Angelmaker

XII Nzzzz​zeeee​yaooo​oooww​ww; not strictly a nun; taken.

Mercer Cradle stands in his sister’s living room with a vastly valuable and possibly insanely dangerous gold bee in one hand and makes zooming noises. It is the defective bee Joe was given by Ted Sholt, of course, the others being out and about causing consternation in the wider world. Mercer is holding the thing between thumb and forefinger and trying to persuade it, by means of demonstration and sound effects and occasional words of encouragement, to take wing.

Mercer did not begin this scientific experiment immediately upon viewing the small collection of trophies which Joe and his sister brought back from the riverside storeroom. His initial position was that the bee should be imprisoned and X-rayed, MRI’d and electron-microscoped, until it yielded whatever alarming secrets it possessed. Joe Spork observed that these options required equipment they did not have and Polly Cradle speculated that attacking the entity might provoke it, whereupon Mercer adopted a strategy of aloof watchfulness in which Joe was permitted to examine the patient while Mercer loomed nearby with a lump hammer—a sort of short sledge—which Polly had formerly used to drive the iron pilings into the walls of her house.

When the bee remained quiescent and indeed rather boringly inert, Mercer became less cautious. His first approach was a very tentative poke, administered with a pencil held at arm’s length, in case the bee should turn into an evil machine of death before his eyes. When this elicited no reaction, he nudged it solidly with the blunt end, and it fell over. He blew on it. He shouted at it, coaxed it, wheedled it and scolded it. Finally, he touched it with his index finger, and when he remained unexploded and unzombified, he picked it up and shook it. Joe was moved to protest that it was delicate, and Mercer agreed not to stand on it or throw it at the wall, but refused to hand it over to Joe for closer inspection using his jeweller’s loupe. It was at this point that Mercer began his attempt to educate the bee by example, and Polly Cradle, who had appeared on the brink of objecting that Joe was the expert in curious automata, was apparently stunned into silence by the image of her brother spinning in place with the bee on his outstretched palm and making buzzing noises.

“Nzzzz​zeeee​yaooo​oooww​ww!” Mercer concludes excitedly, and stares at the bee with the hopeful pride of a new father. There is a faint sound of someone sneezing from the street outside, and the skitter of leaves on the paving in the little courtyard garden beyond the patio door.

“It’s broken,” Mercer concludes. He glances at Joe Spork. “You broke it.”

“I broke it?”

“Probably. Maybe it was the damp. Or it’s bust a spring. Or you got fluff in the wind-y parts.”

“Fluff.”

“Yes. Lint. Pocket funk.”

“In the…”

“Wind-y. The parts that wind.”

“Those parts.”

“Yes. Which I imagine are susceptible to lint.”

Joe is about to explain that any item which can remain functional for forty years by the seaside, which is made furthermore of gold, and which is purportedly an engine of revolutionary change constructed on the principles of arcane mathematics, ought to be immune to lint. But, in fact, the use of gold in the production might be an attempt to avoid rust and oxidisation, and any machine can be gummed up with goo. So instead of saying “You’re a pillock,” which uncharitable assessment had been on his lips, he says instead “Give it to me,” and sits in the lightest corner of the room with his loupe and his tool bag. A moment later, he opens the bag, and uses a set of padded measuring calipers usually reserved for the interior of watches costing more than the average flat in London to tug at the gemmed wing-cases of the bee.

The cases lift, revealing splendid, gossamer wings beneath. Gossamer, but very strong. The thin stuff gouges a tiny scratch in the edge of the calipers when his hand shakes.

Note to self: Pointy. Do not cut your fingertip off.

Although in fact the wings are made carefully. It’s hard to expose the edge in a way which would let you do yourself an injury. A momentary vision of flying razorbees fades away.

The saddle of the bee comes away, wings and all, revealing an inner cavity. Even through the loupe, he can barely make out the parts. Cogs, yes. Springs. Everything spiralling downward, inward, smaller and smaller and smaller, each layer geared to take instruction from the one below in a repeating pattern. Cellular clockwork? Fractal clockwork?

One thing is certain: he can’t fix this. It’s absolutely beyond him, and beyond Daniel too, without question. And yet… oh. There is something. A change in style where the impossible meets the merely brilliant. Yes. The layer which is humanly imaginable was made by hand, and from the shape of the works and the way in which they are arranged, it could be Daniel’s: it has his finicky preference, his bullish allegiance to the leaf spring and the conventional metals of his time. Below that layer, it’s a different matter, a thing of physics. Mathematics made real. But there at the join, there is… something. The central driveshaft is too thick… oh. Mercer is actually right. There’s a foreign object. Too thin to be an eyelash, and too supple… a single strand of silk. It could actually be a cobweb, wrapped around the spindle. But how to remove it?

He ponders, then laughs, and stands up.

“What?” Mercer asks.

Joe scuffs his feet back and forth vigorously across Polly’s carpet. “It’s clockwork,” he explains. “It’s not electrical. At least, I don’t think it’s electrical.” He grins, and leans down with the loupe, extending his finger to a quarter-inch away from the bee. Through the lens, he can see the thread stand to attention, the static charge from his finger plucking at it. Fatal to electronics. Fine for clockwork.

