‘Thought we’d lost you back at Cleeve …’
People kept touching each other. Hands and arms and lips.
‘Klade?’
Klade jerked, expecting another of the Shadow Ones. But it was the man who said he was his father who came limp-staggering towards him across the terrace’s clean wet paving.
‘Ah this.’ Briefly, he waved his walking stick. ‘I’m old before my time. Fact is, Klade, I’ve got something I’d like to show you. Well, a couple of things, actually …’
The house gleamed. Its inside light drummed at Klade’s eyes. ‘We don’t really need that in here, do we?’ One hand still wheezing on his stick, the man reached with his other—which was nearly as translucent as Fay’s—towards the knife Klade realised he still held in his hand. He felt a snarl in his throat as he drew back.
‘The thing is, Klade …’ Without the beard, the man’s face was sterner and thinner and greyer. ‘We’ve made a few rules. And one of them is, no guns or knives inside the house. Makes sense, Klade, if you think about it… ?’ Klade relented to the cold, unprising fingers and let go of the knife. After all, what did he know?
The man was a slow mover. Not that this was a problem to Klade, who’d long been used to travelling with poor Ida. Down and down the stairs. In the falling tunnels, hollows, with their strung lights and the happy smell of damp into which he was being led, the man, between waiting and wheezing, his stick tapping, told Klade about things which were being done to, as he put it, bring the old place back to life …
A big machine lurked in an alcove near where the generators ground. The man said that it was called a reckoning engine, which was the pride of his own and many other guilds—which is perhaps the sort of thing, Klade, that you should know. This one was an early version, but still immensely clever. Could think a thousand things quicker than a mere human could think one, although of course it couldn’t think for itself, which sounded to Klade, as the machine grinned its ceramic wheels at him, like the sort of nonsense only an Outsider or a Shadow One would say. Anyway, he knew what reckoning engines were. Hadn’t he read enough newspapers? And he wondered as he watched the man haul himself around the whirring device in weary gasps if he really was his father, and if telling you things you already knew was what fathers were for.
‘This is the spinet, a type of keyboard where we input data. And here we insert the punchcards. Maybe it’s something you can try, Klade. I spent hours down here when I was even younger than you are. Marion and I had this theory about the way the world worked. And I hoped this machine could store and process all the data …’
The Beetle Lady told me.’
‘The Beetle Lady? But you don’t know her, Klade. That must have been something you heard since we got here …’
They moved on. After the sound of the generators, it grew both quieter and louder.
‘Hear that? Goes right down to the sea… This was the way I went…’ The man waved his stick. ‘… when I first returned to the house. You’ve seen the ones—the ones who came here from Einfell? They seem to be hiding now, although they’re still somewhere in the house. They seem to be using spaces behind the panelling and down in these caverns. Perhaps there are passages as well. But the funny thing is, no one’s afraid of them. They’re just accepted. Like the balehound and the ravener, I suppose. Although I know that’s entirely different. Don’t you think that’s the most marvellous thing, Klade? The way people have learned to accept?’
Klade nodded. He’d avoided these depths, and had little experience of the sea, but great frothy breaths of it now came pouring into boomy spaces.
‘Down there is Clarence Cove. But we really can’t go much further without one of those suits I had on.’ Leaning against the wet rock, the man hawked in breath. ‘Beyond here, the aethometer readings are still much too high for safety.’
‘A thumb eater?’
‘Never mind—it’s just a device. See where this stone goes under …’ The man shuffled onwards, and the tunnel dropped close to their heads and darkened. Then, it brightened. They were inside a small cave lit by an opening into the sky. Two shining bottles were set in a rough alcove like the shrines Klade had seen plundered in churches.
‘Now these …’ His breath whistling like the air. the man picked one up. ‘Are chalices of distilled aether. They must have been left here by the aetherworkers once they’d been extracted and refined from the mess below—forgotten, I suppose, although they’re worth a great deal… What do you know about money, Klade?’
