Twelve Nights

by Andrew Zurcher

  ‘But, Ell, you know we don’t have these pictures in a book.’ Something about her sister’s urgency and conviction unsettled her; she felt irritated. ‘And there are so many of them. Anyway, don’t say anything about it just now. Wait till we find Dad.’

  Flip must have disappeared through the far door; meanwhile Will was speaking in increasingly animated whispers to the two other wraiths. Kay looked at him critically. In the bright light of the hall he looked even more insubstantial than earlier. Though his features and limbs were every bit as elegant as those of the others, he looked a bit more gaunt, a bit more bent. The others didn’t have that tired, if cheerful, wryness to their cheeks. Instead the crescent moon of their faces had a sort of heavy crease, as if, had they been creatures chiselled in stone outside a cathedral, the sculptor had saved the deepest cuts and sharpest lines for their severe brows, their pursed lips, their grave chins. One of them was waving a handful of papers at Will. Kay immediately felt sorry for him – it had to be the inventory, she thought; and, sure enough, in a moment all three wraiths, after a short and evidently tense silence, turned to her. Will came up first and, with his usual stooping grace, dropped to his haunches.

  ‘Kay, I need to ask you for that tooth now. Foliot and Firedrake –’ and here he gestured at the others, looming caricatures of officiousness behind him, one of them still clutching the sheaf of inventory instructions – ‘they have to clear the removal with Sergeant Ghast, and Ghast doesn’t like his officers to keep him waiting.’

  Something about the way he said ‘officers’ – a little hesitation, maybe – made Kay distrust these new wraiths. She avoided looking up at them, instead holding Will’s eyes. There she found comfort and, in the face of this new threat which she felt instinctively was dangerous to him as well as to her, resoluteness. ‘Tell them, please, that I will take it to Ghast myself.’

  Foliot and Firedrake had been listening. Now they tittered mirthlessly and crumpled the papers into a ball just behind Will’s head; but he stayed put, and Kay thought she saw another smile at the corner of his eyes. She felt Ell’s duffel coat brush up against her, and reached out to hold her, still not breaking Will’s gaze. He never looked away. A long moment seemed to open, long enough for Kay to decide – for certain – that whatever he said, she would trust him. Finally he said, ‘So. I will go with you, and I will be your guide.’ He breathed out and nodded. ‘You’ll need one.’

  There followed a whirl of motion, so brisk and startling that Kay couldn’t take it all in. Asking Will to explain was out of the question, as he strode lightly along beside the girls, following Foliot and Firedrake. He was clearly paying close attention to the response of Ghast’s emissaries. They must, Kay judged, be Will’s superiors: he followed them.

  As they passed through the door at the end of the hall, the lights behind them darkened even as the lights before them blazed. Had Kay never dreamed dreams; had her father not carried her on his shoulders through half the cathedrals in England, lifting her as high as he could to see if, just this once, they might touch the fretted, runnelled roof; had she not on summer evenings lain with Ell in the waste field behind their lane, their heads pillowed by a clump of clover, singing songs to put the otherwise lethargic clouds into a dance across the vault of the sky – then she might not have been struck by the room – the cavern – into which the wraiths then led them. But she had dreamed, and reached, and sung, and she knew the size of this place, upon which the light of a thousand, or ten thousand, torches suddenly spilled in a concert of discovery. Kay had learned to look up.

  It was a library; or, more accurately, a great treasure hall of books. If one were to take the greatest domes, and naves, and halls, and chambers, the grandest throne rooms, and auditoria, and amphitheatres, and stadia, the largest of arenas, and combine them, this colossal cavern would be the result. Had Will not ducked round to follow the girls, urging them on with his brisk tread, Kay would simply have stayed there.

