Книга - Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence
Michael Marshall Smith


An unpredictable, poignant, and captivating tale for readers of all ages, by the critically acclaimed author of Only Forward.There are a million stories in the world. Most are perfectly ordinary.This one… isn’t.Hannah Green actually thinks her story is more mundane than most. But she’s about to discover that the shadows in her life have been hiding a world where nothing is as it seems: that there's an ancient and secret machine that converts evil deeds into energy, that some mushrooms can talk — and that her grandfather has been friends with the Devil for over a hundred and fifty years, and now they need her help.









HANNAH GREEN AND HER UNFEASIBLY MUNDANE EXISTENCE

MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH










Copyright (#u4abea521-3a00-5603-8c27-f00fe3489f30)







HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street,

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk (http://www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk)

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

Copyright © Michael Marshall Smith 2017

Michael Marshall Smith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008237912

Ebook Edition © July 2017 ISBN: 9780008237936

Version: 2018-09-21




Dedication (#u4abea521-3a00-5603-8c27-f00fe3489f30)


For Nate,

who heard some of this first,

and without whom it wouldn’t exist.


One’s destination is never a place but rather

a new way of looking at things.

—Henry Miller

Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch


Table of Contents

Cover (#u57f2796d-825e-5ded-9764-373e700f8572)

Title Page (#u7e1a8d12-14e9-50ad-9437-f2bdd5d9f769)

Copyright (#ua26908fa-c336-5a60-9b59-baddeda6482a)

Dedication (#u05d0dd61-f8e2-59eb-b43d-c800d8966892)

Epigraph (#u0ecace78-d45a-5d17-ad0c-2968af401094)

Then (#u4c02dd12-0f15-57e5-a41f-5703f523539c)

Part 1 (#u0551abfb-586b-5bfe-93b6-1761d9ec1ef5)

Chapter 1 (#ufcb1ef60-4780-5648-9243-13c794e3a978)

Chapter 2 (#u567ed79e-4628-5023-ab34-b4bc6163e19f)

Chapter 3 (#u0577dd83-7928-5ff2-82a8-1246a829f8b0)

Chapter 4 (#ued43511b-16b9-52ec-a355-57016b076dae)



Chapter 5 (#u9be406e1-39a9-5d88-a09e-0abef489f82d)



Chapter 6 (#ub3ba39e3-8516-583c-ac80-3cc04227f6ef)



Chapter 7 (#u1ba98f61-47e0-57a7-b854-7695d9d4ac0f)



Chapter 8 (#ub40a7557-292e-5518-a995-d3930d15c673)



Chapter 9 (#udef646b7-3568-51ab-bcef-2e3a2caaa3cf)



Chapter 10 (#u199fe42f-36e9-57e6-b3e7-39215b254724)



Chapter 11 (#u3ceb65fe-5392-5796-91ac-ea12cbceed8e)



Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)



Part 2 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)



Part 3 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)



Now (#litres_trial_promo)



Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)



About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)



Also by Michael Marshall Smith (#litres_trial_promo)



About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Then (#u4abea521-3a00-5603-8c27-f00fe3489f30)


Imagine, if you will, a watchmaker’s workshop.

In fact, please imagine one whether you wish to or not. That’s where something’s about to happen, something that won’t seem important right away but will turn out to be – and if you’re not prepared to listen to what I’m saying then this whole thing simply isn’t going to work.

So.

Imagine that thing I just said.

If it helps, the workshop is on the street level of an old and crumbling building, in a town some distance from here. With the exception of the workbench it is cluttered and dusty. The watchmaker is advanced in years and does not care about the state of the place, except for the area in which he works.

It is a late afternoon in autumn, and growing dark. Quite cold, too. It is quiet. The workshop is dimly lit by candles, and the watchmaker – you can picture him in the gloom, bent over his bench, if you wish – is wearing several layers of clothing to keep warm. He is repairing a piece he made several decades ago, the prized possession of a local nobleman. It will take him perhaps half an hour, he estimates, after which he’ll lock up his workshop and walk through the narrow streets to his house, where since the death of his wife he lives alone but for an elderly and bad-tempered cat. On the way he will stop off to purchase a few provisions, primarily a bag of peppermints, of which he is extremely fond. The watchmaker. Not the cat.

The timepiece he is working on is intricate, and very advanced for its time, though the watchmaker knows that were he to embark upon crafting something like it now he’d do things quite differently. He has learned a great deal since he made it. He doesn’t make anything new any more, however. He hasn’t in a long while. The story of his life has already been told. He is merely waiting for its final line.

Nonetheless, his eyes remain sharp and his fingers nimble, and in fact it only takes ten minutes before the watch is working perfectly once more. He reassembles it, and polishes the outside with his sleeve. Finished. Done.

He stands with the piece in his hands. He is aware, through his profound understanding of its workings, of the intricate mechanisms involved in its measuring of time, the hidden movements. He feels these as a subtle, almost imperceptible vibration, like the murmur of a tiny animal cupped in his hand, stirring in its sleep.

And he is aware of something else.

Not one thing, in fact, but a multitude – a cloud filling his mind like notes from a church organ, soaring up towards heaven. He is aware of children, and a grandchild. They cannot be his, because he has none: his marriage, though long and comfortable, was without issue. Aware, too, of the people who had come before him, his parents and grandparents and ancestors, aware not merely of the idea of them but their reality, their complexity – as though he has only ever been the soloist in the music of his life, supported upon the harmonies of others.

He’s aware also that though the candles in the workshop illuminate small areas, there are patches of darkness too, and parts that are neither one thing nor the other. That his entire life has been this way, not forever pulled between two poles but borne instead along far more complex currents, of which ticks and tocks are merely the extremes.

How did he come to be standing here on this cold afternoon? he wonders. What innumerable events led to this?

And why?

He shakes his head, frowning. This is not the kind of thought that usually occupies his mind. He is not normally prey, either, to a feeling of dread – though that is what is creeping up on him now. Something bad is about to happen.

Something wicked this way comes.

He hears footsteps in the street outside. He half turns, but cannot see who is approaching. The windows are grimy. He has not cleaned them in many years. Nobody needs to see inside. His venerable name on the sign is advertisement enough, and as he has gradually withdrawn from the world so he has come to value the privacy the windows’ opaqueness confers.

But now suddenly he wishes he could see who’s coming. And he wonders whether his life is over after all.

He waits, turning back to the bench, busying his hands.

And the door opens.

No, no, no. Sorry. Stop imagining things.

I’ve got this completely wrong. I’ve tried to tell the story from the beginning.

That’s always a mistake. I’ve learned my lesson since, and have even come to wonder if this is what I was dimly starting to comprehend on that cold, long-ago afternoon. Life is not like a watch or clock, something that can be constructed and then wound for the first time, set in motion.

There is no beginning. We are always in the middle.

OK, look. I’m going to start again.




PART 1 (#u4abea521-3a00-5603-8c27-f00fe3489f30)


A story is a spirit being, not a repertoire,

allegory or form of psychology.

Martin Shaw

Snowy Tower




Chapter 1 (#u4abea521-3a00-5603-8c27-f00fe3489f30)


So. This is a story, as I’ve said. And stories are skittish, like cats. You need to approach calmly and respectfully or they’ll run away and you’ll never see them again. People have been spinning tales for as long as we’ve been on this planet, perhaps even longer. There are stories that are so ancient, in fact, that they come from a time before words – tales conjured in gestures and grunts, movement of the eyes; stories that live in the rustling of leaves and lapping of waves, and whose ghosts hide in the tales we tell each other now.

Be good, and be careful.

Beware of that cave; that forest; that man.

Some day the sun will go dark, and then we will hide.

But all stories – and I’m talking about proper ones here, not stories about sassy teens becoming ninja spies or needy middle-agers overturning their lives in a fit of First World pique and finding true love running a funky little bookshop in Barcelona – need us to survive. Humans are the clouds from which stories rain, but we are also shards of glass that channel their light, focusing them so sharply that they burn.

Humans and stories need each other. We tell them, but they tell us too – reaching with soft hands and wide arms to pull us into their embrace. They do this especially when we have become mired in lives of which we can make no sense. We all need a path, and stories can sometimes usher us back to it.

That’s what happened to Hannah Green. She got caught up in a story.

And this is what it is.

Hannah lives in a place called Santa Cruz, on the coast of Northern California. It has a nice downtown with organic grocery stores and a Safeway and coffee shops and movie theatres and a library and all the things you need if you want other towns to take you seriously. It is home to a well-regarded branch of the University of California and also to a famous boardwalk, where you can go on fairground rides and scare yourself witless should you be so inclined. The boardwalk features a house of horrors and a carousel and shooting galleries and the fifth-oldest rollercoaster in America (the famed Giant Dipper, which Hannah had ridden only once, with her grandfather: both emerged shaken from the experience, and he later described the contraption as ‘potentially evil’) and places to buy corn dogs and garlic fries and Dippin’ Dots. It is a matter of lasting chagrin to the childfolk of Santa Cruz that they’re not allowed to go to the boardwalk every single day.

Though outsiders have been visiting for many years to walk on the beaches or surf or eat seafood, the town – as Hannah’s mother sometimes observed – is rather like an island. Behind it stand the sturdy Santa Cruz Mountains, covered in redwoods and pines, cradling the town and providing a barrier between it and Silicon Valley and San Jose. Once these mountains were home to wolves and bears but the humans got rid of them to make the place tidier, and for the convenience of those who wish to hike. South lies the sweeping bay, where not much happens except for the cultivation of artichokes and garlic and other unappealing grown-up foodstuffs, until you get to Monterey, and then Carmel, and finally the craggy wilderness of Big Sur. On the northern side of town there’s mainly emptiness along seventy miles of beautiful coast until you reach San Francisco, or ‘the city’, as everyone calls it in these parts. Santa Cruz could therefore seem somewhat cut off from the rest of California (and indeed the world), but luckily almost everyone who lives there is content with this arrangement. So Hannah’s mother sometimes said, without much of a smile.

Hannah hadn’t heard her mother say much recently, however. Before Hannah became embroiled in the story I’m about to tell, she was already a participant in several others, starring in The Tale of Being an Eleven-Year-Old Girl, TheStory of Having Annoyingly Straight Brown Hair, TheChronicles of My Friend Ellie Being Mean to Me for No Reason, and TheSaga of It Being Completely Unfair that I’m Not Allowed to Have a Kitten. One story had come to dominate her life recently, however, looming so large and changing so many things in such enormous ways that it drowned out all the rest.

It’s an old and sad and confusing tale, called Mom and Dad Don’t Live Together Any More.

Hannah knew the exact moment when this story began, the point at which some malign spirit had furrowed its brow and wondered ‘What if?’ and started messing around with her life.

It was a Saturday, and they were in Los Gatos. Hannah’s mom liked Los Gatos. It’s neat and tidy and has stores they didn’t have in Santa Cruz. Hannah’s dad was never as keen to make the half-hour journey over the mountains (the most doom-laden highway in the world, according to him, attractive but luridly prone to accident, and it’s hard to be completely sanguine about the fact it actually crosses the San Andreas Fault) but between the Apple Store and a coffee shop and the nice square outside their favourite restaurant he seemed able to pass the morning pleasantly enough while Hannah and her mother shopped.

Lunch afterwards was always fun. The restaurant they visited was bright and airy and the waiters were friendly and wore smart uniforms and before you got your food they brought baskets of miniature breads and pastries which Hannah’s parents would try to stop her eating. Meanwhile they’d talk and sip wine and Hannah’s mom would show her dad some of the things she’d bought (though never, Hannah noticed, absolutely everything).

All of Hannah’s memories of Los Gatos were good, therefore, until the time six months before, when she happened to glance up while nibbling a tiny muffin and saw her mother looking out of the window. Mom’s face was blank and sad.

Surprised – lunches in Los Gatos were always cheerful, sometimes so cheerful recently that they might even have seemed a little shrill – Hannah looked at her father.

He was watching her mom. The expression on his face was not blank, though it was also sad.

‘Dad?’

He blinked as if waking from a dream, and gave her a hard time for starting another pastry, though she could tell his heart wasn’t in it. Meanwhile her mother kept staring out of the window as though watching something a long way away, as if wondering if she were to jump up from the table right now and run out of the door as fast as she could, she might be able to catch up with it before it disappeared from sight.

Food arrived, and everybody ate, and then they drove home. They didn’t go to Los Gatos again after that. As far as Hannah was concerned, that lunch was when it all started to go wrong.

Because two months later Hannah’s mom moved out.

