Turquoiselle (23 page)

Carver (afterward) thought he did not speak. Not now.

“You produce, Mr Carver, an energy, decidedly, and of a sort
largely unquantifiable. Although by now heightened by Mantik’s chemical
treatment of certain articles and objects – things you might, given your tendency,
appropriate – steal. The chemical, by the way, is in itself harmless. The rest
of Mantik’s crew, or anyone, remain impervious, having no reaction to or with
it. Which, evidently, is not so for
you
. Evidently also, the
chemical formula was allowed to pass into the hands of Croft’s people, so that
once they got hold of you, they could apply it and immediately witness the
unmissable result. The augmentation reacts
with
and
on
you, Mr
Carver. Your astonishing power is galvanised. And, incidentally if most
effectively, this is what produces the extravagant side effect, the coloured
glow that filled your private garden shed, and now lights up to the left of
us, here. Your own unease and dread, Mr Carver, have changed its nature, (you
see,
nature
repeated by me yet once more),
turned it through the colours of the Alert, blue-green right through to
scarlet: 6th Level High. And the volume of your deadly, (deadly, again), power
is now also raised to a phenomenal level. It goes perhaps without saying, Croft’s
outfit did not in any form understand precisely what it indicated – or what
that power entails. They were hoping to learn. Obviously, once they had you
here, certain people were set specially to watch you. I was one. Mr Van Sedden
and Mr Ball were the main operatives. And as we see, they were affected very
rapidly. But I must add, even when you were first held here, drugged and
investigated,
helpless
,
your power worked on all and everything around you. Unconscious, Mr Carver, you
were and are as lethal as when fully aware. Even your prime interrogator, I’ve
heard, lost purchase after only a day and night. They thought it was a
breakdown. It
was
.
Your work. As I say, Croft and his people hoped to learn what you were, and
what you could accomplish. They have. I though am, as I said, immune. Ninety-nine
percent immune. As, very probably, the other member of our trio is, or perhaps
any
of
our kind. But nobody, Mr Carver,
nobody
else. And that is why no
one has yet come up the hill, to us here. A purely animal response. They sense
you
are
here. But also, Mr Carver, that is why they will, eventually, irresistibly,
arrive. Your skill, your genius, Mr Carver, is to bring insanity. And by now
you can affect machines too. Am I correct – your cars frequently needed
repairs, your phones – other items? Even – it has been mooted at Mantik – you
can upset the
weather
.
But your main talent lies with people. Your main talent lies in driving your
fellow humans mad. To start with, your father and your mother, the most and
worst exposed, and as your power erratically and blindly grew, caught in its
blast. Later, if more patchily, fellow students at your schools, even certain
adolescents and teachers at the special college, though by then you had become
even more solitary, and Mantik, too, was already experimenting with antidotes,
several of which had some helpful effects. Nevertheless, you have seen what
you can do with the entirely unprotected. Donna, even Maggie, Donna’s mother.
Even Mr Johnston, your neighbour in the village. He was one very susceptible
victim, who did not have much contact with you at all, though of course,
generally meeting you at the garden’s end, by the
shed
, where – naturally – your
ability was itself augmented. Mr Johnston went mad and acted out the fantasy of
a dangerous intruder. Even manipulating his injured leg to move with an
unusual fluidity it should not have been capable of – and for which he has paid
physically, since. He might even have murdered you that night, if Mr Croft’s
battalion hadn’t stepped in first. Madness.
The
infliction of madness is your power. You can drive insane. You can even drive
to suicide. You have always been a gun, Mr Carver, but now the bullets are in,
you are loaded and primed.
You are a missile,
Mr Carver, and now the clock has struck midnight, the hand of authority has
turned the key and pressed the button. Mantik. They perfected your talent and
let their enemies – their Life-Long Enemies – seek and find and take you. And
so you destroyed these enemies of Mantik, as you were intended to. Not even
knowing, Mr Carver, what you did. Forgive me,” she said, the
voice
said, gentle now, sorrowful and sorry. “Forgive me, Car. For telling you the
whole truth at last.”

White
.

White flashed, cracked, burned, blanked.

Out of the redness, blind whiteness. The ruby glare had flared to
Diamond. Top Level Alert. Annihilation. Terminus.

A second later, pale and amorphous, offering no competition, real
lightning clawed across the hill. And instant thunder detonated less from the
sky than underfoot.

As with the explosion, the earth shook. And the central shed’s
blind white glare went out.

Carver, in the darkness, could
see
her now, again. Anjeela. Her
voice had stopped, and so
she
returned. And – she was no
longer Anjeela. In the dark, after the bursting of the glow had died and the
lightning melted, he could make out this woman had herself grown luminously
pale. Her skin had become ethnically European, her features the same, nose,
mouth. Her shadow eyes. He knew her, even so. Knew the one that now she was
fully
changing
herself into.

