‘I’m going to take you to the car,’ Cal said, and pulled de Bono to his feet. He wasn’t quite dead weight; there was enough strength left in his legs to aid Cal in his efforts. But his head lolled against Cal’s shoulder as they crept up the path.
‘The fire touched me …’ de Bono whispered.
‘You’ll survive.’
‘It’s eating me up …’
‘Stop talking and walk.’
The car was parked only a few yards down the street. Cal leaned de Bono against the passenger side while he unlocked the doors, glancing up and down the street every few seconds while his inept fingers fumbled with the keys. The snow was still getting heavier, shrouding both ends of the street.
The door was open. He went round to help de Bono into the passenger seat, then returned to the driver’s side.
As he stooped to get into the car, the dogs all stopped barking. De Bono made a small sound of distress. They’d done their duty as watch-dogs; self-preservation silenced them now. Cal got into the car and slammed the door. There was snow on the windscreen, but there wasn’t time to start scraping it off: the wipers would have to take care of it. He turned on the ignition. The engine laboured, but failed to start.
At his side de Bono said, ‘… it’s near …’
Cal didn’t need telling. He tried the key again; but still the engine resisted life.
‘Come on,’ he coaxed it, ‘please.’
His plea bore fruit; on the third attempt the engine caught.
His instinct was to accelerate and get out of Chariot Street as quickly as possible, but the snow, falling as it did on several days’ accumulation of ice, made the going treacherous. The wheels repeatedly threatened to lose their grip, the car sliding back and forth across the road. But yard by yard they crept through the pall of snow, which was so heavy now it reduced visibility to a car length. It was only as they approached the end of Chariot Street that the truth came clear. It wasn’t just snow that was smothering them. There was a fog thickening the air, so dense that the car headlights had difficulty penetrating it.
Chariot Street was suddenly no longer part of the Kingdom. Though it had been Cal’s stamping ground since childhood, it was alien territory now: its landmarks erased, its urbanity turned over to wasteland. It belonged to the Scourge, and they were lost in it. Unable to see any sign of a turning he trusted to instinct and made a right. As he swung the wheel over, de Bono sat bolt upright.
‘Go back!’ he yelled.
‘What?’
‘Back! Jesus! Back!’
He was gripping the dashboard with his wounded hands, staring into the fog ahead.
‘It’s there! There!’
Cal glanced up, as something huge moved in the fog ahead, crossing the path of the car. It came and went too quickly for him to gain more than a fleeting impression: but that was already too much. He’d underestimated it in his dreams. It was vaster than he’d imagined: and darker; and emptier.
He struggled to put the vehicle into reverse, panic making his every motion a farce. Off to his right the fog was folding upon itself, or unfolding. Which direction was the thing going to come from next?; or was it somehow everywhere around them, the fog its hatred made matter?
‘Calhoun.’
He looked at de Bono, then through the windscreen at the sight that had de Bono rigid in his seat. The fog was dividing in front of them. From its depths the Scourge loomed.
What Cal saw befuddled him. There was not one form emerging from the murk, but two, locked in a grotesque union.
One was Hobart; albeit a Hobart much transfigured by the horror that now possessed him. His flesh was white, and there was blood running from the dozen places around his body where lines of force – connected by wheels and arcs of fire – entered his body and broke out the other side, revolving through him as they swung to meet the second form: the monstrous geometry that towered above him.
What Cal saw in that geometry was all paradox. It was bleached, yet black; a void, yet brimming; perfect in its beauty, yet more profoundly rotten than any living tissue could be. A living citadel of eyes and light, corrupt beyond words, and stinking to high heaven.
De Bono threw himself against the door and began to wrestle with the handle. The door opened, but Cal snatched hold of him before he could pitch himself out, at the same time putting his foot on the accelerator. As he did so a sheet of white flame erupted in front of the car, eclipsing the Scourge.
It was the briefest of respites. The car had backed up only five yards before the Scourge came at it again.
As it came, Hobart opened his mouth to a dislocating width, and a voice that was not his issued from his throat.
‘I see you,’ it said.
The next moment it seemed the ground beneath the car erupted, and the vehicle was flung over onto the driver’s side.
There was total confusion within, as a hail of bric-a-brac tumbled from dashboard and glove compartment. Then de Bono was scrabbling at the passenger door once again, pushing it open. Despite his wounds some of a rope-dancer’s agility was still in evidence, for he was out of the felled vehicle in two economical moves.
‘Get going!’ he yelled to Cal, who was still attempting to work out which way was up. As he stood, and levered himself out of the car, two sights were there to greet him. One, that of de Bono disappearing into the fog, which now seemed charged on every side with an empire of eyes. The other, a figure standing in the midst looking at him. It seemed it was a night for familiar faces, changed by circumstance. First, de Bono; then Hobart; and now – though for an instant Cal refused to believe it – Shadwell.
He’d seen the man play many roles. Avuncular salesman, wreathed in smiles and promises; tormentor and seducer; Prophet of Deliverance. But here was a Shadwell stripped of pretences, and the actor beneath was a vacant thing. His features, robbed of animation, hung on his bones like soiled linen. Only his eyes – which had always been small, but now seemed vestigial – still preserved a trace of fervour.
