by Guy Burt
It takes him a long time to see me, though I get the feeling that this is not because I’m hidden, but because his eyes are not working properly. Then he focuses, picking me out of the other shapes around him.
He starts to say something, and then stops; clears his throat; shifts slightly. He uses one hand to prop himself up against the folded blanket and pieces of timber that we have used to make him a crude pillow.
He says, ‘Alex?’
His voice is still low and different – rusty-sounding – but not the voice of a demon or a monster from a comic book. In Jamie’s comics the monsters’ words are sometimes written in a different way – dripping with slime, or shaky. In my head I imagine how they would sound, and Jamie and I try them out on each other. But the hermit’s voice is not like that. It is the same voice: roughened and dry-sounding and weak, but the same. I find, to my surprise, that I am suddenly not afraid any more.
‘Alex?’ he says again. ‘Is that you?’
‘Yes,’ I say, and I get down from the step and come out into the chapel towards him. ‘Are you OK? Are you better now?’
He doesn’t seem to be listening properly. He says, ‘Water. Please.’
‘Oh,’ I say, understanding. The water bottle is where Jamie has shown me; I pick it up and go over to the hermit. It isn’t as difficult getting close to him as I have thought it will be. ‘Here,’ I say.
I have to support the bottle as he drinks, because although he brings his hand up to it, he doesn’t seem able to grip the plastic right. He takes a few swallows of the water and some of it spills down his face and onto his shirt. His eyes close briefly and I take the bottle away.
‘That’s good,’ he says.
‘How’s your leg?’ I ask.
His face twists a little. ‘Hurts,’ he says briefly.
Tentatively, I touch my hand to his arm. ‘You’re really hot,’ I say.
He nods slightly. ‘Yes. I know. I feel it.’ Speaking seems to exhaust him; he closes his eyes again for a long minute. When he opens them again, he says something I don’t understand: the sounds are strange, unfamiliar, and though I struggle, I can’t make sense of them.
‘What?’ I say.
He blinks, and his eyes pull round to me with difficulty. ‘What is this place?’ he says.
‘It’s the chapel,’ I say. ‘You remember. You came here after you hurt your leg.’
He frowns. His breath comes in short, tight gasps. He says, ‘You mustn’t tell anyone.’
‘We won’t,’ I say.
‘You haven’t told anyone, have you?’
‘No. I promise. Anna said not to.’
He nods at this, as if satisfied, and his eyes start to close. Then all at once they are wide open and he has gripped my wrist with his hand. His grip is fiercely strong, and I struggle and fall to one side, twisting my arm. He doesn’t let go. ‘You haven’t told anyone?’ he says.
‘No! Stop it – you’re hurting.’
Abruptly his grip slackens and I wrench my arm free, stumbling backwards against the big locked double-doors of the chapel. The sound of me slamming into them booms around the chapel and I lose my footing, falling to the floor. My wrist aches where he has held me.
I scramble to my feet and run wildly across the room, echoes of my footsteps clattering off the stone walls. Out in the main body of the building, I turn, waiting, but everything at the far end is silent. I wait a while longer, and then I creep back, watching all the time in case the hermit is only pretending, and actually hiding there ready to grab me again. But when he comes into view round the end of the pews, I can see that he has his eyes shut once more, and that his breathing has subsided into a faint murmur. The hand that held me is lying out to one side of his body, and he has slumped a little sideways against his makeshift pillow. I stand watching him for a long time, ready to bolt, but he doesn’t move. My heart slows from its pounding in my chest.
In the end I sit down in my place on the stair, as before. The bottle of water has been kicked over in my struggle with the hermit, and I can see the trailing line of it from the bottle’s mouth across the dusty floor to the doors, and out under them. If the hermit wakes and wants more water, there won’t be any; but it is his own fault, not mine. We will have to bring some more later.
I sit, with the candle at my elbow and the comics in a low stack by my foot, watching the hermit, waiting for the hour to go by.
