Haunts

by Stephen Jones

  He turned but of course there was nobody else in the room. He stared at the reflection of himself in the full-length mirror fitted into the panels of the wardrobe doors. The mirror was not the best quality. Red paint edged it, indicating that at some previous time it had been part of some other furniture. The silver backing was scarred and there was foxing in the corners. A look of shabby chic, he supposed the hotel was going for, but it appeared out of place when compared to the rest of the room, which was formal, Edwardian, verging on the cold.

  “God, you’d have hated this, Ju,” he whispered.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and stared at his fingers. Julie liked his fingers. She had described them as surgeon’s fingers, as early as their first date. He could do nothing for her, though, with these delicate fingers. He could not stave off death. He couldn’t find the life in her and coax it back, make it bloom, make it overpower the hurt that took her away. He felt bad that he had escaped with little more than bruises and shock (poor thing) while she had the life slammed from her in less than a millisecond. He wished she were merely lost, like that dog in the bushes.

  He unpacked, desultory, quietly panicked by his decision to come here. He didn’t know what to do. He had been filled with plans when he took that journey up with his wife. They were celebrating their third anniversary. Glass, ha ha. But also he’d meant this trip to be a way for them both to shed the tension that had been building up in London. Julie’s homeopathic shop in Camden had been hit hard by the recession. She relied on the Christmas shopping period to tide her over the following half-year, but trade had been anything but brisk. She had had to let one of her assistants go and, although she enjoyed a steady supply of small orders via the website, and as a practicing herbalist was able to lean on the money she made from her patients, it was not enough to help them scramble out of the red. Another twelve months like this would have buried the business. Instead, they buried Julie, and all the worry over the business meant less than nothing. It was sold. It was over.

  As for Don, he was teaching guitar to a class of young boys and girls at the local primary school. They had more often than not been bought the instrument for Christmas, or their birthdays, but little thought had gone into it. The parents tended to buy expensive items, without pause to consider if the guitar would be too big or small, the neck too wide for the child to be able to shape a decent barre chord. In the main his pupils had no natural aptitude. No promise. One boy had picked up the guitar like a double bass. Another held the guitar in the correct manner but, astonishingly, had used his strumming hand to fret chords and vice versa. It was enough to make him want to restring his Gibson via their scrawny little throats.

  It had been such a long time since he had relaxed, or even tried to. He stared out of the window at the square and the people milling around it. The opera house and the park were possible places to visit, but he didn’t feel like being among other people. He shaved because it ate up some time. As he did so, he thought about guitars and people. He wanted to write a song about Julie, but he didn’t know how to begin. All the great songs written by guitarists for important people in their lives. John for Julia; Eric for Conor; Joni for Kelly; George for Patti. Mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. Lovers. There ought to be something in him for Julie, but every time he thought of music, he felt guilty. How could he even begin to consider the positioning of notes on the stave when she would never again be able to do the things she loved?

  He felt a twinge in his cheek and ran his finger over the skin there. He hadn’t nicked himself shaving but there was a lump in his cheek. Great, he thought, I survive a major road traffic accident only to fall foul of cancer. He checked in the mirror. Maybe the blade had taken the top off a pimple he hadn’t noticed. The edges of the lump were raised. It felt tender. He tried squeezing it, convinced now that it was filled with pus and he would have to clean it or run the risk of it becoming a boil, or worse. He stopped immediately. The slightest pressure told him that there was something solid beneath the skin.

  He called down to reception and asked for ointment, plasters, and painkillers. He poured vodka from the miniature in his minibar and drank it in one swallow. When the packets and pills came, brought by a young man whose expression clearly spoke of his disdain for anybody who asks for such things from room service, Don tenderly applied to his cheek some of the ointment—which contained a substance he recognized from Julie’s work in homeopathy, something that was good at drawing out foreign bodies—and placed one of the plasters over it. He stomached the pills with more vodka. He changed into a shirt and trousers, went down to the bar and had a cocktail, read the newspaper and, when the bar started to become busy, retired to his room, more than a little drunk, where he slept fitfully.

