“Okay,” Josh said, though it was anything but.
“There’s something else.”
“Tell me.”
“You aren’t going to want to hear it.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“He says this is your fault. Now you have to stand up. Make things right. Everything that has happened, everything that is going to happen is because of what you did.”
“If I smash the mirrors, if I bring Lockwood back, will that change things?”
“He doesn’t think so.”
31
The old man’s ghost watched them take his body into his own mausoleum.
It wasn’t an event Damiola had ever expected to bear witness to, but then how many people got to be visitors to their own funeral?
He’d lied to Josh, not through any sense of shame, not trying to shift the blame, but because Damiola needed him to step up. It wasn’t his fault; none of it was. It went back further than that; all the way back to Seth and Eleanor. One for one. He’d created Glass Town, he’d fashioned the illusion and bonded those streets to the Annwyn. He’d banished them, not Josh. In all of this talk of one for one, they’d been ignoring the most obvious flaw in their thinking: Eleanor Raines.
If Arawn was here, now, in place of Seth, then that had to mean there was another of his kind in this place somewhere, a counterpart that balanced out Eleanor’s banishment, and whoever it was had been here for a very, very long time. That was the nature of balance.
He hadn’t always known how it worked, but as things became clearer, his understanding crystallized and it grew more obvious that everything that had happened—and was going to happen—lay at his door. He’d had a lot of time to mull things over on his bench watching over the cemetery. He had created Glass Town. He had trapped Eleanor and Seth in that hellish place. No one else.
So, one for one, he’d started this, and because of his own stupidity he wasn’t going to be around to finish it.
That was why he’d lied to Josh.
He needed him motivated to fight, but no so guilt-ridden that he curled up into a ball and surrendered.
Damiola didn’t know who had come through, or what role they would play in the coming days, if indeed they would play a part, but he was sure they were here, and had been for a long time. There was a cuckoo in the nest.
He followed them inside.
“Is he here with us?” Josh asked, the female officer.
Ellie Taylor nodded.
The pair of them struggled with his bulk. The narrow corridor that led into the chamber of mirrors they’d set up to snare Seth wasn’t exactly made for carrying a dead body down, which was ironic given the purpose of the building they were in.
“What do you want us to do with your body?”
Damiola hadn’t thought about it. How many people did? Maybe those facing down their last days, putting their house in order. But normal people still laboring under the misapprehension they’d live forever? Not so many, he’d wager. He looked at the pathetic bag of bones and those rags it was clad in. There wasn’t enough meat on it to feed the worms. “I don’t care,” he told the Speaker for the Dead. “Tell him to prop me up in the corridor with a sign around my neck saying Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.” The ghost chuckled at that. She didn’t look quite so amused by the notion.
“He says he doesn’t care.”
Diplomatic.
They stopped at the last door.
It was obvious that Josh didn’t want to open it. He knew what was on the other side.
“Tell him to get a move on, some of us haven’t got all day.”
“Do you remember the last thing I said to you in here?” Josh asked the ghost.
He did.
He’d told him he wouldn’t live forever, that one day he’d come back to break the glass and finish Seth once and for all. The threat was chillingly prophetic.
Josh reached up to rest his hand on the lintel, contact breaking the seal Damiola had put in place in a scintillating cascade of purple sparks that trailed like the corona of a fast-burning firework. A fine curtain of Northern Lights colors rippled across the doorway as Josh opened the door.
Ellie Taylor held her Maglite torch between her teeth, shining the way forward. The beam caught in and reflected off the array of mirrors set up inside the musty confines of the burial chamber.
One of the first mirrors they reached had a web of cracks spidering through its silvered glass. Damiola remembered exactly how the mirror had broken.
A single candle flame burned in the center of the room.
Unlike any normal candle its light was eternal. It would burn and burn, and as long as it did the enchantment holding Seth in Hell would hold.
They set his body down.
Josh crouched down beside it, placing both hands flat on the stone just as Damiola had done when he’d sealed the tomb. The ghost remembered the words of the chant, but couldn’t bring himself to say them just in case they might actually work from the afterlife. He didn’t need to. Contact with Josh’s hands conjured filaments of bluish light from the cold stone. The light smoked as it chased along each and every crack back into his hands, undoing the latticework of raw energy that had trapped Seth Lockwood.
The mirrors behind Josh began to move, sliding back to reveal Seth’s prison.
Josh lifted his hands from the stone and turned to look at the glass.
Breaking contact, the energy dissipated, the crackling electricity behind Damiola’s illusion fading away to nothing as the magic found its way back into the earth.
Josh looked up at him through the mirror, and seemed finally to see him. He had aged a decade in as many minutes.
Josh banged on the glass with the side of his fist, but it remained empty. Again, more insistently this time, trying to summon Seth Lockwood’s leering face to the fore.