He waves his finger one way, then the other, and it unravels a bit. He tries again, and then it flies to his fingertip and away. He catches his breath. The bee doesn’t move.

Slowly, he puts everything back in place, layer after layer and then the wings and the cases, and finally sets the bee down on the table.

“Well,” Mercer says after a moment, “I suppose we are no worse off than we were before.”

After a moment, they leave the bee where it is, and turn to the record collection, and the small portable gramophone known as a Piglet.

The little machine does indeed make a soft whiffling noise when Joe Spork turns the crank, and then a sort of grating roink when he gets to the stop point of the spring. He puts the first record on the turntable and a fresh needle in the clamp, and lowers the arm.

The ghost voice speaks again, scratching down through decades, musing and melancholic. His grandmother. His blood. It’s not even a letter, this one. Joe Spork wonders whether she had a recorder of her own. Perhaps Daniel made her one. He pictures her alone at her desk, and his imagination inserts, of all things, an inkwell in front of her and an actual quill in her hand, because all this was such a long time ago. She clears her throat, and speaks.

You said once I knew nothing of the real world, and I replied that you had it exactly backwards. Only mathematicians know the world for what it is. I can see you, waving your hands and shaking your head, Daniel, but it is true. I will prove it to you.

Suppose that you take two clocks, and you place one upon a pedestal in your house and put the other on board a rocket and fire it around the Earth. When the rocket lands, the two clocks will tell different times. Why? Because the clock in the rocket has been closer to the speed of light and less time has passed on the rocket than in your office. That is the least strange thing about the universe, Daniel: that time, which appears most absolute to human beings, is nothing of the kind. It is relative.

Do you still not see what I mean? Very well, then consider a cat in a box with a bottle of poison. At any moment, the bottle may open, or it may not. At any moment, the cat may die. Now: take two pictures, one after another, of what is in the box. Look at the second one first. At that moment, the observation determines what is in the first picture, and what happened to the cat. From our point of view, the information flows backwards through time. This is not a joke or a romance, Daniel. It is quite simply the way of things. The universe is undecided without us—and our minds are part of what exists at some level we do not yet begin to understand.

That is the true nature of the world we inhabit. Not the easy one we mostly encounter. Anyone who tells you otherwise is living in a dream.

The record comes to a stop, the needle looping around the inner ring in an uneven swirl.

Joe leans back as Frankie’s record comes to an end, and looks around. Mercer Cradle is seated on the floor, Buddha-like and unexpectedly limber, a cross-legged legal statue cut from the stone with his eyes closed in thought. The Bethanys have taken up flanking positions on the sofa behind him, slightly fidgety because they were unable to force him into a comfortable chair and they feel strange about sitting above their boss. Polly sits next to Joe, and has a single sheet of paper on a glass clipboard, ready to take notes in soft pencil.

“Next one,” Mercer says quietly, before Joe can wonder aloud whether there is anything here of value.

It is Polly who picks the next record, and this time, the voice is not dissociated or melancholic, but desperate with pain and horror.

They are all dead, and I killed them. I am a murderer now! Yes, I am. Don’t say it is not my fault. I built the machine, oh, with such great intentions. I was saving us all! But I got something wrong, Daniel. Me. I got something wrong, the train stopped at Wistithiel and they are dead, and worse than dead, and I have no idea why I am alive, and I should not be, and Edie came to save me.

I want to believe it was him. Shem Shem Tsien, like an old, bad dream, breaking my machines and pushing buttons. But he was not here, Daniel. I did this all by myself. I killed a multitude, and now they will close me down and the engine will never exist unless I can find a way alone.

I do not want to be alone, Daniel. I am sending you something. You must seal it away. No one must see it, because it is death; death such as no one has ever died until I came along. Death by destiny, by crystallisation, by inevitability. I killed their souls and left their bodies alive. In the history of human life, there has never been anyone so dead as they are.

I am the greatest murderer there has ever been.

And then she cries until the message comes to an end.

Almost unwillingly, Mercer turns the record over. Crackle, pop. Fizzle, splot. Crackle, pop. After the savage horror of the confession, it is almost soothing. They listen for a while. Finally, Mercer scoops another from the bag and sets it on the turntable. The voice is older, and mercifully the horror is absent, though in its place is a soul-deep regret, a sorrow which has weathered in and will never leave.

I confess, I thought you were an idiot. Yes, Daniel, I know, you have never given me cause and I am an impatient old baggage. I am what I am, and what life has made me. I try to be better.

You were right. I made the machine strong so that it would cover a larger area and that made it too strong for the mind.

Pause.

I know the solution, now. How to make it work. I knew even while it was happening, but it was too late. The answer is to retransmit. To have a great network, so that the signal can be very gentle and yet reach around the world.

Do you remember that we made love in the field outside my mother’s house? And you were stung on the rump by a bee and mourned for her because you said bees were creatures of creation, and having only one sting were loath to attack? That this was why almost every culture in the world venerates the bee and hates the wasp?

Make me a bee, Daniel. Just one. Make me a glorious bee which people will love, and I will make something wonderful. Bees will be the messengers of my truth. They will spread across the world and connect everyone.

Make it splendid, Daniel. Make it wild and pretty. The thing I do now must be so much more than a machine.

