Loveday turned once again to stare through the window at the tree and the mound. He spoke without caring whether we heard or not. ‘The story is ridiculous, no doubt about it, but that’s no argument against it. In fact it has a ring of truth about it on some level.’
A harp player on a nearby table struck a soft chord.
‘You are mad, both of you,’ I said.
Uncle Dylan nodded. ‘Absolutely. But so are you.’
My mood lightened. I laughed and stood and bade them goodnight. It was early but I had a headache and stiff neck. Better to leave them to their strange games and hobbies, the defective worship of a past glued together from memories of films and novels, where archers in green trousers shot arrows at juggled apples and damsels wore hats as tall as towers, ribbons streaming from them like levitating rivers.
***
I lay on my hard bed, my skeleton shifting inside me, the storm outside getting worse and creaking anything it could, including the teeth of the howling dog in the rain somewhere who bit the wind valiantly, foolishly, annoyingly until midnight clanged on the church clock in the village, the dull notes whipped away, carried off like pewter plates by hungry pirates, for the coast was once infested with them.
Sleep eluded me and I felt almost suffocated or crushed by the weight of the cliché I seemed to have become embedded in; the stormy night, a feeling of helplessness in the face of forces supernatural, malign, perhaps, or just impossible, which is almost as bad.
But at last I had to admit defeat and get up, dress myself and stand at the tiny warped window of my attic room.
And then came the flash of lightning that confirmed my suspicions I wasn’t a real man but an actor in a drama, a cheaply produced horror play or film; for the tree seemed flat, a cardboard cut-out, in the instantaneous glare of the electric discharge; and from the highest branch swung a man, the puppet I knew to be Matthew Loveday.
I remained calmer than perhaps I should have. I stood for a full minute and peered into the darkness, waiting for the next flash before I went into action. I don’t understand this delay; I think it was just bafflement or even a strange sort of boredom. Then the thunder boomed and knocked me out of my complacency like a sonic elbow in the ribs. I flinched, turned and ran down the stairs to the hotel’s rear door.
The next flash, even brighter and more intense, came while I was still on the stairwell. I smelled it and felt my hairs prickle. I heard heavy feet somewhere, one of the guests or else a strange acoustic trick. Probably not Uncle Dylan, who was such a deep sleeper he was difficult to rouse even at times of emergency. Once, when a lorry crashed into the lobby of the hotel in the early hours after the driver fell asleep at the wheel, Uncle Dylan remained blissfully lost in dreams.
I reached the bottom of the stairs, twisted the door handle and felt the punch of the wind on my creased brow. I had to physically lean forward at an absurd angle in order to push myself across the threshold into the garden. The door slammed behind me so loudly that it came off its hinges and clattered to the floor in time with the next roll of thunder. The body was kicking; it wasn’t too late to save him.
‘Loveday, you fool! What sort of game is this?’ I cried.
My useless words of chastisement, a sop to my own feelings of guilt at not hurrying faster to his assistance, were shredded by the wind, mangled into disconnected sounds, grunts and clicks.
I raced across the sodden lawn to the haunted tree. The long grass was undulating, lapping at my legs as I plunged forward. I was aware that the tree was a likely target for a lightning strike, being the tallest object in the vicinity, but I felt no concern about that.
My desire seemed simply to reach the legs of the dying man, to touch his feet, to console him with my presence. There was no way I could cut him down, for I had forgotten to bring a knife. But I didn’t return to the hotel to fetch one. My quest was spiritual.
That sounds ludicrous, callous, deluded, and doubtless my response to this tragedy was all three. But I’m not justifying myself, merely reporting my actions. I felt drunk, not wholly sane; but a part of my mind retained a lucidity that sneered at the rest of me, at my impetuous dash across damp electric tingling shadows to stand under the shoes of a suicide. Already he was kicking with less force, twitching less.
