Snakeskins

by Tim Major

  The hooded head turned towards him. Though Russell couldn’t see any glimpse of Ixion’s features, he imagined a hard stare.

  “Okay. It was only a joke. But the more I think about it, the more I see it. Rivals struggling for power, beneath the apparently calm surface of the GBP. You mentioned the Party being at risk of being broken apart, and I don’t know if you know this, but Adrian Lorde doesn’t exactly command respect, whereas this woman, Angela McKinney…” Russell had hoped that his conclusions might sound more revelatory. Ixion’s silence suggested that this was all old news. “I’d be surprised if she wasn’t pitching herself as a rival to Lorde. You can’t blame her for wondering whether forty-odd years as PM might be plenty, I suppose. And there have always been those rumours about our country’s missed opportunities – till now I’d dismissed them as urban myths, but who knows? About Americans travelling to the Moon, about wild inventions and alternative forms of government. The way some of those guests at Ellis’s party were talking… I mean, they seemed to be taking all that sort of thing seriously, and I got the impression they were blaming Lorde for the UK being left behind.

  “Anyway… the other thing is that there’s been talk – this is amongst a wider group, politicians and bigwigs and the like, milling around at Ellis’s house. You should see the place. You’d think the house would sink into its foundations, the amount of mahogany and antiques they’ve got in there.” He sensed the invisible eyes upon him again. “Sorry. I go on when I’m nervous. They were talking about targets, or maybe only one target. I heard Ellis say it again, this afternoon on the phone. ‘The target is widening,’ he said, and he sounded pretty upset about it. He used the word ‘triangulation’, too. I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but the first thing I think about when I hear the word ‘target’ is weapons. Do you think I’m being crazy?”

  Ixion gave no response.

  “Minister Blackwood is acting weird too.”

  “Weird?”

  “Maybe he always has, maybe I’m only now beginning to notice it. But he looks absolutely exhausted. I guess that’s not odd in itself – I mean, he’s a Party official and even in the normal course of things he has a lot on his plate, probably. But what’s strange is that he keeps denying it. This woman he keeps talking to, in the banner-printers and at the party – he seems desperate not to let on how tired he is.”

  To Russell’s surprise, the man released a deep chuckle. Was this all a game to him? Russell was suddenly outraged. “Look, this isn’t right. Me telling you all this, and nothing in return. And now I’m suddenly getting wind of some kind of attack… and you’re just going to let me stew?”

  Ixion composed himself. “It rarely pays to make assumptions.”

  “Well. That’s as maybe. But it turns out I can’t help it. Do you know what my assumptions are about you, for example? I think this talk about being at the heart of government is rubbish. I assume that you’re a disgruntled ex-Party worker of some sort, or just an anti-prosperity protester with a personal grudge. That maybe you hate Ellis Blackwood personally for whatever reason…” He paused. The man had flinched, he was sure of it. “Right. So that’s it. And you know what? It doesn’t matter. I think you’re on to something, and I think you’re right about Nell being in trouble, and I think that whatever is going on may mean that my rock-solid government job might actually be a sham. But I’ll tell you what does matter: this has to be a two-way process. I tell you what I know, and you give me something in return.”

  The man cleared his throat. Now his deep voice was less grating. “There is plenty that I don’t yet know. I see only the peripheral details.”

  Russell bit his tongue. Let him continue.

  “I do know something,” the man continued. “It’s not much. Tell me, does Blackwood have a series of several appointments over a two-day period, beginning the day after tomorrow?”

  “That’s a question, not information.” When the man didn’t speak, Russell relented. He could picture the cluster of bookings Ellis had instructed him to add to the diary, all scheduled for the end of the week. Each of them tagged with a question mark. “Yes. He said they’ll keep him so busy that he won’t be in the office. He didn’t want my help making any of the arrangements.”

  Ixion nodded, holding onto the rim of the hood to prevent it from slipping back. “As I thought. It’s actually only a single appointment, though. And he will be away from the office because he will be away from his home, for two nights minimum. The reason, I believe, is that he fears that somebody may follow him, and that making the journey only once would be pragmatic.”

