by Ben Jeapes
The shimmering tentacles were growing brighter, and there were many of them. They knotted around the cathedral, so tight he could barely see the ground, and then radiated away in all directions. Many disappeared over the horizon, north, south, east and west and all points in between, but most came down to earth at different points around Salisbury.
“Have you worked it out yet?” the thief asked.
The cathedral was vibrating beneath his feet. He would have felt it even without his newly enhanced senses. He looked down, through the complex internal scaffolding of the spire and the hidden roof spaces and the galleries, into the heart of the building. Energy was accumulating within the ancient edifice.
Energy from where? He had seen so much of it just by looking around, but none of it was going into the cathedral. It was just appearing there and it couldn’t just appear out of nowhere ...
The thief nodded proudly.
“I see you understand.”
Meta-Salisbury, Ted realised suddenly. The all-the-Salisburys that lay beneath the real one: the domain where the Knowledge had been stored. The thief was leaching off that. He was drawing energy from one world to another ... why?
The power was brightest right beneath the tower, beneath his feet. It was a furnace-like glow in the same place as the glowing vortex of the Knowledge had been in the other place’s version of the cathedral, and the ghostly tentacles emanated from this central point. The brewing fireball was held in by some invisible force and Ted could sense it weakening. It would grow to a certain point, and then it would burst, and it would shoot out along these lines ...
“Arse,” he whispered.
The thief smirked as he slowly circled the top of the spire.
“A single surge and I will fry the heart of every single member of the bloodlines.” He snapped his fingers. “No more guardians, ever.”
It took a moment to sink in, and then Ted stared at the tentacle going into his chest as if it were a snake, or a sword that someone was letting him inspect before they thrust it into him.
He looked at the rest of them. Thousands of them, heading out in all directions, each one with a slumbering potential guardian at the end who would never wake up. He tried to picture the bloodbath. Whole families about to be wiped out; lives about to be torn in two as partners woke up next to their murdered love one. But he would never see it because he would be one of them.
From up here he could see Sarah, still imprisoned in her forcefield, and the thief’s car with Robert in it. Sarah had a tentacle too. The car didn’t.
“Robs?” he whispered.
“Oh, I disconnected him – I need him. Which of course means I have a connection spare. I know – a parting gift! You’re going to die, Ted, in about one minute, but I will let you choose anyone you like to take with you. Barry? An enemy at school? A girl who stood you up? Just name the name!”
Grief and self-pity welled up inside Ted. He doubled his grasp on the cross and pressed his face to the cold, rough metal as he started to sob.
“Oh, Ted! Show a little dignity.”
Ted couldn’t help it. It was so unfair. He was only sixteen. For all the character faults that the thief had listed, he hadn’t hurt anyone. He was a kind brother, a good friend, could maybe be a better son. Conscientious employee, responsible owner of one fifth of a cat, a natural love resource that no girl had ever tapped. He was still a virgin! But anyone who remembered him at all – one name among the many victims of Salisbury’s mysterious one-night massacre – would just go, “oh, yeah, Ted Gorse. Had a problem with stealing stuff.” And maybe, “how do you think he got up the spire?”
But if he couldn’t help the self-pity he could at least work with it. His grief began to expand outwards: for the other innocent victims, for all those who would mourn him, for the rest of his own life that he would never live.
And finally it turned to rage. Rage, against the smug creature standing on thin air only a short lunge away. Ted tensed and slowly started to lift his feet up. If he could get them up onto the crossbar, he was pretty certain he could jump. He would seize hold of the thief and ... and see what happened. Best case scenario: the thief could support both of them and would get Ted onto the ground. Worst case: the thief couldn’t hold two people in the air at once and both of them would fall to their deaths. Quite frankly, Ted would be happy either way.
“Oh, no you don’t!”
The thief backed off suddenly, too far away for Ted to jump. Suddenly he was shouting, furious, as if moving back had pulled him free from a shell of politeness.
“You pathetic child, you still think you can fight me, don’t you? After everything I have done and everything you have failed to do, you still think you have the remotest chance!”
He began to circle the spire, as if he were pacing about to deliver a rant. The witch appeared next to him but the thief ignored her – and the old guy who was with her. Ted blinked. Who the hell was he? He bought his clothes from the same shop and had the same barber – in fact, hang on, wasn’t he the guy the book club was all about?
Chapter 25
This was more like it. Stephen could hear, now – for all the good it did him, because the old bat just ignored him and Ted couldn’t hear him back. But at least navigating was easy. You just sort of thought, and you moved in the direction desired. Stephen and the crone followed Ted through the stifled Close and were unseen witnesses to the reunion with Sarah and Robert.
“Okay, you’ve got them!” Stephen shouted. “Now just get away, Ted, for Christ’s sake get them all away from here–”
But the woman was shaking her head, and then it was too late because Himself was suddenly there. Stephen cheered when the woman liberated the … the … oh, sod it, the angel or whatever it was, and then he began to chew his knuckle again as Sarah went into full battle mode, and yet Himself was here with Ted, and …
Himself seemed just as unaware of their presence as Ted did, and Stephen could only think of one reason why she was just observing, not making her presence felt.
