The Glass God (20 page)

“Yes?”

“I – I – I –…⁠?” The creature’s fingers twisted at its side, and with a sudden heave it threw up its arms, releasing a great stench and sending the mist swirling around it. “I – I – I – ” The reeds at its back began to wither and crack, turning brown, then black, curling down to burnt ashes in an expanding circle around him. The tarmac beneath his feet split, jagged fault lines rushing outwards, dust billowing up from the surface of the road. Mud bubbled and foamed, great bursts of gas popping from the still earth, and Sharon could feel it now, a dryness on her skin, a sucking out and a pulling in, a suffocation on the air, and she tried not to breathe, tried not to run as the creature raised its hands to the sky and shrieked,

“I – I – I – want – want – want what I – I – am owed!”

The sound was a wheeze, a bare gasp, but it tore the mist around it and rolled down the empty street.

Faded slowly away.

The creature raised its right hand, palm-out, towards her. The lines in its flesh were drooping sags of skin, holes peeking through to suggest darkness and rotten muscle below. “You – you – you – you – give – it – it back.”

“Give what back?” breathed Sharon. “What was taken?”

The creature’s face twisted as it tried to find the sound, then, with a great hiss of frustration, it pointed again towards Sharon’s feet. “Give – it – back!”

She stared down at her feet, then up again at the not-man, who again raised the palm of his hand. Sharon looked at her own hand, saw nothing amiss except perhaps a bit too much dirt and…

No.

Looked again.

A little bit closer.

Looked with the eyes of a shaman, and there it was, a distortion to the mist, like a knife cutting through silk, a tiny after-image which clung to the surface of her skin and moved, a little out of time, with her hand, when it moved. An indelible, impossible, invisible set of crosses, one smaller than the other, set in its neighbour’s top left corner: the mark of the Midnight Mayor.

“Oh, shite,” she whispered. Her eyes flashed up again to the creature. “Look,” she babbled, “I think I gotta warn you, I’m only a shaman. I mean, Swift made me deputy Midnight Mayor and that, but it’s not like I’ve got any power, it’s not like I’m up for the whole… you know, bang, boom, blast kinda stuff. I just run a support group! Counselling within the community. I can’t be dealing with missing things and owed things and all that crap. You want the… the…⁠” Her voice trailed off. “Okay,” she said. “So you probably
do
want the real Midnight Mayor, but he’s kinda… so I can see why you might… but, really, I don’t think you’re reasoning this one through properly! It’ll all go crappy with me in charge! I mean, nine times out of ten I’ve no idea what I’m saying and I’m only ever nice to people because I don’t have the charisma or the knowledge or any of that to get away with witty put-downs, so really, honestly, this seems like a terrible mistake!”

The creature pointed again at her feet, then back at her hand. “Give me – me – me – what I – I – I am owed.”

“Okay, okay…⁠” Sharon tried a deep breath, then regretted it, coughing on the foul air. “Any clues as to what that might be?”

“Give me!” he hissed, and before Sharon could start forward, or scamper back, he turned in a sweep of ragged robe and flapping skin, and marched away, back down the bare and empty road.

“Hey, wait, that’s so unhelpful it’s like, I mean, I don’t even know what it’s like, it’s like so…⁠” The mist spun around him, eating the figure up. “Hey! You can’t get all doomy on me and then not contribute to the overall affair!” she called out, as the darkness swallowed the creature up. “That’s just bad working practice!”

Silence from the fog.

Sharon stood there, staring up the road after him.

There was a flash of light at her back, white and sharp. She turned and saw a pair of bright white spots moving through the gloom. She looked back; there was no sign of the creature. The mist was already rising, drifting up into the air as if it had decided it was interested in being a cloud after all. Rhys was staggering to his feet, running his hands over his head, his neck, his chest, feeling for disaster.

A crunch of gears changing in the dark, the rattle of an undermaintained diesel engine trying to shake itself loose.

“Ms Li?” called the druid, leaning against the bus post for support. “Did he…⁠?”

Sharon stood in the middle of the road, hands clutching her elbows, like one trying to fight off a deep, damp coldness. “Damn,” she muttered. “We are in so much shite.”

