by Tim Lebbon
“Someone else once said that to me,” Cain said.
“Your father. I taught him that very idea.” She turned and moved on.
“Then he was wrong as well,” Cain said, but she appeared not to hear.
At the top of the stairs, they turned left and walked along a narrow landing. The carpet was threadbare, the wall finish moist and moldy, and in several places the ceiling had caved in. Its remains had long since been trodden into the floor or kicked away, but the holes left behind stared back with pure darkness. Could be anything up there, Cain thought, and he held his candle high to ward off the unknown.
At the end of the landing, they came to a door. It was cracked and warped, as if something had tried to force it open from inside, but it still hung strong in its frame. Several large padlocks secured bolts in place.
“I’ve always wanted to see in here,” Magenta said dreamily. “But none of us are allowed.”
“Who doesn’t allow it?”
“Peter. He may not have been like us, but he had a job to do. All of us know more of the world than anyone normal, but as you’ve seen from Whistler and the nun, sometimes we need protecting from each other.”
She placed the candle at her feet, reached up, and touched the first padlock. It sizzled and became fluid, re-forming into a metal tankard that clanged to the floor.
“Shit!” Cain said. He should not have been surprised, he supposed. He had seen Magenta change, from clown to warrior to mother. The fact that she could enforce a change on other things was only one step removed.
“I don’t do this much,” Magenta said, and her voice held a trace of pain. This was uncomfortable for her.
“Don’t hurt yourself.” He heard the shadow giggle at his shoulder.
Magenta laughed as well. “Concerned for your mother?”
Cain shook his head, but she had her back to him and did not see.
She touched the next padlock and it fell to the floor as a shower of ball bearings. The final lock twisted, flamed briefly, and then dripped down the face of the door, scorching it, drying and hardening into a slick of melted metal. Magenta stood back and sighed, seemed to relax into herself, shook her head. Then she picked up the candle and turned to Cain.
Her eyes were scanning the landing behind Cain as if looking for a missing thought. “I’ve never been in here,” she said, “and I don’t quite know what to expect. I think it’s just the minds of dead people . . . I think. But they may have a strange effect.” She stared into the darkness beyond the candlelight, and Cain suddenly believed that she truly could not see him. “Cain? Are you with me?”
“You’re just like me,” the shadow whispered, snickering.
“I am,” he said. As Magenta pushed open the door, Cain wondered which of them he had answered.
The light from their candles filled the room. Cain was aware of the smudge of shadow on his left, but he did not glance that way. He looked straight ahead. At the glass cabinets, and the things inside them.
“Oh, Peter,” Magenta said, her voice surprised more than disgusted.
“Fuck,” Cain said. “Monsters. You’re all monsters, all of you!”
“Don’t leap to conclusions,” she said. “Who knows exactly what your head would look like were it stripped of flesh and hair?”
Skulls. There were at least forty glass cases fixed to each wall, and in almost every case sat a skull. Cain turned in a circle, looking all around the room, and the movement of his candle gave life to the skulls’ eye sockets. Their ghost eyes followed him, and as he paused and stood as motionless as possible, still one or two of them seemed to move. Every skull was grinning. Smashed nose sockets snorted darkness.
“Monsters!” Cain said, and he turned to leave.
The door slammed shut. Magenta was there, waving the candle in front of him, her eyes still distant and uncertain. “You’re there,” she said. “You’re here. Somewhere. And now you have to see.” She stepped forward, and Cain stepped aside to avoid being burned by her candle.
“Can’t see you,” the shadow on his shoulder said. “Your mother can’t see you.”
“Did she ever?” Cain said.
“What?” Magenta turned, and her beautiful eyes were filled with sadness. Almost as if she knew what Cain had been talking about.
“Nothing.”
“See here,” she said, waving her hand around as if giving a guided tour. “The remains of dozens that knew the Way. All these were people like us, people with a knowledge of the universe that so surpassed normal understanding that it set them far aside. So superior that—”
“Superior,” Cain said, nodding. “That word again. So superior.”
