by Jeff Noon
But the thought of his family set Nyquist into reverie, and the passing countryside had a lulling effect on him. The doctor let him be, and concentrated on her driving.
He felt he’d been in the village for longer than three days. He could barely recall how scared he’d been, at his first sight of open land, and the never-ending sky. Now he felt the landscape mirrored him perfectly, and he felt more at home here. The news of a family connection made him want to dig deeper: it was like finding a puddle of precious water at the bottom of an ancient well.
The doctor was speaking, and he had to tune in to catch her words.
“… and so we had a little fling, the two of us.”
“Sorry, who?”
“Myself and the professor. Back when the world was young and full of glee. And she was quite the catch, back then, believe me. Of course, we had to keep it hidden.”
“You were Edmund to her Alice?”
“Don’t be disgusting. Edmund and Alice are siblings.” She smiled. “What do you think I am, a pervert?”
“And what about now?”
“Now? Alone. All alone. Except of course for my beloved saints.”
The car bumped over something in the road.
“What was that?” Nyquist asked.
“A dead dog. Actually, just a pothole. Anyway, we’re here now. King’s Grave, as requested.”
She brought the car to a halt. The land seemed to close in around the vehicle. A stone wall on one side of the road, a field on the other, which vanished into a haze of drizzle and mist after only a few yards. It was a lonely place, and cold, and for a few moments both driver and passenger sat in silence.
Higgs spoke first. “We don’t know for sure which king is supposed to be buried here. Some old Saxon warlord or other, I suppose. Aelfric Bloodaxe. Something like that.”
Nyquist took out his pocket atlas and turned to the page where Len Sadler had marked the location of the farmhouse. He would have to cross open land to get there. A lone magpie hopped along the stone wall, unperturbed by human presence.
The doctor asked, “What are you doing out here, Edmund?”
“I’m not sure. But there’s a house somewhere near, an old farmhouse, or a cottage, and I think my father lived there for a while.”
Higgs shivered. “Rather you than me. How will you get back?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I’ll be driving back this way in a couple of hours, once I’ve seen to my patient. I’ll park here and wait for a quarter hour or so. After that…”
“Yes, I know.”
“You’re on your own.”
“Thank you.” But he was reluctant to leave.
“What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
“I’ve told you about the photographs?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I showed you the one of my father.”
“Oh yes.”
“Well there are seven of them altogether. Seven photographs. Somebody sent them to me, and I don’t know who it was. But they brought me here, to the village.”
“They’re a kind of lure, do you mean?”
He looked at her. “There was a game I used to play with my dad. We’d cut a random set of images from a book, and from newspapers and magazines, arrange them in a circle, and then tell a story backwards, using the pictures as prompts, or clues.”
“No wonder you ended up a detective!”
“Maybe.”
“So how did you win?”
“By making up the funniest or the wackiest story.”
“You invented this game?”
“No. My father did. He called it Widdershins.”
“Which means counterclockwise. To go against. Or to move in an opposite direction.”
“Really? I thought he’d just made the word up.”
Higgs smiled at this. “We were taught the word at school, and instructed never to walk widdershins around the church, or else we’d bump into the devil.”
“I think I took the left-hand path around the church, on my first day here.”
“Oh? Who did you meet?”
“Just your common or garden ghosts. But they were inside my head.”
“The worst kind, I always think.”
“The point is, my father always beat me at widdershins. He had a fierce imagination.”
“So you think the photographs you were sent connect to this game, in some way?”
He shrugged.
“But that means your father sent them to you, doesn’t it? Isn’t that what you want?”
“Maybe. Look, if I don’t see you later, doc, I tell you how I got on tomorrow.” He opened the door and stepped out into the road. The magpie flew off. Likewise, the car drove away and was soon lost from sight and hearing.
Nyquist was alone in the wilderness, more now than ever. The sky was low enough that he felt he could reach up and touch the dark clouds. The air was heavy with humidity. It wasn’t exactly raining, but he was soaked by the time he’d taken the half-cobbled path that led across the field: his skin and clothes collected moisture. But he kept going, bowing his head whenever the wind came up. And with each step he felt the mask was taking him over once again; perhaps the beetle’s effect was wearing off? He did his best to fight against the impulse, to keep his mind clear. He had to find this house, he had to see if his father was still there. The slightest chance took a hold of him and would not let go. He stepped off the pathway, onto grass. He could only trust he was going in the right direction. He passed the remains of an animal, half eaten, the wool a matted bloody mess around a wound. A lost sheep, most probably. Or a sacrificial lamb.
Now his feet were sinking into the soft muddy ground. Each step was a struggle. He imagined that his progress was churning up the bones of the Saxon king, long dead, probably more peat than calcium. A blast of wind attacked him; his overcoat whipped at his sides like the wings of a demented crow. Droplets of rain found their way inside his mask giving him the feeling of being underwater, like he was drowning. He tried to shake off the fear. And then, conjured from his thoughts almost, a dark mass appeared in the distance, a structure of some kind. He had to hope it was the cottage and he started to walk faster.
Now the rain hit hard, driven sideways by the wind.
