‘Here?’ the man shouted.
The ferryman nodded, putting the engines into reverse and guiding the boat alongside the small wooden jetty. The water was bright with sun, the breeze only light, but the boat dipped and rose, lurching towards then away from the steps. The man threw his bags first and then, grabbing the holdall containing his laptop and papers, he waited till the side of the boat rose before jumping. He stumbled. When he stood up, the ferry was already backing into the river, ready to turn towards the other side, the water round it golden.
The path from the jetty was steep, leading up a slope of scrubby holm oaks and sweet chestnuts, the grass each side tall, the wildflowers turning their colours towards the river and the sun. Swallows wove among the trees and down over the shallows. A cuckoo called. In the distance a bell rang one note, over and over. Stopping to catch his breath, everything seemed so exact in the strong light, the colours vivid, full of life, the whole view a celebration of energy. He smiled.
The path curved left towards the village, but he carried straight on to a wooden gate leading into a small fenced meadow, the top part of which had been planted as an orchard. Another gate led from the orchard’s far edge to steps beyond, winding up unevenly through a terraced garden of olive trees, figs, almond and peach, beds of flowers, herbs, roses and delicate ornamental grasses, pale as clouds in the breeze. An old wall enclosed the garden on each side. In parts little more than a crumble of masonry, at times taller than a man, its grey and honey brown stones were hung with honeysuckle, climbing roses, clematis, valerian, oxeye daisies, mosses and great plate-sized spreadings of ash-colourd lichen. Tiny blue and yellow flowers spilled from the gapping mortar. There were pear and plum trees espaliered along its length and vines fixed by ancient wires to large iron spikes. Wooden doors, some closed, others ajar, were set into the wall, their faded green or grey-blue paint peeling, their hinges rusted. From one of these an old man came, carrying a pair of shears.
‘Hello!’
The old man stared into the sun and had to shield his eyes.
‘Ah!’ he said, raising his hand out in front of him in a gesture that seemed to the new arrival to be half-greeting, half-warning.
#
The house was a mix of styles and materials. Its various sections, added at different times by different imaginations, sometimes sat easily with each other, spawning charming corners or graceful spaces. At others, they made unhappy neighbours, resenting the intrusion, grinding their differences in a gloom of brick and rusting iron huddled round damp gaps the sun never saw, or flared in brittle blarings of white paint and steel girder, clinical and blinding. Some corridors angled awkwardly or would wander, absentminded, only to end in an unexpected wall sporting nothing but a portrait, its features sardonic and knowing. The main stairs rose their broad grandeur rather dramatically, only to compromise it with a sharp turn, becoming narrower still, the steps uneven, the walls leaning in oppressively. Some rooms, like his, were full of a restful light, looking over the gardens or down towards the river. Others had been carved dimly from mean space, or choked with abundant, ill-fitting furniture. Some gazed onto nothing more than an opposing wall, or into impenetrable, day-long planes of shadow. The furnishings varied with the styles, though some had been moved from their original rooms, only to stand out awkwardly among pieces from another taste or age. Others remained where they had first been placed, isolated by progress or the loss of their looted companions, time sifting onto their fossilized moment the status not of relics or museum pieces, but of things accidentally recovered, puzzled over and misunderstood by the present.
Though he only used a handful of rooms, he would wander into the others, opening doors onto their worlds, peopling them with ghosts in period clothes dressing for dinner or summer parties, planning new lives, ordering old ones in ossifying regimes of spinsterhood, idling through bored afternoons of rain, dancing in the main rooms, screaming at infidelities, reading night after candlelit night away, negotiating the awkward silences that gathered like shadows among dutiful guests, spending lonely love-repressed dawns watching the world born again over the river, wandering their regrets through the immaculate gardens or sobbing, desperate and inconsolable, at a child’s death.
‘There was more than one family here, at some points,’ the old man said. ‘You know, they had money and added bits on at different times, and new families came or new branches of old families, bringing their lives and their possessions and their plans. It seemed too small to some of them, children and staff everywhere, and then suddenly there’d be just a couple of old ladies and a servant, knocking about in all that space.’
The old man showed him photographs of gatherings. Different fashions dancing under the lanterned trees or sat to laid tables of crystal and glinting cutlery, platters of summer or Christmas, teas of elaborate cake and delicate china, men in cigar pomp and the bonhomie of brandy, children hauled into a boredom of adults, women in intense groups, staring hard into the lens.
‘Of course, they didn’t take so many shots of ordinary days. One lady, though, took hundreds of the gardens. They’re in a drawer somewhere.’
As the old man said this, he looked onto the sloping grounds where he spent most of his time, silently caring for the plants, a kneeling figure in the beds, hunched and inconspicuous among the foliage.
