Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence Read online

  ‘Face the front.’

  Ron quickly turned back. The tugging sensation continued for a few moments, getting stronger, as if something had its claws in his clothes, or even skin, and was refusing or unable to let go – and then suddenly stopped.

  He heard the old man mutter something, followed by footsteps crunching away in the fallen snow.

  ‘You may turn back towards me now.’

  Ron did so, slowly, surprised to find the old man was still there, now looking at him with a thoughtful expression, his head cocked on one side.

  ‘I can tell that you should not have received the attentions of my associate,’ he said. ‘I shall chastise him for it.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I will give you one piece of advice, in recompense for your troubles. Even when you think you’ve apologized as much as you can, once more never harms. Your story can change. Overnight.’

  Ron watched the man walk away across the parking lot to a large black car in the corner. Despite his age, he seemed to have no difficulty navigating the patches of ice that had proved unavoidably treacherous to Ron.

  Oddly, the old man opened the back door of his car first. He stood with it open, waiting for a moment, as if for a tardy dog, and then closed it, got into the front and drove away.

  Halfway home and already very cold, Ron had an idea. It didn’t seem like an especially good idea, but he couldn’t get it out of his head. He stopped, turned round, and trudged towards downtown instead.

  He went to the Burger King, where Rionda ignored him steadfastly for an hour and a half. Eventually, however, she consented to listen as he said sorry for everything, up to and most definitely including the debacle the previous weekend at her parents’ house.

  Her parents’ bathroom remained a sore point for Rionda, as the army had visited that afternoon and there was growing speculation that it – and the rest of the house, and possibly the ones on either side – might have to be destroyed in the interests of public safety, but Ron was so patently sincere that she couldn’t help but soften.

  He seemed different somehow, too, and when he walked her home at the end of her shift it was Rionda, rather than Ron, who slipped on ice going up the hill leading to her own little house. Ron caught her arm, and she did not fall.

  She kissed him.

  Five months later they were married.

  They will play no further part in our story, but I’m happy to relate that they lived happily ever after.

  Chapter 7

  At around the time Ron arrived downtown, cold and snow-covered, and was plucking up the courage to go into Burger King, the old man in the black linen suit was sitting at the counter in a dark and dangerous basement bar only five streets away. To the casual observer it would have looked as if he was alone. He was not.

  The imp called Vaneclaw was perched on the next seat. Bar stools are not designed for the likes of accident imps, and he kept slipping off. If you’d been able to see him, you might have thought the thing he most resembled was an extremely large mushroom, one of those exotic types, possibly a chanterelle. With a face, though, and spindly little arms and legs, covered in patches of hairy mould, like something you might find lurking at the back of the fridge after several months, and hurriedly throw away. Luckily – in common with all familiars of his class – Vaneclaw was invisible to the normal eye.

  ‘You are a very stupid imp,’ the old man said.

  ‘Oh, I know.’

  The imp did know this. Not only was he stupid on his own account, he came from an unusually stupid family, a line of imps celebrated for greater than usual dimness. His parents had once gone four years without contact, though they were plaguing two people in the same house, because they were too stupid to find their way from one floor to the next. This might have been more excusable had it not been a single-storey dwelling. Vaneclaw’s grandmother was worse, so very dense that not only could she not even remember her own name (consistently referring to herself as ‘that one, right here, where I am’) but she also spent nearly thirty years plaguing herself. (In her defence, after she’d started, it was difficult to stop. Accident imps are sticky. Once they’ve bonded to someone they’re almost impossible to get off.) The entire family was so intellectually torpid that they didn’t even have the sense to apply to be stupidity imps instead, whose job is to cause otherwise smart people to behave stupidly, which seldom involves anything more complicated than access to alcohol and a member of the opposite sex.

  ‘Explain yourself, Vaneclaw.’

  ‘Well, boss. What it is, is this. Once you disappeared—’

  ‘I did not disappear.’

