The Changeover (13 page)

Miryam led Laura to the door.

"Is Sorry out there?" asked Laura as the door opened on darkness. She wanted to think there might be a friend waiting for her. "Is he being Gatekeeper out in the dark?"

"Indeed he is," Miryam replied and Laura could feel, rather than see, her peculiar smile. "But he's not out there. He's inside your head. Didn't you feel him move there? Don't you feel him there now, waiting for you? You must be brave, Laura, and never turn back."

"What if I can't do it? What if it doesn't work?" Laura asked.

"Never ask that!" Miryam told her, softly but very seriously.

"I'm not scared. Only curious!" Laura insisted.

"Well, Laura— let me put it like this," Miryam said. "Once you walk through the gate that Sorensen will show you, you must succeed. It's your life you are gambling with."

"Good!" Laura said fiercely. "I don't want any way

back. It must work — that's all there is to it."

"Winter is certain you will succeed," Miryam told her.

"Will it hurt?" Laura asked. "I want to be warned."

"It will seem to hurt," Miryam replied, not very comfortingly. "Do what is shown to you to do. I can't warn you. A changeover is never the same twice over. Each person pictures their own."

"It's very dark," Laura said, taking a hesitant step. "Where are we? I can't remember. Are there stairs?" There was no reply. "I can't remember," she repeated and put her hand back to the door, but the door had gone. She could feel nothing before or behind her. She realized at last that she was alone and in such darkness that she could not see an inch ahead of her. If she had been an Egyptian mummy waking into the bandaged dark of a triple coffin under tons of ancient stone she could not have been blinder or looked into a deeper blackness.

She stood there a long time, unable to tell if she were alone, or in company. Sometimes her isolation seemed so great she wondered if she had been projected into the heart of a black hole somewhere. Yet at other times the darkness, while losing nothing of its impenetrability, seethed with the spirits of people and events. She thought she smelt flowers, and then something peppery. Something apparently breathed next to her ear; a finger soft as thistledown, cold as ice touched her lips and immediately she tasted a birthday cake made for her by Kate when she was nine years old, remembered the sweet, smooth texture of a whole crystallized cherry that had slipped in unchopped, glowing like a jewel in the dark, moist slice that had been passed to her. A ghostly hand, perhaps Sorry's, touched her breast with scarcely any more weight than sunlight. She thought he might have become some sort of demon lover in her head and might dictate her own possession, so that she would feel it like a memory although it had never happened, but the sensations went by like dreams.

She was woolly Laura Chant, sitting in the dark preparing to pit herself against the lemure, the evil spirit, wicked Carmody Braque who had chosen her brother to sustain him in his unnatural existence. "Lolly!" said Kate in her ear. "Laura," said Chris Holly. "Baalamb!" said her father. "Laura Chant," said old Winter. "Chant," said Sorry in his prefect's superior voice, touched as always with self-derision. Jacko did not call her. He floated in his hospital womb, tied to life by wires and tubes, devoured from within by the ravenous lemure.

Laura could not be sure if she sat there for minutes or hours or days, for this blackness was the solvent of time, holding seconds in a disordered suspension. But then she saw a crack of bluish light. The darkness was splitting an inch before her eyes, or perhaps it was the actual pupil of her eye painlessly but inescapably dividing. Darkness had confused her. The light was quite a distance away from her. A door or gate was opening. "Do what it is shown to you to do," said Miryam's voice, and Laura moved to the door, stepped through it into a vague half-world where everything she saw wavered as if she were looking at it through tears. She moved along, and slowly the wavering grey- ness settled down and she began to recognize the place in which she found herself, under a strange, dark sky with clouds so heavy and low she felt she could have put up a hand and touched them. Every now and then the lightning wrote across them in an instantaneous scribble of power, but Laura did not bother to look more than once at this electrical graffiti.

