Stoneheart

by Charlie Fletcher

  Blam!

  The head stopped moving and all the sections dropped into piles of coiling brass swarf, like the metal off-cuts from a lathe, squirming and writhing in on themselves in knots of shiny worms. They knotted and reknotted themselves tighter and tighter until there was nothing left on the pavement except the smell of burned metal and the suggestion of a man-shaped scorch mark on the stone.

  The Fusilier rested his gun butt on the pavement and looked at it, breathing hard. So did George and Edie. The bird looked at it. Having had more experience in these matters than any of them, it thought faster and decided it was time to leave.

  It opened its wings quietly and took a step forward into the air.

  The Fusilier’s eyes caught the movement. His hand moved in a fast blur.

  There was a click as he unsnapped the bayonet and a whirr followed by a simultaneous thock and squawk! as he threw the sword-size knife hard and fast across the pavement.

  The Raven found itself pinned to the side of the building, with a blade through the wing. It didn’t feel any pain, just irritation.

  “No, you don’t,” said the Fusilier, as he rapidly fed bullets into the magazine of his rifle through the open breech, and slammed the bolt home on a live round.

  “Squawk?” clacked the Raven, trying to look friendly and unthreatening and cuddly, which is a problem if nature has fitted you out in greasy feathers, and decided you should wear basic bad-guy black.

  “Not a chance,” said the Fusilier, and blam. He blew the Raven into a cloud of feathers that would have been the makings of a very stylish feather duster, if your tastes leaned to the stricter end of the goth spectrum.

  The Fusilier retrieved his bayonet and slung his rifle 302

  The Man of Many Parts over the shoulder. He looked all around, checking that the coast was clear before he looked at George and Edie.

  “Thank you,” said George.

  “Thank the Gunner and old Dictionary,” said the Fusilier. When he spoke more quietly, his voice was less vinegary and more of an astringent wheeze.

  “The Gunner’s okay? You’ve seen him?” said George, his spirits lifting even further. The Fusilier shook his head with a finality that sent George’s spirits straight back into a tailspin.

  “No. From what he wrote, I don’t reckon there’s much chance of any of us seeing the Gunner ever again. Not as a walking spit. Think he’s done for. He sent a note. By pigeon. To all of us. Saying he was scuppered. Asking us to keep an eye out for you two, as it were.”

  “Oh,” said George, a lump rising in his throat.

  “Yeah,” wheezed the Fusilier. There was a pause. “He was something, wasn’t he?”

  Before George could speak, or maybe because he couldn’t quite trust himself to yet, the Fusilier switched attention to Edie.

  “She okay?” he asked.

  George saw that Edie was still shaking. Her face, always pale, now seemed almost translucent. Her eyes were open wide, but her dark pupils had shrunk to the size of periods.

  “Edie?”

  She heard his voice from a long way off. It seemed to take a lot of effort to turn her head, and almost impossible to focus on him.

  “You okay?”

  She felt her ears. She was almost surprised to find them both present and attached. Her neck felt badly wrenched, and she rubbed it.

  “Bet your head hurts from being squeezed in that waffle maker,” he said.

  “I’m all right.”

  She wasn’t. She knew it. He could see it. But he could also see arguing with her would just make her dig her heels in and make it worse. He didn’t have the energy for an argument, and she looked like what energy she did have was all being used to keep upright. He decided to keep an eye on her. She looked like she might faint at any moment.

  The Fusilier just nodded.

  “That’s a good girl. Right. You need to get off the street, sharpish. Got anywhere to go?”

  They shook their heads. He checked his watch. Scowled.

  “Okay. Follow me, at the double. I know a place where you can get a bit of sanctuary. Dunno what you done, either, but upsetting that bird’s not a clever idea. We better get away from here.”

  George look at the feathers twisting up into the night sky.

  “But you blew it to hell!” he said.

