Resonance (40 page)

Nothing

V
INCENT CALLED OUT
,
Raquel? Raquel! Answer me!
But there was not even a flicker of a response.

When he got to the back of the house, none of the villagers had seen her. He dismissed them to the hunt, and they left eagerly, communing with the hoots and whistles whose purpose was solely to frighten their prey. Vincent closed his eyes, quelling the urge to simply scream Raquel’s name into the night.

Luke,
he thought,
where are you?

In the woods to the south of the house. Got the dogs with me.

Have you seen Miss Raquel?

No. The childer still ain’t answering me, neither.

If you see her, tell me.

Himself not about?

Vincent allowed a long pause between them, and Luke’s next thoughts were tight and disapproving:
I see
. He assumed Cornelius had retreated underground and left them to deal with the crisis alone. Vincent was perfectly happy to let him think the worst. Luke was almost certainly right – Cornelius was most likely, at this very minute,
slumped on the lower steps, gazing up at the Bright Man and doing nothing.

Are you really going to speak of doing nothing? You who have spent your whole life closing your eyes and turning away?
‘Shut up,’ Vincent told himself, snarling at the empty air as he stalked back around the house and onto the gravel drive.

Just like you did nothing that day in the orchard, when you heard those awful words and saw poor Matthew’s stricken face?

‘Shut up!’

Or do you consider turning on your heel and sneaking away ‘doing something’?

‘Shut up!’ cried Vincent again, only marginally aware that he was yelling.

Or the next day, when Cornelius came to you and said he had done something wrong and that he needed to speak to you, and you told him ‘perhaps later’? Or the next, when you found Matthew crying and you, once again, turned away?

Vincent groaned, turned full circle on the gravel, and bellowed into the night.

‘RAQUEL! ANSWER ME, WOMAN!’

This was it. This was absolutely it. He was leaving. As soon as he found Raquel, and by the devil he would find her, he was taking her and they were going. He had had enough of Cornelius’ inaction and Cornelius’ silence and Cornelius’ poisonous fear. He …

Ah, yes, Raquel. Raquel, whom you left trapped in that cesspit of a home with that animal of a husband until she was driven to murder. It was Cornelius who saved her. Not you. Cornelius who broke her from prison, Cornelius who brought her here. Cornelius who gave you the new life you had wished for but would not act upon. Matthew and Raquel, your new family – Cornelius’ gift
.

Vincent came to a halt by the front steps, shook his head. ‘Shut up,’ he whispered. ‘He only did it because he knew I was restless.’

All these years his friend, and you have done nothing, said nothing, fixed nothing when he needed you most.

Vincent recalled the look Cornelius had given him only this afternoon, slumped on the dungeon steps, on the very brink of finally speaking – that hopeful, terrified, yearning look, from which Vincent had dropped his eye. How many times over their lifetime had he turned from that look? And how many things would be different now, had he responded to it as a friend and not retreated from it nor allowed Cornelius to retreat from it, like the cowards they both were?

‘Oh, Matthew.’ Vincent pressed the cool metal of the pistol to his forehead.
Matthew. I am sorry.

But what use was sorry? What was lost was lost. Vincent was not about to beggar himself for the forgiveness of the dead. With a scowl, he glared out into the fog-shrouded garden.

I will not stay, Cornelius. You may continue this travesty if you wish, but I am tired of being prisoner to my disease. I am leaving.

A minute fluttering of the air startled him. Peering upwards, it took him a moment to realise that it was snowing. The liberal dusting on his jacket suggested it had been doing so for quite some while. Holding his face to the sky, he closed his eyes and let the flakes numb his skin.

The air had grown markedly cooler. Soon the roses would be crusted with frost. Soon winter would be here. The thought filled him with an almost savage happiness.

Let it come
, he thought.
Let everything die. Let everything crack. It is time.

A heavy rumbling sent him spinning, and he raised his pistol as a huge bulk of darkness lurched around the far side of the house. For a moment Vincent thought it was death, come in response to his bitter command. Then he was ducking and shielding his head from a storm of gravel as the great wild shape of his own horses and carriage thundered past. The carriage swayed dangerously on the turn and careened off up the carriageway at tremendous speed.

Vincent lowered his chin, bared his teeth and started running.
The intruders are out the front
, he called.
They have stolen my carriage.

Flight

J
OE BENT OVER
the reins and mercilessly cracked the whip. He usually despised whips, but in this case, with this cargo, he would bare these horses to the bone if he had to.

There came the faintest brightening of the air as the trees thinned, and the humpbacked bridge loomed ahead. The lake. Joe was so terrified that he closed his eyes. Sounds hollowed out as the carriage crossed the bridge. His thoughts beat to the rhythm of the horses’ hooves:
Let me live, let me live, let me get her home.

There was a jolt as they crossed the hump and then they were rattling over cobbles once more, and he was looking over his shoulder as the bridge faded into the fog. He was alive!

He turned forward again. He was alive. And he felt fine. There was none of that floating heaviness he had suffered on the lake. He felt perfect! It had been the water, that was all! It had made him sick. Sure, poor Harry could hardly stand after being down in it, God love him; he was weak as a kitten.

