Two Dark Tales

by Charles Lambert

  Omar shrugged. ‘There are one or two details that need fixing.’

  ‘Really?’ He’s been in touch with her, thought Gordon. He’s told her about that house behind my back. Maybe he’s right. We do need the money.

  ‘She’s writing a book about God’s secretary.’

  ‘She’s what?’

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  ‘Don’t tell.’

  They went to the station to pick her up. She was a large woman, with large brown hair, and a large brown bag. She wouldn’t get in the car until she’d finished her cigarette. ‘These fucking trains,’ she said. ‘The whole fucking world’s gone mad. There is no such thing as passive smoke.’ She spoke with an accent that veered wildly from the Essex estuary, where she was born, to New York, her current base. She told them this as they drove back to their house, while Gordon glanced at Omar’s rigid, concentrated, marginally horrified profile. She worked as a journalist, freelance after being sacked by a US tabloid neither of them had heard of, where she’d been the official J-Lo correspondent. ‘That would be Jennifer Lopez,’ she said, when neither of them reacted. Gordon, who’d thought she was talking about the North Korean leader, said, with some effort, ‘Wow!’ Omar rolled his eyes.

  Omar and Angela worked on the website while Gordon put plates and glasses on the table. He’d kept lunch simple, cold cuts, salad, fruit, but Angela nourished herself on wine and cigarettes, leaving the two of them to pick at whatever they’d put on their plates. She was telling them about a nun who’d survived on stale bread and her own vomit between bouts of self-flagellation and divinely inspired typing, and the fight she was having with her New York editor about royalties on e-books. Neither argument encouraged hunger. After coffee, which she drank with an almost religious fervour, she said she wanted to see the house. Gordon looked at Omar.

  ‘The house?’ he said.

  ‘I thought we could just take a look from the outside,’ he said.

  ‘Right,’ said Gordon.

  Angela walked round the outside, as they had done, squinting in through the windows. ‘This is just what I’m looking for,’ she told them. Omar smirked at Gordon. She was about to say something else when her mobile rang. ‘Oh,’ she said, staring at the screen. ‘Will you two excuse me?’ She moved away from them a little and began to talk. Somewhere in the distance a dog had begun to bark. Would that put her off? Gordon wondered. She didn’t seem the doggy type. They caught snippets of what she was saying; she sounded as though she was trying to convince someone of something. At one point, she called across to them. ‘Would you guys say round here was like Positano?’ They looked at each other, Omar with a pleading expression in his eyes. ‘Yes,’ shouted back Gordon. ‘But better. Much better. Less hoi polloi.’ I’ve done it, he thought; by uttering these almost entirely dishonest words I’ve succumbed to the madness.

  On the way back, they told her they would find out who owned the house and whether it was available to buy or not. ‘You guys can make it happen,’ she said, adding: ‘For a fee, right?’ She seemed relieved when Omar said, ‘Naturally.’

  After she’d left and they’d raked over the horror of her every word for any remaining embers, Omar went to talk to Ciccio. ‘You stay here,’ he told Gordon. ‘You know what he’s like when there are witnesses.’ Gordon, who had no idea what Ciccio was like at such moments and had never, in any case, seen himself in this light, as a potentially damaging witness, agreed nonetheless to go along with Omar’s ban. He washed the glasses, emptied Angela’s various ashtrays, checked his email, turned on the TV. There was a programme about a gay couple looking for a house in southwest France. Art imitating life, he thought, except that this wasn’t art, and what he and Omar had going for them wasn’t quite life, or didn’t feel like it. The mystery house was a rose-covered cottage a few miles outside Béziers. The place the couple chose in the end was lovely, though, and cheap enough to seem possible even for them. Well, almost. Maybe this was the moment their lives would change, become worthy of being lived.

  Omar was soon back. ‘He knows the house,’ he told Gordon. ‘It’s owned by two sisters. One of them lives in Australia and the other one lives in California. It used to be lived in by their brother, but he died a couple of years ago. They asked Ciccio to take a look at the furniture and see what it was worth, but then they decided they didn’t want to sell. He’s still got the key.’

  ‘He’s still got the key?’ repeated Gordon.

  Omar nodded. ‘Yes, that’s what I thought.’

