Mortal Love (35 page)

“Finchley Park,” said Juda. “He's heading toward Muswell Hill.”

The Mercedes moved swiftly through the traffic, veering onto side roads whenever Juda or Nick sighted the dog running like a mechanical hare in a greyhound course. Daniel was hardly aware of it. He kept seeing those two tall figures moving toward each other through the leaves until they formed a single entity flaring into emerald light.

“Ally Pally?” wondered Nick. “D'you think that's where they're headed?”

“I don't know,” said Juda. “He'll go until he finds someplace he recognizes, or she will.”

The car stopped at a light beside a fish-and-chips shop; the smell struck Daniel like a hammer blow, a curled rainbow tail and fire searing his fingers. The light changed, the car lunged forward. Another ghostly city took shape around him—no, not another city, this one, though it was as if he saw it for the first time. There were the pubs, the cobblestone streets; soft brown London brick and crumbling warehouses, the spire of a stone church, a gray schoolyard behind tall iron gates. The East Finchley tube station, locals named the Archway and Clissold Arms. Old men with heads bent over glasses at a mahogany bar and back rooms full of boys in Arsenal shirts. Two gangly young men shouted, then pummeled each other, reeling across the sidewalk while music echoed from a jukebox.

“Hey!” said Daniel. “Isn't that … that's—”

The boys tumbled head over heels as a black-and-white dog raced past and they flickered and disappeared, like a television screen fizzing into snow.

“There!” shouted Nick. “There they are!”

He jabbed at the windshield, pointing to where the motorcycle stood idling at a light. Beside it the Border collie danced and barked. Juda swore, wheeling the car so it went up onto the curb. Before it came to a full stop, Daniel had lunged into the street.

“Daniel,
no!”

He ignored Juda's cry and started running. “Larkin!”

She was only a few yards away, seated on the back of the bike. “Larkin!” he shouted. “Larkin, wait!”

She turned. For an instant he saw her clearly, her mouth half parted as to speak, her brow furrowed.

“Larkin,” he gasped, close enough to touch her. “Larkin …”

She did not see him. She did not stare past him but through him: he was a trick of the light, casting no shadow. He was invisible.

“Larkin.” He couldn't hear himself. How could he, when he didn't exist?
Larkin.

The light changed. The woman nestled her head against the shoulder of the man in front of her, and in a roar of exhaust, the bike shot off.

Daniel shouted. Something flung itself against him, and he stumbled. When he looked up, the motorcycle was gone.

“Fancy! Stay there, that's it!”

Beside him Juda Trent ran up and grabbed the dog. Fancy yelped frantically as she slipped collar and leash over its head.

“There,” said Juda. She laid a hand on the dog's head, and it quieted. “That's my sweet, that's my Fancy. …”

Daniel stared numbly at the street. Fancy strained at the leash; Juda spoke to him sharply, and the dog sat.

“Come on!” Daniel cried impatiently. “We'll lose them!”

Juda shook her head. “He found it. The Edgware Road—the old Roman way. It will take them to the motorway west.” She turned and headed to her car.

“You're not going without me!” Daniel yelled.

“Suit yourself.”

They got in. Juda stared impassively at Nick still in the backseat. He shook his head.

“No.” Nick opened the door and climbed out. “Not me.”

Juda backed the car off the sidewalk. Nick stood, watching. As the car waited for the light to change, he called anxiously to Daniel in the front seat.

“Whyn't you come back with me, Danny? Come on. …”

“No. I'm going after her.”

The car began to move. Nick waved his hand in farewell. Juda stared straight ahead as Daniel watched his friend recede into the distance.

“You shouldn't come,” Juda said at last. “But I'm not going to waste time arguing.”

“Where're we going?”

“The West Country. Cornwall. Sleep, if you can.”

They took the North Circular out of the city, west and south through suburban and industrial wastelands until they reached the M4. Near Slough they stopped for gas.

“Do you want me to drive?” Daniel asked. He felt dangerously wired, his nerve ends buzzing and spitting with a sense memory of student amphetamine binges. “You must be exhausted.”