A lot of things stayed the same. Hannah attended school, did homework, went to French class on Tuesday afternoons (which was extra, because Mom thought she ought to be able to understand it, even though the nearest place anybody spoke French was probably France). Dad had always done the grocery shopping and cooked the evening meal – as Hannah’s mom travelled a lot for work, all over America and Europe, and had always seemed baffled and infuriated by the oven – so that was business as usual.

There’s a difference between ‘Mom being away until the weekend’, however, and ‘Mom is away … indefinitely.’ The kitchen table goes all big. The dishwasher sounds too loud.

Her grandfather came to stay with them for a week – or, at least, his meandering path through the world brought him into Santa Cruz – which was nice. He did the kind of thing he usually did, like making odd little sculptures out of random objects he found on his walks, and dozing off in an armchair (or spending periods ‘resting his eyes’). He cooked dinner one night though it wasn’t entirely clear what it was, and tried to help Hannah with her science homework, but after ten minutes of frowning at the questions simply said that they were ‘wrong’.

Hannah also saw her Aunt Zo, who came down a few times to keep her company. Zoë was twenty-eight. She lived in the city and was an artist-or-something. She had alarmingly spiky dyed-blond hair and several tattoos and wore black most of the time and was her dad’s much younger sister, though it seemed to Hannah that Zo and her dad always looked at each other with cautious bemusement, as if they weren’t sure they belonged to the same species, never mind family. Hannah didn’t know what an ‘artist-or-something’ even was. She’d intuited it might not be an entirely complimentary term because it was how her mother described Zoë, and Hannah’s mom and Zo had not always appeared to get on super-well. It had to be different to an ‘artist’, certainly, because extensive tests had demonstrated that Aunt Zo couldn’t draw at all.

She was friendly, though, and fun, and had gone to a lot of trouble to explain that the fact Hannah’s parents didn’t live together right now didn’t mean either of them loved her any less. Sometimes people lived together forever, and sometimes they did not. That was between them, and the reasons could be impossible for anybody else to understand. Sometimes it was because of something big or weird and unfixable. Sometimes it was merely something ‘mundane’.

Hannah hadn’t understood what this word meant. Aunt Zo waved her hands vaguely, and said, ‘Well, you know. Mundane.’

Later Hannah looked it up on the internet. The internet said that the word came from the Latin mundus, meaning ‘world’, and thus referred to things ‘of the earthly world, rather than a heavenly or spiritual one’. That made zero sense until she realized this was only a second thing it could mean, and that usually people used it to mean ‘dull, lacking interest or excitement’.

Hannah nodded at this. She didn’t see how Mom and Dad not living together could be without interest, but she was beginning to feel her life in general most certainly could.

The next time she saw Zo was when her aunt came to babysit overnight because Hannah’s dad had to fly down to a meeting in Los Angeles. Hannah dropped the word into conversation, and was pleased to see her aunt smile to herself. Emboldened, Hannah tentatively asked whether maybe, next time, rather than Zo coming to Santa Cruz, Hannah could come up to the city instead. She did not say, but felt, they could be girls together there, and have new and unusual fun that would not be dull or lack excitement. Zo said yes, maybe, and how about they made some more popcorn and watched a movie.

Hannah was old and smart enough to understand that whatever ‘mundane’ might mean, ‘maybe’ generally meant ‘no’.

Otherwise, life dragged on like a really long television show that was impossible to turn off. She went to school and ate and slept. Mom sent her an email every couple of days, and they spoke on Skype once a week. The emails were short, and usually about the weather in London, England, where she was working. The phone conversations were better, though it sometimes felt as though the actress playing her mother had changed.

Hannah realized it wasn’t likely that, even when (or if) her mom did come back, she was going to come and live with Hannah and her dad. Straight away, anyway. Missing her mother was tough, but bearable. Hannah put thoughts of her in a box in her head and closed it up (not too tightly, just enough to stop it popping open all the time and making her cry) and told herself that she was welcome to look inside however often she liked. In her imagination the box was ornate and intricate and golden, like something out of a storybook.

Missing her dad was worse, because he was right there.

He hadn’t gone away, but he had. Virtually everything about him with the exception of his appearance (though he often looked tired, and didn’t smile with his eyes) had changed. He hugged her at bedtime. He hugged her at the school gate. When something needed to be said, one of them said it, and the other listened. But sometimes when Hannah came into a room without him realizing, she would look at him for a while and it was as though there was nobody there.

Otherwise, nothing much changed.

School.

Homework.

Food.

Bed.

School.

Homework.

Food.

Bed …

… like waves lapping on a deserted shore. Life was flat and grey and quiet, all the more so because every other adult with whom she came into contact – teachers at school, her friends’ moms and dads, even the instructor at gym, who’d always been snarky with literally everyone – treated her differently now. They were polite and accommodating and they always smiled and seemed to look at her more directly than before. They were so very nice to her, in fact, that the world no longer had edge or bite. It lost all shape and colour and momentum, and any sense of light or shade. It was like living in a cloud.

Late one autumnal afternoon, as she sat watching through the window as a squirrel played in the tree outside, looking so in charge of its life, having so much fun, Hannah realized that her own life had become ‘mundane’.

Horribly, unfeasibly mundane.

So I suppose that’s where we’ll begin.

Don’t worry, things will start to happen. This hasn’t been the actual story yet. It’s background, a few moments spent sifting through the tales already in progress in order to pick a moment in time and say: ‘So now let’s see what happened next.’

And we will.

But before we get any further into Hannah’s story, we need to go and meet someone else.




Chapter 2 (#u4abea521-3a00-5603-8c27-f00fe3489f30)


Because, meanwhile, an old man was dozing on the terrace of the Palace Hotel, on Miami’s South Beach.

The hotel stands amidst a half-mile of art deco jewels restored to their former glory in the 1980s, and – like many of the others – was determinedly now running back to seed, as though that was the state in which it felt most comfortable. The old man had a local newspaper on his lap but he had not read it. To one side, on the table supporting the umbrella protecting him from the sun, was a glass of ice tea that had long ago come up to ambient temperature. A large bug was swimming in it, a leisurely freestyle. The waiter working the terrace had approached the table several times to see if the gaunt old buzzard wanted his glass refreshed. Each time he’d discovered the man’s eyes were closed. His position had not changed in quite a while.

Nonetheless the waiter decided to try one more time. In half an hour his shift would be over. In most ways that was awesome. The afternoon had been hellishly humid and the waiter was looking forward to returning to his ratty apartment, taking a shower, sitting out on his balcony and smoking pot for a couple of hours before hitting the town in the hope of finding some margarita-addled divorcée or, failing that, simply getting wasted. Business on the terrace had not been brisk, however. He was below quota on tips (and behind on his rent), and that was why he decided – now it was approaching five – it was worth one final attempt to upsell the old dude in the crumpled suit into a big glass of wine or, better still, an overpriced cocktail.

He went and stood over him.

The old man’s head was tilted forwards in sleep, showcasing a pale forehead dotted with liver spots, a sizable beak of a nose, and combed-back hair that, though pure white, remained in decent supply. Large, mottled hands rested on knees that appeared bony even through the black linen of his suit. Who wore black in Florida, for God’s sake?

The waiter coughed. There was no response.

He coughed again, more loudly.

Consciousness returned slowly.

It felt as though it was coming from a great distance, and that was because this was not a normal awakening. It wasn’t merely a matter of rising from sleep. On this day, the old man woke from a far deeper slumber.

He opened his eyes and for a moment he had no idea where he was. It was hot. It was bright, though the quality of the light suggested it must be towards the end of the afternoon. He could see the glint of some ocean or other, past the stone terrace on which he sat.

And there was a young man, wearing a white apron, standing in front of him and smiling the kind of smile that always had financial outlay attached to it.

‘Refreshed, sir?’

The old man stared confusedly at him for a moment, and then sat up straight. He peered around the terrace and saw young couples at other tables, and a few older people wearing hats and looking out at the ocean as if waiting for it to do something. Hotels on either side. Palm trees.

He turned back to the waiter. ‘Where am I?’

The waiter sighed. The old fart had seemed fine when he ordered his ice tea earlier. Evidently a day in the sun had fried what was left of his wits.

‘Wondered if I could interest you in a cold glass of Chardonnay, sir? We have an intriguing selection. Though perhaps a crisp Sauvignon Blanc would be more to your taste? Or a Martini, a Bellini, or a Sobotini? That’s the signature creation of our in-house executive mixologist, Ralph Sobo, and features a trio of—’

‘Did I ask you to recite the entire drinks menu?’

‘No, sir.’

‘So?’

The waiter smiled tightly. ‘You are on the terrace of the Palace Hotel,’ he said, offensively slowly. ‘South Beach. Miami. The United States of America.’ He leaned forwards and added, loudly enough for people nearby to turn and smile to themselves, ‘Planet Earth.’

The man frowned. ‘How long have I been here?’

‘In this spot? The entire afternoon. The hotel? I have no clue. I’m sure reception can assist you with that information, along with your name, if that’s also slipped your mind. Now – can I help you with a beverage, or not?’

The man shook his head. ‘Just my bill.’

The waiter walked off, bouncing his tray against his knee, vowing that he would use everything within his power to make sure that the wrinkly old fool received his bill only after a very significant delay.

This waiter had only been working at the Palace for a couple of days, and didn’t yet know many other members of staff. Otherwise he might have heard, in passing, whispers about this particular old man. Rumours that in the three months he’d been resident in a suite on the thirteenth floor, it had proved impossible to place guests in the accommodation on either side. The hotel’s sophisticated computer system appeared to have developed an intermittent glitch that meant those rooms showed up as occupied, even when they were not. Any attempt to override or ignore this resulted in double- or even treble-booking, with the inevitable fallout of enraged guests, and so for the time being reception had stopped trying to allot the rooms. They had also temporarily halted attempts to get to the bottom of the means of payment the old man had presented. His credit card, though unimpeachable in status and hue, proved impossible to retain reliably in the system. As a result – and to the hotel manager’s increasing disquiet – no charge had yet been levied against it. The technical department claimed this would be fixed very soon. The manager hoped this was true, though it was not the first or even third time he’d been given this assurance.

The waiter didn’t know any of this, however. So he went over to the register and surreptitiously tore up the old man’s bill, before hanging up his apron and leaving the terrace, whistling a tune to himself.

It’d only take the senile old bastard ten or fifteen minutes to get a new bill from the next waiter, but any inconvenience was better than none.

The man sitting under the umbrella didn’t wait that long, however. He laid ten dollars on the table, securing it under his glass. He stood. For a few moments he didn’t move any farther, apparently becalmed, his face blank.

Then suddenly he smiled.

It was not a simple smile, one of pleasure or joy. It was complicated, rueful. If you’d been watching, you might have thought he’d remembered something, a matter that was not urgent but which he felt foolish for having neglected.

He took a last look at the ocean and then turned and walked towards the doors to the hotel lobby, moving with a good deal more grace and speed than you might have expected.

An hour later, after a shower and in the middle of his second joint, the waiter from the Palace Hotel was relaxing on his balcony when it suddenly collapsed, dropping him forty feet into the chaos of his downstairs neighbour’s scrap of yard, where he died, reasonably quickly, as a result of a sheared metal strut which punctured his ribcage and heart.

This was not a coincidence.




Chapter 3 (#u4abea521-3a00-5603-8c27-f00fe3489f30)


It was seven in the evening, and Hannah was waiting.

Waiting.

Waiting.

She’d been waiting since breakfast, during which her father had been even more distant and insubstantial than usual; and waiting since he’d dropped her at school, saying goodbye with a hug and a kiss but an odd look in his eyes. He had forgotten to shave that morning, she noticed. He’d forgotten the day before, too. She hadn’t waited during the math homework they’d endured after pick-up, as she knew she had to pay attention. Her dad had more than once described helping her with math as his punishment for all the evil things he didn’t remember doing in a previous life, or lives, and while she doubted this was true she understood his patience was not limitless, especially now.

She then waited while he cooked dinner, her favourite, a creamy pasta dish with bacon and peas that he’d invented for her when she was small and the very smell of which made her feel safe and warm even when she knew that the world had changed. In fact, as she sat in the corner of the kitchen reading while he cooked, she wondered whether it was accidental that he happened to be cooking creamy bacon pasta this evening, or if it was in some way related to whatever it was that she knew – without having any reason she could put a finger on – that she was waiting for. The menu had been notably random in recent weeks, occasionally featuring complicated things she’d never seen before, but then frozen pizza three nights in a row.

And now tonight, suddenly, it was her favourite.

