Songs From Spider Street (5 page)

She glanced
over her shoulder at him. “What’s wrong?”

Raising his
eyes to meet hers, Paterson found himself entranced by a dance of unexpected
movement and colour. The bright, lovely garden came as a surprise after the
harsh and measured interior of the house.

Eve had
turned to face him. “Are you alright?”

“Yes, mmm.”
His eyes struggled to drink in the variety of forms and textures that met them.
The garden was vivid with movement in the light breeze, and the colours seemed
too intense for the weak spring sunlight.

As he
followed Eve towards an oddly-shaped structure partly hidden at the bottom of
the garden, Paterson caught a glimpse of something shining among the flowers
and plants.

He stepped
closer to where the light had caught his eye, reaching forward to part the
leaves of a rose bush, cautious to avoid the cruel thorns.

“What are you
doing?” Eve had retraced her steps and was standing just behind him.

Paterson
started. “I thought …”

“Yes, I see.
The plants are just weeds - they sowed themselves, you know.” It was obvious
that Eve thought her explanation full enough and continued on her way to the
strange building.

Paterson took
the opportunity to peer more closely at what hid in the foliage. There, among
the burning colours and lush greenery, stood rows of neatly-aligned steel
stalks. Their heads were made of burnished petals studded with bright gems. A
metal garden! Of course, thought Paterson. It made sense that Van Epps would
extend his architectural theories to the grounds as well as the house.

But he could
not think how the metal and the precious stones remained untarnished and bright
among the organic lushness that surrounded them.

Paterson
quickly caught up with Eve. She turned as he touched her on the shoulder.

“Weeds? You
said the flowers were weeds?”

She blinked
at him but her expression remained unchanged, as if she was dealing with a slow
child.

“Yes. There
were none when the house was built. The garden looked lovely when it shone in
the sun. But now …” She looked around at the generous growth sadly. “It’s been
choked. I thought you knew. You said you could help.”

None of the
books or architectural monographs Paterson had read had even mentioned the
garden. Architects! Now if the volumes had been written by horticulturalists …
but then again …

“I didn’t
know. I-it’s incredible,” stumbled Paterson.

Eve smiled
slightly at him before turning away to continue her journey.

Once they’d
reached the unusual gazebo at the end of the path, they sat each side of a
small wooden table covered with a dark cloth and some wind-gathered detritus.

Eve reached
inside her dress pocket and removed a set of large cards. She spread the cards
on the small table before her, ignoring the leaves that covered part of it.

“What’s this?”
asked Paterson.

“They’re
cards.”

Paterson
sighed with soft impatience. “I can see that. If you want me to play, you’ll
have to teach me the rules. I’m not big on card games.”

Eve gave a
short laugh. “It’s not a game. Well, a game of sorts, I suppose.”

Still
puzzled, Paterson directed his best quizzical look in her direction.

Eventually
she responded. “They’re for cartomancy … looking into the future, if you like.”

“Witchcraft,
now?!” he snorted.

Eve shook her
head, looking slightly hurt. “No, no. I’m no witch, just a sensitive, that’s
all.” She smiled at him, then flipped the first card. “‘The Huntress’.”

She turned
the second. “Ah, ‘The Lost Island’,” she said with mild concern.

Paterson
looked from the cards’ hand-painted designs to Eve’s intent small face. “Well?”

“It means
that you may not get all you hope for. But the later cards could put a
different complexion on things. Let’s see.” She plucked absent-mindedly at the
front of her dress as she spoke, inadvertently releasing one of the buttons.

She laid the
next two down without comment – ‘The Tattered Banners’ and ‘The Burdened Priest’
– and, even though he didn’t believe in anything that the cards said, Paterson
became vaguely concerned.

A further two
cards – ‘The Saltimbanque’ and ‘The Morning   Star’ – joined the pattern laid
out before them. “Hmmmm,” said Eve. “I think I see.”

“And this
card,” she flourished it before setting it down, “shows your true desire.” She
set it in its place and frowned. Paterson read the words ‘The Mare’s Delight’
at the top of the card and noted the elaborate design of two horses copulating
beneath a lunar eclipse.

