I don’t know what made me glance at the house at the end. It was almost certainly just an accident, something for my head to do while my body did all the running. Just before I reached the end my eyes drifted across the filthy pane of its main window, and what I saw—or thought I saw—terrified me into losing my balance and falling. I seemed to take a long time to fall, and my mind insists that this is what I saw as I did.
A face, almost merged with the shadows of the room behind the window. A face that started off as something else, something unrecognizable and alien, something which slid and twitched into a normal face faster than the eye could see. A normal face that looked a little like the publican’s, and a little like Miss Dawton’s. And like, I realised, that of the old crone from the guest house, especially when we’d returned last night. It wasn’t simply make-up which had made the difference, far from it. If I hadn’t been so drunk I think I would have realised at the time. I think the make-up had been put on to hide something else.
And there was one more thing about the face. It looked a little bit like my mother.
All that passed through my head in the time it took me to fall, and was smacked out of it when my head cracked into a curbstone. My knee felt badly grazed and twisted, but I was up on my feet immediately, backing hurriedly away from the house. There was nothing to see in the window. No-one was there. Maybe they never had been. Nevertheless I turned and ran away.
It started to rain then, at first drizzling, but then settling into a steady downpour. I plodded down one street after another, sometimes thinking I heard something, sometimes hearing nothing but water. My head hurt by then, and blood ran down the side of my face, mingling with the falling rain and running down into my shirt. At the slightest sound I started and whirled around, but too sluggishly to make any difference. I couldn’t seem to think in straight lines. It didn’t feel like it had the night before. It just felt as if I was terribly, miserably frightened.
In the end I gave up and headed towards the square as best I could, limping my way down the tangled streets. It should have occurred to me sooner I suppose, after all, I’d had the right idea in the beginning. I should have stayed where the procession might end. In retrospect I’m glad I was too stupid to realise that, but at the time I wearily cursed myself.
It didn’t make any difference. The square was still deserted. But they’d been there. That much was clear from the very atmosphere, from the feeling of recently emptied space. It was also obvious from the scraps of paper lying in gutters, which hadn’t been there before. I squatted to pick one or two of the sodden pieces up. They were from the pamphlet, as I might have expected. ‘Yogsogo…’ one fragment said. ‘…thulu mw’yleh iä…’ read another. Late, far too late, I wondered if it all meant something, if it was something more than a local idiosyncrasy or the result of a blind typist. I don’t think I can be blamed for not suspecting that earlier. All I’d wanted was a weekend out of London. I wasn’t expecting anything else.
Looking back up through the slanting rain I noticed something. From where I was it looked as if the door to the pub was now open. I got up and walked towards it, taking occasional paranoid glances into the darkness at the other corners of the square.
No light was showing, but the door was open. The publican had left his pub. The landlady had abandoned her guest house. Were these people so trusting, or did they simply not care? My face in an unconscious wince of tension, I carefully pushed the door open a little further. No sound came from the room, and when I poked my head cautiously within I saw it was completely empty. I stepped in. The room looked much as it had when I’d last been there, except at the bar. The flap which allowed access to the bar area had been lifted up and left that way, and the door behind was also open. I walked over and, wishing I had a god or religion to invoke, stepped behind the bar.
The first thing I did was to peer into the gloom of the second room, the one you could just see when standing at the bar. I couldn’t see much except chairs, all of the unusual shape. Then I turned and looked through the other door. The wall beyond was panelled with dark wood, and the narrow corridor it formed a part of stopped just past the door. I stepped through and looked to the left. Stone steps led down into darkness. I felt around for a light but couldn’t find one. Even if I had I doubt I would have had the courage to use it.
I thought for a moment before starting down. I wondered about running back to the guest house, checking if Susan had returned. Perhaps the Festival had ended, and she was waiting impatiently in the sitting room, wondering where I was.
I don’t know why I didn’t believe that was the way things were. I simply didn’t, and I went down the steps instead.
There were a good number of them, and they went straight down. It was pitch dark almost from the top, and I walked down with a hand braced against the walls on each side of me. My head was still hurting, indeed it seemed to be getting worse. When I shut my eyes it felt almost as if a small light was beginning to glow in my temple, so I kept them open, little difference though it made to my progress.
Eventually I ran into a wall, and turned left. I walked a little way down another corridor and then realised that I could see a slightly lighter patch in front of me, and the sound of distant waves. Not only that.
I could hear piping, and I started to run.
Of course, I thought, as I panted my way towards the end, of course the procession would end on the beach. And of course, perhaps, it would go there by way of a pub that had been called The Aldwinkle, a pub whose name celebrated the night they’d found their chance to emerge. Susan had been right. The name wasn’t simply a souvenir of a bygone event. It meant something to the village, as did the wreck itself, along with R’yleh and everything else. It meant something horrible, celebrated a disastrous opportunity which had been taken advantage of. The piping grew stronger as I approached the end of the tunnel, and when I emerged breathless onto the beach I saw them.
