The images obtained show structures resembling tree branches, exactly like the Old Dead described to Colonel Bedford. If you compare photographic plates, you can see them moving. Of course, what we see are simply three-dimensional cross sections of something much larger. Maybe there is only one Culler, a Leviathan sleeping in kata, and woe to us if he ever wakes.
Lodge and Marconi did not believe the results. They claimed that the structures were simply a hyper-optical illusion, like Lowell’s Martian canals which provided me with so much inspiration in my youth. They insisted we terminate the project and bury the results. I objected, but at that point they had the Queen’s ear. Ever since, they have kept me on a tight leash, and I no longer know who to trust.
I should not have given up the fight so easily, but at that time, I felt revealing the truth would be pointless. It would only lead to terror and anguish: after all, we lacked effective aetheric weapons to defend ourselves with, and in any case, I feared an arms race with the Russians.
And in the end, I could not be sure. Maybe Lodge and Marconi were right.
The closer I get to death, the closer to the end of my tether, the more I think about those early days, and the visage of the Cullers in the CAMLANN images.
Now that we face the prospect of another world war that threatens to span the four dimensions and destroy souls themselves, I have started to wonder if the Cullers might be a blessing in disguise. If there is something that can prevent a clash between our two aetheric Empires, with our opposing philosophies, it is a common enemy. We are too bound by convention to scale the heights the Presence has achieved, but for all its formidable intellect, it lacks imagination.
Together, I believe that we can withstand the Cullers and unravel the mysteries of aether, time, space and souls. And even then, we will only be beginning.
If you are reading this, you have the CAMLANN file in your possession. It contains everything we know about the Cullers. The key to the cipher is on the remaining pages of the book you are holding; call that my last act of vanity, to sneak my works to the Presence’s reading list.
We may never meet again. You may be surprised to hear that I do not have a Ticket: when the time comes, I have decided to go where my imagination takes me. And if all I am and ever was is lost to Fading, I hope the last thing to go is the pride I feel in calling you my son.
H. B.
20
THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME, 5TH DECEMBER 1938
The rest of the letter consisted of pages and pages of grouped digits and letters, a cryptographic key. Peter Bloom closed the book, paid for his untouched coffee and walked out into the street.
He reeled and had to stop after a few steps. Civil servants in dark suits hurried around him as if he were a rock in a river of tweed and umbrellas. Finally, he let the crowd carry him forward until it came to a stop at a traffic light.
Everything West had written rang true. Peter had already deduced a good deal of it by himself—or at least the existence of a mysterious force that had decimated the Old Dead, and was still a threat to all of Summerland. The lack of a densely populated afterlife logically implied some kind of filter for aetheric civilizations, otherwise the Empire’s ectonauts would have found far more than the ruins of a single city. He had presented his reasoning to Otto and Nora, and had been surprised to find they agreed with him.
In any case, this was far too implausible for an SIS plot. The prime minister was a tired old man who had made peace with a decision—to use Peter as a messenger to the Presence. And the message changed everything.
The light shifted from red to green. He stepped off the kerb and saw the end of the world, the shape of things to come.
If it was true, and the Cullers came, then the Presence—along with the entire Summer City and its countless souls—would be destroyed. The British Empire might survive, but the Soviet Union would not. The world would fall once more into barbarism and darkness and the fear of death. The religions and men like Djugashvili would fill the power vacuum and use that fear to build empires of blood and terror.
Peter crossed the street and turned into Birdcage Walk. He had to get the book to Otto and Nora at all costs. The extraction protocol was ready, and if that failed, he could always walk into the Soviet Union embassy and hand himself over to the rezident—the NKVD station chief, in the country under diplomatic cover.
