Weaveworld (98 page)

Everything went to dust.

4

Each day Suzanna would spend several hours talking to him, telling him how the day had gone, and whom she’d met,
mentioning the names of people he knew and places he’d been in the hope of stirring him from his inertia. But there was no response; not a glimmer.

Sometimes she’d get into a quiet rage at his apparent indifference to her, and tell him to his vacant face that he was being selfish. She loved him, didn’t he know that? She loved him and she wanted him to know her again, and be with her. Other times she’d come close to despair, and however hard she tried she couldn’t stem the tears of frustration and unhappiness. She’d leave his bedside then, until she’d composed herself again, because she was fearful that somewhere in his sealed head he’d hear her grief and flee even further into himself.

She even tried to reach him with the menstruum, but he was a fortress, and her subtle body could only gaze into him, not enter. What it saw gave her no cause for optimism. It was as if he was uninhabited.

5

Outside the window of Gluck’s home it was the same story: there were few signs of life. This was the hardest winter since the beginning of the century. Snow fell on snow; ice glazed ice.

As January crept to its dismal end people began not to ask after Cal as frequently. They had problems of their own in such a grim season, and it was relatively easy for them to put him out of their minds because he wasn’t in pain; or at least in no pain he could express. Even Gluck tactfully suggested that she was giving too much of her time over to nursing him. She had her own healing to do; a life to be put in some sort of order; plans to be laid for the future. She’d done all that could be expected from a devoted friend, and more, he argued, and she should start to share the burden with others.

I can’t, she told him.

Why not?, he asked.

I love him, she said, and I want to be with him.

That was only half the answer of course. The other half was the book.

There it lay in his room, where she’d put it the day they’d returned from Rayment’s Hill. Though it had been Mimi’s gift to Suzanna, the magic that it now contained meant she could no longer open it alone. Just as she’d needed Cal at the Temple, in order to use the Loom’s power, and charge the book with their memories, so she needed him again if they were to reverse the process. The magic hung in the space between them. She could not reclaim on her own what they’d imagined together.

Until he woke the
Stories of the Secret Places
would remain untold. And if he didn’t wake they’d remain that way forever.

6

In the middle of February, with the false hint of a thaw in the air, Gluck took himself off to Liverpool, and, by dint of some discreet enquiries in Chariot Street, located Geraldine Kellaway. She returned with him to Harborne to visit Cal. His condition shocked her, needless to say, but she had that brand of pragmatism that would find her the first brewing tea after Armageddon, and within an hour she’d taken it in her stride.

She returned to Liverpool after two days, back to the life she’d established in Cal’s absence, promising to visit again soon.

If Gluck had hoped her appearance would do something to break the deadlock of Cal’s stupor, he was disappointed. The sleepwalker went on in the same fashion, through February and early March, while outside the promised thaw was delayed and delayed.

During the day they’d move him from his bed to the window, and there he’d sit, overlooking the expanse of frost-gripped ground behind Gluck’s house. Though he was fed well, chewing and swallowing with the mechanical efficiency of an animal; though he was shaved and bathed daily; though his legs were exercised to keep the muscles from wasting, it was
apparent to those few who still came visiting, and especially to Suzanna and Gluck, that he was preparing die.

7

And the dust rolled on.

VI

RAPTURE

1

f Finnegan hadn’t called she would never have gone down to London. But he had, and she did, as much at Gluck’s insistence than from any great enthusiasm for the trip.

As soon as she got out of the house, however, and started travelling, she began to feel the weight of recent weeks lift a little. Hadn’t she once said to Apolline that there was comfort in their at least being alive? It was true. They would have to make the best they could of that, and not sigh for things circumstance had denied them.

She found Finnegan less than his usual spritely self. His career at the bank had floundered of late, and he needed a shoulder to curse upon. She supplied it happily, more than content to hear his catalogue of woes if they distracted her from her own. He reminded her, when he’d finished complaining and gnashing his teeth, of something she’d once said about never marrying a banker. As it seemed he’d soon be out of a job would she think again?, he wondered. It was clear from his tone he didn’t expect yes for an answer, and he didn’t get it, but she told him she hoped they’d always be friends.

‘You’re a strange woman,’ he said as they parted, apropos of nothing in particular.

She took the remark as flattery.

2

It was late afternoon by the time she got back to Harborne. Another night of frost was on its way, pearling the pavements and roofs.

When she went upstairs she found the sleepwalker had not been put in his chair but was sitting against heaped pillows on the bed, his eyes as glazed as ever. He looked sick; the mark Uriel’s revelation had left on his face was livid against his pallid skin. She’d left too early to shave him that morning, and it distressed her to see how close to utter dereliction such minor neglect had left him looking. Talking quietly to him about where she’d been, she led him from the bed over to the chair beside the window, where the light was a little better. Then she collected the electric razor from the bathroom and shaved his stubble.

