Restoration (31 page)

  "Certainly usual for me," said Jonah.

  "I wish I could say I was comfortable with following the House's directions in the first place," said Hawkins. "It's hardly seemed driven towards our best interests thus far."

  "Who knows if it's the House talking or Sophie," Alan replied, "we have no idea where one ends and the other begins."

  "And that makes me feel much better," said Barnabas.

  Alan and Penelope had done their best to fill the In
trepid
crew in on what had happened to them all, even more aware how ludicrous it sounded when trying to explain it. In the end Hawkins had dismissed matters with a wave of his one good hand. "I'm a sea captain," he had said, "we know that sometimes you just have to follow the tide wherever it may go. For now it flows towards this library and we shall sail with it as best we can."

  Packed and prepared as well as they could ever hope to be, they made their way towards the station exit. There was a solid wall of darkness where there should have been the hustle of pedestrians and the honking battle of taxicabs. Every now and then a ghostly passenger would walk out of that darkness and pass through them on their way to the station.

  "Weird as you like," said Ryan, pulling faces at a besuited businessman as he emerged into the light, checked his watch and dashed towards his imaginary connection. A young woman appeared, weighed down with shopping bags and her own pleasure at having bent her credit to near breaking. "Help you with your bags darling?" Ryan asked, eyeing her appreciatively. He skipped in front of her, smiling as he held open his arms and puckered up, meaning to kiss this beautiful illusion. She collided into him, sending him sprawling onto the stone floor, his amorous expression switched for one of surprise. The woman was just as startled, dropping her bags and staring at him momentarily before a look of confusion spread across her face and her eyes slipped from him.

  "She can't see you any more," said Penelope, "she did… I'm sure she did, but now…" she moved her hand towards the woman. It passed right through her hunched back as she stooped to gather her shopping. "No, gone again…"

  "But how could she even have been there in the first place?' said Hawkins. "You told us they were just images… not real people at all."

  "That's what we thought," said Alan.

  "Doesn't matter," Penelope said, "if we stop to pick at every mystery we come across we'll never get anywhere."

  "Yeah," said Ryan, getting to his feet, "wish I'd known that might happen though, I'd have gone for her tits."

  "Ryan!" Maggie shouted.

  "What do you want from me?" he asked shrugging. "I'm a teenager, tits are what we think about."

  "I must be a teenager too then," said Jonah, "I think about them a fair deal too."

  "I think Penelope's right," said Alan, determined to bring an end to the conversation. "Let's get moving."

  Penelope pulled her torch out of her trouser pocket and shone the beam into the darkness. "We need to find the route through," she said. "This is how Carruthers used to do it. You find the point at which the beam cuts off and that's the way ahead."

  "And hope we don't get crushed to death while we're at it," added Alan, thinking of the couple of times he had been attacked by the wraiths.

  "That too," Penelope agreed. "Ready?" she asked.

  One by one they nodded and she stepped forward.

 

 

  Sophie knows that things are coming together. There is a point when something is more done than not done. Like when the toast – on setting number four – smells of crispness and crunch and loses its white. Like when the car turns off the motorway and starts its way along the windy roads that lead to a house. Like when you can see the plate more than the spaghetti. They are at that point now. She can see lots and lots of plate.

  Library. That was the word that she kept hearing inside her head. Library.

  She had been to her local library a few times. She liked it there. It was all about A,B,C and long numbers that told you exactly where everything was. She hadn't read any books when she had gone there – that had been what interested her mother, before she had got dead she had read lots of books – she had just walked the rows. Understanding the system, reading the numbers, checking people hadn't tried to break things by putting a book back in the wrong place. This happened a lot and she thought the clever people that worked there must have had to empty themselves a lot at the frustration of it. Despite that she wondered if they might let her be a librarian one day. She would have been very good at it, she thought. It would have been a job that made her Very Happy.

  Perhaps that was what she was going to do now. The voice in her head wouldn't say. She hoped so.

  The voice in her head had changed. To begin with it had been the House. That barking dog that she could not understand. Now it did not bark. It used a voice that she knows. To the others it is the Grumpy Controller. To her it is not. She knows the man's name and it is not Grumpy Controller. He has been speaking a lot to her. Part of her is glad. She knows the voice and it makes her think of home. Part of her is not glad. She knows the voice and it makes her think of home. This is complicated so she tries not to worry about it.

  Now the voice is telling her what to do. Not all of it. Just step by step. This is good as she has enough to think about keeping everything else together. Though the House is helping with that too, it is a Very Very Clever House now. Much cleverer than her old house – not her grandparents house her Proper House the one they had all lived in before her mother stopped living altogether – that had just stood there. You had to do everything for it. If you did not close its windows then the rain would come in and soak its floors. If you did not close its doors then the leaves would blow in and you had to count them all back out again. If you did not turn on its Central Heating it got all cold. Her house had been stupid.

  Every now and then she tried to listen to what was happening outside to Alan and the Lady. She had heard the Lady scream but Alan had gone to save her so that was okay. Alan was good at saving people. He had saved her and that was good.

  Now the Strange Men from the Strange Ship had come and that was nice. Alan liked them, even though they were very Strange and Very Untidy. The Strange Woman was here too and Sophie took a moment to look at all her hair and it made her feel good. It was silly hair but she liked it.

  They were travelling now. Going to the library like they had been told. She knew that Alan worried about putting her on his back but she didn't mind. Sometimes you just Had to Make Do and this was like that. Besides, she couldn't feel it most of the time. Most of the time she was in her head. Or the House's head. And in there you didn't feel the bag cut into your bottom or make your legs shake. In there you didn't feel anything at all.

