“Hello there,” I called to him, bluffing friendliness.
He did not reply. I took a few steps closer. “I’m waiting for my friend,” I explained. The dogs went berserk. In the fading daylight, they seemed to glow, their pale white coats and blood-red ears shimmering in the twilight. Their long snouts flashed sharp teeth as they reared and jerked to get at me. Again I felt like hightailing it back to the car, locking the doors, and driving away very fast. But I fought down the impulse.
The man watched me impassively, his face all creased and wrinkled like a monkey’s, his eyes glittering hard and bright. He did not speak, but with the unholy racket the dogs were making I would not have heard him anyway.
We might have stood there all night long, if I had not made up my mind that, dogs or no dogs, I had to check the cairn one last time. Raising my hand in wary entreaty, I stepped hesitantly forward. “Look,” I shouted, “I’m just going to the cairn down there”—I pointed past him toward the glen and then turned toward the car— “and then I’m going to get in the car and leave—”
When I turned back, the man was stumping away across the field. I did not wait for an explanation but legged it down the hill. The glen was almost as dark as the inside of the cairn, but once down I had no difficulty finding the entrance hole in the side. I stuck my head in and hollered a few times and flicked the flashlight around inside. No answer. No sound. Nothing.
“All right, Simon, have it your way,” I hollered, my voice falling dead at my feet. “This time you’ve gone too far. You’ve got no one to blame but yourself! You hear me, Simon? I’m leaving you here!”
I dug his wallet—bulging with cash, credit cards, various forms of identification—from the inner breast pocket of the jacket and pulled out a Barclaycard. I shoved the plastic credit card in a crack between two stones at the entrance to the cairn, where he would be sure to find it. “There you go,” I shouted, my voice loud in the silent glen. “You’re a smart guy, Simon. Find your own way home!”
I turned my back on the cairn, climbed from the glen, and returned immediately to the car. Halfway across the field, I saw a man in a long yellow coat hurrying along the road. At first, I thought of running to meet him and telling him what had happened. If he lived in the area, he would know about the cairn. Anyway, it seemed I should tell somebody.
As I got closer, the man slowed as if to meet me at the car so we could speak. When I got within shouting distance, I even lifted a hand and called to him. But at the sound of my voice, the man quickened his pace and hurried on. I reached the car just before he disappeared around a bend in the road, a few dozen paces further on.
I shouted again. I know the man heard me, because he turned. Even in the twilight, I could make out his face—if face it was. His features were large, exaggerated, masklike, with a long, hooked nose, a wide mouth, and absolutely enormous ears sticking out from under an uncombed mat of wild black hair. His eyes were wide and bulging beneath the single dark arch of a furry brow.
I beheld this singular visage, and all desire to speak to the man fled. My throat seized up and the call froze on my tongue.
He glanced once over his shoulder, then turned away again. Upon reaching the bend, the man disappeared. I do not mean that the bend of the road took him from sight. Strange as it is to tell, he actually seemed to vanish.
I say this because the man’s clothing glimmered as he passed from sight. Now, it might have been a trick of the fading light, but I swear his coat shimmered, giving off a distinct flash as he departed. That, more than the sight of the man’s hideous face, rooted me to the spot. I stood gaping after him, and the sound of the wind rising in the trees gave me such a chill that I jumped into the car and drove away.
On the drive back to Oxford, I had a good long time to think things through and convince myself a dozen different ways that Simon deserved getting left behind for his idiotic practical joke. I don’t know how he managed it, but I knew Simon. If anyone could pull off a stunt like that, he could. Who else would have the talent and the resources to waste on such foolishness? He’d probably spent months painstakingly setting up the whole thing behind my back. And it had surely cost him a bundle.
Well, funny joke, Simon. But I’ve got your car and your wallet, and you’re freezing your beezer off in the gloaming. Who’s laughing now?