At the beginning it had been an eerie business, ministering to him like this, and it had upset her. But time had toughened her, and she’d come to view the various chores of keeping him presentable as a means to express her affection for him.

Now, however, as dusk devoured the light outside, she felt those early anxieties rising in her again. Perhaps it was the day she’d spent out of the house, and out of Cal’s company, that made her tender to this experience afresh. Perhaps it was also the sense she had that events were drawing to a close; that there would not be many more days when she would have to shave him and bathe him. That it was almost over.

Night was upon the house so quickly the room soon became too gloomy to work in. She went to the door and switched on the light.

His reflection appeared in the window, hanging in the glass against the darkness outside. She left him staring at it while she went for the comb.

*

There was something in the void ahead of him, though he couldn’t see what. The wind was too strong, and he, as ever, was dust before it.

But the shadow, or whatever it was, persisted, and sometimes – when the wind dropped a little – it seemed he could almost see it studying him. He looked back at it and its gaze held him, so that instead of being blown on, and away, the dust he was made of momentarily stood still.

As he returned the scrutiny, the face before him became clearer. He knew it vaguely, from some place he’d gained and lost. Its eyes, and the stain that ran from hairline to cheek, belonged to somebody he’d known once. It irritated him, not being able to remember where he’d seen this man before.

It was not the face itself which finally reminded him, but the darkness it was set against.

The last time he’d seen this stranger, perhaps the
only
time, the man had been standing against another such darkness. A cloud, perhaps, shot with lightning. It had a name, this cloud, but he couldn’t remember it. The place had a name too, but that was even further out of his reach. The moment of their meeting he did remember however; and some fragments of the journey that led up to it. He’d been in a rickshaw, and he’d passed through a region where time was somehow out of joint. Where today breathed yesterday’s air, and tomorrow’s too.

For curiosity’s sake he wanted to know the stranger’s name, before the wind caught him and moved him on again. But he was dust, so he couldn’t ask. Instead he pressed his motes towards the darkness on which the mysterious face hovered, and reached to touch his skin.

It was not a living thing he made contact with, it was cold glass. His fingers fell from the window, the heat-rings they’d left shrinking.

If it was glass before him, he dimly thought, then he must be looking at himself surely. The man he’d met, standing against that nameless cloud: that was
him.

A puzzle awaited Suzanna when she returned to the room.
She was almost certain she’d left Cal with his hands on his lap, but now his right arm hung at his side. Had he tried to move? If so it was the first independent motion he’d made since the trance had claimed him.

She started to speak to him, softly, asking him if he heard her, if he saw her, or knew her name. But as ever it was a oneway conversation. Either his hand had simply slipped from his lap or she’d been mistaken and it hadn’t been there in the first place.

Sighing, she set to combing his hair.

He was still dust in a wilderness, but now he was dust with a memory.

It was enough to give him weight. The wind bullied him, wanting its way with him, but this time he refused to be moved. It raged against him. He ignored it, standing his ground in the nowhere while he tried to fit the pieces of his thoughts together.

He had met himself once, in a house near a cloud; he’d been brought there in a rickshaw while a world folded up around him.

What did it signify, that he’d come face to face with himself as an old man? What did that mean?

The question was not so difficult to answer, even for dust. It meant he would at some future time step into that world, and live there.

And from that, what followed?
What followed?

That the place was not lost.

Oh yes! Oh God in Heaven,
yes
! That was it. He would be there. Not tomorrow maybe, or the day after that; but someday, some future day: he would
be there.

It was not lost. The Fugue was not lost.

It took only that knowledge, that certainty,
and he woke.

‘Suzanna,’ he said.

3

‘Where is it?’ was the only question he voiced, when they’d finished with their reunion. ‘Where’s it hidden?’

She went to the table and put Mimi’s book into his hands.

‘Here,’ she said.

He ran his palm over the binding, but declined to open it.

‘How did we do that?’ he said. He asked the question with such gravity; like a child.

‘In the Gyre,’ she said. ‘You and I. And the Loom.’

‘All of it?’ he said. ‘All of it, in here?’

‘I don’t know,’ she told him in all honesty. ‘We’ll see.’

‘Now.’

‘No, Cal. You’re very weak still.’

‘I’ll be strong –’ he said simply, ‘ –once we open the book.’

She could not better such argument; instead she reached across and laid her hands on Mimi’s gift. As her fingers laced with his the lamp above their heads flickered and went out. Immersed in darkness they held the book between them, as she and Hobart had once held it. On that occasion it had been hatred that had fuelled the forces in the pages; this time it was joy.

They felt the book begin to tremble in their custody, growing warm. Then it flew out of their hands towards the window. The icy glass shattered and it disappeared, tumbling away into the darkness.

Cal got to his feet, and hobbled to the window; but before he’d reached it the pages rose, unbound, like birds in the night outside, like pigeons, the thoughts the Loom had inscribed between the lines spilling light and life. Then they swooped down again, and out of sight.