Twelve Nights

by Andrew Zurcher

  Phantastes crossed the chapel with a clutch of dried leaves in his hand. Kay looked at the floor. Between their feet, the stone had been painted with a picture of two wolves staring at a nest which contained three eggs. A goose flew overhead.

  ‘You’ll need to choose one of these,’ said Phantastes softly, all the edge melted from his resonant bass voice. ‘I’d choose for you, but only the imaginer can know which leaf will be right for her when the time comes.’

  ‘How am I to know?’ Kay asked.

  ‘Look at them and think about what you have to do. Sometimes you won’t even know why you know, or what you know. But you’ll take one.’

  Kay looked at the large, veined, olive-green leaves fanned out in Phantastes’ hand. They looked a bit like the bay leaves that grew in a large earthenware pot behind the house at home, but they were larger, more rounded, and even dried were of a much deeper evergreen, and their whitish veins protruded milkily from them – like scurf on the sea, she thought. She needed to find her father, to think his thoughts – but not his thoughts at all. She needed to dream his dreams, and to follow the fever of his frenzy. The veins on the leaves stood out in some places more prominently than others, and Kay could almost see in the milk-white veins the foamy saliva of a ranting madman. She traced her fingers over the proffered leaves, touching the ridges of the veins, and let her touch linger on the nodules where the veins stood out most prominently. Where the spine felt thickest – though not on the largest of the leaves – she pinched and drew it out. She had hardly looked.

  ‘A good choice,’ Phantastes said kindly, staring at his hands, where Kay saw his veins, too, standing proudly blue against the skin. In her own hand she turned the leaf – and saw that it was fresh, supple, not dried at all, covered with tiny hairs, bursting with juice.

  ‘But this leaf –’

  ‘I picked it from the tree, in Alexandria – at home – for this –’ He had no more words. Every nerve in Kay’s body hummed.

  ‘Oh, Phantastes,’ she said, and twirled and twirled the supple fabric of the leaf between her thumb and forefinger, dizzy with it, drunk already on its moment.

  ‘Trace the veins back to the stem, Kay. Follow the milk of the leaf.’ And then he had slipped away.

  Will was sitting beside Ell, talking quietly about the colours of the glass above them. Kay saw that he had the horn in his hand, where he held it unobtrusively just outside their conversation. She knew what it was for, and that Ell would have to blow it when the time came; and, thinking that the time had better come sooner than later, she sat down and thrust the leaf all at once into her mouth, squeezing her eyes shut and sinking down cross-legged on to the floor. She only just had time to place her palms on her knees before a bitter rush of metal spiked beneath her tongue and seemed to course like electricity through her nerves. Her toes throbbed suddenly.

  For a few moments Kay swam, just keeping her head above the level and taking in the metal flavour that began to soak first her joints, then her limbs, then her pelvis and abdomen, rising all the time. She didn’t know exactly what she had expected, but somehow thought something would happen to her vision, her head; this by contrast was a simple taste, and yet one that she could feel not only in her mouth, but all over her body – as if she were bathing in a sea of cold electric soup and her feet were tongues. She was aware that the others were circling her, watching her, settling down on the floor around her to watch, and speaking in hushed whispers; but they dwindled from her awareness like candles snuffed by dawn, still burning but shedding no light. Instead this sun of metal rose into her throat, burning and beginning to hum, scattering all the clouds and shadows of thought before it, and leaving only a single light of awareness, a single long and resonant peal of equal sound, condensing all causes and effects into that single, lasting, momentous eternity of presence into which all consequence was instantly absorbed.

  But even so, Kay found she could think.

  In her thought was the image of her father lying on this floor, staring up into the hued shadows of the stone vault above; she walked towards him with her awareness, each step a shudderingly effortful shedding of distance, and stood over him, peering down at his sunken eyes, the grey stubble of his lank and careworn cheeks, the mottle-pored bone of his nose and the slight movement at the inner edges of his pallid lips as he breathed softly in, then out. How. How to see what he saw, to feel what he felt. Feels. Sees. How. As if she were leaping into the air and diving into a hole into the ground all at once, Kay contorted her thought and let it fall, just heavily enough to alight on his vantage. Her eyes widened; she was staring at the ceiling, exhausted with the effort of approach and thinking nothing at all.

