'Even before the Schism, it got to be bad enough: all of them spoilt by greed—like him—then all fighting and arguing amongst themselves, the miserable fools.'
Loofah was back on the path now, gliding through the lapping waves of bluebells, through the infinite colonnade of melting plastic tree trunks. The shape slid along beside him, like a distortion on the lenses of his spectacles.
'But afterwards, after the split, with everybody stuck over here and each divided into—into…'
'The ones who are two?'
A stunted Scots pine nodded, quivering at the memory.
'It went from bad to worse. For then not only were they at each other's throats, but also at—at…'
'Their own throats?'
'Divide and conquer—the fat toad from over there had won. Or at least that's how it seemed. Until…'
Stumbling on some ancient loss, the shimmering paused again. Loofah, too, was silenced by sorrow. The path was suddenly steep and dark, diving down between dense stands of mutant pine and hydra-headed hazel. Its stony banks were coated wet emerald moss, like a fungal growth, and dog's mercury—the ancient plant of darkness—spilled out between the narrow trunks beyond.
'Mrs Turner,' the moss eventually whispered, its half-voice forming this single, enigmatic name.
'Mrs Turner?'
'Sometimes, just sometimes, when all seems to be lost, someone appears, someone special, a beacon of hope in the darkness of despair. Mrs Turner was our beacon.'
A middle-aged woman with a bulldog face peered out of the submarine gloom, a torpedo Havana clenched between her determined lips, two fingers raised in a triumphal 'V'.
'She was one of us, one of the divided damned, but even so she somehow managed to bring some sort of peace,' shimmered the broken sunlight, 'First within herself, and then to the rest of us, within ourselves and between ourselves. And when we'd stopped fighting with ourselves, we could turn our attention to the one who was the enemy of all.'
'Mr Stobart?'
A narrow shaft of golden light piercing the dense canopy pulsed in affirmation.
'We were special people, don't you forget that. And when she got us working together, all for one and one for all, there was nothing we couldn't do, nothing. I know you won't believe me, you young ones never do, but we amounted to something then, we really did.' Quivering geriatric pride slid quietly over the lethal foliage of a holly bush. 'None of us could have done it alone, not even her, but together we managed it, together we found a way of breaching the fat toad's barriers. We were able to build a way back, you see, a way back to over there.'
The rhythm of its excitement pulsed in Loofah's chest like a battle chant.
'Of course it wasn't big enough for all of us—it was a raft not a ship—but we had a plan. A few of us would get through, you see, and squash the toad. Then, with him gone, we would be able to put things back to how they used to be, mend the great wound, heal the two into one.'
It paused, while a ripple of yellow-flowered nettles shimmered with nostalgic joy.
'Freedom—unity—it was within our grasp. We could almost smell it. And I was to be in that first wave, part of the vanguard. Mrs Turner chose us personally, you know. She could depend on the pair of us, she said, we were one of her best. You should have seen us then. Trained to perfection, we were—a fighting machine. I was younger then, of course, but—.'
'And Norbert? Was he chosen too?' interrupted Loofah, stamping firmly on the blossoming flower of its nostalgia. Crushed back to harsh reality, the nettles began to shimmer with the familiar rancour.
'He most certainly was not,' they hissed, 'In fact right from the start my once-friend played a very minor role in Mrs Turner's efforts—involved enough to know what was going on, but no more than that. Of course the rest of us had no inkling then that they had plans of his own.'
The shape convulsed with sudden fury.
'Our intention was to squash the toad, heal the Schism, then freedom for everybody, same as before,' spluttered the half-choked breeze, 'But that wasn't good enough for your dear friend there. Oh no, the greed had soaked into every crevice of their nasty little souls—if he still had one, that is—and he was rotten from the top of his pretty head to the tips of their painted toenails. "Same as before" wasn't what they wanted, because that meant sharing. And like the toad, the poisonous little weevil didn't like to share.'
'So Norbert wanted to be like Mr Stobart?'
'If he could go through on their own, he thought they could crush the toad and take its place. And because of what he had learnt from Mrs Turner, they would be able to make sure that no-one could ever get through again after him—and so ensure that he could hold onto their new empire and keep the rest of us trapped over here, forever divided and without hope.'
They had reached the bottom of the slope. The path was wider here, less stony. The woods too had opened out, with adolescent ash and energetic young oaks vying for dominance of the valley bottom.
'He waited until the way was nearly ready, until we were about to go through, and then they struck. We who were once his friends, he knifed us in the back and stole what we had built. And he would have succeeded, there was nothing we could do, for he had taken us all completely by surprise.'
Then the shimmering light paused—and then smiled grimly to itself.
'But?' asked Loofah.
'The two halves of the same whole,' murmured the light, 'They did not act as one.'
'Then it wasn't both of them that betrayed you,' said Loofah, 'But I thought you said that—.'
'Two sides of the same coin, two treacherous minds, indistinguishable in their maggot-eaten corruption: indistinguishable—but divided. Running in the same direction, you understand, but on different tracks.'
A sudden waft of rotting flesh choked the air. The culprit, a phallic stinkhorn toadstool, jutted impudently out of the black leaf-mould a few yards from the path, apparently unashamed by either its obscene shape or its odorous personal problem.
