by Guy Adams
He laughed at that. "I think it's more a case of having spent my whole life looking backwards. For once I've started looking ahead, it makes all the difference."
"Well," she replied, "let's hope there's something worth looking forward to."
Yes, Alan thought, let's hope that.
4.
Alan had agreed to take the second shift on watch, taking over from Ryan. When the lad woke him his face was contorted with such worry that Alan assumed something awful had happened. "What is it?" he whispered, looking around to see if everyone was safe.
"You'll see," said Ryan. "The noises, coming up from the canyon. It's enough to send you mental."
"What sort of noises?"
"I don't know," said Ryan, "wailing… I can't describe it, you'll hear them soon enough, scared the shit out of me and I don't mind who knows it."
Alan gave the boy's arm a squeeze. "Well, get yourself to sleep now, I'm here."
"Probably never sleep again," Ryan said, but shuffled off just the same.
Alan moved to the outer edge of the firelight and began to slowly stroll in a circle at the perimeter of the darkness. He had his torch and frequently shone its beam but it only illuminated more dusty ground and the edge of the canyon beyond them so he switched it off to conserve the batteries. To begin with he assumed that Ryan must have imagined the noises that had so scared him, the night was silent beyond the crackle of the fire and the sound of snoring. Then, after a few minutes, he began to hear them. He understood why Ryan had struggled to describe it. It was reminiscent of many things but not wholly evoked by any of them. Alan thought of the noise you made by blowing across the neck of a half-full bottle, or the ghostly whistling one heard in a marina, the wind drawing notes from the masts of the boats. This had that eerie quality but wasn't so tuneful. He remembered a girl who had been waiting for a bus outside the campus, laughing with her boyfriend – Albie Forrest, Alan remembered, that had been the kid's name, and the girl was Jessica… Jessica something. They had been play fighting, she accusing him of some imagined indiscretion, he rebuking her with a wide, innocent smile. He had stepped back and tripped on his own rucksack, falling back into the road just as their bus had pulled up. The sort of stupid, stupid thing that happened everyday. One of those stupid deaths, the sort that mocked the victim with their sheer fucking pointlessness. The front wheels of the bus had gone straight over him. Alan was sure that poor Albie Forrest had known nothing about his own death, just a sensation of hitting the pavement and then – bang – no more. His girlfriend though, Jessica – Alan wished he could remember her last name, he had never taught her but somehow the fact that she had seen her boyfriend die demanded the respect of his knowing her full name – Jessica whoever had opened her mouth and the wail of shock, the primal note that echoed out of her, not a scream like you see in the movies, a much more forceful noise, had also been similar to the wailing that came from the canyon. What sort of creature makes a noise like that? Alan wondered? He pictured something grey and small, wizened beasts, used to a life in caves and darkness. Their wide "O" of a mouth open in perpetual sound, pumping that terrible noise into the night air. It only took him a few minutes to become just as disturbed as Ryan had been. "Avoid the canyon," the beggar in Dyckman's painting had warned them. Hearing that noise Alan couldn't imagine for one moment something enticing enough to lure him in. He stepped closer to the edge, shining his torch again to ensure he didn't stumble in the darkness. You couldn't get a sense of the canyon's depth at night but he had marvelled at it during the day, drawn by Ryan's insistence that you couldn't discern the bottom. The boy had been quite right, it had been like gazing into a distant black lake with similarly dark tributaries running off and into the distance.
As he stared over the edge he glimpsed a light, only brief but a flash nonetheless. A match perhaps? He glanced back towards the camp fire, wanting to make sure that everything was alright. When he looked back over the edge the light had returned, a small orb that appeared to bob along in the darkness. Someone walking a distant trail with a torch, maybe? Could somebody – some other unfortunate like themselves – have travelled through the box and be stuck down there in the darkness? Perhaps they were working their way up, terrified of the noises around them, desperately hoping to find the light. If that were so then surely Alan should help? Maybe hold his torch over the edge to guide them?
Alan dropped to his knees, torch in his hand, and pulled himself along his belly towards the edge of the abyss. Even as he was doing this a small voice, a uselessly small voice told him he was mistaken, whatever that light was it was no passing innocent. Alan ignored the voice, barely even heard it – in his head there was nothing but that alien wailing, that noise that was like so many things but none of them precisely – he was determined to shine his torch into the darkness.
The beam lit up the rocky edge of the plateau, pulling out shapes of small trees and outcrops of stone. The bobbing light hovered for a moment, no longer moving. Then, with a speed that proved the lie that it was held by any human hand, it swept upward, flying towards him like a signal flare. The wailing seemed to build in volume. Jessica's roar at the sight of her boyfriend leaking from beneath fat wheels, a child blowing a note on a half-empty coke bottle, a train unfurling its whistle in the depths of a tunnel. Alan's mind seemed to sink beneath it and he could imagine looking down on himself, lying there stupidly on the edge of the sheer drop, the vision falling away from him as if his consciousness were spiralling upwards into that endless black sky. It was a sensation akin to being faced by one of the wraiths that patrolled this House's empty spaces, that feeling of being both the observer and the observed. As if a sliver of the mind had been cut loose allowing you to exist in two places at once.
