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CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

After Pudding

George and Edie were working their way through a new part of the city. It was a part where modern buildings rose high on each side of them, but from streets whose names, narrowness, and random angles betrayed them as part of the very old plan of London. They turned down a thin sloping section of road called Pudding Lane.

“Don’t know why you’d call a lane after a pudding,” grumbled Edie, her collar held tight around her neck.

“It’s where the bakers worked,” explained George, happy to have found himself in a part of London that he knew about, if only from history lessons. “It’s where the fire started.” “What fire?”

“The Great Fire. 1666. It began in a baker’s oven around here.”

“You know dates and things? Must be a brainbox as well as rich.”

“I’m not rich, Edie. And it’s an easy date to remember. It’s a cigarette and three pipes.” “It’s what?” said Edie, completely lost.

“Everyone gets taught that. The one looks like a cigarette and the sixes look like pipes. You know—like old men smoke?” “I don’t know any old men. And I didn’t get taught about any fire.”

“Well, if you don’t believe me—”said George, turning left out of the bottom of Pudding Lane, “—look at that.” A tall stone pillar soared over their heads, dominating the small square that stood at the crest of a gentle rise. George thought it looked like a more homely Nelson’s Column. It may have been the fact that buildings crowded in on it from all sides, giving you no place to stand back and appreciate its size; or it may have been that the square pediment it sat on had a door in the middle of it, with a yellow light burning inside. It somehow seemed more like a lighthouse than a triumphal column. And of course, there was no triumphal figure atop the fluted gray stone pillar. Instead there was a square cage running around it, painted gray and white. And rising from this unexpected cage was a gilded urn sprouting frozen gold flames. Even on a gray day like this, the aerial gilt sparkled against the city dullness around it.

Edie pulled him back into Pudding Lane.

“What?”

“Have you gone dragon-blind all of a sudden?”

After Pudding “Dragons?” he said, floundering.

“On the top of the plinth!”

He stuck his head around the corner. Sure enough, he had completely missed the four roughly carved dragons clinging on to the corners of the plinth. They had a desperate teeth-gritted look to them, as if their legs were getting tired of gripping on to the corners, and they might plummet bottom-first to the ground below at any moment.

“I have to go up there,” he said, looking up at the drizzle. “It’s still raining.” “They’re not waterspouts, George. I think the ‘not flying in the rain’ thing only applies to the gargoyles who are meant to be waterspouts. These look more—nasty.” She pulled out her sea-glass. It was lifeless and opaque, and told her that, despite their proximity and unpleasant grimaces, these dragons were—for now—no threat.

“They might be dead statues,” he said “The Clocker said a lot of statues don’t move anymore because they’re dead. They died in the wars between the spits and the taints.” He saw the trap his mouth was opening up for him to fall into, so he stopped.

“What wars between spits and taints?” she asked.

“Just ancient history,” he finished quickly, wanting to move on. He made a great play of looking at his watch. “We better get a move on. I’ve not got much time.” He wasn’t going to tell her that he might, by making the Gunner save him from the pterodactyl, have triggered the beginning of a war between the spits and taints that was going to be anything but ancient.

“Look. We’re probably fine,” he said, nodding at the dull sea-glass.

She zipped it back into her pocket. “Huh,” was all she could come up with at short notice, but she gave it all the feeling she could muster.

The two of them watched the dragons very carefully for the first sign of any movement as they walked in under the lee of the pillar.

“George,” she said, nodding at a sign on the stone to the left of the door.

It showed the admission charges for the Monument. Children were one pound.

“We haven’t got two quid,” she said. “You’ll have to go alone.” He looked up at the cage in the sky.

“I’ll be quick. You wait under cover over there.” He pointed at a modern building faced in shiny brown marble.

She shivered. He took his coat off.

“Here. You wear this. Keep you warm. I’m going to be inside, running up those stairs. I’m going to be dry in there. Probably too hot by the time I get to the top.” She was unexpectedly thrown by his offer of the coat. She took it tentatively, and then thrust her arms into the sleeves decisively.

“Thanks.”

After Pudding “No bother.”

“What are you going to do if it stops raining, and one of those dragons isn’t dead and does wake up?” He shrugged and tried to sound more confident than he actually felt. Although he already felt that trying to hide things from Edie was a bit pointless. Her eyes seemed to suck the truth out of things. Either that or he was getting light-headed with all this running around and sleeping rough. A hunger pang twinged through his gut. He ignored it.

“There’s a cage up there. Like a shark cage. You know, for when you dive with sharks.” “I don’t dive with sharks. How bored do you have to be to do that, anyway?” she asked.

