The Children of Dr Lyall
John Connolly
Even amid rubble and dust, there was money to be made.
The German bombers had reduced whole streets to scattered bricks and memories, and Felder couldn’t see anyone coming back to live in them any time soon, not unless they fancied their chances with the rats. Some areas were still so dangerous that their previous occupants hadn’t even been permitted to scour the ruins for any possessions that might be salvaged. Instead they could only stand behind the cordons and weep at what had been lost, and at what might yet be recovered when the buildings were finally declared safe, or when the walls and floors were either pulled down or collapsed of their own volition.
‘Buried treasure’, that’s what Felder called it: money, jewellery, clothing – anything that could be bartered or sold, but you had to be careful. The coppers didn’t look kindly on looters, and in case Felder and his gang needed any reminders on that score they had only to visit the Ville, or Pentonville Prison, where Young Tam was doing five years, and they’d be five hard years too because one of the coppers had broken Tam’s right leg so badly that he’d be dragging it behind him like a piece of twisted firewood for the rest of his life.
For the most part, though, the Old Bill weren’t up to much any more, weakened as they were by the demands of war, and Felder and his boys could outrun most of them. Young Tam was just unlucky, that was all. Even then, it could have gone much worse for him: rumours abounded that Blackie Harper over in Seven Dials had been shot by a soldier while stealing suits from a bombed-out gentleman’s outfitters but the details of the killing were hushed up for the sake of morale, it being bad enough having Germans slaughtering Londoners without our own boys giving them a helping hand. It was said, too, that Billy Hill, who was carving a reputation for himself as the leading figure in London’s criminal underworld, was very interested to know the name of the solder who had fired the fatal bullet, for Blackie Harper had been an associate of Billy’s, and good staff were hard to come by in wartime.
But Billy Hill and his kind operated on another level from men like Felder, even if Felder aspired to greater heights. Felder, Greaves and Knight: they sounded like a firm of solicitors, but they were just bottom-feeders, scouring the dirt for food while trying to avoid being gobbled up by the bigger fish. All three, along with the unfortunate Young Tam, had been liberated by the Germans at the start of the war, when the prisons freed any man with fewer than three months left to serve, or any borstal boy with six months under his belt. Knight, Greaves and Young Tam fell under the latter category. Felder was older, and already on his third conviction for receiving stolen goods when he was released in 1939. He was spared conscription because he had lost his left eye to a catapulted stone when he was eight years old, and was careful to exaggerate the paucity of vision in his remaining organ. Young Tam, meanwhile, was mentally defective, and Knight had come over from Northern Ireland to find work in London only a few weeks before he was locked up in borstal for assault, and was therefore technically ineligible for conscription, although he hadn’t bothered to present himself to the relevant authorities in order to clarify his status. Finally, Greaves had spectacularly flat feet. All four, even Young Tam, should have been required to do civilian work under the terms of their exemption, but they did their best to remain under His Majesty’s radar, for they would not grow wealthy digging potatoes or cleaning up after the sick and dying in one of the city’s crowded hospitals. Quite the little band they were, Felder had sometimes thought: a one-eyed man, an idiot, a flatfoot and a Belfast Protestant with an accent so thick that he might as well have been speaking Swahili for all the sense he made to anyone but his closest associates. It seemed that Billy Hill, high on his throne, needed to have few concerns about them for the time being.
And now they were three. It was a blessing, in a way, that Young Tam was no longer with them. True, he would always do as Felder told him, and he was strong, and good with his fists, but Felder’s ambitions did not allow for a mental cripple. Billy Hill had no idiots working under him, because idiots wouldn’t make a man rich. Early in the war, Hill’s gang had used a car to break into Carrington’s of Regent Street and nab six thousand pounds’ worth of jewellery, a sum that boggled Felder even now. Hill was selling everything from silk to sausage skins, and it was whispered that the war had already made him a millionaire. By contrast, Felder’s biggest score had come in 1941, when he and Knight had been fortunate enough to find themselves only streets away from the Café de Paris on Coventry Street as the supposedly secure basement ballroom was blown to pieces by a pair of German bombs that descended down a ventilation shaft, killing over thirty people. Under the guise of evacuating the wounded, Felder and Knight had stripped the dead and dying of rings, watches and wallets. They’d made hundreds on that one night, but things were never as good for them again.
