King of Morning, Queen of Day

by Ian McDonald

  With the final dregs of her strength, she seals the Gateway and smoothes it away and it is as if it had never been.

  As the emergency services people come smashing through the doors with their axes and pneumatic jacks, Enye resheathes her swords and escapes through a window and up onto the roof. While the boys in blue are otherwise occupied, she makes good her escape down the ice-bound fire escape. It catches up with her in the car. She slumps over the Citroen’s steering wheel. Hers is the only vehicle in the car park. The slashed roof is incongruous, and cold, though it is not from the cold that she is shivering. She watches the firemen go up their extending ladders to fight the flames that are beginning to lap from the windows. High-pressure hoses knock in the remaining panes of glass. She hopes Elliot has good insurance. Everyone is looking up. Good. She turns on the ignition.

  And a cold cold knife turns in her womb.

  She cannot breathe. Cannot think. Cannot do anything but lie helpless, paralysed in the car seat as the cold cold knife slowly disembowels her. It is worse, much worse, much much worse, than the pain the dancer inflicted on her, for there she was afraid she was going to die and here she is afraid she is not going to die. Slowly, slowly, the pain eases. She can think. She can act. Fat drops of sweat roll slowly, slowly down her forehead despite the cold in the car. She has bitten her tongue; the brassy taste of blood fills her mouth. She stumbles toward the flashing blue lights of fire police ambulance.

  “Help me! God, help me!”

  Sparks shoot upward from the conflagration. The ambulances with their pulse-rotating lights and fluorescent orange stripes are light-years away.

  “Help! Me! I think I’m having a miscarriage!”

  Figures in Night-Glo yellow vests are turning. Too far. Too slow. Too late. Out of the night, the knife comes tearing with gleeful, vindictive Joy; tearing open her womb and sending her crashing to the frost-patched blacktop.

  She doesn’t know whether to be relieved or disturbed when after a night of tea and tests and trans-sonic scans the gynaecologist (why do gynaecologists always wear bow ties?) pronounces that baby, if not mother, is hale and hearty.

  “I can go home?”

  “You can go home, if you’re careful. The slightest twinge of anything like this again, you come see us. And no more warehouse parties.”

  The fat friendly nurse with the country accent slips her a card with the address of a Women’s Centre on it.

  “Leave the bastard,” she whispers. “I don’t care who he is, what he says, you can’t allow him to do things like that to you. There’s always someone here.” Then, in her professional voice, “Are you staying for lunch? It’s pork casserole.”

  A tall, ectomorphic teenager who is supposed to have swallowed a toothbrush saunters into the ward, stares at Enye’s black, hard bruises.

  “I think I’ll give it a miss all the same,” says Enye.

  She knows what she is to do now.

  The taxi leaves her at the end of L’Esperanza Street. On the first day of the new year she walks past the black iron palings and the high-gloss polyurethane doors and the brass knockers.

  She stops dead.

  Outside number twenty-seven L’Esperanza Street, like a fragment of the previous night fallen into today, are pulse-rotating blue lights, fluorescent orange stripes, static-blurred snatches of voices on radios.

  The police.

  The front door of number twenty-seven lies open. A woman officer is standing beside Mr. Antrobus’s memorial. By her side is Omry. Two uniformed officers and a plainclothesman emerge from the front door. The uniformed officers are carrying the paraphernalia of her Shekinah factory. The plainsclothesman holds up two plastic Zip-Loc bags, shakes his head.

  The woman officer escorts Omry into one of the police cars.

  Neighbours peep from behind net curtains, careful not to be seen lest that be mistaken for an admission of complicity.

  Enye turns around and walks away. Bursts of police communications crackle from the prowl cars. Engines start and purr. All it takes is for one neighbour to shout, or call. A pointing finger would be more than enough.

  She glances over her shoulder.

  Two of the three police cars are moving off. One unmarked vehicle remains to await her return. The two cars approach her. Omry is in the backseat between two woman officers.

  Enye walks faster.

  Faster.

  Do not run.

