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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A Man Called Dictionary

The Gunner walked fast, and George jogged to keep up. The Gunner had something on his mind. He cleared his throat, as if approaching a difficult subject with a delicacy he wasn’t used to displaying.

“He herks and jerks a bit. Don’t mind it. He doesn’t. Unless you let on you notice.” “Herks and jerks?” said George, who was getting quite used to not understanding what anyone was saying to him.

“Yeah, slobbers. And twitches. He don’t mean anything by it, he can’t help it; but I’ll tell you what, he’s got a brain on him. He knows all about words and history, and London … and anything else you can think of, I reckon.” The Gunner walked on a few paces.

“Mind you, he is sensitive about the twitching. And he’ll make funny noises all of a sudden, like he might bark out a strange word, maybe like he’s a bit, you know …” He tapped his tin hat.

“Mad?” George ventured.

“Nah, not mad. As such. Not Dictionary. But you might think he’s got a few tiles loose on the roof, so to speak. He hasn’t, though. His bark’s worse than his bite, and his brain—well, way he tells it he wrote a whole dictionary by himself in half the time it took a roomful of Frenchies to do it, so his brain’s top of the line. He don’t much like Frenchies, of course, but that was the way of it when he was alive—” George stopped in his tracks.

“When he was alive? So he’s dead?”

“He’s not dead, you idiot. He’s a statue, right?” Edie was walking right behind him. He didn’t know how long she’d been there, and he jumped a bit at the sound of her voice so close in his ear.

“Right,” growled the Gunner. “He’s the spit of a man who lived three hundred-odd years ago, which was a time when little misses was meant to be respectful and silent, so you keep a mind of it when we talk to him, right?” Edie’s expression said anything but it was all right with her, but she didn’t say a word as they came up out of the side street and into the Strand, heading east into the flow of pedestrians hurrying toward Charing Cross station.

Strangely enough, although no one noticed the Gunner, everyone got out of his way, so George and Edie were able to make good progress by tucking in behind him and staying close.

“Weird how they can’t see him, isn’t it?” puffed George.

Edie said nothing. After several yards of nothing, George decided he wasn’t going to speak to her anymore. When he had first realized she could also see the Gunner, back in the underground garage, he had felt a flicker of relief that at least here was someone else who might share his nightmare and make it less horrible. He now realized this had been the fear talking.

Edie might be his age, she might be able to see the unbelievable things he saw, but there was no inch of give in her. He’d tried to talk to her and she’d started out by hitting him—and things had gotten worse from there. Much worse. He could still taste the bile in his mouth from his reaction to her glinting with the Sphinxes. Nothing good had come from her yet, and he’d be a fool to expect anything from her. Least of all a conversation.

“It’s horrible,” she said.

Despite himself, he looked around at her. She shrugged, her eyes on the ground.

“When I first saw them moving—the statues—I thought I’d gone loony. I thought the first one I saw was some kind of trick for the tourists, some bloke dressed up, covered in black paint or something. I thought it was a good trick. Then I noticed no one else paid him any attention at all. And after a bit I got sc—I got what you said. Freaked out. Then I saw you running through the park with him, so …” “So you ran after us.”

“I thought it’d make it less horrible.”

“Here we go, come on, mind that bus… .”

The Gunner suddenly lurched into the traffic, making for a small, pale stone church marooned on its own island where the Strand was joined by the curved tributary of the Aldwych, just before they both hurried on to become Fleet Street. The church’s spire ascended to the sky in elegant steps, sharply defying the taller and more impressive buildings around it, flanked by a scrabble of twisted plane trees reaching up in half-hearted solidarity.

Three statues stood facing east in front of it. George looked at each one expectantly. There were two men in World War II uniforms and peaked caps; and farther off, the back view of a man in a long gown on top of a very elaborate plinth peered back down the Strand as if expecting something distasteful to appear at any moment. George looked at the Gunner.

“Is he the Dictionary?”

“Why d’you think it’s him?”

“Because he looks like a professor. In his robes. He looks distinguished.” The Gunner shook his head.

“He’s not distinguished. He’s just a politician. Come on.

George eyed the two statues in peaked caps as they approached them. Is it— The Gunner pointed past the stautes.