  The shelves on which the countless books stood had been carved from the rock of the cave. Along the floor, on carpets woven in wine and violet, long tables had been laid in aisles, on which here and there a plotting board sat, a pile of stones at the edge of each one. She counted four – no, five – aisles. Through the hall, gigantic globes of the earth and moon and stars stood mounted in wooden casings, and low stools were tucked in an orderly way beneath each of the tables – enough for, Kay reckoned, about a thousand wraiths. She couldn’t get a close look at any of the books themselves, but she could see plainly that some of them – even, perhaps, most of them – were of a towering, Atlantean size, running to a thousand pages each, or more. Above, the shelves rose towards the vault and the books grew smaller, and as the little group swept out of the hall again, Kay had just time to notice that these upper shelves were stacked with the tiniest ones, hardly larger than her hand. As they exited, the thought struck her hard: there was not a single soul in the whole vast space. It was entirely empty.

  After the hall, through another low, thick-walled door arch, the five of them came into a corridor, almost a tunnel. This, unlike the library, unlike the tapestried entrance hall, was not at all empty: wraiths were swarming through it, weaving round and past one another – with grace, yes, but also with worry, pace, determination. Some of them, like Foliot and Firedrake, were frowning, and many of them held papers under their arms. Kay wondered if these were yet more inventories, the lives in catalogue of yet more missing fathers or mothers. Or children. In a sudden panic she nearly collided with Foliot as the two leaders drew up short before a small wooden door. Firedrake raised his fist, hesitated as if listening for something, and then rapped twice, hard. The door swung open.

  The halls had been magnificent, and the tapestries engrossing, moving. The room into which this squat door opened was completely unlike those. For one thing, it was dark – so dark that it took her eyes a while to adjust to the light as the wraiths, ducking, ushered them both in. For another, the ceiling was low, and Will had to compensate partly by leaning over, and partly by bending his legs, just to keep his head away from its rough stone surface. But what really made the room unsettling for Kay was that it was filled with short, stumpish wraiths barely taller than herself, and nowhere near as lean or as graceful as Will, or even Foliot and Firedrake. They looked, she decided, positively gnarled, their faces and hands studded with wartlike protuberances, hairy, ruddy and thick-lipped. Fifteen or so of them sat writing at two large trestle tables on either side of the room, and another five or six carried papers back and forth between the tables and a set of large chests lining the walls. At the far end of the room, up a step and behind a magnificently carved desk, sat a single hunched figure, muttering as he angled his head over several piles of papers. His right hand was on the table before him, bunched into a tense fist, so tight that the individual muscles in his fingers stood out in the low light. At the hush that fell over the room, he looked up.

  ‘Ghast,’ said Will, with a whispered emphasis.

  ‘Gross,’ murmured Ell, with no emphasis at all.

  ‘At last,’ barked Ghast, raising and slamming his fist down upon the table with a crack.

  For all her bravado, Ell shuddered next to Kay, and her hand went suddenly clammy. Kay squeezed it hard, willing herself to be strong for the confrontation she had promised herself.

  ‘So,’ Ghast went on as he rose from his chair to tower diminutively behind the desk, ‘you have really done it this time, you incompetent. I spelled out that inventory in my own hand, you tunnel-scraper, you useless silk-spinning, stone-plotting, muse-loving freak. I should have thrown you out with the poets and that ragtag fantastical scum. And I would have, if it hadn’t been a comfort to watch you pulling your guts out of your own backside. You leek, you brainless eel. You’re very nearly as incompetent as you are –’ he looked Will up and down, then sneered – ‘long. How could you possibly have mangled this assignment any worse?’

  Ghast had started forcefully, but he finished w
ith a roar that, Kay thought, seemed beyond the capacity of his stumpish frame. He stopped, apparently to lick his thick dry lips. Will raised his hand as if about to speak.

  ‘Don’t say a word,’ Ghast cut him off. ‘So these must be the children. Tell me,’ he said to Will much more quietly, his eyes never leaving the painfully cramped wraith as, with a prowling excitement, he circled round to the front of the desk and stood at the edge of the step. ‘Tell me, you monster, did you ever in your life think you would again be so privileged as to see, to meet or to remove an author?’ His every word was a snarl of scorn. Kay stood a little prouder as she felt Will’s hand lightly on her shoulder.

