Martin’s flat was on the top floor of a house in the middle of Worcester Terrace, a row of Georgian houses that the professional middle classes were beginning to reclaim from decades of low rent squalor. Four storeys below, Dr. John stood like a smudge of soot on the clean white doorstep, looking up and waving cheerfully when Martin asked him if he’d lost his mind.
“I’ve had a bit of an adventure,” he shouted.
Martin put his keys in a sock and threw them down. By the time his visitor had laboured up the stairs he was dressed and in the kitchen, making tea. Dr. John stood in the doorway, making a noise like a deflating set of bagpipes. He had turned a colour normally associated with aubergines or baboons’ bottoms. When he had his breath back, he said, “You should find somewhere nearer the ground. I think I have altitude sickness.”
“I should punch you in the snout.”
“Whatever it is you think I did, I didn’t do it.” Dr. John flopped heavily onto one of the kitchen chairs. He had the bright eyes and clenched jaw of a speed buzz. There was fresh mud on the knees of his jeans. Grass stains on his denim jacket; a leafy twig in his bird’s nest hair.
“Then you didn’t spike Simon Cowley’s beer.”
“Oh, that.” Dr. John opened a Virginia tobacco tin and took out a roll-up. “Yeah, I did that. You have bacon and eggs to go with this tea?”
“If I had any bacon Id give you bacon and eggs if I had any eggs.”
Dr. John lit the roll-up and looked around the little kitchen. “I see you have cornflakes.”
“Knock yourself out. What did you spike him with?”
“The herbal shit I scored off that girl.” Dr. John poured milk over the bowlful of cornflakes. “Is that hot chocolate I see by the kettle?”
“So you blew your reputation as a professional drug-dealer to check out this hippy chick.”
Dr. John shook chocolate powder over his cornflakes. “My curiosity was piqued.”
“Did she give you anything?”
“She handed it over without a word. Check it out.” Dr. John fished something from the pocket of his denim jacket and showed it to Martin. It was the size of his thumbnail and crudely pressed from a greenish paste; it looked more like a bird-dropping than a pill. “Weird-looking shit, huh? So weird, in fact, that even I wouldn’t take it without testing it first. So I broke off the smallest little sliver and dropped it in Mr. UFO’s beer.”
“Too much acid has fried your brains.”
“But in the best possible way.” Dr. John was bent over the bowl, spooning up chocolate powder/milk/cornflakes mix. The roll-up was still glued to the corner of his mouth. Although the window was open, his funky odour filled the kitchen. “So, did my freebie take your wanky friend to somewhere good?”
“Good enough for his pal to know he’d been spiked.”
“It didn’t give him fits, make him foam at the mouth, make him sing in tune?”
“I didn’t hang around to find out. He just looked very spaced. Had a thousand yard stare and a stupid grin.”
“Cool. Maybe I’ll give it a test flight this afternoon. Make me some more tea, man, and I’ll tell you about the girl.”
Dr. John said that he had followed her across the Downs into the wild strip of woods along the edge of the Avon Gorge. “She was like an elf, man. Breezed through those fucking woods as if she was born to it.”
“So she isn’t the front for Turkish gangsters. She really is just some crazy hippy.”
“She might have been crazy, but she really could move. Floated right down those steep narrow paths to the bottom of the gorge in about a minute flat. I got stuck halfway, saw her cross the road at the bottom, saw her climbing over the rail on the other side, down to the river.” Dr. John lit a fresh roll-up and looked at Martin, suddenly serious. “You know how the Avon is almost dried up because of the drought? There’s grass growing on the mud, and where grass isn’t growing it’s all dry and cracked. She walked over that shit, man, straight towards what’s left of the river. Then a couple of lorries went past, and when they were gone she wasn’t there any more.”
“She jumped into the river? Come on.”
“One moment she was walking across those mud flats, and then those bastard lorries came along, and she was gone, that’s all I know.”
“Let me get this straight. She was giving away some kind of drug for free, and then she was struck by a fit of remorse, so she walked down to the river and drowned herself.”
