Still shivering, she returned to the living room to look for the blue stone. There was a substantial hole in the wall where its impact had gouged out the plaster. The stone itself was unharmed, lying on the rug in front of the hearth. She didn’t pick it up. She’d had enough of its delirium for one night. Avoiding its baleful glance as best she could, she threw a cushion over it. Tomorrow she’d plan some way of ridding herself of the thing. Tonight she needed to tell somebody what she’d experienced, before she began to doubt it. Someone a little crazy, who’d not dismiss her account out of hand; someone already half believing. Gentle, of course.
17
TOWARDS MIDNIGHT, THE TRAFFIC outside Gentle’s studio dwindled to almost nothing. Anybody who was going to a party tonight had arrived. They were deep in drink, debate, or seduction, determined as they celebrated to have in the coming year what the going had denied them.
Content with his solitude, Gentle sat cross-legged on the floor, a bottle of bourbon between his legs and canvases propped up against the furniture all around him. Most of them were blank, but that suited his meditation. So was the future.
He’d been sitting in this ring of emptiness for about two hours, drinking from the bottle, and now his bladder needed emptying. He got up and went to the bathroom, using the tight from the lounge to go by rather than face his reflection. As he shook the last drops into the bowl, that light went off. He zipped himself up and went back into the studio. The rain lashed against the window, but there was sufficient illumination from the street for him to see that the door out onto the landing stood inches ajar.
“Who’s there?” he said.
The room was still for a moment; then he glimpsed a form against the window, and the smell of something burned and cold pricked his nostrils. The whistler! My God, it had found him!
Fear made him fleet. He broke from his frozen posture and raced to the door. He would have been through it and away down the stairs had he not almost tripped on the dog waiting obediently on the other side. It wagged its tail in pleasure at the sight of him and halted his flight. The whistler was no dog lover. So who was here?
Turning back, he reached for the light switch and wasabout to flip it on when the unmistakable voice of Pie ‘oh’ pah said, “Please don’t. I prefer the dark.”
Gentle’s finger dropped from the switch, his heart hammering for a different reason. “Pie? Is that you?”
“Yes, it’s me,” came the reply. “I heard you wanted to see me, from a friend of yours.”
“I thought you were dead.”
“I was with the dead. Theresa and the children.”
“Oh, God. Oh, God.”
“You lost somebody too,” Pie ‘oh’ pah said.
It was wise, Gentle now understood, to have this exchange in darkness: to talk, in shadow, of the grave and the lambs it had claimed.
“I was with the spirits of my children for a time. Your friend found me in the mourning place, spoke to me, told me you wanted to see me again. This surprises me, Gentle.”
“As much as you talking to Taylor surprises me,” Gentle replied, though after their conversation it shouldn’t have done. “Is he happy?” he asked, knowing the question might be viewed as a banality, but wanting reassurance.
“No spirit is happy,” Pie replied. “There’s no release for them. Not in this Dominion or any other. They haunt the doors, waiting to leave, but there’s nowhere for them to go.”
“Why?”
“That’s a question that’s been asked for many generations, Gentle. And unanswered. As a child I was taught that before the Unbeheld went into the First Dominion there was a place there into which all spirits were received. My people lived in that Dominion then, and watched over that place, but the Unbeheld drove both the spirits and my people out.”
“So the spirits have nowhere to go?”
“Exactly. Their numbers swell, and so does their grief.”
He thought of Taylor, lying on his deathbed, dreaming