‘I don’t know. I mean no—of course you don’t. But living here, in this place …’ I was walking sideways to her as I struggled to keep up. ‘Although you seem ordinary.’
‘Why should I care what you believe?’ she muttered.
My body reacted before I had time to think. I stopped, grabbed Annalise’s arm, and spun her around. As I did so, the air was sheared by a thin, inaudible shriek.
‘Look …’ I was breathless as I faced her. The ruined corridor seemed suddenly endless. ‘I’m like you. Nobody asked me about today, about coming here. I can either go off on my own and sit somewhere and wait for my mother, or I can stay with you. In fact, I—’
‘All right …’ I was still holding Annalise’s left arm just above the wrist. My fingers tingled as, seemingly of their own accord, they let go. Beneath the grime, and but for the reddened marks made by my fingers, and to me quite incredibly, her skin was unmarked. ‘But don’t think I’m like you,’ she added. ‘Because I’m not.’
But Annalise was totally unique to me. And I suppose that in many ways I was almost equally strange to her; an ordinary lad from the ordinary world in which she seemed to feign disinterest. But I also felt, even then as she turned from me as she began to walk on, that our oppositenesses fitted together. That we made a kind of a pair. More and more of the crystal growth became apparent as we crossed into what would once have been the state rooms of Redhouse, although most of their roofs and the once-ornate plaster of many of the walls had fallen away. At first, there were just tiny grains of engine ice powdering the ruined floors. Then, larger, chandelier-like excrescences began to droop from the few remaining beams that spanned the ceilings.
‘Lots more people used to live here,’ Annalise said matter-of-factly. ‘But they had to stop. They used to work aether engines here, just like in Bracebridge ..
So she’d heard of Bracebridge! But the questions, the marvels, were coming too quickly. We had entered a room which reached all the way up through the house to the oval dome of a huge and miraculously intact skylight. It was walled with spilled and sagging cliff faces of books, tiered with balconies. The place soared far beyond my comprehension of a library, although clearly it had once performed that function. Here, also, the two quietly warring sides of the house entwined. Darkly veined, the glowing growths of engine ice clogged the shelves, dripped down the stairways in a glittering foam that broke across the floor in frozen waves. Even the glass dome was half covered like a blinking eye. I touched some of the ice. The crystal was cool and brittle. It crumbled with a fizzing, tinkling sound.
Annalise’s breath was close on my cheek.
‘I like to read here,’ she said.
‘I like reading too, or at least—’
‘—looking at the pictures, I suppose. The only problem is,’ she continued before I had a chance to deny it, ‘this whole library’s too old. The books fall apart.’
I lifted a tome which lay at the top of a pile which had spilled to the floor. The pages fluttered out like snow. It seemed a sad thing; all this dying knowledge. But when I turned to Annalise, she was smiling.
‘Come on! Bet you can’t catch me!’ She scrambled up a banister, grabbed a book from a shelf and threw it down at me. I ducked. It skidded across the tiles. The spine was ridged with crystal.
‘Looking at the pictures! Bet you can’t even read!’ Another book whizzed past.
Half angry, half laughing, I stared to climb up after her. The wood creaked and splintered. Engine ice fizzed down. Annalise fled ahead of me, slinging more books and insults.
‘Have you heard of Plato?’ she shouted, tossing out a tome from the rail above me which crashed below with the thud of a brick. ‘He was a person just like you, although a lot more intelligent. He invented aether long before the Grandmaster of Painswick, although he really just thought about it. It’s the fifth element, and it just goes around in circles when all the others travel in a straight line.’ Another book shot past me, spiralling down through long bars of sunlight, flapping its jewelled covers. More and more books flew by, their pages fluttering like birds, offering bright glimpses of their coloured plates. They rose and circled around me before sliding across the library’s distant chequered floor. I began to throw books out myself from the shelves around me, climbing from ledge to ledge as Annalise darted ahead. Finally, we reached a truce, and lay spread-eagled and breathless on the tiles amidst the wreckage of our battle. My scratched palms and knees were dusted silver-white. The huge, eerie library glowed.
‘Won’t you be in trouble for all this mess?’
