‘Ralph, the man who found you here, says you might be—’
‘Who are you?’ he hissed back through bared teeth in an accent she’d never previously heard.
The question, simple though it sounded, made Marion pause. She certainly wasn’t the creature whose name the people were still shouting and banging out on pots as they ransacked—and this was something she would have to take in hand, it was certain no one else would—this house. But still, she had to say it. ‘I’m Marion Price. I think I might be your—’
‘You’re not! You can’t be … !’
He looked a little like the younger Ralph, she had to admit, but perhaps it was no more than the resemblance she saw etched in the pain of many other faces.
‘I’m sorry, but I am. It’s just that people have… the wrong impression of me.’
He leaned further back from her, still blackly tensed as steel. His chair creaked. But at least he hadn’t attempted to escape. Or attack her.
‘Were you really raised at Einfell?’
He nodded, or at least gave his chin a jerk. He doesn’t look old or young, she thought. He doesn’t look anything—he’s like the soldiers you can heal in the flesh but who still remain wounded. He’s something only this war could have made …
‘Do you know where you were born, Klade?’
‘It was …’ He licked his lips. He tended to spit as he spoke, and dampness flecked her face. ‘A place called Saint Alphage’s. That was what Silus took me to in Bristol away from the song and showed me.’
‘Silus?’ Song?
‘He was…’ The lad gestured vaguely. Like everything else he did, the movement was slightly off key. As if he’d learned to be human at one remove. Which she supposed would be the case …
‘Was?’
‘He and Ida raised me.’
Signatures on the papers she’d seen back in Saint Alphage’s, although she couldn’t remember the names. But, with a falling sense of horror, Marion realised that Klade must have stared through those same iron gates.
‘Ida’s dead,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t know about Silus and that man who said he was my father won’t say …’
Which father? When? Did he mean Ralph, or the changelings? ‘I’m sorry.’ How many more times was she going to have to say that? Klade, with his reddened eyes and spiked dirty hair and murmuring hands and impossible voice and name, was more like a grown version of that thing she had discovered under the sink at Saint Alfies than the child she’d once dreamed she might have had.
‘What I mean is, I never knew about you, Klade. When I did… When I did, I’d have come this way sooner. But I’d learned then that you might have been sent to Einfell. And part of me feared that—’
‘What?’ His hands skittered on bright black metal. The bolt clicked back in an aethered glow. His eyes suddenly blazed. ‘That I’d be one of the chosen, a changeling?’
‘I didn’t know, Klade.’
‘Well, I am. Look.’ His fingers scrabbled ferociously at his sleeves. Rotting threads ripped. He shoved out his left wrist across Steward Dunning’s desk towards her. ‘Go on! Look! Feel!’
Touching her son’s flesh for the first time, conscious of its smoothness and warmth, the indentations of skin and bone, Marion could tell that he bore no Mark. ‘All that means is—’
‘What it means is that I’m like bastard Blossom. I’m like that fucking ravener out there. I’m the bloody moon in the sky over Inver-something. Now fuck off and leave me alone …’
Marion had dealt with too many suffering patients not to know when to comply with this simplest of human requests. Standing up slowly, moving as unthreateningly as she could around the desk, and leaving the door half open, she walked and then ran along the corridor and up into Invercombe’s main rooms. She didn’t know what to think. She didn’t know how she felt. After all, Klade and the few changelings which had now seemingly fled Invercombe had used as this place a haven. And look at it now.
