Preaching to the Choir (Terrible Worlds: Transformations)

Chapter 1

Around fifteen minutes later, Elena nudged Ross’s elbow, making the four-by-four swerve alarmingly on the gravel. “I thought you said we were here.”

He waggled his eyebrows at her, that way he did, like a puppet on a kids show. “We’re here,” he confirmed. “All this is it. We’ve been here for quarter of an hour. House is ahead somewhere.” And the car crunched on.

There had been a pile-up on the motorway—which was the closest the British got to freeways, though they still looked a bit cramped to Elena.

The plan had been to set off from London and motor peaceably through what Ross called the Home Counties, lunch at this nice pub he knew, then arrive at the old family residence with plenty of daylight left still.

Except other people’s traffic plans had been a bit more action-packed, so they’d ended up at a roadside services, arriving hours after dark with February fog wreathing the splay of the headlamps ahead of them.

The promised grand view of Ross’s ancestral pile was not to be, or at least not until the morning.

Instead, Elena got a blur of gnarled trees pressing close to the path on either side, grey and fleeting like out-takes from The Blair Witch Project.

Ross, who’d been voluble on the way up, was pretending to concentrate now.

Someone could do with coming up this way with thirty tons of tarmac; the car rattled and jolted over sunken potholes and scored through puddles of uncertain depth.

The four-by-four had been sheer excess on the motorway, but right now she was powerfully glad of it, because if they’d brought the electric runaround or the ridiculous red sports surfboard-on-wheels thing that Ross hadn’t wanted and never drove, they’d have left a breadcrumb trail of undercarriage all the way back to the main road.

“They like trees, your family,” she said, after a branch had scraped the windshield for the third time. “This your, what, hunting thing? Red coats and horses and the dogs with the floppy ears?”

“You’d think, wouldn’t you?” Ross agreed.

“I mean, I think Dad hates the very idea of it. The noise and the fuss and the social of it. He’s not a fox apologist or anything.

But Uncle Jas is a member of some hunt in Berkshire.

Spitting feathers when they banned it, not that he let that actually stop him molesting innocent animals.

And gloating like F when it got reinstated, needless to say. Not the nicest of chaps, Uncle J.”

“And he’s going to be here, I assume.”

“I mean, presumably. The old B.”

“‘Bastard.’ You can say that with me, remember? And ‘fuck.’ I mean I had you trained. I had you swearing like a sergeant of marines. Bit depressing you’re backsliding now.”

“Dad does not approve,” Ross said firmly. “I mean Uncle Jas, now, he wouldn’t give an S—a shit, don’tcherknow. So maybe you two would get on, actually.”

Then the headlamps flared on stone ahead, sudden as an apparition, and Elena squeaked. It was the sort of cartoon noise Ross always ribbed her about, and that she hated herself for, but what had just been illuminated was worth a squeak.

It was a door, yes. Possibly a Dread Portal.

A big arch of grey stone with a genuine castle-looking motherf—MFer of a door, with an actual iron ring set into it like Bela Lugosi would be turning up any moment in his opera cloak and fake fangs.

That wasn’t squeak-worthy, though. As they’d come to park up on what was presumably a big gravelled space before the house, the car had jolted over one final pothole and the light had swung down, then up.

Up to flare across the ivy-crawling stone above that ominous door. Up to what was carved there.

And Ross was killing himself laughing, like he’d planned it. Although there was a nervous edge there that suggested he’d been caught out by the sight too.

“One of the Enderby Angels,” he explained. “I’ve seen pictures. They’re… they’re a thing. Apparently we had to beat off art historians with a stick back in the day. Best-preserved example of the Valdés school or something. Seventeenth century Gothic rubbish.”

“What,” Elena said with feeling, “the fuck.”

“I know!” Ross crowed, and she still felt his sudden ebullience was covering for shock. “I mean, Jesus, right?”

“Not my Jesus. Not my angels.”

“Oh, well, actually,” he said in that nasal mansplainer voice he did, “in the actual Bible I think you’ll find that actual angels—”

“Don’t look like that.” And the fact that the thing was lost to the darkness now the headlamps were pointed at the door again wasn’t much comfort. Perhaps the opposite, in fact. Because if she couldn’t see it, she couldn’t be sure it was still fixed in place and safely lifeless.

