Page 93 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

‘Hello.’

He swung around, because it was Mori’s voice, and Mori was there too, just behind a desk tucked into an alcove behind the stairs. He looked exhausted.

‘I couldn’t leave a note out on the desk here, you might not have found it. Sorry it’s so obscure.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Thaniel began, and then did understand, because he had gone nearer to the desk.

Mori was only half as solid as he usually was. He sounded wrong, too far off. It was a phonograph. It was clearer than any phonograph recording usually could be, and the phonograph itself, which was right next to him on the desk, had been altered. The cylinder wasn’t wax but something else that sheened strangely.

Outside, the electricity waned. The blue fire in the trees stopped spilling down the stairs and Mori vanished into the falling chalk. The phonograph was still going.

‘I’m … leaving this here in case I didn’t work up the nerve to ask you for help in person. I mean to try, but I know what I’m like at asking for help.’

Thaniel went nearer to the desk, his throat closing.

The St Elmo’s fire came back. So did the ghost. He was packing away the machinery scattered over the table, ghost things that weren’t there anymore. Close to, Thaniel could see how the figure affected the chalk. One mote might drift about normally in the air, then snap across to make part of the shape. It was pin-sharp in here. Mori had been wearing a threadbare jumper and through a loose part in the knit, the chalk had even outlined the stitching of the leather patch on his waistcoat shoulder underneath. He had sewn that on himself, because he always put clockwork pins through it and he’d wrecked the tweed.

‘What shows up in the ghosts,’ said the phonograph, and Mori, ‘are moments where there are several possibilities depending on them, so I should be making one now. The greater the dependent possibility tree, the better the ghost will imprint.’ He swallowed and looked at his watch again. ‘It’s why a lot of the ghosts you’re seeing are caught in the moment they’re dying. Death generates massive possibility trees; one person’s death affects dozens of other people, thousands of other decisions. And that’s why Yoruji has been so haunted since I’ve lived here. Because I know everything that might happen, everything I do is always – in aid of what I want to happen. I end up doing a lot of small things that will affect a lot of larger things later. What that really means is, I’m going out of my way to create big possibility trees. Forests.’ He sort of laughed. ‘You can always tell when someone like me has lived somewhere; it’ll be the most haunted place for miles around. In order to see the ghosts, you need a lot of electricity in the air, so they always show up in stormy weather. And there’s a lot of electricity now because it’s artificial. There are generators at a station in Aokigahara. The scientists there are under orders to work out what I do, and reproduce it. They run the electricity strongest at night, I think so it will disrupt Tokyo less. Nothing mystical is going on, if you were worried. I’m rambling,’ he said, and stopped for a few seconds. ‘Anyway. I’m hoping the ghost upstairs will still be visible now. They replay themselves whenever the electricity becomes strong enough.’

‘Upstairs,’ Thaniel murmured.

Mori nodded once as if he’d heard him. ‘I’m going to be arrested and taken away by Kuroda’s men. It’s important that they do it, so I’m not going to stop them. I don’t know where they’ll take me, they’re deciding randomly, but that doesn’t matter. Or I don’t think so. I think I’ve arranged it properly. All I need is someone to go to Abashiri and … something.’ He had been leaning forward against the desk to speak into the phonograph. He looked ill. ‘I’m sorry. I have no idea what I’m doing anymore. I can’t remember anything after next week. Or not really. Snatches of – the most likely future as it stands just now.’

Thaniel stared at him. There was an electromagnet behind his heart, tugging uselessly towards the ghost. It was so strong it hurt and he had to close his hands over the edge of the desk and press his fingernails into the leather top, which put half-moon dents into the filigree edging. Mori was quiet for a moment, too still, catching the rhythm of his own breathing again. Thaniel wanted to reach out, for all it would have been pointless and trite. He kept still and waited. Under the electromagnetic ache was something better. A sort of slow, tentative happiness. Mori hadn’t forgotten about him.

Behind him, Katsu bumped into his heel.

The phonograph crackled.

‘If you could go and see what happens to me, that might be useful,’ Mori said. ‘It will be in the dining room. As I say, it should be clearest at night. I’m sorry. I wish I could be more specific, I wish I could tell you what to do. But all I know now is that this has to happen and that I’m going to need some help. It’s something to do with a place called Abashiri.’

Thaniel had thought he’d been relieved when he got down from the mountain safely, but it was nothing beside the wonderful, luminous relief of finding there was something good he could do.

‘Thank you, Pepper,’ Mori said, belatedly.

Thaniel looked back. Mori switched off the phonograph. It clunked as the recording stopped, which was eerie because it made it seem like a ghost had moved it, though of course he hadn’t; it was only running parallel.

The ghost didn’t disappear straightaway. He faded once he was away from the chalk, but some of it clung. It took half a minute or so for the last line of his shoulder to dissolve.

Thaniel turned away and walked out too fast, then folded down on the stairs, pulled his sleeves over his hands and pressed them over his eyes, shaking with the effort of trying to keep at least a little calm, because every jolt of his shoulders hurt the bullet wound. It didn’t work.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Thaniel waited in the relative warmth of the stairwell for the night to come down fully, and for the electricity to wax. Like Mori had said, the power strengthened a lot just after nine o’clock. The wind lifted and blue fire sighed through the gingko trees as the electricity surged. There were ships leaving the docks, two huge liners, and their funnels trailed brilliant aurora sheets of blue.

The snow had stopped. The ruins of the house were sparkling under the blue light from the trees, and the air was frozen and pristine, with the faint salt clarity of the beach. Not sure where to look for the ghosts, or even if they would appear on what was now the ground, he gathered up pieces of half-burned wood and set fires all around the footprint of the house. The wood was damp now, but he doused it with lamp oil and soon there was smoke everywhere.

When the smoke reached what used to be the dining room, the ghosts turned nearly as solid as real people. Breathing into his sleeve, he navigated through the burned remnants of the corridor to see them better.

Mori was sitting by what had been the window, holding a watch formed partly of cinders, waiting. Thaniel brought some spars nearer to make a new fire up close. Despite all the heat, the blood had gone out of his hands and he could hardly grip. He’d never felt so cold.

A whorl of sparks spun through Mori’s ghost. It ribboned up his arm at first, then up behind his eyes and into his hair. The bright pinpoints followed strands of it, fading as they reached the tips, turning to red and then grey ashes. Thaniel almost didn’t notice when he lifted one hand, the ends of his fingernails bright with rising cinders. He was counting down; five, four, three, two, one.

Ghost men burst through, silent and smoke-roiling. Mori didn’t move. He let the nearest man pin his hands behind his back and didn’t bother even to turn his face away when a second man held something that must have been chloroform over his mouth. When he collapsed, they only looked shocked he hadn’t fought, and the man with the chloroform didn’t move for a long time before he remembered that too much killed you and jerked the cloth away. Someone else, a giant who looked like he might once have been a wrestler, lifted Mori away. It was all soundless, but one of the others waved at him and held him back as if that was wrong, to leave already. The cinders glimmered on the Fabergé egg button on his coat.

The ghost took out a pair of dice and a piece of notepaper. Thaniel turned away, breathed in deep from the clearer air, then went closer to see. The ghost threw the dice and consulted the paper, but the smoke wasn’t clear enough to show anything written on it.

They seemed decided. The big man hurried out, carrying Mori. He let Mori’s wrist bang against the phantom door frame, and then disappeared into a clearer patch of air where the smoke didn’t reach.