Frustrated, he tried knocking on one of the doors, to prove his conviction that the row was deserted. The door duly opened, but there was nobody behind it. Will went in and hunted for life, room by room. The house didn’t smell old or disused; it smelled of nothing at all. Nobody here. He stalked out of the house and slammed the door shut. Marching across the street, he ignored the guffawing parrots and struck out towards the treacly sun, his boots crunching across the shingle beach.
The tide was out: the dark edge of water, periodically creaming into the shore, was only just distinguishable against the salt-and-pepper beach. The stones were smooth and uniform in size and myriad in colour. Some kind of coral provided relief for the eye, a friable, greyish species that poked from the stones like tiny signposts. A little further along, when he came across the bleached skull of a cat, he realised that the coral was not coral after all. He tried hard not to study the beach after that, and would have returned to the lane were it not for the fact that it petered out, swallowed by more acres of shingle. There was little to break up the skyline apart from the spire of a church that looked as if it should be in a children’s fairy tale: crooked and black, it made an arthritic gesture to the heavens. For want of something better to do, Will angled towards it, fingering the strange puckered mark that had risen on his forehead.
The church sat in the centre of a poorly tended graveyard. Bloated insects he couldn’t identify buzzed drunkenly by him. The trees here were stunted, purposefully it seemed, their heads lopped off before they could reach a certain height. Their boughs were famished affairs, the branches leeched of colour and as brittle as the bones on the beach, as if the stuff that lay in the ground was sucking the life from them. Will strayed off the path and tried to study some of the headstones, though time and neglect and the weather had conspired to polish the headstones almost clean of their inscriptions. This one, though:
Here lies Evelyn Marley, beloved wife of Hector. She died when the knife of a robber split her heart open. Humble Street, where it happened, knows her blood.
And this:
Beneath this stone are the mortal remains of Gregory Phipps who died, aged sixteen, brained by a stone wielded by his father. Ten days he took to die.
And this:
The bodies of Robert and Jessica Bunce feed the worms here. Fire took their sleeping forms and gave them eternal rest.
IT WAS A well-stocked graveyard. The stones encroached on each other’s plots and leaned into each other like poor teeth. Will was about to leave the cemetery when he heard a gritty noise rise up from the bottom of the churchyard. He stealthily padded among the stones until he saw its author: a woman wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, hacking at the gravelly soil with a trowel.
“Hello?” Will said, grateful to see another soul in this strange wilderness. The woman raised her head and Will was struck with a frustrating sense of recognition which would not reveal itself. “I know you, don’t I?” he asked, approaching.
The woman straightened and searched his face. “I’m afraid you’re at an advantage,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before in my life.”
“What’s your name?”
“Alice.”
“Alice. No, I don’t know an Alice. But you look like someone I know.”
They stood awkwardly, regarding each other among the bastard cabbage.
“Interesting graveyard,” Will said.
“Isn’t it?”
“But crowded.”
Alice nodded. “Yes, it is a little densely populated. But the beach is a fine overspill.”
“Isn’t that a health hazard?”
“For whom, exactly? The dead?”
Will laughed shrilly, and clammed up. It didn’t feel right. None of it.
“Well, I need to get on,” Alice said, waving her trowel at the weeds. It seemed a pointless chore when so much of the graveyard had already been conquered by yarrow, milfoil and fleabane.
“Don’t let me stop you,” Will said, jollily. “I just wondered if you could tell me where...” The question ran out of steam when he realised how odd he was going to seem when he finished with the hell I am? Without too much of a pause, he diverted to: “...I can find the nearest train station?”
“Oh, trains, they don’t come out this far. What is it? Are you lost?”
“I think so,” Will said. Despite their uncanny conversation, the woman made him feel comfortable. He felt that he could confide in her without embarrassing himself. “I can’t remember where I was about an hour ago. I woke up and I was on a beach. Empty houses.” It sounded so ridiculous when out in the open. “Parrots.”
Alice seemed unimpressed. “There’s a little village, a bit further along the beach, called Gloat Market. You might be able to find somebody to help you there. There’s a pharmacist’s. And a taxi service. They might be able to ride you out to Sud, or Howling Mile, or Mash This. Fair distances, but you’ll find trains there.”
“Gloat Market,” Will said. He didn’t know the place, or the others that Alice had mentioned, but he felt more confident now that he had a few locations to refer to. “Are we in Suffolk?” he asked, but shook his head when she regarded him with bewilderment. “Never mind. Thanks a lot. You’ve been a great help.”
“That’s okay, Will. Travel safe, now.” She reached out and touched his arm.
He waved and tramped towards the cemetery gates. At the threshold he stopped, trying to remember something. He turned back. Sixty feet away, her figure was bent over and earnestly engaged with the trowel, the edge of the blade tearing at the earth.
“How did you know–” he began.
She reared up and he took a reflexive step away. Her eyes glowered at him. The tool dangled from her grip, dribbling what looked like blood into the soft, gritty earth. He was smitten with the impression that she had been able to control who she really was while he talked to her, but that now, with contact broken, she had rediscovered her true form. Will pursed his lips to finish his question, but his mouth had drained of spit. She seemed to lean towards him, but she took off in the opposite direction at speed, moving to the blind side of the church before he could think about pursuing her. Half of her face seemed to be hanging off, a badly knitted balaclava that refused to hug the contours of her head. He hurried back to the beach and tried to calm himself down by reciting the name of the village, Gloat Market, over and over again.
