No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories (38 page)

I knew what he meant. Jennie was an extraordinarily beautiful woman. Her lush hair was black as a raven’s wing, so black it was almost blue, and her eyes were as big and as blue as the sky. She had a full mouth, high cheeks and forehead, a straight nose and small, delicate ears. Despite that Jennie’s photograph was in profile, still she seemed to look at the camera from the corner of her eye, and wore a half-smile for the man taking her picture.

“And she’s in Exeter, with her boyfriend?”

Quarry shook his head. “No boyfriend, just friends. She’s no been home long enough tae develop any romantic interests. Ye should let me introduce ye some time. She was verra much taken with ye’re drawing. Ye hae that in common at least—designs, I mean. For it’s all art when ye break it down.”

After that, in a little while, I took my leave of him…

Driving home, for some reason known only to my troubled subconscious mind, I took the long route across the moor and drove by Tumble Tor; or I would have driven by, except Old Joe was there where I’d last seen him. In fact, I
didn’t
see him until almost the last moment, when he suddenly appeared through the break in the hedge, stepping out from the roadside track.

He looked at me—or more properly at my car—as it sped toward him, and for a moment he teetered there on the verge and appeared of two minds about crossing the road directly in front of me! If he’d done so I would have had a very hard time avoiding him. It would have meant applying my brakes full on, swinging my steering-wheel hard over, and in all likelihood skidding sideways across the narrow road. And there on the opposite side was this outcrop, a boulder jutting six feet out of the ground, which would surely have brought me to a violent halt; but such a halt as might easily have killed me!

As it was I had seen the old tramp in sufficient time—but only
just
in time—to apply my brakes safely and come to a halt alongside him.

Out of my window I said, “Old Joe, what on earth were you thinking about just then? I mean, I could so easily—”

“Yes,” he cut me off, “and so could I. Oh so very easily!” And he stood there trembling, quivering, with his eyes sunk so deep that I could scarcely see them.

Then I noticed the mist. It was just as Andrew Quarry had stated—a freak of synchronicity, sprung into being almost in a single moment—as if the earth had suddenly breathed it out; this ground mist, swirling and eddying about Old Joe’s feet and all across the low-lying ground beyond the narrow grass verge.

Distracted, alienated, and somehow feeling the dampness of that mist deep in my bones, I turned again to the old man, who was still babbling on. “But I couldn’t do it,” he said, “and I shall
never
do it! I’ll simply wait—forever, if needs be!”

As he began to back unsteadily away from the car, I said, “Old Joe, are you ill? What’s the trouble? Can I help you? Can I offer you a lift, take you somewhere?”

“A lift?” he answered. “No, no. This is my waiting place. It’s where I must wait. And I’m sorry—so very sorry—that I almost forgot myself.”

“What?” I said, frowning and perplexed. “What do you mean? How did you forget yourself? What are you talking about?”

“It’s here,” he replied. “Here’s where I must wait for it to happen…again! But I can’t—I mustn’t, and won’t ever—try to
make
it happen! No, for I’m not like that one…”

Old Joe gave a nod and his gaze shifted; he looked beyond me, beyond the car, out across the moors at Tumble Tor. And of course, as cold as I suddenly felt, I turned my head to follow his lead. All I saw was naked stone, and without quite knowing why I breathed a sigh of relief.

Then, turning back to the old tramp, I said, “But there’s no one there, Joe!” And again, in a whisper: “Old Joe…?” For he wasn’t there either—just a curl of mist in the hedgerow, where he might have passed through.

And a few minutes later, by the time I had driven no more than a mile farther along the road toward Torquay, already the mist had given way to a wan, inadequate sun that was doing its best to shine…

I had been right to worry about my state of mind. Or at least, that was how I felt at the time: that my depression under this atmosphere of impending doom which I felt hovering over me was some kind of mild mental disorder. (For after all, that’s what depression is, isn’t it?) Even now, as I look back on it in the light of new understanding, perhaps it really was some sort of psychosis—but nothing that I’d brought on myself. I realize that now because at the time I
acknowledged
the problem, while psychiatry insists that the psychotic isn’t aware of his condition.

In any case, I
had
been right to worry about it. For despite Andrew Quarry’s insistence that I’d sleep well that night, my dreams were as bad and even worse than before. The mist, the semi-opaque silhouette of monolithic Tumble Tor, and those eyes—those crimson-burning eyes—drawing closer, closer, and ever closer. Half-a-dozen times I woke up in a cold sweat…little wonder I was feeling so drained…

In the morning I drove into town to see my doctor. He gave me a check-up and heard me out; not the entire story, only what I felt obliged to tell him about my “insomnia”. He prescribed a course of sleeping pills and I set off home…such was my intention.

But almost before I knew it I was out on the country roads again. Taken in thrall by some morbid fascination or obsession, I was once more heading for Tumble Tor!

