Dark Carnival (2 page)

    'Uncle Einar!'

    Timothy propelled himself on his thin legs, straight through the fog, under the green webbing shadows. He threw himself into Uncle Einar's arms. Einar lifted him!

    'You've wings, Timothy!' Light as thistles, he tossed the boy. 'Wings, Timothy, fly!' Faces wheeled under. Darkness rotated. The house blew away. Timothy felt breeze-like. He flopped his arms. Einar's fingers caught and threw him again to the ceiling. The ceiling fell like a charred wall. 'Fly! Fly!' shouted Einar, loud and deep. 'Fly with wings! Wings!'

    He felt exquisite agonies in his shoulder-blades, as if roots grew, burst to explode and blossom into fresh long, moist membranes! He babbled wild stuff; again Einar hurled him high!

    Autumn wind broke in a tide on the house, rain crashed down, shaking the beams, causing chandeliers to tilt their enraged candles. And the one hundred relatives stared out from each black enchanted niche and room, circling inwards, all forms and sizes, to where Einar balanced the child like a puppet in the roaring spaces. 'Beat your wings! Take off!'

    'Enough!' cried Einar, at last.

    Timothy, deposited gently on the floor timbers, exaltedly, exhaustedly fell against Uncle Einar, sobbing happily 'Uncle, uncle, uncle!'

    'Good flying, eh, Timothy?' Einar patted Timothy's head. 'Good, good.'

    It was almost dawn. Most had arrived and were ready to bed down for the daylight, sleep motionlessly with no sound until the following sunset, when they'd jump out of their mahogany boxes for the revel.

    Uncle Einar, followed by round dozens of others, moved towards the cellar. Mother directed them downwards to the crowded row on row of highly polished boxes. Einar, his wings like sea-green tarpaulins tented behind him, moved with a curious whistling and sussurus through the passageway; where his wings touched they made a sound of drumheads gently beaten.

    Upstairs, Timothy lay wearily, thinking, trying to
like
the darkness. There was so much you could do in darkness that people couldn't criticize you for, because they never saw you. He
did
like the night, but it was a qualified liking; sometimes there was so much night he cried out in rebellion.

    In the cellar, mahogany lids sealed downwards, drawn in upon gesturing pale hands. In corners, certain relatives circled three times to lie down, heads on paws, eyelids shut.

    The sun rose. There was a sleeping with no snores in it.

    Sunset. The revel exploded like a bat nest struck full, shrieking out, fluttering, spreading! Box lids banged wide! Steps rushed up from cellar damp! More late guests, kicking on front and back portals, were admitted, and apologized.

    It rained, and sodden visitors flung their capes, their water-pelleted hats, their sprinkled veils over Timothy who bore them to a closet, where they hung like mummified bats to dry. The rooms were crowd-packed. The laughter of one cousin shot from the hall, angled off the parlour wall, ricocheted, banked and returned to Timothy's ears from a fourth room, accurate and cynical. It was followed by a volley of laughs!

    A mouse ran across the floor.

    'I know
you
, Niece Leibersrouter!' exclaimed father.

    The mouse spiralled three women's feet and vanished in a corner. Moments later a beautiful woman rose up out of nothing, stood in the corner, smiling her white smile at them all.

    Something huddled against the flooded pane of the kitchen window. It sighed and wept and tapped continually, pressed against the glass, but Timothy could make nothing of it, he saw nothing there. In imagination he was outside, staring in. The rain was on him, the wind at him, and the taper-dotted darkness inside was inviting. Waltzes were being waltzed; tall thin figures pirouetted and glided to outlandish music. Stars of light flickered off lifted bottles; small earth clods crumbled from the handled casques, and a spider fell and went silently legging over the floor.

    Timothy shivered. He was inside the house again. Mother called him to run here, run there, help, serve, out to the kitchen, fetch this, fetch that, bring plates, heap the food, be careful, don't stumble, here now, and here — on and on — the party happened around him but not
to
him. Dozens of towering black shapes pressed by him, elbowed him, ignored him.

    Finally, he turned and slipped away up the stairs.

    He stood by Cecy's bed. There was not a tremor in her long narrow white face; it was completely calm. Her bosom did not rise or descend. Yet if you touched her you felt warmth.

    'Cecy,' he called, softly.

