The Unlucky Man (20 page)

"I’m starting to think maybe it means unlucky for other people," I said hollowly, and was greeted with no argument.

"So, where are we going?" Loess asked, and I realised we were already heading the right way, though why I was so sure of it was another matter.

"West," I said definitely. "Out of the city, fast as you possibly can."

"West?"

"Yes," I said with a certainty I couldn’t place. "We’re heading into the mountains."

They didn’t argue, and we drove in silence until the city was a memory, a bad dream left on the horizon. Wracked with exhaustion, pain, guilt, the motion of the car lulled me into my first sleep in what felt like years; a deep, silent rest. I slept for a long, long time.

When I awoke, the mountains loomed large ahead.

In my dream I was back in the little wooden boat with its peeling green paint that Tony and I had explored our flooded world in as kids. I was alone, however, with no Tony to keep me company and no oars to steer. Gone too were the watery byways and fresh pooling streams of my youth, replaced on all sides by a flat dark sea that stretched away, the colour of slate, in all directions of the compass. No matter how hard I looked to the horizon there was no end in sight, just endless still water carrying on forever and forever into infinity.

I had no idea how long I floated idly, lost on that current-less dull expanse. It could have been minutes or hours, whole seasons or lifetimes beyond measure. Time seemed to have no meaning.

Above me the sky rippled in beautiful cascading colours, something like the Aurora Borealis, untamed greens and oranges and pinks swirling and pulsing in pigment blending impossible patterns, an ever shifting palette of dancing hues. But none of it reflected in the waters below; they remained undisturbed, dark and flat and dead.

When I looked down from the eddying colours of the sky it was to find that I was no longer alone in the close confines of the vessel.

Corg sat across from me.

He looked dishevelled and worn out, hunched pale and uncomfortable on the small wooden bench. For such a big man, he seemed suddenly small, shrunken. As I looked at him, I knew that something terrible had happened, but I couldn't quite remember what. The past was a haze in my memory.

"Corg," I said, my voice sounding odd and raw in my ears, "Corg. Something... bad happened to you, didn't it?"

He just looked at me blankly, not reproachful, not forgiving, not anything.

"It was my fault, wasn't it?" I said. I felt certain that it had been, whatever it was.

"I'm sorry," I said. 'Corg?'

His silence continued whilst overhead the colours shifted and bubbled. A wave of red popped and spread like ink against the sky, reflected and glowing in his empty white eyes.

"Corg?"

He opened his mouth to speak as waves of light played across his features.

"You're close," he whispered. "Close. Keep on just a little further. So close."

A shiver ran through me. "You're not Corg," I said. Something strange was happening to his face, shadows seemed to be shifting over his features that were nothing to do with the rippling colour above. He didn't look like Corg anymore, but it was hard to make out his face.

The boat rocked, jerking suddenly on the still water, with such violence that I had to grip onto the empty row locks to steady myself. Ripples were spreading out and away from the boat, great rings that cut a swathe through the inky water.

A feeling gripped me, an absolute certainty, that there was something beneath us in the unknown fathoms under my chipped and peeling boat, which suddenly felt very small and flimsy. I pictured a great, hulking
something
in the dark waters beneath, lurking just below us. The surface, still as glass once more now, was so dark and impregnable that it was impossible to guess at how deep it might go. In my mind I saw eyes as big as ships and long, slithering thick tentacles, oozing and undulating through the oily depths, rising up to drag my little boat down into their drowned lair. Nausea bloomed in my stomach and I quickly snatched my gaze back from the cold sea.

And now Wychelo sat facing me across the small craft. He too, looked like he had been through the wars. His skin was pale and covered in a patina of dirt and smoke, his clothing singed here and there and torn, ragged. There was blood on his face, stained streaks of it around his mouth and across his chin but it was his eyes that truly spoke of his disrepair: twin pools of broken, deep red anguish. He look like someone who had peaked into hell.

I waited. He felt more like a true vision of Wychelo than Corg had, though still not whole, he sat opposite almost like a projection on a screen.

"Close," he rasped, the words torn and shredded from his mouth. He repeated Corg's words back at me. "Just a little further. Close. Close."

One by one the lights in the sky were dying, fading slowly to nothing but the dull memory of colour until that too was gone and all that remained of their splendour was a pallid sickly light that lent a pinkish tint to the heavens. It’s morning, I though mechanically, morning breaking over a cold ocean of nothing.

Wychelo seemed to be having difficulty keeping himself together. A breeze was blowing up from nowhere, disturbing the still surface of the water, and as it blew it seemed to ruffle his features, as if his molecules were being blown about by the wind. For a second he stretched and blurred, shrinking somewhat and growing bony until the Make it Happen Man had taken his place.

And then he too was changing as his face swam. He swelled, grew massive and hulking for a moment into a strange, scarred figure I didn’t recognise although it rang a bell of alarm and familiarity somewhere deep within my unconscious.

Then he in turn was gone, dissipating and swirling away as another form took his place. I only saw him for a second but I had the distinct impression of serious grey eyes, a hard face with short neat steel hair, perhaps a beard. But something within me seemed to be suppressing the image, and his face swam before my eyes, shadow falling across it and smothering him before I could make anything more substantial. Even that brief glimpse, however, had sent a bright painful light through my mind. A memory danced tantalisingly just out of reach. This was important, I thought, he was...

The boat lurched again, with such force this time that it rocked and spun wildly. I grabbed at the side once more and for a few seconds my heart was in my mouth. Eyes squeezed shut, I waited for what I was sure must be coming: the liquid rush of a great volume of water being displaced as a huge body raised itself from out of the murk. I could see it in my mind, feel the wash of cold waves about to hit me as long creepers, fleshy and heavy with suckers slipped over the edge of the boat to engulf me. With it would come the salty sea stench of rotten seaweed and the old, bloated stink of other victims claimed by the depths.

