"I'll bet he said a lot and at least half of it worth hearing. That's our Frank and it's how we all like him." The doctor cut a chortle short and said "But if he told you where to find your sacred item, that's the truth."
While Farman might have demurred about the sacred-ness, especially if Sandra had been there, he said "When could I—"
"As soon as you like in the morning. Sleep sound," the doctor said—it could almost have been medical advice— and rang off.
No doubt Mrs Berry would be able to direct Fairman to the surgery. The front cover of the book he'd placed on the dressing-table had begun to twitch upwards as though it and its reflection were beckoning to him. He no longer felt sufficiently awake to concentrate, and returned the book to its carton, which he locked in the safe. Slinging a towel over his arm, he ventured into the corridor.
He might have preferred the hotel to be somewhat less quiet. He'd been inhibited in public toilets ever since his childhood. He flushed the shared toilet before using it and hoped that his uncontrollably intermittent pouring would be drowned out by or at least indistinguishable from the filling of the cistern. He waited for that to finish so that he could pull the chain, the handle of which wore a mauve sheath that matched the shaggy cover of the lid and the curtains at the dinky window. At last he was free to dodge next door to the bathroom.
Apparently the previous user had left the light on beyond the frosted glass that was additionally obscured by condensation. Fairman pushed the door open and recoiled so hastily that he lost his grasp on the handle. "Sorry," he gasped.
"My fault." It was a woman's voice, though until she spoke he wasn't sure it would be. "Forgot to bolt," she said. "Just getting in shape for the night."
"You carry on. Don't hurry for me. I can do without the bathroom."
He still couldn't see her except as a blurred shape under the steam on the mirror. The bathroom had an oddly stagnant smell; perhaps she had lingered too long in the bath. Fairman was retreating when the door shut, though the imprecisely outlined figure in the mirror hadn't seemed to move. No doubt she'd used her foot to close the door, though it must have been quite a stretch. Presumably the door was still unbolted, a thought that hastened him back to his room. He washed his face and brushed his teeth at the sink, above which a small mirror showed him his back above the dressing-table. He could do with keeping himself in better shape; perhaps he ought to use a gym, as Sandra did.
Outside the window the streetlamps blanched the promenade and blackened the graffiti in the shelter. The pale glare illuminated just a narrow strip of the beach, so that he couldn't be sure whether there were jellyfish in the receding sea. He unlatched the sash and pushed it up, which didn't help him to distinguish the indistinct restless shapes from the movements of the waves. As he leaned over the sill a wind brought him the smell of the sea—at least, the smell of Gulshaw beach. It hadn't previously occurred to him that the place didn't smell as the seaside should; he was reminded of the stagnant smell he'd noticed in the bathroom. Although he believed it was healthier to sleep with the bedroom window open, he dragged the sash all the way down.
The stagnant odour seemed to linger in the dark. It held him back from sleep, and so did thoughts of the book. The reference to a stone cocoon kept catching at his mind, and he found himself visualising an enormous stone oval suspended in outer space, an object that resembled a monstrous egg or an island torn loose from its world to wander among the stars. As it plummeted towards a familiar planet he had a sense that it was being held together from within and reinforced against the friction that would have consumed a lesser meteor. What kind of entity could exert so much control over matter? The vision troubled him like the one he'd experienced after visiting Deepfall Water, and made him feel as he had while reading the book—that he was reaching for memories he hadn't known were his. He was glad the image of the cocoon went no further, and eventually it let him sleep.
Daylight wakened him, and so did an idea. While it might be too much to hope that each volume was indexed, he ought to check. He opened the safe and the carton, and leafed to the end of the book. "Good God," he said with very little sense of what he was expressing.
There was no index. The text was followed by the flyleaves, which were covered with handwriting. However nearly illiterate the sprawling script looked, it might be senile or written under some influence. Fairman didn't think it could be Lunt's, though it must be relatively recent, having been written with a ballpoint. Do not trust all which is herein, it said. Some visions were imperfectly set down, and some came damaged at the source. Some were spoiled by the minds employed to convey them, while others were misinterpreted by the editor. Not the bible nor the Quran is so worthy of restoration.
