“No, it just needs to be in the room. It’s held like that to protect us.”
“What happens if I touch it? Sudden death? Radiation sickness?”
“You can touch it. I wouldn’t advise you to keep it in your pocket for very long,” said PoTolo: a little less intimidated, this time round.
“I’m returning to the exact place and time where you picked me up?”
“I’ll be using the space-time values recorded during the successful retrieval, yes. But you should know, Mr Forrest, it isn’t that simple.”
On the previous occasion Forrest had disappeared from West Africa at sunset and reappeared, mysteriously bedraggled, an hour before dawn. The interval did not, necessarily, indicate anything about the length of his stay; or even prove that Forrest had arrived on the surface, although the physical evidence was compelling. Forrest had been no help. But proof that the probe had visited a habitable Ancient Venus was safely recorded in the data: and it was very, very convincing.
“It’s a pity you remember nothing. You still remember nothing?”
Forrest shook his head. “Not a thing, alas.”
“This time will be different. We’ll have memory-retrieval ready to pluck the images straight from your head, before they can vanish.”
Forrest smiled politely: thinking of Woodsong the sorceress, and the promise he was about to put to the test. The guests assembled, there was chatter. He stood in the gate. All eyes were on the human element in the apparatus: nobody noticed that the globe had gone from its place. Hands in his pockets, he looked to the west, where Hawa herself had sunk into cloud, but the stars he would never see again were beginning to shine out.
And the world disappeared.
The Old Schoolhouse
Written for S. T. Joshi and Lynne Jamneck’s Gothic Lovecraft anthology. I’ve been a fan of H.P Lovecraft all my life, or at least since I bought a big fat classic Horror anthology at a Jumble Sale when I was eight (my mother, a devout rationalist, was horrified; pun intended) – and fell in love with “The Rats In The Walls”. I also know quite a bit about modernist composers’ works, and their social lives, because my son is devoted to that stuff. For the record, the NASA “planets” recordings are real (in case you didn’t know). The most relevant Lovecraft story is probably “The Shadow Out Of Time”, and as a sound-track stand-in for “Hindey Playground” – but with absolutely no intention of suggesting Stockhausen’s music has eldritch occult connections – you could listen to his Gesunge der Junglinge .
In my opinion, it isn’t real horror if in the end there’s a door out of the funhouse.
Ten days after Eliud’s plane vanished I drove to Norfolk, with my cello and Fenris in the back of the car. It was a warm, dull August day; the sky over Eastern England was the colour of dust. Driving in silence (no music, no news or chat I wanted to hear), I felt strongly that I had company. Over and over I’d peer into my rear mirror, wondering who was in the back seat. My black cello case and the little black dog gazed solemnly back, puzzled by my unease. The illusion was natural: I’d probably never been alone on this journey before. At least one of us, usually Renton, would always have been with me.
I collected the keys from Eliud’s house-agent, and took the long-ago route to Schoolhouse Lane. Eliud’s garden was just as I remembered it. The wildflower banks had gone to seed, a mad tangle of baked stalks and tottering poppy-heads, but the grass plots between them were neatly shorn. I let myself in, dumped my bag and the cello beside a stack of flat-pack storage boxes, and looked around. Nothing had changed. The Victorian Board School’s single classroom, long and high, was all the living space. Along the far wall, French doors opened onto a brick terrace. Where I stood, between Eliud’s study and the kitchen, white-painted crooked stairs led to his bedroom suite. I would sleep up there. The house-agent had told me I couldn’t have a bed made up in the Studio, as in the old days. The garden buildings, our summer camp, were no longer habitable: they’d been allowed to go to seed, like the flowers.
The floors shone, the rugs were brushed. The kitchen, and that tiny lower-orders bathroom next to it, sparkled. The piano was in tune: which startled me, though I knew Eliud had been here. He’d called me from the Schoolhouse three weeks ago. The great man had finally agreed to let his official biographer get to work. He wanted someone to help him sort his papers: pack everything up and send it to his new house outside London. I’d agreed to meet him here, after his trip to Sydney.
