Stoneheart

by Charlie Fletcher

  “George—”

  Click. The door unlocked. Little Tragedy put his fingers to his lips and spoke very fast.

  “I never said nothing and I wasn’t here.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  No Man’s Land

  The Gunners face lay on its side, one eye in the water, one eye staring unblinking out at the night and the thin layer of ground mist rising off the grass in the park. There was no question of his ever moving again, but he was still—just—thinking. And because he was thinking at the very edge of his energy, the thoughts were not the thoughts of his time as a statue, of what, as a spit, he had endured and seen of life and London. They were the first thoughts, the spit-thoughts, the idea of him that the sculptor had put into him as he was made. And because the sculptor had not only been a maker of statues, but a soldier himself, the thoughts that the Gunner had came to him like memories of a life lived, a life in the war.

  He no longer thought he was in St. James’s Park. He couldn’t hear the distant growl of traffic. He heard guns rumbling in a rolling barrage, far away. And closer, he heard the flat crack and slap of rifles firing overhead in random counterpoint to the mechanical stutter of machine guns. He heard men shouting orders, he heard other men screaming for their mothers. He heard feet rushing past, he heard the crack-thump of a grenade and fewer people screaming after that.

  He focused on the gouged mud inches in front of his eye.

  He knew where he was.

  I’m in No Man’s Land, he thought. And no bloody man’s going to come out here to get me.

  And no man did exactly that.

  Shapes moved in the mist beyond the mud. A tall figure in a flapping mackintosh and a tin hat just like his walked toward him out of the haze. He saw the man’s boots squish the mud in front of his nose. He felt a hand on his shoulder. He heard a snap of concern as someone sucked their teeth in frustration.

  Then he felt himself hoisted in the air—high in the air, rising toward the sky—and he knew it was over, and the eye not clogged with mud stayed open, but stopped seeing anything.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The Way Marked

  An instant after Little Tragedy disappeared, the Black Friar swept into the room, slamming the door behind him. He stared at George and Edie.

  “You two look very . . . guilty.”

  George felt his face reddening. He’d always been like this. At school, whenever some crime had been announced at assembly, he always blushed, and was always sure that his face looked guilty even when he’d had nothing to do with it. He was sure the Friar could see they’d been talking about him.

  Edie, on the other hand, looked as innocent as she could be, framed in the archway, standing between two mirrors on the inside face of each pillar. As the Black Friar looked back at George, she surreptitiously pulled the sea-glass from her pocket and snatched a look at him, then at the glass. She saw, with more relief than she’d expected, that it was not blazing a warning.

  The Way Marked Then she saw it blazing somewhere else.

  In the mirror.

  In her hand it was dull, but in the reflection of the mirror it blazed blue. She caught another blaze out of the corner of her eye and saw that it was blazing green in the reflection of her hand in the mirror on the other pillar. Checking her hand again, there was no blaze. The glass was safe and dull. She sneaked another look at the two mirrors, and as she stepped back, she saw the mirrors reflecting each other again and again, so that you could see them disappearing away back into infinity, a tunnel of identical mirrors with a fragment of her hand carrying a blazing sea-glass in each one. Then she saw—thought she saw—something else, way down toward the end of one of those mirrored tunnels, something that broke the regular progression of this wilderness of mirrors.

  It was something like a black bowl: more familiar than that, somehow, but it must be a bowl because there was a knife lying beside it. . . .

  But before she could begin to realize what it was, what it might be, where she’d seen it before, the Friar’s voice broke in.

  “Do you have anything to confess?”

  Edie shrugged and pocketed the sea-glass, which made a sort of rustling noise. George thought of the crisp packets jammed in her pockets. As if reading his thoughts, she pulled a packet from her pocket and 8:02 PM 4/22/20108:02 PM 4/22/20108:03 PM 4/22/2010emptied them into another roll on the table at her side.

  “I took some crisps.”

