Weave World

Part Two. Births, Deaths and Marriages

‘The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve; lovers to bed; ‘tis almost fairy time.'

Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream

I

THE SUIT OF LIGHTS

1

The day Cal stepped out into was humid and stale. It could not be long before the summer let fall take its toll. Even the breeze seemed weary, and its condition was contagious. By the time Cal reached the vicinity of Rue Street his feet felt swollen in his shoes and his brain in his skull.

And then, to add insult to injury, he couldn't find the damn street. He'd made his way to the house the previous day with his eyes on the birds rather than on the route he was following, so he had only an impressionistic notion of its whereabouts. Knowing he could well wander for several hours and not find the street, he asked the way from a gaggle of six-year-olds, engaged in war games on a street corner. He was confidently re-directed. Either through ignorance or malice, however, the directions proved hopelessly incorrect, and he found himself wandering around in ever more desperate circles, his frustration mounting.

Any sixth sense he might have hoped for - some instinct that would lead him unerringly to the region of his dreams was conspicuous by its absence.

It was luck then, pure luck, that brought him finally to the corner of Rue Street, and to the house that had once belonged to Mimi Laschenksi.

2 Suzanna had spent much of the morning attempting to do as she had promised Doctor Chai: notifying Uncle Charlie in Toronto. It was a frustrating business. For one thing, the small hotel she'd found the previous night only boasted a single public telephone, and other guests wanted access to it as well as she. For another, she had to call round several friends of the family until she located one who had Charlie's telephone number, all of which took the best part of the morning. When around one, she finally made contact, Mimi's only son took the news without a trace of surprise. There was no offer to drop his work and rush to his mother's bedside; only a polite request that Suzanna call back when there was more news. Meaning, presumably, that he didn't expect her to ring again until it was time for him to send a wreath. So much for filial devotion.

The call done, she rang the hospital. There was no change in the patient's condition. She's hanging on, was the duty nurse's phrase. It conjured an odd image of Mimi as mountaineer, clinging to a cliff-face. She took the opportunity to ask about her grandmother's personal effects, and was told that she'd come into hospital without so much as a nightgown. Most probably the vultures Mrs Pumphrey had spoken of would by now have taken anything of worth from the house - the tall-boy included - but she elected to call by anyway, in case she could salvage anything to make Mimi's dwindling hours a little more comfortable.

She found a small Italian restaurant in the vicinity of the hotel to lunch in, then drove to Rue Street.

3

The back yard gate had been pushed closed by the removal men, but left unbolted. Cal opened it, and stepped into the yard.

If hr had expected some revelation, he was disappointed. There was nothing remarkably here. Just parched chickweed sprouting between the paving stones, and a litter of chattels the trio had discarded as worthless. Even the shadows, which might have hidden some glory, were wan and unsecretive.

Standing in the middle of the yard - where all of the mysteries that had overturned his sanity had been unveiled he doubted for the first time, truly doubted, that anything had in had happened the previous day.

Maybe there would be something inside the house, he told himself; some flotsam he could cling to that would bear him up in this flood of doubt.

He crossed the ground where the carpet had lain, to the back door. The removal men had left it unlocked; or else vandals had broken in. Either way, it stood ajar. He stepped inside.

At least the shadows were heavier within; there was some room for the fabulous. He waited for his eyes to accommodate the murk. Was it really only twenty-four hours since he'd been here, he thought, as his sharpening gaze scanned the grim interior; only yesterday that he'd entered this house with no more on his mind than catching a lost bird? This time he had so much more to find.

He wandered through to the hallway, looking everywhere for some echo of what he'd experienced the day before. With every step he took his hopes felt further. Shadows there were, but they were deserted. The place was shorn of miracles. They'd gone when the carpet was removed.

Half way up the stairs he halted. What was the use of going any further? It was apparent he'd missed his chance. If he was to rediscover the vision he'd glimpsed and lost he'd have to search elsewhere. It was mere doggedness, therefore-one of ‘Eileen's attributes - that made him continue to climb.

At the top of the stairs the air was so leaden it made drawing breath a chore. That, and the fact that he felt like a trespasser today - unwelcome in this tomb - made him anxious to confirm his belief that the place had no magic to show him, then get gone.

As hr went to the door of the front bedroom something moved behind him. He turned. The labourers had piled several articles of furniture at the top of the stairs, then apparently decided they weren't worth the sweat of moving any further. A chest of drawers, several chairs and tables. The sound had come from behind this furniture. And now it came again.

Hearing it, he imagined rats. The sound suggested several sets of scurrying paws. Live and let live, he thought: he had no more right to be here than they did. Less, perhaps. They'd probably occupied the house for rat generations.

He returned to the job at hand, pushed open the door, and stepped into the front room. The windows were grimy, and the stained lace curtains further clogged the light. There was a chair overturned on the bare boards, and three odd shoes had been placed on the mantelpiece by some wit. Otherwise empty.

He stood for a few moments and then, hearing laughter in the street and needing its reassurance, crossed to the window and drew the curtain aside. But before he found the laughter's source he foresook the search. His belly knew before his senses could confirm it that somebody had entered the room behind him. He let the curtain drop and looked around. A wide man in late middle-age, dressed too well for this dereliction, had joined him in the half-light. The threads of his grey jacket were almost iridescent. But more eye-catching still, his smile. A practised smile, belonging on an actor, or a preacher. Whichever, it was the expression of a man looking for converts.

‘Can I be of help?' he said. His voice was resonant, and warm, but his sudden appearance had chilled Cal.

‘Help me?' he said, floundering.

‘Are you perhaps interested in purchasing property?' the other man said.

‘Purchasing? No...1... was just... you know... looking around.'

‘It's a fine house,' said the stranger, his smile as steady as a surgeon's handshake, and as antiseptic. ‘Do you know much about houses?'

The line was spoken like its predecessors, without irony or malice. When Cal didn't reply, the man said: ‘I'm a salesman. My name's Shadwell.' He teased the calf-skin glove from his thick-fingered hand. ‘And yours?'

‘Cal Mooney. Calhoun, that is.'

The bare hand was extended. Cal took two steps towards the man - he was fully four inches taller than Cal's five foot eleven - and shook hands. The man's cool palm made Cal aware that he was sweating like a pig.

The handshake broken, friend Shadwell unbuttoned his jacket, and opened it, to take a pen from his inside pocket. This casual action briefly revealed the lining of the Salesman's garment, and by some, trick of the light it seemed to shine, as though the fabric were woven of mirrored threads.

Shadwell caught the look on Cal's face. His voice was feather-light as he said: ‘Do you see anything you like?'

Cal didn't trust the man. Was it the smile or the calf-skin gloves that made him suspicious? Whichever, he wanted as little time in the man's company as possible.

But there was something in the jacket. Something that caught the light, and made Cal's heart beat a little faster.

‘Please...'

Shadwell coaxed. ‘Have a look.'

His hand went to the jacket again, and opened it.

Tell me...' he purred, ‘... if there's anything there that takes your fancy.'

This time, he fully opened the jacket, exposing the lining. And yes, Cal's first judgment had been correct. It did shine.

‘I am, as I said, a salesman,' Shadwell was explaining. ‘I make it a Golden Rule always to carry some samples of my merchandise around with me.'

Merchandise. Cal shaped the word in his head, his eyes still fixed on the interior of the jacket. What a word that was: merchandise. And there, in the lining of the jacket, he could almost see that word made solid. Jewellery, was it, that gleamed them? Artificial gems with a sheen that blinded the way curly the fake could. He squinted into the glamour, looking to make sense out of what he saw, while the Salesman's voice went about its persuasions: ‘Tell me what you'd like and it's yours. I can't say fairer than that, can I.'

‘A fine young man like you should be able to pick and choose. The world's your oyster. I can see that. Open in front of you. Have what you like. Free, gratis and without charge. You tell me what you see in there, and the next minute it's in your hands...'

Look away, something in Cal said; nothing comes free. Prices must be paid.

But his gaze was so infatuated with the mysteries in the folds of the jacket that he couldn't have averted his eyes now if his life depended upon it.

‘... tell me...' the Salesman said, ‘... what you see...'

Ah, there was a question

‘... and it's yours.'

He saw forgotten treasures, things he'd once upon a time set his heart upon, thinking that if he owned them he'd never want for anything again. Worthless trinkets, most of them; but items that awoke old longings. A pair of X-ray spectacles he'd seen advertised at the back of a comic book (see thru walls! impress your friends!) but had never been able to buy. There they were now, their plastic lens gleaming, and seeing them he remembered the October nights he'd lain awake wondering how they worked.

And what was that beside them? Another childhood fetish. A photograph of a woman dressed only in stiletto heels and a sequinned G-string, presenting her over-sized breasts to the viewer. The boy two doors down from Cal had owned that picture, stolen it from his uncle's wallet, he'd claimed, and Cal had wanted it so badly he thought he'd die of longing. Now it hung, a dog-eared memento, in the glittering flux of Shadwell's jacket, there for the asking.

But no sooner had it made itself apparent than it too faded, and new prizes appeared in its place to tempt him.

‘What is it you see, my friend?'

The keys to a car he'd longed to own. A prize pigeon, the winner of innumerable races, that he'd been so envious of he'd have happily abducted.

‘... just tell me what you see. Ask, and it's yours...'

There was so much. Item that had seemed - for an hour, a day -the pivot upon which his world turned, alt hung now in the miraculous store-room of the Salesman's coat.

But they were fugitive, all of them. They appeared only to evaporate again. There was something else there, which prevented these trivialities from holding his attention for more than moments. What it was, he couldn't yet see.

He was dimly aware that Shadwell was addressing him again, and that the tone of the Salesman's voice had altered. There was some puzzlement in it now, tinged with exasperation.

‘Speak up, my friend... why don't you tell me what you want?'

‘I can't... quite... see it.'

Then try harder. Concentrate.'

Cal tried. The images came and went, all insignificant stuff. The mother-lode still evaded him.

‘You're not trying,' the Salesman chided. ‘if a man wants something badly he has to zero in on it. Has to make sure it's dear in his head.'

Cal saw the wisdom of this, and re-doubled his efforts. It had become a challenge to see past the tinsel to the real treasure that lay beyond. A curious sensation attended this focusing; a restlessness in his chest and throat, as though some part of him were preparing to be gone: out of him and along the line of his gaze. Gone into the jacket.

At the back of his head, where his skull grew the tail of his spine, the warning voices muttered on. But he was too committed to resist. Whatever the lining contained, it teased him, not quite showing itself. He pared and stared, defying its decorum until the sweat ran from his temples.

Shadwell's coaxing monologue had gained, fresh confidence. It's sugar coating had cracked and fallen away. The nut beneath was bitter and dark.

‘Go on...' he said. ‘Don't be so damn weak. There's something here you want, isn't there? Very badly. Go on. Tell me. Spit it oat. No use waiting. You wait, and your chance slims away.'

Finally, the image was coming dear ‘Tell art and it's yours.'

Cal felt a wind on his face, and suddenly he was flying again, and wonderland was spread out before him. Its deeps and its heights, its rivers, its towers all were displayed there in the lining of the Salesman's jacket.

He gasped at the sight. Shadwell was lightning swift in his response.

‘What is it?'

Cal stared on, speechless.

‘What do you see?'

A confusion of feelings assailed Cal. He felt elated, seeing the land, yet fearful of what he would be asked to give (was already giving, perhaps, without quite knowing it) in return for this peep-show. Shadwell had harm in him, for all his smiles and promises.

‘Tell me...' the Salesman demanded.

Cal tried to keep an answer from coming to his lips. He didn't want to give his secret away.

‘... what do you see?'

The voice was so hard to resist. He wanted to keep his silence, but the reply rose in him unbidden. ‘I... (Don't say it, the poet warned), ‘I see...' (Fight it. There's harm here.) ‘I... see...'

‘He sees the Fugue.'

The voice that finished the sentence was that of a woman.

‘Are you sure?' said Shadwell.

‘Never more certain. Look at his eyes.'

Cal felt foolish and vulnerable, so mesmerized by the sights still unfolding in the lining he was unable to cast his eyes in the direction of those who now appraised him.

‘He knows,' the woman said. Her voice held not a trace of warmth. Even, perhaps, of humanity.

‘You were right then; said Shadwell. ‘It's been here.'

‘Of course.'

‘Goad enough,' said Shadwell, and summarily closed the jacket.

The effect on Cal was cataclysmic. With the world the Fugue she'd called it - so abruptly snatched away he felt weak as a babe. It was all he could do to stand upright. Queasily, his eyes slid in the direction of the woman.

She was beautiful: that was his first thought. She was dressed in reds and purples so dark they were almost black, the fabric wrapped tightly around her upper body so as to seem both chaste, her ripeness bound and sealed, and, in the act of sealing, eroticized. The same paradox informed her features. Her hair-line had been shaved back fully two inches, and her eye-brows totally removed, which left her face eerily innocent of expression. Yet her flesh gleamed as if oiled, and though the shaving, and the absence of any scrap of make-up to flatter her features, seemed acts in defiance of her beauty, her face could not be denied its sensuality. Her mouth was too sculpted; and her eyes umber one moment, gold the next too eloquent for the feelings there to be disguised. What feelings, Cal could only vaguely read. Impatience certainly, as though being here sickened her, and stirred some fury Cal had no desire to see unleashed. Contempt - for him most likely - and yet a great focus upon him, as though she saw through to his marrow, and was preparing to congeal it with a thought.

