Weaveworld

twice; three times might be pressing her luck. Though impatience gnawed at her, she decided to wait until the light faded. The days were still short this early in the year; it would only be a few hours.

She found herself an empty house – availing herself of some plain food that the owners had left there – and wandered around the echoing rooms until the light outside began to dwindle. Her thoughts turned back, and back again, to Jerichau, and the circumstances of his death. She tried to remember the way he looked, and had some success with his eyes and hands, but couldn’t create anything like a complete portrait. Her failure depressed her. He was so soon gone.

She had just about decided that it was dark enough to risk venturing out when she heard voices. She went to the bottom of the stairs, and peered through to the front of the house. There were two silhouetted figures on the threshold.

‘Not here …’ she heard a girl’s voice whisper.

‘Why not?’ said her male companion, his words slurred.

One of Hobart’s company, no doubt. ‘Why not? It’s as good as any.’

‘There’s somebody here already,’ said the girl, staring into the mystery of the house.

The man laughed. ‘Dirty fuckers!’ he called. Then he took the woman roughly by the arm. ‘Let’s find somewhere else,’ he said. They moved away, into the street.

Suzanna wondered if Hobart had sanctioned such fraternization. She couldn’t believe he had.

It was time she put an end to stalking him in her imagination; time to find him and get her business with him done. She slipped through the house, scanned the street, then stepped out into the night.

The air was balmy, and with so few lights burning in the houses, and those that did burn mere candle-flames, the sky was bright above, the stars like dew-drops on velvet. She walked a little way with her face turned skyward, entranced by the sight. But not so entranced she didn’t sense Hobart’s proximity. He was somewhere near. But where? She could still waste precious hours going from house to house, trying to find him.

When in doubt, ask a policeman. It had been one of her mother’s favourite saws, and never more apt. A few yards from where she stood one of Hobart’s horde was pissing against a wall, singing a ragged rendition of Land of Hope and Glory to accompany the flood.

Trusting that his inebriation would keep him from recognizing her, she asked Hobart’s whereabouts.

‘You don’t need him,’ the man said. ‘Come on in. We’ve got a party going.’

‘Maybe later. I’ve got to see the Inspector.’

‘If you must,’ the man said. ‘He’s in the big house with the white walls.’ He pointed back the way she’d come, splashing his feet as he did so. ‘Somewhere off to the right,’ he said.

The instructions, despite the provider’s condition, were good. Off to the right was a street of silent dwellings, and at the corner of the next intersection a sizeable house, its walls pale in the starlight. There was nobody standing sentry at the door; the guards had presumably succumbed to whatever pleasures Nonesuch could offer. She pushed the door open and stepped inside unchallenged.

There were riot-shields propped against the wall of the room she’d entered, but she needed no confirmation that this was indeed the house. Her gut already knew that Hobart was in one of the upper rooms.

She started up the stairs, not certain what she would do when she confronted him. His pursuit of her had made her life a nightmare, and she wanted to make him regret it. But she couldn’t kill him. Despatching the Magdalene had been terrible enough; killing a human being was more than her conscience would allow. Best just to claim her book, and go.

At the top of the stairs was a corridor, at the end of which a door stood ajar. She went to it, and pushed it open. He was there, her enemy; alone, slumped in a chair, his eyes closed. In his lap lay the book of faery-tales. The very sight of it made her nerves flutter. She didn’t hesitate in the doorway, but crossed the bare boards to where he slumbered.

In his sleep, Hobart was floating in a misty place. Moths flew around his head, and beat their dusty wings against his eyes, but he couldn’t raise his arms to brush them away. Somewhere near he sensed danger, but from which direction would it come?

The mist moved to his left, then to his right.

‘Who …?’ he murmured.

The word he spoke froze Suzanna in her tracks. She was a yard from the chair, no more. He muttered something else; words she couldn’t comprehend. But he didn’t wake.

Behind his eyelids Hobart glimpsed an unfixable form in the mist. He struggled to be free of the lethargy that weighed him down; fought to waken, and defend himself.

Suzanna took another step towards the sleeper.

He moaned again.

She reached for the book, her fingers trembling. As they closed around it, his eyes sprang wide open. Before she could snatch the book away from him, his grip on it tightened. He stood up.

‘No!’ he shouted.

The shock of his waking almost made her lose her hold, but she wasn’t going to give her prize up now: the book was her property. There was a moment of struggle between them, as they fought for possession of the volume.

Then – without warning – a veil of darkness rose from their hands, or more correctly from the book they held between them.

She looked up into Hobart’s eyes. He was sharing her shock at the power that was suddenly released from between their woven fingers. The darkness rose between them like smoke, and blossomed against the ceiling, immediately tumbling down again, enclosing them both in a night within a night.

She heard Hobart loose a yell of fear. The next moment words seemed to rise from the book, white forms against the smoke, and as they rose they became what they meant. Either that or she and Hobart were falling, and becoming symbols as the book opened to receive them. Whichever; or both; it was all one in the end.

Rising or falling, as language or life, they were delivered into storyland.

VIII

THE ESSENTIAL DRAGON

t was dark in the state they’d entered; dark, and full of rumour. Suzanna could see nothing in front of her, not even her fingertips, but she could hear soft whispers, carried to her on a warm, pine-scented wind. Both touched her face, whispers and wind; both excited her. They knew she was here, the people that inhabited the stories in Mimi’s book: for it was there, in the book, that she and Hobart now existed.

Somehow, in the act of struggling, they’d been transformed – or at least their thoughts had. They’d entered the common life of words.

Standing in the darkness, and listening to the whispers all around her, she didn’t find the notion so difficult to comprehend. After all hadn’t the author of this book turned his thoughts into words, in the act of writing it, knowing his readers would decode them as they read, making thoughts of them again? More: making an imagined life. So here was she now, living that life. Lost in Geschichten der Geheimen Orte; or found there.

There were hints of light moving to either side of her she now realized; or was it she that was moving: running perhaps, or flying? Anything was possible here: this was faery land. She concentrated, to get a better grasp of what these flashes of light and darkness meant, and realized all at once that she was travelling at speed through avenues of trees, vast primeval trees, and the light between them was growing brighter.

Somewhere up ahead, Hobart was waiting for her, or for the thing she’d become as she flew through the pages.

For she was not Suzanna here; or rather, not simply Suzanna. She could not simply be herself here, any more than he could be simply Hobart. They were grown mythical in this absolute forest. They had drawn to themselves the dreams that this state celebrated: the desires and faiths that filed the nursery stories, and so shaped all subsequent desires and faiths.