Desolation

by Tim Lebbon

  And—

  There was something else. Turning around, looking at everything from a new angle, Cain realized at last. Every animal had its head cocked, as if listening to distant music too high-pitched to be audible to any human observer. The fox, chicken in its mouth, held the same pose, as if in life the chicken had been forgotten. The field mice were paused in their rutting. Squirrels had abandoned their search for nuts. It did not matter how accurately or not they were posed, each animal was listening for something. And though they were all dead, dusty, and rank, Cain truly believed that they could all hear.

  He bent down and stared into the fox’s eyes, but they were dulled with concentration.

  Cain knew he should leave. He was terrified of what he had found. He’d had the clever idea that by coming here he would be taking positive action, but now he was only more confused. However hard he tried to convince himself that Whistler was as normal as a million other people, he knew that he was wrong. Cain was blinkered and damaged, and perhaps governed more by his past than he had yet admitted to himself, but he was not stupid. Whistler was not normal, and now Cain had invaded his flat, seen his secrets, disturbed his space to such an extent that the man would surely know. The smell was out of the room, the pig’s eyes had seen him in the kitchen, his shadow had passed across the pictures in the hall. Cain had left his mark simply by being here, and he had no idea what form Whistler’s revenge would take.

  But there was that one last turn in the room, tempting him with secrets. Hidden away by one tall unit, Cain had only to take three steps to round the end of the bookcase and see the rest of the display. It was impossible, but it seemed even quieter than the parts he had already seen. Perhaps because it had not yet been polluted with his breath or his heartbeat.

  So quiet . . . almost as if something waited for him around there.

  He hummed that unknown tune again, waiting for the shadow to reveal itself, but he had no audience other than the dead animals, forever listening. He wondered if they heard him and knew the tune.

  Indecision almost made Cain shiver; he needed to go one way to get out of here, and the other to see what was left. His mind tore him both ways. He rested his hand on the end of the bookcase, so that a simple lean would enable him to see around the corner. There was a window behind there; he could see the splash of natural light, he was so close.

  He should go, flee Whistler’s flat now, get back to his own place and phone the Voice for a talk, comfort, some reassurance—

  He had to see, even though he knew that to turn this corner would take him another step toward somewhere dark—

  Humming the tune, Cain leaned around the corner.

  He had no idea of what to expect, but the smiling face disarmed him completely. His heart thumped hard, double speed, and a cool twist of shock reached up into his throat and prevented him from drawing breath.

  Magenta . . .

  The woman sat in a rocking chair, hands clasping the handles, her brunette hair brushed straight and flowing over her shoulders, feet placed together on the floor, red-painted toenails visible in her open-toed sandals, neat trousers, expensive blouse, jewelry catching the daylight filtering through the curtained window and throwing it back at Cain. And her face, expertly made-up and beatific, smiled at him from her place of rest.

  She had Magenta’s eyes . . . and yet the rest of her was different. The face was rounder, not long and pinched. Her hands were small and dainty, whereas Magenta’s were large, long-fingered, used to hard work. Her nose was smaller, her mouth wider. And the smile on her face—constant as she sat with her head cocked to one side, listening—was empty and dull. A smile that Magenta would never give, whoever she was impersonating, because there was so much more to her than that.

  And yet those eyes, powerful and piercing, even with no moisture to give them depth.

  “Magenta?” he whispered, instantly feeling foolish. The woman was stuffed after all.

  Her eye flickered, and Cain fell back against the shelves. An ocelot’s beak stabbed him behind the ear, a rat’s teeth grazed his palm, but he could not take his eyes from the woman in the chair. Rocking chair, he thought. If she were alive, her heartbeat would set it moving. But there was no movement . . . other than those eyes.

  He stared into them, trying to see into their depths. They were dry. Perhaps the movement had been caused by a bird flying past the window, subtly altering the light coming through?

  Or perhaps she was alive.

