by Ali Shaw
The wind stalked Elsa through the town, brushing over her face and bare arms before dying away and leaving the air still. Otherwise it danced at crossroads and raised miniature whirlwinds out of the dust of poky courtyards, so that it did not feel like one wind but many, each wrestling to claim its own space and territory. At a stall where a butcher sold dried meats, the wind played the part of his assistant, brushing the purpling flesh of his meats free of flies. In another place the wind helped a woman hang out her laundry, unfurling the smocks and breeches she took from her basket to hang on the line.
In one of his emails, Kenneth had potted as best he could the town’s history. He had told her of a devastating flood that once ransacked these buildings. In the dry Thunderstown streets it was difficult to imagine water bucking and roaring between the houses, but Kenneth said that great fathoms of old floodwater still lurked deep and dormant beneath the lanes and alleyways, filling old tunnels where once miners had toiled. Elsa pictured this undertow as she explored, pretending it determined her course, and in doing so she made a discovery: all of the town’s roads led back to the Church of Saint Erasmus. She had to tread with determination to avoid circling back there. Streets that first appeared to bypass the church turned a corner at the last minute and offered her up to it.
Another fact remembered from her email education was that, not so long ago, an excavation in Saint Erasmus’s vaults had unearthed evidence of older buildings on the site, thought to be long-lost temples to long-forgotten deities. When next her route returned her to the church, she had the spine-tingling sensation that the distant past remained close in this place. She stared up at the bluntly steepled belfry and its crucifix dark as two crossed sticks of charcoal. It was the centrepiece of an array of metalwork adorning Thunderstown’s rooftops. Weathervanes in their hundreds glinted from the ridges, some depicting bestial figures, some depicting human faces with lips pursed to blow forth a breeze. Winds skipped nimbly from eave to eave, tinkering with the weathervanes as they went, like engineers toying with the dials of a complex machine.
She began to walk around the edge of the church. Then, up ahead against one of its walls, she saw a small crowd of people, all raincoats and shawls, making quite a hubbub. When she reached them, one or two heads turned to regard her, but the thing they were crowded around seemed more pressing. People murmured to each other in low, serious voices. ‘Hold my hand,’ asked someone of their partner. ‘I can’t bear it,’ confessed someone else. ‘Whenever will Daniel be here?’ ‘Yes, where’s Daniel?’ Elsa budged into the throng to see what the fuss was all about. A creature cowered against the blackened church wall. A dog, growling uncertainly, frightened by the townsfolk who had backed it up against the stone. Elsa couldn’t tell the breed, but it was something akin to an Irish wolfhound: tall and of elegant limb, with a tousle-haired coat and silver whiskers. Its snout and ears were fox-like and she was surprised by the coincidence of its eyes, which were blue and brown-grey, just like today’s sky and indefinite clouds.
The beast wore no collar, and judging by the dried dirt in its fur, Elsa guessed it was either a stray or wild. It did not seem to pose any threat, yet when it moved even a fraction towards the crowd, a man swished his walking cane so violently that it whimpered back against the masonry.
A sigh of relief rippled through the crowd and the people parted for a tall man in a broad-brimmed rain cap to pass. He had a black beard, dark eyes and a Roman nose. He carried his large frame with an authority affirmed by the gathered townsfolk, who all relaxed upon his arrival. His coarse beard began at his cheekbones and hung in black straggles down to his nape. In addition to his rain cap, which he removed as he approached the dog, he wore scuffed britches, high leather boots and a brown chequered shirt with the sleeves rolled up, showing off his brawny forearms.
The dog stopped very still upon seeing him, as if in recognition. The man crouched down so that his head was level with the dog’s, whisker to whisker. He stared for a while into its peculiar eyes, then began to make a deep rumbling noise in his throat like the sound of a distant rockslide. The dog seemed relieved, bowed its head and then pushed it forwards, nuzzling it against the man’s chest. The man’s arms came up gently to hold the dog, one hand stroking along the flat space between its ears, the other itching the soft fur hanging from its throat.
Then his grip turned a right angle and the dog’s neck snapped with a click.
