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Several weeks following the death of a close friend, I started walking alone at night. I was having trouble sleeping, and I think it was a way of trying to reclaim that time for myself. Instead of lying in the darkness remembering Nigel, feeling regret that we’d let the time between meetings stretch further each year, I took to the streets. There was nothing worse than staring at the ceiling and seeing all the bad parts of my life mapped there in cracks, spider webs and the trails of a paint brush. I thought perhaps walking in the dark might help me really think.
On the fifth night of wandering the streets, I saw the woman.
I was close to the centre of town. It was raining, and the few working streetlights cast speckled, splashed patterns across the pavement, giving the impression that nothing was still in the silent night. Over the past hour I’d seen several people. One was a night worker—a nurse or fireman, perhaps—hurrying along the street wearing a backpack and with a definite destination in mind. A couple were youths, so drunk that they could barely walk or talk. One was a homeless woman I’d seen before. Two dogs accompanied her like shadows, and she muttered to herself too quietly for me to hear.
They all saw me. The worker veered around me slightly, the youths muttered and giggled, and the homeless woman’s dogs paused and sniffed in my direction.
But the new woman didn’t look or act like everyone else. At three or four in the morning, anyone left out in the streets wanted to be alone. Closeness was avoided, and other than perhaps a curt nod, no contact was made. It was as if darkness brought out mysteries and hidden stories in people and made them solid, and that suited me just fine. I wasn’t out there to speak to anyone else; I was attempting to talk to myself.
There was something about her that immediately caught my attention. Walking in a world of her own, she followed no obvious route through the heavy rain, moving back and forth across the silent main street, sometimes walking on the pavement and sometimes the road. The weather did not appear to concern her. Even though it was summer, the rain was cool and the night cooler, but she walked without a coat or jacket of any kind. She wore loose trousers and a vest top, and I really shouldn’t have followed her.
But Nigel told me to. It was his voice I heard in my head saying, Wonder what she’s up to? He had always been curious and interested in other people, the one most likely to get chatting to strangers if we went for a drink. Last time I’d seen him he’d been more garrulous than ever, and I wondered if that was a way of hiding his deeper problems and fears. He could say so much, but still didn’t know how to ask for help.
The woman drifted from the main street to a narrower road between shops, and I followed. I held back a little—I had no wish to frighten or trouble her—but tried to make sure I kept her in sight. The rain was falling heavier now, and I had to throw up my hood to shield my eyes and face. The side street was not lit. Rain blanketed the night, making everything even darker and giving a constant shimmer to reality. Her movements were nebulous and fluid, slipping in and out of the darkness like a porpoise dancing through waves.
To my left and right, large spaces opened up. These were the service yards of big shops, covered delivery and storage areas that I barely noticed if walking these streets during the day. Now, they were pitch-black burrows where anything might exist, and I was pleased when the woman passed them by.
As she neared a smaller street, she paused. I also stopped, tucking in close to a wall. I suddenly felt uncomfortable following her. I was no threat, but no one else would believe that. If people saw me stalking the woman, they might think the worst. If she saw me, I might frighten her.
I was about to turn and walk back the way I’d come when something gave me pause.
The street ahead was a place I knew well, home to a series of smaller, independent shops, a couple of nice pubs, and a few restaurants. Nigel and I had eaten and drunk there, and I’d walked that way more times than I could recall. In the stormy night, it glowed with reflected neon from shop windows. A rush of memories washed over me, and I gasped.
The woman seemed to hear. She tilted her head slightly, then walked out into this narrower road. I followed. I had the sudden sense that I was witnessing something secret. I felt like an intruder, emerging from my safe, warm home to stroll dark streets I knew nothing about.
During the day, this place was a bustling centre of commerce and fun. Now it was a whole new world.
By the time I moved out onto the street, the woman had paused beside a series of bronze sculptures on plinths. They’d been placed fifteen years before as part of the millennium celebrations, and I hardly ever noticed them. Seeing them at night, flowing with water that shimmered and reflected weak light, gave them a strange form of life.
The woman was staring past the sculptures and into the mouth of a narrow alley. I knew the place. It was a dead-end passageway between a fast-food joint and a newsagents. I’d stumbled down there once years ago, drunk, a young woman holding onto my arm as if I could be more stable than her. I had vague memories of what we’d done. Shambolic, clumsy sex amongst split bags of refuse and broken bottles did not make me particularly proud, and I’d only ever spoken of that moment with Nigel.
