Marty Crake and Al Clamp, one of the most irreverent comic pairings of the last century. They weren’t exactly darlings of the silver screen in the way that Fatty Arbuckle and Harold Lloyd were, or the more famous pairing of Laurel and Hardy. Crake and Clamp were pioneers of black comedy. There was nothing gentle or slapstick about their physical routines.
The image threatened to break up completely, a gauze of flickering frames blurring the Comedians as the projection lost its focus, and the film began to blister. The acrid tang of burning filled the room as wisps of black smoke curled away from the projector.
The film burned under the heat of the bulb, damaging the invocation. Something was wrong with the Comedians, Seth realized. Where there should have been two men there was only one, conjoined at hand and hip where the film had blistered during their summoning.
Behind them, the image of the city began to melt as the film burned inside the projector.
The stench of sodium nitrate was overpowering now, completely drowning the subtler, richer smell of old leather. There was nothing Seth could do. He couldn’t force the invocation to accelerate or rip them out of the film, they had to emerge naturally, in their own good time, but the flames did more damage to them by the second. He breathed deeply and waited. No amount of damage to the Comedians would prevent them from doing what he needed them to, though it would limit their efficiency and how they could be deployed. They couldn’t walk unnoticed through the streets of London if they were badly misshapen, fire-damaged freaks.
The Comedians looked at him expectantly as their film world burned out around them. Gradually they became more substantial, taking on the physicality their comedy was famous for, until they were finally whole. Behind them the cityscape was consumed in a blackened blister of burned film. It was like watching the end of the world through the lens of a 1920s disaster movie. The only sound in the office was the quick slap-slap-slap of the broken end of the film strip coming up against the metal projector as the reel spun around and around with nothing to show for its effort.
It was done.
Before the projection of the Comedians could burn out along with the rest of the film, Seth took a letter opener from inside one of the desk drawers and sliced his finger with it, drawing blood.
He winced as he held the wound over the projector, squeezing it to force his blood drip onto the lens.
As the first drop hit, it sizzled away on the glass, the second and third likewise, coming together to form a thin crust over the glass. Fueled by his blood, the Comedians would be trapped here for as long as he needed them to serve him.
Seth Lockwood sat down behind his desk.
He needed to think through his next words carefully, because once the Comedians were released, there was no recalling them until their task was done. He couldn’t afford to waste them. He needed to think this through and be absolutely sure he knew what he was going to demand of the conjuration; and that meant finding the precise words. Precision was vital. There was no room for misinterpretation. Once the Comedians were fed, they wouldn’t forget. Those words would become their lifeblood. They would draw sustenance from them. They would draw strength from them. And they would find purpose in them.
The Comedians waited patiently for his instructions.
“It is time,” he said, finally, drawing a deep breath. “The dweomers around Glass Town are failing, and soon must fall. I believe Damiola left instructions for this eventuality among his things. He must have. He thought of everything. Bring them to me. Your service is not through until the dweomers are restored once more and my love is safe. Do you understand? You are not spent until Glass Town is secure. There is no release. You will live on to serve until I see fit to allow you to pass.”
The Comedians bowed their head in acknowledgment.
When Crake looked up again there were tears in his eyes.
Hardly sympathetic, Clamp cuffed his partner across the back of the head with the only hand that was actually his, and rolled his eyes exasperatedly.
“This was his,” Seth said, taking the bow tie out of the final envelope. He rose from his chair and met the uncanny conjuration in the center of the room. He lifted the bow tie to Marty Crake’s mouth, clamping his free hand around the comedian’s jaw and forced it open so that he could feed Crake the bow tie. “Taste him on it. Taste him on the cloth. Go on.” He forced it all the way down with his fingers and closed Crake’s mouth, causing him to swallow over and over until he could be sure the conjuration wouldn’t regurgitate it. The Comedians might look human, despite the bluish light at their core, but they were anything but. When people talked about selling their soul to Hollywood, this was what they were buying. Immortality. Though not the kind of immortality they ever dreamed of. Sometimes it was better to be forgotten. To slip away. But the camera never forgot. That was the point of it; its sole reason for being, to remember. No matter how old an image was, how discolored or faded it might be, how blurred or granulated its composition or how badly it had deteriorated, it abided. A frozen moment. An eternity. And as long as it abided there was always going to be someone there to remember it.