The crowd took a step back, leaving Elsa foregrounded and shocked. The man stood up, punched his hat back into shape and squashed it on to his head. He crossed himself. The crowd followed suit, then gave him a brief ripple of applause while the dog’s corpse flopped on the flagstones.
It lay there staring hollowly up at Elsa while she stared back in horror and disbelief. Then, as she tried to comprehend what she had just seen, a strange thing happened. Its blue eyes darkened. Its irises changed colour like paper blistering in a fire. In seconds they had charred from sky blue to singed black. A sudden breeze passed over and she shivered from confusion and fright all at once.
One or two of the crowd thanked the bearded man or clapped him on the shoulder. Then they disbanded with satisfied chatter, as if exiting a theatre.
The tall man crouched over the dead body, lifted it off the dusty floor by its ears, then hefted the carcass over his shoulder and stood up. The last of the crowd had dispersed. Elsa was alone with him, uneasy but indignant. It was the first time she had seen someone murder an animal for no reason. The man turned towards her quizzically, dog draped around his neck.
‘Ma’am,’ he said, and ducked his head in a half-bow.
‘What ... why ...’ she began. ‘What did you just do?’
‘It was wild, ma’am,’ he said, as if it were self-explanatory. He tried to step around her, but she sidestepped to block him.
‘You should have taken it out of town or to a kennel ... or ... or something!’
He frowned. He seemed to her more like something blasted from rock than something that could grow up from a child. She stood her ground nevertheless.
‘You are distressed by this?’ He sounded confused.
She nodded as if he were stupid, but his voice was gentler than she’d expected and he seemed to be giving serious if bemused thought to her position, all the while with the corpse lolling over his shoulders and the dog’s changed eyes upturned in their sockets.
‘It was wild,’ he pronounced again.
‘It’s –’ she flapped her hands, ‘– it was a living thing!’
He frowned, like he was preparing to disagree, but instead he said, ‘You are not from Thunderstown? I would know you and your family if you were. But it is a pleasure to see a new face here.’
She clenched her fists. ‘Where I’m from has nothing to do with it.’
The dog’s drooping tongue and dangling legs were becoming too much, as was the man’s thoughtful face amongst all that dead fur.
‘My name is Daniel Fossiter,’ he said softly, ‘and I am pleased to meet you.’
‘Elsa,’ she snapped, then felt all the more infuriated for becoming even this familiar with this cruel man.
‘I should explain, Elsa, about this particular species of—’
She raised her palm to him, defiantly. It was a gesture she hadn’t made since high school, where it meant she didn’t want to hear what he had to say, but in the wide church square Daniel Fossiter only looked intently at her palm as if he were reading it. Embarrassed, she cringed away as fast as she could. Only at the end of the road did she look back, to see him watching her patiently, the dog still slung over his shoulders as if it weighed no more than the air itself.
By the time she returned to Kenneth’s house she still hadn’t recovered her cool. The stairs to her apartment passed the door to his sitting room, which he had left open as he loafed on the sofa, watching a cricket match. He had pulled the curtains closed to keep the sun’s glare from the television screen, but the light was too strong and brightened the room reg
ardless, projecting the fabric’s peach hue on to every surface.
Kenneth had kept the furnishings simple: a plain bookcase full of yellow-spined almanacs and a cushioned footstool in front of his deep two-seater sofa. The empty seat of that sofa was as smooth as new, but when he stood to greet her, a depression remained where he’d been sitting, imprinted by years of cricket-watching. Elsa might have thought him lazy, had not one final detail of the room given her a hint of an explanation. On top of the television was a framed photograph of a young black man, probably the same age as Elsa, wearing an orange t-shirt and jeans. He had been snapped in the middle of a fit of laughter. His hands were plastered all over with clay, a large quantity of which appeared to have just that moment exploded across his body.
‘He was a potter,’ said Kenneth, noticing Elsa’s attention to the photo. ‘Michael. My wonderful son.’