I stumbled to a halt near him. He had used a very long rope and he was lucky that the drop hadn’t decapitated him. Perhaps he had somehow let himself down gradually. His feet were six feet above the lawn; to one side stood the mound and the tree reared up from the rounded apex of that, so he was suspended at a lower point than the base of the trunk. I found this a fascinating paradox; a man who had hung himself successfully at a level lower than the tree itself. I stood and shook.
Water streamed over my face. Another flash of lightning made crazy shadows of twisted branches and leaves. Then the shadow of the rope no longer hung straight but began gently oscillating from side to side. Weird how I noticed this from the shadow before learning it from the rope itself, almost as if I couldn’t bear to regard as real the scene before me; I had to have it filtered through its own silhouettes.
Like a pendulum gathering momentum, the dying body of Loveday on the end of its vicious tether was pushed by the wind in a growing arc. The whoosh of its passage through the air was audible despite the aftershocks of thunder that echoed in the labyrinths of my ears. I retreated a step, as if a blade swung there in place of a flesh body.
‘This is a travesty. Please stop!’ I howled at nobody.
But I was rightly ignored, not merely by Loveday, but circumstances also. The tree, the storm, the night, the thick atmosphere of viciousness, my own fear in my own bones, everything.
The invisible hands of an adult wind imparted energy to this man, who was a sullen dying child, with as much efficiency as if he was perched on a playground swing and had to be set in motion by an outside force before he could utilise his legs to keep going, to make the arc wider by swinging his heavy limbs back and forth rhythmically.
As the rope tightened to take the strain it began to sing a note, to drone an accompaniment to the thunder’s occasional timpani. On stage with this minimal percussive orchestra of nightmare, I watched the metronome that had once been a writer swing wider and wider, his tempo increasing as an unnatural harmony was established between the gusts and his kicking legs that served to propel him continually faster.
I fought a desire to fling myself forward onto him, to clutch at his legs, less to slow him down than to be taken away, to experience the wildness of the ride, to replay with perverted nostalgia the bravest adventures of a childhood spent swinging from trees on ropes.
The pendulum gathered energy, the pitch of the stretched note rasped higher and the branch sagged but did not snap.
I moved away, commonsense prevailing inside me, the consequences of a collision with his rushing body too bruising to contemplate. I shook my head, in admiration or maybe exasperation.
Now his swing was so wide that his body was horizontal at the end of each arc, and although the stretched tendons in his neck audibly twanged even over the roar of the storm, I knew he still wasn’t dead, that in fact he had no intention of permitting himself to die until he was quite ready. The futility of the stunt appalled me, the faith he had placed in a possibly fake legend, in muttered beery words in a dim room.
‘Uncle Dylan, this is your fault!’ I hissed, as I turned to look back at a dark façade, the hotel without a single lit window, the panes of glass like fossilised eyelids, a cold hive of insane rumours.
Matthew Loveday was now close to achieving the highest ambition of any amateur swinger, the complete loop. It was clear that this had been a part of the scheme all along, his and the wind’s.
I fell to my knees in the grass, privileged to be a witness.
Then it happened. Lightning photographed the event, a perfect circle, a wheel with a single half-alive spoke; and gathering momentum, he looped the loop again, and then a third time, until like a motor cranked in
to life he began spinning at a dizzying rate, the dreadfully fascinating afterimage of his suicide becoming a disc with a solid rim.
The base of the tree began to shift in its setting, rocking slightly every time he passed, working itself loose, almost as if brass screws had jumped free from an engine block, and moist black earth around the roots bubbled and trickled like water down the side of the mound. I started laughing and pointing and reeling, briefly mad, for I guessed exactly what was going to happen. The legend was about to destroy itself.
Matthew Loveday was now whirling at such a ferocious velocity that I supposed he had reinforced his neck somehow, perhaps by swallowing a hollow metal tube. Decapitation would have been assured otherwise. The roots of the tree were almost fully exposed now and the soil of the mound was crumbling fast around them as the trunk jerked violently from side to side, a rotten tooth wobbling in diseased gums.
Another flash of lightning blinded me. In the darkness that followed a heartbeat later, I heard a dreadful sucking sound.
