KLADE SCURRIED ACROSS THE FLICKERING NIGHT landscapes of Invercombe’s grounds in the wake of Marion Price and the other Outsiders. A thunderous rushing came out of the sky. Trees, madly ragged with endless autumn, flared. Rages of wind battered his face. But he was Klade and he was the Bonny Boy and this was the scene of battle. He was not deterred.
The sky split again in a white gash. Shadows splayed across the dying ground. The earth erupted into light, then smoke, then falling cascades of stones. Klade glanced back towards Inver-something. Joined by pillars of light and dark, it was now the fulcrum of earth and sky. The house was the war and it was the storm, and the earth was turning beneath his feet and the air hung solid as he ran. More light came, further off this time; a glowing rush. He found the other Outsiders as they cowered amongst the bushes amid curses and the click of guns.
‘Don’t shoot!’ Marion Price’s voice. ‘Klade …’ Her face was paler now amid the deep silence between the thunder-guns. A heart. A mask. ‘You must go back.’
He shook his head.
‘This isn’t safe.’ Her hand on his cheek. This time, he didn’t flinch.
‘Where is safe?’ he said.
Some of the other Outsiders chuckled. He saw Marion Price smile. ‘Then stay by me. We must move on.’
Klade had no idea where they were heading, although he knew that something vital must be accomplished with as much speed and stealth as was possible—something which would extinguish this war. Knew also, as if it needed knowing as the guns thundered their deep Ma-ri-on songs all around them, that they must do all that was necessary to protect Marion Price. And here ahead, on a slight rise, gloriously crystalline, rainbowed turrets raised like a beckoning hand.
This strange edifice of glassy stone seemed to move towards them across the wrecked ground. Almost there. The other Outsiders scanned the falling silence with the cold black eyes of their guns. For all its glinting strangeness, this building was no ghost, for a path led to its mock turrets. There was a door, even, towards which Marion Price, breaking from the protective corral of Outsiders, began to run. Klade ran with her as well, and it was in that moment that the darkness emptied in the flare of bullets.
Alice Meynell reached deep inside her portmanteau as, breathing its lost glamours, little more than a breath herself, she scooped up the wyreblack pages in her translucent hands. The ideographs, white swirls of aethered ink, comets, turning planets, circling stars, sang out to her. It was the same with the commonest spell a knife-grinder might cast as he honed a steel—that sense that what you were making had always waited, and you were simply drawing its perfection through the small wound your desire for it had made in the substance of the world—but never this strong. Not even in the keystone of the greatest building, or the powers which bound the moon to the earth. Not even in the greatest of all makings when the entire universe was willed by God the Elder himself. Although this, Alice imagined, as she ordered these flakes of falling night with senses she could no longer describe, must have been very much how He felt.
Doubt had never been something which had greatly afflicted her, but all the enterprises of her life seemed like abject wavering in comparison to now. Was the telephone on? Yes, of course it was on. Telephones, like the tides and the seasons and her continuing urge to be more of what she already was, had no state of off. But the mirror before her—hung inside what her eyes told her was an edifice of old, damp brick, although strangely ornamented, and lit by a bare single electric bulb—flared and sparked. The voices of the men within her near command, who had grown too fearful now to approach her directly, had keened like the calls of distant birds, and what was left of the old Alice Meynell dealt with their queries with a briskness which her old self would have admired. Western guns were lobbing in shells. Not a full assault, but a range-finding, a tuning-up, and she ordered them to make response from decoy positions whilst their main guns remained silent and unrevealed, just as the West’s main guns undoubtedly were. When it came down to it, both sides in battle were essentially the same. The only thing which had ever mattered was who imagined they had won, and even that would soon be irrelevant.
Alice had had no reason to lie to Marion Price. She really had planned the exact consequences of the wrecking spell she had described. East and West, and lands beyond, would be brought to a paralytic halt. Most likely, peace would be sued for as well. England would probably be reunited. Even when judged by standards other than her own, there was much to be desired in the state which Alice planned to bring about. But, as always, such matters were incidental to her; cards you might pretend to possess according to how you wished to direct the flow of the game. It was logic which had always driven her. Sometimes, admittedly, it had taken her to degradations and sadnesses which—much like this war, or in facing her lost and ailing son—she believed she was capable of feeling much like anyone else. But Alice’s difference, her beacon, her own personal Invercombe, had always been that she could see through such things to the greater truths beyond.