Polly Cradle is grinning, and so is Joe. Mercer frowns at them both.

“What?” he says. “Don’t tell me it’s just that they were still in love. I shall be sick.”

“No,” Polly says. “I was just thinking: maybe this isn’t a disaster. The bees. The machine. Maybe it’s a good thing that’s happening, and all we have to do is wait.”

Joe nods. Mercer does not. He opens his mouth to make some objection, but then three things happen on top of one another and whatever it was he was going to say is put aside.

The first thing is that the absent Bethany returns and passes a slim folder to Polly Cradle, who frowns at it and then lays it out on the table.

Two photographs, freshly printed from old images, most likely magazines or newspapers: a gorgeous matinée idol with a high forehead, smiling lightly into the camera, and his older brother, grim-faced and silvered, scowling from the hood of a cloak.

“Shem Shem Tsien,” Polly Cradle says, “also known as the Opium Khan. Think Idi Amin with a dash of Lex Luthor. And this Brother Sheamus of the Order of John the Maker. This is a picture of him from before they all started wearing veils all the time.”

Yes. The same man. Although… it can’t actually be the same Sheamus, now. A son, surely, taking up his father’s vocation.

I thought I had it rough, father-wise.

And then:

Does that mean the Opium Khan has reformed, or that the British government has been corrupted?

But while that’s a question which might have made sense a few years ago, no one seriously believes in the good conduct of their leaders any more.

Just as he is about to share this with the others, the second and third things happen, and the world changes.

One is silent and invisible; an intangible explosion which occurs entirely inside the head of Joshua Joseph Spork. The other is very public and very specific, and takes place three and one-half feet off the ground. They happen at approximately the same time, and so the strange, inaudible detonation which afflicts Joe is missed even by Polly Cradle, who otherwise would spot it clearly for what it is.

Between two records—one claiming mendaciously to be by Duke Ellington and the other labelled with equal falseness as being by Eddie Lockjaw Davis—is sandwiched a single sheet of shiny accounting paper, split down the middle into two columns with a single sure stroke of red pen. It has no timer, no spring, and no pineapple indentations which will fly off as shrapnel, and in fact looks almost exactly not like a hand grenade, and yet all the same it goes off under Joe Spork and vaporises him entirely.

Joe Spork, the exploded man, cannot understand why everyone is looking so calm, until he realises that none of them, not knowing Mathew and Daniel and their appalling confrontations, can understand the columns of figures for what they are.

Here, squeezed between the secrets of Daniel’s non-jazz collection, is something the old man squirrelled away. Something he couldn’t face? Or something he treasured and understood, which brought him some measure of peace?

If these numbers are to be believed, if Joe correctly interprets the figures in Mathew’s own somewhat careless hand—and he surely does, having struggled himself for a decade against the same rip tide—Daniel Spork’s great, stand-alone, splendid business of clocks, the bulwark he set against the surge of modernity and careless consumerist tat, lost money hand over fist. The shop was not, had never been, profitable. Only the ceaseless intravenous transfusions of money from Mathew, evidenced here on this hastily scribbled account, ever made it possible to balance the books. And these transfusions Mathew had managed as best he could in conditions of total secrecy, above all from his father, so that Daniel could continue to believe in his straight-arrow path and continue to deride his son’s choices.

Mathew the gangster, Mathew the liar, Mathew the thief, had begun his life of crime to save his father’s honest business. Had carried it, all along.

Joe is still staring at this earth-shaker, this profound and alien intrusion into his universe from another where everything is different, when he hears Mercer’s voice calling to him through the fog and the final event changes the game once more.

“Hey, sleepyhead!” Joe turns, and Mercer tosses him the golden bee. “It’s warm!”

Joe extends his hand, but—he has never been any good at catching, kicking was always his thing—fumbles the take. He drops instinctively to catch the bee before it hits the ground, and misses again.

Misses, because it is not falling.

Six inches from his cheek, the multifaceted rose-quartz eyes glint at him, and gold-veined wings hum in the air. It flitters towards him very slowly, and lands on his nose. Joe tries to look at it, winces as he inevitably crosses his eyes. He swears he can hear the whisper of golden legs as it moves onto his cheek. Am I in danger? And if he is, what can he possibly do about it?

The bee drops back into the air and lands on the tabletop again, where it wanders bee-ishly around in a random pattern.

Apis mechanica. Live and in person. He watches it without thinking about it, because all of his mind is burning with Mathew and Daniel, and the sense that he has misunderstood everything he has ever known to be true.

A moment later, the bee takes wing again and bumbles around the room. It bumps cheerfully into Polly Cradle’s head, the lampshade, and finally the window.

Everyone starts talking at once, and in the confusion it’s quite natural for Joe to slip out and wash his face.

When Joshua Joseph Spork steps out of the door of Polly Cradle’s house, it is with a strange feeling of coming home and a powerful sense of betrayal. Moving down the street in the gathering dark, knowing that he is to some degree on the run, he feels a kinship with his father which surpasses anything he has ever before experienced. He flinches at shadows, ducks away from lamplight, and when he accidentally catches someone’s eye, he rides the stare, throws such aggression into it that they immediately look away, and do not see him. Indeed, they actively seek to forget him. He steps onto a bus, and out of sheer perversity steps off at the next stop and takes another which goes the long way around to his destination. Or rather, not perversity, but a natural understanding that what he is doing now is rash, and stemming from that, the certain knowledge that it must be done well, or not at all. It must be done in the high style of the Night Market, with all due deference to misdirection and sleight of mind.