GLOAT MARKET ROSE out of the shingle like an elephant’s graveyard. Great vertical twists of bone formed an ivory wall, protecting the village from the winds that steamed in off the sea, smelling of oil and dead fish. As Will passed through the postern gate at the edge of the village environs, he was again assaulted by the belief that there were others here, as real as he, capering just beyond the confines of what he was aware of. He saw flashes of movement, swatches of clothing; heard snippets of sound that were gone almost before they arrived. A brief smell of frying sausages, of dog shit, of soap. Yet there was nothing, in truth, for the village stretched out in front of him, as animated as the graveyard he had left behind an hour or so earlier. Didn’t it mean you were brain damaged, if you entertained the illusion of sensory input?
The bone shield seemed a little grand for the tiny web of streets it contained. A cross-roads at the village centre was marked with a stone flower. Some of the houses that flanked the lanes greeted his passing them by with open mouths; their doors swung rustily on tired, oil-shy hinges. The parrots, at least, had followed him. They sat on washing lines like scraps of filthy linen and heckled him remorselessly.
“Fuckhead!” they screeched. “Minging cock-gobbler! You piss shit! You piss shit! You do! You do!”
Above it all, a constant loop, a soughing as of summer breezes. It was there always, but he had only become conscious of it when the parrots provided their anti-rhythms.
He ignored the parrots and turned onto a lane that appeared to be more densely populated by buildings. It turned out to be called Humble Street. Will wondered if it
was the same Humble Street that had seen Evelyn Marley’s final fall. He found the pharmacist that Alice had referred to, but it was closed. Rather, it was open, but unstaffed. Huge glass orbs sat on the shelves gathering dust. They were filled with powders and liquids of extravagant hue and even more alien names: Grivellage Salts, one was called. Dandiprat’s Tincture, was another. A phial of bleached green crystals bearing the label Paleshrikes found its way into his pocket, mainly because he liked the sound of the name, but also because he needed to have something real to put his fingers on. Too much of what he saw here seemed without substance or anchor. He felt that, once his back was turned on it, it would all dissolve to dust, or fly away into the sky.
Further along the lane he saw a trap without a pony and a pack of thin dogs conferring by a pond. They looked at him without interest as he walked by. As he drew alongside the gates of what appeared to be a salvage yard, filled with cracked, claw-footed bathtubs, radiators, steel buckets, and propellers, a voice cried out to him from an upstairs window in the building that backed onto the yard.
Will stopped and peered through the wooden slats of the gate.
“You, boy!” the voice called. “Give us a hand, won’t you?”
He saw a face at the window, and a hand waggling impatiently at him. Will pushed the gates open and jogged through the yard to the back door. Inside was a kitchen that smelled of suet and overcooked cabbage. Puddings wrapped in muslin were cooling on a windowsill. A recipe book was open and floury fingerprints spoilt a colour plate displaying a hollowed rabbit that was ready for the oven.
“In yet?” the voice called, a deep voice that was being peeled back to reveal a shrill centre.
“I’m coming,” Will said, and hurried up the stairs. On the landing he was greeted by an ecstasy of half-stuffed wildlife. He pushed by the still menagerie, with its glazed eyes and rictuses, and found the room in which the figure stood.
It was a man of around sixty years of age. He was naked. Will tried not to look, giving his attention instead to the framed maps on the walls. “My name is George,” the man said.
“Are you all right?” Will asked.
All bluster and bile, the other sputtered: “Of course I’m not all right, you blithering butterhead. What have you, a spatchcocked chicken for a brain? Can’t you see, I’m cut and bleeding and in a rare old state.”
Wishing he had carried on without stopping, Will said, “Do you have any bandages?”
“Do I look like a besodded pill-pusher? Great yawning twats, man. I should have called for help from that beetle over there.”
George had not yet turned around. Will’s eyes took in the heavily larded tectonic plates of his buttocks and thighs. One of this man’s calves could have stood in for Will’s chest. His back hung in layered scoops of fat that resembled a Christmas tree, the edges of which had been softened by snow. Slowly he turned, this shithouse, this pagoda of blubber, to fix Will with a niggardly eye like a currant pressed into pastry. Again the impact of recognition: there was something in the cast of these features that recalled those of Alice.
More of George was revealed. Will saw the manner of his injury and blushed. He had been winding his cock tight into a vice and had obviously caused some serious tearing at the moment of his climax. Will thought he was taking things very calmly, all things considered.
“Do you know Alice?” he asked, as much to deflect his study of the ruptured organ as anything. It jutted between the fat man’s thighs like a button mushroom. His abject expression might well have been displayed as a result of the wound, but it was for Will’s benefit.