Beyond the windows and doors things like strands of shiny foil-covered
wire were rushing rustling down. The rain had come. And in the rain, over the
slope of the hill, hundreds of fireflies danced: solar or battery torches, the
colour of a cheap bad Sauterne, (the sort his father had drunk), sliding upward
through the deluge.

Twenty-Two

Rain
rushed, noise of thin silver and rusted tin; the thunder dragged its heavy
train carriages around and around the sky. They sat, facing each other, the
man, the woman, on the shed’s floor. Neither spoke now. Beyond the square of
darkness they inhabited, the other dark made sound enough. And soon, through
the windows, light bloomed, shattered by drops of water on the glass. And the
shapes appeared through the broken pebbledash of light and night and water.
They were like ghosts. So many, a great gathering, not speaking, either, making
no sound he could distinguish. But closer. Close and closer, close as the
windows. Up against the glass in the windows and the doors. (Just as Croft had
stood before, that was it.) Pressed up to the glass, the
faces
pressed to it, and each pressing to it one or both hands, their palms flat...
On both sides of the shed. Nothing visible outside now but men and women, the
tops of their bodies and their faces and rained-through hair, and hands, and
behind them other bodies, faces, wet hair, hands – standing just like Croft.
But all these Crofts facing
in
, at the man and the woman
seated on the floor. Unmoving. Unspeaking. And otherwise only the rain and the
thunder, and the million bits of pebbled torchlight.

“The door,” he said. But it was futile. He did not continue.

“The door’s locked, Car,” she said however. Her voice was calm and
miles off. “You locked the door.”

I know, he said, but he did not say it.

They could break in, the mad ones outside. The shed was only wood
and glass. They could break in, would break in, the mad ones, the ones he had
driven mad. If he had, if that was what he could do, if he could – something (
something
)
something had. Him?

He had never known himself. Now he saw himself, as if he also were
outside himself, looking in through a rain-speckled and unclear pane of glass.

He saw himself, and did not know who he was.

And she, he saw her too, and she was not her but someone else.

The shed trembled. Thunder. Or the pressure of flesh and bone.
Only slight. But it would not take much.

“Car,” she said. The woman in the shed with him.

What? he said. He had not said it. “What?” he asked her
aloud.

“In a moment,” she said, “you must get up, go to the window, and
look out at them.”

Why? “Why?” he said.

“I think it may make them draw back,” she said.

He did not get up.

Then he got up.

He walked to a window.

All the faces, the eyes. He stood, not close to the glass as Croft
had, or as they did, but a couple of steps back. It was completely
straightforward to look at them, even into the eyes of them. They did not
appear real. Like Croft, too, Croft as now he was, there seemed, behind each
face, each pair of eyes, nothing. No one was home.

But, as she had suggested they might, they began to shuffle and
slip aside, away. The rain-tide of them was slithering off. And the ones behind
were also withdrawing. Not so far, maybe the space of a metre, another half metre,
left at this one window, between the shed wall and the crowd of mad people.

Carver recognised one or two of them now, men and girls seen
inside the building or the grounds previously. The unsociable ones and the
smiley ones.
There
–
the girl with the clipboard who had last taken him to Croft – a man who had
greeted Carver in the plush restaurant-canteen – “Hello, Car – enjoying that?
That’s a good steak, that, Car–” And there, the fatter woman from the judging
panel that followed Hamel’s death.

If he moved from the window, would the tide of them merely flow
in again right up to the glass?

Carver left the window, crossed to another. Here too, instantly,
the crowd began to shift and sidle away – and when he glanced, the first window
had stayed unoccupied. He went from glass to glass. As each emptied, he went to
the next, and none refilled.

They were indeed all moving off even a little farther, about five
metres now, on the first side, and there, see, a distance down the south-facing
hill, twenty metres, twenty-five –

The woman, not rising, had craned her neck to watch him.

When he left the windows altogether he did not return to the area
of floor where she sat. He sat against a wall, under one of the cleared
windows. Then recalled he had in fact moved back to sit here previously, when
she told him to rest against a wall...

How did you know? But he did not ask her.

It’s
stage-managed, that’s how she knows. Do this, she’ll
say, and it will work
.
He
had
not driven anyone mad. It was
their
game, their theatre
production, during which
they
would drive Carver insane.

But he thought of Sara, shrieking, and his father – he thought of
the girl at the college he had first had sex with, who had reached her climax
clinging to him, and told him how wonderful he was, and then, later, would not
leave him alone, and then later again one day took off all her clothes, and
danced naked on the unsafe fire-escape, cursing everyone till a medic came with
a hypodermic, and Carver had not known why. And a thousand instances, all of
which could be explained away.

The rain fell.

Lights flickered outside, more distantly.

What time was it?

What time is it?

“What time,” he said, “is it?”

“About midnight,” she said, “I think, by now. Try to get some
sleep,” she said.

He leaned his head back on the wooden wall. He was trapped in the
body of an unknown man.

I
don’t know you
.