  “You don’t look guilty about crisps. Come now. I must hear your confession if you are to be shriven.”

  The smile had gone out of his voice. He loomed over them, waiting. Edie glanced at George. George looked into the dark face of the monk, trying to see if this was a new joke. The eyes were black and steady as a coal face.

  “What’s ‘shriven’?” he asked, hoping the question would buy enough time for his racing heartbeat to slow down.

  “Being shriven is obtaining forgiveness by confessing and doing penance.”

  George thought that coal faces probably didn’t look this hard into people’s eyes, as if trying to find all the secrets that might be hidden there. Edie’s voice came through the wodge of her third crisp sandwich.

  “We didn’t come to you for shrivening.”

  Something like humor twinkled back into the upper reaches of the coal face.

  “Shriving.”

  “Whatever. We didn’t come for that. We came for help. For information.”

  “Yes,” said the monk. “I’ve been out walking. You came via the river, which is in itself strange, and you disturbed something under the ground, beneath the road out there. I felt the walls in the underpass. You disturbed the clay in a way things have not been disturbed for a long long time, a much longer time than I have been standing on this building, for example. You, my boy, have roused the hunger of unmade things. Now sit.”

  He spun a stool and sat on it, legs spread apart, hands on his knees. He pointed to the bench in front of him. His movements had an authority neither of the children felt strong enough to resist. George sat down and rolled the plasticene in his pocket. Edie slumped at the other end of the bench and drew her legs up under her as she chomped away on the roll.

  “By way of confession, perhaps you should tell me how you came here and what exactly it is your friend the Gunner thinks I can help you with.”

  George nipped ears out of the plasticene in his pocket, and started working on a nose.

  “I don’t know where to start, really. …”

  “I think you will have to start at the beginning.”

  “I know. Start at the beginning. Go on to the end. Then stop,” said George. That’s what Killingbeck always said to them about how to write an essay. “The thing is, I don’t know what the beginning is. . . .”

  “And you’re worried about the end.”

  “Terrified,” admitted George.

  “Terrified might be an understandable reaction. But terror’s not much use, young fellow. Terror stops you thinking, and stopping thinking’s a good way to let bad things catch up on you. No, I think you better get over being terrified. You can be terrified later, if this ends well. Then you can be as terrified as you’d like in the knowledge that you are safe and it’s all over. If you get terrified now and stop thinking, then the things that want to terrify you will already have won. Does that make sense?”

  “No,” said Edie sullenly.

  “Yes,” said George.

  “I’m glad you both agree,” said the Friar.

  “We don’t,” said Edie.

  “Yes, you do. You’re just someone who says what people don’t want to hear. I know you know what I’m saying is true. If you didn’t think fast, you wouldn’t be here. And if you didn’t have a strong mind, and I mean a really strong mind, you’d be mad by now, wouldn’t you?”

  “No,” said Edie doggedly.

  “Exactly,” said the Friar, looking pleased as he turned his smile on George. “I’d start telling your story from when you fir
st realized that things that you thought could never move, were moving. Or have you always been able to see the London of spits and taints?”

  “Not until today,” said George. “Worse luck.”

  “We’ll get to the luck later,” said the monk. “Start with today, then.”

  George squirmed on the bench to get comfortable. And as he squirmed, he felt the nub of dragon’s head in his pocket dig into his side, the fragment he’d snapped off the facade of the Natural History Museum. He began talking.

  The Way Marked He started with looking up at the belly of the whale and being accused of something he didn’t do, and being made to wait in the hall under the dinosaur, and how he’d gone outside, and what he’d felt—and then the words just came faster and faster, like a torrent, and he couldn’t stop them.

  And he couldn’t stop, or care, about the tears that rolled down his face as he talked, because they were just tears, and he wasn’t crying or sniveling as he told the story of his day, of the Gunner’s sacrifice and the Temple Bar dragon and Edie, and after a while the tears dried. He didn’t even notice when Edie shoved across a wad of paper napkins and he used them to dry his eyes.

