Weaveworld

Instead he stood on the warm ground while forms that were lit as if by a sun that had already set behind the mountain moved around him. A man was dancing nearby, his skirts like living tissue; a girl flew over, trailing the scent of her sex; there were lovers in the long grass, coupling. One of them cried out, whether in pleasure or alarm he wasn’t certain, and the next moment he was running over the mountainside, and there was something coming after him, something vast and remorseless.

He shouted as he ran, to alert the lovers and the bird-girl and the dancer to the horror that had come for them all, but his voice was pitifully thin – the voice of a mouse – and the next moment the grass around him began to smoulder. Before his eyes the coupling bodies now burst into flames; an instant later the girl fell out of the sky, her body consumed by the same venomous fire. Again, he shouted, in terror this time, trying to leap over the flames as they advanced across the ground in his direction. But he wasn’t agile enough. His heels caught fire, and he felt the heat creep up the back of his legs as he ran.

Howling now, he found an extra burst of speed, and suddenly Venus Mountain was gone, and he was running barefoot down streets he’d known since childhood. It was night, but the lamps along the street had been smashed, and the paving stones torn up beneath his feet made the going treacherous.

Still the pursuer came after him, sniffing his carbonized heels.

Knowing it would outpace him given time, he looked for some place of sanctuary as he ran, but the doors of the houses – even those of childhood friends – were nailed shut, the windows boarded up.

There was no help to be had here. All he could do was keep running, in the vain hope that the monster would be distracted by more tempting quarry.

An alleyway caught his eye; he ducked down it. Made a turn, made another turn. Ahead, a brick wall, and in it, a door, through which he hurled himself. Only then did he realize where this inevitable route had taken him.

He knew the yard at once, though the wall had grown twice as high since he’d last been here, and the gate through which he’d stepped a moment ago had sealed itself up. It was the yard behind Mimi Laschenski’s house. Once, in another life, he’d stood on that wall, and toppled, and fallen, finally, into paradise.

But there was no carpet in the yard now, nor any presence, bird or man, to offer their consolation. Just him, and the four shadowy corners of the yard, and the sound of his pursuer approaching the hiding place.

He took refuge in one of the corners and crouched down. Though the heels beneath his buttocks had been extinguished, his panic had not; he felt sick with fear.

The monster approached. He smelt the heat off its hide. It wasn’t the heat of life – not sweat or breath – but a dry, dead fire; ancient, merciless; an oven in which all the good of the world might be cremated. And it was close. Just beyond the wall.

He held his breath. There was a crippling ache in his bladder. He put his hands between his legs, cupping his prick and balls, shaking with terror. Make it go away, he silently pleaded to the darkness: make it leave me alone and I’ll be good as gold forever: I swear I will.

Though he could scarcely believe his luck, his appeal was heard, for the presence on the other side of the wall gave up its pursuit and retreated. His spirits lifted a little, but he kept his cramped position until his dream- sense told him that the enemy had withdrawn entirely. Only then did he dare stand up again, his joints cracking.

The pressure in his bladder would no longer be denied. Turning to the wall, he unzipped himself. The brick was hot from the presence of the creature, and his piss hissed against it.

In mid-flow, the sun came out, suddenly, flooding the yard. No, it wasn’t the sun. It was his pursuer, rising over the wall, its head hotter than a hundred noons, its oven-maw open wide.

He could not help but look into its face, though it would surely blind him. He saw enough eyes for a nation, pressed side by side, set on great wheels, their nerves drawn out like bright threads and knotted in the belly of the creature. There was more, much more, but he only glimpsed it before the heat set him alight from head to toe- nail.

He shrieked.

And with the cry, the yard disappeared, and he was travelling again on Venus Mountain, only this time the landscape beneath him was not earth and rock, but flesh and bone. It was his own body he was flying over, his substance become a world, and it was burning up, burning to extinction. His shriek was the land’s shriek, and it rose and rose as he and it were utterly consumed.

Too much!

He woke suddenly to find himself curled up in the middle of the bed, a knot of dreamt agony. He was sweating so much surely the fire would have been extinguished.

But no. It burned on in his mind’s eye for minutes afterwards, still bright.

2

It was more than a nightmare, he knew; it had the potency of a vision. After that first visit there was a blank night, then it came again, and again the night after. The particulars were altered somewhat (a different street, a different prayer) but it was in essence the same warning; or prophecy.

There was a gap of several days before the fourth dream, and this time Geraldine was with him. Though she made every attempt to wake him – he was howling, she said – he could not be roused until the dream was over. Only then did he open his eyes to find her sobbing with panic.

‘I thought you were dying,’ she said, and he half believed she was right; that his heart would not bear many more of these terrors before it burst.

It was not just his death the vision promised, however; it was that of the people on Venus Mountain, who seemed to occupy his very substance. A catastrophe was coming, that would lay waste those few Seerkind who had survived; who were, in their way, as intimate to him as his own flesh. That was what the dream told.

He lived through November in fear of sleep, and what it would bring. The nights were growing longer, the portions of light shrinking. It was as if the year itself was sliding into sleep, and in the mind of the night that would follow the substance of his dream was taking shape. A week into December, with the nightmare coming almost as soon as he closed his eyes, he knew he had to speak to Suzanna. Find her, and tell her what he was seeing.

But how? Her letter to him had been quite clear: she would contact him when it was safe to do so. He had no address for her; nor a telephone number.

In desperation, he turned to the only source of intelligence he had on the whereabouts of miracles.

He found Virgil Gluck’s card, and rang the number on it.

There was no reply.

IV

THE SHRINE OF THE MORTALITIES

1

he day after Apolline’s visit – with polar conditions moving down across the country, and the temperature dropping hourly – Suzanna went out to look at the sites on the list. The first of them proved a disappointment: the house she’d come to see, and those adjacent to it, were in the process of being demolished. As she studied her map, to be certain she’d come to the correct address, one of the workmen left a fire of roof-timbers he was tending and sauntered across to her.

‘There’s nothing to see,’ he said. There was a look of distaste on his face which she couldn’t fathom.

‘Is this where number seventy-two stood?’ she asked.

‘You don’t look the type,’ he replied.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t –’

‘To come looking.’

She shook her head. He seemed to see that he’d made an error of some kind, and his expression mellowed.

‘You didn’t come to see the murder house?’ he said.