Now, she thought, as she poised herself in the waiting depths of the mirror, I can even see through myself. But, for all this situation’s apparent strangeness, nothing but a clear and well-made path lay ahead. When the spell she would soon dictate to Ralph was cast, everything which she had promised Marion would happen. But there would be one last thing. She, or what she was to become, would also join with the spell and make that joyous leap into the networks, systems and reckoning engines on which this modern Age and the one which lay beyond it would depend. She would become deathless. Pure power. In essence, which was all she would be, the new Alice Meynell would control this land. It was a giddy prospect, certainly. But she was sure she had neglected nothing. Carefully, and for the last time, she consulted her portmanteau, and applied a little cream and foundation, dabbed some blusher to her fading face. Then she remembered the green velvet box in which she had long kept the trophies of her small conquests. Buttons and brooches and hatpins and pendants, they mostly seemed anonymous to her now, but she put them on in any case. These, she thought with a final triumphant shudder as she anointed her neck with the silver chain of a teardrop pendant, are all the shackles I will soon cast off.
Then the telephone began to ring, and Alice knew merely from its tone that this call came from Invercombe, and that it was Ralph. She smiled, happy as any mother might be that her son had chosen to ring her, rather than it being necessary for her to ring him.
How long had it been since he had last seen his mother? Ralph had to stretch his brain to recall the time when he had sat with her in the last summer warmth in the glassed-in gardens of her London house, and the thought left him exhausted. He wondered how much of himself there was left, and what she would make of the wraith he had become.
‘Ralph.’ As always, her eyes saw through him. And then, and as in the old days, he felt some of the pains and doubts which had beset him begin to dissolve. ‘My darling. We’re nearly there now.’
‘I’ve …’ He realised as he paused that he was past coughing. He could barely hear the sound his voice was making, but he knew that she heard. ‘I’ve changed from the man I was.’
‘Who would expect otherwise—after this war?’
He gave an inward shrug. More than ever, words seemed unnecessary between them. He found, also, that he could shape the figure he saw in the mirror before him into whatever he wanted. Yes, he understood how Marion felt about Alice Meynell. He could even dimly glimpse the bringer of revenge and chaos which others might perhaps encounter in his mother’s shape. But that wasn’t her. Not to him. He loved her, just as he was now entirely certain his father had. It was the easiest, most natural thing in the world.
‘How are Helen? Gussie? Flora?’
‘They’re all well, Ralphie. Or they were, and I’m sure they still are. They’ll be better still when we get this thing done…’
But I’m worried. I can’t last…
Ralph, you must never think like that. Remember all those long journeys across Europe …
The carriages, the foyers, the dinners on trays …
Her hand, reaching through the mirror, touched him. He breathed her fresh linen scent, and there was no pain at all. The Shadow Ones were with Ralph as well. They were the leaves of an endless book. They were light across the shore. As, through whispered chants and technical graduations and apertures and empowerments, Ralph broadened the bandwidth of the contact between Invercombe and Einfell and the open telephone systems of the entire East, he felt a lost and renewed sense of sharing with his mother, and a depth of closeness also with this house and all its purposes, which he would have loved to endlessly prolong. But part of him, the same part which had perhaps once lain in bed and battled fevers whilst the rest of him ranged across continents, felt the shudder of another shell. Then, with an urgency which affected him even in this remote and blissful state, all of Invercombe’s clocks began to chime.
‘These, Ralph, will unwind this war.’
The dark sheets of the spells of her portmanteau spilled with light. They looked to Ralph like the night sky, or the glitter of water when the summer sun is so bright that the troughs between each dazzling wavelet seem entirely black. He heard their chant. He felt their onrushing coolness. He breathed their salt. There were depths beneath him, and his lungs hurt.
This thing we’re doing …
In a moment of doubt, the waters contracted to the shallow brightness of that paddling pool in the Kite Hills. He tasted bittersweet chlorine and salt.
