Fearful Symmetries (16 page)

Grace left an appropriate silence.

Dan uncapped the bottle, topped up their glasses. “What, ghostly residues? A substance like ectoplasm? Surely not an actual entity—”

“These are my questions, Doctor. In a sense, Londasleite’s theory of the Four Darks is beside the point. It’s finding evidence for the final strand that interests me. Londasleite pursued an old line of thinking. He insisted he was ahead of his time.”

“Exactly of his time as I’m hearing it.”

“You are right to say so. The scientific community and the Church came down on him hard. He couldn’t even make useful cult coinage out of it, except among his own descendants, one of whom, I have every reason to believe, presently lives in the Everton area.”

“But you don’t know exactly who or where?”

“I have the name Warwick Carstable, but there is no one in the local records by that name.”

Then I don’t know what I can possibly do, Dan might have said, but his visitor knew that already. “You asked before about evil. Why is that?”

“It’s another night artefact in a sense. Londasleite believed that the strand, the disordering, mad-making strand, prepared a suitable person, possibly any of us in a bad moment, a vulnerable receptive moment, for making use of that final strand, whatever the artefact is and
can
be used for. And since we are largely creatures of light, again
his
words, he contended that the final strand led to, at least contributed to, the acts of pure evil in the world. Simplistic then, simplistic now, but so he argued.”

“I
have
known evil,” Dan said.

“I know you have.”

“More stories, Allan?”

“Just our common humanity, Doctor. We work to remain creatures of light at all costs. The Fuligin Braid does not necessarily want us to be and, if Londasleite is to be believed, it is the other part of what we are. We are made to exist in light, but are biologically—psychologically—intended to deal with the Four Darks as well. But we choose to sleep at night whenever possible and so largely avoid them. Habit becomes conditioning, then normality. But I’ve taken enough of your time. I should very much value your assistance in tracking down this Warwick Carstable, or whatever his name is now, and learning what he knows of his ancestor’s legacy and what he can tell us about the final important strand. I’m not sure quite how to proceed otherwise.”

“I can recommend Wendt Investigations in town.”

“Thank you, but I’d rather a scientist than a PI. I will leave my card, if I may. I am staying at the Imperial Hotel for now. Best I go and leave your associate to plead my case for me.”

“My associate?”

Grace placed his card on the desk and rose to his feet. “Why, yes. I understand you have an inmate who wanted me to come here today.”

A half hour later, Peter and Dan were sitting on the embankment at the hospital’s western boundary, watching the dark green water of the Hunter River as it made its long journey to the sea.

“Tell me what you can, Peter.”

“I wanted him here, Doctor Dan. Something you once said about there being attraction points in the world. You also said that, as far as you’re aware, there have been thirty-seven anomalous events in your life.”

“You’ve played a part in some of those.”

“But they predate me being in your life too. I’m one of your thirty-seven when you think about it.”

Dan tried to track where this was heading. “I’ve always allowed that there are others like me: people who are drawn to things, draw things to them. Have to be. It’s natural we connected.”

Peter nodded eagerly. “But that’s the thing. There’s been nothing in Everton for twelve years now. Think about it. Not since Rain Eyes interfered with those burials, and the Haniver sisters arranged their double suicide, not since my catatonic fugue up in my room that time. Away from here, yes, but not here.”

Dan had often considered exactly that. In terms of the constant glitches and anomalies he knew
did
make up the real world in whatever barely seen, half-understood form, provided the constant accounts of ghosts and other intrusion events across the centuries, it
had
been quiet in Everton. Peter Rait, especially, had continued to read things, had used his gift to lock on to incidents, sometimes even
while
they were happening, but two hours away in Sydney, the Blue Mountains, elsewhere, always away from this town,
this
place, where so much had once happened.

“So? Everton isn’t some local hellmouth like in the old morality plays. Statistically things don’t tend to focus on a single spot. It’s why they stay anomalies. They’re spread too thin to make an impression scientifically, empirically.”

“Unless that’s
part
of the anomaly. Someone—something—has been deflecting. Things
have
happened,
are
happening, that we don’t know about.”

