Songs From Spider Street

by Mark Howard Jones

  She’d made a groaning noise. Her brother, who had so far been absorbed in his latest battery-operated gizmo, began to tease her and a fight began. By the time their mother had broken things up, the path seemed like it was a million miles away. And it might as well have been.

  She’d forgotten about it then; it became a lost card shuffled into the deck of childhood memories. For years it hadn’t entered her mind, either as a direct yearning or even a fugitive wisp of memory.

  Then suddenly her father had mentioned it. Towards the end, when the pain had got so bad that the doctors had increased his morphine dosage to such a level that it had unlocked the gates of his mind; then all sorts of things had come spilling from his tongue.

  His longing to discover the secret destination of the path rose to the surface of the muddied pond again and again.

  She would squeeze his hand tight and pray that, in his mind, he would finally make the elusive journey along its short leafy stretch, before it was too late.

  As she stepped out of the hospital’s main doors the sunlight acted like an acid, dissolving her determination not to cry. She’d controlled herself in front of the doctor and the over-attentive nurses but now she was no longer able to hold back.

  Finally she managed to dry her eyes and took her mobile phone from her pocket. Her brother’s voice greeted her from the other end of the connection.

  “It’s Dad. He’s gone, Chris,” was all she could say before her throat closed up with the tension. She turned away quickly as two visitors passed her on their way into the hospital, feeling the need to hide her grief while thinking it desperately unfair that she should have to.

  Her brother made a soft groaning sound at the other end of the phone. Chris hadn’t spoken to his father for several years, and the one time he’d visited him at the hospital the old man had been sleeping.

  “Right,” was all the reply he made. There was a brief conversation in which Chris took on the lion’s share of the funeral arrangements. Then he was gone and she was left with silence.

  She stared down at her shoes. Under the right toe was a dead moth, grey and shedding tiny wing scales around its corpse. Although she was sure she hadn’t killed it, merely trodden on it because it was lying there, she felt its feather-weight add to the burden of death that she had to endure.

  She stamped through her anger and helplessness to her car.

  Once she’d parked down a side street it took a few minutes to make some perfunctory repairs to her make-up. She didn’t expect to meet anyone but did it just in case. Her tears had dried for the time being.

  Relying on a faulty memory from childhood, she looked for the industrial estate near the river. Even once she’d found it, she had trouble locating the path. The overgrown piece of land had disappeared under rows of houses long ago.

  When she did find it, she was disappointed. It seemed so very ordinary. Not at all how she remembered it. Yet her father had woven beautiful children’s stories around it and it obviously meant something special to him.

  She felt she had to keep faith with him and do what her father had never had time to do. So she picked her way around some discarded food cartons and took her first few steps down the path.

  It was just a dirt path with nothing magical hiding under the plants that fringed it. Some of the foliage had been cut down when the houses were built, and the area was now more open to the sky.

  After about 100 yards the path took a turn to the left and headed towards the river. Then it broadened out and she found herself on an open piece of ground, hemmed in on one side by trees.

  The ground was sodden and covered with wild flowers that thrived in the damp. Some species were as tall as her, making the most of the absence of people to spread themselves out.

  She continued to follow the path, unable to see very far ahead of her because of the abundance of foliage. To the right, the ground simply fell away until it finally met the backs of the houses.

  Somewhere nearby she could hear the river rushing softly by and the cars on the road adding their voices to the strange song. Yet it seemed silent and still despite the sounds, the flowers acting as nodding guardians to their perfect little world.

  Then she pushed past a bush that was beginning to grow across the path, and there was the river. It seemed very high up the banks and was running very fast, but it didn’t make as much noise as she’d expected.

  She hadn’t looked at any maps before she came, but somehow she knew there had to be a footbridge across the water and, sure enough, she came across it within a few minutes – a broken old wooden bridge.

  Wooden slats hung out over the river, the planking splintered and broken, suspended above the rushing silver just a dozen feet below.

  Then she drew in her breath too quickly, painfully, as she saw where the bridge led. Her hand pressed on her chest as she tried to hold in the shock and the discomfort.

  A sense of unease crept over her. There, beyond the broken timbers on the far bank, was an exact copy of the hospital where her father had just died.

  Yet it seemed almost twice the size of the building she had left just hours before; a deformation of the hospital whose corridors she had walked for months. And there were other things about its appearance that seemed odd and unnatural.

  Its greyness seemed to be an exaggerated hue; an ideal grey, soaking up light and never returning it. The surface of the building was blotched, as if with a fungus, and seemed to be in a state of near-terminal decay. One of the pillars of the portico was cracked right through with a grey-black growth spilling from the narrow fissure.

  The sign was still intact but many of the letters had disappeared, making a meaningless jumble, with the only continuous run of letters forming the word ‘pit’ above the door.

