The Whispering Swarm (28 page)

As to a scientific basis for the Sanctuary's existence, I was sure one would be forthcoming. I rejected any kind of supernatural explanation. Helena was fond of saying that, if the supernatural should ever manifest itself in a form impossible to refute, then logically it would suggest the existence of God, whatever we meant by the word. But why was Alsacia under attack by Cromwell's Puritans and hireling mobsmen like Clitch and Love? When had the Sanctuary needed to hide itself this way in time and space? And what was the exact nature of its enemy?

Whatever the answers, the Alsacia had hidden itself cleverly in recent centuries. How was that? Some trick of light and atmosphere? I had already seen one example of the abbot's sophisticated scientific instruments. No matter how the trick was done, it was achieved at the very heart of the scandal factory where so many of the British ‘redtops', the tabloids, had their headquarters. Fleet Street would have loved the story. I could imagine the
News of the World
headlines:
SECRET LONDON DEFIES THE LAW
.
Where Was Scotland Yard?
An irony. A bit like hiding from the escaped lion in his own cage. How they did it remained a mystery. Some fluke, I thought. A bubble in time. But of course there were other factors I refused to let myself consider.

The Alsacia was the closest I had seen in Europe to a complete mediaeval town, yet it had incongruous aspects of modernity. A couple of bicycles were near useless on the cobbles but were always parked near the main gate. The only music was performed on slightly weird instruments. Electricity was unknown. Records were played on wind-up gramophones. Nothing requiring batteries or gas worked. Electric music couldn't exist. I missed that almost as much as I missed my home. No TV. No radio. Even the records were of the old pre-electric 78s. I used an old Imperial 50/60 manual typewriter and bought my supplies in a tumbledown shop which sold paper, notebooks and accessories for typewriters going back to the 1880s. Some people dressed in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century clothes, some in a mixture of several periods, though the seventeenth century was increasingly favoured. Some signboards had modern lettering or painting. One shop sold almost nothing but Cadbury chocolates, Rowntree's sweets, Jacob's and McVitie's biscuits and Wall's ice cream. All from the outside world and all retailing for silver rather than copper. Another offered books of all periods, including some vividly coloured contemporary SF, detective stories and, perhaps most incongruously, a lurid French Foreign Legion series of paperbacks, side by side with the 1910s Aldine Dick Turpin Library and mint-condition 1930s Schoolboys' Own Library. I found a Robin Hood TPL with one of my stories. All were too expensive for what they were, from 5/3d to a guinea. A few hundred yards outside Alsacia, where they still existed, they were 6d and 1/-. When I remarked on this the bookseller said the prices were fair. The titles were imports. There were dangers involved, arcane laws could be invoked. What ‘dangers'; what laws? Surely he exaggerated! Those were the days when in the England beyond Alsacia inessential imports were banned and it was hard to obtain anything from America or even Canada. I still get a buzz when I see those big Sunday pages from the
Toronto Star
sent to us by relatives and friends. They were free supplements. The ‘funnies', with
Flash Gordon,
Terry and the Pirates,
Prince Valiant
and Burne Hogarth's
Tarzan.
Wonderful stuff. But when a newsagent had the nerve to charge for them, I would get furious.

In Alsacia I was especially irritated by the high prices charged for paperbacks and pulps, many of them produced so close by, actually printed on machines in Fetter Lane and Farringdon Street, home to the famous Amalgamated Press, where Meg Midnight's adventures were still being told. ‘Imported from where?' I asked once, waving a recent copy of Thriller Picture Library featuring my character Dogfight Dixon, RFC
.
The newsagent was charging five shillings for a one-shilling comic book. Pulling me away, Molly told me they were expensive not because they were saying they were American, as in the world beyond our walls, but because here few people ever managed to bring in stuff from outside at all, often risking a great deal. I found that a bit hard to swallow but I didn't argue. I stopped manhandling Dogfight and put him back on the rack. That was actually the first time I noticed that the newsagent also had magazines from the 1920s and '30s side by side with more recent comics. Time and space were truly skewed here.
The Passing Show
and
Detective Weekly
were as spanking new as my own Thriller Library! Many mint prewar story papers were cheaper than the prices dealers charged in the world outside.

