Just then a fight broke out. The crowd parted, as though drawn to the edges of the room by some magnetic force, and two men staggered about in the makeshift arena, their arms wrapped around each other. They heaved and grunted, but neither could seem to gain the upper hand. I imagined for a moment that they were engaged in a form of primitive dance. At last one of them tore himself free and swung a blow. His fist circled the air like a wrecking ball, but demolished nothing, and as he tottered sideways, off balance, the other man clubbed him above the ear.
‘This is what you came for,’ Hugo bellowed. ‘A bit of real life.’
About to disagree with him, I opened my mouth, but then I closed it again. I had always associated the Red Quarter with brightness, simplicity, a sense of hope. Oddly, though, I now felt as if these properties amounted to a superfluity of some kind, even a weakness. According to Galenic thought, blood was the only humour that had no particular quality when present in excess. Blood had to be looked upon as eucrasic or well tempered, and yet the world I remembered, the world in which I had lived for a quarter of a century, the world I’d turned my back on, didn’t seem well tempered so much as over-sanitised, devoid of warmth and feeling, bland.
By now the two men were fighting on the tarmac in front of the pub, their struggle rendered more dramatic by the car headlights trained on them. I saw a third man with banknotes folded lengthways between his fingers like pieces of a dismantled fan. Bets were being placed on the outcome. Meanwhile, in the bar, a fair-haired man had stood up on a table and begun to sing. The tune was that of a traditional ballad, but the words belonged to a protest song. All people were different, he sang, but if one looked beneath those differences, all people were the same. We had to be allowed to live together, to complement one another. That was where true freedom lay. A subversive idea, of course, if not a kind of treason, and it was then that I realised exactly how far I had travelled in the last eighteen hours or so. The room almost burst apart as everybody joined in with the chorus, which demanded that we overthrow the current leadership. Even before the song had ended, though, there was a surge towards the door. When I asked Hugo what was happening, he looked at me over his shoulder, and his eyes had opened wide.
‘The animals are coming,’ he cried.
It was a sight I would never forget. On arriving at the pub that afternoon, the road outside had been deserted, even desolate, but people were now overflowing on to the verges and into the ditches, and judging by the lights that jumped and flickered in the distance, a good number were making their way across the fields. Fay Mackenzie came and stood at my shoulder. Four local communities took part in the festival every year, she told me. Each community was held responsible not only for the building of an animal, which had to be carried out in secret, but also for its delivery to the site that had been set aside for the burning. Her next words were drowned by the shrill cacophony of whistling and hissing that greeted the procession as it rounded a bend in the road just below us. All four creatures were made of papier mâché and lit from within, and the size of them astounded me. A rabbit took the lead. Despite squatting on its haunches, the rabbit must have stood at least fifteen feet tall, its head and body ghost-white with black patches, its ears laid flat against its back as if it had already learned of its impending fate. Its beady eyes looked frightened, blind. After the rabbit came a sea horse, which was even taller, its neat sculptured head on a level with the eaves of houses. Though it had been painted a delicate shade of lilac, the sea horse also seemed filled with a sense of foreboding. It was there in the recalcitrant curve of its body, and in the pouting of its coral lips. A peacock appeared next, its breast a deep enamelled blue. Its tail was on full display, dozens of eyes afloat on a glinting mass of turquoise, green and gold. To my surprise, I felt not even the slightest twinge of loyalty or pride. Taking up the rear – and here the whistles and hisses almost deafened me – was the salamander I had seen earlier. Up close, it was a terrifying vision, its long tongue lolling between toothless jaws, its short scaly legs grasping at the air. As it lurched past, people from the pub joined the procession, some carrying bottles, others holding torches. I followed, yet another glass of brandy in my hand.
