The Glass God (19 page)

“Possibly,” she said. “Maybe that’s all it is, just… another selfish act. Maybe you’re right. But I figure, in the grand scheme of things, even if that is so, even if the world is as messed up as you say it is… caring is still caring, right, so who gives a damn?” A brilliant grin suddenly spread across her face. “Jesus,” she exclaimed. “I should totally write this down and print it on a T-shirt. Rhys!”

“Yes, Ms Li?”

“Remind me, when all this is done – caring and giving a damn and all that – on a T-shirt!”

“Um… yes, Ms Li.”

8ft cowered beneath the full force of Sharon’s optimism, and stared in horror at her hand as she thrust it out for him to shake. “You clasp it in a symbol of friendship,” she explained. “Leaving aside that friendship is probably just another social construct invented to make life easier and that. But…⁠” – she held out her hand closer to him – “⁠… stop thinking so hard for just five minutes, and trust me?”

8ft looked from Sharon’s hand, to her eyes, and back again. Slowly, he closed his own fingers, torn up and metal-plated, over hers, and shook. Sharon’s grin, bordering on inane, relaxed. “There,” she breathed. “Could’ve gone worse, couldn’t it?”

Chapter 31

Out with the Old

It stands in the mud and watches.

The river washes up to it, breaks around its knees, its ankles, and, as it does, foam rises, great, grey bubbles bursting from the surface of the water, catching luminescent bubbles, like oil on a pond, before slipping away, still frothing, back to the river’s depths. The reeds sway in the breeze around it, and as the air carries the smell of it across the grasses, so they begin to turn brown, to shrink into themselves, dry, crack, wither, decay, wherever it is that the wind has blown.

And still it watches.

And it is angry.

Chapter 32

A Transport of Delight

There was a sign for the bus in the middle of an empty concrete road framed by empty grass banks. The wind blew and the grass stirred, and orange lights burnt in the streetlamps, and nothing moved. Sharon stood in the middle of the road itself, looked left, looked right, looked back again, and saw only more road, framed by mud. Rhys sat at the base of the bus sign – shelter implied a roof – and tried not to yawn.

Sharon prodded him with her foot. He jerked, eyes flying open wide. “Is it here yet?”

Sharon’s frown deepened. She stared down the empty road and said, “You know, when ‘Greater London’ started including parts of Essex, I really think the urban planners cocked up.”

Grasses swayed in the breeze, and the road was silent.

Getting to the Tribe, Rhys was beginning to think, wasn’t nearly as hard as getting back. At least with magical portals and mystic byways, you had a reasonably good chance that economics and time constraints confined the journey to just a few minutes of scrambling around through geographically unsound temporal mists. In the small hours of the morning, the air cold and damp, and the sun not yet even a glow on the eastern horizon, it was more of a challenge to get back using nothing more than the urban travel infrastructure.

“What the hell kind of a bus comes
here
anyway?” demanded Sharon. “What a stupid bloody place for a bus stop!”

What a stupid bloody place for a secret Tribe, thought Rhys. His eyelids were drifting shut and his mind was slipping into that surreal, disordered place where madness made sense and sleep was the only solution…

Seeing this, Sharon delivered a kick to his shin. “You’re still on the clock, you know! If I have to be awake at stupid a.m., then so do you!”

Rhys managed to swallow any response behind a great yawn.

“I hate transport zone six!” wailed Sharon, throwing her arms up in despair.

The reeds whistled in the flat fields of mud at her back, and for a moment Rhys, struggling to maintain some semblance of coherent thought, imagined he could smell…

He gagged, but no sooner had his body reacted than his mind dismissed the notion as absurd. Sharon glanced down at him as he tried to suck away the taste of the sudden stench that the breeze had wafted towards him. “You all right?” she asked. Then Sharon’s nose crinkled. “You smell that? Something…⁠”

She turned slowly. A figure stood, some hundred yards off, a low squat shape in the thick windswept blackness. She paused, and as she looked at it, her nose crinkled again and her face distorted at the smell of…

rotting flesh?

Rhys pulled himself onto his feet, and followed Sharon’s gaze.

