Though it was still only late afternoon, there wasn"t much light in the town. Over the bay the March sky was blue, but once you stepped into the streets it was impossible to see beyond their roofs. Shallow bay windows crowded away, overlapping the narrow pavements. Here was a chemist"s, and here a Bingo parlor, smaller than front rooms; elsewhere he saw the exposed ribs of a lost neon sign, and crumbling names that had been painted on plaster. No wonder people felt the need for someone like Matta. "Order You"re News Now" said a sign in a newsagent"s window, and Hill thought the inadvertent promise might be true for everyone in time, the town was so small and dead.
Soon he reached the docks, which had been disused for years. The town lived off its chemical factories now, since trade no longer came so far upriver. Except for the short cut, wherever it was, there was no reason for anyone to visit the docks. They would be a perfect base for smuggling.
The roads into the docks were closed off by solid gates, rusty barbed wire, padlocked chains. He had to make his way between the warehouses, through alleys narrow as single file and even darker than the streets. He was relieved to emerge at last onto a dockside. Crumbling bollards sprouted from the broken pavement that surrounded several hundred square yards of murky water; warehouses hemmed in the dock. Above him in the small square lightless openings he heard fluttering. As the stagnant water slopped back and forth their reflections mouthed sleepily, a hundred mouths.
It didn"t seem to be the dock the ragged man had mentioned. The alleys led him through another dock on the way to Matta"s house, but there was no fallen crane there either, only more blackened warehouses, another hive of holes gaping at the sluggish water. The brow of an early moon peered over the edge of a roof at him; otherwise he felt he was alone in the whole dockland.
The next alley led him to a bridge across a small ca.n.a.l that bordered a street. Almost opposite the bridge was one of the poorest streets in town, its uneven cobblestones glittering with broken gla.s.s, its gutters clogged with litter. Each side was a terrace like a stage flat, hardly more than a long two-story wall crammed with front doors and windows. It was the street where Matta lived.
There was nothing to distinguish the house from its neighbors-no sign saying M. o. matta, as there had always been on the sideshow. The black paint of the door was flaking, the number was askew; the windows were opaque with grayish net curtains. He loitered in the empty street, trying to be sure it was the right house. It seemed safe enough to do so, since beyond the curtains the house was dark-but the front door was opened, almost knocking him down, by a man who had to stoop through the doorway. "You want to see Mr. Matta," the huge blank-faced man said.
It wasn"t a question. Hill had intended to bring someone whose illness was in no way psychological for Matta to try to cure-but if he fled now, he could never win Matta"s confidence. "Yes," he said, though he felt he had no control over his words. "There"s something wrong with my leg."
When the hulking man stood aside Hill entered, limping ostentatiously. The front door closed behind him at once, and so did the dark. In the musty unlit hallway, where there was scarcely room for anyone besides the hulking man and the staircase, he felt buried alive. In a moment the other had opened the door to the front room, and Matta sat waiting in a caved-in armchair. "Something wrong with your leg, is it?" Matta said.
He seemed not to have changed at all-the soft secretly delighted voice, the face smooth and placid as a sleeping child"s-except that his face looked even more like a mask, on the ropy wizened frame. He was grinning to himself as always, but at least his words were rea.s.suring; for a panicky moment Hill had thought Matta had recognized him. Why should that make him panic? He limped into the room, and Matta said, "Let"s see what we can do."
Hill couldn"t see much in the room. Boxes, which he a.s.sumed contained games, and bits of wood were piled against the walls, taking up much of the limited s.p.a.ce; a few chairs were crowded together in the middle of the floor, beneath an empty light socket. The dimness and the smell of wood seemed stale. All at once the hulking man led him forward and sat him in a hard chair opposite Matta. Faces grinned out of the shadows, but they weren"t why Hill was apprehensive. The man had led him forward so quickly that he"d forgotten to limp.
