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Qinmeartha and the Girl Child
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2 Girl Child LoChiIt would be Easter in a couple of weeks. Joanna had had a good drive down from London, and was feeling relaxed rather than tired by it. Slowing down as she came in off the A38 onto Regent Street -- the road that led into Tarburton's centre from the east -- she wondered for the first time how much of what had happened in the past six months she could tell Aunt Jill, how much would have to be censored. Quite a lot, she concluded. There are some things that don't cross the generation gap, however much Aunt Jill is supposed to have been a bit of a goer in her young days. She parked the red Mini in Ham's Lane, just in front of the Crafts Centre, as usual. Climbing out of it, she looked up at the windows of her aunt's flat, just above the Blue Horse. They were blank, like eyelids closed against the sunshine. Aunt Jill would be watching her from there, so she waved cheerfully, then dived into the back seat to fetch out her squashy grey bagful of clothes. Greta appeared at the door of the Crafts Centre, smiling uncertainly. She was of middle age and looked it, despite a lifetime spent eating nothing that came out of a packet or tin. She claimed to cook everything served in the Crafts Centre from raw materials, no shortcuts, but her neat blue designer apron never seemed to show any food-stains. "Hi," said Joanna. "Hello," said Greta slowly. "You'll have come to see your aunt again?" "Yes," Joanna said. It was an obvious question, and for a second it worried her. Greta wasn't exactly a conversational expert, but she wasn't usually as dim as this either. "It's been a while." "Been a while," Greta echoed. She turned and went back into her shop. Joanna hefted the bag onto her shoulder and crossed the road. The Blue Horse was open, even though it was the middle of the afternoon -- Jas must have decided the grockle season had begun -- and Joanna was briefly tempted to push her way in through the swing doors to the cool, friendly darkness. No -- Aunt Jill must have seen her arrive. Later on, perhaps, Joanna would be able to drag her out of the flat for a drink or three. The flat's entrance was through a concrete corridor and up a little flight of stairs at the back. Listening to the bell's ping-pong, Joanna saw that the tiny garden was a mess, with weeds already growing in a tangled mat across the earth. She frowned. Aunt Jill wasn't an enthusiastic gardener, but she was determinedly dutiful. Had she been ill sometime during the winter, and not said anything -- not wanted to bother Joanna? It would be like her. Ping-pong again. Not that Joanna could have done much about it, even if Aunt Jill had told her. There had been too much going on in London, too many emotional quagmires that had to be either navigated or circumnavigated. The things she wasn't going to be able to talk to Aunt Jill about. The symmetry of the situation struck her as she stood waiting on the doorstep. When last she'd been here in Tarburton she'd been aware that there was something Aunt Jill was withholding from her. Now it was the other way around. Splitting up with Mike -- well, that would be OK: Aunt Jill had shown something akin to impatience when Joanna's relationship with Mike had entered its third year, as if Aunt Jill herself, in her youth, would have ditched the man months before, just on principle. Yeah, and it'd be all right to talk about Peter, too -- about most of it. Ping-pong. How long had she been standing here? Couldn't be more than a couple of minutes. Maybe Aunt Jill had gone to the loo after seeing her arrive. Don't worry about things so much, thought Joanna, pulling a battered pack of cigarettes from her handbag. You're getting to be as bad as Aunt Jill. A fussbudget, Peter would call you... Yes, it'd been a bit of a mess with Peter, hadn't it? Three years of Mike had reduced everything to familiarity. Peter had seemed a good option -- although, when Joanna thought about it, she realized angrily that a lot of what had made him seem so glamorous was just that he had a faster car. They'd driven north one day, up almost as far as Manchester, and in between being terrified of police speed-traps Joanna had felt as if she were throwing off the shackles of her staid, quasi-respectable relationship with Mike. Peter had driven away very quickly indeed when she'd told him she was pregnant. Ping-pong. And the odd thing was, she'd hardly blamed him. "Joanna, darling," said a voice at her elbow. She turned to find the door had opened. A pale face looked at her out of the gloom. "Aunt Jill?" she said hesitantly. "Who else would it be?" "Yes, but..." "I've lost a little weight since you were last here, that's all. Come in, child, come in. Don't just hang around there. There's a chilly draught, if you hadn't noticed." Following Aunt Jill up the inside stairs, Joanna found her mind in a turmoil. If she'd met her aunt in the street she wouldn't have recognized her. Aunt Jill couldn't be more than half the weight she'd been last October, and she seemed twenty years older. This was somebody's grandmother who was pointing her into the drawing-room -- somebody's rather old and decrepit grandmother. "Aunt Jill," Joanna began helplessly, "you look so..." "So what?" There was still a strong light in the blue eye that peered up at her. "So ... changed," said Joanna. "I'm six months older, that's all." Aunt Jill settled herself into the yellow armchair, leaving Joanna to sort herself out however she would. "It's been a long six months. I don't suppose you've had too much time to think about your poor old aunt -- not with all the things you young folk get up to in the city." "I'm sorry it's been so long..." "No, don't apologize to me, Joanna." Aunt Jill waved a frail hand in dismissal. The skin between the fingers was pale-yellow parchment. "I was young, too, you keep forgetting. A long time ago." "Not all that long," said Joanna brusquely, dropping the squashy bag and plonking herself down in the window seat. "You're not all that ancient, Aunt Jill." But she looks it. She looks as if she's not far from the grave. She doesn't look sixty ... sixty-three, I think ... or is it -four? "Long enough. Tea? You'll have to make it for us both, if you could. I seem to have been standing half the day." Joanna put the kettle on, scuttled upstairs briefly to the loo, then filled the pot. The kitchen, normally as neat as one of those pictures in the colour supplements, was like the garden out the back: it gave the impression of being overgrown. "What was Peter like, then?" said Aunt Jill as Joanna came back into the room, carrying the tray. "You never told me much about him on the phone." She didn't sound very concerned. In fact, she sounded as if she were finding it an effort to formulate the words, like an actress suddenly thrust into a part without having been given the script, just told to muddle along as best she can. "Not much to tell," said Joanna. And there wasn't. He had been fun to be with, but now it was an effort to conjure up even the image of his face or the sound of his laughter. Their brief fling had been somehow affectless, even at the time. And then, of course, he'd been abruptly out of her life -- business had suddenly, by some astonishing coincidence, necessitated his departure to Glasgow for the next two years. Leaving her, and a fetus developing inside her. And Mike -- except Mike hadn't really come into it. Oh, he'd been there, of course: hanging around like a faithful spaniel, over-eager that they remain best friends, even though they were no longer lovers. She hadn't had the heart to tell him that the child was actually his, not Peter's: he might have offered, in his gallant way, to marry her, or something embarrassing and confining like that. So instead she'd quietly arranged for an abortion. She'd been surprised by how much of an argument the doctors and nurses had put up, pointing out that an abortion was a permanent thing: you couldn't change your mind about it afterwards. And then she'd been surprised by how completely they'd acquiesced as soon as they'd realized that her mind was set. She got the feeling that, even if she'd had second thoughts an hour before the op, they'd have been overridden by those now-impersonal persons. The biggest surprise was the guilt, afterwards. It was as if it was only once the bond between them had been sundered that she could start to recognize the fetus -- the dead fetus, which she wasn't allowed to see -- as a fellow human being. She didn't think of herself as a murderess, not quite; but she did have the haunting sensation, whenever she woke up in the night, that perhaps she'd run someone over in the car and forgotten about it. Which was illogical, silly, a notion not to be entertained. But a notion which, alas, had gate-crashed, and showed no signs of departure. Joanna didn't respond to her aunt's question. The old Aunt Jill would have seen her preoccupation, but the new one -- this grandmother -- didn't even seem to be interested. "I had a good drive down," said Joanna. "The countryside always looks so gorgeous this time of the..." "You're looked after in my will," said Aunt Jill. "As you must have known you'd be. Say no more about it, now. Just so long as you know." "Auntie!" She'd left the sugar in the kitchen. "Whatever brought that up?" "I'm not as young as I used to was." "You're not old." "Amn't I?" Looking at the pale face, with the bones of the cheek and jaw clearly demarcated beneath the wrinkled paper skin, Joanna could find no answer. Yes, whatever had happened in this past half-year, Aunt Jill was now indisputably old. No argument. "I'll get the sugar," she said. "As you wish, child." This time the arm on the worn yellow chair only half-rose, leaving the little dismissive wave uncompleted. When Joanna located the sugar-lumps, tucked away near the back of the cupboard for the cleaning powders and washing-up liquid, she found they were stained and spotted with what she hoped was just old tea. On the spur of the moment she dumped them in the overflowing pedal bin. "You're out of sugar," she said, back in the drawing-room. "I'll get some for you, later." "Oh, don't worry about 'later'. Tell me something about what's been going on." A little of the vitality had returned to the old woman. She'd pulled herself more upright in the chair, and was drinking her tea black and sugarless. "Well, they sacked me." When Joanna had first told her aunt on the phone there had been a shocked sucking-in of breath: in the old days people never got sacked unless it was for some gross breach of conduct. "They called it making me redundant, but it felt just the same as being sacked." She'd been working for a publishing company, Rolfe & Baldwin. Mainly they published glossy novels with lots of pages and lots of sex in different countries and in unorthodox locales and positions that sold hardly at all in hardback but gained big paperback advances. Joanna had been an assistant editor for nearly five years, all the time telling herself that she was wasting her time -- that sooner or later the right job would turn up at OUP or somewhere respectable, and then she'd be on her way. Instead, as Dave Rolfe had told her, the bottom had fallen out of the soft-porn market, and they were having to cut back. She'd got six months' salary and a big bunch of over-ripe red roses. "Well," said Aunt Jill, "you were never very happy there anyway. Not a great loss." All at once Joanna felt an upsurge of fury. The last few months had been hell -- Mike, Peter, the abortion, the redundancy, everything -- and surely it was her entitlement to have some older person she could lean on, someone whose shoulder she could weep into, just like she'd wept into her mother's shoulder as a child. For almost a decade Aunt Jill had been that person: it was her job to be a sort of mother confessor, and she was failing to fulfil it just at the time Joanna most needed her to. I should be sympathetic, she told herself sternly. I shouldn't be thinking about my own interests at all. I shouldn't be being so selfish. Aunt Jill's ill -- she must be, and here am I worrying away about my own trivial concerns. It was good advice, but the anger didn't go away. She watched her hand clenching on her knee. "I'll go and make up my bed," she said. "And then I'll do some shopping. And clean the kitchen. You've been letting things get out of hand, I think. Have you seen a doctor?" Aunt Jill produced a thin imitation of a snort. "Doctor Grasmere? He gave me a prescription. The same prescription he gave me last year for my rheumatism. I think it's a special sort of medicine that's designed to make elderly biddies go away and stop pestering him." It was the nearest to the old Aunt Jill that Joanna had seen since arriving here. She looked for the smile that should have accompanied the remark, but it wasn't there. "I'll go and make up my bed," she repeated.
Aunt Jill was too tired to go out for a drink that evening -- too tired to do anything much except keep her feet up in front of the television, not even clucking over the usual dreadful news about rioting in Kuala Lumpur and further slaughter in the Balkans. Joanna, who had done some shopping, cleaned the worst of the kitchen and concocted a casserole to throw in the oven -- all in a state of righteous fury -- had no choice in the matter: she needed the drink, not for its own sake but just to get away from the funereal flat and its morbid occupant. It's like the baby all over again, she thought as she clattered too noisily down the stairs. I'm already beginning to think of Aunt Jill as someone completely isolated from me, rather than just ... Aunt Jill. The Blue Horse smelt of stale cigarette smoke and spilt beer, just the way it always did -- but there the semblance of normality ended. It wasn't ever a noisy pub -- not like the Customs House in Regent Street, where the yobbos with bikes and leather jackets hung out -- but this evening it was almost silent, as if the air were too thick to carry sound. The lights -- fake gas-lamps that Jas had put in to replace the fluorescents his predecessor had installed -- likewise seemed muted. There were a few other drinkers already there, one or two of whom she recognized enough to exchange nods with, but only Jas himself had any words for her. "Miss Gard, down for the weekend," he said morosely. "Hi, Jas," she replied, perching herself on a stool, trying to make herself cheer up by pretending to. "A pint of ... Royal Oak, if it's on form." "Royal Oak it is," he said, moving to the pump. He, too, had lost weight, she suddenly noticed. It was better disguised, because of the disreputable old suit and waistcoat he affected, but the jacket was loose on his shoulders and there were flaps of flesh around his chin and cheeks. "What's going on?" she said as he put the pint on the towel mat in front of her and took her coins. "Not just here, I mean." "What do you mean?" he said off-handedly. "In Tarburton. It's not the same." She swung her arm to indicate the pub and the rest of the village beyond its walls. "My aunt's different -- like there isn't as much life inside her as there used to be. And..." She stopped. How can you tell someone, face to face, that they're looking bloody terrible? "And everything," she concluded limply. "Not as I've noticed," Jas said. He was polishing his way along the optics with a torn tea-towel. "Have you noticed anything, Rupert?" Rupert, whose job was something Joanna had never discovered but who was generally regarded as a townie because until last autumn he had commuted daily to Newton Abbot, looked up for the first time from his whisky and soda. "Yes," he said indistinctly. "No. Young Joanna Gard, isn't it? Come to visit your aunt, have you? Fine woman, your aunt. Fine figure of a woman, too." He covered a belch with his hand. His fingers were nicotine yellow, like his moustache. "Few years ago I'd have..." Joanna never found out, thank God, what Rupert'd have, because the door opened behind her. She twisted round and saw a couple of young people -- people her own age -- coming in. It was as if someone had opened the windows in a morgue. At first she didn't register them as anything other than blessed interruptions, but as they came closer to the bar she began to see them as individuals rather than symbols. The woman was, on second examination, somewhat younger than Joanna -- she didn't look to be more than twenty, if that. She had long hair, a glossy black, and skin of a colour that looked as if it would become a tan within days of the first arrival of summer. Her lips were full, although her mouth was small. She glanced at Joanna briefly, her dark, nearly black eyes showing no sign of interest. The man was older -- he could even be thirty. He was in jeans and a faded green Marillion T-shirt. He was quite tall, and had the same night-black hair as the woman. It was clear from stray facial resemblances -- the fleshy lips, the smallness of the mouth, the cleft marking the chin -- that the two were brother and sister, not a couple, as she'd at first assumed. Yet, where the woman's face seemed quintessentially feminine, his was almost defiantly masculine. Joanna turned away and stared at her drink. She'd not been much interested in men since the abortion -- not remotely interested in them, if the truth were to be told -- but this stranger was something different. Things were looking up in Tarburton if they could import talent like this, she reflected wryly. She tried to tell herself that there was something lofty and romantic in that original hot flash of attraction she'd felt, but was honest enough to acknowledge there hadn't been a lot of higher emotion involved. "Guinness, Jas." She liked his voice, as well. Not hunkish: not wimpish, either. It had an accent she couldn't for the moment place. "Tony?" "Just a Coke." So the girl's name was Antonia. Probably. What was his? "You're new here?" Joanna said, turning towards the pair. Oh, God, that must have sounded patronizing, she thought. I'm only sort of here on sufferance myself. "You're a strange face as well," said the man, smiling guardedly. "You must be Jill Soames's niece." "Yes. Joanna." News travels fast in Tarburton. "Jas's told us about you, hasn't he, Tony?" He was laughing at her, but not unkindly. His sister didn't join in. "Don't worry, Joanna -- it is Joanna, isn't it? -- he's given us a good report of you." "And you?" She wished she didn't feel so much like a schoolgirl all of a sudden. She remembered when she'd been in the sixth form the school had hired a temporary assistant cook who'd looked like a sort of unraddled Mick Jagger, and how she'd always turned her face away when she passed him in the corridor in case he was telepathic and would find out what she was thinking about him. She felt like that now. "We've been here ... oh, four months now, I guess. Since Christmas. We moved into the big house at the other end of Ham's Lane, down by the playing fields." "Aunt Jill told me Major Hunter had died. Was the house as much of a shambles as everyone thought it would be?" He looked at her gravely and adopted a portentous tone. "Significantly worse." He smiled. "Oh, boy, was it bad! Mother had to call in professionals in the end, just to get all the crap out of it. There was one entire cellar filled with broken glass. Seems he couldn't face putting his bottles out with the dustbins so he just slung them down there. Enough there to keep Coventry Cathedral in replacement windows for the next thousand years, I should think." "It's not funny, Steve," said his sister, touching his arm. "He was a poor, lonely old man, that's all. Lay off him. Let him rest in peace." "OK, OK." He pushed his sister's hand away. "I won't even mention the heaps of girlie maga --" "Steve! There were no such --" "Sorry, sorry." "Do you like it here in Tarburton?" said Joanna. It sounded like the kind of question someone might ask at a school prizegiving -- something that indicated the asker didn't want an answer. She lifted her glass to her lips as if that would make the words sound wittier. "As good as anywhere," said Tony. She started to say something else, but bit it back. You were going to say, thought Joanna for her, that, just like in all these little places around the moor, the people don't take kindly to newcomers. Aunt Jill's been here for over three years, but they still, though they're friendly enough, treat her as if she were a weekend tripper rather than someone who's come here to stay. "We're going to sit down," said Steve in that rich voice of his. "Join us?" He shrugged towards a table near the rear, where the loos were. Tony was already on her way across, holding her Coke out from her side theatrically, as if Jas would throw her out if she spilt any of it. Perhaps he would. Jas seemed to derive dour pleasure from throwing people out of his pub. "Love to," Joanna said. "I don't really know anyone much around here." She followed, amazed all over again by the contrast between these two rather beautiful people and the rest of the folk in the pub. They were bright splashes of acrylic set on the wall alongside twee, cautious watercolours. Greta, too, had had that same washed-outness about her. And Aunt Jill, of course... "I can't stop long," Joanna explained as she sat down. "My aunt -- I've only just arrived -- something in the oven..." Which is the kind of inadvertent double-entendre I could do without, she thought. There's no longer anything in my oven. I slew it. "It's nice to meet you," said Steve forthrightly. He put his hand lightly on hers. "Tarburton's all right, like Tony was saying, but it's a bit -- you know, dead." Except when people like you two are around to breathe life into it. "As you said, I'm Joanna," she muttered. "And you?" "Gilmour. Steve and Tony Gilmour. The idlest layabouts in an idle family, in case you were going to ask us what we do. Funny sort of question, that, now I come to think about it, and yet we're always asking it of each other." For a moment Joanna was lost by him, unable to work out if "we" were Steve and his sister or the human species at large. "As if you could tell more about a person from what they do between nine and five, by what they earn their meals from," Steve was saying, "than from whether they've just helped you out of a hole, or if they like Stockhausen better than the Black Crowes, or..." Tony, who had been so indifferent to Joanna's presence when they'd met, now seemed to have decided she liked her. "You're burbling, Steve," she said. "You'll bore the poor woman before she's properly even met us." "Tishwash, sister!" he said. "I'm sure Joanna here has long ago decided that, the sooner she can get out of this pub and never see us again, the happier she'll be. Am I right, Joanna?" "Not at all," she said, flustered. "Quite the opposite, in fact." And that may sound like just the sort of courtesy you'd expect from me, but it's true, she added mentally. Truer than you could possibly imagine. "But I do have to go." She gulped down half the remains of her beer -- which, now she was paying attention to it, wasn't up to Jas's usual standards. "Yes -- you said." Steve's voice was sympathetic. "You have an aunt and a casserole to attend to." "Something like that." And quite a lot else. I think.
