Dark Companions (24 page)

Then he halted, wondering what else he’d heard.

The scrape of the door on bare stone had almost covered up another sound from the direction of the cinema. Had the thieves outwitted him? Had they closed the double doors? When he switched on the flashlight, having fumbled and almost dropped it lens first, he couldn’t tell: perhaps the doors were ajar, but perhaps his nervousness was making the shadow between them appear wider than it was.

As he ran, careless now of whether he was heard, shadows of dead gaslights splashed along the walls, swelling. Their pipes reminded him obscurely of breathing-tubes, clogged with dust. In the bare rooms, slumped dusty forms shifted with his passing.

The doors were still ajar, and looked untouched. When he stepped between them, the ceiling rocked with shadows; until he glanced up he felt that it was closing down. He’d done what he could in here, he ought to get back to the shop—but if he went forward, he would have to think. If the doors hadn’t moved, then the sound he had almost heard must have come from somewhere else: perhaps the unlit cinema.

Before he could help it, he was remembering. The last weeks of the cinema had been best forgotten: half the audience had seemed to be there because there was nowhere else to go, old men trying to warm themselves against the grudging radiators; sometimes there would be the thud of an empty bottle or a fallen walking-stick. The tattered films had jerked from scene to scene like dreams. On the last night Lee had been there, the gaslights had gone out halfway through the film, and hadn’t been lit at the end. He’d heard an old man falling and crying out as though he thought the darkness had come for him, a little girl screaming as if unable to wake from a nightmare, convinced perhaps that only the light had held the cinema in shape, prevented it from growing deformed. Then Lee had heard something else: a muttering mixed with soft chewing. It had sounded entirely at home in the dark.

But if someone was in the cinema now, it must be the thieves. He ought to hurry, before they reached his shop. He was hurrying towards the other branch of the corridor, which led to the exit doors. Might he head off the thieves that way? He would be out of the building more quickly, that was the main thing—it didn’t matter why.

The doors wouldn’t budge. Though he wrenched at them until his palms smarted with rust, the bars didn’t even quiver. Wind whined outside like a dog, and emphasised the stuffy mustiness of the corridor.

Suddenly he realised how much noise he was making. He desisted at once, for it would only make it more difficult for him to venture back into the cinema. Nor could he any longer avoid realising why.

Once before he’d sneaked out to this exit, to let in his friends who hadn’t been able to find their way into the yard. Someone had told the usherette, who had come prowling down the central aisle, poking at people with her flashlight beam. As the light crept closer, he had been unable to move; the seat had seemed to box him in, his mouth and throat had felt choked with dust. Yet the panic he’d experienced then had been feeble compared to what he felt now—for if the cinema was still guarded against intruders, it was not by the manager’s daughter.

He found he was trembling, and clawed at the wall. A large piece of plaster came away, crunching in his hand. The act of violence, mild though it was, went some way towards calming him. He wasn’t a child, he was a shopkeeper who had managed to survive against the odds; he had no right to panic as the little girl had, in the dark. Was the knot that was twisting harder, harder in his guts renewed panic, or disgust with himself? Hoping that it was the latter, he made himself hurry towards the auditorium.

When he saw what he had already noticed but managed to ignore, he faltered. A faint glow had crept into the corridor from the auditorium. Couldn’t that mean that his eyes were adjusting? No, the glow was more than that. Gripping the edge of the archway so hard that his fingers twitched painfully, he peered into the cinema.

The gaslights were burning. At least, blurred ovals hovered on the walls above their jets. Their light had always fallen short of the central aisle; now the glow left a swathe of dimness, half as wide as the auditorium it divided. If the screen was faintly lit—if huge vague flattened forms were jerking there, rather than merely stains on the canvas—it failed to illuminate the cinema. He had no time to glance at the screen, for he could see that not all the seats were empty.

Perhaps they were only a few heaps of rubbish that were propped there—heaps
 
he hadn’t been able to distinguish on first entering. He had begun to convince himself that this was true, and that in any case it didn’t matter, when he noticed that the dimness was not altogether still. Part of it was moving.