A parp of horn, a glow of fluorescent light.

She turned, and the bus, a lonely single-decker, slid to a halt by the bus post, its doors slamming open with the thump of rubber on Perspex. At his wide black wheel the driver motioned, urging them on board.

“Come on Rhys,” said Sharon. “Let’s go home.”

Chapter 33

Blue Electric Angels

     We beeee

          we beeeee!

               weeee BEEEEE

immortal eternal brilliant bright beautiful fire light magic dancing death burning sky falling burning falling voice screaming scream dance sing sing sing songs of

trapped

weeeee beeeeee…

     flesh

          flesh wither

               flesh die

help us

     we beeeeeeeeeeeee

free?

Chapter 34

Clean in Word and Deed

Trish said, “Oh, my God, Sharon? What the fuck is that smell?”

Sharon looked down at herself, at her mud-stained, sewer-splattered trousers and boots, at her scorched top and trousers, black-lined fingernails and dirt-encrusted hair. Then she looked up at Trish. At eight in the morning, most of Sharon’s trip back from the shores of the Thames Estuary had consisted of waiting for the trains to start, and, by the time she’d crossed London Bridge, the morning sun had risen. From a fleck of gold in the east, it had become a burning white brightness that filled the dawn sky with so much light, it became impossible to see where sun ended and light began. She’d walked through the front door of her flat, bleary, forgetting to open it as she did so, just in time for Trish – the loud one – to come downstairs in search of breakfast. And now she stood in the hall, muddy, grubby, tired and greasy, staring into the perfectly polished face of her flatmate, and found that she had nothing whatsoever to say.

“There was a thing,” she confessed. Then, thinking this might not be enough, she added, “I’m not sure if I’m ready to talk about it yet.”

This last sentence, was, objectively speaking, an absolute lie, as she was more than ready to find a nice, sympathetic ear, not necessarily human, and preferably a pair of lungs geared up for traditional feedback sounds such as “um” and “ah” and maybe even an “oh really”, at which she could scream the horrors of her day. However, Trish was clearly not about to provide either source of comfort, and so there she was, falling back on the default position of, “I’m not ready”. It wasn’t a rejection, a denial or a rebuff, but, rather, in those few magic words, Sharon informed her flatmate, woman to woman, that behind such a simple sentiment lay a world of emotional pain, best not explored.

Trish hovered, torn between the desire for breakfast and her duty as a flatmate to explore the unexplorable. Breakfast won out. “Okay, babes,” she said, “but you seriously gotta have a bath and those clothes –
write off
.”

Sharon smiled wanly. “Thanks, Trish.” She started upstairs.

“And, hey – no offence, yeah, but will you clean the bath after?”

Sharon had a bath.

Amid the smells of lavender and lemon, she nearly fell asleep.

Her chin sunk beneath the steaming water and foam went up her nose. This was enough to wake her with a start. She sluiced herself off with cold water and, wrapped in towels and with the heater on full blast, she cleaned out the bath. She didn’t feel like the bath
needed
the cleaning, but then she’d become used to the smell of soot and sewage, so who was she to judge?

Afterwards, with a feeling of odd sadness and strange inadequacy, she binned her slime-stained clothes, then took the rubbish to the communal skip outside.

At 9.15, as the door slammed behind the departing Trish, Sharon Li curled up in her bed. Her eyes drifted shut, her mind passing straight through restless fatigue and half dreaming, plummeting for the deepest, darkest depths of sleep, and…

Her phone rang.

Groaning, she fumbled out of bed towards her mobile and, with her eyes still not open, she flipped it on. “Yeah?” she rasped, testing the sound to make sure it was still English.

“Hello? Hello, Ms Li? Ms Li?”

Sharon rolled over onto her back. Her limbs flopped heavily around her. “Hi, Miles,” she groaned. “What time is it?”

“About a quarter past nine, Ms Li. I’m terribly sorry – you aren’t busy, are you?”

“Aren’t I? I guess I’m not.”

“I’m so sorry it’s taken me this long to get back to you…⁠”

“Take your time,” she sighed, pressing her free hand in a fist against her forehead. “Totally okay.”

