Thirteen Chairs (2 page)

William laid the dead man’s hand back by the side of his body, then filled his own lungs with the sweet woodland air. He opened his eyes again, as if waking to a new day. He might have smiled if he had had the strength.

It was over.

But when he tried to rise to his feet he found that he could not. And it was not fatigue that prevented him. The dead man’s hand was closed around his own, holding him down. He pulled against it wearily but it only pulled back with greater determination. He toppled forward, his face landing against soil beneath which the dead man’s face must have lain. He knew he should struggle, but his slow brain was failing to tell his body how. And then he felt the embrace of another bony arm thrown round his back, holding him down with surprising force. Then the other hand released its grip, reached up above him, and began to claw at the earth, bringing down clods of it onto his back.

William made no sound, barely resisted, as the soil piled up over him. After a while, the left arm held him while the right pulled down more earth, and more. And the weight of it was like bedclothes. And as more
fell over his head, there was darkness. There was the smell of earth, and there was darkness.

He knew he must not sleep. He knew he must not.

But he was so tired.

‘T
hank you, Mr Blackmore,’ says the pale man, and a flicker of a smile plays briefly upon Mr Blackmore’s pursed lips before he regains his solemn expression and gives a tiny nod. Then he leans forward and blows out his candle, shifts his chair away from the table, and sits back.

Jack, emerging from the spell of the story like a swimmer breaking the surface of a lake, gasps for air. It is only a tiny noise but it resonates around the otherwise silent room. Then he gulps, and that sounds deafening too. But, looking around, no one seems to have taken any notice of him. It looks, too, as if no one else has reacted to the story quite as he has. No one else looks scared. Instead, there are smiles, and nods of appreciation, as if everyone is relishing the lingering aftertaste of something delicious.

‘Well told, sir,’ says the man with the ragged face, widely grinning. ‘A fine start to the proceedings. A good old-fashioned tale, eh, Mr Osterley?’

Apparently, Mr Osterley is the pale man. He smiles a thin smile. ‘Quite so, Mr Fowler. A fine traditional tale.’

‘Aye, sir. You have the truth of it there, right enough. And a burial in it too, eh?’

Mr Osterley’s face tightens just the tiniest amount. ‘After a fashion,’ he says, and Jack wonders why there seems to be a tone of distaste in his voice now. ‘Perhaps we shall have a more modern tale next. Mr Harlow, I imagine you might have something suitable?’

So that is what tonight is all about then, thinks Jack. Ghost stories. Well, that’s all right. Jack likes a good ghost story. He loves a good scare. Though he’ll have to take a turn himself at some point. He’ll need to give that some thought.

Mr Harlow, it turns out, is the man next to Mr Fowler, and the furthest from Jack of the three bearded men. His beard is neither as neat as Mr Blackmore’s nor as substantial as the giant Piotr’s. It is a scraggy mess, patchy and wild as an untended garden. He is a touch taller than average, and probably used to be handsome once, before so much of his face got hidden away. He is smiling an uneasy smile, nervous and tight. All of him seems to be too tight, in fact. He seems ill at ease, tense, and that tension seems to be pulling him out of his ideal shape. He has a notebook on the table in front of him, a cheap, shabby-looking thing, spiral-bound, tatty and tea-stained. He flicks quickly through its pages with jerky, slender fingers.

‘My story tonight is, um …’ He has leafed through too far, to the few blank pages left at the back of the pad. Flustered, he starts at the beginning again. ‘I wrote it out, years ago. Just hang on a minute …’ he says rather apologetically. ‘If I don’t, I … where is it? … I get rather lost and get things in the wrong …’ His fingers come to a halt at a dense page of text full of crossings out, corrections and amendments. He jabs a finger down at it, as if trying to pin it down and
ensure it cannot escape. ‘It’s a story about … did I ever mention that I used to be a taxi driver? Before, I mean. Well, obviously before, but … Uh, anyway, I was, for a while. And I heard this story once, from one of the other drivers. It’s kind of about a taxi, you see, and, um … So, that’s why I chose this one, because … Anyway, see what you think.’

Mr Harlow looks down at his notepad, quiet for a moment, gathering his thoughts and his courage.

Then he begins to read.

A
gainst the background noise of heavy rain he heard the low rumble of an engine and the crunch of tyres on gravel, and he was glad of the excuse to end his telephone call.

‘Got to go,’ he said. ‘Bloody taxi’s here early and I don’t want to risk losing him with the weather like this. I’ll see you there. ‘Bye.’ He put the phone down and glanced out of the window at the waiting cab. ‘Bloody idiot.’ He meant it equally for the driver and the business colleague who had just called. Two for the price of one.

He gulped down the last mouthful from his glass of whisky – an expensive single malt – and pulled on his overcoat as he walked to the front door. The black car’s rear passenger door was open ready for him, but the driver had returned to his seat rather than remain outside in the rain to usher him in and close the door after him.

