The Uncanny, page 30
And so, at last, with all the courage he had left, he began to recite.
It was one of those situations—it’s remarkable how many of them there are, really—when only William Blake would do.
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
Yes, yes, that was a good one. You could work out the mysterious couplets of that one for hours. Weakly, Bernard licked his lips. He tasted something like decay. He went on.
A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.
Oh, he knew a thing or two, did Crazy Bill.
He lay with his eyes closed, with his jaw slack, his mouth open. Every breath that left him came back again rancid. He was strangling on his own exhalations.
Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born,
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
He hugged himself, but not tightly. He hadn’t the strength for that anymore. He simply held himself, cradled himself, rocked himself in clouds of debilitating nausea.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.
Some are red and some are blue,
And some are filled with sticky goo.
“I can’t breathe,” he whispered. And for he did not know how long, he was lost to himself. In a sunlit territory of emerald grass and rapeseed of a brilliant yellow. Of music and a river dappled with sunshine. And there, ranged everywhere along the lea, naked bodies, sweet, round, white, reclining. A vision of the sons and daughters of Albion …
And then the coffin lid clapped down over him and he was in the blackness again, with the smell of himself rotting alive. And he shook and cried, and whispered, “Mother.”
And her voice answered him clearly: We are led to believe a lie …
Yes, yes, he thought, crushed under the sudden return of reality. Yes …
We are led to believe a lie
When we see not through the eye,
Which was born in a night to perish in a night,
Which doesn’t scan,
But there it am,
Which doesn’t rhyme,
But dying I’m,
So who gives a sod,
Which brings us to God,
And God appears, and God is light,
To those poor souls who dwell in night;
But does a human form display,
To those who dwell in realms of day.
For mercy has a human heart,
Pity, a human face …
But no, that was something else. Still Blake, but another poem.
Oh, what’s the difference, Harper, he thought. Leave me alone, for Christ’s sake. Let me go.
For Mercy has a human heart, she insisted to him,
Pity, a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
He hugged himself, rocked himself in the blackness. Don’t tell me that, he thought. Don’t tell me that, you pedantic bitch, and leave me here. I’m dying. And I’m scared.
Mercy has a human heart, Bernard. A human heart. And Pity, a human face. And Love, the human form divine. Trust me on this.
He raised his bloody fingers to his bloody brow. Dragged them down over his cheeks, smearing the blood. He groaned out, “Cruelty!”
And a spasm of nausea racked him. He clutched his stomach. Turned his head. Tried to retch, but couldn’t. Sobbed.
Cruelty, he thought, has a human heart,
And Jealousy, a human face;
Terror, the human form divine,
And Secrecy, the human dress.
Well, yes, that too, Harper said.
“Secrecy,” Bernard whispered.
Yes.
He lay back again, trying to breathe, trying to support the weight of darkness. All right, all right, he thought. Where was I? Secrecy …?
Mercy, she said.
Right, right.
For Mercy has a human heart … Didn’t we do this already?
No, no. It’s still good. It’s still right, Bernard.
And Pity—Pity, Pity—a human face. Pity.
And Love, she said. Love has the human …
“The human form divine,” Bernard whispered, hugging himself, inhaling the stench of his offal, choking on the stench. And Mercy …
And Peace, she said.
Mercy, mercy.
These fragments …
Mercy.
These fragments you shall shore against your ruins.
“God!” Bernard screamed. Or tried to scream—it came out a rasping gasp.
These fragments … These fragments …
“God, father, father in Heaven. Help me!”
And then—as if in answer to his call—there came those sounds again. Did they? Did they come? He clutched himself. Opened his eyes—tried to—couldn’t tell if they were open or not. Lay with his jaw dangling. Listened.
Yes. The clank of a lock. The rattle of a latch. The creak—oh, the creak of a door opening. The thud as it swung shut.
And footsteps. Footsteps on stone. Approaching.
Bernard peered up into nothingness. His entire body was a prayer.
There was a pause. And then the voice—the voice like smoke—swirled down coolly over him.
“Are you ready to listen now, Bernard?”
Pity has a human heart, a human heart, a human heart …
“Yes,” he said, shuddering, crying. “Yes. Please. Please. I’m ready.”
16
“By Jove, Prendergast,” Hedley cried. “A stairway!”
Harper’s eyes sank closed, her body leaned forward. She and her dragon stick seemed about to pitch off the edge of the bed to the floor.
But she jerked her head up, her eyes open. Forced herself to stare at the TV screen.
By Jove, she grumped. Cobblers.
She continued to watch Storm’s movie as the appallingly ridiculous detectives descended into the vaults beneath the ruined church. Under jutting shadows, under skewed stonework, under hanging arches, they went, following the repeated clang-clang rising from below.
Even now, she could barely remember that she had ever seen the thing before. Could not remember where she had watched it or when. Certainly not why. Which was not all that odd really, considering the quality of the piece.