Finally one day I swallowed my fear and asked Molly some questions. I hated to ask them. The answers might explode this dream and I might lose her forever. But I went for it anyway. How could Alsacia exist with so little apparent intercourse between it and my familiar world? Why was there such an erratic connection in time with that world? Was Alsacia set up this way for a reason? ‘Why can I come and go and others seem to be prisoners? Or are we
all
prisoners of our own half-imaginary habitat? There aren't many rational theories about Alsacia, Molly. None that ever impressed me as more than supernatural gobbledegook. Honestly, the place goes against all logic! There has to be some kind of scientific explanation for it, unless we're dreaming it somehow. Or it's dreaming
us
.'

As usual she took her time answering. ‘You will hear convincing arguments at some point, Mike, but from learned, wise men. Not from me or marketplace thespians or all the rogues of the rookery, but from people who understand the nature of the Alsacia. Most ordinary Alsacians won't go outside the gates because they're afraid they'll not get back. And ultimately death waits for them “outside”, whereas here they can practically live forever. Death itself, they say, protects this Sanctuary. But of course these are superstitions. They cannot grasp the subtleties, so content themselves with romantic, superstitious, imaginative nonsense, plucked from a fairy tale. We all do it.' Her violet eyes held a candour I trusted. She made light of our situation, but understood more than she cared to admit.

‘What are they really afraid of, Moll?' I spoke almost without thinking.

‘As I said, it's mortality.' Sometimes she sounded like a bored teacher to a child. She treated me the same in bed when she thought I was na
ï
ve and too prudish to play some violent game which I'd previously tried and disliked. Sometimes I felt so much older! My experience of most ongoing threesomes, for instance, was that ultimately they created emotional confusion for someone. Too many conflicting agendas. Some games also involved a loss of privacy, of self. She didn't believe that I hadn't particularly liked them. In the right circumstances I could play as cruelly as the next man but I was virtually incapable of objectifying a sexual partner. I had friends with open marriages and could see they managed their lives well enough. When I tried it, I became confused, emotionally and psychologically.

Amused by what she thought of as my prudery Moll loved me enough to accept how I felt. I in turn loved her for what I thought of as her courage and curiosity. The power of the imagination could create a positive monogamy. But I knew it couldn't really last.

 

22

MY GAMES

I told Molly I hated games. But really both of us played a game. We didn't know the rules and we didn't know what there was to win or lose. To a greater degree than I realised at first, our roles were changing. They weren't especially healthy. Against everything I had ever felt like doing I now encouraged other fantasies. Ah, the taste of them. Power and submission. It dawned on me that she had no boundaries. I, like many, had determined my own. Autodidacts like me worked out some rules for ourselves, a moral position. She had no rules except what she borrowed from me, what she interpreted as my desires. She now possessed a not-unattractive ambiguous quality. Was she auditioning roles? Had she turned herself into a quasi-child whom I could fuck whenever I felt like? What was happening? I didn't like women who liked that crap! All it did was feed a hunger, something which must be exorcised or satisfied and accommodated. It felt vaguely nasty. We hovered on the edge of a terrible temptation which I knew in my bones would become an addiction to poison my life and very probably hers, too. She wanted the experience again. The sweet, fantastic, all-consuming sensations she had shared with her first important lover, whom she called her ‘cavalier'. I was jealous of him. I saw him as a rival. I was competing with him, following not my own desires but his. Her mentor? I asked. Did he live in the Alsacia? Sometimes, she said. I was pretty sure at that point it was Turpin, which was why he was off hunting double-deckers on the Cambridge Express run. I had hardly seen him or any of his compatriots since I arrived. The ‘cowboys' had all disappeared. They had met in Oxford. I couldn't imagine Buck Jones in The High. Or could her old lover be Duval? D'Artagnan? One of the other musketeers? All were great horsemen, of course, and as such could be called ‘cavaliers'.