As I wondered what her interest might be in that grubby place, and just what it was about her that troubled me, she began to take off her clothes.
I caught my breath and pulled back around the corner. I felt unaccountably guilty witnessing the woman’s shedding of clothing, even though she was doing it in the middle of the street. Her shoes came off first, then her vest and trousers. Naked, she stretched her arms to the air and let the rain run across her body. She might have been beautiful.
Rain flowed into my eyes. I wiped them and looked again. There was something wrong.
The woman was moving past the bronze statues and heading towards the entrance to the alley. Her motion seemed strange. She drifted rather than walked, limbs swinging slightly out of time, her movements not quite human. Her pale skin grew darker. Her hair became a more solid cap around her head. She slowed before the alley—hesitant, or relishing the moment—then stepped into its shadows.
As she passed out of sight, I had the very real sense that she was no longer there.
I ran into the night.
––––––––
“And you ran all the way home?”
“Yeah.”
“Dude. You. Running.”
I laughed. “Who’d have thunk it?”
Ashley licked her finger and used it to pick up cake crumbs from her plate. Finger still in her mouth, she caught my attention and raised an eyebrow. I rolled my eyes. Ash had been my best friend since we were both babies, and although I couldn’t help but acknowledge her beauty, I’d never been drawn to her in that way.
“Still not sleeping?” she asked.
“No. Not well at all.”
“Hence the walking at night.”
I nodded.
“You’re very, very weird.”
We both sipped at our coffees, comfortable in our silence. The café around was filled with conversation and soft music, merging into a background noise that kept our own chat private.
“Maybe she was a prostitute.”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
I nodded.
“So you’d recognise one?” She had that cheeky glint in her eyes, and I couldn’t help but smile. Ashley called herself shallow, but I knew that wasn’t true at all. She was simply someone who knew how to regulate her depths. She’d been a levelling force in my life forever, and never more than since Nigel stepped from that ledge.
“It’s only around the corner,” I said. “Will you come with me?”
“And search for the mysterious vanishing woman? You bet!”
We left the café. It had stopped raining and the town was alive with lunchtime buzz. Ash and I met for lunch at least once each week, working within ten minutes of each other making it easy. I dreaded her leaving to work elsewhere. She’d mentioned it once or twice, and I knew that she’d had a couple of interviews. It was only a matter of time. Ash was not someone that life held back, and the world was calling.
“It will get easier,” she said, hooking her arm through mine as we walked.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Wish I’d known him better.”
I nodded. Felt a lump in my throat and swallowed it down. “Me too.”
As we approached the place where I’d seen the woman earlier that morning, I heard the cheerful shouts and laughter of a group of school kids. They were maybe nine or ten, posing around the bronze statues as teachers took photos. They probably shouldn’t have been up on the plinths, but no one would tell them to get down. Who would intrude in such excitement and joy?
I headed past the statues and children, aiming for the alley between the newsagents and the fast-food joint, which was doing a busy trade. People queued out the door. A young woman emerged from the alley, wearing an apron with the takeaway’s name emblazoned across the front. She offered us a quick smile, then pushed past the queue and back into the shop. I felt a release of tension from my shoulders, a relaxing in my gut. Ash must have felt it too.
“See?” she said. “No gruesome murders.”
I turned to her and nodded, and then something caught my eye. A litter bin stood beside a bench close to the statues, and splayed across its lip was a dirtied white vest.
“Oh,” I said. I blinked, remembering the woman lifting the vest up over her head.
“What?” Ash asked.
I pointed at the vest. “Why wouldn’t she dress again afterwards?” After what, I did not say, or even wish to consider. She must have walked home naked. If she had walked home at all.
I headed for the alley, and Ash came with me. It smelled of piss. No surprise there. But it also smelled of rain, fresh and sharp, even though it had stopped raining well before I’d finished running home eight hours before.
“Delightful,” Ash said. She stepped over a pool of vomit on the ground.
It was unremarkable, a narrow alley with a dead end thirty feet in, dirty rendered wall on one side, old bare brick on the other. A couple of metal doorways were set into the walls, without handles and looking as if they’d been locked for decades. There were a few black bin bags, one of them split and gnawed at by night creatures—cats, rats, foxes. A pile of dog crap held a smeared shoe print. A dead rat festered against the blank end wall.
