Adornments of the Storm Read online

  There was an old man standing behind the bar, wiping a dented tin pub ashtray with a chequered cloth. He must have been in his early seventies. He had the courageous remains of a thin grey ponytail hanging down his skinny back. He was wearing a T-shirt with a palm tree on it. He looked up as they came in and grinned with enormous and palpable joy. He didn’t have a tooth left in his head. As he threw down the cloth and made to come around the bar a dog barked and stood, wagging its long, feathery tail, from where it had been snoozing behind the bar stools.

  “A coach party, Bix!” the man cried. “Just what I need.”

  TREVENA AND DANIEL sat at Colin Dack’s fragrant little bar. It had been a perfume counter decades before, in one of the old department stores in Invidisham-next-the-Sea. Colin had salvaged it from a skip. It still held the memories of all those perfumes spritzed across it; they had sunk into the wood and lingered there. Colin liked to think of the bar as an instrument, an olfactory piano, constantly giving off motes of fragrance rather than notes of sound. A seductive, timeless symphony of scent.

  He was explaining this to Trevena. It just made Trevena want to sneeze.

  “All those happy customers,” Colin was saying. “All those lovely ladies!”

  Trevena thought about the lovely ladies he’d seen working at perfume counters on the few occasions he’d had to go near them. Faces stiff with mortuary-grade makeup and eyes that went dead the moment you showed disinterest in their stall.

  “You still doing those caravan towing courses, Colin?” he asked.

  “Not so much these days. Not much call for it. You interested, Phil?”

  “Frankly, no, Colin.”

  “Well, the offer’s there. You want another pint?”

  Trevena shook his head. He had only choked down a couple of mouthfuls of Colin’s home-brew so far. How did he get a licence for this place?

  “I could make punch?”

  “This’ll do me, Colin. Thanks.”

  Bismuth came up to the bar. He had to duck beneath the low ceiling and peer through the string of flickering lights above the bar. He put his empty pint glass down.

  “I’ve got a taste for this,” he said.

  Colin beamed, delighted and refilled Bismuth’s glass from a steel barrel beneath the counter. “Crusader,” he said. “Been brewing it for years. It’s my best seller, isn’t it, John?”

  “Yes, Colin. It flies out of the door,” John said. He was sitting at a small table in the middle of the clubhouse floor with Alex and Eliot, playing cards. None of them had touched their pints. Lesley and Anna had gone for a walk around the park, declining Colin’s generous offer of a free bar for the day, in search of ice creams. Bix looked contented, lying at John’s feet with his nose in a packet of crisps.

  Daniel said to Trevena, “You know this Andrew Chapel, Phil. You’re the only one who has met him. What do you think?”

  “I don’t think he knows himself. He reported having visions of black polygons, all tethered together across the sky. Very nihilistic. He thought he had seen the real fabric behind reality and it was just mathematics and chaos, all utterly meaningless. It didn’t feel completely delusional. It was very angry. Angry in a suppressed and unconscious way.”

  Bismuth put his glass down on the bar. Trevena looked up at him. He put a hand on Daniel’s arm and indicated with a glance that Daniel should look, too.

  Bismuth was standing stock-still, his head touching the ceiling of the bar. His eyes were wide and his mouth was trembling behind the untended curls of his beard.

  “What is it?” Daniel said. He got off his stool and looked up into the giant’s face. “Bismuth!”

  “Black polygons,” he said. “Blocks of darkness.”

  “Yes,” Trevena said. “He was obsessed by them.”

  Bismuth relaxed. He refocused, looked around the room. Everyone was staring at him. He put a hand on his belt, where his levers were held in loops at his sides.

  “I know who Chapel is,” he said. “He’s the boy in the refrigerator.”

