Ruby E-Book

Nina Allan

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Ruby tells the story of Ruby Castle told in snapshots and fleeting glimpses and secret histories, in tales repeated and reinvented by those who fall under the horror film actress's spell: her childhood sweetheart, an antiquarian bookseller with a passion for magical artifacts, the mistress of the poet who was once Castle's lover, a young girl in a future Russia who dreams of the stars. Worlds collide, and the boundaries between the real and the fantastic begin to break down.Is Ruby Castle a living person or a collective fantasy? By the end, the world that Castle created through her films has become dangerously indistinguishable from our own.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Praise for the Dollmaker

Also Available from Nina Allan

Title Page

Leave us a review

Copyright

Dedication

B-Side

The Lammas Worm

The Gateway

Laburnums

Stardust

Wreck of the Julia

Red Queen

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise for The Dollmaker:

“A fantastic book, revealing a zone of wonder and a world of truth” Andrew O’Hagan, author of The Illuminations

“Elegant, beautiful and subtly scary” Daniel Kehlmann, author of Measuring the World

“Mesmerising, richly layered and wholly original – worthy of a modern Grimm” Andrew Caldecott, author of Rotherweird

“A masterful and multi-layered haunted toyshop of a novel” Tony White, author of The Fountain in the Forest

“Beautifully written and deeply strange” Leaf Arbuthnot, Sunday Times

“Unsettling, intricately constructed and teasingly elliptical” Stephanie Cross, Daily Mail

Praise for The Rift:

“Beautifully told, absorbing and eerie in the best way” Yoon Ha Lee, author of Ninefox Gambit

“It leaves the reader looking at the world anew. Dizzying stuff” Anne Charnock, author of Dreams Before the Start of Time

“A lyrical, moving story”The Guardian

“Moving, subtle, and ambiguous”Booklist

“A wrenching read, offering a ‘missing person’ story with more depth and emotion than the plot normally allows” Barnes & Noble SFF blog

“One thing you won’t find in this brilliantly ambiguous book is the truth, but so long as you don’t read it expecting a definitive explanation, you definitely won’t be disappointed.”Tor.com

Praise for The Race:

“A unique and fascinating near-future ecological SF novel. Buy it!” Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Annihilation trilogy

“Literate, intelligent, gorgeously human” Alastair Reynolds, author of Revelation Space

“An ingenious puzzle-box of a narrative that works both as a haunting family saga and as a vivid picture of a future worth avoiding”Chicago Tribune

“Enticingly mysterious... akin to the best alternative history fiction”Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“A novel of tender nuances, brutality, insight and great ambition”Tor.com

Also available from Nina Allan:

the RACE

the RIFT

the SILVER WIND

the DOLLMAKER

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Ruby

Print edition ISBN: 9781789091724

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789091731

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: September 2020

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Nina Allan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Copyright © 2020 Nina Allan. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

To my mother, Monica Allan

B-SIDE

The thought of telling Lennox was unbearable. As Michael came out of the sports hall it was Lennox he thought of, his skimpy eyebrows, the round spectacles that always reminded him of Leon Trotsky. Lennox had warned him many times that believing you could win at chess and assuming it as a given were not the same thing. Now, when it really mattered, Michael had let all his teacher’s advice fly out of the window. His mistakes had been shameful and stupid and he had lost the tournament. He had let the old man down.

The only mercy was that Lennox had not been there. There had been a hospital appointment, something he couldn’t get out of. Michael had been disappointed when the old man broke the news of this – now it seemed like a gift from the gods. For some moments he felt consoled, safe in the knowledge of his teacher’s absence. But in the time it took him to walk from the hall foyer to the school gates he recognised the stay of execution for what it was: not a reprieve but a postponement. Lennox would find out what had happened soon enough.

“There’s no escaping disappointment in chess,” Lennox had told him. “Failure is there as a safeguard. Use it properly and it will help you improve. Losing to a better player can be more valuable than any number of victories against weaker opponents. It is only in losing that you find out who you are and what you are made of. This is something you will have to learn the hard way if you are serious about becoming a grandmaster.”

