They’d made a base in the study. Gluck had cleared the largest desk, and laid on it a map of Britain, so vast it hung over the top like a tablecloth.
‘The Speared Isle,’ he said to Cal. ‘Study it a while. See if any of the sites we’ve investigated down the years ring a bell.’
‘All right.’
‘I’ll go sort through the reports; and break open the boxes we brought from Scotland.’
He got about his business, leaving Cal to peruse the map, which was even more heavily annotated than those in the next room, many of the symbols, crossed lines and dusters of dots, accompanied by cryptic acronyms. What the letters UFO signified needed no explanation, but what was a Suspected TMD? or a Cirrus VS? He decided to ignore the notes, which were only distracting him, and simply examine the map systematically, quarter inch by quarter inch, beginning at Land’s End and working his way back and forth across the country. He was grateful that he need only examine the land, because the seas around Britain – those regions whose names had always enchanted him on the weather reports: Fastnet, Viking, Forties, Tiree – those too had their share of miracles. It stood to reason. If there were squid falling on suburbia perhaps there were rains of tyres and chimney stacks on the North Sea. He had moved to and fro across the country half a dozen times when Gluck reappeared.
‘Any luck?’ he wanted to know.
‘Not so far,’ said Cal.
Gluck put a foot-high heap of reports on one of the chairs.
‘Maybe we’ll find something here,’ he said. ‘I’ve started with events in the neighbourhood of Spook City, and we’ll spread out from there.’
‘Seems logical.’
‘You dig in. Anything that seems faintly familiar, set aside. As long as you keep reading, I’ll keep supplying.’
Gluck pinned the map up on the wall beside the desk, and left Cal to wade through the first collection of reports.
The work required concentration, which Cal found hard to come by. It was ten-thirty, and he already wanted sleep. But as he leafed through this catalogue of neglected wonders his weary eyes and wearier brain forgot their fatigue, re-invigorated by the startling stuff before them.
Many of the incidents were variations on by now familiar themes: events in defiance of laws geographical, temporal and metrological. Misplaced menageries; excursions from distant stars; houses larger inside than out; radios that picked up the voices of the dead; ice in midsummer trees; and hives that hummed the Lord’s Prayer. All these things had taken place not in the faraway, but in Preston and Healey Bridge, in Scunthorpe and Windermere; solid, stoical places, inhabited by pragmatists not prone to hysteria. This country, which Gluck had called the Speared Isle, was alive from one end to the other with delirious visions. It too was Wonderland.
Gluck came and went, supplying fresh files and fresh tea at intervals, but otherwise doing as little as possible to disturb Cal’s concentration. It was difficult, Cal found, not to be sidetracked by many of the more bizarre accounts, but by disciplining himself severely he sifted out the one in every hundred or so that contained some detail that might connect the event described with the Fugue or its inhabitants. Some he knew of already: the destruction of Shearman’s house, for instance. But there were other reports – of words seen in the air, of a man whose pet monkey quoted the Psalms – which had occurred in places he’d never heard of. Perhaps the Kind were there now.
It was only when he decided to take a short break from his labours that Gluck mentioned he’d unpacked the boxes they’d brought from Scotland, and asked if Cal wanted to examine the contents. He followed Gluck back into the map room, and there – every item tagged and marked meticulously – was the litter events in the valley had left behind. There wasn’t much; either the survivors had destroyed the bulk of it, or natural processes had done the job. But there were a few pitiful reminders of the disaster – personal belongings of no particular interest – and some weaponry. Into both categories, weapon and personal effects – fell the one item that made Cal’s skin run with gooseflesh. There, laid across one of the boxes, was Shadwell’s jacket. He stared at it nervously.
‘Something you recognize?’ said Gluck.
Cal told him what, and from where.
‘My God,’ said Gluck. ‘That’s the jacket?’
His incredulity was understandable; viewed by the light of a bare bulb there was nothing so remarkable about the garment. But it still took Cal a minute to pluck up the courage to pick it up. The lining, which had probably seduced hundreds in its time, seemed quite unexceptional. There was perhaps a gleam in the cloth that was not entirely explicable, but no more evidence than that of its powers. Perhaps they’d gone out of it, now that its owner had discarded it, but Cal wasn’t willing to take the risk. He threw it down again, covering up the lining.
‘We should take it with us,’ Gluck said. ‘When we go.’
‘Go where?’
‘To meet with the Seerkind.’
‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘Surely it belongs with them,’ Gluck said.
‘Maybe,’ Cal replied, without conviction. ‘But we have to find them first.’
‘Back to work then.’
He returned to the reports. Taking a break had been an error; he found it difficult to re-establish his rhythm. But he pushed on, using as a spur the sad remains next door, and the thought that they might soon represent his last keepsakes of the Kind.
At three-forty-five in the morning he finished going through the reports. Gluck had taken the opportunity to sleep for a while in one of the armchairs. Cal stirred him, and presented him with the nine key files he’d selected.
‘Is this all?’ said Gluck.
