Page 85 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

‘If you can have past ghosts,’ she said softly, ‘and if you can have a clairvoyant who recalls every possible future, then there must also be future ghosts. We’re trying to find a way to see them.’

‘Christ,’ Thaniel whispered.

She nodded, very slight and tight. ‘I’ve been trying to say we haven’t got enough data to produce them,’ she said softly. ‘But – we have.’

He looked across. ‘What?’

‘Someone else here is going to realise …’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve been sending everyone down as many wrong tracks as I can, but I can’t keep doing it. You have to find out where Mori is and get him out. I don’t think anyone else can stop this now. Imagine Count Kuroda with the ability to accurately tell the future. It would be the last weapon human beings ever built. And, once they have the ability to do it, they’ll kill Mori. I never thought I’d be scared of that, but at least he’s sensible.’

‘But the telegrams stopped coming at the end of January.’

She nodded fractionally. ‘Perhaps they’re moving him, perhaps someone decided after the oxygen tank incident that it wasn’t safe, perhaps he’s refusing to cooperate.’

‘Or he’s dead,’ Thaniel said. He felt like his logical facility was ticking without the rest of him. The rest was in a sealed cork chamber, screaming.Chisels. Vacuums. And he’d let Mori walk into it.

‘I hope very much that he isn’t.’

He swallowed. ‘What makes you so sure they’re close to finding future ghosts?’

She leaned down over the table as if she were poring over one of the documents, and nodded for him to do the same. He did, and she put their heads close together. When she spoke, it was barely audible, even so close.

‘Because you can already see them.’

The director breezed in then. ‘Ah, Dr Matsumoto! Looking after our guest, I hope?’

‘Certainly,’ she said brightly. ‘I thought I’d show him the ice caves. Good show down there.’

‘Excellent, excellent,’ he said, and went straight to the scientists at the window, who he plainly thought were more important.

At the foot of the stairs was another door. It led to a deep cellar room full of huge machinery. Beside an enormous steam engine, whose belly glowed red and waved a gorgeous heat everywhere, there were stairs again. They led down a subterranean tower, bricked roughly all around like the inside of a well. It went deep, lit at insufficient intervals by bare electric lights. The heat didn’t even reach a quarter of the way and soon it was freezing. Thaniel followed Grace. The way the hem of her skirt trailed on the steel steps was hypnotic after a while.

‘Ice caves?’ he asked when he was sure no one else was here, and that nobody could hear.

‘Ghosts are easiest to see in a place that sees very little traffic in the way of living things,’ she explained. Her voice echoed blue, up and down. ‘And we’ve only got owls down here. Owls are – well, I’ll show you.’

When they reached the bottom, there was a long, narrow corridor, only just wide enough for one person. It put Thaniel strongly in mind of a mine. The walls were raw rock, seamed with iron. The iron was warm. He couldn’t hear the generators anymore, or the thunder of the dam. They were somewhere below the waterfall now, perhaps even below the river beneath.

More steps down, uneven and rough-hewn, and then suddenly they came out on a brand new wooden gantry that still smelled beautifully of fresh cedar.

They were in a low, broad cavern, where ice curtained the walls. It had formed huge stalactites, which glittered blue by the glow of the lightbulbs someone had hung on string from the gantry rails. There were thick pillars of ice on the ground too, as tall as a man. In the middle of it all was a deep pool. The water was so clear it didn’t look like water. Rocks lifted from the bed. No weed, though, nothing. Just tiny fish. Thaniel was still looking when a grey owl soared down and snatched one from the surface. It landed on an ice pillar and blinked at them.

‘Before they started building generators or anything like that,’ Grace said quietly, ‘they had a whole team of people researching old stories about anything that could have been – whatever Mori is. There’s a good few. Fairytales mainly. There’s a winter king who leads people to their deaths in the woods, or death gods who mark out particular people, or half-devil figures who you can make pacts with for unnatural good luck. The stories are all remarkably similar. They all seem to describe a person, and not an actual god. They’re all tricksters – you never get what you expect from them. And, they are always attended by owls.’

While she was talking, she was opening a box. Thaniel wanted to ask if she could hurry up. His shoulder hurt with a bright fresh pain that felt like the stitches might have come undone, and thinking of all those stairs back to the surface made it worse.

‘It’s a really common thing to hear here, superstition about owls. Some people think they’re lucky, some people think they mean you’ll die soon. But they definitely indicate some kind of change.’

Thaniel nodded. Grace’s box was full of chalk dust, and a little pair of bellows. She pressed them together, and dust blew across the pool.

‘What the researchers found in the trickster stories was that owls always preceded the appearance of the trickster. Obviously it could just be a narrative device, but I don’t think it was. I don’t think our ornithologist thought so either.’ She sighed. ‘I think he found something. I think that’s why he tried to run away.’

There were clouds of chalk over the water now. The chalk plumed and danced. He wanted to say he would help her with the bellows, because she looked thin and exhausted, but he was fighting off a wave of dizziness. He could feel his shirt catching on all the glass cuts.

She pointed. ‘Watch the chalk.’

It was forming patterns. A network of lines outlined themselves in the white dust, quite broad, like owl-sized tunnels. For a while nothing moved but the dust. Then one of the strange air-tunnels sharpened, and an owl ghosted down exactly through it, took a fish from the water, and flew back up through another.

‘What was that?’ Thaniel said.