by Ali Shaw
She stewed in her chair for a minute, pissed off that she couldn’t think of anything cutting to say. In the end she settled for ‘Whatever’ and wished she had simply kept her mouth shut.
He nodded and stalked away.
She exhaled.
Only once he had gone did she let herself tremble. She wanted to be sick.
The worst was that, even when she’d lowered her head to listen at his chest then pressed her lips to his, even then Finn hadn’t seen fit to tell her about this.
The butterfly she had fed earlier flittered back to her table and fanned its wings there. It took off again and circled in the air until, with a sharp slap, she knocked it down. It flapped about on its side on the floor. She stood, carefully lifted her chair and brought one of its legs down hard, screwing the bug into the ground. She spat out the taste of her honey drink, and made her way back towards Prospect Street.
11
THE GORGEOUS PALACES
Bad weather ran wild through Thunderstown overnight, rattling latches and tapping on windowpanes. Elsa slept fitfully, woken every so often by the noises of the wind.
Come dawn, she was too tired to be angry. When she had gone to bed she had felt as if she were lying down in her own fury, sinking into it and tucking it up around her. She had been angry at Finn, angry at Daniel for telling her about Betty and the lightning, angry at herself for letting her defences down, angry with the world for always adding one more complication.
But in the morning she felt neither anger nor anything else. While she slept her heart had curled up into a ball.
She was not one of those people Daniel had accused her of being. She did believe that a person should learn from the lessons of others. All she had done was refuse to let him see it, because she didn’t want to offer him the satisfaction.
She remembered visiting her dad’s storm-chasing friend Luca in hospital. His wife Ana-Maria had been there too, sitting wordlessly at his bedside and picking at the stems of the flowers Elsa’s dad had bought her. Her father had been just a stone’s throw from Luca when the lightning bolt hit, and he was acutely aware that it could have been him, not Luca, lying in the hospital bed. Ana-Maria had clearly been thinking just that, and wishing it too.
The lighting that had taken the sight from Luca’s right eye had left a sickle-shaped burn that ran from his eyebrow to his jaw. Likewise it had removed the pupil and the iris from the eyeball, leaving only a startlingly pink globe which the doctors had covered with a bandage.
It had been the kind of strike every storm-chaser feared. The one against which no precautions could be taken. Dry lightning. That meant a bolt from the blue or, more technically, a bolt from a storm some ten miles away and perhaps even out of sight, which could fork in an instant across the distance. The sky above Luca’s car had been clear and summery, for they were some miles yet from the storm they were chasing, which here was but a grey fringe for the horizon. He had sat on the bonnet, humming along to his stereo, while Elsa’s dad took a leak among nearby bushes.
Had she been offered the choice, Ana-Maria would have accepted Luca’s partial blindness as a lucky escape; compared to the real damage, his blown-out eye was inconsequential.
The doctors explained that no human mind was built to withstand such electricity, and that the lightning had scrambled the natural circuitry of Luca’s brain like a power surge frying a computer chip. Dreams, memories and learned behaviours had all been carried out of place on the currents, and had settled in new configurations. They warned that, when he came to, Luca might not be Luca any more. He might be a new man, born again with no grip on his reality. Dreams might have turned to memories and memories to dreams forgotten upon waking. All Ana-Maria could do was wait and pray. Even she might have become just a dream figure to him, an image fading from the waking day.
Yes, Elsa was well aware of the perils of lightning.
The overnight rain had made all the difference to Thunderstown’s convoluted streets, making the cobbles in Tallow Row shine like a haul of fresh oysters. She did not mind the drizzle as she walked, nor that her jeans stuck to her thighs and her hair turned slowly bedraggled with the water.
Avoiding the pull of Saint Erasmus, she headed instead for Old Colp. Her route took her west through Tinacre Square, where a charm-seller stood all alone amid the drizzle, her red hair dark and damp against her neck. From Tinacre Square a quiet passageway led towards Feave Street, a shortcut where the raindrops landed lightly on the walls.
