Silvertongue (2 page)

G
ough Square is a narrow space, too small, really, to qualify as a proper square, especially if the word “square” conjures up images of a tree-filled green area surrounded by buildings. It
was
surrounded by build-ings—low Georgian brick-built houses in the main—but where a larger square might hope for green, there were cobbles, and while there were trees (in the strictest interpretation of the word), they were sticklike things of no age or consequence, significantly and disappointingly outnumbered by thin metal posts that surrounded the cobbled rectangle at the center of the square.

The cobbles were quickly being obscured by the falling snow. At one end of the open space stood an empty plinth, snowflakes beginning to fill up a small bronze oyster shell that lay on its top.

Dictionary Johnson, a bulky bronze statue in knee breeches, sat on the steps of one of the houses, twisting and fidgeting with something he was trying to work gently into his close-buttoned coat. Whatever he was trying to force inside the protection of his clothing was less than keen on the whole idea, a lack of enthusiasm manifested in an aggrieved mewling, muffled by the wide lapels of the coat. The big man in the bun-shaped wig hushed and cooed to it as he endeavored to engulf it within his garments.

“Hodge shan’t be cold; no, no, Hodge shall not be cold. . . .” he promised.

There was a slight jingling noise off to one side, and he froze, eyes peering into the dark mouth of the alleyway to his left.

“Who’s there? If you mean us harm, I warn you that I shall box your ears! And my friend Hodge, he shall rake you. By God sir, he shall bite and rake you most grievously if you mean us harm. . . .”

The jingling resolved itself into a tall figure. As it approached, it was apparent that the noise came from a mass of small tools and instruments hanging on strings and ribbons from a much-repaired tailcoat. The thin man, now clearly recognizable as the Clocker, bowed politely.

“No need for fisticuffs, Dictionary. Lord no. Mean no harm. Have greatest respect, etcetera. As you know. Friend not foe. Looking for you.”

He paused and waved generally at the falling snow amid the stillness of the square around them. The light glinted off his complicated glasses, rigged out with a bewildering selection of watchmaker’s magnifying lenses ready to hinge down over either eye.

“Feel this to be unworldly. All my clocks stopped. All clocks in city stopped. Extraordinary. Do not even have word for it. . . .”

His hands tried to pluck the right expression out of the air. Dictionary harrumphed and jerked his head sharply, as if shaking loose a couple of forgotten words that might fit.

“Disadventurous? Ominatory?”

The Clocker’s hands stopped grasping the air and traced a faint and elegant bow of thanks.

“Precisely. Knew you were the very fellow to ask.”

A low yowl of feline disapproval emerged from within Dictionary’s garments.

The Clocker cleared his throat.

“Excuse impertinence. Intolerable curiosity. Is that cat?”

Dictionary rose from the step, visibly swelling with something between pride and embarrassment.

“Cat, sir? This is Hodge, sir. More than a mere cat. A boon companion for whom I should rather starve and perish than see suffer the vicissitudes of such unchancy and inclement weather.”

“Ah,” ventured the Clocker.

“He abhors the cold, sir, as I cannot abide a Frenchman or a papist,” rumbled the great man in explanation.

Hodge, a cat statue whose normal home was the empty plinth with the oyster shells, took this as his cue to turn himself upside down and claw his head clear of the enfolding coat. Two well-formed bronze ears flattened on his head, and he showed his fangs in a moment of displeasure.

“Very fine cat. No doubt,” said the Clocker, bravely reaching a hand forward to stroke the cat, who immediately reared up and swiped a claw at the tentative gesture of friendship. The Clocker jerked back, and as he did so his glasses bounced off his face and clattered to the ground.

“My apologies,” said Dictionary. “Hodge is more catamount than fireside puss.”

“He is a fearsome mouser, no doubt,” said the Clocker, looking down at the thin half inch of blood striping the back of his thumb.

“Hodge is the scourge of tittle mice, the nemesis of rats, and the creeping doom of sparrows, Clocker.”

“Sparrows?”

“Birds in general. I believe he takes feathers and flight as personal affronts. I have wasted many a minute watching him stalk the birds in this square. He sees a bird as a challenge, does Hodge. He is, if nothing else, a cat with ambition. . . .”

Dictionary looked more closely at the Clocker as he stooped to pick up his glasses. He pointed a questioning sausage-finger at the thin man’s face. There was an unblinking beam of blue light emerging from one of the Clocker’s eyes, an eye that had a miniature clock face instead of a normal eyeball.

