Weaveworld (89 page)

But Shadwell simply watched as the Angel cleared the fourth wall at a stroke, then turned its attention to the ceiling.

‘You’ll be next,’ Immacolata said.

Shadwell flattened himself against the now naked brick as remains rained down.

‘No …’ he murmured.

The bones stopped falling; there were none left on either walls or ceiling. Slowly, the dust began to settle. Uriel turned to Shadwell.

‘Why do you whisper behind my back?’
it enquired lightly.

Shadwell glanced towards the door. How far would he get if he tried to run now? A yard or two, probably. There was no escape. It knew; it heard.

‘Where is she?’
Uriel demanded. The demolished chamber was hushed from one end to the other.
‘Make her show herself.’

‘She used me,’ Shadwell began. ‘She’ll tell you lies. Tell you I loved raptures. I didn’t. You must believe me. I didn’t.’

He felt the Angel’s countless eyes upon him; their stare silenced him.

‘You can hide nothing from me,’
the Angel pronounced.
‘I know what you’ve desired, in all its triviality, and you needn’t fear me.’

‘No?’

‘No. I enjoy the dust you are. Shadwell. I enjoy your futility, your meaningless desires. But the other that’s here – the woman whose raptures I can smell – she I want to kill. Tell her to show herself and be done with it.’

‘She’s dead already.’

‘So why does she hide?’

‘I don’t,’ came Immacolata’s voice, and the bones on the floor churned like a sea as the ghost rose from them. Not simply
from
them but
of
them, defying Uriel’s destruction as her will made a new anatomy from the fragments. The result was far more than a sum of its parts. It was, Shadwell saw, not one but all of the sisters, or a projection of their collective spirit.

‘Why should I hide from you?’ the monument said. Every shard in its body revolved as she spoke.

‘Are you happy now?’ she asked.

‘What is happy?’
Uriel wanted to know.

‘Don’t bother to protest your innocence,’ the phantom said. ‘You know you don’t belong in this world.’

‘I came here before.’

‘And you left. Do so again.’

‘When I’m done,’
Uriel replied.
‘When the rapture-makers are extinguished. That’s my duty.’

‘Duty?’ Immacolata said, and her bones laughed.

‘Why do I amuse you?’
Uriel demanded.

‘You are so deceived. You think you’re alone –’

‘I am alone.’

‘No. You’ve forgotten yourself; and so you’ve been forgotten.’

‘I am Uriel. I guard the gate.’

‘You are not alone. Nobody – nothing – is alone. You’re part of something more.’

‘I am Uriel. I guard the gate.’

‘There’s nothing left to guard,’ Immacolata said. ‘But your duty.’

‘I am Uriel. I–’

‘Look at yourself. I dare you. Throw the man you’re wearing away, and look at yourself.’

Uriel did not speak its reply, but shrieked it.

‘I WILL NOT!’

And with its words it unleashed its fury against the body of bones. The statue flew apart as the fire struck it, burning fragments shattering against the walls. Shadwell shielded his face as Uriel’s flame ran back and forth across the chamber to
eradicate the Incantatrix’s image completely. It was not satisfied for a long while, scouring each corner of the Shrine until every last offending shard was chased to ash.

Only then did that same sudden tranquillity descend that Shadwell loathed so much. The Angel sat Hobart’s wretched body on a pile of bones, and picked up a skull between the fire-blackened hands.

‘Might it not be cleaner
…’ the Angel said, its words measured, ‘…
if we emptied the whole world of living things?’

The suggestion was floated so delicately, its tone so perfectly a copy of Shadwell’s Reasonable Man, that it took him a moment to comprehend the ambition of what it proposed.

‘Well?’
it said.
‘Might it not?’

It looked up at Shadwell. Though its features were still in essence Hobart’s, all trace of the man had been banished from them. Uriel shone from every pore.

‘I asked a question,’
it said.
‘Would that not be fine?’

Shadwell murmured that it would.

‘Then we should see such a fire, shouldn’t we?’
it said, rising from its seat of bones. It went to the door, and stared off down the passageway, where the caskets still burned.

