Resonance (24 page)

You

Y
OU CANNOT STOP
crying, and your heartbeat is like a hammer against the cage of your ribs. You need a knife so that you can cut yourself from this dress – so that you can liberate your heart and lungs, and release a scream and stop the tears and terror from getting in your way.

You are heading up to the room and your bag, wherein lie the scissors of your trade. But the darkness is aswarm with light, your mind a dissonance of noise, and so you stumble on the stairs. You roll to your back, the dress rustling about you, and scrabble at your ribs, terrified at all you have seen and at how little you can breathe.

It is as if you faint, then, though you do not faint. Your mind remains alert, but your body ceases to move for a while, as if it has had enough of this frantic panicking. You lie glittering on the dark stairs, your hands motionless against your imprisoned waist, and watch the ropes of light twist above you. I can only dimly perceive the web of thickly pulsing lines that are so bright to you. I want you to look away from them, to close your eyes, because I am frightened by them.

I can feel your mind examining the light – feel your calculations as you trace and follow its movement. You realise that it is not tangled like before, no longer tentative and seeking, no longer lost. Now it is
directed
. It is purposeful. All straight lines, it is pouring through that woman in the ballroom – the one with the doll – and the two men out on the ice. It is pouring through them, strong and certain and specific, and roaring back from them to the place where it originated.

You struggle to your feet, gazing upwards. You have forgotten your quest for a blade. You are following the light. It misled you last time – brought you, in the tangles of its grief, to the poor lost soul in the box. It will not mislead you again.

You descend the stairs. You pass into the silence of a book-lined room. I feel the press of your hands against cold glass: you push open a door that is like a window, and you are out in the misty air of a warm night. It must be summer; there is the scent of flowers. You stumble down steps and follow a path into trees.

It is time for me to move. I roll to my side and my hands sink into harsh sand. My body is stiff and cold; my joints creak. It takes all I have to climb to my knees. From the corner of my eye, I see the thing. It moans and sways on the other side of this place, its reflection bright in the still waters at its feet. All its attention is on the ceiling. It does not seem to notice me. It is the only source of light. Once I have crawled away from it, I will be in darkness.

You stumble through dappled moonlight, your hands pressed to your constricted ribs. Overhead, stars blaze in a moon-silvered sky. Heavy skirts glisten in your fists as you
hoist them above your knees. You see ropes of light, and you follow them through long grass.

I begin to crawl.

You slam into apple trees, snag on branches, stumble on roots.

I crawl into a passageway black as the abyss you have called me from. On my hands and knees, through warm pools, I follow my hunger to where you are.

A structure looms above you. It blots the stars, and you stumble into the tumbled remains of a ruined castle. You cross flagstones worn by time, the straight lines of light drawing you on.

The darkness presses like thumbs against my eyes as I am drawn through winding tunnels of blindness: left, then right, and right again. You draw me on, as I draw you down into the black.

You descend damp stone stairs. Those people put your feet into gold slippers, and they are wet now, and filthy. I remember your feet: ten perfect toes cased in black wool. Warm. Tasty.

Your hands press against wet rock as you grope your way, blind and not blind, downwards at the behest of the light. I crawl upwards. Faster now, slipping up the spiralling steps on hands and feet, my face turned up as if testing the air. I think I may be smiling; certainly my teeth are bared.

Behind me the thing pauses. It has been feeding; now it hesitates. It senses us drawing close to each other, you and I. Coming together with the irresistible force of magnets, we are a completion: one thing belonging to the other. It recognises this. It lowers its head like a scenting dog, but I pay it no heed – I am focused only on you.

You descend, and you descend, and suddenly you are
here
.

I crawl up the steps towards you, quick and low and
four-legged
. You run into a gate, which blocks your way. Your hands close around the metal bars. Your eyes search blindly. You cannot sense me, though I am here, crouched at your feet.

I pull myself up the bars, drag myself up, my teeth bared.

You stare unseeing into the dark, your face inches from my cold face.

I press forward, wanting you. Wanting you. Wanting to eat you.

You whisper, ‘Joe?’

My hands close on your warm face, and I remember everything. I remember everything. I pull you in, and bared teeth and greed become a kiss. We kiss. O, love. O, heart. We kiss at last. Your arms come through the bars and we are close, even with the metal between us. You are as warm as I am cold. Your lips, your breath, your tongue on mine – shocking and natural and lovely.

I remember. I remember. I am here.

The Candle
and the Knife

J
OE’S FACE WAS
cold between Tina’s hands, the fullness of his lips colder still. She was frightened by his silence. ‘Joe,’ she whispered. ‘You died.’

He nodded.

‘Are you alive now, Joe?’

