‘See for yourself.’
Hunting gleefully through the tunnels in the wilderness, she discovered children, unwashed faces, hair awry, clothing torn and stained.
‘They look like human children.’
‘They are.’
‘They look uncared for.’
The black eyes looked directly into Penny’s. ‘They are the lost children.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘As once you were lost, Penny Postlethwaite. And now they have joined you. All lost in this same garden.’
She looked around, astonished to find more and more children appearing from every direction. They gathered around her. Already there were dozens of them, perhaps as many as a hundred.
‘Why are they here?’
‘I recognised your need. You refuse to hurt, to punish. You express the desire to help the weak.’
Penny inhaled deeply and stood in the dappled sunlight and stared at them all. It seemed miraculous that all of these children should appear in the garden she remembered. Their unwashed faces gazed up at her. Were they expecting something of her? Were they expecting her to take care of them? But how could she possibly help so many children?
She said, ‘What do I know about lost children?’
The light darkened.
She called out: ‘Jeremiah!’
A voice she didn’t recognise spoke, as if directly into her ear, or possibly her mind: ‘The Master cannot be disturbed at present. He will speak to you soon. But now I must take you deeper into this new experience.’
‘Who are you?’
‘A servant of the Master.’
‘Why am I being taken here? What purpose will it serve?’
‘The Master has urgent business elsewhere. It will offer a new experience.’
Penny was led into a decrepit building. No such building had been part of her family garden.
‘I don’t want to go here.’
‘It is necessary.’
The building stank of bodies, cigarettes, alcohol, toilets. A big man, completely bald and dressed in a sweat-soiled cotton gown sat beside a rickety table upon which were various glasses, bottles of alcohol, cigarettes, cigars, and an extraordinary medley of vials, loaded syringes, and powders laid out in scraps of foil. He beckoned with a ring-bedecked hand for her to choose anything she wanted from the table and then enter through a door behind him.
Penny refused. ‘I don’t feel comfortable here.’
‘It is not necessary that you feel comfortable.’
In the background was a rumble of conversation, many voices, all shouting rather than speaking, none of it in English.
‘I don’t want to be here.’
The voice suggested: ‘I would ask for your patience. There is one who might benefit from your indulgence.’
The big man shoved the door half ajar. Penny stared into a room of semi-darkness. ‘What is this place?’
‘I will leave it to your imagination.’
She was gazing down onto the bald man’s coal black eyes. His perspiring face grew pale as her mind confronted his.
‘Who is he?’
‘Merely a gatekeeper.’
‘What is within the room?’
‘You must enter to see for yourself.’
Penny moved through the door to inspect what the gatekeeper was guarding. There were many women within, in various stages of undress. They were all young, mostly girls even younger than herself.
‘This is a brothel?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why bring me here?’
‘So you can discover your true self.’
‘Is that what Jeremiah thinks of me? I belong in a place like this?’
‘Quite the contrary!’
Penny moved deeper into the room with its horrible, cloying medley of smells. She arrived at a door in a blank section of wall, locked with a sliding bolt. On impulse, she undid the bolt. In the cell was a naked young woman, much the same age as herself. Her hands were tethered with irons behind her back. In spite of the chains, she tottered to her feet to confront Penny on her arrival.
‘Who are you?’
Now she was standing, the young woman was a good six inches taller than Penny. She stank, as if she had not bathed in a long time. Her face was smudged with dirt and sweat and her skin criss-crossed with red wheals of flagellation. Yet still her face, and her eyes, were defiant.
‘Who are you?’ Penny demanded again.
The young woman stared. She made no attempt to speak.
Coming closer, Penny saw that her hair was long and lank, a natural mahogany but streaked with darker and lighter shades. Her eyes were the same shade of mahogany as the bulk of hair. Her lips were the colour of blackberry juice. Their eyes met. The dark brown eyes of the enslaved young woman: the silvery grey of Penny. They stared into one another’s eyes.
She whispered into Penny’s ear, ‘How can I pleasure you, Mistress?’
‘I am not here to use you. Please tell me your name?’
‘Those who pay for my services buy the right to name me.’
‘Have you no shame?’
‘I have none, Mistress. But if you will pay to be pleasured, you will be allowed to shame me.’
‘You must have a name.’
‘I was never allowed a name. Am I to be your hand maiden?’
‘If I can free you – would you be my friend?’
‘The Mistress will decide on her pleasure.’
‘Then my pleasure is to ask you not to call me Mistress. My name is Penny. And though I don’t yet know how, I want to help you.’ Penny hesitated at the sound of screams from elsewhere in the establishment. ‘I assume that you have no name because you were sold into slavery as a child.’
The tormented face stared back at Penny. The young woman’s hair was dangling over her face in sweat-congealed straggles. Penny remembered her own imprisonment in a helmet of glittering jewels. But this girl’s mask was made of iron pins, with black heads, which were embedded in her flesh, forming a bridge over her eyebrows, and trailing down over her cheeks. Tiny rivulets of blood trailed from several of the pins, suggesting a recent torment.