Michael had listened and nodded in agreement but the truth was he hadn’t believed a word. He had known disappointment before in small things, things with no connection to chess. He thought he understood how failure would feel but really he hadn’t a clue, he saw that now. True disappointment had nothing to do with missing a school trip to Lapland or losing your iPhone. True disappointment made you question your whole idea of yourself. It ate you alive from the inside, like one of the necrotising parasites in The Puppeteer, the film starring Ludo Henry and Ruby Castle. Michael would watch anything Ruby Castle was in, although it was her horror films he liked best. His mother told him he shouldn’t watch so many horror films, that they would give him bad dreams, but while it was true that Michael did sometimes have nightmares, none had compared with the horror of what had just happened to him in broad daylight.

The parasites in The Puppeteer were spread by monkeys in a carnival sideshow, wide-eyed lemur-like creatures dressed in red blazers that had a talent for stealing money out of people’s pockets. Ruby Castle played the monkey trainer. Michael had read she did all her own stunts. He wondered what it was about carnivals and circuses that made them such popular settings for horror films. There were the freaks, of course, but it was not just the freaks. Mostly it was the sense that nothing was exactly as it appeared. The carnival people had a special way of speaking, not another language, but a tone of voice. They told you what you wanted to hear. They talked you into deceiving yourself.

Michael had loved the fair when he was younger. Most of all he had loved the dodgems, his father’s arms around him, his plaid shirt spicy with the scent of tobacco. Each time they bumped another car Luis Gomez had laughed unstoppably and so had Michael. It was the only time he remembered them sharing a goal.

* * *

His rival’s name was Douglas Coote. Michael had spotted him as the main threat immediately, though they hadn’t been drawn together until the knockout stages. There were forty other competitors but it had only ever been about the two of them. Coote’s eventual opponent in the final, an overweight senior from Bexley Grammar, had resigned the game in less than half an hour.

Coote was nervy and thin with hazel eyes. He had the habit of clearing his throat after each move, sipping incessantly from his water glass. What hurt was not so much that he had won, but that he was good. Michael imagined an alternative scenario in which their positions had been reversed. He saw himself shaking Coote’s hand, congratulating him on a fine game and shyly suggesting they get together sometime and go through some openings. The picture was so plausible Michael found it difficult to relinquish. He began to walk faster, scuffing his trainers against the tarmac. He was anxious to get away before the others started coming out of the hall, pushing and chattering and conducting excited post-mortems of the various games. As he passed through the gates and into the road he felt a surge of relief. The appearance of Jackson and Pullen caught him off guard.

“What are you doing here on a Saturday, Gomez? Old Lennox keep you chained to your desk?”

“Shut up, Jackson,” Michael said. “Bugger off.” He mumbled the words, blurring their edges, affecting the language he knew Jackson and Pullen would best understand. He wasn’t about to run he didn’t want to hang around arguing with them, either. What Steven Jackson wanted was an excuse for a fight. It would be foolish to give him one. Michael hunched his shoulders, hugged his bag to his chest and tried to push past. Jackson and Pullen weren’t normally dangerous. They took the piss out of his glasses and his skin colour, his closeness to Lennox, but they had never pushed their abuses further than verbal taunts. There were times when Michael thought they might even be afraid of him.

“What’s the big hurry?” said Jackson. “Had a row with your boyfriend?” He made a grab for the strap of his bag, which Michael had left dangling. “He’s an ugly bastard though, isn’t he, old Lennox? I’d have thought that even Specky Gomez could do better than that.”

Michael scowled. It occurred to him that they might know, that they had learned about Coote’s victory and had come to torment him with it. He knew this was unlikely – what Jackson knew about chess could be written on the back of a postage stamp – but Michael hated them to make fun of Lennox. On any other day he would have ignored them anyway but his failure at the tournament had worn away at his defences.

“Get lost, moron.” He yanked on his bag strap, snatching it from Jackson’s grasp. Jackson looked down at his hand while Pullen started doing his inevitable chimpanzee impression. Michael’s heart sank. Gareth Pullen was a weakling and a coward but he and Jackson together still made two against one.

“Who are you calling a moron, you frigging queer?” There was a red, painful-looking stripe across Jackson’s palm. Michael felt laughter coursing through him, threatening to burst forth. He forced it back down.

“You,” he said. “You’re a fucking moron.”