Now he and Knight stood on a patch of waste ground that had once been a redbrick terrace, and stared at a house silvered by moonlight. It stood like a single jagged tooth in the ancient mouth of the street. Its survival had no logic to it, but then Felder had long ago learned that, like the mind of God, the nature of bombs was ultimately unknowable. Some hit and did not explode. Some took down one house or shop while sparing all else around, or, as the unfortunate patrons of the Café de Paris had learned, struck with an uncanny precision at the only vulnerable point in an otherwise secure structure. And then there were bombs that annihilated whole communities and left, as in this case, a single residence standing as a monument to all that once had been. The house was slightly larger than the ones that had been lost, but not unusually so: a lower-middle class house in a working-class street, perhaps. But Felder had cased it after his keen eye spotted the quality of the curtains on the windows, and a quick glance through one of the front windows had revealed what looked like original paintings on the walls, shelves of books, and, most enticing of all, a sideboard full of polished silverware. Discreet inquiries established that it was the home of a widow, Mrs Lyall, and she lived alone, her husband having departed to the next world during the final days of the last war.
As a rule, Felder tried to avoid burgling occupied houses: it was too risky, and brought with it the likelihood of violence if one of the occupants awoke. Felder wasn’t above inflicting violence but, like any clever man, he avoided it when he could. Still, times were hard, and growing harder by the day. Despite his ambitions, Felder had resigned himself to the fact that he needed to ally himself to another for a time if he was to improve his position in life, and Billy Hill’s gang seemed to offer the best opportunities for wealth and promotion. Hill would require an offering, though, a token both of Felder’s potential and his esteem for the crime boss. That was why, after some thought, Felder had elected to cut Greaves out of the evening’s work – in fact, to cut him loose forever. Greaves was weak and slow, and too good-natured for the likes of Billy Hill. He also had principles, to the extent that he had refused to accept a cut of the Café de Paris proceeds offered to him as a gesture of goodwill by Felder, even though he had not been present on the night in question. Robbing the houses of the dead was one thing, it appeared: stripping their bodies was another. Felder had no time for such sensitivities, and he doubted that Billy Hill would either.
Felder had a cosh in his coat pocket, Knight a knife and a homemade knuckleduster fashioned from wood embedded with screws and nuts, which he preferred to the more traditional models easily available on the street, Knight being a craftsman in his way. The weapons were only for show. Neither man anticipated much trouble from an elderly woman but the old could be stubborn and sometimes the threat of violence was required to loosen their tongues.
Felder turned to Knight.
‘Ready?’
‘Aye.’
And together the two men descended towards the house.
Later, as he was dying – or rather, as one of him was dying – Felder would wonder if the house and its occupants had been waiting for him, if, perhaps, they had always been waiting for him, understanding that the laws of probability, the complex crosshatching of cause and effect, suggested his path and theirs must surely cross. He didn’t consider Knight’s part in the process. Knight did as he was told, and so Felder’s decision to target this particular widow was the moment at which the die was cast. But Knight could have made a determination of his own at any of a hundred, a thousand forks in the road between Felder’s conversation with him about the house and the moment that they entered it. After all, thought Felder, as he bled from wounds unseen, wasn’t that the old woman’s point? Not one, but many. Not infinite, but as close to infinity as made no difference to a man like Felder, especially not at that most crucial juncture of all, the line between living and dying, between existence and non-existence.
And, yes, some small consolation might have been derived from the knowledge that this was the end for only one Felder, had it not been the end for the only Felder he had known, and would ever know.
But all that came later. For now there was only the house, its windows hooded, like the eyes of hawks, by the ubiquitous blackout curtains. They did not enter by the front door but climbed the still-intact wall that surrounded the back garden and found, not entirely to their surprise, that the kitchen door was unlocked. Once inside, they saw that the tidy little kitchen, with its pine table and two chairs, was lit by a candle encased in a glass lamp, and there were similar candles in the hall, and halfway up the stairs. Beneath the stairwell was a locked door, leading down, they presumed, to a basement. They heard no sound but the ticking of an unseen clock.
