The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

by Natasha Pulley

  Being locked up in a tower explained why he hadn’t known what she should look for when he told her to come. He had been remembering forward to a time when he was too isolated and too ill to know much of anything, except, maybe, that the place was Abashiri.

  Furious with herself, she clanged the shrine bell again, hard. Probably the fish god would be offended, but that couldn’t be worse than being so generally stupid. She didn’t know now what she’d thought would happen, once Kuroda had Mori. Some gentlemanly confinement with the scientists at Aokigahara; academic questions, perhaps some threats to make him come out with something useful about the Russians, but really, just a stranger sort of da Vinci in a secret workshop.

  Idiotic. Kuroda always went too far. She knew it; everyone knew it.

  At her desk in the warden’s office, on her left, was a telegraph machine. She had noticed it before, but it had never moved and it made her jump when it bumped to life now. The warden swung around and waited by it to catch the tape. The machine clacked as the code transferred itself into writing. She could see where its keys were inside. The long steel tines they hinged on moved like piano strings. The warden’s expression clouded.

  ‘There’s been an avalanche,’ he said quietly. ‘They’re evacuating Kabato prison.’ He lifted his eyes. ‘They’re bringing them here.’

  She frowned. ‘How many prisoners at Kabato, sir?’

  ‘Nearly a thousand.’

  She looked down at the desk and wondered how she was going to get Mori out with double the number of prisoners and guards. It would be barely possible to move without bumping into someone.

  She sat back slightly when she overheard her own thoughts. She hadn’t been aware of deciding to break Mori out. At some point in the last few frozen days, though, the resolution had solidified. If she could get into the Oracle, she wasn’t going to be able to leave him there.

  The warden sighed. ‘With any luck, most of them will die on the way.’ He made a small sound and touched the side of his head.

  Takiko looked up. ‘Sir, if all that’s coming – maybe you really ought to go home and have some rest? You won’t get any once they arrive.’

  She couldn’t credit it at first when he said that she was right, and picked up his coat. As he trudged out, he said to stay until the night-shift man turned up again.

  ‘And don’t tell a soul about this machine or I’ll put you in the solitary confinement shed,’ he said, and left.

  She looked at the patch of air where he had been. She didn’t think he was joking. It seemed to take a long time for his steps to fade away.

  At last, though, Takiko stopped typing and went to the wall, where she tapped along the wainscoting. When she finally found it, the hollow place was right by the hearth, about a foot above her head. It was tiny; just a little panel the size of a plate that hinged outward. The panel exposed the wheel of a vault door. She had to shove hard to spin it open, and when it did, she understood why the rest of the wall had sounded so solid. It was solid. A whole section of it, bricks and all, swung just far enough inward for someone to slide through. Inside was a tiny staircase.

  Because it was right next to the chimney flue, the steps were warm. She snatched up a lamp and eased the wainscoting door to behind her, but not shut. It had no inside handle. The lamp fluttered in the pitch black. As she climbed the stairs, the air took on the warm smell of dry wood. Something scuffled in the roof.

  At the top of the stairs was a door that shone. It was fitted with a clockwork panel the size of a person, and eight different locks, built into mechanisms whose motion was dying down now. She waited for them to stop, then released them all one by one. They were heavy.

  When the door opened, there was no daylight in the room beyond. There was an oil lamp, which made the golding of a perpetual evening, and a fireplace just beside her, lit, miserably, with only a few pieces of crumbling coal. What she could make out of the floor was bare. A ladder led up to a tiny loft space up in the tower rafters, where she could just see the coverlet of a neatly made bed.

  ‘Mori?’ she said quietly.

  ‘Who?’

  The man had been sitting with his back to the hearth, in plain view but very still. He was reading a book, or he had been; now he was looking at her, full of surprised interest. He was old, with a neat beard and warmer clothes than the other prisoners, but he was still wearing red.

  Takiko realised her mouth had fallen open, and clamped her molars together for half a second too long, trying to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. ‘I’m sorry – who are you?’

