by Tom Fletcher
‘Child,’ the figure said again, ‘I have come from Glasstown. Do you know of it?’
Alan shook his head, mute.
‘It is a place far from here, deep in the Discard. I have been sent as an emissary to speak with the one they call McAlkie. I have come to pledge the support of Glasstown to McAlkie and the Anti-Pyramid League. We believe that all souls should have the right to move freely throughout Gleam, in order to find the rooms that were theirs in life. Those who live in the Pyramid prevent this. Can you show me the way?’
‘To McAlkie?’ That the woman wanted to see McAlkie was about the only thing that Alan had fully understood.
‘Yes. To this McAlkie.’
Alan nodded. ‘Follow me,’ he said. Then, after a moment of picking their way slowly through the woods, he said, ‘Would you like me to carry some of your things?’
The woman smiled gratefully. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘That would be most welcome. Thank you.’ She undid the buckles and belts that secured the cage to her back and let it slide to the ground.
Alan undid the latch on the cage door and took what he could. He shoved small parcels and pouches into his pockets and placed the straps of larger bags over his shoulders, and then gathered up boxes in his arms. After setting off, he realised that he had perhaps been over-ambitious, but he didn’t want to admit as much so he struggled onwards. He kept dropping bits and pieces and stopping to pick them up, and every time he tried to pick them up he’d drop other items.
The woman laughed at him, but not unkindly. ‘I’m sorry to have so much with me,’ she said. ‘My people accumulate strange things – trinkets, ornaments, relics. We don’t mean to, but we do. They arrive in our homes, in our buildings. I gathered so much for my journey so that I would have material with which to barter and make exchanges. However’ – and a frown passed over her face – ‘the Discard was quieter than I expected. It has been many, many years since I left Glasstown, and I have never travelled so far. Perhaps the Discard has always been this quiet. As a consequence of the quietness, though, I have not had much opportunity to shed weight. Nor have I adequately sustained myself, or found good shelter from the heat and the sun.’
‘You stayed high,’ Alan said. He didn’t know a lot about the Discard, but he knew that it was a good idea to stay high, if possible.
‘Yes. I kept to the rooftops and the high places, and so I burned.’ The woman smiled again.
Eventually the two of them reached one end of the street where McAlkie preached, and Alan pointed the visitor in the right direction. ‘I can’t go down there myself,’ he said seriously, ‘because Mum might see me, and then she will know that I’m buying lemons for her birthday.’
The woman laughed again, and crouched down to give Alan a brief hug. ‘Thank you, little man,’ she said. ‘Your mother will be delighted, I am sure.’ She struggled to get back up again.
Alan waved goodbye to the Glasstowner, and then turned his mind to the business of buying lemons.
On his way back, the lemons safe in his pockets, he saw something gleaming in the moss of the woodland floor. He rushed over and found a greasy cloth that was partially unwrapped, and recognised it as something he’d carried for the Glasstowner – he must have dropped it. Inside the cloth was a piece of metal shaped like a dented egg. It was dark and heavy. It looked as if it was made to split into two parts. He would have to give it back to the lady. She was nice, and she wanted to help McAlkie, so he would help her. But he could have a look inside it first. He could have a quick look and then just put it back together. He wanted to see what kind of treasure could be found out there in the Discard. He peered around himself, to make sure there was nobody around, but he was alone.
He hit the egg against a rock on the ground, but that did nothing, then he got his fingernails into the crack that ran around its middle and tried to prise the two halves apart, but that didn’t work either. With every failed attempt, he grew more desperate. He couldn’t give it back without seeing what was inside, and yet he had to get home with the lemons so that his father had time to cook his mother’s tea. He’d already been out too long.
Finally he gripped one end of the egg in each hand and tried to unscrew it. It gave a little and his heart lifted. He twisted some more, and the egg slowly began to undo. He spun the top half round and round and it rose from its base until it became loose and he could take it out.
Inside the egg was a small glass cylinder, secured by an intricate metal framework that flexed and bent and shifted so the cylinder was safely suspended away from the sides. Despite the battered exterior, the workings all looked clean and well-oiled, yet when Alan touched them, no grease or anything stuck to his fingers.
Inside the cylinder was a flickering white light. Alan withdrew it from its place. It was rounded at both ends and completely sealed, with the light trapped inside. It wasn’t a bulb; Alan had seen those before. There was nothing else inside the cylinder but the light. It was weird, and it was beautiful. It lit up Alan’s face, and the trees around him. It was magic. Alan had never believed in magic before, although some of the wilder preachers had spoken of it, how it was in the stone, how it preserved Gleam, kept it standing, but everybody said they were crazy and that there was no magic. But this was magic. Alan had it – he’d found it. All thoughts of Glasstowners and lemons and parents receded. There was a tiny metal plaque on the side of the cylinder, with words engraved on it. Alan brought it close to his eyes so that he could read it. The words read:
WHO DO YOU HATE?
Alan laughed slightly to himself. What a strange thing. ‘I hate the damn Pyramidders,’ he whispered, ‘putting the squeeze on.’
The light brightened and the glass suddenly burned his fingers. He let go, but it stayed where it was, in the air, then it rose and floated up, and up, and up, and then it tore through the air in the direction of Modest Mills and … the Pyramid.
‘No,’ Alan said, suddenly realising what might happen, ‘no, no, no—’
But he couldn’t do anything about it. He heard the explosion and the screaming before he’d even taken a step, and long before he got home, he could see the plume of smoke billowing from a great jagged hole in the black stone of the Black Pyramid.
