Jim shook water out of his hair.
“We’re going to chase Death home soon,” he said. “All we need is somewhere to shelter. Nobody can creep up on us in this weather. Afterwards — we’ll see.”
Weinberger nodded wetly, like a dog after a swim. He seemed to share Jim’s feelings about the journey. They were heading towards a different border entirely, and over it, and back again, with the truth, with evidence. That was their real journey, not this farce of a hike.
“I think that’s a hut over on the other side, isn’t it?”
They peered across this lake, into which the sky melted.
A quarter mile away as the crow flies a little shack hunched vaguely. A mile or more around the banks of the kidney-shaped waters. It would be a kennel to dry off in.
It took half an hour of slipping and sliding and detouring to reach the shack.
Inside, piled in a corner, were two delapidated mattresses with their stuffing coming out. Empty, cobwebbed shelves lined one wall. The roof leaked in a few places, and there was no glass in the single window that overlooked the rain-lashed waters. But here was shelter, and even a sort of luxury. A three-legged chair lay toppled on the floorboards; its fourth leg had walked off elsewhere long ago.
Jim broke the chair up and began to scavenge anything else that would burn. He prised the shelves loose. He pulled up a broken floor plank, then another — their nails as loose as a radiation victim’s teeth. He scooped dry earth from under the hut to serve as a fire base, and began to splinter wood. He discovered a pile of yellowed old magazines under a sack. They would light the splinters, which would light the larger pieces of wood.
Faithful to his promise of fish for supper, Weinberger went out into the rain again with the hook and line.
Jim’s clothes were steaming on his body beside a decent fire when the other man came back twenty minutes later. The smoke billowed out of the window, losing itself in the smoke of rain.
Weinberger winked broadly. From behind his back he jerked out a sagging speckled trout, its mouth wide open in horrid surprise.
“Three pounds, if it’s an ounce!”
Weinberger gutted the fish, spitted it on a stick and handed this to Jim to cook.
“Pity we haven’t a quart of whisky with us!”
Even without whisky they feasted royally, burning their fingers. Then they dragged the mattresses closer to the dying fire, as the day too — already submerged by rain — drowned through dusk into darkness.
TWENTY-THREE
The next morning dawned wet and gloomy; which encouraged them. Land, lake and sky had all run together now into one amorphous whole, as though the world was returning to some primitive state of being.
Since there was no more ready wood to scavenge, Jim opened a can of corned beef to eat cold. When they had emptied it turn by turn, Weinberger set the empty can out under the eaves to catch rainwater.
Using the fishing line, Jim slung the pheromone drip flask from a nail in the roof within easy reach of the two mattresses; then he checked the battery power of the cassette player. He tapped out two of the orange hearts of Neo-Harmaline-MDA from a twist of paper. By his watch it was seven-thirty.
Presently Weinberger ducked out to fetch the can, which now held a finger of rain. Jim would rather have swallowed his own pill dry, but there was something ceremonial about the way in which Weinberger toasted him then shoved the can his way; so he washed his pill down with the remaining ounce of meat-flavoured gruel.
Fully dressed on this occasion, they stretched themselves upon the musty mattresses. Jim reached out; Mike Mullen’s voice began to drone.
Later — but how much later, he had no idea — his hand remembered to touch the pheromone tap.
Later — or was it earlier? — as the shack was revealed for the ghost of a shack that it was, he floated up towards the rickety roof along with Weinberger. The grey wet air outside, and inside too, was more cloud than air: a luminous cloud contaminated with dirty shadows. The shadows of the trees backing away from the lake; the shadows of the ordinary world.
Jim gazed down upon the motionless bodies of two hobos, who might be dead of exposure on their filthy mattresses. But he watched those makeshift corpses with a sense of rapture. It was the old rapture of drowning into oceanic light — a light which he now knew to be split by a billion crystal prisms, prisons which reproduced themselves by fission to garner yet more souls.
