No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories

  He looked at me—or more properly at my car—as it sped toward him, and for a moment he teetered there on the verge and appeared of two minds about crossing the road directly in front of me! If he’d done so I would have had a very hard time avoiding him. It would have meant applying my brakes full on, swinging my steering-wheel hard over, and in all likelihood skidding sideways across the narrow road. And there on the opposite side was this outcrop, a boulder jutting six feet out of the ground, which would surely have brought me to a violent halt; but such a halt as might easily have killed me!

  As it was I had seen the old tramp in sufficient time—but only just in time—to apply my brakes safely and come to a halt alongside him.

  Out of my window I said, “Old Joe, what on earth were you thinking about just then? I mean, I could so easily—”

  “Yes,” he cut me off, “and so could I. Oh so very easily!” And he stood there trembling, quivering, with his eyes sunk so deep that I could scarcely see them.

  Then I noticed the mist. It was just as Andrew Quarry had stated—a freak of synchronicity, sprung into being almost in a single moment—as if the earth had suddenly breathed it out; this ground mist, swirling and eddying about Old Joe’s feet and all across the low-lying ground beyond the narrow grass verge.

  Distracted, alienated, and somehow feeling the dampness of that mist deep in my bones, I turned again to the old man, who was still babbling on. “But I couldn’t do it,” he said, “and I shall never do it! I’ll simply wait—forever, if needs be!”

  As he began to back unsteadily away from the car, I said, “Old Joe, are you ill? What’s the trouble? Can I help you? Can I offer you a lift, take you somewhere?”

  “A lift?” he answered. “No, no. This is my waiting place. It’s where I must wait. And I’m sorry—so very sorry—that I almost forgot myself.”

  “What?” I said, frowning and perplexed. “What do you mean? How did you forget yourself? What are you talking about?”

  “It’s here,” he replied. “Here’s where I must wait for it to happen…again! But I can’t—I mustn’t, and won’t ever—try to make it happen! No, for I’m not like that one…”

  Old Joe gave a nod and his gaze shifted; he looked beyond me, beyond the car, out across the moors at Tumble Tor. And of course, as cold as I suddenly felt, I turned my head to follow his lead. All I saw was naked stone, and without quite knowing why I breathed a sigh of relief.

  Then, turning back to the old tramp, I said, “But there’s no one there, Joe!” And again, in a whisper: “Old Joe…?” For he wasn’t there either—just a curl of mist in the hedgerow, where he might have passed through.

  And a few minutes later, by the time I had driven no more than a mile farther along the road toward Torquay, already the mist had given way to a wan, inadequate sun that was doing its best to shine…

  I had been right to worry about my state of mind. Or at least, that was how I felt at the time: that my depression under this atmosphere of impending doom which I felt hovering over me was some kind of mild mental disorder. (For after all, that’s what depression is, isn’t it?) Even now, as I look back on it in the light of new understanding, perhaps it really was some sort of psychosis—but nothing that I’d brought on myself. I realize that now because at the time I acknowledged the problem, while psychiatry insists that the psychotic isn’t aware of his condition.

  In any case, I had been right to worry about it. For despite Andrew Quarry’s insistence that I’d sleep well that night, my dreams were as bad and even worse than before. The mist, the semi-opaque silhouette of monolithic Tumble Tor, and those eyes—those crimson-burning eyes—drawing closer, closer, and ever closer. Half-a-dozen times I woke up in a cold sweat…little wonder I was feeling so drained…

  In the morning I drove into town to see my doctor. He gave me a check-up and heard me out; not the entire story, only what I felt obliged to tell him about my “insomnia”. He prescribed a course of sleeping pills and I set off home…such was my intention.

  But almost before I knew it I was out on the country roads again. Taken in thrall by some morbid fascination or obsession, I was once more heading for Tumble Tor!

  My tank was almost empty…I stopped at a garage, filled her up…the forecourt attendant was concerned, asked me if I was feeling okay…which really should have told me that something was very wrong, but it didn’t stop me.