Annalise chuckled. ‘Missy doesn’t care. She’s like that—she lets me do what I want.’ Close to, she smelled earthy and salty; like any other child. ‘Nobody minds about Redhouse now. Nobody wants it but us ..
Idly, I picked up the sprawled leaves of the book which lay nearest my fingers. Annalise was right, of course. It was the pictures rather than the words which then drew me. Here were ancient woodcuts from the Age of Kings, dark and swirling like the smoke of all the chimneys of Bracebridge in midwinter. Men with the heads of dogs chewed at corpses. Creatures with pendulous breasts and faces like melting lanterns flew on broomsticks through the air. The print beside it was dense, and filled with funny fs and ses. One page had a bigger illustration of what I thought at first was a flower until I saw that what I’d imagined to be the stamen was a figure writhing at a stake amid the black petals of flames.
‘What’s that you’re looking at?’ With a quick movement, Annalise snatched the book away. She studied the title on the spine. ‘Compendium Maleficarum … That’s all so out of date.’ With an effortless gesture, she tossed it so far across the library that it seemed to vanish into the moted air. Then she stood up, hands on hips, giving me a grey glimpse of her knickers. ‘Well? Are you coming?’
I followed as she pushed open a window then dropped down into the wilderness gardens outside. Here, more of the crystal piled amid the flowerbeds in the clear afternoon air, a dense foam amid which great-headed chrysanthemums nodded and roses bloomed. Annalise grabbed a peach from the bough of a tree which was like a glittering white umbrella. Knocking the encrusted fruit against a red brick wall, cracking it open like a nut, she tossed it to me. Juice flooded my palm as I bit into it.
‘You can learn all sorts of interesting things from books without having to go anywhere,’ Annalise said matter-of-factly as we sat down on a lawn beside the silvered mass of a fountain. ‘I mean, I could tell you more about that thingamajig place where you live—’
‘—Bracebridge—’
‘—from a book than you’d ever find out just by living there.’
I shrugged, plucking at the daisied grass.
‘And then of course, there’s all the other things that people get up to.’ Annalise hugged her knees. ‘Men and women, I mean. When they want to rub up against each other and make babies.’
‘I know all about that. Still,’ I conceded, ‘you can tell me if you like.’
‘Well …’ Annalise leaned back on her elbows and studied the sky, her hair falling pale gold now, almost like the foam, her dress nearly managing to be white. She was completely unembarrassed by her subject—but at the same time, she clearly understood that what she knew was well worth telling. I supposed, watching her as she talked, that she couldn’t have been totally isolated here. But, as the grass shone and the widows of the warty house glowed, as Annalise’s explanation of the act of human reproduction ranged bizarrely over the complicated terrain of some language that she had taken from those books, I didn’t want our shared afternoon to be anything other than totally unique.
‘Then the labia minor … And thus engorging the corpora cavernosa … Whilst attaching to the non-striated ..
I listened, genuinely absorbed by the sound of these, long, lovely, intricate words which spoke of rituals far more exotic than I could imagine the adults of Bracebridge—let alone my own parents—performing. Her voice was slightly breathless, high-pitched, a
nd suffused with an odd personal accent that didn’t belong to any particular time or place.
‘Of course, the zygote ..
And as she talked, leaning into the sunlight beside that fountain which sparked and gushed in frozen waves, the off-white strap of her dress slipped from her shoulder. Her skin there looked almost clean and was flecked with golden hairs. Annalise had stopped talking. She looked at me for a moment, blinked, then yanked up her dress. She jumped up and walked off down the sloping garden, where lumpy balustrades gave way to a steeper drop. I scampered to catch up with her, grabbing branches, leaping from rock to root.
‘It wasn’t always like this,’ she called as I crashed after her. ‘Lots and lots of people used to live here. It was probably much bigger than Bracebridge …’
There had, indeed, once been a village beside the river down below this big house, although it was now half-drowned in engine ice, its tumourous roofs sagging or broken, the doors and windows draped, the pathways tumbling with froth. Our feet crunched and tinkled. We climbed to the ruins of the church, its tower fallen in a long, crusted tail, now shining and scaled, with gravestones leaning around it. It seemed colder and darker here; already edged with the beginnings of winter. But it would be good, I decided with an odd prescience as Annalise climbed over what had once been the church wall and the backs of her legs flashed white, if Bracebridge were to become like this one day; frozen in time, ornamented with engine ice.
