Winter Falls

by Eddie Skelson

  Why couldn’t he find the place initially? That had been odd to say the least. Kevin had insisted that he wouldn’t find it, until the day that the person with the letter arrived that is. Melanie had said that he wouldn’t have got into the town unless they wanted him too. What did that mean? She had also said he wouldn’t be able to leave, not now, and more than once she had stated this. He had assumed she meant because of the storm but now he wasn’t so sure that this was the context she had used.

  The symbol he had seen, carved into what was left of the man on the block had been the exact same icon on the letter and directions, which of course was the same as the tattoo that Macgregor wore on the inside of his forearm. Was that the symbol of their church or cult?

  A knock sounded at the door. Two firm raps. It startled Joe and his heart leapt to his mouth. For a second he thought he may have been talking out loud and that they had overheard, but he regained control quickly.

  ‘You didn’t say anything out load dickhead,’ he thought.

  He closed his eyes as he remonstrated with his paranoia. ‘You are fine. It’s probably Guppy Man come for his dinner plates. Come to remove the evidence of drugging your guest you fuck.’ Joe thought bitterly. He wanted very much to punch Guppy Man, Henry, in his frog face.

  He got up and approached the door but stopped and checked the room first. The boots he had been given were by the bed and were wet. He quickly stepped over to them and pushed them underneath so they couldn’t be seen. Two more knocks sounded at the door.

  ‘Coming.’ Joe said, not having to feign irritability. He decided to hide the big coat under the bed as well. Satisfied that nothing provided any indication that he had been out of the hotel he unlocked the door and opened it.

  To his surprise it wasn’t Henry on the other side. Nor was it Macgregor or the Doctor. Instead a new face stood before him. Equal in height to Joe but more filled out across the shoulder. A stocky man but not absurdly so like Macgregor. Once again the Winter Falls look that Kevin had described in detail wasn’t present which made Joe think that Kev had been exaggerating that aspect.

  What the man opposite did look like was a criminal of some sort, according to Joe’s super power of stereotyping people he didn’t know. The man had a mop of black greasy hair held in place by a tatty corduroy flat cap. His dark skin was complimented by a week’s growth of stubble. He wore a bulky donkey jacket that looked quite new and his pale blue denims were met below the knee by a pair of black wellington boots. He eyed Joe without saying a word. A smirk played around his lips, partially obscured by the black hair of his fledgling beard.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Joe asked.

  The man said nothing for a moment, sizing Joe up. An unspoken drawing of lines in the sand was occurring. Joe was sure of it. He couldn’t say why exactly, but he found himself instantly disliking the man. It wasn’t because of his appearance, although Joe thought he definitely had a touch of a Bill Sykes about him, but because he could see a nasty, brutish nature in him. He was certain that this was the kind of person who would set old ladies on fire to get their pension books.

  ‘You must be Mr Clarke.’ The man stated rather than asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Joe replied.

  ‘Macgregor sent me down. Says I’m to tell you that the road is closed.’ The man’s voice was deep and rich with the accent of the Falls. His words cascaded into each other almost like a melody.

  ‘He says the weather is going to turn again later today and its best if you don’t go wandering off.’

  Joe caught a hint of threat in this and surprised himself as he lashed a response back at the messenger. ‘I’m not just some bloody tourist. I know better than to go strolling around strange places during storms.’

  If it had any effect on the man he didn’t show it at all. The laconic smile still lay on his lips. Joe thought that he might be handsome. If a woman liked the rough, Oliver Reed type persona this guy had it in spades.

  ‘Well, he told me to tell ya, so I have.’ He touched his cap as a farewell gesture and turned to leave.

  Joe stepped into the doorway and asked after him. ‘What’s your name?’ The man didn’t pause in his lazy stride away but called back. ‘I’m Billy Duggan. I’ll be seeing ya.’

  Joe watched as Billy disappeared down the stairs. Once he was gone Joe stepped back into his room and locked the door.

