Martin started to walk towards her. As he passed each door along the corridor, it seemed to fly open by itself. The hammering was deafening now, but the rooms on either side were empty, even though he could see armchairs and sofas and coffee tables and paintings on the walls. They were like tableaux from somebody’s life, year by year, decade by decade.
‘Leonora?’ he said, and took her into his arms. She was very cold, and shivering. ‘Come on, Leonora, I’ve come to take you home.’
‘There’s no way out,’ she whispered, in a voice like blanched almonds. ‘The darkest things are coming and there’s no way out.’
‘There’s always a way out. Come on, I’ll carry you.’
‘There’s no way out!’ she screamed at him, right in his face. ‘We’re buried too deep and there’s no way out!’
‘Don’t panic!’ he shouted back at her. ‘If we go back to the bedroom we can find a way to climb back up to Underbed! Now, come on, let me carry you!’
He bent down a little, and then heaved her up on to his shoulder. She weighed hardly anything at all. Her feet were badly lacerated. Two of her left toes were dangling by nothing but skin, and blood dripped steadily on to Martin’s jeans.
As they made their way back down the corridor, the doors slammed shut in the same way that they had flown open. But they were still ten or eleven metres away from the bedroom door when Leonora clutched him so tightly round the throat that she almost strangled him, and screamed. ‘They’re here! The darkest things! They’re following us!’
Martin turned around, just as the light bulb at the end of the corridor was shattered. In a single instant of light, however, he had seen something terrible. It looked like a tall, thin man in a grey monkish hood. Its face was as beatifically perfect as the effigy of a saint. Perfect, that is, except for its mouth, which was drawn back in a lustful grin, revealing a jungle of irregular, pointed teeth. And below that mouth, in another lustful grin, a second mouth, with a thin tongue tip that lashed from side to side as if it couldn’t wait to start feeding.
Both its arms were raised, so that its sleeves had dropped back, exposing not hands but hooked black claws.
This was one of the darkest things. The darkest thing that Leonora had feared, and had to face.
In the sudden blackness, Martin was disoriented and thrown off balance. He half-dropped Leonora, but he managed to heft her up again and stumble in the direction of the bedroom. He found the door, groped it open and then slammed it shut behind them and turned the key.
‘Hurry!’ he said. ‘You’ll have to climb on to the bedhead, and up through the ceiling!’
They heard a thick, shuffling noise in the corridor outside, and an appalling screeching of claws against painted plaster walls. The bedroom door shook with a sudden collision and plaster showered down from the lintel. There was another blow, and then the claws scratched slowly down the door panels. Martin turned around. In spite of her injured feet, Leonora had managed to balance herself on the brass bed rail, and now she was painfully trying to pull herself through the hole in the damaged ceiling. He struggled up on to the mattress to help her, and as the door was shaken yet again, she managed to climb through. Martin followed, his hands torn by splintered laths. As he drew his legs up, the bedroom door racketed open and he glimpsed the hooded grey creature with its upraised claws. It raised its head and looked up at him and both its mouths opened in mockery and greed.
The climb up the precipice seemed to take months. Together, Martin and Leonora inched their way up through soft, collapsing peat, using even the frailest of roots for a handhold. Several times they slipped back. Again and again they were showered with soil and pebbles and leaf-mould. Martin had to spit it out of his mouth and rub it out of his eyes. And all the time they knew that the darkest thing was following them, hungry and triumphant, and that it would always follow them, wherever they went.
Unexpectedly, they reached the crest of the precipice. Leonora was weeping with pain and exhaustion, but Martin took hold of her arm and dragged her through the roots and the soft, giving soil until at last they came to the blanket of moss. He lifted it up with his arm, trembling with exhaustion, and Leonora climbed out from under it and into the clearing. Martin, gasping with effort, followed her.
There was no sign of the forest-girl anywhere, so Martin had to guess the way back. Both he and Leonora were too tired to speak, but they kept on pushing their way through the branches side by side, and there was no doubt of their companionship. They had escaped from Under-Underbed, and now they were making their way back through Underbed and up to the worlds of light and fresh air.