“Where are you? Seth?” Josh raised the hammer, resting the ball head against the glass of the mirror prison. “All I’ve got to do is hit it once. Just once and you’re free. Where are you?” Where before there had been an infinite array of doppelgangers trapped within the glass, now there was nothing. The only glimpse of infinity was emptiness. Whatever mirror world existed behind the glass, Seth’s rage-twisted face wasn’t part of it. “I’m talking to you! Come here and face me!” He hammered on the mirror again, causing the glass to bow beneath each impact.
But Seth didn’t oblige.
He didn’t stop pounding on the glass until the Speaker for the Dead echoed Cadmus Damiola’s one word back to him. “Enough.”
It had the desired effect, leeching all of the fight out of Josh.
He let the hammer fall from his hand, and stepped away from the mirror, pressing his back up against the wall as he slid slowly down it until he sat on the floor. He drew his knees up under his chin and wrapped his arms around his legs, making himself as small as he could possibly be.
“I don’t know what to do … I don’t know how to win…” Josh looked up at the ghost, not seeing him there.
“Neither do I,” said the ghost. “But it was never going to be as easy as breaking a few mirrors.”
The Speaker didn’t relay that message, instead she sat herself down beside Josh and wrapped an arm around his shoulder, drawing him in to a protective embrace.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”
When they finally left, the ghost didn’t follow them out.
It still had business here.
32
The chalk brothers, Gogmagot and Corenius, walked through London oblivious to the way that other people looked at them and their leafy crowns. This wasn’t the land they remembered. This wilderness of concrete and filth wasn’t the land they’d given their lives fighting for or come back to save. It was choked. Dying. Once upon a life, they’d walked this same way, able to see for miles across rolling hills down into the river basin, and it had been beautiful.
It smelled wrong, too. The subtle fragrances of the wildern
ess, the pollen and the lush grass, the syrupy flavor of the sap, living aromas that should have been everywhere were replaced by dead smells that pretended at life. Nothing of the world they’d left behind existed anymore.
Men in drab suits hurried by in a parade of uniformity, each one looking like a carbon copy of the man before him. Steel-tipped toes and canes danced to a downtrodden tune. Their march had the order of a battlefield about it, while the random motion of the tourists moving around them with their overflowing plastic bags played the role of the routed enemy.
They followed the path their leafy crowns mapped out for them, taking turns from street to backstreet and back again as the edges of the first couple of leaves began to curl and brown. It wasn’t the most accurate form of map, more like playing out a game of hot and cold where the leaves withered and died the closer they got to their prey, but gradually they worked their way closer and closer to the center of the web of streets that eventually led them across the river into a land of towering office blocks and windows high in the sky that reflected the sun across the rooftops below. Two men in high-visibility vests wrestled plastic sacks into the trash compactor of their garbage truck while a third attacked a stack of flattened cardboard boxes with his boots before feeding them in behind the sacks. The compactor ground its way through the rubbish. The reek coming out of the back of the garbage truck was the most natural thing they’d smelled since leaving the forest.
“You get a whiff of that?”
“Ambrosia,” Gogmagot said with a wry grin.
“It’s making me hungry,” his brother agreed.
They stood beneath a stone archway, ahead of them a huge Victorian red-brick building, behind them a row of cheap hotels. The white stones of the hotels were caked with soot and filth of exhaust fumes. The patina was so thick it looked as though they had suffered serious fire damage not so long ago. Almost all of the leaves on Corenius’s crown had browned and shriveled up, meaning they were close. The leaves had led them this far, he trusted them to lead them all the way to their first victim. He took no joy in hurting people, but didn’t question Arawn’s wisdom. If Father said that these five needed to die for the greater good, then die they would, and the sooner the killing was over, the sooner they could go about breathing life back into their beloved Albion.
“We can eat when we’ve taken care of what we’ve come here to do. Come on.”
He led his brother into the courtyard beyond the arch. Beside him Corenius sniffed the air, his huge nostrils flaring again and again as he tried to isolate a single unique signature amid all of the scents clogging up the air around them.
“It’s hard to smell anything with all of this sickness in the air.”
“Inside,” Gogmagot said, looking up at the black bars covering the rows of grimy windows. Climbing plants rooted deep into the weeping brickwork, suffocating many of the lower ones, tangling with the bars. It was as though nature was reclaiming the place. The whole thing gave the dilapidated old building an all-pervading air of hopelessness. It wasn’t the kind of place you came to heal, he thought. It was the kind of place you came to die. Which was useful.
They went inside.
The foyer reeked of bleach and urine. An imposing grand marble staircase with the worn-down steps of generations of sick and their mourners shuffling feet dominated the vast space. A number of orderlies came and went, ignoring the brothers. There were other visitors sitting in the plastic seats of the waiting area. Corenius could smell the sickness beneath their skin. There was cancer in the room. With all of the other aromas crowding out every natural odor it was amazing anyone could smell anything in this day and age. But his nose was sharper than most. He could make out a dozen diseases, the imbalances in sweat glands and fungal infections in the patients, as well as the shit stains of the body in one of the nearby rooms waiting to be cleaned up.
There were only three leaves on his brother’s crown that hadn’t withered.
They were close.
The brothers climbed the stairs, beginning their search. They moved through the wards one corridor at a time, checking each room, watching the leaves as they prowled the long halls.
