A HAZY SHADE OF WINTER

by Simon Bestwick

  Danny frowned, then shrugged. ‘You tell me.’

  ‘The moustache.’

  Danny squinted at the picture. ‘Oh, yeah.’

  The face was a little more clearly defined, the planes of the face squarer than those of the statue they’d seen that day, although that could have been put down to the last hundred years of wear and tear. But there was most definitely no moustache on the statue in the picture.

  ‘There was a moustache, wasn’t there?’

  Danny scratched the two-inch scar that crossed his chin. ‘I think so. Maybe it was something else?’

  ‘Like what?’

  Danny had no answer. He shrugged. ‘Who cares? Are we going for a Chinese or what?’

  Sarah took a last long look at the picture, then she shrugged too. ‘Yeah, let’s go.’

  That night, Danny had the dream.

  It was night. He was standing on Knight’s Point, walking towards the statue. There was a storm rising. Thunder rumbled across the sea. Lightning scrabbled on the water and the dry land. A yellow, smoky glow flickered behind the dark clouds.

  The Knight in the statue was straining against the door. There was a loud banging, growing louder and louder, and the door would, every so often, bulge outward startlingly, as if it really was made from planks and not stone. The Knight rocked backwards, then pushed back against the door, and Danny saw that his grey colouring was not stone, but the dull gun-metal sheen of armour. He was suddenly frightened, and somehow knew that the last thing he wanted to do was to go on. What he should be doing was turning tail and running. But, as is the way of such dreams, his feet carried him on towards the Knight and the doorway.

  The Knight turned his head round towards Danny. He looked no older than his mid-twenties, despite the thick moustache on his upper lip, but his face was prematurely lined and aged. His eyes met Danny’s.

  ‘Help me,’ he said. His voice was weary and breathless, but still resonant, commanding. ‘Help me.’

  Danny woke up.

  Sarah was curled up against his side, still asleep. A seagull cried, loud, then fading, like an echo of itself.

  Danny got up and went to the window. There was a fine view of the sea front, although it was dulled at the moment. The beach was a drab mud colour, and the sea was the gun-metal grey of . . .

  . . . of the Knight’s armour. Danny shivered slightly.

  The sun was struggling up over the edge of the sea, over a blanket of leaden clouds, like a sleeper resentfully rising from a too-short rest.

  Something flickered behind the clouds; something yellow. Danny tried to tell himself it was just the sun, squirting through a gap in the cloud cover, but he didn’t think it was.

  Just the dream, he told himself, and went to brew coffee for them both.

  The day passed, but it was overcast and chill, without the warmth or cheer of the one before. As they walked listlessly along the beach, Danny found himself glancing over to the cloud bank. Something yellow flickered in it again, beyond denial. Just like in the dream.

  And he couldn’t be sure, but he thought that when the breeze came in from the sea he smelled not ozone, but sulphur on the wind.

  ‘And you’ve had the dream for two nights running now? Exactly the same?’

  Danny nodded miserably. Sarah hugged him. ‘It’ll be OK. Probably just something in the air.’

  He had a feeling she was more right than she knew.

  The dream came again that night; but it was different.

  The pounding on the door was louder, and the door itself was slowly beginning to push free of its frame. The Knight’s knees were starting to buckle. His gaze, when he turned it towards Danny, was pleading, full of fear, the sight in itself terror-inspiring when cut into the lines of that young-old face, that face that was fully human yet seemed to have been . . . graven. Yes, that was it, graven as if in stone, such was its preternatural strength.

  ‘Help me,’ gasped the Knight. ‘You must help. You must help now, or . . .’

  He broke off and turned back to the door, sinews bulging as it cracked open. The yellow light flickered, hot, smoky, gaining strength and substance. A stench of rot and sulphur hit Danny’s nostrils like a clutch of knives. A low, decayed chuckle wafted out with it.

