Kessler’s pier looked different in the light of day, or rather in the luminous haze of the summer afternoon. Nicholas stood on the shaky wooden decking with Hector at his side. The time had come; they were to travel down to the estuary and find their place beneath the mouth of the Thames. Solli and Albi stood behind them, close to the alleyway. They had said their goodbyes and it had been hard. Solli hated showing any emotion that was softer than rage. He had not spoken since Hector embraced him and wished him a good life. A cannonball made of tears sat in his throat and he turned his attention away from the water and stared back up towards the street and the hard, unflinching sanctity of his violent life. Hector stared into the swollen water. Nicholas pointed at the hanging tarpaulin that concealed the dented bugle.
“Call him,” he said to Albi.
Ten minutes later the Cromwell could be seen heading towards them. It tied in against the jetty, the pilot’s son and Albi tying the ropes. The passengers were stepping over the gunnels when the Patriarch appeared. He, like his boat and his pier, appeared totally different in daylight.
“Afternoon, gentiles,” he said and then stopped speaking while he looked at Nicholas. Hector had seen the two men together before. Seen them ignore each other, on and off the boat. All that had suddenly changed. The Patriarch took one step forward and knelt, bowing solemnly so that his forehead touched the deck. Nicholas twisted his head around, making the gnashing sound that Hector was becoming used to. When he turned back, he was somebody else. He placed his hand on the pilot’s yarmulke and whispered. Only the boat and the river moved.
Hector watched the pier with its sticklike figures diminish in the haze and the first slouched bend in the river. Then he turned to look forward, the chugging steamy throb of the Cromwell’s heart beneath his feet. An insignificant momentum above the churning mass of the epic Thames, where deep down, the silt of Roman bones gritted with a pumice of wild oxen and the infinitesimal grains of gigantic mammoths. All ground down to form a shifting dim landscape, where older stains of petrified forests darkened the restless grey. In this curd, last week’s murder merrily bobbed in its sunken slow motions of chains and concrete, alongside discarded prams and bits of nameless ships and all the dissolving tippings of the city. This was the pool bed and a long way from the soft sands that they were heading towards. It was also unlike the marshy ground of the upper Thames where Nicholas had been before. They were moving into wider bends that swirled across its mighty snakelike flexings. The entrances to the docks on each side were getting larger. Top-heavy vessels queued to be let into their labyrinths of canals and woodyards, warehouses and barges. The trepidation that sat like a constant bird on Hector’s shoulders said nothing. It also stared out across the water and would have sleepily preened its feathers, if it had had any.
They were passing Greenwich when Hector started asking questions. Nicholas ignored the first attempts as if deaf. They were both at the front of the boat, the fresh wind buffeting their faces. Hector was quiet for a moment and then he decided to changed his tactic. They were passing a squat lighthouse on the north shore, which marked the entrance to the river Lea. Large spheres and huge cagelike cones leant at odd angles around the tower. Some were painted red. Men climbed over their imposing surfaces.
“Trinity Buoy Wharf,” came the gruff tones of the pilot from behind them. “That’s where they make ’em and repair the ones broken by the sea.”
Hector grinned politely and turned his back on the information.
“Nicholas, tell me for one minute about why you are different from all the others?”
Nicholas turned and flattened his perfect hair with one hand and began his answer without repetition, hesitation, or deviation. “Because I have lived longer and escaped the forest earlier, having the opportunity to collect unused parts of fading men to gather myself and thus become as I am today.”
“Will others come out and become like you?”
“Oh, I doubt it, it’s far too late for those left behind, they should have slept their way out years and years ago.” He suddenly slapped his hand over his mouth, saying, “Oh no, repetition of years.”
Hector pushed on. “Will you get any older, ever?”
“That’s a good question, but I don’t know the answer. I know it’s possible to get younger while sleeping, but don’t know about the other way round.”
“How do you get younger?”
Nicholas looked back at Hector, pointed, and laughed, twisting his head backwards over his stiff neck.
“You are so funny, Hector, both funny ha-ha and funny peculiar. I can never get younger. I was talking about the Before Ones, the ones that left the forest long before us, some of them were excavated as children. They have grown up as Rumour, lived so long as humans that they have forgotten what they are.”
“Do you have contact with them at all?”
Nicholas stroked his chin and looked across the churning water, its brightness making him squint.
“Not really, I just know they are there.” And then with a bolt of enthusiasm he continued. “Many of my kind will be making the plural. One of the old ones has been in your world for so long that she has forgotten what she is. So her plural is made with a fellow who is half Rumour and half Erstwhile, back in the old caves of Africa.” He slapped his thigh and twisted savagely to gnash at his collar, his weird energetic giggling sending the pilot scurrying back into his wheelhouse.
