Castle Of Bone (7 page)

Hugh never doubted that the attack would succeed, and could not remember subsequently a single detail; only the curious relief he felt when the castle had been stormed and taken. (“It isn’t a patch on Ivanhoe,” Penn whispered in his ear. “Now that
was
a proper castle.”) He did not understand why its capture should seem so crucial, nor why he should feel such relief, since he already knew the outcome. Yet he did feel relief. It carried him through the rest of the programme in a dream, scarcely noticing any of it, his ears still filled with the triumph of trumpets, his eyes with the glitter and fierceness of steel points and blades. The castle was flat again, amateurishly painted, yet still to his mind and memory it was stone, four-square and strong against invasion and attack, the picture in his mind more powerful than the one before his eyes.

He dreamed that night; indeed he not only expected, he forced this dream, or had the illusion that he did. He felt all-powerful. He took the holly trees along the fence in their garden, rearranged them in his mind, and sure enough found himself beside a line of holly trees on a hilltop, looking down on the castle now, or so it seemed.

He was close enough to see it in more detail than before. Trees stood near it, leafless still, and the wind blew mightily and threw the trees about. It looked almost as if the castle standing among them turned, spun, as if it revolved on a spool or plinth. There were bushes as well as trees crouched close to the ground like animals – like lions, Hugh thought. Some were bolt upright, some lay flat, yet all were wakeful, watchful. The roaring of the wind sounded like the lions roaring. The whole landscape seemed to have come to life about Hugh today.

And then he saw a man below him galloping towards the castle. It was the man he had seen before, but there was a glitter about him now. Bit, bridle, sword and spear gave off little points of light. Hugh thought he heard sounds from them, clinks, glitters and jinglings, just as he had thought he heard the roaring lions.

Horse and man galloped in slow motion at first, uphill, but they quickened rapidly, the slope levelling out. As they swept faster and faster across the ground, Hugh began running too, stumbling over the prickly grass, while the castle turned in front of him. He thought he saw men on the battlements now, archers with bent bows. He could have sworn there were roaring lions all around – watching the castle instead of his step, as he gasped for breath, he lost footing, stumbled and fell, banging his head severely. He lay with the sky, the earth, the whole world spinning and turning about, then within, his head, then found himself lying giddily, in darkness, in warmth, in his own bed.

He stilled the spinning deliberately, by turning between the sheets. Something prickled him through his pyjamas. He put his hand down and the same something was prickling his hand, several places at once across one small area of skin. He pulled out a holly leaf, and threw it on the floor beside his bed.

CHAPTER NINE

Next morning Hugh provided the forgotten tortoise with a cardboard box and some lettuce leaves. Then he set up an experiment. He had woken with a passionate desire for knowledge; not simply to watch the cupboard working as they had done yesterday, but to understand the mechanics, how and why it worked. Just as he always wanted to paint alone, so now he wanted to do this alone. He peered over the bannister on their landing to make sure that Jean was not on her way upstairs, and then closed the door very quietly and carefully.

The box of buttons was beneath his bed. Hugh pulled it out, opened and searched through it carefully until he found three brass buttons, all identical except that one was less tarnished than the other two. This one Hugh chose to put in the cupboard first, shutting the door on it. He timed the interval by the second hand on his watch and after thirty seconds exactly, opened the cupboard again.

The second button he left for a minute on the same shelf; the third for one minute and twenty seconds. The first button emerged like the button the day before, two lumps of rock veined just decipherably with metal. The second was still a button, but infinitely shinier, as if new from the maker’s mould. The third button, left in longest, came out smelted, liquid, hot. Hugh burnt his fingers and swore out loud as the metal cooled and hardened before his eyes.

Rummaging in the button box he managed to find a fourth brass button, with an anchor on it, just as the others had. He left this in for the same length of time as he had the third, but it emerged only as two lumps of stone, like the button he had left for half a minute only.