That night, hot although the night itself hadn't seemed to be hot, Joanna dreamed. She was in a place where the sky was always light, a single mass of brightness that arched all the way from one horizon to the other. She knew quite a lot about her situation in this place, but not really enough altogether to explain it. There was a sun somewhere in the dome of radiance, but it was lost in the general brilliance: the sun never set, and it touched the atmosphere of this world into shining with the same unremitting vigour as itself. There was no escape from the light. Here and there rocks stuck up out of the desert, and there were one or two scrubby-looking plants, but they cast no shadows. The radiance was not especially hot, but it was so bright that it burnt her as painfully as red-hot tongs, as if it were flaying away the cornea of the single eye that seemed to be the entirety of her body's upper surface. She slithered. It was the only way she could move. She could extend pseudopodia -- indeed, she didn't even have to think about doing so: it just happened -- and then drag herself a few painful centimetres across the abrasive desert surface, looking for shadows that were not there so that she could hide in them from the light that would not permit her to hide. It was silly to go on searching, she knew that; but she was unable to take the decision just to stop where she was, to give up the hope. It was as if, wherever this hell was, she'd been condemned to spend the rest of eternity hunting for a relief that would never be granted. It was a while before she realized she was not the only one here: although she couldn't see anything out of her single upturned eye except the lurid fire, sometimes shadows moved at the extreme periphery of her vision. Once she'd observed a few of these she realized that she'd always known there were others of her kind. She was of the Wardrobe Folk, as were they; and it was the doom of the Wardrobe Folk to dwell in this arid misery forever. Unless... Unless the Girl Child LoChi could come among them. But Joanna, in her dream, didn't know who the Girl Child LoChi was, and didn't know how she could find out. Lacking that knowledge, she was sapping the strength of her people in their attempts to bring the Girl Child LoChi to their aid. She was at fault -- every extra second that she and the other flat creatures like herself spent here was partly her responsibility. Guilt. Too much of it for her mind to stay here. She woke screaming in a tangle of bedclothes to find light pouring in through the bedroom window. She screamed at that, too, until she realized it was only the morning sunshine, and that she was in her own bedroom in Tarburton-by-the-Moor. A few minutes later she was giggling unconvincedly. Just a nightmare. The Wardrobe Folk -- next it would be the Pantry People or the Cupboard Under The Stairs Collective. But the cold sweat all over her and the sheets and the blankets didn't go away just because her rational mind was taking over its rightful functions once more. She pulled herself out of bed. Later she'd tell Aunt Jill all about this, and the two of them would laugh together at the silliness.
Later, though, when she went to wake up Aunt Jill with a cup of tea, she discovered Aunt Jill was dead.
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3 Farewells, WelcomesThere was a wind up today, coming from the sea to the south, and it was blowing away most of what the Reverend James "Call Me Jim" Daker was saying. Which was, in Joanna's opinion, an unquestionably good thing. Her aunt had never had much time for ceremonies or for what she called "po-faced eulogies", and the Reverend Call Me Jim's utterances would have had her cringing. She was "a pillar of the community" and a "stalwart on the side of virtue" and all sorts of other things he'd never made much reference to when she'd been alive and trying to mount petitions about the Bloody Bells. Joanna looked glumly across the open wound of the grave. She wasn't certain whether or not Aunt Jill had ever attended services at St Leonard's, and she guessed that the Reverend Daker wasn't, either. Still, these formalities had to be gone through, Joanna concluded. Viewed as formalities, they didn't seem too bad; viewed as anything else, the Reverend Daker's overblown testimonials were somehow poisonous, as if Aunt Jill's spirit were not to be allowed to ascend into the hereafter without taking with it its due quota of earthly hypocrisy. There was a scattering of other mourners. Jas had shut the Blue Horse for the occasion, and he was standing opposite her, his eyes downcast. Out from behind the shield of his bar, he looked even less substantial than he had the other day. She willed him to look up at her, but he obstinately refused. Rupert was there, too, his eyes betraying whatever private wake he'd held for himself the night before. He, too, didn't seem to want to look at her. And there was Greta, and the woman from the post office, and even the chap who organized the Bloody Bell-ringing sessions -- probably telling himself that the Christian humility he was showing in coming to the funeral of his old enemy would serve him well in the life to come, or maybe he was just here to gloat -- and a dozen or so others. All of them elderly people, around Aunt Jill's kind of age or older; Joanna was the only person there under fifty. The fresh spring wind made their clothes flap. Joanna was reminded of a different season -- of autumn trees. Come winter, would this leaping breeze be a gale, and would all of the trees be able to withstand it? She straightened her shoulders and told herself to stop being morbid. The Reverend Daker seemed to be coming to the end of his oration -- or, at least, he was pausing for breath -- and she must brace herself to receive the sympathies of the others. On second thoughts, cemeteries were about the one place in the world it was perfectly permissible to be morbid. And why should she don a cloak of false happiness? They took turns tossing earth down onto the coffin-lid. Joanna wiped off her hands on the sides of her skirt. Surely that was about all they had to do; surely they could all pack off home now, herself included. She'd decided against holding one of those glacial funeral teas people seemed to go in for; there weren't any relations, and the only residents of Tarburton whom Aunt Jill had known at all well were gathered here and looking about as uninterested in protracting proceedings as Joanna herself. She had a bottle of scotch back at the flat -- her flat, now -- and proposed to spend the rest of the afternoon getting as much of it into herself as possible before she passed out. From the look of Rupert, his intentions were very similar. As if at a signal, the rest of the party moved off, leaving her alone at the graveside for a moment with the sexton. "She was a nice woman, your aunt," he said, bending to pick up the first spadeful of earth. "She'll be missed around here." It was a better funeral oration than the Reverend Daker had been able to compose.
The level of whisky in the bottle had gone down by about a third, and she'd given up bothering to mix it with water. The light coming in through the drawing-room window was a golden mellow colour, a paler variation on the liquid in the bottle: in an hour or so it would be sunset. She knew she was really quite a lot drunk, although still not drunk enough. Something had wasted Aunt Jill away, something that had grown inside her, devouring her. In other circumstances Joanna might have guessed cancer, but there hadn't been that funny smell cancer victims usually give off, and Dr Grasmere had sworn to her that her aunt had been in perfect health. "She just died," he'd said. "She was old, you know." "She wasn't yet sixty-five," Joanna had said, and she said it again now, raising her tumbler to the whisky bottle in some sort of tribute. "She shouldn't have died. She wasn't old enough to die. She didn't..." No: saying that people didn't deserve to die was stupid, and somehow uncharitable. No one deserved to die except those who wanted to, and Aunt Jill hadn't wanted to. Well. Maybe not. It was hard to tell what the frail old grandmother who called herself Aunt Jill had actually wanted, or not wanted. Joanna wished she'd come down here to Tarburton more often, or at least more recently. She wished she hadn't spent part of that last evening down in the Blue Horse chatting with Steve and Tony Gilmour. She wished... Right at this moment, she discovered, she wished more than anything else that she didn't have to go and pee. The stairs up to the loo suddenly seemed a challenge. Maybe it was stupid of her to have got this plastered. The irony was that she'd driven down from London intending to ask Aunt Jill if it would be possible for her to come to Tarburton to live for a while. Her redundancy money from Rolfe & Baldwin wasn't going to last forever, not at London rents; and there weren't any very appealing jobs around right now, and ... Well, now the flat was hers. She could come and live here any time she wanted -- and probably would. She'd wait a week or so, and then she'd go up to London and give in notice to her landlord. The few possessions she really wanted to keep, apart from the books, could probably all be jammed into the Mini. Mike -- good-old-faithful-spaniel-Mike -- Mike would bring the books down in the back of his van some time. If she asked him nicely. The loo, woman! Not a second more! She was coming back down the stairs, taking them one at a time and gripping the banister so tightly that her hand would hardly slide, when the doorbell rang. "Shit!" she muttered. "Bloody well-wishers. Bloody vultures." But instead she found Steve and Tony at the door. "Hi. Come in. I'm pissed." Steve laughed, his arm round his sister's shoulders. "Then this is a fine time for us to join you." He moved forward, not exactly pushing her but at the same time giving her no opportunity to refuse admission. "We thought you might be drinking, Tony and I, and we thought you might like some company. Miserable occasions, funerals -- more miserable than the deaths themselves, in some ways." "You have a great experience of deaths, I suppose?" said Joanna, trying to put some acidity into her voice. The result sounded to her as if she were speaking through cotton wool. "More than you might think," he said lightly. He was past her by now, standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking upwards. He wrinkled his nose. "Aunt Jill rather let things go to pieces towards the end, didn't she?" For a moment Joanna couldn't think of anything to say. The effrontery of him! The other evening in the pub she'd found his male vitality, his assuredness, immensely attractive. That had been before she'd seen this oafish, arrogant intruder. "Aunt Jill was my aunt," she said deliberately. "Not yours." "I'm sorry," said Tony quietly beside her. "Would you really rather we went away and let you be?" "No," said Joanna automatically. "No -- no, it's kind of you to come. I'm sure I..." "She told us to call her Aunt Jill," Steve was saying. "Over the last few months she and my mother were seeing a lot of each other, and so it seemed only natural we should come to call her Aunt Jill." "She never told me anything of this," said Joanna thickly as she followed him up the stairs -- her stairs. "I think she would have mentioned..." "It's quite true," said Tony. "Steve exaggerates about a lot of things, but he's telling you the truth about this. Your aunt and our mother did seem to be ... very taken with each other, is how your aunt put it. Afternoon tea the two of them would be over here, morning coffee at our house." "And lunch every day at the Crafts Centre," boomed Steve, looking almost proprietorially around the drawing-room. He'd smuggled in another bottle of scotch somehow, and had placed it on the coffee table beside Joanna's. "That was, until your aunt's health began to get so low. Probably's Greta's wholefoods, I should imagine." He cut another chuckle off short. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. What did Aunt Jill die of, by the way? Did that old quack from up the hill tell you?" "Old age, Dr Grasmere said." Joanna crossed and sat down in Aunt Jill's armchair. It must have been obvious to Tony that this wasn't where Joanna had been sitting before, because she said: "Look, are you sure you don't mind us two storming in here? We honestly won't mind if you tell us to go away again." "You're here now," Joanna said with an effort at grandness. "Settle yourselves down. No doubt you know where the glasses are kept." She indicated the kitchen, and Tony slipped quietly out of the room. "I'm surprised my aunt never mentioned your mother to me," said Joanna again, worrying away at the problem. "Even though I didn't see her as often as I should have, we spoke on the telephone most weekends, and she was always filling me in on events in the village. I'd have thought she would have said something about..." "It's a mystery," said Steve with finality, landing with a thump in the chair she'd not long vacated. "That's all. You can ask mother about it when you meet her, which I hope won't be long. Oh, yes, that's right -- I almost forgot. That's one of the main reasons we came across here, Tony and me. My parents would like you to come to dinner one evening soon. In fact, mother was mad keen you should come tonight, but I guess that's ... not possible." She saw her dishevelment reflected in his gaze and laughed. It was the first genuine laugh she'd uttered since finding Aunt Jill dead in her bed. "I've got the glasses," said Tony. She appeared around the wing of the armchair carrying a tray with a couple of mismatched glasses and the aluminium milk-jug. "Water," Tony explained. Steve leapt to his feet and poured for both of them; at the same time he topped up Joanna's tumbler. She waved away his offer of water from the aluminium jug. "I'd like to accept your parents' kind invitation to dinner," said Joanna, forming the words carefully. "Not tonight -- not so soon after my aunt's funeral. But tomorrow, if that would be convenient." "Perfect!" said Steve. "Tuesday evening it shall be. I shall call for you, ma'am, at eight o'clock precisely. We shall have drinks on the veranda beforehand and..." He talked on, and Joanna let the words wash over her. She became much more conscious of Tony, sitting demurely on a chair's edge to her left. It was obvious from the way the girl -- Joanna found it hard to think of anyone younger than herself as a woman -- had her denimed knees so tightly pressed together that she was still nervous about being here, still wishing that her brother would shut up so the two of them could make their polite escapes. It's funny, thought Joanna, the way I was so wrong about both of these two when we met. Tony seemed all haughty and aloof, as if she wouldn't wipe her feet on me, and Steve seemed like the answer to a maiden's dream. Hmmf! Some maiden: some dream. "How old are you?" Joanna suddenly asked the Gilmour girl, cutting Steve's witterings off mid-flow. "I'm ... uh ... I'm nineteen. And Steve -- Steve's twenty-four." "I guessed you about right," Joanna said. "But I thought Steve would be older -- more like thirty." Steve brayed with good humour. "I don't know whether to be complimented or..." he began, but Joanna ignored him. "And yet sometimes," she said to Tony with the slow honesty of drunkenness, "when I look at you more carefully, or when the sun catches your face just so, you seem much older than your brother." Tony flushed under her pale-tea skin, and looked down to where her hands were toying with her whisky glass. "I guess that's a way of looking at it," she mumbled, glancing up suddenly at Steve. Joanna sensed there was something here she ought to know more about, but her mind, slowed by the whisky, wasn't capable of framing the next question. Instead she said: "Where did you live before you came here?" "Oh," answered Steve airily before his sister could say anything, "here and there, you know. The way one does." "Here and there?" said Joanna. "Round and about. We're sort of like gypsies, our family -- we never stop in any one place too long. And you?" "I live -- used to live, I suppose I should say -- in London, in a bit of London called West Hampstead. Pandora Road. Number 48. It's about seven minutes from the tube station. I rent a place. The landlord calls it a flat, but really it's just a glorified bedsit, with its own bathroom. I pay..." And the words kept on tumbling out of her. To her horror she discovered she was pouring out in front of these almost total strangers every detail of her life, of her work at Rolfe & Baldwin and of how that had come to such an abrupt end, of her relationships with Mike and Peter, of the baby that never was -- she remembered to call it a baby, at least, because if she called it just a fetus people might think she was a bit cold-blooded, or something -- and of how it had been Mike's kid when at first she'd thought it was Peter's because she'd got mixed up with her months because being with Peter made for such a lot of turbulence in her life and... All of it. Some bits she'd never properly told herself before, let alone other people. Once or twice during the flood of words she tried to bite her tongue, anything to stop herself blabbing her innermost secrets, but it swivelled easily out of the reach of her teeth. There was darkness outside the window when finally she ground to a halt. She'd lost count of the number of times Steve had quietly leaned forwards and topped up her glass. There was nothing left now of the bottle she'd started on her own, and the level in the second was half-way down the label, and yet she didn't feel nearly as drunk as she had been earlier. Perhaps the adrenalin of confession had burnt away the alcohol. "I'm sorry," she said in a low voice. "I shouldn't have burdened you with all that. I had no right." "You had every right in the world," said Steve boisterously. "That's what friends are for, isn't it, Tony?" Slowly Joanna turned her head to look at the girl. The frame of black hair was lost in the shadows of that corner of the room; through the gloom she could see pale smudges that were Tony's hands and face. Yet she could see enough to know that the girl was profoundly uneasy. "I'm sorry," Joanna repeated in Tony's direction. "No. Nothing to be sorry about. But Steve and I must leave you now. At once. Come on, Steve." Her brother half-rose, then settled back again. "Are you sure you'll be all right?" he said with heavy solicitude. "Have you eaten anything today?" "I'll be OK." Joanna shook her head. She felt angry with him for having been there to hear everything she'd told him, and now all she wanted was for him and his sister to be out of her sight. "Tony's right. Please do go. I don't mean to be rude, but ... but I need some time on my own, right now. I'll see you tomorrow night. I'll be over this by then. But could you...?" "Come on, Steve," Tony said tightly. "Of course, of course," said Steve, and this time, to Joanna's relief, when he got to his feet he stayed there. "Maybe it was wrong of us to come blundering in here but..." "No, but..." said Joanna. Somehow, in a blizzard of apologies from all of them, she got the two Gilmours out the front door. Leaning against the cool wall at the foot of the stairs, she heard them whispering to each other as they tip-tapped down the steps outside. She might have been able to hear what they were saying if she'd strained her ears, but she found she wasn't interested enough. In fact, all she really wanted was some more scotch, a hot bath and bed. Maybe it'd be wiser to alter the order of proceedings a bit: a hot bath while she was still enough in control of herself not to fall asleep or trip and bang her head, then bed with the remains of the scotch to make sure she slept soundly. And, she hoped, for the first time this week to sleep dreamlessly.
