by Steve Harris
The wait was even longer this time.
‘Yes?’ a tired male voice eventually replied.
‘I need a car. Now,’ Martin said. The motel was a small, family-run place. The guy on the other end of the line was the guy who had booked him in and almost certainly the owner.
‘It’s almost two,’ the man complained. ‘Avis and everyone will be shut till morning.’
‘I have to get down to Bude in a big hurry. My own car’s down the road and it’s run out of petrol. It’s imperative that I get away as soon as possible.’
‘Don’t you belong to the AA or something?’ the man asked.
‘No,’ Martin said.
There was a pause, during which Martin found himself able to imagine the unspoken words of the motel owner: Then why don’t you fucking well join?
‘Look, my car’s outside. There’s an all-night filling station not far away. I’ll go and get you some petrol. I’ll ring your room when I get back. OK?’
‘You can add the cost to my bill,’ Martin said.
‘I was going to,’ the man replied and rang off.
While he waited for the motel owner, Martin sipped his drink and thought about Essen jay’s fictional sister.
18 - James Pays a Call
James Green lay on the sofa in the lounge of his flat, wide awake when he should have been in bed and full speed asleep. His mind, which should have been beautifully relaxed and uncluttered as it usually was after sex, was working overtime.
The television was on and he was staring at it but he did not see the images or hear the dialogue. Earlier, he’d made himself a cup of tea, but it stood before him on the coffee table, cold and untouched.
James told himself, for what must have been the millionth time, that it was simply because his life had changed this evening. He was smitten. He’d had plenty of girlfriends and some of them had been intelligent and some had been pretty, but none of them compared favourably with Sarah-Jane Dresden, either in the sack or outside it.
For the first time James Green believed in love at first sight. Or at first date, at least. They’d clicked. There was no better way of describing it. He’d simply never identified this strongly with a woman before. S’n’J’s effect on him was almost hypnotic. He had been enchanted, knocked out of the stadium, hit for six, bowled over - you name it, it all added up to the same thing.
James Green was in love.
This was not what was keeping him from his bed and a good long sleep. The problem he was wrestling with was an overwhelming urge to do exactly the thing S’n’J had forbidden.
That urge was to act like a character in Black Rock.
James, who during the course of the evening had become fiercely protective of S’n’J, was pained by the distress the book and its mysterious author was causing her. And he badly wanted to do something about it. Which meant, in the first instance, going to Tintagel and knocking on the door of the house called Black Rock.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ S’n’J had said earlier. ‘You’re thinking that it wouldn’t do any harm to sail down there after you leave here. I know that and I know why you’re thinking it. But you’re not a book character, don’t act like one.’
Would he be acting like a book character if he went there? James didn’t know. On the surface it sounded like it - the dumb hero going to his doom - but this wasn’t a book, it was real life.
Peter Perfect might have convinced S’n’J that she was being fictionalized, but S’n’J had failed to convince James that this was actually the case. The world outside was fixed and didn’t change at the whim of some hack writer.
It was a nice idea - or it had been back in the fifties when sci-fi was on the up - but these days it was viewed as a cliche. The world was not a construct of someone’s mind. Unless that someone was God, and as far as James knew, God just created. He didn’t go back and fiddle with what he’d done. If he didn’t like what he saw later, he waggled a finger, flooded the world and wiped everyone out before starting again.
James appreciated that S’n’J just thought she was being changed into Snowdrop, though. The trouble with fiction was that it was quite a lot closer to reality than most people gave it credit for. You could build a whole society based around, for example, the fiction that men were superior to women. All it took was enough people telling the same lie.
If he went outside, got in his car and drove to Black Rock, he would be doing it for all the same reasons as a book character would have done. During the drive there he might also feel the things a fictional character would. And he would arrive expecting to meet ‘Peter Perfect’, warn him off scaring S’n’J any more, and go home. In fiction the outcome would be different, of course: something dreadful would happen.
The main difference between real life and fiction was that the dreadful thing (even if you wholeheartedly expected it) almost never happened. In real life, Peter Perfect would probably turn out to be Martin, who had a score to settle. The whole thing could probably be sorted out in less than an hour.
The story of Black Rock, cliched though it might be, had a certain power. He would be the first to admit that. But it doesn’t have the kind of power that could make it come true, does it? he asked himself. What it did have was the power to convince S’n’J that the possibility of its coming true existed. And her mind had done the rest. That was why she was so spooked.
