All Night Awake (67 page)

Too late, Kit thought to run. Too late he thought that if it were so, if this creature were to have use of his body -- whatever that use meant -- Kit, the weaker, would lose his body, aye, and his soul too and all that went with life.

What good was life, if just a semblance, if Kit seemingly would walk and talk, but another creature use his mind and limbs?

He sought to run, pushing his feet hard against the dusty ground.

The elf ran with him, the darkness clinging on, laughter, immortal laughter stopping Kit’s ears.

He ran and ran, in disordered running, till each breath made bid to burst his lungs, and, upon each breath he thought it would be his last.

Then in a dark place, far away from the awakening street where he had started, he fell down. His knees gave out, and his legs with them, bringing him to his knees upon a muddy street, wet with slops and smelly discards.

Kit’s eyes stung from sweat that had dripped into them. He blinked and looked around, and saw that all the houses here, once taverns and bawdy houses, were blocked, the board nailed across their doors, the seal of the Queen upon the board and a warning that here reigned the plague.

Kit Marlowe made as if to rise again, but his knees wouldn’t support him.

Kneeling like a penitent on the muddy street, he heard the elf laugh and felt a touch, upon his whole body at once, like a million wanton hands seeking to feel his skin, his very pores, and trying to possess him and know him and win him as never human lover could have done.

He tried to shrug away from such a touch, too intimate and knowing to be pleasurable, but found nowhere to turn since it was everywhere, and his legs felt too tired to allow him to rise, to allow him to run.

Trembling, he knelt and wished that he would die, or else that he would, instantly, be consigned to the raw attentions of the torturers which, not feeling this soft, would yet be kinder.

The hands, the myriad hands that it felt were touching him everywhere that hand could touch, seemed to sink deeper and, through his clothes, touch his very skin.

Then the touch turned burning, hot, intemperate, and sank lower and deeper into Kit’s being, so it seemed to have captured not inconsequential flesh, but his very soul.

Like a bird trembling between the hands that would wring it, Marlowe sought to escape, but couldn’t. What’s inside cannot be escaped.

With a fearful burning upon his every limb, he collapsed to the muddy street and thought that he’d sealed an hellish bargain.

But something in him laughed, something pushed, like a rider will set spurs to a sluggish horse, something whispered within his brain, “You will rise and do my work now. Morning is nigh, and from now must you spend all night awake and doing my will, if we are to achieve our revenge over our mutual enemy.”

Scene Twenty Two

Marlowe’s lodgings -- a room larger than Will’s and better furnished, with a large bed, covered with a good coverlet. Though the room’s furnishings are minimal, and obviously designed for a room that’s no more than a pied-a-terre within London confines, yet the small writing table is polished oak, the chair before it is an armchair, carved and polished, and the trunk for clothing storage is overhung with a fine brocade cloth. On the bed, on his stomach, lies Marlowe. His clothes are tattered, and blood-stained, as are his hair, his hands and his face.

E
ven before Marlowe woke, a feeling of heaviness was upon him, a heaviness such as one feels when coming down with an illness or when, having slept after a great grief, one wakes to find that grief undiminished.

Awakening, opening his eyes to the bright light of day coming in through his sparkling-clean windows, changed nothing. A heavy scent of rotted flesh and spoiled meat overhung the room; Kit’s head pounded with the worst of hangover headaches, his mouth tasted like an unswept midden, and every movement of his limbs cost him an agony as though a fiend armed with a sharp dagger worked him over, pushing the tip into his skin and piercing his muscle.

No. Not a fiend with a sharp dagger, but many fiends, with myriad arms and countless daggers, all dancing around Kit and tormenting him.

Aching, Kit lay still for a while, but nothing improved. A heaviness rested upon his stomach as though hot lead had been poured, unsuspecting, down his throat in the night.

He moved not, and he hurt, and hurting he thought he might well move. Pulling himself up on his arms, enduring hellish pain along them, he rolled on his side and lifted himself on his elbow. As he rolled the cover of his bed came with him, glued by a black substance.

His head pounded and he looked as if through a dark veil.

Memories of the night before came in fits and starts, each of them hurting as much as physical movement.

Kit remembered Silver, beautiful Silver in St. Paul’s yard, and he remembered their lovemaking, though both mind and heart flinched from the memory as a man will from touching a bruised spot.

His other memories were darker, more confused. He remembered the drunk -- the monumental drunk -- he’d got with Will but from then on he wondered how much of it was real and how much the effects of wine.

He’d thought he’d seen Will go home to Silver, but had he really, or had his wine-addled brain created it, like he’d heard sailors tell that the sun will create a mirage upon the vast, unmoving ocean?

He tried to shake his head at the thought, but his head pounded so badly that he stopped.

Groaning with the effort of it, he managed to sit up. As for the other memories, the memories of the dark being who’d waged -- as far as Kit could think -- a war for Kit’s own soul, or his life or his mortal body -- Kit couldn’t think which and, indeed, couldn’t remember any of it -- those memories were confused and vague, like a dream had a long time ago and never again visited by reason during waking hours.

He essayed a smile, though his lips hurt with stretching, and told himself perforce he had believed his own plays and his judging mind beneath the waking one had brought upon him that same ill judgment of being punished for trifling with demons.

His anger now.... Kit sat on the bed, and again tried to shake his head, but stopped, as a sharp pain made it feel as if a dagger were worked into his left temple. He cradled his head in black, sticky hands, and wondered how and with what he’d got himself so befouled. He remembered the mud of the alley, the stickiness of it, but this stickiness was greater than any clay, and it had the heavy smell of the slaughter house.