The reprisals came later that day, and they came hard. They came wearing battered metal and wielding crossbows and curved swords. They came with fire and with beads beneath their skin. They came, and they killed Alan’s mother, and his father. They took McAlkie alive, because they thought he was responsible, and because they wanted McAlkie alive, McAlkie could negotiate for Alan’s life. So they let Alan live, too.
*
‘I think about it,’ Alan said. ‘I think about it all the time. I try not to, but I do. I told you about it – I told you when I got out of the Pyramid. I found you and I confessed, and—’
‘Aye, right. But now you can’t barely think a thought. You’re always too pissed or high or … busy, with some easy lay. You don’t think about anything, and you sure as shite weren’t thinking about how to solve the Pyramid problem.’
‘No,’ Alan said, quietly, ‘I was too worried about my family.’
The sun was down now, and the stars were out. The moons glowed, their colours not reaching the world on which Alan and Eyes stood. Theirs was a black and confused architecture, a riot of twisted fingers reaching up into the cool, clean sky, grasping for space and for blessing. For forgiveness, Alan thought. The Pyramid was a vast blot, the shadow of which they could not escape, and their boots were swollen into mutant hoofs with the sticky dust of their old home town. Out there in the Discard, fires were being lit. The sound of distant motorcycle engines and occasional drunken cackling drifted over the ruins – ruins, that was what they were – and sometimes the harsh shriek of a raven could be heard. Alan thought for a moment that he glimpsed a couple of tiny green pinpricks of light out there, high up on some tower, but then they were gone.
He didn’t much care about the Clawbaby right now. It had come slo
wly, but the rage had come. He was thinking about Billy – not as the six-year-old child he had just seen, or the two-year-old he’d left behind when he left the Pyramid, but as the whole human being: Billy at every age, all at once, all of the things he had been, all of the different moods, all of the different haircuts, crying and laughing at the same time, two years old and six years old at the same time, and all ages in between, and all ages before, and all the ages that he would yet live to be. Should yet live to be: Billy as a teenager, as a young man, as an old man, all of the different people that he could yet become – should yet become. Would yet become. Would. Alan could not tally the love he felt; he could not total it. It was a bottle that once uncorked would overflow and never stop, and he could not cork it again, and it would fill him up, it would rise up and flood his lungs, and it would drown him.
Alan stepped forward and fastened his hands around his old friend’s neck. It was how he’d attacked Tromo, but this time his anger was greater and his body and head were full of red mist and his vision had blackened and narrowed and his opponent was more feeble. Eyes had dropped his knife – Alan’s thumbs had straight away pierced the papery skin of his throat and he’d spasmed and dropped his knife – and now he was trying to pull Alan’s wrists apart. He fell to his knees, and Alan knelt too, and increased the pressure. His strength was infinite: he could just direct energy to his hands and his grip would tighten. It was a simple, effortless thing to do, and there was no end to it.
Eyes choked and struggled, and then he stopped, and then he died.
30
Resolution
The night blurred quickly. Alan hurried back into the Discard, smoking, the smoke flowing from his nose and mouth and drying his eyes. He stopped at a bucket fire and drank moonshine with some transients, which they let him share for a song. Then, his nausea and shakes quietened for a time, he rushed on to Market Top, where he played some more and drank some more, all the time thinking. People were burning bunches of dried lavender in the tavern fires at Market Top, scenting the night air. Alan paced the square, thinking, thinking, thinking. He could hear laughter and talking and other singers singing, but he did not want to spend time with other people. He felt nothing but an incredible rage, which, despite being also love, somehow, meant that he was not good company, and he knew it. He paced the small network of narrow streets and thought and smoked a roll-up, and he looked up at the sky and listened to the noise of people and the backdrop of the Discard, the whispering, the creaking, the distant howls, the venting of steam, the occasional metal-on-metal shriek that signalled some forgotten machine springing back into life, if only briefly, as was usually the case.
He finished his roll-up and flicked the stub to the ground.
He thought about Spider and Nora and Eyes, and even through his terrible anger he felt a sickening guilt. Eyes had been right, ultimately: the Pyramid’s time had come. But he had to get Billy and Marion out first, and for that, he had to find Nora. Then no more acquiescing, no more negotiating, no more wasting time trying to do it right. They would break into the Pyramid and save his family – not through the main entrance: that way, they wouldn’t stand a chance. They would go in through the Sump.
Alan looked at the Pyramid. His eyes were drawn to the framework of brass and glass and strange machines that rotated slowly around its peak, reading the skies and harvesting light. They gleamed red and pink by the light of the moons.
Alan stared a moment longer, then stumbled through the glowing doorway of a tavern, trying to blink his eyes clear.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Beth and to Jake, for – amongst too many other things to mention – love, motivation, kindness and inspiration. Thanks also to the members of the Northern Lines writing group: Jenn Ashworth, Emma Jane Unsworth, Richard V Hirst, Claire Dean, Nicola Mostyn and Michelle C Green for their insight, support and company. Thanks to my parents, and all of my ever-growing family. Thank you Nicholas Royle, as ever, for your life-changing mentorship. Huge thanks to the enthusiastic and wise Euan Thorneycroft at A.M. Heath and to everybody at the great Jo Fletcher Books – especially, of course, Jo herself, Nicola Budd, and Andy Turner, for all their advice, hard work and patience. And thank you to Mervyn Peake, Grimes, Lewis Carroll, Hayao Miyazaki, Robin Hobb, Jim Henson and Timber Timbre, for the things you’ve made.