The City of Guardian Stones

by Jacob Sager Weinstein

  “Yes, yes, thankfully. Very embarrassed about the, the state you saw me in. I’ve, I’ve, I’ve turned over an entirely new leaf, I can, I can assure you.”

  “Mom, Little Ben, this is… Actually, I don’t think I ever got your name.”

  “HUNGERFORD!” he roared again, then cleared his throat and went back to his previous loud whisper. “At your, at your, delighted to be at your service.”

  He turned around and began crawling along the ground at the foot of the fence, in an apparent effort to stay out of sight. Of course, with his big stone head sticking up above the wall and his voice constantly booming up to a roar before he remembered to lower it to a slightly quieter whisper, he was not exactly inconspicuous.

  We hurried along on our side of the fence as he kept up his monologue. “It’s, it’s, it’s fortunate that my path has reconnected with yours, allowing me to demonstrate my, my more typical reliability, and to correct the earlier unfortunate impression you must have received of, of, of me.”

  As he talked, he walked along one side of the yard and turned right. Still on the other side of the fence, we did our best to keep up.

  At the next corner, the fence intersected a tall glass entryway with a staircase inside. We opened a door from our side and stepped in as he jumped into it through a window on his side. While he was in mid-air, I managed to get a word in edgewise. “You said something about having colleagues?”

  He landed and trotted briskly down the stairs. “Yes, yes, yes, fellow products of Mrs Eleanor Coade, all of us. Normally we don’t, don’t meet up, stationed as we are at our, our various districts and outposts, but in times of crisis, needs must, eh? Needs must.”

  The stairs led into a white corridor, lit by glowing red lights high in the wall. Hungerford walked with a brisk, bouncy, slightly clumsy stride, as if he had too much energy to focus on a little thing like forward movement.

  The corridor turned, and we found ourselves in a space unlike any I’d been in. Hallways and stairs spilled in all directions, including directions that stairs and hallways shouldn’t go in. Windows in hallways going sideways looked out onto hallways going simultaneously up and down past staircases that were somehow diagonal to themselves. And if you don’t think that makes sense to read, you should try looking at it.

  My stomach lurched. Mom turned green. Little Ben broke into a huge smile. “Cool!” he said. “It’s like being in an Escher print!”

  I’m pretty sure I could have come up with a snappy answer to that, but I didn’t dare open my mouth for fear that the last thing I’d eaten would come tumbling out.

  “My apologies!” roared Hungerford. Now that we were out of earshot of the crowds, he wasn’t even trying to whisper. “The Coadeway is a thoroughfare for the, the convenience of the city’s stone guardians, who tend to have iron stomachs, if you will forgive the mixed metaphor.”

  We turned left, and then right, and then up, and then in a direction that I had never encountered before. I’d describe it as 45 per cent right, 78 per cent left, and 100 per cent queasy, and, no, that doesn’t add up. If it bothers you, take it up with the intersection.

  Finally, Hungerford pushed aside a large sheet of green plastic hanging over a doorway, and we stepped through into a hallway that, at long last, was made out of straight lines and ordinary right angles. On this side of the plastic sheet, a sign said DO NOT ENTER: CONSTRUCTION IN PROGRESS, probably because if it said VIOLATION OF LAWS OF GEOMETRY IN PROGRESS, people might be tempted to go in.

  In front of us, a large window looked out onto a room full of musical instruments, ornately carved out of wood and painted red and gold. I didn’t recognize them, but Little Ben did. “It’s the Gamelan Room! We’re in the Royal Festival Hall.”

  It took me a minute to place the name. “Isn’t that the big white building we could see from those stone benches?” I turned to Hungerford. “You led us through the pedestrian equivalent of a triple-loop rollercoaster, when we could have just crossed the street and gone in the front door?”

  “No, no, no, to the contrary. As a magical creature, I’m, I’m, I’m forbidden to wander the streets except in case of masonry theft or other extremity. But, but, but now that you mention it, I suppose you could have walked over and met me here. APOLOGIES! Trot in haste, repent at leisure, that’s what, what, what Mrs Coade kept telling me.”