Funny, Harper thought sleepily. Storm probably hadn’t even known that it was all run-of-the-mill German Expressionism. She could see that he’d thought he was paying some sort of hommage to “Black Annie.” There were the shape of the ruins, the repetition of the sound—clang-clang—the two men descending the stairs. But in fact, the look of the picture—the ambience of it—came directly from the old Universal Studio monster classics like Frankenstein and Dracula. And these had been fashioned by the German Jew Carl Laemmle along with his stable of emigré directors. Hollywood and his own inclinations, in other words, had somehow furnished Storm’s mind with the German Romantic imagery of Rhinehart as it mutated into the pre-Fascist Expressionist celebration of Terror and Will. He too, in other words, was part of the story trail.
Which, so far, was about the only interesting thing she could think of to say about the film. The rest was cliché piled upon cliché.
She leaned on her stick and watched. Down and down, by roving torchlight, Prendergast and Hedley went. And now there was the body of poor, dear Sergeant What’s-His-Name dangling from the wall.
“Poor devil,” said Dr. Prendergast.
Poor devil, by Jove, thought Harper Albright.
The eerie music swelled—as eerie music will—and the two caped heroes moved out into a great underground chamber. There was Jacobus, the archvillain, bedecked in his pentagram robe before the blanketed altar. And there was the heroine, of course, writhing on the wall in her seductively torn blouse. Her wrists chained, her mouth gagged—all very appealing, if you went in for that sort of thing. The poor girl did her level best to deliver the lines, “Mmf, mmf,” with some sort of conviction. And her name, of course, was Annie.
And the villain was Jacobus. Harper lifted one gray eyebrow. Jacobus seeking immortality. Well, that was something anyway. If you thought of Iago watching the film twenty years before. You could imagine him—still reeling from the destruction of his cult, seeking desperately for a sign of his cherished destiny. You could imagine the hairs on the back of his neck bristling at even this minor coincidence.
But it was not enough. Not enough to draw him onto the trail. How could he have known to go from this ridiculous thing to “Black Annie” and the other stories?
Then the answer—a possible answer—began to take shape in her mind. A spilled soda. She had forgotten that. Hadn’t Iago said something about a spilled soda, back in the church of the Templars? A spilled soda, and the next stage was given to me. Yes, that was it.
Harper felt a twinge of fear—her first real fear for the life of Richard Storm.
“Why, Dr. Prendergast, I’m so glad you could make it,” Jacobus said from the TV.
And the doorbell rang.
Harper blinked, looked around her, momentarily confused by the intrusion of reality.
“You’re just in time to bear witness to my final apotheosis,” Jacobus said from the television.
The doorbell rang again.
Harper stood up in a flurry. The doorbell. It might be the police. It might be word of Bernard. It might be Bernard himself …
She dithered before the television, trying to decide what to do, how to proceed. If she turned the TV off, the tape might keep on playing and she would lose her place. If she tried to turn the tape off … well, she really hadn’t the faintest notion of how to do that anyway.
The doorbell rang again. Reluctantly, Harper backed away from the set, edging around the bed.
The voice of Jacobus trailed after her, tinny from the set’s small speaker.
“Poor Prendergast. That you ever thought to defeat me. Could you not see that I am the agent of an immortal power?”
The doorbell rang again, insistently. Harper knocked against the bedside table, the stack of books. She caught it before it toppled over, steadied it. Then, with a last glance at the show, she bustled towards the corridor.
“In such incarnations as this, I travel through the centuries,” said Jacobus. “I feed on the marrow of time.”
Harper stopped. She had her hand on the doorframe. She was about to leave the room. She looked back at the television set. I feed on the marrow of time. That was just what Iago had said to her in the Temple Church. And with a straight face too. She had thought at the time it was a little overwrought …
She stared at the screen. A close-up on the evil genius. A close-up on the grim detectives. The struggling girl: mmf mmf. Jacobus.
“I was here before the oceans turned black with life …”he said.
“And when the deserts are white with death,” Harper said along with him, “I will remain.”
The doorbell again. Jacobus went on.
“The petty hindrances you have put in my way have only served to amuse me. But that’s all over now …”
And with that, the cinema hunchback came chuckling forward. With a magician’s yank, he pulled the blanket from the altar and there …
Harper felt cold sweat beading on her forehead. Felt all her fears—for Bernard, for Storm, for herself now too—coalesce into one churning anxiety. She stared at the TV screen.
And there, as she stared—there, of course, was the baby. Of course. The baby on the altar. Jacobus with his sword raised above it. The gagged woman screaming from the wall.
Good God, of course: it was all exactly as it had been in the jungle. Exactly what she had seen as she had peeked through the branches and seen the awful truth about the man she’d loved.
She had not forgotten it. Not really. She had repressed it, that was all. She had forcibly dismissed its possibilities and pushed them away, pushed them down—even after Storm’s arrival. Even after he’d read that story at the party.
You suffer for what you fail to confess, she thought—even when you fail to confess it to yourself.
