Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron (8 page)

But it didn’t take him long, though his gaze was tired of ranging up and down, up and down, by the time he saw the headline:

ATTEMPTED THEFT AT “THE VARIETY.”

TRADESMEN IN THE DOCK.

Francis Wareing, a draper pursuing his trade in Brichester, Donald Norden, a butcher [and so on, Ingels snarled, sweeping past impatiently] were charged before the Brichester stipendiary magistrates with forcibly entering “The Variety” theatre, on Fieldview, in attempted commission of robbery. Mr. Radcliffe, the owner and manager of this establishment

It looked good, Ingels thought wearily, abandoning the report, tearing onward. But two issues later the sequel’s headline stopped him short:

ACCUSATION AND COUNTER-ACCUSATION IN COURT.

A BLASPHEMOUS CULT REVEALED.

And there it was, halfway down the column:

Examined by Mr. Kirby for the prosecution, Mr. Radcliffe affirmed that he had been busily engaged in preparing his accounts when, overhearing sounds of stealth outside his office, he summoned his courage and ventured forth. In the auditorium he beheld several men

Get on with it, Ingels urged, and saw that there had been impatience in the court too:

Mr. Radcliffe’s narrative was rudely interrupted by Wareing, who accused him of having let a room in his theatre to the accused four. This privilege having been summarily withdrawn, Wareing alleged, the four had entered the building in a bid to reclaim such possessions as were rightfully theirs. He pursued:

“Mr. Radcliffe is aware of this. He has been one of our number for years, and still would be, if he had the courage.”

Mr. Radcliffe replied: “That is a wicked untruth. However, I am not surprised by the depths of your iniquity. I have evidence of it here.”

So saying, he produced for the Court’s inspection a notebook containing, as he said, matter of a blasphemous and sacrilegious nature. This which he had found beneath a seat in his theatre, he indicated to be the prize sought by the unsuccessful robbers. The book, which Mr. Radcliffe described as “the journal of a cult dedicated to preparing themselves for a blasphemous travesty of the Second Coming,” was handed to Mr. Poole, the magistrate, who swiftly pronounced it to conform to this description.

Mr. Kirby adduced as evidence of the corruption which this cult wrought, its bringing of four respectable tradesmen to the state of common robbers. Had they not felt the shame of the beliefs they professed, he continued, they had but to petition Mr. Radcliffe for the return of their mislaid property.

But what beliefs? Ingels demanded. He riffled onward, crumbling yellow fragments from the pages. The tube buzzed like a bright trapped insect. He almost missed the page.

FOILED ROBBERS AT “THE VARIETY”.

FIFTH MAN YIELDS HIMSELF TO JUSTICE.

What fifth man? Ingels searched:

Mr. Poole condemned the cult of which the accused were adherents as conclusive proof of the iniquity of those religions which presume to rival Christianity. He described the cult as “unworthy of the lowest breed of mulatto.”

At this juncture a commotion ensued, as a man entered precipitately and begged leave to address the Court. Some few minutes later Mr. Radcliffe also entered, wearing a resolute expression. When he saw the latecomer, however, he appeared to relinquish his purpose, and took a place in the gallery. The man, meanwhile, sought to throw himself on the Court’s mercy, declaring himself to be the fifth of the robbers. He had been prompted to confess, he affirmed, by a sense of his injustice in allowing his friends to take full blame. His name, he said, was Joseph Ingels

Who had received a lighter sentence in acknowledgement of his gesture, Ingels saw in a blur at the foot of the column. He hardly noticed. He was still staring at his grandfather’s name.

“Nice of you to come,” his father said ambiguously. They’d finished decorating, Ingels saw; the flowers on the hall wallpaper had grown and turned bright orange. But the light was still dim, and the walls settled about his eyes like night around a feeble lamp. Next to the coat rack he saw the mirror in which he’d made sure of himself before teenage dates, the crack in one corner where he’d driven his fist, caged by fury and by their incomprehension of his adolescent restlessness. An ugly socket of plaster gaped through the wallpaper next to the supporting nail’s less treacherous home. “I could have hung the mirror for you,” Ingels said, not meaning to disparage his father, who frowned and said “No need.”

