After the Dance

by Alan Warner

  He didn’t see the father and son again but he saw other people. Once he passed a big heavy man with large black-rimmed spectacles who had a briefcase in his hand, which he thought rather odd. The man, who seemed to be in a hurry, seemed to know exactly where he was going. When they passed each other the man didn’t even glance at him, and didn’t smile. Perhaps he looked contemptible to him. It was exactly as if the man was going to his office and the path of the maze was an ordinary high road.

  Then again he saw a tall ghostly-looking man passing, and he turned and stared after him. The man was quite tall, not at all squat like the previous one. He looked scholarly, abstracted and grave. He seemed to drift along, inside an atmosphere of his own, and he himself knew as if by instinct that the first man would have no difficulty in solving the riddle of the maze but that the second would. He didn’t know how he knew this, but he was convinced just the same. The maze he now realised was infested with people, men, women and children, young people, old people, middle-aged people. Confident people and ghostly people. It was like a warren and he felt his bones shiver as the thought came to him. How easy it had been to think at the beginning that there was only himself: and now there were so many other people. People who looked straight ahead of them and others who looked down at the ground.

  One in particular, with the same brisk air as the black-spectacled man, he had an irresistible desire to follow. The man was grey-haired and soldierly. He, like the first one, didn’t look at him or even nod to him as he passed, and he knew that this was another one who would succeed and that he should follow him. But at the same time it came to him that this would be a failure of pride in himself, that he didn’t want to be like a dog following its master as if he were on a string. The analogy disgusted him. He must not lose control of his will, he must not surrender it to someone else. That would be nauseating and revolting.

  He noticed that he was no longer sweating and this bothered him too. He should be sweating, he should be more frightened. Then to his amazement he saw that the sun had sunk quite far in the direction of the west. He came to a dead halt almost in shock. Why was time passing so rapidly? It must be four o’clock at least and when he glanced at his watch he saw that it was actually half past four. And therefore he had missed Diana. What a ludicrous thing. This maze, inert and yet malevolent, was preventing him from doing what he ought to have done and forcing him to do other things instead. Probably he would never see Diana again. And then the thought came to him, threatening in its bareness, what if he had chosen to walk into this maze in order to avoid her? No, that was idiotic. Such an idea had never come into his head. Not for one moment.

  He looked down at his shoes and saw that they were white with dust. His trousers were stained. He felt smelly and dirty. And what was even more odd when he happened to see the backs of his hands he noticed that the hair on them was grey. That surely couldn’t be. But it was true, the backs of his hands had grey hair on them. Again he stood stock-still trying to take account of what had happened. But then he found that he couldn’t even stand still. It was as if the maze had accelerated. It was as if it could no longer permit him to think objectively and apart from himself. Whenever a thought came into his head it was immediately followed by another thought which devoured it. He had the most extraordinary vision which hit him with stunning force. It was as if the pathways in his brain duplicated the pathways of the maze. It was as if he was walking through his own brain. He couldn’t get out of the maze any more than he could get out of his own head. He couldn’t quite focus on what he sensed, but he knew that what he sensed or thought was the truth. Even as he looked he could see young people outside the café. They seemed amazingly young, much younger than he had expected. They were not the same ones as the early laughers, they were different altogether, they were young children. Even their clothes were different. Some of them were sitting eating ice-cream at a table which stood outside the café and had an awning over it. He couldn’t remember that awning at all. Nor even the table. The fisherman had disappeared from the stream. The cemetery seemed to have spawned more tombstones.

  His mind felt slow and dull and he didn’t know where to go next. It came to him that he should sit down where he was and make no more effort. It was ludicrous that he should be so stupid as not to get out of the maze which others had negotiated so easily. So he couldn’t be as intelligent as he thought he was. But it was surely the maze that was to blame, not himself. It quite simply set unfair problems, and those who had solved them had done so by instinct like animals. He remembered someone who had been cool and young and audacious and who had had a white handkerchief in his pocket like a flag. But the memory was vaguer than he had expected, and when he found the handkerchief it was only a small crumpled ball which was now in his trouser pocket. He turned and looked at the flag which marked the centre of the maze. It seemed that he would never reach it.