Waiting.

They ate at the kitchen table. Her father asked about her day, and listened, seeming more ‘there’ than for the last day or two. He didn’t eat much, though.

Afterwards Hannah carried her plate to the dishwasher and went to the living room to wait some more. Finally her father came through holding a cup of coffee. He perched on the edge of the sofa. ‘I need to say something,’ he said.

For a dire moment, Hannah was convinced he was going to tell her that Mom was never coming back from London, or that Hannah had to leave too, or he’d decided they needed to move to another town or something. She stared at him, barely able to breathe, but saw that his eyes looked soft, and so she thought probably – hopefully – it wasn’t something as bad as that.

‘What?’ she asked.

He pursed his lips and stared down at the carpet. He looked tired. Some of his bristles were grey. Had they been that way before Mom left? Hannah wasn’t sure. He’d never forgotten to shave when Mom was around.

‘I’m not handling this as well as I’d like,’ he said. ‘Your mom being … not here, I mean. I’m trying to do what needs to be done. And it’s working, right? We’re doing OK?’

Hannah nodded dutifully. Most of the time it sort of was OK, but even if it hadn’t been, she understood he hadn’t asked the question in order for her to answer it. Grown-ups did that a lot, saying something they believed to be a fact but putting a question mark at the end. It was meant to make you take the fact more seriously, or something. You learned that you weren’t expected to say anything in reply, just as you learned that if you were a girl you didn’t always want to mention your video-game scores to boys, especially if yours were higher.

‘But …’ He stopped. He didn’t seem to know what he wanted to say next.

‘You’re sad,’ she said.

He laughed, surprised. ‘Well, yeah. You are too, I know. It’s, uh, it’s a strange time.’

‘I’m sad,’ she agreed. ‘But not like you are.’

‘What … do you mean?’

‘You’re badly sad.’

He stared at her, nodding, and she was intensely scared to see that his eyes were full. She had never, ever seen her dad cry. She didn’t want to see it now. She knew life sucked but if it turned out it was bad enough to make her father cry, it was far worse than she realized. That would be beyond mundane.

‘Did I say something wrong?’

‘No. You said something smart.’ He sniffed briskly, and stopped looking like he was going to cry. ‘I need some time,’ he said. ‘Firstly … well, all this.’ He raised his hands, referring to the house, and what was in it, and what was not in it any more. ‘Plus … work. I’m getting behind. One or the other thing, I could handle. Both at once, not so much. It seems.’

Hannah understood that her father typed for a living, for people who lived down in Los Angeles, helping them make stories. She knew this was a hard job sometimes, partly because – so she had gathered, from overhearing conversations between him and Mom – almost all of the people her dad worked for were assholes and idiots, with the creative acumen of mosquitoes and the moral sensibilities of wolverines. He said things like this very quietly, though, as if concerned they might be able to hear him from over three hundred miles away.

‘OK, look,’ he said. ‘Here’s the thing. I wondered if you’d like to go stay with Granddad for a while.’

Hannah wanted to say ‘yes’ immediately, but dimly understood that she should not. ‘Granddad?’

Her father was watching her carefully. ‘Yes.’

‘Why not Aunt Zo?’

‘Zo-zo’s busy.’ He sighed. ‘Got an exhibition coming up, or a performance, or some … thing. Plus you’ve seen her apartment. She has to stand up when she goes to sleep.’

This was an old family joke and Hannah smiled as always, or tried to. It felt different now. In the past there would never have been any question of her staying with Aunt Zo. Now it had evidently been considered, and rejected. That made Hannah feel rejected too. ‘And I was thinking … of you going for more than a couple of days.’

‘How long?’

‘A week. Maybe two.’

Two whole weeks? ‘When?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘But … what about school?’

‘I talked to Teacher Jen. She said it would be OK.’

Hannah looked hard at her father, and knew he was not telling the truth. Not the whole truth, anyway. He would have talked to her teacher, yes. You couldn’t just yank a kid out of school without clearing it with mission control.

But it struck her now that, though he had not shaved, he’d been wearing smart chinos and a shirt when he dropped her at school that morning – the first time in ages he hadn’t been wearing the raggedy jeans he used to only wear at the weekend. She didn’t think you could bail your kid out of school for two weeks just by saying ‘I’m having a hard time.’ So probably he’d said it was something to do with working for the wolverines instead, which is why he’d been wearing business clothes. Things to do with work were always incredibly important for grown-ups. They were respected without question. Far more, it sometimes seemed, than things to do with children.

‘Have you asked Granddad?’

‘Yes. I spoke to him last night. Well, emailed. There’s no phone signal there.’

‘Where is he now? Where on earth?’

Her father smiled, and this time it looked genuine. It made Hannah realize what a long time it had been since she’d seen that kind of smile on his face.

‘Washington State,’ he said, as if this meant the far side of the moon. ‘God knows why. But where he’s staying sounds pretty cool. I think you’ll like it. And he says he’s really looking forward to seeing you.’

From the moment Dad first mentioned the idea, Hannah had wanted to go. She loved her dad’s dad, and the prospect of getting out of Santa Cruz for a while, doing something – anything – other than plodding through her mundane existence, felt desperately attractive. She’d held back from leaping at it because she knew she shouldn’t seem as if she wanted to get away from her father. That also meant she had to say what she said next. ‘But I’ll miss you.’

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she realized how true they were. How badly true.

Her dad’s lips clamped together, the way they sometimes did when he was mad. His eyes didn’t look mad, though. Not at all.

‘I’ll miss you too,’ he said. ‘But we can Skype, and email, and it’s not so long. And when you get back, things will be better here. I promise.’

‘OK,’ Hannah said. ‘Can I watch some Netflix now?’

‘Sure,’ he said, wrong-footed.

‘Yay.’

She jumped up and ran to the den and switched on the big TV. As she was waiting for her show to load she glanced back into the living room and saw that her father was still sitting on the edge of the sofa, shoulders bowed and head lowered. She could not see his face or eyes.

His shoulders seemed to shake, for a moment, and then shake again. Presumably he was laughing at something.




Chapter 4 (#u4abea521-3a00-5603-8c27-f00fe3489f30)


The driver pulled over to the side of Ali Baba Avenue and turned to look at the guy in the back of his cab.

‘You sure this is where you want to be?’

The old man had been silent throughout the long journey into Dade County from South Beach, successfully resisting Domingo’s attempts to involve him in conversation. Domingo was good at conversation, too. His game was tight. He didn’t mind listening either, a much rarer gift, and so he could usually get customers to chat with him, and he did this out of a simple desire to tell people things and to hear stuff about where they’d come from and where they were going, not just because it meant a bigger tip, though that was always welcome.

This customer, though … he wasn’t buying it. Anything Domingo said, he’d said nothing back, remaining relentlessly and noisily silent. He was currently looking out of the window at the twilight, his big, pale hands resting on the knees of his suit. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This looks perfect.’

Domingo laughed briefly. ‘Right. You want to get mugged or score some dope that’s gonna put you straight in ER, that may be true. This could be Heaven on earth right here.’

The passenger held out a few bank notes to signal their business was concluded. Domingo was not to be so easily dismissed, however.

‘The hell you want to come to Opa Locka for, anyway? Some dumbass website say there’s authentic down-home cooking? They lied, brother. The only specialty they got around here is rat boiled in meth. You want food, I can take you places, good places, back where the locals don’t eat each other.’

The old man opened his door. Domingo tried one last time. ‘Look. At least take my card, OK? How the hell else you going to get back? Don’t you be flagging down no cab here, even if you see one, which you won’t. For real. They’ll take you round the corner and rob your ass. If you’re lucky.’

The man got out and walked off down a street that looked as though it had recently withstood a minor hurricane and hadn’t been remotely picturesque before that. Domingo thought about going after him, but this was, bottom line, not a neighbourhood where he wanted to linger any longer than necessary.

So he drove away.

The old man spent an hour strolling the streets as the light faded. He saw low storage buildings of indeterminate purpose, fortified with barbed wire. He passed squat one-storey dwellings interspersed with clumps of stunted palm trees, houses set apart from each other not for the luxury of space but as though the inhabitants didn’t trust their neighbours enough to live in closer proximity. There were no sidewalks, so he walked down the middle of the streets, which were pitted and patched and ragged at the edges and sprouting grass in many places: the kind of broken roads you’d expect to see down the dusty end of country towns that had been dying for decades. It was stiflingly humid.

He encountered few people. Every now and then a child would run past, but never stop. A woman stared at him from the stoop of her small, battered house, as if wondering what kind of fool he might be. A couple of times he observed men loitering outside corner grocery stores, their eyes following him. He passed slowly, in case it would be one of these who’d show him where he needed to go. None moved, however. They seemed winded, listless, as though they couldn’t summon up the energy to rob a frail-looking old man who was evidently a long way from base.

But eventually he hesitated.

He felt something.

He turned in a slow circle, sniffed the air, and then set off up the next cross street. The houses were even farther apart here, and few showed a light. It felt … right.

When he saw the abandoned warehouse down the end, looming in dark isolation, he knew for sure that it was.

They looked up as he entered.

It was a large, empty space, the heart of the disused building. A fire built of fallen palm leaves and broken furniture burned in the centre.

Five men stood around it. Three white, one black, one half-Latino, none of them kids, all in their late twenties or thirties, but dressed in hoodies and ragged jeans all the same. Each looked as though it would be their pleasure to hurt you quite badly. There were a lot of candles, a hundred or more, spread over the floor and flickering in cavities in the walls.

One of the men, the tallest of the white guys, laughed. ‘Whoa,’ he said. ‘Holy crap, are you lost.’

The old man kept walking until he was within ten feet of the fire. He put his hands together as if in prayer, and looked at each of the men in turn.

‘No,’ he said in a calm and thoughtful voice. ‘I believe this is precisely where I need to be.’ He pulled out his wallet and threw it on the floor closest to the man who’d spoken. ‘Let’s get that part over with. I’d hate us to get distracted by mere theft.’

The tall guy frowned.

One of the others picked up the wallet. He leafed through it with a professional eye, and whistled. ‘Six hundred,’ he said to the tall guy, evidently the leader. ‘And change. We going to kill him now?’

The tall guy said nothing. His real name was Robert. That’s what his mother had called him, anyhow. She was dead and had been for a long time, along with his father and two sisters, and these days most people called him Nash instead. He’d been alive for nearly forty years – a long story by local criminal standards – and during that period had done many things. It’d be hard to come up with something he hadn’t done, in fact. Suffice it to say there were women, and men, and children, who woke in the night with his face in their minds as they lay sweating with the terrible memories they had acquired at his hands. Nash had stolen and beaten, and he had killed, via the media of gun and knife and bare hands and the sale of drugs cut with everything from toilet cleaner and chalk to concrete dust idly swept up off the street.

Bottom line: Nash was a very bad man, and in the last six months he’d started to explore whole new realms and means and levels of being not-good.

He was, however, also not-dumb. The way the old guy was presenting said you didn’t simply kill him. Not yet. ‘What do you want?’

‘Tell me about the candles.’

The other three guys glanced at each other. ‘We’re Satanists,’ one said proudly, the guy who’d rifled through the wallet, and still clutched it in his hand.

‘Shut up,’ Nash said.

The old man seemed intrigued. ‘Is that so?’

The guy holding the wallet didn’t want to stop talking. ‘You don’t believe us?’

‘You say you are, you are.’

‘You’d better bel—’

Nash turned to the wallet guy, his eyes hard. The other man went silent. He froze, his mouth open in mid-word. It looked as though he was trying to close it but could not. Eventually, after a great deal of effort, he managed to. Sweat had broken out on his forehead and his hands were trembling.

The old man watched all this with interest.

The trembling man retreated into the shadows. The others followed suit, leaving only Nash standing opposite the old man.

‘Going to ask you one last time,’ Nash told him. ‘What do you want?’

The old man shrugged in a friendly way. ‘I’m curious. I have a fondness for ruins, the abandoned, the lost. I was walking, and saw this place. I decided I’d take a look. I was assuming it would be empty or that I’d find a few homeless or addicts sprawled over the floor. Instead …’ He gestured around. ‘Candles. They look well enough. But you don’t seem the Martha Stewart Living type. So I’m curious.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Merely what I appear to be. But who are you, Robert? What are you these days?’

Nash stared at him. ‘How you know that name?’

‘It’s just a game of mine. Whenever I don’t know someone’s name, I call them Robert, that’s all. So tell me. Was what he said true? Are you gentlemen really Satanists?’

