The Glass God (23 page)

A sudden noise from outside made Rhys jump – a klaxon, followed by a deep, automated voice warning all passers-by to stand clear, as a vehicle was reversing. Somewhere in the flat, a boiler grumbled to itself; and he could make out the course of each pipe in the walls and floor as straight lines where spotty, dark mould had congregated, drawn by the heat.

Once you saw through the discoloration and damp, the flat itself was neatly kept. One plate, one knife and one fork had all been carefully cleaned and propped up in the drying rack by the kitchen sink. One small shelf contained four plastic tubs of different teas, each tub carefully labelled by a neat hand as lapsang, mint, camomile and chai, the original packets long since recycled in the small green bag kept pinned to one wall for the purpose.

Rhys drifted from room to room, his guilt at being an intruder in a stranger’s house briefly undermined by his fascination with all things to be seen therein. He found Sharon in the living room, staring up at a wall of bookshelves that sagged under the weight of reference guides and much-fingered travel journals.

“Maybe he’s on holiday?”

Sharon scowled and didn’t answer. With the trepidation of someone half expecting a bomb, she prised open a couple of tiny drawers in a wide chest tucked away beneath the lowest shelf.

Maps, odd assorted batteries, carefully labelled ancient cassette tapes, manuals on How to Use Your New Iron, guides on how to clean a carpet. Boxes of matches, bundles of paper, carefully folded bills and statements from the pension authority, solidifying pots of sample wall paint. She dug deeper and further, as Rhys hopped from foot to foot and sensed allergic disaster building at the back of his nose. Another drawer, more bits of junk accumulated over the years with the righteous thought of ‘maybe one day…⁠?’ and left to rot; another drawer, and this one…

Sharon froze. Very carefully she moved to pick up the single, small object lying amid a jumble of loose change, from the bottom of its wooden coffin. It was a badge, shaped like a shield. White, metal, it rested in the palm of her hand and her skin was perceptibly colder for its touch. A pair of red crosses marked the symbol; a large one across the middle, and a far smaller one, resting in the top left-hand corner of the shield, which might not have been a cross at all, but a tiny crimson sword.

Sharon looked at Rhys, Rhys dabbed at his nose.

“An A-Alderman?”

Her fingers tightened over the badge; and there it was, obvious, irrefutable, a power in the sign, a freezing of her skin, solidifying, grounding, a kind of…

“Ms Li!”

The panic in Rhys’s voice focused her attention. Looking down at the hand in which she held the badge, she saw that her fist had begun, without any pain, to turn to iron. She dropped the badge, which landed silently on the floor; and at once the metal retreated, rolling back into her own skin as if it had never been there, like sunlight caught behind a passing raincloud. “Bloody hell,” she muttered.

A rattle of the door.

A key in the lock.

Rhys gestured impotently. Sharon swung the umbrella up in front of her like a weapon, then hesitated, dropped the umbrella, picked up the badge, bounced it from hand to hand indecisively, put it back down, and picked up the umbrella.

The door opened, a swush of draught excluder on a lino floor. A footstep in the corridor, then another. They stopped. Another step, and another stop. A voice said, “I have a gun.”

It was old, male, matter-of-fact. Rhys turned grey. Sharon grabbed him by the sleeve, pulling him towards her, and still holding the umbrella aloft called back, “Yeah? Well, I’ve got a druid!”

Rhys bit his hand, leaving a great purple curve along the palm.

Silence from the corridor. Then, “I’m calling the police.”

Another footstep, a shuffle towards the bedroom.

“And your umbrella!” she called out.

The footsteps stopped. Then, “Show me.”

“Hey – you just said you’ve got a gun!”

“I lied.”

“Well, that’s bloody great,” she called back. “But, seriously, that’s a really freaky conversational opener you’ve got going there so you’ll forgive me if I don’t go running straight in for the hug.”

“For the… who are you?”

“Now he asks,” exclaimed Sharon. “Why couldn’t people ever just be pleased to see us?”

“You broke into my flat!”

“No, no, because that implies
broke
, and we didn’t break anything, did we, Rhys?”

“Um… no?”

“See?”

Silence from the corridor. Then loud, outraged, incredulous, “Who the hell
are
you people?!”

