Fearful Symmetries (17 page)

They turned onto Copeman Lane when they finally reached it, and headed along that unsurfaced road for a good ten minutes before they caught their first glimpse of the old water tower atop Spicer’s Hill. A windmill was spinning close by, but with the pump disengaged. Whatever water remained in the tower was from when the pump last operated, though Dan figured that Corrigan kept the old tank at least a third to a half full so the water would steady it against winds exactly like these.

As well as hats and sunglasses, Dan had a knapsack with work gloves, torches and water bottles, lengths of rope for tethering themselves, even a strip of tarpaulin to kneel on when they were up on the blazing top of the tower. He also had a crowbar and a bolt-cutter from the Blackwater maintenance room, but was hardly surprised to find the padlock on the boundary gate unlocked and swinging on its latch.

“Making it easy,” Peter said.

They found the same at the gate in the chain-link fence at the foot of the tower—another heavy-duty padlock unlocked and swinging free.

Dan unlatched the gate. “He really does want us here.”

As they headed up the modest rise, the old tower creaked and moaned above them, shifting in the sudden gusts. There’s a tiny ocean up there, Dan realized, the most unlikely lake and pond. An unlikely darkness too in all this glare, and possibly enough midnight. Some of the iron plates may have sprung over the years, rivets given way here and there, but there were no leaks that Dan could see.

When they reached the access ladder, they put on their gloves and began climbing. The wind made it hard going, buffeting them constantly and burning their skin. The glare was terrible.

Once at the summit, Dan was relieved to see the hatch cover just four metres away. He would have hated to be out on that vast shallow dome longer than necessary. As it was, he felt they could be blown into the sky at any moment.

Fumbling in his knapsack, he brought out the tarpaulin, waited till the gusts eased a little then spread the thick canvas across the burning metal, using his knees to stop it blowing away until Peter could anchor it behind him.

Dan moved forward then, and again felt incredible relief. The padlock for the hatch cover was missing altogether.

In Grace’s pocket, Dan figured.

The tower groaned and shuddered under them. Again Dan waited till the gusts eased, then grabbed the hatch handle and heaved the cover back. It clanged like a gong on the burning metal shell.

Dan took the tether rope from the knapsack, and spent what seemed an eternity securing it round his waist before handing the slack back to Peter so he could do the same. Then he slung his torch round his neck, stretched face-down on the tarp with his head and one arm over the raised rim of the hatch, and sent torchlight down into the gloom.

The stench hit him as he did so: the smell of algae and old water left standing far too long. Then there was the ladder dwindling away, disappearing in a shimmer of dark green water that roiled in the constant buffeting of the wind. It might have been three, four meters deep down there, but how could he know?

Ignoring the heat through the tarpaulin, he played torchlight back and forth across the shifting surface, not sure what he expected to find. Then he saw it: a long wooden box floating a few meters out from the ladder, tethered to it by a short length of cord.

Dan cried out in surprise. It was such a melodramatic sight in such a place, bringing so many conventional horrors to mind: familiar, somehow cosy things like vampires and the undead waiting out the daylight hours inside coffins and caskets.

A much grimmer thought was there too.

Traci Metcalfe and Jane Cotter were missing!

He had to go down and see.

Peter had caught Dan’s reaction. He scrabbled in alongside, peered into the gloom and sent his own torch beam skittering across the water till he too located the oblong box.

“One of the girls?” he yelled above the wind. “Call for help?”

“See if it’s empty first!” Dan shouted back. “Keep hold of the rope. See if you get a signal.”

Dan shifted on the tarp, swung his legs onto the ladder and found a footing several rungs down. Then, thrusting the crowbar through his belt, he began his descent while Peter played out the safety line.

As Dan’s head sank below the rim, he found himself in a different world entirely. The smell was strong, unpleasant, but not overpowering. Some higher plates on the sides
had
sprung near the top, so a few grace notes of light left swatches of green across the eddying surface. The rest was a creaking, groaning darkness, though with a stillness about it, almost a cathedral calm. The heat, like the glare, belonged out there, intruded from above.

