The road was straight, and the houses on the side that was presumably closer to his goal were twice the height of the bungalows opposite. Perhaps they had been built to take advantage of a view. Less than halfway along the street Lawrence said “Yes, here.”
She had barely switched the engine off before he escaped from the harness. When she followed him she found him peering at the unfenced grass in front of the houses. “I’m sure that’s part of the path,” he said.
It wasn’t much of one. It was composed of uneven rock almost overgrown enough to pass for an unkempt strip of the lawns it divided, and stretched from a flagstone of the pavement to a solid wooden fence behind the houses. If it was natural, it was unusually straight despite its irregular edges. As Lawrence stepped on it Violet a qualm of nervousness. “It’s on someone’s property,” she said, though this fell short of explaining her unease. “Do you think we should?”
“It still has to be a right of way. They haven’t dared to cover it up,” he said and strode along the path.
Once it passed between the houses it was shut in by fences enclosing the back gardens. The fences were at least seven feet high, like the one that blocked off the path beyond its junction with a narrow alley that led behind the gardens. “We just need to find the way through,” Lawrence said.
Violet failed to see where, and he plainly couldn’t either. He tramped along the alley at a speed suggestive of conviction, only to return before she caught up with him. The opposite stretch of the alley defeated him as well, and she saw him clench his fists so hard that they looked close to fingerless. The next moment he crouched and sprang up in a bid to peer over the fence. “I think I see—”
Whatever he meant to add was driven into him as his feet struck the ground. Though the impact visibly shook him, it provoked another furious attempt, which allowed him to grab the top of the fence. He was struggling to haul himself up when Violet saw movement at an upstairs window of the nearest house. The woman wasn’t gesturing like a prisoner desperate to attract attention. She had been cleaning the inside of the glass, and now she opened the window to call “You there, what on earth do you think you’re doing?”
Lawrence twisted his head around while he clung to the fence. “Not pretending I’m a dog,” he gasped, “before you ask.”
“What’s that? Just you stay where you are,” the woman said and slammed the window.
Violet had the absurd fancy that the woman was telling Lawrence not to let go of the fence. As his body sagged and began to shiver with the effort of holding on, she clutched at his waist to help him down. When his feet thumped the packed earth hard enough to jar a groan out of him, she felt she had been very little use. Perhaps he was compensating for his frailty and Violet’s by growling “Coming for a word, is she? I’ve got a few.”
“Don’t let’s have another scene. Can’t we leave it now?”
“I nearly saw. I won’t be happy till you have,” he said as they heard a gate being unbolted behind them.
The woman pulled it wide and stood in the frame like a guard. She had silver hair as neat as a fur hat, and was so thoroughly made up to look younger or at any rate less wrinkled that Violet felt dishevelled by comparison. “What did you say about the dog?” the woman challenged Lawrence.
“I’ve been looking for it as you all seem to be.” Violet couldn’t tell whether he meant to appease the woman or was making a sly joke, even when he added “And I was looking for your view.”
“You can’t see it from here.”
“Then could you tell us how to get to it?”
“That isn’t possible. As you say, it’s ours.”
“I don’t think you can do that, you know. You can’t shut the world off from people.”
“That isn’t the world.”
Violet had a sense of overhearing a conversation she couldn’t grasp, if indeed Lawrence did. “And I asked,” the woman said, “what you’re to do with the dog.”
“Not a solitary thing. I’m not much of a dog man, and even if I were I don’t think I’d be as obsessed with it as you all seem to be.”
“In that case you’ve no business being here, and I’d recommend you make yourself scarce.”
“Not till I’ve found why I’m here.” Perhaps hearing his own clumsiness made Lawrence blurt “If you really think we’re trespassing, why don’t you see what the police say.”
“We don’t need them.”
If this was a warning, it only antagonised him. “Do your worst, then,” he said, “and meanwhile you’ll forgive me if I keep looking.”
As he set off at speed along the alley Violet said to the woman “Couldn’t you just let him finish looking? He was here as a boy.”
“And what’s he here as now? I shouldn’t let him stray,” the woman said and shut the gate in Violet’s face.
Violet regretted lingering to stare at the gate as if she were somehow confronting the woman, because when she turned away Lawrence was out of sight. “Lawrence,” she called, both an appeal and a rebuke, as she hurried down the alley to a bend, certainly not the dead end that her momentary panic made it seem to be. She was nearly there when she heard him.
He sounded excited, even shrill, although she didn’t catch the solitary syllable that had been startled out of him. “Lawrence,” she repeated, but perhaps he was too preoccupied to respond. She was panting when she reached the corner of the alley, not as promptly as she would have expected of herself. At least she could see why Lawrence must have yelped in triumph. Just around the corner there was a gap in the fence.
He still wasn’t to be seen. He’d crawled through the opening, then. It was an irregularly rounded hole less than four feet wide and not even as high, at the bottom of a section of the fence that looked older and more weathered than the rest. Violet couldn’t help thinking of the kind of aperture some pet owners might incorporate in a door; certainly it might have tempted the lost dog. “Lawrence,” she called more sharply as she crouched towards the gap.
