Murmur Page 5

  “And then, as well, of course”—it’s strange the way his nerves produce a cry, as though he were wailing “listen to me”—“you don’t have to build anything to time-travel. If you are here, in Wargrave, and I’m far away—”

  “How far?” says someone else.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Ten billion—”

  “Ten billion!”

  “—light-years. And I am there, and I walk just a few steps on, away from you … well, doing that, I turn into your past. My ‘now’ is long before you’re even born. Or if I walk toward the Earth, my now is your future, in which a time machine exists. In which we use them—well, sir, all the time. Quite commonly.”

  Master and Molyneaux and thirty other pairs of eyes bend light toward the figure by the window, with its face half-cut by shadow and half-blinking in the sun. It is a humorous face, eager. He looks so young, dark hair and brows, heavy as cornices, sharpened by sudden growth, the jacket on broad shoulders waiting to be filled. His lips are parted wide enough for me to see the hint of supernatural incision—small and backward-sloping teeth.

  “I’m very taken with that idea,” says Pryor, when the bell goes and the boys rise, muttering. “Of yours,” he adds, his eyes still bright and anxiously moving, aware of Molyneaux’s silence. “Very taken indeed. It’s like telepathy. The silent understanding. And so Roman, the two-headed god—”

  “Pryor.”

  “Or like backstroke, you know. Facing backward, going forward—in a different element, and one you can’t fully resist, so that you’re never out of the water. The thing I didn’t like was Stallbrook’s vagueness. ‘Particles in flight.’ What does that mean? They’re not part of some other medium. He doesn’t see, does he?”

  “Pryor. Just—”

  “What?”

  “Be quiet.”

  The boy is skewered. We’re in a corridor where I can hear more than I see. Swaddled by wood, I sense his smiling injury. And Molyneaux, from whom a shape extends to merge with his friend’s darker mass, relents. “You’re a good sort, Pryor. We talk a lot. You know so much about, well … iodates, for one thing. And the whole of Stinks.” The dark mass shifts, emits an aspirated ha! “Only, you oughtn’t make the Colonel look small. He’s on our side, and we’ve a lot to thank him for. And what”—his voice drops—“was that business with the shoe about? No more of that. It’s … excessive. There’s a good chap.”

  The pale form pulls free of its companion and leaves. Pryor walks slowly in the other direction, toward the common room and a pier glass.

  Now, from the mirror, I can see him properly again. His chin-raised profile glides unreadably. He looks stoic. Around the corner, in the cloistered gallery, I lose clear sight of him. The wood absorbs a little heat. His thermal shape alters, its uprightness a shade reduced, as though his head were bowed. He seems to hug his books and several ha!s escape, ash-white, embered, into the air.

  More bells, more boys, blurred faces, voices, and a tide of youth.

  Pryor turns round and runs back down the corridor the way he came, his head held high. He’s fast. I see him intermittently, as sharply as a passenger at night sees his reflection in the mirror of a train window. He comes and goes: field flashes of presence. The hair has fallen free, he scarcely seems to breathe, his books pinned to his chest, the right arm slicing air. Flushed now, he catches Molyneaux beside a pair of double doors. Through their portholes he sees a class changing, hanging up clothes on hooks, glockenspiel ribs, hands clasping cuffs, an air of general alarm. There’s tiled noise. Others barge past. I can’t hear what Pryor has said. His voice swings back and forth. His hand is briefly on his friend’s shoulder but soon withdrawn, and now he holds the door.

  Molyneaux smiles, looks pleased to have been caught. More like a friend than heretofore. Flattered, relieved. Hungry.

  “I’m going tonight. Across the lake. It’s fifty yards—sixty, no more.”

  “And raspberries?”

  “All kinds of fruit,” Pryor confirms. “A feast.”

  “What if you faint? It’ll be cold.”

  “I only faint at blood. That’s perfectly normal.”

  “I had to carry you last time.”

  Pryor laughs silently, another little wolfish yawn. “I know you did, but this won’t be the same. It’s not footer. As long as you don’t cut yourself sculling. In any case, it’ll be dark. Pitch black. I’d never see you bleed.”

  “You are impossible.”

  “A thing’s impossible. I am invisible, I think you mean.”

