First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (30 page)

Were these the three I’d been waiting for? I strained to see their faces. But the chill wind had bleared my eyes and I couldn’t be sure. Then I saw another behind them: he was dressed all in black and he seemed so menacing, I was sure he would destroy them. In a few seconds it would be too late, so I screamed as loudly as I could above the awful noise of the instruments.

“Mother! Aunt Lizzie! Father!”

The awful discord of the trumpets stopped, and the drums were silent. The procession halted. The faces which all this time had been directed ahead, now turned slowly up towards me. As they did so, my eyes cleared and I saw hundreds of molten faces with eyes writhing as though they were full of little snakes. Then they looked away from me again. The drums began to beat, the trumpets screeched, and the procession advanced along the parade route, black coats shimmering in the rain, then disappearing round the long bend into Empire Street.

I was standing up.

“What is it, Andrew? Are you all right?” Maria was saying, watching me anxiously. “You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”

“An army of ghosts,” I said.

“You’re crying,” she said.

“No, I’m not.” I was having difficulty saying anything. “It’s the cold wind.”

She put her hand out to me, and I took it.

“Poor Andrew,” she said.

I leaned on her and we went into the apartment. She helped me to the armchair and poured me a scotch. She dragged the footstool over and sat facing me.

“Andrew. You must trust me. You must talk to me. Please tell me everything,” she said. “This can’t go on. I love you. I need to know everything.”

I looked at her, and I knew she meant it, and I wanted to tell her everything. But where, where was I to begin? There was so much—so many strands to disentangle—and how would I ever find the words? I needed time.

“Maria,” I said. “Will you let me write it all down? And then will you read it and tell me what you think?”

“Of course,” she said.

So I drank one more scotch to steel myself for the task then I went to my desk and got out a thick notebook with lined pages. And I began writing.

W
ELL, IT TOOK MUCH
longer than I’d ever have imagined. Three days, in fact. Who would have thought so many things in a life need to be told? For three days, on and off, I kept writing. Maria supplied me with coffee and meals and made me sleep when I was exhausted. I slept serene, nightmare-less sleeps.

At times, when I was writing down some familiar experience, it would suddenly seem quite different to me, as if a stone had burst out into song. Other times, the writing was an ordeal. Contrary to Gordon Cacktail’s theory, putting certain things into words didn’t dispel them, but just gave them another kind of terrifying concreteness. The mote, for instance. While I was writing about that, and even when I looked back on what I’d written, it was like living the horror all over again.

On the other hand, I must admit that writing about other matters—for example, that meeting with the woman in the motel among the snowy hills—made me feel wonderful.

One curious thing happened late on the Sunday night after Maria had gone to bed. I was sitting in the armchair drinking a scotch and giving Minnie her nightly session of petting. While I stroked her, I was going over in my mind those things I still had to write about: especially the car accident that injured my arm. I was wondering for the millionth time why I could remember nothing about it.

When suddenly—I remembered. It was as though someone had switched on a series of lights in a dark tunnel. I remembered everything: the way Uncle Norman must have regained his memory, all at once, that night on St Jude.

I remembered I’d been driving for hours, all the way from Camberloo. I was in an old-fashioned car I’d rented, all fins and humps, and I was wearing an old jacket. I recognized it now: it was one of Doctor Giffen’s I’d kept when I sold his house.

So there I was, driving among hills, and the night was snowy. The headlights were reflecting back on the thick snow. Trees and the darkness were leaning in on me menacingly, and I had to crouch forward and peer down the road. I was tired after driving so long—hypnotised by the narrowing road and the snow. I didn’t know where I was; all I wanted was to find some place to stop, somewhere I could stay the night. I must have dozed for just long enough to step on the gas pedal. When I opened my eyes, I was going too fast. I braked hard but the heavy car skidded and lurched over the embankment. For a split second, in the headlights, I saw the thick branches of a spruce, laden with snow. There was a splintering noise, I was catapulted forward, then—nothing.

When I came to, I was in Invertay hospital.

Now, sitting in my apartment, with Minnie on my knee, I could have let out a cheer. My mind, which had been split in two by that gap in my memory, was joined together again. If I was sad about anything, it was because I saw now that my ecstasy with the woman in the motel, which had seemed so real and so necessary, had never happened. It was the delusion of a man who’d struck his head on the dashboard and whose brain was unravelling as his life slowly ebbed away into the freezing night.

I petted Minnie.

“You see,” I said to her. “There’s always a rational explanation—not as exciting, but real, just the same.”

Minnie yawned.

I finished my drink, sat at my desk and completed my account. Then I went to bed.

After breakfast the next morning, I gave Maria the notebook. She settled on the couch and began reading.

I was very nervous. I tried to pet Minnie, but she wasn’t in the mood and sidled away with her tail slashing the air. I tidied the bookshelves. I walked from room to room. I stood for ages, just looking out the window at the trees in the Park, their leaves slowly suffocating under the grey sky.

Sometimes Maria would sigh and look up, thinking about something in the notebook. An hour passed. Once, when she was near the middle, she smiled at me, and I guessed she was reading about our days on the beach at St Jude. I brought her a cup of coffee, which she reached for without saying a word. Two hours passed. She was into the final pages now, and reading intently. I think she had come to the part about her reappearance in my life.

At last, she finished. I was standing by the bookshelves again. She got up from the couch and came and put her arms around me.

“Thank you, Andrew,” she said. “Thank you for trusting me.”

I felt very awkward.

“Well, now you know all my secrets,” I said. “Not that they’re really worth much.”

She pressed against me.

“Not worth much?” she said quietly. “How can you say that when you’ve paid such a price for them.”

I loved her for that.