Martin, used to Dr. John’s fantastic stories, reckoned that about half of what he’d been told was true. He believed that his friend had tried to follow the girl and lost her in the woods; the rest was just the usual bullshit embellishment.
“I don’t know what her motivation was, man. I only know what I saw.”
“You didn’t go look for her? Or call the police?”
“I was on this dead-end path halfway up the side of the fucking gorge. I couldn’t go any further, all I could do was climb up and start over, and if she reappeared while I was finding a new way down I would have missed her. So I sat there and kept watch, but the light was going, and I didn’t see her again, and after a bit I suppose I fell asleep. Woke up this morning covered in dew, with this bastard headache.”
“Let me guess: while you were keeping a look-out for this girl, you finished off your party cocktail.”
“It was my only sustenance, man. I wasn’t about to start eating leaves.”
“Well, look on the bright side. If she did drown herself, you don’t have to worry that she’ll steal your customers.”
“You don’t believe me. That’s cool. But I viddied it, brother, with my own glazzies. She walked over the mud and then she... Shit!”
Dr. John’s chair went over as he pushed away from the table. Martin turned, saw the bird on the stone ledge outside the window. His first thought was that it was a gull, but although it was the right mix of white and grey, it was twice the size of any ordinary gull, and sort of lop-sided, and stank horribly, like rotten meat and low-tide sewage. When he reached out to shut the window, it fixed him with a mad red eye and snapped at his hand, its sharp yellow bill splintering the window frame when he snatched his fingers away. Then it stretched its wings (one seemed longer than the other, and both had growths, bat-like claws, at their joints) and dropped away in a half-turn and floated out across the communal gardens of the terrace, a white speck dwindling away towards the docks.
* * *
Dr. John kept glancing up at the sky as he walked with Martin up the hill towards the centre of Clifton. He was convinced that the bird had something to do with the girl. “It was a spy, man. A mutant gull from the lower depths of wherever she came from.”
“It had some sort of disease,” Martin said.
Dr. John turned a full circle, his face tipped skywards, and said in a sonorous film trailer baritone, “A mutant gull on a mission from Hell.”
“You see pigeons with parts of their feet missing all the time. It’s something to do with walking on pavements.”
Dr. John laughed. “You’re so straight, man, they could use you as a ruler.”
“Maybe it ate a bad kebab on a rubbish tip.”
“Maybe it ate one of the Tap’s mystery meat pies. I’m pretty sure they’ve fried my chromosomes.” Dr. John did a lurching Frankenstein walk for a few steps, arms held straight out, eyes rolled back.
They parted by the tidy park landscaped around the ruins of a church that had been hit by a German bomb during Bristol’s Blitz. Dr. John said he was going to go home and drop that pill and see where it took him.
“Don’t be crazy,” Martin said.
“It’s all part of my ongoing exploration of inner space, man. Cheaper than TV and a lot more fun.”
“It’s probably made out of hemlock and lead paint. Weedkiller and rat snot.”
“Don’t be such a worrywart. There isn’t a pill or powder I can’t handle,” Dr. John said, and sloped off across the grassy space, a squat stubborn figure li
sting slightly to the left.
* * *
The next day, lunchtime in the Coronation Tap, one of Dr. John’s grebo pals lurched up to Martin and asked where the little fucker was hiding himself.
“I’m not his keeper,” Martin said. He was having a quiet pint and a pastie, and thinking about whether to shut up shop for a couple of weeks and go on holiday. The only customer he’d had all morning had been a confused old lady who, after poking about in the bins for ten minutes, had asked him if he had any Ken Dodd records. Scotland, perhaps. Apparently it had rained somewhere in Scotland only yesterday.
The grebo peered at Martin through a shroud of long, lank hair. He was barefoot, barechested under his filthy afghan coat, and stank like a goat. “I got something for him. The stuff he’s been waiting for. You know.”
“Not really,” Martin said, and remembered that Dr. John had mentioned something about expecting a delivery of hash.
“We had a deal, right, so I went round to his flat and he wasn’t there, and I’ve been waiting two whole fucking hours here, and now I have to go down the social and sign on. When you see him, tell him I was looking for him,” the grebo said, and lurched off without giving his name.
