The Naming of the Birds, page 24
“Perhaps, sir,” said Gideon, who still felt notably light-headed, “it will fall in the manner of one of Bishop Berkeley’s trees. No one will be nearby to hear it, and therefore the ladder’s very existence will be susceptible to dispute.”
Cutter drew down the window sash with quiet emphasis. He let out a heavy breath. “Is that philosophy, Bliss?”
“Yes, sir. It is from a treatise on the metaphysics of knowledge.”
Cutter stared for a time, then he pointed at the peculiar brass implement. “Do you see that chandelier hook? No one will see it if I stick it up your arse. I’ll warrant it will still exist, though.”
“Stop it, Cutter,” said Octavia, looking up from her crates. “He’s babbling because he’s been under strain, and because he thought you were dead. We both did.”
“Dead? What gave you that notion?”
“Well, sir,” said Gideon, “we did suffer a moment or two of misgiving, but—”
“We heard something give way, as you very well know, and we heard you struggling. Then you just disappeared. And look at you—you’ve clearly been injured, yet God forbid you should admit to the slightest vulnerability or allow it in anyone else. Least of all in someone who cares for you, however inexplicable that may be.”
Cutter stared, as if perplexed by a riddle, then something shifted in his face. He lifted his bloodied hand, letting his eyes flicker over it, then dropped it again. He shook his head slowly. “All right,” he said, in a tone that seemed oddly weightless. “All right, yes. It was a lightning rod, not a gutter. My own fault, no doubt. They are not made to take any weight. But that is by the by, I suppose.”
He stopped and looked away, out into the night. “Look, I know my own ways, for who better? My own faults. Hard words, to be sure, but there are worse failings than hard words. Much worse. Christ, listen to me wandering. You would think a man in my game would know his way to a confession, yet when it comes to it …”
He shook his head again.
“Listen, we haven’t the time for this now, but if I am right we will have it soon enough. I have been trying to tell you both, after my own fashion. I have been trying to warn you, but it will be out of my hands soon enough. I slipped, yes, and I came damn near to falling. And do you know what I said to myself, in that moment? I said, Not yet, you black-hearted bastard, and not like that. You will not get out of it that easily. So, if anyone was minded to mourn me, all I can say is that he should give it another hour or two. He might find he has cause to reconsider. Now, before someone starts lighting candles and singing hymns, might I remind you that we have work to do. And the first order of business, I believe, is to find out where we are.”
“Mineralogy,” said Octavia, lifting something heavy and obscurely lucent from a crate. “This is chrysoberyl, according to the tag. Apparently, it exhibits something called ‘chatoyancy,’ though it doesn’t seem to exhibit anything much in the dark. Stop looking at me like that, Cutter, there is a point to this. My grandfather used to bring me here when I was younger. I had to look at everything, no matter how dull, because it was edifying. If the layout of these storage rooms corresponds to the halls down below, then we must be somewhere above mineralogy. That’s towards the back, as I recall. Where do you expect to find our new friends?”
“You saw their invitation, Miss Hillingdon. They gave us very little in the way of particulars, but that is not to say they took no trouble over them. No doubt they mean to make an occasion of it, one way or another. Tell me this, since no one ever thought to edify me as a youngster: Where are the grandest rooms in this place? Where do they show off the bigger articles, the great man-eating elephants and such like?”
Gideon did not venture a correction, as he might once have done. He recognised for once that he was being teased, even if he did not feel moved to share the joke. He wondered how much he had misunderstood, for all this time, how much he had failed to see.
Octavia considered the question. “Well,” she said, “it would have to be one of the main galleries. You come to those first, from the public entrance, and the dinosaurs and things were in the hall on the right. But why would they choose a place like that, a vast room where everything is on display—where they’d be on display? Aren’t they supposed to be shadowy conspirators?”
“That I can’t say,” said Cutter. “But when I am faced with a puzzle of that kind, I am inclined to suspect that the answer will be one I don’t like.”
