by Jeff Noon
Becca’s hand lifted from the oak and she hurried away over the grass, holding her scarf to her head against the wind’s clutches.
Nyquist broke contact with the tree. He set off towards the high street. It was past noon and the street was busier than he’d seen it before. He stopped outside the corner shop. The window held a curious display of items: a crystal decanter, a piggy bank, assorted tinplate toys, a packet of Sutton’s rich tea biscuits, icons of five different saints, cobwebs galore, an empty cake stand, a model of Sputnik made from matchsticks, a tin of Bisto gravy browning, and a single book – a study of dream interpretation by “Madame Fontaine, Gypsy fortune teller”. There were many other goods on sale, all crammed up next to one another. One object of interest was a small white packet marked, “The Hair of Creeping Jenny”, whatever that might be. The figurines of the saints made a bizarre collection: one had antlers growing from his temples, another the carved head of a crow on a human body. More curious still was a small bottle made of blue glass. The label bore the legend Penny Blood. It looked Victorian in design. The flask had a card propped up next to it: Genuine blood of Saint Belvedere.
Nyquist reminded himself: no speech, no speech. A bell tinkled above the door as he went inside and the two customers and the shopkeeper all looked at him as he entered, their hands frozen mid-gesture. He made his best shot at the Hello symbol. Despite the grubby state of the window, the shop itself was clean and well laid out. Shelving units held goods of every kind, from ironware to groceries to rolls of cloth, magazines and jars of boiled sweets. The customers and the shopkeeper – a lady of advancing years – resumed their conversation, and Nyquist could see their hands sometimes working together, thirty fingers and thumbs intermingling to construct complex ideas and sentences. Were they talking about him? Probably.
He selected a local atlas from a stand and placed it on the counter along with the exact money: one shilling. No change necessary. He was hoping to keep interaction to a minimum. He needn’t have bothered, for Mrs Featherstonehaugh was in no mood to chat. The lower part of her face was bound with a roll of cotton decorated with flowers, her mouth completely hidden. She took his coins and rang up the price on the till. Nyquist gestured the hand sign for Thank you, hoping he hadn’t said something rude by mistake. Outside he breathed clean air and was glad of it. Dust had settled on him.
He walked across the street to the pub and ordered a plate of egg and chips. Mavis nodded, a slight smile across her lips. While he waited for his meal, he opened the atlas and looked up Beadle Street in the gazetteer. This was the address the old man had written on the back of his father’s photograph, the location of Mr Thomas Dunne, Photographer. He was directed to page 19, an area called Lower Hoxley. He would have to walk along the river to get there. He glanced through the other pages. The outlying areas were mainly devoid of features, just blank white space representing the fields and hills around the village, with only the occasional name denoting a ridge or crest or river crossing. Strangest of all was a symbol on one of these fields, a single red exclamation mark. Perhaps it marked a site of historic interest, or an area of danger?
Mavis returned to the room and placed his meal down in front of him. Nyquist tapped at the atlas with his pen and then inscribed a question mark next to the exclamation on the map. She looked at this with unblinking eyes and then wrote on his napkin.
Stay away.
He wrote: Why?
The answer was a single word.
Ghosts.
She would say no more.
