Do I dare?
– it said, mocking his boast to Suzanna.
DO I DARE?
And then it was upon him.
One moment he was only himself. A man; a history.
The next he was pressed to the lid of his creaking skull as the Angel of Eden claimed him.
His last act as a man with a body he could call his own was to shriek.
4
‘Shadwell,’ she said.
‘No time to enjoy it,’ Hamel remarked grimly. ‘We’ve got to get back before they start to move out.’
‘Move out?’ she said. ‘No, we mustn’t do that. The Scourge is still here. It’s in the hill.’
‘No choice,’ Hamel replied. ‘The raptures are almost used up. See?’
They were within a few yards of the trees now, and there was indeed a smoky presence in the air; a hint of what was concealed behind the screen.
‘No strength left,’ Hamel said.
‘Any sign of Cal?’ she asked. ‘Or Nimrod?’
He gave a short, dismissive shake of the head. They were gone, his look said, and not worth fretting for.
She glanced back at the hill, hoping for some sign that contradicted him, but there was no movement. Fog still held court at the summit; the upturned earth around it was still.
‘Are you coming?’ he wanted to know.
She followed him, her head throbbing, the first step taken through snow, the second through thicket. There was a child crying in the depths of the hideaway, its sobs inconsolable.
‘See if you can keep her quiet, Hamel,’ she said. ‘But gently.’
‘Are we going or aren’t we?’ he said.
‘Yes.’ she conceded. ‘We have to. I just want to see Cal back first.’
‘There’s no time,’ he insisted.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I heard you. We’ll go.’ He grunted, and turned away from her. ‘Hamel?’ she called after him.
‘What?’
‘Thank you for coming after me.’
‘I want to be out of here,’ he said plainly, and went in search of the sobbing, leaving her to return to the lookout post that offered the best view of the hill.
There were several Kind keeping watch there.
‘Anything?’ she asked one of them.
He didn’t need to answer. A murmur amongst them drew her gaze to the hill.
The fog cloud was stirring. It was as if something in its midst had taken a vast breath, for the cloud folded upon itself, growing smaller and smaller, until the force that haunted it became visible.
Uriel had found the Salesman. Though it was Shadwell’s body that stood in the mud of Rayment’s Hill, the eyes burned with a seraphic light. From the purposeful way it surveyed the field there could be little doubt that the distraction which had made it mild had passed. The Angel was no longer lost in a remembered void. It knew both where it was and why. ‘We’ve got to move!’ she said. ‘The children first.’
The order came not an instant too soon, for even as the message ran through the trees, and the fugitives began their last dash for safety, Uriel turned its murderous eyes on the field below Rayment’s Hill, and the snow began to burn.
IV
SYMMETRY
1
o trace of the route Cal had described across the field behind the hill was visible when he and Nimrod reached there; the blizzard had erased it. All they could do was guess at the path he would have followed, and dig in the vicinity in the hope of chancing upon the lost package. But it was nearly hopeless. His route to the hill had been far from direct – fatigue had made him reel and wander like a drunkard; and since then the wind had re-arranged the drifts so that in some places they were deep enough to bury a man upright.
The driving snow obscured the hill-top most of the time, so Cal could only guess at what was happening up there. What chance did anyone have of survival against Shadwell, and the Scourge?: little or none, probably. But then Suzanna had brought him out of the Gyre alive, hadn’t she?, against all the odds. The thought of her on the hill, distracting Uriel’s fatal gaze, made him dig with greater devotion to the task, without really believing they had a hope in hell of finding the jacket.
Their digging steadily took he and Nimrod further apart, until Cal could no longer see his fellow searcher through the veil of snow. But at one point he heard the man cry out in alarm, and turned to see a flickering brightness in the wastes behind him. Something was burning on the hill. He started back towards it, but sense prevailed over heroics. If Suzanna was alive, then she was alive. If she was dead, he was wasting her sacrifice turning his back on the search.