Will it… ? I honestly don’t know, Ralph. But…
A smile. Soft laughter. Hands. Protecting. Lifting.
‘We’ll soon find out.’
They both sang the spell together, and the Shadow Ones sang it as well.
Instinctively, Marion Price ducked, and Klade, clearly used to the whoosh of bullets, ducked with her as well. She crawled a few yards back towards a dip in the grass. Even the ravener, some part of its memory or instinct still working, had hunched down. Just ahead, in a series of yelps and soft socking sounds, the hapless and harmless balehound was being picked apart by bullets. The air rang and sang. Then there was silence.
Marion realised as she sucked back her breath that she was lying in a bowl of mud. The clump of earth and grass which loomed close to her face was all that lay between her and the guns which had flared ahead, and she wished that there was more. Should they really wait here? Then, as the silence stretched, she wondered if the soldiers ahead of them were still there, or were stealthily shifting closer. Perhaps Ralph was right—perhaps they’d seen them and retreated. But weren’t the deserters supposed to have fired back first? She’d never realised how many uncertainties arose the moment someone started shooting at you.
Thunder rattled. More light rolled over them, glinting with icy brilliance on the folly which lay perhaps eighty yards ahead, then the lumpy ground around them exploded with rattling blasts. Shell cases pinged out, but Marion felt no inclination to move. She was afraid. It was that simple. It wasn’t something you thought about. Your body did that all for you; the feeling washed straight up from your gut. But the fear wasn’t her. After all, she was Marion Price. At that moment, bullets rained close to where she and Klade lay, spraying up stones and mud, and Marion breathed the same fear-smoke-and-mud stench which she had washed from many bodies in these years of war. So familiar, yet entirely new here. Even though the thunder seemed to have lessened and the guns had stopped firing again, her vision had sharpened to a near-supernatural extent. She could see Klade more clearly now than she had ever seen him. She touched his hand, and he smiled back at her. He and these deserters were doing this for her. And the folly was ahead. It was merely a matter of rearranging her thoughts until they made sense again.
The dark lit up as both sides started firing. To Marion’s newly sensitised eyes, the bullets were thin trails of wyrebrightness, and she could distinguish the different bores of gun, and was aware of the greater power and purpose which the regular Western soldiers who lay between them and the folly were bringing to bear. Somebody shouted something, a flare drifted up, and they were bathed in a white light far more terrible than the short-lived brilliance of the shells. There was a particular concentration of fire against a nearby deserter, less lucky than she and Klade in the depth of the hollow they had crawled into. Jerked, puppet-like, he turned, rose, whitened, reddened, then collapsed, scarcely recognisable but still hanging half-upright on the shattered remains of his bones. Casting lengthening shadows, the flare fell hissing to the earth. The situation, it struck Marion, was entirely hopeless. And soon there would be another flare.
Suddenly, instantly, shouting to Klade to stay put, she was up. The feeling, to be skidding, near-flying, across this tussocked mud, was extraordinary. She fell into the space where the dead deserter squatted. Sliding, rummaging in a wet fall of flesh, she found the shape of his gun. Another flare was due any moment, but over there lay the place where the ravener knelt. Once more, she ran, and the giant creature snarled and shivered as she collided with its rank pelt. Even in this sleek blackness, she could clearly see the red of its eyes, the hooked curl of its black claws. Then came another flare, and the world turned white and was scarred by bullets’ black trails. Someone began screaming, and Marion stroked the greasy hillocks of the ravener’s spine and murmured through its stench to keep it calm and quiet. There was no doubt now in her mind that the Western soldiers had been ordered to protect this folly. She shifted her gun, feeling its runnels and rises. Just as the flare died, she rammed the snout into the ravener’s flank. Bellowing, the creature raised itself to its full height and staggered straight towards the folly. Marion also lunged, ducking left, skim-running, near-flying, sideways across the ragged earth as gunfire formed a blazing concentration on the ravener’s silhouette. Sprays of blood burst back from it, but still it lumbered forwards. By her own zigzag route, Marion also kept moving. And the folly, from this new sideways angle, drew desperately near.
