Fear and Folly

by Maurits Zwankhuizen

  “OK,” she said. “Lead the way.”

  Jeff went over to the door in the left wall. As he opened it, she watched his face expectantly, the gaunt skeletal face of torchlight. She waited for his reaction.

  “It’s some kind of living room. No furniture but.”

  Her nerves strung taut, she sensed a discrepancy in what he’d said.

  “How can you tell it’s a living room if there’s no furniture?” Saying it herself, she raised a shiver at the thought of a living room.

  “My powers of deduction, dear. There’s a fireplace at the far end.”

  She followed him into a relatively large chamber, bereft of all furnishings. Not even curtains. The torch playing across the walls was met everywhere by the same blank grey stare.

  “Jeff. Isn’t it strange that there are no curtains on the window but it’s still extremely dark in here?” She saw the sun emblazoned in the sky, no longer caught behind clouds, yet no light penetrated the darkness, no warmth soothed her skin.

  “I expect it’s the accumulation of dust which does it,” Jeff said. “Refracting the light or something like that.”

  He moved over to the hearth and with him went the light.

  Linda stepped nearer the window to escape the dark and tried the latch. It was stuck fast. She felt light-headed. The air was tainted. No breeze had freshened this room in a long time.

  She closed her eyes. Slowly she began to relax. To breathe. Rationality returned in the security of her own quasi-darkness. A pacifying purple mist swirled before her. For a moment she felt secure, like nothing could touch her.

  Once she was positive that her control had been restored, that her fears had been conquered, Linda opened her eyes.

  She looked once and then again but to no avail. The light was gone. She was consumed by the darkness despite the window at her back.

  “Jeff,” she panicked, kicking herself for having left her phone in the car. “Jeff!”

  “Up here,” said a distant and distorted voice, after what seemed like an eternity.

  Linda began to feel her way along the wall by her fingertips, groping through the thick treacly darkness until she came to a doorway. From where she stood, she could see a thin sliver of light lying on a staircase ahead of her. That was where Jeff had gone but she didn’t move, for not five yards away she saw a form so profoundly black that it seemed to be an alcove in the wall. Upon her approach, however, it turned out to be a grandfather clock, hoary with dust and mould.

  It ticked softly. She raised her hand and found its face. There was glass protecting it but she found a latch and opened it. As if she was reading braille, she moved her fingers over the clock face and felt the second hand move, then found the minute and hour hands almost directly opposed. The time was a few minutes to six. That meant that they wouldn’t be back in Oxford until after dark. After dark? She almost laughed at the thought. The lamp-lit dark of the motorway was infinitely preferable to this weird well of eyeless murk.

  As she moved past the clock, she kicked something over. She bent down. Her blind, probing fingers came into contact with a long cylindrical piece of wood. It was quite heavy and awkward to hold but she grasped nervously onto it. It would afford her some protection. Against what, she did not quite know and did not care to know.

  A thin line of yellow still lay across the staircase like a thread cast down to lead her out of the labyrinth and guide her back to sanity. She focused on it and made her way to the foot of the stairs, one hand on the banister, the other carrying the stick. She halted on the first step when she heard a crashing noise followed by a shout of pain. Then there was silence. Total, suffocating, soul-squeezing silence. On top of her blindness, it was almost too much to bear.

  Then she heard something. A voice from upstairs. It didn’t sound like Jeff’s voice but she couldn’t be sure. There was something about the tone, the pitch. Or was it just this darkness? Was it so dense that it even played tricks with her hearing? So dense that it could distort sound?

  Linda could barely discern the words but he had apparently made some sort of discovery. Something – she shuddered – something about a body. Then she distinctly heard the word ‘dead’. She imagined a corpse and inadvertently pictured Jeff’s face on it. Disfigured, half-eaten, but Jeff nonetheless. The mutilated face smiled. Linda jumped.

  The voice droned on upstairs. It struck her how uncaring, mocking, even boasting the voice sounded. Standing in the darkness, with no point of reference, her senses bordering on useless, everything seemed strange and frightening. The weirdest feeling overwhelmed her. She needed to get out. She turned to where she thought the corridor to the front door might be but her groping hands met a wall. Disoriented, she turned back to look at the stairs, to at least have a ribbon of light to hold onto, but it was no longer there. Just cold, impenetrable darkness everywhere. Fear raised the hairs on her neck. Fear intensified her grip on the stick. She felt like she was in a tomb. Her tomb.

  She managed to locate the banister again. Taking a deep breath, she began to mount the stairs, the stick held out in front of her. The steps creaked beneath her feet. Above her all was silent. She felt at the mercy of whatever lurked at the top and wished that the stick in her hand was a fiery torch, illuminating the way and keeping the darkness, and whatever else waited for her upstairs, at bay.

  First it was the voice, now it was the silence which sent shivers down Linda’s spine. The creaking of the stairs was so loud and in between there was nothing. If Jeff was there, why didn’t he call out? Was he waiting in ambush? Or was he gone, dead, and was something else waiting for her at the top of the stairs?

