“About time, eh?” He looks so pleased with himself.
Peggy’s gaze slips back to the text. She reads everything twice, including the last lines:
The excavation concluded in tragedy in September 1965 with the discovery of Professor DeAngelo’s body in the nearby River Severn. A verdict of suicide was recorded.
*
She woke quite suddenly, without having to retrace her steps up from her dream. An owl was hooting in the trees. Feeling foolish – as well as damp and stiff and chilled – Peggy returned down the moonlit track to the park gate and then the village hall. The remnant of her dream clung to her like a cobweb on her face; no matter how much she tried to brush it away she could still feel it.
Professor DeAngelo was leaning on the fence outside the hall, smoking the pipe he affected to go with his silver hair and his tweed jacket. “Peggy,” he greeted her affably. “Had a nice walk?”
She was opening her mouth to tell him to get stuffed – or maybe to acquiesce noncommittally, she could never afterwards be sure – when a shadow dropped from the night sky. Bat-winged, black as coal-holes and murder, it fell without sound to wrap lithe arms about DeAngelo’s chest and throat. He yelled once in pure shock, and by the light of the porch bulb Peggy saw a snaky tail whip up and jab him lightly under the ribs, over and over again. God, she knew how horrible it was to be poked there. It might not actually harm but it was an assault that tore the breath away. DeAngelo jerked with each stab and tried to scream, but he couldn’t draw air into his lungs. Flailing spasmodically, he completely failed to fight off the four clutching limbs that gripped him tight. In a second his thrashing carcass was hauled clear of the ground. In another he was dangling over Peggy’s head. Soon professor and abductor were nothing but a single dark shape occluding the stars.
And then he was gone.
Peggy clutched the wooden railing for dear life, frozen in disbelief. It was all over so fast – and so violently. She had no words for the midnight gargoyle she'd glimpsed only in outline. She couldn’t name or explain what she'd just witnessed, even to herself.
The front door opened and Alice the undergrad stuck her head out. She looked surprised to see Peggy. “Is Rory out there?” she asked.
“He, uh…” Stunned, Peggy pointed toward the park. Her voice sounded like it belonged to a stranger. “He went off that way.”
“What on earth for?” Wrapped in her candlewick dressing-gown, her arms tightly folded, Alice edged out onto the porch. “He just came out to check the weather. We were talking about fourth century architecture. Where’s he going?”
“I haven’t,” said Peggy, “the faintest idea.”
*
“Gran,” Nigel breaks the long silence humbly, dropping his voice so as not to disturb the kids in the next room. “I hope you don’t mind me asking: was Professor DeAngelo my grandfather?”
For a long time Peggy does not answer. She moves only to blink. Then at last she nods. “Yes.” And I knew. I carried Laurel with me down those steps into the cave. I took her into the Presence. “He was a real piece of work, that man. Very charming – but unscrupulous.”
Nigel lets out a long breath that sounds like a sigh.
Conscience pricks Peggy. “Your mother was nothing like that, of course. Don’t think that, dear. She was…” She shakes her head in wonder. “She was quite extraordinary. Such an imagination.”
“Not like me, hey?”
No, Nigel is quite the opposite to his mother. Staunchly prosaic. He never even reads novels, only non-fiction.
“Gifted, that’s what the doctors called her. Even as a small child, she would tell the most incredible stories… Oh, sailing on a river boat through a city with golden towers, and riding her elephant to jungle palaces made of ivory and chalcedony. I don’t know where she even got that word from. It’s not like she could have read it anywhere.” She can feel a wobble in her throat as she speaks. “She'd talk about sunsets, Nigel, and the way the moonlight made a path across the bay to the mountains beyond – though she'd never seen the moon, or the sun. She must have heard it on the radio I suppose – she never had any use of her sight, the doctors assured me.”
Nigel puts his hand over hers and squeezes. “It’s alright, Gran. Don’t get upset.”
“I don’t want you thinking Laurel did what she did because she was a bad person, or because she didn’t love you. You aren’t to think that. She was a beautiful, loving girl.”
“I know. Post-natal depression is just a thing. A terrible random thing.”
“She said she couldn’t sleep any more. I think that was what broke her. I tried my best to help…”
“It’s not your fault, Gran.”
Isn’t it? She swallows, and sniffs back the tears. “She was too good for this world. She wasn’t meant for it. That’s what they say, isn’t it – that only the good die young?”
He pats her hand, straining for jocularity, “Well I hope that’s not true, because you must have been terribly wicked in your day, then.”
She tries to smile, but has to turn her face away so he can’t see the look in her eyes.
*
When the family depart at long last, she swallows two aspirin for her headache and takes herself off to bed with a warm cup of Ovaltine – a lifelong ritual that borders on addiction. Eustace slithers out from beneath the wardrobe and hops up to squat like a gargoyle on the counterpane. His face is an inscrutable darkness.
“The first to identify the range of buildings behind the temple as an incubation,” she muses out loud. It’s all up there on the Internet, for the world to see. Millions and millions of people. Smiling, she twists the cap off the little brown glass bottle, ignoring the twinges of arthritic pain, and spills the pills out into her palm. “I think I'm ready now, Eustace.”