He swung his bag at Jackson, catching him a walloping blow to the side of the head. He was surprised how good it felt, how delicious, to lose control. He told himself he was doing it for Lennox, but even as Jackson came for him he knew his action was payback for Douglas Coote.

“I’ll kill you, you fucking geek.” Steven Jackson surged forward, his right fist aiming for the centre of Michael’s face. Michael ducked away to one side and almost tripped over. At the same moment Pullen cannoned into him from behind. Michael went down like a sawn-off tree, sprawling full-length on the tarmac. As he fell he noticed Jackson’s nose was bleeding. Hot gravel sank its teeth into his palms.

He scrambled to his knees but Jackson shoved him backwards and he was on the ground again. Pain flared in his side like a struck match and he realised Gareth Pullen must have kicked him. He was frightened but also furious. He knew he had brought the whole thing on himself.

“Who’s the moron now then, you spastic?”

“Frigging geek.”

Jackson was kicking out also, not at him, Michael realised belatedly, but at his schoolbag. It skidded away from him across the tarmac. Michael lunged after it, wondering at his own stupidity. Pullen threw himself on top of him, pinning him flat. An image rose in his mind: a can of Terminator insect spray with its famous cockroach logo. The cockroach was on its back, legs flailing as the poison dissolved its insides. Michael’s grandmother always kept a can of Terminator under her sink just in case. Grandma Lisa was generally fearless but she had a horror of large insects.

Michael forced himself forward, dragging himself across the tarmac with the full weight of Pullen on top of him. His knees whimpered with every movement but he knew if he didn’t throw Pullen off there would be worse to come. He tugged his right hand free and removed his glasses, tucking them inside his shirt. Somewhere far above him Pullen was making the chimp noise again. Then suddenly the weight was lifted. Michael gasped as his lungs reinflated. He realised someone must have got Pullen off him. As to who his rescuer might be he had no idea.

“What’s going on?”

A man’s voice, one he vaguely recognised but could not place. Michael squinted upwards, trying to establish if he was still in danger. Someone was gripping Pullen by the elbow and Michael realised with a shock that it was the man Lennox sometimes had staying with him, the man he had introduced to Michael as his nephew. Michael tried to recall his name but it wouldn’t come, and he wondered if in fact he had ever known it. The nephew was old, forty years old at least, his greying hair pulled into a straggly ponytail. He had a scar across one cheek, a hard white seam that followed the arc of his right eye socket like a line of stitching. He was wearing jeans and old trainers, like Michael, and a leather biker jacket that hung awkwardly on his narrow shoulders. Once, when Michael had gone to the bathroom in Lennox’s flat, he had caught sight of the nephew sprawled on the divan bed in Lennox’s spare room. His shoes were off, and there was a ragged hole in one of his socks. He had seen Michael and said hello, but that was all.

Jackson was tugging on Pullen’s other arm. Pullen hung suspended between the two of them like a lump of meat.

“Get off him, you pervert, or I’m calling the cops.” Jackson’s face had turned a fierce shade of red. His acne stood out like rivets.

“That works for me, I’m sure they’d have some interesting questions. Shame they’ve got better things to do really, isn’t it?” He let go of Pullen’s arm and gave him a shove. Pullen flew backwards into Jackson, who staggered under the impact and almost fell. “Sod off before I lose my temper.”

“Sod off yourself,” Jackson said. “There’s a mighty queer smell around here.” He turned abruptly and marched off down the road. Pullen slouched along after him, rubbing his arm.

“Are you hurt?” asked Lennox’s nephew. He touched Michael lightly on the shoulder. His grey eyes were the colour of rain.

“I’m OK,” Michael said. He bent down to retrieve his bag. He felt inside, checking his books, his computer chess set and his mobile phone. All seemed undamaged.

“I’d better be going,” he said. He replaced his glasses. “Thanks for helping me.”

“I was hoping you’d come back to the flat. Lennox asked me to meet you today – that’s why I’m here. He has something he wanted to give you. It won’t take long.”

Michael hesitated. He had never been alone with the nephew but if Lennox had sent him then it must be all right. Going to Lennox’s flat would also put off the moment when he had to go home. His mother would be fine but he dreaded having to explain things to his father. His mother didn’t care about chess, or at least she cared about it only insofar as it affected Michael. Luis Gomez pretended to be an expert. His questions were painfully embarrassing. He would be upset at Michael’s defeat without having the least idea of how to assess its importance. He would try to buck Michael up. The thought of this was more awful somehow than the thought of his father angry, which never happened anyway.

