The House of Storms (60 page)

Questions, questions, as they reached the gardens and the followers, drawn up by this new silence from their shelter in the servants’ corridors, came streaming out to greet the returning party. But Marion hung back and, for once, they didn’t seek her out. That sound, that song—there was some twist, something unmade, hanging within it which she fought to unravel. Then she remembered Alice Meynell’s promise that the message, the wrecking spell, would come as three beats which would spell out her name. Ridiculous, really, to imagine such a thing. And vanity beyond all human scope.
Marion
. She tried to recall the sound. But the endless note she had cast into the telephone lines extinguished it.
Whatever else has been destroyed tonight
, she thought; pushing across the terrace towards the inner hall,
Marion Price has gone
.

The house felt empty. Not deserted, but discarded. No clock ticked or chimed as her footsteps trailed mud and worse across the carpets. Even as the windows, their curtains left open in last night’s confusions, began to brighten, not a single shadow moved. The door of the telephone booth beneath the best stairs was ajar, and Ralph, forgotten, remained inside. After so much death, it was almost a surprise to find him alive, although slumped barely conscious over the dialling handle. She glanced towards the mirror as the people crowded around her. It was entirely blank.

Ralph felt hot and loose and light. ‘The guns seem to have stopped,’ she said as she helped him out of the booth, thinking of the junior members of his guild she had killed.

This, she thought as Ralph trembled against her, was the closest they had got to an embrace in all the angry years since she had left him in Sunshine Lodge, and part of her now realized that she was as guilty as he was in their separation, and that the true victim had been Klade alone. But crimes, neglects, wars, murders, once committed, could never be healed. All the rest was self-pity—the same pity she was feeling now.

Against his weak protests, she organised that he be carried up to his old room, then, unable to bear the silent, expectant gazes which surrounded her, she went outside. More and more light was coming now across the parterre gardens. The chain pools chuckled. Branch by topmost branch, the specimen trees were shimmering into life. She headed down the paths and crossed the springing turf and crouched by the seapool. Its waters slipped coolly through her fingers, but lingering curiosity made her still her hands to study the face which gathered on the surface as it smoothed. The rising sun had spread red banners across the sky, briefly turning the entire pool red as she washed the blood from her hands. Her face hung there, but it was quite unrecognisable. She headed on towards the shore.

Whatever Ralph had said was wrong: time really could go backwards, for Marion recognised a spring day when she saw and felt one; she knew its scents and sighs, and the wildness of this light, and the movements of those birds like risen flecks of foam. It would have been so easy just to stay here. Or to carry on walking, fleeing, along this shore, or to head straight into the forgetfulness of this incoming tide. What, after all, was holding her? Even for her son Klade, she knew by now that all she could ever feel was a dulled affection mingled with even duller regret. She wasn’t his, and he wasn’t hers, and no ships were out in the channel today, but at least the Severn Bridge still hung, a silvering of the light, a curtaining of the air.

Marion was too weary to stoop for cockles, or even to peel off her ruined boots. But again the light darkened and coalesced amongst the familiar rocks. Once more, a figure appeared, and she studied it calmly, for by now she was used to ghosts. Not Sally, no. Not Denise or Owen or her father or Mam, or even quite the refracted image of Marion herself, although she recognised something in its aching stance. More a creature of the sea, it seemed to her as it picked its way between the shining rockpools, than anything to be found upon the land. Living weed. Leavings of the shore. Mere driftwood and sail tarp. Perhaps a dying gannet.

‘I thought this might be the place,’ it murmured, ‘to find you.’ A hand trembled and tensed on a stick of driftwood, veins and bones tangling and untangling beneath loose and mottled skin. The face drooped around a lipless mouth, although the eyes inside their sagged blue pouches remained as calmly unsettling as ever. This was still Alice Meynell, even if she looked like an old shorewoman reduced to picking coal at the edge of the tide.

‘You’ve changed …’ Marion murmured, amazed. Alice laughed. Her hair snagged out from her skull. ‘Nothing like enough …’

‘Last night—the spell. Do you know what happened?’ The hand which wasn’t gripping the stick gave a trembling wave. ‘Can’t you hear? Where are the guns? Where are the ships? Why are we standing here? I’d credited you with more intelligence, even if you are just a shoregirl, than to doubt the evidence of your own senses. And Ralph’s alive, isn’t he? As if this house would ever let him die …’ And you think the war has ended?’

