Silence, till she thought her ears had gone back on her, and the sounds had been an illusion.
Far up above the walls a jet fighter slipped lazily Westward toward the sea, its modernity seeming as irrelevant to where and when they were as a stoat at a pet rabbit show—when all the rabbits too had nice sharp teeth.
While Mariella’s eyes were still following it flying so free in air, and wishing she could escape somehow somewhere up where no one could reach or pressure, there was a sharp sound like a pistol shot right in front of her.
She sprung round, startled, her foot dislodging a trail of small pebbles that clattered away down the slope, setting a brief hush to the cicada chorus, while one of them, brilliant red its wings, so neatly hidden when they sit, so huge and phosphorescent when they fly, flittered past before her face, a second shock.
So that she had only half recovered when she saw an eye peering out at her from what seemed to be the solid fastness of the great door: and screamed.
A funny wheedling voice, at the same time bubbling and effeminate, like a choked spring, came at her, and suddenly a section of the gate wheezed outwards. She jumped back realizing suddenly that what she’d seen was first a small judas-eye grating opening, and then a kind of wicket gate, its hinges rusted near solid.
“Like Alice in Wonderland” she thought, and felt oddly safe again.
And the man who appeared, beckoning and gesturing in a way that seemed paradoxically at one and the same time to fend her off and urge her in, was not frightening either. Misshapen yes, bent sideways by some deformity. Frightening, no.
Perhaps it was the huge grin. Tooth-filled, brown, but so shaped into a permanent smile the mouth that no one could resist it unless he hated laughter itself. And the eyes, blue and clear as a rainwashed sky amidst a face so wrinkled, tanned, dirt and berry and scratch stained it could have been an old map of mountains better than a human visage, were absolutely guileless.
The rest of him, in shapeless denim and torn, smoke-blackened leather flying jacket, crumpled beret with oddly Scottish pom-pom crammed down over greasy black and gray ladder-streaked curls, his body twisted across the gap of the little wicket-gate like a spoon bent in careless hands, and round the heels a dog, black and border collieish, leaping and lolloping and barking in idiot joy at the excitement of a visitor, seemed all of a piece with the image of a toy broken clumsily but still trying to perform its amusing tricks with all the fragmentary life left in the clockwork.
The man’s gibberish was incomprehensible, slavering and bubbling, odd squeaks and almost-soprano waverings ending his question-shaped phrasings, even had she spoken Croatian.
She tried, hard, not to laugh at him: after all, you shouldn’t laugh at the afflicted, and anyway he was so likeable-looking, and, a warning voice from childhood “Don’t talk to strangers” talks at schools cried, the childish-seeming are often the most dangerous with their sudden grasping sweaty hands that really only want to play but break what they play with, clumsily and without intent. But the laughter burst out, all the same, almost hysterical. Partly relief, perhaps, that the Germans seemed to have definitely vanished. Even the sound of movement through the bushes distantly round the curve of wall was now inaudible.
The man laughed too, a weird yet not unpleasing peeling trill.
“Can I come in?” speaking very slowly, pointing and gesturing as in dumb talk: Mariella’s efforts produced no enlightenment, only more laughter. The dog slipped past his legs and leapt up, licking, at her. She held it off, half embrace, half blow, and tried again, pointing at herself, then the gate, then the man, pantomiming movement forward with her feet. A few drops of rain splattered, and then, as if that had been last curtain, the sun suddenly burst through the black heavy clouds, falling straight in her face almost blinding, so that wall and man and dog still leaping up all became silhouettes against its brightness.
The man must’ve understood: he stepped back, swinging the wicket aside, whistling the dog clear, so that she had room to pass.
She felt a vast sense of triumph that she’d got a step ahead of the Germans, got in first, a kid’s one-upmanship, gloriously complete, the more so that she had no one to show off to.
Past the gate, she looked round in delight at a tangled garden, a hidden place almost become miniature forest with the growth of trees she knew she must’ve learned about at school but couldn’t recognize, some like cypresses, some oakshape, some feather-dustery firs so that all the air was stirred by their slight movement.
