Yggdrasil Station

by Damien Broderick

Genres: Science Fiction

Synopsis

In medical student August Seebeck's world, almost identical to ours, there are eleven months in a year. None of them is the month of August-until now, when the young orphan stumbles into the true, infinite universe, and becomes a Player in the Game of Worlds. And step by deranged step he meets his siblings: Avril, Decius, Jan, Jules, Maybelline, Septimus/Septima who is both male and female, Toby, the others. And outside his family, glorious, brilliant Lune, also a Player, is quickly his lover, with dreadful secrets of her own. These diverse warriors of the multiverse confront the terrible K-machines, who detest and slaughter humans... but then are the Seebeck family really human? What are these silver symbols engraved into their flesh? What is the true nature of the unending, unfolding cosmos, a meta-reality built from ontological computation, Lune's doctoral specialty? And how can August slay the looming Jabberwock using only the Sun-blazing Vorpal implant in his hand? What final transformation awaits the multiverse at Yggdrasil Station, at the death and dawn of spacetime, where all the heroes die and live again? In this astounding helter-skelter two-part novel, the answers to such questions emerge along a twisting path that will not set you free until you sit with August at a great thirteen-sided table and learn his destiny, and perhaps your own.

Release date: May 26, 2020

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 531

Sample

As she listened from a small side table to the house crooner sing “Moon River” in a smoky room of perfume and fumes of brandy and Scotch, something new snared Lune’s attention. Not the low irritating stench of the deformer at the table near the front with his noisy cronies. Neither was it the expected tingle of a Contest Player’s glamor, not quite, and it put her on edge. Guardedly she scanned the room, saw a young man approach the bar and order a drink. Shadowed, this tall, rangy man with the broad shoulders was presumably her Player: that dark hair, eyes brown as old gold.

With a nod and smile he took his glass from the corn-rowed bar keep, leaned his back against the polished timber counter top, surveying the crowd of revelers from behind those long dark sleepy lashes. He drank a little, held the glass easily. She pressed through the tables in the shadows, carrying an empty cocktail glass that had held only Perrier water. At the bar she stood beside him, accepted his relaxed, approving regard. The faintest penumbra of glamor. He narrowed his eyes, smiled faintly, gave her a slow secret smile. After a moment’s beat he said, “Ember Seebeck.”

Now that she looked at him more closely, the apparent freshness of his youth was lost in the abrasions of time, in perhaps a thousand years of memories and bruising encounters with the worlds, with joys, pains, mortifications unimaginable to the young. It gave him depth, naturally, but experience enshrouded the clarity of the self as a shroud masked glamor.

“You are very beautiful.” He shifted his drink to his left hand, extended his right.

“Thank you. Lune,” she told him. “Lune Katha Sarit Sagara. You’re hunting,” she said. “So am I. I’ve been watching the creature over there.” She frowned.

He released her hand, watching her. “I wonder that we’ve never met,” he said.

“So many worlds,” she said, and found her tone had grown abruptly brittle, “so little time.”

Another cat smile. “What are you drinking?”

“Shanghai Astor Hotel special this time, please.”

The bar keep frowned. “Boss don’t like the hired help drinkin’, even if customers treat ’em.”

“Thomas, I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble. But I’m not working for Mr. Rogerson, not yet.”

“I’ll chance it, if’n you will.” He flashed her a grin. “I never heard of that cocktail, though, ma’am. Somethin’ from New Orleans?”

“Lot further away than that. Jigger of cognac, teaspoon of Maraschino,” she said. “You have absinthe, of course? Half a jigger.”

He nodded, shrugged.

“And an egg?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Two teaspoons of albumin, then. Shake them with half a teaspoon of lemon and some cracked ice. Top off with chilled soda, not too much.”

A man at the front table frowned over his shoulder, nudged the despoiler, a big shouldered man in an expensive suit who looked like a prosperous bank manager. The fog-voiced torch singer seemed not to be bothered by their quiet exchanges, putting his heart and soul into “September song.” Lune took the glass, sipped, ignored them.