After swallowing all the sleeping pills one by one, with sips of the milky malty drink to wash them down, she lies back against her pillows. Eustace looms forward over her supine form, not quite touching her, his horned head blocking out the evening light. She reaches up and touches him, for the first time. His skin is oily beneath her fingers, and it flicks at her touch almost as if he’s shocked. He feels neither warm nor cold. All in my head, she reminds herself, closing her weary eyes.
“Good boy,” she whispers, letting her hand fall back to rest upon her ribs.
He waits, patient as ever, as she drifts off into a doze.
At the end she feels his hands slide round her, lifting her from the mattress.
Maybe, she thinks, like Laurel, she’ll be able to fly.
Season of Sacrifice and Resurrection byAdrian Tchaikovsky
The absence of a quiet man: Kevin’s loss is felt in many small ways. The labs cleared poorly, jars and samples never quite back in place with the millimetre-accuracy that they once were. Late hours of silence without that tacit presence near midnight, for the new man knocks off at ten. Most of all it is the department’s museum, its T-shape of narrow galleries, which misses Kevin. He had been its tender and its master. Now he is gone the exhibits grow untidy, the displays lack the precision of his touch, mislabelled, out of place, a garden growing wild
I never loved another human being as I do the ancient dead. The more ancient the better: fifty million years is a bit fresh, for me. In other walks of life this would be the doorway to psychosis, but a doctorate in palaeontology has reworked me into a productive member of society. I have been at the department here at the university for over a year now, nominally teaching – though it is debatable whether my students learn anything from me – but hired on mostly because I was and am a ferocious publisher for the greater glory of the department, churning out papers every few months on such world-shaking matters as the precise function of trilobite morphology, or an overview of our current state of knowledge on the Tommotian shelly fauna.
One would think that this would qualify me to become part of the team, but in truth my academic colleagues have fuller lives than I: pub, telly, amours, divorces
, talk of which is as dry and dull to me as I always suspect my lectures are to my students. Home holds no amenities for me beyond my bed, which is never jealous of the time I spent working late. I can find in the microscopic intricacies of a fossilised mollusc an infinite fascination that the rigors of human contact denied me. Working late was how I got to know Kevin, in as much as anyone ever did.
His real name was something like Cieven Slovornik, but he was introduced to me as Kevin, and it was Kevin that stuck. He was from somewhere in Eastern Europe, I guessed, or else the Balkans, or somewhere, his speech accented and queerly stressed. He spoke little to anyone, little enough to me even after I struck up our acquaintance. His job description was lab technician, and he had been there four years before I joined the department. In the manner of many quiet, formidably efficient and skilled men, he made his job look effortless, and was consequently underappreciated by everyone. He tidied and filed, categorised and dusted. He cleared up the labs after the students had been in, and he helped classify new finds that came into the department, leaving them with whoever was the best specialist without being asked to, every decision impeccable, invisible. By the time I came along the entire department was running on a frictionless substrate of Kevin’s attentions without anyone ever quite realising.
I didn’t know what his qualifications might have been, over in Belarus, or even if he had any at all, but his understanding of the field was broad and detailed, more than many men with letters to their name. Night by night, the two of us the only living souls in the place, I discovered that he would confidently take on tasks I would not trust to my most senior students, performing them swiftly and to the minutest detail: preparing slides, cleaning and uncovering fossils with picks and acids. Most of all he tended the museum, that odd appendix to the department that was mostly ignored by staff and students except for sudden bursts of activity ahead of open days or summer schools, when members of the wider public might be enticed by it. Without Kevin the place would have been an embarrassment, but he spent many painstaking, nocturnal hours turning displays into dioramas, matching predators and prey, creating miniature wonders of juxtaposition and revelation. He was the Balkan Michelangelo of the display case. I have no idea whether the work was actually in his job description or not.
On one occasion I had landed a contract for a children’s book about dinosaurs, a task that failed entirely to mesh with my usual technical writing style, and only Kevin saved me from ignominy. In his halting, Slavic speech, he sat by me for three nights, retelling the story of the Cretaceous period in a way that I had never envisaged, slowly gaining in confidence as a raconteur while I scribbled down every word. The sounds! The smells! The bellowing clashes of the armoured reptiles, the sudden quiets, water rippling to the silent coursing of leviathan. I, who had lived for things long dead for decades, discovered them again in Kevin’s passionate retelling. The book was, if I say so myself, a modest success, but I have Kevin to thank for it.
“You make them live,” I told him when we were done.
“But they do live,” he insisted. “They are there, in the Then, alive, all of them. They leap and stride and crawl.” He, who normally said nothing, was now in the full flow of his eloquence. “Put your hand here,” touching a chain of vertebrae from a plesiosaur, “and in the Then it is moving, swimming those seas, swift and hungry.” I had never before come across a man who so shared – and exceeded! – my passion for the subject. It was the beginning of the closest thing to a friendship that either of us really owned to.
