Work Text:
29 November 2018
”Don’t disappear,“ he tells her sternly. ”Do not disappear.”
”I won’t,” she says.
When she says it, she is telling the truth. But when she says it, she is also thinking of the stillness of the House and the beauty of the Coral Halls, and how easy it would be to let the coral grow over her too.
April 1985
Sarah Raphael is seven years old, and she creeps around the edges of her classrooms, builds hiding-places at the bottom of the garden, finds hidden paths in the woods. She distrusts high places and open plains. She loves caves, hollows, and shadows; she is fascinated by deep clear pools and flowing water.
Her parents have dragged her along on a walking tour of Cotswold villages, and in Overbury, she wanders off while they’re consulting their maps. She finds a beautiful limpid pond and crouches down at the edge, peering in.
Moments later she falls in and sinks like a stone, as yet quite unable to swim.
A passerby leaps in and drags her sputtering to the surface, and her panicked mother and father come running.
“Sarah, you’ve got to be careful!” wails her mother. “You can’t keep going about with your head in the clouds! That’s how you have accidents like this!”
“It wasn’t an accident,” Sarah says. “I saw something in the water.”
Her mother, long-suffering, drags her hands down her face. “What on earth, dear?”
“Someplace else.”
“The imagination on this child,” her father mutters.
October 1998
Sarah is at a club, dancing.
I was a lonely boy, no strength, no joy
in a world of my own at the back of the garden
I didn't want to compete or play out on the street
for in a secret life I was a Roundhead general
Later that night she walks home alone; she often walks home alone, but no one ever bothers her. Maybe it’s the way she walks: head up, shoulders square, purposeful and direct, striding and filling space like a man. A boyfriend—now ex- status—once told her that she always looked like she was on her way to commit a murder.
She stops at a street corner and looks up. There’s moisture in the air, something between a drizzle and a mist, as if the atmosphere can’t commit to rain or not. The tiny droplets catch the orange sodium glare of the streetlights, throwing into greater contrast the darkness outside of each inverted cone of light. The mist shifts and moves as if with the breath of some giant creature that hides behind the lamps in the darkness. If she lets her mind wander, she can almost feel the entire city inhaling and exhaling as one. Millions of human beings, going about their lives, each individual a fragment of a giant organism. She can’t decide if the city is sleeping or not; and if it is sleeping, what would it mean if it awoke?
She’s pretty sure she read that in a book somewhere. She laughs at herself, shoves her hands in her pockets, and keeps walking.
Winter 2004
There are burns on Sarah’s neck and ears from Pinny Wheeller’s newspaper firebombs. She’s sitting in an examination room in A&E waiting to be seen, and she can smell her own frizzled hair. The stink mixes in an absolutely nauseating fashion with her perfume, an inexpensive vanilla scent she started using at university. She thinks: I’m going to have to throw this crap away; I’m never going to want to smell it again.
After that, she is scentless, until she goes to London to visit a university friend who works in the City and who hauls her only semi-willingly to Liberty for the most expensive afternoon tea that Sarah has ever had in her life. The bill makes her forehead ache. A little later, wandering through the cosmetics department while her friend looks at jewellry, she stops. She can’t say what draws her to that one particular row of bottles amidst all the other perfumes; perhaps it’s the old-fashioned apothecary symmetry of them, the subdued labels, the way they seem to be pulling back from all the splashy bottles and jars on the other shelves. The first bottle she picks up is something dank and heavy with ambergris; the second is a sweet and respectable bluebell-lily confection; but the third—ah. Lemon and bergamot, with an undercurrent of something floral and mysterious. It floods her senses with light and throws open windows in her mind, and it makes her feel as if she’s clad in steel and samite, invincible.
It is called Angelus, and one bottle costs nearly half a week’s salary and her wallet is still stinging from the tea, but she buys it without hesitation.