Nurses looked at them, but no one challenged the chalk brothers’ right to be there.
A leaf fell.
He looked down at it on the tiled floor, then up at his own reflection in the doors at the end of the corridor.
They were getting closer.
“Can you smell her yet?” Corenius asked. He titled his head slightly, savoring the next breath he took.
Gogmagot sniffed at the air.
“I can’t smell shit,” he admitted. “Everything about this world fucking stinks. I don’t know how people can live like this. Don’t you miss the fresh air?”
“Not as much as I miss whoring,” he offered with a grin. “Speaking of which, it’s been too long since I felt like a man. When we’re done here let’s go and find something to fuck.”
They pushed through the doors and entered another ward. This one was filled with side rooms and with beds curtained off from each other. The smell in this place was truly sickening. Nurses busied around a station at the far end, coming and going from behind the curtains with bedpans, while others doled out the next round of meds. A petite Asian nurse with the beaten-down eyes of an NHS veteran came out of the side room in front of them, and did a double take. Her gaze lingered on their hands. Gogmagot realized she was staring. He looked down at his own hands and saw the smears of mud and chalk that stained his fingers.
“Who are you visiting?” she asked, finally looking up at his face.
“My friend,” he said.
“That’s not much help.”
He offered a shrug. What was he supposed to say? He didn’t know his victim’s name.
He touched his lips. “She cannot talk,” he said, thinking about what he knew about the child he was looking for. This time he waved his hand across his face. “She is not … here.”
The nurse struggled to grasp his meaning.
“The poor child—” the nurse heard all she needed to know in those three words and was ushering them out of the ward before he could finish his sentence.
“The PICU is two floors up,” she said, and was already moving off to deal with the next crisis.
“Then that is where we need to go,” he said to his brother.
The penultimate leaf fell as they rounded the landing onto the children’s ward. Corenius ground it underfoot.
The ward formed a vee, the nurses’ station serving as the axis. There was a playroom to the left, filled with brightly colored plastic building bricks, rag dolls, and toy cars. A television set played cartoons to the empty room. A second smaller waiting area was filled with the same mismatched collection of toys, its walls covered in a rainbow of colors, including an actual rainbow, along with a host of curious characters looking for its end. Instead of a pot of gold it was bubble pool filled to overflowing with plastic balls. A toddler drove a miniature car down the middle of the ward chased by two girls on kick bikes, laughing as they pretended to be police cars. It was chaotic. Full of life and energy, but when he breathed in deeply he could smell the undying sickness just beneath the surface of the kids’ skin. Leukemia. It was rooted deep in their blood. None of them would see the year out, he realized. That’s what he learned from their scent.
There were several adults in the ward, but no one challenged their right to be there, so the chalk brothers moved down the ward one private room at a time, pausing at the doors to look through the small wire-reinforced windows set in them at the patient inside. The rooms were all much the same with slight variations on the theme—beloved literary characters painted on the walls, posters of cartoonish heroes—and machines, room after room of life-saving machines.
The final leaf fell as they reached the sixth door.
“Here we are,” he said.
“Looks like it,” his brother agreed.
He opened the door.
They w
ent inside.
The girl lay on the bed. The shallow rise and fall of the crisp white sheet tucked tightly into the mattress was the only proof that she wasn’t a little china doll dressed to look like a child. Her cheeks were too pink. Her eyes were like glass. There was a tube taped into her mouth that fed back into the machine that was keeping her alive.
Gogmagot closed the door behind them and leaned back against it, making sure no one would unwittingly barge in on them in the act.
He watched the helpless girl. She held the key to their survival. He had to focus on that, but it was difficult. It took him a moment to realize the doubt belonged to his host. Rupert Brooke’s thoughts were bleeding through into his own. He’d imagined possession would snuff out the kid once and for all, but he was still inside him, somewhere, or at least an echo was, and that echo lacked the stomach for what needed to be done.
He closed his eyes, pushing down the sickness he felt at the prospect of killing the girl.
When he opened them again, his host had fallen silent.
The respirator hissed on, breathing for the girl. The sound was hypnotic. He watched the shallow rise and fall of her chest as it matched the steady beeps coming from the cardiac monitor beside the bed.
“This is going to be easy,” Corenius said.
“Shouldn’t be though, should it,” he said, moving around to the side of the bed. They’d gone from defenders of the city to murderers of children. He tried to banish the thought but there was a crack in his psyche and Rupert Brooke was haunting him through it. He reached up with his right hand, tangling his fingers in the muddy knots of his hair. He pulled down on the roots, focusing on the pain in the hopes that it would be enough to seal the fracture if only for a moment. “Look at her. She’s no warrior. This ain’t a fair fight.” They weren’t his words, but they were the truth. “This is the kind of thing that taints a soul, Brother.”
“Got to be done, though,” Corenius said, reasonably. “Just think about it in terms of them or us. And I ain’t planning on going nowhere. We’re here to stay. This is our home. No one belongs here more than us.”
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