There was an entire borough between the landmarks of Spitalfields, Aldgate, and Shadwell that just wasn’t there in the real world.
Was this the mysterious Glass Town Isaiah had written about?
Closer inspection and more frantic brushing with his bare hands revealed thirteen curious indentations in the wood, as though a knife had been dragged back and forth across them repeatedly to make its mark, but only for an inch or so in either direction. The strokes were neat, and the same on each of the thirteen points, but their distribution across the map wasn’t even, or seemingly logical. Beside them someone had carved three words—one for one—deep into the floorboards, scoring over the letters again and again to be sure they’d never fade. The first O was within Coldfall Wood, over what would have been the old fairy ring, he thought.
Josh tried to place the rest of the indentations in the real world, but he wasn’t all that familiar with the area, certainly not well enough to pinpoint the corresponding places without a map—but of course he had a map, he had lots of them up on the wall, some with the red-ringed area that had to be Glass Town marked on them, others without. He started to check them against each other, trying to picture where, exactly these deep scored marks referred to in the cityscape he knew from almost thirty years of living inside it.
But it just didn’t fit.
Not in any meaningful way.
He couldn’t join the dots.
It was as though a part of London had been excised and the only proof that it had ever existed at all was plastered all over these walls.
Could people simply forget somewhere existed?
Could they be made to forget?
He looked up from the floorboards to see the smug face of Damiola, Lord of Illusions, looking down at him. That look seemed to say: Yes, yes they could if you knew the trick …
But even if they could, it wasn’t as though an entire warren of streets could simply disappear without a trace, was it? It wasn’t like a ship going missing inside the Bermuda Triangle. Streets were physically rooted to the earth. The ground couldn’t creep over them and bury them away without a trace. Rip them out of the city and surely they would leave behind a physical wound where they had been. Cartographers could erase them from maps, sure, any line that could be drawn could be erased, but that didn’t take those streets away from the city proper. There was no All-Seeing Architect who could rearrange the geography of London to hide an entire neighborhood.
The world didn’t work like that.
One for one.
There was no magic powerful enough to make it happen that wasn’t conjured by books or films or computer games. In other words there was no magic, no matter how hard men like Damiola tried to convince you otherwise, no matter how many endless knots or horned gods or green men he drew. That was the brutally mundane reality of it all. The world was going to work, coming home from work, sitting in offices staring out of windows, dreaming of something bigger, something wonderful, even magical, as you begged strangers to pay thousands of pounds to place glossy ads and clever copy in a dying medium, but that was all it ever was, a dream.
Nevertheless, there was no getting around the fact that Myrna Shepherd had broken into his house tonight.
That wasn’t a dream.
But that didn’t make it magic, either.
13
NUMBER 13
There was food in the fridge, but he wasn’t sure he could trust any of it not to poison him. Everything in there had a jaundiced hue. There was a jar of instant coffee on the counter, though, surrounded by a scattering of granules that Boone hadn’t cleared away. It wasn’t exactly manna from heaven, but it would do for now. Josh boiled the kettle and made a too-hot brew before going back to the projection room cradling the cup in his hands.
How many hours had his grandfather spent in this place during his life? It was hard to imagine Boone’s secret life, but there was no escaping the fact that the old man must have been living one. It was like discovering he’d been living with a spy all these years.
Josh closed the door behind him.
He liked closed doors; they gave the illusion of safety.
The film reel was already in the projector; all he needed to do was plug the machine in and flick the switch to turn it on. The motor hummed slightly alarmingly as he did, and a dust-filled light speared the wall. The reel clicked as the film was drawn between the lens and the light and the images began to flicker unsteadily across the wall. There was no title sequence or anything else that he would have associated with a movie, but of course he was looking at something that had never been finished, something the rest of the world thought was lost: raw footage from Hitchcock’s Number 13.
That the projector started at all was testament to the fact that someone had been paying the bills for this secret place.
There was no sound, so Josh had to try and guess what the story was meant to be. Even without the sound, though, he found himself being caught up in the facial expressions and body language and realized there was a fundamental truth to the story he was interpreting, and that without words it was harder to lie. There was a life lesson in that, he realized, watching the rough cut.
Two minutes in, Josh recognized the pub across the street from where he was now, but everything else was new—or rather old, lost to the German bombs and the avaricious developers who had moved into the area. Every now and again he caught a glimpse of Eleanor Raines in the background, but she never seemed to be the center of any shots. She was instantly recognizable, though, because her face was plastered all over the walls around the makeshift screen.
He watched the way she moved.
He watched the way she inclined her head.
He watched the way her lips twitched as she smiled.
And in all of those things he could see exactly why she’d stolen Isaiah’s heart so completely and utterly. She came alive in the moving pictures in a way that she just didn’t in the stills. It was as though the film had caught part of her essence that stills just couldn’t, no matter how wonderfully they were lit or how perfectly her makeup was applied. And even then she was never the center of attention. She didn’t need to be. She smoldered, drawing the eye no matter where she was in the shot.
