The Glass God (38 page)

“Hi!” she exclaimed. “Yeah, that’s right, I’m Sharon, this is Rhys… and it’s really good of you to, uh… see us, yeah?”

Barry shrugged, the effect rippling down his body in great scaly pulses. “No problem!” he exclaimed. “We’re always happy to help the local authorities. Now, which of our services can we tell you about?”

Sharon chose a chair which looked like it would survive being used, and eased herself into it; Rhys lurked in the doorway.

“I guess we’d like to hear about the services you offer for mystic dudes.”

“Mystic dudes – haven’t heard it put like that for a while.”

“I figured, no point dancing round the subject, right?”

“Absolutely! Well, as we’re talking ‘mystic dudes’, let me think… at the most basic range we do all the standard services; massage, aromatherapy, tanning and so forth. However, we pride ourselves on our customer service and do try to individually tailor each package to meet our clients’ needs. We have an effrit, for example, who only tans at three hundred and forty-four degrees Celsius: and every lunar month the acupuncturist does a session for werewolves. We do aromatherapy for vampires who are on the ‘low blood, low carbs’ course, hydrotherapy for naiads, hypnotherapy for medusas’ hair and, of course, ashtanga yoga on Tuesdays for genies – hatha on Thursdays. Our products are popular with the more… comfortable… members of society; but we have also received medical referrals. I remember one very pleasant young wizard with terrible allergies, who was sent to our masseuse to solve his sneezing problem, and a rather less agreeable gnome with just the most appalling…⁠”

“Excuse me?” Rhys’s voice held a note of keening need. “Allergies? Wizard? Masseuse?”

“Yes, of course. Is this… a problem?”

The druid’s mouth was hanging over. “Allergies?” he squeaked. “Wizard?
Masseuse?
” Salt water welled in his eyes, and his nose began to glow.

“Do you have a website with details of all this on?” asked Sharon, before Rhys could burst.

“Of course, though we do prefer direct client contact, to assess their needs.”

“But you’ve never treated scyllas…⁠?”

“No, I’m afraid not. Do you know some who might be interested?”

“No,” she murmured. “Not any more. What about this…?⁠” She pushed the card across the table, advertising discounted tanning for the sun-deprived connoisseur.

“Yes, this is our card,” said Barry. He passed it back across the table towards Sharon. “Is there… has something happened? Is there a problem?” His tail quivered with the nervousness his face would not show.

“No, no, not at all,” she replied. “Well, actually, yeah. See, I’m kinda working for the Midnight Mayor…⁠” Barry’s tail curled sharply in on itself, an almost audible drawing in of breath. “Well, I guess he is my boss, but I’m also, like, deputy Midnight Mayor, you know, which isn’t to say there’s, like, a problem, because I totally approve of what you guys have got going here, but just to say… there’s kinda a few dead people, and, like, some missing people, and this thing involving glass and shoes and all of that, and some of the dead people… well, they had your card and we figured we should be thorough, you know, so I’m like… this ringing any bells for you?”

He spoke very slowly, eyes wide, fingers tight; and it occurred to Sharon that he might actually be scared of her. “No,” he murmured. “Not at all. Obviously we’ll be happy to help the authorities however we can. Client privacy is hugely important but then… did you say you’re his deputy?”

“Yeah.”

“Of course,” he blurted. “Of course. Anything you need, we’ll happily oblige.”

Sharon could almost feel Rhys’s astonishment at her back, matching her own incredulity. “Uh… seriously?”

“Anything! Anything at all!”

“That’s, uh… that’s great. Well, I guess the first thing to ask is, have you seen a great big glowing glass elemental that spits shards of broken glass?” Barry’s silence was eloquent. “Okay, how about a raging undead god from the plague pits?”

“I’m really sorry, I can’t help you there.”

“What about a rusted blade? Anyone come in here lately waving one of those about? Or a pair of shoes tied together at the laces?”

It was only Barry’s deep confusion, she felt, which was saving her the trouble of his disbelief. “No…⁠”

“Nothing… glowy, zappy, zippy or zoomy of any suspicious nature at all?”

He thought it through. “No, I’m so terribly sorry.”

Sharon deflated. “Ah well. Guess we had to try.”

“I’m so sorry I couldn’t be of assistance.”

“No, no worries. I mean, it was kinda a long shot. Thanks anyway.” She stood up, making to go. “Love this place, by the way; totally recommending it to all my friends.”