After a long beat he decided it was a rhetorical question.

“I’ll be fine.”

She knew by now that “I’m fine” or “I’ll be fine” was George’s equivalent of whistling in the dark, a way of dealing with his nerves and fears. She decided to let him get away with it, because he’d lent her his coat and she was warming up.

He looked up at the drab mottled stone column and the matching clouds rolling past over its head.

“Better get on with it. It looks like it might clear up any minute.”

He blew his cheeks out in a big breath, like a diver about to start his run up on the springboard.

“Though, how the heck I’m supposed to catch a fire anyway in all this rain I’ve got no idea. Right.” He swiveled on his heel and headed for the door, one eye tracking the immobile dragons as he passed under them.

“Good luck.”

She headed for the shelter across the square. Halfway there she turned, and was a little surprised to see him standing at the door to the stairs, looking back at her with a strange expression. He changed it as soon as he realized she was seeing it; but for an unguarded instant, she saw all the hesitancy and the tentativeness beneath the bravado he’d been adopting all the way here from Fleet Street. He switched to a confident smile and waved at her, before pushing at the door.

“George!” she shouted, and ran back through the thinning rain. And ever after she never knew why she did what she did next, but she unzipped her pocket and handed him her sea-glass. “It’ll give you warning if things change. You know.” He felt a lump in his throat. He sensed how much the sea-glass meant to her.

“Edie—”

She waved him off and jogged away.

“Just don’t lose it. Get a bend on.”

He watched until she made the shelter of the building overhang. Then he pocketed the glass and pushed in through the door.

After Pudding Inside, there was a two-way turnstile and a narrow little booth on the right where a man was reading the paper and drinking steaming tea out of a thermos. He scarcely looked up as George dropped his coin into the depression in his narrow counter. He produced a ticket and a pamphlet and went back to his paper with a grunt that sounded like “No monkey business.” George cleared his throat and walked into the center of the plinth, and looked up. Illuminated by the regularly spaced lightbulbs, a stone staircase spiraled up the inside of the column, a black-painted safety railing, framing the narrow void of air in a snail’s whorl. At its center, two hundred feet above, was a core of whiter light where the door opened onto the cage and the sky beyond. Despite the lightbulbs, the space felt very old and distant from the city beyond. It had the clean smell of dry stone despite the rain outside.

George checked the sea-glass and started climbing. He climbed three steps at a time and counted as he went.

By the time he got to thirty, Edie, on the outside, was feeling worried. It wasn’t a specific worry. Though, with statues jumping off buildings and chasing her and trying to waffle her head flat, she didn’t suppose she really needed anything to be that specific about. In fact, it wasn’t specifically worry as such. It was more like a nagging void or a suddenly noticed absence. She’d once had an earache, and it had been really horrid, and she hadn’t known how she would go on bearing it. And her mother had read her a story, and that story had led to another. And after a bit she’d forgotten about the pain—which was fine and dandy, but all stories come to an end, and the ones her mother had been reading to her were no exception to the rule. And when she’d stopped listening to the last story, the real world returned, and she remembered the pain, and then it had throbbed back into action. What she felt now was exactly what she’d felt in the gap between realizing the story was over and knowing she’d forgotten the pain in her ear, and the sure and certain knowledge that it was about to come back, big time.

She was missing the sea-glass more than she’d expected, she realized. It must be that. It couldn’t be that she was missing George, who she wasn’t—she reminded herself—even sure if she trusted.

Though, why had she lent him the glass if she didn’t trust him? She pulled the jacket—his jacket—tighter. And in doing that she felt something bump against her, and she felt in the pocket and found the broken dragon’s head. Its blank eyes stared back at her, and she quickly put it back in the pocket, suddenly worried that it might rouse the nearby dragons by some sympathetic process she didn’t understand.

She wished she had the sea-glass. It had been with her for so long. It had only revealed its purpose once she had come to the city—but maybe that was because there weren’t things like taints at the seaside, or at least not where she’d grown up. Her seaside was not affluent enough to pay for bins to put your dog’s mess in, let alone statues or gargoyles.

A dark shadow flew between her and the sky. Her head came up on reflex, but she relaxed when she saw it was just a bird, not a dragon or a gargoyle.

And then she froze again. The rain was stopping. In fact, by the time she had realized it was stopping, it had stopped. And although Edie was right to be alarmed, the thing she was about to be terrified by was something else entirely.

It was behind her.

Something emerging from the shadows, like darkness becoming visible.