Weaveworld

IV

THE SHRINE OF THE MORTALITIES

1

he day after Apolline’s visit – with polar conditions moving down across the country, and the temperature dropping hourly – Suzanna went out to look at the sites on the list. The first of them proved a disappointment: the house she’d come to see, and those adjacent to it, were in the process of being demolished. As she studied her map, to be certain she’d come to the correct address, one of the workmen left a fire of roof-timbers he was tending and sauntered across to her.

‘There’s nothing to see,’ he said. There was a look of distaste on his face which she couldn’t fathom.

‘Is this where number seventy-two stood?’ she asked.

‘You don’t look the type,’ he replied.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t –’

‘To come looking.’

She shook her head. He seemed to see that he’d made an error of some kind, and his expression mellowed.

‘You didn’t come to see the murder house?’ he said.

‘Murder house?’

‘This is where that bastard did his three kiddies in. There’ve been people here all week, picking up bricks –’

‘I didn’t know.’

She vaguely remembered the grim headlines, however: an apparently sane man – and loving father – had murdered his children while they slept; then killed himself.

‘My mistake,’ said the fire-watcher. ‘Couldn’t believe some of these people, wanting souvenirs. It’s unnatural.’

He frowned at her, then turned away and headed back to his duties.

Unnatural. That was the way Violet Pumphrey had condemned Mimi’s house in Rue Street; Suzanna had never forgotten it. ‘Some houses,’ she’d said, ‘they’re not quite natural.’ She’d been right. Perhaps the children who’d died here had been victims of that same unfocused fear; their killer moved either to preserve them forever from the forces he felt at work in his little sphere, or else wash his own fear away in their blood. Whichever, unless she could read auguries in smoke or rubble, there was no sense in lingering.