by Jeff Noon
The train stopped at another station.
The darkness had taken on a lighter hue, signalling the edge of dusk. Usually he would be worried by the prospect of crossing over, but now all he wanted was to return to Dayzone: he would endure it.
Nyquist waited for the train to start up again.
It didn’t happen. And one by one these remaining passengers got up from their seats and exited through the doors.
Nyquist was alone.
The train remained where it was, perfectly still.
He waited.
A few minutes later the guard came through. Absurdly, Nyquist thought he was going to be told off for not having a ticket; instead the guard told him that the train terminated here. Nyquist said, “But I need to get into daylight.”
“I’m sorry, sir. There’s been some trouble in Dusk, a train derailed. Nothing’s going through tonight, not on this line.”
He couldn’t believe it. “But I need to get to Dayzone. It’s urgent.”
The guard shook his head. “You’ll have to change, before travelling on.”
Nyquist stood up and walked to the carriage door. He stepped down onto the platform and saw for the first time the name of the station.
Vespers. Precinct Thirteen.
He remembered the name from somewhere.
A whistle blew, low and mournful, and the train reversed away from the platform, moving off into the darkness of Night. It left behind silence. A few stars were seen above, especially that strange constellation known as the Wound, which hung over the station like a necklace of jewels embedded in a scar. Nyquist looked around. A single lamp cast a yellow circle onto the concrete platform and a lone figure could be seen, standing just beyond the light. Music drifted through the air. Nyquist moved towards the sound. The figure was an old man playing the violin, the very same blind musician he had seen twice before. The same wooden box on which the player stood, the same tin bowl with a few coins already lying within; the same battered instrument, the same lopsided hat, the same black sightless look in the man’s eyes. Only the music was different. Not in its melody, which seemed to be essentially the same; but in Dayzone the tune had been played as a wild dance, whereas now it was slowly drawn and surrounded with otherworldly harmonies. It sounded as though it were being spun from the twilit air itself, each note, each melodic phrase made of mist. And then Nyquist realised that the tune was none other than “Für Elise”. The notes were well hidden, but there they were at the centre of the web.
Dusk music. A lesson from the shadows.
He felt himself utterly possessed by it, so much so that he hardly noticed the single coin dropping from his hand, into the bowl. The old man nodded at this payment, his music never missing a beat.
Nyquist walked down the platform towards the station’s exit gate.
Crepusculia
The silver mists of dusk swirled around at ground level, touching the night here and there. Nyquist moved as one drawn forward by the spell of somnambulism, his mind hardly registering his surroundings. On occasion he would see another person in the distance, someone walking slowly along in a similar manner to himself, the feet dragging, head slightly bowed, hands held loosely at their sides. Otherwise, the streets were his alone. Soon he came to a large open square surrounded by tall buildings, all of them dark. A number of fetish objects were strung on a series of poles in the centre of the square. These objects were made from human hair, feathers, rusty machine parts, broken knife blades, bullet casings, animal skulls, piano keys. Nyquist saw them as appeasements to the spirits of twilight. A cloud of yellow moths danced around the only streetlamp still working. Beyond this sodium glow, the evening star glittered cold and blue and lonely above the dusklands.
Nyquist walked parallel to the fogline, towards a tiny flickering light some way ahead. A few other people were making their way there as well, a small gathering. Coming up close he saw that the light was a single gas flame attached to the wall of a building; it might have been a small factory, or a church, or a library. The structure was rundown, crumbling, the rear half of it already belonging to the fog, to the folds of dusk. The outside walls were covered in old peeling posters for theatrical events. There was no name above the doorway, no signage, no indication of what might be happening within; only the half-open doorway offered any welcome. Nyquist entered.
A woman was sitting in a little glass booth in the foyer. He bought a ticket from her with the last few coins remaining in his trouser pocket. It seemed to be the exact amount required. She smiled at Nyquist, as though she knew him, or knew his purpose here. Her voice was gentle: “Welcome to the Silhouette Theatre.”
The auditorium was a tiny space, with five rows of banked seats arranged before a raised stage area. Nyquist joined the other spectators already seated, each one sitting alone, isolated. The lighting was subdued. Soft music could be heard, produced by metallic percussion instruments. A large sheet of white cloth was stretched across the darkened stage, from left to right, and floor to ceiling.
He waited. Nobody spoke a word. A few minutes later the houselights went down and the white cloth shimmered, becoming semitransparent: through it the wall of dusk could just about be discerned where it had penetrated the rear of the building, the fog billowing, lit by its own spectral glow. The stage lights came up slowly, bringing the sheet of cloth to life and, as the music grew louder and more dramatic, a large shadow appeared on the screen. The puppeteer herself could be vaguely made out, a blurred figure only, but Nyquist could tell it was the girl, Eleanor Bale. Now the shadow form had taken on a human shape as it moved about in a dancing motion. In time, other puppets joined the dance. On occasion, Eleanor spoke aloud through a crackly loudspeaker, adding details where needed.
Between the shadows and the puppeteer and the audience, a story was shared.