And because he was simply out of his body, and not actually dead, the ordinary world still cast strong shadows to distract him from that contaminated light. The shadows of the forest pulled at him, urging him to haunt the woodlands, and even to skim back to Egremont. He bobbed like a balloon, caught between the shadow wind and a different breeze that blew towards the white fog.
Death appeared suddenly, a red fire upon those hobos’ chests. From waxwork Jim to waxwork Weinberger it hopped back and forth.
This time, they navigated the fog with its coloured crystals more speedily. From side to side they arced, tight on Death’s tail.
Sometimes quite wide straits opened out between the crystals, straits down which Death flew. Sometimes there was far less room for manoeuvre. Yet still the crystals stretched on and on in all directions, apparently forever: a great ocean in which chunks of coloured ice of the same density as water floated at all levels. It was a maze of many possible pathways and innumerable cul-de-sacs — Death’s dead ends — which they could never have picked their way through on their own. Surely a boundary must exist, a brighter or a clearer light beyond . . . but where it might be it was impossible to tell, or set one’s course by, so broken up and so refracted was that true light by the crystal fog.
Death did not exactly ignore them on this occasion. The further into the fog that they chased it, the more it seemed to react to their pursuit by sudden hoverings and pivotings and by quick backward glances, its ruby eyes glittering like crystals in miniature. Death did not seem angry that they were chasing it. Or afraid. Nor did it try to shake them off by squeezing along narrow paths. Rather, it seemed to be luring them on now — keeping ahead of them, but never too far ahead.
Jim wondered how far their elastic life-lines could really stretch. Would the silver threads reach snapping point? Then would Death sweep back to gather them? For all he knew, Death was leading them cunningly in circles . . .
“Is there no end to it?” called Weinberger.
But then, quite suddenly, there was an end. They were through. Out they darted on Death’s tail between the final crystals — into a lucid, shining emptiness which was very like a negative of space: a white void. It was lit, yet from no particular source other than itself. Now there was only the red creature ahead of them, flying unimpeded.
Behind, the crystal fog was a wall which divided this universe in half. Breaking out of the fog, Jim had felt that he had been . . . ‘unconceived’. They were two sperms leaving that enormous egg of a myriad coloured cells. Or was it more like glassy cuckoo spit?
The wall receded as they flew away from it into the white void. It hardly seemed to grow much smaller to a backward glance, only smoother — smooth as a billiard ball. But yes, there was a slight curvature to it now. It was an enormous sphere.
And it was the home of a myriad mind-worlds, and a billion soul-imaginings — including many purgatories and hells. Whilst out here there was simply a bright nothingness . . . Jim began to fear a greater peril, that of being cast adrift by Death in limbo. Was this void the same as Ananda’s ‘pure Nothing’? No, since it contained light. He could see, though there was nothing to be seen. He knew he was conscious, though there was very little to be conscious of.
“Where are we?” cried his companion.
“Watch Death, Nathan! Don’t take your eyes off Death!”
Apart from the tiny red speeding creature, there was only a blank visual Field. If Death, indeed, was still speeding . . . Perhaps it was standing still, and so were they.
Like any single item concentra
ted on relentlessly for too long, the red creature was becoming meaningless. Their eyes would soon blank it out, their brains would not register it, and it would vanish too. They would lose it.
By now Jim’s mind was willing the blank void to be something. His eyes hunted for any marbling or mottling or grain in the luminous space: for some sort of texture or irregularity. Soon, what had seemed at first like indefinite extension ahead and above and beneath them seemed more like . . . walls. Yes, there was a spherical wall behind them: that was the crystal fog. Why should there not be walls ahead too? No space could be utterly unbounded, extending forever. Even a universe must bend back upon itself, so that it created out of itself its own walls: Moebius strip walls with no other side but this one side. The void, too, must bend back upon itself . . .
