sins past, present, and even—for a fee—future. In short, I can soothe your needs and ease your passage through this vale of tears. I am a helpmeet to the needy and a bringer of quietus. If you see what I drive at. . .”
Edie squirmed irritably, pulling the sweatshirt over her knees.
“What I see, and what I hear, is that some spits have got a really annoying habit of using words we don’t understand.”
She looked at George. George nodded.
“What’s a quietus?”
“A quietus, my dear boy, is a release, a discharge from the cares of life, a payment in full, as of a duty or a debt—”
“Look,” interrupted Edie, “just listen. We nearly died getting here. This isn’t time for an English lesson.”
The Friar just beamed at her and waited. When nothing happened, he raised an eyebrow. And waited some more.
“She’s telling the truth. She was sucked into the mud in the Thames, and I was—grabbed by something in the underpass out there. . . .”
The other eyebrow lifted to join its twin. The grin stretched wider. George decided that there was something infuriating about people who talked too much when you didn’t want them to, and then just dried up and smiled a lot, instead of saying anything when you did want them to—especially when t
he smile did the talking and seemed to say “You’re exaggerating.”
“It happened! In the underpass. The walls grabbed me.”
The eyes opened wide and the grin pursed into a little “0” of pretend shock.
“The walls, you say?”
“Yep. The walls.” George realized he was jutting his chin, just like Edie. The monk leaned forward and hoisted a single eyebrow again.
“Devil of a job for a wall to grab someone, wouldn’t you agree?”
He laughed indulgently, jowls wobbling with mirth. Edie’s voice cut in low and flat.
“It wasn’t funny.”
He chortled some more, then controlled himself with a great and visible effort.
“No. I imagine it wasn’t. Walls grabbing him, you say. Why, I suppose they just grew hands and—what? Pinched and snatched at him?”
He started chuckling again, holding up an apologetic hand.
George wasn’t enjoying the big monk’s laughter at all.
“Pretty much. More snatching than pinching.”
The Friar stopped laughing and looked at him.
“The walls grew hands?”
“And tentacles. And a mouth thing on a stalk. Like a big trumpet with teeth.”
The room had gone very quiet, as if more things than the Friar were straining to hear what was being said. The Friar was no longer even smiling. The only sound was the gas heater hissing.
“And this happened? Really happened? To both of you?”
“Just to him,” said Edie.
“But she saw it,” George quickly added.
The Friar looked up at the other carvings and figures around the pub. None of them showed the slightest sign of animation, but George had the strongest feeling something was being said that he couldn’t hear or understand.
The Black Friar rubbed his head and eyes with both hands as if trying to wake himself up. He shook himself and smiled at George.
“What were they made of, these ‘hands,’the hands that clutched, might I ask?”
“Earth.”
The smile mostly stayed fixed on the face of the Friar, but a little of it seemed to drain from around the eyes.
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