“THE THIN WHITE FINGERS ARE VISIBLY LENGTHENING.”
He drags his hands over the mattress, the twang and contour and inclination of each buried spring reviving that much of his memory. He digs his knuckles into the frayed canvas and lifts himself into a sitting position, then he swings his legs into the dark and inches them downward until his feet touch the floor. The carpet is so worn he can distinguish the outlines of the floorboards. Pushing himself away from the bed, he pads to the curtains, beyond which he can hear the whispering. He pokes his fingers through the gap in the musty velvet and heaves the curtains back.
The night is dancing just beyond the grimy window. Poplars whose foliage the dark has transmuted into coal toss their long heads in the wind. Several yards below him, wind ploughs through the grass of an unkempt garden hemmed in by trees. Inside the window, at the bottom left-hand corner of the lower sash, a draught plucks at a stray leaf caught in a spider’s glimmering web.
So much for the whispering, however nearly articulate it sounds. He turns to the room. His suit is on a single hanger in the wardrobe, other clothes of his spill out of the chest of drawers. He isn’t used to waking by himself in the dark, that’s all. Now that he has risen he’ll stay up and be on his way by dawn.
He trots out of the room and along the threadbare corridor without switching on the light above the stairs. When he tugs the cord in the bathroom, the light bulb greets its own reflection in the mirror full of white tiles, and something disappears into the plughole of the bruised bath. It must be a drip from the taps whose marble eyeballs bulge above their brass snout; he sees the movement glisten as it vanishes. He crosses the knotted floor and confronts himself in the mirror.
“There you are, old thinface. Nothing wrong with you that a blade can’t put right.” He’s being deliberately cheerful, because he has never cared for the way electric light looks at this hour—too bright, as if its glare is straining to fend off the dark, and yet too feeble. His face resembles a paper mask, the skin almost smooth except for furrows underlining the sparse shock of grey hair and almost white save for touches of pink in the twin hollows of the pinched cheeks, in the large nostrils of the long nose, on the pursed lips. The stubble on the pointed chin makes him feel grimy, and he ransacks the clutter by the sink for a razor.
Most of the stuff there seems to have nothing to do with him. At last he finds a razor folded into its handle among the sticky jars. He digs his thumbnail into the crescent-shaped nick in the blade, which springs out so readily that he can’t help flinching. What’s become of his electric razor? It’s posing as another jar, its heads clogged by talcum powder. On second thoughts, his chin can stay as it is. He stoops to the sink and wets his face with water from the right-hand tap, which grumbles like a sleeping animal, then he dries himself on a towel with a hole in it the size of his face. He lets down the dark with the cord and hurries to his room.
This time he switches on the light above the bed. The walls absorb much of the glow of the dim unshaded bulb, as their blurred surface seems already to have assimilated the pattern and the colours of the paper. Though the room is spacious, it contains little furniture: the open wardrobe, the overflowing chest of drawers, the double bed with the bare mattress whose stripes trace the unevenness of the springs—just enough, he thinks, to show that it’s a bedroom. He lifts his suit from the hanger and picks up the shoes which stand beneath it as though they’ve fallen from the legs. Once he is dressed he tours the house.
He shuts the lid of the massive toilet and rubs his hands with the ragged towel, and slams the bathroom door. Between it and his room are two bedrooms, an unmade single bed in each. Light through the lampshades steeps his hands in red as he fingers the wall-sockets to reassure himself that they’re switched off. As he backs out of each room he turns the light off and shuts the door, holding onto the doorknob until he feels the lock click.
The clatter of his shoes on the uncarpeted staircase tells him how empty the large house is, and reminds him that he doesn’t mean it to be empty for much longer. When he has opened the bookshop and customers are selling books to him as well as buying them, he’ll store part of his stock in the disused bedrooms. He strides along the L-shaped hall to the kitchen, where fluorescent light smoulders in its tube while he screws the gas taps tight and grovels on the flagstones to examine the electric sockets on the perspiring brownish walls. He needn’t check the room next to the kitchen, since it’s locked. He looks into the rooms which, once their shared wall is removed, will house the shop. Chairs lean against a dining-table beneath the one live bulb of a chandelier, a lounge suite squats in front of a television tethered to a video recorder. He shuts the doors and lifts his rucksack from the post at the foot of the stairs. Hitching the rucksack over his shoulders, he lets himself out of the house.
