It was fascinating, in a way, being that scared. I knew I was in danger – danger of the most perverse and appalling kind. And yet Mccabe had said I could leave whenever I wanted to.
So why didn’t I?
“I gave her what she asked for, that’s all,” Mccabe said.
“Claire would never have asked for anything, not from you.”
“You’re wrong about that, you know. She wanted to know what happened to that man, the one who was torn apart by the bomb, her bonny soldier boy. That’s all she’s ever wanted. I would have thought you, of all people, would have understood that. Fond of her as you are, and being in a similar predicament.”
“Claire loves Dave,” I said. “And there was no bomb.” Similar predicament. A coldness gripped my insides, a coldness that hadn’t been there before, not even when he showed me the photograph of Lionel Rose. Ronny’s image hovered, pressed itself against the seams of my mind, but I would not let it in. Not here, not in this place. I counted to ten, very slowly, making myself visualise each number in neon lighting. I’d read somewhere that this was a good technique for helping to take control of a conversation. Crap, probably.
I seemed to float in the open air, mesmerised by the coiled and flashing infinity of a vast number eight.
“He went off with someone else,” I said. “The guy. Claire’s soldier. The bomb was all in her mind. Everyone knows that already. There was never any secret about it.”
“Are you so certain you were told the truth? Claire wasn’t. Convenient certainties are never enough. Not for some people. Not for a sensitive would-be suicide like your Aunty Claire.” He paused. “You old families. Always making up and breaking up and going to war.”
He was trying to get a rise out of me, I got that, but the way he spoke made it seem as if he was the only one who had the answers, who understood, not just what Claire had been through but what I had been going through too, ever since the moment I saw Claire kneeling beside the Christmas tree in our front room and knew with utter certainty that she was no longer human.
“You misunderstand, anyway,” he said. Infinite gentleness, they call it. As if he’d read my mind. “She is still human. But she understands that her humanity is simply on loan. She has all the answers she could ever have asked for. And you can, too.”
“I don’t want your answers.”
“Really, Willy? Then why are you here?”
EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED, happened. I could tell you that Mccabe had control of me somehow, that he programmed my movements – Marian Rose called it hypnosis, and it would be easy for me to exculpate myself that way, to say my actions were not my own. It could even be that this was partly the truth. Mccabe eased my passage, certainly – you could say he showed me the way. For all that though, I went willingly, just as Claire did. They say the human need to know is the curse of our species, and the fact is that I wanted to know what was in that room more than I cared about what might happen to me there. I realised this moment had always been waiting for me, that I’d never seriously considered walking away. Ronny had tried to save me, but I’d turned her aside. In a contest between knowledge and Ronny, knowledge won every time.
Mccabe took me by the elbow and steered me through the doorway into Geest’s room. The curtains were drawn in there, or maybe there were no curtains, not any more, no curtains and no window, just a wall painted green, like the other three. There was a lamp on in one corner – the desk lamp, I think – which cast just enough light for me to see that there was someone sitting on the bed.
“My amanuensis, Regan Geest,” Mccabe said. The figure turned at the sound of her name. She was wearing a grey woollen dress, rather old fashioned, with a round white collar and a neat row of silvered buttons down the front. Her hair was pulled back in a bun, and I noticed she had a small raised birthmark, high up on one cheek. In the dim light of the windowless room, her eyes shone. Her hands lay quietly folded in her lap.
Regan Geest was still a woman, but there was a monster rigged deep inside her, snarling her insides like a tapeworm, like a maggot. Its yellowish, ambient light seemed to blister and pulse. I intuited these things, just as I intuited that I knew her already, that as with the photograph of Lionel Rose I had seen her face before. It did not take me so long, this time, to remember where: she was the woman in the photograph that formed the frontispiece of Fawcett’s novel.
Clarissa Worthen.
“You’re here,” she said. Her voice was low in pitch, and strangely musical. “Edward.”
“Not Edward, Regan,” said Mccabe. “William.” He spoke to her gently, as he might a child, although I noticed he made no move to touch her or even to draw closer. He was afraid of her, I realised. A little bit, anyway.
“Her brother fucked her,” he said to me. “Raped her. Cedric Blyton raped her, too – it’s all in the diaries. They did it together.”
I sensed rather than saw his head turn towards me. I was not sure, in fact, if Mccabe was still in the room at all, because the space where he had been standing appeared to be empty. My heart started in my chest. I wheeled round to face the door and saw that was gone, too.
“William,” Geest said. She spoke my name as if it puzzled her, a mysterious, useless artefact of unknown origin. She placed both hands upon my shoulders and took a step towards me. She was shorter than me, though not by much, and smelled strangely of pine needles. As she brought her face close to mine I quickly began to lose all sense of it as a face, as a set of recognisable features arranged in the familiar alignment we think of as representing the mind and if you like the soul of a human being. What I saw instead was a series of surfaces: planes and curves and angles, the skin of her cheeks quilted like parchment, stippled with fine hairs and the conical mouths of pores that would not normally have been visible, especially not in the half-light of this dour little room.
