by Tom Fletcher
‘I like Withnail,’ Jennifer says.
‘It’s alright with me,’ Erin says.
‘Withnail it is,’ Taylor says.
Balthazar’s scarf flaps and snaps in the wind. It flies out from the back of his neck, giving the impression that he is perpetually tumbling forward. The ground and the trees and the clouds all tilt. I look at his penis; the end of it seems swollen. Slightly tumescent. I squint. Carcinogens in condoms. I have this image in my head of a big tumour on the end of my cock. I stare at Balthazar. My head is at right angles to my body. Everybody else is standing and looking at him too. Taylor breaks the silence.
‘Makes you think about having children,’ he says.
Graham laughs so hard he bends over.
‘You’ll be lucky, Taylor,’ I say. ‘We’re all going to be infertile because of hormones in tap water and the radiation from mobile phones.’ I pause. ‘And the chemicals in plastic.’
‘Not true,’ Graham says, still laughing. ‘That girl over the road had to have an abortion. You know. The one that dressed like Gwen Stefani. Come on. Think positive.’
I hear one of the monster birds shouting something. Up above us. A shape gliding through the night sky. For the duration of the time Jennifer and I spent inside each other, we were alone in the world. It’s no excuse. But it’s true.
A snowball hits me in the temple. I fall over. I burst out laughing again. The ground eats up my naked hands. The cold, like teeth. I laugh some more. I scoop some up and hurl it at somebody. I can’t see who they are through the snow and the descending mist. It’s starting to feel less like it’s snowing and more like we’re inside a snow cloud. It is being born all around us. I think it’s Erin. The music emanating from the house is suddenly louder. As if somebody’s turned it up. The lyrics are too sinister for party music. Balthazar stands above me like a totem. I feel more than drunk. Everything seems to be taking on more significance than it should. The whole landscape is spinning around my head. The people are blurring. The only thing that doesn’t move is him. Our beautiful, beautiful snowman. Tall and proud and clever and handsome. I plunge my hand into his side to steady myself. The lyrics of the song inside the house flow outwards, above the dying wind. Balthazar is taller than me. I hang on to him. Cling to the side of the mountain as it bucks and rolls like the sea. The same fears come back. Like shipwrecks at low tide. Maybe they’re irrational. But if they are – that doesn’t make any difference. Once upon a time, there was a world in which people weren’t scared of their own bodies. They were scared of other things. They were scared of things that moved out there. Just beyond the edge of their vision. Just beyond the fringe of trees that masked a deeper darkness. They were scared of things that they could fight off with swords and knives and spears and axes and shovels.
The water froze and the wolves came over the river. That was always the story. The pack. Thin and desperate. Lock the doors and board up the windows.
I am jealous of the fears that people used to have.
Erin giggles and hugs me. The presence of her warm body is like a smell that I remember from years ago. It cuts through the fog in my mind. It brings me back to the present. To the snowball fight. The friends. The party.
‘Are you OK?’ she asks. ‘You’ve got your hand inside Balthazar and I’m sure he’s enjoying it but you’re going to get very cold fingers. You’ve gone really quiet. Are you OK?’
‘Yes, thank you.’ I bring my hand out of the snowman. My skin is blue. I don’t feel the cold in it.
‘Good,’ she says. And then all of a sudden it feels like someone’s run a knife down my spine and split me open. I fall over and writhe around on the ground. I can hear people roaring with laughter. After a moment or two of abject squirming, I realise. It’s just a handful of snow dumped down my back.
Jennifer. Her eyes are red and teary with laughter. I stand and look at her. I cannot summon enough concentration to work out what expression I should put on my face. I just look at her.
‘Jesus,’ she says. ‘What’s wrong with you? Where’s your fire? Where’s your sense of fun gone?’
‘What’s wrong with me?’ I say. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘What?’ she says. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean.’ I glance meaningfully in Jack’s direction, but stop short of moving my head. The mist is thickening.
‘What? What do you mean?’ Erin asks. Taylor is listening now as well.
‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry.’ I walk away from Jennifer. I walk across to the other side of the small space that we’re playing in.
