Natural History

by Neil Cross

  The bear was elderly, toothless, shabby as a cheap sofa. Name of Koukla. They’d filmed her being poked and prodded and jeered at, forced to perform a grotesque little parody of a dance.

  ‘The bears live a nomadic existence,’ Jane whispers to camera, ‘being dragged from village to village by their owners. Usually, they travel in horse-drawn carts, perched on tiny wooden platforms. It’s like being transported back to the Middle Ages. When Koukla isn’t performing, she’s chained up through a ring in her nose. She has no shelter from the sun or the rain, no chance of exercise and not enough food and water. It’s a miserable experience for such a beautiful creature.’

  Later, they filmed a meeting with the bear’s owner. Although Richard had brought along an interpreter, on camera he had Jane speak to the owner in English. His thick-tongued hesitancy, his toothlessness, his grey stubble; all these things accentuated his villainy.

  Jane requests that Koukla be released into her custody. The owner refuses; the bear is his livelihood.

  The next scene—before the break—shows Richard and Jane, despondent, staring wordlessly into the middle distance as the Mediterranean sun sets behind them.

  And then, after the commercials, there is a hustle of activity; phone calls to and from Britain; the arrival of an animal charity’s Land-Rover; another meeting arranged with the bear’s owner, a fraught financial negotiation.

  And finally Koukla is led, stumbling like a drunk, to freedom. The charity vet shoots her in the loose, sagging arse with a tranquillizer. She is removed to a straw-lined transport carrier, an aluminium cage secured to the inside of a ventilated truck. And she is taken to a bear sanctuary.

  All this is followed by an epilogue. Two months later, Jane stands once again in the bright sunshine, watching as Koukla, her coat glossy, her frame heavier, frolics at the edge of the water, runs with other bears.

  Close-up on Jane, hair teased from her pony tail by the warm breeze. A final shot of Koukla, in slow motion. Fade to credits.

  Two weeks ago, Laurent Kabila’s forces captured Kisangani. A stormfront was moving towards her, this woman on the VHS, to whom Patrick was married, but who seemed farther away than it was possible for a human being to be.

  He watched the video twice. By then, the bottle was nearly empty and he was good and drunk.

  When he stood, he swayed. He was unsteady on his feet. In his anger and club-footed drunkenness, he was swaying exactly like this toothless old dancing bear his wife had long ago rescued. And that made him snort, to be lurching like a toothless old bear with an imaginary ring, punched right through his nose.

  When Jo had gone home, Nately sat in the empty classroom, irradiated by the blue light, accessing his chatrooms:

  This planet is about to be recycled, refurbished, started over

  Our current best estimate for the diameter of Hale-Bopp’s nucleus is 40 kilometers (= 25 miles)

  The SLO (Saturn-Like Object) is many times larger than Earth. And the way it shadows the comet, it’s obviously under intelligent control…

  He stayed late into the dark of the morning, typing, reading, shifting the mouse. As sleep skulked up behind him, he squinted closer at the monitor. His lower back and buttocks ached. He drank strong, instant coffee that scalded the surface from his tongue.

  Nately was having trouble with sleep again. The same trouble he’d had since he was child.

  It wasn’t insomnia.

  One night, at the age of eleven, John Nately awoke in the smallest bedroom of this cottage. His skin was buzzing like a wasp and his teeth were chattering like a wind-up monkey. And he couldn’t move. He lay there, cemented to the bed—

  —as the door opened.

  He knew he’d closed it, because he always did. He often stayed up late, reading, and the light kept his grandparents awake. They were light sleepers.

  But the bedroom door snicked and swung slowly open. And into the room stepped the Squasher.

  John’s mouth was clamped shut, juddering like a drill. He could do nothing but look at the ceiling. The Squasher came close. He heard the slow pad of its footsteps. It radiated evil.

  The Squasher sprang like a cat onto Nately’s chest. It was very heavy. John croaked as the breath was forced from him. Talons closed round his slender throat. Began to squeeze.

  He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t even scream. He passed out.

