IX: NEPTUNE
Logically, Atwood said, there must be some minimum possible quantum of energy, a constant point past which there was nothing but nothingness. That was the state of Neptune. It corresponded to no geometrical shape, not even to a single point, but wavered perpetually between point and absence, between being and nonbeing, between 1 and 0. Among its symbols were the right foot; Terminus, the god of boundaries; callipers; and the noose. Its hour was favourable to rituals of measurement, division, and navigation.
The fellow who occupied the role of Neptune was a solicitor by the name of Arnold Leggum. He was a Yorkshireman, and he looked rather uncannily like Mr Gladstone, but that was just a coincidence, signifying nothing. Two days after Dr Donaldson left for America, a wheel fell off Leggum’s cab as he rode down Oxford Street, and he tumbled out of his seat and beneath the hooves of oncoming traffic. He died in hospital two hours later of a head injury, raving about stars and storms and a great black dog. Of course the surviving members of the Company believed that that, too, was the result of magical attack by their enemies. Arthur supposed they might be right.
“We have hardly begun to fight,” Jupiter said, “And we are seven.”
Gloom settled around the Company’s table.
THE
SIXTH
DEGREE
{The Great Magical War of 1894–1895}
Chapter Eighteen
Josephine remembered. For a long time there was nothing she could do but remember, over and over.
* * *
They’d gathered on a summer evening at Martin Atwood’s house on Hanover Square. They sat around the great oak table in Atwood’s library. The table was lit by many-coloured lamps, and the recesses of the library were full of distant and flickering shadows. It was dark. Josephine sat between Mercury—Atwood—and Terra Mater—Sergeant Jessop. Atwood’s hand warm and soft; Jessop’s hand hard and callused. They chanted. On the table in front of her there’d been a white card with a red hexagram on it. Red and black. A corona of flickering gold formed as she stared at it and followed the chant. She tried not to be afraid. Jupiter had praised her courage, her insight, her intuition. Atwood had said the same. It was dark. Well, what did her intuition tell her? She was excited. She was afraid. She didn’t know what would happen. Her head was full of the Company’s ritual, intricate and demanding and odd. She tried to concentrate. She thought of Arthur—safe now, thank God, if Jupiter kept her word. She felt light-headed with relief at the thought. She felt herself rising up, up through the darkness, as if she’d been unfolded inside out through the top of her head in a sudden dizzying moment; and then up through the star-painted ceiling of Atwood’s library and past chimneys and washing-lines and pigeons and soot and clouds; and then up into the stars. It was dark. There was a pillar of light ahead of her, a nine-pointed star of light. The others were with her, invisible, silent now. The chanting was over; it was all a matter now of the mind, the soul, the perceptions. She perceived them; she didn’t see them. It was dark, and Atwood was there, and Sun, and Jupiter, and Thérèse Didot, and Sergeant Jessop. Up through the darkness, their wills intertwining and leading one another. Down into the dark. Up and down were all the same thing. Colder and colder, slower and slower, emptier and emptier. Nine bright minds like fireflies drifting in the dark, joyful and terrified. Jupiter, a speck of violet light, led the way; then Atwood, sparking ruby-red; then golden Sun. They fell. There was a moment when they passed out of Earth’s domain and into what lay beyond; it was like suddenly falling into cold water. They fell farther. It was dark. Jupiter’s light began to rise, receding as Josephine fell. Josephine felt something lifting her, shaking her. Someone’s hand on her arm. There was no arm. She had no arm. There was nothing but her mind, and the stars. She fought, not wanting to wake. It was dark. Atwood’s light rose, and Sergeant Jessop’s. Jupiter’s light winked out. She was frightened now—she tried to rise again. Neptune was gone, and Thérèse Didot. She couldn’t rise. She was alone. They were all leading one another and she was alone. It was dark and she was alone. Their light faded in the distance.
* * *
She screamed into silence. Nothing moved.