It had been Luis Gomez who found Lennox in the first place, who arranged for Michael to be enrolled at the school where he taught. It was Luis Gomez who paid for the extra lessons. Michael could not bear the thought of his stricken face.

“Will Lennox be there?” Michael asked.

“No,” said the nephew. “He’s still at the hospital.”

“OK,” Michael said. The man made him nervous but he was always uneasy with strangers. “But I can’t stay long.”

They stood at the bus stop and waited. There was a bus from outside the school that would take them right to Lennox’s door. Michael had travelled on it often, though never with Lennox. Lennox was always waiting for him at the flat when he arrived.

“I lost,” Michael said. In his head the words resounded like death knells. Let loose in the open air they seemed slightly less terrible.

“I know,” said Lennox’s nephew. “I could tell by your face.”

“Do you play?” Michael said. It was a relief to talk about it, he found, which was also surprising.

“I used to. Just a bit,” the nephew said, then laughed. Michael wondered what was funny and decided it was probably him.

* * *

Lennox lived in Kidbrooke, in one of the council blocks. The bin store stank of piss and the lift was often out of order, but the flats themselves were all right and Michael supposed Lennox had been lucky to get one. From Lennox’s living room you could see all the way to Greenwich and the river beyond.

Lennox’s nephew’s name was Colin Wilkes.

“I’m not really his nephew,” he said. “Lennox made that up so he didn’t keep having to explain things. Lennox hates talking about his private life. You must have noticed.”

“Who are you, then?”

Wilkes shrugged. “I’ve known Lennox since I was your age. We might as well be related.” He dug around in one of the kitchen cupboards and brought out a frying pan. “I’m going to do some eggs. Would you like some?”

Michael nodded. The mention of food made him salivate. It felt odd to be in the flat without Lennox, though Lennox never talked much even when he was there. Usually he would sit reading the paper while Michael worked on a chess problem. When he was done with the news he would bring Michael a cup of tea and a plate of Tuc biscuits with cheese. The problems he set were sometimes difficult, sometimes not. Occasionally they would be impenetrable, the lines of logic knotted together like the tag ends of embroidery silk at the bottom of Grandma Lisa’s sewing basket. The proper word for such a problem was abstruse, Lennox said. When he encountered an abstruse problem Michael felt a tense, tingling excitement in the pit of his stomach, as if he were a paratrooper about to leap out over enemy territory. Lennox said that what counted was not the number of problems he solved but his manner of approaching them.

“The answer is already within you,” Lennox insisted. “It is simply a matter of locating it.”

Never once did he tell Michael how good he was. It was as if he took his gift entirely for granted.

The table Michael sat at to do his chess problems was topped with blue Formica. A piece of the Formica had been snapped off, leaving an oatmeal-coloured space shaped like the map of Argentina. Argentina was where his grandparents came from.

Lennox slept in a narrow iron-framed bed with a tatty horsehair blanket instead of an eiderdown. The things in Lennox’s flat were shabby and old, but Michael liked them. He knew that by themselves the chipped mahogany tallboy and the faded chintz curtains might be considered ugly, what his grandmother would have called poverty-stricken, but Lennox’s presence somehow made them all right.

He went to the bathroom to wash his hands, carefully soaping the grazes on his palms. It stung but his skin felt better afterwards. He took off his shirt and ran his fingers carefully over his ribs. There was some soreness when he breathed in, but otherwise he seemed unhurt. He leaned forward, examining his face in the mirror. There was a cut on his cheek but it was shallow and had already started to scab over. Michael thought of the scar on Wilkes’s face, that puckered white line. It looked as if someone had tried to gouge out one of his eyes, the kind of thing that only happened in horror movies. He wondered what had happened to Wilkes, and where Wilkes went when he wasn’t at Lennox’s flat.

He put his shirt back on and stepped out into the hallway. He could smell onions frying, cooking oil – food smells. Michael’s stomach rumbled. He caught sight of Wilkes through the open doorway, in front of the stove. His leather jacket was slung across the back of one of Lennox’s dining chairs.

