Weaveworld

2

He’d woken early, gone downstairs and cooked himself a fried egg and bacon sandwich, then sat with the ruins of his gluttony until he heard his father stirring above. He quickly called the firm, and told Wilcox that he was sick, and wouldn’t be in work today. He told the same to Brendan – who was about his morning ablutions and, with the door locked, couldn’t see the ashen, anxious face his son was wearing this morning. Then, these duties done, he went back to his room and sat on his bed to examine the events at Rue Street afresh, hoping that the nature of yesterday’s mysteries could eventually be made to come clear.

It did little good. Whichever way he turned events they seemed impervious to rational explanation, and he was left only with the same razor-sharp memory of the experience and the ache of longing that came with it.

Everything he’d ever wanted had been in that land; he knew it. Everything his education had taught him to disbelieve – all miracles, all mystery, all blue shadow and sweet-breathed spirits. All the pigeon knew, all the wind knew, all the human world had once grasped and now forgotten, all of it was wailing in that place. He’d seen it with his own eyes.

Which probably made him insane.

How else could he explain an hallucination of such precision and complexity? No, he was insane. And why not? He had lunacy in his blood. His father’s father, Mad Mooney, ended his life crazy as a coot. The man had been a poet, according to Brendan, though tales of his life and times had been forbidden in Chariot Street. Hush your nonsense, Eileen had always said, whenever Brendan mentioned the man, though whether this taboo was against Poetry, Delirium or the Irish Cal had never decided. Whichever, it was an edict his father had often broken when his wife’s back was turned, for Brendan was fond of Mad Mooney and his verses. Cal had even learned a few, at his father’s knee. And now here he was, carrying on that family tradition: seeing visions and crying into his whisky.

The question was: to tell or not to tell. To speak what he’d seen, and endure the laughter and the sly looks, or to keep it hidden. Part of him badly wanted to talk, to spill everything to somebody (Brendan, even) and see what they made of it. But another part said: be quiet, be careful. Wonderland doesn’t come to those who blab about it, only to those who keep their silence, and wail.

So that’s what he did. He sat, and shook, and waited.