Strange Tales V

by Mark Valentine

  I despair of you, Devries. You have invested in the whims of idiots. When the dogs come, I will abandon you. My Lord is beside me. I fell beneath the hooves of a mare. I felt my bones shatter. I was halfway dead when they pulled me from the dirt. I no longer dream. I have examined the silence of the deep night. I have dissected it like one of your cadavers. You cannot hope to follow. I will deny you. You are meat.

  ***

  By the end of last January I was close to giving up. I had been trying to reach Aiden since Christmas. There had been plenty of times during his worst years with the drugs when I called to arrange our yearly meet, half-expecting someone else to answer his phone, an unfamiliar voice telling me he was gone. But the last time I had seen him he had been healthy and—stupidly, I suppose—I had allowed myself to believe, hearing his recorded voice greet me every time I called, that he was still alive and well.

  It was Fi who heard first. She waited until the boys were in bed before telling me. Someone in Aiden’s family, his cousin, had got around to checking his messages and decided to call back. She came through to our landline and told Fi that Aiden had passed away.

  Much was unclear. I imagine they did not want to tell her the details. I expect they were embarrassed. Fi told me she had come away with the impression that Aiden had taken an overdose, although she did not think the person on the other end of the phone had used that word. It is not unusual, she said, for a relapsing addict to overdose accidentally. Something to do with tolerance.

  Over the following days I wondered what could have caused Aiden to relapse, and I realised I knew next to nothing about his life. Our yearly get-togethers had given me only snapshots, cuttings. I had heard the odd name. I knew he changed jobs often. I found myself haunted by the things he had said a couple of years before, the year they started demolishing the school, about his fear. I could only see his death in that context. He had died afraid, and likely alone.

  I had missed Aiden’s funeral. My only means of getting in touch with anyone else who knew him, who might have known him better than I, was by calling his old mobile phone. Aiden’s voice was still on the greeting. It felt almost rude to be addressing my message to someone else. I described myself as an old school friend of Aiden’s, said that I was sorry to hear of his passing. I also said that I had been affected by this news and felt the need to talk about it, and to share my memories of him.

  His cousin returned my call the same evening.

  ‘You said you were a friend? You know you’re the first?’

  ‘I know he didn’t have many.’

  ‘I’m surprised to find he had any. He had some numbers on his phone but they . . . you wouldn’t call them friends. None of them turned up for the funeral. I’m sorry you missed it.’

  ‘I am, too.’

  ‘We buried him up by Kinloch Moor if you wanted to go and see him or whatever.’

  ‘Thanks. I was hoping you could tell me how he was, when he died.’

  A pause. ‘Well, he wasn’t good. You know he had some problems?’

  ‘Yes.’ It occurred to me that I was unlikely to learn anything from this person, who probably knew Aiden no better than I did.

  ‘Actually, did you say you went to school with him? He had some things he kept from school. I was going to throw them away, but you might want to take a look and see if there’s anything worth keeping.’

  ‘Yes. I could do that.’

  She told me that Aiden had been living in his mother’s old house on the scheme behind the golf course. He had moved back there two years ago, after his mother died suddenly. The woman on the phone, Ann, suggested a time and told me that she would meet me there.

  It was only after I put down the phone that a sequence of events came together in my head. The last time I had seen Aiden, the year after they demolished the school, he had been full-faced and happy. I realised this must not have been long after his mother’s death, and yet he had not mentioned it to me, or given the appearance of a person bereaved. I had always taken our conversations to be an opportunity for absolute candour, for soul-bearing. I had shared with him my doubts about my marriage, my fears on becoming a father. He had failed to tell me about this event, which must have changed his life. I found myself wondering if I had ever known him. Of course, I had not. I had not even tried.

  ***

  I went to McBirdy on my own once, a few months after he had given us the books. I did not wait for Aiden when the bell rang. I left the school and walked around the building until I felt sure that he was gone, then slipped back in.

  The crudely made paperback McBirdy had lent me had not satisfied my curiosity. It was a history of occult figures, dryly written and dull. I had got through the section on De Sousa on the first night and skimmed the rest for mention of anatomy or chemistry or anything that looked like a science. I found only a series of biographies and various references to séances and fairies. Aiden carried his yellow book in his schoolbag. He read it in the corridors between classes. He read it on his way home. He sometimes read passages aloud, as he had in the golf course on the day McBirdy gave it to him, but they never made sense to me. I imagined them as sections of some structure that I could never conceptualise because I was lacking some key connecting piece. I wanted another book.

  When I recall my walk to McBirdy’s lab through the near-empty school, it is as if the dream-like quality of what I was about to encounter had begun to encroach long before I got there. The corridors were deserted and the light seemed peculiar and yellow. The band was playing ‘Amazing Grace’ in the basement studio at what seemed like half speed. I remember the squawking of my trainers on the tiled floor. Clumps of dust drifted down in the sunbeams from the ceiling of the gym hall, as if something had recently flown in or out of the skylights.