They went into the dining-room, where his mother was setting out the best tablecloth and cutlery. “Wash hands,” she said. “Tea’s nearly ready.”

They ate and talked. Ingels watched the conversation as if it were a pocket maze into which he had to slip a ball when the opening tilted towards him. “How’s your girlfriend?” his mother said.

Don’t you know her name? Ingels didn’t say. “Fine,” he said. They didn’t mention Hilary again. His mother produced infant photographs of him they’d discovered in the sideboard drawer. “You were a lovely little boy,” she said. “Speaking of memories,” Ingels said, “do you remember the old Variety theatre?”

His father was moving his shirt along the fireguard to give himself a glimpse of the fire, his back to Ingels. “The old Variety,” his mother said. “We wanted to take you to a pantomime there once. But,” she glanced at her husband’s back, “when your father got there all the tickets were sold. Then there was the Gaiety,” and she produced a list of theatres and anecdotes.

Ingels sat opposite his father, whose pipe smoke was pouring up the chimney. “I was looking through our old newspapers,” he said. “I came across a case that involved the Variety.”

“Don’t you ever work at that paper?” his father said.

“This was research. It seems there was a robbery at the theatre. Before you were born, it was, but I wonder if you remember hearing about it.”

“Now, we aren’t all as clever as you,” his mother said. “We don’t remember what we heard in our cradle.”

Ingels laughed, tightening inside; the opening was turning away from him. “You might have heard about it when you were older,” he told his father. “Your father was involved.”

“No,” his father said. “He was not.”

“He was in the paper.”

“His name was,” his father said, facing Ingels with a blank stare in his eyes. “It was another man. Your grandfather took years to live that down. The newspapers wouldn’t publish an apology or say it wasn’t him. And you wonder why we didn’t want you to work for a paper. You wouldn’t be a decent shopkeeper, you let our shop go out of the family, and now here you are, raking up old dirt and lies. That’s what you chose for yourself.”

“I didn’t mean to be offensive,” Ingels said, holding himself down. “But it was an interesting case, that’s all. I’m going to follow it up tomorrow, at the theatre.”

“If you go there you’ll be rubbing our name in the dirt. Don’t bother coming here again.”

“Now hold on,” Ingels said. “If your father wasn’t involved you can’t very well mean that. My God,” he cried, flooded with a memory, “you do know something! You told me about it once, when I was a child! I’d just started dreaming and you told it to me so I wouldn’t be frightened, to show me you had these dreams too. You were in a room with a telescope, waiting to see something. You told me because I’d dreamed it too! That’s the second time I’ve had that dream! It’s the room at the Variety, it has to be!”

“I don’t know what you mean,” his father said. “I never dreamed that.”

“You told me you had.”

“I must have told you that to calm you down. Go on, say I shouldn’t have lied to you. It must have been for your own good.”

He’d blanked out his eyes with an unblinking stare. Ingels gazed at him and knew at once there was more behind the blank than the lie about his childhood. “You’ve been dreaming again,” he said. “You’ve been having the dream I had last night, I know you have. And I think you know what it means.”

The stare shifted almost imperceptibly, then returned strengthened. “What do you know?” his father said. “You live in the same town as us and visit us once a week, if that. Yet you know I’ve been dreaming? Sometimes we wonder if you even know we’re here!”

“I know. I’m sorry,” Ingels said. “But these dreams—you used to have them. The ones we used to share, remember?”

“We shared everything when you were a little boy. But that’s over,” his father said. “Dreams and all.”

“That’s nothing to do with it!” Ingels shouted. “You still have the ability! I know you must have been having these dreams! It’s been in your eyes for months!” He trailed off, trying to remember whether that was true. He turned to his mother, pleading. “Hasn’t he been dreaming?”

“What do I know about it?” she said. “It’s nothing to do with me.” She was clearing the table in the dim rationed light beyond the fire, not looking at either of them. Suddenly Ingels saw her as he never had before: bewildered by her husband’s dreams and intuitions, further excluded from the disturbingly incomprehensible bond between him and her son. All at once Ingels knew why he’d always felt she had been happy to see him leave home: it was only then that she’d been able to start reclaiming her husband. He took his coat from the hall and looked into the dining-room. They hadn’t moved: his father was staring at the fire, his mother at the table. “I’ll see you,” he said, but the only sound was the crinkling of the fire as it crumbled, breaking open pinkish embers.