‘You’re not afraid, are you?’ she asked me.
‘No. Of course not. Why should I be?’
At the foot of a bank, close by the river, the crystal rose in extravagant loops and claws, and the water hissed through brittle curtains which fanned like frosted weed from the shore. We came to the motionless waterwheel of an old millhouse still jutting into the frozen waters of its sluices. We climbed over ruined beams in the crackling marsh that surrounded it, glancing up, moment by moment, at the shouldering roof, the silent wheel. But for this strange frostfall, it was much like the old aether engines you found up on Rainharrow. Curtains of ancient weed fanned out, trapped within the glassy water in dense, inky waves. The sense of the past lay heavy here. In those days of the Second Age of Industry when this wheelhouse had thrived, aether could still be extracted from near the earth’s surface and the engines were mostly set on open ground like any other process of manufacturing. For eighty, perhaps ninety, years, villages such as this one had flourished too, growing stone by stone and roof by roof, burying their dead and raising their babies until they became too remote to be reached by the new railways, too high to be embraced by the canals. Then the aether started to run out. For a while, the waterwheel would still have turned as the children of the village left to find work in the big cities of Sheffield and Preston and the guildsmen struggled to keep the bearings of their outdated machinery turning, using up more and more of what aether they still extracted, leaving less and less to sell.
We walked back up through the trees, clambering over rustling falls of crystal then on through the village until we finally reached the glinting gardens of the big house again. Viewed from this side, standing by the frozen froth of that fountain, it seemed even more scaled and ruined. We wandered inside, skidding listlessly across floors, bonging gongs in empty hallways, knocking off stalactites of growth that dissolved with glassy sighs as the air filled with twilight. Annalise led me along eerie passageways to a large, dim room. Its windows were curtained with engine ice and what little light they admitted glittered on the only item of furniture, something so whitened and misshapen that I thought for a moment it was composed of nothing but engine ice. But the lid of the piano came up surprisingly easily when Annalise raised it and the keys inside were uncorroded.
I asked, ‘Can you play?’
She answered with a scatter of notes.
‘Tell me, Robert …’ More notes. ‘What’s it like in Bracebridge?’
I licked my lips. Where to begin? Where to end? ‘Well … There’s the sound, the feel. I mean, the aether engines. And we live in a row of houses. There are lots of rows of houses … My mother—I mean my father, he’s—’
The piano rang out again. ‘What I mean is, what’s it like for you?’
I thought for a moment. The room rippled into silence. ‘It’s …’ I shrugged.
‘Would you rather be here with Missy?’ Her figure was dim. Scarcely there. A shadow, receding. ‘Would you rather be me?’
‘I don’t even know what you are, Annalise.’
She gave a chuckle. Soft and bitter, not quite a laugh, it seemed to come from someone much older. Once again, her fingers stroked the piano. Dust sparkled up from the struck strings.
‘I’m really quite glad I came here,’ I said.
‘Hmm …’ Annalise was humming, scarcely listening.
‘Now I know people like you don’t just go to Northallerton.’ She closed the lid with a bang.
‘I think you’d better get back to your mother.’
I scurried after Annalise down corridors and stairways. Inside Mistress Summerton’s study, tobacco smoke hung in weary drapes around the plants. It seemed as if my mother and Mistress Summerton had long been sitting in silence.
‘We really must be going.’ My mother climbed slowly from the chair. I saw from the glistening trails that lay across her face that she’d been crying. ‘You see, there’s the last train ..
‘Of course, of course …’ Mistress Summerton stood up also, smiling with a flash of her glasses, and my mother and I were wafted from the room and back into the big main hallway where the engine ice still glimmered and sparkled through doorways with a faint inner light. I looked around for Annalise, but she had already vanished.
The two figures, my mother stooped, little Mistress Summerton as strange and alive as the house itself, regarded each other across the distance of their vastly different existences. Then, in a gesture that was rare even between people of the same family in those times of physical reserve, Mistress Summerton stepped forward and took my mother in her small brown arms. In a way, I was almost as shocked by this embrace as I was by anything I had seen on this magical Fourshiftday. And it seemed to me that the two figures merged; or rather, that Mistress Summerton encompassed them both, spreading across the hall and growing briefly vast in a beating of wings.