  She vanishes back in there to think about long numbers and A,B,C and…

  
Build not break. Build not break. Build not break.

 

 

As soon as they entered the darkness they could feel the wraith moving towards them. It was a sensation rather than a physical presence, though it prickled like static and made the hair on the back of your neck frizz up.

  "This is the same as the creature that stole you and Sophie away?" Hawkins asked Alan.

  "The very same," Alan agreed, "though they're not normally as gentle as they were then."

  "That was gentle?" Barnabas said, remembering the force with which the man and girl had been knocked off their feet and whisked away.

  "From what I gather," said Penelope, "they like to play with something for a while and then pulverise it."

  "Lovely," said Ryan, "you found the way out yet then?"

  Penelope kept swaying the torch to and fro, watching the length of the beam for a point when it would shrink as it shone through the invisible portal they were after. "Give me time."

  "All the time in the world," Ryan sighed, looking around.

  "If the House wants us to do this you'd think it would call them off," said Maggie, the static sending her hair into an even wider halo than normal.

  "If it can," said Hawkins. "Not all watchdogs obey their master."

  "There!" said Penelope, pointing to where the beam cut off a little way ahead.

  They ran towards it, Alan grimacing as Sophie bounced against him in her papoose. Behind them the wraith swooped on their heels as if brushing them out of its world, a grumpy caretaker lashing out with his broom.

  They emerged into one of the House's ubiquitous corridors, deep red carpet and heavy wood panels. In the frequent alcoves there were glass domes filled with bizarre taxidermy. Alan looked at the creatures beneath the glass and found he couldn't identify a single one. He wondered if they were animals that had been constructed from the taxidermist's imagination – "cut and shut" combinations of normal creatures – or whether, on some strange world these things had once flown or burrowed or foraged. In one dome a feathered beast reared up on its back paws, threatening the air with two scythed talons that had the texture of ram's horns. Its snarling mouth showed rows of what could have been human teeth, yellow rectangles, nicked and scored on the bones of some previous meal. Its eyes were like oil in water, black with a colourful shimmer that couldn't quite be pinned down. Alan felt itchy just looking at it.

  "What the hell are these things?" asked Barnabas.

  "Never seen anything like it," admitted Jonah.

  "Imaginary animals," said Penelope, "nightmares, like everything else in this stupid House."

  They moved along the corridor, trying not to look to either side.

  "Is this the way you came from the library?" Ryan asked Penelope.

  "No," she admitted, "I took the scenic route, it involved three days' mountain climbing then a car crash."

  "Oh," he didn't really know what to say to that.

  "You're going the right way," came a rolling, yokel voice from nearby.

  "Who said that?" asked Alan, shuffling forward.

  "I did." On the wall was an oil painting of a rural peasant forking hay into neat stacks. The peasant had quit his work and come to the front of the picture, leaning on his pitchfork. He chewed absently on a length of dry straw. "Library's that way," he nodded in the direction they'd been walking, "though you'll have to go through the ballroom to get there."

  "Ballroom?" Penelope asked. "I can live with that."

  "You'd better hope so, my lovely, those that can avoid the place. It's not altogether sane."

  "An insane ballroom?" Alan asked.

  "What other kind in this House?" asked Hawkins. "Are you the House?" he asked the picture.

  "I'm just a working man," the peasant said, "though I can lay claim to speaking on its behalf at the mo."

  "If the House wants us to go this way," said Hawkins, "why doesn't it make sure that the way is clear?"

  "Well now," the peasant chewed hard on his straw, deep in thought, "this is the essential duality of its condition you see. Part of it wants you to go that way – the rational part of it – the rest just wants to do what it was born for and kill you." The peasant smiled. "Gives you a headache just thinking on it, don't it?" he chuckled. "Like all that 'ego' and 'id' gubbins they go on about," he tapped at his head, "who really understands what goes on inside the cracked dome of our silly skulls."

  "Great," said Hawkins, "lots of help, thanks."

  "I mean," the peasant continued, happy to talk now he had started, "take me for example. Most days I'm happy just to get on with my job, get this hay cleared. Maybe think on what I'm going to put in my pot this evening, wonder whether the barley wine is ready to drink… you know, the usual thoughts."

  "And the other days?" Maggie asked.

  The peasant smiled and nodded at the portrait of a restoration duchess that hung directly across from them. "I wonder what it would be like to hold that dirty bitch down with my pitchfork and hammer her up the arse until I'm spent." He shrugged. "Takes all sorts." He turned back to his hay and began forking it towards the stack.

  "Charming," said Alan, "shall we keep moving?"

  "Perhaps that's best," agreed Penelope.

  The corridor stretched on for some time. The rows of domed animals ceased after a while, becoming busts offering medical cross-sections of the human body. Here a head was cut open to show a smooth, pinkmarble brain, there a torso offered the route of its coiled innards in various pastel shades.

  "Educational," said Ryan.

  "Extremely," said Alan, straightening the papoose on his back where it had begun to sag to the left. "Whereabouts were you from," he asked, "before ending up here?"

  "London lad aren't I?" Ryan replied, putting on his thick cockney accent. "Found the box in an old bloke's belongings. Used to 'find' a lot of things if you get my meaning."

  "You were a thief?" Alan asked.

  "It was more of a sideline to be honest," Ryan admitted, "used to help my dad with his removals business too, that was the day job."

  "Day job?" How old was the kid? "What about school?"

  "That's exactly what I used to ask my dad, 'what about school dad?' I'd ask,"

  "And what did he say?"

  "He said school didn't pay as well."

  "Nice."

  "Yeah… I wouldn't have minded if he actually
did
pay me but, you know, food and board, that was the deal."