Nash elected to tell the truth, not because he considered the practice to be important or valuable, but because it was time to let the weird old dude know exactly what – and who – he was dealing with.

He lifted his right hand, raising it to chest height. His eyes on the other man’s, he coughed, once.

A small glow puffed into life in his palm, at first very dim, but quickly growing into a little ball of bright orange fire, about the size of a golf ball.

The old man watched the flame. ‘Huh,’ he said, as if impressed.

‘Right,’ Nash said, closing his hand and lowering it back to his side. ‘That answer your question?’

‘I suppose it does.’

‘Good. Got any more, or are you going to leave? Or I guess you could stay, and we could beat up on you for a while. For practice. That could work.’

‘How’d you do it? The fire.’

‘It’s a gift.’

‘From whom?’

‘From him. The Dark One. For doing his work.’

‘How? What kind of thing?’

‘We pray to him,’ Nash said. ‘Every day. And we make sacrifice.’

The old man nodded as if someone was explaining an important change in the terms and conditions of his health insurance. ‘What kind? Animals? People?’

‘No.’ Nash laughed scornfully. ‘That’s retro bullshit. You do the wrong thing with the right intent, you don’t need that Dennis Wheatley crap.’

‘So what do you do?’

‘We break, we burn. We spoil.’

‘You say “we”?’

The other men watched from the background, silent, as if knowing this conversation was out of their league.

‘Me, mainly. These guys … they got a ways to go.’

‘So show me something. The kind of thing you do.’

Nash hesitated. On the one hand the situation was kind of whack. He didn’t have a clue who this guy was. Could be a cop for all he knew. But if so, he couldn’t have anything on Nash or he’d have come with back-up and guns – even assuming Miami PD kept detectives on the payroll after they got so old they looked like they should have their feet up on a porch, waiting for the grandkids to come visit so they could go to Disneyworld and waste enough money to feed an Opa Locka family for a month.

The other thing was that Nash did want to show someone, someone other than the hangers-on lurking in the shadows. He’d shown those guys what to do, countless times, but none of them was making progress. They couldn’t get it to click, and that failure was holding him back. Nash understood that it wasn’t enough to walk this road by yourself. You got status from how many you dragged along with you. It was a gift you had to keep on giving. Day after day. Night after night.

He put his hand in his jeans and pulled out a small cardboard container, about the size of a pack of cigarettes. He held it up.

‘What’s that?’

Nash opened it. The interior had been padded with cotton wool. Lying in the centre was a tiny box. He removed this and held it up for the old man to see.

The man leaned forwards and squinted, seeing an intensely shiny black surface over most of the box, apart from the lid. There, someone had spent a great deal of time painting a detailed winter scene: pine trees and snow and a horse-drawn sleigh with two people on it, wrapped in old-fashioned coats and furry hats. It was so precise that it looked as if it must have been painted with a brush of a single hair, white and green with highlights of intense red and purple and dots of gold, all the more striking for the blackness of the box. It was extraordinarily shiny, too, as if coated with many coats of colourless varnish. In its detail and lustre it reminded the old man of something else, a far larger box he had once commissioned to be built.

‘And?’

‘Old guy who lives a couple blocks from here,’ Nash said, putting the tiny box carefully down on the floor. ‘I heard him talking in the store. His wife’s dying of cancer. Her mother was from Russia. The one thing she brought with her from the old country was a box like this. A lacquer box, they call it. It got stolen when this guy’s wife was a kid, but she’s remembered it all these years. Like it stood for her mom, or some shit. So this guy, he knows his wife’s dying, and he’s got cash salted away she doesn’t know about. He’s been saving all these years for the right time, putting a buck away here, fifty cents there. He figures this is the right time. So I overhear him telling all this to the guy behind the counter – who doesn’t give a crap, I mean he really could not care less – telling him that he’s blown this money, seven hundred fifty dollars, on buying one of these on the internet. Spent weeks tracking down a box like the one he’s heard his wife describe all these years. It’s her birthday in a week. He’s going to give it to her then. Or … he was. Until I paid a visit to their house, last Sunday morning when they were at church.’

‘You stole it. Nice.’

Nash smiled. ‘Right. But that’s not it.’

He raised his right foot and paused, closing his eyes as if in supplication, and then brought the heel of his boot down on the lacquer box, smashing it to pieces.

He was quiet for maybe ten seconds, relishing the moment. Then he opened his eyes.

‘That’s what he likes.’

The old man was motionless, as if listening for something. After a few moments he shook his head. ‘I got nothing,’ he said. He seemed irritated, and something else. Disconcerted, perhaps.

Nash was confused too, having anticipated a very different reaction. ‘What?’

The old man stood there, lips pursed, furrow-browed. Up until this point he’d seemed relaxed, as if their discussion had been quite interesting but no big deal. He didn’t look that way now. He looked unhappy, and thoughtful. He looked serious.

‘What’s up, dude?’

The old man glanced at Nash as though his mind was already on other things. ‘What’s up? I’ll tell you what is up. I like your style, but there’s a problem.’

‘What kind of problem?’

‘A big one. I don’t know who you’ve been sacrificing to, my friend, but he is not the Devil.’

‘Oh yeah? How do you know he’s not?’

‘Because I am,’ the old man said.

He turned to the man in the shadows who was still holding his wallet, held up a hand, and clicked his fingers.

The man exploded.

There was utter silence. None of the men standing there, sprayed though they were with blood and brains and internal organs, said a word or made a sound or moved a muscle. It was so very quiet that it seemed possible they might even have stopped breathing, until they all blinked, in unison.

‘Don’t try that at home,’ the old man said, bending down to pick up his wallet from where it had landed conveniently by his feet. ‘Otherwise, keep up the bad work.’

He walked out into the night, purposefully, a man who’d determined that it was finally time to get down to business.




Chapter 5 (#ulink_748ee1ff-3548-5173-ac34-747686bf457b)


The flight was OK except that a woman from the airline kept coming to check on Hannah, talking to her like she was five years old. At first, Hannah had been glad. She was a little nervous at the prospect of the journey, never having flown by herself (though also excited, as it would be the most compelling proof yet that she was, in fact, extremely grown up). Her dad was there to see her off, of course, but he still had not shaved and his voice was quiet and he was blinking an awful lot. He hugged her tightly when it was time for her to get on the plane and stood watching her walk down the corridor until she had to turn the corner and couldn’t see him any more. A kind-looking old lady with long grey hair told her not to worry, she’d see him again soon. Hannah didn’t think it was any of the lady’s business, but said thank you anyway.

She didn’t like to think of her dad driving back over the hill to their house and walking into the silence all by himself. So she did not, and read her book instead.

The flight passed, as they all do, eventually.

The first person she saw when she walked out of arrivals in Seattle was Granddad, standing with his hands in his corduroy trousers, chubby and pink-faced and irrevocably bald. His face lit up when he saw her, and she ran over and buried her face in his sizable stomach.

‘It’s OK,’ he said, putting his arms around her, smelling as always of peppermint. ‘Everything will be OK.’

Half an hour later they were in Granddad’s car on their way out of Tacoma. It was, Hannah believed, the same car he’d had when he came to visit in Santa Cruz – though it was hard to be certain. He seemed to delight in changing them regularly, and in picking vehicles in colours that had no name, somewhere on the spectrum between brown and green and sludge, hues of which it was impossible to imagine someone ever thinking: Ooh, yes, let’s make it look like that. Their shape was also hard to describe beyond that they looked like cars, the kind a small boy might draw. The sole constant – and this is what made it tough to tell if this was a new one or the same old one – was that the inside would be flamboyantly, outrageously untidy.

When Granddad opened the trunk to stow Hannah’s bag he had to move a birdcage, two bags of old alarm clocks, a broken DVD player, quite a lot of shoes, a length of green hosepipe, two large metal springs made of copper, and a stuffed raccoon. Hannah wasn’t sure whether she was allowed by law to ride in the front of the car with him, but there wasn’t any choice as the back seat was full of too many things to list unless you had a piece of paper ten feet long, a pencil, and a sharpener.

From time to time Granddad would make odd sculptures, one of which – apparently fashioned from the insides of a small television, some watches, a toy mouse, and other things she didn’t have names for – graced the bookshelf in Hannah’s bedroom. She had no idea what it was supposed to be but she liked it anyway. He had given her parents several such works in the past, too, but Hannah’s mother had evidently decided they would be seen to their best advantage in the garage.

When she sat in the passenger seat Hannah had to angle her legs because there was an ancient suitcase in the footwell. It was made of leather and had a dusty dial on the front. She asked, politely, if it was possible to move it.

‘I’m afraid not,’ Granddad said. ‘It has to be there or the car won’t go.’

As often, Hannah wasn’t sure whether this was true or not, but managed to get her legs comfortable. ‘So where are you living now, Granddad? Where on earth?’

‘You’ll see.’

‘Will it take long?’

‘Quite a while. I’m going to take the scenic route.’

‘Should I chatter senselessly the entire way, or gaze quietly out the window instead?’

He looked at her and smiled, putting deep, kind lines in the skin around his eyes. ‘That, my dear, is entirely up to you.’

As he pulled out of the parking lot, Hannah settled back into her seat and took a bite of the sandwich he’d brought for her, knowing she’d probably do a bit of both.

Hannah had learned early in life that the thing about her grandfather was he didn’t live anywhere in particular. He did not fail to live anywhere in the way most people did, like the ones who sat on street corners in Santa Cruz, displaced or unplaced, submissive or cranky, overly tan and wary of passers-by, the people her mom and dad had taken pains to explain deserved as much politeness and goodwill as everyone else, possibly more. Those people didn’t have homes because they couldn’t afford them, or due to being unwell in body or mind.

Granddad was different. He didn’t have a house because that was the way he liked it. For a long time – before Hannah was born – he’d had a home. He lived with Grandma, whom she never met, in a house in Colorado. Even then he would have preferred a more itinerant life, but his wife felt differently and they had children to bring up – Dad and Aunt Zo – and so he’d consented to being shackled to one particular house, one particular road, one set of grocery stores and local news stations and weather patterns and group of people and ways of being, and a ludicrous little dog belonging to a neighbour who’d barked the whole damned time for years and years, a memory which evidently still rankled.

Once he’d got over the death of Grandma, however, he’d done what he’d always wanted. He sold the house and everything in it, and went on the road. That was twenty years ago. Now he was a quantum elder, and there was almost no means of predicting his whereabouts at any given moment – where on earth, as Mom and Dad always put it, rolling their eyes, the old man might be. He rattled around the United States (and occasionally other countries, like Russia and Mozambique, but mainly he stayed in America) in a succession of battered cars (or perhaps one car, of surprising longevity, no one was sure). Sometimes he’d hole up for several months, renting an apartment or cottage or shed. At other times he’d pause for only a few days, lodging in a hotel or motel or even, Hannah’s mom speculated darkly, somewhere so far off the beaten track that there were no places to stay, which meant he was presumably sleeping in his car.

Hannah thought this was an exaggeration. Having seen Granddad’s car/s, she was confident there would simply never be enough room for him to stretch out.

They drove for a few hours. At first it was busy city streets and highways, and Hannah kept quiet because her grandfather was concentrating. He drove at a consistent, sedate pace, which from time to time provoked irritation in other road users, manifested by honking and the waving of fists. Unlike her father, who responded to this style of criticism in kind, Granddad hummed serenely – before suddenly stepping on the gas and leaving the other cars for dust, out-smarting them with deft multi-lane manoeuvres. Just occasionally you might feel inclined to close your eyes during one of these dogfights, but you rarely believed there was a genuine chance of dying.

Soon they were out of the city and driving around the Olympic Peninsula. For a while he played music on the car stereo, the kind of quiet, complicated music he liked, which he said was called ‘baroque’, but when it ran out he didn’t put on any more. At times he took them close to the woods and at others he drove along the cold, craggy coast, flicker-lit by sun glinting off the ocean between stands of silver and paper birch. Sometimes they talked, about school and stuff, and where Granddad had lived recently (he’d been lodging at their destination for several weeks now, a long stay by his standards: before that he’d tried a spell in the hills of somewhere she’d never heard of, called Syria, but hadn’t liked it much, too dusty and hot).

For much of the time, as the afternoon wore on, they drove in equable silence. Something she liked about her grandfather was that if you wanted to talk then he’d listen, but if you didn’t want to talk, he’d listen to that too. His mind wouldn’t immediately fly away to work and emails or all the things that seemed to have Mom and Dad in their tractor beams. With them you had to talk all the time to keep their attention, to remind them you were there. Not with Granddad.