Klade shook his head. He’d liked the taste of the few pennies he’d found, but he knew that wasn’t what the man who claimed he was his father meant. And he’d seen aether before—more than enough of it in the factories he and Ida had visited where they made her sing to machines when the bombs went wrong. There was song in the glowing thing he called a chalice, but it was hard and harsh. Wire across slate. A single steely note. Both purposeful and uncontrolled.
‘Well, it’s worth a lot.’ Its light was in the man’s eyes, and his chest was fluttering like a bird’s. ‘Surprising, really, that they left it here. See how it glows. Now. Watch …’ He held it towards the cave’s opening. For a moment, he looked like a Shadow One in its strange backwash. Then the light changed and ceased to be light at all. Darkness spilled around them. ‘It’s called wyrelight. By the way, you should never, ever, try to open one of these chalices, or ever approach anything which contains raw aether. That’s what all those warning signs you must have seen are for. If it gets on or in you, too much of it, well—it can … What I mean is, it’s dangerous, Klade. Even more dangerous than a knife or a gun. You understand that? But what I wanted to say …’ Klade watched as the man reverently returned the chalice in its alcove of wet stone. ‘What I really wanted to say, Klade, is that when you get out of here—when this war ends as it finally must—there’s a place for you. When I say a place, I mean good proper work with decent pay. No matter what happens to me, Klade, you don’t have to live the way that you have up until now.’
‘As an Outsider, a follower?’
‘Before that as well. Neither Marion nor I would ever have abandoned you if we’d known.’
‘I had a better song.’
In the aether’s wyrelight, something like the Outsider feeling which was called exasperation crossed the man’s face. ‘That doesn’t matter, Klade. What matters is that you no longer need feel alone. People matter to each other, Klade, and you matter to me.’
Klade listened. Klade nodded. Klade wondered why people always said ‘Klade’ more often when they were cross or annoyed. Even Silus had done that, back in the times of the Big House when he’d never felt alone. Still, he felt sorry for this man, who plainly wasn’t well. So he decided to do the thing he had seen many of the other Outsiders doing, and opened his arms and moved towards him so that they could Hug-Sing-Dance.
‘No, no, no, no …’ The man almost dropped his stick in his scrabbling hurry to be away. ‘I’m sorry Klade,’ he said, half on his knees. ‘I have this disease. You should never get too close to me …’ Then he leaned to cough and retch, and wyrelight shone across the reddish spittle.
Klade found his way alone back up through the house. As always, there were shouts and singing. Food smells from the kitchens. Steam smells from the laundry. It was scarcely midday, but people were already singing-dancing-hugging-working fit to bust. He’d never realised just how restlessly active Outsiders were. Then another smell caught his nostrils, and he was drawn to it.
‘Touched me. Did she touch you?’
‘’Course she did. How else d’you think she could do it?’
‘Passed the time of day, she did, just like anyone else …’
‘Could do with a wee trim yourself, mate …’ A hand slapped Klade’s shoulder as he shuffled down the corridor. He gave a snarl and backed away.
Marion Price was sweeping the floor of a small room with a single chair and a large, bright fire. She had a slow, absorbed expression on her face as she
swished the broom back and forth. She didn’t notice Klade for a long while as he stood there watching, and when she finally did, he saw the way she tried to make her shocked expression change.
‘There you are …’
‘I’ve been with the man.’
‘The man—ah, Ralph. I’m glad he found you. Is he busy?’
‘Everyone’s busy.’
‘I suppose they are.’ Marion Price rested her chin over her hands on top of the broom and looked back at Klade with her dark, blue eyes. Whispering black and silver around her on the floor like wyrelit snow were great drifts of hair, and the smell of its burning was in the air. Her own hair had changed, certainly, for it hung straight and close, yet was long and clean enough now to sheen with light and sway towards her cheeks as she picked up a dustpan. He thought of Fay. There were crackles and flares as she tossed more of the hair she’d been gathering into the flames. ‘And what else have you been doing?’
He shrugged, still looking at her.