It was shaped like a castle, but its battlements were mere decorations, its arrow slits were blank—all quite useless for the purpose they mimicked. That was why these soldiers had had to dig their defence outside. But this was also their weakness, for it meant that they were exposed and essentially static. And their attention was turned outwards. All of these things, anyway, were what Marion hoped. The ravener had fallen dead. The downpour of bullets had become a sporadic shower.
The Western soldiers were close to her left now. She could hear them muttering to their guns. Then another flare went up, and all she could do was run. She collided with the amazing reality of the transmission house. Flakes of cement skidded beneath her fingers as she felt her way around it through the blinding white light. Then, suddenly, amazingly, there was a doorway, and she was falling through it, crashing down on her knees into puddled concrete. It was darker in here, but not entirely dark—not even as the flare died. There were stairs ahead. Her gun raised, her breath rasping, scarcely believing she was here, Marion began to climb.
The light grew stronger as the narrow spiral unwound. Voices came as well, and a changing yellow glow. The men’s voices were urgent, but it was impossible to catch their exact words, and Marion didn’t doubt that they would shoot in the instant they saw her, even if she had caught them unawares. Once more, her fingers traced the shape of her gun. She whispered silently in her head all the many prayers and spells she had heard moaned and murmured in the delirium wards as the brick pillar at the centre of the stairs curved away from her, upwards and inwards towards the light. This next inch, this next step, and she was certain they would come into view. But the moment lengthened.
Suddenly, she was at the edges of a lantern-lit room, and two men who had been squatting over something were turning towards her, their faces registering slow surprise as she raised her gun. The noise was incredible as the thing barked and leapt in her hands. The men were blown backwards, and the wall behind them exploded into red scrawls which dragged into long smears as they slid down. Her gun fell silent. The room shrank back. Remembering to breathe again, she moved forward. The odd thing was, these men weren’t wearing uniforms, and neither did they seem to have guns. Inspecting them, Marion realised that they wore the talismans of the Western wing of the Great Guild of Telegraphers, and that the thing they had been squatting over was a toolbox. They were trying to disable this transmission house; that was what the Western soldiers outside were defending. What had Ralph said?—something about it being more difficult to entirely disconnect a transmission house than it was to enable it. Hoping that he was right, she tried to orient herself.
Even as gunfire rattled outside, there remained a dull, purposeful hum in this folly. It was like being inside a cramped version of the weathertop. Here, alarmingly close to where her ricocheting bullets had shattered the wall, were the main conductors. Here, in mushroom sprouts of anodised brass, were the registers of octaves and distance. Here, even, for this transmission house was an antique version of its type, was a small haft. Everything was different in many small details to the idealised device Ralph had attempted to describe to her, and yet, Marion realised as her fingers stroked the wires and metals, it was all essentially the same. There was nothing but that continuing hum as she began her work, then, with a sudden certain rush, she felt the nearness of Invercombe. No, its actual presence. For it was here, in dazzling leaps and bounds like an endless hall of mirrors, and she had no doubt that Ralph had established the connection. Marion smiled; it was impossible not to. She remembered the spell, the turns, the actions. And they remembered her. At the very time when she should have been anxious, she felt ridiculously calm. The only moment of panic came when she discovered that a fuse, a final keyshape to bridge the connection between West and the East, was missing. She looked around, registering the flat realities of this real place in which she found herself, and the continuing sound of gunfire, and the red-leaking bodies of the Western telegraphers which were slowly exuding their scents of death. Crouching, turning them over, feeling their sodden pockets, throwing aside a wallet, a cigarette lighter, Marion encountered a recognisably metallic lump and pulled it out, inserted it, male to female, into its home. The tone inside the transmission house grew louder. The task was nearly done.
Large, T-shaped and ceramic-handled, the final activating lever projected at 45 degrees from a slot in the wall, and there was a sense of weight even as she settled her hands around it; a feeling both strongly mechanical and yet marvellously magical. Marion’s bloody fingers skidded off the handle’s cracked white glaze as she pushed. The thing was even heavier than she thought. Wiping her hands down her coat, she leaned down with her full weight. Still, for a moment the lever held, then, the giving of something vast yet perfectly balanced, it moved. There was a mechanical click. Fractionally, the tone which filled the engine house rose. She stepped back. Something had changed, certainly, but she had no idea what. Something had changed outside as well. The gunfire had stopped.
