Darkness: When such a man comes of age,
there comes a period of darkness, when emptiness and
disgust lie all about and there is no beauty in the world.
The lump of meteor-metal the boy carried went cold
and empty of Power.
Testimony, I:4
“Damian, any more alcohol and your wits will be the worse for it tomorrow.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You will be upright and conversing, but hardly at your peak.”
“My wits were at a peak today, and what good did it do us?”
“I did warn you that a round of the hospitals and morgues would be pure slog with little hope of success. If you were to permit the police—”
“No police.”
“I assure you I am capable of inventing a story to account for my enquiries into one Yolanda Adler.”
“I came to you because I thought it might let me avoid the police. If you can’t do it, say the word and I’ll go.”
“I am merely suggesting that using the established machinery of the official enquiry agents could save us time.”
“No police. Yolanda and Estelle have just begun to settle in here. To start out life with a police enquiry and a scandal would be too much.”
“I appreciate your concern. And I am willing to circumvent the police force in order to salvage your privacy. However, it will make things all the more difficult if I am saddled with a bleary-eyed and half-intoxicated partner on the morrow. I ask again, Damian, please stop.”
“Yes, all right. There. Happy?”
“Thank you.”
“It isn’t as if you had never indulged.”
“Yes, thanks to Watson, all the world knows my peccadilloes. Do you wish to bath first, or shall I?”
“You go ahead. Although I’d have thought we could afford something a bit grander than this hole with a shared bath down the hall.”
“Inconvenience is the price of invisibility.”
“Holy Christ, that was cold! Was the geyser working when you bathed?”
“I looked at the device and decided not to risk an explosion.”
“Well, save your penny, it doesn’t work anyway. Brrr. And shaving-cold water is why I grew a beard in the first place, when I couldn’t afford hot water—they sell it in shops, in Shanghai—and I grew tired of savaging my jaw-line with a razor. It looks as if I’ll now have a full beard rather than just the trimmings.”
“One does indeed dread the pull of the blade against cold skin.”
“I can’t see you in a beard.”
“I have worn one from time to time, when a case suggested it. I cultivated a goatee in America before the War, but the longest I had a full beard was when I travelled in the Himalayas. The sensation of its removal, in an open-air barber’s in Delhi with half the street bearing witness, was exquisite.”
“America, eh? Where did you go?”
“Chicago, for the most part.”
“Do you think these bed-clothes have been laundered in the last month?”
“I should doubt it.”
“Perhaps I’ll sleep on top of them.”
“The night is warm.”
“And use my clothes as a pillow.”
“Head lice can indeed be a nuisance.”
“You sure you don’t want a small night-cap, to help you sleep?”
“Damian, I—”
“Yes, yes, you’re right. Clear-headed.”
“Shall I get the lights?”
“No! Leave them. For a bit. If you don’t mind.”
“As you wish.”
“So. Did you go to New Jersey? When you were in America?”
“I passed through on my way from New York, that is all.”
“I went there once. With Mother. When I was nine.”
“Which would have been 1903?”
“That’s right. Why?”
“1903 was the year I left London for Sussex.”
“And took up beekeeping.”
“Yes.”
“Did you truly not know?”
“About you?”
“About me, about her, about …”
“Your mother was a remarkably clever woman. Too clever, I fear, for the men in her life. What she told me, I believed.”
“Wanted to believe.”
“I did not wish to be sent away. I … was very fond of your mother. She was an extraordinary woman.”
“She was lonely. A son can only do so much.”
“I fear she may have been too clever for her own good, as well.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“In any case, good night.”
“I shall turn off the—”
“Leave it! One of them, if you don’t mind. The small one.”
“As you like. Good night, Damian.”