‘It was never that simple—but I imagine that in London and Bristol the processes which will lead in that direction are probably underway.’ Another chuckle. ‘My own forces, certainly, are in disarray.’ Another wheeze. ‘You’ve got what you wanted. And you don’t even recognise it, or know what to do with it. You’re so typical of…’ As Alice searched for the word, a dewdrop formed and glistened on her hooked nose, was caught on the wind and blew away. She ground the tip of her driftwood stick deeper into the sand. ‘We humans. We’re all the same.’

‘You
knew
that the folly would be defended. People
died
there. I killed …’ Marion wiped her face. The shore receded in salty webs. ‘I killed two men. Westerners of your own guild. They weren’t even armed. And I—’

A brittle hand clutched on her arm. ‘You did what was
necessary
.’ It gave a squeeze. ‘What else could you have done? Did you think we could end an entire war without a little further bloodshed? Do you imagine that people are not dying now in the blackout cities? Just because we cannot hear guns, do you think they are not still firing? To reach the better, you must pass through the worst—did you not ever realise that, Marion Price, when your whole life screams out that very fact?’

‘I’ve only ever tried to do what seemed best.’

‘Best!’ Alice sniffed, her eyes wandering over the gleaming bladderwrack. ‘Yet you repaired the bodies of the fighting men who came back from the front, just as others made their bullets, or grew food to fill their bellies, so they could go back and fight again. Did you not imagine that you were as culpable as those who fired the guns? At least last night you briefly put all the self-justifying rubbish aside just for once and did something for
yourself
. Why, otherwise, did you ever come back to this house? And why did you let those people follow you? You did it because it was what you
wanted
, Marion Price. I’m sorry, by the way, that this whole enterprise didn’t spell you your name as you’d wanted, but the spell was even stronger than I’d thought. But, you—you wanted to know what it felt like to have power, to have command. Life and death—those are the things you enjoy dealing with in what passes for your heart. All the rest is mere scenery. I don’t even believe you can
love
, can you? No, not the way you’d want to. Not in the way you imagined love was felt by someone like my poor Ralph. Ah,
love
, Marion. Let
me
tell
you
about love …

‘Love is the feeling which drives this shore. Love is the reason those seabirds are circling and calling to each other. Love is the raping solider, or the husband who goes off to war to kill other husbands. Love is the bee and love is the flower. Love is the prey a mother brings to her nest. Love is what brought those saddened women to Saint Alphage’s. Love, as well, is most likely what kept your son at Einfell. Love, I would guess, is also the reason he probably feels so lost now. For love is the thing we use to dress up our lives with the appearance of meaning, or mourn for when it cannot be found. Love is what drove us to war, Marion. Love of place, love of person, love of self, love of things as they are. Love is blind instinct, Marion. It’s the trick that nature plays upon its inventions to ensure that they copulate and protect their young. And you and I, Marion, through some fault we feel but cannot explain, imagine that we are immune to it. But let me tell you, we are not.

‘How nice it would be, eh, to exist above it all in realms of pure power and spirit! Oh, yes, I share that urge, Marion. To take command of that unreasoning power which you and Ralph spent that summer attempting to define. Why should—what did you call it, Habitual Destiny?—control our lives? Surely we as reasoning creatures are above all that now? Last night, indeed. Last night…’ In a spasm of trembling, and as the sand shone and loosened in the rising tide, Alice nearly fell. ‘I fully believed I had the chance to become something else. Last night was everything I’d planned. Those faint shapes you encountered up at the house—the palest of the changelings, the ones closest to pure spell. They’ve gone this morning, haven’t they?’

Marion waited. There was another swaying spasm; a baring of sparse teeth in a grimace or a smile.

‘That could—
should
—have been me, Marion. The only thing I didn’t tell you yesterday, Marion, was that I, too, was part of the spell. I planned to pass through the mirror, discard the husk you see before you entirely. But instead … Instead … Here I still am. Oh, it’s no great mystery! I’m just an old woman, and I’d only look even more ridiculous if I plastered myself with scent and make-up. So why not be what I am? Whatever else I had last night, I stupidly lost. It fled into the mirror and left me here as you see me now, on this shore. And the funny thing is, Marion, I’m so, so tired I don’t even bloody care.’