It took Martin far longer than he thought to find the underground cavity which would take them back to Leonora’s world. But a strong sense of direction kept him going: a sense that they were making their way upwards. Just when he thought that they were lost for good, he felt his fingers grasping sheets instead of soil, and he and Leonora climbed out of her rumpled bed into her bedroom. Her father was sitting beside the bed, and when they emerged he embraced them both and skipped an odd little fisherman’s dance.
‘You’re a brave boy, you’re a brave boy, bringing my Leonora back to me.’
Martin smeared his face with his hands. ‘She’s going to need treatment on her feet. Is there a doctor close by?’
‘No, but there’s lady’s smock and marigolds; and myrtle, for dismissing bad dreams.’
‘Her toes are almost severed. She needs stitches. She needs a doctor.’
‘An idea will do just as well as a doctor.’
‘There’s something else,’ said Martin. ‘The thing that hurt her … I think it’s probably following us.’
The fisherman laid his hand on Martin’s shoulder and nodded. ‘We’ll take care of that, my young fellow.’
So they stood by the shore in the mauvish light of an early summer’s evening and they set fire to Leonora’s bed, blankets and sheets and all, and they pushed it out to sea like an Arthurian funeral barge. The flames lapped into the sky like dragons’ tongues, and fragments of burned blanket whirled into the air.
Leonora with her bandaged feet stood close to Martin and held his arm; and when it was time for him to go she kissed him and her eyes were filled with tears. The fisherman gratefully clasped his hand. ‘Always remember,’ he said, ‘what might have been is just as important as what actually was.’
Martin nodded, and then he started walking back along the shoreline, to the tussocky grass that would lead him back to Legg’s Elbow and the caves. He turned around only once, but by then it was too dark to see anything but the fire burning from Leonora’s bed, 300 metres out to sea.
His mother frantically stripped back his sheets and blankets in the morning and found him at the bottom of the bed in his red-and-white striped pyjamas, his skin cold and his limbs stiff with rigor mortis. There was no saving him: the doctor said that he had probably suffocated some time after midnight, and by the time his mother found him he had been dead for seven and a half hours.
When he was cremated, his mother wept and said that it was just as if Martin’s was a life that had never happened.
But who could say such a thing? Not the fisherman and his family, who went back to their imaginary cottage and said a prayer for the tunneller who rescued their daughter. Not a wild, half-naked girl who walked through a forest that never was, thinking of a man who dared to face the darkest things. And not the darkest thing, which heaved itself out from under the moss and emerged at last in the world of ideas from a smoking, half-sunken bed; a hooded grey shape in the darkness.
And, in the end, not Martin’s mother, when she went back into his bedroom after the funeral to strip the bed.
She pulled back the blankets one by one; then she tugged off the sheets. But it was just when she was dragging out the sheets from the very end of the bed that she saw six curved black shapes over the end of the mattress. She frowned, and walked around the bed to see what they were.
It was only when s
he looked really close that she realized they were claws.
Cautiously, she dragged down the sheet a little further. The claws were attached to hands and the hands seemed to disappear into the crack between sheet and mattress.
This was a joke, she thought. Some really sick joke. Martin had been dead for less than a week and someone was playing some childish, hurtful prank. She wrenched back the sheet even further and seized hold of one of the claws, so that she could pull it free.
To her horror, it lashed out at her, and tore the flesh on the back of her hand. It lashed again and again, ripping the mattress and shredding the sheets. She screamed, and tried to scramble away, her blood spotting the sheets. But something rose out of the end of the bed in a tumult of torn foam and ripped-apart padding – something tall and grey with a face like a saint and two parallel mouths crammed with shark’s teeth. It rose up and up, until it was towering above her and it was as cold as the Arctic. It was so cold that even her breath fumed.
‘There are some places you should never go,’ it whispered at her, with both mouths speaking in unison. ‘There are some things you should never think about. There are some people whose curiosity will always bring calamity, especially to themselves, and to the people they love. You don’t need to go looking for your fears. Your fears will always follow you, and find you out.’