At the end of the passage, before the next began, lay a modest courtyard enclosed by the windowless backs of town houses. It was brighter than the passageway and smelled of new rain on slate. The drizzle consolidated into heavy drops, each a vertical flicker through the air.
Something landed on her hand. She looked down expecting rain but saw instead a bug, which she swatted instinctively. She made contact, but when she drew her hand away there was no squashed insect on her knuckles. There was only water. Another bug droned through the rainy air, and she realized that the walls were thick with them. They were the size and shape of ladybirds, but had dull grey shells without markings. They dotted the bricks and mortar like drops of mercury.
She froze. Something here was amiss. Her stomach had clenched because of it, but her mind took a moment to work out what was wrong. Then she realized that she had left wet footprints across the courtyard floor, which was bone dry, despite the falling rain.
A transformation was happening at knee-height. She watched a raindrop break there prematurely, shattering against the thin air. Then the shape of its suspended splash became that of spread insect wings, and then the wings flickered into life and the raindrop flew upwards. Through the wing-blur appeared a bug’s miniscule antennae and dangling legs. It whizzed away to join its fellows on the courtyard walls.
With timid steps she approached the nearest wall, where she held her breath and leaned in close to inspect one of the bugs. Its body was like murky water, and similarly translucent. Through it she could see the grit of the bricks. Likewise she could find her own reflection, warped across the insect’s concave back.
She reached out to touch it. It came off the wall and welled into a raindrop on her skin. Its little legs, hairs-breadth eyes and crystalline shell all vanished, and it became only a wavering drop on the tip of her finger. She laughed with wonder. Then straight away she was unnerved, and stepped back sharply.
‘Finn,’ she said aloud. He had invited her into the world of these insects and the world of his own strange body, and on the threshold she had faltered because he had not been straight with her about its dangers. She wanted to enter, dearly she did, but she couldn’t ignore the memory of Ana-Maria’s face as she sat at Luca’s bedside.
She hurried on towards Old Colp.
The rain ceased as she climbed, leaving the sky smeared with so many clouds of so many shapes and shades that it looked like a painter’s palette. On the lower slopes, a wind blew cotton tufts out of the grass. She paused as they floated around her, half-expecting them to transform into insects or birds, but they were just seeds wrapped in fluff. Further up the mountain she came to a gurgling little brook, its surface glimmering with crescents of sunlight that, for an astonished moment, she believed were carp swimming in the water. They were just reflections, but she had to splash her arm through the brook to be sure of it. She felt as if all appearances here were but masks, and nothing could be trusted.
When she reached the bothy, a cloud shadow swept across her and she shivered, although she could not tell whether it was from fright or excitement or simply the cold of the shade it cast. A wind hummed against the rocky bluff the cottage backed against, coaxing deep, eerie music out of the stone.
She knocked fast on the door and folded her arms. ‘Hi,’ she said when Finn answered.
‘You look tired.’
‘So do you.’
‘I didn’t sleep well,’ he said.
‘Me neither.’
He wore a jersey of blac
k wool, frayed and unravelling at the cuffs. He looked just as troubled as her. ‘Daniel told me he’d spoken to you.’
She took a deep breath. ‘And is it true? What he had to say?’
‘Yes. I promise you I never meant to do it. Until that moment I didn’t even know I had lightning inside of me.’
‘I know it was an accident. That doesn’t matter. What’s difficult is ... why didn’t you warn me?’
‘I ... I tried to tell you I was dangerous.’
‘But you didn’t say how.’
‘I didn’t want you to hate me.’
‘I wouldn’t have. But I might have been more cautious about putting my ear to your chest! Or about kissing you. Now I don’t even know whether I can trust you. What if I’d found out in the same way your mother did?’
Another cloud shadow fell across them. In its shade his skin looked foggy grey. ‘It wouldn’t be like that,’ he said. ‘Lightning isn’t predictable.’
