The Ice House

by Tim Clare

She sensed it would be useless to strike him. She should run.

  The man threw open his arms. ‘This is it. This is where it starts.’ He clutched at his ruffled hair. ‘Oh Hagar. I saw it all.’ He looked down at his vaporous body. He pressed his palms to his stomach; they shifted through. His image began to break apart and then, like water pouring into a channel, his edges sharpened and he became clear, discrete. ‘And this is how we meet!’ He laughed. ‘Gosh, I’m so clever.’ His eyes became distant for a moment. He winced. ‘So much is missing. It’s like my mind couldn’t hold it. I knew everything. Time was meaningless.’ His smile returned. ‘But we did it. We won.’

  ‘Won what?’ She momentarily forgot her astonishment in a flurry of impatience. The feeling was oddly liberating – in the abbey, she had grown used to keeping her frustrations compressed within a corset of sororal courtesy.

  The man lifted his hands to Hagar’s cheeks. He did not cross the room; he was simply there, before her, his gelid aura bringing her neck out in gooseflesh. Hagar had a sudden flash of Morgellon standing over her. She recoiled, twisting away, lunging to snap his wrist.

  Her hand passed through the spectre’s forearm as if through a dusty sunbeam. She darted back, panting.

  ‘You do . . . not . . . touch me,’ she spat.

  The angel became solemn. He placed his palms over his heart and withdrew, floating backwards until he stood beside the small walnut chest containing her robes, Bible and wooden Christ child.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was excited. I lost myself.’

  Hagar relaxed her shoulders just a little. ‘Speak.’

  ‘Hagar. I know this must seem strange to you.’

  ‘I’ve lived a long time.’

  The angel nodded. ‘Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I chose you. I knew you might accept what others can’t. Listen: what if I told you that together, we could end death?’

  They talked for hours in her dormitory, Hagar and the angel. He told her his story.

  His name was Arthur Stokeham. He was the grandson of a Welsh countess called Anwen Stokeham and her husband’s butler, Rutherford Cox. Arthur’s family had guarded the threshold that linked England with Avalonia for at least four generations. His grandmother styled herself Lady Dellapeste and became a peer in the perpetuum, taking Cox as her ageless valet. During a Great War in the old world, Arthur had been fatally wounded when an eighteen-pounder misfired. His father, Lazarus Stokeham, arranged for him to be rushed back to England to receive the honours.

  ‘It went badly. I think because I was so close to death. My body sort of . . .’ He made a squeezing motion with both fists. ‘And they weren’t sure if I’d died. I could see and hear and feel, but I couldn’t answer.’

  His devastated father had Arthur’s body transported to Avalonia, where Lady Dellapeste and Cox had agreed to make every effort to see if he could be restored. In fact, they sequestered his body in one of their plantations outside Fat Maw, and did nothing.

  ‘They probably considered you a threat,’ said Hagar, sitting on her bunk. She had not engaged with real politics for years and the stench of intrigue stirred old appetites.

  ‘They considered everyone a threat,’ said Arthur. ‘Love can do that to you.’

  Arthur had spent months trapped in his useless, immobile body – free from pain, but unable to do anything except look, and listen, and think. He had feared he would go mad. But then a very strange thing happened. He discovered he could leave his body behind.

  At first, he could only travel a few yards, rising as a faint copy of himself. With practice, he learned to project himself miles, and eventually great distances at the speed of thought. The time he could spend outside his body was limited, but finally he had the freedom he had craved.

  Sometimes he went to cities and towns and watched, invisibly. But more and more, he found himself drawn to empty expanses – the eerie beauty of a world without people. So much of the planet was uninhabited. He would glide low over midnight deserts, or across the grey, ice-brindled ocean beyond the southern floe. Tall, isolated pillars of black volcanic rock filled him with a weird elation – not at the prospect of discovering something, but at their profound emptiness. Standing alone, the only sentient being for hundreds of miles around, he would lose his sense of self, merging with the sea, the sky.

