by Tom Fletcher
Erin finishes the story. I watch a small grey scrap of spirit detach itself from the wall and zoom around the room a couple of times. It flutters to and from the dead man like a moth with a candle. Then it floats up to the ceiling, where it dissipates into a thousand smaller pieces. They fall like a kind of rain. But every single drop fades away before landing on my pale skin. Erin seems unaware.
‘Francis?’ she says.
‘Yeah?’ I try moving my legs. I find that I can. They are part of me once more. Part of my body. I stand. I lower myself back on to the bed.
‘Francis? Have I been asleep?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘You’ve been telling me a story. About the house. About a boy called Bearpit.’
‘I don’t know anything about the house.’
‘You don’t even remember telling me the story,’ I say. ‘I don’t think you need to know anything about the house to tell the stories.’
‘Francis, I’m tired. And I’m starting to freak out a bit. I can hear things outside.’
‘It’s the wind,’ I say.
‘It’s not the wind,’ she says. ‘You know it’s not the wind.’
‘It’s the gate.’
‘It’s not.’
‘It’s the cats.’
‘No, Francis, it’s not, you know it’s not. Francis, I don’t understand why you’re not dead.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, after a pause.
‘Francis, it’s not funny!’ Her voice is trembling.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. Although I’m not sure what I said that she thought was supposed to be funny.
‘You know it’s all fucked up,’ she says. ‘Francis, what’s that noise?’
I look over and she’s crying. I can hear distant music from out on the mountain. I can hear a fiddle. I can hear laughter, of a sort. Warped and throaty. I can hear shouting and howling and yelping and a rough shrieking. The sounds are distant. They touch something inside me. I know that wherever the sound is coming from is where I’ll find Jennifer. It’s where I’ll go.
‘The noise,’ I say. ‘What can you hear?’
‘Just that shrieking.’ She wipes her face. ‘It’s freaking me out.’
I don’t say anything. Because I’m suddenly aware of somebody else in the room. Somebody is sitting on the end of the bed. It’s Balthazar the snowman. I feel the ice-cold water soaking into the bedclothes and numbing my feet. He turns to look at me. His back is crooked and blue. His head is overly large, and misshapen. His eye-sockets are big enough to have been gouged out by hands. His nose is long, bulbous and dripping. He doesn’t really have a mouth. It’s like the bottom half of his head has fallen away. He has brittle-looking arms and his body is thin. Thinner than we built it. He looks unhealthy.
‘Turn,’ he says. His voice is old, low. You can hear melt water in it. Snow falling from trees. Glaciers splintering. Falling into the sea. I look at Erin. She is looking at me.
‘What is it, Francis?’ she asks. ‘What’s wrong?’
I look back at Balthazar. ‘Turn now,’ he says. ‘Before it’s too late. You need to turn now if you want to find her. Francis. Turn.’
I think about that something that I sensed rushing up towards the surface as I woke. The shadow on my brain. Jennifer. I think about Jennifer.
‘You won’t regret it,’ Balthazar says. ‘It’s what you’ve always wanted. Your fantasies, this idea you have of Jennifer. You can find her with this gift. This gift is just waiting for you to take it. Waiting for you to discover it, take it, make it yours. And with it, you can change the world. This world that makes you sick. This world that makes you angry. The news that leaks into you. You can take this gift out into your world and spread it like freedom and never have to think about cancer or money again. Look at me. Change.’
My eyes absorb his image. His cold wraps around me. I realise his strangeness. It sinks into me. Strength floods my limbs. His head slips forward. A tiny movement like a nod of approval.
I close my eyes. I know it now. Beyond the shadow of a doubt. There is something deeply wrong with me. Hallucinating Balthazar. I focus inwards and I can feel something in there. Something hard and dark at the centre of me. Something growing. Ever-hungry. Swallowing up all of my healthy body for sustenance.
