Desolation

by Tim Lebbon

  There were more letters in the album, more photographs, and then Cain saw himself. A small baby, helpless, pink, and wrinkled and staring out at a strange new world with disbelieving, wide-eyed innocence. He looked in the mirror again and his expression now was similar; all except for his eyes, which, instead of innocent, were dark with fear.

  His mother was no longer in any of the pictures. His father was there, grim-faced, heavy sacs beneath his eyes, and he seemed to have aged an eternity in the space of one page. His eyes no longer met the camera lens, and whoever took the pictures seemed to have lost all interest in the subject. Some of them missed part of baby Cain, others cut out most of his father, as if the emotions of loss and grief were affecting the images and distorting what they purported to show. These scenes should be all happiness and smiles, but even the baby seemed to be crying in most of them. Missing the breast, perhaps. Missing the warmth of his mother, lying there while his father cried and did not reach out to touch his newborn son. Maybe a simple hand on the baby’s head would have comforted both of them and changed everything that followed. But his father looked too distraught and had never been tactile. Cain had grown up without a single loving hug.

  He stared at that picture for a long, long time. It said so much. Most of all, it told him how alone he had always been, from the moment of the birth that killed his mother. His father’s face was filled with sadness and hopelessness, but each time Cain looked again his expression seemed to have changed. As the night moved on, and Cain glanced back again and again at the photograph, his father’s face showed grief, despair, and rage. Most of all, rage.

  The idea that much of what Cain had endured was rooted in his father’s anger—his need for some form of revenge—was almost unbearable.

  There were no more photographs, no more letters. The rest of the album was blank. He flicked the remaining pages again and again, staring at the blank leaves in the hope that something more may appear. A sign, perhaps, that his father had loved him. An acknowledgment that his early years had held some semblance of normality. But the pages remained as empty as Cain’s memory of those first few years of his life. A few weak thumps came from upstairs, as if the shadow were trying to help. But even darkness sat wrong in Cain’s mind, because darkness implied something to hide.

  Cain sat there for the rest of the night, nursing the photograph album and wondering why Peter had been so keen for him to see it. Peter had known his father, but he had never mentioned his mother, and this album was mostly about her. Even that last photograph, so indicative of what the future would hold for the poor baby Cain, was most powerful due to her absence.

  Had Peter known her as well? It seemed likely. Whatever secrets he had yet to reveal, however, had been slaughtered by that mad dog.

  Cain tried to sleep, but sleep was elusive. Dreams hovered like carrion birds, waiting to sweep in and take him for themselves. His wakefulness kept them at bay.

  About four in the morning the birds began their dawn chorus. Cain opened the window so that he could hear better, perhaps discern some meaning in their joyous babble. The singing was wild and loud, as if the birds reveled in this hour when they had the daylit world to themselves, free of humans ruining its beauty with car engines, bustle, and the belief that the world was here to serve them. Birds sang from the front garden, the rooftops, and on the wing, and their celebration of the new day almost made Cain cry. It made him realize just how insignificant he was. It also scared him; there was understanding in the birds’ songs, a comfortable knowledge that humanity had it all wrong.

  Perhaps this was a secret that Magenta, Whistler, and the others were aware of.

  Cain opened the photograph album to daylight and a picture fell out. He had not seen it before. He could have sworn that he’d checked every page, but still this new picture lay on the floor. He remained seated for a while; he had an inkling of what he was seeing, but to move closer would be to fully reveal the truth. He was not certain he wanted that. He could stand and leave the room now, without looking back. Ignore the picture. But he had an idea that even if he were to do that, he would see it eventually. Magenta would force him to look. Or Sister Josephine would appear naked to him again, in a dream or not, and smile as she explained everything. Here we are with your father, she would say. A long time ago now, but I remember it as if it were yesterday. And she would tell him why she remembered that time so well, and that was something Cain had no wish to hear.

  To see the picture himself would be for the best.

  He bent and picked the rectangle of card from the floor, something flat containing such depth. And there they were. His father, young and yet with eyes already shaded by the death of his mother. Gathered around him in a protective group were Whistler, Sister Josephine, George, and a short blond woman with piercing eyes that must have been Magenta. His father’s hand rested on Magenta’s shoulder. Apart from his father, all looked exactly as he knew them. No younger, no different, no evidence that time could play with them. Immortal, Cain thought, but it was an abstract idea and he did not dwell on it. Did not believe it.

  He sat back, holding the picture at arm’s length lest it bite. He wondered whether Peter had been the photographer.

  A door opened and the birds paused in their song. The sound of pan pipes struck up from somewhere, inside or outside Cain could not tell, and the chest in his flat began thumping the floor as if the shadow wished to follow. The birds started singing again and Cain cried out, suddenly afraid of the sounds, hoping that the siren would sing in and silence everything for a few precious seconds with its gift of pain and punishment. But the siren stayed away.

  Magenta entered the room, the fresh new Magenta ready for the new fresh day. As she sat on the bed and held him, Cain thought of his father touching her shoulder and staring grimly into the camera.