The boat bobbed and its engine throbbed alongside the thin nailed-together jetty that looked like it had been made out of the charred, gnawed bones of ancient chickens. Hector’s bad memories of another boating trip flapped back. The jetty shook with the vibrations from the Cromwell and Hector felt it in his hands.
“Is this safe to walk on?” he said in a voice that nobody heard.
The Patriarch was again prostrate before Nicholas, who had his soft hand on the old pilot’s head.
“Honoured malokhim, will we ever see the likes of you or your kind again?” the old man asked, without ever raising his eyes.
“Bad pennies always turn up,” Nicholas joked, removing his hand and walking to the gunwales and daintily stepping over onto the complaining, creaking structure.
“Come, Professor,” he said, offering his arm to his hesitant companion. Seaweed peeled away beneath them, taking black gleaming muscles back into the salty water as they walked along the narrow boardwalk. Hector looked down into their ripples.
“Poor demented things,” said Nicholas.
“Who?”
“Those sea mice, gone mad with the changing of the tides. Twice a day their world changes. One minute they’re enjoying the taste of warm shit soup coming out of London. The next it’s all cold, salty brine. Poor things, moon-cast like the lunatics of Bedlam.”
The pilot and his son held on to the firm handrails and stared, transfixed. Nicholas remembered that they were there and called back over his shoulder, “Be careful not to miss your tide,” and as if an afterthought, he said, “Take care of Hyman and young Solomon for me.”
The skeletal wood became firm ground and Hector rushed forward, starting to breathe again. The engine changed tone behind them and the solid little boat slid backwards into the churning estuary. All the men waved, but the Erstwhile was already moving on, his interest in the past vanished. They walked into the broad evening of the open countryside, Nicholas taking exaggerated lungfuls of Kentish air as if he were back bathing in the limelight on the stage of the Pavilion theatre. Hector looked around him at the slump of marshlands on one side and broad cultivated fields on the other. They were walking on a slow downward gradient and any sign of the estuary vanished under the hedgerows. Hector became unsure why they were walking away from the water.
“Aren’t we going in here…?” he stuttered, facing back into the direction they had just come.
“Not yet, Professor, the tide is rising. That would never do, we would be washed back to Shadwell after taking the second step. Anyway, don’t you want a hearty supper, condemned man’s privilege and all that? They might even have the odd crust or a bone and a bowl of water for the cunt of a bitch.” He chortled while Hector blushed under his scarf and new hair.
Eventually he said, “Who might?”
“The trusty publican of the Rose and the Crown.”
“We are going to an inn?” His disbelief was lost amid the calls of a flock of gulls swooping inland.
“A pub, Hector, a pub. You are not in Baden-Württemberg now.”
The old man still found this strange being’s knowledge of his life unnerving, even after all their weird encounters.
“We must blend in with the locals tonight.”
The idea of Nicholas blending in with any normal humans was difficult enough, but to merge with what Hector suspected would be ignorant yokels, of the kind that he had encountered in Southampton, was grotesque.
“Are we staying there?”
“Yes, of course, we have to change your dream shutters and your weight, that would have been impossible in London, wouldn’t it?”
Hector had no idea what he was talking about, but nodded because it was the easiest thing to do.
“Are they expecting us?”
Nicholas stopped dead, beaming. He waved his hands about as if conducting the birdsong, making skipping motions on the rough road.
“Look about you, Hector, this is Hoo Allhallows. I don’t think they have ever expected anybody.”
They walked for another fifteen minutes or so, until the squat spire of the village church showed above the small bent trees and low-lying bushes, the humps of a few houses rising out of the seagrass and reeds. They tuned onto the rising path that skirted the wall of the cemetery, up into the crossing of a larger road where the Rose and the Crown sat stoutly at its corner.
“There she blows!” said Nicholas with glee.
They pushed open its solid door and stooped into the musky darkness that was constructed of the reassuring smell of log smoke, stale beer, and tobacco, with a distant hint of cooking to heighten the effect. Two customers sat at opposite ends of the room. The only sound was the fire dimly crackling and the drip of an unseen tap.
“Good eventide, gentlemen,” said Nicholas theatrically.
The customers ignored him, but a shuffling could be heard behind the bar and a long-faced pinched woman appeared. She looked them up and down and then put her hands on the blades of emaciated hips.
“Yes?” she said through her long doglegged nose.
“We would like a room to share and dinner for tonight,” Nicholas announced.
“Ain’t got none. Out of season. No call for it now.” There was no flow in her words, just chunks of statement that fell out of her large, thin-lipped mouth without effort or finesse.
“A front room overlooking the sea,” said the angel as if he had not heard her previous emphatic statement.
“You deaf?” she said. “We ain’t got none.”
