Stoneheart (17 page)
“If he was a taint.”
“He’s not a taint.”
“Maybe there are bad spits too?”
They pondered this possibility.
“I wish the Gunner was here.”
T
he Gunner was facedown in the mud and not moving. He’d walked down the Strand, every step hurting worse than the one before, and by the time he’d reached Trafalgar Square and turned left under the lofty pillars of Admiralty Arch, he knew he was in worse trouble than he’d imagined.
He carried the heat of the Temple Bar dragon’s fire in him like a growing poison. It was a heat that sapped all his energy. Never before had he felt like he was made of bronze. He had been made to be a man in uniform, and if he had ever been asked, he would have said he felt like any other man. But no one asks statues these kind of questions, not even other statues.
Inside himself, where the poison of the fire was lodged, he felt looser, almost liquid. Where he had felt solid he now felt soft, and the outer skin, beyond the heat, felt like scrap metal that he had to drag along with him, metal that could burst or break at any moment. He hated the feeling. It was the memory and the pain of his birth, the time when something that was not him but just a possibility of him poured hot and molten from formlessness into his present shape; and in the birth memory was the realization that this is what his death would feel like, and in that thought was the corroding poison of the dragon’s fire.
The pain he remembered was not the pain of the molten bronze pouring into the gunner-shaped cast at the foundry. It was the pain of cooling into that shape, of becoming solid. It was the pain of all the
other
things that the metal could have been made into dying as he became the Gunner and not them. And because the number of things the molten bronze could have been shaped into was infinite, so was the pain of their possibilities dying.
He stumbled up the Mall, and as he passed St. James’s Park to his left, he caught the flat sheen of the lake through the trees. And he thought that if he could get to the lake and get into the water he might cool this burning, sapping pain enough to continue across into Green Park and from there to Hyde Park Corner, and get to his plinth before midnight. Although, by the time he thought it, the fire-poison was gnawing at him so badly that he really would have been happy to lie in the cool inky-black water until midnight came, and the consequences of not being on his plinth at turn o’day happened anyway.
Dead in the Water The pain and the damage was so severe that oblivion and never moving or seeing again didn’t seem so bad.
He hoped the kid would be okay. He was pretty sure the Friar wasn’t as black as he was painted. Not like there was much choice. And the strange girl, the glint. All that hurt inside her. All that pain she would give to those close to her. Still, she was all he could trust.
The boy probably deserved better.
He splashed into the lake, sending a family of sleeping ducks skittering away across the ripples in protest. He fell to one knee, then sat back and laid his body in the cold mud just below the shallow water.
It didn’t help.
He’d expected the water to fizz and steam off him as he lowered himself into it, he felt so hot inside. But the water didn’t boil, and there was no hiss, no hot water vapor rising beneath the spreading plane trees.
It didn’t help a bit.
And now he had used up all of his energy getting to the lake, and he had none left to get home in time. Maybe ever.
“Stupid,” was the last word he said.
Then, with a last gargantuan effort, he rolled onto his great chest and tried to crawl out of the mud, knowing he wouldn’t make it, knowing he’d try anyway. He almost made three feet, and then his arms and legs gave out and he slumped facedown into the mire at the water’s edge. His head twisted sideways, and his helmet came off, and his cheek plowed into the mud and water.
And then he was still.
E
die sat in front of the heater, pulling on her tights. George looked over at her.
“Are they dry already?”
She tugged them on with satisfaction.
“Any drier and they’d be burning. You want to watch your jeans don’t scorch.”
He reached over and felt his trousers. They were pretty dry. He took them off to a dark corner of the pub and changed into them. Edie disappeared behind the bar, and from the crunching noise she was making, he knew she was taking more packets of crisps.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Nicking food. You want some?”
“No.”
She carried on rustling. Then clinking. Then her head popped up over the bar and looked at him through the gloom.
“What?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Yeah, you did. I heard you, I . . .” She cocked her head, hearing something. It was George’s turn to ask the questions.
