Thirteen Chairs (14 page)

Ambler said: ‘Shouldn’t we go out and look for them?’

Of course we should. It was the obvious thing. But somehow it was equally obvious that there was no use. We could feel they were gone. We wouldn’t find them. Nor any trace of them.

I looked at Cole. ‘Tell me about the boy,’ I said.

He looked at me, startled. No, wait, not
startled. Embarrassed
, maybe.

‘There was no boy. Can’t have been, can there? I imagined … must have …’ He rubbed a palm against the side of his head, squinting and scowling. ‘I haven’t been sleeping well lately. I don’t think—’

‘What did you see, Paul?’ said Ambler softly, touching a fingertip to Cole’s shoulder, like he was just very gently adjusting his balance, steadying him.

Cole looked down at the floor, breathing very deliberately, as if he was concentrating on it: in and out, in and out. Then he looked up at Ambler, eyes wide as saucers. He said: ‘He was about twelve, I should think. It was hard to tell at that distance, but I think so. Blond hair—’ Then he shook his head. ‘That can’t be right, can it? Bareheaded out there. And his clothes …’

‘What?’

‘Well, he was dressed for winter back home. Not here. He had, like, a short overcoat on. And a scarf.’ He was frowning now. Remembering, but not happy with what he was remembering. ‘I think he was wearing wellies.’

‘Wellies?’ said Ambler. ‘Here?’

‘I know,’ said Cole, and his voice was crumbling now, breaking apart. ‘I think, maybe …’ He looked at Ambler. He said: ‘Am I going mad?’

‘This boy,’ I said to Ambler. ‘Did
you
see anything?’

‘No.’ He nodded at Cole. ‘He ran past me like a lunatic and knocked me over. I got up and went after him, but I was always behind him. Couldn’t see anything
ahead. Then, just as I was catching him up, he slipped over. I couldn’t stop, so I tripped over him. When we got up there was this gust of wind, kicked up some snow. So there was like a mini blizzard for a second or two. Couldn’t see a thing. When it died down—’

‘He’d gone,’ said Cole. ‘I went off in the direction he’d … towards where I thought I’d seen him …’ His voice trailed off. And then he said: ‘I’m scared.’ He sounded just like a child.

And I knew how he felt.

When we finally abandoned our cold cups of tea, Ambler tried to persuade us to go back out. Cole and I didn’t disagree with him; we just didn’t say anything at all. And we didn’t move. Well, Ambler lost his temper then, which I’d never seen him do before, I don’t think. He shouted at us, pleaded with us, shouted at us again. He said if there was just a chance that the others might still be alive then we had to look for them.

By this point, Cole was sitting on the floor in the leisure room, his back against the wall, hugging his knees. His eyes were squeezed shut and he was rocking ever so slightly backwards and forwards. I thought maybe he was right: maybe he was going mad. And just then, it seemed like a pretty attractive idea to me. Ambler finally gave up on us and headed out on his own. As if he didn’t know what kind of story this is.

You don’t go out alone.

I
should
have tried to stop him. I could just hear the engine of his skidoo as he rode off. Cole was still on
the floor, rocking and mumbling; I couldn’t bear to be near him. Went through to the dorm and climbed into my bunk. I burrowed down into my sleeping bag, got my head right in, and I shut my eyes tight. I wanted it to be dark. I wanted to sleep and make the world go away for a while. But it was still too light, and my head was too full of questions and fear, so I sat up, shaking up Jenny’s snowstorm, watching the water clear as the white flecks settled to the bottom, then shaking it up again, over and over.

In the end, I went back through to the leisure room. Cole was in the same spot, but at least he’d stopped rocking now. He looked up at me as I walked in. Blank eyes. Blank face. I didn’t like how he looked, and I wondered if I looked any better. I persuaded him to play a video game with me. Video games weren’t really my thing, especially the ones Cole liked, but I wanted something to do with my hands, something unreal to occupy my mind. Literally to
occupy
my mind. To take up all the space in it and push everything else out.

So we spent two hours, three hours, four, shooting and slicing and blowing up zombies, till we must have started to look like them ourselves. And we died, and we died, and we died.

When I accidentally blew us both up by bouncing a grenade off a wall and straight back at us, I got up to go to the toilet.

