by Ali Shaw
At last the too-late day came. Her phone call.
‘Please, Daniel, no midwife,’ she gasped down the line. ‘Just you. Listen to me, please. Just you.’
‘Betty ... you need ... I don’t know ...’
‘Please!’
He set off at once, at a run, leaving the hide he had been tanning to spoil.
He found her sitting on her bed. At once she grabbed his forearm and squeezed so hard he felt like the bones inside it would break. She was shivering and sweat-drenched. Daniel piled blankets around her, among them the shawl he’d made, but it did no good. She was freezing cold in the hot room. She ground her teeth to stop them chattering. He saw that a layer of ice had crystallized across the bed sheet. It had tiled the fabric in a snowflake’s hexagonal patterns. Even as he watched (she squeezed his arm harder still) the ice spread and sculpted itself further across the bed. Icicles creaked over the bed posts and stretched for the floor. Networks of frost coated the insides of her thighs. Then there was a thump at the window and a noise like the calling of an animal, or a wind shrieking, and he crossed himself and she arced her neck and shouted and then the baby began to emerge.
‘Help me!’
Daniel went to the foot of the bed and set his jaw. He tried to remember the times in his childhood when he had helped his grandfather birth the livestock. The head came first, covered in a caul of mist. He readied his hands for the body. It followed quickly – so small and so cold, cottoned in cloud and sparkling like hoarfrost. His fingers tacked to it as if to an ice block. It let out a noise like wind wailing across wastelands. The windows shuddered and the door latch shook. ‘My baby,’ cried Betty, and it took a moment for Daniel to realize that she meant the thing he held. He deposited it into her outstretched arms. At once the crying ceased. As she placed the child to her breast, the contact released a hiss like a branding iron cooled in a bucket of water. The smell of burned sugar (for all he knew the smell of hell itself) filled the air. As he stood there, dumbly watching Betty as she held and stroked and soothed, the thing seemed to settle. It took on a guise more like that of a real baby, with true flesh instead of hardened ice. Betty gave a shout of pure delight. Daniel crossed himself.
‘Hello,’ she whispered reverently. ‘Aren’t you wonderful?’ And then she looked up at Daniel and said, ‘A boy, Daniel! And I shall call him Finn.’
5
WILD IS THE WIND
Elsa woke in the early morning to the noise of a wind gusting through Thunderstown. Only when she sat up in bed did she realize that she could no longer hear it, that perhaps she had dreamed it. Through a crack in the curtains she could see the sky filling up with the dull half-light that precedes a hot sunrise. The air had closed in overnight. Inhaling felt like breathing through a veil.
She got out of bed for some water. She drank it at the window, pulling back the curtain to gaze out at the sleeping world. Beyond Drum Head’s horizon it would already be daytime, but the sun had still to labour up the far side of the mountain before its rays could reach Thunderstown. For now the streets enjoyed the last reposeful moments of the night. Even the white flowers growing up through the cracked paving looked like stars set in a stone heaven.
A breeze came in through the open window and licked the fine hairs on her forearm. She shuddered. She had the feeling she was being watched, but outside there was only the view of the rooftops, the motionless weathervanes, the steadily lightening slopes of the mountains. She tried going back to bed, but the discomforting feeling had stirred her wide awake and after a few failed attempts at sleep she made herself coffee and sat by the window to watch the day begin.
When the sunlight came it overflowed Drum Head and rolled downhill to Thunderstown. Walls turned amber and chimney pots gold. Windowpanes lit up with the reflected dawn.
Then, with a start, she realized there was something down there in the courtyard beneath her window. She sprung up from her chair, her coffee dancing in her mug.
As she looked down she saw a wild dog, padding across the flagstones, its brushy tail snaking behind it. It settled down on its haunches and lifted its silvery muzzle to sniff the air. Then it looked straight up at her, its stare inexpressive and animal.
With a cry she pulled shut the curtains. She paced around the bedroom. She slapped herself on both cheeks at once, told herself how stupid she was being, then reopened the curtains an inch.
The dog still sat there, its pink tongue lolling between its incisors and its eyes fixed on her room.
She didn’t know what to do. She poured herself some cereal and stayed away from the window to eat it. She had to put down her spoon when a surge of dread rose up from her toes, overwhelmed her and then was gone again.
Once more she approached the curtains. Her hands trembled so much when she drew them open that the fabric flapped in her grip.
The dog had gone.
With a great sigh of relief she hurried to the bathroom and took a long shower. She dressed and brushed her teeth. Toothpaste dribbled over her lip and pattered into the sink. She buttoned up her jacket and ensured she had packed her keys. She checked the clock. She tried to forget about the dog, just as she had tried to forget about the man she had seen yesterday. After she had come back down from the mountain she had pictured him diffusing into cloud every time she closed her eyes. She had not wanted to be alone, and had bugged Kenneth to share a glass of wine with her.