“What?”
She shook her head and stuffed a juice bottle inside her coat.
“Nothing.”
“Did you hear something?”
“I thought I did. It’s this place. All the mirrors and the dark nooks. Feels like there’s more people in here than you think.”
“There
are
more people in here than you think,” said a voice neither of them had heard before.
It was a puckish London voice, like that of a very old child with a swagger in it. They looked toward the pillared alcove and saw a mask hanging upside down in the archway, grimacing at them. Then a hand pulled the mask away, and they saw it was one of the imp-cherubs that had been sitting on the cornicing. His face was grinning and mischievous, and his hair hung down in an unruly mane beneath it.
“Really,” said George, speaking slowly.
He had the impression that this small boy might disappear at any moment, a thought confirmed by the way the child kept one eye on the door at all times, as if waiting for it to open and the Friar to return.
“Ho, yes. And there are more ‘heres’ here too, if you know how to see them,” said the boy.
Edie opened her mouth, but George waved at her to keep quiet—which she unexpectedly did.
“What’s your name?” George asked.
“Me? I’m Tragedy. Or Little Tragedy. Or You Imp.”
George pointed at the boy’s grinning face.
“Shouldn’t you be Comedy?”
“Garn, ‘course not. That’s why I got given the bleedin’ mask, to hide my face. Comedy don’t need a mask, trust me!
“Why?” said Edie.
“Why what?”
“Why trust you? People wearing masks usually have something to hide.”
Little Tragedy looked hurt and offended.
“Edie,” said George in a low, warning tone.
“I ain’t wearing it now, am I?” said the boy, waving the mask in the air beneath him.
“No,” admitted Edie, after a sharp glance from George.
Little Tragedy’s face split in a smile.
“There you go, then. Besides, everyone’s got a mask of some kind, don’t they? Everyone’s not quite what they seem.”
“Aren’t they?” said Edie.
“No, they ain’t. Blimey, sit under a pub roof without ever leaving for a hundred years, you see things. You hear things. And after a bit, you think things and all.”
“What do you think?” George asked carefully. He sensed that the boy wanted to say something to them, but needed it to be teased out of him somehow.
“Well. It’s all a lark, isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
“So he says. Old Black. He says it’s all a great lark, and that the trick of it is to have the last laugh, and the first laugh, and as many of the ones in between as we can.” His face dropped the smile and became suddenly worried as he went on. “Only, my question is, who are you?
“Who am I?”
“Who am
both
of you? Because, like I said, I seen things, but I never seen Old Black stop smiling—or looking like he’s smiling—like he done when you telled him what you been up to and how you got here. So what I’m thinking is, who are you?”
George shrugged. His fingers itched and felt for something that wasn’t there. He picked his coat off the back of the chair where it was hanging and put it on. He found the piece of plasticene and squished it with his thumb.
“I’m just ordinary. I mean, today I can see spits like you. I mean, I hope you’re a spit. . . .”
“Which I certainly ain’t a taint, begging your pardon, I don’t think so!” spluttered the boy in outrage.
“Sorry. No offense. And I see taints and I’m in this nightmare. But most of the time I’m just ordinary.”
“It’s not seeing us as we are what makes you different. We seen people who can see us before—”
“What happens to them?” broke in Edie.
“Dunno. They don’t usually hang around for long. I think they get got.”
“’Got’ by what?”
“Dunno. But something gets them, because they don’t come back.”
“Cheerful,” said Edie grimly. “Thanks.”
“I’m not saying they get snuffed out, mind. Not necessarily. There’s other ways to go than popping your clogs, other
places.
I’m just saying they maybe go there.”
“To other places?” asked George. Little Tragedy wasn’t making much sense to him, but he still had the feeling that the mischievous-looking boy was bursting to tell them something. Or maybe, he thought, he wasn’t bursting to tell them something at all, but just swollen with the big joke that he knew something he
wasn’t
going to tell them. Despite his snub nose and twinkling eyes, there was perhaps something not entirely wholesome about him.
