Shadows & Tall Trees (24 page)

He could hear guests packing, prior to departure in the morning. With frequent pig-like squeals of door hinges, the hotel was a sty.

He watched TV for four hours before hisses and grunts underlying the actors’ voices had him switching off. He made no other preparations for sleep other than to close his eyes and wait for the last door to squeal savagely on its hinges.

Later, out of the darkness, came the turn of a page. He stared at a slight swaying of the curtains for minutes before leaving his bed and parting them down the middle.

At the dead centre of the deep window ledge was the Journeys End visitors’ book. He closed his eyes, willed it not to be there, and looked again.

Thirty-eight names, and a space opposite number thirty-nine. There was the pen, a slender piece of bone carved to a point. He’d tear the book to pieces-throw them into the stream. His fingers were curved like talons when he heard the voice.

“Greetings this fine night.”

The words shook through him. A male voice, not loud but like a mountain speaking. Karl looked into the deep-set window in which the grotesques were reflected.

Deep snorts and squeals from the porcine thing loosened the flesh on his bones. Next to it, a twisted flourish, a cartilaginous shiny length in shades of reddish bronze emitted harsh whispers, like escaping gas. They were both in the protective shadow cast by a great fleshy dark cap that extended some way past the walls and ceiling it rendered insubstantial. Holes in the massive thick trunk watched him intently. He thought one of them had spoken.

This was the window of Journeys End again, except that he and they occupied the same side of the glass. Tight as a family. Inseparable.

“We fed you well.” Like gravity speaking.

“Yes. De-delicious.” His voice was the last toothpaste squeezed from a tube.

“You must sign our visitor’s book.” In the monumentally deep and reasonable tone a planetary pressure to comply.

“I prefer not to put my name to things,” Karl managed to say.

“Your name is important to us.”

Karl let out a bitter, tremulous spurt of laughter. In the glass, the scatter of holes that observed him would have been light-years deep if light had been conceivably involved. Seen directly, not reflected, he thought he’d be gone into them, never to emerge. They didn’t want that—what they wanted was what was happening, his fingers grasping the pen.

Hissing in his head. Snorts and grunts rooting hungrily in his guts.

“You want to be with your friends, don’t you?” The voice—from the floor of the universe. “Come with us.”

“Where?” he said, though the question seemed spoken through him.

“Home.”
A triumvirate of yearning inhuman voices sent the curtains billowing. He felt a void the depth of his skin away.

“Whose home? I’m happy here, thank you.”

With the lie, resistance began to drain through his right hand and into the bone pen which was moving into position over the empty space on the page.

As the nib drove home, he obstructed it with his free left hand.

White hot pain awoke him to daylight. Grey-blue light around the edges of the closed curtains. Voices; doors opening and closing. Vehicles were moaning on the main street.

A small painless black wound in the back of his hand. There was no pen on the window ledge to have caused it. No book either.

In the dining room he couldn’t eat breakfast. Afterwards, at the reception desk, the manager finally noticed him and Karl asked for his bill.

The manager had chicken skin. His upper lip was bowed in a smile but not the lower.

“I’ll pay by cheque.”

“If you tear out the slip, I’ll stamp it for you.”

The manager stamped the hotel name and passed the slip back to Karl.

The pen had scratched Karl’s unruly signature when he noticed its bony hue. He dropped it and it clattered hollowly onto the desk. The scratching had scored through the cheque to the scabrous book beneath which the manager deftly pulled away. Speechless, Karl pointed with his wavering pierced hand in a tempest in which the manager’s ears flapped and his long fingers rippled like thin pennants.

The hotel leaned four ways in turn. Doors banged open and shut, open and shut. Easy chair cushions plumped and flattened like lungs. The floorboards rippled like conflicting currents in water. Stair risers rose and fell like wreckage on rough waters. Pictures floated as far out from the walls as cords attaching them to hooks would allow. Horseshoes clip-clopped randomly over rough plaster walls. Insane celebration, everywhere.

