This was the south plantation. There were the orchards and the citrus grove. Not that it wasn’t winter here as well. Not that darkness wasn’t falling. Not that things hadn’t changed. But still, this was the place. The house was unlit, but somehow waiting as the followers ahead of him waded the slopes of undergrowth towards the bowl of the valley in a fanning grey wave. Ralph stumbled and fell with them. More warning signs and prohibitions against trespass had been erected around the main courtyard beside the stables, and its gravelled space was occupied by several sheds and the rusty arms of an aether engine. People were milling, pointing, exclaiming in the thinning evening. He heard Marion’s voice. She was blocking the chained front entrance, telling people that Invercombe wasn’t safe, that they must go no further, that beneath the foundations of this house and out into the cove beyond there had been a huge spillage of aether. For now at least, and although there was much grumbling, they were doing as she said. Perhaps, but only for tonight, they might sleep in these grim old sheds. But the atmosphere was uncertain. For why had they come so far, if it wasn’t for this place which the Beetle Lady had promised? And how could this woman who claimed to be Marion Price now be telling them they couldn’t enter this fine and beautiful house if she really was who she said? A gun sounded in the falling darkness. The rumour was passing that there were strange creatures out in the gardens. Monsters, even. There were gasps, hand-clutchings. Ralph had seen such situations when hope and disappointment collided in the times of unrest which had preceded this war. Things could easily grow dangerous.
‘We can’t just let them go in there, Ralph,’ Marion shouted to him as he forced his way through to her. ‘These signs are your own guild’s. You tell them … !’
‘They’d take no notice of me, Marion.’
She nodded her head, but it was in frustration rather than in agreement. Fires were being lit from stuff plundered from the courtyard. Figures and flames leaped across the high walls of Invercombe. ‘I’ll go inside, Ralph. If I tell them what it’s like, they might just believe me. After all, wasn’t all this work done to make the house habitable again?’
‘No one cared about the house—it was done to reclaim the raw aether. And who knows how much is left.’ The door, Ralph noticed, was already ajar beneath its antique lintel. There was even a suggestion of the scuff of footsteps amid the grit and dust. ‘Marion, you can’t go in there. Haven’t you just been telling these people that it could be dangerous?’
‘Then who does?’
Ralph took a slow breath. ‘The house belongs to my guild, Marion. And look at me, what have I got to lose?’
A torch, its bulb and batteries still working, was found in one of the sheds. There were contoured plans which showed Invercombe’s familiar outlines overlain with dense swirls of magics, although, as other followers clustered helpfully around him bearing useless logbooks and tea rosters and pre-war calendars, he had little idea of how to make sense of any of them. Still, he felt an affinity for these departed guildsmen. Just how much aether was left? Enough, certainly, he thought grimly as something black and figure-like danced towards him from a clustering, excited group, for the men to need to wear rubberised suits whilst they worked in there. The outfit stank as if it had been worn through many shifts, but he supposed that he had little choice but to pull the thing on, if only for the sake of show, and then to submit to the added weight of its fishtank helmet. The supporting brass collar dug across the bones of his shoulders. Its angled glass presented a fractured version of the world. The filters were old, as well. Each breath was a musty weight. Someone, perhaps a guildsworker who had once used such things, then found an aethometer amid the ransacked equipment. Rectangular, knurled, glass-faced, about twice the size of a cigarette packet, its pointer gave a lazy twitch in its bath of mercury—still low, still safe—as Ralph studied it in his gloved hands. This was hardly how he’d imagined re-entering Invercombe, but it certainly felt like some kind of dream.
Fumbling with the torch, he unhooked the last chain with his insensible fingertips and pushed open the door into Invercombe’s great hall. The hazily penetrating beam glinted across dusty parquet. The ceiling had held, although there were some signs of damp. He clumped forward. As his beam lingered on the paintings, he saw that many of them were hung upside down, and then that pickling jars and razor shells had been placed along the marble dressers where fine Cathay vases had once stood. Guildsmen’s humour, he supposed. Shivering, alternately hot and cold inside the clammy embrace of his suit, he laboured on.