  Like a balloon balanced on the point of a pin, Kay felt an unimagined, unarticulated dread of any thought, any movement of perception – all ways might lead to catastrophe. Without allowing this awareness to surface into her consciousness, she felt a muffled command: to settle on just the right thought; the thought that would allow her to follow the thread back not to where he had been – she was already there – but to what he had been, just on that precipice of the moment before they had turned him out into the street. She spread herself all over the floor, just knowing its coldness, his coldness, beneath the metallic hum still knifing constantly through her nerves. She sensed herself too warm, too high, still too gathered, too bound. She remembered what Phantastes had said: she should follow the vein, follow the milk of the leaf. With a subdued but sudden sense of surprise she realized that the leaf still lay whole between her tongue and palate; all the silver seeping through her nerves was the taste of its skin. With immediate resolve she chewed it, and felt instantly the pulpy, woody paste of the leaf sap dropping fluidly on to her gums. Its taste was richer, deeper, more of garlic and roots that grow in the ground, and in her mind the current flow opened, as if the metal were running to the wood, and the wood running to the ground. Suddenly there were worms. Fingersful of them. Kay felt her body shudder, her mouth recoiling from the leaf. It was too much, it would be too much. As if from a great distance, she could feel her stomach heave. The worms turned, crawling like reaching fingers up from her abdomen, crawling into her thoughts, pushing with eating mouths into her throat. They were rising red into a red sun. A scream built in her mind. Unlike the scream of a voice, it needed no breath to sustain it, and it went on and on. She swallowed, like a fist pushing down the worms where they climbed. They rose. She swallowed, remembering something – what was it? – but determined not to let the memory reach her.

  Here the scream ended. Here where the sap dived into the ground Kay at last felt the cold, like a kind of despair not wrapping but enclosing her sense as it pushed, in fluid beads, between the small stones, the gelid and unyielding grit and clay of the beginning of thoughts – not her thinking, or his thinking, but the possibility of thinking. Think. She had been on the surface of the leaf, the leaf like a page, and the page that of a book; then by the margin she had sunk to its stem, gathering in; and now she was burrowing within the opening, down to the threads of the stitching where they looped and tunnelled in the unliving earth, through the binding, and then out, anchoring, diffusing, radical. Here it begins. Here begins. Here.

  This is it. I realize. In the moment he was – thinking – nothing but this –

  Thinking that he had been set apart, cut off, left alone; but thinking also that he had become joined, too, by this unravelling, this unstemming, this unstorying – joined to a cause – joined to a first matter of earth – joined to them all – joined to all. Thinking he was apart, he was together; he was being impossibly far away, right here. On the one hand he was single, alone, himself, cut off and discrete; on the other hand he had become real, timeless, like a wraith, as large and encompassing as an idea, universal. Kay held the singularity and the universality in the two hands of her thought and travelled upwards, back into the stem and trunk of state that joined cause to effect, the accident to its consequence, root to fruit. She knew she had to is
sue from every vein at once, simultaneously; she had to hold the two currents together, not only through this central shaft, where it was so snug, so compact, so easy to twine them, but out explosively into the branch and leaf and text and texture of every least vein, every least vein that was a moment. With a huge breathing swell she forced her thought out along every available and imagined taste, sound, sight, touch and scent at once. Come home.

  Just before she felt the sound of the horn goring into her stomach like a tusk, shattering her concentration, she seemed to feel herself coming to herself from a great distance, herself running to herself, a wind running through her running to herself; and she knew the place, the posture, the sense of it. Muttering; a door dug into an earthen wall; light, but also stench; breeze, but also a heaviness; black pavement below, white stone above; concord.