Before Elsa could say anything he frowned and tugged open a curtain. The sunlight, which had seemed so powerful projecting through the curtains, turned coy through the glass, making only the window sill lambent. Then, as clouds moved across the sun, the room became darker than it had been before.
‘You look mighty unhappy, Elsa.’
She told him about the dog.
He listened with the comforting expression of a counsellor, which made his response all the more surprising. ‘Elsa, I don’t want to upset you further, but you must understand. It is good that the dog was killed. Such dogs bring foul luck to the town.’
‘Foul luck? It was just a dog! A beautiful dog with blue eyes!’
‘Ahh, yes.’ Kenneth chuckled awkwardly. ‘The eyes, you see, are the giveaway. Find one of those wild dogs at sunset and its eyes will be pink or red.’
Elsa remembered the way the blue had charred out of them upon death. It made her shiver and fold her arms.
‘Tell me, Elsa. The man who killed it, was he tall? With a black beard?’
‘Yeah, that was him. Daniel something-or-other.’
‘Daniel Fossiter. That man is very well respected in Thunderstown. His family have been cullers as far back as anyone can remember. It would be wise to remain in his good books.’
‘Cullers?’
‘Mostly he kills mountain goats. He keeps the population in check to stop them destroying the plants or wandering down into town. Believe me, they will eat anything they can lay their teeth on. But his role is also a ceremonial one. Daniel is expected to kill other ...’ he faltered, ‘creatures, too.’
She pictured Daniel Fossiter again. There had been an air of power about him that felt animalistic. Like a lion in the wilderness. Not wicked like a human being could be, but menacing by nature nevertheless. ‘I didn’t like him.’
‘To tell you the truth, Elsa, I must admit that I too am sometimes uneasy around him.’
‘Yeah. Exactly. Uneasy.’
She went upstairs to her apartment and sat in the wicker chair looking out across the rooftops. The clouds were all oblong lumps, nothing more than blockages to the daylight. She had liked Thunderstown better before she had encountered Daniel Fossiter in it and she wished she had not chanced upon him. She could use a day without uneasiness.
There had been no such day all summer. After her dad’s funeral she had felt like she was a vase full of hairline fractures, straining to contain water. Then, one day, a month ago now, the pressure finally became too much to bear. One final crack had branched through her and she had shattered into a thousand pieces.
Peter had done it. Lord knows he was probably still searching his soul over it, for she had not been able to explain to him that she had been breaking for a long time and this was just the tipping point. She hoped he would get over it quickly. He deserved that much.
His idea had been a long weekend outside of the city. ‘Let’s take a tent and head out west. A breath of fresh air might do you good.’ He’d organized everything, and when they made their camp late on a sunny afternoon in a woodland glade in Pennsylvania she thought yes, this is precisely the good I need. Resting her head on his shoulder, watching the flames play among the cindered logs of the fire they had built, she took deep breaths of the timber smoke and felt the luxurious heat of the late lazy sun, the quick heat from the flames and the inner heat she’d absorbed from the bottle of red wine they’d shared as they set the logs to burning. Peter opened another bottle, freed the cork with a whoop and filled her glass. The leaves swayed, feather-light. Two squirrels whirled from trunk to trunk. A bird whistled as it flapped through the glade. And then he did the thing that broke her.
‘Elsa,’ he said, as he reached into the pocket of his jeans. He pulled his fist out, clenched around something. He opened his hand and a ring lay there in his palm.
‘Elsa ... will you marry me?’
She stared at that small golden loop. Its diamond eye stared back. Her eyes followed the band’s circumference, round and round and round. When she picked it up the world seemed suddenly very heavy. Leaves and blades of grass lay flattened, weighty as ornaments. She looked through the ring as if it were a spyglass and saw the woods leaning in, the twigs scratching, the bird leering beady-eyed from a bent branch. Her stomach lurched. The world changed, realigning like a dial.
‘Elsa?’
She dropped the ring back into Peter’s palm and choked back a sudden barrage of tears.
His eyebrows knotted. ‘Elsa ... Elsa, I love you.’