The wind has dropped. The poplars are embedded in the tarry sky. Before he reaches the end of his overgrown path and steps into the avenue, his greenish shoes are black with dew. The road leads downhill between buildings which gleam white beyond the trees. Glancing back to reassure himself that he hasn’t left a light on by mistake, he sees that all his windows are dark, all the curtains are open except those of the locked room.
He isn’t surprised to find himself alone on the road; presumably nobody else rises at this hour. He can’t recall ever having met his neighbours, but if they want to avoid him, that suits him. “He’s out again,” he announces at the top of his voice. “Lock your doors, hide behind the furniture, pull the blankets over your heads or he’ll know you’re there.”
The only response, if it is a response, is the flight of a bird which starts up from among the trees and passes overhead, invisibly black, with a sound like the sweeps of a scythe. When it has gone and he falls silent, he thinks he can hear dew dripping in the trees beside the road. Spider threads caress his face, and he imagines the night as a web in the process of being assembled. He halts on the crown of the tarmac, wondering whether, if he’s still enough, he may hear the whisper of the threads. Disturbed by the idea—not so much by the possibility of hearing as by his compulsion to try—he hurries down the avenue, wishing his tread were louder. He’s glad when the landing-stage becomes visible at the end of the road.
Perhaps he’s too early. Though a ferry is moored there, it’s unlit. As he continues downhill, the lights across the bay appear to sink into the black water. Just as he emerges between the last of the poplars, the lights vanish, and he feels as if everything—sky, trees, land, sea—has merged into a single lightless medium. The anchorage creaks as he picks his way to the gangplank and steps onto the deck.
All the stairways to the upper deck are roped off, and the doors of the saloons are locked. He’s heading along the narrow strip of deck beside the front saloon when the gangplank is raised with a rattle of chains and the ferry gives a honk which vibrates through the boards underfoot. At once, as if the sound has started the waves up, water slops against the hull as the vessel swings out from the stage.
If it weren’t for the occasional creak which reminds him of the sounds a house emits at night, he would hardly know he was on a boat. By the time the engine begins to thump, the ferry is well out from the shore. From the upper deck he would presumably be able to see the lights of his destination. He grips the sides of the prow and thrusts himself forwards like a figurehead, but can’t determine whether the unsteady glow which appears to divide the blackness ahead is real or if it’s only the flickering which often manifests itself within his eyelids when he can’t sleep. He wedges his thighs in the V of the prow and watches the forest swallowing the buildings on the avenue. He finds the sight oddly satisfying, and so he doesn’t face forwards again until the ferry has almost gained the opposite side of the bay. When the steersman, a bust illuminated like a waxwork by the instruments in the wheelhouse, closes down the engine, he slips out of his niche in the prow and turns to look.
The landing-stage is wider than the one below the poplars. Several figures are rising from b
enches in a shed at the back of the stage. Floodlights bleach the planks and show him the faces of those waiting—flesh white as candles, eyes like glass—as they crowd to meet him at the gangplank. He sidles past the crewman who has let the gangplank down, a burly man whose black beard so resembles the fabric of his balaclava that his eyes and nose look false, and hurries across the shed to the exit ramp.
Only one of the several pay booths at the top of the tunnel is occupied. The woman inside it is poring over an obese dog-eared paperback, its cover hanging open to display a resale stamp. She waits until he pushes a pound coin under the glass of the booth before she raises her flat sleepy face, and he thinks of slot machines in the seaside arcades of his childhood, glass booths containing puppets which tottered alive if one fed them a coin. He’s heading for the exit when she swivels on her stool and raps on the glass with the largest wedding ring he has ever seen. “Hey!”
