by Tim Lebbon
Cain stepped back in shock, bumping into the opposite wall. Dreamer, she had called him, and he must still be dreaming now. Even with the light shining from behind her, her green eyes gleamed bright.
The nun was naked apart from her wimple. Her greased skin glittered, catching the basement light and diffracting it through whatever she had spread across her body. A hundred rainbow smears sheened her skin. In one hand she held a clay pot. Smiling at Cain, she raised it, dipped in her other hand, withdrew it loaded with a thick golden cream. She spread this across her breasts. They shifted beneath her hand, swaying heavily back into place, gleaming. The rest of her body from her heels to her forehead was similarly adorned, shining with impossible light.
“Sneaking around in your sleep, Cain? You’ve caught me putting on my magic cream.”
“It’s all a dream, Cain!” someone shouted from the basement, and it was Peter. Whoever else was down there laughed along with him.
Sister Josephine smiled at Cain, never once dropping her eyes as she scooped out more cream and pasted it slowly between her legs, parting her knees slightly to give better access. Her expression was frank and challenging. The scent of honey was strong and it reminded Cain of sex, its tang familiar and yet so unknown when allied to this beautiful woman standing before him.
“Bet you want to give her a hand!” Peter called, and again the laughter from the basement excluded Cain, shoving him back from any hope of acceptance.
“Don’t listen to him,” Sister Josephine said quietly, bringing her hand across her stomach, her chest, up to her throat and face. “He only mocks you because he can never be you. He doesn’t know the Way.”
“I’m not dreaming,” Cain said. “I’ve just woken up.” A bee buzzed across his vision, lazy in the dark, and disappeared behind Sister Josephine’s shoulder.
“Really?” the nun said. She dropped the pot and it fell slowly to the floor, far too slowly, landing upright with hardly a sound. “Hmm,” she said, raising her arms, stretching like a cat in front of a fire, “I’m all magicked up.” She stepped forward and reached out for Cain, the smell stronger, her body warming the strange cream and permeating the air with its odor.
The urge to reach out and touch her was unbearable. Cain had had sex, but always with women at Afresh, and none of them had looked anything like this. Sister Josephine’s green eyes bore into him, and he felt as though they were perusing his soul.
“You can’t touch me,” the nun said, “because you’re still asleep.”
She put her hands beneath his armpits and lifted him up. He kept his hands held out from his body, afraid to touch her, feel her warmth, sense her with his fingertips, in case the siren came in and shattered his mind. She seemed to expend no effort in carrying him, and as she walked along the hallway to the stairs, he became certain that she was gliding.
“Don’t forget, you’re dreaming!” a voice called from the basement, and this one could have been Magenta. Whistler’s pipes cooed a few notes. Everyone laughed again, and someone growled, and then they all fell silent as the naked nun took him upstairs.
“You’re not walking,” Cain said, unable to tear his gaze away from her dazzling eyes. Her breasts brushed against his chest as they moved, their groins touched briefly. Yet he could see only her eyes.
“I told you, I’m all magicked up. What a dreamer, Cain. What a wonderful dreamer you are. You know the Way already, for sure, you just need showing. I’d show you. I would.”
“Then show me,” he said, not understanding or caring.
“You’re asleep.”
They were back in his flat, even though he could not remember coming through the door. He heard the buzz of insects, though none were visible. The lights were on. They were still floating inches above the floor. They passed by the picture he had changed, and it shone gold as fresh honey.
Sister Josephine laid him in his bed and took off his clothes. There was no hope in him, no idea that she would join him, because there was so much more to her than sex. Divine, he thought, and it sounded right. Even when she pulled off his briefs and set his erection free, he was not embarrassed, and she barely glanced at it before standing and floating back toward the hall.
“I’m dreaming,” he said.
Sister Josephine nodded, and something like relief seemed to cloud her eyes. She flicked her hand at the air. A smear of cream left her fingertips, and Cain felt it patter across his body.
“Sweet dreams,” she said, and as she left the flat it grew dark once more.
Cain spent an hour after waking thinking about his disturbed sleep. The hidden memory of his father’s house to begin with, the torture when he touched, the ongoing experiment to deny him all the sensations of living. And then his strange trip down to the basement, the glowing, magicked-up image that was Sister Josephine, and his desperate need to touch her. Those green eyes of hers had stuck with him, cool memories of glacial intent.
The chest remained silent in the living room, as it always had and always would. It only ever moved in his mind.
And was he losing his mind?
When he eventually sat up and saw the smear of cream along his leg, he had almost convinced himself that it had all been a dream.
At Afresh, the Voice and Face had tried to make a life for Cain. He knew them as the Voice and Face because that is what they had always been to him. To begin with, he had known their real names, but they had not tried to make him use them for very long. Their emphasis had been on enabling him to find his own way, aiding and guiding, but never steering him. If his own preference was to dispense with their names, then that was a part of his progression.
