Despite Nimrod's quiet despair, Cal couldn't help but smile at this. And indeed, perhaps the man was right; perhaps the Seerkind had no choice now but to enter the Kingdom, and make whatever peace they could with it.
‘I must go,' he was saying. ‘There's a big meeting tonight. Everyone has a right to have their say. We'll be talking all night, most likely.' He went to the door.
‘I won't go to California without saying goodbye,' he remarked, and left the patient alone.
2
Two days passed, and nobody came. Cal was getting better quickly; and it seemed that whatever rapture Nimrod had worked on the staff had indeed diverted them from making any report of their patient's wound to the police.
By the afternoon of the third day Cal knew he was much improved, because he was getting restless. The television -Nimrod's new love - could provide only soap opera and a bad movie. The latter, the lesser of the two banalities, was playing when the door opened, and a woman dressed in black stepped into the room. It took Cal a moment before he recognized his visitor as Apolline.
Before he could offer a welcome she said:
‘No time to talk, Calhoun -' and, approaching the bed, thrust a parcel at Cal.
Take it!' she said.
He did so.
‘I have to be away quickly,' she went on. Her face softened as she gazed at him. ‘You look tired, my boy,' she said. ‘Take a holiday!' And with that advice retreated to the door.
‘Wait!' he called after her.
‘No time! No time!' she said, and was away.
He took the string and brown paper from around his present, and discovered inside the book of faery-tales which Suzanna had found in Rue Street. With it, there was a scrawled note.
Cal, it read,
Keep hold of this for me, will you? Never let it out of your sight. Our enemies are still with us. When the time is safe, I'll find you.
Do this for us all.
I'm kissing you.
Suzanna.
He read the letter over and over, moved beyond telling by the way she'd signed off: I'm kissing you.
But he was confounded by her instructions: the book seemed an unremarkable volume, its binding torn, its pages yellowed. The text was in German, which he had no command of whatsoever. Even the illustrations were dark, and full of shadows, and he'd had enough shadows to hurt him a lifetime. But if she wanted him to keep it safe, then he'd do so. She was wise, and he knew better than to take her instructions lightly.
3
After the visit from Apolline, nobody else came. He was not altogether surprised. There'd been an urgency in the woman's manner, and yet more in the letter from Suzanna. Our enemies are still with us, she'd written. If she wrote that, then it was true.
They discharged him after a week, and he made his way back to Liverpool. Little had changed. The grass still refused to grow in the churned earth where Lilia Pellicia had died; the trains still ran North and South; the china dogs on the dining-room sill still looked for their master, their vigil rewarded only with dust.
There was dust too on the note that Geraldine had left on the kitchen table - a brief missive saying that until Cal learned to behave like a reasonable human being he could expect none of her company.
There were several other letters awaiting him - one from his section leader at the firm, asking him where the hell he was, and stating that if he wished to keep his job he'd better make some explanation of his absence post haste. The letter was dated the llth. It was now the 25th. Cal presumed he was out of a job.
He couldn't find it in him to be much concerned by unemployment; nor indeed by Geraldine's absence. He wanted to be alone; wanted the time to think through all that had happened. More significantly, he found feelings about anything hard to come by. As the days passed, and he made a stab at reassembling his life, he rapidly came to see that his time in the Gyre had left him wounded in more ways than one. It was as though the forces unleashed at the Temple had found their way into him, and left a little wilderness where there'd once been a capacity for tears and regret.
Even the poet was silent. Though Cal could still remember Mad Mooney's verses by heart they were just sounds to him now; they failed to move.
There was one comfort in this: that perhaps his new-found stoicism suited better the function of solitary librarian. He would be vigilant, but he would anticipate nothing, neither disaster nor revelation.
That was not to say he would give up looking to the future. True, he was just a Cuckoo: scared and weary and alone. But so, in the end, were most of his tribe: it didn't mean all was lost. As long as they could still be moved by a minor chord, or brought to a crisis of tears by scenes of lovers reunited; as long as there was room in their cautious hearts for games of chance, and laughter in the face of God, that must surely be enough to save them, at the last.
If not, there was no hope for any living thing.
BOOK THREE. OUT OF THE EMPTY QUARTER
Part Ten. The Search for the Scourge
‘... if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.' Friedrich Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil
I
NO REST FOR THE WICKED
1
Before the explorers, the Rub al Khali had been a blank space on the map of the world. After them, it remained so.
Its very name, given to it by the Bedu, the desert nomads who'd lived for unnumbered centuries in the deserts of the Arab Peninsula, meant: The Empty Quarter. That they, familiar with wildernesses that would drive most men insane, should designate this place empty was the most profound testament to its nullity imaginable.
But amongst those Europeans for whom names were not proof enough, and who had, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, gone looking for places to test their mettle, the Rub al Khali rapidly acquired legendary status. It was perhaps the single greatest challenge the earth could offer to adventurers, its barrenness unrivalled by any wasteland, equatorial or arctic.
Nothing lived there, nor could. It was simply a vast nowhere, two hundred and fifty thousand square miles of desolation, its dunes rising in places to the height of small mountains, and elsewhere giving way to tracts of heat-shattered stone large enough to lose a people in. It was trackless, waterless and changeless. Most who dared its wastes were swallowed by it, its dust increased by the sum of their powdered bones.
But for that breed of man - as much ascetic as explorer -who was half in love with losing himself to such an end – the number of expeditions that had retreated in the face of the Quarter's maddening absence, or disappeared into it, was simply a spur.
Some challenged the wasteland in the name of cartology, determined to map the place for those who might come after them, only, to discover that there was nothing to map but the chastening of their spirit. Others went looking for lost tombs and cities, where fabled wealth awaited that man strong enough to reach into Hell and snatch it out. Still others, a patient, secretive few, went in the name of Academe, seeking verification of theories geological or historical. Still others looked for the Ark there; or Eden.
All had this in common: that if they returned from the Empty Quarter- even though their journey might have taken them only a day's ride into that place - they came back changed men. Nobody could set his eyes on such a void and return to hearth and home without having lost a part of himself to the wilderness forever. Many, having endured the void once, went back, and back again, as if daring the desert to claim them; not content until it did. And those unhappy few who died at home, died with their eyes not on the loving faces at their bedside, nor on the cherry tree in blossom outside the window, but on that waste that called them as only the Abyss can call, promising the soul the balm of nothingness.