The old bat was afraid. And why not? Their opponent could fight angels. What could he do to her? To him?
Stephen still had no intention of abandoning his friend – but he would be of much more use to Ted if he could stay alive too.
And so he hung back, with her, and observed, even though with his present minimal mastery of the mirror there wasn’t much else he could have done anyway. He witnessed the conclusion of the battle, Sarah trapped inside her force field, Ted and Himself swooping up into the air. That was when Stephen found that the mirror worked in three dimensions. He didn’t have to glide over the ground: one thought, and he was following.
“Hey!” His eyes told him that he was rushing through the air, and for a moment he felt giddy, but no more. In reality – whatever reality could now be reckoned to be – he was standing on a stone floor in a weird tower room somewhere. He couldn’t fall. Watching the ever receding ground was no worse than being in a glass-floored elevator. He followed after Ted.
After a moment of hesitation, the old woman came with him.
Ted clung to the cross four hundred feet above the ground, trembling like a wet leaf, while Himself ranted. Stephen only gave the words a fraction of his attention. The rest was focused on finding a way to help Ted down. Come on, come on, come on!
Himself floated in the air. How? How was that possible? Stephen zoomed in on Himself’s feet. What was he standing on? This guy wasn’t an illusion in a mirror. In Ted’s world he was solid – he was there. Stephen dropped down a little so that he could look up at the soles of his own shoes. One of the laces hung down and abruptly bent as it reached the point where the ground should have been. Stephen almost reached out to tuck it into the top of his shoe – a familiar, instinctive reaction.
Hang on. If the lace was bent like that, like it was touching the ground, then it was touching something. And that something was what Himself was standing on. But Himself was only standing on air.
A
memory worked its way through Stephen’s spinning thoughts. The window force field, back in the tower, that kept the warm air in and the cold out. It was just a case of making the molecules all cooperate. Hah! ‘Just’ …
And then he saw it, in a flash of clarity that was almost blinding. No! That was … too easy! But what else could it be? His brain was the old guy’s brain. The connections were all there. What the old guy had been able to do, he must be able too.
“I want to talk to Ted!” he shouted. The woman just looked at him. He floated over to her. “I have to! Come on! He talked to me! I know you can do it!”
The woman had appeared to Ted to point the way to the Close, and the old guy had talked to Stephen. The mirror could do it, if its user knew how.
“I want Ted to see me! I can help him! I can make him see what to do!”
She coldly held his gaze, but then gave another of her fractional nods. Stephen looked back at Ted. He felt no difference, but from Ted’s sudden recoil he knew that he must have appeared right in front of him.
“Ted!” he shouted, feeling the grin work across his face. “It’s STOOPID! It’s STOOPID!”
Chapter 26
“You are all the same!” the thief raged. “All of you!”
He glanced at the couple who had suddenly appeared in mid-air and, after what Ted could swear was a double take at seeing the man, dismissed them with a contemptuous blink. “You have to fight and to struggle – you can’t just accept–”
Ted looked away from the newcomers and blinked back tears. What did they want? Couldn’t they just let him die in peace? The old man was shouting at him – and he couldn’t hear a word. He saw the look of frustration as the old man realised, and recoiled as the man suddenly zoomed in and floated only a few feet away. His face was thrust into Ted’s and he was mouthing something with deliberate exaggeration. Ted cocked his head, narrowed his eyes. He was so obviously meant to get this.
Two syllables, over and over again. Lips pouted on the first syllable – Oo-something? Do-something? Lips smacking together and drawing back on the second. Something starting with an ‘ih’? He tried to run through the consonants. Bih, cih, dih …
Even the witch was in on it now, making gestures, trying to communicate something. The urgent, earnest look on her face was meant to be helping. Why was she pointing at her feet, and at the thief’s?
As far as Ted understood it, the witch was just an image projected into his mind. She could appear anywhere she liked, including mid-air. Her feet weren’t held up by anything. The thief, though, really was here. So … what exactly was he standing on?
He tore his mind away from the fact that he was about to die and made himself study the thief’s feet. He forced himself to see. The thief stood on a platform of solid air – but there had to be more to it than that, didn’t there? Think. Think, think, think ...
There had to be a lot of things.
The air itself.
The motion of the molecules, all commanded to flow in one direction – up.
The knowledge of how to do all this.
The will of the thief to make it all so.
Suddenly Ted choked back a laugh. He understood!
“STOOPID!” he shouted. The old man struck his forehead and rolled his eyes, like Ted had been especially dense in a game of charades and finally got the answer.
It was STOOPID! The thief’s magic worked by taking all these smaller things and making them into one object that he could command.
The exhilaration drained out of him. The power within the cathedral was peaking. Ted guessed he had about ten seconds of life left. He looked dully at the thief’s feet, held up by an invisible platform of air.