The light continued to sail towards him and, inside its orange glare, he saw parts of himself that he had never seen before. He saw himself as a young man – as Chester – sat in the back of that black De Soto, the punishing voice of the box hammering into him, demanding he do as he was told. He saw himself pointing a gun at a small Spanish girl as she ran away from him. Saw the box, handed to him by Ashe seconds before he arrived here for that very first time, coming to in the dark, dripping tunnels that ran beneath the building. He saw not just his past but his future too, the wide-open space where he would one day live – a farm, he thought, I'm living on a farm – that blue sky above but tinged with a darkness, a poison that he couldn't quite identify but knew to be there. He saw those he lived with, recognised their faces and wept, small salt droplets that fell from his startled eyes and dropped down into the darkness below. Darkness filled with a widening light and the ever-increasing howl of the creatures that lived in it. He saw a door, hanging impossibly in thin air, the red dust of the useless soil blowing against its lintel and vanishing through the half-open gap, vanishing into another world. He saw himself walk through that door, a destiny to keep. Then, as the light threatened to consume him entirely, the howling loud enough it must surely split his head wide open if he listened to it for another second, he felt hands grip his belt and yank him back from the edge.
5.
"'Avoid the canyon,' it tells us," said Ryan, "and what do you do? Go dangling over it the very minute I swop shifts with you."
This was not the first time Ryan had said this, nor did Alan suspect it would be the last.
It had been Ryan's hands that had pulled him back from the edge. The boy, unable to sleep thanks to the disturbing effect of that wailing, had lain there for a while before deciding to check on him.
"I just knew something horrible would happen," he said, again for the umpteenth time, "like I could sense it, y'know?"
"I'm glad," said Alan, also not for the first time, "thanks."
"No worries, mate, happy to help."
They were sat well back from the canyon's edge now, both of them shining their torches towards it in case those howling creatures may decide to come up and see them. Alan thought this unlikely. They bring us to them,
he thought, like mythical sirens. He had an idea that they could no more come up here than the weird, pale fish that inhabited the deepest parts of the ocean could creep towards the light. Maybe they explode, he thought, if they come up too high.
He hadn't told Ryan what he had seen. He'd explained the lulling effect of the light and sound well enough, the way it had drawn him to the edge, but that was all. He could see nothing to be gained from the rest but awkward questions he didn't have the first idea how to answer.
The rest of their party continued to sleep behind them, Ryan having agreed that he would sit out the rest of Alan's shift with him. "We should do this in pairs, y'know?" he had said, "keep an eye on one another."
Alan saw the good sense in that and agreed he would offer the same courtesy to Barnabas when he was roused to take over.
"Let's hope there's no more than another day's walk to the hatchway," he said. "I for one don't want to sleep next to that for another night."
"Damn right," Ryan agreed. "Roll on the library, what can go wrong in a library?"
Penelope had told them a few of the things that could – and had – gone wrong there but Alan chose not to remind the boy.
"Time to wake Barnabas," he said. "You go and get him and get some more sleep yourself."
"Alright," Ryan agreed, getting to his feet, "'avoid the canyon' it said," he muttered before heading back to the fire.
6.
They passed the night in dual shifts. It cost each of them an hour less sleep but ensured that the sleep they had was safe.
Once the sun rose to that low, perpetual sunset it held throughout each attic day, they had breakfast and made their way onward.
An hour or so after they had begun their work they came across a hatchway in the dirt. Ryan lifted it and gazed down on an underwater dining room. Large fish coasted around the table decorations and the candles that flickered, quite impossibly, in the murky water.
"No thanks," he said, "I'll brave it out up here for a little longer I think."
The next hatchway was another couple of hours away, this one opening up onto the snowy peak of a mountain.
"Been there," announced Penelope, "and I don't much fancy the three-day trek all the way down it to get to the library."
There was some concern that it might take them days to reach the next hatch – bearing in mind the length of Penelope's previous journey in the house below – but, as the sun began to drop once more, they saw it in the distance.
"I don't know about the rest of you,' said Alan, "but I'd rather keep walking – by torchlight if need be – and spend the night on the other side of that hatch."
Penelope, who had been hoping that they would spend the night in Carruthers old camp – a place she now looked on almost with nostalgia – agreed that anywhere was better than here. Hawkins concurred and so they kept moving.
Sure enough, after half an hour or so they were completely reliant on their torches to see the land ahead. The wailing of the creatures in the canyon to either side of them echoed around them as they walked the last half mile or so.
As the edge of the hatchway crept into the reach of their torchlight, Ryan dashed ahead to open it up and check they were in the right place.
He looked through the hatch and rolled onto his back with a groan. "If that's a library then I'm a badger's bumhole"
As the rest of the party walked closer they could see various coloured lights shining up from the hatchway.
"What the hell...?' Alan squatted down and stuck his head past the hatch.