There were no such contradictions in her voice however. It was steel and steel.

‘How long?' she demanded of him. ‘How long since you saw the Fugue?'

He couldn't meet her eyes for more than a moment. His gaze fled to the mantelpiece, and the tripod's shoes.

‘Don't know what you're talking about,' he said.

‘You've seen it. You saw it again in the jacket. It's fruitless to deny it.'

‘It's better you answer,' Shadwell advised.

Cal looked from mantelpiece to door. They had left it open. ‘You can both go to Hell.' he said quietly.

Did Shadwell laugh? Cal wasn't certain.

‘We want the carpet; said the woman.

‘It belongs to us, you understand,' Shadwell said. ‘We have a legitimate claim to it.'

‘So, if you'd be so kind...' the woman's lip curled at this courtesy, ‘... tell me where the carpet's gone, and we can have the matter done with.

‘Such easy terms,' the Salesman said. Tell us, and we're gone.'

Claiming ignorance would be no defence, Cal thought: they knew that ht knew, and they wouldn't be persuaded otherwise. He was trapped. Yet dangerous as things hue! become, he felt inwardly elated. His tormentors had confirmed the existence of the world he'd glimpsed: the Fugue. The urge to be out of their presence as fast as possible was tempered by the desire to play them along, and hope they'd tell him more about the vision he'd witnessed.

‘Maybe I did see it,' he said.

‘No maybe' the woman replied.

‘It's hazy...'

he said. ‘I remember something, but I'm not quite sure what.'

‘You don't know what the Fugue is?' said Shadwell.

‘Why should he?' the woman replied. ‘He came on it by luck.'

‘But he saw,' said Shadwell.

‘A lot of Cuckoos have some sight, it doesn't mean they understand. He's lost, like all of them.'

Cal resented her condescension, but in essence she was right. Lost he was.

‘What you saw isn't your business,' she said to him. ‘Just tell us where you put the carpet, then forget you ever laid eyes on it.'

‘I don't have the carpet,' he said.

The woman's entire face seemed to darken, the pupils of her eyes like moons barely eclipsing some apocalyptic light.

From the landing, Cal heard again the scuttling sounds he'd previously taken to be rats. Now he wasn't so sure.

‘I won't be polite with you much longer; she said. ‘You're a thief.'

‘No,' he protested.

‘Yes. You came here to raid an old woman's house and you got a glimpse of something you shouldn't: ‘We shouldn't waste time; said Shadwell.

Cal had begun to regret his decision to play the pair along. He should have run while he had half a chance. The noise from the other side of the door was getting louder.

‘Hear that?' said the woman. Those are some of my sister's bastards. Her by-blows.'

"they're vile: said Shadwell.

He could believe her.

‘Once more.' she said. "the carpet.'

And once more he told her. ‘I don't have it.'

This time his words were more appeal than defence.

Then we must make you tell; said the woman.

‘Be careful, Immacolata,' said Shadwell.

If the woman heard him, she didn't care for his warning. Softly, she rubbed the middle and fourth fingers of her right hand against the palm of her left, and at this all but silent summons her sister's children came running.

II

THE SKIN OF THE TEETH

1

Suzanna arrived in Rue Street a little before three, and went first to tell Mrs Pumphrey of her grandmother's condition. She was invited into the house with such insistence site couldn't refuse. They drank tea, and talked for ten minutes or so: chiefly of Mimi. Violet Pumphrey spoke of the old woman without malice, but the portrait she drew was far from flattering.

They turned off the gas and electricity in the house years ago,' Violet said. ‘She hadn't paid the bills. Living in squalor, she was, and it weren't for want of me keeping a neighbourly eye. But she was rude, you know, if you enquired about her health.'

She lowered her voice a little. ‘I know I shouldn't say it but... your grandmother wasn't entirely of sound mind.'

Suzanna murmured something in reply, which she knew would go unheard.

‘All she had was candles for light. No television, no refrigerator. God alone knows what she was eating.'

‘Do you know if anyone has a key to the house?'

‘Oh no, she wouldn't have done that. She had more locks on that house than you've had hot dinners. She didn't trust anybody, you see. Not anybody.'

‘I just wanted to look around.'

‘Well there's been people in and out since she went: probably find the place wide open by now. Even though of having a look myself, but I didn't fancy it. Some houses... they're not quite natural. You know what I mean.'

She knew. Standing finally on the doorstep of number eighteen Suzanna confessed to herself that she'd welcomed the various duties that had postponed this visit. The episode at the hospital had validated much of the family suspicion regarding Mimi. She was different. She could give her dreams away with a touch. And whatever powers the old woman possessed, or was possessed by, would they not also haunt the house she'd spent so many years in? Suzanna felt the grip of the past tighten around her: except that it was no longer that simple. She wasn't here hesitating on the threshold just because she feared a confrontation with childhood ghosts. It was that here - on a stage she'd thought to have made a permanent exit from - she dimly sensed dramas waiting to be played, and that Mimi had somehow cast her in a pivotal role.

She put her hand on the door. Despite what Violet had said, it was locked. She peered through the front window, into a room of debris and dust. The desolation proved oddly comforting. Maybe her anxieties would yet prove groundless. She went around the back of the house. Here she had more luck. The yard gate was open; and so was the back door.

She stepped inside. The condition of the front room was reprised here: practically all trace of Mimi Laschenski's presence - with the exception of candles and valueless junk - had been removed. She felt an unhappy mixture of responses. On' the one hand, the certainty that nothing of value would have survived this clearance, and that she'd have to go back to Mimi empty-handed; and on the other, an undeniable relief that this was so: that the stage was deserted. Though her imagination hung the missing pictures on the walls, and put the furniture bade in place, it was all in her mind. There was nothing here to spoil the calm good order of the life she lived.

She moved through from the parlour into the halfway, glancing into the small sitting room before turning the corner to the stairs. They were not so mountainous, nor so dark. But before she could climb them she heard a movement oft the floor above.

‘Who's there?' she called out - the words were sufficient to break Immacolata's concentration. The creatures she'd summoned, the by-blows, halted their advance towards Cal, awaiting instruction.

He took his opportunity, and threw himself across the room, kicking at the beast closest to him.

The thing lacked a body, its four arms springing straight from a bulbous neck, beneath which dusters of sacs hung, wet as liver and lights. Cal's blow connected, and one of the sacs burst, releasing a sewer stench. With the rest of the siblings close upon him, Cal raced for the door, but the wounded creature was fastest in pursuit sidling crab-like on its hands, and spitting as it came. A spray of saliva hit the wall close to Cal's head, and the paper blistered. Revulsion gave heat to his heels. He was at the door in an instant.

Shadwell moved to intercept him, but one of the beasts got beneath his feet like an errant dog, and before he could regain his equilibrium. Cal was out of the room and on to the landing.

The woman who'd called out was at the bottom of the stairs, face upturned. She stood as bright day to the night he'd almost succumbed to in the room behind him. Wide grey-blue eyes, curls of dark auburn hair framing her pale face, a mouth upon which a question was rising, but which his wild appearance had silenced.

‘Get out of here!' he yelled as he hurtled down the stairs.

She stood and gaped.

The door!' he said. ‘For God's sake open the door.'

He didn't look to see if the monsters were coming in pursuit, but he heard Shadwell cry out: ‘Stop, thief' from the top of the stairs.

The woman's eyes went to the Salesman, then back to Cal, then to the front door.

‘Open it' Cal yelled, and this time she moved to do so. Either she distrusted Shadwell on sight or she had a passion for thieves. Whichever, she flung the door wide. Sunlight poured in, dust dancing in its beams. Cal heard a howl of protest from behind him, but the girl did nothing to arrest his flight.

‘Get out of here!' he said to her, and then he was over the threshold and into the street outside.

He took half a dozen steps from the door and then turned around to see if the woman with the grey eyes was following, but she was still standing in the hallway.

‘Will you come on?' he yelled at her.

She opened her mouth to say something to him, but Shadwell was at the bottom of the stairs by now, and pushing her out of the way. He couldn't linger; there were only a few paces between him and the Salesman. He ran.

The man with the greased-back hair made no real attempt at pursuit once his quarry was out in the open. The young man was whippet-lean, and twice as fleet; the other was a bear in a Savile Row suit. Suzanna had disliked him from the moment she'd set eyes on him. Now he turned and said: ‘Why'd you do that, woman?'

She didn't grace the demand with a reply. For one thing, she was still trying to make sense of what she'd just seen; for another, her attention was no longer on the bear but on his partner - or keeper - the woman who had now followed him down the stairs.

Her features were as blank as a dead child's, but Suzanna had never seen a face that exercised such fascination.

‘Get out of my way,' the woman said as she reached the bottom of the stairs. Suzanna's feet had already begun to move when she cancelled her acquiescence and instead stepped directly into the woman's path, blocking her route to the door. A flood of adrenalin surged through her system as she did so, as though she'd stepped in front of a speeding juggernaut. But the woman mopped in her tracks, and the hook of her gaze caught Suzanna and raised her face to be scrutinized. Meeting the woman's eyes Suzanna knew the adrenalln rush had been well timed: she had just skirted death. That gaze had killed, she'd swear to it: and would again. But not now: now the woman studied Suzanna with curiosity.

‘A friend of yours, was he?' she finally said.

Suzanna heard the words spoken, but she couldn't have sworn that the woman's lips had moved to form them.

At the door behind her the bear said: ‘Damn thief.'

Then he poked at Suzanna's shoulder, hard.

‘Didn't you, hear me telling you?' he said.

Suzanna wanted to turn to the man and tell him to take his hands off her, but the woman hadn't done with her study, and held her with that gaze.

‘She heard.' the woman said. This time her lips did move, and Suzanna felt the hold on her relax. But the mere proximity of the other woman made her body tremble. Her groin and breasts felt pricked by tiny thorns.

‘Who are you?' the woman demanded.

‘Leave it be,' said the bear.

‘I warn to know who she is. Why she's here.'

The gaze, which had briefly flitted to the man, settled on Suzanna afresh, and the curiosity had murder in its shadow.

There's nothing here we need...' the man was saying.

The woman ignored him.

‘Come on now... leave it be...'

There was something in the tone of his voice of one coaxing an hysteric from the brink of an attack, and Suzanna was glad of his intervention.

‘... it's too public...' he said, ‘... especially here...'

After long, breathless moment the woman made the tiniest of nods, conceding the wit of this. She suddenly seemed to completely lose interest in Suzanna, and turned back towards the stairs. At the top of the flight, where Suzanna had once imagined terrors to be in wait for her the gloom, was not quite at rest. There were ragged forms moving up there, so insubstantial she could not be certain whether she saw them or merely sensed their presence. They were spilling down the stairs like poison smoke, losing what little solidity they might have owned as they approached the open door, until, by the time they reached the woman who awaited them at the bottom, their vapours were invisible.

She turned from the stairs and walked past Suzanna to the door, taking with her a cloud of cold and tainted air, as though the wraiths that had come to her were now wreathed about her neck, and clinging to the folds of her dress. Carried unseen into the sunlit human world, until they could congeal again.

The man was already out on the pavement, but before his companion stepped out to join him she turned back to Suzanna. She said nothing, either with her tips or without. Her eyes were quite expressive enough: their promises were all joyless.

Suzanna looked away. She heard the woman's heel on the step. When she looked up again the pair had gone. Drawing a deep breath, she went to the door. Though the afternoon was growing old, the sun was still warm and bright.

Not surprisingly the woman and the bear had crossed over, so as to walk on the shadowed side of the street.

3

Twenty-four years was a third of a good span; time enough to form some opinions on how the world worked. Up until mere hours ago, Suzanna would have claimed she'd done just that.

Certainly there were sizeable gaps in her comprehension: mysteries, both inside her head and out, that remained unilluminated. But that had only made her the more determined not to succumb to any sentiment or self-delusion that would give those mysteries power over her - a zeal that touched both her private and professional lives. In her love affairs she had always tempered passion with practicality, avoiding the emotional extravagance she'd seen so often become cruelty and bitterness. In her friendships she'd pursued a similar balance: neither too cloying nor too detached. And no less in her craft. The very appeal of making bowls and pots was its pragmatism; the vagaries of art disciplined by the need to create a functional object.

The question she would ask, viewing the most exquisite jug on earth, would be: does it poor? And it was in a sense a quality she sought in every facet of her life.

But here was a problem which defied such simple distinctions: that threw her oft-balance; left her sick and bewildered.

First the memories. Then Mimi, more dead than alive but passing dreams through the air.

And now this meeting, with a woman whose glance had death in it, and yet had left her feeling more alive than perhaps she'd ever felt.

It was that last paradox that made her leave the house without finishing her search, slamming the door on whatever dramas it had waiting for her. Instinctively, she made for the river. There, sitting awhile in the sun, she might make some sense of the problem.

There were no ships on the Mersey, but the air was so clear she could see loud shadows moving over the hills of Clwyd. There was no such clarity within her, however. Only a chaos of feelings, all unsettlingly familiar, as though they'd been inside her for years, biding their time behind the screen of pragmatism she'd established to keep them from sight. Like echoes, waiting on a mountain-face for the shout they were born to answer.

