The House of Storms Read online

  She plumped up an extra cushion to support a book on botany and left Ralph to his reading. In the corridor, she checked her watch. Already close to noon. Back in London, her husband Tom would be heading for lunch at his club. In that dense fug, which was like the London air outdoors but ten times multiplied, over red wine and snooker and endless courses of stodge, listening to the same lame jokes and smiling at the same weary faces in their high-backed chairs, much of the real work of the Great Guilds was done. She decided that she would telephone him there before he ate. But first she must make herself presentable.

  She turned along the landing to her own room, which lay at right angles to Ralph’s, with windows opening to a balcony which hung giddily over the sweep of a large, secluded bay. Invercombe was disorientatingly full of such surprises, with odd angles in corridors and unexpected views of land or sea, and the house was positioned so close over the sea on this side that the damage its constant onrush was doing to the foundations scarcely bore thinking about, but it was all undeniably pleasant. She was even starting to wonder if, despite the continuing frigid air and flat grey skies, the odd comfort she felt here wasn’t some initial symptom of the weathertop’s awakening. She and Ralph had been greeted so calmly here, whereas in other places she’d experienced ridiculous fussing only to end up in beds which reeked of urine. Her suspicions of whatever it was that she suspected of Invercombe remained unfounded and unexplained.

  Opening her balcony doors to the salt air, she shrugged off her green silk dress. Almost all her trunks had arrived now, and her clothes had been unwrapped and put away. Also here, a case of black lacquer set on the table beside the windows and glinting with the sea, was her gramophone. Setting the turntable spinning, she removed her earrings and waltzed, two and three, across the shining floor. She touched the steel locks of her portmanteau case and breathed the spell which triggered their release. Twin thunks—a mere emphasis of the music—and its sides unfolded on a velvet den. There was oil of bergamot from the sun-warmed sap of citrus trees. There were waxy distillation of ambergris, and special earths, and particulates of lead. Like a good wine, the contents were easily upset by travel, but as Alice unscrewed a bevelled jar of cold cream and dabbed a ball of lambswool to her face, she could feel that everything was already settling here at Invercombe. Scents of beeswax and almond and hints of rosewater mingled with the hissing sea as she turned two and three to the music in her chemise before the long mirrors of her wardrobes.

  She studied herself left and right. The jaw, the neck, the profile and the timeless face and frame of a woman still entirely beautiful, if no longer quite young. Feet tiptoe light. Firm hips and bosom. Alice. Alice Meynell. Hair which had always been closer to silver than blonde, but which she could still afford to wear long. Clear, Classical forehead. Those wide-spaced blue eyes. All a matter of luck, really. Mere human flesh hung on accidents of bone.

  Humming, she extracted her silver spirit lamp, struck a taper to its wick, and wiped a glass chalice with white linen. The record was clicking in its groove. Setting it playing again, then the chalice warming above the spirit lamp’s gentle heat, she added oils, dashes of spirit, tinctures and balms, then Grecian honey. Stirred with a spoon of whale ivory, the resulting goo gained a frothy lightness which made it especially receptive to the final ingredient, which was aether of the purest charm. Still humming, dancing, and lifting out a small vial from the magic depths of her portmanteau, she whispered the part of the spell which caused its wyrelight to brighten, then squeezed the pipette and wafted the glowing tube towards the waiting chalice. Now, in a fluting voice, she chanted the main verses of her spell; sounds which she had refined with the avidity of the most dedicated steamaster. A pulse of darkness. Her song ended. The droplet fell. The potion was energised.

  Sitting down at her dressing table, Alice kneaded her cheeks. Then she dabbed her fingertips into the preparation and began, always working upwards, to work it into the skin of her face. The sensation was tinglingly pleasant. Crackle, crackle, went the gramophone from the end of its song, joining with the faint hiss of the tide against the cliffs far below and all the rush of life which had brought her here to this moment, to this spell, to this place. She flexed her lips and blinked at the mirror. Then she worked on her neck and shoulders, and circled lightly across her arms and towards the scoop of her breasts, although there were other magics for the body.

  There. She smiled more openly back at herself, completing the picture she wanted her husband Tom to see when she telephoned him. A hint of blue above the eyes, a dash of black across the lashes, then she cleaned her tools and closed her portmanteau and whispered the phrase which froze its twin locks. In every way, she felt refreshed. Amid its many other benefits, the practice of magic was far better than a good night’s rest. She lifted her green dress back off its hanger and gauged, with a quick sniff, that it had absorbed just the right proportion of her personal scent. The record still crackled, and she realised that she was humming along as if it were still playing a tune. In fact—she cocked her head. What exactly had she been humming? It was dangerous, in any case, to murmur so carelessly when you were working with aether and the room, as she looked around, seemed caught in a stage of arrested movement. Hiss, crackle, the sound of the waves. As if, for one moment, the entire house had been breathing.

  Realising that she hadn’t replaced her earrings, she leaned before the dressing table to push the gold posts through the lobe of each ear. Then something terrible happened. As she studied herself and the bright scrutiny of the coastal light fell once again across her face, Alice noticed for the first time in her life that she was developing jowls on each side of her previously perfect jawline.

