Darkscapes

by Anne-Sylvie Salzman

  In January his parents forwarded to him a letter from the police in Inverness. The child had still not been identified. Inspector Durham (Bale did not remember him) had thought for a while he had a clue; ‘unfortunately the genetic testing had not confirmed it.’ Bale put the letter in one of his dictionaries and went off for a drink with the younger of the Afghan professors, though he did not venture to recount to him ‘the unhappy tale of Loch Baintree’. Shevar, less shy, followed the beer with three margaritas and confessed with scarlet cheeks to an unrequited passion for the lady who was chief finance officer of the University.

  And Bale: was he in love with this Inge who said she was half Same, and who had bought a lamb which she kept in the garden of a house she shared with two other lecturers? Bale and Inge acquired a habit of going walking every weekend. At first Bale mistrusted himself; then he realised that walking behind Inge over the yellow dust of the desert was one of the chief delights of his new life. They went to Canyonlands, to Arches and to the Valley of the Gods. At the end of their expeditions they often spent the night in one of the three motels of Blanding, and finished their journey in the early morning. Several miles from Blanding there was a ghost town dating back, reputedly, to the Uranium Rush. Inge and Bale visited it one night in May. They thought they saw fairy lights in a church without a roof. Inge found a passport in the name of Mary Amy Bell in the kitchen of one of the two houses that were still standing intact, and both of them felt their hearts miss a beat before they realised that the passport, being nearly new, must have been lost by a passing tourist.

  ‘But could you imagine it, in this solitude, digging into the mountainside till your bones rot?’

  Bale shook his head. They were sitting under the porch of the church; long delicate strands of cloud were passing across a half moon.

  ‘Do you think they dug just to become rich?’

  From the village, where the night wind was making the planks of the houses creak, they descended towards the bottom of a canyon through which there flowed an exiguous stream. Unseen animals rustled and chirped. Bale’s eyes did not leave the dim outline of Inge’s body.

  ‘I am saved!’ he said, and grasping Inge round the neck he kissed her hotly.

  ***

  Summer arrived, ushered in by two weeks of storm. One of these found Bale, alone for once, in the Valley of the Gods. He nearly died of fear. Lightning had split a rock at his feet. He returned tremulous to Mexican Hat, and dreamed that night of his mother and of a report he was supposed to be making, of which he had written only a third. Bale had no more fear of his dreams and their apparent coherence. From Mexican Hat he proceeded next day to Moab where Inge was awaiting him. He showed her the stone split by the lightning. Their room, number 123, gave onto wasteland over which, at dusk, swooped birds the eye could hardly follow.

  ‘Bats, not birds.’

  ‘Night-jars, not bats. With bats you always have the sense of spots before your eyes.’

  The creatures, whatever they were, flitted to and fro in the light of the lamps.

  ‘We go to Dead Horse tomorrow, and picnic?’

  ‘If you like.

  ‘On Sunday, if it’s fine, we could apply for a permit and sleep in the famous Maze. What about it?’

  ‘If it’s fine,’ said Bale, remembering the storm.

  They had dined off pizza and a bottle of wine beside the lake that lies above Moab. An old man with a beard was bathing fully clad in the half-light, escorted by two large black dogs.

  ‘They are going to take him to the bottom of the lake.’

  ‘He is a god of the locality,’ said Inge, who refused therefore to swim.

  ***

  They switched off the light, opened the window, and lay close to each other, she on her back, he on his stomach, his hand on Inge’s thigh. He fell asleep at once, and dreamed that he was living in a house, some of the rooms of which he did not know. Troubled scenes ensued. He was searching for a friend in the garden, beneath a desert mountain. A path led up it, and Bale set himself to the ascent. When he reached the pass he met a tall bony dog behind which there strode impatiently a woman with red hair. Bale watched her descend towards his friend’s house, or rather towards the night which was filling the bottom of the valley. ‘I should have followed her.’ But the woman had already entered the house.