  “And you want me to find out where he’s going.”

  “Where, and why.”

  “Why?”

  “As I said.”

  Russell shook his head. “No, I mean: why do you want to know? Isn’t it about time you told me… No, I know you’re not going to tell me who you are, otherwise it’d make all this cloak-and-dagger furtiveness awfully silly. But isn’t it about time you gave me a hint why this is important to you?”

  The man paused before replying. “I think it may be important to everybody.”

  “That’s too vague. Come on. You have to give me something. Explain to me why you think this is the crucial detail. Why Ellis travelling somewhere – if, indeed, he will be – for a two-night stay is the one thing you so desperately need to understand.”

  The head turned towards him. Russell shielded his eyes but the man’s street light halo made his face utterly blank.

  “Because—” The deep voice faltered a touch. “Because he doesn’t want us to know.”

  Ixion rose from the bench. Russell barely noticed. The reply echoed again and again inside his head. There had been something strange about the intonation. A peculiar stress on the word ‘us’. What did it mean?

  Ixion had already crossed to the yellow gate, moving with surprising grace across the uneven ground, leaving Russell alone and facing an empty sandpit. He shivered, suddenly feeling the cold. Ixion closed the gate gently behind him and strode along the tarmac path. A pinprick of blue light flashed at his feet.

  Russell gave him a couple of seconds’ head start, long enough for him to reach the line of trees. Then he leapt from the bench and followed. He bent over the yellow gate to see along the path. He saw the dark figure walking away, his dark coat absorbing the orange light of the street lights.

  He eased the gate closed silently, took a few strides after the receding figure, then snuck into an alley. He counted to ten, then popped his head out. He continued in this way for several minutes, feeling increasingly proud of his ability to stay hidden. Then, with a start, he realised that the silhouette was no longer getting smaller. Ixion had stopped. Russell pressed himself into a mass of ivy that clung to a tall brick wall. The leaves tickled his neck. He forced himself to take shallow breaths, despite the distance still between him and his quarry. He leant out far enough to look along the path.

  Ixion was standing in the same spot. As far as Russell could tell, he hadn’t turned to look back. He was staring down at the tarmac path.

  Russell waited and Ixion waited too. The ivy began to itch.

  This was ridiculous. He had been talking to Ixion only minutes ago, so why should he be scared of him now? And he hadn’t even instructed him not to follow.

  With a sudden impulse, Russell pushed himself away from the wall. He walked towards Ixion, attempting a stroll but managing only a stiff-legged strut. When he reached him, he would wish him a cheerful ‘Good night’, then walk past and immediately turn on the spot. The nearby street light would surely illuminate the stranger’s face.

  He rubbed his itching neck as he walked.

  He reached Ixion.

  He almost fell forwards onto his face. He had tripped on a rope that ran from the man’s hand and across the path.

  “Sorry, fella,” the man said. “Didn’t see you coming.”

  He wasn’t wearing a hood, after all, and his face was lined – he must be
in his seventies. No, that couldn’t be right. This couldn’t be—

  At the other end of the rope, a dachshund squatted at the side of the path. It finished defecating and then trotted onto the tarmac.

  Mumbling apologies, Russell extricated himself from the tangled dog lead and hurried away in the other direction.

  * * *

  Caitlin’s head bumped against the inside of the train window. She pulled a jumper from her bag and rolled it up to make a pillow. An armed train attendant interrupted her rest, insisting on seeing her ID card as well as her ticket, tutting as she fished it out and reminding her that identity papers must be carried at all times. Then, just as she settled down, her pager buzzed: it was another message from Evie. CALL ME. She jammed the pager into her pocket, closed her eyes and listened to the clatter of the wheels and the rain drumming on the window.

  Train journeys always reminded her of holidays. She tried to latch onto memories in the hope of calming the churning sensation in her stomach.