  If you run, they will get you for certain.

  One of the entries to the laneway that runs along the backs of the gardens is a matter of metres away.

  One step at a time. Like the journey of a thousand miles.

  She ducks into the entry, presses herself into the back service door of a butcher’s shop that fronts the main road. The cars brush past, diesel whispers. She is shaking. She has fought demons, monsters, nightmares, warriors, and she is shaking. She walks away through the web of alleys and entries.

  This is how it must have happened. The police bust Omry. Maybe as they arrive, woo-woos blaring, lights flashing, to answer the fire call at the warehouse. Maybe they are coming anyway; maybe they have been tipped. That is certainly what Omry thinks. Omry has been betrayed by that bitch Enye MacColl because she wants Elliot all for herself, after her saying that that bitch Enye can do what she likes with him. Omry takes Enye down with her. Or, Omry decides to plea-bargain. Will His Honour be kind to little Omry if Omry sells him her entire dealership network? One or the other. The former, Enye tends to think.

  When she is a safe distance from L’Esperanza Street, Enye emerges onto the main thoroughfares and flags down a cab. While the driver takes her back across the city to the charred shell of the warehouse and her car, she applies strategy as never before.

  The Citroen seems relatively intact. The stock of Shekinah under the driver’s seat is untouched. Ten pills. Her entire stock. It is not enough. She has estimated she will need three, four times the amount. It will have to be enough. Her supply lines have been cut. She must face her Adversary before the supply fails entirely.

  If your Adversary attacks, are you to die because you have not chosen the time and place at which to fight?

  Dull aftershocks seize her womb. She grips the steering wheel, wills them away, pushes them out, out, away from her. The car is slow to start, and cold, so cold. White knuckles on the wheel. Start. Start. Start. The heater is at full blast but it does not stop the cold air rushing through the ripped roof. At speed, the fabric flaps and tears further. At the service station where she fills up and buys chocolate, she removes it. Customers stare at her. She smiles at them, but she is worried about making herself too conspicuous. The police will have the number of her car by now. She will answer their charges later. Now she has more important concerns. Thirty kilometres out a green Ford with two peaked caps on the parcel shelf pulls out and passes. She drives very, very carefully until the police car is lost to view. They did not notice her open top. Hah hah, officer. Well, I’m a real fresh-air freak, hah hah.

  “Makes you grow up apple-cheeked and roseate,” she says to the blind, tumbling blastocyst in her womb. “Sign of high blood pressure. Fancy some music? They do say that the unborn child can recognise external sounds. Of course, you’re hardly even a child. Any preferences? Mahler’s Fourth?”

  The swell of strings and horns spills out of the open-topped car and over the land through which it speeds; across the hedgerows and frost-whitened fields and flooded pastures. Thin, powdery snow has drifted into the windward sides of the furrows. Rooks are dark flopping double-crescents on the eggshell blue sky; clouds of gulls hover over the big tractor rigs ploughing the frozen fields for winter wheat.

  “Not that much worse than being on the bike,” she shouts to her child. “After a while you stop noticing how cold you are. That’s a sure sign that hypothermia is setting in.” There may be truth in her joke. She stops at the next roadside bar. Wooden benches where patrons in surfer shorts and surfer shirts had sat swilling lager in the last
summer anyone ever expected to see are now scabbed with a leprosy of black frost. Enye orders a coffee and a ploughman’s lunch. Rural regulars in sludge-coloured waxed coats look her up and down as if she is a prize heifer and pass comments on her dress. She is still wearing her party gear: hand-painted yukata and track bottoms. She stares back at them: die, peasants, and they return their attention to the wall-mounted television. A smart young lady on the pale blue screen with pictures of the Happening World hovering above her left shoulder is talking about a series of police raids across the city for Drug-Related Offences following a fire at a New Year’s warehouse party last night.

  Last night?

  It’s been a long year.

