Ironhand (15 page)

Two stone talons appeared on either side of the doorjamb, and as George scrambled to his feet, a gargoyle that had once had two horns but now only had one and a stump snarled into the space between them. The gargoyle was too big to get into the room without ducking and edging sideways—and that was what saved George.

He knew he was too far from his hammer to get it, but his hand closed on the wire handle of one of the paint cans he’d tripped over. As the gargoyle was ducking sideways and starting to unfold one wing into the room, George lunged forward, swinging the paint can in a desperate haymaker.

The weight of the can developed a powerful centrifugal force as he swung it over his shoulder, so that by the time it was coming back around on the upswing, it was going at quite a speed. The gargoyle snarled and launched a wild bite at George—and thereby stepped into the blow. The can caught it right under the chin. The force of the blow jarred George’s hand, but he managed to keep hold of the can as the gargoyle went cartwheeling backward out into the corridor and ended up flat on its back. It lay there stunned, then shook its head and tried to right itself.

George felt adrenaline spiking in his nostrils and heard his teeth grind as he clenched his jaw and went after the creature. He swung the can left, and hit it hard on the side of its head, and then he caught it on the back-swing. The can burst as the gargoyle’s head bounced on the floor, and sprayed red paint all over its face and wing.

George saw its neck go slack, and backed up fast, rebolting the door behind him. Something else was rattling the boards that obscured the windows on the opposite side to the street. As the bolt slammed shut, the thought occurred to George that unless he came up with a plan for getting out of the room, he might just be caught like a rat that had locked itself in its own trap.

He wondered if he could survive the five-floor drop by sliding down the rubbish chute. He thought of the Dumpster that it must empty into, and all the lethal, hard, and sharp rubbish it could be filled with. Bad idea.

His legs were starting to shake, wanting to run but having nowhere to go. And now something started rattling the boarded-up windows on the chute side of the room. It really was time to go. He kicked out in frustration, to stop his leg from shaking as much as anything else, and connected with a soft roll of roof insulation. It thudded across the room, and as it did so, George knew what he was going to do. He picked up the nearest roll. Although it was unwieldy, he ran across the room and threw it down the chute. It just fit, with about four inches on either side. He turned and grabbed another, threw it after the first, and then went for another one, working fast and methodically so he wouldn’t have time to listen to the second thoughts banging insistently on the back door of his consciousness.

There was an alarming splintering noise from the blocked window behind him, and he saw that the creature on the other side had managed to get one corner of the boarding free. It was definitely time to leave.

He took a deep breath and swung one leg into the chute. Then one of those second thoughts got through. If he reached the ground in enough of one piece to walk away, exactly how was he going to do that? The gargoyles on the outside wall would recognize him and swoop down.

He swung his leg back out and ran across to the hooks where he had gotten his jacket. He quickly jammed a second work jacket over the one he was already wearing. It was a tight fit, but when it was done, he felt bigger and fatly padded. Then he pulled a hard hat onto his head, snatched up the gloves he’d left on the table, and hammed his hands into them as he ran back to the chute, trying not to look behind at the new banging noise that was rocking the door on its flimsy hinges.

He didn’t let himself think twice this time; though he did grab the hammer and another roll of insulating felt as he passed. He tossed the roll down the chute and swung straight after it into the yawning plastic gullet.

As his hands released the rim of the chute, he heard a loud crack from the window on the other side of the room—but then he was gone, plunging groundward at speed.

He could feel his stomach leap skyward as he fell in the opposite direction. Everything happened at once as he tried to remember to keep his mouth closed so he wouldn’t bite his tongue on impact, as he’d once done on a high flume at a water park. His hard hat bobbled off and fell after him as he attempted to slow his descent by braking with his shoes and elbows and gloves, bracing his back against the curved interior of the pipe.

The outward friction didn’t seem to slow him much, but he hoped it was enough to do more than turn a clean but fatal free fall into a juddering death-slide. His attempt to slow himself down kicked dirt off the sides of the tube, so he was falling into a blinding cloud of choking dust as he went. He stopped breathing and was trying to think how he’d know when to stop his feet from pushing outward in time to bring them together and attempt a parachute landing, when it all became academic: he hit bottom with a slamming jolt that knocked out all the air left in him as his knees pistoned upward toward his chin, and he stopped dead. But alive, he realized with a wave of elation that didn’t diminish half a beat later as his hard hat caught up with him and bounced off his head.

He stayed very still, surrounded by the soft pink plug of roofing felt that had cushioned his fall, trying not to cough and splutter in the dust cloud his impact had kicked up. Once he’d really believed the evidence of his senses and ascertained that nothing was broken, he grabbed his hat and gripped the hammer tightly as he squeezed himself down through the roofing felt and into the half-empty Dumpster beyond.

