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The Sunlight Pilgrims

Page 7

by Jenni Fagan


  Or the sheep.

  Or whatever it is that lives up there—wild pagans dancing naked around fires at night, wearing animal horns on their heads. That would be something. There don’t appear to be any of those so far, but he did hear two people in the shop talking about a druid who owns a castle nearby and has a sex room in one wing. Dylan has not seen any druids—not that he’d know what one looks like. What he can see are some cows in the distance. What he should do is find an Army & Navy store and buy some wellies or a waterproof coat or something. That would take time, though. It might be okay to go just a little way up the mountain. All that space is too tempting. He can’t resist it. It’s like that clean feeling on Christmas mornings: waking up in the attic, going through to the kitchen, where Gunn would have a real Christmas tree next to the old hearth, a sock hanging up that she knitted herself a hundred years ago.

  The air inside the caravan is almost as cold as outside—it’s a constant nip and he clicks off the fire, pulls on a jumper and grabs his jacket and he’s out the door into the wind. He has to take a few steps back to see if the woman is at home, or Stella. What do you say to a woman who polishes the moon? Pleased to meet you, Dylan MacRae, borderline Nephil. It is one of Vivienne’s more endearing myth origins. A child created by a fallen angel and a mortal woman. Never just—one-night stand, didn’t catch his name, sorry, son, love you anyway.

  Dylan crunches along the lane. In this light the caravans appear tired. The two at the top of the lane have dirty windows and assorted debris stacked up in their gardens. Rose Cottage is at the end and it has flowers around the door and plastic pink flamingoes in the garden. No. 9 next door is the best-kept caravan. The silver sheen looks like it is treated with something. There is a neat, upright chimney poking out the top and smoke curling up. She has a wood stack in her back garden and what looks like tarpaulin over random bits of furniture. He wants to knock on her door.

  What if he did, though?

  What if he knocked three times?

  Never answer the door if someone knocks three times—Vivienne used to say that. She said demons always knock three times, but they can only gain access if you invite them in. So if someone knocks on your door three times and you shout Come in—well, then you’re just asking for it and if it is a demon then you really are fucked. What you have to do is go to the door and look through the spy hole and see what is standing on your doorstep and (of course) if it is a demon, then you tiptoe back down your hallway and put the lights out and hide behind the sofa and hope they go the fuck away.

  His grandmother’s journey is the filament Babylon grew upon. Gunn MacRae arrived in London as a pregnant runaway from the islands farthest north. She had five pounds in her pocket and she didn’t know a soul. One night at the White Hart in Soho she joined an all-night poker session and proceeded to drink five grown men under the table. She was raised on the kind of home brew that blinds by the bottle, so London gin never fazed her. She played the last man standing until his heart gave out. All the money on the table and the keys to Babylon just there in his fist.

  Dylan’s phone buzzes. He walks through to the bedroom but it isn’t there, then back through the hall; he retraces his steps and opens the bathroom cabinet to find it buzzing next to his toothbrush: Premises at 345a Fat Boy Lane are secured & cannot be reentered. A. N. Brogue.

  Dylan puts his phone in his pocket. He wants to punch someone repeatedly in the face. He breathes out slowly, tries not to be so angry, tries really hard to be rational about it, not get upset like this, but it is all too fast. They were all sitting in the attic drinking tea, and chatting, and watching telly, just six months ago! Him, Gunn, Vivienne. He feels the faintest lurch, the world spinning on its axis and him tipping somehow with it.

  When he slows down his face gets numb, it’s disconcerting. He needs to walk faster. He is unsure if he can even feel his toes anymore. Dylan turns onto the car park and crosses around the back of the garages. He’ll need to insulate the caravan or, like the kid says, he’ll just die in this. He’ll need stuff. Thermals. A better fire. He really needs clothes. The landscape is layered in different shades of gray, touches of green, brown, white—all the way to the horizon. The mountains are bigger than anything he has seen before. Everywhere there is rock, stone, vastness. Dylan pauses to catch his breath. He is about to live in one of the coldest places on earth this winter. Of all the places he could have come to mourn! His boots crunch across frosty ground. His big hands flex in fingerless gloves and keeping his focus on the nearest mountain, that is the thing. Grief keeps drawing him back, though. Like something he catches out of the side of his eye. Walking down a hospital corridor. The nurse lays down her chart. She looks up and folds her hands quite carefully. Walking back out into the world after. People. Noise. Newspaper sellers. Buses. Rain. Traffic. London. Sticking the key in the door at Babylon and just standing there in the doorway for how long?