  *

  At one point during the night, he was sucked deep enough into sleep to suffer a nightmare. He dreamed he was hiding from something that was trying to sniff him out. Something that had poor eyesight, but keen olfactory organs. Something that was intensely hungry for Don.

  He had hidden in a city filled with black glass. But its surfaces made poor reflections, clinging jealously to their color as if they would reveal terrible pictures if they were allowed to clear. There was no light anywhere. Whenever Don thought he had discovered somewhere safe, cracks would appear in the glass and he would see his pursuer’s thin, long fingers, scabbed and pitted, picking through the fractures in a bid to get nearer to him, near enough to be able to swipe at Don’s clothes. This happened, finally, and he felt the fingers like needles piercing the skin of his thigh. He was swept towards the crack in the glass and unceremoniously dragged through it. He was choking on splinters. And if he looked through the thin aperture, an aperture whose edges he was unraveling messily upon, he could see the shadow of its face and the writhing puncture at its center ringed with shattered white teeth, surely too thin and weak to be able to do all this.

  *

  “Name’s Kerner. Grant Kerner. How’s your breakfast?”

  Now that Kerner had drawn attention to it, Don realized he no longer wanted his food. It was swimming in grease. The bacon was undercooked, the tomato blistered black on the outside, solid and cold in the center. And he was still mindful of the unhealthy, yawning mouth he had witnessed in his dreams. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been hungry, or enjoyed a meal. He pushed the plate away and drew his coffee nearer. Caffeine and alcohol seemed to form the limit of his appetites these days.

  Kerner was eating muesli loaded with extra whole hazelnuts and dried apricots. Don’s jaws ached just watching him.

  Kerner was obviously one of those people who liked to winkle information out of people and he perhaps saw Don as something of a challenge. He kept on at him throughout Don’s second cup of coffee and while he wrapped miniature pots of jam in a serviette and stashed them in his coat pocket.

  “I’m a photographer,” Kerner said, although Don had not asked him his occupation. “I take pictures of crippled things. Cars, buildings. Broken architecture. People, if I can get away with it. Things that don’t work the way they ought to. What do you do?”

  Don thought of his job. For so long he had been going through the motions, it was as if he was working from a script every day. In a way he was, following the slavish schedules set down by a government eager to have its target figures bolstered by achievable test results.

  He showed the children how to play basic chords, the first few essentials: A, D, and E, corrected them when they went wrong— which was often—and put on excruciating “musical” events for their parents to attend. Interaction was at a minimum. He thought the children could see right through him, though they were all under ten years of age. He wondered if he resented them, since Julie’s death. He wondered if maybe he was taking out the fact that he was fatherless, and had never intended to be—certainly not at this age—on them.

  “I’m unemployed,” Don said. He tried to think of a job so far removed from who Kerner seemed to be that he wouldn’t ask h
im any follow-up questions about it. “I used to work in Human Resources.”

  That worked. Kerner’s smile froze a little; he nodded, gazed outside. “That your car?” he asked brightly, apparently happy to find another conversational topic.

  “The Focus? Yeah.” Don closed his mouth. We used to have a Volvo. You know, safest car in the world. Until I totaled it. And my wife.

  “I drive a Lexus.”

  “Nice.”

  “Yeah,” Kerner said. “I like to drive gone midnight. Empty roads. Good up here. Some good roads. Hairpin bends and suchlike.”

  “It’s just a metal box to get me from one place to another.” Don had bought a second-hand car a week after the accident. He forced himself into the driver’s seat. He would not allow it to lock him down. Metal boxes. Wooden boxes. Snow globes.

  “Well, I must go,” Kerner said, and drained his cup. “Some good light here in the mornings. Click-click and all that. Peace out, rainbow trout.”