They were walking in pairs, slowly and in a peculiar rhythm. In the middle of the column a model of a boat bobbed and swayed, held up by a multitude of hands. Soon it would have a chance to see if it could float, because they were walking into the sea.
As I watched, rooted to the spot, the figures at the front of the procession took their first steps into the choppy waters. They did so confidently, without any fear, and I thought finally I understood. I lurched forward without thinking, shouting Susan’s name. The column was a long way away, maybe two hundred yards or more across the mud, but I shouted very loudly, and I thought I saw a figure at the back of the procession turn. It was too dark to even be sure that it happened, but I think it did. I think she turned and looked.
I broke into a run and got maybe five yards before something crashed into the side of my head. As my vision faded to black I thought I saw the thing that had been hiding look at me to check I was done, before shambling quickly to join the others.
I came back to London two days later, and I’m still here. For the time being. All of Susan’s stuff is in boxes under the stairs. Having it lying around was too painful, but I can’t get rid of it. Not until I know what I’m going to do.
I regained consciousness, after about three hours stretched on my face in the mud, to find the beach completely deserted. I started to stumble towards the water, mind still programmed as it had been before I was knocked out, but then I changed my mind. I walked crying back up the slope and called the police from a public phone booth, and then I slumped down to the ground and passed out. I was taken to hospital eventually, where they found two concussions. But before that I talked to the police, and told them what I knew. I ranted a great deal apparently, about a coastal town where they didn’t eat the fish, about the meaning of inverted swastikas, and about monstrous villagers who could disguise their true nature and look like normal people.
In the end the police brought the heavy squad in. They had to. An empty village where doors have been left open and belongings abandoned is more than local plod can handle.
The city cops weren’t terribly interested in my ramblings, and I can’t say that I blame them. But before they arrived I thought that one of the local police, an old sergeant who lived in a nearby village, took what I said very seriously.
He must have done. Because on the following day, as I sat shivering in the sitting room of the empty guest house, I saw police divers head out towards the sea. No-one knows about this, and they won’t. The press never got wind of the story, and various powers will make sure they never do. I’m not going to tell anyone. It’s better that no-one knows. The only question in my mind is what I should do, whether I can forget enough not to act on my knowledge. Time will tell.
I brought my shoes back to London in the end, which was a gesture of a kind. The police found them on the front, and I identified them as mine. Deep in one toe I found a note. ‘Goodbye, my dear,’ it said.
That she went with them I know, and I’m glad she lost her fear of the sea. Perhaps it had never been a real fear, but a denial of something else. When I remember the last hour we spent together I wonder now whether it was a tear I felt on my cheek, or whether her hair was wet. Because when the divers returned they’d made a discovery, something that will never be known. More divers arrived an hour later, and for the next day the beach was crawling with them as they returned to the water again and again.
They found the Aldwinkle, and something inside. The skeletons of three hundred and ten people, to be precise. By the jewelry round her neck and the remains of her passport, one was identified as Geraldine Stanbury.
Two Shot
The weird thing was that he didn’t feel especially enthusiastic. Usually the prospect pepped him right up. He’d spend the last half hour pacing around the apartment, making sure everything was just so, building the scene. This afternoon he was a little excited, of course, but this was mingled with other emotions that made less sense. A feeling of distance, dislocation, and a kind of deep-down lethargy underneath it all—adding up to a kind of queasy anticipation which was unlike him. Probably it was at least partly due to the hangover. The memories of exactly how he’d come by it were vague, but it was sure as hell there. In force. He’d spent the morning drinking large quantities of expensive mineral water in the hope this would mitigate it in some way. In fact it had just made him feel as if he was both hung over and full of water.
He rubbed his face hard with his hands and felt a little better. The clock panel on the wall of his living room told him there was still twenty-five minutes before she arrived. Plenty of time. He’d be fine. He knew the way she’d look when she turned up at the door. Nervous, a little flushed, feeling naughty as hell and not admitting to herself that she liked the sensation. Silly bitch.
He smiled suddenly, and all at once felt better still. The differential had kicked in. The differential between what they thought was going on, and what was really happening. Between their assumption that they were caught up in a sexy, private little affair with someone who just couldn’t keep their hands off them, and the way he really viewed the liaisons. The excitement he felt when they were in the apartment was nothing to what he knew when they were gone. That was the real business.
Feeling well-nigh pepped at last, he shoved himself up off the couch and quickly moved through the two stages of readying the apartment. The first didn’t take a lot of doing. He lived tidily. Fan the magazines (carefully chosen to reinforce the impression that he was intelligent, sensitive and yet sensuously physical—and why the hell not? He was, godammit); plump the pillows on the couch (Lord, women did love fancy pillows); make sure there were two clean wine glasses waiting ready on the counter, and that the bottle in the fridge was cool but not too cold. Anne liked a sip before they got to it, whether to relax herself, blur her conscience or to gild the event with some half-assed romantic veneer, he neither knew nor cared.
