The Kind Folk (26 page)

"Not to comedy, I hope," Luke says without knowing whether it's a joke.

He waits until the audience has finished emptying the car park, and then he gazes into the woods. The glow of a bloated moon a yellow as an old skull leaves most of the trees in shadow. Glimmering trunks resemble bony limbs with cracked flesh, and the forest looks as he fancies a lair of the Folk should look, as though it's being secretly transformed by their presence. "I know you're there," he says and tries again, louder. When not even a leaf stirs—he could imagine the Folk are holding the entire forest still—he drives back to the hotel.

As soon as he's in his room he phones Sophie. The ringtone that's pretending to be no more distant than his mobile falls silent, and a moment's pause is enough to make him blurt "Are you there?"

"Here I am, Luke. Who else would be? Is anything the matter?"

"I just wondered why you hadn't called."

"I didn't know if I'd spoil your performance. I know you like using calls onstage, but I don't think I'd have given you anything to build on."

Luke is glad he didn't have to try and incorporate her into tonight's travesty of a performance. "How was your day?"

"I've laid down nearly half the tracks. We ought to be finished tomorrow."

"Here's to celebrating. I'll say goodnight, then."

"To someone else as well," Sophie says, and is gone.

Her place is taken by a muffled development suggestive of a presence but falling short of any identifiable sound. In a moment Luke grasps that she has laid the phone against her midriff. "Goodnight," he murmurs and finds himself adding "Look after your mother."

Is the soft restless noise a response? Before Luke can define it Sophie says "Did you hear him?"

"I'm not sure what I heard."

"Well, I'm sure he heard you. It felt as if he knows his father."

Luke wishes he could find this more welcome. Surely he can once he has dealt with his kind. "Remember we love you," Sophie says, "and have a good night's sleep."

"You have a better one," Luke says and means it to be true. As he uses the bathroom he feels as though he's preparing for a ritual, and can only hope he doesn't need one. He could find nothing of the sort online, and the papers Terence apparently consulted seem to have been stolen or destroyed, though the library denies that they ever existed. Suppose there's no rite for summoning the Folk because people were too afraid to do so? If there's a way to call them up, surely it's instinctive to Luke and his kind. He gulps a glass of water as he returns to the bedroom, but his mouth stays as dry as the August night. When he clears his throat it sounds absurdly like a preamble to delivering a speech, but then he's desperate for an audience. "You know I'm here," he says and sits on the lanky upholstered chair next to the bed. "You know what I want. It's time we talked."

A face is beside him—a replica of his own. It's in the dressing-table mirror. Luke is distracted by the mimicry, and drags the chair around to turn its back. Now he feels more watched than ever, as if the room is concealing a vindictive gaze. "Show your faces, all of you. If you've got any," he adds with some kind of a laugh.

He hears a surreptitious flutter above him, and he's touched by a chill breath. The air conditioning has produced the illusion of a response. Otherwise the room seems as inert as the blank screen of the television squatting high up in a corner. The place is beginning to resemble a cell in which his obsession has trapped him. He's aware of the lack of a window; he's close to snatching the curtains apart in case unseen intruders are posing as images on the wall. "You don't need a window to let you in," he urges. "You're too thin for that. There's nothing much to you at all."

Could the light be holding them back? He pokes the switch beside the headboard and at once is buried in darkness, so that he has to grope his way back to the chair. A strip of light not much wider than the edge of a knife is visible under the door to the corridor. "Dark enough for you?" he calls. "You must look bad if you're so afraid to be seen. You can let me know you're here now. See, I'm holding out my hands."

In a moment he sees them—his outstretched hands. He can distinguish the angular outlines of the bedroom furniture as well. Is he seeing too much in the dark? Have his attempts to summon the Folk opened up his mind? He's suddenly afraid he may have fallen for another ruse of theirs, unless their refusal to appear is one more instance of their senile malice. "Stop pretending," he whispers in case lowering his voice may bring them closer, "I know you're listening," and twists around in the chair. The dim shape that lurches towards him, jerking out its hands, is himself in the mirror.