  And just before the Knight, with a last draining heave, slammed the door shut, Danny caught a glimpse, the merest glimpse, of what was lurking behind that door. It catapulted him out of sleep and into a sitting position, a scream clotted in his throat like blood. Sarah slept on soundly beside him.

  As he looked, a yellow, smouldering glow crept over the floor through the curtains. He went to the window and looked out.

  The storm was building, thunder rumbling in from the night-dark sea. Lightning flew. But he knew that the glow which danced behind the storm was something else. Something worse.

  It dawned on him as he watched—what was coming and what he would have to do. It all fell into place, the dreams, the strange looks the locals at Newcross had given him, the guttering light and the whiff of sulphur on the sea breeze.

  Tears ran down his cheeks as he looked down on Sarah, small and still in her sleep. She was no fool, nor was she naïve, but now she seemed so young and innocent in her simple trust. So trusting, so sure that she would awake in the morning to find him there, that everything would be as it had been yesterday, when the world was really so hostile and deranged, when anything could happen.

  A kind of vertigo swept through him. Never before had he realised how fragile they all were; how easily, how casually, one act of madness, of violence, of error or unthinking cruelty or sheer blind chance could sweep everything away in the blink of an eye. Love and joy. Hope and peace. How vulnerable it all was. How delicate.

  How precious.

  What he had to do would hurt Sarah deeply. He knew that beyond all doubt, but this was for all, for everyone everywhere, and that included Sarah. He would harm her out of love.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he whispered, and risked a touch of his lips to her face as he dressed. She stirred and he stood frozen with fear, no doubt a ludicrous sight with a foot off the ground, his shoe half on and half off.

  She sighed and settled back to sleep.

  Danny breathed again.

  Dressed, he went out of the room and the guesthouse on tiptoe. He took the keys to the car, but not the room keys; Sarah would need them and he wouldn’t. You needed keys to come in, not to go away.

  The storm was at its height when he stopped the Honda at Knight’s Point and got out. The wind drove into him like the flat of a great hand, trying to ward him off. The thunder rolled like the victory dance of some titanic warlord. Perhaps it was.

  Danny walked into the wind, the rain driving into him like volleys of spears. The Knight still stood there, straining at the door, a lone sentinel against the force beyond, all that held it back from rolling in. Did it seek to colonise the world beyond its own? Or was this its world, one it sought to reclaim, to return to from some unfathomable exile?

  He didn’t know. Neither did he know what it was; nor, were the truth told, did he care to. The brief glimpse of it which he’d caught in his dream had made his heart launch into an impersonation of a heavy metal drummer, and he could not now recall any details. He suspected his mind may have blanked it out. To see it whole, even for a moment, would probably strike him dead on the spot.

  The fires were burning in the sky. Was a brimstone rain about to fall?

  He reached the Knight, who remained as he had been, a silent, unmoving thing of stone. For a moment Danny dared to hope it had all been a dream, imagination, anything but——

  —but as he watched, the stone door, impossibly, bulged inwards.

  1897. The storm. The force had nearly broken through then, claiming the town of Knight’s Cross, seeking to destroy the material of the barrier that held it in check. Someone had intervened at the last possible moment, making it possible for another century to roll by. A century of wars and suffering and grief, yes; but w
ith all its horrors, it had not been one devoid of hope. And all made possible because this little spit of cliff could still stand against the years, all life, all hope bound to this place.

  Because someone had intervened. All because of one man’s sacrifice. And another’s before him. And before him. And before him. . . .

  Now the duty fell to Danny.

  For Sarah, then.

  No; for all.

  Danny stood with his chest against the Knight’s back and pressed his hand flat against the door. He pushed his foot against it. His right hand closed around the stone hilt of the stone sword.

  And the stone head of the stone man turned towards him.

  As he watched, the near-featureless face was sculpted back into being. The faint rims of the eyes deepened, and gained irises and pupils. The mouth grew lips, the moustache broke up into its separate hairs. The nub of nose was stretched out and moulded into shape. The grey stone became pink flesh and blood.

