by Tim Clare
‘How d’you get this place?’ said Delphine.
‘From my father.’
‘Investor, was he?’
‘Oh no.’ Ms Rao chuckled to herself. ‘He inherited it.’
‘From who?’
‘The old earl, Lazarus Stokeham. They were good pals back in Mysore. I think Dad was the closest thing he had to a brother.’
‘And what are you after? Money?’
‘Oh, constantly. Costs a lot to run an operation like this.’ Ms Rao sat and propped her chin against her knuckles. She gazed into the descending circles. ‘Little flies that make a person immortal. Imagine. If we could get one back to Britain, and learn how this . . . substance . . . repairs people . . .’ She gestured at the pool of godstuff. ‘We could change the world. Think of how many lives we could save.’
Delphine slurped her water. ‘You can’t save a life. Only prolong it.’
Ms Rao smiled. ‘That is a proposition I am willing to challenge. Vaccines, antibiotics. Illnesses that not so long ago were fatal are now no more than an inconvenience. Do not mistake norms for inevitabilities.’ She wagged her finger, as if re-enacting some historic reproach. ‘With a little imagination, we could breed animals that could regrow flesh when you butcher them. Infinite food.’
‘Sounds horrific.’
‘More horrific than famine? Perhaps you would temper that disgust if you’d seen worse privation than an empty fridge.’
For the first time since she arrived, Delphine felt the tiniest, most grudging stirring of respect for Ms Rao. Charm was the redoubt of scoundrels. A rebuke was honest.
Delphine gazed down at the pool. Its black surface lay inert.
‘You’re an altruist, then?’
‘Hardly. I’m just muddling along.’ She looked across at Delphine. ‘I’m sincerely sorry we didn’t find you sooner. You seem like our sort of person.’
Delphine tried to think of a cutting retort.
‘You don’t know me,’ she said.
Ms Rao squeezed her paper cone until it buckled with a soft pop. ‘My team have sent me copies of some documents they found in your house.’
‘What?’
‘You didn’t think I’d show you all this without checking you are who you say you are? You’ve accumulated quite the body of research.’
‘It’s my life’s work.’
‘There are sketches of a godfly.’
‘From memory,’ said Delphine.
‘You’ve seen one?’
‘Yes. It stung my father.’
Ms Rao tapped the crumpled cone against her knee, then stood decisively. ‘Listen. If your friend Martha is prepared to open the threshold, I’ll consider allowing you to make the trip. I want to send a team to Fat Maw, to follow up a lead. With seasonal rains it’s probably the last trip we can mount for four months. It’s quite a journey, but you could accompany them there and back, providing you’re prepared to work.’
Delphine laughed – a convulsive, mirthless reflex. It spilled out of her, all high and damaged, and left her panting in the wet heat.
‘I’m eighty-six.’
‘Well, quite. You fit the age profile perfectly.’
She laughed again. How strange that now she found herself here, on the cusp of it all, offered the thing she’d hunted all her life, she was afraid. With the death of hope came a kind of peace. But she wanted this. What if it was a lie? What if . . .
She inhaled heavy, wet air. ‘Let me take a walk.’
Prothero Wood was fragrant with wet bark and leaf mulch. Stout, forking boughs carved the light into continents. Delphine sat in an electric wheelchair, with Martha on her lap eating a napkin of sugar filched from breakfast. When the ground got too boggy they got out and pushed.
Once, she had dashed through these paths heedless. She remembered scoffing at Henry’s slowness, his grunts of discomfort and the stink of the mustard poultices he would apply to his perpetually crocked back. A marvel now, it seemed, how he had kept going so long, with his early mornings and his damp, cramped cottage – no central heating, no NHS. Getting by on tea and beer and a sort of holy grumpiness, the grim calm of the ascetic mixed with the pragmatist’s recognition that the hole in the thatch does not fix itself.
The trees thinned and the hard earth softened to marshland. She drove the wheelchair along a boardwalk, tyres bumping over planks of uneven, salt-smoothed cedar. Bronze rills trickled through gullies, draining back towards the horizon’s narrow, shimmering blade of ocean. A sharp wind made her nose run.