He smirked at
her, but her eyes were intent on the pattern that the cards made on the table. ‘The
Seneschal’, ‘The Crowded Cell’, ‘The Hungry Man’, ‘The Smiling Sisters’, ‘The
Burning Tree’ and ‘The Almoner’ all came out of the pack and went on to the
table.

Eve looked up
suddenly and met Paterson’s eyes. She began to laugh.

“What? What
is it?” he asked. The girl simply kept on laughing. Paterson let this continue
for a few more moments but then began to feel as if he were being made a fool
of. He leaned forward and angrily brushed the cards from the table. “Damn the
cards … and damn you!” he hissed.

Eve stopped
laughing and looked at the cards scattered on the floor with slight disdain.
When she lifted her eyes to Paterson, her gaze was cold.

Feeling
suddenly ashamed, Paterson picked the cards up carefully and shuffled them into
a neat pack once more.

“I’m sorry,”
he said. “ I just …”

She lifted
her head, her deep green eyes staring straight into his. “Can I be honest with
you, Mr Paterson? Shall I tell you what the cards revealed to me?” He nodded,
eager to repair whatever damage he had done; he feared it was considerable.

“I don’t
think you’ve been honest with us. I don’t think you want to repair our house
and to write a book about it at all. You want something else from us, don’t
you? I don’t think you should deny it. But should I tell my father or not?”

Paterson felt
stunned. Was the question genuine, he wondered. He could simply deny his true intentions,
but he was intrigued to find out if he had another way out.

“What do you
mean?”

Paterson had never met a woman like Eve before. She’d simply stated
clearly and simply what she wanted; no games, no coquettishness. She’d told him
that she’d seen the way he’d looked at her and that she wanted him to come to
her room and take her virginity that afternoon. That way his secret would be
safe with her, she’d said.

He’d been
taken aback by her offer. He had no way to know if he could trust her, but he
wasn’t about to turn down her offer either. Besides, he reasoned that she
probably wouldn’t want her father to find out about their ‘meeting’, so he’d
have a hold over her after this.

At four o’clock
Paterson stood outside her door. He was about to knock when he noticed it had
been left open for him. He entered cautiously. Looking around the room, which
was more ornately decorated than the rest of the house, he noticed Eve’s bed in
a large recess to one side. It was covered in white lace curtains, which hid it
from the rest of the room.

When he drew
back the lace he found Eve already undressed and in bed. She smiled at him
coyly, with the bedclothes pulled up to her chin. Suddenly she threw back the
sheets to show herself to him. Paterson’s breath caught in his throat. He’d
only seen four women’s bodies before - and one of those was a saggy old whore
his father had hired to ‘break him in’ – but Eve was far more beautiful than
any of them. Her body was as pale and promising as he’d imagined it; each curve
promised him more than the last.

She seemed
neither excited nor dismayed at the prospect of losing her virginity, merely
lying there passively. “Now. Please.”

Struggling to
control his desires and not make a fool of himself, Paterson quickly discarded
most of his clothes and lay on the bed next to her. They began to kiss as he
ran his hand over her body. She shivered slightly and he thought perhaps she
was cold. She moved her legs apart for him and he moved his body between them,
freeing his hard penis from his underclothes at the same time.

At the sudden
downward pressure of his body, her belly cracked open in a confusion of cogs
and counter-springs.

Paterson
gasped in pain as sharp metal cut into his lower belly. He leapt from the bed
and grabbed at a pillow, pressing it against the wound to staunch the flow of
blood.

Eve looked at
him one last time, surprise in her expression as her lips weakly framed the
words “I love …”. There was an awful sound of liquids settling and pressure
hissing free and then she lay still, her limbs disjointed and awry. A sharp
cracking sound accompanied the opening of her body from groin to breastbone as
machinery and tubing forced its way out.

Stunned by
what he saw, Paterson felt he should bundle the machine girl up as he would a
human corpse. Something at the back of his mind told him this was the right
thing to do. He grabbed the sheets either side of Eve and pulled them over her,
to the accompaniment of further hissing and the odd soft pop.

