Cannonbridge

by Jonathan Barnes

  Wilde’s eyelids are flickering shut. A thin skein of spittle hangs at one corner of his mouth. He is sweating heavily and wheezing and the smell is worse than ever.

  “Oh, monsieur,” says Lachette again and, washed over by compassion, reaches out a hand and soothes the great man’s brow. “I am so sorry, monsieur, that this has been done to you. This gross injustice.”

  But the man in the bed does not reply for he is already fading once more into unconsciousness.

  After a while, Lachette leaves him there and hurries away, to call the physician and Mr Ross. Before he leaves the sickroom it appears to him, though he knows it to be impossible, that the shadows at the corners of the room, now thicker than before, move—seeming almost to scuttle—of their own, terrible volition.

  NOW

  “LISTEN,” SAYS THE old man in the gloom, in that slice of gothic amid the billionaire sheen of the twenty-first century. “You’ve got to listen to me now.”

  Swaine-Taylor has gone—to change, he said, into something smarter—and the two men have been left alone together. Blessborough is behind his desk, Toby to one side of him, perched on a lower seat, his hand aching, his head throbbing, the room’s smell of moist decay heavy in his nostrils, and wishing more than anything else in all the world to just be allowed to wake up from this nightmare.

  “Listen,” says Blessborough again, his voice a shrill croak from decrepitude and lack of use and possessing the faint tinge of a Yorkshire accent which Judd had somehow not expected, “how old do you think I am? Be honest now. None of your soft-soaping.”

  Quickly, adroitly, Toby does the maths. “Well, if you are who you say you are…”

  “I am. You know I am.”

  “Then you must be ninety-four? Ninety-five?”

  “Ninety-five,” the old man confirms with strange, unwarranted pride. “But I don’t look it, do I? Nowhere near. That’s the power, you see. The power of the island.”

  Toby looks at this grisly wreck of a human being and decides to keep his counsel. He decides to keep his counsel too about the old man’s granddaughters, not wanting to be the bearer of such pain, wondering if it would be kinder if the old man never learns the truth.

  “Now, we’ve not got long. Swaine-Taylor will be back soon to take you away and Mr Keen will no doubt be waiting. Believe you me, those aren’t the kind of gents you want to keep waiting. It’s a strange story I’ve got to tell you to be sure. I’d offer you a beer or a whiskey while you hear me tell it but they’re powerful careful here about what they let me eat and drink. All for my own good, of course. For my own good.”

  “I’d heard, sir,” says Toby courteously, carefully, “that you were dead.”

  Blessborough waves the suggestion aside. “Oh, the bank took care of all that. I said I wanted privacy and they arranged it for me. No-one bothers you when they think you’re worm food. Noone at all. Anyway, to business. Matthew Cannonbridge. I’m told you saw the truth of it. That he is another man’s invention. Namely, mine. No doubt you suspect some elaborate hoax, some overarching conspiracy? Ah, yes. I see that you do. The truth, I’m afraid, as Oscar once wrote, is never pure and rarely simple. Why, it’s really a bit of a cat’s cradle.”

  As the old man speaks, Toby leans in to listen, filled up again, all at once and despite the weirdness and danger of his predicament, by that old and potent desire—the need to know. “Tell me,” he mutters. “Tell me everything.”

  “I always wanted to be an academic,” Blessborough begins. “Sounds strange, doesn’t it? Someone like me. P’raps it would be more correct to say that I always liked books and stories. The old ones, best of all. The Victorian ones. I wanted whatever I did for a living to take account of it. Everyone thought I was crazy—my folks most of all—but I studied hard and got myself a place at university. The first in my family to have done it. The first of anyone we knew. So I was all set to go, garlanded, although it seems immodest to say so, with all manner of scholarships and prizes, when the war broke out. With Herr Hitler trampling all over Europe, stories didn’t seem so important any more. So I signed up. Joined the army the day after war was declared. Didn’t need to think twice about it. Now, this isn’t the place to tell you about my war. These experiences would fill up a book in themselves. But there was one particular job the army sent me on which I think is going to interest you. I’d been in Egypt but I was recalled in the summer of ’43 and sent to an island a little off the coast of Scotland.”

