The Ice House Read online

  Tim Clare is a writer, poet and musician. He won Best Biography/Memoir at the East Anglian Book Awards for his first book, We Can’t All Be Astronauts, while his fiction debut, The Honours, was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. He has performed his work at festivals and clubs across the world, on BBC TV and radio. Tim has also written for Guardian, The Times, the Independent and the Big Issue, and presents the fiction writing podcast Death Of 1,000 Cuts.

  Also by Tim Clare

  The Honours

  First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in the 2019

  by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  canongate.co.uk

  This digital edition first published in 2019 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Tim Clare, 2019

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on

  request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78689 481 6

  eISBN 978 1 78689 483 0

  Typeset in Baskerville MT by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  For Suki

  Contents

  73 Years Later

  Chapter 1 Able Was I

  Chapter 2 Sweet and Bitter Water

  Chapter 3 When The Devil Drives

  Chapter 4 The Good Doctor

  Chapter 5 This Chickenshit Outfit

  Chapter 6 A Time to Pluck up that which is Planted

  Chapter 7 An arch where through Gleams that Untravelled World

  Chapter 8 The Great White Lodge

  Chapter 9 Other Shore Reached

  Chapter 10 The Deep and Secret Things

  Chapter 11 Wars and Rumours of Wars

  Chapter 12 The Beginning of Sorrows

  Chapter 13 Patience

  Chapter 14 My Son Was Dead, and is Alive Again

  Chapter 15 Le Morte D’Arthur

  Chapter 16 The End of The War in Heaven

  Chapter 17 Labyrinth

  Chapter 18 The Day of the Inauguration

  Chapter 19 Crawl

  Chapter 22 Death Needs Time for what it Kills to Grow in

  Chapter 21 The Proud Have Hid a Snare for me

  Chapter 22 The Flesh of Kings

  Chapter 23 Reunion

  Chapter 24 The Second Death Hath No Power

  Chapter 25 Burning as it Were A Lamp

  Chapter 26 A Fountain of Water in the Wilderness

  Chapter 27 Extinction Burst

  Chapter 28 Plague

  Chapter 29 Not Till The Next World

  Epilogue

  A man burns.

  He stands at the foot of a mountain. Ropes of flame lap up his naked body. Fat drips and smokes. As he burns, he heals.

  Hagar watches from the shadow of the church. She registers his torment with a slight tightening of the jaw. Her three centuries have not numbed her to suffering, but it is a familiar pain, a punch working the same bruise. Still, she has never seen a peer with gifts quite like his.

  ‘Who is he?’ she says.

  The angel stands beside her, his slender body wreathed in vapour. He smiles winsomely.

  ‘My dearest friend. His name is Gideon.’

  The angel’s calmness makes her belly clench. There are bodies in the river. Blood gluts the shallows. How can he be so serene?

  ‘And Sarai?’

  ‘Gone,’ says the angel.

  ‘What? How?’

  ‘Her kidnapper fled with her into the jungle. He managed to evade all our troops. He’s very ingenious.’

  ‘Then it’s over.’

  The angel chuckles softly. ‘How quickly your faith evaporates.’

  ‘But everything rests on her! Arthur, we need her.’

  The angel lowers his gaze. The mud around his bare feet stiffens, glistering with frost.

  ‘It’s not yet the time.’ The angel seems irritated, almost petulant. ‘You of all people ought to understand the value of patience.’ His expression resets, his composure returning. ‘Don’t worry. He loves the child. You’ll track her down within the decade.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly. Oh, don’t look at me like that. I don’t mean to be cryptic. My god dreams out of time. I see fragments. Possibilities. But I know we can win.’

  Hagar tongues the hole in her gum left by her missing eye tooth. Her skroon, Räum, is tethered to an olive tree, his canoe-shaped beak clop-clopping as he feeds on the corpse of a soldier. His feathers are dulled with road-dust, but the wet ridges of his long, straight bill shine like the pearlescent ribs of a seashell. Grey skin bags around his double-jointed knees. His legs are muscular, the middle toe of either foot extending in a wicked, blade-like talon. He glances up, fixing her with his big hazel eyes. His lashes tremble with droplets of coagulating blood.

