A pamphlet for the Dawton Festival lay next to the large glass ashtray. I looked across at the windowsill and saw that the one I had consulted earlier was still there. For want of anything else to do I picked it up and showed it to Susan. Flicking through the pages a second time failed to furnish us with any more information on what the Festival might consist of. When we got to the centre pages I nudged Susan, looking forward to drawing her attention to the oddity of a Dawton beauty contest. But when my finger was pointing at the photo I suddenly stopped.
I realised now what had struck me about the publican in The Aldwinkle, the aspect of his appearance which I hadn’t been able to put my finger on. There had been something about the shape of his head, the ratio of its width to its depth, the bone structure and the positioning of the ears, which reminded me forcibly of the degraded photograph of ‘Miss Dawton’. I couldn’t believe that she actually looked like that, that I was seeing something other than the result of dark and badly reproduced tones blending into each other, but still the resemblance was there.
‘It must be his daughter.’
When Susan spoke I turned to her, startled.
‘It’s just the printing,’ I said. ‘She can’t actually look like that.’ Susan shook her head firmly.
‘It’s his daughter.’
The door slid quietly open and I quickly put the leaflet to one side, trying to hide it. I don’t know why. It just seemed like a good idea. It didn’t work.
‘Will you be staying for the Festival?’ the old woman asked, laying two cups of brick-red tea down on the table. She addressed her comment to Susan, who said no. Our plan, as discussed in the restaurant, was to rise early the next morning and get the hell back to London. I was loath to question her too closely on what the Festival might involve, because I was aware that I was enunciating my words very carefully to keep the drunkenness out of my voice. On the few occasions when Susan spoke I heard her doing the same thing.
As we sat there, sipping our tea and listening to her rustling voice, I began to feel a curious mixture of relaxation and unease. If the Festival was such a draw, why wouldn’t she tell us about it? And was it my imagination or did she cock her head slightly every now and then, as if listening for something?
A few moments later the second question at least seemed to be answered. We heard the sound of the front door being opened and then, after a long pause, being shut again. Still talking in her dry and uninformative voice the old crone slipped over towards the door to the sitting room and then, instead of going out, gently eased it shut. She carried on talking for a few moments as Susan and I watched her, wondering what she was up to. Perhaps it was my tired mind, but her chatter seemed to lose cohesion for a while, as if her attention was elsewhere. After a couple of moments she came to herself again, and reopened the door. Then, with surprising abruptness, she said goodnight and left the room.
Coming at the end of a day which felt like it had lasted forever, the whole vignette was almost laughable: not because it was funny, but because it was odd in an intangible way that made you want to cover it with sound. Neither of us felt much like actually laughing, I suspect, as we levered ourselves out of the dreadfully uncomfortable chairs and made our way unsteadily upstairs.
I was especially quiet on the stairs, because I wasn’t wearing any shoes. Strange, perhaps, that the old woman had either not noticed this or had chosen not to make any comment.
My memories of the next hour or so are confused and very fragmentary. I wish they weren’t, because somewhere in them may lie some key to what happened afterwards. I don’t know. This is what I remember.
We went upstairs to our room, passing doors under which lights shone brightly, and behind which low voices seemed to be murmuring. As we wove down the corridor I thought at first that a soft smoke was beginning to percolate down from the ceiling. It wasn’t, of course. I simply wasn’t seeing very well. I felt suddenly very drunk again: more drunk, in fact, than at any previous point in the evening. Susan, though only a pace or two in front of me, seemed a very long way ahead, and walking that short corridor seemed to take much longer than it should. A sudden hissing noise behind one of the doors made me veer clumsily to the other side of the corridor, where I banged into an opposite door. It seemed to me that some sound stopped then, though I couldn’t remember what it had been. As I leant my head on the door to our room and tried to remember how you used a key I found myself panting slightly, my shoulders slumped and weak. Another wave of vagueness surged into my head and I turned laboriously to Susan, who was weaving by my side, and asked her if she felt alright. She answered by suddenly clapping her hands over her mouth and stumbling away towards the toilet.
