He suddenly notices the smell for the first time. Now that he knows it is there it becomes overwhelming. His bandages are rank and filthy, he realises. They can’t have been changed for a long time. And the things that are living in them … are they feeding on him? He can’t feel any bites or stings but maybe they are too small to be noticed.
Part of the discomfort, he now knows, is because he is sitting in his own filth. This accounts for the smell, too, he realises. No staff, nursing or otherwise, can have been near him for days, if not longer. He twists his head, trying to peer through the slits in the bandages. The room is virtually bare but for one other chair, giving him no clues as to where he is, or how long he has been here … or when he might expect to be released. His heart sinks, his emotions in revolt at the knowledge that he has been so utterly abandoned. Perhaps, after all his conjecture, this is simply a form of torture for some act of evil he has committed and now blanked from his mind.
He could be in the hands of sadists, yes. They might be the tools of some dictator against whom he has spoken, despite the warnings of those about him. Or they might be just men, wise to commit him to this place and to force him to undergo this cyclical ordeal. The idea of power, its use and abuse, seems new but he knows it cannot be. If he is on some world somewhere he is aware that power of one sort or another is what chiefly occupies the minds and lives of its inhabitants … if there are any.
Sound might give him some of the answers he needs. He opens his mouth and forces air through his waiting vocal chords. Immediately he is disappointed with the flat timbre of his voice, its light and unimpressive tone. Even his wordless groan lets him down, it seems.
Speech is a new toy to him. Words are a novelty, yet he seems to be able to call upon them, which makes him wonder how he knows their shapes, and where and why he might have used them before.
He gropes through the ruins of thought for the right shapes, the sounds that could be a lifeline to some meaning. He can’t see anything much in this room but maybe there is another room adjacent to it, just next door. Maybe there is someone in that room and, if he shouts, they will hear him. And they might answer. He doesn’t know if any of this is true but he invents something for himself – faith – to allow himself to believe it.
He exercises his jaw, groans loudly through his tight throat, and then draws in his breath ready to shout. His breath balances on the edge of action and then he lets it out, flying from him in a wave of vocalised anxiety: “Why am I here?”
Voices, a million voices; tiny, infinitesimal and individually inaudible, joining in one answer that vibrates through his body. The one answer that he felt he knew all along and that makes him weep with pity for himself, everything and everyone else, the tears soaking straight into the dirty bandages. “You are God,” they say.
From where I was I had a perfect view of the world and wanted to draw it more than ever. So I changed my rocket back into a pencil, and tumbled down, down, ever down. If you go to your window and look up you can just see me, moving, twinkling as I spin towards the ground; high velocity.
NOCTURNAL TIDE
The light from the sleeping town behind him barely illuminated the narrow shingle beach, joining with the moonlight to throw a ghostly hardly-worth-the-effort glow on the foam that gathered and then fled a few yards from where he stood.
He hitched his belt up under his paunch, then walked down the few steps to the shingle beach. Almost unconsciously, he ran his thumb over the clip of his holster.
Shivering as the cold bit into him, he wished he was back in bed, warm and oblivious to the fearful task he had before him.
For a moment, he saw himself under the water, sightless and thoughtless under the salt waves, drifting out and away from this place; not having to face the future for fear of what it would look like. He’d give anything not to be standing where he was right now.
When he’d been young, this had been his dream job; Deputy Sheriff, and later Sheriff, of the small beach-side town where he’d grown up. It was beautiful here and, when he married Mary, he thought things would always stay that way.
The only daughter of the town’s minister, Mary had seemed quite a prize with her straw-coloured hair and startling blue-grey eyes. Her shy laugh made him feel like he needed to hold her close, always.
He remembered a high night-time tide nearly a decade ago. Just like tonight, there was a bright moon and a particularly harsh chill on the wind from the sea.
His inability to act then, his confusion and reluctance to take any life, no matter how odd or unnatural, had left him living in a town he hardly recognised any more. The place was haunted by people (he called them that for want of a better word) who looked like those he’d grown up with, who went about their business quietly and didn’t bother anyone, but who just didn’t seem to belong there.
Nobody knew what they wanted but fathers, wives and brothers all slept uneasily, knowing that what they lived with wasn’t the person they’d known for all those years. But why were they here? There was no reason for them to be here. They took up space and seemed to be just waiting for something. He was frightened that their wait would be over tonight.
On some nights, when the fog rolled in, he’d seen one or two of them on the beach, staring out to sea as if willing something to happen. They were always gone by morning.
He always used to love sitting on the headland on moonlit nights, sometimes with Mary beside him, and watching the night-time waves roll in, all silver and slow. Now, as he peered at the waves through the darkness, they seemed black, unclean; they rushed towards him like a pack of predators, hungry for him, eager to drag him down and devour him.
He shrugged and flipped up the collar of his coat to try and keep the cold out as the sea roared and rose, dashing itself into froth as it rearranged the round, grey pebbles in an endless game.
