The old man nodded as he passed. He had the red vines of alcohol abuse across his cheeks and the tell-tale open bottle peaking out of one of his pockets as he leaned forward, watching Josh every step of the way.
The guy was creepy, but said nothing and made no move to stop Josh or beg for spare change to waste on the demon drink.
Josh ignored his audience and walked through the gates, passing into a lost part of London.
It wasn’t miraculous.
Crossing the threshold didn’t suddenly transport him to Oz or Narnia.
It didn’t block out the sounds of the traffic or life on the other side, but it might as well have because Ravenshill was a different country. Josh let his feet take him down the overgrown path between the headstones, looking for Damiola’s name on one of them. A tree to his left was ringed by crooked stones. There must have been two hundred headstones crammed together with only inches between them. None of their engravings were visible; the names of the dead lost. Moss and lichen clung to the weathered stone. There were no bodies beneath the stones—they had been destroyed during the bombings. The stone circle was all that remained of two hundred lost souls.
Time was the cemetery’s worst enemy. It encroached everywhere. Its fingers wormed their way into every nook and cranny, filling them with natural signs of decay. The old stones could stand against anything apart from time.
Josh walked through the lines of graves.
There were no mourners here, and no signs of fresh flowers on any of the plots to suggest that any might come. It was hardly surprising, given the fact that the last interment had happened some sixty years ago. Other than the tramp guarding the gates, there was no one left to mourn these dead. Beneath the weeping willows, he saw an ancient mausoleum fenced off by iron railings. It was overlooked by two stone angels. The skeletal limbs of overhanging trees and the hungry roots of vegetation gone to seed reclaimed the structures on either side of the mausoleum. It wouldn’t be too many years before they claimed it for their own. They were already creeping through the black railings. Crooked gravestones marked more of the nameless dead, their memorials weathered away. The place gave Josh the creeps.
He was just about to give up any hope of finding Damiola’s resting place amid the ranks of anonymous stones, fearing the worst—that it was somewhere amid those ringing the tree—when he saw the mausoleum’s gates properly for the first time, realizing that the filigreed metal looked like a magician’s gloves caught in the moment of transformation from cloth to blackbird ready to fly.
He’d found Cadmus Damiola’s tomb.
A deep crack ran through the wall where clematis vines had clawed it open.
The gate was locked, but judging by the state of the rust-eaten hinges, it wasn’t going to provide any sort of obstacle. Josh looked around to be sure that he wasn’t being watched—the tramp had left his bench and wandered off—and then boosted himself up, scrambling over the railings with their blunted spear-tip points.
He dropped down on the other side and stayed in the crouch, looking around again for prying eyes. He couldn’t have looked more suspicious if he’d been carrying a hand-painted placard that declared he was a tomb robber. Satisfied he was alone, Josh crossed the short distance to the iron-studded crypt door, which like the gate, was locked. He hadn’t thought this far ahead. The lock itself was more decorative than practical, the keyhole as big as his fist. He could see part of the mechanism through the keyhole, but without something to trip it, he wasn’t getting inside. It was ironic, of course, after all the years Boone had worked so hard to keep him from becoming one of the Rothery kids, and here he was contemplating breaking into somewhere far more sacred than any two-up two-down because of the old man’s obsession. It was contagious. His great-grandfather’s madness had been handed down to him like some twisted heirloom. Seeing Eleanor had just cemented it for him. He couldn’t not open the door after that. He owed it to her, to Isaiah, and ultimately to Boone.
He needed something thin enough and strong enough to work into the hole and turn the heavy tumbler without breaking and blocking the mechanism—assuming the tumbler wasn’t jammed up with the rust of age. None of his keys were long enough to do the job. The answer was entwined in the elaborate iron gloves of the rusted gate. It took him a few minutes to worry free one of the thinner pieces of filigreed iron from the design, the rust flaking off in his hands and staining them a dull red as he did so. But he had what he needed: a makeshift lock pick.
