The Unlucky Man

by H T G Hedges

  It was simple coincidence that put Horst on the team that went into the mountains to investigate the hunters’ tale. There were four of them in the team and an additional two attached as a security detail, hard men, armed and silent. This was no war zone, barely a day away from one of the most populous cities in the country, but it paid to be cautious.

  By the time Horst reached the site, the advance security had already arrived and hoisted their mobile lab. It was a basic tunnel shaped structure constructed out from domed lengths of lightened metal and stretched waterproof plastic wrap. A second smaller bunk house tunnel was attached to the back, accessible though a partition door. The whole thing looked a lot like a green-house, like you might use to grow tropical flowers in colder climates.

  At first light they had set off into the mountains to search for the well the hunters had spoken of. They had constructed their shelter at the farthest point a vehicle could take them and so they set off on foot, boots crunching on frost in the cold of the morning. All around the wild scenery brooded with an unwelcoming, untamed violence and, despite the early hour for the days were growing short, the light seemed to have trouble reaching the paths they trod where grass grew thick and tangling and dark, almost brackish green. Sharp rocks seemed to jut out at them from impossible angles, snagging at clothing and tripping feet whilst thorns and brambles grew everywhere, snaking their way across the path and scratching suddenly and unexpectedly at faces. To Horst it seemed like the land was rejecting them, objecting to their intrusion, protecting its secrets from their prying eyes.

  But, at last, they found what they were searching for and the mood of the party, which had been growing strained, gained a perceptible lift. It was a plateau, almost perfectly flat, and bisected by a plunging chasm stretched between two rock walls. They approached cautiously, all of them, the two security men with weapons slightly raised, and looked down into the sleeping darkness.

  Things started to go sour almost straight away. By the time night fell the team had spent several long hours in the clearing, forcing them to make their way back to camp under the cover of darkness. It was a long journey, the rock around them pressing in darkly on all sides, their headlamps casting pools of light around them that seemed to work only to make the night beyond seem all the darker. Strange noises carried to them on the breeze which in itself seemed to have grown colder and more biting than it ought in the passing of just one day, as if winter had descended in one swoop.

  Loulac, one of the security team, had grown ever jumpier as the day waned and the shadows grew, wandering off and staring for long intervals into the undergrowth, or stopping speaking and listening intently as if he had heard something untoward in the surrounding brush. Now, in the dark, as the small group made its slow way back to the comparative comfort of their sleeping tubes, he would stop, again and again, holding up a hand and forcing all of their progress to halt whilst he stood, head cocked to one side, listening to the night.

  "Did you hear that?" he took to saying as the long walk to camp drew on and on. "Did you hear that?" But when they asked him what it was he heard he just shook his head. "Footfalls?" he said at last, and turned his face towards the darkness as if he could cut through it with the force of his will.

  Some of the team were sick in the night. Henery, the chief scientist and essentially leader of the expedition, awoke to find blood on his pillow spilled from his nose in the night, his eyes raw and red, whilst Ben, his assistant, awoke pale and un-rested, the legacy of a couple of hours of night terrors and bad dreams that left him tossing and turning throughout the night. There was nausea, too, amongst most of the group as they sat to a subdued and meager breakfast of dried cereal and coffee at the small table in the bunking tunnel.

  That day saw further activity at the well, testing the area and taking samples and sinking a collapsible ladder into the darkness of the pit to allow them to more closely examine the shadows within. Shadows that seemed thicker and, somehow, more energetic than they had in yesterday’s cold light.

  They returned to the lab and set up working well before darkness fell on the second day, whether for the sake of expedience or out of some nagging understanding that they did not wish to make the journey back from the plateau without the light one can’t be sure. There was a tension in the camp now, so distinct it practically took its own form. Henery’s nose continued to bleed whilst Alphy, an unassuming and methodical man of middling age’s hands had started shaking so badly he was forced to down tools and retreat to the bunkhouse to lie down.

