A clattering noise as though one of the paint pots had been kicked echoed around him. Mark started and trained the light of the phone in the direction of the disturbance. The procession may have gone but there was something still there. Things came shambling out of the farthest shadows of the tunnel. He recognised them as the curious others he’d seen amidst the spectral procession. They were the ones who, like him, bore witness to the passing throng but were not part of it. They had no place in Mark’s world either. He counted a handful of moving shadows as they peeled from the walls and the darkest places, and stepped into the blue-grey luminescence radiating from Mark’s right hand.
One of them came scuttling along the floor, scattering debris with broad swipes from peculiarly elongated limbs. This was what had first made him aware of their presence. He knew its name; in fact he knew all their names. And they were just how he had imagined they would look. Mark backed up against the wall as the first of them broke into the circle of light surrounding him. They seemed no more corporeal than the others who had passed him before, but he sensed their malice and was afraid.
He remembered when he was a child, how his parents and grandparents would regale him with stories from the town’s darker past. Not all of them were true — he had known that even at so young an age. He, in turn, would share these stories amongst his friends. They would scare themselves silly with tales of the town’s local ghosts and bogeymen. Where these stories originated nobody knew but each generation would embellish them with their own gruesome twist. As a lad there were places you would never dare to visit alone unless you welcomed an encounter with Ginny Greenteeth, Icky with the Rag Eye, Crawling Tom or The White Lady. And there were countless more, in fact a whole town’s worth of stories that never existed outside of a terrified child’s imagination. When did the town turn its back on such as these? They were already long abandoned when he’d left his hometown. And that was over twenty years ago. Invoking even one of their names now felt like a gunshot, which he imagined echoing up into the town. The ground might shake, windows rattle and, as one, flocks of pigeons would burst skywards.
These creatures of darkness played no part in the slow procession. As they came from nowhere they had nowhere to go. They were the shadows of superstition, nourished by fear and ignorance. They were a projection of the unknown terrors that had prowled the darkness beyond the fire’s glow ever since man’s origins. Had they existed before? Or were they something that came from within, a trade off for the gift of self-awareness? Surely no other creature before homo sapiens had stared into the night and contemplated the unknown? Perhaps it was tied to the knowledge of our own mortality. The collective fears of countless generations imprinted into the strata of Warrington. These were not the echoes through time of those who had lived before, but a manifestation of the fears of the whole populace. Once they were the formless, intangible and uncertain terrors that had existed only on the periphery of consciousness. But over the generations, names and characters became linked to them. And with those names there must belong faces.
As the figures moved into the pale circle of light he saw clearly how they differed from the others. Whereas the passing throng had never looked like more than an image projected onto a screen made of smoke, these seemed possessed of a more physical presence. The light from the phone in Mark’s trembling hand cast dancing marionette shadows across the walls and floor, the lightshow making the scene before him all the more terrible. They stumbled blindly towards him, their fingers snatching at empty air. Here the smooth twisting smoke of the other apparitions had coalesced into something more substantial; their grey mottled skin looked as if it was formed from cigarette ash. They lacked the expressiveness of the other faces. Here he looked only into empty gaping holes within a mask of churning ash. The others had once been people, whereas these things were nothing more than shabby facsimiles. A child’s interpretation of humanity, where heads appeared either too small or too big, misshapen arms or legs randomly attached to contorted torsos. The eyes were nothing more than frantic scribbles of black and the mouths that might have been intended as smiles were anything but.
The figures crowded around him, blocking his escape and leaving only the slimmest chance of retreat further into the tunnel. But Mark knew that the only way out was right through them. He took a few faltering steps back until he felt the tunnel wall come up behind him. He crab-walked along the brickwork, but here the twisted form of the White Lady blocked his path. He darted back and the creature breathed foully at him. The stifling odour of soap suds was replaced by something equally overwhelming. The air was suddenly thick with the fug of stale cigarette smoke. Mark was a lifelong non-smoker and he always found the smell unpleasant. But there was also a part of it that always reminded him of home. It now filled his head with a barrage of images: a coloured beam of light dancing through darkness onto the screen at the local cinema – may we remind patrons that the right side of the auditorium is designated for non-smokers only. He pictured brimming ashtrays, the spilling grey ash mixing with the wet rings left by pint glasses … yellow stained fingers … the lingering reek caught within the folds of an old greatcoat … a hat with a small bright orange feather tucked into the headband.