  “Faircairn.”

  The nonagenarian frowns. “You know it?”

  “I’ve been there.”

  “Have you now?” He puffs out his cheeks. “They have led you a merry dance, now, haven’t they?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Blessborough ignores this interjection. “The military were doing some weapons testing over there. Can’t tell you exactly what that involved. Even now. Signed the Official Secrets Act. Anyway, I was stationed on Faircairn for a couple of months. Weren’t many of us—just a trusted few. If you’ve been there, you’ll know how strange and indescribable a place it is. None too friendly. And you’ll have seen the consistency of the place. The ground, I mean. The earth.”

  “Volcanic, I thought,” says Toby. “Something like that?”

  “Oh, no-one knows exactly what it is. Like granular black sand, isn’t it? None of our scientists ever had much of a clue. Still don’t so far as I know. But what it is, or, for that matter, exactly where it’s from—none of that’s important.”

  “No?”

  “What’s important is what that stuff can do. What it’s capable of.”

  Judd is feeling queasy now—the smell of rot seems to have got still worse. “Professor?” he asks. “What exactly do you mean?”

  “Only this, lad—that the stuff that Faircairn’s made of can…” He sucks in a wheezing breath and gives a crazy, gummy grin. “Well, it can warp reality itself.”

  There is silence between them.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” the old man says. “You don’t think I’m cracked. A few months ago, you might’ve done, I’m sure, but not now. Not after everything you’ve seen.”

  Toby says, very quietly, wrinkling his nose against the putrid scent: “Go on.”

  “You’ll laugh,” says Blessborough improbably, “when you hear how I discovered the truth. Of course, there was always something queer about the island, always an odd atmosphere… Things we used to glimpse, moving in the darkness, almost out of sight. Things we pushed to the back of our minds… You understand me?”

  “I do,” says Toby fervently.

  “But the truth of it… Well, it was almost banal. One night, on leave, me and a couple of mates went to the mainland. There was a sort of party being held there. A dance in one of the local towns. So we went and we drank a bit and we tried not to think about Faircairn and we did our best to enjoy ourselves. And of course there were women there and naturally there was some flirting and a bit of canoodling. All very innocent. You understand me, Dr Judd? Nothing dirty. And nothing to scare the horses neither. Now, I was courting at the time, the young lady who would subsequently become my wife and I was writing to her regular, telling her my news and doing my utmost to reassure her. And when, later, back on the island I wrote her a long letter, I mentioned the trip to the mainland but, to try to spare her feelings and make sure she wouldn’t worry, I said that the evening had been spent only in the company of men. That there had been no women present. And that was how it began. With a tiny white lie. Not that I thought any more about it. I sent the letter off to be delivered and got back to my work. My sweetheart got my message and she read it and she was never any the wiser. I only started to work out the truth of it a few weeks later. I was chatting to a couple of my mates and one of them happened to mention how odd it was that there’d been no women at that dance. As you can imagine, I was astonished at this. I quizzed them about it and they were all adamant—there had never been anything but bloody men at that party. I worked throu
gh every possible explanation—including, let me assure you, my own possible insanity. But then I understood. It was some property of the island itself which had the power to reach out. And change the world. It took me a while to eliminate every other option. Until I knew, until I was certain, that it could only be the earth itself.”

  Unbidden, Toby remembers his own brief visit to Faircairn, the handful of dust he had collected on some inexplicable instinct. “How did you work it out?” he asks, in far too deep now to doubt.

  “Took some to the mainland,” says Blessborough. “A bit less potent but it still works just fine. I experimented with it—made a few small changes to things. Didn’t always work—any act of pure selfishness seems to dilute it. But often, often it worked, at least when the change was conveyed to someone else. It’s an equation, you see—the soil plus your words plus someone who wants to believe. It was just after the war was coming to an end that I had a notion to try something on a grander scale. Something really remarkable. Something wonderful, too.”

