Before him Cal saw plainly the incarnation he’d only glimpsed in the fog on Chariot Street: Uriel’s eyes, Uriel’s geometry, Uriel’s hunger.
And then its magnetism drew the illusion its will had made out from the ruins of the jacket and up to meet it.
The vision stood revealed: as bright as Uriel, and as vast, as well it had to be, for the image the raptures had made was another Uriel, the Seraph’s equal in every way. As it rose up the vestiges of the jacket fell away from Cal, but its degeneration did not compromise the creature it had parented. Uriel’s mirror stood unbowed before the power that had summoned it into being.
Cal, robbed both of his strength and of the images he’d peeped on, tasted a terrible banality. He had no energy left to look up and wonder at the majesty above him. His eyes were turned inward, and he saw only emptiness there. A desert, in which his dust blew with the dust of all the things he’d ever loved and lost; blew to the end of time and knew neither rest nor meaning.
His body surrendered, and he fell as though he’d been shot, while the dust in his head whipped him away, into the void. He witnessed nothing of what followed. Suzanna saw his collapse. Ignoring the giants that towered over the burning wood, she went to his aid. Overhead the Angels hovered like twin suns, their energies filling the air with invisible needles. Careless of their stings she bent her back to the task of dragging Cal away from this rendezvous of spirit and spirit. She was beyond fear now, or hope. The first and only necessity was to have Cal safe in her arms. Whatever followed would follow. It was beyond her.
Others had come to her assistance: Apolline, Hamel, and from the far side of the field, Nimrod. Together they picked Cal up and took him out of the region of needles, laying him down gently where the ground was softest.
Above them, the confrontation was reaching a new plateau. Uriel’s form had become impossibly complex, its anatomy transforming at the speed of its thought; part engine, part citadel; all meticulous fire. And its conjured companion was matching it change for change, darts passing between them like needles threaded with fire, drawing them closer and closer still, until they were locked like lovers.
If there had once been a distinction between Uriel the real and Uriel the imagined that no longer pertained. Such divisions were for Cuckoos, who believed they lived both inside their heads and out; to whom thought was only life’s shadow, and not its own true self.
Uriel knew better. It had needed the Old Science to seduce it into confessing its profoundest desire: simply, to see its own true face, and seeing it know how it had been before loneliness had corrupted it.
Now it embraced that remembered self, and learned its lesson on the instant. The pit of its insanity had been as deep as the stars it had descended from were high. Unreminded of its nature it had sunk into obsession, devoted to a dead duty. But looking on itself – seeing the glory of its condition – it shed that lunacy, and shedding it, looked starward.
There were heavens it had business in, where the age it had wasted here was but a day, and its grief, all grief, an unknown state.
On the thought, it rose, it and itself one triumphant splendour.
There were clouds above. It was away between them in moments, leaving only a rain of dwindling light on the faces of those who watched it pass from sight.
‘Gone,’ said Lo, when even the light had died, and there was only a gruel of snow shed from above.
‘Is it over then?’ Apolline wanted to know.
‘I think it is.’ said Hamel. There were tears pouring down his cheeks.
A fresh gust of wind had lent new fervour to the flames that were devouring the wood. It did not matter much. They no longer had need to take refuge there. Perhaps tonight marked an end to refuges.
Suzanna looked down at Cal, whom she was cradling as she’d once cradled Jerichau. But Jerichau had died in her arms: Cal would not; she swore he would not. He had not escaped the furnace of the jacket’s destruction unmarked: the skin of his face and his chest were burned, or perhaps staired. But that was the only outward damage.
‘How is he?’ said a voice she didn’t know.
She looked up to meet the harried gaze of a Cuckoo like herself, muffled up in several layers of clothing.
‘Suzanna?’ he said. ‘My name is Gluck. I’m a friend of Calhoun’s.’
‘You’re welcome,’ said someone.
Gluck beamed.
‘He’s not going to die,’ said Suzanna, stroking Cal’s face. ‘He’s just sleeping awhile.’
‘He’s had a busy night,’ said Nimrod, and there were tears on his stoical face too, pouring down.
V
THE SLEEPWALKER
1
here was a wilderness, and Cal was dust in the wilderness, and his hopes and dreams were dust in the wilderness, all driven before the same unforgiving wind.
He had tasted Uriel’s condition, before its healing. He’d shared the spirit’s loneliness and desolation, and his frail mind had been snatched up into the void and left there to die. He knew no way out. In the final arithmetic his life was a wasteland: of fire, of snow, of sand. All of it, a wasteland, and he would wander there ‘til he could wander no more.
2
To those who were tending him, he seemed simply to be resting; at least at first. They let him sleep, in the belief that he’d wake healed. His pulse was strong, his bones unbroken. All he needed was time to recover his strength.
But when he woke the following afternoon, in Gluck’s house, it was immediately clear that something was profoundly amiss. His eyes opened, but Cal was not in them. His gaze was devoid of recognition or response. It and he were as blank as an empty page.
