Glass Town

by Steven Savile

  It hadn’t felt like his since Seth’s return.

  “Time to take back what’s mine,” he said, walking unsteadily across the room to his desk. The projector was in the center of it, Damiola’s Carousel still spinning away eerily beside it, the little wick in the middle burning endlessly. He gathered the carousel up in his arms. It was heavier than he’d expected, but not so heavy that he couldn’t heft it and hurl it at the wall behind his desk. The drum broke away beneath the impact, the card popping out of place and flapping against the metal prong that had held it inside the drum’s curve. The wax dribbled down the metal as the wick burned out.

  He picked it up again and slammed it into the wall over and over again, each impact sending fragments of the machine flying until the bare metal frame was all that was left, and even that was buckled beyond salvage.

  Gideon took the envelope from the safe next and made a small bonfire out of the cutouts in his wastepaper bin. It took less than a minute for the old cards to blacken and burn, thirty seconds more for them to shrivel. He turned his back on them before they became ash. The projector was considerably heavier, so he started his vandalism by wrenching the reels off the armature and unspooling the film. It gathered in streamers around his feet, as he pulled more and more free.

  Gideon tossed the reel aside.

  He shattered the bulb and the glass lenses.

  Then and only then did he pick up the projector and carry it out to the stairs. Gritting his teeth, the old man lifted it over his head and threw it down the stairs. It didn’t make it all the way to the bottom, hitting several steps on the way down. The impact from each bent and buckled the arm until it hung uselessly away from the projector’s body.

  He wasn’t done.

  He went down to the yard out back where two plastic containers were filled with petrol, and carried one of them back up to the office, the other he left at the top of the stairs. He doused the entire office in petrol, splashing it about everywhere. The stench was overpowering. He stood in the middle of the room, sloshing petrol over the rug, the desk, and chair, all across the books in the bookcases, the wooden floorboards, and then dribbled a trail down the hallway to the staircase. He discarded the petrol can in favor of the second, splashing his way down the stairs. In the main taproom he doused the curtains and bar in petrol, then set about smashing the bottles one by one until the entire place reeked of alcohol.

  Satisfied, he sat back down at the table and took up the cigar again, sucking in a last glorious lungful of smoke before he touched the smoldering cigar tip to the petrol soaking slowly into the tabletop, but when it was obvious it wasn’t going to ignite, drew on it, bringing the hot-tip flame back to life, before he tossed it carelessly toward the bar.

  For a moment nothing happened. He thought he was going to have to push himself up out of his chair again, not sure he had the courage to go through with it twice, but a faint whisper-rush of noise as a line of bluish flame caught and spread up and over the bar meant he could sit back in his chair.

  Gideon raised the brandy glass to his lips.

  He was ready to go now.

  None of Damiola’s creations would survive the flames, not the Rushes, the Reels, or the Negatives, none of them. The Hunter’s Horns would be scoured from the landscape. It was the end of an era. The last Lockwood was leaving London.

  He’d played his part. Seth was going after the magician, headfirst into whatever tangled web Joshua Raines was spinning. There was nothing more to be done.

  He felt the heat on his face, contracting the red vines across his nose and cheeks, and the bite of it scouring the back of his throat as he drew another deep puff on the cigar.

  This was the heart of his empire.

  This was his throne room.

  This was his coffin.

  The flames chased across the carpet to the wooden door dividing the snug from the taproom, burning blue as they engulfed the wooden surface. They streaked up the velvet curtains as fiery lines raced across the flock wallpaper where the petrol had splashed.

  The heat was incredible.

  He choked on the thick smoke as it stung tears from his eyes.

  He reached out with a trembling hand for the brandy glass, then raised it to his lips.

  Gideon drained the glass in a single swallow and then closed his eyes and waited for the flames to take him.

  45

  BREAKING GLASS

  One thing Gideon Lockwood was right about was just how much the world had changed over the last generation. Years of specialist education could be replaced by a couple of minutes on Google, The Anarchist Cookbook, and a brief stop at the Minute Mart. Josh followed the instructions step-by-step, putting together some makeshift explosives out of everyday household cleaning items.