With that, and without hesitation, the darkest thing brought down its right-hand claw like a cat swatting a thrush and ripped her face apart.
Before she could fall to the carpet, it ripped her again, and then again, until the whole bedroom was decorated with blood.
It bent down then, almost as if it were kneeling in reverence to its own cruelty and its own greed, and it firmly seized her flesh with both of its mouths. Gradually, it disappeared back into the crevice at the end of the bed, dragging her with it, inch by inch, one lolling leg, one flopping arm.
The last to go was her left hand, with her wedding-ring on it.
Then there was nothing but a torn, bloodstained bed in an empty room, and a faint sound that could have been water trickling down through underground caves, or the sea, whispering in the distance, or the rustling of branches in a deep, dark forest.
NIGHT OF THE WENDIGO
(co-written with Tony Campbell)
According to the sheriff’s deputy, my brother Jack couldn’t have known what had hit him. He had stepped out of the North Star Bar and walked across the parking lot in the thickest of snowstorms, the flakes whirling all around him like a thousand burst-open pillows, when something ripped across the side of his head, tearing off his right ear and half of his scalp. He fell face-first to the ground, breaking his nose, but he managed to roll over on to his back to protect himself, even though he must have been blinded by blood and snow.
A hostess called Alma Lindenmuth heard him screaming out, ‘No!’ She said she couldn’t see anything very much, because of the furious blizzard, but she told the sheriff’s deputy that Jack had twisted and wriggled with his arms wildly flailing and his legs kicking in the air. Then she had seen blood jumping everywhere, ‘like them dancing fountains’, and Jack had screamed, ‘Get off me! Christ! Get off me!’
‘He was shouting out, “Get off me!” but I never saw nobody else, only Jack. I swear it. He was fighting only with himself. He was hurting himself.’
‘You’re sure about that?’ I asked her.
‘I know what I saw, that’s all.’ She was fitfully smoking, as if she couldn’t decide whether she really liked it or not. She had heaps of blonde curly hair with black roots showing. She wore a short denim skirt and a tight denim jacket with metal studs in it. In her cleavage there was a scattered pattern of moles like a star-map of Cassiopeia. She smelled of Tommy Girl cologne and cigarette smoke. I could smell something else, too, something sexual, like burying your nose in the bed sheets on the morning after.
‘Next Thursday at nine-oh-five p.m. I would have known him for seven weeks exactly. He used to celebrate our anniversary at nine-oh-five p.m. every Thursday. Two tequila sunrises, there on the bar. He was such a doll.’
She paused, and sipped at her cigarette, and then said, ‘He was the only guy I ever met who made wood interesting. Well,’ she added, laughing ‘when I say wood I mean, like, pine and fir and that kind of stuff. Timber-type wood. Not just, you know, wood. But he was very physical, you know. He really carried himself, if you understand what I mean.’
‘Sure,’ I told her, and I knew exactly what she meant. Jack had always been outdoorsy with an upper-case O. He had always loved climbing and hiking and snowboarding and most of all he had always loved forests. The smell of them, and the awesome silence. I can remember the two of us standing in the middle of the Northwest Angle State Forest one summer’s afternoon with the sun shining down through the pines like a medieval cathedral and him closing his eyes and saying, ‘Don’t ever let anybody tell you that heaven’s somewhere up there in the sky. It’s right here, Bill. Right here among the trees. Can’t you hear them whispering, Bill? They’re alive, for God’s sake. They’re alive.’ And all I could think of was swatting away all those pesky midges and how much I would have given for a long tall cool one.
The North Star Bar was smoky and noisy and a three-piece band was playing the kind of music that can make you cry even when you don’t feel like crying. Ridiculous, sentimental Gopher-State music, like ‘I Left The Only Woman I Ever Loved At Thief River Falls Regional Airport’. An intermittent neon sign flashed Past Blue Ribbon, as if it were a secret message. Past. Blue. Ribbon.
