That alone was enough for it to have caught the desk sergeant’s attention, but coupled with the image captured by the CCTV it was irresistible.
Why so? Because of the criminals.
Julie studied the photo of Marty Crake and Al Clamp, two of the most iconic faces from the black-and-white days of cinema, captured in the middle of breaking into The Magic Circle. They weren’t wearing their trademark bowler hats and didn’t have their familiar goofy expressions on their faces, but it was unmistakably them, even if they’d been dead for the best part of fifty years. There was nothing slapstick—or undead—about either of them. He assumed the burglars were wearing some sort of latex masks to hide their real faces. It wasn’t uncommon to see Margaret Thatcher holding up a convenience store these days, with Neil Kinnock as her sidekick. Ronnie Reagan was ever popular, as were Elvis, Donald Trump, and Ronald McDonald, clowns one and all. Clamp’s mask was perfect, right down to the detailing on the pencil moustache on the fat man’s top lip.
Part of the image seemed overexposed, as though a bright light had damaged the film. Looking more closely at the pair, they appeared to be joined. It was obviously a trick of the angle, but the effect was unnerving.
“Okay, you got me. What did they steal?” Julie asked the desk sergeant, handing the photograph back.
“That’s just it, imagine all the stuff they’ve got in that place, right? It’s full of old tricks, props, posters, programs, toys, photographs; that sort of stuff. It’s all valuable, sure, and to the right sort of collector probably priceless, but it’s not like it’s easily movable. I mean some barrow boy’s hardly going to be selling it down the Portobello Road, put it that way. It’s all specialist stuff. They’ve got a cylinder there that’s a recording of Houdini’s voice. A lot of old stage magicians bequeathed their tricks to the society.”
“So, Crake and Clamp broke in The Magic Circle and stole some dead magician’s trick? Why can we never get fun stuff like this?”
“Actually, according to the boys over in Euston they took a book, not a trick, but yes, it sure beats another knifing on the Rothery, doesn’t it?”
“A book?”
“According to the museum’s curator the only thing missing as far as he can tell is some old magician’s journal. The thieves shattered the glass case it was in, along with a bunch of exhibits he’d donated, but left everything else behind.”
“You’ve got to ask yourself what’s in that book?”
“That place is like the Bank of England. You can’t just walk in and walk out. They’ve got some seriously high-end security there to protect their secrets. And these guys didn’t set off any of it. That means they are good. Pros. Even so, it doesn’t make much sense: this guy has been dead for ninety-odd years. Every secret he had back then, no matter how revolutionary it might have been at the time, has to be pretty passé now, doesn’t it? Penn and Teller have given every game away. Now it’s all David Blaine and Criss Angel. Street magic, not old stage-show stuff like Paul Daniels.”
“Doesn’t mean the right someone wouldn’t kill to get their hands on it.”
“True, Julie. Sadly.”
“So we’ve got a robbery, a dead magician’s journal stolen to order. Some collector will be locking it away in his safe and it’ll never see the light of day again. If it’s valuable enough for them to go to these lengths to get their hands on it, they’re hardly going to leave it lying around on the kitchen table.”
“Again, very true. You’re on fire today, detective. Casting pearls before swine. And speaking of swine, will your partner in crime be joining us this fine morning? Or does he have the good sense to stay in bed?”
“I just talked to him. He’s taking a personal day.”
“Taff having a day off? Fuck me. Seriously? First time for everything, I suppose,” the desk sergeant said. “Why don’t you go up to the dayroom, grab a coffee, put your feet up, and I’ll give you a shout when something comes in.”
He did as he was told.
Ten minutes later WPC Melissa Banks came into the dayroom to claim one of those horrible vending machine coffees before going back into the room with her rape victim. She was giving the doctor time to take his swabs and photographs and give the girl some peace. “Some nights I wonder what the hell I must have done to piss off the universe in a past life,” she said, sinking down onto the couch beside him. “I’ve got a woman in there, battered bloody, half of her face bruises. It’s pretty obvious she’s been through hell, but she can’t tell me a single thing about her attacker beyond the fact he looked like a movie star. That’s it. A movie star. I ask you, Julie, what am I supposed to do with that?”
“Must be the night for it,” Julie said. “Marty Crake and Al Clamp just robbed The Magic Circle.”
She looked at him like he’d lost his mind, and shook her head. “What the fuck’s the world coming to, mate? I miss the old days when things were simple. The bad guys wore striped shirts and carried sacks that said swag on them.”
“It was never like that,” Julie said, but he knew what she meant. It had felt cleaner when he was starting out. Now every fourth call was domestic violence, battery, or sexual assault. The villains didn’t wear striped shirts and Zorro masks over their eyes. They dressed just like everyone else. There was no way to look at someone and see the monster inside without looking at everyone and seeing a monster inside—and that way lay madness.
17
THE BOOK OF THE DEAD
Seth Lockwood opened the door on the bitterly cold morning.
The sun was up, but frost was king. It owned every surface.
