That’s what Fabian did. By Christmas, Fabian had forced Zak (vocals and guitar) out of the band. On New Year’s Eve Zak had been replaced by Adam Ambrose, some kind of protégé of Fabian’s. The music was changing, too. Zak always said they played blue collar rhythm and blues. Fabian had a more cerebral approach. Fisher couldn’t help replaying a lot of what happened in the last four months as he and Marko built a dog’s bed out of blankets round the base of the warm radiator. While they’d done this Jak had remained in the towel as they worked.
The moment Marko said, ‘OK, Jak, what do you think?’ the dog stood up, shook himself out of the towel, then walked on to the bed, turned round three times and lay down. Once more Fisher was struck by how the animal resembled the jet-black jackal god that sat watchfully at the tombs of pharaohs. Those animals guarded their masters from attack by demon and human for all eternity. As a boy, the story made an impression on him. He liked to imagine the dog statue coming to life to tear out the throats of the tomb robbers.
‘Hey, hey.’ A warming glow of satisfaction spread through Fisher’s body. ‘That’s the first time I’ve seen him walk.’
‘Hey, high five, bud.’ Marko slapped Fisher’s palm. ‘You know, he was probably just cold. When their body temperature drops they shut down. He’ll probably be right as rain in the morning.’
‘Really?’
‘Sure.’
‘Of course, how’s all this going to play when we write our autobiography?’ Fisher couldn’t stop grinning now the dog appeared to be recovering. ‘Shouldn’t we be munching pills and screwing around between playing stadiums full of screaming fans?’
Marko bent down to pat the dog’s head. A pink tongue slipped out to touch Marko’s fingertip. ‘Nah, that’s next year. This year we get to take care of stray dogs and rehearse Fabbo’s songs in a big old house.’
‘Are we doing the right thing, Marko?’
‘It’s our one chance.’ As he stood up he held his hands apart as if measuring a huge object. ‘Our one BIG chance at fame, fortune and the rest of it. We’ve got to take a shot, haven’t we?’
‘I guess so.’
Marko crossed to the stove. First of all he chopped steak for the dog. As he used a carving knife to slice it he said, ‘You know, I gave notice at the workshop? It’s this or nothing now.’
‘Yeah, we’re so rock and roll, aren’t we? I walked out of the office. It only hit me the next morning when I woke up and I sat there with my head in my hands saying, “My God, what have I done?” ‘
‘Now that is rock and roll, Fisher.’ He added water to the steak in the saucepan then put it on the electric ring to heat.
‘Marko, just imagine what Fabian would say. You’re cooking the dog’s food before his.’
‘Fabbo? He can go swivel on a rusty pole. You know what my grandmother said about the dogs she took in?’ He stirred the meat in the pan. ‘She looked into the dog’s eyes and she swore that she could recognize members of our family who had died.’
‘You mean reincarnation?’
‘Something like that … help yourself to a beer. They’re in the refrigerator. You can get me one, too. Cheers.’ He paused as he cast his mind back. ‘To her, each dog she cared for had something in it, some character trait, that resembled a dead uncle, or aunt. You know, the way they’d look at you when you talked to them? Is that weird to you?’
‘We had a dog when I was growing up, but it was always Mack, I didn’t see it resembling anyone I knew who’d died.’
Marko shrugged as I handed him a bottle of beer. ‘It’s one of the reasons she took such good care of them. It was as if she’d been given a second chance to love someone again she’d lost.’ He filled a bowl with cold water then put it against the wall close to Jak. ‘Your dinner won’t be long now, boy.’ He returned to stirring the chopped beef. ‘I’ll simmer this for five minutes then leave it to cool. Fisher? How long is it since your father died?’
‘Ten weeks.’ Fisher thought for a second. ‘Yeah, ten weeks today.’
Marko nodded at Jak. ‘Look who you found on the road today. My grandmother would have said that was too much of a coincidence.’ He stirred the pan again. ‘Would you keep any eye on that? I’m going to do the master’s bidding and bring the wine from the car.’
‘It’s in a white box. You can’t miss it.’