He feels alive.

On the other hand, he feels rotten. Mercer will be fine, will call Joe an idiot and then set about rescuing the situation. It’s not quite so certain that Polly Cradle will be fine. Obviously, she will take no physical harm, but that Joe has sneaked out—successfully executing this time the plan he formulated when she caught him before—will wound her, and he knows it and she will know that he knows it and has done it anyway, and that will hurt her again. He has no regrets about his decision: this isn’t a case of wanting to recant. Blood is not optional. At the same time, whatever is happening between them is also not to be underestimated. They have found in each other some kind of jigsaw-puzzle match, a mutual knowing which goes beyond the smell of her still on his skin, and which he is at pains not to define or recognise until it has time to settle into him.

That Polly could be family one day, that she might—and he might—unite Cradle and Spork in one great dynasty of unlikely rules and criminal histories, his present, practical mind puts firmly to one side. Before he can even reach for that future, or one like it, he has to climb up on top of the rubble of the past and see what the world actually looks like. The rubble of Mathew’s past, which now appears to have been less a wrong turn than the heavy footsteps of a man carrying more than his fair share of other people’s history—a description which Joshua Joseph Spork has always considered applied to himself, and which it now appears applies to almost everyone.

He changes buses again and peers through the window, seeing his own eyes as black gaps in his reflection, and looking through them. The building he needs will be an absence against the dark; a shadow in a shadow. It’s not a tourist spot. The nuns do not light their façade with burning lamps as some churches these days do. The place is less than a hundred years old, and ugly beyond reasonable measure. It is the most woebegone religious building he has ever seen.

The gate is black, and so is the path leading up to it: black gravel, pieces of marble and basalt. It must have seemed like a good idea in ’68 and now no one is allowed to change it; the design is protected by all manner of orders and by-laws.

The walls are yellow stone, stained by time and by London’s population of motor vehicles. When Harriet Spork first came here, there was a pile of flowers left at the foot of a lamp-post in memory of a cyclist killed in a collision with a glazier’s van—decapitated, apparently, by a sheet of reinforced safety glass destined for a local school. From sideways on, the safety turned out to be limited.

All of the bouquets were removed after a few weeks save one, a narrow vase the woman’s brother glued to the lamp-post and the concrete slab in which it is set with some concoction not even the borough’s street-sweepers have been able to undo. Joe came once a month in those days, until Harriet asked him to stop, and over half a year he watched the grim little flowers go from living, to dead, to dry, and finally to a kind of strange fossilisation.

And there it is. He lets it slip by, ignores it. There will be danger here, of that he’s quite certain. The enemy—he doesn’t name them because when you name something you believe you have understood something about it, and he has no idea, still, what his enemy really is—would have to be stone stupid to miss this one. They will anticipate disguises and diversions. They will be watching.

Mathew, in his head: Watching is a mug’s game. You watch for something, you think you know what it will look like. If it doesn’t look like that, it can walk right past you. The human brain, son, is a miracle of rare device, but it dreams and fabulates and it can be induced to deceive the eye. Remember the Monte? Yes? Well, this is like that. You watch too hard for one thing, you miss the other. So when you’re lookout, Joe, don’t watch for coppers. Just wait and see who comes along. You’ll know trouble when it turns up. That’s science, that is.

Joe skips off the bus and turns left down a small street with a crowd of kids. He walks with them as if he’s their big brother, then carries on when they duck into a building site for cigarettes and chilly, frustrated foreplay.

Careful to look merely curious rather than like a man contemplating a spot of B&E, he glances up, feeling a long-suppressed and pleasurable thrill.

Here’s to crime.

The far end of this alley is the back wall of a modern block built at a time when human aesthetic preferences were not considered a factor in local government architecture and all housing was to be neat, sheer, and above all cheap. Somewhat less attention was paid than should have been to London’s clay soil and underground rivers, and inevitably the structure bowed and sagged, and had to be saved from collapse using metal struts which run through the entire frame. These struts, the housebreaker’s friend, protrude from the end wall like rungs on a ladder, affording access to a neighbouring Victorian fire escape on a far more elegant building, which in turn—if you have long arms—offers a way onto the flat roof of the block.

Joe the clockworker never quite got out of the habit of pull-ups on the lintel, so Joe the burglar has lean, narrow muscles which play and crunch under his coat. One, two, three… and up.

Wish Polly could see this. Or Mathew, even. I’m good at this.

Joe skids as he lands; water has collected on the asphalt. He flaps his arms and yelps, half-joyful, then remembers that this is a deadly secret mission and he will almost certainly have terrible things happen to him if he is caught, and drops to his knees. He hisses a swear word as sharp grit in the mud grazes his leg through his trousers.

