The Feast of All Souls

by Simon Bestwick

  “I did not wish for you to see that,” he said at last.

  Oddly, Alice wasn’t afraid. “What are you?”

  “An automaton,” he said. “A machine. A servant. A... perhaps the best word would be a familiar. What animates me is not mechanical; it merely amused my maker to shape me in this way.” The Red Man ran his hand along the sleeve of his robe, as if worried the bone might still be visible. “I was created for a purpose which I am unable to fulfil alone. To do that, I need your help.”

  “What purpose? Who created you?”

  “Can you not guess?” The Red Man turned and pointed to the creature just below them. “He did. Machines were his lifeblood, his wealth – but in private, he preferred to work with flesh and bone. In me, it suited his humour to combine the two.”

  “Him?”

  “He was not always as you see him. With your help and mine, he will be as he was again.” The Red Man turned back to Alice. “He will become the man he once was. He will become Arodias Thorne.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  On Collarmill Height

  OLD HARRY – THE Beast, the ogre – stirred and started at the mention of the name, growled softly; the Red Man waved a hand, and it subsided. Its eyes flicked towards Alice. She looked away, and moved back towards the Red Man.

  “How can that be Arodias Thorne? There’ve been legends about Old Harry for centuries – he’s been around for hundreds of years before the bastard was ever born. And you?” She waved her arms at the surroundings. “Collarmill Height – Collarmill, Sixsmythe told us what that meant. The Red Knight’s Hill – in Latin. You were – how could – you were here when the Romans came, for Christ’s sake. How can you have been made by him? He wasn’t even born until –”

  “Haven’t you understood anything, Alice?” The Red Man went to the cave-mouth. “Where we are now – the spring, the Fire Beyond? From where we are now, we can see for miles. More than you’d think. Across the world. Further. The moons of Jupiter, if you want. Distant stars. And not only through space. Time, too. The past, the future. And more than look. We travel. It’s only a matter of seeing things as they are – as they truly are.”

  The Beast growled; the Red Man eyed it for a moment, then turned back to her. “Old Harry,” he said. “Old Arry.”

  “Arry,” said Alice. “Of course. From Arodias.”

  The Red Man nodded. “He roamed through time at will, but nowhere near as far in space. Not after he became this. It was familiar to him. Browton, where he’d grown up; Crawbeck, where he’d lived. He’d roam far and wide, looking for whatever he craved – young women, mostly. He’d aim to satisfy one appetite or another with their flesh, be it his hunger or his lust. Sometimes both. And I... I would pursue him, find him. Sometimes in good time and sometimes not.” Was that guilt she heard? It was hard to tell with that many-toned voice.

  Alice looked at the ogre; she could smell the stink of it from where she stood. “That... thing is Arodias Thorne? How? I mean, what happened?”

  “‘Be careful what you wish for; you may get it.’ That’s the proverb, isn’t it? Arodias Thorne got what he had desired so long. The Fire Beyond. He controlled it, and so he had – has – eternity, together with the ability to reshape physical reality in accordance with his desires. But that was the problem. Everything, in theory, became subject to Thorne’s will.” The Red Man sighed. “I think that what happened was... a trick? Perhaps too strong a word. I don’t believe that the Fire Beyond has a mind of its own, as such. But I do believe that the kind of power Thorne sought is hard to attain for good reason.”

  “You mean,” Alice had to smile, “that there are some things man was never meant to know?”

  “Or woman?” Incredibly, the Red Man smiled. “Not exactly. I mean that the Fire Beyond, by its nature, cannot be controlled for long – not as he wanted to control it.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “As you use the Fire – as you change things with it – the Fire also changes you. It amplifies both flaws and virtues, shapes not just reality but one’s own form and nature to fit them. And the Fire reshaped Arodias into what he had always truly been – a creature of rapacious greed. His intellect, everything else he might have been, all of that was gone, subsumed into... this. But he had time to know what was coming, and to create me.”

  “To make him what he was.”