Now they were indeed flying through an enormous room, with the most peculiar walls: they were at once everywhere, and nowhere. The enormous room was nothing less than an infinity of ‘local’ rooms, coexisting within one and the same space. Bring one room into focus out of this infinity — choose it — and there you would be. No longer in infinity; and yet on the other side of its walls, its one-sided walls, there would still be all the other possible rooms and spaces. Here was a place that was infinite, yet bounded. No ‘elsewhere’ existed — only an eternal here: the quality of being here, yet with access to everywhere.
Within the crystal fog that they had left behind, trapped souls also chose the shape of their world-spaces — of their rooms — modelling them on their dreams and fears. Yet those lost souls were all separated from each other forever. Whereas this ‘room’ was the Many-in-One. It allowed infinite access.
As Jim realized this, and chose something, the room took on architecture, texture, furnishings . . .
It became a long rococo hall. He and Weinberger were walking along it now, together. Red Death flew on ahead of them down to the furthest end.
The two men took stock of their surroundings.
The floor was of polished parquet. A number of gilded chairs and brocaded sofas stood about, and several round tables the tops of which were inlaid with strips of contrasting marble. The roof was of many linked domes, painted to resemble blue skies v/ith fleecy clouds. The richly papered, embossed walls were subdivided into alcoves or little antechambers each of which housed a closed double door with moulded covings above it and a carved headpiece: of cherubs, tritons, centaurs, bunches of grapes in gilded wood. All along this hall, reaching up to the false sky, was intricacy: carved gilded wreaths, cartouches, friezes, architraves. Nowhere were there windows; yet outside each alcove there hung a heavy ornamental picture frame, and though no painting was inside a single one of these — only a blank space — somehow these seemed to illuminate the hall. With a one-way light: one couldn’t see where it came from, only what it fell upon within this place.
Death had dipped into an alcove at the very end of the hall and settled there, clinging upside-down to the headpiece of the furthest door.
Keeping an eye open for any flicker of movement on its part, just in case it darted back towards them, Jim strode to the door closest by. He gripped the curled, gold handles and pulled the twin doors open . . .
TWENTY-FOUR
A beechwood grew outside, the trees smooth and tapering with the only foliage up at the roof of the wood. The ground was a lavender mist of bluebells. A path led through the wood, disappearing from sight.
Erect on its hind legs, a shaggy wolf with a long thin snout leaned idly against one of the beeches. It panted, pink-tongued. And its teeth dripped saliva. Yet it held a posy of bluebells in one of its forepaws. It looked as though it had only stopped running and adopted this nonchalant pose a moment earlier.
Shrugging itself off the tree, the wolf strolled towards them, holding out the bunch of flowers, grinning wetly, invitingly. Hastily Jim slammed the doors.
“Open up again,” said Weinberger.
“Huh?”
“Just an idea. Go on.”
Cautiously Jim opened the doors a crack, then pulled them wide. Now there was no bluebell wood outside. In its place was a moated castle set in a clearing in an oak wood. Steep, jagged mountains of ice or glass rose beyond the wood, flashing in the sunshine. A dinosaur-like dragon capered out of the oak wood, breathing fire. A knight rode out of the castle over the drawbridge, levelling his lance. Up on the topmost tower stood a lady; wired veils of gauze wafted from her high steeple hat.
“Fairyland!” exclaimed Weinberger. “All the facets of fairyland . . .!”
He thrust the doors shut before they could witness the outcome of the dragon-tilt, and pulled them wide once more.
A great cavern with an underground river rushing through it. . . Bones littered the stone floor. A wicker cage penned a weeping, hand-wringing maiden. A giant, with nail-studded club over one shoulder, grabbed for them. Its fist slammed into the doors as both men threw their weight against them. They forced the twin doors shut against increasing pressure, till they clicked home. Then there was no more resistance from beyond.
Plucking at Jim’s sleeve, Weinberger urged him along to the next alcove and the next set of doors.
Weinberger opened these more cautiously.
A white rabbit wearing a frock coat ran past, feverishly consulting a pocket watch . . .