  ‘An obscure prince I don’t expect you’ve heard of.’ He looked hopeful. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘The cleaner. Sorry, I … thought you might be someone else.’ She swallowed. Her throat was suddenly scratchy. ‘Sorry – what are you doing up here, why are they keeping you like this?’

  ‘I don’t think they wanted to put a prince in with the other prisoners,’ he said unhappily. ‘I should have liked the company.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Disagreed with the Emperor once or thrice too often. Wrote a pamphlet.’

  ‘So what’s this palaver with the door?’ she demanded, and then held her hands out to show she wasn’t angry with him, only the circumstances.

  ‘I’m not sure. It was there when I got here. Rather clever, isn’t it? But will you sit with me a bit, since you’re here? I only ever see the warden and he is – desperately boring.’

  ‘I can’t. If anyone catches me they’ll put me in the solitary confinement shed.’

  ‘Yes, I see,’ he said, with a terrible docility. Now that her eyes had adjusted, he looked much too intense and his friendliness had a hysterical edge. ‘But perhaps for five minutes? Or even four?’

  ‘I’d really better—’

  He caught at her hem. ‘Please—’

  He was just an old man left alone too long, but she lost her nerve. She pulled away and shut the clockwork door, locked all of its unnecessary locks, and stood with her head against the warm bronze, listening as he cried on the other side. With a creeping, seaweed cold, she realised she had no idea what to do. This was a cage for Mori. But no Mori. The more she tried to tell herself it was a good thing that he wasn’t locked in that terrible, perfect, efficient cell, the louder she heard him say that he didn’t know what was going on because there was a heavy chance he would be dead.

  When she reached the base of the stairs, there was another telegraph message. This one was from Hakodate prison. There had been a typhoid outbreak. They were evacuating surviving prisoners to Abashiri.

  Very slowly, she straightened up and folded the message into as many tiny sections as it would go. Kuroda had let her come here, knowing fully well that Mori wasn’t here. Mori, perhaps, had been confused, but not Kuroda. The only reason to let her come all this way for absolutely nothing was to get her the hell out of his way. Maybe with any luck she’d even die here, in the prison or just the pounding cold.

  She should have known, of course.

  Meaning to leave right then, find a ship, go home, she swung towards the window and then stopped. Of course she couldn’t. The shore was a deserted white stretch, and beyond it, the sea was frozen – an unnavigable mess of pack ice and snow. The ships in the bay were all stuck in place as firmly as they would have been in tar.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Yoruji, 16th February 1889

  Something bumped into Thaniel’s ankle.

  He thought for a split second that it was a horribly deformed cat, but then he realised it was gleaming, and the bizarre shape resolved itself into Katsu. The little octopus backed up a bit, tried to shuffle through Thaniel again, then seemed to give up and coiled away at an odd angle. Thaniel dropped onto his knees again and pulled his sleeve over his hand. Even so, Katsu was hot to touch. When Thaniel picked him up, he only waved drowsily as if he still thought he was on the ground.

  Thaniel couldn’t keep a proper hold on him. Usually Katsu would furl up round
your arm and get on your shoulder, and it was the devil’s own work to prise him off again if he wanted not to be prised, but if he didn’t hold on, he was heavy. He writhed out of Thaniel’s hands and bumbled away over the same tracks he had already made, cutting them new again through the fine dusting of snow that had blown over them. But it was only a dusting. Under that was clear ground. He must have been going round the same circuit since the snow started. Whatever catch between clockwork and life there was in his mechanisms, none of it thought Thaniel was there.

  Hating the idea of leaving him behind, Thaniel set off after him, down towards the ruins. There were no bodies, at least. At a distance, a good many things looked like wrecked skeletons, but they were only burnt furniture, collapsed doorways, floorboards that had warped right upwards into the shape of ribs. Katsu trundled through everything. Thaniel had to climb sometimes, half looking, too, for any surviving tablecloth or scrap of sacking to scoop Katsu up in. There was nothing. It had been a very thorough fire.