And she thought: A spilled soda. Yes. That makes it perfect.
She understood now. She understood everything that had happened. She even began to see, in her gathering terror, what was going to happen next.
The doorbell rang again. Again.
Harper hurried out of the room.
By the time she opened the front door, Detective Inspector William Pullod had given up on her. He had gone back down the mansion’s steps, was heading across the narrow street to where his Peugeot was parked before The Sign of the Crane. From the Peugeot’s passenger seat, his assistant, PC Slade, watched him approaching.
But then Pullod heard the door open behind him. He turned around, saw Harper standing there. She looked down on him silently as he moved back towards her, back towards the curb at the foot of the steps.
She braced herself—physically braced herself, putting her full weight on her walking stick. The inspector, she saw, was arranging his features into a po-faced expression of official sympathy. She felt the chill night air blow over her, felt another chill answer it from within. Was it too late? Was it already too late?
Below her, the wiry weightlifter shifted uncomfortably in his overcoat. He squinted up at the old woman through one eye. In one hand, he tossed a ring of keys up and down, jingle-jangle.
“Miss Albright,” he said. He looked away from her, along the dark street. But there was no traffic there, no one moving, nothing to see. He looked down at the keys in his hand instead. “I’m afraid …” he began.
Harper’s fingers curled and recurled around the dragon’s head. I’m afraid, she thought. There was a good English locution for you. I’m afraid there’s been a bit of a nuclear war. The outer woman remained grimly firm but she could feel her framework wobbling. She hated that “I’m afraid.”
“I’m afraid we’ve found young Bernard’s car,” said DI Pullod unhappily.
Harper lifted her chin. “I see. And where are you afraid it is?”
“I’m afraid,” said the inspector, “it’s right over there.” And he gestured across the street towards the pub. “Right in front of mine.” He held up the keys. “A constable found these in the ignition.”
Harper only nodded.
“I don’t suppose he’s come home …” said Pullod.
“No,” Harper said.
“And you’re certain he hasn’t just … run off?”
“Yes. I’m certain.”
The inspector made a very close examination of the keys in his hand. His sharp, energetic features worked awkwardly. “Then I’m afraid …”
“The car might be meant as a message for me. Yes, I’m afraid so too,” said Harper. A movement caught her attention. She raised her eyes to see Slade gazing at her from behind the Peugeot’s window. She didn’t know the man. Could she trust him? Could she trust Pullod?
There was a long silence as the DI resettled himself in his overcoat again.
“Inspector,” Harper said slowly. “How many churches of St. James would you say there are in London?” That was the name of the church in Storm’s film. St. James. Santiago.
The policeman’s mouth pulled down, his hands went up on either side of him. “I … I don’t know. Half a dozen at least, I should think.”
“Yes,” she murmured. “At least …” And she stood pondering. The speech from Storm’s film had confirmed her instinct: Iago had found his destiny that day twenty years ago in the Edgware Road cinema. He had found it, and he wanted to cling to it. In some superstitious way, he was trying to inhabit the stories that had led him to the triptych. Perhaps trying to inhabit Spectre most of all. But then, when Storm had made the picture he was inventing an England he had never then seen. It raised certain logistical problems …
“Tell me this, then,” she said finally. “Do you know of any St. James church that has been abandoned? Or even destroyed?”
Again, Pullod made that baffled gesture. But then, mid-gesture, he stopped. “Well, yes, as a matter of fact,” he said. “There was the bomb blast down in the Barbican. About six, eight months ago now, was it? Started a fire in a church down there. Might have been St. James. Yes, I think it was. I think I remember …”
But Harper was no longer there above him. The door to her mansion stood open, the entryway empty.
Pullod glanced back at Slade in the Peugeot. Both men shrugged.
And Harper returned. Slipping into her cape. Clapping her Borsalino down upon her gray bangs until the brim was just above her spectacles. She descended the stairs quickly.
“Uh …” said Pullod. “Miss Albright? What is it?”
“Don’t be alarmed, Inspector,” said Harper, walking right past him, walking towards the Peugeot. “It’s only the Uncanny. But I believe I’ve caught the current of it,” she called back over her shoulder to him. “Yes. I believe it’s on our side now.”
17
“You will live without pain, you will live without aging. You will live without the fear of death and above the laws of man.”
Bernard lay like a broken toy, all the tension, all the life, gone from him. His arms hung dead on the coffin bottom, his legs lay dead, one bent, tilted against the sarcophagus wall. His head lay still on his flaccid neck, his eyes open, staring, his mouth open.
Love, he thought distantly. Love has the human form divine.
“You think now,” Iago went on, “that you’ll quail at the letting of blood, at the killing of your own children. But I promise you, you will not quail. More than that, I promise you the act will free you, will give you a power over your own life—and a joy in that power—you can’t even imagine now. Any beast can give life to its offspring. But only we can give life to ourselves, over and over.”
Bernard lay motionless, lay limp. Lay staring into nothing, seeing nothing. The human form divine, he thought.
