Glass Town

by Steven Savile

  He reached down to put the stereo on. He was fidgety and didn’t want his passenger to realize just how nervous he was. The CD started playing. It was one of Taff’s. It was the absolute last thing Julie wanted to hear. Keeping his eyes on the road, he leaned forward and fumbled with the buttons to switch it over to the radio, picking up the jarring fiddles of the Levellers on a slightly off-station Absolute Radio. “Better,” he said even as the static crackled across the airwaves.

  As the streets grew grubbier and darker, so, too, did the music. It didn’t matter; Julie wasn’t listening to it anymore. He was trying to figure a way out of the mess he was in.

  It took another ten minutes and twice as many turns as they tacked a way across the capital before the church with its gaping hole where there should have been a spire and bats up in the belfry came into sight. It looked curiously lopsided, like a caricature of a haunted house up on a green and unpleasant hill—this one surrounded by ring after ring of cracked and broken tombstones. The roof had collapsed over the altar and several of the stained-glass windows were broken, letting the elements in.

  They parked the car and stood at the old lych-gate. It looked like it belonged on a much grander structure than the dilapidated church. Julie looked around. There was no sign of Seth, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have eyes and ears in place. Weeds had reclaimed the path that wound its way through the gravestones to the imposing archway where there used to be huge double doors. The greenery turned the granite slabs into tiny cobbles. Immense tree roots rose out of the ground to reach up over some of the graves, while the patron saints set to look over them lay on their sides—chipped, weathered, and broken. Julie saw a headless statue atop one of the graves, hands still clasped in prayer. Beside it words had been hammered into the lead above a sunken mausoleum’s door. The sign said: The Flesh Also Shall Rest In Hope. The wingless angel lying on her back amid the tall grasses didn’t offer much hope, Julie thought bleakly. The old churchyard grounds were heavily forested off to the left; while on the right, red-brick factories crowded the skyline. None of the gravestones were regular or whole. Several of the granite skirts that had outlined the shapes of the graves were buckled and balanced precariously where the ground beneath them had slipped away forming undulating hills that rippled all the way to the tree line.

  “What is this place?”

  “An anchor,” Josh said. “There’s a lens somewhere here, one of Damiola’s glasses.”

  “How do we find it?” Julie asked, but Josh already had the battered compact in his hand. He turned his back to the derelict church and raised the compact high enough so that it showed the building in the glass.

  “Here, look,” Josh said, urgently. “Can you see it this time? Tell me you can see it.”

  Julie didn’t know what to expect when he looked in the glass, but it wasn’t the sight of a halolike crackle of energy running around the rooftop or the sight of the spire fully restored, black slates glittering with early morning dew. A too-white line chased through the halo’s core, sparking as it passed through the hands of a leering gargoyle perched on the corner of the rooftop. A glint of sunlight reflected off the glass in the gargoyle’s grasp. “I see it,” he said. “I don’t understand it, but I see it; up there in the gargoyle’s hands.”

  Josh Raines nodded. “Damiola’s glass. There are thirteen of them ringing the perimeter of Glass Town. It never disappeared. It was never redeveloped after the film studio failed. The magician did something that moved it a step out of time, I think, or pushed it through to another place that exists a step out of time from us. On the other side of those lenses time slows down to the point that one year passes in a hundred on this side.”

  Julie shook his head. “How the fuck is that possible?”

  He turned around, looking at the church without its spire. The gargoyle was still in place, though half of his face appeared to be weathered away to the point that it looked as though the poor creature had had a stroke. The spire wasn’t the only thing that was missing. He couldn’t see the halo.

  He looked in the glass again, reassuring himself both were there, then looked back at the reality of the church and its crumbling walls.

  “I just don’t…”

  “I can’t pretend that I understand the where’s and why’s either, beyond saying it’s magic, but it is what it is. There’s no point standing around arguing the physics of it. This is how we beat Seth. We shatter that lens, bringing down this corner of the illusion. Without it, the magic can’t hold. Then we go after the next and the next until there’s none left. Seth was born over a century ago, all we have to do is wait for time to catch up with him.”