Today would be her first day in her new job and she needed to hold herself together. She would be helping in a low-key, part-time role at the town’s offices. It was a step down from her job in New York, where she had organized other people’s recipes and fashion tips and inspiring real-life stories for a newspaper’s weekend magazine. It had been more like collage-building than journalism and she had loved that about it: she had been a compiler of all of America’s variety and she had never failed to appreciate it. Only, back then she had been sure of herself. When the cracks started spreading, each hour at her desk became an ordeal. Every story, every snippet, every horoscope and even every word puzzle made her question who she was, confused under the weight of all the people it was possible to be. One mid-summer Monday afternoon she broke down in the office. She found it hard to even work out her notice period.
The job Kenneth had helped her find was exactly the sort of thing she needed. Something to forget about come five o’clock. It was only a short walk to the offices, which stood at the end of a dusty street running west from Saint Erasmus. They rose in a grand old heap of tanned stone, with whiskery grasses poking out of their walls, and culminated in a clock tower that unified the ramshackle wings and annexes beneath, but in which the hands of the clock had frozen long ago. Craning her neck and shielding the climbing sun from her eyes, she could just make out a wooden figure on either side of the face, attached to some kind of clockwork track. The first, a man with a rough beard and broad brimmed hat, a pickaxe held in one hand and in the other a hand bell, thrusting it out into the open air. The second wore black and leaned on a scythe.
Lily, Elsa’s new supervisor, met her in a reception hall panelled with dark wood and hung with row after row of trophy goat heads. Lily was nineteen years old and her jaw wagged when she spoke, as if the things she said were chewing gum. She led the way up a flight of wooden steps that tapped under their heels with hollow echoes, to an office with a small desk allotted to Elsa.
Elsa spent most of the day at an ancient photocopier. There the hours passed so slowly that they seemed measured by the broken clock.
‘So what in the world,’ asked Lily when lunchtime at last arrived, ‘possessed you to move here from New York?’
Lily made it sound so ridiculous that Elsa hesitated. Kenneth had treated her decision with something like reverence, so it surprised her to hear someone question it. But in this shabby office it did indeed seem ridiculous.
‘I ...’ she said, ‘I ...’ She was damned if she would belittle herself; Lily could think she was nuts if she wanted to. ‘I did it
to try to get my head straight. In New York my life just ... accumulated. I didn’t feel like I’d chosen any of it, only wandered into it and just started living it. Then earlier this year some stuff happened and it made me realize that I needed to live a life I had chosen, to be a person I had considered being. So I came here, I suppose, to have the space to find that version of myself.’
Lily looked at her like she thought she was nuts.
When she stepped out of the offices at the end of the day, the shadow of the clock tower lay across the street. She wandered wearily into Saint Erasmus Square to sit on one of the wooden benches that faced the church. The evening heat was stirred with dust that blurred the details from the rooftops and made the sky look used and flat.
She was exhausted, tempted to lie down right there in the square and sleep, but she was determined to make something from the evening that was emerging, blown full of the scent of wood fires. She got up and walked until she discovered a bar called the Brook Horse, which spanned five storeys. It had a glorious, hand-painted sign hanging above the entrance, in which a horse swam underwater, its mane flowing behind it. A grid of eggshell cracks had split the paint, but the deep teal of the water remained vivid. The horse in the sign was no ordinary equine. Instead of hind legs its body streamlined into that of a fish, its tail fanning out gracefully to propel it through the currents.
Each floor of the bar was a cubbyhole joined to the others by a rickety spiral staircase. A group of girls who would never have been served in the States nursed pots of a sticky-looking beer on the ground floor, while on the next a woman in a raggedy shawl sewed behind a bottle of wine. The top storey overflowed on to a lop-sided balcony where Elsa sat to watch the heat haze sandpapering all sharp angles from the rooftops and chimneys. It filled the distance with its dust, and of all the mountains only Old Colp was dark enough to show through it.
She gazed across the street. A weathervane creaked and turned west. In a gutter a crow jabbed at something yellow-feathered. Further off, a wind tugged at washing strung between two rooftops. It pulled loose one sleeve of a shirt and flapped it about as if it were signalling to her.
She clutched her hands to her face. All of a sudden she was raging inside for the magic of yesterday. A man had turned to cloud and rained before her very eyes. She should have knocked that bothy door down to get answers, but instead she had run back to Thunderstown and photocopied reports for eight hours. She had to go back. She had to know.
She set off at an impassioned pace, out of town and up the broken slopes of Old Colp. She thought of all the questions she would ask the man. She wondered if he would transform into a cloud again. Then, abruptly, she was lost.
Her passion sputtered out. She came to a halt so suddenly that she tripped. She had thought she recognized the track, the boulders and the harrowed trees that leaned like signposts, but she had no memory of the view that opened before her now: a valley full of weathered rocks and beyond them the horny foothills of the Devil’s Diadem. She looked back the way she had come at a landscape without milestones. She supposed that dusk was soon due, so she begrudgingly turned to retrace her steps to Thunderstown. Then, to her surprise and horror, the track forked at the base of a valley and she could not remember which path she had come down.