The halves of the front door opened and shut like heart valves. On an out-swing he darted through onto the path and looked up at the swinging Hotel Beaumont sign. The building was alive and he was too close. He backed, and it came from his left before he’d time to think about evading it. A violent impact; a thought struggled in his head, died.

The earth shook beneath him; a dry heat. Through the bars of his eyelashes a column of figures approached, some slipping out of sight to either side, some would be in touching distance soon. He shrank back and down.

“Call off the search,” a familiar voice said.

He opened his eyes. Malcolm and Gareth hauled their rucksacks up into the overhead rack. Malcolm looked at his ticket, then at the tiny brass stud on the back of the seat next to Karl’s. “You don’t mind me taking thirty-eight, do you Gareth?” Malcolm said, plumping himself down.
And I’m in thirty-nine as stipulated on my ticket here in my hand.
All seats taken. We’re ready to go
. Karl’s mouth twitched towards a smile.

“So, Karl, where the heck did you get to?”

A new note to the engine and the crocodile skin of grey tarmac became grey silk as the coach glided out of the station and turned onto the main street. Connerstone sharply delineated after the fuzzy imposter in which everything had been like a watercolour left out in the sun.

“Speak to me, Karl,” Malcolm said, joining thumbs and tips of middle fingers to make a big circle.

“Journeys End,” Karl said.

Malcolm looked at him as if trying to work out several conundrums at once. “They certainly do.” Gareth and Malcolm looked at each other
,
then Gareth aimed his camera at Karl. The lens brought to mind the vague pit of a dark tree bole.

“Not now, Gareth,” Malcolm said. “Are you all right, Karl?”

Karl thought about that. “Not sure.”

“Okay.” Staring at the headrest before him, Malcolm formulated a response. “There was a deluge in Guards Wood. Next thing we look around and you’d gone. We spent ages calling out, wandering. Thought you must have headed to the village. When we got here we walked up and down the main street, had a drink in the Yewdale then came here and here you were, out like a light in the corner. So, a happy ending.”

Try telling your face that, Karl thought. He watched Malcolm and Gareth as intently as they watched him. No hint of a struggle to contain mirth or gaiety. It’s all me, Karl thought, and wasn’t he glad about that? Walking at the rear he could have slipped on a wet root, hit his head and knocked himself out. Meanwhile Malcolm and Gareth could have walked on, oblivious. What if some instinct for self-preservation embedded in a state deeper than sleep had subsequently guided him to the village and the coach in time for the return trip to Manchester?

No sinister fracturing of reality. He was here, now, thinking rational thoughts, in the company of his friends and heading home. This was the best outcome after the trio of monstrosities, the priest, the hotel manager; they’d stirred to life in his unconscious, representations of his dread of the future, his only friends gone to distant places, his unsatisfactory job in that wet miserable city. Now he could let his friends go, bring a better attitude to his job, appreciate wet glum Manchester.

The miked stone-dry voice of the driver came over the speakers. “Good evening ladies and gents. Hope you’re seated comfortably. We are finally leaving. Home again jiggety-jig.”

Karl longed to get there. Gareth clicked his camera at the pattern of the rubberized flooring of the aisle.

Outside the village, the coach followed Connerstone Water to the north where the road began to wind as it rose. The declining sun painted hillsides, flashed through scatters of trees. Areas of woodland cover thickened, darkened as the sun became an indeterminate crimson low in the west. At a high elevation there was no more climbing. Ranks of mountains on all sides under an empurpled sky dusted with pink cloud and salt stars. Subsequent to a series of dips, the hills were taller; suspended between peaks the sky had insidiously become dark as graphite.

The coach increased its speed where caution might have been advisable. Karl thought the driver was keen to get home.
Me too
, he thought.

No chatter. Looking along the gap between headrests and windows Karl saw heads leaning.