* * *
She remembered: the gathering on a summer’s evening. In London. A sky of warm and pink-tinged clouds and the cry of street-sellers and the smell of horses. Atwood’s man Lewis met her at the door and hurried her down to the library, where it was dark.
* * *
She remembered: the words of the ritual. The rhythm of the chant, fading into silence. The thick sweet incense that had filled the room, making her head spin, making her laugh. The swirling of light, fading into darkness.
* * *
She could see—it wasn’t all darkness. There were a handful of stars in the far distance.
The bright stars. The pure aether. Everything was silent and still. There was neither heat nor cold. There was nothing to touch, and nothing to touch with. She couldn’t move. She was alone. Without the others pushing or pulling her along, there was nothing to move with, and nowhere to go. No up and no down.
A mistake. An accident. Jupiter had said it was dangerous. Surely they’d come for her. She waited, and waited. There was no way of knowing how long she waited. They didn’t come. She grew angry, helpless and humiliated and betrayed.
After a long time, her anger burned itself out. Terror took its place. Something had gone wrong. Another accident. Atwood and the rest of them might be just as lost as she was—or they might be sitting in their library, scratching their heads, wondering what had happened to her. They might never find her. She might never see London again, or Arthur, or her sisters or her mother or anyone else.
She was terrified for a long time. Eventually that passed too. She began to think.
* * *
She’d moved.
* * *
The stars had changed. She’d moved. When she was angry, she’d shook and burned and moved across the sky. When she was afraid, she’d fallen. Not very much, not compared to the vast empty distances she found herself in. But she’d moved. She wasn’t helpless. It was possible to move. Anything might be possible. Those weren’t stars. This was the realm of the spirit, and hers was strong.
Which way was home?
She willed herself to move. Nothing happened.
* * *
The stars moved, slowly but ceaselessly. The spheres turned. Motion was the ordinary, essential condition of the heavens. It was her fear that kept her frozen. Her will, rather than moving her, kept her fixed while everything else flowed; so she tried to calm herself. She tried to drift, to think of nothing; she recited old poems, she remembered street addresses in London, she thought about her little office, her typewriter …
* * *
Was she moving, or was the scene moving around her? An unanswerable question. There was nothing to hold on to, nothing to measure against. The vision transformed itself; that was all she knew.
* * *
A cluster of lights came into view, moving and growing. Her attention was quickly riveted by a large red star in the distance. A dim far mystery of red against an unfathomable night. As she moved towards it, she felt a spell of overpowering fascination. It was Mars, the fourth planet, unexplored and unknown; irresistible, enchanting, magnetic; calling across the unthinkable void.
Atwood had spoken of natives. Men and women of an unthinkably distant country. Shelter; language; warmth and light. Civilization, perhaps.
The red light grew, faster and faster, as she felt herself rushing with the suddenness of thought through the trackless dark.
At the last moment she faltered. The red light of Mars grew ugly as she fell towards it, as it filled the sky; it darkened to a bloody, baleful purple. Wasn’t that what everyone said it was: a dead world, a ruined world, a wasteland? The thought of what that might mean—not mere words in a magazine, read in a comfortable library in London, not just an amusing story in the newspapers, but the thing itself, looming before her
! She was afraid to fall into it—afraid it would swallow her whole. She circled it, around and around, in light and darkness and light again. Two discs of light circled it with her, racing one after the other. The moons of Mars, or their spiritual shadows. Phobos and Deimos. One was ivory and rose. The other was bright red, like a furnace, and it scared her terribly, for no reason she could possibly explain.
She steered towards the ivory moon.