The wind picked up and carried the smell of dead leaves and rain. He found an empty red telephone box next to the hedge of St James’s Park. He fed the phone a sixpence and dialled a number. There were clicks on the line, and then a woman’s recorded voice read out numbers and letters: a Hinton code for a Ticket. He scribbled it down on The Science of Death’s title leaf with a pencil nub, hung up and allowed himself a brief sigh of relief. He had an aetheric destination, an escape route. Now he just needed a way to bring the book and the code with him.
He left the phone box and walked on briskly, planning a surveillance-detection route.
* * *
Rachel White did not have a nervous disposition. Leading up to her bar exam, she calmly planned her study schedule, executed it perfectly, and the night before the exam she slept a sound eight hours. But now, sitting on the passenger seat of a vintage petrol car—most vehicles had been electric for more than a decade—parked on Birdcage Walk, her stomach felt like an acid pit and she had a terrible urge to bite her fingernails.
All she had eaten after breakfast was a stodgy sausage roll from a food cart. They had been trailing Bloom—both in Summerland and the living world—for the whole afternoon, ever since he apparently deemed it necessary to go clothes shopping, then entered Number 10 and came out carrying a book.
Bloom’s distant shape vanished into a telephone box up ahead.
‘What is he doing?’ she hissed.
Joan, who was at the wheel, gave her a reproachful look.
‘He is setting up a meet,’ Roger Hollis said from the back seat. He thumbed the alphabet dials on his ectophone. ‘I am going to tell Booth and Hickson to get ready. I hope Chevalier is doing his part.’
Rachel looked at her former assistant and firmly pushed her complex emotions into a compartment inside her head and locked it. There would be time for that later. Right now, getting Bloom was what mattered, and Roger had agreed to bring two of Noel Symonds’ Summer Court spirit Watchers—Booth and Hickson—along to the operation. Besides them and Max, they had Helen and another of Max’s agents, a Mr Stokes, on the ground on foot, enough numbers to make following a single person undetectable, especially with Max passing messages back and forth and coordinating.
‘Mr Bloom just made a call,’ said Max’s calm and measured radio voice from the car’s ectophone circuit. ‘I listened on the line. The fragments that I caught sounded like a Hinton address.’
‘Get back in there!’ Roger barked. ‘He could leave that body behind any moment!’
‘Patience,’ Max said. Ahead, Bloom emerged from the phone box and headed down the street.
Rachel gave in to the urge and started nibbling at the nail of her left forefinger.
‘No,’ she said. ‘He needs to do something first. It involves West, and that book he brought with him from Number Ten.’ For a moment, Rachel wanted to storm the highest seat of power in the land and demand an explanation of what the prime minister and his illegitimate son had talked about. ‘Maybe he needs to Zöllner-photograph documents.’
‘If he bolts, if he thought-travels—’ Roger said.
‘Then we will stay on him, Mr Hollis,’ Max said. ‘These nice gentlemen that you brought along inform me that they have the lock on his soul-stone now. Wherever he goes in the aether, we can follow.’ He laughed softly. ‘I could almost believe that Mr Booth and Mr Hickson were bloodhounds in a past life.’
‘This had better work, Rachel,’ Roger said.
‘I believe you are turning into an old woman, Roger.’
Joan set her mouth in a grim line and started the engine. They weaved slowly th
rough the heavy traffic, eyes fixed on Bloom’s short, broad figure.
* * *
Peter crossed Birdcage Walk and did a brief loop around the paths of St James’s Park. His borrowed heart felt like a church bell in his chest. It was wet and quiet, and Buckingham Palace loomed across the lake.
This is the last time I will see anything like this, he thought. Perhaps it was not so bad to carry a memory of trees and a white castle that looked like it was made of porcelain—even if the Queen now ruled from the afterlife. The smell of grass and the cries of birds were sharp and clear.
The last time he had felt like this was when his petition to join the Summer Court had been accepted, and he had gone to the Service’s clinic to pass over.
They set him up in a simple bunk bed with a morphine drip, and before the world faded away, everything was more real than it had ever been. Even now, he could recall the glint of sunlight through a dirty window.