As I think about it, it wakes up. I feel it growing inside my head. Some sort of cluster of mutant cells expanding. Spreading. Corrupting the cells around them. I can feel them breaking off and flowing around the body. Lodging in joints and ligaments and building up in extremities. They’re accumulating. Clinging to the insides and inside sides of me. Growing, growing, growing. Growing.
Taking over.
JACK
The sky was clearing when we got back outside, the inky black spattered with a thick spill of stars, the clouds rushing away over the sea like crows from a sudden, barking dog, and the cold air rushed into our mouths and throats and lungs. There was some sort of feeling in the air; Francis was not dead, we could see again, and the sky was beautiful.
The barn was behind us.
Graham was deathly silent, and against the settled snow I could see his silhouette tremble. It was that bright, beneath the stars, that we all stood out sharply against the ground, like cut-outs.
‘Can you hear that?’ Taylor asked.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘The fiddle.’
‘Yeah.’
‘But there was a fiddle player at the party,’ I said. ‘Maybe it’s not that bad. Maybe everybody got away from, um, whatever happened. Whatever it was.’
‘No,’ Graham said. ‘They didn’t.’
‘Graham,’ I said. ‘What was in the barn?’
He just shook his head and stumbled on, not even turning round to look at me. Taylor and I made eye contact, Taylor raising his eyebrows ludicrously high, as high as only Taylor could raise them.
‘Graham,’ Taylor said. ‘Come on. We need to know what’s happening.’
Graham stopped walking and slumped his shoulders. The head of the axe slumped to the ground. After a long moment’s silence, he turned to face us. ‘They’re all in there,’ he said. ‘The guests.’
Everyone we know was in the barn, he said, but that didn’t mean everyone, that is, the people we didn’t know, the people we hadn’t known, the fiddler and his wild dancers, the aloof, preoccupied gatecrashers – they might have escaped.
Or maybe the gatecrashers had been the perpetrators, because they had been gatecrashers, hadn’t they? After all, that girl, that dancing girl, she had been one of those headed for the gathering at the end of Wastwater. Maybe the fiddler was one of them too.
The sound of the fiddle sawed across my brain. It was coming from a distance, echoing around the mountains easily now that the mist had lifted. From down the slope of the fellside.
From the lake.
‘Everyone we know?’ I asked.
Graham nodded. ‘There were none of those – people – that we didn’t know. But everyone we know. Is in that barn. They’re all dead, Jack.’
At least we were still there. At least Francis and Erin were still alive. But Graham’s words sank into me like stones into the lake.
And Jennifer. Jennifer had to be still out there somewhere, but if all those people had been killed, then Jennifer, too, was surely dead?
I started walking, just struck out, and Graham and Taylor followed.
I noticed that there were no electric lights on in the valley.
‘There are no lights on in the valley,’ I said.
Taylor and Graham looked down, looked all around, from the overbearing fells at the head of the valley, down across the lake and the woodland that surrounded it, over the foothills at the mouth of the valley, along all of the roads that stretched out towards the sea, towards the places where the coastal villages normally twinkled with hundreds of orange lights, and everything was dark. Everything.
There were no ships out on the sea.
There were no cars on the roads.
There were no lights on
in any of the houses that I knew dotted the fellside.
I looked up.
There were no satellites blinking their lonely paths through space.
The fiddler played.
There are stories of lost or missing fiddlers from all over the country. The fiddler would become obsessed by some hole or tunnel entrance that led nobody knew where, and, despite the urgings of his family and friends and lover, would embark on an underground journey of discovery.
‘I will find out where it goes,’ he would say, or ‘I will find out what is down there,’ or ‘I will find out what is beneath our town.’
‘But how will we know where you are?’ his lover, or friends, or family would ask. ‘How will we know that you are not dead?’
‘I will play my fiddle,’ he would say. ‘And by the sound of it you will be able to discern my presence, my location. My very existence.’