When you put aside all the supernatural stuff that S’n’J was frightened about, the real problem was that someone was terrorizing her. And as far as James knew, people like that didn’t target complete strangers.
There was usually a reason behind any kind of vendetta. And that reason was often revenge.
Martin?
There was no Mr Winter. There was no Peter Perfect. They were both Martin.
James thought he knew what Black Rock was working towards; what Martin’s denouement would be. He was going to scare S’n’J back into his arms. On his own terms. The book was a device to convince S’n’J that the only outcome to her life was to go back and let him dominate her.
Quite how it was working so well on her, James didn’t know. She struck him as a woman who knew her own mind, but where Black Rock was concerned she seemed to be very susceptible. Martin was obviously a master of the art of suggestion.
‘So he’s the one I ought to go and call on,’ James said aloud. ‘And tell him what’s what. Warn him that Snowy has a new friend and protector.’
James spent the next thirty seconds frowning. There was something wrong with that verbalized thought but he couldn’t for the life of him see what it was.
When realization came, it didn’t so much dawn on him as smash him in the face. What followed was a very uncomfortable sensation of having been not just suckered, but altered in much the same way as S’n’J had described: as if reality had changed around him, then allowed him to re-enter.
‘I
said Snowy,’ he heard himself say in disbelief. ‘I called S’n’J, Snowy.’
It was a slip, he decided as the odd deja-vu feeling faded, that anyone could have made. To all intents, Snowy Dresden and Sarah-Jane Dresden were the same woman.
There you go again! he scolded himself, then told himself that what he’d meant was that Snowy was a fictionalized version of S’n’J.
James was beginning to feel like a puppy chasing its tail. You went round and round, faster and faster and you still didn’t catch up with it.
There’s only one way to sort this out,’ he said, got up, turned off the television and got his coat.
James picked up the keys to his Cadillac and went to the front door. Sorry S’n’J, he thought, but someone’s got to do something. And sooner rather than later.
It was a little chilly outside, but the rain had stopped. James glared up at the sky which should have been angry with moonlit cloud, but which was clear and full of stars.
Sometimes promises had to be broken.
James climbed into the Caddy, slammed the heavy door shut and started the car, thinking, In a book, the car wouldn’t start. There’d be a mysterious force stopping it. The Caddy’s idle was a bit rough, but it had been like that for months. It needed the service he kept promising it and never giving it.
OK, S’n’J, he thought. How about this for a compromise? At the first sign of something unnatural happening, I turn back. If I see strange lights in the sky, or glowing from the house, or if I see things that couldn’t possibly be, I’ll come home with my tail between my legs. Anything a little bit scary, and I’m outta there.
James put the car into drive and moved smoothly down the road towards Bude’s empty main street, telling himself that by this time tomorrow all S’n’J’s problems would have been solved. There would be no more phantom mailmen delivering fresh book chapters to her.
Bude looked like an American mining town after the gold rush was over. There wasn’t a moving car or pedestrian to be seen. James turned right towards the Falcon Inn where he’d arranged to meet S’n’J tomorrow evening. They hadn’t actually discussed this; he’d left a note in her kitchen saying he’d meet her there at eight - if she still respected him in the morning. There was a chance that she’d only wanted a one nighter, but he thought it was an outside one.
James headed towards Widemouth Bay. This road followed the coast all the way down to Tintagel. It was narrow and there were some tight turns in it, but he thought he could make good time, and the chances of meeting anything coming the other way were remote at this time of night.
As he approached the bay, he had a sudden attack of the heebie jeebies concerning what might happen when he arrived at Black Rock. Its occupant might only be Martin, but Martin could have become a psychopath. And if that had happened it put a different complexion oh the matter.
James pulled the Caddy into the bay’s car park, and stopped to plan his tactics. He wasn’t Bruce Lee or Sugar Ray Leonard but you didn’t have to be to hold your own in a street-fight - you just had to be quick and mean. But being quick and mean didn’t necessarily mean you were equipped to take on a lunatic who might be armed. Especially when your last fight happened three years ago.
But the idea of going home again and forgetting all about it was unthinkable.
Just like it would be for a fictional character, he admonished himself. You’ll brand yourself a coward if you give up now and you’ll never be able to live with it.
It was so excruciatingly cliched it was unbelievable.
It was also true.