A few seconds later Josh heard the satisfying clunk of the tumbler falling into place.
He took a deep breath, then pushed the door open.
The other side was absolutely dark, broken only by the shaft of faint light that encroached around him. Josh stepped inside. He hadn’t thought to bring a torch, and with his phone dead the only light source he had was Boone’s old petrol lighter. He took the battered tin from his coat’s deep pocket, and rescued the lighter from inside.
He slipped the tin back into his pocket and wrapped his hand around the lighter.
A short flight of nine stairs led down to a second set of double doors. Even in the Stygian gloom he could just make out the accoutrements of the stage magician’s craft carved into them. The doors were exquisite. A work of art that like the tomb itself spoke of surprising wealth, which jarred against the expectation of a man who had spent his life treading the boards of British theaters offering penny entertainments for the masses. How could he have accumulated the kind of fortune such an afterlife demanded?
There was only one answer to that, of course: Lockwood.
It was the logical leap as far as joining the dots of what had started out as a very cold missing person’s case and was beginning to look like a grand criminal conspiracy that went back a century. Damiola had been in Lockwood’s pocket, either through greed or fear, both great motivators on their own, but together surely irresistible?
Josh approached the door, resting the flat of his hand against the shape of a huge leafless tree and the curious Celtic knotwork carved into the door.
He opened the door.
22
THE MYSTERIES OF DAMIOLA
“There are no answers in there,” a voice said behind him, scaring a month of his allotted years out of Josh with those six softly spoken words. “At least not the ones you are looking for.”
Josh’s heart was in his throat as he turned to see the old tramp silhouetted against the entrance. He was taller than he’d realized, close to six foot, and despite the thick layers of coats padding his bulk up, he was skeletally thin and showing obvious signs of malnutrition. His breath stank almost as badly as his damp coats. But even so, there was something about the man, a presence.
“I always knew someone would come looking eventually. I’m surprised it took you so long. Which one are you? You look like Isaiah, but you’re not him. His boy?” Josh shook his head. The tramp had a slight accent, the lingering trace of something he couldn’t place. “Poor bastard didn’t deserve what was done to him. If I could do anything, I’d change that.”
“Who are you?”
“No one anymore. I used to be him,” he pointed over Josh’s shoulder toward the doors and the tomb beyond them. “But now he’s just bones and I’m a ghost, I guess. Or as good as. Funny what time does to you, but I should know that better than anyone. But I’m more interested in who you are, boy, and how you fit in to this sorry story? Tell me that.”
Josh started to say he wasn’t involved, not really, but he’d been actively searching out the truth of Glass Town ever since he’d heard its name. Instead, he said, “Did you know my great-grandfather?”
“Ah,” the tramp said, inclining his head slightly, piecing together the genetic puzzle but coming to a conclusion a couple of generations short. “That explains you wearing his face. Time moves on, always ticking on, tick-tick-tick. No matter how much we might want to grab a hold of its hands and slow it down to a more manageable pace, on it goes tick-tick-tick. Cruel bastard. So, th
e hunt has passed from one generation to another? You won’t find it here, you know. There’s no hidden door. Or, to put it another way, you’re barking up the wrong burial place if you think coming here will help you get in, or get her out. I’ll tell you what I told him that night; she’s gone. Forget her. I’m good at what I do. Or at least I was. He was.” He looked pointedly toward the doors behind Josh. “Go on, open the door. Disturb my old bones. There’s nothing in there that will help you.”
“How can you be in there and out here? You keep talking about the body in there as if it’s you, like you’re some ghostly guardian—” Josh wanted to say but the moonlight isn’t streaming through you, you’re not some phantom. “But he is you, isn’t he? Somehow?”
“Somehow,” the old tramp nodded. “Cadmus Damiola the Less Than Magnificent, at your service,” the old man said, forgoing any bow or scrape because his old bones wouldn’t allow it.