He did not know–

I
don’t know
–

What did his name mean? A butcher, someone who carved inscriptions
in stone, a sculptor, a psycho with a knife–

He was walking through a corridor full of mirrors, and in every
one he passed there was a faceless shadow with black gleaming eyes, his height,
his build, keeping pace with him.

He could crawl or he could run, but the shadow would keep up with
him. It would be Carver himself, of course, who could not keep up with the
shadow.

Nothing
seemed changed when he woke... except the rain had stopped. And there was a
lightening to the sense of the dark, if not actual light.

When he looked around him, he noted the woman had altered her position
to sleep. She lay curled up on the floor, on her left side, both her arms
folded in to cushion and support her neck and skull, her knees drawn up against
her stomach. As if unconsciously to protect herself, or she was cold.

She did not react when he got up. But that might not mean
anything. She might well be wide awake, her eyes closed but all of her alert
and listening, to see what he would do next.

The rain-spotted windows were empty of faces.

Carver went to each pane. The crowd had stayed back, twenty,
thirty metres down the hill, to the south and the north, on both sides. They
had revised their position, but were intransigently there. Like the woman on
the floor.

Carver regarded the crowd, the mad people, as he patrolled
quietly round the shed, and round once more. They were, all of them so far as
he could tell, quiescent, and not making any noise. Some of them sat on the
drenched earth, others stood.

Most of the torches had been kept on, highlighting portions of
their group mass, or here and there gone out – maybe only the batteries had
failed – and in these patches casting irregular shadows, blots of night,
visually ominous but unmeaningful.

Every face that he could focus on, however, had stayed fixed
toward the shed. Those to the north looked upward to the south, those to the
south looked upward to the north.

It was like – what in God’s name? – yes, some emphatic Biblical
movie. The Tribes of Israel turning as one to stare at the mountain as Moses
descended to them with the Tablets of the
Laws of God.
Or the Sermon on the Mount, for Christ’s sake, the multitude gazing up at
Jesus.

The imagery, its symbol – of need, savage belief, utter attachment
and expectancy, and – if only momentary – total dependence – was repellent and
frightening.

How long had they stayed like
that
?

As long, it might be, as he had slept.

Carver’s guts griped harshly. Not only in distaste and alarm. The
everyday processes of elimination were asserting themselves, demanding to be
attended to.

It would be wiser and more prudent to crap and piss inside the
shed. But the woman – less through embarrassment and social reluctance, more
some curious protective impulse – made him bolt and bar bowels and bladder
against compliance.

Instead he went to the central door, unlocked it, stepped out and
locked it shut again.

He had gone to the windows and met their faces and their eyes, and
they had withdrawn. What now would they do? Rush up and tear him in pieces,
perhaps. Or only sit and watch their too
human saviour
as he squatted by some tree?
He
was the theatre finally, they the
audience.

Carver moved out and down the slope of the hill. Southward first.
What did it matter? They could kill him, or only sit there, or someone else
would come – some crazy leftover security man, or crazy woman who thought he
had got her pregnant or had knocked her daughter about – No. Irrelevant.

Irrelevantly then, the crowd on the hillside began to climb to
their feet, some clutching out at others, some calling out in thin lost voices –
and they started to scatter away from him, Carver, the single advancing figure,
to run now, some screaming, some falling and pulling others over, but most
scrambling up again and plunging on, down the slope between the trees and
their stumbling roots, through the knots of soaking grass. Running away. It was
not Carver, after all, apparently, who was afraid.
They
were afraid. They fled him, or what they thought he was, or what he really was.
He did not have to proceed very far. When, after no vast distance, he stopped,
still they poured on, shouting and crying, away. He watched them drain down the
hill, like more spilled water.

When even the nearer tumbling figures had grown very small, he
walked back up the rise, past the shed, next repeating the manoeuvre on the
northern side. It was not very different. Seeing him approach, panic and
headlong flight. More fell though that side. A few very certainly did not get up.
They were trampled, he believed, by others. But by now he felt nothing, they
were not anything to him he could empathise with. No one, nothing, surely –
was. Ever had... been.

He relieved himself in privacy among the bushes, cleaning up
afterwards in the prescribed pastoral manner the rule books suggested. The
collected rain was very helpfully cleansing. Lavishly it went on dripping and
streaming down from foliage and branches, up out of the grass, enough to clean
off the shit of a whole squadron of desperate men.

The sky was paling also. Perfect on its cue: sunrise. A lovely new
late summer, early autumn, late fall, God-knew-what- season day. And in the
intensifying flare of predawn, little things were glittering, catching the
gleams: a slender silver broken bracelet, a broken shoe, part of a sleeve, a
thick chunk of hair torn out by a low bough in the panic-flight; pale indeterminate
hair, dawn colour, with one High Level Red Alert of blood along its strands.

Carver reached the shed. He stood with his face against the
windowless western end of it. He felt nothing at all, but he wept. Or it was
only the rain that had somehow filled him too and now, like the excrement, and
the humanity, must leave him.