No alarms. No klaxons. No searchlights. He grins. Oh, yeah. Joe the kid cracksman. He scurries across the roof and climbs down a maintenance ladder to the gables of a red-brick schoolhouse. From there, he walks along the ridge to the far end and lowers himself out over the air. Strong hands, long, thick fingers. Bad for guitar, good for burglary… A downpipe, yes, as expected. Burglars have more than a passing knowledge of exterior plumbing. And sometimes, of course, plumbers have a knowledge of burglary, too… metal pipe. Not more than three years old. Good screws… fine.

He swings around the drainpipe. It creaks, but holds, and he drops to an external walkway of another housing block. Heavy landing on concrete. Faint smell of things best left unexamined. Chipboard doors and graffiti. A woman with her shopping comes round the corner and jumps on seeing him. (Well, indeed, how did he get here? It’s a fair question.) He taps his forehead to indicate a tip of the hat, and she settles. He resists the urge to help her with her shopping, ducks into a grimy concrete corridor and along to the end to a utility staircase. Doesn’t even have to unlock it—the door is rusted through around the bolt.

Inside, more smells: bleach; spray-paint; elderly pet; marijuana and incense. Caretaker’s closet, lock permanently broken, emptied out and pushed shut. He looks out of the grubby window and sees, spread out below him, the glass skybridge joining the next floor down—which is a shopping centre—to the train station beyond.

And how does he know all this? He has mapped it from the ground, committed it to memory against a rainy day when, for whatever reason, he must make this trip without alerting whatever watchers there might be. His Night Market self, maligned and paranoid and never entirely abandoned, has scouted his entry. He has criss-crossed London, delivering packages and wandering gloomily, and he has catalogued possible escapes and entrances without ever admitting it to himself. Ready. For this.

He knocks the window catch with his elbow, a sharp tap, and it breaks. He worms his way through and lets himself down.

The glass roof sags beneath his feet. For a moment, he thinks it will break. He doesn’t look right or left, and wishes he was wearing rubber soles. His leather ones are soaked and sheer on the muddy surface, and the ground is a long way down. Not that he’s looking. He walks forward slowly, without running. That would be a mistake. He tries to make haste, all the same.

Joe steps onto the station roof and edges around the guttering, hand over hand. The station is two hundred paces long. He counts every single one of them. And then the parapet of the convent is below him, perhaps ten feet, but it looks further, and of course, there’s the small matter of the four-foot horizontal gap. There’s no way to turn around, not without risking a serious mishap. He’s never jumped backwards before, not when it mattered. He wonders whether he should try to spin around, or just use his arms to give himself a little extra momentum, and then he’s in the air, and thinking oh, shit, and he has just enough time to think this is a very strange way to visit your mother. Then he lands, tumbles backwards and knocks the wind out of himself, and lies on the parapet considering that perhaps he could just have telephoned.

Hell, no. Fifth-floor man, my friends. King o’ the skybridge. Yes.

The door from the parapet into the convent is locked. Possibly nuns do experience a high incidence of cat burglary. More likely they’re just punctilious. Or possibly the job of closing up still belongs to Sister Amelia, the kindly but stupendously old former disc jockey who, according to Joe’s mother, likes a tot and a fag on the balcony before bed, and therefore takes pains to be sure the job is done right lest someone else take her pitch.

He lets himself in.

Joe has never seen this upper floor before, and so has no idea what to expect. One thing which occurs to him, briefly, is that it may be some extraordinarily secret bordello for bishops with the urge. Another possibility is that it is a casino or moonshinery for bored Anglicans. Then he peers along the sad, green-painted corridor and knows that it’s nothing so bold; it’s just a very quiet, very lonely place where people who have chosen this particular way to spend their lives contemplate the divine. He wonders whether they all believe. Faith has always struck him as either a tremendous gift or an appalling deception, depending on whether there’s a God or not. His grandfather was scathing about “speculative faith,” which is the kind you get from worrying about the possibility that God exists and may be cross with you. Daniel Spork observed that God, if there is one, is well aware of the interior dialogue, and most likely unimpressed by it. Much better, he said, to get on with being the man you are, and hope like buggery that God thinks you did as well as could be expected. Hence all the lessons and strictures concealed in everyday objects. Learn the shape of the world, know the mind of God.

The shape of the corridor suggests that God wants Joe to go down a flight, across the building, and catch his mother when she comes back from evening prayers. If he hurries, he should make it before the place is awash with wimples and he is sternly ejected for possession of external genitals and an unsanctified soul.

Halfway there, he nearly trips over a medical sort of nun who is snoozing on a chair outside what must be the infirmary, and has to sneak by her the way people do in cartoons, actually on tiptoe and for no good reason with his hands held up to his chest, palms out. In a battered brass plaque enumerating the virtues of Saint Edgar, he catches a glimpse of himself in this position, for all the world like a pantomime robber, and sheepishly lowers his hands.

Joe lets himself into his mother’s room and sits on the bed, trying not to notice that the picture of Mathew is on the night table and the one of him is lying on its back by the single chair. He tries to believe that she hugs it, but the chair is not a chair for relaxing but rather one for being penitent, so he suspects she mourns his lack of ambition or his failures, or apologises to him for being a bad mother in her conversations with God. That last one makes him angry, because she was a great mother when she was around: loved him, sang to him, tended and ministered, helped with his homework and stood staunchly behind him in adversity. It was only after she exchanged a gangster for a deity that she began to slip away.