Josh studied him in the flickering petrol light, trying to peel away the layers of grime and time to get to the face the tramp had once owned. Despite the trickery of the shadows, he was sure he’d seen it before—or a version of it—on the poster announcing Damiola’s grand tour on the wall in Boone’s Rotherhithe flat, which meant the old tramp was telling the truth. Or at least a version of it, because that would have made him 120 years old, give or take a few rotations around the sun, and he was looking pretty damn spritely for someone who’d lived the best part of two lifetimes.
“Go on, open the door if you don’t believe me. Perhaps I’m lying and enlightenment waits within?”
“How long have you been standing guard out there?”
“Longer than I thought,” he said.
Josh didn’t say anything, struggling to come to terms with the idea that the stage magician spent his days at the gates of the destroyed cemetery, guarding his own tomb. Why would anyone do that?
The lighter burned hot in his hand. There was only so long he’d be able to hold onto it before he had to flip the lid closed and plunge himself back into the pitch black darkness of the tomb.
He made a decision, then, turning his back on the tramp and stepped up to the door. As he reached out for the huge brass-ring handle he half-expected Cadmus Damiola to say that only the worthy shall cross the threshold and he had been deemed unworthy.
He didn’t; instead, the old tramp said, “It is good that you don’t trust what you’ve been told. Words are so often the basis for any misdirection; look at my hands, see, nothing up the sleeve, nothing hidden in them, but what’s this? Is that your card? It is? I don’t believe it,” he smiled wryly, his tone mimicking the wide-eyed amazement of the spectator seeing the magic for the first time. “Don’t you think if it was that easy to uncover the secrets of my greatest illusion of my life any of the many who have come looking before you would have found my secrets long ago? I mean, ask yourself this, how hard was it for you to find this place, truly?”
Josh flipped the lid closed on the lighter, giving the metal case a chance to cool down. He twisted the brass ring and pushed, but the door didn’t budge an inch.
“Oh, well would you look at that,” the old tramp muttered. “Maybe the hinges have rusted? You might want to give it a really good shove? Maybe that’ll do the trick. Really put your shoulder into it.”
Josh knew he was being played with, even so, he twisted the brass ring again, feeling the tooth of the hidden mechanism retract, and pushed hard but the doors didn’t give.
“Curious. Perhaps something is blocking the way? Let me try for you.”
Josh moved aside as the old man shuffled forward, placing the flat of his hand on the black wood. As he did so, the sigils carved into the wood flared as if aflame for a second, the fire chasing through the crevices carved into the door to bring the patterns to brief fiery life. For the silence between two heartbeats the dark passage was lit an angry red, and then plunged back into darkness as Cadmus Damiola opened the door. The sudden intensity of the light stung his eyes. “No, everything seems to be fine. After you, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. I promise you, it is quite the anticlimax. And I should know, given I’ve been the sole occupant since 1929. At some point I really should go back and die, I suppose. Come to think of it, you might want some light, save you from burning your fingers on that old Zippo of yours.” The old tramp clicked his fingers and in response a stub of candle in the brass holder on the sarcophagus in the center of the room came alive, lighting up the crypt with a sizzle of sulphate.
It was a single flame, but more than enough to light the entire tomb.
“I knew you’d come. You or someone like you. Ever since I felt the first of the dweomers failing I knew it was only a matter of time until someone turned up at my grave. I thought it would be Seth, ordering me to restore the magic, to make it whole again, banish that place back to Hell, or Isaiah begging me to rip apart the veil once and forever. So much time has passed, so many years. I don’t know how it could ever come to this, but it must be inevitable because here you are, and here I am, and I know what you are about to ask me—but first let me ask you why should I help you?”
He didn’t have an answer for that.
“How do I know you aren’t one of them?”
