The Glass God

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Authors: Kate Griffin

BOOK: The Glass God
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B
Y
K
ATE
G
RIFFIN

 

Matthew Swift

A Madness of Angels

The Midnight Mayor

The Neon Court

The Minority Council

 

Magicals Anonymous

Stray Souls

The Glass God

B
Y
C
ATHERINE
W
EBB

Mirror Dreams

Mirror Wakes

 

Waywalkers

Timekeepers

 

The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle

 

The Obsidian Dagger: Being the Further Extraordinary Adventures of Horatio Lyle

 

The Doomsday Machine: Another Astounding Adventure of Horatio Lyle

 

The Dream Thief: An Extraordinary Horatio Lyle Mystery

COPYRIGHT

 

Published by Hachette Digital

 

978-0-7481-2898-3

 

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
 

 

Copyright © 2013 by Catherine Webb

 

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

 

Excerpt from
Hounded
by Kevin Hearne

Copyright © 2011 by Kevin Hearne

 

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

 

H
ACHETTE
D
IGITAL

Little, Brown Book Group

100 Victoria Embankment

London, EC4Y 0DY

 

www.littlebrown.co.uk

www.hachette.co.uk

The Glass God

Table of Contents

 

 

“They be light, they be life, they be fire.
They be flame of blue, wrath of ice,
Dragon of stone, fury of blood.
They be life in flesh, death in sight.
They be the boss.
God help us all”
Anonymous graffiti, men’s toilets, twelfth floor, Harlun and Phelps

 

“While all and any are welcome to attend the regular meetings of Magicals Anonymous, or even pop by at our drop-in surgery, we do ask that if you are inclined to spontaneous combustion or actively leaking organic fluids from the unwinding hollows of your flesh, you use the overalls provided”
Notice pinned to the offices of Magicals Anonymous, 89C Little Lion Street, London WC1

Chapter 1

Listen to the Expert

He said, “No, wait, you don’t want to…⁠”

But, as was so often the case, no one listened.

Which was why the next thing they said was, “We told you so.”

Things went downhill from there.

Chapter 2

Keep Your Feet on the Ground

He feels something press against his thigh, and half turns in indignation.

But the person who just brushed by is still walking calmly on, shoulders hunched, head down beneath a trilby hat, and Darren, as he brushes his leg, can’t feel any blood, and is already half wondering if he imagined it. Perhaps he did. He’s had a bit to drink and while he’s okay – of course, he’s fine! – it’s easy to get jumpy on a lonely night.

He walks on, past the shuttered convenience store and the locked-up laundrette, beneath the painting on the wall of the grinning monkey, banana in hand, and through the accusing stare of the policeman drawn on the metal grille that guards the tattoo parlour, whose graffittoed face warns all passers-by that this shop is
his
shop. He turns the corner into the terraced road where he lives, six to the flat share, a house with a nice back garden where they sometimes try to have a barbecue in order to force the weather to turn to rain, walks three more paces, and pauses.

Stops.

Stares at nothing in particular, then down at the ground.

He seems… surprised.

It appears to Darren, and indeed to anyone who might be observing Darren at the time, that suddenly everything he’s known up to this point has been meaningless. All that was has passed him by, and all that remains is everything which is, and yet to come. He is used to having such profound thoughts at two in the morning after a night in the pub, but it seems to him that this is, perhaps, revelatory. A feeling deeper, truer and more meaningful than anything he has ever experienced with or without the aid of illegal substances, ever before.

And so, for tomorrow can only come if we let go of today, he reaches down to his shoes, and carefully slips them off his feet. His socks are stripy, multicoloured, a reminder, he always felt, that underneath his veneer of clean white shirt and sensible trousers, he once fought for social freedoms and artistic expression. He flexes his toes on the ground, feeling the sudden damp chill of the paving stones rise up through the clean fabric, into the soles of his feet. He lifts up his shoes, carefully unpicking the knot in the laces, then, once they are free, ties the laces back together, one shoe to the other. He raises his head, looking for something suitable for his purposes, and sees a lamppost with a long neck sticking out over the street. He steps back a few paces, to get a better line of sight, then, whirling his shoes overhead, spins them like an Olympic champion and, with a great heave of his arm, lets the shoes fly. They tumble through the air, one over the other, and hook across the neck of the lamppost, tangling a few times round as they come to rest, to form a noose of shoelace across the metal top.

And, just like that, Darren is gone.

Chapter 3

Honour Your Ancestors

It wakes.

This is a long process, made longer by the great deal of time it has spent not waking. Its mouth is stuffed with soil, its bones pressed down by the crushing weight of earth above it. Not all the earth is pure dirt: it stirs, and something sharp and brown lodges against its back. It smells dust, skin-dust, that has seeped down through the grains of broken stone and rotting wool. The fibres of the clothing around it tangle and pull like the threads of a spider’s web, and as it stirs into slow, irritated consciousness, one thought above all else intrudes into what, for want of an argument, shall be called its living mind.

How dare they?
 

How dare they?!
 

Chapter 4

Friendship Is Precious

It began as a Facebook group.

The name of the group was:

Weird Shit Keeps Happening To Me And I Don’t Know Why But I Figure I Probably Need Help
 

As soon as he’d been granted admin privileges, Rhys had gone about changing that name, and the group had become known as:
Weird Shit Keeps Happening
. However, there were still too many people requesting permission to join who were simply troubled teenagers, or adults coming out of difficult relationships, or old folk who’d forgotten to take their medicine, and, of course, the ubiquitous spammers.

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