A HAZY SHADE OF WINTER Page 16

  . . . except that what she saw wasn’t triumph at all, or even regret. More like—hurt.

  ‘You thought..?’ He stared at her. ‘You thought I’d do that? To you? No!’

  He hugged her tightly, close to his cold, beatless heart. ‘I’d never do that.’

  ‘Then . . .’

  ‘I brought you here to save you,’ he said.

  ‘Save me?’

  ‘It’s happening tonight,’ he said. ‘We’re breaking out. All of us. Well, as many as possible. The law of balance. There are more people dead throughout time than alive now. In any case, we can’t all cross. Just some.’

  He stroked her face again. ‘Each of us is permitted to seek out one of the living and keep them safe, to be sure that they aren’t taken. All that matters is that you were mine. I brought you here so you’d be safe when the crossover came. Only people like you, and people like me, will still be here when the sun rises.’

  Juliana stared at him. ‘What . . . what kind of a world?’

  ‘A better one,’ he told her. ‘No more governments, no more tyranny, no more lies. And no more excuses. Just us and our lives, to make the best we can of.’

  She felt dizzy. And afraid. ‘I’m frightened,’ she said.

  His touch, though cold, was strangely comforting. ‘Do you remember that night in your bed?’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘When you told me that change was frightening.’

  ‘Yes. . . .’ And she realised. ‘And you told me that freedom was even more so. I didn’t understand, but you told me that I would, one day.’

  ‘Yes. Juliana?’

  ‘Juan?’

  ‘Welcome to one day.’

  She didn’t answer. She let him hold her instead. From all around in the night there came sounds, as the dead returned to claim their world. But strangely, the fear was going now, and she found herself smiling. And as she turned to kiss Juan, there was a cracking sound and the shutters fell from the stained glass, the candles all died in a single collective sigh of mournful smoke, and the sun’s first rays flooded through the church windows as Juan’s heart began to beat again, his grey face darkened with fresh blood, his hair grew thick and glossy once again; and when they kissed at last, long and deep, after such a time apart, his mouth was warm on hers.

  The Foot of the Garden

  I COULDN’T SLEEP LAST NIGHT, and spent it at my bedroom window staring out over the garden. I had the room light on, and the curtains pulled open, so an oblong of yellow light was flung up the trimmed lawn and lapped against the trailing branches of the willows. Beyond the willows the yews and elms were faintly limned by fitful starlight.

  I couldn’t see the flowers; the roses, azaleas, the chrysanthemums. They were hidden by night.

  Among the willows, I thought I saw movement; the trailing fronds twitched and flapped like a stage curtain flicked by milling actors. It could have been a fox; there are some in this area. But I know that it wasn’t. They never come here.

  It has been a long time since I went down to the end of the garden, to what is there. Since I even thought of it, weeks, perhaps even a couple of months. A long time for me.

  Unable to sleep, I drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and watched the rest of the night, though the willows remained undisturbed. And for the first time in so long, I let my mind drift back two decades, and I remembered Amy.

  Amy. Ah, Amy Madison. Angular in a way that was somehow gentle and welcoming, tall in a way that seemed off-guard and vulnerable. Eyes the colour of a summer meadow, a bright lush green, framed in a fall of thick, soft auburn hair I could lose my hands in almost up to the elbows. Pale as milk, or one of Dracula’s maidens, you used to joke.

  We were ‘a couple’ then. We never spoke of marriage; to us it was an outmoded institution. I sometimes think so, too, with the divorce cases I handle. I certainly never married, but that was not the reason, was it, Amy? With time, though, if we’d had time after that winter . . . perhaps I would not now live alone, childless and loveless and waiting for death.

