The Wanderer (20 page)

(When Jane finished describing the tapestry, Duncan, Elliot, and I turned to William to see his response. But, though he was listening attentively, nothing in his expression suggested he’d noted the resonance with his tale. Jane also seemed unaware of it. At the time, I wondered if this was feigned, if she’d deliberately evoked William’s story, though I couldn’t fathom why. Revelations later that evening suggested, however, that all our experiences had been wrought by a sole malevolence, and that, just as it is thought all mankind’s dreams come from a collective oneiric pool, all dark experiences are drawn from a single well of horror, into which, from time to time, a poor unfortunate unwittingly lowers his pail.)
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Putting out her hand, Jane touched the tapestry. It gave slightly under her fingers. She reached out, took hold of the cloth, drew it aside. A wild writhen thing leered out at her from the passage the arras concealed. Cowering back, letting the wall-hanging fall, she tripped on the warped boards, staggered, fell down heavily. Throwing out an arm to steady herself, she felt, beneath her hand, the gruesome rug. And it too yielded, sagged into a hidden opening.

Some beast beneath was disturbed; a scuttling started up. Leaping to her feet, Jane backed away, breathing hard. The rug was abruptly seized, pulled down into a ragged hole. The scratching waxed louder, more frantic. Edging closer and looking down through the hole, Jane saw a dingy pit, floor strewn with gnawed bones, some with gobbets of flesh still clinging to them. Then she glimpsed a mottled carapace and a brutal pincer, shrank away.

Dread giving her grit, she tore down the tapestry, ready to fight her way past the horrid creature, but found merely a tarnished, cracked, fly-spotted, and warped mirror in a nook. She had a fit of giggles, then, controlling herself, looked about her again. There must be some other way out of the chamber. Where were her boys else? Then she saw, on the far side of the room, in the deepest shadows, a ladder. She crossed to it, climbed up, groping for the rungs, and found there was a trapdoor in the ceiling. Pushing it open, she clambered through.

The upper chamber was lit by sputtering rush torches in wall sconces, was bodged up into a grisly sham of the dining room in her house. The chairs and table were rickety, with rusty nails jutting, and covered in tallowy fungal growths. Peter and Jeremy sat, on the chairs, at the table, eating squirming filth by the forkful. And behind them stood a ghoul, yellowed bone, swagged with shreds of grey muscle and scraps of leathery hide, clad in rags and a blood-spattered apron. Dried-up eyes sunk into a shrunken skull; mouth a raw rent, twisted into a grisly smile.

Jane moaned, retched.

‘Are you alright?’ the thing Roderick had become asked, tenderly.

Struggling to compose herself, sore afraid of what the horror might do if it realized she was no longer cozened, Jane breathed slow.

‘Sorry. I’m fine, really. Just feeling on edge.’

The thing looked leery at her. Strained smile without, turmoil within, she clubbed her brains, but all seemed hopeless.

Then Jeremy, looking up at the thing, seemed to see something of its true, its loathsome, aspect, blenched. She tried to catch his eye, but was too late.

‘What’s that!’ he wailed, pointing.

The thing made to move toward him, and he jumped out of his chair, ran, weeping, to Jane. She squatted, took him in her arms.

‘Don’t cry, Jeremy,’ she said. ‘I’ll not let any harm come to
you.’

Then, feigning mettle, she called out, ‘Peter! Come here. We’re leaving.’

Peter thumped the table, stood, took one of the thing’s withered hands in his.

‘Only if Dad comes with us,’ he said.

‘Peter, my love,’ wheedling, ‘that’s not your dad. Your father is dead.’

‘Of course I’m not dead!’ the thing barked. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘Jeremy,’ said Jane, desperate, ‘tell Peter.’

Jeremy looked out from behind her legs, where he quailed.

‘Peter, it’s true. That’s some kind of a monster. It’s not Dad.’

‘Why are you being so hateful?’ the thing said, doleful look on its ravaged face.

‘Peter, please,’ Jane begged.

Scowling, he shook his head.

Frantic, Jane, started toward him. The thing sneered, reached into the pocket of its apron, took out the kitchen knife he’d fallen on years before, now tarnished, but kept keen-honed, brandished it behind Peter’s back. Jane stopped. Sweat pooled in the hollows of her collar bones, despite the chill. The thing grinned at her.