Peter kept his torch focused on the box, while Dan’s, dangling on his chest, showed the eddies and swirls at the foot of the ladder as he closed the distance. His only thoughts right then were to keep his grip on the rungs and not lose the crowbar.

When he was finally at water level, he made himself continue down four more rungs, hating every moment, dreading what this dark fetid pool might conceal.

People were missing!

Again he dared not hesitate. Hooking an arm through the ladder, he grabbed the tether and hauled the box slowly towards him.

What would it be? Murdered girl? Living girl? Allan Grace as modern-day vampire? It couldn’t be a Dean Corrigan prank to creep out the more resolute kids. They were never meant to get this far.

The box bumped against the ladder and Dan drew it in close. The opened and missing padlocks made him bold. He reached out, grabbed the upper edge of what looked very much like a coffin lid, and lifted. The box bobbed, slewed. The lid came away, slid off into the water.

There was a wild rush in the darkness, a sudden flurry, something, though nothing easily grasped. Whatever it was left the box rocking, dipping, plunging, and Dan’s head ringing as if from a tremendous blow, though the box had been completely empty, Dan was sure of it. Was empty still, just so much sanded watertight timber.

But sudden, so sudden, all of it. And other things in those moments. A scream from above, garbled words, what might have been: “He’s here!”, and the tether rope tumbling down as if cut away.

Dan reacted as quickly as he could, turning, clambering back up the ladder, but fumbling, losing precious seconds, what with the crowbar and trailing tether line. When he was out in the heat and glare again, there was no one else on the vast metal lid, which brought the terrifying thought that Peter had lost his footing and gone over the side—or been pushed!

But when Dan reached the access ladder at last and was starting down, he saw Peter far below, leaning against the car, hands pressed to his head.

The drive back to Everton seemed twice as long as the trip out. Peter sat next to him, dazed, confused, but recovering. He’d been almost catatonic at first, though compliant enough, getting in the car, buckling in, even managing an “I’m okay,” but frowning and rubbing his temples all the while.

By the time they reached the highway, his answers about what had happened up on the tower went from “Not sure” and “He was there” to “He looked so different. Terrible. Blasted. Worn. Gaunt face. Threadbare suit. No glamours hiding anything this time.”

Dan allowed for heat stroke, even Peter’s infrequent condition-related delusions and hallucinations, but kept pressing. “You’re sure it was him?”

“No mistaking it. Where are we going?”

“Everton Base Hospital.”

“No, Doctor Dan! He has Traci Metcalfe.”

“You see that?”

Peter kept his hands pressed to his head, frowning in pain or concentration. “Not sure. It’s this migraine. Get to the arcade!”

“You’ll stay in the car.”

“Yes. Just hurry!”

When they gutted the old Bowen’s haberdashery in Bennet Street, a late-1970s developer revamped the building as a shopping arcade, creating fourteen shopfronts that flourished for twenty-five years, languished for six, and finally ended up in the hands of eight separate owners.

Those owners had never agreed on a common business plan for the site. Some wanted too much rent, others needed tax write-offs, three left their spaces empty to annoy various family members. The two shopfronts nearest the main street kept tenants easily enough, a hairdresser and a country crafts store; Shop 7 in the middle housed a naturopath, Shop 9 a property agent who did most of his work from home. The rest ended up with vertical blinds or venetians shutting them away, sheets of old newspaper or swirls of whitewash, so many closed-up spaces filled with stale air, dead insects, abandoned dreams. The arcade became a ghost town in miniature, a landlocked
Mary Celeste
sailing on untended and largely untenanted through a dozen more winters and summers.

When Dan pulled up out front, he tried calling the police again, but there was still no signal. Leaving Peter to get through when he could, he took a torch and the crowbar and hurried into the quiet arcade. Four shops in use left ten to check, but that number quickly became one when Dan found a shopfront with its windows blackwashed over for maximum darkness.

He couldn’t afford to wait. He fitted the crowbar into the door edge near the lock, applied maximum force. The door sprang on that first try, shuddered inwards, sent dim arcade light spilling across a dusty floor. Dan switched on his torch as he stepped into the gloom, but found it didn’t work. Of course mobiles and torches were useless now.

