Resonance (41 page)

‘He’s dead,’ said Harry. ‘He got us this far; then he died.’

Vincent thrust the pistol into his belt and jumped lightly into the driver’s box. He went to gather Joe in his arms. Harry pushed him away. ‘No!’

‘There may still be time for him.’

‘No!’

Vincent tutted, and stooped once more. Harry put his arms around Joe’s cold body and held on. To his surprise, Vincent sat back.

‘You cannot make this choice for him, boy.’

‘He’s here, isn’t he? He made the choice himself. Leave him alone!’

‘You
want
him to be dead?’

Harry shook his head, gasping. He was so confused. The world was swimming, everything coming in waves. He realised he was sobbing into Joe’s shoulder. ‘Don’t take him back there. Please don’t.’

Vincent sighed. ‘He only sacrificed himself to save another. How do you know what he might have chosen had she not been in danger? Are you really willing to reward him by taking him from here as a corpse?’

Harry shook his head again.
Yes. No. I don’t know
.

With another sigh, Vincent pushed him to one side and gathered Joe in his arms. Harry slumped against the seat,
helpless, and openly crying now, the snow falling down on him in gently cooling drifts. In the carriage, Daymo’s prayers continued, selfish and useless, as Tina lay broken on the floor below.

Vincent rose to his feet, a tall dark shape cut from the night. ‘Do you think you can manage to take the girl home?’

Harry didn’t answer. He was staring at Joe’s pale dead face.

Vincent huffed. ‘At least do him the justice of
trying
,’ he said. ‘If you drive through the village and then take the
right-hand
fork, you will be in the big town by evening.’

The man seemed to think for a moment. Then Joe’s hair brushed Harry’s face as Vincent leaned in to look into Harry’s eyes. ‘Tell everyone there has been an outbreak of the cholera here,’ he said. ‘Warn them not to come. And, boy, if you ever,
ever
say anything more than that, I will find you, understand? I will make you do things you would wish yourself dead for. By protecting my family, you will be protecting your own. Do you understand?’

Harry nodded. The man held his eye just a moment longer. Then, with Joe’s body still in his arms, he sprang to the roof, then to the wall, and was gone.

Goodbye

T
INA WATCHED THE
lacquered wall, listened to Daymo pray, and sensed Harry shiver and moan as he tried to keep the horses moving. Now they had passed beyond the Angel’s sphere, the poison in Harry’s system was running riot. He had begun to talk to himself, and laugh and cry. Sometimes he paused to get sick. Still he stayed up there, the cold eating at his face and hands, stubbornly guiding those horses through the deepening snow, trying to get her to town.

She had been broken in some way she was not certain could ever be fixed, and she floated within herself, calm as a lily on a pond despite the great depth of her grief; despite the knowledge that everything was lost.

Joe was gone. She had felt him go. As the light had grown weaker and the distance between him and the Angel increased, he had simply faded away. When the man took him, there had still been the smallest spark of him left – just the tiniest, tiniest fragment – and then the carriage had moved on and he had disappeared from her entirely.

Still she had kept calling out to him, as she had been calling since he’d wrestled her from Wolcroft’s arms, hoping
that he would hear her, hoping that her thoughts would reach his across the growing distance and through the storm of damage that Cornelius and the Beloved and the vast torturous pain of the Angel had done to her mind.
I love you, Joe. I love you. I love you, Joe. Save him. Save him. I love you. I love you. I love you, Joe. Save him
.

The carriage stopped moving again, and she listened as Harry spoke to people who were not there. He was saying the same thing over and over: ‘There’s cholera. Don’t go to the village. There’s cholera.’

Come on, Harry
, she thought.
Get moving. You can make it
. The carriage lurched as he opened the driver’s gate.
Ah no, Harry. Stay up there
.

He was babbling as he made his way to the carriage door. ‘Promise me, okay? We can’t go back.’

A deep, familiar voice said, very gently, ‘Why don’t you stand back now, son?’ and the door opened in a blast of snow and cold. A woman’s voice cried out, and there was a great confusion of shadows as someone piled into the little space beside her. She was turned onto her back. The woman groaned, ‘Oh,
acushla
. Oh no.’

Tina felt herself being lifted into a sitting position.

Daniel Barrett was frowning at her from the door, a shotgun propped on his shoulder. ‘Cholera,’ he said. ‘
Cholera
, Fran. If folk hear that, they’ll never let us back into town.’

The woman’s arms tightened around her, and Tina was comforted by the smell of apples. ‘We’ll say nothing ’til we get her home, Danny. No one need know. And when we warn the theatre boss, he won’t have to tell the performers the truth. Sure, he can make something up.’

Daniel’s eyes hopped from Tina to Daymo, who still
moaned and sobbed on the seat above her. Fran the Apples squeezed Tina even harder. ‘You’re scared of some germs, is it, Daniel Barrett?’

The man smiled, a gentle, adoring smile, and shifted the shotgun so that he could reach in for Tina. ‘After travelling the length and breadth of the country with you, woman, I’ll be scared of nothing again.’