No, it was not dimness. It was a glow, which was crawling jerkily over the rows of seats, towards the first of the objects propped up in them. Was the glow being carried along the central aisle? Thank God, he couldn’t quite distinguish its source. Perhaps that source was making a faint sound, a moist somewhat rhythmic muttering that sounded worse than senile, or perhaps that was only the wind.

Lee began to creep along the front of the cinema, just beneath the screen. Surely his legs wouldn’t let him down, though they felt flimsy, almost boneless. Once he reached the side aisle he would be safe and able to hurry, the gaslights would show him the way to the gap in his wall. Wouldn’t they also make him more visible? That ought not to matter, for—his mind tried to flinch away from thinking—if anything was prowling in the central aisle, surely it couldn’t outrun him.

He had just reached the wall when he thought he heard movement in the theatre box above him. It sounded dry as an insect, but much larger. Was it peering over the edge at him? He couldn’t look up, only clatter along the bare floorboards beneath the gaslights, on which he could see no flames at all. He still had yards to go before he reached the gap when the roving glow touched one of the heaps in the seats.

If he could have turned and run blindly, nothing would have stopped him; but a sickness that was panic weighed down his guts, and he couldn’t move until he saw. Perhaps there wasn’t much to see except an old coat, full of lumps of dust or rubble, that was lolling in the seat; nothing to make the flashlight shudder in his hand and rap against the wall. But sunken in the gap between the lapels of the coat was what might have been an old Halloween mask overgrown with dust. Surely it was dust that moved in the empty eyes—yet as the flashlight rapped more loudly against the wall, the mask turned slowly and unsteadily towards him.

Panic blinded him. He didn’t know who he was nor where he was going. He knew only that he was very small and at bay in the vast dimness, through which a shape was directing a glow towards him. Behind the glow he could almost see a face from which something pale dangled. It wasn’t a beard, for it was rooted in the gaping mouth.

He was thumping the wall with the flashlight as though to remind himself that one or the other was there. Yes, there was a wall, and he was backing along it: backing where? Towards the shop, his shop now, where he wouldn’t need to use the flashlight, mustn’t use the flashlight to illuminate whatever was pursuing him, mustn’t see, for then he would never be able to move. Not far to go now, he wouldn’t have to bear the dark much longer, must be nearly at the gap in the wall, for a glow was streaming from behind him. He was there now, all he had to do was turn his back on the cinema, turn quickly, just turn—

He had managed to turn halfway, trying to be blind without closing his eyes, when his free hand touched the object that was lolling in the nearest seat. Both the overcoat and its contents felt lumpy, patched with damp and dust. Nevertheless the arm stirred; the object at the end of it, which felt like a bundle of sticks wrapped in torn leather, tried to close on his hand.

Choking, he pulled himself free. Some of the sticks came loose and plumped on the rotten carpet. The flashlight fell beside them, and he heard glass breaking. It didn’t matter, he was at the gap, he could hear movement in the shop, cars and buses beyond. He had no time to wonder who was in there before he turned.

The first thing he saw was that the light wasn’t that of streetlamps; it was daylight. At once he saw why he had made the mistake: the gap was no longer there. Except for a single brick, the wall had been repaired.

He was yelling desperately at the man beyond the wall, and thumping the new bricks with his fists—he had begun to wonder why his voice was so faint and his blows so feeble—when the man’s face appeared beyond the brick-sized gap. Lee staggered back as though he was fainting. Except that he had to stare up at the man’s face, he might have been looking in a mirror.

He hadn’t time to think. Crying out, he stumbled forward and tried to wrench the new bricks loose. Perhaps his adult self beyond the wall was aware of him in some way, for his face peered through the gap, looking triumphantly contemptuous of whoever was in the dark. Then the brick fitted snugly into place, cutting off the light.

Almost worse was the fact that it wasn’t quite dark. As he began to claw at the bricks and mortar, he could see them far too clearly. Soon he might see what was holding the light, and that would be worst of all.

The Puppets

That was the summer when I thought I could see everything. Because I knew I’d passed to go to University, my focus wasn’t narrowed down to textbooks. More than that, I had what I thought I wanted—which shows that I wasn’t seeing very clearly, after all.