  And woke in the bleached morning. He knew it hadn’t been a dream—because John Nately was a clever kid, who knew the difference between dreams and reality. But clever kids also knew that Squashers didn’t exist. So John told nobody; not his teachers, nor his grandparents—not even his diary.

  But the Squasher came back. Not once, but many times.

  Only when John turned nineteen did the Squasher at last reveal itself. He lay in bed, fearfully paralysed, as a group of extraterrestrials clustered round his bed. They were naked. Large heads on small grey bodies.

  The leader tilted its head like a puppy—and as it approached, it narrowed its black almond eyes. In its hand, it held a spindly, metallic instrument.

  At twenty-one, Nately sought psychiatric help. The psychiatrist didn’t laugh, or commit Nately to an institution. Instead, he gave a name to these events, and that was the first relief—if it had a name, it existed. Nately had spent a decade both fearing he was insane, and fearing he might not be.

  The name he was given was this: sleep paralysis with hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations, and it wasn’t even uncommon. If the psychiatrist was right, it was experienced at least once by half the population of the planet.

  But—because it wasn’t a commonly known phenomenon, the people who endured these terrible hallucinations tended, just like Nately, to classify them as supernatural. And, on the whole, people who believed they’d been visited by ghosts, demons or angels, often did what Nately had also done, and kept quiet.

  In fact, paralysis while asleep was normal. The human body secreted hormones that prevented movement—it was a protection against acting out your dreams. Sometimes in old men, this paralysis didn’t occur. You might find them fighting off tigers, or playing soccer, or walking an imaginary landscape, or waltzing with some long-dead sweetheart.

  John Nately sometimes woke when this hormone was still functioning, or the hormone began to function before he had quite gone to sleep. So he lay, genuinely paralysed, and dreaming, but in some strange way awake. The Squasher, the alien, was a manifestation, a broadcast from the animal side of Nately’s brain; the Squasher was a manifestation of all his primitive fears.

  The things John Nately experienced were real. But the things he saw weren’t. They were twentieth-century demons.

  Beyond naming it, not much could be done; but naming it was powerful enough. And Nately began to research his condition. He learned that sleep paralysis was common to all cultures, at all times. Historically, the attacks were given to monsters like Lilith, the Sumerian Hag-demon who attacked men while they slept, squeezing the life-breath from them.

  In Ancient Greece and Rome, the terrible presence was identified with demons of the forest and woodland. One of them was Pan, from whose name was derived the word panic—the emotion begotten of Nately’s night-time visitations.

  In St Lucia, the Squasher was the malevolent spirit of a dead baby. Similar child spirits, unbaptized, haunted the Irish. In Thailand, the experience was known as Phi um—being ghost covered. In Japan it was kanashibari: to tie with an iron rope. Those thus bound could commune with the dead. In Germany, the perpetrator was an Alp, a word related to elf. And in England, it was known as the Night-hag, or Night-mare.

  Only recently had Europeans and North Americans—who no longer much believed in faeyries and night-walking devils—been obliged to find a new interpretation for this experience. It was only when the forest had been emptied of its evil spirits that people such as John Nately began
to receive in their bedrooms visitors from outer space.

  The Greys clambered in his room like baby mice, while he lay paralysed before them. They took him elsewhere, he could never remember quite where. They took semen, and faeces, and samples of skin.

  He knew these were episodes of hypnagogic hallucination. He had a name for it! He knew its history. He knew these were not real extraterrestrials, any more than they were a manifestation of Lilith, Adam’s first, demonic consort—whom God formed from filth and sediment, instead of dust; and who then spawned all the demons which infested the skies.

  But he also knew he was awake when the aliens came.

  Conceivably, he sometimes thought, the aliens were real, and had always been here. Perhaps ancient humans, other cultures, simply observed these extraterrestrials through the distorting goggles of culture—and made gods of them, and fairies, and devils.

  Perhaps sleep paralysis really did give a name to something. But not to what it thought.

  It was difficult, sometimes, not to think these things. And although Nately knew the comet had no companion, there had been a night, long ago, when he’d seen those lights in the sky behaving like lights shouldn’t be able to.