‘Cheers.’
Marko left Fisher to stand at the stove. He gazed at the pale brown liquid bubbling so it jostled at the strips of beef. Even eleven weeks ago it would have seemed crazy to stand up at his desk, throw down his pen, announce he was leaving and wouldn’t be coming back, then just walking out of the office building. After his father died he did just that. It was as if all the world’s boundaries had changed. All those realities in life that seem fixed suddenly became fluid. He’d watched a kind man who always put his family first evaporate before his eyes as the cancer tore through him during the course of sixteen weeks. When it boiled down to the reality of it all, the doctors who’d troop into the hospital ward to stand by his bed could do nothing for him. Dad would smile and nod at them. They’d ask, was he comfortable? Was he in pain? Dad would smile back and reassure them that he wasn’t suffering in the slightest. Good man. Good caring man, who never wanted to give anyone any trouble or cause for concern. But the scene could have been played out fifty thousand years ago by a campfire. Stone age men and women as they crouched there with their spears and flint axes could have done nothing for this man dying of cancer. These doctors with all their years of training and computer driven scanners and smart drugs couldn’t do any more than their prehistoric ancestors.
So all anyone could do, was watch the once towering figure get thinner as he lay in the hospital bed. There he patiently watched the sun rise over the trees and set again. Time was the aggressive warrior that allied itself with the cancer. Every day time and the tumor – that axis of evil – ranged its weaponry of hours and minutes and rogue cells against him to blast away the muscle from his skeleton, until his bones pushed through his emaciated face. Yet still the kind eyes shone out.
Fisher turned away from the stove. The dog lay in bed with its head raised. Its amber eyes met his.
‘Hello, Dad,’ Fisher said. The dog didn’t react to the words. Instead it continued to meet his gaze in that placid way of his. Fisher gave a savage shake of his head. What a stupid thing to say, there’s no reincarnation, there’s nothing! Now he felt a fool for saying the words: Hello, Dad. As if he’d see something in the dog’s eyes to hint that Marko’s grandmother had been right.
A moment later, Marko backed his way through the door with the case of wine. ‘Hell, Fabbo does it style. I expected half-a-dozen bottles. There’s twenty in here. Bombero? Is that good stuff?’ He set the case down on the table. ‘No sign of the others yet?’
‘No, Fabian’ll still be soaking himself. Can’t you just see him lying back in a lace shower cap with slices of cucumber over his eyes?’
‘The scary thing is I can picture exactly that. Ready for another beer?’
‘Yup.’
‘Coming right up. If you put the pan on the window ledge to cool, I’ll fry the steaks.’
Like a film that had somehow burned itself into his brain Fisher replayed scenes of driving to the hospital the night the duty nurse called with the news, then more repeats of the funeral. The arrival of the hearse. The way just the sight of the coffin in the back had been a physical shock that made him gulp for breath. It all replayed through his head, but he helped fry the steaks, he poured the wine, he made small talk with Marko. Still, there was that sense of unreality, as if ten weeks ago, he’d parted company with the world and still hadn’t found the return path … Anyway … Now he’d got these four weeks here with the band. He was determined to make it work. Or die trying. Flippant thoughts were his self-defence mechanism these days. Even so, the words ran a chill down his spine.
‘Listen,’ Marko said. ‘The clock’s striking midnight.’
Chime
s shimmered through the air. The twelfth note appeared to echo back from great distances beneath the house with a shimmering sustain that ghosted through the kitchen for a full minute before decaying to a whisper, and finally dying away.
CHAPTER 4
At one o’clock, the unseen clock chimed a single time. Josanne lay in bed waiting for Fabian to join her. He sat at the table where the anglepoise light shone on his papers, silently mouthing the lyrics of a song he wanted to practise tomorrow.
Rather than disturb the dog, Marko had dragged a mattress from one of the rooms so he could sleep close by in the rest area of the staff quarters.