  ‘All right then, well, once you were, I dunno, not around, I was at a loose end. A lot of us were. And at first that was fine, because I’d been accidenting people for a thousand years by then, non-stop, and I didn’t mind the thought of having some time off, right? But after a decade or so, it’s like, I’ve had my holidays, what now? Accidenting’s what I do. So I got back into it, and for ages everything was fine, honest. You should have seen me. It was top stuff. Calamity Central. But then one night I’m in a crowded pub and the woman I’ve been plaguing for the last twenty years has just died in a freak tofu-braising incident and so I’m ready for pastures new, and I spot this geezer. Total git he was. Perfect. So I thought, right mate, you’re mine. Have some of this. And I threw myself at him, claws out. The bastard moved, though. So I flew right past and ended up stuck to the guy who was behind him, that Ron bloke you just pulled me off, who I freely admit did not deserve what I have put him through. But you know how it is – I was stuck.’ Vaneclaw shrugged, causing himself to slip off the stool again, to land on the bar’s dirty concrete floor with a quiet splat.

  The old man waited while he scrambled back up. ‘You’re an idiot,’ he said.

  ‘Couldn’t agree more. But whoa, boss, it’s magic to see you. Let the bad times roll, eh? Where you been, anyway?’

  The old man looked at the imp for a long moment. ‘I fell asleep,’ he said.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘The specifics of how I spend my time are not your concern,’ the man muttered.

  ‘Mine not to reason why, eh? Especially as reasoning has never been my strong suit. Never really understood what it even is, be honest with you.’

  ‘Do that, yes, Vaneclaw.’

  ‘What? Reason?’ The imp looked uncomfortable, as if being asked to do something well above his pay grade.

  ‘No. Be honest with me.’

  ‘Oh, always! But … what about?’

  The old man was looking at him very seriously. ‘Have you been praying? Have you been making sacrifice?’

  ‘Of course I have, guv.’ The imp was bewildered to be asked the question. ‘Morning, noon, and night, even when I was on holiday and not actively accidenting because of, you know, what I said earlier. First thing in the morning, last thing at night, and, well, somewhere around lunchtime, either before or right after, depending, I have prayed every single day to your infernal majesty, unhallowed be your eternal everlasting dreadfulness, et cetera.’

  ‘What about sacrifices?’

  ‘Yes! My every deed and thought is done in your awful name, for a start. Every single time I do something bad or disappointing, slip another mishap someone’s way, I consecrate said deed to the glory of your appalling self.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  The old man seemed to be watching the only other patrons in the bar, a pair of very ugly men at a table in the corner. The men were talking in low tones, and even an imp as unsmart as Vaneclaw could tell they were not good people. After a moment the old man looked away, as if weary of the sight of them – weary, or extremely preoccupied.

  ‘Boss?’

  The man remained silent. The imp waited nervously. If you’d told him when he woke that morning (curled up on the roof of Bad Luck Ron’s house) that he’d be seeing his lord and master that day, he’d have jumped for joy (and fallen straight off the roof). He still fe
lt that way, but increasingly cautious, too. Something was on the old man’s mind, and experience had shown that the kind of things that the big man had on his mind were seldom good. Vaneclaw felt it safer to remain very, very quiet.

  Eventually the old man turned to him. ‘I want you to do two things for me.’

  ‘Anything, boss, you know that.’

  ‘The first is I want you to look into my eyes.’

  Vaneclaw suddenly felt very nervous indeed. He realized that what he’d previously been feeling hadn’t been nervousness after all. It had been … something else. Maybe … solitude, or what was that other one that began with an ‘S’? He couldn’t remember. Speciousness? Didn’t matter. The point was that what he was feeling now was nervousness. The imp knew very well that the old man could cause people to go absolutely shrieking insane merely by glancing at them. Not just humans, either, but imps and snits and demons and full-grown snackulars, whom even Vaneclaw found a bit creepy.

  But, on the other hand, Vaneclaw thought if the old man looked into his eyes and drove him totally walloping bonkers, the imp would be unlikely to be able to do whatever the second thing was going to be, on account of being out of his mind. Saying you were going to ask two things of someone, and then preventing them from being able to even attempt the second, because of the first, was exactly the kind of mistake that Vaneclaw himself might make. But not the old man.

