Tomorrow

by Damian Dibben

  One night talking wakes me and I find Vilder hunched over the bed, gabbling to my master, as if he were some relic in a cathedral. ‘I am talking to you, Valentyne. And if you do not seem to hear, then I speak to the part of you beneath the conscious, the place where dreams unfold. Or nightmares.’ He swigs his bottle. ‘I suffered more than you. My conversion was dreadful, dreadful. Five years, was it? Six? Injections every other day. How did I imagine it would feel? A serene baptism? That vile, unnatural broth we slicked into our arteries. The abominable nights, the constant cold crawling under the skin. It lived, that liquid. You remember all this? You did not suffer like I. You withstood the torture. Without complaint. Such golden patience you had. Wake up, Valentyne. Do not answer with silence. Wake up.’

  An hour later, drunker and his voice ground to a slur, he’s still talking. ‘Is it not curious that as I unravelled, seventy, eighty years later, as I unravelled, so the work of artists grew obscene? Is that not peculiar?’ It’s the dead of night and in the pauses between his ramblings, a taut silence rings from the city. ‘Did I imagine it? The hurricane of ideas, the hurtling decades of genius, the sublime epoch—da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael—halted, dropped from a precipice, the lights extinguished, the world turned to a madhouse. Did you feel it like I did? It was there plainly. Look at Bosch, that satanic owl watching over paradise. Paradise? He knew there was no such place. That owl was the harbinger of the mutilation that would follow. Do not tell me I imagined it. I was there on the day of Saint-Barthélemy in Paris. I saw with my own eyes heaps of hacked corpses at the gates of the Louvre. The world was unravelling and I with it. Look, Valentyne, at Palissy, Romano, El Greco, if you will, they saw it too. Apocalypse, deluge, trumpets of the final judgement, horsemen drowning, giants felled, mountains smashed, the countryside overrun with serpents, those deranged colours, everything contorted and unwholesome. I did not imagine it, Valentyne. What happened in the world—also happened inside my head. Wake, goddamn you.’ He shakes my master: a compliant sack of bones. ‘You shall not do this to me.’ I stand upright, giving him a firm look, to show I am ready to attack him if he becomes more aggressive. Vilder shrugs, lets go, and soon falls asleep, slumped across the bed.

  Over the next few days, he descends ever more into a state of derangement. First, he comes back from one of his outings with armfuls of flowers—jasmine, honeysuckle and tuberose—but rather than put them in vases, he throws them about the room, crushing them with his feet, until the air is violent with sweetness. Later, he returns with a tapestry. The bemused porter helps him hang it, though it’s larger than the room itself, Vilder bashes nails through the fabric—a landscape of peacocks trailing through a verdant forest—cursing all the while, twice deciding it’s not straight with the ceiling, ripping it down and starting again.

  The following day a harpsichord is delivered after many attempts to get it up the narrow stairs. There’s a scuffling, a bumping and a pinging of keys until two men finally turn it through the door. ‘Put it there,’ Vilder says and they place it between the windows, both stealing a glance around the room, their gaze resting on my master. ‘One of you can tune, I presume?’ The younger of the two nods, an earnest stripling with neat thinning hair and a coat too large for him. ‘And play it too?’ Another nod. ‘All the better. Get to it then.’

  His companion leaves and the stripling opens up the instrument. He tunes it, key by key, plodding each one whilst tightening the string until the note becomes lucid. The monotony of it grows exasperating and I worry, nonsensically, it will disturb my master.

  Whilst it continues, there comes a knock, and—in what has begun to seem like one of the surreal enactments Queen Henrietta Maria put on in Oxford during the civil war—a cardinal is shown into the room. Up until now the innkeeper had been at best vexed by the goings-on in our room, but now he gapes from the landing as if a statue had come to life and walked up the stairs. Vilder shuts the door on him.

  ‘Good day, sir. You received the money? The contribution, I should call it, the correct church vernacular for those unholy notes. Will it be enough to rebuild your transept? I hope so. I could imagine you could build a whole new cathedral for it. Please sit.’ The cardinal is tall and broad, out of scale with the room, and his crimson robe has the effect of making him more so—and he seems entirely perplexed to have found himself here. A glance at Valentyne, at me, at the harpsichord tuner, gives him no more clarity.

