But his view of these matters had subtly changed since his first encounter with Suzanna. He had wanted her capture as he’d wanted no other, and his pursuit of her had led from one strangeness to another, until he was so fatigued he scarcely knew right from left. Real? What was real? Perhaps (this thought would have been unthinkable before Suzanna) real was merely what he said was real. He was the general, and the soldier needed an answer, for his sanity’s sake. A plain answer, that would let him sleep soundly.
He gave it:
‘Only the Law’s real here,’ he said. ‘We have to hang onto that. All of us. Do you understand?’
Richardson nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’
There was a long pause, during which somebody outside began whooping like a drunken Cherokee. Richardson closed his ledger, and went to the second window.
‘I wonder …’ he said.
‘Yes?’
‘Perhaps I should go out. Just for a while. To see these illusions face to face.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Now that I know it’s all a lie –’ he said, ‘– I’m safe, aren’t I?’
‘As safe as you’re ever going to be,’ said Hobart.
‘Then, if you don’t mind …’
‘Go on. See for yourself.’
Richardson was away in seconds, and down the stairs. A few moments later Hobart caught sight of his shadowy form moving away down the street.
The Inspector stretched. He was tired to the marrow. There was a mattress in the next room, but he was determined not to avail himself of it. Laying his head on a pillow would offer the rumours of occupancy here an easy victim.
Instead he sat down in one of the plain chairs and took the book of faery-tales from his pocket. It had not left his presence since its confiscation; he’d lost count of the times he’d scanned its pages. Now he did the same again. But the lines of prose grew steadily hazier in front of him, and though he tried to check himself, his lids became heavier and heavier.
Long before Richardson had found himself an illusion to call his own, the Law that had come to Nonesuch had fallen asleep.
2
Suzanna didn’t find it so difficult to avoid Hobart’s men when she stepped back into the township. Though they swarmed through the alleyways the shadows had become unnaturally dense there, and she was always able to stay a few steps ahead of the enemy. Getting access to Hobart was another matter, however. Though she wanted to be finished with her work here as quickly as possible there was no use in risking arrest. She’d escaped custody twice; three times might be pressing her luck. Though impatience gnawed at her, she decided to wait until the light faded. The days were still short this early in the year; it would only be a few hours.
She found herself an empty house – availing herself of some plain food that the owners had left there – and wandered around the echoing rooms until the light outside began to dwindle. Her thoughts turned back, and back again, to Jerichau, and the circumstances of his death. She tried to remember the way he looked, and had some success with his eyes and hands, but couldn’t create anything like a complete portrait. Her failure depressed her. He was so soon gone.
She had just about decided that it was dark enough to risk venturing out when she heard voices. She went to the bottom of the stairs, and peered through to the front of the house. There were two silhouetted figures on the threshold.
‘Not here …’ she heard a girl’s voice whisper.
‘Why not?’ said her male companion, his words slurred.
One of Hobart’s company, no doubt. ‘Why not? It’s as good as any.’
‘There’s somebody here already,’ said the girl, staring into the mystery of the house.
The man laughed. ‘Dirty fuckers!’ he called. Then he took the woman roughly by the arm. ‘Let’s find somewhere else,’ he said. They moved away, into the street.
Suzanna wondered if Hobart had sanctioned such fraternization. She couldn’t believe he had.
It was time she put an end to stalking him in her imagination; time to find him and get her business with him done. She slipped through the house, scanned the street, then stepped out into the night.
The air was balmy, and with so few lights burning in the houses, and those that did burn mere candle-flames, the sky was bright above, the stars like dew-drops on velvet. She walked a little way with her face turned skyward, entranced by the sight. But not so entranced she didn’t sense Hobart’s proximity. He was somewhere near. But where? She could still waste precious hours going from house to house, trying to find him.
When in doubt, ask a policeman. It had been one of her mother’s favourite saws, and never more apt. A few yards from where she stood one of Hobart’s horde was pissing against a wall, singing a ragged rendition of Land of Hope and Glory to accompany the flood.
Trusting that his inebriation would keep him from recognizing her, she asked Hobart’s whereabouts.
‘You don’t need him,’ the man said. ‘Come on in. We’ve got a party going.’
‘Maybe later. I’ve got to see the Inspector.’
‘If you must,’ the man said. ‘He’s in the big house with the white walls.’ He pointed back the way she’d come, splashing his feet as he did so. ‘Somewhere off to the right,’ he said.
The instructions, despite the provider’s condition, were good. Off to the right was a street of silent dwellings, and at the corner of the next intersection a sizeable house, its walls pale in the starlight. There was nobody standing sentry at the door; the guards had presumably succumbed to whatever pleasures Nonesuch could offer. She pushed the door open and stepped inside unchallenged.
There were riot-shields propped against the wall of the room she’d entered, but she needed no confirmation that this was indeed the house. Her gut already knew that Hobart was in one of the upper rooms.
She started up the stairs, not certain what she would do when she confronted him. His pursuit of her had made her life a nightmare, and she wanted to make him regret it. But she couldn’t kill him. Despatching the Magdalene had been terrible enough; killing a human being was more than her conscience would allow. Best just to claim her book, and go.
