‘She’s just a little girl, Gal,’ she pleaded. ‘She’s terrified. She’s all alone. She needs me.’
‘But you can’t help her, Deedee,’ said Gal. His mind was racing. He wondered desperately what he could say to persuade her, to make her understand. ‘She’s not just a little girl. She’s an old woman as well. And a young one, and a middle-aged one. She’s everything she ever was in her whole life, all at once, and she’s living it over and over again. She’s locked in a prison of her own making. All your life, she’s been trying to drag you into it with her. But what would that accomplish? She wouldn’t be any happier. There would just be two people in prison instead of one. She can’t save herself by destroying you.
‘Don’t you see what she’s doing? She’s distracting us. Deliberately. From our quest. She’s leading us away from it. I thought we had to face whatever she wanted to show us – I thought we had to go through her obstacle course to get to where we’re trying to go. But I don’t think that any more. I think it’s just a trap.
‘Deedee, you’ve heard her story. You’ve spent your life listening to it! You’ve spent your life trying to heal her. You tried so hard . . . But you can’t. You can’t heal her. I don’t think she can be healed . . . She has an incurable wound. But surely, surely, you weren’t born only for this – only to fail at curing something incurable?’
‘Deirdre!’ called the ghost child. ‘Deirdre!’
Her voice was at once so angry and imperious, so plaintive and so reproachful, it chilled both of them to the bone. Deirdre seemed to be in physical pain. But Gal ignored the voice and went on urgently, ‘We have to find it. This is our last chance. Remember what you said, about why she kept building? She’s running from it – she spent years running from it. But whatever she’s running from is our treasure. We have to let her go. We have to let her run away from it, if she can’t face it. But we have to go in the opposite direction. She won’t follow us. She’s too scared.’
‘Deirdre!’ shrieked the ghost child.
Deirdre shut her eyes and put her hands to her ears.
‘Why don’t you trust me?’ said Galahad at last, in desperation. ‘Why did you always trust her more than me?’
And Deirdre looked at him through eyes so dark, so haunted, it was as if he was looking into two black holes.
‘Because she’s only Death, Gal,’ she said softly. ‘You’re Life. And Life is scarier than Death. Believe me.’
Gal opened his mouth to say something. Then stopped, and began again, ‘What –’
For the building had begun to shake gently beneath their feet.
Then there was a splintering noise and the plaster from the ceiling above them started falling like a light snow.
They were standing quite close to one another, facing each other but staring up at the ceiling. Deirdre should have been thinking, it’s about to go, it could go at any minute, I can see it going, it’s all too late, I’ve understood too late. Now we’ll never find it.
But all she could give her mind to was Gal’s warmth, the waves of warmth that seemed to emanate from him, had always emanated from him, as if he were an open fire in a snowy wood. It made her feel drowsy – faint with longing and a sadness she didn’t even understand. Suddenly her grandmother was forgotten. Not even the collapse of the building mattered. Now all that mattered was him.
‘You still don’t remember, do you?’ he said gently, as if there were no danger, as if he wasn’t thinking about the building either, although the floor continued to rock like a large boat in a gentle swell and the plaster kept falling, so that they were both getting whiter and whiter in the shower of it, like ghosts of themselves. ‘You don’t remember about the day she found us in the cave, the day I left you with your grandmother? You don’t even remember anything after the day they tried to burn you. Not about us. Only about her. You don’t remember me being any older than thirteen, do you?’
But she didn’t know what he was talking about. All she knew was that she loved him.
Suddenly, glancing downwards, she noticed a dark stain on his T-shirt, beneath the jacket. It was like an ink blot or a pressed flower. She did not understand it. It passed through her head that he was wearing a shirt with an abstract design on the front, although she had not noticed it before. But at the same time it frightened her.
Almost without meaning to, she reached out and touched it lightly with her fingers. It was damp, and very warm.
Then she felt a stab of guilt, as if she had transgressed in some way, as if she had touched something forbidden.
