Earwig Read online

  Also by B. Catling

  The Vorrh

  The Erstwhile

  The Cloven

  Earwig

  B. Catling

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Coronet

  An Imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © B. Catling 2019

  The right of B. Catling to be identified as the Author of the

  Work has been asserted by him in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

  means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be

  otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that

  in which it is published and without a similar condition being

  imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  eBook ISBN 9781473687134

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  To my nippers: Jack, Flossie and Finn

  Contents

  One

  BROWN

  Two

  YELLOW

  BLACK

  RED

  Three

  WHITE

  PINK

  GINGER

  SILVER

  GREY

  Four

  GOLD

  SEPIA

  GREEN

  Five

  UMBER

  AMBER

  VIOLET

  PURPLE

  Acknowledgements

  One

  BROWN

  It was long and thin; its outer casing was dark brown, jointed about its neck, thorax, abdomen and lower waist. It was dry as a small desert’s wind and moved its limbs in a long, spiky manner without the slightest display of energy or commitment to action. The head looked entirely bald, but was in fact shaded by long strands of colourless hair that were swept back to an oily ridge at its back. The eyes were wide apart and heavily lidded with a dull expression. The ears and the polished shoes were the most remarkable features. Both had been fastidiously preened. Long tufts of yellowish hair sprouted from the ear’s thin helices and were drawn upwards to extend their length and in some species of sunlight appeared equally translucent, like antennae of tight amber. The shoes seemed far too long; reminiscent of the famous ‘big boots’ worn by the diminutive music hall star Little Titch. Except they were not straight and scuffed, but immaculate and curiously turned inwards in a way that suggested a scimitar. Their hard, light brown surfaces glistened like horn as they dangled under the shadow of the circular walnut table.

  It was in the kitchen nibbling at the crumbs of bread that surrounded a half-filled bowl of brown bitter coffee.

  Its name was Herr Aalbert Scellinc.

  The slender glass tube that curled down little Mia’s chin had been fashioned by a jeweller who had been a glass blower employed to shape intricate vessels and air-thin complex tubes and pipettes in a department of organic chemistry, belonging to the great University of Leiden. She wore it all her waking hours, only removing it for eating and sleep.

  Mia kept every possible drop of her saliva so that she could make more transitory teeth for her tiny, insatiable mouth. The original ones had all been removed early in her life, each tooth lovingly cleaned so that a fine plaster mould could be made from its unique shape and size. Then a series of rubber, watertight moulds had been made from the first impression; hundreds of them, so that they would never wear out and would always be there. Identical. She would decant her saliva into their delicate hollows three times a day, and place the rubbers on a green glass tray, which she slid into the freezing compartment of her humming refrigerator.

  The new teeth of her own frozen spit would be ready and waiting to be fitted into her gums in three hours. Or a little longer in the summer time, when the old paraffin-powered heart of the machine found it more difficult to pump icy fluids around its juddering copper pipes.

  Her gums had been surgically prepared to receive the constant changing harvest of restless ice. Minor readjustments were made as she grew. Fortunately her body never grew very much in those early years, so the operations were small and generally only conducted with a local anaesthetic, and sometimes with none at all. Because, in truth, Mia had come to like the sharp jolts of gleaming instruments and to savour the colours of gnawing aches. The mouth surgeon was the only person ever allowed into the tightly locked apartment.

  Mia lived with Herr Aalbert, in a spacious and high-ceilinged apartment on the third floor of a grand house, part of a long row that graced one of the wider boulevards of the city of Liège.

  The sound of the refrigerator echoed far out of its corner in the pristine kitchen. It was a solid upright wooden cabinet fringed and buckled with sturdy brass hinges and latching handles. It was the darkest thing in the room and indeed in the entire apartment. Its phases of gentle rumbling filled the glass and mirrored interiors of the six interconnecting rooms with an almost human and melodic warmth, unlike its predecessor that had taken up a room of its own and sounded like the furious crescendos of a hen coop competing with the gritty bass tones of a steamroller. Ferdinand Carré’s device had not been built for a domestic home. His machine for making ice was meant to stretch its pipes, boilers and ventricles in cargo ships, and was never intended to splutter near the gentility of a growing young woman.

  The new cold box had been severely modified to ensure that deep permafrost existed in each little tooth. The ice core was hard as steel, which meant that each tooth had a likely life of at least two hours or more depending on how inquisitive Mia’s tongue had been since its implanting. The new refrigerator and the new hardness of the teeth delighted Mia, who spent a considerable part of her life in relationship with it. But Herr Aalbert despised it, and shuddered each time it murmured, because it confused and distorted the audible contours of this flat he was paid to live in. He listened intently trying to understand the space around him. He had trained himself from childhood to know where everybody was and who might be approaching and who might be hurting somebody else. If he chose to, he could precisely locate the exact place in a distant room where a mouse was scratching. Or know on what floor a tap was dripping. Or locate the chimney and fireplace that encouraged the wind to moan there. The previous ice machine’s noise had been contained, locked up in its own room. The new machine had been made to share his habitat and voice out through open doors and corridors at will. Again its sound flooded out from the kitchen through all the rooms and he hissed ‘ Doodskist ’ under his hard thin breath.