  A few more steps and she reached the top landing. There was still no other sound but that of the boards beneath her feet and her short, quick breaths. For a moment a light came on. Just long enough for her to see three doors leading from the landing. The light came from the middle door. Biting her lip to hold back the fear, she stepped slowly forward. Now there was another sound audible between the creaking floorboards. A heavier sound coming from the middle room.

  Linda felt a breath of hot air on her face and lifted the stick up high.

  “Who’s there?” she said. Her voice felt small, the words like two bubbles popping quickly into oblivion, leaving no trace.

  With hands outstretched, she stepped through the door into the room. There was a window to one side looking out onto a field and a grove of trees, but it may as well have been a landscape painting for all the light it provided.

  She sensed a presence and, despite the darkness, she could discern the outline of a blacker shape standing in the centre of the room.

  “There you are,” the dark form said. “I’ve been expecting you.”

  A chuckle filled the space between Linda and the figure. She found herself thinking of it as a different being, not her Jeff. Everything seemed warped, within her and around her. Her senses were unable to function properly. They were drowning in a flood of incessant fear, allowing her no time to stop and consider what was happening.

  Throat constricted, she said nothing, but her laboured breathing said all there was to say. The stick was hefted over one shoulder, ready to be used if required.

  “Come here,” the voice said in tones as dark as the air. “Come into the spider’s web.”

  As the voice drew nearer, boards creaking closer, she rushed to meet it, swinging the stick horizontally so that it would strike at shoulder height. A horrendous shriek erupted from unseen lips. She struck out again and again, and each time there was a shriek, each one louder and more anguished than the first. The cries sounded inhuman, alien, and reinforced Linda’s belief that this was not Jeff but someone, something, else.

  Despite the shrieking, it seemed like the creature was grabbing the stick at every blow, perhaps trying to disarm her, but each time she would yank it back for another stroke, and another, and another. Under the attack, the figure had staggered to the window but still its face was obscured by the darkness. Then final
ly it collapsed.

  Linda dropped her arm but kept a firm grip on her stick. She felt sweat flowing down her forehead, biting at her eyes, but the silence stung more. Turning to the window, she swung the stick through it and jumped back in surprise as the pane shattered with a noise similar to the figure’s shrieking. A rush of light swept into the room, burning the darkness away. She covered her eyes for a while to allow her sight to adjust. The room contained no furniture, nothing to distract her from viewing her assailant. She forced herself to look down.

  The body lying at her feet was covered in blood, the face half obscured by a hideous tumour of scarlet gore, but it was definitely Jeff. Linda let the stick fall from her grasp in shock and it tumbled heavily to the floor. A bright metallic glint flew into her eye. Looking down, she was blinded by the polished steel of an axe-head.

  ALTAN

  The old bus moved slowly over the rugged track. There were fields of grass spreading out to the horizon and even a few bright wildflowers ignoring the chill in the air. But there was little more and there had been little more for the last ten hours.

  I turned my gaze back to the man beside me, sitting hunched over his book. I leant closer, trying to piece together his broken English.

  “One day, late October,” he read, “the long ride across the steppe end. Grass stop, mountains start. Nothing grow but shadows from boulders. They could ride no more. Dennard’s guide refused to take him on but Dennard, he say no, he say he have to see what is on other side.”

  We both looked up, as if expecting to see a mountain range stamped on the horizon, but still only an endless sweep of grass filled our view.

  “Dennard climb mountain, the guide stay below. The sun rise and fall but he not come back. The sun too low, the guide climb too, to find Dennard. It take hours but finally he reach the top. Below, on other side of ridge, there nothing but darkness. Darkness full of wind, strong wind. Nearly blow him off his feet. The wind was ice. And then the darkness full of snow, strangest snow he ever see. It shine like gold. Gold, how you say, snowflakes. He was in shock, in love with this snow, but the storm too strong. He have to go down mountain again.”

  The man stopped reading for a moment. He didn’t look up but I could see that he held a vision in his mind more intense than the sights in mine and more immediate than that outside the window.

  “Next morning, the guide see gold light on the mountains. Very bright. But when sun come up, they go, vanish. Like dew. The guide wait three days, nothing. Each day he climb mountain, each day same thing, snow, gold snow. Four days, the guide take horses and leave, go back over steppe. Alone.”

  Whenever the man beside me said the word ‘guide’, his shoulders would straighten noticeably. For this very man had been Dennard’s guide. His name was Altan. It was an appropriate name because it was the Mongolian word for ‘golden’.

  Altan closed the book slowly and looked outside, then pointed a black-tipped finger at what was little more than a smudge in the distance.

  “That is the village,” he said. “Amarkhongor.”

  As we neared, I saw nothing there to define it as a village. A smattering of gers, the traditional nomadic tents, placed around a few more permanent structures. Horses and goats. Children with ruddy cheeks.

  We stepped gingerly off the bus, sore from the long trip and unforgiving seats. While Altan dealt with the driver and retrieved our gear, I scanned the horizon. Sure enough, far away to the east, there was a purple line of varying thickness demarcating steppe from sky.

  Altan was soon at my side and, seeing where I looked, he nodded sharply.

  “That is them,” he said. “The mountains of the gold snow.”

