The day after their first meeting, true to his word, Noel came to see Peter and brought him the Climbers’ Guidebook, a stack of typewritten pages, handwritten notes and photographs. Try as Peter might, he could not be angry with Noel for abandoning him on the roof: the shared nocturnal activity made him feel part of something special.
Peter met Noel’s friends, James, Bunny and Cedric, who also spent their nights hanging off Cambridge’s architecture. They exuded a potent mixture of enthusiasm and sheer insanity. The climber community was small and secretive. Noel claimed that there were often climbers in the same college who never knew each other.
Under Noel’s tutelage, Peter practised on the roof of the Old Library. Noel called it the nursery for climbers: a jumbled confusion of slopes, leaded walks and iron ladders.
A month later, Noel deemed him ready to attempt the Library’s Tottering Tower. It was a twenty-five foot high structure, a thin stone needle with a collar of gargoyles and a sharp cone on top.
Peter gasped when he saw it, but it was more of a mental challenge. You had to leap across a chasm to start, but once you did so, the tower itself had miniature carvings that made the rest of the climb easy, like going up a stepladder.
Then they were both at the top of the tower, standing on carvings and holding on to the spike at the top.
‘Look at this view,’ Noel said. ‘It was worth the effort, wasn’t it?’
The massive edifice of King’s College Chapel loomed ahead, so gigantic that even at their height of sixty or seventy feet, Peter felt like he was still looking at it from the ground. To the north, St John’s Chapel rose above a sea of rooftops. Directly below was Trinity Hall, with the speck of a porter walking across the quad. Peter felt like a bird, soaring.
Maybe Unschlicht had done him a favour. If you were rooted in something solid, you could never truly fly.
After that, he embraced climbing wholeheartedly. It took his mind away from doubting mathematics. It was good to feel red brick against his body, and to solve one problem at a time—hand here, foot here—and see how far up he could get. His studies suffered. The days became blurry, sand-eyed intervals between climbs, and he spent more time adding entries to the Guidebook than he did with his homework.
And that was the way it was until September, when Cedric died.
* * *
After Noel, Cedric was the climber Peter came to know best. He was a tall Trinity boy who dressed in ridiculously high-waisted trousers and braces and smoked a pipe. In tutorials, he was completely silent, folded his lanky frame into his bench with great difficulty, and squeezed his pencil nub so hard it looked as if his long, flexible fingers might snap like twigs at any moment. During climbs, he became alive and talkative, telling Peter about growing up with his six rugby-playing brothers and his plans to open a store selling American comics.
One night, Cedric tried to solo-climb one of King’s College Chapel’s spires. It started to rain, he lost his footing and fell more than a hundred feet. A proctor found his body lying in the courtyard the next morning.
Two days after his funeral, Noel organised a night expedition to scale the spires of the Chapel in Cedric’s honour. The party got their hands on an ectophone and ran the wire up all the way to the top. The climb was difficult—the first frost had settled—but there were ten of them, with lots of ropes. They attacked the Chapel as if it was a mammoth, to be tied down and sacrificed in their comrade’s memory.
At the top, Noel called the ectophone exchange and waited. The sombre mood evaporated when Cedric answered from Summerland. Noel sat atop a gargoyle like some sort of demonic cowboy, lifted the phone and hooted.
‘Here we are, old boy! Here we are!’
Down on the rooftops, the other climbers patted each other on the back and shouted greetings.
Noel waved at Peter, inviting him up to speak to Cedric. He climbed the spire accompanied by the climbers’ cheers, joined Noel at the top and accepted the heavy handset.
‘How are you?’ he asked Cedric.
There was static on the line. Then the dead boy’s voice spoke, more hollow than in real life, but recognisably Cedric.
‘It’s great here, actually. The lectures are still boring even via ectophone. Not much climbing going on. But thought-travel is amazing. And you can shape things with your mind. Need to pay attention, though. If I’m not careful, my head starts to look like a crushed plum. I kind of wish I had got here sooner, to be honest, just not by falling on my noggin.’
