Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances (38 page)

“Doesn’t sound very scary,” said Shadow. “Except for the dying bit.”

They reached the bottom of the road. Rainwater was running like a stream over Shadow’s thick hiking boots.

Shadow said, “So how did you two meet?” It was normally a safe question, when you were with couples.

Oliver said, “In the pub. I was up here on holiday, really.”

Moira said, “I was with someone when I met Oliver. We had a very brief, torrid affair, then we ran off together. Most unlike both of us.”

They did not seem like the kind of people who ran off together, thought Shadow. But then, all people were strange. He knew he should say something.

“I was married. My wife was killed in a car crash.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Moira.

“It happened,” said Shadow.

“When we get home,” said Moira, “I’m making us all whisky macs. That’s whisky and ginger wine and hot water. And I’m having a hot bath. Otherwise I’ll catch my death.”

Shadow imagined reaching out his hand and catching death in it, like a baseball, and he shivered.

The rain redoubled, and a sudden flash of lightning burned the world into existence all around them: every gray rock in the drystone wall, every blade of grass, every puddle and every tree was perfectly illuminated, and then swallowed by a deeper darkness, leaving afterimages on Shadow’s night-blinded eyes.

“Did you see that?” asked Oliver. “Damnedest thing.” The thunder rolled and rumbled, and Shadow waited until it was done before he tried to speak.

“I didn’t see anything,” said Shadow. Another flash, less bright, and Shadow thought he saw something moving away from them in a distant field. “That?” he asked.

“It’s a donkey,” said Moira. “Only a donkey.”

Oliver stopped. He said, “This was the wrong way to come home. We should have got a taxi. This was a mistake.”

“Ollie,” said Moira. “It’s not far now. And it’s just a spot of rain. You aren’t made of sugar, darling.”

Another flash of lightning, so bright as to be almost blinding. There was nothing to be seen in the fields.

Darkness. Shadow turned back to Oliver, but the little man was no longer standing beside him. Oliver’s flashlight was on the ground. Shadow blinked his eyes, hoping to force his night vision to return. The man had collapsed, crumpled onto the wet grass on the side of the lane.

“Ollie?” Moira crouched beside him, her umbrella by her side. She shone her flashlight onto his face. Then she looked at Shadow. “He can’t just sit here,” she said, sounding confused and concerned. “It’s pouring.”

Shadow pocketed Oliver’s flashlight, handed his umbrella to Moira, then picked Oliver up. The man did not seem to weigh much, and Shadow was a big man.

“Is it far?”

“Not far,” she said. “Not really. We’re almost home.”

They walked in silence, across a churchyard on the edge of a village green, and into a village. Shadow could see lights on in the gray stone houses that edged the one street. Moira turned off, into a house set back from the road, and Shadow followed her. She held the back door open for him.

The kitchen was large and warm, and there was a sofa, half-covered with magazines, against one wall. There were low beams in the kitchen, and Shadow needed to duck his head. Shadow removed Oliver’s raincoat and dropped it. It puddled on the wooden floor. Then he put the man down on the sofa.

Moira filled the kettle.

“Do we call an ambulance?”

She shook her head.

“This is just something that happens? He falls down and passes out?”

Moira busied herself getting mugs from a shelf. “It’s happened before. Just not for a long time. He’s narcoleptic, and if something surprises or scares him he can just go down like that. He’ll come round soon. He’ll want tea. No whisky mac tonight, not for him. Sometimes he’s a bit dazed and doesn’t know where he is, sometimes he’s been following everything that happened while he was out. And he hates it if you make a fuss. Put your backpack down by the Aga.”

The kettle boiled. Moira poured the steaming water into a teapot. “He’ll have a cup of real tea. I’ll have chamomile, I think, or I won’t sleep tonight. Calm my nerves. You?”

“I’ll drink tea, sure,” said Shadow. He had walked more than twenty miles that day, and sleep would be easy in the finding. He wondered at Moira. She appeared perfectly self-possessed in the face of her partner’s incapacity, and he wondered how much of it was not wanting to show weakness in front of a stranger. He admired her, although he found it peculiar. The English were strange. But he understood hating “making a fuss.” Yes.

Oliver stirred on the couch. Moira was at his side with a cup of tea, helped him into a sitting position. He sipped the tea, in a slightly dazed fashion.

“It followed me home,” he said, conversationally.

“What followed you, Ollie, darling?” Her voice was steady, but there was concern in it.

“The dog,” said the man on the sofa, and he took another sip of his tea. “The black dog.”

These were the things Shadow learned that night, sitting around the kitchen table with Moira and Oliver:

He learned that Oliver had not been happy or fulfilled in his London advertising agency job. He had moved up to the village and taken an extremely early medical retirement. Now, initially for recreation and increasingly for money, he repaired and rebuilt drystone walls. There was, he explained, an art and a skill to wall building, it was excellent exercise, and, when done correctly, a meditative practice.

“There used to be hundreds of drystone-wall people around here. Now there’s barely a dozen who know what they’re doing. You see walls repaired with concrete, or with breeze blocks. It’s a dying art. I’d love to show you how I do it. Useful skill to have. Picking the rock, sometimes, you have to let the rock tell you where it goes. And then it’s immovable. You couldn’t knock it down with a tank. Remarkable.”

He learned that Oliver had been very depressed several years earlier, shortly after Moira and he got together, but that for the last few years he had been doing very well. Or, he amended, relatively well.

He learned that Moira was independently wealthy, that her family trust fund had meant that she and her sisters had not needed to work, but that, in her late twenties, she had gone for teacher training. That she no longer taught, but that she was extremely active in local affairs, and had campaigned successfully to keep the local bus routes in service.

