The Shadow in the North (26 page)

"Yes—^we've done that," she said, and he thrust EUie at her, and then the cook, and she understood at once, bless her, and took charge.

Webster's room was over the old studio, overlooking the street. Frederick didn't know whether the fire had reached there yet, but Sally's room was over the kitchen and didn't seem as safe. As Mackinnon came down, shaking, Frederick shoved him after the others and fought for breath.

"Help the women out—climb through window— stairs no good—"

"I'm no' climbing! I cannae stand heights—"

"Burn, then," said Jim, and turned to Webster. "Chuck your mattress out," he told him, "and sling him out after it. Here, Fred—" He pulled Frederick aside. "Trouble up there," he said quietly. "Miss Wotsit. She's locked herself in. Says she wants to stay, if you please. Here—^you all right?"

Frederick nodded. "I was a bit dizzy," he said hoarsely.

"Where you been?"

"Down the bottom. Smoke. Can't get through. Come on, then. I suppose Bellmanns responsible for this."

"Them painters," Jim said as they hurried up the first flight of stairs. "I thought they were wrong from the start. I shouldVe got up earUer—I knew there was something wrong. Here—^you've got a hell of a cut on your neck, mate, d'you know that?"

"Something fell on me," Frederick mumbled. And then came a cry from below, and a rending crash, as the floor of Sallys room collapsed into the kitchen.

"Wait there," said Jim, and darted down.

Mackinnon had gotten out, and Mrs. Griffiths had clambered bravely down the flimsy sheets, but they were having trouble with EUie. She'd gotten halfway out and couldn't go any farther.

"Go on, you silly great girl!" Sally was urging her, but she just gasped and blinked and clung in terror to the knotted sheets.

"You'll have to go down with her, Jim," Sally said.

"All right. But you go first—show her how it's done."

He hauled EUie in again and let her fall to the floor, sobbing, and then helped Sally out.

"Give Fred a yell. Tell him to carry on," he said to Webster.

Webster called up and heard an answer. "I hope he can manage," he said. "The building won't last long. I'll go and give him a hand."

"You stay here," Jim said. "Fll take EUie down, then come back up meself. You make sure the knots dont slip."

Webster nodded, and Jim sprang to the windowsill, as agile as a monkey.

"All right, Sal?" he called down.

The houses opposite were lit like a stage set, and a crowd was already beginning to gather. Sally reached the bottom and called out that she was safe, and Jim turned back,

"Come on, EUie," he said. "Lets get you down."

She clambered up hastily beside him.

"Now, then—get hold of the rope like this—that's it. ril go down a bit, see, and give you room. Good linen, this is, it won't break—I nicked it from a good hotel. That's it—good gal—"

His voice receded. Webster waited at the top.

At the foot of the top flight of stairs Frederick had to stop, because the floor was sloping. Or at least it seemed to be sloping. The building sounded like a ship at sea, it was creaking so much. A muffled explosion came from the direction of the studio, and Frederick thought. Chemicals—hope Sally's out—

But he pushed himself up the narrow stairs, dark and hot and swaying. Or was it him? This was a dream. When he reached the top, it was a lot quieter, as if the fire were a hundred miles away.

It was hard to breathe. His strength was draining

away by the minute; he could feel it leaking, like blood. Perhaps it was the blood. He raised his hand and banged at Isabel s door.

"No!" came the muffled response. "Please leave me."

"Open the door at least," he said. "I'm hurt. I cant struggle with you."

He heard a key turn in the lock and a chair being pulled aside. The gende glow of a candle as she opened the door, and her loose hair and nightgown, made it seem like another sort of scene altogether, and only made him feel further lost, deeper in a dream.

"Oh! You're—^what have you done?" she cried, standing aside to let him in.

"Isabel, you must come—there isn't much time," he said.

"I know," she said. "It won't be long now. I won't come, you know. You've been so kind to me here. What have I got to escape for?"

She sat down on the bed. Spread out all around her were a score or more sheets of paper—letters, from the look of them, covered in dark bold writing. She saw him looking.

