The Light Ages (7 page)

We walked on, and an old house came into view. Chimneypots climbed like fingers. Roofs sagged and clambered. Diamond windows shone. The place was half-ruined, but there was such a sense of rightness, as if it had grown from the earth stone on stone and was now falling back with equal ease, that it was a long moment before I realised that it was also very odd. Like glimpsing a face in a crowd, one side beautiful, the other scarred and ugly, it remained hard for my mind to reconcile the old house’s two aspects. Along the crumbling rooflines, huge runners and veins of whitish crystal flickered like soap bubbles in the sunlight. Towards the left side of the building, the stuff lumped and gathered into warty growths, drowning the eaves. Closer to, I saw that it covered many of the walls and windows in rainbow cataracts, white on the surface but winking black in its depths, and gathered in scrolls and serrate pinecone-like growths. Of course, I recognised it—this was engine ice, the same by-product of failing aether which I had noticed leeching from the boiler of the train. But I’d never seen it on anything like this scale.

We climbed the worn semicircle of steps that led to the main door and lay beyond the influence of the growth. My mother rapped on it. The air seemed to shiver, although I could hear no sound inside until the muffled beat of footsteps came, followed by the slide of a lock. The figure standing inside could have been my mother’s age, but she was smaller, wore a plain grey dress and large, round silver-rimmed glasses. She seemed almost ordinary for a moment as I stared at her, and then, with the realisation that she wasn’t, the whole illusion of her humanity seemed to ripple. Although she was nothing like my imaginings, I knew instantly that she was a changeling.

‘I don’t know if you remember …’ my mother began.

‘Of course. Of course. Mary—Mistress Borrows! You must come in,’ she said with a wrinkly smile. In many ways, she was unremarkable. She was small and old, her skin had browned and tanned, was drumheaded across her cheekbones and thinned to almost nothing over her twig-like hands. She bore little resemblance to the trolls and witches of my night-time fears and imaginings, but at the same time there was something about her which was unlike anything or anyone I’d ever seen. That
presence,
and then being so thin and brown and old. It was all of those things, and everything else I couldn’t name or place, which made me sure I was witnessing something beyond the guilds, beyond my life, beyond Bracebridge.

There was
a snip.
I saw that she was holding a pair of secateurs in her thin fingers. Yes, she was plainly old, yet the way she moved as she beckoned us in across the huge and empty hall, still snipping those secateurs, you half-expected her to fly. She was wearing the kind of straw hat my mother might have worn if she hadn’t had on her bonnet, from which spiderweb strands of grey hair escaped, and her ears were like anyone else’s; their tips weren’t even pointed. Blink once, and she seemed ordinary. Blink again, as she stepped into the deeper shadows of the hall, and she almost seemed to vanish. Mother’s shoes and umbrella tapped. Shining tails of engine ice twinkled like dirty snow from the sunlight which drizzled in patches through the roof. My boots stubbed and rattled on the loose stonework. My mother and I seemed a ridiculous pair, arriving here at this strange and ancient house, unannounced but somehow not quite unexpected,

‘Is everything safe, Mary? Are things all right?’ The changeling’s face almost frowned. ‘You’ll probably want to see me alone?’

‘Yes. If that would be … Convenient.’

She nodded, smiling.

‘And you’re Robert, of course.’ She made my name sound enchanting. ‘Who else
could
you be? I’m Mistress Summerton, although your mother called me Missy when she was just about your age …

But I liked Mistress Summerton better. To me, it made an intensely pretty sound, which felt pleasant on the lips and tongue. In fact, I decided, this Mistress Summerton herself was almost pretty as well, old and wizened and changed though she seemed. Her bare, thin arms were twined with muscle like the stems of old ivy, and what inner flesh there was on her left wrist seemed unblemished, but that was only as it should be. I looked around for other creatures of myth and rumour, not just along the dim spaces, but up on along the cracked and sagging ceilings as well, and on the sills of the mostly broken windows and the branches of the nearby trees which grew through them, just in case more changelings happened to be hanging there like bats. But she seemed to live alone here-there was a child’s skipping rope hanging in a hallway, but such oddities were to be expected. Then we reached a part of the house into which ghostly piles of dandelion seed had penetrated. She opened a door along a passageway. The room beyond was cluttered with flowerpots, half-dead blooms and cuttings, seed troughs, cloudy bottles and green demijohns and what looked and smelled like a small sack of dray manure, although, at least in the piled desk and sagging chairs, the place also gave the impression of a kind of office. Beyond the desk, a tall half-circle of windows looked out on an bright garden,
suffusing
the air with a coloured haze. My astonishment was still growing as Mistress Summerton added to the haze by lighting a clay pipe.