  ‘It was beyond generous of you,’ the cardinal says, ‘Monsieur—?’

  ‘Carry on,’ Vilder asides to the musician, before turning back to the cardinal. ‘I’m accustomed to buying the best. Which is why I asked for you in person.’ The bang of a dissonant key. ‘Whether you can help more than a parish priest remains to be seen. But you are here now, and the money paid, so sit.’ The cardinal does so, out of courtesy rather than any willingness, the tiny chair lost under his bulk and robes. Another note, lower. ‘Don’t mind him, he’ll be finished soon. Music may bring my patient to sense. At this juncture, I’ll try anything.’

  The cardinal’s jaw tightens to a smile and he neatens his crucifix over his robes.

  ‘My father had a confessor.’ Vilder deepens his voice in imitation: ‘Every man must have a confessor, just as they must have a throat to breathe. Or was it to eat? The old man had more money than the Holy Roman Emperor and the kings of Spain and England put together, and no currency whatsoever with other human beings—except for his confessor. By the time my father died he’d spoken just a handful of sentences to me in my eighteen years, each of them to assure me how worthless I was. But for his confessor: limitless conversation. They’d lock themselves up in his stateroom and talk and talk and talk. I suppose he wanted to guarantee everlasting life. You are a powerful breed. So, to the matter in hand. There was a gentleman I loved. No need to jump, I do not mean in that way. We’d know each other forever, worked together, studied side by side.’ He points at my master. ‘Him. Yes.’ He pauses, then something in his tone makes my ears prick up. ‘He was dazzling. Valentyne. He—how can I put it into words?—he made everything brighter. Everything, I mean: people, rooms, ideas. Lit up. I wanted to be him, not me. He was younger than me, by a few years, but had the maturity of someone my senior. I copied him in everything. You see, my character—’ He scratches his forehead to find the words. ‘I was purposeless. Vain. Uncourageous. Do not mistake me, I had intellect, greater than his, an ocean of it, and charm too—of my own brand—but I knew not how to use these things. Although we were partners in business, and—as I said—he was younger, he was my teacher, and I was in awe. I would have followed him into hell itself. In actual fact, that is what I did.’ A harpsichord note, deeper. ‘That is not true yet,’ Vilder asserts over his shoulder. ‘Do it again. What was I saying?’

  ‘That you followed the gentleman.’

  ‘Yes, like you follow yours.’ He motions at the cardinal’s crucifix. ‘We made a pact on a particular matter. It was not a small matter. He came out of it well. I—less so. That changed us. We drifted in different directions. Until one day our spheres came together again and he hurt me. Acutely. He broke me. I could not forgive. I’m spoilt you see. I will get my way. I hunted him down. Not easy—but money helped. In the end—’ a little laugh directed at his guest ‘—we met in a cathedral and I told him I had his dog and he took the bait.’ The cardinal looks at me, the harpsichord tuner too. ‘Yes, he. It was a lie, though, and I captured Valentyne.’

  ‘Captured?’ says the cardinal. A note, deeper still.

  ‘To work for me. Do my bidding. Pay his debt, his debt for making me follow him in the first instance, and his debt for not helping when I was in need. I was mad by the time I’d caught up with him in Venice. I’d been dosing myself for decades. Easing potions. The pointlessness of everything. Do you understand the nature of addiction?’ Before the cardinal has the chance to speak, Vilder answers for him. ‘Let us just call it the devil within. Such a fiend
has always lived in me, held its invisible court. Perhaps every human has one. I’d had addictions before, but after my loss, the betrayal, much worse.’

  ‘And where was his dog all this time?’ The cardinal asks, seeming to understand little else of the story.

  ‘I hung all my hate on my loss. If I could not have my Aramis, if I could not be freed, then give me potions. They have meaning. Make them for me and atone. For the decades to pass in light. I’d always had tornadoes in my brain, you see, but with Valentyne’s potions the world was new. It was a place of warless realms. His dog, you say? Valentyne pleaded to be released, so he could go and find his dog. His dog was all he cared about. How absurd, an animal is an animal. And besides, he had to pay his debt. Even you must understand justice?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where was he locked? In prison?’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Where did they take him?’