“Two days ago I knew nothing about anything. My biggest concern was that I’d screw up my grandfather’s eulogy,” Josh said. “And then I find a house filled with my family’s obsession, articles, photographs, film reels, all of them about Eleanor Raines.”
At that, the old man stiffened. “Did you release the Reels? Was that you I heard?”
“Did I what? I have no idea what that means. No. I don’t think so. I watched a few minutes of an uncut Hitchcock movie filmed in Rotherhithe. Is that what you mean?”
“No,” the old man said. “But if it wasn’t you, you have an enemy here.”
“Seth,” Josh said. “The question is, do I have a friend here?”
The old man craned his head as though listening to voices in the wind only he could hear. “Yes, for now. As long as you stand against Seth.”
Josh entered the cramped tomb, the tramp a couple of steps behind him. The old man was right and wrong at the same time. Everything beyond the threshold was disappointing and extraordinary at the same time. The light flickered, guttering in the breeze as it chased into the small space, but didn’t go out. The candlelight pushed the shadows away from the sarcophagus. Josh didn’t realize what was happening at first, barely noticing the way the shadows on the far wall had begun to take on some sort of shape, but as the flame settled down so, too, did the shadows and their nature became clear: they were a map of sorts.
“My original designs for Glass Town,” the old man said. “My greatest trick, and yet the only one I have never been in a position to take a bow for. It will be nice for someone to appreciate the brilliance of it, even if only for a short while. Sadly for you there is no way Lockwood will let you live now that you have got this close, you do know that, don’t you?”
Thirteen stones on the walls were deep red in color, almost as though stained with blood. Josh didn’t need to check his own map to know that they coincided with the thirteen points scorched into the floor of the Rotherhithe flat and copied down there.
Josh looked from him to the sarcophagus and back again. Beyond the shadows and the stone tomb there was nothing else in the crypt. “How can you be in there and out here? It doesn’t make sense. Not that any of this makes sense.”
“It’s a long story, including more than a little alcohol, desperation, a pretty girl, and a necromancer, but then aren’t they all?”
“The best usually are,” Josh agreed, as though there was nothing remotely extraordinary about the fact the old tramp’s nonexplanation included the word necromancer. “I’d still like to hear it.”
“I’m sure you would, boy, but it’s my story to tell, not yours to ask for. So, look around you, are you satisfied? You’ve found the magician’s tomb and but for a little light trick, it’s empty.”
&
nbsp; Josh looked at the shadow map again. The lines blurred, merging and separating in the slight breeze, creating a second layout that looked quite different from the first. Those were the lines he tried to focus on, because they offered a map quite unlike the one he carried in his pocket. Was it a trick of the wind, or his first proper glimpse of Glass Town?
“How do I find it?” he said, pointing at the shadow map.
“Who says it’s there to be found?”
“You wouldn’t be guarding this place if it wasn’t.”
“Very true.”
Josh had a dozen follow-up questions, everything from where is the door—if there was a door—and how did he open it, to why Damiola had made Glass Town in the first place and why he was still protecting it after all these years, what the scorch marks on his map represented, but he didn’t have the chance to ask any of them; the old man tilted his head, seeming to sniff the air, then turned to look back out toward the cemetery. “He knows you’re here. This isn’t good. Come here.” He placed a grubby hand on the center of Josh’s chest. “Can you feel it? The disturbance in the night air? Not good. You’ve frightened him. That’s not a good thing. A man like Seth Lockwood doesn’t react well to being scared. He’s like a cornered beast; he reveals his claws.” Josh heard the movement then, a scraping of feet dragging through the gravel chips that made up the pathways between the graves outside. “There’s something out there.” Not someone, something. The old tramp had chosen his words with care. “We can’t stay here. This isn’t where we make a last stand, and that’s what’s going to happen if we don’t go now.” Cadmus Damiola snuffed out the flame that burned atop his sarcophagus, taking with it the shadow map, and hurried back toward the door, ushering Josh ahead of him.
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