The Unlucky Man

by H T G Hedges

  The boat lurched again, with such force this time that it rocked and spun wildly. I grabbed at the side once more and for a few seconds my heart was in my mouth. Eyes squeezed shut, I waited for what I was sure must be coming: the liquid rush of a great volume of water being displaced as a huge body raised itself from out of the murk. I could see it in my mind, feel the wash of cold waves about to hit me as long creepers, fleshy and heavy with suckers slipped over the edge of the boat to engulf me. With it would come the salty sea stench of rotten seaweed and the old, bloated stink of other victims claimed by the depths.

  When I opened my eyes I was alone, bobbing and swaying beneath the lightening sky. For a moment dark wings flapped overhead and then were gone. The wind that had gusted moments before ceased suddenly, leaving all still and placid as before. Close, it whispered with its final breath.

  Close

  And all around me the waters had burned away, leaving a floating wasteland of grey cinders. In every direction swept away a field of floating ash.

  I had no idea how long I slept for, but by the time I awoke the scenery that rolled by out of the window had changed dramatically. No more were we passing the solid ugly shapes of industrial expansion but rather the forms and colours of an untamed countryside. I watched tall hedges roll past through the glass, dark tangles of thorns and mottled leaves shivering in the breeze.

  Tall trees cast broken shadows over us as we passed, long crooked limbs jutting up into the sky. Autumn was well under way and many of the branches were bare and skeletal, knotted and bony. What leaves remained clung tenaciously to finger-like branches in patches of orange, red and gold whilst those fallen lined the sides of the road in great soggy piles of rotting brown mulch.

  The further we travelled, the wilder the countryside grew. The road narrowed steadily until it was little more than a dirt track, pressed in on either side by unruly reaching fauna and branches that scratched at the side of the car like fingernails.

  "I don't know how much further the car's going to take us," Loess warned from the front seat.

  "It's OK," I said, echoing the voice from my dream. "We're close now."

  And then, through the window, I saw something that made me sit up and take note. It was a sign, half glimpsed through the auburn leaves, for the Ritsby Way Inn. Faded and broken, the sign hung at an angle on an empty building whose once white walls had been stained and damaged by the battering elements. A collection of smaller cabins had been almost completely overwhelmed by new growth but here and there an empty window, the panes missing, poked hollow and gaping amid the weeds. Other bits and pieces of building detritus could be seen amid the scrub of autumn greens and oranges; tubes of tumbled black guttering, the corner of a torn up slouching mattress and everywhere shards of shining broken glass.

  But it was the tree that really struck me. A huge, spreading monolith of almost black wood, sweeping majestically up from the tangle of vines and creepers. Its branches were completely bare, curving spikes silhouetted against the weak light of the day. It rose like a many splintered claw, casting its shadow over the shell of the old building.

  I pictured Wychelo beneath those branches, lost amid the shadows. I could see him, standing still as a statue, eyes locked on the building opposite as the rain poured down into the branches above him and cascaded down all around. His eyes would have been empty then, though they had been blue not long before. And he would already be changed forever, beyond saving.

  But there was no-one standing there now, no phantom shapes beneath the branches, just darkness and beyond it the crumbling remains of the Ritsby as the wild landscape mercilessly reclaimed it. In a few years, I thought, there would be no sign that it had ever been there at all.

  In the end, we could go no further by car. We’d been following an uneven dirt track that had wound well into the mountains, juddering and bouncing us along through its shallow ruts. Eventually our road just petered out into nothing by a low, long dilapidated looking metal tunnel, and it was here that we left Loess’ car. It was probably a mercy really; the poor thing was used to city streets and paved roads and I sensed any further on this course would have added it to the growing list of casualties collecting in my wake.

