Glass Town

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Glass Town Page 12

by Steven Savile


  He stepped back into the road and looked up, checking out the façade. He couldn’t see anything remarkable about the building itself. Like something out of Goldilocks it wasn’t too big, wasn’t too small, and was probably just right.

  Shading his eyes, Josh peered in through the rain-streaked glass.

  He couldn’t see anyone moving about inside, but the paper card hanging from the window promised that the place was open. He tried the door. It creaked open, the old hinges desperately needing oil. Josh was hit immediately by the smell of old books as he stepped inside—one of the most unique, and to some romantic, fragrances in the world. To Josh it was just overwhelmingly musty, like there was no nourishment in the air to breathe.

  The interior of the librum was crammed full of books of every variety imaginable, every age and condition, with weathered boards and cracked spines. Some of them had been loved like old friends, while others, still pristine had been cherished like assets waiting to be cashed in. A well-dressed old man—in cravat and morning suit no less—looked up from a ledger he was laboring over to smile at Josh as he shook the rain out of his hair.

  “Welcome to my humble library, my new friend,” the old man said, warmly. “I like to think we have the finest selection of out-of-print and antiquarian texts in the city, but I’d probably be lying if I said that.” He winked conspiratorially, which made Josh smile despite himself.

  “Thanks. I’m just happy it’s dry in here,” Josh said.

  “Might I inquire if you are looking for anything in particular? We have a good selection of philosophy and psychology, religion is always a favorite, as of course are language and literature, while the classics are a mainstay of any shop like ours. We do have a rather fascinating local history section, if I do say so myself.” He must have noticed the way Josh’s interest perked up at the mention of local history, because he came out from behind his counter and swept a wide all-encompassing arm out to invite him to try his luck. Pick a book, any book … the gesture seemed to say. “We are rather at the mercy of what our customers bring in, or more often than not bequeath, as we help move a lot of collections for families of the departed, so there’s no guarantee we have a particular book, but that’s part of the fun. You never know what you might find. Rather like a lucky dip. You are more than welcome to browse what we have, make yourself at home, and feel free to ask questions. If I can possibly help you with your search, I will. I’ve spent so long in here among the stacks I’m pretty sure I know every book inside out.” It was one of the more peculiar sales pitches Josh had ever heard, but like the shop itself, it had a certain charm.

  Josh wandered over to the local history section and started to scan the spines, not really looking for anything in particular, but hoping something would catch his eye. “I don’t suppose,” he ventured after a few minutes, “you’ve got anything about an area called Glass Town, have you?”

  “Glass Town? I don’t believe so. Are you sure it is local?”

  “Honestly, I’m not even sure it exists,” Josh said with a shrug. What did he have to go on other than the obsession of a dead man and the gingerbread trail he’d laid down?

  The old man joined him at the shelves and started seemingly pulling books down at random, thumbing through the pages to get the indices, musing thoughtfully to himself then placing it back on the shelf as one after the other let him down. Another came down and went back up. Finally, after maybe five minutes of theater, the bookseller turned to Josh and said, “Can you perhaps tell me a little more about this place? Perhaps some landmarks or characters, something else I can try and cross-reference?”

  What names did he have? There had been so many in the articles, including of course his own family, but one seemed so logically linked to the whole thing and yet he knew absolutely nothing about the man beyond the fact that he shared his surname with Glass Town and Isaiah had described him as the worst of the lot in his letter, whatever that meant. He said, “Ruben Glass? I don’t know much if anything about him, save that he would have been around in the twenties, maybe the thirties, and was somehow tied to a stage magician who went by the name of Damiola. Does that help?”

  The bookseller shrugged. “We shall have to see, but that name does ring a bell,” he lifted down a compendium of old Strand magazines from the day, scanning the adverts as well as the articles, until he found what he was looking for.

