'He's a good man,' Minnie said. 'And so is Mr Yolland, if you don't dawdle.'
Nina turned, wide eyed. 'Why? What did he say?'
Minnie shrugged. 'He didn't say anything, but I saw the way he watched as you ran away from Mr Bracewell.'
Nina blushed.
'I didn't run away,' she said.
'Well, don't tell him that,' Minnie said. 'Some men simply adore rescuing helpless women.'
'I'm not helpless!'
'Well of course you aren't, but don't tell him that either.'
Nina laughed, sharply and suddenly enough to draw a look from the nearby couple on the veranda.
'Does Barnabas think you're helpless?' she said.
Minnie's smile faltered a little.
'Sometimes.' She turned away from her cousin and stared out at the chains of distant lights. In an involuntary movement, she reached behind her, tracing the path of her spine as though she expected a crop to be growing there.
Nina glanced at the hall and the music reached out for her, budding a seed of impatience that made her shuffle her feet.
'I should go back,' she said.
Minnie turned to her and her smile was radiant.
'Do,' she said. She reached across and pushed a stray hair away from her cousin's face. 'And you're wrong about the planet being dead and ashen. It is beautiful. It is fertile. We make it what it is. That's why we're here.'
She smiled, but it was a sad smile which made Nina linger a moment. Minnie made a shooing motion with her hands.
'Go on,' she said. 'He's waiting.'
*
At the end of the hall, the staff had begun to lay out the buffet for the evening. A string of tables had been set up along the back wall, and already there were plates of foods in varieties Nina had never seen before: mushrooms in all shapes and sizes, steaks of bracket fungus, salads of hair-like growth. A procession of serving staff dressed in black and white carried plates of fungal sweetbreads and tureens of richly scented soup, spiced with the piquant varieties of powder spore.
The dance floor had thinned since Nina had last seen it, and the Cultivators had been busy, with many more people lined around the room, gathered at tables and waiting at chairs. The murmur of conversation was mounting from the harvested guests, and threatened to overwhelm the music.
Nina saw Aunt Caroline sitting at one of the tables, but Mr Yolland intercepted before she could reach her.
His timing couldn't have been more perfect. The orchestra concluded one song, and the conductor was already tapping his baton against his music stand. A shift in key signature, a gentle percussion and then the strings swelled at his command. Then came the horns and then the slow and delicate piano melody filled the room like the sun on a spring morning.
And Mr Yolland bowed his head and asked Nina for the dance.
They spun orbits around the floor; the music sent them away, then drew them back. The other dancers began to drift from the floor as the Cultivators led them away one by one. But Nina wasn't ready to go. She was too busy dancing. She would dance until the end of the night if the music would let her; she would dance until the end of the world.
If they wanted her, they would have to wait their turn.
We All Need Somewhere to Hide
The exorcism on Bexhill Road was not going as expected. Alce's arm was elbow-deep in the kid's skull, the boy was shrieking and bucking and, on the other side of the door, his mother was screaming his name and hammering her fists so hard the woodwork was splintering.
Eddie Kellogg was five years old and host to a feeder, and it hadn't taken Alce long to spot the Sculptor's mark on the nape of his neck: a ridge of skin, pinched and twisted into a yin-yang symbol by unseen fingers. To the untrained eye, he looked pretty much like any normal kid, and the demon had him playing angel when Alce and Leon had arrived. As usual, it was too much. Demons didn't understand subtlety and the kid was acting like Little Lord Fauntleroy, dressed up to the nines and playing politely with his toys in perfectly symmetrical shapes.
He'd been opened up like a biscuit barrel, and something had been stuffed inside of him before he'd been locked tight again.
The room was bare when Alce had first come in. He'd broken pretty much everything of value in the flat over the past few weeks, he'd shrieked curses and spoken in tongues, but with the flutter of those eyelashes, his mother had fallen completely under his spell. She'd shifted gears abruptly from the terrified woman who had called the number in the Yellow Pages, begging for Alce's services, to the angry momma bear on the other side of the door.