#
During the days, working inside on his computer, sorting through his papers, typing up what he needed, he’d catch sight of the old man fetching a spade from the shed or bringing vegetables to the kitchen, his face always impassive, his step steady and deliberate. There was something reserved about him, monastic. The mornings passed quickly and they’d eat lunch together outside under the trees, or at the big kitchen table, watching the rain splash the leaves and gather in dozens of tiny puddles among the courtyard’s intricate pattern of bricks. In the afternoons, he’d correct what he’d written the day before, then walk into the village, or along the riverbank. At weekends, he climbed the hills behind the village, from where he could see the ferry station to his left and the river winding round the tree-covered spur of land beyond which the sea spread, silver-white and motionless, until it met the sky along the indistinct balance of the far horizon.
In the evenings he’d have a drink with the old man in the courtyard or on one of the terraces, their talk drifting into a silence of thickening light and long shadows. The old man went early to bed, leaving him alone. He’d light a candle and read in the small sitting room or stand in the garden as bats whirred through the air and foxes called on the hills and the night leaked its warmth around him.
Coming in from the terrace one night, he heard a sound and thought he saw a movement in the shadows beyond the kitchen’s large, always open, internal door.
‘Is that you?’ But something in the movement’s quickness made him think it wasn’t the old man. He turned the lights on. He couldn’t see anything. He wandered if some animal had got in, but the outside doors were all closed. He stood by the main stairs and listened. It was silent, a dense enclosed hush of wood and brick and unmoving ornament. He switched the lights off and went to bed.
#
He bought supplies from the village market. Sometimes the old man came with him, and they drank at the bar before carrying the shopping home. The old man knew a few people in the village, mostly older folk whom he nodded at or spoke to.
‘Do you have any family?’ he asked the old man one day when they were walking home, sweat coming on their backs and their hands aching with the bags.
‘I have a son abroad, and a granddaughter. My wife died, not long before you came.’
The old man hadn’t mentioned his wife before.
‘She’s buried in the village there. I take her flowers from the garden.’
They walked on in silence.
When they’d unpacked, he made them some lunch. Afterwards, they sat in the shade of an almond tree, drinking wine.
‘Why are there not more people here now?’
The old man looked away, down towards the meadow and the river.
‘The owners don’t need the money or the hassle, I suppose. Just let the odd person come… while I look after the place. It’s here for them, if they ever need it.’
‘What are they like?’
‘I don’t know them well, not this lot.’
‘Does anyone else ever come here… I mean, just turn up… one of the owners or someone?’
The old man looked at him quickly, then back at the river.
‘Why?’
‘Just… nothing, just wondered.’
That night he heard screaming. He rushed to where the old man slept, at the back of the house.
‘Are you alright?’ he shouted outside his door. In the silence, the lock turned and the door opened enough to show the old man’s face white and shining with sweat. His voice was weak:
‘I’m sorry. Bad dreams. My wife… I’m sorry.’
He closed the door quietly.
#
In the growing sun of summer, the garden strengthened and rose. Leaves and stems filled space after space, braiding them with green. New flowers opened as old ones withered. Birds and insects choked the air above the grass and nettles. Beneath the leaf crowds, rabbits and deer nibbled and browsed in the dawn light, disappearing suddenly into the shade where bracken spread from the wood’s edge beyond the path. Young creatures tottered and played in the warmth; fledglings, loud and insistent, followed their parents, begging for food. Sparrows squabbled, filling the courtyard, and swifts screamed through the deep blues of sky. Swallows came and went at speed to the barn and to the eaves overlooking the garden, feeding their cupped offspring from the plenty of the air. The smell of plants was everywhere, a vegetable fullness that hung in the morning dew and rose with each step through the meadow.
They went fishing. The old man showed him the shadowed canting willow where the fish rested, or the shallows where young trout were sinews among the weed, and flies lit and died on the circling current.
‘This is heaven,’ he said to the old man one afternoon, as he watched his float sway and saunter downstream.
‘No,’ the old man replied quickly, ‘but it’s where heaven would be.’
He thought for a while.
‘Do you miss her?’
A dragon fly hovered above a willow branch that dipped its tip beneath the surface.
‘You make a lot, in this life,’ the old man answered. ‘Marriage, family, home. And it all gets taken from you. You don’t stop making, but you can’t keep it. Then you find you don’t make as much any more, but it doesn’t matter because you know you can’t keep it.’
‘Your son?’ he asked, after a pause.
‘He’s still busy making his life. She was the first thing he lost, but he went back to all that he had made.’
‘Do you keep in touch?’
‘Some. Phone calls and… I’ve seen my granddaughter, you know, and spoken to her, on the computer.’