  ‘By the muses, no,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Leave them out of it,’ Ghast snapped, again visibly annoyed. ‘You know I don’t tolerate that kind of talk here.’ He paused, and the room was silent, but for the papers rustling at the tables around them as the little troll-like wraiths went about their work. They occasionally snatched furtive glances up at Ghast. ‘No, you never thought, did you? Never hoped. And now you’ve gone and plucked her right out of her childhood, right out of her apprenticeship, as pretty as you like. You might as well have strangled her in her bed.’

  At this Kay started at last. Will’s hand tightened on her shoulder, and Ell was immediately clinging to her left side.

  ‘You know, it does me good to see a great wraith like yourself, one of the old guard, the oldest, playing your part in our little revolution. It warms me. You have even exceeded the little cameo role I allotted you in your own destruction. What a colossally cack-handed klutz you are.’ Ghast smiled, revealing in his square jaw two rows of sharp yellow teeth. Like a rat’s, Kay thought. He stepped down off the ledge, lower but somehow, as he approached them, still more commanding with every pace he took. Kay’s ears throbbed with rushing blood. ‘Oh, calm yourselves,’ he snapped, looking pointedly at the girls. ‘We’re not going to hurt you. Though we might have done.’ Kay leaned into Will’s hand, but she didn’t flinch.

  Foliot and Firedrake stepped to the left as Ghast approached, Foliot holding out to his master the crumpled sheets of the inventory. Ghast took them and carefully prised them open, smoothing them with his hand, totally engrossed for what seemed like an eternity. Then, still looking down, he confronted Kay, raised his head and, in a voice so authoritative it was almost silent, said slowly and simply, ‘The tooth.’

  In spite of herself, Kay’s right hand came out of her pocket, rose into the air, unclasping around the tooth that sat upright in her palm. Without taking his eyes off hers or moving his steady face an inch, Ghast took it. Every muscle in her body seemed to rebel; and yet every muscle in her body seemed to do exactly what Ghast demanded.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. Sarcasm, not kindness. Wheeling, he strode to one of the long tables, next to which Kay saw the sacks that Flip and Will, Jack and Sprite had lugged back from the balloon, crammed with her father’s things. He dropped the tooth into the open fold of the nearest, and then stopped. He did not turn, did not raise his head, but said with the same quiet authority, ‘I will want to see this author for myself later. For now take the children to the Quarries, feed them and rest them. Foliot, Firedrake: I will take advice on what to do with them after that. First see these sacks into the cellars. Go.’

  The two officious wraiths each hoisted one of the sacks, crossed the room and ducked out through a low door. For a moment there was silence. Ghast had paused by a low mahogany table. His finger absently caressed a stack of papers. He seemed to be lost in a thought.

  Kay felt Will turning her with his still strong grasp on her shoulder, trying to lead her back out of the door. She struggled free and took a few steps towards Ghast. Her head spun.

  ‘We came here to find our father. Where is he.’ She didn’t ask. She simply blurted.

  The same ruffling of papers and soft tread of indifferent feet around the room marked the heartbeats as they rushed in Kay’s chest. Ghast said nothing for a long time. She watched his knuckles on the table, still tight, then whitening, as if he were growing angry or, she hoped, afraid. She could not see his face, but only the scruff and matt of the tangled hair at the back of his head, and the rough wool collar of his heavy tunic. She waited, knowing he had heard her.

  Then Ghast spoke, again quietly; but with the knuckles on the table almost silver now, he spoke with a new, singular menace. ‘I have already finished with him. You are too late.’

  Will reached out his long arm and dragged Kay from the room.

  Ghast paced around the huddled form where it lay on the stone floor of the Imaginary. It was wrapped in dirty cloths, bound with coarse ropes. Only the head was free of them, though it was matted and caked with sweat, and worse. Two squat wraiths stood to one side, hooded, still muttering and whispering in fervent bursts, maniacal phrases and threats.

  ‘Is he ready?’

  One of the wraiths fell silent. He looked up at his master with a pooling, blank stare. In the half-shuttered light his pupils slowly began to acquire focus, as if his gaze were a bird flying in on a tumult of wind from a great way off.