    There was no response until the third call, when her lips parted a little. 'Yes.' She sounded very tired and happy and dreaming, and remote.

    'This is Timothy,' he whispered.

    'I know,' she said, after a long wait.

    'Where are you tonight, Cecy?'

    After he had repeated the question twice, she said,

    'Far west of here. In California. In the Imperial Valley, beside the Salten Sea, near the Mud Pots and the steam and the quiet. I'm a farmer's wife, and I'm sitting on a wooden porch. The sun's going slowly down.'

    'What's it like, Cecy?'

    'You can hear the mud pots talking,' she said, slowly, as if talking in church. 'The mud pots lift little grey heads of steam, pushing up the mud like bald men rising in the thick syrup, head first, out in the broiling channels, and the grey heads rip like rubber fabric and collapse with a noise like wet lips moving. And little plumes of steam escape from the ripped tissue. And there is a smell of sulphur and deep burning and old time. The dinosaur has been abroiling here ten million years.'

    'Is he done yet, Cecy?'

    Cecy's calm sleeper's lips turned up. 'Yes, he's done. Quite done.' The languid words fell slowly from her shaping mouth. Nothing else of her moved. She was quite still save for the tremor of lips when they answered. 'You know what a surrey top is like, Timothy? Well, that's how the night comes here in this shallow between the mountains. The sun pulls the dark cover down after it. I'm inside this woman's head, looking out through the little holes in her skull. I don't even know her name, while I'm listening to the silence. The sea doesn't move on the shore, it just lies there, so quiet it makes you afraid. I'm smelling the salt of it, quietly. And over me a number of bombers and pursuit planes float across the first stars. They resemble pterodactyls on huge wings. Further over in the sump-land, the iron spine of a steam shovel shows — a brontosaurus frozen in metal pantomime, gazing at those aluminium reptiles flying high. And I am watching these prehistoric things, and smelling the smells of prehistoric cookings. It is so quiet, so quiet. . .'

    'How long will you stay in her, Cecy?'

    'Until I've listened and looked and felt enough. Until I've changed her life some way. Living in her isn't like living anywhere in the world. Her valley with her little wooden house is a dawn world. Black mountains lift on the west, north and south, all enclosing this huge, solemn valley. Two concrete roads rim the sea, emptied by the war. Once in half an hour I see a car run by, shining its headlights. But the dark closes behind it. I sit on the porch all day, and watch the shadows run out from the trees, join and become one big night at sunset. I wait for my husband to come back from town. The sea is on the shore, salted and making no noise. Once in a while a fish leaps up, starlight catching its scales, falls back. The valley, the sea, the few cars, the porch, my rocking chair, myself, the silence.'

    'What
now
, Cecy?'

    'I'm getting up now,' she said.

    'Yes?'

    'I'm walking off the porch, towards the mud pots. Another flight of planes goes overhead, flinging off noise in every direction that propellers whirl in. They take the silence apart and the sound gets into my bones.'

    'And now?'

    'Now, I'm walking along the board planks to where the tourists before the war used to stand watching the grey bubbles rise. My feet make hollow knocks on the planks, slowly.'

    'Now?'

    'Now the sulphur fumes are all around me. The bubbles come up in breaking clusters, smoothing again. A bird flies over, crying sadly. Suddenly I'm in that bird! I fly away! And as I fly, inside my new small glass-bead eyes, I see something, a woman, below me, on a board-walk, take one two three steps forward into the mud pots! I hear a sound as if a boulder has been dropped into molten depths! I keep on flying, ignoring this sound. I circle. As I come back I see a white hand, like a spider, wriggling, disappearing into a pool of grey lava. The lava seals over.

    'Now, I'm flying home, swift,
swift!
'

    Something rattled hard against the window.

    Cecy flicked her eyes wide, full, bright, happy, exhilarated.

    'Now I
am
home!' she said.

    Cecy lay upon her pillow, letting her eyes wander for a time. Finally, she saw Timothy.

    'Is the Homecoming on?' she asked.

    'Everybody's here.'

    'Then why are you upstairs?' She took his hand. 'Well?' She smiled slyly. 'Ask me. Go on. Ask me what you came up to ask.'

