“Did you know?”
“Yes.”
“But Daniel never did.”
“No. I considered telling him.” Because God loves truth. “But it would have been cruel.”
Yes. It would. But you might have told me. It would have made my life easier, because if I’d known Daniel’s trade didn’t pay the way he ran it, I might not have spent ten years of my life doing exactly the bloody same and being so confused when it didn’t add up.
Harriet sighs, and clasps her hands for a moment. May God grant both of them peace.
Again, Joe feels that peace could be granted more generally if people inside his family told each other fewer whopping lies, and left their children somewhat less complex and occult heritances.
At least she hasn’t mentioned the ineffable nature of the Lord at all. When Harriet first came here, Joe assumed that this kind of answer was a sort of polite, convent version of “Fuck off.” Later, he came to believe it was an assertion of faith.
“Daniel built something with Frankie, didn’t he?”
Harriet’s face undergoes a stark transformation, from beatific to furious.
“Oh, he would have done anything for her! He did do anything. She asked a lot, and he always did it. And what she didn’t ask, what she just left him to do … that was worse. She was wicked, Joshua! So wicked. So blighted and dark. They all thought she shone, all those clever men, but she was rotted inside like a windfall apple. Maggots and death. She was a witch, from a witchy breed, and God save her, because I think she’s in Hell. I won’t talk about her. She was a bad one.”
“I thought we were all bad, unless we tried.”
“Oh, we’re all sinful. But we’re not evil, Josh. Not unless we really put our shoulders to the wheel. She was evil. She had such eyes. They saw everything, right down to the bottom of creation. She saw like Einstein, they say. And look what came of him: burning cities and charred shadows on the wall. A half-century of fear and loathing and now we’re all waiting for the first suitcase which turns a city into glass. But Einstein was a godly man, wasn’t he? Frankie was none of that. Oh, no.”
“Why? What did she do?”
“Oh, Joe, these are old sins. Old shadows. It’s better they stay buried.”
“Well, they haven’t. What did she build down there? What did Daniel help her build?”
“She lied to him. She said it was a great mechanism to heal the world. She thought the truth would make everything all right, that she’d usher in a new utopia. Salvation through science, that was the doctrine back then. Salvation comes from the soul, and is the gift of God. But Daniel … he said God helps those who help themselves, of course. He said that everything under Heaven is an opportunity to learn. He said God wanted us to strive to be more than we are, and this was part of that striving. It was all so noble. The Devil turning love into sin.”
“What sin? What was so terrible about it?” Harriet is fumbling at her neck for the cross she wears, and her lips move between breaths in whispered prayer. Devotion. A fear of heresy. Obsessive compulsive disorder constructed around faith. Joe has no idea, never did. She takes his hand and grips it, suddenly fierce.
“It was like a praying wheel, like they have in Tibet. A worshipping machine, all made of gold, like the old heathen temples in the Bible. It prays to Hell.”
“Mum …”
“No! No, Joe, you asked and I’m telling you. It’s a vile thing. It calls to all the old monsters, from the back end of creation. And she knew! She knew. She opened it once and the Devil came and took a host of souls. Innocents, too. She told him, and still! Still he loved her! Oh, she was wicked, with those wide French eyes and the endless evasions and disappearances and then she’d be on the doorstep and ‘I must speak with him.’ And never a word for Mathew. Always about herself. She. Was. Bad! And, of course, no one would listen to me!”
She glares at her son, furious. She is willing him to believe, to understand at last. Her world now is four parts in five invisible, and the remainder is filled with shadows. Once, before she took the last step and swore herself through these gates, she came home early to the house and he wasn’t there, and he returned to find her weeping in a corner, quite certain that the Rapture had come and gone and left her behind—that God had lifted up her bonny boy and cast her back on the heap for her dusty sins and inadequate contrition.
Joe Spork sits and waits for her to run down. It is no good—never was—objecting that this does not sound like the work of a benevolent, loving God; that the universe she believes in is more like something from a Hammer horror movie, vampires skittering like spiders up drainpipes.
