“One of the things you’ll find out when you read the diaries,” he said, “is that there are very explicit instructions about the necessity of preserving the Great Skull.”
She must have remembered, then, what she’d said about a couple of judiciously-placed sticks of dynamite—but that wasn’t the theme she took up. “Am I going to read them?” she asked.
“You’ll have to, won’t you. if you’re going to write a history of the Kilcannon streak?”
She stared at him, not knowing quite what to say. “What I suggested,” she reminded him, “was that I might write a history of Cockayne. The mill and the village—not the family.”
“True,” he said. “That would be an interesting book too. But it might not sell as well as a history of the Kilcannon luck, complete with a record of all its rituals and regulations. That wouldn’t just appeal to historians, you see—it would find a public avid to try out all the formulas and spells, no matter how carefully you analyzed it in terms of the theory of psychological probability. You wouldn’t just be writing a history of reckless superstition—you’d be laying the groundwork for a burgeoning industry.”
She paused for a moment before saying: “Isn’t one of those regulations an instruction that the secrets should never be revealed to a living soul?”
“Of course—but the reading public won’t mind that, and few of its members will be such connoisseurs of paradox as to realize that the fact that they’re reading all about the magic is a cast-iron guarantee that it will never work again, if it ever did.”
“Why would you want me to write a book like that?” Alice asked. “I’d be grateful for the opportunity, I suppose—but I don’t believe in the Kilcannon luck. You do, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he said. “I do. Even now. I’ll still believe in it when I’ve blasted the Great Skull to smithereens and broken most of the other rules in the books. It’s the superstition I don’t believe in. I want to banish that—to eliminate it from consideration, so that the luck can be free from all the paranoid crap that presently surrounds it. It’s a bold move, I admit, but I’m in a reckless mood just now, and I don’t think it’s the kind of mood that might evaporate if I take a few more walks on the moors or a train to King’s Cross. It would be a lot of work, mind. You’d have to spend a lot of time here. You might be able to get a flat in the village, of course, but if not you’d probably have to stay here at the house. It wouldn’t be entirely your book, either—it would be a collaboration, a joint venture. Would you mind that?”
“I’d have to think about it,” Alice said, warily.
“Of course you would,” Canny said. “After all, people would be bound to talk, wouldn’t they? You’re a widow and I’m a single man. You know what the villagers are like, even without Ellen to egg them on. It would probably ruin your reputation, even if you did manage to get a flat. People would be keeping track of your comings and goings every day of the week, always speculating. We’d probably have to get married, eventually, just to save Jem and Madge’s blushes.”
He would rather have been able to shocked her as profoundly as she’d one shocked him, but she was too wary for that—and the effect would, in any case, have been considerably ameliorated by the fact that she didn’t have a mouthful of ham-and-mushroom pizza.
“If that’s a proposal, you bastard,” she said, eventually, “it’s the most dreadful one I ever heard. Even Martin had the grace to ask.”
“So will I, when the time comes,” Canny assured her. “I’m not making conditions, Alice. I’m just pointing out the logic of the situation. I want you to write this book. If the collaboration brings us closer together, that will be an added bonus. If you want to make conditions that will allow you to do it without getting too close, that’s fine—but the diaries have to stay in the house. They’re entailed. They have to be preserved here for my son, whether or not he’s your son too. He’ll have to make his own decisions about how to carry matters forward. You don’t have to give me an answer until you’re ready, of course—you can have all the time you need to reach a reasoned decision, not just about the book but everything.”
“You bastard,” she said, again. “Do you really think I want to be somebody’s second choice?”
“I’d be yours,” he pointed out. “But no, I don’t. And I don’t think it’s a relevant issue. It’s not the right way to look at things, because it isn’t true. London’s preyed on my mind too—and not just because you made me choke on a pizza and then hit me right between the eyes with all that stuff about the Road to Damascus effect. I need you, Alice. I need you more than anything I’ve ever needed in my life.”
“You needed Lissa Lo.”
“No I didn’t. I never thought I needed her, not for an instant. She and I had a lot in common, including some of the same privileges and delusions, but that didn’t mean that we needed one another. Quite the reverse, in fact. It meant that we ought to have avoided one another. I see that now, and so does Lissa. What we both needed, and still need, is someone to balance out our outlandish convictions, someone to provide an anchor in the real world.”
“An anchor? You’re sure you don’t mean a millstone round your neck?”
“Jesus, Alice,” he complained. “You could let up a little bit. I just offered to let you write a book that you’re probably better qualified to write than anyone else in your line of work, and suggested that if collaborating on it didn’t prove too terrible an experience, we might want to take the relationship further. Killing two birds with one ring certainly isn’t one of my expressions. And nothing I’ve said is anything like as indecent a proposal as the one you made me.”