She'd heard that shout today. Or rather, met it, face to face, on the very spot in the narrow hallway where as a six year-old she'd stood and trembled in fear of the dark. The two confrontations were inextricably linked, though she didn't know how. All she knew was that she was suddenly alive to a space inside herself where the haste and habit of her adult life had no dominion.

She sensed the passions that drifted in that space only vaguely, as her fingertips might sense fog. But she would come to know them better with time, those passions, and the acts that they'd engender: she was certain of that as she'd been certain of nothing in days. She'd know them - and, God help her - she'd love them as her own.

III

SELLING HEAVEN

Mr Mooney? Mr Brendan Mooney?'

‘That's right.'

‘Do you happen to have a son by the name of Calhoun?'

‘What business is it of yours?'

Brendan wanted to know. Then, before the other could answer, said: ‘Nothing's happened to him?'

The stranger shook his head, taking hold of Brendan's hand and pumping it vigorously.

‘You're a very lucky man, Mr Mooney, if I may make so bold.'

That, Brendan knew, was a lie.

‘What do you want?' he said. ‘Are you selling something?'

He withdrew his hand from the grip of the other man. ‘Whatever it is, I don't want it.'

‘Selling?' said Shadwell. ‘Perish the thought. I'm giving, Mr Mooney. Your son's a wise boy. He volunteered your name and to and behold, you've been selected by computer as the recipient of-.'

‘I told you I don't want it.' Brendan interrupted, and tried to close the door, but the man already had one foot over the threshold.

‘Please,' Brendan sighed, ‘will you just leave me alone? I don't want your prizes. I don't want anything.'

‘Well that makes you a very remarkable man,' the Salesman said, pushing the door wide again. ‘Maybe even unique. There's really nothing in the entire world you want? That's remarkable.'

Music drifted from the back of the house, a recording of Puccini's Greatest Hits which Eileen had been given several years ago. She'd scarcely listened to it, but since her death Brendan - who had never stepped inside an opera-house in his life, and was proud of the fact - had become addicted to the Love Duet from Madam Butterfly. If he'd played it once he'd played it a hundred times, and the tears would always come. Now all he wanted to do was get back to the music before it finished. But the Salesman was still pressing his suit.

‘Brendan,' he said. ‘I may call you Brendan -?'

‘Don't call me anything.'

The Salesman unbuttoned his jacket.

‘Really, Brendan, we have a great deal to discuss, you and I. Your prize, for one.'

The lining of the jacket scintillated, drawing Brendan's eye. He'd never in his life seen a fabric its equal.

‘Are you sure there's nothing you want?' the Salesman said. ‘Absolutely sure?'

The Love Duet had reached a new plateau, the voices of Butterfly and Pinkerton urging each other on to fresh confessions of pain. Brendan heard, but his attention was increasingly focused on the jacket. And yes, there was something there that he wanted.

Shadwell watched the man's eyes and saw the flame of desire ignited. It never failed.

‘You do see something, Mr Mooney.'

‘Yes,' Brendan admitted softly. He saw, and the joy he felt at what he saw made his heavy heart light.

Eileen had said to him once (when they were young, and mortality was just another way to express their devotion to each other): ‘- if I die first, Brendan, I'll find some way to tell you what Heaven's like. I swear 1 will.'

He'd hushed her with kisses then, and said that if she were to die he would die too, of a broken heart.

But he hadn't died, had he? He'd lived three long, empty months, and more than once in that time he'd remembered her frivolous promise. And now, just as he felt despair would undo him utterly, here on his doorstep was this celestial messenger. An odd choice, perhaps, to appear in the shape of a salesman, but no doubt the Seraphim had their reasons.

‘Do you want what you see, Brendan?' the visitor asked.

‘Who are you?' Brendan breathed, awe-struck.

‘My name's Shadwell.'

‘And you brought this for me?'

‘Of course. But if you accept it, Brendan, you must understand there'll be a small charge for the service.'

Brendan didn't take his eyes off the prize the jacket housed. ‘Whatever you say,' he replied.

‘We may ask for your help, for instance, which you'd be obliged to furnish.'

‘Do angels need help?'

‘Once in a while.'

‘Then of course,' said Brendan. ‘I'd be honoured.'

‘Good.'

The Salesman smiled. ‘Then please.' he opened the jacket a little wider, ‘- help yourself.'

Brendan knew how the letter from Eileen would smell and feel long before he had it in his hands. It did not disappoint him. It was warm, as he'd expected, and the scent of flowers lingered about it. She'd written it in a garden, no doubt; in the paradise garden.

‘So, Mr Mooney. We have a deal, do we?'

The Dove Duet had ended; the house behind Brendan was silent. He held the letter close to his chest, still fearful that this was all a dream, and he'd wake to find himself empty-handed.

‘Whatever you want,' he said, desperate that this salvation not be snatched from him.

‘Sweetness and light,' came the smiling reply. That's all a wise man ever wants, isn't it? Sweetness and light.'

Brendan was only half-listening. He ran his fingers back and forth over the letter. His name was on the front, in Eileen's cautious hand.

‘So tell me, Mr Mooney the Seraphim said, ‘about Cal.'

‘Cal?'

‘Can you tell me where I can find him?'

‘He's at a wedding.'

`A wedding. Ah. Could you perhaps furnish me with the address?'

‘Yes. Of course.'

‘We've got a little something for Cal too. Lucky man.'

IV

NUPTIALS

1

Geraldine had spent many long hours giving Cal a working knowledge of her family tree, so that come Teresa's wedding he'd know who was who. It was a difficult business. The Keltaway family was heroically fecund, and Cal had a poor memory for names, so it wasn't surprising that many of the hundred and thirty guests who packed the reception hall this balmy Saturday evening were unknown to him. He didn't much mind. He felt safe amongst such numbers, even if he didn't know who they were; and the drink, which had flowed freely since four in the afternoon, further allayed his anxieties. He didn't even object when Geraldine presented him before a parade of admiring aunts and uncles, every one of whom asked him when he was going to make an honest woman of her. He played the game; smiled; charmed; did his best to seem sane.

Not that a little lunacy would have been noticeable in such a heady atmosphere. Norman Kellaway's ambition for his daughter's wedding day seemed to have been upped a notch for every inch her waist-line had swelled. The ceremony had been grand, but necessarily decorous; the reception, however, was a triumph of excess over good taste. The hall had been decorated from floor to ceiling with streamers and paper lanterns; ropes of coloured lights were looped along the walk and in the trees out at the back of the hall. The bar was supplied with beer, spirits and liqueurs sufficient to intoxicate a modest army; food was in endless supply, carried to the tables of those content to sit and gorge by a dozen harassed waitresses.

Even with ail the doors and windows open, the hall soon grew hot as Hell, the heat in part generated by those guests who'd thrown inhibitions to the wind and were dancing to a deafening mixture of country and western and rock and roll, the latter bringing comical exhibitions from several of the older guests, applauded ferociously from all sides.

At the edge of the crowd, lingering by the door that led out behind the hall, the groom's younger brother, accompanied by two young bucks who'd both at some point courted Teresa, and a fourth youth whose presence was only countenanced because he had cigarettes, stood in a litter of beer cans and surveyed the talent available. The pickings were poor; those few girls who were of beddable age were either spoken far or judged so unattractive that any approach would have been evidence of desperation.

Only Elroy, Teresa's penultimate boy-friend, could lay claim to any hint of success tonight. Since the ceremony he'd had his eyes on one of the bridesmaids, whose name he'd yet to establish but who'd twice chanced to be at the bar while he was there: a significant statistic. Now he leaned against the door and watched the object of his lust across the smoky room.

The lights had been dimmed inside the hall, and the mood at the dancing had changed from cavortings to slow, smoochy embraces.

This was the moment, he judged, to make his approach. He'd invite the woman onto the dance floor, then, after a song or two, take her out for a breath of fresh air. Several couples had already retired to the privacy of the bushes, there to do what weddings were made to celebrate. Beneath the pretty vows and the flowers they were here in the name of fucking, and he was damned if he was going to be left out.

He'd caught sight of Cal chatting with the girl earlier on; it'd be simplest, he thought, to have Cal to introduce them. He pressed through the crush of dancers to where Cal was standing.

‘How you doin', mate?' Cal looked at Elroy blearily. The face before him was flushed with alcohol.

‘I'm doing fine.'

‘Didn't mach like the ceremony,' Elroy said. ‘I think I'm allergic to churches. Do us a favour, will yer?'

‘What is it?'

‘I'm in lust.'

‘Who with?'

‘One of the bridesmaids. She was over by the bar. Long blonde hair.'

‘You mean Loretta?'

Cal said. ‘She's a cousin of Geraldines.'

It was odd, but the drunker he got the more of his lessons on the' Kellaway family he remembered.

‘She's a fucking cracker. And she's been giving me the eye all night.'

‘Is that right?'

‘I was wondering... will you introduce us?'

Cal looked at Elroy's panting eyes. ‘I think you're too late; he said.

‘Why?'

‘She went outside-.'

Before Elroy could voice his irritation Cal felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned. It was Norman, the father of the bride.

‘A word, Cal, m'boy?' he said, glancing across at Elroy.

‘I'll catch you later,' Elroy said, retreating in case Norman nabbed him too.

‘Are you enjoying yourself?'

‘Yes, Mr Kellaway.'

‘Less of this Mr Kellaway shit, Cal. Call me Norm.'

He poured a generous measure of whisky from the bottle he was armed with into Cal's lager glass, then drew on his cigar.

‘So tell me.' he said. ‘How long before I have to give my other little girl away? Don't think I'm pushing, son. I'm not. But one bride in labour's enough.'

Cal swilled the whisky around the bottom of his glass hoping for a prompt from the poet. None came.

‘I've got a job for you at the works; Norm went on, unfazed by Cal's silence. ‘I want to see my baby live in a little style. You're a good lad. Cal. Her mother likes you a lot, and I always trust her judgment. So you think on it...'

He transferred the bottle to his rigor-wielding right hand, and reached into his jacket.

The gesture, innocent as it was, brought a drill of recognition. For an instant Cal was back in Rue Street, gazing into the enchanted cave of Shadwell's jacket. But Kellaway had simpler gifts to give.

‘Have a cigar,' he said, and went off to his duties as host.

2

Elroy picked up another can of beer from the bar then head out into the garden in search of Loretta. The air was considerably cooler than inside, and as soon as it hit him he felt sick as a flea in a leper's jock strap. He tossed the beer aside and beaded towards the bottom of the garden, where he could throw up unseen.

The coloured lights stopped a few yards from the hall, where the cable petered out. Beyond was a welcoming darkness, which he plunged into. He was used to vomiting; a week in which his stomach didn't rebel through some excess or other was poorly spent. He efficiently discharged the contents of his belly over a rhododendron bush, then turned his thoughts bade to the lovely Loretta.

A little way from where he stood the leaf-shadow, or something concealed by it, moved. He peered more closely, trying to interpret what he saw, but there was not sufficient illumination to make settee of it. He heard a sigh however: a woman's. There was a couple in the shelter of the tree, he decided, doing what darkness had been created to conceal. Perhaps it was Loretta, her skirt up and her knickers down. It would break his heart, but he had to see.

Very quietly, he advanced a couple of paces.

On his second step, something grazed his face. He stifled a cry of shock and put his hand up to find strands of matter in the air around his head. For some reason he thought of phlegm - cold, wet threads of phlegm - except that they moved against his flesh as if they were a part of something larger.

A heart-beat later this notion was confirmed, as the matter which was adhering now to his legs and body, pulled him off his feet. He would have let out a cry, but the filthy stuff had already sealed up his lips. And then, as if this were not preposterous enough, he felt a chill around his lower bell. His trousers were being torn open. He started to fight like fury, but resistance was fruitless. There was a weight bearing dower on his abdomen and hips, and he felt his manhood drawn up into a channel that might have been flesh, but that it was corpse cold.

Tears of panic blurred his vision, but he could see that the thing astride him had a human form. He could see no face, but the breasts were heavy the way he liked them; and though this was far from the scene he'd pictured with Loretta his lust ignited, his little length responding to the chilly ministrations of the body that contained him.

He raised his head slightly, wanting a better view of those sumptuous breasts, but in doing so he caught sight of another figure behind the first. She was the antithesis of the ripe, gleaming woman that rode him: a stained, wretched thief, with gaping holes in her body where coat and mouth and navel should have been, so large the stars showed through from the other side.

He started to fight afresh, but his thrashings did nothing to slow his mistress' rhythm. Despite his panic he felt the familiar tremor in his balls.

In his head half a dozen pictures collided, becoming one monstrous beauty: the ragged woman, a necklace of coloured lights hanging between her sister's breasts, raised her skirts, and the mouth between her legs was Loretta's mouth, flicking its tongue. He could not resist this pornography: his prick spat its load. He howled against the seal at his mouth. The pleasure was short, the pain that followed, agonizing.

‘What's your fuckin' problem?' somebody said in the darkness. It took him a moment to realize that his cry for help had been heard. He opened his eyes. The silhouettes of the trees loomed over him, but that was all.

He started to shout again: not caring that he was lying in the muck with his trousers around his ankles. Just needing to know he was still in the land of the living.

3

The first glimpse Cal had of trouble was through the bottom of his grass, as he upped it to drain the last of Norman's malt whisky. At the door two of the printers from the Kellaway factory, who were acting as bouncers for the night, were engaged in friendly conversation with a man in a well-cut suit. Laughing, the man glanced into the hall. It was Shadwell.

