As they moved through the wildly exuberant foliage, they sensed the strange resonance of a sound just beyond hearing; it permeated the atmosphere with the reverberation of a symphony when the final triumphant chord has faded, yet still lingers in the air. “Listen,” whispered Gianni, pausing in midstep. “It is the music of perfection—the sound of creation in harmony.”
Farther into the jungle, they struck a wide grassy path. “We’re close now,” Kit told them, and a few paces later the travellers emerged from the sun-dappled path into a wide, shallow, bowl-shaped clearing. In the centre of the clearing lay a crystalline lake of translucent, shimmering liquid. The calm, mirror-like surface reflected the sky and overarching branches of the surrounding trees and hinted at unfathomable depths below.
Gianni crept to the edge and knelt down to examine the pool more closely.
“Is this it?” wondered Wilhelmina, frowning slightly. “Is this the Spirit Well?”
“This is it,” replied Kit, noting her expression. “Disappointed?”
Mina held her head to one side. “I thought it would be different. This looks like a pond in a park. Nice but, you know . . .”
“Nice?” Kit shook his head. “Anyway, it’s not so much what it looks like, it’s what it does.”
“Now that we’re here, what are we going to do?” she asked.
“I was hoping—” began Kit, and was interrupted by a nudge to the ribs.
“We’ve got company,” said Cass, indicating the opposite bank where a man had just emerged from the surrounding foliage.
“Bloody hell!” growled Kit. “Burleigh, you rat!” he shouted. “How did you get here?”
“Good to see you too,” Burleigh replied. He waved the Shadow Lamp in his hand. “Superior tools, dear fellow. Even so, I doubt I could have found my way here without you. Well done.” He stuffed the ley lamp into his coat pocket and turned his attention to the pool. “Now, if you will excuse me. I believe I have a rendezvous with destiny.”
“He’s going into the water,” said Mina.
“We can’t let him do that,” Kit told her. “We’ve got to stop him. Come on!” He dashed off around the perimeter of the pool.
Burleigh, poised on the edge of the pool, raised a hand in warning as Kit scrambled nearer. “Stay back!” he snarled. “Do not come any closer.”
“Listen to me,” Kit pleaded. “You don’t know what you’re doing!”
“I know exactly where I am and what I’m doing,” countered Burleigh. He turned his eyes back to the Spirit Well. “This has been my life’s sole ambition. It is what I have lived for. This is Arthur’s treasure, his legacy. I am about to undo all the wrongs I’ve ever done and all that have been done to me. From the moment I first learned about it, this is all I ever wanted—the chance to make it right.” His voice softened. “The chance to make everything right.”
“No!” cried Kit, horrified. “You don’t understand! Arthur was wrong. You can’t undo what has been done. You can’t re-create the past.”
“Oh, but you can. You said so yourself. Arthur did it, and so can I.”
“Kit is telling you the truth,” said Cass, joining Kit where he stood on the bank a few paces from Burleigh. “Arthur made a serious mistake bringing Xian-Li back to life. What you’re about to do will only make things worse.”
Burleigh was shaking his head. “You’re wrong. I can make things better. Don’t you see? In one single act of will, I can change it all—make things the way they were supposed to be. I do not have to be the bastard son of a mother who died in gin-soaked poverty and . . .”
His voice caught in his throat, and it was a moment before he was able to speak again. When he continued, his tone had softened further. “I do not have to be the street ruffian who grew up ragged and hungry, without schooling, without friends, without dignity, or even the grudging compassion of my fellow men. Do you know what it is like to grow up that way? Do you know what that does to a young heart?
“But here”—he waved a hand at the pool—“here is where all that can change. I do not have to be the unloved son, I do not have to be the man who spurned the love of a good woman.” He closed his eyes and drew a shaky breath, then said, “I can be the man my Philippa loved and would have gladly married.”
Burleigh paused and swallowed. There were tears in his eyes as he stood at the edge of the pool. “In the waters of this well, I can be made new. Don’t you see? I can be a better man.”