And sometimes, when a lot has happened in your life, much of it inexplicable, silence is what you need to say the most.

After a while she fell asleep.

It was almost dark when she woke, stirred by a sudden decrease in the car’s speed. Hannah pulled herself upright, blinking, as her grandfather turned off the highway and on to a narrow two-lane road leading into the hills.

‘Are we here?’

‘We’re always here,’ he said. ‘That’s important to remember. But in the specific case of the place to which we’re going, we very nearly are.’

‘What?’

‘Sorry. “Yes” is what I meant to say.’

The road wound up and over the hills. At the top you could see the ocean for a few minutes through the trees, and then the road headed down again on the other side.

At the end of it stood a hotel, an old-looking two-storey lodge made of wood, but Granddad turned towards a crop of cabins dotted along a pathway that meandered along the low bluff above the beach. He parked in front of the last of these.

‘Welcome to Kalaloch.’

The cabin was made of wood and painted white and grey, though not recently. It was clean but had a musty smell, like old sea breezes retired into stillness. There were two bedrooms, a bathroom with a tub so tiny Hannah thought she might have difficulty stretching her legs out in it, and a living room with two chairs and a couch but no TV. At all. Not even a small one. She checked several times, baffled by this overturning of the natural order.

The outside wall of the living room was taken up with a pair of sliding glass doors, with a view out over the path to the ocean. When he’d put her suitcase on the bed of her room, Granddad opened the doors and led her out on to the path, past a couple of battered plastic chairs evidently designed for enjoying the view from the minuscule deck, assuming you’d brought a thick sweater or two.

The beach was twenty feet below the edge of the bluff, a wide stretch of grey sand reaching out towards an even greyer sea. A few pieces of driftwood, large and very white, were strewn across it. There was no one down there, no footprints even. It looked like the end of the world. The ocean seemed as though it went on forever and then a bit more.

A gull sailed by, high overhead, and disappeared.

Even with Granddad only feet away, Hannah felt very alone. Her hand folded around the iPod in her jeans pocket. ‘Is there Wi-Fi here?’

‘Not in the cabin. There is in the lodge, though, when we go over there to eat dinner.’

Hannah nodded.

‘You want to Skype your dad?’

She shrugged. He looked out at the ocean for a moment, then put his hand on her shoulder. ‘I don’t know about you,’ he said, ‘but it’s been a long drive, and I’m rather hungry already.’

She smiled at him. He always heard.




Chapter 6 (#ulink_5e365d20-d8bc-5e77-a37f-a79edc8fdacf)


Meanwhile, about a thousand miles away, a man was sitting at a table in a diner called Frankie’s Food Fiasco, situated at the edge of a small town in North Dakota. The man was called Ron – though a lot of people had another name for him.

The restaurant had got its name because it was owned by a guy called Frankie: sometimes that’s the way it is. Frankie was a capable cook, and his diner was regarded as pretty much the only place you’d voluntarily eat in town. Less well known was that Frankie had never wanted to own a diner. He’d wanted to be a movie star. For a while it looked like it might happen, too, after he scored a lead supporting role in a TV series about a maverick chiropodist turned surfing detective, called Undertoe, which by odd coincidence was the first show Hannah’s dad worked on. It was also the only one that had got a second season, and thus constituted his biggest and, kind of, only success. Frankie had played the star’s dour buddy, prone to mutter the word ‘Fiasco!’ whenever things went wrong – which became a moderately popular running gag in society at large for about five minutes.

Once the show got cancelled and he’d realized the world of entertainment appeared not merely willing, but keen, to get along without him, Frankie had enough smarts to head back to his home town, where he used his savings to buy a failing restaurant, largely because he had no idea of what else to do. Through trial and error – and a degree of bloody-mindedness – he’d rewritten himself as a cook, and now if you wanted to eat out in Shendig, North Dakota, Frankie’s Food Fiasco was where you’d go.

Frankie could have been content with this state of affairs, but he was not. He wished he was still an actor, and in the intervening years had developed a churning resentment of the people who frequented his diner. What did they know about the life he should have had? Nothing. Zip. Nada. They just wanted their burgers and wings and fries and beer. They sat and stuffed their greedy faces not caring that the food they were shovelling down had been prepared by a man who, were this a fair and just world, should be lounging on the deck of a beach house in Malibu, stupefied with money and success.

In revenge for this, every night Frankie would, at random, screw up a single dish. He’d put in way too much salt, or a big dollop of hot sauce, or mix untoward ingredients in such a way that the result tasted quite unlike anything you’d generally regard as food. Though it was never explicitly discussed, some of the restaurant’s customers realized the danger, incorrectly assuming it was a recurrent accident. You couldn’t say anything should you be unlucky enough to be served the booby-trapped dish because Frankie was prone to banning people if they got uppity, and you didn’t want that to happen as the only other place to eat in Shendig (apart from Molly’s Café, which was dependably disgusting) was the Burger King downtown. If you received Frankie’s nightly food bomb you forced down as much as you could and politely told the waitress you were full, declining the opportunity to have the remainder boxed – knowing that statistically you were unlikely to get the booby prize again for a while.

Unless, that is, you were Ron.

Ron ate at Frankie’s at least once a week. It was just down the hill from his apartment and he enjoyed the low ceilings, the wood panelling, the fact that the music was never too loud. He also liked the food, though it seemed like his entrée tasted really weird about one time in three. Ron hadn’t heard the rumour about the food bombs. He just shrugged and put it down to fate.

Ron put a lot of things down to fate. He had to. Like the fact that the booth he was sitting in tonight – and he couldn’t move, because the place was packed: people liked to come in when it was busy, as it lowered the probability of receiving a dish that tasted like it had been cobbled together from things that had died out on the highway and then spent a few days simmering in snot – happened to be right under a spot in the exposed piping hooked to the ceiling that had developed a leak, and was intermittently allowing droplets of very cold water to fall on to his head. He’d tried moving to the other side of the booth, but it happened there, too. Except the drops were boiling hot.

Tonight his ribs tasted great, but he was barely aware of them. He was concerned instead with two other matters, the first being that he’d totalled his car that afternoon. It had snowed heavily a couple of days before and while most people had managed to avoid the very obvious icy patch at the end of the road, Ron had not. As he’d recently lost his job at the picture framer’s after dropping (and damaging, cataclysmically and beyond hope of repair) what had turned out to be a rather valuable painting, Ron wasn’t in a position to get his car fixed. Without one, it was going to be hard to find a new job.

The second thing on his mind was his girlfriend, Rionda. Or rather, he realized gloomily, his ex-girlfriend. She worked at the Burger King and was the nicest person he had ever met. She’d seemed to like him too, but their association had been plagued by disappointing events, including him setting fire to her favourite dress when lighting a candle that was supposed to be romantic, and accidentally backing his car over her foot.

She’d put up with most of this reasonably well, but the last weekend had seen a new low point. Invited for the first time to meet Rionda’s parents, Ron became entangled in a series of calamities during a visit to their bathroom that he still didn’t understand, but which had ultimately led to a need for the services of not one, but two teams of emergency plumbers, working in shifts, an estimated refurbishment bill of six to ten thousand dollars, and an odour which experts were now saying would probably never go away. When Ron had trudged away from the house at the end of the afternoon, Rionda and her mother were standing on the porch in floods of tears, and her father had been brandishing a shotgun.

Ron guessed that was probably the end of it.

He sighed and reached for his soda, not realizing until too late that he’d dipped his sleeve in his barbecue beans, at which point this distracted him sufficiently that he knocked his drink over. Not all of it dripped through the hole in the table on to his trousers, but most did.

It was this kind of thing that caused many people, behind his back, to call him Bad Luck Ron.

As Ron was tucking into a slice of pecan pie and wondering why it tasted so strongly of fish, he looked up to see a man standing at the end of the table.

The man was old, with white hair pushed back from his forehead and large hands. He was wearing a crumpled black linen suit. He didn’t say anything. He merely stood there, apparently watching the corner of the booth, the seat next to Ron.

He was looking at it so fixedly, in fact, that Ron turned to look too. The seat was empty, as he’d known it would be.

Well … it appeared empty. Ron couldn’t see the strange, four-foot-high fungus-like creature sitting there, or the expression of utter surprise, tinged with guilt and nervousness, upon its gnarled beige face.

Ron turned back to the old man. ‘Uh, can I help you?’

The man walked away.

Ron watched him head across the diner and out of the door without looking back. ‘Huh,’ he said.

He soldiered on with his pie a little longer, but eventually gave up. It was making him feel nauseous.

After he’d paid his bill, electing as always not to mention any problem with the food, Ron left the diner and stepped out into the freezing parking lot. He was disappointed to see snow was falling again. Driving home would have taken him five minutes. On foot, it would be half an hour up an icy hill. Oh well. Nothing he could do about it.

When he was halfway across the lot a figure stepped out from behind a car. This sufficiently startled Ron that he slipped on a patch of ice and fell down.

From his prone position he realized it was the old man he’d seen in the diner. Dots of snow swirled around the man’s head. Ron thought it must be snow, anyway.

‘Please stand up,’ the man said.

Ron tried, but halfway through the attempt his foot hit the same patch of ice and he fell down again in approximately the same way.

The old man waited patiently.

On the third attempt Ron managed to get to his feet. ‘Who are you?’

‘That’s not a question you need the answer to,’ the man said. ‘Would you turn away from me, please? Carefully, so you don’t fall down again.’

‘Why?’

‘Just do it.’

Ron did as he was told. Something about the old man’s manner told Ron that doing what he said would be the wisest course of action.

‘Thank you. Now hold still.’

There was a pause; then Ron felt a pulling sensation, as if something was tugging at his back. He glanced behind and saw the old man remained several feet behind, so it couldn’t be him.

‘Face the front.’

Ron quickly turned back. The tugging sensation continued for a few moments, getting stronger, as if something had its claws in his clothes, or even skin, and was refusing or unable to let go – and then suddenly stopped.

He heard the old man mutter something, followed by footsteps crunching away in the fallen snow.

‘You may turn back towards me now.’

Ron did so, slowly, surprised to find the old man was still there, now looking at him with a thoughtful expression, his head cocked on one side.

‘I can tell that you should not have received the attentions of my associate,’ he said. ‘I shall chastise him for it.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I will give you one piece of advice, in recompense for your troubles. Even when you think you’ve apologized as much as you can, once more never harms. Your story can change. Overnight.’

Ron watched the man walk away across the parking lot to a large black car in the corner. Despite his age, he seemed to have no difficulty navigating the patches of ice that had proved unavoidably treacherous to Ron.

Oddly, the old man opened the back door of his car first. He stood with it open, waiting for a moment, as if for a tardy dog, and then closed it, got into the front and drove away.

Halfway home and already very cold, Ron had an idea. It didn’t seem like an especially good idea, but he couldn’t get it out of his head. He stopped, turned round, and trudged towards downtown instead.

He went to the Burger King, where Rionda ignored him steadfastly for an hour and a half. Eventually, however, she consented to listen as he said sorry for everything, up to and most definitely including the debacle the previous weekend at her parents’ house.

Her parents’ bathroom remained a sore point for Rionda, as the army had visited that afternoon and there was growing speculation that it – and the rest of the house, and possibly the ones on either side – might have to be destroyed in the interests of public safety, but Ron was so patently sincere that she couldn’t help but soften.

He seemed different somehow, too, and when he walked her home at the end of her shift it was Rionda, rather than Ron, who slipped on ice going up the hill leading to her own little house. Ron caught her arm, and she did not fall.

She kissed him.

Five months later they were married.

They will play no further part in our story, but I’m happy to relate that they lived happily ever after.




Chapter 7 (#ulink_2aa751e3-1057-590d-8895-cbbb18605b81)


At around the time Ron arrived downtown, cold and snow-covered, and was plucking up the courage to go into Burger King, the old man in the black linen suit was sitting at the counter in a dark and dangerous basement bar only five streets away. To the casual observer it would have looked as if he was alone. He was not.

The imp called Vaneclaw was perched on the next seat. Bar stools are not designed for the likes of accident imps, and he kept slipping off. If you’d been able to see him, you might have thought the thing he most resembled was an extremely large mushroom, one of those exotic types, possibly a chanterelle. With a face, though, and spindly little arms and legs, covered in patches of hairy mould, like something you might find lurking at the back of the fridge after several months, and hurriedly throw away. Luckily – in common with all familiars of his class – Vaneclaw was invisible to the normal eye.

‘You are a very stupid imp,’ the old man said.

‘Oh, I know.’