‘There were others I wasn’t sure about. I kept them aside, but I thought they might be red herrings.’
‘True enough,’ said Gluck. He went over to the map, and put pins in the nine locations. Then he stood back and looked. There was no discernible pattern to the sites; they were spread irregularly over the country. Not one was within fifty miles of another.
‘Nothing,’ said Cal.
‘Don’t be so hasty,’ Gluck told him. ‘Sometimes the connections take a little while to become apparent.’
‘We don’t have a while,’ Cal reminded him wearily. The long hours of sleeplessness were catching up with him; his shoulder, where Shadwell’s bullet had wounded him, ached; indeed his whole body ached.
‘It’s useless,’ he said.
‘Let me study it,’ said Gluck. ‘See if I can find the pattern.’
Cal threw up his hands in exasperation.
‘There is no pattern,’ he said. ‘All I can do is go to those places one by one –’ (in this weather? he heard himself thinking, you’ll be lucky if you can step out of the door tomorrow morning.)
‘Why don’t you go lay your head down for a few hours. I prepared a bed in the spare room. It’s up one more flight, second on your left.’
‘I feel so bloody useless.’
‘You’ll be even more useless if you don’t get some sleep. Go on.’
‘I think I’ll have to. I’ll get going first thing –’
He climbed the stairs. The upper landing was cold; his breath went before him. He didn’t undress, but slung the blankets over him, and left it at that.
There were no curtains at the frost-encrusted window, and the snow outside cast a blue luminescence into the room, bright enough to read by. But it didn’t keep him from sleep more than thirty seconds.
IV
PAST HOPE
1
hey came at the summons, all of them; came in ones and twos sometimes, sometimes in families or groups of friends; they came with few suitcases (what did they have in the Kingdom worth weighing themselves down with?), the only possessions they cared about those they’d brought out of the Fugue, and carried upon their persons. Souvenirs of their lost world: stones, seeds, the keys of their houses.
And of course they brought their raptures, what few they
had. Brought them to the place Nimrod had told Suzanna about, but had failed to name. Apolline had remembered it, however. It was a place, in the time before the Weave, that the Scourge had never found.
It was called Rayment’s Hill.
Suzanna feared that the Cuckoos would have wrought some profound change on the area; dug it up or levelled it. But no. The Hill was untouched, and the copse below it, where the Families had spent that distant summer, had flourished, and become a wood.
She’d also questioned the wisdom of their taking refuge out of doors in such appalling weather – the pundits were already pronouncing (his the bitterest December in living memory – but she was assured that beleaguered as they were the Kind had solutions to such simple problems.
They had been safe below Rayment’s Hill once; perhaps they would be safe there again.
The sense of relief amongst them at being reunited was palpable. Though most had survived well enough in the Kingdom, circumstances had obviously required that they keep their grief hidden. Now, back amongst their own people, they could reminisce about the old country, and that was no small comfort. Nor were they entirely defenceless here. Though their powers were vastly reduced without the Fugue to fuel them, they still had one or two deceiving raptures to call into play. It was doubtful they’d keep the power that had destroyed Chariot Street at bay for long, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.
And when they were finally gathered in the groves between the trees – their collective presence working a subtle transformation upon bush and branch – she felt the indisputable rightness of this decision. If the Scourge eventually found them, they’d at least be together at the end.
There were only two notable absentees. Cal was one, of course. The other was the book she’d given into his hands; a book whose living pages had contained echoes of this midwinter wood. She prayed they were both safe somewhere – the book and its keeper. Safe; and dreaming.
2
Perhaps it was the thought he’d been in the process of shaping when sleep came (that the snow-light was bright enough to read by) which prompted the dream he had.
He imagined that he woke, and reaching into the pocket of his jacket – which was unaccountably deep – took out the book which he’d saved from destruction back at Chariot Street. He tried to open it, but his fingers were numb and he fumbled like a fool. When eventually he got the trick, there was a shock waiting, for the pages were blank, every one of them, blank as the world outside the window. The stories and the illustrations had gone.
And the snow kept falling on the seas of Viking and Dogger Bank, and on the land too. It fell on Healey Bridge and Blackpool, on Bath and Devizes, burying the houses and streets, the factories and the cathedrals, filling the valleys until they were indistinguishable from the hills, blinding the rivers, smothering the trees, until at last the Speared Isle was as blank as the pages of Suzanna’s book.
All this made perfect sense to his dreaming self: for were they not part of the same story, the book and the world outside it? Warp and weft. One world, indivisible.
The sights made him afraid. Emptiness was inside and out; and he had no cure for it.
‘Suzanna …’ he murmured in his sleep, longing to put his arms around her, to hug her close to him.
But she wasn’t near. Even in dreams he could not pretend she was near, couldn’t bring her to his side. All he could do was hope she was safe; hope she knew more than he did about keeping nullity at bay.
‘I don’t remember being happy,’ a voice out from the past whispered in his ear. He couldn’t put a name to it, but he knew its owner was long gone. He pressed his dream into reverse, in pursuit of its identity. The words came again, more strongly.
