Desolation (14 page)

As he passed into the park, time slowed down. He could still hear the vehicular bustle of the city, but it seemed so much more distant, as if the trees around the perimeter sucked in chaos and breathed out serenity. It reminded him of the feeling he had experienced upon first entering the garden of 13 Endless Crescent, but this was more benevolent, and not as loaded with mystery. This was simply
nature wending its way through time, and mankind benefiting from its journey.

He chose a path at random and followed it into the heart of the park. The place was very well kept, planted areas neat and trimmed, the grass cut and watered, and there were benches at frequent intervals. Many of them bore memorial plaques for people who had loved to visit here. There were others in the park, but not many; school and work must keep the place quiet during the day. He passed a woman pushing her baby in a stroller, and they exchanged polite smiles. The baby gurgled something at him and Cain turned away, embarrassed. A dog ran up and sniffed around his feet, and a man called it away, apologizing, throwing a ball and sending his hound plunging into a bank of undergrowth. It growled, there were a few seconds of panicked rustling, and a squirrel darted from the bushes and ran up a nearby tree. The dog bounded after it, the ball forgotten.

Cain walked on, enjoying the heat of the day and the peaceful world around him. People found peace in different ways. A young woman skated by on roller skates, her curves accentuated by her tight clothing, knees and elbows padded. She ignored Cain as he moved aside to let her pass. A woman lay on the grass, reading. A man walked among a rose garden, sniffing blooms. Farther into the park, several women sat with their carriages in a circle while their toddlers ran about, fell over, laughed and cried. Cain did not know any of these people, and they did not know him. They were all alone here, and what stories did they have to tell?

The man sniffing the blooms, was he a painter of lost souls?

The woman reading her book, could she imagine unreality into being?

The roller skater, did she have a blade on her belt, even now sticky with the blood of a recent kill?

Cain doubted it, but he did not know. He knew no one. Everyone here—all these people having fun, relaxing, exercising, reading, pontificating, being busy living—could be as strange as the people in his house. Some could be even stranger. Every story is particular, and if “normal” is merely an average life, there are infinite extremes either side of that to be filled.

Cain had been thrown in with a group of people he had never met, and for once, living life on his own for the first time, he had to learn about them himself. Back at Afresh, any new resident was walked around the grounds and introduced, an act thought by the administrators to be an essential part to fitting in. But Cain was starting to realize that fitting in meant discovering things for yourself. Everyone perceived things differently, even the truth.

He had come here to rest, and he tried to cast such thoughts aside.

He walked on. The path twisted and turned and he lost himself in the park, purposely losing track of the junctions he passed over and the turns he took. He passed by pergolas, benches, and small ponds, and eventually emerged from a wooded area onto a gentle grassed slope, broken here and
there by single trees or flower beds. At that moment there was no one else in sight, so he walked twenty paces out onto the slope and sat down in the sun. There was shade beneath the trees, but he would move there later.

The view was stunning. At the bottom of the long slope was the main lake, obscured here and there by tall trees. A flock of ducks drew lines across its surface, and there were a few rowing boats out, their occupants mainly just sitting back and enjoying the slight movement as their heartbeats rocked the boats.

Cain ate his food, drank some water, started to read. He was reading
The Glamour
again, and as ever he found it easy relating to the characters' experience with invisibility. Cain felt that he could enter a room and remain unseen by anyone there. The sound of birds in the trees around him gave a curiously apt sound track to the novel, singing as if they were alone, without any humans ready to make out the secrets in their songs. He smiled at this, pleased that he could nurture such thoughts. His father had not made him that way.

An hour passed, he finished the drink, and he had read twenty pages of the novel. And when he realized that for the last fifteen minutes he had been reading the same page over and over, he tried to tell himself that the peace of the park was distracting.

Too many birds, singing and whistling their way through the day. Little kids playing and crying somewhere, their mothers cooing unintelligible succor to them. The occasional swish of leaves as a breath of air danced through the trees. The park
was talking to him, calling for him to relax. He closed the book and lay back, content to listen.

