The Nonesuch and Others (6 page)

Diary, I make no claim to understand any of this. No claim whatsoever…That’s probably because I’m drinking again and can’t seem to think straight…Or maybe I’m just too sensitive, too easily disturbed.

I mean, I really don’t
want
to understand it, you know?

I don’t want to, but I think I do…

I’ve often heard it said
that lightning never strikes twice. Oh really? Then how about three times? Or perhaps, in some unknown fashion, I’m some kind of unusually prominent lightning conductor whose prime function is to absorb something of the physical and psychological shocks of these
by no means rare
events, thus shielding the rest of humanity and keeping them out of the line of fire. Something like that, anyway.

Or there again perhaps not. My being there didn’t much help Barmy Bill of Barrows Hill that time in old London Town. It was more like I was an observer…except even now I can’t be sure of what I saw, what really happened. Perhaps I was drinking too much, in which case it could have been a very bad attack of the dreaded delirium tremens. That’s what I tell myself anyway, because it’s a whole lot easier than recalling to mind the actual details of that morning when the police required me to identify Barmy Bill’s dramatically—in fact his radically,
hideously
—altered body where it had been dumped in that skip on Barchington, just off The Larches…

Anyway, let’s stop there, because that’s another story and somewhere I really don’t want to go, not in any detail. But if we’re still talking lightning strikes, then Barmy Bill and the Thin People would be numero uno’s Numero Uno: my personal Number One, my first but by no means my last.

Or maybe we should be talking something else. There’s this dictionary definition that comes to mind: “nonesuch: a
unique
, unparalleled or extraordinary thing.” And if we break that down into its component parts:

“Unique.” But doesn’t that describe a one-off? So how many nonesuches are there supposed to be? I mean is a nonesuch, like a lightning strike, only supposed to occur once? Well not in my case, brother! No, not at all in my case. But as for “unparalleled” and “extraordinary thing(s)”: those at least are parts of the definition that I can go along with. But definitely.

Putting it simply, there are some weird things in this old world, and then there are some
really
weird things—nonesuches of a different colour, as it were—and it seems to me that indeed I am destined to attract or collide with them. Not so much a lightning conductor as a magnet, maybe? Or perhaps the weirdness itself is the magnet and I’m simply an iron filing, unable to escape its attraction.

High-flown, fanciful analogies? Well, perhaps…

Anyway and whichever, the nightmarish fate of Barmy Bill of Barrows Hill at the hands of the Thin People was one such occurrence—my first collision with a nonesuch or nonesuches, so to speak—which seems almost to have been instrumental in jarring the rest of these things into monstrous motion…

I
used to keep a diary,
but no longer…because it’s not easy to forget things once you write them down. And there are things I would much prefer to forget.

So why am I writing this? Well, maybe I’m hoping it will be cathartic, that I’ll purge myself of some of the after-effects, the lingering emotional baggage and psychoses—especially the nightmares and constant panic attacks—the fear, even in broad daylight, that something terrifying knows who I am, and where I live, and might be waiting for me just around the next corner.

You see, no sooner had I got—or thought I had got—Barmy Bill’s weird fate out of my mind, my system, than up popped the next nonesuch: the Clown on Stilts. I had been drinking again—“under the influence of my peers,” as we frequently tend to excuse ourselves—and so, once again, I can’t be one hundred per cent sure of what I saw, imagined, nightmared, or whatever.

But I had moved out of London (
had
to move away from Barrows Hill and memories of Barmy Bill) to Newcastle in the northeast. There was a fairground, which I’m sure was real enough, a scruffy little girl with a yappy little dog, a troupe of really strange people from the Freak House marquee, and finally—as if emerging from nowhere, or from the darkness beyond the fairground’s perimeter—there was the Clown on Stilts.

But that’s enough, I won’t go into it except to say that it ended quite horribly, with that little girl out in the midnight fields, running like a wild thing, and calling…calling—

—Calling in a panic for her suddenly vanished dog: “Woofy! Woofy!”

And I’m sure I remember thinking through my alcoholic haze,
You
won’t find Woofy, you snotty little girl. I don’t think you’re
ever
going to find Woofy!

Later there was evidence of sorts—evidence of a monstrous incursion and a dreadful abduction—but no, I won’t go there. As in the case of my first nonesuch, I have said enough…

As for this latest thing,
lightning strike Number Three, as I’m inclined to call it: this time I’ll try to tell it all; catharsis and what have you. But I have to admit that I was once more under the influence, this time for the last time—definitely. Oh yes, for I’ve been stone cold sober ever since, which is how I intend to stay despite that I feel justified in saying I have been sorely tempted. But for all that I was intoxicated at the time, still it’s barely possible I
might
have been dreaming…no, let’s make that nightmaring.

I should start at the beginning:

Just as lightning strike Number One had prompted me to move out of London, so after my experience at the fairground in Newcastle I once again felt the need to change my address: in fact to depart
urgently
from the north-east in its entirety. I would head south again—but
not
the south-east or anywhere close to the capital.

