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The door banged behind us and we tumbled into the parlour. Mr. Gwent drew the curtains shut, lit a gas lamp, and called out to his maid in a panting voice: ‘Prepare the Grand Kuding tea at once, and make haste! Only one teaspoon of leaves – it must be mild!’
He rang the bell several times, its silvery shimmers echoing in my quivering body; then he hurried to his desk, leafing through sheaves of paper covered in his slanting scrawl. To quell my erratic breathing I employed a technique a counsellor had once taught me, to interrupt a potential panic attack: a short, sharp inhalation followed by a long, deep exhalation. Rachel looked so frail and fragile that she might have been composed from paper. I clasped her hand and spoke words I was not even assured of myself:
‘Everything will be all right now, everything. We will return to 2019 safe and sound. This time tomorrow we’ll be …’ I thought of Fate’s cottage and how we would awaken there; he might attempt to overpower us, but our rage would fire us with superhuman strength. I pictured us victorious over him and stumbling out into the true snow – but no, winter would surely be over now. The thought that the landscape might be one of green hills, of emerging 102bluebells and snowdrops, caused a dizzy disorientation to assail me.
The maid had brought in some tea, and was attempting to pour it when Mr. Gwent shooed her away. He lifted the pot’s lid and buried his face in its steam, frowning and muttering that it must be the correct intensity, otherwise parts of us would be ‘lacking punctuation, with full stops all over the place’. Once more, a quivering beset me and I turned to Rachel, feeling her grip my hand tightly, and then she began to speak – quite the longest and most heartfelt speech I had ever heard her make:
‘I remember that it was Christmas 2019 when I left and came here, to Fate’s world. I couldn’t stand it anymore – the gap between who I was and who I wanted to be – the life I wanted to live. I could see it everywhere; I went out shopping for presents for my friends, and behind all the frantic bustling and rushing, there was this despair behind everyone’s eyes. I realised that the biggest lie of civilisation is that we are happy. We say “Hello” and “How are you?”, and “I’m fine” is the standard, automatic reply, even when we’re not fine at all, even when we’re insecure and panicked and worried about money and thinking, “What the fuck am I doing here?” And I just wanted to escape it all … But I didn’t think – it was still a shock – I drank his tea and then – this.’
A silence filled the room, for both Mr. Gwent and I felt touched and a little embarrassed at this confession. She did not appear to expect anything from us, however, for she merely lowered her eyes, her shoulders rounded with exhaustion. I felt there was nothing I could do but lean over and kiss her in consolation; her lips did not move in 103response. At first she seemed abashed, but a glow began to pulse in her face.
‘This indeed,’ said Mr. Gwent. ‘We used to dine with Fate from time to time – Mary and I, before all this happened. We were among his few friends. We thought him charming and eccentric, if a little sinister. I enthused to him about William Blake and he became enchanted by my ideas on consciousness. At one meal, he would not speak of anything but the newspaper report he had read that day, which detailed how in ninety per cent of miscarriages of justice, the wrongly accused has been convicted on the basis of witness testimony – not spite, you see, but delusion. Fate thought this hilarious: unreliable narrators, he called them, and he became obsessed with the science of reality as a hallucination, so highly subjective and warped that it can be manipulated. And so he found a means with which to do so.’
I sensed that Mr. Gwent had been waiting a long time to share his story, perceived how loneliness had increased its weight with every day.
‘But how did he manage to find such a means, concoct such a drug?’ I pressed him.
‘This he never fully disclosed to me. But look, we are running out of time,’ Mr. Gwent said, with a fierceness to his voice. ‘Now, my novel will not be anything like this world. It will be a place of complete freedom. I shall set it in 2014, and you will be entrusted with the plot: shape it as you wish; unlike Fate, I will not treat you like a father punishing his errant children.’
I turned to Rachel, expecting her to share my horror, but her expression was one of animation. 104
‘But you promised that we would be returning to the present day!’ I cried.
‘Why, and so I shall. I might have lived in Fate’s world for the last decade, but I recollect everything beautifully – I made extensive notes, I can assure you that all the details will be accurate. I left reality in 2007 but 2014 is not so very hard to imagine.’ A look of wistfulness came over his face.
‘But I am referring to 2019, the real world that exists outside any novel,’ I protested. ‘I thought that we would drink this tea and it would reverse our current ailment.’
‘Dear God,’ said Mr. Gwent, his forehead glowering into a frown, ‘I am afraid that my powers do not extend that far. My novel is but a refuge from this world.’
I recollected my earliest memory of this world, poised behind a thick velvet curtain: my identity held down like a jack-in-the-box with the lid fastened tightly.
