Stoneheart (2 page)
G
eorge felt the cold wind slap him as he stepped out of the museum. He felt horrible. The black treacly feeling was still bubbling in his head, and the chill on his face only made it worse. He didn’t know what to do next. He just knew he’d had to get out and be alone for a moment.
George knew that it was safer and easier to be alone. He’d decided this right after his dad had died, when life had suddenly filled with too many people saying all the wrong things, as if their words could begin to fill the new dull hole in the middle of him.
Being a loner seemed like a hard road, and sometimes his weakness betrayed him: for example, he hated himself for smiling at the boy who’d toppled the pamphlet stand on him; it had been sheer, unthinking weakness.
He’d betrayed himself.
Smiling had been like trying to be friends when they weren’t. Smiling had been a gutless, needy thing to do. And George had definitely decided he didn’t need anyone, friends or otherwise.
Rain spat at him, and he looked up, thinking that alone was the way to be, because alone meant you were in charge of what could get to you and what you could keep out.
Above him, high on the decorated facade of the museum, there were carvings of imaginary animals, nearly real but not quite. Lizards that only existed in the mind of the sculptor alternated with alarming pterodactyl-like birds. The pterodactyls had nasty pointy teeth jagging out of nasty pointy beaks, and ugly hooks stuck out of their featherless wings. Their eyes had the wide-open glassy stare of someone you don’t want to cross.
He felt the cold air on his gums and wondered if he was smiling or grimacing. The more he looked the more he saw that the whole front of the building seethed with stone carvings of animals. They made him uneasy. He didn’t know why, but he didn’t like them. He felt watched. Maybe it was the windows in the facade—the people who could be looking out, seeing him with a red face and eyes pricking with frustration and tears that he wasn’t going to let come.
He knew enough about self-pity to hate it. He hated it more than Killingbeck, more than the rock or the hard place. So he turned from the facade and wiped his eyes to be sure no one saw him nearly cry.
He looked at his watch: 3:42. They’d be in there until four thirty at least. He didn’t know what he was going to do. He turned away and leaned back against the building.
Something jagged into his back.
Behind him, at waist height, on the corner of the front portico of the museum, a little nubby carving of a dragon’s head stared up at him.
It reminded him of the things his dad made—used to make—in his workshop. Not the big stuff, the serious stuff, but the little animal toys he’d sometimes squidge out of clay to make George smile when George was smaller, on days when George found him at work but not too busy.
The memory didn’t make him happy. Maybe because he’d thought about his dad too much for one day anyway, or maybe because the dragon had fangs and the fangs reminded him of the monkey, of the taste in his mouth, of Killingbeck.
Whatever the reason, the result was strong and sharp.
He hated the carving.
He hated it a lot.
His fist was bunched and in motion before he thought about it. Once he thought about it, he knew this was going to hurt. He knew there’d be blood, split knuckles, maybe even broken bones. He knew he didn’t mind. He knew in a place that was closer to wanting than knowing that all this was likely, and all this was okay.
His fist was the size of the dragon’s head. His fist was not made of granular stone. In the microsecond before impact, he realized he didn’t know what this would feel like. He realized he was going to break his first bone. He felt more air on his gums as his grin rictussed wider.
He didn’t feel the impact. He heard it—a sharp, ugly crack—and the world jerked a bit.
Something hit his foot.
He closed his eyes and cradled his hand instinctively, waiting for the wave of pain. From the cracking noise alone he knew that bad damage had been done. Now that he’d done it he wished he hadn’t. He didn’t want to look at his hand in case something was sticking out of it. Like a bone. He checked it with his good hand, carefully. No bone, but definitely wetness.
Something hissed at him.
He opened his eyes. He must have imagined it. As he turned to check behind him, his foot stumbled over an obstruction. He looked down.
It was the stone dragon’s head.
He’d knocked it off.
He looked at the portico. There was the stump of its neck, sheared off neat as a scalpel cut.
