Weaveworld

2

It was late afternoon by the time she got back to Harborne. Another night of frost was on its way, pearling the pavements and roofs.

When she went upstairs she found the sleepwalker had not been put in his chair but was sitting against heaped pillows on the bed, his eyes as glazed as ever. He looked sick; the mark Uriel’s revelation had left on his face was livid against his pallid skin. She’d left too early to shave him that morning, and it distressed her to see how close to utter dereliction such minor neglect had left him looking. Talking quietly to him about where she’d been, she led him from the bed over to the chair beside the window, where the light was a little better. Then she collected the electric razor from the bathroom and shaved his stubble.

At the beginning it had been an eerie business, ministering to him like this, and it had upset her. But time had toughened her, and she’d come to view the various chores of keeping him presentable as a means to express her affection for him.

Now, however, as dusk devoured the light outside, she felt those early anxieties rising in her again. Perhaps it was the day she’d spent out of the house, and out of Cal’s company, that made her tender to this experience afresh. Perhaps it was also the sense she had that events were drawing to a close; that there would not be many more days when she would have to shave him and bathe him. That it was almost over.

Night was upon the house so quickly the room soon became too gloomy to work in. She went to the door and switched on the light.

His reflection appeared in the window, hanging in the glass against the darkness outside. She left him staring at it while she went for the comb.

There was something in the void ahead of him, though he couldn’t see what. The wind was too strong, and he, as ever, was dust before it.

But the shadow, or whatever it was, persisted, and sometimes – when the wind dropped a little – it seemed he could almost see it studying him. He looked back at it and its gaze held him, so that instead of being blown on, and away, the dust he was made of momentarily stood still.

As he returned the scrutiny, the face before him became clearer. He knew it vaguely, from some place he’d gained and lost. Its eyes, and the stain that ran from hairline to cheek, belonged to somebody he’d known once. It irritated him, not being able to remember where he’d seen this man before.

It was not the face itself which finally reminded him, but the darkness it was set against.

The last time he’d seen this stranger, perhaps the only time, the man had been standing against another such darkness. A cloud, perhaps, shot with lightning. It had a name, this cloud, but he couldn’t remember it. The place had a name too, but that was even further out of his reach. The moment of their meeting he did remember however; and some fragments of the journey that led up to it. He’d been in a rickshaw, and he’d passed through a region where time was somehow out of joint. Where today breathed yesterday’s air, and tomorrow’s too.

For curiosity’s sake he wanted to know the stranger’s name, before the wind caught him and moved him on again. But he was dust, so he couldn’t ask. Instead he pressed his motes towards the darkness on which the mysterious face hovered, and reached to touch his skin.

It was not a living thing he made contact with, it was cold glass. His fingers fell from the window, the heat-rings they’d left shrinking.

If it was glass before him, he dimly thought, then he must be looking at himself surely. The man he’d met, standing against that nameless cloud: that was him.

A puzzle awaited Suzanna when she returned to the room. She was almost certain she’d left Cal with his hands on his lap, but now his right arm hung at his side. Had he tried to move? If so it was the first independent motion he’d made since the trance had claimed him.

She started to speak to him, softly, asking him if he heard her, if he saw her, or knew her name. But as ever it was a oneway conversation. Either his hand had simply slipped from his lap or she’d been mistaken and it hadn’t been there in the first place.

Sighing, she set to combing his hair.

He was still dust in a wilderness, but now he was dust with a memory.

It was enough to give him weight. The wind bullied him, wanting its way with him, but this time he refused to be moved. It raged against him. He ignored it, standing his ground in the nowhere while he tried to fit the pieces of his thoughts together.

He had met himself once, in a house near a cloud; he’d been brought there in a rickshaw while a world folded up around him.

What did it signify, that he’d come face to face with himself as an old man? What did that mean?

The question was not so difficult to answer, even for dust. It meant he would at some future time step into that world, and live there.

And from that, what followed? What followed?

That the place was not lost.

Oh yes! Oh God in Heaven, yes! That was it. He would be there. Not tomorrow maybe, or the day after that; but someday, some future day: he would be there.

It was not lost. The Fugue was not lost.

It took only that knowledge, that certainty, and he woke.

‘Suzanna,’ he said.