‘That’s you, that is,’ she said proudly. ‘I’ll fill you in later.’
Kay, her mouth full of breakfast, nodded approval, then swallowed. ‘Do you do this for everyone?’
‘Sort of. It’s a memory wall. It remembers everyone I’ve let into this room.’ (Kay didn’t count heads, but there were over a dozen.) She shrugged. ‘I tried being a pavement artist before I got here, doing pictures of people and stars and Jesus and the Last Supper and Blake and all that shit, but I was crap. Now I just do shadows.’
‘You don’t mind me being here? I don’t want to be an imposition.’
Azure smiled benevolently at her guest. ‘Everyone comes through the old free house. It’s no imposition.’
‘Esteban –’
‘– didn’t do much more than what I would have thought of eventually anyway.’
‘He likes throwing his weight around.’
‘He knows his home better than you is all.’ Azure interlaced her fingers, making a prayer-knuckle, which she pressed to her mouth. ‘And he’s scared of me.’
‘Should he be?’ Kay tried not to laugh.
‘Of the house, yes! Don’t look so alarmed. You’ll be fine.’
Kay was sure that she’d neither looked nor felt alarmed. She was practised at making her face numb, her eyes sightless, her limbs folded. She’d learned poker-stillness to keep the unstable world at arm’s length. Until today, it had worked. She had an uncomfortable feeling that she’d stepped into a game without rules, or with rules so complex they made poker seem quaint.
‘I slept well,’ she remarked. ‘It helped, I think. I feel a lot better.’
‘Did you dream?’
Kay nodded. Azure was grinning again, showing those crooked, gappy teeth again. ‘I don’t dream at all since I came here. Except three times. First time, I dreamed I found one of those big coins like they don’t use now, big as a wagon wheel. Second time, I dreamed one of the Follies was burning and no-one could agree whether to put it out or let it burn. Third time, I dreamed there was a body in the library, a man with angel wings instead of arms, and really old, really wrinkly skin, and eyes like he’d died from shock. Those three dreams, no others; and I used to dream like mad back in the real world.’
‘Maybe you don’t remember them. A lot of people don’t.’
‘That’s not the point. The point is, I found one of those big coins under a floorboard in this room just like I dreamed. One of the Follies did go up, two days later. Can you see a pattern emerging? I asked the-Lady for advice and she told me dreams are true.’
‘Some dreams come true. Never the really good ones.’
‘Please, listen,’ Azure insisted. ‘They don’t come true. They are true. They’re real in spite of being dreams. It’s that simple.’
‘I don’t get it.’ Kay shook her head and thought of the car crash in the woods, of the frightened, fascinated girl she’d been and of the boy who’d intruded on the scene in her last sleep without ever having been there before. ‘What about the third dream? Did you find a body?’
‘No, no I didn’t,’ Azure admitted, ‘I didn’t. But you ask Luis and he’ll tell you they did find a body in the library, long before his time, and they buried him in the grounds.’
Kay raised an eyebrow. ‘A body with angel’s wings?’
‘Angel just means messenger. Luis’ll tell you about it, if you ask him.’
Kay sighed, thinking of the hectic outside world, which somehow felt more sedate than the new and unexpected chaos of Candida. There was a little breakfast left, scraps of vegetable and at least one mouthful of cooling salmon. ‘So your point is …?’
‘My point is, dreams are true. Your dream is true. It will happen.’
‘It already did,’ Kay told her, and forked the last of the salmon into her mouth; but her head was full of the dream, and she tasted nothing but hot smoke and the sweet, poisonous oil burning in the body of the dragon.
Chapter Two: In the House of Traps
Don’t let it touch you.
Kay inspected herself in the anteroom mirror. She wanted to appear dignified. There was little she could do about the clothes, but she had washed as best she could in Azure’s tiny bathroom. It would be polite and politic to meet the chatelaine. Besides, she owed Azure.
Don’t let the city touch you. Don’t let its stink get into your pores. Be clean-skinned.
