The Triple Goddess (107 page)

‘At least, not until now. Willy-nilly it’s my job…and yours, Fletcher… to sort everything out.’

His mind numb, out of the window Fletcher Abraham observed his friend the moon, larger than ever, and a planet that he recognized with a start as his own. Or rather, now that he was emigrating, it was his former planet.

‘For crying out loud, ffanshawe,’ said Violet, ’that’s far enough. I know you want to make a grand entrance, show off a little, but there’s such a thing as overdoing it.’

ffanshawe cut the throttle. The spaceship’s speed slackened, slowed down, became slower and slower until they were at a standstill, hanging in a state of dynamic equilibrium at the apogee of their ascent. It seemed that it would have taken only a single joule of energy to set them moving in any direction. Though Dark had not been conscious of any sound before, now there was an audible quiet.

‘Time for refreshment,’ Violet said briskly, her voice cutting the air. ‘Do the honours with the bottle, Fletcher, would you? even if you’re not partaking yourself.’

Lady Enderby pressed a button on the central console, and the burled walnut panel between the tip-up seats in front of them lowered with a faint whine. Inside was a frosted silver ice-bucket holding the champagne, two flute glasses and a napkin. While Dark removed the wire and foil, Violet delved into her handbag and produced her cigarette case. From it she extracted a long slim lilac-coloured cigarette, which glowed as she drew on it without the application of fire.

‘I always enjoy the last cigarette before re-entry,’ she said, inhaling deeply. ‘On this occasion more than most, since it’ll be the last moment I can call my own for a long time.’ She breathed out a stream of smoke and blew several rings, the second of which dropped like a noose over ffanshawe’s head where he sat scowling at the controls and constricted as if to strangle him. Violet giggled.

Covering the cork with the cloth and easing it out until it popped in his hand, Dark resigned himself to what promised to be the most awful, but richly deserved, fate. He poured the champagne as steadily as he could, letting the froth settle before filling the glass to the rim. He handed it to her ladyship, tied the napkin round the neck of the bottle, and replaced it in the bucket.

‘Won’t you change your mind, Fletcher? It’s Dom Pérignon 1921.’ He shook his head. ‘Pity. Well, bottoms up.’ Violet raised her glass, and, taking this as his cue, ffanshawe made an adjustment in the cockpit. With nothing more than a creak of leather, the spaceship up-ended, and although as before nothing moved, Dark pressed his feet into his footrest.

Asteroids rushed past them like a herd of startled deer.

After the exact same number of moments had passed as in their climb, looking out of the window in fascination Dark saw below them the outline of that famous local landmark, the Devil’s Breach, brilliantly lit by the moon, and braced himself for impact as the smooth rounded bottom of the Breach fissured with a sound that one might expect to hear upon the Crack of Doom, and a crevasse opened to admit the vehicle through the Infernal gateway.

Sucking in his breath in a noiseless inverse scream, Dark clutched at something that was tickling his nose, and, when he looked to see what it was, found in his hand a soft white primary feather, a very large one. Instantly was reminded of the dream that he had had, the first night of his incarceration in the tower at the Moated Grange, when he had climbed outside the window and been knocked off the roof by the wings of what had seemed like a giant white dove.

In his confusion Dark thrust the feather at Lady Enderby, as if to ask her opinion in identifying it, and she leaned towards him to see what he was trying to show her.

Her face transfigured by a look of extreme revulsion and terror, and making a great inhuman sound, Violet slid to the floor. There was an explosion, and Dark received what felt like a cosmic kick in the pants. This was followed by a rush of frigid wind, and the dazzle of a million flash bulbs.

The impression or illusion that the reverend had was of being ejected from the spaceship, instead of being engulfed by the tohu-bohu of the awful environment that it was his destiny to be enclosed within for ever and a day. Dazed and befuddled, he saw the Jaguar vanish into the chthonic gloom of the abyss that the Devil’s Breach had ruptured to reveal.