“Shall we take tea and pikelets while we discuss such matters? Hmm?” George drew a podgy hand across his features and Will was struck with the horrifying certainty that the doughy mask would come off under his fingers. “I know of no Alice. All I know is that I am in pain, sir. The kind of pain that makes a man want to tear off his own head and cast it into the fire. Now, as you can see, I have damn-near castrated myself in a lunatic moment of self-absorption. Kindly fetch me something in which I might bind the old peashooter and help me get dressed. You might try that gallimaufry of men’s magazines over there. Under those.”
Will rooted around beneath the glossy, pink pages but only came up with a clean handkerchief folded into a neat square. He helped to jemmy George’s folds and flaps into his waistcoat and britches while they both wheezed with the effort. By the time Will had finished, the windows were steamed and George’s face was as ruddy as the blood on his hands.
“I’ll just buff the old wanking spanners, dear boy, then I’ll make you a bite. I apologise for the inconvenience, but not for my habits. I’m a lonely man who just happens to need extreme relief from time to time.”
In the kitchen, George pottered from larder to refrigerator to table, adding pickles and sausage and cheese to a large white plate. He handed this to Will and instructed him to cut some slices from a slab of bread. Will picked at the food, his appetite gone. George finished his food, then took on Will’s remains. His face in the trough, George became a personable companion, far removed from the objectionable bully Will had seen initially.
“Cakington-cakely?” George asked, when the last forkful of coleslaw had disappeared between his worming lips. Without waiting for an answer, he leaned across to the cupboard and extracted a huge Swiss roll.
It was something in the eyes, Will thought. Something that he and Alice shared. They must be related, he thought, regardless of George’s insistence that he did not know anyone of that name. He watched as George went at the cake with a spatula like a fencing expert showing off his best moves. Who was it that George and Alice reminded him of? He tried to push his mind beyond the young face and the black hole, the light, but he was not equal to it.
“My name’s Will, by the way,” he said, in the hope that offering his name might jolt some shred of recognition from his host.
“Short for?” George asked, working the question around a piece of Swiss roll that would have satisfied a family of four. Crumbs the size of £2 coins were ejected, retrieved and pasted into submission by his fearsome jaw.
“Just Will,” Will said. He heard the fatigue in his voice at the same time that he noticed the black sky begin to boil with clouds.
“George isn’t short for anything either. Good, stout, monosyllabic names. You can’t beat them.”
Unable, and unwilling, to mask his tiredness, Will said, “Where am I, exactly? Where is this place?”
“This is Gloat Market, quite evidently. There are signs as you enter.”
“Yeah, I know it’s Gloat Market, but what is Gloat Market in?”
George frowned. “Don’t follow you, friend.”
“I’m lost. I’ve never heard of this village, or Howling Mile or wherever else we’re near. What’s going on? What is this place?”
“Gloat Market,” George said irritably. “Crisp and oozing nips, man. I’ve never been to any of the other places. No need, really. I’m quite happy where I am.”
“What about everyone else?” Will persisted. “Are they happy where they are?”
“I’m quite certain of it.”
“Then where are they? It’s deserted. You and Alice are the only people I’ve seen all day.”
George gave him a look that suggested his leg was being pulled. “You’re tired, sir. Have a nap and all your nonsense will be forgotten.”
“I’ve had enough of this,” Will spat, and rose from the table. George laid a hand on his arm.
“You might want to try to settle in here,” he said. “Sometimes it’s best not to look too hard for something, even if you don’t know what that something is.”
“What are you trying to say?”
George’s hands flew into the air and he smiled a shockingly toothy smile. “Nothing, dear man. Absolutely nothing whatsoever. Just sorry I couldn’t be of more help to you. As you were to me.”
Will said goodbye, and hiked up a short hill. The clouds gave up their attempt
to hold on to the rain in their bellies and vomited a heavy, oily deluge that soaked Will to the skin in seconds. Cursing loudly, he ran to a cluster of trees and, once in their shelter, saw another house in their shade, its front door swinging merrily in the gusty blow of what was fast becoming a nasty little storm.
Will called a greeting as he entered the hallway and blinked hard as he saw a splash of motion – a woman carrying a tray – at the threshold to a dining room. There was nobody there. He hurried upstairs and flicked a light in the bathroom. There was nobody here either, despite the stroboscopic blip depicting a young woman soaping herself in a bath full of bubbles. He undressed and showered, leaning against the wall while the jet of water fizzed against his skin. When he finally stepped out of the cubicle and started drying himself in front of the mirror, he had to blink hard again, but not because he had seen the ghost of somebody sharing the bathroom with him. He reached out to the mirror and rubbed away the steamed surface. When it was clear, he was able to see the two patches of rot that were eating into his flesh: one on the side of his arm where George had touched him, the other on the back of his forearm: Alice.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: MARAUDER
PARDOE HAD SAID there were just three Inserts. Sean, Emma, and Naomi. But others, it seemed, had learned the secret. Crossing the bridge that spanned the river (known as the Timeless, according to an impatient tradesman on his way to buy calves at an auction), Sean had leaned for a moment on the parapet to watch the traffic below. A barge made its way to the north bank, farting black clouds of diesel smoke in its wake. At the bow, he caught a glimpse of Tim Enever. He was certain of it. By the time he’d nudged Emma to tell her, he was gone.
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