Ironhand (17 page)

He was running so fast he didn’t see the homeless man in the doorway track him with raven-black eyes. And he was too intent on finding his way to Hyde Park corner to hear the tramp saying, “Boy maker running west on Euston Road.”

E
die stood quietly for a long time. After the distant fit of sobbing, the house was still, but not quite silent. Outside the window, the snow-deadened city continued to leak the sound of a distant barrel organ. Apart from that, the only noises she could hear came from within the house, and they were the sounds of the house itself: a door with hinges that needed oiling opened and closed somewhere below. There was a short sliding noise and then a sudden thud as if an unseen hand had opened, or perhaps shut, a heavy bolted lock. Floorboards creaked as something moved across them.

And then there was silence, a silence that Edie added to by not moving at all.

One reason she didn’t move was because she knew that when she did, the dusty floorboards beneath her feet would creak, and she had the distinct feeling that the silence she was listening to was
exactly
the kind of silence that was listening right back.

It was a silence that was patiently waiting for her to make the first sound.

The other reason she stayed still was that she was in the middle of the room, as far from the walls as she could get. A normal person wouldn’t have noticed it, but Edie was a glint, and being a glint, the walls growled at her with a kind of low-frequency hum, a horrid magnetic attraction enticing her to touch them and release the stored trauma from the brick and plaster. It was the same intensity of sadness she felt as she passed cemeteries and churchyards and old hospitals, somehow willing her to reach out and draw it from the stones.

She steadied her breathing and tried to keep her mind off the tug of the stored distress by calmly checking the room for anything that might help her. The insistent pull of the walls made her bunch her hands deep into her pockets, in case they wandered off on their own and touched something without the permission of her conscious mind.

There really was not much to see. There was the barred window, there were the two mirrors, and there was a thick layer of dust over everything. And that was it.

Having reviewed the contents of the room, and keeping her ears on alert for the slightest noise beyond the door, Edie turned her attention to the floor.

She realized that the sick tug of pent-up anguish that came at her from the walls also dragged at her from below, like a dark undertow. She was glad she was wearing shoes. She had never been in a place that held so much potential malice and sadness, so much that there was a foretaste of it in the air; she could tell it was bad in the same way that you can tell what certain foods will taste like just by the cooking smell. It crackled invisibly all around her, like static electricity.

She had never been in this house, but it felt like home.

It didn’t feel like home in a warm way, not like the few tattered happy fragments of home she remembered from the good parts of her childhood; nor did it feel like some idealized vision of home—a place of security where everything would always be all right, everything understood, everything forgiven.

It felt like the other one, the home she’d never been to, the one where secretly—ever since she’d killed her stepfather—she knew she belonged: the dark home where yesterday’s secrets were exposed so that today’s pain could be justified and tomorrow’s punishments planned.

A single tear makes little sound as it falls to the floor, but the sight of it splashing in the dust jerked Edie out of the paralysis she had fallen into, and she remembered to breathe, sucking in a deep and desperately needed lungful of air. She angrily wiped the back of her hand across her eyes, determined that the one treacherous tear would have no company.

Then she focused on the floor again: it was thick with dust but there were distinct footmarks, which she could see were hers and the bare feet marks of Little Tragedy. There were also paw marks that had nothing to do with either of them. They were like dog paws, but bigger than any Edie had seen; and then there was a swirling drag mark serpentining into the room from the door. It came about a third of the way inside and stopped, as if someone had started sweeping and then given up the idea when the thickness and the pervasiveness of the dust had dispirited them.

Edie was standing there, trying to piece together the evidence in front of her eyes, when she became aware of a tickle in her nose.

It wasn’t a bad thing in itself, but it was going to lead to a sneeze. A sneeze is also not a bad thing in itself. Edie had once spent a summer’s afternoon looking up into the sun because it made her sneeze, and sneezing, on that day, had made her feel good. On this night, sneezing was not going to make Edie feel good. It was going to make her feel very bad, because on this night, she knew she would be sneezing into a listening silence that was just waiting for her to break it.

