There Will Be Lies (42 page)

I get out, and now I can see a wooden fence and some grass in front of me.

The taxi driver leans out of the window.
Keep going straight ahead
, he says.
About two hundred yards. Mist’ll lift as the sun burns it off. It’s only the dew does it
.

I walk, as the taxi turns around. I still have a slight limp – I really didn’t take care of myself after leaving the hospital. Maybe I’ll always have a limp.

I follow the fence, and the clumps of foliage along it. I can see the dim shapes of sheep, wreathed in mist like an aura, moving around slowly on the other side, chewing at the grass. After about two hundred yards, like the taxi driver said, the fence stops and I find myself walking into a field, pocked with holes, and with raised tufts of grass everywhere.

I stand, and I wait.

Sure enough, the sun slowly rises, and the mist slowly dissipates – the landscape has its eye half open, for the longest time, and then it very lazily opens it, and the valley reveals itself.

A mountain looms up in front of me, on the far side of a narrow, crystal clear lake, little grey stones on its bottom, as if the water wasn’t there at all, and you only know it is because the mountain is reflected in it, pointing downwards, and usually, I mean generally, mountains point UP.

So: crystal water, shimmering stones, and two mountains, one going up and one going down; identical.

Purple heather spills down the mountainside, an improbable colour, and around me are all the greens and browns of the hills, which flow either side of the mountain, to the distance, like wrinkled sheets. Craggy rocks and slopes of scree run down the mountainside, and the odd sheep clings to the incline.

There is no stag, right now, but I fully expect one to come along at any moment. I know it will. Because, in the end, how far is a stag from an elk? I don’t know if I took the elks from the stags on Shaylene’s cross-stitches, or if we were both being affected by Arizona, the place’s memory, like Coyote said. But now it seems to me those antlers have always been there, around me, in her pictures, in the Dreaming, in the handle of the knife Coyote gave me.

I stand there, and I wait for the elk to come.

Elk, stag, whatever.

And right now, I’m happy to wait. I have never seen anything like this place in my life. I said to the taxi driver,
Take me to the mountains, to a beautiful view. And I need a hotel
. He just nodded, like it was a perfectly normal request. We drove all the way from Aberdeen.

I take a breath, drawing the air of the Scottish Highlands into me, feeling it sucking into my bronchioles and then into my bloodstream, spinning. It’s cool and fresh and it smells like bracken and peat and crystal water, teeming with salmon. It tastes like the velvet smoothness of a stag’s antler, and the colours of the landscape in front of me may not be totally crazy like those cross-stitches that Shaylene used to do, but they ARE intense, as if the air is clearer, cleaner, and everything is made more vivid by it; brighter.

I was right.

It doesn’t look anything like the cross-stitches.

No.

It’s more beautiful.

It’s MORE.

As ever, my thanks go, in no particular order, to my wife, Hannah; my editors, Rebecca McNally and Cindy Loh; the ace agenting team of Caradoc King, Mildred Yuan and Louise Lamont; and Will Hill, author and tireless Second Reader. All these people have improved the book immeasurably with their excellent and astute comments at various stages.

OK, I lied. There is a
bit
of an order. But after Hannah, there is no order of importance.

Honestly.

Nick Lake lives near Oxford with his wife and family. He works in publishing by day and writes books in every spare moment he can find. His powerful and moving novel
In Darkness
, about the Haitian earthquake, won the 2013 Michael L. Printz Award and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal.
Hostage Three
has also received huge acclaim.

@nicholaslake

First published in Great Britain in January 2015

This electronic edition published in January 2015 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © Nick Lake 2015

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

The publishers are grateful to Bob Hicok for an excerpt from
Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem
from Plus Shipping.
Copyright © 1998 by Bob Hicok. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd.,
www.boaeditions.org

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eISBN: 978-1-4088-5382-5

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