“What other places?” asked Edie.
He paused for effect, and his smile went from puckish to something closer to a leer. He said the words slowly and deliberately.
“Other ‘heres.'”
“What other ‘heres’?”
The boy grinned conspiratorially and reached out his arm toward her, little fingers beckoning.
“I’ll tell you if you touch me,” said the boy.
“What?” said George.
“She’s a glint, isn’t she? So if she touches me, she’ll know.”
“Know what?” asked George.
“Know if something bad happened to me. And if she can tell me that, then I’ll tell her about the other places. I might even show her how to get to them, too.”
Edie and George exchanged a look. She cleared her throat.
“Do you think something bad happened to you?”
Little Tragedy put the mask in front of his face. Then took it away. Then put it in front and then took it away again.
“See? Two of me.”
“One’s a mask.”
“I know it’s a mask,” he said, as if explaining something very obvious to two people who were very slow on the uptake. “I’m just showing you what I feel like. Two people, two types of people, and I don’t feel right. Like I’m made wrong. So if you glint me, you can see if I’m made proper. Or if something bad happened that I don’t know about.”
He smiled at Edie, and George could see it was a brave smile, as if he were trying not to cry. Edie walked toward him.
“I don’t like glinting,” she said. “It hurts me.”
Little Tragedy reached out a thin arm and waggled his fingers again.
“Don’t do it,” said George sharply.
Edie stopped in the archway and looked back at him.
“What?”
“All the other statues, the Sphinxes, the Gunner, all of them are frightened of you. Or at least they really don’t like being around you when you glint.”
“So?” she asked, the old challenging look rekindling in her eyes.
“So it’s not right, him being so keen to be glinted. It might be a trap.”
“A trap? You’re joking,” snorted the boy. “Bit late to worry about that, isn’t it?”
George looked at Edie. Edie looked at the door. They both were remembering the
snick
the lock had made as the Black Friar had left.
“Are you saying we can’t trust the Black Friar?”
“Trust Old Black? ‘Course you can trust him! You can trust him for just about anything. Just as long as you trust him never to be what he seems. …”
Edie shivered suddenly as she remembered the drowning girl shouting “He’s not what he seems!”
“George—”
Click.
The door unlocked. Little Tragedy put his fingers to his lips and spoke very fast.
“I never said nothing and I wasn’t here.”
T
he Gunners face lay on its side, one eye in the water, one eye staring unblinking out at the night and the thin layer of ground mist rising off the grass in the park. There was no question of his ever moving again, but he was still—just—thinking. And because he was thinking at the very edge of his energy, the thoughts were not the thoughts of his time as a statue, of what, as a spit, he had endured and seen of life and London. They were the first thoughts, the spit-thoughts, the idea of him that the sculptor had put into him as he was made. And because the sculptor had not only been a maker of statues, but a soldier himself, the thoughts that the Gunner had came to him like memories of a life lived, a life in the war.
He no longer thought he was in St. James’s Park. He couldn’t hear the distant growl of traffic. He heard guns rumbling in a rolling barrage, far away. And closer, he heard the flat crack and slap of rifles firing overhead in random counterpoint to the mechanical stutter of machine guns. He heard men shouting orders, he heard other men screaming for their mothers. He heard feet rushing past, he heard the crack-thump of a grenade and fewer people screaming after that.
He focused on the gouged mud inches in front of his eye.
He knew where he was.
I’m in No Man’s Land, he thought. And no bloody man’s going to come out here to get me.
And no man did exactly that.
Shapes moved in the mist beyond the mud. A tall figure in a flapping mackintosh and a tin hat just like his walked toward him out of the haze. He saw the man’s boots squish the mud in front of his nose. He felt a hand on his shoulder. He heard a snap of concern as someone sucked their teeth in frustration.
Then he felt himself hoisted in the air—high in the air, rising toward the sky—and he knew it was over, and the eye not clogged with mud stayed open, but stopped seeing anything.