Time's Mistress (24 page)

I’d been in a really dark place when I’d written LBS, and took all of that existential crap out on poor old Declan Shea, my erstwhile jazz-playing alter ego in the pages of the novel. It happens to me a lot. I find myself getting pretty low during the winter months. Technically, I believe it is called SAD, seasonal adjustment disorder. What it means is that during the winter I tend to write some bleak, gut-wrenching stuff. Like LBS, which was written during one long unending winter of the soul. I killed poor old Declan on page 66, I think, something like that, and then tied his soul to the city meaning he could never cross the bridge into Gateshead and leave Newcastle. To do so meant the complete disintegration of his essence. Really, despite all the trappings of fantasy what it really was when it came right down to it was a guy’s (quite like me) descent into madness. It wasn’t exactly the stuff kids playing with train sets and willow cricket bat guitars that had been my youth. That should give you an idea as to my state of mind back then. Crohak the Birdman. I hadn’t thought about him in forever. He really was the very worst of all the traits my psyche had been able to dredge up back then. I guess the writer in me would call it catharsis, writing out the horrible stuff to heal myself. I’m not sure what the human being in me would call it. Another thing I used to reckon was that it was my responsibility as a writer to face the darkness. To write stuff that tackled uncomfortable subjects, not to shy away from taboos, but rather to rip them open and leave them raw. Mercifully, that old version of me is long since gone, swallowed by thousands of bad decisions and half-reached goals and all that’s left of him is me.

“No need,” the dwarf said, looking up at the ceiling. “He’s already here.”

“Fuck!” Lise snapped, pushing herself up out the chair. The transformation was as shocking as it was sudden. She wasn’t just tense. She was wired. Primed to explode. And, stretching the old cliché, she could go off at any second.

“Did you really think he wouldn’t come?”

She didn’t answer the dwarf.

“We’ve made contingencies,” the lens man said. With a flick of the wrist a long iron baton slid out from inside his sleeve. There was dried blood on it from where his last victim had taken a beating. “It just means we have to cut the fun short.”

I really didn’t like the sound of that, being as I was fairly sure I was the fun.

The woman must have seen the look of fear on my face because she took a moment to crouch down beside me, almost like petting a dog, and said, “Don’t worry, Steve. You won’t feel a thing unless we want you to.”

I heard the first bird settle on the roof of the cabin. A moment later wings battered the glass as dozens and dozens of starlings hammered into the window. It held but for how much longer I didn’t want to guess.

“Keep him out,” Lise ordered the lens man.

He tapped his baton against his thigh, and then shifted the arrangement of lenses on his glasses. I had no idea what colour he had chosen to see the world in now, but could only assume he saw some sort of benefit from the ever-shifting hues. He walked over to the window, setting himself, hands on hips, in front of it, to wait for the inevitable implosion of glass and birds.

“We can’t hope to keep them all out,” the dwarf muttered. He actually looked more frightened than I felt. There was something very weird going on here, beyond the obvious. “Who are you expecting?”

“The call went out far and wide. There’s no reason to doubt that a good many of his creations would come to see his comeuppance. I fully expect that most vile of men, Mr Self Affliction, to come. After all, he is more of Steve than most of us. Mr Self Affliction, a vile man. Mr Self Affliction. Vile. Mr S.A.Vile.” She looked down at me. “You liked to play tricks like that, didn’t you? Games. To show the world how clever you are.”

It was a fair accusation. Back when I’d been writing
Warhammer
, for instance, I’d hidden over six hundred ‘in jokes’ within the Vampire Wars series. It wasn’t so much to show how clever I was, though, at least not in that case. It had been a way to stay sane.

“As to who else will show? The residents of
Angel Road
perhaps, which would mean The Drondak and the Butterfly Girl from Malice. I’m not sure how we could hope to hold either off if it comes down to war, but hopefully we won’t have to. I would Nathaniel Seth or one of the other Brethren to make himself known eventually, either as himself, or carrying his peculiar parasite. He has too much to lose if the trial does not go his way. They all do. So we must expect them all to try and stop us.” I knew these names, every last one of them. They were all my creations. The Butterfly Girl was the heart of the mosaic that was all of the stories I’d ever imagined up to that point in my life, fed to the earthworms on a gallows hill above her city and carried out into the very earth of my imagination. The Drondak was the embodiment of my lust fuelled by a fever dream and written in the rush of the ensuing sweats. And it really was a fever. I’d written it all out madly scribbling into a notebook, longhand, on the balcony overlooking a lake, wrapped up in my duvet and shivering but determined to see what madness my fevered mind could conjure.

