He is a king, in cities.
A king, or a duke, or an executive. A powerful man, in places other men inhabit. Power is reciprocal like that: he needs their recognition. Together they build an urban hierarchy, a pyramid that extends far above the closed system of their minds. Each charts their course, their competitors. In every list, he ranks somewhere near the top.
So he is empowered, he is an incarnation of the city.
Here the rain whips down, slalom, zig-zag. The mud is an ice churn, thick with crystals, fibrous with the ruptured green of grass and dislocated roots. Here he is something else entirely: weak-shouldered, unmighty. A sprig, something to be rattled in high winds and carried away.
His power is all bound up in electric money. It lives in spreadsheets, in binary transmission, in the pendulum flicker of symbols on an overhead brokerage screen.
He is standing in ruins now, and there is little chance of his being recognised.
This land is interstitial. Once it was more; it was perhaps even a city of its own. All that is archaeology, now. All that is bones and theory. This land is unpeopled and desolate. It exists between two kingdoms like connective tissue, a fatty neck. They have no use for it. There is no strategic value in grey-green heathland, in twisted plains that fold themselves under earth and collapse into pools of ice, into stagnant, rotten hollows. What survives in a place like this is hardy, and remote, and even these things are being choked out across a long winter.
Really, he had made them a very generous offer.
So now this land is his. Purchased sight unseen, certified by title deeds and letters of dominion. The papers are stamped, catalogued, laid to rest: paper and ink in a city he’s never even visited, and now he is the king of moors a thousand thousand miles away. He never had to sign his name for it. There are intermediaries for that, vessels of his power. Tactile, useful hands that reach ever-outwards, a single hungering organism.
It’s a curse, in a way. The need for acquisition. For possession. He curses it now, because it has brought him here, to an unloved moorland that the wind and the rain are trying to tear apart, that is held in place by a ragged lattice of weeds and straining, contorted shrubbery.
His power must have followed him at least part of the way. There is one other man here, knee-deep in gorse and shivering through the shards of rain. He is holding a storm-punched, shiny-black umbrella, and is trying to manipulate the bowl of it over both of their heads.
The executive notices that, and twists away: enough that the umbrella must be positioned over him alone. He pushes the angle of his body out into the path of the wind, and the point is made. The other man stretches out his arm, relinquishes his claim. Dryness is a privilege reserved for the employer alone.
Some distance away there are cars. Candy-coloured, or maybe poisonous. Colours nature has not seen before. The moorland has taken pains to recolour them, to crust them over in weeping browns and soft, mouldering yellows. The soil here is gritty with stone and flint. It has been smeared across the cars’ plastic skin. When it is hosed away, it will leave behind a white web of interlocking scar tissue.
Behind their blacked-out windows are the executive’s family. They are looking out, without enthusiasm, at their new home. Scarred and barren, like the surface of the moon. The only structure here is one brick high.
Somewhere, on a padded back seat, someone’s child is crying.
What his children fail to appreciate is genealogy. It’s lineage. Belonging. This is their homeland, after all.
He filled out a form and gave a sample and mailed it away, and these were the results. This is the place of their origin. In brackish water, amongst the shed skins of fat-bodied, segmented insects. This is where their history begins.
The executive nudges one block of that history with his boot. A stringy lick of slime clings to the leather and he regrets the action. Watches as it eats into the shine.
The remnants of the manor house are low stones only, mossed over and softened by weather. Together they form a chalk outline of a house, like a crime scene. There was a building here, until the moorland murdered it. All that remains is a skeletonised border, half-swallowed, overgrown.
Follow the stones round one by one. Sharp corners, rooms walled away—this was a house with secrets. There is only so much that a footprint shows. The foundation of it is complex, polygonal, stamped down across the marsh. A great house then, a shadowed one.
Trace the spine of the back wall. See how it twists and dives, how it contorts itself around muscled mass, around knotted vegetable rigidity. See how it works its way between great roots like a needle, how it staples itself through the clawed grasp of history’s one true survivor.
Unfelled and unrepentant.
They look up at it together, the executive, his assistant. It almost certainly isn’t an apple tree.
It rises from the earth like a serpent, like a thing about to strike. Its bark might be leather: fleshy, worked upon. Supple with scarification. It spreads itself above them and offers no shelter. Its arms are greying, empty, sharpened into points and aimed at heaven in retribution. It might be twenty feet tall. Maybe less. There is nothing in this landscape to compare it against, except the two of them. For no good reason at all, the two of them do not want to approach it.