I leaned in the direction she’d gone, realised or decided that I wouldn’t be much help, and fell into our room instead. The light switch didn’t seem important, either because of the weak moonlight filtering into the room or because I couldn’t be bothered to find it. I flapped my way out of my coat with sluggish brutality and sat heavily on the bed. I started unbuttoning my shirt and then suddenly gave up. I simply couldn’t do it.
As I sat there, slumped over, I realised that I was feeling even worse. I couldn’t understand why I was feeling so bad, or even what exactly the problem was. It reminded me of a time when I’d had food poisoning after a dodgy seafood pizza. A few hours after the meal I’d started feeling…well, just odd, really, in a way I found difficult to define. I didn’t feel particularly ill, just completely disconnected and altogether strange. I now felt roughly similar, though as if I’d also drunk all the wine in the world and taken acid as well. The room seemed composed of dark wedges of colour that had no relation to objects or spaces, and if asked to describe it I wouldn’t have known where to start.
Suddenly remembering that Susan was throwing up in the toilet I jerked my head up, wondering again if I should go to her aid, and then I passed out.
Susan’s skin was warm and almost sweaty. We rolled and I felt myself inside her, with no idea of how I’d got there. I have images of the side of her chin, of one of her hands and of her hair falling over my face: but no memory of her eyes.
I think I felt wetness on my cheek at one point, as if she cried again, but all I really remember is the heat, the darkness, and not really being there at all.
The first thing I did when I woke was to moan weakly. I was lying on my side facing the window, and a weak ray of sun was shining on my head. My brain felt as if it had been rubbed with coarse sandpaper, and the last thing I needed was light. I wanted very much to turn away from it, but simply didn’t have what it took. So I moaned instead.
After a few minutes I slowly rolled over onto my back, and immediately noticed that Susan wasn’t beside me. I had a dim memory of her eventually coming to bed the night before, and so assumed that she must have woken first and be taking a shower. I rolled back over onto my side and reach pitifully out towards the little table by the bed. My cigarettes weren’t there, which was odd. I always have a cigarette last thing before going to sleep. Except last night, by the look of it.
Suddenly slightly more awake, I levered myself into a sitting position. What had I done before going to bed? I couldn’t really remember. My coat was lying in a tangle on the floor, and I experienced a sudden flashback of thrashing my way out of it. Reaching down I found my cigarettes and lighter in the pocket and distractedly lit up. As I squinted painfully round the room I noticed something out of place.
Susan’s washing bag was on the chair by the window.
Looking back, I knew from that moment something was wrong. I went through the motions in the right order and with only gradually increasing speed, but I knew right at that moment.
Susan’s washing bag was still here in the room. She hadn’t taken it with her, which didn’t make sense. Maybe she’d gone to the bathroom not to wash, but to be ill again. I clambered out of bed, head throbbing, and threaded myself into some clothes with about as much ease as pushing yarn through the eye of a needle. On the
way out of the room I grabbed her washing bag, just in case.
The bathroom was deserted. There was no-one in the stalls, and both the bath and the shower cubicles were empty. Not only empty, but cold, and silent, and dry. I walked back to the room quickly, my head feeling much clearer already. Strangely clear, in fact: it generally takes an hour or so for my head to start recovering from a hangover. Hands on hips I looked around the room and tried to work out where she’d be. Then I noticed the shade of the clouds outside, and suddenly turned to look at my watch on the table.
It was twenty to four in the afternoon.
For a moment I had a complete sensation of panic, as if I’d overslept and missed the most important meeting of my life. Or even worse, perhaps, as if it was just starting, this minute, on the other side of town. The feeling subsided, but only slightly, as I scrabbled round the room for some more clothes. Normally I have to bathe before dressing, will simply not enter company without doing so: which is part of why I say now that I already knew something was wrong. Perhaps something that had happened the night before, something that I had forgotten, told me that things were amiss. A bath didn’t seem important.
