Desolation (22 page)

Peter was dead. Poor Peter, whose mocking tone had covered the deep-set sadness he carried within. He had never found the Way, even though it appeared he had spent his life around those who knew it.

I don't want it
, Cain thought, and images of his father jumbled through his mind: feeding Cain, berating him, torturing him. This photograph album may contain so much more, and truth could take away some of the pain of his past. Or perhaps it would only go to make that pain worse.

Cain followed Magenta through the night. He thought of the Face and Voice, and realized that he had not called them when he should have. Things
had changed so much since his last call, he had no idea what he would say.

Hello, my father was right all along. I do have it. They
tell
me I do
.

Cain shook his head and wished for a normal life.

“Normal is average, and you will
never
be that,” Cain's father once said. “Mediocrity is an offense against the potential of our minds, a slur on the promise of our species. Why build a computer and use it to time an egg? Why create the wheel and use it to gather potatoes? People keep to the narrow roads already set down for them. They don't look beyond their lives. They don't shift the veil. You are going to be so, so special, Cain.”

Cain was seven years old, and he had never climbed a tree.

 

 

 

They reached Endless Crescent without further incident. When Cain and Peter had walked to the pub earlier that day, it had taken only twenty minutes. He and Magenta seemed to have been running for hours, and he believed she must have taken him right across the city and back again, moving via side streets and little-used roads in an effort to shake any pursuers. But why do that when what pursued them lived in this house?

Cain was utterly exhausted. Unused to such exercise, he had almost fallen behind, but Magenta's strong hand—and those deep eyes—encouraged him on. That, and the sense of danger she exuded, the weapons on her belt ready at a second's notice. If she was his savior for tonight, then the more dangerous she was the better.

Heaven sat behind them, Peter's tumbled-down home, and there were no lights in its windows tonight. Cain thought that perhaps he would try to
get inside tomorrow, but he had no idea what the rest of this night would bring. Perhaps tomorrow's plans were best made when dawn touched the east.

“Home sweet home,” he muttered, but Magenta did not respond. They walked through the front garden—still it watched, breathed, filled with secretive rustlings—and Magenta opened the front door.

“Do I have anything to fear?” Cain asked, suddenly certain that once he entered the house he would never leave again. “Once I'm in there, is something going to happen to me?”

Magenta turned on the doorstep and her eyes softened. “Cain, haven't you been listening to anything? You're as special as us, as unique. You just haven't admitted it to yourself.”

“Peter thought he was special. That didn't prevent George from tearing out his spine.”

“Peter never knew the Way, and he said too much. If he'd do it once, he'd do it again. He was the landlord, but even after so long it appears he would have betrayed us. We can't have that.”

“You knew this was going to happen?”

“No, but I'm not surprised.”

“So what do you do?” Cain asked. “What are your special superhero powers? What has the Way given you?”

“Freedom,” she said, smiling at Cain as if he were a child. “Knowledge. Truth. It's given me a real life, not one dictated by preconceived notions of right and wrong, good and bad. I'm anyone I want to be, Cain. One day I'm white, next day Asian. One day I'm someone men would die for,
next day they don't even see me. You have no idea of the power in that.”

“I came here looking for my own life,” he said miserably. “I never wanted to get involved with everyone else's.” Wherever he looked he saw Peter on the ground, the dog raking at his back with its unnatural claws, and he could still taste the fear and dirt in the landlord's mouth.

“You'll find it,” Magenta said. Her voice was so certain.

Magenta's flat appeared normal, and yet there was something about it that disturbed Cain greatly. To begin with, he could not quite pin down what that was, but it did not take long for him to see the sham.

The hallway was lined with bookcases, and each shelf was jammed with books stacked vertically and horizontally. He glanced along the spines, but there was not one title or author he recognized. None of the spines were cracked or creased; all of the books were unread. He remembered Whistler's strange volumes of
My Philosophy
, and he suddenly had no wish to open these.