He was a fugitive, and that explained a great deal of his reticence. From where, precisely, nobody was sure. He never named a country, but there were plenty of places east and south of central Europe where having the wrong ancestors could abruptly become hazardous to your health, fossil feuds from generations back springing to life and howling for the blood of the living. He had come to England fleeing persecution, that much was known, his people under threat from some ancestral enemy. Years later, he still lived in the shadow of it. His daily routine was an exercise in getting in nobody’s way and attracting the least attention possible, his diligence, I assumed, born from memories of a land where any excuse might suffice to move him on or worse. Even at his most relaxed, as we talked over the latest articles in New Scientist past midnight, sitting in the museum and surrounded by his handiwork, I always felt that he was looking over his shoulder, an edge of nervousness never far from him.
Then there was his religion, another topic he never addressed directly. I soon learned from colleagues that Kevin was a member of some odd little sect, some import from his unmapped homeland. Certainly he had sporadic days off for some observance or other. Doctor Rillental, the department head, whose doctorate was apparently in inter-departmental politics, was far too aware of the number of minority boxes Kevin ticked, and never demurred.
So the days went on, smoothing seamlessly into months, and then close to a year of our odd camaraderie, a friendship sutured together around an interest in the dead stone relics of forgotten times, which were more real and immediate to both of us than any of our fellow staff members. I settled down to the job, bored my students, published my papers with a frequency and regularity that became the envy of the department, and assumed that the pattern of my life had been set for the next decade or so.
It was not to be.
One night in mid-March, it was, that Kevin came to me. I had not seen him that evening at all, but this was not unusual. A defining feature of our friendship was a lack of obligation, and he would drift by as and when he had the time and the inclination. At one in the morning, however, just as I was typing up notes on ammonite shell perforations and the probable causes thereof, he was there at my shoulder, strangely reticent, some new nervousness to his manner.
We exchanged a few words and it was clear that he was ill at ease, but I did not press him. Eventually in his own time he came out with, “I have a request, a favour from you.”
I think that, discounting immediate family who have a claim on one’s loyalties regardless of actual like, nobody else had ever said this to me, nor been in such a position of intimacy from which to venture the question. Faced with that realisation and self-knowledge, I nodded for him to continue without hesitation.
“I need you not to be here one night next week, on March 20th,” he explained, a little awkwardly. “It is a very important favour.”
“What’s this about?” My mind was completely blank. I could not imagine.
“I need to … use the museum.” He was not looking at me, staring fiercely at the desk.
“You need to?”
“We – some of my – my people.”
Something was nagging at me, the desk calendar catching the corner of my eye. The date he gave was marked there: vernal equinox.
“Kevin, is this to do with your … religion?” I asked carefully.
For a moment he was not going to admit it, but then he nodded, once, sharply.
I frowned. “Your religion needs the museum.” I was being rude, I knew, but the thought baffled me. I knew Kevin to be a man of broad scientific knowledge, and in my experience religion and science seldom touched hands. Certainly, Kevin had made the museum a very temple to rationality, every detail intricately researched. I could not think what any religion might find to exalt in there.
“We are very greatly interested in the things of the past,” he said slowly, picking his way through the English words with more hesitation than I had ever know. “They are of much importance to us. Each year since I came here, there has been a … ceremony in the museum. Before you came there was never anyone else, at such an hour, to object. Now … this year, this is very important to me. To me, more than any other. This year is my ceremony.” His eyes met mine at last. “You must tell nobody. I have trusted you with this.”
“Nobody,” I echoed, and the thought of mentioning it – to Doctor Rillental or anyone else – never crossed my mind. “Kevin … this is that important, to you.”
And then the point that I took a step too far, presumed too much, forgot myself. The question that should never be asked. “Could I watch?” because I was intrigued, as no human activity had ever caught my imagination before. A religious ceremony (or was the word ritual?) in a museum, some strange sect that revered the past. I felt as excited as if I was describing a new species of bivalve.
The silence stretched itself out, until even I, social inadequate, felt moved to fill it with “I mean, I’d be interested to see…” and “if it isn’t…” but the pause I had taken for offence was instead Kevin thinking patiently over the request I had made of him, weighing pros and cons, considering the chance of a betrayal if I refused, and other variables inconceivable to me.
If the reasons for my asking had surprised me, the reasons for his agreement were a closed book. In retrospect, though, I can only think that, whilst our odd friendship had led me to greatly overestimate the ways in which we were alike, his own assessment of my similarity to him had been so much wider of the mark. And in the end, I think that he valued my companionship on a level that I could not appreciate. He was, after all, very far from home, and I think that he was lonely.
“You must promise not to interfere,” was all he said. I wasn’t sure why I might be moved to interfere, at the time, and – again in retrospect – I should have thought more about it.
*
“It is a matter of practicality,” Kevin explained to me, on the chosen night. “We value rationality above all other things. You know that the calendar on your desk, it is a recent thing, yes? In truth, in logic, without sentiment, that point when the days are starting to grow longer than the nights is the start of the year.”
We were waiting for his co-celebrants, approaching midnight, March 20th. Kevin could not keep still, and he spoke in halting rushes, more words than I normally got from him in a week.
“But there is sentiment, even for us. Your people have always known that the turn of year is a special time: for death of the old, birth of something new. You have your own celebration, yes.”
The Private Life of Elder Things Page 14
