Kraken (3 page)

At the center of the bay stood a small cottage, warm light already spilling from its windows. The fading end of the day had Will carefully sidling along the length of the wharf. Heavy yellow-billed gulls eyed him suspiciously from the jetty railing as he dragged his bag towards the shore, anxiously eying the water on either side of the narrow wooden walkway.

Once he reached the solidity of land he took a deep breath and eased the strap where it had dug into the sweaty flesh of his hand. The wheels on his travel bag caught on the crushed shells lining the narrow path. He negotiated it uncomfortably, crowded in by tall lilies on each side of the path. Will’s shirt was quickly damp with dew.

The second thoughts started as soon as Will began to climb the few steps to the low porch in front of the cottage, heaving his bag up behind him. What had he done? These weren’t even second thoughts – this was fully fledged regret, taking flight and dive-bombing him in an effort to get him to retreat. Immediately. No. He wanted to do this. He missed Parker, right? He missed him and he was here to tell him that. Before good sense could assert itself, he knocked on the front door.

He heard movement and through the glass panels at the top of the door shadows flitted in the soft yellow lamplight.

The door was opened by a young woman in her twenties. Will’s first thought was that she should be carved in stone for worship on a distant mountain. Even though he didn’t like girls, her luscious dark hair and skin drew him towards her. A warm smile lit her eyes, and her shirt was a little askew. “Hi,” she said, sleepily.

Will’s ever-ready sense of social anxiety was eager to reintroduce itself. He took a step backwards. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry, I’ve got the wrong house. The ferry said Swansea Bay jetty, but— “

“No, you’re in the right place; this is Swansea. Were you looking for Parker?” The woman turned around and called out. “Parker!”

A familiar voice answered, “Did Doug lose his power again, baby? Hang on, I’ve got the storm lantern.”

Up until this moment Will had thought the phrase ‘the blood drained from his face’ was a figure of speech, but as Parker put his arm around the woman and turned toward the door Will felt every capillary open and his red corpuscles withdraw from his extremities, as if he’d been sliced apart and his body knew it had to preserve essential organs only.

Will took in every detail, and wondered if his brain had helpfully decided to record it all, so that in every half-peaceful moment in the future it could replay it and remind Will what an idiot he was. Parker’s zipper was half-mast and he was wearing unlaced hiking boots but no socks. The woman’s lips were puffy, and a hickey bloomed on her dark chocolate skin, peeking above the collar of her expensively-cut shirt.

“Will?”

Parker sounded surprised. Will couldn’t seem to find his voice at all. He was watching from somewhere very far away, looking at a stranger make a fool of themselves.

“I thought you weren’t coming,” said Parker.

Well, obviously
, thought Will. He wanted to gesture towards the woman, but his arms seemed to temporarily belong to someone else.

The woman stirred uneasily, her face registering concern, as she looked between Will and Parker, and she edged slightly away from the arm around her shoulders.

The silence stretched out.

“Please excuse me,” Will finally rasped out. “I appear to have made an error.”

He made a one-eighty and lurched stiffly down the steps. The beam coming from the front door lit a second short path leading to a small painted gate, not even waist high, so he unlatched it and walked through.

“Hell, no. Will, wait!” Will could hear Parker fumbling with his boots, and didn’t stop.

Only a few steps in and trees blocked all light from the house. The lilies grew thick on each side of the path. Will tripped in the gloom, but the vast bulk of plants cushioned him and held him upright. His hands grew sticky from the touch of the long, crushed leaves.

The swing-clunk of the gate behind him nudged him into a run. He was a kid again, running in the dark from something horrible at his heels. Suddenly space opened around him, the lilies replaced by sparse second-growth forest. Will dodged sharp left and abruptly splashed into an ankle-deep stream. He waded across and clambered up a steep valley hillside. His feet slipped on the dead leaves littering the ground; his shoes designed for city streets, not wilderness. A figure pushed through the lilies on the path behind him somewhere, so he kept climbing, pulling himself up now with his hands, holding onto rough sapling trunks, working by touch.

Will paused for breath. He sat down where he stood, resting one hand on the damp leaves, digging his fingers down into the soil, and wedging his foot into the angle between a tree trunk and the soft ground to stop himself sliding back down. His shoulders heaved, half in tears, half in oxygen deprivation. Will realized he was both shaking, and an idiot.

He had run into an unknown forest, at night, in front of his boyfriend – his ex-boyfriend – and his ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend. Without his luggage.

Suddenly, painful laughter bubbled up inside Will, and he had to put his other fist into his mouth and bite down hard to stop himself barking out loud guffaws. Now that his breathing had calmed he could hear Parker below him on the valley floor, calling Will’s name. He sounded surprisingly distant. Clearly the only thing to do was get up, walk back down the hill, apologize for being an asshole, beg a bed for the night, and leave in the morning with good grace. There was no other alternative.

Except, Will was startled to realize, he had no intention of doing it. He sat quietly while Parker lurched around in the dark for a good twenty minutes. After a long silence, when it seemed Parker had given up, Will got to his feet and climbed the rest of the hill. His shoes squelched with every step and the soles gave him no traction, so he took them off, tucked his socks inside them, and tied the laces together, hanging them around his neck.

Will rolled his trousers to just under his knees, and added ‘get checked for ticks’ to his mental list. There was enough light to make out dim outlines now. The moon had risen; only a new moon, but enough to dimly glimpse where he was.

Above him bellied black lines ran along the ridge, through the trees. Power.