But you don’t have to worry, because there won’t be a crazy lying in wait for you, he told himself. The thought, which was undoubtedly a truism, didn’t give him much comfort. What he thought might give him some comfort was to be as prepared for the impossible as he could.
He got out and unlocked the huge boot. Somewhere beneath all the spares and junk was a big rubber torch and a crowbar.
James felt quite a lot better when he had his right hand wrapped around the crowbar, and to his astonishment the torch didn’t just glimmer, it shone like a searchlight.
That’s it then, he told himself. Peter Perfect or Martin or whoever it is, doesn’t know you’re coming. Or if he, she, or it does know, they can’t do anything about it except wait for you.
It wasn’t until he was on the outskirts of Tintagel that the other alternative occurred to him: that whoever lived in Black Rock might not have bothered to try to stop him. James did his best to dismiss this and was surprised to find his best was good enough.
‘Here I come, Martin!’ he yelled as he turned into Tintagel’s main street. He didn’t even care if he sounded like a hack horror-story hero. ‘Ready or not, I’m coming down there to get you!’
James didn’t realize how dry his mouth was until he reached the turning that veered off towards the campsite. According to the book - and to S’n’J - you turned right, then hooked left again on to a steep and narrow track which led downhill through the valley to the bottom part of Barras Nose where the house was supposed to stand on a rock that was almost surrounded by sea.
His heart began to hammer as he made the turn and there it was: the infamous hoggin track.
James took the car to the start of the track and asked himself the question that was required of all visitors to Black Rock. If I take the car down there, will I be able to get it back up again?
James peered down into the gloom beneath his headlights. It wasn’t the angle of the track which bothered him -although from here it looked as if it was a one in five descent, perhaps getting steeper later - but the width. S’n’J had said it was just about wide enough to accommodate her Sierra but the Caddy’s breadth made her car look pencil-slim.
Go for it, he told himself. Just take it slowly. You can always back up again if it starts looking a little too sticky. Or you could simply park up here and walk down.
James Green did not now, and never had, placed a great deal of credence in the power of pride. He had always subscribed to the belief that no matter how capable you were, it was always best to give anything that looked like trouble a very wide berth. Even if you were supremely confident. Everyone knew that pride came before a fall - or in this case, a very long drop.
So when he put the Cadillac Eldorado back into drive and began to creep forward towards the steep descent he told himself that he wasn’t doing it because his pride would be wounded if he chickened out.
He knew it wasn’t true, but he told himself anyway.
The drive wasn’t easy. The Caddy’s front wings reached either side of the track and the combination of the big bonnet and his driving position obscured his view of the way forward for a distance of about ten feet. All he could do was proceed exceptionally slowly while he tried not to think of the pink goo that had been on the front of S’n’J’s car. The unidentifiable st
icky substance had scared him, whether he’d admitted it to himself or not. It seemed to have spoken to a deep and primal part of him that recognized it as something to be avoided at all costs.
Because it wasn’t dog guts, but something that might have been ghost-splatter? James asked himself. The kind of thing you’d expect to see if you ran down a ghost. Ectoplasmic innards?
The last time he’d seen anything like that was in Poltergeist when the woman crashed back through the ceiling carrying her daughter. They’d been covered in some yukky-looking kind of jelly. James couldn’t recall whether or not it had been pink, but he could remember that they’d bathed it off quite easily. The stuff he’d seen on S’n’J’s car clung like chewing-gum to a child’s hair. It wasn’t water soluble at all.
If that’s the case, the dog is a ghost, he thought. And then he shook his head. None of this had anything to do with the supernatural and if he had any imaginings that leaned that way, he’d inherited (or caught them) from S’n’J.
There aren’t any such things as dog ghosts,’ James said aloud and didn’t much like the frightened tone of his voice.
Then he screamed.
At the big black dog that had leapt out of nowhere and landed lightly on the track about twenty feet ahead of him.
Reflexively, James hit the brakes. The wheels bit and the car stopped with a slight crunch of gravel. The bonnet dipped and bobbed level again in a meet-the-queen curtsy and James was left staring at the big black dog, who was neither dead, nor injured nor ghostly in any way.
Looking almost majestic, Diamond Ambrose Anstey, his black coat shining in the car’s headlamps, turned to face James. His eyes gleamed white in the reflected light making him look a little like one of Angela Carter’s wolves, but this wasn’t a devil dog, or a ghost, or even a dog come back from the dead.
