The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

by Natasha Pulley

  He settled back against the wall. The air was still mountain-thin and electric-coppery, and it was still hard to inhale all the way, but apart from that, it was a nice evening and the sun was going down. After he’d eaten, he felt better. He got up again and brought in some wood from the pile by the door, and lit the old-fashioned stove under the table. Once it was going, he put the grate back over it, a blanket over the table, and tucked himself under the edge of it to catch the heat, basking in how good it was to have stopped walking and to be warm.

  A tiny sound uncoiled somewhere on his left. It was so faint that it was on the edge of being imaginary, but he straightened up and heard it again, a slightly different shade of red. It was just the pitch of a man’s voice.

  He stood up again, trying to hunt it out. At the right distance, running water – gutters mainly – had the colours of a human voice. He opened the door. There was a faint chattering somewhere outside and if he’d heard it blind it could have been a stream or children talking, but he could see the water from here, or rather, he could see something like a stork walking in it, just through the trees.

  When he pulled the door shut, he heard it again, a bloom of gold off to his left. There was a deeper, dark red under it. Piano strings, but only the thrum they made when you blew on them, nothing stronger. He strayed across and put his head against the top panel. It was a fraction stronger there. It wasn’t a tune, but it didn’t quite sound random either. It was snatches of something, too quiet for him to catch and fill in the gaps. He listened for a while before opening the lid. The hinges squeaked.

  He didn’t understand what he was seeing at first, but when he did, he jumped and the piano lid banged shut, which juddered the strings and made the ground look like it was casting a rainbow mist as the reverberation hummed up through the floorboards. From inside the piano came upset, disturbed skittering. He waited for it to stop before he opened the lid again.

  The strings were covered in moths, a whole colony of them. They were shuffling over the entire sounding board, their wings and legs just heavy enough to sound the strings. He stared down at them and wondered what the hell to do about them.

  He took the monk’s lightbulb outside and propped it on the bough that stooped down just outside the window, then pushed open the window, which was uneven and warped on its runners. In the dimness, the moths were only a shifting shimmering over the strings. Not wanting to hurt them, he eased the damper pedal down and then rippled the keys to make them move. They lifted from the strings and hovered, disorientated, and then began to falter out towards the light.

  One of them landed on his knuckles and paced about – it was very soft – then bumbled away again. He was no entomologist, but it seemed like too much of a coincidence to meet some winter moths only two months after Mori had asked him to post a package of them to this same forest. But even if they were the same moths, he had no idea what they were supposed to mean.The crawling, slimy thought he’d had after the explosion in Tokyo, and with Grace, crept through his head again. Something had gone wrong. None of this felt like Mori’s plans did when they were going well. There were too many gaps and broken pieces.

  On their way out, the last moths avoided a distinct space in the air, like they were hitting the edge of an invisible thing. It was only for a second, but they outlined the shape of a person. Then they were out and coiling around the lamps. He watched the place where the ghost had been, unable to shift the creeping sense that it was watching him back.

  He couldn’t sleep. Whenever he was close, there was another flash from the electricity tower, or a clatter outside that might have been a bat or something else, and he jerked awake again. All the while he couldn’t stop feeling like there was someone in the corner.

  He pulled the blanket further up his shoulder and curled forward against it. It felt like one of those makeshift nights when something had gone wrong and everyone ended up camping on the floor instead of in their usual places. It had happened once at Filigree Street; they’d given up the bedrooms to Dr Haverly and his youngest boys, because Mrs Haverly was in a difficult labour. Sometimes over the patter of the hail outside it had been possible to hear the midwives talking, urgently, through the chimneys, and so Mori had kept the phonograph going on the hearth to send the music up the chimney shaft to the boys upstairs. It was Christmas, and he’d put on carols, because Mrs Haverly would be all right in the end and so would the baby.

  Between them, they had a candle and a game of backgammon, where the lacquer counters winked.

  He couldn’t remember who had won or lost, but after the game, Mori had pulled him back to fit them together under the blankets. Thaniel caught his hand and pulled it down, not quite all the way, and pressed his knuckles to ask him to keep it there. He did, and didn’t move except to stroke the edge of his thumb against Thaniel’s last rib, like it was made of something much more difficult to come by than bone. From outside somewhere came the bright clatter of breaking glass. It didn’t even occur to him that their own windows might be in danger. He had fallen asleep listening to the carols and the hail and the bang of the wind hitting the side of the house.

  There was still some leftover calm in the memory, enough to rub off and catch a silvering of it, at least. He lay holding it until he could sleep. In the dark, the room strobed every so often as the tower fizzed and flashed.

  The next morning, everything outside was invisible in glowing white fog. Wisps of it had come in where he’d left the door a fraction open for air. He lay watching it, only half awake, and thinking distantly that the weight of his hands on his chest was uncomfortable. A new arena of feebleness. He didn’t move, not wanting to get up straightaway into the cold, but he could tell that if he stayed where he was, the background panic under his ribs was only going to get worse and worse. He hadn’t completely relaxed at night since the ghost had caught his shoulders at the legation.

  He shifted as an overture to getting up, and froze when he realised that it wasn’t his own hands on his chest.