  She stared, and Cain stared back. He could hardly breathe. The tension was unbearable, a thick silence that one of them had to break soon, building and building toward some terrible pressure. He held his breath and heard his heart, but there was nothing else. She would laugh soon, unable to carry on the charade any longer. The trick had been played, and however complex the chain of events that had led Cain here, they had succeeded in pulling him in. Perhaps now they would leave him alone.

  Cain took a sudden step toward the woman, hoping it would startle her into moving. The rocking chair remained still, and her eyes were now staring at his chest. He was so terrified that he burst out laughing.

  He would touch her, see if she was warm . . . but that was something he could never do. No matter how long he stood here, the finality of that touch would keep him away.

  If she’s not alive, then Whistler murdered her! Cain thought, the true horror of what he was seeing hitting home for the first time. He had barely had time to think about how she had died.

  There was a crash from somewhere else in the building, and Cain recognized it as the front door slamming. He waited for a reaction from the woman—

  (Magenta, it can’t be Magenta, can it?)

  —but still she stared, head cocked as if listening to Cain’s internal ramblings, the fear, the doubt, the dawning realization of the terror behind the scene he had discovered.

  Someone was running up the stairs.

  Cain turned and threaded his way back between the loaded bookcases, and as he exited the room filled with the Followers, he swore he heard a parting chuckle from inside.

  The footsteps had stopped, though he was not sure where. He moved quickly along the colorful hallway, knotted up inside with fear, expecting the siren to sing at any moment. Glancing through the peephole in Whistler’s door, he saw that the landing outside was deserted. He opened the front door and prepared to flee.

  Peter leaped into view from the right, eyes wide, sweating, perhaps through exertion, perhaps not.

  Cain stumbled back and fell onto his backside in Whistler’s hallway.

  “Quickly!” Peter said. “Here!” He held out his hand, and Cain reached up automatically. The landlord helped him to stand and then pulled him from Whistler’s flat. “We have to leave now!” he said. “He’s coming home!”

  Not long before his father died, Cain and he began having real conversations. Thinking about it afterward, Cain had put it down more to the fact that his father was lonely than because Cain himself was growing up. The old man never claimed to miss his wife, but sometimes he stared into space for such long periods of time, his eyes so distant, that he must surely have been thinking of someone long gone. And perhaps he also had the inkling that Cain was somehow approaching whatever epiphany he had planned for him.

  “What is Pure Sight?” Cain asked one day.

  His father glanced at him, surprised, and went back to peeling apples. They were in the kitchen, a sterile, stainless-steel-lined cell with little color on the walls, and no pandering to decoration. Peel fell to the worktop and formed impromptu twisted sculptures, and Cain wondered whether he could make anything of them. The meanderings of the mind, perhaps. The aimless twisting of lonely thoughts. He felt as alone as his father appeared, though he would never tell him that.

  “All this time and you have to ask?” His father rarely looked at him when he spoke, as if afraid of what he would see in his son’s eyes.

  “All this time and you’ve never told me.”

  “O
f course I have. I’ve told you it’s the perception of truth, lying at the heart of what makes us real. It transcends civilization, religion, faith in anything but reality. It’s the purest thing there is, and to have it is to be blessed.” He went on peeling, and for a while the steady scrape, scrape was the only sound.

  Cain frowned, twirled one of the strings of apple peel around his finger, creating different shapes of loneliness. “You’ve told me what it’s meant to be, but not what you think it is.”

  “I think it is what it’s meant to be, and that’s what I’ve told you.”

  “Not everything is what it’s meant to be. The books say we’re meant to be with God, but you tell me He isn’t there. So how can you be sure of Pure Sight? What is it to you, Dad?” Cain rarely used the familiar, usually managing to communicate with his father without calling him anything. Although cut off from the world, he was more than aware that there was something precious missing between the two of them. He had read of love in history books, and for him it was that distant.

  “What is it to me?” His father glanced at Cain and then sighed, setting a half-peeled apple down on the worktop.