It was covered with a tarpaulin and tied down against the wind, but he found a gap and managed to serpentine, headfirst, out of it. He risked a glance upward, and saw that all the gargoyles were massed around the windows of the room he’d just left, five stories above. He darted into the protection given by the overhanging scaffolding and walked as quickly and quietly toward the corner of the building as he could manage.

If the gargoyles hadn’t heard him falling down the chute, he was sure they must be able to hear his heart hammering. He remembered to put the white hard hat on his head as he came to the end of the scaffolding, and walked out into the street with only the slightest hesitation. Not looking back and up was almost the hardest thing he’d had to do, but he knew he couldn’t. Because any gargoyle who looked down mustn’t see his face and realize that the bulky man walking away beneath the hat was, in fact, a boy.

His shoulders itched and his ears strained for the sound of anything whistling out of the sky behind him, but by the time he had walked halfway past the next building, he thought he might have gotten away with it. As he passed the cascading fonts announcing the entrance to the British Library, he gave himself the luxury of twirling nonchalantly on his feet. He saw that the coast was clear, and his knees almost buckled with relief as he hurried down Euston Road.

He didn’t notice a huge statue turn its head and look at him from a vantage point set back in the piazza outside the British Library. The huge male figure was bent over a large pair of dividers, as if measuring the world. He looked as though he had been made, cut up into chunks, and then badly reassembled, with gaps where the joins didn’t quite meet.

The giant looked at him, then up at the rookery on St. Pancras. He put his fingers in his mouth and whistled.

“C
ome on, Glinty, time to be somewhere else,” said Little Tragedy, tugging Edie back through the mirrored arches, into the dark alcove beyond.

At the front door of the pub, she could see the Friar talking earnestly to whoever was on the other side. Being somewhere else seemed like exactly the right idea. The only thing was that once she looked around, she realized there was no door out of this cloistered space. It didn’t feel like a place of escape. It felt like a dead end. She suddenly felt like a rat in a trap.

As if reading her thoughts, Little Tragedy put his finger up to his lips and monkey-swung up onto one of the wall lamps and did something to the mosaic roundel in the ceiling. He dropped to the ground, nimble as a cat.

“Trust me. I know somewhere the Tallyman won’t find yer.”

He beckoned her to the parallel mirrors. Edie’s feet braked on the carpet. She had no intention of going back to the Blitz. Little Tragedy shook his head impatiently.

“’S all right. I changed the wossit in the ceiling. We ain’t going to the past, just somewhere else in the city, somewhere they can’t find yer. It’s an ’ouse, a safe one, don’t worry. Look, it’s nuffink bad.”

He pointed into the mirror. Edie let her feet take her close enough for a look. There was no conflagration on the other side of the mirror. There was just an empty gray room, bare gray walls meeting dusty gray floorboards. The only relief from the plainness silvering everything was the crisscross lattice shadow thrown across the floor by the window in the moonlight. There was nothing else in the room, and no shadows where danger might lurk.

She heard the Friar raise his voice in the doorway. She heard the words “walker” and “stone,” and that alone evaporated any misgivings she was having about reentering the mirrors.

She nodded at Little Tragedy. Her eyes slipped over his shoulder and were caught by the sight of George’s jacket hanging on the beer-pump handles. Little Tragedy saw what she was looking at and nodded.

“You’re right. Don’t want to forget the dainty, do we?”

He nipped out into the barroom proper, and quick as thought, had snatched the blazer and was back at her side.

“Ladies first,” he whispered.

Just before Edie stepped into the mirror, she hesitated.

What if—?

Before the thought could go further, Little Tragedy had clucked with impatience and pushed past her, into the mirror, tugging her arm as he went. She stepped in after him and felt the surface tension on the mirror stretch and pop as before, and then she was in the room beyond.

This time, instead of her ears being assaulted by a hellish barrage of noise, she experienced the opposite— complete quiet. It was the sound of a city at peace with itself. It was so silent that she could hear her heart begin to slow from the panicked tempo it had risen to when she had been in the pub only an instant before.

It wasn’t just the lack of explosions and fire that was different from the last trip she’d made into the mirror. It also wasn’t hot. In fact, it was the opposite. The air was still, so there was no draft, but it was not even warm.

“It’s cold,” she said, watching her breath plume as she turned to look at Little Tragedy.

“Sometimes it’s cold, sometimes it isn’t. It’s a funny old room,” said the boy. He was looking at her over the top of George’s jacket.

