Desolation (16 page)

Someone was running up the stairs.

Cain turned and threaded his way back between the loaded bookcases, and as he exited the room filled with the Followers, he swore he heard a parting chuckle from inside.

The footsteps had stopped, though he was not sure where. He moved quickly along the colorful hallway, knotted up inside with fear, expecting the siren to sing at any moment. Glancing through the peephole in Whistler's door, he saw that the landing outside was deserted. He opened the front door and prepared to flee.

Peter leaped into view from the right, eyes wide, sweating, perhaps through exertion, perhaps not.

Cain stumbled back and fell onto his backside in Whistler's hallway.

“Quickly!” Peter said. “Here!” He held out his hand, and Cain reached up automatically. The landlord helped him to stand and then pulled him from Whistler's flat. “We have to leave
now!
” he said. “He's coming home!”

Not long before his father died, Cain and he began having real conversations. Thinking about it afterward, Cain had put it down more to the fact that his father was lonely than because Cain himself
was growing up. The old man never claimed to miss his wife, but sometimes he stared into space for such long periods of time, his eyes so distant, that he must surely have been thinking of someone long gone. And perhaps he also had the inkling that Cain was somehow approaching whatever epiphany he had planned for him.

“What is Pure Sight?” Cain asked one day.

His father glanced at him, surprised, and went back to peeling apples. They were in the kitchen, a sterile, stainless-steel-lined cell with little color on the walls, and no pandering to decoration. Peel fell to the worktop and formed impromptu twisted sculptures, and Cain wondered whether he could make anything of them. The meanderings of the mind, perhaps. The aimless twisting of lonely thoughts. He felt as alone as his father appeared, though he would never tell him that.

“All this time and you have to ask?” His father rarely looked at him when he spoke, as if afraid of what he would see in his son's eyes.

“All this time and you've never told me.”

“Of course I have. I've told you it's the perception of truth, lying at the heart of what makes us real. It transcends civilization, religion, faith in anything but reality. It's the purest thing there is, and to have it is to be blessed.” He went on peeling, and for a while the steady
scrape, scrape
was the only sound.

Cain frowned, twirled one of the strings of apple peel around his finger, creating different shapes of loneliness. “You've told me what it's meant to be, but not what
you
think it is.”

“I think it is what it's meant to be, and that's what I've told you.”

“Not everything is what it's meant to be. The books say we're meant to be with God, but you tell me He isn't there. So how can you be sure of Pure Sight? What is it to you, Dad?” Cain rarely used the familiar, usually managing to communicate with his father without calling him anything. Although cut off from the world, he was more than aware that there was something precious missing between the two of them. He had read of love in history books, and for him it was that distant.

“What is it to me?” His father glanced at Cain and then sighed, setting a half-peeled apple down on the worktop.

Cain sat still for a minute or two, eyes downcast, glancing at his father every now and then to see whether the old man was going to respond.
Angry now
, Cain thought,
and sad too. Sad that it's taken me so long to ask, perhaps. And heartbroken that he has no way to answer
. Even then, at thirteen, he knew things he should not.

“It's nothing to me,” his father said, “because I have never known it. And I never will. Age has corrupted me beyond that ultimate knowledge. I'm tainted by time. I've seen too many things, both beautiful and terrible. I've tasted blood and spice, and heard birds singing and people screaming. I've smelled insides turned out and the first spring blooms, and felt summer rain and the acid sting of defeat. I've tried, son. I've tried as hard as I can. But it's way past me now.”

“You don't have Pure Sight?” Cain said, aghast,
because every second of his life he had believed his father was trying to pass something down to him, not create it anew.

His father looked at him as he spoke this time, staring into his son's eyes, trying to impart meaning that Cain was too young to appreciate. When he remembered that occasion years later, Cain liked to think it was guilt. Perhaps even the need for forgiveness. “You're still young enough,” his father said, “and I've done my best for you.”

