Castle Of Bone (17 page)

He could not have said, then or afterwards from where his impression of energy, of furious movement came; because everything he saw, that printed itself so indelibly on his mind’s eye that he was able to see it there for ever after, appeared as calm as what lay outside.

Till now his walk through the tunnel had coexisted with his journey into the castle. Now his two selves met and fused. He came into this inner courtyard from the outer one, he also came from his tunnel into the same place, though he had the impression of being pushed into it from behind, out of the tunnel, while he had seemed to be pulled, sucked in, from the outer court.

He stood there dazed and momentarily blinded.

The floor and walls of the court were like those of the tunnel, alternately transparent and opaque – at times Hugh could see through them to the apple trees beyond (which looked, though insubstantial, vague as a vision or a dream) at times they reflected back everything within the hall. At still other times, however, though they appeared transparent, he could see nothing beyond them but a faint blue haze. The castle might have been drifting in the sky; above, below and all round it, a huge void.

There was an apple tree in the middle of the court; strangely austere and stern, its leaves and trunk and branches seemed made of a dim silverish metal like pewter, and its apples of fine gold. A soft light came from these. It was more like electric than candle power in that it seemed less particular to its source than a candle flame would be, spreading itself further and more evenly, like light from electric bulbs. Yet it was also more mobile than electricity; ebbing and flowing within the fruit and within the hall, as living flames would move.

Beneath the apple tree stood a round bowl on a pedestal, like a baptismal font, but bigger. Anna stood beside it on a raised platform, and on the step below her knelt Penn, his hair like the golden apples, giving off light or appearing to. They were Penn and Anna and yet not Penn and Anna. “They’re both grown up,” said Jean in an awed voice, and indeed they were. Yet they looked exactly as they had known them, only the age and authority were new. Anna, though still small and pale beside her brother, had gained something of her mother’s brilliance. It was a quieter, dimmer brilliance than her mother’s, yet also fuller and more powerful; steel to silver, you could say. She wore the same clothes she had worn in their world, white shirt, black skirt, a medallion on a chain that Penn had bought her for her birthday from the cheap Indian shop in the town. But they might have been robes on her now, as Penn’s clothes on him might have been armour.

Hugh’s two kinds of knowledge fusing, he recognized them at last. Anna was not only Anna, but the girl in the alder grove (he even remembered that the Anna he knew had a nightdress as red as the dress in the alder grove). Penn was the man in armour who had passed him, riding, when he had been rooted, held to the willow tree.

Nothing except the apple tree was static. The fire threw light upon walls and floor, created lights and shadows which themselves constantly changed and shifted, taking on the forms of tree and flowers and of animals and birds, these reflected sometimes out into the sky itself. The sun had gone. The whole sky now was a dark, deep blue.

Hugh had to hold very tight to himself. He felt that if he did not he too would be lost, shifting shape from second to second. In a way he wanted to be lost. He wanted to let go, he would have done, yet something would not let him. Mostly that something could only have been Jean. She clung to his hand still, so holding him to his own form, he thought resentfully; she could not, would not, let him go.

Anna and Penn changed form, however. It might have been merely an illusion created by the shifting brilliance of the fire itself, yet at times they appeared indistinguishable from the form it took. At one moment Anna became a giantess, her head lost in darkness, shadows falling from her outstretched arms across the bodies of Jean and Hugh. The next moment she dwindled to her own size. Penn dwindled too. Briefly he was the Penn they knew; but he did not remain there, he went on dwindling, until a tiny baby lay at Anna’s feet; their baby, as if new-born again.

He heard Jean gasp besides him, as Anna bent and took the baby up. For a moment she held him close to her. Then she stretched out her arms, the baby hung above the flames. Hugh knew what would happen then. But he did not let it disturb him, not least because he wanted it to happen; that was his decision, he wanted it; he wanted it to happen to him, too, because thereafter he would have to decide nothing; it would all be done. All he must do now was wait and see what came of it.

But Jean’s grip on his hand tightened. “Hugh.
Hugh
. You must stop her. She’s going to put him in the fire.”