She stopped the chair at the edge of a slow-flowing trench, set the foot brake. Stunted vegetation shuffled in the breeze: purple, grey-brown, verdigris. She had forgotten how the saltmarshes’ colour palette felt wrong, uncanny – like an old television screen damaged by a magnet.
Martha climbed down from the wheelchair and walked to the edge of the trench, leaving hooked footprints in the soft mud. The comb-shaped heads of her antennae fluttered and sniffed at the loamy, freezing wind.
‘Well?’ said Delphine.
Martha faced the ocean. Her maroon armour was lustred with sea spray. From the east, a flock of redshanks called in high yipping voices.
Delphine felt a constriction in her chest. ‘Martha?’
The wind surged in a big, woofing show of power, wrinkling the ponds.
A horrible dragging guilt pulled at her stomach. Martha was going to make Delphine ask. She would not simply offer her power. Even when the others had left, when it looked like nuclear war might destroy the world and Algernon and the other lanta set off to hunt for an escape, Martha had stayed to be with Delphine. She had never asked for anything, except to be able to live her life in peace.
Delphine had to go. To reclaim what was lost. She had learned to live with this pain in her heart, but seeing the threshold had turned the dull ache to burning agony.
‘Martha.’ Her voice was cracking. ‘Darling. I have to say something.’
Delphine closed her eyes and breathed. The air tasted brackish and good.
‘You’ve always been . . .’ She opened her eyes. ‘Martha, I know you’ve probably made up your mind already but I just want to say. We can go home if you like. Back to the cottage. We can forget all this nonsense and go home because it’s been a good life, with you. I know I’m an awful fuss but it’s been a good life and I don’t regret it. I can’t. You mustn’t . . .’ She took a shuddering breath, concentrating on a patch of sea holly. ‘I wouldn’t want you to think because I spent all this time looking for a way through, that I was trying to get away from you. That I wasn’t satisfied. That you weren’t . . . enough, or something.’ She began pulling at each of her fingers in turn. ‘Oh dear. I’m sorry. I’m not saying this very well. I just mean . . . You’re important to me. More important than this other business. So. That’s it, really.’
Martha turned. Clayey mud was splattered up her shin plates; it dripped in grey-brown gobbets from her bristly thighs. Her eyes waxed aurora green.
She raised her arms. Her back split open.
Two smooth leathery sheaths unhinged, separating down the middle and swinging up. Beneath was a pair of tatty, translucent wings. They rustled, then fizzed into motion.
Martha bounced lightly on her curved toes. She bent her knees, jumped and rose steadily into the air.
She hovered, her blurred wings sparking bright video-glitch colours. The pincers either side of her mouth flexed as she chatter-ticked in clickspeak.
She took off, towards the woods.
Hidden amongst wind-hunched oaks was a cottage. Delphine rode the wheelchair to the edge of the clearing. Waist-high grass and tall weeds grew in dense profusion. There were rosemary bushes laced with crystalline cobwebs; a tiny, pudding-shaped goldcrest was whiffling from branch to branch, calling in his bold bright voice: See! See! See!
She stood, unhooked her stick from the back of the chair and made her way into the undergrowth.
There was no sign that anyone had come this way in a long time
. She tramped down grass and swatted weeds with her stick. Henry would have been horrified. Behind the thick windowpanes, the curtains were drawn. The thatch was mossy and worn.
Again, that shrinkage – that gap between her memory and the thing itself. Henry’s old cottage was small and rain-wet and not at all grim and runic like the one in her dreams. But it was here – it was real.
Martha was standing at the doorstep, talking to the front door. Delphine stopped behind her. She let out a moan as the stick took her weight. The door was crusted with sunburst lichen.
Delphine bowed her head in prayer. She pressed a hand to the rough stone wall.
Oh Henry. You’d be probably be furious if you knew I was coming after you. Are you dead? Can you hear me, up in heaven? Or am I talking to myself, like Father used to? Am I doing the right thing?
She heard scraping and opened her eyes.
Martha had set something down on the doorstep. It was a fist-sized chunk of limestone, shiny with water. It left a little dark puddle on the step.
