The Chimes (19 page)

Then in the middle of a clear straightaway, I hear Lucien stop. I hear his hands patting tunnelbrick and his whistle orient me to his whereabouts. Then he disappears into a tiny tunnelmouth. Through it where I follow there’s grit and concrete dust and it smells like cut bone or hair, something bodily and aloof but not unpleasant. Thin pipes run along the sides of the walls and press against my arms as we move through. Sparks of light cross my blinded vision.

I try to breathe shallow, save myself lungfuls of dust. But as we go, the dust gets thicker. Grit, then chunks of rubble, then broken pieces of concrete under my hands. Raw and snagging and a tear at my nails with a warm liquid trickle down my palms, though I can’t see the blackness my blood adds to the dark. Soon so little space that I cannot push aside the rubble as I crawl. My jeans tear at the knees.

Then, ahead, the sound of something heavy breaking and falling. I jump. The back of my skull hits domed tunnelmouth and I bite my tongue, the pain as bright as a flare in the black. And I am reminded that I have a body still. That I’m more than just a crawling, forgotten piece of darkness.

A cascade of smaller broken sounds further off, breaking and falling lento in the silence. In the dizzy groundlessness, the crash could have come from above me or even below. I wait until all sounds have stopped and I listen for Lucien’s presence. Nothing. The immense weight of the city above presses down on me.

Subito I am tired, so tired, and I want to lie down in the dust and concrete grit and rest. But from below then comes the comeallye, Lucien’s whistle. I feel forward with my hands. There is barely any crawlspace between the rubble and the roof. But I stomach it, pull forward with my forearms, feel the tug and snag of rock on shirt and skin. And my head meets wall. The way ahead finishes like a cut-off breath. I lie there for a while, roll from back to stomach so the tunnelmouth is a bare few breaths from my face. Then I feel a current of cool air play across one hand.

Halfway down the rubble slope, in the wall of the tunnel, I find a small jagged hole broken in the brick. I work my legs back so my head is level with it and I whistle the first few bars of the comeallye and Lucien’s whistle floats back up. No other way but head first. I push the rubble clear of the gap and then worm my way backward so I can get my head and arms through. My shoulders barely fit. I stretch out far as I can and my hands swipe air.

‘Push through,’ says Lucien’s voice below. No traction behind, my feet scuffing in the cramped tunnel. Then one plimsoll finds solid wall and I push through until I’m half suspended. ‘Further,’ he says. I stretch and the bricks round the hole break a bit and my balance shifts. Down below, there is nothing, only panic and a drop without measure. Then Lucien’s hand grips mine.

‘Give me your weight,’ he says.

I push back again behind me, pray he’s strong enough to take it, and kick free. Then Lucien is gripping me by the chest and I’m half over his back and falling for a moment. Then I’m down and my feet on flat ground and I’m standing close to him, both of us breathing hard.

Something is different. In the air is a low and constant ringing, silver and steady. The Lady tells her presence in drops of silence. But this silence is a constant flow, sure and so loud it’s deafening. My whole body echoes to it. I start to speak, but Lucien is already off. The space lengthens as we run, a long tunnel that leads ahead wide and curving. Underfoot are narrow mettle tracks, shoulder-width apart, big enough for a trolley or a jigger. The silver silence seems to fill the tunnel, flowing down the tracks to me.

On the next turning, something strange happens. Like a magic trick, the silver ringing disappears. Normal echoes of brick and mettle, and the matter-of-fact light tread of Lucien’s feet ahead. I shake my head, as if this might clear my ears. I keep following. Large, wide tunnels, brick and tile, by their echo. Left, left, left, right. We are returning in the same direction. With the final turn and another five beats, it is back. A sustained, silent peal. I feel light-headed.

The great current is now running perpendicular to us. As I listen, it seems to grow stronger: a full stream, a torrent that will pull us along. After a while Lucien stops and I can hear him breathing in the dark. I hang back, piano, listening to the pattern his halting breath makes in this vast, grand ringing. I wait for him and listen. I let the peals of silver settle over me.

His voice comes to me through the dark, as it always does.

‘Simon?’

He knows that I am here. He hears me as clear as I would see him in daylight.

‘Yes,’ I say. I try to say it without expression, without panic. I doubt that I succeed.

‘Can you hear it?’ he asks. His voice has the familiar excitement in it, and my heart rises up as it always does.

‘It’s . . . it’s vast,’ I say, finally. ‘I don’t understand what it is.’

‘I have to show you. You won’t believe it otherwise.’ He moves forward again slowly until he is about ten beats ahead. He hums soft and then places his hands against the side of the tunnel. The sound of this is hollow and resonant. I can hear him grip something, and then the noise of a short, violent pull. Mettle creaks and strains heavily, and then the tunnel is filled with a different light, a pale glow. In the glow I see Lucien’s profile, with the curled hair pushed back high off his forehead. He turns to me and his eyes are reflected in the light like a cat’s.

‘This way,’ he says, calm, and then he disappears into the door in the side of the tunnel.

I stand there alone. The door stands just ajar and the milky light appears to be flowing from it. The door is thick and made of mettle. Circular bolt heads ring the edges of the door, cruel and ornamental at the same time. In the pulsing glow, I see where they are bleeding dark red rust. The colour sounds something in me and I hesitate. But there is no choice. I hold the levered handle tight and swing the door open and hear its underwater creak. I draw a breath and hold it deep, seal it tight inside me. And then I step inside.