Will shrugged. They had to go somewhere. He set off following them from pole to pole. The compacted earth lay firm under his feet, and the occasional tree had been trimmed back, the cuts fresh and white in the moonlight. The poles were fresh too, still smelling green and acrid from the chemical treatment. Twigs and wood chips littered the track; the bite of tiny cuts in his soles greeted him with every step.

The ground rose gradually as he walked. After about an hour the lines overhead veered away from the ridge, and the track dipped down a steep hill to the north, deeper into the interior. Will paused for a moment, trying to imagine the shape of the island from a brief glance at the map at the ticket cabin. He felt very certain he was supposed to follow the ridge, at least for a little way, but he had no idea what he was heading towards. It just felt . . . right. Leaving the confident trail of the power lines was foolhardy, at the very least. But the idea of going down that steep hill dismayed him if he picked wrong, and he had to come back up again.

He took a step off the path along the ridge. A sense of distant pleasure tripped up his spine and along the base of his skull. He shivered, relaxing into it. That seemed to settle it. Some remote part of his brain pointed out that his rules for logical thought seemed to have long abandoned him. Left behind, stock still in horror on Redport quay, perhaps.

He wove through the forest, no longer noticing the slight pain underfoot against the delicious sense of distant bliss that tantalized his skin. White patches of lichen coated the trunks of saplings around him, bouncing the light through the trees. The forest smelled like new growth and ancient death.

He stepped out into a clearing. The skeletons of three huge trees filled it, white as bone in the moonlight. They weren’t particularly tall, not any more, anyway, but they were broader around than the reach of three of him. There was no undergrowth here, only shards of crisp white broken wood, as dry as British humor.

The sense of pleasure was strong now, shooting through him and making him feel peaceful and loved. Whatever it was, it was here. He pressed his body against the nearest tree, hugging it, then turned around and sank to the ground, leaning back against it.

His brain tapped insistently again. Ah, yes, of course, now he realized what he was feeling. Hypothermia. How delightful. While a life spent in a medium-size city had absolved him from experiencing it before now, he’d certainly read about it. Relaxed, happy, somewhat delirious . . . it all fitted. Any minute now he’d be shedding his clothes and lowering himself into an icy mountain stream for a relaxing cool-off. Well, it was certainly what he deserved for running into the spring night, getting wet feet, and then deciding to wander recklessly through a forest. He idly wished his tablet wasn’t back in his luggage, so he could have penned a goodbye note, maybe made some interesting scientific observations about his last moments.

He closed his eyes and let the night surround him. He felt the life around him, and heard the squeak of timber against timber, the soft roar of the wind in the treetops above. Somehow his bones lying forever amongst these beautiful ancient trees seemed very apt. There were worse ways to go.

Something feather-soft brushed Will’s face. The thought of spiders and bats jerked him from his reverie. He wasn’t alone. An owl sat not ten feet from him, on a branch at the edge of the clearing. He’d never seen an owl before, and it wasn’t what he expected. It looked unlikely to deliver a letter, and rather more inclined to rip out his eyeballs with its great yellow hooked beak. And then devour them.

The owl’s body wasn’t white, but a mottled brown-and-cream, with soft stripes over the chest and belly. The eyes were large, but framed subtly by a compact sleek head. It turned towards him, and Will was quite certain it saw him, was watching him. It spread its wings and flapped for long seconds, making no noise even in the quiet night forest. Abruptly it was airborne, circling over Will’s head as he craned his neck to follow its flight. The pale plumage was dizzying against the stars.

It threaded itself through the trees, landing on a branch six feet into the forest, and looking back at Will.

Getting up felt like the hardest thing he’d ever done. He’d only taken a step when, with a hop, the owl was airborne, whispering through the trees to a branch fifteen feet away.

He followed the owl mindlessly, heading down through trackless forest. Every time he grew close the owl moved on again, always dancing just ahead of him. When they came at length to a thick band of ferns he pushed on blindly, holding his hands in front of his face and batting away spider webs with a shudder. He lost sight of the owl, but when at last the ferns cleared he was on a knoll where the forest parted and gave him a view across the bay towards the mainland, low and dark in the faint moonlight. Ahead Will spied lights in the distance.

The cottage was set low to the ground. As he climbed the steps Will felt weary, and wanted nothing more than to shuck his clothes and crawl into bed. He walked up to the sliding glass doors and stood for a moment, wondering what to say. Moths were throwing themselves against the glass, aiming for a roomful of moons, always out of reach.

As Will stood there, wondering what the hell to say, a man inside approached the sliding doors. He was tall and lean, with russet hair, and wore only lose sleep pants. He gazed at Will through the door, then walked up to the glass and placed one hand against the glass. They stood there for a moment, frozen in place.

Will tentatively raised his own hand and waved it slightly in greeting. The man’s eyes opened wide and he hurriedly reached for the handle of the door, then jerked away, stepping back.

Will looked down at himself, realizing belatedly how filthy he was. If someone had knocked on his apartment door at night looking like this he would have called the cops on them. He shifted uneasily on his feet, trying to think how to appear both non-threatening and less disheveled. He unlooped the sneakers from around his neck and held them sheepishly.

The man suddenly came to life, sliding the door open. “I didn’t expect— ,“ he said. He sounded a little shell-shocked.

“Um, hi.” We waved again, then looked at his hand and put it down. “May I come in?”

He watched the guy’s eyes as they went down his body, taking in his bedraggled shirt, rolled up trousers and dirty bare feet.