She wept. When they had first started dating they had agreed with cool cynicism that love was just chemical flushes and electrical signals flowing through the brain, something tacky that belonged in souvenir shops. ‘Love,’ she had declared once to Peter, ‘is just the heart on an I Heart NYC baseball cap.’ And he had agreed with her.
Yet here and now he was deadly serious about it, down on his knees and looking up at her.
And she did not love him, even if she cared for him deeply, and she did not know whether she even believed in love, and she had lost her father, and she wanted to go like he had, up with the tornado to see him in whichever place he had left the earth for, and she could not explain that to Peter and could not explain why she was falling apart like this, and she did not know anything about herself any more.
3
CLOUD ON THE MOUNTAIN
The next morning, in the scorched front yard, Elsa found Kenneth Olivier hard at work digging out weeds with a trowel. He stood up straight when he saw her, dusting the bleached soil from his fingertips.
‘Off exploring again?’
She nodded. She had her sunglasses and a thick layer of sunscreen on, as well as a water bottle in a bag hanging against her hip. ‘I’m going up to the mountains.’
He looked reflective. ‘Which one?’
She paused, then pointed. ‘That one.’ Three of the four peaks were visible from here. The fourth, the Merrow Wold, was hidden behind a low cloud in the south. The rest of the sky remained an unbroken blue, but that cloud above the Merrow Wold was bleached like ash. In the north the broken pinnacles of the Devil’s Diadem glimmered in the sunlight, while to the east the face of Drum Head was slowly emerging. Elsa, however, pointed to the western mountain, the hump-backed rise with slopes as dark as soot.
‘Old Colp,’ said Kenneth.
‘Yeah, that’s the one. On your map it says there’s a viewpoint. Near to a windmill, if my map-reading’s any good.’
‘Hmm. That windmill’s not there any more. The wind it was milling saw to that.’ He chuckled uneasily. ‘Be careful up there. These mountains are full of old mine entrances. Some of them are only half-sealed.’
‘Don’t worry. I might look like a city girl, but I grew up in a spot even more remote than this.’
He nodded, although she could tell she hadn’t convinced him. He looked embarrassed. ‘I beg your pardon, Elsa, I’m just an old man, fretting. I’ve been fretting a lot ever since Michael went away.’
She put a finger to her lips. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ She moved towards the street then paused. ‘Where did he go?
Your son, Michael?’
He smiled. It was an awkward, unhappy smile. ‘I wish I knew the answer to that question. All I know is he went out for a walk in the mountains.’ He cleared his throat. ‘There is a bit of local folklore about how these mountains come to be here. It is said that, long ago, four storms became weary from whipping and raging through the air. So they came to settle on the earth, right here, to rest for a while. They soon fell asleep, and while they slept they began to crust over and calcify. By the time they awoke, the four storms of the sky were rock, welded solid to the ground. It’s a superstitious way of explaining that there are places up in the mountains that aren’t as stable as they look. Places, as the story would have it, that have kept something of their stormy origins. We found Michael’s clothes folded on the bank of a mountain lake. That was the last we knew of him. We dived and dived to try to find his body, but he had just ... vanished.’ He sighed and rubbed his brow. ‘I am sorry, Elsa. Now I have made it tough for you to go up there. But you must because you want to and the views are magnificent. And you will be perfectly safe, of course.’
‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘to hear all of that.’ She had hoped to offer more sympathy, but no sooner did she think about her own loss than a lump filled her throat.
Kenneth chuckled sadly and retrieved his trowel. ‘Thank you. Now you enjoy your walk, and don’t worry about any of these things.’
The lower reaches of Old Colp were covered in tussocks of grey grass or knotted heather in coarse carpets. Blossoms flowered in the tangle, and Elsa assumed they must be poisonous because the mountain goats had left them alone.
Halfway up the foothills she stopped to admire the view of the town below. The sun found the metal of the manifold weathervanes and lit them up like a bay of prayer candles. Still the windows of the Church of Saint Erasmus remained indomitably dark. The sky had sullied, thanks to the dusty cloud she had seen earlier above the Merrow Wold, which had now smeared itself northwards across the heavens.