That evening, after he’d closed up his shop, Martin made a detour on the way home, to call on Dr. John. He told himself that his friend was probably in the middle of one of his forty-eight hour sleepathons, but there was no harm checking. Just in case. He leaned on Dr. John’s doorbell for five minutes, listening to it trill two floors above him, then went down the whitewashed steps and rang the bell of the private members club in the basement. It was owned by Dr. John’s landlord, Mr. Mavros, an after-hours drinking spot featuring sticky purple shagpile and red leatherette booths. Martin had worked behind its bar last year, when he’d been scraping together enough seed money for his record shop.
“I hope this doesn’t mean trouble for me,” Mr. Mavros said, after he had handed over the key to Dr. John’s flat.
“He’s ill,” Martin lied. “I said I’d stop by and see if he needed anything. Soup or aspirin or whatever.”
“He look ill when I see him,” Mr. Mavros said. He was a thin, consumptive man with no hair on his head except for a splendid pair of thick black eyebrows. He wore red braces over his immaculate white shirt, and as usual a small cigar was plugged into the corner of his mouth. “He come back from somewhere when I was locking up this place, two o’clock in the morning. I say hello and he look straight past me. Into the distance, like he see something that isn’t there. I know he drink, he smoke dope, but this was different. You tell him, Martin, if he start on the hard drugs, if he cause me trouble, that’s it, I throw him out.”
The door to Dr. John’s tiny flat stood ajar. The bed-sitting room was hot and stale. Sunlight burned at the edges of the drawn curtains. The bed was piled with cushions and dirty clothes; the floor was strewn with clothes and broken-backed paperbacks, unsleeved records and record sleeves, empty cans and bottles, tin-foil takeaway cartons, and yellowing newspapers. In the filthy little kitchen, the tap was running over a stack of unwashed dishes and pots. Martin turned it off, heard something splash somewhere else in the flat. He called out, felt a jolt of nerves when there was another splash.
The bathroom was a windowless cubbyhole just big enough for bath and bog and wash-basin. The light was off, and it smelt like the seal pool in the zoo. The bath was brimful, and in the semi-darkness Martin could see a shape under the shivering surface of the water.
“John?”
A pale hand lifted like a lily; water cascaded over the edge of the tub. Martin jerked the light cord with a convulsive movement and in the sudden harsh glare of the unshielded bulb the boy in the bathtub—fully clothed, in the same brown, chalkstripe waistcoat he’d been wearing at the Free Festival—sat bolt upright, eyes wide, water running out of his nose and mouth.
Martin helped the boy out of the tub and got him onto the bed, but he wouldn’t answer any of Martin’s questions about Dr. John, and quickly fell into something deeper than sleep. He breathed with his mouth open, making a rasping gurgle, and didn’t stir when Martin went through his pockets, finding nothing but a couple of pound notes wadded together in a knot of papier-mâché. Martin suddenly found that he couldn’t bear to stay a moment longer with this unquiet sleeper in the hot, claustrophobic flat, and fled into the late-afternoon sunlight and the diesel dust and ordinary noise of traffic.
He sat on the bench beside a telephone box on the other side of the road and thought about his options. If he told Mr. Mavros what he’d found, the landlord would probably throw out the boy and change the lock on the door. And if he went to the police, they’d probably make a note of Dr. John’s disappearance and forget all about it. He could always walk away, of course, but Dr. John was a friend who had helped him out of a tight spot, and he had a vague but nagging sense of duty.
Sooner or later, he thought, Dr. John would turn up, or the boy would wake up and slope off to wherever Dr. John was hanging out. All he had to do was wait. How hard could that be? He went around the corner, bought a parcel of fish and chips and a can of Coke, and returned to the bench. The blue sky darkened and the air grew hotter and thicker. A police car slowed as it went past and the driver took a lingering look at Martin, who had to suppress an impulse to wave when the car came back in the other direction ten minutes later. The streetlights flickered on. A little later, Mr. Mavros switched on the light over the door of his club, illuminating the board painted with its faintly sinister motto: THERE ARE NO STRANGERS HERE, ONLY FRIENDS WHO HAVEN’T MET.