As if in mockery of the morning, when she had watched the sunrise crown Drum Head then rush through the town in a golden outpouring, the dusk was brief and the sunset as fleeting as a smoke signal. A few pink bars flared across the sky while she toiled up the path she hoped would lead her back. Then the light blotted out behind Old Colp’s eclipse. She shuddered. She still had no idea where she was or how to get back. The fierce desire that had driven her up here was gone with the evening light. Nearby an animal yipped, and she couldn’t tell whether it was bird or beast. She scrambled onwards, pleased that the path had started to ascend, hoping that the higher ground would offer her a view she could use, but when she reached the path’s crest she saw only expansive black slopes. In the sky vast clouds had spread like ink spills. The only light was a jaundiced smudge where the sun had died out behind the mountain.
She sat down forlornly on a rock. Darkness drained the land. The visible world became small and black; but beyond sight it echoed with the tuneless symphonies of the wind. She wondered when she had last been so immersed in a night. Not since her last in her childhood home, when she was fifteen and could not sleep because all of her belongings were taped away in boxes, ready to be relocated in the morning to the new house her mum had bought. Her mother had never really liked living on a ranch in the empty prairie, so when she kicked Elsa’s dad out she headed straight back to the city of Norman. It was only when they went to visit the new place, a bright wooden house in a leafy suburb, that Elsa realized how much she loved that ranch in the middle of nowhere. On her final night there, while her mother snored in the adjacent bedroom, she had slipped out of bed and crept downstairs, remembering how she had tiptoed just so as a little girl when she and Dad escaped for morning storm hunts.
That night she had wandered a long distance from the unlit ranch. As she’d sat down on springy earth, the darkness had felt like a sister. The night was kin to the lightless workings of her heart and lungs, the pitch-black movement of her blood in her veins. All of her feelings happened in darkness, in emptiness as immeasurable as the expanse of the firmament above her, of which the stars were but the foreground.
Now, in this night on the mountain, she felt that same darkness inside her again. Without the metropolitan fluorescence of New York she could feel it going into her like a thread through the eye of a needle. It suffused her and reassured her that, lo and behold, it had been in her all along. She was, at heart, just as empty as the night, and despite being so lost she was grateful for the rediscovery.
When the animal call sounded again it startled her out of herself. It howled nearer now and there could be no doubt – it was a wild dog. All at once it appeared. It prowled into the cusp of her vision. Even a few yards away its body was hard to pick out. Its fur was as dark as the night clouds. Its teeth when it bared them were moon-pale. Its eyes were freckled with white like the zodiac.
It padded to a halt and stood in front of her, panting and staring up along the length of its snout.
‘Hello,’ she whispered pathetically.
Its tongue flickered across its nose. It slinked past her and trotted away a few paces. There it paused and looked back, idly swishing its tail.
She stood up, hesitated for a second, then followed. It loped along at a fast pace, and in her attempts to keep up she stubbed her toes painfully on a stone and tripped through a rut in the earth. It kept moving, weaving down through pathless valleys and up slopes she had to ascend on all fours. When she reached the top of a peak she shrieked to find the dog lurking in wait for her, its muzzle point-blank to her face, its breath rancid and meaty. Then she realized that beyond the dog, at the bottom of a long and easy descent, shone the lights of Thunderstown.
She laughed to see their glowing amber spiral, so welcoming after having been so lost. Then for a second she had to shield her eyes because out of nowhere a blast of wind hit her, kicking up dust from the soil and flapping her hair against her ears. This wind did not smell fresh like an alpine breeze, but grimy like feral fur. Then it was gone and she uncovered her eyes. She turned to the dog to pat or scratch her thanks, but it had already left her. Surprised, she studied the night in every direction. It must have run off, into the darkness.
6
PART WEATHER
The next morning, when she left for work, Elsa found Kenneth Olivier standing on a garden chair in the front yard of his house on Prospect Street, holding a battery-powered radio up to the sky like an offering. To its aerial he had affixed an extension bent from a coat hanger, which he now reached up to tweak an inch to the left. The adjustment changed the tone of the static crackling from the radio’s speakers, but still all it would emit was a crackle and a hiss.
‘Oh, hello, Elsa
,’ he said upon noticing her. He kept the radio held aloft. ‘It’s the heat we’ve been having, see? It’s playing the devil with the reception for the test match. The television’s a lost cause and the radio looks to be another.’
She had slept badly, and once she had given in and left the pretence of her sleep, it had taken her five minutes to pluck up the courage to open the curtains, afraid to find another wild dog crouching there in the courtyard. When she had finally opened them the courtyard had been bare, but her unease had persisted.
‘Elsa?’ Kenneth put down the radio. ‘Are you feeling okay?’
‘Yeah,’ she said. Then, after a pause: ‘I wanted to ask you about something. This might sound crazy, but ... I keep seeing these dogs ...’ And she told him about the animals, the one who had lurked in the courtyard yesterday morning and the one who had guided her last night. She didn’t tell him about the man she’d seen, although she could tell he was concerned by her ventures in the mountains after dark.