Marion supposed that she had done her job, although the reek of death was getting stronger in here now. Automatically, in the way she would have done with any corpse, she laid out the bodies of the men. She straightened their guildpins and rearranged their clothes over the worst of their wounds. She closed their eyes. They were far younger than she’d thought, and had probably only ever plied their trade in this time of war. One was nursing a wispy moustache, the other bit his nails, and she didn’t know what to feel about what she had done. It was silent outside: the deserters had lost the brave resistance they had put up on her behalf, and Klade—but she couldn’t think that far. She picked up the gun again. The thing disgusted her now. But if she waited a little longer, the Western soldiers were sure to come up and finish off the job. But she was impatient. Gun raised, she headed back down the folly’s tight spiral stairs.
It was still night outside, and her eyes were slow to adjust. She turned, aiming randomly as she limped out on to the slippery earth, and pulled the gun’s trigger, but all she got from it was an impotent click. Then a ravener-like figure surged towards her from the dark. She cringed, then recognised its lopsided stance.
‘We’ve won,’ Klade lisped.
Four human deserters died along with the balehound and the ravener in what was to become known as the Battle of the Folly. Not one of the defeated Western soldiers—confused by the absence of any structured response from their attackers, and by their mad willingness to fight—had survived, although Marion, as they trudged into the silent dark away from that raised, prohibitory hand, knew enough not to ask how or why.
That sound, that shift in tone, still haunted her as much as the deaths. It was like the change of key in the most aching pan of a song; impossible to pin down. Had the war really ended? Had they done any of the things they were supposed to have done? She had no idea. Klade, in that moment of supposed victory, had drawn her against the large, surprisingly male shape of his body as she threw aside her gun, and she supposed she had hugged him back. But her head remained empty. Apart from the sense of that lever giving. Apart from this long, endless note … But the guns had stopped, and the sky was paling over the estuary in first anticipation of dawn. Dimly now, the shape of Durnock Head, and then that of the house, and its weathertop, were being revealed. Just as on every other day of its long existence, Invercombe was remaking itself.
Questions, questions, as they reached the gardens and the followers, drawn up by this new silence from their shelter in the servants’ corridors, came streaming out to greet the returning party. But Marion hung back and, for once, they didn’t seek her out. That sound, that song—there was some twist, something unmade, hanging within it which she fought to unravel. Then she remembered Alice Meynell’s promise that the message, the wrecking spell, would come as three beats which would spell out her name. Ridiculous, really, to imagine such a thing. And vanity beyond all human scope. Marion. She tried to recall the sound. But the endless note she had cast into the telephone lines extinguished it. Whatever else has been destroyed tonight, she thought; pushing across the terrace towards the inner hall, Marion Price has gone.
The house felt empty. Not deserted, but discarded. No clock ticked or chimed as her footsteps trailed mud and worse across the carpets. Even as the windows, their curtains left open in last night’s confusions, began to brighten, not a single shadow moved. The door of the telephone booth beneath the best stairs was ajar, and Ralph, forgotten, remained inside. After so much death, it was almost a surprise to find him alive, although slumped barely conscious over the dialling handle. She glanced towards the mirror as the people crowded around her. It was entirely blank.
Ralph felt hot and loose and light. ‘The guns seem to have stopped,’ she said as she helped him out of the booth, thinking of the junior members of his guild she had killed.
This, she thought as Ralph trembled against her, was the closest they had got to an embrace in all the angry years since she had left him in Sunshine Lodge, and part of her now realized that she was as guilty as he was in their separation, and that the true victim had been Klade alone. But crimes, neglects, wars, murders, once committed, could never be healed. All the rest was self-pity—the same pity she was feeling now.
Against his weak protests, she organised that he be carried up to his old room, then, unable to bear the silent, expectant gazes which surrounded her, she went outside. More and more light was coming now across the parterre gardens. The chain pools chuckled. Branch by topmost branch, the specimen trees were shimmering into life. She headed down the paths and crossed the springing turf and crouched by the seapool. Its waters slipped coolly through her fingers, but lingering curiosity made her still her hands to study the face which gathered on the surface as it smoothed. The rising sun had spread red banners across the sky, briefly turning the entire pool red as she washed the blood from her hands. Her face hung there, but it was quite unrecognisable. She headed on towards the shore.