The living area was sparsely furnished and decorated in soft green, the dining area empty apart from a tiny table and one lonely chair. The kitchen looked brand new, highly polished stainless-steel fittings set off against white units and a concrete slab floor. It was well kept, neat and tidy, completely unused. Cain went to the bathroom, and as he stood peeing he looked around at the highly polished fittings, the sparkling floor, the bath and
shower cubicle that were all far too pristine to have simply been
cleaned
. These were
untouched
.

Magenta was in the living room when he came out, sitting in the middle of the floor, stretching. She nodded at the photo album he had put on the sofa when they came in. “I guess you'll be wanting to have a look at that now. Feel free to use my bedroom if you want some privacy.”

“I'm not sure . . .” Cain said. “Some things are best left unknown.”

“You really think so?” She stood up straight, raised her eyebrows, and shrugged.

“What are you doing?”

“Changing.” She smiled at his startled expression. “Don't worry, I'm nothing like George. It comes and goes with my moods. It's just the Way for me. Causes some bastard aches and pains sometimes, so I stretch out as often as I can.” She shrugged off her black jacket and unzipped the fly of her leather trousers, squirming them over her hips and dripping them to the floor.

“Maybe I will use your bedroom,” Cain said, abashed. He picked up the album and tried not to look at Magenta, and the harder he tried the more he looked. She was smiling at him, but there was nothing sexual about it at all, nothing enticing.

“Sorry if this makes you uncomfortable,” she said, “but I can feel something coming on. Wait and see, if you want. If it will open your eyes a little bit more, it can only do good.”

I don't want Pure fucking Sight!
he thought once again, but Magenta grabbed the hem of her tight
T-shirt and lifted it over her head in one motion, and he could not move. Her body was lithe and athletic, her breasts small, her hips narrow. She sighed and stretched, the muscles on her legs and stomach tensing and releasing as if happy to be free of unnatural hindrances.

“You're gorgeous,” he said, unable to help himself.
I saw a man killed tonight, and now I'm telling a naked woman she's gorgeous
. But Peter's death seemed distant already, as if it had happened far away in place and time. If that was Cain thinking more along the Way, then he could live with that small part of it; it gave him comfort.

“Thanks,” she said matter-of-factly. “Sometimes, I guess.” She lifted one arm behind her head, stretched one leg out in front of her, squatted down, and groaned as joints clicked with the sound of pebbles on concrete. She turned her head to either side, similar crunches greeting each movement, and her face creased in pain.

“Sorry, Cain,” she said.

“What for?”

“Well . . .” But she said no more. Her body flipped sideways onto the floor, and Magenta groaned again, squirming on the carpet. Something moved beneath the skin of her stomach, flexing it, pushing out as if eager for release. It rose higher, parting just below her ribs and pulsing up under her chest. Each breast seemed to grow in size, and her nipples changed from soft and pink to hard and dark. She whipped her head on the floor, blond hair trailing. Her fingers scratched at the carpet—Cain
saw a forest of plucked threads, evidence of many previous changes—and then Magenta's hair was suddenly brunette.

He stepped back. There was a new woman before him already.

“Shit,” she moaned, twisting on the floor, her legs filling out, arms thickening, and something happened to her face.
“Shit!”

Cain turned and ran for the hallway. He meant to flee the flat, but the thought of the ravenous George out there, and perhaps that flying, freakish nun, held him back at the last second. He went into Magenta's bedroom instead, the album clasped to his chest like a talisman, and he shut the door on her swearing and thrashing and her long groans of pain.

He sat on the double bed—it was made up, and the bedding smelled new and just out of the packet—and listened to the noise from the living room. Magenta's voice had deepened a little, and her words, though confused, seemed to be singing out some strange mantra. It was not a prayer as such, but there was a pattern there. Even though Cain could not decipher the meaning, it sent a chill into him, as if he were hearing his own death sentence in a foreign tongue.