It was Knight who first noticed the patterns on the walls in the hall, taking them initially to be some strange manner of floral wallpaper and then, as he drew nearer, deciding – still erroneously – that what he was seeing was a network of cracks in the plaster, almost like the craquelure on the surface of a painting. (Knight had shared little of his background with Felder and the others. Equally, they had not troubled themselves to inquire into another man’s business if it did not concern them, especially when the man in question gave no sign that such an intrusion would give him great pleasure in any case, but Felder had come to realise that Knight knew something of art and literature, and was better educated that his thick dialect might have led one to assume. In fact, Knight came from a house filled with paintings, and a family that talked easily of abrasure and blanching, gresso and glair. Had he been privy, before he died, to the insights gifted to Felder, then he might have appreciated more the story told by the patterns on the walls.)
Both men drew closer, Felder’s fingers reaching out to trace what was gradually revealed to be ink work on the otherwise unadorned walls of the house, an intricate design that resembled most closely the thin branches of some form of creeping briar, as though the interior had been invaded by a pestilential vegetation, its greenery now lost to the breath of winter, had it ever enjoyed foliage to begin with. The effect was further enhanced by the addition of red dots at apparently random points, like winter fruits somehow clinging to a dead bush. Beside each red sphere was a pair of initials: E.J., R.P., L.C., but never the same combination of letters twice.
And although it was impossible to find a logic to the entirety of the tracery, it did seem to Felder and Knight that, on an individual level, its creator began with a single line which then split after an inch or so, one line continuing on to divide again while the other terminated in a horizontal dash over the vertical, like a dead end. Yet even here deviations from the norm sometimes occurred in the form of a series of dashes that, on occasion, eventually found their way back to the main thread. Similarly, numbers were appended to certain lines, which Felder took to be dates or, in particularly involved cases, hours, minutes and seconds. The designs covered the walls up to the ceiling, a few even extending on to the ceiling itself, a stepladder by the front door permitting access to such heights. They continued along the wall beside the stairs, and Felder presumed, up to the floor above their heads. The kitchen, by contrast, appeared devoid of any adornments, largely because it was barely spacious enough to accommodate its cupboards, sink and a four-ring gas cooker, until Knight, in a fit of curiosity, returned there and opened one of the doors on the wall, revealing a further network of bifurcating branches drawn, and even cut, into the interior panelling.
Again, waiting for death – a death – to approach, Felder saw another crucial juncture here, a point in events when lives might have been saved, when both men could have turned and left the house, for although they had not yet spoken, still their shared unease was evident on their faces. Then Felder thought of Billy Hill, and a share in the wealth that the war was bringing to those ruthless enough to seize opportunities when they were offered. Hill would not have turned away in the face of such inky manifestations of madness. Instead he would have reckoned the creator more vulnerable still to his predations, and honed in on easy pickings.
Beyond the kitchen lay a dining room, empty and dusty, with a closed pair of interconnecting doors leading to the front room. As with the hall, the walls were covered with lines.
Only now did Felder become aware of a presence in the front room, the one in which he had earlier glimpsed the books and paintings and, most interesting of all, the glass-fronted cabinet filled with silverware. It was the merest shifting of shadow against shadow, and the slightest exhalation of breath. A chair creaked, and Felder recognised the sounds of a sleeper responding to some small disturbance, such as the unfamiliar noise created by two men entering a house that was not theirs. Footsteps shuffled on carpet. The door began to open.
Knight reacted first. He was past Felder before the older man could even make a determination of the situation. Knight pushed hard against the door. There was a single shout – a female voice, old, querulous – and then a series of muffled impacts beneath which Felder discerned the breaking of fragile bones, like a quail being consumed behind closed lips.
Felder entered the room to find Knight straddling an old woman on the floor, one knee on her chest, his fist raised to strike again, her eyes already assuming the strange vacancy of hurt and shock. Felder gripped Knight’s wrist before he could strike her again.
‘Stop!’ he said. ‘For Christ’s sake, you’ll kill her!’