Had he the mind to, he might have reached out and touched the grey figures milling about just in front of him. Though they appeared unable to see, he noticed how they seemed to home in on the bluish glow in his hand. He stretched it out to one side and, all save the female apparition clinging to the wall, unsteadily pursued the light. Perhaps this might be his way through? Mark was about to hurl the phone away from him and make a break for it, but something stayed his hand. Beyond his tormentors, there was another figure. A man, tall and thin, stood beneath a feeble curtain of light marking the entrance to the tunnel. It was his only way out. The man had his back to him as if oblivious to Mark’s predicament. He wore a hat and from the cloud of smoke that wreathed his head, Mark deduced that he was smoking.
The screen blinked off once more and Mark was scrambling to reignite it. The distant silhouette remained but the advancing figures were lost to the pitch black. By the time he’d got the light back on he was mere inches away from the humourless, contorted faces. He barely had the chance to scream as they fell into him. He thought he was done for but their flailing arms exploded on him like waves against rocks. Ash billowed up, filling his nose and mouth, choking him as he stumbled forwards. Something grasped at his legs and, looking down, he recognised Crawling Tom. Even though he turned to dust as he made contact it was enough to trip Mark and he toppled heavily onto the prone torso. He collapsed right through the squirming body and was enveloped by the resulting plume of detritus. Mark scrabbled instantly to his feet and pushed through what still remained of the tottering figures, coughing and spitting out the blackened filth threatening to clog in his throat. Hot tears purged his eyes and rolled down his face, forming rivers of pale flesh through a mask of grey powder.
Just one solitary figure remained between Mark and his way out. He loped towards it, trailing an ash cloud that seemed to be retreating back into the shadows. He chanced a single glance over his shoulder, the sight spurring him onward. Amongst spiralling constellations of ash and dust his tormentors were coalescing back into their nightmare forms.
Mark wanted to run faster but as he approached the man standing by the boarded-up entrance and entered the pool of half-light stealing in from the narrow opening overhead, he stopped sharply. He became suddenly aware that the only sound was the wet slap of his feet on the rain-slicked stone cobbles echoing back into the darkness. Yet still the man did not acknowledge his approach, but stood there with his back to him as if in deep contemplation or composing himself.
The light from the mobile phone had gone off again, but Mark made no effort to relight it. There was enough to see by here. Just. Save for that spark of orange on the hat the man was little more than a silhouette. Shifting darker shadows within the grey shape gave some sense of form. This was no flicker
ing phantom or ash bogeyman, but a solid physical being. The head was hidden beneath the rim of the hat so only the ears could be discerned. But these appeared too large, like open shells — the ears of an old man. The heavy smog of cigarette smoke increased, banishing completely the suffocating odour of the soap factory. He was presented with the image of the old man on the coach, but it was only the briefest of visitations. He breathed more deeply, the smell sending him further back into childhood… a hat and tatty Macintosh hanging from a hook on the back of a door… nicotine fingers flicking crumbling ash from the folds in a pin-stripe suit … the sinuous dancing smoke … the orange glow of inhalation … a feather like a frozen flame. His habit was so much a part of him that in recent years Mark had occasionally thought back and wondered whether his grandfather had smoked the cigarettes or that the cigarettes had smoked him. Mark mostly remembered his final years as some brittle, rasping, nicotine-stained husk of a man. To the child the devastating effect of his grandfather’s end infected his nightmares more than he had been prepared to admit. When monsters came calling it was with wheezing gasps and long yellowed fingers, accompanied by the pungent burning of tobacco and the heavy aroma of soap suds threatening to steal the air from his lungs.