  But that is not entirely true. Invisibility, the plane of presence beyond sight, is very rare. What draws the eye, nocturnally, is what we know is there.

  Later that night, a full moon sticks in the poplars above the shut boathouse, and by its light a heron stalks beyond the ramp, peers at the onyx lake water. Head feathers lifting from the neck give it the disapproving look of Colonel Stallbrook on the sidelines at a rout.

  Pryor jiggles the boathouse lock. He can’t force it. “Nearly, nearly …” Molyneaux hugs himself, heron-like guardian of his friend and yet another failed scheme. “It doesn’t seem to want to go,” Pryor admits, standing. “I’m sorry. Wrong damn pin.”

  Despite the chill, Molyneaux grins. They pause to look at each other, the mad assortment of their clothes, pullovers, dressing gowns, and plimsolls for rowing. Pryor dusts off his hands and sheds his outer layers, turns to remove his vest and pants, and walks down to the water’s edge.

  And in.

  Amazed, Molyneaux stares. The water laps Pryor’s luminous rear. An audible fsss and the naked boy’s white bottom disappears, his arms surrendering. Molyneaux glances round. They haven’t been followed. The heron’s carved out of blue-gray; a little owl calls farther off, perhaps as far away as Deauville, land of greenhouses and raspberry canes. Pryor bobs seal-like in the black expanse.

  “Come in!” he whisper-shouts. “We’ll swim.”

  Molyneaux balks. He’s neither weak nor shy. He simply has foresight, a sense of what might come to pass. Compared to Pryor, he’s less nervous and less apt to be reckless. He plans—his work is very neat—and that of course is what makes Alec, who is clumsy, his best friend. They are a pair. It’s strange, he often thinks, that Pryor doesn’t seem to have another friend. He could be popular enough. He has a wit. (He liked “one line in Hamlet, and it is the last.”) He’s strong—runs like the wind. Perhaps he simply doesn’t care. He certainly gives everyone the cold shoulder. Noli me tangere. Everyone else, that is.

  They swim across the lake that forms a natural boundary to Wargrave School, in search of food. They are the hunter-gatherers of a famished tribe, following a moonlit trail, suspended in a darkened element, wind-ruffled where the oxbow widens and the river terrace drops. Halfway between the boathouse and the other shore, Pryor pulls up, treads water, waits for Molyneaux, who’s making slow progress, breathing poorly, each stroke laboriously conceived.

  Pryor prefers to swim beneath the surface of the lake, where he can go faster. He waits and hangs, expelling air so that he sinks, and while he sinks opens his eyes to watch the water’s relic luminosity vanish. Into the dark he falls and feels almost no resistance, his weight distributed. “I’m not falling,” he thinks. “The earth rises.” He has no force. The massive body of the lake bottom—its feet of leaves and grit, the old flood plain, bedrock, downfold, and crust, the whole planet—rushes to greet his cold body.

  He has the feeling that he’s staring back in time, or at another part of time. And, as he stares, the white, blown carcass of a moon-like fish—a tench—stares back from the reed bed, its ripped flesh waving in a dense current.

  On the far side of Deauville Lake, the Deauvilles, Ceylonese tea giants, built their summer house, and round it in a fertile acre planted an orchard—apples, plums (espaliered), damsons and mirabelles, raspberry canes. It stretches down to shiny pebbles and a gravel bed, in whose unkind embrace the two boys lie, shocked by exposure, both shaking. Molyneaux shakes a
little less. His breath comes, when it comes at all, in whistles. He is curled up like a louse. On his blue chest, a salvage team hammers for scrap, battering lungs and heart.

  “Alec—”

  The other boy makes no reply, but picks his friend up and hauls him through dusty canes toward the summer house—a pavilion with rattan chairs, a daybed, blankets in a pile. The French windows are locked. The waning gibbous moon behind Pryor is bright, and I can see his desperation at the pane—the pane that houses me. He shades his eyes to see inside. The body of Chris Molyneaux has one arm about Pryor’s neck, one foot dragging, the other twisting free.

  Panic distracts; it does not concentrate the mind and, while he casts about for stones, Pryor scents warlike omens in the air. A cat, loping along the blue shoreline, stops to observe the scene. A field mouse trails from its mouth. There are others, among the trees. The secret population of the night, avid for death—and Pryor, unwilling to drop his friend, afraid to break the glass. What if he cuts his hand and faints? Who’ll help them then?