'The rot of their greed was identical, you see, and complete. If there had been just one tiny sliver untouched, then they might have been able to work as one—and succeed. As it was, each planned as the other, but in divided ignorance. For each aimed to betray the other along with the rest of us.'
The path crossed a sluggish stream over old railway sleeper. The ground here was wet and dank near the stagnant water; stands of nettle and writhing bramble exalted in the exuberant fertility of the rich black soil.
'They struck at the same time and in the same way. And when victory was within their grasps, they found themselves face to face, fighting for the same single prize. And this is what gave Mrs Turner a chance. For while the traitors battled with each other, she was able to hide part of what we had created, to stop either of them from finding our precious raft.'
'Gosh,' exclaimed Loofah, 'So there's a sort of raft hidden away somewhere that can take a person from here to there. It sounds a bit like the double woman, except that she's a woman not a type of—water—vehicle…'
His naïve observation stuttered lamely into silence as the penny finally dropped.
'But for our leader, though, it was all over,' moaned the breeze above the low canopy, thankfully disregarding his silliness, 'Because Mrs Turner could not save herself. When the hiding of the way was done, you see, she had to destroy herself to avoid capture, fusing her two into the unity of blessed oblivion.'
Again Loofah felt the sharp pain of its loss and winced.
'But without telling anyone about the hiding place?' he asked.
'Before she left us, she spoke briefly to officials,' whispered a tangled mass of bramble, 'I believe that her last words were mainly about the one who will come to find what she had hidden, though by all accounts she said little. I understand that more has come to light since, but you'll know more about that than I do. After all, you're the one she spoke of, aren't you? Her chosen one, her new blue-eyed boy, the Johnny-come-lately who's going to reap the rewards of all our hard work and sacrifice, the—.'
'But the rest of you?' Loofah said, cutting through the green slime of its outflow, 'Couldn't you have tried again after Mrs Turner had, um, passed away?'
'Oh we tried, believe me how we tried. Without her, though, it was useless, without her the fools couldn't keep from falling back into conflict. And soon it was the same as before: one against one, self against—' it shuddered in mute agony '—self. They destroyed themselves, the idiots, one by one and two by two, until there was none left but for a few lost, wandering, cursed…'
And with an optical convulsion, it sobbed into silence.
'And Norbert?'
'Is there any justice in the whole wide universe? Can anyone, anywhere, have any trust in a government that allows the betrayed to perish while the traitor lives?' Black bile burst across the sun-dappled nettles. 'For, by duplicity and guile, the two halves of the poisonous weevil have somehow managed to stay alive—and apart.'
The shape quivered like a tortured amoeba and began to shrink away, dissolving in the acid of its resentment.
'And he's still hoping to find it, isn't he?' said Loofah, as the bitterness of stale vomit gagged in his throat, 'The hidden way to over there I mean, the raft, The Woman Who Looks Both Ways.'
For a time it got smaller and smaller, saying nothing. Then it paused and the bitterness seemed to ease.
'I have heard it said—rumours only, you understand, and certainly nothing official—that when she hid the way we had made, Mrs Turner fitted it with a little surprise for our foreign friend. It just might be that if he ever does find the Two-Faced object of his dreams, things might not work out quite as he expects.'
And with a last pulse the shape was gone, leaving Loofah alone on the nettle-choked path, struggling to swallow the bile-soaked, half-digested mess of its words.
Mrs Fulbright's directions had been crystal-clear and led Loofah out of the woods, through a couple of sunlit fields of buttercups and daisies, over a stile (asleep on the job—not even a wobble) to a road at the edge of a sizable village, where resided—so the spider had assured him—the person with the knowledge he needed to continue his quest.
The road, lined with bungalows and houses of every vintage since Victoria sat on the throne, curved gently downhill until it hit, square on, a vast village green. It was a dizzyingly empty space, where, fleeing the wind, tiny ripples scudded after each other across the emerald plain, swirling around the feet of white-clad cricketers, while on the far shore a scattering of spectators watched from deckchairs and a white scoreboard showed the visitors needed sixty-seven to win.
A row of nineteen-sixties detached family homes overlooked the green. In the drive of one of these, a middle-aged man was bent over a Black and Decker Workmate in front of his open garage door, his electric sander howling like an Arctic wolf as he ran it over the elegant curves of a mahogany table leg. He looked up, saw Loofah, and smiled broadly, wiping dusty perspiration from his brow with a muscular bare forearm.
'Good afternoon! Lovely day, isn't it?' he called over the unearthly howl of his power tool.
The electric wail of the sander dived suddenly to silence as the power was cut, just as a solid thwack thudded in the liquid air and Loofah turned to see the red ball bounce merrily across the green waves. The dazzle-white batsmen returned to their creases to a polite ripple of applause.
'That sounded like a good hit,' said the DIY enthusiast, coming up the drive, 'Was it a six?'
'A four, actually,' said Loofah, 'but a cracking hit nevertheless. Um, I wonder if you could help me. I'm looking for a chap called Stubbington and I was told that he lives in this village—you wouldn't happen to know where I could find him, would you?'