She couldn’t see through it by simply stooping. The posture sent pain flaring up her spine into her skull. She had to lower herself onto all fours on the prickly concrete and duck towards the opening. The low sun met her, shining directly into her eyes, so that she was scarcely able to distinguish that the sliver of fierce light appeared to be resting on the edge of a cliff. Was there a path, either the one they’d followed from the road or another track crossing it on top of the cliff? Violet squeezed her eyes shut and widened them, which didn’t help at all; either the sun had subsided beneath the edge or it had been overwhelmed by cloud, because all she could see through the gap was a pallid expanse as featureless as a void, as if the fence was perched on the brink of the cliff.
Her perspective must have changed. Perhaps she’d crouched lower without noticing. She was about to wriggle through the gap as a preamble to lecturing Lawrence for making her do so when a fiercer stab of pain brought her almost to her feet. She gasped as her hands struck the spongy fence, which felt cold enough for the moisture it exuded to be close to frozen. “Lawrence, say where you are,” she shouted and heard her voice invade the silence—just her voice, which made her feel more intrusive than ever, as though every resident who could hear her disapproved of her. She didn’t need to shout when she had a phone. She wavered to her feet and fumbled the mobile out of the padded pocket of her plump coat, and poked the key to call Lawrence’s number.
When she heard the bell inside her phone she tried to hear where his ringtone might be, but the simulation in her phone gave just a single trill before it was cut off. She just had time to glimpse an image on the screen—a figure whose upright stance looked somehow unnatural. Perhaps she was reminded of the posters she’d seen in Striders Halt because the face was disintegrating into a mass of pixels. She had no chance to read the displayed name, which seemed shorter than Lawrence’s, as the phone emitted a bleep like the isolated note of an alarm and the screen went blank. She was pressing the power button—squeezing it withou
t result—when she thought she heard Lawrence.
Had he called “Yes”? The high sharp sound resembled that word more than any other. He was somewhere around the corner—in the alley, Violet hoped, not on the far side of the fence. She hurried to the corner and peered along the alley, which seemed to have grown unreasonably dimmer. Surely the sun shouldn’t have taken so much of the light with it, though enough remained to show her that the alley was deserted. “Lawrence,” she called. “Tell me where you are.”
Her voice petered out between the fences, giving way to a silence so total that she might not have spoken at all. What childish game was he playing? Even if he wanted to reward her with some surprise he thought she would appreciate, she wasn’t enjoying his behaviour. “Lawrence,” she called more and more furiously, “Lawrence,” as she marched along the alley, searching for another gap, even a chink in the fence. She was still looking and, more desperately, listening when the alley brought her to the corner of the road.
The unbroken fence stretched out of sight, presumably following the edge of the cliff. The premature twilight made her aware of the absence of streetlamps. She could have concluded that whoever had developed Striders Halt didn’t care to waste any light on visitors, though the street was visible enough, the blank windows of the bungalows competing with their doubles across the deserted roadway to reveal no evidence of life. She was about to call to Lawrence when she was distracted by the street sign. She’d assumed the first syllable of Valley Terrace was covered up, but now that the poster had fallen off as though it was no longer required, she saw the word was only half the length she’d taken it to be.
A chill wind brought the poster fluttering towards her across the arid flagstones. The face of the begging pet hadn’t just been scribbled out; someone had tried to substitute a caricature of another face, so vigorously that they’d shredded the paper. Violet might have fancied that the damage had exposed features underlying the animal’s face. Why couldn’t she read the lines printed beneath Fetcher’s name? Even if some computer problem must have been responsible for the repetitive gibberish, she thought it odd that nobody had noticed. All this was distracting her from finding Lawrence. As the poster sank flat on the pavement she called his name, and turned just in time to glimpse a response.
It could only be Lawrence. The movement had been by the Viva, and of course that was where he would have met her, presumably to lead her to the view he’d rediscovered. She thought he’d beckoned her to follow, since it was the only gesture that made sense, before returning to the path between the houses. “Just wait,” she cried, “what on earth’s the urgency?” Perhaps some aspect of the view was about to disappear with the waning light, and she hurried to the path so as not to disappoint him. But when she reached the alley behind the houses she found it was deserted.
“What are you playing at, Lawrence? Show yourself, for heaven’s sake.” She gasped all this as she tramped along the alley, though her voice was too breathless to travel very far. He must have gone back to the gap in the fence—she’d begun to think he had been crouching as he dodged along the path, as though getting ready to crawl through the hole—but surely he could have waited for her at the corner. “All right, show me—” she urged as she came to the bend, and then her voice died in her mouth. It wasn’t only Lawrence that she couldn’t see. There was no gap in the fence.