  Molyneaux’s hanging arm swings once and—points.

  A silver hint from underneath a gray stock brick. Pryor lays down the painful weight—Molyneaux twitches, tries to cough—and takes the key and thrusts it in the lock. Something has warped, worked loose; Molyneaux is lying at his feet in the spring mulch, leaves glossy-dark as patent-leather shoes, his body thin and starved but smooth, like some young chief not yet committed to his passage grave, waiting for earth and chalk to wrap him round.

  Inside the pavilion, above the daybed, glows a deer’s skull. Pryor shivers. He didn’t see it there before, although it’s bright as Sirius in Canis Major, Procyon, or Capella. And by an optical effect (the angle of the moon), his own reflection peers out from the animal’s long head, which grunts and stares.

  The animal he has become inspires him to charge. He butts the door. It falls open, a clatter of springs and uncorked wood. A lightning crack divides my pane and I see everything faulted and thrown.

  Pryor lifts Molyneaux, somehow, onto the bed, though Pryor himself is exhausted. Molyneaux’s quiet, his eyes fixed on the goal of survival. Their nakedness a fact, the boys seek warmth, a cave, some rest. The furnishings feel alien and obvious—three blankets with a herringbone pattern, the striped provisional mattress, cushions to make a body comfortable.

  When he has put a chair against the door, Pryor climbs into bed and pulls the blankets round them both. Facing the wall and held, Christopher Molyneaux grows no colder. Nothing is said. No more is done. The armor of his chest unfastens in the presence of his friend, whose nervous heat is life.

  “I’ll give myself up,” Pryor says, eyes closed, at dawn. “I’ll go back in a minute. To fetch help. Don’t worry, I’ll say it was all my fault.”

  The words are whispered into Molyneaux’s white shoulder. Neither body moves. The lake has dried on them.

  An hour later, Pryor wakes again and leaves the nest. Molyneaux stays, watching the paint acquire a faint color.

  Pryor unhooks the deer’s skull from the wall above his still-curled-up companion. Examines it. Not a good specimen—the back half of the lower jaw’s missing, a gap that, with the open cranial cavity, makes room enough for Pryor’s head.

  He puts it on.

  Molyneaux rolls over to see a creature in the doorway of the summerhouse. Behind it stirs the morning mist, to which the creature’s breath patiently adds, and behind that a boat greeting the island’s little stage—the stage the two boys missed last night.

  Appalled voices. The creature flinches at the sound. Its chimerical head jerks five degrees, returns to gaze at Molyneaux as all around them trees explode with donnish crows and exclamations from the shore.

  A step farther inside the house. The creature bows its head to Molyneaux’s shy hand, offers itself. Its skin is rough, a blanket-hide, its scent the tea of wintered leaves, its eyes deep-set and warm.

  “And she was miles from anywhere in Indochina, in the hills. Not even there …”

  The woman with the Colonel wears a matron’s uniform. Their clothes, put on in haste, look tight, uncomfortable. “Are these things yours?”

  It’s an irrelevant question, like asking, “And what sort of time do you call this?” Into the answering silence pours the questioner’s self-doubt, his powerless pride. Stallbrook’s mouth overworks, wet with dismay. He nods toward Matron, who holds the dressing gowns and shoes. “I know—” he starts. “Good God, Pryor, this little escapade—have you no care? Did you not think what it might do? Your father, he and I … ought we to be ashamed of you?”

  “My father’s dead.”

  “Day he was born …” Matron whispers. (He has turned out exactly as she thought he would. Just look at him! See how the boy has wrapped himself in standard issue, like those poor souls in the newspaper! But he is touched, whatever Colonel Stallbrook says. Who could forget the way he came to Wargrave, on the first day of the General Strike, on foot, without a change of clothes? “I am Pryor. I ran from Southampton.” And what is that the little monster has upon his head? Who does he think he is?)

  “Who do you think you are?”

  “I am the Red Lady of Paviland.”

  “He has gone mad.”

  “Put these back on at once.” Stallbrook advances, throws the dressing gowns and pullovers at Pryor’s feet, and points, enraged, at the wide door and cracked window. “Trespass. Breaking and entering.” His arm outstretched, his brow sweating. “You’ve no idea, the fix you’re in.”