“Not them. He’s at the other end.”

George felt odd walking past the statues, as if either one might suddenly jerk into life at any minute. Despite their uniforms they both looked a bit schoolmastery. Edie eyed them both carefully. She nodded at George.

“I know what you mean.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“They look like each other. But they’re different. You can sense it.” “No, I can’t. I was just thinking it’s really weird not knowing when or if they’re going to come alive.” “Oh. I thought you got the vibe.”

He looked at her. She looked disappointed.

“What vibe?”

“Dunno.” She nodded at one of the uniformed men. “But there’s a lot of death there.” George realized something else about Edie. Nothing she said ever made anything better. He shivered and followed the Gunner around the corner of the church.

“There’s a lot of death everywhere,” grunted the Gunner. “This is London. Lot of life, lot of death, lot of everything. Here he is.” “Here who is?” said a new voice.

George looked up. A statue of a man in eighteenth-century dress looked down at him, a bird perched incongruously on top of a wig that in real life would have been powdered, but now was peppered with pigeon splat. Between the bun-shaped sides of the wig, his face hung fleshy and lopsided, mouth working silently, as if he were chewing his tongue.

The Gunner tipped his helmet back on his head and nodded a greeting.

“Dictionary, if you can spare a moment of your time, we’d like a word.” Dictionary cleared his throat explosively and spoke. His voice was deep and rough and had the flattened vowels and blunt consonants of the Midlands. George couldn’t help noticing that he sounded more like a farmer than a man who knew all about words and London.

“What time I have is not my own, but that granted by an unknowable Providence and so not mine to give. However—” Dictionary nodded at a thick book held in his left hand, as his right—as if it had a life of its own—plucked at a frock coat and knee breeches. “—what words I have are in this book, and placed there by mine own labors, so of them I may make free as I will, and they are, as ever, at your pleasure.” George’s eyes edged sideways to look a question at the Gunner.

“He says yes.”

Edie spoke quietly under her breath, “Well, he takes a lot of words to say it.” The Gunner fired a look at her. Dictionary squirmed briefly, like a man surreptitiously trying to dislodge an ice cube someone has slipped down the back of his shirt.

“Well, it is not often that we see children who see us as we are, Gunner. I’ll warrant there’s a history here, eh?” Dictionary plucked at his breeches and dropped creakily to one knee as he looked down at them.

“You might say, Dictionary. The boy here’s in a spot of bother—” “Tchah—the ‘boy’has a name, no doubt?”

The Gunner brought George forward. George looked up at the lopsided slab of Dictionary’s face and decided that it was a face that appeared angry and forbidding until you looked closer, when you saw something kinder in it. It was a face that wasn’t used to smiling—but wanted to.

“He’s called George. George, this is Dictionary Johnson. Dictionary—George.” Dictionary spasmed suddenly, as if trying to jerk himself out of his coat in one fast movement. His neck twisted twice in a stuttering reflex, and he barked something that may have been a word but might have been mere noise.

“Gah—pleasure of your acquaintance, sir.”

Gunner prodded George in the back.

“Oh. Pleased to meet you.”

Dictionary looked at George, which made him feel uncomfortable.

“I observe you are exercised, sir, exercised by some strong emotion.” “Yeah,” said George, “I’m confused.”

“Confused—or scared, perhaps?”

“Perhaps,” muttered George quietly, looking away from Edie.

“When I was young and fearful, a wise woman gave me this advice, which I treasured and now pass on to you: just as hope enlarges happiness, so fear aggravates calamity.” “Ah,” said George, still trying to untangle the words into some kind of sense.

“You make things worse by worrying about them,” explained Edie.

He turned on her.

“They can’t be much worse than things trying to kill me, can they?” “Of course they can. They can be much worse.”

Before he could ask her what she meant—or even ask himself whether he wanted to ask her, in case she told him—Dictionary cleared his throat.

“You would perhaps oblige me with an outline of the events that bring you to my humble plinth? I am starved of conversation, you understand, which is vexing, pinioned as I am here on this lonely outcrop as the life of the fair city swirls round and past me. There is no wit, no variation to divert me from the depressing spectacle of the gentlemen of the law strutting in and out of that magnificent theater of lies opposite.” He jabbed his book at the vast white stone jumble of pinnacles and arches across the road.