But he took the hand she had touched him with and bent his head and kissed it with such passion that it was as if her whole self were in her hand and his whole self was expressed in the act of kissing.
She stared at him, startled. But she didn’t move away.
‘You’re wounded,’ she said.
He didn’t stop kissing her.
‘But it must hurt!’ she said, as if the kissing had been an answer and she was protesting.
‘All the time,’ he murmured.
‘We’re not allowed,’ she said hopelessly, although already she could barely speak with the joy and the relief and the strange familiarity of the kissing. ‘She’ll kill you,’ she murmured. ‘She’ll kill us both . . .’
He didn’t stop kissing her. He never stopped kissing her.
And there was no jealous old woman, or terrifying child, to come and separate them, and it didn’t matter about the building collapsing – what mattered was that this should happen first, even if they perished in the attempt. And for Deirdre there were no more words, no more fear, no more darkness, no more cold – only kisses, only warmth, only light, only him.
They clung together on the floor against the wall, their clothes disarranged, their hair and shoulders covered with white plaster, and he kept stroking her arm and kissing the top of her head and rubbing his chin in her hair as the building kept rocking, gently now, beneath them, as if they had just been through a storm in a boat on the open sea. He seemed absent, exhausted, relieved of some kind of burden and yet, at the same time, profoundly sad. And as they sat curled up like the ghosts of two cats she kept thinking with a kind of wonder that he was holding her so completely that she could not be sure where he ended and she began and that she wasn’t certain if she was clinging to his hand or her own.
She had held her own hand before. She had had to.
‘Why doesn’t it hurt you?’ she murmured, looking with infinite tenderness at the strange wound in his chest while she stroked the warm skin down his side. ‘Why doesn’t it hurt when I touch you?’
‘You make it better, Deedee. It hurts when you’re not touching me.’
‘But what is it? How did you get it? I don’t understand how you could be walking around with a wound like that. It doesn’t seem possible . . .’
‘I don’t know when it happened. I seem to have had it all my life. I already had it when we were five. My chest used to hurt all the time and I didn’t know why. But it didn’t start to bleed until – until –’
He spoke so softly his voice was little more than a whisper; and yet the grief in it overwhelmed her. He took the hand she was stroking him with and kissed the palm of it, closing his eyes.
‘Why are you so sad?’ she said.
‘Because this can’t be real,’ he said.
She sat up and turned so that she could see his face.
‘You’re wrong, Gal,’ she said earnestly. ‘Everything that happens in this house is real. It’s all true. Believe me. I know. It’s something about time. And memory. They leak here. There aren’t any borders – or not the usual ones . . .’
‘That’s not what I mean,’ he whispered. Then he seemed to search for words. ‘Oh, Deirdre,’ he said at last, ‘have you really forgotten? How we used to meet every afternoon at the cave – for years? The first time we kissed? How she stopped us – from doing this? And what happened afterwards? Maybe, if you don’t remember, I’ve no right to –’<
br />
He stopped. She was staring at him. And he knew that she understood at last.
‘I’m dead, aren’t I?’ said Deirdre suddenly.
For a moment Galahad was silent. Then he began to sob.
‘I’m dead,’ said Deirdre again. ‘I’m dead.’
‘Yes,’ said Galahad, and he was trembling so violently and holding onto her so hard they both shook with his grief.
Deirdre’s mind was racing. But she pushed herself upwards against the wall, so that he could lay his head on her breast.
‘I’m dead,’ she repeated finally in wonder, as if it explained everything.
But Gal just wept helplessly, as if, at last, all his remoteness had passed away and his heart was utterly exposed.
Deirdre had never seen him cry before. His terrible sobs were so revealing, so communicative, it was as if she had never known him before this moment. She had not fully understood what mattered to him. She had not known how much she mattered to him. She mattered so little to herself.
She tried to collect her thoughts.
‘And grandmother? She’s dead too? That’s true?’
‘Of course,’ he said with difficulty. ‘But you died almost a year before her. Her funeral was on your anniversary. That was today.’