  He squeezes through a tiny path and as he comes out onto the farm road a twig skelps him in the face, a touch of blood, red on his finger and stark against a bleached-out sky—a harbinger of snow up there, even he can tell that. A sign on a fence says EIGHRE: and there is a picture of a little beach; the arrow points along a pathway and that walk is longer than he can go right now. The trees smell green and woody, the furrowed soil frozen but still with that deep earthy clarity, all undercut by brine from the nearby sea. Across the fields, soil in neat furrows and sparkling with frost for miles. There is an old crooked tree, wide on the base with bald limbs that have faded to look like bone.

  The witches’ tree.

  It soothes him.

  Flat mushrooms grow around the base, all soft and wide and potentially fatal. Dylan crosses a wooden stile. Along the side of the field his boots slip on frozen bits of ground and he makes his way up a rocky incline. Height up here. Light so bright he can almost feel his pupils dilate, even though these skies are muted.

  He should go back.

  While he is out here he seems to be coming back to himself somehow, though.

  Also, he can’t get pissed while climbing something this big.

  That magician’s trick.

  The rabbit disappeared.

  A boy at the front of the audience stares into the hat. Where has it gone? It is elsewhere or not at all. That’s the only two options, kid. Elsewhere—not at all: what’s your bet? Dylan swallows down hard. He reaches the top corner of the field and he is panting. His throat burns. Below him the farmland brightens from dark brown to orange. A tractor lumbers out of a barn. The tops of caravans in the park are visible now. In the distance there are long trails of light where the motorway must be and he climbs faster, turning regularly to see the world unfold like a map below him. A light smoke drifts further up the mountain from a wee traditional croft house and the air is so cold it stings his nostrils. The sun slips behind a cloud, but a few seconds later the sky brightens fractionally and even that one faint tweak of light repaints shadows and valleys on the mountains.

  Dylan steadies himself, puts his hand out on a pine tree and the bark is rough to touch and a tiny spider runs down the trunk, red and quick—right across his fingers. He walks into the forest. Everything quietens. The wind cuts out. The motorway no longer hums in the distance. His breathing slows. Sun spirals down through treetops showing up sediments of silver and amber dust. A frozen pond. Curls of ice make a frost flower on a fallen bough. Each iced petal is perfectly curled and see-through. Winter has been hand-carving them overnight. Placing them here. Dylan takes a photograph on his phone, wishes for a better zoom. He had a look at the temperature on the old barometer before he left and it was minus eight. Up the slope, pine trees taper toward the light; it endlessly changes their shape and texture—sunlight illuminates one branch for a second, then dims a whole section of forest the next.

  As the trees grow thicker the light dims. It is soothing. It reminds him of Babylon.

  Setting up the projector.

  A screen counting back, 10, 9,
8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and that flicker.

  Drinking tea.

  It is so naturally dark in here that he could set up a projector right in this forest. In the summer he could tie up sheets in the clearing and send out invites to the locals to come and see movies here at night. If this winter ends. He could think about it. He wouldn’t charge for admission, not at first. He could supply popcorn and gin, though, make enough doing that once a week to keep himself going. It’s a thought. It would be great to see films out here at night, perhaps with some fires going in autumn, hot wine, roasted chestnuts, why not? There is something to love in this. Some people love people, some people love buildings, and he did—he burrowed in his projection booth—but this! Buildings and people—the relationship between them—childhood homes, holiday cottages, a shed in a garden, a derelict car. They showed a documentary last year about a woman who married a bridge.