  THEY DREW THEIR plans, sitting around two of the clubhouse tables that had been pushed together. Lesley and Anna had returned, their lips red and shiny from the Rocket lollies they had bought at the gift shop. Bismuth was agitated. He wanted to get on with things, but Daniel and John managed to calm him sufficiently to get him to sit with the rest of them at the tables. He sat scowling, perched on a stool, looking like an adult at a child’s tea party. He had declined Colin’s second pint and had left it on the bar, to Colin’s visible disappointment.

  Before Bismuth had been reunited with the others, he had been lost, wandering, seeking the oblivion of insanity. But before that he had been caught, trapped and deceived in a loop of Dark Time, made to relive bereavement and loss, over and over again. His gift as a Firmament Surgeon had been his ability to enter the dreams of the bereaved, the broken and those stuck in denial, and free them, removing them from the dream and allowing acceptance to replace the devastation. The devil-in-dreams had used this ability against him and manipulated Bismuth’s loss to perpetuate his cycle. He had become stuck, unable to realise what had been done to him. Doctor Mocking had saved him and brought him back to the fold.

  Bismuth had been lost, but his powers had remained, and before he cast himself from the Gantry he had seen something amongst the bombsites of a mother’s dream: a refrigerator, old and rusty standing in the distance, on a dais of concrete. It shone, he recalled, in that concrete greyness, and he called to the mother not to open it, in God’s name. As he had scrambled over masonry and cables he knew he would be too late, and she reached out and opened the door.

  Her screams had done for him, Bismuth had said. It was the last time he travelled and he threw himself into the brazen, consuming magnitude of the Gantry with her screams still howling in his head.

  After the Night Clock had been assembled he had made it his mission to find the residue of the dream, track down any echo of it remaining in Dark Time. It had become his obsession, to find the boy in the refrigerator and set him free. Because, as the mother had opened the door and seen the child dead in there, blue and cold and cramped into that shallow space, Bismuth had seen something else. The child had opened its eyes. They were black but far from dead.

  He had found it by chance, in a dump, tracking down and killing an Autoscope that had fled there during the Firmament Surgeons’ purge following the gathering of the Night Clock. He had stood before it, the remains of the Autoscope beneath his boots, already rotting into the filth, and reached out a trembling hand.

  It had been empty. It was always empty. Seven years and over a thousand battles across that dump but at the end, it was always empty. Until the last time.

  “It was a block of darkness,” Bismuth said. “Living. The boy was in it. I could see his eyes. I thought I had lost him.”

  “Why do you think it’s Chapel?” Lesley asked.

  “Synchronicity, archetypes. They’re what we work with, isn’t it. The architecture and calculus of the Night Clock. I think the boy was trapped, lured there in childhood. He was a reborn Firmament Surgeon as lost as the rest of us, but never grew up to be found and become a part of us. Chloe said she thinks Chapel is a Firmament Surgeon but in the throes of corruption. I feel it’s him. They’re the same person. The devil-in-dreams has kept the boy in a loop, feeding off him, making him relive his nightmare the same way he made me relive mine.

  “Chapel’s depersonalisation and visions of dark blocks, polygons. He’s externalised the darkness within the fridge, that cold, blind hell, into his art. He’s communicating with himself.”

  Trevena spoke, “That makes sense. But how can he be in two places? Trapped in a refrigerator and alive and growing up as Chapel?”

  “Chapel the boy is trapped in Dark Time, in a dream, or part of a Quay. Chapel the man was allowed to grow up for the purpose of being controlled and corrupted, to be turned before we could find him. He has been saved for a mission. The devil-in-dreams has tried t
o outthink us. It has almost succeeded.”

  "HE’S PROBABLY FELT like shit his whole life,” Daniel said.

  Trevena agreed. “When I assessed him that was what came across in his history. I thought at first he had a personality disorder, something narcissistic or schizoid. An emptiness. It explains the depersonalisation and detachment.”

  “Something essentially missing.”

  “Yes. Exactly. There’s one other thing, though. It bothered me at the time and it’s bothering me now. He spoke of having a child. Male. He never referred to him as his son, though, or called him by name. Just his child. It was odd, but I put that down to the lack of emotional involvement. I was going to ask him about it, next time I saw him.”