The night breezes sift gently through the open apertures of the belltower. I sight precisely down the valley with the torch. It’s already switched to green; I have done this long since. I aim at Jamie’s house, though it is difficult to make it out accurately in the darkness. The torch has a clever switch, which you push back and forth to turn it on and off but can also press in, to flash the torch; so it is this that I do. One. Two. Three. I wait a second, and then repeat the signal. One. Two. Three.
It is two minutes past the hour when I see it: Jamie’s room light blinks on and off three times in response. I grin to myself, knowing that he’s seen me, that he’s been there by his window watching for me. Happily, I put the torch down on the floor, and start to drag the case back to from where I took it.
As I am doing this, though, it starts to come to me that there is now another hour before I can contact Jamie; another hour to be spent in the chapel with the hermit. I slow in my dragging of the case until I have stopped completely, halfway across the raised wooden platform of the tower. I don’t want to go back downstairs just yet.
Above me, the pigeons shuffle and warble quietly in their sleep. I sit myself down on the floor and stare at the case.
The clasps are scuffed and one of them is shattered from where Anna hit them with the rock, but the other, we have found, works just well enough to hold the case closed, though it is no longer locked properly. You can get it open very easily, by prying at it with a thumbnail. I reach out and stroke the surface of the case, which to me still looks like an instrument case, like Jamie’s.
Almost without deciding to, with my brain still thinking vaguely about instrument cases and not wanting to go back downstairs, I fiddle the catch open and lift up the lid of the case.
The gun is inside, just as we left it. It is big – a rifle, not a handgun – but it is broken into several pieces. Just as when I first saw it, it takes me a moment to assemble the thing in my mind, to make a whole shape out of it, though the clues that it is a gun – the trigger and handle part, and the barrel part – are all there. It’s just that they are spaced apart from each other in an unfamiliar way, dislocated. And there are some parts that I am hard put to find a name for, and whose purpose I can only guess at.
Each of the parts of the gun has its own home in the grey rubber foam that lines the case; the compartments have been cut away neatly and each piece fits snugly in its gap. I reach out, hesitate, and then touch the wood of the handle. It is cool and smooth, the surfaces sculpted and planed with extreme precision. I know, looking at it, that in some ways it is a very beautiful thing; a piece of craftsmanship like a carving or an antique or something.
Behind the handle and trigger part is a big, solid-looking block of curved and smoothed wood. The rifles I know best come from television, and the Saturday cowboy films that Jamie and I sometimes watch together. This wooden part is the part, then, that goes against your shoulder when you lift the rifle to shoot. But it looks much bigger, and more solid, than the ones on the TV, and the back part of it seems to have been carved or moulded to fit smoothly against the curve of a man’s shoulder. There is a small panel here with writing on it. I run my fingers over it gently, and then bend close and click the green light of the torch onto it for a moment to read the words.
MAUSER-WERKE OBERNDORF GmbH.
It means nothing to me. There is a number underneath the words, too. I click the torch off and set it down beside me.
The moon is quite low in the sky, and there is enough light through the four windows of the tower for me to see the rest of the pieces in the case
clearly enough. There is a longish wooden part with a stubby barrel protruding from its end. There is another, separate barrel, too, set above it in the case, and for a long time I can’t understand how these two barrels work together. Then I see the clean glint of light on one end of the second barrel, and touching it can feel the screw-thread there. So – this second barrel screws into the first somehow, to make it longer.
The guns on TV always have a little metal triangle at the end of the barrel, which the cowboy lines up with his target when shooting. But this gun doesn’t have anything like that; just a smooth bulge at the end of the metal tube, punched through with regular slots on all sides. Strange.
There are a couple of other things in the case. In one corner there are a series of six small troughs. Three of them are empty, but the other three contain what I quickly realize are bullets: slender cylinders of two different coloured metals, one gold, one greyish-silver. Each is as long as a cigarette. I wonder briefly where the three that went in the other troughs have gone. I think also of the gunfights on TV, and think it rather brave and perhaps foolish of the hermit to carry only six bullets. In all the fights I’ve seen, you need a lot more than that.