‘What’s going on?’ Graham asks.
‘Nothing!’ I say.
‘It’s nothing,’ Jack says. I look across at him. He is close enough for me to see his eyes. His face is grim.
‘But—’ Graham starts.
‘I want to believe in this whole other world,’ Jack says, raising his voice to interrupt Graham. Shouting and whooping come from inside the house. I think he is crying. ‘This whole other world from which the stories and the myths and the ideas come. I want it to be a world that we can go to. Sometimes, at night, I do believe. That we can reach it from some of the places round here. The forests and rivers. The mountains and lakes. But I’ve never had any real reason to believe. Nothing.’ He starts to cry.
‘Yes, Jack,’ Jennifer says. ‘OK. But stop now, hey? We’re all here to have a good time.’
‘Hey,’ Graham says, ‘Let him be.’ He is leaning on the axe again.
‘Don’t tell me what to do, Graham,’ Jennifer says. ‘Don’t you tell me what to do.’
I look over at Jennifer. I can barely see her now. The cloud is lowering still, and the visibility diminishing. The snow is getting wetter. I look over at Jack. No, I think. You don’t need another world. There’s more than enough going on in this one.
‘Jennifer’s right,’ Jack says. ‘I’m getting upset over nothing. You don’t see how supportive of me Jennifer is. None of you have seen that. Not even you, Francis.’
The way he drops my name in confuses me. Maybe he does know. But then, he is defending her. Which would be strange, if he does know. Maybe his love is unconditional. She is freedom. He has faith.
‘It’s cold,’ Taylor says. The momentary silence is broken. ‘Maybe we should go back inside.’
Jack is standing with his arms around himself. His head hangs down dejectedly.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ Graham says. ‘Relationships! I’d never have one.’
I can make out Jennifer’s outline. She stands with her arms folded. Her weight on one leg. She wears a long coat. Her face is indistinct. I can’t help but feel desire.
I see somebody appear behind her. Somebody from the house come to examine our beast of a snowman, no doubt. But as I watch they put their arms around her. She starts screaming like nothing I’ve ever heard. The sound is shrill and terrified, almost inhuman. I imagine the back of her throat being peeled away by the force of it. The figure drags her backwards into the mist. I start to run after them. Despite the discomfort those arms inspired in me. They were weirdly long, and knotty. And the head was faintly bulbous. A little too large for the spindly body that supported it. Some people put too much effort into fancy dress. Jennifer. I don’t know what I want from you. Or if I want anything from you. But you can’t disappear. Not now. You can’t disappear. Jack is running beside me.
‘I know what you did,’ he says. The words sound weirdly squeezed by the wet air. ‘I know what you did.’
I don’t say anything. I don’t fully know where Jack is. I can’t see anything through this mist other than the grey-green ground meeting my every footfall.
‘Francis?’ he says. ‘Francis? Is that you?’ His words sound distorted, unreal. He sounds further away than he did a moment ago.
‘Yeah,’ I say.
‘Jack? Francis?’ Erin shouts from somewhere else. I can’t tell where though. Graham too. Their voices are faint. They seem to come fro
m directly beside my ears. Like quiet whispers. But there’s nobody there.
‘Jack?’ I say. No answer. I’m out of breath and have a stitch. I can’t see anything. I stop running and bend over. I put my hand to my stomach. As I recover, I start to imagine other people running around me.
‘Taylor? Hey, Taylor? Erin? Graham?’ No answer. Instead, this sense of other people running. Scarily fast, all around. I can’t see them or hear them. I just have this sense of them all rushing downwards. Like they’re falling into the lake. But running, not falling. Maybe the blood in my brain is coursing around the wrong channels as the result of some growth deep within. I’m starting to lose it. There’s nobody here. Just me in the fog. There’s nobody around, running or otherwise. I tremble. My hands and arms jerk about like I’m a puppet. I start walking, not knowing what else to do. But then realise that I don’t know where I’m going, so I stop again. ‘Oh God,’ I say, to nobody. ‘Oh God.’ I feel like things are creeping up behind me. So I turn around. I can’t see anybody there. Just a grey blank. It would be black if not for the moonlight. I can just about hear the music of the party in the distance. A dull thumping. But I can’t contemplate going back without Jennifer. The direction that the music comes from is not obvious at first. But then I hear a shriek in the distance. A thin wail that sounds like Jennifer screaming. The two sounds each give a context to the other, so I can make a guess at the direction I should be heading. Her scream is accompanied by a high-pitched whooping, and I tense every muscle in my body. ‘Oh God,’ I say again. I start walking.
