A world of horror, p.28
A World of Horror, page 28
In the end, it would need to wait until the next day. Doctor McLeod came later than expected, and there would be no time after he left. Neil had expected the doctor to be the cold-fingered old man who’d examined him as a child. It was only when a much younger man arrived that it occurred to Neil that the old doctor would have been dead by now. This man was in his forties, and Neil thought he remembered him from school: a cocky brat who had been a few years below him. The doctor completed some paperwork, said some sympathetic words, and made his excuses.
“Is someone coming to collect the body?” the doctor asked at the door.
“I’ve called Jon Crumlish,” Rhona said. Neil had no idea who Jon Crumlish was and, by the time the doctor had gone, he started to feel quite redundant, almost invisible, and to question his own memory of having been invited. While Rhona hummed around the small house with purpose, he stood in corners with his hands in his pockets, or paced the hall, sticking his head through doorways.
He noticed quickly that there was nothing about the house to suggest that a life had been lived there. The furniture—what little of it there was—was the sort of flat-pack fiberboard junk Neil once used as a student. There was nothing personal on the walls, and the shelves were filled with dusty books that had not been touched in decades.
Finally, Neil wandered into the front room, where Michael’s body still lay, on the sofa, with a red tartan blanket over it.
Michael’s arm hung down from underneath the blanket. It was only on seeing the hand dangling, palm up and open, fingers curled inward, that Neil started to feel something like grief. It was the realization that all Michael had ever experienced—everything they’d done together and whatever had happened in the years since—had been to this end, as if none of that mattered more than this. That hand poking out: pathetic, like a beggar’s bowl.
He quickly tucked it back under the blanket and then wiped his fingers on his trouser leg. He thought briefly about pulling back the blanket to look at Michael’s face, but an image of what he might see came into his mind and he thought better of it.
It was dark in the room. The curtains were thick pulled across the bay window. It seemed suddenly to Neil that there was no air. He went to the window and reached for the curtain.
“Don’t!” Rhona came into the room with a bottle of malt and two glasses. She ran to the window, put the bottle down on the floor, and grabbed Neil’s forearm. “Sorry,” she said, still holding onto him, with him still holding onto the edge of the curtain. “It was my Granny’s thing. When someone dies. To keep the spirits out.”
In university, Neil had gone out with a Jewish woman who had covered every mirror in the flat with tea towels when her uncle died. She’d told him at the time that this was because the void left behind by the departed soul was an attractor to dark spirits, which might otherwise be seen gathering ghoulishly in the mirrors. Long after the relationship ended, he’d read that the tradition was more prosaic, and was in fact about avoiding the temptation for vanity at the time of mourning. But he had considered that there might be something between these explanations—that maybe the real dark spirits were the bereaved, and that it was the terrible face of their own grief that they had to be protected from witnessing in the mirrors. Neil understood the islanders’ tradition of protecting the newly departed from the restless dead, who might sweep into a house of mourning on the west wind like a flock of birds to steal souls away, but he wondered whether, by following the tradition, there was something more earthly from which the living sought to protect themselves. He let go of the curtain.
“Still drink whisky?” Rhona said.
He said yes, and followed her to the kitchen. He did not tell her that he drank far too much of the stuff, and that Clare had been trying, and failing, to get him to cut down. He felt his hangover fighting back through the ibuprofen and codeine he’d taken on the ferry. They sat at the counter by the window and Rhona poured.
Neil held the glass of whisky up to the light from the window—an old habit. Several of the trees in the garden outside were dead. What leaves they had were a year old, crumpled and pale. “How long had Michael been living here?” he said.
“Ten years or so. He inherited the cottage when the old estate manager had a stroke and moved to Glasgow. It came with the job.”
“Not bad,” Neil said. Rhona shot him a dark look. He swallowed some of the whisky and swirled the remainder around the bottom of his glass.
“How was he?”