"Yes," she said, "his letters. Reading them . . . it's always made me happier than anything else in my whole life. I'll never have anything better if I live to be a hundred. And if I do live—^what have I got to look forward to? Loneliness and bitterness and regret. . . . No, no, go, please, you must. Leave me. Please. You must go . . . for Sally..."

Her eyes were bright, her whole expression sparkled. His head was swimming; he had to cling to the chest of drawers in order to remain upright, and he heard her words distantly but very clearly, like a daguerreotype in sound.

"Isabel, you silly bitch, come downstairs and help me out, if you wont come yourself," he made himself say. "Everyone else has left, and the buildings going to collapse any minute. You know I wont go till you—"

"Oh, you're so stubborn—it's mad. Has he gone?"

"Yes. I told you, everyone. Come on, for God's sake."

She looked so excited, though, like a girl going to her first ball, flushed and pretty and young; or like a j bride. . . . He was almost afraid he'd died already and 1 this was some dream state of the soul. She said something else, but he couldn't hear it. There was a roaring in his ears, like the fire—^well, it might have been the fire—and this floor was creaking now too.

He tore the curtain aside and pushed open the window. This room faced the street, like the landing window below; if they jumped, maybe—

He turned to the bed. She was lying on it, facedown, her arms spread wide. She was facing him, and her hair had fallen softly over her cheek and jaw so that only her eyes and her clear forehead were visible; but he could see that she was smiling. She looked transcendently happy.

Suddenly he felt angry at the stupid waste of it and stumbled across the floor, meaning to drag her to the

window. But she clung to the bed, and he found himself dragging that, too, until, sick with pain and exhaustion, he fell across her. It would be so easy to give up.

Oh, God, what a waste.

The heat was intense now. The door was oudined in flames, and the floor was sagging and creaking like a ship in a gale. The air was full of sound—roaring, flailing sheets of sound, like audible flames. All kinds of sounds were mixed up in it. Music, even . .. bells . ..

She moved. Her hand found his and clung.

"Sally?" he said.

It might have been Sally. She'd lain beside him like this, but they'd been naked then. Sally was strong and fearless, and lovely, incomparable.. . . Lady Mary was beautiful, but Sally . . . Where was she?

Oddly enough it felt like drowning. There was an area of terrible pain around him—he could feel it there—but it didn't quite touch him. Instead he lay inside it, trying to breathe, and the air came into his wounded lungs like water.

He was going to die, then.

He turned his head to Sally to kiss her for one last time, but she whimpered. No, that was wrong. Sally wouldn't do that. Sally was somewhere else. This girl couldn't help it. Get her out, and—

He reached for the window, and the floor collapsed.

cJnto ike QJ kadi

ow

It was still dark when they brought his body out. Sally had waited with the others in the shop across the road while the firemen fought the blaze, and wrapped herself in a borrowed cloak and held Webster s hand and said not a word.

They d watched every movement the firemen made. Sometime in the early morning it had begun to rain, which helped the pumps; the fire had blazed so swiftly and completely that it hadn't been able to sustain itself for long, and the firemen were able to move into the smoldering, sodden ruins and look for Frederick and Isabel.

Then there was a shout. One man looked up and back at the shop across the road for a moment, and others clambered up to help him.

Sally stood up and smoothed down her cloak.

"Sure you want to?" said Webster.

"Yes," she said.

She gently unclasped his hand and gathered the cloak around her and went into the road, into the drizzle, the cold, the smell of ashes.

i

They were bringing him down so carefully that at first she thought he was still alive, except that there was no urgency in their movements. They laid him on a stretcher in the light of a flickering lantern and, seeing her, stood aside. One man took off his helmet.

She knelt down beside him. He looked asleep. She laid her cheek beside his and thought how warm he felt. She put her hand on his bare chest, where only a few hours before she had felt his heart beating, and thought how still it was now. Where had he gone? He was so warm. ... It was a mystery. She felt like stone; she felt dead, and he felt alive.

She kissed his Ups and stood up. The fireman who'd removed his helmet bent over and covered Frederick with a blanket.

