The Jo Fletcher Books Anthology

by Frank P. Ryan

  After a time, I began to worry that I was not moving at all. That I was merely treading water: pushing the damned scree down and down and not actually elevating myself. I had this idea that the action of my legs was just stretching out the surface of the earth, as if it was elastic, and behind me in the mist a great pile of stretched and baggy stone was accumulating, and around it the scree was piling up.

  I started using my hands as well, continuing on all fours. It didn’t make a difference. I wondered if I was even on a slope, or if it had flattened out and I was just crawling across a flat endless plain. A world of scree. With no landmarks or visual markers of any kind it was easy to lose perspective. And orientation, almost: I had no context. The movement felt like hard work, which suggested I was going uphill, but maybe all of my limbs were just tired from the climb. I didn’t know.

  I wondered how long it had been since I’d eaten, since I’d had any water. I stopped then and took a bottle from my backpack. One of several. I drank and drank, although it couldn’t have been that long since I’d had any. It wasn’t as if I’d been lost in the wild for days. I’d had a substantial lunch at a pub in the valley. Still, though, I tipped the water into my mouth faster than I could swallow it and so I spilled it, and then I got really angry with myself, pounding my hip with a balled-up hand.

  After the water, I continued again on all fours. And in a kind of incredibly happy, delirious way, I realised that there was a huge shadow in the mist ahead, getting darker and larger and more solid. I was happy because it was something that wasn’t scree; it was a sign that I was making progress. And that was the most important thing to me, right then: progress. Nothing but forwards motion mattered at that point. I could have turned around and slid right back down the fell, picked myself up and strolled leisurely back to the car, but no. I had to go forwards. I had to go up. I had to make progress. And this thing, this shadow, this was a positive indicator of that progress, surely. I was moving towards it. Or, it struck me, maybe I wasn’t moving forward, but instead the mist was lifting, meaning that this thing was becoming more apparent. That would be almost as good as progress; visibility, which would enable me to measure my progress.

  The shadow turned out to be a great knuckle of black stone, rising like an island from the liquid torrent of scree. I recognised it: Hell Gate Pillar. The recognition was a kick in the knee. I had not ascended very far since entering Great Hell Gate. I was not even level with the tops of the Napes. I still had the much longer part ahead of me. But – but. I could alter my route slightly now, because I knew that if I bore left as I went, I would eventually come to a ridge at the top of the Napes which would provide me with a much easier route to follow to the summit.

  Then the mist really did start to lift. I was glad at first, but almost immediately I felt as if I was being watched. I looked around, I looked behind me, but – obviously – there was nobody there. What I did see, though, was the sun descending in the west. The sky was less cloudy in that direction, but cloudy enough to result in an intricate sunset: lots of hard edges in the sky, the sea below ablaze. It was beautiful. Where I was, amongst the mountains, darkness was falling. I hadn’t realised until that moment.

  The other thing that I realised as I watched the sunset was that, should I fall or roll or slip or be swept backwards, I would shoot right over the top of the Napes in a shower of scree.

  I kept on going. I wondered what I looked like. An insect, probably, moving slowly and haphazardly across some surface for no apparent reason.

  It occurred to me that it would not be safe to progress in full dark. And it would be full dark, when night truly arrived, because the sky was still cloudy. I stopped and looked around. Everything was twilight blue. At that moment despair welled up inside me. I felt as if I’d just woken up and found myself in this predicament. A significant part of me was contemplating just lying down and trying to sleep, right there on the scree slope. Maybe I could have done that. It seemed right then like the most sensible thing to do. But it was also ridiculous. Is going to sleep really an answer to anything, ever? I was confused. Sleeping on the scree, in a T-shirt? Really?

  Then I saw a light. Not too far away, either. It must have been close to the tops of the Napes. It was warm-looking. And I could smell wood-smoke. It made my mouth water.

