by Jeff Noon
“Eleanor?”
The girl murmured in reply, nothing that could be heard. She had not yet looked up from the pool, where red and gold coloured fish swam lazily through the shallows. Nyquist took a step closer, careful not to make any sudden moves.
“I’ve brought your belongings. Your clothes.”
Eleanor looked up for the first time. Her eyes were lifeless, glazed over, and it seemed that she didn’t recognise her visitor at all. But then she moved her head slightly and said, “Nyquist? The private eye?”
“Yes, it’s me.”
He handed her the green duffle bag. Eleanor took hold of it as though it were some strange, alien object. A slight smile came to her lips. “What do you mean?” she said. “I’m alive? Of course I’m alive.”
So then, she had been listening. There was still a mind at work, somewhere in there.
“That’s good,” he replied. “Alive is good.”
She started to look through the bag.
Nyquist glanced over at a young couple on a bench not too far away. They looked for all the world like two lovers who have just had their first real argument and were shocked into silence by its burning message that perhaps love is not forever. A bird twittered away in a nearby tree.
“What is this place, Eleanor?”
“Day and night. Night and day. The one following the other. As it should be. As nature intended it.”
Nyquist looked up at the artificial sun, seen through the glass roof. He could almost believe it was real, the light was so perfect, so unlike the fake suns of Dayzone. Reaching out to the nearest tree he parted the leaves, revealing a small mechanical canary fixed to a branch. It chirped merrily.
“They lock the doors,” the girl said.
“Sure. It’s a prison. And don’t tell me, Patrick Bale is one of the benefactors.”
There was no reply to this. The girl’s attention had wandered.
“Eleanor? Are you on medication?”
“Little white pills. Happy pills. But shhh…”
“What?”
She lowered her voice. “I’ve thrown mine in the water. Well half of them, anyway. Do you see how slowly the fish are swimming?” She laughed at this.
Nyquist didn’t know whether to believe her or not. He watched now as she pulled the bundle of yellow cloth from the bag. This was unwrapped with a careful hand, revealing the wayang kulit puppet within. Her fingers moved over the delicate leatherwork.
“He made this. My father.”
“Dominic Kinkaid?”
“Of course.” Eleanor smiled again. “He was very skilful. A very creative person.” And then the joy left her face as quickly as it had come. “They wouldn’t let me go to the funeral. That’s one reason why Patrick put me in here, to keep control of me.”
“And what else?”
“Because of my power. My power over time.”
“Now what the hell does that mean?”
She looked at him. Her eyes were brighter than before, and more intense. He felt unnerved under their stare.
“He’s scared of me.”
“Bale?”
“He hates me. He thinks I’ll destroy his little world, his pathetic little city with its ever-growing tangle of timescales, that I’ll make it disappear.” Her voice rose in anger. “All he cares about is his wealth, and his stupid position in the world.”
He was worried her outburst might bring an orderly along, but she immediately quietened and fell into a reverie. “Why have you come here, Nyquist? You hardly know me.”
He told her straight. “I think somebody’s trying to hurt you. They wish you harm.”
She shook her head and stared into the water. A goldfish rose to the surface, caught a tiny insect, and dived back down again.
“You mean Patrick Bale?” she asked.
“No. Not him.”
“Who then?”
Nyquist couldn’t bring himself to tell Eleanor of the two shadow men who had attacked him, demanding her whereabouts.
“I want to help you, Eleanor. That’s all.”
“Why?”
He closed his eyes against the brightness of the garden. “Because I let you escape, and because I let your father – your real father – die in front of your eyes.”
Now she was silent. Moments passed. The artificial birds sang their artificial songs in the trees.
“Tell me what happened, Eleanor. Why did you run away from home?”
She looked at the puppet in her hands and said, “I never got on with my father, with Patrick I mean, not really. And then one night I found some letters of my mother’s, love letters, all from a man called Dominic. And that’s where I found his photograph, with the letters.”