“She didn’t come out again,” I said.
“Not while you were watching.”
“But her clothes.”
Ash shrugged.
I walked the length of the alley, fearing what I might see, eager to make sure there was nothing there. I shifted a couple of rubbish bags with my foot, releasing a foul stink that made me gag.
“Jesus, what a wonderful smell you’ve found!” Ash said.
I covered my mouth with the collar of my coat and went in deeper, shoving bags aside with my feet. Old wrappers spilled, slick with rotting food. Things crawled in there, dark and wet, reminding me of the nude woman flowing with rainwater, silvery, flexing and shifting like something inhuman. I bent down to look closer and saw a nest of slugs, leaving trails like slow echoes and pulsing like something’s insides.
“Weird,” Ash said. She was looking at a spread of brickwork close to the ground, a few feet from the end of the alley. I went to her and stood close, our coats brushing. She grabbed my hand.
“What?”
“Don’t know,” she said. She shivered. “Let’s go.”
“Hang on.” I crouched, leaning in closer, trying not to block out precious light so that I could see what she’d seen.
“Come on. Let’s go.”
“What is that?” I asked. But neither of us could answer.
The bricks were old and crumbling, covered with black moss, joints clotted with decades of filth. This wall had never seen sunlight, and perpetual shadow had driven darkness into the brick faces and the mortar in between. Across a spread of brickwork, something protruded. It looked like a swathe of dark pink pustules, solid-looking rather than soft, dry and dusty even though the brickwork around them was damp. I reached out to touch, but Ash grabbed my arm.
“What if it’s poisonous?” she asked.
“It’s just the bricks,” I said. “Frost-blown, maybe. They’ve deformed over time.” I reached out again, but didn’t quite touch. Something held me back. Something about the shape of the feature, the way it swept up from the ground and spanned several courses of bricks.
It looked like an arm reaching from the ground, embedded in the wall and only just protruding. At its end, a clenched fist of brickwork protruded more than elsewhere, cracked and threatening to disintegrate at any moment.
I wondered what that fist might hold.
Ash grabbed my coat and pulled me upright, shoving me before her along the alley and back into the street. “It should be cleaned,” she said. But she didn’t enter the fast-food shop or the newsagents to share this opinion with them. Instead, she headed back to work. I stood there for a while looking at the discarded clothing in the litter bin. It was slowly being buried beneath lunchtime refuse—coffee cups, crisp bags, sandwich wrappers. Soon it would be completely out of sight. Forgotten.
I wondered where the woman had gone.
––––––––
“I’m sorry,” Ash said. She’d called me after work, on the way to her boyfriend’s place.
“For what?” I was in the park, beyond which lay the old terraced house where I lived. It was raining again, and a few umbrellas and coats hid anonymous people as they took various paths home.
“I just...that place at lunchtime felt a bit odd. Didn’t it?”
“ Yeah.” But I couldn’t quite verbalise how the alley had felt strange. Like somewhere else, I might have said. The idea crossed my mind that I’d seen a ghost, but I had never believed in them. I was a rationalist, an atheist, and until Nigel’s death I’d been happy and comfortable with that. Since he’d taken his own life, I had been struggling. Not for him, because he was gone now, flickering out from a wonderful, expansive consciousness to nothing in the space of a pavement impact. But for me. All that was left of Nigel was in my mind, and the minds of those who loved him. That didn’t seem much to leave behind.
I thought of those weird shapes across the rotting brickwork, blown clay in the shape of a rising, clasping arm and hand.
“Max says hi.”
“Hi, Max.”
“See you soon. And don’t go wandering tonight. Weather forecast is awful, and you need sleep.”
“Damn right. Bottle of wine, then bed, like a good boy.”
“Good boy.” Ash hung up, leaving me alone in the park with the rain, and the puddles, and the memory of a time me, Nigel and a few others came here to play football when we were kids. I thought I heard his laugh. But it was someone else, and I started walking again before whoever was laughing caught up with me.
––––––––
Wind roared around my house and made the roof creak, rain hammered against the closed windows, and next door’s dog barked, waiting for them to come home. I tried to sleep for a while, but failed miserably. The brief buzz I’d had from the bottle of wine was gone, melted away into the darkness of my bedroom. I lay awake for a while staring into the shadows.