At the top of the stairs was a corridor, at the end of which a door stood ajar. She went to it, and pushed it open. He was there, her enemy; alone, slumped in a chair, his eyes closed. In his lap lay the book of faery-tales. The very sight of it made her nerves flutter. She didn’t hesitate in the doorway, but crossed the bare boards to where he slumbered.
In his sleep, Hobart was floating in a misty place. Moths flew around his head, and beat their dusty wings against his eyes, but he couldn’t raise his arms to brush them away. Somewhere near he sensed danger, but from which direction would it come?
The mist moved to his left, then to his right.
‘Who …?’ he murmured.
The word he spoke froze Suzanna in her tracks. She was a yard from the chair, no more. He muttered something else; words she couldn’t comprehend. But he didn’t wake.
Behind his eyelids Hobart glimpsed an unfixable form in the mist. He struggled to be free of the lethargy that weighed him down; fought to waken, and defend himself.
Suzanna took another step towards the sleeper.
He moaned again.
She reached for the book, her fingers trembling. As they closed around it, his eyes sprang wide open. Before she could snatch the book away from him, his grip on it tightened. He stood up.
‘No!’ he shouted.
The shock of his waking almost made her lose her hold, but she wasn’t going to give her prize up now: the book was her property. There was a moment of struggle between them, as they fought for possession of the volume.
Then – without warning – a veil of darkness rose from their hands, or more correctly from the book they held between them.
She looked up into Hobart’s eyes. He was sharing her shock at the power that was suddenly released from between their woven fingers. The darkness rose between them like smoke, and
blossomed against the ceiling, immediately tumbling down again, enclosing them both in a night within a night.
She heard Hobart loose a yell of fear. The next moment words seemed to rise from the book, white forms against the smoke, and as they rose they became what they meant. Either that or she and Hobart were falling, and becoming symbols as the book opened to receive them. Whichever; or both; it was all one in the end.
Rising or falling, as language or life, they were delivered into storyland.
VIII
THE ESSENTIAL DRAGON
t was dark in the state they’d entered; dark, and full of rumour. Suzanna could see nothing in front of her, not even her fingertips, but she could hear soft whispers, carried to her on a warm, pine-scented wind. Both touched her face, whispers and wind; both excited her. They knew she was here, the people that inhabited the stories in Mimi’s book: for it was there, in the book, that she and Hobart now existed.
Somehow, in the act of struggling, they’d been transformed – or at least their thoughts had. They’d entered the common life of words.
Standing in the darkness, and listening to the whispers all around her, she didn’t find the notion so difficult to comprehend. After all hadn’t the author of this book turned his thoughts into words, in the act of writing it, knowing his readers would decode them as they read, making thoughts of them again? More: making an imagined life. So here was she now, living that life. Lost in Geschichten der Geheimen Orte; or found there.
There were hints of light moving to either side of her she now realized; or was it she that was moving: running perhaps, or flying? Anything was possible here: this was faery land. She concentrated, to get a better grasp of what these flashes of light and darkness meant, and realized all at once that she was travelling at speed through avenues of trees, vast primeval trees, and the light between them was growing brighter.
Somewhere up ahead, Hobart was waiting for her, or for the thing she’d become as she flew through the pages.
For she was not Suzanna here; or rather, not simply Suzanna. She could not simply be herself here, any more than he could be simply Hobart. They were grown mythical in this absolute forest. They had drawn to themselves the dreams that this state celebrated: the desires and faiths that filed the nursery stories, and so shaped all subsequent desires and faiths.
There were countless characters to choose from, wandering in the Wild Woods; sooner or later every story had a scene played here. This was the place orphaned children were left to find either their deaths or their destinies: where virgins went in fear of wolves, and lovers in fear of their hearts. Here birds talked, and frogs aspired to the throne, and every grove had its pool and well, and every tree a door to the Netherworld.
What, amongst these, was she? The Maiden, of course. Since childhood she’d been the Maiden. She felt the Wild Woods grow more luminous at this thought, as though she’d ignited the air with it.
I’m the Maiden …
she murmured,
… and he’s the Dragon.
Oh yes. That was it; of course that was it.
The speed of her flight increased; the pages flipped over and over. And now ahead she saw a metallic brightness between the trees, and there the Great Worm was, its gleaming coils wrapped around the roots of a Noahic tree, its vast, flat-snouted head laid on a bed of blood-red poppies as it bided its terrible time.
Yet, perfect as it was, in every scaly detail, she saw Hobart there too. He was woven with the pattern of light and shade, and so – most oddly – was the word DRAGON. All three occupied the same space in her head: a living text of man, word and monster.
The Great Worm Hobart opened its one good eye. A broken arrow protruded from its twin, the work of some hero or other no doubt, who’d gone his tasselled and shining way in the belief that he’d dispatched the beast. It was not so easily destroyed. It lived still, its coils no less tremendous for the scars they bore, its glamour untarnished. And the living eye? It held enough malice for a tribe of dragons.
It saw her, and raised its head a little. Molten stone seethed between its lips, and murdered the poppies.
