by Tom Pollock
CHAPTER 17
‘You’re sure this is the place?’
‘Positive.’
Mr Bradley’s fingers drummed on the small stack of photos they’d run off on his home printer. Pen knew them pretty well as they’d been taken from her mobile. She wished she’d been surprised that he didn’t have a recent shot of his daughter.
On the off-chance, she’d also printed a couple of copies of the sketch of the scrawny boy; it was just possible they’d find someone who might recognise him.
He hesitated and then said, ‘Parva, you’re Beth’s best friend. I want you to know that if she isn’t— Well, if we don’t—’ He muttered, ‘Well, then I’m sorry.’
Pen flinched but didn’t reply.
His words spilled on into the silence. ‘Beth was always Marianne’s little girl more than mine. When Marianne died, I … I went inside myself, it was like I was trapped there.’ He swallowed. ‘I couldn’t get out to Beth. I tried, inside I tried to find a way to make myself, but I couldn’t reach her.’
She wouldn’t let you, Pen thought. If it had been me, I wouldn’t have let you either.
‘I just,’ he went on, ‘I didn’t know how to go about caring. There wasn’t anything to grip. I don’t do well with all that stuff, emotional stuff, I mean. It doesn’t come naturally. What else was I supposed to do?’
Pen couldn’t bring herself to deliver some platitude. She bit her lip and then said quietly, ‘Try harder.’ She let herself out of the car and stamped up the rickety wooden steps.
She heard Mr Bradley’s car door slam as he climbed out and followed her, wheezing, up the steps behind her.
‘Come on, Mr B,’ she said, trying to get past the awkwardness of the moment, ‘the workout’s good for you. I bet she’s—’ She tailed off.
‘What?’ he asked, but then he too saw and fell silent.
Ahead of them, the bridge gave way to nothingness. The stairs on other side of it had been ripped away and the ends of the planks protruded like split, dirty fingernails into the black.
And it was black. Every streetlight was out, and the concrete clearing behind the estates was invisible. On the other side a light glowed weakly for an instant, barely disrupting the murk, and then it was gone.
Mr Bradley looked bemused.
‘How do we—?’ he murmured, but Pen had already jumped down.
Glass crunched under her feet as she landed. On the ground she could make out the clearing a little better. Her breath stalled.
The place had been ripped apart.
The streetlamps had been uprooted like metal trees, wire roots sprawling from the concrete clods at their bases. The glass bulbs were smashed, the remains strewn across the ground.
She heard a whoomph of breath and a muttered swearword. Mr Bradley came up behind her shoulder. ‘What happened here?’ He sounded bewildered.
Pen tried to answer, but her throat constricted and she couldn’t speak. She stared at the place where she’d thought her best friend would be waiting for her, where she’d found only the aftermath of violence.
The light on the far side of the yard flared again. Briefly illuminated, something glinted by Pen’s foot. She uttered a little cry.
Mr Bradley shouted, ‘What is it?’
Pen pointed downwards as the light pulsed again. A severed hand clutched at the pile of planks that had once been the steps of the bridge.
He collapsed to his knees and reached for it. ‘Oh God, oh God—’ His voice faltered, and then relief flooded into it. ‘Parva, it’s all right—’ He lifted the thing up. ‘Look, Parva it’s not real, it’s— Ow! It’s glass, it’s made of glass!’
It was immaculate: the bones, the muscles, even the pores of the skin, were all sculpted in smooth glass, and fine strands of dull grey metal twisted through it in place of veins and arteries.
The glow came again from the other side of the courtyard. Mr Bradley stood marvelling at the glass hand, but Pen shouldered past him and walked towards the light source. A thin wheezing sound carried through the dark: stuttering little breaths, and Pen felt her heart flutter.
The glow came again and at last Pen saw the source clearly. She broke into a run, skidding to her knees beside it.
It was a glass woman, and she twisted her head, her eyes wide, as if she’d sensed Pen arriving but couldn’t see her. Both of her legs and one arm ended in short, ragged stumps, surrounded by glittering dust as though the limbs had been crushed to powder. Pen could see her lungs through her transparent skin. Each time she breathed, the lungs compressed and her glass heart beat, and with each heartbeat, the wires that ran through her glowed.