In the beginnings of grey daylight, the noisy chaos stilled as she moved through it. Eyes followed her. Prayers and whispers were made, and in many ways the situation of being in this place wasn’t so unfamiliar. A house requisitioned and in need of order; in need, above all, of someone to take the lead. For all that she had seen and experienced, the sense of being here, of being back at Invercombe, suddenly broke over her. For she was alive, and so was her son, and she could sense the power of this house which had delivered him to her stretching out towards her in lazy welcome like the paw of a yawning lion. After all, there was so much that needed doing here. Grime on the windows. Leaking pipes. Tiles in need of resetting. Statues fallen from their pedestals. Blocked sluices and perished valves. The gardens gone entirely wild. And dust everywhere. And half the sheets and towels filthy already. And this ridiculous shore-detritus. And beds unhygienically unmade. And mess. And grime. All to be fought against. What would Cissy Dunning have said? Work to be organised and prioritised. Order to be found and then maintained. After all, these people believed she was Marion Price, even if Klade didn’t, and it was time, Marion decided, as she rang the dinner gong in the hall and climbed on a chair and the people gathered around to listen, to prove to him and the world who she really was.
XIV
IN THE DAYS AND NIGHTS which followed, guildsmen and women returned to their old labours. There was enough work in Invercombe for a battalion of lost trades. From electricians to stonemasons to chefs to the common washers, there were few who couldn’t apply their skills. Disputes about guild demarcation arose which only Marion Price could settle, and she couldn’t be everywhere, hard though she tried. But still the work went on, and still, and more certainly now, they sang her name.
Flues were cleaned. Fires were lit. Boilers filled and leaked. The house rang and creaked and steamed, and light-bulbs were found and set wildly ablaze against the dull midday as the generators were reapplied to the business of powering the house. Clothes were washed, bleached and hung up in dripping fronds. And everywhere, in this bustling frenzy, people were singing as they washed and wiped and dusted until the windows steamed grey-white. Klade sought solace in the wild gardens and the sharp taste of strewn windfall apples and rotting lemons amid the passing sweeps of rain. The lush and noisy house which shone out at the centre of it all, where Outsiders ate, and talked, and bustled, and walked arm in arm, mouth to mouth, hand in hand, was no longer the place of refuge which had once welcomed him. The Shadow Ones had fled with the followers’ arrival to Inver-something’s furthest caves and caverns which even he couldn’t reach. Amid all this touching, shouting, feeding, dancing, cleaning, shining, breaking, bothering, eating which went on day and night, he was entirely alone. Klade would have blocked his ears, but there was no escaping this song of the Outsiders.
There was to be a Dance on the third night. Dance was what they called it, although as far as Klade could tell these Outsiders had never stopped jigging and dancing and singing to the orders of the woman who called herself Marion Price since they’d got here. It was too much for him, and once more he had to go outside into the welcoming dark through the big main door where the balehound which now stood guard growled at him. Klade snarled back. Inver-something had been everything he’d hoped for, a haven of Sweetness and Home, but now nothing, nothing, nothing was the same …
Voices. Faces in the sharp glow from the windows. Succumbing to old instincts, Klade cowered and hid.
‘Breathe that air.’
‘So mild here. Could almost be spring coming again.’
‘Finest drop of cider I ever tasted.’
‘You’d drink your grandma’s piss to get yourself tipsy.’
‘I would, that.’
‘Know what they say—well, it ain’t exactly her that used to live here, but her sister.’
‘Makes sense that she did as well, then, dunnit?’
‘Nah, nah. Marion Price was brought up in Einfell by the goblins, see. That’s why they’re here, hiding in the walls …’
A long pause.
‘They say it’ll all be over by Christmas.’
‘Can’t be long then, can it?’ A woman’s laughter. Low and liquid.
Klade watched the Outsiders entwine. And the Singing and the Dancing went on, and there seemed to be no escape from it, not even outside, for here was the ravener, being coaxed to roll a barrel up from the cellars by two young Outsiders who briefly stopped laughing when they saw Klade. He wandered further afield. He found a quieter place as it began to rain, and squatted there, listening to its ticking dripping as the singing house glowed out at him through the flashing, waving leaves. But at least, if he hummed to himself, or if he opened his mouth and screamed as he drank the acrid, chilly rain which rattled over his skull and let the truer, deeper song flow over him in chilly rivulets, he couldn’t hear it.