When his mother passed on her story about the man who waited by the old market gate every New Year’s day, it was always his grandfather he’d pictured. Standing forlornly, wreathed in blue smoke and wearing his long grey mac, his face lost under the brim of his tilted trilby.
He’d realised long ago that what his mother had related was intended as a joke. But like Mark, his mother had believed in it on first hearing. Did his mother ever really understand? He didn’t think she had. He remembered how she would tell him that, as a child, she would look for but never see the man with as many noses on his face as there were days in the year. He remembered how she would laugh at her own gullibility as a child, never once noticing the fear take root in her own offspring. How many nights after that had he woken crying, trying to make sense of his mother’s story? Through his nightmares strode the familiar figure of a tall thin man that might have been his grandfather. He certainly wore his relative’s hat with that distinctive orange feather in the band, but he could never conjure up the face to fit. It had always remained elusive, a malleable ever-changing thing, like kneaded dough. His subconscious mind rebelled at the sheer impossibility of what he tried to place there — a face that possessed three hundred and sixty five noses.
Of course, he realised now that on the first day of the year a man with as many noses on his face as there were days in the year would look just like any other man, with just one nose.
Just one nose for that one day.
But today was not that day. It was April the nineteenth. Mark was still trying to calculate the total number of days that had passed when the thin man finally turned to face him. A large hand reached out and, as if in some daze, he raised his own free hand to meet it. Strong fingers closed on his firmly, warmly. The phone dropped from Mark’s other hand and it clattered across the hard stone. He barely noticed it break apart with the impact as the thin man politely raised his hat by way of a greeting and let the meagre light from outside fall across his features. This wasn’t his grandfather, nor the old man he’d encountered on the coach.
All Mark could do was to keep on counting.
Afterword
The first Ill at Ease project was conceived as an experimental venture into the uncharted waters of ePublishing – specifically Kindle – by Mark and Stephen. Mark asked if I’d like to contribute something and realising such an opportunity might not present itself again I jumped right in. The resulting eBook proved a critical, if not exactly commercial, success. Our stories received favourable notices from all those that read them. The anthology even appeared on the longlist for that year’s British Fantasy Society awards. The general consensus was that we’d achieved what we set out to do. If only a handful of people had read the stories, they were at least the right people and the only criticism we received, and it is hardly a criticism at all, was that there wasn’t enough of it. So when we decided to follow it up with a further volume, we decided to invite a few other writers along.
There Shall We Ever Be is one of a handful of recent stories affected by memories of childhood. And is also one of three stories that use Warrington as the setting – the others being my unfinished novel A Place for Everything and the, so far unpublished, short story The Kingdom of Shadows.
It started life, with the title The Parts We Throw Away, as a rather simple tale of a property developer falling foul of an old industrial northern town demolished then built anew. The story presented here retains little of this original conceit. The protagonist Mark finds that long suppressed memories of his past have fallen under the influence of the collective psyche of the town’s abandoned past. It is relatively trivial childhood fears that manifest themselves; but in the circumstances he finds himself, these fears prove overwhelming.
This aspect of the story came from how my, then, five year old daughter would be afraid of small things which to most adults wouldn’t even be noticed. She once refused to walk past a parked car because the arrangement of headlights and radiator grill gave it the appearance of having an angry face. It was this idea of a small, inconsequential childhood fear returning to haunt an adult that forms the centre of the story.
The story also highlights the cultural and historical vandalism perpetrated on the town by successive councils that seem in the thrall of developers. Even listed buildings aren’t safe from the wrecking ball.
It proved a frustrating story to write, none of it came easily. I tend not to overplan what I intend to write and usually approach any project with only a vague idea as to where I am going. I also tend not to start writing at the beginning. I think of it as a jigsaw, all the pieces are blank until I decide what picture needs placing on each piece. And only when I attempt to assemble them can I be sure that the pieces form a cohesive whole. Hopefully you won’t even see the joins.
If you are reading this afterword and the story that precedes it then it is because there are others who have a far greater faith in my words than I do.
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