“That’s true,” she conceded, eventually. “In fact, you’re right. I really ought to stop letting it all out on you, just because I can’t say anything to Mum and Dad, or Ellen...or anyone else, really. You’re the one who’s providing the anchor, not me. This need thing seems to be mutual. And you’re right about taking it slowly, leaving the age-old decent interval. We need to know that we wouldn’t drive one another completely crazy, and working together on the book would certainly put that to the test. Okay, I’ll come clean. I really wanted you to ask me do this, or something like it, and I feel a little stupid now for pretending so hard that I didn’t. Fuck Lissa Lo—or not, I really don’t want to know about that right now. Shit, who am I to complain—the luckiest man in Yorkshire thinks that getting off with me might count as an extension of his lucky streak, How lucky is that? Now I’m babbling. A gentleman would probably have interrupted by now to save me from further embarrassment.”
“We don’t have to do that any more,” he told her. “From now on, we can let our vulnerabilities show. We don’t have to do anything reckless, like telling one another the whole truth, but we can stop hiding quite as determinedly as we were before. Okay?”
“Fine. You do realize that our Ellen is going to kill me, don’t you? She’s bound to twig, probably long before anyone else.”
“She’ll be happy for you,” he told her. “She was telling me just the other day how unlucky and unwise I’d been to let all three of you slip through my fingers. She offered me Marie, but I don’t think she was serious. If you tell her all about it she’ll be so grateful for the gossip that she won’t even think of being annoyed. Not that there’s any rush, mind. For now, all that you need tell her about is the possibility of writing the book, and getting access to all the Kilcannon family secrets. That’s all I intend to tell Bentley.”
Alice squinted slightly as she looked into his eyes, and Canny made a mental note to get a more powerful bulb for the desk lamp before they attempted any serious work in the inmost part of the library. She seemed to be able to see him clearly enough, though. “You’ve changed,” she said. “I can’t quite put my finger on it, but you’re different.”
“No I’m not,” he told. “The world’s different, but I’m not. I’ve been through a few things—a close brush with death, a close brush with its opposite—but I’m the same. N
ot just the same luck, but the same style...except that it’s not really a style at all. It’s just a habit—a matter of taking things to much for granted. Maybe I should have learned better, but that kind of habit is hard to shake, and when you get right down to it, it’s not something a sane man would want to shake. It’s part of my luck—my real, measurable, authentic luck. Sometimes, you see, psychology really does reflect probability. Some of us really do have a house percentage to draw on, whether or not we follow the rules. You won’t cure me of that, Alice, and you shouldn’t want to.”
“You’re wrong, you know,” Alice said. “Ellen’s going to be really, really pissed when she finds out that we’re screwing around. She was always the glamorous one, you know. I was just loud. She might not have been serious about Marie—although it might help set poor Jack’s mind at rest—but if Marie thought she had a chance....”
“What do you mean, set poor Jack’s mind at rest?”
“Ellen always swore she was his, and I always knew that she was telling the truth, but Jack was never that certain. Why do you think it took him so long to make an honest woman of her? Let’s not get into that, though. Are you sure it’s me you want?”
“I can talk to you,” Canny said, truthfully.
“Fucking Yorkshireman,” she retorted. “Romantic as a stone skull.”
“Snap,” he came back, wishing that he didn’t feel quite so much like a cheat, when he was really nothing of the kind. He was being as honest as he could be, and as honest as the world would ever let him be. Everything else was just a pattern of phantoms in his skull, with no real referent in the world they shared—just a symptom of some wayward nEurological disorder.
He could still see the future, although it wasn’t as clear as it once had been. He would marry Alice, in St Peter’s—not for a while yet, but when all the inconveniences were out of the way and the traditional decent interval had elapsed. Stevie Larkin would be his best man, Ellen Ormondroyd would be her maid-of-honor and Marie would be a bridesmaid—who would probably try harder than most to make use of the bridesmaid’s traditional droit-de-demoiselle in respect of the best man. Alice would bear a child the following year: a son, who would renew and eventually inherit his father’s gift and title, as well as the royalties from his mother’s books, many more of which would follow successfully in the wake of her fascinating account of the secrets of the Kilcannon fortune. Canny would love his son as much as any father could, and share their common funds with him as liberally as he could bear to do. He would love his wife very dearly too, and share far more with her than his father had ever shared with his mother. They would make the most of their life together, and that was all there was to it. There as no need for anxiety, no need for pain, no need to regret anything that had not happened and never could have.
They would be happy together.