Cain heard the sound of music carried on the breeze. He jumped up and looked out for Whistler. It was surely not his neighbor, probably a car stereo blasting from one of the roads outside. But his instant reaction brought home the truth. He was not here to relax, he was here to decide what to do.

He picked up his litter and his book, bagged everything, and walked down toward the lake.

They had been playing him. It was ironic that the efforts they were expending to fool and confuse him made him feel more alone than ever. His pursuit of George had felt arranged, though he had no proof of that. Last night, however, was clearly a play from start to finish. And the only way to become involved in a play and influence its outcome was to become a player.

It was as easy as that. Cain's mind was made up before he even realized it, and by the time he reached the lake and started walking around it, he was making plans. He would not let his dreams control him, and he would not let the others in the house control his dreams. He would declare a new start to his life—here, now, in this park, at this precise instant—and determine to shed once and for all the stifling memories of his past. The dreams may still come, but he would better them. Magenta and Whistler and the others may toy with him for their own amusement, but from now on he would play his own part, not merely sit it out as a passive
victim of their games. From that would come acceptance, and perhaps even more of an understanding of how the world worked. To make his own life, he had to understand others. He would not let them frighten him away. Perhaps they
were
all odd, but they certainly did not have the monopoly on weirdness.

Pleased with himself, Cain bought an ice cream from a van and sat beside the lake. He heard music again, drifting across the water as if risen from its depths, and this time it was not the borrowed echo of a car stereo. He recognized the style of this, the sound, the rounded vibrations and exhalations of pan pipes. And as he looked across to the far side of the lake, he dropped the ice cream in his lap.

Even at this distance, Cain knew that the figure was Whistler. Tall, gray hair tied in a ponytail, his long black coat flapping out behind him even though the breeze was only slight, he walked across the grass slope where Cain had been sitting ten minutes earlier. And he was not alone. Like some modern-day Pied Piper, he led a strange procession after him: a woman pushing her baby in a buggy, a cat slinking from tree to tree for cover, a squirrel loping across the grass, several birds flying, hopping, flying again. All of them followed at a distance as if afraid to draw too close. Whistler seemed unaware or unconcerned; he simply played his pipes, strolled along, looking at the ground before him as if the rest of the park held no interest.

“No!” Cain said. He stood, his first inclination to run around the lake.
“No!”
He would catch up with Whistler and quiz him, or follow along with
the others to see where they were being led. “It's my own life. Leave me
be
!” He turned, brushing ice cream from his crotch, and started running around the lake.

Whistler had obviously followed him to the park and waited to make his presence known, expecting Cain to fall for the dupe and follow him. And now was the time Cain could make his own play. For whatever purpose, they were toying with him, his decision to flip expectations was about to be put to the test.

With Whistler here, Cain would be able to break into his flat. Perhaps then he would see what the tall man was all about.

As he ran from the park a shadow passed over him, fleeing rapidly across the grass and disappearing into a clump of trees. A waft of warm honey came to him and faded just as quickly. He looked up, but saw only a flicker as something disappeared above the trees.

Too big to be a bird
, he thought. But he shook his head and ran on. They were not going to trap him like that. His mind was made up.

The street was deserted and the house seemed quiet. The garden welcomed him with its customary covert rustlings, but he would not be drawn by them today. The front door was locked, so he used his key, slipped inside, and closed it again behind him. The lobby was still. A clock ticked somewhere out of sight, the doors to the basement and back garden were firmly shut, and he heard no signs of life from upstairs. If Magenta was in her flat above
him she was motionless, perhaps waiting for him to move first.

He hurried upstairs and stood outside Whistler's door. For a second he had a sudden flush of doubt. What if the man in the park had not been Whistler? But Cain was
certain
. It was too much of a coincidence for it to have
not
been Whistler. He would not let false doubts derail him now. He listened at the door, holding his breath, waiting there for a full minute. There were no sounds at all from inside; no music, no cautious footsteps.