The chasm closed, and there was a short silence, as if the earth had lost its breath after swallowing a mouthful of one of ffanshawe’s wickedest curries. Then from underground came the sound of, not just a muffled explosion, but a mighty eructation that set the gentle crests and hollows of the hills, now restored to their former smoothness, heaving like ocean swell.

All hell having apparently been contained rather than breaking loose, Dark was aware of a pleasant sensation, as if he were seesawing downwards at a gentle rate of descent on a parachute. When his head cleared a little, he perceived that this was indeed the case. In the light of the moon he spotted the extensive gardens of the Old Rectory beneath him, with his own abode standing to the rear behind the row of poplars that screened the Annexe from view of the big house.

This was all quite delightful, Dark thought in his concussed condition; but as he got closer to the ground, he remembered that this was his maiden parachute jump and that his relief might be premature. He recalled from somewhere that one was advised, when finding oneself in such a situation, to meet the ground with one’s knees bent; to avoid getting hung up in a tree; and, in the event that one was fortunate enough to land without sustaining serious injury, to pull in the chute as quickly as possible so as not to be dragged along the ground.

As terra firma leaped up to meet him like a dog that was pleased to see one return home, the reverend surveyed the surrounding area for the hazards of trees, chimneys, hard tennis courts, statues, and lawnmowers that might be waiting to proclaim his hubris. When he saw all of the foregoing—the Church had sold the Old Rectory to a private individual who had put in the obligatory modern eyesores of tennis court and swimming pool, and there was a sit-upon lawnmower the size of a tractor outside the stable—he stopped hauling on the lines and hoped for the best.

Coming in at a slight angle, so close to the tops of the trees that he brushed them with his raised feet, Dark lowered his undercarriage...and made a perfect landing. Unhitching the harness of the parachute—where it had come from, and how it had glommed onto his frame he did not bother to consider—and shouting with gratitude and joy, he gathered up the silk that straggled behind him on the dewy grass like a punctured balloon and folded it reverently on the ground.

Then he walked unsteadily, as if he were a sailor who has just set foot on dry land after circumnavigating the world, down the path through the churchyard that led to the bunker-like excrescence of the Annexe.

Echoing Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘“Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill”’, he breathed.

The Annexe exuded an even greater air of desolation and neglect than ever, which Dark found upsetting because he had never noticed it before. Approaching the front door he knocked on it, half-heartedly and half believing that he would answer it himself in the person of a stranger. For the first time in his life he felt lonely.

When nobody came it did not occur to him to try the handle, and he was about to go round to the rear entrance when, without the former palaver of unfastening chains, drawing bolts and unlocking, it was flung open and the two Barts!, pausing only to gape in disbelief, hurled themselves down the steps to embrace him.

Their momentum knocked Dark over harder than the mistimed parachute landing he had anticipated and the three of them collapsed in a heap. Not to left out, they were joined by Dark’s decrepit hound, sway-backed and milky-eyed but doing his best to wag his tail.

Odysseus was home.

‘Hello,’ gasped Dark, getting to his feet and helping up first the Barts! and then the animal. ‘Oh, I
am
pleased to see you. How
are
you both? I do hope you’ve been making use of all the rooms. Gosh, I’m absolutely ravenous. Perhaps the three of us could scare up a late supper together and talk, if you’re not too tired. It’s high time we got to know each other better. And to get things off on the right foot, you must promise me that from now on you shall call me Fletcher…as I will you as...’

‘…rrld.’

‘…gnss.’

‘Of course. Agnes and Harold. Wonderful. Come on.’

As their master plunged into the house, the dumbfounded Mr and Mrs Bartholomew stood shuffling their feet; until a minute later Fletcher returned, took each of them by the hand and drew them inside.