“Mmm,” said Octavia, stowing away her mineral sample. “I’d had a similar thought. It occurred to me, for instance, that they might have chosen the place because they want us to be on display. Because they want us to be seen.”
Gideon grasped his left arm discreetly. He had been troubled by peculiar spasms, rippling upwards from the injured hand. The sensation in his forearm was one of sinuous constriction, as if it were wound about by a snake. “Or perhaps,” he said quietly, “they were not the ones who chose the place.”
Cutter gave him an oblique look, his chin thrust aside. He shook his head and moved to the door, where he conducted a hasty inventory of his pockets. Gideon glimpsed a package—narrow and tapering, wrapped closely in brown paper—that he recognised but could not place.
“I fear we are worrying the point to death,” said Cutter. “It is a long time since I was in the way of stepping out with ladies, but I recall it as a simple enough business. If she named a railway station you would find her near the doors or the ticket office, not crouching in an engine boiler. We will make our way to these main galleries, and we will make as little racket as we can help. Creeping up on people is not a complicated undertaking either.”
Gideon took his place by the door, reaching beneath his coat as he did so. The revolver felt cold to the touch always, though it was next to his body. This time he did not draw his hand back at once. He skimmed its contours for a moment, letting his fingertips memorise them. “I’m sure you are right, sir,” he said, though he had not been attending. “I’m sure it will be all right.”
Octavia turned at this, her fingers slowing as she pinned up her hair. He offered her a placid smile.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, all right, Gideon. Cutter, what’s the time?”
“Eighteen minutes to midnight. Have you any recollection of the distance?”
“I was a bored child, Inspector, not a surveyor. But I suppose it is three hundred yards or so, from this side to the public entrance. I don’t think the exact distance matters, though. We are not an army marching over open country. We shall be sneaking along unlit passageways, coming upon locked doors and blind turns. I wouldn’t hold out much hope of timing our arrival to the minute.”
“Well, so be it,” answered Cutter. “I doubt it makes any odds, a minute before midnight or five minutes after. All I want is to be there a minute before they know it. If we find they have watchers and hatchet men crouching behind every glass case, that will be another matter. I doubt they went to such lengths, however. This is a delicate bit of business, and they will want to keep it close. I am counting on another point, too, though I will say no more about it for now. In any case, I have something near enough to a plan, but it is not without its faults. For one thing, it will mean that I must go most of the way without a hand to my gun.”
He stooped to attend to something in the darkness. A dim scuffling followed.
Octavia spoke with icy forbearance. “I don’t suppose you’d care to explain any further, Inspector? Why won’t you have your hands free? And what on earth are you doing?”
“I am taking off my boots, Miss Hillingdon. You might make a start on your own, since you have a good deal more unlacing to do. I did tell you it was a straightforward business. We will not have our hands free because we will be carrying our shoes.”
THEY KEPT TO the attics at first, to make what ground they could out of anyone’s hearing, but in this place even the attics were a labyrinth of cloaked treasures. Even in the dark, they sensed the close press of accreted mysteries, of the blind eyes and arrested wings that were massed all about them, waiting to be named. What little they could feel or see they did not recognise. Gideon would put a hand out—an awkward business, with his shoes in his hands—and his fingertips would graze illegible fissures, arid spines, or papery husks. Even when some meagre light reached them, from a slatted window or a hidden skylight, it hardly helped. It showed them crouched beasts riven with pins or plumbed to flasks of bitter-smelling fluids. It showed them tablets of scabbed slate, inscribed with indecipherable lobes and incomplete symmetries. It showed them ranks of great jars, gravid with undersea murk and the stilled forms—fat coils, tender membranes, pallid vanes—of things that must once have lived and were now forbidden to perish.
