“What sin? What was so terrible about it?” Harriet is fumbling at her neck for the cross she wears, and her lips move between breaths in whispered prayer. Devotion. A fear of heresy. Obsessive compulsive disorder constructed around faith. Joe has no idea, never did. She takes his hand and grips it, suddenly fierce.
“It was like a praying wheel, like they have in Tibet. A worshipping machine, all made of gold, like the old heathen temples in the Bible. It prays to Hell.”
“Mum…”
“No! No, Joe, you asked and I’m telling you. It’s a vile thing. It calls to all the old monsters, from the back end of creation. And she knew! She knew. She opened it once and the Devil came and took a host of souls. Innocents, too. She told him, and still! Still he loved her! Oh, she was wicked, with those wide French eyes and the endless evasions and disappearances and then she’d be on the doorstep and ‘I must speak with him.’ And never a word for Mathew. Always about herself. She. Was. Bad! And, of course, no one would listen to me!”
She glares at her son, furious. She is willing him to believe, to understand at last. Her world now is four parts in five invisible, and the remainder is filled with shadows. Once, before she took the last step and swore herself through these gates, she came home early to the house and he wasn’t there, and he returned to find her weeping in a corner, quite certain that the Rapture had come and gone and left her behind—that God had lifted up her bonny boy and cast her back on the heap for her dusty sins and inadequate contrition.
Joe Spork sits and waits for her to run down. It is no good—never was—objecting that this does not sound like the work of a benevolent, loving God; that the universe she believes in is more like something from a Hammer horror movie, vampires skittering like spiders up drainpipes.
A brief image coalesces in his mind—crumpled linen faces watching him from the windows of a black van. He glances at the window and sees himself reflected in the glass, and for a moment is afraid to look directly at his image in case there is a tall, heron-stooped figure close behind, black-shrouded hands reaching out to clasp him. He strains his ears for the sound of breathing, for that strange rasping. He can feel the presence of someone else in the room, the uneasy knowledge of someone standing in the dead space behind your spine. Spider hands trailing threads.
He turns.
And sees Harriet sitting loosely on the edge of her bed looking at him and, for the first time in a long while, actually seeing him as Joshua Joseph, with the fullest understanding of their shared life. Here, now, she is his mother, and nothing else.
“Have you called Cradle’s?”
“Of course.”
She nods, and rubs a hand across her mouth. She cocks her head pensively. “But you’re here. You sneaked in. So you’re not doing as you’re told.”
“I was.” He wonders whether to tell her that he may possibly be about to fall in love with Mary Angelica Cradle; that Polly has invested in him and he in her.
“And it’s Frankie’s machine?”
“Yes.”
“You need the Night Market, Joe.”
“I don’t have it. I never did. I’m a watchmaker.”
She snorts. “You’re my son. Mathew’s son. The Market’s yours, if you want it. If you decide to take it.”
She levers herself down onto the floor, slipping her knees into the shiny indentation of her daily observances. He stares. Has she gone again, back inside her faith? If she prays now, she will pray until he leaves. She will not talk to him any more. He has seen it in the past, when they fought over her decisions, when he asked her to come out and be his mother again.
But this time she prostrates herself entirely, and reaches in a most unconventical way for a small metal box, wedged between the frame and the mattress. She hoicks it out and sits back on her heels, looking pleased.
“Here,” she says. “This was Mathew’s. Perhaps it’s meant for you.”
It is a locked green cash box, the kind you saw in every shop when Joe was a child, perhaps seven inches long and five across, with a little metal handle on it and a slot for the coins.
“What’s in it?” he says.
“I don’t know, Joshua,” Harriet Spork says. “I never opened it. I don’t have a key. But that won’t stop you, will it?” She smiles grimly.
He shakes the box. It rattles, metal on metal, and something solid goes “fwfp,” something thick and rough. A box within a box, perhaps.
“Thank you,” he says, and goes to hug her again. Before he can, there’s a noise like a car crash outside, or many car crashes all at once, and the clangour of alarms. A bright-eyed old woman in a severe grey suit puts her wimpled head around the door without knocking.
“I’m so sorry to disturb you,” she says. “But I think you better come with me.”
“Why?” Joe asks.
“Because your enemies have just broken down the front door and I suspect they propose to carry you off.”
Harriet stares. The other woman makes a face. “Hurry up, please.” And it is only when she steps fully into the room, carrying a small, vile-looking dog under one arm, that Joe Spork recognises her as his erstwhile client. It takes him a fraction of a second longer to observe the large, old-fashioned revolver in her other hand.
“You!” Joe growls at the author of his misfortunes.
“Yes,” Edie Banister says. “I suppose I should acknowledge at this time that I am not, strictly speaking, a nun.”
Edie Banister leads them off down the corridor and back the way Joe arrived. On the floors below, something bad is happening, loud and angry. Nuns are shouting—not screaming, but shouting, stern and outraged and very certain of their ground—but those fearsome voices are falling away into what sounds like one shared gasp or indrawn breath. Where indignation and affront should be growing, it is muffled, reduced to an appalled whisper of dismay.
At the head of a flight of twisting stairs, Joe glances down and sees a group of sisters standing in a huddle. The front nun has her hand flung out in a gesture of accusation, but she is faltering already, and the furious finger is being modified into one of warding. She is afraid.
A single figure lopes past her: a black-linen werewolf on the hunt, wide shoulder brushing her aside, feral head turning this way and that, seeking prey. Edie Banister grabs Joe unceremoniously by the collar and drags him back and away.
“Don’t be a fucking tourist,” she hisses angrily. “We need to be away, youngster. Or didn’t your daddy teach you that? Piss off first, sightsee later?”
“He told me never back down,” Joe Spork replies grouchily, following her down a small side corridor.
“Oh, aye, that I’m sure he did. But reading between the lines, did he say you have to stand when you will definitely lose? Or did he say regroup and retrench, then fight back?”
Polly and I are your only friends. But somehow, that advice does not seem intended for this eventuality. Joe growls. “I don’t trust you.”
“Good! Then you may not die. But for the moment, shut up and do as you’re told by the nice old lady. Or take your chances.”
He mutters something between a complaint and an acceptance, and Edie turns on him for a moment a dazzling smile of encouragement and fellow feeling. Then waves the whole conversation away.
“Down here,” she says sharply, and they duck into an access staircase which is, if possible, even tinier than the corridor. Joshua Joseph feels that he is entering a wonderland constructed for the habitation of little old ladies, and hopes he will not have to shrink to survive. Then he grins, because he knows all about shrinking to survive, and is pleased—if disturbed—to find that it’s not him any more.