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4 Not the MunstersHer hangover had largely ebbed by the following evening. She'd slipped guiltily down to the strangely subdued Blue Horse at lunchtime to feed it a couple of pints of Royal Oak, keeping her fingers crossed that the two Gilmours wouldn't come stumbling in and catch her in the act. She'd meant to have only the one pint, but Jas had refused to accept any payment for it, so she'd asked for another to settle up the score, as it were, but then he'd refused to take her money for that one, either. She'd have felt better about it if he'd shown her any signs of friendship, but instead he'd made both refusals with a sort of glum resignation that told her he was merely doing his duty. Still, the beer had worked its magic. She'd climbed into this bath mostly cured, and she was feeling fine now that she was climbing out of it. She looked at herself in the mirror, striking a girlie-magazine pose, grinning; then suddenly straightening up as if Aunt Jill could be watching her from out of the walls. She was just an inch or so below medium height, with shoulder-length ungroomable hair that couldn't decide whether it wanted to be dark or fair. Her nose was snub, her eyes blue-grey. Her breasts weren't large enough and her bottom was too big. It was hopeless telling herself that virtually everyone else she knew likewise thought their boobs were too small and their bums too big: she, Joanna Gard, was the one woman who really was big and small in all the wrong places. She found she was grinning again. Well, at least I'm unique in something. She dried herself on the thick pink towel she'd given Aunt Jill for Christmas three or four years ago, enumerating her other failings as she did so. Her ankles probably in fact were -- objectively were -- a bit too thick, and they were looking worse than usual today. Maybe she was suffering a bit of water-retention because of all the stress. Her toenails badly needed cutting, but there was no one going to see them, so it didn't matter. She had a little heat-spot on her waist, still left from where the seat-belt had been chafing against her during the drive down from London -- how long ago? Just over a week, wasn't it? What to wear? She slipped into a pair of pants with pictures of the Gummi Bears on them -- Peter said he'd picked them up in Disneyland the last time he'd been in California and had been waiting to find the right woman to wear them -- and a plain white Marks & Spencers bra: very sensible. But as for the rest? The trouble was, she hadn't a clue what the Gilmours senior were like. She'd kept a watch from the window most of the morning -- it had been something to do while waiting for her head to stop expanding and contracting -- hoping to catch sight of anyone coming up Ham's Lane who might be them, but everyone she'd seen had been depressingly familiar. Rupert on his way to the Blue Horse. Greta popping in and out of the side-door of the Crafts Centre to puff at a cigarette whenever trade slackened off a bit. The Reverend James "Call Me Jim" Daker huffing officiously about his business. The reputed gay who lived up at the far end of West Street and was said to be a writer of some kind; Aunt Jill had introduced them once but Joanna couldn't remember his name. There were a few others, but no one who could have been the Gilmours. Their children seemed casual enough: both of them seemed to live in jeans -- neatly pressed designer jeans that probably cost a fortune, but jeans nevertheless. If their parents were likewise ... But ... Maybe... Joanna swore at herself. It wasn't as if she had much choice. She'd packed a skirt for the weekend, just in case Aunt Jill had company, but it was only the kind of thing you could wear for standing around politely sipping sherry. Her own jeans weren't knife-edged like Steve's and Tony's: they could do with a wash, she realized as she put them to her face. There were some clothes in the wardrobe, left behind other times she'd been here -- maybe there'd be something wearable among those. The Wardrobe Folk. She shook the thought away with an angry jerk of her head. Last night's booze hadn't spared her the nightmare of the world with the sky of unrelieved light. She'd been unbearably thirsty as well -- though whether this had been genuinely part of her dream or her body telling her that all the whisky was dehydrating her was something she didn't know. Probably the latter: the creature who was her in that other world didn't seem to have a mouth, so presumably couldn't feel thirst. But she had discovered something new: there was a certain frisson of excitement among the other creatures who shared her predicament, because somehow they all knew -- herself included -- that the advent of the Girl Child LoChi would not be long, now. Joanna hoped so. Maybe the dreams would stop pestering her then. She found what she was looking for at last. It would have looked hideously quaint in London, but down here in Tarburton it was probably all the rage: a black jumper suit that caught her around the hips and waist so that her bum looked bigger than ever. "Good breeding stock," she said to her reflection in the wardrobe mirror. "A fine figure of a woman. You'll make someone an excellent wife, some day." Mike had always liked her in this, so was probably the subliminal reason she'd left it down here. "A Freudian jumper suit," she said to her reflection, waving her forefinger at it like a schoolmarm. Shoes. Ah, yes. She had some little black sandshoes that would have to do. The end product, she decided, once she'd brushed her hair and her teeth and was back in front of the wardrobe mirror again to practise her smiling, wasn't too bad. She'd lay money she'd be able to turn Rupert's head, anyway. If ever she wanted to. Maybe even Steve's, although after his performance last night she was absolutely certain that she wasn't in any way attracted to him, would never be, and the very thought of him made her feel queasy. Maybe even Tony's... Eh? Where had that thought come from? It didn't seem to belong to her. "Getting more versatile in your old age, hmm, Joanna Gard?" she said to the mirror. She glanced at her watch. Forty minutes until Steve was due to arrive to pick her up. She could put her feet up and maybe, very cautiously, take a little scotch just to make sure the hangover didn't suddenly come back again. She was abruptly very tired. Sitting in the armchair swilling scotch seemed like a much better idea than going out to have supper with the Munsters -- or whoever Steve's and Tony's parents turned out to be. Joanna giggled. Oh, yeah: the Munsters in Tarburton.
They were charming, of course. Ronnie Gilmour was at the door when Joanna and Steve arrived. She proved to be an older version of her daughter, but with some of her son's flamboyance. She drew Joanna to her for a brief, almost contactless hug, then stood back to look at her properly. "Steve warned me you were pretty," Ronnie remarked, clearly unaware that she was saying exactly the wrong thing, "but he obviously didn't warn me enough." Joanna mumbled something embarrassed and allowed Steve to guide her by the arm through the heavy blackened-oak door. At least she was wearing the right sort of thing: Ronnie was in a brightly coloured gypsy dress with a line of faded-blue lace across the bosom -- more or less the uniform of the middle-aged hippie. Her voice had the same fullness as Steve's. Joanna was led into a large room with a fire blazing in an open cast-iron hearth at the far end. The furniture was characterized by its weight rather than by any apparent comfort; what a second-hand dealer might have called "much loved". The walls had been left unplastered, with whitewash over the rough-hewn stones. Here and there were pictures and hangings, an odd mixture -- so far as Joanna's untrained eye could ascertain -- of ancient and modern, fine and garbage. Getting up from one of the overstuffed armchairs gathered around the fire was a man of about fifty whom Joanna guessed must be Gilmour père. "Vic Gilmour," he said, smiling, extending a massive hand towards her. "And you're Jill Soames's niece. We were so devastated to hear of her death. Ronnie took to her bed for a day to get over it." But none of you thought to go to the funeral, Joanna thought resentfully. She was such a good friend of you all that Steve and Tony were supposed to call her Aunt Jill, and yet you didn't walk a hundred yards to see her stuck into the ground. Too shy? Too shy of what the villagers would think? Or didn't you really know her that well? Hmm? "We wanted to come to the funeral," said Vic Gilmour, as if he had heard her thoughts, "but it wouldn't have been right. That was a time for the people of Tarburton to express their grief, not for outsiders like us." "But Aunt Jill was an outsider herself," said Joanna, moving to the chair Vic had indicated. "She wouldn't have ... minded." "A drink?" said Ronnie, coming to the fireside. She'd got a trail of flour on the sleeve of her dress, which was more than Greta of the Crafts Centre ever allowed herself. As the evening progressed Joanna found herself thawing to this family. She'd thought that Vic was merely giving excuses when he'd said that they'd been reluctant to trespass at her aunt's funeral, but soon she came to realize that he'd been perfectly serious: the Gilmours really did feel like interlopers, like gypsies who would naturally be resented by the community among which they'd parked their caravans for a while. Soon Joanna began to recognize that they were seeking in her a kindred spirit, just as presumably they must have sought out Aunt Jill when first they'd come here. Over soup -- which was Unidentifiable Country Vegetable or Country Unidentifiable Vegetable, she couldn't make up her mind -- she wondered if Steve or Tony had told their parents anything of her drunken outpouring last night. If so, there was no trace of the knowledge in the two older people's eyes. Vic and Ronnie seemed concerned to be as frank and open with her as possible, and to make sure she knew this. She wasn't sure she much enjoyed that part of the experience -- it was like a stranger who insists on standing too close to you. The main course was a triumph, and by then the wine they'd been drinking had started to work its relaxing magic. Cutting into a slab of pork that had been marinated in cider and some herbs she didn't recognize, Joanna began to feel more at ease with the world than she had since arriving in Tarburton. The conversation had veered away from her and Aunt Jill and anything to do with current circumstances towards politics, which in a paradoxical way was safer territory. They were all good liberals, of course, as she'd known they would be -- and as she was herself -- and they bemoaned the difficulties of getting hold of the Guardian or the Independent regularly down here in the wilds. Yet as the discussion progressed -- she held herself back any time she felt herself becoming too prescriptive -- she discovered that the Gilmours' knowledge of their subject matter was oddly ... amateurish. They were going through the motions, it seemed: they were saying most of the right words, and in general they were saying them in the right order, but there were gaps. Midway through a mouthful of strawberries and ice cream Ronnie said something about the former Yugoslavia that let Joanna perceive that the woman had the country positioned in the wrong continent -- somewhere to the east of Moscow. And Steve described Nelson Mandela as head of the CIA rather than the ANC without any of the rest of the family seeming to notice the slip. If Joanna had been a little more sober or a little drunker she might have been more concerned by these lapses, but she was too full of her hosts' generosity and wine to give the matter too much thought. She was reminded of a couple of right-wing Sun readers she'd once met in a seaside hotel who'd sombrely told her that Shirley Porter was deputy leader of the Labour Party. It was reasonable for the people at the other end of the political spectrum to be equally vague about such irritations as facts: no one section of society should be allowed a monopoly on ignorance. "How long are you staying down here for?" Vic asked her once they were sitting back around the fire again. He'd poured brandies for them all except Ronnie, who'd pleaded migraine. "Now that the funeral's over, and all." "I thought," said Joanna, shy now she was voicing the idea, "that I might come down and live here for good -- well, for a few years, anyway. My aunt was -- well, not wealthy exactly, but not poor either. The flat's mine, and there's enough money invested to give me three-quarters of an income. I thought I might see if I could drum up some freelance work to make the other quarter." "Tired of London, eh?" said Vic, smiling encouragingly at her. "But obviously not tired of life." The remark threw her. It wasn't something she'd thought about before. The truth was, now she came to confront it head-on, that perhaps she was tired of life, too, in a way. The past six months had given her more of "life" than she could have wanted in a decade. Maybe a large part of her urge to kick the dust and soot of London off her feet was that she wanted to leave that sort of life -- what the Chinese curse calls interesting times -- behind her as well. Once again she had the disconcerting sensation that Vic could tell her thoughts. "That's not what I meant," he said. "I meant tired of living. You have so much vitality locked up inside you, young Joanna Gard, and you seem just to let it out in small, carefully measured doses. Maybe you're wise. You seem to me to have more life inside you than all the rest of us put together." Joanna laughed, embarrassed. "Not true!" she said, throwing up her hands. "Look at your children, Vic. Look at Steve. Look at Tony. Can't you feel the vitality pouring off them?" "No," he said flatly. "Not the same way you have it." She looked up, alarmed. Then she relaxed: at some stage while they'd been talking the two younger Gilmours must have slipped out of the room. "I don't know what you mean by that," she said slowly. "Haven't you noticed anything odd about this village?" "Well -- yes." She took another sip of brandy and rolled it around the inside of her teeth. "Yes. Everything seems to be sort of slowly winding down, as if the people were getting tired, or something. They're still the same people all right -- I'm not talking any Invasion of the Body Snatchers stuff -- but they seem sort of resigned, sort of lethargic. Sort of dying from the inside out, like my aunt did..." What a horrible thought. She'd begun to connect up Aunt Jill's wilting with the quietness in the Blue Horse and the sense of futility she felt clinging to all of the village's foci, but that had been before Aunt Jill's death. The event had shocked her out of any temptation towards introspection; it had made her concentrate on living through the surface layers of each day, unwilling to let her thoughts paddle any more deeply than was necessary to guide her to the next place where she'd be safe from the waves. But talking with Vic was making her stop dodging the waves any longer -- and as she looked up into his brown eyes, which seemed softer than before, she realized he had deliberately guided her to this state. "You think there's something really ... really wrong here, don't you?" she said. Her voice was hardly more than a whisper, barely loud enough for him to have heard it above the crackle of the logs in the hearth. "I wouldn't like to put it as strongly as that," he said, shifting uneasily in his seat. "It just seems ... Well, I've heard of dying villages and ghost towns before, but those have always been just metaphorical terms. Here in Tarburton it's as if the metaphors are being made real -- reified, if that's a word you use." "I'm a publisher's editor," she said archly. "Was." He chuckled. The spell that had seemed to be settling down around them dissipated. "We've both maybe been reading too much creepy fiction," he said. "Watching the wrong sort of movies. Looking at something perfectly innocent and assuming there must be some dark secret lying at the heart of it all." "I wish I could say I agreed with you -- entirely," said Joanna, suddenly serious again. "But there is something creepy here, you know. Take Jas, the landlord of the Blue Horse. I never much liked the old bastard -- his racism is hard to stomach, just for a start -- but you always used to ... to know when he was around, if you like: he was hail-fellow-well-met with a vengeance, telling jokes or losing his temper or something. But now he's like a ghost of himself. He looks like a set of articulated clothes-hangers walking around under cover of a tweed suit, and it's as if his personality were the same. He's there, but he's not there at the same time. He used to be himself: now he's rather like the bar-tender in a grotty old Western movie -- there's an actor in the rôle, but he doesn't actually have to do anything except be the Standard-Issue Bar-Tender." This time when she looked at Vic's eyes she saw pain in them. "We were very fond of your Aunt Jill, you know, Joanna," he said quietly. "Are you two having a nice old heart-to-heart?" said Steve from the door. "We've been doing all the washing up and stopping Mum from whacking into the cooking sherry." Vic grinned. "Liar," he said to his son. "You mean you've been in the kitchen getting in the women's way, more like." "How could you be so cruel?" This, thought Joanna as she turned in her seat, is the man I thought was so goddam attractive when we first met? Bloody hell, but the usually 100% reliable Gard Hormonal Targeting Device sure came a cropper with this one. Though she smiled politely, as if Steve had said something witty, and not too long after that it was time to go home. Alone.