  The light was a little orange square: a window. I told myself that perhaps I was mad; I’d never seen a bothy in that location before, on my previous explorations or on any map. But some bothies are easy to miss; they’re so squat and grey that they just look like piles of rock themselves. Maybe I’d never noticed this one before because I’d never been up here at this time of night?

  ‘Hello?’ I shouted. There was no answer.

  I moved gingerly across the scree in the direction of the window, well aware of the consequences of clumsiness in this location. In the fading light I could just about see the slope of the mountainside below me rising slightly in a jagged edge. Beyond that, I knew, was the vertical drop of the Napes. The top of them – that jagged edge I could see – was a nightmarish mess of irregular spikes and crevasses. It was amongst that chaos that the light shone.

  Looking through the window into the mountain, I saw a tiny square room with a fire burning happily in the fireplace, and some hooks driven into the walls, ostensibly for the purpose of hanging clothes to dry.

  The location seemed relatively secure; it was not right on the edge of any drop, and I didn’t have to watch my footing or balance while I looked for the door, which I found before too long. The door, too, looked like a doorway into the mountain, the structure was so well disguised. In daylight, you’d be able to tell it was man-made, but in that dimness the densely stacked slates it was made of were almost indistinguishable from the disordered stone all around.

  I opened the door and went inside. ‘Hello?’ I said again, despite it being obvious there was nobody there.

  I looked in the visitor’s book. Nobody had left their name or the details of their stay for twenty years. The last entry was from ‘Mike’ and all it said was ‘Caught in storm.’ Dated September 1992.

  A fire flickered in the hearth and along the mantelpiece – one unfinished wooden beam – people had left empty whisky bottles and the wax stumps of burned-down candles, the shapes of which I found vaguely unsettling for some reason. They were strange; not flat enough, not puddled enough. They were tumescent. Tumescent was the only word that described them properly.

  Beneath the window was a small shelf, and on the shelf was an old radio. It was so old it looked like a modern vintage-styled one. There was no wire and no aerial. I tried turning it on, assuming it was battery-powered, but it didn’t do anything. The batteries had probably run out a long time beforehand.

  There are bothies scattered all over the fells. They all look pretty similar on the inside. They’re very basic; usually just a roof and four walls to keep the wind and rain off. Not all of them have fireplaces, though. I looked at the fire in this one. I sat down in front of it and took off my wet boots and socks. Somebody must have been in here sheltering from the mist, and then departed when the mist disappeared. It didn’t seem likely to me, but I couldn’t see any other explanation. They could have been climbers, with all the gear – they might have just nipped off over the edge of the Napes at the first opportunity. It wouldn’t have been too daunting if they were all roped up. That must have been it.

  I stretched my legs out and let the fire warm the soles of my feet until the heat became uncomfortable. I took my T-shirt off and stretched it across two of the hooks. I wished I had some whisky myself, or something exciting to eat. I looked in my backpack. I did have a pack of cereal bars; better than nothing. In fact, right then, a cereal bar sounded like heaven.

  When I woke up the fire was on its way out and the room was lit only by the embers. Everything glowed red. I could see through the window that the night was still thick. A square of blackest black. Then s
omething out there moved. My heart stopped. I couldn’t see what it was; I thought I’d just been looking up at the cloudy night sky. Maybe it was just a cloud. I didn’t know. I wanted to look at the door, but didn’t want to move my eyes away from the window. My mind was racing through the worst possible things I could see; the things I absolutely did not want to appear at the glass. A white human face. The paler the worse. A big grinning mouth. Long teeth. Black eyes. A bloody hand. A ski mask. Any kind of mask.

  Then there was a noise from the radio. I’d thought it was red-lit by the fire, but now I saw that it had its own red glow, coming from behind the frequency dial. The noise was a voice, but broken up, as if the signal was bad. A female voice. After a few seconds of mangled words and waves of static it levelled out, and became clear. The voice was speaking in another language. The tone was very even and matter-of-fact. I didn’t know what it was saying. But there seemed to be other, less distinct voices swirling around behind it. One of the voices sounded pained. It wasn’t speaking at all. Maybe trying to speak. The beginnings of lots of words, breaking down into whimpers and moans. Maybe the speaker wasn’t in pain; maybe they were debilitated by pleasure. But the first voice, the main one, was still going, still clear and precise. I could hear whispers behind it that were so distorted as to be unintelligible. I didn’t understand how some of the voices could be clear and some not.

