by Alex Pheby
‘A boy like you? Having been through what you’ve been through? Afraid of blood?’
Nathan shook his head and slit his fingertip. The edge was sharp, and he scarcely felt it at all, but blood came nonetheless, shining in the candle light, filling up the shape of a sphere before it ran down his hand and wrist.
‘Don’t waste it. The more the better. Pick up the clay and mix in the blood. It is barbaric, but the Odeum works on old magic, scarcely controllable, and all the more powerful for it. It needs sacrifice, it needs blood to appease the power that operates it, to make it do your bidding.’
‘What will it do?’ Nathan asked. The clay was sticking in the wound, acting like a poultice, so he used the back of his thumbnail to clear it out of the cut, making a fresh trickle of blood come.
‘That depends on what you make. A Retrospective Odeum shows you the past. If you fashion an object from the clay, it will show you the past of the object; you need only specify when and place it on the stage. If you make it a person, it will show you them as they were before. Fashion two, and you will hear them speak to each other. Fashion a cast of hundreds and see what it was they did together in the past. The more blood you use, the longer the magic will last, but also the more useful it becomes. A drop or two and you will see something, but not all of it, and not perhaps the thing that you intended. The Odeum is difficult to control and some say it is capricious; the more you sacrifice, the more willing the spirits invoked will be to satisfy you, as they themselves have been satisfied. Once the spirits’ thirsts have been slaked, you can even ask questions.’
Nathan nodded and his hands moulded the clay. He did not need to be told any more, and he did not listen as the book clarified the process, or when it pondered as to who or what made the Odeum possible. Instead he moulded the clay in front of him, first into the rough shape of a human being, arms, legs and a head. The book drew pictures of famous people of the past, but Nathan paid them no attention, and now the figure in his hands was clearly a girl. The more he worked it, the clearer it became, slender legs and a knee-length skirt, hands clasped in front of her, a bonnet from under which no hair could be seen.
‘That was quick! Put it on the stage.’
Nathan took the figure and turned it in his hands. The blood on his finger was tacky and brown with clay. When he smoothed the face, it left two patches like smears of rouge on the cheeks.
‘Quickly. The spirits will not tolerate old blood.’
Nathan put the figure down.
‘Name it, and your time.’
‘Prissy, yesterday evening.’
For a second or two, nothing happened. The candles guttered a little, the wind rattled in the window frames. Nathan turned, and then it moved. The figure did not get up or look around. It lay where it was, except that, slowly, it pulled its knees up and wrapped its tiny ill-formed arms around them, curling up into a ball, tucking its head in. There it stayed. Nathan watched, but it didn’t move. It said nothing, and all that could be heard was a gentle, quiet sobbing.
Nathan turned to the book. ‘I don’t understand. Is it working?’
‘Next time, use more blood.’
At the door there was a rattling.
Nathan spun round, stared, his lip between his teeth. The handle of the door twisted and, finding the door locked, rattled again. On the pages of the book came a picture of Nathan, flat to the ground, looking under the crack of the door. He mimicked it, and there in the light from the corridor outside was the thinnest slice of an image – a gill-man’s fingertips, splayed on the floor, behind them the meeting of a gill-man’s knees with the floor.
Nathan sprang up, sprinted to the candles and one by one blew them out. When he got to the last one the first one lit again, and the second, until they were all alight once more. Nathan tried the gas lamps, but none of them had valves, the controlling of them not obviously achieved by the occupant of the room.
The handle rattled again, more vigorously this time. Nathan had left the key in the lock and it shook with every twist of the handle. If it fell the gill-man might, with its long and slender fingers, be able to drag it under, open the door with it.
Nathan slid forward, as silently as he could, put his fingertip on the key, held it in place. Now the rattling stopped and instead, from the other side, was a probing inhalation of breath – it was smelling for him.