I was still talking to Alma when a tall, stooping man appeared at our table. He wore a long black coat that made him look like a mortician. His hair was white and thick and sat on top of his head as if it could have been a toupee, yet there was an over-combed absurdity about it which made me believe that it was probably real. He wore a striped shirt and a dark blue necktie with the letters NEWS embroidered on it, in yellow.
‘You a reporter?’ I asked him.
‘Why?’
‘Says NEWS on your necktie.’
‘Oh, that. You’re reading it wrong. North East Wood Society, that’s what it means. We’re here to protect forests. Like our fathers did, and our fathers did before us.’
I held out my hand. ‘Pleased to meet you, in that case. My brother was into forestry.’
‘Jack Ballard? Yes, I had more than one discussion with Jack Ballard. You brother was very interested in cutting down tress. In fact, your brother was almost obsessive about cutting down trees.’
‘Of course. That’s what forestry is all about. Growing, cutting, preserving. It’s all part and parcel of the same process.’
‘Not necessarily. Depends which trees you’re cutting down, and why.’
‘Should I know your name?’ I asked him.
‘For sure. John Shooks. You ever been to Shooks, on the Cormorant River, near the Blackduck State Forest? My great-great-grandfather founded that community, with the specific assistance of the Ojibwa.
‘Can’t say I’ve been there, no. I’m a liability lawyer. Fire insurance claims mainly. Some auto-wreck stuff. From Minneapolis. Here’s my card.’
‘Married?’
‘That’s right. Two kids, boy and a girl.’
‘Very different from your brother, then?’
‘In some ways, yes. What are you getting at?’
John Shooks turned his head towards the bar. I beckoned the bar girl in the electric-blue satin blouse with the ruffles at the front and she came over and said, ‘Yah?’
‘Give me another Jack Daniel’s, would you? And a tequila sunset. And whatever the gentleman’s having.’
‘Seven-Up’ll do me. You’re drinking Jack Daniel’s?’
‘My younger brother was torn to bits three days ago. You don’t drink warm milk to get over a thing like that.’
John Shooks stared at me for a while. His eyes were heavily lidded, like a lizard’s, and his irises were pale grey. His nose was awkwardly broken and his chin was
prickly with white stubble. He looked like a week-long forecast of seriously bad weather.
‘Your brother was torn to bits because he forgot who these forests belonged to.’
‘I don’t get you. The medical examiner thinks that he was probably attacked by a bear.’
‘In the middle of town? That never happened before.’
‘There’s always a first time,’ I challenged him.
‘I never saw no bear,’ put in Alma. ‘Well, there could have been a bear … but I never saw one.’
‘There was a force-six blizzard blowing at the time,’ I reminded her. ‘Visibility down to fifteen yards.’
John Shooks picked up his 7-Up and sipped a little from the bottle, keeping one eye on me while he did so. ‘You ever seen a bear? Bear’s a hard thing to miss, even in a blizzard,’ he remarked.
‘What are you trying to tell me? You’re not trying to suggest that my brother was killed deliberately?’
‘Well … I wouldn’t use the exact word “deliberately”.’
‘All right, then. What exact word would you use?’
He licked his lips with the blue-grey tip of his tongue. ‘I would use the word “unavoidably”.’
‘You want to explain that?’
John Shooks shrugged. ‘What happened to your brother was an unavoidable consequence of the fact that he was felling over two thousand acres of trees in the Lost River Forest without taking the trouble to ask who those trees belonged to.’
‘Oh, come on,’ I retorted. ‘He was employed to do it, by the Minnesota Forestry Department. Those trees belong to the state. My brother was employed to clear away jack pine and pitch pine, and replant the area with some threatened strains like white pine and Austrian pine, really good timber trees. That’s the way I understand it, anyway. So I don’t see the beef.’
‘Beef? Your brother was considering the commercial value of all of those two thousand acres of trees, and not what they represented in spiritual terms.’
‘Spiritual terms? I’m sorry, Mr Shooks, I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’
Figures of Fear Page 11
