by Ali Shaw
Further uphill, the path led around a shoulder of the mountain that obscured the town. All signs of civilization were erased. Dark slates sat up like rabbits between the parched grasses and occasional contorted tree. Several times she glimpsed real hares, or rodents she didn’t quite recognize, hopping after shady burrows. Then later she saw her first Thunderstown goat, a stony white creature with horns that doubled its height, peering down at her from a natural turret of boulders. It brayed as she passed, and the noise was like the echoes of long-gone landslides.
From this height she could see the rest of the mountain range, running in a jutting line of yellow and brown like an animal jawbone still full of sharp teeth. Caught between some of those peaks were twists of grey and white cloud, and when at one point she passed along a valley top, she saw a puff of mist climbing the far slopes, as sprightly as one of the goats.
When she came to the windmill it was indeed ruined. A piebald cylinder of bleached plaster and blackened stone, prized open in places by the weather. Between the path and the ruin stretched a meadow of springy brown grass, across which it looked as if a storm had blown apart the mill as if with dynamite. Some thirty feet from the main structure a broken-off sail arm had been fastened to the ground by the grass. A layer of something covered it, as dried out and leathery as a gourd. The stained canvas of the sail itself stuck hard and dark to the frame.
As a viewpoint it was everything she’d hoped it would be, offering an unparalleled panorama of Thunderstown and the surrounding mountains. They leaned in above the roofs below like card players around a table. She inhaled, and the air going into her was so clarified compared to that of the city that she burst out laughing. What relief, that her plan had come good like this. Not since she first moved to New York had a change of place so delighted her. Back then she had felt drunk at the sheer sight of Manhattan, its chaos and its possibility. This time she had feared that relocating was what her mum had warned it was: escapism. She had never been good at knowing the difference between running away and running forwards and she reckoned that with her they were probably one and the same thing. When faced with any challenge or fear she knew only to run, and only in retrospect could she tell whether she had charged in headlong or fled for her life. She wondered if this was what her dad had really meant when he described himself as weather-powered. To be in constant upheaval. Finally, she turned away from the view to investigate the ruin. An assortment of cogs and ratchets poked out of its snapped top, growing red dreadlocks of rust. She walked its circumference and found, covered in mosses that brushed loose with the lightest motion, a door so small it came up only to her breastbone. She tried the handle, assuming it would be locked, but it budged an inch before wedging against its own frame. Age and water had bent it out of shape, but she shoved it hard and it lurched open.
She ducked through the door and forced it closed behind her, its woodwork groaning as she did so. Inside the ruin it was cool, and beautifully lit by beams of sunlight bouncing between the rusted gears and splintered timbers above her. It felt like entering a shipwreck. Brighter light shone in thin shafts through chinks in the wall, drawing glowing threads in the air. Knobs of fungus protruded from bricks and beams, steeped in the orange pigment of the rust that fed them.
She stood there enjoying the noise of the fluting breeze in the decrepit mechanisms above her. She soaked up the atmosphere. She lost track of time.
Then she heard a voice.
When she got over her surprise, she tiptoed to the wall and peeked out through one of the chinks in the masonry.
A man was standing there on the grass, taking in the view of Thunderstown.
The first striking thing about him was that he was there at all. The second was that he was not only bald but entirely hairless. He had a bony, wary face without any eyebrows, eyelashes or any indication of stubble. Despite this lack of hair he still looked young, and she guessed he was several years her junior, probably twenty-three or twenty-four. He stood firmly over six feet tall and was broadly built, but his size came from neither muscle nor fat. She had the impression that his body was more like that of a sea lion, as if it were a design from a different habitat in which, if it were to return there, its shapelessness would be its grace.
He wore a shirt with the cuffs rolled up, jeans worn through at the knees and a pair of shoes so battered that his toes poked out through open lips. She had no idea how long he’d been standing there. He was all alone and talking to himself. ‘I wonder what would happen to me,’ he said, ‘if I just let go?’
