Weaveworld

A CHAPTER OF ACCIDENTS

1

f there was any pattern at all to the events of the day following, it was of reunions denied by chance, and of others just as capriciously granted.

Suzanna had decided the previous evening that she’d go up to Liverpool and re-establish contact with Cal. There was no use in circumspection now. Events were clearly approaching a crisis-point. Cal had to be warned, and plans made – the kind of plans that could only be made face to face – about how they could best protect Mimi’s book, and their lives, in the coming storm. She tried calling him ‘til about midnight, but nobody answered.

In the morning she rang Apolline, fresh from Salisbury, to tell her what she’d seen and learned at the Shrine of the Mortalities. She was prepared for Apolline to reject the information Immacolata’s spirit had offered, out of contempt for its source, but that proved not to be the case.

‘Why shouldn’t we believe it?’ she said, ‘If the dead can’t be honest, who can? Besides, it only confirms what we already knew.’

Suzanna told her she planned to go to Liverpool, and talk with Cal.

‘You won’t be alone up there,’ Apolline informed her. ‘Some people went looking for raptures in your grandmother’s house. You might want to find out if they had any luck.’

‘I’ll do that. I’ll call you when I’ve seen them.’

‘Don’t expect me to be sober.’

Before setting out Suzanna tried calling Chariot Street once more. This time her call received the number disconnected tone; the operator could not tell her why. The morning news bulletin would have answered the question, had she switched on the radio; the television would even have shown her pictures of the patch of blasted ground where the Mooney house had once stood. But she tuned in too late for the news, only catching the weather-report, which promised snow, and more snow.

Attempting the journey by car was, she knew, a certain disaster. Instead she took a taxi to Euston, and the mid-morning train North. Just about the time she was settling down for the four-hour trip to Liverpool Lime Street – which in fact took six – Cal was half way to Birmingham on the eight-twenty train via Runcorn and Wolverhampton.