Gianni joined Kit and Cass on the bank. “My son, I understand why you feel the way you do,” he said, adopting a priestly tone. “What happened to you should not have happened to anyone. But it did happen. Sadly, it did happen.
“We all have regrets and sorrows in life, mio amico. We all have our trials, and these must be borne with courage and fortitude. It is for us to shoulder our burdens and go forward in hope and trust into the future God has ordained.” He put out a hand toward the pool at Burleigh’s feet. “But this place, this Well of Souls—it is not about remaking the past. It is about the future. Whatever you take from the pool, you steal from the future. This is a theft that creation cannot endure.”
“The apocalypse we talked about,” said Wilhelmina, stepping forward, “is the death of all creation. It began a long time ago, and was caused by Arthur stealing from the future to remake the past for his own purposes. He was wrong to do that, and what he did poisoned the well.”
“You cannot know that,” Burleigh said, his voice slurred. He turned his attention back to the pool and took a slow, deliberate step into the liquid.
“No!” shouted Kit, dashing to the place on the bank where Burleigh entered the pool. “Stop!”
“There is no going back now,” Burleigh told him. “I will do what I have come to do.”
“For the love of God, Burleigh,” shouted Wilhelmina. “Please stop!”
Burleigh took another step, deeper into the pool. Wind gusted through the treetops round about; it swirled around the pool, shaking the branches with sudden violence. Leaves began falling from the trees, and the forest fruit shrivelled on the stem, dropping to the ground. The grass lining the banks of the well began to wither and die; before their very eyes it dried and blew away.
“We’ve got to get him out of there,” said Mina. “Kit, we’ve got to do something.”
“Burleigh!” Kit called. “Look around. See what’s happening! Listen to me, you’ve got to come out of there. You’re making things unstable.”
Burleigh took another step; slow ripples of light scattered across the pool. He was now up to his knees in the Spirit Well. Leaves and petals spun to earth, falling like snow, some of them striking the pool, sending tiny pulses of light racing across the surface wherever they touched. The wind, which had been gusting fitfully, dropped away to nothing, and an eerie silence settled over the glade.
Cass, standing close to Kit, let out a cry halfway between a gasp and a stifled scream. “I do not believe it,” she said, her voice quivering. “Kit, look.” She pointed to the forest behind them. “What’s happening?”
Kit looked where she was pointing and saw a second Cass step out of the jungle. Wearing the outfit she had been wearing when Kit first met her—the odd combination of long peasant skirt, billowy blouse, blue-checked shawl, and high-topped shoes—she looked around with an expression of puzzled apprehension, saw the others, but made no move to join them.
“That’s me,” Cass said. “That’s what I was wearing when I first met Haven and Giles.”
“Stay calm,” Mina told her, shuddering at the memory of meeting her own twin in Prague. “She is probably more freaked out by this than you are. Just turn around and don’t look at her.”
Kit turned to Burleigh, who was wading deeper into the pool. “Do you see that?” he shouted. “You caused that! You’ve got to come out of there.”
Burleigh regarded the duplicate Cassandra, who was just then joined at the Spirit Well by another doppelgänger. “Oh no,” gasped Wilhelmina as a second Gianni
appeared. This one was dressed in the robes of a priest. “It’s Brother Lazarus.”
Gianni regarded his twin: long black cassock, short tonsure, and the owlish round-rimmed glasses—it was himself as he had been when in residence at the Montserrat observatory. Like the others, this newcomer appeared disoriented and confused, but then he saw Gianni and instantly recognised him. After a moment’s hesitation, he lifted a hand in a tentative wave. Gianni waved back and called a warning for the doubles not to come any closer. To Kit he said, “We must get Burleigh out of the pool—now! Before something else happens.”
“I’m going to have to go in and pull him out.”
“That’s not safe,” Mina said. “It could make things worse.”
“I don’t see we have any choice.”
Kit stepped to the edge of the pool, but before he could enter, Cass cried, “Kit, wait!” She stabbed a finger at the screen of foliage behind him.