The huge man was returning from the darkest corner of the room, between Hill and the door, and he had a knife in his hand. In a moment Hill saw that the man was also carrying a faceless doll. He went to stand behind the armchair. His hands reached over Matta"s shoulders, holding the knife and the doll. Hill sucked in his breath inadvertently and waited for Matta to take them-and then he saw that Matta was paralyzed. Only his face could move.
The huge hands began to work at once. In the dimness they looked as if they were growing from Matta"s shoulders, their arms no longer than wrists. Almost at once they had finished carving, and the right hand turned the doll for Hill to see. He sat forward reluctantly, and couldn"t make himself go closer. He was sure it was only the dimness that made the carved face look exactly like his-but for a moment he felt like a child again, in Matta"s power.
Matta had trained his a.s.sistant well, that was all. The power was Hill"s now, not Matta"s. He was going to pretend that his limp was cured, and that would ingratiate him with Matta, help him set his trap. But Matta was gazing at him, and his grin was wider, more gleeful. It looked even more as if he were holding the doll before his face with deformed hands. "You came to spy on us," he said, and at once, almost negligently, one huge hand snapped the doll"s leg.
At once Hill couldn"t move his leg. Matta was leering at him, a pale mask propped on a wooden body, and above the mask a dim smudge with eyes was watching emptily. Many more faces were watching him, but he reminded himself that the others were only carved, and that allowed him to stumble to his feet. It had only been panic that had paralyzed his leg, after all.
Though Matta was still grinning-more widely, if anything-his eyes were unreadable. "I think you"d better go straight home," he said, his voice soft as dust.
Hill was so glad when the huge man didn"t come for him that he headed blindly for the door. He"d have his revenge another day; Matta wasn"t going anywhere. Just now he wanted to escape the dim cell of a room, the musty faces, the staleness. Matta was as bad as he remembered, but now that malevolence was senile. He glanced back from the hall and saw the huge man placing a box on Matta"s lap-a game, with something like a worm carved on the lid. He hurried into the deserted twilit street, ignoring the twinge in his knee.
When he reached the ca.n.a.l he looked back. The huge man was watching from the doorway of the house. He stood there while Hill crossed the bridge, and all at once the reporter knew he was watching to see which way Hill went. He strode between the warehouses, into the alley he"d emerged from. As soon as he felt he"d waited long enough he peered out to make sure the man had gone back into the house, then he dodged into the adjacent alley.
They must think they"d scared him off with all their mumbo-jumbo and telling him to go straight home. Let Matta sit and play his game, whatever it was, however he could. Hill was going to find out what they wanted to hide, before they had a chance to do so. Though night had already fallen in the alleys, he ought to be able to see in the dock.
Dark cold stone loomed over him on both sides, blinding him. Perhaps he was going too fast, for sometimes the ache in his knee made him stumble; the rough walls sc.r.a.ped his knuckles. He must have strained a muscle in his leg when the huge man had urged him forward, or when he"d left so hurriedly. At least there seemed to be no obstacles to hinder him.
But there were. He reached a junction only to find that the right-hand alley was blocked by a rusty bedstead. It hardly mattered, since that route led to the docks he had already seen. He groped to the left, mortar crumbling between the bricks and gritting beneath his nails.
Before long he"d had to turn aside several times. Piles of chains and bollards, and in one place a door jammed between the walls, blocked some of the routes; sometimes he had to retrace his steps. In those few places where the glow of the darkening sky managed to reach, he could see nothing but the claustrophobic alleys, the towering windowless walls. He wished he hadn"t come so far, for he wasn"t sure he could find his way back if he had to do so. If Matta"s a.s.sistant was responsible for the blocking of the alleys, presumably he would have blocked the route into the dock.
Hill was trying to remember the way back when he heard the wallowing. Something large was moving through water, quite near. It must be a boat-perhaps the one that Matta wanted n.o.body to see. He limped to the next junction, and saw that the attempts to turn people away hadn"t quite succeeded. At the far end of the left-hand alley he could just see the width of a dock.