As he began again, any pretence to a system in the work forgotten, the roaring in the hill began, climaxing in the din of erupting earth. This time he didn’t look back, didn’t try to pierce the veil for news of love; he simply dug, and dug, turning his grief into fuel for the task.
In his haste he almost lost the treasure in the act of finding it, his hands already covering the glimpse of paper before his distracted brain had registered what it was. When it did he began to dig like a terrier, shovelling snow behind him, not quite daring to believe he’d found the package. As he dug the wind brought a voice to him, then whipped it away again, a cry for help, somewhere in the wilderness. It wasn’t Nimrod, so he kept digging. The voice came back. He looked up, narrowing his eyes against the onslaught. Was there somebody wading through the snow some way off from him? Like the voice, the sight came and went.
The package was just as evasive. But even as he was thinking he’d been mistaken, and there was nothing to find, his frozen fingers closed on the thing. As he pulled it from the drift the paper, which was almost mush, tore, and the contents fell in the snow. A box of cigars; some trinkets; and the jacket. He picked it up. If it had looked unremarkable at Gluck’s house it looked more so now. He hoped somebody in the wood had a clue as to how to unleash its powers, because he certainly didn’t.
He looked around for Nimrod, to give him the news, and saw two figures trudging towards him, one holding the other up. The bearer was Nimrod; the man he was helping – the same Cal had heard and glimpsed presumably – so swathed in protective clothing he was unrecognizable. Nimrod had seen the prize Cal had lifted up to show him, however, and was coaxing the man to pick up his speed, yelling something to Cal as he approached. The wind stole the words away, but he yelled them again as he came closer.
‘Is this a friend of yours?’
The man he was all but carrying lifted his snow-encrusted face, and fumbled with the scarf that was wrapped around its lower half. Before he’d pulled it down, however, Cal said:
‘Virgil?’
The scarf came away, and Gluck was looking up at him with a mixture of shame and triumph on his face in equal measure.
‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘I had to be here. I had to see.’
‘If there’s anything left to see,’ Nimrod shouted over the din of the wind.
Cal looked back towards Rayment’s Hill. Between the gusts it was apparent that the top of the hill had been entirely blown open. Over it a pall of smoke was rising, its underbelly lit by flames.
‘The wood …’ he said. Forgetting Nimrod and Gluck, he began to plough through the snow, back towards the hill and what lay beyond.
2
There was nothing arbitrary in the Scourge’s attack. It was systematically destroying the field and the surrounding region in the knowledge that sooner or later its eyes would find the creatures whose proximity it smelt. In the trees there was an organized retreat; the children, accompanied by either guardians or parents, moving through to the rear of the wood and out into the open air. Few others moved, but stayed at their stations, preserving the integrity of their hiding place. Suzanna wasn’t certain if this was defiance or fatalism; perhaps a little of both. But however deep they dug, their store of raptures was all but exhausted. It was a matter of seconds rather than minutes now before Uriel-in-Shadwell’s glance reached the trees. When it d
id so the woods would bum, invisible or no.
Hamel was at Suzanna’s side as she watched the Angel’s approach.
‘Are you coming?’ he said.
‘In a moment.’
‘It’s now or never.’
Maybe it would be never, then. She was so transfixed by the formidable power being unleashed in front of her, she couldn’t avert her astonished gaze. It fascinated her that strength of this magnitude should be turned to the sordid business of atrocity; something was wrong with a reality that made that possible, and offered no cure for it, nor hope of cure.
‘We have to go,’ said Hamel.
‘Then go,’ she told him.
Tears were welling in her eyes. She resented them coming between her and seeing. But with them she felt the menstruum rising – not to protect her but to be with her at the last; to give her its little sum of joy.
The Angel raised its sights. She heard Hamel shout. Then the trees to the right of where she stood burst into flames.
There were cries from the depths of the wood as the screen was breached.
‘Scatter!’ somebody yelled.
Hearing its prey, the Scourge caused Shadwell’s face to smile: a smile to end the world with. Then the light in the bloated body intensified, as Uriel mustered a final fire, to destroy the rapturers forever.
A beat before it broke, a voice said:
‘Shadwell?’