‘It’s okay,’ Pen found herself whispering. It blatantly wasn’t okay, but she didn’t know what else to say. She cooed as if to a small child, gently lifting the shattered woman’s head and grasping her one remaining hand. It was smooth and hard, and rapidly giving up its heat to the air. ‘We’re here now,’ Pen said softly, ‘we’ll help you.’ Although she had no clue how she could help at all.
Suddenly the woman sat up hard. She opened her mouth so wide Pen could see glass tonsils. Her eyes were screwed up, as though she was screaming. She didn’t make a sound, but flared off a brilliant flash.
Pen was blinded. The world vanished into coarse-grained darkness. She groped around for the woman and something snagged her finger. She felt blood. She heard the clink of the woman falling back, and her own breath was panicked.
Then Mr Bradley cried out, ‘Parva!’
Pen stumbled through the darkness towards his voice, yelling, ‘Mr B! Mr B!’ over and over. Her voice sounded thin and deranged.
‘Parva!’ He was close; she could hear his panting breaths through the night. ‘Parva, my leg—’
She was close enough to make out the shape of him now, lying face-down on the tarmac. He had something wrapped around his ankle, a tourniquet of barbed wire. A taut strand led away from the prone man and disappeared into the black mouth of a nearby storm drain. Pen crouched and pulled at it, but it was tight around his leg, and her fingers came back bloody.
Mr Bradley lurched suddenly, and the wire started dragging him backwards over the pavement. He screamed in pain as he slid along the ground, twisting and flailing for purchase on the asphalt. Pen cast around for something she could use to cut him free. She clutched absurdly at her clothes, as if she carried pair of wire-cutters in her pockets.
‘Hang on, M-Mr B, just, just hang on; I’ll—’
Orange light flared then, shattering the darkness like an instant dawn. Pen gaped at it as it stormed up over the broken bridge, coalescing into human shape as it came close. She scrambled out of the way as the figure jumped from the bridge and landed lightly on the concrete. It was another woman, like the first, but not identical – a sister, maybe – and she was burning with a far stronger inner fire. The woman extended one hand towards Mr Bradley and flexed her glowing fingers in a peremptory motion.
With a sickening, adhesive sound, the wire’s barbs began to come free, glinting in the woman’s light. The wire strands wavered, as if they were fighting some invisible magnetism.
The glass woman crooked her fingers into claws and bent her back in effort. Tendrils of barbed wire snaked grudgingly out of the storm drain: yard after yard, the inch-long thorns gleaming. The wire-thing thrashed, apparently trapped by whatever force the glass woman was projecting.
Her head was bowed and her hand extended as though in prayer. She sagged, her glass knees shaking with the effort.
A single skein of the barbed-wire thing reached for the ground. It wound and snapped in frustration, labouring through the heavy air.
The shining woman dropped to one knee. The glass rang on the pavement like a bell.
The barbed wire touched earth—
Suddenly, the monster was free from the glass woman’s power. It accelerated instantly, lashing out at her. Barbs bit into glass with a sickening crunch and she staggered back, her light flickering. The wire blurred and coiled i
n the air, like a metal cloud anchored to the earth. Tendrils curved like hooks and struck with venomous speed, not towards the glass woman, but towards Pen.
She had no time to get out of its way.
Metal whirled around her, whipping her hair. Pen gasped for breath, trapped in a vortex of wire. The whirling strands tightened around her, enclosing her in a spinning cocoon. The gaps closed up, extinguishing the light from the glass woman. Pen sucked in her stomach and screwed up her eyes, waiting for the barbs to touch her.
Silence. She heard nothing now, saw nothing, but she felt the needle-tips of the barbs on her eyelids. They were gentle, like a blind person learning a new face. They tickled her. Then pinpricks erupted all over her body, probing: under her arms, along the back of her neck, between her thighs, between her fingers. She felt the thorns sink in.
She wanted to scream, but she couldn’t expand her chest.