Martha turned and walked past Delphine, into the long grass. Delphine stooped and picked up the rock. On the underside was a smooth ammonite. As she moved to replace it, she realised there was something written on the doorstep – white letters scraped out in limestone:
WHITHER THOU GOEST.
Ms Rao was in the courtyard, overseeing the unloading of pallets from a van.
‘Martha says she’ll do it,’ said Delphine.
Ms Rao turned. ‘Good. Thank you.’ She glanced around the gravel. ‘Is she . . .’
‘She’d prefer to remain incognito for a while.’
‘Of course.’ She slid a walkie-talkie from inside her greatcoat. ‘I’ll have Butler make arrangements for your journey. We’ll need a couple of days to prepare. In the meantime, we have some preparatory materials for you to read. There are guest suites made up on the first floor. We need to give you a few shots,’ Ms Rao patted herself on the tricep, ‘and they can make you quite poorly so it’s good to rest as much as you can. I’ll radio for someone to escort you there. We’ll provide supplies for the trip but let us know if there are belongings you need collecting from your home. You’ll need new clothes, of course.’ She looked Delphine up and down, smiled. ‘We’ll find something in your size.’
‘Wait.’
Ms Rao lowered the walkie-talkie from her ear. ‘Yes?’
‘You didn’t let me finish,’ said Delphine. ‘She says she’ll do it – on one condition.’
Avalonia is a continent in the southern hemisphere.
Delphine sat up in bed, reading a primer that had been pushed under her door. It was printed on A4 sheets held together with a staple. The text was thoughtfully large, including the header at the top of each page: PLEASE RETURN TO A MEMBER OF STAFF AFTER READING FOR SAFE DISPOSAL.
It comprises a mix of tropical rainforests to the north and monsoon forests to the south. Hills and mountain ranges create large areas of sheltered lowland in which a wide variety of flora and fauna thrive. Though the majority of relationships within these ecosystems appear to be non-zero-sum, there are a number of significant apex predators for which you must remain vigilant.
Delphine adjusted her reading spectacles and flicked a few pages ahead. There was a rough sketch of the island, shaped rather like a jagged apostrophe or a croissant placed on its end. Oh gosh, she was getting peckish again. She relit her pipe and took a couple of contemplative puffs.
Remember that although many residents of Fat Maw speak versions of French or English, the language has undergone – and continues to undergo – marked semantic drift. A non-trivial portion of their contemporary vocabularies are loan-words from local tongues such as Low Thelusian, Sinpanian, and the various river dialects that travel southwards from settlements throughout the continent. Listen before you speak. New recruits are advised to spend at least one month in Fat Maw developing their ear before attempting to converse with residents who are not employed by our agency.
She flicked ahead again. There were drawings of vesperi, harka and lanta, with arrows explaining anatomy and secondary sexual characteristics. A vesperi’s sex, it said, did not stabilise until after puberty, around the time they grew too heavy for flight. Gender was a looser, more malleable designation to vesperi than one’s virtue name, a term which led to the footnote: See Primer 1B – Onomastics.
She could not see how she was supposed to absorb all this in a few days. It reminded her forcibly of the grim duties of school, the French verbs by rote and the succession of kings and queens. She knocked her pipe out into an empty mug and took a chocolate from the dish on her bedside table. Martha was sleeping in a cot under the window. Delphine yawned. Needs must.
to dreams of chimney stacks, oil and gripped wrists he sleeps he sleeps he slee
When she woke she was lost. Meshy, spiderweb shadows spread across an unfamiliar room with a high ceiling. She groped for the bedside table and found her spectacles. It was only as she sat up that she remembered where she was.
She glanced about, still vaguely suspicious she was in a dream. The primer lay splayed on the quilt where she had fallen asleep reading it. On the other side of the room, a pine wardrobe stood next to a commode with a metal frame, upholstered in grey, wipe-clean plastic. The commode’s potty attachment clung to its underside, pale, accusing and vaguely parasitical.
She slid her bare feet down onto the rug and spent a few moments collecting her thoughts.