It was the Salesman’s name that had been called, but it was Uriel that looked round, its calamitous glance momentarily postponed.
Suzanna’s gaze left the Scourge, and went to the speaker.
It was Cal. He was walking across the smoking ground that had once been the snow-covered field at the bottom of the hill; walking straight towards the enemy.
At the sight of him she didn’t hesitate to break cover. She stepped out from the margin of the trees and into the open air. Nor did she come alone. Though she didn’t take her eyes off Cal for an instant she heard whispers and footfalls at her side as the Kind appeared from hiding; a gesture of solidarity in the face of extinction which moved her profoundly. At the last, their appearance here said, we’re together, Cuckoo and Kind, part of one story.
None of which prevented an awed voice, which she recognized as that of Apolline, from saying:
‘Is he out of his fucking mind?’
as Cal continued to advance across the earth Uriel had laid waste.
Behind her, the crackling of flames mounted, as the fire, fanned by the wind, spread through the woods. Its glow washed the ground, throwing the shadows of the Kind towards the two figures in the field ahead. Shadwell, with his fine clothes torn and singed, his face paler than a dead man’s. Cal in his pigskin shoes, the flame-light picking out threads in his jacket.
No; not his jacket: Shadwell’s. The jacket of illusions.
How could she have been so slow as not to have noticed it earlier? Was it the fact that it fitted him so well, though it had been made for a man half his size again? Or was it simply that his face had claimed all her attention, that face which even now had about it a purposefulness she’d come to love.
He was within ten yards of the Scourge, and now stood still.
Uriel-in-Shadwell said nothing, but there was a restlessness in the Salesman’s body that threatened to detonate at any moment.
Cal fumbled to unbutton the jacket, frowning at the ineptitude of his fingers. But he got the trick of it on the fourth attempt, and the jacket fell open.
That done, he spoke. His voice was thin, but it didn’t shake.
‘I’ve got something to show you,’ he said.
At first Uriel-in-Shadwell offered no response. When it did it was not the possessor who replied but the possessed.
‘There’s nothing there I want,’ the Salesman said.
‘It’s not for you,’ Cal replied, his voice growing stronger, ‘It’s for the Angel of Eden. For Uriel.’
This time neither Scourge nor Salesman replied. Cal took hold of the front panel of the jacket, and opened it, exposing the lining.
‘Don’t you want to look?’ he enquired.
Silence answered him.
‘Whatever you see,’ he went on. ‘It’s yours.’
Somebody at Suzanna’s side whispered: ‘What does he think he’s doing?’
She knew; but didn’t waste precious effort on a reply. Cal needed all the power she could will to him: all her hope, all her love.
Again, he addressed the Scourge.
‘What do you see?’ he said.
This time he got an answer.
‘Nothing.’
It was Shadwell who spoke.
‘I See. Nothing.’
‘Oh Cal,’ Suzanna breathed, catching the flicker of despair that crossed his face. She knew exactly what he was thinking, and shared his doubt. Were the raptures in the jacket dead? Had they withered away without victims to nourish them, leaving him standing before Uriel unarmed?
A long moment passed. Then, from somewhere in the belly of the Angel there rose a low moan. As it came Shadwell’s mouth opened, and he spoke again. But it was quietly this time, as if to himself; or the thing inside himself.
‘Don’t look,’ he said.
Suzanna held her breath, not daring to believe his words were a warning. Yet how else could they be construed?
‘You do see something,’ Cal said.
‘No,’ Shadwell replied.
‘Look,’ said Cal, opening the jacket as wide as he could.
‘Look and see.’
Suddenly, Shadwell began yelling.
‘It’s lies!’ he screeched, his body shuddering now. ‘It’s all corruption!’
But the moan that was still rising from the creature inside him drowned his warnings out. This was not the howl Suzanna had heard in the rock of Rayment’s Hill: not an insane cry of rage. This sound was sad, infinitely sad, and as if answering sound with light the jacket, whose threads she’d feared bankrupt, began to brighten.