Damiola understood that.
The magic was in sustaining the image, preserving the memory, and through his carousel he had found a way of bringing it back to life. It was good old Hollywood magic.
“It is all I have of him. But it is rich with his flavor. His sweat, drawn out by the stage lights night after night, soaked into that material. That is him. His essence. He is inside you. The man was unique. There wasn’t another like him in this entire shithole of a place. Given that, it shouldn’t be hard to find him amid all the filth of London. So go. Go forth. Hunt. Do not return here until you have found his secrets. He was a magician. He must have recorded the workings of every trick he ever did. Glass Town was his masterpiece. There must be instructions somewhere. Find them. I will save his greatest creation, even if I have to tear down half of London to do it. And you will not fail me. Do you understand?”
Crake chewed on the black tie.
The fat man looked at his other half and nodded. A star of the silent age, he had no words to say. There was nothing that needed to be said. Seth knew how this particular conjuration worked. There was nowhere Isaiah’s get could hide that the Comedians couldn’t find him.
15
SLEEPLESS
Julius Gennaro couldn’t sleep.
That in itself wasn’t unusual. He wasn’t the deepest sleeper at the best of times, and living in the middle of what became the last bastion for whores and junkies every weekend night there was more than enough going on to wake him whenever he threatened to find refuge in it. He had been planning on moving out for the best part of a year, but without getting a roommate the ridiculous property prices in the city meant it was a choice of a desirable cupboard in a decent area or this.
This won for now, but it wouldn’t win forever.
Something had to give.
There was an air of decrepitude about the entire area that could only be found in the old red-brick terraces of London. It wasn’t so much that they’d crumbled as they’d been beaten down year after year through living done hard, skilled laborers being written off by the country they’d broken their backs for, their children and children’s children left to grow up with a bitterness that went back generations.
A wag had painted a big red NO on the Hope Street sign under his window. That just about summed it up.
Tonight’s insomnia wasn’t just down to the usual backstreet symphony of the loved and unlovely, though. There were other reasons for it; chemically, no doubt, the caffeine had a large part to play in his mind refusing to settle. He’d never been a coffee drinker, but Taff insisted on doing the rounds of designer cafés and the greasy spoons, putting merciless pressure on his bladder and gulping down enough caffeine to keep a herd of wildebeests going on one hell of a rampage. But beyond the chemical there was something else: the suspicious little part of his mind that made him a half-decent cop
per refused to shut off. He had no idea what other officers were like, but with Julie, once his mind got hold of something it wouldn’t rest until it had worked it out. He’d worry at it. Pull and push and prod until something gave. It was why he couldn’t read books and made a lousy companion in the cinema—he was obsessed with knowing. And right now, lying in bed staring up at the shadows conjured by the chip shop’s lights reflected over the galaxy of plaster spirals stippling his ceiling, he was obsessing about one thing: Taff Carter had never once ducked out of clocking off.
It was a stupid thing to be keeping him awake, but he couldn’t let it go.
The thing was he knew his partner.
Taff was a stickler for rules and regulations. He was a by-the-book kind of man. That was just who he was. Some of the younger beat cops called him Jobby Carter—short for Jobsworth—behind his back, because where they were tempted to give an inch and take a yard, Taff was a stick in the mud, or up the arse, or any other variant of inflexible that came to mind involving sticks not bending.
Julie had always figured his partner was just a bit fixated when it came to routines.
Until tonight.
And that bothered him.