Shadow learned, from what Oliver didn’t say, that Oliver was scared of something, very scared, and that when Oliver was asked what had frightened him so badly, and what he had meant by saying that the black dog had followed him home, his response was to
stammer and to sway. He learned not to ask Oliver any more questions.

This is what Oliver and Moira had learned about Shadow sitting around that kitchen table:

Nothing much.

Shadow liked them. He was not a stupid man; he had trusted people in the past who had betrayed him, but he liked this couple, and he liked the way their home smelled—like bread-making and jam and walnut wood-polish—and he went to sleep that night in his box-room bedroom worrying about the little man with the muttonchop beard. What if the thing Shadow had glimpsed in the field had
not
been a donkey? What if it
had
been an enormous dog? What then?

The rain had stopped when Shadow woke. He made himself toast in the empty kitchen. Moira came in from the garden, letting a gust of chilly air in through the kitchen door. “Sleep well?” she asked.

“Yes. Very well.” He had dreamed of being at the zoo. He had been surrounded by animals he could not see, which snuffled and snorted in their pens. He was a child, walking with his mother, and he was safe and he was loved. He had stopped in front of a lion’s cage, but what had been in the cage was a sphinx, half lion and half woman, her tail swishing. She had smiled at him, and her smile had been his mother’s smile. He heard her voice, accented and warm and feline.

It said,
Know thyself.

I know who I am,
said Shadow in his dream, holding the bars of the cage. Behind the bars was the desert. He could see pyramids. He could see shadows on the sand.

Then who are you, Shadow? What are you running from? Where are you running to?

Who are you?

And he had woken, wondering why he was asking himself that question, and missing his mother, who had died twenty years before, when he was a teenager. He still felt oddly comforted, remembering the feel of his hand in his mother’s hand.

“I’m afraid Ollie’s a bit under the weather this morning.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Yes. Well, can’t be helped.”

“I’m really grateful for the room. I guess I’ll be on my way.”

Moira said, “Will you look at something for me?”

Shadow nodded, then followed her outside, and round the side of the house. She pointed to the rose bed. “What does that look like to you?”

Shadow bent down. “
The footprint of an enormous hound,
” he said. “To quote Dr. Watson.”

“Yes,” she said. “It really does.”

“If there’s a spectral ghost-hound out there,” said Shadow, “it shouldn’t leave footprints. Should it?”

“I’m not actually an authority on these matters,” said Moira. “I had a friend once who could have told us all about it. But she . . .” She trailed off. Then, more brightly, “You know, Mrs. Camberley two doors down has a Doberman pinscher. Ridiculous thing.” Shadow was not certain whether the ridiculous thing was Mrs. Camberley or her dog.

He found the events of the previous night less troubling and odd, more explicable. What did it matter if a strange dog had followed them home? Oliver had been frightened or startled, and had collapsed, from narcolepsy, from shock.

“Well, I’ll pack you some lunch before you go,” said Moira. “Boiled eggs. That sort of thing. You’ll be glad of them on the way.”

They went into the house. Moira went to put something away, and returned looking shaken.

“Oliver’s locked himself in the bathroom,” she said.

Shadow was not certain what to say.

“You know what I wish?” she continued.

“I don’t.”

“I wish you would talk to him. I wish he would open the door. I wish he’d talk to me. I can hear him in there. I can hear him.”

And then, “I hope he isn’t cutting himself again.”

Shadow walked back into the hall, stood by the bathroom door, called Oliver’s name. “Can you hear me? Are you okay?”

Nothing. No sound from inside.

Shadow looked at the door. It was solid wood. The house was old, and they built them strong and well back then. When Shadow had used the bathroom that morning he’d learned the lock was a hook and eye. He leaned on the handle of the door, pushing it down, then rammed his shoulder against the door. It opened with a noise of splintering wood.

He had watched a man die in prison, stabbed in a pointless argument. He remembered the way that the blood had puddled about the man’s body, lying in the back corner of the exercise yard. The sight had troubled Shadow, but he had forced himself to look, and to keep looking. To look away would somehow have felt disrespectful.

Oliver was naked on the floor of the bathroom. His body was pale, and his chest and groin were covered with thick, dark hair. He held the blade from an ancient safety razor in his hands. He had sliced his arms with it, his chest above the nipples, his inner thighs and his penis. Blood was smeared on his body, on the black and white linoleum floor, on the white enamel of the bathtub. Oliver’s eyes were round and wide, like the eyes of a bird. He was looking directly at Shadow, but Shadow was not certain that he was being seen.

“Ollie?” said Moira’s voice, from the hall. Shadow realized that he was blocking the doorway and he hesitated, unsure whether to let her see what was on the floor or not.

Shadow took a pink towel from the towel rail and wrapped it around Oliver. That got the little man’s attention. He blinked, as if seeing Shadow for the first time, and said, “The dog. It’s for the dog. It must be fed, you see. We’re making friends.”

Moira said, “Oh my dear sweet god.”

“I’ll call the emergency services.”

“Please don’t,” she said. “He’ll be fine at home with me. I don’t know what I’ll . . . please?”

Shadow picked up Oliver, swaddled in the towel, carried him into the bedroom as if he were a child, and then placed him on the bed. Moira followed. She picked up an iPad by the bed, touched the screen, and music began to play. “Breathe, Ollie,” she said. “Remember. Breathe. It’s going to be fine. You’re going to be fine.”

“I can’t really breathe,” said Oliver, in a small voice. “Not really. I can feel my heart, though. I can feel my heart beating.”

Moira squeezed his hand and sat down on the bed, and Shadow left them alone.

When Moira entered the kitchen, her sleeves rolled up, and her hands smelling of antiseptic cream, Shadow was sitting on the sofa, reading a guide to local walks.