He felt the downward pull of Knight’s right hand, the urge to harm, and then the tension went out of the younger man. Knight rose slowly and wiped his hand across his face. It left a smear of the woman’s blood on his nose and cheeks. Knight rarely acted in this way, with heat and anger. He was, by nature, a cold being. Gradually, the rage went out of his eyes.
No, not just rage, saw Felder: fear too.
‘I – ’ said Knight. He looked down on the old woman and shook his head. ‘I – ’ he repeated, but nothing more came to him.
Felder knelt and gently took the woman beneath the chin, turning her head so that she was facing him. Her nose was broken, that much was clear, and her left eye was already closing. He thought that Knight might also have broken her left cheekbone, maybe even damaging the eye socket itself. Her mouth was bloodied, the upper lip split, but, as with Knight, something of her true self was now returning after the attack. Her right eye was bright. She tried to rise. Felder helped her to her feet, aided by Knight, even though the woman weighed little more than the clothing she wore, and they almost carried her to the armchair in which she had been dozing.
‘Get her some water,’ said Felder, ‘and a cold cloth for her injuries. Jesus.’
Knight did as he was told. Tenderly, Felder brushed a length of grey hair back from the woman’s face and tucked it behind her right ear.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘That wasn’t meant to happen.’
The woman didn’t respond. Her single undamaged eye merely regarded Felder with a kind of disappointment.
Knight returned, a dripping tea towel in one hand, a cup in the other. From the right pocket of his jacket, Felder noticed, peeked a bottle of brandy. Felder reached for the cloth, but Knight paused at the door, his eye fixed on the wall in which the window lay. Felder followed his gaze. More lines, more forks, more patterns, more red, inky berries. On three sides the walls were filled with bookcases and cabinets. Only here, around the window, was there space to continue the house’s peculiar decoration.
‘Never mind all that,’ said Felder. ‘Give me the towel.’
His words broke the spell, and Knight handed over the damp towel and the cup of water. Felder used the cloth to clean away some of the blood. He had hoped that its pressure might also keep some of the swelling down on the damaged eye, but when he touched the towel to the area the woman gave a pained yelp, and Felder knew that his initial suspicion had been correct: Knight had broken some of the bones in her orbital rim. Felder forced her take water, then emptied the rest on to the rug and indicated that Knight should fill the cup with brandy instead. Knight opened the bottle, took a long draught for himself, and then poured two fingers of brandy into the cup. Felder made the woman drink once more, and used the cloth to wipe away the trickle that dribbled down her chin.
‘It’ll help,’ he said.
He hooked her hand around the cup. Her respiration was shallow, as though it pained her to take deep breaths. Felder saw again Knight’s left knee buried in the woman’s tiny, flat chest. He held his hand over the spot, not wanting to touch her breast.
‘Does it hurt here?’ he asked.
She gave a small nod. Felder looked away.
‘You should go,’ said the old woman. She spoke the words on an exhalation, wheezing them out.
‘What?’ said Felder.
‘You should go. They won’t like it.’
‘Who?’
‘You told me that she lived alone!’ said Knight. A clean blade appeared in his hand, extending itself like tempered moonlight.
‘Shut up,’ said Felder, his attention fixed on the woman. ‘Who?’ he asked again, but she did not reply, and her right eye flicked away from him to the bookshelves over the fireplace.
Felder stood. He turned to Knight.
‘If anyone else lived here we’d have heard from them by now, with all that racket you made,’ he said. ‘Still, search the house. We’re in this now, and we may as well milk it for all we can. Jewellery, money, you know the drill.’
‘Why don’t you ask her where she keeps it all?’
‘Have you seen the size of this house? It’s not Buckingham Palace. There can’t be more than a few rooms upstairs.’
‘I know, but – ’
‘Maybe you want to hit her again, see if you can kill her this time.’
Knight looked away.
‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.
Felder reached under his coat and untied the strings that held the sack in place. He indicated the silverware with his chin.
‘I’ll take care of that lot. Now get a move on.’
Knight appeared to be on the verge of saying something more, but he knew better than to argue with Felder, especially with the wreckage of the old woman bleeding away before him. Felder would take him to task for his little loss of control later, once they were safely away from here. Knight left the room, and Felder heard his heavy tread as he ascended the stairs. When he looked back at the old woman, she was smiling at him.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘For what?’