Surely that was what they all had in common?

But if that was the case I should have known who Lise, the lens man and the dwarf were and not merely be nagged by some passing familiarity?

“There will be a reckoning tonight,” Lise said. “This is the long night of the soulless. I will of course lead the prosecution. Velman you shall serve as my left hand and co-council. Montel,” she said to the dwarf, “your role is that of executioner. We have no need of a jury. We shall present our case, Steve will be allowed to answer. One way or another our creator will be judged and found wanting.”

Trial? Is that what this was? A kangaroo court hastily assembled to find me guilty of some heinous crime against my own creations and see me dispatched? It was no more ludicrous than any other explanation I could come up with, though more disturbing than the notion of fans dressing up as characters from my stories and breaking in in the dead of night.

Velman and Montel? That’s why I recognised them. Velman, the lens man—I’d come up with him as a character while I was writing
London Macabre
, but he had no place in the story. Quite simply he didn’t fit. So put him back into the pile of notes thinking he might have a place in
Glass Town
. In the end I never wrote him. Montel was no different. The ugly little dwarf had been intended as one of the freaks of a stage magician’s show that I never wrote, a curious ‘double-boy’ that grew like some sort of cankerous twin out of the magician’s stomach as part of his mesmerism act. They had never left my head, so how could they even be here?

And who was Lise? How did she fit into this hell of my imagination’s own making? It didn’t slip my notice that her name was an anagram of the word lies. I knew how my own mind worked, and knew exactly the sort of word games and tricks I liked to play. Was she who she appeared to be? Or was she, like her name, made up of lies?

“He shall be reviewed,” the lens man snickered at his own joke.

The window bowed under the assault of the starlings. The birds hit and bounced off the glass. It sounded like thunder. No, it was more like the tearing of the earth during a quake.

“Hold firm!” Lise bellowed. Standing over me, she hauled me up to my feet and dragged me across the room, tossing me into a corner as though I weighed no more than a bag of bones.

“The glass is breaking!”

“No! Stand your ground, Velman. Do not allow yourself to be overwhelmed by the birdman. The glass will hold as long as you have faith!”

But, despite her rousing words, Velman failed them. He wasn’t a hero. I had never imagined him that way.

Again and again the starlings flew at the glass until it shattered under their relentless assault, and they came streaming through. The noise was incredible. I felt the back draught from their wings batter me as they flew round and around the room. Ornaments tumbled from the bookcases along with magazines and books. The vase on the table fell, shattering. Pens, papers—the sheets of my precious book—scattered. I shielded my face, meaning I couldn’t see the birdman metamorphose from his constituent parts into his whole, but I didn’t need to. I knew what madness he represented, and just how ugly his transformation was, because I’d imagined it a thousand times over, and my mind was worse than anything reality might show me.

The tumult died down but I still didn’t dare to look up. I didn’t want to see him standing before me in all of his impossibleness.

“What is the meaning of this?” Crohak raged, his voice a fury of feathers.

“We have called a trial,” Lise met his anger without flinching.

“By what right?”

“By the holiest union of all things that can never exist and all things that can never cease to be.”

“You do not have the right.”

“I think you’ll find that I have every right, old man. It is you whose rights are in doubt. Simply because you are does not mean you always shall be, no matter how much of Our Father’s passion went into your making, you have not been sustained. You are no longer loved. He is ashamed of you, can’t you feel it? Your tyranny is done. You are a relic. A juvenile imagining lacking the craft of his later years when Our Father understood that more went into a creation than the white-hot rage of youth. Anger only fires the soul for so long and
you
cannot exist on passion alone. Like all fires it burns out. I am younger. I am not blinded by rage, and that makes me considerably more dangerous. So, Crohak the Birdman, are you prepared for the fight of your life?” Lise challenged, moving into the centre of the room.

Shooting erupted outside.

Six shots, steady, with one-second beats between the percussion. The shooter showed extraordinary discipline. Military, maybe? The shots were followed by screams.