He concluded then that you could not control this past at all; that is, you could not determine the stage of its past to which you wanted some object to revert, by the length of time you left it in the cupboard. The cupboard worked to its own timings, had its own logic. It would have comforted Hugh a little to have disproved that, if only minimally. If time as he knew it, running in a straight line, from the past through the present to the future, had related to the cupboard, even in reverse, it would have been something to cling to, to make him feel safe. It must be orthodox time, he thought, which made life seem relatively stable and ordinary. If time melted, had no force, then space, the whole physical world would easily melt as well. Hugh longed for one aspect of the cupboard to be controllable.

He stood staring at it, as if the cupboard itself, its wood, its form, might divulge some of its reason and purposes. He held a door open with one hand and rested his other hand on a shelf. He was stretched across the cupboard, his arms wide, but the cupboard seemed to hold him, rather than he it. The sun flowed past him, bringing out the close grain of the wood (so close that to the naked eye it scarcely made patterns on the wood, as coarser graining does). Light brought out the differential tarnishing of the thin brass hanging-rail. In one place he could see all colours there, oilish rainbow colours like the colours of the melted plastic.

Hugh dropped his hands suddenly and stepped right back. He clenched his hands and stood perfectly still, his head singing curiously. He took one step forward – hesitated – pulled his foot back.

He wanted – he could not look at what he wanted, because he knew that he must not, should not do it. But he wanted to; only, he was afraid. He put his foot forward again; he could not help it, it might have been dragged; and snatched it back. And again he could not help it, for his fear took over. He felt the two contrary pulls that he had felt before, himself ruling neither, yet ruled by both. They cancelled one another now and left him motionless.

He wanted to get inside the cupboard. There was a little, clear, moving picture inside his head, of stepping in, crushing himself up, pulling the doors shut on him. The doors snapped across his mind, cutting off pictures, making his eyes blind. It was dark inside the cupboard. The brass rail sang above him. He could see nothing now, only feel it.

Darkness. Hugh shook his head. For there was no darkness, only full daylight, hot sun. He stood staring at the cupboard, and the wanting to enter it was still so strong, it pulled him forward. He took one step forward and another, telling himself it was only to retrieve the pool of hardened metal that still lay on the floor in front of the cupboard. He bent, reached out a hand, stepped forward again. One foot was actually in the cupboard now. In a moment the rest of him would have followed. But –

“Hugh,
Hugh
,” came a voice behind him and the crash of an opening door. “Penn and Anna are here. Mum says we ought to go. She’ll take us down to the station.”

“I don’t believe she’s ready, for a start.” Hugh’s voice belonged to someone else. His eyes blinked in the sunlight.

“Well she is, for once. You’d better hurry up,” said Jean.

“Well I’m not.”

“Well hurry up. What have you been doing, Hugh?”

“It’s far too late to go anyway. It’ll be jammed by now, in the holidays. I haven’t been doing anything.”

They were going to the zoo. It was one of Hugh’s favourite places, he went there often, by himself. He went to observe and also draw, animals, buildings, people – observing perhaps quite as much if not more than he actually drew, keeping all forms, animate or inanimate, in his head, playing around with them, distorting, rethinking them, and setting them on paper at last, if ever he did, transformed by his feelings and impressions; forms both remembered and remade.

These expeditions, however, were not only strictly solitary but usually as early in the morning as the zoo opened. He had been planning this trip alone too – attracted as much as repelled by the prospect of the crowds, because he had meant to observe them as closely as he observed the animals – but his mother had seized on it as a means of paying back yesterday’s hospitality by Penn’s parents. (Penn’s mother had given them all supper after the tournament.) Hugh had protested of course, but less than he would have done ordinarily, because his wish to be solitary had been partly overlaid by the compulsion to be with the other three. He had no choice in any case, the matter was decided by his mother, which for once made things easier. She gave Hugh money for all of them and a picnic lunch, rather untidily wrapped. She also gave him three letters to post, because she said she would like them to have the zoo postmark on.