So he lay there trying to work out what was different about today. And what really got under his skin was the fact that there was nothing different about it. It had been pretty much business as usual, apart from the woman in white, the same as every other day they had spent together. So why had Taff bailed on him rather than head back to the station for the change of shifts? What was so urgent he couldn’t do it ten minutes later?
Julie worked backward through everything he could remember, watching the shadows change as the owner of the takeaway closed for another night, the 2 a.m. shift done. As the sign went out, it left the moon to light his cramped little room.
Julie could smell the fat and grease in the air. It wasn’t conducive to deep thought, but no matter how he looked at it, nothing out of the ordinary had happened, even if the shift had ended with a bit of excitement over at the Rothery. That was a common enough occurrence.
So why break the habit tonight?
It could only be the woman.
Taff had been single for as long as Julie could remember, not that they talked much about sex and women, or the lack of both in their lives. Taff was more of a rugby and real ale kind of conversationalist, though he had a surprising love of jazz, which didn’t quite fit with the man’s rough edges; whereas Julie was your metrosexual modern man happy to talk about art exhibitions, world news, politics, religion, changing gender roles, gay marriage, underground music, or anything else he’d found within the pages of The Guardian. Chalk and cheese. It made the shifts interesting.
But as far as he could figure, the woman was the only thing that made sense. And even then it was stretching the definition of sense to a point far off in the distance. Closing time wasn’t exactly the ideal dating hour, unless you were paying by the hour and didn’t want to worry about the niceties of social convention.
He sighed.
Was he overthinking things?
Was it just a case of Taff needing to be somewhere, all quite innocent, and trusting a friend to help him out no questions asked?
Maybe. Probably. But the problem was the no-questions-asked part.
As he pondered that, Julius couldn’t help but wonder if there was any significance to where Taff had dropped him off? The Hunter’s Horns was right on the boundary of the Rothery, by the green and the lightning-struck tree. They used to joke that beyond that corner lay nothing, like on the old maps that said Here Be Dragons. The only reason to drop him off there, so close to the station, was if Taff’s business would take him back into the estate, wasn’t it? Otherwise it would have been quicker to drive on. So was he meeting a woman in the Rothery?
Julie gave up on sleep for a while, and went through to the kitchen area—it wasn’t an actual kitchen, just a workbench and a sink—to grab a glass of milk from the fridge and sit on the windowsill in the lounge and stare out into London.
By three in the morning he was so convinced his partner was in trouble he sent Taff a text asking him to call, just to let him know everything was okay, but of course there was no call. Why would there be? It was 3 a.m. and Taff would be off in the land of nod dreaming, no doubt, of big-breasted women to a soundtrack of soft jazz.
That didn’t help Julius Gennaro sleep.
Just after three he jumped in the shower. The old pipes took an age to warm up, so he suffered five excruciating minutes of ice-cold water streaming down his body through gritted teeth, and toweled himself off colder than before he went in. He went back through to the kitchen area and brewed a cup of coffee, putting an extra spoonful of instant powder into the cup, and then tried Taff again.
Still no answer.
But again, why would there be? It was barely 3:15. And they weren’t due back on duty until midafternoon. He was asleep, just like Julie ought to be.
He pulled on a T-shirt with a faded barbed-wire fist emblazoned on the chest and a pair of jeans already worn threadbare on the right thigh. Both were relatively new, designer secondhand chic, or in other words it cost a lot of money to look this scruffy. Julie stuffed his feet into a battered pair of Adidas, grabbed a leather jacket from a hook by the door, and headed out.
It was a night for firsts—the first time Taff had cried off from clocking out, and the first time Julie had visited his partner’s house.
He saw a black cab on the corner, and ran down the middle of the road to catch it, waving his arms above his head to make sure the cabbie saw him and didn’t drive off. Clambering in the back he gave the driver the address and settled back in for the ride.
Ten minutes later the black cab pulled up outside Taff’s house.