When I opened my eyes I was alone, bobbing and swaying beneath the lightening sky. For a moment dark wings flapped overhead and then were gone. The wind that had gusted moments before ceased suddenly, leaving all still and placid as before.
Close
, it whispered with its final breath.

Close

And all around me the waters had burned away, leaving a floating wasteland of grey cinders. In every direction swept away a field of floating ash.

I had no idea how long I slept for, but by the time I awoke the scenery that rolled by out of the window had changed dramatically. No more were we passing the solid ugly shapes of industrial expansion but rather the forms and colours of an untamed countryside. I watched tall hedges roll past through the glass, dark tangles of thorns and mottled leaves shivering in the breeze.

Tall trees cast broken shadows over us as we passed, long crooked limbs jutting up into the sky. Autumn was well under way and many of the branches were bare and skeletal, knotted and bony. What leaves remained clung tenaciously to finger-like branches in patches of orange, red and gold whilst those fallen lined the sides of the road in great soggy piles of rotting brown mulch.

The further we travelled, the wilder the countryside grew. The road narrowed steadily until it was little more than a dirt track, pressed in on either side by unruly reaching fauna and branches that scratched at the side of the car like fingernails.

"I don't know how much further the car's going to take us," Loess warned from the front seat.

"It's OK," I said, echoing the voice from my dream. "We're close now."

And then, through the window, I saw something that made me sit up and take note. It was a sign, half glimpsed through the auburn leaves, for the
Ritsby Way Inn.
Faded and broken, the sign hung at an angle on an empty building whose once white walls had been stained and damaged by the battering elements. A collection of smaller cabins had been almost completely overwhelmed by new growth but here and there an empty window, the panes missing, poked hollow and gaping amid the weeds. Other bits and pieces of building detritus could be seen amid the scrub of autumn greens and oranges; tubes of tumbled black guttering, the corner of a torn up slouching mattress and everywhere shards of shining broken glass.

But it was the tree that really struck me. A huge, spreading monolith of almost black wood, sweeping majestically up from the tangle of vines and creepers. Its branches were completely bare, curving spikes silhouetted against the weak light of the day. It rose like a many splintered claw, casting its shadow over the shell of the old building.

I pictured Wychelo beneath those branches, lost amid the shadows. I could see him, standing still as a statue, eyes locked on the building opposite as the rain poured down into the branches above him and cascaded down all around. His eyes would have been empty then, though they had been blue not long before. And he would already be changed forever, beyond saving.

But there was no-one standing there now, no phantom shapes beneath the branches, just darkness and beyond it the crumbling remains of the
Ritsby
as the wild landscape mercilessly reclaimed it. In a few years, I thought, there would be no sign that it had ever been there at all.

In the end, we could go no further by car. We’d been following an uneven dirt track that had wound well into the mountains, juddering and bouncing us along through its shallow ruts. Eventually our road just petered out into nothing by a low, long dilapidated looking metal tunnel, and it was here that we left Loess’ car. It was probably a mercy really; the poor thing was used to city streets and paved roads and I sensed any further on this course would have added it to the growing list of casualties collecting in my wake.

A metal structure, stained and worn by time and neglect and the wild, lay in a state of disrepair and was being gradually reclaimed by nature. Trailing, tendril like weeds had cemented themselves to the walls, growing in suffocating ribbons over the whole of the outer surface. Rubbing away a crust of dirt and spider web from a cracked plastic sheet of window, I peered through the small cleaned patch at a curiously modern interior. It was some kind of mobile lab, buried, so far as I could tell, under a thick layer of dust and growing damp where rainwater had leaked in at the seal.

Equipment was dotted around the empty space, scientific apparatus in the main: bottles, tubes, heat lamps and other, more esoteric items that I couldn’t place. There were units set up and seemingly abandoned, ready to carry out analysis on, what, I thought? Something that was worth the effort of traipsing all the way out here for. Clearly this shack had been some kind of outpost and from the look of things it had been abandoned in a hurry and it had been left heavy with shadow and dirt and filthy unexplained dark smudges.

There was a second room, a bunkhouse, off the first and here, too, there were definite signs of sudden abandonment; beds were left un-stripped, still with linen on, whilst a few personal effects lay forgotten on the bunks. A pile of old clothes, left to rot, sat disquietingly forlorn in a far corner. Most unsettling, however, were the rusty brown streaks on the floor, on one of the beds, faded yet unmistakable as blood long ago spilled. We too decided to leave it all behind. There were probably secrets here to be uncovered, but I was being pulled, inexorably but firmly, further into the wilderness, though by what I could not say.

From the door of the lab a footpath, narrow and overgrown, snaked off amongst the rock and we followed it. It wasn’t raining here, but the air had grown colder as we climbed and I could taste on it the first sting of winter. Our breath clouded in the still air as we climbed, faces numbed by the chill air.

We couldn’t know it, of course, but the make up of the landscape had changed drastically, impossibly from what Horst had seen as a young man on a doomed scientific expedition. Gone now was the swallowing density of undergrowth, the trees and winding roots and dark hedgerows. Gone, too, was all that black grass and mud, replaced with fen like bogs of stinking pale water. They stretched away in all directions, a buzzing, sucking expanse broken only by patches of spiking reeds and puffs of yellow marsh gas.

"This doesn’t make any sense," Whimsy breathed, nose crinkling at the fetid, rotting stench drifting off the water. "None of this does, up here," he gestured widely around, "This isn’t the type of thing we should be seeing at all." He was right, of course, but I found myself beyond surprise or even concern.