  The first voice was now speaking in a different language to the one it had started in. Maybe it was repeating the same message in lots of different languages. Maybe it would come round to English, eventually. I wondered if it was an SOS, or special mountaineering broadcast. But it hadn’t been working! I picked the radio up and shook it. The broadcast continued. I turned it upside down and looked for the battery slot. I couldn’t find one.

  There was a kind of clicking noise in the mix now; clicking, or maybe knocking, somebody knocking on a door. Maybe it was a foreign radio play? There was a quiet urgency to it all.

  The main voice changed again; not just to a different language, but a weird grunting, choking sound. I threw the radio across the room and it broke, but the sounds continued. I glanced back at the window. Nothing to see, but then there had been nothing to see before, until I saw something.

  Then the voice switched to heavily accented English. I didn’t recognise the accent. It was a young-sounding voice. It could even have been the voice of a child.

  This is the mountain radio. Do not go where you want to go. Stay and help us with the pain. Stay and help us with the pain. This is the mountain radio. Do not go where you want to go. Please stay here and help us with the pain.

  The voice wavered at this point, but continued.

  This is the mountain radio. Do not go where you want to go. Do not know who you want to know. This is the mountain radio. You do not know what you think you know. You are the only stone you know. This is the mountain radio. This is the mountain radio. We are watching where you go. We already know what you will know. This is the mountain radio. You do not know where you will go. Do not go to the place you know. This is the mountain radio. Do not go where you want to go. Do not go when you want to go. This is the mountain radio. We are waiting for you to go. When you know us, you will know. That this is the mountain radio.

  One of the secondary voices started shouting, but it sounded far away.

  This is the mountain rad—

  Then the voice stopped. There was a distorted sweeping sound. But no, sweeping was not quite right. It sounded a bit like a ball-bearing rolling around a curved surface, or even irregular breathing. Then the voice resumed, but it was again speaking in a different language. Something behind it was wailing.

  I stamped on the radio again and again, but the voices didn’t stop. I ran out of the bothy, temporarily forgetting that I’d seen something out there in the dark. But I could still hear the radio. All I could see was a thin band of sky above the sea in which stars were visible.

  The stones beneath my bare feet were sharp.

  Something was on the fellside above me. I could feel it. I looked up. There was just pure black darkness. But I heard the slow trickle of scree moving down towards me; something was sending it this way, disturbing it, causing it to flow. Each shard of rock nudged another shard. When scree starts moving it is hard to stop. I couldn’t see it coming, but I could hear it, and then it was all around me, and I could feel myself moving, sliding down towards the top of the napes, and the voices were still going, and I scrabbled like a madman, like an animal, and the voice returned to English just as my heel caught something blade-like and unmoving, and I started tipping backwards, arms flailing, over the edge of the Napes.

  This is the mountain radio. Do not go where you want to go. Do not believe the things you know. This is the mountain radio. This is the mountain radio. The place you love is the place you’ll go. The stone you are is the stone you throw. This is the mountain radio. You don’t know what you want to know. But we’ll be with you when you go. This is the mountain radio.

  I had my eyes open as I fell, but I saw nothing. The darkness was so absolute and the height so great. The whole of the vastness of space was talking to me. I felt then more than ever that I was nothing but a tensile wire in a very high place, making a strange sound as winds passed over me.

  Tom Fletcher has published a number of his short stories in various publications, as well as three standalone novels with Quercus and Jo Fletcher Books, The Leaping, The Thing on the Shore and The Ravenglass Eye. The Factory Trilogy is his first fantasy series, beginning with the novel Gleam. He lives in Manchester with his wife and sons. You can contact him on Twitter @T_A_Fletcher or at www.writertomfletcher.com.

