The Ecliptic (43 page)

I nodded. ‘Thank you.’ But it struck me that I should not let the old man leave without pressing him for answers. ‘Hang on. Ender?’

He was halfway out the door. ‘
Evet
.’

‘Did you come across a note at all? When you were cleaning up the place?’

‘Excuse me. My English . . .’

‘A
note
—’ I made the action: left hand paper, right hand pen. ‘Did the boy leave a note?’

‘Foolertin?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Fullerton.’

The old man shrugged. ‘There was nothing like this, I don’t think.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes. Very sure.’

‘The provost doesn’t have it?’

He shook his head. ‘No. No. There was nothing like this.’

I had been thinking all day about the circumstances of the boy’s death, and I had concluded that nothing ought to be assumed. Everyone was behaving as though Fullerton had killed
himself—even Quickman had swept to judgement on the matter, though he seemed to be wavering on it now—and I still had misgivings. I had seen the odd effects of the boy’s
sleepwalking, after all, the full influence of his dreams, and I reasoned that his drowning in the bathtub might well have been its consequence. Accidents like these were possible.

‘I can go now?’ the old man said.

‘Yes. I won’t be long.’

‘I will come back for you soon. To lock it. The wood I leave outside your door, OK?’

I nodded.

The neatness of the room was troubling—it had been forced back into order after cleaning, and the placement of the boy’s possessions was too overtly conscientious. I dragged the
desk-chair to the wardrobe and brought down the guitar. Its wooden hips were damp at the edges, watermarked. As I thumbed the strings, it made the most unmusical sound. The thinnest strings were
missing, in fact, and so were the little white pegs that secured them. When I laid it on the bed, I heard something clattering inside the body of the instrument. I had to shake it upside down,
expecting the pegs would drop out, but a
jeton
fell onto the mattress instead.

Everything about it was familiar—the groove in the metal, the phoney gold lacquer worn away in all the same places—but, turning it over in my fingers, I saw that it was not a ferry
token. Its faces had no markings. This must have been what the boy had flashed at me that day, when I had confronted him about the broken window. I felt strangely disapproving of him, then
disappointed in myself for not expecting he would lie to me.

The drafting table seemed out of place, moved in from someone else’s studio. When I connected the desk lamp, it cast a doomy light over the surface: there were handprints on the laminate,
pencil marks and skids from an eraser. An array of papers rested on the table’s narrow ledge: finely textured sheets, a heavy gauge, expensive. Apart from the foremost page, which showed a
rectangle sketched in freehand, they looked unused. I checked them against the lamplight, hoping I might find the indentations of the boy’s handwriting; but, instead, I saw the fault lines of
a picture in the paper, fading through each sheaf.

I took the graphite stick and rubbed it sidelong over the page with the heaviest depressions. Bit by bit, the faint white furrows left in the graphite began to form an illustration. It was made
of four thin panels, about an inch across and several high. Each box contained a line drawing of one man’s face in close-up. They showed his dawning expression: (i) gasping anger; (ii)
recognition; (iii) a softening of the brow; (iv) tears.

Even as a rough negative like this, it was a spectacular drawing: an assembly of simple lines, some feathered, some solid, that seemed to lift the man’s whole character from the blankness.
I had seen this exaggerated style somewhere before, but could not think where. There was a darkness to it, an acuteness of detail. The character’s face was ageless and muscular, the sinews of
his neck implied through subtle cross-hatching. He looked hewn from a block of lumber—superhuman—but also jaded, fragile. At the bottom of the page were the makings of a signature I
could not read: an L, perhaps an N, and a thatch of jagged squiggle.

I put the drawing to one side and searched the cupboard by the table. There was nothing in it but a pine cone and a pencil sharpener and three red guitar picks. In the boy’s closet, I
found his cagoule and a canvas bag half stuffed with clothes: his bee-striped sweatshirt was in there with the rest of his dank laundry. I checked the pockets of all the jeans and discovered only
lint. There was a fountain pen and a Roman coin in the boy’s sock drawer, along with a few seashells and Pettifer’s camphor-wood turtle, which I could not resist winding up and letting
spin across the floor. It scuttled underneath the chest of drawers; I could not retrieve it. On the bedside table was a paperback of
Huckleberry Finn
, loaned from the mansion library; it
bore the provost’s stamp on the back cover and a strip of dental floss was serving as a bookmark three hundred pages in.

I checked every recess of the place, from the gap under the bed-frame to the shelf above the roller blinds, and even the boy’s stove (I saw the grate was resting slightly off its latch).
There was barely a mote of ash inside and the coke-scuttle below it was almost empty. On the blindside of the fluepipe, though, I noticed Quickman’s lighter. I spent a moment trying to make
it flame. It would not even spark—perhaps it never had.

The bathroom was the only place left to inspect, but I could not bring myself to search it. Instead, I put the boy’s drawing and the trinkets into my satchel and left. The wooden crate
that he had sat upon to make his scribblings was still out on the walkway. I rested there awhile, trying to view things from the boy’s perspective. That marshy, weathered lawn. The bare bones
of the pomegranate trees. This little patch of ground was such a wondrous place to be in springtime, when oleanders bloomed between the pines and all the fading purples of the sunset seemed brand
new, uncharted. It was the best spot to put down a chair and watch the sky for herons. Now the winter had corrupted it.

