Resonance (32 page)

The woman tried to gently brush the hair from Tina’s face. Joe slapped her hand away. ‘Get your own life,’ he hissed. ‘Stop pawing at ours.’

The woman smiled. ‘So tender.’

Someone rushed up the steps, startling them. Wolcroft.

‘Raquel?’ he asked anxiously. ‘Are you well?’

She turned to him with a decisive gesture. ‘Cornelius, I would very much like to keep these children.’

‘Keep? But …’

Wolcroft sank to his haunches on the step at the woman’s feet. He tentatively took her hands. His eyes flicked to Joe’s borrowed clothes and jerked away again, as if afraid to draw attention to them.

‘Raquel, does that boy not … does that boy not
disturb
you?’

The woman shrugged. ‘I had hoped the girl might give you joy, Cornelius, and I admit the boy quite stymies that plan. Nevertheless, they make a tender little couple. I want you to rescue them for me.’

Wolcroft’s expression drew down, and his grip on the woman’s hands tightened. ‘The boy’s
clothes
, Raquel. Do his clothes not disturb you?’

The woman turned to Joe as if inspecting his clothing for the very first time. She laughed in amusement. ‘Cornelius,’ she said, ‘I think even I can withstand the youthful impropriety of a shirt worn without cravat and
jacket. Besides’ – she playfully tapped Wolcroft’s stained waistcoat – ‘you are hardly in a position to judge.’

Wolcroft drew back, his expression tragic, and she smiled at him in puzzled concern. ‘Why,
meu caro,
what has upset you?’

‘There is not one item of his which I would not know on sight,’ he said. ‘I remember every
button
, Raquel. I remember every thread. Surely as his mother you should …’

Wolcroft bit his lips, as if to kill his words, and abruptly turned his back to sit at Raquel’s feet. Raquel immediately leaned on his shoulder, gazing down to where Luke and the children were playing on the ice. At her touch, Wolcroft clenched his hands and squeezed his eyes shut.

Raquel seemed to have no reaction at all to his obvious distress, and Tina began to suspect that this woman saw only what she wanted to see, understood only what she wanted to understand – everything else was just so much mist to her, so much meaningless birdsong.

Wolcroft, however, was aswarm with darkness. Dense and heavy, and sickly sweet as if compressed by aeons underground, his emotions rose through the surrounding ropes of energy. Tina knew this was how her own feelings must look as they travelled to the Angel – sorrow so intense it darkened the light.

She pressed back against Joe, anticipating the return of the Angel’s howling greed. But – despite the nourishment he received from them – the Angel seemed to feel only the merest flicker, only the faintest suggestion of Tina’s and Wolcroft’s pain. Without an audience to marvel at them, their feelings were negligible, it seemed, and the Angel turned away again, focusing all his concentration on the lake.

Joe gazed over Tina’s shoulder, fascinated at what he saw through her eyes. ‘It’s feeding off them.’

‘It’s not enough,’ she said.

These people took far more than they gave. Even now, the woman was growing numb and still as she absorbed her share of the meagre sustenance the Angel had taken from her friend’s anguish.

She mumbled, ‘The seer claims part of the Angel resides in the lake, Cornelius. She claims it allows her to see Vicente as he journeys under the water. Do you think this is true?’

Wolcroft opened his eyes and looked straight up into the clouds. ‘I do not know, my dear. I have sensed nothing of him since he submerged. He is a blank to me.’

The woman sighed. ‘Isn’t that Vicente, through and through? Always keeping the kernel of himself withheld.’ She smiled and whispered into Wolcroft’s ear. ‘And don’t we love him all the more for it,
meu caro
? Doesn’t it only serve to deepen our yearning?’

He sat forward, away from her touch. Tina thought he looked marooned, all alone in the world.

‘Seer,’ he said dully, ‘tell me what they are doing down there.’

She closed her eyes, welcoming the chance to concentrate on something other than his sorrow and her own, and the Angel’s disregard for it.

‘They’re … they’re nearing it.’

‘It?’

She opened her eyes. ‘The ship – they’re being drawn to it. Time is very slow for them. It’s like they’re moving through a dream.’

‘A dream,’ he whispered. ‘If only.’

Raquel pulled him back into her, closed her eyes and laid her head against his shoulder. Wolcroft’s brow creased in pain as her breathing deepened into sleep. Tina clutched Joe’s hand. Out on the ice, the children tired of playing with Luke, and retreated to the trees. Luke resumed his vigil over the tripod.

Slowly, slowly, underwater, Harry and Vincent neared the poisonous hulk of the ship.

Dead Angels

T
HE WATER WANTED
to float Vincent upwards, and he had to pull himself along the brazier chains in order to descend at all. The chain was visible for a scant few yards below him before fading to nothing in the dark. Deep below, the dull green light endlessly pulsed.

Except for the moderate chill of the metal against his palms, Vincent did not feel in the least bit cold, and he had absolutely no notion yet of needing to breathe. Prior to the plunge, he had entertained the experiment of inhaling a lungful of water – just to see what would happen – but once submerged he had quickly discarded the notion. He did not much like the idea of this water intruding into his body. Its touch was … what was an appropriate word? Clammy? Yes. Clammy. Unpleasant.

No wonder the pond had never featured much in the leisure pursuits of the family. Thinking back, Vincent realised it had never factored much even in their thoughts or conversations. How strange. It was as if, in all the time they had been here, the pond had existed only vaguely for them, its presence acknowledged but ignored by the human occupants of the estate.

