John Dark looked at the words and then at me.
Okay, I said.
I stepped past her and tried to open the door. It was also oak, like the gate in the walled garden. I could see from the thick crust of moss that had grown across the bottom gap that it had not been opened in living memory, and I was fully expecting we would have to kick and shove at it, but it didn’t even squeak too loudly as it opened with just the smallest resistance. This was unusual enough for me to look back at John Dark and exchange a look with her. She made a face and shrugged.
Okay, I said. Bon.
Wee, she said. Good.
I walked in. The room was low and broad and had an immediate generous feel to it. The walls were panelled with wood. There was a wide staircase leading to the floors above. There were carpets laid out across the hall, dark rectangles on the lighter floor, with complicated patterns on them. The colours were muted both by age and the layer of dust that covered everything. The only sign of neglect was that layer of dust. The house had been left in good order, and that had been done on purpose, as we were to find out.
Griz, said John Dark.
I turned and found she was standing at the big table that took up the centre of the room. There was a frame, like for a painting, and behind the glass someone had placed a couple of sheets of paper covered in big letters.
WE HAVE GONE.
WE ARE IN THE BATHROOM AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS.
DO NOT WORRY ABOUT MOVING US
WE ARE HAPPY THERE AS WE WERE HAPPY HERE IN LIFE.
PLEASE MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME.
FOOD IN THE WALLED GARDEN.
FIREWOOD IN THE SHED BY THE BACK DOOR.
TAKE WHAT YOU NEED. USE WHAT YOU CAN.
STAY AS YOU PLEASE OR GO AS YOU WISH.
BE WELL. BE HAPPY. BE KIND.
I read it twice, and then I cleared my throat and tried to translate it for John Dark. It made me feel strange, reading something directly meant for me, written to me from the past. I mean, I know it wasn’t written for me, Griz, but it was written for anyone who came into the house and found it and that was me.
When I had made it clear what it said, we headed upstairs without needing to agree to do it. It just felt the right thing to do. Paying our respects.
They had gone neatly, making as little mess as they could, and they had gone together. They were just bones now, tangled together in the giant metal bathtub which had feet like a dog’s which lifted it off the ground. Their skulls leaned together, companionably, one bigger than the other. The water had evaporated over time, leaving a flaking, rusty tidemark that was probably not just rust. There was a knife lying on the floor beneath the bath. Looking round the room it was hard not to imagine their final moments. There were saucers everywhere, full of puddled wax that had once been candles, and where there were no candles there had been vases and buckets full of flowers and branches, of which nothing remained but dry stalks and twigs that crumbled to dust when I touched them. There was a green bottle of wine with a foil around the neck, and there were two glasses lying unbroken among the bones. It looked like the big one had held the smaller one lying against him. I supposed they might be a man and a woman, but I do not know what the difference is in skeletons. They had filled the room with candlelight and flowers, and then they had got in the bath together, and drunk the wine and then I think they had gently cut their wrists perhaps in the warm water and I hope that they had just felt they were going to sleep in each other’s arms. It didn’t feel a sad or a creepy room at all. Bones are just bones. And it didn’t feel haunted. Like I say, there are no such things as ghosts. But it felt like we were intruding.
I think John Dark felt the same.
Eels etay day john four, she said. Tray four.
Then she nodded and walked out of the room. She went downstairs to hunt around, and I walked along the corridor looking into the rooms on either side. They had covered everything with sheets, to keep the dust off I think. They had been there so long that they had caught drifts of dust, and I was coughing because I had just moved the sheet aside to look into a tall cupboard to see if there were any good clothes or boots to vike when I heard a noise that sent an immediate spike of fear down my spine.
It was a high-pitched woman’s scream, long and wavering, and it wasn’t John Dark. And then there were suddenly other voices, more voices than I had ever heard in my life.
The sound almost made me pee in shock.
And then I heard John Dark shouting for me.
Chapter 26
Tannhäuser
It wasn’t a woman screaming, and there weren’t other people downstairs. There was just John Dark and a blocky sort of box with a handle on the side. The box was covered in a skin of mottled material that might have once been made to look like leather, but it was worn and frayed and the thin plywood beneath poked out at the edges. Its lid was open, and inside a disc like a big flat black plate was turning around and around despite the fact a sort of tubular metal arm like a goose’s neck appeared to be clamped over it. When I had time to look closer, I saw that in fact it only touched the spinning disc very lightly, with the end of a needle that went along a tiny groove that spiralled from the outer edge to the inner circle. The centre was a round paper label, a dark red and gold thing.
The screaming was singing, as were the other voices. And the noise flowing under them was music. Big music. I had not heard your music before. Not like that. I had heard music, of course, but it was all little music—Ferg’s salvaged guitars or Bar’s tin whistle, and I had been transfixed by the lone sadness of the violin Brand had played in the chapel on Iona. But those were all one, at most two instruments at a time, and I had heard the music as it was being made. It was good but compared to this it was thin. This was music so large and deep that I could not really imagine what the instruments were that made it. It was shocking. And frightening. It was exhilarating and all those things in between because I was touching your reality as you would have experienced it. I wasn’t poking through overgrown ruins and sorting through the cracked and rotting stuff you left behind, trying to patch together your world from the rubbish pile. This was like a time machine: the sound I was hearing was the same sound you would have heard if you had turned the crank on the player. These musicians were long dead, but the sound they made together had outlived them and all the generations following, through the Gelding, through the Baby Bust and right on up to now.
