The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

by Natasha Pulley

  She did think about it. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s – just go slowly then.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be going anywhere,’ Willis said from the office. ‘Don’t be surprised if you collapse.’

  Thaniel shook his head at nobody and couldn’t think of anything to say that Vaulker wouldn’t mind.

  ‘He’s a prick,’ Six said sombrely. ‘Pay no attention.’

  He laughed, which hurt. She kept pace with him as he inched up the steps, one hand on the wainscoting. When he half fell, she waited but didn’t touch him. In the porcelain bowl in his room, Six’s lightbulbs were still alight. They were brighter than before.

  ‘Where are you off to?’ he asked, because she had picked up the octopus lightbulb and now she was heading back for the door.

  ‘To show this to Mr Fukuoka.’

  ‘Ah – hold on, petal. Why?’

  ‘He’s my friend. He gave me half of his jam thing.’

  He bit the end of his tongue. Fukuoka was a kind man, Thaniel was nearly sure. ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘But don’t stay with him too long, he has plenty to do.’

  ‘How long is too long?’

  ‘More than half an hour.’

  ‘Half an hour,’ she repeated, and took out her watch to set the bell.

  The door clicked shut. He listened to the brown thumping as she went downstairs and wanted to go out after her, but standing up was too difficult. He waited at the window for a little while, leaning hard on the sill. Fukuoka was at the edge of the protest camp, and he bent down and made a fuss of her when she tumbled out, then picked her up to show her what was going on. Everyone had crowded together; they were burning a big, floppy doll made of white bedsheets and stuffed into a Western-style suit, complete with necktie and pocket watch. Fukuoka put Six on his shoulders.

  Mori would have said that the worst really hadn’t come to the worst if people were still doing that sort of double-thinking. She was fine.

  Owlbert surfaced and pecked the window latch. Thaniel let him out, and watched him swoop down to the protest camp to land on the crossbar of a half-constructed tent.

  Thaniel crumpled onto the hearthrug and stayed sitting up for long enough to make a fire among the warm horseshoes in the grate, because it was so cold the lenses of his eyes felt like frost and he had a distinct feeling he would never wake up if he let the temperature drop any more. The second the little flame caught properly, he dropped down sideways. He lay with his cheek flat to the sheepskin rug, still too cold, breathing the smell of lanolin. He felt ill enough to spark a lick of panic. If he died and if Six came back in and assumed he was asleep, which she would, no one would find him until the steward came in mid-morning tomorrow.

  After a heavy while, he forced himself half-upright and pulled the side table nearer. It was where the phonograph sat, well away from the fire to save the cylinders. He put it on loud, so that if it carried on late into the evening, someone would come in. Putting the needle onto the cylinder was as much as he could do. He snagged the blanket off the chair and fell back onto the rug. He felt victorious about the blanket. The fire roared through some pine needles.

  He fell straight into nightmares about being lost on roads he didn’t know, with something following him. He kept waking up, but every time he went back to sleep, the thing was closer.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Abashiri, Hokkaido, 17th January 1889 (one month ago)

  Takiko had gone to the edge of the forest early for firewood. They were running low at the prison; apparently it was one of those things the previous girl had done, but nobody had known. It was a novelty to collect wood for fires. She was used to coal, and as she picked up promising twigs and little branches from the dry powder snow, she quite looked forward to lighting them. Burning wood was a gorgeous thing, especially when it was minus fifteen in the sun.

  There was a big snowdrift by one of the trees just a little way into the woods, suspiciously big. Hoping it was a stack of wood that the last girl had collected, she brushed some snow aside. She found the head of a horse underneath. She stood still for a while. The cold had desiccated the horse’s eye and turned it glaucous. She brushed off more snow. The rest of the horse was there, saddle and all. When she straightened up, she saw there were snow mounds right back into the woods. She chose one at random. Under it was a dead body in red. It was peculiarly less than upsetting. She’d never seen a dead person before, but, blanched in the cold, the body didn’t look like a person at all anymore, just a clumsy impression of one; as though something lonely had tried to make a man from frost and shards of birch bark.