Cole said: ‘Get food.’

‘OK,’ I said.

As I headed out of the door, Cole was standing, stretching, yawning. He glanced out of the window. ‘No sign of Ambler,’ he said flatly.

I found all the worst foods in the kitchen and piled up platefuls of delicious unhealthiness for us both: biscuits, cake, chocolate, crisps. Like food for a child’s party but without the little triangular sandwiches. Then I carried them slowly and carefully, like a tightrope walker, back to the leisure room, concentrating hard on not dropping anything. I was shivering with cold before I got back but I refused to ask myself why.

The leisure room was empty. The games console had come unplugged from the TV and the screen was full of white noise, like a snowstorm.

I heard the plates smashing at my feet, waking me from my daze. I ran to the window. There was Cole, wandering out over the ice, walking like a zombie. No coat, no boots. And there was a little squall of snow blown up just ahead of him: a twirling dance of snowflakes that he was walking straight into. And for a moment there seemed to be a small shadow ahead of him, a darker shape in the blizzard of white. Hard to see at that distance, and through the swirl of snow, but it looked like a boy.

I was stock-still, transfixed, with a weird tension building within me: a pressure and a sense of panic. I realized I was holding my breath, had been for too long. I breathed out, and the window steamed up in
front of my face, blocking my view. When I wiped it clean they were gone.

No boy.

No Cole.

No swirling snow.

Just miles and miles of icy nothingness.

And only me in it now.

I looked out at it wearily. Eventually a shiver shook me alert enough to close the door. Good idea. Shut everything out. If I sat tight, then the main base would send someone out for me eventually. Wouldn’t they?

If they were still there.

I slumped back down, close in front of the TV and stared hard at the snowstorm of static on the screen. The random dancing pattern was soothing and hypnotic. I turned the volume right up and the crackle and fizz that went with it drowned out the sound of the wind that was picking up outside, the sound of snow whipped up by the wind, hitting hard against the window.

There wasn’t normally snow. There shouldn’t have been snow, not in the coldest desert on earth. No snow. It was wrong. But at least I couldn’t hear it now. And if I didn’t look up from the screen then I wouldn’t accidentally look out of the window. Wouldn’t accidentally see the boy in the snowstorm, walking this way.

I put one hand into the pocket of my fleece and felt the toy in there, the snow globe. Wrapped my fingers around the smooth glass and thought of my sister, thought about home.

Distracted, my focus slipped and the TV snow blurred away to reveal the reflection of my face, haggard and grey and hollow-eyed. Then I focused again and my face dropped back behind the curtain of swirling white flecks, and I stared into it, and I listened to the static.

I didn’t hear the outer door opening. And I didn’t feel the icy rush of wind. I didn’t hear footsteps in the corridor. I turned the TV up to full volume. Loud enough to hurt.

I stared at the screen.

I stared into the swirling white madness.

And then I closed my eyes and waited for the darkness.

And I wasn’t afraid.

J
ack’s chest feels tight. He realizes, eventually, that this is partly because his arms are wrapped around ihis body, as if he’s hugging himself for warmth, though he can’t tell how much of the cold he feels is real, and how much has seeped into him from Mr Randolph’s story. Either way, when he untangles his arms and the tension remains, he wonders for a moment why that is. Then he notices that he is holding his breath. He lets out a small sigh of air and the tension subsides a little, though the cold remains, and his breath paints a candlelit smear of mist in the darkness.

He looks at Mr Randolph who squeezes his eyes shut again, blinking away a subtle tension in his face to regain his natural blank expression. He sits there, still and straight and cold as ice, though no mist plays around his thin lips, so far as Jack can see. This ought to worry him, he realizes. In fact, a lot of things ought to be worrying him now.

Because at some point during Mr Randolph’s story, Jack accepted the inevitable truth of his situation. In fact, he must have known for quite some time; he just hadn’t fully admitted it to himself. But now that he has, he’s a little surprised that he doesn’t feel more scared. He is scared, of course. He can feel the fear inside him, trembling with potential. But somehow he feels removed from it. The fear is just a fact, an inevitable part of him that he feels and observes and examines with quiet fascination. It’s beyond
his control, but it’s not overwhelming. Not yet.