  “I don’t understand,” he sobbed, ashamed of his tears but unable to hold them back.

  “You will,” she said, hugging him to her. There was nothing familiar or affectionate in the gesture, and it felt awkward, but Cain was thankful all the same. Right then, even though he feared Magenta, he was grateful for the contact.

  He cried some more, she rocked him, he glanced up at her face, and she stared away as if distracted. Suddenly feeling tired, he rested his head against her shoulder and closed his eyes, shutting out the soreness of tears, the sting of revelations from the photograph album. As if to escape the coming day and what it may bring, he slept.

  He is in a room he has never seen before. There is no young Cain there this time, it is him as he is now, the new Cain, the explorer Cain discovering his life. This is not a room in his father’s house. It has colored pictures on the wall and extravagant furniture. There is a crystal chandelier hanging from the low ceiling. Something nags at him, some troublesome knowledge, but he cannot recall what it is. It remains in the background like a whisper in the night, just beyond the range of hearing.

  The voice that screams at him is anything but a whisper.

  “Come back!” it screeches. Its panic and volume make the voice unrecognizable and androgynous. Cain does not fear the siren right now, but he does fear the voice. It is insistent, demanding, and desperate, and the implication is that if he does not obey, bad things will happen. “Come back! Come back!”

  A rhythmic thumping accompanies the voice. It provides a background tempo to the screams. It could be a fist banging on a door, or a head impacting a wall.

  Cain thinks that the voice may belong to the Voice, or the Face. They can see the problems he has encountered, and they are begging him to return to Afresh, to find safety and leave danger behind. Come back, they are calling. But that does not sound like them. They would not scream or rage, they would be gentle and understanding.

  “Come back!”

  Not like that.

  The thumping again, and behind the sound is something worrying: the cracking and splintering of timber, as if something is breaking through.

  Cain thinks he may b
e dreaming, but everything feels very real. He walks to the door and tries the handle, but it is locked. He runs his hand across the door’s surface but feels no lumps, no evidence that it is being battered from the other side. It is cool and calm.

  “Come back!” Pleading and threatening. Cain shakes his head and cringes, as if to instantly lose the memory of the voice.

  He walks to the first of the pictures hanging on the wall. It shows a view of 13 Endless Crescent from across the street. The photographer must have been standing with his back pressed against Peter’s front door; there is even the hint of a shadowy overhang in the top of the picture. Number 13’s front garden is trimmed and well-maintained as ever, but even from this angle there is no hint of what lies beneath the low shrub canopy. The house is bathed in sunlight and the first-floor window is open, revealing a figure standing just inside. The sunlight barely touches the shape, and yet Cain can see that it is an incarnation of Magenta. Those eyes hold no doubt. He looks up at his own dining room window. Though there is a face there, it is not his own. It is a shadow in defiance of the sun.

  “Come back to me!” The voice has changed now, become more modulated and thoughtful, as if realizing that blind panic will never work. Cain still feels no compunction to obey its strange command. He does not know exactly where it wants him to go, nor even where it is coming from.

  The next picture looks like a police photograph of a murder scene. But it is so well-taken, the lighting so perfect, that Cain suspects that it took a while to set up and many attempts to perfect. It shows the landing outside his room, the small attic door standing ajar, Vlad’s belongings spilled out like vented guts. Everywhere there is blood. It is splashed up the walls, spattered on the carpet, ground into the inside and outside of the opened door, rich and black in the claw marks slashed into the wood. The door to his own flat is closed, and speckled with blood and viscera. The color is startling, the quantity shocking. I thought he was killed far from here, Cain thinks, but then he catches sight of the next photograph and his attention is drawn away.

  It is a painting this time, set in his own flat. There is much that he recognizes, and yet he also perceives subtle differences: The walls are too bright, the furniture wrongly organized, as if whoever painted this did so from instruction rather than memory. His coat is flung over the back of the sofa, making the flat his own. The view through the window is blurred, a chaos of colors that seems on the verge of breaking through the glass and flooding the flat, swallowing everything whole. There is something behind the sofa.

  “Come back, Cain!”

  Cain frowns, moves closer to the painting, and as he steps to one side his view behind the sofa inexplicably improves. He presses his face against the wall, squints, and now he can see what it is. The wooden chest. Or what is left of it.

  “Cain, Cain, come back! Don’t leave me all alone, not here, not forever!”

  The chest has exploded from inside. Splinters of wood prickle the rear of the sofa, and several have even penetrated the ceiling, hanging there like stalactites.

  “Cain . . . no.” The voice speaks this time. The shouting has stopped. And Cain knows it is the voice of the shadow. He had not recognized it before because he was so used to hearing it mocking, sardonic, not like this. Not shouting. Not hopeless and pleading.

  Whatever was inside the chest has gone. The broken timber is scored with claw marks, though he cannot tell whether they are on the inside of the wood or the outside. He glances back at the framed photograph of Vlad’s murder scene, but these new marks are different. Less violent, more desperate.

  “Cain?”

  “Yes?” At last, Cain could no longer prevent himself from answering.

