by Ben Jeapes
“I beg your pardon?”
“What was taken? If you saw the same person we all saw, and your experience is consistent with ours, you’ll have had something taken from you.”
Malcolm drummed his fingers on the top of his desk, once, twice. He had already gone a few light years beyond his usual zone of comfort on this subject. He had never talked about this to anyone. Now he was being asked to share it with a complete stranger. But, until he had seen the picture, he had thought he must be the only one in the world. Now he knew there were others with the same experience. He had to find out.
“The first six years of my life,” he said shortly. “That’s what was taken. I have absolutely no memory of my childhood.”
There was a pause at the other end.
“That does sound consistent. Listen, Martin–”
“Malcolm.”
“–Malcolm, you’re only the second to respond to our little advert and I think we would all very much like to meet you. There’s just three of us – my wife and myself and our new friend–” He neatly anticipated Malcolm’s next question. “–but that isn’t to say there aren’t more, is it? We’re at the finding-out stage right now. We’d love to hear what you have to tell us and, who knows? We might have things of interest to say to you. Would you like that?”
No, Malcolm thought, it might quite possibly be the second most unpleasant experience of my entire life. But as the first most unpleasant experience was the one they were talking about, there wasn’t much of a contest.
“I believe I would. Where can I find you?”
They chatted for a couple more minutes and finally hung up. Diana came over and slipped her arms around his shoulders.
“Am I going completely mad, or just soft in my old age?” Malcolm asked. He felt her kiss the top of his head.
“Either a complete stranger has just talked you into doing something you don’t want to do, which is something I’ve never managed in over forty years of marriage, or you really do want to do this.”
“Mm.”
Their combined gazes fell on the picture on the desk.
“Stunner, eh?” Diana asked. “Maybe we should both try that look.”
“I don’t think either of us could pull off the hairdo, my love.”
It was only a pencil sketch but the artist had known his or her stuff. Dark, burning eyes blazed out at them from beneath the pointed fringe of a V-shaped haircut.
Monday evening …
The man who opened the door to the flat was an old friend from long ago, except that Malcolm had never seen him before in his life. They stared at each other for a couple of seconds, while Diana looked from one to the other, sensing something significant but with no idea what.
“You have seen him, haven’t you?” The man would have had a strong Wiltshire accent, if it hadn’t been squeezed out in nasal trainspotter tones. He had a long fringe to hide a receding hairline, and had apparently bought all his clothes from the 1980s.
Malcolm’s mouth was suddenly dry – not an experience he was accustomed to.
“Yes.” He could see it on the man’s face: the stamp of their common experience. To anyone else’s eyes it was invisible, but to his it was so clear that the man might as well have been wearing facepaint.
“Well, I’m Dennis, I believe we spoke on the telephone. Come in, come in. This is my lovely wife Jane–”
“Dennis,” Malcolm murmured in acknowledgement. He and Diana stepped into the small living room. “Jane–”
Jane had hair so plain and straight, a dress so long and shapeless that she seemed to be disappearing into the background. She looked up to say ‘hello’ and their eyes would have met if Malcolm’s eyes were on his knees. But even that was a bit too much and her gaze quickly went back to its comfort zone on the floor.
But Malcolm had seen enough to know that she had the stamp on her too. As did the other person in the room, a portly woman in her forties, seated in the single comfy chair and knitting.
“And this is Louise.”
Louise looked up, briefly and unsmiling. A nod of acknowledgement, and then she went back to her knitting.
Malcolm made himself be breezy and at ease.
“Well, I’m Malcolm and this is my wife Diana.”
“Greetings, Diana. And–” Malcolm saw the doubt flicker on his face as the other man studied his wife. Of course, Diana would not have the stamp. Until a minute ago, he hadn’t realised the stamp existed. The thought that Diana might be an outsider, might not belong, was like a stab of ice in his heart. If they tried to exclude her …
“Are you also one of our select group?”