Then he had slept and dreamed of climbing, looking for handholds on the side of some vast ethereal building. A gentle warm sun shone on his back. There were handholds everywhere, statues of angels and engravings and planes where it was easy to find purchase with his rubber-soled shoes. Until a statue of a saint came apart beneath his fingers with a thunderclap, his feet slipped and he fell.
Then he was fully awake, in complete nothingness, surrounded by silence and the chill embrace of Summerland. A suffocating panic filled his chest, but he no longer had lungs. There was no distinction between the self and the other here; both were just eddies and currents in the same fluid medium.
But he was prepared: he had memorised the feel of his body, standing naked in front of a mirror, imprinting the sensation of his falling and rising chest and the flow of air through his nostrils. He summoned the memory and the aether sculpted it for him, stroke by stroke. With that came the amber twilight glow of the First Aether above.
Soon, if things went well, he would undergo the Termin Procedure and leave the aetheric world behind, too, becoming a thought in the mind of the Presence. The notion should have been comforting, but there was a degree of regret, too. He had not said goodbye to Noel, nor to his mother. He hoped that one day, they would understand.
He focused on the route, on the walking. With the clarity of his approaching end, it was easy to memorise faces, gaits, coats and registration plates. He left the park through the west gate, then proceeded to Eaton Square and its opulent residences. The Metropolitan Sepulchre on Primrose Hill loomed to the right, a hundred-storey pyramid with its five million dead, but he ignored its vast mass, focusing instead on the small, on the people.
And then, finally, the safe house.
It was smaller than the one George had used in Chelsea. The cover story was that it was owned by a photographer who used it for the occasional shoot—it was not uncommon for the New Dead to have their picture taken in a charter-body, to help maintain their self-image. His stomach was tense when he picked up the key hidden beneath a flower pot and entered.
If things went as planned, he would never leave. Not in the flesh, in any case.
The house was cold and empty, and the sheets covering the furniture made it look like a wintry landscape in the pale daylight.
The Zöllner camera was a heavy black thing of leather and metal, kept in a safe together with the sensitive, silvery polarisation plates in their brown paper coverings. It was a cumbersome thing: you could only load one plate at a time, and changing used plates was a delicate process that took a couple of minutes even if you had more experience than Peter did.
Peter set The Science of Death up on a low table in the kitchen where the light was good, inserted the first plate into the camera and focused it on the number-covered pages. His hands shook. He could feel Pendlebury’s soul moving in his skull, next to his own. He had to sit down for a moment until the sensation passed.
Only a few photographs, he told himself. Then I can go. Then I can disappear. Would it be like a photographic film exposed to bright light? All the shapes and patterns that made up his being blotted out by exposure to the greater radiance of the Presence?
He picked up the camera again, focused it and took the first picture. The camera buzzed as its circuits imprinted the aetheric pattern into the plate’s magnetic loops. He switched plates and took another picture, then another. Every now and then he paused, tore out the pages he had already photographed, threw them into the fireplace and burned them.
* * *
‘What is he doing?’ Rachel asked.
‘It has only been a few minutes,’ Max replied. ‘The gentlemen from the Summer Court are watching in the aether, my dear Helen is on one side of the building and Mr Stokes is on the other. No one else has gone in or out. If you prefer, Mrs White, I can have a brief look inside.’
‘Please do.’
‘I am going to join Helen for a wee bit,’ Joan said, getting out of the car.
Rachel nodded and drummed on the dashboard with her fingers. She had to do something, and had already gnawed two fingernails to the quick.
Roger coughed. It took her a moment to realise that they were alone for the first time since the night in Roger’s flat. She remembered the smell of his aftershave, the rail-thin feel of his body.
‘Are you happy, Rachel?’ he asked suddenly.
‘I do not want to do this now.’
‘We may not have time later. Why do you stay with him? With Joe, I mean.’
‘What do you think you know about me and Joe?’