Then she rallied her routed wits. She needed to get Peter outside somehow; the sight of the desert waste might shiver the illusion for him, as it had with her. Taking Jeremy’s hand, she led him over to the ladder.

‘Climb down,’ she whispered. ‘Wait for me at the bottom. Don’t be scared. And don’t budge from the foot of the ladder.’

‘Okay,’ Jeremy said, through tears. ‘We’re not leaving Peter, though, are we?’

‘No, of course not. Now, be brave for me.’

He nodded, then placed his foot gingerly on the first rung, started down. Glancing over her shoulder, Jane saw the thing
make to approach, then stall, stand grimacing. She followed Jeremy down, slow, grabbling for each rung. The door was shut again, and it was very dark. The dread chitinous scratching still rose from the pit beneath.

After Jane had stepped down off the last rung onto the floorboards, she groped about in the dark, found Jeremy. He flinched away, whimpered.

‘It’s me! It’s me. Don’t fret.’

‘Mum. That noise…It’s horrible.’

‘Jeremy, stay here, against the wall. Don’t move. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, Mum.’

‘Okay. I’m going to go up there again now. When I come back down Peter’ll be with me. And we’ll leave.’

Then she reached into her bag, took out her hipflask, raised it to her lips to swig, put some of the fire in her she was bluffing, but, as the vodka swilled into her mouth, she felt disgusted, cast the flask from her, to clatter to the floor, spat.

‘What’s that?’ Jeremy yowled.

‘Don’t worry, sweetheart. Just wait for me here.’

She climbed back up the ladder, clambered through the trapdoor. In the sham dining room, Peter and the thing stood much as she’d left them.

‘Do you think you can both forgive me?’

The thing narrowed its eyes.

‘It’s the strain of this book,’ she went on. ‘Writing’s so difficult just now, has made me bad tempered. But I promise I’ll make it up to you. In fact, I’ve just bought Jeremy an ice cream. Peter, would you like one? The van’s waiting outside.’

The boy bit his lip.

‘Jeremy’s had one?’

‘Yes.’

He squinted down at his feet.

Louring at Jane, the thing again waved the blade.

‘Can I have a flake
and
hundreds-and-thousands?’ Peter asked.

‘Of course you can.’

He started for Jane, but the thing held fast his hand.

‘Peter, can’t you see she’s trying to trick you? There’s no ice-cream van. It’s too late for that.’

Peter turned, looked up at the thing, frowned.

Then came a faint cracked air. An ice-cream van’s carillon. Jane’s mouth dropped open. The thing flinched as if struck.

A scurry. Peter darted forwards, the thing tried to hold him back. Sinews snapped, gristle grated, the thing’s pale and mottled hand was wrested from its wrist. It howled, wept. Peter screamed, struck at the hand. It loosed its grip, fell to the floor, but, as he ran wailing to Jane, scuttled across the boards after. Peter hid behind Jane, and she stepped forward, kicked the hand. It flipped, then lay on its back, waggling its fingers, unable to right itself.

The thing, tears running down its tattered cheeks, said, ‘I just wanted for us to be a family again. Why take my sons from me?’

Jane turned to Peter.

‘Climb down the ladder. Quick. I’ll be right behind.’

Peter, then Jane, began scrambling down the ladder. Bellowing, the thing lurched at them, hacking with the knife. When they reached the bottom, Jane cast her eyes upward, saw it, haloed by the light spilling through the hatch, clambering down.

She started herding her sons towards the chinks of moonlight seeping round the edges of the door, keeping them to the wall. Then the thing missed its footing, dropped, thudded to the boards. Rot spores drifted up, gyred in the light from the trapdoor. After lying prone a moment, the thing struggled to its feet. One of its eyesockets was shattered, the shrivelled ball dangled by a purple and nacre chord, and its jawbone hung askew, its black tongue, a slug in brine, lolled. Then, staggering
towards Jane and the boys, the thing that had once been Roderick blundered into the pit. There was a splintering and a crunch, then a chittering, scrabbling, rending, shrieking.

Jane, reaching the door, threw it wide, and she and her sons flung themselves through…

…and stumbled, gasping, into a wood-panelled lift, one of the foot tunnel’s. The operator, an elderly woman, glanced up at them, smiled, nodded, pressed the button. Perhaps she thought they’d been playing at ‘it’.

