The Last Revelation Of Gla'aki (15 page)

"I tried to be," the priest said like a sigh. "Mea culpa, I was wrong."

"In what way?"

"I thought the books were best kept apart." With another breath the priest said "You'll appreciate I've learned my error."

"You don't mean the people you gave them to." When Father Sinclough shook his head—in the dimness the pale scalp seemed to wobble—Fairman said "Why those people in particular?"

"I never questioned it." The priest held out his hands as if they were cradling a burden. "We're all one here," he said.

Fairman wanted to protest that he wasn't, whatever the priest's words were supposed to mean. Instead he demanded "And why me?"

"It becomes you, my son." Father Sinclough clasped his hands together; in the gloom they looked near to merging into a single pallid mass. "When Donald Rothermere read your essay we knew you'd take all the care that was called for," he declared. "Do you know what Eunice Spriggs said?"

His eyes were wide enough to be expecting a yes, but Fairman was disconcerted to learn that the mayoress had been involved at such an early stage. "Please say."

"She said she was sure you'd live up to your name."

All this had taken quite a few breaths out of the priest, but Fairman was provoked to try another question. "Forgive my asking, but is Sinclough really yours?"

The priest shook his head slowly, and Fairman told himself its outline hadn't shifted in the process. "It was the first change I made," Father Sinclough said.

Fairman didn't feel the need to interrogate him further, even to learn how it might be spelled. "Anyway, could I trouble you for the book?"

The priest laid his hands on the arms of the chair. "We've led you quite a dance, haven't we."

"Never mind, it's over now."

"Not entirely, Mr Fairman." Father Sinclough took a breath and said "Not here."

Fairman found he had to take a breath himself. "I'm sorry?" he said but didn't feel. "You're telling me the book is..."

"It's at the church."

"Because it's safer there, would that be?"

"It would be safe anywhere in Gulshaw, Leonard."

However much Fairman was failing to understand, it surely didn't matter. "Well then, shall we go?" he said and stood up.

The priest sagged if not sank back into the chair. It looked as though the stagnant gloom had donned a pallid face and hands. "It's waiting for you," he said.

"Perhaps you could tell me where to find it."

"Where else but the pulpit, my son."

"Thank you for your time," Fairman said, which seemed sarcastically inadequate. "Thank you for everything you've done," he tried saying, but the priest's face had grown even less distinguishable. Surely only the dimness was engulfing its features. Just the same, Fairman wasn't slow in letting himself out of the house.

The street was still deserted. "Not a soul," he heard himself murmur before his voice sank without a trace into the fog. There weren't even many cars on Forest Avenue; he could have driven after all. The lethargic fog receded ahead of him as if it was about to unveil the world, and he felt it leave a residue on his skin. The windows of the houses were hardly distinguishable from the grey walls that framed them, and yet he felt watched—enormously so. The street wasn't entirely silent apart from his footsteps; moisture kept dripping from the trees, spattering the wet road and occasionally drumming on car roofs. The shrouded woods put him in mind of a jungle, as if they and the line of trees opposite were reverting to the primitive. He was resisting an urge to sing if not to talk to himself— to add some sound to his muffled footfalls and the intermittent plop of condensation haphazardly accompanied by hollow metallic thumps—when he heard a noise behind him.

It was high up in the trees. It might have been a bird, although he was belatedly aware that he'd seen none in Gulshaw, not so much as a seagull. When the foliage rustled again he glanced back. The branches of more than one tree were shaking against the unseen sky, as if some creature had leapt from one to the other. Fairman couldn't help thinking of the zoo, which—together with the Leafy Shade and Sprightly Sprouts—was somewhere in the murk beyond the priest's house. Another treetop quivered, and at the same time one shook on the opposite side of the road. Whatever was on the move up there sounded larger than a bird, but it was indistinguishable from the clumps of greyish branches. Fairman turned away, and as his suddenly unstable legs threatened to let him down he grabbed the nearest tree. His fingers recoiled, and he tramped faster towards the church. Surely the trunk hadn't squirmed like a wet scaly limb in his grasp, but he didn't touch any more trees. Even when the floppy sounds in the treetops multiplied he refrained from looking back.