PEEPER
He crossed over the bridge and walked along the bank, away from the village. The Hale widened into a pool where a flotilla of swans was swimming, perfectly content in the waters of winter. A sign advised against feeding the birds. The river ran on over a weir, and the land started to dip, following the valley floor to a slightly lower level. A small lane and a few old cottages marked the way. And then open country. A little later he saw the foundations of a new set of houses visible in the ground, next to a pile of tools and machinery covered in tarpaulin. He followed the river around a curve of land and there before him was Lower Hoxley. Only twenty minutes’ walk separated the two built-up areas but he could see straight away that the lower-lying village was a different prospect than its older cousin. He imagined that most of this village had been built in the last fifty years or so. For a moment, Nyquist imagined that they might ignore the calls of the saints in this place, but no, he saw that people were using the Hoxlian sign language. Following the directions of his atlas, he came to the village’s center. He turned onto Beadle Street and found house number 11. It was a large two-story building, the door marked Closed Until Further Notice. The painted sign above the window read Thomas Dunne, Photographer and Picture Framer. He ventured down a side alley and found a window with a missing panel of glass. Nobody could see him. He reached in, lifted the latch and climbed over the ledge into a kitchen. The place stank of neglect. He walked along a corridor lined with portraits, all depicting the same woman. She was dark haired and fair skinned with eyes that often looked away from the camera. Each photograph was marked with a name and date: Agnes, February 1956; Agnes, September 1957 and so on. A first door led to a small living room, another to photographic darkroom, and a third to the front of the shop: a counter, a battered filing cabinet, a cash register with its empty drawer open. There was nothing here of interest, so he tried the living room, but it showed only the usual furniture and attributes of lower middle-class life. He walked into the darkroom. Bare walls, cupboards, metal trays on a worktop, each containing a layer of murky liquid. A single photographic sheet floated in one of the trays, its image completely blackened, lost forever. A pigeon’s feather and a collection of dead flies and bugs dotted the surface of the liquid, which was a strange color, a bluish tinge with tiny glints of silver floating within it. Nyquist looked around the room. It was easy to imagine voices whispering in this airless space. It was a place where memories had been solidified, the moment captured. The thought was clear: the photographs he’d been sent through the post had been processed here, on this worktop. He tried the light switch, and the room was flooded with a deep red light. A moth was roused from slumber. It started to bat against the bulb over and over again in an angry, compulsive manner. Nyquist knew the feeling.
He took the staircase to a landing: a bedroom in the front, a bathroom and toilet, and a large storage room in the rear filled with empty picture frames and cardboard boxes. He looked through one of the boxes, finding a vast depository of images: bucolic family scenes, brave-faced young men dressed in uniform, woman in summer dresses and high-necked gowns, children sitting stiffly under the lights, local landscapes, the village in sepia tones. One image was marked: Hoxley High Street, 1891. Nearly seventy years ago. It didn’t look that much different from today. He wondered if he should look inside some of the other boxes. But did he really think he’d find more pictures of his father? No. Nyquist shivered. This place was getting to him, making him uneasy.
On one side of the room a row of large objects was hidden under sheets of white linen. He uncovered the first one and saw it was a peep-show machine, the kind he’d seen in penny arcades when he was a boy. The Mutoscope. That was the official name of the device, but his father always called them “What the Butler Saw” machines, as they were meant for adult viewing only. This one advertised the wicked delights of “Lady Anna’s Boudoir”. Mr Dunne must have supplied images for them, or else he collected them for his own pleasure. Nyquist pulled the sheets off the other machines. Two of them offered the usual erotic titillations, but the last peep show in the line held a very different kind of promise.
Dance of the Tolly Man.
And below that a date: St Algreave’s Day 1939.
He took a penny from his pocket and dropped it in the slot. A handle was released from the side of the machine. Nyquist placed his eyes against the viewing aperture and started to crank the handle, around and around.
It was a fli
ckering world.
Black, white, black, white, black, white.
The cards clattered as they turned on the drum, each one holding a new image, moving on the story one frame at a time. His eyes were painted with motion.
The village green in the summer, people gathering in jerky motion, captured so many years ago, preserved and brought back to life.
A faraway song was heard, seemingly arriving from somewhere in his head.
Sing along a Sally, O
The moon is in the valley, O
The children appeared. They were dressed in white gowns, with flowers woven in their hair. They danced around the pole, the ribbons they held knotting and unknotting in elaborate patterns, back and forth, weaving in and out, in and out.
Around and around, turning, turning.
Black, white, flickerings of day and night.
Insert: a raven flying across in a slow blur of wings.
Stutter. A jump in time.
The moon suddenly overhead, waxing gibbous.
The dance continuing.
Come to grief or come what may,
Tolly Man, Tolly Man, come out to play!