  As night approached, heightened nerves were pulled still tauter, tempers frayed. Loulac, whose behavior had only increased in paranoia over the course of the day until he was muttering constantly about a figure in the undergrowth, took to peering through the plastic window out onto the scrubby grey grass outside.

  "There’s someone out there," he whispered and, though they trooped out, Loulac and his mustachioed companion Rees armed and ready, they found no sign of any trespassers in or around the camp. Once back inside, however, Loulac took up his staring once more until the light faded and all he could see in the window was his own pale reflection looking back.

  "I’m sure there’s someone moving around out there," Loulac muttered again and again.

  "Shut up, man," Rees said. "There’s no one out there." But it came out as a whiny pleading sing-song and not the defiant statement he had intended.

  In the morning they discovered that Alphy was missing and it was presumed he had taken off in the night although where, and even more mysteriously why, could not be easily answered. That day was spent traipsing through the undergrowth, shouting his name as any expectation that he might answer dwindled and faded to nothing. Thorns scratched at faces and roots somehow wove themselves around the scientists’ unsuspecting feet as the dense tangle of weeds and bracken and twisted dark foliage seemed deeper and more menacing than ever.

  By now the team was in a bad way. Henery continued to bleed spasmodically and had taken to walking with a handkerchief pressed permanently beneath his nose, pink, puffy eyes streaming in the cold cutting wind. Every now and then the small team had to stop and wait while Ben heaved into the dark grass. He had taken a sedative before sleeping the night before as a pre-emptive measure against bad dreams and claimed that this new sickness was a reaction to the pills.

  "Why would he have gone?" Ben asked weakly, not for the first time, following another prolonged dry retch over some twisting weeds.

  "Maybe someone took him," Loulac answered darkly, eyes fixed firmly on the shadows under the branches. The security man’s behavior had grown more erratic still as the day wore on and the feeble light faded. He twitched at every small sound and spent long minutes studying their back trail, sweating despite the autumn cold. It was almost dark when he finally flipped.

  The first they knew about it was a sharp intake of breath followed by the deafening plosive roar of Loulac squeezing off two rounds into the dark beneath the trees.

  "I’ve got you now," he shouted, tearing off into the undergrowth. "You can’t hide from me!" Rees went after him, shouting for him to stop in the thin, wheedling voice that had become more and more the norm to emerge from his mouth as the days passed. They would not seem him again until the light had faded entirely from the world and day had ended.

  Night found a disconsolate group of scientists huddled around the generator powered light in the bunk house. They had searched all day for Alphy and come up empty. Now they huddled behind the thin walls of their tunnel and kept the light shining.

  A door opened, footfalls sounded in the adjoining room. They shared a tense worried look as the door creaked open, perhaps giving rise in their mind’s eye to who, or maybe even what, might come through from the dark.

  In the end it was Rees who entered, stumbling on wobbling legs. He was covered in blood: it was on his clothes, it was on his hands, it was on the blade of the knife that fell from his shaking fingers and clattered on the floor where it lay accusingly.<
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  "Loulac’s dead," he said weakly, stumbling over to the nearest bunk and sitting down. "It was self defence," he continued, "He just came at me, he was crazy. I... I had no choice." He petered out into a choked silence, lying down on the bare mattress and burying his face.

  They gave him a sedative, one of the same that Ben had been taking the day before and waited until he was asleep before speaking.

  "In the morning," Henery said to the assembled team, "We are getting off this mountain. We need to sort this mess with Loulac out," he gestured at the comatose shape of Rees on the bed, "See where it leads. The radio’s down," they had tried it when they got back that evening to be greeted with a grating whine of static and nothing more, "And I for one do not object to the idea of not spending another night up here. Any objections?"

  No one said anything. No one said, "What about Alphy?" They were all imagining how good it would be to get off the mountain, to get away from the dark wilderness outside and the damned well at its centre. They all wanted out. Henery’s handkerchief glowed crimson in the weak light.

