Shades of Nothingness

by Gary Fry

  “Forgive me, I really must be going. ”

  The woman’s interruption acted the way Tullis’s subconscious mind had earlier, putting an end to creeping speculation, even though on this occasion he’d been speaking private thoughts aloud. Nevertheless, her comment had proved as distracting, and Tullis was unable to keep hold of his latest recollections. He shook his head to clear his mind, but all he saw was the woman strolling quickly away, her unwittingly obedient dog in tow.

  “Yes, I do remember, ” Tullis found himself saying, and after turning to glance again at the old ticket office, he saw no reflection gazing back, despite not having moved from the spot he’d occupied only moments ago.

  Then he did move away, however: back to his car for his case and towards the hotel in which he’d stay overnight. A pursuing breeze felt like uncertain limbs grasping for him. After entering the building and checking in, however, he advanced for the bar, where he ordered a mood-stabilising pint before retreating to a corner of the lounge. He deliberately remained out of view of the windows, making sure he was unable to see that small building opposite.

  Another hastily consumed pint was enough to set free less welcome memories than those he’d hoped to entertain. Tullis must have been six or seven years old when he’d visited the theatre on the cliff-side across the road nearby. His parents had insisted on buying advance tickets, but at the time Tullis’s father had been encouraging their son to cope with the world by himself. Tullis had been sent to the ticket office to purchase three admissions to a show involving a clown who danced with gaudy, knee-high puppets.

  The man who’d served him hadn’t stopped smiling. Even his eyes—the wrinkled eyes of a man in his forties: unthinkably old to Tullis at the time—had simply smiled, smiled and smiled. Perhaps it was the presence of so many cheerful children that kept him so happy…At any rate, after Tullis had handed over money, he’d received three stubs of paper, and not only that. The man had also whispered something to him, his tell-tale square-ish jaw hanging down as if broken.

  “See the star of the show after the performance and learn a secret you’d happily die to know, ” he’d said, or certainly words to this intriguing and unnerving effect.

  The youthful Tullis had thought little about this strange comment until finding himself seated between his parents in the theatre that evening. Then the show had begun as a figure had stalked onstage. He was tall, chalky-faced, and dressed in a colourful suit. A fuzzy wig, a painted smile and feet in long shoes had completed the ensemble. From his hands dangled dolls on strings that jerked to the rhythm of crazy organ music that had accompanied his appearance from the wings. He’d cavorted and caroused, his puppets mimicking his obvious madness, and when the performance was over half-an-hour later, the audience around Tullis and his parents had been rapturous. A standing ovation had followed the clown’s noisy departure. He’d soon reappeared to cheers and whoops of infectious delight…and then vanished again, the dolls on strings trailing behind in painful acts of woody contortion, their limbs jerking back and forth as if about to break like brittle bones.

  The after-show treat gave children a chance to meet the clown, and this had occurred in the theatre’s lobby. As Tullis’s turn had approached in a slowly diminishing queue, he’d observed boys and girls stepping up to the heavily made-up figure and then watched as the man had stooped towards them, presumably to whisper something amusing into their ears. At any rate, each had moved away smiling…but reflecting now on the scene, did the adult Tullis believe their smiles had been strained to the point of confusion?

  Then it had been his opportunity to approach the clown…

  At that moment, he was snatched from his reverie as someone bumped into his table. Tullis glanced up to see a man of similar age, though a good deal drunker. He was clearly one of life’s failures, while Tullis considered himself relatively successful. Middle age was a time of serious judgement in this regard, and Tullis felt morally superior while turning his gaze upon the man.

  “Ooh, look at you, ” said the man, scotch fumes and much worse— probably the stench of early onset liver failure—escaping his mouth. “Anyone would think you…you actually lived here. ”

  “And you do?”Tullis replied, intuition prompting the words.

  “Man and boy, ” the man added, and if he’d meant the terms the other way around, his next tipsy comment failed to concede the error. “Shit, what’s the…difference anyway?”

