Glass Town

by Steven Savile

  Josh clamped his hands over his ears, the paralysis that had gripped him broken finally, and nearly fell through the doorway as his soles lost their purchase on the slick cobbles. He reached out with his right hand, planting it flat on the side of the frame, and plunged into the darkness of Damiola’s workshop.

  They came after him, no hint of shambling or shuffling movement as they surged down the middle of the narrow street, their outstretched hands slapping against the brick walls and wooden fences on either side, playing them like the leather skins of battle drums as they ran.

  If the wild drumming was meant to intimidate him, it worked, but not half as effectively as Clamp’s unearthly static howl. That was so much worse. It was like a jolt of electricity pulsing through his blood. Every muscle tensed as it surged through him.

  That noise removed any and all doubt that the Comedians were fashioned from the same stuff as Myrna Shepherd and that their sole purpose was to tear his soul apart.

  He slammed the door behind him, praying it would keep them out.

  Damiola’s workshop was an incredibly narrow building, claustrophobic and cobwebbed, with only two rooms on the ground floor. The bare boards of a staircase rose at the far end of the uncarpeted hallway. With very little light, he mistook the mirrors at the end of the hallway for windows out into the street beyond. If he’d have looked more closely, or thought about the fact there was no light source in the workshop, he might have seen that the light was emanating from within the mirrors, and the landscapes he saw there bore no relation to what he should have been seeing through the window of an East End hovel, but rather looked to be perfect reflection of a greener, pleasanter land. Albion. The ancient England was surrounded by mirrors filled with mist. But fear stopped him from seeing any of that.

  The first of the two ground-floor rooms must have been the magician’s workroom once upon a time. It was filled with the dusty accoutrements of his art; sword cabinets stood empty, housing dust and spiders in place of a crisscross of deadly blades; elaborate water torture chambers, long-since drained dry; chains and handcuffs dangled from the ceiling, suspended on hooks where Damiola must have practiced his escapologist’s act; the mirrors of a crude Pepper’s Ghost trick lined up to cast his mirror image halfway across the room, all half-hidden in shadow; trapdoor mechanisms, hidden compartment triggers, all manner of curious contraptions and installations that simulated levitation and other illusions; linking rings lay on a worktop; a death-saw cabinet lay folded in two, no beautiful assistant’s feet wiggling out of it; and so much more he couldn’t describe much less imagine how they might function on stage. It was all here. Every part of the magician’s craft. But it was all broken, unmade, or at least part-made. These weren’t the finished articles; these were tricks in various stages of the design process.

  He moved through them quickly, looking for something, but with no idea what that something might be.

  The second room was given over to the three glassblower’s ovens—the furnace, the glory hole, and the annealer—and the blowpipes, plaster, wooden molds, crucibles, and rails that had been set up for the pipes to ride so the magician could shape the glass while it was still red hot. There were hand-drawn designs on the scarred and pitted workbench. Josh looked at them as he moved through the room, assuming they were the blueprints for the Opticron or some variation of the light-manipulation illusion he’d been working on before he made his deal with the devil that was Seth Lockwood.

  A large marble slab dominated the rest of the room, which was where the magician did his work.

  The floorboards were stained with burns and scorch marks. Around the room were other glass objects, a vast array of lenses and the like surrounded the blueprints on the bench, component parts of the Opticron, no doubt, spare parts or misfires, it was impossible to say which.

  Josh stepped over a pair of jacks that lay discarded on the floor.

  It had obviously been decades since the furnaces were last fired up. A thick layer of dust and grime had settled over everything. It all smelled so stale, like the air hadn’t moved in the workshop for years.

  The front door rattled against its frame, dragging him back to the here and now abruptly.

  There was no back door.

  That was his first thought. There were windows in the hall, and here in the workrooms, and plenty of things to break them with.

  Josh had to fight down the urge to panic.

  He needed to think.

  Be calm.

  But he felt sick.

