The Last Revelation Of Gla'aki (14 page)

Tom paid this so little attention that he might have thought she wasn't addressing him. He tilted the plate on its way to the table, and when the action threatened to dislodge the vegetables—potatoes not much more whitish than the beans and carrots—he grabbed Fairman's fork and used it to hook the dangling dewlap onto the plate. "Gently, Tom," Mrs Berry blurted.

"Could I ask what the meat is?" Fairman said, if only to delay the encounter.

"Gulshaw's best," Mrs Berry said. "Our own produce."

He supposed it would be impolite to enquire further. The knife sliced it readily enough once he'd dragged the meat across the plate with the fork. The rubbery texture suggested seafood, and it did taste rather like fish, though he wasn't able to identify the underlying flavour. He could have thought that not just his hostess and her staff but the occupants of the shelter across the road were watching him. The more conscious he became of being observed, the vaster the attention seemed, and he did his best to make short work of the fillet and the vegetables to which it lent its taste. As he laid the utensils together on the glistening plate Mrs Berry said "Pudding?"

"I'll turn into it if I eat any more." Since this failed to amuse his audience, whose gazes grew distant in unison, Fairman added "Thank you enormously, but I honestly don't think I could find room."

"You've done us proud," Mrs Berry said. "You go and finish what you're here for."

Had he drunk too much? Though he'd left wine in the bottle, having gestured Tom away, Fairman's legs felt a little rubbery on the stairs. In the upper corridor he had to support himself for a moment against the wall, leaving a moist handprint on the fishy wallpaper. His skin kept turning clammy, and when he dabbed his forehead with a hand, both of them felt infirm. Perhaps the fog had given him a touch of fever, in which case he might benefit from a bath.

As he stepped into the corridor with a towel over his arm he thought he heard activity in the bathroom. Nobody was visible through the frosted pane, but he was easing the door open when the fluid restless sound was repeated. Surely it was only water trickling into the drain. The bath glistened with moisture, and he saw movement in the plughole. A greyish substance was withdrawing out of sight, and he could have imagined that as it vanished it blinked at him. That was enough to send him back to his room, where he confined himself to splashing water on his face.

He couldn't hear Janine Berry or her staff. He wasn't far from fancying that they were still where he'd left them, standing side by side to watch him plod away replete. The idea seemed to magnify the stillness, which felt as if it were focused on him. He dragged the curtains together without glancing through the window and released the book from the safe. "All life is the instrument of the mage, and remains in his power after the process men call death..."

The volume seemed to promise formulas to revive the dead, to conjure forth their wakeful thoughts, to inhabit their bodies so as to use them as disposable vessels in some form of arcane exploration, even to prevent the newly dead from departing as long as they were useful to the sorcerer. None of these were promises Fairman was anxious to see kept, but he couldn't resist reading on; that was why he was here, after all, though perhaps he was glad not to be able to interpret much of what he read. "The mage shall be known by the summoning of the remains..." Which was the summoned, and which the summoner? If there were occult formulas they must be lying low in the midst of the text, and he found himself trying not to hear his own voice, though the peripheral sight of a mouth shaping every word didn't help. He released a breath as long and slow as any of those he'd kept hearing—the waves outside his room— when the blank flyleaves brought the volume to an end.

Once it was locked away he ventured into the corridor, where the stillness made him feel more observed than ever. Perhaps he ought to blame the eyes of all the fish that were embossed in the wallpaper. He didn't simply flush the toilet as an aid to using it but sang to cover up his activity: "Thou great inspiration, so much more than sea..." Back in his room he couldn't resist going to the window. The tenants of the shelter raised their sluggish floppy hands, but their faces were so much in shadow that he could have thought the featureless grey expanses below their eyes weren't scarves. In spite of the hour and the fog, more people than he could count were on the beach. Some were sitting with their backs to him, but surely it was fog, not the sea, that kept drifting over their outstretched legs. Far too many of the motionless figures, both the seated ones and those on their feet that rubbery shoes had enlarged, were facing the hotel. All their eyes were so wide that they made the other features seem to have dwindled if not shrunk into the flesh.