“That’s the Law Courts,” said George.

“Indeed.” Dictionary nodded. “And a fine excess of architecture it is for such a plain purpose as deciding right from wrong. It is my observation that on the outside, all the light exuberance of spires and turrets point upward to the heavens in order to distract one’s attention from the fact that inside, within the dark chambers of the law, all points downward, into the fell attorney’s pocket. ‘Tis like paint on a tart’s face, mere distraction. Why—” The Gunner interrupted.

“The boy has a problem, Dictionary. Pardon me for breaking in, but it’s a serious one. We’ve come from asking the Sphinxes—” “The Sphinxes? Gah—then you’ll be none the wiser and twice as confused, no doubt. Only a jobberknowl would go to a sphinx for an answer—” “Jobberknowl?” George looked at Edie, who shrugged.

Dictionary’s fingers flew through the pages of his book.

“A blockhead.”

“A thicko,” explained Edie helpfully.

The Gunner prodded George in the back again. George cleared his throat.

“The Sphinx sort of gave us a half-answer, and told me to go to the ‘dark shaveling.’Only, I don’t know what a shaveling is.” Dictionary’s fingers flew through the pages of his book, slowing down as he got nearer the word he was looking for. He stabbed it in satisfaction.

“ ‘Shaveling: a monk.’ ”

“So I’m looking for a dark monk?”

“A monk or an abbot, a friar—”

“A dark friar.”

The air went a bit still. The children gazed up at the two statues, who were looking at each other with that look people exchange when they’re busy not saying something.

“A dark friar who knows all about London.”

Dictionary straightened and looked east, up Fleet Street.

“A black friar, then.”

The Gunner nodded slowly with a grimace.

“The Black Friar. Should have known.”

“What’s wrong with this Black Friar?” asked George, trying to watch the two statues at once.

“Nothing,” they both replied rather quickly, looking away from each other.

“Still,” harrumphed Dictionary, “not a man to disturb lightly. Perhaps I can help. It is mere vanity, but I pride myself on a tireless knowledge of the metropolis.” “The boy’s got the taints stirred up. He don’t know why, but they’re after him. That’s why we went to the Sphinxes, seeing as how they’re halfway between us spits and the taints.” “And what crepuscular illumination were they able to shed on this dilemma?” “What does crepuscular mean?” interrupted Edie.

“Dim,” said Dictionary, with a sour twitch of his shoulders. George could see he didn’t like being disturbed while he was talking.

“Well, why not say dim? All these long words are like talking in code.” Before Dictionary could reply, George broke in. He wanted answers, and he didn’t want Edie starting another argument.

“The Sphinxes said I needed to find the Stone Heart. I think they said the Black Monk—” “Friar,” said the Gunner.

“The Black Friar could tell me what it was.”

“’Course, it’d save a lot of time and—you know, if you happened to know what the Stone Heart was, Dictionary,” said the Gunner hopefully. “Then we wouldn’t have to bother the Friar at all. And that would be …” He seemed to run out of words.

“More convenient?” suggested the other statue. There you go.

“So we need to fathom the meaning of the Stone Heart,” said Dictionary, suddenly swiveling and lowering himself so that his stockinged legs hung off the edge of the plinth. He riffled through the book in his hand, but came up with nothing. He clutched it to his chest and rocked back and forth, eyes closed in thought.

“Stoneheart? Stone heart? A heart-shaped stone, perhaps. Or the heart of a stone—but that could be any stone, and looking for any stone in this great city would be like trying to find a grain of wheat in a wheat field. No. Stone Hart perhaps—’hart,’as in a statue of a deer, a male deer, carved of stone?” He opened one eye and looked at them. No one nodded, so he closed it again, rocked some more.

“Or Stone Heart, perhaps being a disease of the affective organ, in need of physick, as in gallstone, kidney stone?” George nudged the Gunner and spoke quietly.

“I don’t understand what he’s saying.”

The Gunner put his finger to his lips and looked at the rocking figure above.

Edie’s voice cracked the silence.

