Desolation (24 page)

The voice that screams at him is anything but a whisper.

“Come back!” it screeches. Its panic and volume make the voice unrecognizable and androgynous. Cain does not fear the siren right now, but he does fear the voice. It is insistent, demanding, and desperate, and the implication is that if he does not obey, bad things will happen. “Come back!
Come back!
”

A rhythmic thumping accompanies the voice. It provides a background tempo to the screams. It could be a fist banging on a door, or a head impacting a wall.

Cain thinks that the voice may belong to the Voice, or the Face. They can see the problems he has encountered, and they are begging him to return to Afresh, to find safety and leave danger behind.
Come back, they are calling. But that does not sound like them. They would not scream or rage, they would be gentle and understanding.

“Come back!”

Not like that.

The thumping again, and behind the sound is something worrying: the cracking and splintering of timber, as if something is breaking through.

Cain thinks he may be dreaming, but everything feels very real. He walks to the door and tries the handle, but it is locked. He runs his hand across the door's surface but feels no lumps, no evidence that it is being battered from the other side. It is cool and calm.

“Come back!”
Pleading and threatening. Cain shakes his head and cringes, as if to instantly lose the memory of the voice.

He walks to the first of the pictures hanging on the wall. It shows a view of 13 Endless Crescent from across the street. The photographer must have been standing with his back pressed against Peter's front door; there is even the hint of a shadowy overhang in the top of the picture. Number 13's front garden is trimmed and well-maintained as ever, but even from this angle there is no hint of what lies beneath the low shrub canopy. The house is bathed in sunlight and the first-floor window is open, revealing a figure standing just inside. The sunlight barely touches the shape, and yet Cain can see that it is an incarnation of Magenta. Those eyes hold no doubt. He looks up at his own dining room window. Though there is a face there, it is not his own. It is a shadow in defiance of the sun.

“Come back to me!”
The voice has changed now, become more modulated and thoughtful, as if realizing that blind panic will never work. Cain still feels no compunction to obey its strange command. He does not know exactly
where
it wants him to go, nor even where it is coming from.

The next picture looks like a police photograph of a murder scene. But it is so well-taken, the lighting so perfect, that Cain suspects that it took a while to set up and many attempts to perfect. It shows the landing outside his room, the small attic door standing ajar, Vlad's belongings spilled out like vented guts. Everywhere there is blood. It is splashed up the walls, spattered on the carpet, ground into the inside and outside of the opened door, rich and black in the claw marks slashed into the wood. The door to his own flat is closed, and speckled with blood and viscera. The color is startling, the quantity shocking.
I thought he was killed far from here
, Cain thinks, but then he catches sight of the next photograph and his attention is drawn away.

It is a painting this time, set in his own flat. There is much that he recognizes, and yet he also perceives subtle differences: The walls are too bright, the furniture wrongly organized, as if whoever painted this did so from instruction rather than memory. His coat is flung over the back of the sofa, making the flat his own. The view through the window is blurred, a chaos of colors that seems on the verge of breaking through the glass and flooding the flat, swallowing everything whole. There is something behind the sofa.

“Come back, Cain!”

Cain frowns, moves closer to the painting, and as he steps to one side his view behind the sofa inexplicably improves. He presses his face against the wall, squints, and now he can see what it is. The wooden chest. Or what is left of it.

“Cain,
Cain
, come back! Don't leave me all alone, not here, not forever!”

The chest has exploded from inside. Splinters of wood prickle the rear of the sofa, and several have even penetrated the ceiling, hanging there like stalactites.

“Cain . . . no.” The voice speaks this time. The shouting has stopped. And Cain knows it is the voice of the shadow. He had not recognized it before because he was so used to hearing it mocking, sardonic, not like this. Not shouting. Not hopeless and pleading.

Whatever was inside the chest has gone. The broken timber is scored with claw marks, though he cannot tell whether they are on the inside of the wood or the outside. He glances back at the framed photograph of Vlad's murder scene, but these new marks are different. Less violent, more desperate.

“Cain?”

“Yes?” At last, Cain could no longer prevent himself from answering.

“I need you. Not everything you see is true. Don't believe your eyes. Believe your mind.”

“You're the shadow,” Cain says.

“If that's how you want to view me.”

Cain stares at the painting of the broken chest. A
painting rather than a photograph, because it has yet to happen.

“Don't believe your eyes,” the shadow says again, “and come back to me, Cain.”

“I don't know what you mean. I don't know what to believe.”

“Maybe you've just had a bad dream.”

Cain runs his index finger across the top of the picture frame and it comes away dusty. He wonders whose skin he has on his. “There was a woman,” he says, “and she kept changing.”

The shadow is silent for a while, as if considering his comment. But then it chuckles, back to mockery, all evidence of former insecurity now vanished. “Cain,
really
.”

Cain turns and walks to the window, looks out, sees nothing at all. It is not simply night, it is
empty
. There is nothing beyond the room. He glances over his shoulder at the door and the banging starts again, but this time its insistence is intimidating rather than frantic.

“Come back to me, Cain,” the shadow says in a singsong voice. “We belong together.”

Cain shakes his head, sits down, and wakes up.

“Cain?”

Someone shook his shoulder. He opened his eyes and saw the strange woman, but her eyes gave her away. Strange, yes, but always Magenta.

“Is this a dream?” he asked.

“Not this, not now. Come on. You've slept past midday, and we need to talk.”

Cain sat up on the bed, groaning and massaging
his limbs. It felt as though he'd run several miles in his sleep, over and above the distance they ran last night. Magenta stood back and waited by the door, but Cain's gaze was drawn to the wall next to her. There were no pictures there and no sign that there ever had been. The room was as blank and sterile as the rest of Magenta's flat. He glanced up at the ceiling, but nothing slammed down demanding his return.

