The City's son st-1

by Tom Pollock

  She’d left pieces of her mind like this all over London, and no one else knew where. No one, except maybe Pen.

  She glanced over at the taller girl. When the two of them swapped secrets it wasn’t like the hostage-exchange Beth sometimes saw with other girls. Pen genuinely cared, and that meant Beth could risk enough to care, too. Pen was like a bottomless well: you could drop any number of little fears into her, knowing they would never come back to haunt you.

  It started to rain: a thin, constant, soaking drizzle.

  Pen wrote her poems on kerbs and inside phone boxes, romantic counterpoints to the pink-and-black business cards with their adverts for bargain-basement sex, carnal specialties listed after their names like academic degrees:

  CALL KARA FOR A WICKED TIME: D/s, T/V, NO S, P OR B

  ‘… you might be the puzzle-piece of me,

  I’ve never seen.’

  ‘That’s gorgeous, Pen,’ Beth murmured, reading over her shoulder.

  ‘Think so?’ Pen eyed the verse worriedly.

  ‘Yeah.’ Beth knew eight-tenths of sod-all about poetry, but Pen’s calligraphy was beautiful.

  The sun slowly bleached the buildings from the colour of smoke to the colour of old bone. More and more cars passed them by.

  ‘We should head,’ Pen said at last, tapping her watch. She frowned, considering something, then added, ‘Maybe we should catch separate buses. We don’t normally arrive at school together — it might attract attention.’

  Beth laughed. ‘Isn’t that a little paranoid?’

  Pen gave her a shy, almost proud smile. ‘You know me, B. Paranoid’s where I excel.’ She led the way out of the narrow alley and they slipped into the hustling crowd.

  Pen took the first bus.

  Beth felt like a spy or a superhero, sliding back into her secret identity as she waited for the next.

  CHAPTER 3

  Maybe it was one of his worms that found me, nosing through the thick sludge at the edge of the river, or perhaps a pigeon, wheeling overhead, from one of the flocks that nest on top of the towers. All I know is that when I wake, Gutterglass is crouched over me.

  ‘My, my, you’re quite the mess, aren’t you?’ the old monster says gravely. ‘Good morning, Highness.’

  He — Glas is a ‘he’ this time — looks down at me with his broken eggshell eyes. Old chow mein cakes his chin in a slimy beard. His rubbish-sack coat bulges as the rats beneath it scramble about.

  ‘Morn-’ I begin to say, then the pain of the burns washes over me, choking off the words. I inhale sharply and wave him back. I need air. He’s nabbed a tyre from somewhere and his waist dissolves into a single wheel instead of his usual legs. Lithe brown rodents race around the inside, rolling him backwards.

  I grit my teeth until I reach a manageable plateau of agony, then, groggily, I take in my surroundings. I’m on a silt strand under a bridge on the south side of the river — Vauxhall, judging by the bronze statues lining the sides. The sun shimmers high in the sky. ‘How long?’ My throat feels as tight as a rusted lock.

  ‘Too long, frankly,’ Glas replies. ‘Even the foxes came in before you did. Do I need to remind you that you are my responsibility? Assuming, of course, that responsibility is a word that your grubby little Highness comprehends? If anything happens to you, I’m the one who’ll have to answer to Mater Viae.’

  I shut my eyes against the harsh light, biting back the obvious retort. Mater Viae, Our Lady of the Streets, my mother — left more than a decade and a half ago. I hate how Gutterglass still bloody nearly genuflects whenever he says her name.

  ‘If she ever comes back,’ I say, ‘do you really think she’ll care which particular pile of London crap I sleep on?’

  ‘ When she comes back,’ Glas corrects me gently.

  I don’t argue with him, because it’s not nice to call a man’s faith ridiculous.

  Most mornings you can find him (or her, if that’s the body Glas makes that day) at the edge of the dump, looking towards the sunrise over Mile End, waiting for the day when stray cats march in procession down the pavements and the street signs rearrange themselves to spell Mater Viae’s true name: the day their Goddess returns.

  Air sighs out of his tyre and he sinks down beside me. He opens the black plastic of his coat and chooses one of the syringes strapped there. He’s been raiding hospital bins again. He slides the tip into my arm, depresses the plunger and almost immediately the pain ebbs.