The chronology of it escapes him. Stone under root, and yet stone clambering over bark, like a low bridge. The two things woven into one, a single beast, a double-helix punched into bruised terrain. Perhaps they grew together. Perhaps they always intertwined. This was how his ancestors lived, then: bough-shaded, under a roof of dried leaves, in a home enshrouded by the great grey monster of this tree.
In his other hand, the assistant is holding a clipboard. Silently, he passes it across. The executive flips back and forth. The paper is sodden, collapsing to the touch. The ink bleeds across the tips of his fingers.
This thing almost certainly isn’t an apple tree. On that they are agreed. And yet.
There is one stone more. The only stone within the perimeter, the only stone inside the house-that-was. White, and scrubbed, and carved well flat. Flared with linework at its base. It might be a table. It might be an altar.
Three apples rest on its surface.
The first is shiny-smooth and taut. Edible, even. The second is thin skin tented over decay, bulging with rot. Rain tears bullet-holes in its fraying canvas. The third is liquidised, it is rags and smears and a sharp, fertile stink. The storm is poised to wipe it clean away, it is melting before their eyes, they have come at the last possible moment. The lipped surface of the stone fills, overpours, sluices away.
Two apples remain.
Beneath them are words, deep-carved. Or one word, enacted many times. A word written in a language that passed through this place so very long ago, that left its own footprint on the skin of the world.
The words on the altar, floating beneath a scum of rot and rainwater:
MALO MALO MALO MALO
The executive sees it all. The tree, the skeleton of the manor, the fruit, the stone.
There is a greenness to the air. A presence. It runs electric against the surface of his soaked skin. Perhaps—
A long blare. Someone is pressing the car horn. Underneath that, the muffled shout of a child, safely insulated behind glass. He turns away.
His name is Michael Carrington, and he has come to build his family a home.
“You’re right,” says Michael Carrington. “First things first, that tree will have to go.”
It is three nights later and he cannot sleep. This is not unusual.
He is a powerful man. Like so many powerful men, he is getting a divorce. Or rather, he is being divorced. A divorce is happening to him. Michael Carrington is a passive onlooker in the process of his divorce.
On paper, this is not the case. On paper, he is fighting very hard. There are useful hands here as well. There are intermediaries to bare their teeth. It’s what they’re paid to do.
In the privacy of his mind, however, he takes no part. Michael Carrington is interested in family only, family past and future. It anchors him in this world, and without his wife he wants an anchor very much indeed.
A house, then. A seat. An ancestral home. Populated with children, with descendants. He loves his children. He keeps them with him always. Even the baby, whose mother sits and frets on the far side of oceans. He is a powerful man. How else is he to demonstrate his love?
So he is being divorced, he is building a house, he is running a business. He cannot sleep. The hotel air conditioning is very loud.
Today has brought bad news on every front. Projections shrink. Trends are against him. He is voiding money from an open wound, he is bleeding out. There is a lot of blood in him, but even so. Only so much a man can take.
His wife has heard about the nanny. He doesn’t know how she managed that. She should be cut off, adrift from her resources. An exile.
All the same, she knows. With that the one sweetness in his life folds in, becomes sour.
Progress goes badly on the house. He doesn’t speak the language of the men at work there. They guess and grasp at his. From what he understands it is the soil. It is bad soil, it is flawed.
The roots of the tree were far-reaching. Dragged up, they pulled the land with them. What is left is absence, what remains is abyss. It swallows foundations whole, it drags the builders deep. It is waterlogged, too. A swamp sinking downwards.
His sleepless mind is straying, now. The swamp is all around him. The carved stone at his feet is an anchor-weight, it drags him down. He tries to read the words but they are plummeting out of reach.
The earth holds him fast, or he holds it. He webs through it, grasping with tiny hands, seeking moisture, succour. He pulls nutrients up the long frame of himself.
The sun is a fevered flicker. The soil is stiff with frost. He is the sole feature of a featureless landscape. He stretches out, above, below. His family, past and future. Anchored in history, in loam, in sky.
An animal approaches. Something sharp about it, bladed. An axeman.
It takes measurements, practices its swing. There is an art to this, to his dismemberment.