  And as he spoke, Edie saw that his voice stopped being so scared and frightened and bewildered at the predicament he’d fallen into, and became a little deeper, a little darker, a little angry, even.

  She realized it was as if his voice was mirroring the changes he himself had undergone on the journey here.

  And because she wasn’t talking, she was able to watch the Black Friar. He sat still as the statue that he was, face set in an encouraging smile. Because she was a good watcher, and because of what Little Tragedy had said about him not being what he seemed, but mostly because of the shouted warning from the drowning girl, she saw things about him that others might have missed.

  She saw his eyes change as George went on with his story. Saw him flick a glance at her when George got to the bit about the Sphinxes. Saw his hands bunch a little tighter when George described the fight at Temple Bar. His eyes flashed from George to Edie again as he told about the near miss at his mother’s flat. And then the Friar sat back and relaxed his body, but not his face, when George told about their passage from the river to the pub.

  “And then we met you,” ended George. “Can I get something to drink? I’m parched.”

  The Friar sat looking at him for a long beat. Then he stood suddenly, as if he had made his decision, and leaned back over the bar. His hands came back with two bottles of Coke.

  “You know these are bad for you?” he asked.

  And then he used his teeth like a bottle opener, twice: fast, in a gesture that Edie and George both thought was unusually un-monklike, and held out a bottle to each of them.

  “Don’t try that yourselves,” he admonished.

  He sat back down as they drank, and put the two bottle caps on the table in front of him. He doodled them around on the brown wooden surface, then left them next to each other.

  “So,” he began, “you’re on your own.”

  “There are two of us,” said George.

  “Quite right,” he replied, pushing the two bottle caps together so they touched. “The two of you on your own. And the Gunner sends you here. But he doesn’t come himself.”

  “He was hurt. And he had to get the dragon before it got George,” Edie explained.

  “The dragon and George. George and the dragon,” mused the monk. “Seems almost perfect, indeed it does.”

  He was getting jolly again. His eyes were retreating into the cracks of his smiling cheeks, which made them harder to see.

  “Your hand again, George, if you’d be so kind.”

  George showed him the hand with the red mark zag-ging and curling in on itself in the middle of it.

  “It hurts?”

  “It aches now. It was worse before.”

  “Capital. Capital.” The monk let the hand go. “And that was the hand you lashed out with, the hand that broke the carving on the museum?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the broken carving, what of it?”

  “It broke?”

  “And then?”

  “And then this pterodactyl came off the wall, and this all began.”

  “Quite so, quite so, as you say. But the carving?” His tongue popped out and licked his lips as he leaned forward. “Where is it?”

  George looked up at the expectant, almost hungry-face. He felt the carving jabbing into his side through the thin lining of his coat.

  “Why?” he found himself asking.

  “WHY?” said the monk, his bulk jerking forward and lowering over George like a storm cloud about to break. “WHY? Why ask why?”

  Edie sat forward. And edged slowly toward George. “Because we don’t know whether to trust you.”

  The words sat there, flat and unmoving as the bottle tops on the table between them.

  “I see,” said the storm cloud, settling back on his stool. He exhaled like a boiler adjusting its pressure. His eyes swiveled left and upward, although his great head didn’t move an inch.

  “I suspect the hand of a Little Tragedy has been meddling here. Or the tongue. Is that right, You Imp?”

  There was a pause. Then a little voice came floating out of the alcove.

  “Sorry, was you talking to me?”

  “Yes, You Imp. Have you been talking to the children here?”

  There was another pause and the sound of someone shifting uncomfortably on a cornice.

  “Er. No?”

  “No?” boomed the monk.

  “Well, not ‘no’as such. Perhaps . . . perhaps more as in a ‘perhaps’ sort of a way, if you see what I mean. They was asking me things, pestering me, by your leave—”

  “We weren’t,” said Edie. “He’s lying.”