  The great city of Liège bulges under the Netherlands and the weight of Germany to its east. But its knotted spine is pure Ardennes; a city of guns and garlic that speaks its Walloon, German and French through barriers of a gentle mutual contempt. Herr Aalbert’s parents had both been German, but he was fiercely Dutch and chose to speak in that tongue, with occasional flurries of French or English, most of which were reserved for matters of food and drink in the former and foul cursing in the latter. Aalbert’s father had spent time imprisoned in England and the tough old man spat out Anglo-Saxon abuse with great relish. In fact by the age of six Aalbert had been fluent in three tongues- worth of expletives. When away from respectable company, or those he was forced to ‘respect’, he frequently laun
ched into roared long sessions of meaningless swearing, like a valve letting off the frustrations and torments that come from a hypocritical subservience, manifest in both his fastidious care for Mia’s life and the sly ways he listened in on it. Drinking glasses of different shapes and sizes were placed in the rooms next to her bedroom and adjoining bathroom. Three for her sleeping and dressing. Four for her naked toilet, some so delicate that he could hear the curve and anxiety of her growing adolescence within the precision of one waxy ear.

  Herr Aalbert had never touched her and never intended to. He had been employed to wash, clean, cook and to never let Mia leave the confines of the six rooms. He reported weekly by telephone on the child’s health and well-being. He undertook his duties and obligation with diligence and a bony, humourless vigour. She was ‘safe’ in his care and he classified his listening as little more than a personal bonus, an extra observation that was well earned and caused no harm, as long as it remained secret.

  Herr Aalbert had been living with the child for the last three years, during which she had hardly ever spoken to him. Mia was self-possessed and indifferent to his attentions and he had long since shelved the little curiosity he had about her origins or identity, such speculations not being part of his job. He knew that she was not a mute because he had heard her talking to her teeth in a mumbled gummy voice that was surprisingly deep for one so small, sometimes in her bedroom and sometimes standing next to the freezing machine. But mostly he heard her through the glass that he held against the various walls of the apartments. There was something about the disengaged sound, the voice inside the wrong space, that gave him subdued pleasure.

  The truth was that he had never really trusted his eyes. He knew they played tricks. His mother had convinced him that he had not seen any of the brutal things his father had done. This had crippled his visual memory and stunted all imagination attached to sight. But meanwhile his hearing stayed intact and grew in seclusion, making a nest of remembrance from twisted sticks of shouts, twigs of cries and feathers of sobs. He trusted his listening and it had protected him and gifted him a concealed power.

  It had been his astute sense of hearing that had kept him alive in the mud of the Great War. Indeed it had been responsible for placing him on much drier land in 1917.

  His ‘gift’ had been discovered when a military field experiment had been seeking ‘volunteers’ for a special unit testing acoustic sensing devices, a pre-radar means of identifying approaching planes or airships. These primitive listening tools were two huge trumpets of metal; cones pointing wide-end upwards into the clouds and rain. From the thin tapering end ran a tube into the ears of the operator, who would swivel the device while searching the skies.

  There were many different prototypes tested, the most bizarre being a captured German headset that was comprised of two front-facing horns attached to a mask made of leather and rubber. Strong optical lenses, calibrated to infinity, were set into the goggle section. Aalbert and eight other men would stand in a curved row, slowly turning their heads to collect the sound of an engine chewing the clouds at some distant point. The lenses would then help them pinpoint the target for the banks of anti-aircraft guns. He would spend hours wearing this technical gargoyle, moving like a dummy or an insect. He had no doubt that this odd assignment and these impossible inventions had saved his life. So the ticks and stiffness they had instilled in him were a small price to pay.

  Eventually he was assigned to a lone hillock beyond the range of rifle fire and outside of artillery bombardment; there he would listen for hours on end. The uncanny amplification of the wasteland and its mournful skies channelled directly into his brain. He had learnt to unhook most of his thinking while he endured these listening duties, and found something like solace in the grey swivelling landscape between his ears. It was during these moments of concentration and expectation that he had learnt to focus ten per cent of his awareness elsewhere, to separate a small section of alertness for emergencies.

  He and two other listeners were stationed at the rim of no man’s land, each attached to their own set of enormous trumpets. They looked out over the banks of a flooded and cratered river and listened through all the water for the drone of incoming enemies.