“I’m here for moral support.”
“Diana was with me when it happened.” Malcolm heard the abruptness in his voice and didn’t care.
“Really? A witness? Well, that is unusual. We were all alone when … Very well, Diana, welcome to the group as an honorary associate!”
“Can I remind you, Dennis, it’s not your group?” Louise murmured. But she briefly glanced up between purls. “Hello, Diana.”
Which seemed to be all the greeting they were getting.
Dennis seated them on the settee and disappeared into the kitchen to make tea. Diana tried to make small talk with Jane, but even though Jane’s lips moved and sometimes her voice rose above a whisper, her conversation seemed to be mostly on the telepathic level. Malcolm had even less luck with Louise. He couldn’t really talk about knitting and she didn’t seem to want to talk about anything at all.
Dear God, he thought, I could be at home, I could be mowing the lawn, I could be having a beer, I could be reading a book, I could be sticking needles in my eyes and I would be having more fun ... why the hell did I decide to do this?
After a couple of days, Dennis came back with cups of tea and a plate of biscuits. He sat down on a straight-backed chair next to Jane and pulled out a pen and notebook.
“I like to record notes of these little gatherings, Malcolm, if that’s acceptable to you?”
“Oh, please, be my guest. So ... what exactly do you do here?”
Dennis had been distinctly evasive on the phone. In the flesh he wasn’t much different.
“Well–” A nervous laugh. “To be entirely frank with you, Malcolm, if I may, we’re all of us somewhat finding our way a little. The group’s not very advanced in age. Jane and myself ... well, we’ve known ourselves for years, of course – in fact, the moment we first laid eyes on each other, we each knew that the other one had seen him. But it was only a couple of months ago that the thought struck us: well, suppose there might be others? So we had the idea of putting the advert in the paper.”
“Just the Journal? Why not go national?” Malcolm asked.
“A very fair point. But we’ve all lived in Salisbury all our lives, it seemed to be a local effect ... I take it you’re local too?”
“I was born and raised here. After university I lived in London until I retired last year.”
“That sounds local enough. So, Louise answered our ad almost immediately and you ... well, you know.”
“Should you ... would you–” Jane sounded as if she were apologising for being alive. “You could ... you could um ... you could tell us–” Her voice died away in a whisper.
“We’ve all shared our experiences.” Louise’s voice was quick and clipped, and the clicking of the needles didn’t slow down. “Let’s hear yours.”
In nearly forty years at the bar, Malcolm was pretty certain he had met some of the rudest people on Earth. A middle-aged frump barely scratched the surface. On the plus side, she obviously preferred to use one word where Dennis would use three or four.
“My experience,” he said as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “Yes, of course.” Diana squeezed his hand.
He and Diana were facing the window. The flat was on Milford Hill and the roofs of Salisbury shone red in the evening sun. They swept down to where the cathedral spire rose up out of the jumble. It looked li
ke God had taken Salisbury in both hands and forced it down over a spike sticking out of the earth. Malcolm imagined the city as a giant turntable rotating around the big stone needle in the middle.
Stop there! He recognised the signs in himself. The more his mind really did not want to grapple with a subject, the more it wandered into the realms of fancy. He was here for a purpose. He had committed himself to at least this evening. He would go through with it. So Malcolm bowed his head, to collect his thoughts and memories of that corner of a field in Cambridgeshire, and looked up again.
“I was a student,” he said, perhaps a bit too loud. Immediately Dennis bent his head to the notebook and started scribbling. Malcolm listened to his own voice and turned it down a little. He could talk to a jury and come across as the most reasonable man they had ever met. He could do that here. He forced himself to sound happy, as if he had no problem talking about this.
