by Mike Carey
It was taking Madigan’s parents a long time to sort out the last few details at the clinic. They stayed at Pokoj for a whole week, and then they paid for another week after that. The longer they stayed, it seemed to Madigan, the more time they spent on the phone, or writing emails, or leafing through important looking folders full of paperwork. She had given up asking them if they wanted to play with her.
Madigan had good days and bad days. Sometimes she visited the museum or played in the grounds, and sometimes she was too tired even to get out of bed. However she was feeling, though, she always spent as much time as she could with Mr Stupendo. When she was having a bad day he would visit her in her room to talk and tell stories, and sometimes he brought her fresh cherries from the market in Puppendorf, because they were her favourite. And on the days when she felt better he would walk with her, or she would sit in the restaurant and watch him do magic tricks for the guests.
Almost every time she saw him Madigan asked him when he was going to steal the moon again. She couldn’t stop picturing it all in her head: the moon shining up from the palm of Mr Stupendo’s hand, the black sky vast and empty without it. She badly wanted to see him do it, but whenever she asked him he said no. His excuses were different each time, but the answer stayed the same.
‘It’s broad daylight now,’ he would say. ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.’ Or, ‘Too much fog tonight – I can’t steal it if I can’t see it.’
He always raised one eyebrow at her as he spoke, because he knew it made her laugh. But he started talking about something else as soon as he could, and sometimes he would just say, ‘Later, Madigan,’ in a worn-out voice, like she was annoying him. Madigan began to worry that he wasn’t allowed to steal the moon for some reason, or maybe he didn’t remember how any more.
The night of her tenth day in Pokoj, Madigan could not sleep. Her chest was hurting more than usual, and she tossed and turned, trying to make herself comfortable. When she did finally drift off, it was only to wake again a few hours later, stiff and sore from lying in a funny position. She pushed herself up onto her pillows and glanced out of the window to see if it was morning yet. The moon stared back at her, round and full, casting its light across her bed in a wide beam.
Madigan could hear her parents’ sleepy breathing from the bed next to hers, so she put on her shoes and dressing gown over her pyjamas and slipped out of the room. The stairs to the attic were hard work, but she didn’t mind because they looked so beautiful, the moonlight making them shine like they had just been given a new coat of silvery paint. Mr Stupendo could have no excuses tonight, she thought. This time, he would have to steal the moon.
When he opened his door, Mr Stupendo did not look like Mr Stupendo at all. He was wearing his pyjamas, and his eyes were all red round the edges from tiredness. In the room behind him Madigan could see a photo album open on the bed, lit up by the yellow light of the bedside lamp.
‘Madigan,’ he said, rubbing his eyes. ‘It’s two in the morning. What are you doing here?’
‘Look outside,’ Madigan said.
‘What?’
‘Look!’ She pulled him over to the window and pointed to the moon. ‘Go on,’ she said eagerly. ‘Steal it. Like you did before.’
‘Go back to bed. I’ll do it some other time.’
‘No, now,’ Madigan insisted. She knew that if she didn’t make him do it straight away then he would just come up with more excuses, and she would never get to see it. Mr Stupendo looked at her for a long moment. Then he sat down heavily on the bed.
‘I can’t,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘Jesus,’ he muttered. ‘I just can’t, OK? I never could in the first place.’
Madigan frowned at him in confusion. ‘But you said you did,’ she pointed out.
‘Well I lied!’ Mr Stupendo snapped. ‘It was a trick, Madigan, just a trick. The audience and the stage were on a platform, and when I drew the curtain I pressed a button that made the platform go round, just until the moon was out of sight, and so slowly that no one could tell that it had moved at all. I didn’t steal the moon; I moved the world around it. And that kind of trick takes a lot of money, and a lot of people who believe in you enough to give it to you.’