  ‘How do you know what I’m thinking?’

  ‘Oh yes, like you’re such a mystery,’ said Omar, grinning.

  ‘I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to take a look.’

  ‘I called her while I was walking back. She was still on the train. She said she’d come down again this weekend.’

  ‘We’re supposed to be checking up on Cees.’

  ‘Well, that can wait, can’t it?’

  Gordon nodded. ‘So it’s a bit of a fait accompli then?’

  ‘We’re only going to show her round,’ said Omar. ‘If she doesn’t like it, no harm’s done.’

  ‘And if she does?’

  Omar shrugged. ‘If she does, we’ll take it from there. We don’t even know how much she’s prepared to pay.’

  ‘Positano prices?’

  Omar rubbed his hands together. ‘That would be nice.’

  Angela was talking about money. She’d sued someone, successfully, for damp in a flat she’d sublet, evicted one tenant who’d lost his job and installed another one for a substantial down payment. She’d thought of giving the money, or some of it, to a local convent that ran, among other things, a soup kitchen for down-and-outs in the area. They’d asked her to volunteer before they accepted her donation, so that she could see what they would do with her money. She was much admired in New York Catholic circles, she told them, because of the work she’d done to promote the message of Mother Teresa. She’d brought them both a copy, signed, of her coffee-table book, large print, much of it quotation, with pictures of the wizened Albanian luminary hightailing it from one celebrity event to another. Gordon asked her if she’d read Christopher Hitchens on Mother Teresa, but she was busy opening her cigarette packet and Omar had already kicked him under the table before she asked him to repeat the question. They were in the garden of a restaurant this time, drinking Chardonnay del Lazio, eating deep-fried local prawns and a soup made from just-born fish. She lit her cigarette, pushed her untouched soup to one side. ‘I said I’d go in and help them get the food ready,’ she said. ‘They gave me potatoes. I had to peel this – I don’t know, ton? – this ton of potatoes, and then cut them into pieces to go into some kind of stew, I guess. And so there I was, peeling and cutting, and this sister comes up to me and says, no, not like that, you need to take off all the peel. And I’m like, there’s peel on this? On this?’ She waved an imagined half-peeled tuber in their faces. ‘And then this nun picked up some of the pieces I’d already cut up and said, Oh no, honey – she called me honey! – these are different sizes; some of them will be cooked before the others, and I said, where the fuck is this place? Is this some kind of cordon bleu establishment? I mean, they’re fucking homeless. So then I thought, I can do good with this money in other ways. I have friends who work so hard, they need to chill out somewhere cool. Everyone loves Italy. It’s so, I don’t know, old world. I have these people I know who worked with J-Lo who are just so beat, you know? So what I’m doing is diverting that cash into their well-being. Does that make sense?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Omar and Gordon, as one. Their hands brushed against each other as both tried to fill her glass.

  ‘I have friends who need to find God in their hearts,’ she said, leaning forward, the edge of her sleeve trailing in the untasted soup. ‘Do you have God in your hearts?’

  ‘We’re looking for him,’ said Omar, straight-faced. ‘We really are.’

  She nodded, apparently satisfied.

  Angela liked
the inside of the house even more. She bustled from room to room, lifting dust sheets, taking photos with her mobile, leaving a trail of ash and some overpowering musk-based fragrance she’d applied to herself in the car. ‘How much do you think I can rent this place out for?’ she said. Who to? Gordon wondered. Your God-seeking media friends? How much would they be prepared to pay in their search for spiritual well-being? Omar named a figure that startled Gordon and seemed to slightly disappoint Angela. ‘In the low season,’ he added hastily. ‘And how much do the owners want?’ she asked when they were standing outside the house again and she had checked her email. ‘I need to talk to them,’ Omar said. ‘I’ll let you know.’ She looked at him, wagged a finger. ‘Make sure you do,’ she said. She turned to Gordon and repeated the gesture. ‘You make sure he does.’ You despicable creature, thought Gordon as he smiled and nodded. I loathe you with all my sinful heart. They took her directly from the house to the station while she made phone calls and, between calls, talked uninterruptedly about the healing power of prayer.