The end of the alley was blocked by a heap of rubble and twisted metal. It would have kept most people out, especially now when it was so nearly dark, but he hadn"t come so far only to leave Matta"s a.s.sistant the chance to clear away any evidence. He clambered over the rubble and dropped to the uneven pavement, where he almost staggered straight into the water as his aching leg gave way.
More than the danger made him stumble backward. His first glimpse of the water had shown him something larger than he was, inching toward the pavement and rising to meet him. When he looked again he saw it was a length of piping, pale as the moon and stouter than a man. It must have been ripples that had made it seem to move.
He would have to hurry despite his leg, which he must have wrenched while clambering. Already he was having to strain his eyes, though at least the moon was just visible above the warehouse to his left. He limped in that direction, peering at the pavement, the water, the warehouses; the blackness peered back at him hundred-eyed. There seemed to be nothing to find, and he"d ventured beyond the edge of moonlight before he realized that it should not be there at all. How could the moon be only just clearing the roofs when he"d seen its brow half an hour ago, barely visible above a warehouse somewhere over here?
It couldn"t have been the moon the first time, that was all. He hadn"t time to brood over it, for he had noticed something rather more disturbing; access to the dock from the river was blocked. One end of a bridge had torn loose or been dislodged, wedging tons of rusty iron in the entrance. What could Matta have been waiting for that night if the dock was inaccessible? Just what game was he playing? Surely there was no need to run, whatever the answer was, but Hill was running headlong now, anxious to be out of the darkness. He was so anxious that he almost stepped into s.p.a.ce before he realized that the pavement wasn"t there.
His bad leg saved him. He"d tottered backward as it threatened to give way. Now he could see the crane, quivering like jelly underwater, through the hole it had torn out of the pavement. There were splintered planks too, which must have bridged the gap until they had been destroyed. The gap was far too wide for him to jump with a bad leg. All at once he felt he was a victim of another of Matta"s games, and only his inarticulate rage stood between him and utter panic.
He had no reason to panic. Surely he could find his way back, since he had to do so. There was no point in waiting for the moon to rise higher, when the clouds never left it alone for very long; besides, he preferred not to see the dock more clearly-the walls and the water maggoty with windows, the buildings that seemed so lonely they no longer had anything human about them, the drowned objects that looked as if they were squirming. He was very near to panic as he scrambled over the rubble into the alley, particularly since the whitish pipe appeared to have drifted closer to the pavement. Perhaps it had been a distorted reflection of the moon; certainly it reminded him less of a pipe.
The moonlight didn"t reach into the alleys. When he lowered himself from the heap of rubble, the shock of the darkness was almost physical. He made himself hurry- he knew that the floor of the alley was clear of obstructions-though it felt as if the walls had captured him, were leading him blindfolded, too fast for his limp. Somewhere behind him he heard the wallowing again, which sounded now like someone emerging hugely from a bath. He restrained himself from going back to see. He wasn"t even sure that he wanted to know.
He"d regained some confidence, and was striding quickly despite his bad leg, when he ran straight into something like an outstretched limb. He"d cried out before he realized what the obstruction was: a pile of bollards. He must have taken a wrong turning in the dark.
He groped his way back to the last junction and limped in the other direction. Yes, this must be right, for now he was able to follow several alleys unhindered, and soon he could see an open s.p.a.ce ahead. He was almost there before he saw the fallen bridge, and realized he had come back to the same alley into the dock.
He couldn"t think where he had gone wrong. He could only trudge back into the narrow dark. At least the moonlight was beginning to filter down, and showed him an intersection almost at once. He was sure he hadn"t turned here on his way to the dock; he would have noticed the row of whitish tires in the left-hand alley, tires stacked together like a pipe. In the intermittent moonlight they seemed to squirm restlessly, and he was glad he didn"t have to pa.s.s them.