‘There …’ Mistress Summerton stepped back and reached to touch my mother’s forehead, muttering something more, wordless words which ran high quick and clear as a guildsman’s spell. Then she turned to me, fixing me with the gaze of her glasses, which filled with swirling light.
‘You must take care of your mother,’ she said, although her lips barely moved. I can feel a strength in you, Robert. And hope. Keep that hope, Robert. Keep it for as long as you can … Will you do that for me?
I nodded.
Mistress Summerton smiled. Her strange gaze travelled through me.
‘Goodbye.’
I looked back at the house as my mother and I walked down the white driveway. The crystal growth seemed more like the honey-glow of twilight now. And above it all, the stars were forming. One, shimmering low ahead of us in the west, was a deep, dark red.
My mother grabbed my arm.
‘Don’t tell Beth or your father about today,’ she muttered. ‘You know what he’s like …’
I nodded, thinking of Mistress Summerton’s words.
‘And take this basket—I don’t see why I should have to carry it all the way!’
I carried the empty picnic basket for my mother as we hurried to catch the last train from Tatton Halt.
V
LIVING THE HARD AND ORDINARY LIFE we lived on Coney Mound, torn as I was between past and future wonders, my mother hardly needed to have asked me not to speak to anyone about our visit to Redhouse. Naturally, I was hungry to keep my own secret portion of this world, particularly if it lay beyond Bracebridge. So I bore my burden—along with the bright images of that day; Annalise, Mistress Summerton—in silence, although, as I wan
dered the town, my head was filled with questions which had previously never troubled me.
Down in Bracebridge market square, I found a patch of especially cracked and weathered old stone where the stocks had stood, and where, before that, and in the chaos of the First Age, changelings might once have been burnt before we learned how to tame and capture them. And rummaging through the town public library, sniffling over dank pages, I searched for G for Goldenwhite, U for Unholy, R for Rebellion, and C for changeling. But what was a changeling? All the talk of green vans and Northallerton and trolls and milk souring and babies being eaten seemed like nothing but gossip across the back fences of Coney Mound. But on a high shelf in the corner of the library so dim and dank and unvisited that the shadows seemed to give a resistance, I heaved down a tome embossed with a cross inside a letter C and flopped it open.
It could almost have been one of those books from Redhouse, but this one contained foggy photographs the colour of nicotine stains amid long columns of text. Flesh rippled and sluglike, or white and blooming. Faces cracked like peeling paint. Limbs strung with cascading cauls.
‘What are ye lookin’ at?’
It was Masterlibrarian Kitchum, a half-blind man of such dumb illiteracy that it was hard to imagine that his appointment hadn’t been some kind of joke. Cursing, he dragged the book from me and chased me into the rain.
But there was so much I still needed to know. So, within three shifts, and on a grey Nineshiftday of irredeemable ordinariness, I set out to make my way back to Redhouse. I left home at the usual time carrying my school satchel, then doubled down and back around the edges of lowtown, trod the cabbage leaves through the failing allotments, crossed Withybrook Road and followed the railway tracks around the side of Rainharrow to the point where that lonely branch line dipped across the moors. It was past midday when, plodding on beneath dulled loops of telegraph as the wind bit into me, I took the path through the greying heather beside the old quarry. The late autumn sun was already ominously low by the time I entered the wood leading down to the clearing where my mother and I had had our picnic. Despite the new bareness of the trees, the path grew darker as I descended it, drowning in riots of thorns and holly. Wading through the undergrowth, no longer sure if I was following any kind of path, I began to panic. I was running, breathless. Then, when I was sure I was utterly lost, the wood suddenly relented and I found that I was standing again at the edge of the moor. Darkness was flooding in and the greyish path threaded back towards the empty platform of Tatton Halt. I took it at a grateful run and trotted homewards along the track, pausing only to ease the pain in my sides. The telegraphs glowed faintly above me with distant messages, and, far beyond that, the stars began to glimmer in clusters and strings. One, beckoning towards Coney Mound, was red.
The Light Ages Page 6