He tries sitting still and keeping quiet. He doesn't know how many hours he spends watching the luminous sketch of a room. Every so often the vent in the wall emits a tinny clatter and expels a frigid breath, but otherwise the room outdoes even him for stillness. When he begins to nod as if he's acknowledging the futility of his bid to entice the Folk, he crawls into bed. He wants to be alert when he goes where he's sure he can find them.

Something has waited for him to fall asleep. He's wakened by a sense of being watched. A face, or an attempt to assemble one, is peering in at him. No, not in; the curtains are still shut—it's peering down. For a moment Luke has the fancy that a window has appeared overhead, then that a mirror is above him, and then he's fully awake. A shape considerably taller and scrawnier than Luke is spread-eagled against the ceiling above him. Its limbs are stretched so wide that it's clinging to all four corners overhead. It's facing downwards, although this doesn't involve much of a face.

As Luke reaches for the light-switch he sees the figure tense all its spindly limbs. "Let's stay in the dark, then," he says in a voice he barely recognises, "and talk." He hasn't finished speaking when the shape scrabbles across the ceiling and disappears into the corner furthest from the door. It's scuttling backwards, and the lopsided head is the last of it to be dragged into the niche beneath the roof, where the pale lump shrinks like a punctured balloon. By the time the light comes on there's no trace of the intruder-—no movement other than the icy breath from the vent in the wall. Luke should have known that his visitor wouldn't linger; perhaps it came just to mock his desperation, to remind him how malicious the Folk are. He ought to have recognised that there's only one way to entice them, and the knowledge actually lets him sleep.

THE WALLS

He's up at dawn. He has no idea how much he may have to do before driving home. Apart from a brace of waitresses, he's alone in the banqueting hall decorated with prints very like the one that does duty as a view behind the curtains in his room. He makes do with cereal and coffee; he has an instinct that he shouldn't eat too heartily before his task. He doesn't bother looking around for intruders. He means to encounter the Folk soon enough.

He checks out of the hotel before eight o'clock. The receptionist is dabbing at her eyes with a tissue behind the counter that's pretending to be antique. Her face looks remodelled—identical eyebrows, sculpted cheekbones, lips painted with pink gloss, a nose as regular as her tan. "New contacts," she says, apparently to explain the tissue. "Are you off to see the sights?"

Luke hopes so, but hardly in the sense she has in mind. "Are there many round here?"

"We've all our old towns, and there are houses you can visit," she says and passes him a handful of brochures. "Or there are lots of walks."

Luke glances through the brochures but doesn't see his destination. "Isn't Round Hall Way one?"

"I don't know it." She risks wrinkling her smooth brow for an instant and says "I really don't know that one at all, and I've lived in Cranstone all my fife."

He can tell that she's speaking the truth. He found just a single reference online to Round Hall Way, giving only an approximate location. It no longer appears to be on any map, if it ever was. "Forget it," Luke says and hopes she will. "It's my mistake."

As he steps out of the hotel a gout of blackness runs down the wall of the car park—the shadow of a crow that Luke has put to flight. The blue sky is empty apart from the sun, and looks close to growing as bright. Magpies chatter in hedges beside the road and fly off at the approach of the car. Beyond the hedges hills are keeping their rounded heads down, and he could imagine the parched land is dormant, waiting to be awakened. A blue flower flutters up from a verge, or rather a butterfly does. It jitters above the hedge as Luke notices the remains of a stone circle on the far side of a field. He doesn't need the ruin to remind him where he has to go.

Some miles along the road he comes to a lane that seems to lead towards his destination. It's even more circuitous than the main road, and in another mile or so he has to turn along a track that meanders more nearly in the direction he wants. The tarmac is as cracked as an old tree and scarcely wide enough for a car to pass his, if there were one. The route looks as if it may have been unfrequented for some time. Swifts dart across it with high thin cries, swooping to pick invisible life out of the air. Then they're gone, leaving the landscape as motionless as the sky, and Luke has to trust his instinct that he's close to his goal. He drives onto the yielding verge and parks the car.

