Page 68 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

Thaniel sat still while that filtered down. He couldn’t remember a bullet.

Willis sat down awkwardly in the chair by the bed. He didn’t quite fit. The back was wicker and squeaky. ‘What’s your diagnosis? If you have one. You have trouble breathing. It’s very noticeable when you sleep.’

Very noticeable. The skin down Thaniel’s shoulder blades tried to crawl. There was something uniquely horrible about being told a thing about yourself you didn’t know. ‘Lungs, something. I never found out properly. If it kills me it does, I don’t need to call it by its first name.’

Willis lifted his eyebrows and made no effort to disguise that he considered such an approach to be stupid. ‘Well, let’s see.’

Thaniel turned his head away as Willis twitched the edge of his shirt aside with a cold stethoscope. It made him shy. Willis looked annoyed and listened for what felt like an unnecessarily long time. When Willis sat back, he inclined his head.

‘Well, it’s not going to kill you quite yet. If you look after it,’ he added from under his eyebrows.

Thaniel nodded.

‘How’s the symptoms?’ Willis asked.

‘I’m fine. Bit slow sometimes.’

‘And?’

Thaniel hesitated. He didn’t want the conversation to last any longer than it had to – he didn’t like Willis or his patronising sharpness – but it would have been more stupid not to mention it. ‘I’m seeing things. You know. Dreams, ghosts. Like the staff.’

‘Are you indeed,’ Willis said, looking disgusted.

‘I don’t believe in it. Is there anything you can give me?’

‘Short of laudanum, not really. I’d suggest you spend less time going native. It’s admirable, naturally, but it can cause one a certain flabbiness of thought. The Japanese are essentially pagan, you realise; they exist rather in the state Europeans did some three thousand years ago.’

‘Japanese isn’t witchcraft, Willis, and it is definitely not making me see anything.’

Willis opened his hands to say, well, there’s your problem.

Thaniel shook his head once, too tired to point out that not that far down the road at the Palace was a good collection of Japanese men who felt exactly the same way about English, and that most international treaty problems would vanish overnight if everyone would just get over their snobbery long enough to sit down, have a cup of tea together, and recognise that they were all exactly the same person in slightly different hats.

‘Do you know where my daughter is?’ he asked instead.

‘No, I’ve no idea,’ Willis said, as if Thaniel had asked what all the names of Saturn’s moons were. ‘Don’t try to get up. Get some rest and read the newspaper. You ought not wear yourself out with visitors. If you get up I will tether you to that bed,’ he added.

Thaniel was certain this advice had less to do with rest and more to do with Willis’s unwillingness to have children in his surgery.

‘This came for you,’ Willis added, and handed him an envelope.

Thaniel waited, and then had to say, ‘Could you open it for me?’

Willis did so, and handed him the single sheet inside. It was a photograph of Grace Matsumoto. She was standing against a white wall, holding a newspaper from the day before yesterday, and a small sign that said:

AM NOT DEAD STOP MAKING A FUSS.

‘Well, that’s that then,’ Thaniel said, puzzled. The sign sounded exactly like her, but the tone didn’t match the way she was looking into the camera. She was just like he remembered her, pointy and boyish, but she looked exhausted. There were marks under her eyes. He sighed. However she looked, he couldn’t open the inquiry now. Something brushed him again. It didn’t touch him quite, but he felt that pre-touch along the fine hairs on his arm. ‘Can you feel that?’

‘Yes,’ Willis said unexpectedly. He breathed out loudly through his nose. ‘This place is rather creepy. It’s the weather, that’s all.’

Just for the barest second, right on the edge of his eye, he saw Mori. Not in clothes Thaniel had seen before – a lovely evening suit – and he was holding something he never once had at Filigree Street – a cigarette and a book of Lucifers. Just a brief shape in the dusty air and then vanished. Thaniel sat frozen, searching for the shape again.

‘Don’t let it get to you,’ Willis growled.

Once Willis had gone, he felt too tired to pick up the newspaper. The shade of paint on the wall opposite, a pale cream, was the colour of the scritching noise that cheap phonographs made when violins lifted too high for the wax to record properly. He drew his knees up so that he could look at the blue blanket instead, and sat still, his free hand on the back of his neck where the nerves ached and his hair was growing through softer where it had been shaved up. The bruises from the carriage crash were starting to throb.

He could feel Arinori’s blood still; it was sticky over his good hand and both knees, even though when he looked, there was no trace of it. When he thought of what he’d said to Arinori, he wanted to scream. Get it done properly: it flamed and burned through everything else, each word a lump of charcoal.