No tip for you, he thought. He ducked into the back seat and slammed the door shut in what he hoped was a clearly dissatisfied manner.

‘The Hardwicke Centre,’ he said. ‘You know where that is, I suppose?’

The driver didn’t reply. He didn’t even turn his
head, only raised his left hand in a vaguely reassuring wave while tapping with his right hand at the screen of his sat-nav. Then he eased the cab around the circular gravel drive and out towards the road.

‘
Turn right.
’ The sat-nav’s voice was female; soft and warm, but precise too.

Sprawled in the back seat, he scowled at the back of the driver’s head. They used to just know, he thought. They had to learn all the routes by heart. Now they just rely on gadgets. Probably foreign too. Too embarrassed to try to talk to me in English. Oh well, at least that might mean he won’t try to start a conversation. He’d become all too familiar with the conversations of taxi drivers in the last year or so. He didn’t like talking with anyone very much, but he especially hated talking with taxi drivers.

‘
At the next junction, turn left.
’

‘Can’t you turn the sound off, at least?’

He wanted silence. Actually, no, he didn’t want silence. He just didn’t want anything to interrupt the sounds of driving: the rain on the roof of the car, the noise of the road beneath the wheels, the thrum of the engine. He missed it. He’d loved driving. Loved his car. Oh, his beautiful car! He didn’t want to think about what had happened to it. When was it? Must have been about a year ago now. He’d been so unlucky. There must have been some oil or ice or something at that corner: he never would have come off otherwise, whatever the so-called experts from the police said.
And he hadn’t been so far over the limit. He’d just lost track a bit at the office party. It was difficult to judge quantities in those plastic cups.

The driver gave him the same vague wave as before, again without a word.

‘
In two hundred metres, turn left.
’

Oh, what was the use? He dug his smartphone out of his inside pocket and clicked onto the calendar. Then he scrolled back in time to a year ago. Well, would you look at that? The accident had been
exactly
a year ago. To the very day! Exactly a year since he had lost his beloved new car, and his licence, just because he’d had a glass or two of wine too many. And how was he supposed to know how strong that punch had been? It really wasn’t fair.

‘
At the junction, turn right.
’

He glanced out of the window, vaguely recognizing his surroundings. It was an odd route they were taking. Not the one he’d have chosen himself, but he chose not to question it. He had noticed scars on the backs of the driver’s hands. Dozens of them. He didn’t want to guess at how he might have got them, and he certainly wasn’t going to ask. Instead, he returned his attention to his phone. He stared at the date and, despite himself, thought back to that night.

It had been snowing then. Prettily at first, as he had set off home, snow from a black-and-white Christmas movie. But then it had got worse about halfway back, and become harder to see where he was going. Perhaps
he
should
have slowed down a little, but the road through the woods was always very quiet, so where was the harm? That was part of why he’d chosen to live out there in the middle of nowhere, after all. And a car like that – well, it’s just not right to drive it slowly.

He closed his eyes in a moment of reverie, remembering the car. He’d only had it a couple of days. It had still had that new car smell, not really a nice smell in itself, but full of excitement and promise. The thought of it almost brought tears to his eyes. He breathed in deeply through his nose, half expecting that same scent now but catching, instead, a distinct whiff of something rotten.

God! Can’t they at least keep the cars clean?

He opened his eyes and stared angrily at the back of the driver’s neck, but noticing there, for the first time, more scars to match those on his hands, continued to say nothing.

The galling thing was that, up until the drive home that night a year ago, it had been a brilliant week for him: a big promotion at work; the new car as a result of the promotion; the final papers on his divorce coming through. He had felt a huge sense of freedom. No wonder he had celebrated with a drink or two. No wonder he had wanted to drive fast, and feel powerful and abandoned and alive.

And it would have been fine if it hadn’t been for the snow. The snow making it so hard to see. And
there
must
have been ice on the road. Must have been.

And the other car …

As they turned a corner, a car passed them going the opposite way, its headlights raking through the interior of the taxi, glaring into his eyes and stretching shadows over the driver. It shook him back into the present. He glanced out of his window and couldn’t recognize where they were. He would have expected that they would have joined the main road by now, then they would go up on to the ring road, bypass the town centre, and on to the venue. But maybe there was a problem on one of the roads that way and the sat-nav was automatically diverting them. Or, on the other hand, maybe his driver was trying to prolong the journey to push the fare up. Well, if that was the case then he’d picked on the wrong man. He took out his phone again and clicked on its GPS. A map filled the screen, a pointer tracing the car’s progress as they went. They were certainly a little off course, but only a little. Not enough that he could be sure of deliberate deceit. Not yet, at least.

But I’m watching you now, sonny boy. You just try it on and I’ll know. I’ll get you sacked at the very least.