  The telephone booth beneath the best stairs in Invercombe’s inner hall was a small red-plush construction topped with a domed brass bell which looked as if it had been polished far more times than it had ever rang. It was part of the history of the house and her guild’s own experiments, and certainly the earliest model Alice had even seen, although the booth inside was pleasant enough, for all that it was antique. Sitting down, she was confronted by a mirror, but in the softer downward glow of an electric bulb, she could almost tell herself that she hadn’t seen what she had seen upstairs.

  The bulb dimmed, and she felt the usual familiar give-and-pull resistance as she closed the connector and dialled the number of Tom’s club with the pivoted brass post. Relays engaged through hidden cables which, buried below ground here so as not to spoil the beauty of Invercombe’s grounds, broadened at that folly transmission house to head on towards the pulse and throb of a clearinghouse reckoning engine. She gazed at the mirror and felt something shiver, a break in reality. Her face dissolved, and then even the glass itself faded—or rather widened—and exhaled a mingled rush of male voices. She felt the sting of cigar smoke and heard the faint roar of London traffic; the portal to London was fully open.

  A waiter leaned towards her from the distant booth to enquire to whom it was that she wished to speak, and she felt the breath of the door swinging shut as he went away, then heard the chuckle of a drink being poured—before her husband arrived and seated himself opposite her in the mirror.

  ‘I thought I’d find you here at the club, darling.’

  ‘You know me. Regular as clockwork.’ Tom’s tie, although doubtless recently reknotted, was already askew, and he smelled more of sweat than of eau de cologne. ‘How’s Ralph? I’ve been telling myself all shifterm that no news is good news, and you certainly seem to have taken enough stuff with you to that place—where is it? Inverglade?’

  ‘It’s lnvercombe. And I’ve scarcely taken anything.’ Alice looked playfully wounded as Tom gazed back at her with that familiar yearning look in his eyes. She needed his regard, especially after what she’d seen upstairs in the mirror of her vanity table. It was better than aether; a warm blaze. ‘Ralph’s settled in well. And I’m so glad we came here, even if I do miss you terribly.’

  ‘You were in London for such a
short time. And you’ve been away so long.’ Tom’s smile almost faded.

  ‘Well, you know why. Needs must.’

  ‘Yes, yes. And Ralph—I do understand that London’s not the place for him.’

  Tom gazed at her. He worked his lips. There were lines around his eyes now. He had Ralph’s thick black hair, but it was receding at the forehead and greying at the temples now, although his jaw had been a little saggy even when she’d first met him. It was so much easier for men to grow old gracefully.

  ‘Anyway, I’ve been missing you, darling.’ He flared his nostrils as he breathed her scent, and vague commotions and the clatter of a passing London tram touched Alice’s senses as she told Tom about Invercombe’s peculiarities: the steward of the house who was female, and Negro; the weathertop, of the effects of which she remained sceptical; the odd accents: and Ralph, who had slept well and was working his way through the surprisingly good library and nagging her about exploring the place.

  ‘That all sounds quite marvellous. I’m proud of you both. And tell Ralph … Tell him I’m proud of him, too. And that we’ll soon be spending a lot more time together. There are so many things I want to share with him, Alice.’

  ‘It’s been difficult for us both.’

  ‘And you seemed so gloomy when you left.’

  ‘But I’m not now.’

  ‘And you look …’

  Alice, even though she hadn’t allowed her chin to droop, raised it a little further.

  ‘… quite marvellous, darling.’

  Then they talked of business, and the news was hardly cheering. A construction contract was being delayed for supposedly technical reasons. Tom was all for allowing extra time for redesign, but Alice remained convinced they should pull out and take legal action.

  ‘Isn’t that a bit harsh?’

  ‘We have to be harsh. Wouldn’t they do the same to our guild?’

  Tom nodded. He knew his own instincts were often too conciliatory, and relied upon Alice’s strength and advice. Then they said goodbye, and his image faded, and the mirror darkened, and she could feel—doors slamming in an unfelt wind—the relays closing on them all the way back to London. It was time for her to lift the connector, but for a few moments she left the line open, and the black space of the mirror seemed to widen. Looking into it now was almost like falling. With a little more effort, she felt sure she might be able to enter that space; travel along the lines as something incorporate and then emerge at some far other end. It was an idea, a risk, an experiment, which she’d long toyed with, and then always dismissed as both too ridiculous and dangerous. But what better place than here, the house, the telephone breathed to her, to try? After all, isn’t this where all this trickery with mirrors began? Releasing the connector, she sat back and watched herself reform in the glass of the booth’s mirror. Raising a hand to touch the tender flesh of the jawbone, she could feel that gravity, which pulled down mountains and rolled the moon across the sky, was clawing the flesh off her face.

  Leaving the booth, pulling on a coat, Alice headed outside. It was even colder than she’d imagined. Trailing breath, she crossed the front courtyard and then the bridge which spanned the gorge-like cleft over the River Riddle, and followed the path which wound up through the pinetum towards a smell of smoke. Bald-headed, handlebar-moustached, gauntlet-gloved, Weatherman Ayres was dragging curling black masses of a form of cuckoo-plant she recognised as hellebore into the flames of a bonfire in a clearing.