  Since he’d lost the compact he had no way of knowing exactly where the anchors were, but thanks to the MacGyverish wonders of the internet he didn’t need to. He put the plastic carrier bag on the ground between his feet and looked up at the gargoyle. He couldn’t see the halo anymore. Josh crouched down on the floor, emptying out the contents of his shopping bag. Aluminum foil, an aerosol can of air freshener, and an old box of sparklers left over from Bonfire Night. He peeled off a sheet of foil, spreading it out across the gravel, then uncapped the air freshener and stood it in the middle of the foil. Moving quickly he took the sparklers out of the box and scraped them so the sparkler dust landed on the foil. He gathered the foil up, closing off the package. That was all he needed. He took one of the unused sparkler wires and poked it into the base of the foil, then using Boone’s lighter, lit the sparkler and backed quickly away to hunker down behind the nearest row of graves.

  It took less than a minute for the fuse to burn out.

  For the longest second of his life nothing happened. Josh started to stand, thinking it was a dud. He’d been careful to make sure the sparkler dust was in the biggest possible pieces and that none of them had got under the can of air freshener, like the instructions said.

  The sound of the explosion was eardrum shattering—far more violent that he’d imagined it could possibly be, as the canister was torn to shreds by the violence of the detonation. The shrapnel sprayed every which way in a lethal hail of aluminum. Josh ducked back down beneath the protection of the headstone, eyes firmly fixed on the ground beneath his feet. He heard a second detonation, this one quite unlike the first, deeper, more resonant, as the lens shattered in a coruscating shower of blue-tinged sparks far brighter than the makeshift bomb had been. He counted out eleven in his head, adding one for good luck, before he risked looking up from behind the safety of the headstone.

  The devastation wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the sound suggested. The gargoyle and the stained-glass window beside it had taken the worst of it. The shrapnel had shredded half of his face and blackened scorch marks ran down the church wall from his perch to the ground. The window was gone. He could see the glow of flames inside the church.

  Josh pushed himself up from his crouch and hurried around the side of the abandoned church toward the archway that once again had become a doorway into another world.

  Eleanor Raines waited on the other side.

  He looked at her. He wanted to say something clever, some line about how he’d promised he’d save her, but she’d never been in more danger in all the years since Seth snatched her. She smiled tentatively toward him, but didn’t move. She looked around for signs of danger, but was alone on the other side of the broken barrier. There was no way of knowing if, once she set foot on this side of the veil, she’d be able to go back. He didn’t want her stepping out of Glass Town until he was sure there could be no going back for any of them, and that meant finding Seth’s missing finger.

  He walked into the church.

  Seven steps took him out of today all the way to the threshold of the film studio that had been Ruben Glass’s century-old folly. This time the streak of stars in the sky above him—visibly only through the holes in the church roof—was less ja
rring. It didn’t feel as if his gut had been twisted by Time’s invisible hand. He didn’t look up or around. He didn’t want to see any of it.

  He focused on Eleanor’s face.

  There were flames between them where his homemade bomb had done some serious damage. A dozen pews, those closest to the shattered window, were ablaze. The effect as the flames burned across a century was disconcerting. They appeared to flicker in and out, caught between burning bright in the here and now and ceasing to be—or yet to be—where Eleanor waited all those years ago.

  Josh walked down the center of the aisle, his hand slick with blood. He looked down and saw a shard of glass digging into his palm. He hadn’t felt it hit. He closed his fist around it, concentrating on the pain as he made the final few steps into Glass Town ignoring the weird flickering of the flames, then pulled it out and cast it aside

  “You came back,” Eleanor said. “I didn’t think you would. Not when I saw Seth take you a moment ago. Where is he?”