  With a sigh of exhausted expression she sank upon the surface of the cold floor, feeling its distinct and angled hardness against her side, her leg, her ankle. The leaf was still in her mouth, and before she opened her eyes she spat it out; a little saliva dribbled sideways down her cheek, and she realized she must be lying with her cheek against the floor. Her stiff hand she tightened. She tested her strength against the floor, with the ball of her palm pushing weakly up. There were voices now, and the sound of the horn was a memory, and the voices were pulling her beneath her armpits, each one dragging at her, now here, now there. Or were they hands? She fell into them, and found herself sitting up. She opened her eyes into Ell’s.

  ‘Kay, did you hear the horn?’ she asked brightly. ‘Did you hear me blow it? It worked, didn’t it? I did it.’

  Kay smiled and thought to put her hand on Ell’s cheek; but it only lifted as far as her arm, so Kay rested it there, almost against Ell’s elbow, and squeezed. ‘You did it.’

  The wraiths gave her five or ten minutes, some water and some dried fruit before they began to ask her the questions she was so anxious to answer. Phantastes wanted to know everything she had noticed from the beginning, and although Kay was ready to recount it all, Flip broke in severely and kept the questions short and direct. ‘She hasn’t got the energy and we haven’t got the time. If Ghast, or Kat, or any of them know we’re here, they’ll know why we’re here; and if they know why we’re here, they’ll be racing to prevent us from finding him. We’ve been followed before.’

  Chastened, Phantastes left the questions to Will and Flip, and instead hovered around Razzio who, plainly revolted by the whole process, sat hard against the far wall, idly tracing patterns in the worn stone floor. Kay dutifully reconstructed her final impression, trying to recall the minute detail of its clarity, like a white light – bright; so bright she almost could not look at it, even now. It struck her like a dream, something she knew inside and out but had no words to describe, something that could only be experienced, and not detailed; but still she struggled to observe it, as if she had been outside rather than within it, and gave them all the details she could.

  They were plainly stumped. She had mentioned the stench, as of rotting leaves or maybe sewage; the door framed by rough stone and set into the earthen wall; the two sorts of stone, one perhaps the paving of a road, the other a sculpting stone, almost marble in its smoothness and translucence. She had recalled the little breeze, which perhaps she had not felt, but seen stirring in – what? – newspapers? But also a heaviness in the air, as of pressure. A sense of movement she remembered, but also a presence or a stasis. The wraiths could do nothing with it. Flip became more and more impatient, his hands stretched taut as he sketched fruitlessly in the air. By contrast Will waited quietly, although he, too, was evidently frustrated – wondering if he ought to have tried the integration again, Kay thought; wondering if he ought to have let so young a child risk so much and fail them so completely. Kay searched through her memory of that moment of apprehension, and tried as hard as she could to particularize a little more of it – but it was like trying to tear at granite with her fingernails. Though she was sitting still, she felt her lungs heave, and she gasped after air; a weakness eddied in the muscles of her arms and shoulders; and her head hurt. All she could say, as she at last gave up her attempt at recollection and analysis, was the one word she had almost forgotten: concord.

  The two wraiths both looked up and at her with sudden interest, then at one another. They had heard something in that of which Kay was entirely ignorant, she knew – she could see the excitement and hope on both haggard faces.

  ‘Was that a word you saw or heard during the dismantling, Kay?’ Will asked quietly but urgently.

  ‘No – it was more the word that was hovering over all the things I saw and heard and felt and smelled and tasted – as if they all had a theme or a colour to them, and that was it. Concord. It was the last thing I thought before I realized I was hearing the horn.’

  Flip had already got to his feet, and with a fluid motion slung Ell by both arms up and on to his back; she looked surprised, but clung on with manifest delight. ‘Let’s go,’ he said – loudly enough that Phantastes and Razzio, ten metres away, heard him and immediately gathered themselves ready to follow. Flip was stooping out through the door and down the near stairs. Kay looked imploringly at Will.

  ‘The Place de la Concorde. It’s in the centre of the city, not far. It may make sense of some of the things you said – it’s worth a try, anyway. Anything is worth a try.’

  ‘There was something else,’ said Kay.

  Will hesitated. Flip was gone.

