The House of Storms (53 page)

Chill and hunger drove Klade back to the house when the night was ending. He’d expected mess and stink, but those Outsiders who hadn’t been up late Dancing had arisen early and were cheerily and noisily cleaning and washing and sweeping and polishing and putting things away as the first cloud-churned light threaded through the rooms. Klade’s skin tingled. His nose itched in an inside place he couldn’t reach. At least the Outsiders quietened a little when they saw him. But the pause was only brief, and Inver-something shone and bustled like a tune you hated but couldn’t shake, and the gleam of all the corridors and surfaces hurt his head and eyes.

‘Pass us that rag.’

‘Right and proper homely, eh?’

But Klade had never come across anywhere more unHomely than Inver-something was now as, still dripping from the rain, and getting what he knew were called
black looks
from other Outsider faces even as they sang out his supposed mother’s name, he shuffled over sneezily soft carpets which had lost their comforting scree of shell and weed. More and more of this place was being lost to him even as it was reclaimed. Did Outsiders ever really live in places such as this? How tall would anyone have to be to need ceilings this high? And all these rooms for talking, eating, sleeping. Studies for Studying in. Drawing rooms for Drawing. And now, charging and humming towards him, trailing its wire like the tail of a kingrat and piloted by a woman in a scarf and a pinny who was hummingly joining in its song, came a machine which sucked up what little there was left of the floor’s precious dust. Klade fled.

An enormous table gloomed and gleamed like a lake on a windless day in an otherwise empty room. Had he been in here before? It was hard to tell, with everything so changed, but Klade saw something resembling himself shifting within the shine of the wood. More of him, or at least some darkly ragged creature which moved when he moved, was tilted in the endless glass picture frames. Even the windows, which had been wiped of their mist, blazed back at him. He sneezed. He took a knife from a rack where it lay blazing amid many others like so many netted fish and used its point to dig a trail of non-shiningness across the table. There. He loved the grating sound it made—then, as if summoned by the noise, a portion of the room’s gleam extracted itself from behind a baroque chair and moved towards him on elements of its legs. Part flesh, yes. Part real, too. Part not, as well, although, as Fay grew close to him, Klade noticed that she still had that lovely rocky, watery, foggy scent. He had to smile, although he knew she wouldn’t understand.

‘I wasn’t sure if you were still here,’ he told her.

You haven’t come looking for us, Klade.

He shrugged. Finding the Shadow Ones unless they wanted to be found was like catching leaves in a gale. His eyes trailed over Fay—what Fay had become. She was watery gleams, she was spills of grey. Look hard enough, and you might perhaps imagine the freshly changed creature he’d encountered in that hot summer at the edge of the woods back in Einfell, but he’d known from the first moment he’d encountered her here that those moments, the good and the bad, were gone as if they had never existed. That was the thing about the Shadow Ones. Each second was an endless escape. Nothing ever lasted, or remained. Of course, they still had the changed remains of what passed for their bodies, but they cared nothing for sustenance or pain, and were happy to fade. Sometimes, when he first ran with them in the last of autumn which had then still clung to Inver-something, stuffing his mouth with fizzing windfalls of fruit which at first made him happy and then made his head ache, he’d felt the same. For he was Klade, and the song was like the song of Einfell which he’d heard from the very first moment he remembered opening his eyes. But it was bitter here as well, and it was sweeter, and the Shadow Ones always slipped from him no matter how hard he chased. Only at night, as the darknesses grew colder and he sought shelter within this house which had garlanded itself with signs and chains, did they come closer so that they might feed on his dreams. The sea, still strange to him in its scents and sighs, washed in on their singing tide, and the room and the bed which he most frequented grew embroidered with gorgeous decay. This, he knew now, was why Silus had always warned him against the company of the Shadow Ones. Not because of what they were, but because of what they made you become. And the house had whispered with them in the dark driftwood silences and the stirring of limbs which only came close when his own grew languid and could no longer respond. Sometimes, he saw this land not as a thing of days and nights or shifterms or even seasons, but of a perpetual
something
which was too slow to be time at all, across which he and the changed and the unchanged all crawled like the ants he’d once crushed or popped into his mouth, just to feel their momentary tingle on his tongue, and were just as soon gone.