Again: a bilious, lime-green, goggle-eyed toad rowed lazily along a winding river under the feathery drip of willow trees. The toad sported a straw boater with a candy-striped hatband, a loud checkered jacket and a mustard-yellow waistcoat. The toad was puffing on a fat cigar . . .
On they went to the next alcove.
Here the doors opened on to some future city, or some city on another world. The two men stood high on a railed tower, looking down. Gossamer bridges spanned rose-red canyons. Craft flew through the air, flapping metal wings like birds. The sun in the sky was hugely swollen, a dying bonfire red. When they reopened this same door a moment later, bloated glassy spiders the size of houses floated through a violet sky above a tawny desert, their dangling webs snaring angular white birds . . .
“They’re genre doors, that’s what,” said Weinberger. “Sets of fictions. Imaginings. Free creations. Not hells or purgatories, but inventions. Folk invention, personal invention.”
But beyond the next double doors lay a perfectly normal town suburb of white clapboard houses with green-tiled pitched roofs, neat lawns and hedges. A parade was in progress, with drum majorettes and a pipe band . . .
“Perhaps this is a memory of the ordinary — the humdrum?”
“Yes.” Jim smiled. “I can hear the humdrum playing.”
“It’s somewhere to go back to at night, after fighting dragons and rescuing maidens?”
“They’re probably all busy swopping wives and husbands there, and holding black masses.”
“You just hold a black mass here, boy, and you’ll get what you summon!”
“So maybe this is Horrorville, or Sexville?”
What lay beyond the next doors was quite incomprehensible, unless it was an example of abstract invention. Differently coloured lights hummed about a great three-dimensional abacus. Musical tones sounded in a constantly varying warble . . .
“If we go through one of these doorways, can we get back again from the other side?”
“No idea, Nathan. Maybe. Probably. But we aren’t here for the scenery!”
All this while, they had been moving closer to the final doorway where Death hung. Now they quickened their pace towards it. From the gilded carving above those doors, Death squeaked at them plaintively.
“It wants in,” said Weinberger. “Who usually opens the door for it?”
Wary of the creature hanging above his head, Jim reached for the handles, which were shaped like rams’ horns. Pulling both doors wide open, he stepped back. Immediately Death flitted through the doorway, down the wide short corridor beyond.
After about thirty feet this corridor opened directly on to a pearly space. In the midst of the space
floated what looked like a child’s drawing of a treetop on fire with little flames, or a burning bush uprooted. As they watched, some ‘leaves’ zipped away like red meteor streaks. Others arrowed in from outside the pearly space. They were neither leaves nor flames. They were the Death creatures, roosting in their aviary: hundreds, perhaps thousands of them. Every moment a few left; every moment a few returned.
Half-way down the corridor stood a gold-lacquered bamboo screen that reminded Jim of the pipes of a choir organ. From behind this screen stepped a tall red angel.
This was no human angel, though. It was no man or woman with white wings.
The angel stood over six feet tall. Its body and limbs were thin and rigid, like a stick insect’s. The wings sprouting from its back were those of a death’s-head hawkmoth. Its head was disproportionately large, with big faceted eyes. It had a prim little mouth, of cartilage. It was a thing of great strength — and lightness. And it was as red as Death.
“Don’t worry,” it said, watching them a thousand times over with its eyes. Its voice was chirrupy.
“How you see me is not exactly how we are. I could have appeared to you as a copy of a man, but that would have been misleading. Better by far that you meet me as an alien creature. This will assist your understanding of the situation.”
“What situation?” asked Jim. “What are you?” He knew, as he spoke, that this was merely an automatic, parrot response. So long as the being did not move towards them, they were safe. Provisionally.
In the pearly space outside, the red mites of Death roosted upon that free-floating network of branching spars. Constantly, as if at a hidden signal, one or two streaked away; others streaked back . . . So the angel, then, was their Master: the true Master of the House of Death. One of their Masters, at any rate.
Watson, Ian - Novel 10 Page 15