  ‘But when I flew, sometimes I felt this . . . I’m not sure how to describe it. Almost a yearning.’ He pressed a palm to his heart. ‘But a physical thing. Something calling out to me. Oh God.’ He pulled a face. ‘I sound like I’m writing a poem. It was more a magnetism. A force pulling at my etheric body, resonating with it, drawing it in. It was a bit like the feeling I’d get just before I had to return to my physical body, but . . . stranger.’

  ‘Like hooks,’ said Hagar.

  ‘Yes,’ said Arthur, ‘exactly. Hooks. Some intuition – I don’t know what – made me resist it, until one day, I wondered what would happen if I just . . . gave in.’

  Instantly he had found himself propelled through the air in a blur of colour and sound, pulled towards the source of the signal. He resisted, felt a wrenching at his core, as if he were being twisted apart. Finally, exerting all his will and focusing it in a single direction, he broke loose.

  He found he was underwater, gazing down into an ocean trench – a vast canyon into which the seabed collapsed, a bottomless pit. From its depths, that strange resonance beckoned him, his etheric body vibrating like a cello string.

  ‘And I had to know,’ he said, with a note of melancholy.

  As he descended, the light filtering down from the surface grew dimmer and dimmer, until he was alone in the soft nimbus of his etheric body. As if the universe had died, and here he was, at the end of all things.

  Down, down, and all the while this feeling of yearning, of impending union. Time grew uncertain. Had it been minutes? Days? His mind wandered, looping back on itself.

  ‘I had the strangest intuition that I’d been there before. Like I’d always been there, like I was returning to the beginning. Sensations were flowing into me: voices, gunshots, pipers playing, the crash of a waterfall. Wet mown grass, lemons. I was cutting into a steaming gammon. I was back in the trenches, smoking a cigarette. I was listening to Papa cry through the study door. I was a pike, oozing over the soft mud at the edge of the lake, I was the reeds caressing the white scales of its belly, the cold clear water that held it.

  ‘I passed through a layer of ice. Things inside it called out to me. I could hear them singing.’

  As Hagar watched, a ripple pulsed through Arthur’s body. He seemed to lose his thread for a moment; strange trails rose from his edges. He snapped back to awareness. ‘Sorry . . .’

  He had continued to sink, though he sensed he was no longer heading down so much as inwards. His surroundings became liquid once more. Through the darkness he saw gnarled towers the colour of dead leaves coiling towards him over vast distances, forming immense contorted spirals that glowed with a faint smoked amber light. They loomed bigger, gaining texture and depth, until their scale began wearing on his composure.

  Now he perceived threads of piercing black against the amber – inky helixes, visibly flowing – hundreds, thousands of strands. The strands wove into lattices, complex geometric shapes rising from a sea of shifting lines then sinking back into chaos. He followed them, though they had no perceivable beginning nor end. The lattices showed him petals, crescent moons.

  Deeper, deeper. The yearning rose to a kind of glorious agony, and was all twisting together, the amber and the black. Great snaking arms of midnight sprawled across a copper vastness. An axle turned at its centre – the heart of it all. The farther he fell, the larger the formation became, until he could no longer see it, until he understood it was bigger than he could possibly imagine, until he felt himself come up against an invisible threshold.

  And he pressed himself into it. And he felt his mind brush against what lay beyond.

  ‘I knew everything. The colourless dre
ams of hunching foetuses. The rich-rotten heat of deep-sea sulphur vents. Sunlight turning to sugar in a fig leaf. How it feels to be buried alive. The pull of moon on ocean. The pull of heart on heart. The treasures of the snow. The treasures of the hail.

  ‘I saw through billions of eyes. I heard the hidden music. I touched the darkness upon the face of the deep. The source of the honours.

  ‘And I understood.

  ‘It lives.’

  Hagar gazed down at her soft leather slippers. Odd notions were stirring at the corners of her mind.

  Arthur had spent the past few minutes pacing the dormitory, lost in contemplation. She understood that he was a mere product of the godfly parasite – no more miraculous in origin than her. All sentient beings were dispossessed angels. Could this really be the hand of providence?

  ‘It’s no good,’ he said. He shook his head. ‘Most of it’s gone.’

  ‘Most of what?’

  ‘The future.’ He flicked a hand through his skull, hair wafting and reforming. ‘It’s like trying to hold the ocean in my hands. But I knew it. It was all there, laid out for me to read.’