  ‘All right,’ the imp said, and slowly raised his eyes.

  Precisely one minute later, the old man nodded. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I see you speak the truth.’

  The imp was so relieved that he felt as though he’d turned to jelly. It had been a very unpleasant sixty seconds. It was as if an acidic worm with spikes was crawling through every tiny, crooked nook and cranny of what passed for his mind; at times he’d felt also as though he was getting a glimpse in the other direction, seeing fire, and blood, and long-ago dust.

  It was over now, though, and he’d evidently passed the test. ‘So what was the third thing, boss?’

  ‘Second thing, Vaneclaw.’

  ‘Oh yeah, sorry.’

  ‘Go now, throughout the district. Locate every one of our personnel in the area. Every single imp, demon and snackular, each familiar and shadow, soulcutter and schrank. Bring them here. Do it quickly. Do it now.’

  ‘I am so on it, boss.’

  ‘Not while you’re still here.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  The imp slid quickly off the stool and scampered away into the night, leaving the man in the linen suit alone at the bar, looking intensely thoughtful.

  And tired.

  And old.

  Ten minutes later the two ugly men from the table walked up to the counter, having decided that they would like to rob him.

  ‘Look into my eyes,’ the old man said.

  One of the men left the bar five minutes later and killed a family in a house six streets away, before stealing a car and driving it into a wall, dying instantly.

  The other staggered off into the dark, cold night and spent the short remainder of his days living in a box under a bridge, convinced that every time he breathed, his eyeballs filled up with spiders.

  Meanwhile, the old man waited in the bar for the imp to return.

  Chapter 8

  Hannah picked at her food. It wasn’t that she didn’t like it. Everything she’d eaten in the hotel so far – dinner the previous night, breakfast this morning, and now lunch – had been good. Not as nice as when Dad had his game on but, on the other hand, not frozen pizza three nights in a row. She simply wasn’t hungry.

  She hadn’t slept well either. She’d been woken several times in the night by the mournful sound of wind. It would sweep past the windows and over the roof of the cabin with a long, low howl, and then tail away as if it’d forgotten or come to terms with whatever tragedy had provoked it in the first place. It would be quiet for a while – a long, pregnant silence – and then suddenly do its thing again, much louder and with more keening this time, as if it’d realized that actually everything was far worse than it had originally feared, and the world needed to know.

  It was cold, too. Granddad piled blankets and an extra counterpane over her when she went to bed, but in the dark hours it was freezing. Eventually, about six in the morning, she had wrapped herself in her dressing gown and a blanket and left her bedroom, padding out to the main room. She’d been surprised to find Granddad already there, fully dressed, staring out to sea, or at where the sea would be if it hadn’t still been dark.

  ‘You’re up early,’ she said.

  ‘Hmm?’

  Granddad took a moment to come back from whatever thoughts he’d been having, but then he said the hotel would be serving breakfast by now and why didn’t they go get a big plate of eggs to warm themselves up.

  He had been acting strange since, though. He seemed to lose focus every now and then, head held as if listening for something. After a moment of this he’d shake his head and be totally normal again.

  They’d started the day by heading down the wooden steps to the beach, turning left and walking. They walked for an hour and then turned and walked back. The sea was grey and choppy. The sand was grey, too, punctuated by large, dark boulders. There was no one else around.

  They talked of this and that. Looking back, Hannah couldn’t remember exactly what they had talked about. Just … stuff. Mom and Dad always wanted to know how school had been, when she was going to do her homework, if there was the slightest possibility, ever, that she might tidy up her room. With Granddad it was more like waves on the beach. Coming in, and going out, none of them mattering but all of them real. It struck her as a shame that it was hard to remember this kind of talking after it was over.

  ‘What are we going to do this afternoon?’ she asked.

  ‘Walk the other way. You have to. Or the beach gets unbalanced.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yes. Like a seesaw. All the sand slides to one end. I wouldn’t want that on my conscience. Or yours.’

  Hannah raised a disbelieving eyebrow. Granddad just sat there looking innocent.