There was a thin gray mist in the air, but even that couldn’t hide the curious deformity of his early morning visitors. Or more accurately, visitor. Marty Crake and Al Clamp looked up at him from the doorstep. There was something a little bit pathetic about them, he thought. Anyone who happened to see the exchange would have been forgiven for assuming the two went inside holding hands. The conjoined Comedians were fused at hand and hip, not holding hands. Their creation was flawed, but that didn’t appear to have hindered their efforts to find Damiola’s journal.
He hadn’t expected them to return so soon; that they had could only be good news.
Seth could barely contain his eagerness as he led the pair back through to his upstairs office where the light still burned in the projector. Seth closed the door behind them, making sure they were alone, and gave the reel on the projector’s arm a push as he passed it to take up his seat behind the desk.
The creature wasn’t empty-handed. It clutched a leather-bound book in its two functional hands.
“Is that it?”
Clamp shrugged eloquently as Seth took it from them, the Comedians’ silence not hindering their communication, rather it spoke volumes. Seth cradled it in his hands like it was the most precious thing he had ever touched, which, given what was at stake, it just might have been—if it had the answers he was looking for. The leather was soft and buttery despite its age.
Seth placed it on the desktop.
He ran his fingers across the cover, feeling every grain and indentation in the leather before he cracked open the spine and turned to the first page.
Being the Journal of Cadmus Damiola
And Containing the Fundamental Secrets of His Art
Seth inhaled sharply.
This was it.
Damiola’s diary.
His secrets.
He could barely contain his excitement as he turned to the next page.
It was blank.
He turned the next.
Blank.
And the next.
Blank.
Every single page in the damned book was empty. There were no secrets here. Even in death the illusionist defied him. Excitement turned to rage as Seth drove himself up out of the seat and hurled the book at the far wall. The pages splayed open as it landed, taunting him with their emptiness. “Is this some kind of fucking joke?” He fumed, shoving his chair back. “D
o you think it’s funny?” The Comedians said nothing. They didn’t move. “It’s empty! I gave you one simple task and you failed me! Damiola, you sniveling little cocksucker, are you in there?” He stared at the Comedians as though they were somehow sentient, not merely projections brought to life by some ancient trickery. “Can you hear me? I should shove my hand up your fucking arse and rip your bowels out, you prick.”
The Comedians stared implacably at Lockwood.
“Can you hear me?”
He had no idea if the dead man could—if anything of him resided inside his creations, if they were still linked in any way, or if they were something else entirely: demons, angels, ghosts, echoes? It didn’t matter; he wouldn’t be defied. Not by them. Not when the cost of failure was so high. He was a man of violence. Born of violence. Raised in violence. At home with violence. At peace with it. They might not be flesh and blood, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have a few tricks of his own up his sleeves that would hurt them just the same.
He heard movement downstairs, probably that idiot son of his banging about in his wheelchair. Well, fuck him and fuck the wheels he rode in on. Seth clenched his fist. It would have been easy to lash out, to ride the wave of rage and unleash it in an explosive burst, driving his fists into the fuckers until they bled whatever it was creatures like them bled, but he knew from grim experience it was far more chilling to master his anger; to exist in a state of violent equilibrium.
Seth pressed his fist to his own temple, pushing so hard that it hurt the plates in his skull.
When he took his fist away he was calm.
“I do not accept failure.”
Marty Crake blubbered, fidgeting as silent tears streamed down his face. Al Clamp remained calm, awaiting further instruction.
“One simple task, that was all you had. One task.”
Clamp inclined his head slightly, then shrugged. It was a frustrating gesture only using half of the comedian’s body. Crake looked down at the floor, but not Clamp. He met Seth’s challenge head-on. He put a finger to his lips as though to silence Seth. But the gesture meant something else, didn’t it? Quiet. Hush. A whisper. Secrets. What was he trying to tell Seth? That he’d somehow fulfilled his half of their pact?
“You failed me,” he insisted. “I am your master. I brought you forth. I own you.”
Clamp shook his head.
“Get out of my sight.”
The Comedians held out their hands, as though chained and cuffed, asking for release.
“No,” Seth shook his head. “Bring me what I need to repair the dweomers.”
The Comedians turned and walked slowly across to the other side of the room, where they stooped awkwardly to retrieve the book from where Seth had thrown it. They brought it back to him.
They held out their hands again, miming release.
“You are done when I say you are done. I want that bastard’s secrets.”
Crake pointed at the book.
“This? This thing is worthless! There’s nothing in it! There are no answers in here!” He yelled impotently, tearing a page clean out of the journal, “Look at it. Where is the wisdom?” He crumpled the page up in his fist and walked toward the Comedians. “Can you read a blank page?” He held it up before Crake and Clamp’s eyes. “Can you decipher its secrets?” He waited for an answer from the silent duo. “What does it say? How do I save Glass Town from ninety years of decay and dissolution? How?” He demanded. But of course they had no answers for him. Seth shoved the crumpled page down Clamp’s throat forcing him to swallow the paper just as he had forced Crake to swallow Damiola’s bow tie. “You don’t have a fucking clue!”