Then I got up, dressed, slipped on my raincoat that was still wet from walking home from work, and went out into the night.
It was almost two in the morning.
I walked into the city. I lived in a suburb, but it was only fifteen minutes through the park, past the hospital and into town. All that time I saw no other pedestrians, and only a few cars. Some of them were police vehicles, and one slowed when it passed me, a pale face peering from the window obscured and made fluid by rain impacting the glass. I stared back, hiding nothing. The car moved on.
I was heading along the main street, intending to visit that alley again. There had been something strange about the woman, but I found that I was not afraid. I had no idea why. Maybe it had been Ash’s strange, repulsed reaction to that feature on the wall, and my realisation that I was less troubled than her.
The weather was atrocious. Wind howled along the town’s main thoroughfares like a beast unleashed, revelling in the fact that there was no one there to view its nighttime cavortings. It whistled through the slats of fixed benches, rattled shutters on jewellers’ shops, and flung litter into piles in doorways and against wet walls. Rain lashed almost horizontally, spiking into my face and against my front, the coat hardly any barrier at all.
I leaned into the wind and rain, working my way through the town, and the night was alive around me.
I saw a few people. It was earlier than I usually chose to walk, and a couple of the later clubs had only kicked out an hour or so before. A few drunks huddled against the weather and tried to remember where they lived. Some were in pairs, more alone. I also saw the homeless woman with the dogs. The hounds looked my way, but I don’t think they growled, or if they did the wind carried the sound away. Maybe they were growing used to me.
There’s a part of town where five roads converge. People call it a square, though it isn’t really. It’s disordered and accidental, the same as most people who pass through from midnight onwards. That night it was a wilder place, and as I approached along the main street I had to stop and stare. The square seemed primeval. Great cliffs of brick, stone and glass rose up on all sides, channelling torrents of wind and rain that met in the middle as if in battle. A tornado of litter and rain twisted back and forth, throwing off its contents and sucking more in. The sound was staggering, the effect intimidating. I could see shop windows flexing beneath the onslaught, as if the buildings themselves were breathing great, slow, considered breaths.
I stood there for a while just watching, and then as if carried like shreds of refuse on the storm, memories of Nigel came in.
We cross the square, arms around each other’s shoulders. It’s a Saturday afternoon and we’ve been in the pub all day, ostensibly to watch a big rugby match, though neither of us is really into sport. The atmosphere was electric, the pub a sea of shirts of two colours, good-natured banter fuelled by beer turning into hearty singing, and much friendly mockery of the losing team. It’s been refreshing and upbeat, and Nigel has said that tribal warfare has never been so much fun. We’re going to buy food. We head down one of the narrower streets—
—and Nigel reels from the blow, staggering back into a doorway as the big, thick thug storms after him. I’ve never been so afraid in my life. But that’s Nigel getting picked on for no reason. We simply walked the wrong way and met the wrong nutter. He’s drunk, that’s obvious, and though I’m not one to judge by first appearances, he looks like he likes a fight.
He launches another punch at Nigel, then I’m piling into the bastard from behind, shoving him forward as hard as I can into the shop window. Glass cracks. He half-turns to glare at me, murder in his eyes and blood running from a cut in his forehead. Nigel lands a punch on his nose, a pile-driving crunch that we’ll talk about for years to come—
—we’re following two girls who have been smiling at us all afternoon. We’re too old to stay at home, too young to hit the pubs, so town is our afternoon playground, and today feels special. Nigel is the good looking one, and both girls have been eyeing him. I’ll become used to playing second fiddle to my friend.
I sighed, and my breath was lost to the storm like so many memories. His death still hit me like this, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever grow used to it.
Buffeted by high winds, soaked to the skin, I decided to make my way home.
The shape started across the square just as I took my first step. It was a man, perhaps late fifties, long grey hair swirling around his head and coat flapping in the wind. Yet none of his movements seemed quite right. His hair moved a little too slowly, like flexing wire on a stop-motion mannequin instead of real hair. His coat seemed to shift and wave in slow motion. He paced across the square with a definite destination in mind.
He looked just like the woman I’d seen the night before. Out of place, removed from his turbulent surroundings, walking his own path through a city that seemed unable to contain him.
