One night though, he woke and felt much sharper-minded than before. For the first time he had less urge to get right back off to sleep. There was a voice saying,
‘I’ve stopped the sedatives. Your back’s had a chance to rest now. I don’t want you becoming mummified.’
This was Doctor Lassiter, sat beside him talking quietly. The clock read two-thirty, and the sky was dark along the edges of the curtains. The room was lit only by Toby’s bedside lamp.
‘And the boy’s looking good,’ the Doctor continued.
‘He’s woken up?’
‘No, he’s still in the coma. But he seems very restful, not in any discomfort. As I hoped, it seems he hasn’t injured his spinal cord, only bruised it.’
Toby breathed a partial sigh of relief. The Doctor went on, quietly and reflectively,
‘But his injuries. Only in Stove. Only in Stove... No sane person could do that to themselves. To go in that fast with the top of the head, all that pressure compounding through the neck and down the spine... Even someone with a death wish would flinch, would duck out at the last moment. Are you with us, Tobe?’
‘I’m with you. Could you pass me that water?’
‘Here you go. Is that good? How do we live like this? How has this become our life?’
‘Bad timing.’
The Doctor chuckled, ‘Bad timing. I like that. So when are the good times? When are they set to roll?’
‘Spring,’ managed Toby, still croaky.
‘Ah spring, the Stovian false-dawn, when we can pretend things are well again. When we can pull our collars up and our cuffs down, and pretend the winter didn’t bite us head to toe.’
‘Or blame it all on the pipeline.’
The Doctor knew the routine well, they had played it often enough. He rocked back in the visitor’s chair,
‘Ah yes, the pipeline. Tough work. Can leave a man black and blue. If every scar blamed on a rogue shovel or jagged pipe-end had been so, then I’d be billing the Stockton-Overbury Company for fifty-thousand a year in claw-back fees.’
Toby could have gone on then, prompting the Doctor in ever-wilder rhetoric. But he wasn’t well, and besides he hadn’t the heart. So asked seriously,
‘Anything from the Scientific Committee?’
‘The Scientific Committee,’ the Doctor hissed. ‘I quit.’
‘Oh no. Why?’
His friend became more serious than Toby had often seen,
‘The town suffers a holocaust every year, and our only answer is an overworked doctor and two guys with a weather station?’
‘But you’d gotten so far. Your theory.’
‘The town knows my theory: that the sickness attacks bright minds still forming. But what is it that attacks them?’
‘I thought you’d mapped the winter hotspots, like Compass Point?’
‘We have. And the fellows have found even more hotspots – or better described as coldspots – running right along the seam between the two mountains. We even think we know what makes them come to life each winter.’
‘But didn’t we always know it was the cold?’ Toby was tiring again.
‘But everywhere gets cold. What’s special about our cold? They spent the summer digging around Compass Point. They found that the rock there is fractured, riven with underground streams. It’s when this underground water freezes that the sickness starts. The ice must expand and pressurise the rocks. Now, our magnetic fields are crazy enough as it is, but Lord knows what this pressure does to them. The compass-needles spin even wilder.’
‘And as with the compass points,’ concluded Toby, ‘so with our children’s minds?’
‘Well, the brain is only electricity after all.’
The Doctor’s voice had risen to a pitch that might wake sleepers. Yet Toby was just happy to see his friend so enthused. However, this was Stove they were talking about, and so no joy could last for long,
‘But it was futile. I realised that, and so I quit.’
Toby had to summon all his energy to pursue now, as natural sleep threatened,
‘Help me out, Doc. You’re not adding up. You’ve learnt all this, so why stop now?’
‘Because it offers us no practical solution, Toby. Maybe we could stand in a line with hot-air blowers down the centre of the town for three months every year, and stop the underground ice from forming. Maybe that could halt it. Maybe we could focus on one district and move everyone there. But realistically, there is no way. We can’t defeat a mountain, the Earth itself.’ The volume of the Doctor’s voice fell again as he concluded, talking very privately with his friend,
‘That leaves us with the one option left, don’t you think: to admit defeat and go down the hill? Wasn’t that what we always knew we’d have to do someday?’