‘Well—you can sit down in this chair. You need your hair cut at least as much as anyone else I’ve seen.’
In a dream, Klade did as she said. She seemed to like to have him sitting in chairs. Not that he found them particularly comfortable, but he really didn’t mind that much. And sitting here as she moved behind him, he didn’t even feel quite so afraid. Perhaps he was beginning to understand better now why the Outsiders looked and talked as they did around Marion Price.
‘I know our lives have been very different, Klade. But that’s gone—it’s in the past.’
‘Ida used to sing to me.’ He opened and shut his fingers in a vee. ‘She cut my hair.’
‘The song was how Ida spoke to you? She was the c—the one who looked after you at Einfell, wasn’t she, Klade? The one you said you were with in the war, and who died. I’m so sorry, Klade—’
not sorry never sorry or sad
‘—You must miss her.’
‘I miss Blackcurrant Dream. I miss Cherry Cheer.’
‘But they’re just drinks, aren’t they, Klade?’ He jumped at a buzzing sound. ‘Don’t worry. It’s a just a hair trimmer, so do sit still…’ The buzzing grew louder, and he glimpsed the small, black and angry-looking machine before it burrowed shiveringly close to his ear. ‘People have been coming back for the second time. Can you believe that, as if hair needs cutting twice!’
‘They think you’re Marion Price.’
She chuckled. ‘You know what, Klade—I really don’t mind that so much now. At least I’m doing something useful, or pretending I am, so why should I care?’
The buzzing came and went like a huge summer insect, and Marion Price came and went as well. He saw her arms, bared to the elbow where she’d rolled up her sleeves, where the skin was differently white, with pale blue veins which ran smooth on one wrist and whorled on the other around the scab of the thing which all Outsiders had which was called her Mark.
‘You know, Klade, so I’m happy that you and Ralph have been able to get to know each other. All these years, he and I never knew …’
‘That’s what he says as well.’
The buzzing paused. Then, but to a subtly changed rhythm, it came again as Marion Price leaned close and then back from him, and he caught the sweetly bitter scent which came from beneath her arms. ‘He’s not well, Klade. Things… Well things between us were made complicated even before you were born. It’s hard to explain, but I want you to know that we meant a great deal to each other.’
‘And now?’
‘We’re different people, Klade.’ Closer, busier than ever, the cutter buzzed around the back of his skull. ‘We can’t undo what’s happened. But it’s a miracle that we’re all here together, don’t you think?’
Always, Klade thought, that pause when the man called Ralph and the woman called Marion Price mentioned each other. And they didn’t Love-Dance-Hug like many of the other Outsiders did, no matter what she said about how they had felt in some remote time before they’d abandoned him. But the cutter still hummed and his hair fell towards his shoulders and drifted down to touch his hands. Here, indeed, was so much of what he’d been missing. For the song was in this machine and the song was Marion Price as well, as she and her cutter hummed. The sound was clear and faint, held somewhere deep within yet spilling out as he watched the slight changes which came and went around the edges of her mouth. As she leaned close, bits of her were often all he could see. An arm, the side of her face, a quick sweep of her cutterless hand as she pushed her own hair back around an ear. The soft white push of her blouse as she leaned the shape of her body against him. Klade remembered Ida snip snipping in the Big House, the golden curls she’d remembered falling in a different life. He felt light-headed. He really didn’t want this to end.
‘There.’ Marion Price stepped back and tilted her head, and he saw her full face in the firelight, and the lovely fall of her hair. There were, he now noticed, tiny Shadow One slivers of grey in it. ‘We haven’t finished yet.’ She laid her hands on his shoulders as he moved to get up. ‘What about this … ?’ Her fingers stroked his face. ‘I guess you’ve never shaved, eh?’
Klade listened to a tinkling rush as something was filled with water, and he felt the weight of a towel, cool and clean-scented, across his shoulders. Then she was before him again, bearing a steaming, blue-rimmed enamel bowl.