“Thank you!” As she passed through the door, Barry sat up a little straighter, tail swishing to one side, nearly knocking a cup of herbal tea into the bin. “Excuse me? Ms Li?”

“Yessss…⁠?”

“Thinking about it, one of our clients did start screaming uncontrollably last week during her facial.”

Sharon paused, one hand on the door handle. “Okay,” she said. “Is that… common?”

“Well, Mrs Greyfoot does tend to see things from the nether regions, but sometimes she takes her medicine, sometimes she doesn’t…⁠”

“So… she screams a bit anyway, I mean?”

“Yes, but this time she screamed
at
a client, which isn’t very common and was highly embarrassing for the establishment.”

Sharon hesitated, eyes narrowing as she turned back in the doorway. “And what did she say?”

“She said, ‘I will have your shoes’. Which I did think rather odd at the time, as Zhanyi wasn’t wearing any shoes.”

Sharon’s smile was a quivering arrow notched to the bow. “I think Mrs Greyfoot may be a smarter lady than you know.”

Chapter 67

The Truth Hurts

Her name was Zhanyi.

She’d been a client, according to Barry’s logs, for over four years; but recently she’d stepped up her attendance at the spa and was, the owner concluded, looking much better and happier for the same.

Then a few weeks ago, Mrs Greyfoot, who saw things that others didn’t want to see, had spotted Zhanyi on her way to the tanning booth, and screamed, and screamed, and screamed. And in between the screaming, one of the things she’d screamed was, ‘I will have your shoes’, which everyone agreed was a sure sign that Mrs Greyfoot needed more of her medication. And Zhanyi was…

“⁠… a really sweet young lady, really lovely, it’s such a shame about her condition.”

“Which is?”

“The poor thing, such a pity. By day, I swear, never anyone nicer.”

“And by night…⁠?”

Barry looked pained. “It’s not so much a question of the solar cycle,” he explained, “as the intensity of illumination. Obviously in winter it’s much harder for her, poor dear. Much harder indeed.”

“So,” Sharon pushed out the words one at a time. “What happens to her when it gets dark?”

Barry told them.

Sharon’s smile didn’t falter. “Yeah,” she said. “I can see how that might be a bit of a bitch.”

He gave them her address anyway, just in case.

It was late afternoon by the time Sharon and Rhys got off the Underground in Hammersmith, to the sound of “Ms Li?”

“Yeah?”

“You know how we’re keeping travel receipts, see, for the Aldermen?”

“Yesssss…⁠”

“What if you’re on pay-as-you-go auto top-up?”

There was silence in reply to this. Amid the panoply of things going wrong with life, magic and her new job, Sharon hadn’t considered the question of reimbursement for expenses incurred.

“Maybe… we can send a memo?”

“It’s not a problem, though,” insisted the druid; “I don’t want to cause a fuss!”

Sharon smiled feebly, and strode out into the grey afternoon light.

Hammersmith was not her favourite part of town. It was a great ugly junction where great ugly roads collided: a one-way nightmare of horns, traffic lights, pressed-in pedestrians on narrow pavements, and giant shopping mall depths where schoolchildren in pink and grey tried to look tougher than their peers even while buying latte frappuccino and a cinnamon bun. The place was at once rebuilt and run-down, with so many conflicting personalities that it possessed no character at all. Sharon sniffed, and thought she detected just the tiniest scent of rotting flesh. A shiver ran through her.

Two days. Then I’ll have your shoes.

They headed south, into the no-man’s-land of samey terraced streets where buses tended not to run, and the corner shop was a rare beacon of enlightenment.

They walked on. Occasionally Rhys sneezed. As they slowed down in front of a perfectly ordinary door on a perfectly ordinary street, Rhys declared, “W-well, this is for the good of the city…⁠” and made no move to knock on the door.

Sharon sighed, marched up the crazy-paving path that ran all of three foot past the dustbins and hammered on the front door, with its black iron knocker. The sound seemed dull, hollow, loud, in the quiet street. She glanced at the neighbouring scene: a ground-floor bay window populated with cut-out pictures drawn by infant children whose parents just knew that their offspring was the next Picasso; family cars wedged in nose-to-tail; and rubbish bins carefully marked out for trash, paper, card, glass and aluminium by owners who loved the environment and feared the council. As she looked around, it occurred to her that the door where they were standing was probably the only one in Fulham which had bolts on the outside.