She had remained starry-eyed and oblivious, even when Alce had aimed the scrylight at the boy. Its light flattened the room's perspective and cast a shadow too enormous and grotesque for a five-year-old child, spreading its uneven bulk, fringed with horns and spikes and tendrils across the magnolia wallpaper. His mother refused to see the monstrousness of it, so Alce had instructed Leon to escort her out the way.
Bang! Bang! Bang! went the door. Parents never understood. They either didn't believe anything, or they believed everything wrong.
Alce gritted her teeth. I need a fucking holiday, she thought, and then she got back to work.
*
Darkness was waiting for them on Bexhill Road when they were done. Leon was silent as he drove the van through the late evening traffic, and Alce sat in the passenger seat watching the lights of downtown split and merge across the windows as they slid past. Too much time bathed in the crepuscular blue-grey dusk of the scrylight was always jarring. Her mother would compare it to jet lag:
'You're fast forwarding to a very particular moment of the day,' she would say. 'A frozen moment, stretched out way beyond its capabilities and folded flat. Then you turn the switch and bam, you're back where you started again, snapped back like you were on elastic. It's not right and your body knows it. Throws you for a loop if you're not wary. Need to keep an eye on your footing.'
Alce's mother knew all about what it was like to lose your footing, or at least Alce presumed she did; it was hard to tell in her current state. Alce hadn't visited the care facility in years, it didn't seem worth it unless she received word that circumstances changed. She paid the bills each month and received reports in the mail. Condition unchanged. No physical response. In the bed in her private room, her mother had barely moved for nearly six years. She didn't speak and, while her eyes were occasionally open and her pupils responded to light stimulus, Alce was under no illusion that she registered anything.
Alce had been assured her mother was healthy, she just wasn't quite at home, but Alce had seen so many bodies with an excess of souls, she was alarmed to see one with barely anything inside it at all.
'We should get you to a hospital,' Leon said, glancing at the handkerchief covering Alce's finger, the one the boy had tried his damnedest to bite off.
'It's not serious,' she said. 'Baby teeth. I'll deal with it.'
He glanced at her, sceptical.
'I'll take the jar to the Padre,' he said. 'You should turn in for the night. You look tired.'
Alce was tired. She was exhausted. 'I'm fine,' she said.
The nightclubs were dense that evening, the irrepressible energy of the mobs of revellers coalescing and slowing the city around them. Alce stared at them listlessly. They all looked so young, so careless, although she supposed a lot of them were her age, maybe even older. They whooped and howled at each other like jungle animals, slapping the bonnet of the van as they crossed the road in front of them, lapping up the glare of the headlights. Leon remained impassive. It took a lot more than drunk people – happy drunk people – to rile him.
Alce cradled the scrylight in her lap. A new crack had opened along one side from where it had fallen when Mrs Kellogg had finally broken the door down. It was nothing another length of gaffer tape couldn't fix.
There were newer models available, the modern versions were lighter and had more features, but she liked this one. It did one thing and it did it well, it
had never let her down, and it felt solid enough she felt she could use it as a cosh if things ever got really out of hand.
Of course that was what Leon was for as well. Alce had learned at an early age how to handle herself in a fight but she preferred to avoid them, and if that was impossible, the next best option was to outsource to someone more likely to absorb the violence. Leon was a slab of a man, and she'd seen him taking on entire gangs of blood-sworn acolytes on the South Side, swatting them off him like they were a squall of autumn leaves.
Like the scrylight, she'd inherited Leon. He'd been the one who found her mother after her encounter with the Sculptor that time, and he'd carried her back to the seminary, twenty-three miles on foot without so much as a pause.
They hadn't always been so close. When the old Padre had first assigned him, Alce remembered that her mother had treated him abominably. She hadn't wanted a minder, she said. She didn't need muscle.
'We're doing fine,' Alce had heard her scream at the phone.
'We?' the old Padre's voice had crackled over the loudspeaker. 'Lyssa, your daughter isn't part of this.'