The jacket was dosed and buttoned. There was no need, it seemed, for supernatural seductions; the Salesman was buying his entrance with charm alone. Even as Cal watched he patted one of the men on the shoulder as if they'd been bosom buddies since childhood, and stepped inside.

Cal didn't know whether to stay still and hope that the crowd would conceal him, or make a move to escape and so risk drawing the enemy's attention. As it was he had no choke in the matter. A hand was over his, and at his side stood one of the aunts Geraldine had introduced him to.

‘So tell me: she said, apropos of nothing, ‘have you been to America?'

‘No,' he said, looking away from her powdered face towards the Salesman. He was entering the hall with flawless confidence, bestowing smiles hither and thither. His appearance won admiring eyes on all sides. Somebody extended a hand to be shaken: another asked him what he was drinking He played the crowd with ease, a smiling word offered to every ear, all the while his eyes ranging back and forth as he sought out his quarry.

As the distance between them narrowed Cal knew he couldn't long avoid bring seen. Claiming his hand from the grip of the aunt he headed off into the thickest part of the crowd. A hubbub drew his attention to the far end of the hall, where he saw somebody - it looked to be Elroy - being carried in from the garden, his clothes in filthied disarray, his jaw slack. Nobody looked much bothered by his condition every gathering had its share of professional drunkards. There was laughter, and some disapproving looks, then a rapid return to jollification.

Cal glanced back over his shoulder. Where was Shadwell? Still close to the door, pressing the flesh like an aspirant politician? No: he'd moved. Cal scanned the room nervously. The noise and the dancing went on unabated, but now the sweating revelers seemed a mite too hungry for happiness: the dancers only dancing because it put the world away for a little time. There was a desperation in this jamboree, and Shadwell knew how to exploit it, with his fake bonhomie and that air he pretended of one who'd walked with the great and the good.

Cal itched to get up onto a table and tell the revellers to stop their cavortings: to see for themselves how foolish their revels looked, and how dangerous the shark they'd invited into their midst.

But what would they do, when he'd shouted himself hoarse? Laugh behind their hands, and quietly remind each other that he had a madman's blood in his veins? He'd find no allies here. This was Shadwell's territory. The safest thing would be to keep his head down, and negotiate a route to the door. Then get away, as far as possible as fast as possible.

He acted upon the plan immediately. Thanking God for the lack of light, he began to slip between the dancers, keeping his eyes peeled for the man with the coat of many colours.

There was a shout behind him. He glanced round, and through the milling figures caught sight of Elroy, who was thrashing about like an epileptic, yelling blue murder. Somebody was calling for a doctor.

Cal turned back towards the door, and the shark was suddenly at his side.

‘Calhoun,' said Shadwell, soft and low. ‘Your father told me I'd find you here.'

‘Cal didn't reply to Shadwell's words, merely pretended he hadn't heard. The Salesman wouldn't dare do anything violent in such a crowd; surely, and he was safe from the man's jacket as long as he kept his eyes off the lining.

‘Where are you going?' Shadwell said, as Cal moved off. ‘I want a word with you.'

Cal kept walking.

‘We can help each other...'

Somebody called Cal's name, asking him if he knew what was wrong with Elroy. He shook his head, and forged on through the crowd towards the door. His plan was simple. Tell the bouncers to find Geraldine's father, and have Shadwell thrown out.

‘... tell me where the carpet is,' the Salesman was saying, ‘and I'll make sure her sisters never get their hands on you.' His manner was placatory. ‘I've no argument with you,' he said. ‘I just want some information.'

‘I told you,' said Cal, knowing even as he spoke that any appeal was a lost cause. ‘I don't know where the carpet went.'

They were within a dozen yards of the vestibule now, and with every step they took Shadwell's courtesy decayed further.

They'll drain you dry,' he warned. Those sisters of hers. And I won't be able to stop them, not once they've got their hands on you. They're dead, and the dead don't take discipline.'

‘Dead?'

‘Oh yes. She killed them herself, while the three of them were still in the womb. Strangled them with their own cords.'

True or not, the image was sickening. And more sickening still, the thought of the sisters' touch. Cal tried to put both from his mind as he advanced, Shadwell still at his side. All pretence to negotiation had vanished; there were only threats now.

‘You're a dead man, Mooney, if you don't confess. I won't lift a finger to help you...'

Cal was within hailing distance of the men. He shouted across to them. They broke off their drinking and turned in his direction.

‘What's the problem?'

‘This man.' Cal began looking towards Shadwell.

But the Salesman had gone. In the space of seconds he'd left Cal's side and melted into the crowd, an exit as skilful as his entrance.

‘Got some trouble?' the bigger of the two men wanted to know.

Cal glanced back at the man, fumbling for woods. There was no use his trying to explain, he decided.

‘No ... ‘ he said. ‘... I'm ail right. I just need some air.'

Too much to drink?' said the other man, and stood aside to let Cal step out into the street.

It was chilly after the suffocation of the hall, but that was fine by Cal. Hr breathed deeply, trying to clear his head. Then, a familiar voice.

‘Do you want to go home?'

It was Geraldine. She was standing a short way from the door, a coat draped over her shoulders.

‘I'm all right: he told her. ‘Where's your father?'

‘I don't know. Why do you want him?'

There's somebody in there who shouldn't be; said Cal crossing to where she stood. To his drunken gaze she seemed more glamorous than he'd ever seen her; eyes shining like dark gems.

‘Why don't we walk together a little way?' she said.

‘I have to speak to your father,' he insisted, but she was already turning from him, laughing lightly. Before he could voice a protest she was away around the corner. He followed. There were a number of lamps not working along the street and the silhouette he dogged was fitful. But she trailed her laughter still, and he went after it.

‘Where are you going?' he wanted to know.

She only laughed again.

Above their heads the clouds were moving quickly, stars glimmering between, their fires too feeble to illuminate much below. They caught Cal's eye for an instant, and when he looked back at Geraldine she was turning to him, making a sound somewhere between a sigh and a word.

The shadows that embraced her were dense, but they unfolded even as he watched, and what they revealed made his gut somersault. Geraldine's fare had dislodged somehow, her features running like heated wax. And now, as the facade fell away, he saw the woman beneath. Saw, and knew: the browless fare, the joyless mouth. Who else but Immacolata? He would have run then, but that he felt the cold muzzle of a gun against his temple, and the Salesman's voice said: ‘Make a sound and it's going to hurt.'

He kept his silence.

Shadwell gestured towards the black Mercedes that was parked at the next intersection.

‘Move,' he said.

Cal had no choice, scarcely believing, even as he walked, that this scene was taking place on a street whose paving cracks he'd counted since he was old enough to know one from two.

He was ushered into the back of the car, separated from his captors by a partition of heavy glass. The door was locked. He was powerless. All he could do was watch the Salesman slide into the driver's seat, and the woman get in beside.

There was little chance he'd be missed from the party, he knew, and littler chance still that anyone would come looking for him. It would simply be assumed that he'd tired of the festivities and headed off home. He was in the hands of the enemy, and helpless to do anything about it.

What would Mad Mooney do now, he wondered.

The question vexed him only a moment, before the answer came. Taking out the celebratory cigar Norman had given him; he leaned back in the leather seat, and lit up.

Good, said the poet; take what pleasure you can, while there's still pleasure to be had. And breath to take it with.

V

IN THE ARMS OF MAMA PUS

In the haze of fear and cigar smoke he soon lost track of their route. His only clue to their whereabouts, when they finally came to a halt, was that the air smelt sharply of the river. Or rather, of the acreage of black mud that was exposed at low tide; expanses of muck which he'd had a terror of as a child. It wasn't until he'd reached double figures that he'd been able to walk along Otterspool Promenade without an adult between him and the railings.

The Salesman ordered him from the car. He got out obediently - it was difficult not to be obedient with a gun in his face. Shadwell immediately snatched the cigar from Cad's mouth, grinding it beneath his heel, then escorted him through a gate into a walled compound. Only now, as he laid ryes on the canyons of household refuse ahead did Cal realize where they'd brought him: the Municipal Rubbish tip. In former years, acres of parkland had been built on the city's detritus, but there was no longer the money to transform trash into lawns. Trash it remained. Its stench - the sweet and sour of rotting vegetable matter - even overpowered the smell of the river.

‘Stop,' said Shadwell, when they reached a place that seemed in no way particular.

Cal looked round in the direction of the voice. He could see very little, but it seemed Shadwell had pocketed his gun. Seizing the instant, he began to run, not choosing any particular direction, merely seeking escape. He'd counted maybe four paces when something tangled with his legs, and he fell heavily, the breath knocked from him. Before he had a chance to get to his feet forms were converging on him from every side, an incoherent mass of limbs and snarls that could only be the wraith-sister's children. He was glad of the darkness: at least he couldn't see their deformities. But he felt their limbs upon him; heard their teeth snapping at his neck.

They didn't intend to devour him, however. At some cue he neither saw nor heard, their violence dwindled to mere bondage. He was held fast, his body so knotted up his joints creaked, while a terrible spectacle unfolded a few yards in hunt of him.

It was one of Immacolata's sisters, he had no doubt of that: a naked woman whose substance flickered and smoked as though her marrow was on fire, except that she could have no marrow, for surely she had no bones. Her body was a column of grey gas, laced with strands of bloody tissue, and from this flux fragments of finished anatomy emerged: a seeping breast, a belly swollen as if by a pregnancy months beyond its term, a smeared fare in which the eyes were sewnup slits. That explained, no doubt, her hesitant advance, and the way her smoky limbs extended from her body to test the ground ahead: the ghost was blind.

By the light this unholy mother gave off, Cal could see the children more clearly. No perversion of anatomy had been overlooked amongst them: bodies turned inside out to parade the bowel end stomach; organs whose function seemed simply to seep and wheeze lining the belly of one like teats, and mounted like a coxcomb on another's head. Yet despite their corruptions, their heads were all turned adoringly upon Mama Pus, their eyes unblinking so as not to miss a moment of her presence. She was their mother; they her loving children.

Suddenly, she started to shriek. Cal turned to look at her again. She'd taken up a squatting posture, her legs splayed, her head thrown back as she voiced her agony.

Behind her there now stood a second ghost, as naked as the first. More so perhaps, for she could scarcely lay claim to flesh.

She was obscenely withered her dugs like empty purses, her face collapsed upon itself in a jumble of tooth-shard and hair. She'd taken hold of her squatting sister, whose scream had now reached a nerve-shredding height. As the swollen belly came close to bursting, there was an issue of smouldering matter from between the mother's legs. The sight was greeted with a chorus of welcomes from the children. They were entranced. So, in his horrified way, was Cal.

Mama Pus was giving birth.

The scream became a series of smaller, rhythmic shouts as the child began its journey into the living world. It was less born than shat, dropping from between its parent's legs like a vast mewling turd. No sooner had it hit the ground than the withered midwife was about her business, coming between mother and spectators to draw away veils of redundant matter from the child's body. The mother, her labours over, stood up, the flame in her flesh dying, and left the child to her sister's ministrations.

Now Shadwell came back into view. He looked down at Cal.

‘Do you see?' he said, his voice all but a whisper, ‘what kind of horrors these are? I warned you. Tell me where the carpet is and I'll try to make sure the child doesn't touch you.'

‘I don't know. I swear I don't.'

The midwife had withdrawn. Shadwell, a sham of pity on his fare, now did the same.

In the dirt a few yards from Cal the child was already standing up. It was the size of a chimpanzee, and shared with its siblings the appearance of something traumatically wounded. Portions of its inner workings were teased out through its skin, leaving its torso to collapse upon itself in places and in others sport ludicrous appendages of gut. Twin rows of dwarf limbs hung from its belly, and between its legs a sizeable scrotum depended, smoking like a censer, uncompanioned by any organ to discharge what boiled within.

The child knew its business from its first breath: to terrorize.

Though its face was still wreathed with afterbirth, its gummy eyes found Cal, and it began to shamble towards him.

‘Oh Jesus...'

Cal began looking for the Salesman, but the man had vanished.

‘I told you,' he yelled into the darkness, ‘I don't know where the fucking carpet is.'

Shadwell didn't respond. Cal shouted again. Mama Pus' bastard was almost upon him.

‘Jesus, Shadwell, listen to me, will you?'

Then, the by-blow spoke.

‘Cal...' it said.

He stopped struggling against his restraints a moment, and looked at it in disbelief.

It spoke again. The same syllable.

‘Cal...

Even as it pronounced his name its fingers pulled at the muck about its head. The face that appeared from beneath lacked a complete skull, but it was recognizably that of its father: Elroy. Seeing familiar features in the midst of such deformity was the crowning horror. As Elroy's child reached to touch him Cal started yelling again, scarcely aware of what he was saying, only begging Shadwell to keep the thing from touching him.

The only reply was his own voice, echoing back and forth until it died. The child's arms jerked forward, and its long fingers latched onto Cal's fare. He tried to fight it off, but it drew closer to him, its sticky body embracing him.. The more he struggled the more he was caught.

The rest of the by-blows loosed their hold on him now, leaving him to the new child. It was only minutes old, but its strength was phenomenal, the vestigial hands on its belly raking Cal's skin, its grip so tight his lungs laboured for breath.

With its face inches from Cal's. it spoke again, but the voice that, came from the ruined mouth was not its father's this time, but that of Immacolata.

‘Confess,' she demanded. ‘Confess what you know.'

