You are, you teepfreak, she thought. Read me, over. He did not blink. She sought leverage. What had the Doctor said were likely signs of psychic fall-out? "Bad dreams," she said, and had the satisfaction of watching David"s regular features wince as if struck.
"You too?" he said. His voice hovered between hope and commiseration.
Roz nodded. That"s right, she thought as strongly as she could, confide in me. I " m like you. It was a fallacy that it was impossible to lie to telepaths. It took skill but it was not impossible.
David looked her over speculatively. After a moment his eyes dropped and he darted out of the kitchen. Roz watched him scrabbling about in the heap of unwashed clothes and papers around his bed.
"Read this." He thrust a crumpled sheaf of paper under Roz"s nose.
Anton Jarre drew the long blade of the straight razor across his throat. Bristles, some still black, most tainted with grey, flicked onto the white porcelain sink. Stuck to the surface, they resembled mites. He swirled them down with a cup of water. Would that all his problems were so small and could be disposed of with such brisk finality.
"Anton?" his wife"s voice came sharp from the parlour.
"Are you still in there? Do you intend to go to work today at all?"
He smiled. The effort helped make his voice sound happy even if his face was hidden from view. "I"ll be there." A white lie. He had no intention of hurrying in to face those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Georges Picquart was leaving from Gare de Lyon this 36 morning and he was going to see him off, even if no one else would. Time enough to put his own head on the block when he had laid some ghosts.
The Doctor threw another pebble. After the third a blond, close-cropped head looked out for a moment, and a packet fell from the window.
The Doctor picked it up and retired into the shadows to read Cwej"s report. It read: "Current police investiga-tions: disappearances among artists and writers; absinthism among students at the Sorbonne; and four murders, including one of a member of the Council of Deputies, who was due to retire because of ill health and age, and had no known enemies. I " m a.s.signed to Anton Jarre, the officer investigating that one. Current police scuttleb.u.t.t: the Dreyfus case, and no, I don"t know what this is, and as everyone a.s.sumes I do it"s difficult to get a lead. I think it"s political or religious. It"s hard to tell. My status: the papers seem to have done the trick, but no one wants me working for them. Hurried transfers mean trouble-makers, apparently even in this century. I suspect they"ve parked me on their biggest trouble-maker. H o w " s R o z ? "
Claudette Engadine twisted her perfect lips into a little moue moue of distaste. How could David live in this rotting apartment? of distaste. How could David live in this rotting apartment?
Every time she came here she wondered what she saw in him.
If they had not arranged to go to the park, she would have gone straight home again and written to tell him to move somewhere nicer.
Decor was so important. A person was known by the company they could afford to keep, that was obvious, but a house was also the window to the soul. A man who could live here was on the verge of losing all self-respect. She sniffed. David"s appeal was already a mystery to her. He was not especially amusing. His jokes were often more painful than anything else. There were handsomer men. Perhaps it was the knowledge that she could help him; that he needed her to help him. She rested a gloved hand on the banister for 37 37 a moment and then rolled the dust between her fingers.
Grimacing, she set off up the stairs.
Roz unfolded the paper carefully. It was thick and yellow.
She still found it hard to believe it was made of pulverized trees. Flint-axe technology. Back to basics.
She read: I know a song worth two of that. A song that sirens dare not sing, a knot that binds within the brain, and turns the wheel of everything. Ca.s.silida"s response to Naotalba, before the entrance of the King." The words seemed innocuous enough, but she had a momentary feeling of discomfort as they were read out, like a st.i.tch catching in a runner"s side.
"So who are Ca.s.silida and Naotalba, and who is the King?"
she asked, to fill the silence that had grown while she read.
I don"t know," said David wretchedly. "It"s like my painting, it both is and is not real. It could mean anything but hints at everything."
"What painting?" Roz snapped, angry with herself. She had seen no sign of artist"s materials during her search of the attic flat.
"If you dreamed of a man you had never seen before and sketched him on waking, only to meet him walking up the stair, would your sketch be from life or not?"