  ***

  The next day Inge and Bale set off for Tierney’s Canyon. After nearly an hour of travel, just at dawn, they parked their car by a blank signboard and walked for some time along black ground, bristling with thorny bushes, until they reached the abrupt descent into the canyon. Bale walked behind Inge, careful and sweating. They descended into the canyon in silence by a track so cleverly constructed that one was hardly aware of the drops.

  What was in Inge’s thoughts?

  ‘The man yesterday, the man of the lake with his two huge dogs.’

  ‘At night the waters of that lake become phosphorescent.’

  ‘The people of the mountains come down there and bathe, singing mysterious incantations.’

  ‘Undoubtedly.’

  She started to laugh, shivered despite the extreme heat, yawned. The bottom of the canyon bloomed with luxuriant vegetation, and Bale, close up against Inge, wished they might never leave. But they had to continue along the path, which followed the course of an invisible stream and then plunged into a labyrinth of rocks belonging to a larger canyon. They stopped again for lunch at the mouth of Russell’s Canyon. Russell and Tierney, farmers or hunters, had left behind no traces beyond their names. Bale left Inge for her siesta and went off to explore the blind recesses of the canyon which lay off their path. The walls were close together, the air was almost cool and of a green that was like blindness after so much sun. Feeling along the walls Bale arrived at a sort of sandy alcove from which all sunlight was shut off. A large grey dog was lying there which made Bale start back; dark and menacing, it caused his heart to leap. Flies stuck clustered over its eyes, its lips, its flanks: the dog was dead. Bale touched it with the tip of his foot. Then, hands extended, he groped towards the end of the alcove. Round the corner he saw the swamp which the stream was feeding, and the red haired woman with a drowned face and her arms crossed.

  ***

  He ran. He flew up the slope, driven by a panic terror that could spring only from one thought: ‘I manufacture dead people; I manufacture the dead.’ He scraped his forehead and his knees on the rocks of the canyon. When he found Inge sleeping in the shadow of the cliff he had ceased to be himself, that new self behind which he had hidden in fear for more than a year. He woke her.

  ‘I fell,’ he said.

  ‘I see that, poor dearest.’

  ‘Let’s go back, if you don’t mind.’

  They climbed back up Tierney’s Canyon. He was in tears. She walked in front, turning round from time to time so that he could catch up with her.

  He tried every expedient to divert his thoughts from the abyss which once more had opened at his feet. He counted Inge’s steps, felt for the beating of his pulse under his jaw, and found it irregular. Imaginary insects passed before his eyes, black, born in the abyss. ‘I manufacture the dead.’ He had a sudden feeling that the skin of his stomach had become so thin that the slightest thing could make it burst. ‘God knows what I have in there.’

  ‘Let’s stop at Moab this evening, if you’d rather rest,’ said Inge when they were back at the car.

  ‘No, I’ve walked in . . .’ began Bale, without knowing what he was saying.

  She shrugged, but her mind was not set at rest.

  ‘We’ll go to Dead Horse.’

  ‘We could go tomorrow evening. It’s almost vacation now.’

  ‘I’d rather this evening,’ said the manufacturer of dead people. His lips seemed to him full of poison and stiffer than usual.

  ‘She knows nothing, she sees nothing, and perhaps . . .’

  An ambulance slipped past them on the way to Moab. They drove back onto the road between two cliffs
of red rock.

  ‘. . . perhaps she can save me.’

  Below the road a bright green curtain of trees shut off the canyon.

  But it is too late, I was wrong, it is too late to save me. I must just end by. . . .

  ***

  His heart, how was it beating? Back at the hotel Bale took a shower and, while Inge succeeded him in the bathroom, counted up his wounds, from which the blood had again started to flow. Then he sat at the window and looked at the white desert that surrounded the motel.

  They bought a bottle of wine, bread, cheese, apples, salami and a pocket knife. They left round about six thirty. The sky which had been a whitish colour, had turned blue. Two aeroplanes, followed closely by a third, made a W against it which soon flamed red in the sinking sun.