‘I just saw a place,' he said, trying to avoid the trail of spittle that was about to fall tram the beast's chin. He failed. It hit his check, and burned like hot fat.

‘Do you know what place?' the Incantatrix demanded.

‘No...' he said. ‘No, I don't.'

‘But you've dreamt it, haven't you? Wept for it...'

Yes, was the answer; of course he'd dreamt it. Who hadn't dreamt of paradise? Momentarily his thoughts leapt from present terror to past joy. To his floating over the Fugue. The sight of that Wonderland kindled a sudden will to resist in him. The glories he saw in his mind's eye had to be preserved from the foulness that embraced him, from its makers and masters, and in such a struggle his life was not so hard to forfeit. Though he knew nothing about the carpet's present whereabouts he was ready to perish rather than risk letting anything slip that Shadwell might profit by. And while he had breath, he'd do all in his power to confound them.

Elroy's child seemed to read this new-found resolution. It drew its arms more tightly about him.

‘I'll confess!' he yelled in its fare. ‘I'll tell you everything you want to know: Immediately, he began to talk.

The substance of his confession was not, however, what they wanted to hear. Instead he began to recite the train timetable out of Lime Street, which he knew by heart. He'd first started learning it at the age of eleven, having seen a Memory Man on television who'd demonstrated his skills by recalling the details of randomly chosen football matches teams, scores, scorers - back-to the 1930s. It was a perfectly useless endeavour, but its heroic scale had impressed Gal mightily, and he'd spent the next few weeks committing to memory any and every piece of information he could find, until it struck him that his magnum opus was passing to and fro at the bottom of the garden: the trains. He'd begun that day, with the local lines, his ambition elevated each time he successfully remembered a day's times faultlessly. He'd kept his information up to date for several years, as services were cancelled or stations closed. And his mind, which had difficulty putting names to faces, could still spew this perfectly redundant information out upon request.

That's what he gave them now. The services to Manchester, Crewe, Stafford, Wolverhampton, Birmingham, Coventry. Cheltenham Spa. Reading, Bristol, Exeter, Salisbury, London, Colchester; all the times of arrival and departure, and footnotes as to which services only operated on Saturdays, and which never ran on Bank Holidays.

I'm Mad Mooney he thought, as he delivered this filibuster, listing the services with a bright, clear voice, as if to an imbecile. The trick confounded the monster utterly. It stared at Cal as he talked, unable to understand why the prisoner had forsaken fear. Immacolata cursed Cal through her nephew's mouth, and offered up new threats, but he scarcely heard them. The timetables had their own rhythm, and he was soon carried along by it. The beast's embrace grew tighter; it could not be long before Col's bones began to break. But he just went on talking, drawing in gulps of breath to start each day, and letting his tongue do the rest.

It's poetry, my boy, said Mad Mooney. Never heard its like. Pure poetry.

And maybe it was. Verses of days, and lines of hours, transmuted into the stuff of poets because it was all spat into the face of death.

They'd kill him for this defiance, he knew, when they finally realized that he'd never exchange another meaningful word with them. But Wonderland would have a gate for ghosts.

Hr had just begun the Scottish services - to Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Inverness, Abe and Dundee - when he caught sight of Shadwell from the comer of his eye. The Salesman was shaking his head, and now exchanged some words with Immacolata - something about having to ask the old woman. Then he turned, and walked into the darkness. They'd given up on their prisoner. The coup de grace could only be seconds away.

He felt the grip relax. His recitation faltered for an instant, in anticipation of the fatal blow. It didn't come. Instead, the creature withdrew its arms from around him, and followed behind Shadwell, leaving Cal lying on the ground. Though released, he could scarcely move; his bruised limbs were rigid with cramp after being held fast far so lung.

And now he realized that his troubles were not over. He felt the sweat on his face turning cold, as the mother of Elroys terrible infant drew herself towards him. He could not escape her. She straddled his body, then reached down and drew his face up towards her breasts. His muscles complained at this contortion, but the pain was forgotten an instant after, as she put her nipple to his lips. A long-neglected instinct made him accept it: The breast spurted a bitter fluid down his throat. He wanted to spit it out, but his body lacked the strength to reject it. Instead he felt his conciousness flee from this last degeneracy. A dream eclipsed the horror.

He was lying in darkness on a scented bed, while a woman's voice sang to him, some wordless lullaby whose cradle rhythms were shared by a feather-light touch upon his body. Fingers were playing on his abdomen and groin. They were cold, but they knew more tricks than a whore. He was hard in a heart-beat; gasping in two. He'd never felt such caresses, coaxed by agonizing degrees to the point of no return. His gasps became cries, but the lullaby drowned them out, matting his manhood with its nursery lilt. He was a helpless infant, despite his erection; or perhaps because of it. The touch grew more demanding, his cries more urgent.

For an instant his thrashings shook him from his dream, and his eyes flickered open long enough to see that he was still in the sister's sepulchral embrace. Then the smothering slumber claimed him again, and he discharged into an emptiness so profound it devoured not only his seed but the lullaby and its singer; and; finally, the dream itself.

He woke alone, and weeping. Every ligament tenor, he untied the knot he'd made of himself, and stood up.

His watch read nine minutes after two. The last train of the night had left Lime Street long ago; and the first of Sunday morning would not run for many hours yet.

VI

SICK SOULS

1

Sometimes Mimi woke; sometimes she slept. But one was much like the other now: sleep marred by distress and discomfort - wakefulness full of unfinished thoughts that faded into scraps of nonsense, like dreams. One moment she was certain there was a small child crying in the turner of the room, until the night nurse came in, and wiped the tears from her patient's eyes. Another moment she could see, as if through a dirtied window, some place she knew, but had lost, and her old bones ached with wanting to be there.

But then came another vision, and this one she hoped against hope was a dream. It was not.

‘Mimi?' said the dark woman.

The stroke that had crippled Mimi had dimmed her eyes, but she had sight enough to recognize the figure standing at the bottom of her bed. After years of being alone with her secret, somebody from the Fugue had finally found her. But there would be no tearful reunions tonight, not with this visitor, nor her dead sisters.

The Incantatrix Immacolata had come here to fulfil a promise she'd made before the Fugue had been hidden: that, if she could not rule the Seerkind, she'd destroy them. She was Lilith's descendant, she'd always claimed: the last pure line from the first state of magic. Her authority over them was therefore unquestionable. They'd laughed at her for her presumption. It wasn't their nature to be ruled, nor to count much on genealogy. Immacolata had been humiliated; a fact a woman like her - possessed, it had to be admitted, of powers that were purer than most - would not easily forget. Now she'd found the carpet's last Custodian, and she'd have blood if she could get it.

An age ago the Council had bequeathed Mimi some of the tactics of the Old Silence to arm her against a situation such as this. They were minor raptures, no more: devices to distract an enemy. Nothing fatal. That took more time to learn than they'd had. She'd been grateful for them at the time, however: they'd offered some smidgen of comfort as she faced life in the Kingdom without her beloved Romo. But the year had gone by and nobody had come, either to tell her that the waiting was over and the Weave could give up its secrets or to try and take the Fugue by force. The excitement of the early years, knowing she stood between magic and its destruction, dwindled to a weary watchfulness. She became lazy and forgetful; they all did.

Only towards the end, when she was alone, and she realized just how frail she was becoming, did she shake off the stupor that living amongst the Cuckoos had brought on, and try to set her beleaguered mental powers to the proem of the secret she'd protected for so long. But by that time her mind was wandering - the first symptoms of the stroke that would incapacitate her. It took her a day and a half to compose the short letter she'd written to Suzanna, a letter in which she'd risked saying more than she vented to, because time was getting short, and she sensed danger She'd been right; here it was. Immacolata had probably sensed the signal Mimi had sent up at the very last' a summons to any Kingdom-bound Seerkind who might have come to her aid. That, with hindsight, had probably been her greatest error. An incantatrix of Immacolata's strength would not have missed suchs alarms.

Here she was, come to visit Mind like a dispossessed child eager to make good at the death-bed, and so claim her inheritance. It was an analogy not lost on the creature.

I told the nurse I was your daughter: she said, ‘and that I heeded some time with you. Alone.'

Mimi would have spat in disgust, had she had the strength or the spittle.

‘- I know you're going to die, so I've come to say goodbye, after all these years. You've lost the power of speech, I hear; so I'm not to expect you to babble your confession. There are other ways. We know how the mind can, be laid bare without words, don't we?'

She stepped a little closer to the bed.

Mimi knew what the Incantatrix said was true; there were ways a body - even one as wretched and dose to death as her own - could be made to give up its secrets, if the interrogator knew the methods. And Immacolata did. She, the slaughterer of her own sisters; she, the eternal virgin, whose celibacy gave her access to powers lovers were denied: she had ways. Mini would have to turn some final trick, or all would be lost.

From the corner of her eye Mimi saw the Hag, the withered sister, hunkered up beside the wall, her toothless maw wide. The Magdalene, Immacolata's second sister, was occupying the visitor's chair, her legs splayed. They were waiting for the fun to begin.

Mimi opened her mouth, as if to speak.

‘Something to say?' Immacolata asked.

As the Incantatrix spoke Mimi used what little strength she had to turn her left hand palm up. There, amid the grid of her life and love lines, was a symbol, drawn in henna, and reworked so often that her skin was now irredeemably stained; a symbol taught to her hours before the great weaving by a Baba in the Council.

She'd long-ago forgotten what it meant or did - if she'd ever been told - but it was one of the few defences they'd given her that she was in any condition to use.

The raptures of the Lo were physical, and her body was too paralysed to perform them; those of the Aia were musical, and being tone deaf, had been the first she'd forgotten. The Ye-me, the Seerkind whose genius was weaving, hadn't given her raptures at all. They'd been too busy, during those last, hectic days, with the business of their magnum opus: the carpet that was soon to conceal the Fugue from sight for an age.

Indeed, most of what that Babu had taught her was beyond her present power to use - word raptures were valueless if your lips couldn't shape them. All she had left was this obscure sign - little more than a dirt-mark on her palsied hand to keep the Incantatrix at bay: But nothing happened. There was no release of power; not even a breath. She tried to recall if the Babu had given her some specific instruction about activating the rapture, but all her mind would conjure was his face; and a smile he'd given her; and the trees behind his head sieving sunlight through their branches. What days they'd been; and she so young; and it all an adventure.

No adventure now. Just death on a stale bed.

Suddenly, a roar. And from her palm - released by the memory, perhaps - the rapture broke.

A ball of energy leapt from her hand. Inunacolata stepped back as a humming net of light came down around the bed, keeping malice at bay.

The Incantatrix was quick to respond. The menstruum, that stream of bright darkness which was the blood of her subtle body, spilled from her nostrils. It was a power Mimi had seen manifested no more than a dozen times, always and only by women: an etheric solution in which it was said the wielder could dissolve ail experience, and make it again in the image of her desire. While the Old Science was a democracy of magic, available to all - independent of gender, age or moral standing - the menstruum seemed to choose those it favoured. It had driven a fair number of those chosen to suicide with its demands and its visions; but it was undeniably a power perhaps even a condition of the flesh - that knew no bounds.

It took a few droplets only, their spheres becoming barbed in the air, to lacerate the net that the Babu rapture had created, leaving Mimi utterly vulnerable.

Immacolata stared down at the old woman, fearful of what would come next. Doubtless the Council had left the Custodian with some endgame rapture which, in extremis, she'd unleash. That was why she'd counselled Shadwell that they try other routes of investigation first: in order to avoid this potentially lethal confrontation. But those routes had all been cul-de-sacs. The house in Rue Street had been robbed of its treasure. The sole witness. Mooney, had lost his wits. She'd been obliged to come here and face the Custodian, not fearing Mimi herself, but rather the scale of the defenses the Council had surely lodged with her.

‘Go on...' she said, ‘... do your worst.'

The old woman just lay there, her eyes full of anticipation.

‘We haven't got forever,' Immacolata said. ‘If you've got raptures, show them.'

Still she just lay there, with the arrogance of one who had power in plentiful supply.

Immacolata could bear the waiting no longer. She took a step towards the bed, in the hope of making the bitch show her powers; whatever they were. Them was still no response.

Was it possible that she'd misread the signs? Was it perhaps not arrogance that made the woman lie so still, but despair? Dare she hope that the Custodian was somehow, miraculously, She touched Mimi's open palm, brushing the spent calligraphy. The power there was defunct; and nothing further came to meet her from the woman on the bed.

If Immacolata knew pleasure, she knew it then. Unlikely as it seemed, the Custodian was unarmed. She possessed no final, devastating rapture. It she'd ever had such authority, age had decayed it.

‘Time to unburden yourself,' she said, and let a dribble of torment climb into the air above Mimi's trembling head.

2

The night nurse consulted the clock on the wall. It was thirty minutes since she'd left the tearful daughter with Mrs Laschenki. Strictly speaking she should have told the visitor to return the following morning, but the woman had travelled through the night, and besides there was every chance the patient would not make it to first light. Rules had to be tempered with compassion; but half an hour was enough.

As she started down the corridor, she heard a cry issuing from the old lady's room, and the sound of furniture being overturned. She was at the door in seconds. The handle was clammy, and refused to turn. She rapped on the door, as the noise within grew louder still.

‘What's going on?' she demanded.

