Stoneheart

by Charlie Fletcher

  “Edie, wait, stop talking, just listen. Just listen! The Stone Heart and the Stone at the Heart of London? What if they are two different things, instead of two ways of describing the same stone. What if this London Stone is the Stone at the Heart of London, but the Stone Heart is something else entirely, something we’re missing?”

  She shook her head. Not wanting to entertain anymore talking, wanting to get this over.

  “Like what? I mean, forget it—”

  “I don’t know what the Stone Heart would be then, but you know what the Friar said, he said it could be anything, anyplace, anyone—”

  “No time for this, George—” she said flintily.

  He felt desperate, like he was almost grasping it.

  “No, seriously, what if there’s more to this than me just making good what I broke and going home to extra maths and a bunch of kids who don’t like me any more than I like them? I mean, Edie, look!”

  He showed her his hand, the one with the maker’s mark.

  “I made a bullet, Edie. And it worked). What if—?”

  She shook her head and cut him off.

  “There’s no time for ‘what if,’George. This is when you do what you do—and good-bye, yeah? There’s no point us both being stuck here, right? It’s like climbers: one falls off and is dangling by the rope, and the other one holds on as long as he can, but in the end he’s not strong enough—and why should they both fall off the mountain? So come on, George. You’re safe now. You get to go home. No one gets to go home, he said—but you do! Yeah, you’re special, George. You get to do the thing they said you couldn’t; you beat them, don’t waste it by not going home. Make it mean something by going home and being happy! Cut the rope! It’s not your fault I’m dangling. If you were dangling I’d cut the rope without a thought, so do it!”

  “No.”

  He looked at his watch.

  “I’m not leaving you alone here. I’m not forgetting any of this.”

  “You idiot! You could be free!”

  “But you’d be stuck here. Alone.”

  “I got on fine before I met you.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “So what? If you forget all about this, you wouldn’t know about it, so you wouldn’t even have to feel guilty—you idiot, you total absolute idiot!”

  And she hit him, openhanded.

  In the face.

  And he just stood there. And she hit him again.

  And he just looked at her, something hardening in his eyes.

  “GO!”

  And this time her open hand constricted into a fist, and when it hit him, his face rocked back and there was blood on his lip.

  “I told you never to hit me again,” he said thickly.

  “And I told you not to tell me what to do,” she retorted, cocking her fist.

  “Still here?”

  He turned and bent over the grille.

  “Fine. See you.”

  “Yeah. See you,” she said with a last look at his back. Then she turned away and walked back to the Gunner, wiping something from her eye.

  “S’all right,” said the Gunner. “You’ll be all right.”

  “Oh, please,” said the Walker, sounding exquisitely bored. “Glints are never all right. They almost all come to bad ends. Tell her the truth.”

  “Excuse me, miss,” It was George’s voice. She turned.

  He was standing there looking confused. There was no recognition in his eyes. It was horrible. He was hunched over and apologetic like when she first saw him. All the steel that completing his quest seemed to have put into him appeared to have drained back out of him.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m … do you know where I am?” He looked embarrassed. “Sorry. But I don’t know how I got here. I think I’ve had a bit of a turn.”

  His arms flapped helplessly. She remembered the boy she’d disliked at first sight.

  “Sorry. No idea.”

  And she walked away.

  “Edie.”

  She stopped. And it hit her. And she whirled.

  George grinned at her. Standing straight and unapologetic.

  He threw the dragon’s head up in the air and caught it.

  “Thought I’d keep a hold of this. See how hard the Hard Way really is.” And there it was, in his wink. A flash of steel. “You don’t get rid of me that easily.”

  And to their great embarrassment, they both started laughing and found each other hugging—though the moment they realized this was happening, they stopped it immediately and just beamed at each other.

  “That was a horrible trick,” she said.

  “Yeah. You deserved it. All that ‘cut the rope’ rubbish.”

  “You didn’t have to do it, George. I mean it. I’m not scared of anything.”