Everywhere, these slight rearrangements. Flashing the torch back towards the ceiling, he saw that the lightbulbs had all been neatly removed. But perhaps that was also the aether workers—and it was better, certainly, to concentrate on practical considerations than to worry about ghosts and uncertainties. That way, the library, although, as if the sea itself had somehow risen this impossibly far, the carpet was strewn with rotting weed. This way, the west parlour and the peacock room. All surprisingly intact. He checked the aethometer. Still barely registering. Perhaps this place really might provide a haven for the followers.
He flickered the torch into each of the main ground-floor rooms, saw fine chairs he’d once sat on and longed to sit on again, although there were more pebbles and other bits of shore. He had a choice now of going up or down. He debated routes and possibilities. The sensation, as his head throbbed and he took the quick needy breaths which were all his lungs or the suit’s filters seemed capable of achieving, was entirely familiar … He had no particular desire to investigate Invercombe’s damp lower reaches, but if there was danger left in the place, that was surely where it would lie. And he could check the generators as well. It made every kind of sense.
A green service door lay to the left of the lavender room. A red warning triangle had been nailed to it. The oval of his torch dancing below him, he took the spiral stairs, then leaned to catch his breath against the long, arched corridor which led one way towards Steward Dunning’s old office (what chances, part of him which he didn’t want to listen to was muttering, that she’s still there?) and the other various storerooms and to the next set of stairs. Narrower, these. Then gleams of damp, or possibly engine ice, although still not enough to cause concern. Funny, when by logic he should be hoping that it remained safely dark, that he should be wishing for light. He inspected the torch. Was it fading? He tumbled the last steps and landed in a sprawl.
This was the service level. He could tell, even in the cocoon of his helmet as he crawled himself back upright, that the generators were still turning. Their hum reached through his bones and the torch, as if encouraged by their presence, shone more brightly over their beetle cables and red flanks. Yes yes yes yes … He could even hear their song over the gasp of his own breath. Then there came a clicking. Imagining footsteps, he froze, held his breath. But the sound was familiar to him as well. There, beyond the last fading needlepoint injunctions—There’s No Work Like Early Work—lay the reckoning engine, still working on some seep of residual purpose and current. He studied it in amazement. It, far less amazed, seemed to study him. He picked his way on. More red triangles. Ralph had never gone lower than this into Invercombe’s catacombs, but the barred metal gate which led towards Invercombe’s sea caverns had been broken open, and the downturning tunnel beyond seemed to swallow the light of his torch, and yet gave off a definite glow, which grew as he descended. He glanced at the aethometer’s needle. Still safe here, but considerably less so. His feet skidded. He steadied himself. The roof, as he descended, gripping the ropes hung from rusty iron hoops in the walls, rose and fell, dripping and glinting, then ascended into a larger space. Unmistakably now, these were caverns carved by the sea. A shifting mist shone in the beam of his torch. Still, the meter was climbing. Who knew what tides and ravages had been summoned to Clarence Cove? This—for the steps were scummed and luminously green—was surely as far as he needed to go. But Ralph’s weariness was lost to curiosity in this strange, sea-breathing place.
He entered the full breadth of a natural cavern which opened to Clarence Cove. There was no need to check the aethometer here. The tides pulsed with brilliant darkness. The salt air glowed. He turned off the torch, which now only produced a useless fan of black. The aethered sea, darkly gleaming, booming, beating, rose and fell, and Ralph breathed with it, and it breathed with him. Its froth was densely braided with a wrack of weed and timber and many other leavings. Jewelled with chains and the bones and bodies of strange fish and a scuttled ship’s wreckage and fragments of terracotta, it rose and broke. In a shuddering heave, the sea washed closer. Against the dimmer glow of the night beyond, climbing in scaffolding, riding on buoys and pontoons, bobbing on chains, scrambling out across rocks on concrete and rail as if attempting to escape, were the structures with which the aether workers had attempted to tame this place. But they had failed, and the remains of their work now sprouted mocking ornaments of cuckoo-growth. The sea laughed with the jagged purple mouths of giant mussels, it streamed with glowing fronds of bladderwrack. Glad at last for the discomforts of his suit, Ralph turned back to the steps, but then something seemed to move far up in the cave. Were those eyes, or pebbles in a jellyfish? Was that phosphorous hair, or merely rotting weed? And what exactly had the followers claimed they’d seen out in Invercombe’s gardens? But the panes of his helmet were misting, and this place was simply starting to play on his mind.
