CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Siege in the Sky

When George had slid pell-mell across the wet skylight and been launched into the void above the glass-roofed engine shed far below, there had been an instant of actual and momentary weightlessness that battled a sickening sense of disbelief, as his world went quiet . . .

—And then gravity took over and “off the roof” turned into “down toward the ground.”

George had heard that people who fall off high buildings lose consciousness before they hit the pavement. It was one of those playground facts that kids tell each other, like the one about drowning, how gentle it is in the end. George had always wondered how anyone knew this stuff. It wasn’t as if you could ask dead people how it had felt. He had fallen through the air like a flailing starfish, watching the humped-glass roof of the train shed come up to meet him with appalling finality.

He didn’t lose consciousness. In the few seconds of free fall, his mind remained as sharp as the glass panels he was about to hit. His life didn’t flash before his eyes. He didn’t experience a moment of relief, of oneness with the universe. He just felt alone. Brutally, sadly, and irrevocably alone. And he just had time to think what a terrible waste this was, how terrible it was to have wasted such a precious and extraordinary miracle as life. He felt ashamed at how little he had made of what he had been given, more ashamed of anything he’d ever done or not done in his life.

He wondered if this terrible pain had gone through his father’s mind the instant of the car crash that had killed him. As George accelerated toward impact, his last thoughts tumbled after one another, and they were these: he knew his father had definitely felt all of this, and he knew that his last thought had absolutely been of George, and he knew that the pain of that last thought had been unspeakable, and he knew this just as surely as he knew he had gone to sleep every night since wishing for just one last word with his dad. He thought of his mother and remembered the good times and laughter and realized, just as he ran out of air and hit something solid, that she would now spend her life unable to say those last words to him. And the sudden pain of that realization was worse than the impact.

The impact wasn’t too bad.

What took the edge off was the ton or so of flying sandstone that swooped in at a shallow angle and caught him, flattening off his downbound trajectory and slowing his velocity into a survivable deceleration. George had the air knocked out of him as the gargoyle almost fumbled the catch, and things went black for a microsecond, but then he saw the wing that was flapping above him, and he saw the mended seam. He twisted his head to see the gargoyle’s face, which spared him a quick look and said:

“Gack!”

“Hello, Spout,” said George, fighting a ridiculously inappropriate bubble of hysterical laughter that was rising in his throat. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this. . . .”

Spout swerved suddenly. A large gargoyle swiped a talon at them, and then a second one flew in from above. Spout only managed to avoid a collision by flying into the side of the building and bracing himself against the scaffolding. On reflex, George grabbed on to the plastic safety webbing that shrouded the cold tubing. Spout punched away another assailant with a snarl and then turned and slashed at George. For a moment, George thought the creature had perversely snatched him from death only to have the satisfaction of decapitating him. And then the talon whistled past him and slashed a hole in the webbing. Before George could quite realize what was happening, Spout had grabbed him and pushed him into the relative safety of the decking within. George sprawled on the splintery boards, then turned in time to see Spout reaching a talon inside the slash.

“Ging,” he hissed urgently. George held out the fragment of wing, and the talon closed around it.

The great stone mouth opened and produced the first clear word George had heard from it, probably because it actually did begin with a G.

“Go.”

George was shocked by the clarity.

“You’re saying ‘go’?”

Spout nodded fiercely, one eye scanning the sky above him.

“Go, Eigengang, go!”

George got it.

“Eigengang? You’re calling me Ironhand?”

Spout exhaled heavily and rolled his eyes as if George were actually denser than the rock Spout had been carved from—and then Spout was savagely yanked back into the blackness as a gargoyle dropped and tackled him around the neck.

George didn’t waste any time wondering why Spout had started to talk. He just decided anywhere would be better than where he was right now. As he saw gargoyles buffeting the protective mesh around the scaffolding, he decided to try for anywhere with solid brick walls around it. He ran along the clanking aerial walkway, trying each window as he passed. Four windows along, he got lucky. The window was in the process of being replaced, so there was just a dark hole in the brickwork.

He vaulted in and rushed blindly through a room full of timber and workbenches. He saw a door on the far end, which he ran for.

As he burst through the doorway, something grabbed him in an all-enveloping tackle. For a jolting moment, he knew it was some fresh hellish monster, and then he got himself disentangled and realized he’d just run into sheets of plastic that had been hung to keep the workman’s dust in one room. He pushed through into a long, dark corridor and stumbled abruptly, his foot—the one without a shoe on it—finding a void where the floor should be, and he crunched on a rough surface below. He looked down, and in the murk, realized he’d gone through the floor and onto the lath and plaster of the ceiling below, because half the floorboards had been removed and were stacked on the side wall of the corridor.