Not far from the top of the pass, the crowd streamed left on to a narrow track that led down into a sort of rift or depression in the land. With steep grass slopes on three sides and a sheer dark wall of rock at the back, the site had all the qualities of a natural amphitheatre. Wooden platforms had been erected at the bottom, each with stacks of kindling underneath. The people gathered down there were singing the song I’d just heard in the bar. When they reached the end of it, they simply returned to the beginning again, the volume seeming to build with each rendition. By the time I completed my descent, I, too, knew all the words.
I pushed into the middle of the arena. The animals had already been hoisted up on to their respective platforms. Seen from below, they resembled the hideous creatures that appear in cautionary tales. I suspected that the children who attended the burning would have dreams about them afterwards. Or nightmares. If you didn’t do as you were told, the salamander would come after you, its blunt jaws snapping at your heels. Or the ghostly rabbit with its blind pink eyes. These were the ogres in this part of the world. These were the bogeymen.
Sensing a shift in the crowd, I turned in time to see it parting. A dark-haired man strode towards the clearing, flanked by armed civilians in balaclavas. He was dressed in black tatters, as though he had just been pulled from a burning house; wisps of smoke rose from his clothes, and a trail of ashes glowed in the grass behind him. He began to mount a flight of wooden steps. On the ground below, his escorts formed a line, facing outwards, their semi-automatic weapons held diagonally across their chests. A hush had fallen. Just murmurs now. The man kept his back turned as he climbed. Only when he was standing beneath the salamander’s fearsome jaws did he swing round. A loud gasp escaped from the crowd. A child began to cry. The man’s face and hands were black, so black that I couldn’t distinguish them at first. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but flames and smoke came out instead. Everything about him was black. The whites of his eyes, his teeth. Even his tongue. A wind sprang up. His charred rags stirred.
‘I am the Master of the Conflagration,’ he said slowly, his voice so deep and guttural that I imagined that his larynx too had been fire-damaged.
‘Welcome,’ the crowd said, sounding, by contrast, almost shy.
The Master paused for a moment, then he spoke again. ‘If people tell us what to believe, do we believe?’
‘No,’ the crowd said, louder this time.
‘If people tell us what we are, do we listen?’
The crowd shouted, ‘No!’
I glanced over my shoulder. The field was full, right up to the top of the path. I could see heads silhouetted against the sky, and every face was turned in the direction of the Master.
‘We know what we are,’ he was saying, ‘and we know what we are not.’
The crowd murmured in agreement.
‘And what we are not,’ he went on, ‘we shall now, ceremonially, destroy.’
His right arm swept out sideways, then his left, and lighted coals flew in quick, bright arcs from both his sleeves. The crowd cried out with one voice, a voice in which I heard both rapture and alarm, then it burst into spontaneous applause. The coals had landed among the kindling, and the stacked wood beneath the animals had started to burn. But the Master of the Conflagration was gone. Though he didn’t appear to have climbed down off the platform, he could no longer be seen. His bodyguards were leaving by a rough track that led up to the neck of the pass. Their dark clothes soon merged with the darkness of the field. Above me, the salamander began to creak and fidget as flames reached for its belly.
I turned to the man standing beside me. In the light of the blaze his face seemed to glisten. ‘Where did he go?’ I asked.
The man didn’t take his eyes off the burning animals. ‘This must be your first time.’
‘Yes.’
The peacock’s tail flared with a vicious crackle.
‘Some say he’s the leader of the Black Square,’ the man said. ‘Others say he’s just a travelling magician.’ The man turned to me, and the shadow of his nose lengthened across his cheek so suddenly, so markedly, that I flinched. The man grinned. ‘You’ll just have to make up your own mind.’
‘It’s you,’ I said.
The man’s grin widened. ‘Is it?’
People scattered, screaming, as the salamander’s head parted with its body and floated into the air, swept upwards by a blast of heat and held there for a moment, as if tethered. It swayed in the dark sky, leering at our upturned faces, then it was consumed by flames, its long tongue curling, shrivelling, blackening, and with one final lurch, in which it appeared to cast a poignant glance over its shoulder, recalling, perhaps, the journey it had undertaken earlier that evening, it crashed to the ground in a shower of sparks, leaving nothing but a heap of burnt paper and a scorched wire frame. I watched as several children ran over and poked at the corpse with sticks. Then, like many others, I turned and started back towards the road.