Yet I was seeing so much for the first time: how the shadow of the church spire made the village square into a sundial (ten o’clock at Millie’s Woollens, eleven at the Acorn, just as the bar was opening); how the campers’ tents beside Delamere Forest resembled orange wedges of processed cheese; the workmen’s sentry box guarding the pit outside the post office, where they were supposed to be improving the telephone exchange, and the way passersby both frowned at the intrusion and muttered “About time.” Even Mr Ince’s Punch and Judy show seemed new to me, a childhood delight it would do me no harm to recapture. Again I was wrong: in the end, horribly so.

In its season, Mr Ince’s little theatre always stood beneath a clump of trees at the edge of the village green. There seemed hardly to be room in the striped box for Mr Ince and his sharp elbows, which protruded when he walked. The puppets nodded and pecked and squabbled like birds on a window ledge; sometimes their ledge was so crowded with movement that you might have thought he had more than two hands.

It was his skill that kept me watching. Sometimes on my way home past his cottage, I’d seen him carving his figures with infinite care; now I saw that care in the gestures of their tiny hands, the birdlike cocking of their heads, the timing of their actions. Perhaps at midsummer, when he went traveling, his audiences appreciated his skill.

Of course I liked to think of myself as the only intelligent sensitive person in a village of dullards—or almost the only one. Was she my real reason for loitering near the theatre? Beyond the clump of trees, through the gap in the buildings of the village square, I might, if I was lucky, watch her: Rebecca.

Sometimes she appeared at the window of her parents’ antique shop. Sometimes I only thought I glimpsed her among the elaborate furniture, the delicate clocks, the plates like circular miniatures. When she came out of the shop—the frills of her unfashionably long skirts and petticoats billowing, her blonde hair streaming—it was as though a porcelain figure had come to life.

I’d wanted her for years. Perhaps when I was younger I might have approached her, but brooding over the possibility had made me worse and worse. Years at a boys’ school had driven me further into myself. There were girls to be had in the village, despite their giggling pretence of aloofness, but they weren’t worth even the meagre effort they required. I could only lie in bed with an illusion of Rebecca and feel feverish with guilt afterwards. No doubt those nights left me even less prepared for the day she came to the house.

My father was a dentist; my mother, his anaesthetist. They had brought me up to take care of my teeth, and though he fished inside my mouth with a mirror twice a year, I never needed treatment. Often I imagined what he did with his hooks and drills and pliers, especially when his victim was someone I didn’t like. I felt smug when I saw the victims in the waiting-room, chatting bravely or louring over spineless magazines.

One morning quite early in my long holiday I finished a book by Camus. When I’d stared at the forested horizon for a while, depressing myself with thoughts of suffering, I went downstairs. I glanced into the waiting-room, past the stand whose curlicues were bare of coats, and there was Rebecca.

At once I saw how little reassurance there was in the framed Edwardian comic postcards on the walls, the simian chatter of a radio announcer and his records. Only I could comfort her, for she was alone—and all I could do was dodge out of sight, afraid that she would catch me watching.

I patrolled the hallway several times before I managed to enter. “Hello,” I mumbled, but she seemed not to hear me; I had scarcely heard myself. My momentum carried me to the magazine table, where at least I needn’t face her while I pretended to look for something to read.

Impulsively I grabbed the least dog-eared of the magazines and swung round. I wasn’t fast enough, for my face was already a mask that must be blazing visibly, my stiff tongue thrust painfully against my bottom teeth. I could only poke the magazine towards her while slowly, very slowly, she looked up.

Her smile almost overbalanced me. “Oh, no thank you,” she said, and let her hand stray towards a magazine that lay abandoned at her feet.

Though my face was puffing up with embarrassment, I managed to read the title:
Musical Times
. “Do you like music?” I stammered, and wished my gaping mouth were even larger, for then I might swallow myself.

“Very much. I play a little. I play the violin.”

“Oh, was that you?” Perhaps she had glimpsed me dawdling past her house and gawping at the melodies beyond the trees, thinking that someone besides myself appreciated good music. I had never dreamed that Rebecca herself had been playing.