Valentine Sprake turned away from the darkening view and walked in a jerky, hurried fashion across the room, as if he had seen, out there in the marshes, something which surprised him. Ignoring Michael Kearney, he leaned over Meadows’ desk, picked up the coffee-pot and drank its contents directly from the spout. “Last week,” he said to Meadows, “I learned that Urizen was back among us, and His name is Old England. We are all adrift on the sea of time and space here. Think about that too.” He stalked out of the office with his hands folded on his chest.
Meadows looked amused.
“Who is that, Kearney ?”
“Don’t ask,” said Kearney absently. On the way out he said: “And keep off my back.”
“I can’t protect you forever,” Meadows called after him. That was when Kearney knew Meadows had already sold him out.
Lightweight separators in pastel colours were used to create privacy inside MVC-Kaplan’s otherwise featureless tent of bolted glass. The first thing Kearney saw outside Meadows’ workspace was the shadow of the Shrander, projected somehow from inside the building on to one of these. It was life size, a little blurred and diffuse at first, then hardening and sharpening and turning slowly on its own axis like a chrysalis hanging in a hedge. As it turned, there was a kind of rustling noise he hadn’t heard for twenty years; a smell he still recognised. He felt his whole body go cold and rigid with fear. He backed away from it a few steps, then ran back into the office, where he hauled Meadows over the glass desk by the front of his suit and hit him hard, three or four times in succession, on the right cheekbone.
“Christ,” said Meadows in a thick voice. “Ah.”
Kearney pulled him all the way over the desk, across the floor and out of the door. At the same time the lift arrived and Sprake got out.
“I saw it, I saw it,” Kearney said.
Sprake showed his teeth. “It’s not here now.”
“Get a fucking move on. It’s closer than ever. It wants me to do something.”
Together they bundled Meadows into the lift and down three floors. He seemed to wake up as they dragged him across the lobby and out to the canal bank. “Kearney ?” he said repeatedly. “Is that you ? Is there something wrong with me ?” Kearney let go of him and began kicking his head. Sprake pushed his way between them and held Kearney off until he had calmed down. They got Meadows to the edge of the water, into which they dropped him, face down, while they held his legs. He tried to keep his head above the surface by arching his back, then gave up with a groan. Bubbles came up. His bowels let go.
“Christ,” said Kearney reeling away. “Is he dead ?”
Sprake grinned. “I’d say he was.”
He tilted his head back until he was looking straight up at the faint stars above Walthamstow, raised his arms level with his shoulders, and danced slowly away north along the towpath towards Edmonton.
[Light, 2002]
‘a kind of rustling noise he hadn’t heard for twenty years’ was for me the most frightening thing in the book
Thanks for the reminder. Just finished Empty Space, which is superb, and which left me wanting to re-visit the preceding two…
Hi Ken. Is that the first non-visual information you get about the Shrander? Before that, I think, I kept it as a visual thing. I can’t remember. All I remember is being grossed out by the whole scene.
Hi John, glad you liked it. I’ve begun to be able to see it as one text now, & I’m looking forward to hearing what people think of the whole thing.
Mike: that’s funny, because the closing pages of Empty Space broke any attempt on my part to see all three books as a single text; this, of course, proved more a resolution than any ‘proper’ resolution possibly could.
Hi Brendan. Well, each to his own & I may agree with you in a year’s time…
It’s Sprake drinking from the spout that cues us up for weird Blake, murder, and gnostic orphandom, isn’t it? A cold moment of inversion only equalled by whatever answers Kearney at Sprake’s door later on.
Still, you have to laugh …
martm: yep. It was also the most threatening thing I could think of having him do. I was trying to get every element of the scene falling from menace into comedy & comedy into menace at the same time. I really grossed myself out & I hope it grossed everyone else out too.
“I was trying to get every element of the scene falling from menace into comedy & comedy into menace at the same time.”
Reading that made me think of Pinter, which is weird because I’d never made a connection between you & him before. So am I just exceptionally slow, or imagining things ?
Hard to believe Light is a decade old, or that I’m approaching my third reading still scared witless by it.
For me, the really terrifying bits were related to the fractal processes (however they worked). Tate’s death by mathematics was powerful stuff.