They watched Cal now, as he scrambled off the car and onto the ice-slick street.
‘There’s nowhere left to run.’ he said. His voice was slurred, as though he needed sleep. ‘It’s going to find you, wherever you try to hide. It’s an Angel, Mooney. It has God’s eyes.’
‘An Angel? That?’
The fog trembled to right and left of them, like living tissue. At any moment it might be back upon them. But the sight of Shadwell, and the riddle of his words, kept Cal glued to the spot. And another puzzle too; something about Shadwell’s changed appearance which he couldn’t put his finger on.
‘It’s called Uriel,’ Shadwell said. ‘The flame of God. And it’s here to bring an end to magic. That’s its only purpose. An end to rapture. Once and for all.’
The fog trembled again, but Cal still stared at Shadwell, too intrigued to retreat. It was perverse, to be vexed by trivia when a power of an Angel’s magnitude was within spitting distance. But then the Mooneys had always been perverse.
‘That’s my gift to the world,’ Shadwell was declaring. ‘I’m going to destroy the magicians. Every one. I don’t sell any longer you see. I do this for love.’
At this mention of selling, Cal recognized the change in the man. It was sartorial. Shadwell’s jacket, the jacket of illusions which had broken Brendan’s heart, and doubtless the hearts of countless others, had gone. In its place Shadwell wore a new coat, immaculately tailored but bereft of raptures.
‘We’re bringing an end to illusions and deceptions. An end to it all –’
As he spoke the fog shuddered, and from it there came a single shriek, which was cut off abruptly. De Bono: living and dying.
‘… you fucker…’ Cal said.
‘I was deceived,’ Shadwell replied, untouched by Cal’s hostility. ‘So terribly deceived. Seduced by their duplicity; willing to spill blood to have what they tantalized me with –’
‘And what are you doing now?’ Cal spat back. ‘Still spilling
blood.’
Shadwell opened his arms. ‘I come empty-handed, Calhoun,’ he replied. ‘That’s my gift. Emptiness.’
‘I don’t want your damn gifts.’
‘Oh you do. In your bones you do. They’ve seduced you with their circus. But here’s an end to that sham.’
There was such sanity in his voice; a politician’s sanity, as he sold his flock the wisdom of the bomb. This soulless certainty was more chilling than hysteria or malice.
Cal realized now that his first impression had been mistaken. Shadwell the actor had not disappeared. He’d simply forsaken his patter and his hyperbole for a playing style so plain, so minimal, it scarcely seemed like a performance at all. But it was. This was his triumph: Shadwell the Naked.
The fog had begun to churn with fresh enthusiasm. Uriel was coming back.
Cal took one more look at Shadwell, to fix the mask in his mind once and for all, then he turned and started to run.
He didn’t see the Scourge reappear, but he heard the car explode behind him, and felt the blast of heat which turned the snow to a warm drizzle around his head. He heard Shadwell’s voice too – carried crisply on the cold air.
‘I see you …’
he said.
That was a lie; he didn’t and he couldn’t. The fog was for the moment Cal’s ally. He fled through it, not caring much in which direction he went as long as he outpaced the gift-giver’s brute.
A house loomed up out of the murk. He didn’t recognize it, but he followed the pavement until he reached the first crossroads. The intersection he knew, and took off back towards Chariot Street by a labyrinthine route designed to confuse his pursuers.
Shadwell would guess where he was headed, no doubt; the living fog that concealed the Scourge was probably half way down Chariot Street already. The thought gave speed to Cal’s feet. He had to get to the house before the fire. Suzanna’s book was there: the book she’d given into his hands for safe-keeping.
Twice the ice underfoot brought him down, twice he hauled himself up again – limbs and lungs aching – and ran on. At the railway bridge he clambered over the wire and up onto the embankment. The fog had thinned out here; there was just the snow, falling on the silent tracks. He could see the backs of the houses clearly enough to count them as he ran, until he reached the fence at the back of his father’s house. He clambered over, realizing as he ran past the loft that he had another duty to perform here before he could make his escape. But first, the book.
Stumbling through the ruins of the garden he reached the back door and let himself in. His heart was a lunatic, beating against his ribs. Any moment the Scourge would be outside, and this – his home – would go the way of the Fugue. There was no time to retrieve anything of sentimental value, he had seconds only to gather the bare essentials: maybe not even that. He picked up the book, then a coat, and finally went in search of his wallet. A glance at the window showed him that the street outside had vanished; the fog was pressing its clammy face at the glass. Wallet secured he raced back through the house and left by the route he’d come: out of the door and through the tangle of bushes his mother had planted so many springs ago.
At the loft, he halted. He couldn’t take 33 and his mate with him, but he could at least give them a chance to escape if they wanted to. They did. They were flying back and forth in the frost-proofed cage he’d built for them, perfectly alive to their jeopardy. As soon as he opened the door they were out and into the air, rising through the snow until they found the safety of the clouds.