  Cain sat still for a minute or two, eyes downcast, glancing at his father every now and then to see whether the old man was going to respond. Angry now, Cain thought, and sad too. Sad that it’s taken me so long to ask, perhaps. And heartbroken that he has no way to answer. Even then, at thirteen, he knew things he should not.

  “It’s nothing to me,” his father said, “because I have never known it. And I never will. Age has corrupted me beyond that ultimate knowledge. I’m tainted by time. I’ve seen too many things, both beautiful and terrible. I’ve tasted blood and spice, and heard birds singing and people screaming. I’ve smelled insides turned out and the first spring blooms, and felt summer rain and the acid sting of defeat. I’ve tried, son. I’ve tried as hard as I can. But it’s way past me now.”

  “You don’t have Pure Sight?” Cain said, aghast, because every second of his life he had believed his father was trying to pass something down to him, not create it anew.

  His father looked at him as he spoke this time, staring into his son’s eyes, trying to impart meaning that Cain was too young to appreciate. When he remembered that occasion years later, Cain liked to think it was guilt. Perhaps even the need for forgiveness. “You’re still young enough,” his father said, “and I’ve done my best for you.”

  “But . . .” Cain had no idea of what to say.

  “It’s back to the room tomorrow,” his father said, suddenly stern and distant again. “There’s something else we have to do.”

  Cain never again witnessed the old man so vulnerable. That one time contained the totality of Cain’s memory of his father’s hidden love. Everything after that was pain and sadness.

  As Peter pulled Cain up toward the second floor, the house’s front door opened and slammed again. Peter turned, his finger held to his lips to beg silence, and climbed the last three stairs as if walking on glass. Cain followed, fear and confusion persuading him to imitate the landlord. They stood on the small landing outside Cain’s room and listened to Whistler find his keys, unlock his flat and enter. He shut the door, and Cain expected him to burst out again within seconds, shouting and raving and seeking the intruder that had broken into his home. But though they stood still for at least two minutes, there were no more noises from Whistler. No shouting, no pan pipes, nothing.

  “Keys,” Peter whispered, so quietly that he may have only breathed. Cain handed over his keys; Peter unlocked the door and entered his flat. They walked through to the living room, careful not to make any noise in case Whistler heard them, and sat down at the table.

  “He’s got a dead woman in his flat!” Cain whispered.

  Peter shook his head, scratched behind his ear, stood and looked across the street at his dilapidated home.

  “I saw her! Stuffed, along with a load of animals, all kept in one room. Stinking. Horrible!”

  Peter did not turn, nor seem to react. From what Cain could see of his face, he now seemed calm and contemplative. Gone was the wide-eyed panic from outside Whistler’s door.

  “Are you toying with me again? Are you going to say anything?”

  Peter turned at last, quickly, as if he had just come to an important decision. “I have plenty to say. But not here. Not now. If you’re not doing anything later perhaps we can go for a drink, have a chat, and—”

  “Stop being so fucking casual about this!” Cain said. He wanted to shout, but Whistler’s presence just a few feet below was still strong. “We need to call the police! I’m not going for a drink, I’m getting on the phone right now—”

  “Please, Cain,” Peter said. He sat down again and reached out, grasped one of Cain’s hands in his own, held tight. His palms were cool with old sweat. “There’s so much more to this than you know. You’ve barely seen the shadow of the truth.”

  “You sound like my father.” Cain snatched his hand away and stood, pleased at the alarm on Peter’s face. “Whatever you have to tell me, nothing detracts from the fact that Whistler has a dead woman in his flat.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I saw her.”

  “Have you seen a dead woman before?”

  Dead man, my father, but I was with him for days. I knew for sure. I saw how nature deals with dead things. The black; the rot.

  “No.”

  “Then perhaps she wasn’t dead.”

  “I’m certain she was,” Cain said, but then a sound echoed in his memory, the chuckle he may have heard as he was rushing from the room.