‘So, it’s not all loss?’
‘No, but their lives are so different, so far from here.’
‘Wouldn’t they love all this? I would’ve done, as a kid.’
‘Maybe that’s why you’re here now’ the old man smiled.
The river ran past them, pulling gently at the willow branches, taking leaves and seeds downstream, into the sun and away.
#
When he woke in the near-dark that night, he saw something again. He’d left his windows and the door to his room open to get a through draft. On the landing outside was a hunched, solid shape of darkness. He turned and the shape moved suddenly, the floor of the corridor creaking as it went. He turned the light on and rushed out of his room.
‘Who’s there?! Who is it?’ He tried not to sound scared, but his legs shook. He turned on every light he could find on the way to the old man’s room, where he knocked harshly on the door.
‘I’ve just seen something… someone… in this house. Outside my room. I’m not joking.’
The old man stared at him, bleary in the half-open door.
‘A dream,’ he said.
‘No! Not a dream.’
‘Shadows… still asleep.’
‘No. And not ghosts either.’ He felt annoyed at the old man. ‘I’m telling you, I saw something.’
The old man looked at him but said nothing.
‘I want you to come with me, so we can look together.’
The old man sighed.
‘Give me a minute.’
Half an hour later, they stood at the kitchen table. The old man was making them chocolate with milk.
‘Do you think you’ll sleep?’
‘I know you don’t believe me.’
‘I believe you believe you saw something.’
‘Not something real, though?’
‘When I have nightmares, they feel real to me.’
‘You know that’s not what I mean.’
‘I don’t think you were dreaming, but…’
‘I wasn’t hallucinating. It wasn’t shadows or an optical illusion. I know.’
‘I know you’re certain.’
‘Look, if I’d been drinking, or was really tired…’
‘What do you want me to say? We’ve looked in every room.’
‘Have we?’
The old man nodded.
‘No others, hidden away? Secret places, locked doors?’
The old man smiled.
‘There are no secrets here.’
‘Really? No weird owner with their own key who likes to creep around in the middle of the night? No strange relative kept in the attic, mad but harmless, who goes wandering now and then? No?’
‘I can see you have a very vivid imagination.’
‘Don’t… don’t do that. I did not imagine this. You better be straight with me, old man.’
‘There are no secrets hidden in this house. I have never seen what you saw. When I wake screaming it’s not because there are shapes in the darkness near me. It’s because there’s nothing in the darkness near me. Nothing. And I’m all alone.’
#
The next day, he went to the village for lunch, then walked the hills beyond. He wanted to be away from the house. When he came back in the early evening, the old man had made them some supper.
‘I thought we could eat out here,’ he said. ‘How do you feel?’
‘I’ve been walking; it felt good.’
They ate in silence, watching the garden and the swallows down over the river. It was very peaceful.
‘How did you come to be here?’ he asked the old man.
‘There was a job, helping in the garden. The head gardener was getting too old. We’d just moved to the area; my wife was a teacher in the next town. We never planned to stay.’
‘Was the house full then?’
‘They came and went. One month bursting, the next… just a few. There was always plenty to do, though. I was good with my hands, so I took over the maintenance as well as the garden. In time, they got others in to help me. By then the old gardener had retired. He knew some stuff, that old boy. Taught me all I know about plants.’
‘And your wife, did she move here?’
‘Eventually. There was enough for her to work here as well, when she gave up teaching. We moved in. As I said, no plan to it, just a set of small decisions that led to a life.’
‘Like me, I guess.’
The old man looked at him.
‘Maybe you’ll stay here.’
He looked away when the old man said this.
#
He helped in the garden, watering the plants early in the morning, picking the fruit and vegetables. What they didn’t need they took to the village market every week.
‘We used to have pigs and goats, chickens… even a milking cow,’ the old man said, as they were weeding the beds.
‘Why’s there nothing now?’
‘They died or the fox got them or they became too much for us to look after. I miss them, though. Made the place feel complete. They tie you to the land and to life, like the plants do to the seasons. You come out on a May morning to feed and milk them or lead them out to graze… seems so natural; you feel at one with it. These repeated rituals, like digging the potatoes or collecting eggs… it feels right that you collect these things. Riches, they always felt like to me, ever since I was a boy. So exciting! Same as catching a fish.’
The old man smiled. He seemed happy, animated.
‘Not a bad life,’ he added, jabbing his hoe at the weeds.
‘I haven’t done much of this. Always ended up inside somehow, stuck at a desk, staring at a screen. I’ve never been so close to it all before. I can see why it calms you; it’s very measured.’
‘How’s your work going?’