The following week, she’s getting tea in the break room at her station. One of her colleagues has taken over the questioning of an armed robbery suspect, and Sarah is tired and needs something hot and caffeinated. The detective comes looking for her and informs her that the man wants to talk again to, in his words, the lady with the lovely scent. To her, and no one else.
He confesses to her. His confession checks out.
Years later, when she meets Laurence Arne-Sayles, he scents the air like a wolf at her approach. “Angelus,” he says. “How fitting, Detective Sergeant Raphael. Very fitting indeed.”
September 2018
Sarah stands at the edge of the pond that she fell into thirty-three years before and looks down at the clear water. Surely, she thinks, it’s not six feet deep at the most? It had seemed five fathoms when she was seven. There’s a spray of green pondweed across the surface; in the depths are the shadows of moving fish. Tiny insects buzz about, and a light breeze scarcely stirs the surface.
This is ridiculous, she thinks, but all right, she’ll humour the horrid old man, try out his suggestions. Maybe she’ll understand him better if she does.
She lets her eyes unfocus; somehow that allows her to see both the reflection on the surface—sky, clouds, herself—and the depths at the same time. And suddenly, with an almost physical shock, the memory floods back in a rush. The sense that she was not looking at a mirror, but at a door. That the reflection of the sky was not a reflection after all, but a glimpse into another place rich with mystery, and all she had to do to reach it was to bend down and touch the surface of the water.
Sarah falls forward but there is no splash. Instead she lands splayed out on a stone floor with a painful thud. She looks up at the huge minotaur statues that rise above, at the halls and the paths—literal, actual paths, it’s not a metaphor!—and she starts to laugh.
She doesn’t stay for very long. She realises instantly that she’s completely unprepared; she needs to come back with provisions, supplies, something to mark her way. She finds the way out again with relative ease, and she wonders if it’s going to be as simple going back the second time. She really doesn’t want to have to take the train out to Overbury every time she wants to get through to the halls.
The second time, she goes for a walk in the park and stops at a fountain. Maybe this will work? The fountain is neglected, full of rainwater and green scum, but there’s enough of it to reflect the sky. Enough for Sarah to look into and—
She didn’t think it would be that easy, honestly.
This time she has a knapsack containing: a water bottle, a few energy bars, a notepad, a pen, her phone. Also a piece of chalk, with which she makes little marks here and there so that she doesn’t get lost.
It’s so quiet. No—actually, no, it’s not; she can hear birds twittering and from somewhere in the distance there’s the sound of running water. But the sheer absence of people is its own kind of silence. Sarah thinks: perhaps that’s why Sylvia D’Agostino was happy here. She can sympathise.
She starts to explore, methodical and precise. She finds a statue of a faun raising a finger to his lips, and she regards his expression thoughtfully for some time. She wonders what secret he seems to be keeping. The location of Matthew Rose Sorenson, perhaps.
Sarah finds the message—DEAR 16, THE OTHER HAS WARNED ME…—on her next journey, and after that, the thread she’s been carefully unravelling comes loose with astonishing speed.
October 2018
She is trying to ease Matthew—until he settles on what he wants to call himself, she uses the name in her own mind, even though she knows the name fits him as poorly as the clothes he left behind when he vanished—back into the world. His family’s home. Walks in the park. Libraries. No dragging him to the cinema, no excessive crowds, no going to a Pizza Express or a Waitrose. Slowly she offers him a little, then a little more. She watches his face as he takes in the number of people on the sidewalk, the colour of the sky, She sees his pleasure at rediscovering squirrels and dogs and cats. She takes him into a church and sees the tension go out of his body, just for a while.
Even as she’s guiding him back, she spends more and more time in the House. Sometimes with Matthew, sometimes alone.