  “You make it sound simple,” Julie said, looking up at the deformed gargoyle.

  “As easy as breaking glass.”

  “What can possibly go wrong?” Julie muttered to himself, looking around for any sign that the gangster had arrived. Behind them, nothing moved. Not even the leaves on the trees in the slight breeze. The silence was unnerving. “So, how? I mean, have you thought about how you’re going to get up there?” Julie pointed up toward the gargoyle that was perched about twenty feet above their heads.

  It was obvious that he hadn’t.

  He looked about for something to throw at it, crouching down to pick up a fist-sized rock. He threw it and missed by a good three feet, the rock powdering part of the old stone where it hit.

  “This could take a while,” Julie joked.

  “Not helping.”

  “Wasn’t trying to.”

  Julie glanced back toward the lych-gate again. There was no way Seth wasn’t going to pull something. He wouldn’t just stand by and let them destroy the glass given just how important it was to his survival. Lockwood had given him one task: convince Josh to let it go. He’d failed abjectly at that. Josh was more determined than ever, but that was Lockwood’s fault; he’d gone blundering in in his size twelves threatening Josh’s mother. He didn’t have to do that. It wasn’t big, it wasn’t clever, and it made no sense. It wasn’t a smart play. The problem, as Julie saw it, was that Lockwood was clever. He was deliberate, manipulative, and dangerous. That he’d pushed Josh into lashing out couldn’t be some unforeseen side effect of him trying to be too clever for his own good. He wanted Josh to lash out. Somehow, someway, it benefited him. It had to. But if Josh was right and that by breaking the lens he’d doom Seth, how could that be winning?

  “Who are you expecting to see back there,” Josh said, a new stone in his hand.

  “Just thinking,” Julie said. “This is a mistake. We shouldn’t be here.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a trap, it’s got to be. Think about it, why did he make your mum call you?”

  “It was a warning,” Josh said.

  Julie was unconvinced, and would have been even without knowing his own part in the setup. “Or it was meant to force you into action,” he suggested. “This is a man who has lived his life scaring the living fuck out of people. If there’s one thing he knows how to do it’s put the frighteners on people. He knew you’d do this, go after the anchors. It’s your only way to hurt him, you said so yourself, but look around you, he hasn’t tried to stop you. If you accept he’s not an idiot, and that he’s been one step ahead of you—at least one—every step of the way, that means he wants you to do this. He’s counting on it.”

  Josh shook his head. “No. No. That’s not right. It can’t be.”

  “It has to be,” Julie said, realizing the extent of just how badly he’d been lied to. “He’s going to kill you here. You said it yourself, right at the beginning; he’s going to kill you. He doesn’t want you to stop looking for Eleanor Raines; he wants you dead, like your dad, like your granddad. He wants his brother’s line ended, and you’re the last. It’s all about family for him, and when Isaiah took her name he stopped being a Lockwood. He stopped being family. He became the enemy.”

  Josh continued to shake his head, but Julie could see the doubt creeping in. He
looked around again, seeing this time all the places Lockwood could be lurking, all of the culverts and tumbledown stones and realizing just how vulnerable they were out there in front of the church.

  “We should get out of here.”

  “Go if you want, I’m not going anywhere. I came here to destroy the anchor, that’s what I’m going to do.”

  Julie backed up a couple of steps, his feet crunching on the gravel underfoot. “Don’t do this. You’re playing into his hands. I know you think this is your idea, but it’s not. It can’t be. He’s too fucking shrewd for that. He’s playing you, Josh. He wants you to break that thing,” but Josh wasn’t listening. He walked up to the side of the church and reached up, feeling out the crumbling stones for makeshift handholds.

  A couple of seconds later he boosted himself up and started to scramble up the side of the church, the cornerstones between his legs. Halfway up, with the gargoyle still out of reach, he leaned back looking for more handholds. It was the kind of stupid maneuver that, had he been unluckier, would have ended with him breaking his neck, but whatever god, angel, or devil who looked after idiots was watching over him.