  She turns to the angel. ‘Tell me what happens.’

  ‘But you already know.’

  ‘Tell me again.’

  ‘Very well,’ says the angel, indulgently. ‘You face your master in Fat Maw. You die, twice. Explosions rock the spire and the city burns. Grandmama is there, and dear Gideon, of course. Sarai is with us too, but she’s no longer a child. She’s old. She has grown into her talents. You must take care of her until then. You must take care of all our charges.’ He glances towards the doorway of the old stone church. ‘Each has a role to play.’

  The cornices and window arches of the church are edged with black rope, greasy snakes shrivelled and tightened from years of rain and heat. Filling the entire doorway is a golem, armoured gauntlets bunched into fists at its sides. Its breastplate is incised with an eight-pointed star and it stands beneath the archway, supported by its own armour, inert.

  Hagar pats its chest. The armour is searingly hot beneath her palm.

  Within the recessed helmet, two blue embers flare into life.

  ‘Excuse me, please,’ she says.

  The vast armour oscillates, producing a tone like an organ pipe. Black fluid flows through the armour’s sealed joints, filling in limbs, flexing the articulated fingers of the gauntlets. A burnt, hoppy musk seeps from the visor slit as the golem rises, steps aside.

  ‘Thank you.’ Hagar walks into the church’s cool interior. Its glassless lancet windows cast narrow blades of light across shattered pews. Thorns have pushed their way through the flagstones. They fill the room with a heady, resiny perfume that opens the sinuses.

  At the back of the room, slumped against the wall, is a boy.

  She is glad he is alive. The golem must have subdued him with a blow to the head before retrieving him – a crudely effective tactic, but one which might easily have killed him. He is not the boy she sought – the one who holds the child – but perhaps this mistake is providential. Perhaps, if the angel speaks truly, there are no mistakes.

  The boy’s face is tanned, one side discoloured by a big mauve welt. An oversized vest hangs from bony shoulders. Hagar draws her stiletto and holds it up to a sunbeam. The blade bisects the light, forming a cross.

  ‘His name is Henry,’ says the angel. ‘He came from England by accident.’

  At this, the boy stirs.

  ‘I ought to kill him,’ says Hagar. ‘To be safe.’

  ‘No, no. He’s no threat.’

  ‘But anything that might—’

  ‘Hagar. We’re not monsters. Isolate him if you must, but remember what we fight for. We must be merciful. Henry never meant to get mixed up in all this. He was trying to protect Delphine.’

  The boy moans.

  ‘Who?’ says Hagar.

  ‘Gideon’s girl, back in England. She just killed my father and grandpapa. She’ll be there, in Fat Maw. She
helps us, though I don’t think she means to. That’s why I saved her from falling.’

  ‘How long till she arrives?’

  ‘Not for a good while, I should think.’ The angel’s image becomes foggy at the edges. His voice fades as his god calls him back. ‘She’ll be kept busy by the war.’

  ‘You said the war ended decades ago.’

  The angel darkens to a silhouette. Ice crystals form in the vapour rising from his shoulders, hardening into wings.

  ‘Oh Hagar.’ His voice shrinks to a whisper. ‘War doesn’t end. It sleeps.’

  73 YEARS LATER

  Spartacus911

  Truth seeker

  New member New Topic: HELP SEARCHING FOR OBSCURE RECORDS << on: January 12, 2009, 12:18:02 PM >>

  I am looking into the Neo-Pagan/Druidic rituals of Britain’s ruling families & wondered if anyone could point me towards records of bloodlines of UK nobility/banking elites? Particularly any illegitimate offspring that might not appear on official documents? Interested in members of (hugely under-researched) pre-war Mithras cult SPIM (1932–35) (poss. linked to British Thuleans). They were based in the East of England, on the site of an ancient medieval grove renamed Alderberen Hall (from the German Öl die Beeren [lit. ‘oil the berries’] referring to the anointing oil & the elderberries symbolising witchcraft & the harvest – classic ritualistic elements in ancient druidic human sacrifices) where they reportedly conducted various occult rites, mainly symbolic tauroctonies (a survivor account describes human participants dressed in horns & ritually murdered). Known members included:

  Lazarus Stokeham, 4th Earl Alderberen [DROWNED SELF IN LAKE]

  Graham Burchfield, 1st Baron Wolfbrooke (newspaper magnate with financial links to the Rothschilds) [REMAINS RECOVERED FROM FIRE]

  Ivanovich Georgi Propp (33rd degree Freemason & White Russian émigré, underwent initiation w/ Blavatsky, occultist) [VANISHED] Would appreciate any help investigating. Thanks.