  “Cannonbridge,” says Toby Judd.

  “Cannonbridge,” Blessborough offers triumphantly. “He was only meant… as a kind of joke at first. That, and a sort of love letter, to all the stories and writers I used to like so much. I wrote, on the island, about this author—this great, fictional author—and it gave me great pleasure. I never went to university, Dr Judd— the Professor’s an honorary title, bought for me by the bank, but, in a way, Faircairn was my true university and the creation of Matthew Cannonbridge my thesis. And the more I wrote about him the more I began to see evidence of the island’s weird power. Like… a single droplet of dark liquid spreading through a glass of pure water. References here and there in essays, journals. A poem or two in anthologies. A chapter in a book of literary lives. All quite impossible, of course, but it was happening indisputably all the same. And once I published my book—well, everything got an awful lot worse. He was everywhere. His novels and dramas and verses were everywhere. The whole country believed. And it is dependent on belief, you know, that’s what it hinges on. I’d done it successfully, inserted a wholly imaginary human being into history. Hmmph. You know this is true, Toby. You know it.”

  And he does, of course. He does know it. In spite of its flagrant absurdity, he understands that everything happened just as Blessborough has described. He feels sick now, sick at heart and in his soul, and the stench of the place, its graveyard corruption rises up above him and his stomach heaves and pushes.

  “I write about him still,” the old man says. “In here. The bank found me and they made me rich. I want for nothing. I can write all day about my Cannonbridge. And it is made real.”

  “How?” Toby asks softly. “You’re in London. You’re not on the island anymore.”

  “Oh, but don’t you recognise the smell of it, Dr Judd? The smell of damp black earth? The island is always with me. These walls and floors… this whole suite is packed with Faircairn earth. We are surrounded by that terrible ebony dust.” He starts to laugh then, high and wild and, somehow, no longer quite human.

  Toby is actually relieved when he hears the lift’s chime, hears steps behind him, feels the grip of Mr Keen on his shoulder and spies the pudgy visage of Swaine-Taylor.

  “Hello, Dr Judd,” smiles the CEO. “Now, if you’re fully in the picture, we should go down to the water’s edge.”

  Toby grimaces. “What now?”

  “Why, surely you’ve not forgotten? It’s tonight. The Cannonbridge Bicentenary is tonight.”

  1902

  BY THE BANKS OF THE THAMES SOUTHWARK

  IF YOU WERE to find yourself passing over London Bridge at around a quarter past three in the afternoon on the fourteenth of September of the year that has been named above and were you to glance down towards the river and spy, along its southern bank, the outlines of two surprisingly respectable male figures sauntering there, in defiance of the mud and accumulated debris, you might well be astonished at the identities of these ramblers, for they are both of them amongst the most famous and distinguished men in the Empire. And if you were, by some unlikely magic, able also to apprehend the words that pass between them, you would surely be more startled still.

  “I am a trifle bemused,” says the first of the pair—broadshouldered and brawny, moustachioed, possessing a Scots accent and projecting a certain kind of martial Britishness that is already beginning to seem old-fashioned—“both by your invitation and by the location that you specified for our meeting.” He indicates the great mass of mud and rubbish, the sullen detritus of the Thames.

  “You need not be surprised, Sir Arthur,” says his saturnine, darkclad companion who, by now, requires no further introduction. “And nor should you be in any way alarmed.” He pauses then, as he has already paused often this afternoon, to pick up a large flat stone that he has seen upon the riverbank and slip it into a pocket in his black frockcoat. “I only sought some pleasant conversation. The exchange of ideas. We are the men of the age, after all. Your detective, why, he is immortal. And as to my own, I flatter myself to think that he is at least worthy of a footnote.”

  “More than that,” says the moustachioed man, striding unconcernedly through the mire as once he stood robustly aboard the wildly tilting deck of a whaler. “I read The Mystery of the Prophetic Widow. And The Mystery of the Whispering Pontiff also.”

  “And what did you make of them, sir?”

  “Most diverting. Your talent is positively protean.”