He battled on, head down, body bent over. He had no sense of time passing, only the placing of one foot in front of the other, counting the steps taken for no reason other than to keep himself distracted. 52, 53, 54, 55, 56… And when he next glanced up, he was already standing in front of the cottage. It was shrouded in mist, the one window boarded up. It was a small place, single story, made of local stone, with holes in the roof slates and the walls crumbling at every edge and surface that had met the wind and the rain over the years. But it wasn’t quite the ruin he’d expected from Len Sadler’s description.
The door was locked. A tour of the building yielded no easy entrance: no back door, a single window at the rear, also boarded up. A number of metal sculptures or totems occupied the garden area, made out of rusting engine parts. They reminded him of the sort of thing his father used to make in his workshop, devices for strange operations, or machines to record shapes in the mist.
The door of a wooden outbuilding was banging in the wind. There was a toilet inside, actually just a hole in the ground, probably with a cesspit below. He leaned over and dared to look down. Only darkness. Not even a smell to indicate it had been used recently. But when he turned back to the house, he took note of a bicycle propped against the wall. It looked new, well-cared for. It must belong to someone. He walked back to the front door. Nyquist stood there helpless as the rain fell on him, and ran down his collar. What a pitiless scene this was! And then he saw the upturned flowerpot next to the step. He lifted it up to reveal a key. Quickly he unlocked the door and stepped inside, grateful to be out of the elements. His entire body was shivering from the cold. He felt that he’d walked a good five miles or more, not the few hundred yards from
the road.
It was one single room, quiet but not silent. The wooden beams creaked and the wind whistled mournfully at every tiny crevice. The stones of the walls were slowly and softly grinding against each other. There was a sink in one corner, but no taps, no running water: there must be a well somewhere close by. But the cottage was tidy; it was being looked after by someone, that was evident. The sheets on the bed in the corner were neat and tucked in, a woollen blanket folded on top. Even the fireplace was spotlessly clean, free of ash and soot. It wasn’t a paradise, by any means – patches of moss grew on the walls and rain dripped in through a hole in the ceiling. A metal bucket had been placed beneath the drip. It beat an out-of-time tattoo.
plink
plink
plink
It was easy to imagine a person ending up here, as a hideout, someone on the run, in hope of disappearance from the crowded life. Which begged the question: what the hell had brought his father to this place?
Nyquist made a closer examination of the room’s contents. A small stash of tin cans: garden peas, baked beans, luncheon meat. A camping stove. A row of books on a shelf. An oil painting on the wall, an amateur work by the looks of it, depicting green fields and hills bathed in sunlight. There was something odd about the image. He moved closer. In tiny lettering across the bottom edge someone had written a message in red: Creeping Jenny is calling. Nyquist thought of the name Sylvia had given him: “Written in Blood.” Was it a coincidence, the red color? Did it mean something? Was this a warning from his father? The painting held his eye. And without knowing why, Nyquist mumbled a little phrase to himself: Written in blood. One penny’s worth. And he thought about the penny blood bottle Professor Bryars had shown him. Was that the correct amount of money to be spent, for a relic? For evidence? Evidence of what? Paternity? One penny is all it takes, kind sir, lay your money down, absolute bargain. A splash of your father’s blood, guaranteed genuine. He shook the thoughts away. It was the goddamn cottage, it was getting to him, making him nervous. The shadows, the ghosts in the walls, and the creaking timbers and the rain dripping down.
Nyquist drew his coat tighter, against the cold and the mood.
It was difficult to connect the proud, fine, upstanding man he remembered from his early childhood with the possible resident of this room. And yet he had run away, leaving his son to fend for himself. Had this impulse to wander always been there, a part of his father’s nature, waiting to be activated, perhaps by his wife’s death, by Darla’s passing? She’d died when Nyquist was just seven years old. Everything changed after that, everything. But what had made his father want to disappear into the fog one day, and then reappear here, in the village of his ancestors, so many years later? And then, why choose to live here, in isolation, rather than in the village? None of it made sense.
plink
plink, plink
plink
A strange mathematical equation took Nyquist over: from the rate of the drips, and the diameter of the hole in the ceiling, and the precise amount of rainwater in the tin bucket, he might be able to work out the date when his father had left this place. All he would need is a record of the rainfall over the last few weeks, or months…
Of course, it was madness.
He walked over to the bookshelf and ran a finger along the spines. Forgotten Moon, Gunshots from Hell, Viper’s Kiss, The Devil’s Mistress, Night Prowler. It was certainly typical of his father’s reading habits, as remembered from youthful days. But the last book on the shelf was very different. Nyquist took it down. It was a guide to birdspotting entitled Auberon’s Guide to the Birds of Great Britain. He remembered Len Sadler mentioning this – that his father had asked for such a book, and that Sadler had found one for him. And more than that, much more: now that he saw the cover, Nyquist remembered this book from his youth. It was the most popular of all the bird books, at the time, and his father had given him a copy as a birthday present. He opened it now. The title page told its own story: To my son, Johnny, on his 7th birthday. It was his father’s handwriting. His father had for some reason written exactly the same inscription in this copy, as he had all those years ago. Nyquist had forgotten all about this. He had forgotten until this moment.
plink
plink
The book trembled in his hands as he turned from one page to another: the colored plates, the different species, the details of song and habitat and migration patterns.
