Glass Town

by Steven Savile

  A few minutes later the waitress brought over a chipped white cup and poured a strong black coffee into it. He thanked her and continued to gaze into the middle distance, watching the world go by.

  He was out of ideas.

  So much for solving a mystery that had haunted his family for generations with one day’s legwork hoofing it around London like some half-arsed Indiana Jones. He smiled wryly at the arrogance of youth.

  Eventually the food came, swimming in tomato sauce. Two fried eggs over greasy Cumberland sausage, rashers of bacon, button mushrooms, and hash browns to soak it all up. It tasted exactly how a fry-up was meant to taste, and starving, Josh wolfed it down like a death-row prisoner knowing there’d be no last-minute reprieve.

  So intent was he upon the feast he didn’t realize the woman had returned and was watching him from the street corner.

  19

  ELEANOR

  Eleanor Raines stood on the street corner as long as she dared, looking like the tragic central focus in a melancholic painting of the city in the rain.

  He looked so much like Isaiah sitting there, framed by the window and the streaks of rain running down its glass.

  So very, very much like him.

  It was uncanny.

  For a moment she caught herself thinking it might actually be him, that somehow he’d found a way to cling on to time without the need of the illusionist’s prison, but the longer she watched him the more she became sure he wasn’t the man she’d loved and lost for all that he looked so very like him. They could so easily have come from the same soul split in two.

  He was different; the way he brushed the lock of hair out of his eyes so he could see the food, that he was left-handed when he ate, not right, that he touched his temple when he was thinking, massaging it counterclockwise. He was narrower across the shoulder and broader across the smile as he thanked the waitress for the refill, but more than anything, he seemed content inside his own skin, happy enough to eat alone without needing to engage with the world around him. She liked that about him. Was that how Isaiah would have been if he’d been allowed to grow up normally?

  She leaned back against the wall, angling the umbrella to better see the man in the café window.

  He cradled his cup, gazing out into the middle kingdoms.

  How could he be anything other than Isaiah’s kin? Just look at him …

  Of course, it wasn’t the first time she’d seen him. Eleanor had watched him outside of the church yesterday as they buried Isaiah’s boy. That was hard, not walking up to him before he walked inside and just holding him and pretending he was someone he wasn’t, sharing his grief. But she’d had no business being there so she turned to go without saying a word only to see Seth leading his own son through the wooden lych-gate into the graveyard. Without thinking, she ran. She ran hard and fast, stumbling on her heels and having to grab a stranger to stop from falling in her panic. As he tried to help her she pushed away from him and ran on, knowing she was drawing attention to herself even as she did it.

  She couldn’t risk Seth seeing her.

  He didn’t know she was here, back in London.

  He didn’t know she’d found a way to slip between the cracks and escape her prison—if only for a few hours at a time. That snatched freedom was the most precious thing in her life. He could never know about it. Never.

  But the boy had come looking for her, hadn’t he? Even though he hadn’t seen her, and she didn’t know his name, he was trying to find her. Like father, like son, and now like great-grandson.

  Maybe he’d be the one?

  That was the only explanation for his tour today. He’d taken in all of the anchors, even if he didn’t know what he was looking for, or how close he had been to stumbling up it. One, even two, might have been chance, but not all thirteen of them.

  He was following Damiola’s pathway, even if he didn’t know it.

  Which meant he knew about Glass Town.

  And that, in turn, meant he knew about her.

  So there was hope, wasn’t there? Hope that he would be the one who finally freed her for more than an hour or two from that Hell of Damiola’s making. Hope that one day it would finally be over. The bitter truth was that hope was a bastard that wouldn’t leave her alone to die. She would have been better off without it.

  She looked at her distant reflection, knowing even as she did that it was aging faster than anything around her, time desperately trying to catch up with her flesh. She couldn’t stay out here much longer. Even a few minutes more out here breathing the air of the twenty-first century, drinking in the life that had outpaced her, surrounded by all of these things she barely understood and had no place being among, and there’d be no arresting its merciless assault on her flesh. And no hiding it from Seth. He wasn’t a fool. He’d know what fresh wrinkles meant.