  Back then I was only just completing my first year with a law firm, and you were . . . ah, you were with a performance group in Salford. Musicians and dancers and writers and actors. Someone would bring in a piece of music, an idea for a character, a piece of script or a story idea, a dance routine, and the others would all try to come up with something to complement it. I remember a show you did, in some draughty Hulme church-hall, playing your violin, or was it a fiddle? I can never remember which is which. Your hair had been dyed in some way so that it was not only pale, a ghostly, corpse-like, yellowish-white, but somehow dry and brittle in appearance, like straw. Your face was pancaked with bone-white make-up and etched with kohl, making your pallor deathly, your angularity gaunt, your beauty a memento mori. You wore loose-fitting clothes of black, flapping, with irregular pieces of cloth stitched on them. Was there a wind machine of some kind, or was it a draught or some other special effect that made the pieces of cloth flap and flutter with the noise of bird wings? It doesn’t matter. I remember you, there, like that, and the high notes of the fiddle as your bow quivered back and forth across it, the rising and motion of the dancers. . . .

  And I remember you out of uniform, as it were. Dungarees and a pullover, hair held crudely back in bunches. The smears and spatters of paint on the dungarees. I can see you with a chipped china mug of coffee steaming in your thin cold hands, and a fleck of paint, pure white, on the rise of an immaculate cheekbone. Back then. . . .

  And I had long hair down to my collar, and was cultivating my first vain attempt at a beard. Was I still wearing flared trousers then? I think I was, back in 1979. Thatcher had just got in. The winter was arctic; the cold at least masked the stench rising from the city’s crumbling Victorian sewer system.

  The plans we made, Amy, back when we never knew what the future could hold. I would be a radical lawyer, making a career of helping the disadvantaged and oppressed, crusading for lost and noble causes; perhaps I would even become a QC, use the position to disrupt the corrupt system that had installed me.

  I look back on that time with a mixture of emotions. There is nostalgia, that there could have been a time for me when the world appeared so simple, so black and white; there is embarrassment, perhaps even contempt, partly at my pretensions, delusions, illusions (to say nothing of my dress sense), and partly the contempt that those of us who lose our passion have for those who do not, those of us who speak of every subject—as I speak now—with the same well-modulated, grammatically correct, reasonable Englishness—passionlessness. We squirm at the sound of an angry voice that isn’t angry about its pay being cut or partner having an affair, but about the destruction of the rain-forest or ozone layer. When you have expunged passion and commitment from your own life and voice, you cannot bear to perceive it in another’s.

  Nostalgia, embarrassment—tinged with contempt—impatience at the sometime narrowness of my views, some sadness and an obscure sense of shame, at the betrayal of ideals to which no man could have adhered.

  What would you make of me now, Amy Madison, if you had tongue to talk? What would you make of this successful lawyer, rising from junior clerk to eventual partnership and now, retirement and death paving my way, to sole ownership of one of the city’s most prestigious—and most traditional—law firms? I’ve ceased to count how many I’ve got off, people I knew to be guilty and would have spat on and vowed to destroy back then, when I knew you. And I don’t think I want to know the answer to my question. It is, perhaps, the last question in the world that I want answered. But I ask it, still, every time I look out over the garden.

  And I remember that day, when you shocked me by asking me if I wanted to go to church.

  I was surprised; neither we nor any of the people we knew had much time for the church. It was at best, a system of decrepit and erroneous ideas and, at worst, a symbol of the most blatant repression and mind-control. My first thought was that perhaps Amy wanted an idea for a show,
but then she told me that it was being demolished that day. Puzzled, I let her talk me into her car, and she set off at breakneck speed.

  On the way, she told me. The church, it seemed, was an old one, mediaeval in origin, and though small, sported some fine architecture, including some wonderfully grotesque gargoyles. The thought of using some of them in a show filled her mind. She couldn’t shake off the idea. Somehow, she’d raised fifty-odd quid, which, slipped to the foreman, had secured the promise of as many of the things as they could save.

  The demolition was well underway when we reached the village where the church stood. It was a small, out of the way place in Cheshire. Rooks flapped among the skeletal branches of denuded trees, which lay black against a blotchy grey-white sky, as we crossed an old stone bridge into the village. The houses were all small and low around the black plume of smoke that lay smudged on the sky like charcoal powder, as if crouching in fear or shame. We later learned that whole village was scheduled for demolition, to make way for a new motorway.