“What did you mean when you said Lennox doesn’t like to talk about things?” Michael asked.

“I didn’t say things, I said his private life,” said Wilkes. “Let’s have some music on, shall we?”

He turned the heat down under the frying pan and came through to the lounge. Michael noticed he had taken his shoes off. He was wearing the tartan slippers Lennox usually kept beside his bed.

Wilkes flipped back the grooved laminate lid of Lennox’s ancient stereo system and began flicking through the records on the shelf beneath. All of Lennox’s music was on vinyl. There were a couple of classical LPs, but most of the records were jazz albums from the forties and fifties. Michael liked the look and feel of them, the old photographs on the covers, the faint mustiness, like the smell inside a junk shop.

Of the music itself he knew nothing. On the wire CD rack at home in the kitchen they had the Eagles’ Greatest Hits, the soundtrack to Out of Africa and an album by a band called Marmalade. There were various other CDs that had come free with newspapers and magazines, but his parents hardly ever listened to music. His mother preferred the political documentaries they had on the radio and his father preferred to watch cricket. It had been Michael’s Grandpa Felipe who was musical. According to Michael’s father he had owned hundreds of records: tango music and classical symphonies and jazz albums like Lennox’s. Felipe Gomez had come over from Argentina soon after the war and opened a grocery store in Brockley.

“He could add up whole columns of figures in his head, just like that,” his father told him. “It’s him you take after.”

Felipe Gomez had died when Michael was three. There was a photograph of him holding Michael as a baby, but Michael had no memory of him at all. At least he had his grandmother, Lisa von Pelz, with her crazy German accent and her bug spray and her amazing and terrifying stories of Nazi spies. Of all the family it was Grandma Lisa who indulged Michael’s passion for horror movies. But she understood chess and numbers as little as his father did, and Michael couldn’t help wondering what his Grandpa Felipe had been like. Also, Lisa had got rid of all Felipe’s records. She claimed they were taking over the house.

“What do you reckon?” said Wilkes. “Which do you prefer, fusion or bebop?”

“I don’t know anything about jazz,” said Michael. “You choose.”

Wilkes made a tutting sound, striking the back of his teeth with the tip of his tongue as he sorted through the records. Michael didn’t like the casual way Wilkes handled Lennox’s possessions, although he supposed Wilkes believed it was his right. He was masquerading as Lennox’s nephew, after all.

“You’ll like this,” he said at last. “This is a classic.”

He lifted a record from the stack and held it out. The sleeve, like most of the rest, showed a black-and-white photograph of the singer and then the title, red letters on a white background. The singer’s name was one he recognised, Billie Holiday, although he couldn’t have said for certain whether he had heard her sing before. In the photograph Billie had her hair tied back off her face with a silken ribbon. She looked very young, almost childlike, and reminded Michael of Lynette Berger, who sat next to him sometimes in maths class. Lynette had a wooden pencil case with a sliding lid with a silver propelling pencil and a mean-looking architect’s compass inside. Her parents came from Mozambique. Michael sometimes found himself staring at the nape of her neck, at the gleaming white arc of her shirt collar, at the silky wrinkled line where her hair met her skin.

She had once asked Michael if his mother came from Mozambique, too.

“No, from Nigeria,” he replied, praying like a madman that he wouldn’t stammer as he sometimes did when he got nervous. “She was born in Lagos.”

Lynette smiled and turned back to her work. It had been his first and so far only contact with a girl he liked the look of and it had been exhausting. On the whole it seemed safer to be in love with Ruby Castle. It would be difficult to make a fool of yourself in front of a dead girl, even for him.

The title of the record Wilkes had chosen was Santa Fé Nights.

“There are some rare tracks on here,” Wilkes said. “Even the title track is rare, because Holiday only recorded it once, in some tin-pot studio in Mexico. It was released as the B-side to one of her later singles with Lester Young, but other than that the only place you can get it is on this album. The tune is actually a tango by Ariel Ramirez. He was born in Santa Fé.”

He slid the disc out of its sleeve, holding it carefully by the edges. He placed the record on Lennox’s turntable and lowered the stylus. There was a faint crackling and then the music started, a blowsy saxophone over a rhythm line of piano and bass, and then Billie’s keening vocal, a sound so open and pleading it made your stomach hurt.

