The City's Son by Tom Pollock Read Free Book Online Page A

battered muscles squealed in protest as the rails blurred under her. For a second they were side by side, but slowly, agonisingly slowly, he pulled away. Beth’s breath seared her lungs, but he just ran faster and faster. His motion became strangely smooth, sinuous, like a street rat’s. He almost didn’t look human any more.
    He jumped up onto the wall of the viaduct and was silhouetted against London. For an instant, the low tumble of the city’s skyline was like an army, backing the scrawny boy. Then he dropped over the edge.
    Beth arrived seconds later, wheezing and cursing. She craned her head over the wall. Early morning cars hooted up at her from the street below. But in between their fleeting shapes she saw nothing.

CHAPTER 7
    The Thames Barrier breaches the water, glinting like the knuckles of a giant gauntlet. It’s a Saturday, and the industrial estates of North Greenwich are empty: little fenced-off wastelands. Gutterglass can manifest anywhere in London, but there are places where the spirit of rubbish is stronger, where it accretes in every brick and concrete pore.
    I’m squatting in a car park, behind a car with two missing hubcaps and a cardboard for-sale sign in the window. Rats skitter past, but I ignore them. They’d get a message to Glas eventually, but I want it to travel faster than that.
    I dig my hand into the ground. The soil crumbles between my fingers and tiny black ants teem over my palm. That’s better . I pull a small bottle from my pocket, yank the cork out with my teeth, and allow the fumes to waft over an insect’s antennae. It freezes for an instant, then vibrates ecstatically and races away over the back of my hand, down my leg and into the earth. You can’t beat a hive mind for speed of transmission.
    Now I wait.
    I think of the girl from last night, her broad, flat cheekbones and messy hair. We can take him , she said: we , even though I’d only met her five minutes before and I could have smelled the terror in her sweat through the Oxford Circus crush on a Saturday afternoon. What kind of person thinks like that? We.
    Because I’m alone, because it’s a secret, I let myself smile at that.
    Seagulls gyre overhead, cawing. As I watch, one of them drops out of its lazy circle and spirals fast towards the ground, flapping its wings rapidly to break its landing. The gull looks at me with one yellow eye. I can see a lump distending its throat. It jerks its head back and forth and gags.
    With a slippery sound, a tangle of worms and woodlice spills from its beak onto the ground, spreading over the concrete. My little ant races away from the pack, its job done. It leaves a sticky trail of bird saliva behind it.
    I watch as the bugs work, dragging empty foil tubes, crisp packets and chunks of plywood to the centre of the courtyard. Plastic bags are torn into strips by ferocious, gnashing weevils. Toes form first, and then legs and hips, and a higgledy-piggledy sculpture of rubbish rises uncertainly in front of me.
    The eggshell eyes blink. They, and only they, are always the same. Glas is a woman this time, the rusting handlebars of a bike making up her hips, long strands of tornplastic her hair. The head of a worm wriggles unhappily at the end of one hand. I find an ice-lolly stick from the dirt near my feet and hand it to her. The worm coils itself around it and breaks it into knuckle-joints.
    ‘Thank you,’ she says. Her eggshell-gaze catalogues the burns and black blood-bruises on my chest. Yesterday she’d have tutted or cooed in sympathy, but a lot’s changed since then.
    ‘Nothing beyond your ability to heal,’ she notes with satisfaction. ‘The wraith’s dead, I take it?’
    ‘Earthed behind Waterloo,’ I confirm. ‘I got off light. I reckon the extra power was too much for her; it broke her after a few hours. She was confused, already bleeding out. It was a mercy at the end.’
    ‘That’s something then.’ A little thing. She sighs like she has to be grateful for