A brief image coalesces in his mind—crumpled linen faces watching him from the windows of a black van. He glances at the window and sees himself reflected in the glass, and for a moment is afraid to look directly at his image in case there is a tall, heron-stooped figure close behind, black-shrouded hands reaching out to clasp him. He strains his ears for the sound of breathing, for that strange rasping. He can feel the presence of someone else in the room, the uneasy knowledge of someone standing in the dead space behind your spine. Spider hands trailing threads.
He turns.
And sees Harriet sitting loosely on the edge of her bed looking at him and, for the first time in a long while, actually seeing him as Joshua Joseph, with the fullest understanding of their shared life. Here, now, she is his mother, and nothing else.
“Have you called Cradle’s?”
“Of course.”
She nods, and rubs a hand across her mouth. She cocks her head pensively. “But you’re here. You sneaked in. So you’re not doing as you’re told.”
“I was.” He wonders whether to tell her that he may possibly be about to fall in love with Mary Angelica Cradle; that Polly has invested in him and he in her.
“And it’s Frankie’s machine?”
“Yes.”
“You need the Night Market, Joe.”
“I don’t have it. I never did. I’m a watchmaker.”
She snorts. “You’re my son. Mathew’s son. The Market’s yours, if you want it. If you decide to take it.”
She levers herself down onto the floor, slipping her knees into the shiny indentation of her daily observances. He stares. Has she gone again, back inside her faith? If she prays now, she will pray until he leaves. She will not talk to him any more. He has seen it in the past, when they fought over her decisions, when he asked her to come out and be his mother again.
But this time she prostrates herself entirely, and reaches in a most unconventical way for a small metal box, wedged between the frame and the mattress. She hoicks it out and sits back on her heels, looking pleased.
“Here,” she says. “This was Mathew’s. Perhaps it’s meant for you.”
It is a locked green cash box, the kind you saw in every shop when Joe was a child, perhaps seven inches long and five across, with a little metal handle on it and a slot for the coins.
“What’s in it?” he says.
“I don’t know, Joshua,” Harriet Spork says. “I never opened it. I don’t have a key. But that won’t stop you, will it?” She smiles grimly.
He shakes the box. It rattles, metal on metal, and something solid goes “fwfp,” something thick and rough. A box within a box, perhaps.
“Thank you,” he says, and goes to hug her again. Before he can, there’s a noise like a car crash outside, or many car crashes all at once, and the clangour of alarms. A bright-eyed old woman in a severe grey suit puts her wimpled head around the door without knocking.
“I’m so sorry to disturb you,” she says. “But I think you better come with me.”
“Why?” Joe asks.
“Because your enemies have just broken down the front door and I suspect they propose to carry you off.”
Harriet stares. The other woman makes a face. “Hurry up, please.” And it is only when she steps fully into the room, carrying a small, vile-looking dog under one arm, that Joe Spork recognise
s her as his erstwhile client. It takes him a fraction of a second longer to observe the large, old-fashioned revolver in her other hand.
“You!” Joe growls at the author of his misfortunes.
“Yes,” Edie Banister says. “I suppose I should acknowledge at this time that I am not, strictly speaking, a nun.”
Edie Banister leads them off down the corridor and back the way Joe arrived. On the floors below, something bad is happening, loud and angry. Nuns are shouting—not screaming, but shouting, stern and outraged and very certain of their ground—but those fearsome voices are falling away into what sounds like one shared gasp or indrawn breath. Where indignation and affront should be growing, it is muffled, reduced to an appalled whisper of dismay.
At the head of a flight of twisting stairs, Joe glances down and sees a group of sisters standing in a huddle. The front nun has her hand flung out in a gesture of accusation, but she is faltering already, and the furious finger is being modified into one of warding. She is afraid.
A single figure lopes past her: a black-linen werewolf on the hunt, wide shoulder brushing her aside, feral head turning this way and that, seeking prey. Edie Banister grabs Joe unceremoniously by the collar and drags him back and away.
“Don’t be a fucking tourist,” she hisses angrily. “We need to be away, youngster. Or didn’t your daddy teach you that? Piss off first, sightsee later?”