If the fare has gone up, the least she can do is tell him by how much. But she only stares at him and thrusts her hand under the glass, and he thinks she’s pointing at him until he notices the coin beneath her fingers. “Too rich to need your change?” she says.
“You’ve only taken for me.”
“That’s right, unless you’re hiding someone in your bag.”
“There’s the bicycle.”
She stares as if she’s refusing to acknowledge a joke, though she can see perfectly well what he means. He gestures at the barrier where he leaned the machine when she called him back, and then he realises with a shock that he has left the bicycle at home. When he apologises and reaches for the coin, her fingers recoil like caterpillars, and she bends the paperback open so fiercely that the bunch of pages she has read loses its grip on the spine and falls inside the booth. He knees the barrier aside and marches out of the tunnel, wondering what else he may have forgotten, feeling as though his very substance has been undermined.
On the far side of a broad deserted road, concrete office buildings catch fragments of the white glare of streetlamps in their multitude of windows. The interiors of the double-decker buses parked in a layby opposite the ferry terminal look moonlit. All six bus-stops have someone waiting at them.
As he crosses the whitened tarmac, the six men watch him silently. All of them are wearing dark suits—black, unless the light is altering the colour of their clothes as much as it’s discolouring their faces. They don’t respond when he nods to them, and so he does his best to ignore them while he looks for information. The timetables have been wrenched off the bus-stops; even the numbers on the metal flags have been rendered unidentifiable by graffiti which turn sevens into nines, nines into eights, whole numbers into mixed. Computer displays on the fronts of the vehicles announce destinations, but they bewilder him. Are the computers malfunctioning? Flicky Doaky, Eyes End, Cranium, Roly Polytechnic, View Hallow, Pearly Swine—he doesn’t believe there are any such places; perhaps the names are jokes the drivers crack after the buses stop running. The men by the bus-stops seem to be waiting for him to react, and he can’t help suspecting that they’re drivers. He leans against a building to wait for someone to board a bus.
The men turn away from him and exchange glances, and begin to call out to one another. “I’ll be gone as soon as I get my head down.”
“I’ll have mine under the covers before the sun’s up.”
“Nothing like sleeping when the world’s abroad.”
“Nothing worse than not being able to switch yourself off.”
“You mean the poor bat who couldn’t even when he was supposed to have retired.”
“And wouldn’t let anyone else.”
It sounds like a prepared routine, passing systematically along the line from right to left, and he feels as if they’re talking at him. He’s beginning to experience a rage so black it suffocates his words when another man emerges from a crevice beside him, an alley between the buildings. This one must be a driver, though he is almost a dwarf; he’s wearing the uniform. He toddles to the second bus from the left and turns a knob which folds the door open, and it seems clear that he’s the person to ask. “Excuse me …”
The driver pokes a finger under the brim of his cap. Thick spectacles make his eyes appear to occupy the top half of his wizened face. “Not open yet. You don’t see anyone else moving.”
True enough, all the dark-suited figures have turned towards the conversation and are frozen in attitudes of listening; some have lifted their hands to their ears. “I only wanted to ask which bus goes to—”
He can’t remember. With the loss of the word, his mind seems to shrink and darken. The driver is waiting as though only the word will release him, raising his eyebrows until his eyes fill the lenses of his spectacles. At last a name rises out of the dark. “To Mottershead. Which bus goes to Mottershead?”
“Never heard of it,” the driver says triumphantly, and hops onto the bus. “Nothing called that round here.”
“Of course there is.”
The door flattens into its frame, and he’s about to thump on the fingermarked glass when he realises that Mottershead isn’t the name of a place: it’s his own name. He retreats and presses his spine against the façade of an office in which typewriters are hooded like ranks of cowled heads. He’s restraining himself from turning his face to the concrete when the driver, having hoisted himself into the seat behind the wheel, reopens the doors and inclines his torso towards him. “Got another name for me?”