She looked rough, her eyes and her skin purpled by tiredness. There were more lines than she cared to remember, the slow erosion of time. She wondered how she had come to look so old when she hadn’t really lived. Her unpinned hair had gone jitterbug overnight, sprouting random strands and knots and tangles. She reached for her brush … damn, it was in her bag back in Azure’s room at the other end of the labyrinth. She tried to flatten it out with her fingers, and it barely noticed. She twirled the raggedy strands into the semblance of pigtails.
Don’t let the city taste you. Don’t flirt with it. Don’t flash thigh or tit. Don’t copulate.
‘Don’t suck your hair like that. The strands fill your stomach to bursting. Then you die.’
They were simply and unexpectedly there at her side, smiles like duelling scars. Kay tried not to look startled, even when the shorter of the two, the silent one, reached out to stroke her hair. In the mirror, her face formed a stoic grimace, faintly distressed by physical contact. Both her assailants burst into fits of schoolgirl giggles.
The speaker – top-hatted and taller, with a grease-paint Groucho moustache – made a sweet clucking noise with her tongue. ‘I was like you. When I first arrived here, when I first Appeared, I was a fish without a bicycle. All those years I’d spent planning for the revolution, and here it was spread out before me like Lenin’s succulent, hairy vagina, and I panicked. Why didn’t I choose the blue pill? What I’m saying is that you grow into it. What’s Appeared can’t be Disappeared. It violates the laws of conservation.’ She was breathless. She sounded French. ‘I’m Luna and this is Quint. We represent the Lollipop Guild.’ More giggles.
They flanked her, both lean and unthreatening, but still she felt trapped between them. She didn’t look at them directly but drew in their reflections. They were grinning like morons. Both were Victoria’s Secret connoisseurs (or victims), ridiculously overdressed in their elaborate costumes of basques, laces, suspenders, rings and belts strung with dangling windchime chains. It was difficult to tell how old they were beyond younger – clearly much younger than Kay. They might be tall children or freaks escaped from some locked attic. Their skins were pale, as if never exposed to the daylight.
‘You’re a real Celt, aren’t you?’ Quiet Quint spoke at last, shy, squeaky. She had a jester’s triceratops cap, with little bells that tinkled in time with her breath.
Determined to remain dignified, even polite, Kay asked: ‘Do you live here?’
Luna doffed her hat. ‘We are Flower-of-the-Lady’s Gestapo, her paladins, her sex-warriors. Show her, Quint.’
Quint reached behind Kay’s ear and pulled out a small, patched kitten, which mewled on her palm then scampered down her side to the floor and was gone. ‘It’s a trick,’ she confessed, and looked away.
‘We’re bruja and sister. We’re daughters of dragons. Welcome to the family, Kay.’
Luna clapped a comradely arm round Kay’s shoulder while Quint took her hand into a limp shake.
Don’t let them –
‘You should go in,’ Luna breathed into her ear, ‘she’s waiting for you.’
– get to you.
She pushed at the door. The two child-women didn’t follow her but streamed abruptly back from where they’d come. Kay stepped nervously and respectfully into the library and the presence of the chatelaine.
The-Lady, Azure called her, though she was properly named Flower-of-the-Lady in honour of some
local legend. Kay expected her to be serene and blooming, like her name, like the Pre-Raphaelite half-beauty it suggested. No. She sat at the desk at the far end of the library’s huge central atrium, under shafts of coloured light that dropped from the glass-domed roof. She was writing with a fountain pen and didn’t look up as Kay entered. It was difficult to gauge her height or her age or even the colour of her skin. Her face was obscured by her hair, which fell in neat curls like woodshavings, an old-fashioned look that suited her narrow, meatless build. She licked her lips as she wrote. She had a tongue for catching flies.
Kay crept steadily along the line of the carpet towards her while, either side of her, towering bookshelves stood in ranks, the perfume of oak and varnish mingling with leather and slow-crumbling paper. Though she didn’t dare stop to inspect them, Kay saw that the shelves weren’t uniform but each was carved with a unique and tactile design. The sense of organisation intrigued her.