  ‘Always have to keep pulling this stuff up, Mistress,’ he called as he saw her approach. ‘Have to drag the water race, too, at least twice in the spring.’ It was ugly stuff—purplish and studded with venomous blue-black berries—and the flames leapt up from it with a gushing hiss. Remembering her face, Alice stepped back.

  ‘I just thought I’d come and see how you and your weather-top were progressing,’ she said. ‘I was rather hoping we might have seen its effects by now. At the very least, for the benefit of my son …’

  Weatherman Ayres tossed off his gloves and wiped his brow. Leading her up the muddy path of the gorge where pylons climbed from the wheelhouse below, he wheezed open an iron door into the weathertop’s dry, amber light.

  ‘Have you worked here long?’

  ‘Best part of twenty years.’

  ‘And you’ve never actually used this thing?’

  ‘Well…’ He gave a dial a thoughtful tap with a fingernail. ‘Thing is, Mistress, it’s never been turned off. So in a way it’s always been running. Or at least, idling. Machines are far happier doing the thing they’re meant to do than doing nothing.’ His moustache curled upwards as he smiled. Slapping the gantries, stroking the lion-coloured bricks, he guided Alice around each level. Barnacled with conductors, feeding on aether and electricity, rose the weathertop’s main device. This place, Alice decided, was either a humming shrine to industry or a vast confidence trick. But at least there was a shipshape sense of order. Up and up. Then at last they were at the top, and through another iron door into the cold air of the outer gantry. They were high above Invercombe’s trees, and the drop down was impressive, especially on this side of the valley which fell all the way towards the turn and flash of the waterwheel.

  The dome of the weathertop was pitted and stained. It looked like the surface of a harvest moon.

  ‘Is it safe to touch?’

  ‘Best not, Mistress.’

  Looking out over the treetops through the clear, solid air, she laughed out loud, for the world whitened beyond the greys and shadows of Invercombe’s valley. The fields were heaps of bed-linen. The towns and houses seemed made of paper. ‘Why, Weatherman Ayres, it’s been snowing!’

  ‘Never realise here, would you?’

  Not a heavy fall, it was true, but enough to transform the landscape. She stroked the cold handrail. The folly—a telephone relay house—was a white palace. That way, beyond the handkerchief fields, rose the Mendips. To the north, a dim glower, was Bristol. And there, a mere contraction of the haze, lay the place known as Einfell…

  In Einfell, as every schoolchild knew, dwelt the changed, the deformed, those hobgoblins of industry who had suffered from over-exposure to aether and had taken on some of the attributes of its spells. Back in Ages less civilised that this, changelings had been burnt, or chained and imprisoned and dragged around like familiars or drays under the auspices of the Gatherers Guild. Now, though, and in these modern times, such practices were frowned upon. In Einfell, the changelings, the trolls, the fairies—you could almost choose whatever name you wished—took care of their own. And the guilds conspired forgetfully to allow them to dwell there because it dealt with the problem, and was mostly in their interest, and it was easier to forget.

  Alice fingered the small scab of the Mark on the inside of her left wrist, remembering how she’d once lined up with all the rest of the local offspring outside a green caravan on her Day of Testing. An odd moment alone inside that wheeled shed, which had smelled of pipesmoke and sour bedlinen, as the guildsman dripped her left wrist with some glowing stuff, which, poor as she’d then been, she’d never seen before, but which even the most idiot child knew was called aether. And there you were. Your whole arm smarting and this blazing scab which would never really heal, which was called the Mark of the Elder. Many of the high guildswomen she’d subsequently encountered ornamented their Mark with cleverly constructed bracelets, although for the rest of the world it soon became tide-rimed with dirt and everyday life. But your Mark was never quite forgotten. It proved, as long as it didn’t fade and you were careful and went to church and did all the things your guild expected of you and none of the things it didn’t, that you were still human. But as for what went on inside Einfell’s walls amid those who had changed, that remained a mystery, although, and more than most people, Alice Meynell had often had cause to wonder…

  ‘Most people look in that direction,’ Weatherman Ayres said, following her gaze. ‘Not that there’s much to see. Never have any dealings with th
em, but I’ve heard people sometimes go to them for help—cures, predictions. Though I doubt they ever get it. Place is a disappointment, by all accounts …’

  She took dinner that evening with Ralph in his bedroom. The air felt warmly luxurious, yet beyond Invercombe the earth was sheeted with snow. She shared her discovery with him, and the knowledge floated over them as they played chequers. Ralph could beat her now if she didn’t concentrate. He could even chat about his latest studies in his beloved sciences as he did so. Apart from the sad truth of those jowls, she felt almost entirely happy. It was pleasant to be sitting here in this odd, old house with Ralph—sheltered from the night, the snows, and as Ralph’s words drifted and the chequers clicked, she even allowed herself to prod at the guilty thought that part of her wanted to keep him like this, trapped in a tower like a creature in those fairy stories of which he had once been so fond. But no; she really did want him to heal and to live a life away from her. She even half-believed that it could happen, now that they were at Invercombe.