'I've trained her myself,' her mother had said. 'She's ready. She's more than ready. She's an asset.'
'She's your daughter,' the old Padre had said.
'We don't need him.'
Maybe she was right. Maybe having Leon around had given her an excuse to lose her nerve. Maybe she'd been right about Alce as well. It certainly didn't take long for the Padre to call her once her mother was incapacitated.
It was dirty, physical work, but it was second nature to Alce by now. She still marvelled at the complacency of the oblivious public she dealt with. The ludicrous way they could remain blind to the nature of the wider world until the unpleasant realities of it impinged on their own. She remembered wishing she could feel so immune. She wished she could leave the house one morning and see only the world as it pretended to be. It must be so easy to be ignorant. So happy to not know.
Leon pulled up outside Theo's block in Hewitt Gardens and Alce's stomach lurched. She looked out the window, blinking, feigning ignorance.
'Where are we?'
'Took you home.'
'This isn't my home.'
'No but your man up there's some kind of nurse, am I right? Also I figured…'
Leon reached into the backseat behind him and pulled out a plastic bag, its contents unambiguously a bottle of something, a sprig of ribbon around its neck.
'Leon.'
'For your anniversary,' Leon said. 'I didn't get it for you. I got it for you to give. I figured you'd forget.'
Alce took the bottle wordlessly. She shook her head.
'You're not supposed to know about any of this.' Theo was a secret. Anything outside the work was a secret.
Leon's grin would have been terrifying if she didn't know him so well.
'I know fuck-all about anything,' he said. 'But in this case, rest assured the Padre knows even less.'
Alce leaned across and kissed him lightly on the forehead.
'I don't deserve you,' she said and let herself out of the car. She tapped on the glass, a wordless goodbye, and watched as Leon pulled out, lingering until the van's tail lights had diminished into the traffic.
*
Theo was cooking when she let herself into the flat. She could smell his signature casserole from two flights down. He had the radio on loud and was singing along to Mark Bolan. She set the keys and the scrylight down on the bookshelf, then hesitated in the kitchen doorway, reluctant to interrupt him.
Theo wasn't a nurse; he edited biology journals at the university. He had one of those faces that looked too youthful, but he was only younger than Alce by a couple of years. He was almost-slim, he was almost-fit, he was white-guy dancing in the kitchen in stockinged feet. He had a wooden spoon in one hand, a pair of tongs in the other. It was awkward, but Alce smiled anyway. It was what normal people did after all.
He saw her mid-lyric and started with surprise, then he clutched his hand to his chest as though he'd almost had a heart attack.
'Holy shit,' he said, stumbling against the counter.
'Hey.' Alce brandished the bottle half-heartedly. 'Anniversary, right?'
'Right.' He dropped his tools and stepped forward, taking the bottle off her with one hand and setting it on the counter without looking at it. 'I didn't hear you come in.'
'I tip-toed.'
He rested his hands on her shoulders, and leaned in to kiss her. She could taste the garlic on him, like it had breached his pores as he'd sliced it, and now inhabited him. He slid his hands down her arms, and it was only then that he saw how she had injured herself.
'Jesus,' he said, pushing back and holding her hand up. 'What the hell happened to you?'
'Answer's in the question.' Alce managed a smile. She let him hold her hand, examine it.
He frowned. He only had the vaguest idea of what she did for a living, and even that was under sufferance on Alce's part.
'We need to get you to a hospital.'
'I just need a dressing,' Alce said. 'I'll be fine.'
'Jesus. You've lost the top of your finger.'
'I know,' Alce said. 'I got bit.' She closed her eyes. She shouldn't have told him that.
'Someone bit you?'
'It's complicated. I just need a dressing. It didn't hit the bone. Really, I'll be fine. I've had worse.'
His look reminded her that she probably shouldn't have told him that either. She tried changing the subject.
'Smells good,' she said.
'It'll keep.'