The trees gave out as the road brought him to the Church of the First Word. He could have fancied that the grey stone walls puffed up at his approach, just as the fog seemed to swell with a vast breath as it withdrew across the empty promenade and the deserted beach. He lingered between the mossy gateposts to examine the signboard, having noticed that the definite article had been inserted in smaller letters between the two lines of the name. Patches of lichen obscured parts of the sign, but he thought the last two words had been altered, though he couldn't be sure whether they had originally been Saint Mark.

The same grey lichen had run riot on the gravestones surrounding the church. Some of them were so distorted that Fairman could have imagined the fog had infected them with its amorphousness. A stone urn seemed to be sprouting tendrils like a giant seed if not a tentacled denizen of the sea, and the pale mass dangling from an angel's bowed head was less devoid of features than Fairman liked, as if it was on the way to forming a new face. As he hurried down the path from the rusty gate he saw that quite a number of the mounds that extended from the memorials had crumbled seawards. That needn't remind him of anything, and he tramped to grab the encrusted ring on the door within the grey stone arch.

The door lumbered inwards on its massive hinges, scraping the uneven flagstones, and the stagnant Gulshaw smell came to meet him as though the church had let out a moist breath. The interior was so dim that he left the door open. All the arched windows in the side walls and flanking the altar were at least partly overgrown by a greyish fungoid substance, but Fairman couldn't judge whether this or the fog was responsible for leeching all the colour from the stained glass, where the outlines of the figures were so malformed that it was impossible to tell who or what they were meant to be. As he made his way along the aisle between the pews, all of which were empty even of books, he saw that the form on the cross that overlooked the altar seemed bloated, its ill-defined grey shape drooping forward as though poised to plump on the floor. Whatever Father Sinclough had said, the church was surely no longer in use, at least not in any conventional sense. Had the priest espoused a new faith? That needn't concern Fairman so long as he retrieved the book.

The pulpit stood to the left of the altar. As Fairman climbed the creaky steps, the banisters seemed to turn moist in his grasp. A book was resting on the lectern, and he could have thought it quivered a little with eagerness—his own. The embossed colophon showed a night sky in which unfamiliar constellations hinted at the features of an inhuman face. A stagnant smell that Fairman recognised rose from the pages as he opened it to confirm that it was the eighth volume,
Of the Dreaming of Creation.
He felt his eyes bulge with the strain of reading in the dimness. "All creation is a dream of itself. The universe dreamed itself into being and continues to do so..."

In that case, he thought, the book must be a dream as well. Perhaps he was on the edge of understanding why his time in Gulshaw had grown to resemble one—and then another thought overtook him. At last he grasped something Father Sinclough had said. Although he no longer had the street map, he could visualise the layout of the town, and he had indeed been led a dance. The route he'd followed to collect the books had described the first steps of the dance he'd watched at the Shaw.

At once he felt as if more than the insight had taken hold of his mind. He heard a huge prolonged dribbling breath behind him. It was surely just a wave that had sprawled onto the beach and lingered over retreating, but it felt like a symbol or an omen. So was the book, unless it was more than that. As he read on he could have taken it for a dream he was having, even if not on his own behalf, and was about to waken from. "Who hath shared the dreams the old stones dream, or those of the earth or the sea? Who hath beheld the sleeping visions of the mountains, or been a party to the reveries of the moon? The Ancient Ones partake of the dreams of the farthest stars, where universe and void consume each other for eternity. Let the mage prepare himself before venturing to invite them into his mind..." This and much more seemed to sink past Fairman's comprehension to root itself in his brain. The unchanging dimness gave him no sense of how long he had been at the lectern when he became aware of activity in the churchyard. A crowd was advancing on the church.

Father Sinclough led the procession, and the mayoress supported him on her arm. Though their progress seemed so furtive that Fairman hadn't noticed them until they were past the gate, their faces suggested that they meant to be respectful. They were followed by everyone who had taken care of the books, even Rhoda Bickerstaff, who looked not quite resigned nor yet just nervously expectant. Behind them came people Fairman had encountered in the town— Janine Berry and her staff, the proprietors of Fishing For You and Fish It Up, the Gulshaw players apart from Eric Headon—and then people he thought he had passed in the street or seen on the beach. It occurred to him that while he was reading at the lectern he'd heard a good deal of traffic on the promenade but hadn't realised its significance. By the time Eunice Spriggs and Father Sinclough crossed the threshold, much of the crowd was still outside the gate.