His voice was slow and nasal and deep. He looked at the windmill for a second and she caught a full view of his face and drew back from her spyhole. His eyes were close together, deep and dark. His nose was smooth and straight like a piece of folded paper. She hoped he couldn’t see her through the tiny crack in the wall.
He began to pace around on the grass, moving with light grace despite his size. He stopped for a moment to gaze down at the town made miniature beneath the mountain and as he did so he looked forlorn, as if he were marooned on a desert island and staring out to sea. ‘There’s only one way,’ he said, ‘to find out.’
He took a deep steadying breath and ran his hands back over his bald scalp. He bent his back and stared up at the sky. His evident distress made Elsa feel guilty about spying. She wondered if she could sneak out of the mill and away down the mountain path, so as to allow him the privacy he must surely have come up here to find.
Then the man began to undress. Elsa looked away out of instinctive politeness, but after a moment looked back.
He disrobed methodically. With light fingers he unbuttoned his shirt and tossed it to the grass. He tugged undone the buckle of his belt, then the zipper of his fly, then kicked off his trousers. He pulled down and stepped out of his underwear.
His body was as smooth as a weathered pebble on the sea shore. He had very little complexion: he was not so much a white man as a grey one. He had a flat pair of buttocks and skin as hairless as that of his head.
He stood on the ridge between her viewpoint and the sun. His tall body was an eclipse and the light was a corona behind it. He spread his arms to strike a pose of dejected surrender.
Then, very gradually, he began to dissolve.
Like chalk washed into a blur by the rain, his outline began to distort, and almost imperceptibly he lost his form. One minute he was a man and the next he was a blurry grey silhouette. His skin became a coat of mist. The sun shining from behind him lit him up and edged him with its brilliance, wherein he stopped looking man-shaped and instead resembled a cloud formed by chance into the posture of a human being.
He broke up. His head caved in, becoming nothing more than a dented sphere of fog. His chest tore apart and the blue sky and bright sun shone through the place where his heart should have been. He disintegrated, every second less like a man and more like a cloud.
She yelled wordlessly. She fought the windmill door for a panicked, precious second, then rushed out across the meadow. She slowed to a halt only a few paces from the cloud. She had no idea what she was doing; she was only aware of her heart pounding in her ears.
‘Please wait,’ she whispered.
The cloud flickered with light. She jumped backwards in alarm. A fine filigree of electricity shivered through the vapour. For a second she thought it made up the shapes of arteries, the network of a person’s veins. Then in a shimmer the lightning was gone.
She reached up to her cheek because something cool and moist had touched it.
Rain. It was scattering out of the cloud in a drizzle.
In her bewilderment she had forgotten to breathe. She gulped for air and in doing so let out a pent-up cry.
Then the cloud began to contract. It puckered backwards into shape. Its ragged outline either dispersed in the air or else smoothed down into flesh, covering once again a frame of arms and legs. It rebuilt the man she had spied on, and when he returned into definition he coughed and screwed up his eyes. He teete
red off balance before doubling up to spew crystal-clear water on to the grass.
He whimpered, and she could tell that for the first time he was aware of her presence, and consequentially, that he was entirely naked in it. After a moment – she was still shocked – she remembered enough formality to look away while he retrieved his clothes. She heard his drenched jeans squelching on.
She turned back to him as he buttoned up his shirt. ‘Um ...’ she began, but had no idea what to say. ‘Um, what ...’ Her heart was thumping. ‘What just happened?’
He didn’t reply. He looked as if he didn’t know how to.
‘What, I mean ... oh my God, are you all right?’
He nodded. He licked his lips. His irises were grey, and tinged with the same moody purple as a thundercloud. ‘I can’t explain.’
She gaped at him. She felt like she deserved an explanation. A raindrop dangled on his chin. Two more hung from his earlobes. ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘that I’m not going mad.’