  He barged int o the room of instruments. “You keep mentioning Mrs Coade,” I said. “Who is she?”

  “She, she, she built the factory, of course.”

  “Which factory?”

  “This one.” With his large stone paw, Hungerford tapped out a tune on a nearby gamelan. For a moment, I thought I recognized it, somewhere deep in the back of my memory. Was it another family lullaby? Before I could place it, the entire wall of the room swung open, which was distracting enough to chase away the vague memory. Hungerford bounded through the newly opened gap, and with a quick glance at each other, Mom, Little Ben, and I bounded after him.

  CHAPTER 23

  We gasped.

  The massive room was filled with living stone sculptures of every shape and size. Sitting on the wooden ceiling beams, crammed into alcoves in the walls, perched on the giant beehive-shaped brick kilns that dotted the floor, they were all talking at once. Stone cupids bickered with stone horses. A gigantic stone Egyptian god was leaning down to yell at a little stone mouse. A matched set of stone columns, each with a female head at the top, was arguing with a stone William Shakespeare. At the far end of the room, a wide stream of water ran through a channel, and stone dolphins and stone fish swam in circles around each other, sending up furious streams of bubbles.

  “Silence!” roared Hungerford, and every stone head in the room turned to look at us. The quiet only lasted a moment, before a stone sheep bleated “Humans! Hide!” and the scene turned even more chaotic, with dozens of statues running into each other in their desperation to get out of our sight.

  “Move it, buster!” yelled a cupid.

  “,” yelled the Egyptian god.

  Shakespeare, meanwhile, was trying to cram himself into a tiny gap between two kilns. “Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt!” he intoned.

  “SILENCE!” roared Hungerford, even louder than before, and everybody froze. “The human girl was with me when I was, was, was— She’s seen me on a premises comprising part of the system of justice!”

  A stone judge pounded his gavel on a nearby brick wall, sending up a cloud of red dust. “On your evidence, this court finds that she and her party may be present at a gathering of magical creatures.”

  This seemed to satisfy the statues, who finally settled down. “What is this place?” I asked Hungerford.

  Little Ben answered for him. “It’s the Coade stone factory,” he said, looking around eagerly.

  “I thought the place where stones were made was called the earth’s core.”

  “Natural stone, sure. But in 1769, a Londoner named Eleanor Coade invented a method of making artificial stone and turning it into sculptures. When she died, her secret method was lost, and they tore down the factory and built the Royal Festival Hall over it. Or so they said.”

  “As you can see, there are, are, are certain crucial omissions from the public record,” Hungerford said. “The factory was built above the, the Neckinger, one of the city’s secret magical rivers, and the waters form a, a, a crucial part of our mixture. As a result, we’re more, we’re more lively than stone made with the traditional method involving magma and millennia.”

  “Thus, in Our royal wisdom, We ordered Coade stones posted around the city, to serve as guardians of their mundane brethren,” piped up a miniature King George III, with as much dignity as a squeaky-voiced one-foot-tall statue could muster.

  I probably should have addressed him as Your Majesty or something, but, look, I was raised in America. I didn’t care if King George III was tiny and made out of synthetic marble – he was still my ancestral enemy. Somewhere in the world there might
have been a tiny stone George Washington, and I didn’t want him to feel betrayed. So instead of addressing the mini-king by title, I just pointed at him. “You’ve all met up here because of the stolen amphitheatre.”

  “Not just that,” whinnied a stone horse. “The crumbled walls of Merton Priory lay preserved under a Tube stop for five hundred years. Just this afternoon, someone sheared them clean off.”

  Other statues joined in. “Queen Caroline’s bathhouse! Snatched!” called a naval captain.

  “The Saxon archway from the Church of All Hallows!” honked a swan.

  “Gone! Gone! All gone!” they cried. The statues that had hands beat them against their heads. The ones without hands beat their heads against the wall.