My vision cleared. The tree was gone. I looked up and saw it rising, a wooden rocket pulled by an inverted man towards the zenith, applauded magisterially by the loudest peal of thunder yet.
Then it vanished between muddy clouds. The rain whipped at my face, as if to punish it for an act of unknown insolence, and I exhaled all the air in my lungs, deflating my body and my mind.
Something fell back, a clod of earth or black stone and bounced across the lawns like a bomb, but it didn’t explode. It tumbled into bushes but I watched it only from the corner of one eye. My attention was focussed on the closed clouds, those drawn curtains of brown and grey clotted vapour, a veil thick enough to smother as well as conceal.
And then, as I had expected and hoped and dreaded, they parted again to return the tree to its sessile roost, to drop it vertically like a sepia film in reverse into the gaping socket where it had stood. It bored through the mound, a gigantic flechette, and completely vanished into the soft earth. I lurched forward on legs stiffened by the electric current in the air, scaled the crumbling slope with considerable difficulty.
The tree had buried itself. Albino mists drifted limply out of the hole it had made, the pit that led down into the centre of the mound, from which a length of rope also straggled, thick rope with a rough itchy noose at the exposed end. I saw this when I reeled it in.
Then I sat down on the cold steam and laughed.
The tightened noose was empty.
I walked back to the hotel with a lowered head. I felt at that moment that I would never be able to lift it again, that it was safer to proceed through life with my chin on my chest, to prevent any noose being placed around my neck, whether by my own hand or through the malice of others. When I passed through the broken doorway, I forgot this fear. The dying storm was moving away, taking madness with it.
There was a shuffling at the top of the stairs and a figure moved in the overlapping cones of wan light from a candlestick with two branches and two stubs of sputtering tallow jammed into it. ‘The storm has brought the power lines down,’ said a sleepy voice. ‘We have been plunged into the past but nobody asked for our permission.’
‘A cliché,’ I answered him, but without a sneer.
Uncle Dylan was dressed in comical style, with a spotted red nightcap so long it hung down to his waist and striped yellow pyjamas that clashed with it so horribly I was convinced a nasty joke was being played, that the events of the night had been manufactured.
‘Is it worth going outside? I’ll have to get my slippers.’
‘Do they have curly toes?’ I sighed.
He nodded and I began tramping up the stairs towards him, partly to ensure he would retreat, for there wasn’t enough room for two to pass. I stood before him on the landing and rested one arm on his shoulder and then I told him what had happened, that Loveday was dead, that his body might have come down on a neighbouring property, possibly without his head, which would land somewhere else.
‘Can you be certain about any of this?’ he retorted.
There was a note of weary aggression in his voice that baffled me, as if he considered me too stubborn to learn an obvious lesson. We regarded each other with shocked hostility for half a minute, then he softened and in the dropped light as one of the candle flames died he said, ‘Let’s fetch beer for ourselves. We deserve it, don’t we?’
‘First we should look into his room,’ I replied.
Uncle Dylan shrugged. Matthew Loveday had occupied a space in one of the many haphazard extensions that had been added to the edifice over the years. It was triangular in shape with a warped ceiling and suitable for any dreamer who equated impractical with quaint. The door was shut but unlocked and we crowded inside and frowned, disapproving inspectors of geometry and clutter, the leavings of a life.
‘He used a typewriter, do you believe it? The stubborn fool.’
‘A romantic,’ corrected Uncle Dylan.
‘There’s a sheet of paper in the machine. Step closer.’
Uncle Dylan pulled it out, forgetting to operate the release mechanism and tearing the page slightly. It was a letter addressed to him. Licking his lips, he gave it to me and held the sickly flame at an angle, dripping wax onto the bare floorboards with an audible and regular click, like a rain of insects. ‘I don’t like reading,’ he grumbled.
I recited it softly in the still air of the doomed man’s room, in that old and infinitely lonely isosceles of futile dreams. I spoke as if I really was Matthew Loveday and my voice changed, adopted his accent and pauses, his timorous yet determined tone. Uncle Dylan shut his eyes, swaying and nodding but keeping the candle flame steady.
