He stepped out into the night and saw the weird light immediately.
Something. Like the apparition of Myrna Shepherd that had torn Boone’s house apart looking for something.
“This way, hurry,” the old man said, pulling at his sleeve.
Josh turned his back on the ghostly glow and followed Damiola out through the iron gates. Damiola drew them closed behind him, dragging the left side back on a broken hinge that left it hanging preciously, then uttered a short declarative Josh didn’t catch—the words refused to settle in his mind, squirming around like the metal itself did as Damiola passed a hand across the filigree.
As with the door of the tomb itself, the rusted iron answered his touch with a ripple of flame; this one so hot it seemed to buckle and bow the metal to its whim. Josh saw the shapes of the birds wrought within the fretwork twist slowly as the birds began to tear free.
Damiola leaned in, exhaling a single sharp breath into the iron beaks of the miraculous birds, and then stepped back, giving the summoning room to complete itself.
It wasn’t quiet; the shrieks of twisting metal sheering free of its welds drew an answering cry from the direction of the light. It was the sound of magic calling to magic, and it was as old as nature itself.
Slowly at first, but with evermore determination, the raven’s rusted wings pulled away from the frame. It twisted its head to peer at its master with beady rust-pitted eyes, the rhythmic whump-whump beat of its wings almost masking the sheering snaps of the final welds that pinned it to the gate, and then the metal raven took to the air, circling once, twice, three times overhead, impossible and magnificent as it trailed the rocket’s red glow of sparks in its wake.
The old man leveled a finger in the direction of the eerie light and whispered another impossible-to-concentrate-on command, his words lost in the squeal of rusted metal as the raven swooped low, skimming the tops of the weathered stones before chasing away toward the light reaching the edge of the cemetery just as two men shuffle-walked into the garden of the dead. The light couldn’t separate the pair. Josh didn’t recognize them, except there was something vaguely familiar about them. He didn’t have time to dwell on it. The squeals of metal transformed into shrieks as the raven fell upon the men, who in turn threw up their hands to defend themselves.
“That should buy us some time.”
“How?”
“Not enough to stand here explaining that or arguing about what we do next,” the old tramp said, breathing hard. Beads of sweat peppered his forehead and ran down the red vines in his cheeks to tangle in the mass of his scruffy beard. He started to run, barking short staccato sentences in front of him as he did. “You want into Glass Town? You need to pierce the veil between worlds, to find a place of weakness, an oblique.”
“A what?”
“A weakness in the veil between worlds, where one brushes up against the other. You want to find a way into limbo, into Hell, whatever you want to call it; you need to find a weakness. It is out of time. There is no secret door … I’m sorry…”
“You’re wrong,” Josh shouted at his back. “You must be. There has to be a door. I saw her. Eleanor. She was out here.”
That stopped Damiola cold. “What are you saying?”
“I saw her.”
“No. That’s impossible.”
“Like everything else you’re talking about? Like flying metal birds and you being a hundred and twenty years old? Yeah, it’s impossible,” Josh said, bluntly.
“Glass Town doesn’t work like that. What we did … you can’t just slip into and out of the otherworld, it’s out of phase with our own. Time is different there. You can’t walk from one to the other and back again. So whatever you think you saw, you couldn’t have. And you need to pray for all of our sakes that you didn’t,” he added, making the sign of the cross over his chest. “Even a crack in one of the lenses would be enough to doom it and everyone inside it. Once time slips in through the cracks it all comes undone. It’s entropy. It cannot hold.”
Behind them they heard the desperate howl—it could not have been further from a caw, it was an utterly broken sound—as the bird was ripped from beak to bowels; its shattered wings discarded by the duo as they lunged between the broken stones, on the hunt.
“What do I do?”
“Easy. You run. And you hope those things don’t get through me, because I’m all that’s standing between you and them.” He reached into the folds of his coat for something stuffed deep in the pockets, and pulled out a small brass compact. “Sometimes the only way you can see through smoke and mirrors is with more smoke and better mirrors. Maybe it’s time the whole thing came undone. Every trick runs its course. Look for my workshop on Cobb Street, over in Spitalfields. Everything you need is there. But know this, the closer you get, the more certain it is that Lockwood will kill you, not just try.” He pressed the compact into Josh’s hands, and closed his own hands around them. “Don’t slow down, don’t look back, just run and keep on running, boy. Unless you want to die, then by all means stick around here and let Lockwood’s gets do it for you.”
Josh saw the pair push their way awkwardly between gravestones, seeming to flicker in and out of focus as they came. He recognized them now: Al Clamp and Marty Crake, the comedy duo, and realized he’d seen them earlier that day. He’d been wrong; they weren’t fancy dress partygoers wearing rubber masks, and they weren’t tied together for some bizarre three-legged charity collection. There was no bucket full of coins between them. They were conjoined. Fused together.
“What do I do?” Josh repeated, unable to tear his eyes away from the grotesque comedians as they lumbered toward him.
“I’ve already told you,” Damiola barked, and shoved Josh away.
Josh didn’t need telling a third time.
He ran.