  She sighed. The boy seemed bewildered. Whatever wisdom his experience might have granted had been squandered on his callow dullness.

  ‘Don’t you remember anything?’ she said.

  ‘That’s what I’m trying . . . I can’t explain. I don’t have the words to carry it. Time was meaningless. I saw billions of futures branching out.’ He squinted at an empty section of wall. ‘You left this place. Took back your old position with the palace.’

  ‘I’m in disgrace. Morgellon refuses to see me.’

  ‘True, but he’ll let you serve him. He thinks it’s the natural order of things.’

  ‘But why should I leave?’ she said. ‘To what end?’

  ‘In a few years, Grandmama and Grandpapa conceive a little girl.’

  ‘Impossible. A peer can’t give birth. Their body purges the foetus as if it were a tumour.’

  ‘But it’s happened before, hasn’t it?’ Arthur inclined his head meaningfully. ‘And Grandmama’s gifts have never been entirely clear. Perhaps one of them is fruitfulness.’

  ‘The honours manifest in different ways.’

  ‘But you know the sort of powers the offspring of a peer and her valet is likely to possess.’

  ‘I’ve heard the legends,’ said Hagar.

  Arthur took a step towards her. ‘You’ve lived so long. You’ve watched the endless war, the suffering, the ignorance.’

  ‘No one learns. It repeats.’

  ‘And why don’t they learn, Hagar?’ He made a fist. ‘Because death snatches memory. It robs us of wisdom. It dooms us to this endless cycle. That’s what I touched beneath the ice. A god grown from mortal pain. It drinks our suffering. We sustain it.

  ‘But what if we could undo death? What if we could connect all sentient beings in a great cradle of kinship and mutual reliance?’ He held an open palm out towards her. ‘The bond that ties you to your master. We could use my god’s powers to grant that to everyone, only more so. Connecting with it projected me through time, Hagar. Imagine what would happen if it amplified mental gifts like Morgellon’s and Grandmama’s. We could directly access the minds of all sentient species, suppress the impulse towards murder, rape, destruction. We could link everyone with maundygrubs. Imagine. No old age. No sickness. No death.’

  ‘You want to take away their power of moral choice,’ she said.

  He looked down at his open hand. ‘No. More than that. I’m not proposing a mere negation. I’m talking about creating a world of love, brotherhood, harmony. People will be free to think their own thoughts – I’ve no desire to reduce everyone to cattle. It might sound funny to you, but war showed me the very best of mankind. Selfless sacrifice. Tenderness. Courage. A goodness that survives in even the bleakest of circumstances. A goodness that’s worth protecting.’

  Hagar thought of how the centuries had changed her and Morgellon. She imagined billions of souls, trapped in the material world forever. Without death, there would be no redemption, no chance to return to the Kingdom. Without the freedom to choose evil, there would be no true virtue. A great revulsion welled up inside her.

  What the angel described was hell.

  Arthur smiled. ‘Ah, I wept too. It seems too beautiful, too perfect. Just thinking of it is a kind of torture. But we can do it, Hagar. You must find Auntie Sarai, and bring her to the city of Fat Maw, and face your master in the place you last met.’

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘I didn’t say it would be easy.’

  Hagar laughed. ‘You have no idea what you’re asking.’

  ‘If you prevail, you’ll travel with Grandmama, and my old friend Gideon, far across the water.’ By now, the flagstones around Arthur’s feet were furred with rime. The water she had drawn from the spring for morning ablutions had frozen and split its wooden pitcher. ‘You’ll need Gideon to guide you. I don’t know where I am, but we have a bond. He feels the same pull I did. When you reach me, you lift the darkness from the deep. Like Auntie Sarai, it feeds on suffering, only more so. She can speak to it directly, I think. I can’t see her there, at the end, but she must be. My god will rise and drink our sorrows and use pain to reshape reality. Godflies rise in a black cloud. And my mind and Grandmama’s mind and Gideon’s mind, all our minds merge. That’s the last thing I remember. The great rapture as we’re finally joined.’

  ‘So it happens.’

  ‘Nothing is inevitable.’ He looked at her with a sudden intensity. ‘All I’m saying is that it can.’

