Idea in Stone (23 page)

Stefan stepped off the airport bus, back in the city. He walked with casual, slow steps to the path that led down into Princes Street Gardens. In another time, the Gardens were a fetid loch where the sewage ran down from the volcanic ridge on which the Old Town rested. The water contained the drowned bodies of dogs and witches. Today, it was a verdant park containing living dogs and sunbathers.

Stefan sat on a wooden bench marked with a memorial plaque and looked out at the people in the small grassy valley. He watched a group of shirtless boys kick a football, their skin nearly as pale as the white ball. Backpackers lay next to their packs and bedrolls. Stefan envied their portability, but didn’t feel any compulsion to be one of them. Beyond the far side of the park, trains creaked and sang like metal whales as they pulled themselves along the tracks.

The cast would be well on their way to Spain now. But Stefan was not. He had enough money to stay in the hotel that night, then a few more nights in a hostel. Beyond that—he didn’t want to think about what would happen beyond that.

His concentration flitted away like a moth. He got up and headed across the Waverley Bridge toward the Old Town. The city revealed more of itself to him now; he could navigate his way from the Grassmarket to the Cowgate to the Royal Mile—though the capillaries of wynds and closes seemed to open and close, or change their destinations, and a few corners of the town stayed out of his reach.

The Mile was alive with the tail ends of the Fringe Festival. Actors offered him handbills for their shows, but he refused them. He had no more inclination to be involved in theatre.

A scrawny man in cycling shorts made a show of twisting himself through hoops. A young woman dressed as a flapper posed robotically on an oversized music box, and further down the street a man stood rigid in Roman robes, his face covered in white greasepaint to make him look like a statue. Stefan wondered if this really constituted theatre, this standing still for money. He passed a trio of youths with dirty bare feet sitting on the sidewalk. One, with blond dreadlocks, played a bongo.
Hardly an instrument
, thought Stefan. The drummer’s friend, with thin facial hair like moss, blew into a didgeridoo.
Bong practice,
Stefan quipped to himself. The third just sat with a floppy beach hat in front of him, a few copper and silver coins glinting inside. A small troupe of pastel-coloured clowns ran hand in hand through the crowd, laughing.

Theatre fulfils a spectrum of purposes, Stefan supposed, but he was through with it. He’d unleashed his father’s play on the world, where it was working some kind of change. He didn’t fully understand the effect himself. He was glad to be a part of it, and to finish the work his father’s death left incomplete. But he felt a twinge of resentment: that was not what he’d asked for in his letter, to be
used.

In the courtyard of an old quadrangle of buildings, Stefan stopped for a beer. Many of the buildings’ rooms served as performance spaces, and Stefan enjoyed the energy of the audiences and performers who moved in and out of the small beer garden there. A group stood next to the picnic table where Stefan sat. “Do you mind if we sit here?” asked one of them. He knew they weren’t asking him to leave the table, but he said he was finished, downed the last of his pint, and moved on.

As he walked, the sun crept down toward the ragged cliffs of Arthur’s Seat. Many vantage points in the city had backdrops of rolling green hills that served to remind him where he was. The evening light took much longer to fail at this latitude than it did in Toronto, but eventually it gave way to night. As it did, Stefan found himself in the grassy fields of The Meadows, attracted there by electric lights that defied the darkness. A carnival was set up there, with a Ferris wheel that towered over several small rides covered in airbrushed pictures. Gambling stalls and games of chance rang with bells and sirens, and the night air was made hot and greasy by a wagon selling fish, cheeseburgers, and sausages fried in batter. At the edge of the carnival was a lone caravan. Stefan walked toward this, passing a shirtless man who swung balls of fire on a chain.

The caravan was red and gold with a blue canopy, gypsy-like in colour, but obviously a modern camping caravan underneath, with rubber wheels and signal lights. Hand-painted red letters on a sign read “Psychic”. Beneath the word was taped a slip of paper: “£5”. The Matholics were nowhere to be found—which Stefan considered a good thing—so this would have to do for advice.