Afterwards I couldn’t remember how we met, only that I was standing at the bar and that they were there as well, the three of them. Leon did most of the talking. He wore a leather jacket, and he had lined the lower rims of his eyelids with black kohl. The other man, Mike, had a spider’s web tattooed on the side of his neck. The girl was called April. In her crimson headscarf, her frayed denim jacket and her knee-length boots, she looked faintly piratical. They lived in Ustion, Leon told me, which was sixty miles north, but they always drove down for the burning of the animals. You couldn’t miss the burning.
Somehow it came out in conversation that I was thinking of heading that way.
‘You want a lift?’ Leon said. ‘We’re going there ourselves. Right now.’
Mike and April swallowed their drinks and placed the empty glasses on the bar. It all seemed to have been decided very quickly.
‘Really,’ April said. ‘It’s no trouble.’ Gazing up at me, she linked her arm through mine.
‘Well, if you’re sure.’ I drained my brandy.
‘That’s the spirit,’ Leon said.
‘Come on, Tom.’ April pulled gently on my arm, and we walked out of the bar together.
Leon had a dented pickup truck with roll-bars at the front and an extra set of headlights mounted on the roof. For hunting, he explained. Before he could go into any detail, though, I realised I had left my bag behind. Saying I would only be a moment, I turned and hurried back into the pub.
Upstairs, when I switched the light on, my room appeared to slip a little, like a picture dropping in its frame. Now that I had accepted Leon’s offer of a lift, I was worried he might become impatient and go without me. And there was April too, of course – that tantalising look she’d given me, the way she’d called me ‘Tom’ … I packed as fast as I could and zipped my bag shut, then I hoisted it on to my shoulder and ran back down the stairs. I found Fay Mackenzie in the bar. I couldn’t thank her enough, I told her, for taking me in, for treating me so well and, above all, for trusting me. Probably I said too much, my words tumbling over one another, but she only smiled at me and wished me luck. She wouldn’t take any money for the room.
Outside, the air had thickened. The smoke from the burning seemed to have been driven down the hill, flakes of charred paper drifting past at head-height. My new friends were standing at the edge of the car-park, deep in conversation. Then one of them noticed me, and they separated, their faces turning towards me.
‘All set?’ Leon said.
I nodded.
He held the door open on the passenger’s side. I climbed in first, hoping April would follow, but Mike got in next, leaving April to sit against the door. Leon went round to the driver’s side. Once behind the wheel, he revved the engine, then let the clutch out fast. The truck leapt down the road that led away from the pub.
April leaned forwards and spoke to him. ‘You drunk?’
‘No drunker than usual,’ he said.
I held my bag on my lap, aware of the men’s shoulders on either side of me. It was cold in the truck, and the cramped interior smelled of oil and cigarettes. I watched as the headlights picked out one bend after another.
I turned to Leon. ‘How far did you say it was?’
‘Where to?’ he said.
‘Ustion.’
‘I don’t know. It’s a way.’
He seemed to consider the question irrelevant, beside the point. My stomach tightened. I stole a glance at his profile, hoping for some reassurance, but all I saw was a low, brooding brow, and teeth that slanted back into his mouth like a shark’s – features I had failed to notice while we were talking in the bar.
After driving for five or ten minutes, Leon took a sharp right-hand turn on to a much narrower road. Mike and I were thrown to the left, and April cried out, then swore, as she was crushed against the door. Leon just laughed. The truck lurched and bounced over potholes, unseen branches scraping at the windows and the roof. As I peered through the windscreen, trying to determine where we were going, the road opened out into a wide apron of gravel and weeds. Our headlights swept over part of a building, and I caught glimpses of a turret and an ivy-covered wall.
‘Where’s this?’ I asked.
Nobody answered.