  ‘There were worms. In the leaf. Something I remembered –’

  Will placed his hand, his broad hand, like a blanket on her shoulder, as if to say she should not worry. Its warmth radiated down her side like the heat of a fire or the stroke of a healing knife.

  Down from the chapel, banging out through the heavy wooden doors, through the court and on to the street Kay trailed after Razzio with Will beside her. Her legs hung from her waist like withered branches, and something vacant had opened up in her stomach during the dispersal – if that’s what it was – in the chapel. She counted out the paces again, forcing herself to throw her legs forward on to the pavement, stride after stride. Will must have noticed her struggling, and when he offered her his back, she took it. After that she was able to give more attention to the streets and buildings they were passing: first, row after row of massive white stone piles, even during these quiet holidays guarded by soldiers and non-uniformed sentries; then the river again, which they crossed by an old bridge with an ornamented stone balustrade running down both sides. A few low boats – almost like canal boats – were moving lazily up and down the river, and though it was cold and the doors were shut up fast, Kay could hear the faint sound of music and something like a megaphone. Beyond that, on the far bank, they passed the front of the Louvre – Will stopped for a moment so that Kay could spin her head all around the interior court, where a huge glass pyramid surrounded by a pool of water stood austerely amid the grand ornamentation of the palace walls. But the others were already gone, and Will had to break almost into a canter in order to keep them in sight as they passed through gilt iron gates and into the palace gardens. Pebbles and cold sand crunched underfoot, and the trees stood stark against the crisp, bright sky. A few snow patches lingered in places on the grey-green grass, and clumps of people – tourists and some couples – ambled around the lesser paths and near the huge Ferris wheel that suddenly dominated the garden. Ahead Kay could see a stone obelisk nearing, directly beyond the end of the garden, and something about the colour of the stone, as they neared it, made her sure that this must be where they were headed. It was like recognizing an old familiar taste. Without surprise she noticed that the garden ended in a long flight of steps, and that, to either side, it must meet the street beyond in a sheer wall. Without surprise she observed a thin but constant stream of traffic circulating around the obelisk, which stood serene and stable in its centre. Without surprise, as they went down the steps, she felt a sudden cool, dank heaviness surround her, a
s if they had descended into the earthy shadow of the long swards of turf they had just crossed. It would be here, she thought. It must be here. She slipped off Will’s back, touching down into the place.

  And then, as they rounded the corner beyond the gate at the bottom of the steps, there he was. If Kay hadn’t been looking for him, she would have walked by without knowing him. Though it was the middle of winter, his face glared red in the morning sunlight as if it had burned him; his hair, normally combed back, stood up here and there in ragged brown tufts; his clothes, rumpled and dirty, only seemed familiar on closer consideration; but, above all, his expressions and gestures were completely alien, as if he were playing out some sort of exaggerated character inversion. And his face and hands were animated: he sat on a low crate by the wall, surrounded by little piles of windblown debris, speaking to himself in an unhurried but unimpeded monotone, and gesticulating in a kind of parody of plotting. Kay might almost have thought him some kind of crazed and destitute performer, had she not known him for himself. And while she wanted to run to him, to hug him and hold on to him until he became himself again, Kay knew that she was frightened of him, too.

  Will and Flip had stopped by her side. Ell, still clasping Flip’s shoulders, was craning to look at Ned More. ‘Did I look like that?’ Kay asked. ‘I mean, was I doing those things … when … before?’

  Will placed his hand gently on her shoulder, but didn’t take his eye off Edward More. ‘No, Kay, of course not. Most of the time you just lay very still. I still think what you were doing wasn’t quite the same as dispersal –’

  ‘It was,’ Kay said flatly. ‘I still felt solid, kind of whole, when Ell blew the horn, but I was glimpsing something else – this place, here – and if I had just loosened for a moment – Will, believe me, it was the same. I just didn’t finish it.’

  Flip cut in. ‘I don’t think we should approach him – at least, not quickly, and not all together. I wonder if we should let him see the girls at all. But if we could get Ell and the horn –’