Not long after they were again sitting on the bench on the rise, where they had sat the first time. The mood of the weather had changed everything. There was no hint of a breeze, nothing moved. The sky had thickly darkened, and the trees had loosely darkened, out of shade into a premature twilight. The world, or this piece of it, seemed to have stopped.
Sara had been frightened of storms. That got worse as the years went on. Carver recalled how once she had run in screaming from the street, seeming to bring the pursuit of lightning and thunder inside with her. She had flown into her bedroom and ripped shut the ineffectual curtains before slamming the door to keep her in. But he had stayed in the outer room, watching at the window.
“We shall just have to get on with things,” said Croft, who had not spoken again until now. (What test was this one?) “How have you been, Carver?” as if inquiring after a decent if not well-known acquaintance.
“I’ve been here,” Carver said.
“So you have. Let’s see. You asked me one or two questions before, didn’t you? I consider, under the circumstances... I might try to reply to some of your concerns. Do you think?”
Croft gave every indication of now pedantically waiting for an answer himself.
“Yes.”
“Yes. A positive affirmative.” Croft’s new tactics were odd. But what else? Croft uncrossed and recrossed his ankles. He had not, this time, taken off his jacket. The jacket was a little rumpled. Had he slept in it? It looked that way. Just like the hair of some of the security men, sticking up unwashed and unsmoothed, unready for action –
“You wanted to know why we are so interested in you. Why your Mantik Corp were so interested in you. Apart” (sarcasm?) “from your high intelligence rating and other splendid personal abilities, of course. Mantik Corp,” added Croft, musingly. He put his hands behind his neck, resting his iron-capped head back on them. “There’s a thought. Perhaps you never have thought of this, Carver. Even though that college place where they seeded you wasn’t bad, I don’t know how much of a classic or etheric education they offered... Mantik–” he paused, “Corp. Have you ever heard or read, Car, of the mythic Manticore – a fabled beast, dear old chap. In several of the old Bestiaries that gave – you’ll know? – lists of magical animals supposedly seen, met with, documented, killed, stuffed and mounted. Indian in origin. Had a lion’s body and a manlike face, surrounded by a great mane. Loved eating humans. What’s for Sunday Dinner, Mrs Manticore? Ooh, Manti. It’s roast man with a bit of roast man. They had three rows of teeth, all pointed. And barbs in the tail. Set the table, Mrs Manticore, set the table on a-roar!”
Carver found he stared at Croft. Carver switched off the stare. He glanced round at the trees. Nothing moved. Everything holding its breath.
“No,” Carver said, quietly.
“Ever heard of Paracelsus, then,” asked Croft, flirtatiously – there was no other word for it.
“I’ve heard of him.”
“Physician-alchemist in 16th Century Europe. Said everyone should fuck or masturbate. Commended the practice as healthful. A man of common sense. He also named an algae that had a certain colour. Nostocaris. Or Nostoc, they have it now. Blue-green. Special properties. Or there’s a fish. Its name means Shining Knife. It gives off a blue-green glow in the dark of the deep sea. This scares off would-be predators. But also – and hear this, Car, my dear boy – it glows so strong it casts no giveaway shadow – like the Devil, or someone without a soul. And by its own light it can find its prey with enormous ease. They don’t get warned by shadow, they’re dazzled by glare. And then – Gotcha! ” Croft smacked his hands – pulled from his head with an almost murderous speed – together.
Carver moved back before he could stop himself. He stood up.
Croft was grinning, laughing up at him, delighted as a three-year-old child with his alarming coup.
“It’s energies, Car. That’s why your damn sheds light up. And that’s why we want to eat you alive. You can conjure energies. You’re like a mast that catches lightning. Only it isn’t lightning you catch or that you create. We don’t know – I shouldn’t tell you this, but I might as well, you’re even more ignorant about yourself than we are – we don’t know quite what you do do, or create. But it’s there. It goes off the scale. It has about the potential charge of a little thermo-nuclear device. Only it doesn’t go off bang, old boy. It doesn’t irradiate or poison or fry. So what does it do? Eh, Car? Eh? Any ideas? Any response? Where do we go from here?”