He dressed
quickly, stuffing a bunched pillow case against his wounded stomach, and
scooped the exquisite clockwork girl up in his arms. As he carried her
carefully down the stairs, he found tears wetting his cheeks and blurring his
vision.

She was the
marvellous thing that Van Epps had hinted at. The clue had been there in her
name all along; she was the new Eve, the first of her kind. And the last.

Paterson eventually found Framehr in the basement, hunting for a box of
old papers.

When he saw
Paterson carrying something wrapped in a sheet, he stopped what he was doing
and walked over to him. “What …?” He reached forward and uncovered Eve’s face.

“She was …
mechanical,” was all Paterson could think to say.

Framehr let
out a wail and tried to strike Paterson. “You killed her! You killed her, you
bastard! Give her to me, give her to me, give her back!” Paterson extended his
arms so that Framehr could lift the figure from him.

Idiotically
he repeated: “She was mechanical.”

Framehr’s
eyes blazed at him. “I
know
what she was. She was my daughter. Julia and
I couldn’t … It took Van Epps years … years …” He sobbed, holding the machine’s
hair to his face for a moment before laying the body gently on the floor.

“I came
looking for her,” confessed Paterson. “Even though I didn’t know it.”

This seemed
to make sense to Framehr. He gave a short, bitter laugh. “So you knew. Well,
you’re not the first to come looking for Van Epps’ secret masterpiece! What did
they offer you for finding it, eh? What will they give you, now that you’ve
destroyed it?”

Paterson
shook his head. He stared at the floor. “You hated it here, didn’t you? You
were both trapped here.”

Framehr’s
face turned red as he became even angrier. “Yes. But if you’d done what you
said you would, you fraud, I could have sold this place and lived out a proper
life elsewhere! I shouldn’t have trusted you so easily. You haven’t done a
single thing since you’ve been here, have you?”

“But what
about her? Could she have lived anywhere else?” Paterson asked, nodding vaguely
in the direction of Eve’s remains.

The old man’s
face dropped. He half-turned away, as if he’d suddenly remembered an unfinished
task, before looking back at Paterson and nodding once.

Framehr
staggered back a few paces. He bent and scooped the thing he’d called his
daughter from the floor. A look of immeasurable sadness crossed his face as he
moved towards the opening to the machine pit.

Despite his
age, he hopped quickly onto the ladder, cradling the disintegrating form of Eve
in his arms. Paterson heard small metal parts dropping into the pit, clattering
on the floor. Framehr looked back at him, an expression of awful loneliness on
his face.

“What? What
are …?” Then Paterson realised and dashed forward. He stretched his arms
through the opening, trying to grab Framehr. But the old man had already
jumped, his mechanical daughter clutched to him, plunging down into the
darkness and rust and relentless motion of the dark pit. Paterson heard
something hit the huge wheels and cogs, then came a strangled scream and the
sound of gears straining against something less yielding than flesh and bone.

He tried to
peer down into the pit but a cloud of rust and darkness rose to meet him.
Shielding his eyes, he turned away as the floor began to shake and rivets
complained and then popped. Ripping through the threadbare carpets, the giant
metal plates of the floor began to tilt and crumple as the machinery of the
house tore itself apart. Paterson ran for the stairs.

Once
upstairs, he ran through the lurching structure and almost leapt out of the
front door. He threw himself on the sparse grass and hid his face from the
cloud of dust and debris rolling out from the grinding, groaning despair of the
house.

After ten
minutes, the noise subsided and Paterson dared to raise his head. He felt sick
as he saw that Van Epps’ masterpiece was now a tumbled and tangled heap of
metal, rust, sticks of wood and God alone knew what else. He stood and walked
over to it. The house seemed to have toppled over backwards, away from where he
had lain, revealing the machine pit and another room hidden beneath the
structure.

He knelt,
fascinated, and peered in. He hadn’t discovered this other, hidden room during
his examination of the house. It contained two huge tanks and an elaborate
pumping system; the hydraulics that Paterson
knew
had to exist. A
metallic smell rose from the room and, as he watched, the tanks began to leak a
red liquid onto the floor of the secret room. Soon the room was full and it
began to spill over the lip onto the grass at Paterson’s feet. The body of one
of the cats floated in the liquid.