I refused to admit to myself that Molly so thoroughly engaged my emotions. I think she believed it was possible to compartmentalise her life because she had seen men do it. But not all men do it, and it's usually harder still for women. It drives them crazy. They're not trained to kill feeling. Moll wanted to enhance it. I could never really see it like that. Slow, romantic foreplay was what I liked, no matter what we followed it with. I favoured a romantic calling, and harnessing my nature was what I was about. Between my craft, my magazine and my rock band, I could have my pick of what most young men would consider unobtainable. I was constantly offered what old perverts craved and could only find by paying whores. We hadn't become avant-garde only in terms of the arts. We changed the norm for lovemaking. We were in the vanguard of the sexual revolution, in those brief decades from sexual liberation to the New Puritans, to HIV and AIDS. I would come to understand how she was addicted to fantasy and the indirect uses of power and how that addiction would become the main problem in our relationship, threatening break-up. But that day was still far away. I believed I was helping her feel more secure and that if she was secure she would not need fantasy to bring pleasure. Yet, when I could and because I loved her, I did my best to play the games she wanted. The days rolled by, passion still unspent.

Perhaps because I was so relieved not to suffer the Swarm, I did not recognise the signs of a weird kind of depression. A depression which still haunts me. I did not want to admit that I was missing the children and Helena. No matter where I am, that strange, overheated period of my life sometimes returns to mystify me.

There was Moll, as beautiful as always, as attached to me as ever. My angel. My muse. My damnation. She occasionally sensed my sudden moments of terror. There were periods when I got a flash forward to the future, times when I dreamed a scene accurately and in detail, something she would actually be doing, perhaps, and hadn't told me about. I had done that since childhood. Women thought me psychic. I didn't know what it meant. My mother could consistently pick winners. Auntie Ethel had taught me to read the tarot with an accuracy which scared me. I hated that accuracy. But Father Grammaticus also spoke admiringly of ‘psychic' talents I remained sceptical about. More than once he talked about Radiant Time. What was that? Part of the rational answer I yearned for?

‘Why are they afraid of the outside world?' I repeated the question to her more than once. Her answers were never entirely satisfying. She was often amused.

‘They fear they will die of plague or be attacked. Or eaten by cannibals,' she told me one day. ‘They have so many stories of the World Beyond, as some call it. Your London will swallow them up or turn them mad or the law will have them and cart them off to jail or transport them as indentured servants, even slaves. The Sanctuary has been under attack almost constantly since the war between Parliament and the king. They have seen Cromwell's Roundheads make a little headway. Though they've made the place their headquarters, don't expect the Cavaliers to be here at all times. They trust neither king nor Protector. They fear the monks have been compromised in their compact with God. You've witnessed one attack by Nixer and his militia and seen how easily we beat them back. But Cromwell's power increases. I think we are now truly under threat. Should that great threat come, we have a fighting chance. A good one. The Alsacians will defend this place to the last man or woman.'

‘And child?' I asked. She had already evaded my questions about why we saw so few small children here.

‘It's a tradition with them to defend the Sanctuary, as it is to go armed. This place is, after all, a rogues' rookery.' She laughed. ‘And you must defend what's your own. But really they fear those who hate them and would see them trampled into nothing, remembered by no one.' I noticed that she again evaded a question but I lacked the will to challenge her.

‘Well, I'm not sure the local council would go that far,' I joked, but Molly, who usually made light of things, was almost grave. She was no longer self-mocking. Her seriousness took me aback.

‘We are freeborn English people and will stay so,' she insisted. ‘There are those who would do us grave harm from within and from without. Corporal Love and Colonel Clitch and Jake Nixer, too. The first two are little better than mercenaries, though dangerous enough. We truly fear the likes of Nixer, who sincerely wish us scoured from the face of the Earth. You've met the Intelligencer General? Cromwell's former London intelligencer Jacob Nixer? Once he was little more than a spy—now he is, after Cromwell himself, the most powerful man in the city. The two offices are the same. The Lord Protector acts under pressure from his own Puritans. Jake Nixer has full power to arrest and interrogate whomever he pleases. This man is charged to detect all crime, all wantonness, all witchery, all evil and devilry and pagan worship, all servants of Lucifer and his horrid angels including any others, mortal or supernatural, who threaten the Realm.' Her smile was humourless. ‘He is perhaps our greatest single enemy, Jake Nixer, with Old Thunder and his growing band of cruel cronies. Privately, and do not ask how I know, Nixer fears he dreams and cannot wake up. I suspect he believes the Sanctuary to be sentient. Satan personified or the Colchian Dragon protecting our Treasure. He is possessed. Our Treasure will release him, he says, from his dream. Odd fellow, eh?'