  “That’s right. He couldn’t stop what was happening to him, but he could create a being like me, who could watch for someone like you.”

  “What’s so special about me?”

  “You can reverse what has happened to him. Restore him, to the man he was. I cannot. I can only serve.”

  “How am I supposed to change him back?”

  The Red Man pointed to the burning grail pool. “There is the Fire Beyond in its purest form. If you drink it, you will see.”

  “What will I see?”

  The mask’s dark eyeholes met hers in an empty stare. “Everything. All you have to do is survive the experience.”

  “You’re a cheery fucker, aren’t you? And you’re taking a lot for granted.”

  “Only I can return you,” the Red Man reminded her. “And if you would save John Revell, only I can help you do so.”

  “But... why me? Why me, out of everyone?”

  “There are no wizards,” said the Red Man, “or none that I could find. None who understand the mysteries and rites that Arodias drew on.”

  “Well, I certainly don’t.”

  “Yes,” the Red Man said, “and no. You are not schooled in those rituals. You do, however, understand the concepts and principles involved. You and John understood them at the last.”

  Alice remembered the conversation in her room. “You mean I was right about all that?”

  “Close enough, shall we say.”

  “So you want me to turn Arodias back into a man,” she said. “No wonder the kids wanted me dead. I suppose they thought it poetic justice of a kind, didn’t they, seeing Arodias turned into a slobbering beast? As much of it as they’d get, anyway. And then you come along to take even that away from them.”

  “It is not through my choice.” She stepped back from the real anger in the Red Man’s voice. He sighed. “I am sorry. But you behave as though I had a will of my own in this. Arodias... built constraints into me. I cannot betray him, or disobey. Whatever my own feelings. If I had a choice, I might choose differently. He made me enough like you for that. But at the same time, he denied me free will. I have been his keeper, even his gaoler, for this long; given free will, I might have continued to be, throughout eternity. Or sought to put an end to him. But this was denied me. Perhaps he guessed that he made me too human to be entirely trusted. And so I have reined him in, sought one like you, and protected you from the dead. All you need do now is what I ask – and then you can go.”

  “And John?”

  “And John, if we are quick enough to save him. I can promise that, and what promises I can make, I keep.”

  Alice studied the Beast and thought of the brute hunger with which it had pursued her, of Mary Carson and all she had undergone, of the Moloch Device and the children who had screamed in its embrace, of the withered husk she had prised from its grip. And she thought of John: John as she had known him, the kind, clever eyes, the anger and the warmth of him, and then of the screams that had echoed out behind her as the way had opened to this place. “All right,” she said finally. “Show me what to do.”

  “Just drink the water,” said the Red Man. “I told you: drink and you’ll see. And then you’ll be able to do what has to be done.”

  “If I survive.”

  He nodded.

  The Beast growled. Somewhere, the Moloch Device had John. Alice walked to the spring and knelt. The children had tried to kill her to stop this. Now they’d failed, and she’d robbed them of their justice.

  “I’m sorry,” she muttered, then dipped cupped hands into the water. She’d steeled herself for pain – of cours
e there’d been none when she’d passed through the flame, but that had been a gateway, not a fire for drinking. But there was no pain now, either. The fire licked around her wrists, and she felt nothing but a light tickling, tingling sensation. She scooped up the water; flames danced on its surface and on the skin of her hands.

  I’m about to drink fire. Do it quick, before you think yourself out of it.

  She put it to her lips and gulped. The water was cold and clear and she could taste the purity of it, feel it. A line of pale fire from her lips, down her throat and into her – and then spreading outwards, filling her.

  Alice rose. Her hands were glittering with light. At first she thought it was the last of the spring water, but then she realised the light was coming from within.

  The world spasmed and lurched. The earth was the sky; the water was the earth. The Red Man’s placid mask watched her. The Beast cringed and howled. Chanted prayers rose from the village below. Everything was packed with shadows: the shadows were the past and future of each object, and not only one future but many, all possible ones.

