Stoneheart (4 page)
T
he Gunner pulled George to a halt in the intricate tracery of shadows cast by a neon light above a spreading plane tree. He looked all around.
George concentrated on getting oxygen into his lungs. He waited until he’d gotten enough for a short question.
“Are we safe?”
The Gunner just set off again, but this time George noticed that it wasn’t a headlong run. It was more like a game of hide-and-seek, where the Gunner flitted them from one pool of shadow to the next, always keeping an eye behind them for whatever it was that seemed to be stalking them.
Now that they were moving slower, George’s brain had room for more than just terror and the hard job of breathing despite the stitch in his side. Thoughts tumbled into his head, hopping in on top of each other before he could really focus on them, like watching TV while someone else held the remote and speed-hopped the channels. He thought of Killingbeck. He thought of home, the empty house where his mother would not be there to miss him yet. He wondered if and when she’d notice. He flashed a horrible image of the pterodactyl crawling toward him over the stationary traffic. He thought of his mobile phone, stuck in his backpack, unclaimed in the dark recesses of the museum cloakroom. He saw the stone salamanders writhing into a strike in front of him, ready to kill.
And then he was sick.
As the Gunner tried to pull him on, he kept his hand on a thin plane tree and bent over and was sick. Twice. Then his stomach tried for a hat trick, but there was nothing left but a hot prickling sensation all over the back of his neck, and a tremor that calmed as the Gunner put a big hand on his shoulder.
“All right now?” he asked.
George shook his head.
“You done well there. Didn’t get any on your shoes or anything. Hold on.”
He suddenly hoisted George into his arms and stepped over a low wall on the edge of the park. George opened his mouth, but then the lurching sensation of falling into a deep space took the words out of him unsaid. There was a jolting instant of rushing vertigo before the Gunner’s boots crashed to the concrete. George looked around to see that they had jumped over the wall into a fifteen-foot drop, that ended on the ramp, into an underground parking garage. The Gunner set him on his feet and walked him very quietly down the ramp into the subterranean space.
The parking garage was empty of people and full of cars. Somewhere in the distance came the lonely sound of a tire shrieking in protest, but right now the Gunner and George were the only figures among the bonnets and windshields stretched out below the fluorescent lights. The Gunner walked between two cars, found a shadow behind a concrete pillar, and hunkered down again.
George looked at him. “What are we doing?”
“Waiting.”
“What are we waiting for?”
“For it to go away.”
“What is it?”
“Dunno. Want to go back up there and have a look-see?
George didn’t.
“Besides, you’re run out. That’s why you just chucked it all up. There’s a point of exhaustion, and you just ran through it. S’ like horses. You just need to lie up for a bit. … I was good with horses.”
George noticed that the Gunner had a bridle chain tucked into his belt, under the cape. The Gunner noticed him looking.
“Horse Artillery. We pulled the guns through the mud and tried not to kill the old nags doing it. Lose a horse, lose the guns. Lose the guns, lose the battle. Lose enough battles, and well—”
He seemed to catch himself. George thought it looked like he was pulling himself back into the here and now from somewhere a long way off.
“Anyhow. This ain’t about that. Get your breath.”
The Gunner retrieved his part-smoked butt and fired it up.
George looked at him, then at the fire sprinklers in the ceiling. The Gunner’s eyes stayed on George’s through the smoke curling roofward from the cigarette.
“What?”
“I don’t think …” began George.
“Yeah?”
“I don’t think you can smoke in here.”
The Gunner’s eyes held steady, but something rippled under his dark bronze skin, something near his mouth. Despite himself, George felt an answering twitch on his face. The last thing in the world he felt like doing was smiling, but as the Gunner’s face cracked, he felt his face going with it. And like the small crack that signals the dam is going to burst, as the Gunner began to laugh, so did he.
“Can’t smoke?
Can’t smoke!”