Three junctions further on he thought he"d found where he had gone wrong. That was a relief, because the moonlight was reaching as far into the alleys as it would come; soon the light would be receding. He could just see the walls in those moments when the clouds exposed the moon, and so he was able to run, despite the throbbing of his leg. He"d turned three corners, skinning his knuckles on one, before he almost ran into the stack of whitish tires.
It was impossible. He stumbled back a few yards to the intersection. There was the dock and the fallen bridge, two intersections distant. But hadn"t he seen the tires in the first alley he"d crossed on his way from the dock? He must have been confused by the dark-and by Matta, for he felt as if he was trapped in another of Matta"s games.
That made him feel childish, and in danger of panic. But he wasn"t childish-Matta was, with his malevolent games. His face was what he was. No doubt he was still sitting with the game his a.s.sistant had given him, but Hill refused to try to deduce what that game might be. He needed all his wits to figure out the way back, before the fitful moonlight convinced him that the whitish tires were squirming silently, mouth open, down the alley toward him. They looked rather large for tires.
He turned before he was sure where to go, for the moonlight was draining away, up the walls. He plunged into the thickening dark. He was almost sure of his direction, but hadn"t he been sure before? He was levering himself along with his hands on both walls, partly to feel that the suffocating dark was nothing but bricks. That wasn"t entirely rea.s.suring, for if he collided with anything now, the first part of him it would touch was his face. For some reason that anxiety intensified once he was out of sight of the whitish segments, the tires. But it was his left hand that collided with something in the dark, an object that was clinging to the wall.
It was a ladder. The icy rungs felt scarred with rust, which flaked away beneath his fingers. The chafing set his teeth on edge, and he was limping away, relieved that it was only a ladder, before he realized the chance he was missing. He went back and bracing his heels against the wall, seized two rungs and tugged. The ladder held. At once, ignoring his bad leg, he began to climb.
It must be windy at the top, for he could hear a large object slithering closer across the roof. The wind didn"t matter, for he wouldn"t be crossing the roof. He needed only to climb high enough to see where the street was, which general direction he would have to follow. He was climbing eagerly toward the moonlight-too eagerly, for his aching leg gave way, and he almost fell. As he hung there, gripping the rungs in momentary panic, he was close to realizing what game Matta"s a.s.sistant had brought him.
He tried to grasp the thought, less for its own sake than to distract himself from thinking how high he"d climbed in the dark. He was nearly at the top. Above him the sky swam grayly, suffocating the moon; the edge of the roof sailed free in s.p.a.ce. He closed his eyes and clung to the metal, then he recommenced climbing, mechanically but carefully. Matta"s game had had something like a worm, a maggot, carved on the box-something fat and sinuous. Of course! One of his hands grabbed a rusty handhold at the roof"s edge, then he heaved himself up with the other. There he rested, eyes closed, before looking up. Of course, he should have known at once what the game must be-Matta"s version of snakes and ladders.
He was still resting at the top of the ladder when the moon-colored fat-lipped mouth, yawning wide as its body and wider than his head, stooped toward him.
Welcomeland (1988).
Slade had been driving all day when he came to the road home. The sign isolated by the sullenly green landscape of overgrown ca.n.a.ls and weedy fields had changed. Instead of the name of the town there was a yellow pointer, startlingly bright beneath the dull June sky, for the theme park. Presumably vandals had damaged it, for only the final syllables remained: -----MELAND. He mightn"t have another chance to see what he"d helped to build. He"d found nothing on his drive north that his clients might want to buy or invest in. He lifted his foot from the brake and let the car carry him onward.
Suppressed gleams darted through the clogged ca.n.a.ls, across the cranium of the landscape. The sun was a ball of mist that kept failing to form in the sky. The railway blocked Slade"s view as he approached the town. He caught himself expecting to see the town laid out below him, but of course he"d only ever seen it like that from the train. The railway was as deserted as the road had been for the last hour of his drive.