Michael felt hot and then cold. He recognised the music instantly from the soundtrack of American Star, the film starring Ruby Castle and Raymond Latour. He had never consciously known the woman singing was Billie Holiday, but the track itself was familiar to him as the music from the ballroom scene on board the American Star cruise liner, just before the ship ran aground off the island where the monsters were. The legend was that it was while they were filming the ballroom scene that Ruby Castle and Raymond Latour fell in love. A year later, Ruby Castle had murdered Latour in a jealous rage when he refused to leave his wife for her. Ruby in the ballroom scene was transcendental. She was thirty-eight years old and, as the critics said, at the height of her powers. Those who had written about the film seemed to agree that the impact of the sequence was increased by the painful knowledge of what was to come, not just in the film but in Castle’s life. Some even seemed to enjoy this, to revel in the prospect of Ruby’s tragedy, but Michael felt his heart break for her each time he saw it.

The scene was famous, at least among horror fans. Michael was amazed Colin Wilkes hadn’t mentioned it when he put on the record. He even wondered if Wilkes was playing some kind of game with him, if he knew about Michael’s crush on Ruby Castle and was trying to show him up. He couldn’t imagine how this could be – Michael had never admitted his feelings to anyone. But he wouldn’t put it past Wilkes to have found out somehow. The man was strange. The way he had turned up just in time to save him from Jackson and Pullen, for instance. The way he had guessed about what had happened with Douglas Coote.

The words guardian angel flashed through Michael’s mind, piercing its trembling surface like an azure dart. He kept staring at Wilkes, waiting to see if anything would happen, but Wilkes seemed almost to have forgotten Michael was there. He stood at the kitchen counter dishing up the food, his body swaying slowly in time to the music.

“Lennox loves Billie Holiday,” he said. He opened his eyes, fixed Michael with his steel-grey gaze. “You do know he’s dying?”

Michael stared at him.

“He might not even come home from the hospital,” Wilkes continued. “He’s known for weeks but he didn’t know how to tell you. That’s what I meant when I said he hates to talk about his private life.”

Wilkes brought the steaming plates to the table. He had found an oven mitt somewhere, a long yellow gauntlet. There was corned beef hash and fried bread, a golden mound of scrambled egg. Michael gazed at it dumbly. Wilkes sat sideways in his seat and began to eat, lowering his head towards the food, shovelling egg into his mouth with the back of his fork.

“He said he’d see me next week for the lesson,” said Michael at last.

“He has liver cancer.”

There was a long silence, filled with the rich scents of corned beef and onion. Michael still wanted the food but he felt it would be wrong to touch it. He resented Wilkes for spoiling his meal. He experimented with the idea that Wilkes was lying, but the experiment refused to take off.

“Look,” said Wilkes. He got up from the table, scraping his chair noisily against the linoleum. “He told me to give you these.”

He disappeared into Lennox’s bedroom and came back with a brown paper bag. Inside the bag was the carved wooden chess set Lennox had told him once belonged to Nicolai Maslanyi, Lennox’s own well worn copy of Turati’s Great Chess Openings, and a book that was called simply Chess by a writer named Stefan Zweig.

“He gave me a copy of that once, too,” said Wilkes. “I read it so many times the covers fell off.”

“I can’t take this,” Michael said. Mostly he meant Great Chess Openings, which Lennox rarely let out of his sight. The gift seemed like a sign, Lennox’s way of telling him that Colin Wilkes was speaking the truth. A hard lump came into his throat. He realised he wanted to fight Wilkes, to knock him to the ground and start kicking him the same way Gareth Pullen had laid into Michael.

“I’m sorry to spring it on you like this,” Wilkes said. “But maybe it’s for the best.” He licked his fork and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “You won’t believe me, but I learned to play chess by watching it on television. I grew up in a council care home. They used to show the British chess championships on BBC2 back then. One of the housemasters noticed my interest and encouraged me. Before long I was beating everyone I played and they didn’t know what to do with me. When Lennox came along it was like being reunited with a long-lost father. I was like you once. I loved him, and I lived for chess. The only problem was that I wasn’t good enough, not for the world circuit anyway. When I began to lose it almost killed me. I had no idea how to live in the world, and Lennox could never admit that he had failed. Eventually we stopped talking about it. He’s cared for me like his own son but I sometimes think it would have been better if he’d put me out on the street.” Wilkes paused. “I envied those wankers today. I envied them their simple-mindedness. When I saw what they were doing to you I almost kept walking. I wanted them to teach you a lesson, you see. I didn’t want you to end up like me.”