Her hip and shoulder were tender from where the van had flipped. This was real. She was back at Alderberen Hall.
She lowered her head, her tangled hair spilling forward, hanging over her brow and round her ears. A liquid weight sat in her belly, churning.
She found her wristwatch behind the bedside lamp and slipped it on. The time was almost four a.m. She flexed her fingers, watched a blue stirrup of veins tighten about the knuckles. Feeling rather light and outside herself, she raised her fist to her lips, and kissed it.
Delphine chose to walk the final few hundred yards from the lift to the ice house without assistance. Ms Rao had changed into autumnal reds, her shoulders draped in a loose-woven woollen shawl. Delphine had slept fitfully over the past few days. The injections had left her feverish, misremembered phrases from the primers dancing around her brain. As they walked, she hallucinated tinny music-box-like melodies tinkling from the ventilation system, modulated by fan whirr into queasy warbles. The walls of unworked stone seemed to close in. She felt like a death row inmate trudging towards the execution chamber.
They reached the final blast door; Ms Rao signalled to the camera and the door opened. She led Delphine into the thick, wet heat of the ice house. Delphine went into one of the side rooms, where a white bathrobe lay folded on one of the beds. She changed slowly, lingering as she removed her socks, focusing on the sensation of wool dragging over skin. She was not sure she felt fear any more. She was not sure she felt anything.
When she padded back out in the central chamber, Martha was there, arms by her sides, eyes fluxing a sombre metallic blue. Butler stood beside her, dressed in a white cotton toga that came down to his knees, his wings folded. Ms Rao was waiting too.
Martha climbed into a recess at the edge of the pool. Her hemispherical eyes waxed purple, cycling red, white, gold.
The waters of the pool began to turn.
Delphine peeled her tongue from the roof of her mouth, gluey strands stretching and snapping. A beery, hoppy stench wafted up from the pit.
Ms Rao walked down to the edge of the pool. She held out her hand. In her palm was an apple with a red ribbon tied round it.
‘Test!’ she said. She let go.
The apple punched into the viscous liquid, rolled onto its side, and sank. The small dent it left curled and stirred back into the whole.
Ms Rao looked towards the radio room, tapping her foot.
Delphine watched the steaming water. She imagined the apple, fizzing away to nothingness. Was it really the same apple that emerg
ed on the other side? Or did the threshold take an impression of it and produce a copy? Was the first apple destroyed? Was she walking to her death?
A call from the radio room: ‘Received!’
Ms Rao gave a thumbs up. She turned to Butler.
‘Channel’s open.’
Butler bent his knees. He leapt. His wings fanned, toga billowing. He dropped feet-first into the godstuff. It yielded cleanly and he was gone.
Delphine gripped her walking stick. Her depth perception was doing funny things. The descending circles around the pool seemed at once flat and infinitely deep. She took a step and her whole body swayed. Her ears were ringing.
Ms Rao looked at her. ‘Ready?’
Delphine’s stomach clenched. Oh pull yourself together, woman. She had made a bargain. This wasn’t about what she wanted. She walked down the long, zigzagging ramp towards the well.
The atmosphere grew ever more humid. Sweat dripped into her eyes. The metal rail felt hot under her slick fingers.
At the edge of the pool, the stink was intense and complex, notes of bramble and soap rising then falling back into a hoppy, tarry stew. She thought she might vomit.
She hesitated. She folded her fingers round the collar of her robe, working her thumb over the soft cotton.
‘Ready?’ said Ms Rao. Her face was underlit, faintly cadaverous.
Delphine felt her cheeks prickle. ‘Should I get undressed?’
‘Not unless you want to.’ She looked down into the waters. ‘When you’re ready, just lie back. It feels . . . unusual. But it doesn’t hurt.’
Delphine exhaled. Right. Come on then. She rested her walking stick against the handrail and sat on the lip of the pool, next to Martha. A damp heat washed against her spine.
It was the old diving board trick. Jump before your conscious mind is ready to object. Before the lizard brain intervenes. Take your instincts by surprise. On the ceiling, the tiles formed a pattern. Very faintly, in shades of red and orange and peach, she saw the eight long petals of a lotus.