Inside, the Incantatrix looked down at the bag of dry bones and withered flesh on the bed. Where did this woman find the will-power to defy her?; to resist the needles of interrogation the menstruum had driven up through the roof of her mouth, into her very thoughts?

The Council had chosen well, electing her as one of the three guardians of the Weaveworld. Even now, with the menstruum probing the seals of her brain, she was preparing a final and absolute defence. She was going to die. Immacolata could see her willing death upon herself before the needles pricked her secrets out.

On the other side of the door the nurse's enquiries rose in pitch and volume.

‘Open the door! Please, will you open the door!'

Time was running out. Ignoring the nurse's calls, Immaco-lata closed her eyes and dug into the past for a marriage of forms that she hoped would unseat the old woman's reason long enough for the needles to do their work. One part of the union was easily evoked: an image of death plucked from her one true refuge in the Kingdom, the Shrine of the Mortalities. The other was more problematic, for she'd only seen the man Mimi had left behind in the Fugue once or twice. But the menstruum had its way of dredging the memory up, and what better proof of the illusion's potency than the look that now came over the old woman's face, as her lost love appeared to her at the bottom of the bed, raising his rotting arms? Taking her cue, Immacolata pressed the points of her enquiry into the Custodian's cortex, but before she had a chance to find the

carpet there, Mimi - with one last gargantuan effort - seized hold of the sheet with her good hand and flung it towards the phantom, a punning call on the Incantatrix's bluff.

Then she fell sideways from the bed, dead before she hit the floor.

Immacolata shrieked her fury; and as she did so, the nurse flung the door open.

What the woman saw in Room Six she would never tell, not for the rest of her long life. In part because she feared the derision of her peers; in part because if her eyes told the truth, and there were in the living world such terrors as she glimpsed in Mimi Laschenski's room, to talk of them might invite their proximity, and she, a woman of her times, had neither prayers nor wit enough to keep such darkness at bay.

Besides, they were gone even as her eyes fell upon them -the naked woman and the dead man at the foot of the bed -gone as if they'd never been. And there was just the daughter, saying: ‘No ... no ...' and her mother dead on the floor.

‘I'll get the Doctor,' said the nurse. ‘Please stay here.'

But when she got back to the room, the grieving woman had made her final farewells, and left.

3

‘What happened?' said Shadwell, as they drove from the hospital.

‘She's dead,' said Immacolata, and said no more until they'd driven two miles from the gates.

Shadwell knew better than to press her. She would tell what she had to tell in her own good time.

Which she did, saying:

‘She had no defence, Shadwell, except some poxy trick I learned in my cot.'

‘How's that possible?'

‘Maybe she just grew old,' came Immacolata's reply. ‘Her mind rotted.'

‘And the other Custodians?'

‘Who knows? Dead, maybe. Wandered off into the Kingdom. She was on her own, at the last.'

The Incantatrix smiled; an expression her face was not familiar with. ‘There was I, being cautious and calculating, afraid she'd have raptures that'd undo me, and she had nothing. Nothing. Just an old woman dying in a bed.'

‘If she's the last, there's no-one to stop us, is there? No-one to keep us from the Fugue.'

‘So it'd seem,' Immacolata replied, then lapsed into silence again, content to watch the sleeping Kingdom slide past the window.

It still amazed her, this woeful place. Not in its physical particulars, but in its unpredictability.

They'd grown old here, the Keepers of the Weave. They -who'd loved the Fugue enough to give their lives to keep it from harm - they'd finally wearied of their vigil, and withered into forgetfulness.

Hate remembered though; hate remembered long after love had forgotten. She was living proof of that. Her purpose - to find the Fugue and break its bright heart - was undimmed after a search that had occupied a human life-time.

And that search would soon be over. The Fugue found and put up for auction, its territories playgrounds for the Cuckoos, its peoples - the four great families - sold into slavery or left to wander in this hopeless place. She looked out at the city. A fidgety light was washing brick and concrete, frightening off what little enchantment the night might have lent.

The magic of the Seerkind could not survive long in such a world. And, stripped of their raptures, what were they? A lost people, with visions behind their eyes, and no power to make them true.

They and this tarnished, forsaken city would have much to talk about.

VII

THE TALL-BOY

1

Eight hours before Mimi's death in the hospital, Suzanna had returned to the house in Rue Street. Evening was falling, and the building, pierced from front to back with shafts of amber light, was almost redeemed from its dreariness. But the glory didn't last for long, and when the sun took itself off to another hemisphere she was obliged to light the candles, many of which remained on the sills and the shelves, set in the graves of their predecessors. The illumination they offered was stronger than she'd expected, and more glamorous. She moved from room to room accompanied everywhere by the scent of melting wax, and could almost imagine Mimi might have been happy here, in this cocoon.

Of the design which her grandmother had shown her, she could find no sign. It was not in the grain of the floorboards, nor in the pattern of the wallpaper. Whatever it had been, it was gone now. She didn't look forward to the melancholy task of breaking that news to the old lady.

What she did find, however, all but concealed behind the stack of furniture at the top of the stairs, was the tall-boy. It took a little time to remove the items piled in front of it, but there was a revelation waiting when she finally set the candle on the floor before it, and opened the doors.

The vultures who'd picked the household clean had forgotten to rifle the contents of the tall-boy. Mimi's clothes still hung on the rails, coats and furs and ball-gowns, all, most likely, unworn since last Suzanna had opened this treasure trove. Which thought reminded her of what she'd sought on that occasion. She went down on her haunches, telling herself that it was folly to think her gift would still be there, and yet knowing indisputably that it was.

She was not disappointed. There, amongst the shoes and tissue, she found a package wrapped in plain brown paper and marked with her name. The gift had been postponed, but not lost.

Her hands had begun to tremble. The knot in the faded ribbon defied her for half a minute, and then came free. She pulled the paper off.

Inside: a book. Not new, to judge by its scuffed corners, but finely bound in leather. She opened it. To her surprise, she found it was in German. Geschichten der Geheimen Orte the title read, which she hesitatingly translated as Stories of the Secret Places. But even if she hadn't had a smattering of the language, the illustrations would have given the subject away: it was a book of faery-tales.

She sat down at the top of the stairs, candle at her side, and began to study the volume more closely. The stories were familiar, of course: she'd encountered them, in one form or another, a hundred times. She'd seen them re-interpreted as Hollywood cartoons, as erotic fables, as the subject of learned theses and feminist critiques. But their bewitchment remained undiluted by commerce or academe. Sitting there, the child in her wanted to hear these stories told again, though she knew every twist and turn, and had the end in mind before the first line was spoken. That didn't matter, of course. Indeed their inevitability was part of their power. Some tales could never be told too often.

Experience had taught her much: and most of the news was bad. But these stories taught different lessons. That sleep resembled death, for instance, was no revelation; but that death might with kisses be healed into mere sleep ... that was knowledge of a different order. Mere wish-fulfilment, she chided herself. Real life had no miracles to offer. The devouring beast, if cut open, did not disgorge its victims un-harmed. Peasants were not raised overnight to princedom, nor was evil ever vanquished by a union of true hearts. They were the kind of illusions that the pragmatist she'd striven so hard to be had kept at bay.

Yet the stories moved her. She couldn't deny it. And they moved her in a way only true things could. It wasn't sentiment that brought tears to her eyes. The stories weren't sentimental. They were tough, even cruel. No, what made her weep was being reminded of an inner life she'd been so familiar with as a child; a life that was both an escape from, and a revenge upon, the pains and frustrations of childhood; a life that was neither mawkish nor unknowing; a life of mind-places -haunted, soaring - that she'd chosen to forget when she'd took up the cause of adulthood.

More than that; in this reunion with the tales that had given her a mythology, she found images that might help her fathom her present confusion.

The outlandishness of the story she'd entered, coming back to Liverpool, had thrown her assumptions into chaos. But here, in the pages of the book, she found a state of being in which nothing was fixed: where magic ruled, bringing transformations and miracles. She'd walked there once, and far from feeling lost, could have passed for one of its inhabitants. If she could recapture that insolent indifference to reason, and let it lead her through the maze ahead, she might comprehend the forces she knew were waiting to be unleashed around her.

It would be painful to relinquish her pragmatism, however: it had kept her from sinking so often. In the face of waste and sorrow she'd held on by staying cool; rational. Even when her parents had died, separated by some unspoken betrayal which kept them, even at the last, from comforting each other, she'd coped; simply by immersing herself in practicalities until the worst was over.

Now the book beckoned, with its chimeras and its sorceries; all ambiguity; all flux; and her pragmatism would be worthless. No matter. Whatever the years had taught her about loss, and compromise, and defeat she was here invited back into a forest in which maidens tamed dragons; and one of those maidens still had her face.

Having scanned three or four of the stories, she turned to the front of the book, in search of an inscription. It was brief.

‘To Suzanna,' it read. ‘Love from M.L.' It shared the page with an odd epigram: Das, was man sich vorstellt, braucht man nie zu verlieren. She struggled with this, suspecting that her rusty German might be missing the felicities. The closest approximation she could make was:

That which is imagined need never be lost. With this oblique wisdom in mind, she returned to the stories, lingering over the illustrations, which had the severity of woodcuts but on closer inspection concealed all manner of subtleties. Fish with human faces gazed up from beneath the pristine surface of a pool; two strangers at a banquet exchanged whispers that had taken solid form in the air above their heads; in the heart of a wild wood figures all but hidden amongst the trees showed pale, expectant faces.

The hours came and went, and when, having been through the book from cover to cover, she briefly closed her eyes to rest them, sleep overcame her.

When she woke she found her watch had stopped a little after two. The wick at her side flickered in a pool of wax, close to drowning. She got to her feet, limping around the landing until the pins and needles had left her foot, and then went into the back bedroom in search of a fresh candle.

There was one on the window ledge. As she picked it up, her eye caught a movement in the yard below. Her heart jumped; but she stood absolutely still so as not to draw attention to herself, and watched. The figure was in shadow, and it wasn't until he forsook the corner of the yard that the starlight showed her the young man she'd seen here the day before.

She started downstairs, picking up a fresh flame on the way. She wanted to speak to the man; wanted to quiz him on the reasons for his flight, arid the identity of his pursuers.

As she stepped out into the yard he rose from his hiding place and made a dash for the back gate.

‘Wait!' she called after him. ‘It's Suzanna.'

The name could mean little to him, but he halted nevertheless.

‘Who?' he said.

‘I saw you yesterday. You were running -'

The girl in the hall, Cal realized. The one who'd come between him and the Salesman.

‘What happened to you?' she said.

He looked terrible. His clothes were ripped, his face dirtied; and, though she couldn't be sure, bloodied too.

‘I don't know,' he said, his voice scraping gravel. ‘I don't know anything any longer.'

‘Why don't you come inside?'

He didn't move.

‘How long have you been here?' he said.

‘Hours.'

‘And the house is empty?'

‘Except for me, yes.'

With this ascertained, he followed her through the back door. She lit several more candles. The light confirmed her suspicions. There was blood on him; and a cess-pit smell.

‘Is there any running water?' he said.

‘I don't know; we can try.'

They were in luck; the Water Board had not turned off the supply. The kitchen tap rattled and the pipes roared but finally a stream of icy water was spat forth. Cal slung off his jacket and doused his face and arms.

Til see if I can find a towel,' said Suzanna. ‘What's your name, by the way?'

‘Cal.'

She left him to his ablutions. With her gone he stripped off his shirt and sluiced down his chest, neck and back with chilly water. She was back before he was done, with a pillow-slip.

‘Nearest thing I can find to a towel,' she said.

She had set two chairs in the lower front room, and lit several candles there. They sat together, and talked.

‘Why did you come back?' she wanted to know. ‘After yesterday.'

‘I saw something here' he said, cautiously. ‘And you? Why are you here?'

This is my grandmother's house. She's in hospital. Dying. I came back to look around.'

The two I saw yesterday,' Cal said. ‘Were they friends of your grandmother's?'

‘I doubt it. What did they want with you?'

Here Cal knew he got into sticky ground. How could he begin to tell her what joys and fears the last few days had brought?

‘It's difficult...' he said. ‘I mean, I'm not sure anything that's happened to me recently makes much sense.'

That makes two of us,' she replied.

He was looking at his hands, like a palmist in search of a future. She studied him; his torso was covered in scratches, as though he'd been wrestling wolves.

When he looked up his pale blue eyes, fringed with black lashes, caught her scrutiny. He blushed slightly.

‘You said you saw something here,' she said. ‘Can you tell me what?'

It was a simple question, and he saw no reason not to tell her. If she disbelieved him, that was her problem, not his. But she didn't. Indeed, as soon as he described the carpet her eyes grew wide and wild.

‘Of course,' she said. ‘A carpet. Of course.'

‘You know about it?' he said.

She told him what had happened at the hospital; the design Mimi had tried to show her.

Now any lingering doubts about telling the whole story were forgotten. He gave her the adventure from the day the bird had escaped. His vision of the Fugue; Shadwell and his coat; Immacolata; the by-blows; their mother and the midwife; events at the wedding, and after. She punctuated his narrative with insights of her own, about Mimi's life here in the house, the doors bolted, the windows nailed down, living in a fortress as if awaiting siege.

‘She must have known somebody would come for the carpet sooner or later.'

‘Not for the carpet,' said Cal. ‘For the Fugue.'