Roz considered. "If that happened, I"d think I must have seen the man before and recalled his face unconsciously. Or perhaps my dream and sketch were so vague that I could imprint the face of the first likely man I met onto them."
"Oh, I agree," said David, "if it was a painting of a man."
He hesitated, as if trying to justify himself against some imagined allegation. "It"s not only me. Half the writers and half the painters I know are affected. One - don"t ask me his or her name because I don"t know it - wrote an entire play in their sleep. The play was only performed once before the French authorities ordered the text seized and its acting banned. I was lucky - perhaps my last piece of real luck. I only saw the first act. Since then," David continued, " I " v e found myself writing in my sleep; writing, and rewriting the first act of that play. Apparently I " m not the only one."
38.Roz shrugged. "It seems harmless enough."
David nodded. "It"s not a Gothic romance, nor a penny dreadful. That"s half the horror of it. No one even dies, at least not in the first act. It has no beheadings, no men forced to eat their children, no heads on spikes. Compared to Jacobean tragedy, it"s mild as mice. Everything I have written could have a mult.i.tude of meanings. Everything up to the beginning of the second act. Sometimes I think I cannot bear not to know what will happen next, and yet I have begun to feel that if I were to write the next scene of the verse play, the opening of the second act, then I would have done something that could never be taken back. I would have stepped into a new world. A horrible world."
A knock sounded on the flat"s door.
Emil awoke to find himself curled up on top of a chest of drawers, and for a moment he could not remember how he had got there.
Then a clean feeling of pride washed over him with the weak sunlight from the dirty window, making his skin tingle and darken.
He was in his house.
None of the others, not even his mother, could understand why he had wanted to come back here. His father in particular had reacted as if that desire, even more than Emil"s refusal to take his place in the Family"s crusade, had been the final iron shutter lowered between them.
They had lived here when he was six. The house stood five floors and a gable high and had gas lamps only on the bottom two floors, one of which the family had rented, but Emil had loved it. He had at last, among the houses in which he had lived, found one that he could love as he thought a boy should love his home.
The topmost floor of the house had been uninhabited when the family had lived below. Emil had discovered then that if he climbed up the wooden stairs that clung to the outside of the house and got in through the shattered woodwork of a gla.s.sless side window, he could go through the bedroom to a 39 special place right in the arch of the gable. The tiny curved window, with its white frame and clear oval panes, jutted out between the two empty and forgotten bedrooms. The bedrooms themselves, with ceilings pressed into crazy angles by the shifting ma.s.s of down-bearing slates, and the tiny tracks of trapped birds speckled into the dust underfoot, were too desolate to be comfortable, but between them lay a brief oasis of sunlight. Here, with his legs curled up almost to his chin, Emil would sit on the heavy wooden chest of drawers below the window and bask in the afternoon sun that hit the rear of the house. The drab garden below, with its withered laurel trees, had not hindered his enjoyment, and at times an animal, a dog or a cat, or something red, quick and indeter-minate, something not in his books, would run between the houses. Here, he had felt connected with the world outside as he had never done on his brief excursions into the cobbled streets.
Last night, the key of the house fresh-cut in his pocket, he had slept again in that private place. He had even, although he had the key and could have climbed the interior staircase, approached it in the old way. He felt at home again, at last.
The closet was tight and hot. The tiny s.p.a.ce was full of richly mouldering clothes and the turpentine and paint that she had not noticed earlier. Some paintings lay wedged into the narrow s.p.a.ce, their blank backs outwards, their subjects hidden against the wall.
Roz pressed her right eye to the keyhole and thought of what she would have to do to Chris if he ever learnt that she had let herself be bundled into a cupboard. It was just the sort of thing h e " d find amusing.
"But I don"t want to see a doctor." David was being petulant and childish, and Claudette was rapidly losing her temper.
"Doctor August Mirakle is no ordinary doctor, David.
Everyone who"s anyone goes to see him."
"Really, so to be anyone you have to be mad? Is that what you"re saying? Or is it just that you think I " m cracked?"
