The Glass God (14 page)

Rhys looked again, his eye drifting from one photo to the next. It wasn’t that he couldn’t see the pattern, it was simply…

“Why shoes?” he asked.

“How the hell should I know?”

“But… it must mean something…⁠”

“Of course it means something! Midnight Mayor vanishes, Midnight Mayor has map, map has dots, dots indicate a place where some tosser has thrown shoes over something – it’s so connected it’s like mafia fashion week!” She paused to draw in air, before concluding, “But – and I say this strictly in a humble-but-hopeful way – bugger me if I know
why
.”

“That,” said a voice behind them, “is cos you two are thick as two short planks – which makes you actually thick as one short plank each – and you don’t know shit about crap.”

Rhys felt an itch start at the back of his throat and, yes, if he inhaled – very slowly – through his nose, there it was, the unmistakable, unforgettable smell that could only be that of one unwashed goblin shaman, shimmering into existence out of the empty air. He turned, and Sammy the Elbow was right there, grinning up into the druid’s face with all three of his great yellow teeth.

“Oi oi,” said the goblin. “Someone said summat about wantin’ to talk to the Tribe?”

Chapter 21

In My Reflection, I Find Myself

Midnight in the City.

It was called “the City” to distinguish it from merely The Rest of London. In “the City” men who worked in that impenetrable industry known only as “Finance” discussed matters of great merit in a language composed almost entirely of acronyms and capital letters, with surprisingly few verbs or adjectives. By day, the streets were a sluggish river of stop-start traffic and broken traffic lights, their congestion worsened by the local council’s perpetual-seeming quest to discover oil beneath its streets; by night, they were empty, silent, apart from the occasional delivery van offloading its daily quota of silk suits and stuffed olives. The night buses, what few there were, took every stretch of open road as a challenge to the laws of inertia. The Underground was closed, its shutters pulled across the entrances down to the intestinal maze of Bank station. Streetlight fell, pink-orange, on the statues of proud colonial generals riding proud English steeds, swords raised aloft as if to declare that what we have won can never be lost; CCTV cameras nestled beneath the great stone walls of the Bank of England.

A street cleaner trudged down King William Street, two buckets rattling on his cart, a plastic claw in one hand ready to grasp at floating litter. Framed in a square of glowing glass, a security guard slumbered, cap pulled low, while on Gracechurch Street three voices could be heard, rising through the night…

“Are you sure…?⁠”

“Yes.”

“But do you really…?”

“Yes!”

“I don’t want to be difficult, but are they…?⁠”

“
Yes!
”

Look closely, and two figures could be seen, or perhaps… two figures, and the shadow of a third, much smaller, but carrying about it a smell which cut through all senses like capuchin chilli.

One said, “Ms Li, the Tribe are really rather antisocial, and I understand how we might want to… but is it such a good idea to…⁠?”

One said, and it seemed that this voice came almost entirely from the empty air, “Shut it, runny-nose!”

One, the girl dressed in orange, with blue in her hair, said, “Rhys, I understand that the Tribe are perhaps not the most friendly of dudes. But I really think if we’re polite and sympathetic, then they’ll see where we’re coming from and maybe we can get something positive from this experience.”

Rhys managed to suppress a groan.

They walked on through the night.

Sammy said, “Finding the Tribe ain’t just about knowin’ where to look. They do a lot of hiding, some of it in plain sight, some of it deeper. Gettin’ to ’em ain’t just about geography. Some say you can ask Fat Rat, what lives down in the sewers, and if you give ’im an offering, he’ll give you a ride. But I’ve had this thing with Fat Rat ever since the business with the chimera infestation and the toast rack. So I figured you’d be wanting to try something smarter.”

“You’re not coming with us?” asked Sharon.

Sammy shifted uneasily. “It’s like I said,” he muttered. “I’ve got… history… with the Tribe. I can show you the way, but you’re gonna have to do the talkin’ by yourselves.”

“Okay,” Sharon groaned. “Let’s wander that misty path, shall we?”

They walked on, beneath the wrought-iron roof and low-hanging lights of Spitalfields market, towards the great, dark-glass base of the Gherkin, whose true name had been lost even before it was built. Lights still burnt high up, and bright fluorescence shone in the reception areas, behind the white columns that curved down like twists of DNA. With the streetlight at their backs, Sharon and Rhys could see their own reflections in the building’s glass walls: pasty, faded figures against the shining interior, while Sammy flickered in and out of vision as he drifted from the shaman’s unseen walk into reality and back again.