Beneath them was a large coin arcade, pulsing lights, the chiming of bells, the whirr of ball bearings as they chased across glass tables. He sat back.
"Ryan's right," he said, "definitely not a library."
PART ELEVEN
Restoration
1.
Land makes ghosts, not people. Some places are just built wrong, fault lines in the already temperamental bedrock of reality. They are brittle and prone to leakage, distorting the perceptions of those that visit them. Sometimes this effect can be positive: for millennia artists and intellectuals have claimed to achieve inspiration from their location. A "plugging in" to their environment that charges the mind and instils a clarity of purpose, a richness of vision. Sometimes the effect is not so beneficial. These "cracks" can encourage hallucination, foster metal illness, breed delusion. The human mind is fragile and the effects of such exposure are unpredictable. From catastrophic mental damage to just a feeling of unease, a malaise that can no more be readily identified than shaken off.
That small plot of land in Florida, just off Highway 192 and Interstate 4, soon to be Ted Loomis' tourist Mecca – "The biggest draw around these parts," he had said. "Strike me down if I tell a lie," and God had moved in a most mysterious way, say hallelujah – was one such place.
From the birth of that region, as Orange Island, in the Pleistocene Era, it had made its effect felt. An early hominid had once sniffed its air, in the pursuit of something to put in its belly when suddenly it began to hum The Beatles' Eleanor Rigby. This was followed by most of the White Album and Abbey Road before, desperate to silence the alien noises in its skull, it bashed its little brain out with a rock.
Millennia later, a small settlement of the Apalachee tribe became convinced that if one were to sleep there, one would hear the voices of "spirits". In truth it was the sound of their own subconscious opening wider than any sweat lodge ceremony could accomplish. That and radio filtering through from the future. Radio signals have always been highly prone to temporal leakage and the Apalachee were not the first to drop to their knees on hearing stray coverage of the World Series or Howard Stern.
Hamilton Disston – who would later go fishing with Chester Alan Arthur, the president after whom Alan was named – dreamed up his plans to drain the everglades not a stone's throw from there. A project that saw Disston become the greatest landowner in America. He would later blow his brains out while in the bathtub. The voices gave but they also took away.
Today that little patch of grass and mud, that vibrating acre of earth, had one last trick to play.
"Hughie," the stranger said, waking Hughie up from his uneasy sleep in the driver's seat. "I've made a decision. I'm going home."
2.
Tom woke up as the alarm clock jangled on the passenger seat.
"Alright," he croaked, reaching for it and fumbling it into the footwell, "Jesus…"
He scrabbled around, knocking it to and fro with the tips of his fingers then finally grabbed it. Angry with the thing (and himself) he wound down the window and threw the clock out as hard as he could. It ricocheted off a streetlight and fell silent into the gutter.
This act of spontaneous cruelty towards timepieces stopped a passing woman in her tracks. She stared at Tom and he smiled back through the windshield.
"Morning honey," he said, "looks like it's going to be a beautiful day."
She didn't reply but moved on quickly, in case this lunatic decided she was annoying as his alarm clock.
"Oh yes," said Tom. "A real beautiful day."
He reached into the glove compartment of the hire car and pulled out the revolver he had just bought.
God bless New York, he had thought when getting off his plane the night before, the city of free commerce. He had gone to see Fat Eugene at the Triangle Pool Hall, a man that could sell you most things if you had the dough, and had asked to buy a gun.
"People complaining about your playing?" Fat Eugene had asked. "Making dumb shit requests?"
"Nothing like that, Eugene," Tom had replied, sucking on the neck of a beer and trying to act relaxed. "Just feel the need of a bit of protection, you know how it is."
"I wouldn't give a shit," Eugene had said. "Some motherfucker keep asking you to play Manilow or some shit, I figure they deserve what's coming. I mean that 'Mandy' shit, y'know? That's some lousy noise, a fucker wants to hear that maybe you're doing him a favour y'know?"
"Just get me a gun Euge
ne," Tom had insisted. "You can do that can't you?"
"Of course." Eugene had shrugged, his whopping titties quivering for a few seconds as if trying to bounce free of his vest. "Who is this talking? This is Eugene, he can fucking get you fucking anything."
He had in fact got it within the time it had taken Tom to neck another beer. It had tapped most of his cash, hence his staying the night in the car. It had been that and spend the few dollars he had left on an alarm clock and a bottle of whisky or blow it all on a cheap room. Fuck it, what was a bed and pillows at the end of the day? A man didn't need such luxury. Though you had to admit there was some irony to being forced to sleep rough where he was. God had a sense of humour this morning, that's for sure.
He shoved the gun into his jacket pocket and got out of the car, looking up at the tatty brownstone across the street. He rubbed the sleep from his face. Maybe one more cigarette? No need to rush things. He pulled out his pack of smokes and couldn't help but smile at the solitary cigarette left in the packet. That's some symbolism right there, he thought, shaking it between his lips and flinging the empty pack to the floor. He rummaged for his lighter, lit the cigarette and leaned against the car smoking as slowly as he could.