“Were they dated?”
“Yes. But in some invented, romantic timeline. I couldn’t work it out. But they were obviously old, years old. The later ones mentioned a child, a girl child.” She was speaking quickly now, carried along by the story. “One thing was obvious. This was a man desperate to see his child. It was all there in the letters, all of it, handwritten on beautiful paper. I read and I read. And… and suddenly it all made sense. This was me, I was this man’s child.”
“What did you do?”
“I spoke to my mother. But she just started babbling away, even crazier than usual. Then I asked Patrick.”
“And?”
“Well, he admitted it. It took him a while to do so, and he was very upset by it all, but finally he told me the truth. I wasn’t his daughter. I was the child of Dominic Kinkaid. But he forbade me from seeing him. Of course, that just made me more determined.”
Eleanor stopped speaking. Her eyes had drifted back to the pool.
Nyquist prompted her. “So you went in search of him, your real father?”
“Yes. I found out that he was working in a puppet theatre. Living and working there. A tiny place in Precinct Thirteen, in a town called Vespers. Do you know it?”
“No.”
“It’s in Nocturna, but right on the edge of twilight. So only a very few people dared go there.” She smiled at the memories. “It was a rundown theatre right on the fogline, where night faded into grey. He’d discovered the place when he was young and taken it over, teaching himself the puppeteer’s craft.” Her head tilted slightly. “I can remember first arriving there. I was really scared. But also excited. I’ve always been attracted towards dusk.”
Nyquist found the idea incomprehensible. “Why?”
“I can’t explain it. Everybody was always talking about how dangerous it was, but whenever the train passed over the borderline I would be drawn to the windows. I liked the shapes the mist made against the glass. When I was young I saw faces there, animals, all kinds of things conjured up by my imagination. And my body would shiver with excitement. It’s not the kind of thing you admit to, right?”
Nyquist shook his head.
Eleanor smiled and continued. “Of course when I met Dominic Kinkaid, all of this… all of this yearning started to make sense.”
“Tell me about the theatre.”
“The building had no name, no sign out front, no official address in any brochure or anything like that. It was the kind of place you had to discover for yourself. But later on I found out it was called the Silhouette Theatre.”
Nyquist remembered the photograph of Kinkaid with the two words written on the back: Angelcroft and Silhouette. Kinkaid’s two residences, one on each edge of Dusk, dayside and nightside.
He sat down on the bench next to Eleanor, the better to hear. “So you went inside?”
“Yes. I went inside to meet with my father, my true father, for the first time in my life.”
“How was it?”
“Awkward at first. Well, more than that. He wouldn’t accept me. Not after all these years. But I kept on at him. And then it became a little better. And after a few visits, it was really good, very natural.” She smiled to herself. “We got on. We really got on well together. Better, I guess, than if I’d
known him all my life. But things happen in strange ways, and you have to take advantage of them no matter, don’t you?”
“You do, yes.”
“I would leave the house as though on my way to college; instead I would go to meet him. Sometimes we’d visit his house on the dayside border, on Angelcroft Lane, but mostly we stayed in the theatre. I would help out there, cleaning and tidying, reading scripts for him, things like that. And then Dominic started to teach me the basics of puppetry, how to make the shadows dance in the light.” Saying this, Eleanor moved the puppet she was holding from side to side, lifting it up into the air and down again in a wavelike motion, as though on a journey. Her eyes brightened. “It was just the best time for me. The very best. I had found my place in the world at last.” The puppet collapsed, dying in her lap. “After I’d been there a few times, he told me a little about his upbringing.”
“Go on.”
“He was born in Nocturna, but abandoned as a baby, left right on the fogline. And taken in by a woman who lived there, over the border.”
“In the dusk?”
She nodded. “That’s right. Does that scare you?”
Nyquist looked away from her gaze.
She continued, “This was his adopted mother. Aisha, he called her. Right there in the mist, in twilight. He spent his childhood days in there, never seeing a bright light, or true darkness.”