  —It’s a long commute to see my new husband, she said.

  She lived in Cologne and the bridge was in Prague.

  —The heart wants what it wants, she said.

  In the same documentary there was a man who wrote love letters to a cargo container and in the film he wept and seemed so genuinely grief-stricken that Dylan realized he had never loved anyone the way that man loved his cargo container, and he couldn’t work out what was the most tragic part of that.

  —I will not be happy until we are together again, the man said.

  Another man exposed himself to lorries in lay-bys on the motorway while their drivers slept. A young architect fell in love with the Taj Mahal; he said her beauty was unparalleled, every stone of her palace built from grief and devotion.

  Birds fly up through the branches.

  Dylan’s heart races.

  He is so high up now, he crosses over a burn and a trickle of water joins the rough swish of his jeans and a crunch of frosted pine needles as he walks. There is a new track at the bottom of the mountain and a post with a blue square on it and a green square to indicate the beginning of a heritage trail. He turns and looks back down the mountain and the landscape spreads out, vertiginous.

  It has been nearly two hours’ walking already. From up here you can see the caravan site is made up of rows of vans in different shapes and sizes. Ash Lane is right at the back, it is almost separate from the rest of the park entirely. There are only ten caravans there and they are identical, all with a single, long, same-size garden space around them. To the entrance of the caravan park there is a road and a row of old miners’ cottages. Up here on the mountain he is fairly close to the back garden of a traditional wee croft house and from here he can see a man skinning some kind of animal. The man looks up the mountain toward him and raises his hand. Dylan nods and turns to move on. Something about that guy is familiar. He climbs faster to see if he can make it a little higher before turning around; this is the most wintry weather he has ever felt in his life. He wants to put a kettle on to boil, make something hot to drink, toast and butter, soup. His stomach growls.

  He walks up through a second, thinner layer of forest and there is a sign from the Forestry Commission. It describes all of the trees that are natural to this region. Pine, fir and larch. The sky whitens ominously and he can hear the sea but he can’t see it. A steady whoosh—like bristles of the old sweeping brush across the cinema stage—that pauses just before another wave comes in—the call of a bird high up above—smaller voices of other birds below and a stillness to the air—like the land around him is waiting—ready—preparing—for winter to come. Pine. Wood smoke. Clean air. Earth. His pores open to release alcohol from the day before yesterday and his heart thuds. He has to push his muscles to keep going until they burn and his throat aches and he has too much saliva in his mouth. He is not used to this.

  He stops and spits.

  There is a sense of disconnection, a nothingness and a hard-on. He heads up the next slope. His boots slip on wet bark and frosted stones. His toes are numb and so are his fingers. Then he is in a clearing with massive boulders and blackened earth where people have built fires. It begins to sleet, the cold sheets of icy pellets drive him down the mountain a few steps. He puts his head down and steps forward into the driving cold. Now would be the time to turn around, but he laughs and can’t seem to stop, awed by the sheer lunacy of this weather as it beats him back. It gets wilder and he ducks his head to keep going and then he’s on the ground—an awkward slip and a shooting pain through his elbow, the sleeve of his coat wet and muddy, his knee fucking hurts, the shock of it but he is up already. The sleet drives harder and faster—tells him to quit it—to get real—to go home with his stupid shoes, and that doesn’t mean the caravan—it means—take a train—wait until they’ve put the city together after this winter and start applying for jobs in every cinema in London—get back in a burrow—where ineptitudes like you belong.

  —Fuck you!

  He shouts it into the wind and the sleet is furious now. His hands are red and wet and if winter was a mistress she’d be a cold, violent bitch. His jeans stick to his legs. Heavy. Awkward. He finds footholds in crags of rock, stretches an arm up, pulls himself over a hulk of stone to find a welcome canopy of trees. Dylan reenters the forest and these boughs are thicker, more jagged—giant pines sway wildly, obliterating all but the most abstract shapes of sky. His breathing is ragged and each muscle aches. He stops and checks for his tobacco and he still has it. It’s sealed enough to be good for a roll-up at the top. It shouldn’t get dark until three p.m. but if it does, he can probably guide himself back by the lights of the motorway.