  “Quiet! Please! Calm down, everyone!” I yelled.

  Things settled down for a minute, until Mom couldn’t contain herself any more. “Gone!” she moaned, tears running down her face, and chaos erupted once more.

  Between Hungerford’s roars, and me and Little Ben yelling, we finally got everybody’s attention. “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” I told the stones. “Did Mrs Coade create you to panic at the first sign of trouble? Is that why you were entrusted with the care of this ancient city’s stones by his glorious majesty King George the Third?”

  Yes, I know what I just said about calling him by his title, but I thought the statues needed all the bucking up they could get. Sorry, tiny stone George Washington, wherever you are.

  In fact, I had probably laid it on too thick, because the naval captain waved his stone hat in the air, calling “God save the king!” and it took another minute or two before the cheering stopped. When it did, I got right to the point. “We need to focus on catching the thieves. Did any of you see them?”

  “It was a girl with tattoos,” said a massive stone child. “She stole the walls of St Dunstan in the East.”

  “Aye,” said the captain, “I saw those tattoos. Nice work, they was.”

  The other statues nodded. “It was her! We saw her!” they called.

  “Did any of you see where she went?”

  The Coade stones that had necks all hung their heads. The others looked necklessly sheepish.

  “That’s OK,” I said quickly, hoping to forestall another mass panic. “We just have to figure out where she’s going to strike next. Everything she’s taken has been the remnant of some ancient structure. Are any of those still left?”

  “Only one,” said a stone angel, accompanying herself on a stone harp. “She hasn’t got the section of Roman wall that’s in the car park near the Barbican.”

  “Well then,” I said, “I know where we’re camping out tonight.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Other than the name, the London Wall car park didn’t seem all that special. For a few hundred feet from the entrance, it was a regular garage, lit by fluorescent lights, with numbered spaces along both walls. I was glad to see that there were more handicapped spaces than usual – Aunt Talia used a wheelchair, and I had many memories of circling a parking lot with her, trying to find a space.

  It was only when we got to the rear of the garage that things got strange. Sprawling across several spaces was a section of Roman wall, about twice as tall as I was, made mostly of grey stone with a few lines of red brick.

  Looking at it sticking up between a station wagon and a gaggle of motorcycles, I didn’t need Little Ben to tell me that it was part of the magic 10 per cent.

  Nearby was a door marked STRICTLY NO ENTRY. It swung open and Oaroboarus squeezed his bulk through the doorway. In his mouth, he had a carpetbag that looked exactly like the one Brigadier Beale had confiscated. He handed it to Little Ben, then bowed his head courteously.

  Hungerford had insisted that we go in first while he checked “the, the perimeter”. Now a wave of car alarms, getting closer and closer, announced that he had returned. He was creeping along close to the wall, trying to hide, but he kept bumping his giant stone rump against cars.

  Finally, he arrived, knocking over a handful of motorcycles as he did so. That was when he spotted Oaroboarus. Hungerford rushed up and threw his big paws in the air as if he was about to hug Oaroboarus, but when he was an inch away, he finally noticed the giant pig’s unfriendly glare.

  Hungerford tried to turn the almost-hug into a stretch and ended up tumbling over himself onto the floor. “Oaroboarus,” he said, looking up at the pig. “It’s lovely, lovely to see you. You’re looking very, very, very fine.”

  Oaroboarus nodded grudgingly and threw down a single card.

  Our party found a nook about twenty feet away from the Roman wall, behind yet another set of handicapped parking spaces, and settled down for the night.

  If you’ve never camped out in an underground garage, I highly recommend it. The smell of tyres and gas isn’t quite as lovely as the scent of pine, and the sound of traffic rumbling overhead isn’t as soothing as crickets, but you get used to them after a while. And it’s nice to have a roof over your head and walls to protect you from the rain. Plus, although we couldn’t start a fire, there was a twenty-four-hour coffee shop two blocks away, so we had plenty of hot chocolate to keep warm.