She coughed, and a spray of red blood shot from between her lips.
‘For killing me.’
Under the gaze of the old woman, Felder emptied the silverware into his sack. It was good stuff. He’d been a little worried that it might turn out to be only plate, although his eye, in that first short glance through the window, told him otherwise. The weight of it was considerable, but the sack was thick and strong, and had not let him down yet. His only concern now was to get it all to safety without being stopped by the police or the wardens, for there would be no way to explain away to the law a sack full of silverware.
Felder had chosen to ignore the woman’s recent words to him. She’d taken a couple of blows to the head, and who knew how badly it had scrambled her thoughts? Once the cabinet was empty he made a cursory search of the shelves and drawers, but found only a few florins and half crowns wrapped in a handkerchief, and a gent’s gold pocket watch engraved with three initials and a date in 1912. He considered putting it in the sack as well, but then slipped it into his own jacket pocket for fear that it might be damaged amid the silverware. From upstairs he heard the sounds of Felder rummaging through wardrobes and drawers.
Felder lit a cigarette and, through its smoke, viewed the patterns on the walls. During his search of the room he couldn’t help but notice the nature of the books on its shelves. None of them were titles that he recognised, not that Felder was much for literature, but most appeared to be books on science.
‘Were these your husband’s?’ he asked the woman. ‘A son, maybe?’
The bright right eye fixed itself upon him.
‘Mine,’ she said.
Felder raised an eyebrow. In his world, women didn’t read books on science. They hardly read anything at all. Like rumours of lost tribes in Africa, and monsters in Scottish lochs, Felder had heard of women scientists, but he had yet to meet one himself, and so remained uncertain of their actual existence.
‘You a scientist, then?’
‘Once.’
‘What kind?’
‘A physicist, although I have qualifications in chemistry too.’
‘What are you, then: Professor Lyall?’
If she was surprised that he knew her name, she did not show it.
‘Doctor Lyall,’ she said.
‘Doctor Lyall the physicist. And all this’ – Felder gestured at the patterns on the wall – ‘is physics?’
Lyall gave another cough, but there was only a little blood this time. Her breathing seemed to have eased somewhat. It might have been a sign that her condition was improving, but Felder doubted it. He suspected that it was her body relaxing into death. He wanted Knight to hurry up. Once they were away from the house, they’d find a telephone box and call for help. It might not be too late to save her.
‘Quantum physics,’ she said.
‘What’s that, then?’
‘The study of the universe at the smallest levels.’
‘Huh.’ Felder took another drag on his cigarette, and moved closer to the wall. ‘But what does it all mean?’
He saw her almost smile.
‘You want science lessons from me?’
‘Maybe, or it could be that I just want to keep you talking, because if you’re talking then you’re awake, and alive. We’ll get help for you, I promise. It won’t be long now. But just try to keep talking.’
‘It’s too late for that.’
‘No. Tell me. Tell me about these quantum physics.’
She took another sip of brandy.
‘There is a theory,’ said Lyall, ‘that there are an infinite number of possible existences, and each time we make a decision, one of those possible existences comes into being. But equally, alongside it may exist all other possible, or probable, existences too. It’s more complex than that, but I’m keeping it as simple as I can.’
‘Because you think I’m an idiot?’ He said it without rancour.
‘No, because I’m not even sure that I fully understand its implications myself.’
Felder was not an unintelligent man – poorly educated, yes, but not stupid. What he was hearing, though, seemed to him to be the stuff of fantasy stories: improbable, but fascinating nonetheless.
‘So you’re saying that, when I woke up this morning and decided to make a cup of tea, there was another version of me that just stayed in bed and snoozed for an hour?’
‘In theory. Or when you decided to break into my house, another version of you simply turned away, perhaps determined to live a better life.’
Felder couldn’t help but laugh.
‘Are you trying to make me feel guilty?’
‘No. The fact that you asked the question suggests that you’re already well acquainted with guilt. You don’t need me to torment you further.’
‘You’re quite a woman, I’ll give you that.’
