Advent (74 page)

 
Hell’s great brass gates yawned open to receive her. Its welcome was prepared.

 
So the great and fallen magus lamented as she sank to her death, the river darkness thicker around her inch by inch, foot by foot.

 
Then the murk was lit as if by a burnished aurora. Hollow voices and lidless eyes thronged around her.

 
You die the final death, Magister.

 
Under the choking weight of the river, her eyes were twisted shut and her mouth open in a drowned scream.

 
Give us flesh again, Magister. Give us body. Admit us and be saved.

 
The gates were wide. She was on the very threshold. Her poor battered husk was empty of air.

 
We have served you, Magister. Now accept us and live. Share our being.

 
Better to die, the magus knew. Better to die. The judge was merciful. He had atoned for all sins. There might be forgiveness still, if she refused the last temptation and denied them.

 
The final instant is here. Permit us to do you our last service. Give us your flesh and live with us.

 
The magus had once, triumphantly, believed herself ready to assume immortality. She had let herself be touched by the prospect of something beyond life, love, death, something no longer part of the commonwealth of humanity. Once cursed by that desire, she could not surrender it. For all her wisdom, all the patience and study and humility to which she had once dedicated herself, she could not, in the end, bear to die.

 
I accept, she said in her heart; and so, at the very last, Johann Faust sold his soul.

 
The drenched and ruined body jerked, tensed, filled with strength. Eyes blazing underwater like the furnaces of a sunken city, it stretched out its limbs and swam powerfully away.

Thirty-three

Mother of God
, J.P. thought, looking around the professor’s front room. No wonder she lost her feckin’ marbles.

 
None of them could stop themselves from stealing glances over their shoulders at the faces on the walls, even as they pushed the furniture around and squeezed past each other and fussed over the business of getting lead-grey, semi-comatose Hester Lightfoot into her house. The masks quelled the useless hubbub of conflicting instructions that had been pouring out of the small crowd ever since it had assembled in answer to J.P.’s call for help. This at least was a relief. One of the women was close to hysteria herself, and between her wavering on the outskirts of a screaming fit and the others trying to shut her up while arguing over what to do with Hester, he thought he’d have been mad himself in another minute.

 
If he wasn’t already.

 
He’d be back in the pub right now, so help him, with a glass of something a lot stiffer than stout, were it not for the fact that other people had seen it too, watched it gliding along the sky.
It
. Come on now, J.P., you’re a journalist, make an effort.
It.
The black thing, the black flying thing, rising up before his own two eyes like death’s feckin’ messenger.

 
It’s the end, he thought. It’s finally come. Who’d have thought? Turns out Ma was right after all, God rest her. Hands up everyone who’d guessed he should have paid more attention to Sister Beata and the feckin’ nuns. Some of it stuck in your head, mind. Some of the words had a way of getting in there and never coming out. The poetry of them.
And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; that ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great.

 
His phone vibrated in his pocket.

 
‘Excuse me a sec.’ He left the others attending to Hester and went out to the front steps. She’d be all right now if she was going to be, the others would see to that, and he urgently needed to reduce his exposure to her version of interior decoration.

 
It had started snowing again. Of course it had. The old Vikings had a name for it, he remembered.
Fimbulwinter.
The last winter, when the world got ready to die. Three unbroken years, was it supposed to last? Now that was just a story, though.

 
Just a story.

 
He wrestled the phone out of his pocket. The message from Vicky blinked up:
bbc on line, want ur story.

 
He stared at it for a long while.

 
Well well well, he thought sardonically. My big break. In the right place at the right time. Just what every provincial hack dreams of: getting to do a report for the Beeb.

 
He imagined how it would sound. The crisp, uncommitted, inoffensively regional voice of the studio anchor. ‘John Patrick Moss of the
Western Cornishman
sent us this report.’

 
This report. What would he say? What would he tell the country, and the world? There was a BBC way of doing these things. Detached, wry, just a tad sceptical. Don’t worry, nation of Britain. Don’t worry, people beside your retro radios or in front of your shiny flat-screen televisions. Your man in the field won’t ask you to think anything you don’t want to think.

 
He called in.

 
‘Vicky? J.P. . . . Not so great, since you ask, but— . . . Yes, of course. Now? . . . OK.’ He puffed a cloud of breath into the chill air. ‘No . . . What? . . . Is there a story?’ He tucked the phone closer to his chin. ‘Is there a feckin’ story? Is that what you’re asking me, Victoria dear?’ He let the silence stretch a little. ‘The end of the world. How’s that grab you, Vicky? Think it’ll do for the front page? . . . No. No, you listen to me. I’m here. No one else is going to get here until the weather changes, and that could be a while, eh?’ Three unbroken years. ‘I know what I’ve seen. And I’m not the only one. Put them through.’

 
He heard beeps in the office and Vicky’s exasperated sigh before he hung up. He fiddled with the phone, blowing on his fingers. It rang again almost at once.

 
The urban voice. Slightly bored. Techie. He imagined the bloke in his studio, surrounded by all the equipment. Probably finishing his shift. Coffee, the kind that came with extra adjectives, in a paper cup.

 
‘Yes, I’m ready,’ he said. ‘OK . . . Got it . . . Yes.’