He couldn't be sure of that—couldn't even tell whether any of the people on the beach had been among those he'd encountered in Gulshaw. He felt as if he were dreaming the sights beyond the window; perhaps he would prefer to be. When he retreated to bed and switched off the light he was afraid that worse fancies were waiting in the stagnant dark—more visions of the denizen of Deepfall Water. He found he was nervous of sleeping, and he didn't think he had by the time Janine Berry's voice roused him.

She was singing or more accurately crooning. At first he thought she was in the lobby beneath his room, and then he realised she was outside the hotel. He floundered out of bed and sprawled towards the window. The watchers in the shelter saluted him before growing as motionless as almost everybody on the beach. He caught Janine Berry in the act of rising to her feet at the edge of the waves. As she stooped to cradle a flabby greyish almost shapeless object in her hands her left breast emerged from her blouse, to such a disconcerting extent that it might have been reaching for the prize she lifted to it. The sea fell silent between waves, so that Fairman was just able to make out her words. "You'll shape up," she said. "You'll last. You won't be like your brother."

So this was what dreams were like, Fairman thought as he found himself back in bed. Another showed him a horde of dancers emerging from the ballroom along the promenade to take their bewilderingly elaborate dance onto the beach. While they chanted a celebratory version of a familiar tune they kicked up their legs, which were bare and unnervingly long. Beyond them, through a momentary break in the fog, he glimpsed gelatinous lumps sidling crabwise towards the woods or crawling with a caterpillar motion. His bedtime reading must have given rise to the sight of the dead slithering out of their coffins through any crack they could find and worming through the earth to cluster at the edge of the sea, extending their arms and their hands that were at least as elongated towards the fog. He might have expected this to waken him—certainly he would have hoped for that to happen—but a nagging impression did. He felt as if he'd been talking in his sleep, and to an audience.

Although he seemed to be flaccid with exhaustion, another thought sent him squirming out of bed to wobble over to the safe. Outside the window the fog was engulfing the dawn. He fumbled to switch on the light once he'd transferred his two most recent acquisitions to the dressing-table. He opened
Of Humanity as Chrysalis
at the rear endpaper and then, with resignation that felt dreamlike,
Of the Uses of the Dead.
The pages were no longer blank.

The writing was less recognisable than ever. It looked as though an intruder had been struggling to guide Fairman's hand. The words seemed wholly unfamiliar, having left no discernible trace in his brain. "While Cthulhu makes Himself known to men through their dreams, Gla'aki fastens on their minds so as to make their dreams His own and shape them to His will..." This had been added to the volume on humanity, and Fairman couldn't tell whether it referred to the shaping of dreams or of minds, if not both. Beneath it the sentences were increasingly skewed across the page. "The Ancient Ones are not restricted to Their lairs, since a simple thought of Them may summon Them to seep through the very substance of the world. As Gla'aki came to know the minds of men, so He ceased to need to bind them physically to Him..." In the other volume the handwriting was even less controlled, wandering awry and almost off the flyleaf. "Where the power of Gla'aki has been concentrated He uses all life for His dreams. In these places shall be seen the eldest ways, where whatever lived was uncertain of its form and consumed its like in a bid for vigour..."

This read like an imitation of Percy Smallbeam's prose, Fairman tried to think; all the annotations did. Certainly he found them just as incomprehensible. He wondered if he'd spoken them aloud while scrawling them, and in what voice. As he resisted an urge to try reading them out, the bedside phone emitted its unmelodious clatter. "You're up, 
aren't you, Leonard?" Janine Berry told him. "Are you breakfasting before you go out?"

Fairman was assailed by an excessively familiar taste that rose from somewhere in him. "I think I'm still fed from last night."

"You know best. You fast if you think you should." Before Fairman could find a response she said "We'll have plenty of the special for your lady friend as well. I made it for you myself."