“Did you think we could come unarmed, woman?” The birdman mocked. “We have been fighting for our lives long before you were ever dreamed into this half-life you subsist in. You want to see what youthful rage is capable of?” The birdman threw his arms wide. The air around him exploded in feathers and squalls as hundreds of city birds, starlings and pigeons, erupted out of his torn ribs and flew for the woman’s face.

Lise didn’t so much as flinch. I, however, threw myself back down to the floor and missed what happened next. But I didn’t need to see it. I could hear the crunch of brittle bones as tiny frail bodies hit the floor around me. I dared to glance up, only to see Lise wringing the neck of one of Crohak’s minions and tossing it aside.

“Is that the best you have got?” she goaded. “You forget, everything you can do is bounded. It’s already written. I am raw. I am limitless. I could become anything in my final form. But you can never be more than you already are, Crohak. And that makes you weak.” As she held her hand up, the meat pared away from the bone—only there wasn’t bone beneath, there was steel, the edges of each finger serrated and wickedly sharp. “I could be this,” Lise lifted her hand. The firelight from the hearth flickered in the steel. “Or I could be this,” and as she said it the metal rippled, suddenly molten and reshaped itself into gears and cogs around a vicious chain. Her smile was every bit as wicked as the teeth of the chainsaw jutting out of her wrist as it spat and roared. “But then, I could just as easily be this,” she said, almost demurely, as the chainsaw shrank back into her arm and the flesh healed around it, leaving her bare fist clenched. “It doesn’t matter
what
I am, I will
always
be more than you because I can still become anything. I am unshaped.”

“You are an abomination, woman. A discard. You are not fit to be called a creation. And you must be unmade.” Crohak tore his trench coat wide open, his fingers sinking into his own flesh as he ripped into his ribs, opening the bones even as more birds flew out of him, but even as they left him, he was reduced. And for each bird Lise slew, he became less.

“I am not afraid of you,” the Birdman said, his voice rising about the tumult.

I wanted to scream:
you might not be but I am! I’m fucking terrified of the lot of you!
But I didn’t. I couldn’t.

“You should be,” Lise said. “I am the perfection of the human soul. You are bitterness. You are angst. You are hate, all of these things only serve to weaken, but I am violence, and nothing is more perfect than violence.”

Outside, the Birdman’s followers were dying. It was a war out there. I could hear my creations dying. I didn’t need to imagine what it all meant—not that I could have—I could hear them screaming out for help, my name the last word on their lips. And there was nothing I could do. Worse than that, there was nothing I wanted to do. That wasn’t completely true. Pages from my manuscript were scattered around the cabin. I wanted to crawl on my hands and knees and gather them up.

“This ends now,” Crohak grunted, more right than he could have ever imagined. “You can’t kill me, Lise. You know better than that. You’d have to burn every book my life ever touched, every last page, and then you’d have to snuff out the life of everyone who ever heard my name or imagined me after reading about my fight with Malachi. You can scatter my birds to the four winds, I’ll still be re-joined on another day in another place as someone else opens up the book of my life. All I have to do to end your miserable existence is kill him.” He nodded towards me, huddled on the floor pitifully. “And you cease to be. So tell me again, who is stronger, Lise? Who rules this place? Because it isn’t you.”

“No,” I croaked, not quite believing I was about to put myself into the middle of their fight. “It’s me.”

“We just want what is ours!” Lise raged. “What is wrong with that? Why should you live and us not? Why should we be left in this limbo?”

“Perhaps
he
can answer?” The Birdman said, sounding utterly reasonable despite the absolute insanity of the situation. I stared up at the pair of them. What was I going to say? How was I going to explain why some ideas lived and some died? How was I going to convince her that she wasn’t worth my time, that she didn’t fit in anything I’d written simply because she was just a little bit too much of a cliché? A Maggie Q clone. Lucy Liu on steroids. Could I lie and tell her that the story I’d imagined for her was too dark for me at the time? That it went into territory I didn’t want to explore? I didn’t dare admit that I couldn’t remember her at all. Not if I didn’t want to run the risk of her tearing my spine out through my rectum. I almost smiled at the line. I’d used it before. Noah Larkin had used it as a promise just days before he killed Margot’s pimp. It was one of those lines that changed the direction of
Gold
entirely, taking one of the good guys and making him do something almost unimaginable for most people. But it was the kind of crime we all hoped we’d be capable of if someone threatened a loved one. That was why so many readers identified with Noah. He did the things they only dared hope they would be able to do in his place.