She was in Kingsford Drive once more, walking towards the Gardendale Secondary School. Other pupils, all in school uniform, pelted by her — she recognized no one; they were gone before she could name them. The gate of the school was visible and around it the Gardendale subdivision lay revealed, entirely familiar but made eerie by the lurid light which the sky poured over them. First bell was gone ... she would be late again. Laura began to run — the big trucks rumbled by beside her, the earth-moving machines clashing their jaws over her head. The crowd of uniforms passed in ahead of her. The prefect on gate duty was Sorry Carlisle, sitting there, not at, but on, a school desk, whistling to himself, studying his fingers, bright with rings, just as they had been when she first saw him sitting in his study. He wore his black dressing-gown with its girdle of rope and she could not tell, when he looked up, if he were hero or villain, for he was both threatening and savage, and yet consoling. Two distinct and contrary faces had tangled into one, both smiling with the same set of features as if he were offering to save her and ruin her simultaneously, and to initiate both with the identical hand, now held out to her. He was the boy who had touched her and warned her, and she had invited him in twice and thought that now he might have decided to eat her. However, she was to be brave and do what it was shown to her to do. She walked up to him, looked into his eyes and saw her reflection, tiny and flaring, with light on the silver surface.

"First bell's gone, Chant," Sorry said, "and you're not wearing a school uniform."

"Neither are you," Laura pointed out, returning his intent, private stare without faltering.

"Right on, Chant!" he said and then, "Have you got any money? I'd do it for you free, but you know ... even to cross the Styx you have to pay the ferryman."

"You couldn't call Gardendale 'the sticks'," Laura protested, showing her stone coins. "It's right in the city."

"But built of sticks," Sorry said. "Sticks and stones. Styx and stones!" he repeated with a different, darker emphasis, taking one of her coins. "Now, I'm to give you the sword. You're inventing the terrain, but we're putting in a few of our own symbols."

"What do I use it for?" she asked as he buckled the sword around her.

"Anything that won't let you pass," he said. "I'll put you on the path and you're not to leave it, and not to look back." Laura thought he was looking down the front of her dress and put her hand over it.

"And give me a kiss," he added.

"Do I have to?" she asked him, but in a different voice from the one she would have used yesterday morning.

"I cannot tell a lie," Sorry said. "I invented that bit. I thought it would be nice." The black clouds behind his head flared as if a reddish light had fallen on them from some unseen source.

"Where are we?" she asked, looking around, suddenly uneasy, and feeling a faint jolt as if the ground had shivered under the Gardendale subdivision— as if her abrupt uneasiness was the uneasiness of the whole world.

"Never ask!" Sorry cried, suddenly furious. He took hold of her arms so tightly it hurt, but she realized that she had suddenly frightened him, for his upper lip and forehead shone with a faint, dewy bloom. Relaxing, he laughed a little shakily. "That way philosophy lies!" he declared. "And it's instinct alone in this country. It can't stand the pressure of doubt. You'll kill yourself if you ask questions, and me too, since I'm shut up here with you."

"I'll kiss you because I want to," said Laura, "not because you do."

"I'll settle for that," Sorry replied. "But be gentle with me."

However, he was not gentle himself and neither was Laura. Thunder munched around the edge of the clouded sky. Sorry looked up and smiled.

"I love your sound-effects," he said. There was a little gate she had never noticed before tucked in beside the big school entrance. A track of uneven yellow paving led away from it. Sorry unlocked the gate.

"Follow the yellow brick road and remember, don't look back. Just keep on going. If the road divides, look for a sign. Cut down whatever crosses your path. On your way, Chant, and thanks for the kiss — I think you've got natural talent."

"It's not as if it were hard," said Laura and left him behind.

She was in a forest that was all forests, the forest at the heart of fairy tales, the looking-glass forest where names disappeared, the forests of the night where Carmody Braque devoured tiger cubs, the wood around Janua Caeli inhabited by yet another tiger which might have a human face behind its mask, and Laura's own forest, the forest without trees, the subdivision, the city.

Between the straight trunks of the birches, the earth- moving machines lumbered like shadowy, disinterested beasts, a distant supermarket parking lot showed like a little desert of cars. Mrs Fangboner, hair newly set, came out from between the ferns and called, "Laura — don't get into dangerous spots. Don't let yourself go." But Laura was already going. The shop for fuller figures could be seen through broad, green leaves, its windows full, not of dresses, but fat zeros, pot-bellied legless sixes, and bosomy eights, and threes like pregnant, primitive goddesses. In the teashop the chairs were being stood on top of the tables and made a forest of their own, sprouting upwards in fountains of coloured leaves. Among them Jacko sat, hunched and very frail, looking at Laura with the face of a little old man, his can of apple-juice in front of him.