Dan moved around the open door, then immediately to his left toward the front left corner, as far back into shadow as he could get from the doorway, then turned.

As his eyes adjusted, there was an immediate double vision effect: one moment what looked for all the world like a mob-capped, aproned servant from Sydney’s colonial past sitting meekly, primly, on a chair in the corner diagonally opposite where he stood. The next that figure was down on the floor there, leaning back with knees drawn up in a large plastic farm tub, but naked, no longer dressed, and held by what looked like leather bands at neck, elbows and waist, face covered with a glossy membrane, rubber or leather, without eyes but with a tube for air and water where the mouth would be.

Dan blinked, blinked again, but the image wouldn’t settle, kept jumping from one to the other, picturesque to grim, which
kept
him blinking, trying to anchor what it truly was.

Another glamour, he realized. One thing hiding another, but faltering, wrong, outdated and quaint.

From our earliest colonial days, Dan knew. He was here then. Grace, Carstable, whatever his real name was came to the early colony in Sydney, two hours away now but so much more then, all the while hiding, relocating, moving from place to place as needed, taking human form so he could be among us. He could even have been Londasleite for that matter, putting forward the very theory that would allow him to be known to a select few.

Dan kept blinking, made himself adjust to the constant shifting, finally saw what the two things had in common: a single thread of darkness as round as a knitting needle, extending from the bellies of both images, one belly ultimately, a thick black thread cutting the dim space diagonally from the double figure in the corner to somewhere behind his left shoulder.

The corner behind him!

Dan turned and saw Allan Grace pressed back in the gloom where the blackwashed windows and brick wall came together, but a distorted, distended version of Grace, the torso too long, the shoulders too high, head and upper body tipping forward as if wracked with, what, scoliosis? No, the hunchbacked look of severe kyphosis, the head pushed back then forward like some hooded cobra about to strike.

The thread went from the woman to the suit Grace was wearing! The midnight black suit. So much of that one special strand being drawn out of the Braid—dark matter, dark energy, old night—replenishing, always replenishing, an infinite supply incubated in this woman—in countless women over the years!—harvested, gathered, drawn forth for this, in this one shop, one arcade, and who knew how many other shadowy gathering chambers in half-empty arcades in towns like this one all across the country?

Dan reacted instinctively, reached out, flailed with both hands, broke the thread. He felt it give like moulded powder, like the frangible, dry mud tube of a mud-dauber or potter wasp.

Allan Grace reacted instantly, cried out once, flung his own arms wide and pushed out from the corner, staggered into the middle of the almost empty space and stood in the thin light there.

Dan fought to track what he saw next. The buttoned-up collar had always been too tight. Now it narrowed, constricted. The face, the head above, seemed to blanch, lose all colour. The mouth locked into a line and ceased to be, the eyes bulged, goggled. The shirt below darkened, blackened, as if drawing in as much of the frangible powdery thread as it could.

What neck remained above the cobra-spread became a stem, impossibly thin, so the head, whatever it truly was, toppled, tipped to the side,
snapped
off and fell away, bounced once and rolled into the gloom.

The
suit
continued standing, with a wholly blackened shirt, blackened hands, just the white tip of spinal column thrusting up like an old-fashioned bill-spike.

The spine from Peter’s dream! And wrong, like Peter had said, because upside down, inverted, the coccyx at the top, giving that hideous, splayed, cobra-head effect with the bill-spike of bleached white bone.

No directions in space, Dan remembered. No galactic north or south. We give those, find those, impose order, up and down, north and south, right and wrong. Gravity and other forces, yes, but sorted by
our
reality,
our
limitations and specializations,
our
ways of seeing.

What had once been Allan Grace didn’t operate this way, had a greater dark to work upon, the brilliant dark of the quantum spread, the dark beyond the Sun’s heliosphere, out in that ultimate night with its myriad lonely night lights, the stars.

But working with what was in
this
world this time,
these
forms and modes. Masquerading, feeding here, even while belonging out there, in there, in Londasleite’s Inchoate, wherever.