The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  Jacob watched Shift’s face and waited for a sign of self-consciousness, but his manner remained calm and confiding.

  ‘How do you suppose the pellets got behind your ribs since everything that hit you was a ricochet?’

  ‘I’m not a physicist, Jacob.’

  ‘Well, that’s what a plausible explanation would require, isn’t it? Some fairly unusual physics.’

  ‘People won’t talk to me,’ Shift said. ‘They meet me without trust. Without appetite. Even when they’re not wary they’re never interested, as if to consider me would somehow rob them of consequence.’

  Jacob remembered a friend from his university days, a musician who’d had a breakout album and a considerable career. She had worked very hard at maintaining her friendships. She confided to Jacob once that keeping her old relationships required her never to expect anyone to ask her about herself. ‘It’s my job to listen to them. I’m in the magazines, so they know everything they need to know about me. I get public attention, so I don’t need their attention.’

  Jacob thought what Shift was claiming for himself was something like that. He tried to put that together with the pellets of iron tucked in behind Shift’s ribs where they couldn’t be reached, so Shift couldn’t be fixed, and couldn’t be himself. He said, ‘I’m not sure what you’re trying to tell me.’

  Shift waited, watching Jacob think.

  ‘Are you saying that you’re a person whom nobody would offer an advantage, even just information? Or are you telling me you don’t inspire confidence?’

  Shift seemed reluctant to give up trying to make Jacob guess. ‘I need the people who I want to ask questions to tell me what they know, out of pride in what they know. I want them to pay me in coin they think I can’t spend.’

  Jacob kept his face still, hoping for further elaboration.

  ‘I want a demon to boast to me, because I’m knowledgeable, but ineffectual. I need the sidhe to feel bold enough to let on what their plans are for me.’

  ‘So you’ve made sure you still have the iron sickness?’

  Shift nodded.

  ‘That’s stupid,’ Jacob said.

  ‘I wasn’t aware that not disappointing you was an option, so I’m afraid I haven’t taken any steps to avoid it.’

  Jacob got off the bed. ‘Just don’t fail Taryn.’

  Shift smiled. ‘I suppose that’s one way of talking to me.’

  12

  Brutal

  Taryn woke to the sound of her own voice, pure and bodiless, a version of the mumbling internal self that would remind her to pay her car registration or buy toilet paper. A voluble and insistent voice that came to her when, for instance, she’d over-rehearsed a performance, like the oral defence of her thesis.

  There are things you can’t fix, said the voice, full of anxiety and self-reproach. You have involved all these people—even Alan—in your dishonesty. And you keep lying. Why can’t you just admit to them you’re a murderer? A murderer by proxy. A great seductress of the sob story, who won a man over with her offer of intimacy. ‘Be my hero,’ you said, without being so crude as to actually say it. ‘Do for me what no one else will do and I’ll hold you in the centre of my gaze forever.’ And then what did you do once you had got your promise from him and he’d fulfilled it? You put him out of your mind, exiled him, even forgot his name . . .

  Taryn got up and went into the bathroom to splash cold water on her face. Her cheeks stung. She peered in the mirror. Her face was dripping. She looked frightened. She pressed a towel to her wet skin, dropped it on the floor and lay back down.

  Must she always keep Shift on hand, as if she were an asthmatic and he her inhaler? She laughed at the thought. Then her inner voice came back. You should go to Shift. Show your gratitude. It’s all he wants. That wasn’t what the Muleskinner wanted. He is coming for that. For your wet insides.

  Her cruel self would not be silenced. You know what Jacob would like right now? To be unzipped and invited into your wet insides. He’s a man who would enjoy a little fricative affection.

  Taryn wanted to cry out, but it was as if a thick Kevlar helmet had dropped onto her to cup and contain her head. All she was able to do was lick her lips as she was assaulted by the memory of how angular the rippled edge of Alan’s glans felt when it stiffened in her mouth.

  She lunged over the side of the bed and retched as if she could purge herself that way.

  Jacob appeared in the doorway. He was wearing his coat, as if he’d just come back from somewhere or was about to leave. He hurried to her and scooped her hair back. When she’d finished he tried to put his arms around her. But Taryn didn’t require comfort; she needed saving.