He propped his elbows on his knees, resting his chin in his cupped hands so that he was staring at the floor. When he spoke again, the anger in his voice had gone, and he sounded tired and sad. ‘I don’t have either of those things any more. So I can’t ever do the trick again. Do you see now?’
Madigan did see. Mr Stupendo had told her the truth about stealing the moon, even though he hadn’t wanted to because the story was better. She looked at him sitting all hunched over on the bed. He had gone quiet, as if he expected that Madigan would leave now that he had snapped at her. She sat down beside him, leaned over, and kissed him on the cheek.
‘I still think you’re the best magician in the world, Mr Stupendo,’ she told him. ‘And it was nice of you to be honest with me, so I think that I should be honest with you too. There isn’t a clinic. Well, there is, but I’m not going there. Mom and dad took me last week, but when they saw how ill I was the doctors there said I couldn’t stay. I don’t think I was supposed to hear, but I did, and they said that there was no point, that it was too late to do anything now. So mom and dad have been lying too,’ Madigan explained. ‘They’ve really been trying to get the people at the clinic to change their minds this whole time.’
She looked at Mr Stupendo levelly, just as he had looked at her that first night in the restaurant, when he had pulled away the cloth and revealed nothing but empty space underneath. ‘Mom and dad still think that they can make the lump in my chest disappear, like you made the moon disappear in your story. But they can’t,’ she said. ‘I’m going to die, Mr Stupendo. They just don’t know it yet.’
Mr Stupendo’s face was so white and so shocked that it was as if Madigan was already dead and it was her ghost sitting there on the bed talking to him.
‘Madigan …’ he began. And then again, after a pause, ‘Madigan. I …’
He stared at her, and his expression was the strangest thing. He was looking at her, Madigan thought, but through her too, like he was trying to see past her to all the years that she might have lived but now would not.
‘Its nice to be able to tell the truth to someone,’ Madigan said. ‘My parents always want to pretend everything is fine, so I have to as well, and that’s much worse.’
She realised with a sudden wave of sadness that once she left Pokoj the pretending would carry on, and she would not have Mr Stupendo any more to tell her stories and play with her, and to listen to her when she told him things that her mom and dad wouldn’t understand. Her lips went wobbly at the thought, and she had to look away from him quickly and stare at the floor so that he wouldn’t see the tears if they came.
‘We’ll probably go away soon,’ she said, her voice shaking. ‘They’ll find me another clinic, and that will mean more flights, and pills, and injections, over and over, until I’m all used up and I can’t have any more. I don’t know where I’ll be when I die.’ Madigan risked a glance at Mr Stupendo, and started to sob.
He put his arms around her then, and she buried her face in his chest.
‘Where would you like to be?’ he asked her quietly.
‘Here,’ Madigan said. ‘I like it here. It’s old, and there’s a museum and a big garden. And you’re here, and I love you best of all.’
‘Then here is where you’ll stay,’ he said, and when Madigan looked up at him he was Mr Stupendo again, the Mr Stupendo who stole the moon. He smiled at her, and though the smile was a sad one Madigan found that it reminded her of his grin from that first day, the day when he made her ice cream disappear. He looked now, as he had then, like he was about to perform the best trick in the world, something so wonderful that Madigan would hardly be able to believe it.
He did so the very next morning when he visited Madigan’s parents. He talk
ed to them for most of the day, and when he left, although the moon was still hanging firmly in the sky, Madigan was allowed to stay at Pokoj for good.
Mr Stupendo’s best trick turned out not to be a trick at all.
‘I never found out what he said to them, to make them understand,’ Magda said thoughtfully. ‘But when he came out my mom was crying, really crying. She’d never done that before, not even when she found out I was sick. She just cried and cried, and hugged me, and told me that she was sorry.
‘After that, mom and dad never mentioned the clinic in Stollenbet any more, and they started playing games with me again. They spoke to the manager of the hotel and explained everything, and after that they hired me my own nurse to look after me. I stayed in Pokoj until I died, and Mr Stupendo stayed too, right until the end. He left a few days afterwards; he was going to give up magic and become a teacher, he said.