I arrived in Oxford at six o’clock the following morning, red-eyed, exhausted, and quivering with fear lest anyone discover me driving Simon’s car and raise the alarm. No one did. The garage where he kept the Jaguar was deserted; there was no one else around. Nevertheless, I retained his jacket and kept his hat pulled over my face as I parked the car and tugged the doors shut. Then I hurried through the gate and across the quad to our staircase.
The sight of Simon Rawnson skulking into college in the wee smalls was such a familiar pantomime, I reckoned, that even if I was seen, it would not raise alarm or comment—not that I cared one way or the other.
Exhausted, I flopped into bed without bothering to undress. I closed my eyes and fell asleep instantly, and would have stayed asleep the rest of the day if not for the telephone.
The first time it rang, I ignored it. But it rang again a few minutes later, and I knew that whoever was on the other end would keep on ringing until someone answered. Bleary-eyed and foul tempered, I raised myself up, shuffled to the living room, and picked up the receiver.
“Hullo?”
“Susannah here,” chirped the voice down the wire. “Is that Lewis?”
“Oh, hello, Susannah. How’s it going?”
“Fine, thank you. I’d like to speak to Simon.”
“Simon? Uh, he’s not here at the moment.”
“Where is he?”
“Well, he’s in Scotland, actually.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, thing is, we went up there and he decided to stay, sort of.”
I could hear the sprockets spinning in her head. “He decided to stay in Scotland,” she repeated, her voice oozing disbelief.
“That’s right,” I insisted. “We went up Friday morning, you know—”
“I know he broke a lunch date with me,” she said tartly.
“It was the trip, see? We drove up there and, well, he just decided to stay on a few days.” I tried to make it sound like a spur-of-the-moment inspiration on Simon’s part.
Susannah, of course, was not buying any of it. “Put Simon on this instant,” she ordered. “Wake up the lazy lizard and put him on. I must talk to him.”
“I would, Susannah, but I can’t. He’s really not here.”
“What’s going on, Lewis?” Her tone was glacial.
“What?”
“You heard me. What’s going on over there? What sneaky little game are you two playing?”
“Nothing’s going on, Susannah. I’d let Simon tell you himself, but he just isn’t here.”
“Let me get this straight,” she said. “You and Simon drove all the way to Scotland on Friday, and he decided to stay—”
“Well, yeah, see—”
“—when he knew good and well that he had promised to go with me to early communion and then drive up to Milton Keynes for Sunday dinner with my parents?”
“Look, I know how this sounds, but it’s the truth, Susannah. Really, I—”
Click! The line went dead.
I replaced the receiver and glanced at the clock. It was seven thirty in the morning. I was beat. I disconnected the cord on the phone and stumbled back to bed.
It took longer to get to sleep this time. But just as I was snoozing soundly, I was awakened by a loud thumping on the door. “What have I done to deserve this?” I whined, dragging myself from my warm nest.
The door rattled again as I lurched toward it. “Yeah, yeah. I’m coming. Keep your shirt on.” I turned the key and opened the door. “Oh, Susannah, it’s you. What a surprise.”
She burst into the room as if launched from a catapult. “You needn’t bother pretending,” she stormed. I fol
lowed her to the door of Simon’s room. She gave the room a quick once-over and whirled to confront me. “All right, where is he?”
“I already told you. He’s not here.”
Susannah was a firebrand. A long-stemmed beauty with radiant auburn hair and a figure that could, and regularly did, stop traffic. Bright as needles and twice as sharp, she was two or three notches too good for Simon. Or anyone else, for that matter. I don’t know why she put up with an unregenerate rogue like Simon, or what she possibly saw in him. Their relationship seemed to me one long ordeal by fire—a venture more on the order of a military exercise than two hearts beating as one.
“You’ll have to ask Simon when he comes back,” I told her. “I really can’t say.”
“Can’t or won’t?” She stared at me, her dark eyes bright with anger. She was either deciding to dismember me where I stood, or calculating how much my dressed carcass would bring on the open market. “Is this somebody’s warped idea of a joke?”