Nathan edged away, stretching until he was as far from the door as he could manage while still securing the key. Within seconds he began to ache, the muscles in his arms and legs protesting at the strange posture, shaking and quivering, and if he had had to remain there for long, he would have given himself away with a rattling of his own, but the gill-man retreated, its hands and feet slapping along the corridor.
Nathan breathed at last, ran to the book and tidied away the theatre.
LXII
‘Child, the Master is pleased with your progress. Though you do not deserve His attention, even for the slightest moment, let me assure you that He has spared it for you on many occasions. Indeed, I cannot think of another on whom He has taken such care. All the other boys who come here, except only those with the most obvious and limited utility, He has left solely to my care. But today – oh, glorious happiness.’
Nathan shifted in his chair, kept his hands crossed under the table and made the smallest of nods. Bellows was acting oddly today, as if he was not as convinced of his rhetoric on this occasion, as if there were doubts which he sought to quell with overstatement. Perhaps the gill-man had reported Nathan’s use of the playroom after dark. Perhaps this was the prelude to punishment.
Bellows came towards the table, put his hands on it. ‘He invited me into his presence. “Bellows,” he said, “fine work it is that you do with the Treeves boy, turning him from a wayward thing back onto the path of sense and righteousness.”’ Bellows peered forwards. ‘“He has learned his letters, with the help of the book, and he has also learned something of the world, a world that until this time can have been nothing more to him than a distant supposition, a shadow cast on an already dim and murky canvas, barely discernible. You have taught him, my faithful servant, of the city that lies across the sea, and of the Mistress of that place, the base and ill-disciplined one who struggles always for the death of Mordew and all its people.” These things he said to me, this very morning, characterising you as a thing worthy of paying his mind to, and me also, by association. Do you feel the privilege in that, Nathan?’
Nathan nodded. He kept hearing the rattle of the door handle, kept seeing Prissy, her knees pulled up, unmoving. The locket was warm at his chest, but he did not touch it, could only feel it through his shirt.
‘Quite,’ Bellows crowed, his voice cracking. ‘You do not feel worthy of His approval, knowing yourself to be nothing more than a thing that crawls upon the earth in comparison with He who is so great. And you are right, you are nothing. Yet. Not yet, but perhaps soon. For the Master has work for you, now you are ready. He instructs me to prepare you, for He will come today, in the evening, and after you have eaten, He will take you for this work. What say you to this?’ Bellows peered at Nathan, as if in expectation.
Nathan bowed his head, unsure of what to say that would satisfy Bellows, and unsure of how he felt. Had the gill-man gone straight to the Master, bypassed Bellows altogether? Was he planning his punishment out of sight of the others?
Bellows came and stood behind. Nathan flinched when the man’s hand lay cold on the back of his neck, and he shivered when it stroked down the hair that perpetually stuck up regardless of how much it was combed.
‘You are awed into silence? Petrified by the responsibility? Let me then ease your doubts, for so it was that the Master came to me, not long after my brother left, and bid me to do His work. Though I quivered as you do, quaking in the light shone upon me by His attentions, yet I did as I was bid. I stand before you now, the consequence of that decision, and of my continued desire to serve the Master’s will. Whatever you do now will only
ever result in good, Nathan, whether you see it or not.’
Bellows withdrew his hand and Nathan looked up at him. He rubbed the tip of his finger, toying with the loose flap of skin that the cut had left, rubbing his thumb down the line of the cut and back again.
‘Silence is acquiescence, so much is clear.’ Bellows leaned over him, so that Nathan could see his little mouth framed in the gap in his collar, pink lips wet and flashing, the tongue resting on the lower set of teeth, a line of spittle connecting one lip to another. Bellows reached around and took the chain on which his mother’s locket was suspended and lifted it over his head. It no longer rested against his chest and, almost as soon as it was off, Nathan could feel a thrill in his gut, a prickle in the cut on his finger, and a sudden tingling behind his eyes.
