Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

by Michael Marshall Smith

  ‘Drop it all,’ he said.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘We don’t need it where we’re going.’

  ‘Going? Where are we going?’

  ‘West.’ Nash dropped his cigarette to the ground and strode off towards the truck. ‘We’re going west.’

  Chapter 10

  The man in the black suit drove. You might think a person in his position would prefer an underling to perform that service, and often that would indeed be the case: him in the back seat, the passenger, looking out, casting blight with his gaze. The only being on hand tonight was Vaneclaw, however, and the last thing you want driving your car is an accident imp. With every hour that passed the old man was feeling more and more awake, too. He wanted to be active, engaged. He desired to be doing things.

  And so he drove. Fast.

  The big black car flashed along the highway, brushing the edges of small towns, where people would stir in their beds as if soured by a bad dream they would not remember; sometimes arcing long miles through wide, open country, where there was no one and nothing but the occasional nightbird or vole to look up and shiver as it passed.

  Finally it got where it was going.

  The man parked. He bade the imp stay in the car – on pain of things far worse than death. The imp pointed out, however, that just as allowing one of his kind to drive was a bad idea, leaving one unattended in a vehicle was not a great plan either. The last time he’d been left in a car it had somehow ended up at the bottom of a lake. Upside down.

  The old man sighed, then said, ‘Yes, come along then, but keep silent and out of the way,’ on pain of things far worse than death.

  ‘Right-o,’ Vaneclaw said. ‘I’ll start being silent now, then, shall I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK, bo—’

  Seeing the old man’s face, the imp closed his mouth, and followed him along a path towards the cabin at the end. One side of this was mainly made of glass. The interior was dark, but when the man walked right up to the sliding doors, he could see the Engineer sitting waiting inside.

  The Engineer stood, came and quietly slid open the doors. He looked the old man in the suit up and down.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  It was an old joke between them.

  Fifteen minutes later the two men were sitting on the plastic chairs outside the cabin. The man in the black suit felt the cold but it did not bother him. The Engineer was huddled up in a sweater, two pairs of socks, an overcoat, and a blanket, and had a fresh cup of coffee cradled in his hands. He still felt chilled. Better to have this conversation here than inside, however.

  ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘I let my mind wander.’

  ‘Of course. I felt it this afternoon, reaching out. Someone else did too. I merely wondered whether you’d also had someone watching me all this time.’

  ‘No.’ The old man raised an eyebrow. ‘Were you trying to hide?’

  ‘Of course not. I move around because it pleases me, and for other reasons you know full well. Though I’ll admit I was intrigued to see how long it would take you to track me down. Quite some while, it turned out.’

  ‘No. I only started looking yesterday.’

  The Engineer looked surprised. The old man shrugged. ‘Before that … I don’t remember. I woke up two days ago on the terrace of a hotel in South Beach, Miami.’

  ‘Very hot, Florida.’

  ‘You’re telling me. Evidently I had been resident in the hotel for three months. I have no recollection of that period. Before that, according to receipts in my suitcase, I spent a number of years in Antwerp, of all places. Prior to that I do start to recall things. The wandering, mainly.’

  ‘It’s been fifty years. I’m not surprised you can’t remember everything.’

  ‘That’s just it. I do, before the last few. I recall the moment where I decided that I no longer wished, for a while at least, to actively engage in the course I had pursued for a hundred millennia. I knew I had set countless black deeds and curdled paths in motion, given seed to chaos and sadnesses that would persist without my supervision – including wars that turned out rather better than I’d hoped. I remember decades spent travelling the globe, alone in thought, stalking the mountains and forests and backstreets, sometimes appearing as I am now, at other times as a woman in middle age, occasionally as a large black dog. Even, for a brief period, as a chicken.’

  ‘How’d that go?’

  ‘Not well.’

  ‘But then?’

  ‘It seems … I fell asleep. Not so that I stopped moving and doing, but so that I lost awareness of myself. I moved as if in a dream, a dream so deep that I was not conscious of either its contents or myself.’

  ‘And now you have reawoken.’

  ‘So it appears. Though …’ The old man stopped talking.

  The Engineer let the silence rest for a moment. ‘You’re concerned about something,’ he said then, quietly. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Last night I was in North Dakota.’

  ‘Very cold, North Dakota.’

  ‘Disappointingly so. But I tracked down the imp that is called Vaneclaw.’

  ‘I remember him. Extremely dim.’

  ‘But also very loyal. I interrogated him, then bade him gather all minions from the area, demons large and small. I looked into the dark void in the centre of each and every one. I found them still loyal too.’

  ‘Of course,’ the Engineer said, not surprised.

  ‘Not of course, I’m afraid to say. I suspect it was this that finally drew me back from my slumbers.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘My doubts were first ignited in Florida, where I watched a bad man perform a sacrifice. It was a small act, a breakage, but good enough. It was evidently not the first that he had performed in my name.’

  ‘So he claimed?’

  ‘He did not lie. He had a trick that proved he had been rewarded for prior acts of a similar kind.’