Suzanna couldn’t know – none of them could – what he’d shared with Uriel during their confrontation, but she could make an educated guess. If her experience of the menstruum had taught her anything it was that every exchange was a two-way street. Cal had conspired with Immacolata’s jacket to give Uriel its vision, but what had the lunatic spirit given him in return?
When, after two days, there was no sign of improvement in his state, they called in expert help, but though the doctors exhausted their tests on him they could find nothing physiologically wrong. This was not a coma, they ventured, so much as a trance; and they knew no precedent for it, except perhaps sleepwalking. One of their number even went so far as to suggest the condition might be self-induced, a possibility Suzanna did not entirely dismiss.
There were no reasons they could find, they finally announced, as to why the patient wasn’t up and awake and living a healthy life. There are plenty of reasons, Suzanna thought, but none that she could begin to explain. Perhaps he had simply seen too much; and the surfeit had left him indifferent to being.
3
And the dust roiled on.
Sometimes he thought he heard voices in the wind; very distant voices. But they disappeared as quickly as they came, and left him alone again. That was for the best, he knew, because if there was a place beyond this wasteland and the voices were trying to coax him back, it would bring him pain, and he was better off without it. Besides, sooner or later the inhabitants of that otherwhere would come to him. They’d wither and die and join the dust in the wilderness. That was how things happened; always had and always would.
Everything went to dust.
4
Each day Suzanna would spend several hours talking to him, telling him how the day had gone, and whom she’d met, mentioning the names of people he knew and places he’d been in the hope of stirring him from his inertia. But there was no response; not a glimmer.
Sometimes she’d get into a quiet rage at his apparent indifference to her, and tell him to his vacant face that he was being selfish. She loved him, didn’t he know that? She loved him and she wanted him to know her again, and be with her. Other times she’d come close to despair, and however hard she tried she couldn’t stem the tears of frustration and unhappiness. She’d leave his bedside then, until she’d composed herself again,
because she was fearful that somewhere in his sealed head he’d hear her grief and flee even further into himself.
She even tried to reach him with the menstruum, but he was a fortress, and her subtle body could only gaze into him, not enter. What it saw gave her no cause for optimism. It was as if he was uninhabited.
5
Outside the window of Gluck’s home it was the same story: there were few signs of life. This was the hardest winter since the beginning of the century. Snow fell on snow; ice glazed ice.
As January crept to its dismal end people began not to ask after Cal as frequently. They had problems of their own in such a grim season, and it was relatively easy for them to put him out of their minds because he wasn’t in pain; or at least in no pain he could express. Even Gluck tactfully suggested that she was giving too much of her time over to nursing him. She had her own healing to do; a life to be put in some sort of order; plans to be laid for the future. She’d done all that could be expected from a devoted friend, and more, he argued, and she should start to share the burden with others.
I can’t, she told him.
Why not?, he asked.
I love him, she said, and I want to be with him.
That was only half the answer of course. The other half was the book.
There it lay in his room, where she’d put it the day they’d returned from Rayment’s Hill. Though it had been Mimi’s gift to Suzanna, the magic that it now contained meant she could no longer open it alone. Just as she’d needed Cal at the Temple, in order to use the Loom’s power, and charge the book with their memories, so she needed him again if they were to reverse the process. The magic hung in the space between them. She could not reclaim on her own what they’d imagined together.
Until he woke the Stories of the Secret Places would remain untold. And if he didn’t wake they’d remain that way forever.
6
In the middle of February, with the false hint of a thaw in the air, Gluck took himself off to Liverpool, and, by dint of some discreet enquiries in Chariot Street, located Geraldine Kellaway. She returned with him to Harborne to visit Cal. His condition shocked her, needless to say, but she had that brand of pragmatism that would find her the first brewing tea after Armageddon, and within an hour she’d taken it in her stride.
She returned to Liverpool after two days, back to the life she’d established in Cal’s absence, promising to visit again soon.
If Gluck had hoped her appearance would do something to break the deadlock of Cal’s stupor, he was disappointed. The sleepwalker went on in the same fashion, through February and early March, while outside the promised thaw was delayed and delayed.
During the day they’d move him from his bed to the window, and there he’d sit, overlooking the expanse of frost-gripped ground behind Gluck’s house. Though he was fed well, chewing and swallowing with the mechanical efficiency of an animal; though he was shaved and bathed daily; though his legs were exercised to keep the muscles from wasting, it was apparent to those few who still came visiting, and especially to Suzanna and Gluck, that he was preparing die.
7
And the dust rolled on.
VI
RAPTURE
1
f Finnegan hadn’t called she would never have gone down to London. But he had, and she did, as much at Gluck’s insistence than from any great enthusiasm for the trip.
