cheer as the fence was toppled, sending plagues of fire-flies up as it fell. He moved on as the firefighters advanced into the conflagration, bringing their hoses to bear on the heart of the fire. By the time he’d made a half circuit of the site, and was standing opposite the breach they’d made, the flames were already in retreat in several places, smoke and steam replacing their fury. He watched them gain ground from his new vantage point, hoping for some glimpse of life, until the appearance of another two machines and a further group of firefighters drove him on around the perimeter, back to the place from which he’d emerged.
There was no sign of Pie’oh’pah, either being carried from the blaze or standing amongst those few survivors who, like Gentle, had refused to be taken away to be tended. The smoke issuing from the fire’s steady defeat was thickening, and by the time he got back to the row of bodies on the pavement - the number of which had doubled - the whole scene was barely visible through the pall. He looked down at the shrouded forms. Was one of them Pie’oh’pah? As he approached the nearest of them a hand was laid on his shoulder, and he turned to face a policeman whose features were those of a boy soprano, smooth and troubled.
‘Aren’t you the one who brought out the kid?’ he said.
‘Yes. Is she all right?’
‘I’m sorry, mate. I’m afraid she’s dead. Was she your kid?’
He shook his head. ‘There was somebody else. A black guy with long curly hair. He had blood on his face. Has he come out of there?’
Formal language now: ‘I haven’t seen anybody of that description.’
Gentle looked back towards the bodies on the pavement.
‘It’s no use looking there,’ the policeman said. They’re all black now, whatever colour they started out.’
‘I have to look,’ Gentle said.
‘I’m telling you it’s no use. You wouldn’t recognize them. Why don’t you let me put you in an ambulance? You need seeing to.’
‘No. I have to keep looking,’ Gentle said, and was about to move off when the policeman took hold of his arm.
‘I think you’d be better away from the fence, sir,’ he said. ‘There’s some danger of explosions.’
‘But he could still be in there.’
‘If he is, sir, I think he’s gone. There’s not much chance of anybody else coming out alive. Let me take you to the police line. You can watch from there.’
Gentle shook off the man’s hold.
‘I’ll go,’ he said. ‘I don’t need an escort.’
It took an hour for the fire to be finally brought under control, by which time it had little left to consume. During that hour all Gentle could do was wait behind the cordon and watch, as the ambulances came and went, ferrying the last of the injured away, and then taking the bodies. As the boy soprano had predicted, there were no further victims brought out, dead or alive, though Gentle waited until all but a few late arrivals amongst the crowd had left, and the fire was almost completely doused. Only when the last of the firefighters emerged from the crematorium, and the hoses were turned off, did he give up hope. It was almost two in the morning. His limbs were burdened with exhaustion, but they were light beside the weight in his chest. To go heavy-hearted was no poet’s conceit: it felt as though the pump had turned to lead, and was bruising the plush meat of his innards.
As he wandered back to his car he heard the whistling again, the same tuneless sound floating on the dirty air. He stopped walking, and turned to all compass points looking for the source, but the whistler was already out of sight, and Gentle was too weary to give chase. Even if he had, he thought, even if he’d caught it by its lapels and threatened to break its burned bones, what purpose would that have served? Assuming it had been moved by his threat (and pain was probably meat and drink to a creature that whistled as it burned) he’d be no more able to comprehend its reply than interpret Chant’s letter: and for similar reasons. They were both escapees from the same unknown land, whose borders he’d grazed when he’d gone to New York; the same world that held the God Hapexamendios, and had given birth to Pie’oh’pah. Sooner or later he’d find a way to gain access to that state, and when he did all the mysteries would come clear: the whistler, the letter, the lover. He might even solve the mystery that he met most mornings in the shaving mirror; the face he thought he knew well enough until recently, but whose code he now realized he’d forgotten, and would not now remember without the help of undiscovered gods.
3
Back in the house in Primrose Hill, Godolphin sat up through the night and listened to the news bulletins reporting the tragedy. The number of dead rose every hour; two more victims had already perished in hospital. Theories were being advanced everywhere as to the cause of the fire, pundits using the event to comment on the lax safety standards applied to sites where itinerants camped, and demanding a full Parliamentary enquiry to prevent a repeat of such a conflagration.
The reports appalled him. Though he’d given Dowd leash enough to dispatch the mystif - and who knew what hidden agenda lay there? - the creature had abused the freedom he’d been granted. There would have to be punishment meted out for such abuse, though Godolphin was in no mood to plot that now. He’d bide his time; choose his moment. It would come. Meanwhile, Dowd’s violence seemed to him further evidence of a disturbing pattern. Things he’d thought immutable were changing. Power was slipping from the possession of those who’d traditionally held it, into the hands of underlings - fixers, familiars and functionaries - who were ill equipped to use it. Tonight’s disaster was symptomatic of that. But the disease had barely begun to take hold. Once it spread through the Dominions there’d be no stopping it. There had already been uprisings in Vanaeph and L’Himby, there were mutterings of rebellion in Yzordderrex; now there was to be a purge here in the Fifth Dominion, organized by the Tabula Rasa, a perfect background to Dowd’s vendetta, and its bloody consequences. Everywhere, signs of disintegration.
Paradoxically the most chilling of those signs was superficially an image of reconstruction: that of Dowd recreating his face so that if he were seen by any member of the Society he’d not be recognized. It was a process he’d undertaken with each generation, but this was the first time any Godolphin had witnessed said process. Now Oscar thought back on it he suspected Dowd had deliberately displayed his transformative powers, as further evidence of his new-found authority. It had worked. Seeing the face he’d grown so used to soften and shift at the will of its possessor was one of the most distressing spectacles Oscar had set eyes upon. The face Dowd had finally fixed was sans moustache and eyebrows, the head sleeker than his other, and younger: the face that of an ideal National Socialist. Dowd must also have caught that echo, because he later bleached his hair, and bought several new suits, all apricot, but of a much severer cut than those he’d worn in his earlier incarnation. He sensed the instabilities ahead as well as Oscar; he felt the rot in the body politic, and was readying himself for a New Austerity.
And what more perfect tool than fire, the book-burner’s joy, the soul-cleaner’s bliss? Oscar shuddered to contemplate the pleasure Dowd had taken from his night’s work, callously murdering innocent human families in pursuit of the mystif. He would return to the house, no doubt, with tears on his face, and say he regretted the hurt he’d done to the children. But it would be a performance, a sham. There was no true capacity for grief or regret in the creature, and Oscar knew it. Dowd was deceit incarnated, and from now on Oscar knew he had to be on his guard. The comfortable years were over. Hereafter he would sleep with his bedroom door locked.
1
In her rage at his conspiracies Jude had contemplated several possible ways to revenge herself upon Estabrook, ranging from the bloodily intimate to the classically detached. But her nature never ceased to surprise her. All thoughts of garden shears