The imp did know this. Not only was he stupid on his own account, he came from an unusually stupid family, a line of imps celebrated for greater than usual dimness. His parents had once gone four years without contact, though they were plaguing two people in the same house, because they were too stupid to find their way from one floor to the next. This might have been more excusable had it not been a single-storey dwelling. Vaneclaw’s grandmother was worse, so very dense that not only could she not even remember her own name (consistently referring to herself as ‘that one, right here, where I am’) but she also spent nearly thirty years plaguing herself. (In her defence, after she’d started, it was difficult to stop. Accident imps are sticky. Once they’ve bonded to someone they’re almost impossible to get off.) The entire family was so intellectually torpid that they didn’t even have the sense to apply to be stupidity imps instead, whose job is to cause otherwise smart people to behave stupidly, which seldom involves anything more complicated than access to alcohol and a member of the opposite sex.

‘Explain yourself, Vaneclaw.’

‘Well, boss. What it is, is this. Once you disappeared—’

‘I did not disappear.’

‘All right then, well, once you were, I dunno, not around, I was at a loose end. A lot of us were. And at first that was fine, because I’d been accidenting people for a thousand years by then, non-stop, and I didn’t mind the thought of having some time off, right? But after a decade or so, it’s like, I’ve had my holidays, what now? Accidenting’s what I do. So I got back into it, and for ages everything was fine, honest. You should have seen me. It was top stuff. Calamity Central. But then one night I’m in a crowded pub and the woman I’ve been plaguing for the last twenty years has just died in a freak tofu-braising incident and so I’m ready for pastures new, and I spot this geezer. Total git he was. Perfect. So I thought, right mate, you’re mine. Have some of this. And I threw myself at him, claws out. The bastard moved, though. So I flew right past and ended up stuck to the guy who was behind him, that Ron bloke you just pulled me off, who I freely admit did not deserve what I have put him through. But you know how it is – I was stuck.’ Vaneclaw shrugged, causing himself to slip off the stool again, to land on the bar’s dirty concrete floor with a quiet splat.

The old man waited while he scrambled back up. ‘You’re an idiot,’ he said.

‘Couldn’t agree more. But whoa, boss, it’s magic to see you. Let the bad times roll, eh? Where you been, anyway?’

The old man looked at the imp for a long moment. ‘I fell asleep,’ he said.

‘You what?’

‘The specifics of how I spend my time are not your concern,’ the man muttered.

‘Mine not to reason why, eh? Especially as reasoning has never been my strong suit. Never really understood what it even is, be honest with you.’

‘Do that, yes, Vaneclaw.’

‘What? Reason?’ The imp looked uncomfortable, as if being asked to do something well above his pay grade.

‘No. Be honest with me.’

‘Oh, always! But … what about?’

The old man was looking at him very seriously. ‘Have you been praying? Have you been making sacrifice?’

‘Of course I have, guv.’ The imp was bewildered to be asked the question. ‘Morning, noon, and night, even when I was on holiday and not actively accidenting because of, you know, what I said earlier. First thing in the morning, last thing at night, and, well, somewhere around lunchtime, either before or right after, depending, I have prayed every single day to your infernal majesty, unhallowed be your eternal everlasting dreadfulness, et cetera.’

‘What about sacrifices?’

‘Yes! My every deed and thought is done in your awful name, for a start. Every single time I do something bad or disappointing, slip another mishap someone’s way, I consecrate said deed to the glory of your appalling self.’

‘Hmm.’

The old man seemed to be watching the only other patrons in the bar, a pair of very ugly men at a table in the corner. The men were talking in low tones, and even an imp as unsmart as Vaneclaw could tell they were not good people. After a moment the old man looked away, as if weary of the sight of them – weary, or extremely preoccupied.

‘Boss?’

The man remained silent. The imp waited nervously. If you’d told him when he woke that morning (curled up on the roof of Bad Luck Ron’s house) that he’d be seeing his lord and master that day, he’d have jumped for joy (and fallen straight off the roof). He still felt that way, but increasingly cautious, too. Something was on the old man’s mind, and experience had shown that the kind of things that the big man had on his mind were seldom good. Vaneclaw felt it safer to remain very, very quiet.

Eventually the old man turned to him. ‘I want you to do two things for me.’

‘Anything, boss, you know that.’

‘The first is I want you to look into my eyes.’

Vaneclaw suddenly felt very nervous indeed. He realized that what he’d previously been feeling hadn’t been nervousness after all. It had been … something else. Maybe … solitude, or what was that other one that began with an ‘S’? He couldn’t remember. Speciousness? Didn’t matter. The point was that what he was feeling now was nervousness. The imp knew very well that the old man could cause people to go absolutely shrieking insane merely by glancing at them. Not just humans, either, but imps and snits and demons and full-grown snackulars, whom even Vaneclaw found a bit creepy.

But, on the other hand, Vaneclaw thought if the old man looked into his eyes and drove him totally walloping bonkers, the imp would be unlikely to be able to do whatever the second thing was going to be, on account of being out of his mind. Saying you were going to ask two things of someone, and then preventing them from being able to even attempt the second, because of the first, was exactly the kind of mistake that Vaneclaw himself might make. But not the old man.

‘All right,’ the imp said, and slowly raised his eyes.

Precisely one minute later, the old man nodded. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I see you speak the truth.’

The imp was so relieved that he felt as though he’d turned to jelly. It had been a very unpleasant sixty seconds. It was as if an acidic worm with spikes was crawling through every tiny, crooked nook and cranny of what passed for his mind; at times he’d felt also as though he was getting a glimpse in the other direction, seeing fire, and blood, and long-ago dust.

It was over now, though, and he’d evidently passed the test. ‘So what was the third thing, boss?’

‘Second thing, Vaneclaw.’

‘Oh yeah, sorry.’

‘Go now, throughout the district. Locate every one of our personnel in the area. Every single imp, demon and snackular, each familiar and shadow, soulcutter and schrank. Bring them here. Do it quickly. Do it now.’

‘I am so on it, boss.’

‘Not while you’re still here.’

‘Oh yeah.’

The imp slid quickly off the stool and scampered away into the night, leaving the man in the linen suit alone at the bar, looking intensely thoughtful.

And tired.

And old.

Ten minutes later the two ugly men from the table walked up to the counter, having decided that they would like to rob him.

‘Look into my eyes,’ the old man said.

One of the men left the bar five minutes later and killed a family in a house six streets away, before stealing a car and driving it into a wall, dying instantly.

The other staggered off into the dark, cold night and spent the short remainder of his days living in a box under a bridge, convinced that every time he breathed, his eyeballs filled up with spiders.

Meanwhile, the old man waited in the bar for the imp to return.




Chapter 8 (#ulink_d12e6657-ecb9-5f16-99f6-0505ef2d94ae)


Hannah picked at her food. It wasn’t that she didn’t like it. Everything she’d eaten in the hotel so far – dinner the previous night, breakfast this morning, and now lunch – had been good. Not as nice as when Dad had his game on but, on the other hand, not frozen pizza three nights in a row. She simply wasn’t hungry.

She hadn’t slept well either. She’d been woken several times in the night by the mournful sound of wind. It would sweep past the windows and over the roof of the cabin with a long, low howl, and then tail away as if it’d forgotten or come to terms with whatever tragedy had provoked it in the first place. It would be quiet for a while – a long, pregnant silence – and then suddenly do its thing again, much louder and with more keening this time, as if it’d realized that actually everything was far worse than it had originally feared, and the world needed to know.

It was cold, too. Granddad piled blankets and an extra counterpane over her when she went to bed, but in the dark hours it was freezing. Eventually, about six in the morning, she had wrapped herself in her dressing gown and a blanket and left her bedroom, padding out to the main room. She’d been surprised to find Granddad already there, fully dressed, staring out to sea, or at where the sea would be if it hadn’t still been dark.

‘You’re up early,’ she said.

‘Hmm?’

Granddad took a moment to come back from whatever thoughts he’d been having, but then he said the hotel would be serving breakfast by now and why didn’t they go get a big plate of eggs to warm themselves up.

He had been acting strange since, though. He seemed to lose focus every now and then, head held as if listening for something. After a moment of this he’d shake his head and be totally normal again.

They’d started the day by heading down the wooden steps to the beach, turning left and walking. They walked for an hour and then turned and walked back. The sea was grey and choppy. The sand was grey, too, punctuated by large, dark boulders. There was no one else around.

They talked of this and that. Looking back, Hannah couldn’t remember exactly what they had talked about. Just … stuff. Mom and Dad always wanted to know how school had been, when she was going to do her homework, if there was the slightest possibility, ever, that she might tidy up her room. With Granddad it was more like waves on the beach. Coming in, and going out, none of them mattering but all of them real. It struck her as a shame that it was hard to remember this kind of talking after it was over.

‘What are we going to do this afternoon?’ she asked.

‘Walk the other way. You have to. Or the beach gets unbalanced.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh yes. Like a seesaw. All the sand slides to one end. I wouldn’t want that on my conscience. Or yours.’

Hannah raised a disbelieving eyebrow. Granddad just sat there looking innocent.

The only other person in the restaurant was a young waitress who spent her time looking as though she was in training for a competition to see who in the world could look the most bored, and had a real chance of placing in the medals.

‘Don’t you get lonely here?’

‘I don’t get lonely anywhere.’

‘But how, if there are no people?’

‘Loneliness isn’t to do with other people.’

‘But don’t you want someone to talk to, sometimes?’

Granddad raised his hand in another vain attempt to attract the attention of the waitress. ‘The problem, dear, is my age. When you’re as old as me, if people see you in a corner with a book they think: Poor old fellow, he must be lonely – I’ll go cheer him up. And so they come and talk at you, whether you want them to or not, and they always speak too loudly, and treat you as though you’re incapable of understanding the smallest things, or as if you’re simple in the head.’

‘Really?’

The hand movement not having worked, Granddad coughed, extremely loudly. The waitress looked the other way.

‘Almost always,’ he went on. ‘They believe that because older people move slowly, their minds must creep too. They forget that the way you get to be old is by living a long time, which means you’ve seen a lot of things. When you get to my age—’

‘What is your age, Granddad?’

Hannah knew she shouldn’t interrupt a grown-up but couldn’t resist such a perfect opening. Granddad’s age was a hotly debated topic. Nobody knew what it was, at least not for sure. They knew his birthday – 20 November – but not the year he’d been born. Hannah’s dad and Aunt Zo had spent their childhoods believing that their father was born in 1936, which is what their mother had told them. But one Christmas when Hannah’s mom mentioned this in passing – and when Granddad had enjoyed a few glasses of wine over lunch – he’d laughed very hard and said no, no, that wasn’t when he’d been born at all. Concerted attempts to pin him down subsequently had been deftly avoided. Hannah’s mom had more than once suggested this was because Granddad was losing his marbles, and couldn’t actually remember. Hannah, on the other hand, believed he was just having fun.

‘So very, very ooooooold,’ he said with a wicked grin. ‘Now – we need our bill. Please throw your spoon at the waitress. Aim for her head.’

The beach was wilder on the right. A river came down out of the hills, approaching at a jagged angle as though woozy after a long fight. The river widened markedly as it met the beach, became pebble-bottomed and choked with branches and trees, stripped of their bark, white and dead, washed down out of the mountains. Granddad sat to one side while Hannah explored the river mouth, but even for an only child used to being solitary, she needed someone her own age to make that kind of thing truly fun.

They walked further and found a stretch where the beach near the waterline was busy with sand dollars. These weren’t just the shells, like the ones that – once in a blue moon – you might find fragments of on the beach in Santa Cruz. They were living creatures, as Hannah found with a start when she tried to pick one out of the sand (delighted to have found a whole one for once) and saw it burrowing away from her.

She found its being alive faintly disturbing, as though it was a pebble that had tried to scuttle off.

They walked on, and on. There was nothing along here except wilderness, and thus no particular reason to stop. Neither of them had said anything for half an hour.

Eventually Hannah tired, and ground to a halt.

There was no one else on the beach. She was starting to feel like a piece of driftwood, washed up on this shore and left there forever. Like that, or …

Her father had once told her about something called the Watchers, a story set in the mountains of Big Sur. It was said that once in a very great while, at twilight, people caught a glimpse of figures – usually alone, but occasionally in pairs – standing in the deepest woods, or on a peak some distance away. Dark figures with no faces, not tall, cloaked in long black coats with hoods, or enveloped in shadows. They never did anything, or said anything, and when you looked back they were gone. Her father said people had been claiming to see the Watchers for a hundred years, and that the Native Americans had tales that sounded like they might be about the same thing, from even longer ago. Hannah had assumed her father might be making all this up – he did that kind of thing from time to time, testing ideas for whatever he was working on for the bastards and flea-brains down in Los Angeles – but then one afternoon her teacher had mentioned the Watchers too, and said that they were in a poem by some slightly famous poet who’d lived in Carmel, and John Steinbeck had put them in a short story, too, and John Steinbeck knew absolutely everything about sardines, so maybe he knew about that too.