  “Not here,” Josh said. He didn’t have time to think about her, about what being there with her meant. She looked at him wide-eyed. That Audrey Hepburn line about the beauty of a woman being seen in her eyes had never been truer. “We don’t have long.” He took Eleanor’s hand. She trusted him. “This has to end here. We have to beat Seth once and for all, no going back, but I can’t do it without you.”

  She nodded. “I’ll do anything you need me to. Anything to be free of this hell.”

  “Does Seth have a secret place here? Somewhere he goes to be alone? Somewhere he might hide something?”

  She nodded. “More than one,” she said, then shook her head. “But there’s only one place off-limits to me.”

  “Then that’s where we want to be. Take me there.”

  Eleanor looked over his shoulder, back toward the real world. She hesitated.

  “You can trust me,” Josh told her.

  “It’s not that,” she said. It was painfully obvious she longed to leave her prison, but she didn’t question him. She took his hand and led Josh away from the archway back into the deserted streets of Glass Town. This time it didn’t feel like a lost world, it felt like a false one. He could see the chips and flakes in the paint and the cracks in the fake façades that exposed the truth of the illusion they’d been cobbled together to hide. It was far less magical than Ruben Glass had intended when he’d hired the set builders to hammer it together. From this angle, Josh could see one of the thick two-by-fours that braced the false front of the church wall through the shattered window. That window and the plank of wood presented a disconnect. He knew that logically the view was a hundred years away, because he’d looked in from the other side to see the burning pews, but there had been no supporting beam out there, only the scorch marks where his homemade bomb had detonated. He shook his head, not wanting to dwell on it.

  Coruscating sparks showered down from the ragged edge of the halo where the lens had been torn away to end the illusion. The halo writhed and crackled, lashing against what little of the optic remained to anchor it. It would all unravel given time. Mist crept in through the cracks, bringing the icy chill of that other place with it.

  He had no intention of being inside the illusion when that happened.

  He followed Eleanor to the end of the deserted street.

  It was quiet. Eerily so. But then it was hidden away from the rest of the world and all of its noise. Josh was about to dismiss the creeping sense of unease as just that, when a crackle of white noise set a chill in his heart. The Negative prowled around the corner. The great dog tossed its head back and barked another static hiss, then lowered its head and charged toward them.

  Josh couldn’t move.

  His feet wouldn’t let him.

  There wasn’t a star in the sky above them. The Negative ran hard and low, keeping its body close to the ground. Its nostrils flared as it sniffed them out. Another burst of white noise escaped its jaws. It had his scent. It breathed Josh in, then howled up at the moonless sky. With ten feet between them the Negative stiffened, muscles taut, ready to pounce, but even as it rose to its full towering height Josh saw the blisters in its fur. The Negative’s claws raked across the cobbles, leaving deep gouges in them. It was painfully easy to imagine what they would do to skin and bone.

  Eleanor threw herself between Josh and the beast, her hands up in front of her face as she braced for the impact that never came. The blisters on the Negative’s fur spread, popping and shrinking back like film burning under the camera’s too-bright light. Through the quickly spreading wounds in its flesh Josh saw the street behind the Negative. The beast howled its static roar again, then fell silent as the lower part of its jaw was lost to the blisters. It raked a claw across Eleanor’s red dress that should have opened her from breastbone to sternum, but passed right through her as if she wasn’t there.

  She looked down at her chest and then at the ruin of the creature before her.

  This dissolution was fast, the blisters spreading all across the Negative’s body, blackening as they spread, then bursting to leave behind nothing more than a smoldering hole in the beast that grew as more and more blisters spread. Wisps of blackened smoke curled away from the wounds, spreading out across the Negative’s flesh until it was entirely consumed and the gouges in the cobbles were all that remained of the Negative. The smoke tangled with the encroaching mist.

  The stench was sickening.

  “I don’t know how you did that,” Josh said, his heart hammering, “but I’m not complaining. Come on.”

  “It wasn’t me,” she said.

  “Then we’ve got a guardian angel. Let’s not waste it.”