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5 Night TimesThe squashed-flat creature who was Joanna had managed to manoeuvre herself close to a crumbling earth-column in the desert and was trying to wrap her body around it. The top of the column, less eroded by the sands than the rest, overhung just enough that it might -- it should -- cast a shallow necklace of shadow onto the ground beneath. If she could somehow lever herself up vertically, so that she could make herself like a cuff... No. The rules of this place forbade it. There was nothing she could imagine that could logically stop her from achieving her aim, but she knew almost from the outset that doing so would be impossible. That was the way this particular existence was scripted. It was her lot in life to remain horizontal at all times, with her single eye turned ever towards the sky. Her eye didn't have the capacity to weep, but she imagined it blurring with tears. Even those tears might have provided some respite from the ferocity of the sky's brilliance; doubtless that was why crying was impossible, too. The Girl Child LoChi was coming. That prospect was her only succour. The thoughts of the other creatures like herself drifted in and out of her own, and always there was the same undercurrent: that at last, after all these uncountable millennia, the Girl Child LoChi was coming to bring shadows to the sky. The Joanna-creature slowly, inch by agonizing inch, dragged herself away from the earth-pillar. It was better to be nowhere near it than to see it close by, enticing her with promises of blissful shadow it could not in the event grant her. Some of the others had heard rumours of water -- the first open water that anyone had discovered in living memory -- and they were heading in the direction the rumours dictated. The Joanna-creature knew that the expedition was a waste of time -- that it was every bit as futile as her attempt had been to harvest the shadow of the earth-column -- but she decided to go along with them anyway. Every location in this nightmare place contained the same amount of pain.
There were more stars in the sky than was possible. At least, that was Joanna's first thought when she looked up from the side of the tor at the velvet of the night. The moon, close to the full, had set a couple of hours ago, and the last vestiges of its milky light were gone from the horizon. The tor itself was invisible, although she could feel its bulk near her. She and the two younger Gilmours had taken her bumped red Mini on the spur of the moment, after the pubs had closed, and driven out here onto the moor. Now they were in the middle of an area that seemed of infinite extent and totally devoid of people, except for the distant whisper of the traffic on the A38 and the occasional flash of headlights, somewhere far away, as a farmer headed for home. The darkness made the world featureless. Rather like my recurring dream, thought Joanna as she breathed deeply of the cold air -- it was as if she were inhaling cold, pure starlight. Only there the sky is one single ceiling of fire, and here it's blackness spotted with ice crystals. How jealous my friends there would be if they could see me now. "They say there are ghosts out here," said Steve cheerfully at her side. "You can see why," Tony said. She'd borrowed an old fur coat from her mother -- synthetic fur, of course -- and the fluffy ruff around her neck made her look like an Elizabethan portrait. "I bet the tor is haunted. And there're those funny constructions near the road back towards Tarburton -- rings hollowed out of stone, and little cones. I bet our prehistoric ancestors knew a thing or two about the ghosts around here and built those megaliths to propitiate them." "I bet our prehistoric ancestors are the ghosts around here," said Joanna, and the three of them laughed. She felt what Tony was feeling, though: as if millions of tiny eyes might be peering at them inquisitively from the crevices of the tor. Yet the sensation didn't repel her -- rather the other way around, in fact: it was as if Tarburton were undetectably dying, so that it was preferable to be out here in the presence of the fully dead. Or something. She didn't want to dwell on it for too long. No -- one other realization: there was a taint of something like malice enveloping the village, but that was completely lacking around here. The ghosts of the tor weren't friendly, but on the other hand neither were they malevolent: their existence was too divorced from that of mere human beings, their mentalities too different, for them to bear their mundane counterparts either good or ill will. "Werewolves as well, I should think," said Steve. "And the Beast of Dartmoor." "I thought it was Exmoor that had the Beast," said Joanna. "Oh, I'm sure Dartmoor has one as well," breezed Steve. "In fact, I'm sure that Dartmoor says to Exmoor, 'Huh! Anything you can do I can do better, because I'm bigger than you. You've got the Beast -- well, I'll show you: I'm going to have hundreds of them.'" Joanna giggled at the thought of the squabble. "Hundreds of very small, perfectly formed Beasts?" she suggested. "No, tishwash, woman!" He patted her too roughly between the shoulder-blades. "We're not dealing with any little soft, cuddly, children's-tv-style monsters here. The Beasts of Dartmoor are bound to be enormous, ravening creatures, with their naked fangs dripping luminous goo in the moonlight -- isn't that right, sis?" "If you say so, Steve," said Tony's voice from the darkness. She sounded bored of her brother. "They're like werewolves, only a lot viciouser and a lot less susceptible to reason. That's what I think. Can't you see them, Joanna? Can't you hear them?" He threw his head back and let out a long, vibrating howl. The sound vanished into the night, echoless. "Stop that," said Tony calmly. "You'll have the cops out here to see what's going on." "Piffle! There aren't any plodders within twenty miles of here!" He let out another yell, even louder than before. Joanna felt an edge of ice running up her spine. The ghosts of the tor might be real -- in fact, she was perfectly willing to concede, now, that they were -- but they didn't frighten her half as much as this overgrown youth imitating something much darker, something crueller, something born from the human imagination rather than from the timeless rocks. "Yes, do shut up, Steve," she said, hearing the uncertainty in her own voice. "It's..." She couldn't bring herself to admit out loud that he was scaring her, but it must have been obvious at least to Tony that this was what she'd been trying to say. "Yes, put a fucking sock in it, Steve. We're out here to enjoy ourselves, not to watch you put on the fucking Gang Show." But: "Can't you imagine them, Joanna?" he whispered. She could feel the wind of his breath on her ear. "Can't you see them playing in the moonlight, dancing and fighting and spinning around each other, secure in the knowledge that no one can see them? Doesn't it make your blood sing to think of them doing that, Joanna?" "No." "Not even a little bit?" "No. It just reminds me that I'm cold." She felt him retreat from her. The night seemed to have grown even blacker, because now she could make out nothing at all of her two companions. "Think of them," said Tony -- not Steve this time. "Think of them playing so free under the stars." Tony's voice had taken on extra sibilants. "Stop pissing about, you two." She should have left a light on in the Mini, but she hadn't wanted to spoil the starscape. Now she hadn't a clue where the car was. "Unless you want to have to find your own way home on foot." Steve's response -- she was pretty sure it was Steve -- was yet another of those long ululations. The noise seemed to be travelling away from her, as if he were sprinting across the rough surface of the moor. She could envisage him with his arms thrown out to either side and his head arched back, yelling madly at the sky like an animal. Like a werewolf. "Tony," she said, no longer trying to conceal the nervousness in her voice. "Tony, for God's sake can't you try to get your brother under control?" She tried a good-sport laugh, but it didn't sound very convincing. Tony said nothing, but there was an answering howl from the direction in which Joanna had last seen the girl. "That's synthetic fur you're wearing," she bellowed. "Not the real stuff." There were answering howls on both sides. More than two of them, it seemed. She looked directly upwards at the stars, half-expecting to see strange silhouettes occulting them; but the sky was impassive. "This isn't funny any more!" she screamed. "Stop it! I thought you were my friends!" There were certainly more than two people raising their voices in that long, bestial chorus. Half the moor seemed to be alive with noise. And it wasn't just the howling. Sometimes she could hear heavy, ragged panting, like big dogs make when they've run themselves to exhaustion. The car must be down that way. I'm sure that's how we came up from the road. Just keep your senses together, lass, and you'll find your way out of here. No problem. Think of Dunkirk. Think of getting to the lavs at a rock festival. Think of how brave Aunt Jill would be, in these circumstances. She turned her ankle on a stone and let out a yip of pain as she went down. Her body hammered against the hard, cropped ground, and for a few seconds she was incapable of breathing. The wild cacophony of the werewolves -- she was certain by now they were werewolves -- continued unabated. She rolled over onto her back. Just a couple of minutes ago she'd been bathing appreciatively in the cool disinterest of the stars; now she found it loathsome. "Stop it, you two!" she screamed. "For the love of God, just stop it!" Now she could hear their paws. On the rough grass of the moor itself, cropped short by ponies and sheep, the wolves' feet made a steady swishing noise, like intermittently running water. When they crossed the road, though, their claws skittered like gravel thrown onto a sloping roof. There seemed to be hundreds of the creatures milling around her. But she couldn't see anything. And they were making no apparent move to attack her. The agony from her ankle was subsiding quickly -- she couldn't have hurt it badly. Keep collected, Joanna, she seemed to hear Aunt Jill's voice saying to her. Keep collected and you'll be able to find a way out of this. Pretend it's something you're more accustomed to -- imagine it's an interview for a job you don't much like but have to get ... that your life depends on your getting it! Which was just about the case, thought Joanna dourly. But Aunt Jill's voice wasn't finished with her yet. Think! it urged. Use the evidence of your senses. Think, girl! Think! It was easy enough for Aunt Jill to say that: she was well and truly dead and out of it all. She wasn't lying on her back in the middle of Dartmoor with nothing visible but the stars overhead and just the sound of a million werewolves in her ears. And the beasts were coming closer to her now, as if earlier they'd been afraid of her human-ness but were now learning to conquer their timidity. She felt a hot gust of wind against her cheek, and smelt rotting meat. Oh, all right then: she'd think, just like Aunt Jill told her to. She'd use the evidence of her senses. Sight wasn't going to do her any good, but hearing... The brittle sound the werewolves made as they slid on the hard tarmac of the road. The Mini was parked on the road. She rolled onto her belly and started to writhe forward, serpent-like. The pack knew what she was doing immediately. Interspersed among all the other noises there were now whimpers of doubt, as if none of them had known she could move. She tried snarling herself, just to give the creatures something to think about, but the sound came out thin and pathetic. She pulled herself up onto her hands and knees. Her handbag tangled with her arm, and she coughed with astonishment to discover she hadn't lost the thing somewhere back in the blackness. There were cigarettes in there -- ye gods, but she could do with a cigarette right now. Silly idea. But there was a box of matches nestling alongside the Lambert & Butler's. And wolves were supposed to be terrified of fire -- werewolves maybe likewise, although she was less certain of that. She scrabbled at the catch of the bag, bending one fingernail back, almost tearing it. Suddenly the clasp leapt open, spilling some of her stuff out onto the ground. She patted her free hand around on the grass, feeling for the matches. No, dammit -- that was the little travel box she sometimes used for Tampax. Ah -- there they were. One of the creatures came pounding past, very close to her. She kicked out at it, missed. Now that she had the matchbox in her hand she was beginning to feel more assured. She let out the most ferocious yell she could manage, and this time it was nothing like the forlorn little bleat she'd produced earlier. There was an answering chorus from the wolves, but she persuaded herself that she could detect further signs of uncertainty in their sounds. She fumbled the matchbox open -- the tray was the right way up, for a wonder -- and tugged one of the matches out. She ran her finger along the length of it, feeling for the smooth knob of the head. Gotcha. Letting a smile spread across her face, she deliberately ran the match-head hard along the abrasive strip. Nothing. She felt the match-head erupt beneath her fingertip. She heard the little explosion. She dropped the match as the flame seared her hand. But there was no light.
She awoke to the sound of a doorbell, ringing insistently. She sat up in bed, instinctively gathering the bedclothes around her shoulders. What time was it? She must have had a few too many at the Blue Horse last night, because she couldn't remember putting on her pyjamas and getting into bed. Yet her head wasn't nagging her, the way it had too many mornings these past ten days or so. Whoever was at the door pressed the bell again, a long, long peal. "I'm coming," she said crossly. "Have a bit of patience, can't you?" She fell into her dressing-gown and made for the landing. As she passed her dressing-table she saw the time on the alarm clock there: 11:32 said the red numbers accusingly. She had slept in. She must have needed the rest, that was all she could think: Aunt Jill's death and then the funeral and the way Vic Gilmour had been so amiable and intimate and in the summation so creepy the other night and then... And then there'd been last night, out on the moor. The wolves. The werewolves. The matches that wouldn't light. She didn't know if she wanted to answer the door. If she was going to find Steve Gilmour standing there, his smug smile already in place... On the other hand, it might not be Steve Gilmour, and she desperately needed some human company, someone whose words -- whatever they were talking about -- would wash away the memories of the terror she'd felt out on the moor when she'd realized that not even a burning flame would puncture the darkness. She pattered down the stairs in her bare feet, feeling the friendly roughness of the old carpet. It was Ronnie Gilmour. "Come in," Joanna said. "I'm in a mess, the flat's in a mess, you won't believe the..." Ronnie grinned. "Heard you three had quite a night of it," she said. "Steve was all for coming across here himself to find out if you were all right, but I told him this wasn't any job for a mere man. Besides, I didn't think you'd thank him for seeing you with a hangover." "I don't have a hangover." "Well, you should, if half of what my pair have told me is true. Come on, let me in and I'll make you a cup of coffee." "Yes. I said yes. Do come in. Make yourself at home. I haven't moved things around since my aunt ... since Aunt Jill, you know ... so you shouldn't have any trouble finding things. I'll throw on some clothes and..." "Are you sure you're all right? Tony said it was quite a crack you took on your skull. Maybe you should have Dr Grasmere take a look at it before you go bounding around like this." They were in the kitchen by now, Joanna poised to dash on upstairs to her room. Ronnie did indeed seem to know her way around, filling the kettle with one hand as she reached out with the other for the coffee jar. Joanna had a brief hallucination that it was Aunt Jill standing there, not this woman whom she hardly knew, but then everything returned to normal. Maybe she had taken a bump on the head after all. That was the trouble with concussion: it made you forget the fact that there must have been something that concussed you. "I'll just be a moment," she said weakly. "I'll just throw on my jeans." "Take as long as you like." Ronnie was smiling at her, much as Aunt Jill would have done. Not the Aunt Jill who had died -- the other one, the one she'd known most of her life. "No, I'll be just a minute." It was abruptly very important to Joanna that Ronnie should realize this. "I really won't be more than a minute or two." Ronnie turned back to the kettle. In her bedroom, Joanna stripped out of her pyjamas, then realized she needed to go to the loo. Naked, she darted across the landing. On the way back, walking more casually, she chanced to glance downstairs, and saw Ronnie Gilmour on the lower landing, gazing emotionlessly up at her. She put on a smile and dashed back into her own room. These Gilmours are getting to be a bit much, she thought hotly as she struggled into her blue jeans. (If my bum weren't so big I wouldn't have so much trouble getting into my jeans. Tomorrow I start slimming. Definitely. Cross my heart.) The bloody woman comes charging in here as if she owns the place, then starts peeping-tomming at me. I've a good mind to... Downstairs, she said: "Sorry about that. I forgot to put my dressing-gown on." "It's all right," said Ronnie easily, passing her a mugful of coffee. The mugs were Joanna's innovation since the funeral: she was collecting the naffest she could find. This one welcomed her to Paignton with a picture of a man with his willy sticking out of his y-fronts. "I shouldn't have been looking. But I was just worried about you, you see -- we're all worried about you. All us Gilmours, you know." "I'm not sure how much I do know you Gilmours," said Joanna slowly. She ought to ask Ronnie through to the drawing-room, but for some reason she didn't want to. "Well, of course, it's only been a few days, but I'd begun to hope that..." "What did Steve and Tony say happened to me last night?" Joanna interrupted. "Can't you remember?" "No." Well, put it this way, I'm certainly not going to tell you what I remember. They're your children, after all. "The three of you went out for a drive on the moor after Jas chucked you out of the Blue Horse." "I remember that bit." Joanna took a sip of her coffee. It could have been Coke for all she knew. "And you parked out there by one of the tors, and Steve had a bottle of whisky with him." "And I don't remember that bit." Ronnie coughed. "Well, maybe it's better if you don't remember some of the next bit, either." "No. Go on. I want to know." She tapped the rim of her Paignton mug against the tips of her lower teeth. "I want to know everything." "Well, you all three got a bit ... well, tiddly, don't you know, and -- well, perhaps Steve and Tony are a bit more used to drinking than you are, or maybe they'd had less back in the Blue Horse, but you suddenly were very ill." "Sick, you mean? I puked?" I didn't. If I had there'd still be some of that scummy saltiness in my mouth, no matter how hard I scrubbed my teeth later. "No, not exactly that -- or, at least, I don't know about that. Do you really want me to go on?" "Every last bit of it." "Well, you started ... you know, making up to Steve, making up to him in a very sort of physical sort of way, if you understand my meaning. Don't get me wrong!" Ronnie Gilmour held up her palm to forestall any objection Joanna might make. "I don't make any moral judgements. You and Steve can get up to whatever you want to. But not, I don't think, in front of Tony." Joanna found herself grinning. "Carry on," she said. "Well..." "Do you need to start every sentence with 'well'?" "Well, I ... Are you sure you want me to carry on? I only came here to see you weren't seriously injured, you know." "I'm sorry. It's just that what you're telling me is so radically different from my memories." Ronnie Gilmour paused before continuing. "After Steve had told you that your actions were ... well, inappropriate ... the two of them tried to get you back to the car. But you struggled." Ronnie Gilmour drained her coffee. It was obvious she was nearly at the end of her tale. "You slipped out of their arms and tried to run away, but you fell and hit your head on a stone." "I did? But I don't have a cut or a bump or a bruise." Joanna felt around the back of her head to make sure this was the truth. It was. "I seem to have miraculous powers of recovery." "Well, I'm not going to examine your head, young miss. I'm just going by what Steve and Tony told me this morning. Tony, who seems to have been the only one of the three of you sober enough to know exactly what was going on, drove you both back here and got you into bed. Then she did the same for her brother, at our place." "Steve told you this?" "Yes." That didn't come as a shock, somehow. "And Tony?" "Just the same." And that was something of a surprise. She'd assumed Tony would have more ... integrity. But then Tony had been howling as loudly as her brother, out there in the place where even naked flames couldn't show a light. "Word for word," added Ronnie Gilmour for emphasis. Ah -- that made more sense. Tony had been doing what her brother told her. "I'm afraid that my recollections of what went on last night are still very different from those recounted by your offspring," said Joanna with straining dignity. "And now, if you will excuse me, I have things to do this morning." "Quite," said Ronnie, coldly but without any apparent rancour -- indeed, if anything, she seemed to Joanna to be relieved that she was being let off so lightly. "I have things to do as well. Perhaps we'll be seeing you around." "Perhaps."