‘Not bad… but it doesn’t seem as… I mean, when I got here it was all I could think about; that’s why I came here, for somewhere peaceful to work. I wasn’t expecting this place to be so… diverting, I guess. Not that it’s bad for the work, but I feel a whole new world has opened up around me.’
Down on the river they could hear a boat going slowly upstream. Grasshoppers were loud in the long grass and the nearby flowers bustled with bees. The warm air was ripe with summer smells, a green sweetness, and with the odour of earth as they disturbed it.
‘When I came here,’ the old man said, ‘I thought I might become an engineer. I was saving for the apprenticeship. Then we had our son and the money got spent on other things, and the time went on other things. I didn’t ever decide not to be an engineer.’
They weeded in silence for a while.
‘It was a bit like that with my work. I was left some money, enough to pay for a year’s research. I’d always wanted to do it, but never thought it would happen. Then the money came and I had my chance.’
‘You were braver than me,’ said the old man.
‘I had no wife or child. Still don’t. No house or land. Nowhere to live once I leave here and the money’s gone.’
‘But not the work. Not what you’ve done; that won’t go.’
‘No, that won’t. In fact, it’s turning out to be me, really. To be my life.’
They got drunk that evening. Left their glasses, empty bottles and cigar stubs out on the table under the stars. He helped the old man onto his bed and left him in his clothes. Back in his own room, he lay in the darkness, his head buzzing with alcohol and the drumming of his heart and a sound like muted trumpets. He dreamed of animals in zoo; someone had let them escape and they wandered about uncertain, puzzled at this new freedom, half-fierce and half-lost. He woke at first light, sweating, and slept again until the sun was on his face and his head was empty of everything except a dull, thudding pain.
#
On the hottest days, he swam in the shallows and lay in the sun on the riverbank. The water seemed almost motionless, a thick dust on its surface broken only by the swallows skimming it to drink or the languid rise of a fish, oily in the rippled gold. In the shadows, herons stood fixed to their stare. The occasional blaze of a kingfisher tore the dappled light. He found it effortless to watch the river, its pace hypnotic as it gave up its lives in their little details, slowly, rewarding his patience.
One night he came back to find the old man was visiting a friend in the village. He ate dinner and read outside as the warm evening settled its weakening light around him. When he turned to reach for the bottle of wine, he saw that the windows in his room were black, though the curtains were open and it wasn’t fully dark yet. Then the blackness moved slightly, revealing an outline against the faint wall behind. His stomach tightened with a fear that burst, spreading through him, surging to his heart, beating it heavily against his chest. He felt dizzy, his breath fast and shallow. Trying to quash the fear, he walked quickly back to the house, not stopping as he passed through the kitchen and climbed the stairs. He didn’t turn any of the lights on. His room was empty. He walked up the corridor, opening every door, his movements becoming louder and faster. By the time he reached the last door he was almost running. Then he stopped, his chest crashing with beats, the blood thick in his head, sounding as a constant grating flow. Panic and growing anger shook him. In his fear and fury he shouted:
‘WHO ARE YOU?!… WHO ARE YOU?!’
There was a sound below and he ran towards it, leaping down the stairs. There was noise in the kitchen. He picked up a chair from the dining table and raised it over his shoulder as he burst through the large open door. Then the world splintered into light and he found himself staring at the old man who was staring back at him, a carving knife shaking in his hand.
‘Are you sure you’re not ill?’ the old man asked him later, as they sat by a candle, cradling their brandies. ‘Some brain disorders can make you see things.’
He looked into the darkness beyond the candle’s reach. The old man could be right; it could be something… a tumour or…
‘That’s not exactly cheering is it?’
‘I didn’t say you were ill, but you seem to need proof of something.’
‘One less thing on the list?’
The old man nodded.
‘Which would just leave ghosts and intruders.’
‘And a vivid imagination.’
‘I’m not so worried about that.’
‘I am,’ said the old man. ‘You nearly bludgeoned me to death tonight. I could’ve died of shock.’
‘I’m not sure what you’d’ve managed to do with that!’ he smiled, pointing at the carving knife which still lay on the table between them.
‘Neither was I. When I heard you shout I was already in the kitchen. Then there was a crashing down the stairs and then…’
For a while neither said a word.
‘Perhaps it’s something in the water or the soil?’
‘Never affected me or my wife. Never heard anyone here say anything about shapes and shadows before. Those that died here all died naturally, as far as I know.’
‘Your wife… how did she…?’ he paused, awkward.
‘Her heart. One morning. Just… very sudden.’ The old man looked into his glass.
Outside, the night had gathered, moonless, full of stars.
‘I’m going out to look at the stars. Don’t stab me when I come back.’
‘I’m going up now,’ said the old man.
