The yard behind the magician’s workshop was clean, unlike any of the others he’d run down in his flight from the Comedians. No wheelie bins, no black plastic sacks, or cardboard boxes or anything like that. No litter on the cobbles at all. Not even a page of yesterday’s news blowing down the street. It was an absolutely sterile environment, like the film set it had been once upon a time.
Josh shook his head, stupidly. “Anchor? Scars? I don’t understand.”
“Look,” she told him, pointing up at the window where the Comedians were making an ungainly effort to climb out onto the fire escape. Crake’s first foot clattered on the iron platform. The sound seemed to ripple down to them through the fire escape into the ground. “Look at its hand. Look at what it’s done to the wooden frame.” He did, though he didn’t really understand what he was seeing. The window frame around the Comedians’ hand appeared to be blistering. Curls of smoke peeled away from the timber. It was as if he were watching a piece of film burn under the heat of the camera’s light, the frame around it shriveling back to pure white light. When the Comedians’ first foot came through the window and set down on the iron fire escape the contact burned up another precious few inches, scarring the world. It was only one tiny part of Glass Town, but it had only been on this side of the illusion for a few seconds and in that time the first blister had popped revealing nothing beneath it. A negative. An empty space.
“What’s happening?”
“That thing is one of my keepers … Seth calls them Reels. It’s a joke. He’s got other pets: Dailies, Rushes, Negatives. They’re all part of the film world he stole me from. It’s not human. I don’t know what it is; a demon maybe, if you believe in them, a creature of the mists, a devil. Any of them work. I don’t know how Seth controls it, what kind of pact he made with Damiola to take possession of the damned things, or if he just killed the magician and took them for his own. But he owns that thing and all of the others like it, body and lack of soul.” She crossed herself as she said this. Josh couldn’t help but think that whatever was going on it was well outside the help of any god, no matter how strong her faith. “And you being here, you are a threat to this place. It won’t stop until you are dead and the threat is gone.”
“I’m no threat—”
“You’re here. You’re Isaiah Raines’s blood. You’re the first person to set foot inside the confines of this damned prison of mine. That makes you more of a threat to him than any of your family has ever been. There’s a weakness … a crack … He doesn’t think I know about it. I’ll take you there. Come on.” She grabbed his hand and dragged Josh toward the gate in the garden rails, and through it, urging him to hurry as they rounded the fountain. It was only as he passed it, he noticed that the nymph in the centerpiece had Eleanor’s face. It was disconcerting to say the least: a glimpse as to the depths of Seth Lockwood’s obsession with the actress. Josh didn’t get to dwell on the realization. Eleanor kept on running until they were out the other side of the small garden and standing in the middle of an empty street.
She looked at him then, seeming to see him properly for the first time. “Are you Boone’s son?”
“Grandson.”
“Already? So much time has gone. You look so very like him…”
“Boone?”
“Isaiah. You could be his body double. It’s uncanny. I feel like I am face-to-face with his ghost. I just…” She reached out to touch his face, but stopped short and shook her head. “We don’t have time for this. As much as I want to talk … to tell you things … Seth set that thing after you. It’s a hunter. You’ve got to go. Please. Get as far away from here as you can. It’s the only way you’ll stand a chance.”
He knew she was right—he had brought this thing here, but in his defense he didn’t know where here was, or what it was he’d brought with him. Damiola hadn’t told him any of it beyond setting him down in the right direction. The only thing he’s said—really—was that even a crack in the glass would be enough to ruin the delicate balance his creation held in place, manipulating the veil between worlds. He hadn’t told him to break that glass back there. He hadn’t said tear down the fabric of the illusion or begged him to set the truth free. He hadn’t even meant to tell him what the anchors were, but he had a map, the location of each one seared onto it, and he had a mirror to see through the smoke hiding them. “I only just found you.” The objection sounded lame the moment it left his mouth, but he carried on, sounding like a child. “You wanted me to find you. You wrote that on the wall, didn’t you? Find Me. That was you, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. It was me. You know it was. But I didn’t know you were a marked man. I had no idea he’d set the Reels on you. Believe me, if I had, I never would have dragged you into this. I’d have stayed hidden. I’m very good at it. I’ve been doing it for a long time. And, Jesus, just to be blunt for a moment, you weren’t supposed to just walk in here. No one has been able to do that since Damiola’s dweomers sealed the film studio set away. Do you have any idea what you’ve done? If he finds you here, he’ll know the anchors are coming loose.” She shook her head. “There’s no telling what he’ll do then. He’s not like normal people. He doesn’t like losing. He’d rather destroy the board than lose the game.” That was a telling glimpse into Seth Lockwood’s psychology.
Eleanor pulled on his arm again, forcing Josh to match her speed as she started to run through empty streets of Glass Town toward the crack that would lead him back through to the streets of London on the other side of the illusion.
He used every second he spent in the place to soak it in: every building, every window, every streetlight—gaslight, he realized—every car—none of them immediately recognizable, their badges naming them ABCs and Crossley’s and other bygone models.
It really was like walking through a fully dressed, completely deserted film set masquerading as 1920s London.