"Don't you worry, Jacko. I'll nail the bastard," Laura promised and walked on.

The bookshop was alive with leaves, and each one written on. Novels took a whole tree, but poems were cheap. Kate was selling Chris a poem and giving him too much discount. Laura almost went over to tell her so, but the thunder growled at her... the tiger growled at her and lifted its striped face out of the grass beside the path. Its face was so heavily striped it was more black than golden.

With the coming of the tiger the forest shifted, becoming older and darker. Moss hung from the trees, and the only sound was the faint trickle and gush of distant water. Laura now began to feel an ache in her neck and shoulders, as if she were pushing against an intangible resistance, and vaguely thought it might be something like the past, or reality, for a stream of shadowy figures began to flow past her, all going in the opposite direction from the one she and the tiger, slipping distantly through the trees, were following... She saw dwarfs, lost princes, beautiful girls who had committed themselves to silence in order to save brothers turned into swans or ravens, young men who thrived on sunshine and dwindled with darkness, mutilated maidens who wept over their own silver arms, and then simpler people, three bears, the girl in the red hood, the lost children who found their way home, the lost children who didn't and were covered with leaves by the robins. Once the road divided, but the true path was always marked by her own drop of blood and she followed it faithfully. On her right the unicorn knelt to dip his horn in a pool of water, watched by the pale, radiant eyes of primroses; on the left, three hanged men dripped and fell to pieces among shining flowers, while beautiful butterflies fed from their corruption as readily as from the honeysuckle and wild roses. The trees cried out to her as she passed, some seductively, others in voices of pain, and Laura herself began to ache and throb down her back and in her chest. Briars crept over the road and she pushed through them, scratching herself so that she dripped blood once more. The path was distinct and she pushed on into a forest of monstrosities, a tree of snakes, a tree whose rosy apples, once clearly seen, were the hearts of Aztec sacrifices. A bush, whose branches ended in hands held aloft (as if Laura had pointed a gun at it) allowing her to see a tiny eye on the end of each finger tip, watched her go by. The brick road now began to trickle with water. Moss showed between its cracks and then a green ooze and then water itself bubbling up so that the bricks moved soggily underfoot and yielded their colour, staining the bubbles yellow. The briars thickened and Laura at last drew the sword and began to cut her way through them, but though this lessened her troubles in one way, it increased them in another. The sword slid easily through the woody stems, and the briar immediately reared up, then thrashed about in anguish, screaming with a voice Laura dimly recognized as her own, while, as if the stroke had fallen in her own head, she felt a shock of pain, followed by a spasm of rank sickness. Still she knew she must follow the road and hacked away, while the water ran more and more strongly. The only way she could follow the road was to feel for its stones with her blind feet, while she shivered and retched on her way through the screaming, writhing briars which now began to drip her own blood on her, streaking the water which came up to her waist.

How far is there to go? she wondered. How far have I come? And she turned her head and looked back, though as she did so a voice out of memory warned her, "Never look back!"

Behind her the road branched infinitely. Kate and Stephen stood together in church being married; she saw herself born, her first day at school, saw Winter Carlisle, much younger and softer, feeding hens, saw Mrs Fangboner looking at her dahlias with a rare, solitary pleasure, saw Miryam, stricken, hold a baby who must be Sorry, and Sorry himself crouched under a rain of blows, though she could not see his assailant's face. She saw Chris, in another country, holding a letter he hesitated to post, saw herself looking in a mirror, saw all the possibilities, her own and other people's, that had brought her to this point. At the same time she experienced another jolt similar to that she had felt when she asked the question, "Where are we?" and a big piece of the forest vanished. Beyond it she could see either smoke or steam rising from nowhere. A fine shuddering began to run through everything and, huge in the sky, in faint letters hundreds of miles high the words tam htab appeared, becoming more and more distinct every moment. Laura knew what had happened and immediately ducked down under the water. At first it was like being in mist. She breathed easily.