Today she has come to visit the Folded-Up Child. She has been thinking for the last three days about obtaining samples from the skeletons for DNA testing, so that she might know the names of the People of the Alcove and whether, as she suspects, the Child is the offspring of two of Arne-Sayles’s victims, and if so, who. But now she decides that she will not. It’s heartbreaking enough as it is; to number and name the bones so plainly seems reductive. As if to do so would annihilate the spirit that Matthew sees within them, doubling the tragedy of their deaths.
Today she has brought the Child a beaded necklace. She carefully lowers it over the little skull. ”Matthew’s niece made it for me,“ she says, ”but I wanted you to have it.”
She starts to tell the Folded-Up Child about Matthew’s niece: how she is four years old, contrary for the sake of being contrary, loves Octonauts and Blue Peter and being read to, and then she has to stop, because it only makes her wonder what sort of life this tragic child had—whether anyone ever read to her, for god’s sake, never mind anything else.
Such questions make Sarah think that humans can’t go anywhere without buggering things up, that there’s no beautiful thing that they can’t find a way to blight.
Sometimes, though, when she walks with Matthew through the Halls, she thinks that there is a way of living in the House—in the World—that is not poisonous, and that her vocation is to defend that way. She sees it clearly, like a flash of sunlight on water, and then the clouds pass over and the insight is gone.
November 2018
There is a Hall of the House that she found on her own. Following Matthew’s recordkeeping scheme, it is the forty-second Southern hall, beyond the Coral Halls, in a region of the House that Matthew has not explored as thoroughly as some of the others. In this Hall, water has collected in many small irregular pools, some barely ankle-deep, others too deep to see the bottom. Its walls are adorned with bas-relief carvings of trees. They seem to have been painted once upon a time, but the paint is mostly worn away, leaving only smudges and traces. Each tree is distinct from its neighbour, and she can name some: oak, ash, maple, gingko, cypress, rowan. Other trees don’t look like any she’s ever seen, but she is certain that they grow somewhere in the world. Or maybe some other World altogether.
Sarah comes to this Hall often, when she’s in the House on her own. There are certainly others that are fairer, with more beautiful statues, or more curious sights, but she’s drawn to these pools the same way that she was drawn to the village pond in Overbury. She goes there to sit and read, or think, or work out the problems of vexing cases.
What she has not told Matthew is this: there are times when she looks into a pool and sees not a mirror, but a door, and if she lets her mind go still, she can feel another world start to unfold around her like Victorian stage machinery. This pool reveals a vast library of infinite hexagonal galleries extending in all directions; another shows a still, dark forest with deep pools of water between ancient trees; in another a city that is Oxford but also not Oxford. There are as many visions as there are pools, and if she let herself go, she could fall into one of these worlds, leave behind the one she knows—but each time, she pulls herself back to the House. She promised, after all.
One afternoon she’s sitting at her desk in the police station, thinking about those pools, thinking about how she still hasn’t told Matthew about what she sees in them. There’s a conversation about Brexit going on nearby, and someone has put fish in the microwave, and someone else has walked away from their desk and left the news playing on their computer, and Sarah closes her eyes, thinking about how easy it would be to simply go away from it all. Step through the doors of perception into the House.
Her phone buzzes. It’s Matthew.
She remembers that she promised she would not disappear.
1 December 2018
It is beginning to snow.
Sarah looks out of the window of the café as the world veils itself in white, turning into a Whistler nocturne in grey and white that is broken by splashes of red and yellow light. Inside the café it’s warm and golden. When people come in from the cold, they puff out their reddened cheeks and smile without seeming to realise that they’re doing so, and the snow they dust from their clothes becomes mist before it can settle on the ground. The voices around her rise and fall like music and it occurs to Sarah that she actually doesn’t mind the noise today.
The door opens and Matthew comes in, and he puffs out his cheeks and brushes snow from his curly dark hair. When he sees Sarah he smiles.
“Sorry it’s a bit crowded in here,” she says as he sidesteps between tables on his way to her.
“Not at all,” he says. “It’s beautiful. Isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she says after a moment. “Yes, it is.”