Dictionary stared at it. The hour and the minute hand pointed straight up at midnight, and the second hand was unmoving, perhaps half a second after midnight.

“. . . Your eye, sir.”

The Clocker’s head bent in agreement.

“Indeed.”

“It does not pulse. It did pulse, if I am not mistaken?”

“It did. Regularly. Marked the passing seconds.”

“I remember it well, sir. And yet . . . it pulses no more.”

The Clocker nodded and licked his lips.

“No. As said. All clocks stopped. Believe time itself stopped. If not stopped, out of joint. Have no idea what happened. No word for what this is. Thought you might.”

“No, sir,” said Dictionary, shaking his head. “But if time has stopped ticking, then I believe we are in the after-hours. And what that portends I have no means of knowing.”

Hodge suddenly stiffened and hissed at something in the sky above. The two men looked up and saw a flight of distinctively shaped creatures flapping slowly eastward over the square.

“Pterodactyls?” said Dictionary.

“From facade of Natural History Museum,” agreed the Clocker. “Almost certain. Never seen flying in pack before.”

“Time’s never been out of joint before,” growled Dictionary, eyes scanning the sky for more silhouettes. “It’s the boy and the girl, isn’t it? The maker and the glint. They’ve done something—”

“Or something done to them,” cut in the Clocker. “Boy was chased by pterodactyl. Liked boy. Girl plucky too.”

He watched Dictionary bend and pick up a battered hat from the step and brush a thick layer of snow from it.

“You have plan?”

“No, sir. But I venture if you were to join me on a fast perambulation toward the Gunner’s monument, we may have news of them.”

They walked out of the square, side by side, the tall gangling figure of the Clocker crowstepping through the snow while the barrel-shaped Dictionary bulldozed along beside him. Only Hodge looked back and noticed the square was not left quite empty. High on the roof opposite, a lone bird looked down at them, a dark bird. A raven.

Hodge hissed.

The Raven didn’t blink.

It waited until they had turned the corner before pushing off into the night sky and flapping over their footsteps in the snow, keeping its distance. . . .

“G
eorge,” said Edie, very quietly.

“I know.”

They were frozen about ten paces inside the warm lobby of the eerily silent hotel.

“You feel it too?”

George nodded slowly, his face tight with tension.

“Yes.”

“We can’t . . .”

“No. We can’t.”

The Gunner looked at them, then at the Officer and the Queen. “You got any idea what they’re on about?”

The Officer shook his head. The Queen’s eyes were fixed on Edie, who was looking up at the ceiling as if something unpleasant were about to drop through it.

“No,” said the Queen. “But if she’s sensing something, it’s here somewhere.”

“It’s
everywhere
in here,” whispered Edie, looking at George.

He tried to control the strange sense of nausea and fear building in his gut. He couldn’t put it into words, not in a way that would do justice to the oddness of what he was experiencing, but ever since they’d walked into the building, ten long paces ago, he’d felt wrong, wrenchingly wrong, out of place in a way that was like a kind of vertigo. Except, instead of the fear of falling down, he felt like he was in imminent danger of losing his grip on where and why and who he was, and just falling in every direction at once.

“It’s the people who aren’t here. The ones who disappeared. They’re . . .” Edie flailed for an explanation.

“They’re still here. Just not ‘here’ in a way we can see,” finished George. “Right?”

Edie grimaced and took a step back. She looked so tired and cold and wet that George thought if she got any paler he’d be able to see through her like a—

“Ghost. Ghosts. It feels like ghosts,” he blurted.

“Exactly,” said Edie, turning to look at the Queen. “It’s like when people say you walked through a ghost. The people who aren’t here, they’re
almost
here, and they’re like . . . frozen too. Stuck between here and now.” She wiped her hand across her face, then rubbed it hard, trying to scrub the exhaustion away. “It’s like walking through a silent scream. Being in here with all of them.”

She eyed George. He nodded, and she began backtracking carefully across the well-polished floor.

“We can’t sleep in here. This stillness, this silence . . .”

“It’s too loud,” he said.

“Exactly,” said Edie, still backing up to the door. “If we sleep in here we’ll go—”

“Doolally,” finished George.

The Officer shook his head. “You need sleep, you need food, you need warmth. We’ll take turns to stand watch over you. It’ll be fine.”

“No,” said George, looking at Edie’s face. “No. We’re not sleeping inside. Maybe you lot can’t feel it, but we can. We sleep outside.”

“Outside? It’s bloody snowing, pardon my French,” exploded the Gunner, tipping an eye at the Queen. “Not a night to be playing Eskimos.”