‘Thank you, Mr Randolph,’ says the pale man, and Mr Randolph, without a word, nor even a hint of an emotion, blows out his candle and pushes back his chair.

Jack’s heart is racing, and his mind is too. Thoughts and ideas and fears are churning in his head. He stares down at the flame dancing on his stump of a candle; he concentrates, trying to steady himself, the mist of his breath mingling with the twisting ribbon of smoke. He swallows down a mouthful of cold air and raises his head again. Mr Osterley’s face is the only one Jack can make out at all now, a pale moon shining in the darkness.

Mr Osterley is still and quiet for a long moment. At last, however, he raises a hand, palm upwards, in Jack’s direction, and smiles. At least, Jack thinks he smiles, or perhaps it is only the way the jittering light from the candle is playing on his face.

Jack readies himself to speak, wondering if the lump in his throat will allow any words past at all.

But then the pale man says: ‘You shall have the privilege of the final turn, Jack.’

He lowers his hand, the stuttering light of his dying candle splintering its slow smooth movement into jagged lurches as it reunites with the other in a loose embrace before him.

‘First, I shall tell my own story.’

M
y name is Frederick William Osterley. In life I was an undertaker. I lived my life among the dead. My father was an undertaker too, and I was born into the trade. I mean this quite literally. My mother went into labour in the mortuary of the family business while my father, unaware, discussed coffin choices with two recently bereaved sisters in his office above. My mother gave birth to me there in the mortuary, with the minimum of fuss and no noise, concerned as she was not to further distress my father’s grieving customers. According to her, I followed her example and did not cry until after they had safely departed. I was three weeks early. It was the first and last time I ever demonstrated impatience.

My father, it was said, had a face for undertaking. His features, at rest, naturally arranged themselves into a picture of sombre mournfulness, which was a great asset in his chosen profession. He looked the part, and so customers were content to put their trust in him. And they were right to do so: he was conscientious, hard-working, and had a natural sympathy for the pain of others. He saw people at their lowest ebb: broken, crazed, angry; and he treated them only with respect, courtesy and immense care. He was quite masterful at
his trade, but thought little about it. Mostly he was content to know that his work gave some comfort to his customers in their darkest days, even if many of them failed to appreciate this. Many times I saw customers turn their anger toward him, occasionally they even struck him, but my father never bore them any ill will.

‘We see them to their rest,’ he calmly told me once, holding a handkerchief to his recently bloodied nose. ‘The living
and
the dead: we see them to their rest.’

I began to work with him at a young age. Menial tasks at first: polishing coffins, cleaning, and other small chores and errands. Then as my schooling progressed, I helped my mother with the paperwork and book-keeping. Then later still, I worked with the clients. This was how my father termed them: our customers were the living; our clients were the dead.

‘The clients are a lot less trouble than the customers,’ he told me once. ‘But the customers pay the bills.’

I was not yet thirteen when I began to help with our clients, but I still had very little to do with our customers for many years after that. I had picked up the technical side of the business with ease. I learned how to prepare a body for burial or cremation, and learned the science and craft of embalming. I could even, in the rare instances where it was required, reconstruct the likeness of the deceased to even the most badly injured faces. I had, if I say so myself, a rare talent for the dead.

But not so with the living. I lacked my father’s natural advantages in the business. My face did not possess the same delicate balance of features. Where he looked solemn and trustworthy, I seemed cold and aloof. And though, as time passed, I learned to imitate the care he showed to our customers, I had no understanding of their feelings, their pain. I did not understand loss. I knew all about death, or so I thought, but nothing at all about grief.

In fact, I knew little about anything much outside of the tiny world of our house and the work we did. Throughout my schooldays I was an awkward child, and made few friends, and my father’s profession made me an easy target for mockery and bullying. So I took refuge in my home life. And we were a happy family, in our way. My father may have worn a permanent expression of deep sadness, and my mother could seldom be tempted out of silence, but we were contented with our lot, and we knew amongst ourselves that this was understood. We devoted ourselves to each other and to our work, and we drew strength from our sense of belonging and from the knowledge that we were doing good.

And then my father died.

