by Steve Harris
The memory she’d been keeping at bay was surfacing now. It had been buried in her mind for a very long time indeed. Since she was six. Since her first and only visit to King Arthur’s Castle. She had seen magic that day.
‘Yes, I was able to do it, by then. I’d learned about altering reality. I knew that I wasn’t going to get Snowy back by natural means, but I also knew I didn’t need to. I could write Snowy back into life. I could recreate her. You are mine, Sarah-Jane Dresden. I wrote you into existence. To become Snowy. It’s downstairs in the library. A thousand-page typescript that I wrote sitting up here against this wall on an old Royal manual typewriter. From your very beginning to the day we first met, a few hundred yards away from here. You were conceived - literally, not literarily - on the little curve of beach down in the bay between Black Rock and Tintagel Castle. The manuscript opens with your parents’ visit to the Castle. Go and look if you don’t believe me, it’s downstairs on the third shelf up, about half-way along. I had them linger long after everyone else had gone. It was a warm evening for late October and darkness fell quickly. Your parents - Josie and Victor - were feeling particularly amorous. For the one and only time in their lives, they stripped naked and made love on the beach. And for the one and only time in her life, Josie became pregnant.’
He smiled. ‘It’s today, Snowy. Today is your birthday. The day I brought you from fiction to fact. The day you were conceived. I wrote it all. Even down to how the baby would look. I had pictures, you see, of Zara when she was a baby. She was an only child, you were an only child. Everything matched.
‘Now let yourself remember this,’ he said. The day we met at Tintagel. You can access it now. You haven’t before, because I disallowed it. But let it come out now. Remember.’
And suddenly S’n’J was remembering. She seemed to have no control over the process at all.
He’s right! she told herself as the image began to form in her mind, The bastard is right! He did conceal the memory and now he’s let me have it back!
She wanted to scream, she wanted to lash out and call him a liar and kill him and stamp on him and grind the pieces into the lush carpet, but she couldn’t.
She couldn’t because the house and Philip were both gone now and she was a six-year old child in a short yellow dress. She had a fringe that hung in her eyes and she was sweaty and tired of walking up steep hills to look at piles of old rocks. When they’d told her she was going to see King Arthur’s Castle, she’d expected to see tall towers and a moat and drawbridge, and the slots through which archers had once fired arrows into the eyes of bad kings.
Her daddy kept promising to show her where those slots were, but instead he and mummy were walking round all gooey-eyed, saying that they wanted to walk down to the little beach.
So Sarah-Jane wandered off to explore.
Up ahead of her, at the top of a steep climb was the ruin of what had once been a tower and she ran towards it, hoping for archer’s slots.
And suddenly she had run out of the sunlight into the cool shade at the foot of a tall wall. It smelled of moss and grass here. She looked up the wall and didn’t see any slots, just the blue sky above. There was a seagull up there, wheeling gracefully.
‘Are you lost?’ a man’s voice asked.
Sarah-Jane gasped in surprise and turned towards the voice. There, in the shadows where two walls met, stood a man. He was old - about as old as her daddy - and very tall and strong looking. He was smiling at her.
‘Nope,’ Sarah-Jane said, shaking her head. ‘I’m not lost, I’m exploring.’
The man nodded. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘What did you find?’
Sarah-Jane shrugged. ‘Not much,’ she said. ‘I wanted to see where the archers shot arrows from.’
‘I can show you,’ the man said.
‘Can you lift me up so I can see?’ Sarah-Jane asked. She wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, she knew, but this man looked nice. And he sounded friendly too. And her mummy and daddy were nearby.
‘I can do better,’ he said. ‘I can show you the whole castle. As it was before. When it was brand new.’
Sarah-Jane grinned at him. ‘No you can’t!’ she said. They didn’t have pictures then.’
The man shook his head. ‘But they did have magic,’ he said. ‘And so do I, Sarah-Jane.’
She frowned at him. ‘How do you know my name?’ she asked suspiciously. ‘Do you know my mummy and daddy?’
He nodded. ‘And I know all about you too. They told me. I’ve got it written down in a big book. I’ve got a book of you.’
‘Why?’
‘Because one day, when you’re grown up, we’ll meet again and I’ll tell you about my book of you and you won’t believe me because you’ll have forgotten today. But I’ll remind you. I’ll say don’t you remember the day we met at King Arthur’s Castle and I showed you magic? And you will remember.’
‘You haven’t showed me any magic’
‘Do you want to see some?’
‘Yes please,’ she replied, expecting the kind of trick her grandfather did for her. He could make a knotted hanky dance on his hand and make you think the tip of one of his thumbs came away in the fingers of his other hand.