I followed.
Walking across the square, emerging from the shelter of the buildings, I submitted myself to the full force of the storm. It was as if with every step I took, the storm focussed all of its attention on me, driving along streets and roads and smashing together at that violent junction. I staggered left and right, arms spread for balance, the hood of my coat alternately filling with wind and acting like a sail, then flattening against my scalp like a second skin. I forged on, head down, thinking of arctic explorers fighting against harsh gales to reach their goal. Rain stung my face. I could hardly see anything, squinting at the ground just ahead of me to see where I was going. I crossed the paved area, then a road, and then finally I felt the storm lessen as I neared another building. Hugging myself to its shelter, I looked ahead and saw the man. He was barely visible, a hundred metres ahead and already passing into the night. Winds whipped around him. Rain hammered down, dancing sworls in weak streetlights.
Between one blink and the next, the man was gone.
I strode ahead, moving fast to try and catch up. The storm screamed at me, threatening or warning. I paid no heed. I needed to see the man again, follow him, try to talk with him. I walked back and forth along the street, passing closed shops and cafés, and saw nothing. I ventured into doorways in case he had fallen and was hidden beneath piles of wind-blown litter. When I faced a narrow arcade, I pressed against the metal grille securing its entrance and tried to see deeper.
The night seemed even darker in there, and more still. The shadows were heavy. Watching, I also felt watched.
I took a couple of steps back. My breath was stolen by the wind. Glass smashed in the distance. A car alarm erupted somewhere out of sight, and part of a large advertising hoarding bounced along the road towards the square, shedding parts of itself as it went.
Even if the arcade was not locked up, I would not have wanted to go that way.
I hurried back through the square and started towards home. I saw a couple of other people, and they avoided me as surely as I avoided them.
I slept for three hours that night, naked and cold in my bed with wet clothes piled beside me. Dawn woke me. The man haunted my dreams even as I lay in bed awake, still walking, grey hair and coat shifting to some force other than the storm.
––––––––
Morning brought relative calm. As I ate breakfast I watched the news, and saw that the storm had wreaked havoc across the country. Damage was in the millions. Miraculously, no one had died.
I chewed cereal that tasted like cardboard and thought about that.
No one had died.
It was a Saturday, and as I followed my previous night’s route into town, the streets soon started to bustle with cheerful shoppers, gangs of kids laughing and joking, and people all with somewhere to go.
I had somewhere to go as well. The square was a very different place from just a few hours before, full of people and life, none of them aware of the shattering storm that had existed there so recently. The storm was a dangerous animal, come and gone again, and it had visited with almost no one knowing.
Across the square and along the street where the man had disappeared, I expected to see his discarded coat slowly being buried in a litter bin or draped over the back of a bench. There was nothing.
The arcade was open. Home to a café, a clothes shop, a candle shop and a second-hand bookseller, it wasn’t somewhere I ventured frequently. In daylight, it looked less threatening. I stepped inside. A waft of perfumed air hit me from the candle shop, followed by the scent of frying bacon. It felt safe and warm.
I tripped, stumbled, almost fell, and a youth reached out and grabbed my arm to stop me hitting the ground.
“You all right, mate?”
“Yes,” I said, startled. “Thanks.”
“No worries. They should fix that.” He nodded vaguely at my feet then went on his way, headphones in and thumb stroking his phone.
I looked down. The mosaic floor covering was humped as if pushed up by something from below. Yellow paint had been sprayed across the area some time ago, either a warning to beware or an indication of somewhere that needed to be fixed. No one had fixed it. The paint was faded and chipped, worn away by thousands of feet.
“Hey!” I called after the kid. “You know what happened here?” But he had his headphones in and was already leaving the arcade.
I frowned and moved sideways, shifting my perspective of the raised area. The mosaic tiles weren’t only pushed up a little from below, forming the dangerous swelling that I’d tripped on. There was something in their clay shapes.
It looked like a face.
I gasped, closed my eyes, turned away and leaned against a wall. When I opened my eyes again I was looking through a window at an old man sitting inside the café, nursing a mug of tea. He stared at me, and past me, then looked down at his phone.
I glanced down at the ground again.
It might have been a face. The curve of one cheek, forehead, the hollow of an eye socket, and splayed out behind it was a flow of irregularities in the old tiles that resembled long, grey hair.