I leaned the crate against the wall and headed for my lodging. Even at its borders, the grass was swampy, so I kept to the trail of grit and sawdust Ardak had laid down. It cut a line in the
wrong direction—towards the mansion and away from my studio, where it joined the regular footpath. But I could already hear warbles of laughter up ahead, from short-termers on the portico,
and the sound of them revolted me.

So I broke off the path and went straight across the grass. The clay soil underneath was thick and tacky, and I remembered how it cleaved to Fullerton’s skin on his first night. He had dug
through it with his hands when he could not find his matches. It had rung against the innards of the oil drum like loose change. And then—

I stopped.

I turned so fast I nearly left my shoes behind me in the clay.

The rusty drum was still standing on the open ground ahead, but tilted now, subsiding. It was skirted by a pool of water that I had to hurdle. My heels went skiing on the other side and I
grabbed the can to keep from falling on my face. I tried to heave it up, but the dirt inside had been compacted by the rainfall and it would not budge. It did not even wobble. The only thing to do
was scoop the soil out by the fistful, until the can was light enough to tip over.

I clawed at the dirt, tossing debris over my shoulder.

When my fingers were too sore to carry on digging, I gave up. I kicked hard at the drum and it shifted in the mud. It was just light enough for me to haul into the trees, ploughing a runnel
through the grass behind me.

Under the pines, the ground was not so wet. I pushed the drum on its side, spilling its contents. Amid the clods of soil there was a soggy mass of colour. A saturated pile of magazines the size
of
Reader’s Digest
s. I had to gently excavate them.

The first one I pulled out was flecked with mud, congealed, but the cover was still glossy underneath, a little oily to the touch. I brushed off the muck from its middle. It was not a magazine
at all.

A shirtless young man with plaited hair snarled back at me, meticulously drawn. His wrists were cuffed with iron shackles and crossed beneath his chin. Thin strings of saliva hung from his blunt
teeth like guy-ropes, and, on the crest of his tongue, was a black key small enough to fit a music box.

It was a comic book.

The draughtsmanship was faultless and familiar, bearing the same jagged signature as I had noticed on the drawing in the studio. I had to rub away more dirt to see the title clearly. My heart
seized at the sight of it.

It was as though I was staring at my own face in someone else’s family portrait.

The lettering was designed to look held on by rivets, and the author’s name—the boy’s name?—had been sliced out with a blade. It was a sodden mess of paper, but I felt
the oddest kind of intimacy with it. Whoever Fullerton had been, he was contained inside those pages. Not just his talent and his labour, but every last peculiar shape that ever lurked in his
imagination. I was overwhelmed by a responsibility to preserve it. This and every other comic in the pile.

There were footfalls now in the distance, and a tuneful hum. Ender was tramping down the pathway from the mansion, singing quietly: ‘
Hey goo-loo, helleh helleh goo-loo
. .
.’ I could not let him see me.

I lifted out as many comics from the soil as I could and tucked them in my coat. Three of them. Four. Five. Just when I was running out of room, I found another in the mud. That was all of them.
I kicked through the rest of the dirt, levelling it off. And in that scattered mess, a square of burgundy showed through. The boy’s passport was there upon the mulch.

‘
Kiz goo-loo, helleh helleh goo-loo
. . .’

It was in a decent state, soggy but not ruined. The photo page fell open in my hand. There he was again: the real Fullerton. British citizen. He did not seem any younger in the photo. His lank
hair was the same but his face was studded with acne. Surname:
scratched out
. Given names:
scratched out
. Date of birth:
deep laceration
. I dropped him in my satchel and withdrew into the trees.

Preserving
The Ecliptic
was a wearying endeavour. Each issue had to be unpicked from its staples, hand-squeezed of moisture with a rubber print-roller on a cotton
towel, then hung on a string across my studio. I did not know a simpler way of doing it. Many of the pages were too damaged to rescue. They stuck and tore as I tried to part them, or bled most of
their ink into the towel as I dried them. I lost whole sections to careless mistakes with the roller: too much pressure buckled the paper, shards of grit got caught up in the rubber and shredded
several panels, front and back. Issues 2, 4, and 6 were too warped to read, their pictures washed out or occluded. Most of Issue 5 ripped in my hands as I unpicked it. By the time I had finished
all this conservation work, I felt sapped of energy. At least a hundred pages hung on the lines above my head, stretched from every corner of my studio. I fell onto my bed, into the deepest sleep I
ever earned.

Daylight brought no change to the foul weather. I rose cold and stiff, and stood drinking weak tea in my thermals until the shower ran hot enough to bathe. The fragrance of damp ground was all
about the studio, and the stove-smoke only seemed to worsen it. I had the urge to put on the boy’s striped sweater—it looked so worn and comfortable—but kept to my normal painting
clothes instead. Who knew what time it was? I had not heard the breakfast bell or any distant calls to prayer, but I had woken with a queasy sense of urgency.

Bringing down the boy’s pages from the lines, reassembling the issues, I was overtaken with excitement. The moody covers lured me in. I could not remember the last time I had been so
absorbed by someone else’s work.

I had managed to save just two complete issues—#1 and #3—but most of the front covers were still intact. They were logoed with a kind of origami swan at the top right of the page:
CYGNUS COMICS
. In each of the cover illustrations, the main character grew a fraction older, shown in various states of distress: submerged in a petrol tank, crawling
through an air duct, trapped behind a porthole, clutching sticks of dynamite and other weapons.