“So what do we do once we’re inside?” asked Sharon, as they circled the base of the Gherkin.

“Follow the path, like the sages say, duh!” Whatever Sammy’s strengths as a teacher, people skills were not one of them. Rhys’s eyes flickered towards Sharon; a scowl twisted in the corner of her mouth. “And remember,” Sammy went on cheerfully, voice fading as he did, “just cos they’ve got principles, don’t mean they’ve got brains!”

And the goblin was gone.

Sharon’s scowl deepened. “Sammy,” she grumbled, “has gotta work harder at his attitude.”

Rhys said nothing. He found it hard to meet the gaze of his own reflection in the window, and every time he did, he flinched away, not sure if he could take the guilt implicit in his own stare. Sharon, on the other hand, was stopping at almost every other pane of glass, leaning in and out to consider her warping double, before declaring, “No! No good!” They kept on marching round, Sharon grabbing Rhys by the sleeve whenever he slowed down, with a cry of, “Come on! Work work work!”

And “No good, no good!” she sighed, readying for another circuit round the Gherkin’s base. As they strode past reception, Rhys saw a security guard by the door, examining them from inside his pool of light, radio in hand, face wrinkled with confusion. He tried a wan smile at the guard, and hoped his middle-class demeanour and possibly his ginger hair would convince the powers that be to disregard him as a criminal threat.

When Sharon stopped, it was so suddenly that Rhys almost walked into her. She swayed this way and that, examining her own reflection in the glass, before exclaiming, “Ah ha! This’d be it!”

Rhys followed her gaze, and saw…

… not himself. Certainly it was him, in that the colour of his skin, hair and clothes suggested the same; but somehow, on that curved surface, every aspect of his appearance had been warped. His hair was a swaying burst of colour, his head was three times too big and grotesquely deformed, while his body was withered down to almost nothing: a stick, from which obscene, twisted limbs dangled like tentacles off a dead octopus. Next to him, Sharon was an elongated stretch of colour: a great orange belly swollen above two purple boots which seemed to have been elasticated round the edge of the glass. Her head was a sheet of black falling hair around a tiny slit of a face, as if she’d grown ashamed of her features and tried to hide them from sight. As she leant into the glass, her face swelled up to fill it almost to bursting, two huge, popping white eyes, two black nostrils and a tiny pinpoint mouth which huffed cold breath onto the glass. The condensation from her lips settled in a thin, grey cloud, lingered for a second, then dissolved, sinking, it seemed to Rhys’s eye,
into
the glass itself, like moisture into a sponge.

Sharon stood back in triumph. Before he could protest or waver, she grabbed him by the hand, exclaimed, “Positive attitude, Rhys!” and marched him, face-first, into the wall of the Gherkin.

A moment of uncertainty.

It was not, he realised, the cold, grey twist he sometimes felt when Sharon pulled him after her into the spirit walk, but a damper, harder pressure against the skin, like walking face-first through thick wet laundry left out in the rain. His eyes closed instinctively, there was a sound in his ear, like the faintest tinkling of water on glass, and then he stepped forward and found that there was nothing to step onto. Terror gripped him, and as he overbalanced and began to topple, his eyes snapped open and he looked down, and down, and down a little bit further, into a black pit with a tiny silver bottom, before a hand closed around his collar and yanked him back against a cold, black wall. Gasping down lungfuls of freezing air, he turned to see Sharon, her hand still locked on the back of his shirt, peering at the drop into which he’d nearly plummeted. As he looked around he saw, by the thin light crawling in through cracks above, that they were on a great circular staircase, which led to the unknown glow far beneath. The steps were concrete, damp, slippy and steep; the walls were black glass, with the same helix curves as the Gherkin exterior. Moisture clung to the glass; and if he strained, he could hear, very faintly, the sound of running water far below.

“Hey,” said Sharon, forcing a cheerful lilt into her voice, “Sammy did say follow the path, to get to the Tribe.”