  I must go away, Bale thought. Moab and its spruce shops had distracted him from his sickness, and even made him think that the woman in the canyon was only an illusion. You never even touched her. You saw nothing but a dead dog.

  ‘Inge, what if I go away with you to Sweden in August? Inge?’

  Inge nodded her head with a broad smile.

  ‘There! That’s a good idea!’

  They arrived too late to see the sun set. They missed it by five or six minutes according to Inge, whose spirits kept rising. Being alone, they settled themselves out of the wind beside a twisted tree. Beyond it the cliff fell sheer to a bluish plateau through which smaller canyons wound like snakes. Bale thought of the dead woman and shuddered; back to him came the child too with the fawns, and futile tears rose to his eyes.

  ‘Drink, if you feel like it, my love,’ said Inge; ‘I’ll drive back.’

  He did drink; and saw the emerging stars trace little arcs in the dark peacock sky. The bottom of the cliff had vanished in the mist of night. Inge pointed out in the far distance a black stain which she alone could see. ‘Isn’t that where we were this morning?’ He hung his head without looking.

  Later in the darkness they saw a flicker of light above the peaks of the La Sal mountains, peaceful in the night. The light came from a single cloud which swelled steadily under the curve of the sky. Bale’s mind, dulled with alcohol, was almost a blank. Towards eleven they decided to go back. The wind was raising eddies of dust, and they fancied they could hear thunder.

  ‘Last night,’ Bale started to say, but Inge, her hands on the wheel, her eyes narrowed, did not hear him. He stretched his legs under the dashboard, turned his head to the side and fell asleep, resigned. There came to him this dream, final dream on the last night of the maker of death. He was riding a horse along a small grey path that wound through the countryside; the sky pressed down. Near a boundary-stone a man was seated, hat in hand, and watched him go by. Bale, bewildered, recognised his own features, his look of incredulity. He swallowed his tears and, gripping the pommel of his saddle with both hands, he directed his horse down into the depths of the valley.

  II

  Crucifixions

  UNDER THE LIGHTHOUSE

  THE bungalow stood below a road which ended in a cul de sac as it turned down towards the sea. He rented it for £100 a month; that was all it was worth, Machree, the owner, acknowledged, and not a penny more. A fence protected it from the sheep and cows, stock belonging to Machree and the other farmers on Luag. There were several hundred fatty ewes and some cows of a breed which Crane couldn’t have named; their short-haired calves would grow into stocky little beasts to be butchered as veal before the end of the year.

  Crane found two advantages in the bungalow: from its windows he could see the lake, the sky and even a band of genuine sea. And then it was the last habitation on the road to the lighthouse, which was accessible only by a muddy track closed to motor vehicles. But why not live in the house attached to the lighthouse, as a keeper without a lantern, a man of all work? The property of a traveller from Australia, it was in perfect repair, and for several months a year it harboured adventurous townspeople who left their hired cars on the side of the road between a disused telephone kiosk and the two dustbins belonging to the cottage. Crane could have obtained this enviable post through the mediation of the astute Machree, who knew everyone on the Peninsula and performed the duties of justice of the peace in this land without a master. Crane preferred the bungalow, however, that wart upon the moorland, and the monotonous journeys over to the Orebost Inn where he worked as barman. It was another of Machree’s protégés, a skinny girl called Katie, who looked after the lighthouse, without living there. She and her brother had a little farm three hundred yards from the bungalow; their sheep were marked with yellow and those of Machree with red or blue. There were no animals at the foot of the lighthouse, which was another of its drawbacks. Crane liked the proximity of animals.

  ***

  The bungalow was the second house in which Crane had lived on the Peninsula—and the last, he sometimes said to himself in a vague way. For two years he had shared a flat at Orebost with the hotel cook, an arrangement which came to an end when Jim—James McPhee—departed to Glasgow. From there Crane regularly received enthusiastic postcards: ‘Come too!’ ‘Come back, I’ve got room!’ Crane was fond of Jim and missed their burlesque embraces, but the moors, the moors had got under his skin. He had slept at the hotel for two months, without paying anything, before finding the bungalow at more than twelve miles from Orebost. On the three days a week when he worked in the evening he came home at two or three in the morning, after having swept out the room and filled the dishwashers, which he turned on just before leaving. In winter it sometimes happened that he made his way under skies more full of stars than he had ever seen; but it is true that he had done little travelling. At the summer solstice he would see the sun rise against skies that had never been dark.