40."No, that"s not what I " m saying. You just need to rest, to have different interests. To get out of this house, get out of yourself more." Roz could hear Claudette"s teeth gritting. Her voice was getting slower, with an angry patience that her parents" human servants had probably once reserved for her.
Roz wondered if that was how she sounded to Chris. She hoped not.
"I am not going to see Doctor Mirakle," said David forcefully. "That"s final. Absolutely and utterly final." Roz did not bother listening to the rest of the argument. It was already clear David had lost. Instead she took a finger-length torch from her bag and eased a painting out from the wall, tilting it at an angle so she could look down on the picture.
She supposed it was effective. It was certainly striking.
Utterly unlike the formal portraiture or geometric landscapes that had hung, would hang, in the Baronial Estate on Io, and which were art"s reaction to a millennium of image-storage technology and FX. It was a slew of colour and shapes that blended into a depiction of a shop, in front of which something white and tiny, a baby or a doll, crawled. The frontage of the shop was a wash of blue over gold letters. Roz could not read French, but after a second the words twisted and resolved themselves into the neat script of her childhood African. "Monsieur Montfalcon"s Most Marvellous Mechanical Men & Other Puppetries," she read. Ordinarily the Time Lord gift that let her speak French or Ancient English did not extend to written translations. She was trying to work out if this was part of the Doctor"s "psychic fall-out" when the stubborn harsh silence of a finally lost argument reached her, seconds before the flat"s door slammed. She dropped the painting without a moment"s hesitation and flung the closet door open.
The narrow stairs would give no cover if she tried to follow them that way. Claudette would know she"d been in David"s room. Roz could not care less about offending the sharp-faced society flirt, but if she embarra.s.sed David h e " d cease to trust her and become difficult, suspicious. Intract-able. She opened the wooden shutters of the attic window 41 cautiously, and looked across the rooftops. Tight red tiles.
Steep, but not impossible. She squeezed through the narrow window and ran along the ridge of the roof. If she could get to one of the lower balconies and then across to the next building, she could get down its stairs. From the corner of her eye she caught a yellow glimpse of David"s scarf in the street below. A banner in the wind. G.o.ddess! They were out of the apartment already, heading up the slightly sloping road toward the river. Swearing under her breath, Roz leant forward and grabbed at the guttering that ran along the roof edge. It creaked ominously as she bent forward, testing whether it would hold her weight. The sensible thing would be to go back. She knew the name of the doctor they were going to see. No one expected her to do acrobatics.
No one but her. She was three balconies down and a building across before she caught another breath. Smooth.
Except it wasn"t. She was going to ache for a week, and if she had tried that in a fire fight she would have been chargrilled.
She was getting old.
David and Claudette were turning the corner at the end of the street. Roz kicked in the door of the balcony and ran through the apartment beyond to the staircase. The couple making love on the bed did not even notice her. She noticed them just long enough to memorize the position. If that did not keep her limber, nothing would. Of course it might be a while before she got to try it out.
42.
Chapter 3.
Doctor August Mirakle, who advertised himself as a doctor of the body, mind and spirit, held court in an ugly red brick house on the rue Visconti opposite the Academie du Medecine. He had chosen the location deliberately to imply that the medical academy beamed approvingly upon his activities. Privately, he judged that the site repaid its exorbitant rent four times over in custom even before the silk-screen printed testimonials and the support of his sponsors were taken into account.
All the n.o.bility and the political elite paid handsomely for his attentions, but he also, for his sins, worked with the poor and the ragged, and his sponsors were quite determined that he should continue to do so. The people in whom they were interested were not only to be found in the ranks of the inner circles of government.
Dr Mirakle considered an art student, even one connected with the Engadine family, to fall firmly in the cla.s.s of charitable work. When a client from that cla.s.s was the first of the day it soured his whole disposition. It made it more likely he would have to contact his sponsors. So it was with teeth fixed in a pained smile that was meant to be avuncular, and disdain only half-hidden behind his half-moon spectacles that he began his usual mixture of Christian Science self-help, pharmaceutical encouragement and practical mesmerism.