Under her fingers, his mouth curved into that smile he’d always kept so rare and just for her. She pressed her palm against his chest, to assure herself of him, and ran her hands down his arms, feeling the strength he’d kept hidden from everyone but her.

She would never forget the thrill of first discovering this strength – the summer day Joe had reduced her to laughter and she had bent double, clutching him. The solidity of his arm through the cotton of his shirt had amazed her. The masculinity of it. Thereafter, she had often pretended to need steadying, just so she could hold on to him. Was he so innocent that he believed in her poor balance? Tina didn’t think so. It was just their gentle secret. Their unspoken story.

‘It would kill me to lose you,’ she whispered.

Joe pulled her tight against the bars; then he seemed to lose the strength in his legs, and together they slipped to the ground, the cold metal between them, closer than they had ever been.

I wish you would talk
, she thought,
so I could be sure you were alive
.

As if to please her, his voice came rasping from the dark. ‘There is something in here with me. An animal.’

She clutched him tighter, her eyes straining into the energy-threaded darkness. ‘I know,’ she whispered.

This was where the ropes of lights came from, pulsing and threading through rock and air and sky, emanating from the creature she sensed far below. She had been part of that creature’s mind – she was part of it still – and it was a lonely thing. Broken and starving. She suspected it was mad.

She fumbled upwards, seeking a latch or a bolt, desperate to get Joe out. He clung to her. Joe had never been one to restrain her, it hurt to push him aside, but it was difficult enough to breathe in this terrible prison of a dress.

As soon as he released her it became difficult to think. The noise closed in, the lights stitched themselves through her mind, and she was no longer alone inside her skull.

‘It …’ she gasped. ‘It has lost you, Joe …’

No, that is wrong
.

‘It has lost,’ she amended, ‘something
like
you …
its
you: what you are to me.’

Shaking her head, she groped to find a latch. ‘You have to get out.’

She found a heavy padlock securing the gate, and she shook it, desperate. Joe’s arms snaked through the bars again.
She could feel his hands exploring the deformity of her waist.

‘You’re trapped,’ he whispered.

She pressed her palms to the corset, which was denying her lungs their right to expand. What she wouldn’t give for a pair of scissors.

‘I can’t breathe.’

His fingers scrabbled at the dress as if it were the hard outer shell of a crab, and Tina realised he was trying to free her. She turned awkwardly and presented her back to him.

‘Hurry, Joe.’

He found the rows of buttons that were out of her reach and gouged at them, ripping them apart. The bodice fell loose, the heavy fabric peeling away like petals, but it made no odds because it wasn’t the dress that was trapping her, but the terrible bone-and-canvas construction beneath.

She felt him pluck at the lacings, unable to figure the knots in the dark. Suddenly he went still. He seemed to be listening. He turned from the gate, and she could feel him staring down the steps.

As soon as his hands left her the confusion poured back, and with it a clear vision of the creature in the rock-hewn caverns below. Bright and terrible, it was rushing towards them, hurtling upwards through the dark.

‘It’s coming, Joe! You have to run.’

He reached for her. She pushed him.

‘Run! Before it traps you against the gate!’

There was the brief clutch of his hands, icy and desperate on hers, then he was gone. Tina pressed her face between the bars, calling into the darkness.

‘I’ll be back! I’ll bring Harry!’

But he had fled from her. And there was no sense of
him at all; there was only the creature racing upwards, light trailing behind it, light pushing ahead … focused for the first time in centuries –
understanding
for the first time in centuries, that there was something here other than itself. Running forward. Rushing forward.
Longing
. It began to howl, in a voice that could unravel worlds.

Tina scrambled backwards, her eyes fixed on the writhing air below. The lights were so bright, now that Joe had left her. Thrashing. A chaotic, riotous disorder of the air. Her thoughts and the creature’s thoughts were all mixed up, and it felt as if her skull was about to rupture with a million tiny fissures. Her legs tried to push her away, but the skirts of the dress knotted and snared her.

The thing was directly below her now. With layers of rock between them, it pushed itself through an entrance of stone and into the shaft of steps. Its head dropped between hunched shoulders, its body curled, and it insinuated itself into the spiralling passageway like a snail into its shell. Its wide spread of tentacles trailed behind it like a bridal veil. Its feet and hands left fading prints where they gripped the stone. It flowed past the crevasse where Joe curled like an insect, and he convulsed within the confines of his hiding place.

Tina could feel a seizure coming on: the fierce
butterfly-frenzy
in her temples that signalled an impending loss of control.
Oh no
, she thought,
not now
.

Light pushed itself up from the steps below her – the cold and buzzing luminance of a creature not made for this world. At the same time, light made itself known on the curve of stair above, warm and earthly: the golden radiance of a candle.