“He told me never back down,” Joe Spork replies grouchily, following her down a small side corridor.
“Oh, aye, that I’m sure he did. But reading between the lines, did he say you have to stand when you will definitely lose? Or did he say regroup and retrench, then fight back?”
Polly and I are your only friends. But somehow, that advice does not seem intended for this eventuality. Joe growls. “I don’t trust you.”
“Good! Then you may not die. But for the moment, shut up and do as you’re told by the nice old lady. Or take your chances.”
He mutters something between a complaint and an acceptance, and Edie turns on him for a moment a dazzling smile of encouragement and fellow feeling. Then waves the whole conversation away.
“Down here,” she says sharply, and they duck into an access staircase which is, if possible, even tinier than the corridor. Joshua Joseph feels that he is entering a wonderland constructed for the habitation of little old ladies, and hopes he will not have to shrink to survive. Then he grins, because he knows all about shrinking to survive, and is pleased—if disturbed—to find that it’s not him any more.
“Where are we going?” Harriet demands.
“It’s your convent,” Edie replies.
“This goes to … the kitchen garden.”
“That’s what I thought, yes.”
“There’s no way out. The garden is walled off, and there’s no gate.”
“There will be shortly.”
“What?”
Edie Banister doesn’t answer—she just cocks her head in a way which states eloquently that answers are a luxury and time is pressing, and nuns are supposed to be a bit more placid and a bit less lippy.
Harriet nods. Joe has never seen her cave in so quickly, and suspects that in Edie Banister he is in the presence of a master. Mind you, the eyeless dog is an unfair advantage; the potty-old-bat equivalent of a nuclear bomb.
That his mother’s acquiescence might have something to do with the danger he personally is in, or that this must be weirdly familiar to her from half a dozen heady escapes with his father back in the day, occurs to him only as they reach the foot of the stairs.
The garden door is a bit rotted and decrepit. A large selection of wellington boots, in various sizes for assorted nuns, stands arrayed along the wall. Bastion whiffles curiously at the enticing smell, and there is a noise behind them like a hydraulic press: a very soft, very powerful sound of escaping air.
There is a Ruskinite one flight up. He has jumped or fallen from the fourth floor and landed on his feet. His arms are spread as if ready to grasp something, and his head is rocking to and fro on his shoulders as if he is sniffing. A second later, Joe actually sees another one slump ungracefully through the air like an empty sack and land next to the first. It seems to hit the ground all at once, as if it is just a bundle of clothes with sticks inside, but seconds later it’s upright, rolling its shoulders and briefly touching the first one in a strange, physical recognition. Not a human gesture at all; arachnoid, or lizardy. Then both of them spread their arms in that same wrestler’s crouch, and their heads turn towards him. In unison, they lurch for the stairs.
Edie Banister grasps Joe by the hand and hauls him bodily out into the garden. Harriet is a few steps ahead, but going slowly even at full stretch. He lifts her as he catches up, and is nearly rewarded with a bony elbow in the eye for his trouble before she realises who he is. Edie nods approvingly and skitters past, spry as a sheepdog. Joe glances back and sees the Ruskinites coming out of the door, virtually on top of one another. They stop still, and a moment later are joined by a third. They touch again, that same strange spiderhug and bob, and then spring forward, fast, strong, and eerily silent. He jerks Harriet up onto his chest and runs like hell.
The garden at Samson At The Temple is a retreat within a retreat, a twisting, mazelike place of concealed meditation spots and beds of roses, dead ends and alcoves. It’s a place where a girl can get away from all the noise of a dozen Trappists playing ping-pong and appreciate the wonder of the creation. Edie Banister ducks down into a sunken garden, through and out the other side, doubles back along an avenue of laurel and then through a narrow gap behind a greenhouse and in front of a potting shed. Always, always, she is heading for the outer wall. Always, she puts turns and forks between them and their pursuers, forces the enemy to guess, to hesitate. When Joe pauses to catch his breath and look over his shoulder, she grabs him again, draws him on up another laurel path, this one winding and wild, and suddenly they’re hard against the back wall, high red brick topped with unchristian spikes, three-pointed stars on an axle, sharp-edged and aggressively private.