In the beginning there was only darkness.
The night sky ruled the darkness with his various companions, the moon and the planets and the stars. One such was called Hesperus. She was also known as Venus, the evening star, the most beautiful. The night sky loved her deeply. The moon was jealous of this fact, so jealous that she sliced a hole in the night sky and daylight poured through the wound, from the inside of night’s body.
In this way, sunlight was born.
Eleanor worked the puppets with skill, each new character born out of a blurry realm, coming to stark black life suddenly as the puppets touched the white cloth, their temporary kingdom in the light.
Now the universe was shared equally between night and day. All was well until the sunlight grew tired of the night sky encroaching upon her realm every evening. The daylight was cunning however, she knew that she could not contest the night sky with brute strength; instead she seduced him, in the guise of a comet. From this union came forth the dusk. This offspring of daylight and the night sky was always placed between the two parents, so that one could not directly affect the other without the child’s agency.
A kind of peace ensued, until the dusk child started to desire her own kingdom, and so she stole from both night and day; she stole the moon and the evening star, she stole a dozen sunbeams; she stole sparkles of light from the day, and a few smudges of darkness from night. From these she made the mist, with which she covered her world for protection. Flowers grew in the once barren soil, pollinated by a family of giant moths. Finally, within this fogbound land the city of Crepusculia was built, a magical place that held the future within its walls of grey vapour. And the people of twilight rejoiced and prayed to their gods, saying: “Into the dusk I have wandered, in the pale fog I have fallen and become lost, both lost and found.”
Hearing of this great city within the confines of Dusk, both night and day grew envious. A great war took place, during which the dark and the light joined forces to gain control of Crepusculia. Battle ensued, a battle that is still being fought. As the evening star hovers in the sky, the People of the Dusk celebrate not victory, not defeat, but the edifying nature of their cont
inuous struggle. They pray to the moon and make sacrifices to her, this goddess who floats on a cloud of fog, looking out across the twilight world. Her soft yellow light hangs like a balm over the city. The struggle goes on.
The shadow play came to an end and the stage lights dimmed. Nyquist sat upright, as if from a deep sleep. He felt he had been placed under some kind of charm. The other members of the audience were in a similar state, moaning to themselves softly, shaking their heads, barely able to get to their feet. The vibrant beat of the metal gongs and rattles was still ringing in their ears. There was no applause. How could there be? This story belonged to them, these few people in awe of twilight’s edge for all their strange and varied reasons. Indeed, Nyquist could only think of the story as being his own: the wound in the night sky his own wound, the evening star his own love, the sunlight and the darkness his enemies, the moon his cruel and jealous mistress, and the dusk his rightful place upon the world.
Accusations
Later, when the tiny audience and the few members of staff had left the building, Nyquist pushed through a side door and walked through into a short corridor leading backstage. He found Eleanor in the wings. She was packing away the puppets from the night’s performance, folding the leather figurines into a wooden box decorated with jewels and carvings. The mist could be seen, seeping in through open doorways and broken windows to billow across the further reaches of the stage area. Nyquist could smell dead leaves and taste flakes of ash in his mouth, his body reacting spontaneously to the nearness of dusk.
Without glancing up, Eleanor said, “At least tell me you enjoyed the show.”
He made no reply.
Eleanor looked at him, only to meet his hard stare. She saw the state of his face. “Another fight?” she asked.
Again, no reply.
“Look,” she said. “I’m nearly done here. Then we can talk. You do want to talk?”
“As you wish.”
The girl smiled weakly. “I know I keep running away from you, but what else am I supposed to do? I have to live.”
“Do you?”
“You really are behaving very weirdly, Nyquist. Has something happened?”
“Bale tried to kill me.” He felt his skin tighten in memory. “And his crony, Pearce. They injected me with kia, an overdose.”
“But that’s terrible… the man’s crazier than I thought. “
“I don’t know how I survived. I almost didn’t.”
“What did it feel like?”
Nyquist’s eyes stared ahead. “I stepped right off the clock’s edge and kept on falling. All was dark. And still. Nothing moved. Only myself falling away from time. And then… and then I thought about you…”
“About me? Why? Why would you do that?”
“A light shone in the darkness. And I moved towards it.”
He didn’t tell her what the light was, how terrifying it was, or how it pointed the way to her death at his own hands. Instead he said, “I have the feeling this city isn’t finished with me yet. I have things to do.”
Eleanor stood up, saying, “I know what you mean.”
He spoke coldly, mechanically. “Eleanor, I want those minutes of my life back. The minutes you stole from me.” Anger took over. “I want them back.”
“So you believe I killed Dominic?”
“Yes.”
Eleanor nodded, thinking to herself for a moment. Then she reached out her hand to touch his damaged face and she said, “I’ll get you cleaned up, come on.” She led him up a spiral flight of stairs, into a room in the upper reaches of the theatre. “This is where my father lived, most of the time.” Nyquist looked around. Half-finished puppets hung from the ceiling. Piles of books were balanced on the chairs and on the floor, manuscript papers were piled high on a desktop, on the single bed were heaped even more sheets of paper, all of them covered in handwriting. A single framed photograph on the wall showed a lush blue sky, a green field and the sun, the real sun.
