Only Forward (39 page)

He was always faster than me, always one step ahead, and he still was. There was I, still padding around The City like some poor man's Philip Marlowe, trying to be hip, trying to be funny, trying to be something, anything. And he just played me along like a fool.

Yeah, pick someone from the Centre so that Zenda gets involved and calls Stark in. Yeah, say there's a threat to Idyll so he'll go all the way, for her. Yeah, give Alkland nightmares so Stark sets himself up to remember things he would die to forget. Stark won't notice: he's too fucking stupid.

And why was he able to do all this? Because I let him.

I fell on my face almost as soon as I got out of the circle, cracking my cheek on the hot cobblestones. The baby on Ji's foot was still trying to sing at me even though it had no head, and the rasping buzz of its breath amplified the rushing in my ears. I scrabbled up onto my feet and followed Ji, shouting at him, screaming at him to stop. But he couldn't hear me, and probably didn't even remember I was there.

I ran slithering down the road, slipping on the oily stone, only really following the sound of footsteps. The air was too thick for me to see through it any more, thick with rotten green. It was also hot, far hotter than it is in Turn, and as I ran it coagulated slowly, slipped into shapes that buffeted me, thickened until I was pushing through a loose mountain of meat that moved and flexed and smothered. It was like trying to run through a sea of dismembered arms in the dark, through arms and legs that filled every inch around me and slipped and squirted as I fell forward through them. I couldn't hear anything, and all I could see was black green, as if my eyes were shut, but I pushed and I ran to be with Ji, though in a sense I was with him already. I smacked up against something very hard and realised it was a wall. Groping to either side I found a door and yanked it open against the weight of the falling air. I ran through the doorway and tripped again, fell onto some stairs. I crawled up them as quickly as I could, feeling as if part of my mind had been nailed to the bottom and the flesh was pulled with every yard I made. It pulled like tendons, hard, taut and ready to tear.

At the top I got to my feet again and padded down greasy flagstones, the treacly air getting hotter and hotter as I caught up with Ji. He was still yards ahead, but I could feel him pulling, could sense that all of Jeamland was funnelling into the rotted corridor of this dead building. It pushed me forward and I fell with it, every step like the news that someone you love has died, every breath a moment when the world shoves a hot iron in your face. I heard a cry and pushed even harder through the greased slickness of the air that was now flesh. I had no sense of time, no idea of space. I could have pushed for minutes or for hours. I could have pushed for years.

Then suddenly I crunched into something hard again. I felt around for a door but couldn't find one, could only feel rough grooves of stone.

I pulled my head back and looked up. A few yards above me the baby's windpipe rattled and buzzed, and then it smacked down into the wall. Except it wasn't a wall. It was the floor, and Ji was crawling just in front of me, crawling towards something that howled in the corner of the room. I broke nails on the grooves between flagstones as I pulled myself after him. There was no question of standing up, none at all. Even pulling forward was like pushing your head through rock.

I felt a warm dry hand on mine and pulled my hand back with a howl before I even recognised the feeling. As I stared at the muck on my fingers I knew I'd felt a father's hand, and as I smelt the stink from the smear I was crawling through I knew what it had to be, and knew where I was. I'd been here once before and been able to pull Ji back. But I had been stronger then.

'Ji, no!' I screamed. I flicked the decayed flesh off my hand and bent my back up against the weight in my head. I couldn't get up, but I moved slightly quicker, quick enough to see Ji hauling himself to his knees at the feet of a woman. She had long black hair like a flood and vibrated with something curdled, and her eyes were black too because her head was full of spiders.

She smiled at Ji as he groped for her lap, pulling himself up, and her smile was the worst thing I have ever, ever seen. Ji's face turned up towards her, full of all the hurts he'd had since she'd died, twisted with all the adult things she hadn't been there to make go away for him. She reached out for him, reached her hand to caress his face and I knew that this time I would not be able to save him.