Martin bought another Coke at the fish-and-chip shop, and when he returned to the bench saw something swoop down onto the roofline of the row of houses, joining the half dozen white birds that hadn’t been there five minutes ago. They’re only gulls, he told himself, there are plenty of gulls in Bristol. But he got the shivers anyway, flashing on the monster that had nearly amputated his fingers, and was about to turn tail and head for home when he saw the boy in the brown waistcoat ambling away down the street.
The boy must have crawled back into the bath before he left Dr. John’s flat; he tracked wet footprints that grew smaller and smaller as Martin followed him through the villagey centre of Clifton towards the Avon Gorge, walking with a quickening pace as if drawn to some increasingly urgent siren song. By the time they’d reached the grassy space in front of Brunel’s suspension bridge, Martin was jogging to keep up. The boy walked straight across the road, looking neither right nor left, and plunged into the bushes beside the public lavatories. Martin got up his nerve and followed, found a steep, narrow path, and climbed to the top.
The sky was cloudless and black. The moon, almost full, was setting. The stubby observatory tower that housed a camera obscura shone wanly. Beyond it, the boy and half a dozen other people stood at the rail along the edge of the gorge. Martin skulked behind the thin cover of a clump of laurel bushes. He had the airy feeling that something was about to happen, but didn’t have the faintest idea what it would be. One of the giant, arch-pierced stone towers that supported the suspension bridge reared up behind his hiding place, and it seemed to him that the watchers at the rail were staring at the lamp-lit road that ran between bridge’s white-painted chains and struts to the other side of the deep narrow gorge.
Martin settled behind the laurels, sipped warm Coke. Gradually, more people drifted across the moonlit grass to join the little congregation at the rail. A girl in a cotton dress came past Martin’s hiding place, so close he could have reached out and touched her bare leg. No one spoke. They stood at the rail and stared at the bridge. They reminded Martin of the gulls on the roof. Whenever he checked his digital watch, cupping his right wrist with his left hand to hide its little light, far less time had passed than he had thought.
10:08.
10:32.
10:56.
He must have dozed, because the noise jerked him awake. The people lined up along the edge of the drop were chanting, a slow litur
gical dirge of nonsense words rich in consonants. They bent against the rail, their arms outstretched, swaying like sea anemones in a current, reaching towards the bridge. Martin turned, and saw that two shadowy figures were walking along the road to the midpoint of the bridge, where the two downcurving arcs of white-painted suspension chains met. One was a man, the other the girl in the white dress. She embraced her companion for a moment, and then he broke away and clambered over the rail and without hesitation or ceremony stepped out into thin air and plummeted into darkness.
Martin stood up, his heart beating lightly and quickly, his whole skin tingling, and thought that he saw a brief green flash in the river directly below the bridge, a moment of heat lightning. The girl was walking along the bridge towards the other side of the gorge; the people at the rail were beginning to drift away, each moving in a different direction.
One of them had a cloud of bushy hair, and walked with a distinct list.
Martin chased after him, stumbling in the dark, making far too much noise as he dodged from one clump of bushes to the next, at last daring to cut across his path and grab him by the shoulders and turn him around. Dr. John tried to twist away, like a freshly caught fish flopping in a trawlerman’s grasp. Martin held on and at last his friend quietened and stood still, his gaze fixed on something a thousand miles beyond Martin’s left shoulder.
“Let’s get out of this,” Martin said, and took hold of Dr. John’s right arm above the elbow and steered him through the streets of Clifton to Worcester Terrace. There was another brief struggle after Martin had opened the front door, but then Dr. John quietened again and allowed himself to be led up the four flights of stairs to Martin’s flat. He stood in a kind of dazed slouch, blinking slowly in the bright light of the kitchen while Martin made coffee, taking no notice of the mug that Martin tried to put it in his hand.
Martin leaned against the counter by the sink and sipped his own coffee and asked Dr. John where he’d been, what had happened to him, what the fuck had just happened on the bridge.
Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth Page 16
