The House of Storms (51 page)

‘No one knows what Invercombe’s like now, Marion—unless the Beetle Lady really did get here, and who knows what she did or didn’t see …’

Ralph lost track of Marion as the followers shouldered by him and began to push impatiently on through Invercombe’s gates. It was mid-afternoon. Wet darkness would soon be falling. Perhaps they really would find better shelter within the valley, he reasoned as he trudged with them, frozen and drenched. But it seemed unlikely. The willows along the estate road gesticulated wildly. Sodden flocks of leaves surged. Squinting, he tried to catch sight of the weathertop, but all he saw beneath his dripping eyebrows were more swirls of mottled grey. He’d been too feverish to notice this road into Invercombe when he’d first come in that car from Bristol with his mother, and afterwards he’d been too preoccupied. A thundercrack boomed, bringing, impossible though it seemed, an even stronger surge of rain.

He stared at his blued hands, then down at his muddied clothes. It was still incredibly cold, although the wind was coming less regularly now, playfully ambushing him, then dancing away with laughing whoops. Several times, he almost fell. Crawling through these puddles would have been easier. Lying down in them would have been easier still. But he knew that he’d be trampled in the followers’ wake if he did. It was all that kept him walking. And at least the thunder was fading, and with it the wind and the rain. He laughed out loud, to think that the hope of shelter might actually be true. As always, the Doctress Foot had been right. The trees swayed and glittered. Here was the very last hook of the road which wound down into the valley of Invercombe, and there ahead, shining against a clearing patch of sunset, was the weathertop.

This was the south plantation. There were the orchards and the citrus grove. Not that it wasn’t winter here as well. Not that darkness wasn’t falling. Not that things hadn’t changed. But still, this
was
the place. The house was unlit, but somehow waiting as the followers ahead of him waded the slopes of undergrowth towards the bowl of the valley in a fanning grey wave. Ralph stumbled and fell with them. More warning signs and prohibitions against trespass had been erected around the main courtyard beside the stables, and its gravelled space was occupied by several sheds and the rusty arms of an aether engine. People were milling, pointing, exclaiming in the thinning evening. He heard Marion’s voice. She was blocking the chained front entrance, telling people that Invercombe wasn’t safe, that they must go no further, that beneath the foundations of this house and out into the cove beyond there had been a huge spillage of aether. For now at least, and although there was much grumbling, they were doing as she said. Perhaps, but only for tonight, they might sleep in these grim old sheds. But the atmosphere was uncertain. For why had they come so far, if it wasn’t for this place which the Beetle Lady had promised? And how could this woman who claimed to be Marion Price now be telling them they couldn’t enter this fine and beautiful house if she really was who she said? A gun sounded in the falling darkness. The rumour was passing that there were strange creatures out in the gardens. Monsters, even. There were gasps, hand-clutchings. Ralph had seen such situations when hope and disappointment collided in the times of unrest which had preceded this war. Things could easily grow dangerous.

‘We can’t just let them go in there, Ralph,’ Marion shouted to him as he forced his way through to her. ‘These signs are your own guild’s.
You
tell them … !’

‘They’d take no notice of me, Marion.’

She nodded her head, but it was in frustration rather than in agreement. Fires were being lit from stuff plundered from the courtyard. Figures and flames leaped across the high walls of Invercombe. ‘
I’ll
go inside, Ralph. If I tell them what it’s like, they might just believe me. After all, wasn’t all this work done to make the house habitable again?’

‘No one cared about the house—it was done to reclaim the raw aether. And who knows how much is left.’ The door, Ralph noticed, was already ajar beneath its antique lintel. There was even a suggestion of the scuff of footsteps amid the grit and dust. ‘Marion, you
can’t
go in there. Haven’t you just been telling these people that it could be dangerous?’

‘Then who does?’

Ralph took a slow breath. ‘The house belongs to my guild, Marion. And look at me, what have I got to lose?’