  Don watched Kerner move through the dining room to the door. The other man was of a similar age to Don, he reckoned, but there was a world of difference in their physiques. Kerner’s limbs were slender, he was lithe and stealthy. He panthered across the room. Don hated his own rounded posture. He was all clump and jostle. Too many hours hunched over his guitar. He resolved to do something about it—cut back on the alcohol, eradicate the fast food from his diet, try to exercise more—but even as he left the hotel lobby and walked across the square to his car, he knew this would never be the case. Some people were born to the shape they would occupy all their lives.

  I’m going to take you to the school I attended. I was a model pupil. Don’t laugh. I was a senior prefect. I never had a day’s absence. I took eight O levels and scored As for all of them.

  *

  Don sat in his car wondering how he had arrived here; the journey was a blur. It angered him that he should still be able to switch off whenever he drove, considering what had happened. He got out, stalked away from his little metal box, his mobile coffin, and loitered by the school gates. So this was his old seat of learning, Sheckford Junior. So what? It might have meant something had she been with him.

  There’s the veranda where I used to sit with Belinda Smart, under our coats, feeding each other toffees. There’s the playground where Johnny Dobson fought back against Mr. Addison. There’s the school field where I got ambushed on my birthday and I was egged to within an inch of my life. Now it was all just memories. Then and now. No context. His life was a flatline without detail. Bedtime stories, and not very good ones at that.

  He walked along the edge of the school grounds until he reached the gym. Everything the same. Everything changed. His youth was so close sometimes, he felt he could feel it beneath his fingers. He saw himself every day in any number of mirrors, and it was Don, it was him. But a photograph from even as recent as five years ago displayed to him a massive change in how he looked. His skin greyer now, his eyebrows lighter, his eyes more sunken. But he had not seen it happen. He had been tricked.

  He was a prisoner to the calendar, he realized. He thought in little boxes that were to be ticked off and filled with things to do. Almost every day he thought back to what he had been doing ten years ago, twenty years ago, further. He lived in the past, by his diary. He was a history man, his head full of dead leaves. It was a form of reassurance, he knew. There were too many roads into the future and he didn’t like not having a map for it.

  Movement. He turned and gazed out over the school fields (pelting Debbie Epstein with snow, winning the high jump and just missing out on the 800 meters title, kissing Penny Greig for the first time near the pavilion) and saw a couple gesticulating wildly at each other as they raced across the grass towards the main road. She was having to run to keep up with him, her red scarf flapping at her throat like a terrible wound. She spotted Don and pointed at him. The man’s head snapped up. Little hair. It was like a pink oval, a beige egg sitting on an elaborate eggcup. They arrowed towards him. The man was rolling his sleeves back as if setting himself for a scrap.

  “Martin,” she was calling. Don shook his head, but then realized she wasn’t attempting to address him.

  “Have you seen Martin?” Her voice was brittle. She was at the edge of tears.

  “My boy,” the man explained, and he was full of accusation. “Our boy. He was playing in our garden on Kent Lane, just down there at the foot of the fields. Keepy-uppy. In our garden.”

  “I was washing dishes,” said the woman. “I could see him. And then I went to empty the washing machine and when I came back he was gone and the back gate was swinging open.”

  “Maybe he kicked his ball over the wall,” Don said.

  “Martin is six,” the man said, as if that was explanation enough.

  “He can’t reach the latch,” the woman said.

  “I haven’t seen anyone,” Don said. “I just got here.”

  The man looked him over as if Don might somehow be concealing Martin on his person. “The police,” he said at last. “We have to bring the police into this.”

  “Oh, God,” the woman said. And then she screamed Martin’s name.

  *

  Don drove back to the hotel and forced himself to face up to what was going on. His coming here was nothing to do with a pilgrimage. It wasn’t a personal tribute. It was running away. All of those responsibilities back home; they’d still be there when he returned. Debts and deadlines and demands. Julie was the soft barrier that prevented him injuring himself against all that bureaucracy. She organized, she delegated, she controlled. It might have lapped around their ankles occasionally, but the water never rose around their throats, as it seemed to be doing these days.