Clamp spat out the paper, miming disappointment as he rubbed a curled-up index finger beneath his eye as though wiping away imaginary tears.
Seth drew his hand back, but checked himself a heartbeat before he lashed out and sent the projector spinning across the room. That kind of damage would have been irreparable. It might have been satisfying for a split second, but in the long run it would have weakened him, and that would have been the action of a fool. Seth clenched his fist again; so fiercely this time his nails drew blood from his palm, slowly mastering his temper. He didn’t move or say a word for the longest time, until his breathing was calm and steady instead of the shallow ragged pant it had momentarily become, and he had stopped trembling. Every muscle was taut with barely suppressed rage.
“Give me a reason,” he said, his voice surprisingly calm given the rage inside him. “Tell me why I should snuff your flame out. One good reason and it is done. You have my word.”
The Comedians gestured toward the empty book, as though it not only had all the answers, it was their answer.
Unfortunately for them, it wasn’t one Seth liked.
Crake’s tears stained his cheeks while Al Clamp fumbled desperately with his tie, both parodies of their iconic selves.
“I gave you a chance,” Seth said, sounding oh-so-reasonable. “You did not take it. Now given that you cannot find what I need, and have not won your release, there must be something else you can do for me. I know,” he said, a slow smile spreading across his face. “You can stop Boone’s brat from finding the weakness caused by the damaged lens. You can stop him stumbling into Glass Town and ruining everything. Can you do that? Are you capable of getting something right?”
Clamp nodded eagerly.
Crake mimed walking with his fingers in the air between them.
“No,” Seth shook his head. “On second thoughts, that’s not good enough. Kill the boy. Bring me his heart. Bring me his tongue. Bring me his hands. His cock. Bring him to me in enough pieces that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put poor Josh together again. You can do that, can’t you?”
Crake ran a finger across his throat, pretending to slit it from ear to ear.
“I want you to remember what I’m about to tell you, can you hear me in there, magician? If you can, then let this be written on your soul. Fail me again and you’d wish you could die.”
18
AFTERNOONS AND COFFEE SPOONS
Josh left the flat in Rotherhithe armed with a map to a place that didn’t exist and a head full of questions he couldn’t answer. It was going to be a different kind of day, no matter what happened to him.
Daylight hadn’t made things any clearer, but, and perhaps this was a small mercy, it hadn’t brought any fresh revelations, either.
And no more movie stars had turned up at his door. That was no small thing, given the way yesterday had played out.
As he crossed back over the Thames, Josh knew one thing for sure, and only one: life wasn’t about to get any less complicated. Now it was just a case of living with it.
He’d woken aching everywhere from one of the worst night’s sleep he could remember. Guilt at not going home, or even checking in with his sister and warning her he wasn’t coming back for the night, meaning they were going to worry about him and walk in on the wreckage of the burglary, mixed with a mind alive with the improbabilities plastered across the walls around him made sure of that. Names that until yesterday had meant nothing to him consumed his every waking minute: Damiola, Ruben Glass, Seth Lockwood, Eleanor Raines, even Hitchcock and Glass Town, the Opticron, and, of course, Number 13. They were all alive inside his head. They were more than just names. He felt like he knew them, even the famous ones. They had faces. They belonged to a secret geography of the city that he was beginning to believe only a chosen few knew or even suspected existed.
Suddenly he was one of that number.
He wasn’t sure how that made him feel. Special wasn’t the right word for it. Endangered might have been a better fit, all things considered.
And then there was the scene from Number 13 itself, that moment where Seth Lockwood looked out of the film at him, wearing his newfound cousin’s face … and there was the letter in his pocket that claimed Isaiah had seen Eleanor decades after she’d disappeared, only the woman hadn’t aged a day, whic
h, combined with the way Gideon’s grandson had behaved behind the Scala, left him unable to trust anyone or anything. His head was spinning.
It was all in there, churning about. Refusing to settle.
Josh had copied the thirteen scorch marks from the floor map onto the one on the wall, along with the words one for one, before pocketing it, noting that while they corresponded with landmarks around Spitalfields, Aldgate, and Shadwell, they weren’t in a straight line, Bermuda Triangle–like, or any other easily chartable geometric pattern that might have hidden an entire borough between the folds of the paper. Looking at the marks after he’d meticulously transferred them across offered up no clues, either. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to any of them.
But they had to mean something, didn’t they?
He felt the first fat heavy drops of rain as he made his way up Mansell Street, past the shiny arch of the Tower Gateway DLR station and the insurance offices and windows into a telesales world they offered, reminding him that tomorrow he had to return to the real world, his day spent chained to a desk chasing cold leads. He continued walking toward Aldgate, and eventually to the first landmark he’d drawn on the map, which turned out to be a stuffy little antiquarian bookstore wedged in between a thoroughly modern coffee shop with its mass-produced identical goodies and a pawnbrokers with one of its tarnished brass balls missing.
The words Aldgate Librum were written in an arc of flaking gold across the window, and beneath them purveyors of fine escapes since 1929. Meaning five years before, when Eleanor Raines disappeared, it had been something else. Unfortunately there was no way of knowing what.
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