A torch, its bulb and batteries still working, was found in one of the sheds. There were contoured plans which showed Invercombe’s familiar outlines overlain with dense swirls of magics, although, as other followers clustered helpfully around him bearing useless logbooks and tea rosters and pre-war calendars, he had little idea of how to make sense of any of them. Still, he felt an affinity for these departed guildsmen. Just how much aether was left? Enough, certainly, he thought grimly as something black and figure-like danced towards him from a clustering, excited group, for the men to need to wear rubberised suits whilst they worked in there. The outfit stank as if it had been worn through many shifts, but he supposed that he had little choice but to pull the thing on, if only for the sake of show, and then to submit to the added weight of its fishtank helmet. The supporting brass collar dug across the bones of his shoulders. Its angled glass presented a fractured version of the world. The filters were old, as well. Each breath was a musty weight. Someone, perhaps a guildsworker who had once used such things, then found an aethometer amid the ransacked equipment. Rectangular, knurled, glass-faced, about twice the size of a cigarette packet, its pointer gave a lazy twitch in its bath of mercury—still low, still safe—as Ralph studied it in his gloved hands. This was hardly how he’d imagined re-entering Invercombe, but it certainly felt like some kind of dream.

Fumbling with the torch, he unhooked the last chain with his insensible fingertips and pushed open the door into Invercombe’s great hall. The hazily penetrating beam glinted across dusty parquet. The ceiling had held, although there were some signs of damp. He clumped forward. As his beam lingered on the paintings, he saw that many of them were hung upside down, and then that pickling jars and razor shells had been placed along the marble dressers where fine Cathay vases had once stood. Guildsmen’s humour, he supposed. Shivering, alternately hot and cold inside the clammy embrace of his suit, he laboured on.

Everywhere, these slight rearrangements. Flashing the torch back towards the ceiling, he saw that the lightbulbs had all been neatly removed. But perhaps that was also the aether workers—and it was better, certainly, to concentrate on practical considerations than to worry about ghosts and uncertainties. That way, the library, although, as if the sea itself had somehow risen this impossibly far, the carpet was strewn with rotting weed. This way, the west parlour and the peacock room. All surprisingly intact. He checked the aethometer. Still barely registering. Perhaps this place really might provide a haven for the followers.

He flickered the torch into each of the main ground-floor rooms, saw fine chairs he’d once sat on and longed to sit on again, although there were more pebbles and other bits of shore. He had a choice now of going up or down. He debated routes and possibilities. The sensation, as his head throbbed and he took the quick needy breaths which were all his lungs or the suit’s filters seemed capable of achieving, was entirely familiar … He had no particular desire to investigate Invercombe’s damp lower reaches, but if there was danger left in the place, that was surely where it would lie. And he could check the generators as well. It made every kind of sense.

A green service door lay to the left of the lavender room. A red warning triangle had been nailed to it. The oval of his torch dancing below him, he took the spiral stairs, then leaned to catch his breath against the long, arched corridor which led one way towards Steward Dunning’s old office (
what chances,
part of him which he didn’t want to listen to was muttering,
that she’s still there?
) and the other various storerooms and to the next set of stairs. Narrower, these. Then gleams of damp, or possibly engine ice, although still not enough to cause concern. Funny, when by logic he should be hoping that it remained safely dark, that he should be wishing for light. He inspected the torch. Was it fading? He tumbled the last steps and landed in a sprawl.

This was the service level. He could tell, even in the cocoon of his helmet as he crawled himself back upright, that the generators were still turning. Their hum reached through his bones and the torch, as if encouraged by their presence, shone more brightly over their beetle cables and red flanks.
Yes yes yes yes …
He could even hear their song over the gasp of his own breath. Then there came a clicking. Imagining footsteps, he froze, held his breath. But the sound was familiar to him as well. There, beyond the last fading needlepoint injunctions—
There’s No Work Like Early Work
—lay the reckoning engine, still working on some seep of residual purpose and current. He studied it in amazement. It, far less amazed, seemed to study him. He picked his way on. More red triangles. Ralph had never gone lower than this into Invercombe’s catacombs, but the barred metal gate which led towards Invercombe’s sea caverns had been broken open, and the downturning tunnel beyond seemed to swallow the light of his torch, and yet gave off a definite glow, which grew as he descended. He glanced at the aethometer’s needle. Still safe here, but considerably less so. His feet skidded. He steadied himself. The roof, as he descended, gripping the ropes hung from rusty iron hoops in the walls, rose and fell, dripping and glinting, then ascended into a larger space. Unmistakably now, these were caverns carved by the sea. A shifting mist shone in the beam of his torch. Still, the meter was climbing. Who knew what tides and ravages had been summoned to Clarence Cove? This—for the steps were scummed and luminously green—was surely as far as he needed to go. But Ralph’s weariness was lost to curiosity in this strange, sea-breathing place.