“We both were,” he said, and this time he was the one who squeezed Diana’s hand. She gave him a smile that spoke of a life shared in every way for forty years. “At Cambridge. 1970. We went camping together–”
Malcolm felt a sudden wave of self-disgust as he carried on talking. It was as if they were kids, all huddled together behind the bike sheds, and he was telling a dirty story. The apparition the other side of the field, the attack: it all built up to a climax that everyone wanted to hear but was pretending they didn’t. He was aware of the sound of knitting speeding up and as he described his mind falling away into a sea of grey nothing, Louise dropped a whole row of stitches. The mass of needles and three different strands of wool collapsed into her lap.
“Blast,” she breathed. Malcolm pretended he hadn’t noticed.
He had no idea how long he had floated in nothing but then it had cleared in patches, like mist. Vision returned through rapidly shrinking patches of grey.
(“Malcolm?”)
He had seen light. A bright blue glare that made his eyes water until he remembered to close them. He was staring up at the sky and at something nearer his eyes.
A face. A person. Love. Warmth. Familiar.
(“Malcolm!”)
His lips had moved.
“D– Diana–”
Malcolm shook his head to clear his thoughts. It had been like he was back there again, forty years ago. He glanced up and saw only understanding. They had all been there too.
“What was taken?” Louise asked sharply. Dennis was waiting with pencil poised. Malcolm only paused for a heartbeat. This was something he very rarely shared, but he had come this far, and besides, he had already told Dennis on the phone.
“I can’t remember the first six years of my life. Not a thing. I look at old photographs and they could be a complete stranger. I wonder why my parents were playing with that little boy. That was the main thing. There were other things, here and there. The most obvious damage at the time was – I’d forgotten how to drive a car. Diana had to take us back to Cambridge. Thankfully I remembered her.”
His fingers twined around Diana’s.
“You were extremely fortunate, having someone with you,” Dennis commented. “I would go so far as to say you were blessed.”
“Yes. I was. And so would I.” Malcolm looked around. “So, how does that compare with your experiences?”
Jane, Louise and Dennis shared glances.
“It’s ... not dissimilar,” Dennis agreed. “I’ll send you copies of our own accounts for your perusal in your own time. Different times, different places ... distinctly similar effects.” He swallowed. “You know, I think you’re our earliest case. 1970? Louise here was attacked in the mid eighties, Jane in 1997, I was–”
“So, what was taken from you?”
The abrupt question came from Diana and she was the immediate target of three resentful looks. For a moment even Malcolm saw her as a stranger: the one who had never been attacked; the one who couldn’t understand.
She met Dennis’s stare, eyebrows raised. It had been a reasonable question. Jane was the first to answer.
“I ... drew–” The second word was more like a breath than a spoken sound. “I ... designed–”
“My darling Jane was a graphic designer. She drew kitchens for a company. She won a couple of industry awards.” Dennis smiled fondly at his wife and she directed the ghost of a return smile at the carpet. “That got taken from her. She can still draw, but the ideas, the inspiration – they’re just gone. I was an accountant, now I’m innumerate, can’t even manage two plus two–”
“Why take anything?” Louise snarled with sudden passion. “What is the point? This ... this ... being, this creature, comes out of nowhere and ... and ... psychically mugs us ... for what? For kicks? Out of boredom? There must be some purpose!”
Dennis went into scribbling overdrive to record Louise’s outburst.
No there mustn’t, Malcolm thought immediately. Not if we’re all just mad.
“No, no, there might ... Might not be–” Jane groped for her husband’s hand. He gave her an encouraging smile and she actually drew enough courage to look earnestly at each of them. “Maybe there is ... no purpose ... The elves of legend ... were always ... were always fey ... And capricious ... random–”
Elves? Malcolm tried not to wince at the word. He could just about accept that this group of survivors might be able to contribute something but not if they were going to start talking about elves.
“We are not talking about an elf.” Louise, too, was having none of it. “We are talking about ... about–” She resumed her knitting. “I don’t know precisely what, but we are not talking about an elf.”