The Face was the first person Cain saw after being taken out of his dead father’s house, smiling at him, calming him, soothing him with a look that was part pity, part fascination. It was the honesty of that fascination that stayed with Cain. The Voice was the first Voice he heard, standing behind the Face and beyond Cain’s field of vision; he had spoken many casual truths that Afresh had then taken years to prove to Cain. As the smell, the sound, and the feel of his father’s house faded behind him, and the wide blue sky looked like a place of freedom for the first time instead of the ceiling of an endless prison, Cain asked the Face and Voice if they would be his friends. They both began to cry, and Cain—young, naive, sheltered, and damaged—saw his own sadness and wretchedness mirrored in them.
He had been sixteen when his father died and he was taken from the house. He had been out of the house many times before, but always in his father’s company, and never farther than the local village. Even here there were sights, sounds, and sensations that his father said would pollute his mind, contaminate the purity that would lead him to Pure Sight. More often than not, he had remained in the car with the windows closed and white noise playing through the stereo. People looked inside sometimes, wondering at this pale boy sitting in a locked car at the height of summer, but Cain’s expression invariably moved them along. Once, some kids started tapping at the windows like curious birds, pulling faces, wanting to be friends but not quite knowing how to deal with the peculiarities of Cain’s situation; they could hear the white noise, and they could see the sweat staining Cain’s clothes. Their eyes were curious and searching, but Cain could give nothing back. One of them smiled, and Cain turned away; he knew how to smile, but not yet why. The kids’ faces were browned by freedom, their eyes alight and alive, and their elbows and knees were scarred and scabbed with self-inflicted adventure. Cain’s only wound was the continually fresh sore of the siren. His father burst from the shop and started raging at the children, and Cain closed his eyes to shut out the sight. He kept them shut, comforted by the dark and the white noise, until they were home.
Each trip from the house had exacerbated Cain’s sense of loneliness, of not being real. He was his father’s son, but not his own person. He pinched himself and bit the inside of his cheek, alone and in his father’s company, to see whether it felt and tasted different both times. It did not. But that did not
convince Cain that he was anything other than his father’s subject.
The Voice and Face spent long hours, longer days, trying to convince Cain that his father had loved him. They pointed to all the good things he had done: the access to a huge library, the years he spent teaching Cain the sciences. And later, when they thought that Cain was ready to read them, they let him have his father’s journals. They were filled with scientific ramblings and extensive, wandering talk of Pure Sight, much of it so obscure that even Cain could make no sense of it. The Voice commented that it was almost as if Pure Sight were a place, not a supposed state of mind, and his father had spent years trying to persuade Cain to travel there. If so, it was a place not of this world, somewhere with no rules or laws, no controlling factors or forces other than truth, the real truth, the truth of things exposed and made clear by one’s own purity.
Cain read the first few pages, understanding little, and then he burned the journals in the gardens at Afresh. The Voice and Face came running, but Cain said, “I’m only burning what damaged me.” And much as they seemed distraught, they left him alone.
He had regretted that burning for a long time. It destroyed much of what had hurt him—the evidence of it at least, and his father’s mad reasoning behind why he had treated his son so—but sometimes, especially as he grew older, Cain wondered just how much of himself had been incinerated in those flames. His history lived in his father’s words. He had watched as the books blackened and spat the ash of their past at the sky, and in dreams it was his own flesh peeling off and rising on columns of heat. And though physically it was painless, the emotional hurt was immense and irreparable.
Cain sometimes woke up crying from his dreams, and when the Voice asked what was wrong, he said he was mourning his dead father.
Chapter Five
Player
Cain showered, dressed, drank coffee and ate toast for breakfast, and all the while he was barely there. He may as well have been back in his father’s house, with the minimal attention he paid to the taste and smell of the morning. He was at the basement door with the naked nun, listening to the laughter as she flew him upstairs to bed like some naughty boy caught spying on adult things. He was out chasing an injured or laughing George, losing himself in the lanes and alleys between streets, listening to something eating in the dark. He was visiting Peter in Heaven, and although he had never been inside he knew that the dilapidated shell of that house was misleading, and therein lay hidden truths. His father had wanted him to have Pure Sight, and he had it now, because everything was a deception. Knowing that was surely emphasizing his own purity. The others were deceiving him, playing games with the new residents because they had nothing better to do. Perhaps they knew each other so well that an outsider was always subject to the same treatment and ridicule. He remembered the hearty laughter coming from the basement, and whether he had really been down there or not, the overt mockery in that was more than evident.
Even from Magenta. She was the only one he had met and thought he could get along with. He had heard her own laughter mixed in—at least, he was quite certain it had been hers—and that cut surprisingly deep.
They were excluding him. He had spent so much of his life alone—the Face and the Voice were the only two people he had ever considered as friends—and now, given the chance to create his life anew, make his own friends, he was more alone than ever. That saddened him, but he was not surprised. He knew that he was far from normal, whatever they told him at Afresh, and yet he still had no real idea of what normal meant. He had extensive knowledge of some subjects, gleaned from all his reading, but very little in that most important area of all: life. His father had seen to that.
Cain could find no discernible emotion within him in connection with his father; no love or hate, no curiosity or disinterest. It was almost as if he had become one of those obscure scientists in the books he gave Cain to read, so obsessed with their own purpose that they lose sight of themselves and those around them.