Cain tried the handle, but the door was locked. He held the handle down, nudged at the door with his shoulder, and heard the frame creak. It did not sound very strong, but breaking in was not the right thing to do. Whistler had done nothing to him—none of them had, not really—and there was no justification for smashing his way into the man's flat, invading his privacy, doing something that Cain would hate having done to himself.

Those doubts again, assaulting his confidence.

Still, Cain turned the handle again, worked it back and forth, then listened at the door. No response from inside.

If only he
could
get in . . .

Cain had seen lots of films and read lots of books at Afresh, finding early on that his preference was for the fantastic. He had lived impossibilities, and now he wanted to read of them as well. Many of his preconceptions of how life was on the outside came from his viewing and reading. Any single source would have been damaging; basing his understanding of life on, say,
Something Wicked This
Way Comes
would not be the best way to adjust. But as a cumulative whole they not only presented him with a whole world, but made it as wide and varied as possible. And in that world, people sometimes did foolish things. Like leaving spare keys on the tops of door frames.

Cain felt above Whistler's door, and his fingers touched metal. He and the pan pipe player had obviously read some of the same books.

Already he felt guilt, cold as the key in his palm. It stared up at him accusingly, daring him to use it, urging him not to. After all the bad that had been done to him, Cain had no wish to unload it on other people. Yet simply looking around the flat could not be harmful, could it?

He felt alone in the house, and not only because it was deserted. Some people claimed that they would rather be hated than ignored, but for Cain anonymity would be preferable. At least that way he could still live his own life. Loneliness was something he was more than used to; being actively picked on was not.

If entering Whistler's flat gave him the upper hand in any way, then it could not be a bad thing.

It's your life now
, the Voice had said. Cain was terrified by that, but he agreed. And he had to protect himself.

For some reason, slipping the key into the lock brought on a fear of the siren. Perhaps the thrill he was feeling at acting for himself was something his father would have abhorred. Pure Sight, the old man would have said, relies on purity of mind and soul. Cain was happy to sully himself.

The door swung open and the siren remained absent. Glancing around the landing, checking that no one had witnessed his crime, Cain moved inside Whistler's flat and shut the door behind him.

Wherever he had been, he had always belonged there. His father's house had been maintained to keep Cain within its walls, for whatever nefarious reasons. Afresh was not only a home, it was a secure unit, dedicated to treating Cain and holding him within its grasp. Here, in a stranger's flat, he had stepped outside the realms of his own existence and entered someone else's world.

Everything was different, and for a minute he was overwhelmed by the rush of sensory input, remembering the siren again, the agony in his head and the anger in his heart. There was a heavy smell of herbs permeating the flat, warm and fresh and complex. The carpet was pink, the walls a luxurious green, the paint so textured that it looked like felt lining the hallway. Pictures hung at dozens of random locations on the walls, all seemingly chosen at random; landscapes, impressionist art, portraits, technical detailing, abstracts, flowers, animals, nudes, sex images, pictures verging on pornography, religious iconography, and more. Walking along the hall felt like taking a dozen journeys, and in the end Cain closed his eyes, breathing heavily and wishing he were back in his flat. There at least familiarity would keep him calm.

Whistler's living room was such a startling contrast that the plain white walls, carpet, and monotone furniture hit Cain just as hard. It felt so empty, so soulless that he almost backed straight out, preferring
the intensity of the hallway over such a sensation of nothing. But then he noticed the glassfronted bookcase in the corner filled with red-spined tomes, and he went to investigate. The doors were unlocked, and Cain opened one leaf to read the book titles. He was not sure what to expect; he had barely spoken to Whistler, and hearing his music so briefly could communicate nothing of the man's intellect. But judging by the explosion of style in the hallway, he guessed that the books would cover a multitude of subjects, both factual and fictional. What he had not expected was that each one had been written by Whistler himself.