  She fought free of his embrace and ran to find Shift. She crawled under the covers beside him. ‘It’s here,’ she sobbed.

  He took her face between his hands and gazed into her eyes.

  ‘It’s not afraid of you,’ she said, desperate, and caught his fleeting look of satisfaction.

  ‘We have to go,’ he said, now talking over the top of her head to Jacob, who’d followed her.

  ‘Stuart left his Land Rover. You can take that. I can’t go with you. I have to get on the road to Norwich.’

  Shift disengaged Taryn’s arms. He rolled out of bed, steadied himself on the lowboy and yanked the cannula out of his arm.

  ‘Take it easy,’ Jacob said. ‘Can you drive?’

  Shift said he could. Furthermore, he’d learned when there were no road signs.

  Jacob snapped. ‘Why, when I most need to feel okay about you, do you reach for the fakery? There were road signs before there were automobiles. I think even the Romans had road markers.’

  ‘During the last war they removed the road signs so invading armies would wander the little lanes of England forever. Lovely idea. I learned to drive while hitching rides with lost American airmen on day jaunts, and men from ministries with sweaty foreheads and generous petrol rations.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Jacob.

  Taryn moaned. The icy digitised voice was now making promises. I will take you apart. Soften you up. Suck the marrow from your bones. She smacked her lips. Or she didn’t; it did.

  Jacob, his confidence in Shift restored, asked whether sedation might help her. ‘The doctor left lithium and codeine for you.’

  ‘Giving Taryn drugs to subdue the demon would be an experiment. Everything I know about demons is secondhand. I don’t remember ever having met one before. Please pick her up for me, Jacob. I don’t want to tear my stitches.’

  Taryn was grappled, lifted. The ceiling flowed by overhead as if she were on a gurney. She clenched her teeth and moaned. She was floating. The demon was holding her too and moving her away somewhere. Jacob and Shift’s consultation continued around her. Jacob said, ‘Go grab a couple of Palfreyman’s sweaters. I’ll find your boots.’

  She felt Jacob’s breath in her hair. He whispered that she’d be all right. Then she was wrestling inside herself while something energetic rifled through her life, gleefully pulling out every miserable thought or disgusting sensation and offering them to her. She lost some time. Then Jacob was shaking her and almost shouting in her ear. ‘Taryn! I found an OtterBox with Palfreyman’s hunting gear. I put the phone Stuart left you in it. The phone will make it through the lake in the OtterBox.’

  Your horrible encumbering bodies and feeble provisions against distance. Your phone calls and train tickets!

  Then she was lying on a clammy padded surface, the back seat of a high headroom car. The demon was laughing. Jacob was at the window. Shift appeared beside him, opened the door, and raised her head to loop something around her neck. She touched it—his warm gold claws. She felt like a bird pulled out of an oil slick. Still poisoned and weighed down, but she didn’t have to struggle anymore. The driver’s door slammed, and the engine shivered. Jacob’s face swam in starbursts of her tears. He pressed his palm on the glass and held it there, walking beside the Land Rover as it reversed. Then he stepped away and disappeared be
hind them.

  The demon might be wary of the Gatemaker’s glove, but it soon discovered the artefact wasn’t going to make any judgements about whether two spirits belonged in one body. The glove was like a third person present in the tussle. It was a bystander, an impartial witness. It shone its aureate light on the demon’s excavations. Look at this, said the demon to the glove. Look at what I can do.

  Taryn was roused once or twice from her miserable struggle by the blast of an air horn as Shift cut between two trucks, and by a rapid deceleration at the site of an accident. Night came and the sodium lamps flew by overhead. The dark patches between swinging bands of orange filled with bulbous forms, as if mushrooms were being cultivated in the black loam of shadow. By the light of the lamps the walls of buses and big rigs loomed and slid away, while the shadows remained a fixture, and full of fleshy things, like the fists of babies, further forward than what appeared in the light, until the images that appeared finally receded to the size of very clear thumbnails, and the hands of infants lunged in and pressed their sticky fingers to Taryn’s face. She tried shutting her eyes. But the fingers commenced stroking her cheeks and picking at her lips as if trying to part them.