It didn’t feel real.
All the details were there, but it was like there was nothing behind their painted fronts: there was a factory, he saw, but no smoke rising from any of its chimneys, and a public house, but no welcoming light burning inside its taproom.
He looked back over his shoulder several times to see the Comedians following them, and behind the grotesque Crake and Clamp, a trail of silver footprints that smoldered and blistered a path all the way back to the magician’s workshop. Josh had no idea how she could possibly hope to hide them from Seth or anyone else. Black curls of smoke rose from them, crying out: Here, look at us, see us, we are wrong, we shouldn’t be here … then, through the smoke he noticed something else—a shadow-shape, a blur of movement. He tried to focus on it, but there was something decidedly wrong about the way it moved. He heard its claws on the street, scrabbling as the shape raced toward him.
Josh couldn’t bring it into focus.
Eleanor grabbed his arm and dragged him down another empty street and then another, constantly looking back over her shoulder as the animal surged toward them; its powerful gait eating the distance between them too quickly for comfort. Glass Town was a vast empty townscape, but that meant there was no one to stop them as Eleanor dragged him into a house and slammed the door behind them, and kept on running out the other side, through another house and another. Contrary to his first impression, every interior was immaculate, frozen in time. He saw frames of everyday people and their everyday lives locked in place, everything just so, from the china on the table to the cutlery and even the coats hanging over the banisters. He didn’t stop to think what the presence of all this stuff meant, he just followed Eleanor.
Finally, she stopped running, having led them into a dead end. They faced the brick wall. Josh looked back over his shoulder to see the Comedians approaching, the hound at their heels.
While it moved like a dog, snapping and snarling rabidly, but soundlessly at the air, it possessed a haunting X-ray-like quality of a photographic negative. The dark patches of fur were painfully bright, its eyes two bright white spheres that blaz
ed demonically.
“There,” Eleanor said, pointing at nothing.
“What is that thing?” Josh said, unable to tear his eyes off the animal stalking toward him.
“Seth calls it a Negative. There are three of them. I call them Hellhounds. Black dogs. They keep me in this place … it’s grotesque … like so much else that Seth Lockwood lays his hand to. Now go, before you can’t. Through there.” Josh saw a shadow that ran like a crack at the juncture of the red-brick wall and the house it butted onto. “It’s a weakness in the veil. You can slip through, back into your own London. Go. Close your eyes if it helps.”
Josh looked back over his shoulder one last time. The Comedians were no more than two hundred feet away, but the dog was so much closer, eighty feet and closing fast, less than five seconds from pouncing on him.
They weren’t going to have the luxury of some long farewell.
“Come with me.”
“I can’t. It doesn’t work like that.”
“Of course it does, just take my hand. I’ve seen you out there.”
“I can’t leave this place—not for more than a few minutes. You’ll see why when you leave. Now go.”
“What about the—?” he didn’t get to finish asking how she’d deal with the smoldering tracks of the Comedians or the rabid Negative. She didn’t even ask him what his name was. Eleanor shoved Josh toward the shadow, and he found himself falling into it.
There was a moment—a singular moment that existed within the silence between his heartbeats—when there was nothing. It was the most frightening thing Josh had experienced in his life, despite lasting for less than a second. In that moment his senses failed him. There was no sight, no sound; he could taste the saliva in his mouth, rusty with blood, but there was nothing to feel, not above or below or around him, and no lingering odors, not even his own sweat. Nothing. It all simply ceased to be. Was this what death was like, an absence of everything?
And then he heard her say, “Save me,” as he staggered out into the middle of a busy road, into the blaring of horns and the biting cold of the rain, the night and the stars gone, the sun high in the morning sky.
His senses came alive as he stepped straight into the path of a police car.
26
ETERNAL FLAME
Josh froze.
That hesitation saved his life.
Had he tried to run, the reflexes of the driver would have left him lying dead in the middle of the road. As it was, the man behind the wheel instinctively executed an evasive maneuver, slamming his foot down hard and yanking on the wheel, that had the police car slewing sideways across the road, tires shrieking as they burned rubber.
It spun past Josh as the Comedians emerged from the shadows.
They weren’t so lucky.
The sounds of the impact were sickening as the radiator buckled around their tangled legs, Clamp thrown high into the air even as Marty Crake’s head came down, his face cannoning off the bonnet to a chorus of shattering teeth before the pair were casually tossed aside by the momentum of the spinning car. The bodies cartwheeled across the white line, still seeming to hold hands to the horror of the witnesses, only to be caught by the front of a number 23 bus hurrying toward Aldwych. That second impact battered them beyond all recognition as they hit the tarmac and were mangled beneath the relentless forward motion of the bus. It didn’t matter how hard the driver stamped on the brakes, the bus was moving too fast, and the stopping distance too far to save the Comedians from going under its speeding wheels.
Someone screamed, thinking they were watching two men in fancy dress die.
Josh still didn’t move.
He was staring at the shadow, waiting for the Negative dog to emerge. When it didn’t, he finally turned to look at the horror unfolding in the street. He watched as one of the Comedians’ arms flapped weakly. Cars stopped all around him, people running to help, others crying or dead silent in shock, him an island of absolute stillness inside the chaos of it all.
