Weaveworld

2

– 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 clusters 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 heals. 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 sec 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 stopped 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 adrenalin 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 want 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 a 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 lips 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.