23
MIRROR KINGDOM
And he didn’t stop running until the shock wave of the explosion hit him—so hard it flung him from his feet with all the force of a punishing fist to the solar plexus. Josh scrambled back to his feet, looking back over his shoulder at the plume of black smoke and licks of flame coming from the heart of the old cemetery. A few lights came on around him with faces appearing at the windows a moment later. From where they were it must have looked like a gas explosion. Not that many years ago the default fear would have been an IRA bomb, but times had changed. London wasn’t the city it had been. Of course now there were other terrors, but that first reaction to an explosion and fire wasn’t a bomb these days, even after the July 7 attacks There was always another reason.
He saw them coming out of the smoke: the Comedians.
There was no sign of the tramp, which could only mean one thing: They’d found a way past him.
Josh felt the sting of gravel on his hands as he dusted them off on his jeans. For a full ten seconds he stood stock-still staring at the deformed duo as they shuffle-walked toward him, the smoke billowing all around them. Then he remembered what they were: Lockwood’s henchmen; just like the actress. He turned his back on them and ran.
Instinct took him through the East End streets, those narrow warrens where once upon a time Jack the Ripper and Spring-heeled Jack might have stalked, toward the bright new towers of the business district, and Cobb Street.
They were gaining ground fast.
He didn’t know this part of the city half as well as he would have needed to if he wanted to plan any sort of escape route; instead he had to rely upon speed and luck and hope he didn’t run himself down a blind alley.
Josh drove himself on, not letting himself think.
It was easier to run when you were terrified: the adrenaline flooded his system and cheated his mind into thinking he could run forever. Rain and sweat plastered his hair flat to his scalp. There were plenty of narrow little side streets and back alleys in this part of London. Josh gritted his teeth and took a left then ducked right down a narrow lane that cut a channel between an old haberdashery shop and a newsagent’s
.
He could hear the Comedians coming, their static howls and slapping palms mocking him every step of the way.
Josh doubled back on himself, realizing that he couldn’t simply shake their pursuit. He needed to be smart—assuming they were somehow locked on to his scent, he needed to search out places that would mask his fragrance, or at least hide it among crowds of others. He remembered an old line about dogs losing the scent in water, and for one crazy second thought about hurling himself into the Thames and making a swim for it. The urge didn’t last long, given the fact that he couldn’t actually swim.
He saw the lights of a pub a couple of hundred yards away, and ran for it. He didn’t stop running as he pushed through the doors into the snug. A couple of old heads turned to see what all the commotion was, but he kept on running straight toward the back of the room and the gold-painted hand pointing toward the gents. There were perhaps twenty people in the room. Not enough to hide away in, but the place stank of stale beer and cigarettes despite the smoking ban, and the all-pervading smell of old sweat. It reeked. But would it be strong enough to buy him the time to put some real distance between himself and the relentless Comedians?
Probably not, he thought fatalistically.
Not for the first time in the last twenty-four hours, he wished he had learned how to steal a car. It was pretty much a remedial skill for a kid raised on the Rothery, and if he lived long enough, it was a gap in his education he intended to plug.
Someone laughed, seeing his panicked left-right-left look before his gaze fixed on the painted hand, assuming he was about to shit himself, which wasn’t entirely wrong.
Josh dodged around a man balancing three pints in stretched fingers, and pushed straight through the door, praying that he wasn’t running himself into a literal dead end.
On the other side he was confronted by three possible escape routes, and used the threadbare carpet to make his choice, taking the least walked alternative, gambling it would take him to the fire exit. He guessed right. At the end of the passageway he hit the safety bar on the door, triggering the alarm, and ran out into the yard behind the pub.
The rain had eased off a little over the last few minutes, the worst of the storm having past. The yard was filled with beer barrels. The rain played them like a Jamaican steel band. Six concrete steps led down into the yard. Graffiti on the wall promised that God lived at the bottom of a pint of beer, and suggested the trick to finding him was as simple as drinking enough.
Josh ran straight at the gate. It was bolted. Rather than open it, he clambered up onto one of the barrels, teetering awkwardly as it threatened to roll away from under him, and launched himself at the fence. He kicked, scrambling up over the top—it wasn’t graceful, but it was effective—and dropped down into the alleyway on the other side.
He hit the ground hard and kept on running.
The alleyway was lined with green plastic wheelie bins and black sacks waiting for the dustbin men to collect them. A stray dog curled up against the brick wall behind a restaurant, obviously familiar enough with the routines to know when the spoils were cast out. It saw him, but didn’t stir itself.
Josh paused twice to get his bearings as he reached an alternative junction or alley end, and was forced between taking a right or left, or running straight on, not knowing where either eventually led.
Hearing the suddenly shrill chorus of starlings again, he looked up at the sky. The birds banked and swirled, and once more he seemed to be beneath the epicenter of their mad flight. Unintentionally, his random twists and turns brought him back to the alley Eleanor Raines had disappeared down. He saw the sign on the wall: Cobb Street.
He stopped running and looked back over his shoulder.
The street was empty, but he could hear them: the manic slap-slap-slap of their hands on the brick houses and the constant chatter of sharp teeth chomping mercilessly at his heels. They were coming for him.