“Nobody lives inside Dusk, Eleanor. It’s not possible.”
“Believe what you like. I know what I’ve seen. I’ve stood on the edge with my father, even taken a few steps into the mist. People do live in there.” She screwed her eyes half shut. “They have faces made of fog.”
Nyquist came alert, hearing this. “I’ve seen such people,” he said.
“You have?”
“Yes, but outside of Dusk, they came to find me. They wanted…”
“What?”
He didn’t answer her. Instead he asked her to carry on.
“And once I saw Aisha herself. Just the once. She came very close to me, right to the edge of Dusk. She was a bit scary, to be honest. An old, old woman, staring at me with these really intense yellow eyes. She was close enough to breathe on me, and fog came out from her mouth, it wrapped itself around my face.” Eleanor shuddered. “Apollo knows what she did to Dominic when he was a child, but she changed him, I know that. He was half in love with her, and half terrified.”
Nyquist asked, “You didn’t mention any of this to Patrick? Or to your mother?”
Her reply to this surprised him. She said, “We’re all corrupt, you do know that? The whole family.”
“Why do you say that?”
“It’s the truth.” She stared at Nyquist. “We’re cursed. I saw it all around me. The way Patrick conducted his business, motivated by his own desires alone. So then, no, I didn’t mention anything to him. How could I? He would ban me from seeing Dominic, that was obvious. And well, with my mother… it’s difficult.”
“Yes. I’ve talked to her.”
Eleanor nodded. “You’ll know what I mean then.”
“You like your mother, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do. Of course I do. But she’s been terribly damaged.”
“By what?”
“By life.” The girl closed up a little. “You know how it gets sometimes.”
“Tell me.”
“My mother would sometimes disappear. This is when I was younger, nine or ten. She would get in the car and drive away, herself driving, no chauffeur. Oh, she was quite lucid at times, back then, perfectly capable of looking after herself. For a time at least.”
“Where did she go?”
“I used to think outside the city. Now, I’m not so sure. There was… there was such a blank despair in her eyes, whenever she came back, such distance. I believe now…” She blinked back tears. “I believe she was going to visit Kinkaid on the edge of Dusk, or even further. I imagined her walking over the edge, following her lover, the mist swirling around them as they embraced.”
“What about Patrick? He didn’t mind her going off like this?”
“He would never admit to such feelings, no.”
“You’ve had a strange upbringing, Eleanor. You do know that?”
She gave him a deep, intense look. “Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve had the feeling that something was missing from my life. Something taken away from me. I can’t explain it.”
By now her arms were clasped around her chest, as a shiver ran through her. Nyquist was feeling a little cooler himself. The quality of the air seemed to be changing; he couldn’t work it out at first, and then he understood. The garden was slowly becoming darker. They were turning the lights down, degree by degree. Soon, the staff would be asking him to leave. He needed to find out as much as he could, before then. He said, “What happened next, with Dominic?”
Eleanor rubbed at her eyes to clear them. “The next time I went round to see him, the theatre was closed up, locked. Nobody answered. But I had the sense that he was inside, hiding from me.”
“What did you do?”
“I broke in, of course.”
Nyquist smiled. “Of course.”
“It was an old place, like I said, and the windows were rotten anyway.”
“And was he there?”
“He was.” She looked saddened.
Nyquist kept his voice as quiet as hers. “Go on.”
She took a deep breath and said, “I found him cowering in a corner of his workshop. There were half-finished puppets hanging all around in the dim light. And he looked the same, himself. Half-finished, I mean. In a terrible state. It frightened me.”
“What was wrong with him?”
“His eyes stared at me out of the shadows, and yet I felt that they looked through me. Right through me. It gave me the shivers. And then… and then he told me the truth. The terrible truth, of what he was.”