  He felt so sorry for himself that he began to cry a little and he couldn’t stop. Water drooled from his eyes, and he wiped it away with his dirty handkerchief. There didn’t seem to be so many people in the maze now. It was a stony wilderness. If there was one he could recognise as successful he would follow him like a dog. He would have no arrogance now. His brow puckered. There was someone he remembered as existing outside the maze, someone important, someone gracious, elegant, a magnet which he had somehow lost. She was . . . but he couldn’t remember who she was. And in any case had she been outside the maze? Had she not always been inside it, perhaps as lost as he was himself?

  Slowly and stubbornly he plodded on, no longer imagining that he would leave the maze, walking for the sake of walking. The twilight was now falling, and the café was shut. He could hear no sounds around him, no infestation of the maze, and yet strangely enough he sensed that there were beings there. If he could no longer escape from the maze then he might at least reach the centre and see what was there. Perhaps some compensating emblem, some sign, some pointer to the enigma. Perhaps even the designer of the maze sitting there in a stony chair. He set his teeth, he must not give in. He must not allow the thought to control him that he had no power over the maze, that in fact the power was all the other way. That would be the worst of all, not only for him but for everybody else.

  And then quite ironically, as if the seeing of it depended on his thought, there was the centre, barer than he had expected, no emblem, no sign, no designer.

  All that was there was a space, and a clock and a flag. The clock pointed to eleven. The sun was setting, red and near in the sky. It was a big ball that he might even clutch. The twilight was deepening. For a moment there, it was as if in the centre of the maze he had seen a tomb, but that couldn’t be true. That must have come from his brooding on the cemetery. On the other hand it might be a cradle. And yet it wasn’t that either. There was nothing there at all, nothing but the space on which the paths converged.

  He looked at the space for a long time, as if willing something to fill it. And then very slowly from the three other paths he saw three men coming. They seemed superficially to be different, but he knew that they were all the same. That is to say, there hovered about the faces of each of them a common idea, a common resemblance, though one was dressed in a grey suit, one in a gown, and one in jacket and flannels. They all stood there quite passively and waited for him to join them. They were all old. One of them to his astonishment held a child by the hand. He stood there with them. Slowly the sun disappeared over the horizon and darkness fell and he felt the pressure of the maze relaxing, as if in a dream of happiness he understood that the roads were infinite, always fresh, always new, and that the ones who stood beside him were deeper than friends, they were bone of his bone, they were flesh of his disappearing flesh.

  In the Silence

  The stooks of corn glimmered in the moonlight and boys’ voices could be heard as they played hide and seek among them. How calm the night was, how stubbly the field! Iain crouched behind one of the stooks listening, watching for deepening shado
ws, his face and hands sweaty, his knees trembling with excitement. Then quite suddenly he heard the voices fading away from him, as if the boys had tired of their game and gone home, leaving him undetected. Their voices were like bells in the distance, each answering the other and then falling silent. He was alone.

  The moonlight shimmered among the stooks so that they looked like men, or women, who had fallen asleep upright. The silence gathered around him, except that now and again he could hear the bark of a dog and the noise of the sea. He touched the stubble with his finger and felt it sharp and thorny as if it might draw blood. From where he was he could see the lights of the houses but there was no human shape to be seen anywhere. The moon made a white road across the distant sea.

  He moved quietly about the field, amazed at the silence. No whisper of wind, no rustle of creature – rat or mouse – moving about. He was a scout on advance patrol, he was a pirate among his strawy treasure chests. If he thrust his hand into one, he might however find not gold but some small nocturnal animal. Very faintly he heard the soft throaty call of an owl. He was on a battlefield among the dead.

  He began to count the stooks and made them twelve in all. It was a struggle for him for he was continually distracted by shadows and also not at all good at arithmetic, being only seven years old and more imaginative than mathematical. Twelve stooks set at a certain glimmering distance from each other. Twelve treasure chests. Twelve men of straw. He counted them again, and again he got twelve so he had been right the first time.

  A cat slanted along in front of him, a mouse in its jaws, its eyes cold and green. The mouse’s tail was dangling from its mouth like a shoelace. He put out his hand, but the cat quickly ran away from him towards its busy house, carrying its prey. Its green eyes were solid and beautiful like jewels.