  Oh, I agreed with him that I didn’t feel well: I was dizzy, confused, distracted, but none of these symptoms served to stop me. And through all of this I could feel the lure, the inexplicable attraction of the moors, to which I must succumb!

  And I did succumb, driving all the way to Tumble Tor where I parked in my usual spot and levered myself out of my car. Old Joe was there, waving his arms and silently gibbering…warning me about something which I couldn’t take in…my mind was clogged with cotton-wool mist…everything seemed to be happening in slow-motion…those eyes, those blazing evil eyes!

  I felt a whoosh of wind, heard a vehicle’s tyres screaming on the road’s rough surface, saw through the billowing mist the blurred motion of something passing close—much too close—in front of me.

  This combination of sensations got through to me—almost. I was aware of a red faced, angry man in a denim jacket leaning out of his truck’s window, yelling, “You bloody idiot! What the bloody hell…are you drunk? Staggering about in the road like that!” Then his tyres screeched again, spinning and smoking, as he rammed his vehicle into gear and pulled away.

  But the mist was still swirling, my head still reeling—and Old Joe was having a silent, gesticulating argument with a stick-thin, red-eyed man!

  Then the silence was broken as the old man looked my way, sobbing, “That wouldn’t have been my fault! Not this time, and not ever. It would have been yours…or his! But it wouldn’t have done him any good, and God knows I didn’t want it!” As he spoke the word “his”, so he’d flung out an arm to point at the thin man who was now floating toward me, his eyes like warning signal lamps as his shape took on form and emerged more surely from the mist.

  And that was when I “woke up” to the danger. For yes, it was like coming out of a nightmare—indeed it could only have been a nightmare—but I came out of it so slowly that even as the mist cleared and the old man and the red-eyed phantom thinned to figures as insubstantial as the mist itself, still something of it lingered over: Old Joe’s voice.

  As I staggered there on the road, blinking and shaking my head to clear it, trying to focus on reality and forcing myself to stop shuddering, so that old man’s voice—as thin as a cry from the dark side of the moon—got through to me:

  “Get out of here!” he cried. “Go, hurry! He knows you now, and he won’t wait. He’ll follow you—in your head and in your dreams—until it’s done!”

  “Until what’s done?” I managed to croak my question. But I was talking to nobody, to thin air.

  Following which I almost fell into my car, reversed dangerously onto the crossover track and clipped the hedge, and drove away in a sweat as cold and damp as that non-existent mist. And all the way home I could feel those eyes burning on my neck; so much so that on more than one occasion I caught myself glancing in my rearview mirror, making sure there was no one in the back seat.

  But for all that I saw no one there, still I wasn’t absolutely sure…

  Taking sleeping pills that night wasn’t a good idea. But I felt I had to. If I suffered another disturbed night, goodness knows what I would feel like—what my overburdened mind would conjure into being—the next day. But of course, the trouble with sleeping pills is they not only send you to sleep, they’ll keep you that way! And when once again I was visited by evil dreams, struggle against them as I might and as I did, still I couldn’t wake up!

  It started with Old Joe again, the old tramp, a gentleman of the road. Speaking oh-so-earnestly, he made a sort of sense at first, which as quickly lapsed into the usual nonsense.

  “Now listen to m
e,” he said, just a voice in the darkness of my dream, the silence of the night. “I risked everything to leave my waiting place and come here with you. And I may never return, find my way back again, except with you. So it’s a big chance I’m taking, but I had to. It’s my redemption for what I have thought to do—and what I have almost done—more times than I care to admit. And so, because of what he is and what I know he will do, I’ve come to warn you this one last time. Now you must guard yourself against him, for you can expect him at any moment.”

  “Him?” I said, speaking to the unseen owner of the voice, which I knew as well as I knew my own. “The man on the tor?”

  While I waited for an answer a mist crept into being and the darkness turned grey. In the mist I saw Old Joe’s outline: a crumpled shape under a floppy hat. “It’s his waiting place,” he at last replied. “Either there or close by. But he’s grown tired of waiting and now takes it upon himself. He risks hell, but since he’s already half-way there, it’s a risk he’ll take. If he wins it’s the future—whatever that may be—and if he fails then it’s the flames. He knows that, and of course he’ll try to win…which would mean that you lose!”