The Gunner was laughing like a deep rolling bell. George’s laughter fired along underneath it, sharper, thinner, and echoing with hysteria. Somehow all the fear and incomprehension found a voice in his laughter. He had no idea why things were so funny, only that the laughter was right. He flashed a memory of his dad belching at the dinner table, and responding to his mum’s disapproval with a cheery “Better out than in.” That’s what this felt like, this laughing on the shank end of terror. He had no idea what was finding voice in his laughter, but he knew it was better out than in. Keeping it in would have burst something inside. The Gunner wiped his eyes.
“Can’t smoke? I can step off a monument in the heart of the city and shoot me four taints and drag you through the park double-time, and no beggar sees me, no one turns a hair—and you say I can’t spark up? God’s truth!”
He stopped laughing. George rolled on for a bit and then dried up as inexplicably as he’d begun, as he felt the Gunner waiting for him.
“You need to pay attention, son. Because, whatever you woke up thinking were the rules? Well, up’s still up and down’s still down—but everything in between? All bets are off. It’s a whole new ball of chalk.”
He kept George in the grip of his eyes as he blew a long plume of smoke right at the fire sprinkler.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean: you want to survive this, you need to think first and ask the right questions. And ‘What do you mean?’ain’t the right question.”
George started to shiver. He opened his mouth. Thought some more. Shut it.
The Gunner grunted approvingly.
“That’s good. Engage the brain before running your mouth. Don’t worry about the shivering. It’s shock. It’ll pass, or you’ll go doolally for a bit.”
“I don’t want to go doolally.”
“Might not be the worst thing that could happen.”
George looked at the damp concrete at his feet.
“I think I went doolally a while ago. I think all this is doolally. I think someone’s put drugs in my food or something. I think this isn’t happening.”
The Gunner just looked at him. George wondered if he’d gone back to being a statue.
“Look,” George said after a pause, “please tell me what’s happening. Please tell me what you are. Tell me what those things are. Please.”
The Gunner tapped his chest.
“I’m a statue. They’re statues—carvings—whatever. That’s all we got in common. I’m a spit, they’re taints. Taints hate spits, spits don’t care much for taints because of it. You could say there’s been zip between us since the first man thought of carving something and putting a little of himself into it. We’re both ‘made,’see? Both created by craftsmen or even artists—don’t matter which, we call them both ‘makers’—but we’re as different as chalk from cheese.”
“Taints are evil?”
“Dunno about evil. They’re just bad. See, there’s nothing human in them. They was made to frighten, to be ugly, to leer at you off church roofs and put the shivers up you.”
“Gargoyles.”
“Yeah. Sort of. I mean, all gargoyles is taints, but not all taints are gargoyles, if you follow me. But things like gargoyles was made to remind you about hell, meant to outshout the devil. Nothing human in them. Empty. And like all empty things, they’re hungry. Not for food, though. Hungry for what makes you you, and me me.”
George thought of the pterodactyl’s toothy beak, and the look in its eye, and knew just what the Gunner meant.
“Though, of course, I’m less me than you’re you, me being a spit and all.”
“What do you mean?” asked George; although, as he asked it, somewhere inside him he thought he knew, thought he’d been told this before, thought that if he stopped and tried he could remember the answer. Before it came to him, the Gunner spoke.
“A spit is a statue that the ‘maker’—sculptor, stone carver, whatever—has made to represent someone human. And because of that, while a maker works, something of that must flow into us, and fills that hole the taints have eating away inside them. I mean, a statue of Lord Kitchener ain’t Lord Kitchener, but he’s—well, he’s what the artist thought and knew about Lord Kitchener. It’s like he’s got a spark of Kitchener’s spirit in him. He’s the spirit and image of Lord Kitchener. The spit and image if you like. That make sense?”
George needed to think before he answered. He knew about sculptors. He remembered talk about “putting something of yourself” into things, other talk of things “coming alive beneath your hands.” He felt the plas-ticene in his pocket. He nodded slowly.
“So who are you?”
“I’m the Gunner. No one special. Just a soldier. From the Great War. The only other name I got’s the name of the man what made me. Just like you got the name of the man what made you. Whatever your name is …”
“Chapman. I’m George Chapman.”
