Lucien is several feet ahead of me in the tunnel, walking with his stately lope, and reaching his arms out towards the tunnel’s sides as if he wants to pull the light in to him.
Then something changes. It starts slow, somewhere down in my feet. A sense of unease. Nothing has altered around me. The silver glow is as milky and clear and beautiful. There is no sound in the thronging silence. Nothing has moved or shifted in the tunnel. I start walking in the same direction that Lucien is going in, and I have the sense that I am moving impossibly slow, as if through silted murky water. Nothing there. But round my ankles a feeling of coil and release, coil and release. The feeling moves up from my feet to my knees and hips, and rises then up my spine, where moments before I’d felt the light coming through.
How to describe it, except as the opposite of the opening, lengthening feel of the Pale. It’s as if my joints are shutting, seizing, refusing. My whole body is saying no. I form the word with my lips as the black current reaches my hands and they seize and grip and try to push against something that isn’t there.
There’s pressure under my ribs, around my heart. The creature that had opened its wings within my chest now has my insides trapped tight in its claws. And then I no longer seem able to walk. I try to put my hands up to break my fall, but I land hard on the flat of my knees in the silver tunnel. The glow is still playing piano around me, like something cruel, as I retch and feel my back curl, without my control, inward and prone.
‘Lucien,’ I say, or try to say, or just think. ‘Lucien. What have you done?’
The next thing is my arms being pulled from where they’re curled under me, hugged in around my ribcage. Pulled out in front of my head. Pain in the shoulder joint. Hard, pointed pain, not the dry, refusing pain that has taken up everything else. I try to lift my head up to swear at him, but I am pathetic. I have no strength. Lucien pulls my two crumpled, useless arms together so he can grab both and then there’s nothing, followed by a painful wrench that has his whole weight behind it. He’s dragging me. I feel my forehead bump over the pitted silver. We are moving in slow jerks down the corridor. From time to time I hear Lucien go to his knees. Then his feet at my sides as he rearranges his grip on my wrists.
The claws inside my chest are strong and tight. They have stalked bone by bone up my back and gripped my brain there. My brain is both terribly big and terribly small at the same time. It shakes hollow like a walnut and it grows and pushes fleshily at my skull. At some point I throw up whatever is in my stomach, and then I feel Lucien tip my head and shoulders with the edge of his para-covered foot to avoid the mess as he pulls me through.
As he does it, I blink. And then I blink again because my brain has not obeyed this instruction. And then I try to spit to clear my throat so I can scream. Because my eyes are open and I cannot see. I am blind.
The Dead Room
I come to in darkness. It is cold. I don’t know where I am. I blink, but the dark with my eyes open is the same as the dark with them closed. I am lying on a hard surface and every bone and muscle in me aches and pulls. I try to focus my hearing, but my brain is bruised, seems no longer the right size for my skull.
Then I try to make a sound, any sound, to hear my bearings. All that comes out is a dry sort of moan. The noise should be loud enough to get some hold on the size of the room, but there is nothing. It is completely silent. I try to hear beyond or underneath the silence, but it is dead, closed, shut. And then there is too much pain in my head and I give up.
Off behind me is the sudden sound of loud, violent retching. Lucien. Because of the deadness of the room, I cannot tell where he is. I lie still, as I have no choice but to do, and gradually things come back. I remember the running river of silver. I remember a tunnel made of pure. I remember happiness and harmony beating right through me from head to foot. I remember my parents, shining and healthy. And then, from foot to head, I remember the creep of the sickness that is still inside me, that remains as a brittle twitch in my joints and the horror feeling of something pressing on my ribs.
I understand then. Lucien has brought me here. Lucien has exposed me to something that has made me sick — sick like my parents, like Steppan’s father, like he himself the other night.
I test my limbs. My arms move slightly, but they are tense and tight, caught in the numb grip. I cannot move my legs at all. I can feel them, though I almost wish I couldn’t, as the pain is worst there, like ice. I lie still and try not to think.
After a long time the ache of pressure inside my chest and ears eases a bit. I try to concentrate again, to focus my energy enough to move. Begin at my chest, let my thought move down my arm, trying to remember its network of muscle and bone, to will it back into being.
‘Wait.’ And the falling feel of a memory trick jolts me. This is how it always starts. Lucien’s voice speaking to me out of the dark, sounding me through the questions — always detached, always a step ahead. The voice that knows more than I do always. More even about my own story. But that means something else too, I realise. If someone knows all there is to know about you, isn’t that a kind of forgiveness?
‘It’s easier if you wait until some of the feeling comes back. You’re going to be all right. You’ve had the worst of it.’
I shape the one word that I have in my head and somehow push it past my lips with the hope he will understand.
‘Eyes.’
I can hear him shuffle toward me, maybe on his knees. Then I feel cold fingers on my face. The fingertips of two hands touch just at my cheekbones, just under my eye sockets. I try to flinch away. The touch moves on to my eyelids and then to my chin and forehead. Then there is a cool, distant feeling, almost unrelated to me, where I think my hands are. I feel movement as Lucien picks them up and places them on my chest. Both of them lie over my heart, and I can feel their outline and relief.
‘There shouldn’t be any lasting damage to your eyes. You’ll start to regain sight soon. But it’s dark in here. Hold on.’ I hear rustling and Lucien’s hands pat at my shoulders. ‘Do you have the lighter, the one your father gave you?’ he asks.
I hiss an approximate ‘yes’.
‘Can I get it?’ he asks.
I hiss again and feel him tug my shoulders to remove the pack. I want to tell him it’s in the outside pocket, but he finds it presto and I hear the rolling burr-bite of the wheel and see the blue para in my mind. The flint sparks and I strain to see through the dark.
‘Anything?’
There is only blackness.
I muster a grunt and then wait to hear the wheel bite again. Still just blackness. Grainy, world-ending, silent dark. This time Lucien waits without speaking. I feel the touch under my eyes again, and the cool pressure on my forehead and chin, and a small segment of melody that I do not know.
‘Come back, Simon,’ Lucien says, and he strikes the flint a third time and I see it haloed in the black, a small, dull orange glow of flame.
I try to lift my head. I want to tell Lucien that he has to let the light burn, that it is very, very important to do so. I have never felt so alone, not even on my first arrival in London. But the light flicks off and I am blind again. Helpless.
Then he begins to talk.
‘It wasn’t meant to go like that, Simon. Please believe me. I knew it was a risk bringing you here, but the wind was from the south all day and I didn’t think it would change.’