He wasn’t above using his influence to do damage to other people’s lives. There had been that keen young constable after the accident, for instance.

‘I just wondered,’ the PC had said, in his tremulous
voice, ‘if you had seen anything. Only Mr Korbin went missing the same day as your accident. And from what we know he must certainly have been driving somewhere nearby, and at around the same time.’

No, he had said, he hadn’t seen anything, which was almost true as his eyes had been closed for the crucial seconds when he had drifted onto the wrong side of the road. But he hadn’t fallen asleep. Not for more than an instant anyway, and you couldn’t blame him for that.

Nor had he lied when he had said that he did not recognize the photograph of poor missing Mr Korbin. He hadn’t properly seen the driver of the other car in the split second available to him. And then it had swerved violently to avoid him and careered off the road and into the woodland. Once he had reined his own car back under control he had braced himself for the inevitable sound of the other car crashing, somewhere in the woods, but it never came. And he did not go back to look, or even check his mirror. And by the time he had his own crash (there
must
have been ice) he was another mile down the road.

‘
At the next junction, turn right.
’

Oh no. That did it. They were definitely going in the wrong direction now. They weren’t heading for the conference centre at all.

‘Hey!’

The driver made no sign of having heard him.

‘Hey! I don’t know how stupid you must think I am,
matey boy, but you’re not going to get away with this kind of thing with me.’

Still there was no response. Just the sound of the engine, the sound of the road, and the rhythm of the wipers clearing not rain now, but snow from the windscreen.

‘I booked you to take me to the Hardwicke Centre, not for a scenic drive through—’

He realized for the first time exactly where they were now.

‘Through the woods.’

He was back there. Where it had all happened. Precisely one year on.

What was this?

They had never found the other car. Never found Mr Korbin. He had assumed they would, and feared that they would connect the two accidents. He had feared the inconvenience, embarrassment and expense of a court case against him. But the snow must have covered Korbin’s tracks. A week or so later, when it at last thawed away, he had worried that something must surely turn up, but he had known better than to go back to look. He’d heard nothing on the news. There had been that one visit from the eager young policeman, but a quiet word with the Chief Constable the next time they played golf together had ensured he wasn’t troubled again.

It made no sense that the crashed car had never been discovered but, as time went by, he’d found he
wondered about it less and less. Some miracle had saved him and he had chosen not to question how.

The snow was heavier now but the driver took no notice. If anything, they were accelerating.

‘Stop this!’

He remembered now the photograph the constable had shown him. It wasn’t only of Mr Korbin. It was a family photograph: dark and stocky Mr Korbin, his pretty young wife, his grinning son. Korbin had one burly arm round his wife’s thin waist, his other bent at his side, his hand resting on his son’s shoulder.

‘I said, stop this! Stop the car!’

The driver said nothing but took one hand from the steering wheel and moved it to the gearstick.

The photograph must have been taken on a sunny day. The Korbins were all squinting in the sunlight. Mrs Korbin wore a light cotton floral print dress, the boy wore shorts and a T-shirt, and Mr Korbin had rolled up the sleeves of his collared shirt. On his left forearm there was a tattoo: writing, though it was impossible to tell exactly what it said.

It was clear enough on the burly forearm of the driver now, though, as he changed up a gear and accelerated once more.

The tattoo said: ‘
Scream if you want to go faster!
’

‘Please,’ he shouted. ‘Please don’t—’

And then he was blinded by bright light. A red BMW was coming at them far too quickly and on the wrong side of the road. He was thrown against the door as the
taxi swerved violently. He felt the bump and lurch of it leaving the road, but they did not slow down. He was pressed back into his seat as the car sped over a short patch of rough earth and on into the woodland.

‘Oh God!’

Something was happening to the driver’s skin. The scratches and scars on his hands and neck were opening up to weep tears of blood.

The car swerved through the trees, branches crashing against the roof and windscreen.

The driver’s hands were clamped tight on the steering wheel, his body hunched in concentration as he steered them, at terrifying speed, deeper into the wood. Lines of blood were extending back from his growing scars.

When, at last, the driver turned his head, he recognized Korbin’s face at once, even through its mask of blood.

The wood was denser now. They were racing straight toward a sturdy and immovable tree trunk. There was no way round it, and they were travelling absurdly fast.

He threw his arms pointlessly up in front of his face, but through the gap between them he could still see the tree trunk growing in an instant to fill the full extent of the headlights’ glow, and the driver’s face bloodied, decayed and distorted, grinning back at him in the instant before his annihilation.

Time stopped. The snowflakes hung in the air. He
could see the pattern of the bark on the tree, a trailing thread from his coat sleeve catching the light from the dashboard, the unholy leering smile of the driver.

There was a scream forming in his lungs and it would never be released.

‘
You have reached your final destination.
’