Angling down the torch until its light finally brightened, he felt his way back up through the bowels of the house. This climb seemed far longer than the descent. He coughed, hacked. Part of him longed to rip this damn helmet off and breathe, but at the same time it seemed ridiculous to risk exposure now when so little of the house was left to be seen. The impossible purpose of the generators and the reckoning engine ticked and clicked and lingered with that half-seen face as he climbed the service stairs, and then leaned through a final green door, and shuffled towards the best stairs, which soared above him, a veritable waterfall of carpet. He coughed. A spray of blood coated the inside of his visor.
This was just like old times, and worse. At last, crawling on all fours, his consciousness floating on the dimming beam of his torch, he gained the landing. He thought of checking his aethometer, but realised he’d left it far away at the foot of the stairs, which he doubted if he would ever have the strength to return to. But all that was left, all he owed himself and the rest of the followers, was to prove that Invercombe was safe. Then, he could rest. Ralph’s helmet clanged a wall as he stumbled along the main landing. He hesitated, swaying beneath its weight. All the forgotten horrors of his old fevers, their bland unreasoning logic, the hot sense of conflicts which he alone could resolve, were returning. Then, but certain this time as the ache of his breathing, something moved ahead.
This same corridor with these same pictures. Dustier, yes. And distorted through the blood-mottled panes of his helmet. But still these same gilt-framed pictures of flowers on the walls, even if they were strung with scraps of weed now and ornamented with old bits of lemon rind, of all things, and then hung upside down. Yes, this was the place it had always been and something, quite beyond doubt, had moved ahead of him. A shape, which, in its departing, had turned the same corner which he must turn, which he knew would lead to his own room just as it always had, and still did in his dreams. Nothing had changed. Not even him. He moved forward. His torch had paled, and there was no aether here, but the night sky outside had cleared to admit a rising moon which danced and shifted amid the mullions. A dresser shone. His shadow moved across the walls and the house seemed to move with him. This was like that moment before that meal, when he’d been wandering the gardens. The thing about ghosts, he’d realised then, was that you only saw them afterwards. What you saw at the time was simply reality.
Ralph, as he moved on towards his old room, wondered why he’d clung to logic for so long. After all the things which had unravelled, why should he have ever expected this house to make any sense to him? It wasn’t about danger or not danger. It wasn’t about the crowds or the Beetle Lady or this war or even Marion Price … The door to his room swung shut ahead of him. This was far too much, but then again, it was all to be expected. Time was running backwards, and many spells had been cast, and many seas had risen, and he fully expected, as he gripped the handle in his gauntlet hand and twisted it, to discover his younger self lying there in the bed in the grip of a fever through which the rest of his life had been lived. The fleeting sense of meaning, the heavy heat, the restless purpose, all seemed entirely right. Perhaps logic did exist within a final core of meaninglessness. And perhaps this was it.
His old bedroom, in the moonlight, was more than ever an expression of all the life of the sea which, he smiled to realise, he’d been the first person to bring to it. But the rocks and the leavings of the strand had multiplied, and been loosely strewn and returned to their natural randomness in the process. Even through his helmet, he could smell the rot of weed. His throat whistled and groaned. He dropped the useless torch. There, before him, dimly illuminated, blue-lipped and ghastly pale, floated a face.
‘What are you?’ he heard himself ask.