If Canny ever had his portrait painted, he would smile. He would know himself far too well to frown, or to look like the kind of guilty fool who might have made a pact with the devil. He would live to an over-ripe old age, and keep what looks he had a little longer than nature intended. He would labor long and hard in the vineyards of chance and reap therefrom an abundant crop. He would keep his journal as best he could—save that he would refrain from recording any blatant impossibilities or obvious symptoms of madness—and he would maintain his library for those who came after him, even though he felt even now that it was more like a prison than a fount of wisdom, and more like a tomb than a key to life.
In the end, he knew, he would feel a great deal better than he had felt for the last few days. He would never forget, or forgive, but he would become distanced, and calm, and appropriately grateful for the luck he had had in the past, and the luck he would have in the future.
On his deathbed, he would tell his son not worry about the black lightning.
“The black lightning is nothing but the dark between the stars,” he would say. The whole cosmos is black lightning, with just a few scattered specks of starry light and cold grey dust. The void isn’t empty, you see: it’s a seething mass of potential particles, potential universes. It’s nothing because it hasn’t become anything yet, but the potential is always there. It isn’t anything to be afraid of. Look for the light, son—always look for the light—and don’t be afraid to be dazzled. It won’t let you down. You’re a Kilcannon, and it will never let you fall too far, or hurt yourself too badly, no matter how many times you stumble.”
While this reverie possessed him, he looked into Alice’s eyes. In the dim light her pupils had grown large, and they were full of mystery and potential.
“Life itself defies the darkness,” he said, aloud. “Life is light, even if it’s just a random freak of chance or a reaction to stress.”
“Just what I was thinking myself,” Alice said, dryly. “Sometimes, Canny, you can be a bit of an idiot.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I was just thinking. You’ll get used to it—I hope.”
“I hope so too,” she said.
So he carried on. And on. And on. He didn’t make any resolutions he couldn’t keep, but he did make one that he could. One thing he would certainly never do again, he resolved—under any circumstances whatsoever—was bet on zero on any spinning wheel, or its equivalent in any glossy mirror of whirling fate...not because he feared that it might not come up for a second time, but because he could be absolutely certain that it would. From now on, he intended to stick to positive numbers: the ones that counted.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brian Stableford was born in Yorkshire in 1948. He taught at the University of Reading for several years, but is now a full-time writer. He has written many science-fiction and fantasy novels, including The Empire of Fear, The Werewolves of London, Year Zero, The Curse of the Coral Bride, The Stones of Camelot, and Prelude to Eternity. Collections of his short stories include a long series of Tales of the Biotech Revolution, and such idiosyncratic items as Sheena and Other Gothic Tales and The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels. He has written numerous nonfiction books, including Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950; Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence; Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia; and The Devil’s Party: A Brief History of Satanic Abuse. He has contributed hundreds of biographical and critical articles to reference books, and has also translated numerous novels from the French language, including books by Paul Féval, Albert Robida, Maurice Renard, and J. H. Rosny the Elder.
Borgo Press Books By Brian Stableford
Alien Abduction: The Wiltshire Revelations
The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales
Beyond the Colors of Darkness and Other Exotica
Changelings and Other Metaphoric Tales
Complications and Other Science Fiction Stories
The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies
Critical Threshold (Daedalus Mission #2)
The Cthulhu Encryption: A Romance of Piracy
The Cure for Love and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution
The Dragon Man: A Novel of the Future
The Eleventh Hour
The Fenris Device (Hooded Swan #5)
Firefly: A Novel of the Far Future
Les Fleurs du Mal: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution
The Florians (Daedalus Mission #1)
The Gardens of Tantalus and Other Delusions
The Great Chain of Being and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution
Halycon Drift (Hooded Swan #1)
The Haunted Bookshop and Other Apparitions
In the Flesh and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution
The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels
Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First-Century Ghost Story
Luscinia: A Romance of Nightingales and Roses
The Mad Trist: A Romance of Bibliomania
The Moment of Truth: A Novel of the Future
Nature’s Shift: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution
An Oasis of Hor
ror: Decadent Tales and Contes Cruels
The Paradise Game (Hooded Swan #4)
The Plurality of Worlds: A Sixteenth-Century Space Opera
Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine
Promised Land (Hooded Swan #3)
The Quintessence of August: A Romance of Possession
The Return of the Djinn and Other Black Melodramas
Rhapsody in Black (Hooded Swan #2)
Salome and Other Decadent Fantasies
Streaking: A Novel of Probability
Swan Song (Hooded Swan #6)
The Tree of Life and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution
The Undead: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution
Valdemar’s Daughter: A Romance of Mesmerism
The World Beyond: A Sequel to S. Fowler Wright’s The World Below
Xeno’s Paradox: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution
Zombies Don’t Cry: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution
Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
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