One thing caught his attention early on in the film: a poster for Damiola pasted to the wall of a crumbling tenement. He recognized it immediately because the same poster was on the wall in the other room. The fact it was there, here, and in Isaiah’s letter had to mean something.
Claire Greet dominated pretty much every frame, and with good reason: She was a beauty in the realest sense of the word. It wasn’t sultry or sexualized. There was an innocence to her. She possessed the kind of beauty that would be out of place today in today’s world of manufactured precision. She lined up outside The Peabody with other hopefuls, suitcase stuffed to overflowing on the ground by her feet while Thesiger moved down the line, picking out people to go inside. Josh couldn’t help but think that with it being a Hitchcock movie, no matter how desperate they were supposed to be, the lucky ones would be those who didn’t find themselves with a room inside.
He sipped at his coffee, and then decided to make himself comfortable on the mattress despite the health hazard it posed.
The scene changed, moving along the street toward the wharf, the camera focusing on one of the big steamships on the Thames, presumably highlighting the influx of poor fresh off the boat and the increased pressure their arrival put on the city. The imagery was every bit as stark as anything Hitchcock had ever captured on film with subtleties woven into the fabric of the city itself. But there was no denying it was flawed. Erratic. And without the lies of words to drive it, there was no tension.
Josh found it difficult to concentrate on the film, realizing that there was nothing of any real worth to be found within it. He slumped up against the wall, his head dipping as the night gathered around to claim him.
And then he saw him, a face in the crowd, and all thoughts of sleep fled.
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Josh pushed himself up from the mattress and scrambled to his feet.
He knew that face.
Josh had almost missed him because the camera moved on quickly, but it was so jarring to see someone he knew in a film that was over ninety years old: Seth Lockwood.
Seth was just milling around in the background, not actively part of the film. Josh watched him. He did nothing. He didn’t move. Didn’t interact with any of the main cast. But in one unguarded moment Josh saw something: the camera caught him looking at Eleanor Raines when he thought no one was watching, and it stripped away all deceits. His expression was purely covetous; his need stark, urgent, like it hurt so much to look at her he wanted to claw his eyes out, and yet he still couldn’t look away.
Hitchcock had seen it, too, and focused the lens on Seth.
The director, like the magician he was, used Seth as a classic piece of misdirection, creating the illusion of an external threat to the heroine, something from outside The Peabody. It created doubt in the viewer’s mind, allowing the real threat to move throughout the film unnoticed for a while longer.
Josh watched the frames again, stopping the projector when he had seen enough. It had to be Seth, he thought, even though he’d never met the man, but the similarity between him and the newfound cousin who had waylaid him in the yard behind the Scala a few hours ago was unmistakable.
He had cracked a joke about the apple not falling far from the genetic tree in their family. In every good joke there was more than a grain of truth. The similarities were beyond unnerving.
There was nothing else of note in the twenty-seven minutes of footage. Eleanor Raines occupied the screen for perhaps two minutes of that time, Seth Lockwood barely thirty seconds, and never without Eleanor, but those were the only two minutes of Number 13 that mattered.
14
BLOOD, SWEAT, AND TEARS
How far would you go for love?
What extreme becomes too extreme?
Would you kill to save someone you loved?
Of course, and without a second thought in Seth Lockwood’s case. Two people? Five? What about someone you were obsessed with? Once you were committed, it was the same, wasn’t it? If anything, obsession was purer. There was no art so dark as the human art, as far as he was concerned. It was all about committing to a course of action and sticking to it no matter the cost. That single-minded determination was the difference between winners and losers, and Seth didn’t lose. Ever.
He closed the door.
He needed to be alone and couldn’t stand all of Gideon’s grousing and worrying. How could the old bastard be the fruit of his loins? It wasn’t as though he’d been born without a spine. At one point, in the late fifties and into the early sixties he had been one of the most feared men in London. Seth knew. He’d watched from afar. But the years had sucked the backbone out of his boy leaving a jellylike invertebrate in the gangster’s place. It was sickening, really, to see him so diminished.
Seth would have crushed the kid if he hadn’t needed him.
But good things came to he who waited, and Seth was nothing if not patient. This was still his city no matter what year it was.
He looked at the clock on the wall.
It was time.
It didn’t matter what the hands showed, he’d always known it was time. He’d known since he’d set foot in the church for Boone’s funeral. Things were happening that couldn’t unhappen. He’d caught sight of Eleanor among the mourners along the side of the road, watching as the funeral procession went by, but he hadn’t been able to catch her. That she was so easily able to slip in and out of Glass Town now was a worry. It meant that the dweomers holding the grand illusion in place were failing faster than the damned magician had anticipated, which was bad, but unavoidable. He didn’t understand exactly what the magician had done, or how he had done it, but he knew enough to grasp the implications when one of the ancient lenses cracked. That shouldn’t have happened. The integrity of the entire illusion depended upon the glass. A single flaw could shatter it completely once and forever. And then what for him? Was he simply supposed to allow time to catch up with him and die like a normal man? He needed to replace the lens and restore the dweomers, and he couldn’t do that without Damiola’s help—which wasn’t going to be easily had, given that the illusionist had vanished from the face of the earth back in 1924.
