Incarnate (12 page)

A giant crutch that was propping up a five-story terrace stood in the market opposite Hercules Place. Headless men were queueing in the market, or dwarfs in coats too big for them, and then he saw they were empty coats, hanging on the wire mesh. He turned his back on them and hurried up the cracked steps of the Hercules.

He was showing zombies this week, though the poster called them zombeys. Mr. Pettigrew wouldn’t change the printers, they came too cheap. Pictures of hot dogs were peeling off the stained oven on the sweets counter in the foyer, beneath the buzzing fluorescent tubes with their blackened ends. Suddenly he understood what had been going on today, saw the pattern of events. He was smiling when the office door opened beside the sweets counter and Mr. Pettigrew saw him.

He stared at Danny while he finished tying his bow tie. He was already dressed in his black suit with the shiny lapels, his frilly shirt, his shoes that his wife polished every morning. His clipped moustache looked like part of a uniform too, and so did his shiny black hair, combed straight back from his glistening temples. “You look pleased with yourself,” he said at last. “I hope you’ve got a damned good reason.”

When Danny didn’t answer, he fished out his pocket watch on its chain. “What time do you call this?”

I call it the watch you got out of lost property, Danny almost said. He shrugged to show he was sorry, tilted his head as if that might hide the smile he couldn’t quite get rid of. Eventually Mr. Pettigrew snapped the lid over the face of the watch. “If your father wasn’t ill with his leg I’d fire you now,” he said. “Go on, get in your box where you’re some use. I’m taking a pound off your wages. Maybe that’ll give you less to smile about.”

He stood in the doorway of his office, hands on hips, while Danny climbed the seven faded stairs to the door of his box. The usherettes were snorting with mirth. “That’ll be enough,” Mr. Pettigrew said with a kind of leering indulgence. “Now his highness has arrived we can let in the queue.”

Of course there was no queue. Danny closed the door behind him and climbed onto his high chair, then down again to switch on the single bar of the electric fire. He was grinning. He didn’t have to hide his triumph now. He glanced at the time sheet, spotty with dots where Mr.

Pettigrew had rested his pen, and peered out through his window to check the clock above the toilets next to the screen. Whoever had altered the Mickey Mouse clock must have had their instructions. That was when his enemies had begun to try to confuse him.

The audience was trickling in now, unemployed hooligans and pensioners who must be hoping that the heat was on. They reckoned without Mr. Pettigrew. Danny watched them for a while, enjoying the knowledge that they didn’t realize they were being watched. Then he dimmed the houselights, made the curtains open, and switched on the projector. The zombies came trudging toward the credits, all of which looked like misprints, and the hooligans began to pass a bottle back and forth. They must think nobody could see them. He grinned at them out of the dark. They were just as plain to him as the tricks of his enemies were.

He switched off the electric fire, then he sat up to watch through the window. The projector was already hot, the extractor fan wasn’t taking out enough of the heat of the carbon arc, but Mr. Pettigrew said he couldn’t afford to have it fixed. “If you’re too hot you’ll be able to do without your fire,” he’d said. Danny watched for the zombie with the maggots in its eyes and thought about the leader of his enemies, thought that she must have realized when she’d seen him that she hadn’t managed to destroy his mind with whatever she’d made happen eleven years ago after all. That was why she was making mistakes now, ever since she’d let him see her in Wardour Street. She hadn’t been able to lose him before she’d gone into the shop to phone, and it didn’t matter that she’d managed to lose him afterward by making the streets become confusing: that simply proved she was afraid of him, to play her tricks so openly, to give away so blatantly that she was responsible for everything that had been happening to him in the last eleven years. He only wished he had been close enough to the phone to hear what she had been saying about him.

Here came the zombie, maggots pushing out its eyes. Danny grinned as the hooligans began shouting, trying to pretend it didn’t bother them. He was surer every time he saw it that it was a real decaying corpse; they could do anything in films these days. He touched the projector and snatched his hand away, enjoying the blaze of pain. He was stronger than she was, and cleverer. He was going to enjoy making her pay for all that had been done to him. He was sure he would find her again, now that he had her worried, now that he knew her full name was Molly Wolfe.