‘The Master feels that this reminder of your father, like all reminders of a higher authority, whether they be worthy or unworthy, is a stultifying influence on you as you come into your manhood. Such tokens should be put aside, at least for a little while, so that the child can find in his own resources sufficient strength to act in the world. This for you, Nathan, is a token of something past and gone and which you will have to learn to live without or shrivel and be less than you should be.’ Bellows allowed the chain to gather in the palm of his hand and laid the locket upon it. ‘Fear not. When your adult self has bedded in, and you have proved able to make your own way, this will be given back to you.’
Nathan felt the rush of fire in his nerves like the return of a forgotten friend, and now when he looked at Bellows it was with his eyes raised and wide, and he saw every detail of the strange man, down to the scuffs on the elbows of his jacket and the afternoon grubbiness of his collar and cuffs. Every thought of the previous night’s transgressions left him.
‘Wonderful,’ said Bellows. ‘Return now to the playroom and rest in anticipation of the Master calling for you.’
The rain fell, but Nathan was filled with a desire like impatience, a thrill with no aim. As he turned his back on Bellows, he wanted both to rage and to laugh, but at what he had no idea.
LXIII
The Master did not call for him in the first hour of his play, and he sat it out with the Odeum between his knees, clay out of reach, listening for the turning of the door handle and watching the windows. Gradually his attention could not be diverted completely and his gaze crept to the top of the proscenium, to the representation in red of velvet curtains which he followed in their loops and curves and folds, first from stage left and then to stage right, careful not to let his eye move to the wooden boards and across to what must still be there from the day before.
For a moment he turned away entirely when he caught the shadow of a bird crossing a window, blocking the light for a moment. Then, when he turned back, he wasn’t quite careful enough, and he caught sight of the clay model, Prissy’s ankle, lying there with the rest of the body in sequence as he followed it up. It had dried out, so that rather than a red-brown it was a patchy, dusty beige, peeling in spots and cracked, like mud in a drying puddle. Nathan wanted to ignore it, feared, perhaps, what it might be doing, but his eye was drawn by the change and by its deathly stillness. Its calf was the same, and the thigh – all dried out and motionless. He picked it up, and it crumbled into dust between its fingers.
‘The Retrospective Odeum,’ the Master said, close to his ear, but from behind. Nathan jumped and turned. There he was, kneeling behind him, his tie loosened and a broad smile on his lips. ‘One of my favourites.’
The Master held out his hand, palm up. On it, in a pattern too regular to be the lines that chiromancers use, and anyway etched upon them palimpsestically, were thin white scars.
Nathan stared. ‘This is yours?’
The Master nodded. ‘Though, I suppose, everything here is mine, isn’t it? But I take your meaning. This toy, along with all the others, was one I played with when I was a child. Perhaps I am sentimental, but I have never been able to throw them out. And now they are proving useful, are they not? I had many questions to ask of this thing, and it gave me many answers.’
Nathan nodded. The dust that had been Prissy was gathered in his hands and now he didn’t know quite what to do with it, not since the Master was there.
The Master saw the way Nathan was holding his hands and the slight trembling that was sending little puffs of dust down between his fingers, and he whistled twice. Out from a corner, as if from nowhere, came a small mechanical mouse, like the ones that have a key in their back, but this one had real fur and whiskers and red ruby eyes.
‘Have you two met? This is Mr Sours – and with him somewhere should be his wife.’
The Master got up and walked over to the corner from where Mr Sours had come. He bent over and picked up another mouse, almost the same but with emerald eyes, who had somehow rolled over onto her back. Her wheels whirred and span and when he put her back down, she skittered to where the other was waiting.
‘Romantic little things, aren’t they? Always desperate to be together.’
Once reunited, they came to Nathan and nudged his knee with their noses.
‘They want you to drop your mess. It’s their job to clean it up, you see.’