A second passed. Then another. Pen still didn’t dare open her eyes, but a spark of a thought filled her head: I’m alive. It was only now she realised she hadn’t expected to be. Warmth trickled over her body – wet, sticky warmth. I’m bleeding, she told herself, trying to be clinical, but there’s not that much blood. I’m alive. The wire thorns were in her, staunching the very wounds they’d made.
Pain rippled like fire over her skin, but it felt insignificant next to being alive.
Something like cold thin fingers prodded at her eyes, teasing her eyelashes; as a reflex they opened.
Mr Bradley was staring at her, his face slack with horror. She could see him because the glass woman was still there, kneeling on the ground, glowing.
I’m – I’m okay. It hurts, but …
But she realised she wasn’t speaking. Barbs held her throat tight and she could feel the fine metal thorns grip her lips when she tried to move them. There was a bead of blood under her nose; it tickled madly and she tried to brush it away, but she couldn’t. Her hand wouldn’t move either. She rolled her eyes as far as she could, trying to see her arm. It was wrapped in wire – her whole body was bound in a barbed-wire exoskeleton, and it was paralysed.
She was paralysed.
‘Parva?’ Mr Bradley said uncertainly. ‘Parva, can you hear me?’
Pen couldn’t speak or make any sort of sign, but before she could follow that thought she felt her arm rise, dragged upwards by the wire around it. Her finger extended into a point—
—and suddenly the wires around her lips yanked them open and something lashed into her mouth. Pain stabbed through her tongue as the wire seized it.
Droplets of blood hit the floor of her mouth.
‘Where is he?’ The voice that came from her throat was grotesque, twisted, as if it was being squeezed out of her chest.
Mr Bradley looked ready to faint, but he straightened. ‘W-w-where’s who?’ he stammered.
‘Where is he?’ The wire jerked Pen’s hand.
Mr Bradley looked after the pointing finger, and so did she. Lying on the concrete were the photos that’d spilled from his pocket. Pen was pointing straight at the picture of the skinny bare-chested boy Beth had sketched.
‘I— I don’t know where he is, Parva. You know I don’t. We don’t know who he is. We don’t know where Beth—’
He was right: she did know that. It was the thing coiled around her that didn’t. The tendrils lashed out of her mouth and resealed it, leaving her tongue swollen in their wake.
To Pen’s utter terror, her feet began to move. The wires pulled and their barbs chided and her right foot stepped forward, and then her left. After a moment, her arms began to swing too, as though the creature that gripped her had needed a few steps to get the hang of it. The last thing she saw, before it turned her around, was Beth’s dad, reaching out to her.
But she’d already gone. The wires were moving her legs far faster than she ever could. As she began to pant for breath they relaxed their grip on her lungs and finally, as she ran out on the path past the tower blocks, she could scream.
Paul Bradley ran after her, as fast as he could, but his leg was still bleeding and he couldn’t keep up. He stumbled to a halt, hands on his knees, panting. Too fat and too slow, old man, he cursed himself.
Warmth touched his back for an instant, then the glass woman burst past him, her feet ringing off the tarmac as she pursued Pen. He glimpsed her face, fixed in a snarl of agony. She was holding shards of the shattered bodies in her hands.
‘Wait!’ he gasped, ‘take me, help me— I have to—’
But she didn’t look back. He crumpled onto the ground as he watched her, the only light, disappearing into the distance.
Another one. It was a chill, venomous needle of a thought, but it was true. You lost another one.
He scrambled around in the darkness, groping for the fallen photos. He strained his eyes to make out the shapes in the photos, tracing a finger around the sketch of the boy with the spear.
Then he staggered towards the lit-up estates in the distance. A new wilderness had unfolded around him. There was a new logic. He didn’t know what was real, what was alive. He didn’t know the rules.
Where is he? The rasp the metal thing had forced from Parva’s throat grated through his mind. Where is he?
Certainty crystallised in him. All the people out there driving cars, tossing burgers, having sex, watching late-night TV: they all faded into irrelevance.
Beth was not in that city. She was with this boy’s city. With him.
CHAPTER 18
Steel yourself, Petris. Or, given the circumstances, should that be stone yourself? No, definitely steel. Stoning would be completely different. And painful. And tough to accomplish single-handed.
Of course, Petris reflected, if any of his flock caught him at what he was about to do, there would be no shortage of volunteers to chuck the first rock.