‘You were like the Shadow Ones?’

‘I’d changed, certainly. I believed I’d changed enough.’ She wavered, nodded, considering. The tide, in its shining onwards rush, was sweeping closer to them. ‘No, it wasn’t
that
which stopped me. Haven’t you been listening, girl? Isn’t that what I’ve been trying to tell you? I was poised before the mirror. I was ready to take the leap at the moment you pulled that lever in the transmission house. But it was my own feebleness which stopped me. It was Ralph. It was…’ She paused. Her face writhed. She spat the word out. ‘
Love.
I hesitated a moment too long last night, God help me Marion, because I didn’t want to leave my son … All those years ago, when he was gripped by the worst of his illness, I had this wish, this prayer. Inside my head, I would scream,
Let it be me
. And last night, it came to me again, that same thought, and then it was too late …’

The glittering scraps which Marion had taken to be bits of foam or shell dangling from Alice’s clothes and clinging to her stringy throat and ears, were, she now realised, expensive items of jewellery, beads, buttons …

‘Perhaps you and I can walk out into this tide together, Marion. Or we could just stay here. Either way, the waters will take us soon enough. Can’t you hear the tide’s hissing! And you can push me down, Marion, or I will push you, and who cares which of us survives …’

Alice’s hand was still gripping Marion’s arm, but now in pleading support. It was hard, despite all the other emotions Marion knew she should have felt, not to feel pity for this old woman, who had fallen so far from the magnificent creature she had once been. She shook her head. ‘There’s been enough death.’

‘There will
never
be enough death, Marion. That’s the whole point…’

As Alice, one hand wavering on her stick and the other clasping Marion’s arm, shuffled up the shore, it seemed at first that the tide might overtake them, but their reflections slowly dimmed as the waters thinned, then dissolved as they climbed towards the swing gate into Invercombe’s blossoming gardens.

T
HE SIGNAL WHICH SPREAD
across East and West came not as a surge, but as a shift of tone. A mere change of key, and little enough if it had been mere sound, the spreading wave nevertheless rendered the machines and systems it encountered deaf to the spells of the guildspeople who commanded them. It was a new language, frustratingly close in every aspect of syntax to the one it had replaced, but impossibly difficult to understand and pronounce.

From the telephones, just as Alice Meynell had predicted, the signal surged into the reckoning engines, and from there into the power supplies, and soon suffused every other aethered device and material; meaning, in this advanced Age, almost everything. Even the many aspects of modern life unlinked from the main webs of communication became unworkable. Not only was there no electricity and no gas and no plumbing, but the song also carried itself on the air, and from hand to hand, and from the confused thoughts of one guildsman to another. Soon, other nations were suffering similar shutdowns, and even the weather-tops of ships in the remotest seas were becoming skittish before, in a last blaze of wind, they ceased. Or, more accurately, they became dormant, for guildsmen knew from the continued hum and thrum of their machines that life and power remained. What was lost was obedience.

There were deaths. There were riots. There were structural failures. But the song was more stubborn than it was destructive. Hallam Tower did not collapse, but its fixed beam remained glowing dark and light towards the West. The ziggurat of Westminster Great Park also remained entire. So did the Severn Bridge, and the halls in Bristol of the Merchant Venturers. Like the devices they housed, they were not destroyed; they had just become uncommunicative.

In such circumstances, with resort to travel by horse and dray—and even they were skittish—two days of waiting passed before the commanders of the Great Guilds of West and East made contact. Written communication remained difficult, so they met midway across England in Meriden. Inevitably, there was considerable distrust and rancour. But these men knew each other. They had shared families, lovers, railway carriages, gossip, restaurant tables, in better times before the war. Inevitably, as they shivered in the candlelit gloom of a deserted house which their soldiers, their guns impotent, guarded with the swords they had salvaged from guildhall museums, discussion soon focused not on the division of the spoils, but on how they might ensure that there might be any spoils left at all.