  Julie saw Josh reach out for the glass sphere hidden in plain sight within the gargoyle’s stone talons. Josh leaned out perilously, straining to tease the glass free with his fingertips. Julie could hear the sizzle of the current surging unseen through the lens as it chased around the cordon of Glass Town maintaining the century-old spell. Josh leaned a little farther, his weight very much being taken by the fingers of his left hand as he flapped upward with his right, trying unsuccessfully to dislodge the glass.

  Julie heard a dog barking in the distance. The sound made him shiver, as though someone had walked over his grave. He didn’t like this one little bit. It was all wrong. “He’s going to kill you,” he said again, even though Josh was too far away to hear. He was absolutely sure of it.

  And then Josh cried triumphantly, pulling the magician’s lens free of the gargoyle’s clutches. He held it aloft like Liberty’s torch, then with what felt like slow-motion horror to Julie, let it spill off the end of his fingertips and fall.

  It shattered on the chips of stone twenty feet below.

  The barking intensified: closer, louder, savage now.

  Julie looked around for the source, expecting to see a pack clawing up the road, snapping and snarling.

  Nothing.

  He turned back to look at Josh, and through the open arch where the church doors should have been saw the shimmering haze of a dark street and up above he saw a stray moonbeam and around it, streaks of shooting stars as if all of those thousands of points of light were falling from the sky. When he looked down from that impossible sky he saw a dog—only it couldn’t be a dog, it lacked any kind of tone or color, like a photograph in negative. The dark patches of fur were blisteringly bright; its eyes two blazing white spheres in the center of its skull. It tore up the street that was somehow—incredibly, impossibly—through the archway. Behind the Negative, deep in the heart of the abandoned church where the movie-set street opened up into a Victorian square, he saw a woman in a red dress. He knew her. Even across the distance—across the time—she was unmistakable.

  Eleanor Raines’s screams chased the dog as it barreled out through the archway.

  Still, the rabid animal didn’t make a sound, yet the barking all around him intensified in its savagery, the strays of this London raging against its unnatural presence. How many dogs were there out there, descending on the derelict church? Ten? Twenty? The pack’s howls spiraled, becoming a dizzying cacophony.

  Julie felt the warmth leech out of the air as the Negative prowled toward him, its nearness placing a chill deep in his heart that spread through every vein and artery, putting ice where there had been hope. He felt his vision blur, the dual city within a city before him swimming out of focus as he struggled to cling on to his sense of self. Julie felt himself diminishing, the world around him pitching beneath his feet as he clung to the nearest gravestone to stay upright. The dog closed the distance between them from thirty feet to ten.

  Julie stumbled back trying to put precious distance back between them, but in doing so lost his grip on the headstone and with it, his footing.

  He went down, unable to take his eyes off the Negative as it loomed over him, salivating, strings of black spittle stretched out between sharp teeth. The Negative pressed him down, claws on his chest. He could see the rapid rise and fall of its rib cage, the flare of its nostrils, those strings of spittle snapping as its white eyes burned, but it still didn’t make a sound.

  He clawed at the ground, trying to push himself up, but the weight on his chest kept him pinned to the dirt. Try as he might, there was no getting out from under the beast. Julie wriggled desperately beneath the Negative, but couldn’t dislodge it. Its breath tasted strange on his face. It wasn’t brimstone or anything Hellish. It was blandly chemical. He reached up to push the thing off, and where his hands came into contact with the Negative’s flesh, they came away stained black. He couldn’t feel anything. No tightness of skin. No burning.

  Those too white eyes stared through him.

  Those eyes were fierce.

  The Negative lowered its mouth to feed, teeth opening as it sought out the heat of his pulse in his throat. When he thought all was done, the Negative’s black teeth inches from sinking into his meat, he willed himself gone, out of his head, somewhere it couldn’t hurt.

  The pain never came.

  The grotesque monstrosity stopped and tilted its head, nostrils flaring as it sniffed at the air—once, twice, three times—its head swiveling left and right, before it turned to stare up at the still-stranded Josh clinging on precariously to the wall.