  Onward. Westward. Into the setting sun with Brahms’s Piano Concerto Number Two. She shouts at the sun, hold back the night, hold back the night; shouts at the Citroen, faster, faster, she must get there before dark. In the fading light she pushes the needle up into the reckless zone, trying to beat the sun. She shouts and swears at slower traffic; old farmers in Fiats and hats: why do the slowest drivers always wear hats? She takes appalling risks, peels out, swerves in, corners on less than four wheels, screams at the engine while the engine screams back at her: “I’ll make it up to you when we get back with a nice oil bath and overhaul, just get me there!”

  (When she was a kid and ill in bed, she had dreamed of Paris. Before her mother went out to her job in the Overseas Development Agency, Enye had asked her to pile every book in the house that mentioned Paris at the foot of her bed. Alone with the radio and a glass of orange squash and the comforting intimacy of the blankets around her, she had read and reread those books until she had a Paris constructed in her mind so accurate she could hear the accordion players and smell the baking croissants.)

  (The first time she went to Paris as a student, she had walked out of the hostel and within three streets had needed a gendarme to get back again.)

  This place is like Paris to her. Since she learned of it from the Midnight Children around their fire of embers under the railroad arch, she has photographed it from every angle, in every light and shade and season, with the f-stop of her imagination.

  Fingers, the keeper of the mysteries, had presented it to her with almost sacramental devotion. The heart mystery of the mysteries, the essence of the Rooke archive, wrapped up in a brown paper packet, bound with string. Enye had turned the aged, aged pages, brown and brittle with age, like dried flowers, careful lest even her slightest breath crumble and scatter them. In them she had read of the true name and nature of her Adversary, and the complimentary parts they were both cast to play in the ceaseless unfolding of new mythologies out of the old, like an endless chain of brilliantly coloured scarves from the pocket of a stage magician. New mythologies, new mysteries. Old hurts and pains, old hopes and dreams, played out beneath the Adam ceilings of that house under the shadow of the mountain.

  The reality, she knows, will be different.

  The Department of Forestry has levelled the ruins of the old house to make a car park. There are wooden garbage bins and a log-cabin toilet block. Two cars are parked outside the toilet block. A man gets out of one, heads to the log cabin. The driver of the other car, also a man, flashes his headlights, then steps out and follows the first man in. There is a signboard with the various nature trails and viewpoints marked out in bright-coloured paints, and a notice about how easy it really is to start forest fires. Her headlights swing across the third notice: Department of Forestry: Bridestone Wood.

  There is still light in the sky, though the east is dark and the first stars of the winter constellations are beginning to shine out.

  She empties out her Junior Housebreaker kit; stuffs the bag with car rugs, chocolate, a flashlight, her computer, her Shekinah. The swords do not quite fit. She leaves them protruding from the half-zipped shut top. The two men come out of the toilet block and drive off in the same direction. The carpark is hers and hers alone. She picks her course from the wooden map. The wood is crisscrossed with walks and picnic sites; her way is the one marked with red arrows on wooden marker posts.

  She had expected she should feel something—a spirit of place, faces in the trees, souls in the stones, presences seen and unseen. Following the way-marked path up between the naked trees she feels nothing. Whatever spirit resided here, it has been driven far inward by the improving hand of the Forestry Department with its picnic tables and guides to woodland fauna. Or, she thinks, could the picnic tables and split-log garbage bins and way-marked paths only exist here because the spirit of the wood had already withdrawn into monstrous introspection? It is so dark between the trees she needs the flashlight to read the red sign-arrows.

  “Up we go, up we go, up we go,” she sings to the child within. “Up we go, up we go.” The path grows steeper, and she pauses often, the memory of the knife never far. She talks to the foetus about what the video phagus said, the doubts it had cast: that the Warped Ones she has been battling against might only be her own fears returning to her.

  “Your grandma did say that Uncle Ewan showed schizophrenic tendencies when he was a boy.” She does not tell the unborn thing her conclusion. It already knows, connected to her life by its umbilicus: those same schizophrenic tendencies might have gone undiagnosed in her.