The road sloped toward the bridge under the railway, between banks so untended that weeds lashed the car. The mouth of the bridge had been made into a gateway: gates painted gold were folded back against the wall of the embankment. The shrill darkness in the middle of the tunnel was so thick that Slade reached to turn on his headlamps. Then the car left its echoes behind and showed him the town, and he couldn"t help sighing. It looked as if the building of the park had got no further than the gates.
He"d bought shares in the project when his father had forwarded the prospectus, with Slade"s new address scribbled across it so harshly that the envelope had been torn in several places. He"d hoped the park might revive his father and the town now that employment, like Slade, had moved down south. Now his father was dead, and the entrepreneur had gone bankrupt soon after the shares had been issued, and the main street was shabbier than ever: the pavements were turning green, the net curtains of the gardenless terraces were grey as old cobwebs, the displays in the shop windows that interrupted the ranks of cramped houses had been drained of colour. Slade had to a.s.sume this was early closing day, for he could see n.o.body at all.
The town hadn"t looked so unwelcoming when he"d left, but he felt as if it had. Nevertheless he owed the place a visit, the one he should have made when his father was dying, if only Slade had known he was, if only they hadn"t become estranged when Slade"s mother had died? "If only" just about summed up the town, he thought bitterly as he drove to the hotel.
The squat black building was broad as four houses and four storeys high. He"d often sheltered under the iron and gla.s.s awning from the rain, but whatever the place had been called in those days, it wasn"t the Old Hotel. The revolving doors stumbled round their track with a chorus of stifled moans and let him into the dark brown lobby, where the only illumination came from a large skylight over the stairs. The thin grey-haired young woman at the desk tapped her chin several times in the rhythm of some tune she must be hearing (dum-da-dum-da-dum-da-dum), squared a stack of papers, and then she looked toward him with a smile and a raising of eyebrows. "h.e.l.lo, may I help you?"
"Sorry, yes, of course." Slade stepped forward to let her see him. "I"d like a room for the night."
"What would you like?"
"Pardon? Something at the top," Slade stammered, beginning to blush as he tried not to stare at her vacant eyes.
"I"m sure we can accommodate you."
He didn"t doubt it, since the keyboard behind her was full. "I"ll fill in one of your forms then, shall I?"
"Thank you, sir, that"s fine."
There was a pad of them in front of her, but no pen. Slade uncapped his fountain pen and completed the top form, then pushed the pad between her hands as they groped over the counter. "Room twenty will be at the top, won"t it?" he said, too loudly. "Could I have that one?"
"If there"s anything else we can do to make you more at home, just let us know."
He a.s.sumed that meant yes. "I"ll get the key, shall I?"
"Thank you very much," she said, and thumped a bell on the counter. Perhaps she"d misheard him, but the man who opened the door between the stairs and the desk seemed to have heard Slade clearly enough, for he only poked his dim face toward the lobby before closing the door again. Slade leaned across the desk, his cheeks stiff with blushing, and managed to hook the key with one finger, almost swaying against the receptionist as he lunged. Working all day in the indirect light hadn"t done her complexion any good, to put it mildly, and now he saw that the papers she was fidgeting with were blank. "That"s done it," he babbled, and scrambled toward the stairs.
The upper floors were lit only by windows. Murky sunlight was retreating over ranks of featureless white doors. If the hotel was conserving electricity, that didn"t seem to augur well for the health of the town. All the same, when he stepped into the room that smelled of stale carpet and crossed to the window to let in some air, he had his first sight of the park.
A terrace led away from the main road some hundred yards from the hotel, and there the side streets ended. The railway enclosed a mile or more of bulky unfamiliar buildings, of which he could distinguish little more than that they bore names on their roofs. All the names were turned away from him, but this must be the park. It was full of people, grouped among the buildings, and the railway had been made into a ride; cars with grinning mouths were stranded in dips in the track.