The Shadow Ones could, he knew, let you see in them what they thought you wanted to see. For there was clothing or not clothing on Fay, a mere mist if that was what you wanted, and she seemed storm-wet. Still, the image of the Fay he’d once thought he’d known, and beyond that the young girl from Bristol whom he’d longed for her to be, was stronger to him than all these Outsiders who had come to destroy Inver-something with all their neatness and noise. He watched as her hand, cauled in grey-white netting, silvered as the fishy moon, moved towards the table and the long scar which he had made. Whispering the sweetest inward part of the song, she made it go away.

There.

‘I’m sorry, Fay.’

Sorry for what?
She tilted her head in the swishing light, watchful and listening, although it didn’t seem to be to him.
It doesn‘t count. It’s just a table.

‘For that day. When I tried to—’

‘Aaahhh.’ A real sound, or a stormbeat of wind against glass.
I forgot…

‘I was young then. I didn’t know …’ He paused, licking his lips, wondering what it was he hadn’t known.

It doesn’t matter, Klade. Nothing matters in the way you think it does. I’m surprised that’s something you’ve never learned.

‘This place is full of Outsiders now, you know,’ Klade informed her, as if she cared about such news.

That day you were saying, Klade. That hot day. Yes, now I remember. The thing is, Klade, I always was who I am now. I didn’t realise that Bristol was just a beautiful dream.

He’d had these conversations before. They went round and round in his head like the feeling which came after eating wormed and mushy apples. But still, and just like the apples, it was hard to desist. ‘I
told
you! I’ve been to Bristol—the munitions factories. It’s not the place you showed me!’

Fay’s laughter rang like glass. But it doesn’t mean it isn’t real, Klade! The further I’ve got from Bristol, the more real it becomes. This house helps me—it listens. And I love the song of its windy seas.

Outside, the vacuum cleaner was still snoring at the carpets as the small, loose sea-smelling and faintly reptilian shape which Fay had become reached the pearly approximation of her arm towards him.

Remember, Klade, how we used to touch …

Even though he was sure that Fay remembered nothing, he saw her ebony hair shining in that bedroom back in the dream of Bristol amid the pictures of Egypt and the night sounds of traffic. And brushing, brushing. Sparks and flickers of light. But the lantern shade by her mirror was threaded with gulls’ feathers and the jars before her were fish eggs’ empty purses, and the light swarmed and waved as the vacuum cleaner still gave its foggy moan.

I could be your undersea-lover, Klade. I could be your mermaid…

Klade, drawing back, gave a wild, room-spinning shake of his head.

Fay, more calmly now, more of what she was, simply regarded him.

You’re fainter, Klade. I can hardly hear you. You really have changed since these Outsiders arrived. We thought you were one of us when we had the house to ourselves. I’m sorry, but now you’ve lost your song …

The Chosen, those who were
this
Chosen, were, Klade knew, long past disappointment or regret. But still, he sensed a sadness; perhaps it was his own.

‘Don’t say you’re sorry, Fay.’

I’m never sad.

‘Sad and sorry don’t mean the same thing.’

Just words. You’re using too many …

‘I’m not…’ But it was too late to correct her, for she was drawing away across the lush, shining room, and back behind that chair and on into the panelling. What did it matter, anyway, what Fay or anyone else thought he was? Chosen or not Chosen; Outsider—above all, he was simply Klade.

The busyness of the house went on. Even the gardens were being tidied, and bonfires swirled cheery red as Inver-something’s wildness was put to flame.

‘Sweet Elder! Nobody told me
you
were here.’

‘Thought we’d lost you back at Cleeve …’

People kept touching each other. Hands and arms and lips.

‘Klade?’

Klade jerked, expecting another of the Shadow Ones. But it was the man who said he was his father who came limp-staggering towards him across the terrace’s clean wet paving.

‘Ah
this
.’ Briefly, he waved his walking stick. ‘I’m old before my time. Fact is, Klade, I’ve got something I’d like to show you. Well, a couple of things, actually …’

The house gleamed. Its inside light drummed at Klade’s eyes. ‘We don’t really need
that
in here, do we?’ One hand still wheezing on his stick, the man reached with his other—which was nearly as translucent as Fay’s—towards the knife Klade realised he still held in his hand. He felt a snarl in his throat as he drew back.

‘The thing is, Klade …’ Without the beard, the man’s face was sterner and thinner and greyer. ‘We’ve made a few rules. And one of them is, no guns or knives inside the house. Makes sense, Klade, if you think about it… ?’ Klade relented to the cold, unprising fingers and let go of the knife. After all, what did he know?

