Mappa Mundi (5 page)

When he was five, his mother gave him a hat with a woolly tassel.

When his heart beat, the tassel moved.

In the corner of his eye he saw its shadow.

Wiggle. Wiggle.

In his ear, sheltered by the hat, he heard a sound very faint. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.

Ba-dum. Wiggle.

He laughed. He could see his heart beat.

All day, with the hat on, he kept this power.

At night the hat was put away in the closet in the hall.

At night he didn't see the tassel's shadow.

He didn't hear his heart.

He wondered if you were dead at night and alive in the day.

When he heard a story about vampires he saw they were the opposite.

They were Un-Dead. That made him the Dead.

The kitchen knife made a sound inside his skin like nails on a blackboard.

He didn't hear it with his ears, but with his mind.

The blood that came out made a sound, too, like the sea.

Deep inside it he could hear his heart. Ba-dum.

That was a huge relief.

They stitched him up into silence.

The quiet of enforced silence built like a distant wave.

Eventually he learned to silence himself, hiding in the closet like his hat.

Ha ha. That was a joke.

Funny Dan.

He looked for love.

He found it not.

He looked for love.

He found it not.

He looked…

Fuck this for a game of soldiers.

One day, a year later, Dan saw a vampire in the street.

He was old and hideous with age and neglect, beautiful as he glittered with his crisp shell of overnight frost. He had curled up beneath a bridge, after trying to cover himself in newspaper and boxes, like the mice at the pet shop. He had a hat on, quite a nice one, that some kind person had given him. It had five long tassels of gold, brassy and faintly ridiculous, like the Three Kings get to wear in a nativity play.

The tassels moved in the wind, across the man's crystalline, rat-coloured cheeks. Dan heard the vampire's Un-dead heart in the wind making a sound like cars whooshing past on a wet road. It sighed with the burden of things unsaid and undone, ashamed of itself.

He decided to do something to help. At the Careers Centre they offered courses to tempt the unwary into new lines of work. Dan chose psychiatric nurse. It had a long training time, and college meant he could leave home.

The Universe rewards a good deed. His mother told him so. His father, who spent his life building cars on a production line as an overseer of robots, died of a heart attack in the pub when he was fifty-two, taking part in a steak-eating competition where you could win a tray of uncooked meat, big as a butcher's window, to take home. His last words for posterity—“Another sausage!”

Dan, remembering a broken arm, the closet, and too many clouts to count, figured his mother was right.

White Horse woke up in the middle of the night, choking on smoke. She opened her eyes and the hot, searing pain started tears running down her face. It was almost a relief. She'd been expecting something bad to come her way ever since she'd broken into that car in town. At last it had happened and she could deal with it.

She groped around in the ink-dark familiarity of her bedroom, and for the first time thought she was lucky to have had no electricity for a month—she knew her house and she could walk through it without sight. She found her bag first, just beneath her hand where she always left it. Inside it the machine she'd stolen from the car clunked heavily against her wallet and the snaplock holder with her Pad inside it. At the end of the bed she found her jeans, put them on, and slid her feet into her boots. Her jean-jacket was on the back of the hardwood chair. Coughing, she wriggled into it, on hands and knees, her face an inch from the floor as she crawled towards the door. She kept her face in the zone that was supposed to be less smoky and reached out for the handle but when her fingertips made contact with the thick wood panel the heat seared her skin. Now she could hear the fire, as well as smell it. From the narrow crack below the door a roaring, white-noise sound came, like the aftermath of an explosion, and as she hesitated there, she both heard and felt a part of the first floor crack and begin to give way.

Without warning she was sick, violently, and her next intake of breath was pure poison. She backed up as fast as she could and hauled herself over the bed to the window. The drop wouldn't be too bad, down into her yard grass, although the house was higher on this side where the land fell away into a dip.

Opening the window gave her a few moments to breathe. She couldn't stop coughing. It felt like the house had come loose from the ground and started to spin and buck, like a boat, but she was still moving. She got one leg over the frame, then the other. Her bag stuck, catching on the window lock. A gust of hot air and ash plumed up, from the outside this time, engulfing her in orange sparks. Sharp pain scored across her hands where it touched her and in surprise and fear she yanked the strap hard. It came loose, dislodging her, and she was only spared a head-first plunge to her death when the seat of her jeans snagged and ripped on the catch. She hung helpless for a second, thankful for the rivets and seams cutting into her flesh, and then began, very cautiously, to try and lever herself free.

As she wrestled with the tough material that was stopping her from falling free, she thought she heard someone outside shouting and crying, doing some kind of wild dance in her vegetable patch. Her head was spinning. The cloth gave suddenly and she slipped down, grating the front of her body against the sill, gasping with the unfair shock of this new pain in her breasts and ribs.

Deep within the house's old, dry innards, a fundamental element surrendered to the flames. She felt the wall and her window frame sway slowly inwards and heard the huge, crashing noise of the roof falling.

Gulping air, her hands shaking, White Horse tossed the bag out into the night. Her eyes streamed and seemed to bleed. She couldn't see anything properly. The air was thick as she pushed out with all her might, away from the house and into midair and the spiral of yellow and orange sparks.

She had her knees bent for the impact-and-roll but it was over
before she expected. Her feet met the ground with the solid impact of two concrete blocks. Shooting pains darted into her knees and hips as she rolled, crying out, onto the cold earth. As she panted, trying to get her breath back to shout for help, she realized there was a strange smell all around her and that she was wet—soaking, in fact.