‘Do they treat you as some wild animal? Is that supposed to be your special attraction – your ferality?’
The young woman’s eyes, so dark a shade of brown they now appeared almost black, glittered back at her.
Penny entered the young woman’s mind. She probed deep, looking beyond the wall of hurt, beyond the vast litany of desecration she had suffered here, to the beginning of her experience. She discovered no loving, no mothering, no comforting experience at all. The desecration had begun so soon after birth.
Her fingers trembled in reaching out and touching the hurt face. Penny was astonished to find the face retracting from her touch. One by one she removed the pins that were buried in the woman’s flesh. Their eyes met again.
Penny commanded: ‘Remove the irons that bind her.’
The irons slipped off the young woman’s wrists, leaving bracelets of scarred and ulcerated skin.
Penny scanned the woman’s body from head to foot, registering signs of what was probably disease. Parasites boring into skin. Bacteria and viruses in the organs and inner flesh.
‘Jeremiah – I know you’re watching this. I want you to cure her – cure her of every illness that afflicts her!’
A plane of crackling light moved over the figure of the young woman, scouring her body of every parasite.
‘Now clothe her – make her decent.’
A dress of pale blue silk clothed the girl’s body. Sandals of doe-soft leather enclosed her feet. Only then did Penny pause to gather her thoughts. ‘The bald-headed man, he owns you?’
The woman nodded.
‘I cannot conceive the horror of your life, how you have suffere
d. Yet I sense that you never surrendered. You fought for dignity when there seemed no hope.’ Penny shook her head, led her out through one door and then the second, into the refreshing spring air of her parent’s garden. ‘You’re going to need a great deal of healing.’
The woman stared at her.
‘Jeremiah, I must see you. I must talk to you.’
He materialised beside Penny, who studied his implacable face, the all black eyes that simply returned her gaze.
‘Why are you doing this? Why have you brought me here?’
‘To measure the need in you.’
‘You don’t really care about lost children – or women.’
‘I reward loyalty.’
‘But I have already agreed to your terms.’
‘I have looked into your heart. I discovered a weakness there. Humans are slaves to passion. They fall victim to discontent.’
‘You discovered that I cannot abide cruelty. You saw this as a weakness in me that you could exploit?’
‘You would save the lost, the hurt.’
‘Why would you care about that?’
‘I care nothing about it. But I am sensitive to your needs.’
Penny stared back at this strange dark being, unable to believe a word he was telling her. She considered her reaction: had she really, like she suspected of the Akkharu, found a secret place within her mind, a place that Jeremiah could not read? If so, how could she use this to her maximum advantage?
She said: ‘Please take me back to London and the Black Rose. Stop hiding the truth from me. Stop treating me like some wanton child. I need to know everything that is happening.’
*
Penny felt herself wrenched from a domain of relative peace to witness a vision of apocalypse. Fires blazed through a vast landscape. The sky above had become a furnace. Jeremiah gazed out over the ruined world, his all black eyes reflecting the flames.
‘It’s horrible – awful!’
‘You demanded to witness.’ His voice was softly gloating.
‘What is it? What am I looking at?’
‘Is it not obvious? You are gazing at the region you designate the Eurasian landmass.’
‘It’s burning.’
He said nothing.
‘Why is it burning?’
‘It combusts spontaneously because the temperature of the atmosphere has increased.’
‘Why are you doing such terrible things?’
‘They are consequences of the growing war. The Rose gathered the power of your sun in preparation for the coming singularity.’
‘Are there other such . . . consequences?’
‘Many.’
‘Show me!’
Penny was plunged into the dark, her vision being forced to accommodate near darkness in which moiling spurts of lava erupted from a landscape made up of numerous volcanoes. Rivers of molten rock ran down the mountainsides for hundreds of miles.
‘Where are we?’
‘The region you call the Indian Ocean.’
‘There must have been people here?’
‘No doubt there were. Soon there will be similar catastrophes in the regions known to you as the central European forests, North America, Asia, the great island you call Australia.’
‘You don’t care about hurting all those people?’
Again he held to silence.
‘Please, Jeremiah – show concern for people.’
‘Is this your new demand of me?’
‘Please show people respect. You are responsible for all of this?’
‘I planned the Rose – and it demanded empowerment. What you see is the fruit of my planning though I did not weigh the manifold secondary consequences.’
‘Why do you so hate us?’
‘We are repeating a conversation we had already.’
‘There is more – isn’t there? There must be more.’
‘Yes.’
‘Please show me.’
‘Your star was a convenient source of energy for the metamorphosis. I have been drawing on its plentiful resources from the moment of my arrival.’
‘Heedless of the fact you were damaging the Earth.’
‘Uncaring – but hardly heedless.’