  When she hurried into the warden’s office, she recoiled at the heat inside. It wasn’t that hot, but after the gnawing cold outside, it was as bad as charging into a sauna in a fur coat. She had to catch the door frame, feeling sick.

  ‘Miss Tsuru,’ said the warden, surprised. ‘We’re in a meeting.’

  He had called together all the remaining guards. Only eight. She explained what she’d found. Nobody looked surprised, only gloomy.

  ‘Yes, so,’ said the warden, ‘that’s two more guards gone. Consider the timetable changes permanent, gentlemen.’

  ‘Are we to expect any new staff from Tokyo, sir?’ Tanizaki asked, looking drab. He had his palsied hand strapped to his chest today, but it was still trembling despite the binding. She couldn’t see the timetable, but she could imagine it landed everyone with more night shifts for which the pay did not entirely compensate.

  ‘Not until March, I’m afraid. The sea’s impassable for now. On you go.’

  It wasn’t until she had been going to the prison for a week or so that Takiko really noticed the big central tower. It didn’t have any windows. Its single feature was a lightning rod on the roof. She wondered if it was one of those odd government building projects that happened for no reason except to give restless people something to do. Whatever the reason for it, she had never been up there, though it must have sat right above the warden’s office. In fact the office, up its little stairway, must have been in the base of it. She frowned when she thought of that, because there was no stairway leading upward from the office. It could only be one tall, empty attic space. The electrograph had to be up there.

  There had been a lull in the snow and the guards had taken advantage of it. The prison was almost empty, except for the high-security inmates. Everyone else was out in the forest, building the new road, the cell doors left open. She swept inside, took out blankets for laundry, and put new ones in. It didn’t feel like going into anyone’s private space. There was almost nothing else inside most of them. It wasn’t, Tanizaki pointed out, the kind of place where there was ever such a lot available on the outside to smuggle in. She stoked the braziers in the corridors and had to keep going back to them to warm up her hands. It had been cold before, but there was a miserable, permanent quality to it now.

  The edges of her hands felt rough when she pressed her palm against her nose. The cracked skin was starting to look like burn scars. She sat looking at them, aware that the cold was coming up through the floor and seeping into her knees. Whenever she went to town to buy food, she saw fishwives her age who looked old. Even the Ainu women, who had been made for the cold, were grown up at fourteen and elderly by thirty. It wasn’t about quality of food or exercise, or any of it. It was just the weather. It was too cold to wash properly, too cold to sleep properly, too cold to eat anything fresh and not hot, too cold to ever get more sun than a ten-minute snatch on the way to somewhere else. For every day you were in this winter, you were three days older.

  The warden had said the sea was too frozen to sail on now. Whatever happened, she was stuck until spring.

  ‘Tea time,’ Tanizaki called down to her.

  ‘Right, coming,’ she said.

  When she came into the little office, the tremor in his hand was bad. He couldn’t pick up a cup and had to use his left. He was pinning his right down with his knee, but the next spasm was so strong that
it knocked his leg upward into the underside of the table. The teapot juddered.

  ‘You need knee pads,’ she said.

  ‘I do. Like those things gaijin wear to play cricket. You couldn’t run down to the kitchen and fetch up some more water, could you? We’re running out and I think I’d … spill it,’ he said bleakly.

  ‘Should you be at work today?’

  ‘It never lasts long.’

  She nodded and went downstairs, into the steamy damp of the kitchen. When the cook saw her, he pointed at her with his ladle. There was something wrong with him or, if not wrong, then at least irregular. His eyes were too small and his tongue was too big. She couldn’t always understand what he was saying, although she did now. No stealing. She said yes. He said no. She took the water anyway.

  He grunted and put a tray into a dumb waiter, and pulled a lever. It went up geriatrically. She looked up at the ceiling and bent her mind round the angle of the stairs. The warden’s office was right above them. It was a piece of special laziness not to come down and fetch your own tray, but then, given the choice between having a dumb waiter and not, she would have wanted one.