I had been doing fairly well as a reporter with a newspaper in Newcastle and still fancied myself a journalist. Fortunately there was an opening with a small regional newspaper in Exeter. I applied for the job, got it, and moved into cheap, reasonably comfortable lodgings. All went well; inside twelve months I was settled in; I accepted the more or less menial or general work that at first I was required to perform around the office, and despite my newcomer status my co-workers accepted and appeared to like me.

Summer came around and apart from the city itself I hadn’t yet found time to explore the region. In fact in all my twenty-nine years on this planet I had never before visited the south-west; Devon and Cornwall were completely unknown territories to me. But now, settled in my new job, and having purchased a five-year-old set of wheels with the proceeds of a small win on the national lottery—a win which seemed to confirm the fact that my luck was finally changing—I decided to have a look around the local countryside, in particular the dramatic Cornish coastline, and took a week out of my annual fortnight’s allowance. I would try for the other week later in the year, probably around Christmas or possibly New Year.

The weather was disappointing; Land’s End was drab, and the moors more so. Unseasonably cold and blustery winds blew in off the sea, and even a locale as legendary as Tintagel, perched on its storm-weathered cliffs, looked uninviting, with much of its antique mystery lost to a dank, swirling mist.

Feeling let down, a little depressed, I drove south across country towards Torbay, and the closer I got to the south coast the more the weather seemed to be improving. So much so that by the time I found myself on the approach road to…well, maybe the name of the town doesn’t matter. And for a fact, I wouldn’t want anyone of an enquiring mind to go exploring there, perhaps seeking the location of lightning strike Number Three. No, that might not be entirely advisable.

And so we get to it…and so
I
got to it:

To the small hotel on a hill looking down on the promenade; where, beyond a sturdy, red stone sea wall, the English Channel glinted azure blue in the warm summer sunlight. The tide was on its way in, sending slow-rolling wavelets that were little more than ripples to break gently on the sandy shore. Blankets, windbreaks and parasols were plentiful above the tidemark; below it some dozens of children braved the shallow water, and a handful of adults with trousers rolled up, or skirts held high, paddled at the very rim of the sea, occasionally stooping to gather seashells.

The scene was peaceful, idyllic, irresistible: I could look at it for hours! And, since several of this small hotel’s rooms had canopied balconies facing the sea, I could probably do just that. A simple sign inside the lobby’s glass doors said “vacancies: rooms available,” which helped me make up my mind. It was high season; many of the hotels were full to brimming; I considered myself fortunate to have discovered this quaint old Victorian place.

Leaving the road and following a sign to the parking lot, I drove carefully down a steep driveway to the rear of this once-handsome, now slightly careworn four-storey building, and there found a small, walled rock garden and swimming pool. Below this vantage point, the tiled roofs of a handful of other establishments—hotels and cafeterias—flanked the road down the hillside to the seafront. Parking my car, I stood admiring the view for a few moments more, then used the hotel’s rear entrance and climbed two flights of stairs to the reception area…

There were two people at the desk: the receptionist, a pleasant German woman in her late twenties, who I later discovered to be the hotel’s general dogsbody, and a pale middle-aged woman, the proprietress, who seemed somewhat nervous and quietly preoccupied. I can’t better describe this first, lasting impression she made on me—with her periods of fitful, apparently involuntary blinking, and the way her hands were wont to flutter like caged birds—except to say she appeared more than a little neurotic. I didn’t notice this immediately, however, for at first it was the German girl who saw to my requirements.

I asked about a room, if possible one with a balcony facing the sea. She checked in a ledger, ran her finger down the page, paused at a certain blank space and frowned. Then with a brief, obligatory smile for me, she turned a curious, enquiring glance on the pale owner of the place. And:

“Room number, er, seven?” she said. But with the inflection or emphasis that she placed on “seven,” it was almost as if she had said “thirteen.”

And it was then that I noticed the other woman’s agitation. Ah!
That’s
the word I was looking for, missing from my previous brief description: her “agitation,” yes! A sort of physical and (however suppressed) mental disquiet. She opened her mouth, and her throat bobbed as if she swallowed, but no word was uttered, just a small dry cough.

I turned back to the German girl. “Room seven? Does it look out across the Channel? Does it have a balcony? I’ll be needing it for four or five days.”

“It is—” the girl began to answer, at which the pale woman found her suddenly urgent voice:

“Seven is a corner room. It only looks half-way out to sea. That is, the view isn’t direct. We usually leave it…we
keep
number seven empty, as a storeroom.” And nodding—blinking and fluttering her hands—she repeated herself: “Yes, we use it as a storeroom…Well, usually.”

Now disappointed and perhaps a little annoyed, I said, “The sign at the main entrance says you have vacancies. That’s why I stopped here. So are you now telling me I’m wasting my time? Or rather that
you
are wasting it, by causing me to stop for nothing?”