The man was a slow mover. Not that this was a problem to Klade, who’d long been used to travelling with poor Ida. Down and down the stairs. In the falling tunnels, hollows, with their strung lights and the happy smell of damp into which he was being led, the man, between waiting and wheezing, his stick tapping, told Klade about things which were being done to, as he put it,
bring the old place back to life
…

A big machine lurked in an alcove near where the generators ground. The man said that it was called a reckoning engine, which was the pride of his own and many other guilds—which is perhaps the sort of thing, Klade, that you should know. This one was an early version, but still immensely clever. Could think a thousand things quicker than a mere human could think one, although of course it couldn’t think for itself, which sounded to Klade, as the machine grinned its ceramic wheels at him, like the sort of nonsense only an Outsider or a Shadow One would say. Anyway, he knew what reckoning engines were. Hadn’t he read enough newspapers? And he wondered as he watched the man haul himself around the whirring device in weary gasps if he really was his father, and if telling you things you already knew was what fathers were for.

‘
This
is the spinet, a type of keyboard where we input data. And here we insert the punchcards. Maybe it’s something you can try, Klade. I spent hours down here when I was even younger than you are. Marion and I had this theory about the way the world worked. And I hoped this machine could store and process all the data …’

The Beetle Lady told me.’

‘The
Beetle
Lady? But you don’t know her, Klade. That must have been something you heard since we got here …’

They moved on. After the sound of the generators, it grew both quieter and louder.

‘Hear that? Goes right down to the sea… This was the way I went…’ The man waved his stick. ‘… when I first returned to the house. You’ve seen the ones—the ones who came here from Einfell? They seem to be hiding now, although they’re still somewhere in the house. They seem to be using spaces behind the panelling and down in these caverns. Perhaps there are passages as well. But the funny thing is, no one’s afraid of them. They’re just
accepted.
Like the balehound and the ravener, I suppose. Although I know that’s entirely different. Don’t you think that’s the most marvellous thing, Klade? The way people have learned to accept?’

Klade nodded. He’d avoided these depths, and had little experience of the sea, but great frothy breaths of it now came pouring into boomy spaces.

‘Down there is Clarence Cove. But we really can’t go much further without one of those suits I had on.’ Leaning against the wet rock, the man hawked in breath. ‘Beyond here, the aethometer readings are still much too high for safety.’

‘A thumb eater?’

‘Never mind—it’s just a device. See where this stone goes under …’ The man shuffled onwards, and the tunnel dropped close to their heads and darkened. Then, it brightened. They were inside a small cave lit by an opening into the sky. Two shining bottles were set in a rough alcove like the shrines Klade had seen plundered in churches.

‘Now
these …
’ His breath whistling like the air. the man picked one up. ‘Are chalices of distilled aether. They must have been left here by the aetherworkers once they’d been extracted and refined from the mess below—forgotten, I suppose, although they’re worth a great deal… What do you know about money, Klade?’

Klade shook his head. He’d liked the taste of the few pennies he’d found, but he knew that wasn’t what the man who claimed he was his father meant. And he’d seen aether before—more than enough of it in the factories he and Ida had visited where they made her sing to machines when the bombs went wrong. There was song in the glowing thing he called a chalice, but it was hard and harsh. Wire across slate. A single steely note. Both purposeful and uncontrolled.

‘Well, it’s worth
a lot.’
Its light was in the man’s eyes, and his chest was fluttering like a bird’s. ‘Surprising, really, that they left it here. See how it glows. Now. Watch …’ He held it towards the cave’s opening. For a moment, he looked like a Shadow One in its strange backwash. Then the light changed and ceased to be light at all. Darkness spilled around them. ‘It’s called wyrelight. By the way, you should never,
ever
, try to open one of these chalices, or ever approach anything which contains raw aether. That’s what all those warning signs you must have seen are for. If it gets on or in you, too much of it, well—it can … What I mean is, it’s
dangerous
, Klade. Even more dangerous than a knife or a gun. You understand that? But what I wanted to say …’ Klade watched as the man reverently returned the chalice in its alcove of wet stone. ‘What I
really
wanted to say, Klade, is that when you get out of here—when this war ends as it finally must—there’s a place for you. When I say a
place,
I mean good proper work with decent pay. No matter what happens to me, Klade, you don’t have to live the way that you have up until now.’