  The Knight released the sword into Danny’s hand and stepped away, slipping off his iron helmet. ‘Thank you,’ he said, gently fitting the helmet onto its new owner. ‘Good luck.’

  ‘You too,’ Danny said.

  The Knight walked away, down the Point that was no longer his.

  Danny pushed back against the door as it was shoved towards him, forcing it shut. Something behind it screamed; a long, cheated scream.

  He smiled and thought of Sarah one last time, sleeping safe in her bed, secure as she now had a right to be in the knowledge that the sun would rise.

  I love you.

  Then he pushed the thoughts of her from his mind and turned back to his task.

  Sarah woke the next morning to the joyous cries of the gulls. Something of their joy touched her, too, making her smile, until she realised that Danny wasn’t there.

  She sat up, puzzled, eyes scanning the room. A knock on the door brought a moment’s relief—He’s locked himself out—but then she heard the landlady’s voice, calling her name. Sarah pulled on a dressing-gown and answered the summons.

  The landlady’s face was pale. ‘The police are here, love. They’d like to speak to you.’

  She folded Sarah in her arms, stricken by the dread and anguish carved suddenly into the girl’s face, as if slashed there by a knife.

  They found Danny’s car abandoned by Knight’s Point, the driver’s door still ajar. There was no sign of him. Extensive searches up and down the coast found nothing.

  Suicide was presumed, but no note was found, although it could have been blown away in the storm. That wracked Sarah with the fiercest grief, because she would never know now if there was anything she could have done, if she was in some way to blame for this, if the love she’d cherished had died with Danny . . . or before.

  Sarah stayed in Scarborough for the rest of the week. By its end, she was ready to go home. The police had released the car to her. But before she left, there was one thing she had to do.

  She drove up to Knight’s Point.

  She parked the car where Danny had, then walked up the Point to the statue, looking out across the blue sea where the sunshine danced. She remembered how they’d walked along the beach that day, hand in hand, in love, and sure they would be forever. But it never lasted, of course. Nothing else did; why should love get special treatment?

  Sarah walked up to the statue and her eyes flickered over the Knight. Then she looked harder, and frowned. There was something . . .

  She ran her fingers over the near-blank face, to where the bump of the moustache should have been.

  It wasn’t there.

  But as her fingers ran over the stone chin, she gasped as they encountered a narrow indentation in the rock, about two inches long. Almost like a scar.

  She knew then, and, weeping, she wrapped her arms tightly round the unyielding stone, her tears glistening on its shoulder.

  After a time—how long she never knew—she lifted her head and touched the stone face one last time. Her fingers encountered a wetness, clear to look at and salty to taste, just below the rimmed outline of one eye.

  She smiled a sweet, sad smile, and her walk back down the Point was strong and confident. She did not look back.

  She got in the car, still smiling, and drove away. Behind her, the sea, as flat and calm as a millpond, glittered in the sun.

  Severance

  EVIL, I’VE FOUND, becomes more sickeningly—and disturbingly—easy to understand the older you get. The very ordinary passions, cramped and twisted, that become tyranny or malice are common to us all. The real horror of it is that it’s banal, petty, even pathetic; the Nazi holocaust was the vengeance of a child alternately spoilt and bullied, a third-rate artist who scapegoated an entire people for his failure rather than facing it and the host of rag-bag emotional and psychological twists and cramps he carried with him.

  As far as the banality of evil went, Pete Ogden was a striking illustration, even though I never once saw or knew him commit an act of physical violence. Not that it wasn’t very easy to imagine such a man, had he lived in inter-war Germany, or, more recently, Yugoslavia, with a gun and a uniform, trumpeting his petty power at the gas chamber’s door or the killing ditch’s edge.

  However, Pete Ogden wasn’t from either of those countries, but from Britain. His job was nothing more sinister than that of a Sales and Development Manager for an insurance brokerage in Manchester. The head office stood on the main road of a prosperous middle-class suburb called Didsbury, housing the telephone quotations department, which took up the bulk of the space, the directors’ offices, and a few other departments, small ones each taking up an office the size of a cubbyhole. Pete’s office overlooked the car park and a stand of sycamore and silver birch.