  It was a miniature train that transported her family to the Museum of Automata, holiday after holiday, year after year. It was barely wide enough for two people to sit side by side, and it was roofless and its walls came only to the height of the passengers’ knees. The chill air would become a sideways blast of icy wind as the train trundled along the coastal track. The many visits merged in Caitlin’s memories, only differentiated by annual changes to the landscape: the appearance of the Sea Life Centre, the council’s abandonment of the cable cars, the opening of a pirate-themed golf course which was in bad repair even when it was new.

  The only visit she remembered in absolute clarity was the first one. She had been seven years old.

  * * *

  Caitlin padded along the narrow aisles. Her parents were in the main part of the museum, with its metal roof that amplified the rain. When she left them they had been trying to convince Tobe that the waltzers he’d strapped himself into weren’t operational. Tobe’s voice was beginning to break and his complaining alternated between childish squeaky and bellowing.

  She pressed herself up against one glass frontage after another, gazing at the mechanical dioramas within, dropping in ten-pence pieces from the clear plastic sack her dad had given her. One showed a pair of peasant boys playing a game of bowls, the pins dropping even before the ball bearing hit them, then leaping up again as the mechanism reset. Another showed a baby suckling at his mother’s breast, watched by a peeping tom who emerged from the bushes. The third scene showed a burning building, into which a fireman slid up a ladder and slid back down carrying a blanketed child.

  She had enjoyed it all immensely. After viewing all of the automata she emerged, blinking and confused in the daylight, as though the miniature scenes had been windows into the real world, and as though the world outside was the unnatural one, huge and populated by giants and waves that bore down upon the beach with mechanical regularity.

  Tobe tried to drag her dad away along the jetty, muttering about some shop in town that traded second-hand computer games.

  “Where’s your mum?” Caitlin’s dad asked her.

  He ushered the two of them to a bench to wait. Janet must have left the museum already to stroll along the concrete coastal path and back. Surely she’d return to where they’d last been together. After waiting twenty-five minutes, he asked the woman at the ice cream booth whether she’d seen anybody. He returned shaking his head, but holding two ice creams. After another ten minutes, he checked the nearby shops.

  After another half an hour he paid for Caitlin to go into the museum to search. She peered into every room twice before she finally found her mum.

  Janet was tucked into a booth only a handful of metres beyond the foyer. She had been hidden by a velour curtain that produced a puff of dust as Caitlin pushed it aside. In her mum’s cupped hand was a stack of ten-pence pieces. She grinned at Caitlin and shuffled along a hard bench to let her in. The curtain dropped. The booth was so dark that Caitlin’s eyes took a while to adjust.

  The glass window lit. Caitlin glanced at her mum, who was staring straight ahead. The booth was still so dim that the scene was difficult to make out. Perhaps some of the bulbs had blown. Caitlin leant forwards so that her nose almost touched the glass.

  Inside the box was a painted wooden figure. A man, four or five inches tall. He sat at the foot of his bed wearing a white nightgown that reached almost to his feet. His bare wooden toes protruded from beneath it. He turned to look up at the window above the bed, from which shone simulated moonlight. It shimmered, and when Caitlin bent to one side she could see a partly-painted, translucent disc spinning, casting shadows of gnarled trees into the room. The man watched the moonlight and his body shook, his wooden joints rattling audibly.

  He stood and took a couple of paces away from the bed, centre stage. Another bulb lit, somewhere to his right, illuminating him and making the rest of the room dark in contrast. His neck clicked as he peered into the gloom.

  Then something appeared in the empty space before him, becoming more and more visible. A dark-haired man in a white nightgown. But it wasn’t a solid image. It shimmered and shuddered. Even though Caitlin had seen the effect in some of the other dioramas, she was still taken aback. The figure hung in the air. She gasped as the wooden man in the scene gasped, his jaw clacking open abruptly.

  “Don’t fret, love,” her mum whispered. “It’s just a trick. They call it Pepper’s ghost. There’s a mirror somewhere back there, in the dark.”