A figure shambled into view, called from the depths, from the past, from the heart of the village and whatever secrets might be held there.
Insert: drops of blood, black smudges.
The Tolly Man once more, closer to the dancing circle.
Nyquist looked on, his eyes pressed tightly against the aperture, his hand turning and turning the handle as the children turned and turned again, around and around the pole, the ribbons fluttering and the Tolly Man turning, turning, turning towards the camera’s view, a shambling man whose face was covered entirely in woven twigs stripped of their leaves, the mask bound together with two strands of wire, top and bottom. Flickering, flickering, gray and white and black and sepia toned. It looked monstrous, something out of a nightmare.
Insert: a spinning top.
Flecks of spittle. Scratches.
A cradle rocking.
The Tolly Man.
Closer, closer, swaying back and forth. The masked figure was staring at the camera. His face filled the screen entirely, close enough for Nyquist to see through the gaps in the twigs. He viewed the face beneath, glimpses of flesh, a mouth, a licking tongue, and those dark wet black eyes that never left his, peering from the knotted branches, from the darkness, from the gloom of that long-ago night, across the years and the days, turning, turning, around and around.
The mask touched the screen.
Thorns pressing at skin.
THE GO-BETWEEN
flicker
flicker
flicker
blank
flicker
flicker
blank
flicker
flicker
flicker
blank
Nyquist thought at first that his eyes were blinking, the room appearing to him intermittently, but even when he opened his eyes wide and kept them so, the flickering stayed on, lingering, as though the cards of the Mutoscope were still clicking past one by one inside his head, one blank image at a time. Low level after-effects.
Flicker, blank, flicker…
He was lying on the floor of the storage room. He groaned and tried to move and felt he was climbing upwards from a dream that held onto him, that wrapped around his wrists and ankles and chest, trying its best to drag him back.
He broke loose. He broke loose by banging his fist down on the bare floorboards, again and again until the skin cracked on his knuckles and the pain woke him completely from the spell, and he sat up and rubbed at his eyes and massaged his head at the temples and dragged his tongue across his teeth feeling the dirt and the dust.
Flicker, blank, blank, blank…
He got to his feet and looked around. The room was dark. Or darker than before. And when he looked out of the window, he saw that dusk had fallen. He’d been out for a long time, far too long. Hours had passed. What the hell had happened? He stared at the Tolly Man machine. It looked entirely innocent, a relic from another age.
He heard a noise from downstairs and he moved to the stairhead, peering down. All was silent. He placed a foot on the top stair. There it was again, a banging sound, louder this time. His skin prickled. Had someone else broken in? Or was it the Dunnes, returning home?
One stair, another. Listening, stepping as quietly as he could.
The noise sounded like someone trying to escape a wooden box, a tiny confined space of some kind.
Now he hurried downstairs, his fear banished by action.
The sound was continuous, coming from the rear of the building, from the kitchen.
Nyquist stopped at the open doorway and looked within.
It was a pigeon. That’s all. His heart settled.
The bird was sitting on the kitchen table, casting a wary eye on Nyquist. And when he approached, it took off, flying around the room in a panic, its wings beating against the walls every so often. This was the noise he’d heard while upstairs. It suddenly flew at his head and then away, fluttering madly. For a moment it headed for the open window but then changed its mind, landing on the table once more.
Nyquist stood where he was. There was a small metal tube attached to the creature’s leg. It was a carrier pigeon, like the one that had greeted him on first arriving in the valley. It might even be the same bird, for all he knew; gray mottled with brown, a ring of white around its neck. He reached out a hand and made what he hoped was a pigeon-like call. The bird shook its head and hopped away, leaving tiny claw-prints in the dust of the tabletop.
Gray feathers floated down in the dimly lit room.
Nyquist moved gently, slowly. He expected the bird to leap away again, or even to peck at him. But instead it made a surprise action, melting into his hands, surrendering, its warm body perfectly lodged in his curved palms.
A tiny heart beating, and his own pulse matching it exactly.