“You should get some shut-eye,” Malcolm advised Karl. “And get your doctor to check you out first thing in the morning.”

Not long after, Malcolm was following his first piece of advice and snoring softly, puzzlement verging on anxiety in his furrowed brow. Most eyes were shut if the jerking heads, visible between the headrests, were any indication as the coach swung and dipped around the interlocking buttresses of mountainside. No moon, no stars, no lights of farms or isolated hamlets. Karl supposed the darkness was stretching the distance to the motorway.

Malcolm’s body leaned against him, pressing him into the window. He noted many minute scratches. The glass was of uneven thickness, as if it had approached a liquid state in extreme temperatures and oozed, subsequently hardening again. At the bottom of the frame, where the exterior bodywork bulged out slightly, he noted a matte grey. As his heart turned over, he told himself the whole coach wouldn’t be that non-colour. He pushed Malcolm back so he was snoozing upright. Gareth’s head was tucked down into his narrow chest.

This must be another route bypassing by miles the approaches to Windermere, the next town. The road would level soon, the mountains step back and valleys spread wide. To be endured until then, the shrouded distances, at once vast and claustrophobic. Without stars or moon, an elusive ambient light must be lending these eminences the greater part of their massiveness, comprising as many precipitous walls as slopes.

A pull forward, the bus on a descent. A diffuse redness was intermittently visible below. It couldn’t be the sunset at such a low point in the soaring encompassing terrain.

Karl envied the others sleeping. Closing his eyes, the dark spreading through him was like sleep and he didn’t resist.

When he awoke, a faint red tincture glinted off some surfaces, glowed on others. Elsewhere, intense gloom monumentalized natural features to produce awesome battlements and redoubts, soaring pillars and spiked bridges. Daylight would make the mountains sane again, and hours prior to that the coach would be entering Manchester.

Malcolm’s expression suggested his dream had become tragic and terrifying. Karl wondered if he should wake him. The road had leveled off. Either it was an extraordinary sunset behind and below the miles-wide dark edge ahead, or artificial lights of a size fit to illuminate a gargantuan sunken stadium.

The bus came to a stop. The engine cut out but the window glass continued to vibrate. Karl realized a gigantic voice outside was responsible. Tiny cries flocked around it. It awoke Malcolm, Gareth and the rest of the passengers. Was it the same voice he’d heard scraps of since coming down from the hills to Guards Wood? There had been the country fair at Tilberthwaite and there were, he presumed, others. Late as it was, this fair had yet to conclude. He’d get Malcolm to identify the vast hollow in the mountains on his map when they got home.

The driver spoke over the microphone in a voice that brushed like a yard broom. “When you’ve made your way off the vehicle, you’ll be taken to the place in three groups.”

Such stupendous numbers, their cries like the pipings of an asthmatic chest a continent wide. But the voice of the Master of Ceremonies dominated them all. It exclaimed unintelligibly between screeches of uncontrollable laughter. The speakers amplifying the voice Karl pictured as being as tall as buildings, and in untold numbers.

The passengers were getting out of their seats.

“You know I’ve never actually been to a country fair before. Wonder how long we’ll have?” Malcolm’s eyes bulged, the desperate calamitous dream continuing in them.

“Should be time to take a picture or two,” Gareth said. Not good ones if Gareth couldn’t control the wild shake of his hands holding the camera.

The doors weren’t open yet. Gareth, Malcolm and Karl standing at the end of the aisle, numbers thirty-seven, thirty-eight and thirty-nine, would be the last to leave. Karl looked past his appalled reflection into the darkness. The mountains were like gigantic workings under a rock-solid sky. From precipices, immense silhouetted birds launched themselves and flapped lazily as if on hot up-draughts and appeared to be biding their time.

Conflicting rhythms; the limping beating bass note in Karl’s chest, the running sensation in his head, someone on inner highways coming to convey news that would congeal his blood.