He got up and made his way forward, picking a path as quickly as he could, past the long holes in the floor— hoping he was going to find a staircase soon. He thought he could hear stone wings and talons keeping pace with him on the scaffolding that ran parallel with the corridor, one short room away. He was sure he heard great stone knuckles rapping on the windows behind him, testing them. He bumped against a bench, and something heavy thudded onto the floor.

It was a club hammer, the big heavy kind used for hitting cold chisels.

He picked it up. Having three pounds of drop-forged steel on the end of a stout hickory handle was just the confidence-booster George needed. There was a piece of rope looped through a hole in the bottom of the handle, and he put it around his wrist.

He remembered a comic book his dad had had in his workroom, a memory of his own childhood—The Mighty Thor. He’d been a superhero with a hammer like this. George didn’t feel much like a superhero right now, as he teetered his way carefully along the skeletonized floor joists. The sound of gargoyles tracking him seemed to come closer and closer.

He pushed through another curtain of plastic sheeting and found himself in a great, long room. It was so full of builders’ equipment that in the dark it felt like an obstacle course: scaffolding towers and ladders hugged walls that were in the process of having the plaster scraped off, back to the brickwork beneath; big sacks of plaster and stacks of paint cans were piled next to blocks of Sheetrock panels; and there was even a cement mixer in the middle of the floor. George closed the door behind him and locked it for good measure. He stood there, shivering and wet. Now that he was still for a moment, he had time to realize how very cold he was.

The room had windows on both sides. George was pleased to see that the ones where the outside scaffolding was were all boarded up. So were many on the other side, facing Euston Road. He moved slowly around the edge of the room and wondered if he was safe. He couldn’t hear any more noise from the gargoyles outside; though maybe that was because they, too, were keeping silent and trying to listen, so as to figure out exactly where he was.

If that was so, he gave them a big clue by almost immediately knocking something off a table, something that clashed like a cymbal as it hit the floor. He bent down and stopped its rolling before it made any more noise. It came apart as he lifted it back up, and nearly spilled its contents out the bottom. He caught the lid awkwardly because his free hand still had the club hammer in it. It was a biscuit tin, and George was holding it upside down. He put the hammer down on a tabletop, turned the biscuit tin the right way up, grabbed a handful of biscuits, and ate them greedily, almost on autopilot as he moved away from the table, scanning the room for anything else useful. He wondered if there was a heater in among the jumble, and whether, if there were, would he be able to warm up in front of it. He squeezed between a stack of cylinders that looked solid but then gave and wobbled as soon as he touched them. They were rolls of soft roof insulation. He reached a hand out to stop them from toppling.

And then he went very still, as out of the edge of his vision he saw an ominous group of men behind him, their faces standing out in the relative darkness of the corner of the room.

He didn’t look directly at them, but carried on as if he hadn’t seen them. They were so still that there was definitely something not right about them. He didn’t know why a line of men would wait in the dark, just watching him, but he knew it couldn’t be for any good reason. He drifted slowly back to table where he’d left the hammer. He wanted the reassuring heft of it in his hand before he confronted them, and he figured the way to do that was to act nonchalant. His mouth was suddenly dry as he reached for another biscuit. He crunched into it and then put the lid back on the tin.

He reached toward the tabletop, hoping the men would think he was just going to put the tin down. He placed it on the table, then grabbed the hammer and whirled, ready to lash out if they tried to rush him.

“Okay,” he hissed. “What do you want?”

As he pulled the hammer from the table, he caught a coffee mug, which went spinning off the edge. The only answer he got was the sound of it smashing noisily in darkness.

The men didn’t move. He was now facing them directly, so he could see this clearly. They just stared at him, great white moon faces impassive in the gloom.

He tried to swallow, but the biscuit had gone to sawdust in his dry mouth, and he choked. He stepped toward the line of men, determined that it was better to face them than turn his back and run away. There was something very unnatural in their stillness.

He dry-swallowed the biscuit fragments.

“Seriously, who are you—?”

One step closer and then he stopped dead.

They weren’t anyone. They were just a line of white hard hats and overalls hanging on the wall. It was only his fear and the darkness that had turned them into people.