As Peter listened, it suddenly felt like the spire was inverted, and the night sky was some unfathomable abyss below him.
‘I’m happy for you,’ he whispered and passed the handset back to Noel.
Ignoring his friend’s surprised look, he descended alone, all the way to the alley behind the Chapel, and ran to Trinity without stopping.
Back in his room, he lay down on his bed and closed his eyes. It was so unfair. His father had tried to make a difference all his life and disappeared without a trace. Cedric had just drifted through life without purpose, and to him, Summerland was like a holiday resort.
Was this what his mother had tried to tell him? There was no point in climbing when nothing changed if you fell. There was no point in mathematics if it was just a game, with no stone-hard truth beneath.
Noel and Cedric and the others would never understand that.
For the first time since he started night-climbing, Peter felt completely alone.
* * *
During the years that followed, Peter had come to terms with solitude, but it still stung a little to sit with an old friend over cups of vim, conscious that a slip of the tongue would open up an abyss beneath him.
‘I’m glad you came to me with this,’ he told Noel. ‘Do keep me posted.’
‘Of course.’
‘Incidentally, did your source find out anything more about this defector character?’
‘Not much. The Watcher he spoke to said the Russian was a rowdy blighter. Punched a poet, apparently.’
Peter forced a smile. ‘Punched a poet? That’s a good start. I don’t remember anyone ever punching you.’
‘Well, there was that scoundrel Caldecott. But that was over a girl.’
They both laughed at the memory.
‘We should really get together after work sometime,’ Noel said. ‘Maybe even bring Cedric along. Say what you want about the Winter Court, but at least they don’t have to pay an arm and a leg for a medium to get a drink.’
‘How is the old devil?’
‘Oh, you know. All business these days. Always asks about you.’
‘We had some good times, didn’t we? Once in a while, I still think about that night we climbed the Tottering Tower. Are you going to put that in your book?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Noel said. ‘Some things people have to discover for themselves.’
* * *
The rest of the twilight day in Peter’s own Section lasted forever. He had to finish his briefing for the Winter Court but it was difficult to concentrate. The CAMLANN file burned in his mind like a tantalising hot coal, but he did not dare to examine it in his office. More than once, the words flowing from his aetherpen became complete nonsense and he had to put it down.
Finally, he was done and sealed the ectomails to Hollis with his luz.
On his way back to Undermay, standing in the fourtube car, he kept hearing Noel’s words over and over again.
I thought you should know, in case a witch hunt is imminent.
Every evening commuter who threw him a passing glance looked like a Watcher. Once, his hands on the bar near the ceiling became those of a young boy again, small and pale, with chewed fingernails. He quickly stuffed them in his pockets until he had his self-image under control. It was impolite to remark on drifting appearances, but it would not do if someone who knew him noticed he was in distress.
His luz pulsed with fear to the rhythm of the four-rail’s clatter. The Summer Court had soul-surgeries tha
t could dig secrets from his mind, no matter how well he hid them. And after he was bled dry, there was the judgment of kata, the abyss from which no one had ever returned.
For the first time in seven years, doubt crept into his mind. Not only had George fled the Termin Procedure, he had killed himself. Why would anyone choose a Ticketless journey into the kata depths over joining the Presence?
Peter really had not known George at all.
You can prove anything from a contradiction.
Was it possible that it had not been a suicide after all, that Shpiegelglass or someone else had liquidated George and the Winter Court was covering it up? But why would Shpiegelglass keep that from him?
Peter sat down and watched the fourtube’s pale, dark-suited men and women returning from the upper ana levels, or from long, tiring journeys to do aetheric work in the living world, and felt jealous. Their lives might be meaningless, but at least they weren’t troubled by unanswerable questions.
Back in his flat, he finally took out the CAMLANN file. It was not so much like unwrapping a present as he had anticipated, but rather pulling out a tooth: it had tangled up with the doubts and fears in his mind during the course of the day. He focused on the bubble of aether with its tiny luz kernel and fanned out the documents it contained like a magician’s oversized playing cards.