She said nothing, just swung the car back onto the roadway. It was past eight o'clock, yet the sky looked high and misty blue as a seaside morning, the sun a dazzling yellow lake upon the western horizon. Daniel glanced back to see Fancy sprawled across the seat, long, rose-pink tongue dangling, one eye clear and calm as twilight, the other glittering gold. He turned to look at Juda.

Strands of damp hair clung to her forehead. She gripped the steering wheel so hard that the bones of her hand stood out like tines. The bluish pallor that saturated her nails and fingertips had spread—her hands had an unmistakable glaucous sheen, like the dusty bloom on wild grapes.

“You should try to sleep,” she said. Her face was taut but calm. “I'll wake you if I need a break.”

He thought it would be impossible to sleep, but soon he succumbed to the potent drone of the car engine, the monotonous flicker of council estates and shabby mock Tudors, now and then the hierarchic expanse of a stately home like a childhood dream rising from the long gray hangover of suburban England. He slept through Bristol, where they turned onto the M5 and began heading south, past Taunton, past Exeter, finally woke to night and the smell of moist green things and Fancy's cold nose burrowing into his neck.

He yawned, pushing the dog into the backseat. “Where are we?”

“We're in Cornwall now. We crossed the Tamar hours ago. Have you been to the West?”

“No. Never been out of London.”

“Shame you can't see it. But it's there. …”

She rolled down her window and let her hand trail into the night. A pungent odor filled the car, cow manure and fresh-cut hay, also a grassy, honeyed smell that made his mouth water.

“Gorse,” Juda said. “And heather. There's other things, too, flowers, but I don't know what you call them. We're crossing Bodmin Moor now. No one knows these roads unless they live here.”

“How do you know it, then?”

“I have a little house on the north coast, near a place called Padwithiel. Just a cottage.”

Daniel looked outside. Above them the night sky was the deep iridescent green of a mallard's head. It seemed to reflect the lights of some great city, so bright he could read the few road signs they passed.

But there was no city here. He gazed out at the black tors and barren hills and had the unmistakable, disturbing sense of being watched, of having wandered into a place where he was not welcome.

“We'll cut back to the coast now,” Juda said after some time. “Look.”

In the distance stretched a vast darkness—the sea. Silvery light shimmered across a shifting expanse of black and lunar green; he could hear the rhythmic roar of waves, like the breathing of a sleeping giant. He held his hand out the window, brought it tentatively to his mouth, and tasted salt.

“Land's end,” said Juda. “Actually, Lands End is south of here—fucking Thatcherites turned it into a carpark. But this'll give you an idea of what it was like. What it is …”

She pulled the car off the road, onto turf starred with tiny white flowers. “Here,” she said. She hopped out, Fancy jumping down at her side. “Look.”

He followed her, walking across short, springy grass until Juda grasped his arm. “Be careful,” she said, and pointed. “See that?”

He drew up, aghast.

A few feet in front of them, the world ended. They were at the brink of a sea cliff hundreds of feet above a roiling swath of waves. Far below was a crescent-shaped beach, flanked by wave-gouged granite pillars and a seemingly endless line of cliffs, dramatically undercut by the relentless pounding of the ocean, their crowns of heather and gorse as insubstantial as sea foam.

“A couple of hikers go off every year,” said Juda. She stood with her back to him beneath the eerie green sky, the black-and-white dog sitting watchful at her feet. “Sometimes they just have to leave the bodies—can't get a rescue squad down, and if a storm comes up, it's too dangerous to bring in a helicopter.”

Daniel turned to look at the countryside behind them. There was the road, gray and winding for a few hundred yards before it disappeared. Beyond the road a steep hill sloped upward, gorse-grown, with scattered cairns and a line of standing stones, dark and ominous. At the very top of the hill stood a tower of stone, its base littered with fragments of broken rock and the remains of a wall. “What's that?” he asked.

“It's a beacon. A watchtower. They're all along the coast.”

“But what are they for?” said Daniel. “There's nothing here.”