  Through the window in the magician’s workshop—virtually opaque from the buildup of soot and muck clinging to it—he could see the rusty metal rungs of a fire escape descending from the roof, meaning there had to be a way out from the floor above that didn’t involve trying to clamber out through wire-reinforced windows with the Comedians snapping at his heels.

  The only way is up, he thought grimly, running for the stairs.

  Even as he reached them, he threw a glance toward the array of mirrors, finally grasping the fact that they weren’t reflecting the workshop, but not understanding their true nature as he climbed the stairs to the next landing. The slam of fists against the outside door chased him, pounding over and over until the wood splintered beneath the impact.

  Josh had seconds at best to get out of there—at worst it was already too late—and two doors to choose from: eeny and meeny, with neither looking more like salvation than the other. He followed the geography of the house in his mind’s eye and grabbed the knob of the second, yanking open the door directly above the glass room.

  He stepped into room as the Comedians burst into the workshop, and was confronted by what appeared to be an enormous Heath Robinson contraption—some crazy juxtaposition of junk. There was a brass steam boiler heated by tiny kettles that vented steam that hit a brass plate above and condensed, only to pool in the pan and be dripped back into the kettles to boil again and again, thus creating the machine’s own tiny ecosystem that turned the gears and complex pulley arrangements that were threaded by lengths of knotted string, manipulating a huge lens in the center of the room. There were mirrors, too: a bank of them with gilt-edged frames and foil-speckled glass where the silvering had worn away. Two contained absolutely no reflections at all, the thin light passing into them but reflecting nothing back out. Two others offered a glimpse of deserted streets and what looked like the false fronts of a film set.

  Josh realized he was seeing Glass Town for the first time, but didn’t have the luxury of time to appreciate just how incredible that was.

  He looked around for something he could use to defend himself. Anything. Anything at all.

  There was an old Imperial typewriter, which appeared to have a page from a manuscript still in the carriage. Beside it there was an old cine camera on a wooden platform.

  None of the component parts of the contraption appeared to bear any relation to any of the others. None had any obviously apparent use. It was like the whole thing had been cobbled together to confound the eye, like an elaborate game of Mouse Trap. So many of the pieces appeared to be held together by duct tape and a prayer, but it worked. The reels whirred, and Josh saw that a film was threaded into the projector so that it spooled from one reel to another, and then onto a third—which fed it back to the first reel, insuring the film never played out. The camera’s light was aimed right at the heart of the huge lens in the middle of the mechanism, and shone out through the room’s only window as if projecting a new reality out there.

  Josh didn’t have time to wonder what trick he’d stumbled onto. He heard the Comedians’ static shrieks taunting him as they dragged their twisted body up the stairs.

  It came again, like broken laughter.

  It was hideous.

  Josh worked his way around the side of the room, having to squeeze between prongs that jutted out of the contraption and the wall, making his way over to the window. He could see the iron fire escape on the other side of the glass, but when he tried to open t
he window it refused to budge.

  The sash had been nailed shut.

  The Comedians appeared in the doorway, Marty Crake’s red-raw gums peeled back on row upon row of teeth. There was no room on his face for anything else. Teeth. Teeth. Teeth. Teeth slick with spittle. Teeth clogged with gristle. Teeth filed to points, fashioned to rend and tear flesh.

  White noise burst from his hideous mouth.

  Josh tugged desperately at the window, but it wasn’t opening.

  Damiola had told him what he needed to do, he realized then, and it wasn’t run.

  24

  THE SOULLESS CITY

  He clawed at one of the nails, desperately trying to pry it free, but it wasn’t moving. Splinters dug into his fingertips. He could see Clamp and Crake’s reflections weirdly distorted in the hand-blown glass, and yet the reflections were somehow less horrific than the reality they offered as they came into the room.

  The pulley, cog, and camera contraption occupied so much of the floor space they couldn’t easily get to him. Josh made sure to keep it that way for as long as he could, realizing quickly that the Comedians seemed reticent to so much as touch the machine. He edged away from the window, keeping as much of the contraption between him and them as they worked their way around the room.