I know you had all sorts of ways to record sound and moving pictures of people. But the devices you used don’t work now. The electrics have not lasted; they’ve corroded and died and your screens, big and small, are only useful to us as glass surfaces if we need something perfectly flat. This machine didn’t work on electricity. I opened it up carefully later and found it ran on a big spring that you wound tension into with the handle. As it unsprung, it turned the plate on which the disc sat, and the needle somehow picked up the sound from the disc and sent it out into the world through what must have been a noise box mounted on the head of the goose neck.
This was older tech, and it had outlasted the electric music machines. It was a magic trick, this disc, catching voices in time and then holding them across much more than a century and then releasing them into our ears at the drop of a needle. The sound was sort of crackly, as if it had been captured next to a fire that spat and popped as they played and sang, but through it you could hear the music loud and clear. I didn’t see the picture of the dog on the label until it stopped spinning. It was sitting looking into a cone attached to another kind of music player. It was a terrier like Jip and Jess, white where they were black. Whoever painted the dog had caught the way they listen when something gets their attention, head cocked to one side. At first I thought the label meant the music was called His Master’s Voice, but when I read it and found the other discs with the same label but different writing I figured out it was the name of the company that made the discs.
We both agreed it was bon.
We kep
t the music going as we searched the house, going from room to room, taking the note on the hall table seriously. Whenever a disc finished, one of us would go back and put a different one on, sometimes the other side of the one we had just heard, sometimes something completely different. Some music slowed you down and made you want to sit and listen to it again and again; other kinds of music made you want to jump up and move around to it and dance. This all would have meant so much less to you, I think. You wouldn’t have thought it a kind of magic. You probably had hundreds of different bits of music you could listen to. I doubt you were any more amazed at the ability of a machine to capture musicians’ performances and hold them through time for you to enjoy whenever you wanted than you thought there was anything extraordinary about a car that moved, or a plane that flew. What a luxury, to get used to magic like that.
I found a bigger compass that unfolded and had a round mirror and a kind of sight on it. It was designed for walking, I think, because it hung from a string you could put round your neck. The kitchen had knives, and even better, a sharpening rod that looked like a pencil that would fit in my pack without adding weight. Because of weight, I only took two knives, one made from a single piece of stainless steel, with black dimples bored into the handles for grip. In the study, I found a drawer with folding knives in it. I took one with a chequered dull silver handle which had a red shield and a white cross on it. It wasn’t as good as my Leatherman, but it was great. It had a saw and a spike and a screwdriver as well as a blade and it was scarcely tarnished. The blade took a good edge when I sharpened it. I also found a really powerful pair of binoculars. They had “Trinovid” stamped into them and the lenses were still clear and uncloudy, which was unusual. I took them to the window and they made the distant trees leap forward almost into the room itself. I was pleased to have them because of the power they gave me over distance, to see where I was going. I didn’t know they would be the root of my downfall.
And then there were the books. There was a room lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling next to the one with the music box in it. John Dark wasn’t interested in it, because the books weren’t in French, but because the room had been dark and dry and sealed they were in great shape. I made a mask out of a square of material tied round my face and began to explore the shelves. Book dust seems to be the worst kind of dust in my experience. I didn’t want it in my lungs, making me cough all night. I found a few books I knew which was like meeting old friends in a strange place, amid a multitude that I didn’t know. In another life, if I had not been on my way to get my dog back, I think I would have stayed there for a long time, just reading books and listening to music and eating pesh.
There was a book on the shelves whose title caught my eye. It was called Surprised by Joy. It was partly the title that reminded me of my lost sister, and partly the name of the author whom I recognised because he had written books Mum had read to us when we were little. They were the kind I had liked, about a group of people on an adventure—children who went through a wardrobe and found a land of magic and talking lions and an evil ice witch. This didn’t seem to be that kind of book, not a story but a memory about the writer’s own life. But it had a poem inside it which had the same title as the book. I can remember the first lines as they gave me a pang of extra familiarity:
Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind
I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom
But Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb.
Joy had always been in a hurry, trying to catch up with our older siblings, determined to do exactly what they did even though she was much younger. And the wind had taken first her kite and her over the cliff at the back of the island where the water was certainly a deep and silent tomb. I read it several times because I don’t quite have the way of poetry in my head and also because when I come across a “thee” in a book I know it’s old words and probably not written for me in the now, so my brain seems to wander off, but the rest of the poem unravelled itself. In the end, I realised it was about mourning someone and being betrayed by a second of happiness that makes you forget your loss for a moment, and then feeling worse because that unthinking instant of happiness ends up feeling like a betrayal of the lost one.