When they were out in the open air again, in the waning light of late afternoon, on the south bank of the Thames, they walked to the river’s edge, looked out across it. Then Jeremy shuddered, put his hand to his mouth, pointed down at the shingle beach. A dead swan lay on the pebbles, wings spread, plumage muddied, long neck crooked. A thin smear of blood on its beak.

VII

I write this in a cramped compartment in the hold of the Ark, far from sunlight and moonlight and rain and wind…I fear I’ll never know these things again (I shudder, am wretched to think how, when I first saw, in dark red, stark against the drab steel of its hull, this hulk’s name, I thought it a sign the vessel was to be a refuge). This room was, I’m sure, an office once; it’s furnished with a desk, a chair, and a filing cabinet, empty, save some scraps of paper with meaningless squiggles on and, in the bottom drawer, a pentacle made of five paper clips, bent and twisted together. The tribeswoman and I are confined here, unable to leave, to return to the companion hatch, even if we did feel it worth, to feel the warmth of the sun on our skins again and to gulp our lungs full of fresh air, giving ourselves up to those waiting without.

With no sight of the sky, it’s hard to gauge the passing of time, but I’d hazard we’ve been down here at least a fortnight. Our supply of food has dwindled, and I fear will all soon be eaten up, and that the tribeswoman will starve, even though we’ve been sparing, and I’ve often gone without, knowing hunger can only cause me pain, not kill.

Thankfully, we’d more water, and I’ve not had to go without. That cannot kill me either, but I know, of old, the searing of a parched throat is worse than an empty stomach’s pangs. I’m glad, too, not to have to watch the tribeswoman die of thirst, it’s a bad end, worse than wasting away, belly empty.

I blame myself for our dire pass; we were safe, but I wanted to return for my typescript and typewriter, would not be deterred, was frantic to finish my tale. As it is, I doubt I’ll now be able to; I reckon my age-old adversary behind the attack that led to our being trapped, and await his bursting in, soon, to torture and make an end of me (and, and this wrings me, throw the
tribeswoman, if she’s not by then succumbed to hunger, to her former tribe, as a hunter might throw scraps to his hounds). I must press on, with all haste, if I’m to have any chance of setting down all I wish to tell.

Having just looked over the corrected proofs of my account of Jane’s tale and the conversation and events that preceded it, which the tribeswoman finished typing up earlier this morning, it occurs to me that, for you, no matter whether you barely read, merely skimmed, pored over, or struggled with those pages, only a short time has passed since the afternoon my forehead was laid open and I put the posse from the tribe to rout by killing their chieftain; for even the most painstaking or sluggardly, it can’t have been more than an hour’s reading. But it’s not so for me; it’s actually been many weeks since then; my wound has long healed, and things have happened to the tribeswoman and me to entirely overshadow that afternoon’s violence.

My work has been halting, hampered by turmoil.

Forgive this digression, but, now death looms, time, which once hung so heavy, again seems rare, and I feel compelled to hold it in my hands, examine its facets, as a jeweller, loupe screwed into one eye, would a gemstone.

But, with these musings on time, I’m squandering the handful of it remaining to me; I must return to my tale. But I felt the need to make clear that, though for you, my reader, a short time will have passed since the skirmish, really, in my reckoning, it’s been over two months. Wanting to avoid diminishing the dread atmosphere Jane’s tale builds, and to give you, my reader, a tolerably straight way, I’ve resisted breaking it up. But I have, while setting it down, been battered by squally fate.

While I was working on the melancholy epilogue to William’s tale, the tribeswoman and I were granted a lull of a week and a half or so. I was writing the large part of that time, and she, having taken on the burden of meeting most of our wants, spent her days collecting firewood, hunting, fishing, and foraging. She
was adept at these things, far more skilled than I, and seemed to pleasure in them. I did, though, take responsibility for the daily chores, such as cleaning, cooking, washing, and so forth, but these tasks were done fairly quickly, didn’t take me away from my tale for long. On a couple of occasions, though, as I wished to learn some of the tribeswoman’s wilderness lore, I did go with her on an excursion. She imparted to me a few of her skills; showed me how bulrush stems, dampened and pulped between stones, yielded long fibres that, once dry, could be stranded into strong, flexible twine for snares; taught me that mushrooms, roots, berries, and nuts could be found by watching the wildlife, that birds flocking to a particular tree told it was in fruit, that boars digging in the earth was a sign of tubers that were good to eat beneath the sod; demonstrated how to drowse bees’ nests with smoke, shake out the stupored bees, plunder the honeycomb.