  The Man of Many Parts “Which is a lot closer than you think,” grunted the soldier drily. “So we better get moving.” He shouldered his rifle by the strap. “You don’t want to be here when he gets back.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The Impossible Door

  The church of St. Dunstan’s in the West stands on the north side of Fleet Street. It is—and it was this that was making George cast a nervous glance toward Temple Bar—the westernmost church in the city of London, close to the boundary. It is remarkable for several reasons, but the one the Fusilier was pointing at was a door. It was a perfectly normal, paneled Georgian front door, set in a handsome stone door frame. What made it remarkable was that it was set halfway up the side of the church beneath its own ped-imented portico on top of a blank stone wall, with no means of getting to it.

  It was guarded by two portly bearded men, who stood on either side, half-naked except for some animal skins loosely swaddled around their midriffs. They held clubs in one hand, and had the other cocked jauntily on their hips. For no reason—or perhaps it was the beards—

  The Impossible Door George thought of his geography teacher at school, though he suspected they were meant to be Hercules. Though, why there were two of them, he didn’t know and hadn’t the energy to care. Two bells hung above the door, and George suspected that they hit the bells when the clock dictated. The clock itself stuck out at right-angles on the blank wall below the portico.

  “You’ll be safe behind there, with them two guarding the door,” said the Fusilier.

  “But we can’t get up there,” George pointed out. “It’s impossible.”

  “Of course it is. It’s the Impossible Door. That’s why it’s safe,” said the Fusilier. He cupped his hands and shouted up at the two Herculeses. “Oi! Shop!”

  The right-hand club bearer jerked into motion, as if awakening from a daydream. He stretched the crick out of his neck and leaned over the edge. A torrent of words with lots of consonants and too few vowels poured out from behind the beard.

  “What’s he saying?” asked George. Edie was still not really present, though her shaking had stopped.

  “Blowed if I know,” said the Fusilier. “It’s all Greek to me. . . .”

  me. . . .

  He grinned at the Herculeses. Pointed to George and Edie, gave a thumbs-up, tapped his watch, and then turned away.

  “Five minutes to turn o’day. I got to get back on my plinth. Be good, and if you can’t be good, be lucky!” and he was gone in a sudden tackety-booted clatter, heading back toward Holborn.

  Edie stared after him. She felt at the end of her tether. She could hardly stand. She felt numb. And now, once more, she felt abandoned as the Fusilier disappeared around the corner.

  “Edie,” said George. “Edie! You don’t want to miss this.”

  She turned, and through her numbness came awareness of a grinding noise. And as she looked up at the blank wall, she realized the shadows were all wrong. And then she realized they were all wrong because last time she’d looked, there had been no shadows on the smooth unscalable cliff in front of them. Only now, a zigzag shadow was growing.

  And through the numbness that was clouding in on her, she realized that the shadow was being cast by stones that were pushing out of the wall, making a series of steps.

  There was a clicking noise, and both of them looked up to the top of the steps. One Hercules was clicking his fingers at them and beckoning, while the other was scanning the night sky, club held at the ready.

  “He said it was safe,” said George, not sounding entirely convinced.

  Edie used what felt like the last of her energy to unzip her pocket and
check the sea-glass. It sat there, dim and dull and safe. She pushed past George and pulled herself up the stairs. He waited a beat, and followed her. The beckoning Hercules helped her up onto the step outside the Impossible Door, and pushed it open without a word. He smiled encouragingly. She checked her pocket and walked in under the portico, through the doorway.

  George got up onto the step without any help and smiled at the Hercules holding the door. “Urn. Thank you,” he said. The Hercules smiled self-deprecatingly and hitched up his animal skin in embarrassment. It sounded like he said “In taxi,” but George couldn’t be sure. He nodded a half-smile and tentatively followed Edie in.

  Once inside, they both turned and looked back at the door. The Hercules closed it slowly, as if trying not to frighten them. He pantomimed sleep, and mumbled another mouthful of consonants, making calming gestures with his hand.

  “He’s saying we’re safe. I think,” said George.

  With a final nod and a smile, the door shut with an accompanying thud of finality. The air in the room sucked in a little, as if an air lock had been closed.