Anna had never appeared smaller or more ordinary. She was even chewing her tongue, Hugh saw. But it did not make her any less powerful.

“Don’t you see. She has to put him on the fire,” he said, his voice thick in his throat. “That’s the point of the cupboard. Don’t you see.”

“No, I don’t see,” Jean screamed. “She’ll burn him. She’ll burn him to death.”

“Not to death,” said Hugh. “To life. Isn’t that right, Anna?” He appealed to her directly now. She took the baby to her breast again and in her most little girl voice said to Jean, not to him.

“I’m going to burn him, Jean. I’m going to make him live for ever. We can all live for ever if we want.”

“I don’t want to live for ever,” Jean screamed. “Nor does Penn. Nor does Hugh.”

Anna turned to Hugh now. Anna, not Anna, she said, she almost wheedled in the way he most disliked in the Anna he knew – he had heard her talk to Penn like that, when she wanted her own way – “You don’t want to die do you, Hugh? You don’t want to get old do you?
I
don’t want to get old. I don’t want my skin to shrivel and my hair to turn white. I don’t want Penn’s to, or yours. I want you both to stay with me in my castle.” Her voice coaxed him now; very slow, very low. “All I have to do is bathe him in the fire, then bathe you. Don’t want to get old, Hugh. Don’t want to die.”

“Don’t listen to her, Hugh,” said Jean; sensible Jean; in a voice he knew in her, too, and didn’t like much better. “Don’t listen to her. Listen to me.”

“Don’t listen to her, Hugh. Listen to me,” said Anna. She still held the baby over the flame. But now he saw, to his horror, she would do nothing till he said; it was he who had to make up his mind; Anna had made up her mind; Jean had made up hers. And now it was his, Hugh’s turn. He had bought the cupboard after all; it was his. He had to decide the whole thing for himself.

But now it came to it, he did not know what he wanted. It would have been easy without Jean there, he would have just nodded his head, Anna could do as she was urging, what was it to him? Yet it was not a question of whether he wanted to die one day or not. It was a question of making up his mind about it. And he did not know where or what his mind was. Even had it been working properly, his body would not work, it was rooted, paralysed again, just as the willow tree had paralysed it. Just as his mind was paralysed. He could not connect any one thought to another, nor hold to a single logical thread. There were only two choices after all and each repeated itself over and over, yet each repetition was different from before as well as the same. Stop Anna; let her. Save Penn; leave him. Walk in to the fire, don’t walk into the fire – these were the thoughts went chasing through his head, one after another, time after time. Allow; do nothing. Do nothing; allow. Yet each time it sounded fresh and new. The choice astonished him. His own consciousness was the single link. His mind had to make the decision, to snap the succession at one idea, so inhibiting the next, but even if his mind had been able to do so, his body would not have obeyed. With a huge effort of will, he managed at last to think, fleetingly, of Penn, his friend, of his friendship for Anna too, surprisingly, with this other Anna wheedling him from the other side of the fire. He thought of Jean. For a moment he thought of himself. Avalon, he thought. Thomas the Rhymer, he thought. He remembered all those people taken to live with the fairies, or with the Gods or with Arthur, for ever and ever. And then, pushing these thoughts aside, he thought of the old man’s many lives, and of his own house and his bedroom and the ash tree in the garden. He thought of Humbert, the cat.

Thereafter all thought blurred, one thought lost itself in the next. Hugh felt he was a tree now. He felt rooted, fibrous, with branches; with sap flowing through him, through every vein. He could feel the whole of him, tree self, human self, his human body like one drawn by an old-fashioned anatomist; he felt the paths and strength of each vein and bone and muscle. He held up his hand and against the bone of the fire it looked transparent. He could see the glow of blood and the bones of his fingers, knobbed at the knuckles. He reached his hand out to Anna for help. She reached the baby towards him, nearer and nearer the fire. The flames touched both of them; nearly touched both of them. Avalon. Avalon. The ash tree. Humbert, the kitten-cat.

