Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi (6 page)

And then, setting his final curse upon his creations, the Insane God Qinmeartha afflicted them with immortality.

They were condemned to eternity.

Yet he had not succeeded in entirely extinguishing hope among them. Perhaps one of the imps he had used to effect his punishments had been careless, or perhaps one of the angels had succeeded in conveying some fragment of knowledge in the instant before banishment, but there survived among the Wardrobe Folk the concept of
change
. There had been no change in the universe since close to the beginning of time, since the end of those cataclysmic days when Qinmeartha had exacted his vengeance upon his mortals, and there were no overt signs that change would ever again return to the universe; but the
concept
still existed, in the form of a fragment of rhyme that was somehow known to every individual of the Wardrobe Folk – and, they extrapolated, presumably to the mortals surviving on every other world of this god-tormented universe. That rhyme was:

see LoChi

girl-child LoChi

her back bends not for the heaviest load

she is

starwatcher

she is

cloudrider

she is

she who seeks to the ends of roads.

In their slow way, the Wardrobe Folk spent the billennia attempting to interpret this fragment, but always without success – although even the attempts kept alive among them the notion of change. There was the idea of the Girl-Child LoChi's back, which did not bend; yet the Wardrobe Folk did not have backs, did not know what backs actually
were
. She sought to the ends of roads, the rhyme told them; yet there were no roads in the sandy wastes, only the tracks that each individual made by creeping from one place to another. And the greatest of all mysteries was the word "starwatcher" – for what in all the universe was a star?

But it is not necessary to understand the workings of things in order to be influenced by them, and the Wardrobe Folk knew from this shard of rhyme that one day, in the future either near or far, the Girl-Child LoChi would come among them, and with her she would bring the power to put curtains of clouds across the sky so that shadows would come back to the world.

All of this Joanna knew in her dream: it was the knowledge of the Joanna-creature that had always before been hidden from her. Thus read the history of the world, the history shared by all its immortal Wardrobe Folk.

This was the first time that the dream was not a nightmare, for now that she understood the nature of the world it could hold no terrors for her. There was the pain of the light, of course, filling everything that her huge single eye could encompass; and there was the pain of the sharp-edged crystals grating across her sensitive lower surface; but these were merely agonies, which could be endured.

And there was the hope to make their endurance more possible.

The hope that the Girl-Child LoChi would soon, herself dark, descend from the burnished scream of the sky.

~

The following morning, noon came and went and still the Blue Horse didn't open.

Joanna first became aware that something was amiss as she was dressing after her morning bath. It was a grey-skied day, at last, and so she'd thrown open her curtains and yanked the stiff window up a few inches to let the whisky- and smoke-saturated atmosphere of her bedroom clear a little. She was climbing into the jeans which she'd
still
never gotten around to washing, wrinkling her nose at their fermentish stale-sweat smell, when she registered a noise like the humming of contented bees from the pavement outside.

The window screeched as she hauled it further up in its frame, and a couple of pale faces turned skywards to glance at her.

Greta was among the little throng, wringing her hands agitatedly in her apron.

"What's going on?" Joanna mouthed to her.

Greta shrugged lethargically and pointed a thumb towards the front of the pub.

Looking down from above, Joanna could see nothing different. She raised her eyebrows theatrically, still questioning.

Greta shrugged, and made a gesture that told her to come down and take a look – she, Greta, wasn't going to make an exhibition of herself by yelling the information up to her.

Crossly, Joanna jabbed her feet into the tired black sandshoes that were as much in need of a respite as her jeans – they smelt like a man's socks, and there was a tear at the toe of one of them where her uncut nails had stabbed through. Half a minute later she was coming out through the concrete tunnel onto the pavement to join the rest.

"What's happening?" she said to Greta.

"The pub."

The black-painted doors were firmly closed.

"So what?"

"Do you know what time it is?"

"No." She hadn't the first idea. These days she just got up when the notion took her and staggered through her hours of wakefulness until booze or exhaustion or both sent her back to her bed again.