  There was no road leading to the place. It sat in the middle of a field and, even where the bridge ended on the opposite bank, there seemed to be nothing but grass, undisturbed and untrodden.

  As she stared in disbelief, the sun seemed to rise higher in the sky, shining in her eyes and forcing her to squint even harder at the unsettling sight before her.

  Behind the glass doors, the entrance hall was dark and filled with a voice whispering of emptiness. From the blackness behind each window came broken night-time sobs, answered by even more feeble cries in the darkness.

  She looked up to the second floor, to the room where her father would have been. The inkiness inside seemed limitless, overwhelming. For a second she thought she saw someone who looked like one of the doctors, moving past the window. But that was impossible: whoever it was would have to be twice the size of a normal man.

  The impression of immenseness was close to overwhelming. Fear rushed at her as she felt a sense of enormous size and of a limitless blackness within the structure. Its suffocating mass seemed to bear down on her.

  Finally, she forced her eyes away from the building, staring instead at the turmoil of the river, which seemed comforting in comparison.

  She choked back her tears, feeling her father had been betrayed somehow. Maybe she had, too. Now that she’d come here, where was there left to go?

  Walking out on to the remains of the bridge, the wood complaining beneath her feet, she stared down into the water as it hurried past, eager to be gone. The sun reflected painfully off the surface. She stood for several minutes as the silver and grey bounced around inside her overcrowded skull, carving new pathways for her fear and loss.

  Then the sunlight shattered on the water, dividing into a million tiny reflections. She stretched out her hand towards the apparition of the hospital, not knowing if she was warding it off or pleading for help.

  She took a step forward. Oblivion welcomed her like a long-lost child.

  IN THE GREYNESS OF TIME

  I dreamt that I slept through my death and awoke when the trees were proclaiming theirs.

  Moscow, 1899

  My, but it is windy today. The sort of wind that carries snow. I will delay going out into that wi
nd for as long as possible.

  In front of the grey fence a small boy struggles with his hat and his dog. First one is more troublesome and then the other.

  Each nail in the fence that he passes marks a day of the misery in which I and my little Anna have become caged. There are many of them.

  I have to look away. Oh God, my eyes! The pain is too much. So often now the world disappears behind a series of indistinct veils, one falling in front of the other. The room dissolves before my gaze. I know my sight will go. The doctors have told me this. It is part of the price I have to pay for the coarse excesses of my youth; a price that Anna must also pay.

  I can only pray that it will not be too soon. I need to keep the darkness at bay. I need time to help Anna. There must be money to care for her when I am gone. There has to be.

  I have no confidence that this other one will have honour enough to take her as his wife, to support her and care for her with all the responsibilities and duties that entails. My strength ebbs and flows and I feel helpless; like a child.

  My wife seeks to escape me in the most obvious way.

  Yet how can I deny her even this most hurtful of betrayals after what I have brought into her life?

  I no longer know what she thinks but I understand why she does what she does.

  Although at the still heart of my self I do not think I deserve what she is doing to me, for it is as though she had erased our love and counts it as worthless.

  We have not made love – for it was love, once – for nearly two years. My doctor forbids it and I forbid myself. Anna says she understands. Her own fear may play a part in that understanding.

  Our elderly, thick-waisted maid, Katya, navigates around me at a distance as if the space surrounding me is irredeemably polluted. A fixed smile is my only weapon against her.

  Only Anna’s constant companion is unafraid to confront me directly. It snuffles aggressively against my shoe, scuffing away the shine. It only desists when pushed away sharply. This scuffs my shoe even further and raises a yelp of protest from the animal. Even this display of petty anger exhausts me.

  Something has leached out of me, infecting the whole household.

  Sometimes there is a burning rush inside my head and I want to run to her, to scream at her and put my hands about her pale neck and shake her. Shake her very hard. She refuses to understand that I still love her and that I need to stop her. There is little time left.

  For appearance’s sake, we attend the theatre together, speak to the right people.

  And for her sake we have kept it from her family. I don’t know for how much longer my fading strength will allow me to fend off her father’s and her brothers’ persistent suspicions. Then things will be very bad for her. I couldn’t bear that.

  My cigars, which Anna hates, are one of my few consolations now. My wife has the maid assiduously air the rooms after I have been smoking. I’m sure that is the reason.

  I stumble on the stairs and the sudden scent of clean carpet unearths a memory of our first day in this house. Anna, proud of her role as mistress of her own home at last, queen of her own parlour, bustled about in a carousel of ceaseless activity. I laughed to see her so endlessly animated. She grew angry and I grew contrite, for a little while.

  I stand above her. Her hair fans out across the pillow like a huge sail, catching the wind to steer her dreams far away from me; towards him.

  Her lower lip twitches in sleep. Her soft shadow on the pillow is a mimic.

  A lonely ivory Christ nestles in the pale hollow of her throat, constantly falling then rising.

  Her bedtime perfume barely masks the stale smell of her sweat. I am tempted by her fragility to put an end to all this.