‘Oh
…’ it said with yearning in its voice. ‘…
such a fire.’

Then, eager not to delay its goal’s consummation by a moment, it started back towards the stairs, and the sleeping Kingdom beyond.

III

THE SECRET ISLE

1

he train was an hour late reaching Birmingham. When it finally arrived the snow was still falling, and taxis couldn’t be had for love nor money. Cal asked for directions to Harborne, and waited in line for twenty-five minutes to board the bus, which then crawled from stop to stop, taking on further chilled passengers until it was so overburdened it could carry no more. Progress was slow. The city-centre was snarled with traffic, reducing everything to a snail’s pace. Once out of the centre the roads were hazardous – dusk and snow conspiring to cut visibility – and the driver never risked more than ten miles an hour. Everyone sat in wilful cheerfulness, avoiding each others’ eyes for fear of having to make conversation. The woman who’d seated herself beside Cal was nursing a small terrier, encased in a tartan coat, and a picture of misery. Several times he caught its doleful eyes regarding him, and returned its gaze with a consoling smile.

He’d eaten on the train, but he still felt lightheaded, utterly divorced from the dismal scenes their route had to offer. The wind slapped him from his reverie, however, once he stepped out of the bus on Harborne Hill. The woman with the tartan dog had given him directions to Waterloo Road, assuring him that it was a three-minute trot at the outside. In fact it took him almost half an hour to find, during which time the chill had clawed its way through his clothes and into his marrow.

Gluck’s house was a large, double-fronted building, its
facade dominated by a monkey-puzzle tree which rose to challenge the eaves. Twitching with cold, he rang the bell. He didn’t hear it sound in the house, so he knocked, hard, then harder. A light was turned on in the hallway, and after what seemed an age the door was opened, to reveal Gluck, the remains of a chewed cigar in his hand, grinning and instructing him to get in out of the cold before his balls froze. He didn’t need a second invitation. Gluck closed the door after him, and threw a piece of carpet against it to keep out the draught, then led Cal down the hallway. It was a tight squeeze. The passage was all but choked by cardboard boxes, piled to well above head height.

‘Are you moving?’ Cal asked, as Gluck ushered him into an idyllically warm kitchen which was similarly littered with boxes, bags and piles of paperwork.

‘Good God, no,’ Gluck replied. ‘Take off your wet stuff. I’ll fetch you a towel.’

Cal skinned off his soaked jacket and equally sodden shirt, and was taking off his shoes, which oozed water like sponges, when Gluck returned with not only a towel but a sweater and a pair of balding corduroys.

‘Try these,’ he said, slinging the clothes into Cal’s lap. ‘I’ll make some tea. You like tea?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I live on tea. Sweet tea and cigars.’

He filled the kettle and lit the antiquated gas cooker. That done he fetched a pair of hiker’s socks from the radiator, and gave them to Cal.

‘Getting warmer?’ he asked.

‘Much.’

‘I’d offer you something stronger,’ he said, as he produced tea-caddy, sugar and a chipped mug from a cupboard. ‘But I don’t touch it. My father died of drink.’ He put several heaped spoons of tea into the pot. ‘I must tell you,’ he said, wreathed in steam, ‘I never expected to hear from you again. Sugar?’

‘Please.’

‘Pick up the milk, will you? We’ll go through to the study.’

Taking the pot, sugar and mug, he led Cal out of the kitchen and upstairs to the first landing. It was in the same condition
as the floor below: its decoration neglected, its lamps without shades, and heaped everywhere the same prodigious amount of paperwork, as though some mad bureaucrat had willed Gluck his life’s work.

He pushed open one of the doors and Cal followed him into a large, cluttered room – more boxes, more files – which was hot enough to grow orchids in, and reeked of stale cigar smoke. Gluck set the tea down on one of the half-dozen tables, claiming his own mug from beside a heap of notes, then drew two armchairs up beside the electric fire.

