He didn’t answer. Rested his eyes on hers, but silently and perfectly calm.
‘So if nobody had found the predictions in the first place,’ she said. ‘None of this would ever have taken place?’
Silence returned. And William nodded.
That was the reason he’d rushed out into the street. The reason he’d looked at the mountains.
‘Can we get back into the castle?’ he asked.
‘Why?’ said Janine.
‘Because I think what we’re meant to do is to make sure nobody ever makes the same mistake again.’
59
The first impact made the window crack into a huge white spider web.
It hung in place before them, millions of tiny fragments clinging together, a multitude of cracks as if the window was a city map where all roads led downtown, and the centre was where the spade had hit.
William still had it in his hand.
And he lifted it to take a second swing.
None of them liked breaking in, nobody wanted to destroy other people’s property, but there was no better way and besides, if they succeeded, wouldn’t it be worth it?
The glass was covered by safety film, and it took blow after blow to get through, but eventually there was a hole in the pane and they could hack it open enough to get in.
Inside, there was skiing equipment and running shoes, and even if the village was small and the sports store’s supply limited, Janine knew exactly what they needed.
They packed the rental car that Albert and Leo had arrived in.
And now all they had to do was to wait for it to get dark.
William sat on the porch next to the house, his legs stretched over the stairs down on to the ground, a pleasing kind of restlessness while the hours counted down.
In front of him the village carried on downhill like a retreating set in a theatre, the street vanishing amid the houses, fresh snow falling to rest untouched by feet or wheels.
In the lounge just inside the door Albert and Janine had fallen asleep on the couch. They lay tight together, Albert behind with his arms around her and Janine in front with hers as an extra layer of arms on top of his. As if they wanted to make sure not to lose each other again, not ever, whatever might happen next.
And slowly, slowly the light turned blue.
The day turned into afternoon.
And in the windows around them no lights were turned on, nobody came home to prepare dinner; nothing happened but for the darkness settling and the temperature dropping. And William pulled the thick jacket from the store even tighter around himself.
When dusk started to fall, Leo came out and sat next to William. It was genuinely cold now, cold and quiet, and the only thing that could be heard was the sound of the ice crystals sliding with the wind across the ground, that and the rustle of their down jackets whenever one of them moved.
A flock of birds passed high above the houses, distant wingbeats in the winter twilight, and Leo followed them with his eyes, watched them disappear above the rooftops and down into the valley.
And once the thought had been uttered there was no escaping it.
The birds. Everything else. Everything that was alive, everywhere around them.
All of them carried a chapter.
A single chapter of the story, not humanity’s, and not their own, but everyone’s, together. The world’s.
As William had said, no matter how you put it, it sounded banal. But that didn’t stop it from being true. And it didn’t stop Leo from feeling it.
‘It’s this kind of thing that makes you a vegetarian,’ he said.
William gave him a huge smile.
‘There’s DNA in plants too, you know.’
Idiot, he added. But just inside his head. And with love.
Leo shrugged. ‘Then I guess breakfast is a no-go tomorrow morning.’
The silence returned, and they stared at the setting sun, saw it disappear and take the last of the light with it.
‘Who?’ Leo asked after a while.
One single word, but William didn’t need more. It was the same question that he himself had asked when he first learned about it, the same that Connors and Janine and everyone else who knew had asked at one time or another. The one that kept recurring, no matter how dearly one wanted it not to.
Who put the codes there?
‘Does it matter?’ William said. ‘Who or what or nothing at all or coincidence. Whatever the reason, things are what they are.’
He felt a deep calm. He didn’t know who. Or why. He didn’t know anything, except that he didn’t need to know.
They didn’t know too little. They knew too much.
And he said as much, and then he listened to the silence again.
He looked up to see Leo smiling. ‘I still think it was meant to be,’ he said.
William gave him a bemused look. What was?
‘Us coming here with Watkins’ notes. I think it was supposed to happen.’
‘You know what?’ said William. ‘I don’t really give a damn what you believe.’
And then he leaned over to put an arm around the young man’s shoulder.
They sat for a while, not father and son but as close as they could come, and Leo realised that this was him. This was the man Christina went looking for, this was William the way he’d been, the William who’d made her call Leo in the middle of the night and go to Amsterdam on a whim to track him down. And now that he saw him, he understood.
They sat there, next to each other in the icy wind.
One single thought in Leo’s mind. To say it or not?
Maybe this was as good as things could get, maybe he would just be stepping in things that were no business of his and ruining the moment. But at the same time, he felt that he should. For her sake, if nothing else.
And eventually, he made the decision.
‘She was wearing her ring,’ he said.
