Stoneheart (3 page)
G
eorge ran into Hyde Park Corner, the busiest junction in London, a sea of traffic grinding around a roundabout full of thick monuments and thin grass.
He pinballed across the slow flow of cars, bouncing from boot to bonnet and back again. Cars hit their horns, and a cyclist hit the brakes and shrilled a whistle at him, but George plowed on, pushed by the mind-killing panic that follows cold fear. A truck screeched its air brakes as he slammed in front of it and hit the concrete and railings on the other side. He looked back.
The pterodactyl followed him in an implacable straight line, deliberately, without hurry, like something that now knew it had gotten him.
And worse than this slow horrible thing that clattered its leathery wings and chattered its teeth as it came, was the fact that George now knew that no one else could see it.
It pulled itself toward him over car bonnets in front of the eyes of drivers who just looked through it.
It scraped over the roofs of taxis, and the drivers didn’t stop talking for an instant. No one in the bus looked around, no one registered that this prehistoric nightmare of bones and teeth was stalking a child through the most crowded thoroughfare in London.
The thing hopped up onto the backseat of a motorcycle and looked right at him for a long moment. The motorcyclist didn’t notice, even when it threw its head back and snapped its beak to the skies in a mocking victory clatter.
People say you’re never as alone as when you’re in a crowd, but being alone in a crowd when something’s hunting you down and the crowd can’t see it is a
lot
worse.
George dragged himself backward over the railings before he realized what he had done.
He backed up until he was stopped by seventy tons of white Portland stone. He had backed into the Royal Artillery War Memorial.
He looked around and for a moment thought the pterodactyl was impossibly hanging above his head, ready to drop on him and end the nightmare in a horrible and painful way.
Then the last bit of his mind that could think straight realized he was looking up at a dark statue, a soldier, a gunner in a World War One uniform, tin hat tipped down over his eyes, arms spread out against the stone, like he was resting. And over his shoulders was a waterproof cape that, for an instant, George had mistaken for wings.
There was a clatter in front of him. He looked around, and with a freezing twist in his guts, saw the pterodactyl slowly pulling itself up onto the railings only six feet away.
His body, thinking for itself, began to edge right along the base of the war memorial. Amazingly, the monster looked away. He edged consciously now, reaching for the corner.
The corner of his eye must have caught the movement, because he wasn’t looking for it. He stopped before he knew why.
There, slithering into view, was one of the stone salamanders. George scuttled back along the memorial, toward the other corner.
Again he heard his feet scrape to a halt on the gravel before he knew why. The other two salamanders reared slowly around that corner, mouths open in a silent, gaping hiss.
George had run out of ideas.
The pterodactyl turned to look at him, slowly, easily, hatefully And the hate in its eyes was an old hate, a hate that George didn’t understand, but felt right in his core. And on top of the hate was cruelty and glee.
It
knew
it had him.
It seemed to grow bigger in front of him as it raised its reptilian wings in triumph and blocked out the last of the sun. Its mouth began to open, and from inside came an ancient smell, fouler than anything George had ever smelled, a smell that was old and inhuman and purely frightening.
George had nowhere to run.
He felt nothing but fear and the wall at his back. His mouth made shapes. No sound came out. He saw his tears hit the ground in front of him.
But one word made itself and spilled quietly out of his mouth, falling to earth too silently for anyone but him to hear, as the thing got down off the railings and started toward him.
“Please.”
The monster opened its beak and reared back for what George knew was the killing blow. If its long fanged beak wasn’t already one big grin, you’d have said it grinned even more as it hissed and flexed its sharp talons.
“Please …”
It was over. The thing struck.
Blam!
The thing stopped.
Blam!
The thing looked surprised.
Crash!
Something else landed in front of George.
Something with steel tacks on its boots.
Something with a gun.
Someone.
The pterodactyl looked at the two holes in its chest. Shook its beak in disbelief. In rage. Coiled itself and leaped for them—
Blam, blam, blam!
The first shot stopped it. The second shot dropped it. And the third shot smithereened it, blew it into shards of stone, turned it to dust.
George looked up. He saw a man made from tarnished bronze from the bottom of his army boots to the top of his tin helmet. The Gunner from the war memorial looked back down at him as he broke the revolver in his hand, shook out the spent shells, and reloaded in a movement so fluid that he didn’t seem to need to look at his hands while he did it.
He moved so fast that he snapped the reloaded revolver back together while the shells were still tinkling at George’s feet.
George felt his nightmare wasn’t over. He scooted away from the Gunner, but not fast enough. The Gunner grabbed him and yanked him back against the wall and then stepped in front of him. Protecting him.
Over the shoulder of the rain-cape, George saw the three salamanders boil across the ground and meet in the pile of dust that had been the pterodactyl.
