by Adrian
There is a shadow ahead of me, immense - some great edifice at the heart. What shall I find?
A palace? A temple? A way out?
Carol was always ambitious. Wilful. She was wilful, Oliver, you’ll admit that. She’d never
take advice.
51
Short Changes
Adrian Tchaikovsky
There is something wrong with the buildings as I go on. They look diseased. Their brick-built
shells are riddled, the insides discoloured and malformed. They seem to quiver in pain. I see
tendrils of something, Oliver. I am not sure I want to see
I must go on. I saw wings, great wings beneath the slate sky at noon. It is hunting for me with
all of its hate. I only just avoided it at the canal. I thought I would die. I cannot meet it again.
It will destroy me.
--
It is coming for me now- but why should I be coy. She is coming for me. I see the shadow of
her wings moving lazy against the cracked and riven slabs.
I have found the heart. It is not what I hoped.
What happened back then is that Carol tried to make a breach into the Underside, Oliver. You
must have realised that. Without me, in fact against my strict prohibition, she tried to get in
alone. Well of course I had thought that she might, and so I had taken precautions.
I had not told her all, you see. I had withheld information from her: techniques, precautions,
incantations. I wanted to be sure that she could not make the jump. My success in this was
indifferent.
There is nothing of building here at the heart, only rot, where decay has levered a great
killing wedge to devour all the buildings around, and from that decay it thrusts upwards and
outwards, a diseased flowering that I crane my head back and back to look at. A vast, violent
upsurging of fungus and mould, warty with pores, rubbery with folds and creases, and capped
by towering pillars, grotesquely phallic, greenish-white fruiting bodies of the lurking, sapping thing beneath.
All the buildings near the great outgrowth of fungus are dead, and yet living, because the rot
has possessed them – it spreads to either side in a seething tide. Looking away from the vile
growth I see another, a street away, bloating itself skyward in folds and brackets and gilled
fronds. That must be where the big shopping centre is.
It must have been like something falling into the atmosphere, when Carol made the attempt. I
had thought that she would get nowhere. Instead she got - not somewhere, but halfway. She
struck the membrane between the upside and the underside and she burned there long enough
to leave her shape impressed in the world beneath. And she burned there long enough to
leave a hole where the shape, the imago of her, could get back to the world above.
This was almost two years ago, Oliver. Remember? About the time I dropped out of sight. I
had good reason, believe me.
52
Short Changes
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Read it again, Oliver. Understand what I’m saying without my having to say it.
No, I owe you that much: she’s dead, she’s been dead some time. Whatever you have lived
with, and shared your bed with, is not her. The fact that you did not realise this yourself says more about you and your relationships than I ever could. There is no Carol, any more.
But the thing that she made, the thing that hates me, is still with us. When you let it know
where I was, it came flying. It does not look much like her any more. It boiled away out of
the town above right there in your kitchen, it sounds like, and I’m sorry about your plastic
cups but honestly, right now, I have other concerns.
I have found the Heart. It is decay. The living, growing seethe of it is just rot living on rot.
There is nothing for me here. I will make for the station. It is the only way I can find to get
out.
The shadow of her wings again. I do not think that I will make it, but I must try. I will run,
and I will run, but I will hear the wings behind me nonetheless. The beat of them is like a
word and the word is my name.
Carol is gone. She was taken by her pride and my precautions. Her memento mori hunts me
now, circling and circling. When I bolt for the station it will stoop on me like a hawk. It is all that is left of her, your wife and my apprentice. The thing her hate and my guilt became,
when the rest was burned away.
I shall send you this missive.
I shall count to three.
I shall run.
Goodbye Oliver.
53