11

F
REDA
turned for a last look at her department and could almost hear the children. Holly wreathed the security cameras above the empty aisles, fold-out Father Christmases with expanding paper bellies stood guarding the toys, and she thought of the hordes of children who would soon be overrunning the Toy Fair, children wanting this and this and this while their parents said, “We’ll see,” or, “Be good or Father Christmas won’t come.” She went back, past the toy guns she wouldn’t stock if the store directors gave her a choice, to help a teddy bear as big as a six-year-old to sit up straight, and suddenly the emptiness reminded her of Doreen. She turned quickly and made for the escalators. If she wasn’t careful she might be locked in.

Walking down the dormant escalators seemed unreal, even though her bootheels were loud as a child’s drum. On the second floor the empty beds in their hints of bedrooms made her think of Doreen too. She stepped down away from them as Mr. Harvey shouted up, “Miss Beeching.”

“I’m coming now.” She met him in the hosiery department, among the sauntering pairs of tights. “I’m sorry if I kept you waiting.”

“No trouble. Nowhere to go in particular.” He was settling his trilby on his high forehead and taking his pipe out of the pocket of his fur coat. “May I give you a lift home?”

She was fond of him—his shyness when he wasn’t being the assistant store manager, his unobtrusive praise when he was. He always looked at her as if she were no taller than she ought to be, as if he liked to look at her moist eyes and her lips, which she had the habit of pursing. But she wanted to be alone just now, to think what to do about Doreen. “I’d like to walk, thanks all the same,” she said.

He held onto his trilby as he locked the doors behind him. He must think she was mad to walk on a night like this, when the wind felt like an invisible blizzard, or that she must dislike him. For a moment she thought of the way Timothy had looked when she had refused to marry him. “Thank you, really,” she said. “Another time.”

The streets of Blackpool were almost deserted. Ripples scurried across puddles, the pool of light beneath a trembling streetlamp wavered, blurring. There was nobody on the promenade. She crossed to the railing and gazed out to sea in the hope that the wind might strip her fears away like litter, leaving her able to think instead of feel.

Dark waves smashed over the Lower Walk. The night was roaring, tugging at her headscarf and her heavy coat; her face felt gripped by frost. After a while she walked past the locked piers toward the mile of stalls and fairground. The rigging of the mast that stood in the Crazy Golf course was singing in the wind. Above her the Tower was a latticed silhouette on the churning sky. She thought it was creaking. When the wind dropped for a moment, she heard the sparks of a distant tram on the wire.

The ice cream parlors, the Horror Crypt, and the shops that sold funny hats were all locked; corrugated covers were rolled down over the souvenir stalls. The fortunetellers’ booths were locked too. Freda hurried past on the opposite pavement, for they always made her think of the fortune-teller Doreen had taken her to, who’d told her she was trying to be fair to too many people and ought to be fair to herself—she had to decide what the rest of her life was going to be like while she had the chance. She’d told herself that could mean anything: she’d thrown away her chance and Timothy’s as well, sent him to Germany to bum alive in the sky. It was no good telling herself that he-would have died anyway, she could never be sure that he hadn’t taken some risk because she had refused him. She would always wish she had known what was going to happen before she had decided that her first loyalty was to her parents, that they’d needed her more than Timothy did.

Awnings flapped in the locked fairground, cartoonish colors seemed to glow. She had almost been able to see the future once, eleven years ago, when she had misread the advertisement about dreaming. The so-called experts had persuaded her to stay to see if she could pick up the ability, but whatever had affected her dreams that last night in Oxford, the experience had been so dreadful that she had never dreamed again. If the store hadn’t given her sick leave, if Doreen and Harry hadn’t let her stay at their boardinghouse while she recovered, she was sure she would have gone mad.

The giant face of the Fun House leered across the fairground as if it were ready to laugh its mechanical laugh and roll its mechanical eyes. Doreen and Harry had looked after her when she had needed it most and now, when Doreen needed her, she wouldn’t go. Doreen had written again yesterday, pleading with her at least to come for Christmas. If only it were just her company that Doreen yearned for! But she’d seen at the funeral what Doreen wanted of her. and she couldn’t, not anymore. She’d dreamed of Timothy after his death, she’d dreamed of her parents after they had died in their beds halfway through the war, but she’d had nobody to dream of since then. In a way she had been grateful for that, even before Oxford; it had once occurred to her that people had to die before she could dream of them. Now even the thought of it made her insides feel loaded with ice.