My tank was almost empty…I stopped at a garage, filled her up…the forecourt attendant was concerned, asked me if I was feeling okay…which really should have told me that something was very wrong, but it didn’t stop me.

Oh, I agreed with him that I didn’t feel well: I was dizzy, confused, distracted, but none of these symptoms served to stop me. And through all of this I could feel the lure, the inexplicable attraction of the moors, to which I must succumb!

And I did succumb, driving all the way to Tumble Tor where I parked in my usual spot and levered myself out of my car. Old Joe was there, waving his arms and silently gibbering…warning me about something which I couldn’t take in…my mind was clogged with cotton-wool mist…everything seemed to be happening in slow-motion…those eyes, those blazing
evil
eyes!

I felt a
whoosh
of wind, heard a vehicle’s tyres screaming on the road’s rough surface, saw through the billowing mist the blurred motion of something passing close—much too close—in front of me.

This combination of sensations got through to me—almost. I was aware of a red faced, angry man in a denim jacket leaning out of his truck’s window, yelling, “You
bloody
idiot! What the bloody hell…are you drunk? Staggering about in the road like that!” Then his tyres screeched again, spinning and smoking, as he rammed his vehicle into gear and pulled away.

But the mist was still swirling, my head still reeling—
and Old Joe was having a silent, gesticulating argument with a stick-thin, red-eyed man!

Then the silence was broken as the old man looked my way, sobbing, “That wouldn’t have been my fault! Not this time, and not ever. It would have been yours…or
his
! But it wouldn’t have done him any good, and God knows I didn’t want it!” As he spoke the word “his”, so he’d flung out an arm to point at the thin man who was now floating toward me, his eyes like warning signal lamps as his shape took on form and emerged more surely from the mist.

And that was when I “woke up” to the danger. For yes, it was like coming out of a nightmare—indeed it could only have been a nightmare—but I came out of it so slowly that even as the mist cleared and the old man and the red-eyed phantom thinned to figures as insubstantial as the mist itself, still something of it lingered over: Old Joe’s voice.

As I staggered there on the road, blinking and shaking my head to clear it, trying to focus on reality and forcing myself to stop shuddering, so that old man’s voice—as thin as a cry from the dark side of the moon—got through to me:

“Get out of here!” he cried. “Go, hurry! He knows you now, and he won’t wait. He’ll follow you—in your head and in your dreams—until it’s done!”

“Until what’s done?” I managed to croak my question. But I was talking to nobody, to thin air.

Following which I almost fell into my car, reversed dangerously onto the crossover track and clipped the hedge, and drove away in a sweat as cold and damp as that non-existent mist. And all the way home I could feel those eyes burning on my neck; so much so that on more than one occasion I caught myself glancing in my rearview mirror, making sure there was no one in the back seat.

But for all that I saw no one there, still I wasn’t absolutely sure…

Taking sleeping pills that night wasn’t a good idea. But I felt I had to. If I suffered another disturbed night, goodness knows what I would feel like—what my overburdened mind would conjure into being—the next day. But of course, the trouble with sleeping pills is they not only send you to sleep, they’ll
keep
you that way! And when once again I was visited by evil dreams, struggle against them as I might and as I did, still I couldn’t wake up!

It started with Old Joe again, the old tramp, a gentleman of the road. Speaking oh-so-earnestly, he made a sort of sense at first, which as quickly lapsed into the usual nonsense.

“Now listen to me,” he said, just a voice in the darkness of my dream, the silence of the night. “I risked everything to leave my waiting place and come here with you. And I may never return, find my way back again,
except
with you. So it’s a big chance I’m taking, but I had to. It’s my redemption for what I have thought to do—and what I have almost done—more times than I care to admit. And so, because of what
he
is and what I know
he
will do, I’ve come to warn you this one last time. Now you must guard yourself against him, for you can expect him at any moment.”

“Him?” I said, speaking to the unseen owner of the voice, which I knew as well as I knew my own. “The man on the tor?”

While I waited for an answer a mist crept into being and the darkness turned grey. In the mist I saw Old Joe’s outline: a crumpled shape under a floppy hat. “It’s his waiting place,” he at last replied. “Either there or close by. But he’s grown tired of waiting and now takes it upon himself. He risks hell, but since he’s already half-way there, it’s a risk he’ll take. If he wins it’s the future—whatever that may be—and if he fails then it’s the flames. He knows that, and of course he’ll try to win…which would mean that you lose!”

“I don’t understand,” I answered, dimly aware that it was only a dream and I was lying in my bed as still and heavy as a statue. “What does he want with me? How can he harm me?”

And then the rambling:

“But you’ve
seen
him!” Old Joe barked. “You looked beyond, looked where you shouldn’t and too hard. You saw me, so I knew you must see him, too. Indeed he
wanted
you to see him! Oh, you weren’t looking for him but someone else—a loved one, who has long moved on—but you did it in
his place of waiting
! And as surely as your searching brought me up, it brought him up, too. Ah, but where I only wait,
he
is active! He’ll wait no longer!”