  And would that be such a bad thing, to simply wither away and finally die? Eleanor wondered.

  There was a limit to how long she could stay in the city before time and life caught up with her. She could feel it now, tightening her skin, drying it out and stretching it across her old bones. One day, maybe even one day soon, she’d stay out here and let it take her. It was tempting, the idea that it would all finally be over. But not today, no matter how much she hated her life, no matter how much of a prisoner she was to it, to Damiola, and Lockwood and that bastard Glass, it was still her life and she couldn’t surrender it while there was still hope it might be saved.

  Even if that hope had tomato sauce on his chin.

  Using her lipstick she wrote a message for him on the wall, and hoped he would find it.

  20

  LOST GIRL

  Josh cleaned his plate and set the knife and fork down at a slight angle on it. It always made him smile, but there was no getting around the little habits that were ingrained in him thanks to years growing up with Boone. There were proper ways to do things, like setting your knife and fork down together at five twenty-five on the clock face of the plate.

  The weather had worsened over the last thirty minutes.

  London looked particularly sodden, but then the city was getting used to flooding—well, vacillating between flood and drought, to be more factually accurate—and had been for the last few years. The weather reports were filled with freak floods, freak snows, freak hailstorms with hailstones the size of golf balls, and stock footage of people sandbagging their doors and canoeing down the middle of what had been the road. The rain never seemed to drain away, meaning every year the water table rose a little higher, meaning every year the streets flooded a little faster than the last as though Mother London was trying to wash away her sins. Even the Thames Barrier, the last great defense against the elements, built to save the city from flooding, was next to useless as the water table had essentially risen above its protection in the few short years since its completion.

  A kid hunched over the curb, making a paper boat out of a nightclub flier to set sail down the gutter as a black cab aquaplaned around the corner soaking her. Unperturbed, the kid scrambled forward on her hands and knees and launched her paper boat in the taxi’s wake. The little boat was stubborn.

  Josh looked up from the girl and saw red writing on the wall that he knew hadn’t been there ten minutes ago. He couldn’t read it from where he was, and the rain was already making it run.

  He pushed himself out of his seat and hurried out of the door and across the street, nearly getting himself run over in the process. The driver yelled something at him out of his window. He wasn’t listening. He stared at the wall, and then grabbed the kid, who wriggled like a lizard in a tin trying to break free of his grasp. “Did you see who wrote this?”

  “Get your hands off me, you fuckin’ perv!” Only it sounded like fackin when she said it. “You want Yewtree chasing you?”

  “Did you see who wrote this?” Josh asked again, ignoring her protests and twisting her around so that she could see the two red words dripping like blood down the wall: Find
Me.

  “I didn’t see nuffin,” the girl grumbled, but he refused to let her squirm away. “’n I’m serious about Yewtree so get your hands off me, mister.”

  “So you saw something?” Josh said, turning the double negative around.

  “What? I just said, I didn’t see nuffin. You stupid?”

  “Forget it,” he said, letting go of her collar. She went sprawling across the pavement, and then looked up at him like he’d completely betrayed her by actually letting her go like she’d asked him to.

  “She went that way,” the girl nodded down the street, toward the huge market hall filled with designer foods packaged up at designer prices.

  “What did she look like? What was she wearing?”

  The girl shook her head. “Dunno. Pretty. Long coat. I couldn’t see her face because of the umbrella.”

  “Think. Please. Anything you can remember that might help?”

  The girl sat there on the wet paving slabs looking up at him as she made a show of thinking. “Long yellow coat. Red umbrella.”

  He’d seen her, he realized. Not only had he seen her, he’d sat there admiring her legs, or rather the impossibly straight black seams of her stockings. It had to be her. “Thank you.”