  ‘Wanker.’ He said under his breath.

  He moved to the window to see if Billy appeared in the view but he didn’t show in the half a minute or so that he waited.

  ‘So that was the legendary Billy Duggan.’ He said to himself, his breath steaming up the window as he spoke. The snow was light but constant outside. He wiped at the misty patch he had created and looked out across the town. No one moved about, hardly surprising given the weather but it still seemed odd, eerie even. No one was clearing their path, no one walked a dog or chatted to a neighbour over a wall.

  It was as he mulled over the emptiness of the town that a memory came back, reminding him of what he had been doing before he had slipped into unconsciousness the previous night. He snatched up his iPad and turned it on. The red ‘No Power’ icon lit up.

  ‘Fuck!’

  He had left it on overnight and with the app running, thanks to Guppy Man and his drugged soup. He had set the damn thing so that it wouldn’t turn off when he went to get a cup of coffee at work.

  He scowled at the pad and searched for the charger. He couldn’t find it. He checked under the bed, in both his bag and the travel case. It wasn’t there. The room was tiny and there was only so many places it could be. It wasn’t in any of them.

  Someone had to have taken it while he was out cold. Except that made no sense, surely they wouldn’t want his suspicions raised. Joe paced the room, chewing his lip as he tried to figure out a scenario in which alerting him to the fact that someone had broken into his room, with a spare key he imagined, would be in their best interest.

  Joe stopped pacing, his train of thought was going off the rails again. He rewound. Why had he wanted the pad? He looked at the dead, black screen. ‘It was the names!’ He pulled out his phone, he hadn’t even looked at it since yesterday and was pleased to see that there was still fifty six percent of charge remaining.

  Joe swiped his finger across the screen until the ‘Notepad App’ appeared. He pressed it and once the little digital lined page filled the screen he began to type in the names he could recall from the Cenotaph.

  He visualised pulling up to it in the Nissan, he got out and walked towards it. Extending his hand he ran his fingers across the letters sunk into the stone. When he had finished, satisfied that he couldn’t haul anymore up from his memory and that what he had written was accurate he performed the same mental trick with his viewing of the pad the night before. It was more difficult than the Cenotaph recall had been. He guessed that the drugs had messed up his usual storage method but he did manage to type out eight names.

  They matched perfectly to the names on the memorial list. If the two sources were correct eight men had died in the same year that eight men were born with identical names. It was probably more, he was sure of this, but without the pad he couldn’t check. He needed that charger.

  Joe stood and took his trainers from under the useless radiator. After putting them on he shrugged on his Nickelson jacket, unlocked the door and marched out of his room. He headed towards the stairs with a determined pace.

  Melanie had told him that she thought they were scared of him because they thought he worked for the government. That he had to convince him that this was the case. He decided to do just that.

  When he reached the stairs he could see Henry sat behind the reception desk with his huge oddly spaced eyes half closed. Joe approached with a degree of stealth and once he was directly in front of the sleeping receptionist, slammed his hand down on the counter top.

  ‘Excuse me.’ He said loudly.

  Henry almost fell from his chair and made a strange ‘errggle’
noise as he grasped the lip of the counter to prevent him actually dropping to the floor.

  ‘Where is my fucking phone charger?’ Joe bawled. Henry’s strange face seemed to change in pallor by the second.

  He blinked like a lizard, huge lids over large pale eyes. ‘What?’ Henry said in his raspy, phlegm soaked voice.

  ‘I left my fucking charger in my room. I’ve woken up only to find that it’s apparently disappeared.’ Joe flicked his hand in the air like a conjuror to emphasise the point. He wondered if he might be overdoing the indignation but was quite enjoying seeing Henry squirm.

  ‘That charger is government property and if it goes missing I’m going to have to report that it was stolen from this fucking shit hole of a hotel.’ Joe jabbed a finger at the hapless receptionist ‘Your fucking hotel,’ he added.