Now he looked at his hand. No bone. No blood, even. Just wet from the rain. It was fine. He picked up the dragon’s head. He couldn’t believe it. Something had changed. It wasn’t looking at him anymore. It wasn’t looking at anything. Unless he was going mad, it had been looking at him. Now its eyes were closed. He decided it must have been a trick of the light.
There was another hiss from behind him. Then a wet scrape and a dry squeal.
He knew without looking that the noise must be one of the museum guards, maybe even Killingbeck coming out to give him a real beasting about leaving the hall. He had no idea how Killingbeck was going to react to seeing that his least favorite boy had just broken a carving off the museum wall.
So as he turned, he jammed the dragon’s head into his coat pocket, hoping to hide it but knowing he wasn’t going to get away with it.
It wasn’t Killingbeck. It was something worse, something so much worse that if he’d had time to think he would have given anything for it to be Killingbeck instead.
It wasn’t anything human.
It wasn’t anything possible.
It was, however, peeling itself off the stone facade of the museum and looking at George with flat, blank hatred. And not just hatred—hunger, too.
It was a pterodactyl.
Its eyes were wide and unblinking, as if permanently surprised to find there was room for them at all in a skull that wasn’t so much a head, as a long, heavy beak that tapered back into a ribbed neck, bent under the strain of holding up all those teeth. Its body was small and surprisingly pigeon-chested, but was more than made up for by the large batlike wings and the sinewy legs that ended in bent knuckles and ripping talons.
Something like breath hissed from deep within its stony neck.
George’s body had entirely forgotten to breathe.
The thing jerked off the frieze with a final effort. It tried to spread its wings, but only succeeded in getting one uncurled before it disappeared from view, plummeting below the level of the balustrade.
George heard a noise like a sackful of wet suitcases hit the grass below. Unable to stop himself, he peered over the balustrade. The monster continued unpacking itself and getting all its wings and talons in the right order. It had its back to him. It stretched itself like an old man working a kink out of his neck.
And then it turned.
It looked right at him with dead stone eyes. And as the rest of the body twisted to follow the head and point itself at him, George knew what those eyes were doing.
They were locking on. Acquiring a target.
And that target was him.
As if to confirm this, the pterodactyl raised its beak to the lead sky and chattered its teeth in a noise like a drumroll played on dead men’s bones.
Then it lowered its head and began to lurch forward, dragging itself toward him on its wing-knuckles, swinging its body and foot-talons along between them, like a demon on crutches.
George ran.
H
e hit the corner of Exhibition Road, skidded into the turn, and started sprinting, careening off the crowds filing into the Science Museum. By the time they started to protest, he was just a memory of blurring feet, fifty yards up the road.
A traffic warden tried to grab him with the reflex action all men in uniform have when someone young runs really fast in their direction. “Hey, there …”
George tore out of his grip and kept going. One fast look over his shoulder gave him a horror shot of the pterodactyl clipping along the pavement behind him, with a terrible jerky lope. It appeared to run with its legs and simultaneously pull itself forward on the hooked knuckles of its wings.
Nobody paid it any notice.
George screamed and doubled his speed, ducking into a side street, then almost immediately turning into another. He shouted “Help!” but London’s a busy city, and by the time people heard it he was gone.
He got a stitch.
He kept running, pounding through the backstreets, heading for the park.
Usually you can run through a stitch and get over it. This one must have been a different kind. This one just got another one on top of it and hurt twice as bad.
He didn’t slow down.
Running from nightmares is how nightmares begin. Our bodies have really old memories that our minds know nothing about. And these memories made him speed up as he skidded into the road that runs along the bottom of Kensington Gardens.
He couldn’t see how to get into the park, so he turned right and kicked harder.
Behind him, the pterodactyl pulled itself around the corner and sniffed the air. George ran. Looking back, he saw it getting smaller. It seemed to have stopped to look at all the greenery in the park. He ran and ran until a lorry pulled across the pavement and he couldn’t see it anymore.
As soon as he couldn’t see it, George had time to feel the pain in his side. He stumbled and went sprawling as his feet hit a paving-stone edge.
He bounced up on his feet and looked back. Clear.
He didn’t see the tramp until the tramp grabbed him and stopped him dead on the edge of a junction.