He entered the full breadth of a natural cavern which opened to Clarence Cove. There was no need to check the aethometer here. The tides pulsed with brilliant darkness. The salt air glowed. He turned off the torch, which now only produced a useless fan of black. The aethered sea, darkly gleaming, booming, beating, rose and fell, and Ralph breathed with it, and it breathed with him. Its froth was densely braided with a wrack of weed and timber and many other leavings. Jewelled with chains and the bones and bodies of strange fish and a scuttled ship’s wreckage and fragments of terracotta, it rose and broke. In a shuddering heave, the sea washed closer. Against the dimmer glow of the night beyond, climbing in scaffolding, riding on buoys and pontoons, bobbing on chains, scrambling out across rocks on concrete and rail as if attempting to escape, were the structures with which the aether workers had attempted to tame this place. But they had failed, and the remains of their work now sprouted mocking ornaments of cuckoo-growth. The sea laughed with the jagged purple mouths of giant mussels, it streamed with glowing fronds of bladderwrack. Glad at last for the discomforts of his suit, Ralph turned back to the steps, but then something seemed to move far up in the cave. Were those eyes, or pebbles in a jellyfish? Was that phosphorous hair, or merely rotting weed? And what exactly had the followers claimed they’d seen out in Invercombe’s gardens? But the panes of his helmet were misting, and this place was simply starting to play on his mind.

Angling down the torch until its light finally brightened, he felt his way back up through the bowels of the house. This climb seemed far longer than the descent. He coughed, hacked. Part of him longed to rip this damn helmet off and
breathe,
but at the same time it seemed ridiculous to risk exposure now when so little of the house was left to be seen. The impossible purpose of the generators and the reckoning engine ticked and clicked and lingered with that half-seen face as he climbed the service stairs, and then leaned through a final green door, and shuffled towards the best stairs, which soared above him, a veritable waterfall of carpet. He coughed. A spray of blood coated the inside of his visor.

This was just like old times, and worse. At last, crawling on all fours, his consciousness floating on the dimming beam of his torch, he gained the landing. He thought of checking his aethometer, but realised he’d left it far away at the foot of the stairs, which he doubted if he would ever have the strength to return to. But all that was left, all he owed himself and the rest of the followers, was to prove that Invercombe was safe. Then, he could rest. Ralph’s helmet clanged a wall as he stumbled along the main landing. He hesitated, swaying beneath its weight. All the forgotten horrors of his old fevers, their bland unreasoning logic, the hot sense of conflicts which he alone could resolve, were returning. Then, but certain this time as the ache of his breathing, something moved ahead.

This same corridor with these same pictures. Dustier, yes. And distorted through the blood-mottled panes of his helmet. But still these same gilt-framed pictures of flowers on the walls, even if they were strung with scraps of weed now and ornamented with old bits of lemon rind, of all things, and then hung upside down. Yes, this was the place it had always been and something, quite beyond doubt, had moved ahead of him. A shape, which, in its departing, had turned the same corner which he must turn, which he knew would lead to his own room just as it always had, and still did in his dreams. Nothing had changed. Not even him. He moved forward. His torch had paled, and there was no aether here, but the night sky outside had cleared to admit a rising moon which danced and shifted amid the mullions. A dresser shone. His shadow moved across the walls and the house seemed to move with him. This was like that moment before that meal, when he’d been wandering the gardens. The thing about ghosts, he’d realised then, was that you only saw them afterwards. What you saw at the time was simply reality.

Ralph, as he moved on towards his old room, wondered why he’d clung to logic for so long. After all the things which had unravelled, why should he have ever expected this house to make any sense to him? It wasn’t about danger or not danger. It wasn’t about the crowds or the Beetle Lady or this war or even Marion Price … The door to his room swung shut ahead of him. This was far too much, but then again, it was all to be expected. Time was running backwards, and many spells had been cast, and many seas had risen, and he fully expected, as he gripped the handle in his gauntlet hand and twisted it, to discover his younger self lying there in the bed in the grip of a fever through which the rest of his life had been lived. The fleeting sense of meaning, the heavy heat, the restless purpose, all seemed entirely right. Perhaps logic did exist within a final core of meaninglessness. And perhaps this was it.