  “I know.”

  There was a long beat as they stopped smiling and looked at each other. She took a deep breath.

  “I’m scared of everything,” she said.

  “I know that too.”

  George didn’t know what to do. So he hit her com-panionably on the shoulder.

  “How very sickening,” said a nasty voice behind them. “You have found your own little Stone Heart.”

  The Walker was still gripped by the Gunner, who was smiling and shaking his head.

  “Unfortunately, we have to go now,” said the Walker, squirming his hands out of his pockets. He could only move his lower arms, but in the end it was enough. There was a flash of glass in each one.

  He held them parallel with each other. And before anyone could do anything, he had raised a knee, and with an eye-twisting motion, stepped into one of the small mirrors.

  As soon as the foot touched the mirror, there was a splash of light and the Gunner’s head snapped back so violently that his hat fell off. And then there was a small whoosh as air rushed in to fill the place where the Walker and Gunner had been, as they appeared to be sucked into the mirror.

  For a horrid moment two mirrors hung in midair, held by no hands, facing each other, with the Gunner’s hat and the dagger on the ground between them like a black bowl and a knife.

  And then all four objects were gone.

  George and Edie stared at the emptiness in horror.

  “He took the Gunner!”

  Edie slumped to the ground, needing the building wall to support herself.

  “The Gunner’s gone.” She couldn’t believe it. “We don’t even know where he’s taken him!” she finished.

  George sat next to her. He felt tired. Very tired. But he also felt certain.

  “It’ll be okay,” he said.

  “How?” she said exhaustedly.

  “Dunno,” he said, watching the people spill out of Cannon Street Station as if nothing strange ever happened. “But it’s our turn now. Boot’s on the other foot.”

  “What?”

  “We’ll have to rescue him.” He smiled, trying to look confident. “It’ll be okay.”

  She stared at him in horror and sudden frustration.

  “It won’t. It. . .”

  She looked away and stared at the spot where the Gunner had been, and tried to remember where she’d seen the hat and the dagger lying together like a black bowl and a kitchen knife before. And the memory of someone shouting: “. . . gates in the mirrors!” at her across an expanse of ice came to her. But before she could make the connection, the memory of that ice took over, and the other terrifying thing, the thing that she had suppressed by shouting at the Walker, was swimming back up into her head—and she realized it was so big that she had to tell him.

  “George. I saw him! The one that took the Gunner. I saw him before—”

  “You saw the Walker before today?”

  She nodded, fear rising nauseously in her throat as she knew what she had to say, knowing that saying it out loud would be like making it real.

  “About a hundred years before today, maybe two hundred!”

  “What?”

  “I saw him when I glinted in the
Thames. I saw him at the Frost Fair.”

  “You can’t have . . .”

  “I did. And he was drowning someone. It was—it was . . .”

  She couldn’t go on.

  “It was . . . horrible?” he ventured. It was me.

  He stared at her.

  “It was a girl in a bonnet, and he drowned her, and it was me.”

  And for a long time they looked away from each other and said nothing.

  “Well,” George said finally. “We can’t let that happen either, can we?”

  Then, as the sun dipped, they stood up without any more words and walked together toward the light.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  All the statues, spits, and taints in this book really are out there on the streets waiting to be found. If you feel like discovering them, or even just your own “unLondon,” I really recommend sticking Ed Glinert’s London Compendium in your pocket as you wander about. I did and do, and find it indispensable. Equally indispensable but less portable books were Christopher Hibbert and Ben Weinreb’s London Encyclopedia and Peter Ackroyd’s London—The Biography. The latter’s Hawksmoor was one of the two books that got me out of the rut of my London and made me go and find other ones in the first place, a provocation for which I’m very grateful. The other book was a dusty copy of H. V. Morton’s London, a strange brew of impressions that I’d also recommend searching secondhand bookshops for.

