ALICE FOUND HERSELF STARING at the grandfather clock in the great hall. Now she understood those dull-eyed mothers she’d seen trailing across the Continent revisiting the places which had failed them, lost and black and alone. For she’d do the same. She’d visit every spa and sit in every hopeless waiting room and drink the blood-threaded phlegm of every victim until she finally possessed Ralph’s disease. Then at least—and instead of this terrible impotence which, after two sleepless days and nights, had made her flee Ralph’s room—she could share. She’d take his pain from him and make it entirely her own.
This was far too quick. Not long ago, he’d been wandering the garden. Arguing. Reading. Eating. And it had never been this bad. Not ever. She should never have come to the west, this dreadful place … She couldn’t simply stay. She knew she had to do something. Dry-eyed, her face hurting, Alice hurried outside.
‘Mistress … ?’
She turned and saw Steward Dunning running across the gravel towards her.
‘Mistress, where are you going?’
Alice didn’t know. But wasn’t it a simple enough request—a horse, to ride? ‘And I want nothing done here. You hear? Nothing. And make sure Doctor Foot stays awake. And these skies—tell Weatherman Ayres to get rid of this damn sunlight …’
Summoning a horse from a flustered Wilkins, Alice rode out from Invercombe. Already, the sky above the weathertop was greying. It looked like filthy milk as it bloomed and each clop and fall of the mare’s hooves, the tink of the bridle, was an affront to the air. Then she was struck by the odd thought that she hadn’t telephoned Tom since Ralph had fallen ill, that his father would be busy in London whilst his son, to his mind, still laughed and walked and grew better. She gave a barking laugh, and the mare twitched her flanks. The sky had drawn the light from the land, and she had no idea where she was, or where she was going. Then she came to a sign at a crossroads. Einfell—it seemed beyond all logic that this was where she was heading, but at the same time, it was something which had always lain unadmitted in the back of her mind since she’d first come here to the west. Ahead lay the realm of the changelings. Indeed, and despite everything, she almost had to smile to think that she might soon see Silus Bellingson again.
Here were big hedges of a kind which might surround any large and relatively private establishment, and then a nondescript set of gates, and she dismounted. There was silence. No birdsong. She pushed at the gates, which swung inwards. She rugged the mare’s bridle, but the previously compliant beast wouldn’t budge. Hooking the reins, she headed up the grey-white path.
On either side lay shadowed woodland, then she was facing a lake of parkland with a low building islanded at its centre. Pushing against the thud of her heart, she walked towards it. The building was of the grey concrete which had been briefly thought to be modern near the start of this Age, now weather-stained, and its brassy swing doors gave soundlessly to the pressure of her hand to an anonymous interior, and a wide, fining desk, although there was no one behind it. After all, just how desperate would you have to be to visit this place?
Alice heard the small frictions her shoes made against the polished floor. My son is dying. The thought, far more true and shocking and terrible than anything she had ever experienced, engulfed her. Then she became conscious of something standing in the doorway behind her. A cowled figure, like a friar. It couldn’t be. And yet…
‘Is that really you—Silus?’
Long hands, whiter than ivory, fanned and shaped. I might ask you the same. Has time forgotten you, Alice?
She shook her head, then forced herself to take a step closer to her old lover. ‘My son is dying.’
‘People rarely come to Einfell on happy occasions …’ His voice, although recognisably still his, had become slurred and lisping. Gesturing along a corridor, he turned silently, and Alice followed, wondering how much he remembered, felt, knew. There were numbered doors, and more glimpses of those green lawns squared on the walls like endless versions of the same painting. Whoever had made this place must have loved ordinariness. Then they were in a room, a mere office, and Silus was seated behind an empty desk and motioning with those changed, strange hands which had once caressed her that she should take the chair on its far side. There was another window at his back, giving a view across more of the lawns towards the woods which seemed to lie beyond in every direction. The light meant that Alice could see nothing but shade inside his hood.
‘Should I still call you Silus?’
‘You can call me what you wish, Greatgrandmistress.’
‘You know that I’m a greatgrandmistress?’
‘Wasn’t that the whole point of your life, to become who you now are? And then that you’d never need to tell people how you got there?’
Dimly now, there was a face inside the shadows of the hood. But it was scarcely Silus at all. Scarcely human, indeed.
‘I’ve been staying at a house not far from here. My son’s been ill for so long that I’ve forgotten the time when he wasn’t. But I’ve been searching, and I really thought that Invercombe might make the difference. There’s a weathertop—I gave orders…’ Her eyes strayed from the pallid shape inside the hood, and her cheeks tingled with something cold. Alice Meynell realised she was crying.
You fear your son’s dying?
Tasting salt, she nodded.
‘As you can perhaps imagine, Alice, you’re not the first to visit Einfell in grief. Or expecting miracles.’
‘It’s not a miracle. I just need to give him back what’s …’
Mine?
No. She shook her head. I could let Ralph go, Silus. I could let him fly or fall or be anything. If only …
Silus chuckled, although it was an immensely sad and alien sound; the hiss of winter trees. The hands reached to the hood, lifting it back, and Alice was forced to meet those eyes, which were entirely of the same colour as today’s sky, yet still somehow human. That, far more than the distortions of his skull like face, was the most terrible thing of all.
‘Why should I help you, Alice, of all the people in the entire world?’
‘You were always a good man, Silus.’