  About half of the church had been knocked down. About half-a-dozen assorted machines—bulldozers, JCBs and the like—stood idle round it while the men smoked cigarettes and drank tea. Flames danced and shimmered in braziers and among the rubble heaps, spars and juts of stone protruding from the hard ground. The foreman was a genial, amply built Irishman called Black, and so far had salvaged one of the gargoyles. He apologised to Amy for not salvaging more, but a section of roofing had collapsed, taking with it three or four other specimens. However, he assured us that this specimen was by far the finest of them all, and he promised to take care with the remaining ones. Making a gift of the surviving one to Amy, he waved us off.

  I looked back as Amy drove us away slowly, negotiating the uneven ground with care, as we had no wish to slip into one of the deep ruts made days before by the huge machines, now frozen into the earth. The church spire had collapsed or, more likely, been knocked down. The upper seven or eight feet of it remained intact, and the bottom portion had somehow lodged itself in the rock-frozen ground, so that it rose upwards at an angle. The weathercock, listing, creaked in the mild wind in a somehow melancholy way. Black stood beside it, waving, then flinched sharply away as something flapped past him to alight on the weathercock. It was a vast raven, its wingspan easily three or four feet. Black eyed it malevolently, and the bird contemplated him with what appeared, even at that distance, to be a sort of incurious malice of its own.

  The gargoyle itself, when we brought it back to Manchester and showed it to the members of the group, drew a rapturous reaction. Gargoyles were made, in the Middle Ages, to drive away demons and evil spirits with their own grotesque appearance. I often wonder if it was the grotesqueness of the things that was supposed to repel the creatures, or if they were supposed to convince any would-be attackers that the gargoyles were, in fact, real demons, locked into stone by some sorcerer, and so put them to flight by fear of the like fate.

  This specimen crouched, hunched, to a height of three or four feet, its limbs vaguely humanoid but ending in great webbed claws. Bat-like wings reared up behind the knobbly hill of its spine. The head of the creature was broad and flat, but slightly elongated forward, like a platter. Two stubby but sharp-tipped horns pointed backward from the plate-like head, only these and a bulbous, protruding nose breaking the platter-shape’s regularity. The open mouth seemed to grin unpleasantly, and above were the eyes, small, squinting, and cunning. It crouched before the oohing and aahing company, and now that I recall it, with the benefit of hindsight, it seemed to be poised to attack the first person to touch it, its stone eyes horribly knowing.

  I’ve had too much coffee, too many cigarettes; my hands shake all the time this morning. I’ve taken the day off work. I stand in the breakfast room and stare down the length of the garden, towards the wind-swished curtains of the willows. I squint with concentration. Can I see what I think I see? Almost certainly. I am not surprised.

  I think, today, I will go down to the foot of the garden.

  Everyone was filled with admiration for the gargoyle, but the question loomed: where was it to be kept? Amy would willingly have taken it in, but her landlord hated it on sight and forbade her to bring it in the house. So one of the dancers volunteered, a waif-like girl called Christine. Her boyfriend, one of the actors, Stephen I think his name was, helped her load it aboard their Ford Capri. Their tail-lights shrank away into the night. By then most of the group had gone home anyway.

  Amy drove us back to my flat and we spent the night together, drinking red wine and smoking marijuana. The memory of that still brings a smile to my face, nearly twenty years later. It has been almost that long since I last smoked marijuana. I remember laughing and joking in front of the gas-fire with Amy later, remember coffee with cheap whisky and all the other, private, things that happened that night and in the early hours of the morning before the two of us slept, smiling, in one another’s arms. I remember it so well because I had never felt so happy as then. I never have since, nor will I ever again.

  The next morning we drove back down to the village to see Black. It was a clearer day than the previous one, the sky blue, dressed only in a few rags of off-white cloud. The sun was bright, splintering on contact with the windscreen. I squinted, the action recalling the narrowed eyes of the gargoyle, and shivered despite the warmth of the sun.