“But I think I may have some information on the body dumped in the river…⁠” Sharon opened her eyes. In the few minutes since they’d drifted inexorably shut, the world seemed to have become unbearably bright.

“The river police picked up a body last night, and took it to the morgue. It was rather badly damaged, but they think…⁠”

“Don’t tell me,” sighed Sharon. “It’s a woman.”

“Ms Li!” exclaimed Miles, not missing a beat. “I can see that you’re already on top of this!”

“Not really. Just a hunch. You seen… you know… the body?”

“I was going to head over there now, and wondered if you would like to…⁠?”

Miles let the words fade tactfully away. “Gimme the address,” she muttered, rolling out of bed and landing bum-first on the floor. “This is me, getting totally on it.”

Her mud-splattered shoes were too sodden to be worn in polite society, let alone dead polite society. She crawled under her bed and fumbled around between cardboard boxes and unmentionable pieces of mail strategically ignored, until she found her emergency backup shoes. They, like all the best things in life, were also pale purple, but adorned with white swirls and faint traces of blue flowers along the canvas, which laced up around her ankles to leave just enough lace dangling down at the end of the bow to present a subtle but potent trip hazard. As she pulled the left shoe out from under her bed, her hand brushed something metal and rusted and there it was the

can’t breathe can’t breathe can’t breathe can’t

          how dare they how dare how dare

               GIVE ME WHAT I’M

She snatched her hand away from the end of the umbrella, where she’d stowed it, what felt like a week ago, before the images could overwhelm her. Then, very gingerly, she reached back under, gripping it by the wooden handle instead, and pulled it out. Blue, oversized, missing its end, the mega-mystic umbrella was still as infuriatingly mundane-looking as ever. She turned it over a few times in her hands, but each time the rusted end was visible, where a spike should have been, she somehow couldn’t bring herself to look too closely, let alone touch it. The idea of carrying it around all day was faintly appalling, but then…

How much worse could things get?

Her green canvas bag still whiffed of sewer. She sprayed it with lemon-scented air freshener before putting it on her back; and, this time, she remembered to take the chain off the door on her way out of the house.

Chapter 35

The Dead Have No Fear

They met at St Thomas’s Hospital.

As medical institutions went, St Thomas’s – Tommy’s to its staff – was more of a city state than a place for sickness and disease. With its view across the river to the Houses of Parliament, it towered over the waterside like a great beached whale, occasionally hanging banners out from its topmost windows to offer advice and protest to the MPs dining opposite. Inland – and by the time you’d got there it felt distinctly inland – ambulances swept to and from the swishing glass portals of A & E, while deeper in the hospital itself could be found not merely wards and laboratories, but kitchens, shops, hairdressers, shoe-shiners and various chapels and prayer rooms for different faiths seeking a moment of solace.

It also had a morgue.

Finding the morgue was hard work, as it was one of the few parts of the hospital that didn’t particularly advertise. Sharon stopped to ask one blue-shirted orderly, who gave her such rich and detailed instructions that she’d followed only half of them before having to ask the way again. Being the knower of truth, it turned out, didn’t necessarily equate to geographical savvy.

The morgue itself was down in the bottom of the hospital, washed with the sounds of grumbling boilers and huge chugging thermostats, each striving to keep the building hot, and cold, and all comfortable things in between. Stepping through the swinging heavy fire doors to the morgue itself was like crossing over a weather front, and Sharon half expected a tiny chemical cloudburst to open above her head as the sudden cold air of the morgue hit, along with a stench of disinfectant. The colour of all things to do with death, she realised, wasn’t black, or even white, but pink – a garish, alcohol-laced pink with which every other surface had been scrubbed, every tile mopped and every hand scrubbed that had buzzed on the buzzer at reception. A bored man, with grey hair combed over a freckled scalp, drifted to the reception counter, heard her name and let her in without a word.

A long corridor, the floor rubber-scarred from a thousand passing gurneys. A notice board offered leaflets on what to do when a loved one passed away, your legal responsibilities and the support you might want to get. Walking past it, Sharon couldn’t look. Even without shifting into the spirit walk, she could hear the echoes of people who had passed this way before, feel their clenching grief in the pit of her stomach. It was hard, sometimes, keeping such things out.