The chill behind him became a blast. He saw his shadow thrown up on to the door by flickering blue light; smelt sand and blood.
And then, the voice. Not the boy, but that of his grandfather, of Edgar St Clair Tait. This was the man who had pronounced himself the Devil's excrement, and hearing that abhorrent voice Cleve believed both in Hell and its master, believed himself already in the bowels of Satan, a witness to its wonders.
"You are too inquisitive." Edgar said, "It's time you went to bed."
Cleve didn't want to turn. The last thought in his head was that he should turn and look at the speaker. But he was no longer subject to his own will; Tait had fingers in his head and was dabbling there. He turned, and looked. The hanged man was in the cell. He was not that beast Cleve had half-seen, that face of pulp and eggs. He was here in the flesh; dressed for another age, and not without charm. His face was well-made; his brow wide, his eyes unflinching. He still wore his wedding-ring on the hand that stroked Billy's bowed head like that of a pet dog. Time to die, Mr. Smith," he said.
On the landing outside, Cleve heard Devlin shouting. He had no breath left to answer with. But he heard keys in the lock or was that some illusion his mind had made to placate his panic?
The tiny cell was full of wind. It threw over the chair and table, and lifted the sheets into the air like childhood ghosts. And now it took Tait, and the boy with him; sucked them back into the receding perspectives of the city. "Come on now -” Tait demanded, his face corrupting, “we need you, body and soul. Come with us, Mr. Smith. We won't be denied."
"No!" Cleve yelled back at his tormentor. The suction was plucking at his fingers, at his eye-balls. "I won't -“ Behind him, the door was rattling.
"I won't, you hear!"
Suddenly, the door was thrust open, and threw him forward into the vortex of fog and dust that was sucking Tait and his grandchild away. He almost went with them, but that a hand grabbed at his shirt, and dragged him back from the brink, even as consciousness gave itself up.
Somewhere, far away, Devlin began to laugh like a hyena. He's lost his mind, Cleve decided; and the image his darkening thoughts evoked was one of the contents of Devlin's brain escaping, through his mouth as a flock of flying dogs.
He awoke in dreams; and in the city. Woke remembering his last conscious moments: Devlin's hysteria, the hand arresting his fall as the two figures were sucked away in front of him. He had followed them, it seemed, unable to prevent his comatose mind from retreading the familiar route to the murderers' metropolis. But Tait had not won yet. He was still only dreaming his presence here. His corporeal self was still in Pentonville; his dislocation from it informed his every step.
He listened to the wind. It was eloquent as ever: the voices coming and going with each gritty gust, but never, even when the wind died to a whisper, disappearing entirely. As he listened, he heard a shout. In this mute city the sound was a shock; it startled rats from their nests and birds up from some secluded plaza.
Curious, he pursued the sound, whose echoes were almost traced on the air. As he hurried down the empty streets he heard further raised voices, and now men and women were appearing at the doors and windows of their cells. So many faces, and nothing in common between one and the next to confirm the hopes of a physiognomist. Murder had as many faces as it had occurrences. The only common quality was one of wretchedness, of minds despairing after an age at the site of their crime. He glanced at them as he went, sufficiently distracted by their looks not to notice where the shout was leading him until he found himself once more in the ghetto to which he had been led by the child.
Now he rounded a corner and at the end of the cul-de-sac he'd seen from his previous visit here (the wall, the window, the bloody chamber beyond) he saw Billy, writhing in the sand at Tait's feet. The boy was half himself and half that beast he had become in front of Cleve's eyes. The better part was convulsing in its attempt to climb free of the other, but without success. In one moment the boy's body would surface, white and frail, only to be subsumed the next into the flux of transformation. Was that an arm forming, and being snatched away again before it could gain fingers?; was that a face pressed from the house of tongues that was the beast's head? The sight defied analysis. As soon as Cleve fixed upon some recognizable feature it was drowned again.