Magenta must have heard his sarcasm, but she chose to ignore it. “Peter was our landlord, but he was a caretaker as well. When someone with the Way died, he would dispose of them. Some of them are too . . . different to be left lying around.”
“Was Peter left lying around?” Cain asked. “After George tore him to pieces?”
“Peter’s body is somewhere apart from the world,” she said. “No one will find him.”
“And these?” Cain asked. “These freaks? What are these, your brothers and sisters? My aunts and uncles? Mother . . .”He did not feel the need to finish the sentence. Magenta looked right at him, and he shifted his candle to the side. Her eyes followed.
“Here,” she said, turning back to the wall. “I knew him. Markus Keene. He was a conjuror of fire. He died from his own gift. Corrupted. Power corrupted him.”
“I thought you were all perfect,” Cain said, looking at the skull. It had a part-melted appearance, like a wax model left out in the sun.
“Not all, no,” Magenta said. “But most of us are.”
“Whistler? Sister Josephine?”
“As unique as the rest of us. Look, here’s Lockley! I haven’t seen him for four decades, not since he was shot. A hunter mistook him for a deer. Such irony.” The skull she indicated had antlers protruding from its temples. They had been cut so that the skull would fit into the glass case, but their roots were thick, and Cain suspected they had once been grand.
There were more, dozens more, and Magenta knew more than a few of them. Ashley, with teeth so long that they would not look out of place in a crocodile’s mouth. Arthur, an old, old man from ages past who had been killed by the stench of technology. The Twin, two skulls fused together so that they shared a mouth but each had two eyes, a nose, a brain. The junction of their skulls displayed yellowed cracks like the map of a river and its tributaries, as if they had spent their lives going different ways. Angus, a skull with the snout of a bull, replete with a brass ring still fixed against its smashed nasal passage. And more, yet more, and for every five normal skulls there was one with three eyes, two mouths, and other less obvious differences that marked them as so definitely inhuman.
“And here,” Magenta said, “is George.” She reached into a bag slung over her shoulder. Cain cringed back, petrified at what he would see, but fascinated at the same time.
“Peter should be doing this,” Magenta said as she placed George’s severed head in an empty case. She adjusted its positioning for a full minute, turning it this way and that, stroking hair from over one eye, finally settling on an aspect that seemed to please her. Then she closed the glass lid and stood back.
George had not reverted to his human form. Maybe he had died before the full change could be complete. His jaws were distended, teeth long and sharp, and it appeared that his top lip had been shredded by his own underbite. His forehead sloped backward, hairless and shiny even in death, and his eyes were buried in shadowed pits. Cain shivered, and his candle gave George flaming yellow eyes, filled with rage and a promise of pain to come.
Cain tried to look away but could not. Is this why Magenta had brought him here? To watch her place George’s head among these other dead freaks? Because he had killed George, and this made him involved. This made him responsible.
“I thought you said you weren�
�t sure what was in here,” he said.
“I’d only heard. I’m never sure until I’ve seen something for myself. You’ve seen so much already, Cain. Aren’t you sure? Have you no certainty yet?”
“Don’t try to draw me in,” he said. “Don’t try to involve me.”
“You’re already involved. With all of us. We’re unique, and you’re beginning to realize—”
“Inhuman,” he said.
“More than human. But that’s your choice. I believe, Cain, that it’s a choice you still have to make, no matter what the signs tell me. Don’t let yourself believe that it’s cut-and-dried, because I know there’s still doubt in you. You’d have gone from here by now if that wasn’t the case. I hope that you choose to live for what your father believed in. You thought of him as mad, but he was far from that.”
“I can never be what he wanted!” Cain shouted. His movement gave George’s head a smile and a burning glare. “Why did you leave?” he asked wretchedly. “Why did he tell me you were dead? I never had a mother . . .” Cain sobbed the last word, unable to finish the sentence and unsure of what he had intended saying.