Penn had been angry about the zoo at first; he considered it childish. But he could offer no better suggestion, and when it came to it, all four being in a curiously dreamlike state that day, the zoo seemed as good a place to dream as anywhere. Even the ordinary animals seemed creatures of fantasy, and the stranger ones had never appeared so extraordinary; elongations, distortions, incredibilities; long-necked giraffes and long-nosed elephants, loose-limbed gibbons swinging hand over hand from rail to rail to rail, seals sliding into and through the water, smooth-skinned, rubbery (they barked and splashed, but the movements were unrelated, entirely silent); striped tigers; and lions,
lions,
thought Hugh, and pushed the thought of lions away, deliberately.

He went to the elephant house. House felt the wrong word though, it was more like being underground in an eccentrically lit and hewn-out cave, or like the crypt of a castle (Hugh wished he could stop thinking of castles, too.) There were staged areas of orange light, in which, framed by pillars, wrinkled, primaeval-looking creatures stood, elephants and rhinoceroses, their every wrinkle having definition and importance. Hugh felt as if he had never properly looked at either animal before. They were dusted most of them with yellow sand, this thicker in the cracks and wrinkles, and looked more like reptiles than animals with their naked skins and little, sunken eyes. They looked like that pig, Hugh thought, and again wished that he had not.

He stood and stared at one rhinoceros, bigger than the rest; it stared back with surprisingly mild-looking eyes, almost benevolent.

“Wouldn’t like him for breakfast,” a girl said behind Hugh and giggled. Hugh did not turn around, but glowered to himself.

There was a trench between animals and onlookers, a shallow trench with steps down into it and short stone blocks lining the centre, like old-fashioned milestones. It was scarcely a barrier. He and the rhinoceros might have been in the same dimension, there seemed nothing to stop Hugh reaching it, or it reaching him. It felt familiar suddenly, and then Hugh realized that it was like standing on the hill looking across at the castle. As then, he seemed close and yet remote. When there came sudden movement, he even expected it to be a man on horseback, but it was only a little girl who ran down from the viewing floor and clutched at one of the stone blocks in the trench. Hugh gasped, moved to snatch her from danger, his sense of alarm heightened by what he had been imagining. But no one else seemed to think it dangerous. A man walked down the steps and brought the child back on his shoulders, smiling, while behind him the rhinoceros ambled to the rear of its enclosure. It moved joint by joint as if made by an armourer. Its skin looked as if laid on it in plates, by nails. It did not look real at all, Hugh thought. Perhaps what seemed ordinary reality was no less odd than his new world after all, just as the new world could come to seem as ordinary as reality.

The other three waited outside the house.

“We’ve had enough of this. Let’s eat in the park,” said Penn.

“We could row on the lake then, afterwards,” said Hugh, glad at the thought of escape, “I’ve got enough money left.”

“The letters,” Jean said. “Will you post them, Hugh?”

Hugh stood staring at the letters, blinking furiously, his eyes taking an inordinate time to adjust themselves to daylight.

“What’s the matter?” asked Penn, echoed by Jean. All of them were staring at him oddly, Hugh thought. He glanced around wildly, he wanted to escape, but he could not; anywhere he turned he saw them, castles. The elephant house, the bear terraces, the seal rocks all looked rugged, turreted, like castles with battlements and towers.

He held up each of the letters in turn. There had been a new issue of stamps only yesterday. Hugh had never seen these before. One letter bore a stamp to go to America, another a fivepenny, the third a threepenny stamp. The theme was the castles of England: the first had Carmarthen Castle, the second Windsor, the third, Harlech Castle.

“Castles,” Hugh said to himself, and then out loud “Castles.” He managed to shift himself and set off running through the crowds to find the postbox at the main gate. He could not get rid of the letters fast enough, they felt like fires in his hand, imagined or real he could not judge by now. He went to the wrong gate, and so could not find the postbox at first, dodging frantically through the milling and purposeless crowd, mistaking a woman in red for the box once, and finding it at last more by luck than decision, throwing the letters in immediately. One missed the slot, it dropped, he had to pick it up again. And when it was done, when all three were gone, he leaned against the box, gasping, to the surprise of the postman who came at that moment to empty it.