  It was a small advert beside similar ones for gentleman’s clothing, but where they promised an array of top hats and tails, this one featured a line drawing of a man, Ruben Glass, who cordially invited people to the opening of The Glass Film House on Latimer Road where he would be premiering the role that would make Myrna Shepherd one of the most talked about actresses of the time, raising her up to the pantheon of silent stars that included the stunning beauty of Louise Brooks and Greta Garbo: The Flower Girl of Belgravia.

  Any link between Glass and the actress, even one as intangible as this, was enough to prove he was on to something, wasn’t it? Could The Glass Film House be the same old cinema that lay in ruins behind the Scala? The derelict building was on Latimer Road.

  “‘Between Notting Hill and Wormwood Scrubs lies a vast desert of human dwellings…’”

  “Sorry?”

  “That was how Horace Newt once described Latimer Road,” the bookseller said. “‘A vast desert of human dwellings.’ Paints a vivid picture of early twentieth-century working-class life in the city, don’t you think?”

  Josh had no idea who Horace Newt was, but he couldn’t argue; his few carefully chosen words painted a particular vivid description of the squalor that must have been the city back then.

  The bookseller took down another book; this one called simply The London That Never Was: The Crime of the Century and thumbed through the pages until he found what he was looking for. “Here we are,” he said, “‘Mister Glass was new money. He had a dream of creating a Hollywood in London a decade before J. Arthur Rank laid the first bricks of Pinewood.’” He broke away from reading to opine, “He was murdered, you know? Quite the scandal.”

  Now the man had Josh’s attention.

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Yes, here we are,” he stopped turning the pages. “There were a few books about it back in the day. This one only offers a brief summary, but has, I believe, all of the salient facts. There was talk of Hitchcock adapting one of the more famous accounts, given the salacious nature of the scandal, but obviously that never came to pass. Now I come to think of it, Glass Town might have been the name he’d suggested for his movie studio, a rough play on Holly Wood, but I wouldn’t like to stake my life on it. There was a global economic crash, which halted the development of the entire film industry. You must remember it was just a fledgling industry at the time, and massive risk was involved, even if people were flocking to gaze adoringly at Valentino and Garbo up on the silver screen. Glass lost a not-so-small fortune trying to build his studio, money he had raised by drawing loans and favors from one of the oldest criminal families of the East End. I’m trying to recall … yes, here we are, Lockwood. That was the family. Thoroughly nasty souls. Of course nothing could ever be proven. When Glass was burned alive there was talk that the killing was a falling out among thieves. They found traces of silver nitrate residue on his corpse, believed to be a mocking reference to his failed endeavor, silver nitrate being an essential part of the filmmaking process back then.”

  “So Glass Town got him killed?” Josh said, his mind racing.

  “I suppose you could say that,” the bookseller nodded. “Fascinating case, all things considered. One of the first real gangland stories of our city. Of course, it’s all but forgotten now in the shadow of the Krays.”

  “How about the stage magician, Damiola?”

  “Other than you just mentioning it, I can’t say the name rings any bells, but then I’ve never been a great follower of celebrity, but if he’s of note, then perhaps there’ll be something in here.” He pulled down another book, this o
ne seemingly a history of London theater and easily as old as the bookseller himself, and began leafing through it.

  “Ah, here we are, Cadmus Damiola, I do believe we’ve found the fellow. Who needs the internet, eh? So, let’s see what history has got to say about him, shall we?” The bookseller thumbed back through the pages to those referenced in the index, and started to read. “‘After delighting the crowds of the capital for eighteen months with his wondrous Opticron, a curious contraption that ostensibly allowed viewers to spy other worlds through its many lenses, the magician confounded fans and critics alike by walking away from the spotlight. Fêted by none other than Harry Houdini himself, Damiola gave his final performance on the evening of Saturday, 12 January 1924, in the Adelphi Theatre on the Strand, never to be seen again. The show had been booked to run for three more weeks, but all subsequent performances were canceled. Rumors abounded at the time that he had fallen foul of key figures in the East End underworld and that his disappearance may not have been entirely voluntary. A body, believed to be his, was found some five years later, and interred at Ravenshill Cemetery, in East London. All of his tricks, mechanisms, journals, and paraphernalia of his act, bar the Opticron that made his name, were donated to The Magic Circle by his heirs.’” The bookseller tutted and closed the book. “Well, well, well, quite the character, wouldn’t you say? It does make you wonder if they may not be the same hoodlums who gave Glass such a hard time, doesn’t it?”