  A wave of dizziness sent Alice to her knees beside the grail pool. The grass swam in and out of focus, and then she could see the blades of grass and the crumbs of earth and the ants and mites that crawled amongst them. Now she saw smaller things, smaller and smaller. In the grail pool she saw a water boatman rowing on the surface, in such pin-sharp detail she felt as though she were hovering alongside a battleship, eyeing the grooved chitin of its back, the steady metronomic beat of its paddles. But there were smaller things too: rotifers and tardigrades, hydras and daphnia. She looked away, back at the grass, and now she saw the individual cells with their green cellulose walls. Bacteria teemed in the water, on each blade of grass, even her hands.

  Already her sight was reaching further, further. One of the plant cells rushed towards her, expanding to the dimensions of an office block. The cell wall, the cellular membrane. Here was the nucleus, there the green spheres of the chloroplasts, suspended in the cytoplasm. Then she eyed the nucleus, and it rushed up to meet her. She thought of a golf ball with the outer shell peeled off, a globe made of strand on rubbery strand, wrapped and interwoven. She looked at a single strand and there it was, thick as a tree-trunk beside her. Here was a strand of DNA, that intricate double helix that was at once the recipe for any living creature you cared to name and the machine that would build it. She not only knew the individual molecules – this was cytosine, this guanine, that adenine, the other thymine – and the sequence they stood in, she understood the messages they spelled out, the grammar and syntax of genesis itself.

  Now she started to understand the power of the spring water, how it worked as it had. If she wished it, she could rearrange the molecules of the DNA as easily as she might the tiles in a Scrabble set and reshape the organisms they composed into a dodo, a quagga, a passenger pigeon or a great auk. Any one of a hundred extinct species could live again at her whim: all she need do was to reach out and touch.

  With what? She wasn’t sure, at this level, what her thoughts would move to achieve the desired result, only that they would do so, beyond doubt. What she wanted would happen. And the water that had emerged from the spring in the old days, the one that had become a shrine, that had only been a shadow of this – enough to seize upon this man’s desire for health or life, another’s to know what was to come or what had been, and grant that wish before its touch, its union, its insight departed again.

  And then beyond the DNA, she was falling in among the atoms and beyond them. Here was an atom of carbon: the protons were heavy spheres of red, the neutrons heavier purple ones, while around them, high above, zipped the tiny blue electrons.

  And then she fell beyond: a proton loomed up, the size of a planet, and she tumbled into it. Two up quarks, one down quark, and flickering between them, the gluons that bound them together. Oh, Andrew, Teddy, if you could see this now. To behold this sight with your own eyes – if, indeed, it was her eyes with which she now perceived this.

  And now at last she was at the simplest level, where matter was both a particle and a waveform. Where every choice, every action, spawned new realities. Where pasts and futures shimmered out behind and ahead. Go this way, and see the dinosaurs walk the earth; go that and watch the death of the sun. Reach out a hand and change reality.

  I am it and it is I. I am he as you are he and we are me.

  I am everything and nothing; the potter and the clay.

  There was no she; no Red Man, no Arodias. No John and no Mary. No Andrew and no Emily. Emily. It was all one thing, one great swirling shifting mass of energy that formed here and there into patterns and eddies like shapes in the fire. Patterns of abstract energy in motion through space-time. Emily. There was no point now where she ended and the rest of existence began; in this moment she was everything and could do anything.

  Emily.

  She understood something of what had happened to Arodias now. Her thought potentially controlled everything now – but what controlled her thought? A subconscious whim could command all the force of a conscious desire. She saw her mind for a second as a flimsy structure of biases and ideas, ethics and philosophies imperfectly cobbled together in an effort to create a make-do framework – something to house and cage and channel the fast dark waters of her soul. And that current was now the torrent that swept all else before it, altering even its own shape and course like a river in flood as it wore away the weaknesses in its banks, or shaped islands out of silt and gravel.

  Alice opened her mouth and tried to scream.