Of course, the fact that the lens had cracked was also the only reason he was out here now. He wasn’t blind to the irony. It was an unintended casualty of war, a German bomb had taken down the building it was anchored to and in the process opened the way back here. He’d paid laborers to repair the house a long time ago, but hadn’t concerned himself with the crack because it allowed him to slip in and out of Hell as he pleased. That broken glass could end up being the single most important piece of luck they’d had since Damiola sealed up their little slice of London town and they’d disappeared supposedly to live happily ever after. Without it, he would never have known Isaiah’s obsession had been handed off to a new generation. Seth had hoped that after all this time they’d have given up looking, and gradually forgotten all about Eleanor, him, and everything else and just gone on with living their way into the future while they left the past where it belonged.
He was in the manager’s office of The Hunter’s Horns.
A leather inlaid mahogany desk dominated the room along with a high-backed green leather chair that would have looked at home in the Bank of England circa 1880. The room smelled of that well-waxed leather. An old cinema projector was the only thing on the desk. Filing cabinets and shelves filled with ledgers going back to the ’20s finished the furnishings. Behind the desk was a battered green capstan safe.
Seth knelt in front of it, and pressed his left hand to the cold iron as he spun the dial.
He knew the combination off by heart: 130124.
The numbers would have meant nothing to anyone else, but they were more than just dear to his heart; they were the foundation of his entire life. The thirteenth of January 1924 was the day Damiola had pulled off his greatest trick ever and hidden away Glass Town from the rest of the world. It was the day he had finally owned Eleanor Raines, body and soul. He didn’t think about her heart—he’d never owned that. Seth had accepted that a long time ago. It had taken a while, but he had learned to be happy with what he had. Seth was a practical man.
He had acted impetuously releasing one of the Rushes. It had been a mistake. He knew that. He’d known it at the time, but when his boy had questioned him it had only made him all the more stubborn. That wasn’t a good trait. So now he needed something more surgical to send after the boy. Ideally he would have summoned the Negative, but that particular monstrosity was already patrolling the boundaries of Glass Town, keeping what needed to be kept in, in. So that left the Dailies or the Reels. The Dailies were more creatures of defense than attack, though like all of Damiola’s invocations, equally capable of wreaking havoc. They were insidious little things that came and went in the course of sunrise to sunset, only to rise again with the coming dawn. No good for a night fight. The Reels came in pairs, and unlike the Rushes, which were a quainter evil, what made the Reels more interesting from his perspective was that they were capable of something approaching thought. If the Rushes were bloodhounds, the Reels were sharks.
He opened the safe and removed two of the three brown envelopes in there. One contained cash; lots of it bundled up in tight wads of twenties. Another contained documents pertaining to his life both then and now. All the papers he needed to pass in either time. The one that he wanted contained two reels of film that fit onto the arms of the old cinema projector on his desk.
This was no ordinary projector; it was one of Damiola’s finest creations, a prototype for what became his greatest illusion of all, the Opticron. The films it showed were no mere show reels, either.
He teased the two small reels of film from the envelope, handling them with gentle firmness, cautious urgency, barel
y contained excitement, all of those things and more that conferred ownership and right. He unspooled a little of the film and held it to the light, looking through the frames until he found the silhouette he wanted: the Comedians.
Seth cleared a space out in the center of the room before fitting the reels into the projector.
He winced as the brittle film cracked as he curved it around the armature, and hoped it wouldn’t break completely before he was done with it. He needed what was on that reel. The film cracked twice more, alarmingly, before he’d finished easing it into place and wound it on over the fractures. It stayed in one piece.
The power cable snaked back across the rug to the plug in the wall. Unlike the carousel everything in this invocation was electrical, a much more modern magic. At the time of its invention it had been otherworldly, now it was dated, like the Mismade Girl, the Chinese Water Torture, and other staples of the stage magicians trade. But it worked. That was what mattered. It was as simple as flicking a switch and the reels turned. The projector was slightly unbalanced and rattled against the desktop as they did.
Seth waited for a moment as the frames fed through between the lens and the flickering bulb, then lifted away the cap, bringing the image of the Comedians forth. The movement caused a flickering image to be projected against the back wall, the projection stretching from the center of the floor all the way up to where it joined with the ceiling. A gray image of the city filled the wall. But that wasn’t what he was interested in. The reels spooled on, until finally the Comedians stepped into the frame, and were suddenly larger than life, standing on the floorboards in the middle of the room even as the bottom right corner of the image on the wall began to blister: one obese, the other unusually thin to the point of being gaunt, both instantly recognizable to a child of a certain age.
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