William glanced at him. Didn’t quite follow.
‘When we went looking for you. She’d put it on.’
Oh.
William turned his face away. Said nothing.
‘I wanted you to know.’
Still no answer.
And the silence refused to move, it lingered and was compact and impenetrable, and Leo could only think that he’d blown it, that he shouldn’t have said mentioned it. He should have let it lie, but instead he’d scratched a wound he shouldn’t have touched, and now he was sitting in the evening darkness with a stranger’s arm around his shoulders and no idea what would happen next.
He felt William’s arm slide off of him.
Heard him stand.
And walk away.
No. He stopped.
‘Thank you,’ said William.
Nothing more. ‘Thank you.’
Then he turned and walked back into the house.
And his voice was thick and low and on the porch sat Leo. And he couldn’t help smiling, happy to have let him know.
They drove for much longer than they’d expected to before they found the single-track road.
It branched out from another road several miles from the village, and instead of being blocked with barriers or gates it had been made to look like an insignificant gravel track, either temporary or perhaps private, and it modestly wound off away from the main road.
Not until it was out of sight did the asphalt return and the road lines begin, and after another half-hour ride they could make out the weak contours of the gate at the foot of the mountain.
Progress was slow. They waited until darkness fell before leaving the village, then drove with the engine kept low and the headlights off. The only light they had to guide them was the moonlight through the thin clouds, that and the white edges of the snow-powdered hillside, and they leaned forward in the freezing car, straining their eyes to see. To see where the road turned beyond the next bend. To see if anything moved. Anyone.
But nobody seemed to have noticed them coming, and eventually they deci
ded to stop while they were still a fair distance from the base of the cliffs. Janine and William got out, went to the trunk and collected the equipment Janine had borrowed from the store.
Ropes. Crampons. Gloves.
William took his share. He attached it according to its instructions, fighting not to acknowledge his apprehension; he didn’t like what he was about to do but he knew he had no choice. Indeed, he’d been the one who’d suggested it. And if heights scared him that much, so be it. It was the price he had to pay.
As Leo and Albert turned the car back towards the village, Janine and William set off on foot.
Walked beside the road, tramped across the meadows.
The same meadows they’d run across two nights ago.
But this time not to flee from the castle.
This time to break in.
60
The landscape transformed into mountains as imperceptibly as one season moves into the next, and they found themselves climbing rather than walking, unaware of when one turned into the other.
In the distance they could see the gate they’d escaped through, far away along the mountainside and tens of metres below, and William forced himself not to think about the drop, forced himself to register the things he saw without thinking of where he saw them from.
The turning area by the door was empty.
No vehicles, no movement, nothing.
No tracks in the shallow snow.
Perhaps it meant they’d all left the castle already, or maybe it just meant that there never had been much traffic, and that this was the way it always looked.
From above Janine waved him on. And he did as she’d instructed him, he watched her moves and tried to copy them, put his hands and his feet where she had put hers, and slowly, slowly they climbed higher and higher.
Janine, moving and fastening her hooks and her clips.
Trying routes, advancing upward.
Stopping to wait for William.
And all the time, the abyss under them grew deeper and deeper. And William came after, trying to think about anything at all. Except what would happen if he fell.
When William and Janine finally rounded the ridge, they saw for the first time just how huge the castle really was.
The building swelled out of the mountain like a mushroom on a tree trunk. It crept out from below with walls that seemed to have been blasted into the cliff, following the rock upwards before taking a new turn and surging outwards, forming turrets and towers and terraces and banisters, growing along the mountain in all directions and constantly branching out into new sections. In this manner it continued to rise, with rows of windows and alcoves and ledges and walls that led on to more of the same, like an entire city of stairs and pavilions and gates and towers, topped off by an array of little roofs.
It was a castle that a child could have made from unlimited amounts of Lego. But this was for real, and just as absurd as the thought that someone had once decided to build it, just as absurd was the thought that now it was the base of a military organisation, and that underneath it there was an even larger complex, hidden in the modern zones under the rock.
Janine peered into the darkness, barely able to make out what she was seeing, trying to decide how to reach their target.
The huge, stained-glass windows to the chapel.
From there, they’d get to the stairwells.
Then on to the metal doors where the new section started.
That was the extent of their plan.
After that, they were relying on a whole lot of luck.
The car Franquin saw coming at them on the single-track road didn’t have any lights, and shouldn’t have been there to begin with.
There were two men in the front seat, that much he was able to make out, one of them young and the other one slightly older. He couldn’t remember seeing either of them before and there was no telling what they were doing there.
They might be terrified civilians, trying to escape the disease, hunting for a place to sleep.