  Closer to home, I’m very grateful to Katie Pearson for the D. H. Lawrence quotation at the front of this book. I’d also like to thank my (then twelve-year-old) godson Alexander Darby for reading an early extract from the book and telling me I really ought to describe things better. And finally, thanks to Jack and Ariadne and most especially Domenica for being such good sounding boards, first listeners, and strong believers. The only thing that was more fun than writing Stoneheart was reading it to you in the evenings. This is for you.

  Don’t miss the next exciting adventure in

  THE STONEHEART TRILOGY

  IRONHAND

  IRONHAND

  CHAPTER ONE

  Darkness Falls

  The Walker and the Gunner fell into the dark, pitched into a deep abyssal blackness beyond the memory of light. But though there was no possibility of seeing anything, the Gunner sensed they were plummeting through a succession of layers, as black flashed black in an unpleasant negative strobing, which he felt rather than saw.

  And then the horrible movement through the void stopped abruptly as they hit something solid.

  The Gunner’s knees crunched down into wet gravel, and his free hand instinctively palmed out to halt his fall, sending a jarring shock up his arm as it smacked into an unseen stone wall in front of him. He hung there, head low, angled between the wall and the ground, panting for breath. He felt wrong, more wrong than he’d ever felt, more wrong than he’d known it was possible to feel. He felt it in ways he couldn’t begin to list or explain; it was as if an invisible hand had reached into his core and wrenched everything off-true and left it hanging there, twisted and broken.

  He heard the birl of gravel beside him as the Walker moved his feet. Using the last of his strength, he swiped a hand into the darkness, but his fingers only caught air and blackness.

  He opened his mouth in an “oof” of pain at the effort, instantly clenching it shut and cutting off the giveaway sound. Whatever was happening to him, he was damned if he was going to give the Walker the pleasure of knowing how much it hurt.

  And then the lights came on.

  The first thing he saw was the upturned bowl of his tin helmet lying on the stones in front of his thick hobnailed army boots. Then he saw the protective legging cinched on to his right calf with three buckled straps like the residue of an ancient piece of armor. On a real soldier the legging would have been leather; but in this case, since he was, of course, a statue, it was made from bronze, like the rest of him. His left calf was unarmored, tightly wound with bandagelike puttees instead. Above that he saw his hands, strong blunt fingers splayed on the knees of his army britches, as he took a breath.

  He scooped up the helmet, smoothed the front of his uniform tunic, and adjusted the cape around his shoulders. It wasn’t a real cape. It was a canvas groundsheet from a one-man tent, to keep the weather off, tied in place with a piece of string through two grommet holes. He put on the helmet and stood up straight, every inch the battle-worn World War I veteran that he’d been sculpted to be.

  And then his mouth, despite his best intentions, fell open again as his jaw dropped in shock.

  They were in a large and ancient underground water tank. His feet stood on a small shelf of pea gravel that sloped against one wall. This tiny beach took a bite out of a rough square of black water, about ten yards on each side. The irregular blocks of stone lining the walls of the tank were greasily mottled with age and tumored with sickly blooms of damp fungus, which hung around them at what looked like a high-water mark. Drips from the stone roof of the chamber plopped concentric circles into the dark surface below.

  But it wasn’t the claustrophobic dimensions of this doorless chamber, with its dark water floor and half-moon gravel beach that made the Gunner gasp in surprise.

  It was the lights.

  Each wall had an outline of light blazing from it, a shape about the height of a man and perhaps a third as wide. The shapes were made from irregularly placed pieces of broken glass, and all had the same distinctive outline of a squat turret, the kind of thing a child might draw when trying to represent a castle. The light blasting forth from each of the four tower shapes intersected at the center of the water tank, where a silvered disk about the size of a plate spun lazily on the end of a piece of chain, reflecting the light randomly around the room.

  “What is this?”