“I think it may be,” I told her. And then I made the sad mistake of telling her about the aurochs in the newspaper, our hasty trip to Scotland, the cairn, and Simon’s sudden disappearance. I tried to make it sound matter-of-fact, but succeeded only in making her more angry and suspicious with each word. “But I wouldn’t worry,” I ended lamely. “I expect he’ll be back soon enough.”
“When?” Susannah asked pointedly. Her usually exquisite features were scrunched up in an ugly scowl. I could see that she was only seconds away from pulling off my ears.
“Oh, he’ll turn up in a day or two.”
“A day or two.” Extreme incredulity made her tone flat and husky.
“All right, a week or so—tops. But—”
“What you mean is, you don’t really know when he’ll turn up at all.”
“Not really,” I confessed. “But as soon as he realizes I’m not going to further this stupid practical joke of his, he’s bound to come dragging home.”
“A practical joke? You expect me to believe that?” She regarded me with a wounded yet supremely defiant look. “Well, I have news for you, mister,” she said crisply. “I have had the brush-off before. But never like this. If Simon Rawnson does not wish to see me again, so be it. Why didn’t he just say so—instead of sending his trained monkey along with some ludicrous story about going to Scotland to visit the Queen?”
“A cairn,” I corrected.
“Whatever!” She spun on her heel and started for the door.
“Wait, Susannah! You don’t understand.”
“I understand perfectly!” she retorted. “Just you tell Simon that we are finished. I do not expect to see him again. And I am keeping the necklace!” She slammed the door so hard the walls shivered.
I hurried into the staircase after her. Susannah turned on me. She had reloaded both barrels and let fly. “And another thing! If I even so much as see Simon Rawnson in public again, I will cause the biggest stinking row he’s ever seen. That man will wish he’d never been born. You tell him that, the creep!”
“Listen, Susannah,” I said, reaching a hand toward her arm. It was a clumsy move. I almost lost my fingers.
“Don’t you dare touch me!” She slapped my hand away. “I’m going home and don’t either of you ever try to call me.”
Feeling about as low as a garden slug, I watched her sail away, silk skirt streaming. Wrath had transformed her already considerable beauty into something magnificent and wild—a force of nature, like a hurricane or an electrical storm. Terrifying, but wonderful to behold.
I watched Susannah descend the stairs and then listened to the quick click of her heels on the flagstones as she crossed the quad and was gone. Then I turned and shuffled back to my room. I hated myself for deceiving her. But no, I hadn’t deceived her; I had told her the truth. She had just assumed, for reasons of her own, that I was lying to her, and what could I do about that? Anyway, it was not my fault. It was all down to Simon—I had nothing to do with it.
Trained monkey, indeed!
7
MAD NETTLES
My plan, as far as I had one, was simply to carry on as if nothing had happened. Business as usual. If anyone rang up and asked Simon’s whereabouts, I’d tell them he’d run off to Wolverhampton with a shop assistant from Boots. Serve him right, the toad.
The way I figured it, he was probably waiting until I panicked and blabbed to the police or something. He wanted to see his name in the headlines, and me looking like a fool explaining to reporters how he’d crawled into a cairn and disappeared. Well, he could just wait until hell froze over. I did not intend on giving him the satisfaction.
For the next few days, I carried on my life in the ordinary way. I behaved exactly as before. I took my meals, browsed at the bookstalls, loitered in the library, lounged in my adviser’s office, chatted with acquaintances, pawed through my mail . . . In short, I sallied boldly forth into the frantic free-for-all of academic life I had come to know and love so well.
But work was impossible. How could I work? I could not, truly, ignore Simon’s disappearance any more than I could ignore the nose on my face—however hard I tried. The days passed and Simon did not return. The phone did not ring. Doubt began taking a toll on me. I kept thinking: What if it is no joke? What if something happened to him? What if he really is gone?
Each day that passed brought a new worry. I lurched like a lopsided pendulum between anger and anxiety. Anger at his absurd prank, and anxiety over his safety. Day and night, I suffered a relentless rain of questions: Where was Simon? What was he doing? Where had he gone? Why was this my worry? Why me?