He put his foot on the metal step and looked inside. A heavy, rosy-faced woman with blond ringlet hair sat in the light of a small propane lamp, smoking a cigarette and scraping at a lottery scratch-card with a large brown coin. “Damn,” she said, pushing the card over to a pile of others, and taking a sip from a large yellow can of beer before starting another card.

“Excuse me,” said Stefan.

“Oh, sorry luv, Ah didnae see yeh there,” said the woman. She wore flowy robes and armfuls of gold bangles, looking much the part, but her voice had a thick Glaswegian accent.

Stefan sat on the cushioned bench across from her. He took out a five-pound note and handed it across the table. The ornate batik cloth didn’t disguise the fact that the table could fold away for travel.

“Wha’ wouldjae like to know?” asked the woman.

Stefan wouldn’t be fooled into being pumped for clues. “Oh, nothing in particular,” he said, “just tell me what you get.”

“Okay,” she said. She closed her eyes for a moment, breathed deeply, then opened them. She straightened the table cloth in front of her, stubbed her cigarette out in an ashtray, then moved it, her beer, and the scratch cards to one side. She took out some playing cards, shuffled them, laid them out on the table, then scowled at them and put them back in their package. She held out her hand, so Stefan gave her his. “Hmm,” she said, though they both knew she was bluffing.

Her head jerked back and her eyes opened wide. “Oh!” she said. Her head swung forward and banged twice on the table. As it rose up again, Stefan saw a familiar expression on her face. She smiled with his father’s crooked, devilish-yet-warm smile. She looked down at herself, then up at Stefan with raised eyebrows, and honked her large breasts with her hands.

“Dad?” said Stefan. The medium’s face grinned in response. “So did you like the play? Were you happy?”

The medium gave a thumbs-up.

“What about me, though? I am supposed to still be here, right?”

The medium nodded.

“But what am I supposed to do? I don’t have a job or a place to stay, and I don’t know anyone.”

The medium’s hands steepled on the table, then pushed down, splaying her fingers. Stefan looked at her, puzzled. She repeated the gesture more slowly, pushing and twisting her hands.

“Ah,” said Stefan, “put down roots.”

The medium touched her nose and nodded. Then she leaned forward and tapped her ear.

“Listen? To what?”

The medium gestured at everything around her, and tapped her ear again. She looked to the door, startled, as if she’d heard something herself. Her eyes opened wide, and her head dropped to the table with a clunk. As she regained consciousness, she looked up, bleary and confused. She put her hands to her temples and groaned.

Something outside struck the caravan and rocked it. Stefan and the medium held tight to the benches, looking at each other for explanation. It felt as if the caravan had been charged by a rhino. A moment later, it happened again, with more force than the first time. Stefan got to his feet and thanked the medium for her help. “You’re welcome,” she said, completely confused. Stefan jumped out of the open caravan door and looked around. Against the flashing lights of the rides and games, he saw a figure, a man with a wide-brimmed hat, long cloak, and a scarf around his face. In the darkness, his pupils reflected the light like two luminous zeroes.

“Wait,” said Stefan, backing away from the scratchman. “Why are you after me? What have I done?” But he knew the thing couldn’t speak to him any more than his father could, likely for the same reasons. It wasn’t present in the world by any normal means. The Matholics had used some unholy algebra to bring it across from somewhere else. Stefan reasoned that he was interfering in something important to them. “The play,” he said, “you didn’t want the play to happen. But it’s over.” He banished the thought of the players in Spain, in case somehow it might be read.

The scratchman drew close to him. Judging from the blow it gave the caravan, the night was its domain.

Stefan’s father had spoken to him again. Whatever he was involved in, whatever his father’s plan for him was, it wasn’t finished yet. The Matholics made the same mistake he had: the play was
not
the thing. It was an instrument for getting him here, and it had effected some change, but there was more yet to do. Stefan felt a renewed sense of purpose, and was determined not to let this creature stop him. The only problem was that it was much stronger than him, and he had no idea what it was capable of at night.