“They keep watch.” Juda drew alongside him, chucking softly to the dog. “People have been here for thousands of years—digging for tin, mostly, but gold and silver, too. Tourmaline. There's disused mines all over the West, and some still active. In the early days, they just dug trenches in the ground and looked for metals. They made beautiful things, the people who lived here.”

She bent to pluck a blade-shaped leaf and handed it to him, so he could see the white flower blossoming from its base. “Asphodels. This is when they bloom. May Day.”

“But the towers—what were they watching for?”

“Raiders. And us.” She turned to stare at the ocean. “We were not invaders or conquerors. All that they knew was that we were unlike them. They didn't know we found them beautiful. They didn't know that we found this”—her arm swept out to indicate sea, cliffs, ruined towers, and standing stones, all the night-glimmering world around them—“all this, all this, beautiful. …”

Her pale eyes glittered, and her face shone with a joy like grief. “What was the name of your book? Nick told me, while we were waiting for you at Learmont's.”

Daniel stared at the flower in his hand. He could hear the pounding of the sea, a faint throb in the earth beneath his feet. He let the blossom fall, to disappear amid the tangle of bracken and heather.

“Mortal Love,”
he said.

“Mortal love,” repeated Juda softly. “That's what draws us. Your taste, how fast you move and how soon you die … we see how with every moment you quicken with your own death and it is so beautiful—it moves us, it captivates us—”

She took a step toward him and he flinched, but Juda only shook her head, saying nothing, then reached for his face and very gently laid her fingers upon his cheek. The warmth of her flesh seeped into his own, and for an instant there was no membrane of skin or bone between them, nothing between them at all, only a sweetness that he could somehow feel rather than taste, a slow, thick pulsing inside her veins, the flash of his own blood within her fingertips, and then her lips upon his forehead, her breath warm upon his brow.

“What you feel for her, Daniel,” she whispered, and her hands rested upon his shoulders, light as leaves falling. “That desire for something hopeless, for what is already gone, for what can never be yours—we, too, know that. Every time we touch you, we taste your mortality. It is the closest we come to understanding what it is like for you: to live knowing that you will die.”

“But … you said that you die here as well—you said you become trapped—”

She nodded. “We do. But it's not the same. You burn, somehow, even after you die. We just go out, like a flame. And we leave nothing behind, no paintings, no books, no songs, no monuments. We don't understand them, but we love them, your making of them. And that is what she desires. Seeing herself transmuted into all those things. She craves that. She tries to make it happen. So that when she at last goes out, something of her will remain here.”

She gestured past the sea cliffs to the shifting dark. “There, nothing ever changes. No one ages, everything is the same. Only your people leave a mark upon the world. Like the sea, the way it shapes the rocks over time? That's what you have done. That is what she wants: to be changed, to bear the marks of time that you leave upon her. She herself has tried to do as you do, to leave something permanent behind. She does not understand that it scars you. She doesn't understand that it can kill you. She never remembers that for you, for all of us, it cannot last. Mortal love …”

She fell silent and laid her hand upon Fancy's head. Daniel looked down to see the dog staring at him with prescient eyes, gold and gray-blue.

“You don't believe me,” Juda said.

“I don't believe in anything.” Daniel looked away. “Or no, that's not it. I believe in everything now.”

He drew a hand to his face. Exhaustion had almost driven Larkin from his head. Now she was back inside him, a pressure behind his eyes, his skull. “I can't live without her. Juda, I will die.”

“Daniel, don't you understand?
She can't stay.
She doesn't belong here. She doesn't belong with you. None of us do. We have the chance tonight to return, all of us—”

“All of who?!” he cried. The dog gave a warning bark. “Val? She doesn't even know him! She—”

“Daniel, listen to me! You're wrong. They've known each other … forever. They quarreled, is all. She ran off and became trapped here. And her being here changes this place—both places, your world, ours. Our worlds suffer. We diminish. She has all but forgotten who she was, what she is—but I have not.”

She lifted her head. Her skin had a twilit gleam, the same foxglove glow he had seen on Larkin's face—when?

All the ages he had known her could be measured in hours only.