There was a budget with deliberately obscure line items, a list of personnel—twenty researchers and support staff, both living and spirits—and a contract with Marconi for aetheric instruments. No names of the staff were included, a standard practice in defence-related contracts. Still, it looked like a significant effort: the total cost was more than a million pounds. An impenetrable one-page executive summary talked about research into ‘deep kata phenomena,’ whatever those were.
The project was commissioned by West himself in January 1928—then a freshly minted prime minister—and terminated in August 1928. It had been supervised by a steering committee including West, the Royal Eschatologist Sir Oliver Lodge and Guglielmo Marconi. The minutes from the committee’s final meeting were sparse but indicated that the project had been shut down due to ‘inconclusive’ results—Lodge and Marconi had overruled West. Peter perked up at that. There were rumours that the original three who were present during Colonel Bedford’s first journey to the afterlife in the late 1890s had suffered a falling out. It was certainly true that West, Lodge and Marconi had not been seen together for a while.
The rest of the file—the actual research—was a blur. Peter swore. Either the aetheric record had degraded over time, or the Zöllner camera—which recorded images in aetheric patterns that could be transported to Summerland—had not worked properly.
Or someone had made sure it had not worked properly.
He paced around in frustration. Then it occurred to him to look at the cover sheet of the file. Yes, the file was an aetherized version of an older paper document, which was stored in the original Registry. Which was now in St Albans, a small town outside London, where it had been relocated from the original Charing Cross site in 1932.
It would not do to send an official request for the file, especially if Noel and his Section were watching him.
Then it struck him. The answer was obvious. He needed to find out what the Winter Court knew about him, and what had happened to George. He needed access to the Old Registry.
In other words, he needed a source inside the Winter Court.
He remembered the night Noel had left him on the rooftop alone. It was so dark he had crawled around on all fours, looking for routes down. Then the clouds hiding the moon passed and it became an algebra problem, putting a series of simple steps in the right order. Go down a drainpipe close to a window with ornamental stonework. Jump onto a ledge, hang from it, drop. And then his feet were on the ground.
Peter poured himself a cup of vim, sat down, took up his aetherpen and started drafting an ectomail to Rachel White.
13
ASSET DEVELOPMENT, 16TH NOVEMBER 1938
At the top of the Marconi Tower, Rachel White looked at London through the November rain and steeled herself for her new career as a Soviet source.
Bloom had suggested having the call there early in the evening, after she finished work. ‘Talking on an ectophone is rather dull,’ he wrote in his ectomail. ‘I would rather go for a walk with you, somewhere we can look at the world from different perspectives.’
Rachel buttoned her raincoat tightly against the wind-tossed droplets and wished she had not agreed so readily. Spirit spies did not get colds. She sniffed and waited for the ectophone in her purse to ring. Bloom was late.
The Tower stood near the Embankment. One of Gustave Eiffel’s posthumous projects, it was a triple-pronged radio mast, a monstrosity of wrought iron and steel that smelled of rust. It had started to rain the very moment she began to climb the steps in the central spire. All the tourists and visitors came clambering down in the opposite direction, holding umbrellas and leaflets over their heads. Rachel gritted her teeth, forced her way up to the central gondola and showed her SIS identity card to the watchman, who touched his cap and returned to his glass-walled booth and a cup of tea.
It was a perfectly logical meeting place, of course. The Tower was a hub of spirit messenger and ectomail activity, a giant instrument attuned to the aetheric signals that tied the worlds of the living and the dead together, and meeting there was the Summerland equivalent of a discreet encounter in a crowded, public space. Bloom was being careful.
Below, the Thames was a pitch-black, flowing fracture that bisected London into two lobes of a brain made of street lights, people and electricity. Momentary vertigo grabbed her and she clutched the railing with one gloved hand, struggling to hold her umbrella with the other.