  For some reason nobody could explain, one of the distant pieces of long range artillery must have swivelled around to fire one, meaningless round in their direction. Aalbert had heard its approaching whistle long before the other two men had heard the distant report. He snatched the tubes out of his ears and ducked down, covering his head. The shell exploded at a safe distance, five hundred metres from where they were installed. After the explosion he got up and brushed the loose mud off his trench coat, turning towards his comrades. One was still standing, the other lay face down in the drying mud; both were still connected to their cones. He cautiously walked closer to the standing man and, as his face came into sight, heard a trickle.

  Aalbert stopped rigid when he saw the standing man was dead. Blood was pulsing out of the empty eye sockets of his white face. When Aalbert was capable of dragging his attention away, he went to the other man and turned his stiff body over. The same terrible injury had occurred. They had both been shot, inside out, the terrible volume of the explosion rifling through their heads and finding the softest, least resistant exit.

  He had continued to man his post for three days until a relief party arrived, some of whom said they were disgusted that he had not covered the wrecked faces of his comrades.

  He had been concerned instead with becoming even more cautious and attentive to sounds from afar, and this had made him strain his hearing deeper into the apparatus.

  But it had been on last day of that solitary post that he heard something that devastated his life and convalesced him out of the war. He had been standing on the familiar high ground, pointing his array of cones out over the black stumps of tortured woodland. The birds were gone so there was no interference in the tubes other than the mournful wind and the constant rumble behind him of distant guns. Then the scratched voice came to him as sharp as a gramophone needle inscribing into the bone of his skull. It sounded like his father; the same London inflection and guttural tone of accusation. Just one word, gnarled under his breath, the same word he had branded the young Aalbert with when he caught him hovering near doors and sipping at conversations he could never understand.

  One word: Earwig.

  Aalbert had learnt to listen to movements, especially the old man’s. Aalbert was capable of predicting his changes of mood in advance of them occurring. He heard minute changes of posture and breath and their infliction into the furniture and floorboards. The quietness of growing irritation, the splintering of simmering anger and the inevitable screaming hurtle into rage. The army had been a blessing, an escape from the tyranny and depression of his home, and he had never returned even after he was released from military service and medical rehabilitation.

  Like so many of the wounded, aimless and disappointed, he drifted after the war was over, wanting to distance himself from the killing grounds of northern France. For a while he found work on the grit and aggregate barges that plied the great Maas, mainly as the nightwatchman, keeping guard while the rest of the crew were sleeping or roistering in the town that clung to the river’s banks. Something about the endlessness of the water and quietness of drifting with tons of floating stone gave him the sense of distance that he needed. But the work was part-time and he often found himself between jobs stranded in the countryside at the water’s edge.

  He finally stepped off the boats in Limburg and found shabby employment in the towns and cities of that domain. At the age of fifty-one Herr Aalbert had been a kitchen assistant, a male nurse and a nightwatchman – before securing the present comfort of his position with Mia.

  The job in the advert that he applied for had nothing to do with the one he was eventually given. He often wondered why such an elaborate ruse had been necessary and also wondered why he had been chosen over the other applicants. He
knew he was a man of original and defined talents, but nobody else had ever seen them, ever. His speculation on this was a narrow thing and without any sustained enquiry.

  ‘Caretaker Required’, the advert said. ‘Foreign owners require a trustworthy person to be responsible for the upkeep of a grand apartment in central Liège for a minimum of three to a maximum of five years. The successful applicant is expected to live alone and not allow access to any other person without previous permission of the owners. One of the rooms in the apartment is also occupied.’ Aalbert read this in a newspaper in Au Metro, a bar that he frequented twice a week when he could afford it, preferring early weekday mornings when the place was almost empty. On that day slanted sunlight warmed the dull hum of its emptiness, chaffing the last night’s smell of drink and tobacco. He made his application there and then asking Gervas the owner for a pencil and paper.

  The interview was held six weeks later in Maastricht, the Catholic Church’s strongest foothold in protestant Holland. The address was impressive, being in the Vrijthof , the ancient city’s central square in the shadow of the Basilica of Saint Servatius. He approached a three-storey, quietly imposing house, with its door open onto the activity of a bright morning. Aalbert read the letter again and started to climb the weary creaking wooden stairs, the sounds of the world outside dispersing. The office was on the top floor, tiny and unnamed. The landing outside was dim and silent; the only illumination he could discover was coming from a small skylight. He knocked on the door with a poorly stencilled number 10 on its frosted glass, which rattled in its putty. Nobody answered. He stepped back and waited. Then, taking the letter out again, he held it up towards the skylight to read. This was certainly the place. He then tried the brass door knob. It was locked. He turned back towards the dark stairs when a bell rang, sharp and pointed in a resonance that stung his inner ear.

  Aalbert had a problem with bells. Over the years they had become attached to some of his most distressing memories, which he had long since buried. Their insistent sound made his deep anxieties turn in their shallow graves. He waited for the sound to fade and then returned to the door and twisted the knob again. This time it opened and the surprise of this did not give him time to marvel at how it could have occurred.