The sky was falling down in soft pieces, filling her eyes, as they carried her to a covered cart and laid her down on blankets there. Fran bundled Harry in beside her, a blanket round his shoulders. Tina heard Daniel bully Daymo up onto the driver’s seat. She felt the cart begin to move.

Harry kept mumbling to himself and trying to leave, and finally Fran put her arms around him. ‘Shush now,
acushla
,’ she said. ‘Shhhh, now. It’ll be all right.’

Harry started to cry, very quietly, his face turned away. Fran rocked him and murmured to him, all the time gazing across his shoulder to Tina, who could not turn her head or look away from his defeat, nor take a breath to say the name that echoed in her mind.

Endings

T
AKING THE LONG
walk back from the church gate, Vincent shifted the weight of the boy in his arms and savoured the tranquilly falling snow. No matter how weak the Bright Man, he still had hopes this boy might revive. ‘It will be good for Cornelius to have you around. You may even find that you are happy here – certainly I was for long enough.’

It felt good to have finally decided to leave, but for once in his life Vincent was not going to turn away without speaking. He would talk to Cornelius. By force, if he had to. He would turn his friend’s face to the mirror and make him look himself in the eye; ask him how many lifetimes he intended to squander on this existence of dust; how much love and life and opportunity he would continue to waste.
Better one brief life lived to the full than an eternity of fear, cully
.

Then Vincent would leave. He would take his chances, with the disease and with the world, and he would live – really live – for as long as his body would last. He would take Raquel with him. Gently, kindly, he would show her that
the world held more than the brutalities it had previously revealed. What a life he would give her – he would fill every day with wonders.

The children would be difficult. They must be disposed of – but how best …

Vincent hesitated as he emerged from the last of the southern woods, the smell of burning timber pulling him from his thoughts. He paused a moment only, not comprehending; then he saw the top windows all ablaze with light, and he ran.

The entire village was arrayed on the grass, staring up at the brightly lit top floor, their faces slack. The atmosphere was thick with awe. Vincent ran into it like a wall of hot syrup, and it stopped him in his tracks.

What can it be that is amazing them?
he thought.
It is only fire
. But he knew, the devil take him, he knew already: it was the thought of what the fire consumed, the
spectacle
of its tragedy, that held them entranced.

Vincent searched in vain from face to upturned face. ‘Cornelius?’ he called. ‘Raquel? Where are you?’

Luke came running from the house, trailing smoke and coughing. He staggered across to the nearest villager, Peadar Cahill, and grabbed him as if repeating an action he’d already tried in vain. ‘Help me!’ he gasped. ‘Help me. I can’t get him to leave!’

Suspended as the Bright Man fed through him, Peadar did not react.

Realising the boy was still in his arms, Vincent dropped him to the gravel and ran to grab Luke. ‘Where is Raquel?’

Luke shook his head. ‘I can’t get Himself to leave her. I tried. He’s determined to break down the door.’

Vincent spun for the house. Luke staggered after. His eyes were swollen with smoke and he could hardly breathe. ‘She’s barricaded herself in,’ he gasped. ‘I can’t hear the childer anymore.’

As he ran into the house Vincent heard the villagers make an awed sound, and he felt the violent, coring sensation of the Bright Man latching on to him and beginning to feed.

Smoke was pouring down from the upstairs landings. Vincent ripped his cravat from his neck, tied it across his nose and mouth and battled the stairs. Even his eyes could see nothing in the blinding air, and he had to grope his way to the upper floors.

In the sewing room, everything flared with light. The playroom door was a sheet of flame, and Cornelius was hurling himself at it, bellowing and snarling as he tried to break it down. His sleeves were ablaze when Vincent hauled him away. He had to be punched in the jaw to prevent him struggling free. Vincent threw him across his shoulder and fled for the hall. He could feel the heat on his back as they descended the stairs – from Cornelius’ burning coat or the advancing flames, he could not tell.

By the time they reached the porch, Cornelius was thrashing blindly, all aflame. Vincent threw him to the ground and stripped him of his coat. He hurled the blazing garment away into the gravel. It illuminated a ring of watchers there, their avid eyes all fixed on him.

Vincent staggered back from them as if from a blow. Luke was running from one to the other, slapping them and screaming, ‘Stop! Stop looking at them!’ But he could do nothing to break the spell, and the villagers continued to drink deep from the wondrous circus of anguish and fire
of which Vincent and Cornelius had become the heart.

Vincent barely had the strength to turn from them. He fell onto Cornelius, who was attempting to crawl back into the house, and clung tight. Cornelius’ hair had begun to streak with white. Vincent’s strong hands were beginning to age.

Cornelius’ thoughts were loud in Vincent’s head now, directed only at him, screaming and crying and calling over and over:
Help me save her, Vincent. Help me save her. She cannot end like this
.

But there was nothing that could be done. Raquel was not even a whisper inside their minds. She was gone. So Vincent wrapped his arms around his friend and gathered him in, and with all his strength held him in place as the spectacle of their pain fed the Angel, and smoke poured from the doors, and the flames overhead ate the only person left who they had ever loved.