  Josh wasn’t about to say what he thought, but it would seem to be linked, at least on the surface. Damiola’s final curtain call was the night before Eleanor Raines disappeared. Glass was in Lockwood’s debt, the magician in his pocket. At every turn he kept coming up against the specter of Seth Lockwood and his hateful family. It had gone far beyond the realms of coincidence.

  They tried some of the other names, including Seth and Isaiah, but had no joy.

  As an afterthought he asked the man, “Does the word ‘Annwyn’ mean anything to you?”

  “Why, yes, it most certainly does. It is one of the many names they used to give to the druidic underworld during the age of the Celts.”

  “Underworld? Like Hell?”

  “And Hades, and the others, indeed one and the same. It was ruled by Arawn, the Horned God, who himself is the root of the once and future king legend we associate with the mythical Arthur.”

  Josh had no idea why Boone had noted the name, Annwyn, not once, but twice, or how it related to the disappearance of Eleanor Raines, but the old man must have written it down for a reason, along with all of those mythological references on the third wall. He’d just have to keep chasing until he could make sense of it all. Boone had had a lifetime with this stuff, after all. He couldn’t expect to unravel it all in a night.

  He asked about the cemetery, as it wasn’t one he was familiar with.

  “Gone,” the bookseller explained. “Lost in The Blitz. I’m not entirely sure what’s left beyond a marker stone and a broken gateway, maybe a few of the old stones. It’s not far from here, in the shadow of the Tower,” he hooked a thumb back over his shoulder indicating the city’s most famous landmark. “Which is of course where it drew its name, right on the old wall where the city proper ends and the East End begins.”

  The bookseller invited Josh to share a snifter in the hopes that he would tell him more about his interest in Damiola, Ruben Glass, his cinematic studio Glass Town, and the gangsters in Josh’s family tree, but Josh wanted to visit some of the other places on his map before dark.

  Not that he expected to find Glass Town—which if he was being brutally honest with himself, he doubted existed outside of a dead man’s increasingly desperate obsession and another dead man’s foolish dream—but it was a mystery and there weren’t enough mysteries in the world anymore.

  That, and it was his legacy.

  Boone had wanted him to have Isaiah’s letter, which surely meant that Boone had wanted him to carry on looking for Eleanor. He loved his grandfather, so how could he deny him his final wish? He couldn’t, obviously. But there was a huge difference between taking a few days and dedicating the rest of his life to something. He wasn’t Isaiah. This wasn’t his story. Isaiah had never stopped looking for the woman he loved. He’d become so fixated on her disappearance he’d broken away from his own family, turned his back on his own brother, married her sister, and taken her name as he disappeared down the rabbit hole of his obsession. And then he’d passed it on through the family like some kind of perverse inheritance until it had found its way to his great-grandson. Josh wasn’t going to let it claim his life. He’d give it another day, walk around the remaining sites on the map, chalk them off one by one, and if he didn’t miraculously stumble upon the secrets of Glass Town and Damiola’s trickery, then at least he’d tried, right? Couldn’t say fairer than that.

  He spent five hours wandering the streets around Aldgate, Spitalfields, and Shadwell, pushing through suits rushing to and from meetings, looking at the cracks in the pavement and the clothes the pedestrians wore, trying to see if he could pick out anything that looked obviously out of time. It was next to impossible, because London was a city entirely built around eclecticism and the aesthetics of dozens of cultures and time periods with fashion ranging from the baroque and steampunkish to the plain old punk by way of burqas and band T-shirts and everything else imaginable. Kids wandered by in furry costumes with animal ears. No one walked around with a sign that said I just stepped out of 1924 and no matter how intently he stared at the cracks in the pavement or peered around the corners of buildings he didn’t once catch a glimpse of another world.