  “Hope you’re right,” said Edie.

  They looked around. There was light from a very dim cobweb-covered bulb screwed to the wall above the door, but not really enough to do more than cast shadows that just highlighted what couldn’t be seen.

  It was a strange room. The mechanism for the clock and the bells, by which the Herculeses outside the door struck them, filled the center of the space. There were beams and counterweights and pendulums and cogs. All the machinery threw sharp-angled shadows onto the sides of the room, where there were boxes and hampers and buttresses of broken-backed hymn books slowly falling apart against the walls. The machine room was obviously also used for storage.

  Edie ducked under a large-toothed wheel and opened a hamper. It was full of oil lamps. She opened the next one. It was full of choirboy’s cassocks and surplices. She moved some, and then lay down with them on top of her, curled up in the hamper like a short bed.

  “Edie,” said George. “What are you doing?”

  “Sleeping,” she mumbled. “Need to sleep.”

  Her hand pulled the sea-glass from her pocket and she gave it a final look.

  “Safe. Sleep now.”

  George tried to remember what you were meant to do with people in shock. Or was it concussion? Maybe she had a concussion. He wished he’d listened more in the first aid class at school. Sleeping might be the worst thing she could do.

  “Edie, I don’t know if you should—”

  She opened one eye. “Shut up.”

  “No, I mean you might have shock, and I—”

  “George. Shut up . . .”

  He did. The only sound was the heavy ticking of the clock mechanism in the middle of the room. Edie sat up.

  “. . . There’s someone else in here.”

  George felt a cold trickle of fear slide down his spine. He looked around the room, through the strange shapes of the apparatus, into the shadows. Now that he concentrated on it, there were more shadows in the room than he was comfortable with.

  “How do you know?” he whispered.

  “I heard it.”

  George peered around the room. None of the shadows looked human shaped, though most of them were big enough to hide several people. He reached into the hamper full of oil lamps and picked one out.

  “Stay here.”

  He held the lamp by its handle, ready to swing it like a club.

  “Hello?”

  There was no reply “George,” said Edie.

  “I’m fine,” he lied, as he set out on a tour of the edges of the room. He walked the four walls in a clockwise direction. Then he checked out the roof and the top of the mechanism. He pulled himself up on a metal beam and had a look. There was just dust and pigeon droppings.

  “No one’s here,” he said with relief.

  “Edie?”

  There was no reply. He dropped to the ground and ran across to the hamper.

  Edie was fast asleep. The sea-glass was clenched tightly in her fist, and her fist was wedged under her cheek. He thought maybe he should wake her. Then he thought he’d let her sleep, because it probably wasn’t bad. And beside which, he thought he might just sit down for a bit too.

  He dropped to the floor and sat with his back on the side of the hamper. He pulled his coat around him and wished it weren’t so cold. He still felt damp from the Thames. He tried to remember the warm day in the barn in the hay bed with his father sketching the bull, but the memory didn’t bring him warmth now, only a deeper coldness.

  And then his head nodded twice and slumped forward.

  And for quite some time the only sound was the ticking of the clock mechanism, and the distant traffic outside, and the in-and-out of two children breathing.

  And then there was something else as a kind of counterpoint to the ticking clock, right on the edge of hearing, but so quiet that you almost missed it.

  George’s eyes opened. He didn’t move an inch.

  “Edie,” he whispered. He tried to nudge the hamper side without shifting too noticeably. “Edie!”

  But there was no reply, no shifting of weight in the hamper behind him. Edie slept on, the glass clenched in her fist by her cheek, dull and safe.

  “The clicking noise. I hear it.”

  The Impossible Door “Him,” said a voice from the shadowy corner beside George. The shadowy corner he’d carefully searched and found empty.

  “Heard him. Or me, rather. Apologies. No intention to fright. Introduce myself perhaps? Wish you no harm.”