Captain Esteban propped himself up on a rickety chair to Flower-of-the-Lady’s right. His uniform looked only mildly less shabby than when he had crashed into the dirt the previous day. His raw red eyes and taut skin betrayed a hangover and lost love. He seemed to grin as Kay approached, though it could equally have been a wambling, seasick smile. There was another chair to the-Lady’s left, but this was empty. Two-thirds of an inquisition then, and nowhere else to sit.Don’t relax. Stand if you have to. Stay alert.
She must have struck an unimpressive figure in her T-shirt and shorts, with her bare blue goosefleshed arms and legs on show, her dense freckle-archipelagos fully visible. There was a draught in the library but also a well of heat from somewhere close by. She hoped not to shiver.
Without looking up, Flower-of-the-Lady said, ‘Stay there. I won’t keep you a minute.’ That made Kay crane round automatically for a clock. Overhead there were platforms and half-storeys, all swollen with shelves, but there was no hint of the time anywhere. Esteban – clearly as irritated by the promised delay as Kay, but worse at concealing it – groaned briefly and lowered his heavy head into his hands.
Kay looked for the trace of a smile on Flower-of-the-Lady’s lips, but if there was one, it was well-hidden. Her pen moved patiently along the page and she didn’t look up. The skin of her face, visible below the heavy overhang of curls, was unmarked. Her eyes were wide and brown, floating up briefly to regard Kay before sinking down again into her work. They were humourless but not incurious. Kay stood stiffly with her hands clamped together over her navel and let time pass. Her skin was prickling from her embarrassment in the anteroom.
Presently Father Christmas brought a cup of tea for the-Lady in a bone-china mug that didn’t shake or spill in his surprisingly steady hand. Father Christmas was black and blind and wore a scarlet frockcoat instead of reindeer skins but was otherwise unmistakable. Kay felt vaguely embarrassed to christen the newcomer this way, but his birdnest beard made her think of no-one else. She looked to the surface of the tea, which was milkless but swirling with small, dissolving lumps of butter.
Flower-of-the-Lady’s pen moved. ‘Thank you, Luis,’ she said. ‘Would you be kind enough to fetch a chair for our guest? And perhaps some tea …?’
White marbled eyes turned towards Kay and didn’t see.
‘No tea, thank you,’ she said. Luis moved away and returned moments later with a chair hoisted confidently in one hand ahead of him. In the meantime, the-Lady’s pen ticked and tickled, Esteban sank in his chair and Kay stood.
Don’t let them intimidate you.
Once Kay was seated, Flower-of-the-Lady clicked the top onto her pen, set it aside, and looked up. Even as the light fell across her face, the detail remained elusive. She might be Hispanic, she might be Caucasian, she might be something else altogether. She made a bridge of her hands. ‘Do you know who I am?’ she asked.
‘I think so,’ Kay nodded.
‘Good. Captain Esteban you know. Luis’ – she indicated Father Christmas, who had taken his seat beside her and now leaned forward curiously, his ear cocked towards the conversation – ‘is our librarian. You may be seeing a lot more of him. I am the chatelaine of this house, which means you are under my protection and are my responsibility for as long as you stay within these walls. As such, I hope that your stay here has been agreeable?’
‘It has,’ Kay agreed.
‘And the young lady who calls herself Azure has been helpful in every respect?’
‘She has.’
‘Perhaps you could tell me something of yourself and your business here.’
Kay launched into a practised introduction, her basic curriculum vitae embroidered with details about her assignment to Candida, though giving nothing special away. It took some minutes, and in that time the chatelaine sat poised with amusement rather than interest, Captain Esteban tried and failed to conceal his frazzled lethargy and Luis gave nothing away beyond his sardonic Yuletide smile.
Flower-of-the-Lady tapped her pen on the table. ‘I hope you realise you aren’t the first to Appear in Candida with a scheme to open the city to outside interests. Doctor Arkadin himself found the project beyond his abilities. He had the good sense to give up.’
Kay nodded, though in fact the thought had not occurred to her, had not even been hinted at in her notes. She did prospectus-babble: ‘I understand your concerns, but my employers believe we have the right moment, the right skills and the right people for the job.’