“I won’t,” Michael said. “It was just that one game.”

“That’s exactly what I would have said. Aren’t you going to eat your corned beef?”

Michael shook his head. Quite suddenly he didn’t feel hungry. “I have to go home.”

“Did you like the record?”

Michael nodded, his mind far away.

“I have it on CD. I can burn you a copy if you like.” Wilkes put his hand on Michael’s shoulder. “I don’t like you leaving like this.”

“I have to go,” Michael said, getting up. “My dad will be worried about me.”

“I’ll be sticking around for a while if you want to talk. You know the number.”

Michael nodded. The lift was broken again so he used the staircase. He did not look back.

* * *

The sun was setting, the clouds along the horizon a candyfloss pink. It would soon be dark, Michael realised. He thought about catching the bus then decided to walk. Wilkes’s news had shaken him badly. He needed time to think. It was not just Lennox’s illness, it was the other things, too – Wilkes’s suggestion that his gift might not be sufficient to fulfil his ambition, the kind of fear you didn’t dare contemplate in case it came true. Until today Michael had never doubted his talent. But first there had been Douglas Coote and now there was this.

What he wanted was to talk to Lennox but Wilkes had told him that Lennox was dying and might never come home. Michael suddenly realised he didn’t even know which hospital Lennox was in. He came to a standstill, wondering if he should return to the flat and ask Wilkes about visiting hours. Then he realised he had left Lennox’s gift behind, the chess set and the books. He longed for these things, as if they somehow represented Lennox himself. He ached to go back, but both his father and Lennox had warned him never to hang about the estate after dark. Michael made up his mind to telephone Lennox’s flat as soon as he got home. If Wilkes was still there he would pick up. He had even suggested that Michael should call him whenever he wanted.

He struck out across the heath. He had read that Blackheath Common was once haunted by highwaymen and that the vast oak forests of Shooter’s Hill once stretched all the way to the English Channel. Not now, though. Oxleas Wood was where families went for picnics on Sunday afternoons, and the heath itself was just a patch of rough turf, spread out like a blanket across the ground between Blackheath and Greenwich. People flew kites there, and walked their dogs. At night the main pathways across the heath were illuminated by electric light. Michael never felt he was in any danger, although it was true that once it was dark the heath seemed bigger, slipping back a little in time perhaps, to when it really was a heath instead of a park.

He began to pick up his pace, heading for the part of the heath where he could cut across the road then down Crooms Hill and into Greenwich. There were two men on the pathway ahead of him, strolling side by side and deep in conversation. Michael walked a little faster, thinking he would overtake them, but just as he was about to go past, one of them edged over, blocking his path. The movement appeared casual but Michael sensed it had been deliberate. The other man laughed briskly, and once again Michael suspected it was him they were laughing at. He had a bad feeling, the same as when he knew Pullen and Jackson were in the vicinity. He wanted to shake off these men, to get far away from them. He would run if he had to, but his ribs still hurt from the beating earlier. He knew he wouldn’t get far.

Michael stepped off the pathway and on to the grass, meaning to bypass them that way, but there was more of a rise than he thought. He tripped to his knees with a hard thump. Fresh pain jolted his ribs, filling his mind with memories of Jackson and Pullen.

You’ve had it now, you moron, he thought. Only this time, he was talking to himself.

“Oh Lord, are you all right?” said one of the men. “Can we help at all?”

The men were standing at the edge of the pathway, looking down at him. The one who had spoken was closest. He had an educated voice, what Jackson would call posh, the vowels round and lugubrious as in a play by Shakespeare. He sounded nothing like Jackson or Pullen, which ought to have been reassuring but for some reason was not. With Jackson you knew the worst you would get was a good kicking. This man seemed more dangerous than that, though how and why that should be remained unclear.

“I’m fine,” Michael said. He pulled himself to his feet, meaning to get away immediately and as quickly as possible. The other man grabbed him by the arm.