Felder examined once again the pattern of lines on the wall.
‘So each of these forks represents a decision?’ said Felder.
‘That’s correct.’
‘It’s your life,’ he said, and there was a hint of wonder in his voice. ‘All of these lines, these forks and dead ends, they’re decisions you’ve made. You’ve mapped them out, all of them.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘To understand.’
‘Understand what?’
‘Where I went wrong,’ she said. She took as deep a breath as she dared, readying herself for a longer speech. ‘Because some decisions, some actions, have greater ramifications than others, more damaging consequences. And I think, perhaps, that if they’re repeated often enough, the fabric of reality is altered. I call it “confluence”. If I’d lived long enough, I might even have published a paper on it.’
‘Confluence.’ Felder repeated the word, liking the sound even if he didn’t understand it. ‘But what kind of bad things could an old woman like you have done?’
She frowned, and her voice rose slightly.
‘I don’t regard them as bad. Some might, but I don’t. Still, they had consequences that I could not have foreseen. Confluence occurs at extremes, and nothing is more extreme that the possibility that, by one’s actions, the nature of existence is altered. I did nothing wrong. I helped. But all paths fork, and some paths may lead into shadows. And things wait in the shadows.’
‘What are the red dots supposed to be?’ asked Felder.
He received no answer. Turning, he saw that Dr Lyall had closed her eyes.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Hey.’
He did not move, but watched as the breathing grew softer and softer before ceasing entirely. The cup of brandy fell from her hand and bounced on the tiles of the fireplace.
And suddenly Felder noticed that he could no longer hear Knight moving above his head.
The house had four rooms upstairs – a bathroom with a toilet but no tub, two bedrooms and a third room so small that Knight couldn’t quite figure out why it had been put in to begin with, since it was too small to take a bed and resembled more closely a telephone box than an actual inhabitable space. It was piled high with the detritus of the house: broken suitcases, old newspapers, the frame of a lady’s bicycle, and more books. Books also occupied much space in the two bedrooms, and even in the loo, but unlike in the living room downstairs, they stood in teetering columns on the floor, the better to free up wall space for more of those infernal branching lines on the walls.
Knight was still struggling to understand why he had attacked the old woman – not that it wasn’t beyond him to strike a lady, or even the odd girl who in no way resembled a lady at all, but it was the ferocity of his assault on her that surprised him. For a few seconds he had been overcome not only by an anger that burned like a wound, but also a deep and abiding sense of fear. The patterns on the walls alone could not have caused him to lose control of himself in that way. They were odd, and unsettling, but no more than that. Knight wondered if he might be coming down with something, but he had been fine until he and Felder had entered the house. There was a miasma to this place, he felt, as though the very air were polluted, even if it smelt no better or worse than any other house he knew in which an old woman was living – or slowly dying, depending on one’s point of view.
Nevertheless, his looting of the rooms had not proved unproductive. In the main bedroom he discovered an assortment of jewellery, most of it gold, including an ornate pendant studded with rubies and diamonds, and a tin box which, when opened using the blade of his knife, was found to contain over two hundred pounds in notes, and a small roll of gold sovereigns. Knight immediately liberated two of the sovereigns and stashed them in the lining of his coat. He was aware of Felder’s plan to hand over to Billy Hill most of the proceeds of the night, and largely approved of it, but that didn’t require him to abandon common sense entirely. The possibility existed that Hill might simply relieve them of their offerings and throw them back on the street, perhaps with a beating to remind them of the extent of their delusion if they thought they could buy their way into his favour. If nothing else, the sovereigns would ease the pain of rejection, both physical and metaphorical, and provide him with some security if he chose to abandon Felder in the aftermath. And if Billy Hill accepted them, well, then all to the good: the sovereigns would form the basis of greater wealth to come.
Knight was just storing the jewellery and the rest of the money in his various pockets when he heard footsteps on the bare boards outside the bedroom door. Felder, he thought at first, but the steps were too light, and Felder would have known better than to approach him without warning in a strange house. Knight turned just in time to see what appeared to be a small child’s bare left foot and leg disappear from sight, as though the child had been watching him and now feared being caught. A boy, Knight thought. But where could the child have been hiding? There was nowhere to conceal oneself in the downstairs rooms, and Knight had searched this floor thoroughly. Could the boy somehow have secreted himself among the rubbish in the tiny spare room? It was possible, but unlikely, not unless he had actively conspired to bury himself beneath the books, bags and cases.