  Well, almost all of them. Throughout everything that had happened, Horst had suffered no ill effect. From the moment he looked into the slumbering depths of the well he had started to hear a voice in his head, weakly at first but growing stronger and stronger. As the others grew sicker, more deranged, more paranoid, more afraid, the voice in Horst’s head grew more certain and more sure, more seductive. The voice whispered to him, told him truths about the world, promised him futures.

  Had he been of a mind, Horst could have revealed to the team the fate of their companion, Alphy, lying broken and dead at the bottom of a ravine where he’d tripped in the dark, half mad with imagined shapes in the night and heedless of the dangers of his environment. Food now for crows.

  He could have told them, also, the truth of what happened under the yellow coin of the moon between Loulac and Rees, had he the inclination, but he did not. He retained his silence, and his secrets.

  So no, Horst did not join the others in their joy at leaving the mountain behind. But, he reasoned, it mattered not; he would be back again soon enough, the shadow had told him as much.

  Together, the beast whispered, you and I will rule the world.

  ***

  I had no idea how I made it down from the roof to the street below. Everything passed in a blur of speed and colour. However I did it, I found myself stumbling along the pavement, the sound of sirens loud and growing louder still, their shrieks tearing apart the evening. There was a lot of smoke in the air, filling my eyes with grit and covering my skin with the smell of burning rubber. Glass tinkled under foot.

  When the car pulled up I wasn’t even surprised, it was just another part of the dream-like unreality that had gripped me.

  "Get in!" Loess shouted from behind the wheel, leaning over and popping open the door. As I climbed inside, a furtive figure shifted on the back seat.

  "I’m sorry," Whimsy begun as we pulled away from the curb, "I thought I could trust him, I really did." I held up a hand to stop him. Things had ended as they had to, I understood that much now.

  "It’s not your fault. I could still have run," I said. "I didn’t. Let that be an end to it."

  "Corg?" said Loess, watching me in the corner of her eye.

  I shook my head.

  I saw her take it in, saw the hurt in her face, saw it harden into grim resolve. Wherever she stood before, I knew that she was now in it for the long haul. "I’m sorry," she sighed.

  I nodded. I was sorry too, but there would come a time for that, or I could only hope there would. For now I would remain empty.

  "How did you find me?" I asked at last.

  "We just followed the sirens," she said. "I’ve got a police scanner in the trunk too, that helped. But all the chaos going on down town? Figured you were probably in the middle of it."

  "I heard they call you the Unlucky Man?" Whimsy said from the back. "Reckon someone fucked up there, you got more lives than a cat."

  "I’m starting to think maybe it means unlucky for other people," I said hollowly, and was greeted with no argument.

  "So, where are we going?" Loess asked, and I realised we were already heading the right way, though why I was so sure of it was another matter.

  "West," I said definitely. "Out of the city, fast as you possibly can."

  "West?"

  "Yes," I said with a certainty I couldn’t place. "We’re heading into the mountains."

  They didn’t argue, and we drove in silence until the city was a memory, a bad dream left on the horizon. Wracked with exhaustion, pain, guilt, the motion of the car lulled me into my first sleep in what felt like years; a deep, silent rest. I slept for a long, long time.

  When I awoke, the mountains loomed large ahead.

  In my dream I was back in the little wooden boat with its peeling green paint that Tony and I had explored our flooded world in as kids. I was alone, however, with no Tony to keep me company and no oars to steer. Gone too were the watery byways and fresh pooling streams of my youth, replaced on all sides by a flat dark sea that stretched away, the colour of slate, in all directions of the compass. No matter how hard I looked to the horizon there was no end in sight, just endless still water carrying on forever and forever into infinity.

  I had no idea how long I floated idly, lost on that current-less dull expanse. It could have been minutes or hours, whole seasons or lifetimes beyond measure. Time seemed to have no meaning.

  Above me the sky rippled in beautiful cascading colours, something like the Aurora Borealis, untamed greens and oranges and pinks swirling and pulsing in pigment blending impossible patterns, an ever shifting palette of dancing hues. But none of it reflected in the waters below; they remained undisturbed, dark and flat and dead.