  He took a handkerchief from his pocket and began to dry his face. In the darkness he couldn’t see the handkerchief clearly, it appeared as a vague ghostly shape, and though it had red spots on it he couldn’t make them out. This was the quietest he had ever heard the world before. Even the cat had made no noise when it passed him. During the daytime there was always sound, but now even the dog had stopped barking. He could hear no sound of water, not any noise at all. He put his hand out in front of him and could see it only as a faint shape, as if it were separate from the rest of his body.

  He looked up at the moon which was quite cold in the sky. He could see the dark spots on it and it seemed to move backwards into the sky as he looked. What an extraordinary calm was everywhere. It was as if he had been left in charge of the night, as if he was the only person alive, as if he must take responsibility for the whole world. No sound of footsteps could be heard from the road that lay between the wall and the houses.

  The silence lasted so long that he was afraid to move. He formed his lips as if to speak but he didn’t have the courage. It was as if the night didn’t want him to speak, were forbidding him to do so, as if it were saying to him, This is my kingdom, you are not to do anything I don’t wish you to do. He could no longer hear the noise of the sea, as if it too had been commanded to be quiet. It was like a yellow shield in the distance, flat and made of hammered gold.

  For the first time in his life he heard the beating of his own heart. Pitter patter it went, then it picked up power and became stronger, heavier. It was like a big clock in the middle of his chest. Then as quickly as it had started, it settled down again and he held his breath. The laden enchanted night, the strangeness of it. He would not have been surprised to see the stooks beginning to dance, a strawy dance, one which they were too serious to do in the daytime, when everyone was watching. He felt daring as well as frightened, that he should be the only one to stay behind, that he should be the dweller among the stooks. How brave he was and yet how unreal and ghostly he felt. It was as if the boys had left him and gone to another country, pulling the roofs over their heads and putting off the switch beside the bed.

  This was the latest he had ever been out, even counting Hallowe’en last year. But tonight he could feel there were no witches, the night was too still for that. It wasn’t frightening in that way, not with broomsticks and masked heads, animal faces. Not even Stork would be out as late as this, his two sticks pointed at the boys like guns, as he seemed to fly from the wall which ran alongside the road. No, it wasn’t that kind of fear. It was as if he didn’t . . . as if he wasn’t . . . as if the night had gone right through him, as if he wasn’t actually there, in that field, with cold knees and ghostly hands.

  He imagined himself staying out there all night and the boys appearing to him in the morning, their faces red with the sun, shouting and screaming, like Red Indians. The sun was on their faces like war paint. They came out of their boxes pushing the lids up, and suddenly there they were among the stubble with their red knees and their red hands.

  The stooks weren’t all at the same angle to the earth. As he listened in the quietness he seemed to hear them talking in strawy voices, speaking in a sort of sharp, strawy language. They were whispering to each other, deep and rough and sharp. Their language sounded very odd, not at all liquid and running, but like the voice of stones, thorns. The field was alive with their conversation. Perhaps they were discussing the scythe that had cut them down, the boys that played hide and seek among them. They were busy and hissing as if they had to speak as much as possible before the light strengthened around them.

  Then they came closer together, and the boys seemed suddenly very far away. The stooks were pressed against each other, composing a thorny spiky wall. He screamed suddenly and stopped, for at the sound the stooks had resumed their original positions. They were like pieces on a board. He began to count them again, his heart beating irregularly. Thirteen, where there had been twelve before. Where had the thirteenth come from?

  He couldn’t make out which was the alien one, and then counted them again and again. Then he saw it, the thirteenth. It was moving towards him, it had sharp teeth, it had thorny fingers. It was sighing inarticulately like an old woman, or an old man, its sigh was despairing and deep. Far beyond on the road he could sense that the boys were all gathered together, having got out of their boxes. They were sighing, everyone was sighing like the wind. Straw was peeling away from them as if on an invisible gale. And finally they were no longer there, but had returned to their boxes again and pulled the roofs over their heads.

  He didn’t notice the lights of the house go out as he walked towards the thirteenth stook, laid his head on its breast and fell asleep among the thorns.