Fisher had chosen a room two doors down from Josanne and Fabian’s. After changing into a T-shirt and shorts, he lay in a king-size bed with the lights out. Even though the building had been a retirement home for the elderly it more closely resembled a country house hotel. Every room Fisher had seen so far had been scrupulously cleaned; the furniture was all good quality. Outside, a breeze sighed through the trees. Clicks sounded from the ceiling. It would be easy to imagine feet moving about upstairs but he knew that they were alone in the house they were to stand guard over for the next twenty-eight days. He’d hoped he’d fall asleep quickly. He was pleasantly warm; his appetite had been satisfied by the steak. The red wine Fabian had brought with him was powerful stuff. Although he’d been drowsy enough as he climbed into bed his waking self didn’t yield to sleep just yet. He hovered in that lazy borderland between wide awake and sleep. His senses possessed a drowsy fluidity where sounds seem to mingle with the first ghostly dreams that began to emerge from the unconscious. Fisher imagined what it would be like to walk through the house at night. Alone. Without switching on lights. What if he should become a floating breath of atoms that could easily pass into the fabric of the building to run like electricity through the walls? Why stop with the walls? He could sink down through the floorboards, down through the cellars, through into the earth beneath. There he’d find foundations of medieval buildings that had stood on the same tract of land before the manor house. What mixture of rotting timbers and human bones would he encounter there? What lay beneath that layer? Hearth stones from the Dark Ages? A Roman cemetery containing the bones of centurions 2,000 years dead? To sink deeper would reveal flint arrowheads embedded in the skulls of mammoths that roamed this place when it was tundra 10,000 years ago.
As easily as you can allow your imagination to roam through the building, or down through the foundations into the soil, you can let your mind drift back through time. Before The Tower was an old people’s home it was a base for the US Air Force. They flew B17s out of here to attack the heavy industry of the Ruhr Valley. Then The Tower would be home to air crews who were far from home. This remote corner of Yorkshire must have seemed a bleakly alien place to them. There are no towns or villages nearby. Their world would dwindle to this big old house, and what? A concrete runway and a couple of aircraft hangars? The only life they’d know away from the seclusion of the house would be in those dangerous skies above Germany when the air would turn black around them from the smoke of anti-aircraft fire; or the Nazi interceptors would come screaming at them with their guns blazing death.
Outside the breeze rose then fell. A respiratory sound. The creaks of settling timbers intruded through his half-sleeping, half-waking state as he imagined uniformed men sitting in this very room playing cards in a blue haze of cigarette smoke as they waited for their next mission.
This house has seen a lot of death. How many airmen were delivered back here as corpses to lie in the morgue until their funerals? Come to that, from when this house was built, how many people had died within its black walls? This house must have an appetite for death now. It must be hungry for souls … Drowsy thoughts slipped through him. There was something lubricious about the images now. As if they were poured into his head from some external source. In a house the dust is the sloughed skin of its inhabitants. How old was this skin dust he smelt now? Was it the skin of the old people, or the pilots and bombardiers and gun crews from the wartime bombers? Or did it go further back when this place was what? A TB sanatorium? A lunatic asylum? Back to when it was a family house? All that human dust. He was inhaling it. He could taste it on his tongue … it dried the back of his throat.
Thud. That’s one of his guitars falling. After the thud he could hear the deep bass hum of the strings as they vibrated. Damn … He shouldn’t have propped it up against the wall. It should have been laid down flat on the floor. Fisher opened his eyes. Immediately he blinked as something irritated them. He blinked again but could see nothing in the darkness. He turned his head to see the pale oblong that was the curtains drawn across the window. Clicks, squeaks, a creaking like wood being flexed. Could there be someone walking upstairs? And what about my damned eyes? What’s wrong with them? The room was unfamiliar but he had an idea where the light switch was above the bed. In the dark he reached upward. Smooth wall, then the hard line of the switch plate. A second later he had the row of switches under his finger. He pushed it. A light sprang out from above the dressing-table.