‘They won’t allow it.’ Toby’s eyes were closed again, his voice barely a whisper.
‘No. Too many secrets they want us keeping.’
The Doctor used the word ‘they’ as if he and Toby weren’t members of the very elite he was criticising, explaining,
‘People drifting away to try and find other lives somewhere, fair enough. But how to explain a whole town abandoning itself? People would have questions that we wouldn’t enjoy answering. And so we witness scenes like these.’ He looked around the room, then back to Toby. ‘Anyway, you’re tired. Sleep well, sweet prince.’
And despite his agitation at the Doctor’s words, Toby did just that.
Chapter 39 – Recovery
Before Toby knew it he’d been in the clinic a week. His first walk around the ward had nearly floored him; but by his last day he was dressed and managing several circuits of the clinic grounds. Anyway, the Doctor needed his bed.
‘And I’m expected to be working again in a week?’ asked Toby to the medic as he gathered his things to leave.
‘Light duties, Sarah said.’
‘Sarah from the Sheriff’s Office? She was here?’
‘Here to keep eye on you, in the Sheriff’s absence.’
Well, that was a shock. Of all the faces as the bedside, Toby hadn’t clocked hers.
‘Anyway,’ cheered the Doctor, ‘winter’s nearly two-month’s through now, we’ve broken the back of it. Ahem, maybe not my finest turn of phrase.’
Both looked to the door of the private room in which Andrew Sippitz lay, still out cold.
‘I didn’t even know his name when I did that to him.’
‘Go, Toby, and don’t get maudlin.’
The walk back to the guest house was harder than Toby could ever have imagined. He need two sit-downs along the way, and even then was bent double as he arrived. The landlady came around the counter to hug him.
‘Toby, I’m so glad to see you well.’ (He didn’t feel it.) ‘I would have visited, but you know how busy we get.’
‘Of course.’
‘And you’ve a lady caller, waiting up in your room,’ she added, still giddy.
‘Thank you,’ he said, turning for the stairs.
‘You know I don’t normally approve of such things,’ she giggled, returning to her duties. Toby wished the Stovian Sunset had an elevator.
Like with a letter you weren’t expecting, Toby spent the whole slow journey to his room trying not to get his hopes up – convincing himself it was just an interest statement from the bank, and not the hand-written, perfume-scented love-note of his dreams. And it was the bank letter.
‘Hello,’ said Sarah plainly and not Janey tenderly. ‘I didn’t speak to you at the clinic. I thought it better to meet here.’
‘Not much better – my landlady thinks we’re having an affair.’
‘Let her. You could use the reputation, it might get you some action.’
Though it was the blackest humour, Toby wondered if Sarah was warming to him? It was something in her tone. For hate was so hard to sustain, wasn’t it? Toby knew this, and as he passed thirty so found it hard not to pity even monsters.
She looked him in the eye,
‘He wants to know
if you’re still together, still on our side?’
Toby laughed, ‘Doubt? From Jake? A chink in his ultra-confident armour?’
‘You don’t know how much he’s staking on this.’
‘I know.’
‘So, you’ll come?’
‘Of course,’ he answered in sternness more belonging to Toby the Special Deputy than Toby the nervous collaborator. ‘I did try to pass you a message.’
‘Through Tort? About my neighbour’s window? Yes, I got it. Jake was disappointed that you got your injury before we could answer.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Only that he hoped he’d be interviewing you by now.’
‘He should have come to visit.’
‘Very funny. Maybe you could start tonight?’
Toby didn’t want to face that, and thought on his feet,
‘You know, the thing with being sedated is it leaves you dog tired. Tomorrow?’
‘Okay, I’ll tell him to expect you. Come after dark.’
Toby couldn’t bring himself to sign off their conversation with any message for Jake, no ‘Wish him Good Luck’ or ‘He’ll hear from me soon’. Stuff him, If Jake was leaving Toby to his fate, then Toby would leave Jake to his. But with Sarah’s eyes still questioning his face, he felt obliged to say something, summarising,
‘I’m staunch, I really am staunch.’