  The only other person in the restaurant was a young waitress who spent her time looking as though she was in training for a competition to see who in the world could look the most bored, and had a real chance of placing in the medals.

  ‘Don’t you get lonely here?’

  ‘I don’t get lonely anywhere.’

  ‘But how, if there are no people?’

  ‘Loneliness isn’t to do with other people.’

  ‘But don’t you want someone to talk to, sometimes?’

  Granddad raised his hand in another vain attempt to attract the attention of the waitress. ‘The problem, dear, is my age. When you’re as old as me, if people see you in a corner with a book they think: Poor old fellow, he must be lonely – I’ll go cheer him up. And so they come and talk at you, whether you want them to or not, and they always speak too loudly, and treat you as though you’re incapable of understanding the smallest things, or as if you’re simple in the head.’

  ‘Really?’

  The hand movement not having worked, Granddad coughed, extremely loudly. The waitress looked the other way.

  ‘Almost always,’ he went on. ‘They believe that because older people move slowly, their minds must creep too. They forget that the way you get to be old is by living a long time, which means you’ve seen a lot of things. When you get to my age—’

  ‘What is your age, Granddad?’

  Hannah knew she shouldn’t interrupt a grown-up but couldn’t resist such a perfect opening. Granddad’s age was a hotly debated topic. Nobody knew what it was, at least not for sure. They knew his birthday – 20 November – but not the year he’d been born. Hannah’s dad and Aunt Zo had spent their childhoods believing that their father was born in 1936, which is what their mother had told them. But one Christmas when Hannah’s mom mentioned this in passing – and when Granddad had enjoyed a few glasses of wine o
ver lunch – he’d laughed very hard and said no, no, that wasn’t when he’d been born at all. Concerted attempts to pin him down subsequently had been deftly avoided. Hannah’s mom had more than once suggested this was because Granddad was losing his marbles, and couldn’t actually remember. Hannah, on the other hand, believed he was just having fun.

  ‘So very, very ooooooold,’ he said with a wicked grin. ‘Now – we need our bill. Please throw your spoon at the waitress. Aim for her head.’

  The beach was wilder on the right. A river came down out of the hills, approaching at a jagged angle as though woozy after a long fight. The river widened markedly as it met the beach, became pebble-bottomed and choked with branches and trees, stripped of their bark, white and dead, washed down out of the mountains. Granddad sat to one side while Hannah explored the river mouth, but even for an only child used to being solitary, she needed someone her own age to make that kind of thing truly fun.

  They walked further and found a stretch where the beach near the waterline was busy with sand dollars. These weren’t just the shells, like the ones that – once in a blue moon – you might find fragments of on the beach in Santa Cruz. They were living creatures, as Hannah found with a start when she tried to pick one out of the sand (delighted to have found a whole one for once) and saw it burrowing away from her.

  She found its being alive faintly disturbing, as though it was a pebble that had tried to scuttle off.

  They walked on, and on. There was nothing along here except wilderness, and thus no particular reason to stop. Neither of them had said anything for half an hour.

  Eventually Hannah tired, and ground to a halt.

  There was no one else on the beach. She was starting to feel like a piece of driftwood, washed up on this shore and left there forever. Like that, or …

  Her father had once told her about something called the Watchers, a story set in the mountains of Big Sur. It was said that once in a very great while, at twilight, people caught a glimpse of figures – usually alone, but occasionally in pairs – standing in the deepest woods, or on a peak some distance away. Dark figures with no faces, not tall, cloaked in long black coats with hoods, or enveloped in shadows. They never did anything, or said anything, and when you looked back they were gone. Her father said people had been claiming to see the Watchers for a hundred years, and that the Native Americans had tales that sounded like they might be about the same thing, from even longer ago. Hannah had assumed her father might be making all this up – he did that kind of thing from time to time, testing ideas for whatever he was working on for the bastards and flea-brains down in Los Angeles – but then one afternoon her teacher had mentioned the Watchers too, and said that they were in a poem by some slightly famous poet who’d lived in Carmel, and John Steinbeck had put them in a short story, too, and John Steinbeck knew absolutely everything about sardines, so maybe he knew about that too.