The face tilted. It smiled queerly. Even more odd was the way the look of it reminded him of Marion, or his own features in a mirror. Not, at least, a face of pebbles and fishscales, but then he saw that many other things, seemingly naked yet made partly of old leaf or rusted metal or naked bone, were moving at the far corners of his lost room and the far, dim edges of his helmet.
‘I know who you are.’ Know who you are … who you … are… Echoes of the words rode on Ralph’s thoughts. He coughed and shook his head. The room twirled dizzily. The creatures which now stirred in the strands of moonlit darkness were one thing, but, for all his sea-filth and ragged attire, the one who spoke lispingly to him was unmistakably human. It reached out. Dimly, Ralph felt a finger indent the rubberised fabric which covered his chest. ‘You’re one of us. You’re the Diving Man.’ The spitting voice and the rustles of meaning which tumbled afterwards gave every word an extra emphasis. ‘And these are the Shadow Folk. This is our home.’
It seemed pointless to disagree, and it had begun to strike Ralph that, for all this lad’s wild manner and the bizarre other things which filled the room’s shadows—changelings, he was beginning to guess—his own appearance, suited, and with bloodstained glass fracturing what they could see of his face, was probably at least as strange, and as frightening. He tore at his gloves and thumbed the clasps to release his helmet. Ripe, rancid, blessed air broke over him. ‘And who are you?’ he asked with what was left of his voice.
‘I’m Klade,’ the lad replied. ‘I’m the Bonny Boy. I’m what Marion Price made. I went to Einfell until it grew empty and then I came here. I’m part of the War Effort.’
XIII
SOME OF THE BRAVER or more foolhardy followers had already entered Invercombe’s halls that night despite all Marion’s attempts at prohibition, and it was one of them, a buttoneer from Penzance, who found Ralph Meynell, and the wild lad called Klade who was with him. Ragged and wet and proud and exhausted, the rest of the followers took Ralph’s survival as a signal that this house was entirely safe. After all, why had they come this far otherwise? And wasn’t this, they exclaimed as they wandered, amazed, amid the halls and state rooms and the waiting bedrooms and bounteous kitchens, exactly what the Beetle Lady had promised? Candles were found and lanterns were lit and fires were set in grates. Boots were taken off and feet were ruefully inspected and massaged amid the spreading light and heat. The changed, the monsters, whatever threat there ever had been which might have existed here, had certainly fled. And good riddance. And who cared? Everywhere that night and on into the coming dawn, as the followers filled out through the house and faces were washed and fresh linen was found and instantly dirtied and people milled and talked and laughed in all the ways which their long journey had precluded and Invercombe’s chimneys smoked for the first time in almost two decades, th
ere were expressions of surprised recognition.
‘Just like home.’
‘You never lived in a place like this!’
‘You know our son up in Nottingham?’
‘Nottingham ain’t where we used to live.’
‘Where is this, anyway?’
‘Look at the size of them chairs… !’
‘Me, I could murder a fag.’
‘Heard there’s a box in that room with all the books. Nah, I think it’s that way …’
‘Place is a bloody maze.’
‘Great, innit.’
‘Just like home.’
‘You know, I’m sure I’ve dreamed about this place.’
‘I’m dreaming still…’
Everywhere, this constant happy babble of voices. There were families from Tipton and couples from Bracebridge and lonely men and absent lovers and the hunched, arthritic elderly, all reunited and re-joined, and Marion could almost feel that she was just another part of this as she settled the hunched creature who called himself Klade in Steward Dunning’s old office at the far end of an unpromising low white corridor with its lines of framed injunctions, where she imagined they were unlikely to be disturbed. The lad was wild and itchy and wary. He stank, and she could tell right away from the way he looked about him and shifted his elbows in the creaking swivel chair that he was uncomfortable in small, enclosed spaces. And the layout of the room meant that she had no choice but to sit like some figure of authority on the opposite side of the desk whilst all around her in the lanternlight, in that kidney bean paperweight and the old diary still open on the page for that last day of her and Ralph’s planned escape, her own lost past screamed out to her. In every way, she had made a bad choice of place.
The House of Storms Page 40