  Just outside Pete’s office there was a small desk, with a PC and printer, and the usual secretarial paraphernalia. And a little plaque on the desk: Antony Dennis, Secretary to Sales and Development Manager. That’s me, by the way.

  One thing I’d very quickly learnt about Pete was that he loved mistakes. He read documentation, eyes avid for the smallest error, because there was nothing he liked better than to thoroughly rip someone apart for such a slip. While he might well have preferred a female secretary—tales of the senior (and not so senior) staff’s marital infidelities were the stuff of office legend, and Pete Ogden’s more than most—in me he had something better.

  Even more than mistakes, Pete loved to sniff out vulnerability. For various reasons—most of them financial—I badly needed steady work, and this had been the first I’d been able to get. I quite literally couldn’t afford to lose this job. Pete had very quickly nosed this out, and never missed the opportunity to humiliate and insult me as much as he thought he could get away with, which was almost without limit, as he knew almost nothing would make me quit—I simply couldn’t. It was widely rumoured that, at home, he was the original henpecked husband. I wasn’t sure I wanted to believe that; on the one hand, it seemed chauvinistic in the extreme to blame his wife for his unpleasantness, and on the other, I preferred loathing him to reaching a sympathetic understanding, even though the image of Pete Ogden as some kind of psychic vampire, draining the self-esteem of others to bolster his own, had a certain suggestiveness that wouldn’t go away. At times I wondered if I should pound a stake through his heart. Or was that wishful thinking?

  Anyway. There’s little else to be said of him. He was about medium height, and managed to look very slightly pudgy despite regularly working out and eating well. He was pale and round-faced, with a cupid’s bow mouth, a sharp nose, dark eyes, and sandy hair already beginning to thin slightly over the crown. He was pushing thirty and had just become a dad, which he celebrated by christening the poor little mite after the managing director and his son—Neil Frederick. Did I forget to mention that he was also an incorrigible brown-nose? The directors loved him, belonging to the school of management that believed only toughness got results and good managers were never popular.

  That’s about it. So s
uch was the man, who, one fine morning in late April, trees in bloom and cherry blossom wafting lightly by the window, threw open the door of his office, jabbed a finger in my direction, and snapped, ‘Tony! My office! Now!’

  I tried not to let my nerves show. Pete usually ordered me into his office when he wanted to give me a serious bollocking, though this was starting early even for him. And he wasn’t usually this angry about it; normally it was a deceptively low-key and polite request, the abuse not starting till I was safely out of everyone else’s earshot. Maybe this time I’d really screwed something up, instead of making some small, trivial error. Of course, the big screw-up might just be because I was spending so much time worrying about the small, trivial errors.

  I stepped inside and closed the door. Pete slapped something down on the desk. ‘Is this your idea of a joke?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You will be.’

  The offending object was an envelope that had been opened. I reached for it and he snatched it back. ‘Oh no you don’t.’

  I sighed in exasperation, trying not to make it too obvious. Pete’s fun had only started.

  After about five minutes of semi-coherent ranting and raving, I finally got out of him that the letter had come to him unopened—offence number one. As for offence number two—well, it was hard to say when I wasn’t allowed to even read the letter I was accused of writing, but apparently it said something pretty offensive (or more likely, I thought with steadily increasing venom, accurate) about the man himself. And to give it extra bite, the offending article had been typed on company letterhead and mailed in a company envelope.

  All pretty puzzling, although amusing—keeping my face straight throughout was a little difficult at times. The humour was taken out of it a bit by the fact that Pete was unreasonably convinced that it was my doing. Although he was largely immune to reason and commonsense (getting round the fact that it was a stupidly obvious prank to play, inevitably pointing to me as the culprit, with the argument that I was stupid), he was finally convinced that I wasn’t responsible.