At any other time, Gideon might have been moved to awe. What surrounded him, he supposed, were the spoils of unresting scholarship, and no doubt such labours were to be honoured. All he felt, though, was a brooding indignation. All these specimens, all these relics, all these bones. They could not leave the world untouched, these people, or even the worlds beneath it. They could not be content with dominion over the living. They wanted it even over the dead.
No doubt he was not quite himself. He certainly felt irritable. He had been ordered to bring up the rear, since only he and Cutter were armed, but that was surely a laughable notion. Octavia had proved more than once that she was no defenceless ingenue, and Gideon was hardly a dependable marksman at the best of times, never mind while he was tiptoeing through a darkened maze with a damp and decrepit shoe in each hand.
Octavia must have sensed his impatience. When they came at length to the head of a narrow staircase, she called to him in a whisper. She had seemed at ease with this undertaking from the start, tugging her high boots off without ceremony and knotting their laces together so that she could carry them slung about her shoulders. She had, as she reminded Cutter, done this sort of thing before. In any case, when Gideon drew near enough to make it out, he saw that her expression was composed.
She studied him for a moment. “Are you all right, do you think?”
“Yes, I’m—what? Why are you looking at me that way?”
“You’ve been muttering to yourself. It isn’t like you.”
“What? Don’t be—” Gideon hesitated. “Really? Are you sure?”
“Well, muttering to someone. It was almost as if—oh, it doesn’t matter. I just wanted you to know that we’re getting quite close now. These stairs ought to lead us down to the middle galleries, giving on to the central hall. I’ve sent Cutter down to check—well, I prompted him to think of it, which comes to the same thing. The central hall will take us to the main galleries. Gideon, are you following all this?”
He had been staring, down into the shadows below the steeply raked staircase. And he had heard something, he was almost sure. A solemn tapping that faded when he tried to fix upon it. “Sorry, yes.” He made a show of attentiveness. “Nearly there. To the central galleries.”
She pressed her lips together. “Look, just stay close behind me. And try to remember—oh, hang on, he’s back. Well, was I right?”
“Near enough,” said Cutter, emerging from the gloom beneath them. “These take us to the upper tier of the fish gallery, but there’s a long corridor beyond that. We’ll have to follow that to get to the central hall. That part I am not fond of, since it is a corridor lined with doors and little else. Nothing to duck behind if someone pokes a head in.”
“You went that far ahead?” said Octavia.
“Without you to look out for me, you mean? I didn’t, no. They put floor plans up, for the visitors. All labelled, as neat as you like. Oh, and that’s the other thing. There’s lights down there.”
“What, everywhere? Was it them?”
“No way to be sure,” said Cutter. “I doubt it, though. Would have taken them an age, a place this size. And it’s lit for night duty, not for visitors. Just one lamp in every five, and burning fairly low. It’s what nightwatchmen do, when they start a shift. Otherwise, they would burn twice their wages in kerosene. And it’s all they had to do tonight, I’ll be bound, before someone let them out on unexpected leave.”
Octavia tutted lightly. “Well, I don’t suppose it matters much. We would have come upon lighted rooms eventually, and now we will make quicker progress.”
“Quicker, yes, but not too quick. Do you hear, Bliss? I see you perking up and taking notice, which is a small relief to me, but remember you will be crossing marble floors in your stockinged feet. If you set off at a gallop, you will end up clattering into a stuffed dragon and waking the whole house.”
Gideon gave Cutter a look that he hoped would go undetected in the dark. He was indeed paying closer attention now, and his thoughts no longer felt quite so disordered. But he felt something else, too, now that they had drawn near to what awaited them. It flickered at odd moments at the periphery of his awareness, and it made him think of a showman’s fingertips grazing the surface of a bulb; of empty air crazed blue by a pulse of summoned charge. He was growing frankly deranged, no doubt, but he found he did not mind it. “I will take care, sir,” he said, “not to upset any dragons.”