The deeper he went, the darker it became. Vincent waited for his eyes to adjust, as they would have underground, but they never did, and soon he was dragging himself through total darkness, with only the feel of the chains and the dull green pulse of that distant light to guide him. The old illogical panic began to swell, his fear of small spaces gnawing its familiar hole in his chest.

You are not confined,
he told himself.
You are surrounded by space – it is simply space that you cannot see
.

The water began to press on him like a vice. He must be imagining that. He must. It was not nearly deep enough for such crushing pressure.

But it is. It is. I am trapped. I am going to die!

Vincent came to a halt, clinging childlike to the cold security of the chains, staring desperately into darkness. Chains and darkness. The dull, dead press of the water. He was trapped. He was trapped. He had been confined.

It was all he could do not to heave a lungful of cadaverous water and scream. Then Vincent looked up, and high above him, for as far as he could see, stretched the shining vault of ice. All was space, all was light. He had been staring blindly into blackness while, overhead, such beauty glowed in silence.

Vincent gazed upwards as the hammering of his heart subsided. Arching pathways curved into the distance – the passageway of those violent currents that had borne the magician down, then back again. Now that he had calmed himself, Vincent could hear the vast, mutinous rush of their progress through the otherwise still pond. He could feel the steady vibration the American had described as the throb of an engine. Vincent thought it felt more like the beating of a
heart. Most certainly it was coming from the direction of that gangrenous light below.

He looked down again, into pitch, into fear.

He would do this.

A disturbance on the chain caused him to look up. The point of entry was so distant now, it was barely a fingerprint of light. Vincent waited, unsure, then smiled as the starfish shape of a person spread briefly against it. There came the subtle tug and shiver of someone travelling along the chain.

The American had joined him.

It gets dark down here, boy. But I have yet to feel the need to take a breath
.

There was a hesitation in the movement on the line. Then a tapping:
one, two, three.

If you begin to feel closed in, look up and the light will comfort you.

Again a tapping. Then the tug and shiver again, as the boy made his way down. Vincent resumed his descent. When he neared the brazier, he released the chains and launched himself down towards the light.

He descended into grave-like stillness and a bilious pulse of green. The water here neither floated him up nor sucked him down, and when he stopped swimming he simply hung suspended in the lifeless dark, the dull throb of that engine sounding below. Uncertain, he stared down.
I know what I think I am seeing
, he thought.
But in truth, is that what lies below me?

If the American had not said this was a machine, if Vincent’s own mind had not already been influenced by Jules Verne, might he now be seeing something other than the curve of ornate metal and glass that bulged from the mire
below? Would he be seeing a creature, perhaps, the heart of which could be heard pounding, slow and failing, within the mud of its final resting place?

If this is a creature, I am about to swim through a gap in its very ribs. I shall, all unknowing, be drifting about its broken body; seeing wires and pistons where in fact there are organs and veins; touching metal and glass where in fact there is membrane and bone
.

Vincent shuddered and dismissed this. He was not about to come so close only to allow some squeamish fancy to turn him aside. Determined, he jackknifed down and into the jagged opening in the ship’s side, which pulsed light out into the morbid dark.

The interior seemed entirely composed of narrow twisting tunnels, spiralled with copper ribbing. Vincent pulled himself along them, his body bending and curling, as if negotiating the curved recesses of a snail’s shell. The walls between the metal ribs were gelatinous, almost permeable, but the merest press of Vincent’s palm would cause their surface to harden. A metallic imprint would remain long after his hand was removed, fading only very slowly as the wall lost its temporary rigidity.

The water around him was thick as jelly – warm against the skin. The light and that pulsing noise throbbed in unison. Vincent found it comforting. As comforting, perhaps, as the beat of a mother’s heart to the child within her womb. Vincent knew nothing of the womb in which he had been seeded, except that his father had kept her for more than one voyage, and that one day she had leapt to the sharks with Vincent’s infant sister in her arms.

Vincent frowned. It had been a long time since he had
allowed himself to remember that. How strange – the memory did not bother him as usually it would. Thoughts seemed to come and go very peacefully here. Vincent felt he might be perfectly happy to go on forever like this, pulling himself along one hand after the other, the thick water parting gently ahead of him and closing gently behind, his body sliding as through warmed oil, comfortable, sleepy, content …

His hands were pushed into the open, then his shoulders and his waist, and he was propelled outwards as if from an oesophagus. Released into warm and yielding space, he tumbled through a softness of light until he gently bumped against a floor.

Overhead, the corpses of angels floated and spun like specimens in a jar.

Oh
, thought Vincent.
Cornelius was right.

How long did he lie there, gazing up at the mesh of wings, marvelling at the great immobile hands, the perfect, stony faces of the creatures above? How long, before realising that his own heart was slow, slow, slower than molasses, and that he was looking up at visions borrowed from the childhood he had long since shoved away? He bit down on his lip, hard enough that blood swarmed upwards and pain sent a flare into his stupid brain that screamed,
You are drugged
.

Instead of wings, he saw a widespread net of tentacles; instead of angels, the hunched bodies of dead creatures, multi-jointed legs curled into lifeless bellies, heavy heads tucked onto motionless chests, all bathed in that nauseating light so they almost seemed alive with the pulse of it.

Directly above him, part and parcel of the roof – or floor, door, wall – of this vast chamber, a huge membranous blister bulged. Inside it, something thick and segmented, ominous and diseased, coiled slow and steady and eternal, round and round and round itself like an apocalypse waiting to be born.