Edgar Tait looked up from the struggle in front of him, and bared his teeth at Cleve. It was a display a shark might have envied.
"He doubted me, Mr. Smith…" the monster said,"… and came looking for his cell."
A mouth appeared from the patchwork on the sand and gave out a sharp cry, full of pain and terror. "Now he wants to be away from me," Tait said, "You sewed the doubt. He must suffer the consequences." He pointed a trembling finger at Cleve, and in the act of pointing the limb transformed, flesh becoming bruised leather. "You came where you were not wanted, and look at the agonies you've brought."
Tait kicked the thing at his feet. It rolled over on to its back, vomiting.
"He needs me," Tait said. "Don't you have the sense to see that? Without me, he's lost."
Cleve didn't reply to the hanged man, but instead addressed the beast on the sand.
"Billy?" he said, calling the boy out of the flux.
"Lost," Tait said.
"Billy…" Cleve repeated. "Listen to me…"
"He won't go back now," Tait said. "You're just dreaming this. But he's here, in the flesh."
"Billy," Cleve persevered, "Do you hear me. It's me; it's Cleve."
The boy seemed to pause in its gyrations for an instant, as if hearing the appeal. Cleve said Billy's name again, and again.
It was one of the first skills the human child learned: to call itself something. If anything could reach the boy it was surely his own name.
"Billy… Billy…" At the repeated word, the body rolled itself over.
Tait seemed to have become uneasy. The confidence he'd displayed was now silenced. His body was darkening, the head becoming bulbous. Cleve tried to keep his eyes off the subtle distortions in Edgar's anatomy and concentrate on winning back Billy. The repetition of the name was paying dividends; the beast was being subdued. Moment by moment there was more of the boy emerging. He looked pitiful; skin-and-bones on the black sand. But his face was almost reconstructed now, and his eyes were on Cleve.
"Billy…?"
He nodded. His hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat; his limbs were in spasm.
"You know where you are? Who you are?"
At first it seemed as though comprehension escaped the boy. And then – by degrees – recognition formed in his eyes, and with it came a terror of the man standing over him.
Cleve glanced up at Tait. In the few seconds since he had last looked all but a few human characteristics had been erased from his head and upper torso, revealing corruptions more profound than those of his grandchild. Billy gazed up over his shoulder like a whipped dog.
"YOU belong to me," Tait pronounced, through features barely capable of speech. Billy saw the limbs descending to snatch at him, and rose from his prone position to escape them, but he was too tardy. Cleve saw the spiked hook of Tait's limb wrap itself around Billy's neck, and draw him close. Blood leapt from the slit windpipe, and with it the whine of escaping air.
Cleve yelled.
"With me," Tait said, the words deteriorating into gibberish.
Suddenly the narrow cul-de-sac was filling up with brightness, and the boy and Tait and the city were being bleached out. Cleve tried to hold on to them, but they were slipping from him; and in their place another concrete reality: a light, a face (faces) and a voice calling him out of one absurdity and into another.
The doctor's hand was on his face. It felt clammy.
"What on earth were you dreaming about?" he asked, the perfect idiot.
Billy had gone.
Of all the mysteries that the Governor – and Devlin and the other officers who had stepped into cell B. at 3.20 that night – had to face, the total dis
appearance of William Tait from an unbreached cell was the most perplexing. Of the vision that had set Devlin giggling like a loon nothing was said; easier to believe in some collective delusion than that they'd seen some objective reality. When Cleve attempted to articulate the events of that night, and of the many nights previous to that, his monologue, interrupted often by his tears and silences, was met with feigned understanding and sideways glances. He told the story over several times, however, despite their condescension, and they, looking no doubt for a clue amongst his lunatic fables as to the reality of Billy Tait's Houdini act, attended every word. When they found nothing amongst his tales to advance their investigations, they began to lose their tempers with him. Consolation was replaced with threats. They demanded, voices louder each time they asked the question, where Billy had gone. Cleve answered the only way he knew how. "To the city," he told them, “he's a murderer, you see."
