"The corpse-reviver? Where did you get that?"
"Oh, a book," I say.
So much for trying to sound like I know what I'm talking about.
"Well, I've got it in everything up to 10M," he says.
"I want 1M," I say. "The thousandth potency. That's right, isn't it?"
He frowns again. "You know that higher potencies can be dangerous if you don't know what you're doing?"
I don't say what I'm thinking, which is: But it's just water.
"Yes," I say. "I know. It'll be fine."
"All right," he says. "But I'll have to give you some sort of consultation. What seems to be the problem?" He yawns while I say something about a headache. He lets me go on for a while and then, while I'm still talking, he opens up one of the big drawers and takes out a brown bottle.
"Yeah, yeah. OK. I prescribe Carbo-v," he says. "That'll be eight pounds. That's for the consultation. The remedy is free."
"Thanks," I say, taking the bottle. I pay for the "consultation" and the glass vial I picked up before. Then I leave.
Chapter Eleven
Somehow it's gone six o'clock by the time I'm back out on the freezing street. The light from car headlamps hangs mournfully in the thin mist and people are walking along wearing thick hats and gloves and carrying briefcases, or plastic bags full of lumpy shopping, or both. I decide to go home now and try to pick up the holy water on my way to Heather's instead. The cathedral is on my way to her house, anyway.
Wolfgang's bicycle is in the hallway when I get home. My hands are frozen, even though I kept them both clenched in my pockets all the way back, one holding the glass vial, the other holding the Carbo Vegetabilis. The first thing I do is hide the remedy in an old sugar tin at the back of one of my cupboards; I'm not entirely sure why. Then I put the glass vial on the table and run both my hands under warm water, trying to wash away the cold. I put some coffee on the stove and then go into the bathroom. I try brushing my hair but it's too tangled, so I stick it up in a band instead. I look at myself in the mirror and, as usual, wonder to what level I am cursed. Common sense says that curses don't exist. But then I think that later tonight I am going to make Lumas's concoction, drink it, and see what happens. My reflection doesn't seem to react to this thought, except I think I can sense a mild disappointment in my eyes. When the concoction fails to have any effect, then what? Then it's back to real life and real work without even an office to myself anymore. I put some face powder on my already pallid face and then apply some pale pink lipstick. I don't think I'll get changed again. The jeans I put on earlier are clean, if a bit washed-out and frayed, and all my jumpers look more or less the same, anyway.
After I've had my coffee, I wander down the hallway and bang on Wolfgang's door. He answers it almost immediately and invites me in to his kitchen. Neither of us has a fitted kitchen, just a couple of shelves and cupboards. Wolfgang's shelves are all crammed with nuts, seeds, and dried fruit in clear packets. His cupboards only contain alcohol, and that's why I'm here. As I walk in I realize that the kitchen smells cleaner than usual. Usually it only contains one Formicatopped table and one chair, and if I come to eat here I have to bring my own chair. This evening, however, there are two chairs and there is a little pot of flowers in the center of the table.
"Do you think this is an inviting space?" he asks me.
"Yes, of course," I say. "Especially with two chairs. Is Catherine coming round?"
"Catherine? No. I have finished with Catherine. I'm expecting someone much more special than Catherine."
"Your love life moves quickly," I say.
"Ha! Yes. Quickly and unexpectedly."
"OK. Well in that case I won't keep you..."
"You were not coming for dinner? Because as you know, any other night..."
"No," I say. "Don't worry. Although I wish I was looking for somewhere to have dinner. I'm actually about to go and meet the people who've taken over my office." I shake my head. "I don't know why I'm going, really."
"Ah," he says. "Then, if it is not one of my gourmet dinners, presumably you want something else?"
"Mmm. Yeah. I was wondering if you had any more of that dodgy wine."
Just before Christmas Wolfgang acquired about thirty bottles of Bulgarian red wine from person or persons unknown and he was selling it to me at a pound a bottle. I haven't bought any for a couple of weeks but I need to take a bottle over to Heather's and I don't want to pay a fiver in the supermarket when I've now only got about ten pounds left in the world.
He shakes his head. "Dodgy? How can you say my wine is dodgy?"
I laugh. "OK, then. Your totally legal wine."
His eyes flit horizontally to one of the cupboards. "I have a few bottles left."
"Can I have one?"
"Of course." He pulls one out of the cupboard. The label is written in Bulgarian, which does make it look pretty authentic and, dare I say it, expensive. "So how is life?" he asks, handing it over.
"OK," I say, giving him a pound coin. "Weird. Oh—did I tell you I finished the book?"
"The cursed book?"
"Yeah."
"And this recipe was there? You have the ingredients?"
I don't ask why on earth Wolf would make the accurate assumption that, once I knew these ingredients, the next thing I would do would be to track them down.
"No," I lie. "Sadly, it wasn't there."
"So what happens to Mr. Y?"
"Pretty much everything he feared would happen. There is one good thing: He makes up the concoction and takes it, and it does transport him back to the Troposphere. But it's all horrible. He enters his wife's mind and discovers how unhappy he has made her. Then he enters his business rival's mind and realizes he will never defeat him. Just before it becomes clear that he and his wife are going to have to go to the workhouse, he discovers a bit more about how the Troposphere works. You can in fact jump from one person's mind to another, just as Mr. Y thought. And by doing that you can travel across memories.... It's a bit like surfing, although Mr. Y gives it his own term: Pedesis."
"Across memories...? So perhaps like time travel?"
"I think that was the implication."
I remember the penultimate paragraph of the book.
I had not found happiness, or, indeed, my fortune, within the shadows of the Troposphere. Yet within it I felt something of what a bird may feel skimming in the air : for the time I roamed within this new world I knew I was free. And although in the world of flesh I had failed, in the world of minds I flew, perhaps not as a bird flies, but as a man moving fast over an infinity of stepping stones, each new stone providing a platform from which to jump to many others. As I became accomplished at this method of leaping further inside the world of minds, moving with the lightest and quickest of steps, with the ease of the surf on moving water, I decided to call this movement Pedesis, from the Greek πηδησις
. This river with its stones, like the landscape with its dwellings, flowed forwards—yes—but also backwards. And so I have decided to take flight, pedetically, into the mists of time. Thus I arrive at my story's end, for, this evening, at midnight, I plan to embark on this journey into the very depths of the Troposphere. I doubt that I will ever return to complete my story, so far will I be from its beginning.
"So what actually happens to Mr. Y?" Wolfgang asks. "In what sense does he meet his end?"
"Oh, he vanishes into the Troposphere."
"What, in his body?"
"No." I shake my head. "They find his body later."
Wolf's eyes open wide. "He dies?"
"Yes," I say. "There's an 'Editor's Note' at the end that explains how he was found, cold and dead, on the floor of his cellar. He had locked himself in and taken his last journey from there. His wife thought he had gone missing, and then discovered the locked cellar door and alerted the police. He had starved to death."