Her flight towards it faltered. She felt its glance pierce her. Her body began to tremble in response. She tumbled towards the dark earth like a swatted moth. The ground beneath her was strewn with words; or were they bones? Whichever, she fell amongst them, shards of nonsense thrown up in all directions by her flailing arms.
She got to her feet, and looked about her. The colonnades were empty in every direction: there was no hero to call upon, nor mother to take comfort with. She was alone with the Worm.
It raised its head a few feet higher, this minor motion causing a slow avalanche of coils.
It was a beautiful worm, there was no denying that, its iridescent scales glittering, the elegance of its malice enchanting. She felt, looking at it, that same combination of yearning and anxiety which she remembered so well from childhood. Its presence aroused her, there was no other word for it. As if in response to that confession, the Dragon roared. The sound it made was hot and low, seeming to begin in its bowels and winding down its length to break from between the countless needles of its teeth, a promise of greater heat to come.
All light had gone from between the trees. No birds sang or spoke, no animal, if any lived so close to the Dragon, dared move a whisker in the undergrowth. Even the bone-words and the poppies had disappeared, leaving these two elements, Maiden and Monster, to play out their legend.
‘It finishes here,’ Hobart said, with the Dragon’s laval tongue. Each syllable he shaped was a little fire, which cremated the specks of dust around her head. She was not afraid of all this; rather, exhilarated. She had only ever been an observer of these rites; at last she was a performer.
‘Have you nothing more to tell me?’ the Dragon demanded, spitting the words from between its serried teeth. ‘No blessings? No explanations?’
‘Nothing,’ she said defiantly. What was the purpose of talk, when they were so perfectly transparent to each other? They knew who they were, didn’t they?; knew what they meant to one another. In the final confrontation of any great tale dialogue was redundant. With nothing left to say, only action remained: a murder or a marriage.
‘Very well,’ said the Dragon, and it moved towards her, drawing its length over the wasteland between them with vestigial forelegs.
He means to kill me, she thought; I have to act quickly. What did the Maiden do to protect herself in such circumstances as this? Did she flee, or try to sing the beast to sleep?
The Dragon was towering over her now. But it didn’t attack. Instead it threw back its head, exposing the pale, tender flesh of its throat.
‘Please be quick,’ it growled.
She was bewildered by this.
‘Be quick?’ she said.
‘Kill me and be done,’ it instructed her.
Though her mind didn’t fully comprehend this volte face, the body she occupied did. She felt it changing in response to the invitation; felt a new ripeness in it. She’d thought to live in this world as an innocent; but that she couldn’t be. She was a grown woman; a woman who’d changed in the last several months, sloughed off years of dead assumptions; found magic inside herself; suffered loss. The role of Maiden - all milk and soft sighs - didn’t fit.
Hobart knew that better than she. He hadn’t come into these pages as a child, but as the man he was, and he’d found a role here that suited his most secret and forbidden dreams. This was no place for pretence. She was not the virgin, he was not the devouring worm. He, in his private imaginings, was power besieged, and seduced, and finally – painfully – martyred. That was why the Dragon before her raised its milky throat.
Kill me and be done, he said, lowering his head a little to look at her. In his surviving eye she saw for the first time how wounded he was by his obsession with her; how he’d come to be in thrall to her, sniffing after her like a lost dog, hating her more with every day that passed for the power she had over him.
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In the other reality - in the room from which they’d stepped, which was in turn hidden in a larger Kingdom (worlds within worlds) he would be brutal with her. Given the chance he’d kill her for fear of the truth he could only admit in the sacred grove of his dreams. But here there was no story to tell except the true one. That was why he raised his palpitating throat, and fluttered his heavily lidded eye. He was the virgin, frightened and alone, ready to die rather than sacrifice his tattered virtue.
And what did that make her? The beast, of course. She was the beast.
No sooner thought than felt.
She sensed her body growing larger, and larger, and larger still. Her blood-stream ran colder than a shark’s. A furnace flared up in her belly.
In front of her Hobart was shrinking. The dragon-skin fell away from him in silky folds, and he was revealed, naked and white: a human male, covered in wounds. A chaste knight at the end of a weary road, bereft of strength or certitude.
She had claimed the skin he’d lost; she felt it solidify around her, its armour glittering. The size of her body was a joy to her. She exulted in the way it felt to be so dangerous and so impossible. This was how she truly dreamt of herself; this was the real Suzanna. She was a Dragon.
With that lesson learned, what was she to do? Finish the story as the man before her wished? Burn him? Swallow him?
Looking down at his insipidity from her rearing height, smelling the dirt off him, the sweat off him – she could easily find it in her heart to do her Dragon’s duty, and devour. It would be easy.
She moved towards him, her shadow engulfing him. He was weeping, and smiling up at her with gratitude. She opened her vast jaws. Her breath singed his hair. She would cook him and swallow him in one swift motion. But she was not quick enough. As she was about to devour him she was distracted by a voice nearby. Was there somebody else in the grove? The sounds certainly belonged in these pages. They were far from human, though there were words attempting to surface through the barking and grunting. Pig; dog; man: a combination of all three, and all panicking.