  “I don’t think he’s got a child,” John said. “The child’s him. A projection. He’s holding them both together. He’s been doing it all his life.”

  Bismuth stood up, the stool scraping across the lino.

  “And he’s just broken the connection. We need to move. Now.”

  Part Four

  Unease

  CHAPEL AWOKE ON his bed, in the dark, close to panic, everything feeling loosened by emotion and misrepresented. He had done something terrible, had hurt someone. The memory was vague, pressure against the back of his eyes like a headache.

  He remembered leaving the hospital and hiding in the recesses of an unlocked garage overnight, feeling cold and disoriented, not knowing where to go next or why he was there. At some point in the night he had fallen asleep squatting against the wall and something outside had been trying to fumble the door open, but without the strength to lift it. He had jerked awake from a thin and grainy sleep, and had sat frozen while the fumbling continued. And then it had stopped, and he was able to exhale a long-held breath, his ears ringing in the sudden silence, hyper-vigilant. The voice had spoken from outside and he had had to bite down on his bottom lip to prevent a scream, because he recognised it. He listened wide-eyed, and eventually, when it became too much to bear, he agreed to do what it was asking of him. When he crept to the garage door and pulled it open he saw that it was first light. He remembered going back to the hospital. He remembered hurting someone and taking something. He remembered the taxi ride home, huddling in the back seat clutching what he had taken, sweating and confused, his thoughts no longer his alone. He had let himself into the cottage and gone straight to sleep, exhausted, shaken.

  The dark bedroom pulsed, the furniture seeming to pull away from his eyes when he darted them around, trying to focus on something reassuring, something real. They looked like alien objects and he struggled to find names for them. He awoke to the immediate sensation of weeping. Tears were teeming down his face even as he was opening his eyes, flowing from the well within him that untapped when he slept. He sat up on the side of the bed and sobbed, unable to locate anything; his memories shuffled like the pages of a book in a cold wind, and he couldn’t trap a page, make it settle on some comforting and happy image that might complete him for a while, might take away this awful feeling of loss and disconnection.

  He felt his mind groping and sobbed again, hating the sensation but unable to stop it. He stood up and walked on unsteady legs around the bed.

  He was certain that nothing was real, his memories vague fabrications, and that everything was a film he had been ghosted out of. He groped about, feeling translucent, panic rising, just trying to grasp something that would make his world three-dimensional again. There was an elusiveness to the sense of everything and everyone, an evasion of solidity. He even tried to use his imagination, to disarm the horrors of unreality by peering further, stripping things down to what he knew they were; but there was only absurdity to the molecules that made him and atoms made his mind reel with their racing, terrible spaces.

  The first time it had happened he had awoken in pitch darkness, blind and mindless. He found himself blundering around a formless place, expanding without boundaries into that space and all of him a part of it, stretching forever, until he brushed against something soft and reached out and grasped it. He pulled on it and the heavy curtain drew back from the window and moonlight switched everything back on in his head. He stood staring out into the night, heart racing, eyes wide and startled, and at last began to recall who he was and where he was.

  Now he waited until his eyes became more accustomed to the darkness and then made his way out of the bedroom. He paused on the landing and glanced around. He still felt alarmed by the dismaying scale of consciousness. He could feel his heart beating tightly in his chest and pressed the palm of his hand over it, feeling the pain in the muscles there, and the tingling in his fingers

  He wanted the toilet, but couldn’t face the stark light in the bathroom. It would throw his face back at him in the mirrors and he couldn’t stand to see himself and not be certain at whom he was looking. And the bath and sink and the toilet bowl would all glare white, gnashing out at him like huge teeth in a shiny mouth, and that would be awful.

  He felt everything in him drawn down into his heart, and he tried to locate himself there in the throbbing chambers, but the darkness of the rushing blood submersed him and drove him back out so that he was standing at the top of the stairs listening to it rushing and beating in his ears.

