Black Mountain

by Venero Armanno

  With a sort of thudding in his head Mark could see that the creature was the thing from the corner of his eye, the monster so carefully described in his screenplay. Mark forced himself to read on carefully, to not jump pages ahead in an attempt to discover some secret key to his own inner world.

  Then, there it was, only a short chapter later. The definitive cause for Justin Blackmore’s infuriated telephone call: a scene that was the direct echo of Mark Alter’s screenplay.

  Or vice versa.

  The no-face creature is in a cold cell, begging without speaking, wanting death, and the man in blue is there, hands tightening around its throat.

  Mark Alter pushed himself from his bed and staggered to the bathroom. He felt as if an unseen fist had punched him in the belly and a great hand had slammed his head against a wall. It wasn’t possible. It simply was not possible.

  How? How?

  He didn’t know and he couldn’t imagine what the scene in Cesare Montenero’s novel would lead to. In his screenplay, after that scene in the cell, the no-faced creature did not die but instead went on a murderous rampage. A product of some failed government scientific experiment – which explained the man in the blue coat – all the monster knew or desired was to maim and to kill. The twist was that in each murderee’s last moments, No-Face acquired their face, so that, in effect, each person was being murdered by a version of themselves.

  He threw up hard, three times into the bowl of the toilet.

  Yes, he had plagiarised. Yes, he had stolen. He was a thief. But was it stealing to do so completely unintentionally? For one more time in his life of aloneness he wished someone else was there with him, someone he could talk to and ask questions. Mark thought of calling his father and mother, but their relationship had never been marked by communication. The fault wasn’t so much that of those good folk; Mark blamed himself. They’d tried to love him but year by year he’d drifted further from their care. Joe and Maria Alter might have brought him into their lives at the age of five, when all seemed good and promising, but even by the age of fifteen he’d been certain he wasn’t like them, or like any of their relatives, or of any other friends.

  One day I will find myself.

  But what if I don’t?

  All twisted up inside, Mark read into the evening. When the small book was finished he returned to the first page and started again. From that scene in the cell, with the terrible one-armed creature begging for assistance, Montenero’s story and Mark’s story diverged. The book’s little fantasy played out towards an unexpectedly happy ending. The old man transfers his life into yet another blank and milky creature, and so starts again. Mark’s screenplay, by complete contrast, moved quickly into a sort of comic book celebration of murder. No-Face’s rampage is vicious, cruel, completely without remorse, and promises to continue without end.

  Mr Blackmore had been correct in one aspect, at least: Mark Alter was guilty of stealing a basic idea and a complete scene, but not an entire storyline. Yet how could any of this have happened?

  Mark took a clean sheet of paper and composed a hand-written letter.

  Dear Editors,

  I would like to contact the author of the novel Black Mountain. I have read the book and greatly enjoyed it. I would like to communicate with its author. In fact, I would like to meet him. Maybe Mr Montenero would be interested in someone writing a screenplay adaptation of his novel? If so, I’d be very interested in the job.

  Yours sincerely,

  Mark Alter

  From there, he had no idea what might happen. All he was certain of was that he shared something with some forgotten writer. And just how old was the man, anyway, if his first books were published before the war?

  A reply to his letter came within ten days.

  Dear Mark Alter,

  We are not a contact agency for Mr Montenero, however, in this instance, we have passed along your message. He advises that he doesn’t receive guests and has no interest in film.

  Regards,

  Laura Bird

  Publishing Editor, The Living Press

  There were full contact details, so, undeterred, Mark wrote an email to this Laura Bird.

  Hi Ms Bird, Mark Alter again. Thanks so much for your letter. Could you let Mr Montenero know that I’m a scriptwriter, and pretty good, and that I still think his book would make a really, really great film? He doesn’t have to be involved, but I’d just like to talk to him about how we might go about it. Could you ask him if it’s okay for you to pass me his contact information please? All the best, MA

  The reply? It came the next day:

  I tried him again. He still says no.

  Mark tried to sleep on it. Somehow he had to find a way to see this man. He’d already looked up telephone books, but the few Monteneros listed had never heard of someone called ‘Cesare’ and didn’t appreciate being bothered.

  At the café, the Italian cook looked at the slim novel Mark had taken to carrying around with him, and said during a coffee break, ‘You know what? That book’s writer’s name is the same as the title.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Montenero, get it? “Nero” and “negro” translate as the same thing, which is the colour black. And what’s a “monte”? It’s a mountain. So you get “Black Mountain” out of his surname and in a couple of languages too. Italian, but maybe Spanish and Portuguese as well, I’m no expert. So it’s an autobiography or something?’

  ‘Not unless the old man’s planning on living forever,’ Mark replied, and something cold seemed to slide down into his spleen.

  Mark decided there was only one way forward: the truth. He emailed Laura Bird one more time, promising himself that if things didn’t work out he’d force himself to forget about an old writer and some forgotten book.