  Saving Face • Aidan Harte

  Saving Face

  Aidan Harte

  The boy flinched as I slapped his portrait. When I hit it, it was as though I hit him. A good bond, then. It was not an important commission; the subject was one of the numberless senators from the eastern provinces. The portrait’s skin, cold and slightly damp but otherwise just like flesh, slowly tightened into a look of wan stoicism. It was alive. I cooed and rubbed its cheek softly. There was no need to smile. Like newborn infants, it can discern only dark from light, but its raw nerves are sensitive. It responds to tactile stimulus. My touch, of course, is expert. The eyes widened and the ring of muscles round the mouth unclenched and relaxed. Its reactions were subtle and slow, like a flower turning towards sunlight.

  Not bad – good enough for a senator, certainly, but not a good enough product for my studio. Not good enough work from one of my apprentices.

  ‘The grid is asymmetrical. Melt it down and start over.’

  Youth is audacious. He tried to copypaste the skull grid from an old template, a shortcut doomed to failure – one must mix code specifically. If the code is not fresh, it turns out lumpy. I had forgotten the boy’s name – was it Li? – but I knew well his self-pitying pout and stupidly ponderous jaw. I watched him. He was about to protest, but stopped himself. Yes, I could have warned him before the work had gone so far. I didn’t, because that day’s product was not the portrait but the apprentice. If a lifer studio is not exacting there are a hundred others on Spring Swallow Row waiting to steal its clients. Only pain-learned lessons take, and every generation must taste it anew. It must be fresh.

  I turned away and continued pacing. The client was half an hour late already, a sign of the times; if I tried to charge for it I’d get short shrift. A hundred others are waiting. I was about to take lunch when he arrived. He was short man, with common brown skin, a surprisingly well-tailored suit and the neo-Manchu pigtail, de rigueur in the arriviste businessmen of the South swilling along the capital’s streets these days. Of course he had no apologies to make, only orders to give. Demanding tea and my full attention, he told me what he wanted in a voice that reminded me of a small dog yapping. He had a strange way of pausing mid-sentence and letting a sly smile spread over his
face that suggested nothing he said was meant seriously.

  I listened with a patient expression, nodding and agreeing at the right moment, complimenting his taste where appropriate. They all think they’re unique, but they all want the same type of portrait. I don’t really need to listen; it’s just something that makes them feel at ease and that, any lifer will tell you, makes the work easier. No one is ever disappointed with the results. When he had finished, he said, ‘I suppose you want to know about me?’

  Not waiting for my assent he began to explain his business – commodity importing from the colonies or some other banality. I didn’t pay attention; I’d guessed as soon as he walked into the studio that he was something of the sort. There are two types of client: government nobodies pushed in by ambitious assistants and vulgar businessmen pushed in by their wives. Where was she, I vaguely wondered? Probably spending his money while he lay prone.

  A talented lifer takes a person’s unique characteristics and makes them sing in a way that makes even the most ugly, modest and forgettable faces utterly arresting. Once you have seen a man’s life, you can’t help but treat him like a human – and what an advantage that is!

  ‘Sir, you must relax. This session is about you. We are searching for harmony, a shy thing that will not appear when boastful people are about.’

  Deaf to my hints, he continued bragging.

  ‘Sir, sit still or the bond will not take.’

  ‘Apologies, Master. Only, I’ve never been in a lifer studio before . . .’

  The bond was forming and I let myself float away with the pale emissions of vapour as he talked on . . . I was thirty winters ago and old China was dying.

  *

  The tall man was elegantly dressed; smoking a gold-ringed cigarette perched in a long dragon tooth. His name was Zhiang. He was a lifer, one of the first masters of the art that was then in its tentative stages. As my father conferred with him, I went exploring. The warehouse was stacked with dusty turntables, Bunsen burners, unwashed beakers, drying clay and antique computers with mud stains on the keypads.