  Another ghost shriek of static crackled out of the fat one’s mouth. It seemed almost as though there were words trapped in there trying desperately to be heard.

  Crake’s rows of teeth chattered.

  The white noise kept coming, along with it more and more snatches of something else, something so close to words, but not quite, that they sounded all the more sinister for the almost familiarity.

  Josh backed away from the pair, taking one shuffling step for every one of theirs. He could almost imagine them going around and around in circles, the Heath Robinson machine between them, forever. Only that couldn’t happen; they might not tire, but he most certainly would. And when he did, well, looking at those teeth, what happened after that was the last thing he wanted to imagine. He felt the sweat beginning to gather clammily against his skin.

  “What do you want from me?” Josh asked.

  Al Clamp answered that with a grin, his fat face looking anything but threatening as he followed his hungry companion around the side of the machine in that eerie not-silence that shrouded them. Every time his foot came down on one of the bare floorboards instead of being greeted by a creek or groan it was met by a burst of static and a surge of white noise that lanced through him, the filings in his teeth resonating sympathetically so they functioned as a receiver inside his head, amplifying the noise through the bones of his skull.

  It was hell.

  Josh caught one of the armatures dangling over the side of the contraption with his hip. It swung inward. A dozen other pieces of the peculiar device rattled and clanged, adding to the tinnitus wailing inside his head. The projection light veered upward as the platform supporting the cine camera tilted alarmingly and, the effects being felt along the many joints and joists of the contraption, the lens began to oscillate.

  A weird humming emanated from the glass, barely audible above the sheer hateful sound of the white noise.

  Even a crack in one of the lenses would be enough to doom it and everyone inside it.

  Damiola had told him how to win this fight, even if he hadn’t intended to.

  Shhhhhhh, one of the Comedians’ two heads seemed to say, while the lizardlike tongue of the other’s flicked along the ridges of his teeth making a show of just how hungry he was. Spittle clung to the yellowed points. The fat man tried to wriggle his girth through a tight gap, reaching out for Josh. After that first question Josh hadn’t said a word, so the Comedian had to be shushing the contraption, which made it all the creepier.

  Josh edged another step back toward the door and the landing.

  The fat man seemed to realize what Josh was doing.

  He shook his head and stopped trying to push his way through a gap that wasn’t there and moved back toward the door.

  Crake’s face full of teeth gnashed, rows grinding against each other as he chewed through another static howl.

  This time the sound was enough to drive Josh to his knees as the plates of his skull threatened to tear apart. He clutched at his head, then, as his head went down, began to beat at his temples with the heels of his hands, trying to drive the torments out.

  When he finally looked up the Comedians were barely an arm’s length away.

  Josh struggled to rise, placing one of his hands on the brass boiler. He recoiled, wincing as the metal burned his palm, but instead of fighting it, forced himself to put both hands flat on the searing plates and pushed with all of his might.

  The rickety contraption concertinaed in on itself like a collapsing house of cards, though for one alarming second the lens seemed to stay suspended in midair before it finally fell.

  The kettles spilled steaming water across the bare floorboards.

  The duct-taped armatures pulled apart, buckling as one end tore free of the other and the entire thing came tumbling down.

  The lens hit the floor.

  One of the small kettles hit the lens, cracking it right through its convex heart.

  The light from the cine camera stuttered and failed. As it went out the static howls of the Comedians reached a crescendo, shattering every piece of glass in the room. The cold wind howled in, bringing with it driving rain.

  Josh didn’t dare look away from Crake and Clamp.

  The fat half of the duo moved forward, feet crunching through the debris. Those huge jaws opened again impossibly wide as the comedian’s jawbone dislocated with a crack and continued to open to the point where it could have swallowed Josh’s head whole. There was no answering howl, only silence this time. Profound, horrifying silence. It was so much worse than the static. His partner in crime grabbed hold of one wooden spur and yanked it free. He ripped the old Imperial typewriter free from the twisted wreckage and hurled it at Josh.