  Josh started to run in the direction the girl had indicated, the soles of his shoes slapping on the wet paving slabs. The pavement was slick and slippery. He twisted and dodged around a couple of pedestrians shuffling along like the walking dead, and reached the corner, looking left and right.

  The downpour intensified, the rain spiking up six inches off the road around him. He couldn’t hear for the drumming and the whistle of the wind as it howled through the high buildings, rattling windowpanes and loose tiles. It was like staring out into a gale, but there she was, a couple of hundred yards away, about to disappear around another corner. It had to be her. And if he let her walk around that corner he knew he’d be letting her walk out of his life just like that. So the rain could pour and the wind could howl, he wasn’t slowing down or stopping.

  He ran faster, gritting his teeth and calling, “Wait!” after her, but his words were drowned out by the rain.

  She didn’t slow down.

  She didn’t look back.

  She walked into the heart of the storm even as it whipped up into a righteous fury. The ferocity of it, and the speed it came on, was frightening. It was as if the elements were trying to keep them apart, the universe conspiring to keep its secrets.

  Josh kept his head down and fought his way across the road, following her onto a narrower street. The tarmac changed into cobblestones halfway down the street. He looked up, trying to see her. The rain streamed down his face. He wiped it away, but it didn’t matter how much he rubbed at his face it kept getting in his eyes, stinging and blurring his vision and making it impossible to focus as it tried to drive his head down.

  There were no shops on this street.

  Gone were the lunch restaurants and designer delis. Gone were the secondhand stores and the florists and the offices.

  He stumbled into what quite literally felt like another world—a Victorian slice of London that must surely have been unchanged since the time of the good Queen herself, and more aptly, since the days of Number 13. The cobbles were worn smooth and there was no white line down the middle of the road. If he’d reached out, he could have touched the buildings on either side of him as he ran down the middle of the street, it was that claustrophobic. There were fewer people here, but the street felt twice as crowded because it was so narrow. The second storey of the nearest buildings loomed in over him, casting deep shadows across the street as it narrowed yet again, until it felt no wider than his shoulders.

  “Wait! Please!” Josh called.

  She heard him this time, and visibly hesitated before she threw a backward glance over her shoulder. Despite the misstep she didn’t slow down for more than a fraction of a second. She didn’t need to, because Josh stopped dead in his tracks.

  They were less than one hundred yards apart.

  He recognized her.

  Even with the rain in his eyes and the wind making it difficult to focus for more than a moment at a time. How could he not? She was the reason he was out here in the first place. She was the reason his great-grandfather had lost his mind and the reason Boone had lived a secret life all those years.

  She was the woman who hadn’t aged a day in ninety years.

  She was Eleanor Raines.

  And she really was beautiful. Not what they called beautiful in those glossy adverts and magazines he sold; beautiful in a truer, purer sense of the word. Not all sharp angles and shadows and heroin chic. None of the pictures plastered on the bedroom wall did her justice, he realized, and knew he was standing there gaping like a fool. The reality of Eleanor Raines made every photograph seem flat, dull, and lifeless.

  In that moment he could see why Isaiah had refused to just let her go.

  “Eleanor,” he called, taking a step forward, knowing his voice wouldn’t carry. He didn’t want to shout for fear of breaking the moment. “Wait.”

  She turned away, breaking it for him, and carried on down the alleyway. The sound of her high heels clicking on the cobblestones was lost beneath the rain. She ducked down an even narrower passage, this one more like a shadowy crack between two buildings than a footpath. “Wait!” He called again, chasing her to the mouth of the empty alleyway. “Please.”

  He could hear something … children laughing? No. Not that. Birds. Starlings. He looked up and saw a vast flock of them banking on the fringes of the storm, the flock spiraling overhead tighter and tighter until their wing tips touched and they looked like a vortex in the sky, their black bodies the eye of the storm itself, casting a shadow over the streets below.

  When he looked back down there was no sign of Eleanor Raines and nowhere she could have gone. No doors into the buildings that started the alleyway; no gates in the high wooden fences that continued it.

  He was alone.