He is exquisitely rooted to the earth, and cannot swerve away.
“Please,” he says, or tries to say, but the word comes out as something else instead.
He startles in a tangle of bedsheets. Perhaps he can sleep, after all.
Weeks pass and he no longer has an empire. He watches it from a distance, it is carrying on and he is not. The trends were against him. The board followed. Michael Carrington is being divorced from his own company, and this time he fights, this time he hammers on the doors and foams between his teeth, but no one is listening.
The symbols flicker on the brokerage screens. The market applauds his sacrifice. The gods are pleased. Electric money dances in the spreadsheets of lesser men.
All that remains are his children, his land. He is not a powerful man, these days. He is merely rich. He phones down, extends his hotel stay another week. And could someone please take a look at the air conditioning?
He is dreaming often now, dreaming even during the day, even while he is walking in the street. Catcalls from pedestrians, and the tugging hand of his middle child. Daddy, this way, I think?
They are staying in an adjoining kingdom, a half-day separate from his domain. Things here are not so bleak: there are shops, and restaurants. Things to do.
In shops he is blank, a spare automaton. In restaurants he performs the necessary mechanics. His children squeal and call his name. How fortunate they are to have a nanny to wipe their chins, to clamber under tables and lift their pencils from the floor. He is altogether distracted.
The axeman tests the air. Squares its shoulders against the task.
He has never screamed in a restaurant before.
Pictures come in from the site, depicting great calamity. Good thing he has screamed already, good thing he has numbed the red raw piping of his throat. Great lips of earth peel back in waves. The abyss has no teeth. Only wet tongues that run their way across muddy borders. Bog oozes outwards.
Pictures come in, and he no longer needs to look. He sees it dreaming soon enough.
The land has been uncorked, it is collapsing down the plug-hole with a final, greedy suck. The moors are in decay. They are liquefying, they are rotted through and at last there is space enough for them to dribble down to nothing. This is his homeland. This is his place of belonging.
There are excuses. In honesty, the time of year is wrong. These things look better in the spring.
He writes back, asks them to try more concrete. His children need a home. The ceiling fan in the hotel bedroom no longer condescends to rotate.
The baby is getting sick. Michael Carrington suspects this is the hotel’s fault also. If concrete isn’t working, have they considered using steel? He has not built a house before. Perhaps steel has not been considered at an early stage.
All of the hotel furniture is made of metal. It is the first thing he grips as he jolts awake, as he leaves the axeman and returns to the dead heat of the hotel room.
The bedframe, like prison bars.
The side tables, smooth canisters, beading with condensation.
He doesn’t understand how it happens, how every time he wakes he finds another splinter lodged in the soft, prickled meat of his hands.
Another week passes, by his estimation. He measures time differently now. The cleaner comes mid-morning. The nanny returns with the children in the afternoons. He does not leave the hotel often.
He has phoned downstairs. His booking is indefinite.
He hasn’t heard about the site recently, the site or the business. He hasn’t heard very much at all since he smashed his phone. In the rubble of its face, an alert is flickering. Red blotches, red and blue, deep beneath the shatter and the frost. He can see them, from the corner of his eye. Seeping out of the screen, puddling on the plasticised hotel desk.
Outside, the world ticks on regardless. The world and all its cities too. Michael Carrington has taken a break, he will not be participating at this time.
There is a roughness on his baby’s skin. He has had this attended to. When he is not in his suite he is with a doctor, someone bleary-eyed and feigning patience. They tell him it is a minor reaction. Rashes like these come and go. It is easily soothed.
He takes a second opinion, and a third. Surely the baby has a fever? In rooms like these, it’s only natural. He feels as if he may have a fever himself.
The doctors nod their sympathy and avoid his eyes. They do not send him away but perhaps this is only because he gives them money.
He sits with the child, he tries to play. Tries to make some pampered, bedtime world. Pillows as forts. He knows from books that is the sort of game that children play. He has studied the theory.
He manages a minute, even two. Beyond that he is a man compelled; the game will have to wait. The pillows fall, plush monument in ruins. In the wreckage lays his child.
He pushes up one sleeve. Runs his thumb across the skin. The child protests and he shushes it. He closes his eyes. Opens them. Tries the redness of the weal again. Presses his fingers deeper, harsher. He has to get the sensation exactly right.