  The following morning, they drove through the cork forest to Cees’s house. From the road below, nothing seemed changed. They parked and walked along the track that led up to the house, passing by the haystack. The dog was still there, reduced by now to scraps of flesh and fur, its rictus snarl half bone. My God, thought Gordon, what kind of people are they who would leave a thing like that? Omar shuddered. ‘Very Wes Craven,’ he said, walking on.

  They saw a parked Toyota and the tent, one of those high-tech capsule affairs, pitched at the side of the house. The flap was unzipped. Beside the tent, on a flat-topped rock, was a small camping stove with a coffee pot on it, but there was no sign of Cees. Gordon called out his name a couple of times. His eyes drifted up towards the cave where the pilot had hidden, a black hole halfway up the mountainside, not quite expecting movement. Omar tried the nearest door and found it open. He walked in. Gordon heard him say, ‘Fucking hell!’ and hurried over.

  In the centre of the room was one of those fold-out tables campers use and two wooden chairs that must have belonged to a formal set, spindle-legged and covered with maroon brocade. The table was covered with empty bottles, wine and beer, twenty, maybe thirty of them. Other bottles stood or lay on the floor, some of them broken, as if they’d been kicked over and then abandoned. But the thing that had startled Omar, it was immediately obvious, was the shit, human shit as far as Gordon could tell without quite entering, distributed along the four edges of the floor in equidistant piles, as though whoever had used the room as a toilet had paced himself for some reason Gordon couldn’t bear to contemplate. The lower part of the wall was stained yellow with piss, in overlapping arcs, like a painted frieze. There were flies everywhere, fighting for space on the wealth of ordure, waiting in humming clouds for their turn to settle.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ said Omar again, but without surprise, as though there was simply nothing else that might be said. He backed towards the door, bumping into Gordon.

  Gordon was moving out of Omar’s way when he saw the snake glide out from among the piles of shit, its head slightly raised as if it had seen them, or scented them out. The head moved slowly, smoothly, in their direction until Gordon could see the perfection of its form, and the absence of eyes. The jaws eased wide, as if in greeting. Seconds later, they were standing outside the house, Omar gripping Gordon’s arm, the door pulled shut behind them.

  ‘Fuck me,’ said Omar, over and over, like a mantra.

  ‘Well, Jenny was right,’ said Gordon. ‘There’s definitely something wrong here. No way would Cees do anything like that if there wasn’t. It’s like he was trying to protect himself. With shit. Did you think that? Like it was some sort of magic?’ Driven as much by dread as by curiosity, he walked to the tent. Inside, he found a rolled-up sleeping bag, some neatly folded T-shirts and cargo shorts, a pair of sandals. A wind-up radio. A torch. Cees’s MacBook was open, the screen dead. Gordon picked it up and crawled out. ‘See what you can do with this,’ he said to Omar, who took the laptop from him but held it at arm’s length as if not trusting it not to be made out of shit as well. ‘He can’t be far away. He might have written something, I don’t know. I’ll go and look.’

  He was behind the house when he saw a movement in the grass near his feet. He jumped back, startled. It couldn’t be the same snake, he thought, unless it had slid beneath the door. The snake seemed to pause for a moment, as if making sure that it had been seen, before sliding away from the house. Gordon followed. After three or four steps he saw that it was leading him to the cistern. He stopped. The snake stopped, turned its eyeless head in Gordon’s direction. ‘OK,’ he said, surprised to hear his voice. ‘I’m coming.’

  The hole at the top of the cistern looked larger than Gordon remembered. By the time he had reached the rise in the ground, which reminded him once more of a burial mound, the snake had slithered down into the emptiness. Gordon heard a faint plop as it hit the water below. Omar was shouting for him to come back to the house, but Gordon ignored him and dropped to his knees beside the hole, as if afraid that someone might push him in if he stayed on his feet. It took his eyes a while to adjust. He wasn’t sure what he expected to see, he told Omar later, although he knew as he said this that he was lying. He was expecting to see Cees, face down perhaps, or even worse face up, his arms stretched out in the posture of someone crucified, staring skywards from the black skin of the water, wreathed in snakes. What he saw was a sudden darkness as a cloud of flies descended.

  ‘That was close,’ said Omar. ‘You almost fell in. If I hadn’t grabbed you, you’d have been down there with all those icky-wicky snakes.’ He gave a ghoulish laugh. They were back at home. Gordon didn’t answer. He was sick of being teased.