The thought gagged him, his throat working against his mind and body to close, and stop all thought, all breathing, with overpowering nausea.

He must wash. Whatever it was, he would wash, and it would be gone.

Carefully, cautiously, he extended his feet over the side of the bed, and scooted slowly downward, trying to find the floor and feeling as if he should have already touched it, as if nothing, nothing were under his feet but the mouth of a deep-yawning abyss.

His anger, how quickly it had flared the night before, puzzled Kit himself still. His anger always puzzled him. Hot as hell’s own breath upon descending on Kit, it would cloud his mind and every thought. And afterwards, Kit would stand amazed at what he’d said and done within that whirlwind of fury.

Had he really meant to kill Will Waggstick, the much-married burgher of Stratford? He couldn’t have meant it. It couldn’t be. Will was amusing, in an innocent way.

Even if he had -- and Kit’s head throbbed with ache at the very thought -- even if he had somehow contrived to seduce Silver, how would that make him Kit’s enemy?

Surely Kit could not be so foolish that he thought that an elf who’d leave him for Will wouldn’t leave him for just about any other undistinguished man out on the streets?

No. Will was not the problem. Nor was Silver. The problem was Kit and Kit’s anger, much worsened by wine.

He stood up on unsteady legs.

He’d been angry for so long that he no longer remembered at what. Maybe at the childhood companions who’d turned their back on him, when the teacher had favored him and started grooming him for the scholarship at Cambridge.

Maybe at his parents who, once it became obvious their son would attend university, treated him well enough but not the way they treated their daughters. They handled him with cold near-deference, like sparrows catering to the cuckoo in their nest.

He walked unsteadily towards his washbasin that stood on a metal stand across the room.

He’d felt anger too, he thought, at his father, too quick to consign his oldest son to the ranks of scholars and never taking the time or the interest to show Kit about his father’s own craft, that had been passed down from his grandfather and from his great-grandfather before.

Not that Kit had ever felt a great hankering towards making shoes and fitting them to the feet of the demanding gentry. Even now, thinking about such a thing as his ambition brought a low, croaking chuckle to his throat, a chuckle that resolved itself in a fit of coughing.

No, it wasn’t the mean little workshop, the unpleasant work of tanning hides, the back always bent over some piece of leather that Kit envied. Rather, it was that thing he’d never experienced -- his father’s attentive teaching of him, his father’s paying attention to him and looking upon him as a worthy successor to the name.

His father taught apprentices aplenty and, thinking of that, Kit still clenched his hands in anger.

This anger, he thought now, all this anger, that he’d carried with him almost from the cradle, he’d directed at Quicksilver, too, for so hastily dismissing Kit from his bliss, so blithely turning him away from paradise.

And yet, that was not the source of the anger that exploded whenever Kit was pressured and often when he drank.

Twice, he’d been involved in street brawls, where men had been killed, and once had he served time in jail for it. Yesterday, he might well have slain Will and, even if Kit could contrive to escape the many other deaths that threatened him -- the enclosing snares of his espionage work and the danger of Cecil, or Essex, or Walsingham silencing of him; even if he could escape the privy council’s enquiry and death by torture or hanging or disemboweling -- killing Will would have got Kit executed more certainly, yet, than all of them.

Kit could no longer afford to be a fool and let his anger buffet him here and there like a rudderless ship on a stormy sea.

And besides, had he ever really
wanted
to kill master Will?

By the clear light of the new day, Kit couldn’t find it in his heart to feel anything towards Will but calm benevolence.

Kit swallowed the sticky, evil taste in his throat.

He’d get up and clean himself and go to Will and attempt to make peace with him.

Unsteadily, he reeled to his washbasin. His landlady, ever attentive when Kit was in town, and mindful of her manners around learned scholars such as him, had set a large pitcher full of water on the dresser, beside the stand that supported the ceramic wash basin.

Kit poured water into the basin, dipped his hands in it, preparing to splash at his face.

He stopped. The water in the basin, into which he’d dipped his hands, had turned a deep, dark red, like freshly spilled blood.

Kit looked, with wide open eyes at his sleeve, caked with black the same black that had been on his hands.

Blood. How had he got himself all over blood? Had he killed Will, indeed?

No. He had not. He knew he had not.

Yet, breaking down the flimsy barrier of his mind, came a knocking of images too horrible to contemplate. Images of killing and tearing of -- with bare hands and cruel teeth taking human life, and gorging, like an animal, on the still-warm flesh.

Kit looked down at the basin, with his hands in it, and blood swirling over them, around them, all about.

His stomach wrenched within him and, before thought stayed his aching body, he ran to the window and fumbled with the latches that held the glass panels in place and pulling the panel off and setting it, any which way, on the floor, he leaned out of the window and spewed the contents of his stomach onto the street below.

An indignant shout answered the first volley, but then people beneath moved out of the way, and Kit threw up, out the open window, onto the street below, his stomach wrenched and his mouth tasting foul as never before.

At long last, the need to throw up abated, the pushing in his stomach, the gagging at his throat stopped.

Kit felt dizzy and tired and a fine dewing of sweat covered his forehead.

He looked down the brown front of the building, marked with darker, faintly red tracks where the contents of his stomach had fallen. Red wine or blood?

Kit could not tell, nor could he remember for sure what he had done.

With a sob, he retreated back inside his room, and leaned against his wall, trembling in weakness and humiliation, in fear and tiredness.

His heart beat so fast and so hard that it seemed to him to deafen him and, against the disorder of his thoughts, he could no more than interpose words, carefully pronounced, so that upon hearing them he would know what he was thinking and steady the racing horses which, like furious team dragged the unsteady chariot of his thought towards a deep abyss.