Her eyes, viscid vats of a glaucous greenness, scarcely contained behind the fragile glass roundels of her corneas.
The twin caves of her nostrils, gaping. She’s infected, I thought. I could smell the contagion. She’s going down with a cold.
“There’s a place,” she whispered. She was fumbling with my fly. “Can you see it yet?”
She opened herself to swallow me and then I could.
THE MAP WAS of her, I realised, the green eye of London. Like a patch of peeling lichen on a rotting tree stump. She was here all the time.
WE FALL SIDEWAYS on to the bed. I push into her at last and the relief is wounding. Her thighs are long, with the mottled texture of frogs’ skin. Her hair unspools like spider silk across the burgundy counterpane. I am with the constellations, I am far away, torn asunder like white threads of paper as I feel her enter me, some part of her I cannot name, something like a vine, corded and flexible and slippery as mucus. I feel it digging deeper, into my anus and into my gut and out through my gullet. I think of Mccabe and wonder if he comes to her, if he begs her to bring him to enlightenment, here in this room.
I decide not. I do not think he would dare to discover what his limits are.
Like a maggot on a length of nylon fishing twine, I am skewered and threaded. My bowels let go and my lungs hurt, compressed against the gates of my ribs like sacs of pink tissue paper. I want to die here and I want it to be now. I feel her in me, her cells in my bloodstream, her alien vibrancy. I no longer belong to myself. I know I am nothing.
“THE WAY WILL soon be open,” she says. “All of us must suffer this. Do not be afraid.”
She crosses the room to the monster wardrobe, hooking her fingers around the handle and tugging it open. The backs of the cupboard doors have been decorated with patterned wallpaper in a William Morris trelliswork design. Where the interior of the cupboard should be there is nothing: an empty space filled with blackness so complete it is like staring through a porthole into empty space. My insides seem to shrivel at the sight of it. I am breathing so fast I feel I am suffocating. My hands and the backs of my legs are sticky with my own filth. There
is a nauseating background stench, like the stink of blocked drains.
She nudges me forward, and I crawl into the blackness on my hands and knees. Vague outlines – items of clothing or headless torsos? – twitch and jounce in the darkness above my head. I recognise the purplish scent of mothballs and well-worn tweed. I reach out to touch the back of the cupboard and there is nothing there. I get to my feet in another room – a room within the first room maybe, or somewhere else entirely. Parquet flooring and sage green walls, the same as Geest’s. Instead of the bed there is a massive brown sideboard with many drawers. On top of the sideboard is a large glass aquarium. Beside it stands Mccabe. Something glints in his hands – a set of compasses, it looks like, or a syringe.
The water in the aquarium swarms with life. Tiny fishes, I think at first, but as I draw closer and put my face to the glass I see they are not fish at all, but something else: shrimps, or miniature crayfish; their ovate, transparent bodies fringed by a multiplicity of thrashing legs and a pair of long and curiously graceful whip-like antennae. The creatures are small, less than a centimetre in length. They dart in all directions, ploughing intricate silvery furrows through the water.
“What are they?” I breathe. There is something spookily compelling in the sight of them. I feel I might watch them for a thousand years, and not grow tired.
“What you came here to purchase,” says Mccabe. “Knowledge, power, symbiosis – whichever bargain you are called upon to strike. The nymphs can be introduced through the nose, or through the anus. Your aunt chose the vagina – we’ve found it can help the assimilation if blood is present. Alternatively we can make an artificial incision, quite safely. The upper inside thigh is usually best.”
There is a panel on the wall behind him, some kind of video screen. Images are passing across it, a sequence of film in which a figure is pictured – I cannot tell if it is a man or a woman – lying on a hospital trolley. Their arms and feet are secured by leather restraints. I see a woman – I think it is Geest – stroking the recumbent figure’s temples and forehead before tipping their head gently backwards and holding it securely between her hands.
The camera zooms in, focussing more closely upon the face of the – what do I call them, victim or patient? Their eyes are following the movement of something outside the frame, proving conclusively that this person is conscious and aware. A surgical instrument of some kind comes into view – a cross between a pipette and a syringe, ending in a cylindrical glass chamber instead of a needle. There is something inside the chamber, something that shimmers and flicks, desperate for release, alternating in its frenzy between an uncanny silvery lustre and murky transparency.
I see it flickering for a second in the patient’s right nostril like a trapped fly before it disappears, presumably burrowing into the patient’s nasal tract. The hand holding the silver instrument withdraws. After a moment of complete inaction, the patient braces and then goes into spasm, their back arching upwards, the leather restraints pulled taut by the violent jerking of their wrists and ankles.
The screen fades to black for a second, before the film starts to play again from the beginning.
Either there is no soundtrack, or it has been deliberately muted.
“There will be some... adjustment,” Mccabe says then. “But any memory of what that entails will quickly fade.”
“Adjustment?”
“You will be reconfigured. Torn apart and reassembled. Not in a literal sense of course, not as bad as a bomb.” His voice had quieted almost to nothing, yet still it seemed as if he was shouting inside my head. My ears, my mind rang with his cries, the cries he himself had made, perhaps, on the occasion of his own reconfiguring.