They writhed blindly as if trying to find it, to smell it out, and then they turned and looked at George and the Gunner. George saw it again. The ancient hatred multiplied in three pairs of eyes.
The salamanders hissed and lashed their tails together, sliding them in and out of one another until they were braided, as they had been when he’d first seen them sliding off the side of the building. Then they reared up like a three-headed cobra, moved—and the Gunner fired.
Blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, blam!
Six shots rapid-fire stopped them and spun them, jerking into them, and then the revolver clicked out and there were no more bullets. One lizard twitched and rolled its way out from under the bodies of the others.
The Gunner took off his tin hat and dropped it into George’s arms. He wiped his forehead and stepped across the gap to the salamanders, fumbling with the ammo pouch at his belt.
As the salamander struggled free, he smashed his boot across its neck, pinning it to the ground, reloading the big heavy revolver as fast as before. Two shots sent it to dust. He stepped back and sent the other two bodies the same way.
When he stopped, all there was to see was a faint dust smudge to show where the nightmares had been real.
He reloaded and reholstered the gun before he turned to look at George. George just clutched the tin hat the same way he used to clutch his teddy bear.
The dark statue crouched in front of him. George could see that his eyes were gray, like a pencil drawing of eyes in the black-tarnished face. The gray eyes seemed to look through him. Then the Gunner took the hat and scratched his neck. He stretched his neck like he was working kinks out of it, in a gesture George later felt was strangely familiar.
Right now, George just watched.
It wasn’t that his mind hadn’t caught up yet. It hadn’t even
started.
The Gunner propped the hat against the war memorial and hunkered down next to him, picking something out of his uniform pocket.
Cigarettes.
He—it—the whoever—scratched a black match on the white stone and produced a yellow flame that he applied to the cigarette between his lips. Gray smoke plumed, disappeared inside the statue, and reappeared in a perfect smoke ring. They both watched it shimmer and fade in the London air.
George couldn’t think what else to do. Except:
“Thanks.”
The Gunner turned and looked at him. Took another puff. Kept looking.
George came up with something else to say. But all it was was:
“Urn.”
He looked at his feet. At least they were familiar.
An unfamiliar voice came from the Gunner’s throat. A gravelly voice. A cockney voice.
“Thank me when this is over, mate.”
George looked up to see the gray eyes still looking at him. Because they didn’t blink, he could see the white bits were now a very light gray and the pupils were getting even blacker.
The Gunner took another puff and blew it out on a half-laugh.
“Blimey. You got no idea what you just started, have you?
D
eep in the City something had been woken, something so old and so ordinary that people had been walking past it for centuries without giving it a second look.
It was so commonplace and undistinguished that anyone who came looking for it couldn’t fail to be disappointed with what they found, not that anyone had come looking for a very long time. Nothing about it gave a hint as to its purpose or its power. It looked like a roughly hewn lump of old masonry: whitish rock, about the size and shape of an old milestone. The only clue that it was more than the nothing it seemed was its setting.
It was caged.
It sat in the side of a building that was younger than it by at least two thousand years, and it looked out on the street through a thick lattice of iron bars.
Given its antiquity, people who noticed this usually thought that the bars were to protect it from the public.
Only a very few—and a very strange few at that—knew that it was precisely the other way around.
The grille of iron had become a wind trap for the rubbish that swirled around the building on the eddies from the looming high-rise opposite. A gutted packet of crisps was stuck on top of the thing, glinting silver and brown. A fragment of label proclaimed “Barbecued Be—” to anyone who chose to peer in and see what flavor its long-gone contents had been.
If the person peering in had been a connoisseur of coincidences, they would no doubt have smiled at what happened next, given that the label turned out to be a prophecy as well.
There was a low-frequency hum, the kind that old refrigerators make in the dead hours of the night when they think no one is listening. And then the crisp packet slowly shriveled and shrunk and finally burst into a bright and short-lived flame, before disappearing completely.
And it may have been nothing, or it may have been the two narrow blood grooves on the rounded top of the stone; but cleared of the debris, it now suddenly looked vacant and ready as a mortician’s slab.
N
ow that everything had stopped, George’s legs began to shake for real. Once more he felt like crying; once more—but only just—he decided he wouldn’t. He felt very tired, the kind of tired that sucks you toward sleep like a dark undertow, the kind of tired you know you have to fight because the sleep it’s pulling you down into may not be a good sleep at all.
He looked around to see if the Gunner was still hunkered down next to him. He was, his eyes panning back across the traffic in front of them.
From high above came a keening whistle.
George looked up at the triumphal arch on the other side of the grass. A vast statue of a woman and a chariot pulled by plunging horses loomed overhead. The whistling came again, this time sharper, this time so high and urgent that it drilled into his ears and hurt.
The Gunner nipped the end of his cigarette, pocketed it, and stood up in one decisive movement.