Her eyes flicked to the front table, as did Ember’s, and he nodded. She said mockingly, “Is it… mere coincidence… that we meet here?”

“No such thing, as you know, my dear.”

“So we were meant to meet in this place, however belatedly?”

“I would that it were so. Often I feel more like a chess piece than a Player of the Accord. You know, the ‘destiny that shapes our ends—’”

“‘—Rough-hew them how we will.’ Ember, that view,” said Lune, ever the scholar, “was declared heretical in the Accord, avant la lettre.” Not that this fact bothered her, for the Accord had been hammered out by Thomas Aquinas in 1271 in the Paris Chapterhouse of the Ensemble, long before the emerging physical and mathematical sciences of the Metric Renaissance had deepened sufficiently to show how ill-fitted his theological apparatus had been to the task. Still, tradition had its uses; one retained what worked, and worked around its encrusted shell.

Ember shrugged.

She had been expecting a companion in arms for this night’s task, had depended on it. A small shudder passed through her.

In a soft, velvet voice, Thomas told her, “Boss wants you up on stage now, Miss Lune. Good luck.”

“Thanks.” She put the glass on the timber top, walked through tables to the front. The room was small enough that she needed no mike. In the afternoon, she’d had a brief opportunity to run the house band through her audition repertoire; they nodded to her now, off-hand but friendly. They were good and knew it, even if the horn man was a little too eager for his solos. Half-cut after work, business types looked up at blearily. The deformer thing stared at her with barely contained detestation. She nodded to the band leader, went into Dylan, Tom Waites and finished with a wailing, pure throated reading of Roy Orbison’s “I drove all night” that woke up the salarymen and had them singing along in manic chorus.

“You’re good, babe,” the sleazy manager said, trying to cop a feel. Faintly sweaty and pleased with herself, her throat dry, Lune chose not to injure him. She’d already done what she had to in order to draw just the right amount of attention to herself. Deftly she avoided his groping hand, smiled, shrugged. “Well, so anyway, yeah,” he said, resigned, “you’ve got a gig here.”

“Thanks, Mr. Rogerson.”

“And no drinking with the customers.”

“Oh, were you going to pay me for tonight?”

He frowned, twitched his eyes to one side. “Hey, tonight you can do what you like, honey. But if you’re gonna screw the john, do it outside in the alley, not in here. This is a decent Mithran joint.”

She gave him a dazzling smile. “Thank you for the job, Mr. Rogerson. I’ll be here tomorrow night at nine sharp.” Knowing she would never see his puffy face again, nor his unpleasant cognate world, was satisfaction enough. By the time she had made her way back to the bar, swaying slightly as she passed the despoiler’s table, Ember Seebeck had found them a table and set her cocktail on it.

“You’re brilliant,” he told her.

“I know. Thanks.” The Astor wasn’t up to Singapore standards, but Thomas had done his best. People were giving them unpleasant looks, even though the band had settled down to a drink of their own. “So are we going to kill that thing up front?”

“I thought you’d know.”

“Nope. I guess this is an improv. Situational. The atmosphere’s kind of dirty.”

“I don’t think it’s likely to happen in here.”

“The owner recommends that I take my johns out into the alley. Might have been a hint. Care to join me there?”

“Nothing would please me more. Let’s finish our drinks first.”

“Of course. Sometimes I’m paired with Maybelline Seebeck. Your sister, I take it.”

He shrugged. “One of them.”

She felt a burst of envy. “A large family.”

“As an old family riddle has it, ‘Brothers and sisters have I ten, six doughty wenches, four strapping men.’ Yeah, larger than the usual, these days, one of us for every month of the year. Then again, Mom and Pop had plenty of time.”