He lowered the hammer in relief. Better than not being people, they were dry clothes. He quickly rummaged through and found two work jackets and a padded shirt jacket. The shirt jacket had the flat, slightly sour smell of plaster, but George was in no position to be choosy. He stripped off his wet shirt and shrugged into the padded one. The quilted interior was cold against his skin, but he buttoned the jacket up and tied the arms of his wet shirt around his waist to keep his body heat in. He put the smaller of the two work jackets on top of it. It was rough, dark wool with some kind of plastic covering on the shoulders, but it was warm. Almost immediately he could feel the heat returning to his outer body. He stumbled over something at foot level, and was pleased to see it was a pair of paint- and plaster-covered workman’s boots, like leather Wellingtons, without laces. He jammed his bare foot inside. The boot was big, but not unwearably so. He put the other boot on and stuck his other shoe down the back of his belt, cinching it tight. He rolled up the sleeves of the shirt, went back to the table, where he filled the jacket pockets with the rest of the biscuits and looked for something to drink.

There was nothing except a paint-splattered plastic kettle, so he drank the water from that, all the time keeping his ears open for any sign of gargoyles trying to get in. The only sounds he could hear were normal nighttime city sounds: traffic, the occasional thump of a car stereo in the street below, the high-pitched whine of a scooter, and in the distance the wah-wah and shrill electronic chirrup of a police siren. He crossed to the street side of the room and looked out one of the windows. No sign of trouble.

A gust of wind blew cold in from the window space next to the one he was looking out of, and a rattle of chains alerted him to the fact that it was somehow open to the night air. He hurried over and found that it was open but blocked by the huge circular mouth of a rubbish chute. It was one of those long segmented tubes that you see attached to the side of buildings under renovation. The kind that are essentially made from many bottomless dustbins chained together to form a long snakelike slide that drops all the builders’ debris into a Dumpster below. This one was slightly curved, and George couldn’t see what was at the bottom.

He stuck his head out of the small triangular gap at the side of the chute to see if the angle was shallow enough for him to even think of using it as an escape slide. The bad news was that it wasn’t, really. The worse news was that something hissed on the wall to his right. George looked up to see three gargoyles flattened like geckos on the exterior of the building, all staring at him.

He ducked away fast, but not fast enough to miss seeing that the outside of the building was swarming with stone creatures, all listening at windows or scanning the brickwork. He ran back to the door, knowing he had to get out of there. He bumped into obstacles as he went— sending a teetering pile of felt roofing rolls scattering ahead of him. He hurdled one and then caught his shins against the sharp, hard edge of a paint can and reached the door in an ungainly stumble, dropping his hammer as he reached out to steady himself. It clattered loudly on the floor. He figured that the gargoyles must know where he was by now, so he definitely had to get somewhere else fast.

He tugged at the dead bolt on the door. It was stuck. He’d rammed it too tight when he’d locked the door. He gritted his teeth and pulled harder. It wouldn’t budge, no matter how hard he pulled—then something hit the other side of the door, which freed the bolt, and the door flew open, sending him flying backward.

Two stone talons appeared on either side of the doorjamb, and as George scrambled to his feet, a gargoyle that had once had two horns but now only had one and a stump snarled into the space between them. The gargoyle was too big to get into the room without ducking and edging sideways—and that was what saved George.

He knew he was too far from his hammer to get it, but his hand closed on the wire handle of one of the paint cans he’d tripped over. As the gargoyle was ducking sideways and starting to unfold one wing into the room, George lunged forward, swinging the paint can in a desperate haymaker.

The weight of the can developed a powerful centrifugal force as he swung it over his shoulder, so that by the time it was coming back around on the upswing, it was going at quite a speed. The gargoyle snarled and launched a wild bite at George—and thereby stepped into the blow. The can caught it right under the chin. The force of the blow jarred George’s hand, but he managed to keep hold of the can as the gargoyle went cartwheeling backward out into the corridor and ended up flat on its back. It lay there stunned, then shook its head and tried to right itself.

George felt adrenaline spiking in his nostrils and heard his teeth grind as he clenched his jaw and went after the creature. He swung the can left, and hit it hard on the side of its head, and then he caught it on the back-swing. The can burst as the gargoyle’s head bounced on the floor, and sprayed red paint all over its face and wing.

George saw its neck go slack, and backed up fast, rebolting the door behind him. Something else was rattling the boards that obscured the windows on the opposite side to the street. As the bolt slammed shut, the thought occurred to George that unless he came up with a plan for getting out of the room, he might just be caught like a rat that had locked itself in its own trap.

He wondered if he could survive the five-floor drop by sliding down the rubbish chute. He thought of the Dumpster that it must empty into, and all the lethal, hard, and sharp rubbish it could be filled with. Bad idea.