  ‘Wha...wait’, Henry stammered. He reached under the counter and produced the charger, dangling it between his fingers.

  Joe snatched it off him ‘and what the hell is it doing under there?’ he demanded.

  ‘Handed in.’ Henry croaked the words ‘handed in by guest...was by your door...was gon tell ya,’ he said.

  Joe decided to reign in his temper now. He had his charger and Henry looked genuinely terrified. ‘Mission accomplished ‘he thought. ‘Bloody good job.’ Joe warned him. ‘I have to submit a pile of paperwork when government property goes missing,’ he said.

  ‘That should be enough.’ he thought.

  ‘Right, I’m going back to my room, and I would prefer not to be disturbed by Officer Macgregor’s lackeys if you don’t mind. The sooner I’m home and can forget about this place the better.’ Joe sniped.

  He walked back to the stairs making sure to give Henry a filthy look as he mounted them. ‘Yup, that should do it,’ he reassured himself.

  When he got back to his room he immediately plugged the charger into the pad and waited while it stored enough energy to power up. He believed that he knew why they had taken the bold step of stealing his charger. They wanted to gauge his reaction. Perhaps to see if he would just ‘let it go’ because he was scared of something maybe, or to see if he was some government big mouth or not. He hoped they thought the latter now.

  The iPad chimed indicating that there was enough power to turn it on. Joe eagerly picked it up from the bed and swiped to the photo-gallery. He rolled the images along the screen as he had done before but this time checking off each name that married up to the names on his phone. He had recalled eighteen names that he was certain of on the Cenotaph. Before he had worked his way through a third of the images for 1914 he had found them all.

  The records had to be faked. They were good though. Whoever had forged them had produced them on original documentation he was certain, the texture and age of the paper could possibly be duplicated but Joe thought this wasn’t the case. He was prepared to bet that the pages were the ones that should have been filled out during that year. But they had been rushed. The forger had just copied the names from death records of those who had died in the fighting during the War that year. The lack of doctor’s scribble lent weight to this.

  Joe sat at the table feeling quite pleased. The little task he had set himself, and bawling at Guppy Man, had helped to push the sickening thoughts of the morning away. He wasn’t sure what the results meant and he still couldn’t be certain he was right, but he knew he had revealed something about the town that Melanie hadn’t mentioned.

  Thinking of Melanie reminded him that he wouldn’t see her until this evening, after eleven she had said. He had the whole day to spend sat in his room and he wasn’t sure that he could bear that.

  Feeling emboldened by creating a scene at the reception and sowing the seeds, he hoped, of his connection with the government Joe decided that he should venture out, to show the world he had some spine.

  He thought about using back door of the hotel, as he had done with Melanie, but decided against it. It would probably better to be seen to wander around, just like the tourist he had denied he was to Billy Duggan. If someone came to his room thinking he was still in it suspicions could be aroused.

  Decided, he stood, unplugged the charger from the iPad and inserted it into his phone instead. It was better to have the mobile on full power and ready to go if and when he got a signal. He pulled his boots and coat from under the bed. His jeans were still very damp at the bottom but he figured it was better to wear them, while the snow was still falling, rather than his thin cotton trousers. As he changed into them he looked out of the window and saw the steady snowfall had not altered one way or the other.

  Finally he delved into the bottom of the bag. The pistol and bullets were hidden under the stiff canvas-coated board which stopped the bag from sagging at the bottom. He lifted it and withdrew the items.

  He turned the gun over in his hand as he debated whether to take it. Part of him insisted that he would be insane not too. A man had been brutally murdered by these people and he was only alive because of a misapprehension on their part as to who his employer was. However the thought also repelled him. He had never fired a gun in his life, and although he supposed he could be considered fit and thanks to his passion for the gym was fairly strong, he certainly wasn’t a fighter. Perhaps having the pistol would make him decide on a course of action that he needn’t take.