Because instead of stroking she ran her nails across his cheekbones near the eyes, scratching, cutting, and when the cuts were deep enough she pushed her fingers deep into them, rubbing them up against the bone and tearing the skin as she pushed. Ji screamed but didn't try to get away. He didn't want to escape. He wanted to be with his mother.

When her fingers were pushed in deeply enough she jerked to her feet, legs planted sturdily apart, and she twisted and pulled and Ji's head broke off his body trailing his neck like the root of a tooth. As she raised it above her head and then hurled it towards the floor his lips were still moving and the last thing he shrieked was to me.

'This is you, Stark. You did this!'

It split open on the floor in front of me and suddenly I could stand. I could stand because finally I understood. It wasn't Ji talking, but he was right. I'd done this. I'd done it all.

I ran for Ji's mother and threw myself at her.

She disappeared before I got there and I tripped over Ji's body and fell sprawling. As I tumbled I saw a flick of black, the black of a coat that I used to follow, the coat of a man who was always there in front of me. I saw the texture of the cloth, the seam that ran down the back, the flow of the material as it sailed behind someone who was forever moving forward. I heard his breath and the sound of his boots on stone, and I remembered how then it had been a heroic sound, back when we had both been heroes, when we had been friends. And I remembered how I had loved that sound, that coat, and the last of the sludge drained out of me into the air and all that was left was memory.

I met Robert Afeld when I was eight. By then Stark's Books was doing well, flourishing in the quiet way that my father wanted, and we'd moved into a detached house in suburbia. I was a quiet boy, serious and bookish, someone who could be relied upon to keep his room tidy and be polite to visitors.

By the time Rafe joined the school I'd settled into my own life there. I was the quiet one, the one who worked hard. That was all most of them saw, and few of them wanted to know any more.

Rafe was very different. Rafe was the bad boy, the one who always seemed to be standing out in the corridor, the boy who couldn't seem to make it through a lesson without saying something the teacher would take exception to. He wasn't stupid - just restless - but schools don't like restless children.

We became friends by chance and against the odds. I was playing marbles out in the playground with my set of acquaintances, and Rafe was in a separate game a couple of yards away. The groups were like sovereign states in the land of the playground, each denying the other's existence. I'd never spoken to Rafe then, not exchanged a single word. Though we'd been in the same class for a couple of months our paths simply hadn't crossed: we were two bits of jetsam, being carried downstream on different sides of the river. The funny thing is that, but for a bump in a playground's tarmac, we would have stayed that way, and none of this would ever have happened.

I can't even remember how you play marbles now, haven't the faintest recollection of whatever rules seemed so important then. All I remember is that a shot of mine took an odd bounce off that lump in the tarmac and careered across into the neighbouring game, scattering their marbles.

I was on my feet to apologise immediately, good little boy that I was, but Rafe was having none of it. He grabbed my marble out of the confusion and hurled it through the fence. It was stupid, and childish, but Rafe had had a rough few months at the school, and was gravitating towards being a bad boy for life. I discovered it was an understandable impulse too, because before I knew what I was doing I furiously grabbed one of his marbles and hurled it the same way.

Rafe looked at me for a moment, baffled. Then he snatched a handful of the marbles from our game and out they went. By this time the boys we'd been playing with had scattered to a safe distance, leaving just the two of us there by the fence, alternately flinging each other's hard-won marbles out of the playground with the stern fury of gods.

'What the hell do you think you're doing?'

When we heard the shout we both whirled at once, to see Mr Marchant striding towards us like an angular hurricane. Suddenly we were just two little boys who'd been caught, and as the teacher shouted at us, demanded to know what would have happened if someone had been walking by, we felt the hot embarrassment of the stupid. We were marched back into the school and made to sit on the bench outside the headmaster's office.

It was there that the bond was struck. The good boy and the bad boy, on the same bench for the same crime. We had nothing to say to each other, no common ground, but as we sat there we were in it together, and Rafe smiled at me when I was called into the study. He had a good smile.