George whirled.
“Wha—?”
A lorry thumped through the junction, right over where George would have been.
The tramp let him go. George looked over his shoulder. He couldn’t see anything. He gave in and bent double, gasping with pain and exhaustion, wondering if he was going to be sick.
“Don’t mention it…” wheezed the tramp.
George pointed back down the empty road. The tramp looked back along his arm. The pterodactyl stepped out from behind a tree and looked at them. Then it scuttled behind another tree.
“Did you see it?” George gasped, trying to get the right amount of oxygen into his body as he grasped at the receding wisp of his normal world.
The tramp shrugged and shook his head.
“Just ‘cos you’re paranoid don’t mean they ain’t after you, mind,” he said, and dissolved into a series of lumpy giggles that sounded like he was being choked.
George gulped air. Everything hurt. His feet, his muscles, and his lungs. His head hurt worst of all.
There was no movement from the distant tree.
There was movement closer to him. There was something above the tramp’s head, on the side of the building.
On an elaborate drainpipe, a carving of three fantastical lizardly salamanders fanned out, their tails decora-tively plaited together, their heads facing down, each about eight feet long. That wasn’t what had caught George’s eye.
What caught his eye was the fact that they
moved.
George’s jaw fell open.
Above the tramp’s head, the three architectural details had started to writhe. He could hear the hiss and slither of scales against scales as the tails began to unplait themselves. He could see the salamanders’ eyes turn to him, their noses sniffing.
Cold fear wrapped his neck. He pointed. The tramp followed his gesture. He looked puzzled. “What?”
One of the lizards got its tail free of the others and reared back, hissing at George. He looked at the tramp for a fast second.
“Can’t you see?”
George heard a distant clack. He tore his eyes from the new horrors on the building wall to see the pterodactyl awkwardly loping toward him, only thirty yards away.
George was running again. He ran past joggers, past dog-walkers, past cyclists.
Nobody stopped. Nobody looked. Nobody helped.
But he didn’t slow down. The one time he did snatch a look back, he could see the salamanders scuttle and slither along the gutter beside the creature, with an un-lizardly sidewinding motion he’d seen in a program about rattlesnakes. It was a movement that was horrible in itself, full of threat and power and evil.
George pumped down the pavement, now running alongside Hyde Park past a modern red-brick building with a tower and a soldier and a horse outside.
The soldier didn’t give him a moment’s look.
He could feel each pace through the soles of his shoes, like the pavement was hitting him, rather than the other way round. He could hear his breath like it was someone running beside him. His chest hurt as if it were being burned inside.
He risked a look behind him.
“Hoi!”
He hit the street cleaner’s barrow at full tilt, smacking all the wind out of his body and sprawling in a mess of brooms and rubbish bags across the pavement.
“HOI!”
George found a breath, and another one, and then a lot more ones that each hurt worse than the last. He wiped tears from his eyes.
“You mad?” the street cleaner wanted to know.
George shook his head, no words left in him.
“You clean that up, pal,” said the sweeper, coming out of the gutter. “You clean that up right now!”
George started to cry.
The big sweeper stepped back. Spooked. “Oi. Steady.”
Snot ribboned out of George’s nose as he sobbed. The sweeper looked around, scratched himself, and looked as embarrassed as a man with a bulldog tattooed on his neck can do.
“Steady, mate. It’s …”
He looked around again. People in the bus stared at them, like they were on TV. Disconnected. Bored. Passing the time. People in cars ignored them and concentrated on the car in front. A motorcycle despatch rider roared past.
The sweeper picked up two halves of a broom.
“You broke my broom, you …”
George froze. Behind the sweepers shoulder, on the other side of the road, as a red bus jerked forward, he saw a flash of scale. A sliver of beak. And a dark, dark glint of eye.
The pterodactyl had been pacing on the other side of the road, on the park side, using the traffic as cover.
The bushes on his side rustled again, and this time he turned fast enough to see three salamander tails disappear into the foliage.
“Wha—?” asked the sweeper.
But he was talking to thin air. George had gone.