Chill and hunger drove Klade back to the house when the night was ending. He’d expected mess and stink, but those Outsiders who hadn’t been up late Dancing had arisen early and were cheerily and noisily cleaning and washing and sweeping and polishing and putting things away as the first cloud-churned light threaded through the rooms. Klade’s skin tingled. His nose itched in an inside place he couldn’t reach. At least the Outsiders quietened a little when they saw him. But the pause was only brief, and Inver-something shone and bustled like a tune you hated but couldn’t shake, and the gleam of all the corridors and surfaces hurt his head and eyes.
‘Pass us that rag.’
‘Right and proper homely, eh?’
But Klade had never come across anywhere more unHomely than Inver-something was now as, still dripping from the rain, and getting what he knew were called black looks from other Outsider faces even as they sang out his supposed mother’s name, he shuffled over sneezily soft carpets which had lost their comforting scree of shell and weed. More and more of this place was being lost to him even as it was reclaimed. Did Outsiders ever really live in places such as this? How tall would anyone have to be to need ceilings this high? And all these rooms for talking, eating, sleeping. Studies for Studying in. Drawing rooms for Drawing. And now, charging and humming towards him, trailing its wire like the tail of a kingrat and piloted by a woman in a scarf and a pinny who was hummingly joining in its song, came a machine which sucked up what little there was left of the floor’s precious dust. Klade fled.
An enormous table gloomed and gleamed like a lake on a windless day in an otherwise empty room. Had he been in here before? It was hard to tell, with everything so changed, but Klade saw something resembling himself shifting within the shine of the wood. More of him, or at least some darkly ragged creature which moved when he moved, was tilted in the endless glass picture frames. Even the windows, which had been wiped of their mist, blazed back at him. He sneezed. He took a knife from a rack where it lay blazing amid many others like so many netted fish and used its point to dig a trail of non-shiningness across the table. There. He loved the grating sound it made—then, as if summoned by the noise, a portion of the room’s gleam extracted itself from behind a baroque chair and moved towards him on elements of its legs. Part flesh, yes. Part real, too. Part not, as well, although, as Fay grew close to him, Klade noticed that she still had that lovely rocky, watery, foggy scent. He had to smile, although he knew she wouldn’t understand.
‘I wasn’t sure if you were still here,’ he told her.
You haven’t come looking for us, Klade.
He shrugged. Finding the Shadow Ones unless they wanted to be found was like catching leaves in a gale. His eyes trailed over Fay—what Fay had become. She was watery gleams, she was spills of grey. Look hard enough, and you might perhaps imagine the freshly changed creature he’d encountered in that hot summer at the edge of the woods back in Einfell, but he’d known from the first moment he’d encountered her here that those moments, the good and the bad, were gone as if they had never existed. That was the thing about the Shadow Ones. Each second was an endless escape. Nothing ever lasted, or remained. Of course, they still had the changed remains of what passed for their bodies, but they cared nothing for sustenance or pain, and were happy to fade. Sometimes, when he first ran with them in the last of autumn which had then still clung to Inver-something, stuffing his mouth with fizzing windfalls of fruit which at first made him happy and then made his head ache, he’d felt the same. For he was Klade, and the song was like the song of Einfell which he’d heard from the very first moment he remembered opening his eyes. But it was bitter here as well, and it was sweeter, and the Shadow Ones always slipped from him no matter how hard he chased. Only at night, as the darknesses grew colder and he sought shelter within this house which had garlanded itself with signs and chains, did they come closer so that they might feed on his dreams. The sea, still strange to him in its scents and sighs, washed in on their singing tide, and the room and the bed which he most frequented grew embroidered with gorgeous decay. This, he knew now, was why Silus had always warned him against the company of the Shadow Ones. Not because of what they were, but because of what they made you become. And the house had whispered with them in the dark driftwood silences and the stirring of limbs which only came close when his own grew languid and could no longer respond. Sometimes, he saw this land not as a thing of days and nights or shifterms or even seasons, but of a perpetual something which was too slow to be time at all, across which he and the changed and the unchanged all crawled like the ants he’d once crushed or popped into his mouth, just to feel their momentary tingle on his tongue, and were just as soon gone.
