He came to a halt against a pile of ornately framed paintings and photographs, several of which toppled and smashed. He lay amid the litter of glass for a moment to catch his breath, but the next sight snatched it from him again.
The by-blow was coming at him out of the gloom.
‘Get up!’ it told him.
He was dead to its instruction, his attention claimed by the face before him. It wasn’t Elroy’s off-spring, though this monstrosity also had its father’s features. No; this child was his.
The horror he’d glimpsed, stirring from the lullaby he’d heard lying in the dirt of the rubbish tip, had been all too real. The sisters had squeezed his seed from him, and this beast with his face was the consequence.
It was not a fine likeness. Its naked body was entirely hairless, and there were several horrid distortions – the fingers of one hand were twice their natural length, and those of the other half-inch stumps, while from the shoulder blades eruptions of matter sprang like malformed wings – parodies, perhaps, of the creatures his dreams envied.
It was made in more of its father’s image than the other beasts had been, however, and faced with himself, he hesitated.
It was enough, that hesitation, to give the beast the edge. It leapt at him, seizing his throat with its long-fingered hand, its touch without a trace of warmth, its mouth sucking at his as if to steal the breath from his lips.
It intended patricide, no doubt of that; its grip was unconditional. He felt his legs weaken, and the child allowed him to collapse to his knees, following him down. The knuckles of his fingers brushed against the glass shards, and he made a fumbling attempt to pick one up, but between mind and hand the instruction lost urgency. The weapon dropped from his hand.
Somewhere, in that place of breath and light from which he was outcast, he heard Shadwell laughing. Then the sound stopped, and he was staring at his own face, which looked back at him as if from a corrupted mirror. His eyes, which he’d always liked for the paleness of their colour; the mouth, which though it had been an embarrassment to him as a child because he’d thought it too girlish, he’d now trained into a modicum of severity when the occasion demanded, and which was, he was told, capable of a winning smile. The ears, large and protuberant: a comedian’s ears on a face that warranted something sleeker …
Probably most people slip out of the world with such trivialities in their heads. Certainly it was that way for Cal.
Thinking of his ears, the undertow took hold of him and dragged him down.
The foyer was darker than the main warehouse, but she could see the vague figure of her grandmother standing beside the boarded-up box-office.
‘Mimi?’ she said, her mind a blur of contrary impressions.
‘Here I am,’ said the old lady, and opened her arms to Suzanna.
The proffered embrace was also an error of judgment, but on the part of the enemy. Gestures of physical affection had not been Mimi’s forte in life, and Suzanna saw no reason to suppose her grandmother would have changed her habits upon expiring.
‘You’re not Mimi,’ she said.
‘I know it’s a surprise, seeing me,’ the would-be ghost replied. The voice was soft as a feather-fall. ‘But there’s nothing to be afraid of.’
‘Who are you?’
‘You know who I am,’ came the response.
Suzanna didn’t linger for any further words of seduction, but turned to retrace her path. There were perhaps three yards between her and the exit, but now they seemed as many miles. She tried to take a step on that long road, but the commotion in her head suddenly rose to deafening proportions.
The presence behind her had no intention of letting her escape. It sought a confrontation, and it was a waste of effort to defy it. So she turned and looked.
The mask was melting, though there was ice in the eyes that emerged from behind it, not fire. She knew the face, and though she’d not thought herself ready to brave its fury yet, she was strangely elated by the sight. The last shreds of Mimi evaporated, and Immacolata stood revealed.
‘My sister …’ she said, the air around her dancing to her words. ‘… my sister the Hag had me play that part. She thought she saw Mimi in your face. She was right, wasn’t she? You’re her child.’
‘Grandchild,’ Suzanna murmured.
‘Child,’ came the certain reply.
Suzanna stared at the woman before her, fascinated by the masterwork of grief half-concealed in those features. Immacolata flinched at her scrutiny.
‘How dare you pity me?’ she said, as if she’d read Suzanna’s thought, and on the words something leapt from her face.
It came too fast for Suzanna to see what it was; she had time only to throw herself out of its whining path. The wall behind her shook as it was struck. The next instant the face was spilling more brightness towards her.
Suzanna was not afraid. The display only elated her further. This time, as the brightness came her way, her instinct overruled all constraints of sanity, and she put her hand out as if to catch the light.
It was like plunging her arm into a torrent of ice-water. A torrent in which innumerable fish were swimming, fast, fast, against the flood; swimming to spawn. She closed her fist, snatching at this brimming tide, and pulled.
The action had three consequences. One, a cry from Immacolata. Two, the sudden cessation of the din in Suzanna’s head. Three, all that her hand had felt – the chill, the torment and the shoal it contained – all of that was suddenly within her. Her body was the flood. Not the body of flesh and bone, but some other anatomy, made more of thought than of substance, and more ancient than either. Somehow it had recognized itself in Immacolata’s assault, and thrown off its sleep.
Never in her life had she felt so complete. In the face of this feeling all other ambition – for happiness, for pleasure, for power – all others faded.
She looked back at Immacolata, and her new eyes saw not an enemy but a woman possessed of the same torrent that ran in her own veins. A woman twisted and full of anguish but for all that more like her than not.
‘That was stupid,’ said the Incantatrix.
‘Was it?’ said Suzanna. She didn’t think so.
‘Better you remained unfound. Better you never tasted the menstruum.’
‘The menstruum?’
‘Now you’ll know more than you wish to know, feel more than you ever wanted to feel.’ There seemed to be something