“I’m sorry, Cain. I told you, you were all Leonard ever wanted. As for me, I found the Way the instant I became pregnant. After that, things were so . . . different.”
“You didn’t want me? You don’t care?”
Magenta looked more uncomfortable than sad, and that was as much of an answer as Cain needed. He held his head in his hands and cried, wanting nothing more than to feel his mother’s warm hand on the back of his head, comforting, loving. But all that touched him there was the coolness of the shadow.
“I’m leaving now,” she said. “I hope we’ll meet again. Son.” And before Cain could say another word, Magenta left the room and disappeared into the dark depths of the house.
Her candle remained propped on one of the glass cases. It gave the skull beneath it a quizzical smile, and Cain wanted to smash the case and lose the smile to the dark. But he held back. He could not do that; he had no right.
“Let’s get home,” the shadow said, and Cain said the same.
“I don’t like this place,” Cain said, and the shadow echoed his words.
On the way out, they carried both candles.
There was no sign of Sister Josephine, but Whistler was lying moaning in the gutter. His hair was caked with blood, his face a contour map of bee stings and wounds, and his pan pipes lay crushed into the concrete pavement. He would have more, Cain knew. His time was not yet over. For now, this strange man’s skull was safe beneath his ponytail hair.
The front garden no longer held any fears for Cain. He felt changed by everything he had seen this night. The creatures beneath the shrubs were quiet and watchful, and he wondered what they saw when they looked at him. A man with a shadow on his back? Or no man at all?
All the way upstairs to the first floor, along the landing and up again to his own front door, Cain avoided looking to his left. The shadow was still whispering to him, but the voice was deep down inside his mind now, almost incomprehensible, and it may as well have been his own thoughts mumbling away. So he looked to the right, and not because he did not want to see the shadow again, but because he suspected that the shadow had gone.
In the front door, through the bedroom, into the bathroom, in front of the mirror, and Cain finally knew the truth that had been hounding him all night. He had not wished to admit it to himself, however strong the evidence. That way lay madness. But now he could see, and he knew that the shadow had gone forever.
Because Cain was the shadow.
His reflection stared back in fear and shock, and he could see himself only because he knew for sure that he was there.
Cain was the shadow.
When Cain first saw the shadow in his father’s basement room, it spoke with his voice, but he gave it a stranger’s lilt. It bore his shape, but he made it larger. It spoke of mild rebellion and he shied away from its audacity, though it was really verbalizing his own deepest thoughts. He kept it apart from himself.
For the first time in his life, he had a friend. He would do nothing to ruin that.
Chapter Eleven
Shadow
Next day, Whistler broke into Cain’s flat.
Cain crouched in the corner of the living room and watched the tall pipe player wander in, through to the dining area and kitchen, out again. Whistler paused to look at the pictures in the hallway, rubbing the glass as if he could erase the traces of color that Cain had put there himself. He went into the bedroom and Cain followed close behind, standing in the corner as Whistler rummaged through his clothes, lifted the bedspread, opened the small wardrobe as if looking for a shadow that never was.
Whistler never saw Cain, because Cain was that shadow.
The tall man sat in the living room for a while, nursing a new set of pan pipes and bringing them to his lips, away, up again. It was as if he could not bring himself to play them. Perhaps he was afraid that they would no longer work, or maybe he feared that Sister Josephine would hear him. His face was bruised and stung from their fight, and he carried himself stiffly, broken bones only too keen to remind him of defeat.
Cain sat next to the window, out of the path of sunlight that streamed through. He did not make a sound, though he was not sure that Whistler would hear even if he did. He watched the tall man, and when Whistler finally stood to leave—pushing on his legs to stand up, an old, tired man—Cain followed him to the front door.