  McBirdy’s lab was empty, but his office was not. He was in there, as were Aiden and Darroch. I saw through the window—McBirdy with his hands on either side of his head, shielding his face, his mouth wide open in pain, cowering; Darroch behind him, tall, bearing down, slapping McBirdy hard across the head again and again and again with the flats of his long hands; and Aiden, standing in the corner, clutching his precious yellow book to his chest and watching, intently, as if he were the orchestrator of the scene. I remember it almost as a photograph, except that photographs are silent and the sound of McBirdy’s strange, high-pitched yelps has never left me. I backed away, and when I got out of the lab and into the corridor, I ran. The rest is a blank. I do not recall leaving the school, only that when I did, I imagined—behind my back, though I never turned to look—one, two, three pairs of eyes at a window, watching me go.

  I never told Aiden what I had seen, in part because it had felt like an intrusion, and because after that afternoon I became a little less certain of him. The weight had shifted in our friendship and the change would be permanent.

  ***

  I took the bus to Aiden’s old house, but got off two stops early and walked across the golf course. Since my days at school it had become enveloped by the sprawl. The little housing scheme where Aiden grew up, once an island surrounded by rolling seas of moorland, was now part of the suburban mainland. The golf course, once connected to the moors, was now fenced in, an exhibit.

  I found the scheme itself more or less unchanged. The bent street signs, the cracked pavements: nothing that had been broken twenty years ago had been fixed. Aiden’s house looked much the same behind its garden, which had become wild and overgrown. Walking the garden path, I felt like my own ghost, as if I could not possibly exist in that place as an adult.

  Ann, Aiden’s cousin, must have been twenty years older than him. She seemed as uncomfortable in the house as I did. She led me through the tiny kitchen that had smelt of burnt toast, but now stank of bleach, into the front room. The place had been cleared of furniture and personal items. A few cardboard boxes formed a pile in the corner, and all but one were sealed.

  Inside the unsealed box were some things that had belonged to Aiden. An
n pulled them out one by one. They seemed to be items that she, or whoever, had thought too meaningful to discard or sell: framed photographs, notebooks. Among them was the yellow book from McBirdy. I took the book and a picture from our second year trip to Iona, because it had the two of us in it.

  ‘Did you want to see anything else while you were here?’ Ann asked me.

  ‘What’s to see?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘We were never that close,’ I said.

  She led me to the door. I found my way back to the golf course, clutching the photograph and McBirdy’s book in my hand.

  Halfway across, I stopped and opened the book.

  I felt a kind of rush, like vertigo. Aiden had only given me glimpses of the inside of the book and, appropriately or not, I had decided that it contained the answers to every adolescent question my confused mind had about my future and my place in the world. I had, in the end, faced my future without it. Now, I held it.

  The first few pages were missing, torn out roughly. The book began in the middle of a personal account of some war or revolution, and described the torching of a town hall—bookcases piled up and burned in the public square—the narrator, a child, cowering behind his father’s coat tails. There were accounts of the narrator’s schooling, his friendships and loves. There were long, rambling musings on human nature, cruelty and vengeance, sections of venomous remonstrance directed at the narrator’s tormentors, many of whom were named, although the names were unfamiliar to me. Some of these sections I recognised, or thought I did, from Aiden’s readings.

  I found nothing in the book that I could digest or make sense of at a glance, but I stood in the golf course for at least thirty minutes, flicking back and forth, before closing the book and walking to where I could catch a bus home. I sat on the bus with the book on my lap, considered opening it once or twice, but feeling nervous or guilty, as if it were something pornographic.

  When I got home, Fi and the kids were watching a cartoon. I put the book in a drawer, which became its keeping place when I could not be alone to read it.

  ***

  I decided in the end that I would go to the old school on my own, sit at the Smokers’ Bench, drink to Aiden. There was a supermarket covering much of the land where the school had been. Where the old science block used to be was a car park, outrageously floodlit like the floor of some amphitheatre. The substation where Aiden and I used to sit seemed to buzz angrily under the strain of providing so much light, hissing and spitting intermittently as if in protest.

  I had brought the yellow book. I had been working my way through it, slowly, with effort. I had managed to ascertain that the book was either written by De Sousa, or written to read that way. It was the first hand account of the life of a man as consumed by bitterness as he was convinced of his god-given greatness. It seemed the work of a disturbed mind. In places it was totally incoherent. But I felt that I owed it to my younger self to read and to try to make sense of it.

  I sat on the Smokers’ Bench with the whisky bottle in my left hand and the book open in my lap. I had reached one of the more dense sections of material in which De Sousa was exploring the capacity of the human mind for anticipating death. After a few drinks I started to read aloud. I imagined Aiden sitting with me and listening. Or perhaps I imagined that I was Aiden, reading to my younger self. I became quite absorbed in the reading. It was only because I reached the end of a section of text and looked up momentarily that I saw, through the trees below, an old man in the car park, shambling around in the fluorescent light.

  It was McBirdy. I realised that immediately, before the questions began to occur. Why was he there? Did he know I was here?

  Someone had told me—it may have been Aiden—that McBirdy had gone mad. They said the police found him wandering alone through the town centre, semi-clothed and speaking in tongues. This was years after his retirement from teaching at Saint Columba’s. He had already grown stranger during my later years at the school. I dropped biology after the second year but I heard how he had taken to carving symbols on the lab benches and burning bones in the mornings before the students arrived so that his lab stank of it for the whole day.