When I open my eyes, I am surrounded with an intense, silverwhite glow. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and Lucien was right. I would not have believed him if he had told me. We are standing in a vast tunnel. Its roof arcs high over our heads, and the walls are wider than my arms, stretched out full. The tunnel is made of pure palladium. Its glow is blinding. I feel its pulse rolling over me in steady waves, pure peals of resonant silence. My whole body is dripping with silver, humming with it. The resonance seems to begin inside me, in the bones behind my ears, and run down my spine and out to the tips of my fingers. I feel as if my spine is a candle and there’s a white clear flame emerging from the very top of my head.

I am grinning mad and huge, and I turn to Lucien, who is standing close, and he is grinning too, his smile wide and hil­­arious. The space around my lungs and where my heart is beating is opening up, stretching. I think of the picture in my mother’s book, those creatures with their dark wings stretching too, until they’re full of light and air. The strangest thing of all is that I can feel my parents there, in the tunnel. Their faces come into my mind without effort. I see the two of them alone, standing in the field next to one of the parahouses. They are healthy and young, and their faces are calm. The silvery space opens somewhere inside my throat and middle, and of all things I realise that I am going to cry. Standing in a tunnel under the river somewhere – who knows where?

Lucien is several feet ahead of me in the tunnel, walking with his stately lope, and reaching his arms out towards the tunnel’s sides as if he wants to pull the light in to him.

Then something changes. It starts slow, somewhere down in my feet. A sense of unease. Nothing has altered around me. The silver glow is as milky and clear and beautiful. There is no sound in the thronging silence. Nothing has moved or shifted in the tunnel. I start walking in the same direction that Lucien is going in, and I have the sense that I am moving impossibly slow, as if through silted murky water. Nothing there. But round my ankles a feeling of coil and release, coil and release. The feeling moves up from my feet to my knees and hips, and rises then up my spine, where moments before I’d felt the light coming through.

How to describe it, except as the opposite of the opening, lengthening feel of the Pale. It’s as if my joints are shutting, seizing, refusing. My whole body is saying no. I form the word with my lips as the black current reaches my hands and they seize and grip and try to push against something that isn’t there.

There’s pressure under my ribs, around my heart. The creature that had opened its wings within my chest now has my insides trapped tight in its claws. And then I no longer seem able to walk. I try to put my hands up to break my fall, but I land hard on the flat of my knees in the silver tunnel. The glow is still playing piano around me, like something cruel, as I retch and feel my back curl, without my control, inward and prone.

‘Lucien,’ I say, or try to say, or just think. ‘Lucien. What have you done?’

The next thing is my arms being pulled from where they’re curled under me, hugged in around my ribcage. Pulled out in front of my head. Pain in the shoulder joint. Hard, pointed pain, not the dry, refusing pain that has taken up everything else. I try to lift my head up to swear at him, but I am pathetic. I have no strength. Lucien pulls my two crumpled, useless arms together so he can grab both and then there’s nothing, followed by a painful wrench that has his whole weight behind it. He’s dragging me. I feel my forehead bump over the pitted silver. We are moving in slow jerks down the corridor. From time to time I hear Lucien go to his knees. Then his feet at my sides as he rearranges his grip on my wrists.

The claws inside my chest are strong and tight. They have stalked bone by bone up my back and gripped my brain there. My brain is both terribly big and terribly small at the same time. It shakes hollow like a walnut and it grows and pushes fleshily at my skull. At some point I throw up whatever is in my stomach, and then I feel Lucien tip my head and shoulders with the edge of his para-covered foot to avoid the mess as he pulls me through.

As he does it, I blink. And then I blink again because my brain has not obeyed this instruction. And then I try to spit to clear my throat so I can scream. Because my eyes are open and I cannot see. I am blind.

The Dead Room

I come to in darkness. It is cold. I don’t know where I am. I blink, but the dark with my eyes open is the same as the dark with them closed. I am lying on a hard surface and every bone and muscle in me aches and pulls. I try to focus my hearing, but my brain is bruised, seems no longer the right size for my skull.

Then I try to make a sound, any sound, to hear my bearings. All that comes out is a dry sort of moan. The noise should be loud enough to get some hold on the size of the room, but there is nothing. It is completely silent. I try to hear beyond or underneath the silence, but it is dead, closed, shut. And then there is too much pain in my head and I give up.

Off behind me is the sudden sound of loud, violent retching. Lucien. Because of the deadness of the room, I cannot tell where he is. I lie still, as I have no choice but to do, and gradually things come back. I remember the running river of silver. I remember a tunnel made of pure. I remember happiness and harmony beating right through me from head to foot. I remember my parents, shining and healthy. And then, from foot to head, I remember the creep of the sickness that is still inside me, that remains as a brittle twitch in my joints and the horror feeling of something pressing on my ribs.

I understand then. Lucien has brought me here. Lucien has exposed me to something that has made me sick – sick like my parents, like Steppan’s father, like he himself the other night.

I test my limbs. My arms move slightly, but they are tense and tight, caught in the numb grip. I cannot move my legs at all. I can feel them, though I almost wish I couldn’t, as the pain is worst there, like ice. I lie still and try not to think.

After a long time the ache of pressure inside my chest and ears eases a bit. I try to concentrate again, to focus my energy enough to move. Begin at my chest, let my thought move down my arm, trying to remember its network of muscle and bone, to will it back into being.

‘Wait.’ And the falling feel of a memory trick jolts me. This is how it always starts. Lucien’s voice speaking to me out of the dark, sounding me through the questions – always detached, always a step ahead. The voice that knows more than I do always. More even about my own story. But that means something else too, I realise. If someone knows all there is to know about you, isn’t that a kind of forgiveness?