Then it came to him: the cellar. They had checked it, and found it locked, but Knight could not recall seeing a key. Perhaps the boy had spotted them as they entered the house and, in fear, slipped into the cellar and locked the door behind him. Yes, that was it. There could be no other explanation. Somehow the boy had managed to get past Felder and come upstairs, although Knight wondered why he had not instead left the house and gone to seek help. But who could understand the thought processes of a frightened child?
By now Knight was already in pursuit. He wrenched open the bedroom door, stepped into the upstairs landing, and stopped.
It was no longer the same house. The landing was dark, the walls entirely unadorned except for patches of faded wallpaper that hung stubbornly to the plaster, hints of funeral lilies beckoning to Knight in the dimness. He could see no inked lines, no initialled dots. The landing was still partially lit by candles, but it was now part of a much larger structure, and Knight counted at least eight doors before it ended at a flight of stairs. One of those doors, halfway along on the right, was slowly closing before Knight’s eyes.
‘Felder?’ he called. ‘Felder, can you hear me?’
But there was no reply.
Knight reached into one of his pockets and once again withdrew his knife. It was of Japanese manufacture, and was among his most prized possessions, as well as being one of the few items he had taken from his childhood home before fleeing it for the mainland. He kept it keen, and even to touch its blade carelessly was to risk the kind of wound that would require stitches to heal. Opening the old woman’s lock box had not left even a scratch on the steel. Holding it in his hand gave Knight some small sense of reassurance, even as his mind struggled to comprehend how he could enter a room in one house and apparently emerge from it into another house entirely.
‘Felder!’
This time his cry elicited some response. It came in the form of a childish giggle, and then a hushing sound. Not just one child, then. Two, at least.
Knight moved silently along the landing, testing the doors as he went. All appeared to be locked, all except that door on the right, which stood slightly ajar. As he drew nearer to it he heard the sound of running from behind it, as of children moving farther into its reaches. The footfalls echoed slightly before they faded away, as though the room beyond was very long, and its ceiling very high.
Knight stood before the door. He reached out his left hand and pushed. The door opened without a noise. Ahead of him was a wall inset with a series of large windows, although he could see nothing through them because of the blackout curtains. Below the windows stood a line of children’s cots, all apparently unoccupied. Knight stepped into the room and saw more cots lined up against the wall opposite the windows. A single lamp on a nightstand by the door provided the sole illumination. Knight counted twelve cots on either side and then, as his eyes grew more accustomed to the dark, still more stretching away into the darkness. He could not even begin to guess the size of the room, nor the height of its ceilings, which were taller than the ceilings of the landing outside.
The windows drew his attention again. Yes, there was blackness beyond them, but surely that meant the curtains had been hung outside the windows. He approached them, the knife still clutched firmly in his right hand. He glimpsed his reflection in the glass, marooned in the darkness like a spectre of himself. He touched his fingers to the pane. It was painfully cold, although the room itself was tolerably warm. And what he felt, as his reflected self stared back at him, and his fingertips grew numb, was that the blackness beyond the window was not caused by drapes, or natural dark, but by a kind of nothingness given form, as though all the stars had been plucked from the night sky and hidden away, and the house was floating in the void. Knight was overcome by a sense of terrible loneliness, of a hopelessness that only oblivion could assuage. Hypnotised by the vacuum, he understood that a man might stand here and allow the emptiness beyond to drain him slowly and methodically, leaving only a husk that would, in time, fall to the floor and crumble slowly like the desiccated form of an insect sucked dry by a spider.
Knight heard movement far above his head: a soft scuttling. He began to tremble. He feared that, in envisaging a spider and his prey, the great room had taken the image and given it substance. Slowly he raised his face to the ceiling. The lamp by the door grew brighter, its light spreading outwards and upwards, until it was reflected at last in a multitude of black eyes like flecks of obsidian embedded in the plaster. Knight saw movement too, pale, naked forms intermingling, clinging to the ceiling with fat, truncated limbs; and now descending along the walls, crawling like insects, their gaze fixed on Knight.