  A metal structure, stained and worn by time and neglect and the wild, lay in a state of disrepair and was being gradually reclaimed by nature. Trailing, tendril like weeds had cemented themselves to the walls, growing in suffocating ribbons over the whole of the outer surface. Rubbing away a crust of dirt and spider web from a cracked plastic sheet of window, I peered through the small cleaned patch at a curiously modern interior. It was some kind of mobile lab, buried, so far as I could tell, under a thick layer of dust and growing damp where rainwater had leaked in at the seal.

  Equipment was dotted around the empty space, scientific apparatus in the main: bottles, tubes, heat lamps and other, more esoteric items that I couldn’t place. There were units set up and seemingly abandoned, ready to carry out analysis on, what, I thought? Something that was worth the effort of traipsing all the way out here for. Clearly this shack had been some kind of outpost and from the look of things it had been abandoned in a hurry and it had been left heavy with shadow and dirt and filthy unexplained dark smudges.

  There was a second room, a bunkhouse, off the first and here, too, there were definite signs of sudden abandonment; beds were left un-stripped, still with linen on, whilst a few personal effects lay forgotten on the bunks. A pile of old clothes, left to rot, sat disquietingly forlorn in a far corner. Most unsettling, however, were the rusty brown streaks on the floor, on one of the beds, faded yet unmistakable as blood long ago spilled. We too decided to leave it all behind. There were probably secrets here to be uncovered, but I was being pulled, inexorably but firmly, further into the wilderness, though by what I could not say.

  From the door of the lab a footpath, narrow and overgrown, snaked off amongst the rock and we followed it. It wasn’t raining here, but the air had grown colder as we climbed and I could taste on it the first sting of winter. Our breath clouded in the still air as we climbed, faces numbed by the chill air.

  We couldn’t know it, of course, but the make up of the landscape had changed drastically, impossibly from what Horst had seen as a young man on a doomed scientific expedition. Gone now was the swallowing density of undergrowth, the trees and winding roots and dark hedgerows. Gone, too, was all that black grass and mud, replaced with fen like bogs of stinking pale water. They stretched away in all directions, a buzzing, sucking expanse broken only by patches of spiking reeds and puffs of yellow marsh gas.

  "This doesn’t make any sense," Whimsy breathed, nose crinkling at the fetid, rotting stench drifting off the water. "None of this does, up here," he gestured widely around, "This isn’t the type of thing we should be seeing at all." He was right, of course, but I found myself beyond surprise or even concern.

  A path ran through the sucking water, and not a man-made path either, a natural formation of rock led, winding and unnatural, pitilessly into the heart of the mountain fen. We were being led where we were expected to go.

  We followed the path, treading carefully as some instinct told us it would not do to disturb the greasy grey waters and whatever might lie beneath them. Flies, bloated and ugly, buzzed continuously over the surface of the pools, their nasal songs the only sounds to be heard on air thick with the decaying wetland miasma.

  Clouds of gas and mist were rising off the surface of the water, thick and hazy, distorting our view and confusing the senses. The afternoon seemed dark now, the sun lost behind a veil of choking gas.

  Up ahead, for a brief moment, I thought I saw a flame flare up, an orange beacon in the mist. It was fleeting, but I had the impression, just for a few moments, of a great bonfire, deep within the shifting currents of the marsh, and against it the silhouetted figures of men, dancing and gesturing in the light of the flames.

  The light came again. I wasn't sure what I was seeing, if it was the past or glimpses of some
where else entirely, somewhere that had never been. A carved effigy in red wood stood proudly amid the flames as they licked up all around it. Strange, ugly faces leered along its length, mad eyed human features with lolling tongues and sharp, elongated teeth. A bull's head with a ring through the nose stared balefully next to an eagle with one overgrown eye perched above its beak. Many and more there were along the length of the wood, curving sinuously in the flames until they seemed to be moving and the whole thing looked alive. In the shifting light of the fire the red wood had an almost organic feel. Fish danced with wolves, lions with bears and bats and around all strange shapes and looping patterns told a story I did not have the eyes to read.