“I’m Jagger. My maker was Charles Sargeant Jagger. So I’m a Jagger. You got a big family?”
“No.”
“I got a few. There’s Jaggers all over London. Jagger did well out of the war. People liked what he done, making us look like heroes, but nothing crowing about it. Made us look like men who knew about mud and dying first, then made us look like heroes after. For them that had lost sons and husbands, we looked like the men they wanted to remember them as, the men they hoped they’d become before the bloody generals sent them out to be butchered.”
“So I call you Jagger?”
The Gunner had gone still and was looking up.
“Wh—”
The Gunner looked at him and held a finger to his lips.
“Quiet as mouse.”
He eased his revolver from the holster.
“Cat’s on the roof.”
T
he parking garage had a roof made of concrete reinforced with a grid of metal rods. It was about two feet thick. Above that was eight feet of earth, thick and sticky, like modeling clay. The earth was reinforced by its own web of tree roots, criss-crossing over and under themselves as each tree sent feelers out into the clay in a microscopically slow explosion, searching for water and food. This network was itself laced with tunnels made by earthworms burrowing blindly beneath the park as they went about their business. And on top of all this was the grass—white roots in the clay, green shoots above it, reaching into the air, trying to breathe something clean through the exhaust fumes from the sea of traffic endlessly growling past on Park Lane. In the three inches of grass that topped the clay was a tiny world of insects going about their daily grind as thoughtlessly and relentlessly as the human inhabitants of the city around them. There were ants, there were ladybirds—and for a moment there was a beetle.
Edie saw it quite clearly, its shiny black back reflecting the orange glow from the streetlights as it moved slowly from a discarded cigarette packet toward a pile of vomit. She knew the little pyramid in the grass was vomit because she could smell it. She could smell it better than she would have liked because her nose was on the ground like the rest of her, splayed beneath a bush, hardly breathing. She knew the beetle
was
a beetle—but wasn’t anymore—because she saw the gargoyle land three feet in front of her, and she saw its stone claw plash into the clay beneath.
Edie edged farther back into the shadows under the bush, trying to move as imperceptibly and silently as the tree roots beneath her. In her left hand was a small glass disk, glowing blue between her fingers. It was also hot. She slipped it in her pocket without taking her eye off the stone claw four feet in front of her nose. She didn’t need a warning glass anymore. The thing was here. It was much too here for comfort.
It was a limestone gargoyle with the face of a snarling cat and the horns of a small devil. It had wings, but no arms, and long powerful legs that ended in the beetle-crushing foot claws Edie was staring at. Its eyes were blank stone like the rest of it, the set of its eyebrows was fierce and angry. A century and a half of weather had stained the stone in streaks of black and gray, and somewhere in the past, a hard frost had expanded the water in a crack in its right wing, and a section had fallen off, giving it a lopsided, battle-worn quality.
Edie knew she was good—unnaturally good—at not being seen when she wanted to remain unnoticed. But she wished she was even better at it as she watched the cat-gargoyle bend low to the ground and sniff. As it breathed out, she heard a low whistle, like someone blowing across the mouth of a bottle. It moved its head from side to side across the ground, trying to pick up a scent. Edie decided to stop edging backward and tried to make herself invisible instead.
The cat-gargoyle moved away from her toward the parapet over which George and the Gunner had disappeared. As it turned away to make its sniff-and-whistle noise scenting along the top of the wall, Edie allowed herself a deep breath. She also had a good opportunity to see the sharp ridge of vertebrae running down its back, like a line of giant thorns trying to burst through the taut stone skin. She could see the dense feline muscles bunch and relax as it moved to and fro, as if it were dancing in a slow trance, led by its nose.
And then Edie saw the woman with the stroller and the spaniel, hurrying through the orange gloom, obviously late for something and unhappy about it. The spaniel was running ahead of the woman, ears flapping happily. And then it stopped and its ears went back and it growled.
Edie’s first thought was that it had seen the cat-gargoyle six feet ahead of it. The cat-gargoyle turned and looked at the dog.