Again, that wintry chuckle. If I’d been a good man, Alice, I wouldn’t be here now. I had a wife, a life, children. I had a career. I even believed, may the Elder help me, that I could have you and still keep their love for me …
‘You were scarcely the first man to ever—’
But I loved you, Alice. I think that was my real mistake.
Alice supposed it probably was. In those first difficult months in London, she’d needed a lover of wealth and influence; someone whom she would have to pass beyond, but nevertheless an essential stepping stone along the shining way to becoming what she was inevitably becoming. Grandmaster Silus Bellingson of the Guild of Electricians—a handsome man who prided himself in being both faithful to his wife and family, and yet still charmed all the ladies—had been the ideal choice. And an easy lure. Of course, after a few months when Alice had been sufficiently established in London to decide that it was time to end things and pursue Tom Meynell, Silus had resisted. She remembered the night that she had agreed to meet him late in his office beneath the smoking towers of London’s main power station, and how, unable to resist bragging about his guild’s prowess, he’d led her past the huge halls of the generators, and slid back the doors of the secret cabinets wherein enormous quantities of aether sat quietly roaring light and dark from their quart-sized vials …
‘It wasn’t arrogance, Alice—not all of it. It was love.’ I believed…
‘And what do you believe now?’
‘Is your son really dying?’
‘I would never lie about such a thing.’
‘No,’ he sighed. For all I know about you, I don’t think you would. ‘But you imagine that because the guilds once used my kind to mend problems which lay beyond their spells—and used us badly, it has to be said—and because of all the myths and rumours, we Chosen might also be able to help mend your son. But humans aren’t machines, Alice. And Einfell is as real as you are, as real as this day, and as real as your son’s illness. There is no Goldenwhite. It’s not some mythical place, and the good health you wish back for Ralph isn’t like some broken flywheel. You, Alice, of all people, should understand that there is far more to the imminence of death than that…’
She studied the room. There was a metal four-drawer filing cabinet set on a shining grey linoleum floor beneath off-white walls on which were hung a few faded photographs of Age-old faces. You’re right, she thought, gazing back at the changeling through her blurring sight. I know exactly what the nearness of death is like. This is it.
‘Then why,’ she said, ‘don’t you simply send me away and be finished with whatever game you’re playing?’
Without making the slightest motion, Silus shook his head. ‘I can’t. And there’s something. The Shadow Ones—’
‘Shadow Ones?’
‘They live in Einfell’s far woods. They are …’ He paused. ‘More changed than I am. Closer to the pure stuff of whatever it is that aether seems to strive to make us become. And they have been restless lately. After all, by the end of this year, this Age will have lasted a whole century …’
‘You’re saying that—’
No. I’m not saying anything.
A fresh wave of loss broke over Alice. ‘What can I possibly?’
‘I think you should leave.’
‘Ralph could be…’ Dead already. She let the terrible thought, unspoken, escape from her.
‘I think you should go back to Invercombe.’
Alice nodded and stood up. Silus stood up, too, and opened the door for her with his long white hands. Beyond the office, far along the corridor, she thought she glimpsed another of the creatures, and a face of terrible charcoal, but it was too quickly gone for her to be sure. Then she was outside and alone. Why had she come here? What had been the urge, the point? And what had Silus meant about the Shadow Ones in the woods? When she reached their edge, where the trees brushed the clouds in threads of dark, something in their tumbling shade called to her. Despite everything, she had to know what lay beyond.
There were objects strung amid the trees. Cooking spoons and forks jangled to her passage. Scraps of ceramic and curtain hoop turned and flashed. The way beneath her, which had now become more certain, was paved, of all things, with dinner plates. Then she came to a wider space, and there was movement, although it seemed to her at first that it was merely a cloudy settling of the greyness amid the trees and the summonings of her own confused feelings.
What would you give, Greatgrandmistress … ?
Alice blinked, paused, swayed. Was she really hearing, seeing? Then a shape, part human but entirely grey and ragged, loped towards her across the sere grass, and another, quick and as a shadow, whispered behind it. Something else rustled the trees. For a moment, Alice was surrounded, and the sound and the feeling—frightening, and yet queerly musical, like a yearning song you might hear in a dream—thrilled through her. These things had faces, yes. They had mouths and eyes. They even wore scraps of clothing which rustled and jingled just like the woods which surrounded them, although they were ill impossibly thin and quick and faint. Despite everything, Alice smiled. She reached out a hand towards them, and felt momentary touches against her flesh like the falling of the lightest of silks. These Shadow Ones, she thought with an odd rejoicing, are the true changelings. They are so infused with aether feat they have become almost pure spell. And how sad and typical of Silus, that, even in becoming what he was, he should seep halfway.
What would you give… ? Again, that question. Then they rustled away, and Alice, standing alone once more in the clearing noticed that a small and ancient transmission house lay at its far side. It was abandoned amid the peculiar statuary just like everything else which had been placed here, but she found herself stooping inside, and dusting leaves from the screechy metal chair, and rubbing a dried-up rag across the mirror until her reflection filled the grimed glass. The antique heaviness of the fittings reminded her of Invercombe—of course, this was where those first telephone messages would have been sent, for you could hardly have just one telephone booth. Here was another relic of her guild’s great history …
Her attention regathered in the dulled brightness of the mirror. Alice Meynell. Neither old nor young, but eternally beautiful. Through all her anxiety about Ralph, and although the booth had been long disconnected, it really did seem to her for a shivering moment that some kind of exchange took place.