Mottershead thinks he sees a way out of the trap. “Where do you go?”
“Where it says.”
Perhaps there really is a district called Eyes End. If Mottershead doesn’t board the vehicle he’ll be alone with five of the six men who witnessed his discomfiture, the sixth having flashed a rectangle of plastic at the driver and sat in the front downstairs seat. He watches Mottershead with interest and twirls a slow finger in one nostril. “That’ll do me,” Mottershead tells the driver, and steps onto the platform.
In his pocket is only a twenty-pound note and the change from the ferry. The driver reaches a long arm out of his metal enclosure and plucks the coin from Mottershead’s hand. “You’ll hear me call when you’ve run out,” he warns, and starts the bus.
Mottershead is on the stairs when the vehicle backs at speed into the road and immediately lurches forwards. He grabs the tubular banister and hauls himself to the top deck, where he lunges at the left-hand front seat and flings himself onto it, jamming his heels against the panel behind the destination indicator.
The view ahead has changed. Buildings which at first he takes for disused offices, their windows broken and their exteriors darkened by age, mirror one another across the road. They’re warehouses illuminated by increasingly less frequent streetlamps. Black water glints beyond gaps to his right, while to his left, up slopes no wider than the bus, he glimpses unlit houses crammed together on both sides of alleys which appear to narrow as they climb. He’ll make for any second-hand bookshop he sees which is open. Surely he won’t be turned off the bus before it brings him to the shops.
When the bus slows, he presses his feet harder against the yielding metal. Two men are standing under an extensively annotated concrete shelter at the corner of an alley, and the foremost of them has extended a white stick like an antenna sensing the approach of the vehicle. The bus screeches to a halt, and Mottershead hears the door flutter open and the stick begin to tap upstairs.
He’s assuming that the driver will tone down his driving, but the vehicle jerks forwards like a greyhound out of a trap. He’s preparing to help until he hears the man’s companion following him upstairs. He watches their reflections on the glass in front of him as the man with the stick fumbles for the seat nearest the stairs and lowers himself onto it. Mottershead is shocked to see the companion mimic these actions, all the more so when he realises why he is acting that way. Both men are blind.
If they don’t leave the bus before Mottershead does they’ll know that he didn’t offer to help. The vehicle slo
ws again, and he’s afraid that the driver is about to summon him. No, someone is flagging the bus down, a man craning into the road from beside the stump of a bus-stop.
The door flaps shut, the bus lurches off between the warehouses. The new passenger takes some time to ascend the stairs. At the top he stands gripping the handrail, hunching his shoulders and turning his head tortoise-like. “Who’s here?” he demands.
He’s blind too. Mottershead is fighting a guilty compulsion to answer him when the man with the stick says “It’s us.”
“Thought so. Nobody with all their senses is out this early.”
He stumbles across the aisle and, placing a hand on each man’s scalp to support himself, sits down behind them. It doesn’t matter to the three how dark it is, Mottershead reflects, and wonders what job they have been doing. What job has he retired from? Before he can start to remember, the thin voice of the newcomer distracts him. “Has he seen to the electricity?”
“Not him,” says the man with the stick. “Too busy thinking of himself.”
“Can’t spare a thought for his people,” his companion adds.
“You’d think he’d attend when they try to let him know his lights are going to fail.”
“We’ll have some fun when they’re out.”
“He’ll be sorry he needs his eyes.”
By now Mottershead’s embarrassment has been supplanted by nervousness. Surely they wouldn’t say such things if they knew they were being overheard. He peers along the passing alleys in the hope that he may see a better reason than his nerves to quit the bus. “I remember when the lights fused and I got my own back on my dad,” the man with the stick laughs, just as Mottershead catches sight of a lit area beyond two consecutive alleys, which looks like the beginning of a wide street lined with shops. If he has to wait for any bookshops there to open, that’s decidedly preferable to skulking in his seat. He plants his feet on the ridged floor and, grasping the back of the seat, steers himself into the aisle.
The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories Page 35