  ‘What a mess,’ he mutters again. ‘Sit up. Let’s take a look at the damage.’

  I creak gradually into a sort of shell-shaped hunch, which is the best I can manage. Neat cross-stitches lace my cuts together; the needle that made them has been thrust back in Glas’ arm and the left-over thread is waving gently in the wind.

  ‘Wow,’ I croak, fingering the stitches, ‘I really must have been out cold to not feel those.’

  ‘Dead to the world,’ Gutterglass agrees. ‘Not literally, though, thanks in no small part to yours truly, and in no part at all to you.’

  I have to use my spear as a lever to stand up. I can still feel the electric buzz in the iron where I stabbed the wraith. Glas dusts me down, wiping at my cheek with split penlid fingers. Glas is oddly fastidious — I guess having to make himself a new body out of the city’s rubbish every day means he knows where it’s all been.

  ‘I was hunting-’ I start to tell him about last night, but he isn’t listening.

  ‘Look at you, you’re filthy — ’

  ‘Glas, this Railwraith-’

  ‘Doing these stitches has destroyed my fingers,’ he moans. ‘Have you no heart at all for a poor old rubbish-spi-’

  ‘Glas!’ I snap, a little harder than I mean to, and he recoils and shuts up, staring at me reproachfully. I exhale hard and then just say it. ‘The wraith got loose from the tracks. It got free.’

  For a long moment the only sound is the patter of the breeze on the surface of the river. When Glas finally speaks, his voice is flat. ‘That’s not possible.’

  ‘Glas, I’m telling you-’

  ‘It’s not,’ he insists. ‘Railwraiths are electricity: its memory, its dreams. The rails are their conductors. They can’t survive away from them for more than a few minutes.’

  ‘Well, take it from the son of a Goddess whose bony arse it kicked around the block, three miles from the nearest stretch of track: this one can!’ My shout echoes off the bridge’s foundations. I squat down, trying to work the tension out of my temples with my fingertips.

  ‘Glas, it was so strong,’ I say quietly. The memory of the fierce white voltage of its teeth is seared into my skin. I shiver. ‘I wounded it, but- It must have left me for dead. I’ve never met a wraith like it. It didn’t even try to run, just came right at me…’

  ‘… as though it was it that was hunting you?’ Glas asks, and I look up sharply.

  Because that’s exactly what it was like.

  Gutterglass’ voice is very quiet. All of the rats and worms and ants that animate him go still and for a moment he looks dead. ‘Filius,’ he says softly. And he doesn’t sound confused any more. He sounds very, very frightened. ‘Did anyone see you hunting that wraith?’

  ‘What? No. Why?’

  ‘Filius-’

  ‘No one saw me, Glas, I was just hunting. I was-’ Then I falter, because that isn’t quite true: somebody did see. A sick feeling swells in my stomach as I realise what he’s asking.

  ‘It went through St Paul’s,’ I whisper.

  ‘The Railwraith entered Reach’s domain,’ Glas says.

  I nod as I feel the cold seep through me, like my bones are blistering with ice.

  ‘… and emerged on the other side,’ he continues, his voice grim, ‘loose from the rails, more angry and more powerful than it had any rightful way of being, and coming after you.’ I can hear the strain of forced calm on his borrowed vocal chords. ‘Filius,’ Glas says, ‘there’s an ugly possibility here you need to face up to.’ He sinks down until his shel
ls are level with my eyes. ‘What if that wraith didn’t “ get loose ”? What if it was set free-?’

  The question hangs in the air unfinished. I complete it in my head: What if it was set free by Reach?

  Across the river, the boom and clang of construction drifts from the St Paul’s sites. His cranes grasp at the Cathedral like it’s an orb of office.

  Reach: the Crane King. My mother’s greatest enemy. His claws have been part of my nightmares for as long as I’ve been dreaming.

  He could do it. It dawns on me now, as it must have done on Glas, that Reach is an electric expert. His cranes and diggers, his pneumatic weaponry, they’re all powered by it — so he could have found a way to channel that power into a wraith, to set it, frenzied and burning, on my tail: an opportunistic attack.

  ‘What if it’s finally happening, Filius?’ Gutterglass whispers, half to himself. ‘What if Reach is coming for you?’

