The Light Ages (8 page)

‘You can learn all sorts of interesting things from books without having to go anywhere,’ Annalise said matter-of-factly as we sat down on a lawn beside the silvered mass of a fountain. ‘I mean, I could tell you more about that thingamajig place where you live—’

‘—Bracebridge—’

‘—from a book than you’d ever find out just by living there.’

I shrugged, plucking at the daisied grass.

‘And then of course, there’s all the
other
things that people get up to.’ Annalise hugged her knees. ‘Men and women, I mean. When they want to rub up against each other and make babies.’

‘I know
all
about that. Still,’ I conceded, ‘you can tell me if you like.’

‘Well …’ Annalise leaned back on her elbows and studied the sky, her hair falling pale gold now, almost like the foam, her dress nearly managing to be white. She was completely unembarrassed by her subject—but at the same time, she clearly understood that what she knew was well worth telling. I supposed, watching her as she talked, that she couldn’t have been totally isolated here. But, as the grass shone and the widows of the warty house glowed, as Annalise’s explanation of the act of human reproduction ranged bizarrely over the complicated terrain of some language that she had taken from those books, I didn’t want our shared afternoon to be anything other than totally unique.

‘Then the
labia minor …
And thus engorging the
corpora cavernosa …
Whilst attaching to the
non-striated ..

I listened, genuinely absorbed by the sound of these, long, lovely, intricate words which spoke of rituals far more exotic than I could imagine the adults of Bracebridge—let alone my own parents—performing. Her voice was slightly breathless, high-pitched, and suffused with an odd personal accent that didn’t belong to any particular time or place.

‘Of course, the
zygote ..

And as she talked, leaning into the sunlight beside that fountain which sparked and gushed in frozen waves, the off-white strap of her dress slipped from her shoulder. Her skin there looked almost clean and was flecked with golden hairs. Annalise had stopped talking. She looked at me for a moment, blinked, then yanked up her dress. She jumped up and walked off down the sloping garden, where lumpy balustrades gave way to a steeper drop. I scampered to catch up with her, grabbing branches, leaping from rock to root.

‘It wasn’t always like this,’ she called as I crashed after her. ‘Lots and lots of people used to live here. It was probably
much
bigger than Bracebridge …’

There had, indeed, once been a village beside the river down below this big house, although it was now half-drowned in engine ice, its tumourous roofs sagging or broken, the doors and windows draped, the pathways tumbling with froth. Our feet crunched and tinkled. We climbed to the ruins of the church, its tower fallen in a long, crusted tail, now shining and scaled, with gravestones leaning around it. It seemed colder and darker here; already edged with the beginnings of winter. But it would be good, I decided with an odd prescience as Annalise climbed over what had once been the church wall and the backs of her legs flashed white, if Bracebridge were to become like this one day; frozen in time, ornamented with engine ice.

‘You’re not afraid, are you?’ she asked me.

‘No. Of course not. Why should I be?’

At the foot of a bank, close by the river, the crystal rose in extravagant loops and claws, and the water hissed through brittle curtains which fanned like frosted weed from the shore. We came to the motionless waterwheel of an old millhouse still jutting into the frozen waters of its sluices. We climbed over ruined beams in the crackling marsh that surrounded it, glancing up, moment by moment, at the shouldering roof, the silent wheel. But for this strange frostfall, it was much like the old aether engines you found up on Rainharrow. Curtains of ancient weed fanned out, trapped within the glassy water in dense, inky waves. The sense of the past lay heavy here. In those days of the Second Age of Industry when this wheelhouse had thrived, aether could still be extracted from near the earth’s surface and the engines were mostly set on open ground like any other process of manufacturing. For eighty, perhaps ninety, years, villages such as this one had flourished too, growing stone by stone and roof by roof, burying their dead and raising their babies until they became too remote to be reached by the new railways, too high to be embraced by the canals. Then the aether started to run out. For a while, the waterwheel would still have turned as the children of the village left to find work in the big cities of Sheffield and Preston and the guildsmen struggled to keep the bearings of their outdated machinery turning, using up more and more of what aether they still extracted, leaving less and less to sell.