Hannah felt like a Watcher.

Like something unknown, standing outside normal life, apart from it; right here, and yet far away. As if she lived in a secret country, hidden behind where everyone else lived, or as if some Big Bad Wolf – star of a fairy tale that had unnerved her as a young child, partly because it had been told to her by Aunt Zo, who really wasn’t keen on wolves – had blown her whole house down, changing the world forever, stranding her in a place where her thoughts and fears were invisible to people who were always looking the other way.

‘Can we go back?’

‘No.’

‘Huh?’

Granddad was smiling, but he looked serious, too. ‘You can never go back, only forward. I read that in a book once.’

‘Is it true?’

He shrugged. ‘In a way. Time will slip sideways every now and then, but once something’s happened it can’t be un- happened. You have to make the best of how the world is afterwards. Lots of people make themselves crazy, or at least deeply unhappy, because they don’t realize that.’

‘Are Mom and Dad going to get back together?’

The question came out of the blue and in a rush. Granddad was silent for so long afterwards that she started to think he hadn’t heard, or that she hadn’t said it out loud after all.

‘I don’t know,’ he said eventually. ‘Perhaps.’

‘Don’t you hope so?’

‘I hope they do what’s right for them,’ he said carefully. ‘But I don’t know what that is. I don’t think they do either, at the moment.’

Hannah couldn’t believe what she was hearing. ‘What’s right is for them to be together! We’re a family. They have to be my mom and dad.’

‘They are, Hannah. They always will be. Even if they stay apart.’

‘That’s not enough.’

‘It may have to be, I’m afraid.’

‘No.’ She glared up at him. In that moment he didn’t look like her granddad, someone whose face was so well known that it disappeared, allowing her to look inside. Now it seemed alien, a mask of lines and wrinkles holding a pair of sharp, knowing eyes – old man’s eyes, the eyes of someone who’d witnessed so many things that it made him see the world differently.

Made him see it wrongly.

Unable to say any of this, she ran away.

He caught up with her, of course. Not by running – the idea of Granddad running would have been comical, had she been in the right mood. He caught up with her by walking, steadily, slowly, consistently. She ran out of steam. He did not. She lost her fury. He’d had none. That’s how you win, in the end.

When they got back to the cabin she said she wanted to wander around the hotel grounds, by herself. Granddad agreed but warned her to be careful of the edge of the bluff, and he’d see her in the lodge in an hour.

She set off at a misleading angle – to make it look as though she was really going off to explore – but as soon as she was out of sight of the cabin she changed course towards the lodge. Once inside she got out her iPod Touch, found a private corner, and tried to Skype her dad.

There was no reply. In a way, she thought this was a good thing. He had Skype on his phone and both his computers, the big one in his study and his precious laptop. If he couldn’t hear any of them it must mean he’d gone for a walk, done something other than the staring-at-a-screen routine he’d been in every day and night since Mom left, and which even Hannah knew could not be positive – especially as the staring sessions seldom seemed to be accompanied by the sound of typing. Good for him.

So she called her mom instead. Mom picked up on the eighth ring, as if she’d been a long way from the phone.

‘It’s late, honey,’ was the first thing she said.

Hannah hadn’t thought to check the time. It was after four o’clock. She did the math. That made it gone midnight where her mom was. ‘Sorry,’ she said, though she thought maybe her mom could have said something else first.

‘Didn’t Dad warn you what time it would be?’

Hannah hesitated. Mom evidently didn’t know where she was. ‘I didn’t tell him I was going to try calling.’

‘That’s OK. How are you?’

‘I’m OK. How are you?’

‘I’m fine. Though it’s very cold.’

‘So why are you there?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘If it’s so cold in London, why are you there? Why don’t you come back home?’

‘It’s … it’s not that simple.’

‘So explain it to me.’

‘I can’t. It’s work, and … I have to be here.’

‘I hate you,’ Hannah said.

‘Oh, honey, I know this is hard for you. Hard and … very confusing. But you … you don’t mean that.’

Her mom sounded upset. Hannah wanted to take the words back, but couldn’t – not without having somewhere else to put them. The words were real things, and their story was real, and she realized that she’d needed to say them to someone. She wasn’t sure if it should have been her mom, or dad, or even Granddad, for not being able to promise her everything would be OK. But somebody needed to hear, to hear right now and to understand, that everything was not OK. There was only one word for that. Hannah had never hated anyone or anything before in her life, but right now the word was there in the centre of her head. She couldn’t see past it.

‘I do,’ she said. ‘I hate you.’

‘Honey, I really want to talk to you some more, but can you pass me over to Dad for a second?’

Hannah ended the call. She went to the part of the lounge where there were big windows, and sat looking out over the ocean. She watched as the light started to fade and the grey of the sea slowly rose to meet the grey of the sky, until eventually they joined.

Granddad arrived. They ate, they talked, though not much. They walked back to the cabin along the bluff. Her grandfather stayed in the chair in her room after Hannah had climbed into bed. For a long time they were silent together in the darkness.

‘I know you want them to get back together,’ he said. ‘Of course you do. And that might be what happens. I certainly hope so. I love them both. But for the time being, trust that they both love you, and so do I. For tonight, that may have to be enough. And that’s no small thing, either.’

She could see he wasn’t lying. ‘OK,’ she said.

‘What you feel now is serious, but try not to take it too seriously. Sleep, as deeply as you can. Dream long. Tomorrow things may feel different.’

‘’K.’

She closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep until her grandfather quietly got up and left.

Then she did fall asleep.

Granddad walked to the kitchen. He made a pot of coffee and took a mug of it into the living room. He sat in the big chair, facing out into darkness.

He settled to wait.




Chapter 9 (#ulink_7c97a0cd-5f93-547d-8f99-277d07bdf2f7)


Meanwhile, back in Miami, Nash and his remaining (non-exploded) associates – Eduardo, Jesse and Chex – were breaking into a second-hand store close to the warehouse where they’d encountered the freaky old man in the suit.

Most criminals avoid committing crimes on home turf, on the grounds that stealing from people with whom you might later come into contact tends to be a bad policy. People don’t like being stolen from. It makes them angry and upset. In places like Opa Locka, where the stolen-from have a tendency to briskly take matters into their own hands, this can lead to violent confrontations, broken bones and general sadness.

Nash didn’t care about this, despite the fact the store they were robbing belonged to a man called Mr Files, who even the dumbest locals knew was a dude on whose wrong side you most certainly didn’t want to be. Mr Files knew everyone thought of him this way, however, and would therefore be able to guess that the only person likely to go ahead and rob him anyway would be Nash, whom Mr Files accepted was even scarier than he was. The situation was further complicated by the fact that half the goods in the store were in fact stolen, and Mr Files had acquired most of these from Nash himself. The items were, therefore, now being stolen a second time, and it was far from inconceivable that (after a suitable delay) Nash might resell them back to Mr Files; that some of these pieces of tech might spend the rest of their existence circulating back and forth between them like pieces of flotsam bobbing on a dead sea.

This is why you have to be quite smart to be a successful criminal. Keeping track of the interlocking illegalities and hierarchies can be hard, and if you get it wrong you don’t just get a bad appraisal and the chance to buck up your ideas, but instead wind up floating in the bay, often in more than one piece. Men (and women) who were neither smart nor scary enough to work this system with confidence – men like Eduardo, Jesse and Chex – tended to find a leader and do what they were told.

Though robbing Mr Files’s store made them nervous, they were glad to be doing something. In the couple of days since the encounter with the man in the black suit, morale among the group had not been high. The following night the three men had turned up to Nash’s house to find their boss sitting on the tilting porch, beer in one hand, cigarette in the other, staring into the middle distance. He had not, as per his usual custom, got decisively to his feet, bounced down the steps, and led them into an evening of lucratively criminal behaviour.

He’d just sat there, alone, reaching after a while for another beer and another cigarette, saying nothing. After nearly an hour of watching this, the three men left.

A common trait amongst persons of a criminal nature is a lack of foresight. This is why so many of them end up in jail. It also means that rather than putting money aside for a rainy day, they live within narrow margins. Eduardo, Jesse and Chex were therefore soon in a position where they had no money.

And so they turned up at Nash’s house again the next night, because though they could have scraped together a little cash through muggings or small-scale robberies of their own, working for Nash produced a much higher return – plus there was the fact he was well known for exacting hideous revenge on anybody who messed with his people, and this made them feel a lot safer.

So though it was in none of their natures, they elected to be patient for once, and wait.

Tonight, Nash had come down off the porch. There hadn’t been quite the usual spring in his step, but his guys supposed they could understand why. For six months he’d been trying to raise their game. Lift them from being mere thieves, drug dealers and criminals. Trying to make their actions pay off towards a larger goal – that of being truly evil. For a while on that evening in the abandoned warehouse it looked as though it had worked. But then the old guy in the suit had blown Pete to pieces, and left. Leaving Nash looking wrong-footed, rejected, and … a little dumb.

They knew this was intolerable, the very worst thing – especially in front of people who looked up to you. Leaders who’ve been made to feel dumb often feel the need to re- establish dominance through acts of flamboyant violence, and sometimes it’s the people nearest them who wind up taking the brunt. Tonight, thankfully, Nash didn’t seem like he was feeling dumb.

‘So what’s the plan, boss?’ Jesse asked.

‘Business as usual,’ Nash said. And that was that.

Once they were inside Mr Files’s store they fanned out. All had been in the building before, either to steal things or to buy. They knew what they were looking for. Not televisions, though twenty hung along the side wall. Nobody steals televisions any more, they’ve become too big and heavy. Game consoles were better. Smaller, lighter, easier to sell – even pro junkies need a game to nod out in front of. Laptops worked too.

And – especially and most of all – phones.

Eduardo went to the back and started putting the slimmest and newest-looking laptops into his bag. Jesse did the same with the consoles, picking through the available brands with a practised eye. Chex and Nash went to the other side, where the phones were. The interior of the store was dimly lit through the sturdy metal grille in front of the window, by the flickering neon sign outside and an occasional slow swish of passing car headlamps. Nobody was worried about people glimpsing shapes within the store and alerting the cops. The police knew better than to get involved in the complex criminal ecosystem, unless unusually high rates of fatality were involved.

Chex stood in front of the display with the Samsungs and LGs. He ignored the cheap, contractless handsets that people called ‘burners’, only ever of interest to drug dealers and those of no fixed abode, and started taking down smartphones and stowing them in his shoulder bag.

Nash walked further to the primo items, the iPhones. There were a lot, certainly more than when they’d last robbed the place. This could mean Mr Files had found an additional source of stolen goods, and that was something Nash needed to look into. A man in his position could not tolerate new thieves in his area, not least because if Mr Files stopped relying upon Nash then the balance of power could change. Nash knew he’d be able to resolve the situation, and the fact that spirited violence would be involved only made the prospect more appealing. Since the embarrassing evening in the warehouse he’d found himself increasingly drawn to the idea of hurting people, especially people who’d done him wrong. This, in fact, was what he’d been thinking about while sitting on the porch for hour after hour. Hurting. Causing harm. Breaking things and people so very badly that there would never be any chance of putting them together again. And then breaking them some more.

‘What’s that?’ Chex had stopped plucking phones from the shelves and was standing with his head cocked.

‘What’s what?’

‘I heard something.’

‘No you didn’t. Keep working.’

Chex didn’t, however. Nash was self-aware enough to know these people worked for him mainly because they were afraid of him, and therefore when one of them didn’t do what he said, there was generally a good reason for it.

So he became still too, iPhone in hand, and listened. At first nothing. But then, yes – a faint crackling sound. Not even quite a crackling. Quieter. More like a hiss. And then louder than that, more keening.

The other guys were talking quietly to each other as they gathered up stuff and didn’t seem to have heard anything. No sign of anyone at the door in the back, through which they’d entered. Nash peered at the televisions hanging on the wall. There was something different about them. The screens were dark, but not the flat dark of an LCD or plasma when no power’s going through. A faint swirling motion was visible within the muddy grey. On old-fashioned TVs a dead channel was bright and noisy and sparkling. Now it looked like electricity had been applied to all the televisions, but no signal.

