Weaveworld

III

THE SECRET ISLE

1

he train was an hour late reaching Birmingham. When it finally arrived the snow was still falling, and taxis couldn’t be had for love nor money. Cal asked for directions to Harborne, and waited in line for twenty-five minutes to board the bus, which then crawled from stop to stop, taking on further chilled passengers until it was so overburdened it could carry no more. Progress was slow. The city-centre was snarled with traffic, reducing everything to a snail’s pace. Once out of the centre the roads were hazardous – dusk and snow conspiring to cut visibility – and the driver never risked more than ten miles an hour. Everyone sat in wilful cheerfulness, avoiding each others’ eyes for fear of having to make conversation. The woman who’d seated herself beside Cal was nursing a small terrier, encased in a tartan coat, and a picture of misery. Several times he caught its doleful eyes regarding him, and returned its gaze with a consoling smile.

He’d eaten on the train, but he still felt lightheaded, utterly divorced from the dismal scenes their route had to offer. The wind slapped him from his reverie, however, once he stepped out of the bus on Harborne Hill. The woman with the tartan dog had given him directions to Waterloo Road, assuring him that it was a three-minute trot at the outside. In fact it took him almost half an hour to find, during which time the chill had clawed its way through his clothes and into his marrow.

Gluck’s house was a large, double-fronted building, its facade dominated by a monkey-puzzle tree which rose to challenge the eaves. Twitching with cold, he rang the bell. He didn’t hear it sound in the house, so he knocked, hard, then harder. A light was turned on in the hallway, and after what seemed an age the door was opened, to reveal Gluck, the remains of a chewed cigar in his hand, grinning and instructing him to get in out of the cold before his balls froze. He didn’t need a second invitation. Gluck closed the door after him, and threw a piece of carpet against it to keep out the draught, then led Cal down the hallway. It was a tight squeeze. The passage was all but choked by cardboard boxes, piled to well above head height.

‘Are you moving?’ Cal asked, as Gluck ushered him into an idyllically warm kitchen which was similarly littered with boxes, bags and piles of paperwork.

‘Good God, no,’ Gluck replied. ‘Take off your wet stuff. I’ll fetch you a towel.’

Cal skinned off his soaked jacket and equally sodden shirt, and was taking off his shoes, which oozed water like sponges, when Gluck returned with not only a towel but a sweater and a pair of balding corduroys.

‘Try these,’ he said, slinging the clothes into Cal’s lap. ‘I’ll make some tea. You like tea?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I live on tea. Sweet tea and cigars.’

He filled the kettle and lit the antiquated gas cooker. That done he fetched a pair of hiker’s socks from the radiator, and gave them to Cal.

‘Getting warmer?’ he asked.

‘Much.’

‘I’d offer you something stronger,’ he said, as he produced tea-caddy, sugar and a chipped mug from a cupboard. ‘But I don’t touch it. My father died of drink.’ He put several heaped spoons of tea into the pot. ‘I must tell you,’ he said, wreathed in steam, ‘I never expected to hear from you again. Sugar?’

‘Please.’

‘Pick up the milk, will you? We’ll go through to the study.’

Taking the pot, sugar and mug, he led Cal out of the kitchen and upstairs to the first landing. It was in the same condition as the floor below: its decoration neglected, its lamps without shades, and heaped everywhere the same prodigious amount of paperwork, as though some mad bureaucrat had willed Gluck his life’s work.

He pushed open one of the doors and Cal followed him into a large, cluttered room – more boxes, more files – which was hot enough to grow orchids in, and reeked of stale cigar smoke. Gluck set the tea down on one of the half-dozen tables, claiming his own mug from beside a heap of notes, then drew two armchairs up beside the electric fire.

‘Sit. Sit,’ he exhorted Cal, whose gaze had been drawn to the contents of one of the boxes. It was full, to brimming, with dried frogs.

‘Ah,’ said Gluck. ‘No doubt you’re wondering …’

‘Yes,’ Cal confessed, ‘I am. Why frogs?’

‘Why indeed?’ Gluck replied, ‘It’s one of the countless questions we’re trying to answer. It isn’t just frogs, of course. We get cats; dogs; a lot of fish. We’ve had tortoises. Aeschylus was killed by a tortoise. That’s one of the first recorded falls.’

‘Falls?’

‘From the heavens,’ said Gluck. ‘How many sugars?’

‘Frogs? From the sky?’

‘It’s very common. Sugars?’

‘Two.’

Cal peered into the box again, and took a trio of frogs out. Each was tagged; on the tag was written the date it fell, and where. One had come down in Utah, one in Dresden, a third in County Cork.

‘Are they dead on arrival?’ he asked.

‘Not always,’ said Gluck, handing Cal his tea. ‘Sometimes they arrive unharmed. Other times, in pieces. There’s no pattern to it. Or rather, there is. but we’ve still to find it.’ He sipped his tea noisily. ‘Now –’ he said, ‘– you’re not here to talk about frogs.’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘What are you here to talk about?’

‘I don’t know where to begin.’

‘Those are always the best tales,’ Gluck declared, his face glowing. ‘Begin with the most preposterous.’