No sooner had she thought it than she burst through thin clouds, white but tinged with pink, and into cold air and faint sunlight. A landscape of white hills, coral colours, orange and gold and grey, rose-red rivers. A vast shadow—a chasm—a quarry—a crater. Within the crater, a city of ivory towers, some tall and thin, others domed and gilled like vast white fungus. She fell towards it, tumbling, helpless to stop herself. Fairy-tale towers rose around her. They curved as they rose, like horns. She fell past windows of rosy glass, casting no reflection as she went. Thin spiny plant tendrils dangled bulging flowers across the streets as if they were lanterns. There were sounds again, at last, and scents, and, astonishingly, a familiar sight: the streets and squares and bridges of this scrimshaw city belonged to the same species of fern-winged elf that had fallen unwillingly into Atwood’s library. There were thousands of them.
She fell and came to rest in a room that contained two of the creatures—the natives—the Martians. The room was otherwise bare, containing nothing except some rows of blood-drop red beads on the floor, like a half-finished game of chess. The two Martians stood by a window that overlooked a river. They didn’t notice her. There was nothing to notice. She was perception, without form. It was possible that she was going mad. Their fingers and wings were intertwined.
Nothing she could do could attract their attention. She could make no sound, touch nothing. She could not be seen.
She watched them. They stroked each other’s wings. After a little while, she decided that she had possibly interrupted them in a moment of romance.
She left by way of the window—quite fearlessly, the fear of heights apparently a frailty of the body—and went out into the lunar city to see what she could see. In London it was midnight, and Arthur sat by her bedside in Atwood’s flat, holding her hand, watching by the light of a candle on the mantelpiece as her breath rose and fell, rose and fell.
Chapter Nineteen
I: The Rite of Jupiter
Atwood called a meeting of the Company on a Wednesday night in August. By his calculations, the hour—an unsociably late one—was governed by the Sphere of Jupiter. Their meeting was in an upper room of Atwood’s house, which he called his scriptorium. Martin Atwood, Jupiter, Sun, Thérèse Didot, Sergeant Samuel Jessop, and Arthur Shaw were present. They sat around a long table, with Atwood at one end and Jupiter at the other—all of them except Sun, who orbited the table at a steady pace, counter-clockwise. The tablecloth was violet satin, embroidered in silver with the symbols of Jupiter (the sphere, not the woman). Each person around the table held their left hand out, palm up. Jupiter uttered certain phrases over and over: Nitrae, Radou, Sunandam; Noctar, Raiban, Zorami; et cetera. On the table, in the middle of a pentagram, was a human skull; and between the skull and Jupiter was a six-and-one-half-inch lens in a circular gold frame. The lens and the skull had been positioned and polished with as much care and attention as the finest implements of a surgeon or an astronomer. Between the skull and Atwood was a candle.
Arthur’s role was to hold up his hand without trembling—which was harder to do than it was to say—and to think of the dead. Any dead would do. He thought of his father and mother; his friend Waugh’s brother, who’d died of an infection of the lung two years ago; patriotically, he thought of dead British soldiers in far-flung places; he thought of Mrs Wright, a neighbour who’d died last winter of pneumonia. Images of Josephine lying still in her bed came into his mind, and he struggled to push them out.
He worried that this was all terribly blasphemous. The Bible said nothing about trespassing on Mars, so far as he could recall, but it was very clear about leaving the dead alone. He’d never been all that devout—to his foster-father’s endless and bitter disappointment, religion had always been something of a matter of convention to him, a fact that didn’t require his immediate attention, like gravity, or the post-office, or America—but now he was starting to fear for the state of his soul.
He kept his misgivings to himself. The ritual continued. At each pass around the end of the table, Sun struck Jupiter gently on the back of her head. It was on the twentieth or thirtieth such blow that she suddenly stopped chanting, and began to speak.
~ I’m dead.
Her voice was both deeper and frailer than usual, and rather more Northern. She sounded a little like Arnold Leggum—the man who’d gone by Neptune.
“Yes,” Sun said, still pacing.
~ Bloody hell. No escape, then, is there? No bloody escape.
“You are but a shadow, Neptune, and you will be gone again in but a moment.”