  ‘What strength of trick?’

  ‘A minor thing with fire.’

  The Engineer looked confused. ‘I don’t see the problem. Surely it’s good that fresh acolytes have found the path to you, even while you were … dormant. And specious rewards ensue from their acts of fealty, conferred upon them by the black ether. It was ever thus. Sacrifice begets power.’

  ‘That’s just it, my friend. I did not feel anything at all from the sacrifice he performed right in front of my eyes.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing. My meeting with the imps and demons of North Dakota confirmed my suspicions. They have prayed and made sacrifice, every day and hour. Countless lives have been blighted by their actions – yet none of that power has found its way home to me. I suspect this may even be at the root of how I lost awareness of myself. The dark charge faded to the point where I slipped into some kind of infernal standby mode.’

  The Engineer looked serious now. ‘That’s … very strange.’

  ‘When did you last check the machine?’

  ‘Yesterday. It’s working perfectly.’

  The old man in the suit suddenly frowned, and turned his head towards the sliding doors.

  Hannah had woken first a little before midnight, according to the clock on her bedside table. She was cold. She huddled deeper into her bed sheets and managed to drift back off to sleep.

  She woke again an hour later. She was still cold, but something told her this was not what had interrupted her sleep. She lifted her head from the pillow and listened.

  After a moment she heard a voice. It sounded like Granddad. Perhaps he was on the phone.

  She fell asleep once more, but it was a shallow sleep, and her mind kept working, eventually popping up the observation that Granddad couldn’t be on the phone, because there was no signal here, duh. This observation didn’t know what to do with itself and so it wandered Hannah’s dozing mind, bumping into other ideas and thoughts and fragments of dreams, until eventually it made enough no
ise to wake her up.

  She listened blearily. There was silence, and then she heard a voice again. This time it sounded like an old man, yet not Granddad.

  That was strange.

  She raised herself up on one elbow, still half-asleep. She’d just about be able to believe that someone had happened to wander by the cabin and decided to stop and have a chat with Granddad, were it not for the fact that (a) he’d said he didn’t know anyone here, and was glad of it, and (b) it was now after one o’clock in the morning.

  Also, she thought she could hear the sound of running water, too. And a low, tuneless humming.

  She got out of bed.

  There was silence on the deck as the two old men watched Hannah approach the sliding doors.

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘My granddaughter,’ the Engineer said. ‘She’s the other person who felt the pressure of your thoughts today. It made the afternoon difficult for her.’

  ‘She’ll forget. But what’s she doing here?’

  ‘Staying with me.’

  ‘Yes, I assumed something of the sort,’ the old man said tetchily. ‘I meant why?’

  ‘Problems at home.’

  Hannah reached the doors and slid one of them open. She flinched as the cold air crept quickly inside. ‘What are you doing out here, Granddad? It’s freezing. And who is this man?’

  The man in the black suit stood slowly, towering over her, all the world’s shadows ready at his command. ‘I … am the Devil,’ he said, his voice hollow with the echoes of countless millennia of howling darkness.

  There was silence for a moment.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Hannah said. She blinked at him, and yawned massively. ‘Also, Granddad, there’s an extremely large mushroom in our bath.’

  Chapter 11

  ‘But … but … but … how?’ Hannah asked.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d asked. ‘And also … why?’

  It wasn’t the first time she’d asked that either. She and Granddad were in the living room. The man in the crumpled suit had told the giant mushroom to get out of the bath and go wait outside. The mushroom, whose name seemed to be Vaneclaw, had done what it was told. A little later there had been a faint yelping sound, caused by it wandering too close to the edge of the bluff and falling over it. The man in the suit – or ‘the Devil’ as he kept insisting he should be called – said he’d be able to do less harm down there, and to ignore him for now.

  After a while, however, the mushroom had started calling out, rather plaintively. The noise eventually got loud enough that Granddad became concerned it might get into the dreams of people in nearby cabins, and so the old man in the suit irritably went out to make the mushroom be quiet. He’d been gone for some time.

  Meanwhile Granddad had listened to Hannah ask the same questions, again and again. How, and why, could he possibly know the Devil, the most evil and awful being in the universe, that a lot of people said didn’t even exist?

  Each time she asked, Granddad seemed to try to make a start at answering, but faltered. So she asked yet again.

  ‘Let me tell you a story,’ he said, finally.

  Once, he said, there was a boy.

  His name was Erik Gruen. Erik was thirteen years old and lived on a farm, a small farm, in the vast flatness of central Germany. It was not a very good farm. Every day Erik and his brothers and sisters helped their parents, tilling the land and planting seeds and looking after their straggly collection of livestock. Each year, the family barely scraped by. There was never much food, and Erik – the youngest of six children – went to work in the field every day wearing a selection of cast-offs not just from his elder brothers, but sisters, too. You might think that would have been embarrassing, but it was not, because everyone wore the same – torn rags and bits of sacking, held together with string. The point was not looking smart but being protected from the elements, because often it rained. It was cold a lot of the time, too, and windy.