  She lingered as long as she could decently stretch a tea break with Tanizaki in the warm guards’ room, and then took the cleaning things upstairs.

  ‘Miss Tsuru,’ the warden said when she came in. ‘I don’t suppose you might make us some of your famous tea. We’re feeling rather envious of Mr Tanizaki downstairs.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she said.

  ‘Might help with my headache.’

  ‘Headache, sir?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be sympathetic, I’ll collapse. Wretched things. I see starry lights when they’re on the way and you’re looking sparkly.’

  ‘No one here seems to be very well, sir.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t the most healthful place in the world,’ he said. He rubbed his temple while he watched her lift the little iron teapot from the fire. ‘Quite weak, please. Nakamura?’

  The typing man said yes please. When she handed over his cup, he looked apologetic and turned away coughing. He did as he was told when she said that breathing the steam might help.

  ‘The fireplace is getting ashy,’ Takiko said. ‘It won’t be doing him any good. I meant to ask, sir, if I could have the key so I could come here early and clean it out while you’re not here. It would be a terrible disturbance if I were to do it now.’

  The warden was quiet for a long moment, and she had a nasty certainty he knew exactly why she wanted to come in early. ‘Yes,’ he said at last. He took a key from his desk drawer. ‘I’m trusting you with this. You mustn’t touch anything but the hearth.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Of course. I would never look at any documents, or – I hardly know how to read,’ she said.

  ‘No, of course. You’re a good girl. The last girl was rather nosy. I know you’ll not be like that; you’re quite a different class of person altogether.’

  She nodded once, almost before she remembered that the last girl had frozen to death in a ditch. ‘I hope so, sir. It would be unconscionable.’

  She wondered what the last girl had seen.

  He relented. ‘I don’t mean to frighten you, I’m just anticipating this headache. After you’ve done the window sill, that’s all I think.’

  ‘Shall I take the tray down too?’

  He looked up. ‘Tray?’

  It was instinct, not a decision, that stopped her mentioning how she had seen the cook put a whole meal into the dumb waiter twenty minutes ago. She had a powerful feeling that it would be very stupid indeed to say anything about it. She did look round, though. There was no hatch in the walls, not anywhere.

  ‘Forget my head next,’ she said. ‘I was so sure you were eating when I came up.’

  He flapped his hand towards the window. ‘It’s this place; you lose track of things. Perhaps you were thinking of yesterday?’

  ‘Must have been. Sorry, sir.’

  So someone was taking meals up there. She scrubbed at an old stain on Nakamura’s desk so that she wouldn’t just stand and stare into space, listening to the mechanical clicks inside the wall. Nakamura smiled briefly and moved some of the pattern-photographs from the radius of her brush. When he paused, so did the clicking in the wall.

  She concentrated hard on the stain. The clicking sounded like clockwork. It was operating something; a lock, a door, something. It had been a passing thought when she first had it, but she was beginning to feel creepingly sure that Mori was either up there, or would be soon.

  ‘Oh, my head,’ the warden mumbled. He sank down on the desk, his head in his arms. Across from him, the typist coughed into his sleeve but kept on with his keys, his nose pink despite the waving heat of the fire. She could hear the wheeze when he breathed. As she went back down the stairs, the cold coiled up to greet her. Tanizaki was still huddled miserably at the table, holding his skittering hand flat to the wood while he talked to another man, newly arrived, with snow on the shoulders and sleeves of his greatcoat and a damp sheen on his riding boots.

  ‘… dropping like flies,’ the other guard was saying. ‘Two this morning. And there’s another blizzard coming this afternoon, you can see it on the mountain. I’m bringing them in for the day.’

  She tapped on the door. ‘Afternoon all. Shall I see about some lunch?’ It was only half an hour since she had fetched the water for Tanizaki, but the cold was so dragging that she was starting to feel hungry all the time. Everyone seemed to need more fuel just to stay awake.

  ‘You’re spoiling us,’ Tanizaki said happily.