“What is that?” asked George.
The Gunner’s eyes followed his look up to the frozen horses in the sky.
“That’s the Quadriga.”
“No—” said George.
The whistling came again, and now there was no mistaking its message.
“—that,” he finished.
“It’s a warning,” the Gunner said.
“What about?”
The Gunner scanned the rooftops over the road.
“This isn’t the time for questions, son. This is the time for a choice.”
George opened his mouth. The Gunner rode right over to him.
“Choice is stay—-or go.”
Tiredness sucked at George so hard that he felt like stopping swimming and sinking into it instead. Closing his eyes seemed like such a good thing to do that he let them flutter before he shook his head and tried to think.
“I don’t know what’s happening,” he began.
“Yeah, you do. You’re choosing. Now. Go or stay? Live or die?”
Suddenly and without knowing why, George got angry.
“That’s ridiculous. …”
The Gunner spat.
“’Course it is. Death’s always ridiculous. So what? Life’s a joke an’all. That’s why you might as well have a laugh and enjoy it while you’re ‘ere. But it’s your shout. Which way you gonna jump?”
George’s leg shake turned to a disjointed yammering against the stone. When he spoke, it came out more like a whine than he meant it to.
“I really don’t know what’s happening.”
The whistling became staccato and even more intense. The Gunner grabbed George’s arms and lifted him until they were nose to nose.
“I do.”
George’s mind fused. He couldn’t say anything. He couldn’t really think anything. The Gunner shrugged.
“Right. I’m getting back up on that plinth and I’ll watch what the thing that’s on the way here does to you, because if you’re too stupid to save yourself, you’re too stupid to bother about.”
He dumped George back on his feet and turned. George grabbed his arm and clamped on.
“No. Help me.”
The black face looked back at him for a long beat. Something changed in the face, maybe the set of the jaw, maybe the eyes crinkled.
“God helps them what help themselves.”
“What does that mean?”
“Means hold my hand and run like a bastard.”
George let his hand be enfolded by the big, black hand. He had just enough time to wonder at the fact that the metal felt soft and pliable and not as cold as he’d expected, before his arm was almost yanked out of its socket as the Gunner headed for the underpass.
They skidded into the fluorescent-lit tunnel and clattered down the low ramp, heading north, beneath the traffic. Halfway down the underpass there was a busker strumming a guitar, singing an old Simon and Garfunkel song about being safe in a fortress deep and mighty, with more attack but less accuracy than the original.
His eyes watched George approach. He gave no sign of seeing the Gunner, or of hearing the hobnailed crash of his ammo boots on the concrete floor. He just watched George’s approach with boredom then disgust. He cut the song long enough to spit an ironic “Thank you” as George passed the open guitar case without adding to the spattering of coins in its scarlet interior.
George was still looking back as the Gunner dragged him up the steps into the darkening, tree-shrouded end of Hyde Park.
“He didn’t see you!”
The Gunner just kept running, weaving through the pedestrians heading home through the neon-enhanced gloom, heading away from the traffic, deeper into the park.
“None of them can see you!”
The Gunner tugged George’s arm just in time to make him look ahead and sidestep the tree trunk that loomed out of the orange-tinged darkness.
Which was a pity. Because if he’d kept looking back he might have noticed that he was wrong.
One pair of eyes had seen them. One pair of eyes stretched in something more intense than disbelief. The eyes stared out from beneath a long sweep of dark and shiny brown hair. They were wide-spaced eyes with hooded lids set in a creamy white face.
On the top floor of a red double-decker bus speeding west on the open bus lane, a girl of George’s age wrenched out of her seat and stumbled back through the standing passengers, eyes locked on something disappearing into the park, as the bus drew her farther and farther away.
She yanked the stop cord and serpentined down the stairs, oblivious to the complaints of the other passengers, ignoring the “Hoi!"s and the hands that plucked at her long sheepskin coat as she launched onto the rear platform of the bus, eyes raking back into the darkness, searching for something she could no longer see.
The conductor grabbed her.
“Oi, missy, simmer down.”
She didn’t even look back.
“I have to get off!”
The bus hammered down Rotten Row.
“Next stop in a minute,” said the conductor, not letting go.
The bus slowed for a taxi. The girl twisted her head like a snake and bit the conductor neatly between his thumb and forefinger.
As he yelped and let go in surprise, she leaped off the back of the slowing bus, stumbled, fell, got up, dodged another bus that braked hard, and ran off into the park. The girl—whose name was Edie—didn’t seem to mind the new graze on her knee any more than the honking and shouting behind her.
But then the other thing about the pale face beneath the shiny hair was that it was tough beyond its years, a toughness that came from having decided she wasn’t going to mind about little things ever again.
And it had the look of a face hard on the trail of something big.