There was something completely off about the street.
It felt like it belonged in another time.
Which it did, but he wasn’t to know that.
Cobb Street was long gone from any modern map of London, replaced by the concrete and steel office blocks and the great sprawl of the indoor market. He rushed down the street with the Comedians on his heels.
Now that he was on their turf Clamp and Crake didn’t rush to catch him; they didn’t need to. Rather, they kept their measured pace, shuffle-shuffle-drag, shuffle-shuffle-drag, knowing that he would inevitably tire, and when he did they would fall upon him, bringing him down when he was at his weakest from what felt like hours of running.
Smoke and mirrors. The words stuck in his head as he ran down Cobb Street. The entire thing was an illusion. A grand trick. Cadmus Damiola was a stage magician, after all, so wasn’t whatever he’d done to Glass Town just some magnification of his magician’s art? Like the iron raven? Josh thought, casting another backward glance, but this time looking over the Comedians’ heads. There was no sign of the magical construction in the sky. But if he was right, if it was just a trick, then what trick had Eleanor pulled on him to mask her disappearance? He’d turned over every stone in the alleyway, so how could she simply disappear into thin air?
There was nothing that looked even remotely like a workshop on the street. There were flats with bricked-up windows, others with curtains drawn for the night. Some were so narrow it seemed impossible to imagine people called them home.
Smoke and mirrors.
Sometimes the only way you can see through smoke and mirrors is with more smoke and better mirrors.
That’s what he had now, didn’t he, a better mirror? Josh fished the compact from his pocket and fumbled with the clasp, well aware that the Comedians watched him from the other end of the alleyway.
Facing away from them, Josh held up the compact and looked in the mirror, not sure what he expected to happen—if the magician’s mirror would suddenly give him new eyes, or at least some new sharper perception, or if he would simply see some backward landscape in which the Comedians lumbered toward him in miniature. There was a blue moon behind them, or a blue-tinged streetlight, that cast their end of the alleyway in its peculiar ghost light, just as there had been with the actress in Boone’s house. But beyond that there was an almost ethereal quality about them, as though the light somehow passed through them rather than around them. It was only a slight difference, but it changed everything. Smoke and better mirrors.
But that wasn’t the only thing that caught his eye as being wrong about the reflection—but he couldn’t know for sure without turning around to face the Comedians.
He was right; there, amid the rundown backs of the Victorian terrace, was a door—a split-stable door with the words GOODS ENTRANCE engraved in an arc across the lintel. There was a symbol beneath it, a Celtic knot around a leafless tree, branded into the door. It had to be the entrance to Damiola’s workshop, because there wasn’t a door there unless he looked for it in the mirror’s glass.
Face front, the walls and windows seamlessly joined, hiding its existence.
Was this a first glimpse of how the magician had hidden away Glass Town? A prototype for the trick on a much smaller scale? There was no denying the fact the door wasn’t there, and then it was when he looked at the street through the looking glass, only for it to disappear again when the mirror was removed from the equation. The magician’s workshop was hidden in plain sight. If anyone would know the workings of that kind of trick it would be the man whose signature illusion, the Opticron, involved the manipulation of light and sight through lenses, wouldn’t it?
Josh took four steps back toward the mouth of Cobb Street and the Comedians, then reached out with his free hand to fumble with the door. It was difficult doing everything in reverse, but after a couple of seconds of groping around he opened the door.
As the door swung outward, the Comedians entered Cobb Street. Close up, there was nothing funny about them. The fat man inclined his head slightly,
seeming to sniff the air. Just like a dog, Josh thought, amending that quickly to, a rabid one.
There was no streetlight or shop sign or any other possible source for the weird blue-tinged light now. It emanated from within the fat man, Al Clamp. Only of course it wasn’t the comedian, dead ringer for him or not. That thing in the alleyway was something else entirely, like the woman last night. They were a pair; both of them burned with the same weird light as if they were being projected into the streets by some godlike cine camera. The comedians shuffled a step toward him. Just the one. They didn’t move comfortably.
Marty Crake’s mouth twitched.
What frightened Josh more than anything was that somehow he was close enough to see that involuntary muscle spasm.
The caws of the starlings were the only sound in the otherwise silent alleyway. Al Clamp’s gaze seemed to drift upward, drawn to the raucous birds. There was no iron raven up there to save Josh this time. The reed-thin Marty Crake came toward him—moving with an uncanny serpentine grace. Josh saw the way his hand was fused together with his companion’s, the pair conjoined at hand and hip.
Josh couldn’t seem to force his body to turn. Though his mind screamed run, his legs stubbornly refused to obey him. That one step over the threshold into the workshop was beyond him.
And then Marty Crake’s mouth opened wider than ought to have been possible, and wider still as his jawbone dislocated with a shocking snap. The comedian’s lips stretched back on row after row of razor-sharp teeth as his smile transformed into a death’s head rictus.
Beside him Al Clamp loosed a shrill static shriek. Windows overhead cracked, then as the shriek escalated, shattered, showering biting-sharp shards of glass down on Cobb Street.
Glass Town Page 15