With eyes closed he sees the moors, he feels his own skin. A living, leather bark. A roughness to the touch. The same roughness?
The child begins to cry. Michael Carrington thinks he might well cry alongside it.
And then the child is asleep, and time has crept on once again. The nanny has been and gone, the scripted roar of the television heralds the coming of the night. His older, less beloved children are safely asleep.
He stands over the cot in the evening dark and resists the feeling that itches within him.
He has never resisted anything very long. He lifts the bundle in his hands, and my, isn’t baby getting heavy? His arms outstretched, he staggers a little under unaccustomed weight. Baby must be growing very fast now that father is in charge.
Tiny hands curl into his lapel and pin into place. He cranes his neck. Ruby-red, and clothed in human skin. Michael Carrington is allowed to breathe again.
The outside world has stopped its tick and chatter. They hunch against the cot and together form one shape. For the first time in days, the axeman seems very far away.
A chill blooms against his chest. A seeping, growing wet. He startles. Suppose baby has been sick? Now his breath is coming very fast.
He peels the child away. The fingers relax their hold, the little hands unlatch. The head lolls: gormless, contented. Liquid drips from the tiny curl of a mouth.
Irregular, constant. He watches it stream out between the sleeping lips.
The liquid is translucent, gummed with sugar. The scent is sharp, perfumed. It pools against the material of his shirt, it stains through. There is viscosity, a honey-feel.
It hangs down from baby’s mouth and falls in thick globules on his chest. He wishes for the axeman, then.
Somewhere on the far side of the room, lights dance beneath the cracked façade of his phone screen. He watches the baby face shift in the changing light. Red, blue. Clench, unclench. His baby is dreaming, it doesn’t even know that its mouth has fallen open, that it is leaking a clear, sugar sap.
Carefully, he replaces the swaddle on the other side of his chest.
They move as one shape. In the bathroom there are tissues, and medically unscented wipes.
He wonders what time it is across the sea, whether his wife is awake or asleep. Whether she can sense the transformation creeping across the surface of her child’s flesh.
The bathroom is full of mirrors. He sees himself: unshaven, cradling. He reflects back at himself from sharpened angles. The back of his head, the coloured material of his shirt.
One facet reflects his shoulder, and so he hefts his bundle, makes it so that baby’s sleeping head is lifted above the parapet.
He only sees it for a moment. When he checks, when he has steadied himself against the shower cubicle, when he inspects the face under the sterile bathroom lighting, it is his child once again.
For a moment, however, it is something entirely different. Something with knothole eyes. A splintered, grinning gargoyle face.
The city bids its king farewell. They have dimmed all the lights, they have enacted night time just for him. It is a mark of respect.
Its towers are sentinels now. They witness his passage grey-faced.
This is not his city, of course. His city is across the sea, his city and his wife.
Cities have been kind to Michael Carrington. He watches as the crests and peaks of his final city erode down around him. It happens in waves, collapsing first into suburbia, then outposts, and finally motorway service stations.
Sometime later, there is no sign that there was a city at all.
It is a half-day drive to his kingdom, even when it is the night. The roads are long and straight. There is no element of choice, on these roads. There is simply a destination.
He has left his children in the care of the nanny, or possibly the hotel. He is almost certain that he left them in the care of something.
The watery headlights of the hire car illuminate a row of thorn-bushes. A thicket of carnivorous wooden limbs, flailing at him from the dark.
There is a letter in the pocket of his jacket. He hopes that it explains it all.
He scratches at the back of one hand. It is cracked and ridged like old bark.
The letter makes it clear he has no choice. He loves his family. He does this entirely for them.
There is a layby, an appendix of old plastic tubing and crumpled polystyrene cups. He cuts the engine dead and smooths the letter on his lap. His lips move as he reads.
It doesn’t sound quite the way that he remembered, but it will have to do. He knows there are no further words to add.
He continues in his pilgrimage. The headlights of the car illuminate less and less. There is very little sound here, at the threshold of his domain. There is very little here to make it.
His breath. The modulated voice of the computer navigation. His world is shrinking down.
In all truth, he doesn’t need directions. His destination presents itself each time his eyes close.
The site is landmarked with a huddle of tents. Machinery stands idle, claws cramped, waiting for instruction. The behemoths are all still. Plastic sheeting has come partially unpegged, it is blowing crumpled kisses at his approach.
He leaves the letter on the front seat of the car.