"Tell me about your problems, my friend."
"I came to you because of my dreams," the young man with 43 the American accent said defiantly. "You were recommended to me."
Mirakle glanced at the note his receptionist had pa.s.sed to him. "Ah yes, by Mademoiselle Engadine. Such a charming lady. Such an a.s.set to her family."
The American - the note said his name was David - winced slightly. " I " m meeting her later," he said defensively.
Mirakle judged he was smarting from the brisk kiss on the cheek and wave he had been given by the mademoiselle when she had left him at the doorway of Mirakle"s consulting rooms. Mirakle had seen that, peeking from behind the drapes in the bay window of the study; it often paid to have as much practical information about a patient as possible. A failing love affair was worth gold to him. Usually.
This time he felt a growing unease as he questioned his new patient. There was nothing physical to account for this. David was a dark-haired stripling, no brighter than the average street Apache or politician. Yet there was something different about him. Evidence of muscles only neglected rather than never developed? A strength awaiting exercise? A potential athlete, Mirakle judged, ruined by introspection and by confining his life to the horizons of a cork-lined room. He moved his comfortably corpulent form as if in sympathy, raising a creak of protest from the armchair from which he regarded the patient. Well, he would have exercise soon enough if Augustus Mirakle had anything to do with it.
"What sort of dreams?" He fixed his best mesmeric gaze upon the lad.
In the tiny, cluttered reception room, Roz pressed the end of the sonic sensor against the part.i.tion wall, and ignored the m.u.f.fled noise from over her shoulder. Mirakle"s blonde receptionist was not enjoying her introduction to the Roz Forrester closet experience.
The long, severe, straight streets of Paris did not make it easy to trail people unseen. Claudette and David were young, white and attractive, natural cutters through nineteenth-century crowds. No one had shown any inclination to get out of Roz"s 44 way. Her right shoulder was bruised from barging through street riff-raff. She had not arrived in a subtle or diplomatic mood.
The thick, self-satisfied voice of Claudette"s pet doctor boomed out of the earplug. Under its oily intonation Roz thought she heard something familiar. It was fear.
" I " d like you to have lunch with a friend of mine and, incidentally, of Claudette"s. He is a member of a lay brotherhood that has had some good results in calming the shakes of addicts of opium and absinthe. I would sooner you saw him than returned to me for a nerve tonic, is that clear? His address is on this card, his name is Brother Tomas. I"ll write you a brief letter of introduction if you wait a moment."
G.o.ddess! Roz dropped the sensor, and lunged at the receptionist"s desk. Where did they keep addresses? KeyPADD? A hundred years too soon. On a bit of squashed tree? Yes. She flipped through the card index. "Brother Tomas" was a trap, of course. Mirakle sounded as false as any criminal she had ever interrogated, but then she"d already made her decision when she"d let David leave the flat with Claudette.
"Keep him away from anything unusual," the Doctor had said, but Roz knew that was not the role fate had planned for the artist. He was not a suspect or a witness. He was a judas goat, a lure. The Doctor was obviously intending, when the board was well set up, to use him to persuade the source of the psychic fall-out to come out into the open where he could deal with it. Well, David could be her lightning conductor as easily as the Doctor"s. Of course she"d have to arrange back-up. Going in alone was as bad as not going in at all. A note to Chris should do the trick, courtesy of the Prefecture of Police. She slipped the card into her bag. This time she would get there first.
After David left, Mirakle poured himself a gla.s.s of medicinal bitters. He felt drained and useless. He hated this kind of consultation.
Particularly when the results were positive. David was a cla.s.s three latent on Tomas" patiently worked-out scale. Too 45 dangerous to be allowed to join with Montague"s forces. Not without seeing Tomas first, at any rate. Mirakle had little confidence in Tomas" plans but anything, however risky, that worked against that madman was worth trying. They had nothing to lose, but David and his sort were becoming very common. There were, after all, a dozen like the boy in the garrets of the Artists" Quarter.