The woman snapped her fingers at the dog as she passed on the strip of pathway. “Bramble. Come here. Bramble!”
Bramble was frozen in a trembling rigor in front of the cat-gargoyle. Spaniels don’t get many ideas, so when one takes hold, they tend to stick with it. And with a horrible feeling in her stomach, Edie realized that the thought Bramble was having was
not
about being able to see the gargoyle. It was about sensing her under the bush.
“BRAMBLE! Come!” the woman called. She left the stroller and walked toward the dog and the gargoyle. The gargoyle took a step backward and crouched, drawing its wings open, parallel to the ground, ready to scythe into action. Edie noticed that the ends of the wings had sharp hooks on them. She’d seen a bullfighter once on the TV, and he’d made the same gesture with his cape, stepping back, spreading the cape behind him, hiding the sword, seeming innocent but ready to kill when the bull got close enough.
The woman walked right past the gargoyle. Edie thought she must have brushed it with her coat, but she clearly could not see it any more than her dog could. She grabbed the spaniel and clipped a leash to its collar.
“Come on, bad dog, there’s nothing there!” she snapped as she pulled the spaniel away. The dog started to bark back over its shoulder, the bark getting louder the farther his mistress pulled it. The bark ended in a yelp as the dog was swatted over the nose and attached to the stroller, whose occupant had now started squealing and yelling. There was a flurry of wind in the trees above, and the woman grimaced. She pulled an umbrella from the bags hung on the back of the stroller and opened it one-handed.
“Come on. It’s going to rain. We’ve got to get home. Good dog.”
The smack on the nose had dislodged the thought of Edie from the spaniel’s mind, and she trotted after the cooing mother who trundled off into the darkness, putting a rain hood over the baby as she went.
Edie was about to breathe again when she realized something chilling. The cat-gargoyle remained braced and ready to attack—but its head had slowly turned, and it looked back over its shoulder in the direction the dog had barked.
Toward Edie.
Suddenly—so fast your eyes had to twist to keep up—it switched the position of its body so it faced her bush. Keeping the claw-tipped wings spread in a nasty echo of the umbrella Edie had just watched the woman unfurl, it crouched lower to the ground and sniffed toward her.
Very slowly, one wing tip pushed the bush aside, and suddenly Edie had nowhere to run. The stone eyes looked at her. Edie had time to note that the whistling breath came from a corroded copper pipe sticking straight out of the things mouth, like a gun barrel.
Edie reached into her pocket and pulled out the disk of glass. Where it had glowed blue, it now blazed like a torch, like a blue-green torch. She held it out straight at the end of her arm, with only the merest fraction of a shake. The rest of the shake was in her voice. Go away.
She cleared her throat. Lost the shake from her voice and tried again.
“GO AWAY! You have to GO AWAY!”
One stone eyebrow rose in a question. And then the fierce snarl stretched even farther back, and the horns flattened like the dog’s ears had. And it didn’t go away at all. It stepped toward her, pulling the bush apart, opening her to the world and whatever it was about to do.
And then the rain came—a spitter, a spatter, then all at once like a block falling from the sky. Edie set her jaw and glared defiantly at the stone eyes through the falling water.
“You. Don’t. Scare. Me,” she lied. “Nothing scares me. Not anymore. You can’t hurt me. You have to GO AWAY!”
The cat-gargoyle shook itself in a shiver, looked her in the eye.
“You don’t scare me… .” she lied again.
And then the cat-gargoyle jumped.
Backward. Up into the sky. Into the rain. Away from her.
Edie stared very hard at the place where it had been, until her eyes had convinced her brain that there was nothing to see except rain and grass and the ugly orange light.
She looked at the glass disk in her hand. As she was staring at it, the light died in it, and it looked like what it was, an old piece of sea glass, the bottom of a bottle washed to and fro by the tide, worn smooth by the pebbles and sand. Something anyone might find on a day at the sea. She stuffed it back in the pocket of her sheepskin jacket. Took several deep breaths, and headed across the grass down onto the ramp of the parking garage.