The Light Ages (13 page)

There was an incredible flash. Then smoke, and a wild angry hissing, and a stench of burning. I fell back and saw Grandmaster Harrat’s slow reaction as he attempted to catch me, the slack shape of his mouth, and heard a dull slap as my head struck the floor. But all of this seemed to be happening at a distance. I was drawing up and back. The ceiling billowed out. The air rushed up and I was looking down on Bracebridge, hovering with the stars.

Then the night began to churn. The moon swept over the sky. The trains were streaks of light. The sky blazed, light-dark-light—as the sun fled backwards. Snow flickered across the slopes of Rainharrow and the fields pulsed with the ebb of the seasons. I had no idea what was happening, other than that I seemed to be flying headlong into the past. Was this what death was like, I wondered? Then the sun climbed into the sky and settled west above the rivermeads, and a few clouds curled up into their places around it in the blue sky, their shadows lying in patches over a Bracebridge which had the busy hum of a summer morning. Little had changed in this rush of years. True, the old warehouses at the back of the Manor Hospital down Withybrook Road were still standing, and the ashpits of the brickyard still hadn’t quite began their inexorable climb up Coney Mound. But it was recognisably Bracebridge. And as I felt the warm sun, and listened to the grind and clash of its engines, I began to settle down towards the town, drawing closer to the tarred and corrugated rooftops of Mawdingly & Clawtson. Suddenly yards and sooty bricks were spinning up to me, then the moss of a particular roof, until I passed silently though it and found that I was hovering in the cool glimmer of a room I instantly recognised. It was the paintshop. The scene was almost as I had witnessed it a few shifterms before with Grandmaster Harrat, but it was subtly changed in the way that time changes all things. And there was my mother, looking recognisably herself, yet younger, as she raised and dabbed her glowing brush among the workbenches.

When the door from the yard swung back I half expected to see my father stride in, but instead, and unmistakably, it was Grandmaster Harrat who entered, although he was thinner and lacked sideburns. The supervisor scampered to greet him, her large bosom wobbling. Even then, Grandmaster Harrat was plainly a personage to be reckoned with. I could tell that from the easy murmur of his request, and the tone with which it was granted. If he could perhaps borrow a couple of the paintshop girls? It was a small enough favour to ask, and he shook his head when the supervisor suggested that perhaps the particular ones he’d selected weren’t the best, even if they were the prettiest. His judgement wasn’t to be challenged. My mother and the blond-haired girl beside her nodded at the call of their names and put down the cogs they were working on; my mother knocking, as she did so, her pot of brushes to the floor. The supervisor raised her eyes heavenward.

I floated like a ghost in their wake as these two young guildswomen and Grandmaster Harrat left the paintshop together. They made an odd group, these two different species of human. Grandmaster Harrat in his fine clothes, my mother and her friend—whom she called Kate as they murmured to each other—in their clogs and hand-me-downs. It was plain as they walked across the yards that they could think of little to say to each other, although my mother and Kate were exchanging half-mischievous smiles. Then I heard the shift sirens and I realised as workers trooped out past them that this must be a Halfshiftday. It was an odd time to choose for a ‘special’, as I knew the paintshop girls called such out-of-shop work, with the yards soon emptied and only the few essential workers in Engine and Central Floors maintaining the processes of the aether engines themselves. Even within the walls of the factory the warm summer air seemed full of the promise of afternoon football and walks by the riverside. My mother and her friend Kate would be getting time and a half for this for certain, which wasn’t something which Mawdingly & Clawtson gave out readily to its guildmistresses.

The sirens stilled. The gates emptied. The pigeons cooed. Cooo
Coo
. Cooo
Coo
. In an unremarkable yard Grandmaster Harrat strode towards a whitewashed brick wall. It was set with an iron gate, its rusty bars splattered with old paint. My mother and Kate watched curiously as Grandmaster Harrat lifted the padlock. He thought for a moment, then said something which caused it to break apart. Kate clapped her hands in delight and my mother watched more warily as the gate squawked open. Then a flash of flint, some fiddling with the dried-out wick of an old lantern which flared into a dim sphere. Bricked walls and concrete steps as they headed down and the dank air breathed in and out to the howl and slam of the aether engines. The ways levelled out where the push of air was strong enough to flutter the hems of the two women’s skirts. The previously neatly tiled and bricked passages took on a different appearance. The bricks became smaller, older, crumbling, ancient. Following the light of Grandmaster Harrat’s lantern, stooping as the ceiling dipped, Kate and my mother held hands for balance as their clogged feet skittered on the sloping floor. There were guildsmen’s signs and graffiti on the walls. There were carvings as well, inward swirls which reminded me of the mossy shapes on the sarsens on top of Rainharrow. Still the pounding of the engines grew louder.