‘Good night.’
#
The days were busy. He rose earlier to do his work. One afternoon he travelled to the city for the appointment he’d made at the hospital. When the results came back a few days later, the old man was harvesting marrows and runner beans.
‘I’m not dying,’ he said with a smile. The old man straightened and looked at him. ‘My results… no tumour. No abnormalities.’
The old man smiled.
‘Just a ghost, then.’
‘Or madness!’
‘This place has seen some of that before,’ said the old man, dropping bean pods into the basket at his feet.
‘Now you tell me.’
‘There used to be a retired psychiatrist in the village. His wife ran off with a fisherman.’
‘And…?’
‘What?’
‘I thought you were going to tell me something about madness, or the psychiatrist… you know, something relevant to me.’
‘No,’ said the old man. ‘I just remember that his wife ran off with a fisherman.’
He looked at the old man and shook his head.
‘I’ll make some lunch.’
#
The market that week was the biggest of the year, all the stalls piled with produce, the cafés and bars full of people, children’s shouts and the noise of animals crowding the air, cooking meats, the tang of herbs and cheese and the hot sugar smell of sweets everywhere. Old men smoked and drank, laughing in their seats. A band played and the river was full of pleasure boats and young people jumping from the jetties with screams that broke into sprays of white. When it got dark, fireworks burst over the hills, dimming stars and the slim blanche of the moon, and they lit a great fire in the square, its sparks rushing upwards with the songs.
He travelled to the city again to do some research at the university library. He was away three days and when he returned the old man was ill. Once the doctor had left, he sat with him, talking. Over the next few days, he took him food and read to him. He gave him his medicines. The old man was listless. Sleeping badly, he ate less and less.
‘Most of the stuff’s picked now,’ he said one lunchtime to the old man who was propped up on his pillows chewing a mouthful uncomfortably. ‘That’s smoked eel from the village,’ he added, nodding at the plate.
‘It’s good,’ the old man said, unconvincingly.
‘D’you want me to read to you?’
‘You could. The countryman’s diaries; I like those.’
When the old man drifted off, he cleared his plate and went to eat his own meal in the kitchen.
He worked his new research into his work, spending more time now each day. The old man asked him about it, and he told him what was difficult, what he found easy, what he was trying to do.
‘It sounds ambitious,’ the old man said.
‘I’ve never tried something like this before; I’m learning as I go.’
The old man nodded.
‘How are the plants?’
‘Fine. I’m not as good as you with them. I miss things.’
‘They’re quite forgiving. They want to thrive, really. The soil here is good, and there’s sun and you watering them. Not a bad spot to grow.’
He cut a big bunch of bright colours that afternoon, put them in large china vase and took them to the old man’s room, where they shone in the late bronze light. The old man smiled.
The next morning, as he was working at the kitchen table, his papers spread over it and the door to the courtyard open, he heard the old man coughing and then being sick. He called the doctor, who came and took a blood sample, gave the old man an injection and told him to rest. He left some tablets to take when it got bad and said he’d call again the next day.
That afternoon the old man lay, quiet but awake, while he read to him. In the night, though, he was in pain and cried out. After he’d given him a tablet, the old man slept, his features worn and hollowed against his pillow. As he closed the old man’s door quietly, his fingers still on the handle, he saw a blackness in the doorway at the end of the corridor ahead of him. Ape-hunched, huge, its head thrust forward, two sharp glimmers staring at him. He gripped the door handle, crushing his palm around it, his breath stopped, his legs shaking. He turned the handle again, forcing his legs to move, and his unsteady hands to lock the door behind him. The old man was sleeping, the bedside light still on. He leaned his back against the door and slid down until he was crouching at its foot, his arms wrapped round his legs, his jaw clenched to stop him crying out, his bunched form shuddering silently, urine soaking through his trousers onto the floorboards beneath.
The old man woke at dawn.
‘Did you see it again?’ he asked, staring at him huddled at the base of the door.
He nodded.
‘Are you alright?’
‘I was so scared.’
The old man looked at him for a few moments, then said, in a weak but gentle voice:
‘You can’t go on like this.’
‘I know,’ he said, burying his head in his arms.
The doctor came later.
‘He must rest,’ the doctor said, as they walked away from the old man’s room and, again as he left: ‘Make sure he rests.’
He took him some soup and stayed with him till he slept. That afternoon he worked in the garden, hacking dejectedly at the summer’s dying growth and pulling the last of the season’s crops from the ground. In the evening he dragged a spare mattress and some bedding into the old man’s room.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but it’s just for now.’
The old man smiled at him.
‘I can see I would inspire such confidence.’