THE LAMPS IN the fish gallery burned low, just as Cutter had described, but he insisted all the same that they take a moment to let their eyes adjust. “We have spent the last age straining after gleams in pitch-black rooms,” he said. He had braced his shoes together in his left hand and was swinging them cautiously to test the new arrangement. “And from now on our lives might depend on catching a stray shadow. We can afford to lose half a minute.”
Gideon surveyed the gallery below them, a grand barrel-vaulted hall where a shark was suspended above a staid arrangement of glass cases, unseeing and vastly inert. There was light enough to pick out the ancient nicks and slash marks on its dull flank, the serried trap of teeth in its hungerless mouth. There were deep shadows, certainly, between the display cases and amongst the regimented cabinets that lined the walls, but it seemed impossible that even a moth’s wings could stir unnoticed in this muted sepulchre of a place.
He could not tell if this made the inspector right or wrong, but he chafed nonetheless at his sudden show of caution. “But, sir,” he began, “surely it is—”
Gideon broke off. He had heard it again, rising and fading at the limits of his hearing. A ticking, not quite precise. Like a failing metronome, set to andante. The others gave no sign that they had heard, though Octavia seemed as alert as ever and Cutter, at most times, seemed to possess the hearing of a famished watchdog.
“Surely it is what, Bliss?”
Octavia, who had been adjusting the arrangement of her boots, cast her eyes up in exasperation. “I don’t mean to be unkind, Inspector, but your voice wasn’t made for whispering. It sounds like a gramophone recording of thunder. Perhaps you could give hand signals from now on.”
Cutter passed a hand over his mouth. “Should I answer you with a hand signal, Miss Hillingdon? Because I have one in mind.” He rooted for his watch. “It’s time. Stay close behind me from now on and watch what I do, hand signals or no. And one last thing. I said that certain truths might come out here, but that doesn’t mean you should trust all you hear and see. You will have time enough for doubting me if I am still standing tomorrow, but for tonight you must mind what I say. Understood?”
“Fine,” said Octavia. Gideon gave only a brief nod, when he saw that Cutter was waiting for his response. His attention had been elsewhere.
“Right,” said Cutter. “Whoever these bastards are, let’s have a look at them.”
THEY MADE THEIR WAY in silence through the fish gallery, scarcely glancing at the creatures they passed. In his state of peculiar fixation, Gideon could summon little curiosity for the exhibits, and he looked aside only when some quirk of the light caught his attention, silvering the belly of a listless carp or the gelid coin of a turbot’s eye.
He was grateful when they reached the corridor beyond, though Cutter took on a grim look when he paused to check that the way was clear. It offered little in the way of concealment, it was true, beyond its slender ornamental pillars and a procession of dour busts, and even the rationed lamplight would be enough to betray them at once. Gideon was mindful of all this, and with some effort he kept to their careful and steady pace, his eyes flickering from Cutter’s back to the shadowed doorways up ahead. He was conscious of an obscure elation, though, now that the way ahead lay straight and unobstructed. He had even recognised the source of that strange ticking, now that they were drawing near to it. Footsteps. It was the sound of footsteps.
Cutter put out a hand when he came to the last door, but Gideon and Octavia had already slowed and halted. After all the bickering and shambling progress of the last hour, they had fallen into formation now, each of them attentive to every gesture and hesitation, all of them moving with measured purpose.
Only once, when they had crossed into the vast and pristine central hall, was this pattern disturbed. The concourse had widened as it approached a soaring atrium, and Cutter was skirting the pediment of a column so as to keep to the scalloped margins of the mouth of the passage. He froze, one stockinged foot flexed above the gleaming flags, and he canted his head by a cautious fraction. Octavia and Gideon each skidded minutely as they noted this, then waited anxiously for some further sign.
Cutter glanced back, then raised a scooped hand to his ear. A hand signal. When he lowered it and looked back again, his expression was difficult to interpret. There was wariness in it, but there was a trace of bemusement too. He made another pantomime gesture, scissoring his fingers over empty air.