Penny entered the secret place she had created within herself, using the example of the Akkharu. How very dangerous he was. And how she hated him for what he was doing. She hesitated, waited to see if he had read those thoughts.
‘What about all of the people, the life forms – biodiversity.’
‘Have you learned nothing from our conversations? There is no morality in the cosmos. What happens to one small planet is of no consequence.’
‘I can’t believe what you are saying.’
‘Perhaps you are unaware that stars breathe?’
‘What?’
‘As your sun moves through time and space, it emits energy and entities that you could regard as a breath – you know it as the heliosphere.’
‘Why does that matter?’
‘The modest star, which you so jealously call your sun, controls many aspects of your planet, including your climate.’
Penny’s heart was sinking.
‘You clearly do not understand what you call the solar wind.’
‘How can there possibly be a wind from the sun?’
‘It is not a wind. It is something else entirely. The critical aspect, in my calculations, is that it undergoes cycles.’
‘Please – Jeremiah. Stop! I don’t want to know any more. I can’t bear the thought that you are deliberately hurting the Earth.’
‘Another cycle is nearing its turning point. A very great cycle! We must be perfect in timing the communion.’
‘Communion with what?’
‘We are not alone in our ambitions. I have enemies. And you have a rival in discovering the moment.’
‘What rival?’
‘An immensely powerful one.’
Penny was startled into silence.
‘You would save your Earth? You would help the lost children?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then do not fail me.’
The Lip of Darkness
Mark sat with his back to the crumbling wall of the building that concealed the Mamma Pig. He was staring at the sheer cliff wall of the Black Rose, which pulsed with a fiery light. Padraig, who was sitting next to him, interrupted his thoughts. ‘You and Nan – you have remarkable powers of recovery.’
‘Perhaps because we’re dead already.’
Padraig hesitated, as if considering his reply. ‘Others among the crew were not so resilient.’
Poor Tajh was dead. Mark closed his eyes. He didn’t want to revisit the scene when he and Bull had carried Tajh’s body back to the Pig.
Padraig said: ‘At least Cal is alive. He’ll recover – given time.’
Would he recover? Mark questioned that. Cal had been concussed in the blast. And then, on coming to back in the garage, he had been faced with the death of Tajh. Padraig interrupted his thoughts once again. ‘You must pull yourself together, Mark. I’m afraid we don’t have time to feel sorry for ourselves.’
Mark had been glad of the opportunity just to sit and talk about what had happened with Padraig. His right thigh still throbbed with pain. He rubbed at it distractedly. ‘What do you mean? Do you know something I don’t about what’s really going on out there?’
‘I’m far from sure.’
‘If you know something, anything, please tell me. How could that thing have survived the missile attack? It just swallowed it all up. The missiles didn’t even dent it.’
‘You and Nan are not alone in your resilience.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘They didn’t harm the Rose but I believe they changed it.’
&nbs
p; ‘How?’
‘Do you not sense the changes? Not even through your oraculum?’
Mark stared at the monstrosity that had evolved out of the Black Rose. Its curtain wall glittered, as if it were a colossal gemstone, its surface a scaly web of diamonds. If he closed his eyes and examined it through his oraculum, he could see its surface was a metamorphosing pageantry of colours and patterns, like light shifting over water on which some oily substance, like paraffin, excited rainbow patterns. Even now he could smell it, a hot furnace stink, a noxious sulphurous smell. And it growled – a continuous thunderous roar, as you might expect of a waterfall a mile high.
‘I – both Nan and I – we do sense changes in it.’
‘What do you sense?’
Mark couldn’t easily put it into words. ‘Some sort of evolution. Maybe some cranking up of the level of danger.’
‘Have you noticed the changes in the weather since the missile attack?’
‘What changes?’
Padraig grunted. ‘The weather is not natural. It changes from day to day, even from moment to moment.’ His eyes lifted into the foggy dawn in a scary sky.
‘Is that important?’
‘That’s the question I ask myself.’
‘You think it might explain the satellite interference?’
Another unwelcome consequence of the missile attack was that satellite communication was no longer possible between Brett and President Harvey, though Sharkey and Brett were still attempting to make contact through the intermediary at HQ.
‘What’s the Tyrant up to?’
‘Has it occurred to you that the Rose might be purposeful?’
‘Like part of an attack on the Earth?’
‘That certainly. But perhaps there might be an additional, more subtle, purpose?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like an end game strategy.’
Mark fell silent. He stared at the monstrosity once more and thought about Padraig’s words. An end game strategy? The thought provoked a shiver that ran through him from his brow to his toes. If that were true, how could Padraig remain so calm? Mark felt so restless that for the first time in what seemed ages, he retrieved the battered harmonica from his jacket pocket. How long since he had last played a tune on it? Once he had played it every day – he and Mo had danced to its tune. It had travelled between worlds with him. But he had stopped playing it after the Battle of Ossierel.
The Return of the Arinn Page 33