In his earlier life, there were times—perhaps they were even more common, in fact, than the other times—when spending time with his mother was a renewing experience for Joe Spork. They would walk around together, his small hand in her larger one, the cold strap of her watch rustling against his sleeve, and he would feel like a battery plugged into a giant recharging station, warmth and certainty filling him up. After half an hour spotting kites and dogs and ambling with Harriet, he could soak up days of his father’s jittery, electric-fence presence. It worked in reverse, too; Harriet stood taller when she was with her son. She relaxed the muscles of her face, letting go the sultry, coquettish scowl and permitting herself to be domestic, homely, and happy.

Those times faded away in almost perfect synchrony with the change in relative scale of their palms. As Joe’s first equalled and then exceeded his mother’s, so both of them became unwilling to share the inverted contact which told them the years had moved on. The young man became prickly about being seen to be a mama’s boy, and Harriet found it distressing to have such a grown-up son, and then later too full of unwanted memories to be touched by a powerful, wolfish young man so like her dead husband in his prime. By the time Harriet found God in a grimy chapel at Heathrow Airport, they found one another’s company painful, not because it was unpleasant but because it drained what once it had animated. They spoke occasionally, met rarely, and touched little if at all. When Harriet became Sister Harriet, and announced that her retreat from the temporal world would mean she could only see Joe once every six months, it was hard to say whether the announcement implied a greater or lesser distance between them.

And then she’s there, in the room with him. When he was a child, she towered over him and could have worn his pyjama bottoms as Bermuda shorts. Now he looks down at her in her flat shoes, and she’d fit into one leg of his trousers, and with her hair pulled straight back she is hardly as high as his chest.

Harriet Spork stares at her son, and he can see her wondering whether she should call the porters and have him thrown out. Well, no; there’s no question that she should: she’s a cloistered woman and his presence is absolutely against the rules. She’s trying to untangle whether she will, because in the end—in the absolute, final analysis—he’s her son. He hasn’t actually considered what he might do under those circumstances, and wonders abruptly whether his indecision will be tested.

Apparently not.

“Joshua,” she says.

“Hello, Mum.”

“You’re in trouble.” Not a question. She knows, or she has correctly deduced. Or perhaps she has always expected. “I can’t hide you, you know. The Church can’t give sanctuary any more.”

“I don’t need sanctuary.”

“Oh. Oh, dear.” Because if he is not here to be concealed, he is here for some other kind of help. He considers telling her he has come to see her before he gives himself up. He wonders whether the lie would bring her joy or guilt, and what it would do to him. He wishes he could stop trying to play her, and just be her son, but he never knows any more whether he’s talking to God’s wife or the woman with the plasters and the warm neck who could make everything be all right. He is briefly, irrationally furious that God should require of her the abandonment of her son, and almost tells her, but remembers that this approach triggers a lecture on the testing of Abraham.

Instead he says “I’m going to hug you,” and does, and she, after a moment’s appalled hesitation—because it is very much not what they do these days—hugs him back, fiercely, throws her arms around him and shudders massively and asks him what on Earth is going on, and is he all right, and then for the second time what it’s all about and what it means, and he replies that he has no idea, does not understand, but Billy is dead and the world is upside down and it’s not his fault, but please, please, please, she must be careful, she must, she must. This seems to unzip Harriet’s emotions entirely, because she cries silently into her son’s shoulder and he does the same, feeling all the while that he’s being unfair offloading all this on her, because she’s so small.

At last, she manages to peel him off, or perhaps the point is reached where the hug is finished, and the comfort it grants is offset by awkwardness and self-awareness. They part, and he looks at her.

Harriet Spork—Sister Harriet—is still attractive. The voice which sang “Ma, He’s Making Eyes At Me” is now more commonly deployed for the Eucharist, and make-up has given way to a stern expression which mingles faith and devotion with compassion and—on the rare occasions when she is wrong-footed, as now—a confident anticipation of clarity. She is everyone’s mother now, and Joe feels an absolutely dreadful hunger, and a jealousy, even alone with her in this room. These blessings are mine, his heart shouts, mine and no one else’s! It seems so unfair to him that she should bestow her empathy on others and yet bar her door against him, who most rightfully deserves it.

She has grey hair now; the last black streaks are gone. Perhaps they were a final vanity, now dismissed. Her eyelashes are still spectacular, her hands still elegant.

“I don’t want you to forgive me, Mum. I don’t need that.” Normally he calls her Harriet, because she has asked him to. Today is not normally.

“We all need that.” And Harriet perhaps more than others, which is why she’s so quick on the draw. He pushes the thought away.

“How long do we have?”

“How long do we have before what?”

“When do you next pray or eat or whatever?”

“Long enough.” To achieve whatever God has in mind for this conversation. The fatalism terrifies and angers Joe in equal measure. The answer could mean five minutes or a week.

He takes the folded sheet of accounting paper from his pocket and lays it on the bed, as if it were the final piece in one of Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries and he the detective explaining why he has called everyone here this evening. Except there are only two of them, and it seems far from the last piece, alas.

“Mathew paid for Daniel.”

She looks at him, and then down at the paper, and nods. “Yes.”

“He fiddled the books.”

“Yes.”