  When I looked down from the eddying colours of the sky it was to find that I was no longer alone in the close confines of the vessel.

  Corg sat across from me.

  He looked dishevelled and worn out, hunched pale and uncomfortable on the small wooden bench. For such a big man, he seemed suddenly small, shrunken. As I looked at him, I knew that something terrible had happened, but I couldn't quite remember what. The past was a haze in my memory.

  "Corg," I said, my voice sounding odd and raw in my ears, "Corg. Something... bad happened to you, didn't it?"

  He just looked at me blankly, not reproachful, not forgiving, not anything.

  "It was my fault, wasn't it?" I said. I felt certain that it had been, whatever it was.

  "I'm sorry," I said. 'Corg?'

  His silence continued whilst overhead the colours shifted and bubbled. A wave of red popped and spread like ink against the sky, reflected and glowing in his empty white eyes.

  "Corg?"

  He opened his mouth to speak as waves of light played across his features.

  "You're close," he whispered. "Close. Keep on just a little further. So close."

  A shiver ran through me. "You're not Corg," I said. Something strange was happening to his face, shadows seemed to be shifting over his features that were nothing to do with the rippling colour above. He didn't look like Corg anymore, but it was hard to make out his face.

  The boat rocked, jerking suddenly on the still water, with such violence that I had to grip onto the empty row locks to steady myself. Ripples were spreading out and away from the boat, great rings that cut a swathe through the inky water.

  A feeling gripped me, an absolute certainty, that there was something beneath us in the unknown fathoms under my chipped and peeling boat, which suddenly felt very small and flimsy. I pictured a great, hulking something in the dark waters beneath, lurking just below us. The surface, still as glass once more now, was so dark and impregnable that it was impossible to guess at how deep it might go. In my mind I saw eyes as big as ships and long, slithering thick tentacles, oozing and undulating through the oily depths, rising up to drag my little boat down into their drowned lair. Nausea bloomed in my stomach an
d I quickly snatched my gaze back from the cold sea.

  And now Wychelo sat facing me across the small craft. He too, looked like he had been through the wars. His skin was pale and covered in a patina of dirt and smoke, his clothing singed here and there and torn, ragged. There was blood on his face, stained streaks of it around his mouth and across his chin but it was his eyes that truly spoke of his disrepair: twin pools of broken, deep red anguish. He look like someone who had peaked into hell.

  I waited. He felt more like a true vision of Wychelo than Corg had, though still not whole, he sat opposite almost like a projection on a screen.

  "Close," he rasped, the words torn and shredded from his mouth. He repeated Corg's words back at me. "Just a little further. Close. Close."

  One by one the lights in the sky were dying, fading slowly to nothing but the dull memory of colour until that too was gone and all that remained of their splendour was a pallid sickly light that lent a pinkish tint to the heavens. It’s morning, I though mechanically, morning breaking over a cold ocean of nothing.

  Wychelo seemed to be having difficulty keeping himself together. A breeze was blowing up from nowhere, disturbing the still surface of the water, and as it blew it seemed to ruffle his features, as if his molecules were being blown about by the wind. For a second he stretched and blurred, shrinking somewhat and growing bony until the Make it Happen Man had taken his place.

  And then he too was changing as his face swam. He swelled, grew massive and hulking for a moment into a strange, scarred figure I didn’t recognise although it rang a bell of alarm and familiarity somewhere deep within my unconscious.

  Then he in turn was gone, dissipating and swirling away as another form took his place. I only saw him for a second but I had the distinct impression of serious grey eyes, a hard face with short neat steel hair, perhaps a beard. But something within me seemed to be suppressing the image, and his face swam before my eyes, shadow falling across it and smothering him before I could make anything more substantial. Even that brief glimpse, however, had sent a bright painful light through my mind. A memory danced tantalisingly just out of reach. This was important, I thought, he was...