Memory walked with Carver, strangely, through the leafy wooden outland of the ‘Place’. It slotted itself, surprising sometimes, between the on-off flutter of codes, numbers, digits that seemed also, if patchily, to need to be there in his head with him, trying either to centre or to faze him. Maybe too wanting to remind him of something, but whether helpfully or simply without logic or relevant meaning, how could he tell? He knew definitely what he was doing. Wandering their ‘grounds’, as if perplexed and brooding, as if hoping to make sense of Croft’s enthused outburst. But Carver had not credited a word of Croft’s confidences. They were lies, set to provoke or tangle, all part of the game that went on here, and perhaps – one point of truth – had done so too at Mantik.
The reason for the game was not clear, and might not ever (to him) be fathomable. There had been plenty of that before. He had certainly seen Mantik coin such scenarios in which he had had his part, but never knowing more than his particularised role. For now he wanted merely to see if he could find the end of Croft’s set-up’s ‘Place’ – the physical geography of this territory set in gardens and bounded only one way by sea. Where was the boundary, wall, barricade? What was its type and what lay beyond? Might it, if not now then in the future, be penetrable from the inside out: Escape. And Carver wore for this search the body-language and general appearance of a man concerned and unnerved, which was reasonably good camouflage. He had not questioned Croft, after Croft’s vibrant statement on energies. Carver had stared at Croft, as before Carver had not let himself stare. And when Croft rose and, smiling, pleased, (the three-year-old again), sauntered, whistling, away, silently Carver watched him go, standing with his hands loose at his sides, eyes wide open, frowning. The picture of inarticulate insecurity that might well, after all, be sincere.
The storm Fiddy had prophesied did not yet manifest. Yet the darkness of the day, especially between and below the trees, intensified. It was eventually like an afternoon in an English November. Sunset due at about 4 p.m., but a sky so ungiving that by three lights had gone on in the school classroom or the college hall. Even, back then in Sara’s flat. And before then too, in the squat where she had lived at first with him, and with his father.
And this was the memory that now walked up beside Carver. Opening some after all accessible door, it soaked gently inside.
And it was a new memory – was it? Something (something) not recalled for two thirds of his life – twenty years – or longer. Never recalled since childhood...
How old then was Carver, in this memory?
About three, he thought. (An actual three-year-old child.)
A dark day, and the one electric bulb in the squat’s side room, that dangerous and illegal rewiring had enabled to burn. The flare of it was calmed by a lopsided lampshade of dingy fake pinkish silk. And Sara was sitting on a cushion by the wall, asleep. The air was cold; no heating, but the cold not yet biting or raw. A mild early winter then, back whenever in the earliest ‘80’s of the previous century.
Carver was trying to wake his mother. Who repeatedly, soporifically, shrugged him off. But the man was there then, and picked him up. A big man, bearlike, with a dirty unwashed tang to him, which they all, in their individual ways, gave off. How not? There was no water here to wash in, except the cold water from the other premises with the outdoor tap, and this had to be heated on the open fire in the communal room. The child who was Carver had anyway no aversion to the smells. They were normalcy. The man was warm, and held him with a vast pr
otective surging ease.
“C’mon now, darling,” said the man, hugging Carver close. “Leave your poor mum to a bit of kip. You sit with yer da. Ah, you’re a lovely boy, you are. You’ll be a feller, you will, when you grow up. I’ll take yer fishin’ then. We’ll be rich then, your mum and me. And you. We’ll all be rich, in a big red house in Hampstead. It’ll be warm as toast, and your mummy can have a chandelier in every room to light it all up. Ah, me boy.” And the big face, still tan from a summer working on the roads, a big undrunken face full of large green eyes and sheer approval and involvement, laughing down into Carver’s child’s face, so Carver the child began also to laugh. And the man and he sat by the long cracked window, a French door once, and gazed out at the bare black and grey of a ruinous garden. “Look,” said the warm, dirty, gentle bear, “look – a duckie birdl” And there was. There really was. A duck with a head green as jade and coriander, and outspread swimmer’s wings, flying low over the darkling sky.