‘And what will you make me?’ My voice rose in anger. ‘A foetus or a forty-five-year-old? An aristocrat or a bus driver? I want to be myself again. Why, we may as well stay here – I would rather be me and live out this agony than lose myself again.’
‘Listen: that is precisely what I want for you, my dear boy,’ Mr. Gwent soothed me. ‘I too know that craving well. There is little time to explain the rules of literary metamorphosis, so I must be quick: an author who wishes to impose a strong storyline, when using a real soul in their book, will force amnesia on a character, negating their past, just as Fate did to you – your true self works merely as a subconscious, pressed down. It requires a strong dose of Grand Kuding.’
‘Grand Kuding?’ I exclaimed in dismay, haunted by 105memories of sitting in Fate’s cottage, sipping at that noxious liquid. ‘What was the tea that you used to awaken me?’
‘Ah, that was Soma tea. Soma awakens, Grand Kuding drugs. But you require the latter for the transition, and while Fate gave you a very high dose, I shall give you a weaker strain – enough for the journey only, I promise you. I will not plot you; you will be you. Our memories make us who we are, and you will have all of them!’
‘I see,’ I said, doubtfully, looking to Rachel for her opinion.
At that moment, Mr. Gwent’s maid entered the room, her face flushed.
‘I am sorry to interrupt you, sir,’ she cried, ‘but there is a trio of hooded monks at the door. I advised them that you were not receiving visitors, but they have been persistent in lingering. They gave me quite a chill – and when I next glanced out of the front room windows, I saw that they had doubled in number. Now they are entirely filling up the path!’ Her hand fluttered against her heart as she furtively drew open one of the curtains. We all turned, and all gasped. There, in Mr. Gwent’s back garden, were half a dozen more of them. They strolled to the glass, appearing to stare in and peruse us.
Mr. Gwent raced to the window and violently redrew the curtain.
‘You must both drink the tea and be hasty about it.’
‘But even with our memories, we’re still entering a book within a book.’ I held Rachel’s hand tightly. ‘This is no solution at all! What if we were to let Fate destroy us? Would we wake then, free, in his cottage—’ 106
‘If you die in Fate’s book, you will not return to your former world,’ Mr. Gwent said bluntly.
‘But these are not our real bodies!’
‘No matter – the psychological shock of a death here will result in the true death of your body in the real world. And I have not seen Fate in such a vindictive mood in all the years that I have been trapped here. Drink the tea; take refuge; then seek the Storyteller. He will be able to facilitate your return home, should you still desire it after you’ve spent some time in my world.’
Rachel reached for her cup and began to gulp it down. I hesitated and took a sip. The taste immediately brought back the most unpleasant sensation of déjà vu; I recalled the look in Fate’s eyes as he first saw me drink the tea in his cottage, as though I was some rat he was anesthetising for his experiment. I wanted to approach every single one of his wretched monks and tear off their heads. I took another, much larger gulp, and complained that my tongue was burnt.
‘A burnt tongue is better than death by a hooded monk!’ Rachel said quietly.
‘I will give you both your real names,’ Mr. Gwent insisted. Beads of sweat were glistening across his brow and he unfurled a handkerchief to dab at them. ‘You will be Jaime, Rachel will be Rachel. You will have free will.’
‘And this Storyteller?’ I cried.
‘Find him – they say he is the only answer.’
‘So he is no more than a legend? Why have you not found him?’
Rachel showed me her cup – all that remained was one final mouthful. 107
‘All legends are rooted in truth!’ Mr. Gwent’s hands furrowed his hair. ‘Pray, drink!’
His words were interrupted by the shattering of glass. A chill blew into the room and swirled around our frozen forms; there was movement beneath the velvet curtain, the sound of a hand undoing the latch of the window. Rachel downed the last of her drink and set down her cup with a querulous bang.
I took a gulp of tea, and another, and another. Every mouthful filled me with the rage of surrender, the despair of defeat. Mr. Gwent lifted the sheaves of his novel and began to read, Jaime woke up to find himself in his flat in Manchester, a small room above the record shop that he owned …
One last gulp. The curtains whirled; the shadows laid out by the gas lamps slanted into italics as a monk climbed into the room. But Rachel and I were already fading, like candle flames being extinguished, fire turned to smoke. Mr. Gwent’s narration was filling me like a liturgical chant. I lifted my eyes to the housekeeper and saw in her face an expression of Fate’s, a parting message from him: a look of scorn and fury and, perhaps, sorrow, for the loss of his playthings. The room was losing colour; sound was losing meaning, becoming noise, and the air was all wind and I could no longer tell if the screams I heard were mine or Rachel’s and I found myself crying out for my mother, and then all was gone and there was peace, and dark and a sense of new beginning, and in that beginning was the word … 108