  Finally, I could barely keep my eyes open. Mom was in the middle of an endless anecdote that I think had to do with my grandfather and a tree, but I found Mom’s stories hard enough to track when I was fully alert. Oaroboarus noticed that I was beginning to slump over.

  I didn’t need to be asked twice, and neither did Little Ben. He fluffed up his carpetbag and we lay down next to each other, using it as a pillow.

  “So do you have a stash of those bags somewhere?” I asked. “Or did Oaroboarus somehow get it back from Beale?”

  “Neither!” Little Ben said. “There’s a little corner in the sewer near where I live. Whenever I lose my bag, another one appears there. And anything that was in the old bag is in the new one.”

  “Maybe it’s the same bag, finding its way home.”

  “That’s what I thought, but then I accidentally burned my bag doing an experiment, and it somehow turned up again in the usual spot, good as new. It’s a mystery!”

  As I contemplated that, my eyes drifted shut.

  Next thing I knew, Mom was tapping us awake. She put her finger to her lips and pointed back towards the Roman wall.

  “She’s here,” Mom whispered.

  CHAPTER 25

  A figure in a short-sleeved white robe, with a red scarf tied around the waist, stood by the Roman wall, her back to us. If her costume hadn’t told me who she was, the swirling letters on her arm would have.

  The letters coalesced into words. From the distance, I couldn’t make them out, but they must have been powerful, because they began to shine brightly, their glow starting up by her shoulder and racing down to her wrist. As it did, she lifted her hand and pointed at the wall, and when the glow reached her finger, it shot out, making a bright line on the stones.

  She wrote with her fingertip, in letters of fire. Unlike the words on her arm, I could read these from a distance because they were two feet tall and also, you know, fire. They said Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.

  Hey, I said I could read them. I never said I could understand them.

  But Little Ben seemed to know what they meant. His jaw dropped. He caught my glance and mouthed Tell you later. I nodded.

  The girl added one last thing to her magical graffiti: a straight line under the words. At first, I thought it was just for emphasis, as if the two-foot-tall flaming letters weren’t emphatic enough. Then it burned out, leaving behind a perfectly straight fracture all along the length of the wall.

  The stones toppled towards her.

  The letters on her arm swiftly swirled into a new configuration, and their fiery red glow changed to a cool blue one, which raced down her arm and burst out of her fingers, enveloping the falling stones. They stopped in mid-air.

  I had been so engrossed in what she was doing that I hadn’t noticed a large van backing up to her. Now it came to
a stop. She strode over to it, and with the hand that wasn’t pointing at the floating stones, she swung open the rear door. She gestured with both hands, as if inviting the cut wall into the van, and it floated inside.

  She slammed the van door, and as it drove off, she hopped onto a nearby motorcycle and revved it up.

  Wait, tattoos and a motorcycle? The Precious Man might have been a nefarious heritage-stealing villain, but he was also the coolest dad ever.

  Minnie took off, heading out a different exit from the van.

  “We’ve got to split up and follow them both,” I said. “One of them will lead us to the stolen stones.”

  “I’ll follow the, the, the van,” Hungerford said.

  I looked at his massive form. “Can you do it without being spotted?”

  “You have my, my, my most solemn word. I shall apply the, the full range of camouflage techniques available to a sophisticated jungle predator.”

  He bounded off and crashed into a car, denting its side and setting off its alarm. After a moment of staggering, he righted himself and dashed away.

  “We’ll follow her,” I said. “Oaroboarus, can you give us a ride?”

  Mom looked up at him. “Is he … I mean, are you safe?”

  Oaroboarus reached into his pouch and pulled out a different kind of card – laminated, with his photo on it.

  “We got it after our last adventure,” Little Ben said. “We didn’t want Oaroboarus to risk getting arrested. Ooh, that reminds me. Look what else we have!”

  He reached into his carpetbag and pulled out a thick bundle of cloth and metal. He put it onto Oaroboarus’s back, and when Oaroboarus shook himself, the bundle unfolded into a double-decker bus costume.