  ‘Of course I am, look at you, you’re falling apart. You look like you’ve frozen to the floor,’ she added to the other guard. He was so tall and spindly that one of his parents must have been Chinese. It was very noticeable next to Tanizaki, who was short and stocky. When he folded down at the kotatsu, he looked ridiculous, because he was too tall for it and he had to hinge all his joints down into the right places one by one like a giraffe.

  They both looked pleased when she came back with fish and onigiri. She sat down with them and lifted the spine of her salmon from the rest of it without thinking before Tanizaki laughed that her table manners were too good. He was yanking his fish apart with one chopstick in each hand. His bad one had stopped shaking so much.

  ‘Mr Tanizaki,’ she said, once they had joked a bit about geisha. He had said it too suggestively, and so she had said she couldn’t possibly be a geisha because the last time she’d played a samisen the cat had run away and been hit by a cart. She made up an unnecessary bit about its guts for good measure. If she could only train him to associate her with disgusting things, he would stop leaning so close when he spoke. ‘You know the big tower, above the warden’s office?’

  ‘It’s called the Oracle. It was only built last year. Year before?’ He glanced at the tall man, who shrugged. ‘I forget.’

  ‘What’s it for?’

  ‘It was meant to be a watchtower. Some new prison regulations came in, everyone had to have a watchtower of a certain height. But it’s never been used that I know. Piece of bureaucratic rubbish, I think. They’ve put in some kind of electrical equipment now, something to do with the weather.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said, and pretended to lose interest. She sipped her tea.

  ‘We are a weather station actually,’ the tall man put in suddenly, in the quiet. ‘They send all the readings to Tokyo. There’s no better place to gauge south-coming storms. You know what Shiretoko means, in Ainu?’

  She shook her head. Shiretoko was the name of the whole region, their manta-ray antenna at the top of Hokkaido.

  ‘The end of the world.’

  ‘That’s accurate,’ she said.

  ‘You made that up, Oemoto,’ Tanizaki laughed. ‘Unless you’ve been hanging round with the Ainu on your days off.’

  ‘No, they told us at school. I had a Russian science teacher. It’s like Russian, Ainu—’

  ‘Oh, the famous science teacher!’ Tanizaki g
rinned and thumped him. ‘He fell in love with a Russian science teacher, it was very sad,’ he explained to Takiko, then giggled when Oemoto thumped him back. ‘Get off, it’s not slander if it’s true—’

  Tanizaki collapsed. Oemoto only stared at first. ‘Hey – stop pissing about – Tanizaki …’

  When she came around the table he was seizing. She dropped down and held him still as best as she could. Oemoto knelt beside her to help.

  ‘Is there a doctor here?’ she said.

  ‘Gatehouse – yes. Dr Fujiwara.’

  By the time she had run back with the doctor, the seizure had stopped and Tanizaki was picking himself up slowly, white and shaken. The doctor listened to his heart and looked into his eyes and said he was as all right as he was going to be, though he didn’t look convinced. The seriousness was noticeable, because it didn’t suit him. His name, Fujiwara, meant wisteria, and he had a bright purple cravat on to match. He must have been quite a flamboyant person normally.

  It wasn’t only the staff who were ill. As Takiko let herself out through the delivery gate, which she was using on her way home now to avoid looking at the solitary confinement shed, she saw, just down the hill, that there were bodies with red clothes in the long rubbish trench, dozens and dozens, not quite covered by the snow. Not far away, the birch woods creaked and groaned, white on white, and from somewhere inside came drumming. When she looked that way, an Ainu woman was watching her. She was holding a rich bundle of sealskins, and she looked unearthly, because she had a solid black tattoo right across her mouth like a gag. Her clothes were all bright colours; it must have been one of their ceremony days. Their festivals had been banned, technically, but as far as Takiko could tell, the Ainu ignored mainlanders as a passing nuisance and went on like they always had. The woman turned away and disappeared into the birch wood.

  The drums had disturbed half the birds in the woods. An owl soared right over Takiko’s head and fluttered up to land on the eaves of the Oracle tower. There were six others already there.