But Eliud Tince had vanished, with his current entourage and a planeload of other passengers and crew, over the Southern Ocean (where the plane shouldn’t have been at all). In the end, failing all news, I’d decided to come alone and tackle the job myself. Probably, mainly, because I couldn’t face cancelling his arrangements—
I didn’t know who the biographer was. Before the bust-up it could only have been Michael Renton: Eliud Tince’s amanuensis, his eminence grise; the ‘torturer’ who got the best out of him, as Eliud used to say. But Renton was gone, Renton could no longer be mentioned, so who…? I’d been wondering, picking over the eminent specialists who might be in line, and thinking it’d better not be me the master had in mind. I’m an instrumentalist, not a biographer. I wouldn’t know how to begin. But you never knew, with Eliud. He had strange ideas. I unlocked his study and checked his desk; I climbed the crooked stairs and poked around in his bedroom. There weren’t many places to hide a mountain of paper: the task looked manageable.
But it was too late to start work today. I wandered about, studying framed photographs, mostly black and white; so much better-looking than colour. I found myself in a dark smock under an apple tree, long thin arms and a shock of short dark hair; legs like two tilted sticks propped against my cello’s flanks. And here was Maria Wenger, Eliud’s stepdaughter by his second marriage. Not yet the wonderful, the unique soprano, but already my best friend, in a summery dress all over roses. Yellow roses; I remembered it… It was usually Maria who took the pictures. She was a good photographer, the rest of us were rubbish: Maria in her roses was lucky she’d kept her head. Here was Rikard Glode the pianist, throwing Frisbee with Renton and Julia; while Julia’s daughter, Perseis, aged about two, sat by on a rug. My ex-boyfriend in that shapeless green polo shirt, and the baggy shorts with the frog-pattern… I recognised my friends by their clothes, the way people recognise relatives after a disaster. Only Eliud, grinning in a deck chair, those famous plaid trousers secured around his scrawny waist by an enormous leather belt, was unchanged by the past. I wondered how old he’d been then: more than two decades ago, when I was nineteen? He’d started admitting to ‘the mid-eighties’ recently, but he was notoriously hard to pin down. He wanted us to believe he was immortal, the vain old turtlehead.
We’d been like family, like courtiers, with Eliud as our ruler and Renton his grand vizier; reigning here in deepest Norfolk, and we didn’t go to them: the avant garde music world came to us. But nothing lasts forever. After the big fight with Renton, Eliud had returned to the USA, but not to his native New England. He took up a prestigious post in California and we all went our separate ways.
I’d had my successes since then, but never again known such a magic circle. Now here I was again, drawn back to the source, staring at a black and white photo of my ex-boyfriend at thirty: his merman eyes reduced to punctured grey. His tarnished-gold hair, receding even then, flew around his head in thick metallic scales; so soft to the touch.
I made a mental note to find or create digital copies of all the pictures: save them off and put them with the biographical material.
Later, in dusty twilight, I whistled Fenris from wherever he’d been roaming and we walked up the lane to the Flint Barn; like the Schoolhouse, a relic of the former agricultural community of Hindey; where I knew I’d get signal. Connectivity at the Old Schoolhouse was just as dire as ever. There was no news: only more of the same figures, diagrams and graphs; the same rumours that went nowhere. Maria, an Australian herself, was at the airport, keeping vigil
with the horde of dignified, tearful and terrified relatives, lovers and friends. I was glad Eliud had someone on the spot. His third wife, Lucia Ventto, had been on the flight with him, along with her son Martίn, and Martίn’s newly pregnant girlfriend Annemarie, plus Maria’s sister, the choreographer Judit Saed; and Maria’s dear friend, ex-husband, Mel Colman the operatic conductor… Almost a clean sweep. It was eerie.
I thought of sending a message to Eliud’s phone, hope you’re okay, but that would be ghoulish. I texted Maria instead.
The grain harvest was over. The old barn, a monument to the days when farm labour was plentiful and poor, stood foursquare, facing the remains of sunset on a vast, stubbled, prairie horizon. It was still empty, just as it had been in our day: unconverted, un-reclaimed. I sat with my back to a flint wall that held the heat of the day, waiting for Maria to respond, and reading an article that listed all the vessels, air and sea, that had crashed, been turned back by extreme turbulence, or plain vanished, over the Southern Ocean recently. The phenomenon was blamed on Climate Change. Or Sunspots. Or both… No reply from Maria. It would be early in Sydney. Maybe she was still asleep.