She shrugged. “He wasn’t good. He’d get up in the night,” she said. “Wander around. Talk . . . more shit than usual.”
“But he was lucid. I mean . . . ”
“He asked for you. He didn’t have anyone else, you know. I came up to see him once in a while, and more after he got sick.”
The image of the white hand protruding from under the red blanket forced itself into his thoughts, only now he imagined that it was reaching out to be held. Reaching in vain. Acid surged up into his throat.
“I’m sorry I left,” he said.
“Don’t say you’re sorry when you’re not. Anyway, nobody blamed you for leaving, Neil. It just broke his heart that you never came back.”
“You don’t seem all that happy about it yourself.”
“Well, I could have done with having you around.”
“Sorry.”
“Stop saying sorry.”
“Are we still friends?”
“Oh, we were never properly friends, Neil. You don’t know the first thing about me.”
“What is the first thing about you?”
She gave him a smile that he knew well from when they were young. It always seemed to him that he and Michael were beneath her somehow, that her interest in them was intellectual rather than emotional. When he had been wistful and impatient, and Michael had been tempestuous and strange, Rhona had been steady and, at times, aloof. He imagined that she could have done better than them, and wondered often why she never did. That smile, condescending, almost maternal, said, there are places you and I don’t go together.
So they talked instead about Michael, about their new lives and their new families, until it was dark and Neil was flagging. Rhona took him upstairs and showed him to the spare bedroom, which was cramped and filled with boxes and piles of magazines, and left him there.
Before turning off the light, Neil spent some time looking through the contents of the room. He supposed that he might find some traces of Michael’s life: waypoints with which to chart the spaces between the boy he had known and the middle-aged body under the blanket downstairs. The boxes were filled only with what must have been the affairs and belongings of the previous groundskeeper, trashy novels and letters from banks, but there was a pile of loose papers on the floor that did seem to relate to Michael. Among them was a large notebook, marked sparsely with Michael’s handwritten words.
Neil sat with it on the bed, turning over its pages. Much of the notebook was blank, and what was written seemed for the most part to be aide-mémoires, names, and phone numbers, but here was something of the connection he had been looking for with the man he’d not known, and, while it might have been to do with the drink, he felt the burn of tears in his eyes.
Having flicked through the jotter for a minute, his heart gave a cold flutter when he saw his own name. But where he might have hoped to find an unsent letter or diary entry, the page was filled with nonsense. It read as though Michael had written it in dialogue with himself. There were questions, to many of which he had provided his own answers, although they were impossible to interpret without context. Going up the sleepers. Will there be time?? Yes! Don’t eat. Drink water only. Let me go. That phrase appeared in several places. Let me go. And then, what had caught Neil’s attention: Neil came back.
Neil had to pause, his hand shaking, when farther down the page, he came across the words: Neil came back and it was too late.
He turned over several more pages, feeling sick, almost ghoulish now, as he imagined Michael toward the end of his life, struggling to stay lucid in the middle of his illness: the unrelenting thing growing in his brain that he knew would finally kill him. The last few pages were scattered with disconnected words, every one of which seemed horrific to Neil—cold, blinding, worse today—and that phrase again. Let me go. Please let me go.
The last page with anything written on it said simply: Up on the west wind.
***
THE BED SAGGED in the middle, and a smell of damp came from the foam mattress, but Neil was drunk and tired, and fell asleep almost immediately. Sleep was fragmented and eventually broken altogether by three disturbances in the night.
The first disturbance was the sound of Rhona’s voice coming from somewhere in the house, whether through the walls or the floor he could not tell. The tone of her voice was low and urgent, and something in her cadences gave Neil the sense she was not speaking English. He remembered Rhona had spoken Gaelic with her grandmother as a child, but it didn’t sound like that either. Neither did it sound as though she were speaking to anyone else. There was none of the stop-start that might have suggested a phone call. All of this was impression only.