‘People talk.’
‘Your secretary floozies talk, you mean.’
‘They do not matter a whit to me, you know that. Come to Summerland with me. It is different there. We can be part of a new Service where they value your soul and not your gender. Leave your soldier to his misery.’
‘I don’t think you understand,’ Rachel said slowly. ‘What we did happened because I needed to feel guilty about something. When I handed the file over to Bloom, I had to show a strong emotion to hide my true intentions from him. That’s all it was.’
Roger paused, narrowing his eyes. A cynical smile flashed on his lips.
‘You keep telling yourself that, Rachel. If you don’t mind me saying, it did not look like you were feeling much guilt at the time. I always knew there was a kind of abandon in you, if you just allowed yourself to let it out.’
‘Don’t be disgusting, Roger.’
‘All I am saying is think about it.’ He reached out, took Rachel’s hand and ran a tickling finger along her palm. ‘Life is short.’
She closed her eyes, lost in the sensation for a moment.
‘You are not as bad as all that, Roger. But I love Joe.’ She pulled her hand away.
‘But is it ever going to work with him? You know we are the same. We understand how the world works. We can be equals.’
For a moment, she allowed herself to think about leaving Joe. In spite of all their problems, it still felt like a fracture in her being, not unlike the old idea of death.
The speaker popped and the car grew cold.
‘He is transferring documents to aether,’ Max said. ‘I did not dare get too close. Should we go in and catch our errant bird now, Mrs White?’
Rachel frowned. Being caught red-handed photographing official documents would lead to serious charges—but they did not know the nature of the documents Bloom had obtained from Downing Street. For all she knew, they could be family photographs. Still, maybe it was worth the risk.
‘I promised Symonds the handlers, too,’ Roger said. ‘I say we wait.’
‘It looks like he is going to be a while,’ Max said.
‘Fine,’ Rachel said. ‘Everyone is to hold position until he is finished.’
‘God, I need a cigarette.’ Roger got out of the car and stretched. Then he looked at Rachel, mouthed the words Think about it, and closed the door behind him.
‘Ah, young love,’ Max said. ‘Your Mr Hollis appears to be rather agitated.’
Rachel sa
id nothing.
‘I see.’
‘Spare me your judgment,’ Rachel said.
‘Oh, I never judge. I merely observe.’
‘And what have you observed?’
‘That one difference between animals and humans is that humans rarely admit to themselves what it is they really want.’
* * *
Peter still had a few pages and plates to go when the phone rang. It was the regular handset used by the living, sitting on a low table in a corner. He stared at it for a moment and then gingerly picked the earpiece up.
‘Polka dot,’ a female voice said. It could have been Nora, but he was not sure. ‘Orange and midnight.’ Then the caller hung up.
The words were George’s codes for You’re under observation, spirit and living.
Peter peeked out through the main window but could not see anything. Then he spotted an old woman sitting on a bench in the small park close to the house. He had to get out, and rapid thought-travel to the Hinton address he had been given was his best chance of escape.
He fumbled with the spirit crown’s off-switch. Its constant headache-inducing hum and ticking died. His vision wavered between the living world and the Other Side. His legs felt like jelly. He struggled to free himself from the cage of the skull, to escape what now felt like a flesh-puppet without strings. But the medium’s soul was holding on to him tight, like some sort of tentacled sea creature. He should not have used Pendlebury so many times: the medium’s soul was so familiar with his now that it was reluctant to let him go.
His hands started shaking. A gut-punch of nausea left him on his knees. He coughed out acidic fluids that stained the sheet covering the floor with brown and red. Aetheric sparks flashed in his eyes. He strained against the medium’s will and felt the foreign soul-tendrils cutting into his mind.
A car door slammed outside.
* * *
‘The phone in the house just rang,’ Max said.
‘To hell with it,’ Rachel said. ‘We are taking him now.’
She turned to Roger. ‘Give me your weapon.’