By the time Fairman had read this he no longer thought the book had been defaced. If anything the comments seemed to make the copy rarer still, but how could anyone establish what the original text had been? The set would be available for experts to decipher if they could, and Fairman was content to be its guardian. He closed the book more carefully than ever and returned it to its nest in the safe before he emerged from the room.
A smell of breakfast greeted him in the corridor, and he heard voices murmuring downstairs. He flushed the toilet and then used it while the fattened lid nestled against his lower back. The stagnant smell had departed from the bathroom, and the shower he took didn't revive it, though condensation turned the mirror into a block of fog. Once he was dressed he reassured himself that the safe was locked and went down to the breakfast room.
Two teenage girls in grey track suits were on their way out while their parents told another family "See you next year." The seated party were the only breakfasters just now. They were a stocky lot, consisting of a dumpy son and daughter who resembled their parents so much that Fairman was reminded of those wooden dolls that unscrewed to produce miniatures of themselves. As he sat by the window, beyond which a whitish haze was curtaining the sea off from the beach, the mother twisted her top half around on the chair to face him. "First time?"
"Forgive me, I'm not sure what you mean."
Her husband squirmed around to stare at him. "We've not seen you before," he said in a Lancashire accent at least the equal of his wife's, "she's saying."
"Just here for the night," Fairman said.
The man gave a grunt that might have been doubling as some kind of laugh. "There's not many do that in Gulshaw."
Fairman was wondering if this deserved an answer when Mrs Berry bustled into the room, though not at much speed. "Good morning," she cried. "Any dreams?"
As the boy and girl opened their mouths in unison Fairman said "Nothing I'd call one."
"What would you call it, then?"
The question seemed all the more unwelcome for coming from the stocky man. "Just night thoughts," Fairman resented having to explain.
Apparently it was the mother's turn to speak. "It can bring them, right enough."
"We'll leave them there for now, shall we?" Janine Berry said. "Are you having our big breakfast, Leonard?"
"That'd set anyone up for the day," the stocky man declared.
"Thank you, Mrs Berry," Fairman said. "I'll indulge myself this once."
The parents turned their back to him as Mrs Berry left the room, but the children continued to gaze at him as if he were some kind of specimen until they were told to eat up. As soon as they'd both wiped their glistening mouths the family took leave of Fairman. "Make the most of your stay," the man advised him, and his wife added "So much more to see."
Was everybody in on that joke, supposing it could be called one, or was nobody capable of reading the slogan? The family plodded away before Fairman could find a response. He watched people tramp down to the beach, vanishing into the haze that the sunlight had turned more opaque, until Mrs Berry brought his plateful. "There's a Gulshaw breakfast for you," she said.
It certainly seemed regional. The yolks of the pair of fried eggs were unusually large and pale, and oddly irregular. B
oth sausages were almost the colour of the slices of white pudding, and all these were tinged patchily purple, like the mushrooms and the bacon. Fairman mightn't have been ready to sample his breakfast if Mrs Berry hadn't lingered to watch. In fact it tasted as it should, so that he was able to reward her with an enthusiastic smile, and then he thought to say "I need to see your Dr Stoddart."
"Already?" Mrs Berry said and rubbed her mouth as if to erase the word—rubbed so hard that the skin around her lips looked bruised. "Oh, you mean—"
"He has something for me."
"Of course. I'm going to say it's a book."
"I hadn't realised I was so predictable."
"Nobody's laughing at you, Mr Fairman. You mustn't think you're anything but welcome."
She seemed close to offended. As she turned away he said "I was going to ask if you have a directory I could find him in.
"I can tell you where he is, of course. Eat up," she said not unlike a mother, "and I'll show you where you have to go.