Fifteen minutes later, relaxing in her bath, Joanna felt her bruised ankle. That part of it was real, at least -- only, she could just as easily have twisted it when falling out of Steve's arms. Her fingernail, the one she'd twisted back when she was trying to get her bag open -- that was tender, too. But there were a hundred and one other ways she could have done that. She couldn't prove, even to herself, that her own account of events was the true one, and that Steve and Tony Gilmour were lying. Couldn't prove it, even though what had happened was as bizarre, as fantasticated, as any nightmare. The Gilmour children's explanation was a lot easier to accept, unless you happened to be the person who'd lived through the reality. She was certain she was right. It was just then, soaping her knee, that she realized last night was the first for ages that she hadn't had the dream about being in the world where the advent of the Girl Child LoChi was so desperately anticipated.
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6 Alas, Poor JasJoanna spent the next few days smoking too much, drinking too much and trying to work out the solutions to two riddles: first, what had happened that night on the moor, and why the two young Gilmours had lied so comprehensively about it; and, second, the reason -- if any -- for the symmetry that existed between her experience on the moor and the recurring dream of the light-saturated world. On the moor the sky had been unrelievedly black, save for the stars' pinpoints, and even the flame of the match had shown no light; while in the world of her dreams there was no escape from the sky's radiance, no merciful shadows even in the lee of tall objects. There had been noise on the moor, the cries of large animals and the racket of their rapid movements; while in the desert the sluggish creatures of which she herself seemed to be one made no noise as they slithered from each almost identical site to the next. Had the dreams been some kind of forewarning of the reality, skewed into oppositeness as precognitive dreams so often were? Or was it possible that the reality had, in some way she couldn't properly understand, sparked off the dreams ahead of time? A third possibility, one that she didn't much like to think about, was that in some obscure fashion the dreams might have triggered the reality. But if that were the case then she had to re-examine her whole notion of what the word "reality" meant. She was not prepared to accept that her recollections of events on the moor were illusory, but neither was she able to accommodate mentally the concept of solid, basic, physical reality being sculpted by something as transitory as dreaming -- as soon accept the possibility that someone could dream the world was flat and wake the next morning to discover that indeed it had become so. But, if the events of that bleak black night had been brought into being by the dreams -- as a reaction to them, perhaps: a form of psychological enantiopathy -- and if, at the same time, reality was some kind of tangible, inalterable substrate to the universe, then how could the two be reconciled? Only, she mused, if there were varying degrees of reality, different types of it, different qualities of it. And here her mind rebelled. The whole line of speculation was beginning to lead her into territory that she regarded as mystic claptrap: today pondering the nature of reality, tomorrow signing up as a full-time Hare Krishna zombie -- no sirree! Something else puzzled her, but, because of the amount of scotch she was drinking, she couldn't bring her mind to focus on it. She was fully aware that matters had gone seriously awry in the village of Tarburton-by-the-Moor, and that in the normal way she'd be trying to call the attention of the authorities to what was going on -- or, at the very least, she'd be trying to get away -- but there was something stopping her from doing either of these two things. Something more than just the lethargy induced by the booze, although that was undoubtedly playing its part: when she wasn't reeling from the debilitating effects of last night's excesses she was already half- or entirely pissed from the morning's.
She didn't go out much during those few days, except to fetch further supplies of cigarettes, whisky and food from the International Stores down on the corner of Queen Street and Regent Street. But, even as lacking in alertness as she was, she couldn't help noticing that the little supermarket was like a haunt of its customary self rather than the real thing: the assistants behind the cheese counter and at the check-out were pale and listless, and spent most of their time playing with their nails or chatting dully because of the dearth of customers. She felt obscurely glad, once she'd signed her cheque and loaded up her carrier bags, to be scuttling out of the place and into the fresh air. She kept these excursions as brief as possible, and made no detours: she just went straight down West Street to the junction, crossed over, into the shop, and then back home again, not looking to right or left. If she had had any courage, she kept telling herself, she'd have made a point of confronting the Gilmours rather than avoiding them; but there was always a good reason why it would be better for the moment of confrontation to be put off until tomorrow. Life just ... flowed on, at a very low ebb. She hoped that ghosts didn't exist, because Aunt Jill would be horrified at the kind of existence her solitary niece was leading; but even the image of that erect, vital figure, with her grey hair in its neat curls and her mouth drawn into a featureless tight line of contempt, didn't have the power to drag Joanna out of her laggardly abyss. And she didn't want to be dragged out of it: she was honest enough to recognize this, and accept it. The longer she continued this half-existence, the longer she could delay the moment when she had to accommodate herself to reality -- or reality to herself. And so it was back to the nature of reality again, and from there into conjectures about the wolves on the moor, and from there... The circle was unbroken.
On the Sunday night Mike phoned. "Darling! Is that you?" His voice was distorted on the line, and for a few moments she thought someone must have rung the wrong number. She'd got out of the habit of thinking of herself as anybody's darling. "Who's there?" she said guardedly. "Mike. That is you, isn't it?" "Mike -- Joanna." "Darling, I've been worried about you. No word for nearly a fortnight." "You're not responsible for me any longer," she said, knowing she was being unfair. "We're not an item any longer: we're two individuals." She hunkered down beside the telephone and put her back up against the landing wall. One of Aunt Jill's cacti served as an ashtray. "That's easy enough to say." Mike's voice, even through the Hitch Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy effects, was obviously distressed. "You can't just draw a curtain over the past and pretend it never happened." "You no longer have any claims on me," she said. It's easier to put it that way around than to admit to him the great act of betrayal I've performed. It was his fetus as much as mine that was flushed away at the clinic. I took that fetus from him without his permission. "If you hadn't got it into your head that you owned me, maybe we'd still be together. But we're not. That's over." "I'm trying to be your friend, darling. One of the things that friends are for is to look out for each other. I'm not making any claims on you." "Same difference." "Oh, shit! We're getting into an argument again. Do you want an argument? No?" "Of course I don't. There's nothing left between us to argue about." There was a long enough silence on the line -- if the sound-effects for an electric toaster going berserk could be called silence -- that she began to wonder if he'd hung up on her. She deserved to be hung up on. She took another swig from the bottle and told herself she enjoyed being a bitch, and, anyway, Mike was such a doormat that he deserved whatever shit got wiped on him. "You're all right?" He was there again. "Yes." "You're not lying, are you? Just to not worry me? If you like, I could get in the car and be with you by the morning." "I'm fine. Everything's brilliant. Aunt Jill's died -- did I tell you that? -- and I've inherited the lot, although it'll be a few months before all the papers have been signed. Oh, yes, and I've decided to stay down here in Tarburton rather than live in London any longer: I'm going to be a country girl from now on, and go around with muddy boots and a straw in my mouth. Apart from that, though, it's been just another humdrum fortnight in sleepy little Tarburton-by-the-Moor." Or should I tell him about the night when a pack of creatures that could have been werewolves stretched around me from one side of the moor to the other? Or the way that Aunt Jill's life was drawn from her, sucked out as if by a vampire's bite? Or the way that, every now and then, I catch myself fancying Tony Gilmour, which is a new and not entirely welcome development so far as I'm concerned though at least she couldn't get me pregnant the way Mike did? No, better tell him none of these things. They'd only make him pile into the car, like he threatened, and come down here to make everything even more complicated and even worse... "You're still there? Joanna?" "I'm still here." "Your voice sounds funny. Are you sure there's nothing wrong?" "It's a fundamental impossibility that my voice should sound any funnier than yours," she said deliberately. "Impossibility" was something of a triumph. "The BBC Radiophonic Workshop would be proud of what Telecom's doing for you." He laughed, observing the protocols. "You sound a bit newted," he said at last. "I am. I'm allowed to be. I told you, I'm a free person, now." "You always were." "Sez you." "You know you were. Don't let's get into that again. All I was trying to say was..." "...that if I ever get into any trouble or difficulties, you'll always be there to help me out. I knew that already. Your script's beginning to repeat itself rather too often, Mike." There was another of those crackling, explosive pauses. When he spoke again his voice sounded much fainter, as if Ford Prefect were retreating across the galaxy. "You're not a very easy person to be a friend of, Joanna." "I never said I was." She put the phone down, feeling in some obscure way that she'd scored a point, but almost immediately it rang again. "Joanna? We got cut off." This time his voice was as clear as if he'd been in the next room. "Spose so," she said. "Are you going to be coming up to London any time soon?" "Maybe in a week or two. I've got to see Rinaldo about terminating the lease on the flat, and I've got to sort out how I'm going to get everything down here." "I can help with the van," he said. She'd known he would -- she'd been relying on his van -- but at the same time she hated him for his predictability. It's a good job you like being bitchy, Joanna my lass, because you do it so well and such a hell of a lot of the time. "If you want to," she said. "I do." He breathed heavily. "Just don't let yourself ever forget that I'm your friend, darling. I don't ask to be anything more than that, I realize the way..." "Don't," she said. "Don't go on. I'm happy you're my friend." Now I'm sounding patronizing, which is surely 'way more than the poor guy deserves. "Let's just leave it at that, hey?" "Yeah." His voice was subdued. She knew him well enough to know that he'd been hoping for something more, telling himself not to hope for it, and was now disappointed that his non-expectations hadn't been fulfilled. "I love you," she said out of habit, then hurried to make amends. "I mean, I love you as a friend. I'm not in love with you. It's different." "Yeah. I know. 'Night, Joanna." She relented a little. "You're one of the good guys, you know, Mike? Maybe people don't tell you that often enough. Maybe I don't tell you that often enough." "Yeah. Joanna, it's late: I've got to be up early in the morning. Night-night. Sweet dreams. Don't let the beasties..." She slammed the phone down, and lit a cigarette fiercely. She tilted back the bottle and drank deeply, the whisky seeming to scorch the tender inside of her throat. How do you stop the beasties biting when there's a moorful of them and only the one of you? You bite them first, I guess. But what if you have no teeth?
It was a couple of nights later that the dream presented itself to her in its fullest manifestation yet. The world of the Wardrobe Folk, and the Wardrobe Folk themselves, were brought into existence at the same time as the rest of the universes of the polycosmos by the god Qinmeartha, known to the other gods as "the Insane" -- for surely only an insane god would wish to create existence, and then to continue to tamper with what went on in it. Qinmeartha had initially revelled in the glories of his creation, but after a few billions of years he had come to resent the way that the other gods mocked him, and he had begun to avenge himself on his creations. In those days the world (which had never been named, even by Qinmeartha himself, who was better at making worlds than naming them) of the Wardrobe Folk was a balmy, temperate place, with forests covering much of the land and broad grey clouds often in the sky. Each of the Wardrobe Folk had been attended by their personal angel, who hovered always overhead and had voluminous black wings that could be spread wide whenever the person required greater shade. It was always summer, in the world that used to be, with the trees eternally panoplied in protective leaves; but the summer was a cool one. The Wardrobe Folk had speech then, and music, and eyelids. They built tall houses, ascending and descending between the floors using ramps. They were not immortal: they bred in groups of three or more, imitating their god by producing offspring before they died; perhaps, in that case, they were possessed also by something of his insanity, but what is madness in a god is benign necessity in a mortal. Pastoral days. Soon ended. Qinmeartha could not express his wrath against the other gods, for their retaliation would have destroyed him and then, as an afterthought, the universes he had brought into being, so that there would have been nothing at all of him left. But the mortals who dwelt within his universes were without power, and he had long ago -- without knowing why he was doing so -- designed them so that they could experience pain to a depth of excruciation beyond, although he did not admit this, even what a god could suffer. Qinmeartha the Insane God, in the cosmic glory of his spite, took away the shadows from the universes. Everywhere there was unalleviated light, so that nothing could escape being seen. He drove the angels who had ever accompanied the Wardrobe Folk into invisibility and intangibility, so that, while they were still there hovering overhead -- this was a matter of knowledge that transcended faith among the Wardrobe Folk -- they could no longer interpose their dark wings between the lurid sky and the wide eyes of their wards. The flaring sunlight -- the luminance of Qinmeartha -- stripped the leaves from the trees and then the bark from the branches and at last the branches from the boles; and the rivers and seas dried away to leave a world of sands. All the myriad sounds that the world had been accustomed to enjoy were replaced by just one: that of the wind blowing dry sand over dry sand; the music and speech of the Wardrobe Folk had died along with the rest. The Insane God burnt the buildings the Wardrobe Folk had erected, so that the light of the flames ascended into the sky and added to its brightness; and in one terrible day he sent imps down into the world who with their long serrated knives cut away the eyelids of every one of the Folk, from the newest child to the dying. And then, setting his final curse upon his creations, the Insane God Qinmeartha afflicted them with immortality. They were condemned to eternity. Yet he had not succeeded in entirely extinguishing hope among them. Perhaps one of the imps he had used to effect his punishments had been careless, or perhaps one of the angels had succeeded in conveying some fragment of knowledge in the instant before banishment, but there survived among the Wardrobe Folk the concept of change. There had been no change in the universes since close to the beginning of time, since the end of those cataclysmic days when Qinmeartha had exacted his vengeance upon his mortals, and there were no overt signs that change would ever again return to the universes; but the concept still existed, in the form of a fragment of rhyme that was somehow known to every individual of the Wardrobe Folk -- and, they extrapolated, presumably to the mortals surviving on every other world of this god-tormented polycosmos. That rhyme was:
In their slow way, the Wardrobe Folk spent the billennia attempting to interpret this fragment, but always without success -- although even the attempts kept alive among them the notion of change. There was the idea of the Girl Child LoChi's back, which did not bend; yet the Wardrobe Folk did not have backs, did not know what backs actually were. She sought to the ends of roads, the rhyme told them; yet there were no roads in the sandy wastes, only the tracks that each individual made by creeping from one place to another. And the greatest of all mysteries was the word "starwatcher" -- for what in all the universes was a star? But it is not necessary to understand the workings of things in order to be influenced by them, and the Wardrobe Folk knew from this shard of rhyme that one day, in the future either near or far, the Girl Child LoChi would come among them, and with her she would bring the power to put curtains of clouds across the sky so that shadows would come back to the world. All of this Joanna knew in her dream: it was the knowledge of the Joanna-creature, knowledge that had always before been hidden from her. Thus read the history of the world, the history shared by all its immortal Wardrobe Folk. This was the first time that the dream was not a nightmare, for now that she understood the nature of the world it could hold no terrors for her. There was the pain of the light, of course, filling everything that her huge single eye could encompass; and there was the pain of the sharp-edged sand crystals grating across her sensitive lower surface; but these were merely agonies, which could be endured. And there was the hope to make their endurance more possible. The hope that the Girl Child LoChi would soon, herself dark, descend from the burnished scream of the sky.