We walked back up through the trees, clambering over rustling falls of crystal then on through the village until we finally reached the glinting gardens of the big house again. Viewed from this side, standing by the frozen froth of that fountain, it seemed even more scaled and ruined. We wandered inside, skidding listlessly across floors, bonging gongs in empty hallways, knocking off stalactites of growth that dissolved with glassy sighs as the air filled with twilight. Annalise led me along eerie passageways to a large, dim room. Its windows were curtained with engine ice and what little light they admitted glittered on the only item of furniture, something so whitened and misshapen that I thought for a moment it was composed of nothing but engine ice. But the lid of the piano came up surprisingly easily when Annalise raised it and the keys inside were uncorroded.

I asked, ‘Can you play?’

She answered with a scatter of notes.

‘Tell me, Robert …’ More notes. ‘What’s it like in Bracebridge?’

I licked my lips. Where to begin? Where to end? ‘Well … There’s the sound, the feel. I mean, the aether engines. And we live in a row of houses. There are
lots
of rows of houses … My mother—I mean my father, he’s—’

The piano rang out again. ‘What I mean is, what’s it like for
you?’

I thought for a moment. The room rippled into silence. ‘It’s …’ I shrugged.

‘Would you rather be here with Missy?’ Her figure was dim. Scarcely there. A shadow, receding. ‘Would you rather be me?’

‘I don’t even know what you
are,
Annalise.’

She gave a chuckle. Soft and bitter, not quite a laugh, it seemed to come from someone much older. Once again, her fingers stroked the piano. Dust sparkled up from the struck strings.

‘I’m really quite glad I came here,’ I said.

‘Hmm …’ Annalise was humming, scarcely listening.

‘Now I know people like you don’t just go to Northallerton.’ She closed the lid with a bang.

‘I think you’d better get back to your mother.’

I scurried after Annalise down corridors and stairways. Inside Mistress Summerton’s study, tobacco smoke hung in weary drapes around the plants. It seemed as if my mother and Mistress Summerton had long been sitting in silence.

‘We really must be going.’ My mother climbed slowly from the chair. I saw from the glistening trails that lay across her face that she’d been crying. ‘You see, there’s the last train ..

‘Of course, of course …’ Mistress Summerton stood up also, smiling with a flash of her glasses, and my mother and I were wafted from the room and back into the big main hallway where the engine ice still glimmered and sparkled through doorways with a faint inner light. I looked around for Annalise, but she had already vanished.

The two figures, my mother stooped, little Mistress Summerton as strange and alive as the house itself, regarded each other across the distance of their vastly different existences. Then, in a gesture that was rare even between people of the same family in those times of physical reserve, Mistress Summerton stepped forward and took my mother in her small brown arms. In a way, I was almost as shocked by this embrace as I was by anything I had seen on this magical Fourshiftday. And it seemed to me that the two figures merged; or rather, that Mistress Summerton encompassed them both, spreading across the hall and growing briefly vast in a beating of wings.

‘There …’ Mistress Summerton stepped back and reached to touch my mother’s forehead, muttering something more, wordless words which ran high quick and clear as a guildsman’s spell. Then she turned to me, fixing me with the gaze of her glasses, which filled with swirling light.

‘You must take care of your mother,’ she said, although her lips barely moved. I can feel a strength in you, Robert. And hope. Keep that hope, Robert. Keep it for as long as you can … Will you do that for me?

I nodded.

Mistress Summerton smiled. Her strange gaze travelled through me.

‘Goodbye.’

I looked back at the house as my mother and I walked down the white driveway. The crystal growth seemed more like the honey-glow of twilight now. And above it all, the stars were forming. One, shimmering low ahead of us in the west, was a deep, dark red.

My mother grabbed my arm.

‘Don’t tell Beth or your father about today,’ she muttered. ‘You know what
he’s
like …’

I nodded, thinking of Mistress Summerton’s words.

‘And take this basket—I don’t see why I should have to carry it all the way!’

I carried the empty picnic basket for my mother as we hurried to catch the last train from Tatton Halt.