  The Land Rover took a corner too fast. The top of Taryn’s head banged the door panel, and the shadows emptied for a moment. Then it began all over again, a horrible creeping up. Taryn closed her eyes and kept them closed. The car slowed, time went away; the demon rooted in her body with its long tusks, turning up the bodies buried in her body. She tuned out the sound of delving and lamentation and finally heard the narrow lane—briars and nettles and sorrel and burdock and hollyhocks ticking against the sides of the car.

  Taryn’s face ached, her groin stung and throbbed, and her breasts prickled as if they’d been strapped down and recently unbound. Her arms were wrenched up over her head and she couldn’t lower them. Her fingers were swollen. There was an insistent, repeated pinging sound nearby which her brain eventually registered as the warning noise that accompanies a vehicle’s hazard lights. These few impressions comprised almost the sum of her sensory input. But she could hear herself, too, in full flight, her voice tight, divisive, smug—its tone explanatory, though she was only repeating, ‘Two, two, two . . .’ Then, ‘I know you, too.’

  ‘If you mean to remark on my divided nature, and the fact I’m both sidhe and human, yes, that’s as remarkable as it ever was, given how few we are. But it’s not something I keep secret, so your tone of sly disclosure is a little self-indulgent. Please make an effort to get unstuck, and communicate. We might find mutual benefit in that.’

  ‘Whatever you are, you stink like a slaver,’ said the demon. ‘You can only care for this woman because you’re trying to fan the shrunken flame of your human soul. You believe that tiny soul is worth more than your freedom to walk the roads of the Sidh.’

  ‘Do you mean to remind yourself of your shortcomings? Anyone with a body, and the freedom of the Sidh, can go almost anywhere. When you lost Taryn all you could do—bodiless one—was waft about the world in the tides and traffic, shrinking, and forgetting what you came here for. All you remembered was that Taryn alone was hospitable. And so here you are again. But can you even recall why you’re here?’

  ‘Are you trying to taunt me into frankness? Why don’t you remove this—ornament—so we can converse, spirit to spirit.’

  Silence.

  ‘I made this miserable animal hurt herself while you were busy watching the road. You don’t have eyes everywhere. You might as well be just a body.’

  Silence.

  ‘Why would you want her, anyway? She’s well past her best. Her flesh is softening and growing sour.’

  Silence.

  ‘Tell me, how did this—ornament—come to be in your keeping?’

  Shift laughed. ‘You have no idea who I am, do you?’

  The demon growled, which provoked Taryn into a coughing fit.

  ‘I think you don’t even know why Hell is looking for the Firestarter,’ Shift said. ‘You’re not that important.’

  ‘We know.’ The demon was concentrating hard. It quenched Taryn’s cough, and then she lost her body. Most of it. It still existed to her, but in a diagrammatic form, with its points of pain selected and highlighted. She was losing her sense of the position of her limbs. She knew that she still lay in the Land Rover’s back seat, but she felt afloat, tethered by her hands but flapping in a wind.

  ‘It is night and raining and the wall is high here and covered by thorns and nettles,’ the demon said. ‘How do you suppose you will carry the woman and not have her claw you more? Believe me, she and I are both burning to lay our hands on you again.’

  ‘Taryn is unconscious.’

  ‘No, she’s not. Ah. You seem concerned to hear that. Could it be that you don’t want her overhearing what I say to you? What you say to me?’

  Silence.

  ‘I know more than you, fate-forsworn princeling. I do know who you are. And I know everything the woman knows. Soon I will kill her so that I can depart. Or you will try to drag me to the gate, the gate will brush me from her and, this time, knowing more, I’ll return to Hell.’

  ‘You don’t know what Taryn has forgotten, or discounted, or repressed. Or even what’s temporarily slipped her mind. And where do you propose to go with your very partial information? Is it so easy to get to Hell? In this god-haunted world, you’re a weak and addled thing. And alone, not legion.’