  With a sudden gout of flame, the figures before the blaze were illuminated for a split second. At their head danced a wizened old man, naked but for some skirts of leathery animal skin. His face and chest were painted with some dried orange clay and adorned with circles and slashes of white paint that glowed in the firelight.

  On his face was another white ornament, the full shape of a hand, palm pressed against his left cheek, fingers splaying out across the bridge of a short nose and under his eyes, thumb print stretching down to bisect his lips. His hair was caked with the same white clay and slicked back from his head and so too was the long beard that hung limp from his chin. About his head he wore a crown of antlers and feathers, sewn with wild flowers and vines.

  In his hand he held a knife of sharpened bone in the shape of a crescent moon that sparkled and shone in the orange light as he danced before the pyre. His lips were moving as if in song though no sound travelled across the stinking fen to my ears.

  With a silent crack, the top of the wooden statue, a great horse's head crowned with curling ram's horns, broke away from the main body of the carving and tumbled into the flames. Immediately the supplicants ceased their dancing as one grabbed another by the hair, forcing his head back and exposing the long line of his neck. That wicked curved blade arched down, cutting through the smoky air and an ardent spray painted the chunk of carved burning wood atop the pyre.

  The fire died away as suddenly it had sprung into life.

  Then it came again, another flash of light, and now the figures were still, fixed unmoving against the rolling fire and, though distorted and far away and glimpsed only for a second, I was left with the distinct impression that they were watching, waiting. I heard a sharp intake of breath from behind me and knew that the others had seen them too.

  "What are they?" Loess whispered and, in the confines of the stinking, otherworldly place, the question "what" and not "who" didn’t seem inappropriate.

  "Don"t worry," I said in answer, "They’re not-" I paused, uncertain of how to finish the statement. It wasn't that they weren't real, for they were, I felt sure of it, but rather that they existed in another place and time, that we were seeing them through the skin of the world to where they truly were, somewhere older and stranger by far, a place just below this one, perhaps, but close enough to be almost touching, almost becoming one.

  Amid the waters another scene was playing itself out as a procession of funeral marchers made their slow and sombre way through the mire. They were big men and tall, proud women. Long braided hair hung down past their shoulders and the men's beards were blond and knotted. All wore armour of some description, ringed mail in the main and heavy boots, leathered shields hung at their backs.

  They marched in a proud solemn line and at their head four men held aloft a craft of reeds on their shoulders, within which rested the body of one of their fallen. Gold glinted at neck and knuckle where his pale hands rested atop a short sword, the pommel carved into the shape of twin crows in flight.

  Gently they lowered the boat into the water, casting it off among the reeds and watching in grim silence as it floated off, carried on the current. It bobbed for a long time, edging further and further away from shore until, at length, the small craft was lost to view. Only when it was fully gone did the mourners turn and walk away, in a long line, into the swirling mists. Their shapes distorted, becoming grey shadows amongst the waters before, at last, they disappeared into the smoke.

  "They're not really there," I said, "Not exactly. They can't touch us, I think." And I hoped I was right.

  Confused and oppressed by the clinging fog, the stink of the brackish and rotten water, the glimpses of figures half seen and half real, we continued on, following the path to its eventual conclusion, until, at last, in the bowl between two mountains we reached a point where the world dropped down into a deep yet narrow chasm. The water flowed all around us in a slow waterfall, down over the edges of the pit, disappearing into the darkness below, consumed by it.

  We stared down into the shadows. This then was where it all began, the well at the top of the world.

  It seemed to swallow the light.

  I stared down into the fissure. There was no birdsong, no more insects clicked and crawled and buzzed. All was silence. It was as if the pit was sucking noise as well as light from the world.

  Like it sucked the colour from Wychelo's eyes, the thought leapt into my mind unbidden. Now that we were here at last I felt near to something, so near and yet it remained just outside the reach of my consciousness, a half heard melody drifting away on the breeze with my clouding breath.