After that we nodded at each other in corridors, and in time found ourselves talking to each other. By the time we were ten we were best friends.

I'd been to Memory once before, long ago. It's not so different from Jeamland really. Simpler, more stark. More Stark, in fact, because this is where I come from, really. This is me.

Tall trees like giant redwoods stood either side of the path, in random ranks as far as I could see into the darkness. It was a little like the forest Alkland and I had walked through, but more majestic, more elemental.

I love redwoods. The trunks were metres across, and leapt up into the sky, not even starting to branch out until they were thirty yards above my head. Way, way up above the foliage was thick, impenetrable, and no light filtered down from there. I walked the path in front of me, not bothering to turn to see what lay behind. There was no other way.

I like to think that I saved Rafe from something, that if he hadn't become my friend he would have carried on heading downwards, would have flunked out, been expelled. That's probably true, in fact. But what is also true is that Rafe saved me too.

What I had was thought, and reflection, an interest in things that went beyond the here and now. I'd always been an avid reader, couldn't help but to have been, with my parents. I knew that there were worlds beyond the one we lived in, worlds that you could find on paper.

But I had no drive. I was an armchair romantic, someone who sat and thought and might have done so with increasing pointlessness until the end of his days. Rafe was the opposite: he was a maelstrom of activity, of will. He was always on the move, going somewhere, doing something.

What happened as we grew up was that we grew together, intermeshed until the two of us were really a one and a half. Rafe taught me to act, and I taught him to think. I was someone he could drag along with him, and he was someone I could bounce ideas off, and in time I learnt to do the dragging occasionally, and he sometimes had the ideas.

It was Rate's idea that we start playing music, in fact. He badgered his parents into buying him a guitar when he was fourteen, and my parents soon found themselves doing the same. It makes me smile now to think of their forbearance in those days. Where in your contract for being a parent does it say you have to put up with grotesquely loud and hideously incompetent electric guitar as well as everything else?

We discovered the same bands, learnt the same chords and groped towards the same melodies, and by the time we were sixteen, that was what we were going to do. We were going to be in a band, and we were going to be famous. We believed in ourselves, and with belief that strong, what can stand in your way? We had a common will, and we were going to bend the world to fit it.

It didn't happen, of course. After all the shared time, all the similarities, we were still different. My girlfriends were articulate, his monosyllabic, and our exam papers followed suit. When school finished I had a place at college, and Rafe didn't.

And so I went away, and we only saw each other during the holidays and on occasional drunken weekends, when Rafe would haul himself up to my college town and we would get bollocksed and talk through the night. We couldn't practice any more, and gradually the reality of being a band together began to fade, though time and again we said we'd do it, lying full length on the floor of my room, too stoned to sit upright.

So instead of music, we began to share something else. An idea.

What is it that makes some people obsessed with the idea of other worlds, of a reality beyond the one everybody sees? It can't be just reading, because many people read, but few come to believe and feel what I did. I think something must happen to certain people, like it did to me, some chance perception or inexplicable event, something which embeds in them a faith which will be with them for the rest of their lives even if they don't remember what the original catalyst was. I shouldn't think many of them met a headless man on the balcony when they were small, but something else happened to them, something that made them grow up with the faith. This itch will lead some people to follow obscure and confused religions, will see others sitting in a lotus position in darkened rooms, stretching yearningly out towards something they want to believe is out there. For me it worked differently, and I took Rafe along with me.

I realised that the mind which you used during the day was the same one you had at night. That may not sound like a towering and sophisticated body of thought, but in fact it left everybody else's standing, as events were later to prove. The mind which conjures up scenes and events apparently from nowhere in your dreams is the same mind that can only visualise in the vaguest way when you are awake, a mind that slips and turns. It struck me that if you could train your mind to operate when awake as it does in your sleep, then; you could dream while you were awake, and see a different world.