On this night, Edie knew one sneeze could well be fatal.

Before she could think how to stifle it, it exploded. She grabbed her nose and clamped it shut and jammed George’s balled-up jacket over her face to muffle the sound—but the noise of the air convulsing its way out of her just redirected out the side of her mouth in a sharp detonation.

She stayed where she was, bent over her hands, ears straining for a reaction to the noise. For a moment she thought she’d gotten away with it—but then she heard floorboards creak. It was the unmistakable sound of someone coming up stairs. She could hear a dragging noise, too, a sort of rustling, and the counterpoint of smaller clicking footsteps.

There was an especially sharp crack from a floorboard that seemed to be the larger thing or person reaching the landing, and then the sounds moved closer to the door. Edie had time to see a golden strip of wavering light appear in the crack beneath it, as if the figure approaching were carrying some kind of lantern— and then the footsteps and the scuffling stopped suddenly.

Edie grimaced and very quietly slipped her arms into George’s coat again. Whatever was going to happen, she thought, another layer couldn’t do any harm, either offering protection or warmth.

Then she heard the sniffing.

Two dark shadows broke the golden strip under the door, and from them came hungry intakes of breath, as if whatever was outside were trying to inhale the inside of the room in big hungry nasal gulps of air.

Edie looked down and saw the warning stone blazing a shaft of light out of her pocket. She closed her hands around it, extracting some faint support from the familiar sea-rounded edges and accompanying heat.

The door opened.

A woman stood in the opening, a tall woman in an old-fashioned gray dress that covered her from her neck down to the floor and beyond, where her full skirts belled out and trailed around her. She wore a wide belt tight around her middle, and her hands were covered by thick protective gloves made from rough suede, which reached up to her elbows.

Edie couldn’t see her face, because the woman held a candle in front of it, and all she could make out was the impression of a high forehead and dark hair scraped back into a severe bun.

“What is your name?” the woman said in a disturbingly quiet voice.

“What’s yours?” said Edie, reflexively defiant.

There was a pause. Edie saw the woman cock her head as if adjusting to what she’d just heard. When she spoke again it was almost a whisper, as light and dark as a raven’s feather, but not so quiet that Edie couldn’t hear the rising note of surprise in her voice.

“You are a young girl?”

Edie looked down at herself. “Er, yeah . . . What are you? Blind?”

The candle lowered as the woman answered. “No. I’m not blind, child. I just choose not to see.”

It was the word “choose” that made what Edie saw so much more disturbing than it already was.

The woman’s face was gaunt and almost ageless in its severity, but the most striking thing was the eyes above her high cheekbones.

They were sewn shut.

Four workmanlike stitches closed each eyelid with thick black cobbler’s thread. The only thing that made the sight worse was the hint that the woman had done this to herself.

“Why would you do that?” said Edie, despite herself. “Why would you let someone do that?”

The woman sighed as if the answer to the question were so obvious that it was a waste of preciously hoarded energy.

“Eight short stitches? It’s nothing, child, not if you wish to stop seeing. . . .”

“But why?” Edie couldn’t stop herself asking in outrage.

“Come. You know why. You know what happens when we do what we do. You know willpower is not enough to keep our eyes closed. You know however hard we try, the eyes always open, and then they see what is stored in the stones. You know that the shards of the past stored in the stones are seldom happy and almost always terrible—”

The meaning of what the woman was saying hooked into Edie’s gut like a sucker punch.

“You said ‘us’. . . . You mean you’re a glint?”

“I was. And it is my lot to live in this house. Can you feel what is in this house?”

Edie nodded, her mouth too dry to answer. Then she realized that the woman couldn’t see her; but before she could reply, the woman was speaking again.

“Of course you can. You’d do the same to yourself, girl: close your eyes, wear thick gloves and sturdy boots to avoid any contact with the fabric of a building whose every touch invites an agony a hundred times worse than a mere needle prick. . . .”

Her foot kicked out from beneath her skirt and stamped sharply on the floor, making the dust jump. Her voice remained unnervingly quiet in comparison.