  Perry was dead, I thought. Wychelo was dead. All to reach this place.

  Corg was dead too I reminded myself with a pang.

  "So what now?" Whimsy asked, breaking the silence. "It’s just a hole."

  "No," I said, "It isn’t. You know it isn’t. You can feel it. I know you can." After a minute he nodded unhappily. The air was stiff with anticipation: it felt like the whole world was holding its breath.

  "What is it?" Loess murmured. She too, I noticed, seemed transfixed by the pit, her head tilted at a strange angle as if she was listening hard to something only half heard and half understood.

  "Everything," I said, "And nothing. Another world, I think, wrapped around something at its centre, like a cocoon. Something conscious, alive."

  There was a rusty metal ladder planted into the earth beneath the flowing current at the top of the pit, its rungs leading down to be swallowed by the darkness that lapped at its base. I started to climb down into the fissure. Silently, illogically the other two followed and I knew it was calling to them too.

  As we descended, I saw that the shadow wasn’t receding but rather washed at the rock wall below like oil, thick and glutinous and moving, lapping darkly at the corners of the world.

  We were about half way down the rock face between the top of the hole and the beginning of the shadow when I heard it. Just above me I saw Whimsy jerk round to stare past me into the depths, stiff with tension – clearly, he heard it too.

  It was a sound like a murmur and a scream, a howl and the rhythm of incredible harmony, the wind in the angry confines of a cave, waves crashing against a storm beaten coast, birdsong, the crash of thunder, the roar of a fire. Within the twisting dark lay a whole world of imagined possibility. It started to move. Up, up the rock wall towards us. And as it moved, so too did the shadow in my mind, revealing its secrets, and I remembered.

  I was back in the windowless room with Wychelo and Perry. Corg was already floating away on a sea of narcotic waves. But this time I didn’t follow. A part of my mind, the part that wasn’t me, that tiny ember of curling darkness, was untouched by the strains of poison now flowing into my body. Of course it was: it was the poison.

  The door opened and a figure entered. He was neat in appearance, lightly built, greying at the temples with a cruel patrician face and cold, unfeeling eyes. Dressed in a serious, grey military tunic, buttoned to the chin and free of any adornment, he entered the room with a slightly uneven limping gait. On his hands he wore black leather gloves.

  "You two can go," he said as he entered, and they obeyed instantly. Then another figure entered, a huge, bulgingly muscular creature, carrying a simple chair which he placed down in front

&n
bsp; of me.

  The smaller man settled into it, facing me as I sat prone, head to one side, staring without seeing into his face, not more than three feet distant.

  "Hello Hesker," he said. "Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Horst."

  I had stopped, knuckles white against the cold metal of the ladder.

  "What’s happening?" Loess called down to me, her voice tight with suppressed tension, but I couldn’t answer.

  "Oh my God," Whimsy groaned, seeing the moving line of darkness for the first time. "Oh God."

  It was moving fast now, rushing to claim us.

  "We don’t have long before you start to wake up, so I’ll keep this brief," Horst said.

  "You are going to do something for me, Mr Hesker, a very great something." He viewed me with cold dispassionate eyes in which I could see no human empathy, no warmth, no compassion. To him, I felt sure, I was nothing but a tool to be used and then discarded when my job was done. Or perhaps I was worse than that.

  "I am going to tell you some things first, however, as I think you will remember them at the last, as the seed of darkness leaves you and I want you to understand," and there was a cold hatred in his face as he looked at me now, "You have not made things easy for me, Mr Hesker, and that is why I am telling you these truths now. You have been a thorn in my side. You have, I think, cost me one of my greatest assets in the shape of Wychelo who’s mind I see unraveling as a result of his hunting of you and who, I feel, I shall now have to allow Rift to try his hand against," behind Horst, I saw the giant – Rift – smile a small, pleased smile of anticipation, "And so you must suffer at the last. You will remember this, at the end and at that end, you will know what you have been responsible for."