by Tim Kindberg
Morchid stepped towards his son. As his feet touched the carpet no threads appeared. In fact they lunged away as Morchid moved towards Deobia, who was now kneeling, ready to lie down and be taken to cracked Marrakech, the threads whipping up at him.
“He’s your son,” Chemchi said. “The woman told you and I have shown you. Embrace him.”
“I have dreamed of you,” said Morchid. “Dreamed of your coming…” He stopped himself. Chemchi and the women had moved next to the carpet’s edge. Morchid’s henchman stood helpless.
“You?” Chemchi said. “You? Dream? You should have only nightmares, but about what you do to others. You should suffer for it.”
“I have no liberty,” Morchid said.
“What?” she said in disgust. “You’re at liberty to deprive others of their freedom, to brutalise them and to hand them to other brutes.”
“I must.”
“Deobia, hug your father and let him lie down with you.”
Morchid melted like a child as Deobia reached up to put his arms around him, and manoeuvred the hulk of him down to kneel beside him. Morchid surrendered to his son, until they were both lying down, searching one another’s eyes. And the threads whipped up, encouraged, feeling, wrapping, extending from the youth to the man, growing bolder; and more threads, from the other side of Morchid, were rearing up and curling, arching to meet their fellows on Deobia’s side, bonding over the two figures, taking them down, sucking them into the carpet until both were gone but only one shadow remained.
Deobia’s shadow.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
THE TWO WOMEN stood in horror, watching Chemchi play her torch on Deobia’s shadow to try to bring him back.
“Deobia! Come on!”
But it remained steadfastly, like an inerasable ink blot, the deepest black on the carpet. Then she tried the beam on Akimbe’s shadow, which responded at once, peeling and stirring and turning into a boy-shaped mound, the eyes popping through, like an embryo speeded up in a womb, the threads yielding, retreating, the boy taking shape as Akimbe, just as Chemchi had first encountered him.
She offered him a hand up.
“What did you see? Did you see Deobia? And Morchid? They’ve both gone through. I can’t get him back!”
“Why — no. You told me to see the old woman. I was speaking to her still —”
“We’ve lost Deobia. Deobia is his son.” She tried the torchlight on his shadow again.
Radia was distraught. “It’s my fault,” she said. “If I hadn’t gone along with this … I don’t know what would have happened, but surely not this.”
The other woman and the henchman had disappeared.
“Go, save yourself,” Chemchi said to her.
“No, I must wait for him, I don’t understand any of this. In the name of god, tell me what is going on.”
Chemchi was imagining what could have happened in cracked Marrakech, the two of them arriving, stumbling at the gates and — what? Have a father and son talk? Kill one another? Was Morchid looking for a box to put Deobia in? Was the son a threat or an asset to that monster?
It was as though she was in the hold of a force that had been manipulating her, that knew to send Deobia onto the carpet and have Morchid follow, that the combination of father and son would go through when Morchid by himself could not.
Should she follow?
“We must follow them,” said Akimbe, “we must bring him back.”
“Let me go,” said Radia. “How do I go through? What do I need to do?”
“No, we can’t lose someone else as well,” said Chemchi.
Chemchi felt helpless, drained of her powers.
“Deobia doesn’t stand a chance,” said Akimbe.
Chemchi thought about the clockwork world, about the old woman in the fractured square, and above all about her own counterpart in the riad there. What would he do with them all, those people who sleep-walk, ambling and bumbling around in the eternal mid-day sun? Would he become one, forget like everyone — everyone except his son?
This was Morchid, of unknown powers, who wasn’t meant to be there.
Akimbe walked onto the carpet.
“No,” Chemchi cried, “no, I mustn’t lose you too.”
“But you don’t care about me.”
“Of course I do.”
“You found Morchid’s son — and look where that has got us. We’d be better off not knowing.”
“I thought if everyone knew the truth, that Deobia is his son, that … that the truth would put things right.”