Something suddenly came clear. Maybe it was the jingle. Lune found herself chanting another, a childhood mnemonic for recalling months and holidays:

“ ‘Thirty-three days each from September, To June and July, fire to ember,’” and she nodded in his direction with a smile, which he acknowledged, “ ‘ Plus one extra day each for summer and winter, And every fourth year a leap-day to remember.’”

Ember grinned broadly. “Exactly. Have to suppose they planned our birthdays with exquisite self-control. And you?”

Me what? Oh, family. “A singleton, alas,” Lune said. “I lost track of my parents when the Ensemble admitted me.”

“A good crowd, the Ensemble. A trifle jaded, perhaps. You’ll bring them a breath of fresh air.”

“I’m not that young, Ember. But thank you. Shall we go?”

“My pleasure.” He crooked his arm, she placed her hand lightly there, and they made their way down the narrow curving stairway, more filthy looks and mutters attending their passage. Maybe nobody liked singers, but in that case why would they pay good pelf to sit here and drink? They went out the back way, into the alley, and waited for a minute or less holding hands decorously, watching the sky, the cobblestones, the polluted brick wall of a factory. The large man in the bank manager suit came out of the same door and instantly flung himself at them.

“Filthy nigra slut,” he shouted, and tried to strike her. Despite his slurred speech, he was not even slightly intoxicated, so that when Lune moved to evade his drunken blow it was not where she’d expected and caught her numbingly on the jaw. “You some kinda coon-fucker, you shit head,” he was screaming at Ember. Dazed, she saw through a streaky haze Ember’s arm extend. A small weapon made almost no sound, and the deformer fell to the cobbles, half his head blown away.

“Crap!” he said, “Sorry, I was slow. Shouldn’t have had that drink.”

“Never mind,” Lune said. “Get hold of the bastard’s feet, I’ll find a nexus point.” She spoke to the Schwelle operating system, and a threshold opened. With a noise like a fire hydrant hit by a truck, water smashed out at them, a torrent of blackness in the dark alley. It struck them both bent over, toppled them along the cobblestones, foamed and rushed, dragging the corpse out of their grip and flinging it high against the factory bricks. Lune, choking and drenched, screamed command words. The Schwelle closed, and the noise was cut by a tenth. Water surged back and forth along the alley, slapping walls, draining out into the nearest street and down gutters. Voices were yelping. A light went on above the club.

“Mithra’s bull!” Bedraggled and shocked, Ember was scrabbling through the ebbing tide to recapture their prize. Lune kicked off her shoes, gasping at the chill of the water. She helped him hoist the corpse into a fireman’s lift.

“Bastards must have found that nexus,” Lune told him, “flooded the whole damned valley. Overkill, but effective.”

“Egypt? Indonesia?”

“China. They like those gigantic hydraulic projects. Damn it, I was there only a decade ago.”

“Do you want me to find one?”

“No, no, I have a dozen drop-offs. Just a moment.” She was breathing heavily. So was Ember; the corpse was heavy and ungainly. She spoke another command. With a tearing noise, a fresh Schwelle opened in the darkness, with equal darkness beyond. At their back, Rogerson burst out from the club, a shotgun raised, ready for mayhem, followed by the K-machine’s flunkies.

“Shit, move it, Lune.”

“I’m gone,” she said, and went across. He lumbered after her, weighed down, and she instantly closed the threshold. Another urban myth in the making. Lune hoped there had been fish or frogs carried in on the brief deluge. With a thud, Ember Seebeck dumped the dead thing off his shoulders. They stood beneath unfamiliar stars in a field of sweet clover. Somewhere nearby a large animal whuffled, maybe a mammal, maybe something stranger. An owl-like avian swooped overhead, eyes catching the moon’s whiteness. It settled in a dark tree. Lune took a barefoot step, felt warmth creep into her toes, and a less appealing odor filled her nostrils.

“As you put it so eloquently, shit,” she said. “I really hate the countryside.” She took a careful step backward and wiped her foot on soft clover.