Eleven minutes after he’d left the flat Julie stood in the street looking at the dark windows of Taff Carter’s bedroom. All he needed was the boom box to hold over his head. He smiled at that.
He couldn’t tell if there was a woman in there.
Part of him really hoped there was, and that his partner was getting lucky. It would be good to be worrying about nothing. But another part of him was convinced the dark windows meant something was wrong, which, given it was the middle of the night and every other window in the street was dark, was completely irrational. There was just something about the place that felt off.
Julie had two choices, ring the bell or turn around and head back to his own bed. The smart money was on option two, not that he would have been able to fall asleep, but he was never going to do that.
He rang the bell and waited.
When there was no answer he rattled the letterbox.
Then he rang the doorbell some more.
No answer.
No signs of a light coming on up upstairs.
No complaints or groans from behind the door.
He went down on his knees and shouted, “Taff!” through the letterbox, rattling it loudly enough one of the neighbor’s lights came on and a hoarse voice shouted, “Shut the fuck up will you! We’re trying to sleep! Don’t make me call the police!”
“I am the police,” Julie shouted back, shutting them up. He hammered on the door with his clenched fist, yelling Taff’s name at the top of his voice until a light finally came on inside.
A few seconds later his partner opened the door.
Taff was dressed in a pair of piss-stained boxer shorts and a terry toweling dressing gown that hung open to the waist. He had a look of utter contentment and a pair of sunglasses on his face. He didn’t say anything. He stood on the welcome mat and smiled, but there was no real welcome or warmth there. He kept the door between them and didn’t move to let Julie inside. There was a faint bluish light on the landing behind him; a nightlight maybe. Was his partner afraid of the dark?
“Jesus, Taff,” Julie said, relief flooding his system at the sight of the Welshman. He hadn’t realized how much of a state he’d managed to work himself up into until he saw Taff s
tanding there in one piece, larger than life, a stupid grin on his face, obviously without a care in the world. “Why didn’t you answer your bloody phone, you prick? Or the door? Or just … fuck it, mate, this isn’t how you treat your partner. We’re in this shit together. I was starting to get really worried about you.”
“Worried? Why?”
Julie had to shrug ruefully at that. Why indeed? Because he hadn’t clocked out? So much for doing a mate a favor. “You know me, letting my imagination run away with itself. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I won’t be in tomorrow, though. I’m taking a personal day. I think I deserve it. Now go away, Julie. I want to be alone.” Taff said. There was something in his voice, not anguish, not euphoria but something in between that had no business being there. Taff slammed the door in Julie’s face before he could ask him about it, or why he was wearing sunglasses in the middle of the night.
16
ANOTHER FINE MESS
“So, what have you got for me today?” Julie Gennaro asked the desk sergeant an hour later.
“You should be asleep, kiddo. You look like hell.”
“I should be,” he agreed. “But as you can see, I’m not. And I hate sitting around, so I figured I’d roll in early.”
“Ah, the dedication of youth.”
“If that’s what you want to call it.”
“We’ve got a couple of drunks sleeping it off in the cells, Melissa’s in with a woman who came in to report a sexual assault, got the doc waiting to do a rape kit. Other than that, pretty quiet, all things considered. They’re having more fun over at Euston by the sounds of it.”
“Yeah?”
The desk sergeant rifled through a sheaf of papers, looking for a printout. He put it on the counter between them.
“A CCTV shot from a robbery in progress on Stephenson Way about two hours ago. Take a look.”
Stephenson Way was a few minutes walk from Kings Cross. A fairly unremarkable street, all things considered. There were dozens just like it in a five-minute radius of the train station. And on that unremarkable street there was an equally unremarkable brownstone building. The street and the brownstone might have been unremarkable, but once through the door everything inside was about as remarkable as you got, even in a city like London. This one particular building contained a hidden theater, a miraculous floating staircase, and the largest collection of magical memorabilia in the country. It was the home of The Magic Circle.
Glass Town Page 10