  “You’re too kind,” says Matthew Cannonbridge, stooping

  to collect another stone, doing this so artfully that he scarcely interrupts his pace. “Indeed,” his companion goes on, his words, when set down, sounding friendly enough but possessing when spoken a quality of quiet disapprobation, “you seem to shift according to the fashions of each era whilst somehow succeeding in remaining forever yourself.”

  Cannonbridge smiles—the last time that he shall have cause to do so for more than a century. “You do not altogether approve of me, Sir Arthur. You never have.”

  “I should not go so far as that. I speak as I find and you have never been less than courteous to me. Such rumours as I have heard…”

  “Ah yes. The rumours.” “I form no opinions on hearsay, sir. Only on what I myself see and observe.”

  Another pause to collect another stone and then: “Stout fellow. I thought that you should say so. And it was in the company of such an honest man that I wished things to end. Well, honest to a degree at least. Not so very upstanding, perhaps, in your association with a certain younger lady of whom your ailing wife is believed to be unaware?”

  “Good Lord. Please, sir! Desist.”

  “Sir Arthur, please. No need for theatrics. We are quite alone here. I meant only to demonstrate that none of us is ever quite immune from gossip and tittle-tattle. Now, no doubt you have been wondering why I have been collecting such a store of ballast. Why my pockets now bulge at their very seams with an excess of stone and rock.”

  “I had thought it discourteous to ask.”

  “You’re too polite, Arthur. Trust me, the decades ahead will not welcome such politeness.”

  “We shall no doubt discover the truth of that remark in time.”

  “I have already seen it, sir. Alas, I know it to be true.”

  Our moustachioed Scot does not reply but merely treads on through the mud. Seabirds screech overhead. In the distance, an urchin and an old woman can be seen, scouring the riverbank for anything of value, desperation having driven them to such mudlarkery.

  “Tell me,” says his companion. “Have you ever had the sensation that you are in some wise pursued, only to turn to confront your pursuer and find nothing there but air?”

  A shake of the head.

  “No? Yet I have. All of my life. From the moment of my creation.”

  “Your… creation? How strange a description.”

  “It was a strange event, sir. Strange and most unnatural.”

  “Indeed?”<
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  “There has long been a kind of ragged shadow in my wake. It was there at Geneva and it has been present ever after. Something is tracking me. Watching me. Judging me.”

  Sir Arthur frowns. “So you are afraid, Mr Cannonbridge?”

  “No. Not that. Never that. But I do believe that I know now how to… outwit it.” He bends down, collects one final stone and pushes it into the last available space in his coat. The effect is of a jerkin made of stone. “I have no choice left to me now. Not if I wish to ensure my survival.”

  “I confess,” says Arthur, “that I simply do not understand.”

  “You will. In time, you will see the pattern of it. Now, pray give me your hand, sir. Our conversation has been a decided pleasure.”

  Arthur accepts the elder writer’s hand—cool, too cool, to the touch—and at the edges of the Thames they perform the solemn ritual.

  This done, Matthew Cannonbridge turns away and with implacable purpose strides towards the water’s edge.

  “No!” Arthur shouts. “For God’s sake, man!”

  Yet this is to no avail and so Arthur moves to stop him.

  Cannonbridge turns his head and speaks one word, his eyes flashing in the sunlight. “Stay.”

  Arthur finds himself, impossibly, rooted to the spot, quite unable to move as Cannonbridge walks on, into the water, into the river. The Scot tries to shout again but no sound will come.

  Cannonbridge strides on, the filthy Thames up to his hips, up to his belly, up to his chest, his neck.

  Arthur struggles against his invisible bonds but his efforts are wholly fruitless. He is held firm, made immutable. Later, he will wonder if it is his imagination but he will swear that the water around the author seethes and bubbles; also that strange shadows seem to crowd around the diminishing figure, appear curiously agitated, as if somehow (surely impossible) frustrated and enraged.

  In the distance, the urchin and the old woman seem to have turned, aware of the unfolding tragedy, but too distant to affect events in any way.