  Just beyond Orebost there was a lane that led to what was said to be a Viking harbour, a long waterway connecting a sea-loch with Loch Luag. The Vikings, the story went, had dug it out in order to bring their ships into shelter from storms. On summer mornings you would see curlews and plovers there, stirred into activity by the needs of reproduction. Often Crane would wait there for the sun to rise clear of the earth, hoping sometimes, without going so far as to delude himself, that it would fall straight back again, and the world would end with this brief hiccough of a morning.

  Why this absurd taste for solitude? This world here, its machines, its houses, its people—after a moment he could not stop himself from seeing the abysses between the atoms that composed them—he travelled back too far in their short history; he unravelled the threads of time, and nothing was left in existence. At the window of the bungalow, however, what could he see when he came back to go to bed? No road, no cars, no houses. In the distance, the broken coast, almost a cliff, and the white band of the uneasy sea; nearer to him, the peat and the lake.

  ‘In all the time that is allotted to me,’ thought Crane, ‘this cliff will not budge an inch.’

  ***

  What it was that had determined his choice, Crane did not properly know. His parents had brought him up with gentle firmness. He had a sister of whom he never thought without affection. She lived in Manchester; their parents had stayed in Thurso.

  ‘As for you,’ Crane said to himself, pensively grinding his teeth, ‘here you are, at the end of the world in a house that does not stand straight.’

  He had confirmation of that at the end of spring, one day when he was on night duty. The whole peninsula used to come and drink at the bar of the Orebost hotel: farmers, fishermen, tourists. From May onwards a girl from the tourist office would play the bagpipes along the jetty, under the windows of the bar. The men working in the bar would bring her out glasses of beer and tips from the drinkers: they were delighted, absolutely enchanted, they used to assure her. She was a pretty girl who played rather well. Crane sometimes felt his heart throb for her. At ten o’clock she used to go home on a bike, and the radio resumed its sway. That evening the three last revellers—they were Dutch—went off to the sound of ‘London Calling’. Crane
locked the door behind them and they climbed to their rooms on unsteady feet. He turned down the radio, put straight the chairs, ran a broom under the counter, piled glasses, cups and saucers into the dish-washer. The dark waves lapped below the hotel, still darker now that he had extinguished the light in the bar.

  Before leaving he ate a banana and drank a small bottle of Smirnoff Ice which he had set aside from the stock in the bar. The sky was overcast, the stars shining dim through the cloud. An aeroplane, a military aircraft, Crane thought, passed slowly over the coast at a height of several hundred feet. What was it carrying? Men, munitions, tanks? Crane had no idea. As a boy he had for some months entertained dreams of particularly exciting military adventures, dreams connected, probably, with his reading at the time. Later, his parents had offered a bicycle with a mini-motor in order to deflect him from a career which in their eyes was criminal and dangerous. He was thirteen, and he wanted, he told them, to become a fighter pilot; or perhaps a submariner. Any regrets, Crane? No. Following the aircraft with his eyes, seeing it dive into a bank of cloud over the sea off Orebost, he congratulated himself on having taken the long, twisting road to the Peninsula.

  The aeroplane reappeared, winking its lights, huge, closer than he had at first estimated to the ground. An about turn in the clouds? A forced landing on the sea? Then, before his eyes it plunged into the sea, so swiftly that in the instant that followed he already doubted if he had really seen it. In the sea, not a trace. But what traces, after all, should he look for? Dismembered bodies? Yellow life jackets floating on the dark sea, on the black tide? He went down to the beach, watchful, circumspect. Some ducks were sleeping there, their heads under their wings. At the water’s edge he looked back towards the village. Nothing there had stirred.