“The city doesn’t seem such a great improvement,” he said, laughing lightly. He had a penlight in his hand, examining the headless corpse. Blood and meat and other stuff more like the insides of a machine. Undoubtedly dead, if you imagine the things ever being alive to begin with. “I wonder why they tend to come stocked with such vile bigotry.”

She nodded her agreement. “They might as well wear tee-shirts with branded signs like EVIL MOTHERFUCKER. One thing Maybelline and I offed was screaming about dirty dykes.” She rolled her eyes.

There was a moment’s silence. The light went off. “Well, in May’s case—”

“You know perfectly well what I mean.”

“Yeah. Okay, let’s take this across to your nexus, and hand it over to a disposer.”

They did that thing, and then she went home alone, despite some elegant pleading on Ember’s part, had a long, relaxing soak, ate a scratch meal out of the fridge, watched some trash TV, slept for six hours.

There’s a world I know where the women are a head taller than the men, and file their ferocious teeth to points. The men are just as fierce.

A different world, yet the same, another earth, has luminous rings spread brilliantly across the whole sky, bright as a full moon. Those rings are all that remained of the moon when it fell chaotically too close to the world and got torn apart by tidal forces. There are no people there, only about twenty million different kinds of dinosaurs in a range of sizes and colors. Lots of them are meat-eaters, with shockingly bad breath.

On a third world, the people are lean and lightly furred. The pale pupils of their eyes are slitted vertically. I believe their remote ancestors, maybe fifteen million years ago, were the great Ice Age cats now extinct in our world. All the apes and humans are extinct in theirs. Has any of them managed the trick of slipping here through the mirrored cracks between the worlds? If so, perhaps they gave rise to legends of vampires or werewolves. I don’t think any of them came here, though. They love the taste of simian blood, which is why the apes and humans are extinct in their earth. We’d have noticed them, trust me.

On a fourth, the humans are gone, but machines are everywhere. Evolution by other means. Same old, same old, but different. Always different.

And in all of them, by and by, we Players stroll, connive, or run for our lives. So do the K-machines, driven by malign motives we can scarcely guess at. I like to kill the bastards, I really do.

The endless hazard, of course, is that they’ll kill me first, and those I love. That’s no abstract threat. I’ve been alive and I’ve been dead. Alive is better.

Sorry, that sounds like cynical gallows humor. But I’m not being facetious. It’s the literal and exact truth. I find it hard to recall the filthy noise and confusion of my death. It is simply too painful, and besides your synaptic web doesn’t work terrifically well once your brain has been torn to shreds. Luckily, I’ve always been a cheerful if guarded fellow, equable under stress, buoyant and, you know, simply happy if I’m given half a chance. Even so, death is no picnic. Well, death is a picnic, but the dead tend to be the luckless meat in the sandwich.

But I see I’ve jumped too far ahead too soon. Let me start again.

I don’t suppose I have the appearance of a Player in the Contest of Worlds. You wouldn’t think it, to look at me. Well, that’s not true, of course, since that’s exactly how I look—but if you knew about us you’d probably expect a Player to resemble premium Bruce Willis, all bruised muscles and weary but romantic hard-bitten sarcasm. Or maybe you’d think we look like those macho but insanely handsome Hollywood guys with ponytails who spend most of the day working up their lats and pecs and biceps, and fine-tuning their flashy karate kicks.

Nah—I’m just this tall Aussie walking down the street, booting a loose plastic bottle top into the gutter, hands in my pockets, floppy hair in my brown eyes, looking a bit wary. True, I have a soft leather glove on my right hand, but people assume it’s a personal quirk like a nose-ring, or a data wearable, or maybe that it hides a nasty burn, which I guess comes closest. Other than that, just another graduate philosophy student dressed in black: fashion uniform, in this place.

Let me tell you how this thing came to pass. It began a little later, with Lune. For me, though, it started with Tansy.