~ Bloody hell. Oh God. Oh God, help me.
“Where did you die?”
~ Hospital.
“Which Hospital?”
~ Bart’s, I think.
“How came you there?”
~ I remember I was at the Oxford. The music hall, I mean. Chinese acrobats and a lady escape-artist. The things that woman could do! She could—
“And afterwards?”
~ Very nice if you like that sort of thing. Odd, I thought.
“And afterwards?”
~ Let me have my last happy memories, Sun, you miserable bugger.
Sun scowled.
~ All right! All right. Wheel came off the cab. Tipped out and head over arse on road. Cracked my skull. I remember a bloody great horse coming down on top of me, great big shining hooves like moons, loud as thunder. Crack, crack, crack. It hurts, dying does. Bloody broken teeth spilled out on the cobbles. Let you down in the end, don’t they?
Leggum had had a very fine set of false teeth, of which he’d been very proud.
Sun leaned forward. “An accident?”
~ There was a black dog.
“A black dog?”
~ Or a wolf, or something like it. Big bastard, and loud, and bold as you please, runs out into the road. Frightened the horse. Rears up and bolts and the wheel comes off and out I spill.
“And then?”
~ Someone lifts me up and then everyone’s talking about what to do with me. What’s to be done. Awful, that is. No one can look at you. Let me go, I say, let me go, but they don’t hear. Bloody driver’s run off, mind. Moving again. In a bed. Someone poking at me. Women. Nurses. I’m screaming my head off, mind.
“Describe these women.”
~ Hurts like bloody hell. Listen, Mr Sun, do you want to hear about what it’s like to break your skull?
“Describe these women.”
~ Do you want to hear what it’s like breathing when your ribs are—
“Describe these women.”
~ Just nurses. Gone now. There’s a doctor.
“What does he want with you?”
~ He wants to know how I got here. Bloody nosy questions, same as you. I tell him go away, I’m dead. He says, no you’re not, not quite yet. He wants to know about the Company.
“What did you tell him?”
~ Don’t know. Can’t think, can’t stop myself talking. Bit of my bloody skull’s broken—last words—oh, hell, my last bloody words. Stars. The thing, that thing we brought back. Atwood—where’s Atwood? Listen, Atwood—
“How long had you been in that hospital before he came to you?”
~ Don’t know.
“How long?”
~ Twenty-two minutes!
“Describe him.”
~ Sitting down. Leaning close. Spectacles, tortoiseshell, round and clean. Black frock coat, don’t know the tailor. Grey hair. No jaw to speak of. Four deep lines on his forehead, six when he’s impatient, five when he smiles. Long beard, like the poet—what’s hi
s name, always in the newspapers? Green eyes …
While she spoke, Jupiter stared at the lens, skull, and candle. Jessop slid a piece of paper in front of her, and put a pencil in her hand. Blindly she scratched out a series of sketches of the mysterious doctor of St. Bart’s, in a number of different poses; precise but exaggerated, like faces seen in a fever or a fairground mirror.
Arthur shivered. The room had grown cold. The thing that possessed Jupiter wasn’t a ghost, Atwood had said; only a shadow, a memory, a flicker of consciousness not quite extinguished … But it was ghostly enough to chill Arthur’s spine.
~ That’s all. Then darkness.
Very well. Sun rapped the table nine times.
Jupiter closed her eyes. She breathed in deeply and shuddered. Atwood tenderly took her hand and kissed it.
“Magnificent, my dear. Magnificent.”
“Never again, Atwood. Never again.”
II: The Rite of Mercury
The next suitable hour of Mercury was shortly after dawn on Friday. The Company took a train out of town together to a farm. The farmer was a tenant of Atwood’s, a strapping sunburned rustic type who treated His Lordship with great deference, and asked no questions about the odd party he brought with him or the paraphernalia they carried out into his cornfield.
The Revolutions Page 19