“Oh, God,” I said. I wanted to grab someone and ask them if they saw what I saw. But if they didn’t, what then? What could I say, ask, believe?
I took a photo of the raised area then hurried away, because there was someone I could ask. Ash was my leveller. She would hear me out.
––––––––
As it turned out, Ash had already phoned that morning and left a message on my landline.
“Hey. Give me a call. Got some news.”
I made some coffee first. Every step towards home had calmed my panic, and I was feeling more and more foolish over what I thought I’d seen. As I waited for the coffee to brew, every second that passed seemed to bring me closer to normality once more. Looking at my phone helped. The photo I’d taken showed nothing amiss, other than a slightly misshaped area in the arcade floor. However I viewed it, whether I zoomed in or not, there was no face.
But that’s right, I thought. Because it’s daytime. They only come out at night.
The idea came from nowhere, and was chilling.
The phone rang as I was pouring coffee. I jumped and spilled some, cursed, snapped up the phone.
“Hey, it’s me,” Ash said. “Fancy a coffee?”
“I just made one.”
“Right. Can I come over?”
“Er...why?” It wasn’t often that Ash and I saw each other on the weekends. She was usually doing stuff with Max, and I was busy with the football club, or meeting friends, or travelling down to Devon to visit my family. Dad would grumble and talk about politics. Mum would ask if I’d met a nice girl yet.
“Max and I are moving away. I got that job in Wales. I heard yesterday.”
“Oh. Wow.”
“ You okay?”
“Yeah, sure. Of course. Delighted for you!”
Ash was silent for a while. “You go walking last night?”
“No.” Once uttered, I couldn’t take back the lie. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe because Ash had already started to move away, and to include her in my troubles would be selfish. She’d wanted this for a long time. That didn’t mean I had to be happy, but I could still be pleased for her.
“So I can come over, tell you all about it?”
“Come on over.”
“I’ll bring cake.”
“You know me so well.”
––––––––
“The city eats people,” she said. She took a bite of cake as if to illustrate the fact. “We’re communal animals, but we’re not meant to be somewhere with so many other people. Why do you think places like London feel so impersonal? Live in a small village, a hamlet, know almost everyone there, that’s when you’re happiest. Here...it’s like we’ve created a monster and we’re feeding it every day.”
Her comments hit me hard. They sounded like her trying to defend her decision to leave for somewhere more rural, and that wasn’t like Ash—she was always headstrong and positive. Maybe she was worried about me.
“You think that’s why Nigel did what he did?”
Ash raised her eyebrows, as if she’d never even considered it.
“I think Nigel was a sensitive soul. Life was too much for him, and living in the city didn’t help at all. But no, he had his own real problems, only aggravated by being here. What I mean is...people disappear. One day they’re here, the next they’re gone, and it’s as if they’ve vanished into nothing. Know what I mean? The city eats them, spits nothing out, and eventually they’re just forgotten.”
“That’s pretty depressing.”
“I don’t want to disappear,” she said.
“You never could. You’re too...wonderful.” I grinned, bashful at the compliment. But she saw how serious I was, because she didn’t take the piss.
“You should leave too.” She tapped her engagement ring against her mug.
“I’m...not sure I could.”
“Really? You love this place so much?”
I shook my head. No, I didn’t love the city at all. I just couldn’t imagine anywhere else feeling like home.
We chatted some more, then talked about her leaving party which she’d be throwing in a couple ‘of weeks’ time. She wanted me to DJ there. I said I was honoured, and I’d only do it if I could throw in some AC/DC. She hated them, but relented.
As she finished her cake I thought of the city eating people, and the outline of a face in broken tiles, and the bubbled surface of blown bricks in the shape of an arm with clenched fist.
––––––––
Now that I had an idea of what to look for, I saw the city in a whole new light.
That Sunday afternoon I walked. There were plenty of people around because many of the shops remained open, and the place felt relatively safe. But as time passed by, and I saw more, that sense of safety began to evaporate.
By the end of the afternoon I felt like a meal in the jaws of a beast.
I saw distortion in an old swimming pool’s caged-over window, and if I looked at just the right angle I could make out the shadow of a naked torso in the imperfect glass.