Eleanor pulled him away from the sight of the world outside the city.
“Come on, sit down. That’s it…”
He sat on the bed as she looked at his injuries. There was blood matted in his hair, and the skin was broken and bruised on his face.
“You never get any prettier, that’s a fact.”
She wet a cloth at the room’s tiny basin and started to wash the wounds. Nyquist let her do it, while inside his head a voice whispered: This is your target. This is the person you have to kill.
“Leave me alone.” He pushed her away.
Eleanor looked upset. “I was only trying to–”
“What is all this?” Nyquist grabbed up a sheaf of papers from the bed. He waved them at the girl. “All this! What does it mean?”
“I don’t know. I’m–”
“What?”
“I’m still going through it all.”
“There must be something here, some clue.”
“To what?”
“To stop it happening.”
“What do you mean? What’s going to happen?”
He didn’t answer her. Something had clicked inside him, another tip of the scales, back towards humanity, towards compassion, and he felt himself once again a man caught in a trap. This might be his last chance; he had to understand the case, the secret history behind it, the hidden motives. Only then might he escape his designated fate. He started to read through the papers on the bed, trying to decipher Kinkaid’s scrawled words.
He said, “Eleanor, did you kill again, tonight?”
“What? No, of course not.”
“After you left me there, in that cheap hotel?”
“No! I came straight here–”
“You didn’t black out?”
“Of course not. Nyquist, what are you talking about?”
“Quicksilver has struck again.”
She was shocked at the news, shocked enough to convince Nyquist of her innocence. Not that it did him any good.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “You mean my father wasn’t the murderer?”
“Maybe.”
“But that means…”
“It means you’ve killed the wrong person.”
He watched her face, looking for clues. She was defiant at first and then the signs of a more stricken nature showed through.
“But he told me he was… He confessed to me!”
She turned away in despair and moved over to a small desk in the corner of the room where she sat down with her head in her hands. He was about to offer some words of comfort, but stopped himself. He would let her be, for now.
His eyes scanned the page he was holding, finding a few readable sentences amid the chaotic scrawl.
Every time I look at her I feel my heart about to burst apart. How can I protect my daughter? It doesn’t seem possible. And yet I have to keep doing it. There’s no alternative. Or she will die. That’s obvious now.
Nyquist jumped to another passage.
I’m frightened. I can’t carry on like this. I don’t want to hurt people, I don’t want to kill anyone. It’s too high a price to pay. Yet if I don’t do it, what will happen to her?
Here the writing broke down.
Nyquist grabbed another paper, one that seemed to deal with kia and its properties. He homed in on a legible passage that had been underlined.
Or else consider it this way: Dayzone is the mind of the city, Nocturna the body, and Dusk the subconscious. Mind, body, spirit. The things people see in the flower’s heart are really their hidden fears. And terrible desires. But how can they be conquered?
Nyquist felt he was reading a journal of his own madness.
In many ways it’s worse; the future can be viewed as a fixed property of time, whereas human fear is ever-changing.
Words were scrubbed out here, only becoming clear again with:
It’s not so much what will happen, but what might happen. No. Worse even. What the user might allow to happen. Or worst of all, what they might make happ
en. But how can a person fight such a thing? They would easier catch the mist in their hands.
Nyquist felt terrible. His temples throbbed with a dull ache. He read on:
You can walk away from events, but not from your own darkness.
Eleanor interrupted his reading. “What have you found?”
Nyquist frowned. “Well, he admits to killing people, or at least wanting to. It’s not quite clear.”
“I know. All these messages to himself. Look…” She opened a cupboard and showed him the hoard of paper and journals stuffed inside. “Where do we start?”
“We?”
She started to pull papers from the cupboards, scattering them everywhere. “We have to find out what happened in that room, when he was killed. We’re in this together.” Then she sat on the floor and started to read.
He watched her for a while, a lonely teenage girl reading her dead father’s letters. Then he saw something of more interest: a bottle of gin on a shelf. There was enough for one good mouthful but that was sufficient: immediately he felt more alive.
Eleanor gasped.
“What is it?” He knelt down next to her.
“Look.” She handed him a single piece of paper, pointing to a certain passage. “Read it. The underlined bit.”
He started to read the words to himself.
I have committed terrible crimes, I have taken lives, all for the sake of love…
He stopped. “So that’s his confession?”
“Carry on,” she said. “A few more lines down. Where it’s indicated.”
Nyquist saw the line she meant. As he read it, a cold shiver went through him. He could hardly speak, hardly find the words, not at first. He read the line again, saying. “This doesn’t necessarily mean–”
“Read it to me,” she said. “I need to hear it from another person’s lips.”
Nyquist stared at her.
“Read it.”
He looked back to the paper in his hands, saying the line out loud this time: “Now I see it clearly. I have to kill my daughter. I have to kill Eleanor.”