‘I always knew,’ I began, ‘that one day I would sit down and write a suicide note but this isn’t it, so don’t squeeze sad expressions from your face too hard or you might damage a muscle. There’s no need for either of us to feel awkward. Your company was enjoyable enough but I won’t miss it too much because I don’t belong in this time. The modern world disgusts me, so I’ve decided to take a gamble on the truth of the legend you told me and hang myself into another age.
‘It’s a desperate measure, but if it doesn’t work I won’t notice, and if it does I’ll be free, at least as free as anyone has ever been, for it might be the case that freedom itself is an illusion. No matter. I intend to stay alive if I can, but not in this century. I choose to go back to the era that my new novel is set in, the Dark Ages right here at this precise site, just before the founding of the monastery, if that structure ever existed. I want to live for real the daydreams that I have turned into prose.
‘My novel was carefully researched, but how can it be accurate when so little is known about that period of history? In fact it’s safer to say that this part of Wales in the seventh century was outside history altogether. I know there are absurdities in my book, incorrect patterns and behaviours, catastrophes of detail, solecisms, other errors. I’ll correct them if I can. If I do establish myself among the local people without being pitchforked to death I will rewrite my novel, but more faithfully.
‘When it is done, I’ll waterproof it most carefully, wrap it in layers of skins and seal it in a box, closing all air holes with resin. Then I’ll bury it at the top of the sacred mound and plant a tree there, a cedar, the very tree that has haunted you for so long. Look for the box, open it, and offer what you find to my publisher as a superior second edition. Of course all this is a long shot, but what’s so fine about short shots? I might even end up as a ghost in your hotel, the one that haunted myself. . . .’
I finished and allowed the letter to slide out of my hand and glide into the shadows. Uncle Dylan cleared his throat. ‘He asked about ghosts but never said anything about being haunted himself. Maybe he thought the correct etiquette was to suffer in silence?’
‘Not all hauntings are unpleasant,’ I answered.
‘But by his own ghost? Ugh!’
‘If he had been haunted by himself, that would have given him plenty of
encouragement that he did succeed in travelling into the past. It makes a dreadful kind of sense,’ I conceded.
‘What shall we do now? The box?’
‘It must have been entangled in the roots of the tree. I saw something fall out of the sky. It’s worth a quick search.’
We should have waited until morning, of course, but I was too eager to prove or disprove the outrageous conclusion to the entire adventure. Rain and wind had dropped to a minimum, but Uncle Dylan’s candle still went out. It didn’t matter. On hands and knees I fumbled in the bushes, pulled out the worn box, mud-spattered, decaying.
Curiously warm to the touch it was, as well, and I took it inside before opening it with a chisel. Under layers of mouldy skins a pallid manuscript gleamed at us. I picked it up and it didn’t crumble. The ink was faded but legible and the language was modern English.
‘You do realise the whole thing could be a hoax?’ I said.
‘That would be even more farfetched.’
‘Yes, I guess so. I think I’ll start reading it now, but I haven’t read the first version yet. Does it matter, I wonder?’
Uncle Dylan shrugged. He was good at shrugging. A notable shrugger in any situation that required one. He went to pour beer and brought me a full glass of thick black foam and I sipped. He drank his own glass faster and soon went for a refill, and then another.
He eventually guzzled enough and left me alone. I kept turning pages and moving my moist lips as I read; it seemed more respectful. The tale was enthralling and presumably extremely accurate, a superb evocation of life as it had been back then. The irony was that the publisher eventually rejected it as a replacement for the original.
‘An inferior and implausible rewrite,’ was his judgment. He reprinted the first edition and I returned from my fruitless trip to London with sighs stuck in my throat like unripe cherries. When I reached the hotel I learned that Uncle Dylan had acquired a new guest.
‘Jerome Nightjar,’ with an unconvincing flourish.
Dark World Page 6