“Now. Enough talk. You must come with me.”

Edie had a very strong sense that she was going to be taken somewhere even worse than this. And though they hadn’t worked, she wanted to stay close to the mirrors and the door. They might open back into her normal world and time.

“Forget it,” Edie said. “No way.”

“You must do as I say, girl. You must not say no.”

“Watch me.”

There was a low growl. For a moment, Edie thought it had come from the blind woman. Then she realized it had come from behind her. It was the kind of growl that you feel through the soles of your feet. It was the kind of growl you ignore at your peril.

“I cannot. And I am not used to being disobeyed. . . .” said the Blind Woman in a voice as dark and delicate as beetles scuttling across a black silk shroud.

Edie knew that if she gave in to being scared, she’d go to pieces; and she knew that if she went to pieces, she was done for. So she set her chin and dug her heels in.

“Well, get used to it. I’m—”

Edie didn’t even get as far as “not” before the growls started again, and then the Blind Woman’s skirts billowed out on each side. Two brindled mastiff dogs the size of small ponies came into the room, heads low to the ground, ears flattened, teeth bared, hunched and ready to spring.

“You can come now, or you can beg to come later.”

The Blind Woman’s voice was pale with disinterest as the dogs prowled forward, their great heads six inches above the dusty floorboard, eyes rolled up and fixed on Edie. The spittle leaking out from their snarls left a trail in the dust as they moved across the floor.

Edie stood still until they were close enough on either side for her to feel hot breath on her hands. She clenched and pulled them higher in a subconscious but futile effort to keep them out of harm’s way.

“Look—” she said.

The dogs leaped at her, teeth clashing, loud, angry barks hitting her with the force of actual blows. Dog spittle ribboned across her eyes as her hands reflexively snapped up to protect her face from the sharp fangs clashing inches away.

Despite herself, her survival mechanism kicked in, and she was pushed back by the enraged barking and snapping teeth as the dogs herded her across the room. Her hand touched the wall, and there was a jolt as the wailing past flashed into her.

She went rigid with shock, and dust billowed out around her like a mini blast-wave from an unseen detonation. What she glinted in harsh jagged slices was:

The room in summer.

Sunlight shafting in through the windows, making diagonal beams of light in the dust.

A short-haired woman in a light blue sundress with a sprigged daisy pattern was crouched in the center of the room. She was staring around herself in bewilderment. Her feet looked defenseless in a pair of white flip-flops.

Time sliced, and the woman was suddenly shouting “No!” at the door, with such intensity that the tendons on her neck stood out like whipcords.

Another slice, and Edie saw the woman’s hands scrabbling something hanging on a chain around her neck, to protect it from someone standing in the door. She clutched it tightly, almost hiding the telltale light blazing out from its sea-rounded edges.

It was a brown piece of sea-glass: a heart stone.

Edie saw the short-haired woman go very still. She saw her clench her jaw—saw it in a way that she felt her own clenched jaw.

She saw two huge brindled shapes leap into the living frame, barking furiously, and she heard a scream—

Time sliced again, and on the floor where the woman had been was nothing except the sea-glass and a white flip-flop upside down in the dust.

Edie jerked her hand away from the wall, and the glinting stopped abruptly.

She saw the Blind Woman working her mouth as if choking down a rising wave of nausea. The dogs had taken a half step back. But only half.

“Whatever you saw, child,” whispered the Blind Woman. “Whatever you saw, it will be worse when it happens to you.”

The dogs snarled.

Edie thought of George. She thought of the Gunner. She saw the Gunner smile, and she saw George smile at her, too. She knew that giving in was betraying them as well as herself.

She felt the dogs’ breath on her hand. Hot and wet and meaty. She decided she wasn’t going to give in. She would live to fight another day.

“Fine,” Edie said. “Fine.”

She reached into her pocket and folded her hand around her heart stone before stepping carefully past the dogs toward the Blind Woman. The dogs moved with her, growling more quietly now, eyes still locked on her.