Kit spun around as another man stumbled from the jungle bearing his dead wife in his arms: Arthur Flinders-Petrie as Kit had seen him on that first, fateful visit to the Spirit Well. Haggard, careworn, and desperately tired, Arthur gaped in startled amazement at the strangers on the opposite bank. It was a moment before he found his voice, and when he did, all that came out was a hoarse croak. “Who are you?”
“Stay where you are!” Kit, standing between Burleigh in the pool and Arthur out of it, raised both hands to prevent Arthur coming any closer. “I’m warning you. Stay back!”
Arthur looked beyond Kit and saw Burleigh in the pool. “You!” he snarled and staggered back a step. Looking around furiously, he said, “All you people—what are you doing here? What is going on?”
Burleigh seemed not to hear; he had turned his attention to the pocket where the lights of the Shadow Lamp were glowing through the fabric of his coat. He pulled it out to reveal an instrument glowing with a bright, pulsating, greenish light. Sparks leaked from the little holes around the outer rim, and the device gave off a distinct, waspish hum. Burleigh stared at the Shadow Lamp, seemingly transfixed by what he saw.
“This is getting way too weird,” Mina said.
“It just got weirder,” Cass told her, unable to suppress a shiver as another Wilhelmina joined the doppelgängers at the pool’s edge. This Wilhelmina had a wan, dull appearance; her hair hung in limp ropes and there were dark circles under her eyes. She was dressed in skinny black slacks and a black turtleneck, and had a much abused hand-knitted purple scarf around her neck and sheepskin boots on her feet. Behind her came yet another Wilhelmina—this one dressed in her desert assault gear with the blue pashmina. Cass leaned close to Mina. “Is that really you?”
Mina shook her head in disbelief. “It used to be,” she admitted. To Kit she said, “Kit, it’s getting bad. We’ve got—”
Whatever she was about to say would remain forever unsaid. For at that moment, yet another figure appeared out of the foliage. This man was old. The few strands of hair on his bare head were as wispy as spider silk, and his wrinkled skin was blasted brown by the sun and wind. He looked leathery and tough and as withered as a mummy, but the eyes, sunk deep in his skull, glinted hard and bright with quick, dark intelligence. He was dressed simply in loose-fitting trousers and what had once been a white shirt. The trousers were ragged and travel-stained; the shirt hung off him in tattered scraps, allowing those on the bank to see clearly and distinctly that the skin of his chest was decorated with dozens of curious glyphs: lines, half circles, dots, spirals, triangles, and odd half-geometrical, half-organic pictograms.
Kit glimpsed the familiar collection of symbols and knew the stranger’s identity. They had met before. Only where once the man had been vigorous and in the prime of life, he was now a wizened old man; and where once the tattoos splashed across his torso had been bold and bright indigo, now they were faded, grey, and sagging with the skin on which they were inscribed.
“It’s him!” gasped Cass. “It’s Arthur Flinders-Petrie . . . again! And he’s ancient.”
The old Arthur gazed with rheumy eyes at all the strangers standing around the pool. “You should not be here,” he said, his voice a wheeze in his chest. “This place is not for you.”
“That’s what Friday told me,” murmured Cass. “His exact words.”
The wind gusted sharp and chill, rending the last leaves from the trees. Threatening clouds loomed overhead.
“It’s Damascus again,” moaned Wilhelmina.
The young Arthur, furious, tightened his grip on the body of his dead wife and started forward. “Stand aside, sir. I will not be detained any longer.”
Kit refused to be moved. “What you mean to do is wrong. I can’t let you do it.”
“Try to stop me.” Arthur made to barge ahead, but Kit put his hands on Arthur’s chest and held him back. “Gianni! Help me!”
The elderly Arthur answered Kit’s call for help. Stepping quickly behind his younger self, he opened his mouth and, with unexpected vigour, shouted, “You there! Turn around and look at me!”
The young Arthur ceased struggling to get past Kit and glanced over his shoulder. His features drained of whatever colour was left. “Stay away from me,” he cried. “Whoever you may be, stay away.”
“I will not,” replied the old Arthur. “It has taken me a lifetime to find you. I will not walk away now. I mean to stop you from making the worst mistake of your life.”