An angel, he’d said. And there had been wings, and the thing between the wings had been roughly humanoid, but hideous.

A devil, surely, save that there was a way devils were represented in art, and a way that angels were, indicating the relative attitude of the artists to the former and the latter.

The thing above the door had most certainly been presented from a point of view of adulation and authority.

“Ross,” she said. “Is there anything else you should maybe be sharing about your family about now?”

Ross made an amused sound that didn’t entirely convince her.

He reversed the car across what seemed briefly like an infinite expanse of chipped stone before a snarl of bushes loomed like a jump scare in the red of the rear lights.

And then sat, hands still on the wheel, engine idling, as though he might abruptly change his mind and drive them all the way back to London.

“I mean,” he said, “I thought I’d put you off with all the S I’ve already said about my bloody family.”

She shrugged. “Most of what you said was that you were up to your necks in old money. Which has a certain appeal.”

“Oh, sure.” The thought didn’t seem to enthuse him.

“Look, I understand big families. You’ve met my aunts.

All of them. Actually, no, you’ve only met some of them.

There are always more aunts. Aunts inside aunts, like a matryoshka.

” She was rambling now, because he’d been quiet since they hit the gravel, since he’d announced they’d arrived.

And after the brief, slightly frayed ebullience of a moment ago, quiet once more.

“I get the impression things are a bit fraught, with you and your folks,” she added. It was like feeling out the boundaries of a bad tooth with your tongue, working out where the edges of Ross’s feelings were. Sometimes you didn’t know until it hurt.

“We have a lot of dumbass traditions,” he said. Dumbass was one of his favourite Americanisms. That he was using it felt like a good sign. “I mean, we go back…”

“Longer than my whole constitution, sure, sure,” she filled in for him.

“And we don’t throw anything away. Which includes ways of doing things. So there’s going to be a lot of stupid stuff, and please just smile and nod and we can laugh about it later, when Uncle Jas and the rest of them aren’t around to snoot at us.”

“Are you embarrassed?” she asked, delighted. “Have I corrupted you with my modern ways and now we’ve gone back to the Old Country and they’re going to make you put on armour and joust for my honour or something?”

“Honestly, I was embarrassed about this S—this shit long before I met you. Even at bloody Eton, where everyone’s family has stuff like this, it felt…

except my family paid for a whole new dorm fifty years ago, and we could buy and sell some of the others there, and so nobody really…

half the masters hated me and the other half treated me like I was made of glass. ”

He had not, she knew, enjoyed school much.

And partly it was because of this family stuff, posh as posh, old as balls, weird as fuck.

And partly it was because, as far as she could work out, a British ‘public school,’ which was to say the most exclusively private of private schools over this side of the pond, was like some kind of Stockholm syndrome experiment designed by horrible people to force small rich kids into exactly the same horrible mould.

And thus preserve the Great British Aristocracy or some damn thing.

Which was exactly the sort of comment she would not be passing in earshot of Ross’s family, obviously.

Although she was glad that they’d never quite got Ross shoved into that mould.

Ross had come out of the ordeal still Ross, somehow.

Maybe it was the oldy-weirdiness of his family that had armoured him against it.

Mould. Armour. She could almost feel the ‘u’s dropping into place now she was in Olde Englande.

“Are we, you know, getting out of this car any time soon?” she asked.

He drummed a bit on the wheel, one of his little tells when he was unhappy. Another thing they probably hadn’t tolerated much, at Saint Snooty’s Posh School For Boys.

“Ross Enderbough Junior the Third,” she said, “you had damn well better not be embarrassed about me. Because the time to think about that was probably before you asked me to come with you here.” And he wasn’t a Junior or a Third, of course, and apparently that wasn’t much of a thing with the British rich.

Just her way of needling him, and normally he’d laugh, but not this time.

“I mean, no,” he said, after a worrying pause. “I mean, not in that way. You’re… the world.”

“As in, ‘I mean the world to you’?” Dry, ha-ha-ha, but leaving him room to confirm it if he wanted. Because one thing about Ross was that he never actually said things like that. Good on romantic gestures, but terrible with words.

“The actual world. The rest of the world. And I hadn’t… thought… until we were almost here. Look, my family is really F-ing old and weird and it’s all going to look stupid and stuffy and we can laugh about it later, but—”