Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

Pen had left the white door slightly open, so Triss settled herself by the jamb so that she could peer in through the crack. She found herself looking into a small, dim room partially obscured by the figure of Pen, who was still hovering just beyond the threshold. The lighting in the room was bleached and palpitating, like that in the auditorium she had just left.

‘Miss Penelope Crescent.’ Somebody was striding forward to shake Pen by the hand, somebody male and very tall. His voice was educated, confident and designed to carry. At the same time there was an edginess in his tone, as if he was being distracted by thoughts of something very exciting. He stepped backwards again, fully into Triss’s line of sight, and she saw him clearly.

Her first reaction was shock. The stranger was not just handsome, he was movie star handsome. His short, carefully combed hair gleamed like honey, and he had a small, fair, Douglas Fairbanks moustache that curled up at the ends. He did not wear a proper daytime suit with jacket and vest of the sort her father always donned on weekdays. Instead he was dressed in the latest fanatically casual fashion among those her parents called ‘the sporty set’. He wore a V-necked sweater over his crisp white shirt, the comfortable, loose trousers known as ‘Oxford bags’, and two-toned, tan-and-white ‘spectator’ shoes. Over these hung a sleekly tailored grey-brown overcoat, and Triss could only assume that he had just arrived from some much more glamorous engagement.

‘Always a pleasure. Please.’ He took another step back and spread his arm in a broad, welcoming gesture. As he did so, Triss thought she caught a gleam under his shirt cuff, a hint of metal on his wrist. Pen accepted the tacit invitation, passing him to move further into the room.

Triss swallowed, then pushed both her luck and the door an inch or two more, so that the crack widened and she gained a better view.

It was easy to make out the source of the fitful lighting. To the right, the whole of one wide wall was a seething, quivering mass of silver-and-grey action. It was a movie, there was no doubt about that, but there was no projector in sight, no blanched beam of light from across the room slanting down to strike the wall. Triss watched the great moving picture in bewilderment as some mute heroine, bristling with ringlety virtue, shook her head rapidly and shunned the gifts of a Lothario with seal-sleek hair. Only when a title card flashed up on the screen with the words back-to-front did Triss realize that she must be looking at the back of the auditorium’s screen.

Triss had heard that some cheap fleapits whose screens were nothing but hung sheets sometimes put a few audience seats behind the sheet, charging half price to those who saw the film back to front. But the surface on which this film flickered looked like a wall, not a sheet. And if it were thin enough for the light to pierce, why could she no longer hear the piano music or the murmur of the audience?

The rest of the room was extraordinary for its ordinariness. Aside from its walls, which were lined with the same feathery paper as the corridor, it seemed to be a perfectly normal parlour, complete with floral-pattered chairs, a grandmother clock, a cloth-covered table sporting a tea set and a wireless. Triss could not imagine why such a room would be lurking behind a cinema screen, however, and the light made everything look restless. Shadows jumped and beat like wings.

Pen settled herself a little awkwardly on one large gilt-edged armchair facing towards the reverse screen. Her feet did not touch the ground, and she had pulled her sleeves down over her knuckles, a sure sign that she was on edge.

‘A good choice. The best seat in the house.’ The stranger with the movie-star moustache moved over to stand beside her chair, gazing at the back-to front film. ‘But then, the clearest way to see things always is from the hidden side. Creep up on the world from behind, catch it unawares, and then you see it for what it really is—’

‘Mr Architect,’ Pen interrupted in a small, determined voice, ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

Mr Architect? Triss stared at the stranger with renewed interest. Her father had spoken as if somebody he knew through his work might have been responsible for her fall into the Grimmer. As a civil engineer, her father worked with a lot of architects. Could this man be one of them?

As Triss stared at the Architect, she experienced a growing sense of discomfort. He was handsome, she could see that, but when she thought about it, it was difficult to say how he was handsome. His charm was like a sunbeam right in the eyes, smudging out all detail. When she did squint hard with her mind, she found herself glimpsing bits and pieces through the glare that were not really like Douglas Fairbanks after all. His eyes were very pale, she realized, a light shade of a colour that she could not remember from one moment to the next. His teeth were too white, almost blue-white. His chin was narrow, and there was a kink at the corner of his smile that made her think of a treacherous raised nail on a stair carpet.

‘So I understood from our telephone call.’ The Architect surveyed Pen for a long moment. ‘You asked for an appointment… and here we are.’

Triss’s mind flashed back to Pen’s furtive departure from their father’s study. She did use the telephone! She used it to call this man! But… why didn’t the operator have any record of it? And why was she calling him anyway?

‘They say that a picture is worth a thousand words,’ continued the Architect, ‘and your face, Miss Crescent, is a picture. By now I would expect it to have a thousand happy words to say, but it seems not.’

‘Of course I’m not happy!’ snapped Pen, finding her confidence in her ever-to-hand satchel of rage.

‘No.’ He regarded her with his pale eyes. ‘I suppose you are the sort who will never be happy, but who will make the world far more interesting in your attempts to become so. Ah well. Never mind.’

Pen blinked, and Triss could almost feel the Architect’s clever words simply flowing past her, like elegant brook eddies around a small and determined rock.

‘I’m not happy,’ Pen went on doggedly, ‘and you know why. You tricked me!’

‘Tricked.’ It was not a question, nor an expression of outrage. The Architect let the word fall flatly, rather as he might have dropped an unidentified oddment on the table to examine it. He paused for a few seconds, raising his eyebrows in contemplation, then shook his head. ‘I am not sure what you mean by that.’

‘Yes, you are!’ Pen scowled, and her heels kicked hard at the leg of the regal chair. ‘We made a deal! And I did everything you asked! I got you the diary pages and the brush and all the other things! I even got Triss to come to the Grimmer! You said if I did all of that, you’d take her away!’

Hiding behind the door, Triss had to cover her mouth with both hands to stop a cry of outrage escaping her.

The anger was so overwhelming that it seemed to be something outside her, like a vast animal watching over her shoulder, breathing on her neck and making her skin hot.

‘Well?’ The Architect looked about as concerned as a cat on a summer wall.

‘I thought you’d take her, and that would be the end of it! I just wanted her gone. I never asked for… for that !’ Pen made a wild, rather unfocused gesture, as though waving towards a thought present only to her mind’s eye.

‘I always keep my bargains.’ The tall man smiled. ‘She will be gone. In mere days.’

Triss swallowed, anger yielding once again to fear. She was still in danger then.

‘ Days? ’ exploded Pen. ‘Days of that ? This isn’t what I wanted, and you know it! It’s horrible! I hate it!’