  One by one he chalked off the sites with no more joy than the last, and none of them seemed to have anything in common with any of the others. A bar; a bookies; an abandoned church on a street corner, its steeple missing a dozen slates; an old movie theater that had died when the multiplexes came; a supermarket; a trendy clothes store; a secondhand record shop with its shutters rolled down; a café called Paper Cups; a block of maisonettes; the gates of a Jewish cemetery; the courtyard of a disused hospital that was in the process of being converted to luxury little pieds-à-terre; and a payday loan place, the modern version of the pawnbrokers, the stylized checkbook of its logo hanging out over the pavement. Some of them were abandoned, some quite obviously repurposed from whatever they might have been in another life, while a couple were untouched from the ’20s, but there was no rhyme or reason to why Boone had marked them out.

  He looked on the walls for a sign, a small tag of graffiti or something that would imply a link between the sites, but whilst there was plenty of creative street art on display at some of the sites the others were painfully bland. He looked for scratches or markings in the flagstones of the floor, remembering what his mum had always said about stepping on the cracks breaking your mum’s back. He looked for anything vaguely cinematic, thinking that maybe that was the link. Nothing. Or rather plenty of things. He was in a city full of them. But none of them offered some readily apparent red thread running through them like the room back at Boone’s secret place.

  As the day wore on it grew more and more frustrating, feeling like he’d taken one step forward at the bookstore and two steps back since leaving it.

  Josh browsed through the racks in the trendy clothes shop feeling very much out of place in his slept-in funeral suit. He walked through the Jewish cemetery, marveling at how the gravestones were packed in one upon another like a crazy game of dead-man Tetris to fill every available space, and listened to a tour guide explain how they’d buried the dead vertically instead of horizontally to make the most of the expensive real estate. It was practical if nothing else. He stopped for an overpriced latte in the café and posed as a potential buyer to walk around the hospital grounds.

  Nothing.

  Even though it wasn’t on his map, Josh went to Spitalfields Market and walked the perimeter, looking down every alleyway and each narrow street around Brick Lane and thereabouts purely because Isaiah
had thought he’d seen Eleanor there.

  He saw more of London that afternoon and early evening than he would normally see of it in a month, but not once did he notice anything to suggest that Glass Town was anything more than an old man’s obsession whatever it might have been once.

  After a while it began to feel like he was going slightly mad. At one point he thought he caught a glimpse of a couple dressed as Crake and Clamp, probably on their way to a costume party. They certainly looked the part. But other than that, London presented him with its most mundane face. The most excitement he got was when a couple of spiky-haired girls ran past singing Duran Duran’s “Union of the Snake” before disappearing hand in hand into a sex store on the fringe of Soho.

  It was dusk. The offices turned out for the night. He didn’t want to be seen by anyone he knew from work. Josh finally admitted defeat. He wasn’t going to miraculously stumble into the lost world of Ruben Glass’s cinematic ambition.

  Hungry, he ducked into a not-so greasy spoon and ordered himself an all-day breakfast, which really was stretching the limits of the definition of “all day,” taking it into the night. He perched on one of the high window stools to wait for it, and stared out into space. The rain, which had been on and off all afternoon turned into a proper downpour. Water rushed down the gutter, filling the drains faster than they could carry it away. A couple of people rushed by, heads down, while a woman walked more sedately through the rain, an umbrella obscuring her face. She wore heels and stockings with a seam so straight it must have been drawn in. It was only because he was staring at her legs that he saw the newspaper headline on the side of the kiosk. ANOTHER FINE MESS AS COMEDIANS ROB MAGIC CIRCLE. He couldn’t help but grin and would have gone to grab a paper, but the vendor was long gone. He craned his neck trying to see the woman with the straight seams, but her brisk stride had carried her out of sight.

  With nothing to do but wait, Josh thought about calling home to check in with Lexy, but as he fished his phone out of his pocket he saw that it was dead, so that killed that idea.

 

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