Finally the guys at the back noticed. ‘What’s up?’

Nash held up his hand for silence. He’d already realized a possible explanation was all the TVs were on the same circuit, and had been turned on. Maybe from the back room.

Which meant someone was in here.

He was reaching for the gun lodged in the back of his jeans when he noticed something else, however. The screen of the iPhone he was holding was doing the same thing. Instead of a black, shiny surface, it too was a swirling dark grey. And there was no way someone in back could have turned that on.

He glanced at Chex, saw he was staring down at the phone in his hand too. ‘Hell’s going on?’

Nash looked back at the phone. The variation in tones became more marked. He felt like he couldn’t look away. The darker greys got darker, the lighter a little more light. It was as if there was something there, some pattern just outside reach – like one of those black-and-white pictures you stare at until they resolve into a Dalmatian or something. But moving.

Was it a face?

Was there someone in there, inside the phone?

Someone or something or maybe even a bunch of someones or somethings. If so, Nash believed they were there to talk to him – that this phenomenon was meant for him alone. He was wrong about this: something similar was happening in many places across the country, in front of similar men and women. The only difference was that Nash was able to perceive it clearly. It was not meant specifically for him, but it spoke to him far more strongly than anybody else. His soul was tuned to receive.

And so he was the only one who saw a digital compass slowly swimming up out of the swirling dots on the screen, its needle spinning so fast that it was a blur.

He was dimly aware of Chex staring down at the phone in his own hand, and the others gazing up at the televisions on the wall. But this wasn’t for them.

Then he heard it, or felt it. The message. What sounded like a distant howl, something wild and feral heard from the other side of a mountain in the night, resolved into a number of voices, speaking as one. Two words. A verb and a direction. He blinked, and felt the message settle deep inside.

The compass stopped spinning.

It pointed in one clear direction.

Then suddenly the screen was blank again, and the crackling sound was gone.

When they were back outside Jesse noticed that whatever had just happened, it had put purpose back in Nash’s step. Their leader lit a cigarette and stood smoking in silence for a while. Then he nodded at the bags full of stolen goods each had hanging from their shoulders.

‘Drop it all,’ he said.

‘Huh?’

‘We don’t need it where we’re going.’

‘Going? Where are we going?’

‘West.’ Nash dropped his cigarette to the ground and strode off towards the truck. ‘We’re going west.’




Chapter 10 (#ulink_4f399cb0-265f-5c81-b67a-ff8c5739a5a7)


The man in the black suit drove. You might think a person in his position would prefer an underling to perform that service, and often that would indeed be the case: him in the back seat, the passenger, looking out, casting blight with his gaze. The only being on hand tonight was Vaneclaw, however, and the last thing you want driving your car is an accident imp. With every hour that passed the old man was feeling more and more awake, too. He wanted to be active, engaged. He desired to be doing things.

And so he drove. Fast.

The big black car flashed along the highway, brushing the edges of small towns, where people would stir in their beds as if soured by a bad dream they would not remember; sometimes arcing long miles through wide, open country, where there was no one and nothing but the occasional nightbird or vole to look up and shiver as it passed.

Finally it got where it was going.

The man parked. He bade the imp stay in the car – on pain of things far worse than death. The imp pointed out, however, that just as allowing one of his kind to drive was a bad idea, leaving one unattended in a vehicle was not a great plan either. The last time he’d been left in a car it had somehow ended up at the bottom of a lake. Upside down.

The old man sighed, then said, ‘Yes, come along then, but keep silent and out of the way,’ on pain of things far worse than death.

‘Right-o,’ Vaneclaw said. ‘I’ll start being silent now, then, shall I?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK, bo—’

Seeing the old man’s face, the imp closed his mouth, and followed him along a path towards the cabin at the end. One side of this was mainly made of glass. The interior was dark, but when the man walked right up to the sliding doors, he could see the Engineer sitting waiting inside.

The Engineer stood, came and quietly slid open the doors. He looked the old man in the suit up and down.

‘Where the hell have you been?’

It was an old joke between them.

Fifteen minutes later the two men were sitting on the plastic chairs outside the cabin. The man in the black suit felt the cold but it did not bother him. The Engineer was huddled up in a sweater, two pairs of socks, an overcoat, and a blanket, and had a fresh cup of coffee cradled in his hands. He still felt chilled. Better to have this conversation here than inside, however.

‘How did you find me?’

‘I let my mind wander.’

‘Of course. I felt it this afternoon, reaching out. Someone else did too. I merely wondered whether you’d also had someone watching me all this time.’

‘No.’ The old man raised an eyebrow. ‘Were you trying to hide?’

‘Of course not. I move around because it pleases me, and for other reasons you know full well. Though I’ll admit I was intrigued to see how long it would take you to track me down. Quite some while, it turned out.’

‘No. I only started looking yesterday.’

The Engineer looked surprised. The old man shrugged. ‘Before that … I don’t remember. I woke up two days ago on the terrace of a hotel in South Beach, Miami.’

‘Very hot, Florida.’

‘You’re telling me. Evidently I had been resident in the hotel for three months. I have no recollection of that period. Before that, according to receipts in my suitcase, I spent a number of years in Antwerp, of all places. Prior to that I do start to recall things. The wandering, mainly.’

‘It’s been fifty years. I’m not surprised you can’t remember everything.’

‘That’s just it. I do, before the last few. I recall the moment where I decided that I no longer wished, for a while at least, to actively engage in the course I had pursued for a hundred millennia. I knew I had set countless black deeds and curdled paths in motion, given seed to chaos and sadnesses that would persist without my supervision – including wars that turned out rather better than I’d hoped. I remember decades spent travelling the globe, alone in thought, stalking the mountains and forests and backstreets, sometimes appearing as I am now, at other times as a woman in middle age, occasionally as a large black dog. Even, for a brief period, as a chicken.’

‘How’d that go?’

‘Not well.’

‘But then?’

‘It seems … I fell asleep. Not so that I stopped moving and doing, but so that I lost awareness of myself. I moved as if in a dream, a dream so deep that I was not conscious of either its contents or myself.’

‘And now you have reawoken.’

‘So it appears. Though …’ The old man stopped talking.

The Engineer let the silence rest for a moment. ‘You’re concerned about something,’ he said then, quietly. ‘What is it?’

‘Last night I was in North Dakota.’

‘Very cold, North Dakota.’

‘Disappointingly so. But I tracked down the imp that is called Vaneclaw.’

‘I remember him. Extremely dim.’

‘But also very loyal. I interrogated him, then bade him gather all minions from the area, demons large and small. I looked into the dark void in the centre of each and every one. I found them still loyal too.’

‘Of course,’ the Engineer said, not surprised.

‘Not of course, I’m afraid to say. I suspect it was this that finally drew me back from my slumbers.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘My doubts were first ignited in Florida, where I watched a bad man perform a sacrifice. It was a small act, a breakage, but good enough. It was evidently not the first that he had performed in my name.’

‘So he claimed?’

‘He did not lie. He had a trick that proved he had been rewarded for prior acts of a similar kind.’

‘What strength of trick?’

‘A minor thing with fire.’

The Engineer looked confused. ‘I don’t see the problem. Surely it’s good that fresh acolytes have found the path to you, even while you were … dormant. And specious rewards ensue from their acts of fealty, conferred upon them by the black ether. It was ever thus. Sacrifice begets power.’

‘That’s just it, my friend. I did not feel anything at all from the sacrifice he performed right in front of my eyes.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing. My meeting with the imps and demons of North Dakota confirmed my suspicions. They have prayed and made sacrifice, every day and hour. Countless lives have been blighted by their actions – yet none of that power has found its way home to me. I suspect this may even be at the root of how I lost awareness of myself. The dark charge faded to the point where I slipped into some kind of infernal standby mode.’

The Engineer looked serious now. ‘That’s … very strange.’

‘When did you last check the machine?’

‘Yesterday. It’s working perfectly.’

The old man in the suit suddenly frowned, and turned his head towards the sliding doors.

Hannah had woken first a little before midnight, according to the clock on her bedside table. She was cold. She huddled deeper into her bed sheets and managed to drift back off to sleep.

She woke again an hour later. She was still cold, but something told her this was not what had interrupted her sleep. She lifted her head from the pillow and listened.

After a moment she heard a voice. It sounded like Granddad. Perhaps he was on the phone.

She fell asleep once more, but it was a shallow sleep, and her mind kept working, eventually popping up the observation that Granddad couldn’t be on the phone, because there was no signal here, duh. This observation didn’t know what to do with itself and so it wandered Hannah’s dozing mind, bumping into other ideas and thoughts and fragments of dreams, until eventually it made enough noise to wake her up.

She listened blearily. There was silence, and then she heard a voice again. This time it sounded like an old man, yet not Granddad.

That was strange.

She raised herself up on one elbow, still half-asleep. She’d just about be able to believe that someone had happened to wander by the cabin and decided to stop and have a chat with Granddad, were it not for the fact that (a) he’d said he didn’t know anyone here, and was glad of it, and (b) it was now after one o’clock in the morning.

Also, she thought she could hear the sound of running water, too. And a low, tuneless humming.

She got out of bed.

There was silence on the deck as the two old men watched Hannah approach the sliding doors.

‘Who is this?’

‘My granddaughter,’ the Engineer said. ‘She’s the other person who felt the pressure of your thoughts today. It made the afternoon difficult for her.’

‘She’ll forget. But what’s she doing here?’

‘Staying with me.’

‘Yes, I assumed something of the sort,’ the old man said tetchily. ‘I meant why?’

‘Problems at home.’

Hannah reached the doors and slid one of them open. She flinched as the cold air crept quickly inside. ‘What are you doing out here, Granddad? It’s freezing. And who is this man?’

The man in the black suit stood slowly, towering over her, all the world’s shadows ready at his command. ‘I … am the Devil,’ he said, his voice hollow with the echoes of countless millennia of howling darkness.

There was silence for a moment.

‘I don’t believe you,’ Hannah said. She blinked at him, and yawned massively. ‘Also, Granddad, there’s an extremely large mushroom in our bath.’




Chapter 11 (#ulink_8fe93640-249e-54bd-a08f-c037cbceff58)


‘But … but … but … how?’ Hannah asked.

It wasn’t the first time she’d asked. ‘And also … why?’

It wasn’t the first time she’d asked that either. She and Granddad were in the living room. The man in the crumpled suit had told the giant mushroom to get out of the bath and go wait outside. The mushroom, whose name seemed to be Vaneclaw, had done what it was told. A little later there had been a faint yelping sound, caused by it wandering too close to the edge of the bluff and falling over it. The man in the suit – or ‘the Devil’ as he kept insisting he should be called – said he’d be able to do less harm down there, and to ignore him for now.

After a while, however, the mushroom had started calling out, rather plaintively. The noise eventually got loud enough that Granddad became concerned it might get into the dreams of people in nearby cabins, and so the old man in the suit irritably went out to make the mushroom be quiet. He’d been gone for some time.

Meanwhile Granddad had listened to Hannah ask the same questions, again and again. How, and why, could he possibly know the Devil, the most evil and awful being in the universe, that a lot of people said didn’t even exist?

Each time she asked, Granddad seemed to try to make a start at answering, but faltered. So she asked yet again.

‘Let me tell you a story,’ he said, finally.

Once, he said, there was a boy.

His name was Erik Gruen. Erik was thirteen years old and lived on a farm, a small farm, in the vast flatness of central Germany. It was not a very good farm. Every day Erik and his brothers and sisters helped their parents, tilling the land and planting seeds and looking after their straggly collection of livestock. Each year, the family barely scraped by. There was never much food, and Erik – the youngest of six children – went to work in the field every day wearing a selection of cast-offs not just from his elder brothers, but sisters, too. You might think that would have been embarrassing, but it was not, because everyone wore the same – torn rags and bits of sacking, held together with string. The point was not looking smart but being protected from the elements, because often it rained. It was cold a lot of the time, too, and windy.

It was a tough life, though they didn’t know it. This hard, endless struggle was all they knew, all their parents had known, and all their parents’ parents had known, back into the mists of murky time. The Gruens had been working this scabby patch of land for centuries. That was what they did, all they had ever done, and all they would ever do.

Except that one morning, when it was raining so hard there was nothing they could do outside and the entire family was crammed into the tiny farmhouse, sniping at each other, Erik decided to take a walk. He headed down the long, winding lane and got as far as the road (itself only a track slightly wider than the lane). He kept on walking until he’d gone further than ever before, and then he walked some more.





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