“But it must have one big bed, a dooble, so that we can sleep together.”
One of the customers’ chairs grated on the dark stone floor as he turned to look at these oddities.
“What?” she said, her mouth curling as if by the harsh application of sour invisible pliers.
“A dooble so that we can snuggle up.”
Hector was now very embarrassed and had no idea why Nicholas was talking like this and why he was pronouncing things in a very strange way. The woman was speechless and both customers were looking over their shoulders.
“We are Germans, you see,” added Nicholas, beaming.
The hag flushed and filled her scrawny lungs with rank air, ready to give what Hector had learned was called a “mouthful.” But before she spoke, Nicholas placed two heavy gold coins noisily on the bar, very much in the manner of a conjurer who had just performed the conclusion to a lengthy and complicated trick. The sight of the gold stoppered her mouth and the pent-up air escaped through her shrill nostrils in a wet squeak.
“And this one is for you, my lovely,” said Nicholas, advancing the third coin towards the baggy collar of her worn-out dress. But finding no cleavage there he daintily posted it in the slit of her mouth.
She instantly changed. Softened and unfolded. It was as if her bones had just inflated and a radiating warmth had suffused her body. An astonishing pulchritude reshaped her stance, pallor, and total demeanour. Hector involuntarily took a step back. She wiggled and blushed and started speaking in a soft befuddled manner, her words slurring over the gold. Nicholas pointed at the coin in her mouth and she retrieved it, flushed again, and curtsied.
“Just the one night, sirs?”
“Yes, my dear,” said Nicholas kindly.
She whisked the coins off the bar and Hector noticed that the irregular disks had a portrait of a surly wide-headed man imprinted on them. Nicholas saw his curiosity and winked.
“Nero,” he said.
Before any more could be said or choked upon, the woman was back with two carefully balanced glasses before her.
“Speciality of the house,” she said.
Nicholas beamed and brought the dark red liquid to his lips.
“Ah! The blood, my favourite,” he said.
“Blood?” said Hector peering into the heavy glass apprehensively.
“Port and brandy mixed like us, making the blood.”
Hector sniffed the glass.
“Of the hero. Nelson’s blood.” He then turned towards the room and its gawping occupants. “To the hero, Britannia and death to all our foes abroad!”
The two elderly customers attempted to stand and raise their glasses, but before they could drink, Nicholas had quaffed his and returned to the attentions of the bar lady. At that moment another presence appeared behind the bar. A grim, unshaven man in an apron. He was just about to speak, his eyes fixed suspiciously on the strangers, when his wife grabbed his hairy wrist and opened her hand, so that the gold glimmered.
“Two more, please, patron, in our room,” said Nicholas, and stepped past them through the bar and turned onto a broad wooden stair.
Hector followed, not wanting to be left alone surrounded by stares and unfriendly questions. He sipped the warming drink and followed.
The stair turned and narrowed on each landing; their room was in the eaves. It was tight and low-ceilinged with dismal furnishings in many different styles, the only common feature being the shared exhaustion and paucity of colour.
The bed looked overstuffed and Hector already knew that it was lumpy and squeaked.
“Excellent,” said his elated friend, who had to stoop as he approached the wall to open the small squat window onto a view of the church and churchyard, and beyond it the gigantic far-off estuary. A purplish light smouldered from its waters laced with the shadows of clouds that floated under the glow of the setting sun.
“Magnificent,” said Nicholas, who in his eagerness had torn the lace curtain aside and entirely dislodged both it and its string that had held it in the same place, undisturbed for years. He shook it away from himself like an irritating cobweb, and again did more pantomime breathing. After they settled, he announced that they must make a few preliminary adjustments before eating.
“Please lie on the floor, Hector, after removing your shoes and jacket.” His voice was without humour or warmth. In place of kindness was matter-of-fact abruptness, which Hector was sure that Nicholas had learned from all his years of listening to English doctors. So he did as he was told. Nicholas did the same and came to sit behind his head. He placed his socked feet on the old man’s shoulder and wrapped his long elegant fingers around his jaw and cranium. He tightened his grip and Hector felt panic as he realised that his fragile spine was taut in this being’s severe hold.
“Now, Hector Ruben Schumann, I want you to remember and see the first time you saw Rachel’s beautiful naked body.”