‘It’s about …’ my mother began, still standing, her umbrella and picnic basket jutting out from her sides. ‘What I mean is ..

‘Annalise should be here in another moment. Then we can begin our talk.’ Mistress Summerton came over to me, her pipe clamped within her withered lips. She studied me from our almost equal heights. ‘You’ve grown so finely Robert … It is still Robert, isn’t it? You
look
a Robert now, although not perhaps for life ..

White smoke billowed around her. She seemed to be part of it, receding even as she drew closer and laid a hand on my shoulder which felt hot and light. Then she took off her glasses. Her eyes were brown and bright. In one sense, they were the most ordinary thing about her, but at the same time, they were
too
bright. The pupils were large and big and glittery as jet buttons. The whites had the gleam of wet porcelain.

Then the door opened behind me.

‘Annalise! At last! And I have a job for you.’

I turned slowly, wondering, after what I had already seen, what kind of sprite could possibly have such an affected name. I was disappointed; Annalise looked, in fact, like any other girl of about my age. She was wearing a short-sleeved dress of grubby white cotton, and even dirtier short white socks crumpled above scuffed sandals which might have been new some summers before. Her hair was pale blond, done up in tatters of velvet. She had a high forehead, and skin that would have been pale if it were clean, and eyes which were even greener than the sunlit grass outside. Her expression, as we regarded each other like cats forced to share each other’s territory, was a scowl of disinterest. She had the look of a once-treasured doll that had been left out in the rain.

‘When I say
job,
Annalise I mean a task,’ Mistress Summerton was saying. ‘And I hope a pleasant one. This here is Robert Borrows and I was thinking, well, I was wondering, if you two …’ Her scratchy fingers steered me towards the door. Annalise stepped back. A moment later, we were both standing alone in the long corridor.

‘Do you even
know
what this place is?’ she asked eventually. I shook my head.

Annalise stared at me with disdain. ‘If you want to know, it’s actually called Redhouse,’ she said. ‘If you’re interested in facts. Which I suppose you’re probably not.’

She turned and strode off. One of her sandals had a loose buckle, which jingled lightly with each step. Unable to think of anything better to do, I followed her.

‘So you’re a changeling as well, then?’

‘What do
you
think, little Robert Borrows?’ Perhaps deliberately, she was holding her arms tightly in at the sides. I couldn’t see her wrist. ‘Do I
look
like one?’

‘I don’t know. I mean no—of course you don’t. But living here, in this place …’ I was walking sideways to her as I struggled to keep up. ‘Although you seem ordinary.’

‘Why should I care what you believe?’ she muttered.

My body reacted before I had time to think. I stopped, grabbed Annalise’s arm, and spun her around. As I did so, the air was sheared by a thin, inaudible shriek.

‘Look …’ I was breathless as I faced her. The ruined corridor seemed suddenly endless. ‘I’m like you. Nobody asked me about today, about coming here. I can either go off on my own and sit somewhere and wait for my mother, or I can stay with you. In fact, I—’

‘All right …’ I was still holding Annalise’s left arm just above the wrist. My fingers tingled as, seemingly of their own accord, they let go. Beneath the grime, and but for the reddened marks made by my fingers, and to me quite incredibly, her skin was unmarked. ‘But don’t think I’m like you,’ she added. ‘Because I’m
not.
’

But Annalise was totally unique to me. And I suppose that in many ways I was almost equally strange to her; an ordinary lad from the ordinary world in which she seemed to feign disinterest. But I also felt, even then as she turned from me as she began to walk on, that our oppositenesses fitted together. That we made a kind of a pair. More and more of the crystal growth became apparent as we crossed into what would once have been the state rooms of Redhouse, although most of their roofs and the once-ornate plaster of many of the walls had fallen away. At first, there were just tiny grains of engine ice powdering the ruined floors. Then, larger, chandelier-like excrescences began to droop from the few remaining beams that spanned the ceilings.