  Katsu disappeared down a set of stone steps Thaniel had never seen before. The way down was completely dark. Thaniel stopped at the top. There were burnt floorboards all around, and jagged edges around the stairway. It had once, he realised, had a trap door. He gazed around, trying to work out where he was in the house. It took him a long time before he understood that he was in front of the same hot pool he had been when they first came to stay. He was standing in the room Mori had slept in.

  Somewhere in the darkness, Katsu clunked down more stairs. Thaniel hesitated, because the daylight was failing, but Katsu was noisy on the stone. He could navigate more or less by the sound colours and the way they rang off surfaces, if he had to.

  It was a long way down. The stairs went beneath the hot pools, and after a few yards, the air was warm. When he reached the bottom, he almost fell over the lamp someone had left on the last stair. It was an oil lamp, and beside it, a little box of matches. The gunpowder fizzed as he struck the match on the wall.

  He didn’t know what he’d hoped. The light edged over arches carved in the stone, and marks that looked old, very old, the rambling, weird, characters that had been writing before someone sensible standardised them. Generation upon generation of novice monks must have practised on them, for whatever reason, in the house’s monastery days. It was hard to tell what the place had been meant for. The walls were rough-hewn and irregular, lined now with shelves. The light was only just enough to brush them. The flames from the lamp rippled red and blue at first before they balanced.

  In the ceiling, an odd, soft clicking began. It tinted things a dim yellow.

  Every shelf was lined with dozens of glass bulbs, but not for lights. Rather than filaments, they housed miniature black windmills. Some were turning, and more began to turn as he watched. He leaned down to see one. It stopped when his shadow fell over it, then began again when he let the light touch it. The little set of sails was winding a tiny, fragile mechanism in the base of the bulb. From the base ran a hairline thread. It was real thread, not copper wire.

  The walls shimmered, because similar threads, all different colours, stretched up from the light mills. At the top, worked into the ceiling, were little vials. The threads were pulling springs there, which spun the vials, and now, they were beginning to fan down a soft snow of something white that hung in the air. He put his hand out to catch some. Chalk.

  ‘Hello.’

  He swung around, because it was Mori’s voice, and Mori was there too, just behind a desk tucked into an alcove behind the stairs. He looked exhausted.

  ‘I couldn’t leave a note out on the desk here, you might not have found it. Sorry it’s so obscure.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Thaniel began, and then did understand, because he had gone nearer to the desk.

  Mori was only half as solid as he usually was. He sounded wrong, too far off. It was a phonograph. It was clearer than any phonograph recording usually could be, and the phonograph itself, which was right next to him on the desk, had been altered. The cylinder wasn’t wax but something else that sheened strangely.

  Outside, the electricity waned. The blue fire in the trees stopped spilling down the stairs and Mori vanished into the falling chalk. The phonograph was still going.

  ‘I’m … leaving this here in case I didn’t work up the nerve to ask you for help in person. I mean to try, but I know what I’m like at asking for help.’

  Thaniel went nearer to the desk, his throat closing.

  The St Elmo’s fire came back. So did the ghost. He was packing away the machinery scattered over the table, ghost things that weren’t there anymore. Close to, Thaniel could see how the figure affected the chalk. One mote might drift about normally in the air, then snap across to make part of the shape. It was pin-sharp in here. Mori had been wearing a threadbare jumper and through a loose part in the knit, the chalk had even outlined the stitching of the leather patch on his waistcoat shoulder underneath. He had sewn that on himself, because he always put clockwork pins through it and he’d wrecked the tweed.