“But . . .” Cain had no idea of what to say.

“It's back to the room tomorrow,” his father said, suddenly stern and distant again. “There's something else we have to do.”

Cain never again witnessed the old man so vulnerable. That one time contained the totality of Cain's memory of his father's hidden love. Everything after that was pain and sadness.

As Peter pulled Cain up toward the second floor, the house's front door opened and slammed again. Peter turned, his finger held to his lips to beg silence, and climbed the last three stairs as if walking on glass. Cain followed, fear and confusion persuading him to imitate the landlord. They stood on the small landing outside Cain's room and listened to Whistler find his keys, unlock his flat and enter. He shut the door, and Cain expected him to burst out again within seconds, shouting and raving and seeking the intruder that had broken into his home. But though they stood still for at least two minutes, there were no more noises from Whistler. No shouting, no pan pipes, nothing.

“Keys,” Peter whispered, so quietly that he may have only breathed. Cain handed over his keys; Peter unlocked the door and entered his flat. They walked through to the living room, careful not to make any noise in case Whistler heard them, and sat down at the table.

“He's got a dead woman in his flat!” Cain whispered.

Peter shook his head, scratched behind his ear, stood and looked across the street at his dilapidated home.

“I
saw
her! Stuffed, along with a load of animals, all kept in one room. Stinking.
Horrible!
”

Peter did not turn, nor seem to react. From what Cain could see of his face, he now seemed calm and contemplative. Gone was the wide-eyed panic from outside Whistler's door.

“Are you toying with me again? Are you going to
say
anything?”

Peter turned at last, quickly, as if he had just come to an important decision. “I have plenty to say. But not here. Not now. If you're not doing anything later perhaps we can go for a drink, have a chat, and—”

“Stop being so fucking casual about this!” Cain said. He wanted to shout, but Whistler's presence just a few feet below was still strong. “We need to call the police! I'm not going for a drink, I'm getting on the phone right now—”

“Please, Cain,” Peter said. He sat down again and reached out, grasped one of Cain's hands in his own, held tight. His palms were cool with old
sweat. “There's so much more to this than you know. You've barely seen the shadow of the truth.”

“You sound like my father.” Cain snatched his hand away and stood, pleased at the alarm on Peter's face. “Whatever you have to tell me, nothing detracts from the fact that Whistler has a dead woman in his flat.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I saw her.”

“Have you seen a dead woman before?”

Dead
man,
my father, but I was with him for days. I knew for sure. I saw how nature deals with dead things. The black; the rot
.

“No.”

“Then perhaps she wasn't dead.”

“I'm certain she was,” Cain said, but then a sound echoed in his memory, the chuckle he may have heard as he was rushing from the room.

“Things aren't always as they seem,” Peter said. He clicked his fingers, and as Cain glanced down he could have sworn that Peter's thumb detached, bounced on the table, and rejoined his hand.

“What was
that
?”

“A cheap trick. A sad deception. I don't have it in me to do it for real.”

Cain shook his head and stood from the table, staring out at the street, wondering what Whistler was doing below them even now. Checking telltales left across door openings? Sniffing the air, sensing intrusion like a dog?

“So what are ‘The Followers'?”

“Whistler's faction. Supporters. Whatever.”

“Rats and badgers and, and, and fucking
mice
?”

Peter stared at him as if regarding a petulant child, one that had no knowledge of anything beyond its own introverted existence, its imagination fatally disabled by some fault in its upbringing. And Cain, angry and scared, felt like that child.

At last Peter stood and went to the kitchen, opened the fridge, and took out a bottle of milk.
How can I tell him?
he was thinking, and Cain knew the landlord's mind, yet another thing he should not know. Peter's thoughts were a stew of concerns, from guilt—its subject not apparent—to anger and frustration. And sadness. That was in there too, the same kind of self-indulgent melancholy that had informed Cain's father's voice those final times he and Cain had really conversed.
How can I tell him so much when I don't even know him? He's a stranger to me, and
—

“Sometimes it's easier to deal with strangers,” Cain said.