That was a shuddersome thought.
Mirakle grimaced with pain and bent his fingers into the quick flick of the sign. It would have hurt less if he had been of the same species as its first users. There are kinds of body language that humans are not built to emulate. It would have rea.s.sured him more if he had found it to have power against Montague"s creatures. Sorcery was almost dead, now.
Perhaps he was worrying unduly. It was understandable that certain things were showing in dreams. In the mystic realms Paris must look as if the World Fair had erected the vast lamp proposed by Eiffel"s compet.i.tors that would have illuminated the whole city. If he could dream himself he would doubtless confirm the fragmentary glimpses that these decadent paint splashers were daubing across Paris. Possibly it was best that he had lost that particular ability years ago.
Feeling the heavy sweaty jowls of his face thoughtfully, August hoped for a less worrying patient. A nice honest deviant, perhaps. Why, only yesterday the Mademoiselle Delacroix had been telling him candidly about the beastly English practices her lovers demanded. It had all been singularly refreshing. Idly he wondered what Tomas would make of Mademoiselle Delacroix. The thought gave him a tinge of pleasure.
"He laughed at me." David"s expression was rueful as he sipped at the bitter coffee Claudette had bought him, outside the cafe. Most of the people sitting and watching the pa.s.sers-by were foreigners. The cost of a coffee here was exorbitant, but the flowers in the shop-fronts, expensively reared in hothouses or cut daintily out of coloured paper and ribbons, defied the winter chill.
46."I am sure le docteur Mirakle did no such thing," Claudette scolded, tapping David playfully on one knee. "We must trust others if we wish to gain trust, David."
"Really, he did," said David wishing that had come out sounding less petulant than it had. What had he ever seen in the girl anyway? When he wanted her to be serious she was flirty, and when he wanted her to flirt all she would do was quote her holy man"s latest aphorism. He hoped Roz was all right. Had the closet locked when he shut it? Was she suffocating?
"Poor b o y " Claudette smiled, patting the squirming David on his dark hair.
David smiled back, restraining an almost overpowering urge to hit her. He was not a child, for heaven"s sake. The urge, almost a compulsion, tightened the muscles in his forearms. He reached for the bottle of table wine.
In a flash of ultraviolet intensity he broke it on the table, slashing the jagged gla.s.s edge across her throat, opening his mouth in a scream of rage that gaped to catch the spray of naked red blood that gushed from her whiteness. The vivid light died into a moment that was grey as a blank slate. The grey unbroken bottle trembled in his pearly hand. Claudette smiled at him. With an answering smile that felt inside like a death-mask he finished pouring her drink. The image made his hand shake, and the red table wine - Claudette abhorred white wines - spilled over the table-cloth. He ran from the table.
As the waiter came to mop up the wine, Claudette paid the bill and, still smiling to herself, pushed her chair under the table and followed David, taking care to keep out of sight. It was not difficult. He was ploughing on forcefully. His head was thrust forward, neither looking to right nor left, and certainly not looking back. It was obvious that he was going to Brother Tomas. Poor boy, he had looked so frightened.
Still, it was for his own good. If anyone could help him, Brother Tomas could.
Roz found Brother Tomas"s house on the rue des Tournelles, not far from the so-called Jewish Quarter, at the heart of Le 47 Marais. On the way she"d seen broken windows in kosher butchers and slogans scrawled on walls. Since the supposed treason of Dreyfus, the popular press had been baying for the Jews. Krystallnacht looked like coming early.
The house was imposing but run-down, an aristocratic remnant of the previous century from before the migration of the n.o.bility to St-Germain. Despite its years it looked too grand for a member of a "lay brotherhood".
She looked for a way round to the back; for a way to break in.