  “I don’t understand,” I answered, dimly aware that it was only a dream and I was lying in my bed as still and heavy as a statue. “What does he want with me? How can he harm me?”

  And then the rambling:

  “But you’ve seen him!” Old Joe barked. “You looked beyond, looked where you shouldn’t and too hard. You saw me, so I knew you must see him, too. Indeed he wanted you to see him! Oh, you weren’t looking for him but someone else—a loved one, who has long moved on—but you did it in his place of waiting! And as surely as your searching brought me up, it brought him up, too. Ah, but where I only wait, he is active! He’ll wait no longer!”

  Suddenly I knew that this was the very crux of everything that was happening to me, and so I asked: “But what is it that you’re waiting for? And where is this…this waiting place?”

  “But you’ve seen him!” the old tramp cried again. “How is it you see so much yet understand so little? I may not explain. It’s a thing beyond your time and place. But just as there were times before, so there are times after. Men wait to be born and then—without ever seeming to realize it—they wait again, to die. But it’s when and it’s how! And after that, what then? The waiting, that’s what.”

  “Gibberish!” I answered, shaking my head; and I managed an uncertain laugh, if only at myself.

  “No, don’t!” The other’s alarm was clear in his voice. “If you deny me I can’t stay. If you refute me, then I must go. Now listen: you know me—you’ve seen me—so continue to see me, but only me.”

  “You’re a dream, a nightmare,” I told him. “You’re nothing but a phantom, come to ruin my sleep.”

  “No, no, no!” But his voice was fading, along with Old Joe himself.

  But if only he hadn’t sounded so desperate, so fearful, as he dwindled away: fearful for me! And if only the echoes of his cries hadn’t lasted so long…

  Old Joe was gone, but the mist stayed. And taking shape in its writhing tendrils I saw a very different presence—one that I knew as surely as I had known the old tramp. It was the watcher on the tor.

  Thin as a rake, eyes burning like coals in a fire, he came closer and said, “My friend, you really shouldn’t concern yourself with that old fool.” His voice was the gurgle and slurp of gas bubbles bursting on a swamp, and a morbid smell—the smell of death—attended him. The way his black jacket hung loose on sloping shoulders, it could well have been that there were only bones beneath the cloth. And yet there was this strength in him, this feverish, hypnotic fascination.

  “I…I don’t want to know you,” I told him then. “I want nothing to do with you.”

  “But you have everything to do with me,” he answered, and his eyes glowed redder yet. “The old fool told you to avoid me, didn’t he?”

  “He said you were waiting for something,” I answered. “For me, I suppose. But he didn’t say why, or to what end.”

  “Then let me tell you.” He drifted closer, his lank black hair floating on his shoulders, his thin face invisible behind the flaring of his eyes, those burning eyes that were fixed on mine. “I have a mystery to unfold, a story to tell, and I can’t rest until I’ve told it. You are sympathetic, receptive, aware. And you came to my place of waiting. I didn’t seek you out, you sought me. Or at least, you found me. And I think you will like my story.”

  “Then tell it and leave me be,” I replied.

  “You find me offensive,” he said, his voice deeper and yet more dark, but at the same time sibilant as a snake’s hiss. “So did she. But what she did, that was truly offensive! Yessss.”

  “You’re making as much sense as Old Joe!” I told him. “But at least he kept his distance, and didn’t smell of…of—”

  “—Of the damp, the mould, and the rot?”

  “Go away!” I shuddered, and felt that I was shrinking down smaller in my bed.

  “Not until you’ve heard my story, and then I’ll be glad to leave you…in peace?” With which he laughed an ugly laugh at the undefined question in his words.

  “So get on with it,” I answered. “Tell me your story and be done with it. For if that’s all it takes to get rid of you, I’ll gladly hear you out.”

  “Good!” he said, and moved closer yet. “Very good. But not here. I can’t reveal it here. I want to show you how it wassss, where it wassss, and what happened there. I want you to see why I am what I am, why I did what I did, and why I’ll do what I’ve yet to do. But not here.”