The following morning, noon came and went and still the Blue Horse didn't open. Joanna first became aware that something was amiss as she was dressing after her morning bath. It was a grey-skied day, at last, and so she'd thrown open her curtains and yanked the stiff window up a few inches to let the whisky- and smoke-saturated atmosphere of her bedroom clear a little. She was climbing into the jeans which she'd still never gotten around to washing, wrinkling her nose at their fermentish stale-sweat smell, when she registered a noise like the humming of contented bees from the pavement outside. The window screeched as she hauled it further up in its frame, and a couple of pale faces turned skywards to glance at her. Greta was among the little throng, wringing her hands agitatedly in her apron. "What's going on?" Joanna mouthed to her. Greta shrugged lethargically and pointed a thumb towards the front of the pub. Looking down from above, Joanna could see nothing different. She raised her eyebrows theatrically, still questioning. Greta shrugged again, and made a gesture that told her to come down and take a look -- she, Greta, wasn't going to make an exhibition of herself by yelling the information up to her. Crossly, Joanna jabbed her feet into the tired black sandshoes that were as much in need of a respite as her jeans -- they smelt like a man's socks, and there was a tear at the toe of one of them where her uncut nails had stabbed through. Half a minute later she was coming out through the concrete tunnel onto the pavement to join the rest. "What's happening?" she said to Greta. "The pub." The black-painted doors were firmly closed. "So what?" "Do you know what time it is?" "No." She hadn't the first idea. These days she just got up when the notion took her and staggered through her hours of wakefulness until booze or exhaustion or both sent her back to her bed again. "It's nearly one." "Oh." The information took a while to sink in. "Not as it makes much difference to some of us," said Greta slyly. She'd caught a whiff of Joanna's breath. The crowd fractured, like a puddle that's just been stamped in, as a police car pulled up by the side of the road and then turned to park in Ham's Lane. Two young policemen climbed out and ambled across the road. While one of them began to ask the villagers what was going on, the other, absent-mindedly scratching his beard, turned the handle of the doors. They opened. Shrugging, the policeman pushed his way in, and without pausing to think Joanna followed him. The first thing that struck her was the smell: the redolence of smoke and alcohol was even stronger than in her bedroom upstairs, but it was also overlain by the stink of feces. The policeman glanced at her, and made a face. "I think you'd best stay outside, young lady," he said. "I know what to expect." She did. Aunt Jill's bedroom, that morning only a fortnight ago, had taught her. "I mean it," he said. "So do I." She managed a grim smile. "If I go straight back out now, people will start to think things are even worse than they are." He nodded. "Come on then." They found Jas right at the back of the bar, lying half in and half out of the door that led to the lavatories. For a second Joanna had a picture of him dashing through to try to reach them before his bowels loosened, but then she saw that his body was lying the wrong way around: he'd been coming out when death had struck him. The policeman knelt down beside Jas's head. He put his hand briefly inside Jas's waistcoat, then stripped back one of the body's sleeves to feel for the pulse at the wrist. "I really think you ought to go, ma'am." There was no command in his voice. Whatever had ensnared the rest of Tarburton seemed to have acted on him as well. "I can help you," she said. "You can't help him. He's dead." "Still." He pulled the arm of the suit back down, covering up Jas's white flesh. "You a journalist or something?" "Yes," she lied, then added: "Or no. Whichever you'd prefer." "Figures." He cracked his knuckles. "Could you nip outside, Joanna, and fetch my partner?" She was at the door before she realized he'd used her name. She turned back, staring at him. "Didn't recognize me under my beard, eh?" said the policeman, face splitting into a grin. "You didn't know I'd taken on a day job, did you? We do a little bit of everything, you see." She was pushing through the noisy knot of villagers, all of them tugging at her, demanding that she answer their questions. Her mouth tightly closed, her face set in rigid lines, she just shook her head and burrowed with her shoulders. She eased a little as she got into the concrete passage, which echoed to the sounds of her hurrying footsteps. Luckily she'd left the flat door open, so she didn't have to stop for the ritual struggle with the lock. Upstairs, in the kitchen, she tugged a fresh bottle of whisky from the cupboard where Aunt Jill had kept her cornflakes and raised it to her mouth. It was only as the liquid clug-clugged in the bottle's neck that she began to have coherent thoughts once more. No! I don't believe it. I can't believe it. But it was him. It was Steve Gilmour.
Ronnie Gilmour phoned to tell Joanna they were burying Jas that afternoon. Joanna had some difficulty keeping track of the conversation, because she'd been belting into the bottle in the kitchen ever since she'd got back, and Ronnie had to repeat the information two or three times before it registered properly on her. What she really wanted to do was yell, You're the mother of a shapeshifter, you stupid cunt! And you know you are, but you don't seem to realize just how desperately, desperately important it is that you denounce him, denounce him to the world! Or would denunciation be enough? The telephone conversation had finished some while ago without Joanna having been aware of the fact, and she was now sitting in the drawing-room, hauling deeply on a cigarette. Her throat hurt, and she knew smoking was making it worse in the long term; but in the short term each inhalation brought a few moments of blessed relief from the pain. The quality that had initially attracted her to Steve Gilmour -- what she'd at first interpreted as his elemental vitality, his unabashed masculinity -- had not been an illusion. What had been at fault was the gloss she'd put on her perception. He was indeed something elemental, and he was indeed rippling with the raw stuff and potency of life; but he was more powerful than any human being should rightly be. She hadn't any proper idea of where he might be drawing his energies from, but she suspected that he had some kind of direct connection with the earth itself: no mere animal could be as stuffed full of the élan vital as he was. When she'd been thinking of him just now as a shapeshifter she'd been grossly undervaluing him: yes, he was a shapeshifter, but that was only one small fraction of the whole of him. He had transformed himself -- she now fully credited this -- into not just a single wolf but a whole, huge host of them. Dracula, according to the stories, had been able to transmute at will into a plague of rats; but rats were small creatures, not powerful carnivores that weighed each as much as a grown man. And now Steve had manifested himself to her as a bearded policeman. She hadn't looked closely at the man's face as he'd preceded her into the Blue Horse and peered around the gloomy bar, but she was sure he hadn't been Steve then -- not at first. Even while he'd been kneeling beside Jas's lifeless form he'd still been just another bobby on patrol. But at some time immediately after that the spirit of Steve -- did Steve have a spirit, or was he a spirit? -- had come into him, transforming him, overwhelming him. She had three more bottles left untouched in the kitchen, and was worried that wouldn't be enough to see her through until the morning. Oh, shit, she'd just remembered: Jas's funeral. That was what, ostensibly, Ronnie had been phoning her about. There seemed something vaguely wrong with the fact that he was being bundled into the ground so very rapidly after his death, but for the moment Joanna couldn't work out what it was. Her mind probed once or twice at its own unease, but each time retreated almost immediately. It made sense to bury him as fast as possible, she rationalized wretchedly, before the body began to decompose; that must be why. She couldn't remember what time Ronnie had said the service was going to be -- if indeed Ronnie had given her a time at all -- but she gaped at her watch and saw that it was four o'clock already. Four pm sounded like a respectable sort of a time to be holding a funeral; and as if she'd cued them the Bloody Bells started up their doleful chorus in the steeple of St Leonard's across the way. Getting to her unsteady legs, Joanna slowly moved to the window and pulled back the curtain. There was already a double line of mourners moving slowly up the path towards the church door. She ought to be among them. Jas had known her aunt, hadn't he? And he'd been kind to Joanna herself after Aunt Jill's death, refusing to accept any money for those two pints of Royal Oak, to symbolize his sympathies. There were few enough in Tarburton who would sincerely grieve for the Blue Horse's landlord that she should allow herself to be absent. Her jeans. They were filthy. You couldn't go to a funeral in jeans like these. But what else was there? Some time in the past few days -- she couldn't remember when -- she'd got mud all over the black jumper suit, and one night, drunkenly, she'd taken a pair of kitchen scissors to all her skirts. It was the jeans or nothing. Upstairs in the loo she spent a few explosive minutes. The smell made her want to be sick, but she wouldn't allow herself to go to Jas's interment with vomit on her breath, so she fought down the nausea, forcing herself to take long, deep, controlled breaths through her nose. Standing, she wiped her bottom on the front page of a fortnight-old Guardian -- toilet paper was something she kept forgetting to buy during her furtive trips to the International Stores -- and tried to flush the foul-smelling mixture of newsprint and pale yellow shit down the pan. She lurched to her room, fastening her jeans. They sagged to her hips, and without thinking she scrabbled along the rail inside her wardrobe door to get a belt. It was crimson, with a gaudy buckle done in fake gold and glass diamonds, but at least it would hold her goddam trousers up. In front of the mirror she dragged a brush through her hair and slashed a thick line of lipstick across her mouth; the waxy colour caught the ends of her front teeth, but there was no time to salvage that now -- she'd just have to make sure she kept her mouth shut throughout the proceedings. That was everything, that was everything, surely that must be everything. She stood in the middle of her bedroom's devastation and stared around her in a series of jerky, hopeless glances, as if anything she'd forgotten might suddenly volunteer itself from the midst of the shambles. Her knickers were climbing into the crack of her bottom, which felt moist and sticky, and she tugged vexedly at the sides of her jeans. Downstairs again, she took a slug of whisky from the drawing-room bottle, just to steady her nerves, then grabbed up her handbag (No, it wasn't her handbag: it was Aunt Jill's handbag. Joanna had lost her own handbag somewhere on Dartmoor while the wolves had been filling the skies with their song. But in a way it was her handbag, because when Aunt Jill had died the kind old bird had left her everything, and it wasn't unreasonable to assume that "everything" included this handbag. So Joanna didn't feel like a thief or anything using it.) (Besides, Aunt Jill would have wanted her handbag to be at Jas's funeral, wouldn't she?) and made for the door. The bells had stopped. She could hear voices joined in a hymn -- "Be Thou My Vision" -- as she scurried up the path that wound from the churchyard gate to the church itself. She'd been wrong to think that there'd be a small turn-out to say a last farewell to Jas: from the sound of it there must be forty or fifty, quite an assembly for a little place like Tarburton. She wondered if she should turn back, since her absence would hardly be noticed, but then the thought of Aunt Jill and those two pints of Royal Oak drove her on. She pushed her fingers through her hair, yelping as she tugged on a knot, and wished that she'd thought to bring a hip-flask or something in case the Reverend James "Call Me Jim" Daker guffed on for ages at the grave-side. The church doors seemed to be locked, like those of a theatre once the play's started and the auditorium's full. She knew that St Leonard's had another entrance round the back somewhere, because she'd seen it from the vicarage garden once when Mrs Daker, during a weekend when her husband was away at a conference, had invited Aunt Jill and her visiting niece across for tea. But her recollections of it were vague, and she wasn't about to start stumbling through the rose-bushes looking for it. Thwarted, she stood back from the doors and looked upwards at the sheer sandstone façade of the church. There was someone on the roof, leaning over and peering straight back down at her. She flinched, then recovered herself. It was only a gargoyle, its hideous face twisted into a malicious sneer. Qinmeartha, the Insane God, she thought. She was panting rapidly, unsteadily, and she could feel her heart echoing her breath. Get a grip on yourself, Joanna lass. The Insane God Qinmeartha belongs in that other world, the irrational one he created: not here, not here in good old Tarburton-by-the-Moor, prettiest village in South Devon, winner of seven major tourist-industry awards and blah-de-blah-de-blah-blah. That's just a gargoyle that the good Christian souls of the parish of St Leonard's clubbed together five hundred years ago to erect as a symbol of their ... Of their what? Hardly as an image of their god, surely. The Judaeo-Christian Jahweh was a benign face with a long white beard, a sort of poor man's Santa Claus, not a malevolent sadist like the Insane God who tormented the Wardrobe Folk's world. Wasn't he? In front of her the church doors suddenly opened, so that she was hit by a burst of song. The hymn seemed to have been going on for a very long time. Perhaps the Reverend Call Me Jim had decided that a single rendition was insufficient to express the respect in which old Jas was held in the community, or perhaps the organist had brought only the one piece of sheet music with him. It was still "Abide with Me", which Joanna had always regarded as one of her favourites; but surely it wasn't right that it should be repeated over and over, like this week's hit on a pub juke-box. She stepped forwards, hoping she'd be able to slip in quietly among the congregation without being noticed. A flutter of movement behind her made her turn her head, and she saw that a single crow had come down to walk towards her along the path, parodying a human being as it rocked its shoulders from side to side. Is that what I looked like to anyone who was watching me? she thought. She dragged her eyes away from the creature, and inched forwards into the church's gloom. At first she couldn't see anything at all, although she was aware of the presence of a mass of people. Instinctively she looked in the direction of the altar, expecting to see at least a few candles, but once again there was only darkness. This was coming to remind her too much of the night on Dartmoor, but she kept her nerves curbed: it was just a coincidence, that was all; these old country churches had been built with thick walls and narrow windows, so it was often gloomy inside them. She hummed along with a few bars of "Jerusalem", wondering how long the choir had been singing it before she'd heard them from her window. Windows. Yes, the windows of St Leonard's were quite narrow, which no doubt accounted for the lack of light in the church. There was some fine stained glass in those windows. The doors silently fell shut behind her, closing off the rectangle of sunlight that had failed to spill over the threshold. The windows weren't all that narrow. There should be a matrix of glowing colour falling across the congregation. There should be candles at the altar. And suddenly the whole of the interior was flooded with light, brighter even than her recollections of the sky of the Wardrobe Folk's world. She reeled back against the unyielding doors, holding her arms up to cover her face, dropping her handbag and hearing, despite the lusty hymn, the echoes as her possessions flew away in all directions across the cold stone floor. She knew she'd feel better if she screamed, but some misplaced remnant of decorum forbade her to do so: she was in a church, after all. The light pulsed, impossibly, even brighter, and then dwindled. Cautiously, Joanna lowered her arms. The church was illuminated as if by spring daylight. She could see that the glass of the two windows in the long wall opposite her had been blasted out of the frames; strips of lead hung twisted in place. St Leonard's was empty, except for herself. No, there was somebody else there, standing alone among the pews, hands clasped reverentially across her chest. Tony Gilmour looked blankly at her for a moment, then opened her mouth to launch into the next verse of "When the Saints Come Marching In".