Theo led her to the bathroom and sat her on the toilet seat. He fussed over her hand, gently unwinding the handkerchief and washing the wound it revealed: an elliptical cross-section, beading with spots of blood. He dressed it with care and she watched him work, moved by his delicacy, by the stark contrast between how he treated the cuts and bruises of her, and the brusque way her mother used to patch her up.
'You know,' he said, 'you're not really supposed to leave bits of yourself behind when you go to work.'
'I'm careful,' Alce said. 'Could have been more than just the fingertip. You know how it is.'
Again, his expression underlined how he didn't.
'Either way,' he said. 'Maybe you want to think about doing something else? Something a bit safer.'
She laughed and it sounded hollow.
'I don't know how to do anything else,' she said. 'My mother took me out of school so I could learn from her. No one else would take me.'
She stopped. She wasn't going to talk about this with him. She'd said far too much already. But his smile was good humoured, he'd learned well enough over the past few years not to pry.
'I'll take you,' he said.
She gave him a look for that. Not the look, not the one she'd cultivated to freeze acolytes where they stood, but something softer. Reproachful. It was something else she'd had to learn: a shade of darkness to colour her amusement.
'How's the casserole?' she said instead.
'Like I said, it'll keep.'
They kissed again, and for a brief moment, she lost herself in him, then she opened her eyes and caught sight of the pair of them in the mirror. It was an absurd tableau. She, sitting on the toilet seat, her bandaged hand still raised like she was asking attention in class.
Despite herself, she laughed. He pulled back, his smile uncertain.
'What?' he said.
Her phone broke the mood. Trilling in her jeans pocket until she fished it out and gave it full voice.
'Bollocks,' she said. 'I should take this.'
'I'll get the veg on.' Theo smiled at her. 'You are staying, right?'
'Of course I'm staying.' She gently pushed him out of the bathroom and closed the door to, then tapped the answer key and raised the phone to her ear. 'Padre,' she said.
'What happened?' The Padre's voice was filtered through both a lifetime of smoking and the old analogue phone he kept on his desk. He sounded the part, but he did
n't have the steel of his predecessor.
'Didn't Leon get back?'
'He did. Along with six-and-half kilos of feeder ash, but you weren't there. What happened?'
Alce sighed.
'I was tired, Leon dropped me home.'
A pause. A click. A harrumph. Percussive placeholder sounds as he tried to figure out the best way to reprimand her. She waited patiently.
'Well it's irregular. You know you need to come back to debrief.'
Weak.
'As I said, I was tired. I'll be in tomorrow morning.'
'Well is there anything you can tell me about the job?' The Padre was going through his list.
'For the most part, standard feeder. I'd estimate it had been there for nearly two weeks judging by its size.'
'Any idea how he contracted it?'
Alce hesitated.
'A Sculptor,' she said. 'He was marked. Back of the neck. At a guess, I'd say it wanted us to know it was there.'
She heard the Padre inhale sharply.
'Oh shit,' he said.
She'd never heard him swear before and was surprised by the way it endeared him to her a little.
'You should interview the boy when he's had a little time to recover,' Alce said. 'Figure out where he's been, where he might have met it. You might have to get the mother to agree to hypnosis as he likely won't remember. I doubt she'd want to see me again.'
'Alce, this is very serious.' The Padre sounded flustered. He'd had a relatively easy time of it since taking the role. A few standard possessions here and there, the occasional outbreak of acolyte activity, but nothing on this scale — and he knew fine well that a Sculptor had led to his predecessor's downfall.
'I know,' Alce said.
She heard his breathing at the other end of the phone.
'Is it the same one?' he said again. 'The one that… your mother…?'
'I don't know.'
'Shit,' he said again.
'Get in touch with the diocese, let them know what we're dealing with. They'll probably send Benway over. He's dealt with Sculptors before, so he can take the lead.'
He didn't say anything. She heard only static.
'I'll be in first thing tomorrow,' Alce said. 'Get some sleep.'
You Will Grow Into Them Page 9
