I searched the drawers until I found some sugar tongs for Mrs. Blood, then climbed the stairs. Once on the top landing, I pulled the brass knob to swing the mirror across to illuminate the upper floors. I checked the front rooms first and found only bedrooms; one was occupied, one not. The last place to explore was at the end of a short corridor, and the door swung open when I touched the handle. The room was large and unfurnished aside from a single armchair and a plain oblong carpet on the oak floorboards. As in most galleries, a large oval skylight covered in linen filled the room with an agreeable soft light, perfectly tuned for viewing. On the wall opposite me hung the Caravaggio, and it was every bit as spectacular as the pictures I had seen. But those images had been monochrome, and here for the first time was something I had not suspected: The drapes above the scene of Frowny Girl Removing Beardy’s Head were in a most spectacular shade of crimson, which counterpointed the spurt of arterial blood, also a vivid red. I stared at the large canvas for a few minutes, breathless with the consummate skill of the painter, the fine subtlety of light and shade, and wishing that for just a few minutes I could see more than just red.
I wasn’t the only one staring at the painting, just the only one breathing. Sitting in the armchair was the previous custodian. Though the carpet below him had been stained black with the liquids of putrefaction, he hadn’t rotted to nothing in the closeness of the room, but still had dark skin stretched taut across his bones. His hands were resting on the arms of the chair, and even though his chin had fallen to his chest, I think he would have been looking at the painting as the Mildew overcame him. He was wearing a Red Spot and a prefect’s badge, and poking out from where his clothes had rotted away, a shiny spoon was clearly visible. It proved that no one had been here since the outbreak, and as he had no use for a spoon any longer, I slipped it out of his pocket and into mine.
Mindful of my father’s wish for me to be as quick as possible, and with the possibility of still-active Mildew spores, I quickly opened the climate case, released the painting from its heavy ornate frame and rested it on the floor. It was large—almost six feet by four—and I had to carry the stretched canvas very carefully to get it down the narrow stairs without bumping into anything.
I placed the painting against the wall outside and quickly consulted the street map, then set off. The address of the Purple wrongspot was three streets away, and this would be the only opportunity for me to investigate.
I walked down the main street, past more scattered detritus, empty shops and the remnants of a population who looked as though they had attempted to leave, then given up. Grasses and wildflowers had germinated in pockets of windblown soil, and brambles snaked and coiled without encumbrance. After a few minutes’ searching I found the last known address of the wrongspot. The front door looked shabby and unused, and the windows were boarded up. I was disappointed, but also hugely relieved. I had taken this issue as far as I could and now could quite happily let it go to concentrate on more socially responsible matters. I was about to hurry back to the Caravaggio, and thence to the bridge to meet my father, when I noticed that although appearing unused, the cobbles outside the door were clear of weeds. I paused, my heart beating fast, and without thinking, knocked politely. There was no answer, so I pushed open the door and was met by a sight of such extraordinary magnificence that it quite took my breath away.
Zane G-49
6.1.02.11.235: Artifacture from before the Something That Happened may be collected, so long as it does not appear on the Leapback list or possess color above 23 percent saturation.
I was looking into the front parlor of a house that until recently had been very much in use, as the smell of food and soap lingered in the air. The room was large, and cluttered with bric-a-brac, tools, pots of paint, a Racy Novel or two and random items of scrap artifacture. There was a bowl of apples on the sideboard, and several smoked eels hung from the ceiling. All this, while unusual, was not the most magnificent thing in the room. For placed about the shelves, sideboard and picture rail and hung from the walls were perhaps a hundred or more lightglobes, all shining brightly and raising the level of illuminance of the interior to that of daylight. At night it would hardly be night, and fear would be banished. Zane would have found them in the Chapter House’s “forbidden cupboard,” because unlike most Leapback, lightglobes were too volatile to be placed beyond use by the blacksmith’s hammer, so were either stored by the prefects, thrown in deep lakes or buried.
But the globes weren’t the only Leapback in the room, nor the most remarkable. Propped against a pile of books was a reconstructed remote viewer in a bespoke wooden frame. It was made up of about fifteen parts, the largest of which was the size of my fist and the smallest barely bigger than a one-merit piece. Unlike the small shards that we uncovered from time to time, and upon which the smallest and most inconsequential images flicked and jiggled, the fifteen component parts of this viewer produced a single, vaguely coherent moving picture that could be followed with relative ease, and I leaned closer to stare at the fine detail. Even though the picture jumped from viewpoint to viewpoint with bewildering rapidity, it seemed to be a dramatic play of some sort, with a couple in a bedroom somewhere. That they were Previous was in no doubt, as the difference between the sexes was comically exaggerated, and they had subtle features with eyes that seemed as hollow as the children in the Ovaltine wall painting. I moved closer and realized that I could hear the people in the viewer actually speak. They used a dialect that was obviously ancient but understandable. The woman seemed to say something about how the man wasn’t the same one she had known ten years before, and he retorted that it wasn’t the years but the mileage, which I didn’t quite understand. He used the pet name “honey,” which would indicate they were married, but I could see no wedding rings, which was confusing. As I watched, the man showed the parts of his body where he wasn’t hurt, and the woman kissed them in turn. He eventually pointed to his lips and she kissed them, too, which would have been a sneaky trick, had she not realized what he was up to, which I think she did, and I laughed out loud.
“How much do you know?”
By rights I should have jumped a foot in the air, but Jane’s presence was somehow oddly inevitable. She was staring at me with a mixture of surprise and suspicion on her face. My first thought was about how she had traveled here. I had last seen her at breakfast—barely ninety minutes ago and fourteen miles away. Without a Ford, an impossible feat—like her journey to Vermillion the day before. It was as though she could leap from place to place, like a Pooka.