“Yeah, and what do I do about it …”
And suddenly the senses that let him perceive the tentacles from the cathedral, and the thief’s web of power, and the guardian spirits, kicked in, and he could see it. His mind had the ability, it just needed that nudge of realisation. He couldn’t have described it in anything like normal English but he could see the object as plainly as if it really were a solid thing there in front of his eyes. It was something he could touch. Something he could pull.
He reached out and he yanked the platform away.
The thief fell.
Later, Ted would work out why the thief hadn’t just made another platform. It had many components and one of them was the thief’s knowledge of how to create it. When Ted removed the platform, he removed that knowledge too. The thief found himself positioned four hundred feet above the ground with no idea of how to stay there. He was far enough from the building that he didn’t hit the roof. It was straight down, all the way.
Ted would also work out that it takes roughly five seconds to fall four hundred feet. The thief must have been so surprised that he only screamed for the last two hundred.
Chapter 27
The cold night air boomed inside Ted’s head. The pre-dawn traffic sounds of Salisbury brushed his ears. It took him a moment to realise the significance.
The blanket of silence that had lain across the Close was gone. The guardian lifelines were fading from sight. The cathedral no longer trembled with hidden power. Without the thief’s will to keep them in place, the stored energies leached away into the ground. The thief was dead; his reign was over.
It left Ted with just one small further problem to overcome.
He looked down the forced perspective of the spire and quickly looked away again as it seemed to ripple in his vision. Was the spire moving? Did it sway in the breeze? Or was that just his imagination? He pictured it moving, gently at first but with ever increasing strength, back and forth and back and forth until eventually it flicked him off into the darkness.
Well, he couldn’t stay here forever. His jaw trembled with shivers. He had taken his top off for Sarah – it was still back in the shop – and he was just wearing a t-shirt and it was bloody cold.
He ran through his options. It didn’t take long.
He had his phone in his pocket. He could call for help. Even if they didn’t believe he was where he said, eventually the sun would come up and someone below would see him. They could send a professional climber to get him down, maybe even a helicopter to lift him off. But he thought he would rather face the thief again than explain to anyone how he got up there in the first place.
Which left option B.
He peered down at the base of the cross. The cross was planted firmly in the capstone at the top of the spire, and the base was surrounded by an assembly of aircraft warning lights and a weather meter and what looked like a bunch of aerials and antennae. Ted closed his eyes and very slowly unhooked one leg from the cross, then the other. He let himself down inch by inch, arms still locked firmly over the horizontal bar, feet dangling over space.
The lower stem of the cross, from capstone up to the bar, was slightly taller than he was. He had to make himself transfer his arm lock from horizontal bar to vertical pole. Then he had to let himself slide down, arms and legs wrapped firmly around the pole, until his feet touched the aircraft warning assembly. It shifted as his weight came down on it. He didn’t want to test whether it was strong enough to hold him so, just as slowly, he let himself slide down a little further until he was actually sitting on the capstone, the very top of the spire.
A bout of shaking came out of nowhere. Every muscle seemed to leap as cold and adrenaline combined in sympathetic resonance. He gripped the pole tight until the fit had passed, then gingerly peered down again.
From the ground, the tip of the spire looked sharp enough to take your eye out. From up here, the capstone was a massive chunk of masonry that blocked any view of the upper end of the spire. He had to cling onto the cross and lean right out to see where the rungs were.
Those blessed, life-saving rungs! That Year 8 class visit where he had learned about them could save his life. Steeplejacks climbed the last forty feet of the spire on the outside, and there were rungs set into the spire especially for them. So, bel
ow the capstone there would be forty feet of footholds and then there would be a hatch that would let him in.
Ted took a few deep breaths, and slowly wriggled himself round so that he was on the same side as the rungs. Then he eased his legs out of their deathlock on the cross so that – and he really didn’t want to picture this –his feet now dangled over the void. The capstone dug into his waist and all that held him up was friction and his hold on the metal pole.
Slowly he began to let himself down.
The worst bit of all was when he had to let go of the cross and hold on to the smooth, weathered, handhold-free stone itself. All his weight was held by the grip of his hands and arms on that slick surface. Then his feet touched the first rung and he howled his relief.
He paused there for another age, then dredged up the final reserves needed to start climbing down. First rung, second, third. They were just metal hoops, and the spire was so narrow up here – narrower than he was – that they alternated between two of its faces, with a row of stone knobs in between that had been put there by the masons specifically to push him off into the void. He couldn’t do them one at a time, like a ladder. Every step meant that his right or his left leg was stretched down as far as it would go, and he had to keep moving before it seized up and he became incapable of shifting the other. But, if you forgot the drop below then it was easy to get into the rhythm.
And then there was nothing under his foot to hold him up and his body almost kept going out of momentum. He shrieked and his fingers, knee, thigh – every joint that was involved in supporting him – seized solid. The foot that wasn’t on a rung dangled over 360 feet of air. He slowly pulled himself back up.
He was at the end of the rungs, spread-eagled against two faces of the spire, and there was the hatch. His right foot was below it and his left foot next to it. He ran a hand over the little wooden square. It had a grill set into it, but no discernible handle of any kind.