My father died and he taught me the last thing I needed to know about our dismal profession. He made me understand. I felt the loss of him keenly. My mother too, of course, though again all emotion and distress was carefully hidden from our customers. My father
had died suddenly but discreetly after completing his duties at the funeral of a Mr Oliver Withinshaw.

Mr Withinshaw’s widow had been distraught and had to be restrained from climbing down into her husband’s grave to join him, but my father had whispered calming words to her and led her away. The wake was a dignified affair and passed without incident. My father, satisfied that all was well, departed early.

He died quietly at the kitchen table shortly after arriving home, sitting up straight, his hands one on top of the other on the table in front of him, his eyes closed. His heart, emptied by years of selfless compassion, simply stopped. His undertaker’s face, oddly, looked less mournful in death than it had in life. When I found him there, he looked more peaceful and contented than I had ever seen him.

Those unfamiliar and confusing emotions that my mother and I felt at this time, we held in check. We were professional and maintained appearances for the sake of ourselves and each other, and for the business. We arranged my father’s funeral, and we sent him to his rest, and we took comfort in the pride he would have taken in seeing the thing done right. And though we now carried a sea of sorrow inside, we would not let it flood out and drown us. Instead, we held it safe within ourselves. The morning after my father’s funeral I saw a little more of his likeness in my reflection when I shaved.

Life went on, and so did our business. With my father gone, my mother and I had much more contact with the customers. But I was ready for that now. I held within me my own grief, and it gave me understanding. I spoke to our customers with a new authority, and I took a part of their sorrows from them and added it to my own. And I sent the living and the dead to their rest. I did it well, and for many years. It was all of my life.

My mother made occasional half-hearted enquiries about whether I might ever settle down and have a family of my own, but neither of us, I think, ever considered it a real possibility. I felt no need or want for such a thing. I played my part in the world well enough alone, and I knew too well the eventual fate of all living things. Besides, I had no wish to share my life with anyone. It was not a life that would suit another, I thought. And most of all, I did not wish to share my grief. Now that I had found it, I held it close. It had become an exquisite pain inside of me, a precious, delicious thing. I had spent so long feeling so little, and now, invisible to the world, I held a storm of darkness within me. It was agony and delight at once. Do not expect to understand; I did not. But somehow, I felt, that grief was my father’s gift to me, and I guarded it jealously.

In time, of course, my mother gave me more. Thirty years after my father’s death, after an illness just long enough for us to prepare ourselves, she left this world.
When the time came, she bade me farewell with as little fuss, and as much strength, as she had demonstrated at my birth. She said: ‘Goodbye, my child,’ closed her eyes, and was gone.

She had arranged the funeral herself, and it was a quiet masterpiece. Nothing extravagant, but everything perfectly correct. We did it well, as you would expect. I was the model of professionalism, as she would have wished, and spoke sincerely of her contribution to the business throughout her life. I did not speak of her as a mother. She would have thought it unseemly.

I could tell you of the years following that, but there is little point. I served my purpose on the earth for another seventeen years and then I too left it. I had carried on the legacy of my father faithfully, I believe. I had sent many hundreds of the living and the dead to their rest, and I had done it well.

But when
I
died, there was no one to send me to mine. Of course, there was a funeral, carefully prepared and run with perfect precision by the small staff that I had left behind; able men and well-trained. They did it competently enough. It was organized and efficient, but it was hardly a challenge. I had made it easy for them, after all. There was no one to console. There was a funeral, but there were no mourners. Oh, it was well enough attended, and I was shown due respect, but none truly grieved my passing. No one really cared, and why should they? Why would the living care about my death, when my own life had been devoted only to
the dead? I cannot begrudge them their indifference. So my life ended unremarked upon, and that was an end to it.

Only, then, death was not the end. Then there was
this
. I was dead, but not gone. I was a ghost, a spirit, a wandering soul; whatever fanciful name you prefer to give to this odd state. And I found that there were others like me, others who persisted in this half-life. Others who had failed properly to depart.

Some are confused, some angry, some lost. Each, for whatever reason, cannot yet accept their fate. So I gather them together, and they tell their stories, and it eases them a little. In due course they will go on – do not ask me where – and others will take their place.

I am Frederick William Osterley and in death, as in life, I am among the dead.

And I help them to their rest.