I was studying medicine, not philosophy, about a million years ago after I got back to Australia from Chicago. I fell in love, fell out again, played some music, studied like a dog, and at the end of my third year academics Great-aunt Tansy, with whom I’d shared a big old empty house since my parents disappeared over Thailand, waved me off as I headed for the outback to do a little jackarooing. That’s tending huge herds of beef cattle or sheep that roam across dry grassland spreads the size of small European nations. It’s not done on horseback these days, not much. Helicopters and 4WDs are the preferred method. I learned to round up a few thousand head of cattle at a time from the back of a bounding Suzuki bike, 800 ccs and lean as a grayhound. On a blazing 41 degree Celsius Summer Day (which in Chicago was Winter Day, or would be in a few hours’ time when December 33rd was done), I ate ritual damper and rum cake with the other jackaroos and two hotly pursued jillaroos, drinking Bundy rum and coke and singing western laments. American West, that is. Nothing is more unnerving that hearing three black aboriginal stockmen whose ancestors had dwelled in that part of the country for upward of 50,000 years singing “The Streets of Laredo” in totally unself-conscious American hillbilly accents. That’s how they heard it on the radio, that’s the way they sang it.

I drove home all one day and most of the night late in January in the old 4WD Pajero I’d won on a lucky hand of poker, with a swag of tax-free cash in each of my high-top R. M. Williams boots. At a drive-through booze shop I’d bought a bottle of Bundaberg Rum for myself, for old times’ sake, and a bottle of premium sherry for Aunt Tansy. Dugald O’Brien, her old golden Labrador, met me joyously at the gate, tail wagging. How did he do it? Mysteriously, he always seemed to know when I’d be arriving, and welcomed me with his simple, blessed affection. I wondered if Tansy tipped him off, using her occult powers.

“Do Good, my man,” I told him, “likewise,” and scratched his ears, then crouched to give him a proper hug, dropping my swag but holding the bottles carefully. The poor chap was growing old, and he limped a little as he followed me into the hallway.

The comforting smells of Tansy’s home welcomed me in like a warm memory. It made me embarrassed: I was grimy, and I’m sure I stank like a skunk. I found her in the enormous kitchen, gave her a kiss, deferring the hug for later, and told her I was headed upstairs for the shower. She lifted the remote with a floury hand and flipped off her TV set.

“I’m sorry, dear, you can’t.”

“Huh?” I paused halfway up. I’d driven 1500 kilometers with not much more than fuel breaks; I was numb with fatigue, starting to see double.

Great-aunt Tansy began cutting pastry mixture with a metal template shaped like a heart. She looked up at me, eyes wide and watery blue and honest. “This is Saturday night.”

“What there is left of it. I know, I should phone around, catch up with people, Tansy, but I’m bone tired. After I’ve have a good soak, I think I’ll just slip into—”

“No, darling, that’s what I’m saying. You can’t have a shower upstairs. Every Saturday night, recently, there’s been a corpse in that bathroom.”

Rather carefully, I came all the way down the stairs again, not clattering, and poured a cup of coffee and waited. Tansy did her magic with strawberry jam, popped the tray into the hot oven, began blending a fresh mix for date scones. She made the best jam tarts since the Queen of Hearts, which I guess made me the Knave, since I’d pilfered plenty of them over the years. She sat perched on a three-legged stool beside the heavy oak kitchen table, rolling an amorphous lump of putty in flour with an old-fashioned rolling pin. As ever, no conscious effort went into the expert motions of her hands: it was a tantra, as graceful and automatic as my martial arts kata when I am in the zone. Absent-minded as an old hen, Great-aunt Tansy, and twice as industrious.

After a time, I said, “I can’t have a bath tonight because you have a dead man in the bath.” Anyone else, I’d have laughed, or said something scathing. But it was Aunt Tansy’s testimony, and she was in her eighties, as fragile as expensive glassware.