At the base of an old hotel’s side wall, where access chutes into the basement had been concreted over, two knotted protuberances might have been hands with fingers broken off. Clasping for air forever, the stumpy remains of digits pointing accusingly at everyone left alive.
The stepped marble plinth of a war memorial had been damaged by vehicle impacts and the effects of frost, but there was another imperfection in its structure that became obvious to me now. The curve of a back, ribs plain to those who could see, one shoulder blade arched as if the buried subject were swimming against its solid surroundings.
Finally I decided to go to the place where Nigel had died. I had only been there once since his death, and facing the reality of the scene had been too disturbing. Now, there was more I had to see.
I would go at night. I dreaded what I might find.
––––––––
It was three in the morning, and the homeless woman was there with her dogs once more. The creatures glanced at me, then as I started to approach they pulled on their leashes, one whining, the other snarling.
“I haven’t got anything!” the woman said. The fear in her voice was awful.
“I’m no harm,” I said. “I just want to—”
“What are you doing here at three in the morning, then?” she snapped.
“What are you?”
She didn’t answer this. Instead, she tugged on the leads and settled her dogs. We were outside a pub, long-since closed for the night, and she leaned against some handrailing that delineated its outdoor smoking area.
“I’m walking because someone I know died,” I said. “A friend. And I want to know . . .”Whether the city took him, I wanted to say, but I wasn’t sure how that might sound. “I’m going to see...”
“Plenty wrong with the city at night,” the woman said. “During the day, people keep it alive. Probably best you go home.”
“ But I’ve seen you before. You’re always walking.”
“I know where not to go.”
“ How?”
“Experience.” She muttered something else under her breath. I couldn’t see her face properly, and I didn’t want to go any closer in case that looked threatening. Perhaps she was talking to her dogs.
“I’m going to the old station building,” I said. I hoped that might encourage some comment, positive or negative.
“Hmm.”
“Should I?” I asked.
I saw her silhouette shrug. “You should just go home.” She started walking away and the dogs followed. When I tried to trail after her the animals turned and growled, both of them this time. I slowed, then stopped.
“Why?” I asked, expecting no reply.
“Make a habit of this and the city will notice you.” Then she was gone, keeping to the middle of the street and avoiding the deep shadows beside buildings.
The night was quiet and still, no storms, no rain, and on the way through town I saw several other walkers. I wasn’t sure who or what they were. I did not follow them. I was also careful to keep my distance, partly because they scared me, but also because they deserved their privacy and peace.
I carried on towards the old station building. It was six storeys high, converted into an office block a decade before, and Nigel had worked in an advertising agency on the second floor. That morning he’d taken the stairs, walked past the door exiting the staircase into his studio, and continued to the top. The maintenance door into the plant room on the roof should have been locked, but he’d planned his morning enough to make sure he had a key.
Once out on the roof, no one knew what he had seen, said or done. There was no note. Three people in the street below had seen him step up onto the parapet. Without hesitation he had walked out into nothing.
Where he’d hit the ground there was a raised planting bed at the refurbished building’s entrance. He’d struck its wall, breaking his back. I went there now, a torch in my hand, dread in my heart.
At every moment I expected to see Nigel walking somewhere ahead of me. The echo of a man taken by the city and clasped to its dark, concrete heart, out of place and no longer of this world. But I was alone.
I searched for half an hour—the brick paved area around the entrance, the planter wall, the soil and shrubs of the planter itself. But I found no sign of Nigel. As every minute passed by my sense of apprehension lifted some more.
He’s not here. The city didn’t get him. It didn’t eat him.
People had seen him jump, and perhaps that made a difference. He hadn’t died alone with only the cold concrete for company. His body hadn’t lain there for hours or days afterwards, night crawling across him, darkness coalescing around him. Even dead, Nigel had remained in the human world, because his suicide was born of it.
Though still sad at his death, I felt relieved that he had escaped something worse.
My mood buoyed, I started for home as dawn peered across the built-up skyline. Yet something was different. The skyline I saw looked slightly out of skew, as if new buildings had risen during the night and others had been taken down. The silence remained, broken only by cautious footsteps echoing from unknown walls. Occasional strangers avoided each other’s glances. But there was now something else that I had never noticed before. In the silence that hung over the city, a terrible intelligence held its breath.
As I reached home, I feared that the city had noticed me at last.