A chain moved somewhere inside. The door opened an inch and an eye peeked out. A timid voice whispered, “Hello?”

It was as soft as rabbit fur, hushed as a vicar at a funeral. Somehow its incredible meekness propelled Sharon to enthusiastic confidence. “Hi there!” she sang out, then realised the eye had recoiled from the door in dismay. “I’m Sharon, this here is Rhys…⁠”

“Hello.”

“⁠… we’re here to save the city, rescue the Midnight Mayor, appease the ancient gods, prevent plague spreading through the streets and get a decent night’s sleep at some point preferably without having clocked up too much overtime. Can we come in?”

At length, “I don’t think you should.”

Sharon found her confidence dented. “But… fate of the city?” she suggested. “The walking dead? Or actually,
not
the walking dead, since we want to avoid that, don’t we, Rhys?”

“Oh yes, Ms Li.”

“⁠… and
not
the plague on the streets, which is all kinda related, because we’re anti-plague too… So really, with that kinda brief, I don’t see what the problem is.”

The eye cringed. It wasn’t easy for a single sensory organ to express horror, dismay, distress and terror all at once, and through a gap in the door, but this eye managed it. Sharon tried beaming. This seemed to make it worse. She switched to a more diffident smile, one she’d always thought was a winner, expressing in every quiver the hope that things will be all right really and, if they aren’t, that nobody’s going to be blamed.

“Um… excuse me?” Rhys shuffled forward. “You’re not… part of an evil conspiracy, are you?” he asked tentatively; and this time the blinking of the eye was accompanied by an intake of breath. “Only, I was thinking that after all the victims and distressed friends we’ve met, maybe we were going to encounter someone actually malign? Only that would explain, I think, why you’re being very reluctant to open the door. Only it’s okay!” he added. “Because even if you are part of an evil conspiracy, we’re mostly harmless, aren’t we?”

“Oh, yes,” replied Sharon. “Mostly.”

“Though we do have frightening friends.”

“Do we? Yes, I guess we do. And I’m the deputy Midnight Mayor, which from what I can tell doesn’t mean shit in terms of actual mega-firepower; but did I tell you, Rhys, I met a dragon?”

“No!”

“Yeah, totally! I was kinda busy at the time…⁠”

“When did this happen?”

“Oh, when I was luring the blue electric angels to sleep. I had to go into the dream walk, yeah, and take them with me which was, can I add, bloody hard work, not that I’m asking for sympathy here, it’s just that Sammy doesn’t give me any credit when I do these sorta things…⁠”

“Oh no, Ms Li, I completely understand…⁠”

“⁠… so there I was, in the dream walk, and the blue electric angels were sleeping and I looked at my hand and I do think the Midnight Mayor left some kinda mark on me, even if it’s nothing actually useful in day-to-day evil-battling, because when I looked up there was a dragon. And it was the city. And it’s insane. But in kinda a groovy way. So, yeah.” She paused, head on one side, struggling to recollect through the fogs of exhaustion, sleep deprivation, caffeine-saturation and adrenalin. “That was my big moment.”

So saying, she turned back towards the door.

The door was closed, and the eye had fled.

“Oh bollocks,” she sighed. “I thought we were being so friendly.”

Chapter 68

Bathe in the Light of Revelation

There was a moment.

The world blinked.

When it opened its eyes again, Sharon and Rhys were standing inside the locked door, where, in fact, they’d been all along because, really, it was that or the universe had a lot of explaining to do.

The corridor they stood in was painted white.

White, glossy walls, white glossy floor. Lights lined the ceiling, downlit the walls, glowed upwards from the floor like emergency strips in an aeroplane. White stairs led upwards to the open door of a large white bathroom; a white living room with white padded walls had a white metal grille pulled shut across the windows, the gaps wide enough to let in streams of light. There were no curtains, but more lights burnt, uncomfortably bright, in the ceiling, the wall, the floor, anywhere electricity could be coaxed to reach. Rhys wandered into a white kitchen, where padlocks had been fastened across the drawers and more white grilles were stretched across the windows. He tried the back door to the garden; it was bolted, inside and out.

“Um…⁠?” he said.

Sharon shrugged, and pointed towards the staircase. They climbed upwards, past the white bathroom with its white bath, toilet and tiles; past the view into a white bedroom with a lock on the door and grille across the window, and a white desk on which were laid out a soft white hairbrush, a box of plain white tissues and a book. Sharon glanced down at the book, and froze.