  ‘Solitude is the school of genius’

  Rob Pettifer

  LP bountyhunter

  Moderator Re: HELP SEARCHING FOR OBSCURE RECORDS << on: January 13, 2009, 08:39:06 AM >>

  Spartacus, please stop posting these. This is a vinyl collectors’ forum.

  ‘hellac addict, Deadhead and Beefheart, no YOU’RE a hoarder ;)’

  Spartacus911

  Truth seeker

  New member Re: HELP SEARCHING FOR OBSCURE RECORDS << on: January 13, 2009, 10:18:58 AM >>

  ‘I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.’

  ‘Solitude is the school of genius’

  CHAPTER 1

  ABLE WAS I

  Delphine woke up and remembered: Thompson was dead. Her spectacles lay upside-down on the bedside table, beside an ashtray of polished green alabaster. Her dressing gown still hung from its peg on the door, yellow silk brocade with black satin cuffs. The world was trudging on, callously normal. She lay there, letting the fact of his death sit on her chest, heavy, invisible.

  Eventually, her bladder forced her up. She unhooked her stick from the end of the bed. Her knee wobbled. Bugger it all.

  In the bathroom she wetted a comb under the hot tap and hacked her white-grey hair into a vague semblance of a side parting, wincing as the teeth snagged in tangles. She took satisfaction in her discomfort – each tug at her follicles felt like a little reprimand.

  She dragged some clothes on and rode the stairlift downstairs. The kitchen smelt of roast lamb. She carried the coffee pot to the sink and flushed the previous day’s grounds, flinching at the cold water flowing over her swollen knuckles. A sunbeam lit a slow blizzard of dust. The little TV was still on, muted, yellow Teletext subtitles flashing up under footage of jet fighters banking over the Gaza Strip. A tangle of maroon wool lay nuzzled up against the bread bin, capped with a plastic crochet hook. On the kitchen table was a heap of threshold correspondence she hadn’t replied to – physical letters and printed-out emails, some marked with post-its. Cranks, mostly – a man from Arizona who believed the human genome had been corrupted by a race of biblical giants, a Portuguese student who kept sending her articles arguing that the moon was hollow. The remainder were folklorists, historians and archaeologists – friendly, sincere people who didn’t mind her peculiar questions about bat-people or gateways to other worlds. Of course, she never told them what she knew. How do you explain that when you were a child, you stopped an invasion led by an immortal aristocrat from a world that should not exist? How do you explain your memories of humanoid bat-creatures with fangs and leathery wings, of towering minotaurs armed with flintlocks? How do you explain the insect that appears in your dreams – the dark hornet with a sting that turns people into something less and more than humans, the godfly? And how do you explain that one of those people was your father?

  It was, quite obviously, too much for an email. Better to stick to her cover story. She was just an eccentric old lady, writing a little volume on comparative mythology.

  Spread out across the rest of the table were OS maps of parts of Venezuela, the Siberian steppe and Canadian tundra. Her magnifying glass lay in a red leather slipcase. A lovely, weighty one it was – mother-of-pearl handle and a grooved brass pommel shaped like an urn. An eighteenth birthday present from Mother.

  Delphine walked to the back door and slid off her blue-green Carmichael tartan slippers. She unhooked the long cedar shoehorn from its spot next to the coats, rested a palm on the jamb and slotted her feet into a pair of calfskin brogues. The ritual mollified her a bit – it was rather like turning a fried egg – her fallen arches expanding and relaxing as they settled into the contours of the orthopaedic inserts. Not very practical for gardening, but she had a weakness for handsome footwear – a vice she called shoebris.