And she nodded in acknowledgement as she got up to leave; before saying,
‘Oh, and on the subject of Tort, he’s been asking after you in the office – he thinks we’re friends after you left me the message.’
Toby remembered, ‘He tried to catch me before my injury, but I couldn’t stop to talk.’
‘My guess is that he wants a move Mountain-side. I’m not sure he likes Crawley’s methods.’
‘Which are?’
But Sarah had no more to say on the topic as she left.
Chapter 40 – Night Calls and Conversations
Toby didn’t end up visiting Jake until the evening after next; but soon fell into a routine of calling at the Emsworth house. Like vampires, they met in the night and watched for the sun.
After the serious business of taking Toby’s testimony, they would relax, just chatting like the old friends they were on their way to becoming.
‘Why do you come here?’ asked Jake one time.
‘Because you asked me to,’ answered Toby.
‘But you’re here every night, I’m not having to force you. I wonder why?’
‘Because there’s no one else I can talk to.’
‘If you’re ever seen coming here, we’re stuffed.’
‘I’m in head-to-toe black – who’s going to see me?’
‘Even so, be careful.’
‘I will.’
Sometimes in these after-sessions, Toby would take the lead awhile.
‘How will you do this?’ he would ask. And Jake would answer,
‘Gather enough evidence, then write an article in the spring. Or make a documentary, depending on the footage I can gather. Including your testimony.’
Toby soon got so used to being filmed that he didn’t even notice the camera on him the whole time. Nor the back-up tape recorders soaking up every word. He would ask Jake, at the end of a long night,
‘And what’s your plan?’
‘To stop this ever happen again.’
‘And remind me why I’m letting you?’
‘Because you want it more than me.’
However long they spoke for, there were always a hundred questions left to ask. Jake got used to having to leave them hanging though, ever aware of the morning.
At times, Toby could become quite silly, his attitude childish. But then Jake recognised that twenty-four-hour cover was exhausting when keeping a secret. There was nowhere else he could be light.
‘So Jake, will you be coming with us to Candlemas?’
‘That might not be such a good idea. What’s it like?’
‘It’s a great release – when the Reverend can talk of the renewal of the new year after the end of the old, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief.’
‘Gives a good sermon, does he?’
‘He’s a very spiritual man.’
‘And where is he the rest of the winter season?’
‘He’s a sensitive man.’
‘And the rest of you aren’t?’
‘It affects him quite badly.’
‘What, the sickness?’
‘No, the sadness of the sickness. He has to stay away from it.’
‘He sounds like a real missionary.’
‘The women in the town say his head is with the angels and his feet barely touch the earth. It’s his vision that drew him to the cloth.’
‘Not much use at anything else, eh?’
Toby answered with a heavy heart,
‘We don’t have a lot of choice in Stove. We have to make do with who we have.’
During the span of these visits, the attitude of Mrs Emsworth remained cordial but never friendly. Sarah, with her day job and need to sleep in the evenings, was hardly there.
Meanwhile, whatever Jake had thought of Toby once, he was realising that here was a man no more than a boy inside, like all men were. Life was just a game, only now not played with Action Men and G.I. Joes. It was the torment all men felt somewhere within themselves, the awareness that stopped them handling a real car as they would a HotWheels.
Sometimes Toby would even fall asleep on the Emsworth sofa.
‘What does he think he is?’ Mrs Emsworth would ask Jake, over Toby’s sleeping form.
‘I don’t think he knows,’ Jake would answer.
It would require Jake to gently kick Toby’s ankles when it was time he made a move.
Chapter 41 – Paying Courtesies
And to the Emsworth house wasn’t the only call Toby paid during that slow week of recovery. Toby remembered the conversations he had had on the bus up to town. Although he never followed up on the invite from the lady with the unwed daughter, he remembered Mr Monroe in his blue suit. As Toby’s walking distances got longer, so he made his way up to Hillcrest.