  Hello Laura, I know I can’t ask you to keep doing this for me but there’s one thing that’s sort of important. If you could get this message to Mr Montenero then it’d really mean something. Could you just tell him that I understand what he means about the creature? I’ve seen it too. I know all about it.

  That’s all. Mark

  There was no email reply. Two days passed, three, four, a week and then two weeks. Mark took the book back to the library. He tried to deny its very existence. He deleted every one of his screenplay’s files from his computer’s hard drive and he physically destroyed the backup thumb. One day he was looking out his grimy window, at the dead crooked tree in the backyard, and he remembered the other thing Mr Justin Blackmore, famous producer and director, had admonished him to do.

  Bury it.

  Why not?

  Mark took the hard copies of ‘No-Face’, and an old shovel from the small store of tools under the shack, and buried his various screenplay drafts in a box deep, deep, deep into the ground by the roots of the dead palm tree.

  Posterity could have his film. Or ants and worms.

  The telephone was ringing and when he answered it a husky voice asked, with an accent, ‘Do you feel pain?’

  Mark experienced the same leap of his heart that he’d felt when Justin Blackmore had called him. He knew, instantly, without doubt, that this was Cesare Montenero.

  ‘Why would I?’ he replied. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Then what do you think you know?’

  Mark swallowed hard. Somehow tears sprang into his eyes. It choked him to speak.

  ‘Only that . . . only that I see it too. What you wrote in your book.’

  ‘A creature?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you put it into a film script?’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Blackmore told me. We go back. Don’t have dealings with the man. Don’t trust him.’

  ‘This is Mr Montenero, right?’

  Mark was stalling for time, trying to
get his thoughts straight. Why was the old writer telephoning him now? And now that he had him on the line, what ought he ask him?

  ‘Am I the person you’ve been looking for? You know the answer.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘And no pain, you’re certain?’

  ‘None at all.’

  ‘You’re too young. Twenty-two.’

  There was a sharp intake of breath on those last words. Mark heard it.

  ‘You’re – you mean, you’re in pain?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the old man spoke, and Mark could tell it was an honest answer. There was quiet breathing, then: ‘I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what to call it.’

  ‘I want to come and see you.’

  ‘It’s more realistic to think that I might not be here much longer.’

  There was another intake of that breath.

  Mark imagined an elderly gentleman sitting in some chair somewhere, and an old-style telephone receiver, probably Bakelite, pressed to his ear, his torso doubling over as something that hurt went through him. Trying to suppress it. Trying not to reveal too much of it to the person on the other end of the line.

  But breath doesn’t lie.

  ‘Then let me come now,’ Mark said quickly, afraid the old man would die before he ever had the chance to properly speak with him. ‘Tell me where you are, I’ll get moving.’

  ‘No. It’s too soon.’

  ‘Too soon?’

  Silence. No breath. No nothing. Then: ‘What did you do with it?’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘The screenplay Blackmore told me about.’

  ‘I got rid of everything. All the drafts. Deleted them. I’m going to trash my computer too. And the paper copies, well, I buried them. Under a dead tree.’

  ‘You buried them under a dead tree?’

  Now there was a hint of amusement in the old man’s softly accented voice. Amusement in a man who sounded as if he was just this side of death.

  ‘But I can tell you all about that when I meet you. When I come see you.’

  ‘Are you certain you buried those things under a tree?’

  Amusement and – was it a sort of longing?

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  A pause. Breath in. Breath slow on the way out.

  ‘What do you think you’ll find by coming to see me?’

  Mark wanted to reply with the clear and absolute truth – I want to find myself – but he knew how foolish, how young, that would sound.

  ‘I don’t know. But please let me.’

  ‘I already said I might not be here.’

  ‘Then I’ll come now. This minute.’

  ‘No.’

  There was a longer pause. A ragged sigh. Mark wondered if the old man might not expire on this very line.

  ‘Then when? Somehow I’ll find you. I will, Mr Montenero, I promise you that. So you might as well tell me where you live.’ Mark swallowed. With his sleeve he wiped those tears away. ‘Please?’

  The old man was clearly thinking it over. His voice was softer: ‘Two weeks. A fortnight. Then you can come.’

  ‘What if . . . what if you’re not there?’

  ‘Once you’re here you’ll know where you are.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘You’ll know.’

  ‘Where do I come? Where do you live?’

  Instead of giving the answer, Cesare Montenero whispered, ‘You think you want to live forever?’

  ‘Live forever?’ Mark’s brow was furrowed. Such a thing had never crossed his mind. ‘No.’

  Then he stopped.

  Had it never crossed his mind? Really? Who wouldn’t want to live forever? The question snapped at him, confused him, then, somehow, he knew exactly how he had to answer the old writer. Mark had to answer with his own question.

  ‘Do you want to live forever, Mr Montenero?’

  ‘Huh.’ A pause. A reflection. Then the husky voice. ‘I never used to.’

  And the line went dead.