  And it wasn’t a cloud formation, and it wasn’t ball lightning, and it wasn’t a military aircraft. And he stood and watched it—alone, perfectly sober and perfectly awake and perfectly sane.

  And still he visited those chat-rooms, full of intelligent, articulate and sometimes lonely people who seemed perfectly convinced that the comet—a lump of ice the size of a mountain, approaching the sun—somehow meant something.

  And sometimes, he got a feeling. And he had the feeling now.

  Scrolling through those pages. Through the cables and the underground, through the wires, he felt connected to something.

  The atmosphere around him shimmered with aliens and demons: half-hidden, half-real. And at the bottom of his garden­, an orchard shushed in the night wind, and John Nately was very afraid.

  15

  The day of the comet’s perihelion fell on Tuesday, 1 April.

  John Nately was still downed by migraine, so Jo went to work with Patrick. They ate lunch together, a sandwich by the capuchins: Jo too had become eager to witness them capture a passing duck.

  So they sprawled on the bench by the empty bin, and the capuchins—habituated by now to their daily visits—ignored them and got on with the foraging and squabbling and avoidance of the murky water of their moat.

  And they also ignored the maudlin, honking ducks that now and again sailed past, heads held high, oblivious.

  Charlie woke, and wanted to go home.

  He looked at his little room, the hotel TV with its pay-per-view movies and porn and sport: the minibar fridge, the miniature kettle. And he thought of the months he’d spent here. And now he was done. There was no sense of relief, but there was a good feeling of something ending. He took a shower and felt it wash away.

  And he whistled as he cleaned the rooms and pressed the sheets, and wheeled the laundry baskets past the reps queuing to check out, their cheap baggage at their feet. It all felt like nothing to him: and so did the narrow-eyed, gossiping staff who’d been trapped here with him: the cleaning girls, Mad Mervin in the laundry, the tattooed casuals in the kitchen who had once so frightened him.

  He thought of hitchhiking from Bath, and saw how it had been a preparation for this: for Chris McNeil, for the Anchorage. Nothing was wasted.

  He saw Clive that afternoon and asked for some time off. Clive wasn’t pleased; he saw the glint of freedom in Charlie’s jackdaw eye. But there was nothing Clive could do; he could see that Charlie had escaped.

  At lunchtime, Charlie went outside and stood on the edge of the crescent moon of beach, whipped into eddies and whirlwinds by the Fool’s Day breeze, and he saw it was a patch of desert, and he closed his eyes and stepped onto it. His feet sank a little into the soft sand and he was scoured clean; the sand hurt his cheeks and his ears.

  He walked down to the edge of the sea. It was small and polluted­—but further out, it was deep and green and clean, teeming­ with life.

  There wasn’t much to pack, but he packed it all, because he was never coming back.

  He passed through the main door of the Anchorage, popping out like a bubble from a mouth. He walked round the corner, to where his rusty old VW estate was parked. It was older than him, and he got in and settled into the cracked leather seat. The gear-stick fitted perfectly into the cup of his palm.

  Behind him, the Anchorage Hotel shimmied and disappeared­—it would reappear, he knew, when its next inmate arrived.

  He drove home and the route had no memory, or meaning, or significance. It was just a road.

  Patrick was making dinner when the key scratched in the lock. His heart thumped, and he saw Charlie in the doorway, setting down his bag.

  He said, ‘Mate!’ and walked up to his son and hugged him. Charlie hugged him back.

  Patrick ruffled his hair. ‘What’s this? You want your laundry done?’

  ‘It was a hotel, Dad. They did my laundry.’

  ‘Duh.’ He slapped Charlie’s arse, resoundingly. ‘Shall I put the kettle on?’

  Charlie nodded, dog tired.

  ‘Go upstairs,’ said Patrick. ‘Dump your bag. Then come down and tell me how you’ve been. We thought you’d dropped off the face of the earth.’

  On the landing, Charlie bumped into Jo.

  She said, ‘Hello. Are you okay?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m fine. I’m excellent.’