  He pressed his lips together as he considered the options. If they came back to his room while he was out they might find the gun, then he was definitely screwed.

  He settled on a compromise. Finding the release lever on the pistol he opened up the chamber and tipped the bullets into his hand. He would keep the gun in one pocket as before and all of the bullets in the other. He felt sure that if he pointed an unloaded gun at someone the effect would be pretty much the same as if it was loaded. So long as only he knew the bullets were where they couldn’t cause any harm it should be fine.

  Joe picked up the tray with the plate, bowl and cutlery on them and exited the room, he didn’t bother locking the door not seeing any point in doing so. He made his way to the reception where Henry was once again half way to sleep. Joe let the tray drop onto the desk from about an inch above it and as before, the sound of the crashing ceramic startled the receptionist.

  Henry looked at the tray and Joe thought he detected a reddening in his strange skin. To prevent Henry from thinking he harboured any suspicions about his meal Joe pointed at the remnants of potato.

  ‘Don’t you have fresh potatoes? I hate that powdered stuff.’

  Henry stared at him, thin mouth slightly open, but said nothing, he just shook his head a little.

  ‘He looks like a mental patient.’ Joe thought. ‘Well I don’t want that tonight thank you, just the soup.’ Joe handed his room key over. ‘I’m going for a stroll around the town. I’ll be back later.’ Henry remained silent. Joe frowned at him and then left, this time by the front door.

  Chapter Eight

  Upon leaving the hotel Joe was struck by the rise in temperature compared with when he had travelled through the forest with Melanie. No doubt the flat grey layer of clouds that floated above had helped. The light was poor though, almost a twilight.

  Joe decided to follow the path in front of the hotel down towards the harbour. He could see that there was a glow of soft lighting coming from some of the houses and store fronts. The path down was quite steep and Joe occasionally felt his grip on the snow fall away. He would lurch violently, swinging his arms comically to maintain balance. Each time he looked to around to see if anyone had seen his display but there still appeared to be no one on the streets.

  All of the houses on the path right down to where it finally eased its decline, whether they had the lights on or not, had curtains tightly drawn across every window. It was not until he reached the main street that ran the length of the harbour did he see them unguarded. The first lit building was the second along in a row that backed on to the docks. At the rear of it a jetty disappeared out into the sea.

  Joe approached and
saw a sign, old and weathered like the others he had seen yesterday. It was nailed up, a large three foot square wooden panel that may have once had a painted white background, now there were only grey patches stencilled onto which was text, barely visible.

  Pat Lawton - Food and Beverage est: 1900

  Joe wondered if the signage might actually be over a hundred years old, it looked it. As he stared at the sign the door to the premises swung open. A man emerged carrying a brown box, gripped by large un-gloved hands. He held it against his chest. Joe could see that the top layer was tins with bland labels. Unbranded canned goods. The man halted when he saw Joe and looked straight at him.

  Joe immediately saw the Winter Falls look in this man. Much more than was evident in Henry. He was short and stocky, wearing a large black coat similar to Billy Duggan’s donkey jacket except this went down to his knees. His head, large and oddly shaped wore a few lonely strands of long black hair that lifted and fell with the breeze. His eyes bulged from his head, not only larger than Henry’s but more widely spaced. A flat nose sat below, almost flush with his face and beneath this a razor thin mouth that traced a grim line atop what passed for a jaw line.

  The big eyes performed the ‘lizard blink’ as snow attacked them. Joe thought that he had seen the small dark nostrils flare for a moment just before the man turned away from Joe and continued along the street towards the other side of the harbour.

  Joe watched him shuffle off. He walked with the speed and of a man in his nineties but there was strength in his steps.

  He decided to take a look inside ‘Pat’s’ store. As he stepped in to the shop, which was large inside, he noted that it was no more sanitary than any of the other Winter Falls places of business. Dust, cobwebs and here and there patches of grease or mud could be found in corners and on the walls. The goods were displayed on ancient metal shelves still in their boxes.