  Now Julie was gone, every day was like crashing his car. There were impacts everywhere. He missed her so desperately it was as if he could still feel the mass of her in his hands. Her smell was in every room she’d inhabited. There were shadows and shades of her in everything he owned. When the sun shone she was splintered within it; when it rained, each drop carried a fragment of her reflection.

  He had tried to find that snow globe of hers, after the crash. She took it everywhere with her. It had been a gift from her childhood. A lucky token. He had wandered around in the ruins for an age until the ambulances arrived, his face dripping into the snow around the wreckage, poking with his toe amidst the mangled aluminum, the torn fabric seat covers, the shreds of her. It was gone.

  This is madness, he thought now, but there was no way he could stop being dragged under. To tackle that might mean he had to force her out of his life altogether and he was not ready for it.

  The stress of the afternoon was in him like hot pins. The way that poor woman had screamed for her son. It was animalistic. He could understand her need. He had wanted to howl like that, for Julie. It built up inside you. You forgot who you were.

  He tried to make the room comfortable enough so that Julie might come to him in some way. He needed to be warm and clean and relaxed. He bathed and drank a glass of whisky. He put her favorite music station on the radio. He sat by the window and closed his eyes. He determined what each sound was and relegated it to the back of his mind. There was space here for her.

  He felt himself slide towards sleep. But she was not there to greet him. She had not been a part of this intimate darkness since before her death. It was as if, in dying, she had ceased to exist for him during the moments when he ought to be most receptive to her. Gazing at photographs of her was like assessing a stranger. She mugged for the camera. She was never her natural self. He felt panic at the thought that, day by day, this memory of the truth was gradually leaving him. It scared him more than the nightmares that were so ready to enter that vacuum he’d created just for her.

  That evening, after another challenging meal in the hotel restaurant, Don sat in the bar nursing a glass of Scotch. He’d decided on an early night and a quick escape back to London in the morning. He’d look into therapy. He’d consider a holiday a
way from the UK. He needed to map out his career. Find a new hobby, some new friends. Do the unthinkable. Find someone else. Why not just dig her up and spit into what’s left of her face?

  “Hello again!”

  “You bastard.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Sorry… Grant, isn’t it? I’m very sorry. I was talking to myself. I was thinking about someone.”

  Kerner was observing him with a mixture of skepticism and distaste.

  “Really,” Don pressed. “I’m sorry. That was aimed at me, actually.”

  The doubt in Kerner dissolved. Maybe he could see something in Don’s own features, his posture. Defeat, quite possibly.

  “Then I apologize for interrupting you.”

  “I’m glad you did. There’s only so much abuse I can put up with.”

  Kerner laughed; the tension lessened. He assessed Don as if for the first time. There was a sense of him weighing up what to do next. Don could feel an invitation growing within; he was all too ready to refuse it. But he surprised himself by accepting, when Kerner asked if he would like to accompany him on a visit to Kayte’s Cavern.

  *

  They walked. It was not far. There was a place to buy tickets and cheap souvenirs. A café. All of it closed now. A little display, showing the history of the cave and what had been found there. Roman coins and bones and bronze brooches. Over time, it had been a burial ground, a shelter, and the hideaway for a robber, the eponymous Nathaniel Kayte, who used the darkness and the depth and the churning noise of the water sluicing through it to his advantage when hiding from his pursuers.

  Later it was a tourist trap. People traveled great distances to see the flowstone curtains, the stalactites and stalagmites, the great chambers of pale crystal, glowing in the dark as if lit from within. After that it became a big draw for the Victorians, who were led by candlelight deep into the cavern and then, the flames blown out by their canny guides, asked for more money if they wished to be taken back to safety.

  “Isn’t it a bit late for this?” Don asked again. “I thought you meant we’d go in the morning.”