Cal smiled; here was a man ready for a story.

‘Well –’ he said, taking a deep breath. And he began.

He’d intended to keep the account short, but after ten minutes or so Gluck began to interrupt his story with disgressionary questions. It consequently took several hours to tell the whole thing, during which Gluck smoked his way through an heroic cigar. At last, the narrative reached Gluck’s doorstep, and it became shared memory. For two or three minutes Gluck said nothing, nor did he even look at Cal, but studied the debris of stubs and matches in the ashtray. It was Cal who broke the silence.

‘Do you believe me?’ he said.

Gluck blinked, and frowned, as though he’d been stirred from thoughts of something entirely different.

‘Shall we make some more tea?’ he said.

He tried to stand up, but Cal took fierce hold of his arm.

‘Do you believe me?’ he demanded.

‘Of course,’ said Gluck, with a trace of sadness in his voice. ‘I think I’m obliged to. You’re sane. You’re articulate. You’re damnably particular. Yes, I believe you. But you must understand, Cal, that in doing so I deliver a mortal blow to several of my fondest illusions. You are looking at a man in mourning for his theories.’ He stood up. ‘Ah well …’ he picked up the pot from the table, then set it down again. ‘Come next door,’ he said.

There were no curtains at the window of the next room. Through it Cal saw that the snow had thickened to near-blizzard proportions while he’d been talking. The garden at the back of the house, and the houses beyond, had become a white nowhere.

But Gluck hadn’t brought him in to show him the view; it was the walls he was directing Cal’s attention to. Every available inch was covered with maps, most of which looked to have been up there since the world was young. They were stained with an accrual of cigar smoke, scrawled over in a dozen different pens, and infested with countless coloured pins, each presumably marking a place where some anomalous phenomenon had occured. And on the fringes of these maps, tacked up in mind-boggling profusion, were photographs of the events: grainy, thumb-nail pictures, foot-wide enlargements, strips of sequential images lifted from a home movie. There were many he could make no sense of, and others that looked patently fake. But for every blurred or phony photograph there were two that pictured something genuinely startling, like the frumpy woman standing in a domestic garden up to her ankles in what seemed to be a trawler’s deep-sea catch; or the policeman standing guard outside a three-storey house which had fallen over on its face, though not a single brick was out of place; or the car bonnet which bore the imprint of two human faces, side by side. Some of the pictures were comical in their casual weirdness, others had a grim authenticity about them – the witnesses sometimes distressed, sometimes shielding their faces – that was anything but amusing. But all, whether ludicrous or alarming, went to support the same thesis: that the world was stranger than most of Humankind ever assumed.

‘This is just the tip of the iceberg –’ said Gluck. ‘I’ve got thousands of these photographs. Tens of thousands of testimonies.’

Some of the pictures, Cal noted, were linked by threads of various colours to pins in the maps.

‘You think there’s a pattern here?’ said Cal.

‘I believe so. But now, after hearing what you’ve told me, I begin to think maybe I was looking in the wrong place for it. Some of my evidence, you see, overlaps with your account. For the last three weeks – while you were trying to contact me – Max and I were up in Scotland, looking at a site we just found in the Highlands. We picked up some very strange articles there. I’d assumed it was a landing place of some kind for our visitors. I think now I was wrong. It was probably the valley your unweaving took place in.’

‘What did you find?’

‘The usual debris. Coins, clothing, personal effects of one kind or another. We boxed them all up, and brought them back down with us to examine at leisure. We could have made them fit our pet theories, you know … but now I think much of that’s in ruins.’

‘I’d like to see that stuff,’ Cal said.

‘I’ll unpack it for you,’ said Gluck. His expression, since Cal had told his story, had been that of a deeply perplexed man. Even now he surveyed the map room with something akin to despair. In the past few hours he’d seen his whole world-view thrown into disarray.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Cal.

‘What for?’ Gluck replied. ‘Telling me about miracles? Please don’t be. I’ll just as happily believe in your mystery as in mine. It’ll just take a little time to adjust. All I ask is that the mystery be there.’

‘Oh it is,’ said Cal. ‘Believe me, it is. I just don’t know where.’

His attention strayed from Gluck’s face to the window, and the blank scene beyond. More and more he feared for his beloved exiles. The night, the Scourge and the snow all seemed to be conspiring to erase them.

He crossed to the window; the temperature plummeted as he approached the icy glass.

‘I have to find them,’ he said. ‘I have to be with them.’

He’d successfully kept his sense of desolation at bay until now; but sobs suddenly wracked him. He heard Gluck come to his side, but he didn’t have sufficient mastery of himself to control his tears: they kept falling. Gluck put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

‘It’s good to see somebody so in need of the miraculous,’ he said. ‘We’ll find your Seerkind, Mooney. Trust me. If there’s a clue to their whereabouts, it’s here.’

‘We have to be quick,’ Cal said softly.

‘I know. But we’ll find them. Not just for you, but for me. I want to meet your lost people.’

‘They’re not mine.’

‘In a way they are. And you’re theirs. I could see that on your face. That’s why I believe you.’