Eleanor fell quiet. She folded the puppet into its cloth, placing it back inside the duffle bag. Nyquist let her be for a moment. He reckoned he had about ten minutes before visiting hours ended. He was about to ask her to carry on, when she began again of her own accord, the words tumbling out now.
“I ran. It was all I could think to do. I ran away from there, from him. From everything. From my home, my college, my life.” Her hands clenched and unclenched on her lap. “I was in despair. I stopped eating. I stopped caring about myself.”
“So you ended up in Burn Out, in the room of lights.”
She nodded. “I needed to get clean, to be cleansed of what Dominic had revealed to me. To get it all burned away, in the heat. And the other kids there were as troubled as I was, in their differing ways. They welcomed me.”
“Sure. And then I kicked down the door and messed up everything.”
Eleanor slipped her paperback book into the duffle bag and tightened the drawstrings. “Something like that.”
“This is very important, Eleanor. Look at me.” She did so. “What did Kinkaid tell you that was so bad?”
She hesitated. Nyquist could tell she was on the edge of confession. He repeated his question, as quietly as he could.
“What was so bad, Eleanor?”
She was whispering to herself. He leaned in to hear her.
“I had to kill him. I had to. I had to kill him.” Her body had tensed up as she repeated the phrase. “I had to kill him. I had to.”
“You’ve killed somebody?”
She looked at him, her face stricken. “Didn’t you see me?”
“No.”
“I killed him. I stabbed him in the neck. My own father. I had to.”
“You mean Kinkaid?”
“He told me to do it. He pleaded with me, and he handed me the knife. I’m certain of it. I murdered him.”
“Eleanor. Believe me, that didn’t happen. I was there. I never saw that.”
“What did you see?”
“I… I don’t know.”
She laughed bitterly. “But I had to do it,
don’t you see. I had to stop him from killing again. Because of who he was.”
“I don’t understand. Who was he?”
Her eyes were pierced with daylight as she revealed her secret.
“Quicksilver.”
Nyquist felt his heart grow cold.
A bell started to ring out amongst the trees. Eleanor said, “There’s the signal. It’s the end of visiting hours.”
A nurse walked by, saying, “It’s time to leave now, sir.”
Nyquist stood up. He shook his head. “I need to stay a little longer.”
“That’s not possible, I’m afraid. We close at seven.”
“Seven o’clock?”
“Yes, sir. And we’re running late, as it is.”
“What time is it now?”
“It’s five past.”
The nurse walked on. Nyquist turned to Eleanor. “There’s something wrong.”
“What is it?” she asked.
“It’s wrong. It’s the wrong time. I thought this place closed at nine.”
“It does.”
“But the nurse said it was gone seven.”
“I didn’t hear her.”
Nyquist looked back along the path, but the nurse he had spoken to was not to be seen. The clockwork birds fell silent in the trees, as the glass roof overhead started to darken. A line of shadow was crossing the courtyard. Nyquist watched it approach in fear.
Eleanor said, “Night is falling.”
The golden fish in the pool were slowing to a halt as their mechanisms shut down. Nyquist backed away, but could not move quickly enough. He cried out, “I can’t do this… No! Don’t let it touch me.” The leading edge of the shadow crossed his face, painting his skin with dusk’s silvery grey colours. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and now the garden was filled with mist. Eleanor rose up before him from the bench, a ghostly form. One of the male orderlies was approaching. Nyquist felt strange, unearthed from himself, as he watched the orderly bend down to pick up a silk scarf that one of the other visitors had dropped. Nyquist could not see the man’s face properly, it seemed to be covered in a mist of its own. A shadow man. He was standing behind Eleanor now, his hand coming up holding the scarf. Nyquist saw the hands loop over the girl’s head, bringing the scarf into position against her face; he saw the orderly pulling the scarf tight so that Eleanor’s face was outlined beneath; he saw the girl’s mouth open wide beneath the cloth, desperate to suck in air, failing, her hands coming up to try and pull the scarf away, clawing at it, but it was no good, she was suffocating…