It took five minutes to find the room keys where I’d dropped them, and then I locked the room and walked quickly down the corridor. I ducked my head into the bathroom again, but nothing had changed. As I passed one of the other doors I flinched slightly, expecting to hear some sound, but none came. I wasn’t even sure what I was expecting.
The lower floor of the guest house was equally deserted. I checked in what passed as the breakfast room, although they would obviously have stopped serving by late afternoon. I stood in front of the desk and even rang the bell, but no-one appeared. Pointlessly I ran back upstairs again, checked the room, and even knocked timidly on one of the other doors. There was no response.
Downstairs again I wandered into the sitting room, wondering what to do. There was no reason for the increasing unease and downright fright I was feeling. Susan wouldn’t have just left me. She must be out in town somewhere, with everyone else. It was Festival day, after all. Maybe she’d wanted to see it. Maybe she’d told me that last night, and I’d been too splatted to take it in.
The two cups we’d drunk tea out of the night before were still there, still sitting on the table next to the Festival pamphlet. Frowning, I walked towards them. Guest house landladies are generally obsessed with tidiness. And where was she, anyway? Surely she didn’t just abandon her guest house because a poxy town Festival was on?
As I looked at the cups I experienced a sudden lurching in my stomach, which puzzled me. It was almost like a feeling I used to get looking through the window of a certain pizza chain, when I saw the thick red sauce that coated the pizzas on the plates of the people inside. When you’ve seen and felt that same sauce coming out of your nose while you’re buckled up over a toilet in the small hours, you tend not to feel too positive about it in the future. The reaction has nothing to do with your mind, but a lot to do with the voiceless body making its warning clear in the only way it can.
A feeling of nausea. Why should I feel that about tea?
I moved a little closer to the table and peered into the cups. One had a small amount left in the bottom, which was to be expected: Susan never quite finished a cup. My cup was empty. At the bottom of the cup, almost too faintly to be seen, the pottery sparkled slightly, as if something there was irregularly reflecting the light. Feeling as if I’d been punched in the stomach without warning, I kneeled beside the table to take a closer look.
I hadn’t taken sugar in my tea last night. I never do. I gave it up three years ago and lost half a stone, and I’m vain enough to want to keep it that way. But there was something in the bottom of the cup. I picked the other cup up and tilted it slightly. The small puddle of tea rocked to reveal a similar patch on the bottom. It was less defined than in my cup, but it was still there.
Something had been put in our tea.
I looked up suddenly at the door, sure that it had moved. I couldn’t see any difference, but I stood up anyway. I stood up and I ran out of the house.
As I walked quickly down the front towards the square I tried to make sense of what I’d found. To a degree it added up. I’d felt very, very strange when I’d gone upstairs the night before, strange in a way I’d never experienced through alcohol before. I’d hugely overslept too, which also made sense, and the hangover I’d woken up with had passed differently to usual.
As I approached the square I slowed a little. I realised that I’d been expecting lots of people to be gathered there, celebrating this benighted village’s Festival. There was no-one. The corner of the square I could see was as empty as it had been the night before.
Susan, on the other hand, had got up early. Which also made sense: she’d thrown up immediately after we’d drunk the tea. Less of it would have made it into her bloodstream, and she’d not have experienced the same effects. That made sense. That was fine.
But two things weren’t fine, and didn’t make sense whichever way I added them up.
First, most obviously, why had someone put something in our tea? This wasn’t a film, some Agatha Christie mystery: this was a small village on the English coast. Who would want to drug us, and why? The second question was less clear-cut, but bothered me even more. Susan had an iron constitution, and could hold her drink. She could drink like a fish, to be honest. So why had she thrown up, so long after drinking, when I hadn’t?
Perhaps she was supposed to. Perhaps the drug, whatever it was, had different effects on different people.