  She shuffled outdoors. The dawn air was chilly, fragrant. She stopped at the edge of the patio, one hand tucked inside her suede waistcoat, feeling like Napoleon on St Helena.

  She lit her pipe and took a few contemplative puffs.

  The sky was a bright, uniform grey. Off in the east, the smudged gem of the sun. She gazed out across a havoc of weed-choked soil beds, brown puddles, a few sickly primroses, pebbles, pale grots of bird muck, cracked snail shells oozing cables of mucus, wet moss and a Frazzles packet snagged on a twig, opening and shutting its wet mouth in the breeze.

  Peas and broad beans soon. Turnips too. Maybe this year they wouldn’t bother. She tapped a clump of speedwell with the tip of her stick, watched the little purple heads shiver. Gardening was a siege. You held out as best you could, but the city always fell in the end.

  On a green garden trolley, wrapped in a Union Jack flag, was the corpse of a Labrador.

  Her heart sank. There he was. And there he wasn’t. Gone forever. Death: the absence always present. Oh Thompson.

  As she watched, the trolley turned and began rolling down the garden, towards the trees.

  Delphine stood in the elm copse, puffing on her pipe to keep warm. She gazed into the gravemouth. Half-buried roots threaded spine-like through the uneven, clayey soil. Thompson’s eyes were closed, his coat a glossy, velvet black.

  ‘Are you warm enough, darling?’ she said. At her side, light was bending round an astigmatic smudge the size of a small suitcase. She took a hipflask from her waistcoat pocket. ‘It’s just a nip.’ Her jaw contorted as the toffee-and-cinders taste broke over her tongue and the booze vapour hit the back of her throat. Good shooting brandy. She took a second, more committed nip.

  A stream cut across the northeast of the copse, swollen with run-off. The water passed beneath a wire fence into the neighbouring field. She squinted. It was hard to tell without her distance spectacles, but part of the fence looked like it had been ripped up where it crossed the flow. It was as if someone had shoved or dragged it into the air. The wire was twisted; a fencepost hung in it, unearthed. How long had it been like that?

  Birdsong seeped through the constant, dissonant ringing that underscored everythi
ng. She had a hearing aid but it rubbed and the sound was rubbish. From the adjacent meadow came the chak-chak-chak of fieldfares amongst the blackthorns. Overhead, she fancied she could make out the high, sweet song of a coal tit.

  Perhaps she was just wishing. The old garden used to fill with them. Mother would hang feeders from the conifers. Algernon had liked to scatter sunflower seeds around his deckchair while he read. If he stayed still enough, one might perch on the end of his book, an improbable wonder of white cheeks and biscuit-golden belly.

  ‘I suppose I ought to say a few words.’ She looked down into the grave and tried to sound appropriately solemn. ‘Thompson Venner, you were a patient, noble campaigner and a gentle, loyal companion.’ She took out his retractable lead. It was green textured plastic, with a silver clasp. ‘Um.’ She had meant to toss it in after him, but she held on. ‘Sad to see you go, old man. You met your fate with a stoic mien.’ She breathed in, the air cold against her teeth. The plastic felt rough beneath her fingers. ‘Um.’ Her hand was shaking. Why couldn’t she just let the damn thing go? ‘Would you like to add something?’

  The arthritis in her wrist had returned with the insistence of a deep, radiating bruise. She pulled deeply on her pipe, sighed smoke into the breeze.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘No one will see you here.’

  The smudge at her side began to fill out, becoming a distinct shape with edges. It was like watching mist clear, or a camera come into focus.

  The last of the blur washed away, revealing a wine-red scarab, eighteen inches tall, standing upright on two thick legs. Moisture had condensed on the segmented plates of her waxy carapace. She flexed the black palps either side of her mouth in a yawn.

  ‘Well?’ said Delphine.

  Martha’s jointed antennae sniffed the air, their two comb-shaped heads shivering. Dew had collected on the soft, club-like tips of her outer mouthparts, and with a gentle rippling motion she conveyed the droplets into her mouth. The smoked-blue centres of her eyes shifted upwards, suspended in pools of bright ghostmilk.