  He went downstairs in his boxer shorts and let himself out into his back yard. He stood in dim twilight and urinated into the drain beneath the gutter downpipe. When he had finished he went across the yard in bare feet and stood outside his workshop. He could hear whispering from inside, cunning and insistent. He looked up into the sky. The light remaining on the horizon was brown and exposed a black mountainscape of jagged, tilted vertices.

  Chapel turned his back on the polygons and went into his workshop. The bag was there, with the jar still inside, placed on his workbench that morning before he had gone inside the house. He couldn’t have stood having it in the house, not seeping that awful, constant invocation.

  But now he listened, and began acting on what he heard.

  BISMUTH STOOD AT the edge of the boulevard outside Colin’s clubhouse. It was already getting dark. Trevena figured they had been at the caravan park for about five hours, thinking, talking, planning.

  Bismuth was holding a lever in his right fist. In his left hand he held a compass. It was antique-looking, silver, and seemed to be without cardinal points.

  He slid the end of the lever into the soft earth of the verge at the foot of the clubhouse steps. He compressed the handle and a line of light the height of him opened in the air. It glowed an iridescent, electric silver and widened to the width of a man’s outstretched arms. Trevena felt the hairs rise on his arms and the back of his neck, not entirely from the effect of Gantry but because of it.

  Bismuth wanted John and Bix to go with him, for their enhanced sight and sensitivity. Daniel and Trevena would try to locate Andrew Chapel. Alex and Eliot would stay at the caravan park with Colin, and Lesley and Anna would go back home to talk with Index and gather any information they could about Doctor Mocking and Chloe.

  “Good fortune, everyone,” John said.

  Bismuth stepped through the Gantry, and John and Bix followed.

  The rest of them watched the Gantry close. Colin ushered the boys into the clubhouse. He looked troubled.

  “You okay, Colin?” Alex asked.

  Colin wiped a hand over his face. “I really like that big fella,” he said.

  “He’ll be all right,” Eliot said. “Come on, tell us about that time you blew up those Toyceivers with a gas heater.”

  Colin beamed. “Good lads. A Crusader for all of us!”

  Daniel, Trevena, Lesley and Anna returned to the jeep. “I’ll drop you girls off at home,” Daniel said. “Have you got Chapel’s address, Phil?”

  “It’s on file. We’ll have to go back to my office. He’s not likely to be at home, though. The police did a check when he went missing from the ward.”

  “It’s a place to start. It might throw up a clue. Coppers just knock and have
a look through the window. We both know that.”

  They got into the jeep and drove away from the caravan park.

  BISMUTH, JOHN AND Bix stood on a snow-blown street at the entrance to an abandoned arcade.

  “This used to be a pretty place,” Bismuth said. “When dad was alive.”

  John put a hand on Bismuth’s shoulder.

  “What happened here?”

  Bismuth gazed the length of the arcade stretching ahead of them. All the units on either side of the arcade were empty and full of shadows and dry leaves that had blown in off the road. The roof was high and arched, corrugated, and the ornate iron struts that reinforced it and the flues that ran between them looked skeletal with the dried droppings from birds that no longer roosted and flitted there.

  “I used to help my dad in his shop when I was a boy,” Bismuth said. His expression softened for a moment with nostalgia. “It was an ironworks. He made ornaments and furniture, and repaired things for people in the tiny stockroom at the back of the shop.” He pulled open his coat and put his hands on the levers in his belt. “He made these but he didn’t know what they were for. He used to experiment with things. He liked to make things that looked arcane but had no function. I didn’t know why, I just assumed he was happy shaping metals. But I think he was being guided. When he wasn’t making things to sell or fixing someone’s typewriter, he made piles of unfathomable things.”

  Bismuth walked into the arcade. John and Bix walked alongside him. It was cold and melancholy in the arcade. They passed what had once been a flower stall. John could smell the ghost fragrance of its history.