The medium looked out from the caravan door holding her head. “What did you do to me?” she yelled at Stefan. The figure looked at her, and Stefan took the opportunity to run. He felt the man at his back, fingers clutching for the neck of his shirt, trying to pull him back into the darkness, but he managed to slip into the buzzing, clanking heart of the carnival.

Stefan tried to think as he walked through the booths and games. He wondered if he had any advantages he could use. He found one: this was
his
world. The scratchman’s clothes and movements suggested that if it had ever been part of this world, it was some time ago. Stefan broke into a run, heading toward the street. Toronto taught him to be an expert in negotiating traffic, and his skills had adjusted to the reverse flow of traffic here. He stopped and paced his movement, stepping agilely into the space between moving cars. The next step brought him safely to the middle of the road.

The scratchman emerged from the trees that bordered The Meadows. It looked from side to side, perplexed by the traffic, then stepped hesitantly from the kerb into the street. A white sports car ploughed squarely into it, throwing it into the car ahead with enough force to crush the back hatch entirely. Both cars squealed to a halt. The sports car driver, barely twenty years old, opened his door and music pounded out. He walked slowly toward the other car as its driver climbed out. Both of them jumped back when the cloaked man jiggled, then rolled out of the mess of glass and metal onto the road. Its white head with its faint number tattoos was uncovered, slashed open on one side. Instead of bleeding, the wound in its head released a thin grey smoke. The figure reached up and pulled its hat from the wreck of the car, pushed the flap of its head back into place, and shoved the hat back on.

Stefan hailed a cab in the opposite direction. As he got in and told the driver his destination, he saw the scratchman crawl brokenly into the shadow under the wrecked car. He watched the two men through the rear windscreen as they searched under the car, but knew they’d find nothing.

Twelve

The Lay of the Land

Stefan ducked under a low roof-beam. He squinted in the darkness at the folded newspaper page in his hand to double-check if he was in the right place. The landlord turned back to him. “You have your own shower,” he said, speaking as if Stefan had already taken the flat. The man opened a cupboard door to expose a small, waterproofed chamber like a missile tube overgrown with green and black. “The hot water turns on here,” he said, pulling at a string, which came off in his hand. “I’ll get that fixed,” he said.

“Thanks,” said Stefan, “but—” he feigned checking his watch. “Oh, I’m late for my next appointment. I’ll call you if I’m interested.”

The man looked annoyed. “Don’t leave it too long. I have a lot of people who are interested in it. I only like to show to people who are serious. I’m not down in this part of town very often.”

“I can see why,” said Stefan. He ducked out of the flat and knocked the dust from his feet, not merely to show his disgust—this was the worst of the three flats he’d seen so far—but because the flat also had a dirt floor. He ran across the street to catch the bus going back to city centre. He climbed the stairs to the second floor of the bus, which gave him a perfect view of the grey day. He arrived at the flat, only to find a group of people lined up outside. The landlady hadn’t said anything about others being there (he thought; it was so difficult for him to understand anyone on the phone) but it made sense to him now that they would get all the showings over with in one go.

The building was old; he liked that. It was a tall sandstone building on a wide corner, with curved bricks that followed the sweep of the road. A man—an estate agent or the landlady’s husband, Stefan guessed—arrived and led the group through the door, which had no lock, but led into an indoor alley lined with green and cream tiles. The man led the group up the staircase on the right side of the tiled hallway. They climbed floor after floor past the other flats’ doors. The higher they went, the more potential renters dropped away. Stefan got closer and closer to the man, and heard some of his patter about the building, something about the tenement being restored after the war. He assumed the man meant the Second World War, though he wouldn’t have been surprised if he meant the Boer War.

They reached the top floor, which had a long glass pyramid of a skylight in the ceiling. The light that came in was milky, given the clouds outside, and the hallway was a mess, but Stefan fell in love. Whatever the flat was like, the place had a feeling he liked.