A century ago or even longer. Blane, Blyton, Bliss, Blythe – if I understood anything in that moment, it was how brief a time was a hundred years, how it could and might seem to Mccabe like it was only yesterday.
“And in any case,” he added. “We will help you through it.”
“Fifteen days?”
“You’ve guessed it, Mr Randle. Fifteen days.”
“THEY’RE MAKING YOU do this, aren’t they?” I said, weakly. “Why else would you agree to it?”
“Because eventually they will return to our dimension and existence as you understand it will pass away. No force on Earth can allay it. Those who are not absorbed will be destroyed. They will die deaths that will light the firmament, and last for aeons.”
We were sitting in the granite-and-steel, ultra-modern kitchen of Mccabe’s apartment. Regan Geest was busy making tea. In her T-shirt and faded jeans she looked like any other student, or intern. She seemed lost in thought, taking little notice of either of us. I found myself listening for her movements, in spite of myself. My memories of what had happened in her room already seemed nonsensical, though certain images persisted. Perhaps it was I who was going down with a virus, not her.
My skin and clothes were clean.
“You can’t believe that,” I said to Mccabe. “Not seriously.”
He opened his hands in a gesture of dismissal. “Why should it matter to you, what I believe? The important question is: do you?”
“But why would anyone choose...” My words tailed off. I had no wish to spell it out. I wondered where that peculiar film footage had come from, really. A college project of Geest’s, most likely. It had certainly looked amateur enough.
“You don’t know what you’re asking. With a gift like that, you would be mad to refuse.” He shook his head. “You’re thinking about the pain and the loss, but those things are negligible, no-things. They pass in less than a moment. In the normal run of events you will be dead in fifty years, anyway – a lump of corrupted meat, burned to ashes and scattered to the wind. What we are offering you here is dominion over time.” He stressed the last three words, leaning upon them as if for support, and then reached for his tea. “It’s a fair trade,” he said, more quietly. “More than fair. Think about it, Mr Randle. You’re an intelligent man.”
DID I WAVER on the brink, like Jesus gazing out over Jerusalem, the devil at his shoulder, egging him on?
There’s always that moment in a horror film, isn’t there, when the evil psychopath slash vampire slash bitter-old-teacher-who’s-now-on-the-side-of-the-aliens offers the hero world domination or immortality or whatever, and depending on their decision the hero either dies a hero or becomes a monster.
Even if you think I made the rest of this up – and why would you think anything else? – I want you to believe this bit: I saw colours, shimmering in the air before me like fog on a perfect autumn morning as the sun comes up. I wanted to dive into that moment, to disappear into it, like Hans Andersen’s Little Mermaid, relinquishing herself to the sea foam, if you like.
What pulled me back from doing that was the thought of Ronny. For God’s sake, Willy, don’t be a prick.
I hadn’t heard her voice – her real voice, I mean – for years and years. I knew that’s what she’d say, though. Ronny could always see a bum deal coming a mile off.
HE LET ME leave. I didn’t think it would be that easy, in spite of his reassurances, but he made no move to stop me.
“Take this, why not?” He handed me Fawcett’s diary in its plastic envelope. “I’ve certainly no use for it. Fawcett was weak, in the end, like your friend Lionel.”
“He’s not my friend. I never met him.”
“Even so.” On the doorstep he reached for my hand, which I thought he meant to shake in a perverse gesture of farewell. He passed me something instead: a matchbox, yellow, topped with an image of a galleon in full sail.
Mum used to light our stove with matches like that, when I was a kid.
Not that this box contained matches. I understood that immediately.
“In case you change your mind,” Mccabe said. “Unless you mean to use it, keep it contained. The nymphs are not organic, not as you understand the word. They are nodes of time. But still, given the right conditions they will multiply.”
&n
bsp; “I don’t want this.”
“It is yours.” He closed the door before I could make further objections. I heard the lock click shut.
Later, when I made a cursory examination of Fawcett’s diary, I found something tucked inside the front cover. A photograph of Ronny, standing on the platform of Stamford Brook tube station.
There were some words scrawled across the back of it, in blue biro.
Just a bit of fun.
MY DREAMS THAT night were awful. There’s no point in transcribing them here. Instead of trying to go back to sleep I made myself a mug of Bovril and sat up watching old BBC sitcoms on UK Gold until the sun rose. I did the same the following night and the night after that. I was exhausted at work, but my caseload was pretty routine at that time, luckily, and I was able to manage on autopilot. Gradually the nightmares receded. By the end of a fortnight I was sleeping right through, more or less. Most nights, anyway.
FINALLY I CAVED and telephoned Ronny. I made a bargain with myself: if she said she didn’t want to talk to me or put down the phone that would be it, I would accept that things were over between us and let her go. Those few seconds with the phone in my hand, listening to the ring tone, listening to my crazy heartbeat pounding back at me through the receiver and thinking this is it, this is my future, only it was FUTURE spelled out in capitals, like it was a physical product, something you could weigh or measure or see through binoculars.
Well, you can imagine. Everyone on the planet’s endured a phone call like that.
“Hello, Ronny?”
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