They slept fitfully. Between the old man’s occasional moans, he listened for any sound in the house, his eyes staring at the bottom of the door for any change in the darkness outside. When he woke in the morning the old man’s breath was rasping and shallow; there was a film of sweat on his face and his eyes were shrunk further into the bruise-coloured skin around them. Later, when the old man woke, he helped him drink some water.
‘What will you do?’ whispered the old man.
‘I don’t know.’
In the afternoon he took some soup up, but the old man was dead, his face turned a little towards the wall.
#
Once they had taken the body and he had spoken to the doctor and notified the owners’ lawyer in the nearest town, he began to collect his belongings. The light was weak, a pale gold, thin on the turning leaves or sparkling on the dew that hadn’t left the grass. A blackbird called loudly into the garden’s still air. He sat in the kitchen, by the door open onto the courtyard, watching insects moving among the herbs in their terracotta pots. He could feel the air chilling.
He missed the old man; a sickness of fear and loss filled him. His loneliness was everywhere. He walked slowly round the garden, looking at all the flowers and the vegetable beds. In the orchard, wasps were feeding on the windfalls. The river was slow and quiet, the last of the swallows busy above the sky’s grey reflection and the dark green shadows massing along the banks.
He made his way back to the house where he went from room to room, opening the doors onto their stillness. Most were exactly as they had been when he first came. Through their musty silence, the weak border of the setting sun moved imperceptibly up the wall. In the old man’s room, he stared at the empty bed. The glass and jug of water were still on the table. He felt a sudden anger at these things, these unaltered objects mocking a now incomplete portrait. Yet, there was something hobbled and pitiful about them, too, as if the old man’s death had robbed them of significance. They seemed lost in the lack of life, as left behind as he himself had been.
He placed all his things by the door from the kitchen to the courtyard. The last of the light silhouetted the hills and the ragged outline of the trees. He had booked a room in the town and was searching on his phone for a taxi number when he heard a sound upstairs. He put the phone down and listened. A door creaked and the floorboards on the corridor groaned with a weight. He felt his heart speed and his breath increase, but instead of fear there was a hard certainty, an anger and outrage. He strode to the bottom of the stairs, turning on all the lights. Without stopping, he shouted as he climbed the stairs:
‘You! Who are you? Why are you here?’
The sound was above him now, on the second floor. He ran up the next flight.
‘I’m here! Where are you?’
He was panting, shaking with rage.
‘WHERE ARE YOU?!’ he roared, kicking open the nearest door. Then another. As he reached the third room, he felt a massive blow across his back, then a weightlessness before his face slammed against the floor. He heard his own gasp. He crawled forward on his knees, then onto his feet, stumbling against the corridor wall. Stunned, he tried to look behind him but could see nothing. To his side, the stairs rose, awkward and narrow. He gripped each step, hauling himself up to where four doors grouped around the stairwell on the small top landing. He fumbled the light switch. He could hear it following him. Steadier on his feet, he moved to the farthest door. It opened towards him, revealing a storeroom, piled with ornaments and dusty boxes. He locked the door behind him and rushed to the window, trying to force its ancient, paint-sealed sash. The door shook with a blow. He grabbed one of the boxes and threw it, shattering the glass, but not breaking the wooden frame. A second blow behind him broke the door almost open. He smashed the box into the window frame again but couldn’t break it. He grabbed its sides, trying to haul himself through, but the gap was too narrow and all he felt was the jagged glass slicing into his hands and forearms. He let out a groaning half-scream. Turning, desperate, he hurled himself at the door and felt it crash outwards against a solid weight on the other side. After a moment of juddering shock, he found himself falling. There was another sound of wood splintering as it gave way, then two more massive impacts below, and smaller sounds of debris falling after. Then a silence, stunned and uncertain.
He crawled over the broken door to where the torn balustrade gaped. Staring over the lip, he could see where the bannisters on the two floors below had also been smashed, and where, below that, on the flagstones at the foot of the stairwell, a huge dark shape lay motionless, hunched among lengths of shattered wooden rail.