“And then later, when Daniel had them done in town—”

“Mathew got Mr. Presburn to fiddle them for him.”

Presburn the honest dealer, accountant pro bono to craftsmen and persons of good character. Except that Presburn, apparently, had been Mathew’s creature, the conduit for his completely illicit largesse to his angry father. All true, then. But what does it mean, here, now, to J. Joseph Spork, who tried as a child to be Mathew and then as an adult to be Daniel, and never, really, has focused on being Joe? And who is, in his various persons, now pursued by demons through this world of sin?

“Did you know?”

“Yes.”

“But Daniel never did.”

“No. I considered telling him.” Because God loves truth. “But it would have been cruel.”

Yes. It would. But you might have told me. It would have made my life easier, because if I’d known Daniel’s trade didn’t pay the way he ran it, I might not have spent ten years of my life doing exactly the bloody same and being so confused when it didn’t add up.

Harriet sighs, and clasps her hands for a moment. May God grant both of them peace.

Again, Joe feels that peace could be granted more generally if people inside his family told each other fewer whopping lies, and left their children somewhat less complex and occult heritances.

At least she hasn’t mentioned the ineffable nature of the Lord at all. When Harriet first came here, Joe assumed that this kind of answer was a sort of polite, convent version of “Fuck off.” Later, he came to believe it was an assertion of faith.

“Daniel built something with Frankie, didn’t he?”

Harriet’s face undergoes a stark transformation, from beatific to furious.

“Oh, he would have done anything for her! He did do anything. She asked a lot, and he always did it. And what she didn’t ask, what she just left him to do… that was worse. She was wicked, Joshua! So wicked. So blighted and dark. They all thought she shone, all those clever men, but she was rotted inside like a windfall apple. Maggots and death. She was a witch, from a witchy breed, and God save her, because I think she’s in Hell. I won’t talk about her. She was a bad one.”

“I thought we were all bad, unless we tried.”

“Oh, we’re all sinful. But we’re not evil, Josh. Not unless we really put our shoulders to the wheel. She was evil. She had such eyes. They saw everything, right down to the bottom of creation. She saw like Einstein, they say. And look what came of him: burning cities and charred shadows on the wall. A half-century of fear and loathing and now we’re all waiting for the first suitcase which turns a city into glass. But Einstein was a godly man, wasn’t he? Frankie was none of that. Oh, no.”

“Why? What did she do?”

“Oh, Joe, these are old sins. Old shadows. It’s better they stay buried.”

“Well, they haven’t. What did she build down there? What did Daniel help her build?”

“She lied to him. She said it was a great mechanism to heal the world. She thought the truth would make everything all right, that she’d usher in a new utopia. Salvation through science, that was the doctrine back then. Salvation comes from the soul, and is the gift of God. But Daniel… he said God helps those who help themselves, of course. He said that everything under Heaven is an opportunity to learn. He said God wanted us to strive to be more than we are, and this was part of that striving. It was all so noble. The Devil turning love into sin.”

“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.

“Where are we going?” Harriet demands.

“It’s your convent,” Edie replies.

“This goes to… the kitchen garden.”

“That’s what I thought, yes.”

“There’s no way out. The garden is walled off, and there’s no gate.”

“There will be shortly.”

“What?”

Edie Banister doesn’t answer—she just cocks her head in a way which states eloquently that answers are a luxury and time is pressing, and nuns are supposed to be a bit more placid and a bit less lippy.

Harriet nods. Joe has never seen her cave in so quickly, and suspects that in Edie Banister he is in the presence of a master. Mind you, the eyeless dog is an unfair advantage; the potty-old-bat equivalent of a nuclear bomb.

That his mother’s acquiescence might have something to do with the danger he personally is in, or that this must be weirdly familiar to her from half a dozen heady escapes with his father back in the day, occurs to him only as they reach the foot of the stairs.

The garden door is a bit rotted and decrepit. A large selection of wellington boots, in various sizes for assorted nuns, stands arrayed along the wall. Bastion whiffles curiously at the enticing smell, and there is a noise behind them like a hydraulic press: a very soft, very powerful sound of escaping air.

There is a Ruskinite one flight up. He has jumped or fallen from the fourth floor and landed on his feet. His arms are spread as if ready to grasp something, and his head is rocking to and fro on his shoulders as if he is sniffing. A second later, Joe actually sees another one slump ungracefully through the air like an empty sack and land next to the first. It seems to hit the ground all at once, as if it is just a bundle of clothes with sticks inside, but seconds later it’s upright, rolling its shoulders and briefly touching the first one in a strange, physical recognition. Not a human gesture at all; arachnoid, or lizardy. Then both of them spread their arms in that same wrestler’s crouch, and their heads turn towards him. In unison, they lurch for the stairs.

Edie Banister grasps Joe by the hand and hauls him bodily out into the garden. Harriet is a few steps ahead, but going slowly even at full stretch. He lifts her as he catches up, and is nearly rewarded with a bony elbow in the eye for his trouble before she realises who he is. Edie nods approvingly and skitters past, spry as a sheepdog. Joe glances back and sees the Ruskinites coming out of the door, virtually on top of one another. They stop still, and a moment later are joined by a third. They touch again, that same strange spiderhug and bob, and then spring forward, fast, strong, and eerily silent. He jerks Harriet up onto his chest and runs like hell.