  “Things aren’t always as they seem,” Peter said. He clicked his fingers, and as Cain glanced down he could have sworn that Peter’s thumb detached, bounced on the table, and rejoined his hand.

  “What was that?”

  “A cheap trick. A sad deception. I don’t have it in me to do it for real.”

  Cain shook his head and stood from the table, staring out at the street, wondering what Whistler was doing below them even now. Checking telltales left across door openings? Sniffing the air, sensing intrusion like a dog?

  “So what are ‘The Followers’?”

  “Whistler’s faction. Supporters. Whatever.”

  “Rats and badgers and, and, and fucking mice?”

  Peter stared at him as if regarding a petulant child, one that had no knowledge of anything beyond its own introverted existence, its imagination fatally disabled by some fault in its upbringing. And Cain, angry and scared, felt like that child.

  At last Peter stood and went to the kitchen, opened the fridge, and took out a bottle of milk. How can I tell him? he was thinking, and Cain knew the landlord’s mind, yet another thing he should not know. Peter’s thoughts were a stew of concerns, from guilt—its subject not apparent—to anger and frustration. And sadness. That was in there too, the same kind of self-indulgent melancholy that had informed Cain’s father’s voice those final times he and Cain had really conversed. How can I tell him so much when I don’t even know him? He’s a stranger to me, and—

  “Sometimes it’s easier to deal with strangers,” Cain said.

  Peter spun around and stared at him, startled, his eyes wide and afraid. “You have it,” he whispered. And then he shook his head and went to leave.

  “Have what?”

  “Something I can never have! Your father strove his whole life to raise it in you, and—”

  “You knew my father?”

  Peter stood at the living room door, glancing out into the hallway and apparently noticing the altered pictures. He smiled, the expression melting away the fear that had been apparent there before. “He really did go to the extremes, didn’t he?”

  “I don’t understand any of this.” Cain felt cold and alone, and so much like the child Cain that he almost started to cry.

  “Come out with me this evening. I’ll tell you more. Rest assured, I’m not here to hurt you.”

  “And what about the other
s? Are they here to hurt me?”

  “They don’t know what hurt is,” Peter said. “Come across to Heaven at eight. We’ll talk.” And after one final ambiguous smile, he left Cain’s flat without another word.

  They don’t know what hurt is. That was no answer. And now, with Cain’s life turning to riddles the more he tried to make it his own, Cain wondered how much his father had known of hurt.

  Cain was desperate to leave the flat, flee the house, but it was that thirty-second journey out of his door and down two flights of stairs that kept him in. He looked down into the street and saw none of Number 13’s inhabitants, but that meant that they could be anywhere. Whistler was in, he knew that, although Cain had heard no sounds from below since he had come home. Whatever that tall stranger was doing, Cain did not want to know; he was afraid that much of it involved him. Perhaps he was in his Followers’ room right now, rearranging dust that Cain’s breath had shifted, seeing the truth of the intrusion reflected in the animals’ dead eyes. And the woman? How would she reveal Cain’s invasion of her privacy? Perhaps Whistler would play her a tune on his pipes and she would rise, awaken from the deepest sleep of death to impart secrets through leather-dry lips.

  He stood and paced his flat, purposely making a noise so that Whistler knew he was in. He switched on the radio and turned it up, enjoying the noise, though loud music was always more of an annoyance than a pleasure for him, itching rather than soothing his eardrums.

  The others could be anywhere. What did they have to hide in their flats? George, the man he had followed to the place where a dog ate something alive in the dark. Sister Josephine, the nun who had perhaps smeared her naked self with magic cream and flown Cain upstairs to his bed, or perhaps not. There had been a smear on his leg when he woke, but maybe it was evidence of his own aroused state, and his nightmare-befuddled mind had turned it into a seed of lies. And Magenta the impersonator, whose eyes he thought he had seen somewhere else. If she had been impersonating that dead, stuffed woman, then her performance was exemplary.