The second half of the process took a little longer. There were eight digital camcorders in the apartment, over ten thousand dollars’ worth of high-spec Japanese ingenuity. Two in the living room; four in the bedroom; two in the bathroom. He initially only put new tapes in six, almost electing not to bother with the ones in the bathroom. Never in the seven times he’d had sex with Anne had the action careered into that room. With some women it did, with others it didn’t. With Anne it didn’t. But sometimes it was worth watching for the expression on the women’s faces as they had a pee afterwards, thinking they were in a backstage area and safe from view. Shame, smug glee, guilt and compromised tears: they all informed what had gone before. He put one tape in that room after all, in the camera which directly faced onto the lavatory. He could live without a two shot in here: her face was what really counted.
Each of the cameras was carefully hidden: in curtains, on bookshelves, in tidy piles of clothes. He’d experimented with pinhole cameras in the past, tiny devices not much bigger than the chip required to drive them and the miniature lens on top, but the quality just wasn’t good enough and they required stringing up to a recorder of some kind, which would be kind of a pain.
When he’d finished he went back into the living room. Ten minutes to go. He put a little music on, running it off a pre-chosen playlist on the computer. He listened to all music this way now. Soon as he bought a CD, he used ripping software to store it on the hard disk as MP3 files. Each file was a mere couple of megabytes in size, and with the array of 100 gig racks he had built into the desk, there was room for thousands of tracks at resolutions none of his guests were likely to be able to tell from the real thing. Truth be told, he probably couldn’t these days either. It had been a while since he’d even bought a CD, now he thought of it. Couldn’t remember the last time, in fact. Now he just culled the MP3 files direct from the web. Some were legit, some rip-offs. It didn’t matter. That was the great thing about the web—the distance it put between you and the scene of the crime. No-one was going to come and find him. Not down those countless little wires. They were too thin for culpability to seep through. You could spend your entire life on the web without exposing yourself to anything more dangerous than spam or mail-bombing, both of which he was more than capable of dealing with.
The only people he had direct contact with, the only ones who ever learned his physical address and entered his corporeal world, were the women he met in the web’s virtual chat rooms. He’d cultivate them carefully, coming on like some newbie lurker: matching their own shy advances and only very gently nudging the conversation into the slow spiral which would end in them taking the exchange out of a public arena and into private email. He only ever fished on boards that were loosely tied to his own geographical location. There was no point spending all that time and effort only to find that she lived on the other side of the world. Because eventually he would have convinced the woman—or, in her mind, they would have convinced each other—that it was time to take the relationship a little further. To take it backwards, out of these futuristic and nebulous lines of communication and back to the basic human levels which had worked since the dawn of time. It was never organised by phone. He had not once given his number out. Instead it would be a series of emails, a courtship of text: a careful progression for her, sentences fretted over, rewritten, revised or sometimes sent with a spastic click of a button before she had time to change her mind—but often the same old same old for him, as he’d found that he could cut and paste chunks out of previous campaigns and use them time and again.
And eventually the first visit would happen. A woman, slightly overdressed, eyes round with courage, would turn up at his door. The obvious would happen, and he was good. So it would happen again, and again. At intervals: when the woman could snatch the time; when the ennui she felt in her real life was so acute that it could only be assuaged by an action whose dishonesty jerked her out of her rut. Not all of the women had been married, in fact probably not even the majority: but for the ones that weren’t the very fact that they were prepared to enter into so one-track a relationship showed that none of them were worth taking seriously. It
would carry on until something happened—a crisis of confidence, a tearful revelation to a husband, a prying boyfriend discovering an email trail which by now would be a lewd series of assignation-making—and it was over. He was never the one to make the move. He let them do it, because that way he knew they wouldn’t be coming back and bugging him. They’d just be gone. To be immediately replaced by another one, whom he would have been cultivating in the meantime, keeping out there in the ether until the time was right.
The doorbell rang. He walked across the room towards the door, checking his hair in the mirror as he passed.
She was standing outside. Rather casually dressed, which annoyed him. He liked to see a bit of effort, not least because it proved that the affair was still at the hotter-than-hot stage. Though she did at least look a little flushed.
‘Hi, David,’ she said, and he was pleased to notice a slight catch in her voice. ‘You’re looking good.’
Yes, he thought, I am. And later he found that what she was wearing underneath the blouse and pants wasn’t casual at all.
Two and a half hours later he heard the door close behind her as she left the apartment. He’d been lying on the bed, faux dozing: he was prepared to do a lot of things to keep women convinced they were having one of the world’s greatest affairs, but listening to them prattle after the event wasn’t one of them. As soon as he was sure she’d gone, he was up and in the shower.
A good one, he thought, as he sluiced himself clean. And maybe the best-directed yet. He showered slowly, prolonging the moment.
When he was done, and comfortable in a fluffy white dressing gown which he liked because it never seemed to get dirty, he went into the kitchen, fired up his other computer, and put a big pot of coffee on. He dropped the two wine glasses—hers empty, his still half-full—in the trash. He had plenty more. Then he went back through the apartment and collected up the tapes.
More Tomorrow: And Other Stories Page 31