She looked back at the gate, meaning to persuade the man to leave it open for Heidi and Emico to get in. But already, whistling, he’d locked the wicket with a huge rusty key, one of a number on a ring that he carefully placed on a hook above, where slits in the arch’s curve must once have been, Mariella thought with a shiver of excitement, have been used once to pour down oil or drop portcullises on attackers.
It was just like being a child again. She wanted to run through the garden, try to find where this wall went, and the one that must lie ahead, visible in tantalizing glimpses through the treetops: or sing, or stand on her head. Reluctantly, she decided to be sensible.
She tried to indicate to the custodian, or whatever he was, village idiot without a village, to open the gate again.
All he did was point at himself, and mutter something that sounded like Stepan, and at the dog, and a further mutter that could have been anything but which she took as Bozo because that dog from her childhood had been Bozo: and then smiling he beckoned her forward, and she followed, trying to look in all directions at once.
A few yards on, and the path forked, round a huge broken fountain, one that must have lost its function centuries ago, since an even huger cactus-type thing, with serrated edge tongue-shaped leaves grew in some odd way not round but through the cracked and broken rim, a patch of sun amidst the gloom in which lizards skittered like droplets of the long-ago water it had once held and danced with.
She peered at the plant, trying to remember what Colin had said it was called, carving his name through the leaf on one they’d seen like it on one of the excursions, till the plant’s so armored-looking flesh seemed to bleed sap and she cringed with a borrowed and, she knew consciously, totally irrational pain with the thought of all through its growth the wounds of those irregular razor-cut gouged letters growing with it, unending scars just so Colin could leave his name behind.
As she turned away to follow the gesturing man and leaping dog, both urging her eagerly on, the name came back. Agave. She wished for an instant she were like that, tough and spiny and almost immortal: only then fools’d come and carve their names on her—and anyway she was in danger of turning into one of these silly sentimental middle-class women you got on telly dramas, who had nowt better to do than think about themselves and their ailments.
She moved faster to catch up with her guides, but the perfect place was a little spoiled.
Shadows seemed to swallow them, and as she came up to where they’d vanished, she realized why.
Two towers loomed to left and right, and between them the path passed into the gloom of a second great arch, recessed deeply: here the portcullis was still just visible, jammed and askew high up in the curvature.
Once into the tunnel, her eyes began to recover from the abrupt dive into darkness.
The arch-roofed passageway bent, and just as they reached the bend, low doors opened to left and right. Ahead, now, she could see sunlight in another inner courtyard, and for a second she thought she heard a clucking as of hens. The dog barked, and silence.
The guide seemed to be waiting for her to decide which way to go.
She moved toward the right hand door, the heavy stone underfoot striking cold through the soles of her feet.
Something made the hair at her nape stiffen, a horrid low humming, like wind in far off telegraph wires, or bees in pinewoods.
Mariella looked up.
Dimly above her, in a niche like a saint-holder on a church wall, a ca
rved marble bust stared down. Horrible, sightless; it took her an instant of staring, transfixed, to realize the vile quality of the stare came from the fact that the white eyes had no pupils. The face was metal-stern: the nose big, the curl of twin-forked beard jagged as if trimmed only occasionally and then with a sword: some sort of helmet was carved round, its deeper shadow and constriction emphasizing pools of dark like a skull’s holes along high cheekbone line, and the pride, and at the same time oddly humorous cruelty, as if to remain straight faced for the sculptor.
The guide from behind whispered suddenly in her ear, so she jumped, something about “Ban ... Turki ...” and then a stumble of German, “Grosse Graf,” Great Count, that she half-knew from one of Colin’s many show-off lectures, and then something that sounded like “death” repeated, and gesturings with fingers as if he was doing the universal shopkeeper count for fives, tens, fifties, hundreds, and “Turchken, krieg, grose krieg, hier,” all half hidden in the gloom, misshapen as a spider’s shadow, and then a sudden flash of teeth and wave of hands as if to convey how communication was helpless but at least they both meant well ... and the buzzing or humming started again: she looked up then jumped back as a stick thrust past her.