  But Tullis was now feeling insightful. After another facilitating slurp of beer, he said, “You’ll remember a man who used to work in that ticket office across the road here…about forty-five years ago…and…” Just then, his memories grew even more coherent, and as he went on, his voice was almost excited:“Yes, that’s it. He sold tickets for his own show. Only later, after taking the money, would he get into costume. I’m not sure many of the kids knew it was the same man. His face during the performance—it was square-jawed, like so many others in these parts—was chalked up. But I knew. It was his eyes, you see. When I went up to him after the show and…and after he did…that to me, I recognised them from the ticket office…” Tullis felt immediately uncomfortable, largely because he was unable to recall what “that” was. But then he drew a sharp breath and continued, “Good God, I know the difference between front and backstage. ”

  He thought of his long career in criminal justice, and what he’d been expected to offer Harris the corrupt Town Planning Officer. But none of this was important right now. The drunk was about to reply.

  “That dirty old fucker, ” he said, and if his recollections were accurate, they were accompanied by disgust. “After what he was caught doing, they should have let him rot. In fact, ”—another pause to control an involuntary belch—“I think they did let him rot. In a cell not much bigger than where he used to work. ”

  “The…the ticket office?” asked Tullis, his eyes unblinking.

  The man looked through him, as if seeing through the wall behind and across the lane to that small building on the cliff ’s edge. Moments later, however, he was back to nonsensical babbling.

  “Evil nonce, ” he said, stumbling towards the exit and then out into the mild evening.

  Tullis sank another two pints before deciding to turn in for the night. All the way up the hotel’s flights of steps to the top floor, he thought of secrets whispered into his ear…but no words returned. While struggling to unlock his room’s door, he tried out what seemed like likely phrases—“Every good boy deserves favour, ”; “Eat all your greens and you’ll grow up big and strong, ”; “Be prepared, ”—but none fitted the template his memory had nebulously presented. Then he was inside his room, and having retrieved his case from the car before checking in earlier, he removed nightwear and toiletries, before freshening up in the en suite bathroom and retreating to the bed.

  The curtains had yet to be closed.

  Of course they had: nobody but himself had been in this room since daylight had elapsed. Nevertheless, it was a straightforward task to advance across to the tall single window and tug together the heavy halves of material on their thick pole. The fact that he’d chosen—quite subconsciously, he assumed—a room overlooking the former ticket office didn’t hinder this activity, even though renewed sight of the place shunted his drink-numbed mind into worse territory than he felt able to negotiate. There was nobody out there, however; the small building with its elaborate features was as deserted as the street running alongside it. It was very late. He must sleep and entertain whatever sleazy entities such rest might summon.

  Once the light was off, the absolute blackness prompted paradoxical illumination. He recalled what had happened after approaching the clown in the theatre’s lobby all those many years ago. The man—the chalky-faced clown who, that afternoon, had sold young Tullis tickets for the puppet show—had stooped in full costume towards him, placed his red-ensnared lips close to one ear, and then…whispered something.

  Years later, in a bed near to where this fu
rtive episode had taken place, Tullis was still unsure what he’d heard. But he could remember that, just as the clown had brought his mouth so close that Tullis could feel warm breath on his skin, another child—a girl roughly his own age—had started screaming. Tullis had never learned what had caused this outburst, but while watching the girl’s parents shepherding their sobbing child out of the theatre, he’d felt a sudden wetness against his ear.

  Perhaps the clown had simply spoken, his tongue escaping and inadvertently licking Tullis. Maybe his comment had been the secret he’d promised to reveal, the one that children would “happily die to know. ” But Tullis had been unable to catch any message. The girl’s scream had overruled the sound…if there’d even been a sound. And then he was set free by the clown who, Tullis had only now realised on the basis of his bright eyes and square jaw, was the smiling man from the ticket office.

  “Front and backstage, ” the adult Tullis muttered in his dark-enshrouded bed. “Petty power and petty minds. ”

  And moments later, he was asleep.

