Page 86 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

‘That,’ Grace said, ‘is what a future ghost looks like. That tunnel in the air, that line. It’s where the owl will fly. You see?’

Thaniel thought about it, then decided that in five seconds’ time, he was going to reach out and touch her shoulder. A very thin, feeble little line appeared in the chalk dust between them. Grace nodded.

‘Yes. We can do it too, but not half as clearly as the owls do. I think it’s because we decide things vaguely, most of the time. But say you could perceive the future – even just the immediate future – you’d know what you were doing far more precisely. You’d know the variables. You wouldn’t just decide to cross the road, you’d know exactly when and where you’d cross, because you’d know where all the carts were going to be. Much more specific, much clearer. A much more definite future. I think the more inevitable the future, the clearer the future ghost. Look at this.’

She flicked a sovereign coin. It fell down a very clear coin tunnel in the whorling chalk, and then, right at the last second, the tunnel split into two fainter ones. Heads and tails. The coin landed heads. The ghost trails all vanished.

‘Gravity. Certain. Always,’ she said. ‘Followed by exactly even chances, which are fainter because they have only a fifty per cent chance of actually occurring.’ She sighed. ‘This is exactly how Mori works, isn’t it? He perceives possible futures. This is what he’s seeing.’

‘Yes.’ He hesitated. He had conditioned himself so well never to talk about Mori that it was a struggle now. ‘Sometimes you can … Six was angry with him not long ago. She threw a dice, and if it landed on a six, she threw a firecracker. But even when the dice didn’t land on a six, Mori still heard the firecracker. The – potential firecracker.’ Prising the memory away and giving it to Grace left him feeling hollow.

‘Because the dead future takes a little while to fade,’ she said. She was watching him ruefully. They hadn’t divorced just because Thaniel had fallen in love with a watchmaker. It was as much because Grace had always thought – as far as he could tell – that it should have been her Mori was intrigued by, not some nobody from the civil service.

Thaniel looked away at the owls. They were mesmerising. Some were grey, but some were a deep, coaly black. They might just have seemed unusual out in the forest, but in here, beside the ice and the deep, silent pool, they couldn’t have looked more preternatural if they’d tried. ‘But how are they so clear about where they’re going, then?’

She nodded a little. ‘There’s no light at all in this cave without the lightbulbs. So how do they know …’

‘… where the fish are,’ Thaniel finished. Another owl swept down, though another chalk tunnel. It caught its fish so neatly that it only just disturbed the water.

‘Exactly. What if it’s not that the owls hear their prey extraordinarily well – what if they can sense where the fish intends to go? Like Mori would do?’

‘Christ.’

She glanced up, tentative. ‘Of course nothing is proven yet, but what if all those trickster figures in the stories were people like Mori, and what if the owls follow them because they mistake a clairvoyant’s very clear, very defined lines of intent for those of another owl?’

‘God, you’re right. There are always owls at Filigree Street. I always thought it was because we were near Hyde Park. Mori never said anything.’

She tipped her head, philosophical and tired. ‘It’s only a hypothesis. Owls, for Christ’s sake.’ She looked up at him properly for the first time. ‘What happened to him? How did they get him? I’ve been thinking about it for months, there’s absolutely no way he wouldn’t know what Kuroda intended for him. Unless he walked into it willingly.’

Thaniel nodded a little. ‘He walked into it. He knew something was wrong when we got here. I tried to ask, he said it was fine. He sent me away.’ He had to cough, and tasted iron this time as well as chalk. He hoped it wasn’t blood. He had to get down off this mountain and back to Tokyo before he keeled over. The morphine seemed not to be doing anything much. ‘And I went, like an idiot.’

Grace drew her teeth over her lip. ‘He didn’t tell you anything.’

‘No. But something’s gone wrong. He wouldn’t let anything happen to Six, even if he was away. I’ve seen men who were looking at her too closely get run over by horses. I’m not joking.’ He told her about the carriage crash and Willis, and the windows exploding inward at the legation.

Grace had been nodding gradually while he spoke. ‘You think he’s dead.’

He couldn’t say it. ‘I think none of this feels like him.’ He turned away, coughing again.

He must have looked bad, because he saw real alarm go across her face. ‘Christ, you’re ill … come on, enough of all this. No more chalk.’ She took his elbow. ‘We’ve got staff cabins. Let’s get you fed and settled for the night.’

THIRTY-THREE

Yoruji, 15th February 1889

That morning, Kuroda had been at a coal warehouse. It was empty because the labourers had fled, but haunted with black ghosts formed from the pitch dust. The Ministry had organised the trip to prove to the increasingly skittish general public that the ghosts, in themselves, were harmless. Photographers from the newspapers had come to take pictures, and everyone had been laughing and cheerful. It was the most haunted place Tanaka could find, with about ten ghosts. Even the journalists who’d so enjoyed laying into him when he was in the Navy had said, not even grudgingly, that it was a good thing to do for people. Kuroda had been having a good day.

Once the photographers had gone, Tanaka had taken him quietly to one side, and said that they had a problem.

‘So the lads are keeping an eye on Yoruji,’ Tanaka said, uncharacteristically oblique. He looked grim. ‘They’ve been noticing ghosts in the snow. Like a lot.’

Kuroda frowned, because he had never known Tanaka fuss before. ‘Well, that’s to be expected, isn’t it? Yoruji is closer to the mountain than Tokyo—’

‘No, but like a lot a lot. The men are getting nervy. So I went up this morning to have a look round, just to reassure them, sort of thing. Just chucked a bit of flour around.’ He paused. ‘There’s fucking hundreds of ghosts. I think – for some reason, that place is recording pretty much everything that happens there. It’s not just the odd random thing. I looked round for fifteen minutes and I saw … well. It’s like a giant sodding ghost phonograph. I think it might have recorded things we don’t want people to see.’

‘How clear?’

For the first time since Kuroda had known him, Tanaka looked uncomfortable. ‘I can’t describe it. I think you need to see, sir.’