  I grip my spear so tightly it feels like the skin on my knuckles could split

  ‘We have to get you home — now,’ Glas says. He’s wheeling himself round and round in circles, suddenly all urgency. ‘I need you back at the landfill where it’s safe, until I can find out what’s going on. If this is Reach, he won’t stop with a Railwraith.

  ‘Soon there will be wolves and — Lady save us,’ he murmurs fervently, ‘ wire.’ He begins rolling towards the edge of the bridge, yanking me by the arm, and I have to drag my feet in the sand to wrench myself free.

  What if Reach is coming for you?

  … Reach is coming…

  The mantra goes around and around in my head, dizzying me, but it makes no sense: why now? I’ve been here for sixteen years without my mother’s protection. What’s he been waiting for?

  But the longer I think about it, the more horribly easy it gets to believe. Reach has been the monster in every fairy-tale I’ve ever been told. My mother hated him, and Glas hates him, and I hate him too. I can feel that hatred clotting around my heart.

  Reach is coming… and deep down, I always knew he would.

  ‘Filius?’ Glas beckons impatiently. ‘We need to move.’

  I straighten up, wincing at a fresh wave of pain from my burns, and shake my head.

  Glas arches a dust-drawn eyebrow. ‘This is no time to be stubborn, Filius. In case you’ve forgotten, that wraith is still out there. It almost killed you last night.’

  ‘So imagine what it’ll do to the rest of the city,’ I say slowly. In my mind’s eye I’m seeing the blackened corpse of the boy from last night, multiplied: one for every gutter. That impossibly powerful wraith is wild and indiscriminate and free.

  What if Reach is coming for you?

  The thought is too big; I can’t grasp it. But if I let fear freeze me, then tonight it’ll be me, lying charred by the roadside. Reach is still a ‘what-if’, the wraith’s a certainty: the immediate threat. I seize on it, almost gratefully. I can focus on that.

  ‘I have to finish the hunt.’

  CHAPTER 4

  At the front of the class Mr Krafte was rambling on about The Lady of Shalott, but Beth wasn’t listening. As she doodled, a punked-up warrior princess emerged from under her pencil, blowing a mirror into fragments with her bazooka. Out of the window, she could see the tarpaulin the staff had draped over last night’s work. The portrait had still been uncovered when she and Pen had arrived, other students had been crowded around it, whooping with laughter and snapping it with their phones.

  Beth had felt a hot rush of victory and squeezed Pen’s hand. Pen had squeezed back nervously.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Beth had said, ‘there’s no proof it was us.’ They’d even buried their backpacks and paint-stained hoodies under a tree near the railway, in case of a locker search.

  ‘We’re safe. I’ll find you at the end of the day,’ she’d promised, before letting Pen go.

  ‘Miss Bradley!’ Mr Krafte’s voice jarred her out her reverie and her pencil snapped.

  ‘Yes, boss?’ She looked up warily.

  The old English teacher eyed her with mild perturbation as he folded a piece of paper between his fingers. His face was as dark and wrinkled as the skin on old gravy. ‘Go to Mrs Gorecastle’s office, please. She’d like a word.’

  A muttered ‘ooooh’ went round the classroom and Beth’s throat tightened, but she shrugged, trying to look unflustered. She spent a few seconds folding the warrior princess drawing into a paper plane, and sent it on a kamikaze nose-dive into the bin before she got up.

  Okay, Beth: here goes. Time to put on your innocent face. She glanced at her reflection in the window and sighed. If she’d been holding up a board with a date and time of arrest on it she couldn’t have looked guiltier. She grimaced and swung out into the hall.

  The door to the headmistress’ office had a little round window in it and Beth glanced through it as she approached — and stopped cold.

  She could see three figures behind the wired glass: the headmistress, Gorecastle herself, gaunt and dressed all in black, Dr Salt, who, frankly, looked better flat on the tarmac, rotting flesh and all…

  … and a tall, slim girl standing in the corner, worrying at her headscarf.

  Fury boiled up through Beth, along with an urge to get in there, to stand between Pen and the teachers, to shield her.

  Pen’s disciplinary record’s spotless — what the hell? she thought. But then she saw the mud-splotched backpack on Gorecastle’s desk and the dented spraycans arranged next to it and her indignation withered inside her. Beth suddenly felt very vulnerable, and very cold.