‘Of course,’ the chatelaine murmured, and the long-awaited secret smile seemed to pass over her face at last. ‘This house has a long-standing amity with the civil authorities of Candida’ – an acid glance at Esteban – ‘such as they are. We have some influence of our own that may be brought to bear on your plans. For the moment, however, I’m concerned only with your presence in this house. You may stay here for as long as you like on certain terms. You may leave whenever you like, though if you find no suitable alternative accommodation, I would forcefully recommend that you stay. While you’re under the purview of Captain Esteban’s bureau, I will also have to take his opinions and recommendations – such as they are – into consideration. How do you feel?’
She blinked, the first time Kay had registered that from her chocolately Basilisk-eyes. Kay realised that she had been given a rehearsed speech, as plastic and familiar as her own.
‘I have contacts in the city that Mr Esteban here –’
‘Captain.’ Petulant kid, he was.
‘– that Captain Esteban said he would chase up for me. Assuming he’s done his job properly, I should be able to gather myself together and move out today.’
And why are her eyes smiling now, and why does this feel like a trial, when did you last see your father, eppur si muove, and what is the guilt in Esteban’s eyes, and why does Father Christmas shift so uncomfortably in his chair, revealing to the child-in-the-grotto that she was just slightly too naughty this year?
Esteban, realising the silence was meant for him to fill, hoisted himself up out of the slouch he’d made, looked to her apologetically and said: ‘The address you gave me doesn’t exist. It was burned out a year ago and it doesn’t appear to have been occupied before the fire anyway. What was your friend’s name?’
‘Prospero.’
Luis chuckled throatily. Merry Christmas.
‘Nothing like that in our records. Such as they are.’ Esteban shrugged then, slowly and dreadfully. He ran a hand down his leg and began to scratch conspicuously at the back of his ankle, as if commanded by an unbearable irritation.
Kay nodded businesslike at the chatelaine, to make it clear that her words were meant for Esteban alone. Then she made him look up with the force of her glare.
‘I don’t,’ she said, ‘believe you.’
‘Shit!’
Kay stood at the epicentre of the devastation. Around her, blackened timbers and scorched concrete spread in widening cir
cles like a map of Hell, with the normal streets and buildings of Candida blue and hazy beyond the edge. This had been a huge building once, maybe even a Folly. The wind blew charcoal dirt on her clothes and exposed skin and mocked her flimsy holiday-wear. Esteban paced in a spiral around her, glass and debris crunching underfoot. The combination of hangover and cold air turned his skin faintly blue. Kay’s legs were frozen, but she didn’t want him to see her rub warmth into them.
He looked at her like worshipful meat, like female territory.
Remembering Azure’s dream, she asked: ‘Do you get a lot of fires?’
‘Less than you’d think,’ Esteban remarked. ‘Fire’s the bastard, isn’t it?!’
‘I’m in insurance,’ she remarked, but the thought had nowhere else to go.
They’d ridden by rickshaw to the site of the building, and he’d pointed out the name of the street and the numbers so she’d be sure he wasn’t pulling a fast one. Mildly impressed, she forgot to press him about Azure’s bike.
She spat. ‘Shit!’
‘Do you know where I can get Internet access or an international phoneline?’
‘You seem to forget how isolated we are. There are good practical reasons why no-one has ever invested in laying miles of fibre-optic cable to draw Candida into the global village. You might want to think on that.’
‘Yes-thank-you-I-appreciate-the-advice. Is there a decent mobile signal? No, I didn’t think so.’ Besides, you decided to leave your mobile in the UK and get a new one here. ‘Radio?’
Esteban snorted. ‘Below a peak in the largest mountain range on the planet?’
‘A satellite phone should work.’
‘If you find such a thing,’ said Flower-of-the-Lady, and Kay was no longer certain she could count on the woman’s patience or goodwill, ‘then you’re welcome to try.’
‘Can I even write a letter?’
‘That would be sensible. The local Indians have been known to carry messages.’
Force Majeure Page 3