As I headed back in deep twilight, a stooped and blurred figure came towards me on the lonely track. I was almost frightened, but it was only our former neighbour: the artist whose showroom was at the dandy, urban end of our lane, where there was grey asphalt instead of ruts and grass.
“It’s Aiode, isn’t it?” he said, when we were face to face.
“Ay-ee-the,” I corrected him, uneasily. I couldn’t remember his real name. He hadn’t been friendly, as far as I recalled, and nor had we. We called him “Mr Raven”, after a large, ugly black metal raven that stood at his gate. It was still there, I’d noticed it as I drove by.
“I knew you’d be back. I saw Mike Renton in the lane yesterday.”
He was never Mike. Always just Renton, with us. “I don’t think so!”
Mr Raven looked at me oddly. “I’m sure I’d know Mike Renton!”
I shook my head. “I don’t think he’s even in the country.”
“My mistake. I hear old Eliud’s selling off the ancestral home?”
“Ancestral—?”
He gave me the sidelong look again. “Lord, yes! He had family here going back to the old Hindey times, and beyond. They only left when the village got razed, and that was before the War. That’s why he bought that little old place you’re in. Didn’t you know?”
Thankfully Fenris, my inheritance from a foundered relationship, was exploring and didn’t reappear, scrambling from under the hedge, until our nosy neighbour had walked on – saving me from having to explain the presence of Renton’s dog.
It was an unsettling conversation. I wasn’t surprised that Eliud was selling up, but why hadn’t he told me himself, when he asked me here? I was sure Mr Raven couldn’t have seen Renton, anyway. My ex-boyfriend was living in Japan, semi-retired: just firing off the occasional brilliant article or paper, to let the avant-garde world know he was still alive.
∆
In the morning I set up my work camp. I moved furniture, to clear a space on the schoolroom floor: assembled several of the flat-pack boxes, and collected together everything that could be described as ‘papers’. I would sort through them on the long table where we used to eat. The digital stuff: the contents of a venerable PC’s hard drive; plus a jumble of data sticks, memory cards and disks, could wait. The vintage electronic instruments, vials of Eliud’s alchemy, might hold treasure in their primitive ‘memories’, but I’d leave them until last.
Biographical material. Catalogue material, Discography. Original scores; household accounts. Personal letters, business letters, autographed concert programmes… All I could do was make a start. I broke out a new, lined A4 pad, to jot down running notes. Hopefully a system would take shape as I worked.
I was puzzled by the flat packs, when I thought about it. It wasn’t like Eliud to be so organised. Had he got himself a new Renton, and I didn’t know? The idea jarred. Renton could be so overbearing, so possessive… Of course Eliud didn’t want me for a biographer, that was a joke, but he’d definitely hinted he had something to discuss. I’d thought it might be a renewal of our partnership. He hadn’t produced a significant new work for years; it was about time, if it was ever going to happen. So I’d let my hopes run on, and why else had I brought the cello with me, when Eliud was probably dead, if not daydreaming that I would find this new work among his papers, and it would have been written for me—
Now I felt embarrassed at myself, thankful that nobody would ever know; but still threatened by the imaginary new power-broker—
I put the Shock and Awe Fantasia on the schoolroom’s sound system, (for prepared piano, cello and white noise) and set to work; to the raw, sonorous music of Eliud’s elegy for the soul of the USA. He’d fallen out with Shock And Awe, it was ‘too emotional’, but I still loved my own bowing, and the inhuman, incredible precision Eliud had drawn from me. I’d left the crazy little world of the avant garde behind, I’d been a pretty good, middle-rank classical soloist for nearly twenty years, but I still missed the master’s intensity—
A sheet of peculiar, colourful childish drawings started a heap all of its own. When I’d run into four or five of them I looked more closely.
