He slumped in the chair, and Alice looked down on her friend’s bent head. ‘If the answer isn’t in this world, it might be in another,’ she said. ‘There’s only one thing I can think of to do, and I’m going to do it now.’ Patting James lightly on the shoulder, Alice went out of the room and into the corridor. Up the stairs and down she went, stumbling slightly on her skirts – they’d only just been let down to suit her years. ‘It is a nuisance,’ she mumbled to herself. ‘She was right about our clothes.’ Moving aside a tapestry, she knocked softly on the door behind it.
‘Ah yes, do come in,’ said a low foreign voice from within, almost as if she were expected. It was a small room, more like a closet, with stone walls curved upwards to an arched ceiling. It had a strangely medieval feel, a forgotten room in the midst of a modern, bustling palace. Inside she found a tall man of striking pallor, sitting at a desk, poring over a manuscript. He stood as Alice entered, bowing deeply.
‘You are up late, Princess.’
‘I come from a sad vigil,’ Alice replied. ‘James O’Reilly’s sister Grace. She is deathly ill.’
The tall, pale man offered his chair. ‘It is indeed sad,’ he said, ‘when one so young is found in such a hopeless, helpless state. She has my sympathy.’
Alice did not sit, but stared at his desk absent-mindedly, hardly noticing the strange symbols etched on the manuscript before her. She looked up, into the man’s creased white face. ‘It is hopeless for Grace,’ she said, ‘because no one in this world can help her. But you have other means, other ways. You know what brings me here?’
He smiled slightly and nodded.
‘She must be called,’ Alice added. ‘I know you can call her.’
He smiled again, but this time shook his head in dissent. ‘Are you quite certain you wish to make the call? Death comes to all of you. Grace knows this. She has resignation and fortitude. She has faith.’ His lips gave an ironic twist at the final word.
Alice pressed her hands against the desk, palms down. She needed to remain calm. ‘Grace can live,’ she said. ‘You, by making the call, by bringing her here, you might give Grace life.’
Taking up a long black walking stick, the man turned it slowly, examining the curious shapes engraved on its silver tip. ‘You do remember the last time? The trouble? And though it’s really not something we can discuss, I can tell you in confidence – the worst of that trouble is still brewing, building in fact.’ Tapping the walking stick lightly against the floor, he shook his head as if to clear it. ‘You talk of my giving Grace the gift of life? I doubt the Archbishop of Canterbury would approve of such talk,’ he said in an attempt at a lighter tone. ‘Me, creating life? A collective shudder would go through your Church.’
He did enjoy the cut and thrust of conversation, but Princess Alice refused to be put off by his banter. Circling the room, she came and stood before him again, holding out her clasped hands. ‘Bernardo DuQuelle, you can help, and you must help,’ she cried, losing patience. ‘How can you tease me in the face of death? If Grace dies, James’s heart will break. If you make the call, Grace might be saved.’
The tall pale man looked down on the princess. ‘You are not the only one urging me to call her back.’ He sniffed the air and shuddered in distaste. ‘The others are pressing me; you’d hardly approve of what Lucia asks of her . . . and even if I did agree, who knows what would happen. To call her back, when there are many questions about what she really is . . .’
‘I’ve never believed there is evil in her,’ Alice replied. ‘She can only bring good. She is our friend, our companion. You think so too, I know. She can help. Please.’ Alice took the man’s long, cold hand. She had never touched him before.
The touch seemed to affect him strangely. He looked at her hand. It fitted into his palm, delicate and warm as a newly baked pastry. Sighing and shaking his head, he went to his desk and closed his book. Bernardo DuQuelle wrapped his cloak around his shoulders, and taking up his black top hat and walking stick, bowed to Princess Alice. ‘As I’ve always said, you are a true daughter of Queen Victoria. Yours is a forceful nature, well hidden behind a gentle façade. Let us hope you are strong enough for what lies ahead.’ The creases in his face deepened, but it wasn’t a face to show much emotion. ‘I shall do as you wish. Not for the reasons you think, and much against my better judgement. I shall send the message. But there is no need to clap your hands. I will call, but whether or not she hears it, that I cannot say.’