The figure, shrouded in the night, stood between two pools of orange streetlight. A huddled creature in black, it stood in the middle of the road, staring, assuming it did have eyes to see, straight at them.

“From the Tribe?” asked Rhys, knowing it wasn’t so.

Sharon didn’t answer. She stepped out into the cracked, pot-holed centre of the street, looking fixedly at the figure. “Hi there!” she called out. “I’m Sharon – this is Rhys. Are you waiting for the bus?”

The figure didn’t move.

“I don’t think it is,” hissed Rhys.

“Well, you bloody say something then,” she retorted.

Rhys swallowed, and shuffled out into the middle of the road. “Um… hello. I’m a druid, see?”

He sensed the force of Sharon’s glare. “‘I’m a druid, see’? That’s rubbish!” she declared.

“At least it’s honest.”

“I didn’t lie! I just asked if he was interested in the bus!”

“Um… but it’s a lone figure in the middle of an empty road on a dark night during uncertain times,” he persisted. “And I think we should maybe try getting to the heart of the matter, see?”

For a second Sharon just seethed. “Fine!” she said, and stepped in front of Rhys, putting herself between him and the huddled figure. “Yo there!” she sang out. “Rhys here isn’t just a druid, he’s, like, almost the chosen one of his circle and you – you would not like to see him on antihistamines, so you just stop standing there freaking the crap out of us and get on with it, because it’s really late and there’s a busy day tomorrow and I can’t be having any of this spooky crap without my morning coffee!” So saying, she turned back to Rhys. “There? Heart of the matter enough for you?”

Wordlessly, Rhys pointed.

The man was gone.

Sharon said, “um…⁠”

The smell hit them again, with almost physical strength. Rhys made a choking sound, pulling his sleeve over his mouth, even as Sharon turned first white, then grey. It rose up from the mud around them, spun with the breeze over the reeds; and as the smell grew, so something else drifted up from the ground beneath their feet. It happened fast, in barely a few heartbeats: the mist swelled, a sludgy greyness that surged up around them, amplifying, liquefying the smell into puffy little breaths, crawling up the lampposts and smothering the bus shelter in its embrace. And there it was, the smell, undeniable, irrefutable – rotting flesh.

“Sharon?”

Rhys was already half lost from view, a colourless shape in the gloom. Holding her hand across her nose and mouth, Sharon reached out for him, felt nothing, saw him drift further into the dark. “Rhys? Rhys, keep talking!”

“Sharon?”

Something moved behind her; she turned, calling out again, and reached out a hand to feel…

Soft.

Warm.

Sticky.

Her fingers came away and thick red goo clung to them, dried, coagulated blood, flecked with ancient black clots. “Rhys!” She turned to run, but a hand came out of nowhere and caught her by the back of the neck, pulling her back. The hand was hot and damp; but thin, barely any flesh on it. An unnatural heat came off its fingers of loose skin and jagged bone; the smell was overwhelming. She glimpsed dangling grey skin hanging off in flags.

Then a burst of red-yellow light to one side was accompanied by a voice, shouting;

“Don’t you touch her!”

Rhys staggered out of the mist, with streaming reddened eyes, and a potion burning in one hand. His skin crackled with erratic energy, tarmac popped and gravel split beneath his feet, and the ground shimmered and shuddered with the force of his stride. He plummeted into the side of whatever held Sharon by the neck, hard enough to send both of them flying onto the grass verge. Sharon rolled to one side, crawled up groggily, and saw Rhys fall on top of the thing in the dark, his potion still blazing. Coils of wire were rising up and splitting the ground beneath him, and wrapping, ivy-like, around his and the fallen figure’s feet.

“Don’t… you… touch her!” he screamed, and slammed his fist into the unseen face of the black-clad figure.

A hand rose up from the creature on the ground, all yellow bone and discoloured, fleshless skin. It pushed, very gently, against Rhys’s chest. The druid flew backwards, wires snapping beneath him, potion tumbling from his hand, like he’d been struck by a lorry, and landed with a bone-sharp crack on the road, arms flopping, eyes going wide. He fell, and he lay, and he did not move.