‘Then come here,’ the man said, ‘and kneel down in front of me.’
She walked towards him, ready to turn and run if she needed to, but she didn’t think she would need to.
‘Kneel down here, just at my feet,’ he said. ‘Shuffle a bit closer or you won’t see.’
Sarah-Jane moved a little closer, but the man wasn’t happy until she was so close she could feel the heat of his body through his trousers. She suddenly felt all trembly and shy and didn’t know why.
The man cupped his hands and put them down between her face and his trousers. She was so close that his fingertips touched her chin. They were cool and soothing.
Tuck your hands under mine,’ he said softly, ‘and watch closely.’
The feel of his skin made her hands tingle.
And as Sarah-Jane watched, a ball of shimmering air formed in the man’s hands. It was a little like the heat-haze you saw on roads when the weather was hot, but this one contained golden twinkling specks that shone like fairy dust. Sarah-Jane was delighted.
‘What is it?’ she asked breathlessly.
‘Shoosh,’ he whispered. ‘Just watch.’
And the heat-haze and twinkling cleared and suddenly the man was cupping a tiny castle in his hands. This castle, in olden days. It was whole and it was perfect. It stood on the pair of big rocks and the sparkling blue sea shimmered at the bottom, lapping at the shore formed by the flesh of the man’s hands. There was a little wooden boat sailing across the sea, propelled by a breeze in a big red sail.
And there were guards at the castle gates. And a pair of knights in armour were riding beautifully bedecked horses up the steep hill to the castle. Thin plumes of black smoke were rising from two or three places inside the castle and Sarah-Jane imagined blacksmiths in there somewhere, heating iron and steel and beating out n
ew horseshoes and swords. She could almost hear the sounds of hammers on anvils.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she heard herself say.
‘It’s magic,’ the man said softly. ‘Remember that, Sarah-Jane. Only gods can do this.’
She nodded, watching one of the horsemen flip up the visor of his helmet to speak to the guards. The knight looked just like the man who was showing her the vision.
‘what the devil do you think you’re doing?’
The magic vision ceased instantly.
Sarah-Jane recognized the voice of her father and looked over her shoulder at him as he stormed towards her, his face dark with anger.
‘stop that you perverted bastard!’ her father shouted, and suddenly, the man was pushing her away from him as he moved. Sarah-Jane fell over.
‘Sarah-Jane, come here at once!’ her father yelled. For some reason he had stopped about twenty feet away from her. He looked very angry and very frightened. The man - who was supposed to be her daddy’s friend - was standing against the wall in the shade, glaring at her father.
‘Get up, Sarah-Jane, and come here at once!’ her daddy shouted.
She scrambled to her feet and ran to him.
‘Don’t you ever do anything like that again!’ he yelled at her, raising his hand. He wouldn’t hit her. She knew that. Her father had never struck her. Ever. But his anger at her was enough to make her eyes fill with tears.
‘He was only showing me a magic trick, daddy,’ she wept, looking up at that hand which seemed as high above her as the sky.
‘never again you bad girl!’ her father yelled, and his hand swept down towards her. There was a flash of light and pain, then darkness.
And S’n’J came back to herself, dizzy and shocked.
‘He hit me, she heard herself say in a small, astonished voice. Her face was wet with tears and she felt as if she could curl up and die. She felt filthy. ‘You fixed it so he thought you’d made me give you a blow-job and he hit me,’ she repeated.
‘He was frightened, Snowy,’ Philip smiled. ‘And there were a lot of things running through his head when he saw you knelt there in front of me. You licked your lips when you turned round.’
‘But I wasn’t doing anything!’ she heard herself complain.
‘I had to fix it so it appeared there was. So you would be too frightened to remember anything about what had happened. So that you would believe me now, when I made you remember. Do you believe me?’
S’n’J shook her head. It wasn’t just her mind that had been raped, it was her whole existence. ‘I don’t know what I believe any more,’ she said, tearfully.
‘You can believe this quite safely: I am a god and you cannot harm me. I created you.’
‘What now?’ she asked, stunned.
‘You may as well forget about ever having been Sarah-Jane because by tomorrow morning she will never have existed. You’ll be Snowy and I shall sit here and alter the story so that you’ve always been Snowy. At dawn tomorrow, none of this will have happened. Not even the little glitch where I sacrificed you, my darling. Our histories will be seamless. You and I will live here for ever, in perfect happiness. What more could a woman ask for?’
‘Her own life,’ S’n’J said, dully.