“Everton’s just a country town, Peter. A large one, but still. Tell me about Allan Grace.”

“Twelve years. Something
should
have happened.”

Dan accepted the evasion, let it continue on Peter’s terms. “Why should it have?”

“Two things. You asked if it was my spine in my dream. That led me back to my comment about it seeming wrong somehow, that it could be masking something with that wrongness. What if there’s someone masking, deflecting, that’s exactly the word, to keep us from reading the truth? And, for what it’s worth, Everton isn’t the focal point,
you
are.”

“What?”

“You’re the attractor, Doctor Dan. People always look for special places, damned places, but it isn’t necessarily like that.”

“What, hellmouth
people
?”

“I’ve always felt it was people, certain people, who drew things to them. Or are drawn to things, people, places.”

“Why me? Why not you?”

“Oh, I’m one too. That’s the point. But you seem to do it differently. I’m suspecting you drew me to
you
. Maybe it’s what happened when you were growing up in Reardon all those years ago, meeting those circus performers, getting caught up in their schemes. You
enable
me. Accelerate my gift rather than read things yourself. But you need to stay edgy, restless. So you’ve stayed on here, kept me close.”

Dan wanted to get back to Grace’s visit, but again made himself wait. “Okay, so we’ve been deflected. Something’s out there waiting right now. We just haven’t known to look.”

“Not necessarily waiting. Normally it wouldn’t want our attention. It’s just going about its business, doing what it does. Once you allow your role, my role, but such a role, however hit and miss, you allow that statistically it must have happened. We just haven’t found it.”

“It’s a big town, Peter.”

“It’s a tourist town, Doctor Dan. A pass-through town. People come and go. People go missing.”

“Meaning?”

“Like with Rain Eyes. Transit crime. People disappearing en route are usually counted missing in terms of departure or destination points.”

“Big job tracking disappearances through Everton.”

“Right, so I decided to try something I’ve never really done before. I tried calling it to me, whatever it was. I sent out and invited. Insisted.”

“And Allan Grace came along.”

“He did. And for his reasons as much as mine, I’m sure.
Why
would he reveal himself otherwise?”

“You saw him?”

“I made sure I did, coming
and
going. You must tell me what you talked about.”

Dan watched the slow movement of the river, the roiling deep-green water on its way to the coast. There was so much to grasp: the thought of Peter summoning and Grace arriving, such a thing actually working. The prospect of things happening across all these years, secretly, quietly, people possibly going missing again, so much on such an otherwise normal summer’s day.

As Dan described his brief meeting with the man, he found the idea more and more compelling. It was easy to dismiss a pseudo-scientific notion like the Fuligin Braid in full daylight, in the muggy oversaturated light of this late-summer afternoon, but somehow Peter having the spine dream again and becoming so pro-active himself as to suspect someone in the town, send out an invitation like this, changed everything.

A pro-active part to night, Grace had suggested. That word, that idea. It truly was as crackpot a concept as the luminiferous ether filling the universe, connecting the planets, or the phlogiston being an actual chemical substance released during the act of burning.

Nonsense but seductive nonsense, such a crazy, obvious thing. Take away the light. Just the dark? Or the dark
and
something? Something added the way light was added at the flick of a switch and changed everything, something as
envitalizing
and transformational. And if everything did come down to invisible particles, waves, force fields and quantum states, as Grace had said, how much did we not yet know or track correctly? It was like the human eye seeing only a limited range of the electromagnetic spectrum,
one
version of the available world. What did the eye of an eagle see, or a cat or an octopus? Dogs had limited colour vision. There was ultimately no red rag to a bull. What else might there be?

“You say you summoned him,” Dan said. “But he seemed to
want
to meet me.”

“Camouflage masking genuine curiosity, I suspect. Maybe he was so intrigued at feeling a summoning, such an impulse, that he found it quite irresistible.”

“Then why go on about the Fuligin Braid? Why not just pretend he’s considering making a bequest to the hospital because of kindness shown to a loved one and wanted to check the place out? He certainly looked the part.”