  Was she the first one the Red Man had waited for? Had there been others, who had drunk the water but been unable to withstand what lay behind the veil they’d lifted? Perhaps she was about to join their number.

  The torrent buffetted her. Emily. Emily. Emily Emily Emily. She couldn’t, mustn’t think of it. But she couldn’t not think of it. All she could do was surrender to the torrent and hope she could learn to ride it. Instead of drowning there.

  The torrent grew faster and the waters rose. No air, no light, and no longer able to hang on.

  Alice let go, and let the water take her.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  A Nation of Three

  August 2014

  ALICE LEANT BACK in her chair, rubbed her eyes and breathed out. From upstairs, she heard singing, and the sound of Emily bouncing around her room. How someone so small managed to sound so heavy was a puzzle even quantum physics couldn’t solve; it sometimes sounded as if she was about to come through the ceiling.

  Alice yawned, put her glasses back on and stared at the laptop screen. No, the rest of the book hadn’t magically written itself while she’d taken a breather. More was the pity; the deadline was coming up and right now the writing was like pulling teeth.

  It didn’t help that the kitchen was hot, the air close and thick. It was like trying to breathe cotton wool. The summer had been fierce. A long hot spell had been broken by thunderstorms and torrential rains only a couple of days before – the river running by the village was still swollen and fast – but the blistering heat had quickly reasserted itself. Andrew had wanted to install ceiling fans when they’d redecorated last year, but Alice had vetoed it. She wished now she hadn’t: it would have done a lot to make the kitchen more bearable.

  A pain was gnawing behind her left eye. Always the worst place, meaning a world-class bastard of a headache was on the way if she didn’t do something PDQ. Outside the sun was bright, the trees explosions of glossy dark green and the grass bright emerald. Clear blue sky without a cloud; the song of birds.

  But all that was outside and she was inside, staring at the screen and its single winking cursor. Finish the chapter and you can go out, she told herself, but she’d been telling herself that all day and here she was now at two in the afternoon with barely a paragraph written. She’d manage a few words, a desultory and unsatisfying sentence or so, and then she’d abandon the work, leafing through a book or surfing the ne
t instead. As if the part of her that did the writing was a sulky child who wanted to go out now.

  Alice grunted, got to her feet and went to the sink, where she filled a half-pint glass from the tap. They kept their medicines in a cupboard above the sink; she popped two ibuprofen out of a blister pack and swallowed them with water.

  “Mummy?”

  Alice turned and smiled. “Hello there, chucky-egg.”

  Emily bounced into the kitchen. The blue eyes might have been Alice’s, but where she’d got her ash-blonde hair from was anyone’s guess. Or that tiny heart-shaped face, which they both agreed was going to break hearts one day. Andrew was already joking about investing in a shotgun to deter potential boyfriends. “Look. New picture.”

  Alice knew she was biased, but honestly thought Emily had real talent, although the subject matter was a bit worrying at times: here was another sword-fight, starring a young woman with blonde hair and blue eyes who appeared to be cheerfully dismembering her way through a mixed bag of disreputable-looking humans and other creatures of uncertain origin. “Wow. That’s good.”

  “Can we go out and play now?”

  “Emily, Mummy’s working.”

  “Pleeeease?”

  Working on her textbooks had been an easy enough job after Emily was born; she’d often set up a folding table in the nursery with the cot only a couple of feet away and beavered away on the laptop with breaks for feeds and nappy-changing. The first textbook had been a big enough success for her to have been offered more work, and that work had come often enough and paid well enough – not as well as the work at Amberson’s, it was true – for her to work from home. It wasn’t the big-bucks career she’d dreamt of a few years before, but she was content with it. Motherhood changed you. Andrew had the high-flying career now, and if Alice privately thought she was actually the brighter of the two of them, if she ever wondered if maybe she should be the one still at the lab while he stayed at home and wrote textbooks for school kids then, well, life was like that. There’d always be something you regretted or wondered about.