The figures were drawn in pencil, and scattered apparently at random over different-sized sheets of plain paper. The most common was a triangle, with two strong lines jutting from the base, one from each of the diagonals, and a circle balanced at the apex; like a child’s first version of the human form. Ovoids and squares, less frequent, followed the same pattern. The ‘heads’ had no features, but softer, wavy lines often extended from both ‘heads’ and ‘bodies’; like curly hair, or tentacles; or sine waves. Nearly all the figures were coloured; carelessly scribbled over in blue, red, yellow or dark green. Some were isolated, some in rows, some clustered: some were very small, some much larger.
At first I’d thought they really were children’s drawings. There’d always been children in Eliud’s life. But each sheet was dated and annotated, in the master’s own handwriting. The dates were years apart, and the drawings seemed more coherent, less childish, the more I looked. There was decision and purpose in them, sharp as the knife-edge arpeggios of Shock and Awe. They seemed faintly familiar, too. Had I once known about these strange geometric fish? If they were part of something, an idea developing over decades, what did they mean?
I pondered over one of Eliud’s annotations. Other dimensions are not spatial but exist at right-angles to our own… Was there an optical illusion involved? Obedient, from long training, to my composer’s weird demands, I held one of the sheets edge-on to my nose, and tried to look along it sideways; at right angles. I caught a glimpse of something whipping out of sight; or opening and swiftly closing—
But Fenris was barking and barking. I dropped the paper and rushed around the house: I couldn’t find him. I ran outdoors in a panic and raced around the garden, calling Fenris, Fenris: charging over turf, crashing through flower banks, but the little dog just went on barking madly, somewhere out of sight. Twisted orchard boughs encroached on the shady lawn where Rikard had pitched his tent. The buildings – the Studio, my nest that Renton had shared; the Cabin; the Tenements, the Treehouse and the Sauna (not a sauna, but another spare bedroom, in our day) lay derelict, and I didn’t have the keys with me, I couldn’t get in. I could only rub at cobwebs and peer through dusty glass like a ghost. I shouted Fenris, Fenris, but the little black dog had stopped barking—
Then he started up again: much further away. He must have chased a rabbit into Eliud’s parcel of trees – a narrow slip of woodland, attached to the property but jutting into the lonely prairie fields. In a gap in the orchard hedge there was a polished root that served as a doorsill: I stepped over it, the trees closed around me, and once more nothing had changed. The same narrow path led the eye to a distant lozenge of pale daylight; the same brooding atmosphere swall
owed me. The trees pressed close: mostly young oaks and thorns, rising from a vicious understorey of bramble, and competing for light with the big old twisted chestnuts. I hurried up the path, still calling Fenris! Insects buzzed. Birds scolded unseen. Once the wings of a big hunting hawk flashed between branches. None of us had ever liked the wood: but I thought I knew what was in it. About two thirds through, I came across something I’d never seen before.
Long ago, a massive chestnut had fallen. The timber must have been dragged out and taken away. The stump had remained, tipped on its side, grey starfish roots reaching for the sky; guarding a hollow, open space. We’d tried to enjoy this secret glade in the old days: bringing picnics, rugs and wine; building midnight bonfires. But not often. The narrow wood repelled us, literally. It drove us away. It was dark and ugly; everything prickled and there were biting insects.
I was tired and hot. Fenris was still barking, but now he was behind me. I realised the futility of chasing a little dog who was running round in circles, and noticed a series of pale patches in the leaf litter; like splashes of sunlight where there was no sun. I stepped on one of them: and it was a stone. There was a ring of pale stones set in a circle around the glade. They must have been buried in our day: brought to the surface, maybe, by last winter’s spectacular rains. There were marks on them, like drawings. Hunkered down for a closer look I saw traces of colour, and seemed to hear a kind of chiming, a kind of chattering—
But Fenris was barking and barking.
I ran through the trees again, oblivious of tearing brambles, and back into the house. The French doors were open: my car was parked beside the terrace. Beyond my parking space Eliud’s drive had been overwhelmed by weeds, and somewhere in there Fenris was terrified: barking and barking… I fought my way into the tangle ambushed by sticky burrs, savaged by nettle stings, and found him crouched on the doorstep of the Caravan; which still stood in its old place, immoveable now, white flanks devoured by bindweed and goosegrass. I picked up the little black dog and hugged him tight.
BIG CAT: And Other Stories Page 11