Right at the top of the case, near the hinge, is a thick cylinder as long as my forearm and flaring out slightly at each end. It is the only part of the gun I can’t readily identify, now that I’ve worked out how the barrel goes. It is dark metal, with a dull finish. I sit looking at it for a long time before touching it; and then, with great care and trepidation, I put my fingers under it and ease it gently from its bed.
It is much heavier than I would have thought. The solidity of it surprises me, but also feels satisfying, pleasant in my hands. It is cool to the touch, like all the parts of the gun I’ve actually felt. I lift it out from the case. It doesn’t look like any part of the gun that might go off suddenly; I have been very careful not to touch the trigger or the bullets. In fact, it hardly looks like part of a gun at all. It reminds me of something, though; and as I turn it in my hands and catch the gleam of light on curved glass at its end, I suddenly realize what it is. It is a telescope, like Jamie’s, only smaller and much heavier.
I examine the little telescope until I am satisfied that this is all it is; and then a great thought comes to me. With the hermit’s telescope, and Jamie’s, perhaps we can actually see each other along the whole length of the valley: perhaps, rather than click lights on and off, we can point our telescopes at each other and wave and hold up messages written on paper and read them, even over that distance. Eager to see whether my telescope is good enough to reach down the valley – though it is heavy, it is also small, and might not be as powerful as Jamie’s – 1 go over to the window.
I prop my elbows on the ledge and set the telescope to my eye.
What I see makes me start, and the device almost slips from my hands. I clutch it quickly, and set it down on the ledge rather too fast. It clinks against the stone, but nothing breaks.
The few dim, distant lights of the town have sprung close to me, sharp and crisp in the centre of the telescope’s eye. For the second or so I’ve held it, my hands must have wavered because the view shudders and twitches and drifts this way and that; but it isn’t this which has made my heart race all of a sudden. It is the one thing in the view which hasn’t trembled or shaken at all, but remained starkly constant. Three neat black lines: one from each side, one from the bottom, all nearly meeting in the centre, their ends defining a tiny open space where the lines almost touch, but don’t.
I have never seen this on TV or in the comics – not quite this – but I know at once what it is. The comics even give me the words: telescopic sight. It’s subtly different from comics and the TV in the way that I know real life often is subtly different. Comics and TV show things more clearly, in brighter colours. In a comic this would have cross-hairs and circles and read-outs, not just three stark, mundane lines. It would look much more exciting, but, I now know, much less real. In reality you wouldn’t want all those things getting in the way of what you’re looking at.
Not looking at. Aiming at. That little gap is meant to be filled by – by something.
It is much better this way. I can see that.
There are only three bullets in the case, but there is room for six. What does that mean? Has the hermit killed three people?
Maybe the bullets are still in the gun. Maybe the hermit hasn’t killed anyone.
I think of the bullets, of the shape of them. As long as a cigarette, but not very wide. Less wide than my little finger. I have never seen a bullet before. They are slender, pointed, purposeful.
If a bullet – a real bullet – went through you, what kind of hole would it make?
It feels like information stacked up in my head over the past few days is starting to fall, one piece against the next, starting a tumble of bits and pieces which, once they have all fallen and the crashing has stopped and the dust has settled again, now form a pattern I can see and understand.
I whisper to myself, experimentally, ‘The hermit shot someone.’ I glance across to the gun. The missing bullets; the telescopic sights; the gun hidden in the car. It sounds right, then.
I try another. ‘Someone shot the hermit. Maybe they shot him back.’ The hermit’s leg hasn’t been cut in the car crash. Anna is sure of that, and we have never found the sharp place where he might have cut it. And it doesn’t look like a cut. It looks like something else. I’ve known that all along, but I’ve never known what else. Now I do. The hole a bullet would make.
And the blood in the car must have come from the hermit’s leg while he was driving. Driving away from somewhere; away from where he shot someone and someone shot him.
I say, ‘A long way away. It’s just something a long way away, that’s all.’ And, a moment later, ‘Thank God nothing like that ever happens here.’