They were infants, hundreds of them, each no more than a few months old and each alive yet not alive, their bodies mottled slightly with corruption. Knight stared at them as they came, flowing down the walls. Behind him, and unseen, a small hand reached out and touched a finger softly to the back of his neck. He felt a sting, a spider’s kiss. The blade fell from his hand and he followed it, dropping to his knees as the pain spread through his system. He collapsed on his right side, his eyes open, unable to move, to speak, even to blink. They came to him, hands reaching for his nose, his mouth, his eyes, exploring, testing, more and more of them, until he was lost beneath them and died in stillness among creatures that basked in the novelty of his fading warmth, and wept when it was gone.
Felder went to the door of the living room and called Knight’s name. When no answer came, he stepped into the hall. The stairs to the bedroom were still there, but they now ended in blackness, with nothing beyond them. Where once had stood a front door, now was only a wall upon which hung a long mirror. The kitchen, too, was gone, and another mirror had taken its place, so that Felder stood trapped between infinite versions of himself. He looked back at the body of the old woman, but that too was now changed – or, the thought struck him, unchanged, for her face was unmarked, and she was merely sleeping. She moved in her dreams, the chair creaking, her mouth emitting a small snore, but she did wake, and no Knight appeared to pummel her with his fists. Only as the door began to close in front of Felder did she open her eyes, but he could not tell if she saw him or simply dreamed him before she was lost to his sight. He heard a key turn in the lock as, in the mirrors, all reflections disappeared, and the wall before him began to crack. He watched the cracks advance – forking, diverging, progressing, ending – and saw the ink dry against the plaster as the pattern of his life was drawn for him.
And as one door was locked, so another was opened. He heard the cellar door creak, and the sound of light footsteps descending. Felder did not rail. He did not fight, or scream. He simply followed the sound.
Knight was in the cellar. He sat slumped in a chair, his head back, his eyes, now ruins in their sockets, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. The walls of the cellar were lined with jars, none of them empty.
They won’t like it.
On a workbench rested a bag, and beside it a set of clean, bright surgical instruments. Felder saw unmarked potions in bottles, and powders and pills ready for use. He looked again at the jars, and at what they contained, floating in preservative. He had heard of women like Dr Lyall. Young unmarried girls with reputations to protect, wives who could not explain away a new child when their husbands were fighting in foreign fields, mothers with bodies so worn that another baby would kill them, all came to Dr Lyall or others of her kind, and they did what the doctors would not. Felder had never considered the price that might have to be paid, the burden to be carried. She had marked them all on her wall, the red dots of her visitations.
Thank you.
Confluence. Existence and non-existence, tearing at the fabric of reality, at the walls between universes.
For killing me.
One more mirror stood in the cellar. Felder saw himself reflected in it: this Felder, this moment, fixed by the decisions and actions that had led him to this place. The walls drew away from him, leaving only shadows behind, and out of those shadows emerged children, some little more than crawling infants but others older, and more watchful. Their rage was a cold thing, for there is no rage quite like that of thwarted youth, and he experienced it as a multitude of surgical hooks and blades cutting into his flesh. His reflected self began to bleed, and he supposed that he must have been bleeding too, although he could see no wounds. He could feel them, though. They were all inside: deep inside.
He died slowly, or one of him did, the only version of himself that he would ever know. In the logic of his dying he understood that, in another universe – in many universes – the torment of Dr Lyall by her children would continue, but in this one it had ended, just as his own must surely, mercifully end.
As the life faded from him, a line of ink moved inexorably across the filthy floor, then faded away to nothing.
YRSA SIGURDARDÓTTIR, born in Iceland in 1963, works as a civil engineer in Reykjavik, as well as writing crime novels and children’s fiction. She is best known for her six crime novels featuring Thora Gudmundsdottir, an attorney and single mother, the latest of which is The Silence of the Sea. The series has been a bestseller across Europe. In 2012 she published her first horror novel, I Remember You, combining crime and the supernatural.