“You can use mine, August, downstairs. In fact, I think you should, and the sooner the better.” Her white bun of ancient silky hair bobbed. “The fact of the matter is, my dear, you stink like a polecat.” I watched her press down on the white, datey dough, and the clean round shapes of the scones came out of that putty and sat snugly on the tray she had waiting for them. I felt the sleepy contentment of that large old eccentric nineteenth house closing around me again, and my mind phased away from her mad statement. It was easy to forget at Aunt Tansy’s, which is why I so greatly enjoyed my— I yanked myself out of distraction, forced myself to think about a corpse in a bathroom.

“Always the same corpse, is it?” I drained the last of my cool coffee.

“Heavens no, child, don’t be absurd. There’s a fresh one every week.” She took the scones over to the oven, slid them in above the tarts. The tray rattled. “All shapes and sizes. Last week it was a nice looking young fellow in a tweed suit.” She came back to the table and held out her shaky cup; I poured more coffee. The poor thing was trembling, and it wasn’t the caffeine; she was scared stiff. My bemusement turned to dismay. They keep promising a cure for Alzheimer’s, but as far as I knew firm kindness seemed the only available prescription. Tansy had done a lot for me.

“What happens to these bodies?” Pretty difficult, humoring an old lady’s delusions without making it obvious. And Tansy was sharp.

“They’re always gone in the morning. Sometimes a bit of blood, you know, but I wash the bath out with citric cleanser and you’d never know there’s been a body there.”

Her cup clattered faintly on its saucer. I was getting scared myself.

“How long’s this been going on?”

“It started just after you left for the bush. Let’s see—six of them so far. And another one tonight, I expect.”

I had seen some strange things in my life, not the least of them my lunatic school friend Davers running about an Adelaide football field in cleated boots and his sister’s frilly dress, pursued by jocks—but never anything so weird or blood-curdling as quiet little Great-aunt Tansy talking about corpses in her upstairs bath.

“You’ve told the police, I suppose?”

She gave me a scornful look.

“August, they’d have me committed to an insane asylum.” Her trembling worsened. I felt ashamed. You didn’t just drive your aged relative to the local clinic and ask them to run some tests on her sanity. Or did you? I was starting to think that I’d need to call my aunt Miriam and her husband Itzhak in on this, and did some calculations. No, it was still only about six in the morning in Chicago, which is where they were living at the time. Let it ride, I told myself, see what we work can out right here and now. Besides, incredibly enough, some part of me was beginning to assume that something strange was happening in the old house, something she’d misinterpreted rather unfortunately. I’d never known Aunt Tansy to be entirely wrong about anything important. Could this be the deranged work of one or more of her psychic clientele? Maybe she’d given one of them a bum steer, and this was payback time.

“I’ll just go up and have a quick look,” I said, and took our cups to the sink.

“You be careful, August,” she told me. To my immense surprise, she reached down and held out an old cricket bat that had been leaning against one table leg on her side. “Take this. Give the buggers a good whack for me.”

Then she insisted on a final cup of cocoa for both of us, so I rolled my eyes to heaven and gave in. I packed Great-aunt Tansy off to bed early in her slightly sour old-lady-scented ground floor bedroom at the front of the house, went upstairs.

I opened the bathroom door and gazed carefully around. Tiled walls, pale green, pleasantly pastel. It struck me as odd, peering about the large room, that for years I’d bathed here and made stinks without ever really looking at it. You take the familiar for granted. Two large windows, dark as night now, gave on to trimmed grass three full floors below, and the fruit trees and organic vegetable plots of the back garden. Between them a pink wash-basin stood on a pedestal, set beneath a big antique wall-mounted mirror, at least a meter square, with a faint coppery patina, the silvering crazed at the edges. The claw-footed bath itself filled the left-hand corner, opposite a chain-flush toilet bowl of blue-patterned porcelain like a Wedgwood plate, next to the timber door with its ornate geometrical carvings. The toilet’s polished timber seat was down, naturally, and masked by a rather twee fluffy woolen cover that Tansy might well have knitted herself. A flower-patterned plastic screen hung on a steel rail around the bath, depending from white plastic rings as large as bangles. Tansy did not approve of separate shower stalls; a bath was how she’d washed as a girl, and the wide old fixed shower head was barely tolerated. I didn’t mind, I enjoyed a long soak as much as anyone three or four times my age.