*

One who wanders out of existence

Is drawn to a vale that she described

As a much-loved place from history,
Where

Foxgloves of imagination bloom by moonlight
;

Where stone is soft as butter, trees grow

From our hearts, earth is filigreed with gold,

And churches stand restored within

The sometime cemeteries of our lives.

What is there left to say? Much more.

The place has been absorbed, with many

Accreted years of memory, into a greater land

Of understanding; treasure found; and love.

GLORIA

Chapter One

Within the four grey walls and four grey towers surrounding London’s former Greenwich Hospital, in the tower above the chapel—now the mortuary—Superintendent Laszlo 9013J walked up the stairs to wind the clock. It was almost eleven-fifteen in the morning on a Wednesday in early November, 2032, and the clapper of the cracked bell was about to announce the quarter.

The Greenwich had changed since the days when it had been a famous and much lauded healing institution. Renamed the Exeat Institute, now, instead of being devoted to the saving of lives, it ended them in the name of research. One of the most secretive and protected sites in the world, the people who worked there had to have the highest of clearances from Central, the organization that ruled the Global State.

As Superintendent of the Exeat Institute, 9013J was responsible for every detail of its rigorous seven days a week twenty-four hour schedule, and ensuring the smooth functioning of its infrastructure. DNA microarray robots and sequencers, mass spectrometers, and digital imaging microscopes: although such equipment was not designed to be handled like forklift trucks, far too much of the Superintendent’s day was taken up with ordering repairs and replacement parts, and dealing with incompetent servicemen. There were the cryogenic freezers to be kept at the correct temperature, and the ventilation and air circulation pipes germ-free; there were the climate controls to be maintained, and the sterilizers, and the airborne pathogen filters, the negative pressure ducts, and those that carried purified water and gases.

The machinery, which included many prototypes, was temperamental, and if the generators did not kick in the moment there was a failure in the nuclear electrical power supply, 9013J’s head would be on a platter.

On the human level, the research experts and technicians had to have everything they required in the laboratories, and their every request, however unorthodox or impractical, was to be complied with. Laszlo had a sour opinion of technicians, some of whom were no more than eighteen years old, with their loud voices and pumped-up egos; for all their qualifications and expertise many were clumsy and damaged a lot of hardware. The canteen was a big deal, what with the special diets and constant complaints. Then there was the routine business: corpses and body parts and toxic wastes to be removed; supplies to be ordered, delivered to the proper departments on a timely basis, and distributed within them; elevators and toilets, clean and stocked with paper, to be guaranteed in working order for use by several thousand workers.

The founder and Director of the Exeat Institute, the young and aggressive Hugo Bonvilian 4285D, was the Exeat’s presiding deity, a man whom one was not allowed to express or even have an opinion of. 4285D’s imperatives, either bellowed or whispered in his unvarying rude and peremptory manner, commanded instant attention, however unreasonable they might be and difficult to accomplish, simultaneously with whatever else might be on hand. The slightest hesitation in complying with Bonvilian’s instructions was taken very seriously, both by himself and his enforcers, and mistakes often had painful, even terminal, consequences. 4285D never discussed anything, he never asked for advice, all he did was order and question and criticize.

Hugo Bonvilian was a member of the D Class created by the Global State’s ruling oligarchy, Central. Ds were the most senior category of official to mix with the lower alphabetical categories of individual, and interact with them in the course of fulfilling their roles. The A, B, and C Class-ranked citizens, those who constituted the hierarchy that ruled the Global State, lived in splendid isolation at Central’s vast complex, which was a hundred times the size of the old American Pentagon building, and a thousand times more efficient. A, B, and C Class personnel never set foot outside Central, except for holidays at one of its Rest-and-Relaxation resorts: as little time for frivolity as they had, what these escapes lacked in duration they made up for in intensity. Only the Ds who reported directly to them, such as Bonvilian, had seen an A, B or C; or been spoken to by one of them, because Ds had to have personal contact with their immediately lower echelons to explicate how their strategies were to be implemented.