  ‘Nearly.’

  ‘He remembers nothing?’

  Just at that moment a breaking groan rose from the huddled body on the stones. It contorted, pushing against the cords that bound it. Ghast was reminded of a beautiful moth or butterfly, struggling fruitlessly in its brittle chrysalis. He had seen one once, in a hot season, writhe against its shell until it was exhausted. When it died.

  The shape lay panting. It groaned again.

  ‘My daughters.’

  The slight smile drained from Ghast’s uneven face.

  ‘He remembers one thing,’ said the wraith.

  ‘Then work him harder. Give him no rest. I must have him in the morning, and he must be ready.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the wraith, and turned back to his work, hiding his face in the heavy shadow of his hood.

  Ghast watched the scene for several minutes. He was careful not to make a sound, even matching his own breaths to the rise and fall of his servants’ rhythmic monodies. Their words were not audible to him, but he knew what they were saying. He had designed the technique himself. Again and again they would regale their victim with lies, with false stories, alternative histories, presenting him with a hall of mirrors in which he could not find himself. Their voices would rise and fall, waxing and waning like the drone of locusts eating away at his peace, eating away at his confidence, finally eating away at everything he knew, or thought he knew. He would fall from an irritation into a trance, from a trance into a frenzy, and from a frenzy into a weakness. And in that weakness he would at last relinquish his grip on his own story. He would cease to know himself.

  Then he would be ready. When a man reached that state, he was entirely without integrity, without solidity of any kind. He would believe anything, trust anything, and like a man hurtling through a void would grasp at anything at all as if it were solid ground. To that man, every least dream seemed a hard and reliable fact, every flashing fantasy an eternal reality. He would become so hungry for conviction that he would believe anything, so trusting of everything said or done to him, he would become entirely, utterly untrustworthy. In that state, in the very height of his weakness and vulnerability, they would release him. Just like that. Let him fend for himself then, when he could not. Let him tear himself to pieces in his madness. Let him be mocked by children, kicked by passers-by, taken for a vagrant and locked away, or worse.

  Ghast smiled. It pleased him to think of the Builder, the great architect of a doomed hope, staggering through the streets of some unfamiliar place, pursued by children and lunatics.

  Once, you hunted us, thought Ghast to himself. But now they will hunt you.

  He smiled again, then turned and stalked from the room.

  The Quarries

  Afterwards Kay could not clearly remember what happened next; she seemed to float through more corridors, tethered listlessly to the others. Sounds – voic
es, footfalls, the opening and closing of heavy doors – reached her only distantly, as if they were smothered in cotton in an adjacent room. She would recall a sense of downward movement, as if they had descended a long incline, not so much a stairway as a series of extended ledges that seemed to curve ever to the left. Sometimes other wraiths, both short and tall, passed them in pairs or small groups, less often alone. She felt numb and cold and empty; her bones seemed to have drained within her, and were shuddering like hollowed canes in her legs. She had so many questions, and no strength to ask them.

  A few times, as they swept ever downwards, she faltered. Each time Will’s hand was there to catch her, to prop her up – as if he had read her mind, as if he knew the ache and emptiness in her legs. At first she was grateful, but then she became irritated. She wanted to fall. She wanted to collapse – but he wouldn’t let her. He was her friend, she knew, but more and more she felt in his gentle ministrations the arm of a jailer. And then they seemed to swoop through a low arch and into another gloriously cavernous and entirely vacant womb of a hall. This one, unlike the first two, was not at all furnished or lit; but it was much, much bigger. Across the distant ceiling – if it was a ceiling – as Kay craned her gaze in wonder, she saw tiny points of light like stars, swirling and cascading in patterns far denser and more ordered than those of the constellations. The soft light they created illuminated very little of what was around them, except to give a general sense of gloomy, cavernous waste. On the cave floor she could at first see nothing particular, but from a number of directions she could hear water moving, as if there were a stream nearby; and a fresh and constant breeze stirred her hair as Will, turning, crouched down to talk to them.