The garden at Samson At The Temple is a retreat within a retreat, a twisting, mazelike place of concealed meditation spots and beds of roses, dead ends and alcoves. It’s a place where a girl can get away from all the noise of a dozen Trappists playing ping-pong and appreciate the wonder of the creation. Edie Banister ducks down into a sunken garden, through and out the other side, doubles back along an avenue of laurel and then through a narrow gap behind a greenhouse and in front of a potting shed. Always, always, she is heading for the outer wall. Always, she puts turns and forks between them and their pursuers, forces the enemy to guess, to hesitate. When Joe pauses to catch his breath and look over his shoulder, she grabs him again, draws him on up another laurel path, this one winding and wild, and suddenly they’re hard against the back wall, high red brick topped with unchristian spikes, three-pointed stars on an axle, sharp-edged and aggressively private.

She hands the dog to Harriet and dips her hand into her bag, then slaps a small Tupperware box against the wall. It sticks.

“Come on,” she says, ducking behind a small stone chapel, and when Joe hesitates, she slaps him on the back of his head to get his attention and takes advantage of his utter amazement to get him where she wants him. As he ducks, he sees with horror the Ruskinite hunters surge through the laurel bushes, huge black shapes swooping and lunging, appallingly boneless. They wheel around one another, then jointly focus their attention on the chapel. The nearest one takes a loping step forward. Edie pulls Joe down and sticks her fingers in her ears.

The world is a bass drum, and the conductor has just given the percussionist the biggest nod of his career.

The sky is white.

Joe’s nose is bleeding. There’s dust in his eyes.

When he looks around the corner, the outer wall is gone. So are the Ruskinites. In their place, a crater, black and charred, and the smell of phosphorus and saltpetre, Guy Fawkes Night come early.

“Home-made,” Edie Banister says happily, a soon-to-be-novagenarian with a bad attitude and a fine knowledge of exothermic reactions. “I think I may have over-egged the nitro and gone a bit heavy on the toluene. However, nothing succeeds like excess, ey?”

The garden of Samson At The Temple is breached.

They make it as far as the car Edie Banister has stolen. Team Spork—Harriet and Joe and their new friend—are making the escape of the decade, a corker in the annals of derring-do with added points for age, infirmity and spontaneity. Edie considers the thing something of a masterclass, and hopes someone, somewhere, will take note and teach it to the young. Classics in survival, evasion, resistance and escape: the Banister Exemplar.

And then, from nowhere, the street is filled with skittering, scuttling figures, ragged in their shrouding black, like a plague of spiders. They pour through the doors of surrounding houses and out of parked cars, five, ten, twenty, a myriad bobbing heads and grasping hands. Joe Spork stares at them, takes a step forward in front of Harriet and Edie, and sees them all, every last one, turn their eyes to him. He freezes under their gaze. He can feel the spotlights and the great salvo of bullets, the awful splink as his heart ruptures. He sways. The Ruskinites rush forward.

The first wave tries to grab Harriet, but Edie Banister menaces them with her trusty side arm and they fade away, parting in the line of fire. The second wave approaches from the north and seeks to cut them off from the car, a ghostly interdictory line. Joe recovers himself enough to raise his arms to a sort of fighting posture and forces them to reckon with him. They hesitate and draw back, but before he can be pleasantly surprised, wave three cuts across perpendicular to wave two and sweeps him up and away, iron-banded fingers and corded muscle clamping down on his limbs and lifting him into the back of a van. Behind him, he can see his mother’s placid face turn rapidly to something like a figure from a nightmare, a sudden flash of fury such as he has never seen on her, and she hurtles forward and clutches at the van, screaming like a banshee and demanding him back, give him back, he’s not yours, he’s my son.

Joe Spork struggles, like Gulliver beset by tiny men. They have him in a grip at every corner, and all he can manage now is a sort of billowing. On the other hand, if he can get a hand free he can do some damage. He twists, and feels the grip on one wrist slacken. It hurts, but he does it again, and again, and the vise skids over his arteries, tearing away some skin, and that hand is free.

What’s soft?

Eyes are soft. Throats. Noses and lips. Genitals, too, but many layers of linen make them hard to find, and men and women both learn early to move those parts fast.

He rips at someone’s face, feels flesh and eyes under the cowl, hears a cry, feels them reel away, sees someone guided forward, wide-shouldered and heavy on his feet. A blind wrestler? He rips again at this new enemy, and the Ruskinite slaps at his hand, hard. It hurts, the way it hurts to bang your shin on a glass table. He doesn’t care, reaches again. Come on, then! Let’s go! Let’s do this. Come on, you bastard. He is clinging to the man now, feeling huge, solid limbs, his fingers seeking soft parts, vulnerable flesh. A black linen mask tears free, and he shouts with fierce delight, then feels the war cry freeze in his mouth.

Joe Spork stares up into a face made of gold.

An eyeless face, with a snapping turtle’s jaw and the merest suggestion of features on the burnished plate.

Not a mask.

A face.

An un-face. An un-man.

The Ruskinites close in. They have him, and they are taking him. He screams.

That’s all he knows, because someone clamps something cold over his mouth and he inhales.