Surely there weren"t people in the cars. They must be dummies, stored up there out of the way. Their long grey hair flapped, their heads swayed unanimously in the wind. They seemed more lively than the waiting crowd, but just now that didn"t concern him. He was willing the house where he"d spent the first half of his life to have survived the rebuilding.
As he turned from the window he saw the card above the bedside phone. DIAL 9 FOR PARK INFORMATION, it said. He dialled and waited as the room settled back into staleness. Eventually he demanded, "Park Information?"
"h.e.l.lo, may I help you?"
The response was so immediate that the speaker must have been waiting silently for him. As he stiffened to fend off the unexpectedness the voice said, "May we ask how you heard of our attraction?"
"I bought some shares," Slade said, distracted by wondering where he knew the man"s voice from. "I"m from here, actually. Wanted to do what I could for the old place."
"We all have to return to our roots. No profit in delaying."
"I wanted to ask about the park," Slade interrupted, resenting the way the voice had abandoned its official function. "Where does it end? What"s still standing?"
"Less has changed than you might think."
"Would you know if Hope Street"s still there?"
"Whatever people wanted most has been preserved, wherever they felt truly at home," the voice said, and even more maddeningly, "It"s best if you go and look for yourself."
"When will the park be open?" Slade almost shouted.
"When you get there, never fear."
Slade gave up, and flung the receiver into the air, a theatrical gesture which made him blush furiously but which failed to silence the guilt the voice had awakened. He"d moved to London in order to live with the only woman he"d ever shared a bed with, and when they"d parted amicably less than a year later he had been unable to go home: his parents would have insisted that the breakup proved them right about her and the relationship. His father had blamed him for breaking his mother"s heart, and the men hadn"t spoken since her death. The way Slade"s father had stared at him over her grave had withered Slade"s feelings for good, but you prospered better without feelings, he"d often told himself. Now that he was home he felt compelled to make his peace with his memories.
He sent himself out of the room before his thoughts could weigh him down. The receptionist was fidgeting with her papers. As Slade stepped into the lobby the bellman"s door opened, the shadowy face peered out and withdrew. Slade was at the revolving doors when the receptionist said, "h.e.l.lo, may I help you?" He struggled out through the doors, his face blazing.
The street was still deserted. The deadened sky appeared to hover just above the slate roofs like a ghost of the smoke of the derelict factories. Even his car looked abandoned, grey with the grime of his drive. It was the only car on the road.
Was the park somehow soundproofed so as not to annoy the residents? Even if the rides hadn"t begun, surely he ought to be able to hear the crowd beyond the houses. He felt as if the entire town were holding its breath. As he hurried along the buckled mossy pavement, his footsteps sounded metallic, mechanical. He turned the curve that led the road to the town hall. Among the scrawny houses of the terrace opposite him, there was a lit shop.
It was the bakery, where his mother would buy cakes for the family each weekend. The taste of his favourite cake, sponge and cream and jam, filled his mouth at the thought. He could see the baker, looking older but not as old as Slade would have expected, serving a woman in the b.u.t.tery light that seemed brighter than electricity, brighter than Slade had ever seen the shop before. The sight and the taste made him feel that if he opened the shop door he could step into memory, buy cakes as a homecoming surprise and walk home, back into the warmth of having tea beside the coal fire, the long quiet evenings with his parents when he had been growing up but hadn"t yet outgrown them.
He wasn"t ent.i.tled to imagine that, since he"d ensured it couldn"t happen. His mouth went dry, the taste vanished. He pa.s.sed the shop without crossing the road, averting his face lest the baker should call out to him. As he pa.s.sed, the light went out. Perhaps it had been a ray of sunlight, though he could see no gap in the clouds.
Someone at the town hall should know if his home was intact. There must be people in the hall, for he could hear a m.u.f.fled waltz. He went up the worn steps and between the pillars of the token portico. The double doors were too large for the building, which was about the size of the hotel, and seemed at first too heavy or too swollen for him to shift. Then the rusty handles yielded to his weight, and the doors shuddered inward. The lobby was unlit and deserted.