Yesterday he’d got home from work to find Mary standing in the driveway, shivering. He’d got out of the car and rushed over to her, told her they’d have to go inside to get her out of the cold and warmed up.
But she’d refused. Said she couldn’t wait for him to get home, to get out of the car, to come inside and start talking about his day; she had something urgent to tell him and she had to do it right now, right here.
She’d fallen asleep that afternoon and she’d had another dream, she said. The worst yet.
“I saw all of us. There was everyone we know, everyone who’s still ‘real’, that is. We were made of sand and we were walking out of the sea, up the beach towards the town. Then we all started to crumble away and there were things inside us. Oh God, it was awful!” Mary had shuddered and hugged her coat closer about her. She’d begun to sob.
After he’d got her inside, poured hot cocoa inside her and put a rug over her on the sofa, he’d sat alone in the kitchen to think. This was a warning; it had to be. He couldn’t afford to ignore it this time.
He found it hard to believe that 10 years had passed since the last wave of visitors arrived on this placid shore. Where had all that time gone? On watching Mary, making sure she was OK, trying to love her and make her whole again, he guessed.
A decade of nothingness. And it was all their fault; those things.
He’d watched that ‘girl’ grow for nearly a year. She’d grown in the place that his daughter should be. Then one night, with half a bottle of whiskey inside him, he’d taken her down to the cellar – and she’d gone willingly enough – and put an end to it all. When she realised what was to happen there was something in the girl’s eyes, a grotesque attempt to imitate humanity, but he’d hardened his heart to it.
No-one had asked where the girl had gone; he suspected that they all wished secretly that they could do the same thing. At first he’d thought that if he, an officer of the law, could do something like that, then it might prove an example to others. But the people seemed too confused, too cowed by the strangeness of things, to follow his lead.
They looked at him oddly for a while but then eve
rything seemed to settle down and become normal again; as if anything could ever be normal again.
When he and his wife had first learned, just two years after their marriage, that their daughter wouldn’t be like their friends’ children, he’d felt a bottomless sense of failure. He’d let down both his wife and himself. After a few months that feeling had passed and he’d blamed his wife for bearing a ‘slow’ child; then the child itself for ever being born, before finally and bitterly accepting things as they were.
Mary had found it hard to care for the girl, and he’d often come home to find her in the kitchen crying while the girl sat, neglected, in another part of the house. Within a few years Mary had changed so much. The dreams had started coming; she insisted they were a warning.
When the girl had been ‘replaced’ by whatever it was that had come from the sea that awful night, he’d almost felt a sense of relief. But he knew deep down that things weren’t right and he couldn’t allow that thing to go on living in her place.
He’d ignored Mary’s warnings about that strange night tide and he’d paid a heavy price for it. Then when she’d told him about their daughter, it had been so obvious to him; he should have acted sooner.
This time he wasn’t going to be caught out. He couldn’t change his or Mary’s past but he was going to make sure the future would be different.
On arriving at the beach, he wasn’t greeted by the expected army of grit Golems, marching straight out of his wife’s dream and into the town, replacing and re-making ordinary, decent lives in their image.
That was nearly two hours ago and still the sea seemed content to plough back-and-forth up and across the beach, leaving no unexpected gifts for him to find beyond the odd piece of driftwood or old beer can. It gathered and groaned against the ageing iron legs of the darkened pier, creating the uncomfortable sound of metal and water agreeing to differ.
He swung the beam of his torch across the grey pebbles and down the beach towards the headland once more. Nothing there.
Then, finally, he thought he saw something left behind as a wave retreated, spume flecking the air just a few feet from him. The pebbles crunched and shifted under his feet, betraying his presence as he headed for the spot.
There in the beam it lay, its small mouth opening and closing as though struggling to form words that were a step or two ahead of its thoughts. And God only knew what thoughts they must be.
Its button-bright eyes glistened in the harsh beam of his torch and he saw, even from this odd angle, that this time the thing had his wife’s face. It was looking at him.
For a moment he was tempted to put the cold barrel to his own temple. Because maybe this wouldn’t be the end. Maybe there’d be tide after tide of these things; replacing those he loved and stealing his town from him. And maybe he’d be too old to fight them one day, and he couldn’t face that.
Somehow he felt that he was just one of thousands of men, standing on thousands of beaches across the world, trying to hold back the tide and praying that the inevitable wouldn’t happen after all. But he knew that lonely men on lonely beaches could never form an army and, as the cold wrapped itself around him once more bringing with it a new sense of isolation, he hoped to God that he wasn’t the last one left.
But he knew, wherever he pointed the gun, that what was happening to this town, to him – this thing that he hoped was a nightmare, but that had the night-time chill and salt tang of awful reality – must end here.
THE PATH
He drove past it twice a day, once on his way to work and once on his way home. It lay just off the homeward side of his journey and, if there were enough cars lined up at the red light in front of him, he sometimes sat alongside it.
In the summer, he had the window wound down and he’d lean out a little to stare along its green, leafy length. It stretched for maybe 100 yards and then turned a corner. Very occasionally he saw a rabbit hop into the middle of the path, sit in the dappled sunlight and look towards the road for a second before continuing its journey into the undergrowth.