Panicked, confused, and feeling more and more as if he were living a dream, Cain went to the window to see if he could escape that way. He looked out over the street at where Heaven sat bathed in moonlight. Nothing moved behind its windows. Its door was firmly shut, and the overgrown garden—ideal home for hedgehogs, foxes, and other night dwellers—was utterly still and deserted. He tried the
window, but it was locked. Besides, it was a sheer fifteen-foot drop to the ground. And if he jumped, he would end up tangled in spiky undergrowth.

The album called to him, begging to be opened.

Magenta had fallen silent. Pressing his ear to the door, Cain could hear heavy breathing and the occasional groan accompanying the creak of floorboards. He guessed she was standing up, slowly, becoming accustomed to her new body.

New body? What the fuck was that all about?

The album was warm from where he had been carrying it. Warm as flesh. The covers were of soft, worn leather that could have easily been human skin. He sniffed the book, and it smelled of lost times.

The bedroom door opened and Magenta peered in. She was a brunette now, heavyset, high cheekbones, taller than she had been before. Her eyes were the same, though, and they communicated with Cain, telling him not to be afraid, everything was all right, he would understand soon enough.

He stared, unable to speak past his amazement. A sense of wrongness set him shivering, and he hugged the album for any comfort it could give.

“I'm exhausted,” Magenta said, her voice husky and new, “but I'm not rude. You can sleep in here tonight. And tomorrow, if you're ready, I'll introduce you to George and the nun.” She closed the door without waiting for a reply.

I should run. I should return to Afresh, tell the Face and Voice what was happening here. They'll take care of me, as I am obviously, patently mad
.

And yet . . . and yet there was the photograph album,
the one Peter had gone to such great pains to give to Cain before being slaughtered. And within its covers there may be answers to questions Cain had not yet conceived.

Slowly, squeezing his eyes almost shut, Cain let the first leaf fall open.

Cain's father had always refused to answer any questions about the past. “The past is gone, the future is fluid, it's the here and now that matters,” Leonard would say, and that was always his response. Even as a child, Cain soon came to realize that this was a way of avoiding the truth. There was so much his father could have told him—about his mother, their life together, and Cain's own time as a baby and young child—but the old man chose to remain silent on the matter. However much Cain asked, the answer was always the same. And sometimes, like a grumpy dog woken from a midday sleep, his father snapped at him.

“Why are you so keen to hear about the past? Aren't you happy with the now? Don't you think I'm doing enough for you, helping you, doing my very best to give you the life you deserve?”

“Yes, Father,” Cain would say, knowing that there was no other answer for him to give. And Leonard would grunt and nod, walk away, retreat to his study to conceive of some other cruel test to try and thrust his son toward Pure Sight.

Cain would spend the inevitable lonely hours following such an exchange wandering the house, which was always open to him, and searching through parts of his father's library, which was not.
It always came as a disappointment to find that the books his father studied were much the same as his own: texts on science, mathematics, astronomy, natural history, with nothing given to the exploration of imagination. Back then, Cain had no concept of fiction as an entertainment—it was, he thought, a dark and lonely madness inside him—but he knew of art and expression, and he was saddened that none of the books in the house stretched that way. He would spend hours searching through great tomes on the laws of gravity, hoping that there would be a page or two at least alluding to leaps of imagination. But in such books these leaps were referred to as theories, whereas Cain was searching for dreams.

Sometimes he thought he may find a secret slip of paper that his father had forgotten about, a letter from his mother, something to show that there was more to Leonard than he ever revealed to Cain. But the books were clean, pure, honest volumes with nothing hidden away, utterly closed to interpretation.

In many ways, Cain was blinkered to reality and the true worth of things, but he had always been aware that his father had a past that would perhaps explain much of the present. He had never started to question what was happening to him—what his father was doing—until he was eight years old. From that point on he sought not only Pure Sight, as overseen by his father, but also his own hidden truth, his own story. He started to silently question what his father was doing. And though the possibility of escape never crossed his mind, Cain had
become more and more uncomfortable with the way his father was steering his life.