She tried to yell, but her voice was empty. Instead of her usual tough holler a tiny frog croak came out of her throat, dislodged a bubble of spit, and scraped her gullet so sharply it felt as though a cat was clawing it. But someone had heard her.

Another voice from somewhere in the swirling clouds of smoke said her name in familiar Cheyenne.

“Vohpe'hame'e! I see you. Little devil. Get your butt out here and burn!”

White Horse couldn't recognize the voice, but she understood what it meant by the wet grass that wasn't alight yet and the smell of gasoline all over her.

A fear so deep it made her bones hurt shot through her. Gasping and trying not to breathe, but coughing all the time, red coughs of agony, she searched desperately for her bag. She had to get it. The machine, her evidence, was inside it. She looked everywhere, holding her eyes open in the stinging wind, but all she could see was a tiny pinprick, like a dying star, that she knew was the powerful beam of Red Hat's garage light. She was nearly blind.

Footsteps, heavy and with a kind of drunken doggedness, came closer. She heard them. She felt the tremor in the ground, muffled by the dying spasms of the house.

“At last!” said the voice. It was turned in and gargling on itself so it was an inside-out thing. “There you are!”

White Horse looked up at the same moment her right hand found the bulky shape of her bag. A shambling figure, silhouetted against the glare of the fire, veiled in drifts of heavy, poisonous smoke, stood in bearlike calm over her, its arms half spread.

White Horse stood up. Ice-cold pain shot up the core of her right leg and through her lower back. She started running away from the house, coughing, gulping, throat on fire, and in three strides had lost all sense of direction. There would be the fence and then the road.

The fence hit her at an angle and sent her sprawling to the ground. She landed on the precious bag and something in it broke. The machine. The stench of the gas made her giddy and the voice was suddenly right behind her,

“Wait up, wait up!” It was laughing.

White Horse heard the sound of a cigarette lighter being flicked, flint on metal.

She screamed, and the little frog in her throat whispered, “Help me! Help me!”

The propane tank behind the house exploded with a gigantic bang and the singing scream of metal fragments spinning through the air. Its fireball gave off a hot burst of blue and orange light that reached through the smoke and showed White Horse the woman standing over her, staring at her lighter with an almost comic perplexity as it refused to catch. Her absorption with it was childishly complete.

White Horse pushed herself upright, so frightened she could hardly breathe.
Snick-snick-snick
went the lighter wheel under the woman's heavy thumb. Sparks darted eagerly across to them, as though wanting to help.

Then, in her only lucky break, White Horse felt the paling against her lower leg move easily and knew she was nowhere near the gate, but by the loose rail, away from the road and the light. She was in the hollow where even the neighbours wouldn't see her, in the dark where the pumpkins sat Halloween-fat in Fall.

The lighter was still flicking.
Snick-snick.
It was so familiar. In the part of her mind that wasn't panicking, she knew that sound.

“Martha?” she croaked out. She couldn't grasp that it was Martha, but as soon as she heard that
snick
she knew. It matched that silhouette,
that voice, if you turned it right-side-out again. Martha Johnson, family friend, storekeeper. Martha Johnson was trying to burn her.

Instead of trying to get through the fence's easy gap beside her White Horse was paralysed by this realization. It didn't make sense. She'd been in Martha's store the day before yesterday, buying bread. It couldn't be the same woman. This wasn't real.

“Damn thing,” the voice had changed now. Martha was peevish.

“Martha …”

“There we go!”

In a moment of unconscious and complete necessity White Horse let go of her bag and closed both hands around the end of the loose rail.

She heard rather than felt herself take light. It was a soft “whump” sound and then a rush of wild, hot wind against her skin. It showed her Martha Johnson's livid, gleeful face holding the lighter and grinning at her own cleverness.

White Horse swung the rail. All the nails that had failed to hold it into the post sank into the old woman's smile with a jarring crunch that smashed her grip loose.

Martha Johnson fell silently, without even putting out an arm to save herself.

White Horse screamed and the fire swooped eagerly into her mouth and down her throat to drown her. For the first time she felt herself starting to burn, and the pain was unbelievable, unbearable.

Something knocked her over, rolled her into the ground, and crushed her flat.

She woke up in hospital in Billings four hours later, but it was another two days before she could talk properly, and in that time she decided that she couldn't keep this to herself any more. She had the machine that was responsible for the deaths and the violence. She couldn't make it work, but she knew what it was, and she knew that the men who'd brought it were government because they'd talked in the diner about it when she was waiting tables.

White Horse was going to have to call her half brother. It was good that she had so long to think it through—she had time to think of all the ways she could start and throw them all away. No lousy Pad call was going to fix things between them.

A week later she discharged herself and took her leave of her friends. With the bag safely packed up inside a new rucksack and with credit-card clothing all over her and debts she was never going to pay, she left for Washington, DC. In the bag, the object that had cracked didn't look like it was broken enough to be useless. Whatever it was, Jude would know. He'd help. He had to.

In her hand mirror, as she travelled on the bus, White Horse looked at her reflection, its long hair all gone, replaced with a tight-braided pseudo-African look to hide the fact that most of the hair was fake. Funny, she thought, and giggled, hoarsely, to herself. Cheyenne hiding in African guise. Like her brother, she had two faces now.