  He couldn’t see it properly without turning his head, but there was something beside him, formed of small moth bodies and shifting wings. He jerked away from them and ran to the door. The second he moved, the form dissolved, but he saw it, just; a man kneeling down. The moths burst away in all directions.

  He stood frozen on the doorstep, waiting to see if it would come back.

  The moths started to come together by the wall. He leaned back in. Gradually, enough of them gathered to form the person-shape again. It was doing something; writing, or painting. Then it stooped down and seemed to unroll something invisible down the wall, and mimed out nailing it up. The rubber: it was the workman who had put up the insulation.

  The ghost looked right at him and pointed urgently at the wall, then dissolved again. The moths edged towards the window.

  Very slowly, Thaniel stepped back inside. He had to look around for a bit before he found a hammer, but when he did, the nails in the rubber insulation slid out easily enough. The rubber fell off. Underneath, the wall was bare wood. The writing on it, in white paint, was in big clear Japanese letters.

  DO NOT GO BACK TO YORUJI.

  He stared at it for a long time. A flutter in his chest buzzed with joy to see some sign from Mori, but it was very small. Mori had gone to a lot of trouble to make him see this. Something horrible must have happened at Yoruji.

  Thaniel stared at the block letters. Yoruji was cordoned off, Arinori’s wife had said. No one had heard from Mori for months, except Grace and the scientists, who didn’t know where he was being held. Somehow everyone had assumed Mori was somewhere far away, but Kuroda had set everything up perfectly at Yoruji itself.

  Kuroda could have kept Mori there all this time. Or at least until the end of January, when Grace’s telegrams had run out.

  He didn’t have to be dead. Anything could have happened; he could have been ill from everything they’d done, or even from something they hadn’t even done yet. He felt the pain before he knocke
d into things.

  And he was too bloody stubborn to ask for help. He was doing what he always did; tidying people out of the way. Thaniel had had enough of being tidied.

  Thaniel nailed the rubber back up, packed and locked up, leaned into the office to say goodbye to the director. He wished he could say it to Grace too, but he didn’t want anyone to notice him paying her any more attention than a Ministry clerk would have to. He was feeling as strong as he was ever going to, so he set off back down the mountain with his whole mind churning so much he barely noticed the hanging ghosts on the way.

  He couldn’t really believe it when he saw the glow of the little lightbulb shrine. The monk was there too, cheerful as ever. Thaniel thanked him for everything again and then paid him to fetch in a horse ready to go, and then to go up the mountain if he could and tell the white lady there that she could get out as soon as she needed to, even without money, and without papers if she could keep to the back roads. The monk promised he would.

  He went back through the burning village, back through the fence, past the crooked tree to fetch his bag, and out to the road, to find out if there were any stagecoaches going up towards Tokyo.

  His memory kept replaying every conversation they’d had at Yoruji, how nervous Mori had been, how wary. If he had been watching a future of imprisonment, maybe even his own murder in that godforsaken house slink nearer the whole time, in silence, he had done well to stay standing up.

  Thaniel had to punch a tree when imaginings of black rooms and chisels seethed up too far. He should never have left Yoruji. He had to go back.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Yokohama, 15th February 1889

  The tiredness caught up with Thaniel on the last leg of the long stagecoach run. The journey back had been much more crowded than the way out, so he was propped against the window in order to give a lady with her baby and two chickens space on his right. Despite the cramped awkwardness, he fell asleep against the glass and woke, disorientated, to the comb pattern his hair had made in the condensation. The lady prodded him and said they were at Yokohama.

  There was a rope barring the gates at Yoruji. On it was a sign that said Home Ministry: No Entry. Danger of Death. A policeman clipped over and told him to move along. Thaniel knocked him out, put him under a hedge, and ducked the cordon.

  The path up to the house was a ribbon of undisturbed snow. Pheasants ducked about under the trees, tail feathers trailing blue fire. It was eerie quiet, because any seagulls that might have cried over the sea had long since flown away or flown into something. The snow was packed and slippery where the way was steep. There was no sign of anybody, or any attempt to keep the paths open. Just a spade leaning against a tree, four inches of snow piled up on the handle. The wind ruffled the graveyard bells. Nothing else. The Ministry must have sent the servants away.

  He stopped dead when he reached the top of the hill. It should have had a view of the whole of Yoruji, all its roofs and balconies. But the house was gone. Instead there was a blasted black mess, with snow dusted over ruined, warped crossbeams and the charred husks of fallen gantries. It was gone.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Abashiri, 20th January 1889

  The warden’s secretary, Mr Nakamura, had become steadily more ill since Takiko had first met him. She found him one afternoon not long after Horikawa had been killed by an angry Ainu man who had finally decided to shoot back. Nakamura was just outside the warden’s door, coughing into his sleeve. He lifted his eyes apologetically. He had a scarf tucked under the collar of his kimono jacket and his hair stuffed up in a rag, even scruffier than it had been last week.

  ‘He says I have to cough outside,’ he explained, and motioned at the door with his elbow. ‘He says he can’t cope with his headaches and me making disgusting noises.’