After a few minutes I see a shape looming up in front of me. I shake a little. Shudder. I stop walking and just look. I half expect something impossible. Some troll or ogre or something. I don’t know what. This thing is tall, and it has arms, and it’s all twisted and fucked up. It is covered in hard-looking brown skin. I gather that it is looking the other way, because it hasn’t shown any sign of noticing me yet. I look up at its head, thinking that if I can back away slowly enough, then I might escape. But what if this is what took Jennifer? No. It’s too big.
It’s a tree. The relief almost makes me laugh. I move closer to it. I am so cold. I am so cold that this dead tree actually looks like warmth and shelter to me. My clothes are soaked. But I have to find Jennifer. I am standing next to the tree now. I look closely at it. It still looks a bit like a creature. Or a weird person. It looks like the monster from The Woman Eater. I see there are two trunks, growing against each other. Just above my head height, there are faces in both of them, twisting, almost, as if to look at each other. Each trunk has two branches where arms would be. They stretch up into the sky like the arms of preachers with broken wrists. I start to get the fear again. I look lower down and am almost sick at the sight of what is there. A pale, thick, smooth branch protrudes from the trunk on the left. It lies flat against the body of the tree, but it bends into the other trunk, and disappears into a fold of bark that is a perfect vulva. I put my hand over my mouth. Every hair in my body is trying to escape, is pulling out, like they are parasites and are independent of me. Oh God. I turn away, and start to walk, but I don’t know where to. I go uphill. But we started running downhill when we left the house, so I should be going downhill. I turn again and make myself walk past the trees but I don’t look at them. I don’t want to go downhill, but I do want to get away. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. There is something walking with me, I’m sure of it. I’m imagining it. No, it’s here. It’s there. It is just beside me, walking with me, just hiding in the mist. It’s in my head. It lashes out and claps me on the back. My spine is suddenly a stack of slates, shattered by nerves. My knees bend. Hot jaws close on the back of my neck. A long, scalding tongue slithers into the wound and my legs fold. The pain is too great for me to retain control of anything. All of my strings snap. Heavy, hairy things are astride me. I bite at the ground and the black soil fills up my eyes.
I am moving through a deep grey fog, but I don’t know how. All my limbs are flailing uncontrollably. My head rolls across from one side to the other, dragged by my desperate eyes. The fog slides past as I move forward. But still my body does not connect with anything. I am not lying down, or walking, or being carried. I’m just slowly writhing, wailing, floating through the fog.
PART THREE
JACK
I jumped and ran, the ground pounding into my feet like a hammer, in the direction of the screaming and the strange whooping and laughing. Francis wasn’t far away; he was there, an unfocused smudge, rushing down the mountain beside me, and we ran side by side without speaking. At least, I thought it was him, although with the mist and the silence, it could have been anybody. Was it him?
‘Francis?’ I said. ‘Francis, is that you?’
‘Yeah,’ I heard him say, or thought I heard him say, but I wasn’t sure. I looked over to where he was, where the shape of him was, and my foot suddenly slipped on the snow and the whole blasted fell tipped up and over my head as I spun around, falling and falling and falling and it didn’t stop until I was on my back, lying there, looking at the solid grey air above me. The thought swept into my head that I had to save her, I had to find her first, before Francis, and that was how she would know that I was the right one for her and he was not. I stood up.
The mist pressed in against my face like a blanket somebody was trying to smother me with. What took her? Of course, it could have just been some cretin from the party but that struck me as fanciful.
I didn’t know where I was, but I kept on going.
I found myself standing over a dead body, and I held my breath in case it was her. I knelt down, every atom of my body fit to shoot off, and I saw that it was Francis. I breathed out and first of all I felt relief, and then panic.