At that very moment, her phone gave a tinkle. She let go of the umbrella. The wind seized it and it blew away, rising upwards in a chaotic, tumbling motion. Her hat and face were instantly wet. She fumbled with the earbuds and the tuning dial until she heard Bloom’s voice through the hiss of static and the rain.
‘Tell me, Rachel,’ he said, ‘what do you see?’
She sniffed. ‘Rain. London. And an abyss that will allow me to join you over there if I take just one more step.’
Bloom laughed, a soft, whisper-like sound. ‘I apologise. I should have checked the weather forecast. One tends to forget.’
‘I understand.’
‘If you prefer, we can go somewhere else.’
The wind had eased a bit. ‘I am fine for now,’ Rachel said. ‘I climbed all the way up here so we might as well enjoy the view. What is it that you see, Peter?’
‘Over here, the Tower is like a giant firecracker and we are right in the heart of it. It’s noisy. There are spirits everywhere, flitting back and forth, carrying letters and messages.’
Max was nearby in Summerland, too, watching. She tried to sweep the thought from her mind, in case Bloom noticed anything. Right now, it was easy enough to focus on the chill and the discomfort, and the view below.
‘And you can see the souls of London from here, moving like impulses through nerves. It really is like one vast creature, alive and sentient.’
‘Does death turn everybody into poets, or just you?’
Bloom laughed. ‘My apologies. Poetry does not keep you warm, does it?’
‘Not that kind, anyway. Tell me, then—what can I do for the Summer Court?’
‘I would rather discuss what the Summer Court can do for you. You have had quite a career, Rachel. The Registry, the Irish Section, Counter-subversion. And you even married into the secret world. That happens often, of course, although usually it’s the secretaries, no offence. Your husband used to be a liaison officer for the RAF?’
‘Formerly,’ Rachel said. ‘He has some health issues.’
‘Ah. I was wondering why he was not at the party. I am sorry to hear that.’ There was genuine concern in his voice. The idea that her private darkness was visible to him made Rachel angry. That was g
ood. She seized the emotion and brought it out in her voice, just like she had practised with Max.
‘I did not think we were here to discuss my husband.’
‘Of course not. It is just that I am aware of your pension and Ticket issues.’
Rachel said nothing. The rain had nearly stopped. The tiny raindrops that remained felt almost pleasant on her face.
‘I’m sorry,’ Bloom said. ‘I did not mean to overstep.’
‘You did not. Things are … complicated at the moment.’ She paused. ‘Can you tell me more about what you see? What is it like over there?’
‘Well, it is more or less as they describe in the books. I believe your mother is in a Summer Home?’
‘Peter. I don’t want to hear about four-dimensional captains and three-dimensional ships, or any other broken metaphor. Tell me stuff I can’t read about in books. What is the worst thing over there?’
Bloom considered. ‘That would have to be the Fading. It’s terrifying. One does not notice it at first. Vim—aetheric energy—stops it, for a time. Thought-travel and aether-shaping make it worse. The aetherologists claim that the aetherbeasts used to be human spirits, too, only they forgot their true natures aeons ago.’
‘That sounds terrible. I have heard the word but did not realise what it meant.’
‘The National Death Service does not advertise it. But with enough vim, it is barely noticeable, a tiny memory here and there over the years, and it does not happen to everybody. There are beautiful things, too. The Summer City sings to itself sometimes. It sounds like musical rain. There is a man, a Faded person, who tells fortunes near the Fortress. He listens to the luz bricks. I thought he was mad at first, but if you listen closely, you can hear the soul-stones mutter in the walls.’
‘So it sounds like being dead is no simpler than being alive. Good and bad.’ In spite of herself, Rachel was fascinated. Spirits rarely discussed Summerland—they were always hungry to hear more about the living. She chided herself for getting too distracted: she was no longer a little girl who believed in magic kingdoms.
The rain had stopped. The clouds were a mixture of red and grey, reflecting the city lights. Near the horizon, a solitary star winked over the skyline.