Chapter One
The Stranger in the Bed: Here and Now
A fire engine ripped down 89th Street, the sound of its blaring sirens ricocheting across the canyon of skyscrapers. It bounced upwards, finally reaching the eleventh-floor bedroom of Katie Berger-Jones-Burg. The many windows in Katie’s apartment had no double glazing. ‘Who needs the expense?’ her mother Mimi explained. ‘It’s perfectly quiet this far up.’ But then Mimi took so many pills at night, she was dead to the world. King Kong could come crashing through the windows, and Mimi would sleep on.
Katie didn’t take pills. She had, according to her mother, a drearily non-addictive personality. Mimi was the lead singer of Youth ’n Asia, a fading all-girl pop band. Her life had been filled with adventure, drama and a fair share of hallucinogenic drugs. By contrast Katie was, well, bland. Mimi had once complained that she was the only mother amongst their acquaintance who hadn’t checked her daughter into the Betty Ford Clinic. ‘Don’t you have any obsessions?’ Mimi goaded her. ‘Addictions make a person interesting.’
‘I read,’ Katie countered. ‘I read a lot.’
‘Reading,’ her mother sighed, ‘so outmoded.’
An ambulance followed the fire engine, throwing its wail up through the windows. ‘New York,’ Katie said to herself. ‘The city that never sleeps – well, that makes two of us.’ Getting out of bed, she went to check on Mimi. Her mother was splayed across a beige cashmere duvet. On the wall above her, a multitude of Mimis were reproduced in block colours on canvas. Was it a real Warhol? Katie had her doubts. On the ceiling was a large mirror. The real Mimi was wearing a pink velvet eyeshade and earplugs with purple tassels. She wasn’t wearing anything else. Katie plodded over to the bed – no need to tiptoe – and took hold of her mother’s wrist – pulse rate fine. Mimi occasionally took that one pill too many. ‘Goodnight, Mimi,’ Katie said. ‘Sweet dreams.’ Katie wasn’t certain anyone could dream through that amount of prescription drugs. Maybe that’s why Mimi took them. ‘Sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite,’ Katie shouted towards the earplugs, and was greeted by an answering snore.
She padded into the kitchen, scuffing her fuzzy slippers against the tiles. A quick check of the refrigerator revealed its typical state of emptiness. Mimi was not a big eater. She’d spent enough of her working life in a Spandex catsuit to understand the dangers of food. There were some gluten-free, wheat-free, sugar-free, cereal-free biscuits, a bag full of nettles, six bottles of champagne and fourteen bottles of water. Mimi lived off water – special water, expensive water. Their housekeeper Dolores claimed it was water made from mermaid’s sweat. Water and vitamins . . . and pills. Katie crammed a biscuit into her mouth and poured a glass of water. ‘The water has more taste than these things,’ she spluttered through the crumbs. ‘Sawdust, it’s like sawdust, only with fewer calories.’ Katie talked to herself a lot – there was no one else to talk to.
Still grumbling, she headed back to bed. There was a glow coming from her room, which was strange, since she didn’t have a nightlight any more. Something made her stop at the door and, looking in, she practically leapt out of her own skin. The ridiculous storybook words rang through her head: ‘Somebody’s been sleeping in my bed – and they’re still here!’ But she didn’t believe Goldilocks could have been as scared.
Lying in Katie’s bed was a stranger – a girl, an extremely beautiful girl. She sank back on Katie’s pillows, her chest rising and falling in the effort to breathe. She was so thin and pale, her eyes started out of her fac
e – glowing eyes, frightened eyes. She leaned forward to cough, pulling back the ruffles of her muslin nightdress and pushing her long damp red hair from her face; anything to stop the coughing and force that precious element, air, into her lungs. It was a desperate, but silent struggle. No sound came from the girl in the bed. As she turned her eyes towards Katie, words slipped like smoke from her mouth, circling around her head and dissolving into the darkness. ‘Can you help?’
And then she was gone. As vivid as the girl had been, nothing remained. Katie rubbed her eyes hard. She too was struggling for breath. Taking a pink blanket from the rocking chair, she crept into the living room and lowered herself, shaking, onto the big cream sofa. For the life of her, she wasn’t getting back into that bed.
The visions were appearing – again. It had all happened before. But what exactly had happened the last time, the time under the bed? Katie willed herself to remember. But it was like one of those long complicated dreams. You woke up knowing all the information, but by breakfast it was a blur.