She hands the dog to Harriet and dips her hand into her bag, then slaps a small Tupperware box against the wall. It sticks.
“Come on,” she says, ducking behind a small stone chapel, and when Joe hesitates, she slaps him on the back of his head to get his attention and takes advantage of his utter amazement to get him where she wants him. As he ducks, he sees with horror the Ruskinite hunters surge through the laurel bushes, huge black shapes swooping and lunging, appallingly boneless. They wheel around one another, then jointly focus their attention on the chapel. The nearest one takes a loping step forward. Edie pulls Joe down and sticks her fingers in her ears.
The world is a bass drum, and the conductor has just given the percussionist the biggest nod of his career.
The sky is white.
Joe’s nose is bleeding. There’s dust in his eyes.
When he looks around the corner, the outer wall is gone. So are the Ruskinites. In their place, a crater, black and charred, and the smell of phosphorus and saltpetre, Guy Fawkes Night come early.
“Home-made,” Edie Banister says happily, a soon-to-be-novagenarian with a bad attitude and a fine knowledge of exothermic reactions. “I think I may have over-egged the nitro and gone a bit heavy on the toluene. However, nothing succeeds like excess, ey?”
The garden of Samson At The Temple is breached.
They make it as far as the car Edie Banister has stolen. Team Spork—Harriet and Joe and their new friend—are making the escape of the decade, a corker in the annals of derring-do with added points for age, infirmity and spontaneity. Edie considers the thing something of a masterclass, and hopes someone, somewhere, will take note and teach it to the young. Classics in survival, evasion, resistance and escape: the Banister Exemplar.
And then, from nowhere, the street is filled with skittering, scuttling figures, ragged in their shrouding black, like a plague of spiders. They pour through the doors of surrounding hous
es and out of parked cars, five, ten, twenty, a myriad bobbing heads and grasping hands. Joe Spork stares at them, takes a step forward in front of Harriet and Edie, and sees them all, every last one, turn their eyes to him. He freezes under their gaze. He can feel the spotlights and the great salvo of bullets, the awful splink as his heart ruptures. He sways. The Ruskinites rush forward.
The first wave tries to grab Harriet, but Edie Banister menaces them with her trusty side arm and they fade away, parting in the line of fire. The second wave approaches from the north and seeks to cut them off from the car, a ghostly interdictory line. Joe recovers himself enough to raise his arms to a sort of fighting posture and forces them to reckon with him. They hesitate and draw back, but before he can be pleasantly surprised, wave three cuts across perpendicular to wave two and sweeps him up and away, iron-banded fingers and corded muscle clamping down on his limbs and lifting him into the back of a van. Behind him, he can see his mother’s placid face turn rapidly to something like a figure from a nightmare, a sudden flash of fury such as he has never seen on her, and she hurtles forward and clutches at the van, screaming like a banshee and demanding him back, give him back, he’s not yours, he’s my son.
Joe Spork struggles, like Gulliver beset by tiny men. They have him in a grip at every corner, and all he can manage now is a sort of billowing. On the other hand, if he can get a hand free he can do some damage. He twists, and feels the grip on one wrist slacken. It hurts, but he does it again, and again, and the vise skids over his arteries, tearing away some skin, and that hand is free.
What’s soft?
Eyes are soft. Throats. Noses and lips. Genitals, too, but many layers of linen make them hard to find, and men and women both learn early to move those parts fast.
He rips at someone’s face, feels flesh and eyes under the cowl, hears a cry, feels them reel away, sees someone guided forward, wide-shouldered and heavy on his feet. A blind wrestler? He rips again at this new enemy, and the Ruskinite slaps at his hand, hard. It hurts, the way it hurts to bang your shin on a glass table. He doesn’t care, reaches again. Come on, then! Let’s go! Let’s do this. Come on, you bastard. He is clinging to the man now, feeling huge, solid limbs, his fingers seeking soft parts, vulnerable flesh. A black linen mask tears free, and he shouts with fierce delight, then feels the war cry freeze in his mouth.
Angelmaker Page 40