Cain never wanted to be like that. He wanted to find out what normal was, and become it. Fuck Pure Sight. And fuck anyone who tried to persuade him otherwise. His father had made him unique, he hadn’t been born that way, and now he so wanted to shed the skin of his old life that it almost hurt.
Finishing his breakfast, he looked from the window, down into the garden where he had followed George. He could see the tree beneath which George’s shadow had paused, and where he himself had knelt to see whether there were any signs on the ground. That was where the siren had hit him. From up here it seemed impossible that this garden was the same place. That was patently absurd, but then so were naked flying nuns. He closed his eyes and Sister Josephine was there, her piercing green eyes finding him easily, heavy breasts glistening with magic cream. Cain stood, angry at the stirring in his trousers, angry that she could do that to him. He felt the whole building laugh at his arousal.
He would go for a walk, buy some food and drink, find a park and spend the day there reading. And while he was reading, he would be thinking of what was happening here. Should he tell the Face, the Voice? If he did, would they take him away? For all that had happened, he still relished and valued his newfound freedom. He had been saved at Afresh. But the thought of returning was almost as painful as the idea of going back to his father’s house.
So he would sit and read and think, and somehow he would grasp hold of these flailing threads of his new life and tie them up.
The taxi dropped him at the corner of the largest park in the city. The gates were cast iron, extravagant and old. The trees growing along the park’s perimeter were huge, a variety of species obviously planted at least a hundred years ago to provide a natural barrier. There were railings set into the top of a natural stone wall, their spiked points dulled with successive coats of green paint. An old gatehouse stood to one side of the gate, its windows and door bricked up years before, holding only stale air inside. It gave the entrance to the park a sense of safety and tranquillity. And Cain would be anonymous in there. Alone as ever, but to everyone else in the park he would be just another face. They would not know his story, his background or his reasons for being there. For all they knew he could be normal.
There was a row of shops across from the park, and he bought sandwiches, potato chips, chocolate, and a bottle of flavored water. The shopkeeper barely glanced up as he paid, and Cain wondered at the myriad stories that woman must miss in the eyes of her customers. She would never know his own tale, but for once, instead of making him feel even more alone, this made him feel special.
As he passed into the park, time slowed down. He could still hear the vehicular bustle of the city, but it seemed so much more distant, as if the trees around the perimeter sucked in chaos and breathed out serenity. It reminded him of the feeling he had experienced upon first entering the garden of 13 Endless Crescent, but this was more benevolent, and not as loaded with mystery. This was simply nature wending its way through time, and mankind benefiting from its journey.
He chose a path at random and followed it into the heart of the park. The place was very well kept, planted areas neat and trimmed, the grass cut and watered, and there were benches at frequent intervals. Many of them bore memorial plaques for people who had loved to visit here. There were others in the park, but not many; school and work must keep the place quiet during the day. He passed a woman pushing her baby in a stroller, and they exchanged polite smiles. The baby gurgled something at him and Cain turned away, embarrassed. A dog ran up and sniffed around his feet, and a man called it away, apologizing, throwing a ball and sending his hound plunging into a bank of undergrowth. It growled, there were a few seconds of panicked rustling, and a squirrel darted from the bushes and ran up a nearby tree. The dog bounded after it, the ball forgotten.
Cain walked on, enjoying the heat of the day and the peaceful world around him. People found peace in different ways. A young woman skated by on roller skates, her curves accentuated by her tight clothing, knees and e
lbows padded. She ignored Cain as he moved aside to let her pass. A woman lay on the grass, reading. A man walked among a rose garden, sniffing blooms. Farther into the park, several women sat with their carriages in a circle while their toddlers ran about, fell over, laughed and cried. Cain did not know any of these people, and they did not know him. They were all alone here, and what stories did they have to tell?
The man sniffing the blooms, was he a painter of lost souls?
The woman reading her book, could she imagine unreality into being?
The roller skater, did she have a blade on her belt, even now sticky with the blood of a recent kill?
Cain doubted it, but he did not know. He knew no one. Everyone here—all these people having fun, relaxing, exercising, reading, pontificating, being busy living—could be as strange as the people in his house. Some could be even stranger. Every story is particular, and if “normal” is merely an average life, there are infinite extremes either side of that to be filled.
Cain had been thrown in with a group of people he had never met, and for once, living life on his own for the first time, he had to learn about them himself. Back at Afresh, any new resident was walked around the grounds and introduced, an act thought by the administrators to be an essential part to fitting in. But Cain was starting to realize that fitting in meant discovering things for yourself. Everyone perceived things differently, even the truth.
He had come here to rest, and he tried to cast such thoughts aside.
He walked on. The path twisted and turned and he lost himself in the park, purposely losing track of the junctions he passed over and the turns he took. He passed by pergolas, benches, and small ponds, and eventually emerged from a wooded area onto a gentle grassed slope, broken here and there by single trees or flower beds. At that moment there was no one else in sight, so he walked twenty paces out onto the slope and sat down in the sun. There was shade beneath the trees, but he would move there later.