People came out of the shops. Passengers poured out of the bus. Drivers opened car doors, all of them walking into the middle of the road, bringing the traffic to a stop. Every single one of them driven by morbid curiosity to see something they really didn’t want to see.
And still Josh didn’t move.
He heard someone yelling, barking orders at the others. He watched the bus driver stumble out of his seat, shaking his head, saying over and over, “I didn’t see them. I didn’t see them. I couldn’t stop. They came out of nowhere.”
Someone else shouted, “Don’t try and move them. Don’t. Just leave them.”
“We should do something.”
Voices. Voices. Everywhere.
“We have to help them!”
“Has someone called an ambulance?”
“Are they dead?”
“Do you think they’re dead?”
“Oh, God … they’re dead aren’t they. Jesus. Fuck. Jesus.”
And still Josh didn’t move.
He didn’t move when the young policeman came across to him and tried to guide him out of the road. “Are you all right, sir? Sir? Are you okay? Can you hear me? Are you hurt?”
Nothing.
Josh stared at a man sitting in the window of a café across the street. The light above him was dim, so he couldn’t see his face properly, but he could see more than enough. It wasn’t some mysterious newfound cousin; it was Seth Lockwood. The same youthful Seth he’d seen in Number 13. Just like Eleanor, he hadn’t aged a day in ninety years.
On the table in front of Seth there was what looked like some kind of glass orb, a lens of sorts, crusted in parts with dried blood. Until an hour ago, Josh wouldn’t have thought there could be anything sinister about a glass ball. Now he knew better. Josh could see the small flame burning in the heart of the orb as Seth picked it up and balanced the glass on his palm. He rolled it out to the edge of his fingertips, then brought his hand around quickly so the orb seemed almost to stick to the back of his hand as it rolled, threatening to fall and shatter into a thousand pieces before he brought it back under control again.
All the while, Seth stared at Josh, never breaking eye contact.
“Oh, my God, he’s still alive under there!”
“Help me get to him. Jesus. Jesus fucking Christ. What a mess.”
“For the love of all things holy…”
“Look at his head.”
“Fucking hell … how is he still breathing?”
“Oh, God. Oh, God. Look at him…”
There was a commotion behind Josh. He didn’t turn. He didn’t want to see what was happening. Hearing it was enough. The reflections in the café window were more than enough. Together they were too much. The ambulance sirens neared, but there was no way they were going to be able to negotiate the narrow street and its jammed traffic fast enough.
“Hang in there. Don’t worry. It’s going to be okay. The ambulance is on the way. Look at me. Look at my face. Don’t close your eyes.”
“Roll him over. We should roll him over.”
“No.”
“What if he chokes on his blood or drowns on it or something? We should put him in the recovery position, poor bastard.”
“Leave him where he is. He’s not going to choke; he’s facedown.”
Movement. The dragging of a dead weight across the tarmac as they pulled the Comedians out from beneath the bus. And still Josh didn’t turn.
“I said—holy fuck…”
“What’s wrong with his face?”
Josh watched as Seth leaned forward, and with a careless tilt of the wrist let the glass orb roll back to his fingertips, teeter on the edge, and then fall. The glass hit the linoleum floor by his feet. The impact shattered it and snuffed out the last flickering life from the flame at its heart.
Behind Josh, one of the Good Samaritans said, “It’s too late. He’s gone.” And Josh knew that somehow Seth had relinquished his hold on the thing, letting it go into whatever passed
for its endless night. That was the only reason it was dead, not the bus, not the crushing damage it had caused to the Comedians. They had served their purpose. By shattering the glass he’d extinguished more than just the light, he’d snuffed out whatever magic that had kept that thing alive.
Never taking his eyes off Josh, Seth pushed himself up out of his seat.
The fact that he was here, waiting for Josh to emerge from the shadow meant that he knew, didn’t it? Meant that he knew it all. He knew that Boone had left his grandson more than just a lighter in his will. He knew all about Isaiah’s legacy. He knew that Josh had found Eleanor Raines in her lost London prison. Which in turn meant he knew all about the weakness in Glass Town’s invisible walls.
And he knew all of that because Josh had just stepped out of the place in front of his eyes.
Seth Lockwood was every bit the devil Isaiah had painted him to be.
27
LOST WEEK
Julie Gennaro left the car door open as he walked over to the dead men.
He hadn’t seen them coming. They had quite literally stepped out of nowhere, right in front of him. He was shaking; not just because he’d hit two pedestrians, but because of what he’d seen as they’d gone up over his bonnet: that face. Those teeth. The impossibly wide, predatory smile as the mouth opened wider and wider, then spiraling shut like the metal jaws of a garbage truck as the guy’s head came down, cannoning off the bonnet, before impact dragged the body away. It was like something dreamed up by a fever, a nightmare given flesh and set down in the middle of an East London street, and all Julie could do was stare at the bus driver’s face as he tried so desperately to stop. The true horror of it being that he knew he couldn’t.
Glass Town Page 17