She sounded oddly wistful. Some undefined thought made Fairman's limbs grow rubbery as he stood up, fumbling the receiver onto its stand. He really didn't need to stay in Gulshaw once he'd completed the set of books; he could pick up Sandra at the station and drive straight back to Brichester—it was too late for him to phone and tell her not to come. As he hauled the curtains wide he braced himself to be greeted by the tenants of the shelter, but then his body sagged. The promenade was deserted and so was the beach, as far as he could see for the stagnant fog that made the sea resemble an artificial lake.

Had the weather proved too much for everyone at last? Even the shelter opposite the hotel was empty, and the graffiti glistened as if they had only just been painted; the incomprehensible words appeared to writhe with moisture or with eagerness to be grasped until Fairman looked away. The sense of an unseen audience seemed to have left the hotel. Perhaps he needn't put Sandra off after all, he thought with vague relief. While he wasn't entirely alone— Mrs Berry at least was presumably still in the building—he felt sufficiently at home that he didn't use the plumbing to cover up his noises. Once he'd showered in the already damp bath he dressed and made his way uphill from the car park.

The fog had been waiting for him. The moisture seemed not simply to cling to him but to permeate his glistening skin, which felt feverishly unstable. He climbed the street as fast as he could, though that made him even clammier. The fog might have been ushering him to his destination, leaving its murky mark on every window as it fluttered sluggishly backwards just a few paces ahead of him. All the houses looked as dormant as the empty cars resting half their wheels on the pavements. Did Gulshaw shut down on Saturdays out of season? He could have thought the town was not so much resting from its summer labours as reverting to its ordinary state.

Forest Avenue was indeed beside the woods. Some of the houses on the inland side were so close to them that Fairman couldn't tell where their gardens ended and the woods began. There were no buildings on the opposite side, just a line of trees bordering the cracked uneven road. The priest's house was separated from its neighbours by walls that had partly collapsed, weakened by vines that stretched out of the forest to overgrow most of the garden and clutch at the house. Even the porch between two tall thin grimy windows was adorned with dripping tendrils and beaded leaves. Fairman felt the stone step crumble underfoot as he stepped into the porch to thumb the rusty bellpush.

He had to press so hard that his thumb swelled up around his nail. He was close to trying again by the time he heard footsteps shuffling towards the door, which wavered open to reveal a man whose age had bent him almost a head shorter than Fairman. His floppy slippers must be why his feet had sounded unduly lacking in shape. His black robe emphasised the livid tints of his skin, and his wrinkled face put Fairman in mind of a balloon that had started to deflate; even his bald whitish scalp seemed in danger of subsiding. His large eyes were virtually colourless, and gleamed up at his visitor while his thin faded lips groped for a smile. "Mr Fairman," he said. "Thank you for gracing my house."

His handshake was the loosest yet. His lank fingers writhed in Fairman's grasp as if they were trying to give him a sign, unless they were betraying how age had made them uncontrollable. "Will you sit with me for a little while?" he said.

The hall and the stairs that divided it not quite in half grew darker still as Father Sinclough shut the door. The carpets and the wallpaper weren't much less sombre than his robe, and the additional darkness felt like a weight that had settled into the house. The priest shuffled effortfully into the nearest left-hand room and grabbed the arms of a chair before lowering himself. "Please be at home," he said with the last of a breath.

He hadn't switched the light on. Fairman couldn't even make out the nails of the fingers gripping the chair. The stifled glow through the grubby windows made all the furniture look steeped in fog, though surely it was dust that had risen from the chair when the priest sank into it. A radio that might have been as old as its owner squatted on a chipped marble mantelpiece above a dark hearth strewn with dead leaves that must have fallen from the vines that enshrouded the chimney on the roof. The gloom of the walls was relieved only by a dull glint of glass in frames, all of which had been divested of whatever pictures they'd contained. As Fairman headed for the armchair closest to the window he saw a blurred version of himself slither from glass to glass like an inhabitant of an aquarium.

Having sat down, he edged gingerly forward. The chair felt soft and bloated, and he could have thought it was moist as well, perhaps from its proximity to the fog that loomed at the window. He might have moved if it hadn't given him the best view of the room. Father Sinclough seemed content to be almost somnolently quiet, but Fairman was anxious to be done with any interview. "So," he said, "I understand you're the gentleman responsible."