She saw his eyes grow dreamy at the word, and envied him his glimpse of the place: its hills, its lakes, its wild woods. And were there maidens amongst those trees, she wanted to ask, who tamed dragons with their song? That was something she would have to discover for herself.

‘So the carpet's a doorway, is it?' she said.

‘I don't know,' he replied.

‘I wish we could ask Mimi. Maybe she -'

Before the sentence was out, Cal was on his feet.

‘Oh my God.' Only now did he recall Shadwell's words on the rubbish tip, about going to >peak to the old woman.

He'd meant Mimi, who else? As he pulled on his shirt he told Suzanna what he'd heard.

‘We have to go to her,' he said. ‘Christ! Why didn't I think?'

His agitation was infectious. Suzanna blew out the candles, and was at the front door before him.

‘Surely Mimi'll be safe in a hospital,' she said.

‘Nobody's safe,' he replied, and she knew it was true.

On the step, she about-faced and disappeared into the house again, returning seconds later with a battered book in her hands.

‘Diary?' he said.

‘Map,' she replied.

VIII

FOLLOWING THE THREAD

1

Mimi was dead.

Her killers had come and gone in the night, leaving an elaborate smoke-screen to conceal their crime. ‘There's nothing mysterious about your grandmother's death.' Doctor Chai insisted.

‘She was failing fast.' There was somebody here last night.' That's right. Her daughter.'

‘She only had one daughter; my mother. And she's been dead for two and a half years.'

‘Whoever it was, she did Mrs Laschenski no harm. Your grandmother died of natural causes.'

There was little use in arguing, Suzanna realized. Any further attempt to explain her suspicions would end in confusion. Besides, Mimi's death had begun a new spiral of puzzles. Chief amongst them: what had the old woman known, or been, that she had to be dispatched?; and how much of her part in this puzzle would Suzanna now be obliged to assume? One question begged the other, and both, with Mimi silenced, would have to go unanswered. The only other source of information was the creature who'd stooped to kill the old woman on her death-bed: Immacolata. And that was a confrontation Suzanna felt far from ready for. They left the hospital, and walked. She was badly shaken. ‘Shall we eat?' Cal suggested. It was still only seven in the morning, but they found a cafe

that served breakfast and ordered glutton's portions. The eggs and bacon, toast and coffee restored them both somewhat, though the price of a sleepless night still had to be paid.

Til have to ‘phone my uncle in Canada,' said Suzanna. Tell him what happened.' ‘All of it?' said Cal.

‘Of course not.' she said. That's between the two of us.'

He was glad of that. Not just because he didn't like the thought of the story spreading, but because he wanted the intimacy of a secret shared. This Suzanna was like no woman he had ever met before. There was no facade, no games-playing. They were, in one night of confessionals - and this sad morning - suddenly companions in a mystery which, though it had brought him closer to death than he'd ever been, he'd happily endure if it meant he kept her company.

There won't be many tears shed over Mimi.' Suzanna was saying. ‘She was never loved.'

‘Not even by you?'

‘I never knew her.' she said, and gave Cal a brief synopsis of Mimi's life and times. ‘She was an outsider.' Suzanna concluded. ‘And now we know why.'

‘Which brings us back to the carpet. We have to trace the house cleaners.'

‘You need some sleep first.'

‘No. I've got my second wind. But I do want to go home. Just to feed the pigeons.'

‘Can't they survive without you for a few hours?'

Cal frowned. ‘If it weren't for them.' he said, ‘I wouldn't be here.'

‘Sorry. Do you mind if I come with you?'

‘I'd like that. Maybe you can give Dad something to smile about.'

2

As it was, Brendan had smiles aplenty today; Cal had not seen his father so happy since before Eileen's illness. The change was uncanny. He welcomed them both into the house with a stream of banter.

‘Coffee, anybody?' he offered, and went off into the kitchen. ‘By the way Cal, Geraldine was here.'

‘What did she want?'

‘She brought some books you'd given her; said she didn't want them any longer.' He turned from the coffee-brewing and stared at Cal. ‘She said you've been behaving oddly.'

‘Must be in the blood,' said Cal, and his father grinned. ‘I'm going to look at the birds.'

‘I've already fed them today. And cleaned them out.'

‘You're really feeling better.'

‘Why not?' said Brendan. ‘I've got people watching over me.'

Cal nodded, not quite comprehending. Then he turned to Suzanna.

‘Want to see the champions?' he said, and they stepped outside. The day was already balmy.

There's something off about Dad,' said Cal, as he led the way down the clogged path to the loft. ‘Two days ago he was practically suicidal.'

‘Maybe the bad times have just run their course,' she said.

‘Maybe,' he replied, as he opened the loft door. As he did so, a train roared by, making the earth tremble.

‘Nine-twenty-five to Penzance,' Cal said, as he led her inside.

‘Doesn't it disturb the birds?' she asked. ‘Being so close to the tracks?'

‘They got used to it when they were still in their shells,' he replied, and went to greet the pigeons.

She watched him talking to them, paddling his fingers against the wire mesh. He was a strange one, no doubt of that; but no stranger than she, probably. What surprised her was the casual way they dealt with the imponderables which had suddenly entered their lives. They stood, she sensed, on a threshold; in the realm beyond a little strangeness might be a necessity.

Cal suddenly turned from the cage.

‘Gikhrist,' he said, with a fierce grin. ‘I just remembered. They talked about a guy called Gilchrist.'

‘Who did?'

‘When I was on the wall. The removal men. God, yes! I looked at the birds and it all came back. I was on the wall and they were talking about selling the carpet to someone called Gilchrist.'

‘That's our man then.'

Cal was back in the house in moments.

‘I don't have any cake -' Brendan said as his son made for the telephone in the hallway. ‘What's the panic?'

‘It's nothing much,' said Suzanna.

Brendan poured her a cup of coffee, while Cal rifled through the directory. ‘You're not a local lass, are you?' Brendan said.

‘I live in London.'

‘Never liked London,' he commented. ‘Soulless place.'

‘I've got a studio in Muswell Hill. You'd like it.' When Brendan looked puzzled at this, she added: ‘I make pottery.'

‘I've found it,' said Cal, directory in hand. ‘K. W. Gilchrist,' he read, ‘Second-Hand Retailer.'

‘What's all this about?' said Brendan.

‘I'll give them a call,' Cal said.

‘It's Sunday,' said Suzanna.

‘Lot of these places are open Sunday morning.' he replied, and returned to the hallway.

‘Are you buying something?' Brendan said.

‘In a manner of speaking,' Suzanna replied.

Cal dialled the number. The receiver at the other end was picked up promptly. A woman said:

‘Gilchrist's?'

‘Hello,' said Cal. ‘I'd like to speak to Mr Gilchrist please.'

There was a beat's silence, then the woman said:

‘Mr Gilchrist's dead.'

Jesus, Shadwell was fast, Cal thought.

But the telephonist hadn't finished:

‘He's been dead eight years,' she said. Her voice had less colour than the speaking clock. ‘What's your enquiry concerning?'

‘A carpet,' said Cal.

‘You want to buy a carpet?'

‘No. Not exactly. I think a carpet was brought to your saleroom by mistake -'

‘By mistake?'

‘That's right. And I have to have it back. Urgently.'

‘I'm afraid you'll have to speak to Mr Wilde about that.'

‘Could you put me through to Mr Wilde then, please?'

‘He's in the Isle of Wight.'

‘When will he be back?'

Thursday morning. You'll have to ring back then.'

‘Surely that must be -'

He stopped, realizing the line was dead.

‘Damn,' he said. He looked up too see Suzanna standing at the kitchen door. ‘Nobody there to talk to.' He sighed. ‘Where does that leave us?'

‘Like thieves in the night,' she replied softly.

3

When Cal and the woman had gone, Brendan sat awhile watching the garden. He'd have to get to work on it soon: Eileen's letter had chastized him for being so lax in its upkeep.

Musing on the letter inevitably led him back to its carrier, the celestial Mr Shadwell.

Without analysing why, he got up and went to the ‘phone, consulting the card the angel had given him, then dialled. His memory of the encounter with Shadwell had almost been burned away by the brightness of the gift the Salesman had brought, but there'd been a bargain made, that he did remember, and it somehow concerned Cal.

‘Is that Mr Shadwell?'

‘Who is this please?'

‘It's Brendan Mooney.'

‘Oh Brendan. How good to hear your voice. Do you have something to tell me? About Cal?'

‘He went to a warehouse, for furniture and such.'

‘Did he indeed. Then we shall find him, and make him a happy man. Was he alone?'

‘No. There was a woman with him. A lovely woman.'

‘Her name?'

‘Suzanna Parrish.'

‘And the warehouse?'

A vague twinge of doubt touched Brendan. ‘Why is it you need Cal?'

‘I told you. A prize.'

‘Oh yes. A prize.'

‘Something to take his breath away. The warehouse, Brendan. We have a deal, after all. Fair's fair.'

Brendan put his hand into his pocket. The letter was still warm. There was no harm in making bargains with angels, was there? What could be safer?

He named the warehouse.

‘They only went for a carpet -' Brendan said.

The receiver clicked.

‘Are you still there?' he said.

But the divine messenger was probably already winging his way.

IX

FINDERS KEEPERS

1

Gilchrist's Second-Hand Furniture Warehouse had once been a cinema, in the years when cinemas were still palatial follies. A folly it remained, with its mock-rococo facade, and the unlikely dome perched on its roof; but there was nothing remotely palatial about it now. It stood within a stone's throw of the Dock Road, the only property left in its block that remained in use. The rest were either boarded up or burned out.

Standing at the corner of Jamaica Street, staring across at the dereliction, Cal wondered if the late Mr Gilchrist would have been proud to have his name emblazoned across such a decayed establishment. Business could not flourish here, unless they were the kind of dealings best done out of the public eye.

The opening times of the warehouse were displayed on a weather-beaten board, where the cinema had once announced its current fare. Sundays, it was open between nine-thirty and twelve. It was now one-fifteen. The double-doors were closed and bolted, and a pair of huge ironwork gates, a grotesque addition to the facade, padlocked in front of the doors.

‘What are your house-breaking skills like?' Cal asked Suzanna.

‘Under-developed,' she replied. ‘But I'm a fast learner.' They crossed Jamaica Street for a closer inspection. There was little need to pretend innocence; there had been no pedestrians on the street since they'd arrived, and traffic was minimal.

‘There must be some way in,' said Suzanna. ‘You head round the far side. I'll go this way.'

‘Right. Meet you at the back.'

They parted. Whereas Cal's route had taken him into shadow, Suzanna's left her in bright sunlight. Oddly, she found herself longing for some clouds. The heat was making her blood sing, as though she was tuned in to some alien radio-station, and its melodies were whining around her skull.

As she listened to them Cal stepped around the corner, startling her.

‘I've found a way,' he said, and led her round to what had once been the cinema's emergency exit. It too was padlocked, but both chain and lock were well rusted. He had already found himself half a brick, with which he now berated the lock. Brick-shards flew off in all directions, but after a dozen blows the chain surrendered. Cal put his shoulder to the door, and pushed. There was a commotion from inside, as a mirror and several other items piled against the door toppled over; but he was able to force a gap large enough for them to squeeze through.

2

The interior was a kind of Purgatory, in which thousands of household items - armchairs, wardrobes, lamps large and small, curtains, rugs - awaited Judgment, piled up in dusty wretchedness. The place stank of its occupants; of things claimed by woodworm and rot and sheer usage; of once fine pieces now so age-worn even their makers would not have given them house room.

And beneath the smell of decrepitude, something more bitter and more human. The scent of sweat perhaps, soaked up by the boards of a sick bed, or in the fabric of a lamp that had burned through a night whose endurer had known no morning. Not a place to linger too long.

They separated once more, for speed's sake.

‘Anything that looks promising.' Cal said, ‘holler.'

He was now eclipsed by piles of furniture.

The whine in Suzanna's skull did not die down once she was out of the sun; it worsened. Maybe it was the enormity of the task before them that made her head spin, like an impossible quest from some faery-tale, seeking a particle of magic in the wilderness of decay.

The same thought, though formulated differently, was passing through Cal's mind. The more he searched, the more he doubted his memory. Maybe it hadn't been Gilchrist they'd named; or perhaps the removal men had decided the profit made bringing the carpet here would not repay their effort.

As he turned a corner, he heard a scraping sound from behind a stack of furniture.

‘Suzanna?' he said. The word went out and returned unanswered. The noise had already faded behind him, but it had sent adrenalin rushing through his system, and it was with speedier step that he made his way to the next mountain of goods and chattels. Even before he came within five yards of it his eyes had alighted upon the rolled carpet that was all but concealed beneath half a dozen dining chairs and a chest of drawers. All of these items lacked price-tags, which suggested they were recent, unsorted acquisitions.

He went down on his knees and pulled at the edge of the carpet, in an attempt to see the design. The border was damaged, the weave weak. When he pulled he felt strands snap. But he could see enough to confirm what his gut already knew: that this was the carpet from Rue Street, the carpet which Mimi Laschenski had lived and died protecting; the carpet of the Fugue.

He stood up and started to unpile the chairs, deaf to the sound of approaching footsteps at his back.

3

The first thing Suzanna saw was a shadow on the ground. She looked up.

A face appeared between two wardrobes, only to move off again before she could call it by its name.

Mimi! It was Mimi.

She walked over to the wardrobes. There was no sign of anyone. Was she losing her sanity? First the din in her head, now hallucinations?