  The adolescent shaman doesn’t budge an inch. A stillness holds them all, a pause before the sun appears. Without a class of witnesses, without the rows of small believers with their small beliefs, the master and his pinafored attendant are like empty postboxes, waiting for purposes to visit them.

  The other boy, Molyneaux, where is he? The thought occurs to Stallbrook as the morning sun strikes through the island’s poplars, lights the raspberry canes and apple trees, the Bath stone of the squat pavilion, its gray interior.

  As if he hadn’t heard a thing, or understood or cared, Christopher Molyneaux lies back, one arm behind his head. He’s gathering his strength. A different kind of silence enfolds him. He knows that punishment awaits, though beyond that he cannot know, only dimly suspect. For now he rests, an incommunicable warmth supporting him. He coughs, arches his back, casts off the blankets Pryor spread last night upon the bed. His other hand drifts over his belly and down, pushing the wool farther away, idling. There is about his self-examination and arousal something suddenly fearless, a little menacing, and true.

  When I look back, out of my struck portal, at Pryor, half-incorporated with the skull, the sun is both brighter and differently hued.

  It passes overhead, swiftly. Night falls. Another sun rises and sets. Its arc across the sky pivots, days shudder into weeks and months. Colonel Stallbrook and his helpmate dwindle; they’re blurred by age and pulsing skies, the lantern-flicker of advancing years. With a wild look, as if at last conceding something known but never said or confronted, they see reflected in the shaman’s eyeless abstraction of self the confirmation of their loss: fan-deltaic wrinkles, white hair shriveling, the skin sucked back, a humbling that now accelerates. Stark, for perhaps one full second, two skeletons—their jaws unhinged, their bones dancing slowly apart—illuminate the onset of a longer night. The lake freezes. Ice calls to ice and Pryor’s raised and summoning hand is frosted black.

  No trees, no distant school, a greenstick whine as cities pop, scatter. Another order of significance arrives. Air thickens with the charge of glaciers. The former gas solidifies, the mirror plane of my glass eye is crushed, and I am fractioned, like a mote among the asteroids. Only the world’s ship-like trembling, its great pistons concealed, attests the passage of eons, time brakeless and unpeopled. Then, as fast as they arrived, faster, the glaciers recede, the waters rise, anoxic bile that boils away at Pryor’s still, unvoiced command—and I am either glass again, or obsidian, axe flint, my face up
turned and refashioned.

  The veil of night draws back. The sun comes close, colossal in the sky. A pale hand hangs me on a wall that rises from the desert’s fiery sands.

  *

  Other wan shadows brush the lens clear of disaster and I find I’m in a room from which new, old, and reassuring forms emerge—the shelves of books, the desk, the built-in cupboard, and the bed.

  The man upon the bed, gripping the herringbone coverlet holed by moths, the man bald but alive, amazed by his survival into planetary old age, is familiar. It is Alec. Or it is Molyneaux. Or both. It is a thing that needs a name.

  The room’s not as it was before; the sequence of imagining has been altered, even—infinitesimally—the stirring in the drapes.

  He lifts the glass of water by his bed and I am cast upon its surface as he drinks, close to the terror of his eye, the nostrils and the yellow skin, the chattering teeth, the white pill on his tongue.

  But when he sets the glass down and I’m back in the mirror, I see an apple wobble into existence beside the glass, on a saucer. He picks it up, approaches me, and holds it up, offering the fruit of Deauville and the garden of mortality. “And sir,” he says, the voice remote, radio distressed, like something dialed, “what if you could really come back, be here in the future, knowing it, much more than if you’d merely conjured an image or cast the runes?”

  He bites into the flesh of Malus pumila. His eyes roll up. Pale presences flush out from every wall to catch him as he falls. White violet skinny claws, warty and hand-painted. An eye, a cloak, a tremolo of creeps: cartoons, the imps and gristly disjecta of Disney, Bosch; a swarming substrate with a will.

  Again the voice crackles across the years. It is the witch who calls him now, who calls through him to me. O! Dip the apple in the brew / Let the sleeping death seep through! / Dip the apple in …

  My God, I’m holding it. The apple’s real. Green one side, red the other, heavy, bitter as a quince. The stars outside the room! They’re clustering. A shining host—