As he started along the embankment – not back towards the bridge but in the opposite direction – he realized that he might never again see the house he was leaving behind. The ache that thought awoke made the cold seem benign. He paused, and turned to try and hold the sight in his memory: the roof, the windows of his parents’ bedroom, the garden, the empty loft. This was the house in which he’d grown to adulthood; the house where he’d learned to be the man he was, for better or worse; here all his memories of Eileen and Brendan were rooted. But in the end it was just bricks and mortar; evil could take it as it had taken the Fugue.
As certain as he could be that he had the picture before him memorized, he headed off into the snow. Twenty yards on down the track a roar of destruction announced that he was a refugee.
Part Twelve
Stalking Paradise
‘Western Wind, when wilt thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!’
Anon, 16th Century
I
A CHAPTER OF ACCIDENTS
1
f there was any pattern at all to the events of the day following, it was of reunions denied by chance, and of others just as capriciously granted.
Suzanna had decided the previous evening that she’d go up to Liverpool and re-establish contact with Cal. There was no use in circumspection now. Events were clearly approaching a crisis-point. Cal had to be warned, and plans made – the kind of plans that could only be made face to face – about how they could best protect Mimi’s book, and their lives, in the coming storm. She tried calling him ‘til about midnight, but nobody answered.
In the morning she rang Apolline, fresh from Salisbury, to tell her what she’d seen and learned at the Shrine of the Mortalities. She was prepared for Apolline to reject the information Immacolata’s spirit had offered, out of contempt for its source, but that proved not to be the case.
‘Why shouldn’t we believe it?’ she said, ‘If the dead can’t be honest, who can? Besides, it only confirms what we already knew.’
Suzanna told her she planned to go to Liverpool, and talk with Cal.
‘You won’t be alone up there,’ Apolline informed her. ‘Some people went looking for raptures in your grandmother’s house. You might want to find out if they had any luck.’
‘I’ll do that. I’ll call you when I’ve seen them.’
‘Don’t expect me to be sober.’
Before setting out Suzanna tried calling Chariot Street once more. This time her call received the number disconnected tone; the operator could not tell her why. The morning news bulletin would have answered the question, had she switched on the radio; the television would even have shown her pictures of the patch of blasted ground where the Mooney house had once stood. But she tuned in too late for the news, only catching the weather-report, which promised snow, and more snow.
Attempting the journey by car was, she knew, a certain disaster. Instead she took a taxi to Euston, and the mid-morning train North. Just about the time she was settling down for the four-hour trip to Liverpool Lime Street – which in fact took six – Cal was half way to Birmingham on the eight-twenty train via Runcorn and Wolverhampton.
2
He’d called Gluck from a telephone box at the Pier Head, where he’d gone following the confrontation in the fog. There was no particular plan in this: he’d just felt the need to go to the river, and the last night bus before dawn had taken him there. He’d slipped the Scourge, at least for the time being; he even entertained the thought that the creature might be satisfied with the devastation it had wrought. But his gut knew differently. The Angel – Shadwell’s flame of God – had an insatiable appetite for death. It would not be satisfied until they were all dust: Shadwell included, he hoped. Indeed the only comfort he drew from the night’s horrors was the sense he’d had that he’d been viewing the Salesman’s farewell performance.
The wind off the river was bitter; the snow in it pricked his skin like needles. But he leaned on the railings and watched the water until his fingers and face were numb; then, with the clocks on the Liver Building all offering times in the vicinity of six, he went in search of sustenance. He was in luck. A small cafe was open, serving breakfast to the early-run bus drivers. He bought himself a substantial meal, thawing out as he ate his eggs and toast, still trying to sort out what was for the best. Then, around six-thirty, he tried to get
through to Gluck. He hadn’t really expected any reply, but luck was with him, at least in this, for just as he was about to put the receiver down, the ‘phone at the other end was picked up.
‘Hello?’ said a sleep-thickened voice. Though Cal knew Gluck scarcely at all, he’d seldom, if ever, been so happy to make contact with someone.
‘Mr Gluck? It’s Cal Mooney. You probably won’t remember me, but –’
‘– of course I remember. How are things on the Mersey?’
‘I have to talk to you. It’s urgent.’
‘I’m all ears.’
‘I can’t on the ‘phone.’
‘Well, come and see me. Do you have my address?’
‘Yes. I’ve still got your card.’
‘Then come. I’d enjoy the company.’
These welcoming words, coming after the losses of the night, were almost too much; Cal felt his eyes pricking.
‘I’ll get the first train down,’ he said.
‘I’ll be here.’
Cal stepped out of the telephone box into the biting air. Daylight was still a while away; the snow-bound streets were almost deserted as he trudged up towards the station. A truck laboured through the gloom, spreading grit on the icy road; a newspaper vendor was laying out the early morning edition in the dubious shelter of a doorway; otherwise, he saw nobody. It was difficult to imagine, as he trudged, that there would ever be another spring in Spook City.
3
Suzanna stood at the end of Chariot Street and stared at the sight before her. There were too many people milling around for her to advance any further – her suspicion of uniforms had not mellowed; nor had that of Cuckoos in large numbers – but she could see dearly from where she stood that the Mooney house no longer existed. It had been razed literally to the ground, and the fire that had consumed it had spread along the row in both directions. The Scourge had come visiting in the night.