  The shadow moved jerkily and resolved into the tall thin figure of a man. He held one hand out, open with the palm forward, as if to ward off even the thought that he might mean harm. The other hand stayed down at his side and moved constantly, passing beads on a long loop of string through his finger and thumb, as if he were keeping count of something.

  He jingled as he moved, and as he emerged into the dim light, George saw that this was because he was festooned with watches and winding keys and watchmaker’s tools and little oil cans, all hanging from ancient ribbons pinned to his jacket. He looked like a human Christmas tree. The jacket was an old-fashioned cutaway tailcoat, so overmended and faded with age that it was hard to tell if it was black or dark green, or indeed where the patches began and the original coat ended. The needlework on the jacket and the repairs were done in fine regular stitching, clearly the work of a perfectionist.

  His face, as it revealed itself in the pallid light of the single dim bulb, was not so much old, as timeworn, and actually much younger than it appeared to be when you got close and looked at it. It was just a very old youngish face, a face that had been young for a long time. His hair, scraped back into a queue tied with a frayed purple ribbon, wasn’t actually the gray it seemed to be, but was—like his clothes—powdered with dust. He had a tall forehead and a long nose, which jutted out of his face like a challenge.

  Perched on the bridge of the challenging nose was a pair of jeweler’s spectacles, with extra-magnifying lenses on hinged arms ready to be swung into place over the main lenses, which were, strangely, dark blue. This gave him the unsettling appearance of a blind man who could see everything if he chose to.

  Around his neck he wore a gray woolen scarf wound several times and tucked into a double-breasted waistcoat swagged across with three watch chains. His trousers matched the black-faded-to-green of his jacket, but retained the suggestion of stripes running through them, along with the strong hint of many more painstaking repairs.

  “Had a name. Long gone. Not known by it now. Now known as the Clocker. Pleasure to meet. Apologies for shock. Etcetera.”

  And he clicked the heels of his boots together, inclined his head in a small bow, and stuck out the hand not tallying beads in greeting.

  “You weren’t there when I searched that corner a minute ago,” said George warily, not taking his hand. He glanced over the lip of the hamper. Edie was sleeping, and the
sea-glass was not blazing a warning.

  “Was. Minute ago you asleep. Searched my corner hours ago. No mistake. Sure of it. Stickler for time, you see.

  He spoke in short sentences, sentences so shorn of pronouns or verbs that they weren’t really sentences at all, just clips of information. His left hand never stopped rotating the tally beads on his string. George got accustomed to the rhythm of it and realized he used the click of a tally bead as a kind of punctuation between the microsentences. And the microsentences were always fired in short bursts, so as not to waste a second.

  George tried to shake sleep from his head. He looked up at the Clocker.

  “Okay. Hours ago, then. You weren’t there.”

  The Clocker coughed apologetically.

  “Yes. Was. Ghastly trick. Hid. Rather, made you not see me. Again, apologies, etcetera.”

  His free hand whirled and curlicued as if trying to trace a giant watch spring, or maybe conjure the impression of a host of etceteras from the air in front of him. Then it returned to the offer of a handshake.

  With his mind on the dull sea-glass, George tentatively shook it. The grip was surprisingly firm. 1 m George.

  “George. Good name. Stout fellow, no doubt. Saw you caring for girl. Right thing to do. Clearly taken a turn.”

  “She’s just had a shock,” said George, feeling unexpectedly defensive about Edie, resenting the implication that she had had a fainting fit. “She’s pretty tough.”

  “Well, of course. A glint, I see. Never was a vaporish glint. Tough as the rocks they read. No offense meant.”

  “Er. None taken.”

  He suddenly sat down in front of George, folding his legs akimbo, like a well-oiled machine.

  He lowered his voice.

  “Better not wake girl. Shocked already. Was to see me? Chap out of ordinary? Straw on camel’s back, perhaps? No need heap Pelion on Ossa. Etcetera. Follow, yes?

  “Yes,” said George, who had no idea who, why, what, or even where Pelion or Ossa might be.

  “Good man. Have chocolate, no doubt? Children often do?”