  The question croaked from the Gunner’s throat before he could stop it. He heard a sniff of contempt and focused on the gaunt figure, up to its knees in the water at the edge of the gravel bar. The Walker wore a long green tweed overcoat with a hooded sweatshirt underneath. He swept the hood back and ran his fingers through long rat-tailed hair brindled with gray. He had a skullcap on the back of his head, and a jutting goatee framing a mouth twisted into a permanent half-open sneer. His hands held two small circular mirrors, which he clipped together and stowed in his coat pocket. He bent and lifted a long dagger from the edge of the beach. He unpeeled a thin sour smile as he gestured around the water tank with the gleaming blade.

  “This is a dream of four castles,” he replied, indicating the turret shapes on the walls around them. “It is a vision that came to me in a dream, long ago, when I was a free man. It is a vision that I have made real. It is nothing that you could begin to understand.”

  He shifted the blade in his hand and sliced angled reflections of light around the room, revealing more edges of the subterranean tank.

  “It was a void, and darkness was all it contained until I came across it. Now it is a place of power. My power.”

  The Gunner felt squeezed by the great pressure of earth above him. He felt as lost, as if he had been spirited into the bowels of the earth and pinned beneath a mountain. But he was damned if he was going to let the Walker enjoy his discomfort.

  “Where are we? Where is this?”

  The Walker spun slowly in a full circle, sending the reflected beams of light around the dank edges of the chamber.

  “We are under London. A city you will only ever see again in your memories.”

  The Gunner would have swung a fist at the Walker, but the wrongness inside him seemed to have sapped his normal strength and had left him needing all his energy just to stay on his feet. And besides, he had to know what was going on. He was nowhere he’d ever been, feeling like nothing he’d ever felt, and he could always try to flatten the Walker later, when he came within easier reach. Although, he had a suspicion that escaping or even surviving whatever was happening to him was going to require more than swinging fists.

  “Talk plainer.”
r />   “This is where you stay. Forever, perhaps. Enjoy the light. When I leave, it goes too.”

  The Walker looked at the Gunner with something like pleasure. “You feel it, don’t you; inside, the emptiness, the rising horror, the loss of strength, the sense that you’re not master of yourself?”

  The Gunner made himself stand straighten “Don’t you worry about me, chum. I’m right as a trivet.”

  “Oh, I’m afraid you’re not. You broke an oath sworn to me by the maker. You have to do what I say.”

  “Not happening,” the Gunner snorted tersely.

  “Oh, but it is. You’re a proud man. I won’t offend you by treating you like a lackey. After all, all I require of you is that you die. And all I have to do to effect that happy outcome is to forbid you to dig your way up out of here. And I do. I order you not to try to dig up toward the light and the clean air. Simple, isn’t it? One instruction and you’re doomed. Midnight will come, your plinth will be empty, whatever animates you will die, and you will be just so much scrap for the smelter.”

  The Walker’s eyes burned bright with banked-up malice.

  “Do you still feel master of yourself?”

  The Gunner tried to lift his hands, determined to wrench one of the ceiling slabs down into the water to show the Walker he was wrong. But his arms wouldn’t move. He shook his head in frustration. “I think I’m gonna grab you and shove your mirrors where the monkey put his nuts, that’s what I think.”

  He lurched toward the Walker, but he was much too slow, and the Walker danced out of his reach. The Gunner stumbled against the wall, horrified by how weak he’d become. As he reached back to stop himself from falling, he dislodged one of the bright pieces of glass.

  It fell at his feet. He stared at it, at the opaque surface, the rounded, sea-tumbled edges. And as he stared, his memory fired on reflex, and he saw a similar piece of tumbled glass in Edie’s hand. Then it fired again, and he remembered the first time he’d seen her smile, like sunlight breaking cleanly across her face. He relived the surprise he’d felt when he’d realized that all it had taken to kindle that blaze was to smile at her and call her by her real name; and he remembered strongly how that realization had made him feel suddenly protective of this strange and outwardly flinty girl. It was that surge of paternal protectiveness that collided with the dreadful realization spreading slowly across his mind like a dark stain that made something shift uncomfortably inside him.