  Or thought he was.

  In truth he might be half-asleep or dreaming. All he knew for sure was that either his actual body or his imaginary one was rising from the bed, the motion or his perception of it confused by all the drink he’d imbibed earlier. He felt the carpet underfoot, its softness as convincing as reality while also lacking firm detail. The curtains proved less ambiguous, and as he tugged them apart, the sudden sight of the sea, choppy under a ghosted moon, placed the scene before him—the ticket office and all the deserted territory around it—in an unstable context. Shadows scuttled to and fro, soliciting Tullis’s attention, and soon speculation about whether he slept or not was forgotten.

  Somebody had appeared at the ticket office’s only window.

  The figure’s chalky white face put the dreaming-or-not Tullis in mind of his childhood self ’s return to the bed-and-breakfast where he and his parents had stayed all those years ago. While washing in the bathroom, he’d recalled his mother’s oft-repeated instruction to “wash behind his ears”, and on this occasion had done so. From one of them, bits of chalk had tumbled into the green sink, marring the black towel he’d used to dry himself. Clearly more than the clown’s tongue had touched him back in the theatre.

  But what had that painted man whispered? And was this the same message that had made that poor girl scream?

  Perhaps Tullis was about to be given a second chance to learn the secret…if indeed there was a secret, and the furtive middle-aged man hadn’t simply been making physical contact with children in a lewd and opportunistic manner. Tullis recalled the drunk’s words in the hotel bar: “Dirty old fucker…They should have left him to rot…Evil nonce. ”

  Right now, many interpretations of the clown’s behaviour seemed plausible.

  Another actor had just drifted onto the makeshift stage through the bedroom window. A man about Tullis’s age was weaving along the pavement, clearly the worse for booze. The chalky entity behind the ticket office’s glass grew more visible. The tenant had just lifted the sash frame, exposing itself to starlight. As the drunk drifted closer to this building, poor excuses for hands reached through the opening. Surely even modern makeup was unable to make bones show through flesh like that. The hands, spindly and moonlike, held something that closely resembled coils of skin hanging loose at the figure’s rickety wrists: string, was it? The kind used to hoist and make puppets dance? But it seemed much thicker than that. Then it was rope, surely. All the same, might it serve the same purpose as Tullis’s original interpretation?

  Moments later, the hands connected to an unsteady body, which only tenuously held aloft that chalky disc of a face, started twirling the rope inside the ticket office like a makeshift lasso. Then the looped end shot out of the window, up into the sky, and lost momentum as it cut above a streetlamp which had a lengthy neck. After dropping over it, the rope tumbled down the other side…and was latched around one of the advancing drunk’s flailing arms.

  Now the inebriated man was caught on a puppet-string hinged by the streetlamp above. Seconds later, another rope was tossed out of the ticket office, this one almost dragging chunks of corrupt flesh from its thrower’s uncertain bones. Once hooked over the next streetlamp, however, the unknowing drunk’s progress allowed it to capture his other arm.

  Then, on the waxen stage of the pavement, he was trapped between two uprights, ropes looped around his wrists so that he could perform like a puppet. And that was when the figure in the building started enacting his age-old routine.

  Tullis couldn’t help looking on. Perverse curiosity had overruled the horrific implications of this impromptu performance. He thought again of what the old woman with her dog had said: “…we kindly request that you and whoever plans to tarnish the area by turning that building into something tawdry take their nostalgia elsewhere…”

  And this was nostalgia; he knew that well. It was a reanimated episode from his relatively straightforward past. Perhaps the man now dancing in the street on makeshift strings had also once experienced such blissful sensations; maybe that was why he drank as an adult. Some people fight on with desperate optimism, Tullis reflected; others just give up and seek intoxicating support. In both cases, however, the motivation was surely identical: an attempt to regain pleasure from more innocent times, during youth with all its hope and promises.

  Which ultimately turned to shit.