And yet, why were they here if they didn't believe in miracles? Doubt was drowned in a sudden rush of hope - that the dead might somehow break the seal on the invisible world and come amongst the living.

She called her grandmother's name, softly. And she was granted an answer. Not in words, but in the scent of lavender water. Off to her left, down a corridor of piled tea-chests, a ball of dust rolled and came to rest. She went towards it, or rather towards the source of the breeze that had carried it, the scent getting stronger with every step she took.

4

That's my property, I believe,' said the voice at Cal's back. He turned. Shadwell was standing a few feet from him. His jacket was unbuttoned.

‘Perhaps you'd stand aside, Mooney, and let me claim what's mine.'

Cal wished he'd had the presence of mind to come here armed. At that moment he'd have had no hesitation in stabbing Shadwell through his gleaming eye and calling himself a hero for it. As it was, all he had were his bare hands. They'd have to suffice.

He took a step towards Shadwell, but as he did so the man stood aside. There was somebody standing behind him. One of the sisters, no doubt; or their bastards.

Cal didn't wait to see, but turned and picked up one of the chairs from those dumped on the carpet. His action brought a small avalanche; chairs spilling between him and the enemy. He threw the one he held towards the shadowy form that had taken Shadwell's place. He picked up a second, and threw it

the way of the first, but now the target had disappeared into the labyrinth of furniture. So had the Salesman.

Cal turned, his muscles fired, and put his back into shifting the chest of drawers. He succeeded; the chest toppled backwards, knocking over several other pieces as it fell. He was glad of the commotion; perhaps it would draw Suzanna's attention. Now he reached to take possession of the carpet, but as he did so something seized him from behind. He was dragged bodily from his prize, a small section of the carpet coming away in his hand, then he was flung across the floor.

He came to a halt against a pile of ornately framed paintings and photographs, several of which toppled and smashed. He lay amid the litter of glass for a moment to catch his breath, but the next sight snatched it from him again. The by-blow was coming at him out of the gloom. ‘Get up!' it told him.

He was dead to its instruction, his attention claimed by the face before him. It wasn't Elroy's off-spring, though this monstrosity also had its father's features. No; this child was his.

The horror he'd glimpsed, stirring from the lullaby he'd heard lying in the dirt of the rubbish tip, had been all too real. The sisters had squeezed his seed from him, and this beast with his face was the consequence.

It was not a fine likeness. Its naked body was entirely hairless, and there were several horrid distortions - the fingers of one hand were twice their natural length, and those of the other half-inch stumps, while from the shoulder blades eruptions of matter sprang like malformed wings - parodies, perhaps, of the creatures his dreams envied.

It was made in more of its father's image than the other beasts had been, however, and faced with himself, he hesitated.

It was enough, that hesitation, to give the beast the edge. It leapt at him, seizing his throat with its long-fingered hand, its touch without a trace of warmth, its mouth sucking at his as if to steal the breath from his lips.

It intended patricide, no doubt of that; its grip was unconditional. He felt his legs weaken, and the child allowed him to collapse to his knees, following him down. The knuckles of his fingers brushed against the glass shards, and he made a fumbling attempt to pick one up, but between mind and hand the instruction lost urgency. The weapon dropped from his hand.

Somewhere, in that place of breath and light from which he was outcast, he heard Shadwell laughing. Then the sound stopped, and he was staring at his own face, which looked back at him as if from a corrupted mirror. His eyes, which he'd always liked for the paleness of their colour; the mouth, which though it had been an embarrassment to him as a child because he'd thought it too girlish, he'd now trained into a modicum of severity when the occasion demanded, and which was, he was told, capable of a winning smile. The ears, large and protuberant: a comedian's ears on a face that warranted something sleeker...

Probably most people slip out of the world with such trivialities in their heads. Certainly it was that way for Cal.

Thinking of his ears, the undertow took hold of him and dragged him down.

X

THE MENSTRUUM

Suzanna knew the instant before she stepped into what had once been the cinema foyer that this was an error. Even then, she might have retreated, but that she heard Mimi's voice speak her name and before any argument could stay her step her feet had carried her through the door.

The foyer was darker than the main warehouse, but she could see the vague figure of her grandmother standing beside the boarded-up box-office.

‘Mimi?' she said, her mind a blur of contrary impressions. ‘Here I am.' said the old lady, and opened her arms to Suzanna.

The proffered embrace was also an error of judgment, but on the part of the enemy. Gestures of physical affection had not been Mimi's forte in life, and Suzanna saw no reason to suppose her grandmother would have changed her habits upon expiring. ‘You're not Mimi,' she said.

‘I know it's a surprise, seeing me,' the would-be ghost replied. The voice was soft as a feather-fall. ‘But there's nothing to be afraid of.' ‘Who are you?'

‘You know who I am,' came the response. Suzanna didn't linger for any further words of seduction, but turned to retrace her path. There were perhaps three yards between her and the exit, but now they seemed as many

miles. She tried to take a step on that long road, but the commotion in her head suddenly rose to deafening proportions.

The presence behind her had no intention of letting her escape. It sought a confrontation, and it was a waste of effort to defy it. So she turned and looked.

The mask was melting, though there was ice in the eyes that emerged from behind it, not fire. She knew the face, and though she'd not thought herself ready to brave its fury yet, she was strangely elated by the sight. The last shreds of Mimi evaporated, and Immacolata stood revealed.

‘My sister...' she said, the air around her dancing to her words, ‘... my sister the Hag had me play that part. She thought she saw Mimi in your face. She was right, wasn't she? You're her child.'

‘Grandchild,' Suzanna murmured.

‘Child.' came the certain reply.

Suzanna stared at the woman before her, fascinated by the masterwork of grief half-concealed in those features. Immacolata flinched at her scrutiny.

‘How dare you pity me?' she said, as if she'd read Suzanna's thought, and on the words something leapt from her face.

It came too fast for Suzanna to see what it was; she had time only to throw herself out of its whining path. The wall behind her shook as it was struck. The next instant the face was spilling more brightness towards her.

Suzanna was not afraid. The display only elated her further. This time, as the brightness came her way, her instinct overruled all constraints of sanity, and she put her hand out as if to catch the light.

It was like plunging her arm into a torrent of ice-water. A torrent in which innumerable fish were swimming, fast, fast, against the flood; swimming to spawn. She closed her fist, snatching at this brimming tide, and pulled.

The action had three consequences. One, a cry from Immacolata. Two, the sudden cessation of the din in Suzanna's head. Three, all that her hand had felt - the chill, the torment and the shoal it contained - all of that was

suddenly within her. Her body was the flood. Not the body of flesh and bone, but some other anatomy, made more of thought than of substance, and more ancient than either. Somehow it had recognized itself in Immacolata's assault, and thrown off its sleep.

Never in her life had she felt so complete. In the face of this feeling all other ambition - for happiness, for pleasure, for power - all others faded.

She looked back at Immacolata, and her new eyes saw not an enemy but a woman possessed of the same torrent that ran in her own veins. A woman twisted and full of anguish but for all that more like her than not. That was stupid,' said the Incantatrix. ‘Was it?' said Suzanna. She didn't think so. ‘Better you remained unfound. Better you never tasted the menstruum.' ‘The menstruum?'

‘Now you'll know more than you wish to know, feel more than you ever wanted to feel.' There seemed to be something approximating pity in Immacolata's voice. ‘So the grief begins,' she said. ‘And it will never end. Believe me. You should have lived and died a Cuckoo.' ‘Is that how Mimi died?' said Suzanna. The ice eyes flickered. ‘She knew what risks she took. She had Seerkind blood, and that's always run freely. You're of their blood too, through that bitch grand-dam of yours.'

‘Seerkind?' So many new words. ‘Are they the Fugue people?'

‘They're dead people.' came the reply. ‘Don't look to them for answers. They're dust soon enough. Gone the way everything in this stinking Kingdom goes. To dirt and mediocrity. We'll see to that. You're alone. Like she was.'

That ‘we' reminded her of the Salesman, and the potency of the coat he wore. ‘Is Shadwell a Seerkind?' she asked.

‘Him?' The thought was apparently preposterous. ‘No. Any power he's got's my gift.'

‘Why?' said Suzanna. She understood little of Immacolata, but enough to know that she and Shadwell were not a perfect match.

‘He taught me ...' the Incantatrix began, her hand moving up to her face,'... he taught me, the show.' The hand passed across her features, and upon reappearing she was smiling, almost warmly. ‘You'll need that now.'

‘And for that you're his mistress?'

The sound that came from the woman might have been a laugh; but only might. ‘I leave love to the Magdalene, sister. She's an appetite for it. Ask Mooney -'

Cal. She'd forgotten Cal.

‘- if he has the breath to answer.'

Suzanna glanced back towards the door.

‘Go on ...' said Immacolata, ‘... go find him. I won't stop you.'

The brightness in her, the menstruum, knew the Incantatrix was telling the truth. That flood was part of them both now. It bonded them in ways Suzanna could not yet guess at.

‘The battle's already lost, sister.' Immacolata murmured as Suzanna reached the threshold. ‘While you indulged your curiosity, the Fugue's fallen into our hands.'

Suzanna stepped back into the warehouse, fear beginning for the first time. Not for herself, but for Cal. She yelled his name into the murk.

‘Too late ...' said the woman behind her.

‘Cal!'

There was no reply. She started to search for him, calling his name at intervals, her anxiety growing with each unanswered shout. The place was a maze; twice she found herself in a location she'd already searched.

It was the glitter of broken glass that drew her attention; and then, lying face down a little way from it, Cal. Before she got close enough to touch him she sensed the profundity of his stillness.

He was too brittle, the menstruum in her said. You know how these Cuckoos are.

She rejected the thought. It wasn't hers.

‘Don't be dead.'

That was hers. It slipped from her as she knelt down beside him, a plea to his silence.

‘Please God, don't be dead.'

She was frightened to touch him, for fear of discovering the worst, all the while knowing that she was the only help he had. His head was turned towards her, his eyes closed, his mouth open, trailing blood-tinged spittle. Instinctively, her hand went to his hair, as if she might stroke him awake, but pragmatism had not entirely deserted her, and instead her fingers sought the pulse in his neck. It was weak.

So the grief begins, Immacolata had said, mere minutes before. Had she known, even as she offered that prophecy, that Cal was half way to dying already?

Of course she'd known. Known, and welcomed the grief this would bring, because she wanted Suzanna's pleasure in the menstruum soured from its discovery; wanted them sisters in sorrow.

Distracted by the realization she focused again on Cal to find that her hand had left his neck and was once again stroking his hair. Why was she doing this? He wasn't a sleeping child. He was hurt; he needed more concrete help. But even as she rebuked herself she felt the menstruum start to rise from her lower abdomen, washing her entrails, and lungs and heart, and moving - without any conscious instruction - down her arm towards Cal. Before, it had been indifferent to his wounding; you know how these Cuckoos are, it had said to her. But her rage, or perhaps her sadness, had chastened it. Now she felt its energies carry her need to wake him, to heal him, through the palm of her hand and into his sealed head.

It was both an extraordinary sensation, and one she felt perfectly at ease with. When, at the last moment, it seemed not to want to go, she pressed it forward and it obeyed her, its stream flowing into him. It was hers to control, she realized, with a rush of exhilaration, which was followed immediately by an ache of loss as the body below her drank the torment down.

He was greedy for healing. Her joints began to jitter as the

menstruum ran from her, and in her skull that alien song rose like a dozen sirens. She tried to take her hand from his head, but her muscles wouldn't obey the imperative. The menstruum had taken charge of her body, it seemed. She'd been too hasty, assuming control would be easy. It was deliberately depleting itself, to teach her not to press it.

An instant before she passed out, it decided enough was enough, and removed her hand. The flow was abruptly stemmed. She put her shaking hands up to her face, Cal's scent on her fingertips. By degrees the whine in her skull wound down. The faintness began to pass.

‘Are you all right?' Cal asked her.

She dropped her hands and looked across at him. He'd raised himself from the ground, and was now gingerly investigating his bloodied mouth.

‘I think so,' she said. ‘You?'

Til do,' he replied. ‘I don't know what happened ...' The words trailed away as the memory came back, and a look of alarm crossed his face.

‘The carpet-'

He hauled himself to his feet, looking all around.

‘-I had it in my hand,' he said. ‘Jesus, I had it in my hand!'

‘They've taken it!' she said.

She thought he was going to cry, the way his features crumpled up, but it was rage that emerged.

‘Fucking Shadwell!' he shouted, sweeping a copse of table-lamps off the top of a chest-of-drawers. ‘I'll kill him! I swear-'

She stood up still feeling giddy, and her downcast eyes caught sight of something in the litter of broken glass beneath their feet - she stooped again; cleared the fragments, and there was a piece of the carpet. She picked it up.

‘They didn't get it all,' she said, offering the find to Cal.

The anger melted from his face. He took it from her almost reverentially, and studied it. There were half a dozen motifs worked into the piece, though he could make no sense of them.

Suzanna watched him. He held the fragment so delicately,

as though it might bruise. Then he sniffed, hard, and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

‘Fucking Shadwell.' he said again, but softly now; numbly.

‘What do we do now?' she wondered aloud.

He looked up at her. This time there were tears in his eyes.

‘Get out of here,' he said. ‘See what the sky says.'

‘Huh?'

He offered a tiny smile.