He could still hear the waltz. A track of grey daylight stretched ahead of him and showed him an architect"s model on a table in the middle of the lobby. He followed his vague shadow over the wedge of lit carpet. The model had been vandalised so thoroughly it was impossible to see what view of the town it represented. If it had shown streets as well as rides, there was no way of telling where either ended or began.
He made his way past the unattended information desk toward the music. A minute"s stumbling along the dark corridor brought him to the ballroom. The only light beyond the dusty gla.s.s doors came from high transoms, but couples were waltzing on the bare floor to music that sounded oddly more distant than ever. In the dimness their faces were grey blotches. It must be some kind of old folks" treat, he rea.s.sured himself, for more than half of the dancers were bald. Loath to trouble them, he turned back toward the lobby.
The area outside the wedge of daylight was almost indistinguishably dim. He could just make out the side of the information desk that faced away from the public. Someone appeared to be crouched beside the chair behind the desk. If the figure had fallen there Slade ought to find out what was wrong, but the position of the figure was so dismayingly haphazard that he could only believe it was a dummy. The dancers were still whirling sluggishly, always in the same direction, as if they might never stop. He glanced about, craving rea.s.surance, and caught sight of a sliver of light at the end of the corridor?the gap around a door.
It must lead to the park. He almost tripped on the carpet as he headed for the door. It was open because it had been vandalised: it was half off its hinges, and he had to strain to lift it clear of the rucked carpet. He thought of having to go back through the building, and heaved at the door so savagely that it ripped the sodden carpet. He squeezed through the gap, his face throbbing with embarra.s.sment, and ran.
He was so anxious to be away from the damage he"d caused that at first he hardly observed where he was going. n.o.body was about, that was the main thing. He"d run some hundred yards between the derelict houses before he wondered where the crowd he"d seen from the hotel might be. He halted clumsily and stared around him. He was already in the park.
It seemed they had tried to preserve as much of the town as they could. Clumps of three or four terraced houses had been left standing in no apparent pattern, with signs on their roofs. He still couldn"t read the signs, even those that were facing him; they might have been vandalised?many of the windows were smashed?or left uncompleted. If it hadn"t been for the roundabout he saw between the houses, he might not have realised he was in the park.
It wasn"t the desolation that troubled him so much as the impression that the town was yet struggling to change, to live. If his home was involved in this transformation, he wasn"t sure that he wanted to see, but he didn"t think he could leave without seeing. He made his way over the rubble between two blocks of houses.
The sky was darker than it had been when he"d entered the town hall. The gathering twilight slowed him down, and so did sights in the park. Two supine poles, each with a huge red smiling mouth at one end, might have been intended to support a screen, and perhaps the section of a helter-skelter choked with mud was all that had been delivered, though it seemed to corkscrew straight down into the earth. He wondered if any ride except the roundabout had been completed, and then he realised with a jerk of the heart that he had been pa.s.sing the sideshows for minutes. They were in the houses, and so was the crowd.
At least, he a.s.sumed those were players seated around a Bingo counter inside the section of the terrace ahead, though the figures in the dimness were so still he couldn"t be certain. He preferred to sidle past rather than go closer to look. The roundabout was behind him now, and he thought he saw a relatively clear path toward where his old house should be. But the sight of the dungeon inside the next jagged fragment of terrace froze him.
It wasn"t just a dungeon, it was a torture chamber. Half-naked dummies were chained to the walls. Signs hung around their necks: one was a RAPIST, another a CHILD MOLESTER. A woman with curlers like worms in her hair was prodding one dummy"s armpit with a red-hot poker, a man in a cloth cap was wrenching out his victim"s teeth. All the figures, not just the victims, were absolutely motionless. If this was someone"s idea of waxworks, Slade didn"t see the point. He had been staring so hard and so long that the figures appeared to be staggering, unable to hold their poses, when he heard something come to life behind him.