Carver, (the man) stopped under the trees of elsewhere and Present Time.
He stared no longer inwards at the memory of Croft. He stared back down and down the staircase of a million adult years, to that moment in November. Was that his father, then?
His father – before despair and alcohol got their fangs and barbs into him and changed him to what he later became, a violently drunken abuser, a monster from hell. Him? Then?
A screen shivered inside Carver’s brain. Instead of images numbers flowed across. 1. 1. 1. 1. 4. 4. 4. 4.
Seventeen
Anjeela Merville was standing under a tree, motionless. Her garments matched or coincided with the woodland – dull green, faded black – he might not have seen her, but some freak of punctured daylight had caught her eyes. They shone like bluish mercury. The luminous eyes of a doll, or a cat.
Carver halted. He did and said nothing, for a moment. But this was, in the most bizarre way, like a direct piece of continuity, following somehow instantly on the events that had already passed. Even, indescribably, on the fragment of memory that involved his father. Even on the random and ceaseless snatches of numbers and codes.
“Hello,” she said, “Car.”
He did not speak. He stood looking at her.
She seemed – different. Her hair again? Yes, it was longer. Just below her shoulders now, thick and curling, liquorice black. More copious extensions, then. But she was slimmer too. Perhaps how she had dressed? Corseting beneath...
She said, “How are you, Car?”
“Did Croft send you?”
“No. Croft is scampering about his section in high good humour. No one sent me.”
“You just came after me, then.”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what exactly?”
She said, “Say my name.”
He did not. He said, “There are enough games already.”
She said, “Aren’t there, though. I thought perhaps we could just play, without a game at all.”
He turned away, and began to take long strides through the trees. So far this ‘walk’, which he reckoned had used up about three more hours, had yielded nothing. From a rise, on a single occasion, he had seen south-westward through the trees, and had a view of the up-and-down building, the sea beyond, and the sun gradually descending, discernible only by a metallic bruise behind the purple cloudbank. And he had found no boundary barrier, no sign he was approaching any. There were no sentries either, of any sort he could detect or concretely suspect. An object fixed high up on a trunk had, for a second, convinced him he at last glimpsed a surveillance device. But it was a piece of metal foil, perhaps pulled up there by a magpie, or other gleam-keen bird-thief.
The sun must be near to going down, he thought. But this twilight did not seem to alter. Only she had altered. Anjeela. Presumably gleam-keen on a bit of rustic fuckery in the fern.
Like memory, she was walking beside him now. She had caught up and kept pace with him, matching his long strides without apparent effort. Whatever weight or hair–length, she was fit then. In any sense, he supposed.
“Say my name, Car,” she repeated in a while, her breathing serene and unhurried.
“Have you forgotten it?”
“Have you?”
“Yes,” he said, ridiculously as a kid of thirteen. “I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Anjeela,” she said.
“Merville,” he said.
“AJ–” prompting.
“MV,” he finished. He stopped again and turned again to look down the few inches into her face. (She was also slightly taller than he had remembered, or wore lifts in her shoes.)
Across his mind, vivid enough as if physically it had flown by between them, the number chain flashed on-off on-off. Code – the code – Judges. Market. Always. Able –
She interrupted.
“I want to show you something, Car,” she said. Her voice was velvet. Panther voice. He could scent her, cinnamon and honey, ambergris and pure coffee.
He shoved her, with a roughness he never expressed against women, into a convenient tree trunk. “All right. Why not. Undo your pants,” he said.
And she gave her panther laugh. Not intimidated, not resisting, not eager or willing or vulnerable, not useable at all.
“I want,” she said, “to show you this.”
And she held up her smoke-brown hand, slender and beautifully articulated by its bones and tendons, gemmed with its five mother-of-pearl nails. One of which–
One of which was – was it? – altering. Was – elongating – growing, pushing out of the forefinger, slim, straight, displaying its manicured oval tip –
“What –?” he said.