“Neither does he. He doesn’t know what it is.”

The rocking stopped. Dictionary opened the other eye and focused on her.

“Why, in faith, what I took for a helpmeet and a paranymph is no more than a mannerless”—his fingers fanned the pages of the book at speed. He found the word he was searching for and speared it with his finger—”a mannerless sprunt.” “Sprunt? He called me a sprunt!” bristled Edie.

“I know,” said the Gunner wearily. “He found it under the S’s. If he was looking under P’s he’d probably call you a pest. Or a pain in the—” Edie jutted her chin suspiciously at the figure above her and tugged on his buckled shoe.

“Is a sprunt like a glint?”

Dictionary shuddered and pulled his foot up out of her reach.

“A glint? Not at all. ‘Glint’ does not appear in my dictionary, being an ungodly word, a mere superstition beyond even the wildest Frenchified imaginings of the Romanists. A sprunt is a common word, widely used, as any child even of the female inclination knows, meaning anything short that will not bend.” George looked at her. His lip, despite itself, twitched.

“What?” she asked dangerously.

“You might be a bit of a sprunt.”

“You might be getting a puffy one if you start calling me names, too.” Edie pushed George hard. He had to grab her jacket to stop falling backward. There was a ripping noise and the clink of glass hitting stone. She swung at him, punching his shoulder hard enough to make him let go. Dictionary looked scandalized.

“Now, children, there shall be no occasion for snick-or-snee here in the very shadow of God’s house!” “Snick-or-snee?” said George, floundering again.

“A barney. A bust-up. A fight,” said the Gunner wearily.

“With knives, mark you, with knives,” harrumphed Dictionary.

“It wasn’t a fight. She pushed me. Look, I’m sorry but—” He stopped talking. Edie was crouched over the thing that had fallen out of her ripped pocket and clinked on the pavement. It was the weathered disk of glass. Her eyes were transfixed by it.

“They’re here.”

The warning glass was blazing blue-green light, brighter than she’d ever seen it.

“There’s taints. Here. Now.”

They all looked up into the evening sky—still stained orange by the fluorescent city lights—except Edie, who swept the glass into her other pocket and zipped it shut.

For one terrible moment George felt his gut turning to water as a winged shape dropped out of the sky and flapped over them. He relaxed when he saw it was just a large black bird, not some gargoyle.

“It’s just a bird,” he said with relief.

It flapped around them above their heads, flying as if in slow motion. Dictionary waved his book at it, trying to shoo it away.

“A strick,” he said wonderingly, almost to himself. “A strick if ever I saw one.” “Strick?” asked the Gunner, not taking his eyes off the eerily slow bird.

Dictionary waved his book at the Gunner, as if trying to shake the meaning out of it and onto him.

“Strick. A bird of ill omen.”

He twitched and jerked, and George found himself shivering as if the movement were contagious.

“What do we do now?” His arm was gripped in a small vise. Edie yanked at him. “Run.” She dragged him stumbling into the traffic. After two stutter-steps he was running faster than she was.

The Gunner looked around from where he had been watching the wheeling bird. Horror flashed across his face. He kicked into a sprint and shouted in one movement “No! Not that way!” George and Edie had to stop short as a red double-decker bus turned in front of them, blocking the way down Fleet Street. George heard the Gunner shout, and spun around. He got a glimpse of the big man running toward him, pointing, yelling something—then another bus turned behind George, and for a moment, he and Edie were sandwiched in a narrow red canyon as the two buses passed each other.

It was like being in the eye of a hurricane—a beat of quiet as the two red walls ground past them in opposite directions.

Then, with a whoosh of sound and diesel fumes, the bus ahead of them swept away, and Edie tugged him onward—a good three fast steps until she saw what they were running into. The thing the Gunner was shouting about behind them as he ran around the other double-decker bus. The thing with the fiery eyes and the scales and the wings that cracked like thunder. The thing that saw them from the top of its tall stone perch planted in the middle of the street.

Then she braked, and George stopped, still looking back to see what the Gunner was trying to say, not realizing what they had just run into.

“What is it?”

“I think it’s a dragon.”

And he turned, slowly.

And it was, exactly, a dragon.

And then there was nowhere to run.