The head fell sideways in its niche, and behind she had just time to see that its back was hollow and filled with a vast gray beard or cornucopia shaped hive or nest, when black shapes hurtled out in a cloud. A hand pulled her back and the cloud shot past into the garden, hornets they must be and vanished, still droning that horrid bagpipish noise.
She leant against the wall, gasping, palpitating.
Too much was happening, too fast.
The bust tottered in its niche. The guide leapt forward, and somehow caught it one handed just as it all but reached the stone flags. As he held it up close for her to admire the horrid sightless eyes, she noticed chipped places on nose and ears: doubtless every visitor, if he ever got any other, was treated to the dislodging of hornets—and he confirmed her suspicion by somehow scrambling up the apparently glass smooth walls to replace the face in its niche where it glimmered down balefully, a patch of dead whiteness like the moon or an unwanted child.
She wanted to get back into the sunlight, and started to move toward the inner courtyard, wishing to get the visit over with and wishing too the Germans’d appear to protect her against any more shocks or at least diffuse their effect, make them more a shared traveler’s tale than a sudden heartstopper for one.
But the guide pulled at her arm, into the little door on the opposite side of the passage.
They passed into a gloomy chamber, its few windows thick with dust, high and barred against the light.
Shapeless objects littered it, on walls and floor.
Peering about, she made out what seemed to be battle-axes, rusty swords, a suit of armor; on another wall things like the pikes the Beefeaters had, and then a ‘snap’ at her feet. She jumped back, wondering how much more her heart would take as she realized from the little guide’s horrid, dry, almost hysterical laugh that it was some sort of mantrap he’d snapped shut just short of her foot by a hidden mechanism.
On through a further passage into another room.
More obscure, gloom hidden relics.
On a lectern, a huge Bible, chained up.
She opened it: faintly she could make out a wood engraving of a horridly realistic devil in whose mouth was swallowed all of what was either a woman or very effeminate man except the legs and buttocks, splayed out as if the agony was enjoyable.
In a corner, tilted against the wall, a kind of cart or open carriage, with huge long shafts.
Along one wall, furled on poles, what must once have been flags or banners, but were now merely muddy brown collections of moth holes: the least breeze, she thought, would make them fall to lace-like dust.
The guide stared at her beseechingly, like a pet wanting his ears scratched. Obligingly, she peered closely at them trying to look awed, serious, as if in church.
It meant nothing to her. He seemed content. Colin she knew, would have known just what it all meant.
She sneezed, violently: the cold and dampness was too much.
Another passage.
A room darker still, high-columned, where shapes lurched and made odd snuffling noises.
The guide pointed, banged on something, bounced on it. Laughed, and the dog barked as if with laughter.
Her eyes focusing at last. A kind of camp bed, but double size, filthy with a nest-like mass of straw mattress and sheets so black the noise must be them knocking to get out.
And all around in the gloom, curiously stained sheep, “piss color” she thought, and giggled hysterically.
The room receded vastly into the gloom: a banquet hall, perhaps.
Yet another passage, still following that will-o-the-wisp pair of figures, manlike guide and doglike guide.
Christ, the place must be vast. And why call on Christ, Colin always told her how idiotic it was, this superstitious falling back to childhood in any crisis.
Still, he wasn’t here. Nor anyone else to protect her.
Light ahead. They must be nearly back at the courtyard. Thank God. This time she’d just make straight back through the gate, with profuse thanks, and money even, if the little man wouldn’t be hurt, anything to get away from him, and here.
And within feet of the light and the smell of some strange flower and the jerky leap of a butterfly, a hand on her arm. The guide again, turning her toward the passage wall, and deeper dark.
A soft sound outside, was this a whisper of encouragement?
A trick of wind, probably, she could see a little swirl of dust out there.