We made a fire in the fireplace and sat with the windows open, watching the light die on the landscape below. The music we found ourselves listening to was like the house itself: just the right thing at the right time. The label said it was called “The Overture” from Tannhäuser. I remember the second a had those two dots over it. Must be a foreign name. And wherever Tannhäuser is, I bet they have fantastic sunsets, or maybe dawns, because the music fit them both. We sat—eating pesh and fire-roasted boar—and played that record again and again until it was dark. It started very slowly and confidently, building a gentle but quietly powerful tune, and then a different instrument, I think a violin, maybe more than one, swirled slowly in and seemed to ask a kind of mournful question answered by more violins steadily building and then the whole thing developed into a kind of strong upward cascade of sound that had rivulets of violin tumbling down out of that building cliff of noise, in a way that reminded me of the hundreds of tiny burns and streamlets that sprang down the slopes of the island after a heavy rain. Half the music swirled you upwards, while the other bit tumbled away in sharp, ordered fragments. That won’t make sense unless you ever heard “The Overture” from Tannhäuser and know what I mean, and since you don’t exist anywhere except inside my head, I suppose it just doesn’t make sense to anyone else except me. And maybe you too, I suppose, since you’re the one I’m talking to, trapped inside here with me.
Watching the red sunset glow and then fade to blue over the great forest with this music playing again and again is something I will not forget. I don’t know what the birds and the animals all around made of the noise. They were probably as startled as we were. None of them would have heard anything like it either.
We slept in the music room, with the fire playing shadows on the ceiling. And when I woke, the red was back in the sky and I played the disc one more time, and that is how I know it works even better as the sun rises. It had more hope in it. I took that as a good omen.
As I went out to check on the horses, I heard John Dark put on some different, faster music, and when I came back I caught her doing a kind of jigging up and down and shaking her bottom which stopped as soon as she heard me. She turned and her face was young and her smile not a bit embarrassed.
Dance ay, she said, beckoning me. Dance ay, Griz. Say bon.
And so there in the house that I was already calling the Homely House, John Dark and I danced. As we danced, Jip came in and began to prance around us, barking. His tail was wagging, but I don’t know if he was joining in or telling us we had gone a bit mad. We danced to something called “Tiger Rag” and then we danced to someone called Louis Jordan and then I must have overtightened the crank because it wouldn’t play, and that was when I took the player apart a bit. I was terrified I’d turned the spring too tight, maybe broken it, perhaps trapping all that music back in the disc, never to escape again. I had a horrible cold feeling of guilt as I sat and used my new knife and the Leatherman to unscrew the top and tilt it so I could see the mechanism. I jiggled and poked and nothing sounded broken, and then John Dark, who had been sitting and watching me with interest, disappeared and came back with a little can with a spout and a plunger.
Wheel, she said and pressed the plunger. A little drop of golden oil appeared and fell to the floor. She handed it to me. I used it to make the mechanism slippy again, and worked some into the hole where the crank handle went. And then I put it all back together and by a miracle it worked again.
We didn’t do any more dancing though. I looked at the sky and saw it was towards midday already. I didn’t want to leave, but I knew staying was a trap. A nice trap, and well meant by the people who had lived here and sealed it all up so as to preserve it as a haven for those who might come after. But a snare all the
same.
I made it clear I wanted to leave.
Say bon E. C., said John Dark.
I know, I said. But I have to go.
I pointed to the east.
I have to get my dog.
Mime and pointing at the dictionary followed and then she went for a walk in the walled garden and I went to hunt rabbits with Jip but they were all gone or sleeping far underground. I sat with Jip looking out over the sea of trees to the west and south of us, and listened to the birdsong and the murmur of the wind. He rolled on his back at my feet, which is not something he does very often, and I took as an attempt to cheer me up. I scratched him on the special place on the side of his ribs and his leg jigged up and down as it always did.
And then we went back into the house and found John Dark with a pile of fresh pesh and a finger pointing at the dictionary, jabbing at the word for tomorrow.
Okay, I said.
Okay, she said.
We both made separate passes through the house before it got dark, looking through the neatly laid out objects stored away for those who came later. I decided to take a different set of books about trees and plants, and a couple more pocket-sized leather-bound ones that had thin paper like onion skin. Big, but light. They were books I had heard of from reading other books. One was The Iliad, one was Treasure Island and the other The Odyssey. Looked like a lot of reading in those slim volumes, and I thought we had many nights ahead of us.
I also took a hat and a long oilskin raincoat. Its collar had been eaten by something, maybe a family of moths, but the greeny-brown oilskin was thick and heavy. It would double as a groundsheet on wet ground.
We played Tannhäuser as we watched the sun go down, and then we stoked the fire and turned in, anticipating a big day come morning. I slept deeply and don’t remember any dreams, prophetic or otherwise. I woke with first light and found John Dark was already up and packing away her stuff and loading up the horses. I had a last look round the library, trying not to think of all the wonderful stories I was abandoning there, and then made my own preparations to leave.
A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World Page 23