“Well, my druid here is Rhys…⁠”

“Hello,” essayed Rhys.

“And I’m Sharon Li, community support officer and senior manager at Magicals Anonymous, a confidential, informal, personal service for the mystically inclined. And I’m deputy Midnight Mayor, I guess I’m that, too, but you know, that job’s kinda a bit… whatever.”

“You’re… the deputy Midnight Mayor?”

“Yeah – I said it like that, too, when I heard.”

A sudden thunder of footsteps and before Sharon could shift into invisibility the man was there, filling the door. He stared from Sharon to Rhys and back again, before exclaiming, “But who the hell
are
you?”

The kettle was boiling.

There was something, Rhys concluded, in the sound of rising steam that lent itself to calm. Essentially, water was being excited to dangerous temperatures; so this calm had to be a cultural thing, born out of four hundred years of the British drinking tea. But it was hard to imagine that anyone could get really fraught when there was a cup of tea in the offing.

They stood in the kitchen, the three of them, doing their best not to glare too suspiciously.

The man called Crompton was old. Not the magically fuelled old of Mr Roding the necromancer, or the bent-double old of a pensioner who’d borne too much and lived too little, but a weathered, wind-swept old, of stiff straight joints, proper bearing, canyoned skin and salt and pepper hair cut to stiff military length. He wore a sleeveless woollen jumper over a thick yellow shirt, and had tufts of half-hearted moustache clinging to his top lip. He had snatched the blue umbrella from Sharon’s hand when offered, and his eyes went straight to the tip – or to where the tip should have been. Now he leant against the kitchen counter and seethed in tune with the boiling kettle.

Sharon malingered. It was the only word she could think of to describe her presence in Crompton’s flat; she was not an invited guest, and it was evident he didn’t want her there. And yet, until she had an answer, preferably all the answers, she felt she had no option but to linger. Up to and including maliciously.

“How’d you end up deputy Midnight Mayor?” he asked at last, the words tumbling out past all self-restraint.

Sharon shrugged. “Dunno,” she said. “I think it’s a stupid idea, too.”

By the look on Crompton’s face, he agreed.

“But seriously,” she said. “Midnight Mayor job: there’s fire, there’s lightning, there’s all sorts of heavy artillery stuff – and me? I’m only good for the truth and the walking through stuff, stuff.”

“Which is rude,” added Crompton.

“Which is rude,” Sharon agreed. “But, I figured, fate of the city and that. Besides, you… You said you wanted your umbrella back, and I brought you your umbrella back, and I
know
that, the day he went missing, Swift came to see you, and…⁠”

“Swift is missing?”

Sharon paused, irritated at having her flow interrupted. “Yeah. Well – no. Well – sorta. Look, I’d give you the full story, but I kinda feel like I’m here doing the deductive bit and you’re supposed to be doing the helpful bit so can we just focus on that?”

“I don’t see why I should say anything to people who break into my flat…⁠”

“And return your umbrella!” added Rhys.

“And who are the deputy Midnight fucking Mayor!” exclaimed Sharon. “I mean, I’m sorry, I know it’s kinda having your cake and eating it to be all ‘I don’t want the job’ and then pull rank, but these are difficult circumstances and interesting times and so can everyone just shut up and do what I say?”

To her surprise, everyone did shut up. She waited to see if the moment would last. It did. “Okay,” she said, shifting uneasily before the two men’s gaze. “Sorry about that. But… long day. Uh… so I’m right, yeah, about Swift coming to visit you?”

“What? Yes,” grumbled Crompton. “Or, rather, I went to visit him; then he came to visit me. Actually, I sent him several emails, but I don’t think he read them. So I went to visit him and explain the situation, and he agreed to help because, really, it’s his bloody job and the man was being difficult about a very important issue. Then he came to visit.”

“And bought you some tobacco, right?”

Crompton’s eyes narrowed. “Yes,” he murmured. “And you know this…⁠?”

Sharon waved the receipt, purloined from Swift’s coat. “He renewed a travel card and bought you some tobacco a few days ago. I’m guessing the tobacco was to say sorry for being a tit with the important issue stuff?”