His legs were starting to shake, wanting to run but having nowhere to go. And now something started rattling the boarded-up windows on the chute side of the room. It really was time to go. He kicked out in frustration, to stop his leg from shaking as much as anything else, and connected with a soft roll of roof insulation. It thudded across the room, and as it did so, George knew what he was going to do. He picked up the nearest roll. Although it was unwieldy, he ran across the room and threw it down the chute. It just fit, with about four inches on either side. He turned and grabbed another, threw it after the first, and then went for another one, working fast and methodically so he wouldn’t have time to listen to the second thoughts banging insistently on the back door of his consciousness.

There was an alarming splintering noise from the blocked window behind him, and he saw that the creature on the other side had managed to get one corner of the boarding free. It was definitely time to leave.

He took a deep breath and swung one leg into the chute. Then one of those second thoughts got through. If he reached the ground in enough of one piece to walk away, exactly how was he going to do that? The gargoyles on the outside wall would recognize him and swoop down.

He swung his leg back out and ran across to the hooks where he had gotten his jacket. He quickly jammed a second work jacket over the one he was already wearing. It was a tight fit, but when it was done, he felt bigger and fatly padded. Then he pulled a hard hat onto his head, snatched up the gloves he’d left on the table, and hammed his hands into them as he ran back to the chute, trying not to look behind at the new banging noise that was rocking the door on its flimsy hinges.

He didn’t let himself think twice this time; though he did grab the hammer and another roll of insulating felt as he passed. He tossed the roll down the chute and swung straight after it into the yawning plastic gullet.

As his hands released the rim of the chute, he heard a loud crack from the window on the other side of the room—but then he was gone, plunging groundward at speed.

He could feel his stomach leap skyward as he fell in the opposite direction. Everything happened at once as he tried to remember to keep his mouth closed so he wouldn’t bite his tongue on impact, as he’d once done on a high flume at a water park. His hard hat bobbled off and fell after him as he attempted to slow his descent by braking with his shoes and elbows and gloves, bracing his back against the curved interior of the pipe.

The outward friction didn’t seem to slow him much, but he hoped it was enough to do more than turn a clean but fatal free fall into a juddering death-slide. His attempt to slow himself down kicked dirt off the sides of the tube, so he was falling into a blinding cloud of choking dust as he went. He stopped breathing and was trying to think how he’d know when to stop his feet from pushing outward in time to bring them together and attempt a parachute landing, when it all became academic: he hit bottom with a slamming jolt that knocked out all the air left in him as his knees pistoned upward toward his chin, and he stopped dead. But alive, he realized with a wave of elation that didn’t diminish half a beat later as his hard hat caught up with him and bounced off his head.

He stayed very still, surrounded by the soft pink plug of roofing felt that had cushioned his fall, trying not to cough and splutter in the dust cloud his impact had kicked up. Once he’d really believed the evidence of his senses and ascertained that nothing was broken, he grabbed his hat and gripped the hammer tightly as he squeezed himself down through the roofing felt and into the half-empty Dumpster beyond.

It was covered with a tarpaulin and tied down against the wind, but he found a gap and managed to serpentine, headfirst, out of it. He risked a glance upward, and saw that all the gargoyles were massed around the windows of the room he’d just left, five stories above. He darted into the protection given by the overhanging scaffolding and walked as quickly and quietly toward the corner of the building as he could manage.

If the gargoyles hadn’t heard him falling down the chute, he was sure they must be able to hear his heart hammering. He remembered to put the white hard hat on his head as he came to the end of the scaffolding, and walked out into the street with only the slightest hesitation. Not looking back and up was almost the hardest thing he’d had to do, but he knew he couldn’t. Because any gargoyle who looked down mustn’t see his face and realize that the bulky man walking away beneath the hat was, in fact, a boy.

His shoulders itched and his ears strained for the sound of anything whistling out of the sky behind him, but by the time he had walked halfway past the next building, he thought he might have gotten away with it. As he passed the cascading fonts announcing the entrance to the British Library, he gave himself the luxury of twirling nonchalantly on his feet. He saw that the coast was clear, and his knees almost buckled with relief as he hurried down Euston Road.

He didn’t notice a huge statue turn its head and look at him from a vantage point set back in the piazza outside the British Library. The huge male figure was bent over a large pair of dividers, as if measuring the world. He looked as though he had been made, cut up into chunks, and then badly reassembled, with gaps where the joins didn’t quite meet.

The giant looked at him, then up at the rookery on St. Pancras. He put his fingers in his mouth and whistled.