‘But Sarah-Jane never did have her own life,’ Philip replied. ‘You owe your very existence to me. It belongs to me.’
S’n’J simply looked at him. The tears in her eyes blurred his image so that he appeared dark and terrible. In that moment she hated him more than she’d ever hated anything in her life. It gave her a little strength. ‘Then you’d better make a good job of getting rid of my memories,’ she said venomously. ‘And you’d better hide the finished book away somewhere I’ll never see it, because I swear that if I ever remember even so much as a minute of being Sarah-Jane, I’ll kill you, god or not. Immortal or not. If I remember, I’ll find a way.’
Philip smiled his melting smile. ‘Very eloquent, Snowy,’ he said. ‘A fitting speech for the end of a woman’s existence. Now, if you’d just like to go back to bed and try to sleep, you’ll find that things will look very different in the morning. You’ll feel much better.’
Sarah-Jane stayed where she was, no longer knowing what to do
Philip began to frown. ‘I didn’t expect that to happen so quickly,’ he said to himself. He seemed to be peering past her to the window behind her.
‘What?’ S’n’J asked, glancing over her shoulder.
A heavy curtain hung over the window blocking her view of the outside. There was no curtain rail to hold it up, but it hung there anyway, moving slightly as though in a draught. And as she watched, the reality of the curtain began to falter. The pattern on it faded and the material it was made of became transparent.
He doesn’t have enough power to do it all! S’n’J’s mind cawed in triumph. He isn’t damned well invincible at all!
Outside, up on the track, the shielding over the cars had gone completely. Beyond them, way up the track, another car was coming down. A Cavalier, if she wasn’t mistaken.
‘Who’s that?’ she asked, turning back.
But Philip wasn’t about to tell her. He had other fish to fry, apparently. He waved, said, ‘Ciao!’ and folded up.
Inside a second he was gone.
30 - Fighting Fiction with Fiction
S’n’J did a quick limping shuffle to the window. The Cavalier had now stopped behind her Sierra and the door was opening.
Martin got out, looking very small and frightened. He was carrying what appeared to be the handle of a pickaxe.
She had never thought she would be so pleased to see him.
‘Be careful!’ she yelled as Martin looked all around him, his head bobbing from side to side as if he was a bird that had just landed in a cat pound.
Evidently things weren’t quite as cut and dried as Philip made out. If they had been, he wouldn’t have disappeared so quickly when he’d seen Martin coming. Apparently, Martin was a force to be reckoned with. S’n’J had no idea why this should be.
‘Philip’s weak and losing his grip, you might be able to smash the window. You could at least let Martin know you’re alive!
She whacked the window with the rolling-pin.
It bounced off with the chink! noise of a hammer hitting a ship’s hull.
Up on the track, Martin was less than ten feet away from the car he had come in. He had gone to the side of the track and was peering down into the valley.
The computer! S’n’J thought and shuffled back to where its display was still working, now showing a blank page.
I’ll write on this one, she told herself. And this time I’ll remember to save what I’ve written. Philip shouldn’t have told me the secret, because now I know how make things come true, too.
She flung herself down into the chair, already reaching for the keyboard.
And before her fingers had touched a single key, words began to appear on the screen.
Seventeen
Martin arrived at the track leading d
own to Black Rock with the mother of all battles already going on inside his head, she read as the words formed themselves on the screen.
‘You bastard!’ she shouted at Philip, wherever he was. This was another talent he’d kept quiet. He didn’t even have to sit at the bloody computer to write; he could do it remotely. It quite neatly explained Snowy’s suspicions that Philip never actually went into the room to write; explained why she had not heard the rattle of the keyboard while he worked. It was another of his horrible literary jokes.
‘It had started at the car-rental office, as soon as he’d put his name on the agreement. The ice block in his brain had suddenly lit up and begun to send out spiked pulses of red light which seemed to scorch the very meat of his brain. Each pulse struck in a different place and each left a deep, dull ache behind it when the searing agony stopped. Martin suspected that his brain was haemorrhaging; that he was suffering multiple strokes that would leave him crippled and mentally disabled. He could live with being crippled, he knew, and function almost as well at what he did best; it was the prospect of losing his mind that frightened him.’
The writing paused here, as if Philip - blast his eyes - had stopped for inspiration. The ‘save’ menu appeared on the screen, the option selected itself and the computer’s hard-disk light lit as the writing was saved.
No more words appeared on screen. S’n’J saw her chance.
‘But this wasn’t happening’, she wrote, carefully hunting down the keys and pecking at them with two fingers. It took her nearly thirty seconds to type and save the words.