‘Hold this for me. Try not to shiver.’ Scraping over a stool, sitting before him, she swirled up white billows of lather with a big brush and began to paint them over his face. The stuff smelled of new paint and flowers. It tingled, and corners of it crept into his vision like the edges of clouds. ‘Tilt your head.’ Her fingers touched his chin, and the brush went up and down. ‘Now you need to sit extra still…’
Klade felt that he was beginning to understand this newly discovered Outsider obsession with tidiness. After all, what Marion Price was doing to him was similar to what had been done to the entire house, with all the shining cleaning brushing singing humming touching. No wonder the house felt so alive. No wonder he felt so alive himself. Then, alarmingly, she produced a long, sharp knife.
‘You can’t do that. The man called Ralph says—’
‘Even stiller now …’
The knife hovered, glinting with the image of his own mouth and nose.
‘Not so tense. Just let out a long breath …’ A soft pull-tug. Enamel tinged. Then the knife came again, and the air felt cooler against his face, but edged with flickers of firelight and the touch of Marion Price’s breath.
‘I always think it’s like carving a statue. These are the kind of jobs I used to enjoy doing…’ Her tongue prodded itself from her lips. The blade gave a final flourish.’… when people would just let me get on with simply being a nurse. These times are precious, Klade. Here and now. The war hasn’t ended. Nothing’s really changed. And I’m not the person these people think I am, much though I sometimes wish I was …’
Klade could tell from the extraordinary new feeling which had spread across his face that the job was finished, but he sensed in the long breathing moment in which he and Marion Price regarded each other that they both wished it would go on. Then, raising and dropping her shoulders, she took a breath. ‘Now …’ It was a brisker voice. ‘Just give your face a good rinse and wipe.’
Klade splashed himself with scummy water, then towelled what felt like someone else’s face.
‘You really need to take a proper wash next, Klade. There are plenty of bathrooms you can use. After that, I want you to burn every single bit of those old clothes. They’re past washing, and there’s plenty of better stuff. And I want you to use this on yourself.’ She pressed a squeezy rubber bottle between his fingers. ‘Use this powder everywhere, especially in the other places where you have hair.’ She was leaning before him again, but her eyes were as stern and far away as the man’s had been when he’d told him about not having a knife or a gun. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying, Klade? Powder yourself everywhere. Otherwise, you�
�ll never get rid of those infestations and scabs.’ Then, her hand rested once more upon his shoulder. ‘One last thing …’
She lifted something up. It was a picture frame, no, a proper mirror, which was something Klade usually avoided, although for a moment he thought he was a Shadow One, for the image which she held before him was extraordinarily faint.
‘This steam …’
The mirror brightened as Marion Price squealed her fingers across the glass. Clear and sharp, and shocked and thin, a borrowed Outsider face, partly the man’s and partly Marion Price’s, stared back at Klade.
XV
EVERYTHING SEEMED SO ORDINARY; it was entirely bizarre. Marion supposed she was like all the rest; taking refuge in old habits, returning to type—whatever type that really was. This was the third day since they had arrived at Invercombe, and the dream hadn’t yet broken, although every second seemed blurred. The clocks had all been wound, and set to a stagger of hours which meant that the place rang and pinged and rattled whilst the wind of this perpetual storm whistled over the chimneys.
The hair cutting, the tending of minor wounds, had been her refuge, just as others had found comfort in coaxing the boilers or polishing the china, but she had spent the entire war telling people to do things, and she was Marion Price, and people obeyed her. This identity was something she had come to accept the inevitability of. Someone had to be in charge. And because the followers now somehow imagined that she and not the Beetle Lady had led them here, she was also regarded as the lady of the house. They might permit her to give them purgatives to free their innards of parasites, but it was also a necessary part of this strange formal dance which they were all performing that Marion Price slept alone in the best bedroom in the house, and was served food on silver service in the west parlour according to a menu which she was required to approve. After all, she supposed, resigning herself to having her shoes polished and her clothes laid out for her, the house had been designed for this kind of work, and these people would have it no other way, as they reverted to their old guilded hierarchies. But it couldn’t last.
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