The Nonesuch and Others (12 page)

“But a mystery? Damn right! And such a mystery that as I’ve said, I think it may have added tae Kevin’s problem, his drunken hallucinations and delirious raving, for after that he got a lot worse. He was forever in that room; he no longer slept with wee Janet at all but we always knew where tae find him: in room number seven, aye. And if he wasnae sleepin’ he’d be sittin’ on the balcony gazin’ out and up at that place on the hill. As for what he saw up there—what attracted him, other than the mystery o’ that young man’s inexplicable death—well, who can say? But sometimes we’d hear him chunterin’ away tae himsel’, ravin’ on about…well of all things, about a nun!”

A nun? That rang a bell, but one that tolled faintly as yet in the back of my mind. An alarm bell, perhaps? But while I was still trying to locate the source of a suddenly sharpened sensation of unease, McCann was continuing with his story:

“Well, the time came when Janet asked him tae see a psychiatrist: a ‘trick cyclist’, as Kevin would have it. He must have seen it as a real threat, though, for it did in fact straighten him up…well, for a wee while. But the booze and room number seven—and I think that ghostly place up there—they all had him in their thrall, so that in a matter o’ weeks his addiction had the upper hand again and he’d reverted tae his auld habits.

“But ye ken, the locals can tell ye tales about that crumbling place up there; rumour has it that it’s always had a verra unfortunate, even a bad reputation. And as tae why I bring that up now: it’s because o’ another occurrence no more than a month or so after that young fellow pegged it in his room from no apparent cause other than a severe lack o’ breath. But actually it was far more than just another incident or ‘occurrence’: it was the death o’ another guest!

“Aye, and would ye believe, it was also another tumble from a balcony!? Indeed the first such tumble, because it took place some weeks in advance o’ Kevin’s and from a higher balcony. And that’s one o’ the most irritatin’, aggravatin’ things about the whole tragedy—Kevin’s tragedy, that is: the muchness that the local press made o’ it. Ye see, some bleddy journalist ended up theorizin’ that Kevin’s fall was possibly—even probably—a copycat suicide, o’ all unlikely things! What’s more, this same so-called ‘reporter’ must have been doin’ some serious snoopin’, because he also mentioned Kevin’s ‘mania’, his ravin’ and such, which he could only have extracted from one o’ the staff here.

“Well o’ course Janet sacked the entire gang without delay, except mahsel and Hannah. But too late for poor Kevin, who had already achieved the posthumous reputation o’ havin’ been a madman…

“Goin’ back a wee bit tae the second death up there on the hill: once again this was a young man on his own, and there may have been drink involved. But tae my way o’ thinkin’: while the booze will put a body tae sleep, it’ll rarely find him staggerin’ about on a balcony in the wee small hours o’ the mornin’!

“Anyway, the experts in the case had their own ideas. Their solution tae this second ‘death by misadventure’ was that gettin’ up tae relieve himsel’, this young man had turned the wrong way and, confused by alcohol and still half asleep, had crashed over the balcony wall.

“Now I’m not sayin’ that’s at all unlikely, ye understand—but I really don’t recall too much credence bein’ given tae the couple in the room next door, who swore they’d heard him cryin’ out and bangin’ about before performin’ his high dive.

“But anyway that was the end o’ that old place on the hill. What with its history, the rumours and all, and two deaths in a row, the place would have been done for even without the people from the Ministry. Oh aye, the Health and Safety men. They came tae check out the balconies—which oddly enough were found tae be perfectly safe!—but as for the rest o’ the place: a deathtrap, apparently. And a fire risk tae boot. The owners couldnae sell it so they left it and moved on…

“And that’s about it; no more tae tell ye. Except maybe one last thing, which I’m a wee bit reluctant tae repeat because it just might tend tae reinforce that crazy-man theory. Anyway:

“Almost the whole hotel, the Seaview in its entirety, would have heard Kevin’s ravin’ the night he died. And his last words—words that he shrieked, apparently in some kind o’ terror—were these: ‘The nun! The nun! Oh Janet—it’s the nun!’ before the sound o’ his skull breakin’ and that last long silence.

“It woke me up in mah room all flooded in full golden moonlight, so that at first I thought he wasnae shoutin’ about some phantom nun at all. No, he could as easily have been howlin’ at the full moon. ‘The moon! The moon! Oh Janet—it’s the moon!’ Except as I’ve said, that might tend tae corroborate that silly lunatic theory. Or is it really so silly after all?

“
Huh
! Who am I kiddin’ if not mahsel’? And havin’ hinted as much already, I might as well go whole hog and give ye one last tidbit. Aye, for the moon—that bleddy moon—was a
full
moon on all three o’ those fateful, indeed fatal occasions!

“But there, all done and I’ll say no more, and ye must make what ye will o’ it…”

With which, and without so much as a goodnight, McCann got up and left. And a little while later, so did I. But—

—Just that single shot of whisky had done its dirty work on me, and utterly incapable of resistance I first went to the bar, bought a half-bottle of the filthy stuff, and without even trying to conceal it took it with me up to room number seven…

I remember something of it.
Such as sitting on my balcony thinking, drinking. And out there over the night dark sea, a shining silver disc—oh yes, a bright full moon—laying its shimmering pathway on the slumbering waters of the bay.

Lying back in my deckchair and looking the other way, looking up at that great grim shape silhouetted against the glow of the hidden town, my rebellious or simply lying eyes were having more than a little trouble penetrating the darkness on the high hillside terraces. It was the booze, of course, but I persisted…at least until I forgot what I was looking for, only remembering when finally I found it.

