The Ghost Road Read Free Page B

snake. Zigzag markings, black
on yellow, orange eyes, forked tongue flickering out of that wide, cynical
(anthropomorphic rubbish) mouth. Dodgson went white. He sat down,
collapsed rather, on a tree stump and the girls fanned him with their hats,
while father caught the snake in a cleft stick and threw it far away, a black s against the sky unravelling as it fell.
    Later he went back to look for it, spending an hour
searching through the flamy bracken, but only found a cast-off skin draped over
a stone, transparent, the brilliant markings faded, the ghost of a snake.
    Why was the devil shown in the form of a snake? he asked his father, because it was the only question he
knew how to ask.
    Later there'd been other questions, other ways of
finding answers. Once, while he was home for the weekend, Katharine sat on an
adder, and ran home screaming. He'd gone straight out and killed it, or so he
thought, intending to dissect it at Bart's. Finding the family in the
drawing-room, he'd tipped the snake out on to the hearthrug to show them, and
found himself confronted by an adder that was very far
from dead. The girls screamed and hid behind the sofa, while he and his father
and Charles trampled it to death.
    How do you think about an incident like that now? he wondered, beginning the second circle. Probably every
generation thinks the world of its youth has been changed past recognition, but
he thought for his generation—Moffet's too, of course—the task of making
meaningful connections was quite unusually difficult. A good deal of innocence
had been lost in recent years. Not all of it on battlefields.
    He lowered Moffet's leg and walked round the bed. From
here he could see, through a gap in the screens, the drawings of Alice.
Suddenly, with Moffet's paralysed leg clamped to his side as he closed the
circle, Rivers saw the drawings not as an irrelevance, left over from the days
when this had been a children's ward, but as cruelly, savagely appropriate. All those bodily transformations causing all those problems. But they solved
them too. Alice in Hysterialand.
    'There,' he said, putting the leg down. 'Now can you
prop yourself up a bit?'
    Moffet raised himself on to his elbows and looked down
at his legs. 'Quite apart from anything else,' he said, enunciating each word
distinctly, 'it looks bloody obscene.'
    Rivers looked down. 'Ye-es,' he agreed. 'But it won't
when we get below the knee. And tomorrow the sensation in
this area'—he measured it out with his forefingers—'will be normal.'
    Their eyes met. Moffet would have liked to deny it was
possible, but his gaze shifted. He'd already begun to invest the circles with
power.
    Rivers touched his shoulder. 'See you tomorrow
morning,' he said.
    Quickly, he ran downstairs and plunged into the warren
of corridors, wondering if he'd have time to read the files on the new patients
before the first of them arrived for his appointment. He glanced at his watch,
and something about the action tweaked his memory. Now that would be 'interesting', he thought. An innocent young boy becomes aware that he is
the object of an adult's abnormal affection. Put bluntly, the Rev. Charles
Do-do-do-do-Dodgson can't keep his hands off him, but —thanks to that
gentleman's formidable conscience—nothing untoward occurs. The years pass,
puberty arrives, friendship fades. In the adult life of that child no
abnormality appears, except perhaps for a certain difficulty in integrating the
sexual drive with the rest of the personality (What do you mean 'perhaps'? he
asked himself), until, in middle age, the patient begins to suffer from the
delusion that he is turning into an extremely large, eccentrically dressed
white rabbit, forever running down corridors consulting its watch. What a case
history. Pity it didn't happen, he thought, pushing the door of his
consulting-room open, it would account for quite a lot.
    He thought, sometimes, he understood Katharine's
childhood better than his own.
    Cheshire Cat !