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7 Friendly PariahsJoanna opened her eyes again. The church was full of people, one or two of whom were smiling kindly in her direction. The windows opposite were intact. Candles flickered merrily in their holders around the altar. In the gilt pulpit the Reverend James "Call Me Jim" Daker was holding forth about his namesake Jas, who'd run the pub across the road. Joanna looked for Tony Gilmour's face, and saw the girl standing where she'd seen her only a moment ago, but this time surrounded by the rest of her family and much of the rest of the village. Tony smiled at her shyly, as if uncertain of how Joanna would react. No one was singing. Joanna took a step forward to grip the end of the nearest pew. She imagined that the Reverend Call Me Jim paused momentarily in his homily, as if he disapproved of her late arrival -- which he quite probably did. She needed to sit down, urgently, but all the pews seemed to be full. She looked towards the Reverend Call Me Jim, and he smiled at her. This time there was no imagining that he hesitated. The beefy man stopped entirely, and beckoned her forward towards him. Obediently she moved along the aisle, aware that every eye was on her. She became aware, too, of the rich gamey smell that hung on her: the sweaty jeans, the unwashed bottom, the socks that she'd been wearing awake and asleep for more days than she could remember. She put a hand to her face and found a little crust of dried food at the corner of her mouth. "Come on, dear friend," said the Reverend Call Me Jim, kind but firm. "We can't wait all day for you." There was a solitary chair placed in a space of its own directly in front of the altar. It was to this that he was pointing. Gratefully Joanna tiptoed towards it, knowing that it would make just as much sense to walk normally, since everyone was anyway watching her progress, but wanting to go through the pantomime of courtesy. Once seated, she lit up a cigarette and began to relax. The Reverend Call Me Jim continued his flow mid-sentence, as if there had been no interruption. Jas Paisley -- it was the first time Joanna had known the landlord's name, although it must have been staring her in the face over the lintel every time she went into the Blue Horse -- had shared many of the same fine qualities as her Aunt Jill, if the vicar was to be believed: he had been sober and upstanding -- rare qualities in a publican, remarked the vicar with a condescending smile -- and the community had been fortunate to have such an outstanding person in its midst. There was much more of the same, and Joanna fished out a second cigarette. Yet again she wished she'd had the foresight to equip herself with a hip-flask. The little chair on which she'd perched herself was not overly comfortable, as if it had been designed for the use of penitents, and she shifted around in it, trying not to make it creak. She ground the butt of her first cigarette out beneath her heel, and put its replacement in her mouth, sucking on the unlit tobacco while she burrowed in her pockets for her matches. "...and now," the Reverend Call Me Jim was saying, "we have here before us our old friend Jas for one final time..." The man seemed incapable of saying anything briefly. Joanna toyed with the idea of getting to her feet and interrupting him, of reeling off a far terser oration that she knew would much better summarize the character of Jas Paisley, the intolerant old bastard, than any of the vicar's kind words could do, but she restrained herself. There was no coffin. It wasn't the sort of thing you expected to notice at a funeral -- the fact that one of the most vital pieces of the whole rigmarole had been forgotten -- but it was the case. She was closest to the front of the church so she had the best view, and it was a certainty that the coffin was missing. She twisted right around to try to see over the heads of the congregation in case the box had been put somewhere at the back, but it didn't appear to have been. She felt her cheeks twitch, and wondered if she'd started grinning like an imbecile. This is going to be something to laugh about later, she thought, over a couple of drinks in the Blue Horse. Near the rear of the church sat Rupert, the longest-serving of all the pub's regulars and possibly the closest friend the dead man had possessed. Tears were flowing down the wrinkled cheeks; the eyes were like a pair of stagnant ponds. Rupert, too, had begun to lose a lot of weight. You're going to be the next, Joanna thought. First there was Aunt Jill, and then came the landlord, and the third on the list is going to be you, old man. Unless, of course, there had been others before Aunt Jill. It was something she had never thought to ask, and no one -- certainly not Dr Grasmere -- had volunteered the information. "...I'm sure our good comrade Jas wouldn't be averse to giving us a final song, if we all asked him," concluded the Reverend Call Me Jim above her. She turned to the front again. This was the most bizarre funeral service she could remember attending, but at last it seemed to be wending its way towards its close. She realized she hadn't got a hymn-book, and hoped that the concluding psalm would be one of the few she knew well. She peeked into her crumpled cigarette packet and discovered she'd got only three left: enough to get her through the rest of the service, certainly, and with luck also the ceremonies at the grave-side. If need be she could always cadge a couple from one of the other mourners. "Please, a song, Jas," said the Reverend Call Me Jim insistently. Joanna, glancing around, suddenly realized that he was looking directly at her. There was a rustle of voices from elsewhere in the church. "Yes, Jas -- come on -- just one more song for old times' sake -- buy you a pint afterwards, har har." "Please don't keep us waiting all day," said the Reverend Call Me Jim, a hint of annoyance coming into his voice. He was not a man who took kindly to having his wishes ignored, as Aunt Jill had discovered during her disputes with him over the Bloody Bells. "It's the least you can offer us in return for this splendid service we've been holding for you." Now the man's stare was certainly fixed on her. "But," Joanna piped, "there must be some mistake. I'm not Jas. I'm Joanna." Several of the villagers chuckled, but the Reverend Call Me Jim's face became severe. "This is surely neither the time nor the place for jest, Jas," he said. "All of us here can recognize you. Even the newcomers, like the Gilmours, know you well enough not to mistake you for that bitch Jill Soames's tart of a niece. Sing us a song, if you please -- and preferably a respectable one, such as befits the occasion." She could hear her voice winding higher. "But I'm not Jas Paisley!" she protested. "I'm Joanna Gard, I tell you. I'm nothing like old Jas at all. I'm a woman, for God's sake!" "God moves in mysterious ways," murmured Rupert from the back. "His bleeding wonders should bleeding perform when He bleeding asks them to." "Stop this!" she yelled, standing up, so that the cigarette packet shot out from her lap and slid under the step in front of the altar. "The joke isn't funny! Leave me alone, won't you! Stop doing this to me!" "It seems," said the Reverend Call Me Jim with heavy irony, "that our dear, deceased friend declines to give us this last little pleasure. Well, that must remain a matter to be settled between himself and his Maker; it is not for us to be his judges. So in the mean time there's nothing left for the rest of us to do but bury him." Pews screeched and squawked on the floor as they were pushed back. Joanna could hear the clumsy crowd movements of the congregation getting to its collective feet. "Wait!" she cried. "There's a mistake! You're making a dreadful mistake!" "The grave's already dug, Jas. Surely you're not saying we should let all the sexton's hard work just go to waste?" "But I'm not Jas! Can't you understand that?" The Reverend Call Me Jim looked exasperated. He shut the book in front of him with a loud slam, and turned away from her, raising his hands as if to appeal directly to the Almighty. "Jas, I'm certain you've told more lies to your God in your lifetime than all the rest of the village put together, but surely you must realize that now, of all times, there's no point in keeping up the pretence any longer. Maybe you'd be able to get away with this sort of nonsense in one of the big cities, like Newton, but not among a small, close-knit community like ours. I appeal to you to abandon your lies at this turning point in your existence." The words that came out of Joanna's mouth weren't the ones she'd intended to say. They tasted strange, as if they belonged to someone else. "You're quite right," she said. "I'm Jas. And I'll sing you a song." "Glory be!" cried the Reverend Call Me Jim sarcastically. "The man's come to his senses at last! And what's your song going to be, Jas? 'Three German Officers Crossed the Rhine'? 'The Ball of Kirriemuir'? ''Twas on the Good Ship Venus'? Something in keeping with the way you lived? Or are you going to honour us with a testament to your new, repentant soul?" His concluding shout died away in echoes. "The Lord is my shepherd," Joanna sang, "I shall not want..." As she continued, other voices raised themselves in chorus alongside hers, so that, in later verses where she grew less certain of the words, her stumbles were able to pass unnoticed. The organist, unseen somewhere among the rafters, joined in with both his instrument and his voice -- a booming bass, hitting each note to perfection. Up in the pulpit, the Reverend Call Me Jim rocked his shoulders from side to side, moving his body in time to the music. His red face beamed at her. The psalm ended in a triumphant peal from the organ, and hush crept slowly across the space. Joanna stood with her head bowed, trying to look contrite, portraying -- she hoped -- the image that Jas would have wished to project. "And now," whispered the Reverend Call Me Jim at last, "it is time to proceed with the burial." There was a buzz of excitement from the congregation. This can't be happening, thought Joanna. It seemed to be the leitmotif of her stay here. Singing a song was one thing, but surely they can't really be intending to bury me, for Christ's sake? The Reverend Call Me Jim descended the pulpit steps in stately fashion, his hands folded across his belly -- no longer so ample, Joanna noticed distractedly, as it had used to be -- and crossed the floor of the church towards her. "Come along with me, my child," he said amiably, "for we are all children in the eyes of the Lord." "Hallelujah!" someone shouted, and others took up the cry. "I am only a child," Joanna responded dutifully. "We are all only children," stressed the Reverend Call Me Jim. "Yes!" She recognized Rupert's voice again. "Let's scrag him, lads!" She tugged herself away from the vicar and threw herself towards the side of the church. "All those years," bellowed Rupert, tears choking his voice, "all those years he was pretending to be my friend he was short-pinting me, the bastard! Every effing pint! And he knew I'd never say anything about it, because I'm not that sort, so he just kept on doing it." "And," said someone different, "he was always cheating in the cricket. That time he gave me out lbw, I knew it was just because the..." "He told all his customers I put poisonous love philtres into my flapjacks so that they'd die if they dared to eat in the Crafts Centre..." "He ran over my dog in 1972..." "Please!" roared the Reverend Call Me Jim, lifting up his hands to quell the mob. "Please, my friends. This is the house of the Lord. Let us not permit anything unseemly to occur between these walls! One at a time, for the mercy of Christ! Rupert -- you were the closest to him, so you must have suffered his evils the most. You can lead the way to the cemetery. Put a rope around Jas's neck so that he does not stray from the path." There was already a rope around Joanna's neck, she discovered -- a rope made of plaited seaweed. She couldn't remember putting it on in her bedroom, but then she'd been in such a rush to try to get here on time. The organist struck up a new tune, and it took her a moment to identify it. It was the grotesque Dies Irae from the fifth movement of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, but played in the style of Scott Joplin. Some of the villagers were linking arms and beginning to dance together. Rupert, implacable, was stalking towards her, his face twisting furiously, spittle dribbling from the corners of his lips. The heavy arm of the Reverend Call Me Jim fell across her shoulders, pinning her in position. Rupert grabbed the free end of the seaweed rope. "Every effing pint," he grunted at her, and then he spat at her, the thin spittle spattering across her lips. She broke. Her hand clawed across Rupert's face, the long nails digging deeply into his flesh. She felt the edge of his eye tear. She knew she was screaming something, but they weren't words and they weren't under her control. She kicked Rupert hard in the knee, breaking something of her own -- a toe -- in the process, but she didn't feel any pain. The old man was crumpling up in front of her, his face a curtain of blood. "Unseemliness in the house of the Lord," thundered the Reverend Call Me Jim. "Is our esteemed old friend possessed by demons? Drive out the demons, my friends! Drive out the implements of evil!" And now the whole congregation was upon her, hurling her to the stone floor and kicking at her, jabbing at her with their walking-sticks and umbrellas, beating down on her with weighty handbags. "Stop!" came a voice, louder than even the Reverend Call Me Jim's. "Stop that! Leave her alone." A last few kicks, and then the people were pulling back from her. "Are you wild animals?" said the unidentified voice. "Have you gone mad? Leave the child be!" "That's no child," said the Reverend Call Me Jim. "That's Jas. Dead Jas. We all know him as Jas." "Are you nuts, fat boy? That's Jill Soames's niece, Joanna. She's only a slip of a girl." "He's right. The abomination's right," someone said, sounding puzzled. A hand reached down to help her up. She clutched gratefully at the strong arm, then released it almost at once, tipping back towards the floor. This must only be Steve, in another of his incarnations. The hand grabbed her by the elbow and hauled her to her feet. He wasn't Steve. His face was sombre as he looked her over. She guessed he was about her own age. Sand-coloured hair, just too long and just too short to be fashionable, fell over his forehead. He was wearing black-rimmed glasses. "Are you all right?" said her rescuer. "Joanna," Greta from the Crafts Centre whined from behind him, "has something been going on?" You were within seconds of pulling me to pieces, that's what was going on. "Take me out of here," she said to the sand-haired man. "I need fresh air. Help me." His side felt reassuringly strong against hers as she hugged him to her. "Help me," she said again.
"I know you," she said twenty minutes later. They were walking among the ancient gravestones that surrounded St Leonard's. No one had been buried here in the church's original plot for over two hundred years; nowadays the graves were dug in the New Cemetery, as it was called, on the far side of the Ham's Lane playing fields. "I've seen you before somewhere." "I've seen you before, too," he said. "You used to come and visit Jill Soames every now and then. She introduced us once, in the street. I'm Ian Piper." "I'm sorry," she said. "I don't..." "It's all right. Lots of people don't." "I'll remember you now, though," she said after a pause. "I'll remember you for the rest of my life. Which I think you've just saved, back in there." She gestured towards the silent church building. No one had followed them out, yet now the edifice seemed deserted. Perhaps they'd all slunk away shamefacedly through the exit by the vicarage garden. "A small labour." He looked embarrassed. "I was passing, and heard the noise. I thought a rat must have attacked the Bloody Bell-ringers, or something." "The Bloody Bell-ringers," said Joanna. "That's what my aunt used to call them. The Bloody Bell-ringers." "I liked Jill. She and I felt the same way about the bell-ringers." He grinned suddenly. "The same robust way." "Forthright," she countered. "Unsubtle." "Candid." "Direct." "Unembroidered." She giggled. It was a game Aunt Jill had played, the Jolly Roget Game, but only when she was secure in her company. This man must indeed have known her well. Unlike Ronnie Gilmour, for example, who had claimed so much. "You need to get cleaned up," he said. "I don't like to be the one to say it, but..." "I smell a lot." "I was thinking more of the blood on your clothes. And the dust on your face. For all the Reverend James Daker's holiness, he's never shown very much interest in keeping St Leonard's clean. You do look a shambles." "I guess I must." She looked down at her hands. The right was covered in blood from where she'd torn Rupert's face open. "I'd best get back to the flat." "I'm worried about leaving you alone." "I'll be OK." "They might come for you again." She considered this. She didn't think it was likely -- the people seemed to have been caught up in some blinding spell, which Ian had broken by his arrival among them. But it was possible. "I can't let you come back to the flat with me," she said at length. "If you think that I look a mess..." The attack in the church had made her sober, and now the memories of what the flat looked like -- and smelt like -- were becoming oppressively clear. "I understand," he said, and in a strange way she thought that he probably did. "Well, my house probably isn't all that much better, but the towels are clean and the water's hot." She looked at his eyes. They seemed guileless. "You won't...?" she began. "You'll be safe," he said. "I'm just offering you my bath, and maybe a meal, after. I haven't got any clandestine motives, if that's what you're concerned about." She trusted him. "Apart from anything else," he said, "I just happen to be gay." She stopped in her tracks. "You're the writer," she said. "I do remember you now." "Not much of a writer," he said. "I'm basically just long-term unemployed. I write things sometimes, but I don't often finish them." "I thought you were only reputedly gay, rather than the real thing? I thought you were enigmatic about it. Aunt Jill never seemed to be quite certain." She took his arm and walked beside him out through the churchyard gate. "I don't make a habit of telling people about it -- especially not here in Tarburton." He put his hand over hers, as if they were an elderly couple promenading along the front at Margate. "But with you it doesn't matter if you know or not." She smiled. "I don't matter, hmm?" "I didn't mean it that way," he said hurriedly. "It's just that ... Well, the reason I keep quiet about my sexuality in Tarburton is because, to a lot of the locals, it makes me some kind of pariah. That's why you've never seen me in the Blue Horse, for example. I don't know if it was Jas who barred me from the place first or if it was just that I got fed up with all the abuse he used to yell at me every time I went in there. It's the same at the Customs House: the bikers would beat me to a pulp without a second thought, and most of the other regulars would applaud them for it." "They're a bunch of real bastards down there," Joanna agreed. "But what makes you think I'm any better than they are?" "Don't you see?" He stopped on the pavement half-way up West Street and came around in front of her. The eyes looking earnestly into hers were sky blue. "I feel safe to tell you anything about myself because you're just like me." "I'm not gay," she said, hoping she wasn't sounding defensive. With the possible exception of Tony Gilmour, she thought guiltily. "I didn't mean that!" He took both of her hands in his and placed them flat against his chest. "It was what I was saying about being a pariah. We're two of a kind." "You mean, I'm a pariah, too?" "Well, aren't you?" She thought for a moment. "I suppose I am," she said. "Join the club, then. Be a Charter Member of the Pariahs Club."