Someone was carrying a candle down the steps.

Tina fell back, her body already beginning the jittering dance of a convulsion.

As she fell, the creature exploded from below. It seemed not to expect the gate nor understand it, and its great body slammed against the bars. Portions of it surged onwards – ribbons and tendrils and eels of light flowing through the bars like weed pushed forward on the tide. Then the outflung surge flowed backwards above Tina’s head, slipping against the stones of wall and ceiling as light and tentacles returned to gather around the creature that moaned and hunched and pressed itself against the gate, uncertain and trapped.

Tina stared up into its heavy face-not-face, and the creature seemed to pause. It looked down at her. There was a sudden stillness, a moment taken after centuries of pacing. Even the relentless movement of the light seemed to hesitate. The creature’s song changed in pitch: a high, silver question being asked.

Then someone was shouting overhead. A woman. She came into view around the spiral of the stairs, a candle held high in her hand, and with a frantic kind of joy she leaned across Tina and shouted into the creature’s face.

‘Protest all you want, Angel! Your master can’t hear you here!’ With the candle still held high, she grabbed Tina’s wrist. ‘Come along, child! Have no sympathy for God’s dread soldier.’

The woman was incredibly strong. It cost her no effort to drag Tina up the stairs.

The creature’s voice became frantic as they left it behind. Calling without words – calling in feelings – it screamed its rage.

Tina was dragged up and up, on her back, stone steps bumping sharp against her hips. She wanted to shake free, to take to her own two feet, but the seizure was rising, strong and relentless, and every part of her was clenching tight.

She felt the darkness close its fist. Her head battered the woman’s skirts. The glow of the candle was a brief comfort; then the convulsion locked down, and everything was stolen in the familiar nightmare dance.

‘W
HAT A SURPRISE
to meet you down there in the dark. I had expected to find Cornelius.’

The woman was speaking from somewhere out of sight at Tina’s back. She tutted, reminding Tina of Fran, and Tina opened her eyes to candlelight and moonlight and those incessant ropes of wavering light that only she seemed to see. The air smelled of apples. She was lying on her side in long grass.

There was no moment of confusion on returning to consciousness. She knew exactly where she was: in the orchard by the ruined castle. Below her lay a hundred feet of rock. Beneath it, the creature pressed itself against bars of iron. Joe had just tumbled from his cramped cell. He lay a moment on the damp stone, then crawled away. The creature did not hear nor sense him.

It only senses me
, she thought.
It only senses what Joe is to me.

Its voice was mercifully silent to her.

There were a series of small sharp tugs along the length of her back, someone cutting the laces on the corset, then
cold air as the garment was unclamped from around her ribs. Tina lay still and quiet, allowing herself to breathe, her body too jittery yet to risk movement.

For the first time since the séance at the theatre, she felt sure and part of herself. She recognised the feeling as that strange clarity which often came after a convulsion. People thought she was stupid after, but she wasn’t – she was just far away, and too comfortable to want to talk. She took stock of herself.

She was not about to vomit. There was no nosebleed. She had not pissed herself. This was good.

The woman’s skirts rustled as she came around to peer into Tina’s face. ‘You are awake,’ she said. She sat down in a puff of dark fabric and glitter of jet beading. She had a knife in her hand, the kind of small lethal folding knife that some of the Dublin prostitute girls carried. Tina eyed it.

This is what she cut my stays with. It must be sharp
. She looked the woman in the eye.
I’ll get that knife
.

The woman gestured the torn bodice. ‘Who did this to you,
flor
? It was not Vincent, surely. Certainly it was not Cornelius. They are not men prone to inflicting themselves on women. Was it that American boy?’ She weighed the knife, grimacing, as if considering what she’d do to Harry when she got him. ‘You took refuge with the Angel, I suppose. Well, fear not. You will suffer no more of that unwanted jerking and thrusting here. I promise. No further intrusions will be made upon your person.’

Tina pushed herself up with shaking arms. The corset fell to her waist, and she flung it away with a groan. She shoved the remains of the dress to her knees, kicked it from her and sat back in her petticoats and stockings,
breathing deeply for the first time in what felt like a very long nightmare.

‘I am so glad to have you here,’ said the woman. ‘Cornelius has been so lonely. I almost thought it might kill him.’

Tina eyed her warily.

The woman smiled. ‘We shall be wonderful friends.’

Tina punched her in the jaw.

It was like hitting stone, but the woman rocked back anyway, surprised, and Tina leapt to snatch the knife from her shock-slackened fingers. She twisted the woman’s hair and straddled her, and pressed the knife to the slim arch of the woman’s neck – as quick as any stall-woman ever grabbed a thieving urchin or turned the tables on a cut-purse in the dark.