“When Simon comes back,” I promised myself, “I’ll kill him. I’ll cheerfully twist off his arms and beat him with the bloody ends. No, I won’t. That wouldn’t be civilized. I will, instead, sit him down and tell him calmly and rationally what a terrible, tasteless thing he has done. And then I will shoot him through his small, black heart.”
As the days passed into weeks, I grew steadily more listless, disheveled, ill-tempered, and cranky; I yelled at the scout whenever she poked her nose in, until at last she got fed up and stopped coming by. I roamed aimlessly around the streets, muttering to myself and cursing a great deal. My socks didn’t match. I didn’t wash.
If anyone observed my increasingly debilitated state, they gave no sign. I could not have occasioned less comment if I were a dust ball under the bed. I found myself deeply tempted to grow a hunchback and start swinging from the bell in Tom Tower.
My rapid descent into the slough of despond was matched by an equally steep decline in mental stability. I did not sleep well. Odd dreams troubled me—visions of leafy green men and extinct oxen rampaging through my bedroom, of wandering lost in a dark forest and the ground opening up beneath me and swallowing me whole, of being hunted down and pierced through the thorax by antique spears, of wolves howling in a forest dark, and a hideous horror with a face of grinning death, pursuing me relentlessly over a cold and desolate land—disturbing images that melted upon waking, leaving me exhausted and all the worse for my night’s rest.
I knew the cause of my slide into oblivion: my conscience was pulling overtime trying to attract my attention. From the moment I crawled into the cairn and realized Simon had vanished, my subconscious had begun hand-to-hand combat with my reason. The object? Getting me to admit to myself that what might have happened actually did happen, and that I had done absolutely nothing about it.
Still, it wasn’t so much Simon’s disappearance that hastened my decline. Unnerving as that was, the object of my inner conflict was not Simon’s vanishing act; it was his destination. Where, then, had Simon gone? That was the sixty-four-trillion-dollar question. And I knew the answer.
But I didn’t like to say it.
No, I would rather stew slowly in my own juices than admit what I knew to be true. Nature, however, has a subtle way of dealing with these amusing little dysfunctional games one enjoys so much. It’s called a nervous breakdown.
I began seeing things.
The first incident happened very early one morning. I had spent another sleepless night and decided to take a walk along the river. I slipped through the quad and took the lane leading to the meadow and the riverwalk. That early in the morning I had the place to myself, and just as I was passing the field where the college’s cattle are kept, I saw a large gray hound loping across the pasture, coming at an angle toward me.
At first, I didn’t think anything of it. There are lots of dogs around, after all. But as it drew nearer, the size of the thing registered— the animal was seriously larger: almost as big as a pony. It had a short, curly coat and extremely long legs that ate up the ground at an astonishing rate. And it was coming right for me. I stopped and stared as it leapt the cattle fence without breaking stride. The dog landed in the lane a scant few yards away. Only then did it see me, for it turned as if startled and flattened its ears, baring its incredibly long teeth in a snarl.
I stood stock-still, my heart racing. The dog, if that is what it was, growled menacingly low in its throat and raised its hackles. But I did not twitch a muscle—I was too scared to move. The great hound, still growling, turned down the lane and dashed off. It vanished in the morning mist from the river. But in the instant it turned, I saw that it had an odd-looking collar made of iron chain—the antique kind with curious hand-forged square links.
Despite the fact that I had never in my life seen a dog so huge, I told myself that someone’s pet had escaped from the kennel. Only that, and nothing more.
And then, a few days later, sitting by the window sipping tea on a rainy afternoon, I glanced out into the quad and saw something brown and hairy moving on the lawn. In the gloom of a thick overcast, I could not be certain exactly what I saw. At the time I would have sworn it was a pig—but a different sort of pig from any I was familiar with. Long-legged and lean, with a thick, bristly coat of dark reddish-brown and two curved tusks issuing from the sides of his pinched and narrow face, it carried its tail in a comical flagpole fashion— straight up over its sloping back.