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8 Qinmeartha the Insane GodIf she'd been at her own flat she'd probably have hit the whisky as soon as she got inside the door. Instead, after she'd bathed, Ian fed her cocoa. She sat wrapped in an old towelling dressing-gown he'd lent her and looked at the flames jumping in the hearth. "Thank you," she said. "And I don't just mean for pulling me away from the mob in the church. I think this -- the fire, the cocoa -- is you saving my life for the second time in a day. Thank you." "Next time maybe it'll be your turn," he said. He'd poured himself a glass of beer and was sitting to one side of the fireplace. He looked embarrassed. "I mean it..." she started. "I really wish you'd stop," he said. "You'd have done the same for me." I hope I would have, she thought, but I'm not sure I'd have had the courage. They were wilder than the wolves... "What's it like, being gay?" He laughed. "What's it like being straight?" he said. "I meant, what's it like being gay in a little dump like Tarburton-by-the-Moor? You said you were a pariah. Can it really be like that?" "Oh -- easily. It's not just my imagination. I got on well with your aunt, and Greta's always been all right with me. But most of the rest..." He let the words hang, then added: "Well, you saw them for yourself, today." "Yes, but that wasn't really them. They were..." "Oh, it was really them, all right." He stood up and looked for something on the mantelpiece. "Just pray to the gods of your choice that you don't see them as they really are ever again. They're bad enough, a few of them, when they're just the way they hope everybody thinks they are. Ah -- got it." He was holding a joint. "You don't mind, I hope?" he said, suddenly unsure. "No -- go ahead. I don't, myself, much. Dope usually just makes me feel a bit sick." She finished her cocoa and put the empty mug down by the edge of the hearth, then wrapped her arms around her knees. She was naked under the dressing-gown, and she felt the warmth of the fire directly against the undersides of her thighs. She couldn't recall having felt as contented as this -- not since before Aunt Jill's death, at any rate. She wanted to stretch herself out in front of the grate like a cat, and purr. "Do you have a lover?" she said. "Not at the moment. There's not much of a choice, locally, is there?" "No one in Newton? Or Plymouth?" "No one at all, for a while. There was someone out at Dartington, but he moved to France and I was left behind." His voice was unhappy. "No one in Tarburton you sort of fancy?" she said. "I could do with a lover myself. Maybe you've got better taste in men than I have. We could hunt as a pair -- you taking the gays and me the straights." She cackled. She liked the idea of this man being a close friend of hers; and she wanted, too, to be his close friend, his sister almost. "There's one, but he's not interested." "Who?" He dragged on the joint, making little sparks in the air. "I promise I won't tell," she said. He grinned. "Like being out behind the bike-sheds at the back of the school playground?" he said. "Exactly. Cross my heart." "OK, I trust you, Joanna Gard." He leaned forward. "It's Tony Gilmour." She couldn't say anything for a moment. He misinterpreted her silence. "Yes, I know he's not even gay, but I can't help the fact that I've fallen in love with him. I saw him one night coming out of the Blue Horse, and we just said 'good evening' to each other, the way you do, and that was it for me. I've told myself that..." "B-but..." "Don't say you fancy him too." Ian was obviously trying to banter, but he wasn't completely able to conceal the bitterness. "Well, yes. No -- I mean, no. It's just that..." "Just what?" "Tony's not ... not male. Not a man. He's -- she's a girl, a woman. She's Steve's younger sister. You haven't got the two siblings mixed up, have you?" He was shaking his head. She put her hand anxiously on his knee, removed it quickly, replaced it. "Tony's as male as I am," he said. "Yes, he's the younger one. I mean, whatever made you think he was a girl? Tony's a boy's name, not a girl's." "Antonia. I thought it was short for Antonia." He took another long toke. "Just like Steve's short for Stephanie," he said. "Or Stephen." "But Stephanie in this instance." "Steve. Tony's older brother?" "Older sister." Now Joanna was shaking her head. "There's something terribly wrong here," she said. "There's something wrong with this whole fucking village, and whatever it is has been stopping me from thinking about it too hard. Steve's a man. He's a pompous, self-satisfied, over-bumptious, not terribly bright man. I know! I bumped into him once and felt his balls!" She gulped. "By accident," she added quickly. Ian shrugged. "And I've seen her sunbathing in a bikini. There wasn't much bikini. Not enough to..." Joanna's mind was racing. If Tony were in fact a man, even though the evidence of her five senses had told her otherwise, then maybe this explained why she'd found herself drawn to ... him. But not entirely. Because her first sight of Steve had likewise made her short of breath. And it was impossible to think of Steve as being a Stephanie -- even more impossible than it was to accept that Tony might be an Anthony. All right, let's not take this seriously for a while. Let's just pretend that it's a silly parlour game, with rules that don't make a whole lot of sense, and keep going along with it until we see what we come out with at the end. "Maybe they swap sexes backwards and forwards between them," she said slowly. "I wouldn't be at all surprised," said Ian, so casually that for a moment she thought she'd misheard him. "What makes you say that?" "The fact that Tony isn't remotely interested in me is only one of the reasons why my falling in love with him was such a dumb thing to do." "What else is there?" she said. "Oh, and I think I would like a bit of that joint, please, after all." "You said it yourself, Joanna Gard." Ian passed her the spliff, holding it neatly between his fingers and thumb. "Something's been going drastically wrong in this village for months now -- and nobody's been able to do anything about it. Nobody's even wanted to do anything about it. Except me, and I don't count -- because I'm a pariah. They've just watched as the people have, one by one, begun to shrink away until finally they die, all watched over by the benign eye of the Reverend James 'Call Me Jim' Daker, vicar of St Leonard's, his parish." "Are you trying to say that the bloody vicar's knocking off his parishioners?" She began to laugh. Maybe it was the joint getting to her. Ian smiled, too, but wanly. "No -- no, of course I'm not. He's an evil old bastard, but I don't think he's a serial killer. Not a polite sort of a thing to be, if you take my meaning." His mimicry was good enough that she started laughing again. "But he's been watching it happen, and I think that, early on, he could have stopped it if he'd wanted to." "What started it all off?" Joanna said. Ian drew a deep breath and reached for the joint. "It started when the Gilmours got here," he said. "They're what began it." "I ... believe you," said Joanna after a long silence. "There's something ... odd about them." He hooted. "That's the understatement of the year!" "What have they done to you?" she said. And then she began to tell him about what had happened with the pack of wolves up on Dartmoor. It all seemed very silly to her, sitting here in front of this chuckling fire, warm in a sensible towelling dressing-gown, and she half-expected him to begin to look at her askance or just to start poking fun at her. But he remained entirely serious throughout her account, listening to her intently. She told him, too, about the conversation she'd had with Steve and Tony when she'd told them all the rotten things that had happened to her -- and that she'd done -- since Christmas; which meant that she told Ian some of them as well, although she glossed over the fact that the fetus ("The child," he interposed) had really been Mike's, not Peter's. Then she moved on to what had happened at the church this afternoon, before Ian had intervened to save her from the mob. And finally, before she'd quite realized what she was doing, she told him about the dreams she'd had of the world created by Qinmeartha the Insane God, and of the hopes of the Wardrobe Folk for the coming of the Girl Child LoChi. And as she told him these last pieces, which had seemed to her totally disassociated from the rest, she began to wonder if in fact the dreams actually fitted in with what the Gilmours had been doing to her, if they were all part and parcel of the same thing: the completion of the picture. There was a symmetry she'd noted before between the darkness on the moor and the unending light of the Insane God's world; and that symmetry had been extended during her experiences at St Leonard's, when the false darkness had given way to the pulse of searing light. And had events here in Tarburton, since her arrival, been any less insane than those in the world under Qinmeartha's rule? "That's quite a tale," said Ian when she'd finally come to a halt. The joint had long ago burnt out; he chucked the roach onto the fire, then added some coal on top of it. "It's more than I had in mind. No insane gods or other worlds in my hypothesis." "Which was?" "That the Gilmours are vampires. Not tall old men from Transylvanian castles flitting around the countryside in Batman outfits sucking blood from virgins' throats -- not Hollywood vampires. I was thinking more of psychic vampires, preying on people's life-forces, sucking them dry of their souls so that they can live themselves forever, eternally young." "Anyone listening in on this would think we were both equally nuts," said Joanna. The fire didn't seem to be warming her as effectively as before. There were shadows in the corners of the room that she hadn't noticed earlier. "I don't think we're nuts," said Ian. "I don't think we can be nuts, in this situation. It's the circumstances that have gone nuts, and we're very sanely trying to find the least absurd way of explaining them." "Or, anyway, you are," she corrected. "I don't have any theories, remember?" "You think that all the rest of the weird things around here tie in with the dreams you've been having," he pointed out. "You were talking about Qinmeartha the Insane God and the Wardrobe Folk as if they were as real as you and me." "But they are as..." She stopped. "I think they are. Ian, do you think, maybe, that I actually have gone off my trolley?" "No," he said immediately. "That's gallant. But..." She thought for a moment. "This past fortnight, I haven't been acting too rationally. Apart from the fact I've spent most of the time pissed out of my skull, I've been letting everything else go. I mean you didn't see those knickers I had on: I had to flush them away down your loo. (Hope I haven't blocked it.) And ... hell, a lot of the things that've been happening to me, maybe they've not been happening, as it were. Maybe it's just been that I've gone not-so-quietly bananas. I've been imagining it all." "You weren't imagining being attacked by a mob of church-goers," he said. "That is, not unless you're imagining sitting here talking about it with me now." "That," said Joanna, "is a horrible thought." "I'm real," he said, laughing. He stretched out his hand to her. "Go on -- feel it." She felt the hand, but only because it was there. "I wasn't just making conversation when I was asking you if you think I'm crazy," she said. "I believe that's what the Gilmours have been trying to do with me. I don't know why they'd want to -- perhaps they haven't got any real reason, but have just been doing it for fun, or maybe using me as a scapegoat, like the Insane God Qinmeartha is using the Wardrobe Folk as his scapegoat. I can't tell you their motives: all I can say is that maybe that's what's been happening to me." She paused, expecting him to say something, but he just stared at her in the firelight. "It's been like trying to walk through glue," she suddenly burst out. "I haven't known what's been really happening to me, and what hasn't! Sometimes I've been certain I really was beset by werewolves, other times I've thought it was all just a load of garbage, or maybe a dream that I've somehow drunkenly remembered as if it actually happened. I haven't known, one way or the other." She was crying. In front of anyone else, apart from Aunt Jill -- except that Aunt Jill was dead, of course -- she'd have felt ashamed of breaking down like this. But Ian just put his hand softly on the back of her neck, comforting her by his touch. "It may not be much consolation to you to know this," he said, "but I really did see you being assaulted by the mob this afternoon. And I heard what sounded like wolves howling the other night. Faint and distant they were, but that's what it sounded like to me. Coming from the direction of the moor. I think all those things did happen to you, Joanna Gard. I believe you." He continued to massage her neck. The phone rang, breaking the spell. Ian rose, removing his hand gently, and moved off into another room. She could hear him talking urgently to someone, but couldn't make out the words. "That was Ronnie Gilmour," he said when he came back. His face was white, and he looked as if he were freezing. "He knows that you're up here with me. He was ringing for both of us. He says he's got something to show us -- something he says might interest us. Now. Down at the playing fields at the end of Ham's Lane." "I'm game," Joanna said. "Are you?" "Better get dressed," Ian said.
Dressing in his bedroom, trying to ignore the clammy feel of her jeans against her thighs, she let her eyes run along the spines of the books on his shelves. There was a lot of stuff by Colin Wilson -- that was where he must have picked up the notion of psychic vampires -- as well as books by other authors with whose names she was less familiar: Stan Gooch, John Gribbin, Jenny Randles... She leant down to tie her laces, and saw a small piece of torn-edged paper, like something he might have been using for a book-mark, sticking out from under the bed. She didn't know what made her pull it towards her for a look, but she did. There was a piece of rhyme on it:
"Are you ready yet?" called Ian from below.
All along the railings on the West Street side of the St Leonard's churchyard someone had stuck up bills advertising a
"That's for us," said Joanna, nodding as they passed the first one. She'd said nothing to Ian about the piece of paper she'd found. Now that she knew he was one of them -- one of the same league as the Gilmours, whatever that was -- she was guarded by the knowledge almost as well as if he'd been her knight in white armour, the way he'd pretended to be. She'd brought the paper with her, but now she crumpled it up and threw it away, letting the wind catch it. He noticed nothing. "You're not crazy, Joanna," he said coldly. "You're not crazy at all." They passed the end of the railings and turned right into Ham's Lane. The windows of the Crafts Centre were blank darkness, but there was a light on behind a plain blind upstairs. Greta was still up and about, or perhaps she was reading in bed. Somehow Joanna couldn't imagine Greta reading in bed. Couldn't imagine her reading at all, unless it was something on the mystic power of crystals. On impulse, she turned to look towards the vicarage. There was an upstairs light on there as well. In the bright frame she could see the bulky silhouette of the Reverend Call Me Jim, looking out. Watching them as they went by. Ronnie Gilmour must have told him they'd be coming. Young Joanna Gard and the gay from up the street who's putting the trimmings on the insanity we've all spent so much time creating for her. But the trouble with your schemes is this, my beloved enemies: I found that rhyme under Ian's bed, and it told me that all his talk about you lot being the wrong sexes was just so much bullshit. I know a set of balls when I bump into one: Steve's never a Stephanie. And all the illusions you've been creating for me, using whatever magic it is you have access to -- they all fell tumbling down like a card-house as soon as the breath of Ian's duplicity touched them. It was dark down Ham's Lane, darker than it should have been. Acting her part, Joanna clutched Ian's arm tightly. She was expecting an owl to hoot, just like in the movies, but the night air was silent. Above her she could see the stars, almost as clear and many as there had been on Dartmoor. As they came out of the end of Ham's Lane onto the playing-fields, the full moon emerged in sudden splendour in the middle of the night sky, casting silver shadows everywhere. The naked goal-posts were like geometrical diagrams; the trees in the distance seemed to have been lightly touched by a mist of mercury. And in the centre of the playing fields, about fifty yards away, stood a group of people. Or wolves. They were standing upright, like human beings, but the moonlight picked out the silver of their shaggy fur. "The Gilmours," Joanna said. "They're letting me see them at last." The wolves remained motionless for a few seconds, long enough to ensure that Joanna could be looking at nothing else but them, and then they began to dance. No human being could have reproduced the shapes these creatures made with their bodies and the air. Time and again Joanna had the illusion that there were no animals there at all, merely some slowly boiling mass of metallic liquid. Their bodies seemed to blend into each other, fusing and separating and fusing again, all in time to some stately, silent rhythm. Beside her, Ian began to hum. It was a tune she'd never heard before, but she recognized it immediately: it was the melody which had been written by the angels of blessed shade billennia ago, adopted as the melody for the Wardrobe Folk's song about the Girl Child LoChi. She began to sing it, amazed by the clarity of her own voice in the stillness of the night air. But the words she sang weren't the ones she'd discovered in the fiery world ruled by the Insane God Qinmeartha and later read on the scrap of paper in Ian's bedroom. Not quite.
"That's wrong," she said, when the short song was done. "Those aren't the true words, not the words the Wardrobe Folk have." "The song isn't theirs," said Ian, equally quietly. "It reached them only by mistake, and it was corrupted by them. The version you sang is the real one, the one sung by Qinmeartha the Insane God." "Him!" she hissed. "You are his creatures?" "We are him," said Ian. "We are almost the whole of him. We are all that there has been of him since the universes were very young. What the Wardrobe Folk tell each other is not a lie, for they do not know its falsity: but it is an incompleteness." "You've been tormenting them for billions of years -- Qinmeartha the Insane God has! Is it any fucking wonder they slip up on a few things?" "No, not at all. And we, Qinmeartha, do not blame them for their imperfection." "Blame them!" She twisted her arm away from his. "And I was the one thinking I was going crazy! Either you people think you're an insane god, or you actually are an insane god! Either way sounds pretty fucking fruitcake to me!" "We are insane," he said, grabbing after her. "We are the god. But we are not forever insane. And we are not insane here." She halted. "What do you mean by that?" she said. "'Here'?" "In this facet. Your near facet." Still the wolves -- no, now that she had become more accustomed to the moonlight she saw that they didn't really look much like wolves at all -- still the silver-grey creatures danced. They, if there was more than one of them, had picked up the song from Joanna's lips, and slowly chanted it, over and over, as they moved among each other's bodies. "I don't know what the bloody hell you're talking about," she said tiredly. "What new line are you going to try to feed me, Piper? That you're the Second Coming? Or is that too tame for you?" "You see only the one facet of reality," he said urgently, pulling her towards him; this time she didn't resist. "There are two. Each mortal being exists in both of them, the near and the far, always, although the two segments of every individual mortal are each unaware of the other's existence. That is what happened when the rival gods drove me mad: the fragile balance I'd built up between the two facets was destroyed. It had been my intention, in creating the universes and those who dwell therein, that the two facets should become united in my mortals, so they would experience the entirety of the reality I had also created for them. It is a glorious reality -- wonderful!" "You remind me of a small boy crowing about how clever he's been with his Lego," she said acerbically. "It's all so really great, Mummy, only it keeps falling down." "This is not something to be mocked!" cried Ian. The noise was enormous. The stars seemed to tremble in their paths. "We are the god Qinmeartha, and we shall not be mocked by our creations." "You're mad." "Am I? What do you see over there in the moonlight?" "I'm not certain what I see. German Shepherd dogs out late, playing on the grass." "If we did not need you so badly..." "Need me?" Joanna laughed in derision. "You're going a bloody funny way about getting me, buster." "Need you for our completeness. To restore our sanity. Haven't you started to wonder about the meaning of the song the god Qinmeartha composed about the Girl Child LoChi? What type of human song does it remind you of?" They were walking slowly together towards the dancing shapes. Joanna hadn't noticed this until now. A tiny part of her wanted to turn and run, but its voice was very faint and she ignored it. "A love song, I guess," she said. "It's more like a love song than anything else I can think of." "The rival gods were not content with ridiculing Qinmeartha for his insanity in creating the universes of mortals, and the dual reality with which he had blessed those mortals. They also seized a part of him, and hid it away from him, so that without it he would truly lose his sanity. This was the portion of him that encompassed his moderation and his humility: lacking it, he became like the other gods, fierce and merciless and absolute. In his insanity he perpetrated terrible crimes against his own creations, but ever he sought the missing portion of himself so that he could become once again the fecund and benevolent god of creation, as he had been." They were very close to the wolves -- to the Gilmours -- to the creature(s) that formed the lusts of the god proud to be called Insane until he became indeed so. Ian -- Ian? -- was intoning the words as if they were a well learnt ritual. "The sundering of his wholeness was greater than any agony a mortal can feel, and the lack of his stolen fragment was intolerable beyond even that. The pain drove him -- not his requirement for wholeness. Everywhere he went through the far facet of his creation he could find no trace of his shard -- except for its name, the Girl Child LoChi. His disappointment was greater than skies and seas, and he wrote it between the stars, turning all to fire. "And then, after too many cycles of the universes had gone by, he turned his thoughts to the other facet he had made. "And he found you there." They were close enough to the dancers that Joanna could feel the tiny disturbance they made in the air. "He killed my aunt," she said. "He killed old Jas. He killed others before them." "Those people are not dead," said the Insane God's voice. "I drew their entirety into your far facet. They are alive there." Horrified, Joanna pushed the being from her. "You condemned them to that?" she screamed. "You threw Aunt Jill into the cauldron of the Wardrobe Folk's world?" The splinter of the god held its hands up to her. "Only for a short time," he said. "Only until you are rejoined with us, Girl Child LoChi, so that you can put curtains of clouds across the sky and thereby bring shadows back to their world." "A short time!" she spat. "A short time in that place is an eternity. You want me to help you, so you go about torturing the people I know?" "It was the only way I knew to draw you to me. I borrowed the nightmares of my creations in your near facet, and I used the vitalities of the beings in your far to spark those nightmares into form. I controlled my insanity as best I could -- I had to if I were to persuade you of the truth of my need." "Then I reject you!" The dancers froze. "I reject you for your cruelty, Qinmeartha." "But it is not my cruelty. It is the cruelty of my insanity, brought upon me by my rival gods." "As you worked to bring insanity upon me." "It will not seem like insanity when we are whole once more." "You shall never be whole. I shall never consent to rejoin you." "Girl Child LoChi..." "I am not the Girl Child LoChi now! I am Joanna Gard. I am the niece of Jill Soames -- that same Jill Soames whom you have condemned to everlasting hell. I am not a god: I am a mortal. I am greater than any god." "Then we must take you," said the voice of Qinmeartha the Insane God. The sea of hot fur engulfed her.
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9 She Who Seeks to the Ends of RoadsSo they found Joanna Gard on the Ham's Lane playing fields the following morning. Emptied.
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