  Vilder goes silent for a long time. The midday light turns across his face. ‘How did you come to find him?’ says the cardinal. Minutes pass. He gives an exasperated look at the harpsichord tuner. ‘Perhaps you can tell what is it you want me to do, sir?’

  ‘He might die,’ says Vilder.

  ‘I see, but my question is the same.’

  ‘Save him.’

  ‘By forgiving you?’

  ‘No. What difference would that make?’

  The cardinal is muddled for a moment, then, he says, ‘Ah, you wish me to pray for him?’

  Vilder jerks his head, taken aback and very slowly his expression changes, as a new thought forms. ‘What a fool I am. If you pray for him too, that will save him, is that what you mean to say? Pray for him? It’s nonsense. God? Where is he? Where is this god?’

  ‘If you meant that truly as a question, you might begin—’

  ‘Don’t riddle me, priest. Don’t dare. Get out. Go back to your den. Go back and sell trinkets to the gullible. Go and tamper with other minds. Get out! A curse on you. You desire life everlasting? If you had it, which you never will, you would wish against it in a year. For it is as it was for Prometheus, to be chained to a rock and have an eagle eat your liver day upon day upon day. Humanity has no need of your services, and I even less. Out!’ The cardinal, enraged to the colour of his robe, departs, without words, and the terrified harpsichordist attempts to escape in his wake. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I—I am just a musician, sir.’

  ‘Well, play.’

  Shaking, he resumes his seat. ‘What do you desire? I—I mean to say, which composer—’

  ‘By God, just play!’

  The first few notes tremble, then he finds his tempo. At once my heart quickens, for I know the melody: it’s the same lament that the slight, pitted-face prodigy played in the count’s palazzo in Venice. Vilder is apparently moved, and when the first piece is over, he motions for more.

  ‘Who is that? Is it Schubert?’ he asks, no doubt remembering the conversation he had at the ball in Padua.

  ‘Mozart.’

  ‘That’s right, the one they all talk of. Keep playing.’

  He plays for some time, and Vilder keeps his eye on the bed for signs of life. Gradually he seems to calm, until suddenly he erupts again. ‘Wake up, goddamn you! Foolery enough. Look what I do for you.’ He bangs on the harpsichord, seizing a clump of flowers and flicks them about, before shaking his fist at the tapestry. ‘I bring you the realms.’ My hackles rise as I ready myself to attack at the next act of aggression. ‘Do not blame me,’ he bellows, clutching a handful of flesh from his chest. ‘You did this, not I.’ When he’s settled, he takes out money and drops it on the keys. ‘That will do.’

  As the harpsichordist hurries out, the innkeeper stalks in, sizing Vilder up. ‘I don’t know who you are, or who you think you are, but this is my house and you are not welcome in it. You have until the morning to pack your things and go—’ he motions with a flick of his head at my master ‘—and take your affliction with you.’

  Vilder listens to his steps descend, before seizing the cup of brandy from beside the bed and downing it. He’s about to throw the empty glass against the wall, a foolish gesture that can only get us into more trouble, when a thought seems to occur to him. ‘Prometheus,’ he says, wrinkling his brow. ‘Prometheus.’ He picks up his purse and rushes out. I go to the window and watch him barge up the street out of sight.

  It’s almost dark by the time he comes back with a large package. He throws it on the table, unbuttons and rips off his tunic, and lights all the candles along with the fire, even though it’s a hot evening. He tears open the bundle and organizes its contents: an iron pan, needles and twine, a round mirror, another bottle of brandy and a number of apothecary phials, the type my master always used. He unwraps the final object, a fearsome-looking dagger and looks at me, unsmiling. ‘It is so long since I have practised any chemystry, who knows how this will end.’ He mixes a brew in the pot, calibrating pinches of this, drops, scoops, flakes of that, and finally pushing the pan into the centre of the fire. Very quickly the smell becomes noxious and acrid, making him cough and open the windows.