  Tullis also knew this well; the world of criminal justice had left him jaded and disillusioned, all future possibilities tempered by despondency. But at least he’d tried. As a bachelor with no responsibilities, he might have gone the way of the befuddled man now being hoisted between the streetlamps in the street.

  The chalky-faced figure—a symbol of corruption if one had ever lived—looked on, its jerry-built posture tugging back the ropes it must have scavenged from all the litter in its lair. Residue of that square-jawed grin was caught in strands of moonlight; twin jewels like fading eyes flashed above this upturned curve. Then the figure began yanking its improvised puppet back towards a terrible fate.

  The drunk hurtled across the sky, way above the two streetlamps, and then descended, smashing into the front of the ticket office. With scant regard for minimising injury, he was dragged inside the building, more than one limb snapping as his body was forced through a slot only large enough for a face for smiling, hands to take money and offer admission stubs to customers who knew nothing of the seedy games their purveyor planned to play. Seconds later, as the window crashed down in its solid frame, frantic movement struck up behind it as the fragmenting figure cavorted like a spider over a feed.

  Then the stage was again empty. And Tullis returned to—or perhaps even remained in—his bed for the night.

  Whatever issues the dream had forced to his attention, it had also prompted a solid sleep. After waking the following morning, he felt refreshed, alert and ready to resort to what he’d never done in his professional career: cheat. Memories of what had happened last night had paved the way for his transformation. He’d earned the right to commit at least one minor transgression, he told himself. And anyway, a single corrupt act hardly equated to corruption, did it? Now that was a secret worth remembering.

  After getting up to change, he went down to breakfast, ate much fried food—the kind he soon hoped to sell to tourists, at whatever inconvenience to local residents—and then returned to his room to remove fi e-hundred pounds from the lining of his travel case. Twenty minutes later, he was outside, waiting in front of the old ticket offi , which would today become his own burger and ice-cream parlour.

  Harris, the Town Planning Officer arrived just as he’d promised to. He wore the same brown suit with the tell-tale bulge of a wallet. He also carried a key, and once he and Tullis had exchanged respective materials—the bribe in cash and then a signed contract in return— Tullis was offered access to the place he’d coveted for what felt like an overly chaste lifetime.

  He unlocked and ope
ned the door. Inside on the floor was lots of rubbish, though in the far-left corner—the one in which he’d thought he’d seen a figure yesterday—there was nothing but an absence of litter. Perhaps wind slipping in beneath the ill-fitting door had cleared this corner, but if that was true, how had so much slime got onto the concrete? It looked as if something had been rotting here. Tullis stepped further inside and closed the rickety door behind him.

  The man slumped in a corner to the right had been concealed by the door, but now this was shut, his injuries were all too apparent. Then Tullis realised that he should have known better. Corruption, even when not immediately punished, lingered across time, and here was irrefutable evidence of its corrosive effects.

  Harris stepped inside the ticket office, presumably to say goodbye to Tullis. But when he saw what his dishonourable client had discovered, he lapsed into a similar silence.

  Despite remaining attached, each of the middle-aged victim’s red-soaked limbs was pointed in an impossible direction. By the unnatural cant of his head, it looked as if his neck had been broken.

  “Bloody drunks, ” Harris said, his interpretation surely dictated by a faint smell of toxins in the air. “Looks like he took a tumble. Look here—the window’s been tampered with. There’s scratch marks down each side. He must have jemmied it open and fallen while trying to get inside. Serves him right. ”The man paused, thought for a moment, and finally added, “Well, at least he went out smiling. ”

  And that was certainly true. Switching his gaze from the damaged window frame, Tullis noticed again what had first struck him about the corpse in the corner: his broad grin.

  But then he observed something else.

  There was a white substance on one of the man’s otherwise bloodied ears. It looked like flakes of chalky makeup.

  Maybe somebody—or at least something—had whispered to him recently…or at least mimicked the posture of such an act. And whatever secret the drunk had been told had clearly left him to die with childlike glee.