“Just watch, Car,” she softly said.
The pearl nail, still smoothly couth, now two-three inches in length – but the – finger too – the finger was effortlessly elongating now, not distorting, merely lengthening, becoming the finger of some non-human being – a finger six inches, one hundred and fifty millimetres – long. The finger ceased to grow. The nail had ceased. They lay there, against his forearm, darker than his shirtsleeve. A perfect finger, not ugly. Only – only – ex-tend-ed. Alien.
“You see it,” she said.
“Some drug. I don’t know how. In the coffee?” Or in her perfume –?
“No drug, Car. This is really happening.”
“It’s some trick, then.” He brought his own left hand across and clamped the alien finger and its nail between his own. It moved. The faintest quiver. It was warm, flexible; made of flesh and bone and coordinated. “How?” he said. “How are you doing that?”
“Like this,” she said.
His eyes skipped back to her face, and saw the single strand of shining hair against her cheek, still attached, but its end slipping down, passing like a cord of silk unravelling, unwinding. The end fell on to her throat, slid serpentine down again over her right breast. When it was long enough to reach her waist it twisted, and lay still.
Closed against his palm he felt the forefinger flex again. He let go – and watched as, with its own lunatic grace, it withdrew seamlessly back and back into her hand, regaining its proper length, sibling to the rest, the polished oval just a pleasingly coloured and burnished nail. The curl was sliding up as well, up and up, faster, faster, snapping home just under her shoulder with the others, slinking in among them to hide.
He drew away from her. Two metres between them now.
“Very clever,” he said. His voice had no substance. It was a mindless and redundant voice. Not even his. Then whose? Who – what – was speaking through him?
She said, “It’s what I can do.”
He said, “Their cameras will have seen you do it, in that case. Or do they know already?” He thought, Nothing happened. It was some form of hypnosis. Or drugs... It will be some drug –
“They don’t know. Won’t hear. Can’t see. Something is messing up the spy-cameras, the clever sound system. Sun spots. Something.”
Something, he tho
ught. The repeated word from the beginning, from the dark, from – somewhere.
“I’ll see you around, Car,” she said. She smiled. Her eyes – were not blue. They were – dark. Dark bronze – And then she blinked. Her eyes were blue.
She turned and ran lightly away. Fleet, he thought, that old word, fleet as a deer.
AJ crossed the mind-screen. MV. 1. 1. 4. 4.
Full night had come, by the time he got round to the northern side again, having given up on discovering any finishing line for the ‘Place’. He had had nothing with him. Having to go out with Croft had precluded that, nor had he been given any coffee or water, no nourishment, only confusion and its subsequent anger.
Regaining the more inward environs of the ‘grounds’, Carver found tonight several drinking parties went on. Hardly a wake. An anniversary perhaps. Or seven or so birthdays being celebrated separately but simultaneously. Given Charlie Hemel’s death, that was peculiar. But by now, everything was. One seriously sane and reasonable event might, in this climate, be the most suspicious. Carver was enthusiastically offered, and accepted, a drink of apple juice among the loitering festivities he inadvertently passed. Was the juice spiked? It seemed only by very weak vodka. He drank enough to alleviate thirst. The day, and currently the night, stayed weather-wise oppressive, but finally dim thunders were rolling round the sky. Pinkish sheet lightning sometimes opened the black ceiling wide. (A pink lopsided lampshade. C’mon now, darlin’, leave your poor mum to a bit of kip. A mast that catches lightning. Look – a duckie bird. Crazy. So many crazies in his life. What memory could he trust, here? How many had been implanted? Fingers that grew long like CGI. )
He reached the foot of the rise, (on which the seven railway carriages were stalled), by his own guess around 10.30 p.m.
For some time he leaned on a tree below the hill.
There had been isolated rills of noise rising, sinking, and strings of lights across the woodland, bonfires even. But here, only darkness. So, no doubts.