Fairman was surprised to find how hungry the mouthfuls he'd taken had made him for more. People stared towards him as they lagged along the promenade, possibly looking for vacancy signs. He'd just laid down his knife and fork when Mrs Berry returned. "Here's what you need," she said.
It was a map of Gulshaw with the slogan from the town sign along the upper margin. On the back were advertisements for local attractions: the Shaw, the Bywood Zoo, the Promenade Ballroom, the Woody Ramble forest trail, the Ridem amusement park. "That's his surgery," Mrs Berry said, flattening a fingertip close to the sketch of the woods. "Past all the fun and up Bywood Road."
"I should think he might be keeping what he has for me at home."
"That's where he lives as well, Leonard," Mrs Berry said with an indulgent smile. "He's always there. We have to go to him. Dennis will do all he can for you, never fret."
"I'd better see him before I overstay my welcome with you.
"Don't you bother giving that a thought," Mrs Berry said.
Bywood Road was at the opposite end of the promenade from the church. As he drove past the Ridem rides Fairman saw how the haze that fringed the sea was helping the woods to enclose the town. At the ballroom he turned uphill past a number of large houses with their backs to the trees. The doctor's house displayed a nameplate on a gatepost, where the name was followed by so many unpronounceable clumps of letters that Fairman was reminded of the graffiti in the shelter. He parked on the street and let himself in through the grey stone porch.
In the wide hall beyond the massive door that gleamed white as marble, a receptionist sat behind a desk outside a closed room opposite an open one. She wore a voluminous flowered dress that covered nearly all of her without disguising how disproportionately small her head and hands were. Cropped spiky silver hair framed her face, which might have been more delicate until it had grown padded. "Mr Fairman," she said in a familiar voice rather younger than she looked—of course, he'd heard it on the answering machine. "You're here already, then."
He was bemused by being recognised, and spoke more sharply than he meant to. "The doctor said I should come as soon as I liked."
"He'd have meant before surgery. He's got his patients now."
Fairman felt as if he had to struggle past the professionally bland expression that hadn't changed since he'd come in. "What am I supposed to do? I haven't much time left."
"I'm sure you have more than some of us, Mr Fairman." Before he could clear up her mistake, if indeed she had made one, the receptionist said "You can wait with the others by all means."
"Couldn't you ask the doctor if that's what he wants?"
She was giving this her fixed expression when a man lurched out of the doctor's office behind her. His patchily empurpled face and the disconcerting flexibility of his gait suggested that his trouble might have to do with drink. As the man fumbled to open the front door Fairman said to the receptionist "Can't you ask him now?"
While her expression didn't waver, she pressed the key on a vintage intercom, an action that pulled back her cuff and sent a quiver up her pale inflated arm. Fairman heard a rasping buzz, and then a muffled voice said on both sides of the door "I'm afraid Mr Fairman will have to follow my patients, Doris."
"Doctor says—"
"I understood what he said," Fairman informed her, the nearest he could come to expressing his dissatisfaction, and tramped across the hall into the waiting-room.
All the people seated on straight chairs against the walls stared at him as a harsh metallic rattle appeared to announce him. The buzzer above the lintel was summoning the next patient, a young woman whose baby squirmed so vigorously in her arms that its one-piece suit had almost abandoned its shape. The infant favoured Fairman with a sleepy blink that he would have been foolish to mistake for recognition, and he was working on a responsive smile when the mother carried her exuberant burden out of the room.
A solitary table strewn with copies of the Gulshaw Gannet squatted in the middle of the dun carpet. Fairman took one to a chair, but the content was so trivial—graffiti on the seafront shelters made the front page under the headline RESIDENTS CONDEMN VANDALISM—that the paper might have been designed to reassure visitors that nothing very untoward ever happened in Gulshaw. He'd read all sixteen pages and forgotten virtually every one by the time the buzzer called the next invalid, a pasty-faced man who flattened his hand against the wall at each step he took. That left nine patients, and Fairman found some of them difficult to ignore—a woman with grey swellings reminiscent of fungi on her legs, a man whose chin seemed to merge with his spongy throat whenever he was overcome by an apparently uncontrollable nod, a woman whose every protracted breath sounded like a renewed task. If everyone was seated in order she would be the last to see the doctor, and Fairman didn't think he could endure her sounds for however long that would entail—perhaps an hour. He dropped the newspaper on the table and made for the hall. "I'm nearly at your zoo, aren't I?" he said. "I think I'll kill my time there if you don't mind."