He looked down awkwardly at the grass, the leaves of which balanced so many caught raindrops that it looked as if a diamond necklace had broken there. ‘I can’t tell you anything,’ he muttered.
‘But ... but ... I saw you ...’
‘I let go. There, now you know. I let go. Then I heard you calling to me and that made me come back.’
The drip on his chin fell free and dashed off the broken lip of one of his shoes. In the distance of the sky behind him, a flake of cloud was blowing north, towards the saw-toothed heights of the Devil’s Diadem. A moment ago, she thought, you were a cloud just like that.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
He bit his lip. ‘I’m not sure we should be having this conversation. You shouldn’t be talking to me. We should be frightened of each other.’
She pressed her hands over her worried heart. ‘I am frightened!’
He deflated. Now he sounded crestfallen. ‘Really? For a moment I thought that you weren’t. I’m sorry I frightened you. Am I really frightening?’
She felt dizzy and had to sit down and stare at the grass, where a little golden ant was nibbling through a leaf. She felt as if, in that instant, the world had grown as limitless as it must appear to an insect. ‘I’m going crazy, aren’t I?’
‘No. I explained. I let go.’ He waited for a moment, and then he began to fidget. When he spoke again he sounded alarmed. ‘Please don’t tell anyone in Thunderstown that you’ve met me.’
She rubbed her eyes. ‘It was as if I saw you turn into a cloud.’
‘Yes. Yes, that’s exactly what you did see. And you have to promise never to tell a soul.’
‘I don’t think anybody would believe me.’
‘They might. In Thunderstown, they might. And they might try to get me.’ Again he became worried. ‘I should go now.’ He hesitated, then began to walk away from her.
‘Wait!’
He looked back.
She stood up. ‘You can’t just go. Not after that!’
He looked at her sadly, opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something else, then turned and kept on walking across the meadow.
‘Hey! Wait! Hey!’ She stomped after him. ‘What am I supposed to do now?’
‘Just ... leave me alone, okay? Pretend you never met me. Go back to doing, I don’t know, whatever you were doing up here in the first place.’
She stood there, stupefied in the sunlight, watching him walk downhill towards a stretch of the mountain full of furrows and knotted boulders. Three times, lately, life had so surprised her that she felt as if the planet itself had stopped spinning. First the news of her dad’s death, then Peter’s unexpected proposal, then – perhaps strangest of all – a startled minute during which she had watched a man become a cloud.
When, at the bottom of the meadow, the bald man reached the place where the path veered out of sight, he paused for a second and looked back at her over his shoulder. Then he vanished around a stack of boulders.
No sooner had he gone than she felt the urge to run, although she didn’t know whether she should bolt for the safety of Kenneth’s house or chase the man to get some answers. For a long minute she stood on the spot, held perfectly taut by two opposing forces. But she did not want to wonder about him forever. She set off in pursuit, the soft ground putting a spring into each pace. Past the boulders the path dropped into a gully, in which there were a great many squares and triangles of slate, but no sign of the man. Then she spotted a wet blot on one of the stones, then another, and since the sky was bare she reasoned that these must have come from his soaked clothes. She followed their direction until their clues dried up, then pressed on until she came out on to smoother slopes that were scattered with lonely trees and heads of rock. Here she stopped with her hands on her hips, surveying the mountain for some sign of him.
As she paused she saw a little house built from uneven stacks of slate and tiles, camouflaged by the shadow of a gnarly old bluff it backed up against. It was a bothy, a tiny bungalow, with just one door and one window, a wilderness shelter similar to the ones she had seen in the Ouchita Mountains, which provided mountaineers and rangers with emergency reprieve from the weather.
She approached it cautiously, for she felt sure the man would be inside. Its walls were plugged up with warty grey lichens, except for in one corner which was furred with a moss as orange as a mango. It had a stubby chimney bearing the most delicate weathervane she had seen since arriving in Thunderstown: a fox or wolf with paws stretched out mid-leap and snout raised to scent the wind. Above it the vane branched out into art nouveau curves that drew, in iron, the shape of a cloud.