They both fell into calm at the same moment, and the bird allowed itself to be picked up. It made a cooing sound. Nyquist pulled the metal tube free of its leg and placed the bird back on the table. Immediately it took off and flew away through the open window.
Message delivered.
The tube was easily opened. Inside was a rolled-up piece of paper, which, flattened out, revealed a few lines of neat italic script.
My dear Agnes. I can’t stop thinking about you. Please meet me at the Mocking Gate, tomorrow morning at nine o’clock. I shall wait there for you.
Your loving friend, Leonard.
Nyquist felt cheap, like he’d walked in on a scene of intimate lovemaking. What the Private Eye Saw. This whole affair was turning into a series of puzzles or riddles, but the questions were never asked correctly, which meant that the solutions could never be worked out.
He remembered that he’d left the red light on in the darkroom. He went to turn it off, and saw that the moth was still fluttering about. Its flightpath always brought it back to the lamp and then away, and back: like an obsession. But then it landed on the wall and settled and he had a chance to gaze upon its colors, its wings marked with two ovals of red, the eyes of a demon. The eyes opened and closed as the moth flexed its wings, before it took off once more. But this time it made a mistake, burning itself on the lamp. A wing sizzled, and the poor insect fell into one of the metal trays on the worktop. This was the tray that held the submerged photograph, the black image. Nyquist went over to see if he could help the moth. Something odd was happening: the silver particles in the fluid sparkled as though activated. The moth tried to stay afloat, but its wings were drenched. It was dying. But the process of development had already begun, the chemicals released from slumber. The photographic image lightened, just slightly, and then more so, the black ground fading to patches of gray, and then to areas of almost white. Slowly, slowly, one detail at a time, an image was forming. It showed a road, a house at the end of a row, and a view of open land beyond that, all a little
blurred as yet. But Nyquist could not look away. He waited, hoping the image would develop further. For he could only believe that this was another photograph meant for him. He shook the tray gently with his hands, helping the process along.
There it was, clearly seen: a street sign.
EXCHANGE OF GOODS
Dovecote Lane was on the far edge of Lower Hoxley, a poor area compared to the rest of the village. Number 23 was the end terrace. It had the look of a final outpost before the moors took over from humankind. For the second time in two days, Nyquist compared a house with its image in a photograph. Everything looked the same; the red door and window frames, the overgrown garden. There was even a van parked on the open ground nearby, as there was in the image. A dog started to bark as Nyquist approached. The beast’s entire body strained at the leash that held it to a post. He ignored the animal and knocked on the front door. There was no answer, so he decided to check out the rear of the property. The parked van was marked with a business name: Sadler’s Household Repairs & Removals. The side wall of the house was pockmarked and crumbling into dust in many places, injuries from decades of wind, rain and hail. A pair of wooden buttresses had been erected against the wall to reinforce it, or to keep the house from sliding away. The dusk was heavy in the sky and the fields beyond were already dark. The wind blasted across the open land right into his face.
Demons in every gust, he could hear them.
There was a back yard with three outbuildings. One was a large shed – through the open door, Nyquist saw a workbench with tools set out, and a half-built rocking horse sitting on the floor. A number of painted wooden figures stood on the ground beyond the yard; they looked like fairground icons, or the figureheads of galleons. The other two buildings were cages. Inside each one a great number of pigeons were sitting on perches, or hopping from one resting place to another, vying for space. The air reeked of bird shit. Hundreds of cooing sounds merged into dissonance. The hunched figure of a man was standing at the open door of one of the cages. He was dressed in blue overalls and had a cloth cap pulled down low on his brow. His overalls were spotted with a mixture of paint daubs and pigeon poo: there was no way to tell which was which. The man’s face wasn’t yet visible. He was attending to the birds, scattering seed in the feeding trays. Some of the pigeons alighted on his shoulders. He had a workman’s hands, scarred and shredded, but he stroked at the birds with a gentle touch. Some of them, Nyquist saw, had metal carrier tubes attached to their legs.