Scribble. “... elf,” Dennis murmured. More loudly: “Or a scavenger, maybe. He takes what we don’t hold on to.” He looked pleased with himself. “Yes, a scavenger.” He bent his head back to his notes again to record his cleverness.
“Yes, yes.” Jane nodded eagerly. “Give them ... give the elves something and they ... they leave. An offering. A ... a sacrifice of propitiation.”
Dennis’s pen shuddered to a halt and she leaned over to look at his notes. “... I ... T ... I .. A–”
Malcolm unwisely caught Diana’s eye and suddenly had to suck his cheeks in not to burst out laughing. He fought the temptation to whistle a little tune as she looked, poker faced, to the front.
Jane rummaged in her bag as the pen started again and pulled out a cardboard folder.
“I did a ... another ... another picture–” Her voice dried up in whisper as if it wanted to lie down and die out of embarrassment, but she drew out a sheet of cartridge paper and passed it round.
Malcolm, Louise and Dennis all winced at the new image while Diana craned her head with undisguised interest. Malcolm gladly passed the paper to her and looked at it out of the corner of his eye.
Jane drew well, as you would expect from an ex-award-winning kitchen designer. Malcolm guessed she was the one who had drawn the little sketch that had caught his attention in the Salisbury Journal.
She had got their attacker exactly without defining him in any way. He was just there, slick and fluid outlines defined only by the absence of detail.
“Yes ... um–” Dennis cleared his throat. “It’s very good, darling. I’ll, um, scan an electronic copy and, you know, add it to the minutes.”
“Oh ... yes ... please do–”
“So, what do you do with these, ah, minutes?” Malcolm asked.
“Oh, I send them around so we all have a copy – we can all say none us have the memories we once did!” Dennis beamed at the attempted joke, and it subsided when no one else smiled. “And, um, yes, that’s it. And it’s a resource, for when we find more people. Like you. We’ll keep expanding. I rather fancy the notion of a website, though I can’t get my head around the technical details. Put it up there so that other people may find it – and we will also send a signal to whoever did this to us. We’re together. We’re fighting back.”
By the end of this little speech, his jaw was jutting out and sli
ghtly trembling. Sadly it reminded Malcolm of a little terrier facing down a train that was roaring towards him.
But the sentiment, he thought, was fine.
“A website?” he said. “Diana and I do know a young man who’s quite up on these matters …”
*
“Elves,” Diana said, in the neutral tone that meant she was very, very amused. Malcolm chuckled and guided the car around the roundabout. They continued on down the orange-lit avenue of Churchill Way towards the Wilton road.
“Well, why not?” he asked with wry resignation. “Once you’ve pushed back the boundaries of belief yay far, why stop there? If what we all saw was real then maybe elves are too, along with leprechauns, boggarts and trolls that live under bridges.”
She laid a gentle hand on his knee.
“Was it useful?” she asked.
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.
“I don’t know. Forty years ago, thirty, even twenty ... maybe. I just wanted to know. I wanted to know who it was and why what happened, happened–” He trailed off and shook his head. She didn’t interrupt.
“I’ve made my peace with it,” he said eventually. “I think. Do I need to know? No. Has there been a reappearance? No–” Again he trailed off. “Did you notice everyone had a coping strategy? Some way of firmly defining their own identities after what happened to them. Jane draws, Louise knits, Dennis writes everything down. What do I do?”
“Books,” Diana said immediately, “of course. Where would you be without books?”
Malcolm raised an eyebrow, then glanced at her.
“So, if being a book-lover is my coping strategy, the experience made me something I love and enjoy being?”
“If that’s what it was.” Again she put a hand on his knee. “But Jane was a good artist anyway and you always did love books.”
Even after all these years, Malcolm marvelled that he could just talk like this with his wife. She had never doubted it that it was real – at least, not to him.
He looked thoughtfully out through the windscreen. The streetlamps passed by in ordered pairs, one on each side, over and over.