Decay Inevitable

tiled, in all shades of orange: a sun radiating spirals of energy reached out to the walls.

“Nice idea,” Emma said.

“Isn’t it?” Sean agreed, moving the toe of his boot along one of the spinning arms of colour. “Do you think it means anything?”

“There doesn’t have to be a signal in everything you see, does there?”

Sean looked at her. “I wonder, sometimes.”

Emma said, “Funny though, I feel I know this place. Maybe it was featured in one of those decor magazines once.”

Back towards the stairs, Sean held up his hand. The shadow of a man was on the glass of the front door. As long as they were frozen, studying the figure for a clue as to what action to follow, they could see that the man wasn’t doing anything. He was just standing there.

“Now that,” Emma said, when she realised it was an illusion, “is creepy.”

“Look at how he did it,” Sean said, pointing to a series of mirrors up the stairs that, when sunshine hit them, projected the shadow of a doll onto the glass of the door.

“What kind of a man wants to piss around like that?”

Sean started up the stairs, his boots thumping dully on the bare wood. “Maybe he liked to feel less alone,” he said. “Figures at the door, maybe they made him feel popular, as if he was getting lots of visitors.”

“Yeah, right,” Emma said, trudging after him.

On the top floor, the bathroom was an ice cavern, but without any shades of white whatsoever. It glowed in colours that could have been blue or green or both or neither. The two bedrooms were as spartan as the rooms on the ground floor. The tiles on the floor in the back room depicted a green island in the centre of a sea of aquamarine. Along the hallway to the front room, the colours suddenly disintegrated – soft reds meeting an ash- grey mess that took over until the threshold. Beyond it, the tiles created a perfect black limbo without anything to arrest the eye.

They were about to return to the ground floor when Emma stopped Sean. She had the look of someone trying to root around in her mind for the key to recognition of a face so weathered by time and experience that there could be no hope of success.

She was looking at a map of Pangaea stitched into heavy fabric hanging on the wall, the continents when they were all part of the same land mass. A breeze from somewhere was causing the bottom edge to move slightly.

She reached out and tugged one edge of the map away from the wall.

There was a door, a tiny wooden door with a loop of string for a handle, behind it.

A picture, drawn in crayon on an old piece of paper from a school exercise book, was tacked to its central panel. It was a childish scrawl, a bald man in grey standing on a green hill, with white holes for eyes. The sky was black and a black sun burned in it, edged with brilliance, like a perpetual eclipse.

Sean said, his voice breaking, “I know that place.”

Emma said, carefully, calmly: “I drew that.”

Their hands found each other.

Behind the door: more stairs. They were only half-way up, Emma at the rear, when she heard Sean’s voice, low and breathy, come whistling through his teeth: “Jesus fuck. Jesus fuck.”

The room stretched away from them. Emma was frightened to a point where she could not think clearly. None of the houses along this street had three floors, did they? And the roofs were too shallow to allow for this level of conversion. The ceiling was of an unknowable height, an insane height. The impossibility of it crushed her.

Sean stood on the threshold to the room and she could tell by the movement of his shoulders that he was crying.

“What is it?” she asked, softly. The house creaked and groaned around her as the wind and rain buffeted it. It too seemed affected by whatever it was that Sean had discovered.

“I’ve been here before,” he said. “When I was a child. But I can’t remember... I can’t remember how.”

She pressed against him and looked through the gap between his arm and the curtailment of the banister. The room had no tiles in it; the floor was covered with a ragged piece of matting. Chalked signs and messages had been scratched into it. The walls seethed in shadow and light, spoilt further by an imbroglio of graphite and ink and spray paint.

Emma said, in a voice too small for the room: “Me too.”

What illuminated the walls, what quaked and pulsed at the centre of the room, was hidden within a tube of fabric that was pinned and pegged to a scaffold that reached up to the eaves. An arched window, the only one on this level, provided a view of the tower at Sloe Heath, as if it were a painting, framed and hung.

Sean unfastened the fabric and let it fall. The fire that was revealed, burning in a small, ceramic crucible, was unlike any flame Emma had seen. The tongues of it, reaching to the newly revealed ceiling, were sometimes milky and smooth, sometimes purpuric. Acid whites became mottled with cartoon orange; sudden, impossible black flames measled with slowly expanding moments of electric green. At the ceiling, they rilled and plaited like flecks of rain on glass. The sheer alien spectacle was enough to shock tears from her, but what elicited the pain to go with it, a bone-gnawing sadness, was what coalesced at the heart of the fire.

She had not seen her grandfather for twenty years, yet here he was, bathed by the flames, as scrubbed and as fresh as a child. He turned to look at her, his eyes animated with joy. He was trying to speak to her but either the words were being soaked up by the conflagration or she wasn’t close enough to hear. The enticement of listening to a voice that had been lost to the vagaries of time and her untrustworthy memory was irresistible. She edged towards the tower of fire, cocking her head to improve the trajectory of his words, and saw Sean doing the same. Tears made his cheeks shiny. How could he be feeling this way for someone who belonged to her? She remembered weekends spent with this man, when her parents were having some time to themselves. She would sit on his knee while they watched Charlie’s Angels or Starsky and Hutch or The Six Million Dollar Man. He would waggle her toes and tell her stories about dark horses in stormy fields and angels who played with your hair while you slept and how that was what made you become more beautiful every day. He brought her cakes from the factory where he worked as a confectioner, icing buns and decorating birthday sponges.

She couldn’t say “Grandad” back then. It was too hard a word for her. She called him “Gaga”.

“Gaga,” she said now, the first time she had uttered the name since his death in 1976. It was like understanding what life meant. It was like, for an instant, glimpsing a detail of God’s face. He might as well have died yesterday, so fresh in her mind was he now. And suddenly she could remember how he spoke. The richness of his voice slammed into her consciousness with such clarity that she staggered. Sean reached out and grabbed her arm. He appeared to her as though through a sea of syrup. His eyes were wide, his mouth comically stretched. Was he shaking his head?

Emma flapped his arms away and turned again to her grandfather. He was laughing, his eyes screwed up, happy wrinkles squeezed into the corners of the face. “Count my happy wrinkles,” he’d say. “Count my happy wrinkles and times by five, that’s how long I’ll stay alive.”

Here he was, saying things to her again that she couldn’t hear. Conscious that Sean was behind her, reaching out, trying to stop her from being with a man she had loved so much, she ran to her grandfather, arms outstretched. The flames, when they consumed her, didn’t hurt at all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: SALAMANDERMAN

“CROSS HIS PALMS with crimson, traveller,” the nut said, capering in Will’s wake like a harlequin on speed, busting his guts to impress a king. Ahead of them both, a man in a long brown coat was striding across the cricket pitch, the straps of his First World War flying helmet whipping around his neck in the wind.

“Plasma or fire, he takes either,” the nut was saying now. “He’ll juggle with flames and make your blood