Leon switched the lights and engine off, then opened his door and stepped out. April and Mike climbed out the other side. I hesitated, then I followed. We had parked next to a circular pond with a raised edge, the water hidden beneath a quilt of lily pads. I lifted my eyes to the building that lay beyond. The wings that extended sideways from the gate-house were topped by battlements, and the windows resembled those in medieval castles. I turned back to Leon, who seemed to have fallen into a kind of trance. His friends were standing near by, but facing in different directions, as though keeping watch. I wasn’t sure why they had brought me to this place. I suspected I was becoming embroiled in some reckless agenda of theirs, as a result of which I might lose sight of my own.
‘It used to be an asylum,’ Leon said, ‘but it was shut down years ago.’
The night was quiet and still. Moonlight coated everything.
I walked over to Leon. ‘I need to get moving,’ I said. ‘Maybe you could tell me which way to go.’
He didn’t take his eyes off the building. ‘First you have to give us something. For our trouble.’
I stared at him blankly. ‘Give you something?’
‘Some kind of payment.’
Mike seized me from behind, pinning my arms, then Leon reached into my pockets and felt around.
‘If it’s money you want,’ I said, ‘it’s in my wallet.’
Leon stood back. Behind him, April cut my bag open with a knife and started tossing pieces of my clothing on to the ground.
‘There’s nothing valuable in there,’ I said.
Leon leaned in towards me again, blocking my view of the girl. ‘You know it all, don’t you?’ A grey gleam on his sloping teeth. ‘Actually, no, that can’t be true,’ he said. ‘Because if you knew it all you wouldn’t have got yourself into this situation in the first place.’ I watched as he opened my wallet and went through the contents. He shone a torch on my visa, then on my identity papers, and let out a low whistle.
Still stooping over my bag, April looked round. ‘What?’
‘I heard he was from somewhere else,’ Leon said. ‘I just didn’t know where.’
‘Where’s he from?’ April asked.
Leon told her.
‘What do you think he’s doing here?’ she said.
Still examining my papers, Leon didn’t say anything.
April walked towards me. ‘He could be a spy.’
I had applied the same word to myself only the night before, but in a purely romantic sense. Now, though, it was being used seriously, as an accusation.
‘That’s ridiculous,�
�� I said.
Almost instantly there was an explosion in my head, and I dropped to the gravel, lights hanging in the left side of my field of vision like a curtain of garish elongated beads. Mike must have hit me.
As I lay there, April reached down and pulled off my coat. I made no attempt to resist. She put the coat on over her denim jacket, then paraded up and down in front of the pond as if she were on a catwalk. She was much shorter than me, and the coat’s hem trailed along the ground behind her.
‘You’re spoiling it,’ I murmured.
Mike’s boot caught me just below the ribs. ‘It’s hers now,’ he said. ‘She can do what she likes with it.’
Lying on my side, doubled up, I felt the bile rush into my mouth. At the same time, I had the feeling that the episode was already over and that it could have been much worse. They had what they wanted – my money, my documents, my coat. Clearly, though, there was a kind of protocol involved. They couldn’t leave until their superiority had been properly established. It was important therefore that I didn’t draw any more attention to myself. Better to grovel, play dead.
It appeared to work. The next time I looked, they had their backs turned.
‘I almost forgot,’ Leon said over his shoulder. ‘You go that way.’ He pointed off into the trees.
April made a remark I didn’t catch. The two men laughed.
Doors slammed. My head still resting on the ground, I felt the surge of the engine in my teeth, a vibration conducted by the earth, a kind of bass note. The pickup truck turned in a slow, tight half-circle and I was blinded for a second as its bank of lights swept over me. I saw myself as they must have seen me, a crumpled man, eyes shut to slits. The roar faded. For some time afterwards I thought I could detect the reverberation, but then I decided it was just one of the many layers that made up the silence – or even, perhaps, some residue from the bomb that had gone off, a memory that was physical, a tremor stored below the surface of my skin.
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