It always looked cool and inviting in the sticky heat, while it seemed like a shelter from the wind and rain during the winter months.
It was only a path between an industrial estate and a patch of overgrown land near the river but he always wondered what lay around the bend. He’d never seen anyone walking along it in either direction, coming or going.
Maybe it led to the Emerald City. Or an ancient fairy castle. Or a muddy old scrapyard guarded by paranoid Alsatians. Wherever it would take him, he wanted to find out.
It was only a few miles from home and he vowed to drive back there one day and take a walk down that path.
That evening he tried to explain to his wife about the path. He hoped to entice her with its mystery, include her in its promise of hidden prospects and beguile her with its air of tranquillity.
She looked at him briefly before returning her attention to the plate in front of her. “So what’s so special about it?”
Although it was unkind of him, he knew, whenever he looked at her now she seemed suffused with a sort of greyness that hadn’t been there when they’d met. As if something vital had been drained from her and replaced with nothing.
“It just looks so peaceful and calm down there, you know. It makes you feel that maybe the perfect escape lies down that lane,” he said, emphasising his point with a flurry of hand gestures.
His wife glanced at their daughter, spooning peas into her mouth with intense concentration, before looking up at him again. “It’s just a path.”
He sighed, too softly for her to hear. “But you haven’t seen it, Jen. Maybe we should take a walk down there sometime, then you’d see what I mean,” he ventured, optimistically.
Jen looked at him as if she was afraid of him, then returned her attention to the plate in front of her.
She has no imagination, he thought. Just as well, though, otherwise God knows what she might imagine he was up to all those nights he was ‘working late’.
Three months later, he was promoted and the family moved to another city and a bigger house. Soon his wife became pregnant again and their son, Chris, was born healthy and pink. And there was plenty of room for him to grow in the new house.
He forgot about the path and its promise for a while. Except when it came time to tell his eager daughter her bedtime story. Then he would always tell her a tale of a magic path that led to a strange and wonderful land where unusual and special things happened. He quite impressed himself with his inventiveness and thought once or twice about writing it all down.
But he was no writer and imagined what Jen would say about him wasting his time like that instead of devoting his time to the family or the repairs that needed doing. So he crumpled up the pages in his head and tossed them into the corner alongside all his other ambitions.
She hated the place. Her father had been in here for nearly three months now and the thrice-weekly visits were starting to drain her.
Pulling into the car park, she sat staring at the old hospital. Built in the 1920s, it had pretensions to some sort of reassuring grandeur with its huge windows and its twin-columned portico; a temple of health and healing run by kindly, enlightened miracle workers. But it just looked like death to her.
The air in the corridors smelt as though it was unfit for human consumption. It was heavy with disinfectant, antiseptic and the odd stale waft of God knows what.
Her father’s ward was clean enough, at first glance, but the smell still clung to the place; a clinging staleness beyond the reach of any cleaning product or diligent nurse. Maybe it’s just the stench of withered hope, she thought.
She hadn’t thought about him by name since he’d been in here. She felt as if it wasn’t allowed to have an identity, or for him to be her father. He was only allowed to be a suffering lump of flesh that justified the doctors’ and nurses’ jobs.
He always greeted her with a smile, if he wasn’t asleep, and a cheery “Hello, sweetheart.”
Yet somehow he wasn’t her father. Now there was something missing and she wished desperately that she could find it and return it to him.
She felt like a toy; a doll trapped underwater, tangled in weeds and drowning, but on fire at the same time. The conversations between them, the forced normality, made her want to scream and lash out at someone.
Sometimes she would look at her father, knowing that the thing was eating him away inside, and feel so scared that she could no longer speak. It was eating her away, too.
Her mother, happy in her new life across the water, hadn’t come to see him. Someone once said that we live alone and we die alone. But they forgot to add that in between people spend most of their time trying to prove to you how alone you really are, she thought.
It was a summer of wasps and sticky heat, she remembered, when her father had shown her the path.
It was on a trip to see her grandmother. They’d been stuck in traffic and the car was stiflingly hot, despite having all the windows open. Her father had tilted his head back and said: “Look, there it is, sweetheart. Across the road.”
She’d raised her head from her book. “What, daddy? What is?”
“The path,” he’d said, quietly, perhaps hoping his wife wouldn’t hear.
“Oooh, right.” The little girl she’d been had pressed her nose against the glass and peered through the traffic at the unremarkable gap that led off the road. “The one where the prince jumped on the frog to get home and where all the duck musicians gathered to play music for the moon?”
Her father had chuckled. “Yes, that’s it,” he’d said.
“Look, mum, look!”
While her mother had begun to chide her father for inventing such nonsense, she’d focused on the green leafy road to her fairytale paradise and the colours had seemed to grow more intense by the second. When the car sped away, leaving the path behind, she’d been disappointed that no small figures had emerged from the undergrowth to wave her off.
Songs From Spider Street Page 10