I pulled the screen back on its runner and studied the bath, which of course was empty, fighting an urge to throw off my sweaty clothes and jump in for a steaming soak. The ludicrous possibility that six corpses had shared that bath hung in my mind, even as I shook my head with self-mockery.

The place smelled wonderful, that’s what I was noticing most of all. Scalloped shells at bath and basin alike held a deep green translucent chunky oval of Pears soap, a green deeper than jade, and its aroma seemed to summon me back to childhood, when my mother washed me with the perfumed scents of cleanliness and herself, then dried me briskly with a fluffy towel smelling of sunlight. I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, caught myself sighing, opened them. Just an ordinary bathroom, really. Perhaps cleaner than most. Aunt Tansy was punctilious. The house was large and rambling but tidy; with the help of a middle-aged “treasure,” Mrs. Abbott, who came by twice a week and took over most of the vacuuming and dusting, my Aunt ran a taut ship. A ship insufficiently taut, apparently, to prevent a weekly visitation from the dead.

I glanced at my watch. Little wonder I was tired, it was nearly eleven. Great-aunt Tansy was a woman of regular habits. She always watched television while baking until the end of the Saturday night movie, cleaned her teeth, was in bed by 11.30. Her Saturday corpse must put in its appearance by the time she switched the TV off at 11.15 or so, and be gone when she rose for church at 7.30 on Sunday morning.

“Madness,” I muttered aloud, removing my heavy boots, and climbed into the bath, holding the bat in one hand. By leaving a gap between the hanging plastic screen and the tiled wall, I was able to watch the closed and locked window through a small vertical aperture. This meant sitting on the slippery rounded edge of the bath and stretching my neck into a ridiculous position, but I decided a few minutes discomfort for the cause was worth it. I thought of Tansy’s homely gesture in insisting on shared cocoa and wished for something equally mundane to calm my jitters. Half my friends in school would have lighted up a cigarette, but the foul things made me sick, and besides even if I smoked there’d be little gain in advertising my presence. I caught myself. To whom? This was a delusion, an old lady’s mad fancy.

The silence took on an eerie aspect. In her room on the ground floor below, Tansy might be sleeping by now, or perhaps lying awake, eyes wide and fixed on her dim ceiling. In the bathroom, no sound but my own breathing, not even the movement of wind in the trees below. I felt for a moment as if mine were the sole consciousness active in the whole world. A trickle of cold sweat ran down my back, something I’ve only ever read about. In the last few weeks I had driven a powerful little bike across vast plains, much of the landscape nearly barren due to the El Nino drought and maybe the Greenhouse Effect. I’d once come close to a fall from the skidding machine under the hooves of a hundred spooked cattle, which had scared me without getting in my way; that was fear in the service of sharpened instincts and self-preservation. In Tansy’s deathly quiet bathroom, I felt like wetting my pants. I got out again, lifted the wooly toilet seat, pissed for a while, flushed, left the seat up. This was my bathroom now, by default. I climbed back into the bath, cool on my feet through the socks, sat down again on my narrow perch.

My neck hurt. I got a sudden picture of how grotesque I looked, craning on the edge of the bath, laughed softly to myself and stood up, unkinking my spine, put my hand on the curtain to yank it back. The window nearest to me screeked ever so slightly, and I heard it open a little.

This was impossible. I was on the third floor of a tall old structure without fire escape or any of that modern namby-pamby nonsense. I’d checked carefully to confirm my memory of the garden: no new lattices, the trees were all sensibly positioned meters away to prevent fire hazards, and Tansy’s ladder was inside the house, not even outside in the locked shed. Dugald O’Brien was not r