DREAMS

In a small bare room at the top of the house in Hanover-square John Childermass lies in his bed, half sleeping, unable to rest. The room is cold in the winter air, but he is hot, burning with fever. It is more than 24 hours since he was shot by the woman in the green pelisse and the fire of the bullet has spread livid lines down his arm and across his shoulder, the claws of some cruel creature. Much of the time he does not know either where he is or who might be there with him. At one point he thought Norrell had been there, his lips moving as though he spoke. Yet he could remember hearing no words and when he looked again his master was gone and two well dressed strangers stood in his place. At first he thought them undertakers, solemn in their dark suits, but came to suspect that they may instead be doctors. Certainly he knew that doctors had been there, for his shoulder had been bandaged, the thick pad of cloth now soaked through with blood and he can still taste the sweet bitterness of the laudanum with which they dosed him, dark and glistening red, a ruby shimmering with blood, promising the untold riches of sleep. He remembers too the sharp delving of their tongs, of their knives and their forks as they probed the wound, macabre feasters at a ghoulish repast. Eventually, after aeons of agony had passed they had removed the lead, a tasty morsel, dropping it whole upon the dish, a small piece of him to be devoured later.

It has done no good, this cruel removal, his shoulder throbs like the beat of a strange heart, his arm is stiffened and swollen. The wound is poisoned and all the rust red laudanum cannot make it clean. He is a man of the world, John Childermass, a child of the gutters. He has seen wounds before, wounds that have healed and wounds that have not. His shoulder is of the latter kind and already the tendrils of poison are following the paths of the pain, out toward his fingers, in toward his heart. In his more lucid moments, when the ruby glow of the laudanum has burned low and the soft veils of sleep have parted to allow shattered glimpses of a harsh reality, he fears that he will lose the arm, that the doctors will come to continue their feast, to cut with their knives and their saws, to place the severed arm upon a silver platter and banquet upon his nightmares.

He has contemplated the loss of his arm and believes he has faced the truth. He lies to himself. He has not yet acknowledged the certainty of his death for the wound is too high, too far into the shoulder. Taking the arm would achieve nothing but to let him die in pieces. Somewhere in his heart he must know this although he has not yet allowed himself to recognise it, perhaps he never will. Perhaps he will keep his eyes averted and allow death to come as it will, a thief in the night while he lies ensconced in the soft warmth of his crimson dreams.

There then, at the very gates of death itself, in the chill winter room, John Childermass watches the parade of memories that pass before him, the legion of the dead and the undead, come to welcome him home. His master, Norrell, stands again beside Strange and together they look down upon him, discussing him dispassionately as though he were some spell that had failed. Vinculus is there too, the man he has hunted so far and wide, clutching an ancient book to his naked chest, followed by all five of his wives who laugh and whisper behind their hands, hats upon the heads of them all. And now they all come, the book sellers, the book owners, the men and women from whose libraries and shops he culled his masters collection. In their clutching hands, he knows, they carry the small coins and pittances that were paid for volumes as rare as honesty, as valuable as love. He has nothing to say to them as they parade before him, nothing to offer in recompense but the pain that burns like fire.

He lets them pass, he lets them fade, their hands as hollow as they ever were. Even knowing what must follow he lets them pass and, in the red tinged haze of his fever, sees those he has dreaded and longed for, the half remembered faces from a distant childhood. Each one is there and each one is dead, adorned by the symbols of their passing, the scars of the pox, the wounds of the knife, the watery touch of the deep, endless river. And there, behind them, a rope around her throat, a deadly necklace, stands his mother, Black Joan, dark and sullen, younger now than he, his own dark hair upon her head, his own black eyes looking back at him. He waits for her to beckon, he knows that she will beckon and he knows that he will follow as she leads him into death as once she led him into life.

Yet she does not, no finger crooks to call him hither, she neither moves toward him nor away but stands there still, her eyes fixed upon him, feasting upon his misery and his pain. As his dimming eyes peer into the darkness that surrounds her, he sees that another stands behind her, waiting in the shadows, the very last of them all, wrapped in a cloak of night, the shepherd who ushers his flock before him. John Childermass, caught in the red coils of death, recognises him immediately although his lips and his tongue are thick with pain and cannot form the words he might wish to say, cannot pronounce the name he knows is true. In silence then he watches as the dark man places his hand upon his mothers shoulder, a curiously proprietorial gesture as he ushers her onward, back into the darkness from whence she came. She passes her son without a word but with a small, grim smile upon her bloodless lips, gathering the children before her.

Then they are alone and the man who is dying struggles to reach out a feeble hand to the man who has conquered death. The black King steps forward, the light glinting from the thin gold band that holds his raven hair and, about his head, almost lost in the shadows is a glimpse, the merest suggestion of obsidian wings. He takes the dying man's hand, at first just a touch of fingertips as though to acknowledge this last, painful gesture. Then, gripping the sweat slick palm he lifts it and places it first against his own chest, allowing Childermass to feel the staccato rhythm of the heart that beats there before placing it gently across the dying man's body as though laying him out for burial. The thought passes through Childermass's mind that this is indeed death and that there were many things that he could have done in his life that he failed to do and many things he did do that he regrets. He exhales, a long sigh that could, for all he knows, be his last and feels a cool palm pass across his eyes, closing them, weighting them down with an icy heaviness, as though there are pennies placed there. And so it is that he does not see, a drop of red upon a finger tip, red and dark, like blood, like the laudanum that brings his dreams, that soften his pain. And there, upon the borderland of death he is unaware as the bandage is pulled from his shoulder, as the crimson drop falls into the wound.

In the morning the doctors return, clad in undertakers black, sharpening their knives and opening their scissors. They are surprised to find that the fever has broken and the poisoned wound is clean. Congratulating themselves upon their superlative skill they quietly conclude that they can send a higher bill to the little magician than would have been possible had the patient died.