 
Silence. The machines were waiting to record him.

 
Ah, feck it, he thought to himself. Like Ma used to say, always tell the truth; it’s the easiest thing to remember.

 
He told the truth.

Gawain had to hold her hand every step of the way. If he let go even for a second, she stopped dead, as dead as when he’d first seen her, sleepwalking in the rain. But he held it gently this time and led her without hurrying. This was partly because she’d gone so numb he knew there was no point trying to make her speed up, and partly because it gave him more time to think of something to say.

 
In his other hand he held the little wooden box with its tarnished silver clasp, which she’d used to bring him water from the chapel.

 
The snow was falling again, countless millions of white silences descending. What was he supposed to say?

 
In the first violence of her grief, once she’d at last understood what had happened, she’d clung to him with a stricken intensity to which he had no answer at all. He’d never seen what anguish like that did to a person before. She gripped him so tightly her nails made him bleed and yet she might as well have been a thousand miles away, so powerless was he to reach across the abysm of misery that separated them.
Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,
she’d cried, again and again, until it stopped sounding like a word and became the scream of a gull. How could he answer that? And when at last the cries had emptied themselves and she’d shrivelled into a limp stillness that was if anything worse to witness than the paroxysms of grief, none of his clumsy words had touched her at all.

 
‘Marina.’ Nothing. ‘Come on then.’ Nothing. ‘Let’s get you warm, come on.’ Nothing. ‘Marina, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.’ Nothing.

 
The first time he’d set eyes on her he’d thought she was dead. It was a bad omen. She was getting colder. Dying from the inside out.

 
So he’d lifted her to her feet then, thinking at least he should get her inside somewhere, out of the snow. The chapel was closest, but he couldn’t take her back there, not now, and anyway, she needed warmth. He could find something in the house, maybe. Some clothes. A fire.

 
She’d stood up unprotestingly, face vacant. But now as she followed him along the paths under the trees again, mute as a beast of burden, Gawain admitted to himself that it wasn’t shelter she needed, or fire, or dry clothes, or even the attention of someone who knew what they were doing. What she needed was a speck of light in the emptiness, some tiny thing to hold on to. Something as small as a word, even.

 
He stopped when they came out of the woods, at the bottom of the field below the house. Awkwardly, he put the box down and took her hand in both of his. Her eyes looked straight through him into nothing. It was almost full night now.

 
‘Marina.’

 
Not a flicker. It was like trying to address a waxwork.

 
‘OK. Marina. Before he . . . Before your dad . . .’

 
In the shadow of her face he thought he saw her eyes slide round and look at him, hopelessly.

 
‘Before he . . .’

 
Tristram hadn’t known what to say either. How could he have? What last message could possibly be adequate to the pain he’d handed down to her? How could he even have dared open his mouth? Gawain wondered: maybe speech runs out where magic takes over. Maybe that’s what magic will turn out to be: the things we don’t have words for. And it’s just that there turns out to be so, so much more of that than we all thought.

 
He took a deep breath.

 
‘Your dad told me to tell you something. Before he . . . went to your mum. He told me to tell you that . . .’ He swallowed, closed his eyes. It was just like he’d been doing all along since he got here: keeping going. No turning back. Just keep on. ‘That you kept him going. That he loved you so much, that you were everything to him. That without you he couldn’t have held on even as long as he did.’ Her lips trembled and opened. He knew what they were going to say:
Stop.
Stop torturing me
. But he blundered on, wading through her misery like he’d forced his bare feet through the snow. ‘He couldn’t say it himself, because . . . He could never. Not face to face. He was stuck between . . . between . . .’ Her eyes glistened, then overflowed. Appallingly, her face stayed perfectly still as the fat tears coursed down, like a weeping statue, or a weeping corpse. ‘Marina, I’m so sorry. But I know. The thing is, he didn’t have a choice. It’s . . .’

 
He grimaced, then let go of her hand and took her shoulders. Say the truth, he told himself. Just say it. Don’t try to hide it.
Truth hurts.
You’d think words would be the easy bit, the bit that didn’t need courage, but oh no, oh God no.

 
‘Marina, please. Listen. I lost my mum and dad too. Today. I didn’t even know who they were. I still don’t. All I know is they’re gone, I don’t have anyone either.’ She was weeping with her eyes wide open, completely silently, staring at him all the while. It was unbearable, but he had to go on. ‘It’s like you catch something. Or it catches you. And after that things just can’t keep going like they used to. That’s what I mean, there’s no choice. Your dad loved you so much, Marina, I know he did. But after . . .’ He shrugged helplessly. ‘This. After all this, he couldn’t go on living here, being your dad. Your mum too, I know she loves you.’
My second heart
. The tears washed scars in the dirt and sand on her cheeks. ‘I know she’d do anything to just come and be your mum, if she could. But she can’t. It doesn’t matter how much she wants it. What we want doesn’t make any difference at all. I used to have my life too, Marina. I used to have somewhere to go and stuff to do. But after today all of that . . .’ He mimed releasing a handful of dust into the wind. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m trying to say. All I know is, at least . . . at least . . .’ He swallowed thickly, tasting salt. ‘At least there’s two of us, Marina. It’s not just you. It’s not just me. At least—’