‘I know that he always felt a little bit bad, because he couldn’t save me. But really he did, though he didn’t know it. He moved everything around me, just so that I could stay put. I wish I could tell him how important that was, because if he hadn’t then I would have died somewhere else, and if that had happened then I never would have met you.’
Magda had climbed into Drozde’s lap by this point, and Drozde realised that her arms had encircled the little girl while she spoke. Somehow she had become more solid, more tangible. Drozde could almost imagine that she felt Magda pressed up against her skin, her phantom breath brushing her cheek. She held Magda cradled against her chest, and now the dead girl returned Drozde’s embrace, her touch as light and insubstantial as the hollow bones of a bird. They sat like that in quiet for a while.
‘Did you like it?’ Madigan asked her at last.
‘Yes, Magda. I liked it very much.’
‘I knew you would. It’s because you and Mr Stupendo are just alike.’ Magda beamed at Drozde. ‘You’re both funny and kind, and you look after me, and you tell the best stories. But you’re most the same because when it’s important enough, you know how to tell the truth as well. You make people see.’
Drozde barely heard these words. She was drifting into sleep, exhausted by the events of the day and lulled by the strangely comforting embrace of the dead girl, who seemed to love her so much for so little reason.
Her dreams were like fever dreams, a cage of repeated images and sensations from which she couldn’t free herself. She woke at last, freezing, her own sweat slick and icy on her skin. Magda’s face was close to hers, watching.
‘I didn’t wake you,’ she said. ‘You seemed so tired.’
‘Thank you, Magda,’ Drozde mumbled. ‘That was kind of you. Now do me another favour, please. Go and see if Molebacher is still there.’
He was, Magda reported. Sitting exactly where he’d been before, with the same expression on his face. It was as though he’d turned into a statue of himself.
‘What time is it?’ Drozde asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well is it day or is it night?’
‘I don’t know. I see day and night all at the same time now. We all do. You said –’
‘Oh, I said!’
‘– that there are only two things you miss when you’re dead. Times and places.’
‘Do I ever say anything that makes sense, Magda?’
‘That does make sense. All the different times sort of become the same time, and all the places … well, there aren’t any. There’s only here. But the times turn into places, so when we walk it gets to be something that happened before or after.’
This made no sense at all, but Drozde raised no further argument. The story of Magda’s death lingered in her mind and tangled itself with the other death she’d witnessed that day until there seemed to be nothing left in the world but mourning.
And Molebacher.
29
Lieutenant Klaes was the last man to leave the flogging ground. No-one sent for him: he supposed that he might be in disgrace with the colonel, but could not summon the will to go and find out. He stayed while the villagers left with their wounded on improvised stretchers, moaning and gasping. He was still there when the old carpenter returned with two other men to carry back the last stretcher, shrouded and silent. He spoke to none of them, only overseeing the removal of the hideous frames. When those were down, he ordered Frydek and his men to take the wood away and burn it on the waste ground behind the kitchen. And then he was left to himself.
He had attended floggings before, keeping his composure by detaching his conscious thoughts from the images he was seeing and the sounds he was hearing so that they became abstract patterns whose meaning he was not obliged to interpret. But this time he could not hide in that self-made refuge. The suffering of the six men was too monstrous and too unjust, and his own complicity too great. He could not undo the wrong; all that remained was to bear witness. Now even that duty was past, and he could not think what he was to do.
He found himself walking out through the gates of Pokoj, between two sentries who let the surprise show on their faces as they looked at his. Was he pale? Flushed? Or was it his mere expression that made them stare at him? He had no idea.
He did not know, either, where he was walking to. He took the road to Narutsin at first, but quickly veered off it. If he set foot in the village now he would probably be mobbed and beaten. It was not to be imagined that the villagers would contain themselves in patience after this. How could they, with the blood of their kin and their neighbours soaking into the earth at the mansion house?