In the sunlight Emil"s light, almost colourless hair darkened perceptibly, as did the white skin of his chubby face with its small translucent ears. It was with a healthy outdoor coun-tenance that he climbed down the interior stairs to the ground floor and the rooms that had belonged to his parents. Such changes were still outside his control, but he had mastered the wild shifts in physiognomy that had marked his childhood. If he was angry now, claws no longer burst from shredded fingertips. If he was unhappy now, he no longer signalled it so intensely that any Family member could sense his gloom a mile off, like a black obsidian-tipped pin thrust into a map of Paris.
The powers were still there, however, and he controlled them like a man struggling to lead a pack of hounds that might turn on him at any moment. Coming to the bottom of the stairs, he breathed again the air of the ground floor apartment where he had lived as a child, and for a moment relaxed his control as he surrendered to the feeling of nostalgia. In a second he realized his mistake. The power within him, pressing always at any point where his self-built defences were weak, seized on his desire. The world faded into a waking memory.
His mother, sitting working at her spinning-wheel in the parlour, smiled at him as he went past. She was always kind parlour, smiled at him as he went past. She was always kind whereas his father could be gruff at times, even violent, but whereas his father could be gruff at times, even violent, but somehow Emil had known - since he could not remember somehow Emil had known - since he could not remember when - that if he had to offend one of his parents it was best when - that if he had to offend one of his parents it was best 48 48 to offend his father. There was something about his mother, something that showed perhaps in the slow but utterly certain weave and woof of her cloth-making, that brooked no something that showed perhaps in the slow but utterly certain weave and woof of her cloth-making, that brooked no opposition. opposition.
Then something happened. No. He did not remember it like this. No. He did not remember it like this. His father"s anger. Fire. His father screaming as His father"s anger. Fire. His father screaming as he ran. he ran. In the future, the memories ran boiling into his brain from the fabric of the house as his power absorbed the residual psychic traces buried in the walls. In the future, the memories ran boiling into his brain from the fabric of the house as his power absorbed the residual psychic traces buried in the walls. From her From her spinning-wheel, Emil"s mother saw the skin on her husband"s spinning-wheel, Emil"s mother saw the skin on her husband"s face pucker like a crepe on the stove, and a stench of fat and face pucker like a crepe on the stove, and a stench of fat and burning hair cling sickeningly within her nostrils. Moving in burning hair cling sickeningly within her nostrils. Moving in one determined act she pulled the half-finished shawl for one determined act she pulled the half-finished shawl for which she had been spinning thread from the top of the little which she had been spinning thread from the top of the little pile of clothes beside her where it lay, and flung it over his pile of clothes beside her where it lay, and flung it over his head. The fire, though, refused to be smothered. Uncanny as head. The fire, though, refused to be smothered. Uncanny as a ghost, it burst in thin slivers of light through the weave of a ghost, it burst in thin slivers of light through the weave of the cloth. He started to moan in a high tone worse than any the cloth. He started to moan in a high tone worse than any scream, and she did not have to look up to know that the few scream, and she did not have to look up to know that the few ornaments on the high shelves along the hallway were jumping and trembling in time to his shaking body. The quiet ornaments on the high shelves along the hallway were jumping and trembling in time to his shaking body. The quiet footfalls of her son sounded behind her. Without releasing the footfalls of her son sounded behind her. Without releasing the burning shawl that she clasped to her husband, she turned burning shawl that she clasped to her husband, she turned enough to see the boy"s horrified, inhumanly wide eyes. enough to see the boy"s horrified, inhumanly wide eyes.
"Make it better!" he pleaded. "Please, mama."
Her hands tightened on the cloth. She could not bear it.
Inside her head a white light consumed the world. The ribbon of the world bent and was cut anew. ribbon of the world bent and was cut anew. And twelve years later, remembering in the same house, Emil saw himself through his mother"s eyes, and for the second time his mind was bent by her power, as the world was bent. Two sets of contradictory memories fought in his brain. And twelve years later, remembering in the same house, Emil saw himself through his mother"s eyes, and for the second time his mind was bent by her power, as the world was bent. Two sets of contradictory memories fought in his brain.
Inside the workshop his father, a bulky man, was hammer-ing something down, the trapdoor to the cellar perhaps.