Nathan paused, but when the Master egged him on, he turned over his hands and the pile of clay dust fell in front of the mice and they darted forward towards it, running this way and that until, by some mechanism that Nathan couldn’t make out, the carpet in front of him was clean. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
The Master waved the two mice off, and away they went, to hide in the shadows. ‘You see, Nathan,’ the Master said, ‘for every problem there is a solution.’
The Master took a ball of clay and made a smooth sphere of it with his hands. ‘I have a problem, Nathan, for which I hope that you will prove the solution. Perhaps Bellows has told you of it.’
Nathan shook his head. He didn’t look up, but instead peered at the empty stage, which now had a layer of dust on it where Prissy had lain. He licked his finger and ran it through the dust.
The Master sat down beside him. ‘Take this.’ It was the ball of clay. ‘You’ll find it all much easier, now the locket has been removed. Certainly easier than last night. You understand that already, I think. I placed the locket there to hold back your rage until you could be taught to control it. And I gave you the book, so that it could help you learn. I told it to bring you here, to show you the ropes.’ The Master smiled and Nathan took the clay.
Now, his fingertips tingling and tickling, he could feel the grains of it. It was as if his touch had grown in sensitivity, and so also the degree to which he could control his fingers. His eyes too, though the clay was bluer than before, everything was bluer, even the blood he provoked to come to his fingertip, the old wound that had no chance to heal and which the removal of the clot with a thumbnail made fresh again.
‘That’s it. You will find that you get much better results the more you bleed into the clay.’
‘I know.’ Nathan began to mould Prissy again, but this time, rather than a crude and generic representation of girlhood, between his fingers appeared someone else, someone different – the girl in blue he had seen in the portrait.
The Master tutted, took the clay from Nathan, wadded it into a ball in his fist. When he opened his hand, there was Prissy as clear as if she had been sitting before them, down to the slope of her nose and the curve of her neck. The Master handed her back and Nathan placed the model in the middle of the stage and put his cut finger to his mouth. ‘You need not stop there. I once had thirteen maquettes on that stage, each one of them as perfect as yours, and each one made to speak its lines. I cannot say I enjoyed the performance, but it was, at the very least, instructive.’
Even before he had finished speaking Nathan had made himself busy with another one. He began with the head first, a tousled mop of hair, broad forehead and cheeks, one eyeless socket and a broad insolent grin – Gam: even before the torso was half-formed it was clear who it was.
> The Master stood. ‘Our business can wait one more day, I think. At least until you have settled your curiosity. It may even make you work more efficiently.’
Nathan wasn’t listening; the Spark required the entirety of his attention to carry out its work. He didn’t hear the Master leave either, or see in which direction he left, whether it was to see Bellows or to make his way to Nathan’s room, where the book slept beneath his pillow.
Gam was soon done and placed next to Prissy on the stage. He reached for more clay without knowing precisely who it was he intended to make, but his fingers knew. The Spark knew, and soon Nathan knew as the pear-shaped body began to take shape, the round cheeks and greasy ringlets, the short arms and long delicate fingers of Padge, dressed in silks, red from the blood that would soon bring him to life.
Nathan put him down and wiped his hands.
The cast on the stage shook, as if there was something moving them, and their shadows flickered in the pale blue light that Nathan was giving off. There was life in them: their energy, the tone of it. Padge’s was thick and unclean, Prissy’s high but wavering, and Gam’s grainy and oddly fearful. Nathan bit his lip.
Why was he here? What was it that had brought him into this place? The Master?
He looked around the playroom, seeing everything as if it was for the first time, as if he could scarcely understand why it was that he was here at all, why he had not simply destroyed everything he came across. To kill the Master for the murder of his father, hadn’t that been his intention? As he came up the Glass Road, urging the Fetch on ahead of him, scarcely concealed, and then when the Master appeared before him, what was it that had stayed his hand? The locket? The words Padge said? Their treachery? Or was it some trick? Some power the Master could exert over his enemies, to neuter him and imprison him in this place?