"Thank you," she said to him, and turned to go.

She felt a hand on her arm and looked around to see Webster.

"I've got to go," she said.

He was looking older than he'd ever seemed before. She would have embraced him, but she couldn't stay, or everything would collapse. There was something she had to do. She gently disengaged his hand, shaking her head, and left.

For the next forty-eight hours or so Sally moved about in a trance. One idea possessed her, and she was numb to all else—except for one or two moments when feeling broke through and nearly swamped her. But

there was something she had to do, and she had to do it for Fred. And that was reason not to feel for the moment.

She remembered nothing of the journey north, though she must have gone to her lodgings, for she had a bag with her and she had changed her clothes. She arrived in Barrow late on Sunday night and became suffi-ciendy aware of things to notice the hotel keepers raised eyebrows at a young lady traveling alone—but not sufficiently aware to mind it.

She went to bed at once. She slept badly, waking often to find the pillow wet and herself bewildered, as if she could feel things in her sleep but not know what they were. She breakfasted early, paid her bill, and as the sun broke uneasily through watery clouds and gilded the dingy streets she set out toward her destination. Not knowing the way, she had to stop and ask, and she found that she couldn't keep directions in her head for long, so she had to ask again; but little by litde she made her way to the edge of the town, and then she turned a corner and found herself looking down at the birthplace of the Steam Gun, the empire of Axel Bell-mann, the North Star works.

It was a narrow valley filled with fire and steel, with the glint of railway lines in the strengthening sun, with the drift of steam and the clang of mighty hammers. A rail line led into it from the south and out of it to the north, and a dozen sidings were laid out between the buildings, with shunting engines moving lines of trucks

to unload coal or iron or to shift items of machinery. The buildings themselves were light, glassy structures for the most part, iron-framed and delicate to look at, and despite the presence of the chimneys and locomotives, everything in sight was clean and glittering and new.

It looked like a mighty machine itself—a knowing one, with a mind and a will. And all the men she saw, and the hundred or more she couldn't, seemed not like individuals but like cogs or wheels or conneaing rods, and the mind that moved them all was housed, she could tell, in the three-story brick building in the very center of the valley.

The building was like a cross between a comfortable modern villa and a private railway station. The front door, complete with Gothic porch, opened directly onto a platform by a siding and looked out over the heart of the valley. There were flower beds along the platform, bare now but neatly weeded and raked. On the other side of the house a carriage drive curved up to a similar though smaller door and around the corner to a stable, where a boy was raking gravel. On top of the building stood a bare flagpole.

As Sally stood looking down at this busy, prosperous, flourishing scene she felt a strange sensation: as if waves of pure evil were coming from it, shimmering like a heat haze. Somewhere down there they made a weapon more horrible than anything the world had seen, and the power that made the weapon had reached into her

life, wrenched out the clearest part of it, and dropped it dead at her feet, all because she had dared to question what was going on. Whatever could do that must be evil, and the intensity of it was almost visible in the shimmer and glint of the sunlight on the glass, the steel rails, the quivering air above the chimneys.

It was so intense that for a moment she quailed. She was very frightened, in a way she'd never been frightened before—more than a physical way, in the way that evil was more than physical. But she'd come here to face that. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, and the moment passed.

She was standing beside a grassy bank overlooking the valley. She found herself scrambling down a little way to the cover of a group of trees, where she sat on a fallen trunk and looked over the valley more carefully.

As the morning went by she noticed more and more details, and began to see a pattern in the work. None of the shunting engines, or the chimneys on the buildings, produced any smoke; they were probably burning coke, which accounted for the cleanliness of the valley. The three cranes she saw lifting lengths of steel pipe or sheet iron off the railway trucks seemed to have a different sort of engine, however: it might have been hydraulic or even electrical. Electricity certainly powered whatever went on in the most isolated of the buildings. Wires led to it from a little brick structure nearby, and whenever a shunting engine took a line of trucks to it, it didn't go up close, as it did elsewhere, but stopped in a siding a