‘I don’t remember being happy.’
Memory gave him the name this time, and a face too. It was Lilia Pellicia; and she was standing at the bottom of the bed, only it wasn’t the bed he’d gone to sleep in. It wasn’t even the same room.
He looked round. There were others here too, conjured from the past. Freddy Cammell was peering at his reflection; Apolline was straddling a chair, a bottle to her lips. At her side stood Jerichau, nursing a golden-eyed child. He knew now where he was, and when. This was his room in Chariot Street, the night the fragment of the carpet had come unwoven.
Without prompting, Lilia spoke again; the same line that had brought him here.
‘I don’t remember being happy.’
Why, of all the extraordinary sights he’d seen and conversations he’d heard since that night had his memory chosen to replay this moment?
Lilia looked at him. Her distress was all too apparent; it was as though her second-sight had predicted the night of snow he was dreaming through; had known, even then, that all was lost. He wanted to comfort her, wanted to tell her that happiness was possible, but he had neither the conviction nor the will to misrepresent the truth.
Apolline was speaking now.
‘What about the hill?’ she said.
What about the hill?, he thought. If he’d once known what she’d been talking about, he’d forgotten since.
‘What was it called?’ she asked. ‘… where we stayed – ’
Her words began to slide away.
Go on, he willed her. But the remembered warmth of the room was already fading. A chill from the present had crept over him, driving that balmy August night into retreat. He listened still, his heart beginning to thump in his head. His brain hadn’t re-run this conversation arbitrarily: there was method in it. Some secret was about to be divulged, if he could only hold on long enough.
‘What was it called?’ Apolline’s faltering voice repeated, ‘… where we stayed, that last summer? I remember that as if it were yesterday …’
She looked across at Lilia for a reply. Cal looked too.
Answer her, he thought.
But the chill was getting worse, summoning him back from the past into the bleak present. He desperately wanted to take with him the clue that was hovering on Lilia’s lips.
‘I remember that …’ Apolline said again, her stridency growing thinner with every syllable, ‘… as if it were yesterday.’
He stared at Lilia, willing her to speak. She was already as transparent as cigarette smoke.
Please God answer her, he said.
As her image began to flicker out entirely, she opened her mouth to speak. For a moment, it seemed he’d lost her, but her reply came, so softly it hurt to listen for it.
‘Rayment’s Hill…’ she said.
Then she’d gone.
‘Rayment’s Hill!’
He woke with the words on his lips. The blankets had slid off him as he slept, and he was so cold his fingers were numb. But he’d claimed the place from the past. That was all he needed.
He sat up. There was daylight at the window. The snow was still coming down.
‘Gluck!’ he called. ‘Where are you?’
Kicking a box of notes downstairs in his haste, he went in search of the man, and found him slumped in the armchair where he’d sat to hear Cal tell his tale.
He shook Gluck’s arm, telling him to wake up, but he was swimming in deep waters, and didn’t surface until Cal said:
‘Virgil.’
at which his eyes opened as though he’d been slapped.
‘What?’ he said. He squinted up at Cal. ‘Oh, it’s you. I thought I heard … my father…’
He ran his palm over his bleary features.
‘What time is it?’
‘I don’t know. Morning sometime.’
‘Want some tea?’
‘Gluck, I think I know where they are.’
The words brought him round. He stood up.
‘Mooney! You mean it? Where?’
‘What do you know about a place called Rayment’s Hill?’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘Then that’s where they are.’
Part Thirteen
Magic Night
‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep. r />
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.’
Robert Frost
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
I
BLIZZARD
1
ce had stopped the clocks of England.
Though the meteorologists had been predicting Siberian conditions for more than a week, the sudden drop in temperature found the country, as usual, unprepared. Trains had ceased to run; aircraft were grounded. Telephone and power lines were down in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire; villages and even small towns in the Southern Counties cut off by drifting snow. The plea from the media was to stay at home; advice that was widely taken, leaving industry and commerce to dwindle and – in some areas – stop entirely. Nobody was moving, and with good reason. Large sections of motorway were closed, either blocked by snow or stranded vehicles; the major roads were a nightmare, the minor roads impassable. To all intents and purposes the Speared Isle had ground to a halt.
2
It had taken Cal some time to locate Rayment’s Hill amongst Gluck’s comprehensive supply of maps, but he found it eventually: it was in Somerset, South of Glastonbury. In ordinary conditions it was perhaps an hour’s drive down the M5. Today, however, God alone knew how long it would take.
Gluck, of course, wanted to come with him, but Cal suspected that if the Seerkind were indeed in hiding at the hill they’d not take kindly to his bringing a stranger into their midst. He put the point to Gluck as gently as he could. Try as he might Gluck couldn’t conceal his disappointment, but said he understood how delicate these encounters could be; he’d been preparing himself for just such a meeting all his life; he would not insist. And yes, of course Cal could take one of the cars, though neither was exactly reliable.