Saying the words out loud is a good test. None of them sound wrong in my ears. I know I have understood it all at last. I start to wonder how much of this Jamie knows already, and Anna.
All these times when I think that I finally understand; and each time, the real understanding is still waiting, waiting to come to me too late.
The hermit says something I can’t understand. Mi ez? Hol vagyok?
What is this place? Where am I?
Lying in the darkness of the living room, the candles blown out and the faint rustlings of the garden bushes in the air the only sound, the same fear comes back to me: that even this, where I have at least the illusion of control and command of myself, might still be just a dream. I am waiting now to fall asleep, but any moment I may actually be waking up – and waking up to a time and a reality that, just for the moment, elude me. I might be dying; it might all be too late once again.
From the edges of the darkness I imagine I can hear another voice. The words, again, make no sense; are meaningless in my ears.
Tudni akarom. Könyörgök – mondj el mindent.
But then the incomprehension softens, blurs away, and I understand them.
I want to know. Tell me everything – please.
Strange words in a deserted chapel where the echoes come faintly from the stone. When I first hear them, they won’t fit properly in my ears; but now they do. I know them too well now.
But the voice this time is not the hermit. It is Anna.
Chapter Thirteen
Jamie and I have to get to know each other again. It is a slow process, because although it is really only two years, it is two years that have meant a lot to both of us. We have a lot of catching up to do, and we no longer have the endless, timeless mornings and afternoons of Altesa in which to do it. We have our lessons; Jamie has his music and I have my art. There are sports for Jamie, though fewer for me. It is difficult to talk in house, where there are always other boys around; and because we are in different years, the easy conversations which can occur between boys of the same age are less easy for us.
In the end, it is the music and the art that c
ome to our rescue, and give us the places we need.
The music schools are an old building, tall, buried away in trees at one side of the school grounds. Upstairs, there are practice rooms, the thick, heavy doors insulated against sound, with little rectangular windows set into them so you can check if the room is occupied without opening the door. All the doors leak just a little, though, and to go upstairs is to enter a strange corridor of sounds: scales going up and down, fragments of pieces repeated and repeated to the same point, where a finger mistimes or misplays and forces the player to try again, and the sounds of stringed instruments being tuned, and percussion sounds, and sometimes voices singing or occasionally laughing. It feels to me like a beehive of music, with all the cells buzzing with activity. There is a friendly feel to the building, too, and the boys I meet in the corridor are, like those in the Art department, quicker to smile or say something affable in passing. It is, I begin to realize, another haven in a school which sometimes threatens to overwhelm me.
The Art department is my own territory by now – somewhere I feel as completely at home as I ever can in England. I can go there whenever I want. So it is in the Art department in the evenings, or one of the practice rooms of the music schools in the afternoons, that Jamie and I are able to talk.
We have missed out on two years of each other’s lives somehow. We don’t talk of that last summer before Jamie went away; neither of us seems able to think very clearly about that. But the two years that follow it we are eager for, and as we tell the stories of them to each other, it feels more and more like we are not standing behind a canvas screen with paint-stained coffee mugs on the windowsill beside us, or sitting on piano stools while Jamie idly picks out notes on the keyboard, but instead cross-legged on the floor of a room somewhere a long way away, surrounded by sunlight and comics.
For me, of course, the great news is that I have at last discovered what it is that I can do; what my hobby is, as Jamie once put it. Jamie knows this already: even in the year here where we have not spoken to each other – the year that finishes with my first exhibition, and Jamie breaking a wine glass in his anger and yet somehow finding a way for us to talk again – there has been comment around the house of how well I’m doing in Art. There are the pictures on the walls of my room; and though, at the start, Jamie never comes in there, he hears about them when the boys of my year are talking between themselves. So he knows quite a lot about me, I realize, though obviously he knows more now that he has seen all that I’ve drawn and painted, and now that I’ve explained some of it to him – what I’m trying to do, and what other pictures have inspired me, and what scenes or people I’ve chosen to concentrate on.