Previously it had stood watch up there along with a pair of damaged companion sentinels behind the derelict hotel’s balustraded patio wall; then it had reappeared at a location half-way down the terraces, perhaps placed there—or so I had conjectured—by some midnight romeo, to act as a roof over his bower or love nest. And now…

…But, how had it made its way here? To this spot directly across the dark canyon of the road, behind the rim of the great retaining wall, where only its cowl and upper half were visible from my balcony? Perhaps a freakish gust of wind had carried it aloft, tumbling it down the terraces and landing it right-side-up, trapped against the hillside’s retaining wall.

Well yes, perhaps. And perhaps not.

But there it was, for all the world like the top half of an eerily human figure—indeed of a cowled nun!—looking down on me. And as a car crested the hill and its headlights shone however briefly on that oddly religious shape behind the high wall, so the darkness under the cowl flashed alive in a pair of triangular flares, which were at once extinguished as the beam swept on.

These things I remember, and also laughing to myself in the stupid way that drunks do, as I stumbled in through the balcony doors to collapse upon my bed…

I felt it coming. But don’t ask me how; I just knew. Perhaps it was this affinity of mine for weirdness, this magnetism working in my mind, my being. I had felt it, it had felt me. I had seen it, it had seen me. I definitely had
not
wanted to know it, and that could be why I had failed to recognize it: a natural reluctance to engage yet again with the Great and Terrible Unknown. And it very definitely did
not
want its existence revealed!

Of necessity a secretive creature, it had become, unfortunately for me, practised in the erasure of any suspect knowledge of its being. And quite simply—as an adept of this indelicate art—it now intended to erase me!

I felt it coming, its flexible mantle fully open, parachuting on the night air. But immobilized, my mind dulled by drink, I refused to believe; I denied it. It could not be…it was a nightmare…the Demon Drink had filled my mind with monsters. Ah! But what then of the thin people of old London town? Or the clown on stilts as I believed I had once seen him or it? Or had they too been impure and not so simple fantasies of the flowing bowl, mere figments of fermentation, tremens of delirium?

Yet now I could even smell it: a not-quite-taint, a waft of mushroomy fungus spores, a hybrid thing’s clammy innards, contracting to engulf and smother me…

My God! I felt it on my face like a slither of wet leather! And knowing that it was real,
I came awake screaming
!

It was there in room number seven with me, inside the wide-open balcony doors, leaning over my bed. Its membraneous canopy was closing over my head, shutting off my air, holding me down. I lashed out with both arms, groped beyond the perimeter of the thing’s web. My left hand found and grasped the bedside lamp; I automatically thumbed the switch and dragged the softly glowing lamp inside the living canopy with me.

I was stone-cold sober in a moment, as this alien—what, intelligence?—was illumined from within. And seeing it like that,
literally
from within, I remembered comparing the structure of more orthodox, man-made parasols to the physical form of the octopus. Oh, yes! And now…well it wasn’t only the more orthodox ones!

For there beneath its mantle—where, thank God, there was no huge parrot beak but, instead, surrounding a pulsating slit-like mouth, a ring of eight short, worm-like tongues, spatulate at their tips for the delivery of whatever food sustained it—I saw that indeed the thing had tentacular limbs, all eight of them connected by webbing and lined with grasping suckers.

As for the mantle stretched between these limbs: while it was flexible and had the consistency of a bat’s wing, allowing my lamp to shine through it, still it had the strength of fine leather and was redolent of the thing’s alien essences: anaesthetic odours which were aiding it in my suffocation! Except I wasn’t about to die like that, or by allowing it to drag me to the balcony and hurling me over!

Holding my breath, I stopped breathing the thing’s poisons and thrust my glowing lamp deep into the ugly gash of its mouth. The lamp, too, had a canopy of sorts: its shade, which crumpled up and fell apart as the electric bulb penetrated the monster’s pulsing, dribbling mouth. Only moments ago energized, that bulb couldn’t be very warm, but still it was hot enough to alarm the thing.

Muscles inside the mouth closed on the bulb like a ray fish crushing a mollusk—and the bulb exploded with a loud popping sound. The thing’s mouth was lacerated internally. It spat thin shards of glass into my face, however harmlessly, thank God; it also spat foul, stinking yellow fluid, its blood, and commenced a violent shuddering as it jerked up and away from my face and upper torso.

Then, trying to yell, I only succeeded in gasping, and when at last I could breathe properly I shouted my outrage. This was as much to hasten the creature’s retreat as an expression of my horror. Vivid curses poured out of me as I reached up and tried to throttle its central column, a thin stem of a “body”; and as if these breathy obscenities had helped to inflate it, the monster’s canopy bulged and began to open.

Still shuddering, now it convulsed, and chitin hooks on the ends of its flailing tentacles caught on the frame of my single bed, turning it on its side. Saying a silent prayer of thanks, I sprawled on the floor, from where I could see the thing’s mushroom shape, its silhouette, against a faint night glow. In full flight now, it was desperately squeezing the bulk of its partly opened canopy out through the sliding doors onto the balcony.

Getting up from the floor I lunged after it. I didn’t know what I could do, if anything, but I was more angry than afraid. It wasn’t my fault that this creature, like others I had known, was attracted to me—or me to them, whichever—and I wanted it, them, to know we could fight back, that men could be deadly dangerous too.

And still shouting at the top of my voice I rushed out onto the balcony where, fully inflated, the monster was now drifting aloft. How such a thing could fly or glide—well, don’t ask me—perhaps by generating gasses within its mantle? I don’t know. But anyway I tried to get hold of the clawed, club-like foot at the base of its slimy stem of a body. It was a wasted effort; I couldn’t get a grip and those retractable claws were sharp.