He was standing in a children’s playground in the middle of Victoria Park: a typically decayed seat of London infancy, with heavily graffiti’d slides, a climbing frame and four carved horses wobbling on rusty springs, grinning like they’d had too much ketamine.
He began to shiver, which, he told himself, was because the autumn chill had seeped into his punishment skin and definitely not because he was afraid.
After all, what did he have to be scared of? He was encased in granite armour two inches thick. His grip could tear steel-plate. He’d led warrior priests against scaffolding monsters and crushed them with his bare hands. What did he have to fear?
Well, a treacherous inner voice supplied, there’re the two thousand other bronze and stone-clad soldiers who can also tear steel. Let’s not dwell on what bits of you they might crush with their bare hands if they catch you, shall we?
Petris swigged down a pint of sewerspirit, wincing as the fermenting faecal taste filled his mouth. It was vile, but it was the strongest drink he could brew and the warmth of it was already drizzling into his muscles, its fug washing over his brain. He relaxed.
Cromwell had stumbled in on him as he’d been setting up the distilling apparatus. The bronze Roundhead had eyed the booze in the belljar and asked, ‘What’s the occasion, old man?’
Petris had given an unconvincing laugh. ‘Oh, I’m celebrating, you know: finally telling that jumped-up street-rat to swivel on his own railing.’
Cromwell had laughed himself, and even made the effort to tip his bronze helm to his high priest. Behind his stone mask Petris’ eyes had tracked the tip of Cromwell’s sword as he’d left the room.
What do I have to be afraid of?
As if in answer, one of the swings started to move back and forth. Cr-eak, cr-eak. It was difficult to see, but the space above the swing’s seat looked more solid than it had a few seconds ago. A vague human shape had appeared on it, black against the darkness, and now it kicked its legs and rocked the swing like a child. Slim fingers gripped the chains and viscous liquid oozed from under the fingernails and down the metal. A strong acrid smell pierced Petris’ nostrils.
Cr-eak,
Cr-eak. Cr— The oil spread to the swing’s hinges and they stopped squeaking.
The black figure continued to swish back and forth, the silence now broken only by the drip-drip of the oil off his bare feet.
His teeth wanted to chatter but Petris grimly swigged from his belljar, swamping any circumstantial evidence of his fear in seventy-six per cent proof alcohol.
The swing came to a stop. ‘Petrisss.’ The name came on a hiss of chemical breath. Viscous liquids were drawn into threads between the dark figure’s lips as they parted.
‘Johnny. Always a pleasure.’
‘Iss that why you asssked my attendance?’ The sibilants ghosted on the air. ‘Pleassure? You are notoriousss for itss purssuit – ssstrange then if our pressence iss ssuch a pleasure, how sseldom you sseek it out. One might ssuspect we of the sssynod … unssettle you.’
‘Oh, you always unsettle me, Johnny.’ Petris’ good humour was cinder-brittle.
‘I ssee.’ The black figure sighed. ‘Sspecify the sservice you would ssolicit, stonesskin,’ Johnny Naphtha said, inspecting his black fingernails where they held the swing. ‘And hassten – I hate to hurry you, but my pressence here isn’t helping the health of the herbsss, you undersstand.’ He pointed over Petris’ shoulder, and even in the dark, the priest could see the nearest tree sagging as the poisons dripping from Johnny Naphtha’s feet leached into the soil.
Petris gazed at that richness of death like a parched man at water fountain. ‘Who said I was looking for service?’ he croaked. He was hoarse with thirst.
‘Why elsse would you be sstanding here, ssqueezing your sstone into that abssurd vissage, and trying not to sspit your intesstines out in fear?’ Johnny Naphtha’s voice remained a quiet, courteous hiss. ‘Of coursse you need ssomething. Everyone needss ssomething, that’ss why they come to usss.’
Petris tried for a smile. ‘Perceptive as ever, Johnny. Yes, I’d like to strike a deal, for a fair price.’
‘Alwayss fair, Petriss,’ Johnny Naphtha chided him. ‘We are the Chemical Ssynod. Our equationss alwayss balance. Ssymmetry iss in our blood.’