He meant to go through the archway, but then the breeze changed direction, and he caught a lungful of the close, damp air from the dining room, with a stink so penetrating it brought fear to his legs. He tried not to, but he thought of the last night, the fire and the shadows and the Engine, and one hand went to his forehead where the skin still shone with burn scars. He turned back through the hall and out the double doors to the sunlight beyond. Once outside he meant to walk around past the dining room windows and look in, but found he couldn’t, and while he hated the eyes of the house on the back of his neck, he hated even more the thought that he might turn around and see something, anything, a black adept standing motionless at one of the broken upstairs windows, or the pale, grey figure of Simon himself watching him run.
He ran to his cottage without looking back, for the first time grateful Simon had allotted him a spot so far from the manor. The narrow porch was covered in fallen needles and fir branches, but the windows were unbroken. When he unlocked the door it smelled lonesome, but it was dry, and the coffee tin still stood where he had left it on the shelf beside the little stove, and his muddy footprints were still on the floor. He pulled out a chair and sat at the table, looking out the window at the path past his front door, which wound down to the beach. It was overgrown on the verge. It wouldn’t be long now. After all, he might know it was a path, but it was on its way back to forest floor, frequented by deer and cougars. It didn’t take long, he thought, for the forest to rise up and swallow them down again, leaving nothing but the footings of old houses, and the line of a garden wall looming unexpectedly out of the forest along the overgrown path from the beach.
Anthea’s city is milky and pale on a day in late winter, when the twigs are swollen on the scrub alders that grow in gaps along the harbour front, the water slack and oily around the wharves. The Prophet walks from the customs office to the gangplank of a westbound steamer. He carries a black valise of worn leather. His suit is a bare shade lighter than the mist that obscures the mountainside across the inlet. Even beyond the wharves the waves are sluggish, the dimpled surface of the water as close as the low sky. The grey hulk of his ship rests at her anchor. He pauses at the bottom of the long ramp to the second-class deck.
Up close, his hands are clean and yellowish and skeletal. The old-paper skin seems too thin to cover the long finger bones, as though it were a glove close to splitting; sometime it will fall away and show the desiccated workings of his left hand: the clotted blood, the brownish strands of muscle, and his overwrought nerves running from fingertip to brain. It is hard to believe this hand is alive, or that it could remain alive much longer.
When he showed his ticket and passport—Canadian—he did not speak, having nothing to declare. He does not speak now as he takes the first step up the long ramp. He should rest longer after each step. One hand whitens under the weight of his valise. The other hand supports him on the railing. The sun is higher, but from the second class deck it’s hard to tell that the day has advanced.
Somewhere there’s a steward who will help him find his cabin, but for now he is alone on the deck, the grey day around him brightening, but never approaching white or gold. He leans on the railing, his shoulders sagging under the immaculate lines of his grey suit. Beneath the fabric he wears a thin film of sweat like another garment; the parchment skin of his face shines with it. He won’t set down the valise. It clings to his hand like a child, the bag a dead weight that numbs his fingers and makes deep, white cuts in his palm. It might be an anchor he drags after him. It might be his own heart made of cracked leather, and he like some older Magus gone out to hide it in the world, beating outside his ribcage in a seagull’s egg or the red heart-wood of a Garry oak. Immortality requires that kind of sacrifice.
Looking at the ticket in his right hand, he walks down the long second-class deck. Someone has begun to swab the floor with seawater, so it glistens in the shadowless light, and in it he sees reflected a distorted bit of sky.
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I want to thank my editor, Anne Nothof, for her good taste and patience, as well as Matt Bowes and Paul Matwychuk at NeWest Press.
I have borrowed—without permission—stories and lines from friends, so I thank Dean Ziegler for his squirrels, Jennifer Rempel for the KFC buckets, Eve Ojea for taking me to see Flamenco dancers, and Eileen Wennekers for a line of Menander’s dialogue. Also, my brother leant me the title “Blueprints for Surviving the Coming Dark Times” from one of his own projects.
I am also grateful to Tina Northrup for her critical eye, and to my friends Catherine Greenwood, Heidi Greco, Holly Borgeson-Caulder, and Kimmy Beach.
Finally, I am grateful to my family, in particular Sharron, Ian, and Paulette, and my father, David (1944–2009). And of course Don Bourne, because he made me finish the story, when I might otherwise have given up.
REBECCA
CAMPBELL
has had fiction and poetry published in Grain, Geist, The Fiddlehead, TickleAce and Prairie Fire. She has received a Masters in English at UBC and is currently working on her PhD. at the University of Western Ontario. Originally from Duncan, B.C. in the Cowichan valley, Rebecca now lives in Toronto, Ontario.
The Paradise Engine is her first novel.
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