  It was a tough life, though they didn’t know it. This hard, endless struggle was all they knew, all their parents had known, and all their parents’ parents had known, back into the mists of murky time. The Gruens had been working this scabby patch of land for centuries. That was what they did, all they had ever done, and all they would ever do.

  Except that one morning, when it was raining so hard there was nothing they could do outside and the entire family was crammed into the tiny farmhouse, sniping at each other, Erik decided to take a walk. He headed down the long, winding lane and got as far as the road (itself only a track slightly wider than the lane). He kept on walking until he’d gone further than ever before, and then he walked some more.

  The sky was heavy and black, and the rain kept coming down. Eventually Erik noticed structures in the distance, buildings of a type he’d never seen before.

  After another hour he reached the outskirts of the town. He was in awe. He’d never encountered anything bigger than his local village, which consisted of a few run-down wooden houses, a ramshackle store that never had anything in it except wizened turnips and the odour of rats living and dead, and a hostelry which he’d been warned never to go near because it was where people’s fathers went to drink beer and shout and fall over. He was wholly unaccustomed to the sight of structures that were three and four storeys high.

  He’d never seen so many people, either.

  Going back and forth, rushing to and fro. People yelling at each other and hawking things, striding in and out of all the buildings. Hundreds and hundreds of them.

  Thousands.

  At first it was exciting but after a while Erik found himself dizzy and anxious. He wasn’t used to being in the midst of so many souls. Out in the countryside you knew everyone. Your family, the people on the next farms, the folk in the village. This place thronged with so many people that it was quite clear you could never hope to know them all, not in a hundred years. How could you live amongst all these strangers?

  When he happened upon an especially large building near the centre of the town he went in, hoping for respite from the crowds.

  It was quiet inside. Erik realized it was a church, a hundred times bigger than any he’d seen. He sat on one of the chairs at the back. The church soothed him. There’s something about the still atmosphere of a church – especially when no one else is around – that can make you feel yourself again.

  And there were the windows.

  Erik’s life until then had been painted in shades of brown and grey. The mud of the fields where he spent every day working. The small, dull wooden buildings. The cloudy sky. Apart from the occasional spring flower, he rarely saw any colour at all. His universe was sludge-coloured.

  The windows of this huge church exploded with every colour and shade and hue, even on an afternoon when the sun was barely leaking through clouds and rain. They showed pictures of Jesus, and the apostles, and other scenes from the scriptures, and they were in reds and blues and greens and purples and yellow so bright it looked like gold.

  He sat open-mouthed, staring. They were the most beautiful and striking things he’d ever experienced. Or, at least, they were for half an hour, but then something else stole their thunder.

  A door opened at the other end of the church and a man came in. He was tall but portly, and evidently didn’t realize Erik was sitting at the back. He walked up to the organ and sat down.

  Erik didn’t know what an organ was. He’d never heard one. His parents and grandparents hadn’t either. None of them had ever made it as far as this town, which was named Leipzig. Erik discovered later what the thing with all the pipes was called, but sooner than that, he discovered what it was for.

  The man reached out with his hands and pressed his fingers on the keyboard. Some notes rang out, apparently randomly. The man stopped, and frowned, and looked up at the ceiling, as if waiting for inspiration.

  After a few moments he reached out again with his right hand and played a few more notes, different notes, one after an
other. He stopped; then he tried once more. He seemed to like the sound better this time, and played the sequence again, and again, changing it a little each time, until he found an order that he evidently liked best.

  Then he started playing with his left hand, too.

  His right hand kept playing the first sequence. The left hand played something similar, but not exactly the same, and not at quite the same time. The two sets of notes spoke to each other, as if having a conversation.

  They went round and round, changing, multiplying, until they became like two flocks of birds flying amongst each other, independent yet joined, and the sound got bigger and bigger and more and more complicated as more birds flew to join the whirl … and still, at the heart of it, you could hear the first simple sequence of notes.

  Then the man started playing with his feet, too.

  It turned out there was another keyboard down there, with big wooden pedals, and when he added another, lower line to the soaring music by stomping on them, Erik truly thought his ears were going to explode.

  The stained-glass windows were no longer the most beautiful and astonishing thing he’d ever experienced. This music was. It was so extraordinary, in fact, that Erik let out a gasp.

  The man at the organ heard – despite the music – and stopped playing, immediately.

  Erik was bereft. It was as if someone had turned out the sun. The man turned to stare around the church. ‘Who’s there?’

  Erik thought about trying to hide or run away, but his parents had raised him to be honest, and to take responsibility for his actions. He stood, rather scared. ‘Me, sir.’

  The man left the organ and strode down the central aisle until he was standing over Erik. He looked very stern. ‘Who are you, boy? What are you doing here?’

  Erik explained that he was from a farm, and had walked a very long way to the town and come into the church to be out of the crowds and the rain, and that he hadn’t meant to trespass, and he was extremely sorry.

  The man looked down at him. After a moment, his face softened. ‘Well, then, what did you think?’