  ‘Here it is,’ Omar said, opening his laptop. ‘I don’t know what’s in it but it’s the last thing he wrote.’

  ‘I don’t know if we should be reading his private stuff,’ said Gordon, more angry with Omar than anything else.

  Omar shrugged. ‘Look, if I’d disappeared the way he has, I’d want people to be doing whatever they could to find me.’

  ‘We don’t know if he has disappeared.’

  ‘We couldn’t find him.’ Omar’s tone was patient. ‘The car was there. The tent was open. His laptop was turned on. Oh yes, and there’s that other little detail. He’d left piles of his own shit all over the floor of a room filled with empty bottles. I think that gives us a right, as concerned friends, to do whatever we can to find out what’s going on. And that includes inside his head.’

  ‘I suppose so. But won’t he know you’ve got this?’ And how long have we been friends of Cees’s? wondered Gordon, let alone concerned. He’d often wondered what Omar meant by friendship.

  ‘Not unless he looks specifically, he won’t. I deleted it as soon as it was sent.’

  ‘I’m still not happy about it.’

  ‘So don’t read it. But don’t expect me to tell you what it says.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t.’

  ‘Fucking hell, Gordon, what is wrong with you? Anyone’d think you’d lost your sense of fun as well as your job.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, you haven’t exactly been a bundle of laughs recently, have you?’

  ‘I can’t believe you just said that.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ said Omar, backtracking.

  ‘Yes. You mean I’m boring as well as a financial millstone.’

  Omar bridled. ‘That’s your version of what I said, not mine.’

  ‘It’s plausible though, isn’t it?’ Gordon stood up and was about to leave the room, but Omar caught his arm.

  ‘You can’t just wander off.’

  ‘I fucking can just wander off.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you?’

  ‘Why don’t I what?’

  ‘Wander off.’ Omar let him go. His voice was cold, challenging. ‘Go on. You know where the door is.’

  Gordon’s arm, released, fell to h
is side. It would serve him right, he thought. He had never loved Omar less than at that moment. But where would he go? What did he have? He stood in the kitchen, ripping off a piece of kitchen towel to wipe away unexpected tears when Omar whistled.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘Just take a look at this!’

  Fuck off, thought Gordon. But he went back into the living room, nevertheless. He had nowhere else to go.

  Omar pushed the laptop round so that he could see. This is what he read.

  THE PILOT IS WAITING THE PILOT KNOWS THE HOUSE WILL SHIFT THERE ARE FOUR WAYS IN BUT NO WAY OUT THE PILOT SAYS SHOW ME THE DOOR THE DOOR TURNS ON ITSELF THE PILOT SAYS DRINK SOME MORE THE PILOT SAYS WHITE HANDS WHITE FACE SHIT ON THE FLOOR THE PILOT SAYS YOU ARE SHIT THE WALLS CLOSING IN THE HOUSE TURNING EACH CORNER ON ITS AXIS KNEW ABOUT THIS BEFORE BUT DIDNT LISTEN SO NO WAY OUT THE PILOT SAYS SNAKES EVERYWHERE COME TO THE CAVE THE PILOT SAYS THE PILOT SAYS HANDS ON MY FACE THE PILOT SAYS I AM ME THERE IS ME THE HOUSE IS ME I AM THE PILOT KNEW THIS BEFORE THE PILOT SAYS ON MY SIDE THE HOUSE TURNS INSIDE OUT SO NO WAY OUT OMAR KNOWS NO ONE KNOWS THE PILOT KNOWS

  ‘Blimey,’ said Gordon. ‘I wonder why he didn’t write it in Dutch. I wish he had.’

  ‘He must have wanted someone to read it.’

  ‘Well, I wish someone else had,’ said Gordon. ‘I can’t deal with this at all.’ He wondered sometimes what it must be like to go mad. He wondered sometimes if what he was doing with Omar, this life they were leading together, was a form of madness, or cowardice. But, in that case, who was the bigger coward?

  ‘We didn’t go and look in the cave,’ said Omar, standing up, as if nothing else had been said. As if nothing else had happened that day other than their having read this message, addressed to someone, surely, but not to them. Perhaps addressed to no one.