  “Where then?” I asked, but I’d already guessed the answer. “At your waiting place? Your place on the moor, the old tor?”

  “In my place of waiting, yesss,” he answered. “Not the old tor, but close, close.” And then, changing the subject (perhaps because he thought he’d said too much?) “What is your name?”

  I wanted to refuse, defy him, but his ghastly eyes dragged it out of me. “I’m Paul,” I replied. “Paul Stanard.” And then—as if this were some casual meeting of strangers in a street!—“And you?”

  “Simon Carlisle,” he answered at once, and continued: “But it’s so very, very good to meet you, Mr Stanard.” And again, as if savouring my name, drawing it out: “Paul Stanaaard, yessss!”

  From somewhere in the back of my sub-subconscious mind, I remembered something. Something Old Joe had said to me: “If you deny me I can’t stay. If you refute me, I must go.” Would it be the same with Simon Carlisle, I wondered? And so:

  “You are only a dream, a nightmare,” I said. “You’re nothing but a phantom, come to ruin my sleep.”

  But it didn’t work! He moved closer—so close I felt the heat of his blazing eyes—and his jaw fell open in a gurgling, phlegmy laugh.

  Abruptly then he stopped laughing, and his breath was foul in my face. “You would work your wiles on me? On that old fool, perhapssss. But on me? Old Joe came with goodness in his heart, yessss. Ah, but which is the stronger: compassion, or ambition? The old tramp is content to wait, and so may be put aside—but not me! I shall wait no longer. You came to my place, and now I have come to yours. But I can’t tell my story here, for I want you to see, and to know, and…and to feel.”

  “I won’t come!” I shrank deeper into my bed and closed my eyes, which were already closed.

  “You will!” His eyes floated down on me, into me. “Say it. Say that you will come to my place of waiting.”

  “I…I won’t.”

  His eyes burned on mine, then passed through them, to burn inside my head. “Say you’ll come.”

  I could resist him no longer. “I’ll come,” I mumbled.

  “Say you will come. Say it again, and again, and again.”

  “I will come,” I said. “I will come…I’ll come…I’ll come, come, come, come, come!” Until:

  “Yessss,” he sighed at last. “I know you will.”

  “I will come,??
? I was still mumbling, when my bedside telephone woke me up. “I will most definitely…what?”

  Then, like a run-down automaton, blinking and fumbling, I reached for the ’phone and held it to my ear. “Yes?”

  It was Andrew Quarry. “I just thought I’d give ye a call,” he said. “See how ye slept, and ask if ye’d be out at the auld tor again. But…did I wake ye or somethin’?”

  “Wake me? Yes, you woke me. Tumble Tor? Oh, yes—I will come—come, come, come.”

  And after a pause: “Paul, are ye all right? Ye sound verra odd, as if ye’re only half there.”

  God help me, I was only half there! And the half that was there was in pretty bad shape. “Old Joe warned me off,” I mumbled then. “But he’s just an old tramp, an old fool. And anyway, Simon wants to tell me his story and show me something.”

  “Simon?” Quarry’s voice was full of anxiety now. “And did I hear ye say Old Joe? But…Old Joe the tramp?”

  “Old Joe,” I nodded, at no one in particular. “And anyway, he says that I’m to take him back to his place of waiting. He’s really not a bad old chap, so I don’t want to let him down. And Andrew, I’m…I’m not at all well.”

  Another pause, longer, and when Quarry finally spoke again there was something more than concern in his voice. “Paul, will ye tell me where and when ye spoke to Old Joe? I mean, he’s not there with ye this verra minute, is he?”

  “He was last night,” I nodded again. “And now I must go.”

  “Ontae the moor?”

  “I will come,” I said, putting the ’phone down and getting out of bed…

  There was a mist in the house, in the car, on the roads, and in my mind. Not a really heavy mist, just some kind of atmospheric—and mental?—fogginess that had me squinting and blinking, but without completely obscuring my vision, during my drive out to Tumble Tor.