  At length, driving down the winding country lanes, we came to the stone bridge that led into the village. But, as we crossed it, we saw a number of other vehicles, just in view, near the site of the church, which at this point was hidden from us. Drawing closer, we saw several police cars, and two or three ambulances, all sending flickers of blue light through the air. Strands of blue and white tape hung between hastily erected posts, warning us back.

  Reaching the barrier, I just had the time to observe that the church had now been entirely demolished, when a sight met my eyes that forced me to turn away, retching. Some six or seven people had lost their lives; it was hard to be more precise owing to the condition of the bodies. Even Amy, always far less squeamish than I, grew paler than normal, and swayed slightly.

  My behaviour brought a police officer running, to shoo us from the scene. We left, but not before learning that Mr Black, who had been discovered shortly after dawn following screams of appalling violence, had been among the casualties. And not before I noticed one odd detail; beside the workmen’s tent lay a ground sheet, littered with broken fragments of stone, some of which still retained the shape of claws and partial faces, wings, tails.

  Much shaken, we drove back to the city. We spent the day together, in a rather confused and disjointed way, alternating bouts of mutual comfort with periods of silence and shock. In the evening, I dropped Amy off at the performance group’s meeting and drove back to my flat. I was glad of the peace; somehow, I felt as though I would be better on my own for a while. I wish I felt that way more often, now.

  An evening’s solitude was not to be, in any case. I had barely been home ten minutes when the phone rang. It was Amy. Her voice was tearful, choked. She needed me to pick her up. She would say no more, but something had, clearly, gone very badly wrong.

  When I picked her up, she was all alone outside the church hall, arms wrapped round herself, thin, shivering. She was paler than ever, and for a moment I was struck by the absurd but disturbing idea that she was dead, had died while waiting for me, and by some strange freak of balance remained upright, still shuddering reflexively. As I drew closer, I saw that her cheeks were wet with tears, eyes blotched a raw red. I clasped her shoulders; her arms were rigid as rock. I hugged her tightly, rocked her to and fro. ‘What’s wrong, Amy? What is it?’

  She was sobbing violently by then, so violently that it was some time before she could speak even odd words, let alone complete sentences, but at last she began to shake speech from her throat. ‘Chrissie,’ she gasped, ‘Chrissie . . . Christine . . . Christine and Steve . . .’

  It’s a cold day, the wind rising;
the willows rise to whip and flail the empty air. I’m dressed well, securely wrapped against the chill. Ah, there was a time when the cold didn’t bite so deeply. But that’s the story of my life: there was a time. No more.

  I begin walking down the lawn.

  The police were baffled as to the identity of the murderer. They had been mercifully sparing with the details, but from what Amy said, the assault seemed to have been the work of a madman. It was only afterwards that I realised no one had mentioned the deaths of Black and his men. Then again, what connection was there?

  The savagery of the attack, the mutilation . . . and the gargoyle.

  ‘What about the gargoyle?’ I asked suddenly. It was late, in the sleepless watches of the night. Plumes of smoke trailed up from our cigarettes to scratch yellow marks on the ceiling.

  Amy showed no surprise. ‘Smashed,’ she said, ‘smashed to pieces. And good riddance to the bloody thing.’

  Is it possible she already knew then? Not enough, but some, partly understanding what was happening? I’ll never know. Not in this life.

  When there was another killing the following night, the press started jumping on the bandwagon. At this time, of course, the Yorkshire Ripper murders continued; while the killer had struck mostly in the Yorkshire area, he had killed twice in Manchester, and the prospect of a second psychopathic murderer on the rampage was all grist to the sensationalist mill. This was, however, the last of the murders.

  The victim of the crime had, as far as I can tell, done no more than be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and wearing the wrong attire. He was a Catholic priest, out walking after evening mass in his church in Levenshulme. His remains, hideously mangled and mutilated, were found in the bushes overgrowing the front garden of a condemned house.