Deirdre had a sudden memory of the funeral. She had been there. But no one had taken any notice of her. Now she knew why. Then she felt confused.
‘Are you dead?’
‘No!’ he said. And he said it as if it were the saddest thing in the world.
Poor, poor Gal. Now she understood. Now she realised what his life must be. She did not feel sorry for herself, but she felt sorry, heart-rendingly sorry, for him. It was easier to be dead than to mourn the dead. Of that she had no doubt.
‘How did I die?’ she asked him gently.
‘You fell. From a hole. In the building. In the middle of the night. Some extensions your grandmother had begun – and then changed her mind about . . . The tradesmen had forgotten to put the barriers up when they left. No one could understand what you were doing there. But I knew. You were sleepwalking, like you did every night. And you were trying to find what we had lost. I was in hospital –’
‘You were in hospital?’ Deirdre broke in.
‘Did you think I had left you? I was so worried that you thought I had left you, that you thought I wasn’t coming back. But it wasn’t like that at all. I wasn’t walking out on you – she sent me away. Purely by will! If only, if only I could have fought her! But her will was too strong for me. And then I collapsed, and I couldn’t get out of hospital. I couldn’t even walk. When you died, my chest began to bleed. No one could find out what was wrong with me. They thought it was self-harm. But it’s not self-harm. It’s a mystic wound. It’s been bleeding ever since.
‘This last year has been –’ He stopped and shook his head. ‘There just aren’t words, Deirdre, to tell you what it’s felt like to be in the world without you. Sometimes it’s been more than I thought I could bear. There hasn’t been a second when I haven’t been thinking of you. When I sleep I dream of you. But I don’t sleep much. And when I’m awake I can’t bear to think that you were alone, that maybe you thought I wasn’t coming back, that maybe you thought I didn’t love you, that you died thinking that.
‘And I loved you so much. I loved you so much I can’t live without you.
‘I knew you were still here. That’s why I came back. Because I knew you needed help. And I knew I could help you, once your grandmother was dead.
‘But also – also because I’ve nowhere to go. It’s like I said before. I’m suspended, Deirdre – between life and death. I don’t belong anywhere. Not in life, not without you. But not in here, either, not among the dead, although I can’t keep away. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I have nightmares. It’s like purgatory. God, god, god, if only I was dead. If only I belonged with you. Or if only you were alive again.
‘But you see, we can’t have done what we just did. It can’t have been real. Humans and ghosts can’t –’
Just then there was a sound. They both looked up, expecting the walls to collapse on them at last. But the sound wasn’t plaster falling, or wood splitting, or bricks collapsing.
It was rain. Not outside. Inside. It was raining inside the building.
It was raining inside Corbenic.
That’s when the forest began.
They didn’t understand at first. They were both so accustomed to the sound of rain inside Corbenic – trickling through drainpipes; dripping steadily, rhythmically from leaks in the ceiling into half-filled buckets; pelting onto iron roofs.
But this – this was not inside rain. It was outside rain. It was the soft patter of spring rain on the hard ground of winter. The healing rain whose tiny fingers painted green over brown, on which the drooping heads of flowers supped, in which birds preened themselves. The rain that fell on new graves and brought the buds of grass out of the freshly turned earth.
And it was falling on their heads and bodies, washing the plaster away, drenching their hair and their clothes. It was soaking the carpet in the hallway beneath them and streaking down the walls around them.
It wasn’t long before they saw the first sproutings of life. First there was fungus – mushrooms and brightly coloured, uncanny-looking growths emerging quietly through the carpet, with a fresh, undeniably vegetative scent. Then there was grass, a fine shading of green at first, but it grew rapidly around them until they had to jump up out of its way, for it was pushing up uncomfortably beneath them, surprisingly powerful. Then there were the saplings, splitting the walls, their roots pushing under and then ripping open the carpet, the canopy of their leaves and branches destroying the ceiling and protecting them from the full force of the rain.