    'I didn't come to ask anything,' he said. 'Well, almost nothing. Well, oh, Cecy!' It came from him in one long rapid flow. 'I want to do something at the party, to make them look at me, something to make me as good as them, something to make me belong and there's nothing I can do and I feel funny and, well, and I thought you might — '

    'I might,' she said, closing her eyes, smiling inwardly. 'Stand up straight, and stand very still.' He obeyed. 'Now, shut your eyes and blank out your thoughts.'

    He stood very straight and thought of nothing, or at least thought of thinking nothing, which was almost as good.

    She sighed.

    'Shall we go downstairs now, Timothy?'

    Like a hand into a glove, Cecy was within him.

    'Look, everybody!'

    Timothy lifted the crystal of warm red wine, wine that veins had distilled, muscled hearts had pushed and pumped through thinking minds.

    He held the glass so that the whole house turned to watch. Aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters!

    He drank it straight down.

    He jerked a hand at sister Laura. He held her gaze, whispering to her in a subtle voice that kept her silent, frozen. He felt tall as the trees as he walked to her. The party, a regular vortex, now slowed. It waited on all sides of him, watching. From all the doors the faces peered. They were not laughing. Mother's face was astonished. Father looked bewildered, but pleased and getting prouder every instant.

    Timothy took Laura's hands behind her, she didn't fight him, her eyes were glazed. He spoke and reached up, gently moving her head back, exposing her long white neck.

    Gently, over the neck vein, he nipped her.

    Candle flames swayed drunkenly. Wind climbed around the roof above. Relatives stared and shifted in the dark and stared again.

    He released Laura, turned, popped toadstools in his mouth, swallowed, then, seized, he beat his arms against his flanks and dashed about. 'Look, Uncle Einar! I'll fly, at last!' Beat! went his hands. Up, down, pumped his feet! Faces flashed by him!

    At the top of the stairs before knowing it, flapping, Timothy heard his mother cry, 'Stop, Timothy!' far below. 'Hey!' shouted Timothy, and leaped off the top of the well, thrashing!

    Half-way down, the wings he thought he owned dissolved. He screamed.

    Uncle Einar caught him.

    Timothy flailed whitely in the receiving arms. A voice burst from his lips, unbidden:

    'This is Cecy! This is Cecy!' it announced, shrilly. 'Cecy! Come see me, all of you! Upstairs, first room on the left!' Followed by a long trill of laughter. Timothy tried to cut it off with his tongue, his lips.

    Everybody laughed. Einar set him down. Running through the crowded blackness as the relatives flowed upstairs towards Cecy's room to congratulate her, Timothy kicked the front door open. Mother called out behind him, anxiously.

    Flap! went his dinner, straight down upon the cold earth.

    'Cecy, I hate you, I hate you!'

    Inside the barn, in deep shadow, Timothy sobbed bitterly and thrashed in a stack of odorous hay. Then he lay still. From his blouse-pocket, from the protection of the matchbox he used for his retreat, the spider crawled forth. Spid walked along Timothy's arm. Spid explored up his neck to his ear and climbed in the ear to tickle it.

    Timothy shook his head. 'Don't, Spid. Don't.'

    The feathery touch of a tentative feeler probing his ear-drum set Timothy shivering. 'Don't Spid!' He sobbed somewhat less.

    The spider travelled down his cheek, took a station under the boy's nose, looked up into the nostrils as if to seek the brain, and then clambered softly up over the rim of the nose to sit, to squat there peering at Timothy with green gem eyes until Timothy filled with ridiculous laughter.

    'Go away, Spid!'

    In answer, the spider floated down to his lips and with sixteen delicate movements tacked silver strands back and forth, zig-zag, over Timothy's mouth.

    'Mmmmmm,' cried Timothy.

    Timothy sat up, rustling the hay. The land was very bright with moon now that the rain had retired. In the big house he could hear the faint ribaldry as
Mirror Mirror
was played. In that game a huge mirror was set against one wall. Celebrants shouted, dimly muffled, as they tried to identify those of themselves whose reflections did not, had not ever, and
never would
appear in a mirror!

    'What'll we do, Spid?' The mouth-web broke.

    Falling to the floor, Spid scuttled swiftly towards the house, until Timothy caught him and returned him to his blouse pocket. 'Okay, Spid. Back in it is. We'll have fun, no matter what.'

    Outside, a green tarpaulin fell from the sycamore as Timothy passed and pinned him down with yards of silken goods. 'Uncle Einar!'