  Caitlin couldn’t see a mirror. It was magical. It was magic.

  The man on the stage staggered backwards. He raised his spindly arms and the nightgown dropped down to his elbows, revealing tiny joints.

  Then the ghostly image before him warped, as though it were a reflection in water and somebody had dropped a stone in. The tiny man bumped against the bed. He watched, and Caitlin watched, as the hanging figure became as speckled and insubstantial as an image on an old-fashioned TV. Then it began to rise. No, that wasn’t quite right. Not all of it, only the top, stretching and then dissipating before vanishing entirely. Within a few seconds the entire reflected person appeared to have drifted away like dust.

  And then another person appeared. Directly behind the man, looming out of the darkness, from a space that had contained nothing beforehand.

  “I’ve been trying to work it out,” her mum said. “The man’s nightgown is solid, so I’m thinking there must be a hinged compartment. Or perhaps there’s a hidden hatch in the surface of the stage. But no matter how many times I watch it, I fall for the trick. I get so distracted by the ghost that I forget to watch for the mechanism behind him.”

  The man gave no impression of having noticed the newcomer. His shoulders slumped and his miniature hands went to his face. Relief. Joy, maybe.

  The person that had appeared was his exact twin. The same man, the same dark hair and stern mouth, though lacking the nightgown. Unlike the spectral vision moments before, he was wooden, solid, real. His limbs were skeletal, all pin-joints and thin struts. His crotch was a flat, blank space. He raised his arms high above the first man’s head. Some subtle mechanism turned his tight mouth into a smile.

  The first man spun around. His hands clattered against his body. He looked up at the newcomer and his jaw dropped.

  The naked wooden figure lunged forward.

  Then the lights cut out.

  Caitlin continued staring at the dark window. She could see nothing inside, no hint of movement. She crossed her arms tightly across her chest.

  She jumped when her mum spoke. She had almost forgotten that she wasn’t alone. “Are you okay, Kit? Not scared?”

  “Dad and Tobe are waiting outside.”

  “Kit. This is important. A piece of history. This is how people used to feel about Charmers – that we were monsters, or cursed. This machine was made to warn the public about us. But the people who made this, they were wrong.”

  The ice cream wasn’t sitting well in Caitlin’s s
tomach.

  “I want to go.”

  * * *

  Caitlin’s forehead knocked against the train window again.

  Something rose up in her belly.

  The teenage boy sitting opposite her swooped to gather his books and magazines. He watched her, wide-eyed.

  Puke burst from Caitlin’s mouth, splattering on the surface of the table.

  * * *

  Gerry glanced in both directions along the dark street, then awkwardly nudged the car boot closed with a buttock. She paused for a moment on the kerb, regaining her balance as the pile of hardback books teetered and threatened to topple from her outstretched arms.

  The journey from Ilam had been fraught, and the second half had been in rain-streaked darkness. There had been roadworks most of the way along the M1, and then, as the road cones had petered out, Gerry found herself in the immediate aftermath of a three-car pileup that had blocked the width of the road. She, along with the rest of the returning weekend tourists, had been caught there, static, waiting for the ambulances and fire engines to squeeze through the throng.

  The holdall containing her clothes and toiletries was still on the back seat of the car. She ignored it and set off along the road. The books were more important.

  Anise Hartwell had been equally helpful when Gerry had returned to Ilam Hall on the second day, after spending the entire previous day holed up in the library. They had dined together on the first night, too – trout, wonderfully prepared by some unseen member of staff. After the meal, Gerry had excused herself after the second bottle of wine, when she noticed Anise draw closer along the sofa. Though she was attractive enough, and her warmth was inviting, Gerry was wary of complicating their agreement with anything that might make either of them jumpy. And that was even without considering the fact that Anise was almost double her age, despite not looking it. What had shocked Gerry, though, was how flattered she felt. A Charmer was interested in her. All her life, she had seen Charmers as remote and almost godlike. The idea that she might hold sway over one of this elite class was intoxicating.