"And his body?" the Governor said. "Where do you suppose his body is?"
Cleve didn't know, and said so. It wasn't until much later, four full days later in fact, that he was standing by the window watching the gardening detail bearing this spring's plantings cross between wings, that he remembered the lawn.
He found Mayflower, who had been returned to B Wing in lieu of Devlin, and told the officer the thought that had come to him. "He's in the grave," he said. "He's with his grandfather. Smoke and shadow."
They dug up the coffin by cover of night, an elaborate shield of poles and tarpaulins erected to keep proceedings from prying eyes, and lamps, bright as day but not so warm, trained on the labours of the men volunteered as an exhumation party. Cleve's answer to the riddle of Tait's disappearance had met with almost universal bafflement, but no explanation – however absurd – was being overlooked in a mystery so intractable. Thus they gathered at the unmarked grave to turn earth that looked not to have been disturbed in five decades: the Governor, a selection of Home Office officials; a pathologist and Devlin. One of the doctors, believing that Cleve's morbid delusion would be best countered if he viewed the contents of the coffin, and saw his error with his own eyes, convinced the Governor that Cleve should also be numbered amongst the spectators.
There was little in the confines of Edgar St Clair Tait's coffin that Cleve had not seen before. The corpse of the murderer – returned here (as smoke perhaps?) neither quite beast nor quite human, and preserved, as The Bishop had promised, as undecayed as the day of his execution – shared the coffin with Billy Tait, who lay, naked as a babe, in his grandfather's embrace. Edgar's corrupted limb was still wound around Billy's neck, and the walls of the coffin were dark with congealed blood. But Billy's face was not besmirched. He looks like a doll, one of the doctors observed. Cleve wanted to reply that no doll had such tear stains on its cheeks, nor such despair in its eyes, but the thought refused to become words.
Cleve was released from Pentonville three weeks later after special application to the Parole Board, with only two thirds of his sentence completed. He returned, within half a year, to the only profession that he had ever known. Any hope he might have had of release from his dreams was short-lived. The place was with him still: neither so focused nor so easily traversed now that Billy – whose mind had opened that door – was gone, but still a potent terror, the lingering presence of which wearied Cleve.
Sometimes the dreams would almost recede completely, only to return again with terrible potency. It took Cleve several months before he began to grasp the pattern of this vacillation. People brought the dream to him. If he spent time with somebody who had murderous intentions, the city came back. Nor were such people so rare. As he grew more sensitive to the lethal streak in those around him he found himself scarcely able to walk the street. They were everywhere, these embryonic killers; people wearing smart clothes and sunny expressions were striding the pavement and imagining, as they strode, the deaths of their employers and their spouses, of soap-opera stars and incompetent tailors. The world had murder on its mind, and he could no longer bear its thoughts. Only heroin offered some release from the burden of experience. He had never done much intravenous H, but it rapidly became heaven and earth to him. It was an expensive addiction however, and one which his increasingly truncated circle of professional contacts could scarcely hope to finance. It was a man called Grimm, a fellow addict so desperate to avoid reality he could get high on fermented milk, who suggested that Cleve might want to do some work to earn him a fee the equal of his appetite. It seemed like a wise idea. A meeting was arranged, and a proposal put. The fee for the job was so high it could not be refused by a man so in need of money. The job, of course, was murder.
"There are no visitors here; only prospective citizens.” He had been told that once, though he no longer quite remembered by whom, and he believed in prophecies. If he didn't commit murder now, it would only be a matter of time until he did.
But, though the details of the assassination which he undertook had a terrible familiarity to him, he had not anticipated the collision of circumstances by which he ended fleeing from the scene of his crime barefoot, and running so hard on pavement and tarmac that by the time the police cornered him and shot him down his feet were bloody, and ready at last to tread the streets of the city – just as he had in dreams.