Rhys looked back and was bleakly unimpressed to see that there was no doorway, no crack, no great gap in the wall through which they’d stepped, but just more black glass, solid and impenetrable, giving no clue as to the world from which they’d come. He nodded, unfolding a tissue from a fresh pack, ready to deploy. “Yes, Ms Li,” he intoned, managing to keep the despair from his voice. “I suppose he did.”

Her smile was a little too bright, too white and too cheerful in the gloom, but Rhys managed to swallow his sneeze as they began to descend.

Chapter 22

Be Careful Where You Walk

Her name is…

Her name
is…

… it’s not important right now, what matters is…

… what matters…

… the shoes.

She examines them.

They are in her hands.

Not on her feet.

In her hands.

They are yellow, tough, hard leather, lightly embossed with a pinpoint pattern that runs round the edges of every join.

There is something she has to do to them.

Something important.

Something essential.

Remember…

… it is…

Oh yes.

Here we go.

She ties the laces together.

Looks up for a sign, an object, a dangling pipe.

There – a cable stretches across the street, which sometimes carries power for Christmas lights or festival banners. She takes one shoe in her hand, the other hanging down by the laces, and swings it round and round, building up momentum with each turn of her arm until finally – lift!

The shoes fly through the air.

The laces catch around the waiting wire.

The shoes tumble, one over the other, tightening the knot.

They come, at last, to rest, hanging down evenly, side by side, overhead.

And she, whoever she was, not that it really mattered, is gone.

Only this time, for the first time since it all began, he watches.

And it feels fantastic.

And he wants more.

Chapter 23

The Getting There Matters

The staircase went down until Sharon’s breath steamed in icy puffs.

Then it went further.

An Underground train whooshed through the night, and its whoosh was overhead, sending vibrations through the glass. Goosebumps stood out on Rhys’s arms and back; his teeth knocked audibly in the gloom. The source of light was thin, far off, but still somehow illuminated a place where the staircase ran out, above a rusty iron ladder that descended the last few feet down into a tunnel of fast-flowing, shallow water. Sharon sniffed the air, then said, “Well, it doesn’t
smell
like a sewer.”

She slipped onto the edge of the stair, then gingerly levered herself onto the ladder. The metal sang beneath her at a high-pitched note, a thrum passing upwards that echoed off the glass walls, and seemed to send shivers all the way up the stair to the unseen entrance through which they’d come, far away. With each step she took down the ladder, a new note sounded, the echoes melding back to create a harmonic dirge of sound, which sang on even after she’d jumped into the cold running waters below. Rhys peered down as Sharon turned this way and that, assessing the chilly tunnel where she stood, the water running round her ankles. At length she looked up at Rhys. “You didn’t bring any dry socks, did you?”

“No, Ms Li… Sorry.”

A profound sigh from below. “Magic
sucks
.”

With a great sneeze, which resounded up through the dark to join the other echoes, Rhys crawled out over the ladder and down, splashing into the water below with a cry of, “Ow! Cold!”

“Aren’t druids supposed to be at one with nature?”

“Um… yes?”

“I only query that, because ‘ow, cold’ doesn’t seem a very druidic utterance. Although––,” a thought struck Sharon, “I’ve been reading lotsa books about management and that, and nowhere did anyone say anything about carrying spare socks.” Her gaze drifted forlornly down to her submerged boots beneath the running water. “I guess we’re a bit beyond traditional social roles.”

This sounded like an escape from blame, so Rhys nodded fervently.

The light was running out rapidly now they were in the tunnel. “Do druids do illumination?” asked Sharon.

Rhys fumbled in his jacket pockets. “Um… I think I may have a potion for that…⁠” Little plastic pots bumped against each other, their labels Sellotaped with neurotic precision. He pulled each out in turn, squinting in the dark to read his own words, until finally he gave a cry of triumph. “Try this, Ms Li!”

Sharon took the bottle, and peered at its label. “Baby Shampoo – Travel Size?”

“Oh, no, that’s just what the bottle used to hold,” he exclaimed. “I keep all the bottles, though, because they’re useful now you can’t take liquids through customs at the airport, and because it’s difficult finding good containers for your potions and powders and Tupperware is expensive so…⁠” He became aware that Sharon was staring at him, and his babble dissolved into the tumble of the water. “I’m s-sure this one is safe,” he said. “I even preheated my ingredients.”