The wind almost overbalanced her as she reached the end of the fairground wall. It shoved her round the corner, toward Central Drive and her rooms. She mustn’t go to London, not when she felt like this: Doreen’s yearning would be too much for her, even if Doreen never spoke of it; just being there would make her feel she had to dream of Harry. What did Doreen expect him to say? The dead never had much to say for themselves, even in dreams— just that everything was fine and nobody should worry about them, they would all be together again one day, though Freda had always felt on waking that they’d told her much more that she had forgotten, that she would have to wait to learn. Couldn’t she tell Doreen she had dreamed of Harry, that he was happy and wanted Doreen to be? Certainly she would write to Doreen as often as she could, phone her every day, perhaps.

She was past the far side of the fairground now, and entering the complex of streets that led back to the promenade. You couldn’t get lost, not with the Tower to guide you. She would call Doreen as soon as she got to her rooms, tell her that she couldn’t take time off before Christmas or after, she was needed at the store. It wouldn’t be worth going to London for just the Christmas break. In fact Tess could take over the department for her, she had done so last summer, but it wasn’t really fair to ask her, and besides, Freda had made up her mind. And all at once she realized that she was as afraid of London as of dreaming.

She halted at a crossroads. Terraces led away from her in all directions. Unbroken rows of houses opened straight onto the pavements—homes or shops or guest houses. There was nobody in sight, hardly a window was lit, and she couldn’t see the Tower. Why was she afraid to go to London? She wasn’t going, she didn’t need to know, but not knowing made her nervous. It made her feel as if some hidden part of her mind was lying in wait for her.

She was hurrying in the direction where she felt the Tower should be. None of the streets seemed to be parallel to any other, and the smudgy black sky wouldn’t help her locate the Tower. A dog barked in an unlit house, a cat lay on a butcher’s counter, an empty front room was lit only by the bars of an electric fire. She wanted to be in her rooms, where she might be able to think.

She wasn’t expecting to see the promenade, but there it was suddenly, at the far side of a crossroads. The tide must be rising, for the glittering fringe of a wave fluttered above the edge of the promenade before it was torn away by the wind. She made for the promenade at once. That would show her the way home.

The street beyond the crossroads was dark except for one dim lamp. She had to peer at the uneven pavement as she walked. A paving stone tilted like a Fun House floor as she stepped on it, and she thought of the giant face with the rolling eyes. She would be safer walking on the road. She stepped onto it just at the edge of the pool of light. Something gleamed beyond the lamp, and she glanced up.

A sign over a door said “SAGE.” At first she thought it was illuminated from within; then she saw that it was gilded, though it managed to seem brighter than the lamp. Notices covered the window beside the door:
“SAGE KNOWS YOUR FUTURE,”
one said. She had stepped forward to read the small print when she realized that what had looked like a black door was an unlit corridor, and there was a light at the end. She noticed nothing else, for she’d realized where she was. She had tried to find this place eleven years ago.

She’d come back from Oxford desperate to know her future—to know that eventually her panic would end. A friend of her landlady had told her where to find a psychic who was supposed never to be wrong, but Freda had lost her way in the dark side streets—these streets. Perhaps her need for help was even greater now, since it had brought her here at last.

She stepped into the corridor at once. Suddenly she needed to trust someone else’s insights., though she wished the corridor weren’t so dark. When a board gave way underfoot and she reached out to steady herself, the wall felt like damp chalk. But here was the end of the corridor, here was the light beyond a doorway. She stood gazing.

The light, whose source she couldn’t distinguish, was made to shine straight down on a table and two chairs; the rest of the room was in darkness. A man with an oval face so calm that it looked like a sculpture was sitting at the far side of the table. Presumably he was Sage. She was beginning to regret having wandered in, to scoff at herself— Sage knows his onions, she thought wildly—when he said, “Please come in.”