  ‘You overestimate me. I’ve no influence, no resources.’

  ‘You’ve many lifetimes’ experience. A singular will. My physical interventions must perforce be rare and small. I haven’t the strength to do more than guide you. Oh!’ His image fluxed, fraying at the edges.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s calling me back.’

  ‘What about your physical body?’

  ‘It perishes.’ His voice wavered. ‘Dies and rots. It’s still there, back in Avalonia. Grandmama and Grandpapa don’t find out for months. They cover up the whole business, of course. A peer, dying in his sleep? Shakes every certainty they believe in. Ugh.’ His left arm withered into mist.

  Hagar lowered her head and closed her eyes, as if in prayer. Arthur’s plan was monstrous, obscene. She did not yet know what God intended for her, but she sensed this angel had been sent to her for a purpose. Not the purpose he envisaged, naturally. But perhaps he was a raft, and her task, a river. Already, she was turning his proposal over in her mind. What if there was another way? Something better than eternal deathless purgatory. What if she could use the power of this child he claimed would soon be born, and turn it to more noble ends? The end of the perpetuum. A bringing down of the ancient order. The final sundering of the cage. Deliverance.

  She could not lie, of course. Her vows were still binding, even if she left the convent. But she did not have to tell the truth either.

  She breathed in. Her flesh prickled. As she lifted her gaze, she felt as if the great abbey were breaking loose from the mountain and sloughing into the ravine.

  The angel was fading.

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Tell me what to do.’

  CHAPTER 15

  LE MORTE D’ARTHUR

  ‘I won’t insult you by asking you to trust me,’ said Arthur.

  Delphine shook water out of her machine pistol. His body gave off a blue glow that reminded her of Martha’s eyes. Threads of vapour wicked up from his shoulders.

  She had never seen a picture of Arthur. Yet she knew.

  He stood with one hand in the pocket of his roomy tweed trousers, his hair side-combed, his caramel leather golf shoes bone dry. He was like a cinema projection, but three-dimensional. Her wet fingers ached in the coldness radiating from him.

  ‘It’s about your father,’ he said.

  Delphine dropped her shoulder and tackled him. F
reezing air rushed over her body. She passed through as if he were smoke. Her heel slipped on the ice and momentum carried her off the edge of the platform.

  Cold fingers gripped her wrist.

  She swung out over the water. Arthur yanked her back onto the platform, then his fingertips slipped through her arm. She gasped; her blood felt like it had turned to ice.

  Arthur stepped back – or rather, flowed back, his image receding and reforming. She staggered, rubbing her arm.

  He examined his hand. His fingers smeared together at the tips like alcohol flames.

  ‘I can’t do things like that often,’ he said. ‘Now our time is even more limited.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Do you know who I am, Delphine?’

  She lashed at his head with the pistol. It wafted through harmlessly.

  ‘That won’t do any good,’ he said.

  Adrenaline thundered through her body. She thumbed the pistol’s safety catch to auto.

  ‘Look.’ He raised his palms with an air of weary indulgence. ‘I’m not here to beg your forgiveness. I doubt you’d give it and, with respect, I don’t need it.’

  ‘What are you?’

  Arthur looked down at his shoes, making little effort to disguise a smile. ‘I am but a man. I’ve come to help you.’

  ‘Fuck. Off.’

  ‘For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about your father. Truly. Poor Giddy wasn’t ready. Thought I was dead, only to have me popping back like Marley’s ghost. I thought I’d ease his suffering, but I made it worse.’

  She pulled the trigger. Bullets ripped through him. She pissed through the entire twenty-five-round magazine in under two seconds. Reports echoed off the roof and pilings.

  She stood, panting. The hole in his chest drifted shut.

  ‘I can’t keep this form much longer. Please. I’ve come to stop you making a terrible mistake.’

  ‘Is he alive?’ Her voice broke as she yelled, her words ringing in the darkness. All that time, Father had been trying to tell them. Arthur really had appeared to him.

  Around them, the wind was picking up. ‘Of course. He’s in the summer palace. He’s in terrible pain. He never took a valet or handmaiden. That’s why Sarai can use him.’