But his instincts told him it wasn’t that simple. And he ordered the other men in his car to keep their eyes open for any sign of a movement, either on the road or out on the meadow.
The gate at the foot of the mountain was still just a shadow when the man behind the wheel nodded at the asphalt ahead of them.
‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s where they turned around.’
He was perfectly right. There were tracks in the snow, tyres that had tried to do a U-turn but had been forced to stop on the narrow road, reverse to get space to turn, and then driven off.
But beside the tyres there were other traces.
‘Engine trouble?’ someone asked.
Nobody answered. But everyone saw. Footprints at the side of the road and out in the ditch, traces of someone who had got out of the car and walked around.
And it might be nothing to worry about, merely proof that their car had run into trouble and that the driver and his friend had tried to fix it. Perhaps that’s why the lights were out, because of problems with the battery or the generator or whatever else could malfunction in modern cars.
No one spoke but they all knew there was another possibility. This was the perfect place to get out and continue on foot if you didn’t want to be seen from the gate.
Franquin told the driver to turn off their headlights, too.
And they crept the final stretch in darkness.
Without talking, and with their eyes scanning the meadows.
61
William had promised himself that he’d never do it again.
He had sworn, piously and solemnly, vowed that if he survived the last time he’d never risk his life again, ever. And yet, he was back. And fatalist or not, he couldn’t help wondering if Fate would keep its side of the bargain given that he’d failed to keep his.
Those were his thoughts as he threw himself out into the air.
The fall came like a punch to his stomach.
There wasn’t a single cell in his body that didn’t scream in panic, his vision blurred as he felt the icy wind rush past, felt his body become weightless and lose control, and the ground coming at him from below.
Then the sharp tug as the rope took him. The vertical fall levelled out and became a pendulum motion, and as he swung forward he knew that his entire life depended on a pin in a cleft somewhere above, knew that if it gave way then he and the pin and the rope would plummet to the frost-covered rocks and certain death.
His head counted the microseconds. That’s how long they seemed to be, that he could count them one by one as he floated through the air, every fraction of every second lasting an eternity, full of opportunities for things to go wrong. He refused to look, his eyes wide open so as not to miss her, but his brain determined not to see a thing until everything was over.
Janine reached her hand out to him.
She stood on the sill where the window had been, the gigantic arched window of coloured pieces of glass that had been assembled hundreds of years ago, carefully joined into a display of men with mantels and halos and beards, but that was now gone. She’d hit it feet first, shattering the entire mosaic into a multi-coloured, razor-sharp rain, and now the chapel lay open and waiting for them inside.
The same chapel where she and William had sat and talked only days before. When all they wanted was to get out.
As William’s feet landed next to hers, he clutched her hand, trembling with fear and adrenalin and his eyes had only one thing to say: Let’s never do this again.
William and Janine moved across the screen like dark blue silhouettes against the noisy background. Behind them gaped the ruined window as a black hole of nothingness, just where the monitor had always shown a mosaic of nuances, subtly ranging from thousands of monochrome shades to shining, bright fields of white, depending on the time of the day and the sun’s position outside.
Now the window was gone, and the two bodies that moved past the rows of pews were consumed by the darkness, mergin
g with the camera grain. And when their silhouettes disappeared out of frame there was no knowing where they’d be showing up again.
The cameras were too few and too far apart.
It had never been resolved, and never would be.
Right now, that was a problem.
Not just to him, but to them.
They sped along in silence, walked with purposeful strides along routes they already knew they would be taking. Routes that Janine knew by heart, that she had memorised and that were etched like a map in her head and that they hoped would take them straight to where they needed to go.
Ropes and hooks swung from their backs and harnesses clinked in time with their steps, and William forced himself not to look at them, not to think about what they meant: that they were going to need them to move between storeys, that they didn’t have any key cards and that their only way down would be on the outside.
It scared him, but he had no time to be scared.
Instead, he pushed on, his teeth gritted and his eyes alert, just as Janine’s were in front of him.
It was night and it was dark and they didn’t know how many people were still in the complex.
And they didn’t care very much for suddenly finding out.
William and Janine never reappeared on the screen, and that made it easier to deduce their position.
They didn’t have key cards. Those had been taken from them together with the codes and the papers and everything else they were carrying, and then brought back into safety here at the complex.
And that meant there was a limited number of routes at their disposal.
He stood there, watching the monitors.
Whatever they were planning to do, he had to make a move.
Janine had taken the lead and he followed tightly on her heels. He tailed her through staircases and passageways, she’d passed them all before and knew exactly how far they would take them, where the next door would block their way and how far they’d be able to get without keys.
Chain of Events Page 43