“It is a trick,” complained the young Arthur. “I don’t know you, sir.”
“You know me, Arthur, as I know you.” The old man moved closer to his younger self. Kit and the others watched, spellbound. “And I know that what you came to do must not be done.” He pointed to the body in young Arthur’s arms. “Xian-Li is dead, and so she must remain. You have no idea of the hardship that will flow from this wicked selfishness.”
Arthur closed his eyes and shook his head. “No . . . no . . . no,” he murmured. “It is lies—all lies. Get out of my way.”
The old Arthur moved closer to his younger self. “Hear me! Your damned stubbornness will be the death of many. You may snatch a few years of happiness, but it will bring untold suffering on scores yet unborn. That is reason enough to stop you. And, by God, you will be stopped.” The young Arthur glanced away, as if appealing to the others to intervene.
“Look at me!” The elder Arthur held out his arms as if he would take the dead Xian-Li from his younger self. “She is dead, Arthur. Her death is already woven into the fabric of the universe. It is meant to be. Are you wise enough to know who should live and who should die? Are you the Lord God Almighty now, that you can grant life or take it away?”
With Kit and the others distracted by the clash between the two Arthurs, Burleigh saw his chance. He stepped yet deeper into the Spirit Well. The wind swirled and whined through the newly bare upper branches, and thunder rolled in the distance. Gianni noticed the movement and rushed to Kit’s side. “Burleigh is making his move! Hurry!”
Kit whirled around. “Keep Arthur back,” he shouted and plunged into the pool. He reached Burleigh in three running strides, seized him by the collar of his coat, and yanked him bodily backward. Burleigh twisted and made a wild swipe with his fist. The blow struck Kit on the side of the head, but Kit held on. The next swing missed and Kit edged back a step, hauling Burleigh with him.
Burleigh twisted in his grasp, but Kit clung on, gaining another step. The Shadow Lamp, spitting sparks and throwing beams of light across the pool, sizzled and popped. Burleigh, unable to connect a solid punch, tried to squirm out of his coat. He succeeded in getting one shoulder free, but Kit forced him back another step. Gianni and Cass rushed to the edge of the bank, ready to help when Kit gained another step or two.
“Give it up,” Kit shouted. “It’s over.”
“Never!” shouted Burleigh. He freed the other shoulder and pulled one arm from the sleeve.
Kit felt the coat slip off and made a desperate lunge as Burleigh attempted to transfer the Shadow Lamp to his free hand
. The action knocked it from Burleigh’s grasp and sent it tumbling through the air to land in the pool a few feet away. Still sparking and fizzling, it rested briefly on the surface and then slowly sank into the depths of the Spirit Well. Burleigh spun around and struck Kit a blow to the head. Kit staggered back but held on, pulling Burleigh with him. Gianni seized the struggling Burleigh and Cass took hold of Kit; together they dragged both men onto the bank.
“Get back, everybody!” shouted Mina. “Something’s happening!”
Out in the pool where the Shadow Lamp had sunk, the liquid was glowing with a lurid light and the surface was quaking as if agitated from below by something large and angry. The turgid liquid did not so much bubble as heave and roil.
Even as they watched, the glow spread into fingers—a blush of ruddy-gold tendrils snaking through the translucent fluid. Miniature bolts of lightning streaked away, losing themselves in the unfathomed deeps. The glistering luminescence spawned a host of unusual shapes: rings and spirals and half-moon crescents with lines and whorls and zigzag slashes . . . shapes they all knew by heart; they had seen them inscribed on the Skin Map and painted on the walls of a tomb in Egypt and a Stone Age cave. But these glittering glyphs were not the two-dimensional representations, nor were they static: they moved and morphed, merging and melding, each becoming part of another, joining and combining in new and more elaborate formations before dividing and fragmenting, only to reunite with other fragments in different configurations to create new three-dimensional objects—like miniature figurines made of diaphanous strands and filaments of light.
The objects proliferated, each spawning new ones, and those splintering off to form still more. The surface of the pool quivered and bulged; the bulge expanded, glowing with an ominous purple light.
The Fatal Tree Page 26