A while back, when the strange package addressed to Katie had arrived, she’d remembered everything. All the details of some huge adventure. But then Mimi had come home from the airport – in the midst of a personal crisis as usual – and by the time Katie had settled Mimi into bed, only the foggiest outline of the great events remained. The next morning the whole thing had gone. She’d lost the facts, but she still had the feelings; the emotions of – well, of whatever it had been. Bewilderment, shock and terror; but there was also happiness – a great friendship had been forged. Who was it with? Why was it all just beyond her reach? She’d been somewhere far away on a journey rich with experience. But where?
Katie could have punched herself. Why hadn’t she written it all down, right away? She was a prodigious keeper of diaries. Yet even when she rummaged back through the daily entries of her diary, there were few clues and only a brief mention of some visions: a tall man in a black top hat rising from the steam of the subway and a pretty girl with silky brown hair and serious grey eyes.
The most vivid was of a small plump woman in old-fashioned costume. She’d been wounded somehow, and slumped before Katie, bleeding, in the streets of New York. But then the woman had vanished. They’d all vanished. Like just now with the girl in the bed. Katie couldn’t be certain whether any of this was real. Even when she’d written about these visions in her diary, she’d questioned them. Maybe she had an overactive imagination. Or she could be going that little bit insane. Katie read and re-read what she’d written, finally hurling the diary across the room in frustration, trying to knock the truth out of it. Still, she didn’t know.
There was one more clue, a big one: the walking stick. It had arrived in a package one day, addressed in elaborate script to Katie Berger-Jones-Burg. The doorman had said some kind of punk Goth had dropped it off. It was a fantastical object: black ebony with an elaborate silver head. Both the wooden base and the metal top were carved with strange letters and symbols. ‘Kind of like something a magician uses,’ their housekeeper Dolores had suggested. ‘Maybe flowers will pop out of the end.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Katie replied, turning the walking stick over in her hands. ‘I’ve always hated magicians, especially at birthday parties. What kind of grown-up spends their life trying to fool a six-year-old? It’s pathetic and bogus. But there’s nothing bogus about this walking stick. It’s the real deal.’
Dolores sniffed, ‘Real, schmeal. And you don’t know where it came from or why it’s here. I’d just put it in the back of the closet and forget all about it.’
That was part of the problem. The walking stick had arrived for a purpose, and that purpose was not to forget. It had even come with a card. ‘Aide-memoire,’ the card said – ‘to help her remember.’ ‘Irony,’ Katie said to herself. ‘This is a really great example of irony.’ At the Neuman Hubris Progressive School they were doing Writers and the Martyrdom of Same Gender Preference – Oscar Wilde, Noël Coward, Truman Capote. Her teacher, ‘call me Ted’, kept pointing out the writers’ use of irony as a weapon to ward off persecution. ‘Irony and the walking stick,’ Katie thought. ‘I’d write an essay on it, but “call me Ted” would think I was bonkers.’ She picked up the card and read it again.
‘Aide-memoire’ – to help her remember . . . she could remember nothing.
Chapter Two
The Walking Stick
She must have fallen asleep on the sofa and slept heavily, despite the night’s terrors. It was well past ten when she woke up, the light streaming through the city-stained windows of Apartment 11C. The front door banged, and Dolores stumped in, laundry basket on her hip. ‘Well, someone has the life of Riley,’ Dolores said, dumping the laundry on the sofa, all over Katie’s feet. ‘Someone can sleep where they want, and as long as they want. While some others, well, they had to get up at five this morning to get from the Bronx to Manhattan.’
Katie extracted her feet from the laundry. ‘I bet Mimi’s still asleep,’ she said, sitting up.
‘Course she is,’ Dolores answered, beginning to sort Katie’s socks and shirts from Mimi’s more exotic garments. ‘Looks to me like she’ll be in bed for a week. That Mimi, she’s having a crisis.’
Katie lay back down. Mimi in crisis was always a nightmare. ‘What’s happened this time?’ she asked.
Dolores picked up a red thong between thumb and forefinger; shaking her head she dropped it into the pile of Mimi’s scanty things. ‘Mimi’s agent, he just tried to book her on tour. In Mil-wau-kee, Wisconsin.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘Didn’t you hear me, child? Do you think Mimi’s going to haul her bony butt off to Milwaukee?’