  ‘Can’t you go home?’ Takiko said. Her voice was starting to come out strained. She still hadn’t found out how to get into the tower. The handwriting on the paper crane had stuck with her in a way the frozen bodies in the woods hadn’t. Mori could have been dying up there from something they hadn’t done to him yet; it would be wholly counterintuitive for anyone talking to him, or at least, anyone who didn’t know him. If she could just get up there and make sure he was still in one piece – temporally, physically, whatever – then the painful tightness right in her chest would ease. She had not – had not – signed up to hurt him.

  In her head, a wry voice that sounded an awful lot like Ayame’s wanted to know just what she thought she’d been doing.

  ‘No,’ Nakamura said miserably. ‘The electrical readout has to be inputted constantly.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’m only paid twenty sen a day.’ He broke off coughing again and looked significantly at the door. He smelled of damp and unwashed clothes when he leaned nearer to her. ‘It’s for a lock,’ he whispered. ‘A special new kind. Super-secure. The combinations change randomly. Something to do with the numbers on the readouts.’

  ‘You go home,’ she said. ‘I can do it. It’s just numbers, isn’t it? Even I can do numbers.’

  ‘You would? Really?’

  ‘Go, go. Do first, apologise later.’

  ‘Bless you, miss,’ he said, heartfelt, and went downstairs still coughing.

  Takiko thought the warden would need some persuading, but in fact he was slumped over his desk with a migraine and only waved vaguely to her to get on with it.

  ‘Type the values from the graph into the typewriter there. New graphs come down into that little postbox next to you. You can read numbers? Get going. I couldn’t be more delighted to explain it to you in more detail but the room is literally splitting in two,’ he said into his arms.

  She lifted her eyebrows and sifted across the cluttered desk. It was full of photograph after photograph, all showing the same thing: a grey background with two strange, waving white lines, mirror images. Each photograph had been printed onto paper with the axes of a graph already marked onto it, and so the waving white lines made coordinate points with their peaks and troughs. Now that she was listening for it, she could hear a scritch somewhere above them. It would be the electrograph, ticking.

  ‘Which line should I—’

  ‘Either, don’t care.’

  While she was still looking at one, another slid into the letterbox built into the wall beside her. It had a glass compartment you could draw down with a lever. She took it out, and held it with her left hand while she typed coordinates from the top line with her right. As she did, something deep inside the wall began to click. When she paused, it stopped. When she found a rhythm and went faster, it whirred. It sounded like clockwork.

  The warden waved at her vaguely. ‘Never stop for more than ten minutes. Got it?’

  ‘Why, sir?’

  ‘Just say you understand.’

  ‘I understand, sir.’

  ‘There’s a good girl. Excuse me while I die,’ he said, and curled up in a ball under his desk.

  So she typed, and every half-hour, just before she could finish each graph, a new one shucked down into the glass postbox. None of them were ever exactly the same. The white lines were sometimes jagged, sometimes almost straight. Towards mid-afternoon, one arrived with the lines all over the place, veering wildly right from the top of the graph and right into negative numbers at the bottom, and no sooner had she picked it up than thunder rolled around the sky and snow swirled down, so thick it hid the view of the town and the sea. She looked out at it for a little while to give herself a rest. The whip bruise over the back of her head was blooming a thick ache all around her skull now, even down to her eyebrows.

  ‘I told you not to stop,’ the desk said. ‘It’s a lock, girl. If you stop then it won’t be bloody locked anymore.’

  Nakamura, it turned out, had an especially horrible kind of flu, and so Takiko kept on as the warden’s secretary. The time dragged and then melted in irregular chunks. She typed the coordinates from the graphs into the typewriter, and listened to the pa
rts of whatever mechanism it was attached to turn and click inside the wall beside her. After a while, she made up maths games with the numbers. By the end of three days, she could multiply by twenty seven without straining.

  There was never a chance to talk up into the tower room. Every night, the silent night-shift man came to take over, and every morning, he handed over to her just as silently. The warden said he’d hired a deaf man because deaf people couldn’t talk.

  But on her fourth morning, there was a crane in the hearth when she came in. The young man, of course, wouldn’t have heard it fall, and the fire had burned right down. Horribly aware that the paper wings were smoking, she waved a cheery good morning to the young man, who smiled and bowed, and mimed how cold it was. She agreed. In the hearth, the crane shifted in the ashes.

  Finally, he left.

  She snatched the crane out. In handwriting that was even worse than before, it said are you still there?

  It made her think of the whispering voice in the solitary confinement shed and she wanted to shriek. She was about to call up the chimney when the warden clattered in with a rush of cold air, stamping snow off his boots and frost off his coat. All she could do was light the fire to show that somebody was there. She flopped hopelessly back into her own chair.

  The prison had a small shrine. It was a sorry affair, with a horrible little pottery statue of some kind of fishing god, and Takiko wasn’t religious. But at six that morning, before she had opened the office door to find that the warden had taken to sleeping at his desk, she rang the bell and put a cigarette in the offerings box, because she didn’t have any money left but what she would need to get home. She didn’t say the prayer aloud, in case someone heard. She said in her head, as clearly as she could: Let Mori still be alive.