Immediately Shadwell’s warnings began again, tinged with a new hysteria.
‘Don’t!’ he shouted. ‘Don’t, damn you!’
The Scourge was deaf to the appeals of its host, however. It had its innumerable eyes on the lining of the jacket, willing forth from it a vision only it could see.
For Cal the moment carried terror and joy in such confusion he could not tell one from the other. Not that it mattered: events now were out of his hands. All he could do was stand his ground while the jacket performed whatever deceits it had power to perform.
He hadn’t meant to put it on; that hadn’t been a part of his plan at all. Indeed he’d had no plan; he’d just plunged through the snow, hoping he wasn’t too late to intervene. But events had already outpaced him. Uriel’s glance had found the Kind’s refuge, and was destroying it. The jacket which he’d dug for was redundant; the Kind’s bluff was called. But the sight of the Salesman put another thought into his head: that the jacket’s raptures had worked when Shadwell had worn it, and that he had no better option now than to do the same.
No sooner had he slipped his arms into it than it fitted itself to him, snug as a surgeon’s glove. He felt its embrace as a bargain made. Hereafter it was a part of him, and he of it.
Even now, as he stood before Uriel, he could feel it tapping into him, seeking his humanity to add spice to the illusion it was creating. The Angel’s gaze was fixed on the lining, entranced, the face it wore becoming more distorted with every breath Shadwell wasted on his pleas and predictions.
‘It’ll deceive you!’ he roared. ‘It’s magic! Do you hear me?’
If the Angel was aware of his panic, it didn’t comprehend it. Or if it comprehended, it didn’t care. The jacket’s genius for seduction was rising to its greatest triumph. All it had enthralled hitherto were Cuckoos, whose hearts were malleable and sentimental, and whose desires scarcely rose above the pedestrian. But the dream-life of the entity which now gazed into it was of a different order entirely. Uriel had no halcyon
childhood to mourn, nor lovers to pine for. Its mental powers, though they’d been long left to sterility, were immense, and the jacket’s raptures were pressed to their limits to produce an image of what it most desired.
The garment had begun to writhe and ripple on Cal’s back, its seams creaking around him as though it could scarcely bear what was being asked of it, and was ready to fly apart. He felt he might do the same if this wasn’t over soon. The jacket’s demands upon him were becoming intolerable, as it dug deeper and ever deeper into him, trawling his soul for the inspiration to match the Angel’s need. His torso and arms had grown numb; his hands no longer owned the strength to hold the jacket open. It was left to the forces loose in the lining to spread the coat wide, while he stood in the flux of power, his mind assaulted by fragments of whatever Uriel was yearning after. He could make only partial sense of them.
There was a planet of light he saw turning over and over before him, its immensity grazing his lips. There was a flame sea, lapping at a beach of stone and cloud. There were forms his mind’s eye couldn’t endure to look at making riddles of their breath.
But they were all fugitive visions, and when they’d gone he was back standing on the same dead earth, his body being wasted by Uriel’s hunger. The jacket had reached its limits. It had begun to disintegrate, threads being sucked from its warp and weft and burned away before him.
But Uriel wasn’t about to be cheated; its eyes drew on the fabric, demanding it make good the promise Cal had voiced. Beneath this assault the jacket finally capitulated, but in its destruction Uriel’s demand was answered. The lining burst, and from it rose the image Uriel’s appetite had shaped, its brightness blinding Cal.
He heard Shadwell bellow, then his own cries rose over the din, pleading with the Angel to take its dream to its bosom.
Uriel didn’t hesitate. It wanted this vision as much as Cal wanted rid of it. Through a haze of anguish Cal saw Shadwell’s body begin to bloat as the Angel inside him prepared to show itself. The Salesman could only wail his despair as he felt himself plucked into the air, Uriel’s geometries bearing him up. His skin was tight as a drum, stretched to the limits of its tolerance; his mouth a toothlined O as his cartilage tore and sinew snapped. Then he broke, his body bursting to release its captive, the fragments incinerated in the instant they flew by the glory his destruction unleashed.