“You look like you've seen a ghost,” she said.

Cain laughed. There was no other way he could react to such a platitude. His humor did not last for long.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

He shook his head, ran his fingers through his hair. “Like I've been duped into being myself. Like I don't really belong anywhere. And I'm starting to really believe that.”

“None of us belong, Cain,” Magenta said. “Why do you think we're all here together?”

“I have no idea! That's what I mean, this is all just so alien, so confusing! And I'm not one of you, Magenta.” He shook his head. “Is Peter really dead, or is that another lie?”

Magenta turned away, her eyes downcast. “He's dead. George has never listened to any of us. We all know that we're right and strong and free, but George's fault is that he acts on that too much, not only when he needs to. We told him that you'd discover everything soon enough, in your own time.”

Cain thought of the album he had looked through and the pictures contained therein. His father was around him now more than he ever had
been while alive. Cain found that comforting, and yet also unfeasibly terrifying, as if the old man could spy on him even now. Magenta and the others were a part of his father's secret past, a past that Cain was never meant to know. Or was he? And there was the crux of his confusion; the fact that this whole situation still felt manipulated and coerced.

“You've known Peter a long time,” Cain said—a statement, not a question.

Magenta nodded. Cain tried to perceive a glint of mourning in her expression, but he could not fool himself.

“Aren't you sad that he's dead?”

“Everyone dies.”

“Even you? Even Whistler?
He
looks exactly the same now as he did in that old photo with my father.”

“Whistler and I know the Way.”

Cain waited, but she did not elaborate. “So that's it,” he said. “That's an explanation. The Way gives you eternal life.”

Magenta laughed. “Of course not,” she said. “It just tells us how to live life properly.”

“By killing people.”

Magenta stared at him, a slight smile on her new, fuller lips. “Your life has changed,” she said.

“You think I ever
had
a life?”

“Forget your preconceptions. Forget everything you think you should have, and start thinking about what you need. You're blessed with such a gift, Cain.”

“Blessed! Do you know what my father did to me?”

“Of course I know.” She waved her hand, dismissing such a stupid question. “He was a trifle extreme in his efforts, but only by society's standards. And that's where all concepts of freedom, choice, and free will fall down. Consider yourself a part of society—part of the norm—and you've set yourself down a path from which you will never deviate. It may twist and turn, veer left and right, and sometimes fracture, but it always progresses the same way.
This
way: birth, school, job, marriage, children, death. However many variations of that life there may be, there are constants by which it will abide, simply because of the world it exists in. And those few—those very few—that find the Way are called either mad or criminals. Simply because they follow their hearts!”

“You're not making any sense.”

“I'm saying Leonard gave you a blank slate, and still you left Afresh believing you knew what you wanted.”

“Of course I know. I want my own life.”

“So what are you going to do with it? What does that really
mean?
”

Cain blinked, stared at Magenta's beautiful, bewitching eyes. “I'm going to make it my own,” he said. “My father denied me—”

“He denied you the easy route!” Magenta said. “He sacrificed much of his life to make sure you got the best out of yours. He never found the Way himself, not like me and Whistler and the others. He was like Peter—a trickster who had some knowledge, some skewed insight into how things
could
be, but could never quite get there himself.
He only wanted the best for you. For him, that was the next-best thing. You're all he ever wanted.”

“He tortured me!”

“You did that to yourself.”

“No! He kept me locked in a room, he hurt me, and—”

“How? How did he hurt you?”

“The siren!”

“Every time that happened, it was you that prompted it.”

Cain felt threat oozing from Magenta now, a rich, alien sense of menace that flowed around him like her exhalations.

“How do you know so much?” he asked, aghast.

“He gave you everything he could without ruining your life,” she said, ignoring his question. “He gave you the chance to start.”

“I don't want it,” Cain said. “If it means I become something like George, I don't want to know the Way. I want a wife, and children, and a job.”

“No you don't!” Magenta scoffed, turning and spitting at the wall. Her saliva sizzled into the plaster and disappeared, and Cain wondered whose imagination was making it do that. “If you do, then you're a fool,” she said, “and Leonard and I wasted our time.”

“So will you all decide to kill me now?” Cain asked. “Slaughter me like you did Vlad, tear out my guts and leave me in a park somewhere? Set George on me one evening while I'm out walking?”

Magenta looked at him, and suddenly her eyes were filled with something he could not identify at first. It was so far from the anger that had been
percolating there that he stood from the bed and backed away toward the window. It was, he supposed, sadness.

“Of course not,” she said. “You may think us inhuman, but we're far more human than most.” She lowered her eyes. “No intelligence murders its own son.”

Cain did not hear the word. He could not. Shock held him cool and heavy in that room, grasping tight as if ready to burst his soul from the weak construct of flesh and bone that betrayed it every single day.

Son
.

“What are you saying?”

“You hated your father, Cain, even though he did everything in his power to give you something special. That's all he ever wanted for you. I don't want you to hate me the same way. Go if you want.”

“Are you saying you're my
mother?
”

Magenta stepped aside and opened the door. “Nothing will happen to you,” she said. “Go back to Afresh. Have a nice life. I wish I'd never bothered. Poor Leonard . . .” Her eyes glittered, though tears and anger fought for the cause.

Cain did not want to move past her. He thought of the group photo loose in the album, his father so much younger and the blond woman he had already assumed to be Magenta, his father's hand on her shoulder, squeezing.

“I'll make it easy for you,” Magenta said. She left, slamming the door behind her.

The flat was suddenly empty. Unlived in. Sterile. As Cain sat on the bed and started to cry, his tears gave it life.