  Her own instability, her own fear? she asks the baby. “All the world’s queer except thee and me, and I’m not too sure about me.” If the spirit of the wood reflects the spirit of the Adversary, is it so deeply introverted that it might no longer be capable of reaching out of the Mygmus into the world? What do you think, baby MacColl? Does baby MacColl think that maybe in its mother’s childhood there might be something unremembered but deeply, deeply etched, something branded so deeply into her subconscious that it has found expression in the Mygmus and thus back into the world again in the form of phaguses?

  Does baby MacColl know what it might be?

  Enye MacColl thinks she does.

  “Hey, we’re here! Starry, starry night.” It is cold—bitingly cold—upon the bare slopes of the mountain. The path leads along the upper edge of the forest. Only at the extreme western fringe of the world is there a lightening in the indigo sky. The stars are huge and brilliant and low enough for her almost to touch. She has never seen so many. Like an ancient god, she could gather a handful and weave them into a plaything for baby MacColl. The stone stands a few metres beyond the viewpoint. The small hollow in which its creators set it has been concreted over and is littered with empty beer cans, chocolate wrappers, foil, and the last condoms of summer.

  Small olive-skinned, black-haired Enye MacColl looks up at the stone, feels it with her fingers. Presses her ear to its dew-slick surface.

  Nothing. Only rock.

  She sits down at its foot, wraps herself in the blankets she has brought from the car. There is not much heat in them. She chews down the chocolate, piece by piece, bar by bar. She lays the swords, sheathed, on the short turf to her left, lays the computer to her right.

  “Sorry, kid, but this has to be done.”

  She removes the top from the glass bottle and swallows her entire supply of Shekinah. She sits, wrapped in her thin blankets, back to the Bridestone, waiting for something to happen. She wishes she had some music with her. Why doesn’t she keep a Walkperson in the car? Mussorgsky’s “Night on a Bare Mountain,” hah hah… And as usual, she has missed noticing when the Shekinah begins to take effect.

  When did the hollow in which she is sitting start to get deeper?

  And the ground beneath her grow soft and insubstantial?

  She leaps to her feet.

  The shallow depression has already become a pit, and is deepening every second. The sky is a disk of stars. What is happening? What is happening? It has never been like this before. She scrabbles at the sides of the pit, clings to the grass, but the gradient increases moment by moment, mythlines pour in, a Niagara of light, like the ocean falling off the edge of the flat Earth. She is drowning in mythlines. She tries to hold h
er head away from their downpour to breathe, and all the while the sides of the pit approach perpendicular. The Bridestone has vanished, already fallen into the pit. She reaches for her swords, her computer, cannot reach them. They fall into the abyss. Her grip is failing, the grass between her fingers tearing at its roots. She cannot keep hold, she cannot keep hold…

  All is lost in the blue shift of infalling mythlines.

  Blue shift.

  Red shift.

  Red.

  Times and spaces out of mind no longer terrify her.

  Red. All red.

  Shifts of reality that would cause others to question their sanity are the warp and weft of the fabric of her life.

  Not the red of flames, but the red of wounds, of blood, of flesh.

  What is this place her mythoconsciousness has brought her?

  She sits on the floor of a great hall that reaches in all directions beyond perspective. Red, all red. Floor and ceiling of red flesh, joined by bone piers and buttresses that splay out into riblike vaulting. Her swords and computer are by her side. Also, a discarded chocolate wrapper.

  This is the Mygmus?

  It is not what she expected. She had not known what to expect when she took all her Shekinah in one massive, reality-breaching overdose, but it is not this. She fixes computer to obi, slings swords comfortably across her back. One way looks as good as any other. She sets off at a slow jog. Thanks to cycling, she can keep this pace up almost indefinitely.

  Is she pregnant in here? Just what is the nature of her reality, or nonreality, here?

  The pillars and buttresses multiply endlessly. The only perceived change is audible, a distant, slow pulse-beat thud has entered the fringe of her perceptions.

  Pulse-beat? She touches a hand to the floor. Soft, warm, vibrating, barely perceptibly in time to the beat beat, beat beat, beat beat.