  He barely managed to get out of the way as the huge lump of metal sailed out through the shattered window behind him.

  Josh felt the sudden surge of fresh air against his scalp and didn’t hesitate; he turned and hurled himself out through the shattered window right after the typewriter, hitting the iron floor of the fire escape on his hands and knees. His momentum carried him into the safety railings. Shards of broken glass cut into his hands as he pushed himself up to his feet.

  He risked a look back into the room and wished he hadn’t.

  The deformed Comedians were slowed by the debris, but not stopped by it.

  Coming out of the stuffy old narrow house, the air felt painfully fresh in his lungs as he gulped it down. The rain hit his face. He didn’t know which way to turn. He looked up at the sky. The birds were gone. The sky was gray and full of soot and coal dust that hung over the rooftops in a cloud of man-made fog. Through the clouds Josh saw the lights of the stars. The constellations shifted, trailing light like an entire heaven filled with shooting stars. For a moment it looked as though every single star was raining down from the sky, somehow holding their alignments and patterns until they settled in a different part of the sky. Josh stood there for the longest time, gazing up at a different sky, until the crashes as the Comedians hurled pieces of the contraption aside to get to the window spurred him into motion.

  The metal stairs were rain-slick and treacherous. Josh grabbed the iron handrail and clanged down the steps toward the ground as fast as he dared, setting foot in Glass Town without even realizing he’d stumbled upon it.

  The woman with the red umbrella—Eleanor—waited at the foot of the fire escape, looking up at him, a look of absolute horror on her beautiful face.

  25

  GLASS TOWN

  “That can’t be here,” she said, even before he’d reached the ground.

  She wasn’t talking about him.

  She was looking up over his shoulder at the broken window of Damiola’s workshop
where the Comedians were framed by rotten timber and jags of broken glass. She didn’t seem the least bit disturbed by the thing’s appearance, taking the endless teeth and wide, wide mouth in her stride like it was something she saw every day in this place. “It can’t be here. It just can’t … There’s no crack … It can’t just walk into this place…” and then the horror as realization hit her. “Unless … Please God, tell me you didn’t break the anchor?” She grabbed Josh by the arm and all but dragged him the last two stairs down to the ground.

  He didn’t know what to say.

  He’d expected her to be thrilled to see him. Hadn’t she just begged him in lipstick on the wall to find her? Hadn’t his family been searching for her for the best part of ninety years, never giving up in all that time, and he’d found her? He’d imagined her throwing herself into his arms and, well, if not exactly showering him with kisses at least treating him like a conquering hero.

  “Listen to me. Please. You have to get out of here. Now. Go. Before it tears the whole place apart!”

  Which was easy to say, but there was no way he was going back up that fire escape when that thing was waiting for him at the top.

  “Eleanor? It is you, isn’t it?” Josh said.

  “Yes. Yes. It’s me. You found me. Clever boy. But if you’re going to stand there wanting a pat on the back, I wish you hadn’t. Not with that thing hunting you. You have no idea what you’ve done, breaking the anchor, leading that thing in here. Now please, no arguments, you have to go.” She dragged him away from the fire escape toward the end of the alleyway.

  He could see the green metal dome of what looked like an old theater, the copper completely tarnished. There was a small railed-off garden in the square and a stone fountain in the center. The trees were trapped in perpetual autumn, the leaves forever browned and curled, but not yet fallen from the bough. That almost stopped Josh there and then. He’d climbed out of a wet winter window into an autumnal street? He felt his grip on the simple things—like where he was—slip along with those stars in the sky above them. “Oh, God, Seth’s going to know you’ve been in here … you need to fix the anchor … get that thing as far away from here as you can and fix Damiola’s infernal machine before the broken glass scars the place beyond all recognition.”