She knocked on the door but got no reply, so tried the handle and found it to be locked. She thumped the wood with the flat of her palm. ‘Hey!’ she yelled. ‘Can we talk some more?’
No answer, so she went to the window and peered in.
Someone had clearly been living there, although right now she could see nobody inside. Instead there was a table with a plate on it, and on the plate was the core of a pear, brown but not yet rotten. There were two chairs, and most remarkably given her initial assumption that this was a shelter and not a home, there were mobiles hanging from the ceiling. She twisted her head to try to get a clear view. The ceiling was thick with them. Dangling configurations of wire hung with white paper birds.
‘Hey!’ she yelled again, tapping on the glass. For a moment she considered breaking it, and turned around to locate a stone, but then a cold wind blew past her and she thought she heard a bark. She looked back up the mountain and saw a silver-furred animal slinking over a heap of rocks in the near distance. It vanished into a ditch before she could get a good view of it, and it did not re-emerge. Still, it had made her feel uncomfortable, and she chewed her thumbnail.
Then, because it was the only way to feel safer, she turned and picked her way back towards Thunderstown.
4
A HISTORY OF CULLERS
It had been many days since Daniel Fossiter had last seen Finn Munro, the strange and weather-filled young man whom he protected in secret. Daniel had been to the bothy on Old Colp once or twice in that time, but had found the stone shelter to be empty. Probably Finn was out wandering the mountains, or lurking in one of his many dens in the foothills, and Daniel had been relieved not to have had to endure one more awkward encounter with him.
He trudged now down the path from the dusty Merrow Wold, with a dead goat slung over his broad shoulders. He had shot fifteen that morning, before the winds started digging at the shingly soil and clawing up swathes of dust that trapped him for hours in their powdery fog. By the time he had picked his way clear the best of the afternoon was behind him, but he was untroubled. It excused him from looking in on Finn for one more day. Because it was tough, just being around him. He and Finn were two leftover corners of a triangle that could no longer be drawn.
Eight years had passed since Finn’s mother left Thunderstown, during which time Finn’s voice had deepened and he h
ad grown taller even than Daniel. Yet being a man was about more than gender and age. That was something Daniel’s father and grandfather had always been at pains to remind him of.
He sighed and adjusted the weight of the goat on his shoulders. The gravelly earth of the Merrow Wold crunched under his boots. Every step required his concentration, for centuries of ravenous goats had turned this soil into a slide of rubble. People had fallen to their deaths on the gentle inclines; all it took was one slip, and they would find themselves skidding and rolling down a mountainside that offered no friction or solid space to arrest their fall. They would be scraped and grated apart by pebbles.
‘Betty,’ he whispered. It did not lessen, his ache for her, even after those eight years. His grandfather would have mocked him for it. His father would have turned away in resigned disappointment.
On the morning she left Thunderstown, Betty had appeared at his door and asked him to look after Finn. ‘Take care of him for me,’ she’d said. ‘You’re the only one I trust to do it. And anyway, I’ll be back soon.’ As if there were any chance he might forget her, she sealed the request with a kiss to his lips. Often he lay awake at night remembering that kiss, the lightness of her skin, the smell of her lipstick, the tension in the muscles of her neck as she went up on tiptoes to reach him. Sometimes it seemed that the only thing in the world worth holding on to was the memory of that kiss.
Anything anyone could call ‘soon’ had long since passed. Eight years with no sight or sound was not ‘soon’. All the same, he could not be angry, for to be angry with her he would have to conclude that she had deliberately not written or called, and he could not bear the thought that she might have discarded him so casually. Then again, he could not bear the alternative, which was that something had befallen her to prevent her from making contact, and so he did his best to skirt around such speculation. All he could allow himself was this simple, painful, longing for her return.