He walked aimless through the woods, chancing across paths he didn’t take, tearing his jacket and trousers on thick brambles. To have no direction, no destination, freed him at least from thinking about what he would do when he stopped.
But he did stop at last, in the middle of some forlorn and denuded timberland. A fallen tree blocked his path. Someone had begun to lop off the branches and to pile them up beside the trunk, ready to be carried away or loaded into a cart. But there was no cart, and no sign of the woodcutter except for his axe left leaning against the tree trunk and a coil of rope dumped on the ground.
In a patch of dappled shadow close by the stump of the felled tree, Klaes threw up the contents of his stomach and, it seemed to him, a great deal else besides. When he was finished he stayed where he was, looking blankly down at the vomit and at the spatter patterns on his boots.
Some time later – a little time or a long time, he could not be sure – he picked up the axe and put it to use, chopping through the remaining branches of the tree to leave the trunk clean and clear. When he began to sweat, which was soon enough, he took off his jacket and then his shirt and worked on.
A strong thirst grew on him. His mouth was sour from the sickness he had voided, and now it was painfully dry too. But there was no water near, so far as he knew. He was several miles from the river. The forest was probably criss-crossed by many small brooks and streams, but a man could wander for ever without finding them unless he knew his way. So he ignored his discomfort and worked on, through what was left of the morning and late into the afternoon. When he finally cast the axe aside the sun was low in the sky and the light reddening.
The sweat on his arms and torso turned chill and slick as soon as he was no longer working. He slipped his shirt back on with some difficulty over his drenched limbs. He picked up his jacket too, but did not put it on.
He sat down on the trunk of the felled tree and pondered. The hard physical exercise had removed the blockage in his thoughts, as he had hoped it might. He was able at last to reflect on what had happened and on his part in it.
He had not precipitated this catastrophe. He had advised Colonel August against the floggings, and on good grounds. True, he had not foreseen how far things might go awry, and certainly he had taken no account of the bizarre friendship between the colonel and the quartermaster sergeant, Molebacher. But he had stood out against this madness while it was still fomenting.
On the othe
r hand, he had allowed himself to be drawn into August’s strange agenda of control and pre-emptive mistrust and to feed it with his efforts. He had pursued the girl, Bosilka Stefanu, and used her very much as Colonel August had used him. He was far from guiltless in this, and he had dragged others into his complicity.
All of this stood very clear in Klaes’s thoughts. What was not clear to him was what would come next. He had been until recently an ambitious junior officer looking forward to war because war allowed quicker advancement. But they were never really his own ambitions. They were his father’s, learned parrot fashion the way all good children learn their lessons.
Only now he had learned a different lesson, and it threw everything else into doubt.
In a kind of desperation, trying to salvage something from his life to date, he remonstrated with himself. You’re a fool. He shaped the words with his lips, and it was even possible that he spoke them aloud. A fool twice over. First that you thought you could go to war and keep from injuring people. And now again, if you think you can do better anywhere else.
Surely the villagers he’d just seen mourning their damaged and their dead were killers too. They had murdered Captain Petos or hidden and nurtured his murderers, and still hid and nurtured them. Though the floggings were insane as a punishment for brawling in the street, they were more than just as retribution for murder.
It would seem, by this logic, that everything hinged on Petos’s death. Or rather, not everything, but at least the viability of Klaes’s position and his ability to rest easy with the decisions he’d made.
He needed the truth. The colonel’s vague suspicions had faded into irrelevance now, but Klaes had to know whether they were built on rock or sand. If the villagers were guilty, what exactly were they guilty of? Had they murdered Petos because he’d caught them out in an illegal enterprise? Had it been some set-to, like the fight that had occasioned the floggings – a sign, in other words, that these people were generally ungoverned and out of control? If it was, and if they were, then it might be possible to live with everything that had happened and still feel oneself a man.