  I felt a shiver run through me. The wind picked up. I set to work on my tent. Altan was a man of the steppe. It was autumn so he only needed a bivouac and open sky. He raised a fire and we hunched over it. He took out his book again.

  “Read to me about how they found Dennard,” I said.

  I’d had the book read to me many times already but it was magic to hear the words curl off Altan’s tongue, to rise and die in the very air where this story had taken place over twenty years earlier.

  Framed by fire, Altan opened the book.

  “When summer come, the guide lead government men and villagers to the mountains. Only he know this place. The village people too scared. They not go up mountains, wait with horses. The others climb. Long climb in long summer day. When they get to top, see nothing but mist. Whole valley mist like lake of ice.

  “They use ropes to lift guide down into valley.”

  Altan stopped reading, memory taking over.

  “I think Dennard try climb down to valley. But he blind from mist. Or from snow,” he told me. “The valley steep. Straight down. Even wild sheep fall.”

  His gaze fell deeper into the flames.

  “Dennard just skeleton. It not much work to get him to top.”

  “And then?”

  “We leave him there.”

  I nodded. The villagers would never have allowed Dennard’s remains to be brought down among them. And in these parts they still occasionally practised sky burial. Leaving the dead to the elements and the carrion birds. There was nothing more to be done for him. Leave him to feed the cycle of life.

  “So in twenty years, no one has ever ventured to those mountains?”

  Altan shook his head.

  “The villagers scared of the mountains. And government men. They think best to forget what happen.”

  And that’s why I’d done my best not to remind them. Dennard was a forgotten man. An eccentric explorer who’d met his fate like thousands of others who walked that dangerous path all over the world. The story of the golden snowflakes was even less well-known. So little-known, in fact, as to have melted before it could form superstition or myth. I only knew any of this because Dennard was my uncle, because I’d grown up intrigued by his adventures and his disappearance here in the high steppes half a world away from his homeland. And it was only after years of research that I’d stumbled across the thin red-bound book in Altan’s hands, a short account written by a man in Ulaan Baatar who had heard Altan’s tale first-hand.

  Now here I was, seated by a fire on the Mongolian steppe with the same guide at my side and the mountains where my uncle had died just visible to the east. I barely slept a wink that night. I kept seeing golden snowflakes swirling over a skeleton.

  In the morning, both the flames and Altan had vanished. Through the dawn, I saw a figure approaching and leading three horses.

  “We should leave,” said Altan as he began to load our gear onto their backs. I packed without breakfast. As we rode off, Altan handed me a chunk of cheese to chew on.

  “Why three horses?” I asked as I rode beside him. “We don’t have that much gear.”

  “Fresh meat,” he said simply. “Should we need.”

  The ride ahead was long. We’d be at least five days in the saddle. We had more than enough supplies for the journey to the mountains and back. It was what lay over them that could take weeks to explore. Or just a single hour to kill us.

  Over the next five days, the mountain range gradually grew in size. What at first had been a thick purple curve now evolved into individual peaks like the brown scales on a crocodile’s back. My gut tightened every time I looked at those peaks and imagined climbing them. At times, I even imagined my own skeleton lying beside my uncle’s.

  Altan led the way as if he’d been here yesterday, his thoughts impenetrable. We reached the foothills late on the fifth day. I was exhausted and collapsed to the ground but Altan stayed mounted.

  “I will go and look for a better place to climb,” he said, and he moved on alone.

  I watched him go, feeling more strength ebb from my body. What if he didn’t return? What if there were bears and wolves around these parts?

  Hastily, I collected firewood from the few sparse shrubs which clothed the foothills and constructed a fire. Dinner and tea were both bubbling awa
y when Altan returned in the depths of dusk.

  “I have found pass,” he said. “We can use horses.”

  I nodded. It was comforting to know that we wouldn’t be climbing the mountain on foot, although I knew we’d be leaving our sure-footed horses behind once we began the descent into the valley on the other side.

  Despite my fears, I was quickly asleep after another long day in the saddle. Before I knew it, Altan was outside my tent, urging me to rise. The sun had already set the highest peaks ablaze. We broke camp and I followed him as he rode west for a good hour.

  “There.”

  His raised arm pointed out a gentler slope between two craggy cliffs and we began to make our way up. Our horses struggled with the uneven ground, loose rocks everywhere, so we walked ahead with reins in hand. Tethering our horses, we made camp just short of the ridgeline.

  “Come with,” Altan said. “We see where we go tomorrow.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what lay beyond the ridge. Not with the sun behind us. I imagined it would just be a black void. Better to wait till morning. But Altan wouldn’t wait.

  We marched on up the steep slope until finally the rocks gave way beneath an avalanche of open sky, its intense blue falling like a heavy weight on our shoulders. I felt dizzy, steadied myself against a rock and then looked out at what lay below us.

  I saw mist, so thick that I felt I could step onto it and it would be as unyielding as a frozen lake.

  There was a faint smile on Altan’s face. It was either nerves or madness.

  Shadows soon cut across the mist’s surface from the peaks behind us. Our silhouettes lengthened and ran out into the distance, failing to find a path to the valley below.