There would be nothing that the friends, family, lover, could do, and the fiddler would set off, and the sound of the fiddle would fade, but then remain constant. In some stories, those above ground trace its movement. In others, they don’t. In some stories, the music of the fiddle suddenly stops, indicating that some tragedy has befallen the fiddler; in other stories, the music of the fiddle gradually fades away, indicating that the fiddler is descending yet further.
In no version is the fiddler ever seen again.
Sometimes the fiddler is accompanied by a dog which later reappears from the tunnel entrance, or the hole in the ground, or some other earthly opening (suggesting that they link, connect, beneath the surface), and the dog comes back completely hairless, mad with fear and tainted somehow with the smell of burning. This was generally taken to mean that the fiddler had met his fate at the hands of the Devil.
And the Devil! There is another story, recorded in the 1930s, that in Bushey, on the Middlesex border, on moonlit nights, the Devil sat on a stile and played the fiddle. If you stayed and watched, then after a while you would see the Devil leave his post and walk towards the woods, still playing the fiddle, until he disappeared. In English folklore there is this association between stiles and the Devil – maybe something to do with crossing over, as if being in between places you were more susceptible to something, or more likely to just step out of the world completely.
A sensory stimulus intruded on my chaining together of stories – a flaring up of lights, many and flickering, down at the eastern end of Wastwater, and the moment I noticed them, they stood out like beacons. The music was coming from that direction, and the other sounds.
‘There,’ I said, pointing. ‘That’s where they are.’
‘Who?’ Taylor asked.
‘The others,’ I said. ‘Those others from the party. The fiddler.’
‘Right,’ Taylor said. ‘Hey. Maybe that’s the other party Kenny was talking about.’
‘What?’ I said.
‘Kenny. Kenny said that—’
‘What?’ I said. ‘When? Has he been here tonight?’
‘Yeah,’ Taylor said. ‘Did you not see him?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Jesus, Taylor. I wish you’d told me.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s where we have to go,’ I said, and pointed down to the fires. ‘That’s where she’ll be. Jennifer.’
The fellside was clear before us. It was a beautiful night, aside from the strangeness that gnawed at the back of my head, my mind. The stars were bright. The lake shone beneath them. We trudged onwards in silence.
We were approaching something, something black and hulking, unidentifiable by the starlight. We slowed down as we got closer because everything we could not immediately identify was threatening; we were at the bottom of the sea, or on an as-yet-undiscovered planet. Life could look like anything.
‘What’s that?’ Taylor asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, shaking my head.
‘I don’t like it,’ Taylor said.
‘It’s just a fucking tree,’ Graham said. ‘For fuck’s sake.’ He walked on before us and put his hand against it. ‘It’s just a fucking’ – he raised the axe – ‘fucking tree.’ He swung the axe into the trunk of it, and the snow shivered off to the ground, and the bark came off in hand-sized splinters. He hit it again, and again.
‘Graham,’ I said. ‘Come on. We haven’t got time for this.’ Graham looked like I didn’t know what in his suit, stark against the snow on the ground, hammering the twisted naked tree with the axe, his face a mask. I noticed with a shock that the tree – or the two trees – looked like two people having sex, and Graham was cutting into what would have been the man’s stomach. Why had I not found this place before? I could have taken notes, drawn it for an article. People turning into trees is something that happens in stories up and down the land, all over the world, something to do with falling in love and putting down roots, or stagnating, becoming entrenched, bored, I couldn’t quite remember… I shook my head. As if it mattered.
‘GRAHAM!’ Taylor shouted. ‘Stop it!’ He turned to me. ‘Jack. That tree. Jesus.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Graham! Will you – will you just stop it! Put that thing down!’
He did, eventually, and then he fell to the ground, and started to cry. I almost physically jumped as I noticed that, on the other side of the tree, there was a huge red stain in the snow. ‘This is where we found Francis,’ I said.
‘I can’t believe he wasn’t dead,’ Taylor said. ‘Look at all that blood.’