‘Is that supposed to reassure me? Is there anything else you’ve kept from me? Anybody else you’ve hurt?’ She didn’t want to make him suffer, but she had to have this out with him.
He hung his head. The cloud shadow lifted, but the soft sunlight that followed could not brighten him and he remained overcast.
‘I’ve only ever hurt one person, and that was my mother, whom I loved very much. But there have been other moments of lightning. In the months after she left, when I missed her so badly, it kept taking me by surprise. It would come out of me while I ate, or walked in the mountains, or even while I slept. Each time it felt like my spine had been ripped out, but each time it earthed in the ground. I made sure it could never hurt anyone again, by hiding away up here. I should have told you, Elsa, I should have and I can’t believe I didn’t. But somehow you made it impossible.’
‘You’re saying it’s my fault?’
‘No. I was going to say something else.’ He bit his lip and looked away up the mountain.
‘Well? Whatever it was, you’d better say it now.’
‘I didn’t tell you because you made me feel like my hair was standing on end, even though I don’t have a single hair on my body.’
She was taken aback. She glanced around at the slate and the brown mountain grass, anywhere but at Finn.
‘You ...’ She struggled for the words. Eventually she found some of her old resolve, but was not sure she liked the hard way it made her feel when she said, ‘You still haven’t answered my question. Is there anything else you’ve kept from me?’
He closed his eyes. ‘Yes,’ he said in a faint voice. ‘There’s something else.’
‘Then now’s the time to tell me.’
‘I can’t. Not here. I’d have to show you.’
‘Where?’
‘Further up the mountain. You’d have to come with me.’
She hesitated. ‘Is it far?’
‘Not far.’
Given what she had learned, she knew it was unsafe to be near him, although to her frustration she still wanted to see whatever it was he had to show her. As so often seemed the case in her life, what made sense and what she wanted were opposed. She nodded briskly and they set off, over slopes of whisky-hued soil, banks of black pebbles and spry grass. She hated that the silence between them, which previously she had so treasured, had turned so quickly into a gulf. On their way uphill he sprang tensely over the new mud and slicked thickets while she stumbled here and there, her feet slipping in the soil or tripping over roots that seemed to have been washed free of the earth. Then at last they reached the entrance to a tunnel, as tall as her. It looked like an old entryway to one of Thunderstown’s mines, over which the timber boarding had cracked apart long ago. From its dark mouth she felt a changed air blowing against her cheeks, as if she were standing in front of an open freezer. He led the way inside and immediately something crunched under his foot: one shattered half of a miner’s lantern, with a cobweb ball where a candle would once have burned.
‘My torch is inside,’ said Finn. ‘I usually go down there without it. I can feel the way from the air currents. So to start with it will be dark for you.’
‘What’s in there? What if I hit my head on something? What if there are pits or sudden drops?’
‘There aren’t. And the ceiling is high. You’ll have to trust me, although I suppose that will be harder for you now.’
She looked back at the blue sky framed by the lip of the tunnel mouth. ‘Go slowly. I’ll say if it gets too much.’
Further in, the smell of grass and heather that clung to Old Colp’s slopes gave way to lungfuls of cold, mineral air. They quickly reached the edge of vision, where it became too black for even mosses and moulds to sprout on the walls. Here there was only smooth, blasted rock. A few steps further and the tunnel turned a corner into utter darkness. Each pace became harder than the last, for no sooner had she imagined an impending underground cliff than she had convinced herself that she was about to plunge over it. She came to a halt. ‘Finn,’ she said, and a long echo repeated off the F.
‘Here.’ He sounded only an arm’s length away.
She wanted to reach out for him, but she battled back that desire. She would rather show anger than fear. ‘Finn, what the hell is going on? I can’t see a thing in here!’ A powder of rock dust showered on to her face and tongue.
‘Shh!’ he hissed. ‘Don’t shout! Shouting,’ he whispered, ‘could bring the mountain down on us.’