George turned on his heels and headed for the door. He must have walked through someone who wasn’t there, a doorman perhaps. Anyway, he was ambushed by a sudden cold lurch in his guts, as if he wanted to retch. He grabbed Edie by the shoulder and walked her out the door and into the street.

“We’ll sleep under the arch. Under the Quadriga.”

“You’re both nutty as fruitcakes!” snorted the Gunner, hot on their heels. “It’s warm indoors!”

“There’s heat and beds and blankets and food. . . .” began the Officer.

George was so exhausted he felt that if he stumbled, the ground would just open up and he’d fall into the black maw and never be seen again. “So bring them outside. Duvets, blankets, whatever. We’ll make a fire. . . .”

“Dry clothes. Coats. Hats,” said the Queen. Her daughters nodded and ran off soft-footed into the depths of the hotel.

“What are we going to make a fire with?” asked Edie as George steered them both back toward Hyde Park Corner and the great protective stone arch in the middle.

“That,” he said, pointing at a builder’s truck loaded with what looked like the smashed wooden debris of a recently gutted kitchen. “That’ll burn nicely.”

“Couple of suicidal pyromaniacs now!” grumbled the Gunner, but he angled off and scooped a big armful of wood off the truck anyway.

One of the Queen’s daughters came running out of the hotel with an armful of coats that she’d obviously just lifted straight out of the cloakroom. She tossed George a couple and then lobbed him a mad-bomber hat with long earflaps.

He put the hat on and grinned.

“Cool.” He smiled, the earflaps dangling down on each side of his face like ears on a cartoon dog.

“Not really,” said Edie.

The daughter handed her a long black fur coat. “Warm,” she said simply.

Edie nodded and put it on without slowing down. The hem skimmed the ground as she walked.

“Yeah,” she said, pulling it around her. “Warm.”

A
s in the rest of London, snow was falling heavily outside the pillared facade of the Royal Exchange. Two World War I soldiers stood at ease, back-to-back on either side of a tall war memorial. They wore peaked caps instead of tin helmets, and one was noticeably older than the other.

To their right was an impressive equestrian statue. A martial duke sat astride a noble stallion, a cloak falling off his shoulders, a marshal’s baton clenched in one hand.

“Oi, uncle, it’s snowing,” observed the Young Soldier.

The older soldier looked at the Duke. The Duke was watching a pair of stone gryphons flying overhead. He didn’t let anything like worry play across his impressive brow, but the Old Soldier noticed that he unobtrusively pushed the baton inside his waistcoat, freeing up a hand to rest casually on the pommel of his sword.

“Oi. Uncle. You there? I said it’s snowing,” said the Young Soldier, craning around the end of the monument to see the Old Soldier on the other side.

“You know what you are, young ’un? You’re the grand bloody panjandrum of the painfully bleeding obvious,” scowled the Old Soldier.

“I was just saying. It’s snowing. And everything stopped.”

The Old Soldier blew out his cheeks. “I dunno, son. Sometimes I wonder if you got both blades in the water. Or was you asleep when the clock struck thirteen?”

“It never!” The Young Soldier sounded impressed.

“You’re as much use as an inflatable cheese knife,” sighed the other, then stiffened. “Watch out, Hooky’s having an idea.”

The hook-nosed Duke ran a hand over his face and squared his shoulders as if making a large decision. He cleared his throat and pointed at the two soldiers.

“Right. You two, at the double.”

The two soldiers stepped off their plinth and hurried over to the Duke. He didn’t take his eyes off the sky.

“See that?”

“Flight of taints, sir. Up to no good, I shouldn’t be surprised,” said the Old Soldier.

“No doubt,” said the Duke. “Very well. I think a little reconnoitering would pay dividends. Don’t like not knowing what the enemy’s up to.”

“Want us to go have a look-see, sir?” volunteered the Old Soldier.

“No.”

The Duke kneed the horse and clicked his teeth. The great animal stepped off the plinth and crashed to the ground. The Duke wobbled alarmingly but stayed on.

“All right, sir?” asked the Young Soldier innocently. The Old Soldier kicked him while the Duke wasn’t looking.

“Me, sir? Sound as guns. The sickening artist johnny who made us omitted any damn stirrups,” barked the Duke, steadying himself. “But everything else has gone for a ball of chalk, I’d say: people disappeared, time frozen, snow bucketing out of nowhere. Damn queer straits we’re in.”

And without a backward glance, he led them off into the street of trackless snow, leading away from the square.

“Keep your muskets primed and your powder dry.”