  He gathers all the candles together on the table, pulls up a chair next to it and removes his shirt until he’s naked from the waist up. His skin has a babyish smoothness—so unlike my master’s, which is patterned all over with scars and divots where bullets have struck him—and he has, as I always assumed he would, a crescent-shaped scar at the side of his abdomen, though his curls grandly at either end, like a signature. He sits in the pool of light, holds the knife to his skin, the tip resting against the scar, clenches his teeth and slits it deep. He lets out such a howl of pain that my gut clenches into knots. Even as blood spills out of the fissure, he digs the dagger deeper, widening the incision, cutting a trench through ligament and muscle, before prizing the flesh apart, snatching up the mirror and looking into the wound. Unable to find what he’s looking for, he makes a third incision, and a fourth, before putting the knife between his teeth, pivoting the mirror and digging his fingers ever deeper into the cavity. ‘Damn you, Valentyne,’ he curses, before finally pulling out a stone, a misshapen organ, like a root from the ground. He rips it from its stem and tosses it into the pan on the fire. My ears pop, a silent explosion flips the windows back and knocks me across the room. Then comes the grandiose hum, like a choir chanting far away, and everything in the room multiplies into overlapping versions. For a while the stone in the bowl burns like a little sun, before everything returns to normal, and there is just the sound of bubbling.

  Vilder douses his wound with alcohol and after he’s sewn it up with the needle and thread, he takes the pan from the fire. He waits for it to cool, before taking out the stone, now dissolved to a hard black nugget and pouring the liquid into my master’s mouth, lifting his head as he had done with the broth, but holding it there until it’s all absorbed. As soon as Vilder lays him back down, Valentyne begins to fit. His fingers twitch, and his legs and arms shake against the frame of the bed. I stay with him, vibrating inside with dread, as his convulsions ease only to worsen again. Finally, he twists against the bedhead and comes to a halt.

  I stay with him, paws on his chest, dreading the moment when his heart will stop beating. ‘Where will life lead us if we hide behind tables?’ he said when I wouldn’t go with him down to the shore. ‘The world out there is where we will find answers. And joy. And oysters, my champion.’

  Hearing a noise, I look round to find a stranger sitting in the chair with his back to me—and my stomach turns pure liquid. His hair is thin on his skull, but his shoulders are thick-set, with a mantle over them like a Roman toga. He sits there motionless as if he belonged in the room. A crazed notion comes to me, that he’s a phantom, like one of those pale characters that appeared in the plays I saw with my master in London, an assassinated king or emperor come back from the realm
of the dead to avenge his murder.

  When he turns to me, I’m maddened with fear, for I both know him and don’t know him. I glimpsed Vilder only once without his wig, and far away. Close to, the transformation is staggering. It is not a toga he wears, just the blanket he’s put round himself. I do not calm, the opposite. I cannot shake the notion that this version of Vilder—with thin, sand-coloured hair where his black wig sat—has dwelt secretly in my unconsciousness all my life. My very atoms spin as the notion dawns on me: the shape of his brow, of his nose, the flat facet down the centre of it, the cushiony lips, the pattern of crinkles about his eyes.’

  Brothers. He and Valentyne are brothers.

  I sit, dumbstruck, thoughts coming at me in such a torrent, I cannot keep hold of one before another supplants it. All the events of my past rush at me: the corpse on the beach in Elsinore, Vilder magnificent in London and deranged in Amsterdam. There comes the seismic shock that Valentyne too is a scion of the dynasty that built the doom palace at Opalheim—the very place he was imprisoned. The place that was once his home. I recall the mausoleum there, the pair of tombs beneath the fairy-white ceiling of vaults and drops, he lean and steely, she regal and vain. They too are my master’s kin.

  ‘Valentyne,’ I whine, turning on the spot and digging my paw against his face. ‘Valentyne,’ I bark.

  The heat in the room is insufferable, the fire still burning. I go to the open window, but there too the air is dense and torrid. I exit, run down, barge open the door and stalk across the harbour. They were brothers all this time.