He drifted, grasping with fingertips to consciousness, and soon fell into sleep again, becoming aware as he did of a change in the light and air in the room: darker, cooler, as if a storm had come down outside.
The second disturbance was of his own making. He’d been dreaming fitfully of home: Clare and Alice kneeling by the coffee table, cutting paper shapes. In the dream, he had been watching this scene and had become suddenly aware of his own absence in it. Not only was he not there, but there was no gap where he should have been. He did not belong, and was not missed, and with the realization of this came a deep and paralyzing horror. He observed as though on a screen, remotely, unable to impinge or to influence. And he saw that behind his wife and daughter was a sofa that should not have been there. There was a red, woven tartan blanket on the sofa, from under which a limp arm, a white hand, hung down.
He woke from this dream to a silent room and a cool draught across his face from the window. He rose, felt his way to the door, and through to the landing where there was more light. He descended the stair, turned the corner to the front room where Michael’s body lay. He knelt beside the body, pulled back the blanket, pressed his forehead against Michael’s temple. He did all this half-believing that he was still dreaming, and when—kneeling there, eyes closed—he saw in his mind incomprehensible flashes of imagery, they were seamlessly joined to the same dream: immense flocks of black creatures swirling in over the sea like a storm cell; corpses, naked and bloated beyond recognition, washed up on a beach.
He opened his eyes, unsure if he’d been sleeping and for how long, but overwhelmed with tiredness, and returned to his bed. This time, sleep was black and deep, and came upon him instantly.
The final disturbance was the dawn, which in the summer, in the Western Isles, comes late in the night, rather than early in the morning. This time, the little house seemed alive with movement. Floorboards rattled. The wind shook the window frames. And downstairs, there was the sound of shuffling feet and something being dragged, the sound of the front door latch and the door being opened. Outside, a crow took off, crying in alarm. Neil could hear the beating of its wings. He got up and stood by the window.
The sun was not yet clear of the hilltops. The light was dim and diffuse, almost like a mist: the kind of light that can’t be trusted to tell the truth. Rhona was dragging Michael’s body onto the lawn by the ankles. The blanket was still over his legs and torso, but had slipped away from his head.
Rhona dragged the body to the foot of the birdbath in the middle of the lawn, rearranged the blanket so that it covered Michael’s head. She glanced up to the window where Neil stood, and he backed away a little. She watched the window for a moment, then turned from the house and walked off and up the road, into the trees.
***
IT WAS ALMOST THIRTY YEARS since Neil moved to the mainland with his parents. On the night before he left the island, he walked down to the harbor wall where Rhona was waiting with Michael, and the three of them wandered around the back of the town and up the hill in the direction of Fitzroy and Bheinn Mhor, until they were out of reach of the light from the streets. They stopped and sat, just above the level of the rooftops, on a rocky patch by the side of the track that was clear of thistles and bracken.
It had been a year since the end of school. Neil was bound for the University of Glasgow. Michael had been spending more and more time on his own. Rhona had a job on the mainland, and it seemed to Neil that she was positioned between him and Michael like someone straddling two rafts, and that she’d eventually need to go one way or the other or fall into the water.
Michael opened a bottle of whisky, took a gulp, and passed it to Neil. They talked in a faltering way about work and school and mutual friends. After a while they stopped talking and just drank.
“You’ll miss this,” Michael said, eventually.
“This?” Neil said. “We haven’t done this for months. Years.”
“Months,” Rhona said.
“Tell you what. I won’t miss that place,” Neil said. He nodded in the direction of the town. “All those wanks in their GTIs driving up and down Castle Street every Friday night. Church every Sunday. All those decrepit yellow bastards drinking in the Anchorage.”
“Someone has to live and die here,” Michael said.
“Why?”
Michael stared at Neil for a moment. He seemed to be searching for something. After a few seconds, he shook his head, got up, muttered, “Fuck you, Neil,” and walked off.