‘Sit. Sit,’ he exhorted Cal, whose gaze had been drawn to the contents of one of the boxes. It was full, to brimming, with dried frogs.

‘Ah,’ said Gluck. ‘No doubt you’re wondering …’

‘Yes,’ Cal confessed, ‘I am. Why frogs?’

‘Why indeed?’ Gluck replied, ‘It’s one of the countless questions we’re trying to answer. It isn’t
just
frogs, of course. We get cats; dogs; a lot of fish. We’ve had tortoises. Aeschylus was killed by a tortoise. That’s one of the first recorded falls.’

‘Falls?’

‘From the heavens,’ said Gluck. ‘How many sugars?’

‘Frogs? From the sky?’

‘It’s very common.
Sugars?’

‘Two.’

Cal peered into the box again, and took a trio of frogs out. Each was tagged; on the tag was written the date it fell, and where. One had come down in Utah, one in Dresden, a third in County Cork.

‘Are they dead on arrival?’ he asked.

‘Not always,’ said Gluck, handing Cal his tea. ‘Sometimes they arrive unharmed. Other times, in pieces. There’s no pattern to it. Or rather, there
is.
but we’ve still to find it.’ He sipped his tea noisily. ‘Now –’ he said, ‘– you’re not here to talk about frogs.’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘What
are
you here to talk about?’

‘I don’t know where to begin.’

‘Those are always the best tales,’ Gluck declared, his face glowing. ‘Begin with the most preposterous.’

Cal smiled; here was a man ready for a story.

‘Well –’ he said, taking a deep breath. And he began.

He’d intended to keep the account short, but after ten minutes or so Gluck began to interrupt his story with disgressionary questions. It consequently took several hours to tell the whole thing, during which Gluck smoked his way through an heroic cigar. At last, the narrative reached Gluck’s doorstep, and it became shared memory. For two or three minutes Gluck said nothing, nor did he even look at Cal, but studied the debris of stubs and matches in the ashtray. It was Cal who broke the silence.

‘Do you believe me?’ he said.

Gluck blinked, and frowned, as though he’d been stirred from thoughts of something entirely different.

‘Shall we make some more tea?’ he said.

He tried to stand up, but Cal took fierce hold of his arm.

‘Do you believe me?’
he demanded.

‘Of course,’ said Gluck, with a trace of sadness in his voice. ‘I think I’m obliged to. You’re sane. You’re articulate. You’re damnably particular. Yes, I believe you. But you must understand, Cal, that in doing so I deliver a mortal blow to several of my fondest illusions. You are looking at a man in mourning for his theories.’ He stood up. ‘Ah well …’ he picked up the pot from the table, then set it down again. ‘Come next door,’ he said.

There were no curtains at the window of the next room. Through it Cal saw that the snow had thickened to near-blizzard proportions while he’d been talking. The garden at the back of the house, and the houses beyond, had become a white nowhere.

But Gluck hadn’t brought him in to show him the view; it was the walls he was directing Cal’s attention to. Every available inch was covered with maps, most of which looked to have been up there since the world was young. They were stained with an accrual of cigar smoke, scrawled over in a dozen different pens, and infested with countless coloured
pins, each presumably marking a place where some anomalous phenomenon had occured. And on the fringes of these maps, tacked up in mind-boggling profusion, were photographs of the events: grainy, thumb-nail pictures, foot-wide enlargements, strips of sequential images lifted from a home movie. There were many he could make no sense of, and others that looked patently fake. But for every blurred or phony photograph there were two that pictured something genuinely startling, like the frumpy woman standing in a domestic garden up to her ankles in what seemed to be a trawler’s deep-sea catch; or the policeman standing guard outside a three-storey house which had fallen over on its face, though not a single brick was out of place; or the car bonnet which bore the imprint of two human faces, side by side. Some of the pictures were comical in their casual weirdness, others had a grim authenticity about them – the witnesses sometimes distressed, sometimes shielding their faces – that was anything but amusing. But all, whether ludicrous or alarming, went to support the same thesis: that the world was stranger than most of Humankind ever assumed.