Moments later, he returns. Leaves the keys as well. Slams the door behind.
Nine-tenths of what surrounds him is nocturnal horizon. The land is cold and shrivelled beneath an endless drift of sky. Heather underfoot, a brittle moorland coral. There is noise enough now, each footstep resounds with it.
Underneath it all, the frigid hunger of the peat.
At the centre he finds the crater. A wound that blisters outwards, puckering at the edges, turning them in. Collapsing heathland into rot and slime. This is his impact.
Michael Carrington is almost obliging as he goes. He skitters down the edges, half-standing at first. He falls, streaks himself with mulch. His progress is swifter after that, and lower to the ground.
He thrusts his hands ahead of him, he sends his fingers questing through the ichor and the bog. Even now there is hope of sorts, if only they will brush against the cool surface of the altar-stone.
Among knotted roots and frayed, grassy cable, his hope runs out.
So then, he will be brave. It is easy, now that he has exhausted the other choice. He gauges the place, moves shakily to his feet.
He wonders how it will happen. His skin is silvered in the moonlight, striped with shadow like the mottled paper of willow-bark.
Better him than the child. What he does now is noble, befitting of a king.
He stretches out his long hands before him and wills them into branches. His legs lock into the soil and he imagines they are taking root.
This is how his ancestors lived: bough-shaded, under a roof of dried leaves. Enshrouded in a grey bark. Perhaps Michael Carrington never belonged in cities after all. This is where his history begins.
He squeezes his eyes tight. He controls his breath. Waits.
Eventually, he has to admit that nothing is happening.
His body is his own, and untransformed. He is an executive in a ruined suit, standing in a mud pit in a long-abandoned field. The polished flank of his car gleams at him, reflecting moonlight.
If he finds a stone he can smash the window in, retrieve his set of keys.
He lifts his foot. Nothing happens.
The bog has thickened around him. He tries again.
His leg is in paralysis. Not a muscle of it has moved. He reaches down to massage it, and that doesn’t happen either, his spine has stiffened into place and rendered him a scarecrow.
His body is in the grips of rigor. Only his eyes are alert. Moonlight slips across the hood of his car.
Behind him, the heather crunches underfoot.
His neck is suddenly alive with gooseflesh.
From behind, the thing approaches. His skin prickles at the approaching tread. He longs to turn, and is thankful he cannot. He thought that he might be a tree, for this. It would be easier if he were a tree.
One final, crunching step. Silence, and then the cool whisper of its breath.
He screws shut his eyes and it makes no difference. He has arrived at his destination and the scene is overlaid. Waking, sleeping, he is rooted in this place.
Briefly, a testing pressure at the base of his neck. The sensation withdraws, and a long pause comes.
Michael Carrington stands upright, like a king, and behind him the axeman is readying its steel.
Daylight breaks, and workers come. A shred of white tarpaulin waves them in.
They stand around the edges of the crater and peer down. They recognise his car, of course.
It ripples through them in waves. Horror at first. Then gloom, and joking, and the realisation that none of them are getting paid.
It is hours until the ambulance arrives, until fluorescent jackets unpick the headless trunk from its nest of bog and ice.
Hours more until police arrive from two directions, each unsure of jurisdiction. Together they crack the candied shell of the car door. It’s only a simple note they find: four words, or maybe just the one, stamped out four times in a cramping hand. A message to the living from the newly-dead.
MALO MALOMALOMALO
There are six officers present when the note is read.
Four of them shrug, and turn away.
One recognises it as language long-dead: a marauder that took brief claim to the heathland and surrounding hills.
One knows it better still. The word lodges in her mind, she worries at it across the long afternoon drive. Recognition kindles in her.
She is home, she kisses her partner on the cheek. Just something that she’d like to check, before they eat. She unspools the ladder to the attic space and rifles through the tented shrouds of packing-cases.
It is waiting for her in a small blue book. A battered primer for a language that no longer exists. A curse, a rhyme, a trick. One word shattered; one word that makes four, that radiates meanings like broken glass.
She reads over the translation. She rests her knees against the attic beams. She sighs. To Michael Carrington, it must have made a sort of sense.
She replaces the book. Climbs down the ladder. The world carries on, and it is almost time for dinner.
MALO—I would rather be
MALO—in an apple tree
MALO—than a naughty boy
MALO—in adversity