When he was out of sight, Rhona said, “You know it wouldn’t actually kill you to tell him you love him.”
“He’s going to be all right.”
“You don’t know that any of us will be all right.” Rhona grabbed the whisky from Neil. “He goes up Bheinn Mhor on his own. Up to the Slip. He’s gone for days, comes back cut and bruised. He said to me that he belongs up there with the lost souls.” Then she laughed and added, “My granny won’t have him in the house.”
He laughed too, but he’d known for a long time that Michael was heading for a crisis. The gulf that had grown between him and Michael was not a result of any natural, adolescent divergence of interests. Neil had created it because he did not want to be there when Michael went over the edge.
“I’m going to miss you,” Rhona said. And then they sat, not saying anything to one another, until the whisky was gone. When they returned to the town, she hugged him tight and said in his ear, “You’ll come back to us.”
***
RHONA WAS GONE. There was no note, and no indication of when she might be back. She’d left Michael in the garden, Neil supposed, by arrangement with whoever had agreed to collect the body. As much as it seemed undignified to him, he did not feel it was his place to move the body back into the house. Instead he sat in the kitchen for hours until a van pulled up outside and two young men got out and lifted the body into the back of it. He watched the van drive away, and then made himself a cup of tea.
He wanted badly to return to the Slip. He still felt invisible, even alone in the house, and he thought returning to that hillside might reconnect him with the world somehow. He supposed that Rhona might have gone there ahead of him, had perhaps not wanted to wake him, but he did not much care now. He only wanted to be there.
The most direct route up Bheinn Mhor was on foot. He filled a bottle of water from the tap, and managed to eat some toast and some cold meat from the fridge. Once he was outside of the Fitzroy Estate, the way was simple, but far slower than he remembered, perhaps because he remembered it, for the most part, from his dreams, in which he had glided up the hillside like a bird. The track was where it had always been, but between the more familiar points of reference—outcrops and old trees—were long, featureless trudges of which he had no memory at all. He found that he was in poor shape, and the incline brought him out in an alcoholic sweat, and made his head throb at the temples.
The attraction of the Slip became stronger, the higher up the hillside he climbed. What he’d experienced at home in Perth as a curiosity to return was now a desperate longing. He would be incomplete until he got there. When he saw the shape of Bheinn Mhor’s peak through the clouds in front of him, he turned westward, down a narrow gully that seemed to go nowhere, until it opened up, revealing the mountain’s western face. Here, finally, was the Slip, and Neil was blasted by the full force of the west wind.
There was something Michael had said once that came back to him now. They had been fifteen, sitting on the grass at the Slip, looking down to the sea, and Michael had been talking about how the island had played a part in the war, as a launch point for sorties across the Atlantic, bombing German submarines, and how thousands of people must have died in the waters to the west. “If it had been anywhere else,” he had said, “they might have got home.”
Neil thought about those young men, dying in the cold and dark water, and realized suddenly that he had forgotten where home was.
The bothy was about two hundred yards ahead. It was smaller, dirtier, than he remembered, but what was more jarring was that it did not appear where he expected to see it. Instead of sitting on the crest of an incline, it was below him, nestled at the bottom of a scree-covered slope. He wondered briefly how he could have been remembering it so wrong for so long, and at what point had the memory become corrupted. But even as he did so, the corruption seemed to spread. As if the bothy were casting long shadows, and everything that fell into shade became strange and wrong, one by one the details of the Slip became unfamiliar. The clouds were around him, soaking his clothes. It dawned on him that this was the Slip that he had been warned away from as a child. He was seeing it for the first time in his life: a place where people lost themselves. In all of the years he had been coming here with his friends it had never chosen to show itself to him, and it had only now let him in.
Through the narrow pass of the Slip, Neil could see all the way down to the island’s coast. Gray figures, dozens of them, walked out of the sea and over the beach, where the wind carried them like a mist up the hill. Above, black shapes wheeled in the thickening clouds.