Hector instantly saw her, saw her before he had the chance to become outraged at the request and at the same time that Nicholas wrenched his head sideways and up. There was a crack like a pistol being fired as Hector’s body was pushed hard away from his head by the angel’s steel-hard pistoning feet. He then spun the body sideways, the neck crunching again, and a white sickening light hit him like an express train. Nicholas had twisted his own head backwards and fastened his teeth into the collar of his shirt. He looked like a skinned animal. All the curves and puffiness of gentle humanity had been extinguished, all the subtleties of expression instantly drained, the muscles knotted and the veins standing proud like strangling rope. His mouth had extended, unnaturally revealing row upon row of snarling teeth. The force he was exerting was enough to snap three men’s necks. The inert mats and rugs of the room slithered across the gritty bedroom floor in alarming life as struggling feet kicked and hammered. Hector knew he was going to die, but not why, not now. Why like this? His legs were thrashing mechanically when the right impacted with the leg of the cast-iron bed and the left kicked a china bowl under the bed, sending it skidding and smashing against the wall. It was the last thing he saw and heard before a wave of deep black nausea snuffed him out.
Something was moving between a flutter and roll. It was also like a pendulum, only irregular and faint. He did not know if his eyes were open or closed. The white ghostlike stiffness could have been on either side of his sight, consciousness, or life. Gradually he felt his toes and fingers move and the white thing no longer was far away but was near and growing ordinary. He could make out the landscape behind it. A long plateau stretched for miles, grey-brown and unbroken by trees. A heavy dense sky kept the landscape compressed and stationery. Far far away he could see the irregular glimmer of shining domes set amid jagged mountains of precipices of ice. How had he gotten here? To this woebegone but exotic realm. He tried to move his head but it felt numb and limp. A breeze moved across his face; it smelt of seaweed and cinnamon, of oceans and stale infancy. The fluttering thing was moving in response to the breeze that gusted over and around everything. When it subsided it slowed to almost stillness. It was the lightest thing in all the surrounding darkness. It had words written upon it. Were these the words given at the gate of eternity? The fabled scroll of the Apocalypse? The utterance of final discorporation? He strained to decipher it and understand its meaning, hovering in the great plateau, willing his focus to pull against the flatness and endless distance before him. He read the words slowly in the darkness that flickered and nudged meaning into nonsense, and for a moment was reminded of the text of ants that he had never really seen. But as his eyes deepened again he saw that these were not that twitching scrawl. The letters were now as clear and precise as if painstakingly written by the hand of an ingenious and unskilled scribe. He tried again to understand the esoteric meaning, which was written in the form of a request or command.
After what must have been hours, another light bloomed in the room and Nicholas said, “Ah! Awake at last, I thought you were going to sleep down there forever.” Nicholas lit another oil lamp and the room flowed into order and logic. Hector was not standing up but was lying on his side, his head resting on a cushion and his body covered by the candlewick bedspread. He was staring directly under the bed towards the far wall where the china bowl had broken. This had been the landscape that he had so feared and pondered on for hours.
“Don’t try to move yet, I will help you up in a moment.”
A slight breeze made the lamps shudder and then settle. The flapping whiteness returned. It was a small handwritten sign that had been tied to the side of the bed. Somehow one of its strings had broken and now it dangled in the breeze by one. Again he read its erudition.
Will guests please refrain from placing the used chamber pot under the bed, because the steam rusts the springs.
Nicholas lifted Hector to his feet and guided him to a misshapen, difficult chair that felt as if it had been upholstered with bricks. He held one hand to the back of Hector’s neck while moving him.
“How do you feel, my friend?”
“Tired. I feel as if I have been travelling for miles. What happened, why was I on the floor?”
“Oh, just resting before dinner. Are you hungry?”
“Yes, very.”
A child and the flouncing woman brought their food to the door with a jug of dark beer. They ate in silence. Outside the night had closed in around the pub, making the room feel snug and the rest of the world dark, cold, and distant. A few warming sounds rose up through the floor, telling them that they were not alone. The chicken was perfectly cooked and the vegetables full of taste. So much so that Hector thought them the best he had ever eaten.
“What did you say the name of this place was again?”
“Allhallows on the Hoo peninsula. Allhallows at the end of the world.”
“It’s the best food I have ever tasted.”
“It’s not the place, it’s your senses being reborn. It is happening in advance of our plural, tonight our sleep in this little hutch will complete the process.”
The church bell sounded as Hector’s eyes began to close uncontrollably.
“Time for the wooden hill,” said Nicholas.
“What hill?”
“The wooden hill to Bedfordshire.”
“You said Kent before.”
“Bed. Bett, kleiner spatz.”
Nobody had called him that in seventy years. Only his mother, so long ago. He stood and walked over to the bed, took off his shirt and trousers, and crawled in between the chilly sheets. He was asleep in seconds.
Nicholas washed in the room down the corridor. He was thinking about his radio and all the voices he would miss. The only thing he would miss. He carried the lamp back to the bedroom and looked at the man-child curled up under the blankets. Tonight, all night long he would hold him, locked on tight pressure points and speak the psalms of release: the charms of dispersal. Then the song of joining.