“Who knows why Morchid wanted him,” said Akimbe. “He can’t help who his father is.”
“What do you mean?” said Radia. “What will Morchid do with him? Show me how to go through.”
Radia walked onto the carpet and lay on it, as she had seen Deobia do.
But it wouldn’t take her. The threads remained impassive. The black palimpsest of shadows hung inertly. Even the golden strands were dull and no longer glinting.
Chemchi walked onto it. But the threads stayed locked in their weave. Akimbe, too, lay on it. All three lay in a line on the beautiful carpet, which seemed to have changed completely in character, the shadows soft and seductive. They rubbed their hands across to feel its velvetiness.
“He’s disturbed everything — even the carpet — by going through.” Chemchi tried to keep her mind straight, tried to keep thinking, while the patterns in the carpet formed and reformed, like a mesmerising school of fish, flitting together in perfect synchronisation across the shadows.
The others did not respond.
“We’ve got to get off it,” she said.
“I just want to lie here,” said Akimbe.
“And I want to go through, to see my Deobia,” said Radia.
They lay transfixed. Deobia’s shadow began to ripple and bubble. It worked itself loose from the carpet, an infinitely thin film of perfect blackness in the exact shape of the youth, from his thin feet up through his drainpipe robes, to his thick buzz of hair and the corners of his goggles perched on top.
Nature was precise and perfect, each light ray scraping past a body to make an exact shadow edge. And Deobia’s shadow had this perfection.
But unlike any normal shadow, it stood. And it walked, a black body with no mass. And from the feet of the shadow the youth appeared, along the ground in an exact reversal: his image was where the shadow should be, and the youth was where the shadow should be.
The youth as anti-shadow came from no discernible anti-light. Everything lay in the flickering rays from the candles. The anti-shadow, as though to reinforce the absence of the anti-light, swayed around the walking shadow, apparently randomly.
Chemchi, Akimbe and Radia saw none of this. They lay with mouths and eyes wide open as the carpet’s pattern danced them into oblivion.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
ALI SIPPED HIS mint tea, satisfied with the light pouring down the atrium onto his precious riad, rehearsing all the tales he had to tell from his long life in old Marrakech. Although peace lay over everything, something was different. No one could quite put their finger on it but rumours flew and multiplied around the souks of course. Stories shifted in wild exaggerations as they were whispered. The butterflies and daddy long-legs and bumble bees all buzzed and bumped with chatter along the alleys.
“What would you like for supper?” a voice came from the kitchen.
Ali stirred from his reverie. Life was good. “A nice tagine. Lamb?”
The owner of the voice appeared. It was Chemchi. “Yes, Akimbe’s favourite. I’ll go and shop.”
It was hot, hot, the sun standing at its highest point, pressing on the souks. Under the netting stretched between the roofs of the stalls, Chemchi took a detour, wanting to bask in the full force of it. She slipped out of the crowd, down an alley to the open square.
And there it was before her, blazing white in the searing sun. She started to walk across it.
Something stopped her going to th
e far edge, though. It turned her around. And the far edge was somehow never actually in her vision, although she had thought about it.
Whatever it was, it turned her around like a kindly helper with a hand on her shoulder, well-meaning and benign, it transferred her back, with a gentle pressure back into the souks.
An old woman watched, hunched and shrivelled against the wall.
Acknowledgements
I thank the early mornings, A4 spiral-bound exercise books and Stabilo pens for the creation of this book. I am greatly indebted to those who kindly read my drafts and gave me feedback: Chris Barnham, Robbie Cleary, Sue Davies, Constance Fleuriot, Jeremy Hodgen, Gene Kindberg-Hanlon, Jess Meyer, Clare Reddington, Laurie Smith, Ruth Stanton, and members of the Bristol Fiction Writers’ Group. This is a work of fiction. While the plot and characters are entirely made up, two of the latter were inspired by people I met on a trip to Marrakech. In a fractured square...