“Because the Braid
is
important to why he’s actually here.
You
knowing about it. Me now as well. He called me your associate. He knew you’d tell me. That’s why he wanted a scientist, Doctor Dan. He already knew what I can do, what I can bring.”

“So you should send another invitation. See if we can summon this Warwick Carstable to us.”

“What if he’s already been here too?”

“What, Grace?”

“Why not? What if we’re meant to follow? I started inviting five days ago. He made an appointment two days later.
Then
I had the dream again, the night before he came here. I wanted him to come to us. He wants us to go to him. Tit for tat.”

Dan continued to marvel at what he was hearing. “You really think the spine dream and this are related? Five years, a chat over late-night herbal tea, and a recurring dream gets placed?”

“Looks like.”

“He seemed human. A real person.”

“No reason he shouldn’t, Doctor Dan. Look at us. Normal people once we allow there’s always been more to normal than people think. Different perspectives, different data—the
rest
of the data, as we see it.”

“So we call on him at the Imperial.”

“He won’t be there, Doctor Dan.”

“Payback?”

“A reminder. We do this on his terms. I watched him arrive and leave. There was something about him that
felt
like part of the summoning, if that makes sense. Like your question about whether my urgent spine was supported or unsupported. When I slept on it, as you suggested, I kept getting—weightlessness is the only word—about the spine. I had something of the same feeling with Grace. Doesn’t track, I know, but it’s what I got. What I’m still getting.”

Dan nodded. “How can weightlessness be possible here? He’d have to be
in
water. That’s as close as we get to it in a gravity environment.”

“
On
water would be a very poor second. The floating sensation. But on a boat. A houseboat. Even a raft, so he can dip over the side. In a swimming pool or bore he’d be too visible unless he can exist underwater, whatever he is.”

Whatever he is, Dan thought. How easily we toss off such things.

“Peter, you’ve tried a summoning. Can you do a casting right now, tonight, just range about? Get any impressions, anything on Grace. I’ll phone Bev McDonald and see if the police have any missing persons listed for the area.”

The next morning saw Everton at its worst. A hot westerly arrived soon after sun-up, turning the sky into a white haze and sending the thermometers to the 40° Celsius mark by 10:30. When Dan joined Peter at one of the long tables in the Day Room, the air-con units were working hard. They both had things to share.

There were two missing persons reports currently active for the region, Dan told him, both young women, one a Cessnock local, Jane Cotter, from three months ago, most likely a runaway, the other for a Traci Metcalfe who had been visiting friends in Maitland a week back and never made it home.

Peter had done his casting, looked haggard from the sleep lost doing it for too many hours.

“I keep getting one of the water towers,” he said.

“They’re fenced off, locked. Some even have cameras.”

“Not out at Corrigan’s. Paula tells me Dean Corrigan’s had the whole west section of his property on the market for two years now. He’s let the water in the tower become brackish, deliberately so, claimed it reduced maintenance costs since he wasn’t using it. He’s put up
Contaminated
and
Keep Away
signs and replaced the locks. The kids won’t touch it. The stink puts them off.”

“And you’re seeing his tower?”

“An enclosed dark space out that way. It’s big enough. Huge thing on six legs, at least twenty meters tall, up on that rise. I’m getting that and the front of Bowen’s Arcade down along Bennet Street in town. You know the place, mostly empty. But just the arcade front. No details. The water tower’s much more vivid. I get the shape, the darkness, the
weightlessness
!”

“Hardly a day for visiting old metal water towers.”

“Women are missing, you said.”

What if we’re wrong? Dan wondered. But when was Peter ever wrong when it counted? “We should call the police in on this.”

“Like I said before, Doctor Dan. He won’t be there if we do. He knows what he’s doing. Probably what we’re doing.”

It was a dreadful day to be outdoors, the trees thrashing and heaving under a bleached white sky, every vista blurred and shimmering with heat haze. There were enough people on the streets, other cars about, lots of kids skylarking along the river, but once Peter and Dan left town there were just heat-blasted distances and the empty highway stretching between lines of jiggering fences. Here and there the dark lumps of cattle sheltered as best they could in the ashen fields. Now and then a lonely windmill could be seen racing madly besides its bore.