He's surrounded by fields with no obvious path to follow. As far as he can judge, Round Hall Way lies to the west. There's no point in looking for the vanished mansion, let alone the prehistoric circle that was incorporated into its structure centuries ago. Apparently the alchemist who had the mansion built was hoping that the ancient stones would aid him in some occult task. Even his name has been forgotten; perhaps it was expunged wherever it was found. According to the single reference Luke managed to locate, Round Hall and its owner "collapsed of their own corruption" as a result of the alchemist's bid "to recreate the making of the world", which involved attempting "to transform his very substance into the stuff that was made out of the primordial dark". This sounds to Luke as if the alchemist was trying to become like the Folk, and shouldn't this make the place significant to them? All that Terence wrote about it in his journal was a single phrase, presumably addressed to himself:
FOLLOW PATH
.

There's the barest hint of one inside the nearest field. Beyond a gap in the hedge the faint track leads westwards. The gap might have been made by walkers, but perhaps that was long ago; spiky twigs have grown across it, so that there's scarcely room for Luke to squeeze through. Even though he can see nobody about he feels watched. The path leads along the border of the field to the far hedge, where Luke has to snap off several twigs before he can sidle through a gap. Beyond it he can see nothing he would call a path, but has anybody visited Round Hall Way since Terence did? When Luke makes his way along the edge of the second meadow, coloured fragments flutter ahead of him as though he's bringing the land to life. Despite the August sunshine that is withering every shadow, he has a sense of walking towards an unseen darkness.

He has crossed a field diagonally and struggled along the edge of a further one before he arrives at what he suspects is his goal. To the casual eye it's just another neglected meadow. On the far side, beyond a line of trees spiked with crows' nests, the landscape continues in the same fashion. Luke's route has brought him to a barely visible gap in the hedge. Although it doesn't give onto a path, he thinks he sees what Terence meant. In the middle of the field, almost hidden by ankle-high grass, he can distinguish the start of a stony track.

At least, that's what it looks like. It curves away in both directions under the grass, and he guesses it's all that remains of the outer wall of the mansion. He's sure that it's also the path Terence had in mind, not least because Luke feels much closer to the lurking darkness, practically on its brink. When he glances around, nothing is to be seen except the fields; his car is well out of sight. He grasps the branches on either side of the gap and forces the hedge apart until he's able to squirm through. The parched grass snaps underfoot like spindly bones as he tramps to the edge of the stone arc. "I've come this far," he declares at not much under the top of his voice. "Your turn."

The hedge beyond the remains of the mansion creaks in a breeze that visibly dissipates in the grass before it comes anywhere near him. Otherwise the landscape is as dormant as the stones, and he isn't even sure he's being watched. He has to believe that the Folk are waiting for him to rouse whatever the place conceals. There's a gap wider than a man between the exposed curves of grey stone to either side of him, and an intermittent stony line almost buried in the hard earth beneath the grass extends straight ahead from the left-hand section. It's framed by two swathes of dead grass, each about two feet wide, which is all that the ruin seems to offer in the way of paths. Luke takes a breath that only turns his mouth drier and sets foot on the track that follows the near side of the vanished wall.

At once he's sure this is what's required of him. He feels as if he's venturing into or more accurately under a mass of darkness, though none is to be seen. He does his best to reassure himself by thinking of Sophie, who ought to be at the studio by now. He's reluctant to call her, not just in case she's recording but for fear that contacting her while he's within the ruins might send some of the Folk to her. How irrational is that? Perhaps no more so than the rest of his behaviour. He's here to protect her and their child, and he mustn't let any doubts trouble him. He follows the line of the fragments of wall until it brings him to an angle that he deduces was the corner of an extensive vestibule. Some yards away along a transverse line of stones is a break wide enough for a doorway, to which the path beside the stones leads. "How far do you want me to go?" Luke demands as he heads for the gap. "Isn't it time you showed up?"

Raising his voice doesn't seem to help. It sounds oddly flattened, cut off before it can travel far. He could fancy that it's muffled by the unseen darkness, which feels closer. The ground encircled by the ruin has begun to smell dank, and he represses a shiver. Perhaps the circle has trapped the chill of all the stones somehow. Once he's through the doorway he locates the next one, on the opposite side of the almost invisible remains of an enormous room. The route to it stays close to the walls, and Luke concludes that he's meant to walk the outlines of the rooms, even if he can't guess why. "I'm doing my part," he calls. "How about showing me that's what you want?"