  “Ooooh, I ain’t!” squealed the voice. “Can’t trust her, she’s a glint, ain’t she? By the hand that made me, I swear you should never trust a glint. Nasty probing things, upsetting the natural flow—you know they are, your worship—”

  “He is lying,” said George.

  “Ooooh!” came another squeal “What tosh! He’s a . . . well, I don’t rightly know what he is, but he’s not a canny thing, is he? Not run of the mill, so to speak. Why, I wouldn’t—”

  “SILENCE, YOU IMP!” shouted the monk, and they could hear the glasses jumping on the shelves behind the bar with the shock of it.

  “He is lying,” said George.

  “Well, of course he is,” said the monk in a voice that was strangely warm and calm all of a sudden. “You’ve heard of the father of lies? Well, as you’d expect, he has plenty of children, and that little imp there, that strutting Tragedy, is one of his by-blows. He can no more keep to the truth three sentences in a row than I could tip the great dome of St. Paul’s and use it as my soup bowl.”

  A high-pitched “Oooh!” of affront crept out of the alcove and then was silent. The Friar shook his head and beckoned the two of them to come closer.

  “You’ll make your own choice who you trust, my friends. No coercion, no compunction in my house. It is, as I said, a place of hospitality. What did the Sphinxes tell you?”

  Talking to the Sphinxes seemed such a long time ago to George. It almost seemed like a lifetime ago, in a calmer, gentler age.

  “They said if I wanted to know how to stop the taints killing me, and stop them hunting me, I have to find the Stone Heart, and sacrifice something.”

  ‘"The remedy lies in the Stone Heart, and the Heart Stone shall be your relief. To end what has begun, you must first find the Stone Heart, and then you must make sacrifice and amends for that which was broken by placing on the Stone at the Heart of London that which is necessary for its repair,” recited Edie. The Friar looked at her, impressed. She looked unexpectedly self-conscious. “I’m good at remembering things. But they wouldn’t tell us what the Stone Heart is.”

  “They might have, if you hadn’t used our second question asking about glinting,” m
uttered George.

  “It was my question,” she hit back.

  “Yeah, but the Gunner could have told you, and then …” He ran out of steam.

  The Friar looked at them both.

  “Oh dear, dear. You really have no idea who to trust, do you? You’d rather fight than think after all—”

  “No,” said George. “I really just want to stop this and get home.”

  “Then stop squabbling and listen.” He leaned in, and all the shadows in the room seemed to lean in with him. “You have less time than you know, and more danger ahead than you think. So listen. The way is hard, but it is marked. You have a day to repine and a day to repair. After that—” He picked up the bottle tops and scrunched them in his hand. He dropped the crushed remnants on to the table, where they rocked ominously as his voice broke like low thunder all around the room. “After that, the stones you have offended will rise up and grind you and crush you, and your life and very soul will be winnowed to the four winds on the great threshing floor, and a great fire will—”

  He caught sight of their horror-struck faces and took a breath. When he spoke again it was almost apologetic.

  “Well, it won’t be good.”

  “What does that mean, ‘a day to repine and a day to repair’? Is that like two days?” said George.

  “No. It means you have one day to both be sorry for what you’ve done and to try and make amends. Those twenty-four hours will have begun when you broke the stone. I don’t suppose you know what time that was?”

  “About three forty” said George, remembering looking at his watch and thinking how long it was going to be before the school tour of the museum finished, just before he turned and lashed out a the little carving jagging into his back.

  “Then you must reach the Stone Heart within a day of your offense, and it’s already nearly the Low Twelve. Tomorrow is upon us.”

  “What’s the Low Twelve?” asked George.

  “Midnight. Turn o’day. The time of death and ignorance, but also the time of rebirth, because what can be reborn that has not first died? You have until three forty tomorrow afternoon until—”