There was something in his eyes that she hadn’t seen before. He still had the cocky urchin’s grin, but his eyes didn’t match the look. His eyes weren’t grinning. They were saying something completely different, something not cheery, or chirpy, or cheeky.

They were saying sorry.

“’E’s not a bad man. ’E’s always looking after glints. ’E told me. ’E said no one looks after them better.”

Her heart froze and her hand was already in her pocket, closing around the well-worn disk of her sea-glass. Even as she pulled it out into the gray room, she knew what she would see, because it was already hot to the touch, already blazing with warning light. And as the light shone out and cast her finger shadows on the gray walls, she completed, too late, the thought she’d begun in the pub, just before Little Tragedy had pulled her into the mirror.

The thought was this: if the Friar had shielded her from a bomb blast and saved her from the Blitz, why wouldn’t he save her from the Walker? Of course, the answer was that he probably
would
save her from the Walker. Which raised the question of why the boy-imp had pulled her into the mirror behind the monk’s back, and why he was looking so wrong—

“You’re not talking about the Friar, are you?”

His eyes swiveled this way and that, anywhere but at her face, at the shock and rising horror in her eyes. He held out the jacket, as if making a peace offering.

“’Ere, take your coat. It’s chilly in here.”

Edie looked at the mirror behind Little Tragedy, calculating how she could get to it without his stopping her.

“Thanks,” she said slowly, taking the jacket. She knew how to do it. She’d take the coat and throw it over his head and jump past him in the confusion. She remembered the broken dragon’s head in the pocket and thought that she’d better take that with her, but suddenly she realized the heavy weight wasn’t in the pocket at all. She hesitated, confused for an instant, then looked up and saw it.

Little Tragedy had the broken carving in his hand. He took advantage of her shock to back up to the mirror in two fast steps.

“You can’t take that,” she said, her voice hoarsening. “Don’t do this.”

His smile was really just hanging on by a thread, and his eyes looked so sad peering out from the mismatched face, that he might have been a tragic boy wearing the mask of Comedy, rather than the other way around.

“Don’t leave me here,” rasped Edie, looking at the bare gray walls. Something moved slowly beyond the windows, and a new terror gripped her.

“’E’s not a bad man. ’E told me,” the urchin insisted. He put one leg into the mirror. He paused as if he wanted to be gone but his conscience wouldn’t let him make a quick exit, as if what he wanted was for her to tell him that what he was doing was right.

“Tragedy, no, please—!”

He shook his head. Something glinted in his eye.

“’E’ll be along in a while. You’ll be hunky-dory, no bother.”

As Edie leaped for him, trying to get in the mirror, he jumped back and out of the room, and she hit nothing but hard, cold glass.

Her first impulse was to smash her fists into the mirror, but sense took over and halted her in midpunch. For some reason she couldn’t get back in the mirror, but if she calmed down, maybe she could find a way.

She stepped back, trying to clear her head, pushing the panic and outrage at Little Tragedy’s betrayal down far enough so there was room for her to think.

She spun around. There was a door, four walls, and a window. The door was the obvious choice, but a thought was becoming more and more insistent at the back of her mind, and she didn’t want to open it or even touch it.

She crossed to the window and looked out. It was, of course, barred. The thing that she had seen moving beyond the window was still moving, and the warning bell it had triggered jangled louder and louder in her head.

It was snow.

The rooftops it was falling on were not the rooftops of the London she had just left. There were no sodium streetlights, no TV antennas, no satellite dishes—no lights or flickering from TV screens in the windows beneath. There was no hard-edged electric light out there at all.

It was quiet way beyond the fact that the snow was deadening every sound as it blanketed the city. There was simply no traffic noise. No cars, no buses, no whining motor scooters. There was a distant sound of a barrel organ, and the jingle of a harness.

She looked down through the bars. In the narrow slice of street that she could just make out, she saw a horse pulling an old-fashioned hackney cab, its wheels slowly cutting twin furrows through the deep snow. The driver sat on his high seat, cracking his whip at the horse’s hindquarters, a short top hat tied onto his head with a scarf, his legs swathed in a horse blanket. Then he was gone, leaving nothing but wheel marks in the snow.

She knew then that the imp had lied about more than one thing; she knew she was not in present London. She was in an older London, a London deadened with snow, an icy London where horses made wheel furrows through white streets, a London where it was cold enough for rivers to freeze over and for girls to be drowned in ice holes.

She knew, too, that he had lied about this being a safe house. This was not a safe house, because she could always tell if stones held sadness or anguish or horror, and this was why she didn’t want to touch the gray walls or even the door handle several feet away.

She knew all this even without hearing the distant sound of a woman sobbing, which came from a lower floor, beyond the door.

This was no safe house. This was the House of the Lost.