He laid his cheek on his forearm, struggling for breath, a gasped laugh breaking from him. There was blood in his mouth; it poured from the cuts on his arms and hands, wetting his face. He was still shaking all over. He got slowly onto his knees, where he waited until his breathing eased, before trying to stand. He walked unsteadily down the stairs to the floor below, blood dripping onto the floor. In the bathroom, he wrapped white towels round his arms. He’d need to call an ambulance as well as the police. His phone was still on the kitchen table. His breath was more normal now, but he felt faint. In the mirror, he saw his face covered in blood. His lip was cut and swelling. He picked some glass from his hair. A piece had stuck into his scalp; when he pulled it free, a fresh line of blood flowed down over his forehead, dropping into the sink. He couldn’t stop his body shuddering. He took several deep breaths. As he exhaled the last, he heard a noise from below, a rasping against stone. His heart thumped, stealing his breath and broke a wave of fear over his stomach. He turned his head round and waited. Again, a rasp of gathering from below, longer this time, becoming more than one movement. His legs shaking, he walked quietly back out to the landing. Craning over the stairwell, he looked down. His breath caught as he watched one large arm scrape over the stones, one squat leg flex and straighten beneath the huge humped mass of the back, covered with patches of black, matted pelt. The arm moved its great clawed hand across the stones again. The thick neck, sunk in the humped muscles of its shoulders, shifted. Then a noise, a throat-filling grunt growing in outrage, rose from the creature. Its other arm moved beneath it, and gradually the dark bulk began to heave itself from the stones. He had to stifle a scream. His legs folded beneath him and he dropped to his knees, terror searing everything from his mind in a great white flame of fear.
The need – desperate and total – to run, to escape, shocked him back to thought. He looked down again. Already the creature had got to its feet; ape-like, its knuckles on the stone floor, a rasping growl constant now from its hunched bulk. It shook itself. Suddenly throwing its head back, it saw him and let out a roar, its small yellow-red eyes alive with fury. Down the jagged line of its spine, the patches of black hair rose and the packed ridges of muscle quivered. It placed a huge arm on the stair in front of it, the dark claws curved. Still eyeing him, it drew its lips back slowly, baring long, jagged fangs. Then it roared again and hauled itself forward with frightening speed.
He ran down the corridor on his right, to the library at the far end. He tore the towels from his arms, freeing his hands. As he shut the thick oak door behind him, he saw the beast turning in the corridor towards him, its mass filling the passage. Crashing both arms against the walls either side it pitched forward in a charge. He turned the key and slid the large metal bolt across the top of the door, then leaned his weight against it. The force of the blow threw him backwards onto the floor. Looking up, stunned, he saw the door panel nearest to the key had broken inwards, a gap showing next to the handle. The lock had held, though, and the metal bolt at the top. His thoughts simultaneously blistering with instinct and blanked by terror, he grasped a chair placed against the wall next to the door and wedged its back under the handle. A thud on the other side shook the wood again. The gap in the panel jarred forward, growing.
He scanned the room, then let out a cry of anguished panic. His only thought had been to put the strength of the door between him and the creature. Now he saw what he had forgotten: the tall, narrow windows of the room opened inwards, but were barred beyond the glass, black iron rods set into the stone above and below. He tore the windows open and tried the bars with a prisoner’s desperate grip. There was no other door. The room contained a free-standing bookshelf between the door and the large desk and chair in front of the windows. Other bookshelves were fixed directly to the wall round the room. There was an ornate drinks cabinet in the corner nearest to the desk, but the only other furniture was a small sofa and a large armchair arranged round the fireplace opposite the door.
Behind him, the broken panel jolted forward again with a deep roar and the sound of claws tearing at the wood on the other side. Blindly, he grabbed the sofa and heaved it towards him. Still bleeding heavily from his arms and hands, his grip slipped. He scrambled round and put his weight behind the other end, shunting it forward against the door, just as the gaping panel burst open completely. The beast thrust its arm through, grasping at the handle and the chair still wedged under it. He ran back and pushed the armchair forward against the sofa then, grunting with the effort, he lifted it from the lip of the base and tumbled it over on top of the sofa and partly against the door. The creature’s arm had broken the chair away from the door handle. Looking back at the fireplace, he saw the irons lying next to the ashes of the last fire. Grabbing the heavy poker, he ran back and smashed it down repeatedly on the beast’s arm which drew back with a screaming bellow.
Heaving for breath, blackness threatening his sight, he wedged the chair under the handle again. As he did so, the panel above the broken one burst open also and a clawed hand hooked down, catching the top of his head, ripping his right eye, then tearing his cheek open. He fell against the side of the bookshelf, blood splashing onto the floorboards. He screamed. Beneath his blinded eye, he could feel his cheek hanging down. When he put his fingers where the flesh should be, he touched his teeth, air pouring out around them with the blood. He dragged himself round the base of the bookshelf, away from the door. Grasping the shelves, he pulled up onto his feet again and staggered to the edge of the unit farthest from the door. With desperate energy, he leant all his weight against the bookshelf, shoving until it shifted. He tried again, screaming with effort, and the case slipped sideways, this time moving away from the wall. He heaved again, and some of the books slid out onto the floor. Then again, pivoting it round each time until it was at right angles to the door, when he sent it toppling forward, crashing onto the pile, its side jammed diagonally across the top half of the door, its books spilled over the floor and onto the sofa and the upturned armchair.
