by Ali Shaw
She opened her eyes. The traffic had vanished and Kenneth’s was the only car on the road. The only visible part of the world was locked inside the yellow wedge of the headlights. The road had no boundaries, no walls or hedgerows, and the car rocking and bouncing over potholes and scatterings of slate kept her awake. A forever road, as if there were nothing more in the universe than car and broken tarmac. Then it turned a sudden bend and for a half-moment she could see a steep drop of scree, and sensed that they were at a great height.
The road straightened and the surface evened. Her head lolled.
She opened her eyes. The headlights shimmered across nests of boulders and trunks of stone on either side. No grass, only slates splitting under the weight of the car, each time with a noise like a handclap. Eyes closing, opening. The clock moved on in leaps, not ticks. Either side of the road were trees bent so close to the earth they were barely the height of the car, growing almost parallel to the shingly ground. A wind whistled higher than the engine noise.
‘Awake again,’ said Kenneth jovially. But she was asleep once more.
Awake again. The moon lonely in a starless sky. Swollen night clouds crowded around it. And beneath those the silhouettes of other giants.
‘Mountains,’ she whispered.
‘Yes,’ said Kenneth with reverence. ‘Mountains.’
Even at this distance, and although they looked as flat as black paper, she had a sense of their bulk and grandeur. They lifted the horizon into the night sky. Each had its own shape: one curved as perfectly as an upturned bowl, one had a dented summit, and another a craggy legion of peaks like the outline of a crown.
She lost sight of them as the car turned down an anonymous track. The only signpost she had seen in these last few awakenings was a rusting frame with its board punched out, an empty direction to nowhere.
They had followed that signpost.
‘One more hour to go,’ Kenneth said.
Saying anything in reply took more effort than waking up a hundred times. She drifted off again.
When she came to, the car had stopped and Kenneth had turned off the headlights. ‘What happened?’ she asked, rubbing sleep dust from her eyes.
He pointed past her, out of the window. She turned and straightened in her seat, suddenly wide awake. She could no longer see the mountains in the distance. Stars were brightly visible, but only in the zenith of the night. She could not see the mountains in the distance because now she was amongst them.
Through gaps in the clouds moonlight glistened like snowfall, brightening mountain peaks where it landed and illuminating their bald caps of notched rock. Elsa could feel the mountains’ gravity in her skeleton, each of them pinching her bones in its direction. Yet they were not what Kenneth had parked to show her. Ahead of them the road descended dramatically into a deep bowl between the peaks, so steep that she felt they were hovering high in the sky.
At the bottom of that natural pit shone the lights of Thunderstown.
The first time she had seen those lights had been from a plane a few years back, a passenger aircraft like the one she’d disembarked from tonight. She’d been sitting beside Peter on a second-leg flight, en route to what would prove to be a crappy holiday. He and the other passengers had slept while she leaned her head against the window and watched the night-time world drift by beneath her. And then she’d seen Thunderstown.
Viewed from the black sky, the glowing dots of Thunderstown’s lights formed the same pattern as a hurricane seen from space: a network of interlocked spirals glimmering through the dark. And at the heart of the town an unlit blot – an ominous void like the eye of a hurricane. Peter had despaired because on the first few days of their holiday she’d wanted to do nothing but research the route of their flight, until at last she came upon the town’s name and repeated it over and over to herself like the password to a magic cave.
Kenneth restarted the engine and they began their descent. As they drew closer to the little town, the view slowly levelled, turning the glimmering spiral into an indistinct line of buildings and street lamps disappearing into the distance. Then the road bent around a towering boulder that jutted up from the earth. Its grey bulk hid the approaching town for a second, and the headlights opened up the jaw of the night.
There was something out there in the darkness. She saw it and let out a startled cry.
The lights picked out two animal eyes. Fur and teeth and a tail. Then whatever creature it all belonged to ducked out of the beam and was lost.
‘It’s okay,’ said Kenneth.
‘Was that a wolf?’