Mute swan… Cygnus olor… waterfowl native to most parts of the islands… resident in all seasons of the year… orange and black beak, graceful curved neck…
It was strange present to give to a boy, for the city they’d lived in wasn’t known for its birdlife, or wildlife of any kind, really, beyond the rat, the street dog, and the pigeon. Yet the book had fascinated him, and he would often lie awake at night, gazing at the pictures, and then falling asleep to dream of flight. The skylark!
He turned to another page at random, the pied wagtail, and knew at once that the book was meant for him – now, as it was back in his youth – for a green tendril rose from the page as he opened it. It was much thinner than the other two he’d seen, on cup and gun, but it moved quickly, stretching out and wrapping itself around his finger, seeking a bond with flesh. This time he let the plant-like creature be. He was joined to the paper. Here she was, Creeping Jenny herself, or at least a tiny part of her, as Sadler had explained. The tendril slithered and tied itself around his whole hand, and then the wrist, more of it arising each second from the depths of the book, from the story within, the story of chirrups and squawks, of claws and beaks and feathers, of flight and egg laying, and nest building and fledglings. He was lost in the long glide to earth from the heights, the sudden updraft under the wings, the skimming of the airwaves, the swoop and turn in midair, escaping gravity…
A noise was heard, coming from outside.
Footsteps.
Nyquist panicked. He dropped the book and pressed himself against the wall. It wasn’t fear, or at least not fear of a stranger, but fear of his father; that he would now have to face him, man to man – young to old, child to parent after all this time apart. He felt vulnerable. Exposed. And yet he had to move, he had to see, to make sure. Yet still he hesitated.
A few last drops of rain fell into the bucket.
plink
plink, plink
plink
And then silence. Perhaps the two men were as fearful as each other, both unseen, both in hiding. Father and son, could it be? Nyquist put an end to the waiting. He stepped into the doorway and over the threshold into the dim light of the field where a figure was standing, swathed in a large rainproof coat, the hood up, face shadowed. There was no time to act, no time to be startled even, as the figure strode forward, arm raised, something clenched within it, a club, or a branch. Nyquist felt the impact on the side of his head and he plunged into the darkness of day, and he fell to the ground, to the wet ground, his feet and then his right hand slipping in the mud as the hooded figure came in to strike a second time.
No. No more.
It wasn’t said aloud. The words were spoken inside, inside – no, not spoken, but cried out. No, not cried… but screamed, screamed out inside, in silence.
NO MORE!
And Nyquist’s hand came up to protect himself, to grab at the branch his attacker held, and they struggled momentarily, the two of them, before the other staggered away, dropping the weapon and taking off across the field.
Nyquist rested where he was on the ground. His hand came up to the side of his head, where he felt blood from the cut. His hair was matted, the blood running down inside his mask, across his face. His eyes were covered in a red sheen, the field of King’s Grave painted with the same color. Frantically, his hands pulled at the mask, trying to tear it free, but the thing was stuck, glued in place, the spell still working.
He got to his feet, feeling dazed and weak, almost falling again.
But he kept upright, and moved around clumsily, l
ooking out across the moors, into the distance – the sky low down and unrelenting in gray, brooding, the sun already dipping toward the horizon. His eyes blinked away the blood as he searched for his attacker, but the fields were empty. He moved around the cottage, seeking another vantage, and then he saw a shape moving along the line of a hill, running away and disappearing over the crest. Nyquist set off in pursuit, his feet seeking a good purchase on the muddy ground. As he went, he repeated each of his three names to himself, trying to make a choice, to fix himself in one identity. But each name had its own and equal claim on him. Edmund Grey. John Nyquist. Written in Blood. John Nyquist. Written in Blood. Edmund Grey…
And so it went on. He was out of breath by the time he made the top of the hill. He looked down into a shallow valley where several pieces of metal lay scattered around.
The rain had stopped completely by now.
Nyquist walked down the slope, past the rusting machinery, the spilled innards of an engine, a broken wing decorated with a scarred ensign: the red, blue and white roundel of the RAF. It was the remains of a small airplane, the fuselage already half buried and covered over with bracken and moss. A large pool of water lay to one side, framed in rocks and earth, its surface dark and motionless beneath the sky. The single blade of a propeller protruded from the center of the tarn; it must’ve been thrown there in the crash. Nyquist couldn’t help thinking of the sword Excalibur returned to Lake Avalon.
The hooded figure stood among the wreckage of the plane. He was no longer trying to run away. Nyquist stopped moving also, not wanting to scare the young man. For he could see now who it was.
“Teddy?”
The name acted as a trigger, causing the man to lower the hood of his coat, bringing his face into view.
“It’s me, Nyquist. John Nyquist.”
The lad shook his head in disgust. “I know who you are.”
“You’re not wearing a mask.”
“I don’t need to.” Teddy’s voice was petulant, always on the edge of hurt. “No one can make me do it.”
“You’re braver than I am, then.”