  I close the door softly as I leave her room.

  Up here in the attic I feel more at ease. I am sure everyone else does as well.

  I have lain here for most of the day.

  A thick, gellid ooze has begun to seep from me, gathering in puddles on the bare floorboards. So it has begun.

  Soon it must flow between the cracks and seep through the ceiling below. Into the maid’s room. She will be horrified. I do not mean to cause her distress but am now unable to move.

  The pain begins again behind my eyes.

  Everything fails, everything ends; perhaps I will be gone by the time Anna tires of her game.

  THE SINGING HORSES

  In the frozen, broken room he sits alone.

  “… hope it reaches you. I don’t know if you can hear this. There’s no way to be certain. Not sure if there’s enough power left but I want to try.

  “I needed to … Ruth. The things I needed to say can’t wait. There may be nothing to wait for – nobody can tell me; there’s nobody left now...

  “Everyone else is gone … dead or presumed dead. It started when Gureyvich thought … found something out on the eastern shelf. ‘A huge mineral trace’, he said … picked up a fault on the automatic survey rig out there, so no more data came in.

  “… in the excitement … went out there … late that evening we heard the explosion. Davies and Kemal went out next morning … all killed, all eight of them … terrible blow …

  “… for all the next week … couldn’t even bury them …

  “Wilkes started saying he thought there was something ‘down in the ice’ … could ‘feel’ it. Bloody nonsense … nothing showed up … and three of the others, out towards the … where drilling had stopped …

  “… seemed like some sort of pseudo-religious crap … ‘gods’ buried in the ice. He’d obviously cracked up … pity he took Davies, Hiram and Kemal with him … nearly a month ago.

  “… haven’t seen Andersson since last week … only one left … alive at least …

  “The wind’s coming hard off the high cliffs today … across the ice at us … me … But you’d know about that … no better since your time here …

  “It was good to have you here. It really was … so sorry about what happened …

  “I remember being young when we … Now an old-ish man looks back at me from the mirror; no hair … own teeth. I was young … vigorous back then, it … much lost – memories, bone mass, muscle …

  “And I wonder what I’ve achieved … entire project achieved anything...

  “… certainly hasn’t lived up to its promise. Since we landed … Now … cannibalized the ship for … But something … working against us. Resisting our …

  “But there’s nothing out there in the white. I know that … because it’s … no air, just something that would cut your lungs to pieces in seconds. Sometimes I feel there is no air in here … Maybe someday, whenever, they will find … suffocated.

  “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.

  “Listen, I just wanted … you’re the only one I’ve ever loved. There’s never been anyone … since … to know that, Ruth.

  “… kept your photograph with me. You and Lor. It’s the one of you together … just after we’d moved out … away from the city and the institute … inconvenient but better for us all, you …

  “You look really happy. Lor … bit distracted … practically had to twist her head around to look at the camera … kept looking behind her at the horses in the … see one of them behind …

  “It was later that summer that … well … I don’t need to …

  “I know you blamed me, Ruth. I know that. I tried to tell you. It wasn’t my fault … wasn’t …

  “The ice was so thin … she didn’t know …

  “I remember her face, her eyes … screaming to me as she slipped beneath the ice … couldn’t save her. She was gone too fast, too deep … no chance of …

  “Her frozen scream … eyes of frost melt into my dreams and even my empty, long waking hours … what more … I’d like you to …

  “Two of the horses came up to the pond to watch … breath making huge clouds in the chilly … probably wanted a drink … threw clods of earth at them … drove them off …

  “I felt as
hamed … Lor used to love those horses. She once told … sit at her window every … watching them in the field across … and listening to them sing.

  “I never told you … said she could hear them singing. I listened every morning after … listened for months and months … only heard them twice … thought I heard …

  “… course I understood why you had to go. You … with me any longer. I understood … never understand why you came to work here … must have known I was here … joy to see you but I knew … only three years since …

  “And I’m glad you left here when … it was my fault but in light of what’s happened since …

  “I dreamed last night (or perhaps … morning) – I don’t sleep now – we were holding … embracing out there on the ice. Our skins, together … covered in snow. Our limbs … embrace, had turned a pure white … heat of our kisses was … that warmed us, kept us alive in that place, so cold … desert of ice.

  “… couldn’t have been a dream. It must have been a memory, or … in a dream. We’re not like that now; not for a long …

  “… first time I saw you … thought you’d go away again … With your red hair … pale skin; yours was a white love, an icy love … remember that beautiful, departed day … seemed perfect.

  “… on the observation deck yesterday. Don’t know why – nothing to see … there was something … thought I saw horses – white and perfect – galloping out of the blankness, emerging proud … four of them. Pure white … ran off again, almost at once, into the nothingness and I … afterwards that they couldn’t have … Couldn’t. … hope I’m not going the way of Wilkes.