And then they were in a forest, and the remnants of the building had become rocks, and they were standing on a mountain path between the trees that seemed to be leading somewhere.
But the strangest thing of all was that the forest seemed so familiar. Deirdre stared around her. It was beautiful, it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, apart from the treasure she could not remember, but she knew the forest was somehow like the treasure, that they had the same origin, were part of the same entity.
When she recognised it, she did so not so much from the way it looked, as from the way it made her feel.
‘It’s you,’ she said suddenly. ‘The forest is you. We’re inside you.’
Gal just stared at her, his face still dusty with plaster and streaked with tears.
‘What?’
‘Don’t you recognise yourself?’ she asked him gently, loving his face, loving him.
‘I – I –’
The rain was easing now. They were both soaked to the skin and should have been cold and uncomfortable, but Deirdre felt happier and warmer and safer than she had ever felt in all the days of her strange existence. She knew that, all her life, she had somehow been dwelling inside her grandmother, imprisoned in her grandmother’s mind. Now she had entered the soul of Galahad.
The rain was Gal. The trees were Gal. The very air she breathed was Gal. His face, his warmth, his life were everywhere.
He seemed bewildered, but she took his hand and pulled him forward, along the path.
It was then that they caught sight of the little girl.
It wasn’t the second little girl, the terrifying one with the blonde bob and the uncanny abilities who was the ghost of Deirdre’s grandmother. It was the first one, the one in the white nightgown, with the long straight silvery fair hair, the one they had seen walking away from them when they first stepped out of the flat onto the landing, before they had got trapped in Deirdre’s grandmother’s memories. She was walking away from them again now, some distance ahead of them, along the path. She walked slowly, in a deliberate, absorbed, and yet somehow absent manner. She walked as if she was dreaming. She seemed about five years old.
They both knew they should follow her, but as they did s
o, a curious thing happened. The closer they came to her, the older she seemed to be.
She had been five or so when they first caught sight of her; before they had gone many steps she seemed seven or eight; then twelve; then fourteen.
And still she walked slowly away from them, and although they were walking as briskly as they could, and her pace never changed, it seemed difficult to catch up to her.
The path ahead of them became a rough stairway of rocks; slowly, gravely, dreamily, the girl began to climb it. The sun was shining through the heavy canopy of trees, dappling their vision, the window of sky directly above them was cobalt blue, and yet Deirdre knew they were still inside Corbenic; that it had somehow become Galahad’s domain, as if the seed of him had been planted in the very centre of it and suffused it with life, his life. They climbed the stairway behind the girl, who was now almost a woman, and it was difficult – steep and uneven and mossy and damp; but as they climbed, Deirdre’s joy grew and grew, for she already knew what the girl was leading them to; what they were about to find.
When the girl ahead of them reached the top of the stairs they saw her pause, as if waiting. They had almost caught up to her when she suddenly turned and looked at them calmly.
Deirdre froze on the stairway.
She was looking into a mirror. The girl’s face was her own. And at the moment she recognised her, the girl disappeared.
There was a small cave at the top of the rocky stairway; the entrance was barred by an iron gate; the cave was suffused with a gentle red-gold light; the sleepwalking girl of many ages with Deirdre’s face had led them to it.
Deirdre brushed away her confusion, dismissed her uneasiness. Surely, surely, their trials were over.
‘It’s here! It’s here!’ she cried. ‘We’ve found it!’
She was breathing hard with the effort but she dragged herself and Gal up the final steps and leant for a moment, all but exhausted, against the gate, before pressing down the latch and letting them in.
There was the room of glass. There was the iron plinth. There was the crystal box, from which shone the warm, red-gold light. And there, inside it, was the creature they had seen once before, all those years ago, and forgotten, the thing whose existence had haunted them ever since, the red-gold thing the size of a fist that moved constantly, rhythmically, as if clenching and releasing, clenching and releasing, like a little animal, like a ruby-coloured frog, like a sea anemone.
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