Whistler paused there in Cain’s hallway, then spun around. Cain stepped sideways against the wall, hitting it with a thump, and the impact set one of the landscape pictures shaking. Whistler stared at the picture, brought the pipes up to his lips, and played the first notes through this new instrument. Only two notes, quiet and low and quick, but they made the hair on the back of Cain’s neck stand on end.
Whistler lowered the pan pipes and smiled. He looked around the flat one more time and, in a voice so low that he must have believed he was speaking only to himself, said, “I only hope he’s happy.” Then he left and closed the door behind him.
He had not noticed Cain. Even when Cain had been standing right in front of him, Whistler had not seen him. He had suspected Cain was there maybe, or guessed, or known in some obscure way that only those with the Way could understand. But he had not been certain. Because Cain was the shadow, and even on the brightest day a shadow has a home.
Cain sat in his living room, feeling the warmth of Whistler fading slowly from the sofa, and cried bitter tears. Once, the choice had been his to make.
No more.
Cain crept downstairs that evening and waited in the lobby. He approached Sister Josephine’s door several times, raised his hand to knock, drew back. In the end, he hid beneath the stairs with the other shadows, waiting for the sun to sink lower and the light to fade away.
As darkness fell, the world was opening up to him. Reality. Truth. Concepts that he used to have on the verge of sleep or in the depths of dreams, rich ideas of change and exploration, all rose up and invited his inspection. Unlike before, they did not vanish with his next breath. They remained, honest and true, and he could not help feeling a spark of excitement deep inside. Sometimes he used to think he had an original thought; now he had many. He had never felt such potential.
He walked to the nun’s door and tapped on it three times, stepping quickly to the side. He heard footsteps from inside, and she opened the door, glanced out, holding a gown closed across her chest.
Cain slipped in.
Sister Josephine shivered and slammed the door, backing away from it, staring at the wood as if it would bulge in after her. Cain was a step behind her, walking back as she did. He could reach out and touch her hair, should he so desire. He breathed in and reveled in the honey aroma, a mysterious and exotic mix of sweetness and sex.
She could not see him.
He stepped aside and held his breath as she passed by, a frown on her face. He waited in her hallw
ay for a few seconds after she had moved into her bedroom, gathering his thoughts and hating himself, hating himself.
Was this what Pure Sight was all about? George was a killer, Whistler was a manipulator, and if the pipe player was to be believed, Sister Josephine flew across the city seeking men to fuck to death.
Was this what it was all about?
Cain walked to the nun’s bedroom, knelt, and looked inside. She was on the bed, her gown thrown open to reveal her full nakedness. There was a pot of her magic cream on the bed beside her, and she was working it slowly into the knife wounds that Whistler had punched into her body. She cringed. She cried. The smell of her tears merged with the warm, rich tang of the cream, and Cain hated himself even more when he felt the heat in his groin.
Had his father wanted this? Is this what his mother had? He stared at the beautiful naked woman—no nun now, for sure, although she no doubt had a whole history that would always be a mystery—and he thought of what Whistler had said about her. She could fly, Cain had seen that for himself. And she could fight. She was like an imaginary superhero, but one with dreadful faults.
But wasn’t that the case with all of them?
Her hands broadened their areas of application, passing over the slits in her skin and working through fresh blood.
A bee came at Cain, slow and unconcerned, and he remained still. It struck his cheek and veered away, buzzing in confusion at hitting nothing. The nun paused and stared at her bedroom door, and Cain moved quickly to the side, out of view.
“I hope I see him again,” she said. Cain bit his lip and frowned, looking down at his hands, seeing them only because he knew that they were there. A waft of fresh honey came from the bedroom, and when Sister Josephine’s groans turned into moans of a different kind, Cain moved away and quietly let himself out.
He returned to his own flat, and as he opened the door the phone on his bedside table was ringing. He picked it up and the Voice crackled at him, asking him where he was, whether he was well, why he hadn’t called to tell them how things were. Cain held the phone for some time, listening to the silence that the Voice was expecting to be filled. And then he hung up. There was really nothing he could say.