There was silence. He heard the beast lumbering up the corridor away from the door. A second of hope burst through him. Then the sound of another charge grew and crushed inwards, forcing the piled furniture back, creating a gap between the frame and the edge of the half-shattered door. He grabbed the poker and thrust it, point first, through the gap at the creature’s face. He felt it strike home and an enraged roar shook the walls. The poker was torn from his hand, and he only just managed to pull back, away from another clawing lunge. He stumbled to the large writing desk and pushed all his strength behind it, uselessly. He dragged the chair over and threw it against the door above the bookshelf. He ran back to the drinks cabinet, but it was fixed to the wall by four thick brass brackets. He forced the doors open, breaking the dainty lock. A light flooded out and a dozen bottles of spirits stood packed beneath two shelves lined with glasses, a pair of ornate cocktail shakers and several miniature cans of mixers, all lit by the small bulb set unobtrusively above them. There was nothing else.
In desperation, he turned towards the desk. On its surface an old address book and some pens lay under a light patina of dust. There were two drawers down either side, and one in the centre. Hauling each open wildly and tipping them, papers scattered over the floor. He tried to move the desk without them, but still couldn’t. The oak door smashed inwards, tearing the metal bolt from the top from the frame and shunting the whole pile of furniture back. In the centre of the ruined room, he turned round and round, staring wildly for something he could use. Nothing but books, glinting glasses and rows of brightly labelled bottles remained untouched. Then, on the shelf set into the stone inside of the fireplace, he saw the red and yellow of a box of matches.
He grabbed bottles from the cabinet and poured the first one over the piled furniture. His hands were shaking so much he broke the first two matches before they could strike. The third broke too but fell, lit, onto the material. A delicate blue flame, not much larger than a candle’s, lifted into the air, then another and another, more and more sprouting up like a crop. He emptied the second and third bottles, the flames following him as he went. As he tipped the fourth bottle, there was a storm sound of gathering thunder that broke the door forward in one piece, the large top hinge forced away, two huge arms grappling behind grappling, beating it down. The beast lunged the top half of its bulk over the beaten door, forcing itself into the space. Stumbling backwards, he threw the bottle at the creature but missed, exploding it against the wall above the door in a cloudburst that broke suddenly into flame as it rained down everywhere. He ran to the cabinet and hurled bottle after bottle at the door, each blazing in burning gulps as it shattered. He saw the great dark torso and the grappling black arms wreathed in fire and screams. The whole doorway was being consumed, the piled furniture roaring in yellow orange limbs that tore up the wall hurling waves of black smoke before them. When there was only one bottle left, he stopped. Collecting up the desk drawers he threw them, too, into the flames. Then he collapsed onto his knees, the world blackening around him, rushing into his mind.
The tall, austere room was filling with smoke; it poured out the windows and through the bars. He choked and gasped back into consciousness, coughing blood. The fire roared lavishly now, thrusting up to the ceiling and out into the corridor, fanned by the rushing air. He grabbed the last bottle, pulled the stopper, and gulped it down. Pain screamed through his face. He gulped again, tilting his head, keeping the brandy off his torn cheek. He swigged again and again, his insides flaming now, his mind blackening then clearing, thundering with fire and smoke and the bellowing rage of the beast and his own agony of blood and pain.
Out of the sound of it all, through the choking chaos, he saw the blaze burst back into the room, flames and burning material scattering in front of it. He heard a scream again, a vast bestial roar, and saw, set in a world of fire, the dark shape of the beast, clawing desperately through the flames towards him. He turned his head away.
On the floor, half-hidden by a piece of paper, was a letter opener. He reached for it. A bone-handled knife, its blade the length of his open hand, it had blunt edges but a sharp, elongated point. He took another long drink. The screaming now was constant. The fire itself heaved at him, roaring, its great ape-like form burning with purpose as it lunged closer.
From nowhere, a silence took all this, holding everything still, a timeless calm in which he was alone and unafraid, filled with a sudden certainty equal to anything.
‘No,’ he said, quietly but sure, ‘I decide this.’
Gripping the bone with both hands, he forced the blade sharply with all his strength, burying it in his chest.
#
Over the river’s moonless surface, lighting the slight swirls and momentary ripples of black, the night sky laid tinges of red that brightened and grew, a vermillion path dimming the stars as it lengthened, stretching towards the far bank and the old wooden jetty where the ferry boat lay tied, rocking gently on the dark flow.
Craig lives and works in the UK though, since Brexit, he feels more of a Brexile. He reads and writes lyrical poetry, prose and drama. He spends his increasing middle age staring into the middle distance. This seems to help.