  In the following two weeks Mark Alter felt more alive than he’d ever felt before. He was nervous and sleepless with anticipation, but was also wracked by anxiety, by anguish. He would meet this old man who saw the same thing inside his mind that he saw, he would find some real answers. Yet how would Montenero let him know his address? When would Mark be contacted again?

  The telephone didn’t ring except for calls from the café to confirm his roster. Worse thoughts crept into Mark’s mind. What if Montenero has passed away since the telephone call? What if I never have the chance to find out what binds us?

  Exactly fourteen days after the telephone conversation, an email appeared in the electronic in-box he so rarely used.

  Here is the address.

  It was from Laura Bird.

  As if liberated from chains, Mark immediately readied his backpack. He used a red pen to work out the route on a fold-out map and he checked bus and train timetables. No need to fly; a day and a half would get him there.

  Without calling the café to say he wouldn’t be back for some time, perhaps a very long time, he rushed out of his home and started his life’s journey.

  The road in both directions was hot and dusty, heavy traffic lumbering past in the monotony of midday. More than twenty-four hours had passed, too many bus and train connections had been taken, but he knew he was almost there.

  Where?

  Cesare Montenero’s address was somewhere deep in the country. Mark had arrived into the sort of outlying area that should have been rural but was now very obviously on its way to becoming thoroughly suburban. Construction vehicles rumbled past him. Billboards advertised farmland sell-outs and subdivisions.

  At the next turn marked on his map things changed, and for the better.

  Along Greatrock Road, Mark found that the vista was different. There were tall trees thick and full of birdlife. Insects were chirruping and lizards and other creatures scuttled through the undergrowth. The sweat dried on his face and in his shirt, and the road narrowed until it became a nice, cool country laneway. Few cars passed. Cattle and horses grazed behind country fencing. The region was marked on his map as ‘Godbless’.

  Mark hiked on and a good half century melted away.

  The place he was after seemed to be at the peak of the hill in front of him. It was no black mountain, but there was a steep gradient to the top. Empty paddocks and swaying grass were the only neighbours. A driveway cut upwards and a splintered wooden post box was nailed to a stump. The number was the same as the one on his scrawl of paper.

  A large handprinted sign read, No Visitors.

  Then, going higher, Mark saw what must have been Cesare Montenero’s house, an absolute oddity sitting in the centre of a huge hilltop parkland.

  It was a red-brick mansion with arches, gables and a pair of chimney stacks that weren’t smoking. More than anything the great home resembled a kind of dilapidated European manor, something that should have resided in the green meadows of provincial France or Italy. The house was nestled amid five, maybe ten manicured acres on which were mature jacaranda trees and scores of hoop pines, giants every one of them – Mark thought they must have been fifty, a hundred years old.

  Further back, the land started to dip to the natural curve of the terrain, and a green perimeter marked the start of thousands of acres of state forest. In all, this place was built for seclusion; if you liked privacy and solitude, he thought, here was your paradise.

  No bell, buzzer or intercom. The long, swing-open gate had a reminder of the sign down in the lane: Private Property, Keep Out, This Means You.

  Making sure to shut the gate behind him, Mark started up the drive toward a large circular courtyard. Before he was halfway there three dogs appeared
from around the side of the house.

  They came so fast across the jade lawns that he didn’t have time to make a run for safety. Their heavy paws pounded the ground. At the last moment, with a gasp of horror, he turned his face and body away, expecting to be mauled like meat.

  Instead, all three dogs circled his legs, panting hard, tails wagging.

  A black, a white and a red-brown. Breathing again, Mark continued to the house, three dogs at his heel.

  The front door was heavy and hand-carved, with an iron knocker in the shape of a snake consuming itself. He rapped hard.

  Thirty seconds, sixty. No one came. Mark walked carefully around the side of this peculiar manor, past four locked garage doors and a thriving vegetable garden.

  Another door in the back. He knocked on it and called out.

  ‘Anyone home? Hello?’

  No answer and not a single sound from inside.

  Then Mark saw something extraordinary: a large wild and overgrown patch of forest that had been fenced off, constituting maybe an acre of the virgin woodlands the entire Godbless region must have been generations back. It was a private jungle, preserved perfectly. Flowering flame trees gave the illusion of fire and movement. The treetops were full of the blues, reds and greens of budgerigars and parakeets; a great squawking wave of white cockatoos passed over Mark’s bemused head.

  He turned back to the house. ‘Someone home?’ he yelled at the top of his lungs.

  No answer.

  He went and sat on a steel bench near the driveway. The dogs curled around him.

  As evening descended, Cesare Montenero’s little world at the top of the hill started to move towards stillness and silence. Even the birds disappeared. Grey clouds passed overhead and a deep chill set in. Without a coat or jumper, Mark started to shiver. The dogs grew unhappy and restless. They rose to their feet, stretched, then started to whine and scratch at the back door.

  He went to that door and tried it. The thing was unlocked.