“More or less,” murmured the old man. “He began, I believe, to appreciate both the importance of my office and the danger we are all in, and, lacking the emotional intelligence to simply apologise, he attempted to make up for it in other ways. Difficult man, this Midnight Mayor. Maybe it does make sense, having you as his deputy.”

Sharon wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not.

“Now,” she persisted, “when you say ‘important issue’…⁠?” She let the words hang. Crompton glanced at Rhys, who was occupying himself with an almost spiritual dedication to the pouring out of tea. “Rhys is my IT manager,” explained Sharon, seeing the look. “You can trust him with anything.”

“Your… you are investigating this with an IT manager?”

“Yes.” Sharon’s smile didn’t shed a tooth. “And I used to be a barista, until I became at one with the city and the city became at one with me, at which point I began to blend into the background of all things and become a part of all things around me, which are in fact in me, and I saw the truth that is hidden beneath the reality we make for ourselves, the world of perception, you see, and the walls of things were as shadow before me, and I had panic attacks sometimes because in my sleep I walked through the dreams of men. Then a goblin called Sammy turned up at work and ordered a really large cuppa tea, and I guess you could say I’ve become more grounded since then. So I guess the point
is…⁠” –
she drew in a long, shuddering breath
–
“⁠… you just shouldn’t go around judging people until you know them.” She treated Crompton to another, dazzling smile. “Whatcha say?”

Crompton almost writhed beneath the force of her optimism. He said, “What do you know about Old Man Bone?”

“Old Man Bone…⁠” Sharon tried the words out, to see if they felt better than they sounded. They did not. “⁠… nothing. What’s he?”

So Crompton explained.

Chapter 38

Crompton

I’ve got a job to do. Not pretty, not nice, but gotta be done. Started hundreds of years ago, even before the first plague came. We’re always told that life is magic, and death is the end, but people never think it through, because even dead things, when they decay and change, have a power. Always been a problem in a big city, what to do with the dead.

They say that Old Man Bone started out as the gravedigger who dug the holes in unsanctified ground. Suicides, witches, beggars with no names, bastard babies what died before they could breathe – that lot, he was the one who took them, dragged their rotting corpses out of the city streets and gave ’em rest underground, out of sight and out of mind. The city’s got more bones beneath it than most people think, the living moving in so quick they didn’t have time or space to move the dead. Victorians had a real problem with it; nowhere to put the corpses, you see, so they built this railway that carried the bodies out in the dead of night, whole carriages of them laid out on wooden bunks, like the sleeper train to Scotland, only these sleepers were never going to wake up. Some folks said they saw him there too, Old Man Bone, driving the necropolis engine, scarf blowing in the wind, like a rider of the apocalypse, they said, but, then, they were Victorians, bit hysterical, bit fanciful about stuff like that, and, personally, I don’t believe it.

What I do believe is the bit about the plague pits. When the Black Death first came to this country in the fleas on the backs of the rats, it killed whole villages and towns, and no one knew why. Every family lost someone – some families lost everyone. You could walk into places where the houses stood empty, and those people that were left did not have the strength to bury the dead. The crops rotted; children ran wild, living on dead human flesh. That, the stories said, was when he truly became Old Man Bone, the raggedy man. He walked among the corpses and buried the dead, never asking reward, never stopping for the moon or sun. He cleared the dead things from the streets and houses, and when it was done, and the survivors came out from the shadows to scrub the filth from their homes and reseed the fields, Old Man Bone went back into the earth, to sleep with the dead.

They say he walked again in 1665, when the plague returned to London, only this time he wore a doctor’s mask over his face, and great black gloves, and he could carry a corpse over either arm, and pulled his cart of the dead over the muddy cobbles without ever a word or a sign. His feet were bare, and you could hear him work by the slopping of soil over the plague pits, long into the night. When, next year, the fires which burnt down the city, also burnt out the plague, he was gone, blown away like ash. He was not seen nor heard of again until the Blitz, when they say a man with no shoes on his feet and lime in his hair, helped bury those bodies what were too damaged to be recognised, in the great tombs they dug on the edge of the city. He is a part of the city, is Old Man Bone, just like the Bag Lady and the Midnight Mayor. He caters for the dead, and when others cater for the dead, he sleeps at the bottom of the old plague pits with the bones of those he has buried, and all he ever asks is…