  It bounded away from Julie, leaving him gasping, shivering and dizzy from the shock that somehow he was living not dying. He could feel the warmth of blood on his chest, a very mortal reminder that things didn’t have to stay that way.

  He was on his feet a moment later, hand pressed to his chest, his blood dribbling out between his fingers where the Negative’s claws had pierced his flesh, and yelling barely coherently, “What the fuck is that thing?”

  He didn’t expect an answer.

  Certainly not the one he got.

  “My pet,” Seth said, emerging from the sanctity of the abandoned church. “Don’t be afraid, Julie, she’s not here for you. You’ve done well. I couldn’t have done this without your help. Now,” Lockwood turned to look up at Josh. “Do come down from there before you fall and hurt yourself. And you will; she has that effect on people. She really sucks all the fun out of life. Tell him, Julie. You know what I’m talking about. I can see it written all over your face, plain as day.”

  The Negative prowled around the ground beneath Josh, waiting for him to fall. Julie could still feel the dread its nearness had instilled in him, the sheer overwhelming urge to just give up, to curl up fetally, and surrender.

  “I can’t…”

  “Don’t be so modest, Julie. You’ve got quite a way with words. You must have, to have lied so convincingly that young Josh here swallowed your bullshit.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” he said, telling himself that, telling Josh that, telling Seth that. Not one of them believed him.

  “What’s happening to me?” Josh moaned. “I can’t see. Oh, Christ … I CAN’T SEE!”

  “Ah, that’s not good,” Seth said, quite matter-of-factly.

  And then Josh lost his grip.

  40

  HANDS ACROSS LONDON

  The world was turned on its head.

  Josh twisted against the chains trussing him up. The place—wherever it was—was dark. The air against his skin was cold, making him think it was some sort of warehouse or meat locker. Somewhere Lockwood wouldn’t be disturbed while he dispensed his tortures. Somewhere Josh really didn’t want to be.

  Time passed.

  Too much of it.

  The darkness was dislocating and disorientating. It threaten
ed to consume him. He was alone with his thoughts, and that was the last place he wanted to be. Images of the Negative plagued him. Was it out there in the silence? He couldn’t feel the ice where his bones ought to be, so surely that meant he was safe from it, at least for now?

  The last thing he remembered was losing his sight; then falling.

  So maybe it wasn’t dark at all, maybe this was his life now?

  A world of nothing.

  He struggled to straighten up, reaching to clutch his legs and for a moment at least relieve the pressure of the blood pounding through his skull. Surely the bones couldn’t take the relentless pounding. Something inside had to give eventually, a tiny blood vessel somewhere deep inside the labyrinth of his brain rupture in a fatal aneurysm and end him. Folded double, struggling to stay upright long enough to reach up with his right hand to fumble with the chains binding him at the ankles, Josh felt the weight of the thick padlock rattle against the chains as he wrestled hopelessly against his bonds. He was going nowhere. He fell back down, resigned to whatever the darkness had in store.

  More time passed. It crawled, it raced; it lost all meaning.

  Josh listened desperately for any sign that he wasn’t alone, fearing that Seth was just going to leave him hanging until he slowly dehydrated and starved to death.

  Finally he heard something. It wasn’t a comforting sound.

  Rats.

  He heard them scuttling about in the darkness, getting braver, edging closer. Their claws scratched on the concrete floor.

  He missed the silence.

  How long would Seth leave him hanging?

  A day? Two? Too long?

  Out in the darkness he heard the roll and slam of steel shutter doors going up and down, followed by slow, measured footsteps.

  “Who’s there?” he called out. “Who is it?”

  “No ghost,” Seth said. “No demon, no devil, and definitely no salvation. Just me.” He was nothing more than a voice in the darkness. “I hope that’s enough?”

  The chains rattled as Josh turned again, wriggling around frantically like a daddy longlegs under a magnifying glass on a bright summer day. The sound swelled to fill his head, overwhelming his senses.