L
IVING THE HARD AND ORDINARY LIFE
we lived on Coney Mound, torn as I was between past and future wonders, my mother hardly needed to have asked me not to speak to anyone about our visit to Redhouse. Naturally, I was hungry to keep my own secret portion of this world, particularly if it lay beyond Bracebridge. So I bore my burden—along with the bright images of that day; Annalise, Mistress Summerton—in silence, although, as I wandered the town, my head was filled with questions which had previously never troubled me.

Down in Bracebridge market square, I found a patch of especially cracked and weathered old stone where the stocks had stood, and where, before that, and in the chaos of the First Age, changelings might once have been burnt before we learned how to tame and capture them. And rummaging through the town public library, sniffling over dank pages, I searched for G for Goldenwhite, U for Unholy, R for Rebellion, and C for changeling. But what was a changeling? All the talk of green vans and Northallerton and trolls and milk souring and babies being eaten seemed like nothing but gossip across the back fences of Coney Mound. But on a high shelf in the corner of the library so dim and dank and unvisited that the shadows seemed to give a resistance, I heaved down a tome embossed with a cross inside a letter C and flopped it open.

It could almost have been one of those books from Redhouse, but this one contained
foggy
photographs the colour of nicotine stains amid long columns of text. Flesh rippled and sluglike, or white and blooming. Faces cracked like peeling paint. Limbs strung with cascading cauls.

‘What are ye lookin’ at?’

It was Masterlibrarian Kitchum, a half-blind man of such dumb illiteracy that it was hard to imagine that his appointment hadn’t been some kind of joke. Cursing, he dragged the book from me and chased me into the rain.

But there was so much I still needed to know. So, within three shifts, and on a grey Nineshiftday of irredeemable ordinariness, I set out to make my way back to Redhouse. I left home at the usual time carrying my school satchel, then doubled down and back around the edges of lowtown, trod the cabbage leaves through the failing allotments, crossed Withybrook Road and followed the railway tracks around the side of Rainharrow to the point where that lonely branch line dipped across the moors. It was past midday when, plodding on beneath dulled loops of telegraph as the wind bit into me, I took the path through the greying heather beside the old quarry. The late autumn sun was already ominously low by the time I entered the wood leading down to the clearing where my mother and I had had our picnic. Despite the new bareness of the trees, the path grew darker as I descended it, drowning in riots of thorns and holly. Wading through the undergrowth, no longer sure if I was following any kind of path, I began to panic. I was running, breathless. Then, when I was sure I was utterly lost, the wood suddenly relented and I found that I was standing again at the edge of the moor. Darkness was flooding in and the greyish path threaded back towards the empty platform of Tatton Halt. I took it at a grateful run and trotted homewards along the track, pausing only to ease the pain in my sides. The telegraphs glowed faintly above me with distant messages, and, far beyond that, the stars began to glimmer in clusters and strings. One, beckoning towards Coney Mound, was red.

Tired and afraid and disappointed, I followed the dim strings of lowtown’s gaslights and the milky wyreglow of the quickening pools, and climbed the familiar streets past St Wilfred’s. The cobbles were wet, each glinting with a fleck of that red star. The houses were black. The air was silent. Then I heard something screaming, and my heart chilled. It sounded as if claws were being dragged across the surface of the night. Then the noise emerged from the alley opposite me and became a dark figure. Its eyes, like the cobbles, burned with twin flecks of red light, and the air seemed to grey and shimmer around it. The night shrank and pulsed. I was sure at that moment that the devil himself had decided to walk Coney Mound, or at the very least that Owd Jack, aged and pained beyond belief and yet still living, had come to reclaim me. SHOOM
BOOM
SHOOM
BOOM.
Stretching its rags, the thing shuffled towards me. And I ran. I was leaning against the gate of our back yard and catching my breath in ragged yelps before I realised that I’d only glimpsed the Potato Man. This was, after all, the time of year for him.

‘You’re late.’

My sister Beth barely glanced up at me as I slumped down before the kitchen range. She thumped a dried-up meal on the table as I worked off my boots. I studied the chipped plate. A slice of shrivelled bacon. Some fibrous lumps of sea-potato, that ever-ready standby of the poor. Not even a slice of bread.