They came to a door. The small room beyond had once been half-tiled, although many had now fallen and crunched beneath my mother’s and Kate’s clogs. Old shelves sloped from the walls. Guild notices long obliterated by age and damp curled amid the wreckage. It was a disappointing place to come to after so interesting a journey; the only item which didn’t look to have been forgotten for the best part of an Age was a rough wooden crate about a foot square and a yard long, and even that hardly looked new. The words CAUTION DANGEROUS LOAD were stencilled in plain red capitals on the lid. Grandmaster Harrat took out his pocket knife and cut through the string which had been knotted around the catch. The hinges gave a screech. The inside of the crate seemed at first to be stuffed with nothing but yellowed newspapers, but Grandmaster Harrat smiled to himself as he burrowed through it like a child at a lucky dip.

The object he found was plainly heavy. He had to hook in both of his hands to lift it out. And the pounding air seemed to quieten as it emerged—glittering, and about the size of a human head. It seemed to me that no one had spoken since they entered the room, and that even the beat of the engines grew distant as he laid the thing on the grubby floor beside the crate. For all that it was summer outside, the air seemed solid, frosty. It glittered in faint rainbow-plumes. But Grandmaster Harrat, on his knees, had the expression of a small boy at Christmas. Flurries of anticipation, joy, fear, flew across this face. The object was dazzling—wyrebright and yet black, too, in that subterranean room, flooding up towards him, mimicking and exaggerating those shifts of expression and hollowing his eyes, melting his flesh. Facets caught and glinted. It was like a huge jewel—or rather, as I then thought, knowing little of such things, it resembled a massive, glittering block of crystallised sugar. But it was the glow
inside
that strange stone which mattered. It writhed, gathered, unravelled, poured out. Shadows swept back, burning out the shapes of a crouching man and two standing women until they became raw, impersonal, emblematic. The scene, as the light began to pulse to the same rhythm which pervaded all of Bracebridge, was like some complex and ever-changing guild hieroglyph. Grandmaster Harrat, Kate, my mother—they were no longer who they were but simply its acolytes, the crude mechanisms by which this thing might exercise its power. Their shadows bowed and worshipped across the blazing walls to the beat of the engines, first dark, then bright. And I was part of it, too, faint though I was. The light extended, stretching into something which was and wasn’t a human form, but a silhouette gathering in smoke to reach its blackening arms towards me.

I must have screamed then. Something seemed to break and the vision began to stutter and fizz. Then, with a stench of acid and a sharp ache in the back of my head, I was back in Grandmaster Harrat’s workroom amid the fizzing smoke of another failed experiment. I was lying on the floor and Grandmaster Harrat, who had put on weight and substance over the years since whatever he had been doing with my mother, was leaning over me. The light on his face, caught up by the gaslight in the gleam of something spilled, was soft and yellow and ordinary.

‘Robert! Robert—can you hear me? I thought for a moment …’ His jowls trembled. ‘I thought ..

I sat up and felt my head and winced. A lump. Nothing more. Grandmaster Harrat’s hands were on my shoulders as I climbed to my feet. I shook him off. The filament—the whole experiment with electric light which lay on the workbench—was a smoking ruin. And he was looking at me now in that same sad and unchanging way.

‘But …’

‘What, Robert?’

But I shook my head.

I left Grandmaster Harrat’s house and walked home with my belly full and my eyes stinging, just as I did on every other Halfshiftday.

A
RRIVING HOME EACH EVENING
at Brickyard Row, looking up at the sky as it boiled over our front gable and wishing that our house belonged to someone else, I had to force myself to go inside. I hurried past my mother’s room on my way up to bed, fearing the sour reek of illness and the pulsing darkness which swirled out in triumphant eddies as the fire gasped, rocking the dim light, making monsters of us all.