Elsa bunched her fists. ‘What can be so important that we have to go to all this effort to reach it? Can’t I just wait here while you fetch it for me?’
‘No. It can’t be moved. You have to see it to understand. I can guide you, if you like. But to do that you’d have to take my hand.’
‘I’ll be fine, thank you. Carry on.’
It took great effort to follow him as slowly as she did. Her legs objected with every straining muscle. If he found it difficult to progress at such a nervy speed he said nothing. He was as silent as he was invisible.
Then a light burst on like a supernova. Elsa slapped her hands to her eyes and shrieked, thinking lightning. Rock dust shook in the lit-up air, but there was no thunderbolt. It was only the glow of a hand torch and she relaxed her guard, although after the total darkness it pained her retinas.
‘We’re here,’ he said.
She blinked and blinked until eventually she saw the expanses of a cavern around them, and Finn offering her the torch by the handle. She snatched it and held it tight. Her eyes slowly accustomed to the underground and the reluctant colours locked in the rock walls. Stalactites broke the high cave roof into countless archways and winked, milky pink and orange, in the torch beam. From the ground, stalagmites pushed up to meet them, and in places the two had met and fused into palatial columns. In one instance, a frail stalactite hung like a photo of a lightning bolt, while out of the ground its nubby counterpart rose, its pearly head stopping only a millimetre beneath. She had once read an article about stalactites, and she knew it could be a century before they at last fused.
She swung the beam around the cavern. The far wall stretched upwards in a gradual curve. The flinty rock face shimmered green and peach like the skin of a trout.
Finn pointed in that direction, where in the dark a body of water oozed. ‘Shine the torch over there.’
The light hit the water’s surface and diffracted up the wall on the far side.
‘Shine it higher.’
Beyond the water, the rock was coloured with seams of mineral.
‘Higher still.’
Elsa raised the light and it revealed a cave painting.
It was a pattern of shapes painted in dark and sanguinary substances. All the cave paintings she had ever seen in books depicted bison, hounds, huntsmen or mammoths, but this was a painting of broken triangles and abstract nothings. She tried to imagine Palaeolithic painters reaching at full stretch to daub pigment on the stone. If this water had flowed here then, they would surely have risked their lives to d
o so.
She ventured as close as she could without losing her balance and pitching into the arc of the water. The torch trembled in her hand, making the cave painting appear to dance. Then she swung the light away and shone it at Finn, who screwed up his eyes and raised a hand to shield his face.
She lowered the light a fraction. The painting was not a pattern but a sequence. It progressed from left to right like the frames of a cinema reel. ‘It’s a story,’ she declared. ‘Each of these shapes follows on from the last.’
As far as she could tell, the story in the cave painting went something like: Once upon a time, there were cottony shapes, indistinct things with indefinable boundaries. Then, for reasons unknown, the shapes became definite. They morphed from smudges into triangles. None of the triangles were perfect: one had cracks running down it; one had a corner so smoothed away that it was now almost a half-circle; one had a dent taken out of its top.
‘This one,’ she said, focusing the torch and wishing she could keep her voice as steady as its clean line of light, ‘is the Devil’s Diadem. This one is Old Colp.’
Finn stared into the tar-black water. ‘Yes, and there’s more. Shine it higher.’
She did so eagerly, and discovered a painted ceiling. All the animals of prehistory were there, horses and hounds and horned goats. Yet no beast was complete. Part of each dissolved into the stone. A rearing horse had hindquarters that vanished into a craggy overhang. The forepaw of a dog stretched out and became a stalactite.
In the corner of the ceiling were the humans. They too broke down in places into blank nothingness and shadows. And some – these had been painted curled up, or bowed in despair – had white lines flying out of their hearts.
‘Who are these people?’ she asked. ‘What does this mean?’
‘I don’t know for certain.’
Again she turned the torch on him. ‘What do you mean, you don’t know? I asked if there were any more secrets and you led me here.’
‘I brought you here because I thought the paintings might help you understand.’