Peter spun around and stared at him, startled, his eyes wide and afraid. “You have it,” he whispered. And then he shook his head and went to leave.

“Have what?”

“Something I can never have! Your father strove his whole life to raise it in you, and—”

“You knew my father?”

Peter stood at the living room door, glancing out into the hallway and apparently noticing the altered pictures. He smiled, the expression melting away the fear that had been apparent there before. “He really did go to the extremes, didn't he?”

“I don't understand any of this.” Cain felt cold
and alone, and so much like the child Cain that he almost started to cry.

“Come out with me this evening. I'll tell you more. Rest assured, I'm not here to hurt you.”

“And what about the others? Are they here to hurt me?”

“They don't know what hurt is,” Peter said. “Come across to Heaven at eight. We'll talk.” And after one final ambiguous smile, he left Cain's flat without another word.

They don't know what hurt is
. That was no answer. And now, with Cain's life turning to riddles the more he tried to make it his own, Cain wondered how much his father had known of hurt.

Cain was desperate to leave the flat, flee the house, but it was that thirty-second journey out of his door and down two flights of stairs that kept him in. He looked down into the street and saw none of Number 13's inhabitants, but that meant that they could be anywhere. Whistler was in, he knew that, although Cain had heard no sounds from below since he had come home. Whatever that tall stranger was doing, Cain did not want to know; he was afraid that much of it involved him. Perhaps he was in his Followers' room right now, rearranging dust that Cain's breath had shifted, seeing the truth of the intrusion reflected in the animals' dead eyes. And the woman? How would she reveal Cain's invasion of her privacy? Perhaps Whistler would play her a tune on his pipes and she would rise, awaken from the deepest sleep of death to impart secrets through leather-dry lips.

He stood and paced his flat, purposely making a noise so that Whistler knew he was in. He switched on the radio and turned it up, enjoying the noise, though loud music was always more of an annoyance than a pleasure for him, itching rather than soothing his eardrums.

The others could be anywhere. What did
they
have to hide in their flats? George, the man he had followed to the place where a dog ate something alive in the dark. Sister Josephine, the nun who had perhaps smeared her naked self with magic cream and flown Cain upstairs to his bed, or perhaps not. There had been a smear on his leg when he woke, but maybe it was evidence of his own aroused state, and his nightmare-befuddled mind had turned it into a seed of lies. And Magenta the impersonator, whose eyes he thought he had seen somewhere else. If she
had
been impersonating that dead, stuffed woman, then her performance was exemplary.

Only a quick trip down those stairs, past the faceless front doors, through the front garden that felt farther away from the street than it should . . .

Peter had known his father. Cain had no doubt of that, simply from the way the landlord had spoken of the old man.
He really did go to the extremes, didn't he?
He could never have made something like that up, and he could not be talking of anyone else. Perhaps their meeting that evening would shed some light on the old man.

Yet this worried Cain. His limited understanding of his father came from his own perspective, no
one else's. He had never met anyone who knew the man, and the Voice and Face had only talked of him in their professional capacity. They had never seen him alive, never looked into his eyes and seen the dark seed of madness nestling there like a cancer. Talking to someone who had known his father threatened to give Cain a whole new angle on his existence, and he was not sure he truly wanted that. He had spent the years since his father's death trying to come to terms with what the old man had done to him, and why, and though there was much left unknown, Cain felt that he had reached some level of understanding and acceptance. When he met Peter that evening, his whole world could be turned on its head.

He should ring the Voice and reveal his fears, tell him what he thought was happening here.
They're all against me
, he would say.
I'm so alone
. But the Voice may well suggest a return to Afresh, whether he believed Cain's tales or not, and that was something Cain could not abide. The place had never been a prison, but now that he had tasted real freedom—however strange—it would crush him if he ever had to return.