Then she was all business. We sat on the couch and she began asking me questions, so many questions. About the
nightmares, for instance: what could cause a man to be so tormented?

The fact was, I felt very uncomfortable talking about these things. Writing had been fine: a solitary exercise, a communication with the silent paper. The written words were out there at arm’s length, divorced from me. Even the “I” who wrote them was only a stroke of the pen, a character in a story, not the real me, Andrew Halfnight.

But talking was something else. The mouth that spoke was my mouth, the words were formed by my vocal cords, my spittle, my tongue; the spoken words were alive and part of me.

Nevertheless, I had come this far. So I forced myself to talk to Maria. I tried to answer all her questions. About the turreted mansion and Amber Tristesse: What made me crave those kinds of experiences? About the mote—she said that part frightened her: Was it just an awful nightmare, an accumulation of the unpleasant things I’d been through, all gathered together against me? About the woman in the motel room—she said that section moved her: Didn’t I think the experience was very positive? Hadn’t it something to do with rebirth, and a second chance?

Maria’s questions were astute, and I tried my best to deal with them. I must admit, after a while, the talking was easier. So much so, I wanted to ask her some questions. For example, I wanted to know about her life with her dead husband. So I asked her.

She looked happy and surprised.

“I’ve been hoping and hoping you’d ask,” she said. “I’ve been longing to tell you about him. He doesn’t deserve to be forgotten. He was a good, kind man and I think of him every day.”

She began talking about him fondly as we sat there together on the couch, and I was surprised to find how
much I enjoyed hearing about their life together. While she talked, the weather brightened up, so that the carpet was striped with sunlight through the venetian blinds. After a while, she leaned against me and was quiet, and I thought it was over. I began to relax, to enjoy the silence. But she wasn’t finished.

“Andrew,” she said. “What about that photograph of your parents? Why did you wake me in the middle of the night to talk about it? Why did you keep mentioning it in your notebook? What worries you so much about it? I didn’t quite understand that.”

Her question made me very uneasy again.

“It was just a silly delusion,” I said.

“Well, explain it to me.”

I wasn’t sure I could explain, and I told her so.

“Please try,” Maria said.

So I tried. I talked about the number of coincidences in my life—including the fact that she herself had turned up in Camberloo, of all places. And surely it was odd that my arm had been injured, just like my father’s, near a place called Invertay.

“As I was writing, I noticed so many things like that,” I said. “I suppose everybody can expect a few coincidences in their lives, but isn’t there a limit?”

Then I told her how I’d always been disturbed by the fact that people, and even places—like Stroven, then St Jude—had been annihilated after their contact with me. I told her how frightening it was to see that huge sink-hole in Stroven: as though my nightmares had been prophetic. And how terrifying it was to be pursued by someone I could never see, who didn’t mean me any good.

“I think Harry Greene has to take a lot of the blame for that,” I said. “When we were on the
Cumnock
he talked about the Eternal Cycle and how dangerous the Second
Self might be to me. It must have made more of an impression on me than I thought: I half-believed everything when I was a boy.”

I told Maria that when I was writing these notes, twenty years later, it dawned on me that I must have identified the mote with the Second Self, and thought it had caught me at last. It had been chasing me throughout my nightmares. In fact, all through my life.

“I believed it must have been watching from the moment I was conceived, cancelling out all my chances to be happy,” I said to Maria. “I made it responsible for my sister’s death, then my father’s, then my mother’s. It was the cause of my nightmares, of every awful thing that happened to me.”

Maria was listening attentively.

“As for the photograph,” I said, “I often lay there in bed, looking at it and thinking about it. I was in such a state, I believed there were two Andrew Halfnights: and the other one was there the very day I was conceived, and took that picture.” It sounded so silly. “It’s embarrassing to talk about it. But it all made sense to me, Maria. Everything fitted. It was logical. Like the logic of a nightmare.”

Maria was quiet for a while. Then she said she still had a lot of other questions she wanted to ask, but she’d spare me them for now.

“Thank you for that,” I said.

“Harry Greene was a good friend to you,” she said. “I know that. But if you hadn’t seen that
Monstrous Regiment of Women
book in his cabin, you might have been spared a lot of your nightmares. And why did he mention all that Morologus nonsense to a young boy?”

“He didn’t mean any harm,” I said. “He just loved the idea that there was some mystery behind everything. Not like Gordon Cacktail’s view of the world.”

“Cacktail!” she said, as though she’d smelt something unpleasant. “That awful man!”

We were both agreed on that.

“But when you come to think of it,” she said, “there isn’t that much difference between Cacktail and Morologus. Their theories about the world are nightmares too, but nightmares they want to force on the rest of us. Sister Justitia wasn’t much better: her idea about love, for example. If you ask me, it’s much harder to love one single person than it is to love everyone in the world.”

“I suppose it is,” I said.

“Believe me,” she said, and those little birds in the corners of her eyes seemed very lively, “I know that. From experience.”

I thought I understood what she meant.

N
OW
, I
SWEAR, THIS
is when the strangest thing happened. Another coincidence—perhaps the biggest: something you expect to find in a book, but not in real life. And Maria was there to witness it.

We were sitting on the couch, having just finished talking about Harry, when there was a knock at the apartment door.

I don’t know why, but it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I got up and went to the door. I opened it as cautiously as if I expected some monster to be there. The monster turned out to be a man from the courier service with an envelope for me. I signed his form and he gave me
an official-looking manila envelope, addressed to me. On the left top corner, it said
COUPAR STEAMSHIP LINES
, and it was stamped London, England.

The courier left and I came back into the apartment, closed the door quietly behind me and tore the envelope open. It contained two things: a letter and another, smaller airmail envelope. The letter had the
COUPAR STEAMSHIP LINES
heading.