There was no reason why the receptionist should, and her unassailable expression might have been telling him so. "Would you mind letting me know when the doctor's free?" he said. "I'll give you my number."
"We have it, Mr Fairman."
As he stepped out of the porch he saw the zoo at the top of the hill. He thought he wouldn't care to live so close to it, but perhaps the neighbours took it as part of living in a holiday resort. Or perhaps they were determined to ignore it, since all the windows he passed were curtained, as if there had been a death or the houses were occupied by night workers catching up on their sleep.
The signboard for the zoo had broken out in lumps of moss, one of which transformed the name into Byword. Beyond a small gate in the wire fence a man sat in a wooden booth that was piebald with lichen. His long pointed chin rested on his gloved hands, and he wore a floppy hat so nearly shapeless that he might almost not have known how to fit it to his cranium. As he saw Fairman he lifted his head, which seemed to elongate while his eyes took their time over widening, and the hat sagged backwards to reveal the slogan GULSHAW BY GUM. Fairman was reaching in his pocket for the fee posted on the booth when the man waved at him so vigorously that his fingers appeared to writhe—just the glove, of course. "Sorry?" Fairman said.
"Keep it." The fellow poked a greyish tongue between his lips as if rediscovering his mouth and muttered "It's on the town."
Perhaps this was a concession they made at the end of the season. Before long Fairman thought he wouldn't have been too happy if he'd paid. The exhibits weren't identified by signs, so that he couldn't tell what he was supposed to look for in the cages and concrete pits beside the winding mossy paths. Did the pits contain bears or big cats? None of those were visible, and the trees along the paths blocked off so much of the hazy sunlight that he could see nothing except darkness inside the bunkers in the pits. If the cages were for apes or monkeys, why weren't the enclosures roofed? Fairman could imagine their occupants leaping fro
m the trees into the forest to make their escape. Even the windowless aquarium and reptile house didn't offer much; once his eyes adjusted to the dimness he had to conclude that most of the glass cases were presently disused, unless their tenants were lurking behind the rocks inside. Several panes bore large greyish fingerprints or more probably some other kind of marks, since they lacked whorls and appeared to be on the other side of the glass. He couldn't help recoiling when a boneless hand stretched out its pallid fingers to him from behind a submerged rock, but of course it was a squid or octopus, even if he couldn't see any suckers on the tentacles that darted back as though imitating his retreat. He shivered with the stony chill of the building and made for the open air.
It was less open than before. The haze had crept closer, dousing the grey sun. No wonder the animals had taken refuge wherever they could. He'd pretty well abandoned looking for them, and had begun to think of returning to the surgery, when he glimpsed movement in a cage. An ape was hiding behind a tree, gripping it with a large grey hand disconcertingly reminiscent of the object that had seemed to gesture at him from the tank in the aquarium. As he peered at it the fingers wormed away around the trunk. He watched for it to reappear until he grew cold with the dank stagnant air, and then he headed for the exit. He'd taken just a few steps when he seemed to hear a murmur behind him. "So much more to see," it said.
Nobody else was on the path. Were those fingertips or fungi on the glistening tree trunk in the cage? He needn't care, and he was making rather faster for the gate when a voice called out somewhere ahead. "Mr Fairman."
"Yes?"
"Leonard Fairman."
"Yes," Fairman yelled and put on speed until he saw the pay booth. The man in the misshapen hat was craning his top half over the counter and around the side of the booth at an angle that looked decidedly painful. "There you are," the man said. "Doctor's ready for you now."
The Last Revelation Of Gla'aki Page 3