He laughed. ‘Just a dog, I think.’
They cleared the boulder and the buildings drew close enough to make out individual windows and doors.
‘Here we are,’ said Kenneth. ‘Home.’ He spoke that word with deliberate heaviness. An invitation as much as a statement. Elsa had never been to Thunderstown, but – sitting bolt upright, wide awake now and stiff with anticipation – she did feel a sense of homecoming.
In the first street they entered many of the houses were boarded up. They were terraced slate cottages, with rotted doors and windows locked by hobnails. ‘Nowadays there are more houses,’ explained Kenneth, ‘than there are people to live in them. We cannot keep them all in good order, especially when the bad weather comes. Nobody lives on this road any more. But don’t worry, we’re not all dead and buried in Thunderstown.’
The car bumped along the road’s broken surface. The final tenements in the street weren’t so derelict, yet there were still no lights inside. It was late at night, but these houses would not be coming to life at dawn. Their doors looked like they could no longer even be opened, shut as tightly as the doors of tombs.
In the next street the houses were taller but still seemed strangely cowed, as if they had been compressed under the weight of the sky. Their walls had been plastered and painted, and outside one front door a lantern fended off the shadows with a reassuring glow. Beside the lantern hung a basket full of wild mountain flowers, winking orange and yellow like the lamplight. The shutters on the ground floor had been flung wide, and through the window Elsa saw a sitting room lit by a chandelier. A thin mother in a nightgown rocked a baby in her arms, and stroked its forehead. It was a welcome sight after all the decay. The mother looked up as the car drove by, as if it were the first motor vehicle in an age of mule-drawn carts.
They passed a bar, the Burning Wick, with outer walls of sooty slate and an interior panelled with caramel wood. A bare light bulb shone inside, but the bar had long since shut for the night and its stools were stacked on its tables. Nevertheless, in the doorway an old man in a raincoat remained, cradling a bottle of something wrapped in brown paper. He wore a leather rain cap, the broad brim of which flopped down at the sides like the ears of a spaniel. He stared up mournfully at Elsa as the car passed, and then the road turned and he vanished from view.
More houses followed, some of their slate fronts painted in muted colours that brought tentative life to the streets. Then the road curved into an enormous square lit by antique lamp posts, save in a few instances where their glass heads had shattered.
Suddenly Elsa gasped. At first she had missed the square’s principal landmark. It loomed so large that her tired eyes must have skipped over it, mistaking it for an intrusion from a dream.
‘The Church of Saint Erasmus,’ whispered Kenneth, and slowed the car down. ‘Patron saint of sailors, among all things.’ He chuckled. He had a habit of closing his sentences with a chuckle instead of a full stop. Elsa wound open the window to poke out her head and look up, then up further.
It was gargantuan, disproportionate to the needs of the tiny town; a massif of stone to rival any cathedral. And it was entirely unlit. The night air around it looked displaced, as if evicted from its rightful position by the immense bulk of the building. She thought of the cathedrals of New York, and how at night their chiselled stone faces were celebrated by brilliant lamps. The Church of Saint Erasmus
was lit by nothing. And she could tell, even in the gloom, that it would be a very different kind of spectacle if it were. Its awe was in its darker-than-nightness, its graceless silhouette, its sad blunt steeple hardly taller than the highest point of its roof, its broad sloping sides built for girth rather than height. More like a titanic pagan megalith than a Christian church.
They turned out of Saint Erasmus Square and drove along more streets of hunched terraces and town houses. She caught some of the names: Auger Lane, Drillbit Alley, Foreman’s Avenue. ‘There were mines here once,’ explained Kenneth. ‘In fact, the whole town is built on them.’
Then they turned into Prospect Street, a name she recognized. Here, at number thirty-eight, Kenneth parked the car and turned off the engine.
It was a four-storey house, crumbling but charming. Kenneth confessed that he spent most of his life in it watching cricket matches on television. He joked that cricket and lashings of rum were all he had cared to hold on to of his old life in St Lucia. The keys he gave her for her room were large and warm, like the hand he clasped around hers when he placed them in her palm. He let go slowly, giving her fingers a squeeze.