  The headmistress opened the door and pursed her thin lips. ‘Ah, Miss Bradley. Do join us.’

  Beth pushed past her to the desk, grabbed the backpack and swung it onto her shoulder. She glowered at the headmistress, her face burning. There was nothing to do now but own it.

  ‘So,’ the headmistress said. ‘Do you have anything to say for yourself?’

  Beth stayed silent, but inside her head a stunned voice was repeating one impossible phrase: Pen gave you up. Pen gave you up.

  Pen…

  ‘This is very serious, Elizabeth,’ the headmistress was saying. ‘You will be suspended while we investigate this matter, and that may well lead to expulsion. It is only Dr Salt’s personal request that stops me involving the police further. You should be very grateful to him, frankly. Do you have anything to say?’

  Beth kept her mouth shut and stared dead ahead. She’d show the traitor in the corner how it was done.

  ‘Very well, then,’ Gorecastle said. ‘I have some telephone calls to make. Julian, a word?’

  Dr Salt escorted her from the room.

  Beth couldn’t make herself look at Pen. Maybe if she didn’t look, it would somehow become someone else who’d betrayed her. She felt intensely, painfully weary and she dropped herself into Gorecastle’s office chair. A sudden wave of anger went through her and she kicked the desk so hard it screeched back over the floorboards.

  Pen looked at her incredulously. ‘B, you’re mental-’

  ‘How much more trouble do you think I can get in, Parva?’ Beth snapped. She chewed out the syllables of Pen’s real name; the first time she’d called her that in three years of friendship.

  Pen gulped, and something glittered on her cheek: a tear.

  Pen’s crying. Instinctively Beth reached up to hug her, and then dropped her arms. They felt so useless by her sides.

  ‘Beth, I’m-’

  ‘ Don’t say it,’ Beth snarled. ‘If you tell me you’re sorry, Parva Khan, I swear I will kill you dead. Just… just — ’ There was only one question, branded on her mind. ‘ Why? ’

  ‘He said he’d-’ Pen’s voice went scratchy. She tried again. ‘He said he’d-’

  ‘ What! ’ Beth demanded. ‘ What did he say?’

  But Pen didn’t finish; instead she huddled into herself and pulled her scarf around her.

  ‘You made it worse, B,’ she said miserably. ‘You made everything worse.’


  Beth gazed into her best friend’s face and for the first time in years she couldn’t make sense of it. Pen’s eyes were like slammed doors. A spidery feeling of wrongness crept into Beth’s throat. ‘Pen,’ she whispered, ‘Pen, what does that even mean? What happened? Pen? ’

  Pen hugged herself in silence, and Beth realised that for the first time in years, she couldn’t read her. It was a shattering thought. I don’t understand, Pen.

  And if she didn’t understand Pen, she didn’t understand anything at all.

  Gorecastle returned a few moments later. ‘Parva,’ she said, ‘thank you for your help. You can go back to class.’

  As Pen bundled herself from the office the headmistress eyed Beth. ‘Get up,’ she ordered coldly, and as Beth rose slowly from the chair behind the desk, never breaking eye contact, she sighed. ‘Children like you, Elizabeth,’ she said wearily, ‘ children like you ‘Perhaps I should just have just let the police have you.’ She picked up a form. ‘I have left a message for your father; you will wait here for him to pick you up. I shall take the opportunity to discuss this matter with him.’

  Beth’s heart, which had been hammering at a million beats a second, suddenly slowed and a sick feeling welled up in her. She started to stuff her spray-paints back into her backpack. ‘We’ll be waiting a while then,’ she whispered.

  CHAPTER 5

  They finally let Beth out at three o’clock. Her dad hadn’t called. She walked to the park and spent hours pacing, chewing at the cuticle on her right thumb and squinting at the sky until the last of the colour drained from it. She knew she’d have to face him eventually, but that didn’t make it any easier.

  At last, trying to ignore the clenching in her stomach, she forced herself to head for home.

  The hallway was dark and she kicked over a mountain of junk mail on her way towards the sitting room door. Her hand was trembling a little when she set it on the doorknob; she hadn’t been inside that room for weeks now. She fought down the urge to run back out into the street.