He felt as if the dimness in which his feet were sunk had become mud. Even if the sounds hadn"t been so large he would have preferred not to see what was making them, wheezing feebly and sc.r.a.ping and thudding like a giant heart straining to revive. He forced his head to turn, his neck creaking, but at first he could see only how dark the place had grown while he had been preoccupied with the dungeon. He glimpsed movement as large as a house between the smudged outlines of the buildings, and shrank into himself. But it was only the roundabout, plodding in the dark.
He couldn"t quite laugh at his dread. The horses were moving as if they could hardly raise themselves and yearned to fall more quickly and finally than they could. There were figures on their backs, and now he realised he had glimpsed the figures earlier, in which case they must have been sitting immobile: waiting for the dark? They weren"t going anywhere, they were no threat to him, he could look away and make for the house?but when he did he recoiled, so violently he almost fell. The torturers in the dungeon were stirring. They were turning their heads toward him.
He couldn"t see much of their faces, and that didn"t seem to be only the fault of the dark. He began to sink into a crouch as if they mightn"t see him, he was close to squeezing his eyes shut as though that would make him invisible, the way he"d believed it would when he was a child. Then he flung himself aside, out of range of any eyes that might be searching for him, and fled.
Though the night was thickening, he could see more than he wanted to see. One block of unlit houses had been turned into a shooting gallery, although at first he didn"t realise that the six disembodied heads nodding forward in unison were meant to be targets. They must be, not least because all six had the same face?a face he knew from somewhere. He stumbled past the heads as the six of them leaned toward him out of the dark beyond the figures that were aiming at them. He felt as if the staring heads were pleading with him to intervene. He was so desperate to outdistance his clinging dismay that he almost fell into the ca.n.a.l.
He hadn"t noticed it at first because a section had been walled in to make a tunnel. It must be a Tunnel of Love: a gondola was inching its way out of the weedy mouth, bringing a sound of choked slopping and a smell of unhealthy growth. Slade could just distinguish the heads of the couple in the gondola. They looked as if they hadn"t seen daylight for years.
He swallowed a shriek and retreated alongside the ca.n.a.l, toward the main road. As he slithered along the overgrown stony margin, flailing his arms to keep his balance, he remembered where he"d seen the face on the targets: in a photograph. It was the entrepreneur"s face. The man had died of a heart attack soon after he"d gone bankrupt, and hadn"t he gone bankrupt shortly after persuading the townsfolk to invest whatever money they had? Slade began to mutter desperately, apologising for whatever he might have helped to cause if it had harmed the town, if anyone who might be listening resented it. He"d only been trying to do his best for the town, he was sorry if it had gone wrong. He was still apologising breathlessly as he sprawled up a heap of debris and onto the bridge that carried the main road over the ca.n.a.l.
He fled along the unlit road, past the town hall and the sound of the relentless waltz in the dark. The ap.r.o.ned baker was serving at his counter, performing the same movements for almost certainly the same customer, and Slade felt as though that was his fault somehow, as though he ought to have accepted the offer of light. He mustn"t confuse himself with that, he must get to his car and drive, anywhere so long as it was out of this place. It occurred to him that anyone who could leave the town had done so?and then, as he came in sight of his car, he thought of the blind woman in the hotel.
He mustn"t leave her. She mustn"t be aware of what had happened to the town, whatever that was. She hadn"t even switched on the lights of the hotel. He shoved desperately at the revolving doors, which felt crusty and brittle under his hands, and staggered into the lobby. He grabbed the edges of the doorway to steady himself while his eyes adjusted to the murk that swarmed like darkness giving birth. The receptionist was at her desk, tapping her chin in the rhythm of the melody inside her head. She shuffled papers and glanced up. "h.e.l.lo, may I help you?"
"No, I want?" Slade called across the lobby, and faltered as his voice came flatly back to him.