  She hugged him. Her coarse hair tickled his cheek. ‘Welcome back.’

  ‘I hope you didn’t go nosing round my room.’

  ‘What would I want in your smelly room?’

  He grinned, and moved on. Good to be back.

  And later, they sat, the three of them, round the table. Charlie told them stories of the Anchorage Hotel, or as many as he was able. But Jo wasn’t listening. She kept glancing at the kitchen window, the way lovers glance across crowded bars.

  Charlie nodded at her and raised his eyebrows.

  Patrick told him, ‘It’s this bloody comet. It’s closest to the earth today, or something.’

  ‘To the sun,’ said Jo. ‘It’s the perihelion. It’s closest to the sun.’

  ‘Well, excuse me.’ Patrick waggled his eyebrows at Charlie. See?

  Jo scowled, pissed off—as the phone rang. Patrick answered. It was Nately.

  ‘John! How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine. Much better.’

  ‘That’s good. That’s good.’

  ‘So.’

  Patrick was aware of Jo, at the table, pricking her ears up like a rabbit.

  ‘Do you think Jo should come over?’

  ‘Ah, I don’t know, John. It’s getting late. She’s got the binoculars.’

  The rabbit ears wilted, and Patrick felt bad. He was joking. He had no intention of standing in the field all night, guarding Jo against imaginary predators—not when he could be drinking a beer with his boy, at the warm fireside.

  He rested the phone on his shoulder. Jo was pleading with silent, puppyish intensity.

  He put the phone back to his ear. Asked: ‘What time’s good?’

  ‘Anytime. Soon as. Tell her to dress warm.’ Jo was already halfway up the stairs.

  In the roaring Land-Rover, chasing the headlights, they sat in silence. Patrick had on his old parka, Jo her stripy beanie cap.

  Jo said, ‘He’s okay. Mr Nately.’

  Patrick shifted gears. Heavy as a bus.

  ‘I know he’s okay. If I didn’t think he was okay, I wouldn’t be taking you.’

  ‘I know he’s strange.’

  Patrick glanced at her as he drove. Her face was angelic with knowingness and love.

  Alone, Charlie wandered room to r
oom, reckoning the source of the house’s unfamiliarity. It felt lifeless, unanimated—the opposite of haunted.

  He examined photographs of his mother and father. And of him and his sister, much younger, squinting under African skies. He remembered everything.

  And he went downstairs and turned on the TV. He settled into the sofa. He felt safe and warm.

  There was a knock at the door.

  Nately was waiting at the window. He opened the door before they were halfway down the path, and the yellow light cast him into silhouette.

  Patrick stamped his feet. It was a cold, clear night; the sky vast above them, making them small.

  He said, ‘What time shall I pick her up?’

  ‘Hey, come on. Stay for a look.’

  ‘I’ve seen the comet, John. Several times.’

  Jo shook his wrist. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Nately.

  Patrick sagged, powerless. He wanted a beer with Charlie. But this night was important to Jo—and Nately, too. Importuning Patrick to stay had been an act of considered, if peculiar, hospitality.

  So he surrendered—‘Okay. Five minutes’—and followed them inside.

  Charlie rolled his eyes, hit mute. He put down the remote control.

  ‘Coming!’

  The hallway was shockingly cold, cold enough to make him gasp a little; the flagstones made his feet numb. He opened the door.

  It was Chris McNeil.

  Patrick followed them to the little observatory. Nately had killed all the lights, and Patrick was troubled by the quality of the darkness. He looked up, at the slow-spinning starscape—and was able to locate the comet with his naked eye; a bright star drawing a diaphanous tail behind it. It made him think of Jane, and he was overcome by a sudden, terrible yearning; a kind of homesickness.

  Jo pulled down the noisy rolling shutter, exposing the fat telescope.

  Patrick and Nately exchanged a glance. There was something in Nately’s face.

  Jo said, ‘Do you want to go first?’

  ‘Go on, then.’

  Patrick squeezed himself into the shed, settled himself into the chair, and squinted into the eyepiece.