  I watched him for a while. He was walking back and forth across the same section of the car park in straight lines, turning sharply from time to time as if tracing a geometric figure with his feet. His head hung so that he was looking at the tarmac, and twice he stopped and looked up to regain his bearings. The second time he looked through the trees, directly at me.

  It occurred to me that he was standing more or less on the site of his old lab.

  I went to him. Had I not been drinking—had he not seemed so in genuine need of help—I might have sat and watched him until he turned and shuffled off home. Instead, I picked up my book and my bottle, went down into the glare of the car park lights and approached McBirdy.

  I had not seen the other old man at the edge of the car park, in the darkness beyond the reach of the lights. Something caused me to look in that direction and when I did, he stepped out.

  Unlike McBirdy, Darroch had aged terribly. He was as tall and thin as ever, but his face was hollowed and grey, and he did not so much walk as progress forward in a series of awkward lurches, as though each step was an attempt not to fall over. He made his way across the car park in this fashion, not towards me, but towards a place between McBirdy and me. It seemed he was trying to head me off.

  Darroch moved quickly, and when he came in front of me he straightened himself, seemed to grow another foot taller. And there was still the feeling of intimidation, fresh and familiar as if the twenty intervening years had never happened.

  ‘That book is ours,’ he said. ‘Give it!’

  Behind Darroch, McBirdy ran his hands through his hair. I recalled him making the same gesture in his office on the day Aiden and I came to see him. The day he gave Aiden the book. I saw the same desperate glint in his eye. There’s a sensation when the impossibilities pile into one another with such collective mass that some subconscious fuse blows. It can’t be real. Though dulled by drink, I experienced that sensation then.

  Standing beneath Darroch I felt smaller, as if I had shrunk into my own outline. I felt childlike, unconfident in the most basic decisions: which way to stand, what to do with my hands. I shuffled my feet. I was unable to speak. And the only thought I was able to hold on to was of my children, that I would see them in the morning and have to be Daddy again, when I was this shaking adolescent, pretending to be a man. I gave him the book.

  I heard Darroch whisper, Boy. And although he was walking away from me, I heard that voice in my ear. He put his arm around poor McBirdy, but I had the sense that it was not an arm but a wing he was stretching out and enveloping McBirdy somehow.

  I called. ‘Where are you taking him?’

  Darroch turned, stepped towards me and into a beam of light, and stood there for a moment, half-lit, skeletal, staring. Then he tilted his head back, so that the light caught his yellow eyes, and he bared all of his teeth, and stretched out his left arm towards me. I felt a chill and a tightness across my chest with the thought, bizarre though it was, that he might reach across the car park and grab me with his thin fingers. Instead, he showed me the palm of his hand, then balled that hand into a fist, and with his teeth gritted tight and his eyes on me, he tilted his head back further. Behind him, McBirdy was motionless.

  I felt another cold rush as I saw what Darroch was doing. He was tugging with his teeth at a phantom tourniquet on his outstretched left arm. With his right hand he mimed a syringe, and he plunged it into his forearm. The schoolyard caricature of the junkie. He pulled his head back further, as far back as he could without taking his bulging eyes off me, and I could see veins and sinews through the thin skin of his neck. I do not know how long he stood there like that, because I turned and ran into the trees.

  I waited at the Smokers’ Bench for some signal that it was safe to go home. A few times I considered going back out into the
car park, but I was stopped by the image in my mind of Darroch, still frozen in half-shadow with his arm out, his teeth bared. I pulled the whisky from my coat pocket and drank. A crowd of kids happened by: we regarded each other for a moment and then they passed without a word, like animals of a different species.

  When the whisky was gone I got up and took a bus home. The lights were off and one of the boys was in the bed with Fi. He stirred when I sat on the edge of the bed to remove my shoes, and started to moan and swipe limply at some apparition. I watched him for a moment, then placed my hand firmly on his chest. When he fell still, I lay across the foot of the bed. I waited for sleep, but found myself unwilling to rest, clutching at half-remembered fragments from the yellow book, threads of gold, intangible, that receded one by one into an obscure, unreachable place in my mind.

  When the dogs come, I will abandon you.

  My Lord is beside me.

  You cannot hope to follow.

  AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

  Charles Wilkinson’s publications include The Pain Tree and Other Stories (London Magazine Editions) and Ag & Au (Flarestack Poets). His stories have appeared in Best Short Stories 1990 (Heinemann), Best English Short Stories 2 (Norton), Midwinter Mysteries (Little, Brown), and Unthology (Unthank Books), as well as in genre magazines/anthologies such as Supernatural Tales, Horror Without Victims (Megazanthus Press), Sacrum Regnum, Rustblind and Silverbright (Eibonvale Press), Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction and Shadows & Tall Trees. New short stories are forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Bourbon Penn and Phantom Drift. He lives in Powys, Wales.

  L.S. Johnson lives in Northern California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such venues as Lackington’s, Interzone, and Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History. Currently she is working on a novel set in eighteenth-century Europe. She can be found online at traversingz.com.