‘You are here now,’ he said in a formal voice, clearly aware of how momentous the occasion was for her. A kick of adrenaline perked her up. Yes, here she was. At the start of starting over.
She grinned and left Kenneth smiling after her from the bottom of the stairs, while she ascended to the uppermost floor. Kenneth had explained how he had converted this space into a one-bed apartment some years ago, when his fully grown son came to live here and wanted a place of his own. Here stood the door: a panel of rich, varnished wood like the lid of a treasure chest. She weighed the key in her hand: its head was the size of a medallion and satisfactorily heavy. She pushed it into the lock, pausing to enjoy the tarnished brass of the door handle and the flecks of rust on the hinges, then she reached out, pinched her finger and thumb around the head of the key, and began to twist.
The mechanism of the lock made a noise like a quarter dropped into a wishing well. She opened the door and listened to the hinges sing.
She closed her eyes and remembered all the beds she’d called her own down the years. The bed she’d had as a kid, on which she used to sit with her duvet piled over her, reading with a torch the cloud atlas her dad gave her; the bed in her college dorm that she’d shared with various bugs and boys; the bed in her New York studio, narrow as a pew; Peter’s bed and its soft white sheets; stretches on sofas and floors.
She opened her eyes.
Beyond the door a dark stretch of hallway into which she walked so excitedly that she half-expected the air to crackle. She felt along the wall for the light switch and clicked it on.
The walls were papered grey, with a pattern that might once have been artful but was now as broken as aeroplane contrails. In places the wallpaper peeled up where it reached the skirting boards, which ran around a floor of bare wood. At the end of the hallway hung a full-length mirror in a silver frame, like something from a fairy story.
She left her cases in the hall under a row of coat pegs, took another deep breath and closed the door to shut herself in. On either side of the mirror were two closed doors and she walked down the hallway and opened the one on her left.
So this would be her latest bedroom. A high ceiling, a wide bed with grey sheets and an antique wooden wardrobe. Big enough to fill a whole wall, its doors had been engraved with spiralling patterns that threaded hypnotically around each other. In each outer corner of the door was carved a round-cheeked face, and it was from the puffing lips of these that the swirling patterns originated. She grinned, remembering her dad clowning around in her bedroom when she was very young, flapping his arms and huffing through his impression of the great north wind. She opened the wardrobe to the smell of wood polish and the jingle of dancing coat hangers. A bunch of dried flowers hung upside down from the rail within. She opened her suitcase to unpack her clothes, but immediately had no energy to do so. Unpacking could wait until the morning, although she did deposit the presents her mum had given her (still unwrapped and in their carrier bag) into the wardrobe, before firmly closing the door. She did not want her old life coming with her to Thunderstown, however well intentioned her mother had been.
Back through the hallway, the other door led to a sitting room with a kitchenette crammed into one corner. On a small table, Kenneth had filled a vase with fresh mountain flowers, their florets all buttery yellow. A wicker armchair by the window overlooked a courtyard lit by a lamp post. Beyond its far wall were more houses, and in the distance, a triangle of something darker than the rest of the night. She hoped that the morning would reveal it to be the low spire of Saint Erasmus.
She heard a faint tinkle outside the window and pushed open the glass.
A charm dangled lightly from a rusty nail wedged into the outside sill. She unhooked it and held it in her palm. A medley of trinkets, all bound by a dirty thread: silver-barked twigs; a pair of copper coins with their faces disguised by green patinas; a bent feather and something ... Suddenly she jerked her head away and dropped the charm to the floor. A canine tooth, flecks of blood dried to its roots. She reached down and retrieved it. The tooth clinked against the coins.
She tossed the whole thing out of the window and watched it fall to the courtyard below, where the old twigs snapped on the flagstones.
She yawned and returned to her new bedroom. She permitted herself to test the mattress.