Joe stood in the box, bared his teeth in a grin, and cracked the reins. They were going home.

Flight

H
ARRY CLUNG TO
Tina, his legs braced to prevent them both from bouncing off the seat. Every bump in the road lurched his stomach and brought kerosene-tasting bile into his mouth. He hadn’t felt this ill since he’d had influenza and had missed the New York boxing championship.

‘I ever tell you I’m a champion boxer, kid?’ he whispered.

Tina’s head battered his shoulder, her dull eyes fixed on the ceiling. He gathered her closer.

‘I’ll … I’ll show you my medals when we get outta this. You can help me polish them.’ He belched kerosene again, and groaned. ‘Of course, I might have made some of those medals out of bottle tops. But I’m not admitting to which …’

In the seat across from them, Joe’s cousin was crying like a baby.
Shut up
, thought Harry.
Just hold on to that poor old woman and stop crying
. Truth was, though, Harry wanted to cry himself. He’d never felt so useless and scared.

They bumped violently over the hump of the little bridge and Daymo screamed with terror. Miss Ursula was curled in his lap, wrapped in the blankets from her pram. She was
gazing at Tina, perfectly content so long as the girl was in sight.

What was going to become of the poor thing? What was going to become of Tina? She was like a warm corpse in his arms. She seemed completely broken.

‘Kid?’ he whispered. ‘You still in there?’

He wondered if she had saved the Angel. He had tried to find out, staggering after Joe as he had rigged up the carriage, asking again and again what had become of the creature in the jar, what had become of the Angel, until Joe had rounded on him.

‘Do I look like I care what happened to the Angel?’ he’d yelled. ‘Look what it did to Tina! She was trying to help it! She was trying to
help
and she meant
nothing
to it, you understand? Nothing.’ He had pushed Harry aside and gone back to snapping things into place. ‘The Angel can choke for all I care.’

‘But Joe,’ Harry rasped. ‘That thing in the lake. If we don’t fix the Angel …’

He’d rambled on, dizzy and sick, barely keeping his feet, trying to make Joe understand just how
apocalyptic
that thing felt, how terrifyingly end-of-the-world.

Joe had laughed, a harsh and bitter laugh. ‘End of the world.’ He’d grabbed Harry by the scruff and bundled him into the carriage. ‘Every day is the end of the world for someone, Harry. But I’ll be damned if today is hers.’

He’d pushed Harry over to Tina, who lay on the rear carriage seat like a bloodstained fairytale. He’d snarled at his cousin, who was already cowering inside. Then he’d slammed the door on their faces and banged his way up onto the driver’s box to send the carriage lurching from the yard.

Once they’d crossed the bridge, the air grew much colder. Harry was aware of the lake to his right. He peered out, trying to get some inkling of the creature that lurked there, twisting and turning under the placid water. There was no sense of it at all. It was as if it did not exist.

Harry remembered standing on a snowy New York street at Christmas. He had not been able to understand how it could still go on – the crowds smiling and jostling, the glittering prettiness – when his brother Armin lay on the other side of the wall, coughing his life up in gobs of blood and pain. Harry had wanted to grab the laughing crowds and shout,
Listen to me, listen! He is real! His life is real! He’s not a dream!
Then Armin had died, and it was as if the world had been right, and he had never existed.

‘But he wasn’t a dream,’ whispered Harry. He put his hand to the window. ‘And neither are you.’

He did not think this creature would let the world ignore it.

There was a grind of brakes, and the carriage halted with a suddenness that almost flung Tina from his lap. He held her tight, staring across into Daymo’s crazy eyes. Had they been caught?

Three knocks from above sent them cowering. Harry looked up. ‘Joe?’ he called softly.

The knocks came again.
Rat, tat, tat
. Then nothing.

‘They’ve caught us,’ groaned Daymo. ‘I’m not going out there.’

Harry slipped from under Tina’s weight. Out the window there was nothing to be seen but a lamplit circle of fog. He could hear the horses panting in the stillness. He opened the door and stepped down into the cold.

Joe was a dark blob perched high in the driver’s box; Harry could barely see him through the glare from the carriage lamps. ‘Joe?’ he whispered. ‘What’s wrong?’

The young man lifted his arm, pointing forward. ‘The lock,’ he said.

Harry shielded his eyes to look. Ornate gates hung suspended in the fog, blocking their way. ‘Joe, what about the Angel? What about the creature in the lake?’

Joe shifted above him. Harry thought he might be looking back at the avenue of trees. There was a strange flatness to his voice when he said, ‘Vincent is coming.’

This spurred Harry forward like a poker in the ass, and he staggered to the gates. He clung to the elaborate metalwork as he examined the lock. The chains were heavy and chill in his hands.

Joe’s voice floated down from behind him. ‘Harry, can you drive a carriage?’

‘No,’ he mumbled, trying to insert a trembling pick into the keyhole. ‘So stay right where you are. You have no hope against that man. I don’t think he’s even human.’

Shit
. It felt as if he was going to fall over. He could barely focus. What if …
ah!
There it was: the lovely satisfying give and
clunk
as the lock succumbed to his charm.