  The demon let out a long shriek. It flinched away from Taryn’s extremities and burrowed deeper into her brain. Taryn was once more able to sense her body, its aches, spasms and injuries. She wanted to add her cry to the demon’s, but it still had hold of her mouth and lungs. It screeched, and Taryn felt the hot wire jab of a blood vessel bursting in her left eye. That eye poured tears, but she could see, she could smell; she had got that much back.

  Shift sat pressed against the door on the driver’s side of the back seat. His hair clung to condensation on the window and made a spidery halo around his bloodied face. His cheeks and throat were striped by long, bloody gouges ending in dangling ribbons of skin.

  The demon had done that, using her hands, when Shift had pulled over and climbed into the back seat to put a stop to whatever the demon was making her do to herself. Shift had tied her hands to the door behind her. He was peering at her now with an alert, guarded expression.

  Drops of water ran on the insides of the car window. Water dripped from its ceiling and walls. The vehicle was a wet cave, its interior filling with steam.

  The demon continued to wail until something gave way in Taryn’s throat. The cry diminished and changed to a high rasping. In movies, demons had growling, layered voices representing the many beings clustered like parasitic cysts in one poor human body. But the spirit possessing Taryn was alone, and forced to make do with her human vocal apparatus, and it was pushing that apparatus beyond its capabilities. ‘Hell!’ The demon shouted, articulate again. ‘Hell is the Homeland!’

  Taryn’s legs flew wide. One of her feet thudded into Shift’s shoulder and the other stretched and pointed as if trying to perform a ballet pose. The demon seemed to be trying to use her muscles to dislocate her joints. It left her head free so that she could watch her body elongate and strain, her gaze leaping to each audible wrench and pop. She saw the tendons turning white below her hipbone. She threw her head back to see how her hands were tied. Shift had used the cotton cord from the hood of her sweatshirt and had looped it through the door handle. She was pulling against the cord and her hands were swollen and purple. Her fingernails were rimmed with blood.

  Through the window behind her head Taryn could see a flowering hawthorn hedge, its foliage lit from below by headlamps reflecting off the wet road. As she watched, drops on the inside of the window flattened as if there were a huge blow-dryer inside the car. The air got hotter and hotter.

  Shift spoke. Taryn heard him begin, his words so slow and deliberate that they came out as separate sentences. ‘That�
�s. Enough. Of. That,’ he said, his voice dropping octaves between each word. Then it wasn’t a voice. It was the sub-harmonics of a volcano.

  The door behind Taryn blasted out of its frame. A steely shrieking sounded around her and she was dragged out of the car by her tied hands. Her breasts and thighs scraped and bashed across the door frame. She thought, I’m going to die.

  And straight after dying she’d be in Hell, a place she now knew existed. She was unprepared.

  She remembered with cruel clarity her mother weeping after her cancer diagnosis. There was a lump, and Addy Cornick might have known about it if she’d had her scheduled mammogram, but she’d been depressed and careless—a late twentieth-century woman putting her fate in her own self-examining hands, in superseded practices and blind chance, when there was that which, oracle-like, could see her future, and could save her from it. Taryn’s mother had blamed herself. Taryn was blaming herself. She was facing the blackness at the edges of her field of vision, and it was Hell, a sight-cancelling shadow in a sense-trammelled death.

  The car’s headlamps flew apart and were bowled along the lane, lighting it briefly as they faded then blinked out. For a moment Taryn dangled, the hawthorn tugging at her clothes and hair, her toes a few metres from the road. A storm of hot air swung her into the hedge then away from it again. The demon relinquished her voice, and she screamed in terror.

  Above her was a huge grey cloud. A grey glow like the billows of static electricity that filled Bea’s favourite nightdress whenever Bea got up in the night, slid out of the polyester sheets of the creaky beds they occupied on their visits to Princes Gate. Taryn would urge Bea to roll around before getting up so there’d be more static. Bea would thrash about then leap out of bed, her body haloed grey-white, crying, ‘I’m the ghost of Princes Gate!’

  Roiling plumes of luminescence surrounded Taryn. An icy object thumped against her chest: the Gatemaker’s glove. When it touched her damp skin it stuck fast, as if it were a metal container straight out of the freezer.