  Just a little further.

  He has been saying that for hours now. Isn’t it always the way? Just a little further than before. Just a little more. Just one more drink. Just one more song. Down the slope twig sculptures hang from branches, they bob and pirouette in the breeze. He takes another photograph. They’re sinister. Who has been putting them all here? Maybe the man who was skinning an animal? Maybe the satanists? Or the druid with a sex room. He laughs to himself. And he’d thought Soho was full of its fair share of weird. He steps over a stile that is half-broken, the wood swollen by years of rain and snow; it crumbles beneath his weight and wood lice spill out onto the forest floor, all black scaly armor and hundreds of wriggling legs. Dylan walks along another path until he is going up the mountain vertically and, as he turns around, the view unfolds in every direction—look at that!

  Layers of landscape settle everywhere.

  There are trails of white and red lights in the distance: cars emerging from a foggy sleet, and mountains below and jutting crags behind him, and down to the left valleys and peaks and a glimpse of blue further even than waves. A bank of white cloud is drifting up the hillside. It moves quickly. He stops still. Is it dangerous? What are you meant to do when a humongous cloud is coming toward you on a sheer mountain drop? He lifts his phone and there are no bars, he can’t even google it. Two eagles spiral out of the cloud, calling out to each other, and one has something small gripped in its claws. They coast on the wind—each wingspan must be about three feet—and they appear almost still. The tips of their wings flutter as the wind carries them forward before they plummet back down through whiteness.

  Cloud unfurls—it steals fields and trees and rocks.

  Dylan sticks his hands in his pockets.

  Fuck it!

  It’s a cloud.

  What can it do?

  He cricks his neck. Squares his shoulders. Plants his feet wide. The path below him is gone now and the treetops disappear; a few of the tallest Scots pines stick out, then they are gone. When the cloud reaches him the temperature drops even further and his breath is vapor on the air. Dylan sticks one hand into the cloud. It disappears. He sticks a foot out and it is gone too. The cloud goes through him—through his heart and his lungs, his rib cage, the pulse in his veins, his brain. He holds his arms out but he can’t see them anymore—he can’t even see his jacket—when he looks down it is just a collar and his nose and his hair—then t
hey’re gone.

  This is a kind of flying.

  Arms right out.

  He is bodyless and traveling at great speed.

  The cloud is so dense he could be upside down—falling off the earth—this is what it means to be chilled to the bone. Anything could come at him through this. The first girl he ever kissed, with her brown eyes and upturned nose and stripy socks. A Yeti looking for a husband—ready to drag him home and tell him to put up her broken shelves or rear her Yeti children.

  It. Isn’t. Passing.

  If anything the cloud’s getting thicker.

  Disoriented, he peers forward.

  An endless white tunnel and if he steps into it, he will see what?

  Vivienne and Gunn?

  It makes him think of the magician’s curtain between life and death; any minute now it will open onto an endless bar where rows of creatures with long, narrow teeth hand out cocktails, and when people sip from each straw they are actually siphoning off the last vestiges of their own humanity— the Other Side doing a great trade in soul mining—and the lizardic bar staff smile and nod as all that energy is siphoned down into the cellar. Sent out into the universe. Where some monstrous source of life feeds on it.

  He can’t breathe.

  He cannot take a panic attack here!

  What if the cloud won’t lift?

  It feels like something passes right behind him—it raises the hairs on his neck. He hears what could be footsteps or something falling out of a tree and he grips his phone. He can imagine the headline: Tall man sucked into deadly cloud on mountain, starved to death, pulled out own hair.

  The cloud slows.

  His heart hammers, but—a glimpse of a hand, his arm, his nose, coat buttons, then his jeans, his belt, his feet and there is still the same sound behind him, something walking on the rock. Dylan wills himself to turn round. Close enough that he could reach out and touch her—is a doe.

  She is just one step away.

 

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