Sleet drove down from the hills as winter made a final stand against the spring, peppering the windows with ice. The wind clawed at the slates; it burrowed through fissures and dragged at me with terrible fingers. Then there came an empty evening when Beth was absent from the house, Father was out drinking, and the wind suddenly ceased as if in frozen shock. The air lay almost in balance, almost at peace, as I sat at the kitchen table, raising and dropping the hood on the oil lamp so that a circle of light flooded in and out. The neighbours were out, too, as they often were now: banished by the sounds and the rumours which emanated from here. All of Bracebridge seemed hollow and empty. But the air still pulsed, drawing in and out in waves of light and darkness, tinkling the best porcelain on the dresser. SHOOM
BOOM
SHOOM
BOOM.
Then a scuffing noise made me look up and I saw something large and repulsive emerge from a narrow crack in the ceiling. It dangled as it attempted to clamber amid the joists, then dropped with a dull plop onto the table and lay there, momentarily stunned. A dragonlouse. Not a particularly large specimen by the standards of the beasts which inhabited Mawdingly & Clawtson, but I’d never seen one so close before. The bluish shield of its back was scrolled with what looked like a lumpy parody of a guildsman’s seal, but the body beneath was pink and blue like the veined and near-transparent flesh of a human baby. I flipped it over as I’d seen the marts doing with their boots on East Floor. It squealed and made a thinly popping sound as I repeatedly brought the base of the lamp down on it, then let out a foul gout of ichor. I scooped the mess up with newspapers and tossed it into the fire, then moved towards the stairway.

Darkness seemed to fall in huge flakes as I ascended the stairs. SHOOM
BOOM
SHOOM
BOOM,
and the rest of the earth had stilled in a long moment of waiting as I worked back the door to Mother’s room, feeling a strange resistance which was like the pressure of time itself. I realised I was holding the family carving knife. Handled with fine cedarstone, its aethered blade thinned to a sickle curve by years of Father’s sharpening, it was one of those precious pieces of truly guilded workmanship that every family cherished. It felt heavy, then light, in my hand. I must have rocked back the kitchen table drawer after wiping my hands of the mess of the dragonlouse and reached in to take it, although the motion, the decision, seemed as impossible as the fact that I gripped it now.

My mother’s bedroom swayed. A dull fire crackled in the grate and coal lay scattered as the bruised flames quivered. There was no heat, but my mother was crouched before it, her long, grubby night-gown pooling around her knees. I felt a pang of hope, near joy. She was up! She was on the mend! Then, sensing my presence, she twisted her long neck around towards me with a snap of joints. Gripped as a squirrel might hold a nut, a nugget of the coal was clasped in her hands. Crumbs of it clung around her lips, blackening her tongue and teeth. Her nose was flattened and her eyes were wide and deep, almost circular, glowing. Her shoulders had grown bluish spines. Around her body, a carpet of dragonlice was scurrying.

‘It is you, isn’t it, Robert?’

I sensed the struggle for recognition. The different way she now said my name.

‘What are you doing here, now? Why are you bothering me?’ The membranes of ruined nostrils twitched.

‘And what are you carrying?’

She stood up slowly, her bones creaking. And she was tall, tall. A few thin strands of hair adhered to the exaggerated dome of her skull. The flesh of a ribcage jutted through the open night-gown. Inside, grey-greenish organs churned and pulsed. I caught the reek of hot coal. I wanted to use the knife, but I had no idea how. And I even understood that it was what my mother would have wanted; that the worst thing that could happen would be for the creature she had become to remain alive. I raised the blade and it danced with purpose in the fire’s dim flames. In that instant, I’d have done anything to put an end to this. But then the air contracted around my heart, squeezing it with winter claws. And the creature tilted its head and rolled back the aether-pouring whites of its eyes. Spreading its arms, it hunched towards me and dropped its jaw to emit a foul belch of flame.

I tumbled back and out into the landing. The thin doors of the house seemed to tear themselves open for me, driven by the same force by which I was driven until I found myself standing, doubled-over and breathless, outside and alone on the cobbles of Brickyard Row. Somewhere, a shovel raked, music played, a dog was barking. The birch trees fanned their limbs across the patch of land that sloped down beneath the stars towards lowtown and the dull grinding of the brick factory. I drew in breath after breath as the air around me shuddered and plumed. Feeling something in my hand, I realised that I still held the cedarstone-handled knife. I threw it hard over the trees and across the rooftops and the whole shimmering bowl of the valley, towards the red star which, low and in the west, was still gleaming.