The priest shuffled to the front pew with the mayoress, where they sat and gazed up at Fairman. As they entered the church he'd thought Eunice was doffing her hat as a mark of respect, but did women do that? Now he saw that the object she'd stuffed into her handbag hadn't been headgear in that sense. Everyone in the crowd uncovered their bald heads as they stepped into the church, the women included. Nobody was wearing beach shoes, despite their appearance and the way their rubbery feet slithered over the stone floor. Too many eyes to count were gazing up at Fairman now; it felt like being observed by a single consciousness, and not only from within the church. He ought to have suspected something of the kind, given all the phrases they had in common. He was watching the church fill up—all the pews were occupied, and newcomers were crowding three deep along the walls—when the priest raised an unstable hand. "Read, my son," he murmured. "Read to us."

To some extent Fairman was glad to return to the book. He'd caught sight of a group of familiar figures in a pew at the back of the church. As they tugged their scarves down, he could have thought they were dragging their faces lopsided or otherwise awry. The townsfolk who couldn't find space inside the church were massing around it, although not at his back, where the waves had grown slower and louder. Some of the spectators had managed to clamber up to the side windows, though he didn't know what they were able to see; the faces flattened against the panes were so blurred that he could have taken them for lumps of the fungus that clung to the stained glass. He did his best to ignore all these sights and concentrate on the book, beginning where he'd left off. Perhaps it conveyed more to the listeners than he was aware of understanding himself, because there was rapt silence except for his voice and the sluggish progression of waves behind him on the beach. At last he came to the end of the printed text and turned to the flyleaf.

"The grimoire is a tool for the unmaking of the world. What are these volumes save a nexus of ancient power? Happy the land which is bounded by them, for it shall be irradiated and transformed. Happy the denizens of that land, for they shall renew the oldest ways of shaping, when all that lived partook of a single creation. More powerful still is the mage through whom the old words find their voice, and happiest is he whose lips Gla'aki uses to address the world. Wherever He is heard He shall manifest Himself to His worshippers..."

Fairman was no longer reading aloud, since the page was blank. He felt as though he was hearing someone else preach—as if the book had found a voice that wasn't his. He had to speak up, because the ponderous slithering of the waves had grown louder. He was about to continue, though he'd no idea what he would say, when he glimpsed a concerted movement in the church.

Everyone in the congregation had bowed their heads. Until he looked at them he was able to take this as a gesture of respect, and then he clutched the pulpit so hard that it seemed to sweat in his grasp. Although every head was lowered so far that he could see the back of every neck, all the faces were still turned up towards him, as if their raptness had dislodged them. They were no longer intent on him, however. All the wide dislocated eyes were gazing past him.

As the protracted cumbersome sound that he'd kept hearing was repeated at his back, he could no longer avoid realising that it wasn't the noise of waves, because it had left the beach. He felt himself tremble, and the pulpit shivered; he thought the entire church did. Perhaps the tremor that spread through the floor and rose up the walls to the gloomy timbers under the roof betrayed how massive the presence was, so weighty that it shook the earth, or perhaps the vibration was a sign of its power. Then the church grew as still as the multitude of unblinking eyes, and Fairman had to turn and look behind him.

He was being watched from beyond the altar. An eye was peering through each of the windows that framed it— an eye as large as Fairman's head. They looked as if they were using the church for a mask. He found himself struggling to feel equal to the sight; perhaps he could survive it, since the eyes were no less blurred than the vast pallid face out of which they were craning. Then a third eye swelled like a moist fleshy balloon through the wall above the crucifix and stooped towards him on a flexible greyish trunk the thickness of a tree. It was followed by the face, which absorbed the cross as it seeped through the stones around it—a whitish spongy moon-shaped face twice Fairman's height, featureless except for the stems of the eyes and a circular thick-lipped mouth. It was followed by a sample of the body, an oval mass bristling with restless spines as long as Fairman's arm, as the face leaned over the altar towards him.