  “I need you. Not everything you see is true. Don’t believe your eyes. Believe your mind.”

  “You’re the shadow,” Cain says.

  “If that’s how you want to view me.”

  Cain stares at the painting of the broken chest. A painting rather than a photograph, because it has yet to happen.

  “Don’t believe your eyes,” the shadow says again, “and come back to me, Cain.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. I don’t know what to believe.”

  “Maybe you’ve just had a bad dream.”

  Cain runs his index finger across the top of the picture frame and it comes away dusty. He wonders whose skin he has on his. “There was a woman,” he says, “and she kept changing.”

  The shadow is silent for a while, as if considering his comment. But then it chuckles, back to mockery, all evidence of former insecurity now vanished. “Cain, really.”

  Cain turns and walks to the window, looks out, sees nothing at all. It is not simply night, it is empty. There is nothing beyond the room. He glances over his shoulder at the door and the banging starts again, but this time its insistence is intimidating rather than frantic.

  “Come back to me, Cain,” the shadow says in a singsong voice. “We belong together.”

  Cain shakes his head, sits down, and wakes up.

  “Cain?”

  Someone shook his shoulder. He opened his eyes and saw the strange woman, but her eyes gave her away. Strange, yes, but always Magenta.

  “Is this a dream?” he asked.

  “Not this, not now. Come on. You’ve slept past midday, and we need to talk.”

  Cain sat up on the bed, groaning and massaging his limbs. It felt as though he’d run several miles in his sleep, over and above the distance they ran last night. Magenta stood back and waited by the door, but Cain’s gaze was drawn to the wall next to her. There were no pictures there and no sign that there ever had been. The room was as blank and sterile as the rest of Magenta’s flat. He glanced up at the ceiling, but nothing slammed down demanding his return.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said.

  Cain laughed. There was no other way he could react to such a platitude. His humor did not last for long.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  He shook his head, ran his fingers through his hair. “Like I’ve been duped into being myself. Like I don’t really belong anywhere. And I’m starting to really believe that.”

  “None of us belong, Cain,” Magenta said. “Why do you think we’re all here together?”

  “I have no idea! That’s what I mean, this is all just so alien, so confusing! And I’m not one of you, Magenta.” He shook his head. “Is Peter really dead, or is that another lie?”

  Magenta turned away, her eyes downcast. “He’s dead. George has never listened to any of us. We all know that we’re right and strong and free, but George’s fault is that he acts on that too much, not only when he needs to. We told him that you’d discover everything soon enough, in your own time.”

  Cain thought of the album he had looked through and the pictures contained therein. His father was around him now more than he ever had been while alive. Cain found that comforting, and yet also unfeasibly terrifying, as if the old man could spy on him even now. Magenta and the others were a part of his father’s secret past, a past that Cain was never meant to know. Or was he? And there was the crux of his confusion; the fact that this whole situation still felt manipulated and coerced.

  “You’ve known Peter a long time,” Cain said—a statement, not a question.

  Magenta nodded. Cain tried to perceive a glint of mourning in her expression, but he could not fool himself.

  “Aren’t you sad that he’s dead?”

  “Everyone dies.”

  “Even you? Even Whistler? He looks exactly the same now as he did in that old photo with my father.”

  “Whistler and I know the Way.”

  Cain waited, but she did not elaborate. “So that’s it,” he said. “That’s an explanation. The Way gives you eternal life.”

  Magenta laughed. “Of course not,” she said. “It just tells us how to live life properly.”

  “By killing people.”

  Magenta stared at him, a slight smile on her new, fuller lip
s. “Your life has changed,” she said.

  “You think I ever had a life?”

  “Forget your preconceptions. Forget everything you think you should have, and start thinking about what you need. You’re blessed with such a gift, Cain.”

  “Blessed! Do you know what my father did to me?”

  “Of course I know.” She waved her hand, dismissing such a stupid question. “He was a trifle extreme in his efforts, but only by society’s standards. And that’s where all concepts of freedom, choice, and free will fall down. Consider yourself a part of society—part of the norm—and you’ve set yourself down a path from which you will never deviate. It may twist and turn, veer left and right, and sometimes fracture, but it always progresses the same way. This way: birth, school, job, marriage, children, death. However many variations of that life there may be, there are constants by which it will abide, simply because of the world it exists in. And those few—those very few—that find the Way are called either mad or criminals. Simply because they follow their hearts!”

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  “I’m saying Leonard gave you a blank slate, and still you left Afresh believing you knew what you wanted.”

  “Of course I know. I want my own life.”

  “So what are you going to do with it? What does that really mean?”

  Cain blinked, stared at Magenta’s beautiful, bewitching eyes. “I’m going to make it my own,” he said. “My father denied me—”

  “He denied you the easy route!” Magenta said. “He sacrificed much of his life to make sure you got the best out of yours. He never found the Way himself, not like me and Whistler and the others. He was like Peter—a trickster who had some knowledge, some skewed insight into how things could be, but could never quite get there himself. He only wanted the best for you. For him, that was the next-best thing. You’re all he ever wanted.”