A push at her back, some muttering she could not understand, and then, in what she knew was German but meant nothing. “Quelle, gross quelle, brunnen, tief, tief” still no clarity in her brain.
The hand in her back pushing her forward. Sheer darkness all round now, only a step or two into the hollow opening in the wall, but blackness absolute: underfoot, rough, hollowed, the very slightest declivity. A breath of cold, foul air.
And she stopped, grabbed outward. Hands on emptiness, then scrabbling backward onto walls. And a leap back.
The little guide’s arm passed her, lighting a match, muttering, chattering, like a pansy interior decorator or a monkey.
And in the faint yet harsh flare of the match, emptiness dropping away at her feet beyond all sight, and a far wall, tormented twisted living rock.
Shivering, she threw a small coin from her purse, not even looking to see what denomination it was. It bounced on the far wall, fell. And long, long afterward not even a loud splash, a splash tiny beyond belief.
She ran, frantic, toward the light, brushing mancreature and dog aside, her breath gasping, heaving, ripping her throat raw as if she’d run ten miles.
And a voice calm, posh, Queen’s English as if the BBC from some Third Programme Tutorial, “Too bad—the due has not been paid after all. We must think of something else.”
She halted her headlong run, tried to clear eyes blurred with tears of panic, blazed almost blind by the sudden light.
A few feet away across the courtyard stood the most unlikely person she could imagine there.
Middle-height, not fattish yet somehow implying corpulence ... and the very first impression, so sharp it withstood even scrutiny of jarring detail, was of a British army officer from one of those “stiff upper lips, chaps, over the top now” wartime films. The little stiff tash, the red face, redness showing even under the weathered tan, the cropped fair hair, the stiffness of carriage and the vaguely tweedy vaguely patched clothes: even to black eye patch worn like monocle.
“Well, that’s too bad, Carruthers of the F.O.”
That same nervous impulse that had always made her speak out in class at school, speak out against her will with the dreadful pun, the cheeky remark, the comment any teacher took as rebellion and sneer. Yet never intended as that, some longing merely to be accepted whatever she di
d, reassured that she had a right to be there, to exist: even the reluctant laughter of schoolmates who hated her really for being too clever, the hurled blackboard eraser or chalk of goaded teacher who till then had unassailed held grip of class and now had to fight near hysteria of choked giggles by classmates, even these were better, these and the inevitable punishment, the dreadful wait for cane or letter to parents, then sitting in the class, silent, friendless, unknown.
And sometimes it had worked to exorcise her fears. The bully of a girl two classes higher, nailbitten, huge, hair cropped like a footballer, who’d attacked and terrified her rabbit-shivering so often on the way home.
And one time had started to tease her, set as monitor at their school dinner table.
Only this one time Mariella had turned, not brave, merely so embarrassed by her terror she had let her unconscious speak. “Get back in your cage, ape. I’ll rattle your bars when I need you.”
The gale of half-choked laughter this time had been armor.
The bigger girl had flinched as if hit in the stomach. Perhaps the comparison had been her secret vision of herself and how the world saw her, the barrel chest and slightly hairy chin and biceps.
She had never bothered her again.
And even, three years later, seen by Mariella one cold winter afternoon turning too quickly dark on the way home, the older girl already having left school and being, as far as anyone could learn, an ineffectual cinema usherette, had invited her, harsh yet pleading, to go into the bushes with her down Dobson Bank, saying she had some new rainbow-striped knickers she wanted to show Mariella.
But someone had called Mariella, “Hey, your dad’s waiting with the car” and Mariella never saw her again.
The same impulse, to strike out with words when fear gets too much.
But this one, stood, fiftyish, even in his sixties perhaps, firm in his half-shadowed corner in the arch-colonnaded yard, dim as if night was where he was, even the squawking scrabbling ducks and chickens staying well clear, such calm more like a whirlwind’s vortex than any mere silence, he was something else again.
The Year's Best Horror Stories 14 Page 30