The figure picked itself back up. And now Sharon could see its face. Ears, lips and nose had withered away to cavities in its sagging skin. His eyes were hollows of burst inky-red, the whites long since lost to blood, jaundice and time; and his great, oversized back was bent almost double over the curve of a rag-clad body, so he seemed small and short, though he might have been a giant, for all she could tell. He wore a coat of lacerated brown leather, rotted away to hanging strips that dangled off stick-arms and a spine-stretched back. His nails were great bark-like curves, forming thick loops of bone; his feet were bare, each metatarsal clearly visible as they moved beneath his almost translucent skin. His face turned slowly, barely lit by the flickering remains of Rhys’s potion, and as his gaze settled on Sharon there was

          taste of mud

               weight

                    heat

                         worms in skin

and she gasped for sudden breath, choking on ash and dust, scrambling back up the grassy bank as the creature took one step, then another, feet barely lifting off the ground, towards her.

“Whatever you want,” she stammered, “this is a seriously bad way of getting it.”

Another step, then another. The smell of rot tumbling off his body was almost overwhelming, but to puke was to divert attention from the thing as he staggered towards her, it was to look away from those curling nails and blood-filled eyes, and neither of these were things she could do. Rhys stirred on the road behind, tried to lift his head, and flopped back down.

“Now look,” she babbled, as the creature came another step nearer, then another; so close now, she could touch the hem of its tatty leather robe. “I’m guessing, based on circumstances only, that you’ve got some issues you need to work through, and I’m just telling you, that this is not the most productive way of doing it…⁠”

A hand reached down towards her and instinctively Sharon moved. She moved without moving, a slipping down, rather than a rolling out, a drop into the greyness of the spirit walk, into the place where all things were true and nothing was real; and for a second, as she looked up into the face of the monstrous man, she saw…

A mask. A leather mask, with a great pointed beak at one end, and two round hollows for eyes.

Then the hand came down towards her and, here, the flesh wasn’t hanging off, wasn’t dangling limp – here, the flesh was a living, writhing thing, coated over with a living, heaving mass of maggots and Sharon drew in a breath and, not quite knowing what she was doing, and having nowhere else to go, she pushed herself up and ran straight
through
the hand.

A moment.

A second, and it lasted a hundred years.

For a moment, maggots coated her skin.

For a century, she breathed dirt.

For an instant, rats chewed at the end of her toes.

For a millennium, fleas sucked on her hot blood.

Bare feet curled in dirt.

Toes pressed down deep and beneath them, dead flesh moved.

Just for a second.

Only forever.

Then she stumbled
through
the man in his rag coat, his body jerking hard as she passed out the other side, his fingers opening and snapping back. She stumbled onto the ground behind him, wiping not-there maggots off her skin, spitting not-there ash from out her mouth and, with the violence of her own revulsion, she stumbled back into the visible world, back into the mist and the smell of flesh. Realising this, she turned again and looked behind her; and there he still stood, turning in the faint glow-light to stare at her. It was perhaps too much to attribute any expression to his face, if it could be called a face at all; but if it wore any look, any glimmer of feeling, then that look was…

surprise.

For a moment, the two stayed there, frozen in place, while Rhys rolled over on the ground and tried to work out which way was up and which was down.

Then the rotting man in the rotten coat reached out, slowly, one curled bone-hand, and there was no threat in it, and perhaps an invitation.

Sharon stood up, a limb at a time, her body shaking with effort, revulsion, fear.

The hand gestured, once, calling closer.

Sharon shook her head. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “Not a bloody chance.” The figure hesitated. Then pointed at the ground, at his bare feet, then at Sharon’s own. “Um… this is gonna be a tricky kinda conversation, isn’t it?” she said.

The creature gestured in exasperation, and pointed again at her shoes.

“You got vocal chords left?” she asked. “Or how about charades?”

His head tilted to one side, hesitant, struggling to understand. Then it moved forward and back, chicken-like, a gesture which began with the chin and thrust outwards, almost clucking, and with it came a sound, a little puff on the air.

“Uh – uh – uh – uh…⁠”

Rhys was on his hands and knees, groggy and bewildered. Sharon glanced at him, saw no blood, stared back at the gasping creature. “What do you want?” she breathed, quiet in the dark.

“Uh – uh – uh – I – I – I –…⁠” The words came slow, little half-wheezes.