The sight seemed to turn not just her mouth dry but her mind, parching it of the ability to think. When she faltered to the section of the fence where she was sure the gap had been, she felt as if she might have to support herself against it—might even discover that it wasn’t solid. But it bruised her fist as she thumped the new wood, which was indistinguishable from the rest of the fence. She was almost bewildered enough to wonder if the fence could have been repaired while she was searching for Lawrence, and then she had the equally unwelcome notion that she had somehow mistaken her way—that the gap must be at the other end of the alley. If her ageing brain had let her down, surely she could bear the possibility so long as she found Lawrence. Perhaps becoming each other’s mental backup would be part of growing old. She needn’t be ashamed to admit she’d lost her way, though wasn’t Lawrence’s behaviour responsible? Once they were reunited she’d decide how much to blame him and how soon she would forgive him. All these thoughts kept her going almost as far as the opposite end of the alley, until she could no longer avoid seeing that there wasn’t so much as a crack in the fence.
As she stumbled out beside the street sign the poster lying on the flagstones stirred, raising its disintegrated face. “Lawrence,” she shouted and was turning towards her car when a figure peered around the house beside the path and ducked back. She was sure it was Lawrence, but how could he act like that? Had senility overtaken him all at once? She called his name over and over, though increasingly feebly, as she made for the path.
It was as deserted as the street, and so was the alley. Violet felt close to releasing a scream of frustration, if not another kind. She was peering wildly about as if her desperation could produce Lawrence when she caught sight of the window she’d seen the woman cleaning. It was blankly curtained now, but it was the only inspiration Violet could find. She limped up the path and along the street to the front of the house. “Hello?” she cried as soon as she’d rung the doorbell.
She didn’t hear another sound until a silhouette appeared on the frosted glass that made up most of the front door. The outline of the figure was fragmented by the swarming nodules of the glass, which left the face as a pale blur. “Why are you making all that noise?” the woman demanded, barely audibly. “Who do you think you are?”
“I know who I am.” Saying so wouldn’t help, and Violet said only “You saw me behind your house. You spoke to me.”
“Count yourself privileged. I’ve no more to add.”
“I’m looking for my husband.”
“You won’t find him in here.”
“But you saw him as well,” Violet pleaded and felt a twinge of hope. “You were watching him, weren’t you? Didn’t you see where he went?”
“He can’t be far.”
“No, but he could be lost.” At once this seemed altogether too possible. “I’m sure a stranger could get lost round here,” she said.
“Not for long.”
Violet couldn’t tell why this sounded ominous: perhaps because that was how the thought of losing Lawrence made everything feel—the empty street as dim as the interior of the house, the figure that seemed disinclined to take shape on the glass. “May I use your phone?” she blurted.
“You most certainly can not.”
Violet tried to believe she’d mistaken the murmur. “I need to call my husband. My phone’s dead.”
“They aren’t welcome here.”
Violet suspected this meant far more than her phone and Lawrence’s. “Just help me find him,” she begged, “and we’ll leave you alone.”
“He’ll be found.”
Why should this seem threatening? It aggravated Violet’s growing panic. “Help me,” she said furiously, “or I’ll make such a noise it’ll wake the whole place up.”
“No need. It’s awake,” the woman said, and her silhouette decomposed further as it shrank into the darkness of the house.
“You can’t get rid of me like that. You won’t until I’ve found my husband,” Violet cried and was about to create more of a disturbance—however much would bring the residents out of their houses to help her—when she heard Lawrence call her name.
It was only the first syllable. She’d never liked being abbreviated, but now it was more than welcome, even when it was yipped as shrilly as that. He was further away than the street, but at least the sound hadn’t come from the direction of the cliff. “Lawrence,” she shouted as she swung around, nearly losing her balance. “Come here. Come back.”
The empty street seemed to capture her voice, holding it in. The unlit houses, where every window was colourlessly blank with curtains, emphasised th
e gathering darkness. She could have thought the night was cutting her off from Lawrence. “Talk to me,” she shouted. “I’ll come to you.”
“Don’t.”
Why would he say that to her? What would have made him say it to someone else? Surely she’d misheard him. “I’m coming now,” she vowed and dashed to the car.
As she strapped herself in she was overtaken by a notion that she wasn’t sure she welcomed. How could all this be anything except a nightmare? She was asleep in the passenger seat while Lawrence drove them home, and soon she would waken to find they were safe. She was tempted to think so, and yet it dismayed her; it felt like betraying Lawrence, abandoning him to the unlit indifferent streets. She mustn’t use the idea that she was dreaming as an excuse not to find him. She lowered both front windows of the car and felt as if she were letting in the icy night to keep her awake. “Lawrence,” she called as she switched on the headlights. “Keep talking to me.”
While she turned the car the headlamp beams lit up a bungalow and then its twin, followed by one that could have been either of them. Driving straight on would have brought her to a dead end, and in any case she felt lost enough without venturing into the unknown dark. She coasted to the junction at not much more than a walking pace while she peered ahead hard enough to sting her eyes and called Lawrence’s name. As she eased the car out of the road she heard him.
She was about to respond when she realised she was hearing a dog. It was the first she’d heard in Striders Halt, and how long had it been since she’d ceased hearing birds? The yapping sounded not far from articulate, which was why she’d taken it for a human voice, though she didn’t want to wonder why Lawrence would have been protesting “No no no.” If it was the elusive Fetcher, someone else could catch the animal. “Lawrence,” she called louder, but the only answer was another burst of frenzied yapping. She was almost at the next junction when she saw the creature ahead.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume Three Page 25