"It's nearly one."

"Oh." The information took a while to sink in.

"Not as it makes much difference to some of us," said Greta slyly. She'd caught a whiff of Joanna's breath.

The crowd fractured, like a puddle that's just been stepped in, as a police car pulled up by the side of the road and then turned to park in Ham's Lane. Two young policemen climbed out and ambled across the road. While one of them began to ask the villagers what was going on, the other, absent-mindedly scratching his beard, turned the handle of the doors.

They opened.

Shrugging, the policeman pushed his way in, and without pausing to think Joanna followed him.

The first thing that struck her was the smell: the redolence of smoke and alcohol was even stronger than in her bedroom upstairs, but it was also overlain by the stink of feces.

The policeman glanced at her, and made a face. "I think you'd best stay outside, young lady," he said.

"I know what to expect." She did. Aunt Jill's bedroom, that morning only a fortnight ago, had taught her.

"I mean it," he said.

"So do I." She managed a grim smile. "If I go straight back out now, people will start to think things are even worse than they are."

He nodded. "Come on then."

They found Jas right at the back of the bar, lying half in and half out of the door that led to the lavatories. For a second Joanna had a picture of him dashing through to try to reach them before his bowels loosened, but then she saw that his body was lying the wrong way around: he'd been coming out when death had struck him.

The policeman knelt down beside Jas's head. He put his hand briefly inside Jas's waistcoat, then stripped back one of the body's sleeves to feel for the pulse at the wrist.

"I really think you ought to go, ma'am." There was no command in his voice. Whatever had ensnared the rest of Ashburton seemed to have acted on him as well.

"I can help you," she said.

"You can't help
him
. He's dead."

"Still." He paused, pulling the arm of the suit back down, covering up Jas's white flesh. "You a journalist or something?"

"Yes," she lied, then added: "Or no. Whichever you'd prefer."

"Figures." He cracked his knuckles. "Could you nip outside, Joanna, and fetch my partner?"

She was at the door before she realized he'd used her name. She turned back, staring at him.

"Didn't recognize me under my beard, eh?" said the policeman, face splitting into a grin. "You didn't know I'd taken on a day job, did you?"

She was pushing through the noisy knot of villagers, all of them tugging at her, demanding that she answer their questions. Her mouth tightly closed, her face set in rigid lines, she just shook her head and burrowed with her shoulders.

She eased a little as she got into the concrete passage, which echoed to the sounds of her hurrying footsteps. Luckily she'd left the flat door open, so she didn't have to stop for the ritual struggle with the lock.

Upstairs, in the kitchen, she tugged a fresh bottle of whisky from the cupboard where Aunt Jill had kept her cornflakes and raised it to her mouth. It was only as the liquid clug-clugged in the bottle's neck that she began to have coherent thoughts once more.

No! I don't believe it. I
can't
believe it.

But it was him.

It was Steve.

~

Ronnie Gilmour rang to tell Joanna they were burying Jas that afternoon. Joanna had some difficulty keeping track of the conversation, because she'd been belting into the bottle in the kitchen ever since she'd got back, and Ronnie had to repeat the information two or three times before it registered properly on her. What she really wanted to do was yell,
You're the mother of a shapeshifter, you stupid cunt! And you know you are, but you don't seem to realize just how desperately, desperately important it is that you
denounce
him, denounce him to the world!

Or would denunciation be enough? The telephone conversation had finished some while ago without Joanna having been aware of the fact, and she was now sitting in the drawing-room, hauling deeply on a cigarette. Her throat hurt, and she knew smoking was making it worse in the long term; but in the short term each inhalation brought a few moments of blessed relief from the pain.