IV

He watched television. Movement of light and colours, forming shapes. Outside the window the sky drew his gaze, stretched taut, heavily imminent as thunder. He wrote words.

Later, he was sailing through enormous darkness; glinting globes turned slowly around him, one wearing an attenuated band of light; ahead, the darkness was scattered with dust and chunks of rock. A piece of metal was circling him like a timid needle, poking towards him, now spitting flame and swinging away. He felt contempt so profound it was simply vast indifference. He closed his eyes as he might have blinked away a speck of dust.

In the morning he wrote his review at the flat. He knew he wouldn’t be able to bear the teeming aisles for long. Blindly shouldering his way across the floor, he found Bert. He had to gaze at him for a minute or so; he couldn’t immediately remember what he should look like. “That rewrite you did on the TV review wasn’t your best,” Bert said. “Ah well,” Ingels said, snatching his copy of last night’s
Herald
automatically from his desk, and hurried for the door.

He’d nearly reached it when he heard the news editor shouting into the telephone. “But it can’t affect Saturn and Jupiter! I mean, it can’t change its mass, can it? … I’m sorry, sir. Obviously I didn’t mean to imply I knew more about your field than you. But is it possible for its mass to change? … What, trajectory as well?” Ingels grinned at the crowd around the editor’s desk, at their rapt expressions. They’d be more rapt when he returned. He strode out.

Through the writhing crowds, up the steps, into a vista of beds and dressing-tables like a street of cramped bedrooms whose walls had been tricked away. “Can I speak to the manager, please,” he said to the man who stepped forward. “
Brichester Herald.”

The manager was a young man in a pale streamlined suit, longish clipped hair, a smile which he held forward as if for inspection. “I’m following a story,” Ingels said, displaying his press card. “It seems that when your warehouse was a theatre a room was leased to an astronomical group. We think their records are still here, and if they can be found they’re of enormous historical interest.”

“That’s interesting,” the manager said. “Where are they supposed to be?”

“In a room at the top of the building somewhere.”

“I’d like to help, of course.” Four men passed, carrying pieces of a dismembered bed to a van. “There were some offices at the top of the building once, I believe. But we don’t use them now, they’re boarded up. It would be a good deal of trouble to open them now. If you’d phoned I might have been able to free some men.”

“I’ve been out of town,” Ingels said, improvising hastily now his plans were going awry. “Found this story on my desk when I got back. I tried to phone earlier but couldn’t get through. Must be a tribute to the business you’re doing.” An old man, one of the loaders, was sitting on a chair nearby, listening; Ingels wished he would move, he couldn’t bear an audience as well. “These records really would be important,” he said wildly. “Great historical value.”

“In any case I can’t think they’d still be here. If they were in one of the top rooms they would have been cleared out long ago.”

“I think you’re a bit wrong there,” the old man said from his chair.

“Have you nothing to do?” the manager demanded.

“We’ve done loading,” the man said. “Driver’s not here yet. Mother’s sick. It’s not for me to say you’re wrong, but I remember when they were mending the roof after the war. Men who were doing it said they could see a room full of books, they looked like, all covered up. But we couldn’t find it from down here and nobody wanted to break their necks trying to get in from the roof. Must be there still, though.”

“That has to be the one,” Ingels said. “Whereabouts was it?”

“Round about there,” the old man said, pointing above a Scandinavian four-poster. “Behind one of the offices, we used to reckon.”

“Could you help find it?” Ingels said. “Maybe your workmates could give you a hand while they’re waiting. That’s of course if this gentleman doesn’t mind. We’d make a point of your cooperation,” he told the manager. “Might even be able to give you a special advertising rate, if you wanted to run an ad on that day.”

The five of them climbed a rusty spiral staircase, tastefully screened by a partition, to the first floor. The manager, still frowning, had left one loader watching for the driver. “Call us as soon as he comes,” he said. “Whatever the reason, time lost loses money.” Across the first floor, which was a maze of crated and cartoned furniture, Ingels glimpsed reminiscences of his dream: the outline of theatre boxes in the walls, almost erased by bricks; a hook that had supported a chandelier. They seemed to protrude from the mundane, beckoning him on.