‘What’s wrong, Graham?’ I crouched down and put my hand on his shoulder.
‘I think I killed somebody,’ he said. ‘In the barn. I think I killed somebody and I don’t know who.’ He put his head in his hands and, hunched over like that, sobbing, looked like some sort of shivering rock. The axe was solid and static beside him, as were the humanoid trees. They were like two damaged giants standing there, making love, curving up and over his hunched body.
‘What do you mean,’ Taylor whispered, ‘killed somebody?’
Graham shook his head. I had that feeling again, like I was a body of water with cold, heavy metal things floating down through me, like hammers, or axes.
‘Graham,’ Taylor whispered again, ‘what do you mean – killed somebody?’
Graham fired up off the ground like a jack-in-the-box, spitting and screaming.
‘What the fucking fuck do you think I mean?’ Taylor and I jumped backwards as Graham flew at us, his eyes red-rimmed and wild, his hands bunched into pale fists. ‘You pair of numb fucking imbeciles!’ he roared. ‘What the hell is wrong with you? I hit them with the axe until they stopped fucking moving. What were you doing? Where were you? Where are you now? Are you in there? Eh? Soulless fucking – fucking – wankers!’
He spat on the ground and then sat back down.
There was a long silence.
‘Graham,’ I said, slowly, trying not to let the fear or the anger creep through. ‘What do you mean – you don’t know who it was?’
‘It was dark,’ he muttered. ‘I couldn’t see them. And they were – they weren’t looking – at me. They were on the floor, eating one of the, uh, one of the bodies. I could hear them, and I couldn’t – just couldn’t – stop myself from, uh, hitting them.’
Taylor and I looked at each other. Taylor was pale, tired-looking, and I thought that I must have looked similar. In that light, in our current state, even Graham probably struggled to tell the difference between us. Sometimes I looked at other people and wondered if I looked like them. People used to get Francis and me mixed up all the time. Occasionally I just picked up attributes of the people that I spent time with. I think a lot of people did that; they were composites of people they knew. Still, people wouldn’t have any trouble telling Francis and me apart any more. He’d be the one that couldn’t walk.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ Taylor said. ‘For fuck’s sake, Graham. What the hell is wrong with you? Eating a body? Are you on drugs?’
Graham just shook his head, returned to his trembling, deat
hly silence. After a while he answered, briefly. ‘I know what I saw.’
‘You can’t really be sure, though,’ Taylor said.
Graham didn’t reply.
‘Did you see their face?’ I asked.
He shook his head again.
‘You didn’t see their face,’ I said. ‘Male or female?’
He shrugged.
‘Graham,’ I said. ‘Male or female?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘What do you mean, you don’t know? Male or female?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Long hair or short hair?’
‘I don’t—’
‘You say you don’t know one more time,’ I said. ‘You say it just one more time. Now I’m asking you. Graham. Was it Jennifer? Did you kill Jennifer?’
‘What?’ he said, looking up at me, confused. ‘Look, Jack. Taylor. You weren’t there. You don’t get it. It was dark. I was scared. And they were – there was something about them that just wasn’t – wasn’t right. They were too tall.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘Too tall? Is that some sort of – what does that even mean? You couldn’t make out their gender because they were too tall?’
‘Why the fuck would Jennifer be on the barn floor eating some poor dead fucker?’ Graham said.
‘I, um, well,’ I said.
‘We’re not – there’s something wrong,’ Graham said. ‘Can you not see? Don’t give me any shit, Jack. Can you not see that the normal ways of looking at things, the normal ways of acting, thinking, aren’t making sense? The things we know that define one thing from another are gone. It’s like the boundaries between things have been lifted away, suspended. Do you ever think of there being a grid or – or a system of some sort that lies over the land and wraps around the edges of things? Connects things together? Makes a tree something different to a person?’
‘You want the honest answer?’ I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m worried about Jennifer. OK? That’s what I’m thinking about. Not one of your hallucinations. Your weird grid.’