"It is gone," he said simply. Charlotte heard the rattle of the torch being placed back onto its stand. Trembling, she opened her eyes.
The cavern was normal again or at least, as normal as it had been when she first saw it. The walls still seemed to move with a fluid, balletic grace around her, the light from the torches giving the colours life. Now, the vibrancy she felt was a blessing, something that pinned the contents of the pit down with its warmth and vitality.
"What was that?" she asked, hearing the idiocy of the question but having to ask anyway.
"Darkness," said Babbas. "There are places where darkness gets into the world, through pits and caverns and sunless spots. The Order of St John of Patmos is dedicated to finding these places and to keeping in them the light of God, to keeping the darkness at bay. It has been my job on this island for many years, and now it is yours."
Babbas went past Charlotte and stepped through one of the openings carved into the cavern's wall. Charlotte, terrified of being left alone near the pit, scurried after him. At the doorway, she stopped, peering through into the shadowed beyond. There was a flare of a match igniting and then the softer glow of a lantern spread around in tones of red and orange, revealing a small room.
The walls were lined with shelves, and the shelves bristled with leather-bound book, their spines black despite the light. The far wall was curtained off and in front of the curtains was a desk. Its scarred surface held an open journal and a pen.
"This is where the records are written," said Babbas, gesturing first at the open journal and then at the books lining the shelves. "The activities of each day are listed, written in confirmation of their completion."
Charlotte, interested despite herself, said, "Are these the records for the whole order?"
"No, only this church. The Order has churches in other places and they keep their records as they see fit."
"How many other churches?"
"I do not know. People are called, and the order receives them. We do not move around. There are many places where darkness can escape into the world, and when the Order discovers them, it takes in light to combat it. That there is still darkness means that we have not found all of the places. Now, we must go. There are things to do."
Charlotte wanted to refuse, to tell him that she could not leave her life behind, but the sheer size and complexity of the loss she was facing meant that the words would not fit around it. No more saunas, she thought. No more work or going out at lunchtime with my friends. No more nights curled up on the sofa with a bottle of wine watching a movie. No more pizza or restaurants, no more telephone calls. No more life. I can't, she thought hopelessly, I can't do it. And yet, as she thought, she heard again that slithering, chitinous noise and remembered the darkness slipping across her foot like the warm kiss of some terrible, moistureless mouth, and she could not turn him down. Instead, she said, "Why can't you carry on?" A question, she knew, to avoid her own final acceptance.
"I'm dying," Babbas said. "I have something growing inside me and it is killing me. I cannot carry the oil for the lamps any more. I am slow. I have not yet, but one day I will slip and fall, or forget something, and then? It will escape. I can stay and teach you, but I cannot carry the responsibility any longer. It is why God called you." He removed the stained white cloth from his head and came towards her, holding it out in front of him reverently. She saw the marks of the old grease that stained it like tree-rings denoting age, and smelled the sickly scent of his decaying, dying flesh.
"We wear this, those of us who carry the burden," Babbas said. "It is, perhaps, our only symbolic act, the only thing we do that is devoid of true function. This is the mantle of light."
So saying, Babbas draped the cloth over Charlotte's hair so that it hung down, brushing her shoulders. It smelled old and sour. Babbas smiled at her and stepped back as the weight of centuries settled on Charlotte's head.
CHRISTOPHER FOWLER
The Twilight Express
The funfair blew in one hot, windy night in early July, while everyone's doors and windows were sealed against the invading desert dust. Billy Fleet knew it was coming when he heard the distorted sound of a calliope drifting faintly on the breeze, but he didn't think then that it might hold the answer to his problem.
He leaned on his bedroom sill, watching the soft amber light move across the h6rizon of trees, beneath a velvet night filled with pinhole stars. The country dark was flushing with their arrival. On another night he might have climbed the trellis in his peejays and sat on the green grit of the tarpaper roof to watch the carnival procession, but tonight he had too much on his mind. The fair had travelled from Illinois to Arizona, and somehow made the detour here. There were a few dates yet that weren't played out, small towns with bored kids and fathers jingling chump change, but soon the carnies would be looking to put down roots before the dying summer cooled the hot sidewalks and families grew more concerned with laying in stores for winter than wasting good money on gimcrack sideshows and freak tents.
Billy turned restlessly under his sheets, wondering what it would take to clear his troubles, and the more he thought, the more desperate he became. His mother would cry, his father would beat him, and then a subtler meanness would settle over his life as friends and teachers pulled away, shamed by his inability to do what was right. It was a town that put great store by self-discipline.
But it wasn't cowardice that would prevent him from pleasing them, it was preservation. He wasn't about to throw his life away just because Susannah's period was late. No matter how hard she pushed, he wouldn't marry her. Hell, he wasn't sure he even liked her much, and would never have gone up to Scouts' Point if she hadn't complained that all the other girls had been taken there. The entire bluff was crowded with creaking cars, and though the scent of rampant sex excited him, it all felt so tawdry, so predictably small town. He had no intention of staying in Cooper Creek for a day longer than he had to, for each passing moment brought him closer to stopping forever, just as his father had done, and boy, the family had never heard the end of that.
He couldn't just up and leave without money, qualifications, some place to go, and with just three weeks left before his graduation, it was a matter of pride to stay. He imagined the door to a good out-of-state college swinging open, taking him to a bright new future. But by the time summer break was over Susannah's belly would be round as a basketball, and the trap would have closed about him. He knew how the girls in the coffee shop talked, as if finding the right boy and pinning him down was the only thing that mattered. Mr Sanders, his biology teacher, had told him that after babies were born, the male stopped developing because his role in the procreation cycle was over. It wasn't right that a girl who came from such a dirt-dumb family as Susannah should be able to offer him a little dip in the honey-pot and then chain him here through the best years of his life, in some edge-of-town clapboard house with a baby-room, where the smell of damp diapers would cling to his clothes and his loveless nights would be filled with dreams of what might have been.
There had to be another solution, but it didn't present itself until he went out to the field where the Elysium funfair was pitching up in the pale gold mist of the autumn morning, and watched as the roustabouts raised their rides, bolting together boards and pounding struts into the cool earth. There was a shop-soiled air about the Elysium, of too many tours without fresh paint, of waived safety permits and back-pocket accounting. The shills and barkers had not yet arrived, but Billy could tell that they, too, would be fighting for one more season before calling it a day and splitting up to go their separate ways. Funfairs rarely stopped at Cooper Creek; there wasn't enough fast money to be made here, and although the local folks were kind enough to passing strangers, they didn't care to mix together.