The Shadow Ones could, he knew, let you see in them what they thought you wanted to see. For there was clothing or not clothing on Fay, a mere mist if that was what you wanted, and she seemed storm-wet. Still, the image of the Fay he’d once thought he’d known, and beyond that the young girl from Bristol whom he’d longed for her to be, was stronger to him than all these Outsiders who had come to destroy Inver-something with all their neatness and noise. He watched as her hand, cauled in grey-white netting, silvered as the fishy moon, moved towards the table and the long scar which he had made. Whispering the sweetest inward part of the song, she made it go away.
There.
‘I’m sorry, Fay.’
Sorry for what? She tilted her head in the swishing light, watchful and listening, although it didn’t seem to be to him. It doesn‘t count. It’s just a table.
‘For that day. When I tried to—’
‘Aaahhh.’ A real sound, or a stormbeat of wind against glass. I forgot…
‘I was young then. I didn’t know …’ He paused, licking his lips, wondering what it was he hadn’t known.
It doesn’t matter, Klade. Nothing matters in the way you think it does. I’m surprised that’s something you’ve never learned.
‘This place is full of Outsiders now, you know,’ Klade informed her, as if she cared about such news.
That day you were saying, Klade. That hot day. Yes, now I remember. The thing is, Klade, I always was who I am now. I didn’t realise that Bristol was just a beautiful dream.
He’d had these conversations before. They went round and round in his head like the feeling which came after eating wormed and mushy apples. But still, and just like the apples, it was hard to desist. ‘I told you! I’ve been to Bristol—the munitions factories. It’s not the place you showed me!’
Fay’s laughter rang like glass. But it doesn’t mean it isn’t real, Klade! The further I’ve got from Bristol, the more real it becomes. This house helps me—it listens. And I love the song of its windy seas.
Outside, the vacuum cleaner was still snoring at the carpets as the small, loose sea-smelling and faintly reptilian shape which Fay had become reached the pearly approximation of her arm towards him.
Remember, Klade, how we used to touch …
Even though he was sure that Fay remembered nothing, he saw her ebony hair shining in that bedroom back in the dream of Bristol amid the pictures of Egypt and the night sounds of traffic. And brushing, brushing. Sparks and f
lickers of light. But the lantern shade by her mirror was threaded with gulls’ feathers and the jars before her were fish eggs’ empty purses, and the light swarmed and waved as the vacuum cleaner still gave its foggy moan.
I could be your undersea-lover, Klade. I could be your mermaid…
Klade, drawing back, gave a wild, room-spinning shake of his head.
Fay, more calmly now, more of what she was, simply regarded him.
You’re fainter, Klade. I can hardly hear you. You really have changed since these Outsiders arrived. We thought you were one of us when we had the house to ourselves. I’m sorry, but now you’ve lost your song …
The Chosen, those who were this Chosen, were, Klade knew, long past disappointment or regret. But still, he sensed a sadness; perhaps it was his own.
‘Don’t say you’re sorry, Fay.’
I’m never sad.
‘Sad and sorry don’t mean the same thing.’
Just words. You’re using too many …
‘I’m not…’ But it was too late to correct her, for she was drawing away across the lush, shining room, and back behind that chair and on into the panelling. What did it matter, anyway, what Fay or anyone else thought he was? Chosen or not Chosen; Outsider—above all, he was simply Klade.
The busyness of the house went on. Even the gardens were being tidied, and bonfires swirled cheery red as Inver-something’s wildness was put to flame.
‘Sweet Elder! Nobody told me you were here.’
The House of Storms Page 41