Within moments she was sound asleep.
In the cold dead of night a strange sound at her window awoke her. A snuffling like some wild creature. She rolled over. Probably nothing more than the sounds of an unfamiliar house. Probably just the weather making its night-time noises.
She put it out of her mind, and sleep dragged her back into her dreams.
2
AN EXECUTION
Elsa woke to a bird chirruping on the window sill and a bedroom filled with sunlight. She blinked sleep away and yawned.
Then she remembered she was not in New York.
She propped herself up on her elbows. The clock on the wall had just struck half-past nine. She sank back on to the pillows and smiled. Finally. Finally she was a world away.
When she got out of bed she stood for a while at the window, taking a long look at her corner of Thunderstown. A morning haze made the street look like a faded photograph. A yellow film of sunlight masked every crumbled facade and dusty flagstone. She smiled, washed, dressed and discovered the groceries Kenneth had thoughtfully left in her otherwise empty kitchen. After a breakfast of muesli and an apple that crumbled as sweetly as fudge on her tongue, she ventured out, ready to explore her new home. The haze was lifting, although it still hid the sun in a radiant quarter of the sky. In the east, small clouds marred the blue of the atmosphere, and the warm day seemed powerless to polish them away.
The slopes of the rolling mountains that encompassed Thunderstown had been chewed back by centuries of biting wind, until their naked slate showed through. Where grass or scrub did grow, the late summer had roasted it golden. Dried-out soil had given way to rockslides that had exposed sheer tracts of black and brown earth.
Of these mountains, four imposed themselves on the town beneath, one at each cardinal point of the compass. The largest was a crumple-peaked summit in the east. During her email exchanges with Kenneth, she had excitedly posed every question she could think of about Thunderstown, and he had told her that this massive mountain was named Drum Head. It was particularly dominating due to the way the sun caught its slopes: light threw its rocky sides into a relief like the man in the moon, so that on bright days it wore a gentle and stupefied expression made from untold tonnes of rock.
Opposite Drum Head, in the west, Old Colp climbed in a steep curve like the arched back of a cat. Its slopes were dense with a species of mottled heather that the locals called tatterfur. In the north, Old Colp’s foothills gave way to the ragged lower ranges of the Devil’s Diadem, a m
ountain with no single peak but a cluster, the points of which jabbed upwards like the teeth of a mantrap. Kenneth had said that two centuries back the Devil’s Diadem had been called Holy Mountain, but he had long since forgotten the story of its rechristening. There were too many legends in Thunderstown, he had said, for anybody to remember them all.
The southern mountain was more discreet. A haze shrouded it like smoke around a bonfire. This was the Merrow Wold, piled up with so many boulders and so much stony rubble that it resembled not so much a mountain but the largest cairn ever erected. Goats had made it that way, gnashing at the soil and plant life until the earth shrugged up no more flowers and shoots, only pebbles and slates. The Merrow Wold was the most barren of all the mountains and the hardest to climb; its ground slipped and crunched underfoot like the shingle of a beach.
These four were each too giant to ever be ignored by the little town they cupped between them. Their scale made Elsa feel so slight as she wandered the flowing roads with no fixed destination, letting their tributary alleyways and shadowed passages carry her. She felt at once enclosed, as if in a maze, and exposed, as if on the plains of her childhood. A narrow street would course along between the tall walls of houses, around a tight bend, narrow and narrow further, then terminate in a dead end. Just when she’d begin to think she might wander this labyrinth forever, a sharp turn or a run of steep steps would eject her and she would be released into a brilliantly lit courtyard, wildflowers bursting up between its flagstones. But wherever she found herself, one of the four mountains would always preside.
There were more residents in Thunderstown than first met the eye, but they were furtive, like pill bugs found under a lifted slab. They were absorbed in themselves, always in a hurry to be elsewhere. She couldn’t comprehend their dress code: even in this late-summer warmth the women wore shawls and the men raincoats and broad-brimmed leather caps, as if such garments were the vestments of a religious order.