‘Well, yeah,’ Katie said. ‘I mean I know, she’s played Madison Square Garden, and 20,000 pre-teens screamed their heads off. But that’s over. Youth ’n Asia hasn’t exactly been in the charts lately.’
Dolores balled up Katie’s white cotton socks. ‘Youth ’n Asia’ she sniffed. ‘Now that’s the problem. They never did have no Asia in them, and now they’ve got no youth. Mimi’s just too old to go dancing around half naked on stage. She can’t let go, and she can’t go to Milwaukee. So she’s gonna go to bed, and stay there.’
Katie knew what this meant: trays of mood-enhancing foods demanded and then pushed aside; heart-to-heart chats with Katie at two in the morning; and Mimi’s special zombie drift through the apartment after yet more pills. She’d once shown up at Katie’s school, in her bathrobe, to confess that her maternal aura was tinged in grey. But then, Neuman Hubris was the type of school used to that type of mother. They’d escorted Mimi home, and then signed Katie up for extensive counselling. Katie had thought this unfair. Mimi loved psychoanalysis, cognitive therapy and behavioural reviews – anything so that she could talk even more about herself. Katie loathed counselling and dreaded the sessions. She had nothing to say.
Dolores was still talking about Mimi, in a kind of droning sing-song, a litany of complaint. But Katie had left Mimi and her crisis behind. She’d remembered her own crisis last night – the girl in the bed. ‘Can you help?’ She’d seen the girl and the message so clearly. What had that been about? Was it a bad dream or a real vision? Last night she’d been so sure that it was real, like all that other stuff hovering just outside the reach of her mind. Now she wasn’t so sure.
Katie was usually an appreciative audience for Mimitalk, but Dolores noticed she wasn’t listening at all. ‘Katie,’ she said, ‘you are a hundred miles off. Girls your age, they just dream and dream all day. What you need is a firm hand, and you’re not gonna get it from Sleeping Beauty in there. Really, it’s time you got up.’
Katie did get up – shot up in fact. She stood bolt upright, staring out the window. But it wasn’t the spires of St Thomas More’s she was looking at, or the black silhouette of Mt Sinai hospital. It wasn’t the view from her apartment window at all. Just beyond her, on the windowsill, stood a man. He was very tall, a black top hat accentuating his
height and a long cloak whipped around him. He shaded his eyes with one hand, strange glittering green eyes, and peered through the window. As he pressed his face closer, she noticed its unnerving whiteness – he was practically transparent. All the time he was tapping on the window with a black and silver walking stick. He tapped and tapped, yet there was no sound. Katie lived on the 11th floor. How was he able to do this? He wasn’t even holding on.
‘Don’t jump!’ Katie cried, running towards the window. ‘Hang on! I’ll call the doorman, and the police. Why can you never open a window in this apartment?’
‘They’re sealed shut,’ Dolores answered, looking puzzled, ‘except for the terrace. What are you doing, child?’ Katie yanked the doors of the terrace open. Running to the edge, she scanned the side of the building. No one was there. She ran back in and checked the windows. Nothing. Girding herself, she ran back outside and looked down. Had he jumped? Her eyes moved over every inch of the terrace. All she could see was Mimi’s Buddhist shrine and some ‘medicinal herbs’ in pots. Katie listened to the taxis honking far below and felt the icy chill of February in New York. She shivered. No one was there.
‘Change of plan,’ Dolores said, leading Katie back inside. ‘I don’t think you should get up after all. I think you’re heading right back to bed.’
‘But Dolores,’ Katie said, ‘he was here.’
‘I know, honey,’ Dolores said gently, ‘nothing a warm glass of milk and some rest won’t fix.’
‘But the man, he’ll fall,’ Katie protested.
‘I’ll call the doorman downstairs, sweetie,’ Dolores said soothingly. ‘I’ll make sure he doesn’t fall.’ Putting her arm around Katie’s shoulders, she steered her into her pink bedroom.
At the foot of her bed, Katie stopped. ‘Dolores,’ she said, ‘can you just pull down the duvet, and turn over the pillows.’
The Chronicles of the Tempus Page 23