‘Lots more people used to live here,’ Annalise said matter-of-factly. ‘But they had to stop. They used to work aether engines here, just like in Bracebridge ..

So she’d heard of Bracebridge! But the questions, the marvels, were coming too quickly. We had entered a room which reached all the way up through the house to the oval dome of a huge and miraculously intact skylight. It was walled with spilled and sagging cliff faces of books, tiered with balconies. The place soared far beyond my comprehension of a library, although clearly it had once performed that function. Here, also, the two quietly warring sides of the house entwined. Darkly veined, the glowing growths of engine ice clogged the shelves, dripped down the stairways in a glittering foam that broke across the floor in frozen waves. Even the glass dome was half covered like a blinking eye. I touched some of the ice. The crystal was cool and brittle. It crumbled with a fizzing, tinkling sound.

Annalise’s breath was close on my cheek.

‘I like to read here,’ she said.

‘I like reading too, or at least—’

‘—looking at the pictures, I suppose. The only problem is,’ she continued before I had a chance to deny it, ‘this whole library’s too
old.
The books fall apart.’

I lifted a tome which lay at the top of a pile which had spilled to the floor. The pages fluttered out like snow. It seemed a sad thing; all this dying knowledge. But when I turned to Annalise, she was smiling.

‘Come on! Bet you can’t catch me!’ She scrambled up a banister, grabbed a book from a shelf and threw it down at me. I ducked. It skidded across the tiles. The spine was ridged with crystal.

‘Looking at the
pictures!
Bet you can’t even
read!’
Another book whizzed past.

Half angry, half laughing, I stared to climb up after her. The wood creaked and splintered. Engine ice fizzed down. Annalise fled ahead of me, slinging more books and insults.

‘Have you heard of Plato?’ she shouted, tossing out a tome from the rail above me which crashed below with the thud of a brick. ‘He was a person just like you, although a
lot
more intelligent. He invented aether long before the Grandmaster of Painswick, although he really just thought about it. It’s the fifth element, and it just goes around in circles when all the others travel in a straight line.’ Another book shot past me, spiralling down through long bars of sunlight, flapping its jewelled covers. More and more books flew by, their pages fluttering like birds, offering bright glimpses of their coloured plates. They rose and circled around me before sliding across the library’s distant chequered floor. I began to throw books out myself from the shelves around me, climbing from ledge to ledge as Annalise darted ahead. Finally, we reached a truce, and lay spread-eagled and breathless on the tiles amidst the wreckage of our battle. My scratched palms and knees were dusted silver-white. The huge, eerie library glowed.

‘Won’t you be in trouble for all this mess?’

Annalise chuckled. ‘Missy doesn’t care. She’s like that—she lets me do what I want.’ Close to, she smelled earthy and salty; like any other child. ‘Nobody minds about Redhouse now. Nobody wants it but us ..

Idly, I picked up the sprawled leaves of the book which lay nearest my fingers. Annalise was right, of course. It was the pictures rather than the words which then drew me. Here were ancient woodcuts from the Age of Kings, dark and swirling like the smoke of all the chimneys of Bracebridge in midwinter. Men with the heads of dogs chewed at corpses. Creatures with pendulous breasts and faces like melting lanterns flew on broomsticks through the air. The print beside it was dense, and filled with funny
f
s and
s
es. One page had a bigger illustration of what I thought at first was a flower until I saw that what I’d imagined to be the stamen was a figure writhing at a stake amid the black petals of flames.

‘What’s that you’re looking at?’ With a quick movement, Annalise snatched the book away. She studied the title on the spine.
‘Compendium Maleficarum …
That’s all so out of date.’ With an effortless gesture, she tossed it so far across the library that it seemed to vanish into the moted air. Then she stood up, hands on hips, giving me a grey glimpse of her knickers. ‘Well? Are you coming?’

I followed as she pushed open a window then dropped down into the wilderness gardens outside. Here, more of the crystal piled amid the flowerbeds in the clear afternoon air, a dense foam amid which great-headed chrysanthemums nodded and roses bloomed. Annalise grabbed a peach from the bough of a tree which was like a glittering white umbrella. Knocking the encrusted fruit against a red brick wall, cracking it open like a nut, she tossed it to me. Juice flooded my palm as I bit into it.