‘I love you,’ he whispered, kissing the cold metal. ‘Marry me.’ Then he was lurching about, hauling first one then the other gate aside and stumbling back to the carriage. He hesitated on the step, staring back into the dark.

‘Get inside, Harry.’

Sure enough, there they were – the familiar, terrifying pinpricks of light: Vincent’s eyes, far off but getting closer as he ran towards them in the dark.

‘Shit, Joe. He’s faster than a steam train.’

‘Get inside.’

The door hadn’t even swung shut before Joe urged the carriage forward again and they were through the gates and out on the road. Harry clung to the window frame, gazing backwards. There was a foot or so of snow on the road, and a wintry stillness to the world that spoke of miles of frozen wasteland.

The carriage lurched and Harry sank to his knees on the jolting floor, clasping his stomach. Even the roughest Atlantic crossing had never crippled him like this. It seemed the further they travelled, the sicker he became.

The carriage bumped again and Tina, all skirts and elbows, fell from the seat to land on top of him. Gasping, Harry wrapped himself around her unresponsive warmth and hung on.

They seemed to be picking up speed. It felt like they were about to rattle apart. On the seat above him, Daymo was making a high, terrified whine. He was staring down at the bundle in his arms, holding it out as if to distance himself from it. All Harry could see was Miss Ursula’s crooked little hands, which she was holding up to the ceiling, her fingers moving slightly like she was reaching for a gift. Daymo was fixated on her face. Whatever he saw there was causing him to make that horrified sound.

‘What is it?’ asked Harry, his voice vibrating like a harpsichord note. ‘What’s happening?’

Daymo thrust the bundle at him, begging him to take it. Harry drew back, not wanting to see. There was grey dust rising from the cowl of blankets. Puffing up with each
bone-jarring
lurch of the carriage, it was snatched by the wind
through the open window to mingle with the snow as it was sucked out into the cold.

Harry yelled as the carriage lurched again – a massive bump this time, as if the wheels had left the road. The floor tilted, sending him and Tina sliding in a heap. They rattled along like that for an alarming moment: the floor tilted, Harry and Tina tumbled against the door, Daymo yowling. Then it felt as though the carriage fell off a cliff, and they were all suspended in the air until,
bam
, they slammed down onto the floor again.

Harry saw a blaze of stars as his head hit the foot-warmer, and then there was nothing, or nothing that he cared too much about, except the carriage jolting along beneath him for a while.

H
IS SENSES CAME
dribbling back, along with the slow creak and moan of the carriage. He was lying on his back on the floor, and, oh, Tina’s weight was squashing him.

‘Get off,’ he whispered. ‘Tina. Please.’ He pushed weakly until she slid from him; then he just lay there, gulping at the cold air, which streamed down from the window above.

After a while, he reached to find her. ‘Sorry,’ he rasped. ‘Sorry.’ He closed his hand on her hair. Through the window, dimly illuminated by the flickering carriage lamps, he could see the ivy-covered stones of the big estate wall passing by with a stately lack of urgency.

Why were they going so slow?

Daymo was huddled on the seat above, his eyes shut and his lips moving in prayer. There was no sign of Miss Ursula – just a thick coating of ashy dust on the lacy
coverlets, and a scattering of red crystals from Tina’s broken rosary.

As Harry stared at these paltry remains of the vibrant, tragic old woman, the carriage slowed and juddered beneath him, and then came to a gentle halt. Somehow, he found the strength to drag himself outside.

The air was brutal and still, snow falling lightly in the golden circumference of the lanterns. They were at a corner of the estate wall. Just ahead, the fragile ruins of a church rose delicate shapes against the scudding clouds. The road turned sharply left there, and made its way through a village of neat, dark houses. Everywhere, the blanketing snow caught the diffused moonlight like a reflecting mirror and made the world seem ghostly and impermanent.

Harry groped his way around to the driver’s gate. ‘Joe?’ he whispered, fumbling the latch. ‘Joe, we need to keep going …’ He crawled into the box and knelt at Joe’s feet for what felt like the longest time, his burning forehead rejoicing in the snow-covered leather of the seat. Then he straightened.

Joe was bolt upright in the middle of the seat. He had wedged himself in with the driver’s blankets, and had tied the reins to his hands so the horses would keep going in a straight line. But a dead driver gives no signals, and so, with no one left to urge them on, the horses had eventually come to a halt, waiting to be told what to do.

‘Ah, Joe,’ whispered Harry. ‘Ah, Joe, come on, pal.’ But Joe’s hands were colder than ice and his face was crusted in snow. Harry brushed the crystals from Joe’s cheeks; they melted instantly on his own feverish skin.

There was a sweeping sound from the road behind them, and a jolt as something hit the carriage. A shape
launched itself from the luggage-rack to the roof, then up to the wall on their right. It was Vincent. Perched on the wall, clinging with one hand to the bare branches of a great oak and pointing a pistol with the other, the man glowered down in fury. Harry couldn’t even summon the energy to be afraid, and when Vincent saw who they were, he lowered his weapon.