Саймон Морден - Down Station

‘This is my home. This is where I was born, and where I’ll most likely die. I’ve never been to your London. I suppose it must be a real place to you, but it’s just a story to me. I’ve never seen a signpost or a map with it on, and I’ve never known anyone go there from here. You, any of you: ever heard of anyone who’s come here and gone back? No? Then this is where you are now.’

‘Forever?’

‘Forever’s a long time. Who’s to say what might happen?’

Mary started to speak◦– several times, and each time the words got caught in her throat. She eventually gave up, her shoulders slumping.

Mama had no such problems. ‘So what are we supposed to do, wolfman? Where do we go? Where do we stay?’

He regarded her with his pale eyes, as blue as the wolves’. If she was intimidated, she didn’t show it. She put her hands on her hips and waited.

‘Well?’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘Go home to my babies,’ she said. With force.

‘Apart from that.’ He shifted diffidently.

‘There has to be someone who can help us.’ Mama tried again. ‘Someone has to be in charge.’

‘It might be like that in your London. It’s not here.’

‘What is it like here?’

‘You can do whatever you want,’ he said. ‘There’s no one to tell you what to do, no one who can make you do something you don’t want to do.’ He reached out his hands and laid them on the animals’ heads, and they stretched their necks slightly to butt into his touch. ‘You can be whatever you want to be.’

Dalip frowned at the idea. Almost his every waking moment had been planned, since he’d been old enough to remember. This school, that club, a friend’s house, the gurdwara, plays and concerts and recitals, and family, so much family: brothers and sisters and cousins and second cousins and uncles and aunts. The thought that he might be free of all that was… intoxicating. Even if it was for just a while, before someone was able to show him the way home.

It must have shown on his face, because he became aware that Stanislav was nudging him with his toe and shaking his head slightly. Was there any reason to believe the first person they’d met since arriving? No.

He swallowed. But what if it was true? ‘We’re not exactly set up for just, you know, starting. Where do the other people live?’

‘Wherever they want,’ came the infuriating reply. Then the wolfman relented. ‘You mean a village.’

‘Yes. A village, or a town. Do you have towns here?’

‘If there are, I don’t know of any. There are villages, here and there. Sometimes they’re empty. You just have to find one.’

‘And you know of somewhere?’

‘You got a walk ahead of you. Or you could try the geomancer. She’s close enough.’

The way he said it, it just tripped out like he was saying they could ask in the local pub.

‘A geomancer?’ Dalip sort of knew what that meant, because geomancy scored a lot of points in Scrabble. ‘Would he know more about where we are?’

‘She,’ the wolfman corrected. ‘Yes, if she’ll wear all your questions. She’ll want to trade, your knowledge for hers, so you’d better be prepared to answer, too.’

‘Where does she live?’

‘Up the river.’ The man pointed. ‘There’s a gorge, steep, and best you went around it. There’s a lake beyond it, and a castle by the shores of the lake, and that’s where you’ll find her.’

‘How far?’ asked Stanislav, and Dalip watched as the men eyed each other suspiciously. Stanislav still hadn’t let go of his club.

‘For you? Two days. If you don’t stop to smell the flowers.’

‘I will be certain to stay away from them.’

The exchange was apparently over. The wolfman sprang to his feet with a grace that belied his size, and the wolves were suddenly up, too, and straining to be back in the forest.

‘Do we tell the geomancer who sent us?’ asked Dalip.

‘If you like. Oh, you mean names? A description will do,’ he said. The wolves were dragging him away, and he was letting them. ‘Names have power, little darkie. Best you remember that.’

He was running, chains in his fists, a wolf either side of him, away from the fire and between the trees, leaving only his words and his scent.

‘Darkie,’ said Dalip. ‘He called me darkie.’

Stanislav finally dropped his club at his feet. ‘I do not trust him.’

‘Not after he called me darkie, no.’

‘That is not why. I have met men like that before. Count yourself lucky you have not.’

‘Dalip, what’s a geo-thingy?’ Mary stepped between them.

‘Geomancer. A sort of priest. They tell the future using stones. You heard him call me darkie, right?’

‘Better than Paki, I suppose.’

‘I—’

‘Enough,’ said Stanislav. ‘It does not matter to him what colour your skin is, only that you bleed red. He was trying to provoke you, and look, he succeeded.’

Dalip’s fingers curled and uncurled around his kirpan. ‘At least we learned something.’

‘Did we? Perhaps we did. Perhaps we only know what he wanted to tell us.’ Stanislav’s gaze followed the path the man had taken back into the forest. ‘This geomancer, if she exists: what is she going to want from us, other than our answers?’

For a brief moment between waking and sleeping, the dreams of being burnt alive faded◦– Nicholls’ clip-board bursting into flame and the sheets of paper curling as they were consumed◦– and she thought she was back in her hostel.

Music, loud and fast, coming through the wall at her, sounds of an argument through her well-locked door, the grinding of changing gears from the road outside… That was only a dream, too. Her reality was a vast open vista and the people she’d arrived with. That was it. That was all she had now. Literally, the clothes she stood up in, and nothing else.

There was nothing to eat. There was only river water to drink: it tasted odd, and no matter how often she cupped her hands, she always ended up with silt or something floating in it. Water came out of a tap and into a cup, not flowing past her face in a hundred different streams separated by sand banks. She had no real choice, and in the end she just shut her eyes and drank anyway.

She wasn’t used to this. She was used to a bed, and coffee first thing, and if not a bed, someone’s sofa. She was tired, with gritty eyes and a mouth that still tasted of last night’s fish. Her neck ached, so that when she tried to stretch, things went crack.

The early morning light slanted over the far-distant mountains, bright and sharp, and the huge moon had thankfully disappeared over the opposite horizon. The sky was brilliant blue, with cotton-wool clouds piled up to the heavens.

If she’d stepped out of her door, draped in her favourite dressing gown, mug of coffee the same colour as her skin in hand, and been greeted with the same sight, she’d have been amazed. Her first reaction would have been to grab her phone and take some pictures. Here, it was different.

The wolfman who’d visited them in the night had told them to follow the river as far as the gorge. She squinted upstream, the direction they had to go if they wanted to find this priest, this geomancer. The horizon was hazy. Perhaps she could make out a notch in the mountain, cut by the river, or perhaps she was fooling herself. But priests were supposed to help people in need, even if the ones she’d encountered were long on advice and short on providing the everyday necessities like weed, fags, booze and burgers, phone credits and bus fares.

The wolfman had said the geomancer wanted their stories in exchange for her assistance. Mary could do that. She was good at telling stories, ones that tugged at the heartstrings and opened the wallet.