The thing that had initially attracted her to Steve Gilmour – what she'd at first interpreted as his elemental vitality, his unabashed masculinity – had not been an illusion. What had been at fault was the gloss she'd put on her perception. He was indeed something elemental, and he was indeed rippling with the raw stuff and potency of life; but he was more powerful than any human being should rightly be. She hadn't any proper idea of where he might be drawing his energies from, but she suspected that he had some kind of direct connection with the earth itself: no mere animal could be as stuffed full of the
élan vital
as he was. When she'd been thinking of him just now as a shapeshifter she'd been grossly undervaluing him in her own estimation: yes, he was a shapeshifter, but that was only one small fraction of the whole of him. He had transformed himself – she now fully credited this – into not just a single wolf but a whole, huge host of them. Dracula, according to the stories, had been able to transmute at will into a plague of rats; but rats were small creatures, not powerful carnivores that weighed each as much as a grown man.

And now Steve had manifested himself to her as a bearded policeman. She hadn't looked closely at the man's face as he'd preceded her into the Blue Horse and looked around the gloomy bar, but she was sure he hadn't been Steve then – not at first. Even while he'd been kneeling beside Jas's lifeless form he'd still been just another bobby on patrol. But at some time immediately after that the spirit of Steve – did Steve have a spirit, or
was
he a spirit? – had come into him, transforming him, overwhelming him.

She had three more bottles left untouched in the kitchen, and was worried that wouldn't be enough to see her through until the morning.

Oh, shit, she'd just remembered: Jas's funeral. That was what, ostensibly, Ronnie had been phoning her about. There seemed something vaguely wrong with the fact that he was being bundled into the ground so very rapidly after his death, but for the moment Joanna couldn't work out what it was. Her mind probed once or twice at its own unease, but each time retreated almost immediately. It made sense to bury him as fast as possible, she rationalized wretchedly, before the body began to decompose; that must be why.

She couldn't remember what time Ronnie had said the service was going to be – if indeed Ronnie had given her a time at all – but she gaped at her watch and saw that it was four o'clock already. Four pm sounded like a respectable sort of a time to be holding a funeral; and as if she'd cued them the Bloody Bells started up their doleful chorus in the steeple of St Leonard's across the way. Getting to her unsteady legs, Joanna slowly moved to the window and pulled back the curtain. There was already a double line of mourners moving slowly up the path towards the church door.

She ought to be among them. Jas had known her aunt, hadn't he? And he'd been kind to Joanna herself after Aunt Jill's death, refusing to accept any money for those two pints of Royal Oak, to symbolize his sympathies. There were few enough in Ashburton who would sincerely grieve for the Blue Horse's landlord that she should allow herself to be absent.

Her jeans. They were filthy. You couldn't go to a funeral in jeans like these. But what else was there? She'd got mud all over the black jumper suit some time in the past few days – she couldn't remember when – and one night, drunkenly, she'd taken a pair of kitchen scissors to all her skirts. It was the jeans or nothing.

Upstairs in the loo she spent a few explosive minutes. The smell made her want to be sick, but she wouldn't allow herself to go to Jas's interment with vomit on her breath, so she fought down the nausea, forcing herself to take long, deep, controlled breaths through her nose. Standing, she wiped her bottom on the front page of a fortnight-old
Guardian
– toilet paper was something she kept forgetting to buy during her furtive trips to the International Stores – and tried to flush the foul-smelling mixture of newsprint and pale yellow shit down the pan.

She lurched to her room, fastening her jeans. They sagged to her hips, and without thinking she scrabbled along the rail inside her wardrobe door to get a belt. It was crimson, with a gaudy buckle done in fake gold and glass diamonds, but at least it would hold her goddam trousers up. In front of the mirror she dragged a brush through her hair and slashed a thick line of lipstick across her mouth; the waxy colour caught the ends of her front teeth, but there was no time to salvage that now – she'd just have to make sure she kept her mouth shut throughout the proceedings.

That was everything, that was everything, surely that must be everything. She stood in the middle of her bedroom's devastation and stared around her in a series of jerky, hopeless glances, as if anything that she'd forgotten might suddenly volunteer itself from the midst of the shambles. Her knickers were climbing into the crack of her bottom, which felt moist and sticky, and she tugged vexedly at the sides of her jeans.