As soon as she got out of the house, however, and started travelling, she began to feel the weight of recent weeks lift a little. Hadn’t she once said to Apolline that there was comfort in their at least being alive? It was true. They would have to make the best they could of that, and not sigh for things circumstance had denied them.
She found Finnegan less than his usual spritely self. His career at the bank had floundered of late, and he needed a shoulder to curse upon. She supplied it happily, more than content to hear his catalogue of woes if they distracted her from her own. He reminded her, when he’d finished complaining and gnashing his teeth, of something she’d once said about never marrying a banker. As it seemed he’d soon be out of a job would she think again?, he wondered. It was clear from his tone he didn’t expect yes for an answer, and he didn’t get it, but she told him she hoped they’d always be friends.
‘You’re a strange woman,’ he said as they parted, apropos of nothing in particular.
She took the remark as flattery.
2
It was late afternoon by the time she got back to Harborne. Another night of frost was on its way, pearling the pavements and roofs.
When she went upstairs she found the sleepwalker had not been put in his chair but was sitting against heaped pillows on the bed, his eyes as glazed as ever. He looked sick; the mark Uriel’s revelation had left on his face was livid against his pallid skin. She’d left too early to shave him that morning, and it distressed her to see how close to utter dereliction such minor neglect had left him looking. Talking quietly to him about where she’d been, she led him from the bed over to the chair beside the window, where the light was a little better. Then she collected the electric razor from the bathroom and shaved his stubble.
At the beginning it had been an eerie business, ministering to him like this, and it had upset her. But time had toughened her, and she’d come to view the various chores of keeping him presentable as a means to express her affection for him.
Now, however, as dusk devoured the light outside, she felt those early anxieties rising in her again. Perhaps it was the day she’d spent out of the house, and out of Cal’s company, that made her tender to this experience afresh. Perhaps it was also the sense she had that events were drawing to a close; that there would not be many more days when she would have to shave him and bathe him. That it was almost over.
Night was upon the house so quickly the room soon became too gloomy to work in. She went to the door and switched on the light.
His reflection appeared in the window, hanging in the glass against the darkness outside. She left him staring at it while she went for the comb.
*
There was something in the void ahead of him, though he couldn’t see what. The wind was too strong, and he, as ever, was dust before it.
But the shadow, or whatever it was, persisted, and sometimes – when the wind dropped a little – it seemed he could almost see it studying him. He looked back at it and its gaze held him, so that instead of being blown on, and away, the dust he was made of momentarily stood still.
As he returned the scrutiny, the face before him became clearer. He knew it vaguely, from some place he’d gained and lost. Its eyes, and the stain that ran from hairline to cheek, belonged to somebody he’d known once. It irritated him, not being able to remember where he’d seen this man before.
It was not the face itself which finally reminded him, but the darkness it was set against.
The last time he’d seen this stranger, perhaps the only time, the man had been standing against another such darkness. A cloud, perhaps, shot with lightning. It had a name, this cloud, but he couldn’t remember it. The place had a name too, but that was even further out of his reach. The moment of their meeting he did remember however; and some fragments of the journey that led up to it. He’d been in a rickshaw, and he’d passed through a region where time was somehow out of joint. Where today breathed yesterday’s air, and tomorrow’s too.
For curiosity’s sake he wanted to know the stranger’s name, before the wind caught him and moved him on again. But he was dust, so he couldn’t ask. Instead he pressed his motes towards the darkness on which the mysterious face hovered, and reached to touch his skin.
It was not a living thing he made contact with, it was cold glass. His fingers fell from the window, the heat-rings they’d left shrinking.
If it was glass before him, he dimly thought, then he must be looking at himself surely. The man he’d met, standing against that nameless cloud: that was him.
A puzzle awaited Suzanna when she returned to the room. She
was almost certain she’d left Cal with his hands on his lap, but now his right arm hung at his side. Had he tried to move? If so it was the first independent motion he’d made since the trance had claimed him.
She started to speak to him, softly, asking him if he heard her, if he saw her, or knew her name. But as ever it was a oneway conversation. Either his hand had simply slipped from his lap or she’d been mistaken and it hadn’t been there in the first place.
Sighing, she set to combing his hair.
He was still dust in a wilderness, but now he was dust with a memory.
It was enough to give him weight. The wind bullied him, wanting its way with him, but this time he refused to be moved. It raged against him. He ignored it, standing his ground in the nowhere while he tried to fit the pieces of his thoughts together.
He had met himself once, in a house near a cloud; he’d been brought there in a rickshaw while a world folded up around him.
What did it signify, that he’d come face to face with himself as an old man? What did that mean?
The question was not so difficult to answer, even for dust. It meant he would at some future time step into that world, and live there.
And from that, what followed? What followed?
That the place was not lost.
Oh yes! Oh God in Heaven, yes! That was it. He would be there. Not tomorrow maybe, or the day after that; but someday, some future day: he would be there.
It was not lost. The Fugue was not lost.
It took only that knowledge, that certainty, and he woke.