Whatever Ralph had said was wrong: time really could go backwards, for Marion recognised a spring day when she saw and felt one; she knew its scents and sighs, and the wildness of this light, and the movements of those birds like risen flecks of foam. It would have been so easy just to stay here. Or to carry on walking, fleeing, along this shore, or to head straight into the forgetfulness of this incoming tide. What, after all, was holding her? Even for her son Klade, she knew by now that all she could ever feel was a dulled affection mingled with even duller regret. She wasn’t his, and he wasn’t hers, and no ships were out in the channel today, but at least the Severn Bridge still hung, a silvering of the light, a curtaining of the air.
Marion was too weary to stoop for cockles, or even to peel off her ruined boots. But again the light darkened and coalesced amongst the familiar rocks. Once more, a figure appeared, and she studied it calmly, for by now she was used to ghosts. Not Sally, no. Not Denise or Owen or her father or Mam, or even quite the refracted image of Marion herself, although she recognised something in its aching stance. More a creature of the sea, it seemed to her as it picked its way between the shining rockpools, than anything to be found upon the land. Living weed. Leavings of the shore. Mere driftwood and sail tarp. Perhaps a dying gannet.
‘I thought this might be the place,’ it murmured, ‘to find you.’ A hand trembled and tensed on a stick of driftwood, veins and bones tangling and untangling beneath loose and mottled skin. The face drooped around a lipless mouth, although the eyes inside their sagged blue pouches remained as calmly unsettling as ever. This was still Alice Meynell, even if she looked like an old shorewoman reduced to picking coal at the edge of the tide.
‘You’ve changed …’ Marion murmured, amazed. Alice laughed. Her hair snagged out from her skull. ‘Nothing like enough …’
‘Last night—the spell. Do you know what happened?’ The hand which wasn’t gripping the stick gave a trembling wave. ‘Can’t you hear? Where are the guns? Where are the ships? Why are we standing here? I’d credited you with more intelligence, even if you are just a shoregirl, than to doubt the evidence of your own senses. And Ralph’s alive, isn’t he? As if this house would ever let him die …’ And you think the war has ended?’
‘It was never that simple—but I imagine that in London and Bristol the processes which will lead in that direction are probably underway.’ Another chuckle. ‘My own forces, certainly, are in disarray.’ Another wheeze. ‘You’ve got what you wanted. And you don’t even recognise it, or know what to do with it. You’re so typical of…’ As Alice searched for the word, a dewdrop formed and glistened on her hooked nose, was caught on the wind and blew away. She ground the tip of her driftwood stick deeper into the sand. ‘We humans. We’re all the same.’
‘You knew that the folly would be defended. People died there. I killed …’ Marion wiped her face. The shore receded in salty webs. ‘I killed two men. Westerners of your own guild. They weren’t even armed. And I—’
A brittle hand clutched on her arm. ‘You did what was necessary.’ It gave a squeeze. ‘What else could you have done? Did you think we could end an entire war without a little further bloodshed? Do you imagine that people are not dying now in the blackout cities? Just because we cannot hear guns, do you think they are not still firing? To reach the better, you must pass through the worst—did you not ever realise that, Marion Price, when your whole life screams out that very fact?’
‘I’ve only ever tried to do what seemed best.’