‘Francis?’ I said, although I didn’t think he was breathing. I could see my own breath misting in the air in front of me every time I exhaled, but there was no such sign of life from him. ‘Francis?’ My heart was beating against the drum of my chest and I felt hot, despite the cold air and the snow on the ground. The snow on the ground.
It was red; blood was seeping out from his prone body and all over my hands and my knees, pressed down into the wet ground beside him, and it was all over his face, drying into brown patches over his mouth and chin, and all over his whole damned body, I realised, numbly. What could have done this? And what were they doing to Jennifer?
I remembered Francis’ face as it hung over the edge of the bed while Jennifer gyrated on top of him, his neck taut and his mouth open and his eyes closed. Some practical voice was thrashing around beneath the memory, like maybe we needed mountain rescue, or an air ambulance, or something. My mobile. Where was it? I tried to get it from my pocket, my fingers cold and inflexible, and I dropped it a couple of times and only then did I see how badly I was shaking.
Eventually I brought the phone up to my face, only to see that the screen was blank. I fumbled with the buttons, but couldn’t turn the thing on, however hard I pressed. It was dead. I kept opening my mouth to speak with him, with Francis, but then closing it again, and I wanted to play Mario Kart with him, beat him at last, knock him off the top spot, the git. That DVD collection he had, all the B-movies, more than I would ever have thought could have been made.
I wanted to cry, but Jennifer might miraculously have appeared and seen me, so I stopped myself. The energy that tears would have released built within me until I felt that I was vibrating, slowly lifting from the face of the earth, and I shouted and screamed as loud as I could. Maybe the others would hear me and be able to find me. He had a hole in his neck, a rupture. I didn’t dare leave him, leave his body, in case I couldn’t find it again and it disappeared along with the mist.
I shouted and screamed until I felt that I was vomiting gravel and then I found that I couldn’t shout any more. I heard people running towards me, and then I heard Taylor’s voice.
‘Jack?’ he said. ‘Where are you? Did you shout? Are you OK?’
‘Taylor!’ I shouted, and it hurt like
hell but sounded no louder than a crow with its lung punctured by one of the cats that tumbled and yowled around Fell House, the dying bird jerking around like a leaf in a gale. ‘Taylor!’
What would Taylor think? Taylor was like a role model to all of us, like in the same way that Christians asked themselves: What would Jesus do? We asked ourselves: What would Taylor do? WWTD? Francis used to hide behind the sofa when Taylor got in from work, and then jump up and scare the shit out of him, and Taylor would lean the ironing-board up against Francis’ bedroom door, which opened inwards, so that when Francis opened the door to leave his room the ironing-board would fall on top of him. Now, though, one of Francis’ ribs was poking straight up out of his chest, at almost ninety degrees to the position it should have been in.
‘Jack,’ Taylor said, from directly behind me. He put his hand on my shoulder. Erin was there too, and Graham, and I saw that the mist was clearing. ‘Jesus. Francis.’ Taylor leaned over beside me and threw up. The bile in it ate through the snow, leaving a patterned hole like the trail of a firework.
‘We need an ambulance,’ Erin said. She pulled her phone from her pocket and fiddled with it angrily before putting it back. ‘My battery’s gone. Taylor? Have you got yours?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Left it inside.’
‘He’s already dead,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘He’s not dead,’ Erin said.
‘He is,’ I said. ‘He’s dead.’
‘He’s not,’ Graham said. ‘You can see his breath.’
‘No you can’t,’ I said, ‘I found him a few minutes ago. I’ve been watching him.’
‘You can,’ Taylor said. ‘You can see his breath.’
‘Look,’ Erin said.
I looked, and saw breath clouding above his mouth.
‘Maybe you couldn’t see it in the mist,’ Erin said. ‘Come on. We need to get him back to the house.’
We tried to lift him, but I expected his spine to be rigid and it wasn’t, so I dropped him. He landed on his side and settled on to his front. The back of his shirt was ripped open, and the skin was torn, and his splintered vertebrae were visible.