Fisher blinked as he looked up. The pricking of his eyes told him particles had settled on his eyeball. But what the hell had happened to the ceiling? It was no longer flat but bulged downward. In the light of the lamp he saw that dust was falling from the ceiling in a yellowish blizzard of particles. What occurred to him first was that a water pipe had ruptured upstairs, allowing water to pool above the ceiling boards. Now the weight of the accumulating water caused the ceiling to bulge downward in the middle. He opened his mouth to shout Marko but that dust fall sent particles swirling across his tongue to hit the sensitive skin at the back of his throat. He coughed to clear it before shouting again. Only …
Only something wasn’t right with the room. It had been bigger than this. There’d been a generous walking space around three sides of the bed. That was gone now. What’s more, the ceiling was so low he realized he could reach up and touch it. Not that he wanted to.
Fisher didn’t know why exactly … it was a gut instinct: the walls had become repulsive to him. They were no longer dry horizontal planes covered with a dull reddish paper. Though he couldn’t actually see it, some quality of the wall was suggestive of being moist. They weren’t vertical either; they curved inward. And hardness gave way to a surface that might have been rubbery, or even muscular. Dust cascaded. He dragged his hand across his eyes so he could clear some of the muck that settled on his retinas. The house is collapsing. Get to the door – get out. But the door was no longer where it should be. It appeared to press against the foot of his bed; worse, it had dragged the wall with it, so the entire end of the room puckered. Fisher pushed back the sheet to scramble from the bed. His free hand he held up to his eyes to shield them from the dust fall. Yet his hand was no higher than his forehead when it struck the ceiling lamp. Fisher scraped his knuckles across his eyes again to clear them. The ceiling bulged downward. The light shade that hung from it was of a reddish brown glass in the shape of a globe. He saw it now press down against his chest. The wire had been as thick as a little finger, now it became engorged as some fluid appeared to pump from the ceiling into it. Even the light bulb swam with a luminous green liquid as it crushed down on him. He tried to slide sideways across the mattress to escape it. Only now the walls flowed inward over the bed to enclose him. The once smooth surfaces were dimpled. Moisture seeped through the red wallpaper to stand in beads on the material. Everything became distorted, enlarged … morbidly enlarged. He could see the weave in the paper. Falling dust particles were the size of salt grains. The light bulb inflated. The metal collar that attached the glass vessel with its element had swollen. It pressed against Fisher’s upper chest. He could even read the name of the manufacturer stamped there, only the letters bulged sickeningly from the metal like diseased fingers that had inflated to grotesque dimensions. AXXLYTE. He couldn’t take his eyes from the word. Not that there was choice now. He couldn’t move his head. The walls o
f the room pressed inward to crush him. The pain in his chest was unbearable. He longed to cry out. As much in disgust at the wall with its mucous-like sheen. I’m going to die. The thought seared him like a lightning flash. I’m going to die now. And I can’t make anyone hear me. The walls were touching his face when he realized this was his last chance. He couldn’t take a lungful of air, but he knew he had to shout. If only to express rage at having his life crushed from him like a woodlice ground under the heel of a boot. This time he ignored the burning presence of the dust in his throat. With the last few cubic inches of air in his lungs he yelled. The effect was like yelling into a box full of blankets; the sound absorbed the moment it escaped his mouth.
He knew he had to try again, only this time the pressure was too extreme to inflate his lungs. Tears ran down his face. What light reached him through the engulfing folds of the wall began to die. Darkness poured into the tiny void occupied by his head. A dwindling void at that. The clock chimes rang out. A pulse of brassy sound. Then … a rushing, swirling sensation. An impression of a huge physical presence retreating with such speed that currents of air raced to fill the vacuum. Light hit him with the suddenness of a slap in the face.
‘Fisher! What’s the matter?’
Gasping for air, rubbing the dust from his eyes with the sheet, Fisher struggled into a sitting position. He sucked air into his lungs like he’d been sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool for the last five minutes.
‘Fisher? Are you OK?’ A figure stepped through the dazzling light toward him.
‘Marko?’
‘What on earth’s wrong?’
‘It’s the walls … the house …’ He gasped for air. ‘It was falling on me.’
‘Falling?’ Marko chuckled. ‘You’ve been having a bad dream.’