‘Best!’ Alice sniffed, her eyes wandering over the gleaming bladderwrack. ‘Yet you repaired the bodies of the fighting men who came back from the front, just as others made their bullets, or grew food to fill their bellies, so they could go back and fight again. Did you not imagine that you were as culpable as those who fired the guns? At least last night you briefly put all the self-justifying rubbish aside just for once and did something for yourself. Why, otherwise, did you ever come back to this house? And why did you let those people follow you? You did it because it was what you wanted, Marion Price. I’m sorry, by the way, that this whole enterprise didn’t spell you your name as you’d wanted, but the spell was even stronger than I’d thought. But, you—you wanted to know what it felt like to have power, to have command. Life and death—those are the things you enjoy dealing with in what passes for your heart. All the rest is mere scenery. I don’t even believe you can love, can you? No, not the way you’d want to. Not in the way you imagined love was felt by someone like my poor Ralph. Ah, love, Marion. Let me tell you about love …
‘Love is the feeling which drives this shore. Love is the reason those seabirds are circling and calling to each other. Love is the raping solider, or the husband who goes off to war to kill other husbands. Love is the bee and love is the flower. Love is the prey a mother brings to her nest. Love is what brought those saddened women to Saint Alphage’s. Love, as well, is most likely what kept your son at Einfell. Love, I would guess, is also the reason he probably feels so lost now. For love is the thing we use to dress up our lives with the appearance of meaning, or mourn for when it cannot be found. Love is what drove us to war, Marion. Love of place, love of person, love of self, love of things as they are. Love is blind instinct, Marion. It’s the trick that nature plays upon its inventions to ensure that they copulate and protect their young. And you and I, Marion, through some fault we feel but cannot explain, imagine that we are immune to it. But let me tell you, we are not.
‘How nice it would be, eh, to exist above it all in realms of pure power and spirit! Oh, yes, I share that urge, Marion. To take command of that unreasoning power which you and Ralph spent that summer attempting to define. Why should—what did you call it, Habitual Destiny?—control our lives? Surely we as reasoning creatures are above all that now? Last night, indeed. Last night…’ In a spasm of trembling, and as the sand shone and loosened in the rising tide, Alice nearly fell. ‘I fully believed I had the chance to become something else. Last night was everything I’d planned. Those faint shapes you encountered up at the house—the palest of the changelings, the ones closest to pure spell. They’ve gone this morning, haven’t they?’
Marion waited. There was another swaying spasm; a baring of sparse teeth in a grimace or a smile.
‘That could—should—have been me, Marion. The only thing I didn’t tell you yesterday, Marion, was that I, too, was part of the spell. I planned to pass through the mirror, discard the husk you see before you entirely. But instead … Instead … Here I still am. Oh, it’s no great mystery! I’m just an old woman, and I’d only look even more ridiculous if I plastered myself with scent and make-up. So why not be what I am? Whatever else I had last night, I stupidly lost. It fled into the mirror and left me here as you see me now, on this shore. And the funny thing is, Marion, I’m so, so tired I don’t even bloody care.’
‘You were like the Shadow Ones?’
‘I’d changed, certainly. I believed I’d changed enough.’ She wavered, nodded, considering. The tide, in its shining onwards rush, was sweeping closer to them. ‘No, it wasn’t that which stopped me. Haven’t you been listening, girl? Isn’t that what I’ve been trying to tell you? I was poised before the mirror. I was ready to take the leap at the moment you pulled that lever in the transmission house. But it was my own feebleness which stopped me. It was Ralph. It was…’ She paused. Her face writhed. She spat the word out. ‘Love. I hesitated a moment too long last night, God help me Marion, because I didn’t want to leave my son … All those years ago, when he was gripped by the worst of his illness, I had this wish, this prayer. Inside my head, I would scream, Let it be me. And last night, it came to me again, that same thought, and then it was too late …’
The glittering scraps which Marion had taken to be bits of foam or shell dangling from Alice’s clothes and clinging to her stringy throat and ears, were, she now realised, expensive items of jewellery, beads, buttons …
‘Perhaps you and I can walk out into this tide together, Marion. Or we could just stay here. Either way, the waters will take us soon enough. Can’t you hear the tide’s hissing! And you can push me down, Marion, or I will push you, and who cares which of us survives …’
Alice’s hand was still gripping Marion’s arm, but now in pleading support. It was hard, despite all the other emotions Marion knew she should have felt, not to feel pity for this old woman, who had fallen so far from the magnificent creature she had once been. She shook her head. ‘There’s been enough death.’
‘There will never be enough death, Marion. That’s the whole point…’
As Alice, one hand wavering on her stick and the other clasping Marion’s arm, shuffled up the shore, it seemed at first that the tide might overtake them, but their reflections slowly dimmed as the waters thinned, then dissolved as they climbed towards the swing gate into Invercombe’s blossoming gardens.