The room he'd killed in was waiting for him, and he lived there, hiding his head from any who appeared in the street outside, for several months. (He assumed time passed here, by the beard he'd grown; though sleep came seldom, and day never.) After a while, however, he braved the cool wind and the butterflies and took himself off to the city perimeters, where the houses petered out and the desert took over. He went, not to see the dunes, but to listen to the voices that came always, rising and falling, like the howls of jackals or children.
He stayed there a long while, and the wind conspired with the desert to bury him. But he was not disappointed with the fruit of his vigil. For one day (or year), he saw a man come to the place and drop a gun in the sand, then wander out into the desert, where, after a while, the makers of the voices came to meet him, loping and wild, dancing on their crutches. They surrounded him, laughing. He went with them, laughing. And though distance and the wind smudged the sight, Cleve was certain he saw the man picked up by one of the celebrants, and taken on to its shoulders as a boy, thence snatched into another's arms as a baby, until, at the limit of his senses, he heard the man bawl as he was delivered back into life. He went away content, knowing at last how sin (and he) had come into the world.
XXVI: THE LAST ILLUSION
What happened then – when the magician, having mesmerised the caged tiger, pulled the tasseled cord that released a dozen swords upon its head – was the subject of heated argument both in the bar of the theatre and later, when Swann's performance was over, on the sidewalk of 51st Street. Some claimed to have glimpsed the bottom of the cage opening in the split second that all other eyes were on the descending blades, and seen the tiger swiftly spirited away as the woman in the red dress took its place behind the lacquered bars. Others were just as adamant that the animal had never been in the cage to begin with, its presence merely a projection which had been extinguished as a mechanism propelled the woman from beneath the stage; this, of course, at such a speed that it deceived the eye of all but those swift and suspicious enough to catch it. And the swords? The nature of the trick which had transformed them in the mere seconds of their gleaming descent from steel to rose-petals was yet further fuel for debate. The explanations ranged from the prosaic to the elaborate, but few of the throng that left the theatre lacked some theory. Nor did the arguments finish there, on the sidewalk. They raged on, no doubt, in the apartments and restaurants of New York. The pleasure to be had from Swann's illusions was, it seemed, twofold. First: the spectacle of the trick itself – in the breathless moment when disbelief was, if not suspended, at least taken on tip-toe. And second, when the moment was over and logic restored, in the debate as to how the trick had been achieved.
"How do y
ou do it, Mr. Swann?" Barbara Bernstein was eager to know.
"It's magic," Swann replied. He had invited her backstage to examine the tiger's cage for any sign of fakery in its construction; she had found none. She had examined the swords: they were lethal. And the petals, fragrant. Still she insisted: "Yes, but really…" she leaned close to him. "You can tell me," she said, "I promise I won't breathe a word to a soul."
He returned her a slow smile in place of a reply.
"Oh, I know…"she said, “you're going to tell me that you've signed some kind of oath."
"That's right," Swann said.
"- And you're forbidden to give away any trade secrets."
"The intention is to give you pleasure," he told her. "Have I failed in that?"
"Oh no," she replied, without a moment's hesitation. "Everybody's talking about the show. You're the toast of New York."
"No," he protested.
"Truly," she said, "I know people who would give their eye-teeth to get into this theatre. And to have a guided tour backstage… well, I'll be the envy of everybody."
"I'm pleased," he said, and touched her face. She had clearly been anticipating such a move on his part. It would be something else for her to boast of: her seduction by the man critics had dubbed the Magus of Manhattan. "I'd like to make love to you," he whispered to her.
"Here?" she said.
"No," he told her. "Not within ear-shot of the tigers."
She laughed. She preferred her lovers twenty years Swann's junior – he looked, someone had observed, like a man in mourning for his profile, but his touch promised wit no boy could offer. She liked the tang of dissolution she sensed beneath his gentlemanly facade. Swann was a dangerous man. If she turned him down she might never find another. "We could go to a hotel," she suggested.