  He followed Eleanor through three more streets, working their way toward the center of the lot. Up ahead he saw the domed roof of what he mistook to be some sort of place of worship. It wasn’t. It was a movie theater. Light speared out of the single aperture in the dome with searchlight intensity. It arced out toward the barrier. He was looking at the source of the halo. The root of the conjuration, which kept the Otherworld open on this side of the veil.

  “In there,” she pointed unnecessarily. He was already climbing the steps toward the doors. Chains were looped through the push bars, secured by a heavy padlock. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t like they were going to get arrested for breaking and entering. He pulled his jacket off and wrapped it around his fist, then without thinking about how much it might hurt, slammed his fist through the glass. Without unwrapping his fist, he punched out the jagged splinters of glass left behind in the frame, then clambered through into the dark of the cinema.

  It was musty inside, with no light save for the little that filtered in through the windows and doors. Deeper in, he’d be moving in pitch black. Where would Seth hide his treasure? Not near the door, for sure. Up in the projection room? That was the most likely option, wasn’t it? Not down in the theater itself, up out of the way, somewhere safe. The reality was that there were thousands of places in this building he could have stashed the tip of his finger. The chance of finding it was less than zero unless it was simply waiting to be found. He took Boone’s lighter from his pocket, flicked the wheel, and shone the tiniest light on the darkness.

  Unlike the buildings they’d passed on the way here, the cinema wasn’t a shell behind the false front. It was a proper building, curling wallpaper on the walls, and the red carpet underfoot looked as if it had never been walked on. This would have been the heart of the movie lot, he realized. The place where Ruben Glass intended to hold his glorious premieres, welcoming the bold and the beautiful one and all to marvel at the opulence of the new theater. Gold statues of Egyptian gods and goddesses were set in recessed sconces along the walls. There was more gold along the carpet rails and the banisters set along the walls. In full daylight, it must have been a throwback to the opulence of the time. Huge spiderwebs clung to the chandelier above him and spread across the ceiling like the draped fabrics of sheik’s tent. He really didn’t want to encounter the ar
achnid responsible for spinning out that grand design as he ventured deeper into the place in search of the stairs. The lighter was hot in his hand by the time he found them.

  He climbed two at a time, Eleanor a couple of steps behind him.

  “What are we looking for?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Josh said.

  Their voices echoed through the empty spaces.

  “Try me, you might be surprised.”

  “A finger. Well, a fingertip.”

  “You’re right, that’s definitely not what I was expecting.”

  Josh explained how that fingertip allowed Seth to pass into and out of Glass Town freely without the risk of time catching up with him because as long as it remained here he never truly left. He couldn’t tell if she was impressed, or angry she hadn’t thought of it herself. At the top of the stairs he turned to see her holding one hand in the other. He pretended not to notice.

  The one advantage of the absolute quiet was that he could hear the tick of the projector wheel coming from up above them. The second set of stairs was behind a door marked Projection Room. There was a warding carved into the wooden threshold, and within it a crude rendition of a woman. As Eleanor tried to follow him through, it stopped her midstep. A lingering piece of Cadmus Damiola’s magic that kept Eleanor Raines out of the room. Try as she might, she couldn’t cross the threshold.

  “I’ll be back,” Josh said. “Keep an eye out. Yell if we have any unwelcome visitors.” She nodded. He climbed up the old wooden risers one step at a time, each one groaning underfoot. The room beneath the dome was small—the ceiling barely high enough for him to stand upright in it. A weird projector stood on a table in the middle of the round room. It was unlike any film projector he’d ever seen. There were loads of windows all around it that were shuttered so no light shone out through them. The single source of light in the room speared out from the heart of the machine, aimed at a lens that amplified it as it arrowed it out through the glass window which acted as another lens, intensifying the flickering light as the projector wheels rattled on endlessly, with no film to project. The set-up wasn’t unlike the weird Heath Robinson contraption with all of its kettles and brass plates and condensers he’d found above the glass shop the first time he’d stumbled into Glass Town. But this was different. This was the source. This was where the magic happened.