  ‘What shows up in the ghosts,’ said the phonograph, and Mori, ‘are moments where there are several possibilities depending on them, so I should be making one now. The greater the dependent possibility tree, the better the ghost will imprint.’ He swallowed and looked at his watch again. ‘It’s why a lot of the ghosts you’re seeing are caught in the moment they’re dying. Death generates massive possibility trees; one person’s death affects dozens of other people, thousands of other decisions. And that’s why Yoruji has been so haunted since I’ve lived here. Because I know everything that might happen, everything I do is always – in aid of what I want to happen. I end up doing a lot of small things that will affect a lot of larger things later. What that really means is, I’m going out of my way to create big possibility trees. Forests.’ He sort of laughed. ‘You can always tell when someone like me has lived somewhere; it’ll be the most haunted place for miles around. In order to see the ghosts, you need a lot of electricity in the air, so they always show up in stormy weather. And there’s a lot of electricity now because it’s artificial. There are generators at a station in Aokigahara. The scientists there are under orders to work out what I do, and reproduce it. They run the electricity strongest at night, I think so it will disrupt Tokyo less. Nothing mystical is going on, if you were worried. I’m rambling,’ he said, and stopped for a few seconds. ‘Anyway. I’m hoping the ghost upstairs will still be visible now. They replay themselves whenever the electricity becomes strong enough.’

  ‘Upstairs,’ Thaniel murmured.

  Mori nodded once as if he’d heard him. ‘I’m going to be arrested and taken away by Kuroda’s men. It’s important that they do it, so I’m not going to stop them. I don’t know where they’ll take me, they’re deciding randomly, but that doesn’t matter. Or I don’t think so. I think I’ve arranged it properly. All I need is someone to go to Abashiri and … something.’ He had been leaning forward against the desk to speak into the phonograph. He looked ill. ‘I’m sorry. I have no idea what I’m doing anymore. I can’t remember anything after next week. Or not really. Snatches of – the most likely future as it stands just now.’

  Thaniel stared at him. There was an electromagnet behind his heart, tugging uselessly towards the ghost. It was so strong it hurt and he had to close his hands over the edge of the desk and press his fingernails into the leather top, which put half-moon dents into the filigree edging. Mori was quiet for a moment, too still, catching the rhythm of his own breathing again. Thaniel wanted to reach out, for all it would have been pointless and trite. He kept still and waited. Under the electromagnetic ache was something better. A sort of slow, tentative happiness. Mori hadn’t forgotten about him.

  Behind him, Katsu bumped into his heel.

  The phonograph crackled.

  ‘If you could go and see what happens to me, that might be useful,’ Mori said. ‘It will be in the dining room. As I say, it should be clearest at night. I’m sorry. I wish
I could be more specific, I wish I could tell you what to do. But all I know now is that this has to happen and that I’m going to need some help. It’s something to do with a place called Abashiri.’

  Thaniel had thought he’d been relieved when he got down from the mountain safely, but it was nothing beside the wonderful, luminous relief of finding there was something good he could do.

  ‘Thank you, Pepper,’ Mori said, belatedly.

  Thaniel looked back. Mori switched off the phonograph. It clunked as the recording stopped, which was eerie because it made it seem like a ghost had moved it, though of course he hadn’t; it was only running parallel.

  The ghost didn’t disappear straightaway. He faded once he was away from the chalk, but some of it clung. It took half a minute or so for the last line of his shoulder to dissolve.

  Thaniel turned away and walked out too fast, then folded down on the stairs, pulled his sleeves over his hands and pressed them over his eyes, shaking with the effort of trying to keep at least a little calm, because every jolt of his shoulders hurt the bullet wound. It didn’t work.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Thaniel waited in the relative warmth of the stairwell for the night to come down fully, and for the electricity to wax. Like Mori had said, the power strengthened a lot just after nine o’clock. The wind lifted and blue fire sighed through the gingko trees as the electricity surged. There were ships leaving the docks, two huge liners, and their funnels trailed brilliant aurora sheets of blue.

  The snow had stopped. The ruins of the house were sparkling under the blue light from the trees, and the air was frozen and pristine, with the faint salt clarity of the beach. Not sure where to look for the ghosts, or even if they would appear on what was now the ground, he gathered up pieces of half-burned wood and set fires all around the footprint of the house. The wood was damp now, but he doused it with lamp oil and soon there was smoke everywhere.