  It was as though she’d slipped between the cracks and simply disappeared right before his eyes.

  21

  RAVENSHILL

  He turned over every stone in the alley, physical and metaphorical, but she simply wasn’t there and there was nowhere she could have gone.

  Part of Josh began to doubt she’d ever been there, that he’d caught whatever sickness had driven the rest of the men in his family—all save for his dad, Barclay Raines, who’d died well before his time and in that case probably before the obsession could take hold—mad.

  With no real idea what else to do, Josh followed the only clue he had left and embarked upon a pilgrimage of the dead. It was that or give up and go home for the night, and going home meant facing Lexy and his mum, and work in the morning, which felt too much like the real world for today. Today was the kind of day meant for creating his own Josh Stories his friends could trade with smiles at his memorial. He knew roughly where the old Ravenshill burial grounds were supposed to be, if not where they actually were thanks to the ever-shifting landscape of the city. One thing he’d already learned was that a lot could change in ninety years. Not least the contents of a cemetery in London, which wasn’t something he would have ever imagined before the bookseller’s explanation, and then of course it had made absolute sense. The Blitz had rewritten the landscape, and it stood to reason that the bombs wouldn’t discriminate between the living and the dead.

  He had no idea what, if anything, he’d find waiting for him at the end of his pilgrimage.

  Graffiti on the walls offered the wisdom of a generation’s worth of prophets. They didn’t have very much to say, or maybe it was just a case of being too old to understand what they were saying? Wasn’t that how it worked? Each generation had its own idols and martyrs, and where once it had been Timothy Leary now it was the Steve Jobs of the world—or whichever faceless suit had replaced his vision after cancer had claimed him—the youth bowed down to as they offered every sort of iGenius for download b
y the kilobyte if you had the right data package.

  The city moved to the drumbeat of his heart, an insistent percussion that had Josh looking back over his shoulder on every street corner, not just looking left and right before crossing the road. She had been there, almost close enough to reach out and touch. He thought about Isaiah’s confession to Boone, that he’d seen her, unchanged, in 1994, and realized that as crazy as it was, it was true. That was a game changer. It was one thing to keep it all at a distance and think of it almost academically, but it was quite another when it was the evidence of your own eyes. Eleanor Raines might have disappeared ninety years ago, but she had been here less than an hour ago as though she’d stepped out of one timeline and into another.

  Josh sank down onto a bench seat, head in hands, ignoring the rain, and tried to think it through but there was nothing about it that made sense. The whole impossible scenario defied logical explanation. But there was no getting away from the fact that he’d seen what he’d seen.

  She’d been running. From him? From Lockwood’s goons? There were so many places someone could lurk unseen. The streets were nothing more than an elaborate rattrap. Unwelcome Boomtown Rats lyrics ran through Josh’s mind as he doubled back on himself determined not to be caught. He glimpsed his reflection in a shop window: he looked harried, tired, and stretched thin. He couldn’t be sure that was entirely an illusion of the glass. He checked the street signs against the basic map of the city he’d used to mark out the strange scorch marks on the wooden floor of Boones’s secret flat, following its landmarks to be sure he was walking the right way.

  Up ahead, he saw the gates of the burial ground as the bookseller had promised, and for a moment thought the pitted iron was all that remained of the cemetery because behind them rose gleaming towers of concrete and steel reflecting dozens of incarnations of London back through their blind windows.

  He saw a little old man huddled up on a bench oblivious to the rain. The man, with the wisps of his white hair plastered flat to his scalp, looked up at him as he approached the wrought-iron gates. The iron formed the black wings of a raven, reinforcing the dilapidated cemetery’s name. One side of the gates hung lopsided, only held in place by the rust. As he got closer he realized that the old man was actually a tramp, swaddled in layer upon layer of dirty old coats and torn trousers. He wore a pair of hobnail boots that had been resoled so many times you could tell the age of them by looking at the rings around the bottom of them. The smell was the worst of it; weeks-old piss fused into his coats was being released by the rain.