The square was completely deserted. I stood still for a moment, trying to work out what to do next. There was no bunting, no posters, nothing to suggest a town event was in progress. I turned round slowly, feeling the hairs on the back of my neck rise. It was unnaturally quiet in that rotten, decomposing square, abnormally empty and silent. It didn’t just feel as if no-one was there. It felt like the fucking Twilight Zone.
I walked across to The Aldwinkle and peered in through the window. The pub was empty and the lights were off, but I tried the door anyway. It was open. Inside I stood at the bar and shouted, but no-one came. Something had happened in the pub after we’d been there last night. Some of the chairs had been shunted to the side of the room, and others put in their place. They looked like the chairs in the guest house, ugly and misshapen. Their occupants obviously had better luck when trying to buy a drink: a few of the small glasses lay scattered on one of the tables. One of the Festival pamphlets lay there too, and I irritably swatted it aside. It fluttered noisily to the floor and fell open, displaying its ridiculous inaccuracies. ‘R’lyeh iä fhtagn!’, for example. What the fuck was that supposed to mean?
It did at least make me think more clearly. The Festival had started at three o’clock. I knew that. What I didn’t know was where it had started. Presumably it took the form of a procession, which began at one end of the town and ended at another, possibly in the square. Perhaps I was here too early. I was now hopping from foot to foot with anxiety over Susan, and felt that anything had to be worth trying. If the Festival wouldn’t come to me, I’d bloody well go and find it.
I launched myself out of the pub, slamming the door behind me, and ran off towards the opposite corner of the square. I carried on up the little road, past yet more dilapidated houses, casting glances down narrow side roads. When the road began to peter out into cliffside I turned and went another way. And another. And another.
It didn’t take long for the streets to sap what little courage I’d injected myself with. It was like running through a dream where the horror you fear round each corner turns out to be the horror of nothing at all. No-one leant on their fences, passing the time of day. No-one was hanging out washing. No little children ran carelessly through the streets or up the cobbled alleys. No-one, in short, was doing anything. All there was to see was rows of dirty houses, many with upper windows that seemed to have been boarded up. It was a ghost town.
/> And then I found something. Or thought I did.
I was moving a little more slowly by then, fifteen years of cigarettes taking their toll. To be absolutely honest I was bent over near a street corner, hands on my knees, vigorously coughing my guts up. When the fit subsided I raised my head and thought I heard something. A piping sound.
Jerking myself upright, I snapped my head this way and that, trying to determine where the sound was coming from. I thought it might be from back the way I’d come, perhaps in a parallel road, and jogged up the street. I couldn’t hear anything there, but I ducked into the next side road anyway. There I heard the sound again, a little louder, and something else: the rustle of distant conversation. Casting a fearful glance up at the darkening sky I pelted down the road.
I turned the corner cautiously. There was nothing there, but I knew there had been. I’d just missed it. I ran along the road to the next corner and listened, trying to work out which way the procession had gone. I chose left and soon heard noise again, louder this time: an odd tootling music, and the babble of strange voices. The sound made me pause for a moment, and another fragment of the previous evening slipped into my head. Was it a noise like that, an unwholesome and hateful gurgling, which I had heard behind one of the guest house doors?
Suddenly the sounds seemed to be coming from a different direction, and I whirled to follow them. Then, quite by chance, I happened to be looking over the abandoned garden of one of the houses I was passing when I saw something through the gap between it and its neighbour. Three sticks, about a foot apart, moving in the opposite direction to me. As they progressed they appeared to rock slightly, and it was that which made the connection. They weren’t just sticks. I couldn’t be certain, because it was now fairly dark. But to me they looked like little masts.
I’d thought I couldn’t run any faster, that my lungs would surely protest and perhaps burst. But I doubled back on myself and sprinted up the street, taking the corner on the slide. The street was empty but this time I was sure I saw the flicker of someone’s ankle as they disappeared around the corner, and I pelted down the road towards it.
More Tomorrow: And Other Stories Page 30