‘Come in, Deputy. It’s good to see you.’ Mr Monroe seemed genuinely thrilled to meet his caller. ‘I know we say “Come around” and “Of course I will”, but so often it’s a courtesy and never acted upon. Perhaps the one party was only offering out of politeness, or the other not sure if it was a genuine invitation, and so feared that they could cause a scene by following it through.’
The man talked nineteen-to-the-dozen, as people can when starved of conversation,
‘I did have a feeling you would come though. And you being so busy. The morning lull, eh? I was never a Deputy myself, as I told you. Though I remember it from when my Declan was among your number.
‘Come in, come in, sit down. I’ll get the pot on.’
‘Thank you, Mr Monroe,’ said Toby as he accepted his cup, once sat in the cosy living room. The walls and furnishings were stripped back to the wood, golden-varnished, and dominated by a roaring fire in a stone grate.
‘Vernon, please,’ he said, sitting opposite. ‘And I hope I can drop your title too, leave it at the doorstep with those boots of yours, so to speak.’
‘Of course.’
‘I remember my Declan being so glad to leave his duties at the door. He was one of those who started it all off, you know – a first generation sufferer of “the groaning sickness”, as we called it then. That first winter was the worst time of my life. A town full of sick children. I thought we were losing them, every parent did.
‘Yet in spring, when Declan and the others just got better, well I can’t tell you the relief. And even better when he was old enough, and it stopped affecting him all together.’
This was everything that Toby had been so keen to ask about, yet here the man was talking without bidding; and Toby let him, soaking it up.
‘Of course we’d noticed that it only caught our youngsters, and only in wint
er. Yet when we also realised it passed when they got old enough... to know that they grew out of it, well, it gave us the option, didn’t it? The awful option: to contain it, to not to have to give up our jobs and our homes. And not to have to tell the Stockton-Overbury Company that living on the mountain drove our kids crackers. For we’d be telling them to give up on their investment, that men with families couldn’t watch the pipeline year-around. And therefore the only kind of man available to them would be the loner, the outcast, the prime-candidate for cabin fever, hearing voices and firing at squirrels with both barrels of a shotgun.
‘But it was fine. Well, not fine. But the illness passed, it lasted only through adolescence. We could contain that; the kids could grit their teeth and bear it. My boy did. And the first thing he did that first winter it didn’t return, was volunteer to help those younger boys taking his place.
‘No doubt you think about your own childhood, Toby, and the Deputising winters you’ve endured since. You may curse me and that first generation of settlers for lumping you with all this extra weight on your shoulders.
‘And it’s odd isn’t how even during winter we don’t talk of it often? We don’t go out of our houses much, as no one speaks in the shops. And people keep their heads down as they pass.
‘It’s an open secret going on around us. But then, that’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? The history that no one else will tell you. The history that even I’ve not told before.’
Chapter 42 – Shock Therapy
The old man slapped his knees, ‘As I say, I really did think you’d come, Toby. I could sense it on the bus. I won’t say I was looking out for you that afternoon, but I guessed that that was your travelling day, and found myself in Gaidon too.
‘I remembered you with Janey, you see, and was always touched by your story. I knew you had a heart and could be talked to, not like some of those young thugs I’ve seen in action – forgive my seeming to criticise your colleagues. I would never judge your methods, not with the task we set you.
‘But yes, perhaps I did arrange our meeting. Perhaps there is some truth in that. If I’m being honest, I was grateful for a chance to catch you before we got into town.
‘You see, there aren’t many of us left now, of those first seasons. Yet so much was decided then, and none of it written down. So much that has stuck – that’s the first amazing thing! Nigh on fifty years’ worth. Have you ever known a secret kept so long? Those first Councils would be amazed to see us still here. I wonder, if they could indeed see us, whether they would make the same decision? And that’s a weight in itself. I don’t want to die with it on me. I want it shared, and in so sharing, halved. Isn’t that Shakespeare?’