Then there were some bits and pieces from games which Mr Williams had given to him. There was a chess piece which looked like a little castle, and another which looked like a little horse, also some bits of plastic with letters on them and little numbers, and other bits of plastic which had spots on one side.
In the old country house around which the hospital had grown and spread since its foundation after the First World War there was the Sheltered Unit's library. An old man and an old woman sat in there, playing games over an old coffee table. Mr Williams took pieces from their games when they weren't looking, just for a laugh. He would give them the bits back later on, of course, so it wasn't really stealing, but oh, it was funny, watching them get all upset!
Steven thought Mr Williams was naughty, but he did make him laugh, and Steven liked to feel trusted, and liked being in on Mr Williams's jokes and secrets. It was good.
The crows called his name again, wheeling above the turned-over fields, scraps of black against the greyly shining clouds. Steven smiled and looked round the littered surface of the tunnel floor. He leaned down and picked up the matchbox with the three dead matches inside it and turned it over in his hands. He heard a train hooter in the distance.
Soon a train would go noisily overhead, on the rails on the top of the banking the tunnel ran through. Steven liked the busy, steely noise the trains made over his head. It wasn't frightening at all. He squinted at the words on the faded cover of the little match-box:
McGuffin's
iZEN BRAND!
matches
average contents: v2
Steven didn't understand. He turned the matchbox over and read a riddle printed on the back. He didn't understand that, either. He read the words out slowly to himself. "Q: What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? A: The unstoppable force stops, the immovable object moves."
Steven shook his head and put the matchbox back down on the ground. He shivered. It would be time for tea soon.
Dr Shawcross scratched behind his left ear with one finger, brow furrowed like the ploughed Kentish fields. He couldn't think of any other way to put it, so he wrote, finishing the sentence and also the report, apart from the summing-up:... euphoric, but still totally lacking insight into his disability.
Steven stared at the bright inverted U of light, as the train clattered and whined overhead and the little iron seat on top of the grass-roller vibrated slightly. The crows called his name, their hoarse voices not quite drowned by the passing train: "Ger-out! Ger-out! Ger-out!"
He was happy.
TUNNEL
Quiss stood on the parapet of the balcony, staring down at the white plain beneath. His mouth was dry, his heart beat quickly; he was trembling, and a nervous tic jigged at one corner of his mouth as he stood, swaying slightly, getting ready to jump.
He was going to kill himself, because now he knew the secret of the castle. He knew what it was founded on, what underlay it; he even knew where it was and when. The red crow had shown him.
They had played a game called Tunnel, which was based on a game called Bridge. They played two hands each, using blank cards, trying to make things called tricks. The idea was that Tunnel was like Bridge played underneath the table, or in the dark. As in Spotless Dominoes, they had to go through the motions of playing the game, hoping that eventually they would play one game in such a way that the blank cards - which the little games table had ascribed values to, new ones for each game - would end up displayed on the table in a logical sequence, the "tricks" correctly composed of similar-suit cards.
The game was over; after a thousand days they had done it, but they were still undecided what to give as an answer to the riddle. They couldn't think of anything they both agreed was a reasonable response. Quiss didn't care any more. It wouldn't make any difference, anyway. There was only death here, death or what the red crow had shown him. He looked down at the snow. It lay over the jumbled crags of slate far below, at the base of the castle. It was about a hundred metre drop. There would be a lot of wind noise, he would feel cold for a while, weightless for an instant, then... nothing. He should do it now, but he had to prepare himself. Still, Ajayi might not be away for very long (she had gone looking for books as usual), and he didn't want her seeing him there. He leaned forward, over the drop, biting his lip.
No machine-gun this time, he thought.
He had been down in the guts of the place.
More locked doors. The same ancient corridors, dimly lit. His scullions would not help him find keys for the doors; they said they had no influence with the keykeepers, they didn't know any of them and if they started to make any inquiries they would be under suspicion immediately; they thought the seneschal already knew of their allegiance to Quiss, and merely tolerated it.
Quiss tried to engage the attendants he met down here, deep under the castle, in conversation, on the odd occasions when he encountered them; but they were taciturn, unhelpful. He thought about knocking one over the head sometime, seeing if it had a key which he could steal and use, but as soon as he had even hinted he might try this his own scullions had started weeping and begging him not to. He and they would be terribly punished if he tried to open the castle's doors like that. The black minions, they said, in quivering voices; the black minions... Quiss assumed they were talking about the attendants he had seen only once, with the seneschal that one time he had found an open door and the seneschal and the black-robed minions arrived in the creaking elevator. He reluctantly shelved the idea of taking a key by force.
He walked along the corridor. He was in the general area of the door he had found open, many many days ago. He thought he could just make out a sort of half-felt, half-heard thumping noise, and suspected he was somewhere near the number-crunching room; dee pee as the snooty attendant had called it.
The corridor opened out to about twice the cross-section which he regarded as the castle's standard. A slate bench on one wall faced a row of twelve large, stout, metal-strapped doors.
He was weary, so he sat down on the bench, looking through the gloom at the tall, dark doors.
"Tired, old man?" a voice said, from above him. He turned and saw the red crow, perched on a peg stuck into the wall high above the slate bench, near the vaulted ceiling.
"What are you doing way down here?" he asked the creature, surprised to find it so deep in the castle's structure.
"Following you," the crow said.
"To what do I owe such an honour?"
"Your stupidity," the red crow said, stretching its wings as though stiff. One of its small eyes glinted in the dim light from the glowing, transparent tubes at the apex of the ceiling.
"Really," he said. If the red crow was just insulting him, let it. If it wanted to talk it would have to start things off. He suspected it did want to talk. It was here for a good reason.
"Yes, really," the red crow said testily. It flapped off the perch on the wall and landed in the middle of the floor, facing him. It folded its wings. A little dust swirled around it. "You won't listen to reason, so I'm going to have to rub your nose in things."
"Are you indeed?" Quiss said coldly. He didn't like its tone. "What 'things'?"
"Call it truth," the red crow said, spitting the word out like a lump of gristle.