“Oh look, it’s the little chess boy,” he said, peering at Michael down his elongated nose. “We were looking for you.” He moved to one side slightly, drenching himself in light from a nearby streetlamp. He wore a long dark coat, knee-high lace-up boots with diamanté buckles. His face was thin and pale, and his voice was terrifying, with the same knife-edge of sarcasm teachers used when they were about to give you detention. Only it was worse somehow even than that, because it was a voice he knew.

The man was Aeneas Lascombe, from The Puppeteer.

“Eh, niño,” said Lascombe’s companion. “You hurt?”

He had a thick Spanish accent and Michael felt outraged, imagining that the man was making fun of Michael’s own father. Then he got a proper look at him and realised he had been mistaken. The man, smaller and wirier than Lascombe but no less awful, was Gara Brion, the Guanche restaurant owner in American Star. He was wearing his spider-god costume, the same yellow cloak and papier-mâché mask he had worn for the island fiesta scene. As Michael watched he performed an extravagant cartwheel across the grass, the yellow cloak billowing in the twilight like an amber sail.

Aeneas Lascombe still had Michael by the arm. His grip was not painful exactly but it was firm enough to make Michael feel he could not escape it. He took a step backwards, hoping Lascombe would let go and after a moment he did, the pale fingers gliding off him, cutting the silken twilight like nacreous knives. They left trails of whitish light behind them, a phosphorescent glimmer that was gone almost before Michael realised it was there.

“I need to get home,” Michael said. His lips felt numb. He listened to his own words with a kind of distant interest, as if they were part of a programme on the radio.

“That’s perfectly all right,” said Lascombe. “We weren’t intending to detain you. Only we have something of yours, I believe? We thought you might need it.”

He reached inside his coat and drew out a small package. It was the brown paper bag he had left behind at the flat, the bag that contained the chess set and the books. In spite of his terror Michael found himself reaching for it. The paper crackled, and Michael could feel the hard wooden edge of the box that held the chess pieces. The box was beautifully carved, and opened flat to make a chessboard.

“You should take better care of your things. Especially presents. Presents are beneficence in physical form. They should be treated with respect.”

“Yes, I know.” Michael found he could no longer think straight – he was simply reacting to each new and terrible moment as it arrived. Reason told him these men must be actors, that this was some sort of masquerade, but at the same time Michael knew that this was not so. These people were the characters, the people Angel Garcia and Ludo Henry who played them in the movies had represented. Knowing that Aeneas Lascombe and Gara Brion were imaginary made no difference – Michael knew it was the truth. The inside of his head felt weightless, as if he might float up from the ground at any minute, drift away across the heath and into the night.

“If our business is concluded, we really must fly,” Lascombe said. “It’s a shame we can’t stay and chat.” He folded his arms across his chest and inclined his head. “Think about where you’re headed, won’t you? You might not realise it yet, but success – fame – brings in its wake its own cruel and special form of captivity.” He turned his eyes away from Michael then spread his arms, seeming to take in the whole heath, the coloured lights burning from the bars and restaurants at its fringes, the tall spire of All Saints’ Church that was Blackheath’s main landmark. “I’ll wager there’s not one player or scholar or prodigy that does not at some hour of the day or night wish for the harlequin life of the varmint, the abject failure, the vagabond.” Lascombe grinned, showing the gold-capped tooth Michael remembered so well from the film. “Of course, travelling with the circus I can have both.”

Gara Brion laughed like a loon, gathering his spider cloak closely around him then unfurling it like a bat’s wings. He gave a deep bow, an illusionist accepting his applause, then threw something on the grass. Michael saw it was a pair of shoes, Colin Wilkes’s tatty Adidas trainers. The lace of the left shoe was missing. Michael bent down to pick them up, then realised he already had his hands full with the chess set and the books.

“I wouldn’t bother if I were you,” Lascombe said. “He doesn’t need them. Not any more.” His voice had grown fainter, Michael realised. By the time he turned back towards them, they were already gone.

Michael ran. He didn’t stop until he reached the edge of the heath, the bright arcs of car headlamps moving slowly along Shooter’s Hill Road. He crossed at the lights then turned, looking back the way he had come. Beyond the immediate glare of the lights the heath was dark and inscrutable, a hole in the luminous fabric of the world.