“Hugh. Hugh. Oh
Hugh
.” Jean was screaming at him now, was pulling him, punching him, shaking him, to no effect. There ran in his head still, unstoppable – Stop Anna. Let her. Avalon. Humbert the cat. I am a tree. I am . . . But Jean was still screaming away besides him, she was fumbling at her brooch, the brown stone in its silver setting. She undid it at last, pulled it out, she jabbed its pin into his arm with all her strength. “
Hugh
!” she screamed one more time. And at the sudden, agonizing pain, Hugh screamed too; his mind cleared momentarily by the pain and fright, he gathered all his strength, snapped the succession, snatched one thought out and held it there as if in front of him, fed his voice with it. “Stop, Anna, no,” he said, slowly, thickly. It was hardly a decision, more a pressure to which he had at last acceded; whether it was what he truly wanted he did not know. It didn’t even seem to matter very much. His voice might have belonged to someone else. “Stop, Anna,” it said. “No, Anna. Don’t.”

The words stilled everything. They stilled the fire, the leaping shadows, they stilled Anna’s arms, they stilled the world turning about the transparent walls of the court. They stilled his thoughts. The only movement left belonged to Jean – once made, predictable, unexceptional as it was, it suppressed all other movements, all other possibilities. Anna, standing by the dying fire, looked small and pale and harmless, a little girl; all the energy having left her, as it had left this place, she let Jean take the baby from her, without let, without hindrance. Hugh’s mind, too, was a vacuum. He felt insubstantial, a thin pale shell, that would shatter at a touch.

Jean went ahead of him now, towards the inner door of the castle. Holding the baby close to her, Anna at her heels, she walked as if she was asleep. Hugh went after them, slowly. His eyes on Anna’s feet, he saw that the strap on her right sandal had come away from the sole, so that her foot kept losing it, sliding sideways, out of the shoe.

They had almost reached the door. Behind them as Hugh turned to look for the last time, he saw that the fire in the bowl had died. The silvered apple tree was on fire instead, a tree of flame, but a cold, consuming flame, as icy as the stars.

They walked through the great door of the castle into a void. It felt like walking off the edges of the world. Hugh expected to find himself falling, and for a moment sensed infinite distance and infinite time, sound growing from him, flowing round him, spreading infinitely, echoing.

The void narrowed and the echo died. The sound compressed itself, folded itself in, clattered as if against a closed and wooden wall. There was a sudden, blinding light. The cupboard door opened, all four of them walked out onto Hugh’s bedroom floor; Hugh, Jean, Anna and lastly Penn in his proper age and form.

The void had gone. Walls had closed round Hugh, confining him, imprisoning him in the narrowest of castles; the castle of bone, he thought. This castle of bone was himself.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It was the same but different. They were the same four people but different.

It was Penn who was the hardest to accept. They had known him both as a new-born baby and as a man, and at his present size, much nearer man than baby he still looked surprisingly small. It was like coming into a house you had known as a young child, huge in memory now appearing to have shrunk, both in size and in effect. It made Hugh feel diminished – almost cheated too. On the other hand if he thought of the baby, Penn seemed gigantic; his arms and legs quite grossly thick, like trees.

He stood in the middle of Hugh’s room now, head down, shaking it, totally bewildered, believing nothing. That was his protection and relief. If he remembered the castle or what had happened he deliberately refused to admit he had. He protested indignantly when they showed him the empty jars of baby food, the bottle with the inch of milk left in the bottom; indeed, looking at Penn now Hugh found them quite as astonishing himself. And when they tried to tell him that it was no longer Thursday, that a whole day had passed, he would not accept this at first, merely grew angrier. They had to turn on Radio One (rather a coming and going sound because Hugh’s transistor needed batteries) to prove it to him. An excited voice said “Hullo everyone,
hullo
. It’s one o’clock again and welcome to our Friday Show. We’ve got some great,
great
sounds for you today” – that it was still only one o’clock giving Hugh almost as great a shock as the fact that it was undeniably Friday must have given Penn. While they were in the cupboard no time had passed outside.