J
OE JERKED TO
life on hard gravel, flames lighting the sky above him. He was sprawled at the feet of heedless men and women, their attention fixed on a smoke-filled doorway. Tina’s voice was in his mind, or the echo of it was, or the memory, because she was not here. She had gone. But her insistence remained, the desperate plea that she had been drumming into him since the bridge. He rolled to his elbows, crawled from the smell of fire and ring of rapt watchers, and followed his memories into the darkness of the trees.

The symbiote was where she’d remembered leaving it,
lying in a dim shiver of light at the base of a stone wall in the ruin of a castle. Joe wrapped it in his waistcoat and carried it to the place Tina had been heading before Wolcroft had saved her life by breaking her contact with it. Down into the dark throat of the earth he went with it, fathoms underground, through depths and depths of darkness illuminated only by the nacreous glow of the creature in his arms.

He turned a corner into a much brighter light, and there behind the thick bars of a rusting iron gate stood Tina’s angel. It paid him no heed at all, and it seemed not to even notice the creature in his arms. Its great spider hands were pressed to the ceiling above its head, its sea of tentacles held upwards like a cup. It filled the tiny space of the stone staircase with its presence, and it was, as it had been when Joe had first seen it, intently feeding.

‘Here,’ whispered Joe, holding the Beloved up to the bars of the gate. ‘I brought this for you.’

The Angel did not respond. But the Beloved, as if reacting to the Angel’s light, raised first one, then another, then all of its trailing arms. Almost too weak to move, they groped and wavered, then finally, finally, made contact with the Angel.

It was so graceful, in the end. Such an elegant, peaceful, tender union. After all the wailing and pain and need, it was like a gentle song, the way they came together.

Joe put his hands against the bars as the Angel straightened and expanded and became whole. He could feel the power withdrawing from the air, the focus of energy shifting as the Angel withdrew its yearning light and began, as was its proper nature, to feed through the consciousness of the creature that had curled around its neck.

Its own Beloved, that poor dead thing, was pushed aside,
and it slipped to the floor, unheeded and unmourned. These were the things left behind when the Angel walked away into the tunnels: the body, long dead, of a casually discarded soul; and Joe, alone and lonely in the dark.

I
T WAS MORNING
when Vincent found the boy. He was sitting on a jumble of fallen stone, his head tilted back against the wall of the ruined castle yard, watching the sun rise above the smoking roof of the house. The air was bitter, the grounds bright with frost, and for the first time in many decades Vincent truly felt the cold. The boy watched his approach without lifting his head from the wall, and did not react in any way when Vincent offered him the blanket he had carried from the house.

‘Put it around you, boy, or you shall be ill.’

‘You look older.’

Vincent sat stiffly onto the stones, the blanket bundled in his lap. ‘I feel older,’ he said.

They watched the smoke rising and, not for the first time this morning, Vincent wished that he could cry. ‘My wife is dead,’ he whispered.

‘And Wolcroft’s kids?’

‘They were not Cornelius’ children. He brought them as a gift for Raquel when …’ Vincent glanced at the boy, who stared coldly back. ‘Yes,’ he answered flatly. ‘The children are dead.’

‘Is your house ruined?’

‘The upper floors are gone. The attics. The structure can be rebuilt, of course, but the occupants …’ He looked down
at his hands, the already healing burns on his fingers and palms. ‘Not even the Bright Man can resuscitate ash.’

‘I gave the creature to your angel. I took it down those stairs.’

Vincent nodded dully. ‘I think you saved our lives doing that, mine and Cornelius’. Had you not done so, I think the Bright Man would have sucked us dry.’

‘I didn’t do it to save you. I did it because Tina wanted me to. I thought I’d die afterwards … Why didn’t I die?’

‘I do not know. Perhaps because that particular creature and that particular symbiote are not meant for each other? Perhaps they do not fit quite perfectly and there is, even now, still something of the Bright Man’s power reaching out to us.’

‘I don’t want to live here forever, mister.’

Vincent got to his feet and dropped the blanket into the boy’s lap. ‘That is up to you,’ he said. ‘You can always just walk away.’

Joe squinted up at him, the rising sun in his eyes. ‘Are you leaving?’

‘It’s time. I’ve had my fill. I need more, or I need nothing. Either will do. How about you?’

The boy shook his head. He seemed terrified. If Vincent had been a different type of man he might have stooped and gripped his shoulder, or embraced him, or offered advice. But Vincent was what he was, and he had given all that he could give. The rest was up to Joe.

‘Here,’ he said, dropping the iron key into the boy’s hand. ‘In the old days, I’m told the Angel used to wander the woods. It used to stand sometimes by the pond and touch the water, and the old folk say it used to sing. Let it free. I cannot guarantee it, but I suspect that if you do, the pond will thaw
and the creature within it will remain asleep – at least for so long as the Angel lives.’

The boy closed his hand around the key but gave no sign that he would act. Once again, Vincent found he did not much care, and he turned away with no more words.

Leaving the boy in the shadow of the ruins, Vincent took the path through the apple trees and down through the woods. Once he reached the lawns the whole world seemed to open up in frost and snow, a wide and careless, glittering expanse waiting but not caring either way if he came or went. Smiling, Vincent kept on walking, the house at his back, the world at his feet, not choosing a direction, just happy to be gone.